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

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So good morning, hello. Good afternoon for those of you elsewhere.

Good evening. So in preparation for this meditation practice, I think a wonderful

principle for engaging in meditation is to have some confidence in the instruction,

what you're doing in meditation. To have some confidence that what you're doing in meditation is

wholesome, it's healthy, it's a good thing to do. And then to do it wholeheartedly.

And wholeheartedly does not mean to make superhuman effort to strain or any kind of way.

It can mean to give yourself over to the activity so that that's all you're doing.

Almost as you give yourself over to the activity so fully that you become the activity,

almost, or your self-consciousness and self-conscious concerns fall away,

concerns about other things and other places, other times, falls away.

And it's akin to doing a hobby or reading a book or playing a musical instrument or involved in

maybe sports or play of some kind where you give yourself over fully to the activity.

And that's part of why it's so refreshing. It's kind of like all the stresses of life or preoccupations of life fall away.

And you're just doing the activity, you're fully becoming the activity almost because you give yourself to it.

And it's possible to do this with meditation, to give yourself over to being mindful, to being present for breathing,

present for your body here and now, to enter into, almost like you're entering into a new world

for the period of the meditation.

And you enter into that world fully, you step into it with leaving nothing behind.

And so there's a kind of self-forgetting that can happen in a whole harder effort

or this healthy kind of absorption or engagement in what we're doing.

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