Tara Brach - Conscious Prayer: Finding Refuge in Loving Presence (Retreat talk) (2016-05-11)

Episode Date: May 15, 2016

Conscious Prayer: Finding Refuge in Loving Presence (Retreat talk) (2016-05-11) - Prayer is a communing with our enlarged being. This talk examines less conscious forms of prayer, and how we can evolve the power of our prayers by opening into the depth of our longing, and reaching toward our true belonging. (from the 2016 IMCW Spring Retreat) Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I wonder how many of you have been in some way tracking your experience and noticing how much of what's going on is kind of that we just forget and then remember and forget and remember. And sometimes the forgetting can be moments and sometimes it's really long stretches. So this is a story about a long stretch. When he was very young, he waved his arms, gnashed the teeth of his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that the dishes trembled in the china cabinet. Oh, for goodness sake, his mother said, you're not a dinosaur. You're a human

being. And since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate. Seriously, his father said at some point, what do you want to be? A fireman then? Or a policeman? or a soldier, some kind of hero. But in high school, they gave him tests and told him he was very good with numbers. Perhaps he'd like to be a math teacher. That was respectable. Or a tax accountant. He could make a lot of money doing that.

It seemed a good idea to make money, what with falling in love and thinking about raising a family. So he was a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted that it made him, well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant, but a retired tax accountant. And still worse, a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb. He forgot to take his pill, forgot to turn his hearing aid back on.

Every day it seemed he had forgotten more things, important things, like which of his children lived in San Francisco and which of his children were married or divorced. Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling the familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin,

watching dragonflies flitting among the horsetails at the water's edge. I find that a really poignant trance story that swaths of our life can really be confined inside the stories that we've been told, the expectations that we adopted about ourselves or the limiting inner messages, until we're living kind of half awake and we're convinced we're a certain kind of person

and that we really can only do these things and we can't do those things. So we're just living in this narrative. And sometimes it's overt suffering, as many of you've touched into, that when we're living inside the sense of something's really wrong with me, our others will never love me, that it can be just deep angst. And sometimes it's more of the kind of trance when we're on automatic a lot, and yet there's this undercurrent of disappointment that in some way we're not really really

living true to who we are, who we sense we can be. And I run into that disappointment a lot. There's a phrase, the big squeeze that I like. It kind of describes our evolutionary predicament. And it's that, and you can sense it every day, that we get caught in this kind of egoic self with its judgments and its comparing and its controlling and so on. And we have, the squeezes, we also have this deep intuition of the possibility of loving without holding back and the possibility of really seeing clearly the moments and living in presence. And so that's part of our predicament that we live with that sense of what's possible

and each one of us can really watch how small-minded we get. We can just watch it. So the evolution of consciousness that's going on, that we can intuit what's possible is a shift in identity from being the person that our parents or our society told us we were and that we came to believe by repeating our thoughts over and over again from that egoic self that feels separate and usually, in some ways not okay, to shifting kind of a waking up out of that, to perceiving this open

field of awakeness and tenderness that expresses through these body minds in unique ways, but sensing our home in that openness. So tonight I'd like to continue what really each of the talks has been exploring, which is how do we decondition the trance that keeps us small? How do we decondition that and really evolve our practice with these trainings? And we'll be looking at particular pathways home to open-hearted awareness. But to begin, just to take some moments to sense what are the key elements that keep us in trance, that keep powering the trance. One of the big ones is really the same. fixation of the thinking mind that we get caught in thoughts and we take our thoughts to be reality

over and over again. So what are thoughts? If you're having a thought, in your mind there's probably an image, but there might not be. Some people don't have a visual mental movie so much. Usually there's some audio, like little sound bites, and that combo creates a kind of map or representation in our mind of the living reality. And our big mistake over and over is that we take that map and we actually think that's what's real. We do that. From an evolutionary perspective, our thinking these maps are absolutely essential to surviving and thriving and they're essential in our spiritual practice. When they're our servant, they serve on all levels.

You know, we design buildings and we compose music and we can reflect on the three marks of existence of and begin to have those representations because they represent something that's actually living and real, point us back to the living reality. They serve us. And when they're not the servant, when we're not resting in awareness and the thoughts and recognizing thoughts as thoughts.

In other words, when they become the reality, when they're the master, they dominate us and they trap our sense of being. We start believing we're less than what we are. And then, of course, they do more than that. They lead us into delusion and they lead us into all sorts of reactivity. My favorite illustrations of this, some of you might remember, is a couple of that are from Michigan, and they decide to go to Florida

to celebrate their honeymoon. And they decide to stay in the same hotel they stayed at 20 years earlier. But because of their schedules, they can't leave at the same date, so he has to leave a day earlier. So he flies down there, checks into the hotel, and they have a computer in the room,

so he sends an email to his wife. And as happens, he makes a little mistake, and he leaves out one letter in her email address, so it goes out, but somewhere in Houston, a whole other world here, there's a woman's just returned home from her husband's funeral.

And he's a minister for many years. He died from a sudden heart attack. He was called home to glory, so to speak, from a sudden heart attack. So the widow decides to check her email, and here's what she finds. She looks, and then she actually faints. But here's what her son rushes into the room, and here's what she had been seeing on the screen. screen. Two, my loving wife, subject, I've arrived. Date 20th of April, 2016. I know you're surprised

to hear from me. They have computers here now and you're allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I've just arrived and been checked in. I see that everything's been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then. I hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. And then, P.S., shore is hot down here. There's one great master, Ajum Budidasa, was asked to describe the world, and his description was, lost in thought. When Gandhi was asked to speak about Western civilization, his response was, it would be a good idea.

Most of our thoughts are not serving creativity and healing and spiritual awakening. If you just track your own mind They say that we have 68,000 thoughts a day and 98% of them we had yesterday so there's this cocoon of familiar thoughts going around and around one of my favorite cartoons

has a guy who's driving and he's right about to enter a desert and there's a sign and it says you and your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles so we're addicted to thinking most of us. It's just this incessant inner dialogue

and especially in the moments that we're not focused on some sort of external task are default. And this is they've found the default network in the brain where this happens gets activated. So when you're not on purpose doing something out there, it gets activated and what happens is you keep having self-referential thoughts

to locate you in time and space and give you a sense of orientation. And as you know, most of our thoughts or many of our thoughts have that negativity bias, so we fixate not only on self-referential thoughts, but on worry thoughts and fearful thoughts and what's wrong thoughts.

And so basically we're continuously sensing a problem. We're continuously trying to solve a problem. And that affects our biochemistry and our state of mind. and we're in a trance then. And it can go on for minutes until you recognize, oh, thinking, thinking, or it can be a habit of a lifetime. Just take a moment, if you will, just to close your eyes. I'm going to take two words out of thin air and ask you to reflect on them.

The first word is trouble. And just say the word a few times to yourself, notice what happens in your body, trouble. Okay, and you can put that one aside. Now kindness, kindness, and just sense what happens with that word. And then you might reflect, as the Buddha described it, that whatever you regularly think about, that becomes the inclination of the mind. Another way to say it where attention goes, energy flows. And we know that neurons are fire together, wire together.

This is the way the neuroscientists put it, that what we think about regularly creates our reality, creates our body state, creates our life. So you can open your eyes if you'd like or if you'd like to sit with your eyes closed, that's quite fine. in the most basic way, our thinking keeps resurrecting the story of ourself and a sense of a self. And it separates us from a larger sense of our being. So in our practices together, we are deconditioning that trance of thinking.

We're deconditioning it by shifting over and over again. Every time we notice thinking, we're shifting into the senses. This is the ground-level practice of awakening from trance. We have to really establish awakefulness in the senses and keep coming back and just the intentions to be mindful of thoughts. And then we begin to make the shift from living inside them and believing them to that phrase many of you are familiar with real but not true, whereby we sense that the thoughts are really happening, they're real in that sense.

and the physical sensations that come with them are real. But these sound bites and images in our mind are not the reality. They're not the living truth. And when we sense real but not true, then we have a choice and we can evaluate, hey, are these serving awakening? Are they serving healing? Are they serving freedom?

Are these thoughts just reaffirming that trance? that keeps this beingness in a kind of limited in prison state. That's the gift of coming back out of thoughts you get to start choosing. So that's one of the mechanisms of trance is the fixation of the thinking mind. The second one to name is our fixation on emotions, whereby emotions come up and we get possessed and identified. So there's rising waves or constellation of waves in the ocean and those waves become me. I'm the fearful self, on the victimized self, I am the embarrassed self, the angry self,

the aggressive self, that's suffering. In those moments that they're not just waves in our ocean, but that that's me, that's suffering. And we have this very pervasive habit of when we feel bad, we add a second arrow that says, I'm bad. Just check it out that when there's feelings that are physical unpleasantness, emotional unpleasantness, something takes it personally and thinks I'm bad. That there's something wrong with me for these unpleasant feelings. So as we've been practicing together, we decondition the trance, these fixations,

we come out of the thoughts and back into the senses, and then when there's that stickiness of the waves, we start identifying with the waves, we've been bringing the two wings of awareness to recognize what's happening and to allow with kindness. and we refine those two wings or deepen them with the acronym rain where we're recognizing and allowing and then deepening the two wings by investigating. That deepens the recognition. And the allowing gets deepened as we nourish with kindness. So that's how our practice has been going.

And as many of you have noticed, and here's where we're going to kind of add some other dimensions tonight, one of the challenging places as we start to practice the two wings through rain is that we touch into something that's really challenging and it's very hard to bring a kind of compassion to ourselves and I'm wondering how many of you have noticed that, getting stuck in the waves and how hard it is. So that's a particular place that becomes really important for ourselves and for all beings is when we are so caught in that small cell feeling that we don't have access to a kind of loving that we can offer to ourselves.

That's a very painful and stuck place. It feels very young and powerless. and what we can begin to discover in that stuckness is that the very sense of powerlessness, the kind of humility that comes with it where the ego really can't do it, the ego cannot take care of itself, becomes the grounds of what we sometimes call taking refuge,

our prayer. It becomes the grounds of calling on what someone, something in a sense must be beyond the ego because the ego can't pull it off. So this is still part of the end of rain. It's the wing of love. But instead of offering to ourselves, what we're going to be exploring as other pathways to open-hearted awareness are ways that we can reach out and in to a source of loving awareness that's beyond the ego. cell when we're stuck. And we see this as one of the most poignant transformational junctures in the mythology of the Buddha. It's probably one of my very favorite stories from

the mythology. I mean, it's been so helpful to me. And as the story goes, many of you, I think, are familiar with it, that the Buddha sat through our Siddhartha Gautama sat through the night and Mara, the shadow side, the God of greed, hatred, delusion, and more was attacking spears and arrows. And through the night, the Buddha had trained his mind, or Siddhartha trained his mind so that there was a tremendous amount of equanimity, the two wings of wakeful noticing and being able to investigate and profound compassion all there. So as the slings and arrows and came at him, he was able to meet those energies with those qualities of presence.

And each one would turn into each of the attacking elements would turn into a flower petal. And as the morning star began to rise, there was a heap of petals right in front of them. And the drama was not over because Mara brought forth the greatest of the challenges, which was doubt. That's the real stuck place. It's like doubt is when there's that sense of I don't have it in me. I can't do this. There's something so fundamentally wrong with me, so unlovable about me, so unworthy,

it just can't work. Doubts when we're saying, well, others might be cut out for this path, but I'm not. Doubt paralyzes. So at the moment that the Buddha attacked with, I mean, Siddhartha was attacked with doubt and it came in the form of who do you think you are to take the mantle of a Buddha, you know. That's when he put his hand on the ground and he called on the earth goddess to bear witness. to his goodness. And this is kind of an expression mythically of really calling on the whole web of life, calling on the heart of the universe, the earth goddess, that loving presence of,

that lets us know our belonging and our goodness. And he called out to the earth goddess. And it was in those moments of calling out from that depth of prayerfulness. He took refuge, basically. He took refuge. It was from those moments that lightning and thunder appeared and finally Mara withdrew and that was the moment that he became the Buddha. He was free. He was fully awake. And it came after taking refuge. So there's a very powerful, very powerful teaching in this, that while separation is an illusion, it's a very powerful illusion, and it can be in the depth of the sense of being caught in it, that something in us intuit what's beyond that ego, and we reach to it. We reach to it. We touch the ground. So we're going to deepen our kind

of exploration of prayer, of refuge, because when it's not mechanics, we're not, we can't, when it's conscious. It enables a shift from a sense of separation to unity. It's a skillful way of moving from perceived duality, reaching out and then discovering that what we're reaching out to was and always is what we are. It was just forgotten. So many different times in ways that we can sense the power of this. For myself, before I talk, any time I'm sitting here before I talk, there are some moments where in some way I reflect, please, may this be of benefit, may this serve our awakening. And it's not, there may be some insecurity in me, some

sense of separateness, and it's coming from a very sincere place, but to the degree there's any sense of a me that's supposed to be doing something, that prayer dissolves that sense of a self that's trying to make something happen, and it creates more of a sense of just here we are. There's something in the sincerity or the humility of it that works in that way. And through my life. When I've had experiences that have really shaken the ground, whether it's been a betrayal of a teacher, that was a really big one for me, or feelings of rejection and a relationship, addiction to food, really getting caught as I've written about in radical acceptance, a lot of self-aversion, a lot of the trance of unworthiness. And then the most recent, very, very clear one to me,

was the grief and the fear around getting sick about 10 years ago. And that was actually what gave rise to me writing True Refuge, which is about taking refuge in prayer in many ways. Each of those times, I found this taking refuge is this incredible pathway to homecoming. And again, I want to say it's not different from what we've been doing. When we have the wing of what is happening here, the beginning of taking refuge is recognizing what's going on. And when we have the wing of bringing kindness or love, refuge is reaching out to that kindness

and love, connecting with it. So if I had a define prayer, refuge, prayer is a practice of communing with or turning towards a larger sense of our beingness. John O'Donohue talks about prayers, the bridge between longing and belonging. I like that. Often it's a response to insecurity. Recently was introduced to a book by Rabbi Liu, and I want to read you the title. The title is, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared.

So his book is a journey of transformation. It's the days of awe, the time period between right. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And the essential message is that we're not often aware of it, but we live with this insecurity, this ego cell can't actually prepare meaningfully for what's around the corner. We just can't. We keep trying. We really want to be prepared.

But something in us knows we really can't do it for the big things. we still try, we're always trying to be ready. Have you noticed how much we try to prepare ourselves? Yeah, okay, not alone. But the big ones, you know, the loss of loved ones, the loss of our bodies, stuff that really shakes the grounds of our being, they reveal we have a very tenuous connection to life and it brings up all the unease and the restlessness, the duca. that Trudy talked about so beautifully last night, that existential unease, as long as we feel

we're separate, we're going to have it. And we know in that ego sense of knowing that we can't really be ready. This is real and you are completely unprepared. What a message. So more than half Americans say they pray daily. Another study, 85% in the last study, week. And I find it useful to think of prayers in evolving capacity, just as where consciousness is evolving, our prayer can become deeper and stronger, more powerful as we practice. In the early stages, you might think of it that every one of us is praying. I mean, every one of us is seeking comfort, safety, love, connection. William James says that the beginning of every religion is the word help. I read a story about a father trying to comfort his son. It was during a

thunderstorm, and he'd go into the son's room. The child would be very upset, and he would tell him, you know, don't be scared. God is with you. And the third time he went in, before he could say anything, the kid said, look, I know God's with me, but I really want someone with skin on. I loved it. So in the early stages of prayer, it's not as mature, and often it's what I've often called false refuge, is that we fixate our prayer on something that we think will give us temporary ease or relief or comfort or help us in some way, but it doesn't really satisfy our deep longing. So it might be that we're looking for a parking spot or we're trying to win the lottery or praying our dog doesn't vomit or whatever it is.

There's one story of a lady going to her priest, and she says, Father, I have a problem. I have two female parrots. They only know how to say one thing. So what do they say? Woman blushes, and then she explains, well, they say, hi, we're prostitutes. Do you want to have some fun?

And the priest goes, oh, that's obscene. But anyway, after a few minutes of deliberations, he comes up with a really brilliant idea. He says, you know, I have two male parrot. very devout birds. I've taught them to pray and read the Bible. Well, how about you bring your female parrots to my house and we'll have them in the cage with Francis and Job?

My parrots can teach your parrots how to praise and worship and speak in more appropriate manner. Thank you, the woman responds. This may well be the solution. Next day, she brings her two female parrots to the priest's house. As the afters her in, she sees his two male parrots and they're holding rosary beads and their praying. She's impressed. She walks over and places her parrots in with them. After a few minutes, the female

birds crowd in unison. Hi, we're prostitutes. Do you want to have some fun? There's a stunned silence, and finally one male parrot looks at the other one and exclaims, put the beads away, Francis, our prayers have been answered. So there's all levels of prayer and then more narrowly fixated ones. There's ones that are abstract. You know, the Unitarians are said to say, to address their prayers to whom it may concern. And then there's the ones that are, you know, just come out, they're kind of rote, and we learn them very, very early, and we're not even sure what they mean. Somebody else described a three-year-old praying, and here's how his prayer went. Our father, who does art in heaven, Harold is his name, amen.

I thought that was as good as description as any. Our father who does art in heaven. I thought it was so good. So there's also a real shadow side to prayer whereby it becomes, you know, out of our fear and our wants, it becomes a way to leave what's going on here and look towards something that's outside and distant. I remember John O'Donoghue saying that if you fill your longing with external and distant things,

you'll never come home to the truth of your belonging. It's also used, misused by those in power, the dominant culture used to fixate attention on getting something that won't really serve. And the example I'd like to give you is from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who writes this. He says there's a story fairly well known about when the mission. came to Africa. They had the Bible and we the natives had the land. They said, let us pray and we dutifully shut our eyes. When we opened them, why they now had the land and we had the Bible. You understand. It's used to manipulate. So let's take a look at how conscious prayer, how conscious aspiration, consciously taking refuge really works. And,

Again, John O'Donohue. And by the way, I bring him in a lot if you are drawn to his work. He's one of, to me, is one of the best voices out there in terms of the power and beauty of prayer. In this particular quote, he says, 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. I love this description. It really resonates for me.

I think the image I get is of a tree and that when our roots go deep into really what's here and what's really happening in us, the wanting, the craving and underneath that, the longing, then we can reach out with a fullness towards the light, towards the warmth, for a tree towards the wetness, towards the air. And a tree is in continual communication with a larger belonging. And like a tree, these forms of ours, you know, if we get past the illusion of being separate, are in continual communication with the full web of life and beyond that with a formless presence and awareness that's here.

So prayer uncovers that. and how it does it. We go inward, inward, inward. It's as if you sense the waves, we're going into the waves and feeling into them and into them, as we've been doing with the wing of investigating. And then there's an expressing that comes from that, a natural expressing of what we long for

to connect us with the ocean. It's like the waves we're touching into and we're then reaching out to sense the ocean. And you can think of it in terms of your brain that we're actually through prayer, we're feeling into what our limbic system is expressing. We're feeling the anger and the fear and the hurt and the craving and the wanting. And yet we're reaching towards what is really the capacity through the frontal cortex of a bigger vision and compassion and empathy.

We're reconnecting. You remember the flip lid. When we're caught in a separate self, we're disconnected from the larger, spacious, awake love of our being. So prayer is a way of connecting both in our biophysiological cell, creating communication and connecting, and in a more energetic way also. Here we have Rumi who says, in times of sudden days. danger. Most people call out, oh my God, would they keep doing this if it didn't help? Only a fool keeps going back where nothing happens. The whole world lives within a safeguarding.

Fish inside waves, birds held in the sky. All exist are held in the divine. Nothing is ever alone for a single moment. All giving comes from there, no matter who you think you put your open hand out toward, it's that which gives. All giving comes from there. No matter who you think you put your open hand out toward, it's that which gives. So it takes practice to evolve prayer. And the practice, as I mentioned, is this practice of being able to touch into what's actually happening right here so we can get to the aliveness of our longing. D.H. Lauren says it's that we can't just get, man can't just get what he thinks he wants. He has to get what he really wants, what the true self wants, and it takes some digging. We have to go down and down and in and in to sense

that longing, and then we reach out to that which gives, to our true belonging. We have to do it again and again. The Buddha touched the ground. We have to touch the ground over and over to start getting familiar with that pathway to loving presence. Over and over. The poet Hafeis puts it this way. He says, ask the friend for love. Ask him again.

For I've learned that every heart will get what it prays foremost. How many of you in your own experience have felt the power of prayer? Can I see by hands? prayers the voice of longing that reaches outward and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging so we practice touching the ground and I want to give some examples of illustrations of how we can unfold our practice maybe give you some places you want to experiment with we begin with the inward and inward tracing inward and I mentioned it this morning, tracing back desire.

So when something comes up, let's say we have a fixated desire on this person or having this experience or this happening in our lives. How do we, like those tree roots, go down and down and down? And by example, a man I worked with some years back, his pattern was a very strong craving for intimacy and then a way of sabotaging. intimacy over and over and over again, and he was deeply lonely. And so he would, you know, in between partners, he would then fixate again on having a partner. And he was very good at the initial

steps of connecting and having the kind of the excitement and infatuation and kind of attraction and so on. And then he'd get very, very engaged with it and really wanting things to work. but as he'd start getting closer with his potential new partner, he'd find something wrong with her. He just sorted for what was missing and just wasn't perfect. And then he'd very quickly shut down. And so he developed the sense of his own way of operating as judgmental and defended and rigid and perfectionistic.

This was his self-sense and he kept playing it out. So we began to, with prayer, you always start right where you are. And so where he was was this fear that he wasn't going to get what he wanted. If he went ahead and hung out with somebody who didn't fit the perfect description of his mate, his ideal mate, then he might not get what he wants and then, you know, be a real waste. So he had that fear that he wasn't going to get what he wanted. So we started investing in, what is it that you're really wanting?

He goes, I want a companion that's really right. Okay? Well, if you had a companion that's really right, what would you get to feel? Well, then I'd get to feel belonging. Like there was no edges like we really, really fit. And that would be like a communion, like a complete, like there would be a sense of being one with everything. Like everything would dissolve that made me feel separate and I'd feel one with everything. This is tracing back, tracing back.

Then I asked the most important question, well, what would that? that actually be like that experience? This is something if you want to have those tree roots go down and down, you do that, you turn. Instead of fixating on the partner, you come back, well, what am I really wanting? What would it really feel like? What is the thing I'm really wanting to experience? And for him, warmth, fluidity, aliveness, fully aliveness, light-filled, we're the universe. And I said, okay, you're saying, can you sense it? He goes, yeah. And I said, well, sense it more. like really let go into that. Let it be there. He's feeling this warmth and fluidity. And in those moments, as you can imagine, there's no longing because he's inhabited his

longing. And when you inhabit your longing, there's belonging. You belong. Tracing back the desire, tracing back belonging. So I encouraged him to take a break on the dating for just enough time to kind of give a little interrupt the patterning and practice, in a way he's practicing putting his hand on the ground, you know, saying, okay, this longing, I just really, really want to feel this, and then tracing it back, until he started getting more familiar with what was always and already here. And it did not mean he did not still really want a relationship. It just meant there was a, more of him resting in the loving awareness that was already inherently what he was, and

so that that longing could be expressed in a way that didn't have the grasping so much. He wasn't as identified with the longing. Does that make sense? Okay. About two years later he had his first really intimate relationship and he hit the same patterning of starting to judge and feeling himself pull back. But this time, he was able to be with the pulling back, feel like, oh, I want it to be perfect, here's what I'm wanting, here's what I'm wanting,

trace back the desire, re-rest in what was already there. It gave him more space to let the judging come and go and say real but not true. It gave him more space to let the feelings of anxiety about, well, if this isn't right, I'm going down the wrong track, I'll never have what I really, want, just a little more room for them to come and go and keep paying attention to who she really was. Tracing back. That's one of the pieces I just wanted to leave you with that we do this U-turn and take

from our fixation of what's out there and trace back to the very source of the longing. We find that the longing is really the voice of loving awareness calling us home. That's what we find. The second part of John O'Donohue's description of prayers going down and down, and then we reach out towards what we're longing for, the kind of expressing. It's where you have that felt sense of longing and you go ahead and express it. Rumi says, cry out. Don't be stolid and silent with your pain.

Lament. And let the milk of loving flow into you. So, what are ways that we can explore this pathway? Again, we're still kind of on the end of rain, the wing of love, that we, how do we connect, how do we reach out? And one way is by literally speaking it, whispering it, mentally whispering it, you might have had that experience that when you put something and you communicate it, it brings it alive in you.

If you're with somebody and you feel that you love them, that's a lot of you. That's one thing, but when you look at them and say, I love you, all of a sudden all that love becomes completely right energetically there. You access it. I know for myself I was thinking of my mom the other day and just feeling her presence and feeling kind of that longing to really commune. And it was there and it was kind of amorphous but tender. And then some part of me said, you know, kind of in this prayerful way, I started speaking

to her and say, I just, I love you and I wish I could just feel you completely here. And in those moments, there was the sobbing and then behind the sobbing the sense of her presence. When we communicate, we connect. Communicating, connecting. part of refuge or prayer, taking refuge, you know, sensing the words, sensing the urge, communicating it, saying it out loud, can be the hand posture of bringing these palms together. Different people have different experiences of it. I'll just interrupt my flow by saying I saw

a cartoon right before I came to insects talking and they are one saying, I don't know why everyone calls me a praying mantis. Actually, I'm agnostic. So prayer pose. That's really not to illustrate anything at all to you. Just threw it in. When I am on my knees or when I have my palms together and I'm behind my altar at home or when I'm in nature or by the river and something in me, the Zen called Gosho, the kind of prayer lowering my head. I'm at my most sincere. There's something that it's humble, but not like there's something bad here and something wonderful up there.

It's more just this recognition that this, what normally is occupied as self isn't what it is. It's really this honoring of the beauty and the truth of a larger sense of being. again from John O'Donohue, my prayer guru. He says one of the most tender images is the human person at prayer. When the body gathers itself before the divine, a stillness deepens. The blaring din of distraction seizes, and the deeper tranquility within the heart envelops the body. To see people at prayer is a touching sight.

For a while they've become a moored, unmoored from the grip of society, work, and role. It is as if they have chosen to enter into a secret belonging carried within the soul. They rest in that inner temple impervious to outer control or claiming. So to share an example of taking refuge, both the kind of going inward and the calling outward, I thought I'd describe a pattern that I've been stuck in many rounds over the years. And the pattern is getting caught in always having the next thing to prepare for and feeling anxious about it.

And behind that anxiety is a belief that, well, if I don't prepare a lot, I won't do as well, and then I will lose respect and lose love. So there's this egoic thing of I have to work real hard in order to be ready. in order not to fail, et cetera. So it causes dukkha, it causes suffering, because all those moments, it's like the dinosaur story, all those moments, that whole swath of moments of preparing them inside a kind of separate anxious self that's doing something in order to avoid failure and loss of love. And I'm missing out in those moments really being able to take in the,

the beauty of what's here. I'll take for granted my relationships, take Jonathan for granted, I won't taste food as much, I'll be on my way somewhere else and not here. And so then what happens is when I slow down, all of a sudden there's a real deep upwelling of grief for lost life. Can anybody else relate to that? Okay, that was a little bit of self-therapy there. So I've noticed this pattern for, you know, 20, 25 years. It's not something that is a new kind of pattern. And then over the last, you know, decades, you know, I've done a lot with, you know, recognizing when it comes up

and bring a lot of compassion and forgiveness to the anxious, preparing place. But a shift happened in the pattern, and that's what I want to tell you about, which is I remember one retreat where I was, I had touched into fear many rounds. I had sensed the anxiety of not enough and the anxiety if something's going to go wrong. And round after round, the wings of just noticing and allowing and then deepening it with kind of investigating, touching in, offering compassion. And I remember I got home and I got home to, as I often do, a really busy phase. And the speed at

which, because when I first got home, I was very open, you know, very present and tender. And the speed at which I went, whoop, and I became, you know, the type A yogi, do-all, and just kind of like skimming the surface, it was so quick, so sudden that it plunged me into the sense of, wow, this kind of real grieving for my life, like how after a retreat could I so quickly go back into that pattern? And I remember in my mind I was just saying, you know, I can't change this. I can't change this.

And then with that there was this waking up like, of course. Of course I can't change this. It was the ego running into a wall. And in that stuckness, there was this kind of humility of prayerfulness, that it's beyond this ego, what really can be my refuge. And that, you know, I've been praying, as I mentioned, for many years in different situations, but I started learning in a deeper way how to feel into the depth of that grieving place

that yearns to live in love fully, and from that place the prayer emanates forth, You know, to please love me, please be with me. You know, please love me, please be with me, please help me, help me, help me, help me. And to the degree that I've touched into the poignancy of the longing, to that degree, there's an openness to receive. And the experience is receiving as if light and warmth, as if I'm being kissed by the beloved. And it seems at first to be bathing me from, in front. front like this, but then I find that it's also from behind and it's also from interior.

It's the continuous loving presence that everything is floating in right here though, not some abstraction right here. And then as different experiences come up that are painful, the senses, the streams of anxiety, each one there's a sense of taking them like in two hands and offering them into that vastness. So it's not just receiving love, but it's also offering or surrendering what seems difficult into something larger, which is another direction of reconnecting. Rilke says, I yearn to belong to something, to be contained in an all-embracing mind that sees me as a single thing. I yearn to be here.

held in the great hands of your heart. Oh, let them take me now. And to them I place these fragments my life and you, God, spend them however you want. In the same way that the Buddha realized the limits of the Sagoic self and called on something larger, there are many pathways for us to explore in this reconnecting, in this reconnecting. In this remembering of the loving presence. It's always here but forgotten. When we're in trance and it becomes really obvious, we can touch the ground by going in and in and in and really sensing inside that longing what we're really yearning for and discovering it's already here. And we can go in and in and feel the intensity of that yearning to be loved and pray for,

whisper, express, communicate, and open our soul. ourselves, listen and take in. And we can feel the pain that's here and we can literally just hand it over, hand it over. The self can't fix the self, but there is some wisdom in us. It's really love calling us home that reminds us to reach out. Here's Clarissa Estes. This is called a prayer. Refuse to fall down. and if you cannot refuse to fall down, refuse to stay down. If you cannot refuse to stay down, lift your heart toward heaven. Like a hungry beggar, ask that it be filled.

You may be pushed down, you may be kept from rising, but no one can keep you from lifting your heart toward heaven, only you. It is in the middle of misery that so much becomes clear. The one who says nothing good came of this is not yet listening. There's a reason that in the Buddhist tradition, and I found this in all different spiritual traditions, there are classic arctippal refuges. And one of the classic arctypid privileges is the awareness that's right here, the loving awareness that's our own Buddha nature.

Refuge in the Buddha, refuge in awareness. The other refuges that are absolutely interrelated are refuge in the truth of the moment, down and down and down, right into what's here. Refuge in truth, the Dharma. Another refuge is refuge in loving relatedness with each other, the very real truth of our belonging with each other. In tonight's talk, we've really explored refuge in loving awareness, but they're all completely interrelated.

And the more we wake up, the more are our, our loving and our prayer naturally includes each other. One friend describes her mother did loving prayers for others and she took an hour each day and she'd include everyone in her circle. There were 100 people that she would offer blessings to. This is her rituals, Catholic.

And she described her dying as so peaceful she could feel all the beings around her holding her. Now the bodhisatt of prayer as we wake up, this awakening heart, mind, says whatever is occurring, may this serve the awakening of this heart and mind. So there's a sense that whatever's going on in our life, the deepest prayer is that may it serve this awakening and may this awakening ripple out to touch the lives of all beings. This evolving prayer takes so many forms. Associated Press reported a donation to earthquake relief fund for the people of Haiti. This was 2010. And in one of the donations, what spilled out of

the envelope was $14.64, crumpled bills and coins from the pockets of folks right here from a Baltimore homeless shelter with a prayer and a message. It said, we're worried about our homeless brothers and sisters in Haiti. The Bodhisattva's prayer, sensing, belonging, and praying and offering into that. And then there's that maturing prayer that is perceiving the beauty and the goodness of this web that we belong to. And the prayer is really not petitioned as much as gratitude. And you know the feeling of it.

When you feel grateful and something in you expresses it, acknowledges it, communicates it, you become one with that goodness. It just carries you into that oneness. Meister Eckert said, if the only prayer you ever say in your life was thank you, it would be enough. Thank you. So we began really with the suffering of the trance. It's really a suffering of disconnection of separateness. The story of the dinosaur, that, you know, this forgetting who we are.

and this yearning that we each have to live from the truth, the wholeness of our being. And we're each finding our ways of remembering. I sometimes think of this kind of metaphor of the Gulf Stream, and it's said that if there's a straw in the Gulf Stream and it's misaligned, it gets twirled around, and it just has this really awkward movement pattern. But once that straw gets aligned, it flows. with the Gulf Stream becomes part of it. And so it is with us that when we reach down and down and down, we touch the ground, when we open out in prayer, we start being aligned.

The love of this universe and the wisdom of this universe can flow through us. So I'd like to close. We'll just do a little bit of prayerful practice right now together, taking a few moments to set yourself in a way that feels comfortable and alert. Prayer always begins, conscious prayer begins right where we are. So an honest connecting, that wing of recognizing what's happening right here, the state of your heart, this moment. To go in and in to sense the state of your heart and listen in deeply, trace back some and sense this heart could express itself what it is that you really long for, what matters.

Sometimes the pathway in where we're starting is a sense of something missing or something wrong, a sadness, a blockness, sometimes it's a desire, or sometimes we go right into that deeper longing. Just stay right where you are and listen in more and sense so what is it that this experience really is and what is it wanting. What's the longing right now? What's your prayer for your life right in this moment? If you could sense into what it is you're really wanting, what would that experience be like? And only if you feel like it, you might bring your hands into prayer, position. Again, just experiment and sense that the most sincere place in you, the depth of you, is communicating, whispering, belonging. You might hear the words in your

mind, maybe please love me or please help me awaken. May this heart and mind awaken, noticing how as you go in and into the most sincere place there's a natural reaching out that connects, that connects with love, that connects with presence. Ask the friend for love. Ask them again, for I have found that every heart will get what it prays for most. Namaste, truly namaste, to each of you. And thank you for your very beautiful presence. Thank you.

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