Tara Brach - Embodied Presence (Part 1) – Planting Our Roots in the Universe

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

In describing our human predicament and dis-ease, D.H. Lawrence says we are like a great tree with our roots in the air. We need to replant ourselves—in our bodies, hearts and spirit. These two talks are guides to replanting ourselves. In Part 1, we explore how we are so often dissociated from the life of our body, and the pathways home. Part 2 looks at the challenges of pain, fear and trauma, and how we can gradually and skillfully reconnect with a wholeness of being. 

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste friends, welcome. The Washington Post did a kind of social experiment some years back and it took place in a D.C. Metro station where a man was playing Bach music on a violin for 45 minutes. And during this time, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. And only six people stopped and listened for a short while. And several children did, but their parents kind of hurried them along.

And no one realized that the violinist was the renowned Joshua Bell, who's performed some of the most intricate pieces ever written while playing on a violin. It was worth $3.5 million. So it brings 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, playing some of the finest music ever written, how much else are we missing? If we look honestly at our lives, most moments, we're often thoughts. We're not directly connected to what's right here and to our senses.

or not directly feeling the aliveness of the moment available to really savor the beauty, to sense the mystery, not right here. And as it happens, because of our negativity bias, our thoughts are usually have a whole undercurrent of anxiety. They create a sense of separation. So the grounds of the path of awakening is this shift from thoughts to living in our senses awake, because that's the only place that love happens. When we're embodied, it's really the roots of wisdom, of seeing what's truly here and of all

healing. So, this is kind of a warm-up because this week, what I'd like to do, and it's actually this week and next week, is share two talks that can guide us back to our bodies, you know, back to that full aliveness and heart and spirit. So, I hope you enjoy the talks. Namaste and welcome. About a decade ago, a spiritual teacher was asked to describe our contemporary society and his response was lost in thought.

And I thought that was a really kind of wonderful description in a way. A hundred years earlier, D.H. Lawrence observed our disconnection. really from this living world and how we lived in another kind of universe in a sense. We weren't really connected. And this is what he wrote. He said, 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 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. I think that's one of the best metaphors I've heard about our predicament, the sense of being like a great uprooted tree and our roots are in the air. We're in this kind of cyber universe or virtual universe,

lost in thought and we need to re-plant ourselves in this living reality, this mysterious sacred presence that we can only experience if we wake up through our bodies and our senses. And every mystical tradition tells us in some way to go back to the natural world, to go into the woods or the desert up into the mountains. mystical traditions tell us to do yoga and to dance and to awaken to the mystery and the aliveness inside. It's the portal really to the sacred. And this is the Buddha teaching 2,500 years ago. There's one thing that when cultivated and regularly practiced leads to deep spiritual intention, to peace, to mindfulness, and clear comprehension, to vision and knowledge

to a 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. So our reflection for this class and the next one, which will be in two weeks, is really a homecoming to aliveness, replanting ourselves in our natural being, in our earth, in our bodies. And really one of the most regular questions I get is, but what if I can't feel what's going on in my body? And when I teach rain and I address this sum in radical compassion which is a guide to rain, a lot of people have trouble when they're investigating their experience

feeling the aliveness of the body. And it's a real prominent feature in our whole society that so many are dissociated. So we're going to explore that some. One art professor described how when her daughter was seven, she asked her what she did at work. And so she told her that she taught people to draw. And she's taught at a college. And the little girl stared back at her mom with kind of incredulty and she said, you mean they forgot? You know? And the truth is our bodies know how to sing and dance and draw and they know how to make love and to give birth and to die and they know how to mourn and they know how to celebrate.

And the given is we leave our bodies regularly and we can look at today. I mean, how many moments were we off planning or figuring out something or trying to solve a problem or obsessing or remembering, or just some way in cyberspace? And the given is in those moments our senses are shut down. We're not online or emailing and at the same time aware of the energy in our body or listening to the sound of the rain or the birds. just doesn't happen. So, the other thing that happens is that when we're lost in thought, when we're dissociated from our body, we're cut off from empathy, we're cut off from compassion,

we're cut off really from connectedness and wonder. John O'Donohue's no longer alive, poet, philosopher that I love, he says this, he says, our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. So, any pathway to full awakening requires a deepened communion with the life of the body. It's just part of it. And one of the essence teachings in Buddhism is be a light unto to thyself, which means take in all sorts of teachings, listen to the teachers and the podcasts and read the books or do whatever. I don't think the Buddha talked about podcasts, but you get the idea.

But the bottom line, there's no freedom until we do that U-turn and bring our attention to what's the nature of reality right here. What's going on here? Can we look into our own minds and our own awareness and sense what's true? investigation. So we'll take a moment to reflect together and I'll ask you to come back as you're listening. Right this moment if you'd like to close your eyes, even as you were listening, how aware were you of your body?

And maybe what happens right now when you become aware of your body and your posture, your breathing? You feel the energy in your hands? Can you feel your feet? Are you inhabiting your chest, your belly? And today, if you scan today, was there some presence in your senses? Did you feel that wintery air on your cheek? Listen to birds or see maybe the silhouette of the trees against the sky or feel your breath or get in touch with what mood was here.

heart, did you sense what was going on with another? One teacher advises, don't go far from your body. And with even a little exposure to meditation where the invitation is to keep coming back to presence, it reveals that there's this universal challenge in staying here. Look right now, feel in your body, can you stay here, some? What people find is either they They can't feel sensations much in their body, maybe the hands but not some of the more interior parts of our body. Or they get in touch but can't stay very long or get in touch but there's a real reaction, there's a feeling of being overwhelmed or flooded, not liking.

It's rare to rest wakefully and allowing just opening to the changing flow. How come? You might check right now, what is between me and being home in my body in this moment? Just check what's between me and being at home in my body at this moment. In sense, you're kind of entering the inner wilderness. Can you be at home with that wilderness? Because it's a realm that's changing, always changing. If you're inhabiting your body, you're feeling change, sometimes raw, sometimes intense,

sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful. But if you're really awake in your body, you'll notice it's out of control. You can't be present and controlling at the same time. And if you're awake in your body, you may feel fear or joy and you may feel that mystery of presence. So here's another inquiry is you're feeling yourself in this wilderness of sensation and you're letting it happen. Who am I in this wilderness?

What's the sense of who you are when you're opening in your body? Can you sense how presence in the body actually dissolves the sense of a self or a doing self? For many, especially not used to being in the body. there can be a real upwelling of restlessness or anxiety, discomfort. So the habit is to dissociate. Just notice right now what it's like and take a few full breaths and see as you open your eyes you can keep staying awake somewhat in your body, maybe listen with 10% and 90% still feel

your body sitting here. So again, if you feel like, oh my, my. I'm not very good at this or I dissociate quickly or I've just, I realize I've been through my day and I've barely landed in my body. You're not alone at all and that's mostly what... This isn't like a something's wrong with you thing. It's the, really, it's one of the features of our society is that we dissociate. And then instead of staying in our bodies we go up to our mental control tower and we try

to control our life from there. a while ago, James Joyce wrote a short story. The line that always stands out to me is, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. Isn't that a great line? I mean, isn't it just true? So, if you look at contemporary society, our children are leaving, leaving their bodies earlier and earlier. For children and teens, it's an average of seven hours, behind a screen and four to seven minutes outside. Now that's really, really frightening to me. I'm just think of that. When little boy proudly announced in kindergarten that his cat had kittens, said there are three females and three males. And the teacher said, well, how do you know that?

He goes, well, my father turned them over. There's a label on the bottom. So what we think about it, like, what does it mean that? our kids all have devices that they're constantly looking at and what will happen if our children don't feel a connection and joy and belonging in the natural world. Will they love this earth and feel intimacy with this earth and want to take care of this earth? What happens? You know, I also think of how the obesity rate in children's tripled since the 1970s.

there is a real dis-ease with leaving our bodies. Now, thinking is not the problem. I want to make that clear. We need to think. Thinking is part of what really allows us to be creative, it allows us to pursue spiritual explorations, it allows us to communicate. Thinking is great. And we overthink, we're addicted to thinking and we don't know how to discern between the thoughts that actually allow us to keep on evolving and the thoughts that keep us trapped in small, fearful cells. So the problem is that when we're not present in our bodies and our hearts, our thoughts get hijacked by our limbic system.

Many of you know we have a negativity bias. That means that we are inclined to fixate on what's wrong and what's missing. And if we're not embodied and present, that's the default. Our minds will be run by our fears. We will spend most of our time anxious and worrying and trying to busily figure out things way more than we actually need to work out problems. How many of you notice that you're kind of going around the day a lot of times, assuming there's a problem and trying to figure something out. Don't even bother raising your hands.

It's okay. But you understand. So, what happens is that overthinking, the way we do it, especially when it's run by fear, separates us. It separates us from our own hearts and it separates us from each other. We feel like we're in a little, or in our own little vacuum or silo, busily working out problems and that something's wrong. It fuels the shadow on a global level. When on a global level humans are overthinking and run by fear, we cause a lot of damage. Thinking tends to create hierarchies. Thinking creates separations.

When we're run by fear we live in hierarchies, we get caught in domination. mastery, control, making others inferior. So in a global way, our fear-based thinking ends up driving racism. It drives tribalism. It really leads to violating other humans and other non-human animals because we feel like they're less than us and violating the earth. And I say this and that might all sound abstract, but consider this. If someone's really in their body and feeling what's going on inside them and willing to

open to their fears and willing to bring presence to what's difficult, there's a natural compassion that then can extend to the world around them. When we're in our bodies we feel more of the natural world around us. We feel more belonging. We want to take care. We can see the shadow in our daily life too. When we're not present, we can see how our anxiety creates a sense of separation and the more we worry, plan, obsess, the less we're able to be intimate.

So I'll speak for myself here because, and I shared this at some point I think last year, I became aware that for quite a while when my son would call me, I would be in front of my computer screen and as we were talking I'd be kind of deleting emails that I could get rid of and doing little busy work and sometimes writing checks out and so on. And then started noticing I'd get off the call and feel this kind of slumping sense of oh my gosh this is my son, I love him, why was I multitasking, why couldn't I just be there? Now of course being completely transparent, he only calls me when he's driving from place to place. So he's multitasking too.

But it really has, there were a few rounds where I really felt some angst around it and it actually has shifted how I pay attention. We need to think, but when we're addicted, we vacate the premises. We're not really able to be intimate with our life. It creates a trance. This is Annie Lamont, the writer. She says, my mind is my main problem. almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come

with me. So, when we're in trance, when we're in the trance of thinking we lose the freshness and spontaneity and creativity that's really who we are. George Carlin says, do you ever get that strange feeling of voge-day? This is not deja vu, voge dey. It's a distinct sense. that somehow something just happened that has never happened before. Nothing seems familiar, and then suddenly the feeling's gone. Vosier Day. Okay, so we're setting up the challenge, and the challenge is a deep habituation to leaving our bodies and being lost in thought beyond the usefulness of thought. And I suspect if I did a survey, most of us would confess the falling in that category of often thought more than as beneficial.

So, reconnecting. And we're going to emphasize two main ways. We're going to talk about reconnecting when we're caught in the trance in daily life and the reconnecting that a daily practice of meditation fosters. It inclines us more to come back to our body. If you're sitting regularly, there's going to be more re-reactors. remembrance during the day, more noticing of trance. But we're going to start with during the day now. We have to recognize we're in a trance in order to come back. So I want to tell

you what I think are the four flags, the main flags of trance, and I've already mentioned them in some way. But whenever we catch them in our daily life, if you want to deepen on your spiritual path, let it be kind of a flag or a signal that says, oh, this is a This is the trance, come back. Now the first one, the first big one, is obsessive thinking. And we sometimes catch ourselves, we realize, okay, I'm perseverating. I have been cycling through this same thought over and over and over again. It's like that saying that we have something like 65,000 thoughts a day and like 98% of

them we had yesterday. It's that. So we realize, okay, this is not... moving forward our purpose in life. This is just cycling. I mean, how many moments are we in some way preparing for what's around the corner but over preparing? And I'm watching myself with that right now because I'm leaving town tomorrow and whenever I'm about to leave town and there's something about airplanes and security lines and so on and packing that I just keep cycling through.

like things I've already figured out and worked out and planned and even put in my suitcase, I'm still kind of like churning. So it's kind of like that story of the mom that sends an email to her son and it says, start worrying details to follow. It's like worry needs a place to land. The intensity of our compulsive thinking is in. in direct proportion to the extent we're unwilling to experience our bodies in that moment. I'm going to say that again, the intensity of our compulsive thinking is in direct proportion

to the extent that we're not willing to experience our body in that moment. In other words, there's some angst in there and it's driving our thoughts and we don't want to sit down and just feel the angst, so we keep on churning. So the big and wonderful and profoundly transformative question when you're obsessing, what am I unwilling to feel? What really wants attention inside me right now? And the practice is see if you can interrupt obsessing. Just notice what you're unwilling to feel, just name it okay, angst, anxiety, fear, discomfort,

worry. And then just breathe and with kindness feel what's in your body even for 15 seconds and then go back to obsessing. But you'll find that if you keep interrupting there's going to be more and more spaces of waking up and you will gain more tolerance for the discomfort in your body you are running from and that's the key. In psychology it's called affect tolerance. In a meditation, we're trying to learn that we're the ocean and we have room for the waves

so we don't always have to feel we're knocked around by the waves. Okay, so this is the first one, obsessive thinking. When you notice it, just be willing to interrupt, okay, what am I willing to feel? And then just breathe with it, kindly. Ten seconds, fifteen seconds, see what happens. The second big one that's a sign of trance. judgment. In some way, judging myself, judging others, judging life, but judgment. If you start watching your own mind, you'll notice how many moments there's a sense that

things aren't the way they should be. Just how many moments. Sometimes it's not dramatic, it's just a little bit like not quite comfortable and should be a little bit more comfortable for us physically or emotionally. Are somebody's not doing something terribly wrong but we're just wanting them to be a little different. So, judgment is any way we're wanting life to be different and the mind circles around that. Again, with judgment and I'm making this very short and pithy and that's a lifework. Try to interrupt it. Try to feel what's under the judgment and breathe with it kindly. Okay? So there's obsessing, there's judgment. The third sign of trance is when we're caught in some kind of addictive behavior of ways that we distract ourselves

and numb ourselves. And this is that huge catch-all of food and drink and drugs and shopping and internet and so on. But in some way we're caught. It's like the man is the wife are sitting in the living room and she says to him, you know, if I ever become a vegetable, you know, just really pull the plug, and he goes over to the TV setting yanks the cord. And we are addicted to our screens. There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users. You already know what I'm going to say, right? Computers and drugs.

And it is, I mean, there's all sorts of studies now about what the dover. mean fix and how much we are hooked. And most people I know will confess that they are hooked. So, just like every other one of the trances that we get caught in, you might sense the reflex to check your emails and maybe one out of four times instead of doing it, just pause and feel what's going on inside you. What am I unwilling to feel? breathe with it and be with it kindly. Now by now you've gotten that there's a little recipe here and of course you need to customize it but each time you're interrupting and pausing, you're sensing what am I unwilling to feel

and you're breathing with it, you're feeling it kindly. And then you can go ahead and do what you're going to do but you'll find that you're in at least a slightly shifted state of consciousness because interoperating you're in a little because interrupting the behavior creates more space. It's that brilliant, incredibly helpful line from Victor Frankel, that between the stimulus and the response there is a space and in that space is your power and your freedom. That when you interrupt trance states and you pause,

you're beginning to have more access to your true nature, to your wisdom and your compassion. So don't worry if you interrupt and go right back into the behavior. The interruption counts, okay? All right, I've given you three so far. Obsessive thinking, judging, and the addictive kind of distracting or numbing. The fourth is speed.

We are a society that's absolutely addicted to speed. We're racing around. We're always trying to cut things short, whether it's, you know, through our microwaves or getting a faster connection on the internet or whatever it is, we are a very restless, impatient culture. So there's an underlying mantra of, I don't have enough time. How many of you can relate to that one? All of us probably, many of us.

And I keep always, I'm amazed when I go to a meditation retreat where we slow down or retreats and the instructions are we have walking practice and the instructions are to gradually slow down the walking so it's slow walking. But what's always phenomenal is when I walk half as fast I notice twice as much. It's amazing when you slow down. We are habituated to a certain pace, slow it down even a little and your lens of perception opened to the mystery. We're in a trance when we're speeding along. Last week, I shared a story that's always touching you of a woman who was diagnosed with cancer and only had

a year to live and had a one-year-old daughter. And her mantra became, I have no time to rush. So many people share with me a kind of underlying sorrow. And it often comes to when there's been a loss in their lives, that they've been racing across the surface but not really arriving, not dropping in, not letting this moment matter. It's like even right now as we're reflecting together there's a sense, well, we're on our way to something to the end of the talk or on our way to the rest of the day or evening or whatever it is. We have a map in our mind and it's very rare that we pause from our speed.

this enough to really sense this moment, this moment right now, matters as much as any moment in the universe. And if we can't sense the mystery and sacredness right here, we're in a habit of not noticing. We'll keep racing across the surface. So again, with speeding, it's the exact same process. Okay, a trance. We're in a trance just for a little bit, just to interrupt it, just slow down, take a few breaths, feel that energy, that anxious, restless energy that's been driving us, breathe with it, tell it it's okay. And then whatever you need to do after that, okay.

But here's the deal that when we're speeding and when we're judging, when we're obsessing, when we're numbing, we are running away from the present moment. We're running away from the life of our bodies, we're running away from our hearts. And as long as we run away from the wilderness in here, which can feel angsty, we're also running away from the place where we can feel passion, creativity, love, and freedom. Carl Jung has this quote that I've, for years, it's really struck men. He always talks about in psychological terms what happens when we cut off. And he says one of the greatest influences on their offspring and on themselves is the

unlived life of the parent. One of the greatest influences on their offspring and themselves is the unlived life of the parent. is the unlived life of the parents. Living lost in thought is creating unlived life. It's moments that we're in a virtual world. We're not living our life. And so the pathway is this willingness and it takes courage to go ahead and be in the wilderness and not be in control and develop kind of a patience or acceptance of what feels raw and difficult. And then in that presence, we begin to discover the mystery or the sacredness that's there. We have to be embodied if we want to love. You know, love, when it's an idea,

is very thin. It's a tenderness. Ticknat Han has a kind of great teaching around this. He describes how this took place in 1966, how a friend invited him to, took him to the Atlanta airport, and they're saying goodbye, and she asked, is it okay to hug a Buddhist monk? Now, in his culture and country, they just didn't express that way. I mean, the Buddhist monks did not go around doing hugs. But he thought, you know, I'm a Zen teacher, shouldn't be a problem for me to do this. He says, why not? But he says, as she hugged me, I was quite stiff.

While on the plaintiff side that if I wanted to work with friends in the West, I'd have to learn the culture of the West and to surmount this cultural barrier of communication, he described, he developed what he called a hugging meditation. And he says, it requires we disarm all our chronic cynicism because it appears intolerably awkward, but then it blossoms in a way. So, according to this practice, you have to really hug the person you're holding. So this is like we're usually at trance when we give a hug, we do sideways hugs or we just pull someone in it. But this is like you have to get embodied here. And you have to make the other person very real in your arms, like they're a living, breathing body too.

So it's not just the sake of appearances where you're patting them on the back to pretend you're there, but you're actually, we all know that one, you know. We're actually consciously hugging with all your body, spirit, and heart. He says, breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms alive, breathing out, she is so precious to me. And he says if you breathe deep like that and hold the person you love, if you're embodied, if you're here in your heart and your body, the energy of your care and appreciation will penetrate into that person and she'll be nourished and bloom like a flower.

So that's a very Tick-Not-Hans kind of way of expressing. But if we want to translate it to ourselves in a way that it's just in our daily life, what would it be like if with somebody dear you just made it part of your intention to show up for a hug, to show up, to really be in your body and feel your care and let your hug express that tenderness? You have to be here for that. So, we're talking about the pathway back and the first part that we've been talking about is how to interrupt the trance and get back into our bodies and our hearts and each of

you knows your particular favorite ways of going into trance. You might choose one thing. It might be too much to say, well, every time I judge or speed or obsess or, you know, it might be too much, but you might say, you know, every time I catch myself judging, if I can remember, I'm just going to pause, feel my body, feel what's going on, breathe, and then continue, and it's really revealing. So that's one of the pathways back. The other is a daily meditation practice.

And when I say that, and I often really try to emphasize this, we each have to find what we can do regularly. Nature loves rhythms, so there's something about every day finding some moments to come into presence, to on purpose pay attention to the moment. It's a gift to the soul to do that. But I think that in order not to find it being something rigid, guilt-inducing thing, my way of doing it is that it doesn't matter how long. So what that means is that and I've shared this before, from when my son was born, that was 32 years ago, I had a period where I got very lax with my practice and could feel the lack of it when he was an infant.

So I committed myself to every day no matter what, but I had that back door that it didn't matter how long. And usually I sit for around 30 minutes or 45 minutes, but there have been times I get to the end of the day and I'll just sit down and I'll take a few deep breaths and I'll, may everybody be happy, may everybody be blessed and go to bed, you know, and that counts. So I invite you to have some regular rhythm in your life where you just call practice some pause for a few minutes or 20 minutes or whatever to reconnect with your body, heart and spirit. And sometimes you won't feel like you're reconnecting with anything, you'll just feel

like you tried and your mind was busy, but that counts because you were intentional, okay? So, daily practice and that means that the kind of practice I'm talking about is as we started with the Buddha, this mindfulness of the body and you might feel that right now just as you hear the words that you kind of move from the head. and begin to scan your body again and sense what wants to let go a little. And you might notice that you can soften your hands, and you can soften your belly, and you can start again to feel your body breathing

and feel even in 10 seconds, a little more present. So you pick the style of practice you enjoy doing, For some, a body skin works wonderfully to get us in our bodies, perhaps having an anchor of the whole body and the sensations of the body or for some sounds and sensations of the breath, but something that brings you to your senses. Now I remember one of my first conscious experiences as an adult of a sense of the sacred. And I was a junior in college and taking classes in yoga and meditation. And I remember one spring day leaving that class, it was evening, and it was the fragrance

of the fruit blossoms in the trees. And I stopped at one point, just stood very still and I could feel the breeze, gentle breeze on my skin and my mind was quiet. And I realized that my body and my mind were in the same place. place at the same time. And that was the sense that life is sacred, that quietness and that presence. That was years ago. But it's one of the realizations that I most keep coming back to is that the portal to presence is through awareness of this living body. This is Kabir. 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 as a part of a beginning to wind up here we don't move directly usually from trance to resting in a sense of blissful sacred presence i wish it were that way but it's not usually that way. Usually there's layers of fears or craving or tensions that are asking for our attention. So, part of our task is to offer a kind and intimate presence with whatever is here. But it's in that process of offering presence to the aliveness in our body that we actually come home to a very awake presence that has room and that is mysterious and beautiful. Now, sometimes when it's very difficult we need to bring a whole lot of care and go very, very

gradually into our bodies. And this is particularly when there's a lot of trauma. So what I'll be addressing in the next class is when there's a lot of trauma or when there's a lot of pain in the body and it's really hard to arrive how to you. How do we work with that? Because we can start listening to this kind of a talk and think, boy, there's something really wrong with me that I'm not opening up into my body. But when there's pain, when there's fear, it's really difficult and we need guidance.

So we'll talk about that. But the motivation is what's important, that we have that intuition, as D.H. Lawrence put it that we need to replant ourselves in this natural world, in our own bodies, in our own hearts, and that that's going to be the pathway to really the mystery and to sacredness. So we'll close with a short meditation. Feel free to adjust how you're sitting as you bring your attention in inward you might yet again scan and notice if there's any places in your body that have tightened up that would really like to let go a little.

So just bring a gentle listening attention to your body and sense what wants to let go right now. Maybe there's some tension in the jaw and you can bring a slight smile to the mouth. Sometimes we don't notice but when we've been thinking a lot the micro-muscles around the eyes tighten so softening the eyes can help as part of quieting the mind. You might allow your shoulders to fall away from the neck and even imagine a sense a little bit of a melting or dissolving in the shoulders, ice to water and water to gas. Let the hands be soft and let the chest be open and see if you can loosen and soften

in the belly and let the breath go deep into the torso as you wake up deep into the body, feeling the touch points of where your hands touch each other or your legs, pressure, warmth where you're sitting, your bottom on the chair, on the cushion, feet on the floor, and feel your whole body as a field of sensation. You're receptive in allowing the movement of energy and aliveness that's here. You might sense if there's anything that wants attention in the domain of your heart, if there's any mood or emotion, that simply wants your acceptance, a kind attention.

Just to breathe with and feel the life of the body, the life of the heart, including sounds, you're letting your senses be wide awake, wide open, implanting yourself in the universe, in this wilderness and this aliveness, noticing the sense of your own being when you're really inhabiting this aliveness, feeling it fully. See if you can sense a kind of formless presence that's here. The solidity of self dissolves when we open into this mystery of aliveness.

Relaxing with the mystery. We close with a poem from Robert Hall. Within the body you are wearing now, inside the bones and beating in the heart, lives the one you have been searching for so long, but you must stop moving and shake hands. The meeting doesn't happen without your presence, your participation. The same one waiting for you there is moving in the trees, glistening on the water, growing in the grasses and lurking in the shadows you create. You have nowhere to go. The marriage happened long ago. Namaste and thank you for your presence.