Tara Brach - Awakening from Virtual Reality (retreat talk)

Episode Date: January 31, 2014

2009-05-02 - Awakening from Virtual Reality - This talk examines how we get stuck in identifying as a separate, deficient self, and the way that a deep attention frees us from trance. "The invitation of the Path is that we can wake up out of our stories of limitation and blame. We can listen to and touch the longing in us that really wants to love without holding back and live from freedom. And we can then look at what's true within us so deeply that we discover the very awake, empty presence that is our essence. And we can live from that so that our lives become an expression of that realization. An expression of loving presence."

We've many times today said namaste and some of the folks in one of my groups said, so what is this bowing? And the word namaste means I see the divine in you. And the bow is just this honoring of the sacred that really lives through all of us. In the west we go, hi, how are you? And in Asia they go namaste. It's just kind of a nice and powerful way to really honor. and I'm feeling that right now.

That's why I brought it up. I'm feeling an honoring of you. I'm very aware of what the first day of a retreat is like. All the different weather systems can and do go through. I mean, maybe not all at once, but sometimes we have what's called multiple hindrance attacks, you know, or it's like it's all happening. And sometimes it's peaceful and beautiful.

And what we get is that there is a real power to the formula of retreat. and that is there's an intensified intention. We are conscious of wanting to be awake, and that really does draw us towards more wakefulness. And there's also a lot of our habitual escape strategies have been removed. We don't have access to them. But one thing we find is we still do have access to thinking, thinking, thinking. So we can do it a lot, right?

You notice that. Rumi has a poem where there's a mouse and a frog in conversation. We meet at this appointed time but the text says lovers pray constantly. Once a day, once a week, five times an hour, it's not enough. Fish like we are, need the ocean around us. Do the camel say let's meet back here on Thursday night? Ridiculous, they jingled together continuously talking while the countenels. walks. Do you pay regular visits to yourself? Do you pay regular visits to yourself?

Don't argue or answer rationally. Let us die and dying reply. Do you pay regular visits to yourself? What a wonderful inquiry, you know. I think sometimes part of what we experience when we come here and it starts getting quiet is realizing how we haven't been paying regular visits, we haven't been listening, we haven't been intimate with our inner life. And there's a natural and a healthy sadness that comes in one of our groups we really were exploring that. So when Rumi says let us die, what does he mean? And in a sense my understanding is that to arrive at home to come into what's right here, there's a letting go or a waking up out of our habitual ways of leaving, doing, fixing, adjusting, controlling. There's a kind of a dying to our habitual

modes of escape in a way. And that on the spiritual path it's learning to die over and over. Because if you notice today you might let go and open and be there and the whole thing reconfigures itself and you get caught up and yet the next story in trance and there's another round of going oh oh yeah okay come back let go of that be here it's not easy though um one of the first retreats i went to somebody told a story that was something like guys being chased by a tiger and he jumps over kind of the edge of the cliff and he's hanging on to a vine and there's craggy he rocks below and the tiger's pacing and he yells out, help, help, you know, God help, you know, and there's a voice, yes, my son. And he says, can you help me? Yes, I'll help you.

I'll do anything, okay? Just let go. Big silence. Is anyone else there? You know? And it's like we'll do anything but let go. We'll do anything but any, you know, just letting go of the struggle is just not how we're designed. So just a note on the language of letting go, because letting go is not another doing. Somebody says, just let go. It doesn't mean you do something. It's almost like if you clench your fist right now, the doing is in the clenching. And the letting go is a seizing the self-activity.

It's a seizing to clench. It's a letting go of the resisting and the defending. So the kind of essence of our practice here is this letting go of the clench. It's letting go of the ways we escape, letting go of the ways we leave the moment. Another way to put it is it's an unresisting presence. It's this moment absolutely not opposing anything.

So this unconditional presence from the point of view of the self is really challenging and the reason why is that the self knows that it's here by continuing to clench and struggle and control. In other words, if we stop the doing the self gets really existentially nervous. It's like the whole sense of that things will work out for us and that bad things won't happen. The way we deal with that is by the clenching and the resisting. So from the self's point of view, unresisting presence is like death. There's a, one person wrote, I was hitchhiking the other day and a hearse stopped. I said, no thanks, I'm not going that far. So there's a sense

that letting go and letting be like really dropping it is like that far. It's like as soon as we really just stop resisting, just be, there's this whole mystery that opens up. There's a groundlessness. We lose our orientation. So that's our predicament. Our predicament is that we have this very profound conditioning, that senses that we're self, we're separate and that we need to control things to be okay. And we also have a very innate, wisdom that intuit this mystery, this love and awareness that's really what we are. And from that innate wisdom there comes a longing to let go. It's like we really want to let go of all the doing and fixing and controlling we want to

be free. So Pema Children calls this the big squeeze. I think it's a great term, this conditioning and then this deep intuition. So I'd like to explore tonight is really this path of waking up from the conditioning and of really resting in the truth of what we are, this presence. And I'd like to orient this talk around a story that I've always really liked, and it's about a young man named Nachi Keta, a young Indian man. who comes face to face with death.

And it's after the death of several of his friends. He's a young man that he actually has this kind of a sense of the brevity of life and really the shallowness of worldly pursuits when they're, in some way, divorce from a spiritual understanding. So he was the son of a rich merchant and knew that the heart's happiness doesn't come from the property we own and then got very, very much in a deep anger and conflict with his father because his father was encouraged by the Brahman priests to make a good donation in order to secure himself a rebirth in the next life, a good rebirth. And so the day arrives to make this

donation and the father says, I give my cattle, my gold and all of value to the priest of the temple. And then Natchikato says, all you value. Ha, what about me your son? And so he publicly shames and his father and his father is angry and says, well, I give you as well. I give you to death. And so Nachi-Kato's eyes are blazing and he replies, I accept and then he leaves. So that's the blow up on the home front. So Natchie Keda goes to a remote spot in the deepest forest and he sits and waits for death to show himself. And for three days and three nights he sits intent and motionless to touch.

determined to face death in a spiritual quest. And then eventually he comes to what's called the land of Yama, the King of Death. And Lord Yama, the King of Death, is also known as the keeper of accounts and he has death's three assistants, pestilence, famine, and war, who explained that Lord Yama's away. He's out collecting rent. So Natchie K agrees to wait. And he waits for these three days and then death returns and his assistants tell him of this most unusual young man who's come to seek him. So, Lord Yama says, welcome to my kingdom.

I see you're a man intent on his journey and alas I've kept you waiting. I will make up for the three days I kept you waiting by offering you three boons. You can choose three blessings for your journey. Now during this time of waiting, Nachi Kata had really entered a kind of luminous state of mind and he recognized what he most needed to go on. Okay, and this is really what we need on this spiritual journey. And the first boon that Natchi Keta requested was forgiveness for all that he had touched. He says, let my father look upon me with the same joy as the day I was born. Natchikata knew that only by releasing his past, by reconciling with all that was incomplete in his heart,

could he continue his journey? So he is then blessed with this and reunion with life is the blessing granted by forgiveness and the boon of forgiveness left Natchikata's heart open and clear. So then Lord Yama looks at him and says, you know, your first boon was a wise one, what will be your second? And after a bit of silent reflection, Natchikata spoke and he said, I asked for the blessing of inner fire.

okay the blessing of inner fire he knew that to succeed on his journey he would need the courage to follow the path with his whole being so inner fire is this wholehearted energy it's a spiritual passion that sometimes we describe as aspiration

it's when we're really awake to what matters there's an inner fire it's like nothing holds back we give ourselves So again, Lord Yama honored Natchikata's wisdom and blessed him with this strength, with this devotion. So free from the restrictions of old conflict and filled now with this limitless energy of aspiration, this compass of the heart that really guides us. Natchikata had found much to help support him in this kind of awakening from the small. self. So he was then asked to name his last boon. And after reflecting, Nachikata looked at death and

said, I asked for that which is immortal. And with some surprise, death reminded this audacious young man that he had come to the last boon and that he could choose anything. Lord Yama then conjured up visions of what Natchikata might choose instead, a harem of beautiful maidens to travel with on his journey, a royal golden war chariot with the world's fastest deeds, a palace where Natchikato would be king. It would be kind of a draggy story if he said, I'll take the harem, you know? But anyway, we'll see. Anyway, so Natchikato viewed all of these and more. Why not choose among these, death urged again? But Natchikato is a determined youth, not easily led astray. once we have seen this, you know, kind of the luminosity of what's possible, we're not so

easily caught up. And so Natchikata said to Lord Yama, will not all of these things that you have shown me return soon enough to your own kingdom, Lord Yama? The Lord of death smiled at Natchikata's understanding and answered, yes, it is true. Then I asked to know that which is immortal. at this Lord Yama said, I will grant your third boon and he handed Natchikata a simple and yet extraordinary gift, a mirror. He handed him a mirror. He said, if you wish to find the secret of immortality Natchikata, I cannot help you with more than this. You, yourself, must look directly into yourself. Then you must repeatedly ask yourself the greatest of all human questions. Who am I? Look beyond your body and your thoughts, Natchikata.

In this way, you will find what you seek. So, whether it's in a spiritual initiation or meditation, we too must face Lord Yama. In fact, we always are facing Lord Yama. All the time we're facing change and loss. And we also must ask who is born and who dies. just as this portion of the story as Natchikeda gazes into the sacred mirror he enters into the profound spiritual questioning that leads to the deathless

when everything he held was released and stripped away a pure and timeless heart arose by looking in the mirror and seeing who he was Natchikato was free so the journey begins for Natchikato with disillusionment and so it's true with all of us. I mean, we may be drawn to spiritual practice by some intuition of the sacred,

but there's also some disillusionment that kind of clears the way for that, where the old stories of what might bring us happiness or might work out for us kind of crash. So that whether it's because our heart is broken, which is for many of us, the opening. It's like when our heart is broken, there's something that's deeper and larger

than where it particularly was fixated that we gain access to. So it can be a relationship crashing or it can be that we get our diagnosis that ends the illusion that we have forever. That's one of the wake-ups. Or it may be that we're addicted to a substance and wasting our days and that's what we realize. Or our children get into trouble in a big way or we lose our job. Someone gets sick, someone dies. And we can see it in meditation all the time that this is Lord Yama, it's that these mind states, sometimes it'll feel really good and then it goes. It's like we thought we had it. In fact, there are times you meditate and you go, I get it now. Now I get it. It's like if I just let go and totally love myself, it's just all right. And then it's like, what was I

thinking? You know, it's like it's gone, gone. So there's one person that writes, this life is a test. There's only a test. If it were a real life, then you would have been told and you would have been given more specific information about where to go and what to do. Anyway, it's out of our hands. It's just out of our hands. So when we encounter Lord Yama, and we encounter this change and that it's out of control, one response we have is something's wrong. Something's wrong with me and something's wrong with life. and the invitation on the path is to notice that but not believe it and to take a deeper kind of presence in that moment, a deeper in an undefended presence. And the path that Natchikato went on is a guide on how we might do that.

So let's look at each of the pieces, each of the boons. And we'll make tonight a bit of a, we'll have a few reflections so that you can explore how each of the pieces, of these boons is a part of waking up from the trance. It's what enables us because the trance is thick. It's not bad, it's kind of meant to be the way it is. You know, we are designed to incarnate and feel separate and live in these stories. But we're also designed, we're also we have this gift of awareness that can become aware of itself. They can become aware of itself. they can notice the trance and discover a mystery, a kind of sacred presence that is what we are

and it's bigger than the trance. So the first of the gifts towards this kind of homecoming to truth is forgiveness and we spent a little bit of time on it this afternoon and for some people forgiveness is really a description of the whole spiritual path. by that I mean that our defenses against how it all is keep on reconstituting themselves. On some level when there's unpleasantness, we immediately turn on ourselves or the world. So where we're forgiving, we're letting go of that armoring and that resistance that we have towards how this life right here is, how this life in another person is, how life is.

in a very specific way to forgive means that we don't believe our stories of blame it's so profound when we can get that we have a story of blame and that it's causing us pain and we don't have to believe it it's distancing us so one of the investigations on the path is really how am I creating distance you know, how am I distancing from the life in here right now?

How am I distancing from this person or this person, this sangha? How am I distancing from the earth? To let go of the story of wrongness is not easy. I mean, if we watch our lives, we know, we know. I mean, it's very humbling how quickly we go in. As soon as we feel hurt, the reflex is not to feel the hurt it's to push away something. I like this Dear Abby.

She has a few letters that she's admitted she was at a loss to answer. And one of them goes, Dear Abby, I have a man I can't trust. He cheats so much, I'm not even sure the baby I'm carrying is his. I think it's a sleeper, but it's a good one. When we're upset inside, we lash out. And it comes in all different directions. One report is of this boy who announces proudly to his dad,

you know, I'm going to marry grandma. And the father says, gently, son, you can't do that. Children don't marry their grandparents. And he goes, why not? You married my mom, so I'm going to marry yours. So forgiveness, it doesn't mean erasing all boundaries. It doesn't mean giving permission to be hurt. One cartoon I liked was of these two doctors

you're standing beside a dying man's bed and they're saying, so could we have all your stuff after you die? And the subheading is doctors without boundaries. So there's a few misunderstandings I wanted to say about forgiving because it often is experienced as if I forgive you then it means that I was wrong or that forgiving means that it's okay for you to do such and such. you can forgive and vow never ever again.

You can forgive and absolutely commit yourself to doing everything within your power to not have that kind of harm happen that you cause it as somebody else causes. You can completely commit yourself. You can forgive and divorce someone and you can forgive and not vote for someone and you can forgive and in any way you need to take care of yourself.

it's the heart. When we forgive, we're letting go of the armoring that's keeping our heart feeling separate. It's a movement of the heart to include what has been pushed away. I think the reason that forgiving is so hard, because it really is, if we're really forgiving there's a challenge, is that in order to forgive we have to feel the vulnerability that we've been trying to protect ourselves from. So when we're blaming, the blame is kind of covering over something and when we forgive, we have to really feel it. And it can't be forced. You can't will forgiveness, but you can be willing. And so in this teaching from Natchikata's story, you don't force the forgiveness, okay, I'm going to forgive my father right now, but because you recognize that not forgiving

keeps you trapped, keeps you trapped in the victim, keeps you something less than you are, there's an intention, there's an intention and that opens the door to forgiveness. Give you an example of how it works, and one of a client I worked with some years ago, when his wife left him, he was living in kind of obsessive stories of blame about, I mean, every filter in him was what was wrong with her and how she had really blown it and broken her promise and betrayed him and there was some triangulating going with the kids because they were both blaming each other to the kids so it was very very painful situation and he began to sense because one of the children started having really difficulty that the suffering of the blaming

but then he turned it on himself okay now i've screwed up i've gotten caught in this and it was my fault and I'm undeserving and so on. So he really was in the bind of blame and by the way much of the forgiving is really forgiving ourselves. So in working with him as we began to explore what does it mean to let go of the story of blaming yourself? What would you have to feel? And that's a question I ask a lot. If you let go of your story of blame. You pick your favorite one and let go of it, what would you have to feel? And for him, what he had to feel was the fear of failure and that if he failed he'd lose everybody, everybody would leave him, wouldn't love him. When he could recognize that, when he could recognize

the fear of failure, so he wasn't blaming, then he had to feel the fear of failure, that's when he had one of the moments I call it kind of the ouch where this is painful and he was able to then start holding himself in compassion. Forgiven, forgiven, just to offer those words. The self-compassion was the beginning of real healing. For him because it was a fear of losing love and I shared this with one of the groups today, he found himself saying please love me, please love me. and it wasn't to her. It was he really needed to feel the sense of being held in love. And that's a very, very powerful thing to say,

to just whisper, please love me. At first it feels contrived. But if you say it, you get that a part of you is saying that. There is a very young, vulnerable place in most of us that in some way is saying, please love me. and it's actually very authentic to connect with that because when we actually feel that longing, what happens, and this is where the power is,

is we become very receptive to feeling loved, which then puts us in touch with love itself. And it's not so dualistic. It's no longer someone out there loving me. It just were back in touch with love again. So he did that. He got in touch with that very young, vulnerable place, please love me.

And he held himself with love. and then he was able to see her more clearly. And he could see how she was feeling unseen and she was feeling really isolated in their relationship and how she needed to move on. They were able to co-parent, which is really what's important. So when we hold our own unmet needs with compassion, then we're able to forgive another.

healing is not possible without forgiveness, just not possible. There's a line that I learned from this African tribe that I've shared a lot on Wednesday nights that vengeance is a lazy form of grief, that vengeance is a lazy form of grief, that when we are blaming, it's a way of not feeling the grief inside and the mourning and the fears that we've been trying to avoid. So as I mentioned, the biggest domain of forgiveness, and this is, we're back to Nachi Kha's story, if we want to be free to move more deeply, if we want to be with what's inside us, we have to be able to let go of our judgments about it. So if we're fearful and we're judging ourselves

for being fearful, we can't be with the fear. There needs to be a soft quality of heart to be with anything that's inside us. And what that means is so let's say there's physical pain and then we become obsessed with how to get rid of it and then part of us doesn't like ourselves for being a small obsessed person about our pain. We have to forgive that whole process of reactivity and it's hard because we want to be different than we are so we have to forgive that we're not different than we are. Does that make sense?

It goes very very deep, I've found in myself over and over again and that it's not until some part of me goes, oh, okay, it hurts or I can't be different than this, I want to be. That in that softness, I drop to a more full and genuine and transformative quality of presence. So it's forgiven, forgiven. So let's take a moment, we'll reflect on this first boon. And the invitation is to pause because there have been a lot of words and just feel yourself right here.

and let the intention be some intimacy with your experience. So there's listening and there's feeling the sensations of the body. And notice as you experience sensations if there's anything difficult or unpleasant. And you might just sense that the words forgiven, forgiven are a way of relaxing any resistance. They're a way of just letting be what's here. that in facing Lord Yama we face all the changing, living, dying parts of this universe and naturally the conditioning is to resist. So forgiven, forgiven, relaxes us back into presence.

You might sense if there's anything in your heart right now that in some way you're not liking any attitude, any emotion, any sense of self that feels in some way tight or small. And again, forgiven, forgiven, or if those words aren't your words, that's fine in some way, allowing what's there to be there without resistance, letting go of any attitude that this is wrong. And you might broaden and sense if there's anything going on in your life

where you've locked into that attitude of, I'm bad or I'm wrong. or you're not forgiving towards yourself, anything going on. And again, just to sense your intention to relax any resistance, to let go of the notion of this is bad or wrong, to hold with a gentleness. Even the intention will open the door.

And in a similar way to scan for where in a relationship you might be created, separating separation from another person with judgment, with stories of resentment, of blame. And just feel from your sincerity the intention to not push another out of your heart. The intention is the beginning of really coming home to who in truth we are, beyond any story of a self that's been wronged, beyond any story of a victim. We come home to that awareness that's naturally forgiving, wise and kind. So this is the first gift as we take refuge in presence, is relaxing resistance,

letting go of our stories of blame. And you can open your eyes if you'd like. And it's one that for most of us we have to come back to again and again because as I mentioned, whenever there is difficulty, we very quickly go into something's wrong, it's me or it's you, or it's life, but we're in some way in opposition. So this first boon of forgiving relaxes the opposition, allows us to come back home to wholeness. The second of the boons is inner fire and really that's the love and interest in life

that gives us the possibility of giving ourselves wholeheartedly. We're so fragmented and distracted. I've known, you know, like we're just such a notice how multitasking we always are and we're just all over the place and it's amazing to begin to collect and really give ourselves to what we love. This is Robert Frost. He says something we were withholding, made us weak until we found it was ourselves. So inner fire is really the love of life, the love of waking up, love of truth, love of

Dharma. It's what energizes the path. And I feel like one of the big misunderstandings of Dharma of mindfulness is that it's dry in some way. And the reality is that we wouldn't be able to walk the Buddhist path. We wouldn't be able to sit down and meditate. We would never sign up for a retreat unless there was something incredibly juicy and alive and impassioned in us about waking up. There's no way we would deal with this. If there wasn't something in us that really felt alive about it. So the marker of the inner fire is sincerity. As I mentioned last night, it's you know it when there is that aliveness of aspiration, there's a quality of sincerity that you can pick up in another and we trust people when we sense their sincerity because they're

more at home. They're more coming from the real source of what matters to them. So what we'll explore for a few minutes is that we all have ways of closing off the inner fire. Every one of us has our strategies of getting preoccupied and waylaid and they're out of fear. And you might just reflect for yourself, just for a moment, just check in and just even ask yourself, you know, how do I hold back? How do I hold back from loving the ones that are close? Or from maybe expressing my creativity, or from really realizing the fullness. of my spiritual life, of who I am. You might even sense, how am I holding back in this moment?

So Rumi writes, gamble everything for love. He says, if you're a true human being, half-heartedness does not reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. I love that, at mean-spirited roadhouses. So how do we hold back?

It's really part of this waking up to our patterns. I call them false refuges. You know, that we, how do we get waylaid? And one of the big ways is that we keep on playing and believing in some idea of a limited self. We keep believing a story that we're less than what we are and that we don't have what it takes, that we really can never fully be intimate, or that we can never realize the depth and dimension of what we are,

or never really be creative. We have a kind of small, mind of belief that what we long for is down the road. We're here at retreat and we're working hard to build that kind of muscle of mindfulness, but really the real freedom and liberation is after we've done that three-month retreat and gone to Asia or whatever, we have these ideas if it's not here. you know one of my favorite stories came I first heard it when my son was in a Waldorf school years and years ago from the art department

where in one of the art classes the children were grouped doing their art projects and the teacher was circulating around and one little girl was really just completely immersed and into it and so the teacher kind of leaned over and said so hon what are you drawing and little girl said well I'm drawing God and the teacher kind of chuckled and said, well, hun, no one knows what God looks like.

And without skipping a beat, without even looking up, she said, they will in a moment. And I love that because, you know, John O'Donohue is one of my heroes, said, you know, where did our wildness go to? You know, we come onto the planet and we're so vibrant and curious and alive and it gets kind of civilized or cultured out of us in some way. And part of what happens is a mistrust, a mistrust of our bodies and our emotions. So we get waylaid at mean-spirited roadhouses when we buy into those stories of limitation, when we then go ahead and numb ourselves and distract ourselves and observe from a distance. We observe life from a distance. We don't fully engage. So it's kind of like we're looking through

a window at life and we're analyzing and not really in our body. It's like reading all the book reviews but not reading the books or thinking about nature but not actually feeling the wind and smelling the sense and being there. Or as they say it's Zen and the art of reading all the books about Zen. You know, that's kind of a... So one of the ways of connecting with inner fire is when we face the truth of how fleeting this world is. When we just get it, like Natchikata did, then when we get it that it's fleeting and that D.H. Lawrence said, you know,

it's not doing what the self-wants, it's doing what the deepest self-wants, and that takes some diving to really connect with our deepest longing. It takes a kind of wake-up. So a story I heard some years back of a mother urging her four-year-old to hurry up and get into his sneakers and, you know, she wanted to get in the errands and then get them to the park to play before having to come home and make dinner for the family and so on. So Noah had other plans. He's saying, but I want to feed my horsey, won't you help me? You know, and the mom's about to insist, well, we have things to do and places to go and so on. But, and we want to get you to the park. But then she remembers and this friend had recently. recently shared how her sister when pregnant had been diagnosed with cancer and she had given birth to a healthy baby girl but after some months it became clear that she wasn't going to make it.

So during the first year of her baby's life and this was the only time she would have with her child her mantra was that she would keep saying to herself is I have no time to rush. I have no time to rush. And so remembering this was this kind of wake up and so no, you know, I have no time to rush. And so Noah's mom bent over and said, here you go, honey, and she hands him a toy carrot. She goes, horsey's love carrots. And Noah's thrilled and he's got his hand stretched out saying, here you go, horsey, his

eyes are wide with excitement. And this mom's thought was just simply, he's so dear and how long after all will he want me to help feed his imaginary horse? So in a way, no time to rush. That comes from inner fire. That's the sense of, well, what do we really value? Do we want to race through to the finish line, or are we willing to really arrive to feel what's here?

So we'll reflect again, if you will. Another language for this really is devotion. It's really being in touch with what we love and devoting ourselves. And my hope is that this links in a little to last night's reflection because it's not a one-time reflection. You could be asking yourself this question of what really matters many, many, many times, and each time it'll take you more back right here,

home and where your heart is. So pausing and feel your breath for a little bit and just invite yourself to relax. Not even trying to rush to the end of this, talk or to the end of this evening, just really let this moment matter as much as any moment in your life. Notice that. Are you waiting for something else? Are you on your way somewhere? So the invitations to really be intimate with the life right here. Sometimes the way I frame it to myself is if I only had a few minutes to live, I try to make it as real as possible.

So you might check that out. If you only had a few minutes to live, what would most matter about these moments right now? What would be your aspiration for these moments? Truly. There's just a few minutes. What matters right now? So there's a sense of what do you most long for to touch, to experience, to realize?

And as you sense what that might be, just sense the possibility of inhabiting that, that it's right here. You don't have to wait. If it's love, if it's for, freedom, just be that, be that presence. So in facing the truth of our life, this impermanent, living, dying world, we begin to free our heart by letting go of the stories that separate us, the stories of blame, and then we deepen our presence by really sensing what matters to us, living from what matters to us. We're going to go on to the

third boon now in a moment. So open your eyes as you'd like to. So this third boon is looking into the mirror and this is the deepening and to me it's the kind of the wholeness of practice bringing into its fullness. And we look into the mirror and we see that which is timeless that which is eternal. But at first it doesn't seem that way. First we look into the mirror and it might be Lily Tomlin says I always knew I wanted to be somebody, but I guess I should have been more specific, you know? I remember when I first times I went to the Insight Meditation Society, there was a sign-up saying self-knowledge is not necessarily good news, you know? So it's like when we first start looking into the mirror,

what we see are some of the warts and blemishes, we see the vulnerability, we see the layers of mean-spiritedness or narrow-mindedness or obsession. We just see the layers. But what happens as we keep looking, as we keep offering presence, is we start discovering the very nature of that presence itself. In other words, we start discovering the awareness that's aware of the sadness or fear or whatever. So all the teachings of all the spiritual traditions have ever studied in some way say, look at what's happening, look into awareness,

itself. And they start with having us quiet down some because it's hard to look into the mirror if there's a lot of static and a lot of interference. This is Srinor Sargadatta. 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 the pathway that we practice here is we quiet some, you know, today and quieting means we just start noticing the busyness. It's not like we do something about it. We just start noticing in that noticing there's a quieting down. We start noticing how the mind is fixating

and we start in that noticing the grip releases. There's not a doing. You'll find that the freedom comes just by the noticing. And this is what the Buddha did under the Bodhi tree. He just noticed what was happening and he looked into his own mind. He looked into his own awareness. So we start making regular visits to ourselves. And what we see first is all the grasping and resisting of the mind

and then we begin to see more deeply who's there, this presence or this love that's here. And what we discover, whether what we love is the Buddha or Christ or great spirit or beauty or truth, this is the essence of what we are, that there's nothing more mysterious than the awareness that's looking through your eyes right now. There's nothing more vast, more beautiful, more loving than that essence of presence that's listening right now, that's looking out through those eyes and that's here. That's what we discover. But as I say on the way we notice fixation first, so there's a quieting process. So we'll experiment with the last boon and I'm aware of

the tiredness here and I'm aware that there's going to be spaciness and it's just a way of let's just touch into it and see with this last boon and I'm aware of the tiredness here and I'm aware that there's going to be spaciness and it's just a way of, let's with this last part of looking into the mirror what we find. So if you will again, sit up maybe a little bit taller, a little bit more alert. So in just a few moments we're going to, as we do this it's just going to take a few moments actually move through the whole process of how a meditation can unfold. And the first beginning part of a meditation is to pause and to be aware of arriving. Notice if it's possible just to relax a bit more through the body.

Maybe your shoulders a little bit back and down, the hands soft, belly soft, maybe a few full breaths to help collect the attention. And with the relaxed attentiveness, just to notice what's happening. The essential activity of mindfulness is recognizing and allowing. we practice just noticing the sounds and noticing how awareness doesn't oppose anything that the sounds are free to arise and pass. And we recognize the sensations in the body and when there's a surrendering forgiving presence, they just live through us. They just play themselves. Vibration, heat, tingling. It's like glints of light in the night sky of starlight, just sparks of life, playing, dancing,

just happening. And awareness doesn't oppose anything, just lets it happen. So there's wakefulness and allowing. And there may be emotions or moods in the heart that are playing through. And there's no resisting, when there's no resisting, they just come and go. So recognizing in the foreground the sounds, the sensations,

feelings, this whole play, and see if you can notice in the background an alert inner stillness, the presence that's aware, just being that presence. That's it. be the silence that's listening, the awake space that's aware of sensation,

empty, aware heart that with tenderness can hold this world. This presence, this beingness is what we are. The poet Rolka writes, center of all centers, core of cores, almond, self-enclosed and growing sweet. All this universe to the furthest stars and beyond them is your flesh, your fruit. Now you feel how nothing clings to you. Your vast shell reaches into endless space and there the rich thick fluids rise and flow illuminated in your infinite peace. A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be when all the stars are dead. They're opening your eyes. So this is the third of the boons

is this inner mirror where we look in and we begin to sense the whole world that's playing and then the presence that's aware of it. And I'd like to end with the final part of Natchie Keta's story because this was Natchie Kato's realization of what he was, this awareness. So at the end of the story we see a young man bowing to Lord Yama a final time totally at peace.

Then, as if by magic, the landscape of the kingdom of death changes to the spring rice fields of his native India. In this, a last secret is revealed to him. Death and birth are not separate. Renewal comes by dying. When we have faced death and unloaneness, when we've realized the formless, we are unafraid to live and lie flowers under our feet. we go becomes holy ground.

Nachi Kata knew this in his heart and walked off towards his home to embrace his father and start a new life. So this is the possibility here of, this is really the invitation of the path. And the invitation of the path is that we can wake up out of our stories of limitation, of blame. We can listen to and touch the longing in us that really wants to love without holding back and live from freedom. And we can then look at what's true within us so deeply that we discover the very awake, empty presence that's our essence. And we can live from that

so that our lives become an expression of that realization, an expression of loving presence. and that means here is that we walk out on that lawn and we step and feel the ground and listen to the birds and smell the sweet spring and it's all an expression of this mystery, something to celebrate. So take the last final moments just invite you to just take some silence, some quiet.

Being the silence that's listening, the vast awake space that's aware of sensations and this empty awake heart that with tenderness can hold this living, dying world.