Tara Brach - Embodied Presence - Portal to the Sacred, Part 2

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

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.  In this talk, Tara explores:  how embodied presence awakens love, creativity, and wisdom—inviting us to meet life's moments with full attention and an open heart. the universal tendency to leave our bodies when discomfort arises, and how returning to direct sensation reconnects us to aliveness. practical ways to stay present with physical and emotional pain, transforming "pain" into the changing flow of sensation. mindful strategies like pendulating between ease and discomfort, softening resistance, and "resting in love" to reduce suffering. how waking up in the body opens a portal to mystery, dissolving the small self and revealing our true nature as vast awareness.   The post Embodied Presence - Portal to the Sacred, Part 2 appeared first on Tara Brach.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste friends, welcome. Thank you for being here. I'll begin with a story about a man who came to one of our retreats on the recommendation of his therapist who told him he'd feel better and after the retreat he goes back to his therapist and said, I was so intense, I touched into really raw fear and I had pervasive self-doubt and really touched into the deepest grief. You know, you said I'd feel better and therapist nodded sagely, yep, you'll feel your fear better and I thought you'd feel yourself doubt better

and your grief better. And, you know, there's this misunderstanding about meditation that we're transcending the body and the feelings and our earthly experience. and a more true understanding is that by meeting this earthly life with a full presence, we connect with our full heart and spirit. So, this is what we're exploring in a two-part series that I love from the archives. And this is part two. If you missed the first one, you can find it on my website. Friends, you know, so many life moments we spend.

in that trance of thinking. We know it. And the most cherished parts of life, you know, love and gratitude, wonder, true insight, it arises from being right here in an embodied presence. So my prayer is that we can all deepen our attention to this so that we really can serve and savor this precious life. Thank you. This afternoon I was in my yard and kind of walking past these new daffodils and feeling that sense of what happens when, you know, getting your first blossoms in your yard in the spring. And it reminded me of that spiritual master who was asked why he meditated. And his response was, so I can see the little purple flowers by the side of the road as I walk

into town each day. We practice really to be fully alive, to really engage with this life. And the last class was an exploration of waking up into these bodies and our senses fully with the understanding that we often live a bit removed from our body. So how to be more alive really here in our bodies. I'd like to continue that in this class how this mindfulness of the body of our body, of our senses really is the portal to full presence, to living from wholeness. And I thought, well, one of the things just to say is that everything that we most value

in our life, whether it's love or creativity or wisdom, feeling fully vibrant, is only available if we're awake in our body. We have to be here for it. And there's a wonderful little verse from the poet Bocon goes like this. Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate wandering. Where we go matters less than what we notice. Life is a garden, not a road.

We enter and exit through the same gate wandering. Where we go matters less than what we notice. So you might just in your own heart scan and sense today and sense the quality of noticing today. How much did you notice? And by noticing how much were you really available to those around you? How much did you notice of your own inner life? of the natural world? How much did you notice?

And I know for myself when I do a retro scan, what I realized is that huge swaths of today were in my mind thinking and I was in a virtual reality not noticing these immediate living experiences. I was off, you know, in the future or the past. And so it is with most of us. I call it a thinking trance because in those moments that were often thought, we're not actually listening to the sounds around us and we're not actually attuned in a felt sense way to what's going on in our bodies. And actually our empathy registrars kind of dimmed, you know, we're not on full telt in terms of our aliveness.

And this isn't to say that we have to think. We need to think thinking is part of survival and flourishing and we overthink. We're not here very much. So we're going to be exploring really how by being one step removed, we're removed from what most matters. And I often, it over, this always reminds me actually of a story, one of my favorite stories of this, a novice is approaching this Zen. master and he has this burning question and the question is, what happens to us after we die?

And the monk says, I don't know. And this is very, very disturbing to the novice. He says, you know, I thought you were a Zen master and so on. And the response was I am but not a dead one. So what we get is that we cannot think our way into freedom. We can certainly think and solve problems and we can think and create buildings and flights to the moon and so on but the big stuff, how to love, how to really connect with each other, the real creativity that comes out of us, the deep wisdom that can look right into reality itself.

It is not through thinking. So the inquiry is really how do we live? more fully in the moment in our bodies and the challenge is that we have huge conditioning to exit our bodies. If I said to you, one of the Zen teacher says, as his instructions, don't go far from your body, don't leave your body any more than you need to. And if you really practice, say, okay I'm going to stay in my body, what you find is we get tugged all over the place really, really quickly.

And the challenge is that the body is the real wilderness. When we're in our bodies, it's out of control. It's the whole universe's intensity, the heat, the fire, the pain, the pleasure, everything is expressed through these living bodies. So there's an uneasiness with that out-of-control wilderness. It's raw, it's intense. much more comfortable exiting, a little removed up in the control tower up here, you know, dip in now and then when it seems safe.

George Carlin says, I'm not into working out. My motto is, no pain, no pain. So when there's unpleasantness, we don't want to be here for it. So we're going to explore in this particular session here, how do we come in this, we come into our body when it's uncomfortable or when it's unpleasant. How do we do that? And we're also going to look at the gifts of embodied presence. So one question I have for you, how many of you actually experience regular pain in your

life physically? Okay, there's a good bunch of us, 75%. I can say for myself, I feel good talking about it because I feel like I've had a qualified amount of experience with it. You know, I've spent enough time with different types of chronic pain, not as much as many people, but enough that I know and I can be humble about it, that the reflex is very quickly to not want to be here. Like when I'm feeling sick or uncomfortable, the last thing I want to do is sit down and get into my body. Really, it's just, that's not where I want to be. Any distraction is better, you know? So, the first reflex is not to like,

it, to want it to go away. The second one is, you know, if you have to be around to try to figure out how you can get rid of it, how you can fix it, anything but just simply opening to be with what is. So, I'd like to emphasize a few things about our universal conditioning because it's just so not personal. You know, this is not our particular thing that we don't like hanging out in physical discomfort. Even when it's not so, it's not so not personal, you know, it's not strongly unpleasant. We have a very compelling habit energy of leaving our bodies. This is even when it's not unpleasant. We have a default setting in our brain that when we don't have a task at hand, our brain is designed to start scanning the past and future. It just

does that. It scans and it's basically trying to reify a sense of self on its way. and predicting what's going to go wrong and, you know, trying to make sure to protect ourselves. The more stressed we are, the more feverishly we enter into that default and try to get away from the present moment. It's like we have a bicycle and the more stress, the faster we pedal away from the present moment. Does that make sense? Okay. So, this happens when we're super stressed but also just ordinary unease.

We don't like being with it. So we leave. We start discursive thinking. We get self-conscious if there's silences, you know how it is on an elevator. The last thing we're going to do is breathe and feel our bodies because it gets really angsty. So we look into an iPhone, know anything but just feeling what's here. And we all have our particular habits of exiting from the premises. And one of the story I shared last year with this group was told by a new doctor who's doing his residency in obstetrics. And he describes being really embarrassed doing pelfic exams. And he says to cover his embarrassing his embarrassing, His exit strategy, he didn't put it this way, I am, was he'd whistle softly.

And that was, you know, so he did, he just, so he's, there he is, he's working on this middle-aged woman and he says, all of a sudden she burst out laughing and he got even more, he got just, oh my God, and then he said, well, am I tickling you? I'm really sorry. And she says, she says, no, she has tears running down her cheeks. She says, no doctor, but the song you were whistling was, I wish I wish that you. I was an Oscar Meyer weiner. The doctor did not submit his name.

So we don't stay. We exit the premises, we all have our patterns. And it happens like all different, there's all different causes. The most profound is this existential, the motor of our body mind has a certain amount of fear in it. If there's any sense of separation and we perceive separation. with that comes fear. That's the primal mood of the separate cell. So there's a certain low hum in the background of fear, okay?

So that's there and then it gets more exaggerated, depending on our backgrounds and so on. It's very much reinforced, this, we should exit the body, is very much reinforced in patriarchal religions where the body is considered out of control and the sight of passion and emotion, And the attitude is that it's lower then. It's, you know, there's the sacred and God up here and then there's the body with all its, you know, all its tendencies to misbehave down lower. So we're trying to transcend the wilderness of the body. And a story that I thought I'd share with you on that one is that little boy opens this

old family Bible. and he's looking at the old pages and something falls out and he looks at it closely. It's an old leaf from a tree that have been pressed between pages. So the little boy says, you know, it tells his mom, look what I found, look what I found. And she said, what do you have dear? And he said, and this is with astonishment, he says, it's Adam's suit. So the split, there's a split that is really evolutionary where we've become less and less inhabiting our body and more living above it and operating on it, that dissociation.

And of course it's deeply exacerbated if we have trauma, if there's some sort of wounding, and if we have physical trauma. You know, it's like the more difficult it is in here, the more we dissociate and we leave. So I'm naming this because it is the universal coping strategy to leave our body. bodies. Everybody does it to some degree. Now, what's interesting is to start to ask ourselves, what happens to you when you regularly leave your body? Okay? Because each of us, we might even have in our minds even a percentage of, you

know, 99% of the time or 47% of the time, you know, we're not here and just really inhabiting. You might check right now. you inside your feet? Can you feel your feet? What about your left hand? Can you feel it from the inside? Can you feel your shoulders from the inside? And can you notice how much you weren't there before I asked you? Right? I wasn't either. So, I'm coming back too. So what happens when we're habitually exiting? Okay, well one thing is it takes energy to maintain dissociation, so we get fatigued. If you're regularly dissociated, fatigue is one of the things that happens. Another thing that happens is that even though

we're dissociated, there's a part of us that knows there's something that's unfaced or unprocessed in the tissues, that we're not with what's here, so there's anxiety. We might not be feeling in contact with the raw fear. but there's anxiety because we know it's there. Something knows we've left. Okay? So, fatigue, anxiety. Often our exit strategies are things we're ashamed of. One of the ways we exit our body is actually by eating to numb body feelings. Are there maybe overeating, or overconsuming? Are we obsess a lot? And so then there's a feeling of shame or self-judgment because of the way we leave.

Another symptom and suffering of leaving the body is then we're cut off from the heart so that what we feel is really an abstraction of love or compassion. But there's not very often that real tenderness and something in us knows. There's a self-doubt, am I really a loving person? Because we're not really feeling it. Two men were playing golf in this story and one's about to take a swing when a funeral procession appears to the road next to the course and he stops mid-swing, takes off his cap, closes his eyes and bows his head in contemplation.

His companion comments, that must be the most touching thing I've ever seen. You're a very feeling man. The man's recovering himself and replies, yeah, well, we were married 35 years. Now, I thought that was great. That was really funny. Okay, so again, we're just to remind you what we're talking about here. There are consequences to cutting off from our body and fatigue is one of them and the chronic anxiety and judging ourselves and then cut off from the heart.

We also are cut off from the belly, the pelvic area and that's considered the site of authentic power, that feeling of really being kind of balanced like a mountain and really empowered comes from this area. And then finally we're really cut off from the sources of intuition, the presence that's required to be really intuitive. So there's a cutting off and a missing out that comes when we leave. And yet here we are and our predicament is, yeah, but but being here is difficult. So that's where we're going next.

How do we return and how do we deal with the fact that there can be in the return, sometimes very pleasant, sometimes very unpleasant? Last class, and this is your first time listening, it'll be useful, the classes are all podcasted, it's all free. Last class we talked about how when we exit we go into a trance. We kind of leave and we don't know we've left and we're in a trance and there's different signs of trance. And so last class we talked about how when we notice the trance, whatever it is, obsessing is

a good example, ways that we can pause and interrupt it even for a little bit and bring ourselves, read ourselves back into our body very kindly, even for five seconds, interrupting our exit strategy. begins to create new neuropathways in the brain and a new way back. And it takes some time, but that's our strategy for not being lost. The other is a daily practice where in our meditation we're practicing by being mindful of our bodies. And if you do some of the guided meditations we do here, pretty much every one of them,

the key portal to presence is coming. coming into this body and feeling from the inside out the aliveness that's here. Okay. Within that, there is, this is the common denominator of meditation that really brings alive-embodied presence. We're continually making a transition from being in conceptual thoughts and going, oh, thinking, thinking, and coming back into our body. That is the main shift going on in almost every style of meditation.

We're coming out of trance, virtual reality, and into the reality reality of being right here. And you might just pause right now and close your eyes and notice all the ideas that I've been tossing out and the different thoughts may be going on in your mind. and just very gently noticing, okay, thinking and now take a nice full breath and come back into your body, just in habit. Be, breathe, be right here. Just notice the sense of contact and that there's a difference between any idea or thought and this living, mysterious presence that's right here.

invites us by saying, step out of the tangle of fear thinking, flow down and down into ever widening rings of being. You might as you're sitting here, raise your hand up, eyes are still closed but raise your hand up so it's kind of suspended right in front of you. And then for a moment open your eyes and take in your hand. look at it and just sense this is hand, this is the familiar hand you've been with this lifetime. And anything else that comes as you look at it, if you want to turn it over and see both sides, that's fine. If you want to wiggle your fingers, go ahead. Yeah, go

ahead. But then just hold it still again and close your eyes. Close your eyes and feel your hand from the inside out. You might even slowly sweep it back and forth in front of you, but keep your eyes closed and just feel the sensations from within the sensations, the tingling, the vibrating, and sense to yourself, is there a shape to hand you might hold still again? Is there a shape to hand? Is there a boundary? If you relax all notions, and just open directly to your senses, what is true? What is this? Can you sense this changing, vibrating, tingling flow of sensation?

It's almost as if it's rising out of emptiness, dissolving into emptiness, a floating, changing field. You might again notice the difference between any idea of hand and this living, mysterious reality, this pulsing, vibrating reality, keeping your eyes closed and then gently relaxing your hand down. Perhaps you can feel both hands now. Sound, sensation, aliveness. When we get out of that tangle if you're thinking it's widening rings of being right here. Or as Pema children put it, this very body that we have that's sitting right here, right now, with its aches and its pleasures, is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, fully alive.

As you're ready, you might open your eyes and have that intention of staying with this aliveness. So, a daily practice of coming awake in our bodies makes it a lot easier as we move through the day to have that pathway back, well greased. And in our practice we not only practice with sitting but there's walking meditation as many of you know where we walk and there's nothing mysterious about it, we're just simply walking with awareness so that we feel the sensations of moving our bodies and walking on this earth wakefully. Ticknut Hans says the great miracles not to walk. on water, but to walk on this earth with awareness.

You know, a friend of our community here was leading a day long last weekend here in Washington and they held it at one of the, on the toe path, on the C&O Canal. And people were doing walking meditation on the canal. And when they regathered, one woman said she was stopped by a pastor byer who asked her if she was doing forest bathing. And in another way she probably was because that's the idea is that when we walk in awareness with our bodies awake, we really become part of our world. We feel our aliveness and the aliveness, the whole web of aliveness and it's very, very beautiful and it's like a homecoming. So then the question, okay, but that's when we're not filled with physical unpleasantness.

So what about that? So I begin by addressing it by giving you the, this is I think a really cool equation that I've been using for years which is pain times resistance equals suffering. Okay? So if there's unpleasant sensations and there's zero-one, you know, there's zero. resistance, what does that mean? No suffering, right? Okay, we're all mathematical here.

If there's a huge amount of resistance, it gets really, really bad. So, what typically happens when there's physical pain is that right away, if you watch yourself, there's a sense of, oh, something's wrong, how much worse is this going to be, what should I do about it? about it. This could be really, really bad. I think Dave Barry says it best. He says, if you ever experience a medical symptom, such as itching, you can go to the internet with just a few mouse clicks, you can discover the reassuring truth. There might be a worm in your brain. Really, Medline Plus, itching can be a symptom of a condition called visceral larvae migraines, literally a worm in your brain. Another symptom of worm brain,

of brainworm is, and this is a direct quote, irritability. So next time you're irritable. Okay. So what happens, and this is a kind of proliferation in the polyscript, it's called paponcha, where one thing happens and then you have a reaction and then another reaction. The typical thing when things are unpleasant is to think, oh, something's wrong and then then what that's going to mean and then what that's going to mean. And so it's not just unpleasant sensations. We get swamped in misery.

So I'm going to give you kind of a sequence of how we can work with that by first sharing a story about one man I knew well from this community this number of years ago, meditated regularly and he was a runner and he tore his ACL ligament and of course you know there was pain and the pain set off fear like I'll never be able to run again which got him angry which got him depressed so it wasn't just unpleasant sensations it was he was really in suffering he had surgery a very slow recovery and for months any time he he would feel pain and it was not great pain. It was just unpleasantness. He'd be angry at his body, you know, he felt betrayed by his body, he felt the fear I'll never

heal and he dissociated, he disconnected, he just got caught in his head, he was not really in his body. So the way we worked was to have him in his practice begin again to do the body scan and and just, you know, soften the eyes and feel his eyes floating and feel his cheeks and relax his shoulders down, just get into his body more. But when there was unpleasantness in particular the instructions were, don't call it pain, just think of it as sensation, unpleasant sensation, because pain is a solid block of an identity, but sensation is changing and moving.

and to notice, you know, how intense it was, and to soften around it, to feel the soft space around it and just feel it. And then whenever he had a reaction to it, like thoughts, what else is going to happen and so on, to just come back and say this belongs. This is just the unpleasant sensation that belongs in this moment. It's like this wave in the ocean belongs. This is just what's going on in this body right now. and to keep softening around it and to be kind.

So he worked with pain in this way, calling it sensation, coming back to it over and over and getting curious what does it actually feel like, feeling the soft space around it, just regarding it kindly. And the more he did that, you know, he recovered naturally anyway but, and he couldn't run anymore, just saying this is not like a, you know, he recovered naturally anyway, but, and he couldn't run anymore, just saying this is not like a magic fairy tale where he was kind to his pain and he got back all full functioned, he didn't. But he, you know, he shifted his exercise regime and was hiking and so on. But he said that he gained something that was precious. He said when I was running,

I was treating my body like it was a machine. But now I'm living from the inside out. So whatever I'm doing, whether it's hiking or swimming or whatever, I'm inhabiting it fully. His body became precious to him. Science, and there's been a number of double-blind studies on this, has shown that instead of resisting its pain and resisting, either tensing against it or our minds resisting, if instead On some level we allow, and allowing means this belongs, just letting it be, there's actually greater access to our immune system. So, I think that's really interesting to the area of the injury.

In fact, I remember a friend of mine had psoriasis on both of his arms and he sent one arm a whole lot of meta of loving kindness and it healed faster. That's an N of one, but I thought it was interesting. So these are the basics of working with unpleasantness, just to call it sensation, become very aware or mindful of how that constellation of sensations changes. Sense the space around it, give it room, let it be there. What if it's really strong? What if it's really strong and it throws us off balance and we can't just be interested in

and feel it changing around and being unpleasant. So this is where I want to go next. Just check time here. One of the most valuable practices that I've done with really much more intense physical unpleasantness is to identify the places in my body where it's either neutral or pleasant. And that can sometimes be my hands or it might be around my body, around my eyes or my feet, you know, someplace like that. And then, and then if you think of it as zones, zone one is where there's real unpleasantness. Let's say you have a really bad

lower back ache, okay? And then zone two where it's neutral pleasant, let's say, is the hands. And so what you do is you're pendulating or going back and forth. So you might, for me if it was my lower back, I'd feel my lower back a little but then I'd go to my hands and rest and kind of get some resilience and feel myself balanced and then bring the attention to the lower back for a little bit and then back to my hands. I mentioned lower back because that was a pain place right as I was scanning that I could feel a little discomfort and you go back and forth and as you do that you find that there's more space that you're living in.

You actually make room for the unpleasantness in a way that really is helpful. But at times, if it's really strong, it's not wise to try to be with it. It is wise to move away from it and because it can really exhaust you or depress you. You can really wipe out on it. So take a break, move the attention elsewhere. Not just to the breath but you might move the attention to music or to something you're reading having a cup of tea. In other words, don't try to stay with it. Sometimes we need support in opening to some larger space so we don't have to stay fixated with the pain. And that's true

with emotional pain, our physical pain. I was really struck by one story that there's a lot of bringing mindfulness into schools in Washington, D.C. And in one story, bringing it into an inner-city school, when little girl when she was really upset, said she had a new strategy that when it felt too much for her, she would put her hand on her dog's heart and feel her dog's heart and that helped to give her enough space or distance so she could then be with what was there. Isn't that a beautiful strategy? That's what I mean by moving away.

There's sometimes we need some distance, we need to connect to something else, something larger, have some tea, be in nature, listen to music and then come back and feel what's here. So we're not always, it's not like we're always plunging right into the center of what's difficult. Frank Osseseskes, who's a friend and author who is the founder of Zen Hospice, has a friend who's has many stories of working with people that were going through a lot of physical, really great physical discomfort. He was very close to one of the men that he was accompanying in his death. And he had stomach cancer and the man asked him to guide him in a meditation because it

was so hard to be with. So, Frank began, but as soon as he began, said, you know, with the breathing and feeling what's going on, the guy said, this is just too painful to meditate. with. So, Frank offered to place his hands on the man's belly to help hold the pain, okay, adding another person in there. And he said, how's that? And the man said, well, that's a little better. And then Frank put his hands a little further away from the man's belly. And ah, that's even better. And so, Frank invited him to rest, to feel, sense his hands kind of holding the space around this man and just to rest in that space there. And the man said, okay, just rest in love, rest in love.

And from then on, whenever he had a whole lot of pain, he was using morphine, but whenever he had a lot of pain and he couldn't just penetrate and feel the direct sensations, it was rest in love, rest in love. Because he could sense Frank's presence something large. or helping them to hold the pain. So I share that with you because there are many different approaches to coming back home again. And sometimes just not using the word pain but just getting interested, feeling the sensation, sensing the space around them, noticing how things change.

That's mindfulness and you'll find that that presence actually makes room for what's there. Other times you might pendulate, other times you might take a break. You might sense that resource for you that's resting in love. So we're going to do a short guided meditation with pain if you will close your eyes and try this out. And if you're here thinking, but I'm feeling terrific, don't worry, because there will be a time. I promise. Please sit in a way that you're doing that you're feeling terrific.

comfortable and closing your eyes, collect your attention with a few nice full breaths. Now scanning your body, noticing if there's any area of discomfort, of unpleasant sensations and with whatever might call your attention, bringing a receptive attention to that area. noticing what happens as you begin to be present with the sensations. Notice if there's any attempt to push the pain away or to pull away, any contraction in the body, any tensing in an emotional way, and if there's added thoughts of what might be wrong, just to notice them as other layers of resisting. Not to judge that, but just to notice that.

included in your awareness. And if it's tolerable, letting your intention be to remain present, perhaps sending that message you belong, allowing the unpleasant sensations to be just as they are. Regarding them with interest, with gentleness, you might choose to deepen, to really, to center your attention right in the center of the intensity, as if you're sensing from inside out the experience of the sensations. It might be helpful to even name burning, aching, twisting,

tearing, stabbing, throbbing, noticing how they're changing, noticing the space between them, around them, the movement. And if they're strong, taking some moments to sense more the soft space outside of the constellation of unpleasantness. And if they're very strong, as I described, you might find a place in your body that feels neutral or pleasant, some distance from that area. For some it might be the hands or the feet or the lips and establish a sense of presence there.

Take a rest and as you feel ready you might feel the presence in that place that's neutral or pleasant and then bring the attention back in a gentle way to touch the area that feels more unpleasant. aware of the neutral or pleasant area. So you're going back and forth, keeping as much presence in the easier area as needed to maintain a balance. Notice how it opens up space more generally, it widens your perspective. You might imagine and sense that you can let the unpleasant sensations float in a larger space

of awareness. attention, noticing their natural change, the dance of change, letting your body become like an open space with plenty of room for unpleasant sensations to arise, dissolve, fade, intensify, move and change, no holding, no tensing against, inhabiting the sea of awareness, the sea of awareness, letting painful sensations float in an accepting openness. Notice who you are when you're not fighting pain, when you're letting be. And if you'd like to open your eyes, please feel free. In these classes on embodied presence I've named a number of reasons why

we choose to wake up in our bodies, to reconnect with our natural intuition and creativity and love and wisdom and many, many reasons. I'd like to say the core reason in a little bit of different language which is when we dissociate and when we're living in that virtual reality, the whole sense of who we are shrinks. We're living in the story of a self. But when we start waking up into our body, we wake up into this mysterious aliveness that's really sourced in awareness. So our whole sense of identity shifts.

We're no longer inside that story. We're in a much more mysterious open field of awareness. And this for me was a very profound part of my working with illness. I often tell the story of about eight years of a decline in chronic pain and sickness and not really knowing if there was a way out, I'm a lot better now. There was a prayer during that period really which was in some way, may I find some freedom in the midst? Okay, it's going to be like this but can I this life have meaning?

Can I feel loving and alive anyway even though it's unpleasant? And my practice was exactly what we're exploring and I wrote this up a lot in True Refuge because I had to find refuge when we're in pain. And as I described in True Refuge, the practice was in some deep way to say this belongs, that this unpleasantness, whatever's going, this is part, this is the waves in this ocean right now. And to the degree that I could let it be there. there, there was a relaxing back to be the ocean.

I was no longer fighting. I was resting in a very open and tender awareness. And that was the gift of staying, of coming back and being with what's there. The poet Hafei writes it this way. He says, please stay near to me. Please stay near to me. Hephase will spin you into love. Stay near. Stay right here with what's going on. We can't do it all the time. Sometimes we need a break. But if you dedicate yourself to training,

to be awake in these bodies, you will be dedicating to this portal that actually introduces you to the truth of who you are. Because it's when we feel directly the sensations of aliveness, we're right at that place where we begin to sense form and formlessness. We begin to open to the mystery. So I invite you for one last time to close your eyes as we close together. And you might remember the words of Eduardo Galliano. He says, the church says the body is a sin. Science says the body is a machine.

says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta. And so we take our moments to open into this aliveness again with interest, with friendliness, feeling this living dance of sensation, letting it all belong, and noticing what happens if you deepen the presence so that you're really letting go into the aliveness, surrendering into the aliveness, relaxed and awake with this flow moment to moment. Life is a garden, not a road. We enter and exit through the same gate wandering. Where we go matters less than what we notice. Namaste and blessings.