Tara Brach - 2015-02-18 - Part 2: Basic Elements of Meditation Practice

Episode Date: February 21, 2015

2015-02-18 - Part 2: Basic Elements of Meditation Practice - This two-part series offers a clear and fresh understanding of practices that cultivate mindful awareness. The first class examines our attitude towards practice and gives guidance on posture, establishing an anchor for attention, and learning to concentrate and collect the mind - “coming back.”  The second class focuses on the practice of mindfulness - “being here,” and the component qualities of clear recognition and an allowing non-judgmental presence. 

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. So welcome and namaste. So this is the second of two classes that are introducing the basics of meditation. And in the first class, we emphasized really over technique the essential element of attitude. And I might have, I said it in some form. that if I watch people over years, that what really makes a difference between those that maybe plateau or get habitual or even drop meditation and those that keep on unfolding and waking up is a quality of a sincerity about practice, a kind of wholeheartedness, that it's coming out

of a love for waking up, not out of a dutifulness, or I should be doing this, or others expect me to be doing this, or it looks good to be doing this. So attitude and recognizing it's really a path of homecoming, that we're practicing to come home to the fullness of who we are so that we really have access to our natural intelligence and open-heartedness and creativity and love. It's homecoming. There's a story I love about Suzuki Roshi, great Zen teacher, and at some point one of his students asked him, well, as Zen practitioners, what is it that we should be doing with our spare time? And Suzuki Roshi said, spare time? And then he just started laughing uproarously, and that was it. Spare time. You know, it's as if, you know,

it's really not a church on Sunday kind of path where you just compartmentalize and do it. a practice, this is really living so that our whole life will be real life. We're not on our way somewhere else or leaving somewhere. Each moment really counts. This moment right now counts as much as any other movement in the world. It's not on the way to the end of a talk or filler. Each moment is real life. So how does that happen? I mean, how is it that we can really pause so that we can hear the sound of the wind in the trees. Those that live in this area, we had a lot of wind recently. You know, were we listening? Or see the kind of crystal brilliance of the snow and the light. I really hear the excitement in a child's voice. You know, are we

here for this life? So the theme tonight we'll be kind of exploring is bringing alive mindfulness in the second introductory class and really understanding that it affluences every part of our life and particularly our relationships with each other. This is attributed to Einstein although who knows. It says if you're driving safely and kissing a girl, you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. So we practice so that we're wholly here for our life, including the losing of life. So we have a way to hold this living, dying world. And I think when I say that of a teacher, a Buddhist teacher,

who wrote some beautiful words as she was nearing her death, and I wanted to share them with you. My days are short, and as I grow weaker, I experience so much gratitude for my meditation. Not only the joy and ease it brought but the hard parts for every bored and restless sitting and every fearful

fantasy and every pain and itch I sat through and every itch I didn't scratch was a training for kindness a training for the muscle for bearing witness for the trusting spirit that carries me now

as I face my death so we practice to live fully to lovefully to discover that quality of timelessness and presence that really can hold our world. There's a short reading from the Desert Fathers that I think is illuminating, and a novice asks,

is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened? And the response is, as little as you can do to make the sunrise in the morning. So the novice says, then what use are these spiritual exercises that you're having me practice? The response is to make sure you're not asleep when the sun begins to rise.

So it's kind of, as I said last class, that enlightenment is an accident. Practice makes us accident-prone. You know, it makes us available. Last week I shared a line from the poet Rumi, which I think can be a kind of container for our exploring, which is, do you make regular visits to yourself? And I think if we're honest,

we know that we fixate on this, things and we obsess on things. And we might notice when we're upset, but we don't make the kind of visits of bringing a real friendliness and curiosity and care to what's going on inside us very regularly. And so one understanding of this path is cultivating and intimacy with our inner life. You know, just really becoming friendly with and aware of, oh, okay, so it's lonely right now, are scared or fearful, are, oh, so there's real passion here on this, you know, just really being awake to what's going on inside us. And of course, as we are, the more attuned we are inwardly, the more we, you know, we're waking up the neural nets in our brain

that allow us to be quite attuned to each other. So we began with this introductory class in exploring how to arrive, how to come back. And the given is that we spend a lot of time in a kind of trance of thinking. And if we just review today, all we do is review today, we can sense how much we were in kind of that dreamlike state of on our way to something else and crossing things off the list and planning and worrying and managing. But not that many moments where there was a kind of quality of presence where we were really noticing what's happening right here.

When we're in trance, our senses are not fully awake. We're not actually listening to the sounds in the present moment. We're not feeling the sensations that are right here. So the first step in meditation practice is training to notice the trance of thinking and simply come back. Now, I just want to say the caveat, and this question comes a lot is, well, don't we have to think to work or to help our family or to do anything, and of course we do.

And this isn't about vanquishing thoughts. This is about developing the capacity to know when we're lost in thought, so we have some choice because a huge amount of our thought patterning is fear-based and repetitive. It's as one person said, you know, I have 60,000 thoughts a day and 98% of them, I had yesterday. You know, it's like we're really living in a kind of cocoon of familiar thoughts that aren't so useful. So to have a choice. You know, as long as we're playing out the same patterns of fear-based thinking, our bodies are going to feel anxious, and that produces more thoughts, and we're in a kind of looping where we're chronically uptight or anxious to some

degree. So mindfulness, this first training in coming back gives us the opportunity to break old patterning and establish a kind of new quality of freshness, spontaneity, openness. So there's coming back. And the way that we practice the strategies most common is to have an anchor or home base like the breath, could be sound, could be feeling the whole field of bodily sensation, but something that helps to connect us with the present moment. So we sit and we quiet and we relax and we bring our attention to that and that helps us notice, oh, I've left, I'm no longer with the breath. And then the practice is not to judge because judgment is actually another thought that just whips up more activity. But to say thank you very much.

but this is a thought. It's not the reality that's here, and then we gently arrive again with the next in-breath or out-breath, maybe relax a little, reattune. You can start fresh as many times as you want. That's coming back. And to deepen that presence, part of the practice of coming back is to see if there can be a sustained attention with the primary anchor. So we really really have some absorption, some quality of real calm and steady attention right here. Now that sets the groundwork, coming back, sets the groundwork for the next step, which is what we're going to explore tonight, which is really called being here. It's mindfulness. And one metaphor that's helpful to some people is, if you imagine a camera, coming back in concentration and absorbing is like you're focusing the

camera, trying to get the picture, trying to get some steady attention. Well, mindfulness is click, it's taking the picture. It's recognizing what's actually happening. So that's where we'll be bringing our attention and as a by way of definition, you can consider mindfulness or cultivating a mindful awareness is that we're paying attention on purpose. There's an intentionality to the present moment and without any judgment. So those are the qualities. It's kind of intentional, okay, I'm noticing what's happening,

present moment, moment by moment, without judgment. In the Asian script, the words for mind and the words for heart are the same. It's different dimensions, but it's the same. And whenever I'm teaching about mindfulness, it feels absolutely essential to say, you could be saying heartfulness. And there's no way to practice mindfulness without a heart that is tender and responsive. If mindfulness is kind of an objective, distant witnessing, then it's not engaged in alive.

It requires a quality, a non-judgmental allowing kind heart. So in a way you can think of mindful. mindfulness is having both the clear seeing and the soft open heart as the two hand-in-hand qualities that allow us to be fully present. Does that make sense having these two qualities? Sometimes they're described as the wings of a bird. I like that metaphor too, that there's a quality of clear seeing or understanding what is right here. And there's the question that goes with that is what is happening right here. And then there's the wing of a allowing acceptance, making space for what's right here.

And they absolutely are both needed for the bird to fly to freedom. So we begin by sensing as we cultivate mindfulness that we're bringing it to the weather systems that go on inside us. We all have changing weather systems that we can't control. But as one Hindu yogi put it, you know, you can't stop the waves, but you can learn to serve, you know. So we can learn to be with them in a healthy way. And that means learn to recognize them, that's one wing,

and learn to let them be, to allow them to come and go. And the biggest challenge, I think for most of us, when it comes to mindfulness, is when we get agitated in some way, if we get angry or jealous or frightened, When we get agitated, we tend to judge what's happening right away. Rather than be mindfulness, we have this immediate kind of reflex to say, this shouldn't be happening, I shouldn't be feeling this, I've got to change this.

It's like it feels not okay. And so we're immediately responding to what's going on with judgment, not with mindfulness. this. So a story I like to share that I feel is kind of illuminates a little bit of this comes from the film Gorillas in the Mitz that some of you might have seen where Diane Fosse is shown to be this amazing, she's amazing field biologist, a student of, her mentor was George Scheler, who was a primate biologist who really unveiled most information about gorillas more than anybody had found in the past. His colleagues asked him how he was able to get so much remarkable detail about their tribal structure and about their family life and their intimate habits

and so on. And his response was really quite simple. He said, I didn't carry a gun. So all the previous generations of field biologists had been these rifle-toting guys that went in to observe, the gorillas and somehow these gentle creatures must have sensed that and they never came near and they were not they were so the biologists weren't able to observe them but George Shaler went in and he had such a sense of respect I would say respect is probably the key word such an appreciation for these these gentle creatures he didn't bring a gun and they sensed his kind of energetic allowing and curiosity and friendliness and they allowed him to observe them and I think that's a real wonderful way to position ourselves with our

inner life that there's this wildness that goes on in here that we all have these nervous systems that are capable of huge range of emotions given different conditions and either we can encounter them and have a lot of judgments about how we should be, or we can put down the gun, put down the judgment, and regard them with the quality of, you know, friendliness and curiosity that actually allows for a certain quality of healing and awakening to happen. We start getting familiar with ourselves,

and part of getting familiar and mindful of our inner life is to recognize our patterning, how quickly we come to conclusions and have narratives about ourselves that are limiting. One of my favorite little prayers goes like this, says, Dear God, so far today I've done okay. I haven't been greedy, grumpy, nasty, self-indulgent, and I'm really thankful for that.

But in a few minutes, I'm going to be getting out of bed. And then I'm going to need a lot of help. So we have different strategies that interfere with mindfulness, ways that we try to control our inner life. And I've mentioned a big one, which is we have the strategy of judgment, we have these narratives of what's wrong with us. Then we have a lot of ways of distracting ourselves. And again, you can look through today, yesterday,

and notice that we each have our favorites of how we leave presence. And for some people, it's getting really endlessly lost online through just being caught up in emails way beyond what's necessary. And for others, it might be overeating or overusing of other substance. You know, ways that we distract ourselves, numb ourselves. One story, a woman and a man are sitting in a living room and he's saying to her, you know, if I ever become like a real vegetable, I really lose it, just pull the plug, at which point she goes over to the TV set and yanks out the plug to the TV, you know.

But how many hours do we spend in front of a screen most of us? And how present are we? We have these ways of leaving and probably one of the big things, is obsessive thinking. If we're not in front of a screen, if we're doing other things, we're still running a movie, right? And the movie stars Mois. And it's all the things that are wrong or need to happen or we're afraid won't happen. So this obsessive thinking about ourselves and how we're doing in the world, it's a brief few lines from Pema Children. She says, being preoccupied with our self-image is like being deaf and blind. It's like

standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers and a black hood over our heads. It's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs. But isn't it true that when we're in our trance of, you know, obsessive thinking of our movie about, it's kind of a home movie that's always running about ourselves and our world, that we miss an awful lot. So this all goes to say that training in mindfulness gives us back our lives. It gives us choice. It gives us choice as to waking up from a trance that usually has a lot of feelings of separation from ourselves and our world. It gives us a choice to follow the thoughts that are helpful, productive, creative, useful, and let go of those that really cause us pain.

And the key, basically, to the practice of mindfulness is learning to stay. So we catch that we've left and we learn to be here, just to stay. And at times, it takes this willingness to tolerate what's not comfortable because we leave, there's a certain amount of restlessness in our system that we don't like hanging out with. And of course, it's still there because we always leave, so we never do any processing of it. So part of learning to stay is being willing to encounter the layers of our aliveness that we've been running from and learning to befriend and tolerate what's there. And we do that with this simple, as I've been describing it, these two wings of noticing

what's happening. Okay, so what's the first? felt sense right here. It's that question right now you can ask yourself, what is the experience of this moment? If you check in and you just let your attention directly contact, well, what's going on inside me? What's the felt sense? Is there anything predominant? It's that question. And then the second question is, and can I let this be? Can I allow this? And we practice this in all the domains. So, we practice this. So, we when we talk about becoming mindful, we're becoming mindful. The first domain or foundation of mindfulness is described as physical sensation.

So when I ask you that question, one core place of checking is this whole realm of bodily aliveness. So what is happening right now? We bring our attention into our body. The Buddha said that this entire world exists. within this fathom long body. And you can't really realize the fruits of meditation until you develop a capacity

to bring a full presence to the aliveness of the body. Because every other level arises from and is grounded in the body. In other words, you can't work with emotions unless you can feel the sensations in the body. and whenever you're having thoughts that are charged, it's because there's certain energies in the body that are driving them. So we have to be able to open

with a patience and a gentleness to this body. Read you a line from John O'Donohue. He says, we need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know that they belong and to life, to spirit. it is our minds that make our lives so homeless. This is the first level of practice with mindfulness

is that we bring our attention to this whole realm of aliveness. We'll just practice for a moment together now. And what I'd like to do is invite you to stand, if you will, and you can see you adjusting your seats, but if you don't mind standing up and find a balanced way to stand so that maybe your feet or shoulder with apart, allow the arms to hang naturally, let gravity do it,

and take a moment to close your eyes and just feel the standing posture from the inside out. You might feel the feet and let them just spread so you can feel yourself grounded, connected to the earth. Soften the backs of the knees. You might let the tailbone drop down a little bit, softening the belly, let the chest be open, let the shoulders fall away from the neck, a little back and down.

I tuck the chin slightly. Just take a few full breaths now. Now just imagine that you're an enlightened being. You're a fully awake Buddha, Christ, just totally enlightened consciousness. So your awareness that's wide open, lucid, awake, allowing what is. And notice what it's like, from the vantage point of this awake awareness to experience the life of this body that's right here.

Sense what it's like, pleasant, unpleasant, remembering that the wings of awareness are to simply clearly notice what's happening and unconditionally allow life to be just as it is. How does the enlightened mind experience this living body? You see if you can continue to feel that awareness, that aliveness, and just move very slowly and mindfully back into the sitting posture. As you continue to listen, you can listen from that quality of presence.

I find that people are often surprised that they can even imagine themselves to be an enlightened being. and yet that enlightened quality of awareness is our innate capacity. And it's also interesting that when we imagine and sense that awareness, how much aliveness we can begin to feel in the body, how much presence there, changing flow. So this is the first foundation of mindfulness, this awareness of vibration, pleasantness, unpleasantness, squeezing, tingling.

See if you can stay feeling it right now. Feel your hands, feet. And this is the ground of this next foundation we're going to explore as we're together, which is being mindful of emotions. And emotions or mind states could be sad or happy, angry, afraid, restless. You know, in Tibetan art,

it's always been interesting to me that if you look at the temples and the tankas, the mandalay's, you find there's a theme that as you enter in, as you approach the sacred space in the center, you have to go through this whole domain where these animal-headed goddesses and deities, and they're fierce and ferocious and angry and jealous and frightening, and all the energies, all the energies that we have in our nervous system, that's what's represented in these shadow deities. And the message is that to get to sacred space, we need to go through and experience and engage with the deities, the shadow deities.

And in fact, each of those deities, the energy that is expressed is actually one dimension of enlightened mind. but it's in some way tangled and we need to be with it to let it untangle and fully empower us. So if it's anger, we need to be with it so we can find the discriminating wisdom, that jewel of wisdom that's inside it but is basically subverted because it's torched in some way, in some confusion. And inside the fear, that love for being alive,

each energy has a gift if we can engage with it. And if you go through the fearsome and fierce and wild deities and really engage with a mindful presence, a heartful presence, you come to the center, which is really that sanctuary of peace and freedom. So we practice to begin to really fully experience what's here. And I'm thinking right now of one story I heard where one therapist who was into mindfulness-based therapy told us told a client that he should really be. classes and even go to a weekend retreat because it would allow him to really feel better. So the guy came to classes and he actually went to a weekend retreat and came back that following Tuesday to his therapist and said, you told me I'd feel better and I was filled with a feeling of rage during the retreat. I went into incredible anxiety. I felt a lot of shame.

And as therapist said, yeah, you're feeling your shame better and you're feeling your anger and rage better and you're feeling your anxiety better. And it's true. We also end up as we feel those intense energies feeling our love more fully and feeling a very deep and boundless quality of peace. So it's true. We feel better all of it. So the challenge, as you know, is that our conditioning is to back away when it's intense or unpleasant or unfamiliar. So this is where mindfulness training takes a certain quality of courage, where it's more important to live fully and feel fully than it is to cocoon ourselves and armor ourselves. where we really are training to stay.

And we start learning that there's a kind of chain reaction that goes on that gets us caught as we leave the present moment. And it's a chain reaction of thoughts and feelings that start spiraling until before we know it were just really caught in the grips of a lot of fear or a lot of anger. And you can imagine small examples like going to an appointment and then you're caught in traffic. And so your thoughts are, I'm going to be late for this appointment,

they're going to put someone in ahead of me, and that means I'm going to be late for such and such. You start getting anguish, and then you realize it's my own fault. If I just planned ahead, I always do this to myself, then turn it on yourself, and then maybe, but it reminds you of somebody else that did something that really did make it hard for you.

Then it turns into anger, and it goes on and on. And the point is that if we could catch it and just say, okay, it's traffic, I know my pattern, Okay, just feel the heart a little bit tense, breathe with it. You just see this as a car, feeling the car moving, feeling your hands, feeling the moment, feeling the moment, and not follow that train. Then we free ourselves from a tremendous amount of suffering.

It's really learning how not to get lost in that chain of reactivity. This is one example that might not help too much, but a man goes to a bar and he orders a drink. The bartender gives it to him, and then he pushes the drink off to the side, and he orders another drink. The bartender serves it, and this time he drinks it. So the bartender says, what gives? And the man says, well, I go to AA meetings, and hear regularly,

it's the first drink that leads to trouble. The secret of bringing a mindful awareness, to what's difficult is learning to pause. The sacred pause is really the key, whether you're in traffic, or whether somebody has just sent you an email with a criticism or your child has just been rude. It's learning to pause.

I often quote Victor Frankel in saying that between the stimulus and the response, there is a space and in that space is your power and your freedom. There's so much truth in it. It doesn't matter how many times we hear something about pausing in the moments that we just stop, just stop that tumbling forward and replaying our pattern, just stop.

In that moment, we can begin to reconnect with an intelligence and a kindness that we haven't had access to. There's a story that some of you might remember that always touches me, but a man who is struggling with anger and anger is one of the ones that's most valuable to pause with,

an executive who was really encouraged to start doing mindfulness training to work with his anger. He one night, worked late, went to a small supermarket that he'd go to and, you know, piled up all the stuff he needed and he knew he had to go home and make more calls

and do more emails and so on. So he's kind of in a rush and in front of him as a woman and she only has one item in her cart. And she's right in front of him in line and she's not an express line, she's in his line. And then she has a child

and she hands the little girl over to the clerk and they're ooing and eyeing over the little girl and he's sitting there with his pile of groceries get really, really uptight. You know, somehow, other, what's going on is mine as I've got important things to do. I'm in a rush. I'm not going to get this stuff done.

What are they thinking they're doing? You know, really uptight. And then he remembers to pause. So he pauses, and then he brings a mindful attention, just as we've been exploring to what's going on in his body, all this different sensations, a squeeze in his chest, pounding of his heart, the anger,

that explosive feeling. He names it, angry, angry. It's a really powerful tool to name what you're noticing. Anger. And then he'd breathe with his anger, which helps to breathe with what's intense, and keep paying attention, not go off into the thoughts. He could have gone off into the thoughts that they shouldn't be doing this. No, he kept staying with his body.

Then it turned into fear. Anxiety. Oh, afraid, fear. This fear like, I won't get things done and my whole life will fall apart. heart, you know, that fear. Well, he felt it. Fear, fear. Then as he opened to and felt that more space opened up, which is what happens, when we don't run away from the feelings, when we name them and allow them, these two wings, we start finding the space of presence. So he started finding the space of presence. Okay, more present. And then he looked at the

little girl in the clerk's arms and he goes, oh, she's kind of cute. Okay, the baby went back to a person that with the groceries they left, it's his turn. He said, you know, that baby was really cute. And the clerk beamed at him. It said, oh, that's my little girl. My mom brings her over twice a day. My husband got killed in the war last year in Afghanistan, and it's my way of having a little time with my babe. So I share this because it's not because everybody we run into's had a huge tragedy. But, you know, life for each of us is, you know, the grounds are shaky. We all experience loss. And to be mindful, to be able to pause, we can get in touch with what's going on inside us. It makes us more empathetic, more connected to our

world. It shifts our sense of identity. That's the most fun. fundamental gift of mindfulness. That man started off feeling like a kind of important and aggrieved person. He had, you know, he had a complaint about the world and with that anger. And his identity shifted to a quality of presence that was friendly, open. It shifts our identity. So this is learning to stay. And I'd say the biggest question I get when I teach about mindfulness and heartfulness and learning to stay with what's difficult is that sometimes it feels too hard. And as important as it is to learn to stay,

it's important to learn to forgive that we can't always stay. We can't. Especially if there's been trauma, and most of us have some trauma, even if we don't have full-blown PTSD, we have places in us that have been wounded and that when we get caught in the grip, it's really, really painful. And so we do the best we can.

We do what's sometimes called resourcing, where we find whatever we can that helps us get in touch with a sense of security or strength or perspective or humor or comfort so that we can be with more directly what's here. Sometimes what's here that we need to pay attention to, some deep sense of being violated, of unsafety, of not belonging sometimes. It's with the therapeutic container, with a therapist, that we then bring the mindfulness and begin to really learn to stay.

So I think what I'm wanting to emphasize is that to have the intention to befriend our inner life, to bring mindfulness to what's there, and to know that we, We can't always do it and to have the intention to be incredibly accepting and kind towards that. So that gradually, and it's not all at once, but gradually we begin to be able to say yes to the moment, to recognize what's happening and say, okay, I can be with this. Let me read you a poem right here that I love from poet Dana Fowles. She says, in the shared quiet, an invitation arises like a white dove lifting from a limb and taking flight.

Come and live in truth. Take your place in the flow of grace. Draw aside the veil you thought would always separate your heart from love. All you ever longed for is before you in this moment. If you dare draw inner breath and whisper yes. Just to invite you to, for a moment, close your eyes. Really simple. This doesn't have to be some formal meditation.

And just scan. Just as you were with a close friend, you'd be with that person and sensing what's really going on for this person. Sense what's right here for you. There may be no particular discomfort or pain. Just whatever's prominent. whatever physical sensations or emotions. And just to practice this simple way of recognizing what's here, you might name it, and saying yes.

It doesn't have to be the word yes, but the energy of agreeing to the life that's here. Agreeing to the life that's here. Letting be. You might notice what happens if you deepen the yet. Yes. Just experiment and let that yes, that quality of allowing, be absolutely unconditional. So you're contacting what's here and totally saying yes. All you ever long for is before you in this moment if you dare draw in a breath and

whisper yes. And as you're ready, if you'd like to open your eyes, please do. So thus far in this class we've really covered, how do we bring mindfulness to these different layers, to the layers of sensation in our body, to the emotions. We also bring mindfulness to our thoughts. We begin to notice certain kind of thoughts, and we have that mindfulness that recognizes, oh, it's a thought. It's not the living reality.

It's a thought. And we come back to our heart and our body. and then we start discovering more and more, and this is the gift of the practice, is that it begins to bleed into and marble into everything we're doing. So we might be moving through the day and in some way recognizing one of our habitual reactions or patterns. And as I described with the men in the super movement,

we have this capacity to pause and re-check in with ourselves. And it becomes contagious because when we are more present, it invites a presence forth in other people. I want to share another story that I love that shows us some that also took place in a supermarket, in a grocery store.

And this time, this is a woman that describes being with her friend, shopping in a store in California and she and her friend became aware of a mother with a small boy. They were moving in opposite direction so they kept crossing each other's paths in each aisle and the woman barely noticed them because she's so furious at her little boy. He seemed intent on pulling items off the lower shelves and as the mother became more and more frustrated she started to yell at the

child and several aisles later had progressed to shaking him by the arm. And at this point, this woman's friend spoke up, and this woman's friend who's telling this story was a wonderful mother of three and a founder of her progressive school, and she probably never once treated a child so harshly. So this woman expected her friend to give the woman a kind of solid mother-to-mother talk

about controlling herself and about the effect this behavior had on a child. And so this woman was brinked. race for a confrontation. She felt a spike in her adrenaline. But instead, this is what her friend did. She said, oh, what a beautiful little boy. How old is he? And the woman answered cautiously. He's three. My friend went on to comment how curious he seemed and how her own three children were just like him in the grocery store, pulling things off shelves, so interested in all the wonderful colors and packages. He seemed so bright and intelligent, my friend said. The woman had the boy in her

arms by now and a shy smile came upon her face, gently brushing his hair out of his eyes. She said, yes, he's very smart and curious, but sometimes he wears me out. My friend responded sympathetically, yes, they can do that. They're so full of energy. As we walked away, I heard the mother speaking more kindly to the boy about getting home and cooking his dinner. We'll have your favorite, she said, macaroni and cheese. So meditation training is really in being here. So we gain access to what's below the surface patterning of reactivity, to that quality of compassion, to that quality of wisdom, intelligence.

And when we stop rushing and stop judging and stop reacting and open to what's here, there is a shift in our felt sense of identity. There's a shift really from our habitual ways of sensing kind of our ego and who we either should be or want to be or shouldn't be to a quality that you can't really put words to but has more of a sense of openness and awakeness and tenderness. And we have a real capacity then to respond appropriately in a healing way. to what comes our way. So one of the descriptions of this has been the term the lion's roar.

That when we start getting this capacity to come back and learning to stay and learning to move through those intense energies and really come into presence, the lion's roar is a quality of confidence that we can meet whatever comes. And it's a quality that is actually more gratifying than certain levels of happiness because there's a sense that whatever comes our way

we can work with it and that allows us not to be tensing against what's next but really to inhabit the aliveness and creativity that's right here it gives us as one teacher described it a heart that is ready for everything there are two basics that we've been tracking as we've been moving through these two classes. And one is attitude that it's not what's happening. It's this quality of sincerity and real wholeheartedness that we're choosing to be present. It's not a should. We're choosing it. And then we learn to collect our mind. We learn to come back. And then there's this quality of being here where we really bring a friendliness and a curiosity to the life that's here.

On a practical level, and I mentioned this in the last class, what will most serve you is to commit yourself to practicing every day no matter what. And as I shared in my own story, the back door could be that it doesn't matter how long. But nature loves rhythms, as you'll notice, you know, the sun and the sun. the planets and the moons and everything circles around in a kind of rhythmic way. And when we rhythmically make visits to ourselves, it establishes a quality of presence of intimacy with the life that's here that's truly a gift to your soul. It can affect everything in your life. It could be that you decide each morning that before you enter your day, you're going to sit

for five minutes with possibility of maybe letting it stretch to 20, but see what happens. And one of my friends says, you know, the best attitude is, he said, put your tush on the cushion, take what you get. You know, it doesn't matter what happens. You know, you come, you have the intention of, okay, I'm going to come back a bit, I'm going to feel the breath. Just notice what's happening, that's that wing, allow it to happen. And then, you know, you we begin to quiet and collect some. We begin to touch in, and maybe you'll feel inclined to stay longer. Or maybe you'll just offer a blessing to yourself in the world and enter your day.

And either way, there will be more inclination through the day of remembrance. There will be more moments of pausing, more moments when your life is real life. So let's just close with a short bit of sitting of intentional presence. As you come into stillness, just begin with your intention, even for these few moments. Feel your heart's intention. Then give yourself that gift of relaxing a little bit more. See what parts of you have unconsciously tensed. up and just see if you can loosen and soften a little.

I take a few conscious full breaths. And then for these next moments of silence, simply noticing what is happening and allowing the life to be as it is, saying yes, closing with the words of poet Dorothy Hunt. She says, do you think peace will come some other place than here? some other time than now, in some other heart than yours.

Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all. This moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome. Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all. This moment in the heart space where everything that is welcome. Namaste and thank you. you for your attention. 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.