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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So, warm greetings from Insight Meditation Center, here in Redwood City.

Wonderful to have you as part of this.

And as an introduction to this meditation,

one of the great possibilities or opportunities in meditation is to lessen our self-preoccupation.

And being preoccupied with ourselves, our concerns, our worries, our desires, our conceits,

this is all, it has a very much to do with our discursive thinking.

A lot of it is fueled by discursive thinking, it's perpetuated by it, it's strengthened by it,

it's reminded of it.

And I think not a few people discover that they track what their discursive thinking is about,

that often oneself is a key character or is an important reference point

for what the commentary discussion fantasies are going.

And as the discursive mind becomes quieter, and we become stiller or calmer,

and perhaps some of the strength of our desires, our ambitions, our fears, anxieties, our conceits,

become less and less, then something remarkable begins happening.

And that is that the orientation that we come from no longer is so self-centered.

It doesn't mean that we ignore ourselves, but it means that there's kind of a opening up,

a receptivity, a sensitivity that others and their well-being, their suffering,

becomes as important as our own.

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