Tara Brach - 2014-11-19 - Awakening Through Change and Loss

Episode Date: November 22, 2014

2014-11-19 - Awakening Through Change and Loss - Our capacity to live and love fully is entirely related to how we open to the truth of impermanence. This talk examines how our ways of trying to control life solidify our perception of being separate and threatened. We then look at the wings of mindful presence and compassion that open us to loss and grief, and reveal the loving awareness that is beyond birth and death.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Namaste, good evening. Many of you are probably familiar with the research of his last few years that basically says that as we get older, elderly people have an increasing sense of well-being. That one understanding is that we're adaptable and that as maturing beings, beings we go through our life and as we experience the natural and the inevitable losses, there's a growing kind of acceptance of change. And with that acceptance of change, it enables more of an appreciation of the moment. That's one way of understanding this. And as we know,

the main theme of our lives is change. Everything keeps changing. And rumor has it that upon leaving the garden, Eve said to Adam, my dear, we are living in a time of transition. But doesn't it always feel that way? I mean, at any time in your life it feels like, wow, I'm really in the midst of a lot of transition. There's a sense of that for many of us. And that, well, changes, if you really look close, it's unceasingly creative, the unfolding. There's also, if you take it from the perspective of the separate self, there's always a shadow there of this kind of looming sense of loss. And, you know, but what I mean is that anything that's born dies, which includes us.

And so that means that there's a backdrop of this awareness of mortality that, especially we humans with our particular kind of frontal cortex have, that's, you know, that's, you know, just always there, that can bring up for many a kind of background sense of anxiety. And for some depression and for some turns into anger, for some shame, it has a lot of different expressions. And that can get accentuated when we experience a real direct loss. When change means we've lost something we really value, whether it's a person that we love, dies, or we're losing our own health, our relationship that matters goes down. But then those

feelings can get really accentuated. And in any given time, many of us are actually facing some fairly large loss. And the older we get, the more that's happening. And I'm curious just as we sit here together tonight, how many of you are either facing or living right now with a fairly big loss in your life, if you don't mind sharing. I'm certainly one of that. Okay. Thank you. So one of the most central teachings on the path, and really this was quite at the heart of True Refuge, my book True Refuge, is that our capacity to live wakefully and lovingly and fully is totally related to our capacity. to open to change and loss.

That you can't separate the two. We cannot love and be really present with our life if there's a lot of resistant and tension around what's around the corner. And so that was a... It actually is what inspired me to write True Refuge as I was dealing with a major loss in terms of my own personal health.

And since writing the book, I've had so many people. share their stories about moving through some pretty horrendous experiences and what is it that allowed them, this is the inquiry, what allows us to open to the very experiences that we most in our human separate egoic self don't want to happen? How do we open? So this is going to be the theme of our class tonight and I invite you all to whether you're dealing with something immediate and right in front of you

or any place that you find you're resisting how it's going. I mean, how is it that we begin to really find that quality of presence and heart that has room? So we'll look at really our relationship with change. In Buddhism, it's one of the key characteristics of existence described as a Nicaa, or a Nika. And it's considered one of the places that's most, most essential for us to shine a light on. How are we relating to change, to loss? So I'll start with one approach.

Somebody sent me this a bit ago that's a little on the light side. And this is a very great Spanish sea captain was walking on around a ship, and a soldier rushed to him and exclaimed to him that there was an enemy ship. He says, enemy ship is approaching us. And so the captain very calmly said to the soldier, go get me my red shirt, which he did. So the enemy ship comes and there's a heavy round of fire exchange and the Spaniards win.

And the soldier congratulates the captain and said, but how come the red shirt? And he said, well, if I bleed, I didn't want the other soldiers to see it because then they'd lose hope. Just at that moment another soldier runs up and says, you know, sir, we just spotted another 20 enemy ships. And the captain very calmly replied, go bring me my yellow pants.

That's one approach. So from an evolutionary perspective, there are two major modalities that we can think of from which we, you know, really meet the changes that come our way. And the first one is really from the sense of an egoic self. It's when you're in that identity of I'm separate, and this world's out there and I'm in here, and what's happening is a danger and a threat.

And the approach then is to control. The egoic self goes right into controlling mode to defend against, you know, the fragility and the uncertainties of what's happening, which means sometimes control is denying and sometimes control is manipulating other people or shutting down or getting caught in fear, grasping onto whatever provides some sense of security. Chokhian Trunkpa described it that we become a bunch of tense muscles protecting our existence. So controlling. And some of you might remember the little story of a man who kind of falls off a cliff and he's holding onto a vine or something like that.

And, you know, there's a tiger kind of walking back and forth on the top. And below them are these jagged rocks. And he says, you know, oh, God, help me. And here's a booming voice. I'm here. And he says, God, what do I do? And the voice is just let go. And then the guy goes, is anybody else there?

But you get the idea that it's the last. that when we're feeling, you know, the egoic self-feel feels threatened, the last thing we can do is let go, is drop our control strategies. So controlling life is one mode. And then the second option, which is as we evolve, as we awaken, is meeting the changes, the challenges, the grief, the sense of loss, with a full sense of presence. a real letting be with tenderness, which for those of you are listening was the theme of the meditation that we did together tonight, that you might want to explore.

So this is a real open-hearted presence. This is a presence that really gets that life is coming and life is going. And one of my favorite teachings on it came from Ajan Cha, who is a forest monk in the Taravada tradition, and he holds up a glass. And he says, do you see this glass? He says, I love this glass. He says it holds the water admirably. And when the sun shines on, it reflects the light beautifully.

And when I tap it, it has a lovely ring. Yet for me, this glass is always. broken. When the wind knocks it over, my elbow knocks it off the shelf and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, of course. But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious. So there's this quality when we really allow for everything's coming and going, including these bodies, including those that we most love. There's a sense of how precious this life becomes. I remember some years ago, Tickna Han at a retreat that Ticknanhan held the way he closed the retreat.

And he had us get into pairs, and we would, and then he had us, you know, namaste means I see the divine or the sacred in you, the timeless presence that's here. And then he'd have us hold each other, and with the first breath we'd mentally whisper to ourselves, I'm going to die. and then the second breath, you're going to die. And then with the third breath, this is all we're holding each other, and we have just these precious moments. So when we're awake and allowing the truth of impermanence, there becomes a quality of cherishing that's possible. And you might imagine what it would be like of all your important decisions,

you know, all the choices you are making in your days, all your responses to the people around you were informed by this understanding of Anitia that it's coming and going. I'm going to die. You're going to die. If that remembrance was there, what life would be like? So you see, so there's a wisdom in it. This is the potential of our evolving consciousness to shift from, that sense of impending doom and something's wrong and this is bad when we encounter losses

to a quality of real presence cherishing being right here. And the first step that we'll be exploring together is to become mindful of how we go about controlling because we flip into it really quickly. And we do the controlling, for sure, when really big things come up, when we sense, oh my God, you know, I'm going to lose this person in my life or my health is going. We try to fix things. I mean, and it's natural, by the way, and it's important that we do what we can, but we over-control. So can we begin to see how we over-control, how how many moments is not just when big things are happening. How many moments there's a sense that around the corner something bad is going to happen.

How many of you have noticed that, that sense of just, it's around the corner. Yeah. So, or a sense of, you missed a bullet, but the next thing is going to go wrong. So we're kind of waiting for the shoe to drop, the other shoe to drop, and that right now it might be okay, but I'm going to fail. I'm going to blow it next time in some way. we're going to lose what we love. So there's a way in which we move through life wired to feel insecure

and then wired to control so bad things won't happen. And we get hooked in it. And there's tension in our body and it becomes like an armoring that we wear. And we try to control things by losing ourselves and our thoughts. And if you notice you're obsessing, that's part of controlling. We lock into emotional reactivity, and then we end up behaving in ways to try to protect ourselves. So we're going to look at the ways we control.

But I want to just, as I was reflecting on this, I was reminded of a story that Tom Wolfe told in his book The Right stuff that I wanted to share. He describes how during the 1950s, elite military pilots would do a lot of experimental. flights with planes at altitudes where the ordinary rules of aerodynamics no longer apply. And they'd get out there. And then the plane would do these wild things. It would tumble around in space and it wouldn't do that, it wouldn't respond in the ways it was supposed to.

And what they did was they recorded the pilots as they were going into their final dive, the one that killed them, and as they were trying to try to figure it out and make things work. and they hear them screaming into the microphone. I've tried A, I've tried B, I've tried C, I've tried D, what do I do next? And as it turned out, the more frantically they maneuvered and tried to control things, actually the more terrifying the situation became.

So the final solution emerged, interestingly, after test pilot Chuck Yeager was out there, and he hit his head so he actually stopped controlling things, and he kind of fell through space for seven miles, and then came into the denser atmosphere, and that's where he could, you know, there are certain levels that we can control things. And that's when he can put the ship back into a spin and steady it and land.

So he survived. And the answer to what do you do when things are like out there, like beyond, the beyond, is you do absolutely nothing. You sit there and fall. And Wolf puts it this way. He says, you take your hands off the controls. In fact, that's the only choice you had. Okay, so this is a little bit of our guiding theme for this exploration, is that we begin to notice that we habitually overestimate the domain we can control.

Every one of us. There's a very narrow band that we actually can manage, and even that, when we're trying to manage it, doesn't always come out so well. because often that we think that we can manage other people. That causes trouble. Some of you might remember, mothers preparing pancakes for her son, Kevin's five, Ryan's three. The boys are arguing over who gets the first pancake, and the mother saw an opportunity for a moral lesson.

So she says, if Jesus was sitting here, he would say, let my brother have the first pancake, I can wait. So Kevin turned to his younger brother and said, Ryan, you can have the first chance at playing Jesus. So we learn to manipulate. So that's the first area. And seemingly, you know, we can get away with it some, but we know that in the long run, what does that do to relationships?

So we overestimate the domain. And one of the ways that you might think about it is the domain of, you know, aging, sickness, dying, the domain of how other people act and treat us. You can't really control it. So we begin to start recognizing what are our strategies. And our strategies, our common ways of controlling, are the ones that we do in daily life. It's not just when we're out beyond the normal dense atmosphere. We do them all the time.

And I'm going to name some. And I just invite you to reflect on what are your ways of trying to manage things that you know intuitively, if you're being honest with yourself, it's over-controlling. And the reason it's so important to recognize is because in the moments that we're controlling, we're not able to access the very qualities of heart, of compassion, and of presence

that actually can give us freedom in the midst. And if our habit is in control, our habit is not to access our own strengths and resources. So one way of controlling that's chronic for most of us is being busy. I don't mean being engaged and productive in a wholesome way. I mean the busyness that we know about. It comes from, there's a mantra that goes with the busyness, which is there's not enough time. So there's the underneath busyness, if we really stop and if you pause in the middle of

busyness, the give away that it's a false refuge, that it's a, A control strategy is if you pause, you're going to feel in your body a restlessness and an angst that feels really uncomfortable and you just want to get busy again. There's an article I read recently that had Ruben Naulman. He said, are you twired? T-wired. T-wired. Simultaneously tired and wired.

How many of you have noticed that combo, Twired? Can I say, yeah. I think it's a great word. And what happens is twired comes out of that. We have this kind of angsty feeling like something's wrong and it's around the corner I've got to do something about it. So we get, it's hyper-arousal, hyperactivity, and then we get exhausted.

And so, but then, you know, we don't really sleep well, so we go into our day, but then that arousal gets us really wired again, so we're twired. Okay. We don't know how to truly rest. We don't know how to take our hands off the controls. I mean, even when there's ostensibly no major problem.

And we know how to kick back as in dull our minds and, you know, watch TV or go online or something, but we don't know how to rest. Do you know what I mean by rest? I just stop the doing and just be, just here. The Tibetans describe it that, Business is considered to be the most extreme form of laziness. And I think it's really very powerful because, you know, we fill up the space so we don't have to relate to ourselves.

It's like it's lazy because we're not willing to be with the rawness that's here, so we stay busy. So that's a mean way that we try to control things. I remember one woman who found out she had a year to live and she had maybe a two-year-old daughter, her mantra was, there's no time to rush. So that's a control strategy that takes major intention. Another control strategy is all the ways we distract ourselves.

So we know our routines. We might have something real to engage with, but it's much easier to go online and just answer emails or float around online or get on the phone or text. It's the book The Shallows that I mentioned. It keeps us on a thin level. but we don't have to drop into our life.

And then another strategy of control is actually depressing, you know, like sleeping, disconnecting, withdrawing, avoiding. Our control strategy is food. And again, it's not like we're being bad people, just to recognize it, recognize that the way we eat is to soothe and so we don't have to feel the rawness of experience. Our drugs, our alcohol.

big control strategy that most of us know about is denial. It's just acting as if, pretending as if, not acknowledging, this hurts. This is hard. This is difficult. And in our culture, it's a death-denying culture. So it becomes, we're not invited to really share about what's difficult. So I'm giving right now some of the examples. The denial is really, really.

painful. I know one man who some years ago lost his job when, you know, the economy went down, couldn't find another job, and was unable to name how devastating that loss was for him, how much his sense of who he was was just stripped away and how much shame he felt. And he got very isolated in that and his marriage crumbled, not being able to grieve. And, and name what's true makes us sick. For another, a couple that I talked to, their oldest daughter, I talked many years after this happened,

when their oldest daughter was killed in an accident, this was as the other children were growing up, and the family was not able to talk about it. And then as I got to know the family, how much injury that caused to the other children because it was kind of a secret. So denial. It's young calls at the unlived life

that when we're not facing it and living it and not only cause us suffering to ourselves but every relationship we're in. And then another control strategy is blaming and that one is one of the most dangerous because of course it causes war. When we can't tolerate our experience, we find the cause outside us, we blame and we attack.

For one couple, they lost their teenage son to leukemia, and there was so much pain for the mother that she in some way was blaming her husband for not doing enough to save them. And she knew it was irrational, but she couldn't help it. And that broke up their marriage. I'm trying to give you examples of this, just to get a feeling. These are examples that are in the realm of when there's been extreme loss, but we do the blaming even when there's not extreme loss, when we just feel uncomfortable. And then, of course, we blame ourselves. And that's another control strategy. Not to, rather than feel what's there, we think we're going to try to make things different by controlling ourselves into being a different

person. Okay. So these are the ways we have the hands on the control. How do we begin to take the hands off the control? You can't will yourself. You can't will yourself to open to the grief or to open to the fear that's here. But there can be a kind of willingness where it's your intention to recognize the control strategies and open into what's actually happening. And we're going to spend the rest of our time exploring how when we're kind of caught and we're facing loss or living with loss,

do we begin to take our hands off the control and open to what's here? So as I often do, I thought I'd begin with my own story that one of the time in my life that I saw with most clear relief, the controller, and how the controller really didn't want to take hands off the controls, was when I was going through that decline, that health decline, and it was over a period of a number of years. But there was one particularly intense phase, where I had gone to a retreat and I had a concussion.

And I didn't quite understand the severity of it, and so over the next six months I was having all sorts of symptoms. But my controller self was kind of driving, I was kind of denying how sick I felt and pushing myself and staying busy because there were a lot more rewards to staying busy than having to cancel things and feel like a sick person. And the controller was doing a lot of self-judgment, like I'm not dealing with this, I'm not figuring out how to fix myself.

You know, there was a lot of that. And then I had a real crash because I was pushing too hard and not taking care. And I landed up in a cardiac unit at Fairfax Hospital for a week. And nobody knew what was wrong. All that they knew from symptoms was that I had bradycardia, my blood pressure, my pulse was down so low. I wasn't functional. So I was living, this is like a classic example of uncertainty.

They didn't know, should we put in a pacemaker? I had every test in the book, and it wasn't coming out very clear. So I was facing this uncertainty. It was like going to have to cancel teaching. Did I just, you know, cancel Wednesday night class? And the controller kind of would kick in and try to figure things out. But I remember one night, I was lying there in a nurse. came in and said to me, oh dear, you're feeling badly, aren't you? And she kind of was, she

kind of clucked sympathetically and left the room. But there was something about somebody else saying, oh, just that simplicity of you're feeling badly that softened me. And I, it's like that part of me that was denying and trying to say, just kind of went to the side. and I was able to begin to touch the fear and the uncertainty. But over that week, the controller kept coming back. I remember at one moment getting it that I needed to really be with, just really be with. And I remembered a phrase from Chogium Trunkpa,

which is the practice is to meet your edge what's really happening and soften. to meet your edge and soften over and over again. And that captures the two wings of presence that really are liberating. Meeting our edge is to recognize fully, contact fully, exactly what's here, the truth of the moment. That's the edge. And for me, the edge was fear and grief.

And the soften is, meet it with the space that's tender. soften with it. Let there be heart. Okay? So, mindfulness, really contacting being with, and heart. So I remember one of, you know, towards the end then one of the nights, as you know in hospitals, there's no real night, it's like, you know, people are always coming and so on, really being there with the intensity of the fear and just saying, okay, meet this and soften, meet this and soften. And it was, you know, it was like a sense of dying.

You know, it was very hard to be with it. And my mind would start obsessing, and I'd come back, be with it. It was like this gaping hole, this tearing feeling of my body. And I could sense that what that fear place most needed was like that nurse, oh dear, you know, this is hard. So I did what I often do. It's okay, sweetheart. I offered that to myself. and that dropped into grief.

The fear dropped into underneath that grief, and I just kept letting go into it, softening into it, until there was a shift. And the shift, the best way I can describe it was from the controller that was trying not to feel something and trying to think things through to just becoming this tender space. It's like this vast tenderness that was,

that was what I was. It's in large sense of belonging. Like it is belonging to the whole. And to say it honestly, the very next day, I recontracted, but it was easier to meet my edge and soften. It became more and more familiar

that I just didn't know what was going to happen. And I kept taking my hands off the controls and resting in something larger, and that was a refuge. But I had to learn the way there by doing it over and over. So my purpose in sharing this story of, you know, when you're encountering loss, is that it requires both wings to say, okay, I'm going to open to the grief,

open to the fear, and not bring a tenderness to it, we can't do it. And I think of it like an ocean and waves, that when the waves are really strong, we have to have some remembrance of the ocean-ness in order to be with them. Otherwise, it's too hard. the ocean is that loving presence. It takes practice. One woman, who I've been in touch with, her control or self-led her into a drug addiction that was really pretty horrendous. But she's in recovery, and over these last years she's been really practicing presence and practicing self-compassion a lot. And just recently she lost her mom. And she sent me an email

and in the email she said, you know, sometimes I'm numb and I'm cut off and other times it's horrendous waves of grief and sorrow. But there's some quality of letting it be there and letting it be okay that I've learned that's given me the space for it. That's just today. So sometimes when the fear and grief are really strong, and it could be other experiences too, there's too much contraction

to be able to even offer ourselves compassion. We're too regressed. And at those times, we really need to know how to reach out in order to grieve. We need to be able to mourn. Every one of us faces losses, and if we don't mourn them,

if we can't really enter into our body and let that happen, we don't end up loving again fully. So one woman, this is another kind of story example, and this one I shared in True Refuge. In fact, a lot of what I'm sharing in this class is from True Refuge. This is a woman in our community who had breast cancer, metastasized, and we worked together closely. She really wanted to draw on the Dharma and how to take refuge as she moved towards her death. And her controller didn't want to let other people down.

Her controller didn't want to share her pain with others because she wanted to be a model for how you can go through dying by taking refuge. So here she was trying to be a good spiritual person. That was another way of controlling. And so when we met, one of the times she said she was very much feeling afraid and lonely and she could feel that, but it was really hard for her to admit to her world

really how hard it was because she had this notion that if you're spiritual, you don't get real fed up. She said, I lost my, she says sometimes I have no faith. It's like I just feel exhausted, confused, scared, and lonely. That's not being a good spiritual person. One day, she was, was at home and her friends would bring her food and so on. And I remember she described how it

happened that her friend Anna came to deliver food and she was lying, curled up in bed and a lot of pain and she didn't want Anna to know she was awake because she had been crying and she just wanted to take care of it herself. So she heard the door shut and let herself start really weeping. And then Anna climbed into the bed and kind of curled around her and just had her, held her. She had thought Anna had left, but she had actually been in the room. That was the first time she really let herself weep and realized how much that in order to grieve,

she needed to feel held. We need to know our belonging. So for her, the practice then on and we worked together, I said, you know, if you could feel that part of you that most wants to be held, what's it saying? And it's saying, please love me. Those were the words she kept saying. So her practice was to say, please love me. And I asked her, well, if you could imagine what you want most to be loving you. She said, well, it's my mother. And her mother died years ago. I said, okay, say the words and sense that you can really imagine your mother loving you. And so that's

what she would do. She would say, please love me. And she'd sense her mother's energy, this is like warmth and light enveloping her, taking care of her. She started letting this practice go so deep that she could do it to, you know, in her mind to friends, to trees, to plants, until she was actually, whoever she was with, she was actually letting in love. She was letting in the world's love. And she described it that she felt the whole world loving her and it dissolved her. So it was just love that was loving her.

And she was that loving presence. In other words, when we really let it in, the self that's holding a barrier and trying to protect ourselves dissolves, and then we become that love. She said that when you accept your dying, it's not hard to feel one with God. That was her realization. That when she really accepted it and felt the grief and let in love,

she realized she was one with God. So again, I'm sharing this story because we sometimes have this notion when we're facing great loss, that we're supposed to curl up in our own bed and weep it away or get through it and it should have a certain timing. It has no certain timing. We need others.

It's not like it's going it alone as a sign of strength. Often reinforces this egoic self that actually feels like it's supposed to be doing things a certain way, rather than dissolving that self and letting us feel the connection we're longing, for. You know, there's been a lot more research recently on the power of relationships to heal. And now there are healing circles for those that are grieving in hospitals when people get first diagnosed with cancer. There's healing circles for people that are grieving, great losses.

I also think of it in terms of Joanna Macy bringing together people so they can grieve and feel their despair for the earth. Because, again, we kind of hold in our own. little bubble, and it's almost like when we let other people say what they're grieving, it helps us to open to what's in us. When our hearts break fully open, we become a tender openness. So I'm spending time on this tonight because we often make loss and death and sickness a bad thing. And if we consider it it just part of this living, dying experience, then what comes up around, it becomes a portal to what's sacred. It becomes a portal to really recognizing more fully who we are. We find right in the center of our sorrows, if you go

really into grief, like really open into it, deeper and deeper, what you'll find in the very center is a very timeless and pure love. The grief is for a sense of loss connection. And if you trace it back, you come to the place in you which cherishes connection. And you trace it back even further, you become that cherishing. You become that sense of belonging. In the Lakota Sioux tradition, a person who is grieving is considered most Wachan, W-A-K-A-N, and that means most holy. Again, it's a portal. And there's a sense that When someone is struck by loss, there's an openness to that which is beyond this world that occurs. When you really feel lost, when the ground is shaken, there's the veil thins and there's more

access to a sense of the timeless, the eternal. So grieving people's prayers are considered especially strong. It's proper to ask them for help in the Lakota Sioux tradition. I think there's something really beautiful about that, that most of us have touched in some way, that when we've really opened to grief and let it really move through us, there's sometimes in the aftermath of the emotion a kind of quiet tenderness that feels like home. And we're really in touch in those moments. So we're exploring really how to shift from hands-on-the-controls to discovering this holiness and this wholeness of being where that tenderness lives.

And one of the most beautiful examples I've heard of that is from Tick-Nod-Han. And I mentioned last week that he's suffered a brain hemorrhage and he's pretty frail and sick. he's in his own process of passing. We don't know when. But I want to share his story about experiencing his mother's death because he experienced it as one of the great misfortunes of his life. And he grieved her for more than a year,

like really active grieving. And we need to do that. And then after that year, she appeared to him in a dream. And in it they were having this wonderful talk and she was young and beautiful. and he woke up in the middle of the night and had the distinct impression that he had never lost his mother,

that she was alive in him. And then he stepped outside his monastery hut and began walking among the tea plants and he still felt her presence by his side. And he says so beautifully, she was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet.

And continuing to walk, you sense that his body was a living continuation of all his hands, ancestors and that together he and his mother were leaving footprints in the damp soil. Some of you may have had this experience. I was actually with somebody earlier today and his teacher, Aguenca, died a few months ago. And he said it's like there's the idea that he's died and I can't have the contact I've had. They were very close.

But, you know, I can feel him in me. You can hear his voice, I can sense the teachings, I can sense the who he was inside me. That's more true than anything else. There is something timeless that is still here. Again, Tikna Han. He says, this body is not me. I am not caught in this body. I am life without boundaries.

I have never been born and I have never died. Over there, the wide ocean and the sky with many galaxies. all manifest from the basis of consciousness. Since beginningless time, I have always been free. So smile to me and take my hand and wave goodbye. Tomorrow we shall meet again, or even before, we shall always be meeting again at the true source, always meeting again on the myriad paths of life.

We're really looking at how we engage with this ever-changing, world, this world of coming and going, and discover something timeless, some stillness, some eternal quality of loving. But I think it's really important to say that for most of us the grieving is slow, it has its own organic stops and starts and so on, and it's gradual that we, it's over time that we start sensing that shift from really missing, acutely missing a person to sensing their presence. I'd like to share with you the poem that is probably my favorite poem about this process of grieving, and it's by John O'Donohue, and it's called For Grief.

There are days when you wake up happy, again inside the fullness of life, until the moment breaks in your throne back onto the black tide of life. loss. Days when you have your heart back, when you're able to function well, until in the middle of work or encounter suddenly with no warning you are ambushed by grief. It becomes hard to trust yourself. All you can depend on now is that sorrow will remain faithful to itself. More than you, it knows its way and will find the right time to pull and pull the rope of grief until that coiled hell of tears has reduced to its last drop. Gradually, you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed. And when the work of grief is done, the wound

of loss will heal, and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. So this is something that for so many of us we hear and we know it's truth. And it has not just to do with the loss of a dear person. It has to do with all our moments, that we get attached to life being a certain way. and when it doesn't go our way we fixate on what's wrong and if we can over time just let ourselves feel the discomfort, the pain, the fear, the hurt,

and feel it with honesty and with tenderness, we find that what we long for is always right here. The love that we long for, if we bring enough presence to the moment, we discover that loving presence right here, the peace we long for. We think we can go chase after it in some way or make things different. But it comes when we relax the controlling and rest right here, just rest. There's a reflection that's often used in workshops and trainings to awaken us to impermanists

because we so much want to turn away and control things. and in that reflection we're invited to consider several people who are dear that are with us now and just witness our experiences we face the truth that could be gone in any moment. And let ourselves feel that. Why bother? Well, there's a reason that we purposefully let ourselves get into the habit of turning towards loss. And that is because we're so habituated to place.

pulling away that it takes a willingness to look. And it takes a willingness to look and then to really bring those two wings of presence, to open to what actually happens inside our bodies and our hearts and to soften, meet our edge and soften. And the fruit is that we discover two dimensions of awareness that are really the fullness of who we are. And one dimension I've been mentioning as we We open to these changing currents, we discover that which is really still and unchanging.

As Sogiel Rimbusha puts it this way, he says, if everything changes, everything changes, then what is really true? Just consider that if everything changes, let me close your eyes for a moment, if everything changes, every moment, everything changing, then what is really true? Is there something beyond the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? So one dimension is there's this, we can intuit this kind of openness that everything's happening in, the stillness that a life is unfolding from.

If you think of the waves in the ocean, there's this vastness here. And then when we let ourselves feel that and open to the waves, like if right now you just open to what's right here, you can begin to discover the possibility of a profound tenderness. Srinar Sorgadatta says, look inside. When I look inside, wisdom tells me I'm nothing. When I look outside, love tells me I'm everything. Between the two, my life flows. So we sense that in our life there's these inevitable losses

and that the possibility is if we bring a presence and a kindness to the places of loss, we discover loving presence as our very essence. We'll close, continuing, if you haven't closed your eyes already, with these two wings of presence, meeting our edge, and softening with what's right here. Just very honestly sense what's right here. In welcoming everything we don't have to like what's arising,

just simply bring our presence, feeling the sensations in the body, whatever emotions are here right now, including numbness, disconnect. Just let everything be as it is. Can you sense that nothing is holding still, just as the seasons keep rolling and changing, everything in our subjective experience is in motion, sounds, sensations, vibration.

What happens if you really say yes to the flow? Completely allow it to be as it is, surrendering into the flow. Everything changes. and what really is true. Can you sense in the background of stillness and openness that everything's arising from, dissolving into? You sense if you rest in that openness, this possibility of regarding all the changing waves

in the surface of our life with profound tenderness. We close with a simple prayer of loving kindness. May we each be blessed, to meet our moments, these changing moments, including the great losses, with the tenderness and presence, letting our hearts be broken open and becoming that open tenderness. May all beings everywhere discover that love and that presence, which is their very essence. Namaste and thank you.

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.