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

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So good evening, nice to see you all. As many of you know, I'm continuing this introduction

to mindfulness meditation series.

Today is class four.

It will be the last class on mindfulness meditation.

I'll be continuing on other weeks after this with some other topics related to

meditation but the introduction to mindfulness meditation was these four weeks.

So maybe I'll just give a brief review of what we talked about the first three times we met.

The first time I emphasized mindfulness of breathing, just resting the attention on the experience of breathing.

I'm emphasizing this word experience or sensations

rather than thinking about breathing rather than

imagining the breath going in and out or some other things that's that's another way to meditate,

but for mindfulness, we're just staying

with actual experience.

And this alone can be a practice to distinguish, well, what is it about to think about breathing and what is it to experience breathing?

And for me, I sometimes would think about, I would consider that the experiences don't necessarily have words.

It's just an experience.

Whereas to think about breathing is words primarily.

So that could be one way to make a distinction.

And so when I'm doing guided meditations,

I'm often talking about the sensations of breathing rather than the breath or breathing just to highlight this embodied experience of just the body breathing.

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