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

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Yes, good morning. Is that loud enough for you, the volume? So I'll do one announcement

and in my mind it's been interesting that what I'm going to announce

also kind of sets up my talk as a contrast almost.

So this evening at 6 PM I'm going to do an online Zoom teaching meeting for Spirit Rock and they asked me to do kind of a book reading I suppose. I have a new book that came out called

Everything is Practice and and it's a manual for sitting inside retreats,

especially a manual for our, at our retreat center in Santa Cruz.

And so I see it not so much as an opportunity to talk about the book, but to talk about my enthusiasm for insight retreats.

And even more so for those that are the longer ones, the month long.

And I think it's one of the great things that Spirit Rock offers is the month long

or the two month long retreats every year.

So that will be the topic.

But in thinking about that and happy to do this, there has been a bit of a problem with

teachings like that that I do.

And that is that people will assume that what the teachings are for a retreat

are how we're supposed to practice in daily life.

And one of those has to do with walking meditation.

And on retreat, walking meditation is very particular generally.

There's many ways of doing it, but there's a kind of, sometimes we call a formal way of doing walking meditation.

And so people get the idea that this is the way we practice walking in this tradition, just walking very slowly and back and forth.

And another way is to see that retreat practice,

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