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

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Good morning, Bar. Hello again.

So this poem, but I read during the guided meditation.

Maybe it's written by Poet who was inspired by the poems of the Terry Gata.

The movie might know the Terry Gata are the poems of awakening poems of women from the time of the Buddha.

And this poet was inspired by them and reinterpreted them and I wrote new poems, which I think are lovely, which I think are really lovely.

And maybe I'll just quickly repeat the poem here.

While walking along the river, after a long day meditating on Vulture Peak, I watched an elephant splashing its way out of the water and up the bank.

Hello, my friend, a person writing there said scratching the elephant behind its ear. Did you have a good bath?

The elephant stretched out its leg, the person climbed up and the two wrote off like that together, seen what had once been so wild.

Now a friend and companion to this good person, I took a seat under the nearest tree and reached out a gentle hand to my own mind.

Truly, I thought this is why I came to the woods.

So sometimes meditation practice is not befriending our mind, but instead there's a certain type of beating ourselves up or degrading ourselves or speaking disparagingly about ourselves, about our practice.

And so what would it mean for us to make friends with our minds? What would it mean to soften this inner critic that sometimes shows up with meditation practice?

And so this inner critic, we might think of it as something like a subpersonality inside of us, a certain dynamic or constellation of experiences that puts us down, belittles us as this judging, blaming, nagging, as this quality of harshness.

And it kind of creates this inner climate or this inner environment of harshness. And when this inner critic is up and running, there's this pervasive sense of inadequacy of not being enough.

Whatever I'm doing is not quite right or somehow insufficient.

And so when there's the inner critic is really allowed as authoritative or really present, there's a sense of that we just don't accept things.

It's not good enough. It's not okay. I don't accept it.

Whatever our experience is, this shouldn't be happening.

And the four noble truths, of course, recognize that the first truth is there is suffering.

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