Tara Brach - 2015-01-28 - Inhabiting Our Bodies with Presence

Episode Date: January 30, 2015

2015-01-28 - Inhabiting Our Bodies with Presence - Our conditioning is to pull away from our physical experience when it is difficult. When we regularly dissociate, we are removed from  the source of our power, intuition and capacity to love in a full way. This talk looks at the ways we leave our body and the path of homecoming to living loving presence.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Namaste and welcome. So this coming Friday, my husband Jonathan and I are heading north into deep winter, and we're going to be going up to a forest refuge in New England that supposedly there's two to three feet of snow and, you know, the high might be in the 20s and so on. So we were spending these 10 days in silence and stillness. And I was reflecting on how through the ages, people on a spiritual path have done that, have left kind of the habit or routine of day-to-day life and taken time here and there.

And usually off in the wilderness somewhere, and out in the desert or in the forest or in a cave somewhere. Usually you don't hear about Caribbean beaches, but I'm sure that could work too. But what really occurs to me is that we go into nature and we can do it on a daily basis and find that there's a way in which when we're in nature, the elements help to strip down our being so we just come a part of and more connected to the basics. It's a way of cleansing. When we go into the wilderness,

what we're really doing on retreat is going into the wilderness of our own being. And there's an understanding through the ages that the wilderness of these bodies, these living-dying bodies, is this domain that we need. we pull away from and that it's not until

we know how to really enter and occupy and really be at home in these living bodies, that these bodies actually become a portal to spirit, to the formless. So this is the theme for tonight.

One of my favorite quotes is John O'Donohue and he describes how our bodies know that they belong. to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make us so homeless. So I'm going to return to that some. Our bodies know they belong.

These bodies are living in the present moment. They're here. They're awake. But our minds keep us in a kind of virtual reality that keep us separated from ourselves and from each other and from this living world. So one of, perhaps just to name, Kibir puts it this way, he says, inside this clay jug, there are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains.

The God whom I love is inside. So entering the wilderness, you know, this body is the domain of experiencing love. just to think about it and reflect, can you experience love if you're not awake in your body? Can you? It's an idea, but living love, the love that we are in love with, do you know what I mean? That love has an energetic quality. To really understand reality, we can't be in our thoughts, we have to be awake, in our bodies, to perceive directly this ever-changing flow.

So, canyons and pine mountains, the God that we love is inside, and we're terribly frightened of going into the wilderness, and there's a lot of reasons. It's, you know, the same heat and fire of the stars is in our body, and the violence of this universe is in our bodies. And I've brought for an example, this is from the New York Times Science section. It says, in a far-off galaxy, some of you read this, two black holes dance toward explosive union. And then it describes how these pair of supermassive black holes are spiraling toward a cosmic collision of unimaginable scale.

The final act of this mating dance, perhaps a mere million years from now, could release. as much energy as 100 million of the violent supernova explosions in which stars end their lives and wreck the galaxy it's in. Now, this is stuff we can use the words, you know, but what they point to, we can't conceive of. End a galaxy, wreck a galaxy. I mean, wrecking a galaxy, and yet we're made of the elements and these bodies are created and they dissipate, they dissolve, they disappear sometimes violently. The wilderness of these bodies is out of our control. So to enter the wilderness is really to open to this living, dying world.

And yet it's the only way we get to love, and it's the only way we get to wake up. So it's a bit of a conundrum, okay? There's a push-pull on this one. And our basic conditioning is when things feel like too much, when they feel intolerable, we pull away. We dissociate, we separate out.

And a metaphor I like is to think of your body as a house. And there you are in the living room kind of occupying the center of the house, but there's a child crying, and you try to take care of this child, the child's hurting, and you do all that you can to quiet and calm the child, but it won't work. and the crying starts getting to you so that you're powerless, and it brings up all the fear and powerlessness and helplessness, and you've got to get away from it.

So you leave the crying baby, and you go as far away as you can up to the attic. But you can still hear the child, so you close the door, and you can still hear the child crying, so you put in earplugs. And you're looking around, but you still know you're in the house, and the child's downstairs, so you look into your computer screen until you've really left into a virtual world. and as you can probably sense that's something that most of us do

each day to some degree that there's something going on inside us which is some existential, restless, agitated, uncomfortable thing and we don't want to feel it so we go away from it

and where do we go? La Cabeza? I don't know if it's law but you know, the head. So we hang out up in our heads and we do it in ways that really keep ourselves occupied and distracted, and yet part of us knows, no matter how much we get distracted, that this is going on, so we live with a sense of a kind of undercurrent of

feeling anxious, because we know something's going on that we're avoiding. We have a really deep identification with what I'm calling this house of a body, with how it looks to the world, with how it feels, and with how well it's functioning. Really deep identification. And when we don't think we look well, when we think, when we think we're not, something's wrong with the functioning, when we're hurting physically, we're threatened. And if we feel really threatened, we leave. And on the other side of things, when something to do with this house goes right, when we think we can look better, we go after everything we can for our parents, or when we think we can feel better, we grasp after what gives us pleasure. So we spend a lot of time with our strategies to feel good and our strategies to avoid feeling bad. And they take over.

The more they take over, the more our identities hitched to this house, this body, not in the way, in the sense of living from the inside out, but in the sense of this is something I need to control. Okay? So let me ask you, how many of you have dealt with the challenges of a serious illness? Can I see by hands? And look around at each other because, okay, I should be raising my hand.

Okay, how many of you have had chronic pain for a stretch of time? For those that are watching, I'd say that on both of those hand raises, it's been three quarters that aren't watching, those that are listening to the podcast. How many of you have gone through, had an accident that was traumatic?

Good number of people. How many have had a loss of mobility where for a while you couldn't function in a normal way you couldn't do the things you needed to do? Okay. So I ask this because that means that a lot of us know what it's like to have to encounter the wilderness when it's out of our control. And we certainly know, I won't even go for hand raises

on how many have felt really consumed in a painful way about body image. You don't have to raise your hand on that one. I know. Or I could ask for a hand-raise of how many have gotten addicted to something. A lot of us. We can raise our hands, I have. Okay, this is better. We're getting more real here.

So when we're identified, when we're reacting to the wilderness, when we're trying to control it, it becomes like an enemy. And we're really turned on ourselves. split. We're not living in a sense of a wholeness of being and we cannot feel a sense of intimacy with the world around us. Rather, these bodies are something to control and not to inhabit. I want to read you a reading I read towards the end of last year that I like to go back to as much as I can remember. If you want, you can close your eyes. you're listening. I am the pain in your head, the knot in your stomach, the unspoken grief

in your smile. I'm your hot flashes, your cold hands and feet, your agitation, your fatigue. You tend to disown me, suppress me, ignore me. You usually want me to go away immediately to disappear. You mostly are irritated or frightened and many times shocked by my arrival. And from this stance you medicate in order to eradicate me, ignoring me, not exploring me, is your preferred response. So I implore you. I am a messenger with good news, as disturbing as I can be at times. I'm wanting to guide you back to those tender places in yourself,

the place where you can hold yourself with compassion and honesty. If you look beyond my appearance, you may find I am a voice from your soul. I may ask you to alter your diet, get more sleep, exercise regularly, breathe more consciously. I may encourage you to see a vaster reality and worry less about the day-to-day fluctuations of life. I may ask you to explore the bonds and the wounds of your relationships. I may ask you to laugh more, to spend more time in nature, to eat when you're hungry and less when pain or bored. just spend time every day if only for minutes being still. I'm your friend, not your enemy.

I'm simply tugging at your sleeve, too long immune to gentle nudges. My charge is to energize you to listen to me with sensitive ear and heart. You are being so vast, so complex, with amazing capacities for self-regulation and healing. Let me be one of the harbingers that lead you to the mysterious core of your being where insight and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart. So there's a shift that's possible in moving from relating to this living bodily being as an object to control, as a dangerous place, as something to possess or get more pleasure for, to move from that, what we might call the kind of egoic stance of, you know, I have a body,

to listening, inhabiting, and cherishing this living presence that's right here. So that's what we'll be doing. we'll be kind of looking now, how does that shift occur? How do we move from that kind of egoic treating the body as an object as a possession and possibly as an enemy, to letting it really become a portal, to letting this cherished form become a portal to the formless, to realizing how spirit lives through us.

And the key, I'll just say in a nutshell, is learning to stay. And we've been leaving, we all leave, and we leave so regularly that's really one way of describing a lot of the path of meditation. We're recognizing we've left, we're in a way relaxing our way back, and learning to hang around, be here for this life. So the first step is that we'll spend a little time with is recognizing how we leave. We all do it. And we all do it every day. Do we know it, though? Are we aware of it?

So we look at that. We look at how dissociation is a survival mechanism, but no longer needed by us, for many of us, and yet we still do it. So how do we leave? In one way that we know we leave is through mental obsessing. And most all of us get caught,

and that. And when it's mental obsessing about the body, we often can live in fear of the body. Like, not only what can I do to be more comfortable and get rid of this, but really, what's wrong? We have a sense of any symptom triggers off the sense of something's wrong. And I found this, this is Dave Barry who says, if you ever experience a medical symptom, such as itching, you can go to the internet and with just a few mouse clicks, you'll discover the reassuring truth. there might be a worm in your brain. Really, Medline Plus, the National Medical Library in NIH, itching can be a symptom of a condition called visceral larva migraines, literally a worm in your brain.

Another symptom of brainworms is, and this is a direct quote, irritability. You know how you always hear this about med students, that they get absolutely paranoid because they read about all these conditions, and then they get the slightest little twitch somewhere and all of a sudden they're having some neurological disorder that's going to take them down. So then we worry about something comes up in our bodies, and then what gets triggered is how much worse is this going to get? Do you know that one? I remember this little story about a man who says,

I recently picked out a new primary care doctor, and after two visits and exhaustive lab tests, he said I was doing fairly well for my age. I just turned 60 something A little concerned about the comment I couldn't resist asking him Well do you think I'll live to be 80 He said well do you smoke tobacco

Drink beer, wine or hard liquor? Oh no I'm not doing drugs either Then he said you eat ribby steaks and barbecued ribs Nope not that My doctor said red meat's unhealthy Do you spend a lot of time in the sun Like playing golf, boating, sailing, hiking or biking Nope don't do that

He said do you gamble, drive fast cards Or have lots of sex No, I said. He looked at me and said, then why do you even give a damn? So we obsess, and more generally our obsessing takes the form of this kind of chronic worrying and planning and judging. In other words, we're controlling our life, not living it. The other natural way we leave the body, and we can see this and it's very much from our culture, is we get very speedy. So I've found for myself, especially, especially at retreats where we slow down the pace a lot, we do a very slow walking.

I find that when I walk half as fast, I notice twice as much. Speed really has us kind of zip over the surface of experience. And of course we're quite busy, you know. So we, I remember reading that there's a relationship, it's not direct, but there's relationship between the word busy and heart-killing in the Chinese script. Even if it wasn't in the Chinese script, I can say for myself that when I'm in busy mode, I can say the right things,

but I'm not occupying my heart in a way where I'm viscerally feeling caring and tender. So busyness is another way we leave. and then we leave in all the ways that we distract ourselves in virtual world online TV listening the headset on

and we're in a virtual world and not here and so we're not really connected with what's actually happening and one of my favorite examples of this took place in a story this is a story where some centuries ago the Pope decided

that all the Jews had to leave Rome And naturally there's a big uproar from the Jewish community, so the Pope made a deal. He would have a religious debate with a member of the Jewish community. If the Jew won, the Jews could stay, and if the Pope won, the Jews would leave. The Jews realized they had no choice. So they picked a middle-aged man named Moisha to represent them. Now, Moisha asked for one addition to the debate to make it more interesting. Neither side would be allowed to talk.

Okay. So the day of the debate came, and Moisha and the Pope sound opposite. at each other for a full minute before the Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. Moisha looked back at him and raised one finger. The Pope waved his fingers in a circle around his head, and Moisha pointed to the ground where he sat. And then the Pope pulled out a wafer and a glass of wine, and Moisha pulled out an apple. The Pope stood up and said, I give up. The man's too good.

The Jews can stay. An hour or later, the Cardinals are gathered around the Pope saying, what happened? The Pope said, well, first I put up three fingers. to represent the Trinity. And he responded by holding up one finger to remind me there was still one God common to both our religions. Then I waved my fingers around to show that God was all around us, and he responded by point of the ground to show that God was also right here now with us. I pulled out wine and wafer to show that God absolves us from our sins, and he pulled out an apple to remind me of original sin. He had an answer for everything. What could I do?

meanwhile the Jewish community crowded around Moisha what happened they asked well Moisha said first he said to me that the Jews had three days to get out of here and I told him that not one of us was leaving then he told me the whole city would be cleared out of Jews and I let him know we're staying right here yeah and then and then asked the crowd well I don't know said Moisha he took out his lunch and I took out

mine So when we leave our body and we live in this virtual realm, when we disconnect, we disconnect from reality and we're living in interpretations. And sometimes they jive with other people's interpretations. We have that consensual reality. Sometimes they don't. But we're still living in representations in our mind. We're believing in our thoughts and we're not awake in our bodies and our senses.

So then the question comes, well, what happens when we're chronically leaving, when there's that child crying in the living room and we're leaving, what actually happens? And whenever there's physical or emotional intensity and we leave, what's unprocessed stays in our body. So the child's still crying in there. It's unprocessed. And that creates energetic blockages because we're putting in earplugs and we're doing things to create a distance. So the energy gets blocked down. And when we leave and we block off in the belly, and if you become sensitive,

you start becoming mindful of sensations and really move into the area of the belly, you'll find that the belly is often very armored and tight. It's something you can start noticing. It takes a lot to soften. Well, that's because that's one of the areas that there's a real neural nexus there where we feel a lot of emotion

and we want to separate from it. So we tighten there so as not to feel. And the belly is where we digest and digest life experience. So it's undigested. It's also considered a chakra that has to do with power, feeling really the power of the universe moving through us, empowered. So we cut off our own access to power when we tighten there.

I'm talking about what happens when we leave. We leave the source of power. What happens when we block off in the heart? Well, we tighten there and then there's numbness and we can't feel loving. There's a lot more that goes on when we leave, to whatever degree we're leaving. It takes a certain amount of energy to keep on leaving. It's not like, well, once we're in the attic, we're always there. We're here.

We have to keep on leaving, keep on shutting down, and not feeling and hearing that crying child, so we get tired. It takes work to keep leaving. There's a tiredness. There's a sense, as I mentioned, that something is wrong. There's a kind of a lurking in the background sense. And then, finally, the last thing I'll mention, when we dissociate regularly, when we leave our bodies,

is we add on a layer of shame or judgment for the fact that we're leaving. Okay? We have different styles of things. Some of us leave by overeating. some of us by obsessive thinking, most of us by doing all of it, you know. But then we feel bad about that. So what then motivates us to reconnect? Now there's again a purpose to the leaving.

We're trying to avoid really great, what at one point was really intolerable discomfort. When we were younger, we couldn't handle it. And then it became our habit to leave. but what motivates us to come back? And I'd say that there's in each of us an innate wisdom or intuition that we can't find the freedom, the realization, the love that we long for if we don't really inhabit our lives. Again, remember the words of John O'Donohue, poet and the philosopher,

that we need to come home to the temple of our senses. He says our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. Our bodies know. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. So we need to train ourselves to come out of our mental activity and bring our mind into our body, into our heart. And yet it's hard because it's scary. There's that wildness in there, that wilderness.

that we've been avoiding for a long time. So it takes a willingness, a kind of commitment to bring a real caring presence, and to do it in a way that I like to bring up attitude, you know, people come to meditation classes, and some of the first instructions they get, and you hear it here every single class I teach, is you take some full breaths and then we walk through the body, we scan through the body.

And the reality for most of us is that there's parts of our body that are really hard to feel. They can either be numb or be scary. And so then the instructions are so just sit and feel the aliveness of your body as if this is a wonderful, gloriful thing, but for many of us it's really difficult. So what I'd like to invite you to consider is that many of us have been leaving our body for decades, for decades, millions of mind moments of leaving. It takes a lot of forgiveness and a lot of acceptance and patience and coming back. I mean, not to blame ourselves that it's hard, not to blame ourselves that we're lost in

thought most of the time, not to blame ourselves and we can't really feel parts of our body fully. Really understanding and forgiving. There's a wonderful necklace that has a bone shape and it says, sit, stay, heal. And that's what we're aiming at, and yet it takes a real gentle training. and it takes a kind of an attitude about this body that we're really getting it, that that's our intention. This is a poem called Living in the Body by Joyce Sutton. Body is something you need in order to stay on this planet and you only get one.

And no matter which one you get, it will not be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful enough. It will not be fast enough. It will not keep on for days of time, but we'll pull you down into a sleepy swamp and demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake. Body is a thing you have to carry from one day to the next.

Always the same eyebrows over the same eyes and the same skin when you look in the mirror and the same creaky knee when you get up from the floor and the same wrist under the watch band. The changes you can make are small and costly, better to leave it as is. Body is a thing that you have to leave. eventually. You know that because you've seen others do it, others who are once like you,

living inside their pile of bones and flesh smiling at you, loving you, leaning in the doorway, talking to you for hours and then one day they're gone. No forwarding address. So there's an attitude and that is one of patience and acceptance, one of cherishing, that this is the way that awareness is expressing itself through this living bodily nature. And then one in a very deep way of opening to that it's coming and going, living and dying. So how do we begin to actually bring our attention in? It's kind of bringing it down into the body when we've been up and out for so long. And really the practice that we explore over and over again of intentionally scanning through the body, taking our time, breathing,

feeling the life from the inside out is the training. Right now you might for just a moment, close your eyes and just feel your hands, as we often do, and just feel the tingling that's there and see if you can soften and feel the hand from the inside out, the aliveness. See if you can notice some pulsing, vibrating. See if you can sense where your hand ends and the air begins, or where your hand ends, and you feel the sensation of another part of your body. Is anything holding still?

Just as a cup is filled with water, this whole body is filled with awareness, space, awake space, experiencing this aliveness. So our ongoing practice can be to keep bringing our attention into our body, feeling from the inside out, these hands, these arms, these shoulders, this belly, this chest. There's two questions that help us to come into the body and one is, what is happening inside me right now? And the others, and can I be with this? Or can I just let this be? Coming into our body and feeling what's there. Now, the question

comes up, that's the general domain of mindfulness of sensation. Yeah, but what if it's intense? And so when the body is going through real intensity, to both sense that we can have contact with what's there, that we can touch into it, but also to find the space around it, find the soft space around it. And sometimes, if you right now, just scan through your body, just feel your body. And notice if there's any areas that are difficult where you feel unpleasantness, see if you can find, if you widen out the attention from that area, where you start feeling a sense of neutrality where it's no longer unpleasant. So if you have an ache at a certain place in the back, just widen the attention until you find where there's space, aliveness in the

body, well, you're not feeling discomfort and sense that you can allow that wider sense of space to give you some room to let the discomfort play itself and to find some balance in the midst. Sometimes just feeling the hands when another part of the body is really having a hard time can help you to be with what's there. I shared different practice being with pain and radical acceptance and I got an email from a man named Eduardo Okubaro. He said, thank you once more. Your book helped me a lot to cope with pain some days ago when I had terrible renal colics due to a kidney stone. Once I expel it, I will name the stone after you. It was a nicest thank you note I've ever gotten. So these are just a little bit of ways that we

can come in gently and be with what's there. But I I'd say one of the most powerful ways that we can invite ourselves back into the wilderness is by resourcing through the heart. And I want to share with you a story that might help you to understand better what I mean by that, how we can really bring compassion and love when we've turned the body into an enemy to re-inhabit with more of a quality of cherishing and care. I worked with a woman who was, had been a dancer for many, many decades, and she got rheumatoid arthritis. And she came to me because now her movement was limited.

And every time she felt the unpleasantness of the disease, it was like a trigger where she felt like in some way she had done something wrong and she was being punished. And she felt like without the capacity to move with ease, without grace, her life was totally this downhill slope. It was stolen from her. And so her identity, which had been as this incredibly graceful, beautiful, able to move, a person was undercut because now she just felt like a sick person, an oppressed sick person. And I know because we did that hand race that many of you know what that means to go from feeling athletic or vital to in some way feeling like your whole identity contracts around this body that's not working.

and that's what was happening to her. So basically her mind was making her homeless, okay? She was disconnected from herself. She'd done what she could do medically. So we worked together with these two wings of really, you know, what is happening and can I be with this? Can I be with this with kindness, with heart? And her attitude, as I mentioned, was, you know,

I did something wrong, I'm bad, this is terrible, I have my future's really ruined. And so the first step was to recognize, okay, this is her mind making her homeless. Many of you are familiar with the phrase real but not true. This is, her thoughts are real, they're happening, but they're not the truth. So she first had to recognize that, but then how to feel, her practice was to feel in her body what those thoughts were generating. and in her body she could feel this gripping feeling of fear.

So that was what was under it. That was what was keeping her at war with her body, this fear of her life being ruined. That's when she began the loving kindness practice. Every time she'd have that trigger and she'd end up feeling the fear there, she would imagine being a parent protecting and holding a child and just saying, darling, I care, I'm here.

And sometimes she'd put her hand on our heart as I often teach people to do because that is communicating the love. And then the few would turn to grief and she'd have the waves and grief move through until more and more she discovered a very open and tender space that she could really inhabit. She described it. She felt like when she went through that process of entering right into where the fear was and holding it with kindness and feeling the grief and holding that with kindness, the space that had opened up, she said, I feel like the whole world could move through me. I felt grace. Now, I share that because there's physical grace that with the

arthritis she couldn't experience, and then there's going into her body and through the feelings in her body and discovering a much more profound kind of grace, where she discovered herself as this tender space that life could move through. She described it, I am the universe, and all life is moving through me. Now she had to do it over and over and over again. Every time she'd move around and feel a trigger of pain, she'd have those thoughts, she'd have to come back into her body, feel the fear, go into the grief, and back open to that tender space. Many, many rounds. But when she wrote me, after she had practices for a while, she said, I used to move more gracefully on earth. And now the experience of grace is that my heart is more free. I want to give you

an after a post on this story that she then started working with those who are struggling with physical limitations, helping them find that inner grace to help them move and live on this earth with more ease. There's a wonderful phrase from choking. Trunkpa, and that is that we learn to meet our edge and soften. And I think that really applies to re-inhabiting our bodies, is that we encounter in our bodies the wilderness is hard, and we feel that tightening. And that's the edge, and we have to keep on softening, and it takes a huge amount of courage. And yet, there's something in each one of us.

we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be listening, if we didn't have a longing to really discover and live from our wholeness, to sense this whole living presence in being and sensing that that luminosity, that luminosity it lives through, there's something in us that longs to realize and live from who we are. So we find that courage, and it comes in different ways. I found for myself, remember being once in a hospital for a number of days and feeling that, just as this woman did, that same kind of fear about my life and the grief there.

And at times, my way of meeting my edge and softening was through prayer. I just took it all, and I'd say, and in some way I was kind of bowing my head and offering it into the love and the presence in this universe. because in those moments I felt too small to hold it. But in offering it, in feeling and offering it, I actually reconnected with that loving presence, that space. So that was another pathway to feeling what's here and letting it be held in something larger.

Share one more story of this and really about living in the body that moved me a lot. And this was a story that Frank Osseskes, the founder of Zen Hospice, and continues to do beautiful teaching on being with death and dying. He describes being very close to one man who had stomach cancer, an elderly man, who was in a lot of pain. And this man asked him to guide him in a meditation so he could be with this living, dying body. So Frank did, but as the guy tried to practice it, he said, no, the pain is too much.

I can't do that. So then Frank offered to put his hand on the man's belly to help hold the pain. And he agreed, and he said, yeah, but it still hurts. And then he said, well, what about this? And he put his hand a little further from the body. And the man said, oh, that's lovely. So he had his hands near, but over the man's belly, and invited him to rest a bit. He said, just rest now. And then the man said this, he said, oh, just rest in love. Rest in love.

And that became his mantra until he died, that he found that there was this tender space of loving presence that could hold the pain, that he couldn't go directly into the core of the pain, but there was space for the pain to kind of float or be there. Just rest in love. So I share this because I feel like we're all on this path of making this shift from what we might call the kind of egoic self-relationship with the body as an object, as the enemy,

as this something we're trying to get more pleasure for and less pain, to really inhabiting these living forms and cherishing them, sensing that this is nature playing out, this is spirit waking up through us. In this particular way, no matter how it is, this aliveness, is arising from awareness and helping us to recognize awareness. So we started tonight saying that this is essential part of the spiritual journey, entering the wilderness, and there are different ways that can help us. If every day our intention is to wake up out of this virtual reality of thinking, not

that we're supposed to get rid of thoughts. We need to think, but we overthink hugely. So just know, okay, enough already, and come back to our sense. senses. If we can ask those questions, what is happening inside me right now? And like the dancer sense, oh, okay, there's fear and breathe with it and open to it and find the grief that might be under that. And if we open enough, we'll find this tender presence that's interior to sensations and it's the space that they all float in. There's room. We too can rest in love, rest in that spirit.

So we'll close in a simple way tonight. We'll just take a little bit of time to enter the wilderness and just feel the life that's right here, just inviting your attention to feel this life from the inside out. The body is always in the present moment. You can just gently scan down as we often do. Let the eyes soften, slight smile at the mouth.

Let the shoulders relax back and down some, and just feel them from the inside out. Feel the aliveness in the hands, softening and feeling the hands even more intimately. Feel the heart from the inside out, the energy and flow and dance that's there, and the space that it's floating in, the interior space that everything's arising from. Just as a cup is filled with water, his body is filled. filled with awareness. See if you can just let everything happen. You might explore what happens when you say yes to the aliveness that's here, inviting and allowing it to be just as it is, sensing in the foreground this entire dance of energy, sensation, and in the background,

that alert inner stillness, that luminous presence that's aware. We'll end with the words of Mary Oliver, the poet who writes a poem called The Spirit likes to dress up. The Spirit likes to dress up like this, ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders and all the rest.

At night, in the black branches, in the morning in the blue branches of the world, it could float, of course, but would rather plumb rough matter, airy and shapeless thing. It needs the metaphor of the body.

lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids. It needs the body's world, instinct and imagination, and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility, to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is. So it enters us in the morning, shines from root comfort like a stitch of lightning, and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star. Namaste and blessings. 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.