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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org. I say good morning, good morning, it's morning for me, but I recognize it's not

morning for everybody. And as you can see by the title that for this week these five days I want to talk about the inner critic and I'll start by just doing a definition of the inner critic and maybe I'll start by saying not everybody has this

inner critic so many people do but not everybody does so I don't want to, you know, universalize it and feel like, oh, if you don't really know what I'm talking about, then you're not somehow with the program or something like this.

No, no, just some people have it and some people don't.

And it's kind of like a, maybe we might even say

like a sub personality inside of us if I could use that type of a language this way which it's constantly putting us down and belittling us and this voice of negativity that's blaming ourselves and nagging at us and has this maybe a pervasive sense of shame, shame for what we are, how we are, who we are, or maybe there's also a climate or an attitude

of harshness kind of creates this environment, this internal

environment where we're really harsh with ourselves and when this

inner critic is up and running there's a feeling of inadequacy like somehow I'm just to

whoever who I am is not enough or how I am is not enough or somehow I'm not worthy or in some kind of way this feeling of inadequacy that can result from this inner critic and wow there's so much pain so much

Duka associated with this

dynamic that many people have

And so today I want to start with them a guy to be able have and so today I want to start with with a guided meditation that's designed to kind of like disarm the inner critic and part of how we're going to do this is maybe with a meditation that's not the usual meditation.

Partly because the usual meditation, probably the inner critic, if there is one, has already co-opted it and is already like oh you can't do this right or it's your it's hard for you and it's easy for everybody else or you're not doing it good enough or something like this.

There's a way in which this might even be so familiar to us,

we don't even recognize it.

So I want to introduce a meditation practice that can be incredibly powerful and

transformative and not in the way that we're expecting it and maybe part of its power is because we're not expecting it.

So I learned this annotation practice from Sharon Salzburg and she said that she learned it from a

94 year old Sri Lankan monk, 94 years old, who had an incredible amount of energy and was enormously happy.

This sounds fantastic, right?

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