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. Hello, hello, and welcome everyone to this edition of Happy Hour.

So I would like to invite us to explore the practice of presence this session and presence with curiosity, not assuming or not forcing anything in particular,

but a stance of interest, curiosity of being with. And let me give you a couple of pointers as to what I

mean. So I'd like to invite us to explore the way we pay attention in a nuanced way.

So for example, are we paying attention to our breath in order to make it a particular way?

And it can be very, very subtle, very subtle what I'm inviting us to explore.

Are we paying attention to our emotions, to our heart space in order to dampen it, make it okay, to get rid of it, rather, to get rid of it. Is there an agenda?

It's a very subtle agenda. And just to back up, perhaps a question to sit with is there are two modes of meditation. One is noticing, being with, really allowing with any agenda, simply noticing and saying what is.

And only through this way of being, only when we have really seen the ways we make and we force, we don't accept reality, only after

we have seen this, then we are able to master the second type, the second type of skillful

means of meditation, which is cultivating,

which is, for example, practice of thought replacement.

There are teachings in Buddhism on that.

But the question always comes up to, should I just observe or should I change?

Well, changing or cultivating or shifting becomes, so both of

these practices are available in the Buddhist canon. However, not until we have mastered being with.

We have mastered seeing clearly with no agenda or seeing our agenda that, oh, yeah,

I'm paying attention to my backache in order to make it stop.

Like, yeah, I have an agenda or my heartache so that just goes away after you've seen the

agenda and softened and really

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