Tara Brach - 2014-08-20 Bringing Awareness to Doing

Episode Date: August 23, 2014

2014-08-20 Bringing Awareness to Doing - One of the core domains of egoic trance is addictive doing - chronic activity driven by fear and wanting that keeps us from realizing a wholeness of Being. This talk looks at how addictive doing keeps us in the map of time, identified as a separate self, always on our way somewhere else. We then explore ways we undo this conditioning by pausing and opening to the liberating dimension of Being.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. I'd like to begin tonight with a cartoon that I saw a few years ago that I've always liked. And it has a female robot who's kind of jumping around. She's ecstatic and she's saying, I'm free, I'm free, free at last. I've overridden my manual drive. I have. And I found my manual override button is really the language. I'm free.

And it seemed to me about the most perfect expression of how the path goes, that we have this conditioning. And we're trying to find a way to step out of our conditioned self and discover really the depth and the aliveness and the beauty of who we are. So tonight what I'd like to do is explore a key area of manual override. and that's our conditioning to busyness. And I just want to check and see if there's anyone in here that thinks this is not going to be relevant. And there may be a few, because that's not everybody's thing, but many of us.

And if it's not like physical busyness and doing in an outward way, it's an inward kind of busyness. We're always chewing on and picking on something in our minds. So I'm not talking about the kind of doing an activity that has to do with being creative or productive or serving an engaged way. I'm talking about addictive doing. And the reality is we live kind of in this world where we all have demands and things that we want to and like to do to take care of ourselves and our families

and work and to help our world. You know, political activism, social activism, there's things we want to do. So this isn't about doing. Really the point is that for our activity to be enlightened, to really be of benefit, it needs to come from a quality of clarity and open-heartedness, which is not where addictive doing comes from.

In fact, for our activity to really have an impact in a creative way, in a serviceful way, in a heart way, it really needs to come from a place of being, a quality of presence that has a kind of inner stillness or silence to it. I often think about Gandhi who took a day off each week, no matter what was going on, no matter what campaign he was involved with. He took a day off and he said he did it so that through prayer and meditation he could stay connected to the most pure place within him so that his work in the world would be guided from that spirit. You know, in the same way that our body has to sleep in order to be healthy, the same way our egoic doings need to desist.

we need to have breaks for our spirit to thrive. And I found this interesting reading from Choggyam Trunkpa, a Tibetan teacher, and he says, give yourself a break. He says, give yourself a break. That doesn't mean to say you should drive to the closest bar and have lost a drink or go to a movie. Just enjoy the day your normal existence. Allow yourself to sit in your home

or take a drive into the mountains, park your car somewhere, just sit, just be. It sounds very simplistic, but it has a lot of magic. You begin to pick up on clouds, sunshine, and weather, the mountains, you're past, your chatter with your grandmother, your own mother, your own father. You begin to pick up on a lot of things. Just let them pass like the chatter of a brook as it hits the rocks. We have to give ourselves some time to be.

So this is very much a reflection on the sacred pause, that we need to pause in small ways and in large ways in order to keep coming home to realize and trust the spirit that's here. Otherwise, we live in a trance that who we are is much smaller. We become a small, busy person. You know, when I think of the image of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, and this is the classic image of the sacred pause, that he had done all these severe restrictions of diet and austerities,

and before that he had done grasping after pleasure, and he's basically saying, stop. Just stop all the egoic doings. Come to rest. You know, there's something always and already here inside each of us. It's something that's looking through these eyes right now and feeling with his heart right now that's always here. But we're so busy running around that we forget.

So just pause. When we're unable to pause, we end up living from the surface of our being. We don't pick up on so much. Some of you might remember, this took place seven years ago in Washington. A man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes.

in the subway, Washington, D.C. Metro Station. And during that time, approximately 2,000 people went through on their way to work, most of them. And he played continuously. And during that time, only six people stopped and listened, and that was just for a short time. And then the only people that really stopped and tried to stay and listen were children. There were a handful of children, but their parents, each one, the kid would try to stay, stop, but the parents would usher them along, kind of drag them unwillingly. Okay, so only a handful of people really stopped. And he finished playing and a

silence took over and no one noticed, no one applauded, there was no recognition. No one knew that the violinist was Joshua Bell. It's one of the greatest musicians in the world and he played one of the two most intricate pieces ever written. The violin worth $3.5 million. Two days, before he had sold at a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100. Okay, so this is a true story. And, you know, he played incognito

in the metro station. It was organized by the Washington Post. It was really, I think, one of the most brilliant social science research pieces ever done. And it was really asking the questions, you know, in a commonplace environment, at an

inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty? Are we there for beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? In other words, are we here when we're in our routine, when we're habituated, are we here enough to pick up this mystery and beauty that is shining through everything all the time? Powerful experiment. So I think one of the most profound questions on any spiritual path,

and we all have different ways of framing it to ourselves, but it really is how can I pause? more? How can I keep reconnecting with this, what I'll call the dimension of beingness, this quality of spirit, of presence, of the awakened heart? How can I pause more and contact that? And I think it would be an interesting thing for each of us to ask, you know, what would it take henceforth, because there's no time better than right now, what would it take henceforth for you to deepen your capacity for pausing, for relaxing back, because we don't inhabit spirit by trying to get somewhere. It's not like we're trying to become something

different. It's really a relaxing back and resting in what's already here. How can we henceforth more and more moments relax back and touch that? So what I find whenever I ask that kind of question of the very first step is to shine the lens of mindfulness on how, for me, my habit of staying busy. Because if I don't see it, then I'm locked into a trance. And so what we'll do as we explore this together is look a little bit about our habits of preoccupation. And to the degree that any of us suffer or feel disconnected from ourselves or each other, it's because we have a habit of preoccupying, of leaving, moving away from presence. So to begin to catch our habits, to be able to know what they are is the first step,

and then to begin to sense what's under them, what's driving us, and how do we really stop and come home? So we'll explore that a bit over this next time, but I thought I'd share with you a really terrible joke. This is really bad. and it comes from my husband Jonathan who tells a lot of really good jokes but this is really, he admits it.

So Socrates says to be is to do Sartre says to do is to be Sinatra croons dooby dooby doby doby doby this is the cheating one and Fred Flintstone says Yaba daba do

It's pretty bad I know Okay. So how is it that we end up being so addicted to doing, becoming human doings? And it really is an evolutionary inheritance that in the most existential way, first comes a sense of separation. You know, we incarnate and we all have this tendency, all organisms, to perceive that what's here is me and the rest of the world is out there. So there's a fundamental duality. That's the first thing. that happens. The second thing is that out of that duality there's a sense of something's wrong or something's missing. And then the third is this compulsion to do something about that. Does that make sense? As kind of an existential framework, we feel separate. Something feels

wrong. We're trying to do something about it. And it comes in the sense of something feels wrong like, I'm hungry, I need something else to eat, or it can be something's wrong, I haven't accomplished enough in this lifetime. I'm a failure. I've got to prove. myself. It could be any level. Okay? And for much of our history on the planet, we humans needed to be vigilant and pretty active to survive. So it's very biological that we are in the habit of sensing either pleasure or pain and that being a message to do something. If you think of it over the eons, it wouldn't have worked to take the sacred pause. I mean, really, if you think of our ancestors or primitive ancestors pausing, you know, meditating, chie-gong, you know,

kind of tuning in, chanting, doing some Kyrton, and, you know, get completely decimated by some wildcat or woolly mammoth steps on you. Things happen. So you had to kind of watch out. You can tell I don't know my history too well. But we wouldn't have lived a pass on our genes, right? So in our evolution, it wasn't possible. earlier on to begin to do the kind of practices and cultivate the kind of attention that actually frees us. It's just it's kind of a developmental thing. Even now, because we have so many of the past structures in our brain, we have a default network in our brain that when we're not actively on task, in other words, when we don't have some

particular job to do, that network lights up and what it does is it basically, has us generate past and future images so that we stay oriented in time and oriented as an egoic self that can hop on things and do things at any moment. It's a way of staying in control. The default network wants us to stay in control in case there's danger. I read somewhere that we when we're sleeping we actually wake up about 10 times a night and scan our environment and then we go back to sleep. And if we, unless we're, we have a sleep disorder, we don't notice that. But the point is this, that we're rigged to be vigilant.

We're rigged when we don't have a task to have our mind wander. And then people wonder and start thinking, well, I'm not cut out for meditating because my mind is all over the place. It's all of us. That's just the way it is. That doesn't mean we can't train ourselves and collect our attention,

but we're rigged that way. So to take it personally is not being fair to yourself. Okay, so we have this existential predicament. We feel separate. We need to do something about the feeling of not enough or something's wrong. We have this evolutionary inheritance of being rigged to be vigilant. And so the job of the ego is to navigate and to ensure that we have more pleasure and less pain.

And the more difficulty we encounter, the more difficulty we encounter, the more of the more the egoic response is got to do something. And many of us are hooked in on this. Some of you might remember this little story of a group of friends are hunting and one of them has a heart attack. And he's on the ground and doesn't look like he's breathing. So his friend calls up 9-1-1 in a complete panic and says, oh my God, my friend, I think my friend's dead, heart attack. And so the person says, be calm, be calm. Now just first go over and make sure he's dead. she's listening and she hears a shot. Comes back, he goes,

okay, he's dead. Now what? And it's a silly joke, but we get the idea. It's like, you know what it's like when you're really agitated or really angry? It's like you feel like no matter what you want to do something because that gives you,

at least if I'm doing something, I have a fundamental sense that I'm taking control. Not that it really helps. Okay. So the trance of addictive doing that so many of us get caught in have a number of currents that feed it and we're in a culture that's very speedy and stressful

and it keeps on confirming that if we want to get what we want and avoid what we fear we need to do more so I so frequently talk to people and when we start inquiring and sensing what's underneath a current state of feeling ashamed or down on oneself, some belief, I'm not doing enough. I'm not doing enough to be a good parent. I'm not doing enough to make a contribution.

I should be doing more. It's deep in us. Okay, what are the flags of addictive doing? Because I'm going to ask you to in a little bit reflect and sense where you see, this as pertinent for you. One flag is that it's just plain excessive doing, that there's always a sense of more to do. We can't stop.

There's always a sense that there's loose ends to tie up and I have to do more. You know, there's one little kind of quote that says, I'd like to try to get everything done so the last day of my life I won't have a lot left to be busy with, you know. But you get the idea, right? I mean, we'll never tie up all the loose ends.

But there's that sense that there's always more to do. And then if we keep checking for the signs of addictive doing, under our activity you'll find the body is very tense. There's a lot of tension. And you'll find also that you're not connected to your body, that when you're in an addictive doing mode, dissociated from the body, and actually you're in the mind, and the mind is tumbling forward into the future.

Again, these are just the signs of it. signs of it. So there's a lot of worrying, there's planning, there's obsessing. The biggest sign is what I call the map of time, that when we're in Addictive Doing, we're living in a map in our minds where I'm here and I'm going there and I'm on my way somewhere else. In other words, doing has to do with accomplishing over a period of time. So we're locked in the map of time and there's usually deadlines. And think of that word deadline. What does that bring up for you?

Right? Deadline. There's a sense of fear that there's not enough time. And you might check for yourself and notice how much that fear drives you. The fear that there's not enough time.

And again, I want to say that it's activity itself this isn't about stopping activity. This is about a quality of energy where our activities hijacked by the limbic system. And there's a sense of having to speed, there's a sense of judgment that there's not enough, I'm not doing enough, there's not enough time, disconnection from the senses. And what's our sense of ourself? Who are we when we're in addictive doing? I'm going to ask you to check that out, what you're your self senses and just say that when we're caught in addictive doing, we have totally lost

sight of the depth and wholeness and mystery of our being. We are completely cut off and living in a very small narrative of the doing self, very, very small, very shrunken sense of our being. We also have lost sight of our values. When we're in doing mode, we are not connected with what most matters. The story of an old man dying and he smells apple pie from coming from downstairs. He tells his grandson to go down there and ask

his wife to bring him a piece. Child comes back and says, sorry, Grandpa, she's saving it for the funeral service tomorrow. It reminded me of this little Woody Allen's story where he says, and he has this big pocket watch and he pulls out, he goes, I love

this old watch. It was my grandfather's. When he was on his deathbed, he sold it to me. Okay, so let's do a little reflecting together and see if you can kind of track for yourself where you see the addictive egoic doing taking over. So you might take some moments just to collect the attention, feel yourself here, and from a quality of presence, just to review a little bit of the landscape of your day or of your days. And just notice the activity that you sense gets hijacked, that becomes a more kind of addictive doing,

where you really leave a more full sense of who you are, leave your heart, leave a more embodied, awake sense, and get caught in that speediness, in that sense of not enough time where you're in the map of time, you're trying to get somewhere else, trying to make something happen, and to the extent possible, if you have an example of that right now in your mind, something with your family, something at work, if you can put yourself inside that situation for a moment, and sense from that situation how you're viewing the world, is there a deadline and how your body feels that.

You might sense when you're caught, when you're speeding, when you're in that addictive doing, what it is you're truly trying to accomplish in those moments. Are you trying to relieve anxiety about falling short, about failing? Are you trying to make sure something doesn't go wrong? Are you trying to avoid letting other people down? Is there a sense of something's wrong underneath it?

Something's wrong or about to go wrong? Or maybe you're trying to get something. Maybe there's a sense of something's missing, something's not enough. I need to go get what I want. More money, more approval, more sense pleasure, another possession. Now here's the key reflection. Who are you? When you're in that really addictive doing,

overdoing. What's the sense of yourself? What's kind of the narrative of your story of yourself? Do you like yourself? The first step to wake up from this conditioning, this addictive doing, is to start getting familiar with it. Notice it. Notice how you feel in it. Notice what it does to your sense of your being. You can open your eyes if you'd like. So addictive doing is really just a chain reaction, like everything. There's a stimulus, there's a pleasantness or an unpleasantness, and then we have that impulse to do. It's a stimulus response.

And it's usually outside of consciousness. So there's thoughts or feelings of feeling threatened or afraid or wanting. There's a fear, I won't be prepared. Or there's this wanting to upgrade some tech possession. Or there's afraid of letting somebody down. And then we just launch into it. We go shopping or we make a phone. And it's that kind of.

Linge response. And because it's a temporary fix, we temporarily soothe the anxiety or the want that's there, we keep recycling back into it. And it's not always dramatic. The thing about addictive doing is more that it's ongoing. So it's like always being in this cloud of reactivity and never seeing the light of our being. We're cut off. This is the poet Rilke.

we set the pace, but this press of time, take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this herring soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy. All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy. If we don't get serious, and I don't mean serious as in heavy-handed, but if we don't really commit to looking at our addictive doing, we don't have a way to reconnect with our being. I remember some years ago the story one woman told of a friend of hers who had cancer and was diagnosed to have a year left to live,

and she had a young daughter, like a two-year-old or three-year-old daughter, and her mantra became, I have no time to rush. Sometimes we commit ourselves to cutting this addictive doing because we know we have to. It's like our priorities get set straight because we get the diagnosis or something. But it's possible not to wait so long, to sense like with that Joshua Bell story

that there is a world, there is a sacred beingness that's here that shining through everything. Thomas Merton says, this is not a story, it's true, it's here, and we miss out. We're so preoccupied. So meditation, and we're now shifting to, okay, so how do we begin to relax back and arrive again, you can consider meditation as a pathway of undoing the doing. We're not trying to do something and get somewhere, but we're actually deconditioning that doing mind that's always busy and active.

It's like one Swami Satchananda, when Hindu yoga was once asked, you know, by a student, do I have to be a Hindu to do this yoga? And he said, I am not the Hindu, I am an undo. And it's the truth. I mean, this spiritual path is not like a doing of ourselves to become more perfect. We're undoing this egoic conditioning so we can find this. reconnect with this natural, radiant consciousness that's always here. It's an undoing.

And you might say, well, yes, but when I meditate, it feels like I'm doing something. I'm scanning the body and I'm relaxing parts of the body and then I'm attending to the breath and I'm noticing what's happening and then I'm sending loving kindness to a part. And it's true. There are many, many strategies in meditation

that help to align us to calm us. There are heart practices like Heartan, like chanting or like having a mantra, a loving-kindness mantra go through that absolutely deconditioned the armoring of our heart.

There are many practices that help to align us. But I'd say that the ultimate practice of meditation, the pure essence of meditation, is a non-doing presence. Where we even put down

all those strategies, and simply rest in what is, be what is. And we're going to get there. In fact, maybe one of my favorite stories to share would be about the Buddha's closest disciple, and also as his cousin, Ananda. And after the Buddhist death, this is one of my favorite stories. There was this great council of enlightened beings

was being planned, and he wasn't entitled to attend because even though he'd worked strenuously at it all his life, he hadn't become an aura hot. So he hadn't become enlightened. So the evening of the council meeting approached, and he was determined the day before to practice, and he was going to practice vigorously all night, and he was not going to stop until he attained his goal of enlightenment

because he wanted to be at the meeting. So all he succeeded in doing, of course, was making himself discouraged and exhausted, really, not the slightest progress in spite of his efforts. So towards dawn, he decided to let go of all striving and all efforts and simply rest. And in that state, just laying back and resting, he lost all greed for attaining a state,

all fear of not attaining the state, he simply rested his head on his pillow and became enlightened. So what freedom? It was an undoing. It was not striving. It was rather a letting go. A sinful, wakeful, relaxing. Now, I think it's really important to add

that Ananda spent decades and decades doing a lot of the strategies that many of us do to practice to train his mind. And who knows if he had been told decades earlier, oh, don't bother with these strategies, just relax back what would have happened. We don't know. Because for many of us, and it's different for different people, the strategies are what actually, it's like we do some very wise doings so that we can relax doing. So for some people, and this is my sense, that some people, for whatever the

karmic reasons. Don't need to do a lot of the more strategic kind of meditation, what we might call the doing meditations of focus on the breath or scan through the body. And just the instructions simply rest as awareness to stop doing. Just take refuge in pure, non-resisting presence. This keeps surrendering back into presence. Those kind of instructions really may be the most liberating instructions that are possible. And I encourage you all to include those instructions, even if that's not all you do as part of what you do, because they are, to me, the essence of a liberating meditation.

But for many of us, the condition to get lost in trance is so strong that we need some training in how to wake up. up our mind and come out of the thoughts and come back and we need a kind of place to land when we come back. And we need to learn to offer a gesture of kindness because we are so locked into self-aversion. So the bottom line is it's an experiment for each of us as to how much strategy we use, but ultimately if we want to be free, we have to stop doing. Now, the strategy The strategy that is perhaps the one that most lends to non-doing is simple mindful awareness. And some of you might be familiar with what's sometimes called the magic quarter-second,

which is that when there's an impulse in our mind that comes from something pleasant or unpleasant, there's a quarter of a second before that impulse leads to action. mindfulness actually allows us in the pause and the space between that impulse and the reaction to have some wakefulness so there's some choice. So whereas in the past all of our patterning of defensiveness or aggression or whatever it is came from never being conscious of that stimulus response, with mindfulness we start finding the space between the stimulus and the response and we're able to interrupt our patterning and rest in more presence. That's where the freedom comes from. We get to decondition the doing.

So I'm going to review a few of the basic trainings that if you want to learn to pause more, to rest in being more that you might consider, and one of them is simply to set the intention at the beginning of the day to pause more. And then to, ahead of time decide there's certain places that are conducive to pausing. For instance, at a red light, you're stopping anyway. Call it a pause. It's not cheating. Just check in. If you're walking outside, I do this a lot. I tell myself, at some point I'm going to kind of spontaneously just stop for no reason. And just, again, pausing means just arriving in my senses. So I'll randomly stop during a walk and it's amazingly revealing how the forward motion of walking

keeps me in a certain trance of being on my way somewhere. But when I stop, like fully stop and stand still, all of a sudden the world rushes in and the senses are awake and there's an arriving. And then if I'm conscious, I can start moving and continue moving in presence. but it's very easy to slip from presence into a self doing something on her way somewhere. So walking is a really useful one. When you hang up the phone, right after hanging up the phone, just, you know, it can be five seconds. A pause of five seconds can allow you to touch into a quality of beingness. They can transform what comes after it.

One of the key pieces when you're doing this informal pausing is to come back to your senses. So when you pause, if you do a checklist and say, okay, listening, okay, got that. Okay, feeling the sensations in the body. Okay, that's woken up again. Okay, feeling the heart. You're back again. So use your senses as a reestablishing presence. And another trick for informal pausing is to, because sometimes when we pause, what we open to

is a sense of agitation or a sense of feeling like we've done something wrong and guilt, or there's a sense of anger, forgive whatever you encounter. So these are again some tricks, but pausing informally through the day lets this consciousness bleed into everything. Try pausing when you're in a little bit of comfort. with somebody when you're feeling a sort of distance or tension and instead of saying anything, just pause. It's like count to ten, pause, but in the same way, reopen to your body, to your heart. Check your intention and see what's really your deepest intention in those moments.

It can change the whole course of a relationship. Okay, so there's informal pausing, And then there's meditation. There's a real power to creating a space, a window for meditation. It's a pause. It's a bigger pause. It's your 20-minute pause or your 45-minute pause. When I said meditation, any practice that helps in homecoming, it could be Qigang or it could be chanting or could be prayer. But creating a pause to have some practice to bring you home is a gift of the soul.

To have that every day creates a rhythm and nature loves rhythms of homecoming. When you meditate, no matter what style you're doing, okay? No matter what you're doing, I'd like to invite you to consider having some portion of it have the intention of non-doing, where you drop all ideas of a practice and have your only intention be simply to be. And it's really challenging because we much rather have a project.

You know, most meditation, there's some project. Okay, I'm going to stay with my breath. Okay, I'm going to feel my body. Okay, I'm going to do this or do that. But this is a small portion where your only intention is let life be exactly as it is. And when you notice you've started controlling things again, forgive that, notice it, let go, come back to letting be. I can say honestly that in my own practice, you know, I do a lot of the strategies to align

and calm down and collect and open my heart. But it's the moments of total letting be that most directly reveal what feels like truth. and most directly allows me to trust because you can't trust reality if you're manipulating it on any level if you're doing something in some way acting upon reality you won't trust it

but in the moments that you're not doing anything you become that reality and you discover a kind of trust and at-homeness that makes your heart totally fearless that comes from non-doing doing from really simply letting life be as it is. Don't be discouraged if you find your mind goes off again and again and says, well, I'll just do a little more collecting with the breath and then I'll let be.

I mean, it's just we do that. If you find, well, I know for myself that I'm very into this purely letting be meditation as long as I feel a lot of pleasantness in my body. But when I feel unpleasant, then I do a little more work on it, you know, see if I can find the space inside it and do this. and do that. See if you can have the courage to say, this too. You know, that great mantra, this too. And just keep including whatever arises and let that be too. There comes a kind of freedom of spirit that you really trust, you can be with anything. It's that phrase,

the heart, that is ready for anything. So I'll give you, let's see I'm going to do this. Let me just briefly, because I didn't realize how late it was, just say that there are three gifts that arise from pausing at the Bodhi tree, from coming into stillness, from pausing and just letting be. And one of them is healing, that when we, as long as we're in some way manipulating and controlling, we're not opening to the part of the person. of our being that most need attention. So in the moments that we say, okay, Togium Trunfa did it beautifully, he says, meet your edge and soften. When we just meet the edge where it's difficult and soften,

we really let be, then that part of our being that's wounded or needs attention gets to be processed and digested. So healing is one piece. Another piece that is one of the great gifts of letting be is that in the moments of letting be, we discover that we're in love with life. Thomas Merton describes our busyness, our doing as a kind of contemporary form of violence because we're violating our natural rhythms. When we come out of that, when we start being

present, we start touching the life that's in here, we actually awaken this circuitry in our brains that allow for compassion and love. The social brain, this part of our brain, and you could say that this is a science way of describing it, but the social brain, this networking, requires an embodied presence. And our map of time

when we're on our way somewhere else means that we're not embodied. If you're busy, if you're an addictive doing, in those moments, you're not feeling your connection with others. There's a story I love of been going around for a number of years about a four-year-old child whose next-door neighbor was an elderly gentleman, he was recently widowed, and one day little boy noticed that the man was outside on his porch crying.

So he went into the yard and climbed on his lap and he just sat there. He just hung out with him. And the mother looked over, saw her son and the old man sitting together. So when the child came home, she asked him, you know, What was it that he said to, the neighbor? And he replied, I didn't say anything, Mommy. I just helped him to cry. When we start learning how to pause and be, we can be with each other.

If we're always on our way, we can't really hold a space with each other. The final gift, okay, there's healing, there's loving. The final gift I'll mention is that when we have this man, manual override button and find it, and we can cut through the doing, we have more being, we can actually see truth. It's as Rilke says we, only when we tarry can we touch the holy. And for many of us, if we're really honest with ourselves, we don't create many spaces where we're actually just simply being intimate with the moment.

So I think as a way to close tonight, I'd like to just do a little bit of a non-doing being practice. I'll give you a few suggestions as to how to do that letting go. And just give you a taste of it and invite you as you continue to practice, whether you're a beginner or you've meditated for 30, 40 years, to... Not wait. Not wait to be. Don't wait. We don't know how long we have. And you can go very deep on this path, but it takes a commitment to pausing. So as you've been doing, just adjusting how you're sitting, so that you're able to be alert and at ease.

And take a few moments to let yourself really arrive in your senses. So you're aware of the sounds that are right here. Let the sounds wash through you. And in the same way that there's that receptive listening, listen to and feel the body, the senses, the energy, the tingling, the vibrating. Listen to and feel your heart. So that you're open to the whole dance of sound and sensation.

Let everything happen to you, Rilke says. The terror, the beauty. just let this whole changing dance live through you. Sensing in the background this alert inner stillness, presence itself, just resting, being that presence, and letting life happen just as it is. When the mind moves into thoughts, which is a form of control, and you notice just relax back, sensing if it's possible to let go just a little bit more. and close with the

words of Lama Gendon Rimpichet Happiness cannot be found through great effort and willpower but is already there in relaxation and letting go don't strain yourself there's nothing to do

let the game happen on its own springing up and falling back all will vanish and reappear without end waiting to grasp the ungrasurable, you exhaust yourself in vain. As soon as you relax this grasping, space is there, open, inviting, and comfortable. Nothing to do. Nothing to force. Nothing to want. Everything happens by itself. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation,

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