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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Hello everyone and welcome.

And as we begin, get ready for meditation.

I would like to mention yesterday we talked about openness, being open to whatever is happening in such a way that there's lots of room for experience.

You can just have experiences, thoughts, feelings, sounds, occurrences around us when we meditate.

Don't have to stick anywhere. We don't have to pick them up. We don't start thinking about them.

We don't have to react. There can be kind of an openness, like an open window. Just allow things to pass through.

And this related to other kinds of teachings from meditation, of meditation being a radical acceptance of the present moment, being kind of thoroughly receptive to experience.

And in that class, that category or kind of side of meditation is important as it is.

It's good to have it balanced with another side.

And that is, and the two can go together. They don't have to be separate, but as a way of talking.

And that is the side of being upright, the side of not collapsing.

We don't, metaphorically, we're sitting upright. We're sitting uncollapsed.

We're not finding difficult things that we're experiencing, thinking about, remembering, feeling, and just kind of bending over and putting our hand on our forehead and feeling sorry for ourselves.

Or we're not giving up on ourselves or giving up our ability to be grounded, firm, stable by the moment.

So on one hand, we're quite open to our experience, which might seem a little bit like we're just available to be victims of challenges.

But the other side of it is we are not, we're being undefeated.

We are not covering, we're not giving up, we're not collapsing.

We're not giving up, giving in to the inner forces that might be pushing us, driving us to run away or give up or collapse or feel sorry for ourselves or get involved in it.

We're involved in angry thoughts of revenge or we're not giving up our presence and stability here because of some fantastically wonderful, pleasurable fantasy that we get pulled into.

So this ability to be grounded and upright, grounded and just here in a strong way goes together with this openness.

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