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 a few comments about practice, practicing for the rest of the day here,

that one of the principles of Buddhist practice is that you can't really take care of the world until you're first

taken care of yourself to some degree. And one of those ways is to find yourself at home in yourself. It's a powerful word,

powerful metaphor of being at home, but to be stable in yourself, to have a sense of stability,

like you're really here. So there's a stability about being here.

If we spend a lot of time at our head and our stories thinking and not really grounded in our

body, it's really easy to be pushed around by the winds of the world of what people think

and the comings and goings of events and experiences and even our emotions.

And then if we go to be with someone, we're easily kind of jostled around by the events, the experiences, what people say.

But if we kind of be grounded in ourselves physically,

like if you're standing, you can really feel like you're standing

with both feet, kind of firmly on the ground, like the roots of a tree or something.

And from there it's like a strong redwood tree that stands up,

and you really feel the weight of your body, the substance of your body,

whatever strength there might be in the body, that you're in the world with your body,

not only with your head, which is so often the case.

And, or if you're sitting in a chair or a couch, there's many ways to relax and just be chill,

you know, sitting. But many of them involve not being so strongly rooted and stable, feeling

stability. I'm really here. And so to sit in a chair with stability, with a stability from your sitting bones and going up, you're there in a full way. Like the statue of the Buddha, he doesn't collapse away from the world, and he doesn't lean into the world, but he's really here,

in the sitting posture, present, available to the world, ready to respond what's needed,

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