The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

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So good morning everyone and welcome and I see from the chats that I put in 730 for the meditation here today and all of you are here and know that this is the time

so hopefully no one's going to miss it.

I was just put in a few minutes ago.

Perhaps I was distracted by thinking about what I would teach this morning about being undistracted.

So, happy to be here with you.

So this is the second session on basic instructions and

mindfulness, laying down the foundations for what we do.

And so yesterday I said that one of the functions of

of mindfulness of breathing, you know, a sincere but relaxed dedication

to being present with the breathing is not to succeed at that task, but rather to have that task highlight how distracted we are,

how busy the mind is, what we're caught up in.

And one of the advantages of beginning that way is that then you succeed right away.

If you try to stay present on the breathing, but there's a lot of forces of distraction,

then you can be frustrated right away.

The other reason is that that distraction is is useful to think of distraction.

to think of distraction.

The more that we're distracted, more

ruminating, caught up in our thoughts, the more we're fixating on something like our

emotions, our memories, or what's happening around us, our body experience, the more we're caught up in it experience the more it represents stress more it represents tension and

there's a feedback loop between tension and stress and more distractibility, more

...