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

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Okay, so hello again, hello and welcome everyone to this rendition of Happy Hour.

So for our practice today, the theme I want to invite is cultivating goodwill for others,

others who are different from us in some way.

And I'll guide it in the guided meditation. Earlier today I was practicing meta for my neighbors who were listening to very loud music outside my window so I closed the

window so that doesn't come through. Like, oh yeah, they're really enjoying their music, okay, great. So

can we instead of being irritated? For example, can we have met a, they're actually having

a good time, they're young people, so can we transmit this so that we're not suffering,

so we cultivate goodwill.

And also... cultivate goodwill and also cultivating goodwill for people whose opinion might be

different from us. There's this very interesting work actually by a psychologist who wrote the book, The Happiness

Hypothesis. His name is Jonathan H-A-I-D-T.

So a couple of you are nodding, yes.

Great work, if you're not familiar with his work,

but just in brief he has done a lot of research on people who have different

opinions from what we do it's are important to us to

they have different value system you they have different values

they have they from values they have there we have values that are important to us

they're also they have values that are important to us too, but they lean into

different values. So for example, maybe are we value, say, loyalty and and and they value freedom and that's really important for them so it's really when we have differences of opinion it's important to consider differences of value. It's important to consider differences of value. It's not that one

value is worse or another than another, but to appreciate the different values that people might have and is is driving their

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