Tara Brach - Absolute Cooperation with the Inevitable

Episode Date: July 20, 2013

2013-07-17 - Absolute Cooperation with the Inevitable - This talk addresses common misunderstandings about acceptance (allowing, "letting be") and explores the challenges and blessings of opening to the raw emotions that we habitually avoid. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

If you were here last week, the talk was on Skeleton Woman, the myth of Skeleton Woman, and the theme being embracing this living, dying world. And tonight we're going to be continuing that exploration in a way. And I wanted to harken back to my very first retreat because I remember probably day two or three. The teacher of that retreat said, that the boundary to what you can accept is the boundary to your freedom.

The boundary to what you can accept is the boundary to your freedom. And I could feel in the room and I could feel in myself some intuitive, yeah, that's truth. You know, just kind of getting it that if we're battling reality in any way, if we're battling aging or sickness or dying or other people's behaviors or our inner weather or other people's not cooperating with us. If we're at war with how it is, it's exhausting and it's futile basically. So we get that. We get the spiritual significance of this notion of really accepting the life that's right here. And I'm going to use as I speak interchangeably

the words accepting or forgiving or allowing or even a surrendering presence to what is right here. So Ajan Chaa puts it this way. He says, if you let go a little, you get a little peace. If you let go a lot, you find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you find absolute peace and tranquility.

So again, something resonates. We kind of know if we let go and stop the fight. There's some very beautiful peace that is possible. And we can also sense in daily life how incredibly challenging that is. And again, when things don't go our way, we contract and react. We don't open and let go.

Again, Ajan Cha, a very good, this Thai teacher, he passed away probably 20 years ago now, but so he says it, he says, we see ourselves clinging and we know it, but we still can't let go. This is 50 to 70% of the practice. Isn't that good that we see it? This is part of the practice. We just see it, okay, I'm hooked in some way I'm clinging or I'm resisting. thing. Okay, we see it. And so 50 to 70 percent of the practice is seeing and knowing

it but still not being able to let go, but that's okay. I think that's really encouraging. At that same first retreat where I heard, you know, the boundary to what you can accept is the boundary to your freedom was followed up with a little story about a guy who's chased by a tiger and he kind of goes over the edge of a precipice and he's hanging by the limb, you know, there's always a limb there that you're hanging by. And there's a tiger above and below him thousands of feet below, there's these jagged rocks. And so he yells out, help. You know, he's really freaked out, is anybody there? And hears a booming voice, yes. He goes, God, is that you? Yes. Help, can you help me? And then God says, just let go. Is anybody

else there? You know? So, let Letting go, and I actually think letting be is a better language for it, is our least favorite option, if it's such a thing as an option. But it's not just that. Even though intuitively most of us would say, yeah, accepting is very basic on the spiritual path. When we get into nits and grits, there's a lot in our belief system that says, wait a minute, there's a lot of places where it's really not right to accept. And I want to speak to that because it feels really important. You know, it sounds obvious, but do we accept

it when somebody's physically attacking us? Okay? So let's just look. Here's a reflection for you. Okay, you can close your eyes. Okay? So this reflection really begins with bringing to mind some inner experience about yourself that you typically don't like, that you judge yourself for. In other words, when your anger flares up, are your experience of yourself as lazy? Or when you feel selfish, self-centered, judgmental, when you go into obsessive thoughts or feelings of jealousy or addictive craving, any of it, just pick something. that when it comes up you don't like something you judge yourself for. This is just to kind of experiment a little bit with what we're talking about.

And just imagine when it arises and sense it arising right now what it's like for you, the kind of thoughts and feelings that go along with whether you've chosen addictive craving or neediness or insecurity, whatever, just what it's like when you're in it. So we get the instructions to let me. be, to simply be mindful of it to let it be, and sense for yourself what is wrong with accepting this moment that it's here, that this selfishness is here, this anger or laziness is here. What's wrong with accepting it? What bad might happen if you just let be?

What really stops you from accepting, okay, this is here right now? So you're really examining what really is in the way or prevents you from accepting some inner weather systems that you encounter. And you can keep exploring this, open your eyes as you're ready. And so some of you might have noticed that when you kind of checked it out really and said, okay, what would, what's so bad about accepting is some very quick reflex that if I accept this right now, it'll never change. There's no way I'll be able to get over it and improve myself. How many of you kind of touch something in that genre? If I accept this,

it won't change. How many of you found that if you, the sense of if I accepted, it might get worse and get out of control? Can I see by hands? You're shy, you're going like this. Okay. There's a real sense that acceptance is going to get in the way that, way of improving ourselves. That if we let be, if we don't figure out how to get rid of things or change things, not only will we never improve ourselves but others might reject us for them. For some people there's a sense of, if you really sense, well what would happen if you really started just saying yes and letting me all the different weather systems you normally

judge, it's like we wouldn't know who we were anymore. if we really stop judging ourselves. I mean, try that on. There's a Zen teacher that says that our freedom is to be without anxiety about imperfection. So what if one of these weather systems that we think of as our imperfections,

what if you just really, rather than trying to change it, there wasn't that anxiety, there was just a letting be around it. But we have a broader objection. It's not just that we, don't want to let go of our judgments of ourselves, there's a sense of what about accepting it when somebody else is acting in a hurtful way to ourselves or loved ones? Do I just accept that? What about accepting even broader companies that are clear-cutting forests or accepting the

pollution that has been put into our rivers and streams or the cruelty to millions and millions of animals every day. What about accepting that? What about accepting the oppression of minorities, the violence, the racial violence that we've all just witnessed as an enlarged community in the last couple of years, the hate murders? Do we accept that? So I bring this up because we have linked with the idea of acceptance actually a sense of, well that's being passive or inactive or it's actually resignation. It's not ethical or moral. So what But the reason I bring all this up is because it's really important as we go deeper into spiritual practice, if we want to understand the truly liberating potential of radical acceptance,

that we really understand what it is and what it is not for ourselves and also for sharing with others. So perhaps one way to consider it is, you know, if we ask ourselves, well, what does it really mean? What does letting be mean, especially if a situation is harmful, if we're acting out an addiction, or if our partner's been deceptive, unfaithful, or a child's being really rude? What does it mean then? Okay? And so one principle that I think is really helpful to remember is that you can only accept,

and I'll use also the words let be or say yes. You can only accept your own experience in the present moment. Now, what that means is that, let's say, we are finding ourselves acting out an addiction. All we're accepting is this moment's feeling of shame or craving. If we're accepting somebody else has been deceptive or unfaithful, all we're really accepting is this moment's feeling of rage or fear or hurt. In other words, acceptance is just this moment what we're actually experiencing.

It's the actuality or reality that's here. That's what we have to accept and that's all we can accept. Does that make sense? An extension of that. Acceptance or allowing or letting be does not mean that we're approving of something and it doesn't mean that we're validating a related belief. So let's say again that we have an addictive craving and acting out on addiction and acceptance means okay I'm feeling the shame right now of that.

But it doesn't mean that we're believing we're bad. That belief might be there but acceptance doesn't mean we're validating the content of the belief. So acceptance has nothing to do with the content of beliefs. We're just accepting a living experience in the moment. Okay? It's another piece. Another piece is that acceptance, this moment, does not mean in any form inactivity or disengagement.

In fact, acceptance and allowing and letting be is an incredibly engaged kind of presence. We're fully in contact with what's going on, our attention is fully engaged, which then enables us to engage actively in the next moment. principle about acceptance and allowing is you can't well acceptance or allowing. The ego can't make it happen. There can just be an intention. We're going to get into that a little more in a bit, but it's not another doing. Okay, now I'm going to go and accept this. You know, it's more of an undoing. I'm going to undo the resistance by relaxing back and making room. The final thing, the final principle that just again,

these are principles for you to try on not to accept as content, just check them out and see what feels like living truth. The final piece is that mindful acceptance are allowing in this moment of what's right here is the very ground of responding to the next moment with wisdom. So, we get the email that's very provocative. And most of us can get it that if we can pause enough to just get in touch with the moment and be with this moment's experience, there's more of a possibility from that pause that will then respond from a place a little more equanimity.

So we get that, right? That makes sense. It's true in the biggest ways. It's as Carl Rogers said, it wasn't until I accepted myself just as I was right here now, that I was actually free to change. That our capacity to open and say yes to and allow the, what Clarissa Esta says is the not beautiful, is actually the prerequisite to freedom and to unfolding.

It's also in a very basic way, brings out our best. It aligns us with, it gives us the chance of coming back to our heart and our values. There was an article that some of you might have seen in the New York Times on July 5th called The Morality of Meditation. Can I see by hands? I'm just curious how many saw that one. Yeah, a good number. Okay.

Really interesting piece of research. One group did an eight-week course in meditation. The other group didn't. They called people into a lab ostensibly to do a certain kind of questionnaire or something. But the real research was that when the person that was part of the experiment came to a lab, there was one free seat.

They took that seat, but then the other people that were in the seats were part of the experiment, but they didn't know it, then somebody with crutches came in. And the question was, who will give up their seat? Will this person give up their seat? So what they found is that for the group that had been meditating, they were three times more likely to give their seat up than the others. The statistics were a little discouraging. Let me see. It says only 16% of the non-meditators gave up their seats, 16%, proportion rose to 50% among those that had meditated. So, how come? Well, there's different theories, but the basics are, A, if you're

practicing meditation, you start noticing more. So you actually kind of register, oh, okay, this is what's going on, you're just a more alert. But the other piece of, you're just a more alert. But the other piece is that as we cultivate mindfulness, it actually activates the compassion network in the brain. There's more empathy, more access to empathy. So all that is to say that this basic principle of pause, when we're activated, pause, and see if it's possible to open to and let be what's going on inside us in the moment is the very ground of living our lives aligned with who we really are, aligned with our heart and our deepest awareness. Now again, we can frame it this way and I find that most people kind of get it

it that yeah, you know, if we can pause we're going to come from a wiser place and then what we need to look at is it's still amazingly difficult. Like we're going against the stream of some of our strongest conditioning that when things are difficult, everything in us wants to act. Emotion is designed to move us. So we, as soon as things are uncomfortable, which there are a lot of moments of our lives and when they get really uncomfortable, the hardest thing in the world is to pause. One of the best little examples I ran into is a story of a couple of New Jersey hunters in the woods and one of them falls to the ground and he doesn't seem to be breathing. His eyes are rolled back in his head and so the other

whips out his cell phone and calls emergency services and he gasps to the operator, my friend's dead, my friend's dead, what can I do? So the operators has a very calm, soothing voice and she says, okay, let's take it easy, let's slow it down. I think I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead. So there's a silence and a shot is heard. The guy comes back on the line, he says, okay, now what? Isn't that one of the worst jokes you've ever heard? This was actually evoded one of the world's funniest jokes.

I thought it was... Okay. But we get the gist of it, is that we'd rather do something than nothing. It's the beginning of soothing our nervous system to feel like we're in control. That's why we keep doing things. We're doing self. So pausing, the reason it's so radical, this letting be not in some way trying to control

or manipulate our experience, really pulls the ground out from under the ego. Our entire egoic structure is designed to react. Non-reacting starts to undo that sense of ourselves. And it's not just the ego. It's not just the human ego in terms of reacting. I mean, you can look at a simple-celled creature or see an enemy and know that if you poke that little creature, it's going to go contracting right away, right?

So this contracting isn't just a phenomenon on the egoic level. But you can see it really clearly with us that when something difficult happens, if we lose something or somebody clearly is misunderstanding us or when formed our child was just suspended from school, we don't just take a breath and stop and say, okay, what's happening? Can I open to this? We just don't usually.

Okay? And it's down to the basic understanding in both Western psychology and Buddhist psychology that as soon as there's unpleasantness we have a complete reflex to in some way control it by pushing it away. As soon as there's pleasantness on some level we're trying to keep it, hold on to it. And for most of us we do it with our thinking of our thinking, It's unpleasant. We immediately launch into judgments and figure out how to get rid of. Pleasant. There's some swirling around on how we can have more and not lose it and so on.

It's the deepest sense of who we are, this self who's navigating through the day, trying to avoid the discomforts, trying to make things work out, trying to be in charge. And if you watch your day, and it's really a little, interesting to kind of look back through the day. I sometimes call it the space suit self because it's like we take on the space suit of strategies to navigate and it's pretty much always in action through the day. Now I'll do this, now I'll do that, this will make this feel better, this will work out that problem. And if we're not doing, we're figuring out. Have you noticed how many moments you're figuring things out? They're not all.

necessary moments. But a lot of the, a lot of it goes on without even any conscious intending, this reflex of reacting. Another one of the classic stories that describes some of this was a man who was filling out an accident report form for an insurance company and they asked for additional information when after he submitted his original information. He says, in block three, I put poor planning as the cause of my accident. You said I should explain it more fully. I trust the following details will be sufficient.

So here goes. He says, I'm a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I discovered I had 500 pounds of bricks left. Rather than carry them down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel attached to the side of a a building. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out, and loaded the brick into it. Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to ensure a slow descent of 500 pounds of bricks. You will note in block number 11 of

of the accident report form that I weigh 135 pounds. Due to my surprise of being jerked off the ground, so suddenly I lost my presence of mine and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to to say I proceeded at a rapid rate down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming down. This explains the fractured skull. Slowing slightly, I continued my ascent, stopping when the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep in the pulley. Fortunately, by this time I had regained my presence of mine, was able to hold tightly

to the rope in spite of my pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel. Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 50 pounds. I refer you again to my weight in block number 11. As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I again met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the fractured ankle.

The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell onto the bricks. Fortunately, only my toes are cracked. I'm sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in pain and able to stand and watch the empty barrel six stories above me. Again, I lost my presence of mine and let go of the rope. This is entitled, Unknowing When to Let Go. Okay, so our question tonight then is how do we in the midst, how do we in the midst of this tendency for reactivity? How do we find that presence that allows us to us to pause and open to our experience in the moment.

And clearly, if there's something, some emergency that's asking for fight, flight, that's going to serve us, we have access to that. But most of the things we're reacting to are not in that category. Most of them are habitual fears and wants that are, that we're wired to react to, that keep us circling in the same behaviors that we know cause us trouble. So the primary place that we're going to look at now on how we come into that presence is a movement from thoughts into the direct bodily experience. This is the key movement.

This is the training that meditation actually gives us some skill in that is so key. and the inquiry that will help us do that, this is a question I ask myself a lot and I think you'll find useful, you can pick your version of it, is that when you're feeling reactive just to say, well, what right now is asking for acceptance inside me,

our inclusion, or alternately, what am I running from right now? What am I resisting? What's difficult to be with? Some inquiry like this, what wants acceptance or what am I running from, will help you to begin to let be the part of you that most needs attention. Give you an example from my own life last Wednesday.

So, last Wednesday I intended to be here in person, I couldn't be, so we chose this talk on Skileton Woman. And late morning, the way this unfolded, I'd had a talk, this talk I'm giving right now, prepared pretty much. But I started feeling sicker and sicker.

I was feeling achy and weak and tired and so on. So I canceled a midday appointment. I thought maybe I'd turn a corner, but I just kept getting worse and worse. And so when I check into my body, okay, am I supposed to go teach tonight? My body was entirely thumbs down. but my mind wasn't cooperating.

My mind was at odds. Well, maybe it won't be so bad. I really can't cancel. It was way too late to find a guest teacher in the sense of letting people down and just not showing, just didn't feel good. So I'd keep checking with my body, uncomplicated, thumbs down,

but then all of us... And, you know, I felt this tension, and then as it happens, it dawned on me that it might be a good idea for me to walk my talk a little bit, because here I was writing about embracing, you know, I was going to teach about letting be the moment, embracing situations that are right here, and here I was all at odds.

So I really said, okay, so the boundary to what I can accept is the boundary to my freedom. What is it that I need to accept? That inquiry. What is wanting acceptance, needing acceptance? So, okay, beginning, first thing I'd find were those unpleasant sensations of sickness, okay, I can do that. It's not that hard to accept, okay, unpleasant, unpleasant.

But there was more. There was this voice that was saying, yeah, but not showing up feels like failure in some way. It feels letting people down, it feels disconnecting, it feels like something's wrong with me more than just I'm sick. Okay, so what wants acceptance? when deeper to allowing the sense of fear and efficiency and that falling short feeling. Now of course that's really, really familiar territory.

I mean, I can say there have been tens of thousands of moments that I've gone, oh, okay, that's what I need to be with. So when I can get to it, it doesn't take that long. There's an, oh, it's almost a relief. It says, oh, okay, it's that thing, you know. you know. So then just breathe with that feeling, view with it. And the kind of space opened up so that there was a shift in my sense of who I was. I went from feeling like the person who was sick and actually something was wrong with her because she was going to let down others

to just this kind of space of awareness that was noticing including these different feelings and sensations. This is the freedom that's possible. And whenever there's conflict, whenever there's suffering, there's always something inside us that's asking for acceptance. There's always something that wants to be included in a kind and open attention to help bring us back to a sense of wholeness. Now what I've noticed is that for most of us,

We spend decades running away from certain core experiences and they actually shape our life. We spend decades running away from a certain kind of shame or fear and then our life, the way it expresses is over and over again this kind of problem with intimacy or this inability to really give ourselves to work because we're in some way holding back or this fear of failure. So I wanted to share one woman's story about, you know, the boundary to what she could accept that really felt this, this felt very clear in.

This is the one, and I have this story is in True Refuge. A woman I worked with whose mother had terminal breast cancer, and she was the only local offspring, so she was the one that was on for taking care of. of. But growing up, her mom had been really narcissistic and neglectful and so she had avoided her for years. So here she was, she was supposed to be with her. She was feeling kind of guilty because she felt all this anger, but she didn't want to be with her. She just felt like, you know, it's just, it's thankless, it's unpleasant, I don't want to be with her. And she told me one of her first memories, which was when she was three years old, her

mother yelled to her that the bath was ready and that she had to get in the tub and that when she went upstairs and got in the tub there were about two inches of lukewarm water and her thought was to herself, this is all I'm ever going to get. So there's that deep sense of anger and rage and as I said that was not really faced a lot because it kept on replaying itself in most relationships on some level she felt let down or are in some way mistreated or in some way that she wasn't getting taken care of. So we began to bring these kind of practices of noticing and allowing, accepting to the anger and it got to where she had a lot of thoughts that she kept going into of how this

is wrong or I can't really open to the anger because then if I do it will be too much. And so we worked with some of those beliefs and thoughts and I kept inviting her to come to where the anger lived in her body. And as she did it, the basic instructions for letting me with this were let it rip, let it be as much as it is. Now that doesn't mean let your stories go wild. It doesn't mean believe your stories of bad mother or deprived child. It means let the feelings in your body be as they are.

Contact the reality and open to it. And so I asked her what she was experiencing. It was like this hot-pressured cauldron in her chest. And I said, okay, so what is allowing at me now? It just wants to explode, she said. I said, well, let it. It was bursting into flames and like a windstorm spreading. And I said, what's happening now?

She says, it's blowing through all the windows of your your office, it's blowing up and down the East Coast. You know, all life forms. It's ripping through the earth. It's spreading through space. And I kept saying, allow it. Just let it be as much as it is. And again, this is like letting reality be as it is right now.

And so she imagined it exploding through the universe. And then gradually she started getting quiet. I said, what's happening? She goes, well, now it's losing steam. She sat back inside. And then she said, now there's only emptiness. She says, there's no one left in the world. I'm utterly alone.

There's no one who loves me. There's no one I can love. So the allowing unfolded into this kind of grieving for the loss of love. When we allow something, it unfolds into something else. There's a roomy, Rumi poem. Very simple. It says very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground, be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You've been stony for too many years.

Try something different. Surrender. So for her the stoniness was kind of this kind of locking in of the anger, not letting the love life and her just be, move and then locking in the anger, locking in the grief. The surrendering was letting it be, letting herself feel it, letting herself respond to it. So I asked her how she wanted to respond to the grieving and she put her hand on her heart. As many people I work with often explore this, just this simple phrase, and this was from a Hawaiian healer actually, I'm sorry and I love you. So pausing, allowing, letting the layers unfold and then able to respond from that place of compassion.

So this is again the shift in identity that comes when we went with radical acceptance of what's actually here. She wasn't accepting her beliefs that her mother was wrong. Nor was she saying that I'm going to put down on my boundaries and let my mother trample over me now. In fact, as it was, she maintained some very realistic boundaries. But she was opening to her own experience in a courageous and unconditional way. And her identity shifted from the victim, the angry victim, the grieving self to that

kind of space that can offer compassion. be ground be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are I love that be ground be crumbled that's the letting go letting be making room for what's really here

so as I mentioned with her mother is to give you a little bit of the end of this story she kept the boundaries she needed in the sense of you know not allowing her mother to take advantage of her to put out those little barb comments, but they really started fading anyway as her mom got sicker.

And she found that by bringing a compassionate presence to herself, she was actually able to hold her mother with a lot more kindness and her mother could feel it. There was something in the air. So I want to share with you that the last evening that she told me about with her mom, she said her mom woke up with a hot and sweaty and she put a cool cloth on her mom's brow and her mom said to her, you know, nobody's ever washed me. And she immediately thought of that little girl with tears that she and her mom had both felt neglected. And she touched a very uncomplicated love in those moments where she could feel with her mother

that connection that she knew would be there long after her mom was gone. So I share that part of the story with you on purpose that. you know, as we make room in our own being, we make room for others and we make room for the natural love that's there to unfold itself. It's blocked. If we're in some way, there's a boundary to what we're accepting, there's going to be a boundary to our loving because we're not really occupying our wholeness. So really the theme tonight is how come allow our letting be is so key on the spiritual path. And the intuitive response to that is that the alternative to saying yes,

to allowing what's here, is being at war with reality. And that's actually the ego's stance. The ego is basically constantly trying to get things to be different, trying to ensure it's one way and make sure it's not another way. And there's no winning in that, of course. You can't, all you can do is get tight or reactive or separate. And I like the way Anthony DeMello really framed this. He's a Jesuit priest.

He was asked to define his experience of enlightenment. He said, enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable. Isn't that good? Absolute cooperation with the inevitable. Now the inevitable is what's actually right here. It's not saying, oh, it's my destiny to never accomplish such and such, so you cooperate with that. That's not what he means.

Absolute cooperation, the inevitable is to have the wisdom to allow the reality that's here in this moment to be experienced, to be present with it fully. And there's two main elements that, that really we are training in that enable us to cooperate with the inevitable. And one of them is we are learning in meditation to not believe our thoughts. The thoughts aren't reality. That we can see them happening, recognize them, let them inform us, let them be a map, but know how to wake up out of them so that we can touch the living experience right here and

not be inside a virtual reality. And that gets particularly interesting and tricky because it's the ego's primary way of resisting the moment. The main way the ego does not feel its rawness is to be really busy judging and figuring out and this happens in spiritual life too. In spiritual life we want some certainty, we want some ground and one of the classic stories of a novice in a monastery asking the Zen master, you know, what happens after we die? And his response was, I don't know.

And this is bothersome to this novice. And he said, I thought you were a Zen monk. And he said, I am, but not a dead one. So one level of the training is to relax the grip on our thoughts, to dedicate to it for the sake of reality. We can't know reality if we're lost in our thoughts. And many of our thoughts injure us. You know, they come out of wanting and fear.

It's said sometimes that our minds are armed and dangerous. And they're armed with thoughts that tell us you're separate, you're not enough, you need to struggle to get what you want. You know, we need to fight others to avoid being, taking an event, of, so disarming the mind simply means getting that phrase that I like, real but not true. Thoughts are happening, you know, our beliefs and the feelings are real, but what they're telling us is not truth itself. Real but not true. It's really important the attitude in working with thoughts. You can't like will yourself to drop them, you can intend to relax

the grip. That's really important because otherwise you'll be at war with your mind and that war goes on forever anyway. So just the intention to recognize thinking, to sense when it's kind of fear-based, when it's not serving, to relax the grip. So Kaviri Patel in her poem called Thanking a Monkey, says it really well. She says, there's a monkey in my mind swinging on a trapeze, reaching back to the past or leaning into the future, never standing still. Sometimes I want to kill that monkey, shoot it square between the eyes so I won't have to think anymore or feel the pain of worry. But today I thanked her and she jumped down straight into my lap,

trapeze still swinging as we sat still. Isn't that lovely? Yeah. So, our thoughts are intended to help us. We're trying to, in some way we have this idea that we're in a bad situation and we're trying to help ourselves. But they actually keep us caught in that sense of a separate and struggling self. So that's one piece, is intending to relax the grip of our thoughts.

And the second main piece that we're exploring tonight in the different examples they gave you are this is this. intention to feel what's here and to let it be, to let it be all that it is. Some of you remember that Jungian quote about unlived life. It's like the parts of our being that we don't open to and feel end up causing our suffering, unlived life. As I mention often, this intention to open to the rawness that's here, it's not wise if we've been traumatized to in any way push ourselves into that. It's supposed to be very gradual, often with support of healing other. Sometimes we have to take some time to establish

more sense of safety or balance before we can. But eventually we want to open the windows and the doors and really let the winds of whatever's here move through us, really allow this life to live through us. When we do, when we're undefended, when there's that absolutely cooperation, what happens? Well, the ego is kind of out of a job. The ego that keeps us feeling kind of tight and reactive, it's not there anymore really. And what happens is we've re-entered a flow of aliveness and that flow is basically emanating out of a very vast space. So we reconnect with a vastness and an aliveness. Yes.

One more question I'd like to bring into the room and into the airways I know that's honoring those that are with us from other places that comes up and that is, well, if I'm opening to and allowing the moment, how does that help me in making any of the decisions in my life? Like how do I know what job is really the right job or should I, is this really the partner I should be with or should I send my child to private school or? or, you know, decisions. So I want to just ask you to reflect for a moment on what you might consider a seemingly poor decision, okay?

Something that you might have just... Maybe some of you don't feel like there have been any poor decisions, and that's fine too, but if you feel like you made it like a bad move, like, you know, in a relationship or a poor decision on how to deal with something, poor decision, parenting, work, So take a moment, it helps to close your eyes, it helps me to remember things too, to check into that and sense where there might have been a poor decision. And if you have one in mind, see if you can feel into who was deciding.

In other words, sense where the decision emanated out of. Was it a feeling of being pressured? of fear, of need, unmet neediness, of preoccupation, confusion, what was the state of heart-mind that it came out of? Just kind of feel into that. And while you're reflecting, you might recall a really wise or good decision. It might have felt more like a direction you went into in your life or response to a situation, and linking up with really good partner, meaningful work, something to do with parenting,

creative expression. It's fine if you don't have an example, but if you do, some turning in a good direction, in a situation or in a big way. And again, you might, as you consider that, since who was navigating, if you responded to another person, in a situation that was particularly loving or generous or wise, who is navigating? Where did that come from? And I invite you to sense whether when there's a wise decision or a wise response or a wise direction, whether it's actually coming from a solid sense of self or whether really

the ego's out of the way at those moments and there's more of a a flow, that you're more being guided by something larger or deeper. Just sense into that. The metaphor I offered a few weeks ago was that if you have a straw in the ocean and the Gulf Stream, you know, it could be batted around in all directions, but if it's aligned with the Gulf Stream, the Gulf Stream flows through the straw. And in a similar way when we're more present, when we're pausing, when we're opening to what's here, we become aligned in a way that this universe and life flows through us.

It's not like we're deciding, it's like the deciding and the responding happens from the very universal kind of flow of wisdom, intelligence, compassion. You can open your eyes when you want. I've mentioned that Gandhi took a day each week for prayer and meditation because he said he wanted to make sure that his actions for non-violence or social justice arose from the deepest, most awake part of his being. And so it is that it's out of presence that all engage spirituality, all all the actions that really make a difference can happen. It's if you think of the evolution

of consciousness, that at the egoic level it's a willfulness and a sense of controlling. And when you wake up outside of the ego, there's no longer such a willfulness, it's more replaced by a sense of flow. And I like the sense that's kind of like a stream, knows how to go around rocks. There's an intuitive knowing about flow. And there's sense that our life is unfolding in a very natural, spontaneous way and there's not a self that needs to get in the way too much to try to figure anything out. So I'd like to close on this note, do a brief meditation with you on how we can allow the present moment in a way that opens us to flow, opens us to that wisdom.

You begin with the words of Dorothy Hunt. Do you think peace will come some other place than here, some other time than now, and 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 thinking that it should be some other way. that you should feel some other thing, that your life should unfold according to your plans. Peace is this moment without judgment, this moment in the heart space where everything that is

is welcome. Relaxing, releasing the grip of any thoughts of the future or the past or even thoughts of right now, relaxing any tightness in the body, sensing the possibility of allowing this aliveness to be just as it is, letting everything happen to you, this whole changing dance of sensation, relaxing the heart, relaxing the heart open and allowing whatever streams of emotion or mood just unfold themselves as they are to be felt. What happens if you let everything be just as it is? Peace is this moment without judgment,

this moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome. Namaste. Thank you. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, are about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org.

Thank you very much.