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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Here we go. Great. Awesome. Well, hello. Hello again and welcome everyone.

It's lovely to be with you. Yeah, it brings up happiness and joy and gratitude for me

for this space of happy hour to exist for us practitioners to come together from different

places in this world from our homes. Don't have to drive anywhere and we can practice

together. So I'm feeling gratitude. So given that tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the United States,

seems like an appropriate theme to be practicing with gratitude. So a couple of words I want to say, and you might have heard them before,

but I want to invite you to listen to them with beginner's mind. Actually, you may not have

heard them before. So first of all, gratitude

is not a should, is not a must. It's don't practice gratitude with a stick that I should be

grateful for what I have because there are people who are suffering. That, ooh, ouch,

that doesn't really help.

That doesn't expand our heart.

Instead, ask a question, can I, can I be grateful for this?

And this could be anything.

Can I be grateful for this?

And it could be something good or pleasant or a blessing

in your life. And as we continue to practice in this way with a sense of curiosity and interest

and open-heartedness, then it actually becomes, this practice becomes, can I be grateful for this challenge?

Can I be grateful for this difficulty?

Can I be grateful for this pain or something that I usually am not grateful for?

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