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

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Thank you. Good morning, everyone and welcome. Can you hear me all right?

So this morning I'd like to talk about a very important kind of concept in mindfulness in general and give a kind of a Buddhist take on it. And that is the difference between stimulus

and response.

And people teach mindfulness often emphasize this distinction.

And so I will as well with emphasizing the wonderful opportunities that are available in really knowing how to identify

this distinction and kind of in what's in between the stimulus and the response.

And in the process, discover something about equanimity, the The angle to understand equanimity and how to have it.

So, as I understand it, the usual teachings on stimulus and response,

is that response is different than a reaction.

And a reaction is something that happens kind of as a habit, kind of an automatic pilot.

There's a stimulus and then without even any reflection, any consideration,

there's automatically some kind of activity we do, called reactivity,

meaning an activity that's in response to something, acting.

So that could be we say something that we later regret.

It just came out of us like that.

It could be an expression of an emotional

expression that comes out of us so quickly that, again, maybe later we regret it. And it could be

that it's something that, in activity we do. We do something we do impulsively with our actions. We push send on our computer

when we had the, we saw that there was this lovely thing to buy.

And the fact that we don't have enough money in the bank account for that doesn't matter.

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