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

Please visit our website at audioderma.org.

Good evening and welcome, welcome everybody.

So tonight I'd like to talk a little bit about meta, this practice of loving kindness.

Some of you know that I'll be teaching a retreat on loving kindness and so this little warm-up for me.

Kind of like a dig into the topic.

And so I'm sure many of you know that meta gets translated in a number of different ways,

classically or maybe commonly I should say it's loving kindness,

but also we can use this idea of goodwill, some people use friendliness,

some people use effort, care, warm-heartedness, all kinds of different ways that we might understand.

But one thing that maybe distinguishes meta from these other words like in English,

this just love or goodwill is that it has a quality or it's characterized by freedom.

So it's this goodwill that has this quality of freedom associated with it.

There's a number of ways in which we might understand that you can't hear,

so I think the volume needs to be a little bit higher.

There we go, I don't know, is this louder?

Maybe not, maybe I'll just keep on talking into things.

Oh, there we go, there we go.

You can hear now, right?

So this goodwill, this sometimes it's worth love.

Sometimes it's not so easy or appropriate to use the word love,

because love sometimes has this lot of baggage associated with it.

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