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

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So hello everyone.

everyone.

Nice to have you here.

So, it began with this talk with evoking a simple, maybe obvious idea that our lives are often challenging, that being a human being is challenging in so many different ways, small

ways every day and big ways, existential ways, and sooner or later in life.

And then how do we respond to those challenges?

And there are two ways that I'd like to suggest. One is a way

that closes possibilities that we narrow our focus that close down.

And the other way is we open possibilities.

We create more possibilities.

We're open to things being different.

One way closes our minds, our hearts, another way opens it.

One way kind of marshals more self-centeredness in the process that it kind of supports self-centeredness and the other one supports kind of a

decrease in self-centeredness. So there's some other way of being in the world that's much more satisfying than that.

And for these division, in these two different ways, I want to talk about the hindrances and what I call is they're near opposites or near friends to use kind of a Buddhist terminology.

And for those of you who don't know, the hindrances are very common

teachings in the inside tradition world in Buddhism and people who want to

develop the inside practice that we teach.

You're supposed to become an expert on the hindrances.

There's a lot of things, you know, that these are really the primary,

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