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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

It's about the practice.

A few times in my life, I've had a bird fly into a room where I was at.

And then the idea was to help the bird out.

And we'd open the door, open window.

And sometimes it's been successful relatively easily,

but often it's been a challenge.

And it seems like every time we tried to help it out,

guide it out, it would fly up higher, above the door, above the window, and it was, you know, across the room.

And it seemed like all our efforts to help, you know, just made the bird more agitated and was not helping.

And occasionally the way to do it was to keep the door, window open,

and leave the room and just leave it alone. And it would eventually calm down, eventually would

fly around and find the opening. Imagine if the one-room house you're in, the bird flew in, but rather than just one door

and a couple of windows, all the walls were doors that opened up. So every wall could open

up wide. And so the bird's in there, but you just open everything up.

And it's only way, you know, it's just completely now open all four walls out to the great

outdoors. And then you leave the bird. And, you know, it's no problem. It just flies out to every direction it goes. It's free to go and fly

out and be happy. So imagine that whatever thoughts, reactivity, emotions, any kind of things that

get triggered inside of you as you sit here and meditate.

Imagine it's a bird that's gotten stuck inside a room.

And you might open the door, you might try to let go of it or do something.

...