Tara Brach - 1000 Serious Moves

Episode Date: August 15, 2012

2012-08-15 - 1000 Serious Moves - We easily habituate to feeling stressed, leaning forward, trying to figure things out and get things done. The undercurrent is we are living reactively--resisting unpleasant experience, seeking out more comfort and ease-- perpetually wanting life to be different than it is. In response to this confined way of living, the Buddha invites us to discover our innate capacity for happiness, the wellbeing that arises in full presence. These two talks explore the ways we get caught in the trance of reactivity and grimness, and the pathways to unconditioned happiness. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

Zen master Ticknathan has a wonderful one-liner and it is it's not enough to suffer. You must touch peace too and happiness and ease and will-being. I love that because it is so easy to get into a mindset of that this life is a problem that we're trying to solve. Okay. and in a daily way we lock into getting grim. I see it in myself, I see it in many, kind of trying to get through the day. So I'm starting tonight's talk with a poem by the poet Hafeis

that I really love. It's called Tripping Over Joy. And he writes, what is the difference between your experience of existence and that of a saint? the saint knows that the spiritual path is a sublime just game with God and that the beloved has just made such a fantastic move that the saint is now continually tripping over in joy and bursting out in laughter and saying,

I surrender. Whereas, my dear, I'm afraid you still think you have a thousand serious moves. So that's the title of tonight's talk, A Thousand Serious Moves. I think it's a great line and it really sums up our trance in a certain way that we go about life and if you kind of catch yourself at any moment in some way we're on this track and we're on our way somewhere and it's kind of serious business.

I'm not saying it's undiluted. We marvel in our fun but we can get really grim. and in a way I could stop the talk right here and if all we did together perhaps for the next few weeks was had a reflection where we would pause and just say well right now am I

you know in that trance of a thousand serious moves it's a fabulous wake-up I play with that one a lot but I'll talk since I have the time to talk tonight So it's an attitude that goes into spiritual life too and I think it's one of the big misunderstandings of Buddhism that it's all about suffering and that we're trying to purify and transform

and in different ways master the art of concentrating or whatever it happens to be that in some way there's a message that this spiritual thing is another project that we're trying to get good at. Now that's not what the Buddha taught and that's not the essence of any of the wisdom traditions. But it's easy with our mentality to take it on that way. Self-improvement. So what I'd like to say mostly is that while attention to suffering, suffering is part of the truth of what is, is absolutely a sense.

to wake up. So is attention to joy, to the natural joy of being alive. And because we're so conditioned to get grim and beyond that thousand series moves thing, it's really important that we realize this is as much a part of the path as anything else. Why? When we're really present, there is a natural happiness and well-being that emerges. it's part of who we are it's an expression of our deepest nature so it's part of our commitment to being all that we are

to say it's not enough to suffer okay so we'll explore this some tonight I'd like to maybe tonight and next week explore really what are the gateways to this happiness In other words, what is it? What stops us? You have to be able to see what stops us.

And then how do we really wake up out of this tendency to get grim and feel that bubble of delight, of joy, of happiness, of well-being? We'll get more into definitions, but what frees us to that? Maybe this is a juncture just to pause and invite you just to check in for a moment on your own life and how this takes place in your life. In other words, how much do I actually experience happiness is the question?

How much well-being is there? And if you close your eyes and you just scan today this week and just through that filter, has it been the thousand serious moves and have you been kind of caught and narrow and life as business? How much has there been a sense of really resting in a kind of well-being, appreciation, enjoyment, savoring? You can continue to reflect and you might include these are kind of some of the

dimensions of well-being that were really put out by Seligman, who is the kind of father of positive sense. psychology. So one domain of happiness is experiencing pleasure through the senses. Is that so in our lives? Another domain is a sense of engagement, a flow, just really being involved and engaged and going with activity, immersed. How much of that? Another domain of well-being is feeling our relatedness, the positive emotions that come with feeling connected with each other. Part of well-being is feeling a sense of meaning, of belonging to something larger than what we consider the ego self, that belonging. And for many, part of will-being

comes from a sense of the kind of growth or mastery or accomplishment that's meaningful in a deep way to us. So it's a filter, just a sense. So how is it for this particular body, mind, heart? Is there much well-being? and you can open your eyes when you'd like. The Buddha described two kinds of happiness. Now the first is called Pamoja. That's the poly word. And it's really the worldly happiness.

And many of the things I mentioned to you just now had to do with worldly happiness. You know, it's the happiness and it's conditioned. It's conditioned on certain things being a certain way. So Pomoja is, you know, perhaps with a certain person, or particular accomplishment or tasty food. That's one kind of happiness.

The second kind of happiness, which is the liberating kind of happiness, the Buddha talks about, is called sukkha. And my favorite term for sukkah is happy for no reason. Okay? Happiness without cause. It's that sense of well-being that comes just out of our natural presence,

just the beingness. when we're resting in that beingness, the realization of really what we are, there is a natural sense of well-being, of belonging, of love, of freedom. That's Suka. That's the unconditioned happiness. So I'm going to talk about the first, Pomoja,

because Pomoja can be very wholesome, can actually be a platform or a gateway to Suka, but it also can be a gate. way to real suffering. So that's what I want to talk about for a little bit. Okay, so sometimes it's fleeting. This happiness that's called conditional happiness or Pomodja where it's just a good taste or a great massage or, you know, one of those perfectly aimed compliments like, you know, really you're 63? You don't look a day over 61 or you know, whatever. Actually, that would be devastating, really more like it. Or, you know, our team wins the Olympics or, you know, which is,

you know, you just, you do get a flash. There's research that shows for men, especially for men, our biochemistry when our team wins. I mean, there's a real surge in the happiness chemicals, you know. So that's the fleeting kind of happiness, and sometimes it's longer lived, like when we really accomplish something that matters to us, or time in a beautiful setting,

or a real creative endeavor that we're in the flow, and then Pomoja, it's still, conditioned on something, but it has the kind of longer life to it. Now, even this conditional happiness can be really wholesome, can kind of acquaint us with a sense of ease and well-being, especially when we learn to savor, and that's going to be the next class, some of the ways that we can really work with what's going on in our lives to open our hearts. So, there's some beautiful expressions of conditional happiness, like the happiness that happens when we see someone else happy.

It's conditional, but it's beautiful. And it comes from a very pure place, okay? Are the feeling of happiness or gratitude when somebody's been really kind to us? Or when we get touched in a transcendent way by some exquisite music, you know, Mozart, and we're just, ah, you know. These are very precious, beautiful experiences on planet Earth of conditioned happiness.

And when we hold them lightly, when there's kind of an open hand, we let them land and hold them lightly, they acquaint our body-mind with really an experience of openness and freedom. And here's the difficulty. We are deeply conditioned to have strong preferences for for some of our pomoja, that we want certain things a certain way, and we grasp and get attached and get fixated. And then it turns to pain. And there's a whole lot in Buddhism.

And in many traditions about the pain that happens when we get attached to conditioned pleasures. So it's an interesting inquiry, and you can ask yourself, and let's do this inquiry right now, that if you just kind of close your eyes and say, all right, so what is between me and real happiness? And you might sense a certain relationship.

It doesn't even have to be a real troubled relationship, but is there anything between me and happiness in this relationship? Or it might be a work, your work. Is there anything between me and happiness in my way of engaging in work? Or just at this time in your life, what is between you and happiness, if there is something? And for many of us, as we ask that question,

we touch into a kind of chronic anxiety in our system that's worried about something that's up and coming. Are we touch into a sense of hurt or anger at the way somebody's been behaving or judgment? Are we touching just a sense of, well, I'm not unhappy, but I'm just not there yet. I'm not really flourishing in my work or there's not real intimacy or it's just not enough. What I'm getting at is that what is between us and being happy is some sense that something's

wrong or missing with what's right here. And it's really interesting if you stop in any moment in your life and say, well, right this moment, am I happy? You might find that there's almost a habit of things aren't quite right right now. You're kind of waiting for something or tensing against something, something's missing or something's wrong. This is the conditioning. Am I happy right now? Maybe there's just a little physical discomfort. Not a big deal, but something tells us as soon as there's unpleasantness of any sort that we really can't be happy because something's wrong. That's the way our mind works. So it's very strong conditioning and it's part of the survival brain. Very strong conditioning.

to keep scanning for what's wrong to try to make things better, but not just rest in how it is. The more historic wounds or hurts, the more historic deprivation, the stronger that sense of something's wrong or something's missing is in our system. The more of the thousand serious moves we're always trying to control and manage things. One of the main ways this takes shape is what has, has been called if only mind. And I'm going to ask you to check out if only mind in your own life.

Now if only mind is probably what you're imagining it to be, which is this, and it's a delusion, this delusion that if only such and such were in place, if only my body were healthy, or if only my partner

would change and be who I want her or him to be or if only wars would stop or whatever the if only is, then I could be happy. So we've postponed happiness based on a condition. And we each have, from what I've detected, for most of us, our favorite handful of if onlys. So sometimes it's if only I could have this food. It's very immediate. If only I could have ice cream, then it would be really fun. Things would be fine. For a lot of us, if only I could

accomplish such and such. If only I could get these three things done today. I mean, have you noticed how much we hitch our relief and ease and well-being to getting certain things checked off the list? I mean, really, I'm not alone in this, right? I mean, because I see it every day going on. If only others would cooperate is big. It's really big. We really want others to change and be a certain way. You know, there's this tension in the perception,

suit of if only. If you check out if only when it's there, it's not like we're just, there's some pleasantness that we're going, oh, how lovely. It's a have-to-have feeling. And with that, there's a fear of not having it. So there's tension and we're pursuing. And on a seven-year-old girl admitted calmly to her parents that Billy Brown had kissed her after class. How did that happened? asked her mother. It wasn't easy, admitted the young lady, but there were three other girls that help me catch him. So, you know, it's this thing of, you know, it starts really early. In some way we're chasing after because our life isn't going to really work out unless we have the right partner. That's just a big one just to name it. It's not truth, but it's big in

our minds. Our, the partner we have isn't, you know, it's either grasping or aversion. It's not the way we want it. I remember somebody sent me this little cartoon and it had these two very fancy looking poodles lying in bed and one was kind of cowering looking really ashamed and the other was wagging her finger saying bad sex bad bad sex so it's this thing of you know others are not the way we want them to be and often we actually withhold our love we're so in if only if only you'd be different we actually withhold our love because there's some sense in us that it If we act loving, that's like positive reinforcement for staying the way you are. Isn't that true?

So something in us is tight. I saw another little cartoon with these very old couple that were sitting in rockers on a porch. And he's saying to her, now you want an open marriage? So just to reflect for yourself now. And I'm giving you a little bit of silly examples, but I think you get the idea. idea. So you might just close your eyes and ask yourself this one. Is there some way that you have some future happiness linked to something being a certain way that you're waiting for? Is there an if only that you're in some way waiting for yourself to change? Only I could

work through this obsession or this addiction. If only this other person would change. If only that I could have this particular job with this financial. financial security, then I'd be okay. If only I could tie up all the loose ends, lose weight, be healthy. And sense how much that is actually a trance that you're in. In some way, waiting for something. You might even ask yourself, is it really true that if I got that, I'd be happy? It's okay if part of you said yes. It's just a useful question. So the problem that I'm really talking about, which is not a bad thing, it's kind of a universal thing, is that we get hitched. Like our longings get hitched in a narrow way.

And really there are substitutes for what we really long for, which is belonging, love, you know, really being fully alive. But we hitch it on, can I just be financially secure? or can I just have this partner or whatever it is. So there's a couple of very deep truths on why, if only mind, causes suffering. And the first one is we are regularly wrong about what we think is going to make us happy when it's these fixated wants.

There's a lot of research now, a lot of research on happiness. Probably you're aware that if you Google on Amazon for happiness, there are scads of books on it, articles. It's just, you know, it's like this culture is avidly pursuing happiness and not actually becoming happier, but avidly pursuing it. But in a way that's got a lot of grasping. So, okay, so 13 studies show that lottery winners are ultimately no happier than non-winners,

and paraplegics usually become as content as people who can walk. Now that to me is powerful. That we anticipate good things happening are going to make us happier and that bad things will make us miserable. And we do have a temporary spike, it's true. That's why I said it's okay if you think it'll make you happier. It will, maybe, for a while. But after five months,

this is the research that I've heard from the positive psychology crowd. After five months, we return to our happiness set point. many of you know that it's been discovered that we each have a happiness set point which is generally where we land up whether good things or bad things happen so we think it's going to make us happier we hitch on to something it's the story of a young man asked god how long a million years was to him and god said a million years to me it's just like a single second in your time then he asked god what a million dollars was to him and god would applied, a million dollars, it's just like a single penny to you. Then the young man got up his

courage. God, could I have one of your pennies? And God said, sure, just a second. It doesn't work. So we have this set point. We think things are going to make us happier. They don't. But there's another deeper to me reason that if only mind causes suffering, which is that, what while we're in the midst of if only, we're not here. We're not inhabiting our lives. Life's what's happening while we're kind of waiting for something to come together. You know, it can be really sad. I mean, I talked this week to a woman in her late 60s.

Her husband's older than her, and he's now in Alzheimer's. And she was really going through a deep kind of sadness because she was just kind of looking at the landscape of her. life and how many years did she and her husband kind of postponed their own enjoyment in some way because they were trying to get his career together and feel more secure in this and get the kids in colleges and there was always something that in some way was between them just acknowledging oh this is it here we are let's just live it and I think that's really common remember sharing several with you how one woman very, very involved with hospice work, described the most common regret

expressed by the dying, was the sense of having lived up to other people's expectations of who they were, or even their own internalized expectations, but not living true to their hearts. They were doing the thousand serious moves, kind of on that automatic thing. So if only mine, the ways we fix on something narrow keep us from fully occupying right now. Wanting is for the next moment to contain what this moment does not. So then the inquiry really is what allows us to see this trance and wake up to where the one place where happiness is possible. You know, what allows us to really change that set point and really open to what's our potential?

Because the Buddha said, I would not teach you about this happiness if it were not possible for you. And we get habituated. We get kind of resigned to our mood. It's just familiar. And I'm not talking about a kind of another form of attachment of, oh, I have to change my set point.

You know, it's not that. It's a sense, it's the wisdom in us that senses, oh, I've just forgot that there's a way of being that's possible, that's really possible, possible, and it involves becoming more holy who I am. So then we look at, you know, how this works. And I remember a couple of years ago I was about to give a talk on some of the something like this and somebody left a little comic strip on my, on this seat I'm sitting on, and it had this robot who was jumping around joyously, she's going, I'm free, I'm free,

I'm free at last, I finally found my manual override button. And I feel like it kind of sums it up, that, you know, there is a way to override this conditioning, to always be seeking after things being different because that's the conditioning. I mean we are wired, our survival self is wired to be scanning for what's wrong and what's missing all the time. We have the consciousness. It's part of our makeup to become aware of that and step out of it. And that doesn't mean that we don't still look and notice when there's danger and it doesn't mean that we don't pursue things we want. It just means that our lives are not possessed by it. There's more choice and there's more arriving in the one place where there really is freedom. So the rest of our

our night tonight will be really how we evolve ourself, how we let these practices wake us up out of the thousand serious moves. And I want to say that the conditioning to stay stuck to keep thinking oh if only my health or I can't be happy because you know this is happening

with my son or whatever it is that conditioning is really really powerful so in order to move towards this freedom it takes a very strong

intention as I said we're kind of accustomed and resigned. So it takes an intention to be happy. And again, in the research on happiness, they found that people that are happy actually intended to be happy. It's like they're choosing it. It's like this matters, it's possible, why not? So this dedication is really to our full potential. and I was very moved. I heard a story, I think it was last year.

A friend of mine was at Spirit Rock on the West Coast and was part of a year-long training for people of color. And so this woman that was part of the training was a community activist and had experienced a childhood of poverty and trauma and abuse. And then herself, she faced a lot of illness. and of course culturally racism, single parenting of two children.

So she had a rough life. And she talked in this group very openly, very vulnerably about the years of struggle to educate herself and to stand up for her beliefs and how she become radical to fight for justice and the kind of local and national politics. And she had been really grimly determined.

And she had been doing the thousand serious moves with many, many elements of great dignity. So I'm not saying it's just like a blanket, it's not something that's a blanket trance, a lot of life to it, but she had been very, very grim.

So in this group, the last meeting of the group, this woman announced, she said, after all the struggles and troubles I lived through, I would decide to do something really radical. She said, I'm going to be happy. I had tears because I realized the wisdom in that, which is it doesn't matter what's happening. It doesn't matter what our diagnosis is or what's happening.

There is a unconditioned well-being. It doesn't mean we're happy as in delightful joy happy. It could be the kind of compassion that feels tender and there's something in us that feels at home. But it's possible in the middle of, of any circumstance to come to a sense of being at home in that well-being. And the beginning, it's just what this woman said. She decided, I'm going to be happy. So when I hear that, I can feel it coming, that decision coming from a different source than that kind of goal-driven,

this is my next self-improvement project. It's like she sends this is a possibility, this is my potential. Why not? Why not? I had mentioned earlier Marty Seligman, positive psychology, and I think it's so important that that's part of the mix of what's available in the field because it's very easy for our psyches to think, oh, you're going to a therapist, something's wrong, you're going to fix it. Well, we can go to therapists and we can practice meditation because we sense a potential we want to unfold. So this is a little bit of his story here, and I love it, because he was asked what led him to really studying happiness.

He said, the epiphany happened when my daughter Nikki and I were gardening, and she was just five. I should confess that when I garden, I'm goal-directed, time-urgent. Nikki was throwing weeds in the air and dancing around, and I yelled at her. She came back to me and said, Daddy, do you remember before I was five, I whined all the time, I whined every day?

Did you notice that since my fifth birthday, I haven't whined at all? I said, yes, Nikki. Well, Daddy, that was because on my birthday, I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being so grumpy. It's good. Good teacher. So he says in a flash I saw that she was right about me

I really was a nimbus cloud a nimbus cloud and probably any success I had in life was probably not due to being a grouch but in spite of it he said I also realized that my profession and that psychology was half baked that the baked part was about suffering but the unbaked part was about positive emotion and virtue and positive institutions

in a moment in that classical religious sense I acquired a mission. It's courageous to face the suffering in our life. And it's courageous to open to the well-being and happiness that's possible. And it takes some intention. So another, you know, just a quote that I wanted to share that I think I've shared here before, André Gide's writes,

know that joy is rare, more difficult and more beautiful than sadness. He says, once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation. So the word obligation is a strong one. But again, joy and happiness and well-being are an expression of who we are when we're not fixated on something is wrong. Something's missing. It's like those are the clouds, the nimbus clouds,

in our consciousness. And when we're not fixated on them, there's space for the light to shine through. We don't have to live clouded over. So let's check this one out. Why don't you take a moment and just close your eyes and let this be a pause where you might take some time to arrive.

Just feel your body here. As we did in the meditation, let your awareness scan through your body so that you feel if there's places of tension. This could be another moment to just let go a little, relax a little more. Just like our habit to be grim, our body has a habit to tense up.

So part of choosing to be happy is choosing to relax a little. Maybe right now you could choose to relax the brow and just soften the eyes. You might sense the smile spreading through the eyes. And you can choose to sense a half smile at the mouth just play with that. Let the inside of the mouth be in a smile.

And you can actually choose to smile into your heart, not to cover over anything, but just to feel the space that's there, the heart space. And just let that smile spread through the body, the sense of receptivity and openness. And then sense what happens when you let yourself say, I want to feel happiness, to experience well-being,

to sense it as a longing of the heart. I want to open to the natural joy of feeling alive, of being alive. And just sense what happens. Just honestly notice what happens in your mind, your body. I mean, just to bring up doubt of what's possible? Does it bring up questions of deserving? Does it bring up a sense of excitement, at possibility? May I be happy?

May I feel happy? just sense what happens when you said that message I feel happy that's part of the practice is just to explore letting that intention be in your consciousness and you can open your eyes when you'd like

once we have that intention it energizes presence because there's an innate wisdom in us that knows that if we long for happiness we have to come here. It just goes like that. We know.

So we sense, you know, happiness can be imagined in the future, we can have memories of it, but it's lived here. There's an old Eskimo quote that goes that yesterday is ashes. Tomorrow is wood. Only today does the fire burn brightly.

Only today does the fire burn brightly. is the fire burn brightly. So the decades of research on mindfulness and on meditation affirm that when we establish a very full presence, a really full presence, then the parts of the brain that correlate with what's called positive emotion,

you know, unit of feelings and peace and happiness and well-being light up. And you get a deactivation of the afflictive emotions, the limbic area. It's just when there's a full presence. So here we are. We're actually, that's the training we have here basically, is how to be present. But what we find is arriving in full presence has its stages. So it's not like the moment that we say, okay, I'm going to be here, that all of a sudden those centers light up. It takes some time to arrive. And there's layers of what we've been running away from, layers of armoring, layers and tangles of unlived life.

So it's a process of coming into a full presence where we're really resting in that yes, letting life be exactly as it is. It's a process. And part of what we go through in that process is we run into the different thoughts and beliefs that keep us from presence. We run into, you know, it's the Buddha said it this way, he said, whatever the practitioner regularly thinks and ponders upon, that will be the inclination of the mind. So as we practice, we find, oh, my mind's gone off to that worry, or my mind's gone off trying to figure out how I can get more of such and such,

or I'm rehearsing this conversation. So we see that the neuropathways of worry and grasping keep getting reinforced. Of course, part of coming into presence is we just find out about that. It's okay. Noticing it starts loosening it up, just not all at once. These scientists say that neurons that fire together, wire together. So we start noticing, well, if I'm telling myself this, that someone, you know, if I'm always judging in this way, I'm just deepening those grooves

of a kind of tight, judgmental, grim person. person. If I'm always worrying and planning, I'm deepening those pathways, the 1,000 serious moves. So we start being more aware of the way we're caught and loosening the grip and resting more in presence. What are you believing? Are you going around believing something is wrong with me or something's wrong with you if you are? Then to notice it will help you to step back, come back home into the census. So I'd like to share one story of one woman who discover, who's her process of discovering this.

And this is a woman who's in a high security prison, stills there. She writes, you and I, we share the planet. Perhaps that's all you think. When I look out of the six inch wide slit of a window, I see the same clouds as you. So we share sky too. A relationship has to start someplace. Might as well start big, right?

And then she goes on to the difference between me and you. And she describes, she's been in prison for a long time, she describes the stages of going through, at first she went through huge fear and then anger about being in prison. And she says there was always an under-overcurrent, depending of the year of guilt, shame, regret, mortification,

basically shooting on myself. This is what, she was living in the belief of the world is bad and I am bad. She started noticing all this when she started taking mindfulness classes that some friends of mine her teaching in this prison.

And she describes some mindfulness helper to see that and come into the present moment. So I'll tell you a few things she said. She said, I learned how to just be, how to listen to the way my body feel. I learned how to be still, really still. That's where I learned the peace of mind where it lives.

Then I learned I could move in stillness. She says mindfulness works wherever a person lives, however a person lives. There is stress in every life. The trick is to see the life around the stress. I look at my slit of a window and see the prettiest stars I've ever, seeing because I can really see now. Why was I here for 15 years before I realized that I couldn't

detect yellow flowers under the low pressure sodium lamps in the courtyard? That's easy. I never bother to slow down and pay attention to be mindful, to realize that it is still okay. I am still okay even if all my best laid plans fall through. It's hard here to not make plans for when I go home it's harder to face the realization that when I go home might not actually ever get here those days make me have to be okay with today as a Christian I know I was never promised tomorrow as a mindful person I can see that this sky is pretty this grass is green

if this is the only sidewalk I will ever walk get to walk on I'm at a place where I can appreciate that it's not always a bad sidewalk. I have joy in pointing out Orion when I leave my meditation group on Wednesday night. Joy in pointing out Orion when I leave my meditation group on Wednesday night. The time to read what she wrote in a way to honor her because I think there's something about discovering in any circumstance, no matter what it is, that it's possible to be. come into the present moment and find happiness. That's the possibility. And sometimes you're

in circumstances that if you don't, it is pure suffering. Sometimes you can just go into a more kind of distracted trance, but sometimes not. So for her, attending to the breath, to the others that she was practicing with, as it turned out, the flowers, sky, stars, simple things, made her happy. This is Nietzsche. He says, for happiness, how little suffices for happiness. The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye glance. Little makes up the best happiness.

Be still. Be still. How many of you notice that what really makes you happy are really small things and simple things. Have you noticed that? Yeah, let's, I just, by hands, how many have noticed that? That really when you're, it's little things, the simplest.

Yeah, thank you. There's something really beautiful in that, that the deepest happiness, really, when we sense it, there's very simple things, and it's not actually the thing. It arises from the presence that's there. If there's not presence, there's not happiness. We think we're happy about the beauty of the clouds as they're moving through the sky

or the sound of a child's laugh or playing in the ocean waves or whatever it is. We think we're happy because of things. But what's actually allowing us to be happy is the background space of presence itself. You might investigate this. And the way to do it is when there's beauty or kindness or recognition of the the good simple things. When you're feeling those moments of happiness, pause and look for the background to that experience within yourself. You'll notice that if you've landed in a moment of well-being, there's a background of presence. This is a poem by Dorothy Hunt. She says,

in this choiceless, never-ending flow of life, there is an infinite array of choices. One alone brings happiness to love what is. So initially when we come into presence we don't love what is. We're just committed enough to say I'll be present with what is. Okay, realistically speaking, right? We have a sense of pain in our body. We're not going to just enter in and immediately love it, but we're negotiating kind of, okay, I'm going to be present with it. And usually there's a thing in the background saying, and hopefully it'll go away. Okay, right? But then presence begets presence. If we stay, there's sometimes a sense of, okay, there's a little space.

And then we start appreciating that there's some space. And then the pain, then that space regards the pain with some softness or tenderness. And then the what we are is no longer the person fighting the pain, but we are that kind of tender presence. And there's love there. And it comes out of just agreeing to be present. what we're really seeking when we say, I want to be happy, is that presence.

So tonight, we're going to close in a few moments, but tonight really the message is we create our prison. We're in prison as long as we're wanting life to be different, as long as we're on this track of a thousand serious moves where we're trying to avoid bad things and get more good things. We're in a kind of prison because we're trapped and we're removed from the place where happiness and wholeness and presence is possible. So the pathway home decide that well-being matters,

and that's the wisdom place that kind of intuits it's possible. We don't have to be in a kind of resigned trance and just be grim. We don't have to be in our deathbed to regret that we weren't true to ourselves. So decide on happiness. and then we become mindful of all the thoughts and patterns that keep us small and keep coming back to presence because right here in this aliveness of this body and heart there's a deeper truth okay so decide on well-being keep coming back keep coming back and as we do we discover that happiness is intrinsic in presence

so let's explore that a little together we'll close with that kind of of investigation of how coming back leads us home. In a way, the inquiry for this practice is, isn't it true that we really long for is already here? Isn't it true that what we really long for is already here? Always and already here. This final meditation, in a very simple way, just invite yourself into the moment. You might feel the breath, feel your heart, whatever state your heart is in, and mentally whisper, I love, and then fill in the blank. So just repeat it over and over again. It may be that I love looking at clouds, I love walking in nature, I love a particular person, but just mentally whisper, I love, I love, and just see what

comes out. Make things up if they don't come to mind. Just play with it. Take one thing that's come to mind that you know you love, where the love is strong, It might be a person, something beautiful, your dog. Bring that close in so you can really feel the loving, what you love about this being or experience. And let the love be as big as it is. You can even let the object of the love drop away, so you just feel the loving itself. And sense within that loving, a presence and a weakness and a deep sense of a way. well-being, sense how much space there is in that loving for whatever arises.

If it's painful, then there's tenderness. If it's beautiful, there's loving kindness. In this choiceless, never-ending flow of life, there's an infinite array of choices. One alone brings happiness to love what is. Open ourselves to the natural joy of being a lot of being a lot of. to happiness and well-being. May all beings everywhere discover their potential to love without holding back and to cherish and open to this life

with all their being. May all beings be free. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule are about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com,

our IMCW's site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.