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

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Here we go.

Great, so hello, hello everyone.

Lovely to be with you on this Friday or Saturday, if you're on a different time zone.

It's already morning or afternoon the next day.

So for today's practice, cultivating meta-kindness, goodwill, the practices of the heart.

I wanted to combine two invitations.

One is an invitation for rest, for deep rest.

As a way to share kindness with ourselves, to be kind to ourselves, we don't always have to be doing, doing, doing.

So this is opening up to rest is an expression of kindness.

And I want to couple that actually with the intentionality of engaging with kindness in our choices.

We always have choice points.

We always have choices that we make and sometimes unintentional, sometimes intentionally.

And I want to bring more awareness to what's called in Buddhism, volition or volitional formations or suncaras.

We talked about it this past week for those who showed up to the 7 a.m.

It's this sense of even mild or subtle volition or choice that we make in our minds all the time, all the time.

So bringing more awareness to that, we can choose to be kind, gentle, generous, grateful, et cetera.

We can choose, quote, unquote, choose.

Sometimes it doesn't feel like it's a choice, but really it is a byproduct of many, many choices we've made in the past or choices that we've been engaged with, perhaps through our upbringing.

And we can start to notice it, not to, to self-flagulate and say, oh, I'm being mean to myself and just adding more salt to the wound, but just noticing.

And perhaps ever so slowly bringing more kindness, making a choice to slowly, slowly change the flow of our future choices.

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