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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Greetings, greetings everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever your time's on my beat.

My name is Nicky Margot-Forey and I'm delighted to be joining you this week supporting us and Gail, who's teaching a retreat this week.

So the theme that I'd like to invite us to explore this week is the five aggregates and I'll say a lot more about it later, but we're now let's just begin meditating together, sitting together.

So let's let's begin, let's arrive, let's arrive in our bodies, let's arrive in this moment in time.

And let us let us sit with a sense of integrity on this earth, a sense of dignity, internal dignity, dignified, no matter what is going on, whatever the conditions of the mind and the body.

And we meet them with a physical form that is dignified.

If you're sitting, allowing your spine to be a straight sense of integrity, dignity.

If you're lying down and standing also, letting the body have a sense of dignity and its posture.

And while we sit with our back straight aligned as if an invisible string is pulling up on our head ever so gently, straightening, aligning our vertebrae.

We also want the body to be relaxed, so that the sense of uplift is not forced.

It feels natural, the body is being uplifted this form.

And at the same time is being pulled down.

Regravity, the muscles are relaxed by gravity, offering their weight to the earth.

As if we have wings and have roots and suspended with ease.

Inviting the feet, to feel the earth, to feel the contact points,

or sit bones to feel the contact points,

hardness, softness, heaviness, edges,

sensations of aliveness.

An inviting awareness too.

Hold the breath, relaxing and receiving the breath in the abdomen, unbreath at a time.

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