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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Good morning. Welcome, welcome. So today's the fifth day, the last day I'll be continuing

this series on the poetry of practice and as I've been doing in the earlier days in the week

do a little bit of a guided meditation. And then I'll drop in a poem and then after the

meditation I'll talk about the poem a little bit. There's something about poetry in some ways it can be really

supportive of practice in that it uses language in a way that maybe has some precision and yet it has can be very evocative to.

In some ways there's a meditation can be like this too. In some ways there's a meditation can be like this too, where there's some precision and yet can be evocative and not in precision in terms of using the usual language, but maybe there's a way in which it feels

like this.

You know, with meditation, we're sometimes talking to that direct experience like what's actually happening and poetry is

waiting to an experience and maybe not so much by describing it directly, but helping it to maybe arise

in the reader of the poem.

I don't know if that made any sense.

Yeah, there's this way, I guess, part of the poetry of practice for me is how poetry uses language to help be listen an experience,

without being prescriptive.

Maybe that's what I'm pointing to.

And so there's a way in which meditation practice often is prescriptive, but the art of practice is finding our way

with the directions that are given.

Some of you know, right, there's these 16 steps of on up on a satai or, you know, all these

distinct steps in the sati patana suta or,

or, you know, I myself, I've given plenty of meditation instructions and that's really helpful but there's also another part of our self that maybe that's a poetic art that is reading between the

lines that is feeling our way into the moment instead of just following the instructions.

...