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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org. So good morning everyone and can you hear me all right? Okay out there. So I want to start with an introductory story to this talk.

It's maybe a teeny story, maybe you'll think of it insignificant, but it represents something a really

important turning point in my life. So at some point I spent about three years doing Zen training at a Zen

Monastery here United States and it was quite nice but you know it's kind of you're fully enter into that

world it's deep in the mountains there's you know it's 14 miles on a very small

steep dirt road to go into the national forest lands in the middle of which

is this little monastery and so it was completely involved in that world for three years.

And Zen training is done with a lot of ritual and there's a lot of ways in which you engage your body.

So for example, if you want to step into the meditation hall,

you always have to step in with a particular foot first.

And you can't just step in without foot,

and they just kind of casually walk around.

You have to have your hands in a particular way

as you walk through the meditation hall.

And there's a particular way of walking through the meditation hall.

You can't just take the shortest route to your seat.

You have to kind of take a certain route around the place.

And when you get to your seat, you plop yourself down and kind of pick your nose little bit and get ready.

You would, you bow to your seat and then you turn around you bow away from your seat and

then this particular way in which you turn around and sit down on the seat and then classically in then there's a particular posture you sit in and

I mean most classically it you sit in full lotus upright. Most people don't sit in full

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