Tara Brach - Divine Abodes: Joy

Episode Date: October 26, 2011

2011-10-26 - Divine Abodes: Joy - Joy is an innate capacity, an expression of unconditional presence with life. Yet for many, it is blocked by our conditioning to grasp after life and to defend against loss. This talk explores how we can develop the selfless presence that allows for joy, and nourish that joy so it blossoms in our life. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

For the last few weeks, we've been exploring what are called the Brahma Vaharas, and that's a word meaning the divine abodes. This is the places that our hearts and mind live when we're really awake. And so the first one of the divine abodes is loving kindness and the second compassion. And these are the two that we already explored. They arise when we're paying attention to the nature of reality. reality when we open ourselves to what is if we open ourselves up to goodness and beauty

then loving kindness naturally arises if we open ourselves up to suffering to pain and we're really open then compassion arises we feel a sense of our innate connectedness and and and a natural response of wanting to be helpful joy which is mudita is the word in Pali, this is the third of the Brahma Vaharas, arises when we're open to both the beauty and the suffering. So it's characterized, joy is characterized by two things. It's characterized by a full openness. Joy is very, very expensive.

It's very, very inclusive. It's that yes to life no matter what, you know. And joy is very embodied. It's experiencing that aliveness right here in this human body so that if we're mental we might have a really nice feeling, but it's not that fullness, that wholeheartedness of joy. So we're going to explore joy tonight. And Mudita, the word that means joy, it's sympathetic joy, is joy for this aliveness, joy for this awakening that's happening. and joy for the joy of others. It's this recognition that we're innately connected with each other.

So when we experience this aliveness of joy, it includes this incredible celebration when another is experiencing joy. I'd like to start with a quote that I love from Andre Geed. Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation. So powerful words. And just to say, it starts by saying it's rare. And when I talk to people about joy and just start, you know, inquiring, so what's your experience like?

How much do you experience happiness or the fullness of joy? most people when they're being honest say not so much it's just not so common and when joy arises it's short lived it's fleeting so rare

I think it's true and then he uses the word once you recognize the value recognize that it's actually this innate expression of who we are when we're fully open

it becomes a moral obligation. And so again, just what does that mean? A moral obligation. Well, when I reflect, it means that we recognize the potential and we're committed to exploring and opening to every facet of our being to really sense our capacity to celebrate. That we're committed to that.

But that's part of the adventure. So maybe a brief reflection, just to sense, well, where are we actually, where do we live with this? Ourselves right here. Those of you that are listening tonight, those I know so many are listening in through the podcast, let's just take a pause and reflect for a moment. And if it helps you to reflect, close your eyes, please do so. So this week, these last days, were there moments of joy? Did you have moments of what I've described as this openness that's including just the way life is,

yet very embodied? Were there moments of that sense of fullness where life felt like totally enough, just as it is, this moment? And if you connected with some of those moments, just sense what it was like, reenter a little. as we'll explore tonight, part of cultivating this capacity is to loiter a little when we have that sense of joy and let ourselves immerse a bit. And if you're sensing that you didn't feel much joy, just to honestly acknowledge that with some interest and some curiosity. When you're ready to open your eyes and come back, I'd like to begin, as you can imagine, with

exploring, well, how come so little? What is it in our conditioning and in our culture that makes it so rare? And we begin in a way with recognizing that in order to feel joy, we have to be present. We have to be going with the flow and opening to the flow and saying yes to the flow. And most of the time we're trying to manage the flow. I mean, if we look at our lives honestly, most of the time, we are trying to navigate and negotiate the twists and turns of our daily life. And our days are organized around our wants and fears. I want to get more comfortable. I want to achieve that.

I want to get there. I'm on my way there. I don't want this to happen. I don't want that person to take me like this. I don't, you know, we go through wants and the fears. and a big one that we live with is that there's not enough time. The time's a big deal when it comes to joy because to experience joy we have to enter a timelessness

where we're not on our way somewhere else where we're not worried about what's about to come where we can expand out and occupy the moment. Does that make sense? And how many moments do we have? that sense of pressure like there's not enough time. A lot for many of us. So the two qualities of joy that identify it, this openness to the moment and then embodiment, well, how often are we in our bodies? Have you ever just stopped and sensed, well, for today, how much was I

lost in thought. How much was I in that trance? And then we find huge swaths. We're not here that much. So we see more joy in young children, as you know. And why? They're not so habituated around doing and getting somewhere else. They've not yet been kind of imprinted with that fear that if you don't get X, Y, and Z done, you're not okay and you'll be, you know, rejected or you'll fail. So there's more of a sense of openness to the moment. They have wants and fears, but there's more free open spaces, and there's therefore more of a kind of spontaneity. Their personalities haven't hardened around the pursuit.

In the early 1850s, American painter James McNeill Whistler spent a brief and academically unsuccessful period at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. The story goes that when he was assigned to draw a bridge, He drew a romantic stone one, complete with grassy banks and two small children fishing from it. Get those children off the bridge, said the instructor. This is an engineering exercise. Whistler got the kids off the bridge and drew them fishing from the banks of the river and resubmitted the drawing.

The angry instructor yelled, I told you to remove those children. Get them completely out of the picture. But the creative urge was too strong in Whistler. His next version had the children completely out of the picture indeed. They were buried under two small tombstones on the riverbed. So the culture can beat our capacity for joy out of us. And it happens in two different ways.

And one is I've kind of referred to it. It's a stress about getting it right, doing it right, doing enough, not making mistakes. Picasso said the first half of his life, he tried to paint in a mature way. during the second half he tried to learn to paint like a child so it's that fear of mistakes and then there's this grasping we have which is very much you know the billion dollar advertisements in this in this you know industry that keeps us thinking we need more and that in some way in any given moment something's missing we're waiting for the the next moment to contain what this moment is not. So there's this feeling like we're not complete yet. So we go after more achievements or more

security or more money. There's grasping. It's been described in the Buddhist tradition that the near enemy of joy, this is the shadow side of joy, is attachment, that good things will happen and then we're attached to them and we want more of them. And that in a moment of being attached to happiness, we squeeze that happiness. We can't really feel it's full flowering. As soon as we want more of it or we want to hold on to it, like a friend of mine last year that was in a new relationship and she was, she really liked this new man and she was really excited about it. But each step of the way, she was kind of in some way monitoring, does this have the ingredients and is this going to work and what's the next step going to be that will really deepen and

create a commitment here? That was always in the background. That's not full joy in the moments. And we can see it in so many ways that we squeeze the joy. I do have to share. There's one story of a first grader who tells her mom, Billy Mills kissed me after school today. And her mom says, oh no, how did that happen? The little girl responds, it wasn't easy. It took five of my friends to catch him. So the chase starts very early. And then we get attached.

We get attached to us. We'll have a sweet moment with a loved one or with our child and then we have such remorse. How come? How come we don't have more time like this? And in that very moment, what happens? Squeezes in the joy, right? Or we can, it just could be pleasure of eating something good. Like I, a few days ago, my ex-husband Alex, made us this big batch of homemade almond butter,

which is just delicious. And I, and I took some and I had it. And as I was tasting it, I thought, this is so good. I'm going to have to have more. And then immediately I went, no, I can't have more. I'll feel sick if I have too much almond butter. Here I was thinking about feeling sick in the middle of a good taste. taste. I mean, you know, what gives? And it happens while we're meditating. We can start quieting

and get a little bit in the zone where things get a touch peaceful. And there's an immediate computation of, okay, now what happened to set this up? And how do I keep it? Or how do I have it more? We don't, here's the quote that some of you might be very familiar with by Blake. He says, he who binds to himself a joy does the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity sunrise. Okay? So the near enemy of joy is this tendency of ours to try to hold on. It's one form of controlling things.

The full enemy, the full shadow side of joy is that we push away in. enjoyment. There's an aversion to enjoyment. And you might think, not me, you know, but it can be subtle, but it's, it's kind of, I think of it like we keep the windows closed to not let in fresh air because we're afraid there might be a storm. So in some way, there's a controlling, and there's a sense, and it happens to many people, depending on their personal history, that it's dangerous to relax and enjoy. If I let my guard down, if I let myself enjoy, something bad's going to happen. I may even get punished because a lot of children right in the middle of some really spontaneous, joyful moment in some way got criticized, in some way got pounced on. So it's in our nervous

system. It's a little bit dangerous. Something bad might happen. That after, serious pleasure, always something else happens that pulls me down. So we keep the guard up. And there's something that it's been described as a happiness toleration point. That joy is very, very alive. And it can feel out of control. It can feel like I'm not big enough to hold all this joy. So we have kind of a part of us that holds it down and that says, wait a minute, I better get serious about life again because I'm going to miss something. I'm not going to be prepared for something. Something will slip through the cracks. The poet Hafiz describes it in a wonderful way. He talks about life as a chess game with God. And he says, well, what's the difference

between us and a saint? And here's what he says. The beloved has just made such a fantastic move that the saint is now continually tripping over joy and bursting out in laughter and saying, I surrender, whereas my dear, I am afraid you still think you have a thousand serious moves. A thousand serious moves. And doesn't that sit somewhere in us that we have this sense, that we have these important serious things? It's a grimness. So there is a bit of a mistrust that comes in the culture. and it's definitely in our bodies.

A mistrust of fully enjoying. Maybe we don't deserve it. Some puritanical streak we see in many religions. Many misunderstandings of Buddhism I've seen that pleasure is the problem, and that's not what the Buddha taught. It's our attachment that causes suffering. Some of you might remember a story of a young monk

who arrives at a monastery and he's assigned to helping the other monks copying the old canons and the laws of the church by hand. And so he notices that the monks are copying from copies. So he goes to the old abbot and questions this. He points out that if there was even a small error earlier on, that it would never be picked up. In fact, it would continue in all subsequent copies. And so the abbot says, you know, we've been copying from copies for centuries, but you have a good point. So he goes down to the vaults way deep in the caves under the monastery

where the original manuscripts was sitting for ages, hundreds of years, and hours go by, nobody sees the old abbot. Finally, the young, young, new monk gets really worried. So he goes downstairs and he finds the old avid who's banging his head against the wall and crying uncontrollably. So he asks him, Father, father, what's wrong, what's wrong? and in a choking voice, the old abbot replies, the word was celebrate. So that's the word of warning.

Don't let it go by. So I've been talking a bit about how what we do to shut it down. And I talked about the way we grasp, but the way we have a fear, we don't deserve it. The biggest way is judgment. In any moment that we are judging ourselves, not enough, or judging another person, the biochemistry of joy is not able to flow through our bodies and minds.

There is a way in which in those moments our heart just isn't available. Charlotte Joko Beck she's a Zen teacher and she said that our failure to know joy is a direct reflection of our

inability to forgive. Our failure to know joy is a direct reflection of our inability. to forgive. So that one of the prerequisites if we really want to be available is to honestly see

where are we holding our hearts closed to other beings because we can't be considering others an enemy and our hearts can't be hardened if we want to discover this very beautiful innate capacity for

celebrating life. So another reflection if you will. Just take another moment. to pause, to close your eyes. And as you check in, check in with your body and heart asking the question, what is between me and experiencing joy? And you can ask it for this moment,

but feel into the major currents of your life. What is between me and experiencing joy in my life? in my life? Is it a kind of controlling that I'm always have to have things a certain way? Is it this a basic chronic dissatisfaction that things aren't right, that I want something different, something really basic in my life different before I can experience joy? Is there a sense that there's something wrong with me or you or the world so we can't just settle in and experience joy? Or maybe it's a feeling of a physical pain or discomfort and it's we're in reaction to it so it's hard to just open our hearts is it that

you have a story about the future that's limiting what's between me and joy and the second question just to ask yourself do I sense the possibility of joy am I willing to open to that possibility is their curiosity is their longing to feel that unconditional happiness. And if something in you feels really closed and no I don't feel the possibility, then to hold that with a kindness because that's as good information as anything else. And even the moment of recognizing and holding that with kindness creates a bit of space you'll find. When you're ready, please open your eyes. Okay, so let's explore together what allows us to enter the stream of joy.

And the primary entry is to embrace life as it is. It's this very training that we explore here over and over again of recognizing what is happening this moment and finding the space to allow it to be as it is. Now I just want to say that, and I feel I pretty much, have to say it every time I use this language of opening to life as it is, that that doesn't mean we say, oh, the environment is dying and there's all sorts of plans to speed that up,

and now I'm just going to open to the moment and say yes and not do anything. We can open to the pain we feel about that in the moment. We open to the despair we feel in the moment, and that may lead to very naturally to wise action. So opening to this moment as it is is not resignation or passivity. It's just opening to this moment as is. It's honestly acknowledging the actuality of this moment's like this. And I have a courage to open and feel it. So this is saying yes. The precursor of joy is saying yes to the moment, to this very moment. And I like the language. of just sensing that joy comes from getting real, that we get real with what's right here.

Now there's three dimensions of that, of what we get real with, that I'd like to just name and we can explore together. It's three dimensions of what we say yes to. And one of them is that we're saying yes to what's unpleasant. And one of them is, and this is the training, that we can acknowledge it's unpleasant, and acknowledge we don't like it,

acknowledge part of us wishes it would not continue, and still say yes in this moment to feeling it and being with it. The second of the three dimensions is that we say yes to what's pleasant, not grasping it, not adding stuff to it, but just yes. And the third, and this is one we don't often talk about, we say yes to possibility. It's the opposite of limiting and tightening. We say yes to what's possible.

So let's look at these three. We begin with unpleasantness. And the challenge with getting real means that we actually are opening to experiences that feel difficult to be within our bodies that we don't want to be with. So part of opening to what's unpleasant is saying yes to the fact that we don't want to be with it.

It's just staying. we start right where we are. Now, an example for you that I've noticed, I've taught a lot about the trance of unworthiness, and one area of real unpleasantness for me over the years has been the feeling of unworthiness. You teach about what you have to work with, you'll find. And so that has become an area of unpleasantness.

It's actually a wonderful training for me. so that when something crops up and it happens pretty much every day where I feel like I'm falling short in some way, I get really interested and I feel it in my body and I stay. Now sometimes it's just a little twinge and I go, okay, you know, in some way feeling like I'm falling short, recognize it, allow it, it comes and goes. And sometimes it's big and it's like, okay, so this is the training.

An example for you of when it's larger or when it was larger, a couple of years ago, I flew out to the West Coast to teach a day long. And sometimes jet lag affects me more than others, but that day long it really affected me. And I recognized in the afternoon that I was only partly there, and I was looking through very glazed eyes. And people, I would open it to questions, and the questions, you know, I'd sit there after hearing a question, and it almost might have been not in English.

You know, it didn't land anywhere. But I remember one person asked a question, and I said something a little bit silly, and, you know, people are in the mood to laugh at these things, and they laughed. And I remember looking at her and catching a look like, oh, that made her uncomfortable. And flying back from the West Coast, the experience of remorse and the experience of, you know, here I am, it's like everything in me wants to be. helpful and to feel like I might somebody takes the chance to ask a question in a large group that's vulnerability and I in my lack of sensitivity um was hurtful I didn't want to be but I was so I remember

sitting there and going okay you teach about feelings of failure you talk about the trance of unworthiness now walk your talk and I remember sitting there on the plane and just the feeling in my chest of shame and and just remorse was so painful but it was really valuable because I just kept whispering yes, yes, and doing what I teach so much of, you know, just holding it with kindness until there became this space of openness and compassion that actually felt joyful because I felt this possibility of, wow, you know, if we can really say yes, no matter what,

this heart gets really vast. And that points to the essence of what's behind you. joy, which is as soon as the selfing starts dissolving, as soon as there's not a centralization around self, our energy is free to radiate in a very loving, expansive way. What keeps us from joy is this fixation on self, what I need, what I fear, what's wrong with me. So if we can persevere and hang out with the unpleasant, what happens is we start dissolving the sense of self. We become a sense of presence itself.

Very powerful to say yes to unpleasantness. It opens up the gateway to joy. Now, we also have to learn to say yes to pleasantness, and that means not wrapping more in our mind around it, what it means, how we want it to love it to love. last, how we are afraid it's going to go away. It's opening to pleasantness with a very deep simplicity and feeling of appreciation. I want to share an example, an email I got recently. One of our dear friends in this community, his name's Jesse, one of the founders of I.B. Me, which is

the mindfulness group that's really bringing a lot of trainings to. teens and younger and children. Well Jesse the founder had a very serious heart disease last year and he's been he was in a hospital for about oh gosh five months and he had a heart replacement really serious. This is a young man 32 years old and so here's what the email said he said I was able to go outside and to fresh air outside the hospital for the first time in five months yesterday. I can't even begin to describe what it was like to smell the flowers, to feel the actual sun of my face, to watch the birds, to listen to the fountain. The small things mean so much now. If we could remember that it's fleeting and really be here

for our experience, there's a very beautiful and simple way we start saying yes to the pleasantness that's here. Nietzsche says, for happiness, how little suffices for happiness. The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye glance. Little makes up the best happiness. Be still. So whether it's opening to unpleasantness, our plan. pleasantness, joy comes in the space of presence. It's because we're being present and we're not

focused on self, we're focused on presence with what's here, that there's space that allows that freedom of the heart to express. Okay, so I named a third realm. We opened to pleasant and say yes, unpleasant. We open to possibility. And I find this one, slip up. by people a lot that we that in some way people ask me what possibility that doesn't sound Buddhist that's not what's right here but embedded in right what's right here and this is part of the law of physics is the innate possibility of what what can unfold out of this moment and when we're open to it rather than have a storyline of the future we're available in an incredibly

creative and dynamic way we will keep reliving our patterns we'll keep fulfilling our own prophecies of you know I'm not good enough to have this intimate relationship or worthy of it or I'll never really be successful or really be happy just the thought of that

keeps the biochemistry and the emotions and the behaviors moving to keep us locked in to stop what's possible So really being open to possibility is a brave stance where we're unwilling to hold a story about the future that limits us. The Uruguayan political prisoners may not talk without permission. I'm reading a little writing from Eduardo Galliano. They may not talk without permission or whistle,

smiles, sing, walk fast, or read other prisoners. Nor may they make or receive drawings of pregnant women, couples, butterflies, stars, or birds. One Sunday, Didaco Perez, a school teacher tortured and jailed for having ideological ideas, is visited by his daughter Malay, age five. She brings him a drawing of birds. The guards destroy it at the entrance of the jail. Remember, that one was off the list, right? On the following Sunday, Malay brings him a drawing of trees. Trees are not forbidden and the drawing gets through.

The Dadaako praises her work and asks about the colored circles scattered in the tree tops. Many small circles have hidden among the branches. Are they oranges? What fruit is it? The child puts her finger to her mouth. Sh! She whispers in his ear, Selly, don't you see their eyes?

They're the eyes of the birds I've smuggled in for you. C.S. Lewis says, All joy reminds. It is never a possession. and goes on to say joy, intuit's what is about to be, intuit's what has always been, our original nature, the truth of wholeness, the non-conceptual, the mystery.

So there's a kind of intuitiveness that senses possibility, senses the vastness and mystery of space and inner space, senses that we can't possibly know what love is in our minds, senses the mystery that's here, and lives with that. So I bring this up because joyrises not just when we contact the immediacy of the moment, but also is infused with an encompassing sense of how it all is.

It's an openness to the mystery, to the truth of change, the possibility of change. I remember when I went to a Qigang retreat, the summary for this one, and Qigang is this meditation, a healing meditation movement, through the body and contacting the subtle energy, the real creative force that lives through us. And one of the key teachings at that retreat was to let go of any limiting idea about healing. And this was a healing retreat. This was a lot of us were there because we had illnesses. And it wasn't about fixating on a new belief.

Yes, I'm going to get rid of this cancer or whatever it is. it was just pure openness, just open to how energy can unfold itself, how we can be enlivened, and how healing is possible. Openness. And there was such a mood of joy there. And it wasn't from false expectation. It was that openness and the other element I described early embodied, staying right here in this aliveness and just open. So, If you bring to mind someone that's joyful, that's what you're going to sense in them. You'll sense that inclusiveness, that openness, and yet right here with it, with the aliveness. Okay, another reflection for you, if you will.

Just take a moment to close your eyes. And this is an inquiry just to ask yourself, if you can sense any limiting story about the future that you live with, that in some way tightens you, armors you, brings up a kind of depression, anxiety.

It may be a belief such as I'll never experience good health again or I'll never have a really close or intimate relationship. It's not possible to be happy. Maybe it's that I'll never really really contribute the way I had hoped. Or maybe you're limiting stories about somebody else that you

love. That person will never experience what you want for them. You may be running into all sorts of limiting stories, but just if there's one that comes to the foreground of your attention, maybe a limiting story about how others will always relate to you. Just see if you can name it, acknowledge it as, okay, this is the story I'm living with, and sense if there's some willingness to hold that with kindness but not necessarily believe it. Are you willing to open to the truth of possibility that we really don't know? Alchemy of joy saying yes to what's difficult in the moment, yes to what's pleasant, and yes to possibility. Okay, now, and now, and the last part of this exploration together is two ways that we can really nourish the experience of joy.

And the first is to say we all have spots or moments that sometimes are fleeting, but spots where we're not grasping onto anything and we're not pushing away and we're not preoccupied with their self and there is that quality of openness and sometimes it just goes right by we might have just a moment where we go ah wow those colors are really pretty of the trees you know or that smell of the fall you know we might have just a moment where we see a child and see the light in their eyes and just something in us gets really happy that they're just to see that aliveness but then it goes and we get preoccupied really quickly one training that cultivates our capacity for joy

is to purposely stop when we even get the slightest little tendril of a sense. Ah, happiness. Some simple pleasure. You have them. Stop. And sense what happens when you really allow yourself to soak it in more, to savor a little more.

We're not a culture of savering. we grasp after our pleasures but we don't just pause into it's like just tasting that almond butter just letting it be as it was there's so much in this fall that's beautiful what if you committed yourself to just each day looking for moments where you could pause

and even if it doesn't feel like the full-blown joy of you know celebrating life even if it's just like a ah you know stop let that see again, taste it, feel it, feel it in your body. I love this. Mary Oliver, I find, is one of the poets that most inspires me to pause and savor because she does that and then she writes about it and lets us know what happens. She says, oh, to love what is lovely and will not last. What a task to ask of anything or anyone. Yet it's ours and not by the century or the year.

but by the hours one fall day I heard above me and above the sting of the wind a sound I did not know and my look shot upward it was a flock of snow geese winging it faster than the ones we usually see

and being the color of snow catching the sun so they were in part at least golden I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us. The geese flew on. I've never seen them again. Maybe I will someday, somewhere. Maybe I won't. It doesn't matter. What matters is that when I saw them, I saw them as through the veil secretly, joyfully, clearly. So pausing, creating a space in the pause so

we can actually begin to get familiar with the experience of joy, of that openness and that embodiment, pausing. The second way of nourishing is to express joy. It can be little joys or big joys, but to express them. So there's a kind of celebration of the beauty and the mystery and the wakefulness that we cherish. So how do we do that? We express it when we laugh or when we dance or when we pray or when we sing. I mean, it's built into cultures to celebrate together in these ways. You probably know the way Rumi put it. He said, let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground to express it. Some of you know this story by Mory Sendak that I love and show. share often. He writes, there was a little boy who sent me a charming card with a little drawing. I loved it. I answer all my children's letters, sometimes very hastily, but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a wild thing on it. I wrote, Dear Jim, I loved your card. Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, Jim loved your card so much, he ate it. That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it. He loved it. He ate it. So there's this real beauty to when we feel that

openness and when we feel that embodiment to express it and to express it in whatever way fits for us to move through it and just feel it and let let it be known. known. So again, we've talked about three different approaches and one is this the power of what's our whole practice here, this radical power of yes, just yes, real opening to the unpleasant, the pleasant the possible. And then we talked about the power of pausing. Take your time and get familiar with how it is in your body and your heart and your mind to feel joy or to feel happiness. And then the power of expressing what we're feeling in some way of appreciation. Now, each of these pathways, each of these pathways has a common denominator, which is there's not a centralization around a sense of self.

In the moments you say yes, check inside. What happens to your sense of who you are when you're saying yes? Check it out. Yes, does it? resolves that tight contraction of selfness. It doesn't mean we still don't have a way of navigating and knowing I'm here and I need to do this and I shouldn't do that. That's still available. It's just not where our identity is living.

Saying yes dissolves that centralization. In the moments that we pause and appreciate, we're no longer self-s, it's not a self-thing. It's not like we're appreciating and holding tight. we're just appreciating. There's an openness. And when we express our joy, real freedom from that kind of self-centeredness. Now one of the most beautiful expressions of joy is service. When we're helping, there's that selflessness and we're helping from a place of love, of great heart. It's one of the most joyful experiences that we can have. And I love this. This is Mahonda's Gandhi says, service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.

But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service which is rendered in a spirit of joy. And maybe you've had the blessing of that to give in a way where you just felt this delight and love in the giving. That is something that is, it's a blessing. It comes from an inner freedom. And it's something that we can cultivate. We can explore giving and feeling in that giving, that selflessness. So a closing story for us that I think is a beautiful example of this. And I got this story from Tattoos on the Heart,

which is a book I've recommended last year, and if you weren't listening last year, it's really one of those books to read, tattoos on the heart by Gregory Boyle. He is a pastor of a church in an area with the most concentrated murderous gang activity in Los Angeles. And their church declared themselves a sanctuary church in 1987, and they began to house over 100 homeless people a night. So this is a story around that particular situation.

The challenge was that the next day, they'd have them for the night, the next day people would grumble about the smell and talk about going to church elsewhere, you know, because 100 homeless people. And they did all they could. They sprinkled, I love my carpet, you know, that stuff. They sprinkled that on the rugs and they potpourri and airwicked around. But, you know, 100 guys is a lot of guys. So they decided to address the discontent in a sermon.

And he asked this question. He said, what's the church smell like? And people were mortified. no answer. Finally, someone booms out, smells like feet. Okay? And then he asks them, why it smells like feet? The response, because many homeless men slept here last night.

And he asked, well, why do we let that happen? It's what we've committed to do. Well, why would anyone commit to do that? Because it's what Jariah Jesus. It is what Jesus would do. Well, then, what's the church? smell like now. A man stands and bellows. It smells like commitment. The place cheers. A woman waves their arms wildly. Huela arosa. It smells like roses. So this packed church roars with laughter

and a newfound kinship that embrace someone else's odor as their own. He writes, the stink and the church hadn't changed only how the folks sought. So there's this space of care and compassion and a willingness to give that becomes absolutely joyful. It's freedom not to be occupied with self. Now this doesn't mean we don't do what we need to do to take care of this self. That comes from wisdom and compassion. I'm talking about fixation, preoccupation, obsession. So let's practice a bit. We'll just do a little exploration, taking these three elements that I've name tonight and seeing how it works for you in your own experience. Take a few moments when I invite you to pause for reflection. As you pause, just consciously let yourself arrive,

sense what helps you bring your body and your heart and your mind right into this moment. Take a moment to scan your body and your heart. We'll practice a bit of this yes meditation of loving what is, just sense exactly what's here right now. And if you notice pleasantness, yes. Opening to it, feeling it. And if you notice unpleasantness, yes. So that whatever is predominant in your attention, whatever sensations you feel strongly, if there's a mood that's strong, if there's something in the background that you know wants attention that has to do with a difficult situation in your life, just meeting what's here with real openness, either using the word yes itself, you might mentally whisper yes, or the spirit of yes, that energy that

agrees to what's here. See how deep your yes can go, this letting be, waking, You might sense if there was an unconditional yes, that profound openness and allowing, what would your sense of your own being be in those moments? When there's a complete yes to the life that's here. It said that joy is like the sun that's empty of a center. There's no center to the sun and yet radiates out endlessly. When there's a deep unconditional yes, the center dissolves and there's just that simple radiance of life, of aliveness.

So the pathway to joy begins with this unconditional yes. And then it includes also an inner bow of appreciation to wherever there's something that awakens some joy. So if there's something in your life you feel an aliveness, a joy about, or if there's something that right in this moment you're sensing joy about, to say thank you, to feel your appreciation, to get to know the feeling a bit. This is where we pause and savor the beauty, the goodness, the presence, the presence with sorrow we savor. And the third part of cultivating joy is to express, and we can express with offering blessings.

You might think about someone you care for who's having good fortune right now. Someone you care for that's having good fortune that's happy and opening and in some way feeling a sense of aliveness. Offer them your blessing. May you prosper. May you be joyful. May you flourish. May you appreciate the blessings in your life.

offering blessings to your own being, imagining yourself happy and full. I experience and appreciate the blessings of awakening of happiness and freedom and extending blessings outward as we do with the meta practice, compassion practice, where we open ourselves and sense this world that we live in. And take some moments to really connect with that, to sense the people in the room right here, each with their share of suffering and blessings. Since those that are with us listening in some way connecting to these teachings and practices

in different places in this country and around the world, it's feeling this whole network of beings wakening together. And since all our relations, all the animals, those that fly and those that crawl, and those that swim. Sensing this living earth, offering our blessings, may all beings touch natural joy, experience the natural joy of being alive.

May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Namaste. Before we close, I just want to say, make one comment, which is some, and I wish I had made it as formal part of the talk, some of you might have been

listening and felt, well, I am the farthest thing from joy. And how can, I mean, this is just far, far away. That, honor that as really important and valuable information to hold with kindness, because that is the first step of saying yes and moving towards joy. Doesn't matter what comes up, start right where you are. Thank you. Thank you for your listening attention. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.