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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So to offer you some

options, So to offer you some options for how to practice this morning,

we have this kind of language or way of describing meditation.

The mind wanders off and you bring it back.

The mind goes out, then you have to bring it back.

You return to the breath, keep returning.

The metaphor of movement.

And that can be quite fine and it works quite well,

and people can get settled and relaxed and concentrated

by just coming back and not giving themselves over to their thinking and preoccupations,

kind of giving themselves over to the meditation over and over again.

Another way of doing this, which is interesting, is don't return. Never return. If the mind wonders off someplace, I don't know where the mind goes, but if your mind wanders off, let your awareness follow it. So your awareness holds that. It knows that that's what's going on. So there's a

very clear knowing that this is a thinking mind. So rather than letting go of it, just open up and

almost like your awareness is a field, like a window that opens, and it's bigger than any thought that you have.

And so you can have a very generous open way.

You know, oh, this is thinking, this is what it feels like.

And then in that kind of awareness, it's even bigger and more relaxed,

it just knows, this is thinking, this is feeling, this is an emotion, this is whatever

it is, then in the middle of that, let there be the breathing. So it's not returning to the breath,

it's just you have a sense that you're resting or you're established here in the middle of it

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