Tara Brach - Awakening Our Body's Awareness – Part 1

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

Awakening Our Body's Awareness - Part 1 - Mindful awareness of our bodies is a portal to full aliveness, wisdom and love. These two classes will explore the trance that takes us away from our body, the pathways home, ways of working with pain, and the gifts of an embodied presence (a favorite from the archives).

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I often use the word trance in talking about this whole path of waking up in recognition that we spend huge swaths of time in a kind of virtual reality where we're thinking in time traveling, you know, thinking about the future and the past. not actually awake right here in our senses. And yet, pretty much everything we most value when you think about it, feeling love, we have to be in our bodies, wisdom, we have to be here to directly contact reality, creativity, the

things we most value require being awake in our senses. And so what I'd like to explore in this class and in the following one really is this the pathway to full embodiment. It's what in Buddhism is described as the first foundation of mindfulness, that everything else arises out of our capacity to really be at home and awake in this living body. It's what we need to love life, celebrate life, really live it fully. There's a story that an art professor told about a conversation with her daughter, her daughter was seven, and she asked this woman one day what she did at work.

And the art professor told her, well, because she worked at a college, she said, well, I teach students how to draw. And the daughter looked really bewildered and she said, you mean they forgot? And I often think about how our bodies... know how to draw and to sing and to dance and they know how to be sexual and how to give birth and they know how to heal and they know how to die. You know, they know all of this. We know how to mourn and we know how to celebrate. And the given is that we leave our bodies regularly and there is a forgetting. The poet and philosopher O'Donohue's

said that our bodies know they belong to this life, belong to spirit. It's our minds that make us so homeless. So this isn't a diatribe against thought because, as they say, thought is a wonderful servant. I mean, it allowed amazing accomplishments and experiences and it's part of the spiritual path, wise contemplation. And it needs to be a servant. Because when it's a master, it takes us away from this full alive body. So we'll explore that, the pathway back to really sacred presence, to full embodiment. And just to say that historically, I think this is so interesting, and so many traditions, those on a spiritual path would go out into the wilderness to practice

and they would be kind of leaving behind all their duties and obligations and really habitual living to be in the elements. And yet ultimately, the wilderness that we all have is the wilderness of this living body. One teacher said, don't go far from your body. Then we have James Joyce who writes about Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body, which is what happens. We're kind of floating above, thinking a lot.

So we are in this process of learning how to reconnect. And the Buddha taught that be a light unto thyself, that the only way we can wake up is to really explore and examine and wake up in this embodied form. And you might even check right now as I'm speaking whether there's any sense of inhabiting this body. You know, do you feel like you own a body or can you feel your hands and feel the aliveness inside your hands? You might pause and just check for a moment, even close your eyes and just sense how awake

are you right now in your body? Can you feel sensation in your feet? You feel the arms and the legs? What happens if you soften a tense muscle? Can you feel more movement, more flow, more aliveness then? As we know, any exposure to meditation shows us that there's a challenge staying right here. See if you can stay a bit, right here.

Feeling the hands, the feet, the aliveness in the body. You might even ask, what's between me and being? at home in my body in this moment. Just ask that. What's between me and really being at home in my body in this moment? You might find that you just can't feel sensations. It's such a habit of being dissociated that it's very hard to feel much aliveness unless you're really feeling physical pain or really in perhaps feeling sexual pleasure.

very targeted but we primarily, maybe you don't feel so much sensation. Or you might find that you get in touch but you've already left. Can you stay a little longer? For some you might find you get in touch but then there's an immediate sense of judging something. And for others you might feel like as you go into your body that you get flooded by something that's really difficult and you feel really stuck and overwhelmed. You might experiment as you're reflecting, as we reflect together through these classes, coming

back again and again. Just experiment. Because what we find is that it really is entering the wilderness. To the degree all those moments that we're actually staying, we're living in a world that is out of control. We're not controlling it, we're just living the aliveness. And what you might find is that the body lives in the present moment. The mind does not.

And we're often uncomfortable in the present moment. We'd rather be somewhere that we can control it because when we're in the present moment in our body, the doing self is out of a job. Check it out. If you're really open to what's happening right here in the body, you're not organized back in that more conceptual doing self-narrative. I remember one student who didn't experiment and he would take the subway to work and his whole practice would be, how much can I stay in my body through the day?

And he'd be in his body in the subway and he'd breathe and feel it and get distracted and come back and he'd walk to his office and he could feel himself walking and he'd get in the elevator and he'd get to see. but he could still feel himself, but as soon as he got into the office and got into any kind of conversation, he'd lose it. Now let me just say, it's possible to stay somewhat anchored in your body and still talk, but it's not that easy because you can't be rehearsing what you're going to say. You actually have to listen and feel, listen and feel, or you have to speak but stay aware.

And what he found was that he got very anxious, very anxious and vulnerable when he tried to stay in his body but was also trying to communicate and operate. Why is that? We're used to being in this mental control tower. The doing self is much is our habit of being. So we leave, we dissociate, we go towards security which is living in a mental realm. Our children are leaving earlier and earlier. We know that, right? Our children are leaving their bodies earlier and earlier. Five to six hours a day behind a screen is the average. I sometimes think about that and really get chills, you know, that we've kind of, it's like

the lobster in the pot, we're kind of getting used to how much humans are plugged into something versus just living their experience. children five to six hours. One story, a little boy proudly announced in kindergarten that his cat had had kittens and the teacher asked, well, what sex were they? And he said three males, three females. He goes, oh great, how'd you know? And he said, oh, my dad turned them over, the labels on the bottom. You know, it's like our disconnection to nature and to the natural world. Children are outside 50% less than last generation. Think of what that means.

It means you don't feel your connection and love for the earth as much. Are you going to take as good care of the earth? When your world is really cyber world, obesity level in children's tripled since 1980. So this is children. We know it's true for adults too, but I'm just naming a trajectory and you can see it through the evolution of our species, this trajectory of leaving our bodies and living in a mental world.

You know, in the unfolding of agriculture, it moved us from hunter-gatherer, very embedded, to dominating nature. And then it got even more so in the industrial and then with technology, the sense of being removed from the natural rhythms. And what happens when we get removed from the natural rhythms? Because, you know, thinking spurs on more consuming, more generativness, more expansion. But we leave nature.

I mean, when we are contacting nature, we're intimate. When we're in thinking, we're removed. And this is Reggie Ray. He says, to approach the world by objectivity. identifying it, to reside mainly in the head, is to put ourselves in the position of domination, mastery, and control. And what it does, it leads to violating that which we have dissociated from. We can then violate the earth.

We are dissociated, we can violate other humans that we feel are less and we can violate other animals that we don't feel a connection with. I heard an apocryphal story. Say that again, apocryphal. Here we go. This is July, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were training in a remote moon-like desert in western United States for the expedition to the moon. Okay, so this area is a home to several Native American communities and as the story

goes, one day they're training and the astronauts came across an old Native American and the man asked them what they were doing there and they replied, they're part of a research expedition that would shortly travel to the moon. And when the old man heard that, he fell silent for a few moments and then asked the astronauts if they could do him a favor. What do you want? they asked. Well, said the old man, the people of my tribe believe that Holy Spirit live on the moon. I was wondering if you could pass an important message to them from my people.

What's the message? Asked the astronauts. The man uttered something in his tribal language and asked them to repeat it and memorize it. What does it mean? asked the astronauts. Oh, that I can't tell you. It's a secret that only our tribe and moon spirits are allowed to know. When they returned to their base, the astronauts searched and searched until they found someone who could speak the tribal language and asked him to translate the secret message.

When they repeated what they had memorized, the translator started to laugh uproariously. When he calmed down enough to speak, they asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they had memorized so carefully meant this, quote unquote. Don't believe a single word these people are telling you, they've come to steal your lands. So we get the idea. D.H. Lawrence, who really lived at the time when industrialization was showing a lot of its toxicity, described, said this. He said, it's a question practically of relationship. We must get back in relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. For the truth is, we are

perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs. We are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe. Vitely, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe." I think that phrase is so great. We must plant ourselves again in the universe. And we can kind of sense that, that uprooted tree that we're in this virtual realm and there's something about coming back and reconnecting with our earth and our bodies that's absolutely essential. So we look at what are the flags of tramps?

What are the flags that we've dissociated from our bodies and from our full aliveness? And they're all forms of controlling, all the different ways we leave our bodies. And if you start recognizing them, that's the beginning of the training in the first foundation of mindfulness. Oh, I've left, I'm off in thought. And I'm going to give you the different kind of flags, come back. So one big flag, most of us know, obsessive thinking. And we all get caught in it.

Where we're just absolutely lost and we're totally riveted. And so repeating visitors of worrying and planning and rehearsing and, you know, how much we're preparing for what's around the corner, how often we're trying to figure something out. And it's like our world collapses, it becomes tiny. and small and we miss out and we miss out of what's in our body. Most of it has to do with danger. What's around the corner that's dangerous that we can prepare for?

In one national park there's a wonderful story about how they advised hikers to be alert for bears and take extra precautions and they advise the park visitors to wear little bills on their clothes to make noise when they're hiking. We also say visitors should carry pepper spray just in case of bears encountered. They also say it's a good idea to keep an eye out for fresh bear scat so you have an idea that bears are in the area. And they say people should be able to recognize the difference between black bear and grizzly bear scat.

Black bear droppings are smaller and they often contain berries, leaves and pussle bits of fur. Grizzly bear droppings tend to contain small bills in the smell of pepper. The best laid plans, right? So the intensity of our compulsive thinking is direct proportion to the extent that we're unwilling to experience their body in a full way. I want to just say that again, to the degree we're intensely caught in obsessive thinking, there's an unwillingness to be here. There's something difficult that we're really avoiding. Okay. One is obsessive thinking. The second flag of trans, judgment.

Whenever we're in judgment, and this is a deep habit, there's something wrong with you, there's something wrong with me, or there's something wrong with the world. We are leaving our bodies where the actual feeling of aversion or fear or hurt or jealousy or whatever it is lives,

the only place that we can actually heal. But when we're caught in judgment, we're removed. Obsessive thinking, judgment, and then all the habits, of distracting numbing and we know them. We know the consumer habits we're leaving our body, the living reality here when we're trying to grab after the next fix and a lot of it's online. It is an addiction, it's going to be in DSM if it's not already more refined but it's

an addiction and when we're online we're rarely awake, feeling sensitive, feeling empathy, feeling open. One of my favorite stories is of a man and a woman in a living room and she's watching something, I don't know, and he's, you know, but she says, she turns to him and says, honey, if I ever turn to a vegetable, please pull the plug. And he goes to the TV set and yanks it, you know? And we get hooked. So we're plugged in. Obsessive thinking, judgment, all our distraction, and then the fourth is speed. We speed in contemporary societies, industrialized technological societies, we speed because we have this whole impetus to get more done, to produce more, to be more. Does that make sense? I mean, how many of you

have had the thought of only I just had a few more hours in the day? You know, that kind of thing, there's not enough time. We speed. I notice so often at our retreats we do in addition to kind of a sitting practice, we do walking practices of mindfulness and mindful movement and the walking as we begin to quiet, it's a slow walking and it becomes so clear that when I walk half as fast, we walk, we're going to quiet. I noticed twice as much. We speed through things, we don't notice the world.

One of the stories that's always touched me is of a woman who got some sort of a diagnosis, a cancer diagnosis that basically gave her about a year to live and she had a one or two-year-old daughter and the real anguish of not so much time left with her beloved. And her mantra was, I have no time to rush. No time to rush. And I wish we all had that in a way because we kind of skate through and tear through our life and then where are we going, you know? What's the finish line?

death and how much do we really drop in? So in a basic way when we're controlling our experience, we're not experiencing our life. When we're controlling through obsessing, through judging, through distracting, through speeding, we're not here for it. There's a West African elder, his name is Maladoma Somme. He's a wonderful teacher if you hear his name or catch wind just to follow him a little bit. So he had been away from his home village for about, for a number of years, he went to a Catholic boarding school. So he returned, I think it was 20 years, he returned after 20 years.

And one night he said something about wanting to turn on some lights and he was told this, he was told, no, if we light the lamps we won't be able to see. And then as the village elders explained it, you can't see anything real in daylight. The only thing you see in the daylight is what you want to see. When you turn the lights off in the night, you see what wants to be seen, which is a whole different story. The understanding that I get from that is that we move through the day and we're mostly in this virtual reality where we've narrowed the field of perception and we're thinking

our way through the day. where our attention is aimed and we have to turn off the glare and blare of our thoughts because they run interference in order to see what wants to be seen, the life that's right here. That doesn't mean that we're always turning off our thoughts. It just means that we have a choice as to whether to be lost to them or not, that we develop this skill of mindful presence that can say, oh, this is a thought that's useful, this is in some way serving something I need to get done or something I need to communicate or

some healing or some creativity or whatever. And this is a channel that only brings me more separation, more anxiety, don't need it. That we develop that mindfulness that notices. Carl Jung describes that when we're cut off from aliveness, he describes it in a psychological terms, he says one of the greatest influences on their children and on their own lives is the unlived life of the parents. The greatest influence on their children and their own lives is the unlived life of the parents.

And it could be on the level of, oh, I never pursued music or, you know, I didn't pursue some art form or the career that I'd really wanted because I had a family or whatever, but there's a deeper meaning also which is, I know, I know. I never really arrived in the parts of my body and being that needed attention. I never opened to the passion or the fear or the aliveness that's right here, the unlived life and trance means unlived life, it's unmanifested spirit. And we can sense that in our own lives. I mean so many have a background feeling of disappointment that their life isn't really

the life they had imagined or hoped for, that it's falling short in some way, that we're skimming the surface. One woman I worked with had that around relationships that she's just repeating the same patterns and that she was never going to live really fully a meaningful relationship. And so we looked at it together and she had this habit of having a lot of thoughts about how she was falling short and was going to be found wanting. not be appealing to someone, be rejected, be pushed away. And in anticipation of that she would do the very behaviors that would distance.

And this is a very familiar pattern, I'm sure many of you know it or exceed it in yourself or others. And so what would happen is she would start thinking those thoughts that I'm not going to be accepted and she'd get very tight and she'd get very unnatural in her behaviors and she'd get critical. like, put the criticism in and put the criticism out. So I asked her, you know, if you had to put down all those thoughts, what is it you're most unwilling to feel when you start being engaged in a close relationship? And she got in touch with a very, very old fear and security.

You know, her parents were very critical and not present. It was a very young place. And it was a fear that somebody was just wasn't going to want. want to be with her. And I asked her, so what is that place most need? And she said, it needs me to stay with it. And so really her practice was to stay in her body with that vulnerability with a tremendous amount of compassion.

And she started doing that. She sent the message, I'm here, I'm not leaving. Again, remember, we're exploring in this class that we dissociate, we leave. We're not just leaving our bodies, we're leaving the wounded places in our bodies. There's parts of us that need to feel accompanied and we leave. So for her to keep saying, I'm not leaving, you know, I'm staying and feel and be with that vulnerability, created a lot more of a space of compassion, a space of presence and she started having more choice in whether she was going to buy into the thoughts.

She was in a relationship and she'd have the same thoughts of, oh, he's going to push me away because of this and she'd say, it's just a thought because she was inhabiting a larger space of her being. She had more choice. When there's unlived life, we don't have so much choice. We're under the line, we keep repeating the same patterns. But coming awake in the body begins to open us to a much larger, awareness.

When we're dissociated, we don't trust ourselves because we know we're avoiding something. When we start connecting, the trust grows. I remember from myself in college one of the first experiences I had of really trusting and feeling a sense of the sacred that it's right here. It's not like down the road or out there. And it was, I had done a yoga class. I started doing yoga when I was, end of junior year, I think. And it was after a yoga class.

I remember I was, it was spring and I was walking back to my apartment and there was the fragrance of the blossoming fruit trees and so on and the moon and it was just a lovely setting. And I remember I paused and I stopped and I was already somewhat in my body from the yoga and I just said, take it all in. Just open your senses to it all. And in some way, in those moments, my body and mind were in the exact same place at the same time.

I wasn't like partly in my thought, I was like completely awake in the senses. And a little afterwards I had the thought, oh, that is sacred space. that fully inhabiting the moment, that first foundation of mindfulness really being awake is the foundation of, is really the portal to a very deep freedom. Life felt sacred. You might want to pause for a moment because there's a lot of words and again see if you've left our check and see if there's some kind of reentering, re-inhabiting just in this moment, can you close your eyes and feel your hands?

Can you feel tingling there? You might soften a little. Can you feel your feet from the inside out? Can you let there be an openness to the chest? You soften the belly a little. You see the breath deep in the belly. You're saying yes to the aliveness right here. The poet Kiber says, inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains and the

the maker of canyons and pine mountains. The God whom I love is inside. And keep the attention right here. We looked at how come trance, why we dissociate, what we're trying to control, we're afraid of feeling the wilderness, the rawness and aliveness directly in our body. So we obsess and we judge and we numb and distract and we speed. That's when our roots are in the air. But if you start noticing it, if something in you has this yearning for sacred presence,

you can begin to sense the flags of trance. Now reconnecting, sometimes there's a lot of pain and in the next class we're going to explore how when there's a lot of pain we can grab. gradually re-enter in a way that really wakes up our compassion and our wisdom. Yet as an ongoing daily practice if we can, this pathway home of feeling the breath and the body and opening to what's here, having our senses be awake, we begin to include the unlived life that really brings us to tremendous energy and aliveness and love and healing. woman described the healing she experienced. This is a meditation teacher that rose through

a bout of cancer. She said there was a large abdominal tumor and it was removed and she said with it was removed all of the certainty I had clung to. There was no certainty left. So she said I quit work and I stopped spiritual teaching. I turned to anything I thought might help me change what led to the cancer from acupuncture to therapy. Mostly I became humble before the body. That was 15 years ago. It was the biggest turning point and awakening of all. Before, I had used my body to practice. Now, I had to inhabit it, respect it, love it with all the feminine force and nurturing and understanding I had withdrawn into my spiritual life. Keeping my heart in my body became my practice and it has become glorious.

Keeping my heart in my body became my practice and it has become glorious. Even the first awakenings did not come close to showing me the joy of living in the body in the senses in each moment. I love my life in a new way. This has become the place of freedom. So we listen to this and we sense this possibility and this is, she talks about the feminine but this is all of us really learning to bring our heart into our body staying here and finding the tremendous amount of aliveness from it.

We start undoing all the patterning that developed as we were children and we could feel that aliveness and joy and then we started getting civilized and you know how John O'Donohan who puts it, he said, what happened to our wildness? You know, the wildness of the child, and it's the wildness of God, that we covered it over and got lost in our minds. You can sense that aliveness in children when you listen to this story that Maurice Sendak, the illustrator, tells. I've always loved this story. He writes this. He says, once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it, I loved it. I answer all my children's letters, sometimes very hastily. But this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a wild thing on it.

I wrote, Dear Jim, I loved your card. Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, Jim loved your card so much, he ate it. That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Moris Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it. He loved it. He ate it. So we get the idea that there is a wildness, a freedom to live and love this life and it's our nature, it's also the source of wisdom. When we bring our full awareness and attention right here to this body, we directly discover impermanence.

We sense that everything is coming and going. We sense it's a real mystery. The body lives in the present. We sense that mystery by entering the body. You might listen to this as a wonderful poem Living in the Body by Joyce Stutven. Here's what she writes. Body is something you need in order to stay on this planet and you only get one. And no matter which one you get it will not be satisfactory.

It will not be beautiful enough, it will not be fast enough, it will not keep on for days at time, but will pull you down into a sleepy swamp and demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake. Body is the thing you have to carry from one day into the next. Always the same eyebrows over the same eyes and the same skin when you look in the mirror and the same creaky knee when you get up from the floor and the same wrist under the watchband. The changes you can make are small and costly, better to leave it as it is. Body is a thing you have to leave eventually. You know that because you've seen others do it, others who were once like you, living inside their pile of bones and flesh, smiling at you, loving you, leaning in the doorway,

talking to you for hours and then one day they're gone, no forwarding address. It's a mystery, this body. So the basic teaching here is to really arrive for fully and inhabit. And in so doing, we sense this mystery of impermanence and we sense through the form, this full aliveness and we sense that formless, that which is aware, over and over again, returning to the senses. So I'd like to end in that spirit of arriving fully in the senses, the last few minutes here, if you will.

First, I'd like to invite you to very, very, very, quietly and mindfully, stand up and close your eyes, please do. You might step a little bit so you're not going to collide into anybody, but listen to your body now and just make whatever small movements again that aren't going to violate people nearby that will allow your body to feel a little bit of stretching and motion, feel your breath. Yeah, you might want to stretch your arms up. Inhaling, you might press the heels up of your hands, stretching, stretching, stretching,

inhaling and then with the exhale, let the arms float down a little. That's it. You might roll your shoulders forward and up, stretching up, up, up, up. Shoulders to the ears and exhales, you relax back and down. Inhale, forward and up. Exhale, back and down and then reverse it. Inhale back and up. Exhale forward and down. Inhale back and up. Inhale again, stretch up up, up, up, up. And exhale, relax your shoulders and relax your breath and just feel

the tingling and vibrating in the area of the neck, the shoulders. You might feel the palms floating in space, the energy in the palms, you might just move the hands slowly, just feeling the moving through space. That's it. shaking the hands a little, maybe rubbing the palms, shaking them out again. And then again holding still, letting the hands come still, feeling the aliveness there, feeling the body standing here and breathing. And again moving slowly as we did before, coming back, seated position for a short guided meditation, entering the wilderness of the senses, closing your all,

Otherwise, adjusting your posture in those small ways that allow you to feel upright, feel balanced. Notice if there's any parts of your body that just want to let go a little bit more right now. As your body breathes, relax and feel the weight of your whole body on the chair or cushion. The feeling of pressure or warmth with your bottom contacts the seat, the places of contact with your hands, touching perhaps each other, your legs, or your feet, contact the floor or the ground. You might also be aware of the sensations of your clothing as it touches your skin, the air on your face, keeping your eyelids closed.

You might let your awareness receive the play of images and light there. You might notice a flickering of light or dark or certain shapes, shadows or figures of light. Take a few moments to attend a scene with relaxed, receptive awareness, feeling your breath and sensing the space around you, be receptive to any sense that might be in the air. Discover what it's like to smell and receive odors present in the surrounding area. let your awareness open into the space around you. Can you imagine receiving the symphony of sounds, letting the sounds wash through you? Can you listen to the changing play of sounds, not just with your ears but your whole awareness? Can you listen to the sounds and the spaces between the sounds,

aware of the close-in sounds and the more distant sounds, perhaps of the most distant sounds you can detect. With an open, receptive awareness, take these next moments to bring full attention to listening, sound. Now with the same receptivity of listening, listen and feel inwardly, sensing the sensations and the aliveness that fill your body. Let your awareness fill your hands. Can you sense the tingling and the vibrating there. Let the awareness fill the feet. Notice what you're aware of there, inside your head. Invite your awareness to fill your whole body.

Can you imagine your physical form as a field of sensation? Points of light in the night sky. Can you feel the movement and quality of sensations, tingling, vibrating, heat, cool, hard, soft, tight, flowing. Take these next moments to bring your full attention to the dance of sensation. Now let all your senses be wide open. Your body and mind relax and receptive. Allow life to flow freely through you. So you're listening to and feeling your moment to and experience. Notice the changing flow of sensations, sounds, feelings, and also the background of presence that's here. Let yourself appreciate this awake inner space of presence,

the full expression of aliveness that's here. Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. The God whom I love is inside. Namaste and blessings. Thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.