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

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To our lives.

And one of the questions is, where's the source from where the awareness flows, where it comes from?

And it is a personal thing to be aware. So you're not going to say, well, it comes from the room next door.

And that's where it comes from. It's the basement, the control room and the basement with all that.

It's personal. So it comes somehow with the awareness resizing you, the send stores, the nerds, the eyes that hear, the ears that see.

It's all lives here with us. But awareness is more than just seeing and hearing.

So to be aware, to offer presence, to be really present, we do that kind of with our whole being, with our body.

And I like to think of awareness as not up in the control tower in the head.

But rather, it's come how arises out of the depths of our torso, more in the center of our physical being in a sense.

And I prefer kind of to do mindfulness of breathing, to do it in the torso, the belly or the diaphragm, the chest area.

Because it puts me closer to that source, the torso source, the kind of the middle, the center, what I feel like is my being.

And so if you imagine that awareness is there at the center, it begins there, and it radiates out from there.

And we can be aware of things beyond our body, right?

So radiates out, and awareness then is receptive to sounds, maybe speaking right now, the sights in this room, and the traffic outside this, you know, beyond there.

So it goes out, it kind of flows outwards, is a kind of metaphor I like.

And the second metaphor it's related to that, is that of a small heater, or a small fire in a cold room, cold space.

That the heater, as it warms, will warm up what's closest first.

And so if you're really cold in the room, you go close to the heater, because it's radiating, that's where it's radiating.

And so it begins radiating, warming, and thawing, melting, softening, what's closest.

And then it begins, as that heats up, it's the heat spreads and spreads.

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