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

Please visit our website at audiodderma.org.

To say a few words about the practice,

that Darma practice is a practice that helps us to live a life that is not stressed, to live a life that's at ease. And one of the consequences of stress

is that it limits us. In some ways it also divides us to have the muscles in the body

tighten up and be contracted, to have the thinking mind contracted and kind of tightened around certain thoughts and

certain beliefs to have somehow some kind of stress in relationship to our

emotional life limits us limits the full working of who we are, and our life, so it's very easy, starts becoming

divided if we're stressed and if we're tense, if we're attached, if we're contracted. And a lot of people live divided lives.

That in certain situations, part of who they are are not available, not present,

they leave it behind, they leave it at home or something.

And as we put on the, you know, these robes of stress.

And as stress, contractions, tightness, attachments,

decrease, then it tends to be a kind of a softer, more suffusive kind of feeling of presence through our whole being. to hold things at bay or shut off parts of who we are or be so distracted that we don't even

know what's who we are or what's happening for us.

And so there's a movement towards a wholeness and one of the expressions of that wholeness and one of the expressions of that wholeness is all things included.

There's nothing in mindfulness that is considered inappropriate for mindfulness to hold.

And this is a very powerful principle.

Everything is welcomed. in mindfulness. It might not be welcomed on our tongue as we speak.

It might not be welcomed that what we actually do if we want to punch out our neighbor.

There's things that, but we are welcomed and inclusive of whatever origin inside is that we have that's

being, wants to be expressed in unkind words, wants to be expressed in unkind bodies, actions. So there are behaviors we want to not do, but we never

...