Tara Brach - Embodied Presence: Portal to the Sacred - Part 1 (2019-03-13)

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

Embodied Presence: Portal to the Sacred - Part 1 (2019-03-13) - This two part series explores how we regularly leave our body and skim life's surface in a mental trance, and the ways we can train our attention to come home again. We look at working with physical and emotional pain, and the gifts of love, wisdom, creativity and aliveness that arise as we learn to fully inhabit these living forms and all our senses with awareness.  Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. One of the themes that is pretty much in every talk is about the power and preciousness of presence. And a few weeks back I was reflecting on a way of describing this and I was reflecting really in the shower as I was, as the weather was coming down, was reflecting on really living from presence. And then I realized that I was slathering my hair with shaving cream. My first thought was, I'm never going to tell anyone this.

I told Jonathan a little later and he said it was a really good thing I didn't start shaving. So I share this with you because we all, every day go into trance. And by trance I mean our world shrinks and we're living in some circling thoughts that are taking us, we're time traveling in the future or the past and our body usually gets tight as we're anticipating things that might go wrong and we're just not in contact with our world. And in that virtual reality we miss out and we miss out really on the things that if we did a kind of survey and I said, you know, what do you most value? We miss, that's what we miss out on. We miss out on the real living feelings of love. It can't happen when we're in a virtual reality. We miss out on

real creativity. We miss out on wisdom because wisdom comes from really contacting reality. we're not fully alive, we're not in our bodies or our senses. I remember one art professor described that she was talking to her daughter, her daughter was seven and her daughter asked her what she did and she says, well I teach people how to draw. And the little girl stared back at her incredulous and she says, you mean they forgot? You know? I so often think about how our bodies know how to draw. and sing and dance and our bodies know how to make love and how to give birth and how to die,

how to mourn and how to celebrate. And our bodies know and we leave our bodies all the time really regularly. Most of the day we're trying to figure out something. Have you noticed how many moments we're trying to figure out? You know, it's like as if there's always some problem to solve, always, you know. And we're going around in that kind of planning, worrying mode and in cyberspace. I mean we're... sometimes it's just computing how many moments in front of a screen and it's depressing.

I mean we're just hooked into something that's not this living reality. And what happens is it cuts us off from the world. the quality of presence is absolutely necessary if we're going to have empathy for others. It's absolutely necessary for that. If we're going to have any sense of compassion or connection or real wonder, it cuts us off. John O'Donoghue is one of my favorite poets and philosophers no longer alive. And one of the things he says is that our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless.

Our minds that make our life so homeless. So for this talk and the next, because I seem to never be able to cover everything I want to in one, we're going to be exploring embodied presence. Really how to wake up in these bodies and really how embodied presence is the gateway to the sacred, that if we want to really experience the mystery and the numinous and that that which is beyond our thoughts we have to be here awake through these bodies. And it's a really nice season to get embodied because we're turning into spring so how about that we're here for it.

Do you know what I mean? Like really here in our senses. So historically those on a spiritual path would go into the wilderness. This is in many, many different traditions. They'd go into the desert or the forest or mountain caves or whatever and the idea is to reconnect with the natural rhythms true belonging that way and for many of us. I mean, I imagine many of you find that when you go into nature you start feeling a sense of homecoming and I'm curious how many of you think of it as part of your path to go into nature, you start feeling a sense of homecoming and I'm curious how many of you think of it as part of your path to go into nature, nature. Yeah, yeah, for those of you can't see the hands going up, that was probably four-fifths maybe. There's something about being in nature and in the elements that we

remember were made of the elements and some of that separate personhood starts being less solid and less separate and we become part of what's here. So ultimately the wilderness is these living bodies. There's nothing more wild in the whole entire universe, in the galaxies, in the black holes and exploding red stars and so on, then what actually goes on inside these bodies? It's all the wilderness. And the pathway to our full potential requires a deep communion with the wilderness right here.

Right? in this, what the Buddha said, this fathom long body. And it's always to me very compelling that the final message of the Buddha was be a light into yourself and the only way is by exploring our direct experience right here. So right this moment, if you will, you might just close your eyes for a second and notice how much you're aware of your body and you might initially realize, oh I was listening to words and I wasn't really, nothing in me was aware of my body but start entering your body again.

You might notice can you feel the energy in your hands? You feel your feet, you feel your chest, your belly. You're in your body today. Did you feel the air on your cheek at all or the feeling of the clothes on your body? Did you feel your breath at all today? Did you listen in to the mood of your heart? Did you listen in to another's life with that real attentive presence? One teacher advised as his spiritual teaching, don't go far from the body.

I'd like to invite you as you participate because really we're participating in these talks, checking things out, to keep 80% of your attention, 90% of your attention, 90% of your attention, your body and maybe 10% listening. And I promise you you won't miss anything important. Promise. In fact that's all I'm going to say tonight. Okay, so you can open your eyes if you'd like, but notice as you open your eyes that you can still feel your feet on the ground

and feel the weight of your body on the chair, pressure, warm, feel your hand, stay. A little exposure to meditation lets us know pretty much right away the challenge of staying awake in our bodies. If you've meditated at all you'll know that we are very, very conditioned to exit over and over again. And the challenge for some people, it's simply I just don't feel much from the neck down. I can't feel many sensations and that might be because we've had trauma in our life.

or just because of we're super mentally oriented. For some people really know it's very hard to feel sensations at all. For others they can touch but they can't stay. Others stay a bit but find all sorts of reactivity and judgment about what's going on and some people try to get into their bodies and get overwhelmed and flooded and have a miserable time. So it's not so easy. And if you check and I invite you to do it right now, again, just click, close your eyes, ask yourself, what's between me and being at home in my body in this moment?

At home in my body in this moment. And just check. Since you're entering the wilderness, what's it like? Maybe you notice that there's something intense or unpleasant. Maybe you notice it's all changing. there's something really pleasant. Can you sense how being awake in the body puts you in touch with it, it's out of control? You can't be awake in the body and controlling at the same time.

In the body is where fear lives. Of course, joy and excitement live there too. And in the deepest way, in the body it's a mystery. Staying, just keep inviting yourself back into this wilderness. This moment and this moment. You might wonder who am I in this wilderness when there's real presence in the body, who am I? And if there's a lot of presence you'll find there's no real answer.

Because when we're really present in the body all the ideas about a self, are no longer, we're not living in those anymore. You can open your eyes if you'd like or you can keep your eyes closed. But what many people find when they start really investigating, sensing what is between me and being at home and my body, is that it's pretty uncomfortable and disorienting because it's all out of control in there. It's like we have this,

mental control tower up here and we're very used to living up here but when we come down into the body we can't control anything and it can feel really off balance and scary and basically the doing self is out of a job when we're embodied and present. Does that make sense? I'm just kind of look around a little. The doing self, okay, out of a job. It takes thinking to sustain a sense of self. And we like to hold on to that idea of a self. So one student, I decided, you know, he was going to really practice embodied presence through the day. He's going to stay in his body and he was monitoring and, you know, kind of worked pretty well in the subway. He was able to do that. He walks into his office,

he's feeling himself walking, walking, walking, stepping, stepping. First conversation and he noticed that he's off in his head and that's fine we have to think to be able to talk so. But even when the conversation was over he was still running things he tried to come back was much harder. The next conversation he was in the middle of a conversation when the other person was talking he thought well I could be in my body now but he realized that he felt too much anxiety. He was so used to preparing what he was going to say back he couldn't stay in his body. We all do that.

We continually leave so that we can control things, prepare for things, figure out. And here's the deal. We have to think a certain amount to successfully navigate our life. But we're addicted to it. We don't know how to push the button saying, okay, pause and be here. And as soon as we do, it feels vulnerable and some of you might remember from James Joyce, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body, okay? And that's us. We kind of move around and we're up here in the control tower and we're

so habituated to it, it's, you can sense it if you look back on today. How many moments did you spend in body in your senses? So, one very true and painful fact about our society and where it's going is that our children leave earlier and earlier. And now statistically they're indoors five to six hours a day behind a screen. One little story, a little boy proudly announced in kindergarten that their family cat has had kittens and there were three males and three females. And the teacher said, well how did you know? and the little boy said, well, my daddy turned them over and the labels on the bottom.

And we can sense how much real connection with the outdoors, with nature. 50% less time outdoors than the prior generation. 50%. The obesity rate in children has triples since the 1980s. And of course adults are going the same way. So I'm bringing this up to say that dissociation from our body is unhealthy, it's happening a lot and it's been happening through the evolution of our species. And if you go back and just track the major periods and I find this so fascinating, hunter-gatherer

very embedded in nature, agricultural well that's when humans started dominating nature and going by calendars and clocks and kind of being removed, you know, planning and thinking and living on that calendar time and kind of being, I'm me and I'm controlling the show and this is nature out here. And then industrial evolution and that whole era, which still exists of course, removed even more from natural rhythms. And then technology which keeps us plugged in as we started earlier right into that screen and of course is taking away a lot of the jobs that have more hands-on action because it's

all artificial intelligence. Scary statistics, 35% of all jobs disappearing by 2034. So we're living more and more in a virtual world and that's the way it's going anyway but how do we stay embodied so we're still connected with our heart and our values and our senses as the world gets increasingly into cyberspace. And one of the things that is most important to be able to see is that the more we separate from our bodies, the more we're in the chronic thinking mode, in the virtual reality, the more the shadow masculine comes out, which is that we approach the world through domination, mastery, and control, resigning mostly in our head and that's in a global way what leads to not taking care

of this earth, thinking the earth is ours to exploit, or thinking animals are ours to eat and causing torment, or thinking other humans are less than us and violating them. So if you imagine somebody's really awake in their bodies, how are they going to treat other bodies and other animals than the earth with a lot more empathy? this into daily life, the moments that were caught and lost in thinking and not in our bodies or moments when we're not able to be intimate with others. And I was thinking of myself a few weeks ago, I realized I was talking to my son and as I was talking to him I was deleting emails that I didn't need to deal with and realized that

I really, my attention was really fragmented and I had to ask him. what he was saying a couple of times and you know I realized that my my biggest regret when I die will probably be all the moments that I in some way multitasked and was caught up in my head rather than in my heart being with others. Of course he only calls me when he's driving. I just have to balance that a little bit. So as I said we need to think but we're a addicted and it keeps us from our bodies. Annie Lamotte put it wonderfully. She said, 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 we get lost in trance, we lose the freshness of the moment.

And there's a way that we get kind of bored with our lives because we're just in this mental familiar cocoon. George Carlin says, do you ever get that strange feeling of Vujaday? Not deja vu, Vosier Day. 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. Vujaday. Actually I was going to name this talk Vujarday because That's so cool, you know. It's like to really, instead of being in that, been there, done that mode, when you're embodied, I mean if you're really awake in your body and you're really listening to sound

and you're really taking in your world, it does not feel familiar, it feels magical. It sometimes feels difficult, sometimes it's raw and intense, but it's not boring. We're awake for it. So the rest of this talk and next we're going to be talking about how do you reconnect? Because we've all to some degree dissociated, everybody to some degree, unless we're really, really awake. So how do we reconnect? And I'm going to talk about two different approaches and the first approach is how during the

day when we get caught in trance we can come back. So when you're in that trance of obsessing or whatever it is, how do you come back? And then the second is the daily practice that really helps us to have that full embodiment. So first, the process of returning. There are four main signs of trance that I think it's useful. If you want to train an embodied presence, here are the four, okay? each one of them are signals saying come back. And before I name the four, just to say when we're in trance in some way we're avoiding

being right here. So coming back isn't so easy because on the way back we have to touch what we've been avoiding. Does that make sense? That it's not so easy to come out of trance during our daily life because we're actually on purpose trying to get away from something vulnerable. So part of the reentry is that very powerful question, what is it I'm unwilling to feel? I invite you to keep that in your mind as we go over these four main flags of trance. The good news is that even though we're kind of unwilling to feel something and in the habit

of leaving, the more we practice coming back, the more our way we're willing to feel something, the more our window of tolerance expands and we actually can find ourselves feeling at home with the whole range of experience, which is freedom. That is the meaning of equanimity, that you can be with whatever. It allows you to feel what's called the lion's roar, which is one of my favorite kind of images from Tibetan Buddhism. The lion's roar is that confidence that no matter what comes up. you can hang out and be with it.

It's workable. And the way that we develop that confidence by coming out of trance and being with what might feel edgy or uncomfortable. So here are the four. The first one should be familiar. It's obsessive thinking when you find yourself going over and over and over again about the same theme. Anybody here...

No, I won't even ask... You don't have to raise your hand. So it's repeating those cycling thoughts about what bad's going to happen and rehearsing and preparing and there's that sense something around the corner is absolutely that we're having to fend against and the compulsive thinking we think is going to help us protect ourselves. That's what obsessive thinking is we wouldn't do it if we didn't think it was really serving us. I like this little story that was post...

This is actually posting in a national park where the rangers were telling hikers to be alert of bears and take precautions to avoid an encounter. Just like we're thinking we're taking precautions with our obsessing to avoid something bad. So here's what they advise, park visitors. They say wear little bills on your clothing so they make noise when you're hiking and carry pepper spray just in case the bears encountered. Okay, obsessing, what should I do? What do they do?

They say, keep your eye out for fresh bear scats. You have an idea if there's bears in the area. And then they say, you should be able to recognize the difference between black bear and grizzly bear scat. Black bear droppings are smaller, and they often contain berries, leaves, and bits of fur. Grizzly bear droppings tend to contain small bells and the smell of pepper.

So much for our obsessing, right? It really doesn't help. The intensity of our commaseless. impulsive thinking is in direct proportion to our unwillingness to feel what's in our body. I want to say that again. The intensity of our obsessing is in direct proportion to unwillingness to feel what's in our body. So there's a sign when you're obsessing you know, okay, something I'm unwilling to feel.

But have courage because if you just get the knack of coming back anyway, even if you just come back a little bit, you start to interrupt the pattern. So here's how you do it. And it's simple and this should sound very familiar. You notice the obsessing, you might even name it. Obsessing, obsessing, or whatever your top ten favorite hits are when you're obsessing, you know, name that. So you just name it. And then breathe and feel where it is in your body that you're really unwilling to feel. Because there's something going on. Just breathe with it and breathe kindly with it. In other words you might even put your hand in your heart or just say it's okay.

So how do we come back from the first sign of trance the obsessing? Notice it's happening. Okay, I'm just planning on how to avoid the bear around the corner, whatever it is. Interrupt it, name it. Okay, obsessing. Breathe, feel in your body, be kind. Even for five seconds. seconds. You see we have these neuropathways that have been the energies been running

through them in certain patterns over and over. So just interrupting for a short amount of time actually makes a really big difference. And gradually you'll find your window of tolerance or belts, you'll actually come back and find you can make yourself at home in the wilderness. You can. Okay. Obsessive thinking. the second one is judgment. When we are caught in the trance of something's wrong and it usually has to do with something's wrong with that person or with me. But when you find yourself in the trance of judgment that's again another time, it's another

signal to come back, come home. The judging and I mean averse of judging. I'm not talking about the judging like that wise discrimination that sees that oh, when I speak in that tone of voice, it alienates, it's not that. I'm talking about averse of judgment, you know, shaming ourselves, others are bad, you know, that the constant blame. That's the second one. And again, those are very deep neuropathways, the judging mind.

To be able to interrupt and come back to your body is one of the most liberating pathways you can find. So have that intention when you notice you're judging to go, okay, interrupt. Judging, name it. Breathe, come into the body and with kindness feels what's under it. What's under it'll usually be hurt or fear, some discomfort. Okay. Obsessive thinking, judging the third of the trances is when we're caught in distracting

ourselves, numbing ourselves, the kind of behaviors where we know we're trying to get away. And that could be food, drink, drugs. Okay, these are behaviors and those are a trance too. I'm talking about overuse. There's a story I've always loved of a man and a woman in their living room and he's saying to her, you know, if I ever become a vegetable, just pull the plug, you know, and which case she goes over the TV sit and yanks out the plug. And I love it because we know that if each of us is honest with ourselves, we know there

are many moments that we're distracting ourselves to get away from boredom, discomfort, feelings of anxiety or angst or whatever. We just do. I mean how many of us go online and do check or texts or emails or whatever, when we know we really don't need to. It's just that flinch, you know, just to get away from the moment. So what am I unwilling to feel? And I suggest, and this is a, there's a wonderful quote by Edward Tuft, he says, there are only two industries which refer to their customers as using, users, drugs and computers.

You can tell I have a bit of a thing about this and I am part of it. And so I've made certain rules for myself just because I feel that it takes away so much from living a spiritual life to be hooked in cyberspace so my rules are kind of like I don't go on my email or anything until I've already done what's called my soddena, my meditation and exercise in the morning and prayers and so on. And I'm religious about it because I think it can infiltrate everything and take over in so many ways. I challenge and invite you one out of four times that you have that reflex to go on

online or check or this or that when you know you don't have to, because a lot of times we don't. One out of four times, pause and do the interrupt, just as we're talking about it. What am I unwilling to feel? Name what's going on. Okay, want to go online, name it, breathe, be kind, pay attention. And even if a minute later you go online again, you've still interrupted a pattern and you can begin to build new neural pathways. And I'm curious how many of you feel like you might try that out, one out of four times? Can I see? Oh, thank you.

Because that's the one that I'm working with right now. And it's hard because it's so pervasive in our lives. So I'll be very curious. Maybe we'll do a... Sometimes on Facebook, I try out things and I ask people to share what they're finding out. Maybe we'll do that with this particular addiction. Obsessive thinking, judging, the distracting. The last one is the speeding around, the rushing around, the racing around.

You might notice when you're driving what it's like when somebody's driving slower than you are and you're trying to get somewhere, that feeling. We are so trying to get on. on our way somewhere else. It's so big a deal for us. You know, the sense of I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time. I have too much to do.

Need to get more done. One of the most beautiful things about being on a meditation retreat is that not only does, you know, there's clearly not a whole lot to do, but there's a purposefulness of slowing down. And I always notice how when I move half as fast, I notice twice as much. It's really powerful. One woman shared how her sister when she was pregnant had become diagnosed with cancer. And she gave birth to a healthy baby girl but after some months it was clear that she wasn't going to make it. And I think she had a year or so.

And during that year, because she knew it was a little, the only time she was going to have with her baby, she had a mantra and the mantra was, I have no time to rush. I wonder how many of us as an interrupt could try that one. To sense when we're speeding and pause for a moment. It's so powerful, so beautiful, just to interrupt it a bit. You know, Carl Young describes the suffering of being cut off from the sacred or from our aliveness in psychological terms. He describes it as that one of the greatest suffering or the greatest influences on their offspring and their self is the unlived life of the parent.

One of the greatest influences on their offspring and on themselves is the unlived life of the parent. And you might think of it as, oh, the person that never pursues music. but it's much deeper. The unlived life is the life it's like racing across the surface and never arriving, never dropping in to feel the passion or the loneliness or the tender-heartedness or the soul or the wonder. On our way somewhere else. Janet showed me an article that came from Krista Tippett's wonderful show On Being. So many gems. And in this case, Krista was interviewing Aaron Dunnigan, surname, Gardner, Spiritual Presbyterian

Minister. And Aaron introduced the notion of induced meandering. And I'll explain what it is. It applies to rainwater harvesting. That you, if rainwater runoff is harvested rather than speeding the way it does, if there's a way to slow it down, to wind its way down the hill rather than rushing full speed, then it can sink in and irrigate the plants and it refills the ground water tables below. So, induced meandering. And I know you can make the connection with our lives, you know, rather than rushing to the finish line. What if there was some induced meandering here, you know? so that we can slow down enough to really let in the springtime that's unfolding

and let in the gleam in a child's eyes, or let in the shower that's coming down rather than thinking other things or whatever it is, let in this life. So again, if we want to work with the fourth of the trances is speeding, to interrupt it. What am I unwilling to feel? And can we do a bit of induced meandering? It's a fabulous term.

So I've been talking thus far longer than I expected about the first approach to becoming embodied, coming back from the trance. And the second approach is having a daily practice where we're training ourselves to move from this busyness of our mind into this wilderness that's here and over and over again. And the way our practice goes we get often thoughts and the most simple, elegant kind of description of the instructions is just inviting ourselves back to arrive again in presence, here, this breath and have you been in touch with your body as you've been listening? Maybe you can again feel your hands and feel your feet. See, our ongoing daily practice is a training in coming back.

It's a training in coming back to the one place where we can really live and experience this life. I remember I began meditation when I was in college, I think I was a sophomore or junior. And I remember going to, and I went to yoga class and at the end we meditate and I was feeling this mindful awareness of my body and I walked out into, it was a spring night and I could just the air was filled with the fragrance of the fruit trees blossoming and there's this gentle breeze on my skin and my mind was quiet and I realized that my mind and my body were in the same place at the same time, that life felt sacred and that I hadn't had that experience before,

my mind and my body in the same place at the same time. So that was now 47 years ago and I can say to you that the most recurrent realization I have in meditation practice is the preciousness of coming back to this wilderness right here, that it really is the pathway to the sacred. From the poet 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 perhaps as a way of closing to say that it's not an easy thing to train the way of it

in embodied presence, but it's doable. The more we've been wounded, the more we have physical pain, the more challenging it is. And the next class we're going to address how to work with being in a body that's really uncomfortable. It doesn't feel like canyons and pines and bliss. It feels like yucky and I don't want to be here. And yet what motivates us is that there's some something in us that wants to live fully and love fully and experience the sacred and

that we know that we have to come back and reconnect to do that. D.H. Lawrence writes this. He says, when we get out of the glass bottles of our ego and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forest again, we will shiver with cold and fright, but things will happen to us so that we won't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in and passion will make our bodies taught with power. We shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down. We shall laugh and institutions will curl up like burnt paper. It's freedom. The old things, the institutions, the cages dissolve when we

we start to open into this living body and discover the presence that's possible. So with that we'll take a few minutes to close in an embodied way. I invite you to close your eyes and come into stillness. This will be short but give you a taste of the simplicity of our practice. As you come into stillness, allow yourself to notice what's going on in your body. Imagine in sense that you can just allow the awareness to descend and fill your body. Let your shoulders fall away from the neck and feel inside your shoulders. Maybe there's tightness or tension and sense that you can let that float a little in awareness,

softening, letting go. And let your awareness fill your hands. So you can feel your hands from the inside and how much can you notice the tingling that's there, the vibrating. And sensing those sensations and that aliveness floating in awareness, floating in space. Let the chest be open. See if you can let this next breath be received in a softening belly.

this breath and this breath and again. Your body begins to wake up with awareness. The hands are still soft, the belly soft. And feel right down to your feet, the tingling, the vibrating there, place of pressure, warmth and contact where your feet touched the ground. And you might imagine the earth, and this whole earth field around it and the energy the earth flowing up through your body. so that if you widen your attention, your body can be like a field of sensation,

tingling, vibrating, alive. Sense how this aliveness is filled with the light of awareness and sense how much you can relax and let go into the aliveness. Poet down a fold says, trust the energy that courses through you. Trust and then take surrender even deeper, be the energy. Don't push anything away. Follow each sensation back to its source in vastness and pure presence. Our pathway is to make ourselves at home more and more in this wilderness, this aliveness,

this portal to presence. Again, the poet 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. Namaste and thank you for your presence and attention. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.