Tara Brach - Awakening Beyond Self (2015-10-21)

Episode Date: October 24, 2015

Awakening Beyond Self (2015-10-21) - Suffering is our call to deepen attention and discover the truth of who we are beyond the identity of a separate, deficient self. This talk examines how thoughts, beliefs and emotions keep us trapped in a confining identity, and two pathways of practice that serve awakening and freedom.

Greetings. I'm Tara Brock and I'd like to welcome you to these podcasts. While the talks and meditations are offered freely, we'd very much appreciate your support. To make a donation or learn more about my schedule, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org. Thank you. Again, welcome and namaste. I'd like to start this talk with a poem by the poet Tukharam. he writes, I was meditating with my cat the other day

and all of a sudden she shouted, what happened? I knew exactly what she meant, but encouraged her to say more, feeling that if she got it all out on the table, she'd sleep better that night. So I responded, tell me more, dear,

and she soulfully meowed, well, I was mingled with the sky. I was comets whizzing here and there. I was suns in heat. Hell, I was gallows. But now look, I'm landlocked in fur. To this I said, I know exactly what you mean. What to say about conversation between mystics?

Many, I suspect, have this sense of being caught in a kind of smallness of self, kind of stuck in a self, and yet also intuiting a sense of what we are, that's much vaster, more mysterious. And so we live with this kind of paradox of getting caught in the conditioning of a limited sense of what we are and also attuning and sensing at times how much more there is. And so it was the yearning for me of realizing that that greater mystery that got me to move into an ashram when I was 21 right after I graduated

from college and to move from the kind of free-willing life of the mid-70s to in a very, very disciplined kind of an ashram life where I'd be wearing, we wore white garb and turbans and

got up at 3.30 in the morning each morning and took cold showers and meditated and did yoga for two and a half hours and it was very, very structured and disciplined. It was also rather exotic in the sense of chanting Sanskrit mantras and the whole lifestyle was very different from being in a dorm. So, and underneath it all was this sense of a yearning to realize something I intuited was there

and that felt down the road and I just needed to throw myself in fully and which is what I did. What was beyond the ego? So after 12 years I got drawn by Buddhist practice and I left the ashram and went one of my first Buddhist retreats a story was told that really stands out for me and I share it now and then because I love it and the story has a woman who decides that she's going to go to India to see the guru and her travel agent tried to discourage her she said well why don't you go to Miami

like you usually do, you know. But no, she wanted to go see the guru. So she takes that long trip to the flight to India and then the train across India. And during the train ride, some other people knew about this guru, and they said, you know, the rules are you can only say two words. But she knew that. She said, it's okay, it's okay.

She gets on then the bus that goes through those hairpin turns and through mountains to get to the encampment. where the guru is. And again, a couple of devotees reminded her of the rules. And she said, right, right, right, two words. She's in line, this long line to see the guru. She's finally up front and the attendance, again, reminder of the two words. She goes in to the tent. And there he is. He's in his saffron robes, his wispy beard. She looks him in the eye and she says, Sheldon, come home. I like this because I had just come from going way out of my way doing a whole exotic lifestyle

that I had many wonderful things in it but trying to I was on my way to something it was down the road in some other world in a way and often that's the way it is on the spiritual path we have a notion of being on a path and that what we're seeking is down the road it's not like it's right in this moment, It's, we're doing stuff now and training our mind and our heart so that some point

maybe after that three-month retreat or maybe after a three-year retreat like they do in Tibet, maybe we'll have some of that realization. Or maybe it only happens to great spiritual figures from 2,500 years ago. But the point is one of the great illusions. on the spiritual path is that it's going somewhere else, that awakening happens to other beings, that it's not right here imminent, possible. So, a great cartoon with fleas wandering in a forest of fur,

and they're wondering, is there really a dog? It's kind of like that, okay? So the core perception that obscures the truth of what's right here, that it's not down the road, it's right here, the core perception is a sense of separate selfness, that there's a self here and a world out there, and there's two corollaries that lock us in, that have us landlocked. And one of the corollaries is that life should be different in some way.

There's some ongoing undercurrent that something's wrong, that something's missing, that it's not okay. And then the other corollary that goes with it is, and therefore I need to control things to make it right. When that's going on, in any moment there's a sense of a self here, things should be different, and I need to control things to make them different, we're landlocked. We're living in a limiting sense of self. We're not in touch with the fullness and truth of who we are. So the moments when this is our perceptual frame when we're trapped is those are addressed by the poet Wei Wu Wei who says,

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9% of everything you do, do is for yourself. And there isn't one. The Buddha offered a very radical teaching that I've found now in pretty much every mystical contemplative tradition. And that is that, and it's present in all, it's non-dual wisdom. And that, that teaching is that we're never separated from the awakened heart mind any more than waves are separated from the ocean. We might not realize that awakened heart mind, but we're not separate from it. Even at the times we feel most stuck, most contracted, most neurotic, it's still intrinsic to what we are. It's still there. So the corollary to that

is that this is kind of a central teaching in Buddhism, that each and every one of us has the capacity to realize that luminosity, that wakefulness, that tender-heartedness, that openness. Each one of us has that. I saw last year a very cool cartoon. There's a lot of them now of two monks sitting side by side. And in this one, one monk was annoyed and he's saying to the other, well, you stop shouting out, ka-ching, every time you have a major insight. So here's the Buddha.

He said, I would not have tired. you about happiness, about freedom, if we're not possible. I would not have taught you about freedom, about happiness if we're not possible. And to me, the only real point to Buddhism is this teaching that what we seek is not outside of us. It's right here, right now. of the Asian teachers no longer alive that I've always been inspired by a Srinar Sargadata. And he describes becoming enlightened, you know, how it happened this way. He said,

My guru told me that I'm the ultimate source, the ultimate essence of all. I pondered that until I knew it was true, until I became it. And then he added, I was lucky. because I trusted what I was told. So we can make this talk really short. Do you trust? I'm curious, if I ask the question, I'm asking it, and check in, do you trust that Buddha nature, these qualities of the awakened heart mind, are within you?

Do you trust that that Buddha nature is within you? How many of you have that trust, have that sense? Okay. Thank you. I remember when I was first asked, I went, of course. And then I started thinking of myself in different ways and I went, ah, sometimes, you know. So in a deep way, you would not be here, you would not be listening if you're listening to the podcast, unless there was some wisdom place inside you that intuited deeply that inherent mystery, that vastness of awareness and love. We intuit it.

And sometimes we get glimpses through beauty, through being in nature. It just arouses an awe that tunes us into who we are beyond that limited sense of self. Or sometimes it could be through lovemaking or having a child or being at the bedside when someone dies. There are so many moments that there might be a quietness. and the minds between the thoughts or something that shines through. We have many moments.

So we have that intuition of who we are beyond the self and we also wouldn't be listening and wouldn't be participating in meditation if we weren't aware of the suffering of forgetting, right? And we know we forget, that we get small-minded. So, part of awareness taking form, incarnating is forgetting.

This is roomy. Whatever comes into being gets lost in being drunkenly forgetting its way home. And I like that because we often add that sense of something's wrong with me to the fact that we forget and we get waylaid. and we get fixated on very small, narrow goals and forget what really matters to us. It's not our fault. We're designed to forget. But that's also not the end of the story. And if you think of it in an evolutionary way, we're designed to forget, to get identified as an individual ego self.

And we also have the equipment to recognize that, to be meta to that, and see that happening, see that process happening and touch into something that's unitive, something that's vast, and beyond that separate self. And the pathway, what's required is to release the fixation of selfing. The word selfing is,

it's part of the jargon or the lexicon in the Buddhist community, and it's just all the activities, all the narrative, all the beliefs that keep sustaining the sense of, here I am separate and usually deficient. So we need to be able to release the fixations of that. Tonight we'll be looking at two primary pathways of how we kind of release the fixations and open to who we are.

And I find the most useful metaphor for these pathways is one of ocean and waves that one way of practicing is to attend to the waves of the present moment. And this is what we often are teaching with mindfulness practice, to be quiet a little bit with the breath, but then we're mostly opening to notice what's going on, noticing this rising of fear, and noticing these thoughts and then this belief,

and then noticing the sounds of the sirens as we were meditating, and then noticing a little bit of a clutch in the chest, and noticing an ache or soreness in the back, and then noticing excitement, whatever it is, we're recognizing and allowing the change, changing waves. And the power of that when we start witnessing and bringing mindfulness to the waves and letting them come and go as they are is we start relaxing back and sensing the ocean-ness. We start sensing the presence that's vaster than any of the

particular formations of the waves. So being mindful of the waves reveals the ocean. Does that make sense so far? Are we good? Okay. Well, the second pathway, and when we've quieted some, is actually to turn the attention and intentionally look towards the ocean itself, to intuit and feel into that formless being quality. And when we can, when we begin to start inhabiting this, that sense of formless being, then the waves ripple along the surface and there's a cherishing, there's a presence with, but we're not identified by.

the waves. Now, the challenge with the second way of looking towards awareness itself is it can easily lead to what sometimes called premature transcendence, where we have the sense of, okay, I'm just the vast, empty ocean, but we're actually dissociating from the waves. It's not like we're actually opening to them and feeling them, we're kind of pushing away the body and the aliveness that's here. And it's sometimes called a dry emptiness because we've in some way pulled away from difficulty,

from emotions, from the body. True emptiness and openness includes all that aliveness. For that reason, most meditation trainings begin with bringing our attention mindfully to the changing waves, which is where we begin,

in this inquiry tonight, opening to the changing waves. And we're going to do it by looking at a main domain of selfing. Because if we can begin to bring our attention to it, and this is the incessant inner narrative that keeps telling us who we are and believing in things that aren't true, if we can shine a light on that, that's the main hook that keeps us from realizing something larger. So a primary flag of selfing is obsessing where we obsessively think.

And most of us have at least good seasons of it where we're anxiously worrying and planning and figuring out. It's a survival tool of the ego. One of my favorite examples of this. About eight years ago, we had one of our standards. Poodles was a name Hakuna and Jonathan brought him into my life. I was a stepmom and he was a super standard poodle like monstrously large about 110 pounds. Jonathan used to call him a poodle on steroids. They were really big. So I take him for a walk around the neighborhood in Cardrock Springs where I

live then and it'd be fun he'd be happily cheerfully bouncing along sniffing and so on. But then periodically we'd encounter a pair of Akitas that lived on the other side of the neighborhood. Now, there was bad blood. Bad blood between. And as soon as I'd see them, what I'd have to do is find a tree and wrap the leash around a tree and hold on, because remember, he's 110 pounds. And that's a lot of hurling mass of poodle. So I would hold on to him.

And then as soon as they'd come closer, he'd start lurching at them and barking and growling. and they'd walk by and then it would be over pretty abruptly I'd unwind the leash and he'd go back to prancing along cheerfully and sniffing and it was all done and I used to think wow if that was a human not a not a dog he'd be like mulling over in his mind he'd be saying to himself you know who the hell they think they are that's my hood you know what are they doing in my hood I can't trust them they're going to come back again I'm going to teach them a lesson you know So I'm no wimp, you know, that kind of thing. And it would go on and on, right? But he just dropped it.

It was a great teacher for me on that. Anyway, so a key element in our practice and our training is to notice the waves of obsessive thinking, to notice them. And even if it's not obsessive thinking, to notice the waves of thought. Because what happens is we get lost inside them. and they tell us who we are and we believe them and they tell us who other people are and we believe them

and they tell us what's going to go wrong around the corner or what's wrong with us and we believe them okay so we begin to have the intention and the training and meditation to sit still and just notice okay notice when you've been lost in thought and don't add another thought of judgment to that thought because that just makes it more heavy, you get more landlocked in fur,

but just notice, and then gently wake up again out of it, listen to the sounds, come back to your senses. And the more you do that, and notice the difference between any thought and what's right here, the more you get, wow, it really is a virtual reality.

It's not the truth. This is perhaps one of the biggest takeaways in the whole Dharma, the whole path, is getting it that our thoughts are not who we are, that we don't have to believe our thoughts. When we start getting that, we have a lot more freedom to begin to sense what's true. It is so easy to be in a virtual reality of thoughts and take them as real.

And one of my favorite examples is if you think of the personals, for some of you have done the personals and you know what it's like, how you read something and you get this idea of who the person's going to be. Here's one example.

Single black female seeks male companionship, ethnicity unimportant. I'm a very good-looking girl who loves to play. I love long walks in the woods, riding in your pickup truck, hunting, camping, and fishing trips, cozy winter nights lying by the fire. Candlelight dinners will have me

eating out of your hand. Rub me right way and watch me respond. I'll be at the front door when you get home from work wearing only what nature gave me. Kiss me and I'm yours and there's a phone number and ask for Daisy. Thousands, thousands of men called up the number and found themselves

connected to the Atlanta Humane Society. Daisy, of course, is a black laboratory retriever. Virtual reality. So the more that we awaken and we compare our thoughts to reality, the more we get these are sound bites, they're images. They're not the real thing. And we start getting that, you know,

there's just a lot of stuff going on inside us. I sometimes think of anybody was whispering in my ear. The stuff that goes on in my mind, I wouldn't put up with it for a moment, you know. one of the instructions we sometimes suggest playfully at retreats is just to imagine everything you're thinking is actually going on in the mind of the person sitting right in front of you or it's coming through a loud speaker everybody's thoughts are just coming through a loud speaker but we're nuts really when we look at the kind of thoughts that go through our minds

so part of deconditioning selfing is to be able to bear witness to the thoughts and not believe them. And then what starts happening is when we become aware of thoughts as a mind starts settling a little because we're not fueling them and we start noticing gaps between the thoughts and in those gaps

really the light of reality shines through. We start having a glimmer of something that we can't really put words on, something that's mysterious but begins to help us rest in what's called true nature. Now the big challenge with waking up from the narrative is when our thoughts are really sticky, when they're telling us something we've been telling ourselves for years about who we are. So we're going to spend a little bit of time with

our core beliefs because our fear beliefs are very, very hard to just look at and say, oh, I don't have to believe this. And yet that's what's possible. What happens with our core beliefs, these are the basic fear beliefs that say something's really wrong with me. I'm not going to be loved. I'm undeserving of love. I'll always fail. I can't trust other people. That kind of thing. What happens is they loop with feelings of shame and fear and they trigger off behaviors that of course reaffirm our beliefs and they become our personality and our character. and as Gandhi said, they then turn into our destiny. That if we keep on living out of our core beliefs

about a limited self where something's wrong and we need to do something about it, if we keep living out of that, we keep replaying the same patterns. It creates our destiny. So, where do the beliefs come from? Well, from our parents saying, in some way, be different than you are, from the culture at large saying that who you are is not okay,

especially from the dominant culture that makes all those that are not in the dominant culture in some way less that really sends messages of you are not as good as and as worthwhile as us. So we end up believing them and then these are the two basic beliefs. I need to be different and I need to control things in order to be different. Okay, remember those are the beliefs that keep us landlocked in ego, infer. So, the inquiry is often can we begin to get that these are real but not true? And this is a phrase I try to bring in in many, many talks. I got it from Tibetan teacher Sokney Rimbusha, wonderful teacher.

real but not true that the belief in some way that you're not deserving that something's wrong with you that other people won't love you that you have to do a lot in order to get other people's affection real but not true it's real

because it's actually happening and it sets off real feelings in us and real behaviors and so on but it's not truth Can we get that? Usually when we bring that real but not true into our attention, we usually go to the sense of, well, it really does feel real. So, what helps us to unhook from beliefs?

And again, I'll quote Srinar Sorgadati. He says, illusion exists because it's not investigated. We need to pay more attention. every one of us, to the degree we feel not free, to the degree we suffer, it's because we're believing something that's not true. We're believing in a self that's limited and deficient,

and that's not true. So we need to investigate. And our suffering is a call to investigate. Suffering is not a bad thing. I think of it as if you imagine a caterpillar in a cocoon, and developmentally at some point that caterpillar is supposed to break open and fly to freedom, right? And if it develops but it doesn't leave the cocoon, there's going to be pressure against that cocoon and that pressure creates suffering.

Well, your suffering arises because you're more than you think you are. There's a bigger truth that you're not inhabiting. You're living landlocked. So, I'll give you an example of when we say, investigate, what does that mean? It's what we've explored many, many rounds. It means bringing mindfulness and compassion to the belief, inquiring, feeling into it. And the illustration I'd like to share, which I shared with some in the last few months, share it again because this story really touched me,

really inspired me actually, was about an executive who was responsible for a number of team leaders in his tech company and personality-wise and so on he was a really critical person, judgmental, harsh, alienated others, people were intimidated, his employees, but it was most painful what happened with his wife and his two teens

that he really alienated and created a lot of sense of resentment and upset. So a friend sent a podcasted talk and he thought maybe mindfulness could help. He was at one of our short retreats, or three-day retreats. And we worked in the group

and he got in touch with his anger and the beginning of really beginning to bring attention there is just to recognize and allow, okay, anger's here, just to give space for it. Especially with anger, we so quickly make it wrong. I know for myself when I'm feeling anger, I sometimes have to say forgiven, forgiven, not because, oh, it's bad and I'm forgiving it, but because so often I assume that I shouldn't be feeling it, just to make room for it.

So he made room for it, just allowing it to be there and I asked him to investigate and it felt like that kind of swollen, hot bursting feeling and then as he kept allowing himself to feel it underneath that he felt this clench of anxiety. And I asked a question I often ask when we're investigating experience mindfully and that is what are you believing? When you're feeling that anger what are you believing when you're feeling that fear? And it's believing that fear and as belief was things are going to go out of control and I'm going to fail. That was what was underneath his anger, that when the world wasn't cooperating, an employee, his wife, his son and daughter, it's out of control, something's going to go wrong and I'm going to fail. So I asked him this

basic question, is it really true? I mean, is it possible this is real but not true? Okay? And And as many people did, he said it certainly feels real, this feeling I'm going to fail. And so I asked him to let the feelings be there. I'm going to fail that fear and sense how long he'd been living with it. He said as long as he could remember. As a child, he felt afraid of failure. How much of his life that had affected. He could sense how much that distanced him from other people to always be afraid of failing.

And as he got in touch with the effect of living with that belief in those feelings for all those years, there was a real arising of sorrow. And I asked him what that place in him most needed, that place that was afraid, that had that belief. And he said, just to know I'm aware of it, just to feel I care. And so he sent the message into himself, because I often will ask, is there a message that would have? help and it was simply it's okay. Real kind, it's okay. He said with that, and this is all in the

group, it actually happened fairly quickly. He said he started saying it's okay, he could feel softening. He could just feel there was more space. He wasn't caught in the angry self or the fearful self. He was resting in a kind of a witnessing, kind, tender place. So I asked the question, who would you be if you no longer believe that? Who would you be if you no longer believed that you were going to fail or that you're a failure? And he didn't have words for it but he kind of did this, which in the motion I'm doing is kind of like fly like a bird. He'd said, I feel it was kind of freedom, just free. So he practiced this.

This was his practice. Every time anger would come up, sometimes he'd get angry and blow it, but other times he'd pause. And he'd feel in his body, he'd feel the anxiety. he'd sense what was needed, you know, and just say it's okay and it would come and it would go. Being with the waves. And again, I want to remind you when the waves come and there's a sense of something's wrong and then we try to control things, he was controlling with his anger, then it just locks us into that small self.

But if the waves come and instead we pause and we feel what's going on and we inquire and we sense what's really happening, and we bring kindness, they come and go and we discover a larger sense of identity. We're not landlocked. By the way, there's a clash of metaphors here, in case you haven't noticed, waves and landlocked, I apologize. I didn't think that out. So I want to give you a little bit of the aftermath for him.

He practiced this for a few weeks, and then he came in and told me a story that had happened at work where one of the project leaders had come in to meet with him and admitted that things were way behind schedule and that he personally had had some things that fell through the cracks. He apologized.

He said he was going to try to get on them. And as this man was listening, he could feel the growing anger because this is going to reflect on me and this is a failure and so on and the anxiety. And he just mentally was breathing with it and whispering it's okay.

So he calmed down some more presence. and as he calmed down he saw this man in his earnestness and his sincerity and that he was really trying and being quite honest and how he had been for this last seven years that way and he reflected that back. He said, I understand. I trust you're doing the best you can. Well, this was not his normal response. The guy was a little surprised.

He looked surprised and then he said, well, I wasn't going to bring this up, but the reason things are falling through the cracks is because my wife was diagnosed with stage four cancer. And my children and I, oh, it's just a really, really rough time. So thank you for your understanding. And as he was leaving, the man hugged, which had never, ever happened in his time working with other people.

And he told me afterwards, he just sat. in his office and he said he had tears in his eyes when he thought about how different it could have been, how he could have just blown it and been angry and not had those moments of realness and kindness with this person and gratitude that he's actually living from more the truth of who he was. So this is the practice of real but not true and just to get a taste of it we don't have time to fully examine and shine a light on beliefs right now. I just want to invite you to take a few moments just to get a taste. You might close your eyes and scan for a time recently when you

got stuck in some strong emotional reactivity, perhaps with another person in your family or at work, friend, situation where you got angry or felt hurt, maybe filled with judgment, maybe where you felt intimidated, someplace where there's some suffering, which you can sense is this call to deepen attention. You might let yourself look more closely at that situation where you felt reactive. When you're feeling those feelings,

you might ask yourself, well, what am I believing in those moments? If you look through the eyes of the place in you that's most vulnerable or activated, what's that place's view of the world? What's it believing? Is it believing in some way you're deficient? Is it believing in some way you're being rejected or that you're not special or you don't matter? That's the way others are perceiving you?

If you can sense into some belief there, that you're going to fail, that something bad's going to happen, how others are relating to you, feelings of unworthiness. You sense into that, you might ask, is this really true? Or might this be real but not true? And you might notice really honestly, what is it like to be living with this belief? When you're believing this, and you might exaggerate at some so you can really tap in,

what's it like? What's it like in your body and your heart when you're believing? believing this. Can you sense how landlocked, how small you get, how tight, the suffering of believing. Maybe you can sense how long you've been living with this belief and how it's affected your life, the moments of intimacy that have not happened because of it, the capacity to enjoy, to be creative, to feel more free. And as you bear witness to where the hook is, what you're believing, the feelings. You might regard yourself that experience with genuine compassion and sense a gesture of kindness right now. It might be, as I often do, putting your hand gently on your heart, it might be some words that you offered yourself that

go right to what's needed inside, the place in you that's caught, the place in you that feels that something's wrong, that feels it needs to defend or control, just send some message of kindness of care, letting yourself feel that vulnerability inside you. And if it's hard to offer care to your own being, you might call on the inexhaustible source of love that's in this universe, just call on it. Ask it to flow through you, through your hand, through your heart, right into the place you that most needs it. Ask for that. See what happens.

You might sense and ask yourself, who would I be if I didn't believe this anymore? Who would I be without this belief? Just ask and get that glimmer. What would my life be like without this belief? Sense in the moments of holding your being with a belief. kindness or feeling held, that shift in identity, that sense of opening beyond that landlocked to small deficient ego itself and just sense that tenderness, that awakeness, that openness,

that's really the qualities of your true nature. And know that every time this suffering comes up, it's a call to deepen your attention to bring presence and kindness and discover over and over again a larger truth. You can continue with your eyes closed if you like or open your eyes. So thus far we've been really exploring how we pay attention to the waves and begin to sense a larger identity by going really truthfully into the waves and in this case the waves of beliefs and feelings. Now I mentioned the other pathway which will

spend the last part of this reflection on which is beginning to open to the sense of ocean-ness, the formless presence that's always and already here but often obscured by our thoughts and habits. And so this is a shift in attention rather than focusing on the waves, on the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations, the breath, were actually turning back towards awareness and surrendering into something vast and mysterious. And it takes a willingness to open to the mystery. I wanted to share this story and then we're going to practice a bit. And this is a story, a woman who she cries out,

oh my God, David, no. And this is a woman named Glenda and she sees bright lights headed straight for the car. as a squeal of the tire struggled to grip the road and her own shriek of helpless terror combined, she knew she had lost her husband forever. This is an awful accident. Moments before the car came crashing through their windshield, the couple had argued over something silly

and been sitting in resentful silence. They had had these little scuffles before, but unlike all previous skirmishes, this time there would be no opportunity to apologize and reconfirm their love. Three years after the accident, this is, by the way, written by a surgeon, Glenda sat with me in a dimly lit hospital chapel. At her request, I'd arranged the meeting between her and the young man whose life had been saved

by the gift of her husband's heart. The heart recipient and his mother were almost a half hour late for the meeting, and I was ready to suggest to Glenda that we leave. The issue of recipients meeting donor families is a sensitive one. I understood why the man might have changed his mind. As I stood and took Glenda's hand, she said quietly, No, we have to wait. He's here in the hospital. I felt him arrive about 30 minutes ago.

I felt my husband's presence. Please, wait with me. Glenda is a practicing family physician. She's well-versed in bioscience and as I do, admires the rigor and healthy skepticism of modern science. Now, however, the power of something that transcends what science calls common sense was tugging at her heart. David's heart is here, she added. I can't believe I'm saying that to you, but I feel it.

His recipient is here in the hospital. At that moment, the door opened and a young man and his mother walked hurriedly down the center aisle of the chapel. Sorry, we're late, he said, with a heavy Spanish accent. We got here a half hour ago. We couldn't find the chapel. After introductions and an awkward attempt at humor about having a heart to heart, heart meeting between the young wife and her husband's heart, the usually shy Glenda blurted out, this embarrasses me as much as it must embarrass you, but can I put my hand on your heart, on your chest? I mean, feel it, feel your heart? The young man looked at me and his mother, put his hand to his chest and finally nodded his head. As Glenda reached forward, he unbuttoned

his shirt, took her hand and gently placed it against his naked chest. What happens next transcends our current view of brain, body, heart, and mind. Glenda's hand began to tremble and tears rolled down her cheek. She closed her eyes and whispered, I love you, David. Everything is copacetic. She removed her hand, hugged the young man to her chest, and all of us wiped tears from our eyes. Glenda and the young man sat down and saluated against the stained glass window of the chapel,

held hands in silence. Speaking in her heavy Spanish accent, the young man's mother told me, my son uses that word copacetic all the time now. He never used it before he got his new heart, but after surgery, it was the first thing he said to me when he could talk. I didn't know what it means. He said everything was copacetic. It's not a word I know in Spanish.

Glenda overheard us, her eyes widened. She turned towards us and said, that word was our signal that everything's okay. Every time we argued and made up, we would both say everything's copacetic. copacetic. Our discussion about a magic word that seemed to reveal a code of the heart within him stimulated the young man to share story after story of changes he experienced following the transplant. Described by his mother as a former vegetarian and very health conscious, he now craves meat and fatty foods. A former lover of heavy metal music, he now loves 50s rock and roll. He reported recurrent dreams of bright lights coming straight form.

Glenda responded almost matter-of-factly that her husband loved me, had played in a Motown rock-and-roll band while in medical school and that she too dreams of the lights of that fateful night. If we can slow down and quiet even a bit, we get that this is such a mystery this life we're living. We don't know any of the answers to the big questions. this field that we're belonging to of aliveness and awareness. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes we touch it when we're accompanying someone at their death or at a birth or looking at the night sky. It's a mystery.

So there are several pathways to begin to quiet the mind and then turn right towards the mystery. And we'll just practice a little tonight as a closing of this. But just to say, all the practices that turn towards the formless, towards the ocean of awareness, are grounded in non-doing, much like the meditation practice before I began this talk. They start with non-doing and they end with non-doing because true meditation is non-meditation. We can't contrive or control experience and then trust its reality. So it's really in the moments that we relax the controls, that we just open and relax back, letting life be just as it is, that we begin to see directly into the nature of this mysterious reality.

So as we practice, I'll just say the attitude that most supports looking into the ocean of awareness really is a light touch. Be curious, be friendly, open to the mystery. This afternoon, I was, as I was preparing some of my thoughts for this evening, I got a call from one friend who's part of our community. And he reminded me of how when he first came to classes about four years ago, and when I did this kind of a talk, he would say, I totally zoned out.

That's what he said to him. It's okay to zone out. It's okay if this doesn't connect. And then the moments I said, don't worry if this doesn't land for you, he was so relieved, because it didn't. he said three years later, this has become a central part of his practice. So hold it lightly. And don't, if it doesn't feel like it makes sense, that's fine. Just be curious. In that spirit,

you might take a moment to pause and close your eyes, let the attention go inward. Just notice what's going on inside you right now. You might sense if there's a natural relaxing, there's any part of you that wants to let go a little. And just for curiosity's sake, you might want to take a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds, to try not to be aware. Okay? 10 seconds, try not to be aware. And perhaps for most of you, it becomes quite evident that awareness is just happening. It's not something you can turn off. You don't have to go anywhere to be aware. Awareness is what's listening to these words. Awareness is what's looking through your eyes, seeing the scattered bits of light and darkness. Awareness is what's feeling the sensations in your body. Take a moment to notice what you're aware

of, to really listen and let the sounds flow through you. Then you might know, you might know notice that there's silence that's listening. Can you sense the silence that's listening? Just do intuitive, relax back and just be the silence that's listening. You might be aware of sensations, taking a moment to notice the whole play of sensations, tingling, vibrating, pulsing, warm. And if you turn back towards awareness, can you notice the stillness that's perceiving sensation, being that stillness? Again, you might notice in the foreground sounds, feelings, sensations. Can you notice in the background that vast openness that everything's occurring in and just be that openness, that this entire universe is arising and passing,

through, nothing to figure out. If thoughts arise in the foreground, you might sense the silence that's listening to the thoughts, taking a moment to sense this human heart right here with its vulnerability, its feelings, and sense the tender heart space, formless, empty, radiant heart space, that which is aware, moving from the foreground, the waves of experience to recognize in the background, this oceaness, the waves all dancing on the surface, inhabiting that vastness. This is roomy. I am water.

I am the thorn that catches someone's clothing. There's nothing to believe. Only when I quit believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul. Now in this ocean of pearling currents, I've lost track of which was mine. Namaste and thank you for your attention. We hope you've enjoyed these teachings. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule and special online offerings,

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