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

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Okay. So one of the invaluable understandings for doing, I think, any spiritual life, maybe any human life, is that

the life goes through rhythms and goes through cycles, and that things are changing and moving.

And it's as simple as there's the rhythm of waking up and maybe being

awake a little bit during the day then getting tired or then going to sleep there's the rhythm of

waking up maybe being hungry and having breakfast being good for a while then getting hungry and having, being good for a while, then getting hungry and having lunch, being good for a while, and then having a dinner. And so there's this rhythm of eating and not eating. There's the rhythm of breathing. You know, if the only thing that was really good was breathing in. We just do that all the time. Forget about

breathing out. You know, that's just the drag. You know, or if breathing out is the good one,

just get you relaxed. Just do that then. Forget about the breathing in. But no, there has to be

a rhythm. There's a rhythm breathing in and breathing out. And so there's a lot of

different things that these cycles that come and they go, they have their place, and it's important

to kind of go through that. And one of the really important cycles of any life is to spend time relaxing, being at rest,

not doing much. And something can settle, something can relax. Some people have the notion

of a fallow time, a time when the field is left alone, nothing to grow in it,

so the field can regenerate, and then you can grow something on it again. We need that kind of time,

too. And that's enshrined, if I may use that word, in some religious traditions where they have

the idea of the Sabbath. I think for some people, the Sabbath is a time

to recover because we have a rhythm of being active and then needing to recover, being active and

then needing to rest. And so this idea of pausing to catch our breath.

It's good to be active involved.

It's good to pause, catch our breath so we can be fresh.

Some of us have a rhythm of somehow we get dirty enough, we take a shower,

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