Tara Brach - Awakening from Virtual Reality

Episode Date: June 6, 2014

2014-06-04 - Awakening from Virtual Reality - This talk looks at the power our virtual reality of thoughts can hold over our lives. We then explore how bringing mindful awareness to thinking enables us to heal historical wounding and discover who we are beyond the self-story in our mind. We don’t have to believe our thoughts - they are "real but not true!"

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. I'd like to begin this session by inviting you to do a reflection that will bring us into our theme for the evening. So if you'll close your eyes, okay, you're walking in the woods right now. Imagine that. And there's a loud speaker that's broadcasting the thoughts of any trees, you go by. So each tree's having a running commentary or a running narrative about itself. So you're hearing things like how favorable or not it is compared to other trees. There's one that's very kind of machismo with a big trunk feeling good about that and another's kind of

feeling bad that her bark is all wrinkled and others have smoother bark and some are preoccupied with bad weather forecasts and some with threats of invading beetles. Here one tree talking about how another one's blocking its sunlight. Of course, another one's envious of the big one over there, attracting more birds, but at least no woodpeckers for this one. And it goes on and on that as you keep walking, each tree in some way is running a story about it and its life and what's wrong and what it needs. And you can take a big breath and with the exhale,

So I'll be glad that when you walk through the woods, that's not actually what you experience, right? And yet when we walk through our life and feel free to open your eyes if you'd like, we know it that we live in a home video that stars Mois, right? We know that. And the key feature is that there's an incessant inner dialogue. And we're often lost in that movement. lost in that movie and when we're lost it takes over our entire experience of who we are

and it defines our world. So what happens is we start to meditate and one of the first things we discover is what's called seeing the waterfall, right? And seeing the waterfall means this endless stream of thoughts and commentaries and memories and plans and judgments. We just see it all. And as we, it's whether it's in our meditation or our day if we're actually tracking, we'll notice that we're the huge swaths of time that were in that virtual reality. We might even notice that it's really repetitive. In other words, one person describes it that there's 60,000 thoughts a day and 98% of them we had yesterday.

One cartoon portrays it beautifully with a man who's about to drive into the desert and there's a big sign saying, you and your own tedious thoughts next 500 miles. So we live with this home video going on, and the core characteristic of our thoughts, this is kind of the fundamental duality of thought, is it posits a self and here and a world out there. So everybody else is in some way a character, a player on the stage.

Just as, you know, when we use the word traffic, everybody else is traffic. We never think of ourselves as the traffic, right? Same thing with crowds, right? We're not the crowd. So related to this duality, I'm separate, I'm in here, the world's out there, is this understanding that the primal, mood of the separate self is fear. So fueling this incessant dialogue is a hum of anxiety. Not all thoughts, but a lot of thoughts. And this is because thinking evolved like everything

else does it serve our survival. Yeah? And over the eons, we have what's called a negative bias. In other words, our thoughts spend a lot more time honing in on what's going to cause us trouble, where the danger is. Our thoughts are rigged to anticipate problems. So if you've had a thousand encounters with dogs and one of them you had a bad experience, that's the one you remember, right? That's the way our brain works. So we've got a fear bias and many of our thoughts are fear driven and depending on our culture

and our personal biography it's more or less that way. And what happens then is that this leaning towards fear-based thoughts end up affecting everything about how we experience the world and many of you've heard this bit from the neuroscientists that describe how our emotions have left to their own devices, you know, have this 1.5 minute length of time that they express, they come and they go. But that's not the way we experience emotions. For us, we get caught in them and they just hang in there because what keeps fueling them? Our thoughts.

These fear-based thoughts keep, you know, telling us what else could go wrong and then the body shoots forth its next spurt of whatever biochemicals go with stress and on we go. So I bring this up because again from neuroscience we get that neurons that fire together, wire together. And we're very habitual creatures. We get very caught in having a certain kind of constellation of thoughts going on that create certain emotion that then lead to certain behaviors and we keep living in them. And until in some way we wake up to how this thinking is going on, we stay locked in that.

The Buddha said, whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind. So what are your thoughts like? How many of your thoughts or thoughts of kindness or thoughts of genuine interest in what's true? Curiosity. How many of your thoughts are really about waking up, about freedom, what serves? And how many of your thoughts are worried thoughts? No judgment.

Just take a moment. Let's reflect again. is just a very simple reflection that I like to do whenever I can. Just try this out. We're going to just take a word and pluck it out of thin air, the word trouble. And just let the word trouble be in your mind and let whatever comes up around it come up around it. Keep mentally whispering the word trouble and just notice your body, your heart, trouble. trouble, trouble. And if you take a nice full breath, nice full breath, and then magically pluck another word.

We'll just take kindness for now, just to give a contrast, kindness. Okay, just let kindness kind of float around in there. Say it a few times. You can even say it and have a gentle whisper saying it, kindness, kindness. What does that do? What's the effect? Whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind. What kind of thoughts are flavoring your mind and your heart and your life?

And you might even just to bring it more right into right now, what was today like? How much were you lost in thought? What kind of thoughts? And feel free to open your eyes and come on back whenever you want to. So our thoughts create our emotional experience, it sustains our emotional experience. It really creates our entire, it's the filter for our reality. Carlos Castagnata, who writes about the shaman Don Juan, been drawing from him recently, he says this, we maintain our world with our inner dialogue.

A man or woman of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. Okay, so all of our experience is shaped by the kind of thoughts going through. That means that's as if you think of the log jam in a river and where are you going to have some impact if you work on something, you know there's one log that if you can move it a little bit, then all the other logs will move through wherever it's torqued and go down the river. Well, thoughts are a really big log in the log jam, are repetitive thoughts. And it's only as we begin to bring a mindful awareness to the thoughts, to the content end process of our thoughts, that A, we can begin to heal lifelong patterns that come out of wounding. We can't do that healing unless we are aware of the thoughts that keep on

and perpetuating the pattern. And B, if we can't wake up out of thoughts, we can't discover really who are what we are. Otherwise, our thoughts are going to keep giving us a story about a self that's limited or deficient or superior to others, but underneath that, there's a kind of empty, scared place. But they'll tell us a story.

won't be able to recognize the living truth of who we are. So you've already tuned into what our theme is tonight. We're going to really, it's kind of going to be hands on. I'm going to ask you a few times to check in and do different reflections and the like. On how do we wake up from, I like the language of virtual reality, how do we wake up from the reality that our thoughts posit? which is sometimes useful, sometimes not, but not the real thing. And I can say that the most common message I get from new students, when I say, well, how is the meditation is, well, my mind was really busy.

You know, I think a lot. And I usually want to say you and all of us, because our mind secrete thoughts like our body. bodies secrete enzymes. It's just what minds do. They think. It's part of survival. It's supposed to happen. It ensures survival. It ensures flourishing. So we're not trying to stop thoughts and we're not trying to control thoughts. What we are intending is cultivating a wise relationship with thoughts. I sometimes imagine like an airplane, you know, when it goes through a cloud, how in the middle of the cloud, it's like the whole world is cloud and just seems

like that's the universe. But then when it gets out of the cloud, the clouds in the field, but you just sense the vastness of what is. When we're inside a thought and we forget ourselves, we forget it's forgetfulness, we forget the fullness of awareness, the whole world is shaped by that cloud. So how can we be aware of thinking? The classic line is that thinking is a very good servant and a very, very poor master. It's a good servant because we know it.

If we're traveling, we need a map. We need GPS. Guidance is really, really helpful. If we want to build a building, we have to visualize it and see what it's going to look like. We want to heal a disease. We have to sense the causation and drug interactions and what's an integrated approach that's good. We have to think about things.

I definitely think a lot before I give these talks. And then part of me goes, okay, anything that really matters about this talk is not going to come through thinking and then I try to stop thinking. It's like I have to have an experience and then try to put it into words. That's a not, I didn't mean to go there. But part of the spiritual path. is the wise use of thought. In other words, we contemplate the meta-meditation, the loving kindness meditation. It's a reflection on where goodness is. Compassion is a reflection

on where vulnerability is. We use our minds to help turn us towards the light. But the thoughts aren't the thing itself. When thoughts are the master, it's because we're caught in obsessing, we're lost in them, they're driven by fear, they show up as judgment, and it's a prison. It's like you can sense that your body and mind is living in something smaller than the truth of who you are. Thinking then becomes when it's a master of prison. I remember some years ago working with a student and he was very caught in self-judging thoughts. And he said he reminded himself of this tiger, this regal white tiger that he had visited in the Washington D.C. National Zoo. The tiger's name was Mojini.

And Mojini was put in this cage that was like about a 12 by 12 cage with iron bars and cement floor. And for years, Mojini would just go back and forth, pacing, pacing. You've seen how it happens in these tigers and cages in a zoo. And eventually what happened was the biologists, the staff worked together to create this amazing natural habitat for her several acres at hills and a pond and a variety of vegetation. So it was with a lot of excitement and anticipation that the staff brought Mahini to her new home. But it was too late because when the tiger was released, she immediately sought refuge in a corner of the compound and just began pacing the same kind of pacing 12 feet by 12 feet back and forth. And she did that for the rest of her life, wearing bear this stretch of grass.

So perhaps the biggest tragedy that we kind of sense in our lives is that freedom is possible. We sense this possibility of loving without holding back and of really resting in a radiance and an awareness that's very open. We sense the possibility of presence in the moments. And we watch each day how we recontract and play out old patterns. So the tragedy feeling is it's possible, but we get so habituated. So the key to unlocking the door, the key to opening us out of that prison,

is to begin to bring a mindful attention to the patterns. So we're not just living in them and playing them out over and over. So mindfulness of thoughts means being aware of them, not being identified. And it enables us to realize, and this is the big thing, that thoughts are thoughts. They're not reality. And the biggest breakthrough, truly, the biggest breakthrough I see happening at retreats, and it just goes deeper and deeper, is this recognition,

I don't have to believe my thoughts. I am not my thoughts. In other words, that self that my thoughts is telling me about is not me. It's the same thing, really, different expressions of it. So what we'll do is explore some key, skillful means that help us to become more mindful of thinking. so we can realize what we are beyond thoughts. And the first is just a very simple,

just to get us kind of deepening our attention to thinking. Again, I'd like to invite you to close your eyes and let your attention go within. Take a few breaths. Let yourself feel collected. Come right here. Just to imagine that you're like a cat by a mouse hole. And you're going to be counting.

whatever mice kind of peek out or run out, you're counting thoughts. And that in the next very short while, your only job is to notice the thoughts that come and just number them. So just feel yourself in your body, feel your breath, whatever helps you to know you're here, and know your intention is to count your thoughts. Okay, please begin. Okay, opening your eyes. Come on, bag. So let me check with you.

How many of you had under 10? Okay, there's under 10 people who are there. How about 10 to 20? The 10 to 20 zone? 20 to 30, 30 to 40, over 40, over 100. So just to take a moment and sense, as you were being that cat by the mouse hole, what the thoughts actually were? How many of you had thoughts that came kind of audio, like words or sound bites? Can I see by hands? I'm just curious.

How many more had kind of images, maybe a background message or something, but more imagery? Yeah. How many were still shots? Movie? How many had kind of like a movie? Okay, so some of you noticed that it could be more in motion, kind of like a movie. Sometimes they're body-based. You might have noticed that you had a thought, that it was some impression,

but you could really kind of feel the sense of it in your body. And some of you might have noticed that you had kind of sneaky thoughts, like, oh, it's getting quiet, or oh, just the naming of a number is a thought, right? Anybody get caught in that loop? And sometimes they're emotionally tangly, like, I'm really not doing this right.

I really don't, you know, are some reaction to it, and then you start sensing that the thought comes with a lot of energy. So the deal is that thoughts are representations of reality. They come as, you know, usually images, sound bites, some combination of it. The most important recognition, and this is the phrase that I like the best, is that thoughts are real but they're not true. And by that I mean the representations of reality, they really are happening, but they're

not the reality itself. In other words, if you saw a photo of a tree or you had a thought of a tree, it wouldn't be the actual living tree that you know with its leaves budding and turning colors and falling off and swaying in the breeze or still or the smell of blossoms or the feeling of the bark. It's not that, right? It's a representation. John Audubon said, if there's a difference between the bird and what the guidebook says, believe the bird, you know? And some of you know that for many years I had a favorite t-shirt and it said meditation, it's not what you think. So when our minds are very busy, when we're in that incessant dialogue, we tend to conflate

thoughts with reality. In other words, they're not in our mind representations. They're not a map. They are it. We're believing what's going on in our mind. So most styles of meditation begin by saying let's get quiet a little, not get rid of thoughts, but let's do something to collect the attention like the breath, like scanning through the body so that they're not taking over quite so much so we can begin to be mindful of the fact that they're even happening. Okay, so we quiet a little. But then the next instructions deepen. And these are instructions for getting mindful of the thoughts themselves. And the first and major support that many people find helpful in mindfulness of thinking

is to do a little bit of mental notation or naming. And you don't have to do a lot. It doesn't have to be like every single thought you're naming it. But you'll find that in the moment of naming a thought, it really loosens the identification with it. Clearly, it's a thought, not the reality itself. So you might name the type of thought. Okay, this is a worry thought.

This is a planning thought. This is a remembering. Okay, you might say this is a judging thought or I'm rehearsing again. A lot of us do a lot of rehearsing or I'm figuring out, you know, figuring out thoughts. Sometimes, so we're just going to name them, sometimes fantasizing, daydreaming. But then if you'd like, for some of us we have our top ten hits and we know what they are. Like, we know that we keep recycling. And it might be that one of your top ten is to do with work

or to do with a struggle with a colleague or is to do with a romance or an infatuation that you're having or to do with dieting or to do with how you appear or to do with redecorating or remodeling. We have our top ten, right? So it's not to get rid of them, but to know they're happening that you might say, okay, you know, thoughts about sickness. I remember when I was struggling with sickness, I was

constantly trying to figure out what was wrong with me and what would make me better. So I just called, you know, sick person thinking, you know, it's just like, okay, I'm that sick person trying to figure out my sickness. It helped. It gives a little bit of space and then there's a little bit of choice, which is the whole deal. So the first step is a little bit of this naming. It's basically recognizing thinking is happening right now. And it's a very friendly, soft, non-judging recognition. If you recognize thinking and you carry with that a really big judgment like this is a sign of bad meditatorship or something like that, you know. In other words, if you start getting on your own case, all you've done is add another thought, a

judging thought. That's really fear-based and just keeps on fueling reactivity. So part of the power of mindfulness is to recognize with really no judgment. Just recognize, okay, thinking. Some of you might remember this wonderful poem by Kaviri Patel. She writes this. She says, there's a monkey in my mind swinging on a trapeze, reaching back to the past, or leaning into the future, never standing still. Sometimes I want to kill that monkey, shoot it square between the eyes so I won't have to think anymore or feel the pain of worry. But today I thanked her and she jumped down straight into my lap, trapeze still swinging as we sat still.

Do you have a sense of the attitude? Because this is what's key. As we cultivate mindfulness of our thoughts, thoughts, one part of the attitude is be friendly. Just be friendly, just happening. Be curious, okay, thinking, and this is another virtual reality I'm creating. Be good-humored. I mean, they're really wacky. There's a saying that the mind has no shame. You know, it goes anywhere, does everything. So that's the first part is this kind of knowing it's happening, naming it. And the second part, you might call it letting go.

I think of it more as if you're clutched onto a thought as relaxing the grip and just reopening back into our senses. When we're thinking, we've left our senses. Check it out. When you come back from a thought, you'll notice that while you were thinking, you weren't in touch with your body. You weren't hearing the sounds that are actually happening right here. you weren't feeling whatever mood is going on. You were in a virtual reality.

So we relaxed the clutch onto the thought, the contraction, and listen again and feel in our body again. Let the senses be your home base. Come back, come back, come back. And then here's a really, really valuable piece. notice the difference between any thought and this mysterious, ever-changing, aliveness that's right here, this presence that's here. Just notice the difference. When you come back from a thought, sometimes coming back will be really unpleasant. You'll be having a thought about something

that's really agitating. And when you kind of let go of the content of thought and come into your body, you're going to have to actually directly contact the vulnerability and agitation. So the point isn't that when you let go of thoughts and come back into presence, it's all like crystal rainbows of light, you know, and fun and pleasure. It's just whatever was going on. But it's the reality of the moment. It's the one place where we can begin to discover compassion and in the space between the thoughts, that's the one place where wisdom can really begin to arise. So these are the two basic practices of mindfulness.

We'll just again take a few moments together just to explore that, being mindful of thoughts. Just in these few moments, again, establish presence with your senses. listening to sound, feeling the sensations in your body, whatever mood or emotion might be here, resting in presence and then let your practice be quite simple. When a thought arises, it might in some way note it. It could be just thinking, thinking, or it might be the kind of thought or the content,

whatever feels helpful, and then relax open to the senses and notice the difference between virtual and reality. It even sense as you practice the space between the thoughts. True wisdom arises in the silent awareness that simply experiences what's happening. The words of Wu men, 10,000 flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn't clouded by, unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. Okay, taking a few full breaths, come on back. It's not complicated and it's definitely not easy. It takes practice. One of my teachers, Joseph Goldstein, one of the earliest retreats I went to,

said what he would say to himself is, do I want to think or be free? It was very either or a proposition. Okay, so that's the basic practice. And what happens is the more we get the hang of it, the more we're in relationship with our thoughts not lost inside them, the more freedom that comes. And one of my buddies, Wes Nisker, who's a teacher on the West Coast, puts it this way.

He says, after years of meditation practice, one of the most significant changes in my life has been my relationship to my mind. Now, we're still living together, of course, and we remain friends, but my mind and I are no longer. longer codependent. I am slowly but surely gaining my freedom. Now here's where the rubber hits the road on this stuff, which is our beliefs are very sticky. So when our thoughts are circling around because we have some very sticky charged core belief going on, not so easy to say, you know, thank you very much and come back to this sensory world, there's a real

grasping of the mind. I like the way Mahatma Gandhi put it when he described it that our beliefs create our thoughts and our thoughts, create our actions and our actions create our character and our character creates our destiny. And it keeps on going. We keep recreating our life in such a habitual way that it becomes our destiny unless we deepen our attention. So how do we do that with thoughts? Some thoughts are a reasonably useful representation, some beliefs, I'm sorry,

how do we do it with sticky beliefs. Some are a fairly useful representation of our reality or our path and they actually help us, like the belief that another person's actions, if it's causing suffering, is coming from suffering. Or perhaps the belief in what's possible when we extend ourselves, our hearts to another, or when we express vulnerability.

But for many of us, because our beliefs are fear-based, they keep us in a kind of prison that's really painful. And the fear-based beliefs I'm talking about are the ones that we're all familiar with, that I'm unlovable, I'm unworthy, I can't trust other people, I'm going to always fail, those kind of beliefs. There's a common denominator of them that life should be different, or I should be different,

or you should be different. And the should is the giveaway. Any belief that has the word should in it is going to be a setup for trouble because it's an argument with reality. Should be different. It doesn't matter whether we're right or wrong. Life is as life is. And if we're opposing life, we're at war with life.

life, there's going to be suffering. So when we're suffering, it means we're believing something that's not true. And our beliefs keep driving us into the same habitual behaviors. And we can see it in our relationships. I mean, how many of us at age, for some of us, 50s and 60s, can say, I am doing exactly what I was doing when I was a teenager and it creates distance from people. Same underlying beliefs are in there. They keep affecting how we communicate. make us rigid and predictable. Story of man named John invites his mother over for dinner, and during the meal, his mother couldn't help

but noticing how beautiful John's roommate was. She had long been suspicious of a relationship between John's roommate, and this only made her more curious. Watching the two interact over the evening, she really wondered if there was more going on. Reading his mother's thoughts, John volunteered. I know what you might be thinking, but I assure you that Carrie and I are just roommates.

About a week later, Carrie came to John and said, You know, ever since your mother came here for dinner, I've been unable to find that beautiful silver soup ladle. You don't think she did something with it, do you? Oh, I doubt it, but I'll email her just in case. So he wrote down, Dear Mother, I'm not saying that you did or did not do anything with the soup ladle, but it's a hot that it disappeared after the dinner.

Do you know anything about this? Later, he received an email from his mother that read, Dear Son, I'm not saying that you do something. sleep with Carrie, and I'm not saying that you don't. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the soup ladle by now. Love your mother. So our beliefs create, our thoughts, create our actions, create our character creates our destiny. And the big challenge is then, how do we begin to work with them? Because beliefs feel so, so true. And that's the challenge. I can say to somebody when they tell me a belief that they're unlovable,

well that's a real belief, but it's not true. But that doesn't matter because it feels true. Right? So I want to just take the last, just a few minutes here, to share with you a story about how we can begin to bring a mindful kind of investigation even into those core beliefs in a way that loosens the grip they have on our life. And I do believe that it's an essential part of the path to begin to sense where we're caught in those and bring that courageous kind of inquiry to it. So this is a real but not true story for you.

That's a true story. Okay, so this is a man I worked with at a retreat a number of years ago. He was a recovered alcoholic. His adult daughter was estranged. He had gotten divorced. You know, her mother, his wife wanted the divorce, but she was a teen, and so he left and continued contact and then had some visit with her two children,

would babysit and so on. But there was a strained distance between them, polite, but stayed very surface. And he basically felt that he wasn't trusted, that his alcoholism had taken down the marriage. The daughter had always been protective of her mother, so he was the bad guy. And so he just kind of assumed she didn't really want to have much to do with him.

But at the time of the retreat, he was getting increasingly depressed and withdrawn, and he was getting actually more and more in touch with this core sense of being rejected and ashamed, really ashamed and alone. And the shame was the strongest feeling. So in our interview, we have one-on-one interviews at these longer retreats. I asked him to go right inside that place that felt ashamed, and I asked him, what are you believing?

And basically it was that I'm damaged goods. I'm bad. I've blown it with loved ones. I'm unlovable. And unforgivable was a big one. So bad and unforgivable were the two most charged elements. So I asked him, once you said my belief, you know, I'm bad, I'm unforgivable, I said, is it really true?

Okay, I know you believe it, but is it really true that you're bad, you're basically bad and basically unforgivable? And he said, look, I don't know about really true, but it really does feel that way, my gut, in my heart. And I asked him again, I said, but again, just consider, do you do you really know that it's true? Like, could part of the opposite be true, that you're not bad, that you are forgivable? And he would concede, well, I can't know for sure, but this is how it feels. I guess that's where we were. So I said, okay, go ahead and feel it then. When you're believing that you're bad, your damaged goods, your unlawful, you're

unforgivable. What's that like in your body? And we took some time to really check in. He said, it's like the life is draining out of me. It's like there's an aching empty hole in my heart. And I asked him how long he'd been feeling that, a long, long time, and how had that feeling and that belief affected his life? And he could see how by believing on bad and unforgivable, He had pretty much pulled away from any possible closeness with anyone. He had no real juice. He had no energy and he felt utterly isolated. So I let him spend some moments and it takes a lot.

It's hard. But just to live with that experience, okay, isolated, really, really isolated, really cut off, no energy. Just live in that. And then I asked him, and this is the key question, to sense into this, who would you be if you no longer believed that you were bad? If you no longer believed you were unforgivable, who would you be? Just check it out. He became very still, and then he teared up, and the words were, I'd be a part of this world.

He said, I'd belong, I'd have a liveliness. If I didn't believe I was bad and unforgivable, I'd have hope. So I just invited him to take some time just to get a taste of that, to let himself rest a little and open his heart to that possibility, knowing that, of course, the belief would come back and he'd recontract, but he had tasted real but not true. He had tasted the possibility of what it's like outside of that virtual reality. And he practiced a lot with that.

Whenever the thoughts and the feelings would come up, he would in some way say, do I really know it's true? What's it like to feel it? Who would I be without it? Led to an honest encounter with his daughter one day. He was there. He had a routine on Sundays. He'd come by and hang out with the kids for a couple of hours.

And this time, instead of leaving when he usually left, he asked her if, and she had seemed kind of tight and tension. but he went ahead and had the courage. He said, can we talk a little? And they sat down, and when he started sharing with her what he was going through, he started naming it,

she began crying. And he said, why are you crying? He said, you just keep visiting and visiting, and you've never wanted to spend time with me. And she said that she just felt like, you know, when he'd leave, he was done with the children,

it was like all her life. he was done with her. It was like she did not matter. So she took his distance, as disinterest. He was being distant because he felt like he had blown it and how could she ever forgive him? And they ended up holding each other in crime. And it took a while.

They got real close and then they kind of put up their, and they had to keep refining their way, but it was the beginning of a reconciliation. He never thought was possible. I started tonight mentioning the Tiger Mojini. We all know in our own lives where we're caught up in habits and we know where those habits keep us from what's possible, from the possible intimacy with each other in our world,

from the possible sense of really trusting, relaxing, taking joy in the moments. Our way of freeing is challenging and yet simple. It's this dedication and it takes practice to waking up out of these thoughts, to being willing to feel what's going on in our bodies and hearts, to being able to really sense, okay, this virtual reality of men is real,

but this is not the truth. There's something more. just holding open that possibility. So we'll just take the last few moments, if you will, just to come into whatever position allows you to be relaxed, to be here. And perhaps as I was speaking, there was a belief that came to mind for you that you know you get caught in,

something that limits, something that puts you at war with yourself or your world. And there may be a time that you spend more time with it than right this moment, but for now you might just let it rest there, just sense that what you're believing as a belief. You might sense how it feels in your body when you're believing it, what it's like when you're really sensing you're going to fail, you're always going to fail,

you're not loved or lovable, or you'll never be close to others in a real world, way, you're undeserving, whatever it is. You might ask yourself, who would I be if I wasn't believing this? And be willing to rest in not knowing, be willing to rest in a gentle, kind awareness that's open to possibility. Namaste and thank you. The teaching you have received has been freely offered.

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