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

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Good evening. Welcome, welcome.

Nice to see you all. Nice to practice together. I wanted to talk a little bit about thoughts tonight. In other settings I've been talking about thoughts, and I like to talk about it some more here.

Because there's this way, like when we sit down and meditate, like we just did for 30 minutes,

there often can be the sense of like, dang it, why are all these thoughts here?

Or there can be a sense of like, why is the mind so busy?

Or if only my thoughts were different or would go away or something like this.

Even if those expressions weren't explicitly said in the mind, there can be a way in which we have a little like

resistance or aversive relationship to our thoughts, especially when we're meditating.

And we're not meditating, we love our thoughts.

But when we're meditating, we often are, you know, wish it that it would go away or be otherwise in some kind of way.

So in this tradition, as many of you know, this is not about getting rid of thoughts.

We don't have to do that.

Turns out you can't in the way that you think you might be able to anyway.

But really, what's being pointed to you

is just noticing our relationship to thoughts.

So it's more about noticing

and just how we are engaging with thoughts,

how we're being with them.

Are we all in?

Like in love with them and being entertained by them? Or are we, when we wake up from being lost in thought, thinking like,

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