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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Welcome, welcome.

It's nice to practice with you all.

So tonight I'd like to build on this theme that I did last week on Friday.

I did with this theme on kindness.

And I'd like to kind of maybe build on that, this idea of kindness.

And I'm influenced by Sharon Salzburg.

And she has a book, if I remember correctly, it's called The Force of Kindness.

So many of you may know that she's well known for loving kindness practice.

She's one of the main people that brought it to the West and popularized it here in the West.

But Sharon prints out that we may think that kindness rates pretty low on these characteristics

that we think people should have.

We all think that maybe like an intellect or a sharp wit or beauty or invulnerability or power or authority

or all these other things, but certainly must be more important than kindness.

And if you look at our media, what we see and all kinds of media, right, we get this message that kindness, that's not really valued.

But it is, right, in our lives it's valued.

But in so many ways we get this message that it's somehow, maybe it seems wimpy.

Like kindness is something that you do if you can't have a sharp intellect or wit or beauty or power or something like this.

Like, okay, well we see this person is kind, at least I can be kind.

It's kind of the message that we see showing up in so many different ways.

I know that sometimes I've felt that with, you know, the movies or TV shows, you know, sometimes like the sidekick of the really powerful person in media is kind.

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