Tara Brach - 2014-10-22-Part 2 - Happiness

Episode Date: October 24, 2014

2014-10-22-Part 2 - Happiness - The Buddha said that he would not teach about happiness if it were not possible to realize this experience of peace and deep well-being. In this three part series, we explore two kinds of happiness - that which arises out of particular causes and the experience of “happy for no reason.” The talks examine the attachments that block happiness, ways to “gladden the mind,” and the liberating presence that naturally expresses as pure happiness.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. So welcome to this gathering in class. This is our second in a series on happiness. And the reality is we, each of us, have a really deep capacity to feel a sense of at peace and at home with what's happening and a sense of joy and celebration about life. And as we know, day by day, we have this habit to resist and to contract and to chase after things and not really to let ourselves rest in and enjoy. We don't have many moments where there's that sense of enough, you know, that I could die right now.

This moment just as it is is enough. So one of the more existential descriptions of how things are is that we incarnate and feel a sense of separation and right out of that separation there's a sense that something's missing, there's not enough, incomplete, and then we become fully organized around trying to get more complete, enlarge, connect, fill what's missing. So the last, in the first class that we did on this, the exploration really was what is between me and happiness. And what we come up with, if we're really honest in any moment, is there is that sense that right now something's missing or something's wrong. And if we think of it in an evolutionary way, there's this negativity bias that's part of our survival brain that has us fixate on what we're.

what's wrong and leaves us with either defensiveness or aggression or a kind of cynicism. I remember hearing a story about, I think it was a professor at Columbia that was lecturing his class one day and he said in English two negatives make a positive, but in some languages, for instance, Russian two negatives still remain a negative, but there's no language where in two positives make a negative. And then somebody in the back of the class said, yeah, right. I thought that was cute. So there's two basic modes of practice that evolve us, really, and that give us access

to our potential for joy. And one of those modes is pure presence. And this is the most foundational of what liberates us. that no matter how it feels, if we use the gateway of presence, if we just have that commitment to bring a kind, clear attention to just this, to really feel it and feel it in our body, that very presence opens us back into a sense of our own wholeness of being. There's room for what's moving through us,

and with that there's a sense of ease and peace and freedom. The second of the modes of practice that evolves us is sometimes described as gladdening the mind. And these are ways that we direct our attention, so we actually reconnect with a natural sense of well-being. The reason it's so valuable is because our conditioning with this negativity bias is to fixate on what's wrong. This starts to counter-condition that bias. So this class will be on how to gladden the mind, and we'll explore what I consider to be three basic ways that we can do it that kind of create an inner environment that allows a very deep and authentic happiness to flourish.

And it's based on a very simple principle, which is where attention goes, energy flows. whatever you pay a lot of attention to that's what's going to create your state of heart and mind and it's a really powerful understanding when we start getting that the Buddha put it this way he says whatever the practitioner regularly thinks and ponderes upon that will be the inclination of the mind

so in any moment how you're thinking is the practice that creates the tendency for more of same. I like to pause here and just suggest you take a sense of, well, what was today like? You know, if you can remember the landscape of the day, your mental landscape, what were the kind of thoughts that populated your mind? I mean, were they worry thoughts about what bad could go wrong or planning thoughts? Or were you trying to figure things out? Were you trying to get something more done to cross things off the list?

Was there thoughts of being pressured or oppressed or feeling like a victim of something? The bad things were happening to you or were there judging thoughts? Because that's the domain that creates separation. We're practicing separation. Or maybe there were thoughts

of how you could be helpful to others or concern for others thoughts of kindness, thoughts of curiosity, wondering. Those are the practice that generates connection. So the neuroscience world terms it this way, that neurons that fire together wire together. And neuroplasticity is kind of a key understanding because when we start really getting it,

the more that we have certain fear thoughts, the related feelings come up in our body, and we're actually programming in a kind of biochemistry that affects everything. In a way, if I'm going to paint a common scenario, just to give us a sense of the impact of how we're thinking creates our life. And in this example, let's say at an early age, a parent loses their temporalized, and says, you know, you're bad. Or at an early age, a parent is preoccupied and pushes us away because we're a nuisance. Our ignores fully.

Goes away unexpectedly. So then the survival brain kicks in and it's trying to protect us. And it comes up with assumptions about what's going on. And the assumptions tend to be that something's wrong with me and that I need to change my behavior in order not to be, you know, not to keep engendering trouble. And out of this, we create what I sometimes call as a space suit self, which is a whole kind of set of beliefs and feelings and behaviors

that try to avoid bad things happening, avoid that treatment, secure the self. A lot of judging and pretending and obsessing and worrying. We've got these beliefs and these behaviors to try to protect ourselves from danger. And underneath that's the raw feelings of, something's wrong with me and something bad's going to happen. So what happens when we start meditating? Well we spend a lot of time when we're not meditating

trying to get away from that rawness. You know, we run away with our thoughts and our behaviors. So what happens when we start meditating is first we have a million restless thoughts, the same activity of staying away from that rawness. But gradually, because meditation works, works, the mind does quiet, but we start getting in touch with what we've been running away from. So often instead of crystal rainbows of light and people tell us you meditate and relieve your stress,

what we come into is all sorts of unprocessed, uncomfortable emotion. Some people say, you know, I came to class and I just couldn't stop crying. Or I felt so agitated, I felt like I needed to walk, and I meditate walking. And this is really common. common. So we try to train because some teacher tells us, hey, stick with it, the way through is

through, what you resist, persist. You've heard this, right? Okay? So we're told that the message is you've got to learn to stay. So then we start the thousand serious moves. You remember that poem where we say, okay,

this meditation is, grim business, I'm going to stay with this painful, raw emotion. But then what happens is for some reason without realize it, we're kind of meditating less and less and busy, job, new child. You know, I'll be mindful through the day, but I really don't have time to sit. And a couple of years pass, and then our therapist or somebody tells us, oh, you should be meditating. So we decide to reboot the practice, but we're not so eager.

So here's the deal, that it's... It's really essential over time eventually to be with that rawness. We can't heal what's here unless we're with it. And we also need ways of connecting through meditation with ease, with beauty, with creativity, with happiness. If we don't, we won't stay with meditation. If there's not some inclination or inkling of what's possible, if we don't get a taste of ease or happiness,

we're not going to stay with it. I think there's this wise balancing on the spiritual path, and sometimes the best metaphors of a garden, that, of course, part of it is the practice as presence, of really going right to the root of the weeds and pulling them out so you can really free up. And part of the practice is really nourishing the soil and planting the seeds of peace and happiness. So at retreats, you can really see very clearly how this balancing becomes necessary.

It's very easy to go to retreat and have this ambition like, okay, I'm going to go and sit this retreat and I'm really going to change the stuff that's wrong and I'll free myself up. And so there's this project mentality. and we're about to start a retreat and I'm very aware at the beginning people are really trying hard they want to get it right

and it can look really really grim and because we're walking a little more slowly than normal you know there have been people that have visited retreats from the outside and they feel like it's the land of the walking dead you know there was a well-known

Thai forest master Ajan Shah who many of you might have heard of He visited the Insight Meditation Society in Barry, Massachusetts, and he saw for the first time a huge group, a huge crowd of retreatants that were walking very slowly in the Mahasi style that was from Burma. So here's a Thai master, and he's watching people that are trained in this Burmese style, 100 people walking around the place really slowly. So he stopped a few of the retreatants,

and he said to them, sympathetically, but he also had a little mischievous look. He said, I hope you heal from your illness and can go home soon. So it's one of our habits in daily life, forget retreat, to get grim, to be on purpose, to be trying hard, to be beleaguered and oppressed, and we can easily carry it into spiritual life. And so the first step, if we want to begin to gladden the mind and have more balance on the path. So we really can have an integrated kind of approach is having the conscious intention,

the conscious intention, to explore the possibility for happiness, that that be a part of it. There's a story that I try to share whenever I have an opportunity because I think it's so good that Marty Seligman tells. He's the father of positive psychology.

And positive psychology, is talking about just what I'm talking about, the necessity of, in addition to being with things as they are, also very on purpose gladdening the mind. And he talks about one of his great insights that happened when his daughter, Nikki and he were gardening, and I'll read you, 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 me and said, Daddy, do you remember before I was five? I whined all the time. I wind every day. Did you notice it since my fifth birthday? I haven't whined at all. I said, yes, Nikki. Will

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. He said, in a flash, I saw three things. First, she was right about me. I was really a nimbus cloud and probably any success I had in life was not due to being grouch but in spite of it. And then he describes that, you know, this habit we get in and how important it was for him professionally and for us all for our freedom to really trust that this possibility for happiness for positive emotion is here and we can cultivate it. Research, a lot of research into happiness these days and it has shown that people that are

happy have an intention towards happiness. You know, we have this evolutionary conditioning. We need to counter it. So, the garden. And we begin to look at how do we nourish positive mind states? How do we plant those seeds? And so I'm going to spend the rest of the time on these three basic ways of gladdening the mind. And their gratitude, serving, and savoring. Okay? Gratitude, serving, and savoring. And each one directly deconditions an egoic habit that blocks happiness. So we'll look at that. So we begin with gratitude. And part of it, the ego habit that we're deconditioning is the inner complainer. Now, you might think to yourself, do I have that egoic inner complainer? And just,

I just invite you to just watch. I can say, I know I do. I mean, I know that voice that's grumbling a lot. There's a little cartoon of a dog who's in therapy, and of course his psychiatrist is a therapist also, and the dog's saying, I bark at everything. Can't go wrong that way. So we have this habit. Seligman, again, he did research with gratitude, and he worked with severely depressed people and had them write down three good things that happened to them for 15 days. and 94% had a decrease in depression. 92% said happiness increased.

This is just saying a few things positive that happened. I was reading Oprah has done a lot on gratitude, and she's describing her gratitude journal, and what an amazing difference it made in her life. For many people I know in the Dharma, in the Buddhist tradition, and they've been finding gratitude partners and just sending emails. You have to write anything. You just write three things today I'm grateful for.

It changes some of the patterning in the mind. So the key to cultivating gratitude has to do with your body. And what it is is that when you feel gratitude, you actually spend some time to feel how you're experiencing it in your body, that uplift of the heart. just to get familiar with it, notice it. The more you notice it, the more it increases. We're entraining the brain.

We're very used to the biochemistry and felt sense of complaining. So you have to get used to the feeling of appreciating, of gratitude. Even when life is more difficult, it's all in how we frame things. Remember where attention goes, energy flows. And one of my friends who some of you know from the courses he teaches, the Awakening Joy courses, James Barras, describes visiting his mom. She was 89 years old. She died last year.

And she was definitely a half-full type. She had a major inner complainer. And so he was explaining to her the benefits of gratitude. And she was skeptical that, you know, she could. go in that direction but he encouraged her to play a little game and every time she complained she was supposed to add end my life is very blessed so she could say oh my god they keep leaving the windows open in here and my life is very blessed oh my god there they won't stop talking you know we're visiting and my life is very

blessed oh the salmon is over cooked and my life you get the idea okay so they played with it. He stayed for a week and they messed around with it and he called her to encourage continuing. And it created a revolutionary change in her during these next months. And she was losing her eyesight and all sorts of things were going wrong. She turned 80 and sent him a card and I want to read it to you. They had this happen in their family of sending these little poems on their birthdays. She wrote, I'm happier than I've ever been and truly mean each word. The thought says, that caused the worries now all seem so absurd. Though my eyesight has been dimmed, I see clearer than before. The glass is not half empty. It's overflowing, to be sure."

Eighty-nine years old, and my life is very blessed. So this isn't something that we do to cover over pain. There are many times when we're really down, we feel hurt, fearful. And gratitude is the furthest thing from our consciousness. It can feel like a false kind of activity. First step is just open to what is. Open with self-compassion. And after you do that, if you really open to what is and there's self-compassion, you start finding some space and you start appreciating the fact

that you actually have some skill with coming into presence. You can start sensing, wow, you know, this actually works. I can be present. Space doesn't mean that the pain's gone, but it means you're more at home and something larger. And you can feel gratitude for that. Andre Neuann says, the choice for gratitude rarely comes without some real effort, but each time I make it, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little easier, a little freer. So we begin to choose on purpose. and we'll practice for now, just the simplicity of gratitude. I want to give you a taste of each of the three

as we're here together. So take a moment to close your eyes. You might collect your attention with your breath. Just feel and relax with the inflow and outflow. I like using the imagery of a smile because it very quickly sends a message to the nervous system to relax, fight, flight, freeze, sympathetic nervous system quiets down, the parasympathetic opens some,

and you can really feel that there is more receptivity, more of a natural embodied sense of appreciation. So let the eyes soften feel a smile there, a slight smile at the mouth. And for this next little bit, I'd like to invite you to whisper the words, I am grateful for, or I am grateful to, But just to keep saying, I am grateful and filling in the blanks, and whisper it. Don't be shy. Just whisper it. We'll all be doing it together.

Just beginning with the words, I am grateful, and see what wants to come. Let the landscape of your life appear. Whispering a little bit louder, you might let one thing or person that you're grateful for come right to the front of your mind right now. and take some time to rest with that, to feel just how grateful you are for that. So you allow it to fill you. Let the feeling of gratitude be as big as it wants to be and discover what the felt sense of gratitude is.

What's it like in your body? Where do you feel it? Breathing with and getting to know gratitude, sensing your intention as you move through your days to be receptive, to appreciate, to notice the simple things that wake up our hearts. Coming back, opening your eyes. So there's gratitude. And then the second area of really waking up, gladdening the mind, is serving. And I have to say that I've known many people that have struggle with depression and really what goes along with depression is locked into a fixated on self. It's not our fault when it gets like that. That's the pain of it though. We're never happy

when our lives are organized around self. And then finding that it's deconditioned in serving, that that self-fixation when we start serving just by nature we've widened our attention and we begin to remember a larger belonging and a meaningfulness to our life. Albert Schweitzer says, I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know, the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

And we know this. We know that when we're of benefit to others, it just feels good. And it's good for us. I mean, there's this research I was reading about asked volunteers what made them happy, what brought satisfaction to their life, and then it looked at the white blood cells at the genes responsible for immune activity, for inflammation.

And those that reported more hedonic things, the ego based on, like, consume, makes me happy to consume this or to own that or this sense pleasure or whatever, this personal accomplishment, all the markers were up for inflammation, less for the antibodies that were produced. And for those that instead described their happiness coming from having a higher purpose, from service to others, there is more of the antibody producing the gene, the lower levels that created the inflammatory conditions. You get the idea that it's for our health, it's for our happiness,

that self-centeredness creates a separation and a sense of stress, and fear that hurts us, that's unhealthy. So there's a theory that different gene expression driven by an evolutionary strategy of working for the common good. In other words, there are rewards for helping that come on a very physical level. So it's part of our evolutionary unfolding that our happiness is linked to a widening sense of identity. And I think that's intuitive that the more we feel a sense of belonging to nature,

to another person or to the whole, the more we feel our hearts freed up. Story that I love on this theme was told by a British writer. He described a story that changed him profoundly. And it happened when he was this impoverished student living in the north of London, and he got a call saying that his mother was in the hospital and wasn't expected to survive the night, and his father said, you've got to get home, son. So here's what happened.

He says, I got to the railway station, but found I'd missed the last train. A train was going as far as Peterborough, but I would miss the connecting leads train by 20 minutes. I bought a ticket and got on anyway. I was a struggling student and didn't have the money for a taxi the whole way, but I had a screwdriver in my pocket and a bunch of skilleting keys. I was so desperate to get home, I planned to nick a car in Peterborough, hitchhike, steal money, something, anything I just knew from my dad's tone of voice that my mom was going to die that night and I tended to get home if it killed me. Tickets, please, please, I heard. I fumbled for my ticket and gave it to the guard when he approached.

He stamped it, but then stood there looking at me. I'd been crying, had red eyes, and must have looked afright. You okay, he asked? Of course, I'm okay. I said, why wouldn't I be? And what's it got to do with you in any case? You look awful. Is there anything I can do?

You get lost and mind your own business. I said, that'd be a big help. I wasn't in the mood for talking. If there's a problem, I'm here to help. That's what I'm paid for. I was a big bloke in my prime, so I thought for a second about physically saying, sending him on his way, but somehow it didn't seem appropriate. The only other thing I could

do to get rid of him was to tell him my story. Look, my mom's in the hospital dying. She won't survive the night. I'm going to miss the connection to Leeds at Peterborough. I'm not sure I'm going to get home. It's tonight or never. I won't get another chance. I'm a bit upset. I don't feel like talking. I'd be grateful if you'd leave me alone, okay? Okay, he said finally getting up. Sorry to hear that, son. I'll leave you alone then. Hope you make it back home in time. Then he wandered off down the carriage back the way he came. I continued to look out of the window at the dark. Ten minutes later, he was back at the side of my table.

Oh, no, here we go again. This time I'm really going to rag him down the train. He touched my arm. Listen, when we get to Peterborough, shoot straight over to the platform one as quick as you can. The lead's train will be there. I looked at him dumbfounded. It wasn't really registering. Come again, I said stupidly.

What do you mean? Is it late or something? No, it isn't late, he said defensively, as if he really cared whether trains were late or not. No, I've just radioed Peterborough. They're going to hold the train up for you. As soon as you get on, it goes. Everyone will be complaining how late it is, but let's not worry about that on this occasion. You'll get home, and that's the main thing.

Good luck and God bless. Then he was off down the train again. Tickets, please. Any more tickets now? I suddenly realized what a top class full-fledged jerk I was. and chased him down the train. I wanted to give him all the money from my wallet, my driver's license, my keys, but I knew he'd be offended.

I caught him up and grabbed his arm. I just wanted to... I was suddenly speechless. It's okay, he said. Not a problem. He had a warm smile in his face and true compassion in his eyes. He was a good man for its own sake and required nothing in return. I wish I had some way to thank you, I said.

I appreciate what you've done. Not a problem, he said again. If you feel the need to thank me, the next time you see someone in trouble, you help them out. That will pay me back amply. Tell them to pay you back the same way, and soon the world will be a better place.

I was at my mother's side when she died in the early hours of the morning. My meeting with the good conductor changed me from a selfish, potentially violent, heathenness into a decent human being, but it took time. I've paid him back a thousand times since then. I tell people, I tell the young

people I work with and I'll keep on doing it to the day I die. You don't owe me nothing, nothing at all. And if you think you do, I'd give you the same advice the good conductor gave me. Pass it down the line. So I wanted to take the time with that story. I always get touched by it. Something about passing it down the line, that if each of us just had that in us, that intention in some way to just notice, you know, that just the way we suffer, others suffer, just the way we're hurting, others are hurting, and reach out. And it could be in some ongoing service project or just the small kindnesses. We're passing it down the line. We are part of really having that evolutionary impact on changing consciousness.

So we'll take a moment here to reflect again, okay? A moment to close your eyes. Again, you might experiment, letting the image and sense of a smile soften the eyes. Feel a slight smile at the mouth. Feeling the breath at the heart, breathing in and out, letting there be a bit of a smile there, spreading through. And take a moment to reflect on some time in the last days or weeks or months

where you in some way served another. helped, gave some ease to, offered your care. Or you might choose instead to imagine helping or serving another. Whether you're imagining it or remembering it, sense the other person, as in some way relieved, happy, helped, and notice in your body and your heart what the experience is of reaching, touching out, touching another's heart in some way, easing another. Again from Catholic priest, philosopher Henri Nguyen, he says,

every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I am moving from fear to love. I may close this little reflection by sensing in the next, through this evening or tomorrow, one particular place where you might reach out with kindness, with heart, to bring some happiness or ease to another. Passing it down the line when you're ready opening your eyes. So we've explored gratitude which deconditions this negativity bias to be complaining and thinking things are wrong.

We talked about serving which deconditions a fixation on self that something's wrong with me and it opens us back to a sense of belonging. which is the truth of what we are. We belong and are part of each other. The third is savoring. And you might remember, E.G. White, saying, I wake up each morning torn between the desire to serve and the desire to savor.

And I think he goes on to say, it makes it hard to plan the day or something like that. So rather than savor, our egoic conditioning is, when something's pleasant, we either grasp at it, Are we angst that it's temporary? Are we shut down and barely notice life's pleasures as they pass by? Or we go after substitutes? We rarely savor in that kind of open-handed,

remember to kiss the joy as it flies by. You know, we rarely savor. Often we're going after substitutes. One of my favorite illustrations. This elderly man's describing what he does now that he's retired, And he says, well, for example, the other day, Mary and my wife and I went into town and visited a shop. When we came out, there was a cop writing at a parking ticket. We went up to him and I said, come on, man, how about giving a senior citizen a break?

He ignored us and continued writing the ticket. I called him a buzz cut creep. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn out tires. So Mary called him an inflated dumbbell. He finished a second ticket and put it on the windshield. Then he started writing more tickets. This went on for 20 minutes. The more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote.

Just then our bus arrived and we got on it and went home. We tried to have a little fun each day now that we're retired. It's important at our age. So savoring the moments, instead of our ways of grasping after things, our false refuges, our ways of ignoring, how do we savor? Share with you a story that a good friend told me a few years ago about a couple who loved to travel and they're very much living at fully kind of couple

and then he got diagnosis of Parkinson's and this friend told me how they continued in this incredibly lively engaged open way with this capacity for joy and when they were asked you know well what's really enabling you to do this this is what they said they said they have a shared attitude

and it's a conscious effort to make each day as good as it can be, deciding to be happy. Where there's a will, a willingness, it opens us up to possibility. And I can speak for myself that I know that when I spent about eight years where I was pretty sick and I, the activities I could do got very limited, the things that I normally totally love doing, which is being outside and exercising and moving around freely I couldn't do. And so I had to find a way, you know, my mantra was loving life no matter what. I had to find a way to love other ways of being.

So my world got smaller and I loved the smaller world I was in. It really doesn't matter what is going on in our life. What matters is the attitude. And if the attitude is, I'm going to make today as good as it can be, I'm going to savor what's here, we will find beauty and goodness to savor. Just like in the other two domains, the way to develop the habit of savoring

is to pause when something is beautiful, as good catches our attention, the sound of rain or the look of the night sky or the glow in a child's eyes, or we witness some kindness somewhere to pause. and then to totally immerse in the experience of savoring it. And that's really important because almost across the board we have this habit when there's something beautiful or good

to notice it and then to just tumble right into the next thing in our life. So it takes deliberateness. We really need to stop. Ah! And feel how it feels in the body. Memorize the felt sense in the body. That's what entranes the mind. And again, we're moving from the egoic habit when there's pleasure to either grasp or ignore

to really feel through the body, that sense of wonder, appreciation, goodness. So my practice now in terms of in training, savoring is, and I've been doing this for a number of years, is I walk every morning outside by the river and I will kind of randomly pause, like there'll be some notion of, okay, just stop right here. Not that it's a particularly beautiful place. In fact, I stop at places that I would have never thought, oh, let's look at this. Just stop.

And it's amazing in the stopping. Presence becomes much more intensified. There's a kind of stillness that's then aware of all the aliveness and all the sound. And in that moment, I'll just absolutely be open. and receptive to the colors and the smells and so on, and memorize the felt sense of it. Memorize the felt sense of wonder in that moment. Get to know it.

Psychology today did a, had an article, some research on aging, and they found that elderly or not more grumpy, they're actually happier, and the reason that younger people are fixated on the future, worries, accomplishing what needs to be different, what will go wrong, and when you're older for many there's a sense of limited time and impermanence there's more motivation to enjoy moments I mean I was so aware with my mom in the last years

of how appreciative she was of very small things we'd go for a walk and she'd see you know the bluebells and whoa the color of that or we'd have the fire in the we have a wood stove oh I love the fire in the wood stove or just a very normal dinner of rice and vegetable oh, she just took pleasure and everything. There's more appreciation. Another friend in the community described his father who was having dementia,

and he was sitting there's a branch of a tree you could see through the window and he'd look at it and go, wow, you look at that. That's really, the shape of that branch is really beautiful. And he'd say, you know, wow, that branch, That's really beautiful. And over and over again, but each time he was experiencing authentically that awe. Einstein says there's two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle, and the other is as though everything is a miracle. So if you want to train in awe, train in wonder, pause. Pause for the simple things. Make it part of your life. There's a practice of taking 10 breaths when it's really fantastic. Just take 10 breaths and really breathe with and stay with exactly that particular expression of the sacred through form.

Because everything is just that. Whether it's the turning of a leave or the sound of a bird or whether it's the way somebody's moving with certain kind of grace, it's all an expression of the sacred. So pause. Breathe with it. Take it in. Kabir, not the poet Kabir, but Kabir, a shoemaker, when he'd work, he'd always repeat the mantra, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram's the sacred of the divine. It's like the sacred's right here, right here, right here, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram, day off, 20 years. He'd Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram. So one day, Ram appeared, okay? And Kabir said,

who are you? And Ram said, I'm Ram, you know. But why are you here? Why am I here? You've been calling me for years. Now I've come. What do you want? Well, I don't want anything. What? You've been repeating my name. How come? I just love repeating your name. Then for the years to come, wherever Kabir would go, he'd be followed by Ram and the sound, Kabir, Kabir. So tonight really been explained. There's these two dimensions of our practice, and one is this pure and liberating presence, where we're simeer, simply recognizing just what's here and allowing it. And the other is a way of deconditioning some of our habits through gladdening the mind.

Through just feeling gratitude, just taking the habit of naming three things you're grateful for each day. Serving, just remember to reach out a little bit more. And then feel the feeling of that. Not like, oh great, puffed up me, I've done. just serve, but it actually dissolves the me and connects us and we become we. It's beautiful. And then to pause and to savor the moments, to really stop and be with the life that's here. So you can experience what Thomas Merton describes as that the divine is shining through

everything, and this is not just a nice story. It's the truth. So we'll close, just taking a few moments as we've been doing to pause, to again let that image and sense of a smile spread through the eyes, the mouth, the heart, and the energy and spirit of a smile to fill your being. So you can't even sense where your body ends. It just fills, expands, dissolves, opens. Closing in a very simple way with loving kindness practice and all of the ways of gladdening the mind or forms of loving kindness, they all soften and open the heart, wake us up from separation. To just bring to mind someone who's easy to love, someone you deeply care about. Let yourself sense that person's goodness. What is it that lights you up about this person?

Is it their kindness and the way they show love to you? Maybe it's how they are when they're happy. You can really see their happiness. or their intelligence, their clarity, or the humor, just the aliveness of this being. Sense the person close in as if they're really looking at you and sensing your relationship with that person, your appreciation. You might just mentally whisper thank you. Whisper their name and say thank you. And again, just feel that heart space, that warmth and aliveness and light widened.

feel the life that's right within you, that in you that wants to wake up, that wants to be honest, that wants to love without holding back, offering whatever wish, whatever blessing you'd like to offer to yourself in this moment, and letting that sense of hearts face wide and out in all directions infinitely out to the sides, above you, below you. So you can sense the beings of your life all a part of your heart, those known and unknown. You can sense the earth or mother in your lap. All life everywhere held in the space of loving presence. May all beings everywhere be happy.

Touch the natural joy of being alive. May all beings everywhere touch great and natural peace. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Namaste. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington,

please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.