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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So warm greetings from Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City and delighted to be sitting here,

to offer this period of meditation.

And as an introduction to the meditation, from time to time, people benefit enormously from resting,

taking time out to sleep and if fortunate enough to sleep well, wake up, rested and clear

and ready for activity.

And if we're fortunate enough, we can take a vacation, or we can take a Sabbath, we can take

some really time off, holiday, and step away from

our normal activities, normal preoccupations and concerns, maybe even forget a lot of the

everyday concerns and preoccupations, responsibilities, and not to abandon

them, but to come back refreshed, to come back somehow settled, come back ready to engage in a nice

way.

In the evening, I, often there comes a time in the evening where I'm not that sleepy, but it's just, it's just, I'm not really interested or quite capable of doing certain kinds of work. And so I don't. I'd take a break and do something simple and get ready for bed. And then in the morning at some point I'm ready.

So this idea of vacation. So meditation works this way as well.

And to understand it that way

can maybe help us be more willing to put aside our preoccupations and our concerns

without thinking we're abandoning them or being irresponsible.

But to really give us the opportunity, ourselves the opportunity,

to put aside the things that we're ruminating about, churning about,

the things that we're obsessing about,

to put aside the ordinary ways in which the mind is spinning and preoccupied and maybe even

...