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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org.

So this is the fifth week of this introduction to meditation series and I want to build

on what we've done so far this week or apply it in different ways. But one of the things

I'd like to talk about today is the role of concentration as a partner to mindfulness.

And I'll start with an analogy and then we'll sit that many years ago I went to Yosemite with my family and small kids when they were small

kids when they were small and we stayed in tent cabins in the Yosemite Valley. And then during

the day we did some beautiful hikes, but some of them were quite steep and had to keep these little kids kind of entertained as we went

along. And we had brought with us luggage of different types that we could carry from the car to the tents.

If I had decided to bring all my luggage with us on our hikes into the mountains,

carrying the suitcases and the backpacks and sleeping bags

and everything that we had,

we wouldn't have gotten very far.

It would have been quite exhausting.

So the same thing with meditation.

Sometimes we carry with us into meditation.

So much of the baggage, so much of the memories, expectations, projections into the future, fantasies, we carry it along and we can't go very far.

And we can't go very far if we're carrying a lot of baggage with us.

The role of concentration is to put down some of that baggage and even if it's just briefly so we can be mindful and the mindfulness can be continuous. Part of the function of concentration is for the mindfulness to stay put for a while so that we can

hike along in our life without carrying a lot of baggage, picking up a lot of things along the way. The role of what's called

concentration is not just to be continuous but to be immersed in what we're

being mindful of,

...