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

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So welcome to this five week course and introduction to mindfulness meditation and there are people

who are still coming in so maybe one of the least important things to say is a little bit

about me and I've been the teacher for this community since 1990 and I came to study at Stanford and I'd been a monk for 10 years practicing here in this country, practicing in Japan and Zen monasteries, practicing

in Southeast Asia, in Thailand, and Burma.

And that was my life. I was really, there was a time in my life to no longer be a monastic, but I wasn't, you know, leaving Buddhism or something, so I just somehow ended up at Stanford studying of all things Buddhist studies

so I didn't get that far away. But then when I came there the people in I started teacher training with Jack

Kornfield and Jack Kornfield knew the facilitator for a small sitting

group in Palo Alto.

And he told them, well, you can invite guilt to be the teacher.

And so I came there to start teaching in August 1990.

And then. 1990 and then slowly over those time that things grew and developed until it became

active in us for us to buy our own place and so in then in 2000, end of 2001 we bought this

place from the wonderful ministers. We had this beautiful couple who they really wanted us to buy their church

because they were kind of mystical Christians and they sat in silence and then we

sit in silence so they really wanted us to have it and so we had a

wonderful relationship with them a lot of love and a lot of kind of a mystical

not mystical but contemplative beautiful silence we had together.

And so then we've been here now for 22 years. It's a long time, it's hard to believe. So I have a lot of experience

meditating. That meant I started meditating when I was 19 and that was... Oh, when you do the math, that was half a century ago.

It's kind of unbelievable.

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