Tara Brach - Embodied Awareness - Embracing the Unlived Life - Part 2 (2016-03-23)

Episode Date: March 26, 2016

Embodied Awareness - Embracing the Unlived Life - Part 2 (2016-03-23) - When we disconnect from the aliveness of our body, we are in a trance that prevents us from living and loving fully. These two talks examine our habits of dissociation - including the cutting off that comes from trauma - and the suffering of “unlived life” that this creates. We then look at how practices of mindfulness and compassion, guided by the acronym RAIN, enable us to re-enter our bodies, and discover the creativity, love and wisdom that naturally flow from embodied awareness. 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 matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. The last talk that I gave was on embodied presence and awakening in our body, awakening our senses to full aliveness. And so tonight is the second of a series that explores this. I'd like to start with a mid-eastern story that I heard some time ago about a man who was falsely accused as a criminal and he's put in jail. And a friend came to visit and gave him a prayer rug.

And he was really disappointed because he had wanted a hacksaw or some tools to help him get out. But, you know, so he realized, okay, this is what I got, I might as well use it. So every day he'd kneel down and bow and pray. and he started to get more familiar with the pattern that was woven into the rug. And one day it struck him that the image in the rug was really the diagram of the lock that he could unlock to step into freedom. So, the pathway that frees us, the portal to freedom, is always right here. It's what we're standing on.

It's this aliveness in our body that's right here. It's just what's going on. And probably the biggest illusion in the world is that it's something down the road that we have to wait to learn and get and so on. Right here, the prayer rug right under our feet. And what's so interesting is when you consider it is that everything we experience, a sense of fear, a sense of joy, excitement, whatever, it's always registered in this living body.

So if we want to enter reality, reality, true reality, we absolutely have to experience aliveness in our body. It's the way. The Buddha said it's through this fathom long body that we experience the whole universe. And Kabir put it this way, the God that I seek is within. So we're going to continue this exploration about how really any healing that we feel is important to us

requires going to where emotions live in the body to process and unfold them and any realization that we seek requires being awake in the senses so we can directly contact reality and any love that we long for it requires being embodied so we can feel our hearts

so it's not conceptual or abstract. The challenge of course which we all know is that we tend to leave home again and again and again and we're just I regularly say well let's just think of today and if you think of where you journey to

today in your minds, if you refue the day, you probably noticed that there actually weren't many swaths of actually living presence. And we spend our time in pretty an incessant inner dialogue about what's around the corner, what we need to plan on, what we're worried about, what we're rehearsing. So, I think of this as the, this leaving home, as the real meaning of leaving the garden. You know, when we talk about leaving the garden of Eden and there's a mythology in many different spiritual traditions for leaving the garden. I like to most comfortably think of it in terms of evolutionary psychology that we all, there's the original state as a kind of embeddedness, not with a self-awareness, but an embeddedness. And then the first emergence is into this

egoic self-aware being. We naturally leave the garden. when we become aware of a self. And then this is a highly simplified version. We wake up, we become identified as separate self. We've left the garden, that sense of real belonging connectedness. We feel me and here, world out there. And then as we continue to evolve our consciousness, we begin to be aware of that. And through that presence, re-enter the garden, so to speak.

And reentering the garden means really embracing this aliveness unconditionally. Now, that's hard because the nature of being embodied, this is something we all find as we start to practice if we're going to stay a bit, is experiencing pleasant and unpleasant. And the unpleasant can be intense. We can experience all the rawness of the elements of fire and pressure and heaviness and weight we can also experience flowing and light and dancing vibration and so on. And when we start checking out staying in the body,

we feel the rawness of our vulnerability as human organisms. We feel the sense of the squeeze of the fear and the hollowness and ache of the shame and the sense and we also experience the ecstatic vibrational bliss of love, but it's all in the body. So the training that we're in really is first how to come back from all the thinking and then how to really with awareness, with kindness, open to this incredible, raw dynamic dance that's going on right here. Again, over a simplified way, in order to stay in this body we have to decondition our

limbic reaction to try to control things. And this is pervasive. Every one of us has a nervous system that is rigged to when it's pleasant in some way try to seek it out more, enhance it, hold on to it. And when it's unpleasant to try to move away from it. I mean a few-celled creature amoeba will do it, contract away and we do it. So there's a deconditioning that's necessary. and yet we've got a lot of programming in us to carry on the way we've been doing it.

And it's deeply reinforced by our culture. I mean, our culture is in a developmental arrest in terms of the egoic level. It has not continued to evolve for the most part in many ways. And you can see it on so many levels, the need to dominate nature, you know, be in control. It's like the humans have the right to control nature and every other species and to violate and so on, including parts of their own species. And you can see it in how we over-medicate our body and you can see it in our addictions to substances and how much we are addicted to virtual reality that we're trying to control things and not live

in the wildness of these bodies. And when we do, we lose intimacy. You can see it so much, you know, that we spend all this time in our minds kind of of circling around with how we're afraid of falling short and trying to seek comfort and rationalize and so on, that we live in a very, often a very small, very self-centered and often distorted kind of a reality. I'll share with you one of my favorite examples. some of you'll remember, I shared it last year, of a couple that lived in Minneapolis, I think,

and they decided to go to do their honeymoon where they had been in Florida 20 years earlier, because of their schedules, he had to go first, and she was going to follow the day later. So when he arrived, he sent her an email, but by mistake he left a letter out of the address. And so, meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a woman had just returned, a widow, just returned from the funeral of her husband. He was a minister who had been called home for glory. He had had a heart attack. Anyway, she decides to check her email,

and she faints when she sees her email. And her son came in to see what happened, and he found out on the computer screen, here's what it read. It said, to my loving wife, subject, I've arrived. 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 has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you. Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. And it's P.S. sure is hot down here. It's a fun one. So we leave and we leave in our thoughts and our thoughts are often distorted and I mentioned in the last class that it's even more and more so with

our children, this next generation that younger children spend six hours a day online in front of a screen. This is on an average teens, nine hours. So there's a forgetting. I mean if a young child is spending a lot of time in virtual reality and not in nature there's a kind of forgetting a disconnecting. Since I was talking about evolution, a four-year-old opened a big family Bible and suddenly an old dry leaf that had been pressed in between pages fell out. And with astonishment, he exclaims,

Mommy, mommy, I found Adam's underwear. So it's fun, but just to sense that if our children are not in love with the natural world and feeling their belonging, it lessens the tendency to be a steward to take care. So this is one of the great sufferings that comes from dissociating and leaving and being in virtual reality. But there's another one which is that when we leave our bodies,

we disconnect from empathy. In other words, it takes a sense of embodied presence to have a living kind of empathy and compassion. Otherwise, it's abstract and it's easily out the window. You've probably noticed if you're really busy and you're really lost in your thoughts and you hear something in the news that's terrible. You'll say, oh, how terrible.

But it's not like your heart is weeping for the losses in an intimate way because you're not in your body. Furthermore, when we don't know how to really be with, the life and the body, when there's unfaced fear, it turns to aggression. And, you know, we're living in a time that we're so aware of and so horrified by the cycles of violence, by what's just happened recently in Brussels and then less in the news but ongoingly bombings in Syria where Islamic people worshipping Shai Temple bombed, 100,000.

43, this was last month, and then we lost. So lives and lives and what's causing it? Well, we leave this living body and rather than processing and being with the fears, they drive us into cycles of violence. So we practice together. This right now we'll be practicing and we keep on exploring in our own lives to heal the unfaced, unlived life inside us. We practice to discover within this bodily form, the spirit that shines through. And we practice for the healing of our world. Because if those that are

listening and practicing start waking up more and more our hearts and minds, it's contagious and it helps. The pathway home, again, it's like that prayer mat. It's again and again when we get caught in suffering, the message is, come back right here. Let exactly what's going on, exactly how it's registering in your body be the portal. That's the pathway. And yet what happens as we'll notice is that again and again, our minds will try to interpret, try to figure out. So the beginning practices really in meditation are notice how we're getting lost in thought.

Notice how we're trying to make our world safe and comfortable by trying to mentally understand it rather than an embodied presence that's living it. You know, one of my favorite from the Zen tradition examples is Zen monk and his student. and the student was asking a lot of questions. And one of his questions was, well, what happens after we die? And the Zen monk said, well, I don't know. And that was really upsetting to the student

because you really wanted to know. So he said, I thought you were a Zen monk. And the response was, I am, but not a dead one. So this is right at the heart of our practice is recognizing this cocoon of familiar thinking and Rumi says, step out of the tangle of fear thinking. Step out of the tangle of any thinking. Be able to honor thinking, let it be a good servant, but know how to step out and experience reality

directly. Okay. So we practiced in the last talk we explored how the when thinking sticky, which it often is. You keep getting sucked back into the same narrative, your top ten hits, you know how it goes. When it's sticky, how we can use the acronym Rain to re-establish an embodied presence. And as a reminder, that means you just recognize what's going on. Okay, worrying, worrying. Allow. Give space for the life that's here. Just give space. Don't judge yourself for thinking. Then investigate, R-A-I, investigate in the body. And just to say again, I like to keep repeating this. Investigate for some people means think about it.

That's not what it means in this. In rain it means investigate in an embodied way. Find out where do you feel it in your body. Is it pressure? Is there a sense of squeeze? Is there a sense of flow? What is it like in your body? Investigate.

The end of rain and the version that I've been teaching much more recently is to nourish with kindness, with compassion, which means whatever you find. And often it's vulnerable or raw to bring a quality of kindness to that. After you've done the steps of rain, recognizing and allowing and investigating, which means really contacting and nourishing, then just to rest in your immediate experience, And there's in that resting, you'll notice what's called non-identification that after doing rain you're not so identified with what's going on, more there's a resting in a awakefulness and openness that's free.

It can be a matter of degree but that's the fruit of rain. So don't just do rain and miss out on the fruit. Like if the rain falls and new plants come up, just rest and rest and not. discover the new growth, the flowering. So we practice for a moment, just let's try it out and sense how we can become more embodied with rain and then we'll move on. As you pause right now to practice, I'd like you to bring up something that happened today or yesterday or within the last few days that was slightly stressful that got you thinking. got you activated, but not something supercharged.

It won't be useful right now to do something supercharged. Something that brought up sticky thinking, irritation, anxiety. It might be something in a conversation with somebody, something at work, something going on with your health, something that's around the corner that you're anxious about. Any situation that's a little sticky or tense will do, take a moment to again reflect on it, think about it, remember it. The R is just to recognize, okay, this is what's going on.

Stressful situation, thinking about it. The A is to allow, just to create some space that you're not trying to fix anything. You're not trying to make the stress go away. You're just allowing the situation to be there in your heart-body mind. And then to investigate is to deepen your attention and just notice, well, how is it living in my body? With some curiosity, when I'm in this situation, when I'm activated, what's it like in my body? Scan, the throat, the chest, the belly, just come into your body.

It helps to use a breath, a slow, longer breath, breathing in and out and feeling the breath that in your body, just to stabilize your attention, your body, then use your breath. Investigate. What's it like? And even if you're not sure of how it feels right now is related to the situation, what matters is investigating how is your body right now? What's going on right here? The end of rain to nurture. is just to regard with kindness. Whatever you're noticing, you might nurture just with a sense

of acceptance, warm, gentleness, some gesture of kindness. And then we pause after the active steps of rain. It's just to sense the fruit, whatever it is, without expectation, just to sense the quality of presence that's here, just to notice what it's like, to rest in it. So sometimes when we're lost in thought or in a virtual reality, the coming home into the body is simple. We just go, oh, okay, I'm out there and just feel your breath and you come back in. And sometimes if it's stickier, as we just did, you'll recognize and allow what's going on and then investigate on purpose. Really bring your attention to scan down through your body and feel from the inside out and on purpose, offer a gesture of kindness and discover how much more awake and

present you are when you've taken those steps and deepened your attention. Okay, so opening your eyes. So this is the reign of embodied presence, a way to come in more purposefully But now I'd like to bring up the question that I think is really a key one when we explore our bodies and coming awake in our bodies, which is, what if what's there feels like too much? And I'm wondering how many of you have tried to come into the body, be mindful of the body and felt like it just felt too difficult to be in your body. Can I just see by hands? How many have noticed that?

Don't be shy. It helps to sit. So just so for those that are listening, it's about half of us. I certainly have. I've had times that I've been so agitated or scared that it didn't feel useful even to sit into my body. It felt like better to calm myself before I come into direct contact with what's here. And so I'd like to take a good part of the rest of this talk to address,

well, how do we become more embodied? when there's trauma or strong feelings and emotions that feel like too much. Because there's not a wholesomeness to assuming that whatever is going on we should be able to come into our body and feel it. That is absolutely deluded because we can retramatize ourselves. So, when we don't have sufficient resources, and by resources I mean enough sense of safety, or balance or stability to be mindful of what's going on in the body, that's the risk

that we can actually come into our body and feel the same raw terror we have felt before and actually deepen the groove of trauma. So what this tells us is that in order to become embodied sometimes we need to first cultivate some resources, first calm our nervous system some. The reality though is that eventually the unlived life that's there that we're afraid to feel needs to be lived if we're to heal. Eventually it just can we be gradual and intelligent about how we come into the body. I'd like to read you I think one of the wisest quotes in the world.

This is author and psychotherapist Alice Miller she writes. what happens if we don't pay attention to what's in the body. She says the truth about our childhood is stored up in our body and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child

who's still whole in spirit will accept no compromises or excuses and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth. So another way to say that is that there's no true healing and there's no full experience of freedom really experiencing reality, insight into truth, full awakening of heart until we come into the body.

So the process of rain that we described is a way in, but as I mentioned, and this really, it depends on how much trauma and how raw the emotions, you know, how the pacing of it, whether we need to do a lot of resourcing. I'll share with you an example of, a woman who actually came to this class, this Wednesday night class, a number of times, before she came to see me privately. This was when I was still in practice as a therapist. And she told me that it was really difficult to follow the guided meditations because

any time she started trying to come into her body she felt panicky. It was very agitating. And so I suggested to her that that wasn't the meditation for her right now. And we started exploring what was going on for her. And this woman was a parole officer. And as a child she had been sexually abused and continued to have relationships that were abusive. And whenever she was treated in a certain way

or heard a certain tone of voice, she'd get panicky inside. And the way she described it was she'd get her insides, we'd all knotted up in a little ball and she'd say, I'd disappear. I have no access to any sense. sense of who I am and what's real and my mind is spinning. But she said even when I'm not triggered, she said, Tara, I feel like I've lost my soul. Don't have a feeling of depth of being.

I don't feel alive, you know, I can't feel my body, you know, when I try to feel my body I freak out. So the way I worked with her and this is something we can do in therapy but we also can do through meditation is the inquiry of what actually gives you a sense of comfort, safety, connection, love. What does work? And each of us, we wouldn't be able to survive. We wouldn't be able to take a step on this earth if there weren't some even tendril of a thread to feeling belonging or safety. We have something. So we start with what we have. And so she named her best friend and her sister and as the weeks went by I got to join the club as allies that she felt safe when she remembered us.

So we started practicing how she could bring us to mine as she could actually visualize the three of us surrounding her. And when she did it and when she actually opened to how that felt, she said it felt like a warm bath, like she could just finally relax a little. That became a practice. because the more you practice where attention goes, energy flows. The more you practice, the more you create neuropathways that actually give you access to her. It was access to that sense of being able to relax, being held. We practice and the more she could feel that,

the more we could start practicing getting embodied. And we started with safe places in her body, which is important. You start with your hands or your feet where the trauma isn't, as located. So we started with safe places and we began to include more and more of her body and it was a kind of back-forth thing where we'd establish a sense of safety and connection and then she'd dip into her body and then if things felt scary she'd come back and remember the sense of connection kind of in and out, in and out, until more and more she had the sense that she could have a presence that was more like the ocean and the feelings in her body were

waves but she was big enough. Now of course that wouldn't happen when she get triggered. When she get triggered she'd just have to go back to her resources. But it happened some months after we had been building these resources that her ex-boyfriend, her boyfriend had been very abusive, he was now an ex but she was really frightened that he was going to be stalking her. She stayed overnight at her friend's house but even after her friend had gone to sleep, the terror started building. So she did what we had done hundreds of times, you know, called on her allies and felt that surrounding of her allies. And she said, with that, she started opening into the fear and she said it was like hot,

broken glass tearing through her. It was really terror. But she just kept sensing. She kept visualizing and sensing her allies holding her. And she let the fear, she allowed it. she allowed it to move through her, a kind of surrendering that's not a weak surrendering, it's out of trust that she could hold it. And she said gradually, the fear was still there but there was more and more space. The space of loving was bigger than the fear and she said then it started filling with this warm, luminous light and then she had tears because she realized it was the light of my own soul. The pathway is through, not necessarily right away. In fact, it's not wise or kind

sometimes right away, but the pathway eventually is this kind of allowing that then totally transforms our relationship with the fear and reveals the space and the sense of the sacredness that is what we are. When I realized I was going to share this story, a poem came to mind that I thought I'd share. It's kind of the end of sharing the story by Dana Falls, who's one of my favorite poets. And it's called Allow.

Okay, so you can just sit back and listen. There is no controlling life. Try corraling a lightning bolt, containing a tornado. Dam a stream and it will create a new channel. resist and the tide will sweep you off your feet allow and grace will carry you to higher ground the only safety lies in letting it all in

the wild and the weak fear fantasies failures and successes when loss rips off the doors of the heart our sadness veils your vision with despair practice becomes simply bearing the truth in the choice to let go of your known way of being, the whole world is revealed to your new eyes. So embodiment means facing the truth of what's in our body, which includes fear and opens us to loving.

I love the language of the fearless heart, and it's the title of, I'm doing an online course on the fearless heart in a few weeks that you can access through my home page on my website. But the reason I name it the fearless art is not because we're without fear. Fear lives in the body. We're alive in this body and our nervous system experiences fear, but it's possible to bring presence to that fear

in a way that we discover a heart space that's larger, that's large enough for this living, dying life. That's the fearless heart. So we practice and as I mentioned there are a number of ways that we can prepare for mindfulness that rather than directly entering into the rawness we can prepare ourselves. We can practice a breathing, it's sometimes known as coherence breathing and it's very well researched that helps to activate the parasympathetic and deactivate the sympathetic. It's long, slow breathing,

equal matched in-breadth, equal-matched-out breath, no pause in between. It will calm you down. We can practice putting our hand on our heart and our hand on our belly because research shows that there's neural cells around the heart that are activated during stress and respond to the pressure and warmth of our touch. It actually calms us down. And it's even more effective if you combine it with nurturing thoughts. You can activate the parasympathetic, meaning reduce fear, by walking in nature.

Tons of research. The difference between somebody walking in a city street or walking in nature, we start coming home to the elements, we start relaxing. So we're talking really in exploring together, how do we come home, how do we come back to the garden and we do it either directly with range as reentering and investigating and being with, or we do it more gradually by first remembering a feeling of love or connection or safety and then gently coming in. But either way, to discover and experience what we long for, the body's the portal,

this last little piece is just describe the fruits that come as we are increasingly awake in our body, but to invite you for a moment to check and see if you're here. You might feel your hands and senses your awareness filling your hands. Are you actually feeling your hands? Are they just an object there? Are your feet an object down there? Can you feel them from the inside out a little?

Can you sense the length and the volume of your arms and feel them from the inside out. What about your heart? Can you gently bring your breath to your heart? And just from the inside out, sense, okay, this is the life of the heart right now. As we begin to honor and tend to the body in a present way,

we actually increase our level of vitality and aliveness. I've seen people that come to a week-long retreats where we're over and over again coming back, feeling the life of the body, describe the awakening of the senses like seeing, going outside in the spring and seeing that new green of spring, that kind of lime yellow and saying, I could feel it in my body, you know, or hearing the sounds of the birds and saying it was a sympathy, you know, you could just, wow, you know. And that's what's possible that these senses wake up. And you begin to

to get these nuanced sounds and tastes and so on. And here's how Eduardo Galliano puts it. He says, the church says the body is a sin. Science says the body is a machine. Advertising says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta. So the first fruit is we actually get to live more fully.

We get to, and such a, I love exploring this particular theme in the spring because it's already, we're already kind of drawn to it and it brings it alive. So that's the first fruit, is that aliveness. The second fruit is that when we're embodied in feeling that aliveness and we bring the attention to the heart, the heart becomes an incredibly sensitive, sensitive, space. And, you know, I described with in this story, the woman's name is Dana who was, you know, surrounded by her allies and feeling that warm bath of presence. You know, the way she described

is that she started letting it in. It became loving presence. She could actually feel it viscerally. And the opposite side is many, many people have confided in me that they know they love others, but they don't actually feel loving. So they know it's there, it's really what we are, but they don't feel they're inhabiting it. And the more we're in a virtual reality, the more we leave home, the less we actually feel it. So we start not really trusting ourselves. When we've taken a long leave of absence from being home, we start mistrusting the goodness of our hearts because we haven't felt that tenderness that lets us know, oh, okay, I care. Does that make sense? I know one mom described how she felt like,

it was a painful confession. She said, I feel like I spend more time worrying about and judging my daughter or teen than I do loving her. And that brought great pain to her. So, I invited her to practice. I say, okay, so sense this things you're judging and worrying about. And she sensed them. I said, okay, now feel that in your body. body. He's kind of doing rain. Okay, allow that to be there, but investigate, feel it in your body. Okay, feeling it, feeling it. And just put your hand on your heart and offer kindness. And she started sensing how all that worry underneath it, she wanted to know her daughter would be okay. She loved her daughter. But she couldn't contact until she on purpose started taking right

what was there. You start right where you are. You don't try to get, jump into love. You start with the worry and the anxiety. And it's the presence with that opens us to the space that becomes tender and loving. Start where you are. I remember another woman whose father had Alzheimer's and she said that she was so busy trying to deal with all the circumstances and so upset and so on that she wasn't feeling kind. And so again, when I, you know, I asked her to get in touch with the busyness and the stress and so on, the anxiety in her, by going into her body, she started grieving the loss. And in the very depth of that grief was the loving.

The body is the portal. The poet Hafez says, please stay near to me and Hafez will spin you into love. Stay near to me, to this reality, this aliveness. And her face will spin you into love. So we're talking about the fruits here. And one fruits is this aliveness. And the other is becoming really tender. Taking whatever portal, whatever's going on and through our bodies,

finding that heart space that's tender. The third fruit I want to mention is the fruit of realization, of freedom. the fruit of wisdom of really seeing what's true. If we're avoiding reality, if we're in any way controlling, in any moment controlling what's going on, we can't experience reality. Any controlling and we're one step removed we're separate from,

we've divided ourselves away. But in the moments of embodiment, of opening to the sense of the form and sensation, we start discovering that space, that formless, empty space that all arises from, and the love that suffuses that space, the awareness that suffuses that space. So for Dana, it was recovering her soul. That was her language for that, that she went through her body and found that tenderness and that awakeness and that space.

And another would say Buddha nature emerges, and another would say, Christ's consciousness through the body. So we started by sensing that prayer out that it's actually right here, it's under us, that the illusion is we have to wait, we have to figure something out, we have to practice harder in another place for 30 days to whatever it is. And the reality is that any moment that you say, oh, right now, come back, right here, here. You can begin to sense that presence and that space that's really home. So I'd like to close with a brief meditation. This is a short one where we can just

taste the fruits of embodied presence. As you close your eyes and let yourself become still, just briefly scan through your body and sense any part of your body that wants to let go, wants to soften or relax a little right now. You might soften the eyes. There's these little micro-muscles around the eyes that tighten when there's thinking and when we soften them it helps to relax the mind open. You might sense a slight smile at the mouth. You might let the shoulders drop away from the neck and just soften there.

Softening the hands. Let the belly be soft so you can let this next breath be received. in a softening belly, this breath. And again, just relax your heart. Sense you can smile into your heart, not to get rid of anything, but to create the space that has a room. Let that sense of space and aliveness spread through your whole body

so you can feel this field of sensation, this living body. Like points of light in the night sky. Just let everything happen. Sense is awake. You might notice that everything is changing, nothing's holding still. Sense what it means to just open and surrender to the changing flow. Just let it happen. Very deep yes, a very deep yes to the life that's living through you.

Even when you feel you've surrendered and opened you can sense an even deeper possibility of allowing and surrendering, not opposing anything. it lived through you and sensing the space that this aliveness is suspended in, playing out in, moving through, the space between the cells, the interior space that sensations emerge from, the space that surrounds us, sense that it's filled with the light of awareness and to bring this living, awake awareness to the level of the heart now. And in a very particular way in this human life, to let yourself bring to mind someone you care about and sense how this heart space holds and experiences a dear one.

Sense this being's goodness and feel the sensitivity and tenderness of the heart, aware, registering, sense the unmas. unconditional accepting presence. This is the fearless heart that's got room for life, that's free to love, that's free to include all of life in the heart. Hence this heart space wide, wide open, including this whole world, all living beings. We close in a simple way with feeling the prayer of the heart. May we each be blessed to come home into this aliveness and into the awareness, the loving

awareness that's really our essence. May we live from loving awareness. May this loving awareness be inhabited, expressed in a way that brings healing and peace to our world. Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.