Tara Brach - Dissolving Trance with RAIN (2017-01-11)

Episode Date: January 14, 2017

Dissolving Trance with RAIN (2017-01-11) - One of the pervasive expressions of trance is identifying with a limited and separate sense of self.  This talk contrasts the self-trance to our intrinsically open, awake and loving awareness. We then explore how the mindfulness and self-compassion in the RAIN practice can directly dissolve trance and reconnect us to our true nature. Free download of Tara's 10 min meditation: "Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease" when you join her email list.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. This class is going to be looking at trance and waking up from trance and we're going to focus particularly on how the practice of rain weaves mindfulness and self-compassion in a way that can really free us. And in particular, free us from those stories that keep us feeling that we're small, that we're separate, that we're not okay.

It's a primary version of suffering in our culture and elsewhere. And I thought I'd begin with something that really grabbed my attention some years ago. This was a high school student's application to college. I'm just going to read you parts of it. It's an essay that a student wrote in response to that question, tell us about anything significant in your life. Here goes. He says, how can I describe myself? I can tread water for three days in a row. I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing. I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook 30-minute

brownies in 20 minutes. I'm an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru. I one single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon from a horde of ferocious ants. I played bluegrass cello and was scouted by the Mets. When I'm bored, I build large suspension bridges in my backyard and I enjoy urban hand-gliding. On Wednesdays after school, I repair electric appliances free of charge. I'm an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy, evening wear. I don't perspire. I bat 400 children trust me. I've won bullfights in San Juan, cliff diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I've played Hamlet. I've performed open heart surgery and I've

spoken with Elvis. But I've not yet gone to college. Please consider accepting me. So that's the sort of culture that we're in that really we're supposed to be special, right? And I think it's really interesting that it's always in the background, that there's these standards we're supposed to measure up to really matter. And they're all externals in some form or other that make us worthy, our valuable. That our value, our worth is hitched to certain kinds of successes, the ways that we look, we know it's hitched to certain kind of intelligences, you know, not necessarily it's just one kind of intelligence. It's usually what's called left-brain intelligence,

when many have different kinds. It's hitched to often athleticism, you know, it's hitched to power, to influence. There's a hierarchy of how valuable we are that often has inferior in terms of race. What race are we from? Are certain religions? It permeates our culture

that our value is hitched, to these externals. And what we do is we move through comparing ourselves, constantly comparing ourselves to each other and to others, constantly. I read one woman who wrote that she said I was walking down the streets of Manhattan, I realized for the last 15 minutes I'd been comparing my body to every other woman's body that I saw. And then she said, 15 minutes? Did I say that? No, 15 years. But that's the way. our psyche works and the core of our suffering is this trance that we're believing in the self that we have a story wrapped around, that the self that is compared to others and is either

inflated like, oh we're making it, we're special, we're important and we're in that a lot in some way feeling really special and important are deflated and feeling really deficient and we're in that a lot and we often swing. So the point is that we're caught in a narrow version of our being that isn't the truth and that's the suffering. I'll read you a quote from Pema Chodron that I think captures it in a powerful way. Being preoccupied with our self-image is like being deaf and blind. It's like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with the black hood over our

heads. It's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs. Do you understand? It's like when we're fixating our attention on moi and on comparing and how do we fit a standard, are we doing okay, how much of this universe is being blocked out. It's described by Thomas Merton that this secret beauty of who we really are, our intrinsic value, and when we're occupied with are we good enough and when we're feeling less than or better than that secret beauty is cut off. We don't have access to it. We don't trust. We don't trust who we are. So what happens is instead we move through and sometimes there's it's just a light background of never enough and that's for many people. It's just this

chronic in some way we could have done it better or should have done it better. It's like that cartoon with the dog and the psychiatrist and the dog saying, you know, it's always good dog this and good dog that, but is it ever a great dog? You know, it's like that. So sometimes it's that background of just not enough, but often it takes over and then we're completely possessed. It's like that is the lens for our whole life of something's wrong. You know, I just came back from a retreat that I led and then we also had a retreat in the fall

and for so many the core suffering was that sense of fundamentally not okay. And then it would hitch to certain circumstances of life. For instance, I'll give you a few examples. One woman felt this failure in mothering, this schism she had with her adult, daughter and it's just she couldn't forgive herself with the way she had mothered. It just was so big that sense of failure that defined her. Another young man was locked in feeling incomplete and undesirable as a partner and not having a mate, that was it.

Just fundamentally wrong, not okay. An older man had been worked for the government, passed over for promotion but a lifelong thing of not recognized, just kind of not really acknowledged on the workplace, falling short. And so much of it is so directly informed by our culture. I was talking to one woman, woman of color who works at a white-dominated advertising firm, very, very high up, I think is vice president or whatever. Doesn't matter the level of achievements. Constantly, is a sense of being on the outside. She can be treated deferentially but still marginalized on some level, not part of us.

It's deep. We go into a trance when it takes over, when our sense of who we are is shaped by the something's wrong feeling. We're in a trance. And there's several signs of trance that if we start catching, then we don't have to stay in it. In other words, if you catch a sign that you're in trance,

that's the beginning of not being in trance. So some of the signs are physical. I think the big signs of being entrancers that you'll notice that when you're in trance, your senses are not awake and you're not in your body. It's either that, just really disengage from the body, are completely possessed by a feeling in the body.

It takes over, like the anxiety is taking over, or the anger takes over. It swings, but there's not a mindful embodiment, okay? And then if you think of, well, what's the sign of trance in the mind? Well, lost in thought. Completely lost in thought. And the thoughts usually are, as I mentioned, comparing, judging thoughts, myself and judging others, are thoughts that are in some ways reactive, that are, you know,

like just obsessively trying to figure things out. And then behaviorally, the sign of trance. It's when that sense of have to have that we're kind of chasing after something, we're chasing after food or we're chasing after some other form of a fix or we're chasing after approval. You kind of feel you're on your way somewhere. It's that on your own. my way somewhere else, now is not what really matters. The other signs in terms of behavior is we're either chasing after something or we're push something away. It's like I don't like the way it is and we're either trying to numb ourselves in some

way or we're trying to figure something out to get away from something or we're going to sleep but there's some way of trying to push away the moment. If you watch most moments were either wanting something more and different or not wanting something, wanting something to go away. My favorite example, one I just think is kind of perfect, is a cartoon I saw actually years ago but I'll update it for you of this fortune teller and she's with a woman and the woman saying, I need your help, I need you to look into the crystal ball. My husband, there's just a block, he won't talk about his feelings.

So the fortune teller says, what else is new? But okay, I'll look. So she looks into her Christopher Ball and we're updating it now. She says, beginning 2017, men are going to begin to talk about their feelings. Within moments, women across the country, women across the whole world really, but within moments women will be sorry. So there's what we want and then getting what we don't want and so on. I've been describing this trance, the way I like it, it's visual that I think is really

useful as Joseph Campbell describes this big circle of awareness with a line going through it. And when we're in trance we're below the line. In other words, above the line is everything we're aware of, below the line is everything we're not aware of. So when we're in trance, we're below the line, we're just not aware of what's going on. You might be aware of your anxiety thoughts but you're not aware of your body or really you're just, you're not aware of what's going on really in your heart, what's under the anxiety thoughts. Or you might be aware of being completely caught up in anger but you're not aware of really

what you're believing behind that. There's stuff left out. So when we're in trance we're below the line and we're believing in a narrowing, we're narrow, limiting story that's not the truth. And so the Buddha basically said, this is the essence of suffering. When we're below the line, we're forgetting who we are. You know, we're forgetting the awareness and the love and the creativity and the fullness of our beingness.

One of the understandings of trance, if you think of it in terms of our evolutionary history, is that when we're in trance, we're kind of cut off from the parts of our brain and our mind that have perspective and mindfulness and compassion and are self-aware. And we're being driven by the limbic system when it's activated and afraid. That's kind of what's going on. We're being driven by fight, the part of us that's fighting, that's blaming, that's judging, or flight, the part of us that's withdrawing or freeze where we're just kind of stuck. And what's going on in those moments is, when we're below the line, we're trying to control

our experience. When you're above the line, there's a quality of presence that's allowing reality to be as it is. When we're below the line, we're trying to fix or do something about things. Years ago I went to a conference on trauma and this, what I'm about to share with you is not a commentary on using medication because I actually think that medication when wisely used can be a good thing and when not wisely used can be, I'm talking about psychoactive medications when not wise, it's not a good thing, but there was a poster at this conference. And the caption under there was, if there was Prozac back then, and it has a picture of Karl Marx saying, hmm, sure capitalism could work if we tweaked it a bit. My favorite one was

Edgar Allan Poe, who's looking out the window and saying, hello, Bertie. That was great. If there was prozac back then. So the contrast to trance or being below the line is sometimes we're what I call really our natural state, a quality of beingness. And it's when we remove the self-blinder. It's when we're really resting in awareness. And you wouldn't be here or listening right now if you hadn't touched presence. We're called to be above the line. It's part of our evolution to be more and more awake. So we've all touched presence. We sometimes skim right over it and don't really let ourselves settle there because we're not in the habit of going, oh, let's just rest in this. But we've touched it. You've probably touched it at births

when it's just like everything falls away and there's that, ah, right here, just this. And at deaths. Presence doesn't have to do with pleasant or unpleasant. Presence has to do with a quality of beingness, of awakeness, of openness. We touch it at death, we touch it when we're just aware of the mystery and beauty of nature, of the sunsets or the sky, the stars and the night sky. And we touch it if someone dear to us is hurting and we really start listening and taking in, oh wow, you really are suffering. There's presence.

It's there when we're not tied up in that story about self. When we're not fixating on are we good enough or how special we are. There's a little cartoon I saw about a guy who goes, talking to his bartender and it goes, I know there's no self but it's really all I can think about. And it really is true that our thoughts are are very habitually revolving around how am I, how am I doing? And if we're at the end of our life looking back, the moments that will most cherish are the ones when we weren't caught inside that trance but rather we were there for our life. So the question is how do

we find our way back to presence when we're stuck? And what I'd like to do is, I'd like to do is explore how the practice of rain, which I'll describe in a bit, really brings together these qualities of a mindful and a heartful presence, really the two facets of presence. I'd like to begin with a story that some of you might remember that I think captures the basic wings of presence in a beautiful way. And it's a story about a monk, a Buddhist monk, who lived in the north of India, who was known as a brother of mercy, and by that he was a healer, a very compassionate being, and he would bring this healing presence to people, real loving acceptance of them just as they were, and in his field of presence,

in the nurturing of his presence, there was a tremendous amount of awakening and freedom. But after a certain number of decades of serving in this way, he became really dispirited, He had kind of compassion fatigue, as they say. And he had heard about a very brilliant, spiritually deep nun who lived hundreds of miles away, who really had something, her very deep meditation practice, something a lot to teach him. So he decided to go into pilgrimage and really learned from her. And he did that. He went through several days and nights of walking and staying at two.

different temples. At one temple he ran into a woman who was a Buddhist nun and she said that she knew of this person and he tells her his story how he'd spent all these years offering compassion but really felt kind of he felt kind of empty from it. So she offers to guide him to the resident of this great meditator, this nun. And so they arrive at the edge of a bus. And so they arrive at the edge of a bustling village and they're warmly received and it turns out the old nun he had met was none other than this great meditating nun and she had been she had been out and about so he stayed with her and he learned from her and really it was very it was very mutual kind of thing they learned from each other and as it turns out many years later as she lay dying because her

practice just to backtrack her practice her wisdom practice had been one of deep inquiry right into the truth of things. And so whereas he had been kind of this offering compassion, this field of compassion, she was like, what is true? She brought people right to the core of truth. So many years later she lays dying and beckons him to her side and she said there's something I never told you. On that day we met I too had lost heart.

I was headed north seeking a great healer I had heard about. Okay. She smiled, squeezed his hand and peacefully passed away. To me, there's something really, really important about this story. And that is that very often people say, well, this is the true path. And, you know, it's really about this cutting through Cohen that can cut through to the truth. This is the true path. It's all about love.

And yes and yes. and all paths, you know, really it's who we are and what really matches us, but there are two wings of awareness that really move through all traditions. And one wing is this capacity to hold with our heart totally lovingly what's going on. And the other wing is to see clearly the truth of what's going on. And like two wings of a bird, they're entirely interdependent. You can't really see through to the truth of what's right here inside you if you're not holding the space of inquiry with profound acceptance and tenderness.

Okay? And you can't open your heart to life in a real way if you're not seeing clearly the life that's here. We need the two wings. So as we look at rain, what we see is that rain intrinsically, this acronym that we're going to be looking at has the two wings of awareness built into it. And rain, for those that aren't familiar, is recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. Okay, so think of the two wings, recognize as seeing the truth of what's going on in the moment, and allow is that space of heart that let's be.

and then we deepen that presence. It's like two pairs. With the eye, investigate, go deeper into seeing that truth. A deeper clarity about what's true. Investigate and nurture and engage love. Each pair is essential. We start with recognize and allow. We're going to break these up into two pieces

and then we're going to practice the full practice of rain together. tonight. And the way you might think of recognize and allow is that you're noticing right what's there in the moment. Just whatever, when you're in a challenging tangle, you're going, oh, okay, anger. Or, oh, okay, I'm caught in fear. You're naming it in some way to yourself. And you're letting it be there. Just letting it be there. You're not trying to fix it. You're not judging it. you're not pushing it away, you're just letting it be there. That's Recognize and Allow. And an example of Recognize and Allow that really touched me,

and this is from years back, those of you that have read Radical Acceptance might remember it, was of a man who had Alzheimer's and came to a retreat with me. And he was also a psychologist, and he was, he needed his wife to help him find the different meditation rooms and to go to the meals and so on. But when we had our meeting, he was very upbeat and I asked him, you know, what allowed him to be so upbeat? And he said, well, you know, it's like the leaves falling from the tree and fall. It's not something bad that's happening.

It can be scary and hard, but it's okay. Then he told me a story, and this is where you're going to see the recognizing the allow. He said that he was early on, early in the onset of Alzheimer's, he was given a talk and he had been invited to address maybe 100 people. So he got there and right before he began it was like he completely blanked out. So he had no idea why he was there, why he had been invited, what he was supposed to do. So, okay, so that was the moment. So what did he do? Well he paused and then he put his palms together and he just named what he was aware of.

Okay? Embarrassed and then he kind of bowed, afraid, bowed, heart pounding, heart pounding, bowed, confused, bowed. This went on for a bit and then he started to calm me down so relaxing, you know. And when he looked out some of the people there had tears in their eyes and one person said, you know nobody's ever taught us the teachings this way. And what did he done? Well first he didn't do anything.

The beginning of changing any pattern is to pause. And that was what he did, he paused. And then he began to name, to recognize just what was happening and the bow was his way of allowing, just letting it be there. Recognize and allow. And really there's a sense that that awareness, that presence of just recognizing allowing, of untangled things for him. I think of it sometimes as a kind of yes meditation where you're just noticing reality and agreeing to reality. You're saying yes to the reality of the moment.

You might just for a moment close your eyes, we'll just experiment a little. You can practice the first two steps of rain with anything that's right here. So you might think of a situation today, yesterday that was stressful. Imagine you could just put yourself in that situation right at the point when you're feeling things are most intense in some way and freeze the frame. Just let yourself remember what the different aspects of the stress were. What was maybe something somebody said that was critical

or maybe you were late for something, maybe you had made a mistake, maybe you said something that you felt embarrassed about. Just pause, just as this man did, just stop, pause. And you just might mentally whisper, what is it that you're aware of is going on inside you? An embarrassment or anxiety, anger, blame, self-blame. just mentally whisper it. There's a power to naming things. Recognizing is served by mental notation, naming. And then after you name it, just allow it to be there. You might imagine bowing or I like to mentally whisper yes sometimes. It doesn't mean yes I love this, it means yes,

this is the reality of the moment. It's an intelligent acknowledgement. and giving space to what's here. Noticing whatever's going on inside you right now. Recognizing is just to contact the experience, the physical sensations or the mood, and say yes to it. Notice what happens when you say yes to what's going on inside you. Just a gentle, soft yes, the energy of yes.

See, if you deepen the yes right now, whatever you're experiencing, this contacting it and completely allowing, with a very gentle heart, completely allowing what's here. And just listening to this verse by the poet Kaviri called Flurries, this flurry of snow thoughts inside my mind globe is continuous. No room for sunlight, warmth, peace. I'm stuck inside a pattern I can't control unless I see the woman trapped inside

and the one holding the globe the choice to shake it up again or cradle the scene in her hands till all the cold flakes have settled and quiet serenity abounds. Okay, so opening your eyes. So these are the first two steps of rain, recognize and allow. This is the nun recognizing with that clarity what's happening

and the monk allowing with heart. Those two qualities, the two wings. Now if there's a real tangle, you might have brought up something in your mind that was really a tough one. Some more than just a little stress from the last few days and you'll find you'll recognize and allow but there's still a lot going on, agitation and so on, that's when you need to move on to the next two steps which are deepening the recognizing and allowing, where you recognized and allowed and now you deepen it with investigate what really is going on and nurture. So to understand, investigate, we inquire. It's usually through questions we start asking ourselves that there's a quality of interest

that we're bringing to our inner life to find out what's going on, what's really going on here? What am I believing? What am I feeling? What's really here? And then nurture, there are many ways of nurturing, but often, and I put my hand on my heart a lot, it's directly bringing kindness,

your own kindness or the imagined kindness from others right to the place of woundedness. So I'm going to give you an example of these two how we deepen the recognize and allow with investigative nurture and then we're going to be practicing it together the whole four steps of rain. The example I thought I'd give you is

of a minister I met with some years ago who was really caught, had a kind of impasse in his marriage and his wife was really dissatisfied and kind of harkens back to him and won't talk about their feelings because she wanted him to be more intimate and more vulnerable and not so spiritually detached. And she wanted him to be able to say, I love you and look into her eyes. That was what she wanted. She wanted even more than that for him to take her dancing. Okay. He was blocked, he was stuck and defended and it was really brought up

anxiety and anger to feel any request from her like that. So we were kind of working together on it and under that block, you know, as he would recognize and allow his feelings and he got in touch with a deep sense of aversion and shame. So he recognized it, allow it, feel it fully. You know, he really felt the disgust in himself. You know, how come he could comfort and guide other people, you know, in his congregation but he couldn't be really close with people. It really started hitting him.

He has a harsh inner critic saying, you know, be a better person you don't deserve. So he was always managing himself. He couldn't embody his preaching. So he felt a lot of shame. So recognize, just to recognize that shame, recognize aversion, and let it be there, allow. Now, that's very hard.

But allow just means pause. Don't try to do anything with it because we're going to go deeper here. investigate. When I asked him to feel it, to feel what is feeling, it was this empty hollow area. It had a sinking feeling, an ache in his heart and his belly. And the belief that went with it is I'm a total imposter. Defective. Okay, that was the belief because I asked the question, well, what are you believing when you're feeling this? I'm just a total imposter. It was a deep imposter syndrome. Then I asked a question that I really recommend to you, which is right to that

wounded place, the place that feels completely like an imposter, empty, ashamed, and so on, what is this place most need? That was the question. And for him, it was a real deep sense of forgiveness and love, the sense that he was trying. And that he was trying. And that he was, and recognizing it and that he couldn't help it. It's a real forgiveness, so he wouldn't be blaming himself for being bad. And so he, you know, when he recognized that, I said, then we got to nourish. That was investigate, nourish. So I invited him to, you know, try to offer that forgiveness and he said, I can't forgive myself.

It feels like I'm just too bad. So I said, well, what could forgive you? And he said, I just need to feel God's love. love. And so for him, this is this very kind of formless sense of a loving presence that he imagined pouring in love and forgiveness through his hands into his heart and into his belly saying, it's okay, just surrender your love, you're held, it's not your fault. That kind of message. He had to go through many, many rounds of this. At that time when he first did it, he felt really washed through, like this new possibility opened up. I asked him, you know, what would

it be like? What would your life be like if you no longer believed you were an imposter? If you didn't believe something was wrong? And he felt like this just, this boundless creativity would become possible. He felt like he could dance. That's how he felt. But he wasn't there yet. He had to do many, many rounds of rain where he would feel his wife's request, he would feel that sense of shame and embarrassment and I can't do it. He'd have to investigate to that empty hollow place that felt unforgivable. He'd have to call on God's love and that forgiveness to come through him. And after many rounds, he started feeling this loosening up and he said that after 26 years of marriage for the first time he felt like they were feeling each other's hearts.

and some months later he emailed me and he said, we're signed up for classes and swing dancing. So let me read you a poem and then we're going to practice. This is Rumi. 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 need to devour.

The invitation is to begin recognizing the signs of wormness of trance, you know, that we're caught in trying to eat more, get more, push away control. And there's a grace when we begin to deepen attention. with mindfulness and self-compassion. And the grace as we come above the line, we start inhabiting that wholeness and love that's really our nature. So let's practice together.

We'll take, this will be about 10 minutes to practice the rain meditation. Find yourself a way of sitting so you're comfortable, let your eyes close. You may take a few full breaths, inhaling deeply, filling the chest and lungs, and then a slow out breath, relaxing, releasing and letting go with the out breath.

You might scan your life right now and sense a situation where there's a recurrent kind of reactivity that comes up, maybe with another person, where you feel that you go unconscious some where you no longer have access to your inner resources. It might be that you go into blaming or defensiveness, hurt, where you pull back or lash out. I wouldn't pick a situation that feels that it's got a current of trauma in it that won't serve you. But something where you feel your emotions get triggered, you get some sense of strong emotion, maybe anxiety, fear, guilt. And you might imagine, as if you're watching it

in a movie, just letting the film roll till you get to the frame that most epitomizes when you're getting stuck. You don't feel like you have many choices, freezing, pausing right there. And sensing, we begin with recognize the art. of rain just to notice what's predominant. What is it you're most aware of in the moments of being stuck? Is it anger or hurt, judgment, embarrassment? We begin rain by just recognizing you might mentally whisper whatever you're most aware of.

And the A of rain, the A of rain, allow it. let it be there. The A of Rain is a kind of pause where you give space to what's here without trying to change it in any way. For some it might be helpful to mentally whisper, yes. You're agreeing to fully experience this with friendliness, with interest. That allows you to move into the eye of rain which is investigate. You begin to really sense so when I'm feeling this? Where do I feel it in my body? See if you can maybe even let your posture change to represent the posture that most expresses the feelings and it may be that your hands go into fists or just sense how your facial expression changes if you're really in touch with and

contacting the inner experience. It's very useful to let your body posture express it. Feel the place in your body where you most feel the sense of the fear, the anger, the hurt. You might ask yourself the question when this is going on, what am I believing about myself? Is it that others don't care or that I'm going to fail or that something terrible is going to go wrong? I'm not respected, I'm invisible. What am I believing? if you have a sense of the belief, notice the feelings that go with it in the body and how they might change or intensify when you're really believing the belief. So you can feel right into the place in you that's most vulnerable and ask that part of

you, what do you really need? How do you want me to be with you? What do you most need to experience? Is it love or forgiveness, understanding, safety? Just might ask that place, what is the message you most wish you could hear from a trusted other? What would be most reassuring, healing? And just listen.

Sense what this part of you most needs and as you're listening you might shift your posture little so you feel like you're really inhabiting a more full sense of your being right now. So you're listening really from your true self, from your wise heart. And you might put your hands on your human heart here and experiment with this right now, let the touch express a kind of tenderness because we're entering into nurture, the end of rain, listening to what's needed, you've investigated, listening to what's needed and now sensing how you want to respond, how this part wants you to be with it, what message you might offer yourself, letting your attention go inward

and through the touch and with a message offering the love care that this part of you most needs, however most resonates. your own sense of presence and care as you hold and communicate with this part of you. Let yourself really rest in and inhabit that heart space, that clarity that can be with this part of you. And sense as you rest in this natural presence, what your life would be like if you didn't believe that there was something wrong with you. If you didn't believe the limiting thoughts, what would your life be like? Who would you be? And just let go and rest in that awake and heart

space. 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 not. 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 need to devour. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.