Tara Brach - Being Embodied: Gateway to Aliveness and Spirit – Part 1

Episode Date: March 17, 2022

Being Embodied: Gateway to Aliveness and Spirit – Part 1 - All that we cherish—creativity, love, wisdom, realization—arises from an embodied presence. Yet as we know, the wounds and trauma of our society and individual lives leads toward dissociation. These two talks look at the challenges to awakening through our bodies, and the practices and teachings that guide us on the path. 

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Today's talk is the first of a two-part series that I chose from the archives. It's on embodied presence. And I'm aware that with so much crisis in the world right now, more than ever we need ways of grounding ourselves, of coming home and a inner refuge of clarity and aliveness and open-heartedness. And that means coming into this

living body. So I hope you find that these teachings and practices in this talk and the next support you through these challenging times. Thank you. I'd like to start with a story recounted by Zen Master Ticknod Han. And he says this. He says, a friend took me to the Atlanta airport. And when we were saying goodbye, she asked, is it all right to hug a Buddhist monk? Now, my country, we're not used to expressing ourselves that way, but I thought, you know, I'm a Zen teacher. It shouldn't be a problem for me to do that. So I said, why not? And she hugged me, but I was quite stiff. While on the plane, I decided that if I wanted to work with friends in the West, I would have to learn the culture of the West. So he went about creating a hugging meditation.

And according to this practice, you have to really hug the person you're holding. In other words, you have to have them feel real in your arms and make them feel real, not just for the sake of appearances, but really being awake. So you're not pretending you're there, you're not patting them on the back. You're actually breathing consciously and feeling them there. it's the hugging meditation as real mindfulness. And he writes this, he says, breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms alive. Breathing out, they're so precious to me. So if you breathe and hug and are present in that way, holding a person you care about, the energy

of your heart and your care and your appreciation will penetrate into that person. it'll penetrate into them in a way that lets them feel deeply nourished. Now, I'm aware during this whole COVID era, we haven't had much hugging, and now kind of as we, many of us begin to creep out, it's a hug-conscious moment in our history. And it's interesting to consider how embodied and present are you for a hug? you know, and there's a bigger question, of course, which is how embodied and present are we when we're listening to our child or listening to a friend, you know, are we, how embodied are we, are we able to feel the air in our cheek, you know, do we sometimes pause to listen

to the rain or listen to birds or maybe take in the fragrance of spring flowers? And do we taste food past the first few bites? As most are aware, we live in a really mental world and so much of our lives goes on in our minds. It's virtual and we're disembodied, we're looking at a screen much of the time. It can be rare that we're really awake in our bodies and our senses are awake. you might scan today, just review today for a few moments. And notice if there were moments when your senses were awake, where you were mindful of your breath, just felt the in-breath and the out-breath or felt the aliveness of your body,

where you're aware of sounds or smells or images, where you felt the mood in your heart. even this last hour, just a sense, how much were you here? Or how much were you submerged in the trance of planning or worrying or figuring or obsessing? A couple of years ago, I was composing a talk on presence and I remember reflecting about it in the shower and I suddenly realized that I was slathering my eyes. head, my hair with shaving cream. It's all over. I'm really glad I didn't start shaving. But it's so clear that in the moments that were lost in thought, it's a virtual reality. And in those moments, our senses are not awake. And we're also cut off from the presence that allows us to

be empathetic, that allows us to be compassionate, that gives rise to creativity, wonder. We really need to inhabit our bodies if we're to inhabit our spirit. We need to be here. I heard a story of a woman, she was an art professor, and she said that when her daughter was seven, she asked her what she did at work, and she told her, well, I teach people how to draw, and this is in college level. And her daughter, stared back at her, incredulous, and she said, you mean they forgot? It's so clear our bodies know how to draw and to sing and to dance and they know how to make love and give birth and die. They know how to mourn and to celebrate. But the given is

we leave our body regularly. especially so if we're anxious, depressed, and that's at epidemic levels these days. Along with the pandemic, there's so much economic instability and there's all this social strife and mistrust and hatred. It stirs us up in a way. We become increasingly disembodied. One of my favorite ways of expressing this comes from John O'Donohue, Philoogneux. philosopher, poet, writer. He says, our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit.

It is our minds that make our lives so homeless. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. So, my friends, I return to this theme over and over, if you've been listening to me, you know that because, you know, in my own practice, and I would say this is every day both in formal meditation as I move through the day, it's forgetting and remembering. It's going off into thoughts and then in some way saying, oh, come back, come back. And being back here, maybe feeling the breath, feeling the aliveness in my body. And it gives so much more space and heart and vividness to being alive. It really is a homecoming.

And we know if we've had a little exposure and meditation that arriving in presence, the challenge is staying here. And we find that either we can't feel sensations in our body, this is for some people, are maybe can touch in but not really stay for long, or maybe stay for a bit, but then judge and react and leave, or else for many, if there's trauma, get overwhelmed. It's a kind of flooding that happens. So it's rare.

It's rare to rest wakefully for any stretch of time, really allowing and being in the changing flow. Just to maybe get a little better taste of how come you might pause right here. And let's just check in together. If it helps to close your eyes or let your gaze be downcast, do that. And since being here and you might ask yourself, well, what's between me and really being at home in my body in this moment? And maybe there's a sense of I don't know how.

Or maybe I don't feel much. Or maybe I don't want to. It feels unpleasant, it feels scary. And unless it feels like really too much, just continue a little bit longer. You might think of it as entering the wilderness. Just agree to be here. Maybe feeling your hands, helps us soften to feel the hands, feeling your feet.

Become aware of sensation. See if you can feel the torso, kind of in an interior way. way inside the belly, helps to soften the belly, let the breath touch you deep in the belly, and feel the heart. Just notice what's it like right now inside and now and again. And you might notice that it's a realm that's changing and maybe it's raw or intense or maybe it's pleasurable, maybe it's really uncomfortable, but stay a bit. and notice how it's really out of control.

It's where fear lives, this inner wilderness, and it's also where the mystery is. Stay again, just re-arrive, be here. And you might sense, this is more subtle that when you're here in the wilderness, who are you? What's the sense of your own being? Maybe you'll discover that as you stay in the wilderness embodied, it strips away the identity

of a self, of a doer, of anyone who's controlling. It's like the doing self is out of a job and it's unfamiliar, maybe uncomfortable, maybe scary, for sure, unfamiliar. Feel free to open your eyes, maybe take a few breaths. and thank you for exploring some. One student had the intention to stay, just as I invited you to, to come into the body and stay as he went through the day at work. So he starts, he's in the subway on the train, and he could breathe and keep coming back

and feel some inside his body. And then he's walking into the office and he's feeling his footsteps moving, moving, moving. but as soon as he got into his first conversation totally exited and then he tried to return. He said, okay, just be here, listen, speak. And he discovered it was really a very vulnerable, disorienting experience. He didn't feel in control. He had left his internal control tower, you know, where we remove and go to thoughts. And that's what happens.

when we are inhabiting our bodies, we're not in that control tower controlling things and it makes us uneasy. So the habit is to leave, it's to dissociate and go towards security, towards control. I love the way James Joyce put it in one of his novels. He said, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. and that's the way it is. Now, our children are leaving earlier and earlier. They're indoors so much now, five to six hours a day behind a screen. That's amazing.

And, you know, there's a cartoon of a mother talking to her young son. He's immersed in his tablet and he's barely looking up and responding. He says, go out and play. What do you think this is? 1962, and it's scary. You know, our children are outside 50% less than prior generation. And the rate of children that really unhealthy weights has tripled since 1980. Children are less fit, less connected to their bodies and to the earth body, really. And it's the same as adults. And this trajectory of

increasing dissociation from embodiment, we can see it through the evolution of our species, you know, that the early hunter-gatherer was embedded in the natural world. And then with agriculture, we pulled away and there was a domination of nature, you know, planning and thinking and living in the calendar of time. And then with industry increasingly removed from natural rhythms. and then even more so with technology living in virtual realities apart from nature and body. And in the West, think of our founding religious theme, original sin, where our bodies are considered lower and dangerous in the sight of temptation and evil. And they're there to be disciplined or else disregarded. So we leave Eden in all senses of the word.

We leave our full aliveness and take refuge in thoughts, trying to control our life with our mind. And this trend, this increasing disembodiment, has profound implications for our individual well-being and our collective well-being. I'm thinking of Srinor Sargadata, So one of the teachers I love to, I love reading his books, they inspire me and he has a simple phrase that the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it.

The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it that our thinking separates us and if we don't have a grounding connection it gives rise to the shadow side of the masculine. And by that I mean that we approach the world by objectifying it. We're seeking to in some way control, dominate, master. And when life or another being, our part of life, is an object, it's not a part of us. We can violate it. That's what happens. I shared in, I think it was radical acceptance, my book Radical Acceptance about my son Narayan

on his sixth birthday, I gave him an ant farm. And he spent hours watching, you know, with total fascination, these little creatures magically creating their network of tunnels and he named several of them and followed their struggles and progress closely. And after a few weeks he showed me the ants graveyard. He watched as some of them dragged the bodies of their dead comrades and deposited them there. and I remember after that day he showed me that, I picked him up at school and he was really upset. And he told me that on the playground, the kids had been making a game out of stepping on ants. And he was just horrified that they were hurting these friends that he really had bonded with.

And I tried to comfort him by explaining that when we really spend time with any living being, as he had with the ants, we find out they're real. And there's a relationship that happens. Their life is fragile, they want to stay alive. So his playmates hadn't gotten to know the ants like he had. And I told him if they had, they wouldn't want to injure them either. When we don't really attend to this living world, including our own aliveness and other living beings, we don't take good care. Life becomes this object that we can either ignore or we violate. And it's led to catastrophe on this planet.

We know that. We know that we haven't paid attention. We haven't listened to the needs of our Earth. And it's led to tormenting billions of non-human animals annually, considering them as an object as food. And it's led to and sustains racial and other, or caste systems that are built on ideas of superior and inferior. I mean, I really think a lot of those schoolchildren stomping on ants that when we disconnect

from our living world and from the sacredness of what's here, we are so destructive. So the pathway back to connection requires purposefully training our attention. Whatever and whenever we really wholeheartedly attend to the person we're with our dog or the tree in our front yard or a squirrel on a branch, that living energy becomes more intimate, becomes more of a part of us. Krishna Murti, another spiritual teacher, wrote that to pay attention means we care. which means we really love. To pay attention means we care, which means we really love.

Attention is the most basic form of love. So, by learning to pay attention to our inner aliveness, becoming embodied into the living world, we fall in love with our world. We want to protect our world as part of our hearts. Okay, so we're going to look at the training for that, how we train our attention in this way and I'd like to emphasize two approaches, to awakening from the trance of thinking where we're in a kind of mental control tower and reconnecting to full aliveness, to full spirit. And the first way is really waking up from the trance during

daily life. How do we do that? And the second is the formal practice of becoming embodied. In a daily way, our thinking trance is really arises out of a habitual tension about living, about what might go wrong, and that's what keeps driving us into the mental control tower. And there's four flags of trance I think are really useful to train with. And each of them is just a signal, it's saying, okay, off in a small, smaller reality, trying to control things, come back, come back. So to practice with these flags, it just helps to remember that it's a habitual part of most of us to exit the body and to get lost in thoughts and to control.

And it's because something feels dangerous or unfamiliar in the wilderness. And one of the questions I love for coming back is just to say, what am I unwilling to feel? Just to ask that. And it takes some dedication and courage, but what we find is that there's this layer of angstiness, of restlessness that we keep trying to get away from. But when we can just sit down into it, our toleration increases and we actually then open into some of the very pure flows of aliveness that are homecoming. So you can trust that process. And if you just get in the knack of interrupting the trance and coming back,

become more and more at home in what's right here. Okay, the four flags. First one, we know it well. It's obsessive thinking. When you just sense your mind just cycling, oh, I've been thinking about that one for a lot. Cycling in its worry or it's planning or rehearsing a conversation, you know, just sense, okay, preparing again for what is around the corner.

And so what we can do is notice that as the flag of trance of the moment, interrupt it by let's say just name what's going on, okay, worrying, planning, rehearsing, and then just bring the breath into the body, feel what's there with kindness. So, that's the process. Notice what's happening, name it. And then gently come back down into the body, breathing, feeling with kindness. The second flag we're going to talk about judgment. And that again, so many moments we're not aware of it, but in some way we're comparing

and judging ourselves to others, ourself to ourselves. putting others down and it's just a habit. And so when you notice it, it's an amazing opportunity to practice coming back into embodied presence. And again, just name it. Okay, judging. And then breathe yourself back into the body with some kindness and just sense what's here. You can ask yourself, what am I unwilling to feel? And it'll bring you more fully into whatever you might have been running away from. And as I mentioned, initially it's unpleasant. But what happens is if you just stay and breathe with what's there, the quality or fullness of

presence grows and there's room for it and there's room for more. There's room for a real feeling of immediacy and presence and curiosity and creativity. We have a lot more choice. Okay, so the first one's obsessing. That's the flag to come back. The second one is judging. The third is when we're in action in terms of some way distracting ourselves or numbing ourselves. It could be food or drink or drugs, but this is, you know, getting super busy. We have so many ways of leaving. I've always love this story of a couple who are sitting in the living room and the woman says to, the man, you know, if I ever turn into a vegetable, please pull the plug. And he goes right over the TV set and yanks out the plug. And we know it how many times we are just zoning out to get

away from being here. It gives us an escape. And a key one, of course, is getting lost down the black holes of the internet, that and emails, and tax and gaming. You know, there's only two industries that call their customers users. And that's drugs and computer. And it's because we are addicted. So, a challenge. Maybe one time out of four when you have the reflex to check your text, just one out of four are your email, just pause. You might say, is it necessary? What am I unwilling to do? feel. And then again, breathe and gently come back to what's right here, really with kindness. Even one out of four times is actually huge. If 25% of the time you didn't follow that reflex,

you'd be opening up a huge domain of practice for presence. Very, very powerful. So we have named obsessing, we've named judging, we've named the different ways that we distract or numb ourselves. The fourth big one is simply the nature of speeding, speeding around, moving fast. Just notice what goes on in you when there's an obstruction to your speed. Like if you're driving and there's a really slow driver or there's a red light or there's traffic, we have such a drive in us to do more, get more done, get there faster. And there's a angsty place in us where the mantra is, I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time.

It's so revealing when we're at retreats or doing walk, some place we're doing walking meditation and we slow down and pay attention to our steps and the feeling and the sensations and the legs and really be here for our steps. And I have seen over and over how when I walk half as fast, I notice twice as much. It's really powerful. It starts reversing that need to get more done, racing through life. You know, there's that thing of, is the person who gets more done, do they really win? So there's a story that informs my life a lot, and I like to share it. A woman described how her sister, when she was pregnant, got diagnosed with cancer, and she gave birth to a very healthy baby girl. But after some months, it became clear she wasn't

going to make it and that she really had about a year. And so during that first year or so of her baby's life, which was the only time she'd have with her child, her mantra was, I have no time to rush. I have no time to rush. If we want to train an embodied presence, it means challenging that tendency to speed. Doesn't mean we can't do things at a decent pace. It's that angsty push that keeps us racing around when we really don't have to be and stops us from being here, which is the only place that gives us access to love, to connecting with others, to wonder, to freedom.

So, we train our attention with these kind of four flags of obsessive thinking and judgment and distraction and speed. Each one, it's just a matter of pausing and naming what's going on and we might ask ourselves, you know, what am I unwilling to feel? And then breathing ourselves gently into the moment. It's not only though when we're lost in a thinking trance that we can practice. this. Also during daily life, pleasant things happen. We don't stay for them. That's the problem. We do not have the art of savoring. But when something pleasant arises, let's say you're seeing

the moon, you're seeing the night sky with stars and moon or maybe you're in a shower and you feel that real hot sensation of what are just washing over you or a good taste of food, a hug, you know, something pleasant, completely pause. Say, be here, be here, be here, just be here, and savor. Learning how to arrive, to really pause and savor the pleasant experiences is every bit as much a training in embodied presence as coming out of the thinking trance when we're being driven. And the reason is this, that even when it's pleasant, we have a difficult time staying because it's unfamiliar to stay in the wilderness, even when the weather's beautiful. We get very edgy when we're not in the mental control tower

and feeling like we can anticipate what might be around the corner. So we don't live the moments. One of the most powerful of the statements or writings from Coral Young was, he put it this way, he said, one of the greatest influences on their offspring and themselves. are the unlived life of the parent. The unlived life of the parent. And when we race through life, when we're judging, when we're obsessing, distracting, we're not living the life that's here. And it may be that the unlived life is that we, you know, never pursued a career in music or art, but it's deeper. It's really the unlived, passions, the tender heart, the soul. And we need to be in our bodies for that. We need to be embodied.

So the pathway home, the first realm is in daily life, you know, coming back from that trance and letting ourselves really savor what is pleasant. I want to now just move to our formal meditation practice, that we are training in mindfulness, which is really considered the first foundation, being aware of the body, the realm of sensations. And it's the first foundation because to be aware of emotions, our perceptions, are the truth of impermanence, truth of emptiness, to be aware of love. to know the luminosity of awareness itself, we have to have that grounds of being awake in the aliveness of the body. Everything builds on that. So if you practice the meditations I often lead,

most of them include a body scan, which is training ourselves to be mindful of the different parts of the body, waking up through our body. And we'll explore this more next week. week, but we have a really strong conditioning to avoid feeling different parts of our body, especially if there's discomfort or pain, our difficult emotions which we feel in our body. And most of us have some degree of dissociation, which means we have to reconnect. It's not so familiar. We're in a PTSD society. and when there's a sense of trauma, we pull away.

We go into the mental control tower. So the practice is to come back gradually. And it has to be done with wisdom. If there's trauma, we really need to resource ourselves first because we can get retramatized. We'll touch into that some. But we learn to come back gradually. so we can start discovering the presence and the space and the formless awareness that's the source of all the aliveness. I remember one of the first conscious experiences I had of that of really sensing a sacred awareness

that was the source. And it was over 47 years ago, I was a junior in college. and I was taking yoga and meditation classes. And I remember it was spring and, you know, I walked home after one of the classes. And I could smell the fragrance of the fruit trees blossoming. I was feeling myself walking and moving and felt a gentle breeze on my skin. And my mind was quiet and I stopped. I totally stopped.

And then I realized that my body and mind were in the same place at the same time. And in that, that collectiveness, there was a sense of everything's sacred. Everything's sacred. And the poet Kabir, 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. So in the years that have followed, it's just been a deepening realization that coming into this aliveness what appears as physical form, I might think of as a body as skin and bone and muscle and this and that, when we actually inhabit that physicality.

We actually inhabit the sensations. It becomes a gateway to the formless. Through inhabiting the form becomes a gateway to the formless. It's an empty aliveness, kind of vibrating space. And it's often filled with an exquisite tenderness really. The Tibetans call this the rainbow body. And it's the deepest, most mysterious energy of the body. as we tap into it, we really discover a gateway to true refuge, to awareness itself.

So I've been describing in a number of ways, this pathway of coming into the body and in that way coming to open fully to spirit. And I want to say again that we often don't move from trance, from being in that mental control tower and planning and worrying straight into resting in that sacred presence, that that's not so often how it goes. There are layers of unlived life and they include fear and hurt that we've been running from and passions and also just the complete expression of aliveness. We've been unwilling to feel it. And sometimes it's really difficult as with strong physical and emotional pain and as I mentioned we're going to explore next time how we can graduate.

wake up through that with compassion, with wisdom. But the motivation, because you might be wondering, why would I really want to sit down into uncomfortableness? And I know that one. I mean, I've many, many mornings as I'm meditating and I start coming into my body, what I'm coming into feels incredibly unpleasant. You know, it really is not where I feel like I want to be. And yet I have had so many experiences of staying, learning to stay, and discovering in staying, that that intensifies presence and opens up presence in a way that not only is there a room for the unpleasantness, I'm really actually resting in a much more spacious and tender and free space. So the idea of the idea.

The idea is rather that we just get the knack of including what's here in presence. And then we get to be here. We get to be here for the sweetness of spraying and for the reality that it's all changing and for how precious it all is, for the ants that are precious and the trees and the next being that we spend time with. All of that because we kind of learned how to arrive. in presence and stay. And then we discover in that, that silence, that formless loving awareness, that's our spiritual source. So I'd like to practice a little. I'd like to invite you into

a practice of entering the wilderness. This won't be long, just to get another taste wherever you are finding a posture that is a comfortable also that allows you to be wakeful. Become aware of your body sitting here, breathing, and sense gravity, sense the hug of gravity, and kind of belonging to the earth, sense of space around you, and now feeling the breath more intimately. And as you breathe, begin to feel the earth. feel your hands, soften your hands, and then soften a bit more so you can feel the sensations, the tingling, the vibrating.

And still feeling your hands, you might also feel your feet. Perhaps the pressure, the warmth, contact with the floor, and feel the interior of the feet. Again, noticing tingling, vibrating, aliveness. that awareness, you can feel the legs, the length, the volume, the weight, and the arms. Still breathing, aware of the breath. Let this next breath be received in a softening belly. So you're breathing deep into the torso, this breath and this one. And again, soft belly. Feel the heart from the inside out, still breathing, aware of the heart, the hands, the feet, the belly, opening to feel the whole interior of the body and you might sense where you can let go a little bit if

there's any tightness or tension, softening, and then feeling this whole body at once as a field of changing sensation, warmth, coolness, tightness, flow. just let it all happen, not opposing or controlling anything. Sense this whole realm and field of changing sensations and the background, a formless living presence, that which is aware from the Radiant Sutra, experience the substance of the body and the world as made up of vibrating particles. and these particles made up of even finer energy particles, drifting more deeply, feel into each particle as it condenses from infinity and dissolves back into it continuously.

Noticing this, breathe easily with infinity dancing everywhere. Thank you, friends. Thank you for being willing to explore the wilderness. I wish you all blessings as you continue to sends into the aliveness and awareness that's here. And I'll look forward to being with you next week to continue the journey. Be well. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.