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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

And then to offer you just some brief words about the practice, maybe support you today,

that it's all too easy to be aware, to be mindful through the medium of our thinking.

And so rather than being mindful, people are more thoughtful.

And they confuse sometimes being thoughtful with being mindful.

And it's easy because the word mindful is so close to, you know, the thinking mind.

And I really would love if we had, instead of translated the Pali word sati as mindfulness, we had translated

as bodyfulness. There's a whole different form of awareness that's embodied. Just, you know,

if you touch your knees, you sense and feel the knees. That's a kind of awareness. If you feel

the temperature, that's an awareness.

You feel the clothes against your skin. That's your being, you're sensing. And there's a lot of

sensing, a lot of signals that come from the body that form a very different form of awareness,

way of attending, way of being, know what's going on.

And if you can drop into your body and let the body awareness, embodied awareness,

the awareness that flows out of your body, it can be easier to use your body, the weight of it, the solidity

of it, maybe the uprightness of it, as a grounding, as a place of strength, as a place of really being

established in the present moment so that the thinking mind doesn't wonder off so much

because your whole body is supporting you to be here.

The thinking mind can be anywhere in the universe at any time in history.

It can, you know, it can be there and then mostly.

But your body is always here and now.

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