Tara Brach - Embodied Awareness - Pain and Living Fully - Part 3 (2016-03-30)

Episode Date: April 2, 2016

Embodied Awareness - Pain and Living Fully - Part 3 (2016-03-30) - The experiences we most value - feeling creative, loving, vital - require being awake in our bodies. Yet when faced with physical pain, our conditioning is to pull away from our bodies, and get lost in thoughts. This talk offers guidance in working mindfully with different levels of pain, as we cultivate our capacity to live from an embodied presence and open heart. 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. I'd like to begin with a true story that some of you, D.C. area folks may remember. This took place in a Washington, D.C. Metro Station in 2007, where a man played violin. He played six. Bach pieces for 45 minutes. And during the time he was playing those pieces about 2,000 people went through the metro station and most they're on their way to work and only six people stopped to listen for a very short time and there were a few

children that stopped but their parents quickly hurried them along. So no one knew it but the violin player was Joshua Bell and he and he and he, you know, one of the greatest musicians in the world, and he was playing some incredibly intricate, amazing Bach pieces, and he was playing it on a violin worth $3.5 million, and just a couple of days earlier he had played in Boston where the seats averaged $100 a person. So here he is in the metro, and pretty much nobody stopped. So he was incognito. It was part of a Washington Post social experiment about how our society experiences beauty. And it brought up an important question, which is if we don't have a moment to stop and listen

to one of the best musicians in the world, how much do we miss? Really? And if we think of our day and how we move through our day and for most of us, we kind of are aware that we're rushing forward. You can feel it, you can feel your bodies on its way somewhere else. And we leave our bodies, we leave our senses, so what are we missing? Are we here for the changing seasons or for the excitement of our children? Are we here for our own bodies, our loneliness, our excitement, our passions? So, the last couple of classes have been talking about the theme of being embodied, being fully awake and happening our bodies.

But one of the main elements here is that if you think of the great epiphanies, you know, in your life, the moments when, if you were looking back at your life that felt really meaningful, the common denominator would be that in those moments you are awake and in your senses. Those are not moments that you were thinking about the past or the future. The moments that matter where there's a sense of meaning, we're here for them. And I'd say the other side of it is that some of the greatest suffering that gets brought to me and I hear different kind of flavors of suffering. But some of the deepest is a sense of disappointment about our life,

that my life isn't what I wanted it to be, imagined it to be, it's not turning out. There's a sense of skimming the surface or racing to the end line, which is death, you know. But in some way not dropping in and not really living it. The Buddha talked about our fathom long body and he said within this fathom long body has found all the teachings, is found suffering, the cause of suffering and the end of suffering. And in another way of articulating it, within this fathom long body we experience this mysterious

flow of life and this body is where we actually experience love. We can talk about it and think about it, but this is where we experience love. And this body is the portal through this living form to that formless dimension that really brings us to wholeness, that sense of that timeless dimension. So the body is the gateway and the challenges, and this is what we've been exploring over these last few weeks, is that when the going gets tough on any, any level, we are designed to leave. We leave the premises. And it's a universal conditioning just to pull away from unpleasantness. And then to the degree that leaving becomes habituated,

to the degree that we're in some way dissociated, to that degree we lose a sense of vitality, creativity, love. So each of us has some experience, you know, that kind of jarring sense of, boy, you know, there's an incessant dialogue going on in here and I'm in it a lot. And I often review my day and see the swaths of time when I was just, you know, in that figuring out mode or planning or whatever it is, we're in it a lot. And it's, it's, we're in a culture that perpetuates it big time. We spend so much time in front of a screen. And are we feeling our bodies in those moments?

Probably not very much. There's a book called The Shallows. I can't remember the name of the author, but it describes how more and more just the way our brain is working. We are taking in a massive amount of information more than ever, but there's not a deep sense

of how it gets understood or integrated. In other words, the shallows means we have kind of attention deficit and we play on the surface and we take a lot of pieces in, but there's not a depth of understanding. There's not a depth of putting together the patterns or seeing the big picture. By example, a proposal by the British Government Agency, they decided to let, through the East,

internet, people suggest the name for a $287 million polar research ship. So there's this ship. And so they cast about for suggestions for the name via the internet. They thought it would be a good idea just to draw on the collective wisdom. So the web users unleashed their creative energy. And the frontrunner, the name was RRS Bodey-Moteface. Boady McBoatface? I mean, come on. As the name for... I mean, to me it's like that's what we come up with. Bodie McBoatface? I don't know. It struck me. I don't know about you. So one of the basic ways of describing it is a mind-body split, whereby just in terms of how we're evolving, we're spending more and more time in a mental, virtual realm. And there's a big price to pay for that

disconnection, a really big price to pay, more and more addiction, more and more violence. When we're living cut off from our body, we're also cut off from empathy and compassion. So there's more violence. We also are cut off from really knowing how to listen to our bodies and take care of our bodies. And so there's eating disorders and sleeping disorders and obesity. and we're cut off from our larger body, the body of the Earth. If we really want to respond to what's going on with our Earth,

we have to feel our belonging, that the Earth is our body, and care enough to respond. I'm sure a lot of you saw the front page of the New York Times today where there's been improved computer modelings of Antarctica, and it's now becoming clear, that the ice cap there, the glacier caps there, it's melting at a pace that's way faster than they thought. So what it seemed like would take hundreds of years is all going to happen by the end of the century, which is something like a five to six foot increase in terms of water level,

which wipes out the coastlines in most coastal cities. And you know, I say that, and for many of us we've heard this kind of thing a lot, so it just sits in a compartment in our brain, but our body doesn't feel it. What's it going to take? So in the 1900s, Deach Lawrence was writing, and one of the things he wrote that had a kind of urgency to it was in 1931. So here he was in this society that was devastated by war and by the landscape was despoiled by industrialization.

and I want to read you what he wrote. I think it was in Lady Chatterley's lover, but I'm not positive. Let me see if I have it here. He says, it is a question practically of relationship. We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. For the truth is we are perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs. We are cut off from the great sources of our inward needs.

nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe. Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe. That image, this great uprooted tree with the roots in the air, we must plant ourselves again in the universe. So I actually think of meditation as exactly that process, that we're going from that virtual reality with our roots in the air and we're re-establishing our connection in a very intimate way

with the life that's right here, which then enables us to connect with each other and the earth and really feel that sense of spirit that moves through everything. One of the ways that I've been describing it is that, you know, when there's unpleasantness, we pull away. And the last talk explored how when we have that unpleasantness of difficult emotions, how we pull away and how we can learn to come back into the body and really find some freedom. Well, similarly, when there's physical pain we pull away. and I'd like to explore that in this class.

Like how do we work with physical pain? How do we replant ourselves? How do we stay when it's really unpleasant in our bodies? And it's interesting that physical and emotional pain have greatly overlapping neural regions in the brain. So actually the strategies are quite similar. But there are wise ways of working with physical pain and learning to stay.

One of the great examples I love, you know, that kind of shows this is there's a Hindu yogi, Swami Satchananda. And he, this was once in a health food store, I saw this poster of him. And he was on a surfboard and he was doing treposed, you know, that one-legged trepose on a surfboard. And the caption underneath said, you can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. Come meditate with Swami Satchananda, you know, gave the time and the place. so on. And in a similar way we can't stop the waves of pleasantness and unpleasantness. It's going to happen and some of us are going to lock into some chronic unpleasant, some of us extremely acute and we need to find a way to surf. So the core teaching on this is that

that unpleasantness, that pain is inevitable. Every one of us, it's inevitable. But suffering is optional. That's the core teaching, that we can't stop the waves, we can find a way not to suffer. So we'll look at a bit how the correlate to that teaching, the other core, is that the more we resist unpleasantness, the more we suffer. And there's one of those faux kind of equations, which is pain times resistance equals suffering. The more we feel unpleasantness and contract, the more we suffer. Now we contract in a bunch of ways. When there's physical discomfort, we contract physically.

We tense against it. More in a big way, we mentally tense against it. So we tense against it with our attitude. We go, this is bad, this is a problem, I have to figure it out, it's wrong, it's my fault, it's somebody else's fault. I'm a victim, but that's a mental tensing. That's an add-on. And then we fixate on how long is it going to last

and what does it mean and what's it going to deprive me from doing? So that's all the mental resistance in that equation. The attitude that serves, this is across the board, is instead of being at war with pain to stop the war,

to do whatever is possible and kind and wise to relieve ourselves and to stop the war, to just let reality be reality. This is what is and not add on bad, wrong, victim, oppressed, because that tension in our system actually is where the suffering comes from. So let's look at the practice. We're going to do a little practice together also with unpleasantness. So if you came tonight and you're actually, or you're listening to the podcast and you're actually feeling some pain, you're in luck. So I'm going to explore it on three levels.

And the first level of unpleasantness or pain is the level where it's unpleasant, but it's tolerable. It's like, you know, we can do this level. Okay. And the second level we're going to look at is where it's getting much more edgy and challenging. But, you know, you can handle it, but it's just really not fun. And then the third will be when it's too much. So the first level, when it's tolerable and yet unpleasant, the core practice is recognizing and allowing.

Those are the wings of mindfulness, that there's a very direct, without an add-on of thinking, what's this like, recognizing? It's that question, is, how is this experience right now inside me? And then the allowing is, can we let it be? So that's the core of when it's tolerable. And we're actually with that what's happening, bringing an interest. So instead of calling it pain, which locks it in conceptually,

there's a kind of investigation of this constellation of sensations. What's it really like? okay burning, stinging, twisting, aching, pressing, squeezing, what's it really like? And how does it change? So this is mindfulness to notice, to examine, to allow. It's this non-reactive presence. And what happens when we're not resisting is there's this really profound shift that happens from in some way feeling a sense of something's wrong

to an impersonal presence that's just allowing things to happen and it might not be pleasant but it's fine that's the shift that's really freeing we're going to practice that in a moment but we'll use for mindfulness we'll use the acronym rain because that'll allow you to bring the fullness

of that mindful presence to whatever's uncomfortable. And out of interest, how many of you feel like if you scanned your body and you really were paying attention, you'd find some discomfort right now? How many? Yeah, so those of you that are listening, that was about 75%. Okay, so we're going to bring rain to pain. Okay, rain to pain. and this will be inviting you to come into stillness

and you might scan and see where there may be something and this is not a time if you have really severe pain to dig in but more where you feel something that's a mild or moderate discomfort in your body sitting still, letting your awareness scan through your body and if you notice an area where the sensations, you might sense the sensations as unpleasant. Let your attention hover there. We begin the acronym R is Recognize.

So just to recognize, okay, unpleasant. And the A is Lao, which is really where you're giving space for it to be just as it is. you're noticing if there's any attitude of non-allowing and you're having the intention at least to let things be as they are okay recognize and allow now with some interest and a gentle attention begin to investigate just be curious about this constellation of sensations You might bring the attention right to the center of them where you feel the most intensity. Or you might titrate by sensing the outer area of them and then sinking in a little more deeply as you go.

But be curious and sense, so what's it really like? Is it throbbing, aching? Is it hot? Is it cool? How does it move or change? Does it get more intense, spread? Does it get heavier or lighter? Since this constellation of sensations floating there, you're just examining with interest, with gentleness. You might notice if there's any emotions around the sensations,

some fear, tension of some sort. Just include in mindfulness, let everything be, let everything float, the eye of rain is to investigate, including the attitude. The N of rain is to nourish, which means to bring to that gentle investigating a quality of kindness. That quality of care or heart that can really free us to simply be, free us to let the sensations move as they are, to have things be unpleasant but not suffering. after we've done the steps of rain, recognizing, allowing, investigating, adding that kindness,

the nourishing, there's a simple resting in awareness and just notice as you rest the difference between feeling like you're a self that's oppressed by pain and this awareness that's simply allowing and noticing the weather system that's moving through. Notice the difference and rest. How many of you felt that as you did that, your relationship to the sensations really did shift so there wasn't any opposition, you really felt a sense that you were... it was unpleasant but not suffering.

Can I just see by hands? How many of you get a taste of that? Good. So, what happens when it gets more challenging, when it's not so easy to hang out there? Okay? The metaphor I like for this, because what we're really, what the approach is when it's less tolerable that we need to find some more space, some more room for it, okay? And the metaphor that I like is that if you imagine you've got a sink and you put a bunch

of tablespoons of salt in it, the water in there would get salty. but if you throw those same tablespoons into a lake, they dissolve and there's no notable difference. Similarly, if you can widen and expand the sense of your being, if you can tap into space, more space, then there's room for what's there and you can then be with it and actually you can begin to practice rain with it because you are operating from a larger space. So how do you do that? One of the ways is that you, and you can explore this even as I'm speaking, you might close your eyes, especially those of you that have unpleasant sensations that are more difficult,

that you might sense that beyond the body the space that's in the room, sense the air on your skin, the sounds around you, the light outside. So there's a sense of exterior space that you connect with and you kind of let yourself relax outward into that. Another way to touch space is to find in your body some places where it's either pleasant or neutral. So, for instance, let's say you have a really bad ache to the lower back, but your hands are just fine. You're feeling kind of just tingling or vibrating there. Rest your attention in your hands. We call the lower back would be considered zone one, the unpleasant area.

And the hands are zone two. So you want a zone one and a zone two. And then the way to practice is gently start going back and forth. So you establish yourself, you establish the zone two, you really get your attention there and then you dip into zone one

but you know you can take a break and reestablish a larger sense of space and ease as you come back to zone two. So this is pendulated. going back and forth from a, if it was emotions, from a safe or loving space to the difficult emotions and with pain from a pleasant or neutral place to the unpleasant. That's one way that you can do it. What happens when you do that is you get increasingly a sense of tolerance that you can

include what's difficult and again it's painful but not suffering. I taught this in radical acceptance, you know, working with pain and bringing mindfulness to pain and then these strategies of having some space and going back and forth. And I got a email from a man called Eduardo Okubaru. Here's what he said. Thank you once more. Your book helped me a lot to cope with pain some days ago when I had terrible renal colics due to a kidney stone. Once I expel it, I will name the stone after you.

you. So flattering, you know. So what we're exploring are the different strategies and one is rain to bring just to bring a full mindful, heartfelt presence. And by the way, with rain, the N of rain that nourishing really makes a difference because to the degree that there's an opposition to the pain, that's still going to create tension and suffering. So with the end of with nourishing. When you're offering kindness, it really helps to soften the field. One man did an experiment, this was years back, he had psoriasis on his arms, and he did a loving kindness practice sending love to one of his arms, but not the other one, and the psoriasis disappeared on the arm that he was sending metta or loving kindness to. It was an N of one,

so I don't know how much it counted, but it was an interesting experiment. So let's look at what we do when it's too much, okay? Because pretty much everyone I know has had times when it was absolutely unintelligent and uncompassionate to stay with pain. It would be exhausting, it would be overwhelming, it's not useful. So we need to know when it's too much, how do we shift gears? And this is something that takes some practice, learning to turn our attention to something that's engaging, that's wholesome enough.

It could be reading a book, listening to music, having to, talking with a friend. For many people, because the feeling of pain when it's too much comes with fear, the relationship with another person being in some way in contact with another person can be very, very helpful. One of the stories that I've always loved that describes when it's, too much, was shared by Frank Osseskeskes, who's a Zen hospice. And he worked with a man who was dying of stomach cancer. And so the pain was a lot.

And the man asked him to teach him a meditation or guide him in a meditation so he could be with the pain. So Frank began, but the guy very quickly said, it's too much. It's too painful to meditate with. So, Frank offered his hands to place on the man's belly to help hold the pain. Now that's an example of connecting with a larger space. So if you can feel the hands and feel the other person, there's more room for the pain. And he said a little better but it wasn't enough.

So Frank put his hands further from his belly and he said, oh, that's lovely. Because he had opened to enough of a larger sense of space that the pain could be there and he wasn't fighting it. And so then Frank invited him to rest a bit in that space. And the man said, rest in love, rest in love. And that became his mantra. And every time, you know, he couldn't penetrate the direct sensation of pain, but when pain would come up, he'd get help from the morphine pump,

but his help, his refuge, rest in love. I really find that as a very powerful teaching that when we're caught in pain, sometimes, if you think of it as an ocean and waves, sometimes the waves of pain are tolerable enough and if you stay right with them and you sense their contour and you sense the shape and feeling and experience of them, in that presence you'll sense the oceanness. You'll become big from that presence and waves can. come and go. They can be unpleasant but it's not suffering. Sometimes if they're really strong waves, instead of getting rolled by the waves you need to in some way stretch out

your consciousness and sense the oceansness. And rest in love is a beautiful example of how one person did it. So we in each of our lives are going to be doing all of those. Some Sometimes we'll be directly with the waves and there's so much revealed from that and other times we'll be trying to sense the larger space. However we do it, it's by replanting in this bodily universe that we start discovering a level of freedom and aliveness that we hadn't known was possible. I wanted to read you how one teacher described it and she experienced this through a out with cancer. She writes, a large abdominal tumor was removed and with it all that I had

clung to as certainties in my life. I quit work and I stopped the teaching. I turned to anything I thought might help me change what had led to the cancer from acupuncture to depth therapy. I became humble before the body. That was 15 years ago and I can now say that it was the biggest turning point and awakening of all. I had used my body to practice in the past. Now I had to inhabit it, respect it, love it with all the feminine force and nurturing and understanding I had withdrawn into my spiritual life. Keeping my heart in my body became my practice. Keeping my heart in my body became my practice. And it has become my practice. And it has become glorious. Even the first awakenings into perfection and grace did not come close to showing

me the joy of living in the body, in the senses, in each moment. I love my life in a new way. This has become the place of freedom. Keeping my heart in my body became my practice. So tonight I started with Joshua and how we leave our bodies and miss out. And the invitation is to have our practice more and more be to wake up these senses and feel from the inside out, this aliveness. And inevitably we will encounter the unpleasantness of difficult emotions and difficult sensations. And then we have to navigate.

Each one of us either stay directly contact with that recognizing, allowing, investigating, nurturing, are, at times, we resource ourselves with something larger. We rest in love. We sense the space that's there. And we go back and forth, back and forth. But either way, in the increased presence with our bodies, we begin to see the truth of reality.

We begin to recognize everything's changing, radically impermanent. We get to recognize firsthand that in the moments we try to control it, stop it, grasp at it, we're going to be suffering. We get small. And we start recognizing that when we let be, when we truly let be, we discover a quality of aliveness and presence and a kind of formless, timeless, timeless quality of awareness that feels like home.

So I'd like to close with a meditation. So if you will, just to adjust how you're sitting so that you're comfortable and alert, intention be... to arrive and inhabit this living body, to let this life be a portal entering and experiencing fully, beginning by opening to sensations. You might scan through your body and notice

if there's any areas of particular tightness or tension. Because when there's tension or a body in a way we're pushing away the moment, We're tensing against what's here. See what part of you might want to let go just a little bit more right now. Feeling the aliveness in the hands, feeling the contact places where you're sitting on this earth. The pressure, warmth at your bottom where you contact your chair or cushion, where your hands rest on your legs or knees,

your feet are on the floor. and feeling from the inside out, the aliveness that's here. Let everything happen. You deepen your attention to this living play of this dance of sensation. You might sense, is there a center to this aliveness? Can you find a center? Is there any boundary? Is there anything that's not moving anywhere?

Just keep letting go into the changing flow. Can you sense the space that everything's happening in? The space, the interior space it's arising from, the space that's filled with awareness, just aliveness and awareness. Continuing in presence as you listen to this poem Hokusai says, Hokusai says, look carefully. He says, pay attention.

notice. He says, keep looking. Stay curious. He says, there's no end to seeing. He says, look forward to getting old. He says, keep changing. You just get more who you really are. He says, get stuck.

Accept it. Repeat yourself as long as it's interesting. He says, keep doing what you love. He says, keep praying. He says, every one of us is a child, every one of us is ancient, every one of us has a body, he says every one of us is frightened. He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear. He says, everything is alive, shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees, wood is alive, water is alive.

everything has its own life everything lives inside us he says live with the world inside you it matters that you care it matters that you feel it matters that you notice it matters that life lives through you

contentment is life living through you joy is life living through you Satisfaction and strength is life living through you. Peace is life living through you. He says, don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. Look, feel, let life take you by the hand.

Let life live through you. Namaste, blessings. We have a little time this evening, as I mentioned, about 10 minutes. So if anyone has questions about this whole process of embodiment and everything we talked about, please feel free. Hi. Would you please discuss if there are any differences, what those differences might be between using the rain method

for alleviating suffering from physical pain compared to suffering from emotional pain? So the question is, the difference is using rain in working with physical and emotional pain. And thanks to the question, it's a really important one. The suffering that comes from physical pain is emotional. The sensations themselves are really unpleasant, but it's when we add the fear of what's going to happen

or the shame of feeling our own vulnerability. that's where it becomes real suffering. So in a way, when we bring rain to physical, we start including the attitude and bringing our presence to that. The physical sensations themselves are just extremely unpleasant, but that's it. So it's a really important recognition.

If you leave here and you leave, and the one thing you go with is when there's physical unpleasantness to say, okay, how am I relating to? to this? What's my attitude? That will give you a whole other dimension of mindfulness and presence that will actually give you more flexibility in working with what's there. On the mic back again, I think there's a follow-up question. What if the physical pain isn't physical but some sort of loss? Again, then you're bringing rain to emotion. And when

you bring rain to emotion, you're paying very much attention to sensations. Okay. Anytime you're working with rain with the investigating, even though it sounds like investigating would be a mental word, you're actually investigating how what's being experienced is happening in the body. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Hi. So with meditation, I think my main struggle is to keep calm. It's like whenever I start doing it, It's like, ideas start like attacking. It's like, now it's that ideas start like attacking. Now it's time to think and I don't want to think.

It's like, what do you do with that struggle? Yeah, so the big challenge then and how to be present in the body is that you're running into the talking brain, right? It's a wonderful question because that really is one of the first layers of meditation training that we all have to keep coming back to, which is we have huge,

huge, huge practice being in our minds. Many, many mind moments of habituated thought. So again and again it's patience, really being patient, just saying, oh, talking again, don't make it wrong. You know, if you're at war with your thoughts, you'll be at war for the rest of your life, you know, because, you know, the mind secretes thoughts like the body secretes enzymes. We just think. So be patient and just know that if you have an intent, you have an to say thank you very much thoughts and come back to your body, that the more times you do that, the more it'll create a kind of inclination to be more embodied. So you can trust every time you return from thoughts without making it a judgment.

Just return with interest and friendliness. You're actually creating a new habit in your body and heart and mind. Okay? So thank you for bringing that in. Yeah. So with the emotional pain, if you've become practice in rain and accepting and giving the pain space, I think there's also times when you just become numb. I don't have physical pain, my heart doesn't hurt because I'm so good at just accepting and moving on,

but I think there's a level of numbness that's attached to that. And so what do you do with it? I mean, there's so much heartbreak in life. It's just, that's the way it is. So, you know, I paint, I write. What are you supposed to do with all the pain, right? So is the question that sometimes what we're working with is physical pain or emotional pain. Sometimes what we're facing is really a numbness.

Is that it? You want to feel it, but you also have to keep going, right? Because you've got responsibilities and life, and, you know, you want to let go of it and move on. but we don't have time to feel it and let it go and do all that kind of stuff because it's just life just moves too quickly. For different people, it means different things to say, well, I need to get on with my life or I need to be with this, but I feel numb. For some people, the numbness is really a very old protective mechanism

because way back then it was too much, and there's still a fear that it's too much. and for others it's just temporary and actually it's very useful to go do other things and it enlarges us and it gives us some more resilience and perspective and then we can come back so it's individual but one thing to say is the most useful guideline for me is just to keep starting right where I am in the moment so if right this moment there's numbness just to begin to bring an interest in a care and not make it wrong, but that becomes the portal. So if wherever you are, you bring a quality of respect and curiosity and presence, it actually unfolds itself in a very

natural way rather than trying to figure out, you know, should I be here or should I be doing something else? Just to let that be in the forefront your guiding principle. Just keep starting fresh right where you are. And I appreciate your question because it's very nuanced. Thank you. Yeah, so we have maybe time for one or two more. Hi. Something that I run into a lot is tuning out. And can you talk about that a little? If I'm tuned out, if you're tuned out, then the brain doesn't happen. How do you? What's your way of tuning out? Like, how do you do it? Just turn off. Turn off. But say a little more. just so I can, do you get, you preoccupied?

I guess maybe disconnecting from emotion, disconnecting from my body, that emotionally, mentally and physically, like that my mind leaves my emotional and physical self. And when you notice that you've tuned out, do you then decide to come back again? That's the challenge is actually noticing it, and I was wondering if you could say more about that. Yeah, so this is for all of us.

And every one of us has strategies of disconnecting. And I often talk about false refuges as, you know, that we have our particular styles. And some of us just get completely lost in an online game or an online, or just, you know, surfing the web. And others go into some obsessive thinking and planning or fantasizing or whatever. And others will use food or whatever. So it's really useful to, when you're in a very accepting and open and curious space, just to kind of sense, okay, these are the signs of trance for me. And start each day having the intention just to notice it.

Like you might even just name it, say, okay, this is a trance right now, this is a signal of trance. That might be all you do for a few months, not trying to get yourself out of it, not trying to manage anything. just with interest being able to say, oh, okay, in a trance now. And of course that's the beginning of not being in a trance. Then what happens is there becomes a kind of yearning when you've said, okay, in a trance now, to be a little more here. And that's where you start inviting yourself to what I call relax back. You're not forcing yourself to get somewhere, more, you're kind of relaxing open your senses.

You're checking, okay, well, what am I really here? right now. What's right now going on in my heart? So you begin to begin more intimate with the moment that way. But start by noticing your exit strategies and just naming it for now until you get pretty onto yourself when you've left. Does that make sense? Yeah and thank you so much because this is really what we're all working with. We have unpleasant sensations, unpleasant emotions. we are habituated to going into a trance and it's counter to our conditioning to decide to come back. And yet, in each of us who's here, each of us who's listening, there's some deep wisdom that knows that we will not find the freedom and the love

and the spiritual realization that we yearn for if we keep the habit of leaving in trance. We kind of know that. So go at it with a kind of patience and humor and gentleness, and you can trust that if it's your aspiration to wake up from trance, you're already waking up. You're already waking up. So thank you for being here. Thank you for your wonderful questions,

and we will get together again next week. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.