The following meditation is led by Tara Brock.

To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit TaraBrock.com.

As we're settling in together this morning, I'll speak a little bit more about the landscape

of our meditation.

I often think of it as we offer so many different bits of guidance that ultimately each one

of us has to customize the instructions, not just in general, but even moment-to-moment

to sense what most fits the moment in a deep and big way.

The goal or purpose of practice is kind of an undoing of the conditioning that keeps us

from being, from pure being, from being that awareness, that loving awareness, that's

our nature.

So, we're undoing conditioning and the approach is to that undoing.

And the Buddhist tradition are described as skilful means and there are supposedly 84,000

skilful means.

You can in some way group them and the main kind of clusters of skilful means that we

teach at these repository treats, I think, three main clusters.

And one of them is concentration, which is where we choose a place to bring our attention

over and over again so that we can develop a more sustained attention, a steadyer attention

by, let's say, concentrating on the breath.

The mind begins to quiet.

There comes some space between the thoughts so we can actually be present.

So, concentration gathers and collects and quayets the mind, but it's not the goal of

the practice.

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