Tara Brach - Embodied Awareness - Embracing Unlived Life - Part 1 (2016-03-09)

Episode Date: March 12, 2016

Embodied Awareness - Embracing Unlived Life - Part 1 (2016-03-09) 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, 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 thanks 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. An art professor told a story about his seven-year-old daughter. She had asked him one day what it was that he did at work. So he told her, well, I teach people how to draw. And she stared back at him with kind of an incredulous look, and she said, you mean they forgot?

And I love that because our bodies know how to do everything. Our bodies know how to draw and sing and dance and our bodies know how to make love and how to give birth and how to heal and how to die. Our bodies know. I love the way John O'Donohue puts it. He says, our bodies know that they belong to life, to life, to spirit.

He says, it's our minds that make our lives so homeless. Our minds that make our lives so homeless. So this is what we'll explore for the next bit of time, actually this talk and the next one, how our minds put us in a kind of trance that cuts us off from our bodies and from all the aliveness and creativity that really is part of our being. And the given is that we leave regularly. I mean, if you look through today, if you kind of scan back and I like to do that,

just to kind of think of today, we in a flash realized that we were somewhere other than right here embodied. You know, you can check right now for a moment. Just check, are you aware of the energy in your hands, in your chest or heart area, your belly, your feet? As soon as we go into thinking and especially when we're lost in long trains of thought, we're very far from being in this way inhabiting this aliveness. or somewhere else. And for most of us, meditation shines a real light on this,

that we're asked to come and be right here, and we notice that we either can't feel much. A lot of people can't feel a lot of sensations. And as we'll explore, the more trauma we've had in our life, the harder it is to feel the life of the body, and the more we're in a culture that's a traumatizing culture, the harder it is. So for some, it's just very difficult to feel ourselves in our body at all. For others, there's a sense of touching in but leaving very quickly, very, very hard to stay.

For many, there's a touching in and a sense of judging or not liking what's going on. So it's an interesting inquiry. You know, how come it's so hard to really live from the inside out, feel our bodies. And you might check just for a moment. Let's just take a moment to practice. If you want to close your eyes, because that helps to get in touch with the kinesthetic senses and have the intention to feel the life of the body from the inside out.

You might even drop in the inquiry, what's between me and being at home in my body this moment? simply notice what happens when there's an intention to experience the aliveness that's here, an intention to stay, awake, feeling from the inside out. What many notice is we get uneasy, either we leave out of habit or we get uneasy. There's a kind of restlessness and uncomfortability and anxiety. and if you'd like to open your eyes you can. And a way to understand it is

when we enter our body, we're entering the wilderness. We're leaving the domain of where it's mapped and controlled by the brain, and we're entering the wilderness. In the bodies, the domain where there's a play of pleasantness and unpleasantness, and they're both guaranteed as part of being wired as a human or wired as any organism on the planet really,

we get uneasy because we can't control it. When we're in our bodies, when we're just feeling, by nature we're in a being state. As soon as we start doing, we're no longer receptively aware of what's going on in our bodies. And we are completely conditioned, we're programmed to be identified as doers. So we get very uneasy.

It's like we don't know, our life isn't going to work out if we're just hanging out being aware of our bodies. It's a really existentially uncomfortable thing because really the doing self is out of a job. That's what it comes down to. So our basic way of controlling our life is to leave the premises.

Tell me, does that make sense? Kind of looking around to see. Those of you that are listening to podcasts, there are mostly not. So, as I mentioned, the more there's unpleasantness or intensity, the more we're inclined to leave. And the culture has a big impact on how much we leave. We're a very disembodied culture, and for children, it's happening younger and younger and younger. Many of you've heard the statistics of how, compared to a couple of generations back, how little children are outside in the natural world and how much in front of

of a screen. And that disconnects from the rhythms, from a kind of intuitive, instinctual understanding of the living, dying world. I remember one person described asking a group of children what the, you know, about the head and the body, and they said the purpose of the body is to carry the head around, you know. So in one little, in one story, little boys proudly announces in kindergarten that his cat had kittens and the teacher got real curious and said, oh, so males, females, he goes, oh, there are three females, three males. And she said, so how'd you know? And he said, oh, my dad picked him up and turned him over, the labels written on the bottom. In a deep way, being engaged in feeling our bodies from the inside out, feeling our

connection with the earth, that sense of belonging is what allows us to take care of our bodies in our earth body. I mean, how can this next generation have the kind of loving belonging that is required to really show up for this planet? So we leave and we leave through our thinking and when we leave our bodies

and by the way, that doesn't mean we can't have thoughts but when we are really cut off when we're not awake in our bodies, we're in a trance. And if you think of what is a trance, a trance is a kind of contorted or distorted fragment of reality. We're living in something smaller than the whole. And there's a tremendous amount of suffering that comes from that. The wilderness is really the domain that allows us to manifest our full potential. For a moment, consider moments in the last week or month or year that felt really precious

to you, sacred moments, moments that really, really mattered. You just close your eyes and sense, well, what were those moments? What was going on in those moments? Maybe you're thinking of a moment of intimacy with someone or something really broke through, or some veil fill and you really contacted another, or moments of real creativity. Or maybe you're thinking of some awe or wonder you felt in the natural world. Maybe it's a moment of healing

or something dropped away. You opened up to something. You might sense whatever you're reflecting on that you weren't lost in thought those moments, that when we're experiencing what's most precious to us, we're there for it, we're embodied because the things that most matter to us, like love, are not abstract. They don't happen through virtual reality. They're experienced in a very visceral way.

True wisdom. We need to be embodied. We can think about things, but the moments that there's true insolity. site, it's coming from a direct engagement with reality itself. There's not a, in the interference or interpretation of thoughts. The precious moments are moments when we are living out from the wilderness. You know, I remember for myself when I think back of certain moments of epiphany or moments that felt like sacred space, I was touching into the sacred. I remember one of the first was when I was a junior in college and I was taking a yoga class and we'd end

each yoga class with meditation. So it was a very embodied meditation. We'd gotten ourselves really awake in our bodies and then we'd sit still and just feel the aliveness and so on. And I remember after one of those classes I was walking through the woods and it was kind of early spring and going, I just kind of went through the woods and then into a neighborhood that was very treasy. And I remember the smell of the fragrance of the fruit trees blossoming and I could feel this gentle breeze on my skin and my mind was quiet and then I stood still and I don't usually stand still when I'm on my way somewhere so I just stood still and I realized that my body and my mind were at the same place in the same time. Like I wasn't leading ahead with my thoughts. It was all right there. I was touching into the wilderness. I was living from the wilderness.

That was 42 years ago. And at that moment, oh, my body and my mind are in the same place at the same time, jumped out. This is Kibir. Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. the God whom I love is inside. So let's explore more how we, you know, it's not our fault, but how we cut off and how we return with the understanding that a full spiritual life, and by spiritual life I mean an

integrated, mature, living fully, lovingfully, requires that willingness to enter the wilderness. And the given is that it's natural, where we get cut off some. But there's an intention to really be here. And you can see it through different spiritual traditions, whether it's the Christian desert fathers that would go out into the desert or the Thai Buddhist forest monks that would be, you know, the forest was their place of refuge or Native Americans

with the sense of that the sacred is shining through every living, every living being, every part of nature. How many for you is being in nature part of your spiritual awakening? Can I see by hands? Wow, yeah, okay. So you understand. I was thinking of that a good title for this would be responding to the call of nature.

And I realized, you know, we could have a video with three easy steps, you know, but I guess that doesn't quite work, does it? So the suffering that we experience, And it comes from, as I mentioned, our cultural conditioning, the conditioning within our families, really from the existential clutching that's kind of defending our existence. But the suffering that we experience is that the sense of not being able to live from our fullness. And I've always loved the way Carl Jung puts it.

He says that one of the greatest influences on their office. offspring and on themselves is the unlived life of the parents. The unlived life of the parents. Now, unlived life, you might think of it like, oh, I really, really wanted to have that career in music and I settled for computer programming or, oh, I really, you know, it's, that's one level. But really the unlived life is energetic. It's that in us which we were unwilling to draw.

into and open to and feel whether it was the loneliness or the shame or the fear or the passion or the longing. It's unlived life because whatever is left unfelt or unseen. We are identified with, we're identified with, it keeps us small. So one of the things that I think if we sense into our own life is that for many people, There really is an undercurrent of kind of a disappointment or feeling of falling short that has to do with not living the life fully. There's a sense of possibility that's not being manifested. That's unlived life.

That's that there is something we're still habitually moving away from that we're not willing to open to. And for many people, this is really the most clear convergence of Buddhist psychology and Western psychology, which is that we need to shine the light of awareness, we need to shine the light of awareness on whatever parts of the psyche we're not really open to. So if we look a little more closely, we're going to take the rest of our time to look at how we go into trance, how we leave, and then how we re-enter the wilderness. We'll use rain, which is really the guided practice of mindfulness and heartfulness,

of mindfulness and compassion. How does rain help us re-inhabit? How does it help us embrace the unlived life? So that's what we're going to explore. And as I mentioned, the trance, the leaving is sustained by being lost in thought. and we all get lost in thought. The future, the past, we have a commentary going on. And in any moment, and it's interesting to check,

when you come back from thoughts, when you're meditating, just notice, have you been aware of the sounds that are here? The sensations, the feelings? And you'll realize that it's really a cut-off. We're really cut-off in those moments. So, thoughts are useful. I mean, thoughts are not a good master, but they're a good servant, but they take over. And then it's like we're at the movies, and we're spending 24-7, or we're either dreaming

asleep or we're daydreaming, but we're at the movies. So the pathway to homecoming to the wilderness, to the God that we love, is one of recognizing the trance, oh, okay, been gone. and by the way it's part of our condition to go into trance and it's also part of our capacity this is what mindfulness does to notice it and go oh okay I've been gone how many of you have found that that you've caught yourself when you've been gone and been able to come back can I see hands for that okay so you understand we we get that we leave. We go off in these kind of train rides into a virtual world and then we go, oh, we step

off the train and you can do it in a half second. Oh, right here. So the first step is to notice we've dissociated. And the possibility is that that noticing can become quicker, cleaner, more regular for all of us. That's the possibility. Every one of us can strengthen that capacity to recognize. I often use the metaphor of the Wizard of Oz and how, you know, when Oz is behind the curtain and who was the one to pull the curtain was little dog Toto, right? You remember that? And we have that inner Toto. We have that mindfulness that senses, okay, this isn't reality. Let's pull the curtain. So practice is to notice, oh, been off and thought. it. If you judge being in trance, you deepen trance. Try not to add that second arrow,

as they call it, and we call it. Because any time you've caught on, oh, in trance, you actually have this capacity to arrive right here and you really are strengthening a muscle of remembrance. That is a gift. Okay, so the first step is to recognize the flags of trance. And in our external way of moving through the world and our thoughts, there are a few big ones. And these are all going to be really familiar to you since we're all masters of going into trance. And one of them is speeding, is we're just moving really fast and we're trying to get somewhere. And the undercurrent with each of these flags of trance is that there's a limiting belief that's going on. And the limiting belief is, I don't have enough time.

I need to get more done. Okay, can you relate to that one? That's a big one, big one. I mean, I found for myself that when I go half as fast, I notice twice as much. Remember, trance is that contracted, distorted fragment of reality. We notice a lot more when we slow down. So, one big one for trance is when you're speeding.

Another is judgment. When the mind is judging, you're wrong or I'm wrong that habit and underneath that is the belief you know things should be different something's wrong and things should be different okay

and then there's another kind of trance which is where we're in obsession and we're worrying and planning and strategizing because again there's a sense that around the corner something's wrong we have to do something this is the egoic trance that I got to keep controlling things in order to make things right just notice, just watch yourself through the day.

Most of the time there's a sense, there's a problem and I need to be solving it. As soon as you say, well, who would I be if there was no problem to be solved? No words. Okay, so we are trying to do things and control things and this was some Boy Scout, this is kind of information for Boy Scouts and it was posted in a national park. The National Park rangers are advising hikers to be alert for bears and take extra precautions to avoid an encounter. They advise park visitors to wear little bells on their clothes so they make noise when they're hiking.

Visitors should also carry pepper spray just in case the bears encountered. It's also a good idea to keep an eye out for fresh bear scats. You have an idea if the bears are in the area. People should be able to recognize the difference between black bear and grizzly bear. scat. Black bear droppings are smaller and often contain berries, leaves and possibly bits of fur. Grizzly bear droppings tend to contain small bills in the smell of pepper. The best laid plans, right? Okay, so speeding, judging, obsessing, whirring, planning, strategizing. And then the last one is very obvious. We're in trance when we're distracting and numbing ourselves when we're hooked

online, you know, just surfing or overeating. And we get it. I mean, this is not a mystery. We get it that in those moments of speeding around or judging or getting, you know, getting lost in our worries or distracting ourselves, we're not here. We get that. So when we're not here, we're not able to draw in our deepest heart and our deepest wisdom. One woman that I, some years back, was talking to me about a new relationship she was in. She was at a retreat and she was kind of obsessing about it because her concern was, well, I've made so many mistakes in past relationships. I mean, how do I know what to trust? How do I know how to trust my own perspective of whether this is the right person or whether we're going about it the right way and so on?

And so when we investigated, what became clear was that this time, as in the past, she was so busy trying to figure things out and running stories about what could go wrong or how she should act or how this person should respond and what it meant if he didn't respond and so on. She wasn't really checking in with her body and with her heart. She wasn't embodied, which is really the only way we can have wisdom. So we started practicing, okay, when all this is coming up, come into your body. And she said, well, there's just a lot of anxiety. Stay. Stay. And when she started staying with her body, she found not only anxiety but excitement

and not only excitement, but a lot of just a kind of a dynamic, creative aliveness and some space that it was happening in. and she was then able to start talking to her partner and being able to communicate in a whole new way about, oh, so here's what's coming up, in a way that actually gave them the intimacy that she was worried wasn't there. When we're in a thought trance, we miss out on reality.

We can't find out. for empathic connection and this is science is showing it you have to be embodied to have the mirror neurons activated in a way that lets you attune to another we can't attune so

the challenge is this that it was in relationship that there was wounding and the severed belonging in relationships because we were often young or it was just too much to handle is what caused the cutting off in the first place.

So for many, many people, because of neglect or abuse or a lack of attunement, and this is all a matter of degree, early on, there was a sense of this feeling of fear or shame or confusion or whatever is too much, I have to leave. And so many, many people, many of us have to a decent degree the habit of being really uncomfortable to traumatize by feeling what's here.

So we leave a lot. So again, just to summarize the trance part, we dissociate because there's pain, there's intensity, it's unfamiliar, we don't feel in control. We can't feel that we're who we are, the ego-sopharmes. that's managing things. So we leave the body. And yet, when we leave the body, we're in a trance. There's unlived life and we're not able to access our heart and our awareness. There's a kind of faux formula that goes here that pain times resistance, meaning leaving, equal suffering. So I talked some about the ways that we leave, you know, the speeding and the judge.

There's inner symptoms too that for some of us are even more remarkable, which is that it takes energy to wall off the unlived life. So if there's a lot of dissociation, there's typically a lot of tiredness, okay? There's a lot of fatigue, less access to life energy. I mean to wall off means we're blocking a flow. When we're walling off unlived life, it creates a kind of tension so there's actually a more physical tension and pain. When we're walling off unlived life, there's a chronic sense of apprehension. Why? Our body's intelligence knows that there's something we're pushing away. There's anxiety. Can I handle it?

And finally, when we're pushing away a part of our life, we get identified as a defense, self. There's a sense of the who I am as a controlling, defended, not okay self. So the identity gets very consolidated. So it's for all this that I suspect there's no one here that's listening that doesn't intuit the value, the liberating value of being able to enter the wilderness and open to what we've been pushing away. The question is, is, How is that possible? How do we listen more deeply and open more fully? Our tendency is so deep to leave.

Some of you might remember I've spoken about this little... There's a bone-shaped dog tag. And on it it says sit, stay, heal. And that's the way it is. So I'd like to... We're going to explore how we can use rain to re-enter, but I'd like to take a pause and read a prayer that I share now and then that I think is a really powerful illustration of what happens when we don't open to the unlived life.

It's called the Felt-Sense Prayer. So you might just sit back and close your eyes and just listen. Listen as if it's your own body wisdom, your own embodied spirit speaking to you. I am the pain in your head, the knot in your stomach, the unspoken grief and your smile. I'm your high blood sugar, your elevated blood pressure, your fear of challenge, your lack of trust. I'm your hut flashes, your cold hands and feet, your agitation and your fatigue. fatigue. You tend to disown me, suppress me, ignore me. You usually want me to go away immediately to disappear. You mostly are irritated or frightened at many times shocked by my arrival.

From this stance you medicate in order to eradicate me. Ignoring me, not exploring me, is your preferred response. More times than not, I'm only the most recent notes of of a long symphony, the most evident branches of roots that have been challenged for seasons. So I implore you. I am a messenger with good news, as disturbing as I can be at times. I'm wanting to guide you back to those tender places in yourself, the place where you can hold yourself with compassion and honesty. I may ask you to alter your diet, get more sleep, exercise,

regularly, breathe more consciously. I might encourage you to see a vast reality and worry less about the day-to-day fluctuations of life. I may ask you to explore the bonds and the wounds of your relationships. I am your friend, not your enemy. I have no desire to bring pain and suffering into your life. I am simply tugging at your sleeve too long immune to gentle nudges. My charge is to energize you to listen to me with the sensitive ear and heart of a mother attending to her precious baby. You are a being so vast, so complex, with amazing capacities for self-regulation and healing. Let me be one of the harbingers that lead you to the mysterious core of your being. We're inside and

wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart. So our practice, whether it's in formal meditation or through the day, is to have that intention to wake up from the trance and have that willingness to enter the wilderness, to listen and let this aliveness of our being be our friend, to inhabit our fullness. And the metaphor I like in terms of waking up out of the trance is that we typically are leaving Earth all the time or orbiting in kind of a mental movie, a satellite, and that we're coming back and we're coming back and Earth is living presence. We're coming back to the aliveness that's right here.

So we look at rain and for those of you that are unfamiliar with rain, rain is simply an acronym that guides us in bringing mindfulness and compassion to what's here. And with rain, it begins by in some way you recognize, okay, I'm in trance right now. And it might be the outer thing where you're speeding along or you're judging or obsessing or it might be an inner thing where you're feeling the real fatigue or the anxiety. But in some way you go, okay, I'm not living from the wholeness of being. So you recognize, R is recognized. And the A is allow.

You say, okay, you're not going to judge this. Let this be. Let the whole situation be there. You're pausing and allowing. When you recognize it's helpful to name what's going on because that'll deepen the recognition that this is what's going on and you don't have to be lost in it. When you allow, it's like you're saying yes, not oh yes,

the obsessing and the mental voice that's saying something's wrong is right, your yes is saying yes, okay, I'm allowing this to happen, I'm not going to judge it right now. But then the I is you begin to investigate and investigates not mental. Investigate is where you investigate in the body. What is going on inside me right now? Have you even asked that question right now? If you say to yourself, okay, what is happening inside me right now? You can begin to sense with that inquiry, some contact with the body, with the breathing, with what's here. Recognize, allow, investigate, and then whatever we come in contact with, the N is nourish.

It's bring a quality of kindness and gentleness to that. because if you think about it this way, we have been avoiding the unlived life for a long time. There's fear. And the quality of nourishing makes it safe, brings a kind of spaciousness and warmth and tenderness that makes it possible for us to embrace the unlive life. Now, the key in bringing rain to re-enter the wilderness

is after you've recognized a loud, investigated and nourished, you stay and you rest in whatever is here. In other words, you be. Just the way you might think of rain coming down in it and then after rain the flowers, spring flowers come, in a similar way, after the practices of rain, rest in that flowering state of being. Just be. That's where if you get familiar with your beingness, that's where you start accessing the love and creativity and wisdom that's really who we are. I'll give you an example of one man I worked with, used rain as a way of entering the wilderness, of embracing unlived life.

And he and his sister had been estranged for five years, six years. She had gone into a car accident and had gotten addicted to Oxycontin and she had disclosed that. she had promised not to tell anyone. And she claimed she was trying to help. He felt betrayed, that she was meddling and disrespected him. But it was really a life relationship. She was his older sister. And through his life he always felt in some way victimized by her saying you're not doing it right.

So that was the relationship. So even after he weaned from the painkillers and so on, he couldn't shake the sense of the betrayal and he ruminated a lot of. over it. So this is the trance. He really got caught in anger and blame and judgment and rumination. And it wasn't only with his sister this pattern played out. I mean he felt let down, disappointed and so on by other people but she was the main focus. So he refused to attend family gatherings and it kind of created a schism so she got angry at him because She said, you know, now you're not just hurting our relationship, you're hurting our parents

and our family, you're so selfish, you're so rigid, why can't you just be forgiving and so on? She's still being his older sister telling him how he should be different, so of course he dug in his heels even more and deepened his resolve to cut her out of his life. The only way I can heal is if I get rid of her, you know, that kind of thing. Well, as it happened, her only child, her daughter, his niece, got engaged and they were going to she was going to marry the following year. And he got a very loving note from his niece, and they had had a very sweet relationship,

and she pleaded with him to come to the wedding. So he had some months to kind of mull over this one, but he was in a conundrum. So he brought it to a retreat, and he was obsessing still. You know, if she did wrong, and if I cave, then it's like saying it's okay to treat me that way, and I'm sure you can relate.

this is very familiar kind of conflict that people get in. You know, he had this sense that he would just receive more of the same demeaning treatment. So that's where we decided to practice some rain. And the recognize, okay, so the trance is, I'm a victim, I'm being demean, I'm, you know, the obsessing, the blaming and so on. Let it be there, create some space, not to add judgment to it, and then to investigate, what's it like in my body underneath that? And for him it was the heat of anger and the feeling of pushing away

and he'd flip right back to his thoughts, you know. But then we'd keep saying, you know, investigate, what's it like in your body? Let the feelings be as big as they are. That helps with investigating when you want to become embodied. And they were very explosive outward. They were very destructive energies. But when he let that happen, he came to what he called a kind of hurting crying place, which was, you know, and a feeling of shame and badness.

And it was kind of hollow and aching. And, you know, it was the place that was basically his sister's message. You're just not doing life right. So, okay, he's investigating. And then that's when he began to nourish with kindness that place, that hollow, crying, ashamed place. and just, you know, sensing what it needed was just that presence and that kindness. And as he did it, he started describing that that hollow place was becoming increasingly tender

and alive and warm and full with light. He could feel that happening. And so I said, okay, just rest, just be, just be, there's nothing more to do. And it was in the being that he felt like, you know, his whole body lit up. He felt like it was lit up with energy that he hadn't felt for as long as he could remember. And when he did open his eyes, his eyes were incredibly bright and alive. The unlived life for him was hurt and shame that was locked in his body and had been there for a really long time. It was not a one-shot.

He recollected into victim and blaming mode and he had a redo reign many, many times. but each time you became more and more familiar with that pathway into the wilderness. And that's the invitation here. At first it's really hard because we've spent years and years not going there. I've many times shared the one inquiry of this wise sage who said, what is it you're unwilling to feel? So we all have unlived life. And there's difficulty getting in and we need to be.

to be really patient and the reign of becoming embodied. It's many, many rounds. But the good news is that with each round you become more familiar with that pathway back home to wholeness. And if you take the time after doing some rain just to rest to really let go to not do anything. Remember, it's the controller that dissociates. In the moments that you're awake in your body and not doing, those are moments of freedom. Those are moments when you can start to sense that beingness, that spirit,

that really suffuses everything. Oh, just so I almost forgot to say that they sent me a picture of the wedding and I saw a picture of him between his sister and his niece. He did go. and they were smiling through tears. You could feel the sense of the depth of what that reconciliation did. Going into the wilderness allowed him to re-establish a connection that was precious. Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains

and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. mountains. The God whom I love is inside. So let's spend a little bit of time. We'll do the last bit of this, with a meditation about entering the wilderness. And as you come into stillness, just the sense that this wilderness is our nature, our friend, it's a source of wisdom, it's a place of healing, love. That doesn't mean that that it's not difficult, that all the weather systems in the universe exist, that it is our portal to wholeness, and the pathway includes embracing the unlived life. So as you take these moments, you might find somewhere in your life where you're already

very aware distinctively of how you go into trance, some situation that you might might not be able to pause in the midst of the situation, but you can reflect on it right now from this vantage point. Situation where you get very speeded up or very caught in judgment, perhaps where you get caught obsessing and trying to figure out solving a problem, where you get squeezed with that sense of something's wrong or something's going to go wrong and you leave yourself. you have a situation in mind, this is a kind of applied meditation, the reign of embodiment, just to recognize, okay, this is trance.

This is the doing, defended self, leaving, cutting off. That's the recognizing. The allowing is to not make yourself wrong for it. Everybody, everybody, everybody leaves the moment, leaves our bodies. We all do it at times. So just to allow, just say, okay, allowing, accepting, give it some space and that'll enable you to move to the eye of rain. When you're in that and go ahead and let yourself be aware of what it's like when you're

in those circumstances, when you're triggered, when you're in that, when you're afraid of what's around the corner, afraid of failure. If you investigate what's it like in your body, perhaps you can feel your throat, your chest, your belly and just imagine that situation and feel what goes on. We've spent millions of moments leaving our bodies. This deconditions the trance, being willing to enter. the wilderness, what's happening? Is there a clutch of anxiety? Is there a feeling of embarrassment or shame? Is there the heat of anger? Just stay. Breathe and stay, investigating and noticing. And as you do, you might begin the end of rain to sensing that you're offering kind,

caring energy to whatever you're noticing. For some it's helpful to bring the hand to the heart as a way of that gesture that really is one of sincere nourishing. Whatever you're noticing, okay, this is the deconditioning of trance. We're entering the wilderness and we enter with our investigating curious mind and we enter with kindness. Notice what's happening in your body. Breathe with it.

Even if you haven't been able to get in touch with a strong emotion, whatever you're feeling right now counts. Breathe with it, whatever's predominant. Inhabit this aliveness that's right here, however it is. Feel from the inside out, the throat, the chest, the belly. Let it be washed through with kindness. And then for these last few moments, simply rest. Let your intention be to let life be just as it is, just to be.

Let this life live through you now. Keep relaxing back and letting be. In the moments of embracing the unlived life and then simply being, we discover a heart as wide as the world. This is how John Muir put it. This is a song by John Muir as part of our closing. Here is a calm so deep, grasses, seas waving. Everything in wild nature fits into us,

as if truly part and parent of us. The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not pass but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks and the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love. taking a few full breaths, opening your eyes.

We're going to continue this exploration because there's an inquiry that I didn't really touch on tonight which is, what about if it's too much? What if it's too hard to enter the wilderness? We're going to explore how we can do it gradually, wisely, kindly when we face that it feels like too much experience. But in the meanwhile, I'd like to know invite you to practice during these weeks. When you notice you're off, practice just pausing

and arriving again in your senses with interest and kindness. Thank you for your attention. Namaste. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.