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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

So then to say a few words about the practice.

In our home we have a garden and we water the garden and we have a faucet on the edge of the house

that there's attached to it a V so a pipe that attached to the faucet and then it goes out in the V

and to that or the Y it's more like a Y.

And to the two sides of the Y, you can put two hoses.

And so one hose goes to one side of the yard, the other hose goes to the other side of the yard.

So if you want to water one side of the yard, you turn it on that Y, so it goes into that direction, or the other one, you turn it to the other

direction, the valve, or you can have the valve right in the middle and the water can go into both

hoses at the same time. So it's a, you know, it's kind of practical and nice.

So it's kind of like we have something like that in our minds.

And in a sense, the water of our minds is our capacity to be aware, to have attention.

And attention or awareness is not a neutral thing.

It's almost like food. It's almost like fuel.

It's almost like water that lets things grow.

And you want to be careful what you allow to grow.

Because if you spend a lot of time having all your attention pouring in to worry,

chances are you're actually growing worry.

If you are pouring all your attention into, you know, desires,

your growing desire. know, desires, your growing desire.

And so you want to kind of, what we want to do is to kind of be able to be very discerning and careful what this fuel or this water of awareness is actually doing and where it's going.

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