Tara Brach - Beyond the Controlling Self - Part 1

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Beyond the Controlling Self - Part 1 - It's natural that we do what we can to ward off danger and further ourselves. While our control strategies – such as aggression, judging, planning, seeking approval, pretending – have a developmental role, they are not a recipe for happiness, intimacy and freedom. An essential part of our evolution is to recognize when we are over-managing our lives, and learn to let go of the controls. These talks explore how we can release the grip of the over-controller, and the profound awakening of our hearts and minds that is possible in the shift from doing to being.  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste friends, welcome. So I'm imagining that like myself, you have that feeling of the world speeding up, that there's just more and more information, more globally impactful events. you know, one climate catastrophe after another. And in our personal lives, our nervous system can feel the stress of it. And the primary reaction when we're stressed is to try to control and manage things, to try to control what's really an uncontrollable environment. And of course, it's natural.

We're trying to ward off danger that feels right around the corner. yet when we become what I call the over-controller, we really don't like ourselves and it creates distance from others. It really blocks us in a deep way from living from our hearts, from a sense of wonder or curiosity or really the fullness of who we are. So I'd like to share with you a two-part series I did in 2019. and it feels really appropriate for these times. It's called Beyond the Controlling Self. And I'll share personally that putting these talks together was really powerful. It helped me wake up in quite a helpful way. It helped this shift from this habitual doing, always trying to manage things and do things, to much more of a sense of being, of presence.

So I'm hoping it serves you, my friends. May you enjoy. Namaste and welcome. So William James over 150 years ago described the suffering of contemporary society as this going around in a ceaseless frenzy, always feeling like we should be doing something else. What's changed? How many of you can relate to that? Always thinking, yeah, there is something in us, this kind of chronic doing where we're anticipating around the corner that there's yet something else that's going to need our attention

that's going to go wrong and so even when we're doing one thing there's a sense of we've got to get to the next. Of course, sometimes what we're doing is what we call the needful. We really, really need to be doing what we're doing. And one of my favorite illustrations is of a man who went on a safari with his poodle. And as it turns out, the poodle started chasing around some butterflies and found that he was totally lost at one point. So he's trying to find his way back and then he sees a leopard stalking him.

And so the poodle goes, uh-oh. And luckily, the prudal noticed some bones on the ground close by, and healy turned his back to the approaching cat and started to chew on them. And just as the leopard was about to pounce, the prudal called out, boy, that was one delicious leopard, but I'm still hungry. I wonder if there's another around. By hearing this leopard halted his attack mid-stride, a look of abject terror on his face. He crawled off to some trees nearby thinking, boy, that was a close call. That creature nearly got me. Meanwhile, a monkey had been watching the whole scene from a tree and he called out to the leopard promising some valuable information in return for the leopard's protection.

The leopard agreed to the deal and of course was furious to learn he had just been made a fool of. So the leopard now with the monkey on his back took off to find and eat the conniving canine. Once again, the poodle saw the leopard and this time with a monkey on its back approaching, a very smart poodle, put two and two together, figured out what had happened, that he wouldn't have time to escape. So he sat down with his back to his attackers, pretending he hadn't seen them. And just when they got close enough to hear, he said, where's that damn monkey? I sent him off an hour ago to bring me another leopard. So we love it when we canive successfully and when it's necessary. And you might be wondering what this has to do with our

talk for the evening. Now I'm going to figure out some way to link it up. But every one of us has a survival brain that is equipped to activate actions we need to protect us and to further our well-being. We all have it and that survival brain makes very good use of thinking. As survival brain tells us something's wrong, something's missing and then it puts our brain to good use to try to fix things. And so we go around doing a lot of conniving. I mean, we do, we all do, a lot of problem solving and so on. And as we know, well, it's absolutely essential that we protect against leopards, you know, the leopards in our life, and we, you know, in some ways that we are trying to win over and get what we want. We know that's important. It's not a

recipe for a rich, loving, creative life. And if we spend all our time hooked by that survival brain and trying to control our environment and control other people and get what we want, and if that's our full-time occupation because it's become habitual, we miss out a lot. It says, John O'Donohue put it, he said, we're so busy manage in our life. that we miss out on this great mystery we're a part of. That always strikes me because when we start looking at our lives we realize that we over-manage things, we're over-controlling, overdoing. You might, and I like doing this whenever possible, take a moment to close your eyes

and just let this be some time to reflect on today. And the inquiry really as you review the day was how much was the frame of mind that, and there's a problem here, there's something wrong, something I need to solve it, I need to do something. How many moments are you trying to figure out something or prepare for something that were behind it that was stress, you were being driven by stress? And in contrast to that, to the manor, to the man. of today, how many moments were there of what am I called being, you know, just being, there's a sense of listening and taking in the wonder of spring, how much being.

And just to consider that in order for us to continue evolving, in order for us to have true well-being, to meet our potential. We need to develop the capacity to shift from that doing to being. We need that capacity. We need to be able to sense, okay, I don't have to be protecting from leopards or winning over monkeys right now. I can rest for a bit. And you might even ask yourself and bring it right into the this moment. If there's nothing to do right now, what's here? Right in this moment, if there's

nothing to do, who am I? What's the sense of myself? If there's no problem to solve, what is here? As you're ready, you can open your eyes. You might have sensed if you got a little quiet and you ask those questions, you know, really if there's nothing to do, what's here, that all of a sudden one of my friends describes this, looking at the roof comes off of the room and like there's just a lot more openness and mystery and aliveness and who knows, but we're no longer in a box in that trance of I'm a self on my way to do something else and do it right and not make a mistake and we're out of that. that. So, what we'll be doing this class and the next is exploring really how we loosen

the grip of that kind of addictive doing, of the over-managing, over-controlling and how we can move more and more to have the choice to rest in that being state, that more mysterious, vibrant, open-hearted space, from doing to being. And again, why is that important? I can speak for myself and if you've been following these talks and podcasts for a while I come back to this theme fairly regularly shifting out of the controlling self, you know, letting go of so much controlling, being more just here. I can speak for myself, you might know FOMO, the fear of missing out, well, my big FOMO

is that I'm going to manage my way down to the deadline, the end of the strip, death and not have really been around for the moments as much as possible. I think that is the deep fear that we're going to miss out on life, you know? And the way we miss out is that we're in a doing trance or human doings. How many of you can relate thus far? Are we together on this? Okay, okay. I speak of it because I know the inner control, my inner controller and it's sometimes very gross and sometimes very subtle but I know that and I know how of course we have to do

a certain amount to take care of our lives but we way overdue. So the beginning of understanding the shift from doing the to being, I find a very useful kind of metaphor from Aldous Huxley who describes the reducing valve of awareness. And what he says is, let's say you can think of it as in the early development of our species when we were pretty much in the grip of the limbic brain, you know, of really survival brain, the valve of awareness that has a potential to be wide open and experience everything, the totality is very narrowed to just what we need to pay attention to in order to make it.

It gets very fixated, it's narrow and it's rigid. And the basic felt experience is something's wrong or about to go wrong and so there's a lot of vigilance and a lot of looking around for what's going to go wrong or something's missing, how can I get it? And that is kind of a description of the primitive brain, a very narrowing, a very narrow valve and if you think of it like you're on a cross-country trip and you know how the valve of awareness is going to be if you know you have engine trouble well you're looking for a mechanic or you're on a cross-engine trip and there's a blizzard

well then you're going to be looking for a place to get off the road and stay narrow or your person that you're going with your partner has a acute appendicitis and then you're looking for a hospital so it's that kind of thing you're in bite-flight freeze or are you're a vegan looking for a meal you can have? I'll see. But now, but now you can go to Burger King and you can get a vegan whopper. Did you know that? Just in New York Times last day or two.

Yeah. So your valve opens again a little with happiness. So that the idea is that we can spend... And when we're stressed and our on button of stress is really jammed, we can be going around with a narrowed valve all the time and not really take in the world around us, not really be able to listen to loved ones and really be there and present, are to take in beauty, our sorrow, not, we're just not there for our life. Now as we know that the way the narrow valve works,

is when we're stressed there's a message that something's wrong and then the message is you have to do something. As soon as there's something wrong we get the message of do something. And again, sometimes it's useful and sometimes it's not. One of my favorite examples of this is a prank that was played in Montana some years back at a high school where students released three goats into a school and they had numbers painted on them. one, number two, and number four. The schoolteachers and the admin spent the entire day looking

for goat number three. So there we are. Something's wrong, rigid, narrow, fixate on something. So what is evolution? What happens as humans evolve? We go from being dominated by our limbic brain and harrowing this kind of narrow, more fixated attention to a much more with the emergence of the prefrontal cortex, the development of it, a much more flexible valve so we can take perspective and we can be mindful and we can, we have compassion and there's a larger sense of belonging, we intuit that okay I'm not just this individual self, you know, moving around on the surface of the earth I am, the earth I belong to this living web, there's a larger perspective and with that there's a capacity

It's not like we've gotten rid of our limbic brain, but there's a capacity to choose and say, oh, right now I need to keep my attention really focused. This is dangerous. Oh, oh, right now, oh, I've been through that before, I know how to deal with that. I can widen it again and I can let this person into my heart. So there's more flexibility. If you're back to the metaphor of on your cross-country trip there's times you can really open and take in the landscape and feel wonder because the valve is open.

And this is how Rumi puts it. This is how a human being can change. There's a worm addicted to eating grape leaves. Suddenly he wakes up. Call it Grace, whatever something wakes him and he's no longer a worm. He's the entire vineyard and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, a growing wisdom and joy that doesn't eat. need to devour.

Okay? So we can shift from this doing, I need more of this and I don't want that, the self-centeredness to this spaciousness that doesn't need to devour, they can feel joy. So if we look a little more at the nature of the controlling self and the suffering we get into and we sense, well how did this happen, when there's a limbic dominance, when we're moving around, always trying to manage things, the whole sense of who we are shrinks. We get very small, we get grim, we get burdened, we feel a sense of them unprepared for what's around the corner, we get very small and anxious.

And so we're kind of hooked on seeking the grape leaves or on manipulating things. and it's a developmental arrest when we're always, always living in that controlling state. And the myth that many of you are familiar with that describes being caught in that limbic trance is the myth of Sisyphus. Okay? We're just absolutely condemned doing. Sisyphus is condemned by the gods to constantly be pushing the boulder up, constantly doing, doing, doing, But it always rolls down.

It's like we can never do enough. We're condemned to pushing the boulder, whether the boulders are judging other people or are trying to do more to prove ourselves. We're condemned to pushing and pushing. And this is the transfer in. We're caught in being a self that's on its way somewhere else, always trying to deal with trouble, solve a problem, and never getting to rest,

never opening to that beingness. So, this is the arctypal trance and how come we have it? Like why do we get caught in that trance? Well, for many, many, many of us, the stress we experience through our families and our culture is such that we're outside our window of tolerance. So rather than being able to keep, have the valve open and sometimes close, it gets jammed, I'm closed because we get hooked on certain strategies to try to make it through. We get hooked on trying, let's say, in our relationships to pretend or present a certain self.

We just are trying to protect ourselves. Or we get hooked on trying to win people over by always accommodating or making them dependent on us. hooked on judging or blaming or threatening people so they'll cooperate with us. We get hooked on our strategies. Why? Because we have unmet needs and we're trying to meet our needs. Some of them don't look so bad. Like we can get hooked on strategies of impressing people but you can't quite tell or hooked on strategies of getting sympathy and getting rewards. And yet if we're hooked on it we're just going to keep on doing the same thing.

In this cartoon, a mama dog is telling her little baby dog, and there's a guy the owner's about to do some training, the mom's saying, they give you a lot of treats while they're training you, so play dumb for as long as you can. So the deal is that these strategies of pushing the boulder carry over also into spiritual life. We can do it when we meditate and really have the sense that we have to try really hard and get hooked into trying really hard. You know, Garrison Keeler's famous lines is, my ancestor were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible

under English law at that time. You feel the boulder there, right? the boulder. And then of course in the Zen tradition you have the new novice coming to the Zen masters saying, I really want to be enlightened. How long is it going to take me? And the master said 10 years and he said, well what if I try twice as hard? And the master says 20 years. Wait a minute, you just said 10 years. For you 30 years. But you can see it, the striver, you know, it's that striving energy. Never. enough, the feeling of never enough.

Now here's a few other pieces about what locks us into always pushing being an over-controller. We get a temporary fix. I mean if let's say we are an over-controller by trying to impress people and prove ourselves and accomplish this and accomplish that, we get a temporary surge or if we're over-controlling by being angry we get a surge of power with the anger. then what happens? We know very well. We get a, there's a reaction to us and then we have to rev up the anger again. Or we've proved ourselves with one thing but because deep down we don't feel enough, we always have to do yet the next. There's never a sense of enough. We still

have to push the boulder and we're still addicted to doing. It's compounded, the Sisyphus complex that, you know, being caught in it, is compounded by, and we're still addicted to doing. It's compounded by the fact that we don't like ourselves for the way we're pushing boulders. There's self-aversion. Sisyphus does not like himself. And you can sense it that whatever our way of controlling things is, whether we try to control by judging or proving or whatever it is, our control by in some way, you know, if we feel unlovable, then we'll control by giving ourselves more food maybe and then we'll feel shame, which

make us feel more unlovable and then more food. We get caught and hooked in the cycle. It keeps us pushing boulders, the self-aversion. So, what can Sisyphus do? I mean, if you think of the myth, what can Sisyphus do? I mean, you know that any revenge against the gods isn't going to work, can't take the boulder and hurl it down at the people below, can't you know, try harder, that's not going to work, doesn't help to bang his head against the boulder and self-hatred. What can he do? What can we do if we're caught in that overdoing and that over-controlling?

What's going to help? If you think again in an evolutionary way, if we're hooked on an activity, if there's There's enough mindfulness. If you can look at your life, if we can look at our lives and say, okay, here's where I get caught in overdoing. You know, here's where I'm just kind of on it and I'm leaning forward. If we can see it and there is some mindfulness, we can choose to interrupt it and stop doing just for a little bit but stop doing. We can pause. And this is why we often come back. in spiritual trainings to the sacred art of pausing.

Pause. Even if you're in the midst of pushing and you pause for a few seconds, you begin to interrupt it. And in the not doing, in the moments of not doing, there's a kind of space that comes that gets filled with an intelligence, with a presence and with heart that can sense some other options, but you have to interrupt the doing first. You have to be willing to pause. You have to stop doing. For Sisyphus, this might mean he stops doing and in that intelligence and that moment of stopping doing, he senses, I just kind of let the boulder go and leave

the mountain and take a shower and maybe listen to Mozart or go dancing or make love. I could do other stuff, you know. But pausing comes first. One of the examples of this in more recent contemporary writing by Tom Wolfe, and this is an example I share one I can remember because it's such a good one, he wrote about in the 1950s all these fighter pilots and highly trained pilots in the U.S. Air Force where they were attempting to fly at altitudes that had never ever been explored before, going beyond the denser atmosphere the earth. And what would happen is that the ordinary laws of aerodynamics did not apply when they got way out there. And so, as he described this, this is in the right stuff. These pilots, their planes

would skid into a flat spin like a cereal bowl and a wax form like a counter and then they'd start tumbling. They weren't even spinning and diving, but they'd just be tumbling through space end over end. And the pilots had no idea how to deal with it. And so they'd be frantically trying to stabilize, they'd be doing all the controlling you possibly could do, and they'd be screaming helplessly to ground control as they went to their deaths. You know, what do I do next? I've tried A, I've tried B, I've tried C. So it was a horrible situation. And the more they tried to maneuver the controls the worse situation. So, when it changed was inadvertent, as often happens, Chuck Yeager was in the plane and his plane started tumbling and he was thrown around in the cockpit

and he got knocked out. So he paused. So he's...he's unconscious going to towards Earth. And then when he regained consciousness, he was already in the denser atmosphere of the Earth and then he could do the controls and stabilize and land safely. But he discovered the only life-saving response possible, which is that you don't do anything. You take your hands off the controls. And it's the only choice you have. This is really the deep teaching. and it's an evolutionary teaching, that we get addicted to controlling, it's driven by the fears of our survival brain, but there's some intelligence that can say, okay, experiment a little. You don't have to always control, just pause.

And in that pause, and this is the whole practice of meditation when we really pause, you can sense in that space the light, the radiance of the sun shining through, there's a natural intelligence that comes and heart. So if we look at it in terms of our lives, there are a lot of small things in the denser atmosphere you can control. You can make your list and decide whether you're going to go here first or there first because of the distance and plan it properly and you can plan what you're going to say to somebody that's going to be appropriate when there's difficulty and there's a level that you can control things. But the big stuff, whether we think of the process of aging or the sicknesses that come

or the things that happen to loved ones or how loved ones behave or even the emotions and moods that go through us, we can't control those things. We need to learn when it's wise. to take our hands off the control. That's the only way we can access a deeper intelligence and a deeper compassion and more freedom. So we're going to look now more closely at how we do that and one of the kind of models that I think is really beautiful for, well how do we relate to our inner controller. And I hope that as I've been to speaking, you started identifying places where, hmm, I'd like to take the hands off the controls

there, you know. How we relate to the inner controller is key. You can't control the controller. You understand that, right? If you have your grip tight and the way you control things is you're controlling other people's behaviors by threatening or by judging, or your way you're doing. your way of controlling is to keep a distance and keep a mask and you don't let people in and you don't feel authentic.

You can't control that. You can bear witness with interest and kindness and in that bearing witness you're creating an atmosphere for change. And this was described, kind of came through very beautifully in the movie The Horse Whisperer that, how many of you saw the horse whisperer? Can I see by? Okay, then some of you might remember this scene. It's basically the theme as Robert Redford is playing the role of a man that agrees to help to work with a traumatized horse named Pelgram. And so at one point, he created this very nurturing relationship with Pelgram. And it was not one of controlling,

but really of being in relationship with him. So you can think of Pelgram as the kind of limbic out of control or over-controller that would just dash off or be dangerous to others. And his nurturing relationship began to calm Pilgrim down. But at one point in the movie Pilgrim got triggered by a woman's cell phone and limbic went off and he started contorting and writhing and then he just ran off into open pasture. So here's what's interesting.

The trainer didn't chase him. He didn't try to lasso him or force him into submission. What he did instead was he started moving calmly towards him, but he stopped at a really respectful distance. So he's kind of witnessing. And he kneeled down a form of submission and simply attended to what the horse was doing and needing. He just kind of paid attention and he waited until Pelham was ready to reconnect.

He just waited. And after some time Pilgrim slowly walked back over to him where the trainer was kneeling and he came closer and the trainer was very present and still and finally Pilgrim lowered his head and that's a sign of a horse's trust and willingness and readiness. And the trainer gently stroked his head and with one finger and this is just nurturing, was able to guide him back home to continuous healing. It's this kind of relationship with the parts of us that get controlling.

Because when we get controlling, and again, controlling could be aggressively controlling but also be self-protective defensive. of it when we get controlling, there's an unmet need in there. It may be trauma, it may be heard of a different kind, but something needs attention just the way Pelham did and we need to pay attention like that. I'm here, patient, respectful, caring. So I want to give you an example of my own process with the inner controller and then invite you to practice a little.

Is this sound okay? And the story I want to share, I mean, I've had different, as I mentioned, I've had different levels of the inner controller come out, but I remember when I was a college sophomore, I did a phase of psychoanalysis. I was feeling depressed and anxious and so on. I remember I had a dream of, a repeating dream of struggling to get somewhere and always being exhausted and that's when I started talking about the image of Sisyphus. And the insight that I had was that I'm always trying hard, I'm always pushing to make something happen, I'm always trying to solve a problem. It was this kind of generic thing we're talking about here. And the big one was

that I'm always pushing to in some way prove myself. And then of course the next insight was I need to push myself to prove myself because underneath I don't feel worthy. So this is me pushing the boulder because I felt unworthy, that was the unmet need. And then the next insight that came along the way was, and I'm giving you a very quick summary of, actually turned out to be a year of psychoanalysis, that the harder I try, the worse I feel about myself. When I'm trying hard, when I'm trying to prove, when I'm trying to impress, when I'm trying to look good. And if any of you know the aneogram, I'm a three, that's the performer and the shadow

side of the performer just has to keep on trying to look good. So then I tell you about how I'm trying to look good so I don't have to try to look good anymore. But anyway, you get the how it works. How exhausting that was and how much I didn't like my striving self. I didn't like the Sisyphus, the controller. And I, around that, when I graduated college, I moved into an ashram, where primarily yoga, we were practicing yoga. And I continued to be paying attention to this, and I brought all my striving and proving

and impressing into the spiritual world and I was going to be the best yogi and the best yoga teacher and, you know, so I had, I was competitive and I was trying to, you know, make up for some feeling like I wasn't okay. And finally, you know, I was on to myself enough that I remember being with a group of women from the ashram, the spiritual community, and naming that I, you know, I might appear one way but inside I was, you know, competitive and I was vain and I was, you know, always trying to get everybody to think I was a great yogi. And I was, I didn't know it then, I'm hyper-mobile and but back then that made for being

like a really good yogi. Now I can barely stretch, but back then and I joined an ashram community. that actually had a Kundalini Yoga Olympics, which was just made for me, you know, and it was perfect. I could compete in yoga, you know, which is crazy, of course, right? But we actually had these competitions

where I remember one summer at the solstice where the competition was on doing wheelpost, which is a back bend. And I remember doing wheelposts for 20 minutes, and winning that and then over the years, thinking about it because of this hypermobility when now if I begin to try to do something like that, you know, how quickly I'll injure myself. And just the karma of that, of developing a pride around something that actually was physiological, I wasn't owning it and ended up causing trouble.

So I confessed. I said, okay, so I've got all this inner control. that's trying to impress. And I remember, I don't remember what happened in the group beyond that. This is probably 40 years ago that I'm speaking. But I remember going back to my room and processing that and initially I thought, oh I'm going to do some fronium because I felt so bad I just wanted to get rid of it. That was controlling the state with something else. Then I started staying with it and that's where the horse whisperer came in. I didn't know anything, the movie didn't exist, but I just started watching what was going

on and what was going on inside was I was beginning to see not only was there the self that wanted to prove herself but underneath that there was a real sense of something's wrong with me, I'm not worthy. And so that witness part of me got much more tender and just really present and I began to sense all the different ways that I was trying to control the world were really coming out of wanting to be loved. And when I could see that, I could then offer myself kindness and to calm down some of that need to prove.

That was of course over time. But in those moments of just being kind to the controller parts, all the parts that were trying to prove, quieted me and it kind of opened. to me to a sense of beingness where I wasn't so identified with the three. I wasn't so identified with the performer and I started getting a taste of who I was beyond the controlling self. That is the gift of this exploration. If you can sense the way you become addicted to doing and even some of the strategies of controlling that might be defensive or aggressive, and begin like the horse whisperer just to bear witness and to pause them, to put them

on pause and just hold the space for them and sense the need underneath. You start opening to a space of who you are beyond them and then that makes a lot of room for them not to have such a grip. So with that I'm going to invite you to reflect a little and I'll walk you through it, okay? In this pause, I'd like to invite you to sense what part of your body can let go a little bit. See if there's a little bit of relaxing through your shoulders, your hands, your belly, let yourself take a few full breaths and then scanning your life, sense if there's any particular place or situation

or you know you go into that over-controller mode. It might be with another person or a difficult situation or in some way you notice that you get particularly judgmental or blaming or defended or you start over accommodating, but you have your way of trying to manage it that might not be so healthy for you. Maybe it's a situation where you feel driven to prove yourself. as was the case for me and then again proving yourself again and it's never enough it's like you always have to push the boulder. Some situation where you'd like to be able to pause and have a different way of responding

to have the situation in mind and you go to right where you know you're caught in your over-control or self where you're caught in the reactivity, imagine pausing and simply notice everything you see about the controlling self right now. Whether it's aggressiveness or judgmental, you're trying to change someone, defended, withdrawn, trying to prove, just like the horse whisperer, just attentive, witness, interest. And you might notice if you're not liking yourself for what you're doing, because that's often a part of the over-controller and you might deepen your attention to sense what's really driving the behavior what's the fear or the unmet need the hurt what are you really trying to get that's deep

there's always an unmet need if we're hooked in pushing a boulder and over-controlling And sensing that you can look the view from your most awake being, your heart, your awake heart, kind of like that whisperer. Some think of it as their future self at the stuck place that has that unmet need and just sense that you can and it might help to put your hand on your heart, send kindness, just energetically, send kindness and whatever can help to comfort or meet that need in this moment. For me it was seeing that I was feeling unlovable and just sending love, saying, I'm here,

you're lovable. Even the intention to offer kindness within can help to meet the needs that are underneath the controller. And to sense the quality of beingness of presence that's here when you can pay attention in this way, when you can pause and pay attention, it's like that valve of awareness opens. And there's more kindness and there's more perspective. There's that shift from being caught in the doer or controller to beingness. And you might even ask, really, if nothing's wrong with me, who is here?

Who am I? The controller never likes itself. But when we open up to this presence, we can sense a kind of homecoming from doer to being. And taking a few more moments and opening your eyes when you're ready. There are ways that we can move in our daily life that help you're us to be more inclined towards being. Sometimes we'll be interrupting the controller when it's full throttle and this is an example of that where we just begin to pause and sense I don't have to live inside that.

But we can also in our day take more pauses and it's necessary to do as individuals and it's necessary in a wise society to take pauses because that invites us back to that beingness. It helps us to know we're home. And this is Mary Oliver how she describes it. She says, when I'm among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locusts, equally the beach, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself in which I have goodness and discernment and never

hurry through the world but walk slowly and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, stay a while. The light flows from their branches and then they call again, it's simple they say and And you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light and to shine. We started by, I brought in the early on this fear of missing out and the big one is missing out in our lives. Sometimes the controller is really blatant and we're manipulating and sometimes it's just that more chronic doing.

we forget to stop. We forget to pause. And if we're doing a lot now, if you looked at today and you saw that you were always tumbling into the next thing, that's what we do in our whole life. It's not like it's all of a sudden going to stop. It's a habit. We can break that habit. So you might close this particular session with closing your eyes again and you might reflect for a moment on even the words, human being, sense human as a modifier for being and ask yourself, well what is it mean to be a being? What does it mean in this moment? And maybe being is more like a verb, being, this awareness that's experiencing moment

to moment. There's a great blessing when we can open that valve of awareness and shift from that doing where we're chronically on our way somewhere else. And senses being this, the space of light and aliveness of loving awareness. And they call again, it's simple they say, And you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine. Thank you for your kind attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.