Tara Brach - Accessing Innate Wisdom

Episode Date: November 4, 2017

Accessing Innate Wisdom - Wisdom is an innate capacity, but often covered over by trance. This talk explores how we abandon ourselves as we busily seek ways to feel more worthy, lovable and safe. We then look at the pathway home, the radical non-doing and space of silence that allows wisdom and love to flow through. "Live your moments as if this is it, let it matter, let it come from a remembrance of what you most care about." Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Many of you have heard of Andres Gregory, my dinner with André. And a man asked him about his writing. And he responded with a story about his wife. She was going into surgery and he realized belatedly, and this was after she was put under anesthesia, that he hadn't really said what he had wanted to, what he needed to say to her. So he made this commitment than when she woke up that he would speak

his heart. This would be his way of communicating as if for the last time. And then his message to the person asking the question was, write like that. Right as if you are expressing your heart as if for the last time. Live like that. Live your moments as if this is it. Let it matter. Let it come from a remembrance of what you most care about. So it's a beautiful message. It's one that many of us resonate with because we have a sense of how most days or many days we move through kind of in this trance-like way that we're either trying to get a get through the day in some way or there's a sense that this life is going to go on forever and it just were on kind of an automatic and it's a bit of a sleepwalking or else we're feeling

just driven through the day by wants and fears but there's certainly not that sense of the moments live this one as if it's the last. Speak your heart as if this is it. So one of the questions that is often brought up especially after a retreat where we've spent a lot of moments coming into presence is, how does this presence help me in making the big decisions in my life? How does it help me in really remembering what matters and remembering my inner wisdom? How do I access that in the midst of the frenzy?

You know how William James described it? He said, we're in this ceaseless frenzy, always thinking we should be doing something else, which to me is very relatable to. So there's a forgetting, and there's a wonderful Jewish parable that I actually have come across twice in the same month, so I thought I'd share it.

And it goes like this, that before an infant is born, the angel of conception infuses that infant with all the wisdom that he or she will need. through life. And then the angel puts her finger on the child's lips and says shh. And it's

as if there's this ceiling of a secret pack between that child and God. And as the story goes, that's why we all have an indentation on our upper lip. So it's this kind of and the way, my understanding of this parable is that

the wisdom is here. It's innate. in each of us, but it's only available in the silence of our minds. In other words, it's only available when there's that quieting of all the trance like busyness so we actually can have that wisdom come through. And wisdom could also be called love because what the mind realizes as wisdom, the heart experiences love. That's only available when we, you know, there's that, that, that's that, that quieting down of the trance-like activity, a kind of pause.

So tonight what we'll be exploring is how we access our heart wisdom, the forgetting that goes on and also this coming into a kind of a silence or a stillness that really allows us to be awake in that wisdom. And if we begin with the forgetting part of it, there's also a another parable from the Talmud, which goes that when a new baby is about to be born, that child is slapped by an angel so as to forget, so as to forget that intrinsic wisdom. And I like that because we can sense as part of the evolutionary journey

that when we incarnate into form, there's a forgetting of that belonging to the wholeness, and we get very focused on and very fixated and identified with the particular form. And so that's kind of considered to be a natural stage in evolution where the microbe perceives itself with its boundaries as a microbe and the tree is a tree and the monkey is a monkey and us as a human and that's the identity that we have for a while. And along with it, our attention is a narrows. This is the reducing valve of attention.

That our attention can't be wide open to receive the universe. We have to be really discriminating and pay attention to this because this is threatening and this is because this helps us reproduce. So we have a narrowed kind of attentional field. And that so it's a biological necessity and as humans that narrow field has a negative bias. We fixate on more on what's going to cause trouble. That's part of our way our nervous system's way of protecting. ourselves. So this is part of the evolutionary journey and it keeps going. Good news, good news,

you know, it keeps going. We keep evolving and so the attentional field can begin to widen. So we start taking in the relational qualities that are going on. We widen and so we started tuning to each other and we have the course there's the physiological wiring that goes with that of mirror neurons and our compassion network that we can actually sense each other. We can be felt by each other. So there's a widening of the attentional lens where we begin to sense an identity that goes beyond this organism to this field to my family and to my tribe and then beyond to all beings everywhere. So there's this capacity to widen out infinitely. And the spiritual path is really describing this widening so we still can operate as an egoic entity, but have that remembering,

have that capacity to widen out and remember a larger truth. That's where we get freedom. There's a way that Emerson puts it that I've always liked. He says that from within or from behind a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we're nothing but the light is all. And he says with this light that shines through is the soul of the whole. So we each have this light that shines through that's the soul of the whole. And when it breaks through our intellect, it is genius. When it breaks through our will, it is virtue. When it flows through our affections, it is love.

So again, we have this sense that there's this innate love and wisdom within us. There's a forgetting, but there's this capacity to remember to begin to open up our attention so that light, the soul, the whole can flow through. And when we're feeling love and when we're feeling wisdom, it's not my love or my wisdom, it's that light of the universe, that universal intelligence and tenderness flowing through these beings. So we can begin to, this is kind of setting a conceptual frame, but we can begin to look at our life and look at today and say, well, where was my attention today? was it very narrow and fixated? Was I in a lot of fight-flight freeze or was there some

widening? Was there some opening to let that light shine through? And so I like just to invite you to just do a little check-in right now, connect these big concepts with the reality of your day. And the understanding is where attention goes, energy flows. So what was it like today? You might take a moment, close your eyes and sense what you were attending to and how you were attending. And I'll suggest a few things. Did you attend a lot to what you were worried about? What might go wrong?

Did you attend to the messages of the inner critic? Or what others are doing wrong? Did you attend a lot to what was coming next? next, was there a kind of rolling ahead into the future? Was there an ongoing mental narrative? Are, were there gap between the thoughts? Was there a bit of the, you know, the quieting and a sense of the way this autumn is unfolding? Gap between the thoughts and a real listening. Were there moments when your senses were wide awake? Where there was appreciation for for others, for love, for goodness, for beauty.

What was your attention like? Were you paying attention to the moment to moment, whatever you were doing, or were you multitasking? Was your attention driven by fear, by wanting? Or was it by interest or by caring? What was open was that lens of attention and what was the quality? You can keep reflecting, but just the understanding is

that when we're stressed, the habit, the reflex is to tighten up and have our attention really fixate in a way that's very driven by the fear and wanting. We get lost in busyness and we get caught in emotional reactivity. That's the habit. Okay, opening your eyes. So the question often comes up in spiritual practice. Like, really, when we're caught, when we're stuck, when we're fixed, How do we reopen? How do we come back? How do we move from fight, flight, freeze, as I often describe it, to attend and be friend. How does that shift happen? And the biggest challenge is one that I'm imagining most of you have encountered, which is the times we most need to meditate,

that we really know that the very best thing for us would be just to pause and come back and feel our breath in our body, the times we absolutely are not in the mood. We don't want to be just to pause and come back and feel our breath in our body. We don't want to do it. You know how it feels when you are sensing there's not enough time. You're stressed, you're tight, you're irritable, and the last thing in the world you want to do is pause, right? I mean, it's just that, we're kind of geared to go. R, if you're angry, and you're about to say something, the last thing you want to do is not say it and go in and feel the anger.

It just doesn't work that way. So we're caught in a bit of a catch-22 because exactly, what we most need, our conditioning has us go at it a different way. There's a story of a student who comes in, she's going to go to a young professor's office and she kind of glances down the hall furtively and she slips into his room, closes his door, and then she gets on her knees, she's pleadingly saying, I would do anything to pass this exam. She leans closer to him. She flips back her hair and gazes me,

meaningfully into his eyes. I mean anything. He returns your gaze, anything. Anything. His voice softens, anything. Anything, she repeats again. His voice turns to whisper, would you study? I thought that was great. So we kind of get it. The moments that if we really want to access our wisdom, we need to to quiet down. But the moments that we actually try, we get whipped up figuring things out and moving forward and doing our old strategies. Now, in the Buddhist mythology, the energies that keep us tracked are described by the God Mara. So it's a bit the shadow side. It's all the egoic drives that are trying to get us to do more, defend, or protect. It's the anger, the fear, the jealousy, the shame. Those are the energies that are.

described. So Mara comes from the self that feels separate. When we're feeling separate, our attention narrows and that's when Mara is in sway. And the strength of Mara, the power of that, and you can see this during the day, again, the times when you're really, really caught, and there's not even a prayer that you can kind of come back to some sense of who you really are. Well, the conditioning, the strength of Mara, some of its biochemical, just our genetic inheritance, a lot of it's cultural. In other words, it's kind of Mara has a culture-wide kind of an appearance. And you can sense in our culture very speedy, very competitive, there's a lot of a power over, you know, and including power over nature. And it cuts off a sense of our natural.

belonging. So we don't have, it's not so easy to widen out and say, oh, it's okay, I'm safe, I belong to this tribe, or this family, or this, you know, community. We're more stuck in that individual sense of self. So it cuts us off from some heart wisdom in this culture. I always like this story about James McNeil Whistler, who in the early 1850s, he was very academically unsuccessful. He did have a period at West Point. So he did have a period at West Point. So he Here you have this artist at West Point Military Academy, and as the story goes, he was assigned to draw a bridge. And he drew a romantic stone one complete with grassy banks

and two small children fishing from it. Get those children off that bridge, said the instructor. This is an engineering exercise. So Whistler got the kids off the bridge. He drew them fishing from the bank of the river and resubmitted the drawing. The angry instructor yelled at him. I told you to remove those children.

get them completely out of the picture. But the creative urge was too strong in Whistler. His next version had the children completely out of the picture indeed. They were buried under two small tombstones on the riverbank. So the strength of Mara, when we're in a culture that is very left brain or really honors power over, you know, others, honors kind of a militancy. it cuts us off. And then of course a great influence for the strength of Mara

is our experience in our own families. And it comes out in both how we give care and how we receive care. And I speak often about the power of that domain because every one of us receives messages and it's the messages of the culture through our parents that are fear-based that say, in order to be okay, in order to make it, in order to be lovable, in order to be worthwhile,

here are the standards. And we have internalized every one of us a checklist of really how we should be, how we should be to be lovable and worthwhile. And it has to do with how we should look and how our body should look and what kind of intelligence we should have and how much we should achieve. And even in spiritual communities, how a good spiritual person comports themselves, you know, we have that too. So we spend our lives trying to be who we think we should be. Let me just say that again. We spend, let's say, huge swaths of our life. We're the energy behind our day is to be who we think we should be.

We're running according to trying to meet some standards. And we have a belief that if we just tried harder, then maybe we would be more who we want to be. And that's deep in our psyches, that if we just tried harder, so there's a lot of trying harder going on. Now here's a quote that's not from Einstein, even though people think it is sometimes, because it's been debunked, but it's a great quote.

He doesn't say this, but somebody says this. Everyone is a genius. Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. But can you sense what's behind that one? That if we're spending our whole life trying to be a certain way, that's not our natural expression, but it's our should. we'll spend our whole life in some way judging ourselves for not being enough.

And most people have that in their psyche. Most of us have that drag on our being where we're at war with ourselves at least some of the time for not being who we should be. There's a sinking feeling, there's an insecurity, there's a sense that others won't really love us. There's a fear that comes with that. It's painful. So what has happened is we've abandoned ourselves.

We abandon who's here and we just keep trying to be who we think we should be. And in a way that means we're climbing a tree. You know, we keep on climbing trees to try to be who we think we should be and leave the currents of our being. So here's just a reflection to kind of, again, let's anchor this in our own lives right here. And again, I invite you with these to, you know, just take a moment to just kind of close your eyes and check in.

We're exploring really are we at home with ourselves, are we living, trying to climb a tree, trying to chase after meeting a standard that we've internalized? How much are we trying to be more or different? And so you just might ask yourself, you know, what is between me and really feeling enough? at home, really accepting this life, this being, just as I am. And you might just sense what happens when you ask of, what's between me and just feeling enough? And there may be a sense of, but I'm not enough, I'm not happy with how I am, something's wrong. And just to sense how that is experienced in your body and what that leads you to doing, saying, acting. For most

of us there's a fear that if we just embrace how we are, we'll never become who we think we should be. And that fear keeps driving us to climb trees, to do more, to present ourselves, to work harder, to try to achieve more. But does that work? You can open your eyes. And I'm going to share two signs of what I call this trance. of not enough, our trance of unworthiness where we keep on trying to do things to be different.

And one sign of it is that no matter how much you try, no matter how hard you climb, no matter how much you achieve, there's still an undercurrent of never enough. So one sign of this trance is you just never get there. Does that make sense? So basically you have a all these strategies. We have strategies to feel better about ourselves, but they just don't work. But they keep us doing, they keep us from just coming into quietness and being okay. They make it so it's not safe or okay to come into the stillness. We need to do more to be okay. So it's like the saying the trouble with being, the trouble with winning the rat ways is you're still a rat. Right? That one.

So you get the idea that you just keep climbing these trees and try to be different, try to be better, but you can't get there. So that is one sign of the doing trance, the trance where you're always trying to do more to be better. The other sign of it is no matter how much you control things and try to make things right in your life, doesn't matter how much you do, there's still a lurking sense of danger,

that you're endangered, that you're not okay. So we do all these things to get our life in order, to take care of our body, to take care of other people, but it doesn't matter how much we do, there's still a sense that around the corner there's something that's going to happen and it's going to be too much. So that's another quality in the doing trance that keeps driving us. There's a story one day when the Sultan was in his palace at Damascus, a beautiful youth who was his favorite, rushed into his presence, crying out in great agitation,

that he must fly at once to Baghdad and imploring leave to borrow his majesty's swiftest horse. The Sultan asked why he was in such a haste to go to Baghdad. Because the youth answered, as I passed through the garden of the palace just now, death was standing there. And when he saw me, he stretched out his arms as if to threaten me, and I must lose no time in escaping from him.

The young man was given leave to take the service. sultan's horse and fly and when he was gone the sultan went down indignantly into the garden and found death still there how dare you make threatening gestures at my favorite he cried but death astonished answered i assure your majesty i did not threaten him i only threw up my arms and surprised at seeing him here because i have a trist with him tonight in bagdad you understand it's like we think we can in some way cheat aging, sickness, and death. So there's this doing self that's busily trying to climb the trees to get to the better personhood, that's busily trying to control things to make things safe. And in those moments of doing, of speeding around, trying to make things safe and comfortable and better, we're actually leaving ourselves, we're abandoning ourselves. and we're abandoning and leaving the silence and stillness which gives us access to that

wisdom, that love. So a story for you just to, that touched me, this is Gregory Boyle who wrote tattoos on the heart and I periodically share stories from that book and if you haven't heard me right, recommended. It's awesome. Just a beautiful book, tattoos on the heart. So Gregory Boyle is a Catholic priest and he worked with youth from in Los Angeles, he's street gangs, created some businesses, just brought his respect, his love, his wisdom to working with amazing stories of transformation. This story is a bit about himself because he's describing how there he is, he's having this busy schedule, he's done his mass in the morning and he's got a baptism to do and he's got

like a half an hour and he's trying to sort through all his bail. So he's doing just like us, cramming it all in and all of a sudden into the room walks Carmen. He says Carmen's a heroin addict, a gang member, a street person, occasional prostitute. So she walks into the room and she says, now he's got about seven minutes and she says, I need help. And she launches right in. He says She's brash, something of a no-shit sister. Oh, she says, I've been to like 50 rehabs. I'm known all over nationwide. She smiles.

Her eyes wander around my office, and she studies all the photographs hanging there. She multitas. And her inspection of the place doesn't derail her stream of consciousness rambling. The family will arrive for the baptism in five minutes. I went to Catholic school all my life, she says. Fact, I graduated from high school even. In fact, right after graduation is when I started to use heroin.

Carmen enters some kind of trance at this point and her speech slows to deliberate and halting. And I have been trying to stop since the moment I began. Then I watch as Carmen tells her head back until it meets the wall. She stares at the ceiling and then an instant her eyes become these two ponds what are rising to meet their edges, swollen banks spilling over. Then, for the first time, really, she looks at me and straightens. I am a disgrace. Suddenly her shame meets mine, for when Carmen walked through the door,

I had mistaken her for an interruption. There's a saying that to be kind we have to swerve regularly from our path. When we're in the doing trance, we abandon not just ourselves, at each other. We abandon our lives. And we're busy trying to climb that tree and be a different or better person. We meet the criteria we think we need to meet to be worthwhile, get more done. When we're trying to control things to make sure something bad doesn't happen, we leave ourselves. I remember, I was now about 10 years ago that I, or nine years ago, I went to the forest refuge which is in Massachusetts for a six-week silent retreat.

And I was approaching it with quite a sense of ambition because I hadn't had a nice long retreat like that for a few years. And Jonathan had just moved in. So it was kind of a little weird. We hadn't quite planned that he was going to move in then, but I already had it on the schedule. So he moves in. He comes down from Massachusetts to live with me,

and I take off for a six-week retreat. So I wanted to make the most of it. I was going to come back and be calm and clear and open-hearted. And I was really going for it for those six weeks. You can probably tell what it's going to be like from the way I'm setting this up. So I began and I started the way I often like to start retreats. It's just taking some days to collect the attention, to get a little more quiet and concentrated and absorbed.

And then I like to go into the more open vipasana where I'm just opening the attention, wider and just from a more calm place just noticing the changing phenomenon. Actually, everything was going along great until it was the end of the second week. When I injured my knee, I would go for kind of a quick walk in the middle of the day to energize, injured my knee. And I said, okay, well, instead of the walking, sitting, walking, sitting, that's the kind of rhythm in that.

I'll just do a whole lot of sitting. I'm going to really do sitting. do it really well, you know. So I did that, but then I got a back spasm, so that wasn't working to all. So I had to do lying down meditation, okay? I'm going to nail down, lying down meditation. I said, all right, I'll do a whole lot of body scans, because that's really great when you have to lie down. The problem was I got really, really sleepy and then got really aversive to the sleepiness. Okay, I'll bring a lot of meta to the aversion. So, okay, I'm going to do meta, you know. So, as you can tell, each time something would shift, I had yet the next strategy I was going

to bring to it. But the truth is nothing was working. And then I went into this place of really feeling defeated, like, okay, this is life and I'm just not being with it very well. I kind of got down on myself and that's when that language of disgrace, disgrace, out of grace, not in the flow. You know, I was like at war. That's when the real practice began. When I really got it that this path we're on is not about doing something to change something. It's about truly surrendering into what's here. It's an undoing. It's letting go of that part of us

that's trying to get the mind to be a certain way or trying to anything. up, you know, touching some rapture or bliss or whatever it is, it's a surrendering presence. Every time I would see my mind take off and say, go from surrendering presence to, oh, okay, now just in these moments, we're going to just follow the breath and get to this more collect, you know, every time I'd see the controlling, the coach in there, I would just say, stop. And that became the most precious mantra of those six weeks. And it wasn't a stop like a policeman doing a red light stuff. It was like this very loving, just stop.

Or sweetheart, just stop, you know. The stop was this radical. You can just close your eyes for a moment if you'd like, just right now. And just let your only intention be to let be. And if you notice there's some controlling or some leaving, just gently stop. Just this. Perhaps the most radical meditation instructions there are have to do with choiceless awareness. We just keep noticing the doing, the doing of the thinking mind, the trying to make something

happen, trying to stop something from happening, get rid of an experience. And just some gentle way we're just saying, stop, undo the resistance, come back. You can just get a taste of this. We'll close tonight with a bit more. But just to say that for me, gradually in the not doing, in the undoing all my traditional strategies, this very natural presence just emerged. And I remember the taste of it at one point was so, because it was undoing, contrived. I hadn't meditated myself into natural presence. I had kind of unmeditated myself. There were these tears at the feeling of just grace. It was like just reentering a flow that

was always here, but I was trying to navigate too much. There is something so radical about stopping or deconstructing the activity. It's like, shh. Grace. So since then for me in my meditation practice, because meditation practice can be kind of sensed as you're doing the most minimal wise doings in order to stop doing. Does that make sense? The minimal wise doing is you just wake up through the body and that's intentional. There's some doing there. You wake up so you're here. You know, wake up your senses. collect a little with the breath just to quiet, but then drop everything. And for me in each practice now when I sit formally and through the day, there's some

part of me that says after a certain amount of establishing the environment for meditation, just stop doing and just rest as presence. Just be. It's almost like the idea of we're seeking peace and we're seeking stillness and it's like we're in this motorboat that's buzzing around and it's making more and more sound and making more and more ways, and we're trying to find our way to peace and stillness. And really what we need to do is just cut back the motor.

This is the poet Hafeis, and it's the translation by Daniel Ladinsky, wonderful. He says, just sit there right now. Just sit there right now. Don't do a thing. Just rest. For your separation from God is the hardest work this world. Just sit there right now. Don't do a thing. Just rest for your separation from God is the hardest work in this world. Let me bring you trays of food and something

that you like to drink. You can use my soft words as a cushion for your head. Just sit there right now. Don't do anything. Just rest. So this radical non-doing is against all of our conditioning. As I mentioned, when we get stressed, everything in us is moved to do more, to climb the tree, to make things safe. When we have major decisions to make in our life, we don't go shh and just quiet. Our minds just turn. It's like caffeinated squirrels chasing each other around in a circle. You know, it's like we just go wild. So we don't relax back into the wisdom that's here until we start hitting a wall of suffering that tells us as happened to me at that retreat that I just needed to surrender. So a story for you,

a young man that I just met recently, a new friend, and Phil Garrity, and we visited just recently, I want to tell you a bit of his story. So when he was 23, he's 25 now, he was kind of his dream job, which he's still in, doing international health work, very much an academic success. Really loved his work, traveling, helping people, very rewarding.

But trying to sense, what's my next step? Am I going to go to grad school or medical school? or just, you know, not sure. And so he applied to top-notch medical school, but then started the churning, went and got even more aggravated until he found he was having panic attacks because in some way the fear of making the wrong decision, like, this is my life, what am I really supposed to be doing,

in some sense that his mind was consumed with that question. So he was accepted at this medical school, but for some reason he just decided he couldn't do it. So he said no. And he didn't know why, but he was drawn to a course on hospice work through a meditation center up in Massachusetts. So there he was, I think 23, with everybody else over 60 doing this hospice course. Two months into it, he's diagnosed with a very rare form of bone cancer, very aggressive. Okay? So how? that happened, that he decided no medical school, yes on hospice work, and then two months

later this diagnosis. So he spent all of last year working with this very, very intense cancer, chemo, surgery and so on, seems that he's in the clear and he's no longer spinning. He's living, it's like that soul of the whole. There's a light coming through him. a kind of grace that he's aligned. So what happened? What happened during that year? And when he describes it, his... And just to say that transformation for all of us,

there's always some kind of a dying and getting reborn. Something has to crack open in order for us to open to a larger space and widen our attention. But it's not always as dramatic as what happened with Phil. But for him, his understanding is that his panic anxiety were that he, the fear of not making a decision true to himself, that he was going to climb up a tree, you know, and try to be who he should be. He was afraid he was doing things according to the conditioning of the culture

as family but not aligned. And it was creating a really deep kind of a havoc in him, that he was going to live from too small a space in his being. So the sickness forced a very deep pause and he found that through those months he had a surrender and surrender again and surrender again every idea he had ever had about what role he'd be in, what he could do, what he would do, because he's basically facing his mortality. He had to surrender everything and then re-surrender over and over.

And he described that through that surrendering, through the deepest of surrendering, that the other side was for the first time that he felt truly seen and understood, truly held in loving presence in some spiritual way. In other words, he found grace. He had reentered the currents that he felt really at home in his being. Now he's resuming his outward life, still kind of feeling out the what's next. But like Andres that I started off with,

there's this very alive remembrance moment to moment of what matters. And that is the whole deal for us. It's like are we in that doing trance? Or is there enough of that that deeper sense of what matters, that light, that loving, can move through us? This is a poem called Toloio Lake and it's by David White. He says, in this high place it is as simple as this. Leave everything you know behind. Leave everything you know behind. Step toward the cold surface, say the old prayer of love

and open both arms. Those who come with empty hands will stare into the lake astonished. There, in the cold light, reflecting pure snow, the true shape of your own face. So what we're talking about tonight as we kind of start wrapping up is really an arctipal pathway back home to that place of where we've let everything go, all that we're holding on to, all our busyness, our doings, our ideas of ourselves, our stories of who we should be.

We just let it all go so our arms are open so that we're in that stillness and quietness that we can experience the truth of who we are and remember what most of the most of our matters to us. Now the challenge that keep coming back to is that our forgetting happens most when we're in this world and we're stressed and we're with each other. And it's not so easy when we're with each other to in some way go, okay, sweetheart stop and just let everything kind of drop. It's very hard. You know, we've got a lot of ideas of how we should be with each other. So a very, um, essential and creative and dynamic part of this path is to be with each other and still in that

remembrance, still letting that soul of the whole flow through. So we're in a personality, but we hold it lightly and there's something that keeps reminding us. And I want to share with you as a kind of final story how Phil, same young man, worked with that one. And he describes, part of his work is evaluating the effectiveness of this health program he's part of in improving the life of the poor. And he describes an experience of being in the role of helper that was very much kind of, it shattered that idea of being in one particular role with another person. and in this story he describes accompanying an old man with a broken hip this man had broken his hip and had lied somewhere unnoticed

and so he was in a huge amount of pain and he accompanied him to an emergency room but they weren't able to get him much attention because it was crowded and busy and so on so Phil describes his helplessness at not being able to provide relief for this man all they could do was hang out with him and so at one point somebody handed this man a roll of bread and I want to read to

this is Phil's words now it was then that something miraculous happened the old man broke his bread roll in half and stretched out his hand towards mine an acute sense of surprise and embarrassment came over me and at first I refused his offer insisting he eat it for surely he needed it more than I

But my attempts to decline the gift were wholeheartedly dismissed as he pushed the bread into my hand motioning near me to eat. And so I did, me looking bewildered and humbled, he looking quite pleased to share his meal with a near stranger. Moments like these conditions continue to deepen my understanding of what it means to embrace non-doing. It's come to mean being brave enough to disarm myself to set aside my intellectual firepower and self-protective shields and to enter into another's chaos, not to do for them, but simply to be with them. It takes courage to sit in that silence, often empty-handed,

and humbly accept the lesson that that man so beautifully demonstrated that day, that I am as much the patient as he is the healer, that he is not a broken machine idly waiting to be fixed by the non-broken, the privilege, the fortune amongst us. He goes on to say, solidarity, true compassion. It's revealed through an earnest and humble kind of love, where one can

simply sit with another in the silence, not feeling frantic to fill it with words or deeds. It has the courage to look into the darkness of our finitude, both of our bodies and our ambitions, which we all face not just the sick. It can trust in the value of non-doing of simply being present. So I wanted to share this story because each of us can find in our own lives those situations where we feel helpless or we feel incredibly angst about having someone else experience something differently. And how difficult it is when others are feeling that sense of their own suffering for us to be with that and let ourselves feel what's there and not try to make it go away. Now this doesn't mean we can't have the wish for relief and it

suddenly doesn't mean that we don't do things to help people including working on their behalf, being their advocates, giving money and so on. But the deepest gift we give to ourselves when we're in trouble and to others when they're suffering is a quality of non-doing presence that has that courage to just be with. It takes a huge amount of letting go of all our strategies to kind of be with the person but in a role that keeps us protected. Poem again, this is Michelle River, she says,

when words stop, when words stop, you can hear the songs of the sea In silence, lean on each other. We're together in the same boat. Let go of the oars. Trust this hole, the rudder knows answers and questions. Gently let all movements bring you closer to the divine current, the all-embracing sea.

Waves break. The oyster melts with love. Look what happens when you let go. Look what happens when you let go. So let's practice together a little as a way of closing. And just notice that you begin this practice with the simple pausing and you might sense if there's any intention as you pause. It's to really let life be as it is.

It can sometimes help to allow that flow, that grace to sense if there's a need a new life natural way of letting go if there's some places in your body that just want to soften. Soffening is like a letting go of doing. It takes doing to keep tight. So when we relax, it's actually the beginning of non-doing. To soften the shoulders, to let the hands be soft in the belly. Just notice what's happening. When words stop, you can hear the songs of the sea. See how much you can just relax with what's right here. Gently let all movements bring you closer to the divine current.

Can you sense the awareness that's here? Just relax back and be that awareness. The oyster melts with love. Look what happens when you let go. Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.