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

Please visit our website at audiodharma.org.

So to say a few words about the practice.

One of the functions of meditation is to quiet the inner voices enough, the inner thinking

we have, even the ones that are almost subliminal, that carry with them all kinds of ideas about who we are and who we aren't.

All kinds of ideas that limit ourselves, that put us into categories, put us in like this kind of person, that kind of person,

or I should have done that, I shouldn't have done that.

And there's all these ideas. Some of them are internalized from our society, internalized by other people, how other people treat us.

Some of them are, who knows where they're from, why we think the way we do.

But to quiet those voices, quiet those ideas, those orientation, those beliefs we have about who we are.

And as we got quieter, the alternative that begins happening is that we begin feeling like we're whole.

We can begin feeling there's nothing wrong with us.

And this idea, there's nothing wrong with us.

It's not, that's not a mistake to have that idea.

You might immediately come up with all the reasons, you know, what's something, you know, really, you don't know my life.

Let me tell you all the ways I'm wrong, Gil.

But it's a self, it's a, it's, it's in that experience of the voices getting quiet.

And all those beliefs becoming quiet, in that space, there's nothing that tells you that you're wrong.

There's nothing that operates that way.

And it's okay to dip into that kind of sense of wholeness.

It's okay to breathe and be alive without operating on the beliefs that something is wrong with me.

Or I have to be a different kind of person, I have to, or whatever it might be.

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