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

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I want to make one correction. I'm not a co-founder of IMC. I was a student here.

So in this style of practice I offered in the guided meditation the receptive awareness

settling back and just receiving moment to moment experience, not aiming or pointing to stay with one particular

object, people often will ask, how does concentration fit in to this practice?

How does it work?

And so I'd like to respond to that question in a little talk here.

So kind of talking about different forms of concentration.

In general, concentration, I would say there's different ways we can think about concentration.

We often think about it as focus.

That's what I think we tend to think about the word as what the word means.

But in terms of a quality of mind, we could say it's a stability of mind and in terms of the meditation practice it's a stability of mind

a composure a sense of collectedness, of non-distraction.

Those are some other words that resonate

with what concentration is.

Unbroken attentiveness, another word.

Concentration arises, it's not something we do so much.

Concentration arises as a natural condition.

It arises when we explore energy and mindfulness together,

making the effort to stay connected with experience moment after moment.

And often we do that by staying with one particular object, the breath for example.

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