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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. You're going to be here. So hello everyone and welcome to this meditation session.

And for this morning I'd like to... to say something about the importance of safety that when our psychophysical system, our body and mind,

really feels safe.

Something settles deeply.

Something relaxes in the body, the heart, the mind that supports the deepening of the darma life, deepening of meditation.

And for many people, a fair amount of feeling not safe feeling anxious or afraid.

It doesn't have to do with here and now.

Sometimes with anxiety, it has to do with predictions or assumptions or imaginations of the future.

And sometimes it's deep conditioning from things that have happened in the past,

which are no longer happening now.

And these forms of not feeling safe or feeling afraid need our care, need our love, need our attention for sure.

And at the same time, it's a, we can also remind ourselves that there is safety here and now,

that hopefully when you sit down to meditate,

you're sitting at a time, a place in a situation where it's relatively safe and that for now, for here and now, it's possible to remind yourself of that safety, that it's a offering that you make to yourself, give

yourself, not to dismiss the fears and anxieties, not to, but to put them in context, to allow a settling and a

peacefulness that maybe can hold. in a

settling,

a

maybe can hold anxieties with a generosity,

care, a love, where we're not so caught in them.

We're not so under their influence.

...