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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

Good morning.

Good morning, all.

What a pleasure it is to be here and what a warm welcome I received in the chat, so thank you for that.

As many of you can see from the title of YouTube that we're going to do poetry of practice again with some different poems.

I was here, I think it was in August, a couple months ago, doing some poetry, and I had so much fun doing that.

And I heard from a number of you that you enjoyed it too, so here we are again, the poetry of practice.

Maybe I'll start in a similar way that I started back in August, and that is to just recognize that there is a way in which we can engage with practice and we can engage with Buddhist teachings in a way that is maybe focused on learning, understanding, maybe learning or understanding technique or teachings.

There's all these Buddhist lists, right?

But there's this emphasis on learning, like gaining something that we didn't have, gaining some knowledge that we didn't have.

And we sure I love this way.

I like to learn new things and to explore new topics.

But that's not the only way, right? That's not the only way to engage with teachings and practice this way in which we feel like we have to consume lots of information.

It can be helpful, but there's also a way that invites a never type of knowing, like this way in which we might touch with awareness or something, like that there's this, maybe a caress of information, a caress of something.

I don't even quite know how to explain it, but this way in which poetry allows this opening of the heart and the softening of that which wants to know more and learn more.

And maybe poetry also is like a type of coming home that is that we have to be here and present to feel the poem to touch into the poem.

So the way that I'm describing it poetry is maybe a little bit more of the somatic experience and maybe even the way that I'm using that type of language is maybe like a little.

That's so straightforward, but I'm hoping that you read all of us have read poems poetry and maybe you understand what I'm talking to that there's a way in which poetry sometimes invites this recognition recognition of something that's true and pure inside of us as opposed to just like a massing more information.

And not just to soften this voice, this leaning into evaluation or leaning into the next moment, I understand it, I got it as opposed to maybe the question is, oh, what does this feel like as opposed to what am I supposed to learn.

So poetry is a way that we allow language to touch us in a different way, different way than our normal way of interacting with perhaps Buddhist teachings or perhaps even just the world in general.

Many of you know that there's plenty of verse in the public canon and the earliest Buddhist literature, there's lots of verse, there's the awakening poems, there's the Dhamma Pada, there's this Atagavaga, that book of eights, the Sutinapata, you know, all these and so today I'll drop in some verse and it's from contemporary times.

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