Tara Brach - From Head to Heart (2018-04-04)

Episode Date: April 6, 2018

If we are suffering, we are believing an interpretation of reality that is limiting and untrue. At these times we are imprisoned in a painful looping of fear-driven thoughts and feelings. This talk explores the ways our practices of mindfulness, compassion and loving presence can guide us from addictive thinking to perceiving life with a wise heart. 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. Namaste and welcome. There's a story I've always liked that is about Houdini very much at the beginning of his career and he would travel around and wow, groups of people he'd be put in a straitjacket and put into a cell and he'd find his way out of the straightjacket and unlock the lock and so on. And so he did this when he went through his circuit of traveling, but there was one little town in Ireland where things didn't work out so well.

He was able to get right out of a street jacket, but he was just fiddling and fiddling with the lock, and finally, you know, he got very frustrated and he gave up, and he asked the guy that had kind of locked it up, you know, okay, so what's with the sophisticated new lock? I've never encountered anything like that. And the guy's response was, oh, this is a very ordinary kind of lock.

I just never locked it. You've been trying to get, you've been trying to get yourself out of an unlocked lock. Now, first of all, to say, I don't know about the veracity of the story. I've heard mixed reports, but I think it's got a great teaching to it, which is that we're in a kind of

prison in our mind and we're constantly trying to solve problems and figure out and worry ourselves through and very busy up here and the busier we are the more we're really locking ourselves in to a stressed out and confined state. Does that make sense? That's my opening gambit here tonight. So then the question is, you know, how come we keep racing around in our minds and so often what we find and how come that that busyness ends up causing us such trouble? And we know from an evolutionary perspective and I bring this in a lot because it explains so much that we are operating off a negativity bias which means that most of our thinking

is fear-driven and the faster and busier we get the more it's really being propelled by fear. And so what that means is that the more we're thinking, the more we kind of get isolated in a sense of separateness and not okayness. And there was that wonderful study done at Harvard some years back that showed that like 46.9% of our time our minds are wandering and during that time we're unhappy. We are not happy. Wandering. Wandering, minds, busy minds, that addictive thinking does not make us happy. So we just start looking, well, what's the tenor or the mood underneath our thoughts? And the Buddha put it quite succinctly, he said, whatever you frequently think and ponder upon, that will become the

inclination of your mind. And that to me is such a powerful statement that if we look at today, What were your thoughts like today? How you live today is how you live your life. What's the mood that's created by the thinking that's most habitual for us? And you might consider today how much of the day was your mind busy trying to figure something out or worrying about something? assuming that there was a problem to solve. Because that's what Houdini was assuming a problem.

Well, we assume we're dealing with a problem. We work our way through the day trying to solve things in our mind. How many moments was there that kind of open presence where you really, for us here in D.C., let yourself take in a bit of the spring that's here. So just to back up a little and say that this isn't like this whole put-down of the thinking mind, thinking is totally essential for surviving and thriving. And, you know, I had to think to put together this talk. And we have to think to do the architecture for a building or for medical advances or to communicate

or in spiritual practice there's all sorts of wise contemplations. Thinking is, you know, can be a great servant, as they say, and it's a terrible master. Because what happens when we're really believing our thoughts and we're really caught inside them is that they perpetuate fear, anger, sense of separation,

jealousy, depression, anxiety, they perpetuate moods that make us miserable. They end up creating distance between us and others when we're hooked on our thoughts because we want to be right. Have you noticed how much it matters to be right? There's a cute story about a little boy who was talking to his teacher about whales and his teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because although it's a huge, huge mammal, has a very, very small throat

because they were talking about, and the little boy said, but a whale swallowed Jonah, and the teacher said, no, that actually didn't happen. A whale just can't swallow a human. And the little boy said, well, when I get to heaven, you know, I'll ask Jonah. The teacher said, yeah, but what if he went to hell?

And the little boy said, you ask him, you know. So our thoughts separate. Our thoughts create separation. So in terms of evolution, thinking is not the pinnacle of our human potential. We think of ourselves as the thinking animal because, in fact, it did give us the kind of GPS navigating that allowed us to get to the top of the food chain.

That is true. But there's more. our potential is a direct realization of reality itself, not the representative images and sound bites that we spend time inside. It's the direct realization of this loving awareness that's our essence. That's our potential to live from that, to realize who we really are. as as the Buddhist scriptures say, oh nobly born, do not forget the luminous nature of your own heart and mind, trust it, it is home.

That's our potential. And if we live in a map, which is what thoughts are, they can be a really good map, but they're a map. We're not living, you know, we're one step removed from this mysterious living, vibrant reality right here. Heldegaard of Bingham says, we cannot live in a world that is not our own. An interpreted world is not a home. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light. When you're thinking, you're interpreting the world. Does that make sense?

thoughts are an interpretation? So how do we, and this we're going to explore in this class, how do we move from an interpreted world to really inhabiting this living reality, seeing reality directly for what it is? How do we have it be so thoughts are our servant, not our master? And the key, what we're going to explore is how do we shift? from the head, you know, from this mental, conceptual world to the wisdom of our heart. It's not a really long distance, but it's a lot of work. So in meditation, there's many styles. I mean, they all have to do in some way with quiet

in our mind. It's like clouds, instead of being inside the cloud, can we get outside them so we can, it's not getting rid of them, but that we have a bigger picture. We can see the whole reality. In the Zen tradition, they say, the quieter you become, the more you'll be able to hear. And we intuit that. The more still we are, the more we can feel.

The more open we are, the more we include. So it's just waking up out of this busyness of our incessant inner dialogue. The challenge is that in trying to do so, we're really going against the stream, against the intensity of our current society. This is a very short reading from Mark Morford, if you haven't read him, his San Francisco columnist.

The title of it is, Hurry up, get more done, and die. Gives you a sense of what it's going to be like. He says, your terrifying word of the day is microtasking, and it comes by way of a relatively humble little article I read via one of those perky little blogs that exist to tell you a million ways to tweak and hack your entire existence to gain maximum productivity, efficiency,

and improved overall time management because, well, if that's not the true meaning of this manic American life, what is? The advice was horrifyingly simple. Okay, listen to this. When you find yourself pausing in between normal projects and work tasks for anything more than, say, 30 seconds, why not take those tiny moments and, well, do more things?

I mean, you're just sort of sitting there, right? What sort of things? Fast things, little things, otherwise inconsequential things, you don't care about otherwise, like clearing your junk mail, refilling the stapler, changing your voicemail message, retweeting somebody's Twitter blip, et cetera, et cetera. But, hey, what else are you going to do? breathe, feel, merely exist? What are you a hippie? It's a fascinating and yes, terrifying idea, really that if you could just maximize your output a little bit more, if you could cram into all

the open white space, another thing to do, wow, think of all you could get done by the end of the day. Think of how much you could check off your list. We are by and large, utterly terrified of silence, stillness, spaciously. the doing of nothing so as to feel the totality of everything. Meditation for most is disquieting and strange. It's against the stream. We really are very addicted to that busyness, to the sound. It's like Houdini.

We're very addicted to continuing to try to figure things out and trying to control things with our mind. We do it sometimes internally. in all sorts of ways. There's a story about a man in a supermarket and he's following a grandmother around and her badly behaving three-year-old granddaughter. It's obvious to him that she has her hands full

because the little girl is going after every sweet, every biscuit, every everything. And meanwhile, grandma's working her way around saying in a controlled voice, easy, Cindy, we won't be long, easy, hon. Another outbursts, he hears the grandma kindly say, It's okay, Cindy. Just a couple more minutes and we'll be out of here. Hang in there, babe. Check out little terrorist throwing items out of the cart and the grandmas again saying in a controlled voice. Cindy, Cindy, relax, sweetie. Don't get upset. We'll be home in five minutes. Stay cool, Cindy. Very impressed.

The man goes outside where the grandmother's loading her groceries and little girl into the car. So he says to the elderly woman, it's not of my business, but you were amazing in there. I don't know how you did it the whole time you kept her composure. No matter how loud and disruptive she got, you just calmly kept saying things would be okay. Cindy's very lucky to have you as her grandma. Thanks, said the grandma, but I'm Cindy. This little terror is Jennifer.

So we try to control things and we do it talking to ourselves, we do it thinking to ourselves a lot. So sometimes we can reassure ourselves with thoughts, but usually, even when we're saying it's going to be okay, it's going to be okay, we're reaffirming that there's a problem here, that we've got a problem on our hands. So what keeps us so hooked is that when we're insecure, we don't want to just do nothing,

we want to feel like we're controlling things and thinking is our primary strategy to control. We leave our bodies and go into the mental control tower here. And because in an evolutionary way, that's where our species got ahead, we're very, this is it. This is the thing we think will work. Except the on button gets jammed. Okay? We just get hooked.

So we're chronically going there. And there is a default network in our brain that when we don't have an activity, as Mark talked about in that pause period, what kicks in in our brain is this scanning of our past and our future, reminding ourselves of where we're been, where we're going, what we need to do, who we are, how others are taking us. It's very self-oriented, in other words. In other words, our brain keeps reinventing this doing self to keep us oriented because we're so uncomfortable with that non-control and... place that meditation invites us to inhabit. And we wonder why it's so hard to meditate.

Well, we are designed to be very anxious when we're not doing things. So we go into this control tower, we leave the rawness of our feelings and we don't realize that when we're in that busyness, that the movie we're watching, we think of our feelings, we think of of it is real. We conflate reality with the virtual reality in our mind. We actually think that's real. And we also think our thoughts are rational. But cognitive science has shown very clearly that our thoughts are not rational, that we actually use thinking to confirm a very emotionally based view of things. There's one at just a very emotionally based view of things. There's one at Chief Justice who was describing, he said, you must remember one thing at the constitutional

level where we work, 90% of any decision is emotional. The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections. But it's unconscious. We're not aware that we are scanning and sorting for information that will back our view of reality. There was two men, lifelong friends that had a very esoteric view of reality and they were very curious to see what happened after you die. And so they made a deal that whoever died first would in some way contact the other from the afterlife to give them some information on what it really was like. And so Irv dies first, okay? I'll read the rest. Norman doesn't hear from him for about a year but then one day gets a call. It's Irv. Oh, so there is an afterlife. What's it like? Norman asks.

Well, I sleep very late, I get up, have a big breakfast, have lots of sex, and I go back to sleep, get up, have lunch, have more sex, take a nap, huge dinner, more sex. Oh my God, said Norman. So that's what heaven is like? Oh, no, says Irv, I'm not in heaven, I'm a moose in Wyoming. And you can see it. He's got his heaven constructed in his mind. We have this idea in our mind and we feed it. The reason I call this virtual realm of thinking a prison, the reason I liken it and I started with Houdini

is because of the negativity bias, we get caught in a very real looping that explains why you might have patterns in your life that are painful and that keep going. And the way the looping works is we have fear-based thoughts that come up, and they get habituated and they create a mood in our body, a biochemistry of fear, that then produces more fear thoughts and it keeps going and it keeps looping. And as it said, neurons that fire together, wire together. So the pathways get deeply worn in our mind.

And there's a lot of research that shows that many of the most basic kinds of thinking that we get caught in when we're looping are really, really bad for our health. They actually speed up aging and cause disease. And I thought that was really interesting if we were wondering how that can happen. The telomeres, some of you've heard of this because it's so out there now, the real research on telomeres is very interesting. Telemeres are the cap on a chromosome. If you imagine a shoelace, it's like the DNA cap that allows the shoelace not to untangle

itself. And yet as we age, that cap gets smaller. And that's a sign of aging. The smaller the telomere, the more our cells are dying and we're available to disease states. Well, they've done research that shows how certain types of... this negative thinking actually correlates with shorter telomeres. And it's really interesting if they named the specific kinds of thinking that they had

researched and show this correlation. And one is people that have thoughts that are very cynically hostile. In other words, mistrusting other, chronically mistrusting others and blaming and hostile. That's the biggest one. pessimism, constantly anticipating things you're going to go wrong. That's another big one. Ruminating thoughts, meaning always trying to solve the problem like Houdini was doing. That's another. And we suppress thoughts. Don't want to go there. Not going to think about that. That's another. And the last one the name was the wandering mind that I mentioned in the Harvard study.

because when our mind wanders, typically it's being fueled by the negativity bias and we're not happy. They all have a stress undercurrent. So I bring this up because there's different types of suffering that come in this prison of conceptual mind when we're lost in thought. But the deepest suffering, this is really where we pay attention, is that when we're in that incessant kind of inner dialogue, the sense of who we are shrinks. We become the protagonist in the thoughts.

We're the story self. You know, we're the one that we're describing in our mental stories that's limited or is going to be rejected or isn't doing enough, is failing in some way. The sense of our being gets confined. Along with that, we have the others in our mind, in our stories, as what I call unreal others, because they become kind of two-dimensional characters and they lose their subjective reality. We don't see so much when we're in those incessant looping patterns of what another might

be struggling with. We don't really see where others are vulnerable. We don't see and remember the beauty and goodness. We're caught in a very rigid kind of looping pattern. So this is probably a good time to pause because I've been speaking a lot and invite you to take one of those moments of closing your eyes and checking in. Let yourself come into your senses, feel your body right here. What we've been exploring is that when we're living inside the looping, we're living.

the looping thoughts, we're living in a narrow and distorted reality. And that's what gives rise to suffering. We end up feeling stuck in an anxious self or a fearful self, an angry self, an isolated self. It's because we're believing our thoughts. We're believing what our mind is producing as reality. like to invite you to scan your life and sense into anywhere that you might feel stuck and reactive, let's say, in a relationship with somebody else. It could be a colleague at work, family member,

somebody that you see frequently, friend, but anywhere where you feel stuck, where in some way you feel like you're caught in some old pattern of reactivity. Once you've identified a person and the situation and you might even zoom in a little and bring to mind the particulars of where you get caught in that reaction, what's going on in those moments, remembering maybe the look on the other person's face or what might be being said. And as if you could be kind of like outside of yourself, a light in the corner of the room beaming into your own mind, what are the thoughts? beliefs going on in those moments.

And what is it that you're really believing about the other person or how they feel about you or about what's going to happen? What are you believing that is part of this suffering? Are you believing that you're going to be rejected or that this means this person couldn't respect you or like you? You believe that you're bad in some way? believing they're bad, they'll never meet your needs or never behave in the way you need them to? What are you believing? As you begin to shine a light on the beliefs, the kind of

thoughts you're having about the other person and yourself, just frame them as, okay, this is the interpretation going on here. This is an interpretation of reality. And notice how true it seems to you. Notice how much you're believing it. Just become a witness to what's going on here. You're believing something that's causing pain. You're bad, I'm bad, you couldn't like me, you couldn't respect me, you shouldn't act that way. You're believing something and just sense how true it seems. A sense what the believing does to your sense of yourself. When you're believing this, what's your sense of yourself? You notice how it shrinks, confines, and distorts, and makes you small when you're believing this, rigid, tight? And when you're

believing this interpretation, what's your sense of the other person? And you sense that it's narrowed, constricted, perhaps two-dimensional? Are there a character in right now, perhaps the enemy and the story, the movie in your mind. So this is the effect of that continuous looping. Creates very deep interpretations or beliefs that contract us, that have us perceive an unreal other, and cause suffering. The beginning is just to begin to look at it, just like you're doing right now,

to have the willingness or courage to investigate a little. This is a belief. Do I have to believe it? Can I sense the suffering of it? We live with the assumption that our beliefs are truth and we don't often pause. If you'd like to open your eyes, it's fine, or you can sit with your eyes closed.

But this is where I in my own life often reflect on the phrase from a Tibetan teacher, real but not true. That these interpretations or beliefs are real in the sense that they're going on, they're actually happening in our brains, and they're real and that they're creating a real effect on us. They're part of this looping that then creates some bad feelings, some anxiety, some fears, some hurt, that then produces more thoughts. And so they're real in that way.

They're actually having an effect on our lives. But that doesn't mean they're truth. They're still interpretations of reality. And if you can sense a glimmer of, I might not have to believe this. I might be able to loosen up this belief. That's a glimmer of freedom. If you're stuck, you're believing something that's not true.

Here's a story that I find interesting. older man who was a lifetime smoker and he was hospitalized with emphysema. And after a series of small strokes, his daughter started urging him as she had regularly done to give up smoking. But he refused. In fact, he asked her to get more cigarettes and he basically said, I'm a smoker this life. That's how it is. I'm a smoker. I can't stop. So several days later he had another small stroke and the effect of it was it impacted one of the memory centers in his brain, and then, without a concern, he stopped smoking for good. How come? It wasn't because he decided to. It was because one day he woke up and forgot that he was a smoker.

So to the extent we're caught up in the roles identified by our beliefs, I'm this kind of person and I can't do that, we have this limiting story. If we're believing it, it will keep on rolling forward. So then the question is, how do we begin to challenge it? How do we begin to not believe our thoughts? And I'll share a bit of a story of one man I worked with. I'm going to tell you a little bit of it and then I'll come back to him. But he had done some mindfulness-based stress reduction, a kind of meditation.

He was a professor at an area college. and he had just gone through a very painful divorce initiated by his wife because, as she put it, he was depressed, he really was not emotionally available. So she went to seek intimacy elsewhere. And his belief, this is the looping he would go through, was people will always leave me. I'm not worthy. People won't want to be close with me. They won't like me.

And that was how he, that was his inner looping. and what that led to was being very defended and leading with his intellect and basically being not vulnerable, just immersing himself in his work, research, being very competitive in terms of publications, out of touch with his body, out of touch with his feelings, not able to listen.

So he's solidified his unreal self, okay? This is the self, I'm the person that will always be rejected, live in my head, and just do well on this particular, track out here, disconnected inwardly. So this is an example of he had a belief. It led to his actions and as Gandhi said it can lead to our destiny. Our beliefs can affect our entire life. I'm going to come back to him. But we do this individually, each of us, these beliefs that

separate and cause suffering. We also do it in a societal way, in a collective way. I mean, if you just if we open out this exploration a little, we have as a in contemporary society, beliefs around consuming that more is better, that growing, we should keep on growing, that we want to expand the economy. It's like when somebody says, oh, the economy is shrinking, we all go, you know, bad. It's like grow, buy more, do more, be more. It's that kind of a belief. So underneath that thing of needing more to be happy, there's a sense of never enough. It drives us to being an over-consuming, addictive society. That's just the collective level.

Exact same thing with beliefs about behind violence. What makes our world violent? There's a belief that there's a bad other out there. And the same belief I mentioned, the cynical kind of anger. Well, we have a cynicism, bad other, whether it's those of different political views, or whether it's another country we think is threatening us, or whether it's an ethnic racial group, whether it's a religion. We're very locked into bad othering.

There's this belief. others are less than are bad. What does that do? It just keeps the looping of violence on the planet. Carl Jung found this so interesting. Carl Jung visited the Pueblo Indians when he was alive in Tauos, New Mexico, and he had a conversation with the Pueblo chief, and he wrote about it in his memoirs.

The chief told Carl Jung this, because he started speaking about white men. He said, their eyes have a staring expression. They're always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They're always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want.

We don't understand them. We think they're mad. I asked him, this is what Young writes, why he thought the whites were all mad. And the response was, they say that they think with their heads, the chief replied. Why, of course, said Dr. Young's surprise.

What do you think with? The response is, we think here. We think here. And he wrote, this Indian had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind, that we are perceiving reality through concepts in our head, driven by fear, where there's a possibility to experience life with a very wise heart. So this is where we're going to take the last part of this reflection together is how do we make that move from this habit, this addiction to our looping thoughts to a wise heart.

And the training, the essence of our meditation training is to be aware of when we're thinking. So rather than being lost in thoughts, we can begin to notice, oh, a thought's happening. It's just a thought. And that is, my friends, the biggest takeaway from people that have gone to enough classes or come to a retreat is, oh, I don't have to believe my thoughts. It's like, oh, it is a movie and it really has impact, but I don't have to believe it. That starts opening the door to freedom in our meditation community. We have a family program and one of the co-founders, Jen Jordan, who's one of our IMCW teachers,

did a skit in the family program and I want to share with you about it. She pretended in the skit to be in fourth grade and the children posed as her teachers and her friends and parents and so on and one by one they'd approach her and they'd do or say something to her. Like for instance, no, for the tenth time you can't get a wrap. or, here's your test, you didn't do so well, did you study? Or, you are so popular and pretty. Our two friends came next to her and began whispering and pointing their fingers at Jen.

So throughout, Jen would start speaking out loud her thoughts. And this is how the exercise went. Every time she'd speak out loud a thought that was not true, the class would ring a bell and then they'd hand an item that Jen had aware, such as a scarf, a snake, glasses and a mustache, a bag of rocks. So soon, Jen didn't look much like herself anymore and was burdened with carrying around all the false thoughts she was having. Isn't that amazing? I think it's such a clever design.

So they were catching her having these thoughts that were obviously real but not true, false thoughts. And they were loading her up with all these costume design, and disguises and stuff. And then she described the freedom of being able to just, oh, this is just a thought and take them off and so she could re-inhabit her true self. This is actually very much our training

is we meditate, we get a little bit quiet with the breath, and then we just start noticing what's happening. And when we realize we've zipped away in a train of thoughts, we go, oh, thoughts. come back. We don't have to believe them. We don't have to ride them. So this is, as I say, the ground of practice. The challenge, sometimes the thoughts are really, really sticky. They're the kind of repeating visitors that come. They're the ones that say, you know, you really screwed up on that, are the ones that are rehearsing for something that's coming

up that we're nervous about. They're the ones that really are feeling resentful towards someone and just can't let go of how that person wronged us, the sticky ones, okay? So with the sticky ones and then the beliefs that are sticky underneath them like anybody that really gets to know me will reject me like the man I told you about, it takes a deeper kind of attention. It's not as easy as taking a mask that Jen had on her face and taking it off. or dropping a load of rocks, it needs a little more attention. So when we're practicing with sticky thoughts, what we need to do is go under them and feel the rawness and the

emotion that's under them in order to let them go. Otherwise, the roots are still there and they'll just keep on coming. We have to bring kindness and do some healing with what's under them. So I want to share with you how the man in this story did that. So his divorce cracked him open, so he was willing. Willingness is the key. If you feel like you're going through patterns that are really causing suffering in your life and you get willing to look at the thoughts and beliefs, then you can find some freedom.

So for him, when he went under the belief, and we talked about how to do this, I'd say, okay, here's the belief that, you know, anybody is going to reject you. What's underneath that? What's the feelings that are there? And there are these unlived feelings usually of abandonment, of loneliness, fear. So for many months, this practice was to have the thoughts come, go under them, and bring kindness to those painful feelings.

If we spend enough time bringing kindness to the painful feelings, they won't keep on generating the thoughts. So he would do that and then he began to get the knack of having the thoughts and being able to say this is real but it's not true. I don't have to believe it. He had done enough of the self-compassion practice they weren't as sticky. So they would come up like he'd have an insecure thought about somebody that he was working with and he'd be able to notice.

them and just say, this is real but not true. I don't have to believe. Gradually, and this is over time, he became increasingly familiar with the awareness that was recognizing the thoughts. He could rest more in a larger sense of himself, in that awareness that's naturally kind and big enough. It's like the sky rather than being inside the clouds. This is a roomy poem that I love that describes this waking up out of this believing our thoughts. He says, are you searching for your true self that come out of your own prison? Leave the little creek and join the mighty river that flows into the ocean. Like an ox, don't pull the wheel of this world on your back.

Take off the burden, whirl and circle. and rise above the wheel of the world, there is another view. There is another view. You don't have to live in a limiting story of yourself. You just don't have to do it. But it takes a willingness and it takes practice. The moment you shift open your perception from believing a rigid belief, your biochemistry changes.

There is a direct correlation between what you're, you're running through your mind and what's going on in your body. And things get more hopeful. So this is one, I'm named briefly the three ways that we wake up out of the trance. We go from the head to the heart and the first is notice the thinking, come back to living experience and if it's sticky, come back with a lot of kindness. Okay? That's number one.

two, if you want to get in the habit of moving from your head to your heart, is to intentionally turn your attention to whatever softens and opens your heart. Intentionally do that. Because of the negativity bias, we sort for what's wrong. So an essential part of the spiritual path, path of healing is to on purpose look out for what we love. It might be as simple as doing a loving kindness practice where we just remember what we're grateful for or remember what's the goodness in another person and wish them well. That starts bringing us more living from here. Remember last week I had more to do than I could handle and I remember in my morning walks I would be walking and I'd feel this grimness

and I'd say, well, wait a minute, right now I'm just walking. I'm not at my computer. There's nothing I'm going to do. Why do I have to be grim? And so I just started this thing of saying, sweetie, please, be happy. And I just kept saying be happy, be happy. And just this reminder that I didn't have to be grim.

I didn't have to be living in that looping of a problemed person with too much to do, weighty, you know. We have to remind ourselves. We go into situations and actually engage in ways that wake up our heart. It's like one engineer in Astoria Gelfrandsdale tells, visited a monastery regularly for years. He hoped it would give him some freedom from chronic unhappiness. But it didn't matter what practice he did in the monastery. Every practice it was given he'd just start thinking about it too much.

He was just really caught in his head. So she finally said, done with these practices, I'm going to give you a living practice. And you have to leave the monastery for two years, and here's what you have to do. This is the abbess, the head of the monastery. And his job was to volunteer for 10 hours a week at a maternity ward in a hospital where he would hold babies that were born prematurely. And so, as you know, without enough physical contact, they don't grow in a way that's healthy.

So he plunged in and he'd hold these fragile little beings very carefully and watch each breath. And what he found most effective was to hold them against his chest. Six months and something new started happening. A little spot of warmth and softness right in the center of his being. And it was foreign. It didn't fit his sense of himself. But he ignored it.

It didn't try to think it out because, you know, which is good, it would have interfered with the warmth that was there. And then over months that warmth expanded to fill his whole body. And gradually it started dissolving that hardened wall around his heart. So he completed his time and he returned to the monastery and the abbess saw that the shift had happened from head to the heart. He wasn't so longer trying to fit everything into his conceptual framework, his beliefs. So his new instructions, when you meditate, don't think about what's happening.

happening. Rather, let your awareness be seated in the tender warmth you feel in your heart. What if we did that? Stop thinking so much about what's happening and just keep coming back and just keep coming back to what's going on right here. Head to the heart. So as a way of closing, we've talked about really three, we talked about two pathways so far back from head to the heart. and one is just keep waking up out of the thoughts. I don't have to believe this, coming back to what's happening right here, when it's sticky, coming back but bringing a lot of kindness. The second way on purpose pay attention to the heart.

Do things that wake up our heart. Reflect on what we love. The third is to look towards awareness itself, to be aware of that which is noticing the thoughts. because as the mind quiets, and you'll find this in practice, as your mind quiets, you'll start sensing the gap between the thoughts, the space. And in the space is the light of awareness. You'll start resting in the sky of awareness and not be so hooked on your thoughts. So we're going to close with that.

We're going to close with a taste of these three pathways. pathways from head to heart, very short reflection, closing your eyes and taking some moments to awaken your senses. The more you ground yourself in the moment-to-moment experience of your senses, the more clear it'll be that you've gone off into thoughts when it happens. So you might start by listening to sound, listen with a very recent, perceptive presence. And with that same receptivity and openness, see if you can listen to and feel into the body the sensations that are here.

You might feel the tingling in your hands. You might feel the sensations and aliveness inside the feet, letting the chest be open, feeling the heart area, feeling the breath, as if it's coming in and out of the heart. You may take a moment and just ask yourself, what is it that I really love? Maybe a person comes out, an activity, an experience, just sense something, someone that you love, and what brings up that appreciation, that loving feeling.

You might let go of the idea of the person or the thing and just feel the loving, feel the warmth in the heart, sensing this whole flow of that warmth of the heart, tend to tenderness, sensations in the body, sounds, there may be thoughts that come and go. And noticing in the background this alert inner stillness, this awareness that's aware of the changing flow, kind of wakeful openness that notices the sounds that arise, it's that presence that's aware of the sensations that are here, the silence that's listening. the tenderness that can respond to the life that's here, spontaneously with care. To move from the head to the heart is to wake up out of the ideas of this life,

to open to this changing flow and the awareness that everything is happening in, closing with Anamika Borst. Stop in your tracks. Stop for once and notice what is always here. Notice what is always present in all your experiences. See that there is a constant stream of things coming and going. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, happenings. They all have a beginning and an end, constantly changing.

Notice that there is something that notices this stream, something that is always here unchanging. This something is just here, it's always here. It is never not here, always present. The one thing that is constant, it is so close and natural to us we fail to notice it. It's like searching for our glasses while all the time we're looking through them. We are this timeless, always. present awareness. We are this awake heart space, this loving awareness that's the source of all life. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn

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