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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So warm greetings at the beginning of our week and I'm happy to be here and to be able to share this wonderful practice that we have and a practice that has been one of the most constant source of gratitude and appreciation for my adult life.

It's the regularity of meditating for all these years.

The through line is a thread that runs through the life and forms a life.

And it's a reference point for my lived life that's been invaluable.

So thank you for this opportunity to be here with you all.

And So, So there's a famous line in the poem's called The Four Quartets by T.S. Elliot that goes something like teach me to

care and not to care and to orient it towards what we're doing today,

teach me that I'm important and not important.

The... The,

So by not important is not that we're unimportant, but rather we often see ourselves as important in the wrong ways. We see ourselves as important enough to be attached to our ideas of who we are, attached to ourselves, clinging to ourselves, clinging to life.

And sometimes that attachment is negative, and so sometimes we treat ourselves with less respect than care than we

would our houseplants. There's a lot of struggles that people have with their identity, with who they are, and criticizing themselves

feeling inadequate in some way. And one of the symptoms of that is not seeing ourselves as important,

it's valuable.

And then the other hand, people will have too much conceit

and too filled with their self-importance.

So it's the importance that we assign ourselves,

negative importance, positive importance, the way that we're

important enough to judge and hold on to ideas that I mean by teach us to be not important.

And then to teach us that we're important,

to know we're important, is to know that independent of our attachments that we can see the world without attachments we can see the world with kindness

...