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

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Good evening. Welcome. Welcome everybody. So tonight I want to talk a little bit about this idea that mindfulness practice is about allowing.

But when I was thinking about it, I was like, oh, allowing. That doesn't sound so interesting it doesn't sound so much fun it doesn't sound like

okay this is something that's gonna finally make me happy and make all my life run perfectly or something like that.

Whereas mindfulness, you know, at least it has that potential for something, right?

Something new and different.

It turns out that mindfulness is so much about allowing,

not so much about going out there and manipulating it and make everything be fine and perfect so that our life runs perfectly.

Because if you could do that, you would not be here on a Monday night, right?

You would be out there making your life run perfectly.

There's this way in which we don't even notice,

and certainly I didn't notice that we are so often, maybe even most often, in a subtle or an obvious way saying no, no, no, no, no, no.

Our conditioner is too cold. It was a little bit too warm earlier or it should be quieter in the hall.

Nope, you know, no, that should be, we should have a longer sit, we should have a shorter sit or, you know, whatever it is.

There's this little way in which we're always saying no, to whatever we're experiencing.

It somehow needs to be... to whatever we're experiencing.

It somehow needs to be different.

And I mean, of course, this is an obvious ways,

but also there's like so many ways in which this is really subtle the way that we shows,

the way that shows up. And when we start noticing all the way in which we're saying no and instead we allow. I'm not going to

say that we have to say yes, but just the kind of the softening the know things really can transform and can change, will change,

...