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

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Okay, let me go begin now.

Welcome.

It's such a pleasure to be practicing together these mornings.

Or, as I said, it's maybe it's not morning for you or maybe you're watching these later.

It's meaningful to practice together.

And today's the third day of the series of poetry of practice.

And as I mentioned a little bit on the first day, there's a way in which we can practice where there's a lot of specificity of directions, like we're following that instructions as precisely as we can.

And we hear the echo of a Dharma teacher or some reading in a Dharma book, maybe even a podcast that we heard and we're really trying to follow the instructions with a certain amount of maybe striving or maybe even some training with some directionality that could go this direction and I'm going to do this.

And that can be tremendously helpful and valuable in a support for practice.

And I certainly have to end my share of that type of practice.

But there's also another way to practice that is maybe a little bit more diffuse and softer.

So it's a more of a feeling sensing our way, maybe tuning into becoming sensitive to what's happening and feeling into where the next moment of freedom or ease well being can be found.

Going one particular direction, feeling into what's needed in the next moment to help support this opening, softening sense of well being and contentment piece and freedom to arise.

So we're still practicing with the same intentionality, but in a different way.

In this series, the poetry of practice, I'm pointing to the second way, there's more this sense of sensitivity, attunement and feeling into what needs to be next, maybe with less of a sense of following instructions and more just feeling our way to the next moment.

And maybe I'll just add just before we begin this guided meditation, the Buddha spoke about right before his awakening that his mind was malleable.

So I like to think of this were malleable as a way in which there's this sense of feeling into becoming sensitive to as well as the sense of directionality and intentionality.

So that is an introduction.

We'll guide us a little bit during this guided meditation and then I'll drop in a poem, a short poem and I'll talk about a little bit after the guided meditation.

So we'll take a moment to settle in feeling the experience of taking a meditation posture and feeling the body in this meditation posture.

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