Tara Brach - 2014-12-30 - (retreat talk) Landlocked in Fur - Three Domains of Formless Presence

Episode Date: January 3, 2015

2014-12-30 - Retreat Talk - Landlocked in Fur - Three Domains of Formless Presence - While we have evolved to experience a defining sense of separate self, our potential is to awaken to the formless dimension - the pure awareness is our shared source. This talk explores how we can undo the identification with thoughts, emotions and feelings that keeps us landlocked and unable to trust and live from our naturally loving and radiant essence. (given at the 2014 IMCW New Year's Retreat in Reisterstown, MD) Poem at start of talk: "Landlocked in Fur" - by Tukaram. From: “Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West” (Ladinksy, 2002)

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Good evening. So I'd like to begin tonight with a poem. This is a new favorite of mine. I was meditating with my cat the other day, and all of a sudden she shouted, What happened? I knew exactly what she meant, but encouraged her to say more, feeling that if she got it all out on the table, she'd sleep better that night.

So I responded, tell me more, dear, and she soulfully meowed. Well, I was mingled with the sky. I was comets whizzing here and there. I was suns in heat. Hell, I was galaxies. But now look, I'm landlocked in fur. To this, I said, I know exactly what you mean. What to say about conversation between mystics?

So the title of tonight's talk may have something to do with landlocked in fur. We'll go from there. So you might not have found over these days that you've been dissolved into galaxies of light. But many, I know, from our groups have sensed an openness in times of really feeling at home or with experience in a fluid way, and then contracted. And the next season has been one of, in some way, anxiety or tension or tightness,

that something's wrong feeling. So one way of understanding, you know, this whole awakening process, or even the word enlightenment, is freedom from that identification with the landlocked self. you know, when we're not stuck inside a limiting story and felt sense of selfness. And you'll notice as you're moving through the day here that the moments that you feel most free, there's not a preoccupation with your story, with comparing yourself to others or to how you should be with judgments.

there's more of that kind of relaxed openness or just part of a flow. So, well, I'm curious in terms of language, how many of you are aware, at least some of the time of when you feel kind of caught in a small identity, when you're living in something smaller than you know you are. Can I just see by hands, how many kind of track that a little? Okay.

That puts us in the same arena. So many of you might be familiar. I've mentioned this a lot of times in talks, if you've listened to them, of the paletive caregiver who described the greatest regret of the dying, one of the single greatest regrets as being that sense of not living true to ourselves, living according to expectations, or living according to internalized shoulds, but not true.

And when I say true to self, true to who we really are. And I've really come to sense how it's not just the dying with that regret that I think all of us live with a sense of how what's possible, who we can be, and some evaluating and sensing a gap that right now I'm not living, you know, my heart's not as open or my mind's not as clear and I'm not as present. and that's that something's wrong feeling. It's not the way it's supposed to be, the landlocked feeling.

And when it's there, we're not trusting ourselves. One of the stories I love came from a Walder school that my son attended to, and they described that there was an art class and students were sitting in fours. I think they were third grade or fourth grade, and the teacher was kind of rotating, around as the children were on a project drawing.

And she stood over one, looking over one little girl's shoulder because the girl was so into her picture. She was really into it. And the teacher asked her, so what are you drawing? And the little girl's response was, I'm drawing God. And the teacher kind of chuckled and said, well, hon, nobody knows what God looks like. And without skipping a beat, without even looking up,

Little girl said, they will in a moment. And what I like about that is there's this confidence when we're really sensing the who we are, when we're okay with ourselves. There's a real natural confidence that comes through. And it's a sign that we're just inhabiting our being. So tonight what I'd like to do, and this hopefully will build, you'll sense the building from this looking at the tightness of restlessness, worry,

and then how important it is that we wake up through our bodies and then the quality of compassion that's necessary. What I'd like to look at tonight is through the lens of identity. In a sense, really, this process of undoing a limiting identity. So if you're walking around in a story of insufficient self or oppressed self or victimized self or will never get it right self, how do we wake up out of that? And I think one of the most powerful frames for the inquiry is simply sensing in this moment,

is there anything between me and really living from the truth of who I am, or the wholeness of who I am, right in this moment? And when we inquire, when we start to observe with that frame, is there anything between, there's three domains that are particularly important to begin to investigate. And one of the domains, you know, is there anything between me and really living in fullness, is the domain of stories. Often we'll find that there's a veil of stories going on, thoughts and stories about this character called self and how the world is.

So that's one of the domains that can get, between us and reality. And another domain is where we get caught inside reactive emotions, fears and wants. And then the third domain, as you might be imagining, is the domain energetically of where we get caught and identified with contractions, energetic contractions, physical contractions. Now each of these domains is a form of contracting. In the mind, when we get identified with thoughts, there's contraction. When we get identified with reactive emotions, we're contracting in the heart area.

And when we get identified with contractions energetically, that's just another more subtle level, or more gross level, actually. And these together make up selfing. And selfing is a word that Ruth brought into the room, that if you're not familiar with, it's just a useful word. For some people it's not, but it's not a derogatory word. It's just that there are these processes that, keep reconstructing our sense of self. And they're really processes of contracting. And there's

a familiar pattern of contractions that make up a familiar sense of self. How does that sound? Does that make sense? I'm going to looking around. Okay, we got it. I got a thumbs up. Thank you. So we're going to look at selfing because really homecoming, coming back to our natural being, is undoing the identifications with those contractions. So that what happens is that when we come into presence, presence relaxes us open beyond the belief contractions. And you've begun to notice that. If you've been presence to your thoughts,

you're going to wake up to something larger. And similarly, when we bring a kind presence to the contractions in the heart area, what happened? What happens? We kind of open to something larger. We might still feel fear, but we're not identified with it. And when we bring presence, the physical, energetic contractions, again, that presence creates a kind of a space around that allows the knots to loosen. That's kind of the direction we're going in here. And there's a metaphor I really like that I'd like to toss into the mix here, which is to imagine, this is for the whole spiritual path,

that it's like we are jumping off a plane with a parachute. Here we are. We come to retreat or we practice this practice. We're jumping off a plane with a parachute. But then we realize that we don't have a parachute. And then we realize that there's no ground to hit. And then we realize there's no one who jumped. How are we doing?

Are you all with me? We'll see how this goes. just keep going together. So this is really a metaphor for undoing our familiar selfing. We kind of, instead of staying with our habitual beliefs and thoughts, we kind of are stepping out of them. And are we going to hit ground? Well, instead of resisting what's here, we open to the rawness,

we open to the emotions. And then the more open we get, the more we discover, there's nobody really it's happening to. And I'll just put that out there for now. You don't have to buy it. But here's something I want to make sure to touch into, that we had one very good question this morning that brought in the fear of that emptiness.

When you say there's no one that jumped, that doesn't make me feel good. That can be scary. So I want to name that this fear of emptiness or no self, you know, it's a natural evolutionary experience. and we emerge, we evolve, designed to perceive a separate self, and designed to cling to that separate self, and designed to defend that separate self.

And so when we're introduced to a concept of, well, there's nobody there, that goes against that, you know, all those tens of thousands of years of evolution, that that's what we were designed to experience. And it's not the end of the evolutionary story because there is built into our capacities the ability to pay attention in a way that senses what we are beyond that separate self and that actually encourages us to jump off the plane.

Every one of you is jumping off the plane by being here, by even having any intention to be my mind, mindful, to pay attention to what's going on with presence, you're stepping out of the familiar cocoon of body-mind patterning. You're jumping off a plane. And to me, it's interesting now, you know, when meditators are put under MRIs and so they start showing what's happening in the brain, what they find out is that there's a deactivation of the parts of the frontal cortex that perpetuate a self-image and a sense of self and other and a duality. So what's going on in the brain matches that dissolution of self and that unit of feeling

that meditators report as they go deeper and deeper into meditation. I'm just throwing that in there because I always think it's interesting how science is a metaphor that parallels so much of what meditators are finding out. Okay, so let's reflect on the domains of undoing the selfing, of sensing where we're landlocked and loosening the boundaries. And even as I've been talking about it, I've been pointing to areas of the body and I just want to open up the possibility of exploring these domains of contraction, the domain of contraction of getting caught in our beliefs and stories is the domain of mind.

Okay? And the domain of getting caught up in and identified with reactive emotions is the domain of heart. And the energetic contraction, the most gross level of where we resist and hold on, is described as the Dantan or Naval area. And this is the area of wellpower and of the basic clutch onto life. We'll talk about it more, but this is the area that I'm going to invite you to explore as we look at letting go of these contractions. So we begin with the area of stories and beliefs and thoughts,

which Ruth really, I thought, gave a beautiful map of this morning of the ways we get caught and the ways we work with it. And I'm just going to add on a few different dimensions and then we'll just experiment together. But one is just to say, well, what are thoughts and what we know about on one level is there are electrical signals you know neurons jumping the synapses that kind of thing we sense they're mostly sound bites and images right

and I remember at my first retreat one of the useful ways to think about thoughts was we were instructed to imagine that everything we were thinking was actually going on in the person in front of us so I'm going to invite you to consider that and if you're in the front row you can use us but you know you might imagine that

somebody in front of you is having a movie going on in their mind and the movie's about some conflict with a colleague and how in some way they were dissed or let down and how they're angry about it and they have to go home and straighten it out

and if you imagine that's going on in another person's mind. And you imagine, okay, so there's this story's going on and you know that person's bodies feeling the fight-flight-free stuff that might go with the story, and you know that it might all lead to certain kind of actions in the future. For you, you still know it's a movie. You know that it's not actually happening right now. But for that person, when they're caught in the movie, it's actually the reality. It's merged. awareness actually is merged with the thought process and they're living in a living reality in those moments and their bodies having experiences and it feels real.

And that wonderful phrase from Sokney-rimpichet that Ruth mentioned, real but not true is the way to begin to loosen it. And we can sense how true that is when it's somebody else's movie. So how do we unstuck ourselves? Because most of the time through most of the day, we're believing the movies in our mind, most of the time. And we suffer because we're believing something that's not true. We're landlocked and we're in a confining kind of set of thoughts. And often the thoughts are really unreliable. The images and soundbites are really unreliable. And one of my favorite examples is this. Okay, this is written by somebody who's a bagpiper. And he says, I play many gigs. Recently, I was asked by

funeral director to play at a grave-sized service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at the pauper cemetery in Kentucky backcountry. Now, I wasn't familiar with the back roads, got lost, being a typical guy, didn't stop for directions, and when I arrived an hour late, I saw the funeral guy had already gone, the hearse was nowhere in sight. Their only diggers and crew left, and they were eating lunch. I felt badly and apologized for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down, and the vault lid was already employed. place. I didn't know what else to do, so I started to play. The workers put down their lunges and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family,

with no friends. I played like I'd never played before for this homeless man, and I played amazing grace. The workers began to weep. I wept. We all wept together. When I finished, I packed up my bagpipes and started from my car, and though my head hung low, my heart was full. As they opened the door to my car, heard one of the workers say, I've never seen nothing like that before, and I've been putting in septic tanks for 20 years. It's so real but not true, right? Okay, so just a few pieces about, you know, this trance we get into when we're caught in thoughts. And this is, these are the key pieces on how they cause suffering.

And the first feature is that when we're believing our thoughts, in any time there's thoughts going on, and we're kind of, inside the thoughts, in those moments, there's a sense of a self in here and a world out there. In other words, the very ground of duality is set up. We cannot feel true connection when we're believing or inside our thoughts. Okay? That's the first one. We're in this duality.

It's often a separate, there's a separate lonely self. It's like in one joke, this guy is in a bar and he's talking to the, the bartender, he says, you know, I know I'm nothing, but I'm all I can think about, you know. That's the first one. The second one is when we're in the thinking trance, because of our evolutionary bias to somewhat fixate on the negative on where there's going to be something wrong, when we're in the thinking trance, it's usually fear-based. In other words, it's not only having a separate self, it's a threatened separate self. In some way around the corner, something's going to go wrong. Okay? That's part two in the thinking trance. The third one is

that our mind's designed to compare when we get into narrative, so there's usually a higher and a lower. I'm better, I'm worse. Good, bad, right, wrong. Okay. And then the last piece I want to mention, and this came up in the groups today, which I think is really important, is that when we're in a thinking trance, we're living in a map of time. We're living, there's a conceptual map that we're living in where we're on our way somewhere else and we've come from somewhere. And some of you might have noticed there's not that many moments in our life when all the notions of a future and a past fade and dissolve and there's just this openness of now. And yet that, those moments are when we actually touch in to the nature that's here of loving presence, light, creativity.

Everything we long for is when there's that boundlessness. It's right here. We're usually on our way. Norman Glass writes this. Life is tough. It takes up a lot of your time, all your weekends. And what do you get at the end of it? Death, a great reward.

I think the life cycle is all backwards. You should die first. Get it out of the way. Then you live 20 years in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young. You get a gold watch. You go to work. You work for 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You go to college. You party until you're ready for high school. You become a little kid. You play. You have no responsibilities. You become a little boy or girl. You go back into the womb. You spend your last nine months floating, and you finish off as a gleam in someone's eye. It's called reverse living.

So Anam Thubten, who is with us for our last retreat, describes it this way. He says, Can we see that there is a mental world that we have created somewhere in our consciousness? It is a mind-created world that we've been living in forever. The world we must transcend is the world. that the mind has constructed. The problem are not thoughts, it's getting identified with

them. And when they start creating our reality. So the first jump off the plane is where we just recognize, oh, thinking, thinking, but we are no longer believing the thoughts or reality. So how do we undo the identification? Ruth went over a number of ways. I mean, the biggest way is the training we're doing here. Over and over. over again, we notice, oh, okay, lost in thought. And then we gently open out of the thought and we notice the difference between the thought and this hereness, whatever this hereness is. It might be that what we come back to is a clutch of anxiety, but we're not living in the mental concept, waking up out of the thoughts over and over again. I love the question, am I dreaming?

because even if you ask it right now, am I dreaming? You get a sense of the veils. You get a sense of a little bit of a kind of conceptual, very subtle world that's between us and this immediacy, this real mystery right here. The deep teaching is be quiet and don't believe your thoughts, and don't believe your thoughts, and don't believe your thoughts.

Now, there's another approach to dissolving the identification with thinking, that a little bit of a, I wanted to do the meditation we did before, to give you a little bit of a sense of shifting from sensations to the sense of the space inside and around. And it's the same thing with thoughts. And one way you might consider it is this. and it's really remembering the space they arise from. You know, where did this thought come from?

Where did it go to? But you might reflect this way, just close your eyes for a moment. Bring to mind a situation at home that brings up some stress, not a huge amount, not a big stressor, but just some, something that's kind of a hassle. And when you do just let your mind roll through the particulars, so you're watching the movie of that situation a bit. And just what you're doing now is what we do a lot.

It's like we're in a movie theater, and we're watching a movie, and usually we're lost inside it because you've got a sign to do it. You're probably still mindful that you're doing it. But that's okay. We're usually watching a movie. It could be an adventure film or a nature film or a comedy or a tragedy. And it's usually starring Moire ourselves. And then the instructions

are look back to the source of the movie. So whatever's on the screen you're looking at, look back now. Turn your heads and look back inwardly and see if you can recognize what the movie is coming from. Where is it arising from? And just as support, you might metaphorically sense that all the movie images arise from a light source. And a series of changing images is projected by the light source onto the screen, and that the light is clear and shining. It's colored by various forms on the film, but its essential nature is pure and unchanging. Now as you are watching the movie and then there's spaces between the movies, let's say you wake up out of a movie and you realize, ah, there's space between it.

gaps. Chogium Trunkpah called the gaps between thoughts extremely good news. And the reason they remind us of that light. We can sense the space, the light-filled space, which is really our own true nature. And it doesn't mean that the thoughts aren't waves or part of what happens, but it's not the unchanging, pure truth of what we are. There's that space there. So we begin to sense that we're the silence that's listening. to the thoughts, the space that the thoughts are coming from and dissolving into. You can continue to reflect and just to share a prayer that this is from Elizabeth Lesser, and I think it's really quite powerful. She says, my prayer to God every day,

remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears. remove the veils so I might see what is really happening here. So this is the first domain of waking up out of the landlocked self is undoing our identification with thoughts. And when we do, any knot that's undone, any clench that's undone, create space. And when there's space, then that light of awareness can shine through. And that's the gift of practicing in this domain of mind, is that as you wake up out of thoughts, there's a lot more

of a sense of the space of awareness. There's a lot more luminosity. And sometimes it's talked of in terms of chakras, these top two chakras, crowned chakra and the third eye, this opening of them, when they're not clenched and when you're not fixated on thoughts, is described as what allows the flow of wisdom and realization of oneness. So if chakras aren't your thing, you can put that aside. If those that like that terminology, I find it really useful, we're basically unclutching the clench and making room for the natural light of awareness to flow. Okay, that's part one. Second domain, the heart. So in the same way, emotions just like thoughts flow, happen, unfold, and we get stuck because awareness takes itself as the emotion. Oh, I am the wanting self,

I'm the fearing self, on the ashamed self. Have you noticed when a strong emotion comes, that really feels defining. Okay? So it would be nice if we could just recognize, oh, this anger and it's just a weather system, just like those weather systems, and it doesn't really have something to do with the true me, but we don't do that, right?

We identify. So the process of undoing that identification is to let go of any resistance, to the actual feelings are felt sense. That's the process of undoing the identification, to let go of resistance to the felt sense. And that's what we've been doing a lot in this retreat with the introduction of rain.

It's when we sense the emotions coming up and we feel ourselves gripped rather than keeping on the clutching, it's like, okay, recognize and allow it's there, and then as we begin to bring that presence, instead of resisting where we begin to begin to, to investigate and bring an intimate attention, there's a natural shift, a natural loosening because we're not as identified.

I'll use this story maybe to describe the shift in identity because I think that the end of rain, and some of you might have noticed this, it doesn't get enough air time. Have you noticed that? Okay, so this tonight's about the end of rain really. How do we wake up out of a limit? identity. So we'll take one story and just look at how this process of waking up

up from a stuck emotion actually frees up our identity. And this is, I wanted to share a story I wrote up in True Refuge because it's been with me lately. And this was a friend from college that contacted me after a number of years

wanting some support with the life situation. He's an African American man, a photojournalist, who married a Caucasian woman, And her family, particularly her father, really, I mean her mother, I'm sorry, her father was actually fine. Her mother was really very, very disturbed by them coming together and outraged. And when they'd visit, she was really rude to him. And his wife would say, you know, we don't have to go anymore.

In fact, she didn't want to go bring him and expose him anymore to the toxicity of her mother. but it was very much a part of his spiritual path to this prayer for awakening may whatever circumstances arise served to awaken this heart from the Tibetan tradition and he just looked at like okay let this wake up my heart and there's another teaching that also made him stay in the game which was choggi'em trunpa had a kind of message which was never give up on anyone

Okay, so he stayed in the game, but he wanted to work with me because it was bringing up childhood wounds that were as painful as you could imagine. When he was young, he felt very much not seen, not valued, a sense of not belonging, and then he went to college where I went, and he was in the minority there, and then he went into a profession who was in the minority, so a lot of a sense of outsider and not deserving. and not belonging, and here he was, getting the message, you're an outsider, you don't belong, and, you know, I don't want you. It was very, very painful. Filled him with a lot of shame and a lot of anger.

So we practiced together. We explored feeling the depth of that wound and how did he want to be with it with himself, recognizing it, allowing it. As you've seen me do many times, that process of bringing really feeling the clutch of it, and rather than resisting, bringing a deeply kind presence to it. And in that kindness, I mean, as he held himself, and he was really holding this very young child, he said he could feel himself going from the victim who is insufficient to the one doing the holding. That's the end of rain, where you move from the victim. or the small stuck self

to that space of care. And so he decided he was going to go when he did the next visit, which was Thanksgiving, he was going to bring his camera. Because his camera was kind of an anchor. He could stay with his body, breathe with his feelings, feel himself here, but still look through it.

And he'd look through his camera in a very benign way. So that's the way he did it. And he, as he described it, she continued to be rude. she wouldn't go out to eat at a restaurant because her friends might see her daughter and her daughter's husband together. It was really very painful and unpleasant. But he took pictures while he was visiting, and he felt like he got some good pictures. And how it turned out was they went back at Christmas.

There was a gift exchange. The mother gave him socks that didn't fit and some chocolates, and not the kind of chocolates like cool, dark chocolate, it was just junkie chocolates. Anyway, but he gave her his gifts, and she opened them, and there were two framed pictures, and as she looked at them, she started weeping. And one of them, he had caught a picture of her playing with her new grin,

granddaughter, and she had this adoring expression on her face. And then in the other one, she had kind of collapsed into her husband's lap, and they were kind of cuddling, and she was happy. So he caught her goodness. He mirrored back her goodness. And as he described it to me, that as he was visiting and watching, he could see both, you know, he could see her controlling self, the scared woman. she was, and he could also see that when she could relax how the goodness came out,

and he caught her goodness, and that's what started melting her heart. She was seeing. Now, it didn't unfreeze immediately. Things like that don't, but that was the beginning of a thaw, and it had come because he was resting in a larger identity. He had brought that presence to himself. He had unhooked his identity from the victimized self or the, wounded self, so he could, he was in a space where he could then be doing some mirroring, and that helped to start to unhook her. So the heart, and I'm going to speak of chakras, when the heart is closed, when that chakra is closed, when there's that clench, we suffer.

And when we begin to stop resisting the rawness and woundedness and opening, a whole new potential arises. And this undefended heart, this chakra here, as it opens, it's really the love of the universe can flow through. And that's really one way of describing it. So let's just, we'll do a brief reflection on this right now, this unhooking. And what we find is that all of the domains of contraction are related, that as we have a contracted belief, that as we have a contracted belief, we have contracted feelings in our heart area. So as a way of beginning, you might bring to mind someplace in your life where you're hooked on the sense that something's wrong with you, where you get caught on that gap between who you should be or want to be and how you are

appearing in your life. And just begin by recognizing how the mind holds it, where the belief is that you should be different, should be further alive. long on the path, shouldn't cause harm to others, should be whatever, where the should is. And as you sense that belief, you might just being mindful of it, even the words real but not true, might support you in that, just so there's a little space around it. Let yourself open into where the contractions live in the heart area. maybe the throat, the chest, the belly, wherever you feel them the most, but sense what it feels like to believe you're falling short. You might sense a bit of fear or shame or sadness

or maybe you're feeling numbness. Maybe it's not an accessible feeling. But let the intention be to relax any resistance. And just to open to what does it feel like? How does it feel in my body and my heart to feel like not enough, falling short, failing in some way, bad or wrong. You might breathe with where you're feeling that, even sensing with the in-breath that you can invite it to be as full as it is. And then as I described in the story, you might just, if you'd like to put your hand on your heart, in some way, sense the possibility of like a caring grandparent or like the Bodhisatt of compassion, just offering some understanding, some care to the rawness or vulnerability or felt sense of this. Some message of care,

let the touch have that tenderness of care. Then you might inquire as you hold yourself in this way. You might sense the belief that was sticky, that you were believing, and just sense, well, who would I be without this belief? Sensing yourself still, touching your heart and in some way, holding whatever is vulnerable within you. You might even ask yourself, who am I when holding this life with care? When we undo the selfing and the mind, the beliefs and the stories, there's that space of awareness opens up. When we undo the clutching or stickiness at the heart, there's a loving presence that's free to move through us.

From the Radiant Sutras, it's described this way. There's a place in the heart where everything meets. Go there if you want to find me. mind, senses, soul, eternity, all are there. Are you there? Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon. Quiet ecstasy is there and a steady regal sense of resting in a perfect spot.

Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again and be saturated with knowing, I belong here. I am at home here. Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again and be saturated with knowing, I belong here. I am at home here. Okay, if you'd like to open your eyes, please do. So we've explored two of the three domains,

the unclenching of the identification with the beliefs and thoughts, and that opens up this mind or the chakras of... there, it's on clenching at the heart, opening up this area here at the heart. So the third area is this awakening at the navel, which really has to do with the most gross level of clutching, and it's that part of us. And some of you might have felt that, this kind of fist in the middle of the gut are these layers of clenching muscles that when we're trying to soften our belly, it's hard because there's this armoring that's very, very primal, very primal level of defense. It's really the core grasping out of which every other level of grasping builds.

And we're resisting aliveness. It feels dangerous and we're resisting. And I sometimes think of it that just coming and deformed a shock. It can be a trauma. We're moving from this unlimited potential. And then it shocks consciousness. Just imagine birthing, somebody grabbing at you and pulling you from the protected womb where you were floating,

you know, into this bright room and loud voices. And there can be a clutch in the gut. And then as we move through early life and not so early life, it can often be an inhospitable environment where we feel really not understood, more clutch, not seen, neglected, wounded. So it's a way. of controlling and protecting. And I find that the more trauma, the more clutching there.

So the movement towards awakening is to become aware of this energetic contraction. And you'll find it with the body scanning if you really pay attention, that there's that tightness there. and then what people come to me and say well I'm really feeling that how do I get rid of the clutch and the idea of trying to get rid of it gets in the way and you've probably noticed that with everything that if you run into fear if you're trying to get rid of the fear the fear the fear knows that you're trying to get rid of it that digs in so so it's like the ego can't get rid of things he goes trying to get more comfortable but it can't get rid of things so give you a kind of a sense of

ways that we that we can open and the story that came to mind to share actually from a number of years ago I was working with a minister and he had kind of hit an impasse in his marriage his wife wanted him to be wanted more intimacy and wanted him to be

more vulnerable, to be able to, he had a hard time looking at her in the eyes and just saying, I love you, just in a present kind of way. He could say it in an offhand way, but to say it and stay with it, that was very, very difficult for him. She felt like he was very spiritually detached in some way. He felt that her wanting him to be more vulnerable and open and real was this kind of demand, and when he felt her demand, it made him even more, it made it even more difficult for him to open. And so he basically was living with a sense of never enough, like I can't satisfy her,

because he'd make these efforts to try to bring more of a closeness, and it was never enough. And so he was living in a lot of anger, and he'd blame her, and then deep down he'd blame himself, and it wasn't, you know, the kind of thing that led to more coming together. So when we worked, I always start right with, it's like start where you are, started with the anger and invited him

to sense the difference between the angry stories and the anger as it lived in his body. It's who he's coming down, down, down, okay? And the basic invitation was when he felt his anger is to let it be as big as it wanted to be. In other words, let it rip, right? let it let and so you know he so again he's a very controlled kind of guy but I just kept saying where do you feel it how big does it want to be what are you experiencing now until he started it started really really ripping you know it's like he said okay it's filling the room it's blasting and dynamiting through the through the windows it's like a tornado that's just like mowing down

houses and churches churches too you know everything you know it's filling the East Coast. So it just got really, really big. And periodically he'd start getting quiet. I'd say, so now what? It just was going out there. But finally he got really quiet and he said, okay, there's something underneath that anger. And so I said, well, what's going on now? What are you feeling? And he said, there's a fear that how I am is really not okay. And underneath the fear, because he kept saying yes. I mean, this is the way to... The unselfing

is to keep saying yes to what's there. Selfing is basically a no-to-life. So if you're working at the Don Tian at the navel, it's like, yes, yes to this energy, yes to this energy. So what does it really like to say yes to that? And then he felt this depth of grief. The thought with it was,

I'm losing loving, I'll never have loving. But there was this depth of grief that it was impossible. He couldn't have it. And he said, but if I open to this, it's like, it'll be true. And I said, yeah, but it is true that you're feeling this. Can you say yes? So that's when he really, there was a surrendering.

And when I say a surrendering, he surrendered into the energy, the reality of the energy that was there, and just let that grief be as big as it was. and in the bigness and the openness that the grief was filling, he started discovering a tenderness that he had not touched in as long as he could remember as an adult. He was just a kind of vibrating, tender, open space. Their process was a slow one because she had to do a similar process

of this kind of insatiable needing somebody else to be different. And so she had her own process, but that was the beginning of their coming together. Mostly I'm sharing the story because the process of waking up out of the landlocked self at the navel is a deep kind of energetic surrendering into what is. And for myself, when I get caught in how I am is not okay, it's really not okay. It's not okay to be judgmental like this, or it's not okay to be selfish.

And then I try to be different. And then I realize, I can't. The ego can't make itself different. There's a kind of giving up that's a really healthy giving up. It's like, I give up. I, the ego, can't do this. Do you see what I mean? It's like the self can't do this.

And then in that giving up, in that to stop trying and surrender into the experience, then there's the possibility of real life coming through. There's a kind of handing it over. And I sometimes actually kind of aesthetically do this where I'll actually take my hands like this as if I'm offering it into the universe. It's like, I can't handle this, I can't stop this, I can't control this, just let the universe do it well with it. Anthony Demela says, enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable. And Relka says, let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.

So you get the feeling of how we work with this most core level of clutching. It's this let it happen. Just let life happen. The gift, when this chakra opens, when there's the allowing of life, is this enormous aliveness and creativity of the universe can flow through us. We keep ourselves from less than alive, less than loving, and less than aware with this clutching. As we open it, it's like this aliveness flows through us

that we belong to. We are that aliveness. And with that is this basic level of trust. Because until we let aliveness happen, we're always defending against it and thinking something bad's going to happen. But when we truly say yes, there's a trust that is incredibly liberating.

that comes with that. From Dana Folds. Trust the energy that courses through you. Trust and take surrender even deeper. Be the energy. Don't push anything away. Follow each sensation back to its source in vastness and pure presence.

Emerge so new, so fresh that you don't know who you are. Welcome in the season, of monsoons, be the bridge across the flooded river and the surging torrent underneath. Be unafraid of consummate wonder. Be the energy and blaze a trail across the clear night sky like lightning. Dare to be your own illumination. We'll close with a guided meditation on these three domains.

If you need to kind of move around to adjust a little before you sit still, please feel free because you've been sitting already for an hour. This will be about five minutes. Let your senses be wide open, sounds, sensations, sensing the space that's interior to the sensations are floating in, the space that sounds are arising and disappearing in, that openness. openness, as a thought naturally will arise. See if you can sense or ask, where did this come from? Where is it going to?

Sensing the space between the thoughts, the gap between thoughts, that mysterious wakeful space filled with the light of awareness. I might imagine the lotus of the mind wide open. awake space, still resting in that spaciousness, bringing the attention to the heart area, feeling the heart, and breathing in and contacting whatever sensations, emotions, feelings are present there. And breathing out, you might feel the space around them, the space inside them, the continuous awake space in the domain of the heart. You might imagine the lotus of the heart wide open,

Wake a luminous, empty heart with exquisitely tender responsiveness to life. In a similar way you might feel the belly, just breathing in and contacting sensations in life there, and breathing out and sensing the space, the interior space, space around, fully saying yes to the life that's here and fully letting it float. unfold in space. You might imagine the lotus at the dantien, the belly wide open, this mysterious dance of life playing through

arising out of stillness, dissolving into stillness. Thomas Merton says, life is this simple. We're living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or fable. This is true.

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.