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

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A couple of words about the practice today.

It's an ordinary human thing to evaluate what we're doing.

And so with meditation, mindfulness,

there's often some evaluation, how am I doing,

are I doing it right?

And it's certainly valuable to do that sometimes.

Some people do it every minute, every moment, you know, and overdo it.

If you spend too much time evaluating your practice, you actually interfere with it.

But sometimes the criteria we use to evaluate our practice is not so helpful.

And I want to offer you an idea about how there's value in just doing the practice without

evaluating it too much. Maybe you wait a while to evaluate how it's going.

And sometimes when it's not going well,

then we say it's not going well.

I don't know what criteria we use for not going well.

But here's an analogy.

If you go in a rowboat out on a, maybe you want to cross a lake to the other side,

and it's a nice, calm day, no wind, no waves, no strong current, and you row across and it doesn't take long,

and you get the other side and you evaluate yourself, well, I did well, I'm a good rower. Fine. But then another day you're going to

cross the same lake and it's a really strong wind. And there's even a waves against you. The wind is

against you. The wave is against you. Maybe even now there's a current that wave is against you. The wind is against you, the wave is against you.

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