Tara Brach - Back to the Garden

Episode Date: August 1, 2012

2012-08-01 - Back to the Garden - The suffering of perceiving ourselves as separate selves expresses as fear, aggression, shame and a host of other afflictive emotions. This talk examines how, by taking refuge in the present moment, and taking refuge in love, we reconnect with our wholeness, and the timeless presence that is home. This inquiry includes a guided meditation on the power of prayer to carry us back to our natural belonging. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

To begin with a story after the Buddha's Enlightenment, after his night under the Bodhi tree, he spent some time walking around, and people would meet with him and see that he looked very, he had a glow. He looked very bright and very peaceful, and a lot of interest in, you know, who is this guy? And they'd ask him, they'd say, who are you?

And his response, they'd say, are you a healer? No. You know, are you a saint? No. You know, are you in some way a master, a contemplative? No. You know, he'd answer no to, are you a holy man? No. And finally, his response was this. I am awake. Just that. I am awake. And what I love about this story is if we ask ourselves about the moments in our life when, we feel perhaps most happy or peaceful or inwardly free. And then we say, well, in those moments, you know, we're really feeling that kind of ease, what's our sense of who we are? And we're not going to go and say, well, I'm a professional da-da-da-da, and we're not going to go and say, well, you know, I'm a social activist or I'm a Buddhist or I'm a Latino.

We don't, that's not where our minds go. because we're living in a sense of being that's broader than any identity we can name. Like the Buddha, there's a wakeful openness, a heart field, a space, a tenderness. But it's narrowing to come up with an identity. So in contrast, when we're very upset, when we're angry, when we're reactive, when we're playing out an addiction, if that question comes up, who am I? The sense of self is very small, very solid,

and in those moments pretty identified as a wanting self or a fearful self or an addicted self or whatever. But we're very solid. And the other characteristic is there's a sense of separateness. And when we're in a strong, reactive, unpleasant, emotional state,

always with that. We might not be noticing it, but we feel very alone. We feel very much like we're here and the world's way out there. Separateness. From the Judeo-Christian, you know, the myth of our part of this world, we're kicked out of the garden in those moments, right? Okay? Those are the moments when we're caught in reactivity that we no longer belong. We are outside of the garden. And in the Buddhist psychology, we are very much in a trance of separation at those times. And that's the description of suffering. Now suffering doesn't have to be anguish kind of suffering. I mean, for many of us, we go through the day in that trance of separateness, but the symptoms are more like worrying, anxious, restless, you know, on our way to something

else, they're kind of our daily routine. It's kind of a mentality that's small, but we're not calling it suffering. If we pause, though, when we're feeling separate, if we pause, we'll feel inside us a real discomfort. It's usually in this area, and if we really let ourselves be there, we don't usually stay. We usually keep covering it over with activity. but if we pause when we're in that trance of separateness we'll find that there's a kind of anxiety a deep sense of fear that something around the corner is going to go wrong

there's a sense that something doesn't feel right and if we scratch even more we'll find that it's I don't feel right it's not only I feel bad it's I am bad in some way very very common So we start examining this chance of separation and with it, when we're feeling separate, along with that is some sense of I could fail, I could be rejected, you know, in some way I'm going to blow it, in some way I'm not going to be enough, I'll be hurt, and then, of course, I'll die.

That's what's around the corner. I mean, you know, we're living this kind of hairy out of control life and the destination's not real popular, right? I mean, that's... Somebody told me that the story of a funeral service, a woman, a very, very elderly woman, the undertaker approached her and asked how old her husband was. And she said 98, you know, two years old than me, he said, oh, he comments, oh, so you're 96. And she responded, hardly worth going home, isn't it? But we live with that sense of, you know, we're on our way and around the corner. is going to be something bad or too much, too much for us, too hard to handle.

So we're as Chovium Trunpa, the Tibetan teacher put it, we're like this bundle of tense muscles kind of protecting our existence because if we feel separate, it's threatened. So that's kind of a state of affairs. Now, the effect of living in an egoic identity as a culture with this underlying hum of fear of something's wrong is that as a culture we overconsume we're always trying to feed ourselves in some way

we're over-aggressive we're always trying to protect ourselves in some way we lose a sense of the sacred because we're always in this societal level of a reactivity in other words we really we lose the sense of the sacred because there's not a touching in

so much to the beauty and the goodness that's here because we're scared. I ran into this story that in the early 1850s, James Whistler spent a brief and very unsuccessful period at West Point, U.S. Military Academy. And as the story goes, he was assigned to draw a bridge, and he drew a romantic stone bridge, completely with grassy banks and two small children fishing from it. Well, the instructor was very unusual.

annoyed he said get those children off that bridge you know so this is an engineering exercise okay so Whistler got the kids off the bridge he drew them fishing from the bank of the river resubmitted the drawing the angry instructor yells at him I told you to remove those children get them completely out of the picture so the next this creative urge of course was too strong in Whistler the next version he had the children completely out of the picture there were two small tombs stones. But it says something about, you know, our task orientation as a culture. I often use that term. You have to, to be kind, you have to swerve from your path. Well, we're so focused on get this

done, accomplish that, protect ourselves from this. We're so worried and busy. We don't pause that much, not only to see who's here around us, but also to see, to, just to be intimate with our hearts. So losing a sense of the sacred. And then, of course, in our individual lives, we have this bias, and it's evolutionary, towards what's painful, towards fear. So we scan, and our mind and our attention,

our thoughts go to what we're worried about, what can go wrong, what's missing. So we might have been in a situation where we did well in some ways, but made one mistake. Where does our attention go to? I used to teach, when I was teaching at Krapala, they don't do this anymore. They used to send me like 140 sheets from feedback that everybody wrote.

And I would go through the papers looking for the ones where the mark was not that good on some of the... And those are the ones I'd read and I'd start, you know, just churning over. That's the way the mind works. We fixate on what's wrong. some of you might remember the story of this school in the Midwest somewhere where the children released three goats into the school and they painted numbers on them one two and four so the administrators were spent the whole day looking for goat number three right but you get the idea that we're the way our minds work so this is the ego self

the separate self that's trying to navigate to protect itself and enhance itself. And it really does go back, I think, to the myth of the culture that, you know, we're kicked out of the garden and something's wrong with life. And there's a sense of something's wrong with us. And we need to cover over, you know, the ego is a kind of a covering to present ourselves to the world because there's something off. I read that Adam said to Eve something like, I wear the plants in this family. It's like we're covering it over. So the question is, and this is in spiritual life, the real inquiry,

is this familiar ego self that feels separate and that's trying to solve problems and trying to get things done and make life? a certain way, be in control, is this really who we are? Okay, that's really the question. Are we really wandering lost

outside of the garden? Is that our predicament? So this is a Tibetan teacher and writer Sogiel Rimpichet. And you might just close your eyes for a moment. Just listen to these words and just sense your life, sense how the seasons have moved through,

changes in your body, in your activities, how there's been this maybe ego self, this sense of separateness, but navigating, but everything keeps moving, keeps changing, is pretty out of control. And what so Gilrumpichet asked, he says, if everything changes, then what is really true?

Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious, in which the dance of change and permanence takes place. Is there something, in fact, we can depend on that does survive what we call death? It's just an inquiry. This is a teaching that you can sense,

well, what does that mean? I mean, if everything we can sense about ourselves, this separate self, is that this body mind is changing, everything around us is changing, is there anything that's timeless? Is it all happening in something larger? Is there a stillness, a silence, and awareness

that is really our true home? This is the inquiry. And I can say that, you know, in the moments that we touch real happiness, that we're intuiting some presence that doesn't have to do with life working out a certain way. And when we sense beauty or when we touch peace, We're sensing some presence that is awareness.

It's not the thing that we're focusing on. That there's something in the background. I sometimes describe it as some alert, inner stillness. It's who's listening right now. Who's really listening? Not the processes that are filtering, but just the pure knowing. Word Buddha awake, sometimes it's described as, you are the knowing.

That's your pure awareness. So when we are resting in that pure wakefulness, that openness, when we're not caught in a smaller identity, there's an enlarged sense of what we are. In those moments, we are the garden. It's not like we're in the garden. We are the garden. And we realized we never left.

It was just a confusion, a delusion. a delusion. But I'm getting ahead of myself because that's the general place I want to pay attention to, which is when we're lost, how do we find ourselves back, sensing this home,

this garden that we are? And back to the Buddha, one of the stories I most love in the Buddha's awakening. So we're not after he's been in lighten when he's walking around, this is the process of waking up, was that he got challenged by all the conditioning that makes our minds and hearts and bodies contract. And that was kind of his waking up process was all these challenging energies that were really that it was described as mara as

you know, the greed and hatred and delusion that came out of us arrows and slings and bows and so on. But really it was the energies of his own, you know, universal challenging energies we all experience. And he didn't wake up because they weren't there. He woke up because of the ways that he responded to them. That's good news for us. That says that each of us on our past, our freedom doesn't come because we've gotten rid of our selfishness, gotten rid of our doubt, gotten rid of our fear. It comes because we've discovered a way to respond, to relate.

That's where the freedom is. Then the weather systems can keep happening. But we're the whole garden. You know, we can include them. So here's the Buddha under the Bodhi tree getting challenged. And he got his final big challenge. And some of you might know that in this myth, the final big challenge was doubt.

And I think it's the challenge for most of us. When we really doubt our fundamental okayness, we really doubt that we have that good. goodness, that Buddha nature, that sacredness. Instead, we sense a flawedness. So he got challenged by doubt. And his response to the challenge, and to me this is the kind of the beauty of the myth,

it wasn't like he tried to bring this muscle of attention and kind of work with that in some confrontational way. He reached out and he touched the ground. And he called the earth God. goddess to bear witness. There was to kind of bear witness to, in a sense, mirror and witness his goodness, his essential nature. And in the moment that he touched the ground and called on the earth goddess, you know, the heavens grew dark and there were the lightning bolts and everything, and Mara kind of pulled away.

And it was then that the Buddha was completely free. Now, what had he done? What does it mean when we're... when we're caught, when we're lost, what does it mean when we're in that trance of separate, reactive, small sense of who we are? What does it mean to touch the ground? Because this is the possibility.

And in my understanding, the Buddha was touching the ground. He was connecting, he was bringing his awareness to really, the web of life. He was saying, you know, I belong to this web of life. So that was the first piece. It's like when all this stuff is going on and we say, okay, just come back to what's actually happening right here. This breath, this heartbeat, this squeeze in the chest, this clay body of the earth, we're coming back to the earth. We're not spinning in ideas. So he connected to the truth of the present moment. And he called unloving presence. He

He called on his belonging to all beings, to the universe, to awareness. So he was reconnecting. It's like from separate to reconnecting. That's the beauty of this gesture. So we sense for ourselves, you know, what does that mean? Because I know when I see people working with emotional wounds or just working with their particular egoic trans patterns and beginning to find a space of being more relaxed, more at home with themselves, not caught in that second arrow so much, just really kind of honoring and being at peace

some. When I see that shift, that person has in some way learned how when things get more trancy how to touch the ground, how to come back into the aliveness that's right here, and also how to come back into relatedness. Because remember, when we're in trance, we feel disconnected. So a key part of coming back and touching the ground is remembering we belong to each other. It's more true that we belong to this field of presence and love that's here

than it is any identity we walk around and tell ourselves about. When we remember our relatedness, a lot happens. First of all, our fear goes down. In the moments of feeling connected with others, the limbic system quiets down. There's all sorts of great research that when we know the truth of our belonging, when someone just holds the hand of a person they trust

and their brainwaves are measured for fear, their brainwaves calm down. When we hug for 20 seconds, oxytocin, that feeling of well-being, you know, the biochemistry of well-being gets activated, starts washing through our system. Connection works. It also brings out the inner resources

that get covered over when we're in fear. We become more creative and spontaneous. When we touch the ground and remember our connection, we become more creative, more empowered. One of my favorite stories is a guy who his car stools out into a ditch and he walks to a nearby farmhouse because he needs some help getting it out and the farmer says, old Warwick, he's got this kind of donkey, he can help you pull it out. So he, you know, hitches the Warwick some ropes to the car and then he starts calling out, go Henry, go Jacob, go. go Warwick and Warwick goes, pulls the car out of the ditch.

And the guy says, why did you say all those names? He goes, oh, old Warwick, he's blind. When he thinks he's part of a team, he can do anything, you know? I think I just like the name Warwick for a donkey. So, touching the ground,

knowing our belonging. The challenge is, as I've mentioned, that when we're most stuck is when we feel most alienated. So again, where I want to move now is how when we're most feeling apart, when we most feel alone, when we most feel, we're in that really limited narrative about who we are, how we begin to sense a larger belonging. Because I think that's the question.

I mean, you might ask yourself, if you think this week at any time that you felt caught, Any time you felt like you got into a real rut and you got grim or depressed or anxious or angry, you might have an occasion in mind, maybe a conflict with an important person or a sense of feeling like a failure in some way paralyzed, overwhelmed by things to do. If you think and reflect to those moments and you ask yourself, well, what was my sense of relationship, relatedness then. I mean, did you feel close to anybody? Could you feel empathy towards others?

Could you receive care or give care? I mean for most of us, when we're in that fight-flight reactivity, the parts of the brain, the parts of the frontal cortex that are involved with relationship, with our social being, with empathy and compassion are shut down. I'm using extreme terms, but you get the idea when we're stressed and reactive, we are cut off from a sense of relationship and we're also cut off from a sense of our own beingness because we turn on ourselves too. So the primary characteristic

our reactive suffering is separate, cut off. So the inquiry then is how do we sense a larger belonging and I think part of the reason I wrote true refuge, and I'm going to be drawing more and more of my talks over this next months from the chapters of true refuge because they're so fresh with me right now, is the sense that every one of us is trying to discover our pathway to true belonging, to belonging to presence, to belonging to love, that we each are find, either are trying to find or finding

our way to refuge, to feeling at home, to feeling that we are the garden again. And there are different pathways. Now, the primary pathway back to the garden that we speak of in these classes, and these Viphasana mindfulness classes,

are to cultivate the skill of coming back right to this moment. If you can do it, if you're very, very stirred up and you can say, okay, what is actually happening right now? And it's almost like you're nailing your attention to this moment. It's really, really close in. And stay and stay and stay.

You discover some freedom. How come? One of my favorite ways of considering it is, if you think of the length of an emotion. I mean, Jill Volta brought this to the woman who had the neuroscientists who had the stroke, and she described the length of an emotion, if it's just pure this affect of emotion,

90 seconds, a minute and a half. Now, how come they last longer for us? How come? How come most of us, they last 10 years? We feed them with story, exactly. The only way your emotions can keep going and stay fairly static is if you keep fueling them with thoughts.

If you truly step out of the storyline and keep anchoring your attention to this squeeze, to this tightness, to this feeling of pounding, to this emptiness, to the soreness or sadness or whatever it is, if you keep staying with your senses so that the stories aren't feeding the emotion,

they change. They might change into, you know, pity might change into despair, might change into fear, might change into terror. I'm not saying they change as something pleasant. But they change, and that is heartening because we start sensing. Now back to that quote, is there something beyond this changing nature? We start sensing as we stay and stay the presence that's here, that alert stillness, as all the weather systems are moving through.

There's a shift in identity. Now this is the power of mindfulness. A mindful awareness notices what's happening in the moment and instead of continuing to fuel that cycle of feeling thought, feeling thought, feeling thought, we relax into the presence that's observing and touching and feeling. and the who we are gets larger. We start belonging to the aliveness and the presence

versus the person, the narrative that's a victim of a feeling. Does that make sense? This shift in identity? Okay, so this is touching the ground, touching the ground of what's actually going on right here, very powerful gateway back into the garden. Now the challenge, and I'm going to spend the rest of the evening on this,

is that when we're experiencing afflictive emotions and we're all stirred up, it's very hard to keep the attentiveness with what's right here in the moment because it feels intolerable. And so, you know, if we have a whole lot of training and a whole lot of balance and equanimity, we can do it, but sometimes it's just too much,

especially when it's fear or shame, really, really difficult to stay with. So what then? How do we touch the ground? And again, I think that this story of the Buddha, that the Buddha called out, remember, he called out to the earth goddess. He called out to some trustworthy presence.

And one of the stories that I find really instructive is of Baba Ram Dass, who had a stroke, massive stroke, and he had practiced in many, many different disciplines. He had Buddhist, Hindu, Advaita, et cetera. He said that none of his tools from a spiritual toolbox, none of them worked when he was in that moment of a stroke. He said he lay in an utterly helpless state.

He was staring up at the pipes on the ceiling, and there was no uplifting thoughts, no inspiration, nothing to relieve the state. suffering. He was unable to regard things with mindfulness, unable to have any compassion. Now this is a figurehead for my generation anyway of the one who recognized be here now, you know, and had all these different ways of moving through challenging things. He said at that crucial moment, and this is how he put it, he said, I flunked the test. Now there's a power to this story because how many of us have had those doubts that, wow, when things get down in darkest,

I'm not able to call on any of this mindfulness stuff? How many of us have condemned ourselves for that? Well, here's, it's valuable to know that it might be that we get knocked around and in the moment we can't figure out how to touch the ground. But there is a way. And here's what happened for Ramda. in the thick of the crisis he began to pray to Maharaji now Maharaji was the guru he knew from Maharaji was no longer alive but Maharaji for him was a pure emanation of love so it was a very

living love and that's what he prayed to he prayed to that living love he said I talked to my guru's picture and he spoke to me he was all around me he was immediately there as fully available as ever and to ramdas that was grace it was with that realization of his guru's presence that everything became okay. I call this taking refuge in love. So we touch the ground and take refuge in truth by being with this present moment.

We touch the ground, take refuge in love by calling on something that's a source of loving that's there, but we're not as connected to it as we want to be. Because we need to feel that belonging. Because the belonging is true. We need to find our way back to it. So Ram Dass called out, and he had a pre-existing relationship, so it wasn't, he had a pathway, he already knew about it.

But when I work with people on finding, and this is for each of you, what is your way when you're really confused, when it's really difficult of touching the ground, if in some way remembering love? and each of us, because love is already a part of what we are, each of us has ways that it manifests in the world that in some way tenderize us and soften us. It comes in all different ways. It may be for some of you that it's a deity

or a teacher or a friend, a grandparent. Could be your dog because dogs are often where we sense that source of loving. Could be nature. Another story of touching the ground, a little different. Okay, so I was teaching at a month-long Bepassan retreat. And was working with, we do teachers, do individual meetings with people at the retreat to help them, you know, work with their practice.

And one of the women I was meeting with was African-American woman who was encountering all sorts of issues, she was paying attention, layers that she didn't normally contact of feeling worthless and insecure about her life. And so one, we've been working with this. And one morning she came to our interview and she had a really cheerful smile and said, and she told me, you know, I kind of said, what gives? And she said, oh, I went to church this morning. I swallowed and said, oh, you did. Well, just background on these month-long retreats the protocol is such that you don't just leave campus you know it's like it's very contained it's very quiet um nobody just goes out and goes shopping or goes to church or goes to a meeting you're

you're there but you know i figure you know my mind was kind of scurring around but you know i'm a pregnant participant basically and she was cheerful so i figured okay something whatever's working so um so she she goes on she goes you know i was feeling that place of insecurity and failure and while I was at church I was praying for love and she says and what I did I wrapped Jesus like a shawl around me she says wrap Jesus like a shawl around me and the peace just filled my heart

she says I haven't taken the shawl off that love's warming me up and it was a little inner jolt that I realized that when she was talking about church it was a kind of metaphorical thing it took me a while I was slow but um but she found her connection she touched the ground by praying for love and wrapping that shawl around her of Jesus and she continued so I was wearing that I'm wearing that shawl everywhere she goes while I walk those hills because this retreats center is hills she goes well I sit my tea while I'm standing at line at lunch and then she gave me that mischievous look she has it nailed she goes yep even in the shower tar I was wearing that shawl wrapped around you know we laughed so that's another way there's just

For her, her way was to sense this loving presence of Jesus wrapped around her. You might consider this part of touching the ground, taking refuge in love as a customized loving kindness meditation. You know, we talk about the meta, our loving kindness practice. And there's a classical form. But truly, I found that everyone I know needs to in some way experience, experiment and customize it for their particular body, mind, heart, personality, whatever. You know, what is the way that you can pay attention so your heart starts softening

and opening so you can sense that belonging? How do you touch the ground? Now we can offer loving kindness to ourselves. We can offer ourselves blessings and love. But the challenge is we often need to start with sensing our ourselves. self loved by another person because it was so missing. I mean most of us have some suffering around not feeling that unconditional acceptance or care or appreciation or valuing our love. So it's part of spiritual reparenting to feel it also from somewhere beyond ourselves. But

we're not very good at receiving love. So when I work with people on imagining, you know, whether it's Jesus' love or imagining yourself, as the Dalai Lama put it, he said, imagine yourself in the heart of the Buddha. Imagine yourself receiving that love. For many people, it's a nice idea. But receiving love, they're not big on it. And you might ask yourself, you know, how often, this is a very real inquiry, How often do you actually, when you're with somebody, actually in a visceral way, let yourself receive care?

Just consider that. Or do you find it's an idea but there's something in you that doesn't really let it in, something's stopping you? Just to check that out. So a very radical way of touching the ground is to begin to learn to reach towards love. and let it in and whatever way can begin to work for us. Sri Narsar Gadata, one of the great non-dual teachers, says the mind creates the abyss, in other words, the mind has us feel separate,

and the heart crosses it. Our hearts can do that. So these are two different ways of touching the ground. Now, I want to just maybe drill down a little into how do we do that? How do we reach out for love and let it in? I mean, this sounds good, but there's a few steps. And the first step, when we're feeling stuck, is to let ourselves go ahead and touch into the pain of that

and feel the longing in there. What is it we're wanting? You know, when we're afraid or feeling ashamed, what is it we're wanting? Just to feel the longing. Is it to feel safe, to feel accepted? to feel valued, like you matter, you really matter. What is it?

Is it to feel loved in a very direct way, like that tenderness? So for this woman at the retreat, when she felt that brokenness and that insecurity, her longing was very simple to feel loved. She wanted to feel held, embraced. Now, I find that in a lot of us, if I was going to do percentages of when I work with people, the longing to feel held. Very, very primal. Okay?

So that was hers. And then the second step, so you feel the longing, you feel, what am I wanting, what am I really wanting? It's to be held, is to be seen. Some of us just to really be seen for who we are. Unconditionally accepted.

So the second step is to sense an optimal source for what you need. In other words, who might you trust does care? And it doesn't have to be somebody you know, can be somebody you know, can be an entity like a deity, a formless being. It can be Jesus, or Kuanian, a bodhisattva of compassion, or the Buddha. Could be somebody that you know. Could be a child, an animal, a tree. So for her it was Jesus. And then, And the third step is visualize it happening. Imagine it happening. And if you can use all your senses, that's even better.

By the way, we're going to practice this so you don't have to memorize it. And then the talks record it. Feel it, hear the words that you might want to hear. In other words, for her, it was wrapping that shawl around her and just keeping it around her. The last part is, then do that 10,000 times. Okay? You know about deliberate practice? It's like a whole science now in terms of mastery.

If you want to really have your neuro pathways very, very much in a flow towards the garden, if you want to be able to touch the ground and have it really happen for you 10,000 times. Okay? Now, when you're doing a deliberate practice, it's not mechanical. It's not like every time you say, okay, I want to feel loved, I want to feel that shawl, okay, I'm going to wrap it around. You know, it's not like that, you know. Every time, it's completely the first time. Every time you're really sensing into this longing, this real yearning.

And every time you're really sensing, what does I really want right now? And what really could be a source of it? And how would I really want to be experienced every time? So the beginning place again is this longing and it takes courage and it takes willingness. You can't will this touching the ground and feeling belonging but you can be willing. You can't even make yourself take it in but you can be willing to explore. John O'Donohue writes, Prayer is the voice of longing.

It reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging. Prayer is the voice of longing. It reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging. So when we touch the ground, when we reach out for love, it's that longing becomes a bridge to belonging, a bridge to realizing the garden again, to taking us home. I love the languaging that John O'Donohue uses.

Many of you might know him. he's no longer alive, wonderful philosopher, poet. He says, it reaches inward. You have to really feel your longing. The more you feel your longing, the more powerful, the prayer. The more you feel that yearning, the more you'll reach out. Reaches outwards to the source of what you long for. And then I love the words ancient belonging.

Because what it says is we already belong. It's like the movement of feeling or longing and reaching for love. and imagining it actually wakes up and reminds us of what is already here. Does that make sense? It's not something different. We're coming back. Now a couple more words on prayer on this reaching out. It's very easy for prayer to become mechanical.

It's very easy to say, you know, this hurts out to help. You know, I want help. It's very easy to do it without mindfulness. And some of you might remember this little story of a woman who goes to the priest and she says, Father, I have a problem. I have two female parrots. But they only had to say one thing. What do they say the priest inquires?

They say, hi, we're prostitutes. You want to have some fun? That's obscene. He's very upset. But then he says, you know, I think I have a solution to your problem. I've got two male talking parrots who have taught to pray and read the bull. Bible. You can do as Francis and Job, you can bring your female parrots over and we'll put them in the cage and maybe my parrots can teach your parrots to praise and worship. So thank you. She's excited. She brings

her parrots over to the priest's house and as the ushers are in. She sees that the two male parrots are indeed in their cage holding rosary beads and they're praying. So she walks over and she puts her parrots in with them and after a few moments you know the female parrots cry out in you to say hey we're a prostitute you want to have some fun and finally one of the male parrots looks over the other male says put the beads away francis our prayers have been answered so in a way we're always praying we're always going after something so the depth of prayer getting in touch with what our heart's deepest longing is uh is what free is us. So just to say that there are many ways to reach out, I, in my own life, I learned a lot

about prayer when I went through kind of the most intense parts of being sick. And there were times, and this was about four years ago, when I was not only sick, I was so fatigued that it was impossible to do very much, and I became incredibly irritable. Like, it was like, it was like I was just constantly frustrated and grim. And grim is the best word for it. I was really, really grim. My world became very small during the phases when I was feeling sick. And in talking about what centers shut down,

I was so absorbed in it that there was just very little in me that could feel any empathy or giving any desire to be generous or anything. I was just very focused on self. And not only that, I was really disgusted with myself for being so focused on myself. So it was like I was not only suffering with fatigue and sickness, but I was really down on myself for not calling on my spiritual tools and being a more expansive person. So I felt pretty unlovable. And I kept wondering why Jomathan or anybody would want to hang out with me, you know, when I was in these phases. is so I would pause and I'd many, many rounds.

I'd just say, well, what is it that I really am longing for? And much like so many people that I've worked with, really the yearning was to absolutely feel some presence loving me. And it had to be personal. Couldn't be this amorphous, oh, there's love in the universe. It had to be that this being felt in some way really known and loved. And the language of the prayer was please love me. I couldn't start it with humans because like so many people, it was like I couldn't imagine energy coming from me. I was feeling too

bad about myself. So I would do it with trees and I often go for walks in Great Falls Park because we live right near the river and I would just lean against the tree and in some way say, just please love me and just feel the energy of earth and tree kind of in some way encircling me and filling me and then as I softened I could start getting a little more bold and I could start going towards you know the animals and the human animals until it was being able to feel you know especially those that I know the best you know that feeling of being just that the love was washing through that I was receiving and the more I really had an undefended heart,

the more the sense of another person loving me kind of dissolved into just being love. In other words, I went from longing to belonging. I was belonging to love. So I share this with you because it's a practice prayer that begins from a sense of separation but has a certain beauty that carries us to non-separation. It begins by yearning for the garden, but in a very wise way, reaching towards that love and realizing we are the garden, we are that loving presence.

So I'd like to have a few minutes to practice, so I'm going to wind up right now by just saying that the story of the Buddha touching the ground is really the story of every one of us seeking refuge. I mean, every one of us is doing it in different ways. We're trying to find our belonging. And if we begin to be become intentional, we can learn every one of us here to be able to touch the ground of the present moment more and more and touch the ground by calling on love. And it can become something that happens just immediately. There's something in us that remembers we long for love, that sense of love being here, please wash through, and then our identity shifts. We become it. So let's practice a bit in last few minutes. Find a way of sitting that you feel comfortable in. You might begin by sensing your intention right now to, and this is that willingness I was

talking about, to explore what it means to call on love, just that interest and care, to know that this is a life practice so that you might just explore around a little tonight in these few minutes without an expectation knowing that this is something you can creatively experiment with on your own. But as a way just to feel it out, you might sense a place in your life where you struggle where there's a sense of maybe some fear or some deficiency a place where you get stuck and feel small in some way. I feel separate, powerless maybe kind of caught in old patterns so that something this is a place where it's something in you saying help.

How do I touch the ground here? How do I find my way back to the garden and this one? And just sense when you're in the midst of that and you might use your imagination to sense yourself right in that situation wherever it's most difficult what you're seeing at those moments, if there's words, someone's speaking. And sense the stuckness, the discomfort,

but also sense your longing, like what is it you most need, what in those moments you most wish you could experience? Is it to be understood or save, accepted, loved? Is it to really trust your own goodness? And if there could be a source of being a trustworthy being that could in some way give to you, in some way serve what you most want to experience, giving you that love or understanding, or what might that be? be. And here's where you can just be creative in your mind, sense what comes up, what entity

might represent really compassion, wisdom that you could sense would love you, would care about you. It could be someone you know. It could be a spiritual figure like the Buddha or Jesus. It could be the natural world, some part of the natural world, or it could be an animal. a dog, just sense a being that's a good channel for loving presence in some way. You might see that being's eyes and sense that being's presence right here. Give yourself permission to just imagine. Imagine what you'd want to experience happening. So if it's a shawl of one being like a shawl around you embracing you,

or you might imagine warmth and light filling you, just letting your heart take it in or maybe you might hear words that in some way reassure you take the chance to open and receive a little see what happens you let your heart feel

bathed in warmth and light and love saturated held sometimes prayer gets more intense if you actually call out in words like, please love me. So you keep on experimenting.

Please see me, please love me, please hold me, be with me. And if it comes from sincerity, you'll sense a moisture and innocence and openness that unearths that ancient belonging. And as you experiment, you might imagine just letting go and merging with whatever the source of loving is,

just sensing that you belong so far, fully to that, that you can't sense you or that anymore. There's just a field. So you can just rest in that belonging. That's what's possible. It might not experience it in this moment, it's fine. But the possibility of letting go and just being that loving presence. We'll close.

You might listen to these words from Ticknod Han as if they're addressed directly to your heart. Being rock, being gas, being made. mist, being mined, being masons of subatomic particles, traveling among galaxies with the speed of light. You have come here, my beloved one. You have manifested yourself as trees, as grass, as butterflies, as single-celled beings, and as chrysanthemums. But the eyes with which you looked at me this morning tell me, you have never died. So thank you for your attention. I appreciate it. It's very sweet to feel the energy in the room right now.

The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much. Thank you.