Tara Brach - Am I Dreaming? (retreat talk)

Episode Date: May 10, 2014

2014-05-07 - Am I Dreaming -  As we cultivate mindfulness we become increasingly aware of how we move through huge swaths of our life in trance. This talk reflects on three key domains of trance, and undoing the habitual reactivity that keeps us from the loving, open awareness that is our essence.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. I wanted to begin. I was very touched and I loved Trudy's sharing last night about wise effort and it reminded me of an experience I had in 2001. And this was a few weeks before 9-11. And I was at the World Trade Center at a conference on Buddhism. It was run by tricycle, It's one of their first Buddhist conferences. And so they asked, as the opening address, they asked about six of us to speak to the question of what, if we had it just in 10 minutes described from a Buddhist perspective, what is the key to liberation, you know, to happiness, to realization, what's the key to it?

And they had a lineup of, at least in my eyes back then, of real elders. And I was the only woman in the lineup. And the person before me was Richard Baker Roshi, and if maybe you don't know of him, Suzuki Roshi's air. Well, in my eyes, he was like a, you know, a real rock star. And so I was intimidated and I was the third to go. We were all sitting up on the stage. And so when he got up, I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to use these 10 minutes.

There's going to be a lot of this twos, you know. I'm just really going to use it. it. He got up on the stage. He bowed. He said, basically, the key to freedom is intention and attention. He bowed again, and he went and sat down, and I'm sitting there like this. Now, I have no idea what I said, but I remember completely what he said. And so I was, you know, reflecting this the sense of this invitation to wise effort that really intention and attention. You know, if I look past the last decades, and there have been so many different people who've gotten involved with the spiritual path, and for those that I've kind of traveled with

friends and so on that got involved in the early days, there are many people that have plateaued in different ways. that have kind of gotten habitual and, you know, it's still helping them with stress and so on. There's not a sense of that adventure into the mystery, you know, that kind of a thing. Those that have that real feeling of this continued awakening, the key quality that I've observed is this a kind of sincerity, a kind of wholeheartedness, that has a real innocence to it, just like in love with waking up, in love with truth. I mean, with it as a sense of really getting that there's some trance or constriction

that we're kind of buying into but not wanting to. So there's this in love with just really continuing to pay attention. So intention energizes attention. and what we're doing here together is bringing this attention that has the quality of lucidity and care, and it shines a light on that trance. It shines a light on all these assumptions we walk around with that are saying in some way not enough, or else you're wrong, or something's wrong. So I like the language of trance because it actually helps me to see more.

more clearly. And I ran into this little story, Anthony DeMello tells. He's a Christian contemplative writer. It's a story about a gentleman who knocks on his son's door. Jamie, he says, wake up. Jamie answers, I don't want to get up, Papa. And the father shouts, get up. You have to go to school. Jamie says, I don't want to go to school. Why not ask the father? Three reasons, says Jamie. First, because it's so dull. Second, the kids tease me. And third, I hate school. And the father says, well, I'm going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it's your duty. Second, because you're 45 years old. And third, because you're the headmaster. So the classic description of our predicament is living in a dream, as many of you know. And we practice here with, you

just over and over again, waking up out of our thoughts and so on. I liked hearing, this is Reb Salman, who describes, you know, he was traveling the circuits teaching. He describes his youngest daughter, Shalvi. She's about five years old at the time, and one day she wakes up and says to him, Abba, and it might be Abba. I'm not sure to pronounce it. It means father.

She says, you know how when you're asleep and dreaming it seems so real? And then you wake up and realize it was just a dream? When you're awake, can you wake up that much more and realize that this is just a dream? It's pretty precocious, right? So we are waking up. I just love watching all of us here together, and I'm including all of us, because I feel like this environment is conducive to deepening attention. And when we do, we see the different ways we've been,

hanging out, believing that we're something other than that we are, that we're not who we think we are. I had a t-shirt that now Law owns. You still own it? She gave, Law gave it away. I have to process, I just need a few moments to process this. Law gave it away, okay. Okay, this too. The T-shirt said, it says, meditation, it's not what you think. Meditation, it's not what you think. So there's a greater truth. And we live in a kind of narrowed plane, and there's a greater truth.

There's a mystery that's aware and loving and here always. and we're living in something smaller. So really the most ongoing inquiry behind all our inquiries is something like what in this moment truly serves awakening? What in this moment

most serves awakening? And in some way if there's any sense of separation that yearning place in us is really wondering that like what in this moment allows for more freedom? What awakens us from the dream? In this morning's instructions, I asked a question at one point,

some of you might remember, which is to just ask yourself, am I dreaming? And this is a question I found in one of the teachers that's most inspired me, Punjaji, just to ask yourself, am I dreaming? And the inquiry shines a light on how often, even when we think we're present, there's a kind of thin veil of commentary or critique or imagining that we're sitting here meditating, having another image that some way divides

us from the fullness of just being right here. So what I'd like to do with our time tonight is explore three key markers of dreaming of when we really in that trance. and the ways that naturally attention can undo the trance, each of the markers, as you'll sense, by very nature, is a way that we're resisting reality, that we're in some way pushing away or wanting life different. And the first that we'll be exploring is attitude,

that sense that what's going on right now is wrong. And often we're not aware that we've come to, that conclusion, but there's some underlying sense that this is bad or wrong. And the second marker that we'll be exploring is how out of that bad wrong feeling, we deepen the resistance by looping around in thoughts and reactive emotions. And then the third is how we then go into either behaviors that are driven by grasping our version. So those are the third. So those are the three signs that we're dreaming. So let's just take them one and a time, because with each one of them, I just want to explore with you how it actually consolidates a sense of self. And sometimes

this is described as kind of a chain, a kind of chain of becoming. It's a simplified version of the chain of dependent origination where you have some sense of pleasantness or unpleasantness, and right out of that comes something's missing or something's wrong. And right out of that comes a looping of the thoughts and feelings to start taking control. And each step further solidifies a sense of egoic self. Further deepens the dream. Does that make sense so far, just broadly? Okay. So attitude, which really says that what's going on right now is kind of a problem. And So it doesn't matter what the state is. It could be, you know, anger or fear or a sense of failure,

or sleepiness or restlessness, any of the challenging energies, we have an assumption with the unpleasantness of it because there's some tension, some stress, that this is wrong or bad. And as we've been exploring through this week, these energies are not only universal, but they're actually information. When we have an emotion arise, there's an intelligence. Our nervous system is designed to have that emotion because there's an intelligence that's communicating to us, hey, pay attention to something.

So when we make something wrong, we're not paying attention to it. Okay? And then it gets stuck, and then the chain moves on. In a broader way, as a culture, we consider stress when there's a sense of tension, pressure, as a bad thing. It's just a kind of assumption that, oh, stress is bad. And there's been some very interesting studies in the last couple of years that really explore that attitude. In one study, they were tracking 30,000 people over a period of eight years.

and they asked two questions. How much stress did you have last year? And do you believe stress is harmful to your health? Okay, just those two questions. And then they tracked to see who died. Good study. It's interesting. Okay, so here's what happened.

Those who experienced a lot of stress in the prior year, 43% more risk of dying. But it was only true for those who felt that stress was bad for their health. In other words, the lowest risk of anyone in the study were those with high stress but didn't believe it was bad. Now, that's interesting. High stress means, okay, lots going on, but this is not bad. It's not wrong. This is not a mistake.

It's information. I'm going to tell you one more piece of this because there was a study at Harvard, and before the stress test, they were taught to consider their stress response as helpful. In other words, a pounding heart readies you for action, breathing faster, more oxygen to the brain, you know, that kind of thing. And in this study with the heart, when the heart rate went up in the breathing, there was no constriction related to cardio problems. In other words, the stress had a very similar profile to joy.

It was just active, the body system responding to intensity. So if you're interested in this kind, I think, Kelly McGonical from Stanford has really spearheaded some of these studies, health psychology. But to me, the point is this, that as part of our ego's development, stress, these different emotional challenges, is critical information for us to sense how we need to adapt and shift our attention so as to wake up. In other words, whenever we're getting caught in emotional pain, it's feedback that you're believing something that's not true. If you're caught in emotional pain, you're believing in feeling something that's limiting. If you're caught in emotional pain, it means that you're identified with an egoic sense of self. You're in a dream. and it's a message. It's not a bad thing. So the undoing of the dreaming, if we can catch it at that

stage, okay, there's something unpleasant or challenging going on. Instead of making it wrong, we can catch that attitude, then we can actually make use of what's going on. I give you an example from my own life. I'm going to share from you a few tonight examples of undoing that places where I felt like I learned some things that were really helpful. And in this one, this is one of the earliest retreats I went to. It was a retreat. I had just begun in a teacher training program, and I was shifting from teaching yoga to teaching meditation.

It was early years, about 25 years ago almost. And I got overwhelmed in the first. the retreat, as many of you have noticed, the more I paid attention, the more I realized wall-to-wall judgment. I went in the retreat a few more days further. I could not believe how my mind was absolutely addicted to judging. And it was like, okay, it's always been like that. I just wasn't noticing. I was judging, you know, my family and my friends and myself. I was judging my teaching colleagues and teaching friends. I was just judging across the board. I understood the positive intention. I was judging because something in me felt like I had to be the best,

and so I had to put other people down, and if I wasn't the best, then I wouldn't be loved. So I just had to keep on putting people down, so I'd still be the best, and I'd still be loved. It didn't help to know that. I mean, it helped a little bit, but it was, the reason it didn't help was, it was so wall to wall that I knew that, yes, these are challenging energies and other people are living with their challenging energies, but this is a really, really big one. And it felt, I felt a despair, like it felt crushing in its bigness. Like, I don't know how I'm ever going to wake up out of this much judging. Anybody ever had that one? Okay. I know I'm not alone, so. There was shame and there's also grief, because I could feel how much judging,

separated me. And one of the nights of that retreat, there had been a bodhisattva talk on the path of an awakening being, and they'd shared the prayer of the bodhisattva, may these circumstances

serve to awaken. So I said, okay, I'm going to slap this prayer on this one, you know. So I just said, okay, there's this shame and this grief around judgment and it feels overwhelming. May this serve to awaken. and it was very mechanical, and I said it over and over again about five, six times, very mechanical.

But then there was like this hitch in me, and I realized, oh, I really, really want it to serve awakening. And then I realized how deep a longing I had that this pain might be a messenger, might help wake me up. And then the prayer became embodied and real. And what I experienced in that was that the very thing I was thinking, this is a bad situation. By bringing that prayer in, I actually in my body got the possibility of it serving,

the possibility of how it could be part of healing, that it wasn't an obstacle to my spiritual path. It was the path. Let me just invite you to reflect for a moment on this one, because this is the first piece of the dream where we get caught, that something's wrong. And just try this one on for a moment. Just letting your attention go inward and scan your life for a situation that brings up difficult emotions, the one that you typically don't like and you wish wasn't happening,

or at least that's your first response. And just take a moment to bring the situation to mind and what it brings up and how you typically respond when it's there. It might be a situation, a conflict that comes up with another person, a child or a parent or a friend, something at work, some way that your addictive behaviors playing out, maybe something that's been going on here, that you've kind of sensed. It's just as very difficult, unpleasant. You wished it wasn't happening.

That you really wished it wasn't happening. And then just take a moment to explore this aspiration. May this too serve to awaken. And see if you can bring your sincerity. Just notice what happens when that attitude of this is wrong or bad shifts. Sometimes instead of the prayer, may this serve awakening, it can be, how might this serve awakening? And that too just opens it up some. Just if you'd like to open your eyes, please feel free.

So the beginning of the dream, when we start incarnating that self-sense, is when we start resisting reality and saying this is wrong. And I'm just giving one suggested way of beginning to recognize that and undo it. just recognize that that attitude actually locks us into us ego-excell, and by instead saying, may this serve, we actually begin to free ourselves. But often we miss it. Often we miss that one. And there's that undercurrent of, okay, this is bad or wrong. And then what it does is it triggers off a lot of obsessive thinking because that's our control strategy to try to then manage things.

It's the next step of resisting. We're resisting what is by trying to control it with our thoughts, right? And as many of you know, emotions, the normal life of an emotion, the up and down they come and go is about 1.5 minutes. But emotions, we generally experience them for a lot longer because our thoughts keep on rolling through and churning up the next surge of that biochemistry of the emotion. So as long as we're continuing to think the thoughts we're having, we keep on revving up the

emotion. So we begin to look at this as that's the next level of resistance. Sometimes I call them false refuges where we get this addictive kind of obsessing about you know anxious worry or planning or figuring out and this is really a challenging one because it's the primary survival tool of the human ego i mean these bodies compared to other animal bodies are you know pretty uh limp and weak and we don't have our senses aren't as good as most other animals so really what we got is a strategizing mind right so and yet we it's like eating you have to think you have to eat, but because we are so chronically afraid, we lock into overdue. So you have to do

some, but we just get hooked. Story to share about how we depend on it. And this is a story about a guy that goes on a safari in Africa, and he takes his poodle with him for company. And one day the poodle starts chasing some butterflies and finds himself totally lost. I like poodle stories, by the way, because I had a poodle and Jonathan did. We just are very fond of poodles and they're real smart. So this poodle's wandering around trying to find his way back after being lost

and all of a sudden sees a leopard rapidly heading his way. So the poodle thinks, uh-oh, and luckily the poodle notices some bones on the ground close by and immediately turns his back to the approaching cat and starts to chew on them. Just as the leopard's

about to pounce, the poodle calls out, boy, that was one delicious leopard, but I'm still hungry. I wonder if there's another one around. So upon hearing this, the leopard halts his attack amidstride, a look of abject terror on his face. He crawls off into nearby tree thinking, boy, that was a close call. That creature nearly got me. Meanwhile, a monkey had been watching the whole scene from high in a nearby tree. The monkey calls out to the leopard he promises some valuable information in return for the leopard's protection. The leopard agrees to the deal and of course was furious to learn the had just been made a fool of.

The leopard, now with the monkey on his back, took off to find and eat the conniving canine. Once again, the poodle saw the leopard put two and two together, because the monkey was on his back and realized he wouldn't have time to escape. So he sits down with his back to the attackers pretending he hadn't seen them. And just when they get close enough to hear, he exclaims, where is that damn monkey? I sent him off an hour ago to bring me another, leopard. So it's kind of fun. And the truth is we rely on our cleverness. And in a way, those that have gotten the most kudos or mileage are the most hooked on, on, you know, how the mind works and have hard time trusting more of a wholeness of being. And the real challenge

is that thoughts are, when we're in thoughts, we're in a virtual reality. We're resisting and pulling away from and not in contact with what's actually here. And the more that we're addicted to thinking, in other words, the more that that's our refuge, we're identified with the thoughts. We're identified with the movie that's going on in the mind. That seems like what's real. This is Heldegaard of Vingen. She writes, We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.

Thinking is an interpretive world, whether it's other people's messages are our own thoughts. it's an interpreted world. It's not really our home. Does that make sense? That when we're living in that virtual reality, we're not at home. We're one step removed. So it's a way of resisting the life that's here and it further consolidates the sense of self. We believe in the narrative we're telling about ourselves in the world and we lose touch with a sense of our intuitive being and our heart and our wholeness. So the undoing is the practice we primarily are doing here over and over again when we're recognizing the thoughts are there

and we're not pushing them away and we're not condemning, but there's a kind of opening again to what's actually real. And in that, when we do that, we start breaking that chain of becoming. In other words, we step out of that narrative that is consolidating around a self. I want to share with you a story again from retreat, because a lot of my insights happened when I've deepened my attention on this and this kind of inquiry about dreaming and seeing through the dream. And this was just a few months ago. I was, well, in January, I was at the Forest Refuge for 10 days, and that's up in Massachusetts.

And for those of you that don't know, this is a retreat center where some of the people that are there at retreat have been there for a year. There's a few that have been there for a few years. People go for long stretches of time, and there's a very strict protocol to really protect the space and the peace and the, you know, just keep a really beautiful environment for going very deep into either collected samadhi or open. So there's rules. And, you know, like here, no talking, no writing notes to other yogis, you know, no contacting. And it's very slow and quiet and still there. So Jonathan and I went up

together and we parted ways the first night we got there. He went to room 214 and I was in 201 and we knew we were just no eye contact. We were going to be ships crossing, you know, six days in. And I started fixating on the fact that I had brought these packets of emergencies with me, but I hadn't given Jonathan any. And, uh-oh, what if he got sick and he didn't have his emergencies? But I know I wasn't supposed to contact him or write a note or do anything. And I thought, you know, it wouldn't hurt to slip them under his door. You know, so, and then I perseverated a little bit.

So, you know, my mind's kind of turning like, yeah, but, you know, it could just stir up a whole, you know, now you gave me this, I'll give you that, you know. But I decided, okay, I'm going to be generous. And it's out of caring. My intention's good. So at a time, I looked down the hall and nobody was around. So I'm going down the hall like this and I went to where the door was and I shoved them under and I went back. And then all of a sudden I got this thing in my heart and I went back to the door and looked and it was the wrong door.

So I had put emergency under another yogi's jockey. door, probably someone who had been there for two years and was in a deep state of samadhi. Well, I went back to my room and I got two more emergencies, put them under Jonathan's door, but then I sat there and said, okay, okay, and I started trying to meditate. Not a prayer. I mean, you know, my mind was just circling around trying to imagine this poor person who was, you know, all of a sudden finding a little gift under, you know, whatever they were thinking. So finally, I went, wait a minute. Am I dreaming? And I really, really said, am I dreaming? And there was something in that that I just

could see the whole dance, you know, the whole thing leading up to it, the kind of the energy and the thought about kind of breaking a rule but doing a nice thing but this but that. And then, you know, having kind of blown it and broken a rule and maybe set in motion something, who knows, I asked again, am I dreaming? And I, I did. I did it about five or six times every time my mind would start going until it got really clear. The difference between the thoughts circling in my mind and the feelings coming up with them and just being here. The difference between my virtual reality and all those stories and just this moment became really, really clear.

And in that clarity there was peace. peace. In that clarity there was peace. It was like I'd really seen through it, I'd undone the dream. Now I'm giving you an example of undoing that's not, there's much more charged experiences that actually take more undoing. But that one just asking, am I dreaming? Keep in mind that it's not a way of trashing thoughts, making thoughts wrong. Here's a poem for you. This is Kaviri Patel. 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 straight into my lap, trapeze still swinging, as we sat still. So this is the second piece. We've, you know, there's something wrong. Can we stop making something wrong? And then there's the way that something wrong when we don't catch it gets us circling in thoughts. Can we wake up from that dream? And so I just say, is this a dream? Am I dreaming? Thank you very much, but not now. Choosing to let go of the dream and open. we miss it, that too. We don't undo the thinking and we don't undo the feelings. And some of you might remember Gandhi said this. He said our beliefs create our thoughts and our thoughts create our actions and our actions create our character and our character creates our destiny. So sometimes

we don't stop the chain and the more times the chain runs, the more destiny we get really trapped in an egoic trance for decades and decades or lifetimes. but we can pause at any juncture of this trance or dream and deepen attention when we catch it and we are waking up to catch it. So if we don't catch it at the stage of making it wrong what's going on and we don't catch even the looping

sometimes we catch it when we see the behaviors themselves, right? That's the next stage. We actually find ourselves eating way more than we meant to eat are saying out loud things we didn't mean to say. And those are the two main areas. We find that our main areas, this is the react of doing part of the trance. It's driven by either aggression. We haven't really been with what's right there, so we act out of the aggression.

And we find ourselves, it may be that we're demanding things from others, or we're guelting them, or we're threatening them, in some way violating. see it in our world. I'll read you a short little piece in alleged radio conversation between a U.S. naval ship and Canadian authorities off the coast of Newfoundland some years ago. The Americans are saying,

please, divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision. The Canadians are saying, recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the south to avoid a collision, Americans. This is the captain of a U.S. Navy ship. I say again, divert your course. Canadians. No, I say again, you need to divert your course, Americans sternly now.

This is the aircraft carrier. USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the U.S. Atlantic Fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers, and numerous support vessels. I demand that you change your course 15 degrees north. That's one, five degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship. Canadians. This is a lighthouse. Your call. so our trance is often very delusional too in all ways so there's the aggressive actions that we get into and then we also know how our wanting just the craving brings us into actions whether it's seducing or chasing or accumulating more pleasure seeking juicy experiences and we see it in meditation

the doing in meditation to have our meditation better and keep in mind any do doing that comes from this wanting solidifies a wanting self. So if you're meditating, you're doing a lot of tinkering, trying to get it to be like this or get it to be like that, or you have yet another project to make yourself the better meditator, that's another level of resisting what is. Kuznzakis, Nikos Kuzensakis. He writes, this is one of my favorite examples I'm sharing with you now. He says, I remember one morning, when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was too long appearing, and I was impatient.

I bent over and breathed on it to warm it. I warmed it as quickly as I could, and the miracle began to happen before my eyes faster than life. The case opened. The butterfly started crawling slowly out, and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were full. folded back and crumpled. The wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them, bending over it. I tried to help it with my breath

in vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear all crumpled before its time. It struggled desperately

and a few seconds later died in the palm of my hand. That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience, for I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry. We should not be impatient. Who we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm. So another way of resisting is really not allowing ourselves to be who we are right now. thinking we should be more and different and trying to push ourselves or contort ourselves, whether it's to please another, to get another's approval, are to meet our own expectation. It can happen in meditation when we think we should be going deep into the fear.

And there's a sense of we're not ready yet. And that really says as in the inquiry this morning that we need to be able to step back, and really find some resourcefulness and have more of the sunshine, you know, giving us strength, and then we dip in, and then we come back and get more of that sunshine. In other words, to listen to our natural rhythms. And in the moment, the wise effort is simply to notice and allow how it is right now. If we're aligned in that way, there'll be a natural intelligence on what most serves. So thus far, what we've explored

is three of the primary signs of being in the dream, making what's going on wrong, getting caught in that obsessive thinking and the emotions that come with the obsessive thinking, and then the doing, that reactive doing of trying to fix, make different ourselves, others. The path of undoing, is really a path of deepening presence with that.

And I'd like to offer for this final part of this talk, the metaphor of ocean and waves, that we deepen our attention, when we pause and discover, okay, caught in that chain, caught in resisting, in reaction, we pause, and then we deepen attention. And we're either deepening attention to the waves of experience,

We're deepening attention to the feelings that are there, what's going on in our body, the sensations. Or, as things get quieter to undo the most primary resistance that exists, we actually deepen our attention to that background of awareness itself. Keep in mind this chain of resisting is solidifying and incarnating a self. And the process of attending and befriending is undoing the resistance and really dissolving this exclusive identity with a separate self. That is the gift. That's the freedom. I like the way Zen Master Ria Khan puts it. Like the little stream making its way through the mossy crevices, I too quietly turn clear and transparent. When we're resisting, we get very solid. If you bring to mine a time in this retreat when you knew

you were taking false refuge, when you knew you were getting lost in worrying or planning, or you knew you were going for it in terms of sleeping or overeating or judging or any of the false refuges. If you bring to mind, and I'm inviting you to check this out as I'm saying this if you'd like, any of the times when you really felt kind of caught up in that resisting false refuge, including making something wrong,

and then you sense in the midst of that You know, what's my sense of self right now? You can begin to sense how solid, how confined, and how separate the sense of self. I explore this with people, the more the stronger the emotion, the more the emotion's got to kind of grip on us, the more separate and solid we feel. Does that resonate for some of you?

this is how the ego gets shaped and gets perpetuated. So the undoing, the undoing, as I'm mentioning, is either that we start deepening our attention to the waves that are coming up around that, the pain of separation and whatever shape it takes, shame, fear, anger, whatever, are as we get quieter, we actually start paying attention to the background of our experience, the more formless dimension. Give you an example, this kind of going towards transparency by paying attention to the waves first because they reveal each other again from the same retreat at the Forest Refuge that I was at,

that there was a, after the emergency episode, finally relaxed. And there was a sitting I got very, very collected and, and quiet, and a lot of rapture in that collectiveness, a lot of just vibratory, just kind of joy, and there's just a sense of absolutely in love with life, absolutely in love with life. And then I had the thought, and I imagine telling Jonathan about how in love with life I was becoming. I don't know if any of you've had any narratives where you've been telling what's happening to other people. Anybody? Yeah, okay, a few.

Thank you. I like company. Okay, so I had this little idea like, oh, so I'm going to tell Jonathan about being in love with life. And then it just collapsed. Not only did collapse, it was like, oh, here I am again, this spiritual ego that's priding herself on having certain states of mind. And this is the sense of inflation. And so I went from in love with life to judging myself for my inflated spiritual ego in just a few moments. It didn't really take on.

because it's a familiar place I've been playing with. But it was kind of like the prodigal son. I had the younger son who was like kind of grasping and really liking the state and then the older brother saying, judging. So it was the yuck of narcissism that was getting me. It was like that that was the feeling. And it was the 10,000th time that I had done the second arrow and in some way was at war with some arising of ego.

It was just like just, it was that sense of I just don't like this ego. So as I've been describing with you, I've been using this practice of am I dreaming a lot, you know, just as some way to cut through and to see. And I could see in those moments, okay, so this ego, this grasping after states and this, then the judging, is all just energetically around. It's just naturally, you know, it's just the energies of life. And I could see all that. It's expressions of awareness, just like a body's an expression

and our creative idea, or a feeling of sadness, or a moment of wonder. This is just another expression. So I was kind of telling myself that. But then my intention kind of deepened, and I really got the sense of it was remembering that kind of teaching that if we can regard whatever is happening, that we're actually choosing it. We're actually welcoming and agreeing profoundly to the life that's here. The more deeply we can say yes, the more deeply we can touch freedom. The other side is whatever we can't embrace with

love controls us, keeps us identified. So with that, my mind. intention, remember intention and attention, my intention got really sincere and then I started sensing how deep can yes go? And this is just another way of, we're just, I'm just offering different ways of posing questions, but how deep can yes go? How fully can I let be? How deeply can I love this too? Okay, and that was the kind of inquiry. And some of you might know that the progenaparamita is considered the mother of all buddhas and that's just an expression of that vastness of wisdom and love and awareness that's really the source of all beingness and so i kind of posed to myself can i relax back and just be progena parameda and let this egoic arises

truly be like solar flares from the sun it's like that like truly this belongs to this vastness? Can I be like the ocean that's loving the waves? It's like that was kind of the... So then I really started paying attention to the waves with a cellular kind of a green

and I know from working with a number of you now that this has been an incredibly rich and deeply freeing path to take what's arising and whether you think of it as the inner child or as your Prajana Parameda and this is

an expression of existence or the ocean and it's the waves, truly, truly, tenderly embracing the life that's here. That was the practice. It's like I was on a cellular way saying yes until, as I described this morning, I started sensing that progena parameda was the space between the cells and around the cells and that everything was emerging from this awareness and tenderness. it all belonged. It really all belonged. As much as we know waves belonged to the ocean, it belonged. So there was a shift there from the resistance,

the being at war with what is. There was a shift to that to being what is an inclusion that was profoundly suffused with loving presence. And then I decided to tell Jonathan a bit of, about it and looped around again. So sometimes we move through and we encounter that kind of coagulation of selfing the way I'm describing where there's a lot of charge and a lot of emotion. But also as you've found, there are times that you're practicing and it's much quieter.

And there's still thoughts that come and go. But in that quietness if you ask, am I dreaming? and really shine a light on your mind, you'll find that there's a subtle kind of ghost self there. Do you know what I mean by ghost self? I'll say it's a sense, a very subtle background sense of what you are, of a self that's in some way controlling or managing

or navigating or having things happen to it. And it's not real active. and it's not like causing a lot of, there's not a lot of grasping or aversion, but there's still some sense of a self that's doing the meditation or having an experience. When that's there, that's still a subtle way of pulling out of just that beingness and being identified. So this is a time where if we want to deepen the undoing in the most profound way, we can actually turn and look towards that sense of a ghost self and look behind and just sense, you know, who's aware of this?

Who's experiencing this? This is called taking the backwards step. That rather than paying attention to the objects that are here, sound, sensations, thoughts, feelings, we're actually gently turning the attention and looking back, it's as if there's a projection, shining the movie on a screen, we're looking back into the projector, into the light, and into the consciousness that even created the film. We're looking back into awareness. Just as with undoing with the waves, this real letting be, there's a total surrendering because you look back, there's nowhere to land, there's nothing to see. All you can do is let go

and let be. Now let me say right now that when I get a little surrendering, because you look back, there's nowhere to land, there's nothing to see. All you can do is let go and let be. Now let me say right now that when I get to talking about this, when we shift from, okay, let's be with and pay attention to objects to consciousness, there's a certain percentage of us that either go, vush, you know, like does not compute, or actually feel frightened or feel annoyed. And I want to honor that each of those is a good informative response, that it may not be the practice or the time to, to attend like this, okay? That if you explore this, it's with a really light touch and with a curiosity and an openness. You know, there's a little description. It's like jumping off a plane

without a parachute, but then discovering that there's no ground to hit and then discovering that there's no one who jumped. It's pretty zanny, was it? Okay. Okay, just for a moment, just checking this out, and I try to do this as often as I can. Just to invite you for, this is like 15 seconds. Okay, ready? For these next 15 seconds, please try not to be aware. Okay, that's enough. Was anybody successful? Anybody?

I'll share that I did this at a workshop with my mom a bunch of months ago and a couple hundred people. She was the one hand that went up. Thank you, Mama. So what we find is it's just happening, right? It's not like you don't do awareness, awareness just is. Try again. Let's just check again.

you might even say to yourself, okay, I'm going to try not to be aware. This time with some curiosity, just gently turn back and just notice awareness. See if you can get a little familiar with awareness. What is this awareness? What is it like if you were describing it? How would you describe awareness? What's the essence of awareness? Just let go and relax back and just be the awareness.

just be awareness, be that wakeful openness. And if you find the attention focusing or fixating on a sound or a thought, the undoing is just to wonder, okay, what's aware of this? Who's aware? Who's listening? And gently turn back and look. attention to awareness and then just

surrender let be Rumi writes one matter one energy one light endlessly emanating all things one bright turning diamond one one one ground yourself

strip yourself down to blind loving silence stay there until you see you are gazing at the light with its own ageless eyes. Taking a full breath, like, and coming back. So we're exploring, really, waking up from this dream

of a small, limited, separate self and the undoing of it. And this is probably the most profound level where there's no doing. If we're practicing a meditation, we get quiet enough, just the practice of, non-doing. And then when you notice an effort towards doing, just notice it and relax again. Helps to dissolve that very persistent sense of I'm doing the meditation. That the purpose of

meditation is ultimately dissolve the sense of a meditator. But then the question comes up. This is the last piece I'd like to touch into is how do we move through the world where we're doing so much doing and not have a sense of an ego doing things. We're just involved with so much. You know, here we can get silent and you might get that quiet and sense that there really is no center to things and sense that space and sense when you're walking that just sounds are heard and sensations are felt and it might not be so much of an egoic sense. But at home, we all know the trance is thick. And it's particularly thick when we're in relationship and wanting to help other people. So much of our helping, there's a kind of a quality still of a

doing self that's wanting to be a good person, or wanting to have somebody feel better because they're not feeling good makes us not feel good. So we're trying to fix them. So I want to share with you an example of how we can, even with that, begin to shine the light of awareness and pause and get out of the way. And this story shared to me, a young man, Phil, who had been very addicted to doing all his young life, proving himself academically and in work, got into Stanford Medical School, and then something in him said, wait a minute, this is more of the same, more of this resisting life by just doing, doing, doing. So he said no to Stanford. started doing volunteer hospice work, and within a month, came down with a very rare and very, very

aggressive kind of cancer, 26 years old. He's now, he's recovered, or he's in recovery. This is a story he shared about his work in a third world country doing some relief work with an NGO and having to come to terms with that doing self. He described accompanying an old man with a broken hip to an emergency room and how this man had to be taken in this wagon of a car and so he was jostled around and the amount of pain he was going through and then having to wait hours in this emergency room still not getting attention and Phil described his helplessness at not being able to provide relief because all he could do is hang out there and at one point someone handed the old man a bread roll and this is what Phil writes he says it was then that something miraculous happened

The old man broke his bread roll in half and stretched out his hand toward 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 feeble attempts to decline the gift were wholeheartedly dismissed as he pushed the bread into my hand, motioning me to eat. And so I did, me looking bewildered and humbled, and him looking quite pleased to share his meal with a near stranger. moments like this 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 be with them. It takes courage to sit in that silence, often empty-handed and humbly accept the lesson that that feeble man so beautifully demonstrated that day that I am as much the way. patient as he is the healer, that he is not a broken machine idly waiting to be fixed by the non-broken. So this is about getting out of the way. It doesn't mean we don't do things, but it means that we shine the light on where there's that grasping or aversion inside us and bring presence to that so that when we add out of the way, as we know, the river knows

how to float, knows how to get around rocks, it knows where to go. And so do we when we get out of the way and there's just that natural intention and caring. There's all these ripples of peace. So tonight, no different from anything else we've been exploring, just to kind of focus on how the dream tightens us into a solid self and how by shining the light we begin to loosen that and become more transparent. So just invite you to take a few moments come sitting quietly, aware of the waves of experience, the body, the heart.

Just sensing how deeply you can say yes to whatever is right at this moment. And sensing in the background, that which is aware, that alert, inner stillness, that formless dimension, just relaxing and resting in that wholeness. Closing verse.

Settle in the here and now. Now, reach down into the center where the world is not spinning and drink this holy peace. Feel relief flood into every cell, nothing to do. Nothing to be but what you are already. Nothing to receive but what flows effortlessly from the mystery into form. Nothing to run from or run toward. this breath, awareness knowing itself as embodiment, just this breath, awareness waking up to truth. Namaste and thank you for your presence. That poet was Dana Faults, just in case any of you

want to know. 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.