Tara Brach - Awakening from the Trance of Self-Centeredness

Episode Date: September 28, 2023

Awakening from the Trance of Self-Centeredness - At the core of our suffering is our universal human predicament: an illusion that we are a separate self. This talk explores how this identification as a self obscures our belonging to loving awareness, and offers a powerful set of practices that shine a light on self-centeredness and relaxes its grip.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Welcome. Namaste friends. I'd like to begin with a poem by the poet Tukharum. He writes this. He says, 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 I 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 and heat. Hell, I was galaxies. But now look, I am landlocked in fur. To this, I said, I know exactly what. what you mean. What to say about conversations between mystics. Landlocked infer. So this is referring to

our imprisonment in the illusion of a separate self, cut off from the vastness and the mystery and the love that's here. A friend of mine was in Asia and a Buddhist teacher asked him to tell him the essence of Buddhism, I'm kind of testing them, I guess. And my friend's response was that there's no solid, enduring self. And the teacher laughed and he said, no self, no problem. And that's the title of a book by another friend, highly recommended, the Tibetan teacher, Anam Thubten. So many of you might know of this Buddhist teaching of Anata, which is the Polyvah

word for no self, and posits that there are temporary, ever-changing bodies and minds, but there's no intrinsic center. There's no owner of the body mind. There's no locus of control, like an ego that's actually navigating. There's no centralized entity that life is happening to. So that's a and contemporary neuroscience says the same, that the sense of a centralized self is actually an illusion, that it's an idea created by the mind, that our left hemisphere is constantly creating narratives to interpret reality. And those narratives center on an idea of a self interacting with the world out there. And it leads us to become identified. with the self and the story. I am the story in my mind.

Of course, our collective consensual reality is built on the same notion of separate selves. I have a friend who's a Buddhist and a comedian, and he describes in one of his rifts, he says, I go into these New York restaurants where he lives, and he says, and I ask for a table for none. I saw an article in the tricycle, which is a Buddhist rag, wonderful, and it had a picture of a gas station, and you had to choose between self and no self. And, you know, guess which emits more greenhouse gases? Okay, so no self, no problem. Well, it's natural and healthy to have a sense of a personal self, navigating the world, the suffering comes from what you might call an exclusive identification with it. In other words, thinking, that's what we are,

it's all we are, and being cut off from a larger sense of our beingness, from a connectedness, from a belonging, from a sense of the mystery. And this full identification with a separate self is what a trance is. It's a narrow experience of reality and that what happens when that's all we think we are, that egoic self, is that life unfolds with its passing pleasure and pain and if we're identified, then our entire life is this effort to control experience. You know, when experience is bad, to tense against it and resist, to be constantly reactive, or when life is pleasant to want to enhance ourselves and grasp, that means all of our painful emotions, fear, shame, anger, jealousy, are arising from this sense of, I'm a separate being here, unthreatened, I need to enhance

myself. I like imagining, kind of go with me on this one, a forest with all these self-centered trees. And, you know, one's ashamed. He's saying it's well, it's my fault. It's something wrong with me that I'm the shortest tree around. And another's ruminating, angry, you know, why aren't more birds choosing me for their nests? Or another one's fearful. Like, I know, I know it, I know it. I'm the next to be cut down for firewood. and another's proud of its changing leaves, oh, look at me, you know, you get the idea. Instead of appreciating their togetherness, their interdependence, their intertwined roots and fungal networks and communicating, it's this fixation on self.

The poet Wei Wu Wei writes, Why are you unhappy? 99.9% of everything you think and everything you do is for yourself and there isn't one. So today's reflection is really the freedom of waking up from a confining illusion of self. And it includes teachings that I often share, sometimes at retreats, often with more experienced meditation students. So if you're listening and you're new the invitation is to just approach with a lot of openness and curiosity, take what's useful, what resonates, let go of what doesn't. The process of spiritual awakening of freedom is, it's often described as a shift in identity

from experiencing ourselves as a separate self to a sense of belonging, wholeness, unitive being. And it's described really in terms of transcending the self and including the self. So it means that we experience an enlarge beingness. And the sense of a self is still there, just not an exclusive identity. It's like including waves of our self-experience, the thoughts, the feelings, and so on, but remembering we're the ocean. And there's different language for describing that oceaness, some just reality, just remembering the whole of reality. Some describe it as spirit or God or consciousness, the divine, loving awareness, Buddha nature, the ground of being. Whatever the language, we all detect there's something more.

we detect there's something more, whether it's conscious or unconscious, there's a longing to realize the truth of a larger belonging, a sense of communion, loving, and it draws us to the path. And the Buddha said, you know, I would not teach about this realization, this freedom, if it were impossible because it is our evolutionary potential. We intuit it because our true nature is already and always here. I've always loved the line from the poet Kabir, which is simply the guest I love is inside. You know, the more we glimpse the deeper truth of our belonging to love, to spirit, you know, the more we are familiar with it and trust in it, the more it transforms all of our moments, all of our relationships, all of our life. So let's take a closer look at the selfing trance, this trance that

centers on self because that's the real meaning of self-centeredness. And of course, the natural place to start would be with Greek mythology. Most of you are familiar, one of the most famous of Greek miss is Narcissus. And this illustrates the suffering of self-centeredness to its extreme. As many are familiar, Narcissus was a beautiful young man, and he didn't love anyone until he saw his own reflection in the water, and then he fell in love with that. And he didn't eat or drink or engage with the world. He just pined away after the reflection, and he died and turned into the flower called Narcissus. Here's the thing. Narcissus didn't suffer because he was in love with himself. It was because he was attached, a kind of an attached kind of living with just his

reflection. And that disconnected him from his true being, his true nature. If he had loved all of who he was, he'd also have been totally in love with life. to the degree that we're fixating on our reflection, the story of our life, you know, what I want, what I fear, what's wrong with me, what's right with me, you know, doesn't matter whether the reflection is beautiful or ugly. To the extent we're fixated, we suffer. When our thoughts and feelings are all circling around the story of self, we're circling around a reflection.

not our real, living, loving, sentient beingness. So no self means you're not the reflection. You're not a passing form, passing thought, a role, a persona, an appearance. I said positively, you are what is aware of the reflection. Sri Narcadatta, and perhaps the quote or line that stays with me the most, he says this. He says, love tells me everything. Wisdom tells me I'm nothing. Between the two, my life flows.

So self-centeredness. It's identifying as that small self and the reflection. and it cuts us off from that wisdom and that love. Now, I want to share that people, when we talk about this, people often ask, well, how do we operate without a sense of self? How do we even know what to do? You might be thinking that. And to say the sense of self doesn't disappear.

There's still waves in the ocean. There's still thoughts and ego and wants and fears. They still appear. we still have navigational tools. The difference is when they're in awareness, we're not identified or fixating on the reflection. We're not landlocked. We're remembering a larger truth, the ocean. And that allows us to move through the day actually with more spontaneity, more access to our natural intelligence and creativity, more compassion in how we attend, and respond to what arises. When we're remembering our oceanists, it's what the Zen masters say

we can give the appropriate response. There's a kind of intuitive grace in navigating. You might consider the origin of the word persona, mask. It's what the Greek actors wore for the play, and then of course they'd go home and take it off. And the point is this, that, throughout the play of daily life, you can use the ego mask wisely as long as there's a remembrance of who's behind the mask. And I include myself in this totally, we forget regularly. We get caught, we get attached to our self-image, or aversive to it. You know, we get fixated on what we want, what we fear, we get caught in that ceaseless inner dialogue. that's identified with the ego mask.

I love the way Andy Lamott puts it. She says, my mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. And so the suffering of this selfing trance is that we move through the day believing in the thoughts of a limited self, that something's missing or something's wrong. wrong. There's this continual referencing and centering on self. There's a little man talking to a bartender and he's saying, I know I'm nothing, but I'm all that I can think about. See my pause here and just take a moment to reflect on the thoughts of the last few hours and

just to consider what they were like. And how much of your mind state had right at the center kind of the protagonist in the movie, Mois, you know, yourself? How much were you like one of those self-centered trees that was forgetting your belonging, forgetting something larger? The Shaman, Don Juan, writes that we maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A person of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. Our incessant thinking continually recreates a sense of self. And the more charge the

thoughts, the more there's that sense of not okay, the more landlocked we are. Separate, cut off. And just check it out when your feelings are really strong. There's a very deep sense of being separate. And there's an identification with that separate self, but it's not conscious. Now, when thoughts quiet some, this is the power of meditation, helps us to kind of become mindful of the thoughts and not be so in them, it becomes easier to see what I like to refer to as the ghost self, that background kind of centering of self, that self-sense that's been unconscious. And maybe just to share with you some of my own process, I've spoken often about how in my early 20s I became anguished and aware of the trance of unworthiness and spent

quite a number of years bringing mindfulness and compassion to the painful emotions that that included and all the bad self-thoughts. the feelings, joined a spiritual community. Really, that was a very big thing unraveling the trance of unworthiness. And there was a deep and real freedom from that sense of personal badness. In my mid-30s there was a major deepening of that process because I started noticing something more. And that was, even when I was pretty relaxed, when there was nothing really stressing, there was no active self-judgment or anything, no difficult emotions. You know, my mind was fairly quiet. I still wasn't fully at ease. So I began investigating, you know, looking more deeply,

what is between me and true peace. And what I'd find is in my body, slight kind of tightness or pressure in the chest. And I'd continue to examine and invite it to express whatever it was experiencing. And there was that sense of, I'm not okay. And as I deepened attention, that was really coming from this sense of a ghost self, this locus of a me, of an eye, the eye that felt like the doer, the eye that things were happening. to. And the sense was just existing as a self wasn't okay. Just existing as a self, just having that be there wasn't okay. But here's the thing. In those moments of consciously witnessing the ghost self, it's softened naturally. And the more I paid attention to this self-sense,

the more presence enlarged and that tight self-sense just dissolved into the larger presence. It's like ice which is made of water just melting under the light of awareness. And with that, there was a more full deepened awareness and openness and well-being. So as I say this, you might wonder, well, really, what's the big deal finding that sense of self in there? really located in attending to it. But the truth is, we spend most of our moments in slight or great unease. We do. And that's because we're unconsciously identified with a sense of separate self. And it's cutting us off from wholeness. Any sense of IMA self fragments the world. It sets us apart from the full aliveness and love and mystery and sacredness that's here.

So the unease, whatever level, is simply a sign of not at home. It's an invitation to deepen attention. So for me, learning to recognize that background sense of self was the beginning of a really profound deepening on the path, I'm just meeting it over and over again with awareness, with kindness, with tenderness. It dissolves. Like I said, it's like sunlight on an ice cube, it just naturally lets go. There's a natural opening or freeing up and then resting in and as loving awareness.

And I found over the years some really treasured supports for practice. and they included training in Zok-chan, which is a Tibetan practice, a lot of different books that inspired me in this direction. One that I speak about a lot is, I Am That by Sri Narcadatta. Really, his central teaching is to keep attending to that sense of I am and discovering the source that's behind or underneath. that sense of I am. So the path isn't to get rid of the self-sense. It's to include it in awareness. Because as I said, if it's unconscious, then that becomes who we are. We get identified with the selfing and the more charged and full, the more landlock we are. And that causes painful emotions.

But even when the self-in trance is not so charged, even it's not always negative emotions. It can be numbness or confusion, just not being attuned to the whole. One of my favorite illustrations is this, and I'll read it to you. As a bagpiper, I play many gigs. Recently, I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a Popper Cemetery in Kentucky backcountry. As I was not familiar with, I was not familiar with, with the backwoods, I got lost and being a typical man didn't stop for directions. I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guide evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch.

I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down in the vault. Lid was already in place. I didn't know what else to do, so I started to play. The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I've never played before for this homeless man. And as I played, Amazing Grace, the workers began to weep. They wept, I wept, wept, wept together. When I finished, I packed up my bagpipes and started from my car.

Though my head hung low, my heart was full. As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, I never seen nothing like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for 20 years. You're right, so apparently I'm still lost. It's a man thing. Okay, so I'll pause here to remind you that it's really easy to think we're bad for selfing, for the self-centeredness that we get hooked by. And I know this one well. I mean, I really know what it's like to think, oh, if I was really awake and free, I wouldn't be trapped in this.

And what I also know well is if we're at war with the appearance of self, if there's judgment, we'll be at war for the rest of our life. Because selfing itself, the arising of a sense of self, the feelings, the thoughts, that's not the problem. having it be unconscious so that we get identified with that self. We think that's who we are. We believe the self and the story. We forget the larger truth of who we are. So, this forgetting is our universal human predicament. It's part of our evolutionary journey to get lost in the story, to get identified. I mean, we have this frontal cortex that churns out thoughts and a lot of the

thoughts are about a self and often about a bad self or a self that's missing something. We are designed to get identified, to get landlocked in fur and skin. Rui puts it this way. He says, whatever came from being is caught up in being drunkenly forgetting the way back. So, it's also part of our journey, and this is what we're exploring together, to wake up from the trance of self-centeredness by including it in awareness, to remember the way back home. And the grounds of this pathway back home are very simple, deepening attention and bringing curiosity and compassion, not judgment, to what's happening. So now let's look at the pathway home.

And just to name that there are many, many approaches to reconnecting with a larger sense of our being, many ways that help us to realize an not to know self and to trust our true nature. And we all have glimpses. You would not be here listening. You wouldn't be drawn to these teachings if you didn't intend to do. to it, this possibility of something more. We sense sacredness. We have a sense of transcending that separate self in natural surroundings.

Often when we're in loving relationship with another, when that spontaneous warmth arises, sometimes when we're serving, sometimes in moments of gratitude, when we're really relaxed, we're praying, when we're in flow states it might come through dance or music or gardening or running or painting. The common denominator is with each there's a very real presence and that reduces the narrative in the brain and it allows the light of awareness and heart and spirit to shine through, something larger. So meditation is our training, our way of practicing, paying attention, deepening that presence. And contrary to all jokes about navel-gazing, meditation reduces self-centeredness

by quieting the mind. There's less thinking, the sense of self becomes more transparent, it no longer obscures reality. This is Sri Narzeghidavai. and how he puts it, he says, when the mind is momentarily free from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and a love you have never known, and yet you recognize it at once as your own nature. So this points to that shift from identifying with the waves of selfing to the ocean, that light and love that includes. Now, when the waves are charged, when there's obsessive thinking, fear, shame, anger, craving,

when we're grappling with the trance of unworthiness, it's wise to emphasize practices that tend to the waves with mindfulness and compassion. And that's why we often explore the rain meditation because it weaves mindfulness and compassion and brings it to the ways. And as we pay attention with kindness, with presence, the oceaness is revealed. But when it's a bit quieter, you can explore meditations that turn towards the ocean, towards awareness itself, for direct experiencing of selfing. experience of I am. You can learn to see it and relax back and inhabit the fullness of being.

It's like narcissists realizing, oh, this is a reflection. And then in that recognition, relaxing back into what was noticing, relaxing as the awareness that's his true nature. So for the remainder of this talk, we're going to focus on awareness meditation, how to to awaken to awareness and directly see selfing and allow it to dissolve. And if you had some experience with non-dual meditations, with Zoghan, with self-inquiry, you'll know that there are many styles or many approaches and I'm just going to be sharing one with you that I've found valuable. But I do want to name it's one of many. Okay, so awareness. We're usually so fixated on forms, on the shape of the waves, on the sounds, the thoughts, the images,

and in particular on the self-stories in our mind, that we miss the awareness that's here. So, we'll take some moments to get familiar with the presence of awareness. And here I'd like to honor the work of Connie Rae Andreas, and particularly her book, Coming Into Wholeness, for those of you who want to explore. explore this more, she makes awareness practice very accessible. So what follows is a short reflection, being aware of awareness. And I invite you to close your eyes or lower your gaze, think a few breaths, consciously breathing.

And now for the next 10 seconds, try not to be aware. just try not to be aware. Okay, that's enough. Most will realize that it's actually not possible, that there's an effortless, spontaneous knowing that goes on, that awareness is always here, even if we're not awake to it. Now, continue presence here and just scan and notice that where there are sensations in your body that are prominent, and still eyes closed or gaze downward, where you feel sensations that are prominent in your body, maybe your hands, chest, beat,

you feel sensations so that you know that the space of awareness is interior, that awareness is in and through the body. Just such that. feeling sensations and sensing that space of awareness that's interior in and through the body and then widening your attention to the space around you listening taking in sounds from any direction there receives spontaneously there's no boundary to your experience awareness is in and through all the space around so continue now sensing the interior space of

awareness that's in and through the body, the awareness that's in and through the space all around, its continuous space filled with the light of awareness. Being aware of awareness, perhaps the basic features of awareness, sensing the openness, the wakefulness, the tenderness, that sensitivity that's responsive to all that arises. the more that you get familiar with this space of awareness, the more you'll find yourself at home. Okay, so if you'd like to open your eyes or move a little bit, please do. In daily life, our habitual mental activity, it's virtual, basically, we're disconnected from our senses. in that our attention narrows and we get very self-scented.

So we move through the day that way, contracted. So we're not experiencing life from that whole field of conscious awareness. It's a narrowed lens. And to widen, we need to purposefully bring attention to the clutch of selfing, that deep sense of I am that obscures the larger reality. because we keep on recontracting. So here's what's going on. That's self-in, taking ourself to be that small self, it's unconscious as I've mentioned. And it's like clenching your fist and forgetting you're clenching. And you might try it right now. Just take your fist and

clench it and then just put your arm to your side but you're still clenching. And imagine that you spend time like this and that you forget get, you're doing other things, and that maybe you notice over time you're beginning to feel drained or tired or feels like life is hard, that something's not okay, but you're not aware of the self-clinch. Now, what happens when awareness wakes up in the hand? Go ahead, just sense awareness waking up in the hand and notice that you can sense that muscles naturally know to let go. You don't have to try. It's without effort. They

relax on their own. This is the power of awareness and how change happens. We don't need to do anything. Trying to make the experience of I relax is like prying one hand open with another. It doesn't work. But with awareness, there's a natural relaxing, a dissolving, the melting, the knowing of how the fist can relax is already in the muscles. The eye relaxes in the meeting of awareness with the clench. The no one's there. I mentioned before it's like the sun, the light of awareness, the warmth of awareness, melting ice. There's a felt sense of the eye dissolving into awareness. So ice is contracted water. And when eye dissolves into awareness, there's a deepening presence and enriching presence.

Okay, that's conceptual. So I want to ground it. I'm going to share one more story of myself and then we're going to practice together. This time the story is fast-forwarding about 30-some years. A year ago, I planned a trip for last week to go to a state park where Jonathan and I could bike together and swim in the ocean. And in the week or so before it, my knees got very, very cranky. So we had to cancel the bike rental that I had. And then when we got there, I got a UTI, a urinary track infection. And we had to come home the next day. I was pretty miserable and disappointed

on behalf of my husband, myself, and also feeling very vulnerable about this unpredictable body and the uncertainty of life. So the next day after getting home, I was meditating, I started sensing awareness just as we did before, you know, in and through the body and through space. And then I scanned my body and I felt that vulnerability. And it was kind of a slight squeeze in the heart and fear. So this is when there was a direct attending towards selfing. I asked myself, where is the self, the eye, that's aware of this vulnerability? Where's the eye that's experiencing this? And it was like this dense dome of energy, you know, kind of behind my head.

And, you know, again, I sensed the open awareness and I invited that self-sense, that dome of energy, density to relax into and as awareness. And it dissolved. And there was an even more full sense of kind of an open, tender awareness. And I rest in them as awareness. And a bit later I checked back and, you know, there was still a slight squeeze but it was like a current drifting in the surface of a vast sea. No suffering. I want to read again from Srinar Sardata. He writes,

As you watch your mind, you discover yourself as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover yourself as the light behind the watcher. That source alone is. Go back to the source and abide there. Okay, so we're going to practice. I want to just name that if you have a charged issue cooking right now, the emphasis is going to be bringing mindfulness and compassion to the waves.

It would be kind of a bypass to try to look for the self that was experiencing. You start with rain and then you move forward from there. So some of you might or might not be quiet enough to inquire into that background sense of I am. There's not one way that's better or worse. The wisdom is to offer attention as needed. So friends, what follows is a meditation for awakening from the trance of self-being. I invite you to start by closing your eyes or lowering your gaze, feeling.

the movement of this life breath in you, relaxing, and bringing attention to the awareness that's present in and through the body. So you might feel sensations in the body and just sense the awareness that knows them, that interior space of awareness and widening attention to the awareness that's in and through space, perhaps listening, sensing the awareness that's listening, the interior space of awareness, the awareness that's in and through the space around you. So there's continuous space filled with the light of awareness. And there really isn't an edge to it. And now scanning your body and mind, relax whatever's easy to relax. Notice what you. Notice what you're

remains. So there's an effortless sense of what wants attention. It might be some physical or emotional tension, some constriction. Just find the location in the body. And sense its size, its shape, the quality of the sensation. Now inquire, where is the self experiencing this? where is the eye that's experiencing this? See if you can find its location, size, a self-filled sense. And if you're not sure, guess, might be behind the eyes, the midline of the body, behind the head, dome around the upper body and head. Sense the location of the self that's experiencing.

the eye, whatever you can about its location, its size, the felt sense of it. And you might inquire, does the sensation of this eye welcome the invitation to open and relax to dissolve in and as the full field of awareness? Is it welcome the invitation to open and relax, to dissolve in and as the full field of awareness? And it can happen however feels natural. If it's not ready, you might even ask, you know, where is the sense of self that's experiencing this self? Again, noticing location, size, sensation, and inviting again to dissolve, relax in and as the whole field of awareness. Just be and rest as the awareness that you are.

If you feel called, you might check back in the location of the original sensation. And just notice if it's the same or a little bit different, or not there. Not trying to change experience. If there's something there, you can invite it, gently feel for how dissolving into awareness might want to happen. And resting as that awareness, just resting. getting familiar, be the awareness that's your true home. You can continue to listen from a more formal position of meditation or open your eyes to say that this is a life practice to turn towards that I am, that sense of I and invite it to dissolve. And sometimes you'll locate a sense

of self and then inquire one again. What's the self-aware of that self? The self that's witnessing that self. And you'll find that each time you do that kind of stepping back, that backward step, the self becomes less dense, less solid, more diffuse. And in time, and this happens over time and practice, just seeing the self thing relaxes it. You know, how to make an invitation or do anything. It's awareness awakening in the clenched fist. It's just seeing it, there's a natural letting go. And in time there's this deepening trust in who we are beyond the reflection of self. So friends, trusting a larger belonging, trusting in this home, this true nature of awareness affects how we live and die.

a living, the Tibetans put it this way, that we move through life as a child of wonder. And then in facing death, it's possible to face death and loss with a truly fearless heart because we know our larger belonging. We know intimately the loving awareness that's home. Again, I'll read from St. Nor Sargadatta. He says, as long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things, you seem short-lived and vulnerable, and of course you will feel anxious to survive. But when you know yourself to be beyond space and time, when you know yourself as that loving,

boundless awareness, you'll be afraid no longer. So our reflection today is really the deepening of the path to recognizing the selfing, that clench of self-centeredness with awareness. to allow a natural relaxing back to formless awareness, to resting in that awareness. And it's natural that we contract back over and over again into that unconscious identification with selfing that we get landlocked in fur. It's natural. And it's just a sign not at home. There's a sense of dis-ease that will remind us, that will invite us to offer a mindful and kind presence to the waves, and when the waves are quiet enough to actually ask, you know, where is the self that's experiencing this? And in time, you will trust this loving

awareness as the truth of who you are more than any story, any sense of self. So let's close together in a simple way, inviting you to pause. Let the attention go inward. And again, to sense the awareness that's in and through the body, feeling sensations, feeling that awareness that's aware of sensations, listening and sensing the awareness that's in and through space. So you can sense that continuous space filled with the light of awareness, the tenderness, the tenderness, openness,

wakefulness of awareness that fuel that includes this change in life. Love tells me I'm everything. Wisdom tells me I'm nothing. Between the two, my life flows.

Thank you, friends, for your presence and your bright, good hearts.