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

Please visit our website at adioderma.org.

Welcome, welcome.

Nice to see you all.

It's nice to practice together.

And today I'm going to continue on this theme of, it's January.

It's the beginning of the year. And, you know, it's not unusual for us to have this idea like, okay, you know, to assess maybe how the last year went and what I'm going to do this upcoming year.

And heaven forbid we might make some resolutions, all those things that we think we should be doing.

I'm making a little joke out of it. Sometimes it can be really useful, right, to set an intention at the beginning of the

year. Maybe start with a meditation practice or a boost your meditation practice or, you know, eat all those things that we know we should eat

and not eat those things that we know we shouldn't eat

and exercise more, all these things, all these things.

So there's this way that January, I might have mentioned this last week,

I can't remember, I don't think I did,

that I was kind of pleased to discover that it was named after this Roman god Janus, right?

To, at beginnings.

And so it's not unusual maybe that there's this sense of beginning with the new year.

And in the Buddhist tradition,

we don't really emphasize beginnings.

There isn't really this pointing to beginnings so much.

Of course, beginnings are implicit within endings,

but in the Buddhist tradition, and maybe I'll

...