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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Hello everyone and welcome.

We're here to meditate for 30 minutes.

One of the associations many people have with Buddhist practice

is that it's important not to become attached that we're supposed to somehow let go of our attachments.

And this of course has some truth to it, but it leads people to sometimes let go of things that don't need to be let go of.

The things don't have to be let go of. It's our attachment to them.

That we let go of the clinging to them.

But also sometimes people confuse holding on to things which are healthy and are appropriate to hold to have to stay keep close with attachment with clinging.

And there is a healthy way of holding things closely to prioritize certain things, to emphasize certain things, to hold on to certain things in a non-clinging way.

And in this family of things that are sometimes not seen as appropriate is safeguarding.

There are some things that are worth safeguarding, protecting, maintaining, and maybe even developing.

And so hold some qualities, hold some sense of being alive and think ways of being that feel peaceful and calm or wise or peaceful, joyful, happy.

Even in meditation sometimes there's a deepening sense of intimacy or calm or peace or inner well-being of some sort or other.

Some people feel that they have a connection to a spiritual dimension of life, a Dharma dimension.

All these might be very whole summed to have and part of the path to practice, something that supports the ongoing movement through Buddhist practice.

And these should be safeguarded, protected to some degree, not with attachment, not with holding tight or not with the kind of disappointment and grief of we lose them.

But we also don't have to be casual about it. We don't have to kind of they come and go as they wish.

When we feel something positive, useful, significant through, say, meditation practice, through mindfulness practice, there's an art to keeping that close, to appreciate that this has priority in our life and not to give it up easily by doing something

that overrides it or pushes it to the side. Some of the things that we do in daily life maybe are not as important as the kind of spiritual connection we feel in meditation or when we're present and calm for our life.

And so to safeguard that, to not give it up easily is part of the art of this practice.

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