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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Great. So welcome back to the third week of the introduction to mindfulness meditation.

And today is mindfulness of emotions.

And to kind of introduce or prepare you for this topic,

I want to tell you an ancient simile.

It goes back to the Buddha, that many people remember this simile and refer to it regularly

as a cut up a wisdom kind of simile that helps them kind of find their way with their life

a little better.

This story, as it's told, is that the Buddha was meeting with a group of people like you,

and then he'd be teaching them.

I don't think he was teaching intro to meditation this way, but he's a group of people.

And he said to them, he asked the question,

if a person came along and shot you with an arrow, would that hurt?

And they would say, yes, that would hurt.

And then he said, well, if the person then came around and shot a second arrow at you,

would that hurt even more?

Oh yeah, that'll hurt even more. And then he offered his

teaching. The first arrow is what life brings you. The second arrow is the one you shoot at yourself.

So if I'm walking down the sidewalk here, and just before this entered the meditation class,

and I trip and fall, that's the first arrow.

That happens to people.

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