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

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Welcome to this morning's short that I'll talk.

So again, I'm continuing with this theme of poetry and practice.

And this poem includes a surprise.

Again, maybe I'll even just say the biggest shifts in practice are a surprise.

It's not like there's a sort of like we can see a big shift coming.

And then we just inch up upon it and then we know like, okay, the next moment something big is going to happen or shift is going to happen.

It doesn't happen that way.

And all of us know this, right?

Those of us who have a meditation practice itself, and when there's maybe dropping through a little deeper level or gaining an insight, there's always an element of surprise to that.

That's just the way the practice is.

It's not like we could exactly see they go, okay, so as I meditate for 12 and a half minutes longer, something is going to happen.

But there's a way in which we're always like stealing ourselves or bracing ourselves against surprises.

One way that sometimes I think about practice is that this idea of going up a children's slide, you know, in little playgrounds, they have these slides.

And then it takes some effort that you have to like walk up to the top of the slide.

And that's some effort.

But then you get to the top and you go, when off you go like down the slide.

And so it's not like there's always a complete letting go and it's not like there's always just effort.

And the difference between this metaphor, this analogy that I'm making up an actual practice is, of course, that we don't really know when we're at the top of the slide and the sliding down is about to happen.

So I'll read this poem that was in poem that I dropped it into the guided meditation.

And maybe I'll unpack it a little bit and we'll see how this is.

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