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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

So welcome, everybody.

Some of you may know that this is the third class in the introduction to

mindfulness meditation.

It's perfectly fine.

If you haven't been at the earlier ones,

just be building on what we've done before.

But I'll also be reviewing what we talked about before.

So here at IMC, we teach mindfulness in a particular progression.

It doesn't have to be taught this way. There's plenty of perfectly viable legitimate ways to teach it. But how we teach it here is I think Gil Fronstel came up with us, you know, maybe in a few decades ago,

this idea that I really like, and that is this idea of practice as having concentric circles.

So in the center is a more stable, then as you get rings around that, these kind of get a little bit more wobbly.

So in the center is mindfulness of breathing, just of the experience of breathing. It's always available, we're always

breathing or you hope so, right? And then a little bit out there is the body. This is also stable, right? The body is always

available and it's especially stable compared to the third ring which is emotions.

That's what we're going to talk about tonight.

And then the fourth is thoughts.

The world of thoughts is like,

we always are getting pushed around by them and it's very slippery and it tends to be the least I'm using this word stable.

So on the preceding weeks we talked about mindfulness of breathing and mindfulness of the bodily experience.

And what I'd like to highlight is that it's so much about experience, sensations, as opposed to thoughts or ideas,

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