Tara Brach - Equanimity

Episode Date: September 8, 2010

2010-09-08 - Equanimity - Cultivating equanimity means awakening our capacity to meet the winds of life with a non-reactive, open, balanced presence. The gift of this presence is that we can see clearly what is happening within and around us, and respond with wisdom, creativity and compassion. This talk looks at our habits of reacting, and the ways we can come home to equinimity in the midst of life's challenges. Please donate at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you!

We have been doing a four-week series. We're on the fourth week of it. And they're called the Brahma Vaharas. And in one of the sets of the Buddhist scriptures, the Buddha's asked, what is the way to Brahma, to God, to communion with God? And as response was to set out a pathway with these four elements, really these four attitudes, and they're kind of include a set of practices that awaken the heart-mind.

And each of these attitudes reflects a facet of the awakened heart mind. And they're really inseparable when we look deeply into them. So they're called the divine abodes, which are the homes or resting places of Brahma. And they're really, when we're awakened in each of these areas, we feel at home. We feel most who we really are. And so we've explored already the first week. We explored loving kindness, the metta practice, which is really our response when we're present with the goodness and beauty

that's all around us and within us. And then we explored Karuna, which is compassion, which is when we open our hearts courageously to the truth of suffering. There's a quality or a tenderness of compassion that arises. Then Mudita, our joy, and it's also called sympathetic joy, is what arises when we open to the 10,000 joys and sorrows, when there's that quality of profound openness to the totality of how things are.

This week will be exploring equanimity, and equanimity is essential for any of those qualities of heart. There is no way to have a mature sense of loving, of compassion or joy, unless we have this quality of presence that does not react in this moment, but rather opens to what's here. No judgment, no resisting, just openness. So this is the final of the abodes, equanimity.

It's called upeka. That's the poly word. And this presence has a quality of openness and balance in the midst of the winds of life. So usually our mind thinks that whatever's going on we're trying to adjust it or control it or get somewhere else. Equanimity has the wisdom of completely being here,

completely right here. And it's really the most radical element of the spiritual path because our conditioning's to think we're on our way somewhere. equanimity is this commitment on the spot to stay and be with fully what's going on, to not run away from ourselves. One of my favorite metaphors for this comes from the bullring, and there's a place in the bullring where the bull feels absolutely sane. And if he can reach this place, he stops running and can gather his strength,

and get renewed. So at that place in the bullring, this one spot, it's like the feng shui of bull rings, that's where the bull feels safe. And interestingly, no longer afraid, and from the perspective of the bull's opponent, the bull becomes dangerous at that place. And the word for this place is Carrancia.

And the job of the matador is to make sure that the bull does not have a chance to occupy this place of wholeness. of balance of equilibrium. That's the job of the Matador. So as human beings, Carrencia, the space of wholeness is within us. When a person finds that they're in the full view of Mara,

their Matador, which means of fear, of anger, of whatever's going on, and yet when they're in this space, there's a quality of steadiness and of wisdom. There's this capacity to tap. into our deepest resources when we're in this space of Carrencia. When we're in this space, we've gathered our strength around us and there's a kind of inner silence and inner stillness

that's more secure than any hiding place. Now I find this a really powerful invitation because we think we're going somewhere. When things get rough, we think we not need to make something happen, that there is this space within us that we can arrive in that really taps us into true safety and true strength and true wisdom. So that's what I want to explore tonight, which is really refuge. How do we take refuge in presence when all the winds or forces of Mara, the challenges are are circling around us and blowing at us and kind of tugging us around. And we begin by first getting really attuned to the ways that rather than arriving, like in the bull ring in this space, we actually spend most of our life reacting. And the reason that the

bull loses is because they're goaded and react and get off balance. Does that make sense? and that's where we become the victim or we become an aggressor but we get goaded into reactivity we lose that inner space that's really our sanctuary so to be able to start looking how does that happen for me

if we each can begin to investigate and it takes a real commitment how do I get into reactive mode and there's many ways we do it in the most broad overview, every moment of our life, there's either pleasantness or unpleasantness or neutrality going on. And we are conditioned in those moments to react. We have this biological conditioning that goes, oh, pleasantness, okay?

And then Mara, this is a god of greed, hatred, and delusion, pleasantness, oh, the reaction, grasp. It's right there. Unpleasiveness. Oh, the reaction. Push it away. control it. And if it's neutrality, we kind of go into a trance of inattention, which is another very dangerous reaction. So those are the most broad descriptions you'll find in Buddhism of how we get caught in a reactivity that ends up creating suffering. How we lose refuge. We

lose our safety in that reaction. And we know it. Have you ever noticed a sense that Another person's way of speaking to is kind of goading you into a reaction, that you've lost your stability, your ground, your contact with yourself. Or how your own mind is getting into a kind of an obsession that it won't leave you alone. And it kind of forces you to then in some way react the world that takes you away from real balance. So we each have our ways. and if we look closer and say, well, what are they? For most people, there's some self-soothing. When Marr is there, one of the ways the bull gets into trouble is kind of we self-soothe,

we dull ourselves or numb ourselves. Sometimes it's with overeating or over-consuming drugs. Henny Youngman says, My dad was the town drunk. Now usually that's not so bad, but New York City so we do that and then

for many of us are the way you know again if you imagine yourself in the bullring the way that we react to difficulty is we start

collecting possessions or trying to get more money more things we just have to add on there was an article I was reading about different people shopping

addictions and habits Deborah Jackson says she likes shopping at the dollar palace because it is convenient and casual. I don't have to get all dressed up like I'm going to Walmart or something, she says. So there's that.

But a major way we leave, which many of us know, is that we lock into judgment and blame. And this is one of the ways that we leave Carrencia most. And we can watch it through our day. And often our blame is towards ourselves, but we also very quickly feel like

disappointed we expect others to be a certain way and we're pretty rigged and it can get subtle or overt i'm going to give you an overt example but we're pretty rigged to to lash out and blame to to filter somebody else through a blaming kind of mind in this one a married man was having an affair with his secretary one day they went to her place and made love all afternoon exhausted they fell asleep and woke up at 8 p.m. The man hurriedly dressed and told his lover to take his shoes outside and rubbed them in the grass and dirt. He put on his shoes and drove home.

Where have you been? His wife demanded, suspicious. I can't lie to you, he replied. I'm having an affair with my secretary. We had sex all afternoon. She looked down at his shoes and said, You lying bastard, you've been playing golf. So we have a filter, and we're ready to attack.

I know that was pretty bad. It was just sent to me, so I just plucked it. The most basic way that we in the bullring go into trance is we get caught inside a story about ourselves. And this is the way we lose track. We lose track of that inner space of freedom. We live inside a story about ourselves. And this is what I really invite you to start investigating.

The story that says, I'm not enough, I need to do more. This is how this person is going to be perceiving me. This is what I need to do in order for this person to experience me in a certain way. To start noticing how many moments we have contrived ourselves so that we'll elicit a certain response from others. how many moments we've left our authenticity so that others will perceive us a certain way Pema Chodron says

being preoccupied with our self-image is like being deaf and blind it's like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with a black hood over our heads it's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs. So we lose currency, we lose

this equanimity, this space of freedom and clarity and balance when we live inside these stories that are very limiting about who we think we are. Now, just to say that it's our biological

conditioning to be entranced. And again, if we're thinking of the bull, the bull is designed to go into reaction. We are. are to, to judge, to lash out, to numb, to be self-conscious, we are conditioned that way. And it's part of survival in some ways.

The problem is that if this conditioning is operating outside of our awareness, in other words, if there's not a mindfulness of it, then we're in a trance that will keep us imprisoned. We'll have no access to cadencia, to equanimity. Now the Buddha then says, okay, it's natural to get caught in your conditioning, and it's natural. We have the capacity to pay attention in a way that wakes us up. Each one of us can become aware of the different ways that we react and deepen our attention so that we're no longer so lost in the reactivity.

We can become more awake. And then he describes really the way it happens. And the way it happens is we train our mind to notice what's going on. We train our mind to arrive again in equanimity where the anger might be there, the fear might be there, but instead of being inside it, we're aware of it. Does that difference make sense? Instead of being inside the reactivity, we're aware of those tendencies.

last week I think it was a week ago Tuesday the Congolese rebels attacked a group of aid workers who were part of the International Medical Corps and these aid workers fled into the bush and they were eventually rescued after the fighting died down one of the workers in the group Brandy Walker is a member of our Sangha and right after class I

got, I heard, you know, through an email that she sent to a friend that she had been just through this ordeal. And she's in the Eastern Congo. She's been there for over two years. Amazing, dedicated woman. She's working with women who have been victims of sexual violence. And so she and some other co-workers got caught in the middle of this attack and they fled into the bush. And she wrote, and now I've had several emails telling me what, got her through in the midst of this crisis. Okay, so this is truly being in the bullring. And she described two things that got her through,

and I wanted to share them with you tonight. So there they were, they were lying on the jungle floor, and it was purely about survival for her. And she was trying to figure out what to do, and she had just that morning listened to a Dharma talk where I had mentioned, you know, of the different ways to come back into presence, one of them is to listen to sound.

Because when you listen to sound, that listening is a very open, allowing attention that gets you right here. So here's what she wrote. She said, I just started following the gunfire, listening to it as the rocket propelled grenades exploded as the shots whizzed above our heads. I just made the conscious decision to listen.

That's one of the ways that she started. coming into presence, coming back to cadencia. Just listen. Okay. And she said, and this is a follow-up email, she said, I made the decision that if I were to die, I wanted to be present and present with the people with me. I thought we would all die together. And I remember, of course, it is all one blur in my memory now, that I was so regretful that I had been cranky the morning of the attack and that this was the last thing my coworkers would remember of me. I'd had a work-related disagreement with one of them that morning. And then I remembered to just let it go. So I focused on looking into their eyes and seeing their divinity. So the first thing was listening to sounds and the second is look into their

eyes, see their divinity. This got me through. I saw such sacredness there, gatherness, and this gave me even more strength to confront my death. So she said this, this heart quality, and then listening, just listening, hearness. And these are two ways to refuge in presence, paying attention to exactly what's happening, the sounds, and paying attention to the truth of love, to our togetherness. And she said it was in these, these are the two things she named that got her through. And she described how then when all the sounds of gunfire and so on stopped for a brief moment the birds started singing and it was the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. So this is to me

a very powerful example of how this practice can train us to take refuge in the midst of anything. What did she take refuge in? It was about survival. She just wanted to get through, but getting through for her meant take refuge in presence in these sounds, just these sounds. not in the spinning thoughts about what's going to happen and what, you know, these sounds. And then these eyes, this divinity that's looking out at me, are togetherness. Now, for many of us, it's not in the midst of this kind of intense crisis that we train in on equanimity. Our training comes every day in the small but habitual ways that we know. know we react because we live most of our moments reacting in some way reacting to try to get more

comfortable to try to justify ourselves to try to feel better about ourselves we're trying to find train ourselves to find cadencia when we're anxious about deadlines or when we feel hurt or angry because we've been criticized by somebody or misunderstood when we feel frustrated when we feel like we're falling short, this is the training ground for equanimity. And it's important to know that this path of homecoming to this space that's really within each of us, it doesn't happen because we've gotten rid of the anger or the anxiety. It happens because we've taken that incredibly subtle

but profound step of just remembering let me be present with this let me just notice what I can about it you can tap the power of equanimity facing Mara in the midst of anger and in the midst of grip of fear or sadness

it's because you're noticing what's happening and you're not totally lost in it so the key to Carrencia is to start exactly where you are. If this moment you're restless, if this moment you find that you're upset about something, you find Carrencia by being with that. Now give you an example for me, I had been at a retreat. This was a number of years ago now. I've been at a retreat that goes right up to New Year's. and I hadn't been in touch with my son,

and I was really excited to talk to him and connect. Because at retreat, you're sending loving kindness, and you're feeling your connection with people, and I was really eager to feel that sense of my love with him. So I called him early on New Year's Eve. It was probably around six. And when I called him, he was very, very preoccupied, and he barely gave me the time of day.

In fact, I could tell he just would do anything to get off the phone. retrospective learning never ever ever call my son nariahean right before a party or party time it's just like what did i expect but i hadn't been thinking of parties that right at that moment so we get off the phone and i'm really really angry like he's so self-centered and insensitive and he couldn't have even for two minutes just put down his life and you know so i was mulling over that and then okay you know, I've been at retreat, teaching at a retreat, I'm teaching this stuff, okay, let's, you know. So, anger. So I'm in the bullring and Mara, this anger, and it's goading me, you know, that's, I was being goaded into anger. Okay, presence with anger. So if I could let go of the stories and just fuel the anger that was there. So that was the first step of coming home to Carrancia, to equanimity, just fuel the anger. and then as soon as I let myself feel the energy, the anger, it transformed into hurt. One of the things that we find is that when we're with these energies, as soon as we're fully with that energy, it starts morphing.

It's the nature of life to keep moving unless we get caught in thoughts, then things freeze. So the anger turned into hurt, and the hurt, the story there was, he doesn't love me. I know that sounds kind of extreme to, you know, all of a sudden say he doesn't love me, but that was the feeling at some level he just doesn't love me. So again, put down the story, but just feel the hurt, just feel it. And then what was underneath that is this need to feel our love, this longing to feel our love. And I just stayed present with it, present with that longing, present with that longing, until what was there was presence.

This is the path of equanimity, is you're, you're, you're present. present with what's going on until what happens is you become the presence. You become the presence. So there was compassion towards myself and then just presence. With that was a shift in identity. I was no longer in the story of the dist mother. You know, I was no longer in the story of, you know, what did I do to bring up a kid like that?

none of those stories. That was gone. It wasn't an identity of a self. There was just this presence that still I could feel the current of vulnerability. I could still feel the lingering tendencies of anger. But I wasn't inside them. It was like I was resting in an ocean. And these were kind of waves or energies.

Carencia. Equanimity has a spaciousness that can let these different waves of our life be there. but we don't have to react to them because when you know you're the ocean you don't have to react to the waves you can just honor them coming and going equanimity really is the grounds of wisdom

in the moments that we can be in that credential that space of not reacting we can actually see things as they are I could sense with my son that as soon as I had a story of he should be different I couldn't see him. But when I was in that space of openness,

I could see, okay, grasping after excitement, he was excited, and then behind that, his goodness, his aliveness, I could see him again. As long as I was in a story of, I need him to be a certain way, I couldn't see me. I couldn't see, okay, there's just a longing for love. Carrencia, equanimity,

allows us to arrive right here and see things as they are. I like the metaphor of an ocean and waves because that is the experience. There's a sense of openness and room for what's happening. So the key, again, in this homecoming to this divine abode as it's described, the key is starting right with what's arising right here.

Right here, this anger, this fear. Let me read you again. This is Pema Chodron again. The only place ever to work is right now. We work with the present situation rather than a hypothetical possibility of what could be. I like any teaching that encourages us to be with ourselves and our situation as it is

without looking for alternatives. Now that doesn't mean we can't look for alternatives later, but unless we're fully with this, we can't arrive in that inner space of freedom. It's kind of a two-step thing, fully here, and then we'll have the wisdom to know what's next. So this is really our training here when we practice Vapasana or insight meditation or mindfulness, whatever we want to call it, is we're learning how to come into this space of, of Crencia, where rather than reacting, we've arrived in this quality of openness and balance

that can see what's going on within us and around us. This is our training that we're arriving in this presence to notice what's happening without judging it, or controlling it, or pushing it away. Awareness does not oppose what's happening. So we're training to be the awareness. And when we come into this presence that really says yes. And I don't mean the idea of yes, that's cellular yes.

So that even right this moment as you're listening, there's something that pauses and says, okay, what does it mean to really say yes? To really allow the way these sensations are moving through me, to really allow whatever's in the heart, that when we are able to truly say yes, what is revealed is a timelessness, a timeless and loving presence

that really expresses our true nature. I consider this the refuge that really has to do with safety. Because when we know we can come home, Carrencia, to this space of timeless presence, We know we can handle anything in this changing world. One woman who, very dedicated meditation practitioner, wrote this. She says, my days are short, and as I grow weaker, I experience so much gratitude for my meditation.

She wrote this, by the way, when she was, I think, about a month from dying. My days are short, and as I grow weaker, I experienced so much gratitude for my meditation, not only the joy and ease it brought, but the hard parts. For every bored and restless sitting and every fearful fantasy, and every pain and ache I sat through,

and every itch I didn't scratch, was a training for kindness, a training for the muscle for bearing witness, for the trusting spirit that carries me now as I face my death. So I'm describing tonight this equanimity, this place of credencia that's within each of us as truly a refuge

for the impermanent ways of this life that live through us and around us. Now, when I speak about equanimity, there's often a lot of confusions are misunderstandings. And I've seen this through the years. I remember last year after a talk at a retreat on equanimity, my mother, who was attending, came up to me and said, well, it was a very good talk, but I totally disagree, which is very much the way my mother says things. And I said, you disagree.

And she goes, yeah, I disagree with equanimity. I said, you know, how do you disagree with equanimity? But you do. And what she said was, if something's going wrong in this world, global. warming, racism, whatever it is, we should not sit and be non-reactive. We should do something. Okay? That was her concern about equanimity. There was a passivity in it. Now, she was, you know, she knows well that I got quite appropriately imprinted by my, you know, liberal activist parents and that I, of course, agree that when there's things in this world that cause suffering, that we should

act, not react, but act. But that was the difference we needed to talk about. Because equanimity in no way means this place, this pause, this space of non-reactivity does not mean that we then don't become active. In fact, I go further and say, it's only if we have the capacity to arrive in crincia that we tap the intelligence and compassion that guides us in responding to this world in a way that can actually bring healing. Not only that, that we can respond in a way that brings a richness and creativity to our life. Because otherwise we're in a translight mechanistic reactivity. We keep repeating the same patterns. It's not fresh. That's why the Matador can control the ball. Because just playing

with the conditioning there. It's when we step out of our conditioning. when you can write now somewhere and you say, okay, pause. What does it mean in this moment to be here and absolutely open to how it is? In that openness and presence is when you start tapping the creativity and juice that can allow you to live in a fresh way. Okay, story for you. This is Itzhak Perlman, who many of you know, the violinists, came on stage to give a concert in New York City.

And if you've ever seen him, he was stricken with polio as a child. So he has braces on both legs, and he walks with crutches, and he gets on stage very slowly and painfully. He has to put it all aside and walk to his chair. And then he takes everything off, and there's a whole ritual before he actually picks up his violin to play. in the writer writes how this happened at the at this particular event where she was was listening the audience sits quietly while he makes his way across the stage they remain reverently silent

while he ends the clasps on his legs they wait until he's ready to play but this time something went wrong just as he finished the first few bars one of the strings on his violin broke you could hear it snap. It went off like gunfire across the room. There was no mistaking what the sound meant. There was no mistaking what he had to do. We figured that he would have to get up, put on the class again, pick up the crutches

and either find another violin or find another string for this one. But he didn't. Instead, he paused for a moment. Okay? He closed his eyes and then he signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began and he played from where he had left off.

And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard before. Now of course anyone knows that it's impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. Pearlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point it sounded like he was detuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium.

We were all on our feet screaming and cheering, doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done. He smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet pensive, reverent tone. you know sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left to me this is one of the most beautiful expressions of the attitude that arises as we start resting in equanimity that life happens and it often does not cooperate and you might consider in your life

where you've in some way been sensing you only have three strings. Because we each have stuff in our lives, you know. It may be for some that there's a very imperfect relationship with a partner. It might be challenges in parenting or real insecurity and finances or struggles with your own health. I know for myself I've often thought, you know, boy, I've been dealt this hand and what I'm, you know, three strings, you know. Maybe frustrations at work. It may be the world, the way our world is. Three strings.

Something's missing or wrong. In the moment that we truly open to how things are, like he just paused and went, okay, it's like this. You know that phrase, it's like this. It's just this courageous, honest acknowledgement of, okay, it's like this. And before trying to control things or seek alternatives to really inhabit it's like this. In those moments of inhabiting,

we tap the creativity to make music with what we've got. Now, it may be that in those moments, we find out what else needs to be done. Some of us we might go get the fourth string. That's our fit, whatever. That's okay. The point is,

if we have the courage to really arrive in how it is right now, we will open up a portal to the intelligence and compassion that allows us to make the most of this life. Equanimity is that portal. So meditation, as I've been describing tonight, is really a training in equanimity. When we pay attention to the goodness and we awaken love, we also bring ourselves into that

full presence. When we bring our hearts to compassion, we open up presence. But unless we have the capacity to be fully here, those qualities, so the heart cannot become mature. So tonight we've explored how to be with some of the kind of normal neurotic stuff that comes up as I describe with myself and my son.

Real crisis, as I described with Brandy, you know, how we really just be with what's happening in the moment. The kind of challenges where one string is gone, how do we pause? And with all of them, there's something that is kind of of key to remember, which is the equanimity, finding our way to Carranzaa does not happen

because we step away from the life. It doesn't happen because we remove ourselves or become indifferent or observe from a sideline. We're not trying to get non-reactive by pulling away. It's full engagement with awareness. This is not a path of passivity. It's really a courageous path. So I'd like to do is practice a little. Just do a little practice of coming to credencia, to equanimity, some of what's going on in our lives right here. So the entry really is deliberately pausing. You might just sense if there's anything between you and presence in this moment. Just even asking that question can help you to sense the quality of heerness. And as a a way of exploring, if you're in the bullring, you know, how to come home into this space

that is really within us. You might bring up a recent situation with another person where you were having some difficulty, not something that is traumatic, but something where there's some sense of distance, of conflict, situation maybe where there is judgment, hurt, anger. So let the situation come to mind and sense the reaction that it tripped off in you. And it can help to sense what really bothered you about the situation, maybe what you were afraid of or hurt by. And then just let your body register the feelings that came up. And as you do, sense your intention for homecoming,

that you feel what arises. but not be lost inside it, that you can notice it, and perhaps say it's like this, or this too, sense it as waves, the waves come and go. If it feels very difficult to let what's there be there, you might offer the part of you that is having a hard time, some kindness. It helps sometimes just to put your hand on your own heart,

and that can help you come home to credence. as Brandy found by looking into the eyes of the others, just to sense some kindness can soften and open you into presence, sensing the possibility of noticing the waves, fear, hurt, anger, but not being lost in them, sensing Crencia, that place of wakefulness and balance that knows what's going on but isn't lost. And letting that experience be there, taking a few breaths and bringing to mind a situation

with this person or another person where there's strong pleasure, gratification, fun. And in the same way, just notice what's going on in your body or your heart. Maybe a moment where you felt understood or appreciated or where you helped someone else and felt a connection or the moment of playfulness. and just feel that in your body. Again, it's like this. Letting those waves be there, bearing witness, feeling them.

It's letting them come and go as they do. And letting both situations being in your mind now. See if you can include both situations in your mind and just sense the ground of awareness and kindness that includes them both, that includes pleasant interactions and difficult ones, sensing that inner credencia, that space, that alert inner stillness,

that's just aware, kind. Imagine the whole room here, everybody here, and each person including difficult feelings and pleasant feelings. Just imagine the person sitting next to you on your left, on your right, the waves of experience, some sadness, some hurt, some peacefulness, some tenderness, sense the space it all floats in. Be that space of presence, that wakeful openness, so that as you gently just notice moment to moment what's going on inside you now,

you can sense you are the ocean that includes the waves. letting go of all thoughts, lax presence, noticing sounds, noticing sensations, being the stillness that's aware of the life within and around you, the silence that's listening. Srinargarata says that when the mind is momentarily free from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and love that you have never known and yet you recognize it at once as your own true nature.

The essential teaching is starting right where we are, bringing attention to whatever's here, and discovering the presence that really holds our life. Closing with the words of Rilke, center of all centers, core, of cores, almond self-enclosed and growing sweet. All this universe to the furthest stars and beyond them is your flesh, your fruit. Now you feel how nothing clings to you. Your vast shell reaches into endless space, and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow illuminated in your infinite peace. a billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be when all the stars are dead.

Well, thank you for the quality of your attention tonight. I appreciate it. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, are about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.