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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

There we go. Great.

Okay. Well, hello everyone. Hello and welcome to Happy Hour.

Delighted to be with you, delighted to receive your greetings really at the beginning.

It always makes me feel connected to this international sangha from so many different parts of the world.

So for this evening, I wanted to invite us to engage with compassion practice.

It's like it's the right medicine for this week, with what is happening in the world,

what is happening geopolitically, and also what is happening very likely for ourselves,

and also with people perhaps we know.

So compassion, you can never have enough compassion, never enough compassion.

And as the Dalai Lama said, compassion is not a luxury.

It's a necessity. It's a necessity for us humans to survive, for us to survive.

It's not a luxury. So with that, I don't think there is much more that I want to say to frame it,

but to say that, please, you're invited to compassion practice, to practice compassion,

wherever you are called for in this session, there might be a lot of physical pain right now,

where you're sitting, practicing, there might be heartache in your heart,

or there might be care and deep care for people who are in very, very painful, difficult situations,

extremely painful, difficult situations elsewhere in the world.

Our sisters, our brothers, our siblings in humanity are not so different,

and maybe that's where your heart goes, to hold them with compassion and good wishes.

So let us engage, let us begin by arriving.

...