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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. Hello everyone and welcome and welcome here to IMC where I'm sitting inside meditation center in Redwood City.

And very happy to be here with you.

So for the meditation today, I'd like to

emphasize a very important point and that is that the key to finding this freedom that Buddhism, freedom that can be found in meditation that Buddhism points to, is supported a lot by understanding or focusing on how we respond to what is happening.

Sometimes I've done the emphasis that there's always only two things ever happening. What's happening and our

relationship to what's happening the way we would put even more so the way that we

respond and that we want to kind of really stay close to how we respond

more than being caught up in what is happening. So if it's a hot day, we could be a victim of the hot day, we could be

trouble by it and upset with it and complain about it maybe and or we can

notice it's a hot day that the heat is uncomfortable, and I'm going to stay present for it. I'm going to be open to it.

I'm going to allow it to be there without reactivity, without judgment. I will stay present

and mindful of the experience even though it's uncomfortable.

So we're taking the initiative to engage in a way to be present.

That has to do with how we are in relationship to it, that where there's a freedom, there's an engagement, there's a capacity to know.

And so always every moment we're in we have the opportunity to respond to what's happening.

Instead of reacting to what's happening, which has no freedom in it,

we take refuge in that place where we have some modicum of choice

to be present, to be mindful, to be aware. It's kind of like, in that way we're always in the present moment.

The response to what's happening is a present moment.

It's kind of like having caught the wave.

And now we're on the front of the wave being carried by it, rather than being in the wave

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