Tara Brach - Embodied Presence: Gateway to Intimacy and Freedom

Episode Date: February 29, 2012

2012-02-29 - Embodied Presence: Gateway to Intimacy and Freedom - We often move through the day in a reactive trance, removed from the aliveness of our bodies and this natural world. This talk explores how coming home to our bodies awakens us to living love, creativity and the deepest realization of who we are. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

I wanted to begin by saying that I've been away for about 10 days, and it's really great to be back here and see all of you. And I was on one of the first vacation slash retreats I've had in quite a long time. And it was really a treat because I got to slow down enough so that I actually could watch clouds that were going very slowly and watch them move through the sky, you know, and feel the breeze and see the change of light through the day. and listen to birds and feel myself walking on the earth.

And it was the kind of thing where I just really was not on my way anywhere. And part of what happened was I sensed this ever-deepening well-being and was remembering the line from Zen Master Dogen who says that to be enlightened is to be intimate with all things. and how much we have to step out of our familiar cocoon of thoughts and really slow down, really pay attention to feel that intimacy.

And it was one of those realizations I've had many, many times that this longing for intimacy we have and how it requires just kind of quieting, and it requires coming into our bodies and our senses. There is no way that we can be connected with our inner life and with each other and with the earth and care about our inner life and each other and the earth if we're not in our bodies. And I don't know if as I say this you're checking to see, okay, am I here or not, you know. but we leave a lot.

So really our bodies live in the present moment. Our senses live in the present moment. So right now, if you're aware of sounds and if you're aware of sensations, feelings, you're here. You're on that path of intimacy, of connection. and if you're accepting what you're aware of if you're aware of it and there's no resisting

that's the beginning of being in love being awake so I got inspired to while I was a way to talk about how our body and our senses really are this gateway to to intimacy and freedom and I got back and then I started to write down some notes.

And quite soon, after returning, this isn't so long ago, Jonathan, my husband, who I was with, got a cold, and he was miserable, and then I realized I was getting a cold, and for the last few days I've been fighting a cold. So I kept saying, okay, the body, this gateway to intimacy, and I'm feeling all this ache and heaviness and tiredness and weakness.

And then, you know, I had been enjoying the outdoors so much, so I, of course, I'm out on my morning walk, and it's cold and rainy this morning and even my dog wouldn't come with me, you know. And yet, and still, there was a sense that this choosing to be here anyway, that it doesn't matter

if it's pleasant or unpleasant. It's more pleasurable if it's pleasant, but the quality of heerness of presence is such a refuge. There's so much more sense of of being at home. And last week, I don't know how many of you were here, but the talk was on love.

And it's so clear that an embodied presence, being awake in this body, awake in our hearts, is what allows love, our compassion, to be a living love, not an abstraction. It's so clear that embodied presence being awake in this body actually gives rise to creativity. It actually allows us to experience our natural intelligence and that this embodied awareness is the gateway to actually full realization of who we are. So that's what I'd like to kind of explore those different elements,

how we can move through this awakenness in our body, to really manifest and fulfill who we are, what our capacities are. I thought I'd start with a short interfaith story that is kind of about this pathway to intimacy with life. And here we have a Catholic priest and a Baptist preacher and a rabbi, and they're all chaplains at a university in the Northwest, and they get together two or three times a week for coffee and talk shop. and one day someone made the comment that preaching to people isn't really hard.

The real thing is how do you preach and actually convert or wake up a bear? That was their thing. That would be it. So one thing led to another and they decided to do an experiment. They'd all go out into the woods and find a bear and preach to it and an attempt to convert it. So seven days later they come together to discuss their experiences. So Father Flannery, who had his arm in a sling and had very, bandages on his body and limbs went first.

Well, he said, I went into the woods to find me a bear, and when I found him, I began to read to him from the catechism. Well, that bear wanted nothing to do with me and began to slap me around. So I quickly grabbed my holy water, sprinkled him, and Holy Mother Mary of God, he became as gentle as a lamb. The bishop is coming out next week to give him first communion and confirmation. Now, Reverend Billy Bob spoke next. He was in a wheelchair, had one arm and both legs.

in a cache than an IV drip. In his best fire in Brimstone Oratory, he claimed, well, brothers, you know we don't sprinkle. I went out and I found me a bear. And then I began to read to my bear from God's Holy Word, but that bear wanted nothing to do with me. So I took hold of him and we began to wrestle. And we wrestled down one hill and up another and down another

until we came to a creek. So I quickly dunked him and baptized his hairy soul. And just like you said, he became gentle as a lamb. We spent the rest of the day praising, Jesus. Hallelujah. The priest and the reverend both looked down at the rabbi. Now, he's lying in a hospital bed. He's in a body cast and traction with IVs and monitors running in and out of him.

He was in really bad shape. The rabbi looked up and said, looking back at it, circumcision might not have been the best way to start. Okay. So, our theme here, how an embodied presence gives rise to the wise choices and decisions and relatedness. Spiritual awakening. So the first recognition is we start looking at what takes us away.

What takes us away from really being right here, living awake here. And we all have our agendas. You know, we go through our day with our agendas, and clearly there's important things in our life, but we're just constantly hooked on what next we're going to do. what we're on the way to, what we want to avoid, what we're worried about, what we're planning. And so our agendas keep us disconnected.

They disconnect us from the creativity that's here and really the wildness and aliveness of our being. I heard a story about a mother who is a art teacher at a university and she was telling her daughter what she did for work. She said, you know, I teach people to draw. And the daughter looked at her and said, you mean they forgot? And in a way, we do forget.

I always think of John O'Donohue, who said, what really happened to our wildness? You know, how did we lose touch with that sense of awe or mystery or freshness? So I remember for myself, it was very distinct when I first discovered how much aliveness I was missing out on. And I was in a yoga class. I just started yoga.

It was my sophomore year of college. And the yoga teacher had us do this kind of guided practice. And you can try it if you'd like right now. I mean, just to begin with, just to help, you might look at your hand and are both hands. and just see what you know you can turn them around a bit and see what they look like to you and any thoughts or ideas you have about your hands what they mean to you how you relate to them just kind of in your mind go hand here it is or hands and then you might gently close your eyes and rest your hands gently softly somewhere and now soften the hands as we often do

soften them and begin to feel them from the inside, fingers from the inside, the aliveness between the palms and the back of the hand. So you're directly aware of the tingling or the pulsing, places of pressure, warmth, sense if there's really a boundary or shape to what you call hand, when you're just contacting the aliveness, and the space, the energy that's there,

is there any real sense of shape? Can you sense it as a field of energy, a kind of changing field of energy? Kind of like points of light in a night sky. My yoga teacher then moved to other parts of the body, the knots and the shoulders, sensing how we can relax them in response to just paying attention, how we can soften and open the belly,

feel the aliveness there, the flow. the flow of energy in our arms or legs. You can continue to stay aware of your body. But for me, this very direct contact with aliveness brought up a tremendous sense of gratitude. I could feel just how enlarged and dazzling alive everything was. And what she really had done it was introduced me to meditation and to what in the Buddhist tradition

is called the first foundation of mindfulness, which is this alive body, this sensory awareness. So the Buddha, and one of the most famous of his teachings, and this is from Satybatana Suta, said this. He said, there's one thing that when cultivated and regularly practiced leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness, to clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge, to happy life here and now,

and to the culmination of wisdom and awakening. And what is that one thing? It's mindfulness centered on the body. It's feeling this aliveness right here inside us. So I mentioned how our perpetual agenda for getting things done gets in the way. And the Buddha called this, he described this as the waterfall, this incessant kind of stream of thoughts and emotions that then drive us into activity and they're underneath them as a lot of fear and wanting and he described how we we live in a chain of reactivity many moments of the day

that were driven by wants and fears and we're just kind of spinning in our thoughts and our feelings and and cut off really cut off figuring things out judging things just cuts us off and so we really can't discover this intimacy and freedom that the Buddha talks about in the Saty Patanah Suta and I've been describing a little that intimacy with life unless we learn how to recognize okay I'm in that chain of reactivity can I come back home right now can I come back home that's really that's really mostly what we're doing here is just noticing we've gotten caught in that trance and that waterfall, as the Buddha puts it. And we're kind of noticing that and realizing, wait a minute,

there's something else that's possible. There's a more fresh, beautiful, alive, wise way to live this life. Can I come back? So we start training ourselves. And I'll share with you one of my early wake-ups in the power of this training, which I shared the story in radical acceptance in the book because it impacted me so much. And this was when my son, Narayan, was in eighth grade. A lot came to a kind of culmination. His grades started sliding, and he was very into computer games and TV and pretty much anything but homework. And I was trying to give boundaries more teeth, you know, so I would daily, angrily barge into his room and find him doing this and know he should be doing that. And found that I was actually in a chronic state of being irritated at him.

So even when it had nothing to do with homework and stuff, in some way I was carrying a grudge because he just wasn't doing his life though I wanted him to. So I remember one night I was kind of woke up in the middle of the night and I had this kind of flash realization that the years were rolling by really fast and I'd be blinking and then he'd be going off to college. and did I want to live these years in this state of conflict with my beloved son? You know, and I know I didn't.

So now I had already for quite a long time been talking about and teaching about and practicing the sacred pause, but I hadn't with this, because this is, I was so irritated that it just, you know, it felt beyond me, but I committed myself to that. I told myself that before I lash out again, I'm going to pause and come home some. It didn't take long for me to get some practice, as you can imagine. It was the next night I went downstairs about 45 minutes after our agreed upon, you know,

no more games. This is homework time. And I, outside the, outside this door, the door was closed. I could hear the sounds of his video game, his favorite game at that time. What was it? EverQuest? I think it was EverQuest, yeah. And I could hear it.

And I had the image that I have very often of having a boulder and smashing the computer screen with it. I mean, it was just like a repeating. So I watched that image come up. So I just got very, very still. And I could feel the anger and I could feel my jaw tightened and the heat and the pressure in my chest. and how much it was horribly uncomfortable. Everything in me wanted to just barge in the room and yell at them, not sit there and feel that,

which is, by the way, why we don't stay with our raw emotions. We act out because they're really uncomfortable. So I had committed myself, okay, pause, pause. So I stayed with it, and the anger started to shift, and what happened was that it kind of, the explosiveness shifted this to this deep soreness, this gripping in my heart, and I realized, oh, this is fear. And when I investigated, I sense, I'm afraid that he's going to ruin his life.

His life's not going to work out if he keeps doing this. It was this kind of fear thing, that he'll fail, that'll be unhappy. And then there was a sense of, it's my fault that it's turning out this way. So the fear very quickly kind of merged into shame, and that often happens, fear and shame. the sinking feeling, again, stay, stay. So this is vopassana. I was just staying with the experience and kind of naming it, okay, shame,

and then this sinking feeling, feeling it in my body, feeling it in my body. And I realized that my eyes were moist with tears and there was this real sadness, this grief about the distance between us. So grieving, grieving, opening, this growing tenderness in my heart that what mattered,

This is where I got down to intention. You know that what mattered beyond all things was loving him, our love. And so I had this resolution to then go and be with him and talk, but with a real remembering the love, letting a deep acceptance of who he was, didn't mean I have to like the behaviors, but him and a love of him, be the container for whatever else I put in, okay. Okay. So I walked into the room and I knocked first and he mumbled come in, you know, and I walked in and he launched into his defense and, you know, what his plan was and when he was going to get what done. And I just didn't speak for a while and he realized, oh, something's going on here. So, so I just said, we need to talk and we did. And I told him that I spoke from a place of concern and care and worry. And then I read. really, really listened. And I listened to how come he liked his, I mean, because I had such an

version to these games, you know, that the sense of mastery and pleasure he got from them. And how when I said lights out at nighttime and he wasn't tired, how it just was really very uncomfortable to have to try to go to sleep when you're not tired. So I listened. And to some of the story here is that our relationship, because it's always been good, basically, we, we warmed up and were able to talk again. And I kept having to be on him on the boundaries, but it came from a very different place, a very different place and he was much more responsive.

Now, just so you know, he still loves video games. He's very into magic cards, as some of you probably familiar with that, and they haven't ruined his life. He's doing okay. We both stray into the old reactivities. We still lock into our roles some, but it's much more.

quick that there's much less lag time that we remember I'm partly telling you this because he's coming home this weekend I think if I say it out loud in front of X number of people I'll be more remembering you know but most of us have relationships that bring up strong reactivity don't we so most of us have a waking up that's possible in this area and it's so powerful when we have this intention in the midst of whatever the reactivity is to pause and it takes courage, but to stay with what's happening in our bodies. You know, for some of us, this is like, yeah, this is the teaching. We know this. And for some of us, it's not as familiar, but it's always a

challenge because when there's strong, raw feelings, our conditioning is to leave. And the fact is that we do leave a lot, even those people I know that are very experienced. So part of the practice is really forgiving the fact that we don't always come into our bodies. Because if we don't like ourselves for that, it actually makes it harder to come home. So forgiving yet committed. Okay? Okay. So there's a discovery that comes up, which is that the more we come home, the more we're actually living right here. That's not just during meditation, but through the day,

the more access we actually have to creativity and to our intelligence. It's like we stay in our minds because we think that it's actually going to take us better places. And this isn't a diatribe against thinking. We have to think, and thinking is part of survival and part of the creativity.

But if we're able to come home to this felt sense in our body, our thoughts actually spring forth in a much more rich and fresh way. That's why sometimes people at retreats, it's very hard for, they'll have a notebook, it's very hard not to scribble things down sometimes because the thoughts become more creative and actually more useful. One man I worked with for quite a long time, he had been an editor of a small newspaper for ages,

and he felt like he had gotten stale, like he did not feel fresh in his work, And he also felt like he had in some way locked into a role with, you know, because he managed a lot of people and a fair number, where his relationships felt in a bit kind of caged in and not very alive too. And as he described it, he'd bifed to work and he'd be in his bodies, he'd biked to work. He would take the stairs and walk up the stairs in the building and be in his bodies, he'd be in his bodies, he walked up the stairs. he'd open the door with mindfulness because this is a meditation student he knew and then he'd say he'd go

into a trance and he wouldn't realize he was in it for hours and hours like he just wasn't there just gone and so we talked about you know because mostly he'd be in front of a screen or on a phone or at meetings and he said he just wasn't connected

so we talked about how he could different practices to stay in touch with his felt sense more. How when he was with others, he could very consciously listen with that intention to understand, to really hear,

and use his body and his hands, actually, his breath and his hands to say, I'm here and I'm listening. I'm here and I'm listening. And it's just training to be here. And he said that he discovered that when he did that, he got a lot of fear.

fear and anxiety in his body because his habit was so much preparing his response that when we just are listening, we're not reforming ourselves to present ourselves. It's like we've let go of the selfing process. So he had a lot of anxiety. So we breathed with the anxiety. Does that resonate for some of you? That when we say, okay, I'm just going to be in my body and listen. And there's something in us that so much wants to, you know, kind of create what we're going to be putting in the world or do something. And whenever we're anxious, we start cycling in our mind again.

So that was his practice with others. And he found that some missing warmth and empathy and kind of co-creative energy got stirred up with that. And then on his own, he realized that he could not sit in front of the screen for lengths of time and stay fresh. So he just started practicing, standing up, moving, stretching, leaving. And he found that the more he moved around, the more intuitive he got about what story to follow, what angle to take, it refreshed him. There's a term called embodied cognition now that psychologists are using. And there's a lot of studies on the body-mind link that show things like if you hold a warm cup of coffee while you're talking with somebody, you perceive that other person to be more friendly and warm.

Isn't that interesting? Or if you hold, there's one with a pencil as you're a smile with a pencil in your teeth, you comprehend pleasant sentences faster than unpleasant. You know, we do the smiling here a lot. It's an outside in practice that actually changes our experience. So there's this link to the experience of the body and how we pay attention to the world. This week, New York Times had a really interesting article on thinking outside the box. And there's been these studies. I mean, how many of you read this article, thinking outside the box,

and just looking around to see because I thought it was so interesting. They did these studies where they construct. actually a large box and they had students sit inside the box or be outside the box when they were asked different questions to come up with new solutions and ideas to problems. And clearly those that sat outside the constructed box were much more creative. When they sensed space and the liveliness and they weren't inside what metaphorically is the box of our, you know, repetitive, familiar thoughts. just physically sitting outside the box.

And then they actually worked when they, instead of walking on this tape that was a box shape, when they could walk freely and move around, again, more creative. I know it's true for me when I'm writing these talks. If I sit in front of my screen and try to come up with, what are the main important teachings I want to convey

or what story will illustrate this. If I'm in front of my screen for too long, it gets very dry and very rote in some way. It's thinner. But if I move around, if I go outside, if I'm in the elements, if I play with my dog, you know, whatever it is, it like brings alive the two hemispheres of my brain in a new fresh way.

So we can see it with others. when we're with others how easily we get wrote. We live inside the box and we give canned responses. We don't really pause and sensile. What do I really experience when you say that? There's that phrase that the dying process begins at birth, but it accelerates at dinner parties, you know? And then how are we with each other when we've meditated for a while or when we've done some yoga when we're walking in nature, a little more chance for some circulation of the creative fluids. Then we begin to look at, well, how do we train? You know, given our challenge, which is stress, that we all have stress, we have a sense, kind of a buzz of anxiety in our system

that makes us not want to be in our bodies, it makes us want to be in our heads planning or be active doing something. How do we train? And in some basic way, our sympathetic nervous systems usually on overdrive in this culture, which keeps the brain very, very active. And the training of meditation, of coming back to this foundation of sensation, really awakens the parasympathetic nervous system. It's like the breaks. It lets us settle back again. Let's us touch that patience that Alan Locos talked about so beautifully two weeks ago. I heard about that. It lets us be here. So there are, I think of this training and there's two key parts, this coming home. And the first is out and out relaxation. And the 11th century

teacher to Lopa said this he said do nothing with your body but relax do nothing with your body but relax you might just for a moment just sense okay so what happens right right now if you check in your body is your body relaxed just take a just take a quick survey inside is your body relaxed okay that's enough how many felt you found your body to be relaxed right now. Okay, how many found as soon as you checked in different areas of tension that I just habitually collected? I know I asked that very quickly.

So it's, but just it's like a really valuable thing to check in and say, okay, really, what's it like in here? You know? So you can check in again and we'll take a little more time this time. So what does it mean just to relax a little more? What's it like for you when you have that intention? Just check in. Sometimes think of relaxing as a fist that's clenching that's unclenching.

That rather than a doing, it's an undoing. Can you sense that inside? That you just offer attention, awareness to the different parts of the body. And it's almost like you're inviting this undoing, this unclenching, untangling. Often people will say, well, just relax. almost like a shaming. So it's really helpful to know that we can have this intention, but it's kind of an invitation, a gentle invitation. So the practice, how do we practice relaxing? Well, perhaps the most well known is simply to scan through the body with a gentle awareness.

You can either go to the places that are obviously tight or just scan through from top to bottom or bottom to top and you're not doing anything, you're really offering an attention. It's as if there's this soft awareness that can, for instance, be in the shoulders. And then the tightness that's there can can naturally dissolve in that softness, in that space. But there's other ways too. One way of relaxing does have a kind of intentionality where you can use the breath and you might try this right now you can breathe in and let the in-breath be a little bit more defined like a like a little bit more of an in-breath than you might normally take and then with the out-breath very slow conscious sensing the letting go the releasing tension

into the space around you so try that again a full in-breath conscious and then a slow out breath where you very, very intentionally sense that releasing whatever tightness is here into the space around you, just letting go. We often do this at the beginning of class and then a full in breath again. And then just sense wherever it's tight, wherever there's holding that it can just melt and dissolve outward, outward. And you can continue that a bit. So it happens when we relax when there's this invitation to let go, this undoing, is that we're beginning to bring our awaken, there's a better way, the parasympathetic nervous system. So there's a bit more pleasantness. There's a bit more possibility to start being mindful of what's right here. And that's the

second part. The second part of awakening in this body after we've relaxed some so we can be here is to really notice with awareness. What's it like? And this noticing includes accepting. It's very allowing. So mindfulness practice, being mindful of the body, again, there's different ways. You can do a systematic mindful scan of the body. That's a very powerful and classic technique where you're not just moving through the body, but you're really noticing what's it like here? And what's it like here? So if you were doing your hands, you'd be relaxing and softening the hands, but you'd really notice and be aware of and allow the actual sensations that are there.

If you close your eyes, you might sense. So what's it like? Well, there is vibrating or pulsing. And where do you feel it most strongly? And how fully can you allow it to be just as it is? This is mindfulness. Often the training is centered on mindfulness of the breath. Where again, with your eyes closed, you might feel the breath,

but this time let it be exactly as it is naturally. There's no intentionality to make it long or slow. Your only intention is to let the breath be as it is. Notice where you feel it where it's most predominant. Perhaps at the nostrils or the back of the throat. perhaps you feel the rise and fall at the chest perhaps expansion and collapsing at the belly or maybe you feel the breath through the whole body

as a kind of opening like a balloon and then a collapsing so you notice where you feel it most predominantly and then really be aware what's it like this moment and this moment as you inhale know that you're inhaling as you exhale know that you're exhaling

perhaps you can notice the beginnings and endings of the in-breath and out-breath so this begins to both concentrate the attention and also bring a real awareness to the life of the body opening your eyes when you'd like okay so this is a very very brief you know review of some of the practices

of relaxing and mindfulness that really can wake us up in our body. What I'd like to do with you is name the challenges. The two big challenges that happen as we begin to try to wake up in the body. One is dissociation, that we're just fine, we're cut off, we can't. I can't feel anything here. And the other is kind of the opposite, which is possession, where something feels so intense and so gripping that we're kind of in a battle with it but we're we're really off balance with it so dissociation and

possession so the first one so many many people come to me and say you know mindfulness of the body embodied awareness sounds great I don't feel anything from the neck down you know and and we'll you know and I'm not going to do a hand raise on it but I know that the more there's been wounding or trauma in our early years it's absolutely our conditioning to leave, to not stay put and feel those areas. It's the only way we could make it through certain parts of our life. It was a survival strategy to dissociate.

So not to be down on ourselves for it or feel ashamed of it. It's absolutely part of the mechanism of this body. And there's a way to begin to wake up. If there's been a lot of trauma, we definitely need help. it's it's we can retramatize ourselves i've i've seen in the early days of meditation teaching when everybody all the teachers would say yeah just completely open to what's happening and let it be as full as it is and notice what's going on and people try to open to the pockets of where the trauma was living in their body and just feel terrified and it was just the learning was there's terror here

and i get overwhelmed re-learned you know so that's the point is that If there's a lot of fear, it feels overwhelming, get help. Either a meditation teacher that is familiar with working with trauma or a therapist that knows how to gradually bring a presence into the body. For many people, the way in is to start with parts of the body that feel safe. And even when people say, I can't feel anything, I can usually say, well, rub your hands, do you feel that? and yes I feel that

okay squeeze your hands okay squeeze hard now just feel your hands like this can you still feel your hands well yeah I can still okay start there does that make sense that we just start really simple a safe part of the body if the hands are safe we can start with the feet

one vet I worked with that was his place if he could sit he could feel his feet he could feel the pressure of his feet and that was solid and it was stable and grounding then he began to feel the pressure of his bottom on the chair and that again grounding and he started with that because he could say here here and feel his feet feel the pressure that was the

beginning for a woman that I worked with who had cancer and and very strong very strong pain it was very appropriate that she not go right into where the pain was strongest but rather listen to music and take her attention away and then gradually come into her senses wherever it was not overwhelming. So she's kind of opened herself to the present moment but not in the places that were most jarring. And then gradually begin to include where it was difficult. So the process of coming into the body is that often we need a resource. We need music or we need an image of something of a loving person or we need a safe part of our body and we use that as a kind of anchor and we

gradually dip our feet in touch into where it's difficult and then leave come out to the safe place again dip in go back to the safe place so again this is I'm going through this quickly but just to give you a feeling that for that even those that are most associated can find their way in to again inhabiting that fullness but why do we bother. I mean, really, sometimes it feels so uncomfortable here, you know, when there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of pain. Why would we bother, you know? And, you know, I come back to me this week. I had this, you know, I was away in this very, very pleasant, beautiful place, and the sensations were all really nice, and it was very easy to want to come home and tell you guys,

let's enter presence through the body and experience our belonging to all this universe then I got home and you know now I'm not feeling so well and cold wet rainy you know it's not the Caribbean and still choosing presence there's something in us that knows

that there's more freedom in being at home and presence than in some way trying to push it away. And there's an understanding that when we leave, when we leave unpleasantness, we leave life, we lose the possibility of intimacy. In those moments, you cannot be intimate. And intimacy matters. And I don't mean intimacy just in a romantic way. We can't connect with our life if we're pushing away the unpleasantness. Do you understand?

There's an equation that's very helpful that pain times resistance equal suffering. It's floating around the whole of the POSA in the world. Pain times resistance equals suffering. It's really true. To the extent that we're pushing away any part of life, we cannot discover that well-being, that connection. We distance from others. We create unlived life.

This is Adrian Rich who voices the sorrow that happens when we push away parts of ourselves, the hurting part. She says, the problem unstated until now is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to be gagged, uncured, ungrieved over. The problem is to connect without hysteria the pain of anyone's body with the pain of the world's body. body. So rather than my pain, my unpleasantness, it becomes the pain or our shared pain. So this is the possibility that as we open to whatever is here, we actually open to the aliveness that we share together, the beauty, the sorrows. It connects us with our world. In a deep way, staying is our connection with all beings and it's not just those that are here. If we can, we, can live in the aliveness of our body and our hearts, we actually can touch the love that includes

those have gone also. It's not just a sense of love with people here. And you'll see that in this, I'm going to read you kind of an essay or poem written by a friend in the Sangha. And you'll see this sense of how the connection is so powerful when we move through our body. This is what she writes Laying down on the bed Where she last was Her place of sleep and rest In the room where she passed a day before

Do you want me to call for help? No, I'm dying, hold my hand Her spirit's still present Feeling a chill from the room Tingling in the body Tightness in the throat A stillness there Her body lying in a crematorium

Imagining the body staying with the feeling. No words, but to feel my body, part of hers and hers part of mine, breathing in and out, taking in her life, her history, her energy, her cares and fears and worries, her hopes and dreams,

asking for forgiveness, feeling gratitude for life, remembering a mother's blessing, wishing I thanked her more, my body too will pass and dissolve. can I let this too be just as it is knowing that I am right here awaken my body

recognizing and allowing this flow of aliveness pausing in the body and taking those moments with her feeling comfort that I had somehow made contact resting in the body I felt the realness of her passing she ends by saying take time today to pause

feel what's happening in your body and come back to the aliveness of now. So you might feel that right now, the aliveness of now. So I'd like to end. I've kind of touched on somehow this coming to the body can help us to feel our connection with others when there's distance, connection when someone's not here, connect us with our creativity or intelligence. The core of the practice succumbing into the body, I think of as yes, as we're saying yes to what's here. So I'd like to end in that way. We'll do a little bit of a yes meditation in a few moments. I really think of it like this, and I ask you, what happens when instead of pain times resistance equals suffering, what happens when there's pain times no resistance? Thank you. No suffering.

Not only that, there's freedom. In the moments when we're not resisting, whether it's pain or our pleasure, when we're not resisting the life that's here, in that openness, there's a dissolving of that self-sense and a connection with a profound presence. That's the yes meditation, that we're opening to the bodies

with unconditional acceptance, with radical acceptance. When we do that, we become large enough for whatever's happening. We contact the space and the awakeness that is our true nature. Through our bodies, we contact that presence. This is Kavir. He says, 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 do a final reflection. This is our chance to explore, really, each of you, to explore the possibility of freedom that comes when we bring this unconditional acceptance to the life that's right here. So you might begin again by sensing the possibility of relaxing just a little bit more right now and feel your intention and your interest, your curiosity,

to discover really who you are through this awakening in the body, who you are through this awakening in the body. What happens if you just let go a little more, see if it's possible to relax just a little more, to unclench, help to sense the smile at the mouth, the slight smile inside the mouth, smiling into the heart, and just letting the spirit of a smile,

spread through your whole body, through your cells, relaxing with exactly what's happening right here. And just ask yourself, what happens if I say yes? If I truly say yes to exactly the experience of aliveness right here. And see how deep your yes can go. So whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, sleepy, restless, tight, flowing. A full yes. Attentiveness and yes. Just notice the changing flows of energy, naturally sense the softening that's possible as you deepen attention. You might also sense the pulsing and the tingling and the vibrating. This fertile, empty space, it's the background of all experience,

this wakefulness, this continuous space inside and around everything that's awake. This reading is from the Radiant Sutras. Attend to the skin as a subtle boundary. containing vastness. Enter that shimmering and pulsing vastness. Discover that you are not separate from anything there and there is no other, no object to meditate upon that is not you.

Enter that shimmering and pulsing vastness inside. Discover that you are not separate from anything there and there is no other, no object to meditate upon that is not you. To experience the substance of the body of the body in the world is made up of vibrating particles, and these particles made up of even finer energy particles. Drifting more deeply, feel into each particle

as it condenses from infinity and dissolves back into it continuously. Noticing this breathe easily with infinity dancing everywhere. Resting in this presence that's the most intimate subject experience of what you are, this radiant wakefulness. It's from this presence that you can sense your heart holding this whole world. You can sense how everybody here in this room, everybody in the world, all beings, all creatures

are part of your heart. So we close with a simple metta or loving kindness prayer, that all beings everywhere might have the blessings of awakening, of trusting the goodness and beauty of their true nature, of living from their true nature. May there be peace here and everywhere. May all beings awaken and be free.

Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.