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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

It's a good morning everyone and it's very nice to be back here with you all.

It's also very nice to be here, just in this posture, my meditation posture,

because I feel like I'm the continuity of being together with a group of people

on retreat this last two weeks.

It's a continuity with all the people who I've had a good fortune to meditate with

and share this life and share these teachings and explore the Dharma.

So, and now here we are to do the same.

I'm very grateful and very appreciative of all of you being here

so that we can share this together.

And so, a valuable question for people doing mindfulness practice

is what would I be experiencing right now if I was not distracted?

Sometimes we miss a lot in our lives by being distracted.

We miss a deeper connection to our life in the immediacy of it as it's unfolding.

A deeper we miss a deeper connection to ourselves and all the complexity of what it means to be a human being

but to really be present for it all and not be distracted.

And if we're distracted we miss a deeper connection to other people.

And that can simply be, or not so simple, but be a deeper perception of others

and take them in and understand them and really be attuned to what's going on for them.

And then we also miss the richness, the sometimes I would say the profound aspects

of what happens between us as human beings and between us and the world around us

...