Tara Brach - Embodied Presence (Part 2) – Planting Our Roots in the Universe – Working with Pain

Episode Date: July 11, 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, welcome. Thank you for being here. So I'll begin with a brief little vignette. This is higher performing corporate executive and he does well in most parts of his life. He has one challenge, one embarrassing difficulty, which is once a month, at the meeting with the president of the company, he wets his pants. And so naturally, he feels quite ashamed about that. And the kindly president encourages him to seek therapy. And what he does

instead is he takes some mindfulness classes. And the following month, he's there at the meeting and the same thing happens. And the president said, well, didn't you go to, you know, get some therapy? And he goes, oh, I started doing mindfulness practice. And he said, he said, he said, he It's still happening, but I'm feeling fine about it now. I'm not embarrassed any longer. Okay, so a little bit of a silly story, but it's actually an entree to this week's talk. We're doing part two on embodied presence. And we're going to be focusing in this week on how to be present with and relate

mindfully and heartfully to physical challenges and to pain. And of course it clearly does not mean that we don't also take care in other ways. But there's a huge amount of suffering that goes on when we have pain, acute sicknesses, where we're kind of in reaction to what's going on, fearful, angry at our bodies, there's all different dimensions of reaction. So it's a deep inquiry. How do we find some equanimity, some presence, some ease? in the midst and in that less suffering with whatever's going on.

So in the broadest way, this talk and the last one last weeks is the invitation rather than living so fully in our minds which is just full with reactivity and planning and worrying and the future and the past, shifting to a more embodied presence, which is really the portal to living with creativity and wisdom and our full heart. So I hope you find this valuable. There's a story about a Buddhist master who was asked how come he meditated and his response was to see the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road as I walk to town each day. And that to me is as beautiful a reason as any.

Our last talk or the last live talk was on embodied presence, how this waking up to the life of our body coming home to the aliveness of our senses really is the gateway to everything we long for. If we can really wake up in our bodies, we can wake up to our heart loving and we can wake up to our full wisdom. And so what I'd like to do is continue that. This will be part two. And what we'll do is we'll look at both the challenges of waking up in our bodies and also the gifts. And as we explored a couple of weeks ago, one Buddhist master put it really well when he was asked to describe the world. His response was, Lost in Thought.

And there we go, when we look back on today, it's pretty easy to sense how much we're in that trance, that kind of virtual reality of thoughts. And often it's easy to see in retrospect how little we were actually awake in our bodies and our senses. And we know that's the way it goes that we spend a lot of time not only in thoughts but in thoughts that get us tight. worry thoughts and like judging thoughts and like planning when we don't need to keep planning or rehearsing when we don't need to rehearse type thoughts.

So we see that we spend time in those kind of virtual realms and we're not so often aware of the life that's here. And this is true even when we get sometimes into our contemplations of the spiritual mysteries, one step removed from full heerness. One of my favorite of the Zen stories is of a young monk who asked the abbot of the monastery, well what happens after we die? And the abbot said, I don't know. And the monk was kind of alarmed.

He said, but I thought you were a Zen master. And his response was, I am, but not a dead one. And so it's a really interesting inquiry about the role of thoughts because we need them to survive and to flourish. And they do serve us on the spiritual path and we're addicted to our thoughts, we get lost in thoughts that don't serve us as we will know. And in the deepest way, if we don't know how to step out of this ongoing conceptualizing, We can't really contact directly the reality that's here.

We can't know truth directly. When we can't get out of thoughts, we can't feel the fullness of love when we're really wide open because thoughts create a matrix where there's a self and another and a sense of separation. So we need to wake up out of our thoughts and the challenges and here's the bottom line challenge that when we wake up out of thoughts and come into our bodies, we're coming into the welderness because we're coming into the domain where it can feel raw and where there can be an intensity of pleasure and unpleasantness and pain. And so there's these inner weather systems, we can't control them, we're just, if

we're opening to our bodies, we're just feeling what's there. And it's much easier to remove ourselves and stay in the mental control tower. We dissociate. I always love George Carlin's phrase, he says, I'm not into working out. My motto is, no pain, no pain, you know. And the reality is we don't like hanging out with pain, you know, we want to fix it or get away from it in some way. So we'll look at together how we can practice when we do have physical or emotional pain. We'll look at that some. And I'm curious how many of you have noticed when you started meditating that you do find you have a lot of pain that you're

working with. Can I see by hands? So there's a lot of us. For those of you that aren't watching that was probably 50 percent and that's just like right now or a lot of pain. of us experience pain at some time or rather. I can say for myself that I've had my reasonable share. I had a period where I had pretty ongoing chronic pain for about six years, sometimes acute, not always acute, but chronic which can really be exhausting. And of course I know many people that have had it way worse but I know what it's like to sit down to meditate and everything in me is going to be exhausting.

I don't want to be feeling this. You know, I just don't want to sit with this. So, if meditation means waking up to the yuckiness that we're feeling in a body, obviously we're not going to be that drawn to it. So let's look at this, but I want to first emphasize that even when we're not experiencing chronic or acute pain, our default, and this is built into our brain, brains, our default setting, when there's any kind of stress at all, and that's a lot of the time, is to leave our bodies. We immediately go to how to control things and fix things and we leave our bodies. And you might have noticed that the more stressed you get, I always liken this to riding

a bicycle and we're riding away from presence and the more stress we get, the faster we're peddling to kind of get somewhere and do something and fix something. And then with that there's that sense, there's not enough time. You notice that one? How often we feel there's not enough time? So we leave and we leave even when there's just ordinary unease. We leave our bodies and we kind of go into that kind of some habit of the mind or behavior to take us away from that discomfort. Some years ago I read a story that was told by a doctor

who was an OBGYN and he described when he was very new in his practice how he was gotten really nervous and self-conscious when he was doing pelvic exams for women. It really made him uncomfortable. So he developed this kind of unconscious habit of whistling when he was doing the exams. And one day he describes her one, he was doing exam on one woman and she started giggling. And then she started laughing and he said, oh, what's wrong? Am I tickling you? And he said, she said, oh, no, no, doctor, but what you're whistling is, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner. So we leave. We get into our habits and some of them are more, some of them cause more harm, some of them don't cause harm.

But the deal is the more intense our discomfort, the more fully we dissociate. And when I say that, as a society we're dissociative. The more that we are struggling with war or with natural disasters, with societal oppression like racism, that creates a feeling of unsafe to be in this body. I remember, Tanahashi-Cote puts it so powerfully. how being African American in this country means it is unsafe to be in your body. So rather than stay with that, and it's the same thing with our personal life.

So many have experienced abuse or really deep wounding and very early on. This is our survival mechanism. We leave the site where it feels most uncontrollable and painful. So let's look at what happens when we leave the site where it feels most uncontrollable and painful. happens when we leave? What happens when we dissociate? And I look at it like we all are somewhat dissociated and we all know we get lost in virtual reality and forget to be here. But what happens? What happens when we leave the aliveness that's here and when there's unprocessed fear, when there's vulnerability that we haven't attended to? Well, one thing is fatigue,

because it takes energy to maintain dissociation. Does that make sense? That if we have to leave, it takes energy to keep on leaving. The other thing is when we're dissociated, we're still chronically anxious. Because even though we're dissociated, the parts of us that are vulnerable, we still know they're there on some level. And, you know, it's as they say that the issues are in our tissues. So there's understanding that there's under unprocessed life here so we're still anxious. There's a kind of chronic anxiety and it keeps us going and it keeps us spinning up here but there's anxiety. Okay, so fatigue and anxiety when we're dissociated and then there's judgment and shame for the ways we end up leaving.

You know, I gave you a silly example with the OBGYN but I mean what are the ways that we leave? I mean for so many of us we obsess and we know we obsess. are for so many others of us, others in overlap, we use substance to numb us to make us feel better to take us away from that unpleasantness. To run away with that we overconsume. So then we judge ourselves for it. Okay, so fatigue, anxiety, judgment. And then in a very deep way when we leave we cut off from our hearts so our caring gets

a little more abstract. We're not as much feeling it as tenderness. And I know many people when I've worked with them have confessed that they don't feel like they're really caring people. Like they can have bursts of it but to really feel open-hearted that's not what they feel because there's kind of a cutoff. Two men are playing golf and one's about to take a swing when a funeral procession appears on the road next to the course, He puts down mid-swing, stops everything, puts everything down, takes off his cap, closes his eyes and bows his head in contemplation. As companion comments, wow, that's the most touching thing I've seen.

You are a very feeling man. The man recovers themselves, says, yeah, well, we were married for 35 years. So, cut off from our hearts. And there's another, there's a lot of levels of what happens. when we dissociate. I'm naming some of the ones that are really common. We also get cut off, and this is, if you think of chakras, we get cut off from this area here, our belly, our pelvic area, which is considered the really site of our authentic power. So when we're lost in our virtual reality, we're actually cut off from an embodiment that has to do with being empowered.

We might have power from anger, a kind of mental kind of power, but it's not a authentic power. Does that make sense? Kind of looking around. Okay. The last thing to mention is that when we're not embodied, when we're cut off, we're cut off from the source of our intuition and our wisdom. So there's a lot of compelling reasons to come back into wholenness into this embodied presence, to feel that we're here. And you might just in these moments sense how here you're here.

here are you and not to judge but just to notice if you've been aware of your body sitting here, if you feel like you have feet or if you're actually filling your feet with awareness, if you feel like you have arms or whether they're actually alive and going vibrating, to feel yourself here. So we'll talk about how do we return and then we're going to go further into when it's really difficult how do we return. The most basic practice in how to return, well, during the day, when we notice we're in trance, when we notice we've completely left, if we can pause a moment and just invite ourselves back, interrupt even for a short time, pause and

breathe and just feel ourselves coming back, that's a really important practice through the day. If you're in conversation with someone and you can even just for a moment say be here, feel your breath, you will actually be in a relational field more of a resonance field. You'll pick up more, you'll be more responsive, you'll be less habituated and automatic, even just a few moments of breathing and saying, be here. It's really, really powerful. If you can move through the day and choose a few times during the day where in particular you're going to invite yourself to arrive. And by that I mean maybe when you're walking to a postbox, you say this walk is when I'm actually going to feel myself walking or something like that.

Or it might be when you're making your bed. When you make your bed, you're going to actually feel the movements of making your bed. I think the best one. And all of us can do this. Do it for a week and see what happens is make your shower or your bath if you happen to take a bath the time that you're actually going to open to sensations. They're typically on the nice side of sensations, you know what I mean? And actually feel it, feel the washing over of water and the heat and the temperature and the texture and slipperiness of soap or whatever you use to lather and feel the touch of your own hands on your own body and be there for it. I have shared how I remember once of the

about a year and a half ago, being in the shower and thinking about a talk I was going to give on how to become more present and realizing that I had just completely lathered my hair with shaving cream. And so, be in the shower and actually be there, don't think about being there if you can possibly do that. So that's during the day, how to really come back and make a point of saying, can I be in my body, especially for the important conversation. Then there's the daily practice where you take whatever time you take each day to actually

come into stillness and include in your daily practice a body scan. And it can be a short one or a long one but move through your body enough so that you know you're awake in the different parts of your bodies. You can sit there and feel this body breathing and actually feel the sense and safe. and aliveness that's here from the inside out. And if you're wondering what I mean by this, let's just try something out. Take a moment to pick up your hand and look at your hand and first of all just notice that you might even mentally say, oh my hand and kind of roll it around and you might

have opinions about your hand like oh my god, how did it get so wrinkly and vainy? or, oh, my fingernails, or oh, it looks pretty strong or whatever it is. Just look at your hand and you might even pick it up as I am kind of in front of you. And now close your eyes and let any idea of hand go and just feel it from the inside out. And you might begin to just move slowly your arms so your hand is kind of traveling in front of you back and forth. or slowly, see it's as if you're moving through water, just moving through space and feel the sensations in your hand. See if you can soften as you move and then coming in stillness right in front of you, soften

even more. And how much do you notice the tingling and the vibrating, the pulsing, perhaps a sense of warm? Do you feel where there's any boundary where hand stops and something else is there? Feel the aliveness from the inside out and notice the difference between any idea of hand and this living, vibrating, ever-changing flow of sensation. It's different. This is the difference between a virtual reality of thoughts and the missing. and the mystery and aliveness of embodiment.

You can let your hand very slowly relax down. Pamma Chodren says, this very body that we have that's sitting here right now with its aches and its pleasures is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive. So, what about when this very body that we have is feeling a lot of unpleasant sensations or emotions? How do we relate to that? There's a basic principle and it's kind of a faux equation that I'll name. And it goes like this, that pain times resistance equals suffering.

Okay? times resistance equals suffering. And the understanding is that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. And it happens when we tense against the pain. Pain comes and it goes, but we tense against it and we lock into a kind of higher level tension which is really suffering. So, if you observe what happens when you get a strong wave of pain, often immediately there's a sense of I don't like this, this is bad, something's terribly wrong, how can I get rid of it? And that's kind of what we do. We don't just feel it as sensations, you know, when we're just feeling what was there

and just directly contacting reality, we immediately add on stuff. It's a whole virtual reality, we wrap around it. I think Dave Barry put it really well. He said, if you ever experience a medical symptom such as itching, you can go to the internet and with just a few clicks discover the reassuring truth. There might be a worm in your brain. Really, Medline Plus, that's a national medical library and the NIH, say itching can be a symptom of a condition called visceral larva migraines, literally a lot of.

a worm in your brain. Another symptom of brainworm is, this is a direct quote by the way from Medline Plus, another symptom of brainworm is irritability. So we have, to different degrees, our versions of proliferating what's there and what starts out as unpleasantness for many of us very quickly becomes something really wrong. But often the reaction, the emotional pain, that we have to physical pain is way more difficult than the physical pain. And I've experienced that myself. When I was at my sickest and I kind of had a spiral down for many years, I didn't know what was going on and the not knowing,

and not knowing if it would ever end and then beginning to think it would never end because it went on for years, the mindset that developed around that was way more. more painful than the actual physical experience. And I think you understand because so many of us go through it. So how to relate? Pain times resistance, all the judgments and ideas and thoughts and so on equals suffering. If it's just unpleasantness most often, I mean sometimes it's beyond the level of tolerance

but often it can come and go and it's actually tolerable. Let me tell you, give you an example of how one person worked with it in this way. We're just putting down the resistance. It was a runner who was a meditator who I, it was powerful to work with him because I was working with him just at the time when I had to give up running because of my connective tissues, tissue difficulties and he had a torn ACL ligament. So, he was, we were meeting and I think we had met at a retreat and then talked once after the retreat and the pain set off all this fear and anger and then depression because he was a lifelong runner and you know he had to

have the surgery and then it was a really slow recovery. And so he was depressed, it was months and he realized that any time he'd feel pain in his knees, it would become a real anger at his body. Like he was really, he felt betrayed by his body which many of us can feel. So we began to work with that and the way we worked was a combination. One piece was he started practicing just doing a simple body scan and just letting, instead of calling it pain, just letting it be unpleasant sensation. And he'd feel the different parts of his body where there were not unpleasant sensations,

he'd feel his shoulders and his hands and then the places where they were. And he'd just start getting the knack of directly contacting the reality of the sensations. Okay, it's like this. Pleasant, tingling, vibrating, unpleasant, sore, squeeze, pender. You understand? He just got the knack of being able. with sensations. And when it was painful, he realized it wasn't excruciating, he could tolerate and he started feeling like he could find the soft space around where the unpleasantness was.

So, he was resting with it in a bigger space and when he went off in reaction, you know, and he started spinning because it's not like we can learn right away to just put that down and basically the spin was what's going to happen in the future, will I ever be able to run again and so on, he would say thank you very much but we don't know and he'd bring himself back to the body scan. Well, he just became more kind and present with his body and he felt and he found during he was, you know, he, it helped him in recovering, he was actually more responsive and attuned to his body so he knew how not to injure himself. And he recovered enough so he didn't go back to full running. He ended

up doing fast walking and doing other types of exercise more. But he described it to me. So, when I was running, I was using my body like a machine. I never was occupying my body. Now I'm inhabiting my body. And whether it's the walking or the swimming or whether I'm doing yoga because you started doing yoga, I'm more alive than I've ever been before even though I can't run. So I share this story because there are many of us that are in that range of it's not excruciating but we have a lot of proliferation wrapped around it and there's a real power to waking up out of the story.

That's the resistance and just feeling sensations as sensations. I know for myself in some way just the words this belongs when I feel a wave pain. Like right now I, as I mentioned earlier to some of you, I have a bit of the tail end of a virus. I'm struggling with something that my granddaughter passed on. And for the first few days it was one of those real kind of feeling all that kind of queasy, achy and so on. And I just kept saying, this belongs. This is just the weather system right now. And it just created a lot more space than if I started computing, when will it be gone

and will I be able to show up for Wednesday night and all those things I often do. There's increasing science on this that's so interesting to me, these several double-blind studies where instead of resisting what's going on, when there's... pain and difficulty in parts of our bodies, there's really a sense of openness and presence. There's actually greater access of the immune system to that area of injury. I think that's really interesting. The immune system obviously is going to not work as well when we're stressing, so it's not that hard to relate to.

One friend of mine had psoriasis on both of his arms and he did an experiment. This is a very non-clinical experiment. But he sent loving kindness to one arm but not the other. And he swears it got better. So I was talking, I wrote a lot about this in beginning and radical acceptance about how to work with pain and not resisted and not call it pain, just be with sensations. And one man, Eduardo Okubaru, read it and he said, your book helped me a lot to cope with pain some days ago when I had terrible renal collocks due to a kidney stone. Once I expel

it, I will name the stone after you. I thought that was the highest praise I've ever gone. Okay. So let's now look at what happens if it's not within that tolerations, it feels really strong, how do we work with difficult pain? And one of the most basic ways is to become aware of the parts of your body where you aren't feeling pain. It might be your hands or it might be your shoulders or your feet. Or you might be aware of something around you that isn't painful, maybe in the sounds around you. Or you might become aware of a person that brings up good feelings and feels safe or an activity, but come up with something else that's like an anchor for your attention that's different than the pain.

So you might be sitting here right now and you can do this as we'll just practice it a little and you might notice that there's somewhere in your body that's not feeling so good. And if you don't have any uncomfortable feelings in your body right now, I'm happy for you. And you can do this another time. But if you do, just feel where that is and we'll call that Zone 1. That's your unpleasant area, okay? Notice what it's like.

But now find Zone 2. And by Zone 2, as I mentioned, it could be some area in your body that feels neutral. You might soften your hands and feel that that's kind of neutral. Or it might be that you, for Zone 2, you just are listening to the sounds around you, the sound of my voice and the space that's here. And that could be Zone 2. Or there might be somebody that brings you feelings of happiness or peace, good mood, it might be your dog and just to have the image of that person or being or it might be

landscape that's kind of sacred to you. So it could be an image. But pick your zone two, which is pleasant and let yourself stay with that and just let yourself get kind of familiarized with zone two where the sensations are okay and the mood is pleasant and then see if you can move back and forth so that you're aware of zone two, the pleasantness and then just just dip in a little to Zone 1, so you're feeling it, feeling the unpleasant sensations, and then go back to Zone 2. So you're remembering a larger space where there's something more neutral or pleasant or okay. And then feeling Zone 1 again, just feeling the uncomfortableness.

And maybe you stay a little longer and start noticing that unpleasantness isn't a solid block. It's a changing movement of sensations. and you might sense the space around it, space between unpleasant sensations. And then if it feels like a lot again, go back to that more neutral experience, maybe your hands or sounds or a pleasant image. And the value of this is that you're not getting rid of and resisting the unpleasantness, But you're helping to keep yourself connected to a larger space so you're not stuck in it

and tensing against it, back and forth. And if it starts feeling more navigable and you feel like you can stay a little bit longer, then with relaxed, gentle attention, allow yourself to feel from the inside out, the area unpleasant and see if you can notice the space between unpleasant sensations and see if you can notice right outside them just the space that's outside them. And notice that there's more presence and balance than when you're resisting or judging. You're here but they don't take over and take a few full breaths and come on back. Now, there are times when they are super unpleasant and they totally take over and there's

just no mobility of the mind to create a larger space and it's not wise are helpful to, it's kind of a masochistic thing to try to rivet your attention there and keep coming back there. It's exhausting and I've had many times of that. And those are not the times to try to be with difficult, difficult, unpleasant sensations. Instead, what you want to do is take a break and find any way that you can bring the attention to something different that is wholesome to you. And it might be music and it might be a cup of tea and it might be talking to a friend or it might be going for a walk.

or it may be in some way just listening to the right music or listening to a talk or whatever it is, but something where you feel some resource, some way you're resourced and replenished. For one little girl and I heard this story when they were from the minds organization that brings mindfulness to the inner city and other places, one little girl when she got really upstead, she said she puts her hand on her dog's heart and that's how she resources. So in some way find your way to putting your hand on a dog's heart or in some way bringing yourself some comfort and taking a break. And this is particularly true if there's trauma because we're talking about physical pain

but it's the same with emotional pain. If it's really strong by trying to be with it, we can end up. of re-traumatizing ourselves and that does not serve anything. So the bottom line is our issues are in our tissues and even with trauma we have to gradually learn to re-enter our body to bring compassion, gentle interest, care and reparent what's there. We need to be in touch. But it has to be gradual and we have to begin by knowing how we can find safe. space that isn't where we are being dominated by the unpleasantness. The meta-meditation, loving-kindness can be a very powerful way if you're feeling a sense

of trauma or a lot of pain in the body. Just to be offering yourself care with your words and with images can be a way of creating a larger space and not getting in the grip of the pain. So I started this by saying we leave regularly and whether we have a huge amount of pain or we are just, it's just the default in the brain because there's some stress and we're in the habit of obsessing and judging and worrying, we leave regularly and then of course the more trauma the more we leave. I'd like to end this by talking about two related gifts that come just as a sort of the

we have the intention and we begin to navigate back into our bodies because they're so precious. And the first one I have pointed to which is we become more intimate with life. Intimacy, whether it's with our inner life or with each other, we have to be here for it. So when we're in our bodies we are more empathetic, we're more attuned, we actually can listen and respond to ourselves and each other with a lot more sensitivity. I'd like to share with you and invite you to kind of listen to this as if you're hearing it from your own inner life speaking to you. It's a beautiful prayer. It's called a felt-sense prayer. I am the pain in your head, the knot in your stomach, the unspoken grief, the unspoken grief.

grief, inner smile. I'm your high blood sugar, your elevated blood pressure, your fear of challenge, your lack of trust. I'm your hot flashes, your fragile low back, your agitation, your fatigue. You tend to disown me, suppress me, ignore me, inflate me, coddle me, condemn me. You usually want me to go away immediately to disappear. to sleep back into obscurity. More times than not, I am only the most recent notes of a long symphony, the most evident branches of roots that have been challenged for seasons. So I implore you. I am a messenger with good news as disturbing as I can be at times. I am wanting to guide you back to those tender places in yourself. The place you

places where you can hold yourself with compassion and honesty. If you look beyond my appearance, you may find that I am a voice from your soul, calling you from places deep within that seek your conscious alignment. I may ask you to alter your diet, get more sleep, exercise regularly, breathe more consciously. I may encourage you to see a vaster reality and worry less about the day-to-day fluctuations of life. I may ask you to explore the bonds and the wounds of your relationship. I am your friend, not your enemy.

I have no desire to bring pain and suffering into your life. I am simply tugging at your sleeve too long immune to gentle nudges. I desire for you to allow me to speak to you in a way that enlivens your higher instincts for self-care. You are being so vast, so complex, with amazing capacities for self-regulation and healing. Let me be one of the harbingers that lead you to the mysterious core of your being, where insight and wisdom are naturally available when called upon. with a sincere heart. Let me be one of the harbingers that lead you to the mysterious

core of your being where insight and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart. So the first gift is that sensitivity, that listening, that being guided by the life of our body right back to the mystery, the truth, the essence of who we are. And the second gift, and I said they're interrelated, when we leave who we are shrinks, the sense of who we are becomes the narrative self. That's one way to describe it. We're living in the story of our self-centeredness but we've lost touch with our heart, with our wholeness of being. As we reconnect, we start inhabiting the very ground of being. And I can speak for myself, as I mentioned earlier. I had this kind of

eight-year decline and my prayer over and over again was can I find freedom in the midst of feeling really terrible. And it was periodic bouts of a lot of pain but when it was extreme as I mentioned there was a lot of fear and a lot of sense of loss. So what I started doing because I realized that when I left it, when I tried to fix myself or when I condemn my body and a lot of times felt shame about like I'm not taking good care of myself, I was going into this very small dissociated self just as I was describing. It was a kind of story of myself. So my practice became contact reality, just contact reality, have the courage to be with

what's here. And it wasn't in a kind of harsh way, it was like just open into what's here and let it unfold itself. And so that's when I started really using these words, this belongs. Okay, this pain right, this moment belongs, this fear belongs, this grief about losing mobility, this grief about losing my capacity to do things that I love, this belongs too. And as I let go of the resistance, remember, pain times resistance equals suffering, as I let go of resistance and let it belong, I started opening into this space, this heart space

where I really had room for the grief and the pain and the discomfort. And that heart space was more the truth and preciousness of who I am than any of the stories. And then as happened for me, I have really got better. I'm much, much better. And I got that takeaway of when it's difficult not to resist. Because if we open to what's happening, we become that openness. This is Linberg writes, go with the pain, let it take you. your palms and your body to the pain. It comes in waves like a tide and you must be open

as a vessel lying on the beach, letting it fill you up and then retreating, leaving you empty and clear. With a deep breath, it has to be as deep as the pain. One reaches a kind of inner freedom from pain as though the pain were not yours but your bodies. The spirit lays the body on the altar. The spirit lays the body on the altar. Annie Marrow Lindberg. So these are the gifts. These are the gifts that sensitivity and intimacy with others as we wake up in our bodies and really coming home to that wholeness of being that is our true nature. Then we get to move through the world and enjoy those tiny purple flowers by the side of the road, really enjoy our moments.

We get to be with our child and feel the hug that really connects us or we get to be with a friend who's in sorrow and actually stay and open our hearts to that. We get to open to the night sky, we're here. Let's close in a very simple way. I invite you to come into stillness and take a moment to, as you close your eyes, sense as you attend to your body what wants to let go right now? Where is there some habitual tightness that wants to release a little bit? You might let yourself feel the movement of the breath and as you just you, you might just

As you relax a bit, feel this whole body breathing, the gentle, receptive attention, feeling the aliveness from the inside out. Softening your hands and feeling the hands, tingling and vibrating, feeling the feet from the inside out, letting your whole body fill with awareness and aliveness and feeling the aliveness in the area of the heart, the tenderness of the heart, this heart space that's here. May we be blessed to live from embodied presence, to realize the love and creativity and freedom that are our essence. Namaste and thank you for your attention.