Tara Brach - From Story to Presence

Episode Date: August 3, 2013

2009-09-09 - From Story to Presence - A fundamental skill cultivated through meditation is awakening from our stories and arriving back in the aliveness of the moment. If we investigate, we find that a large portion of our stories create physical and emotional stress, separate us from others, and obscure the truth of who we are. In this talk you are invited to identify several of your "top ten hits", explore how these stories live in your body, and reconnect with living presence.

Tonight I wanted to talk a little something I've been reflecting about and it's really on a very basic element to all meditation practices. It's one of the most basic trainings that we get and it's really about how we move from the stories that so possess our attention to this now quality, this here quality. because we all get carried away. So this is about spiritual health care. I know many of you are probably torn whether to listen tonight about other health care. It's all that all interrelates. But yeah, spiritual health care.

Really how to kind of spare ourselves some of the excessive stories that we get caught in. I'd like to start with a poem that I like a lot. So just if you will, take a moment to just to close your eyes and feel your body and re-enter if you've left that sense of the life that's here. Take a few breaths and just listen. The spirit likes to dress up like this,

10 fingers, 10 toes, shoulders, and all the rest. It could float, of course, but would rather plumb rough matter, airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body, lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids. It needs the body's world, instinct and imagination, and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is. So it enters us in the morning, shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning, and lights up the deep and wondrous parts of the body like a star. The spirit likes to dress up like this, 10 fingers, 10 toes.

When we're off in our thoughts and our stories, we miss out. We miss out on that, on this kind of mystery, this spirit, this awareness that's living through these bodies. And that's why so many of the spiritual practices has us enter the gateway of the body, to feel the body from the inside, this inner aliveness, and sense with that, that presence, that light, that spirit. Many of you might remember, I've spoken of Ajam Buda Dasa, who is a great Thai teacher, and he was asked to describe this world, and his response was lost in thought.

That was his description of the world. And when we reflect on today or our lives and we're honest, we can sense the huge swaths of moments that we really are not feeling this here quality that we're ruminating about something. We know that's the case. much of meditation training is about waking up from that trance. It's about recognizing and reconnecting with this aliveness.

And even as I speak tonight, you can listen in a way where you keep inviting yourself back to this sense of heerness in your body. Like just sense your hands right now again. Can you soften your hands and right away, start to sense the aliveness there? Can you feel it in your feet? Can you let that spread and feel just even in these couple of moments again this kind of vibrating alive beingness in the body? It's this capacity to come back again and again that lets us

become more familiar with presence as what's real. than the stories in our mind. Now I'm going to be saying that in a lot of different ways over the next half hour, but that's the deal. That this awake presence is more the truth of what we are than the stories and the self-character in those stories that we keep running. Now, just to say that we need to be thinking,

there's a lot of moments that thoughts are absolutely essential to make plans and execute the activities and tasks and work that we do. So this is not a diatribe against thought. It's necessary. And yet there's many moments that we don't need to be thinking, that we're just spinning. And not only that, if we start evaluating our thoughts, just looking at them and sensing, well, what experience is this thought creating? Many of our thoughts create physical tension, emotional stress, interpersonal conflict, and they cut us off from a sense of that alive spirit, that presence, many of our thoughts.

In meditation retreats, you'll often hear the expression of the top ten hits that are going on inside you. And I think it's a real useful one that we begin to sense, well, what are my top ten hits, or top five or whatever they are. And we'll do the next reflection we'll do tonight. I'll be inviting you to pick one of your top hits and begin to practice having that there and then what's it like to be really right here again? What's it like?

Can you gain some awareness around it, some space around it? So it's not so much of a trance. So that's where we're going. So you might even reflect for a moment when I say the language top 10 hits, what do you think of for yourself? And if you close your eyes and reflect, maybe your top 10 hits, you know, one of them has to do a complaint with an important relationship you're in. Or maybe it's a health problem.

Maybe it's something going on at work where you're really stressed. Maybe it's something political. We all go through seasons of railing against certain things. political figures or parties, what's some of the top hits for you? Because when we even begin to name them like that, there's a little more awareness when they rise up in our awareness, in our consciousness. Now just to say that in spiritual life and in creative life, thoughts play an important role, but it's a supporting role and it's really valuable to say that in spiritual life, thoughts play an important role,

to sense the difference so that there's a healthy thing about reflecting on goodness and reflecting on vulnerability and on impermanence and on the nature of reality. But there's still just thoughts. They're a supporting role. I think a lot about Einstein's stories about his own realizations about relativity and how he was in deep contemplative process when he got kind of this burst of inspiration about the nature of reality and then the next five years he used his very good left brain to begin to frame it in a way that he could communicate but the realization came out of a contemplative state this story when lord when poet lord byron was a student at Oxford in the 18th century at the end of a class on the new testament all the students were given

in an examination they were asked to write an essay on the topic of Christ's miracle of turning water into wine. For nearly three hours, students wrote, except for Lord Byron, who sat quietly. Finally, the proctor came to him and noted that he had written nothing other, the papers would be collected in a few minutes. Lord Byron dipped his pen and wrote one line. The water met its master and blushed. He received an A. Thoughts play a supporting role. It really comes down. to the quality of presence. I remember, it was a long time ago now, I had a client that came and was telling me about

his first way of learning meditation and he had seen this poster and it said, breathe in, breathe out, touch peace. And then under that it said, Tickna-Han. So he said for the next, I think it was eight months, he sat there and meditated Tick-Nat-Han. He thought that's a mantra that he was, he never heard. I didn't know. And he said that he actually learned a whole lot. He said he touched into a very quiet place and he really felt very open.

The thoughts aren't the thing, you know, they help, but they're not the thing. I liked that. Ticknott Han. I thought that was really good. So in training, in meditation training, the practice is to recognize the thoughts and the stories, just to recognize them. And when appropriate to know how to wake up and come right back here to this body and this breath and this life that's right here, that's the training.

It's very straightforward and it's very challenging because it takes being able to wake up in the midst of thoughts and go, okay, thank you. thinking and really get that's thinking because usually we're so identified. And it takes having some capacity to really establish a presence in this body so that if I asked you again, can you feel your hands and can you feel the aliveness in them? And can you feel your feet and the aliveness there? And can you let that spread so that you feel the inner aliveness, the body's aliveness? And so that becomes familiar.

Because if you haven't established a familiar sensibility of being right here, it's very hard to come out of thoughts and have a way to come home again. Does that make sense? We need to land again. So the skills are being mindful of the thoughts, having an established embodied presence right here, knowing what that's like. And then the deepest piece that makes it possible is motivation. Like what really motivates us? Now, when the stories are compelling, when they're charged, I call them sticky, you know, it's not easy to get motivated

to come out of them. It's like we want to keep thinking. I've had many people at a retreat say, what do I do if I want to keep thinking, you know? And there's something in us that thinks if we keep obsessing, we'll either solve the problem or get what we want. It's like obsessing is our way to get something. And we get caught on it. And if there's an infatuation, like if we really have a big crush, there's no way we want to pull ourselves out.

Or if somebody's insulted us, there's no way we want to pull ourselves at. So we get really, really caught in it and it's really difficult to be motivated. In fact, we don't get motivated until we really get that we're suffering. You know, I'll tell you, one of my own experiences in the last few years of really sticky was Jonathan, my husband and I bought, have moved about four years ago. And the property we bought, it had a house on it, but they would have sold it for the same amount of money without it without the house. The house was like a total fixer-upper. And we had many

friends warn us but we were dumb. We were whatever. We didn't take heat and so we went through a couple of years of having to do the fixing-up thing. Well I can't tell you the amount of obsession that brought up in me. You know, what tile and how do you get a green washer dryer and whether the floor should be this? I mean I just fixate. and fixated. And it was... And my situation is that I'm not a... My tendency is not to be a shopper. Like I, you know, I return most things I buy. I'm very picky.

But when I do... when I'm forced to have to pick things out, it's like if I check in with what the anxiety is and the fixation, it's making the mistake and it'll be terrible for the rest of my life kind of fear. So I obsessed. And I realized that as much... much time as the project was taking, double that amount was this spinning going on in my mind about should I get this color tile or that color tile. It was embarrassing fixation. I mean, it wasn't even lofty fixation. So I started getting the suffering of it when I realized I felt

like my life was being stolen by my mind, you know. I'm sure some of you can relate. And so Then I got much more intentional about, sometimes called putting like a frame around the obsession saying, okay, this is my top ten hit of the moment renovation and put a frame around it and then I'd get very deliberate, I'd commit myself to what is exactly this experience in this moment. But before that I often had to forgive myself and I want to share that that we can't help it. I mean, it's the nature of mind to fixate. It's very conditioned. So if I tried to wake up out of the obsessing with a kind of self-judgment or self-aversion, that energy actually fueled

it. I was right back in again. But if it was a sense of awe, I'm losing life moment and kind of forgiving the fixation, but then what deliberate commitment, this moment, this step if I'm out walking, because a lot of my fixation was in beautiful places walking by the river, you know, just this step or whatever I happen to be doing one thing at a time, just wash this dish or just do this email or whatever it was, that began to help. But not all our stories are so sticky. So I want to mention that we also just get habituated to meandering thoughts, to the kind of lightweight stories and yet we get really habituated. And it's almost like we're trying to create some sort of a drama out of our life even if there isn't one

because there's some fear of just being quiet. Some fear of just being quiet. Some fear of just getting still. There's a, some of you heard of deep thoughts from Saturday Night Live. This is one of Jack Handy's deep thoughts. He said, when I found the skull in the woods, the first thing I did was call the police,

but then I got curious about it. I picked it up and started wondering who this person was and why he had deer horns. So what motivates us from whether it's the lightweight just trying to create something out of something, or whether it's our more sticky ones, a relational conflict, or whatever it happens to be, what motivates us is suffering. What motivates us

is a sense that it's taking our life and it's also creating all sorts of separation between us and others. A friend of mine, this is about five years ago, she had been married for 18 years, and she woke up one morning and her husband had taken everything of his from the house and disappeared. And they got back in touch and talked out things and so on but he basically said that she was living in her own dream or world of what their relationship was and it didn't matter how much he tried to flag her, she wasn't listening. And she came to agree with them after three years of therapy, that she had been living in her stories. And it made it so nobody could break through and get her attention, including her husband.

The suffering we have of being in our stories is that we miss others. You cannot attune to another person if you're spending a lot of time possessed by your own stories about what's happening and what's wrong and what's going to go wrong. You can't tune in. You can't sense who's there. You also can't sense what's going on inside yourself. I know for myself, I, for many, many years, it was very physical and into athletics and into exercise and I had my idea of, okay, I run three times a week and then I do these repetitions of grinding out, certain exercises, sit up, sit up, push up. And then I started injuring myself more and more. And it got to be that I could no longer play out my story of, oh, I do this three times

a week and I do this 20 rounds a day. Because every moment, unless I pay attention to what's going on in my body, I risk injuring myself. So I've had a move from the story of what I'm doing, just kind of being lost in kind of habitual mode to a continual checking in, moving from the story to the actuality. The same thing for us emotionally that if we're living in our stories we are not able to be intimate with what's going on inside us. We miss out on really how lonely we are and really how to respond to that, are the sorrow, the lust or the yearning, we just don't listen so we can't respond.

Another way to describe the motivation to wake up out of the story is if you ask yourself when am I happiest. If you sense when am I happiest, it's not when you're lost in thought. Or if it is, come talk to me after class. When are you feeling the most love? You know, really. It's not when we're off in our story. That's not when love is happening.

When are we feeling most free, most spiritually awake? It's not when we're making plans and leaning ahead. This is called reverse living. The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends. I mean, life is tough. Takes a lot of your time, all your weekends. What do you get at the end of it? A death.

What's that a bonus? I think the cycle is all backwards. You should die first. Get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young. You get a gold watch. You go to work.

You work 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You go to college. You party. You get ready for high school. You go to grade school. You become a kid. You play. You have no responsibilities.

You become a little baby. You go back into the womb, you spend your last nine months floating, you finish off as a gleam in someone's eye. When we get outside of thoughts of the future, of the past, we arrive in that gleam and that light and that spirit. The only place that we can experience love and freedom and light and spirit is here, right here. So our practice is to come back and to live life fully really means to live this moment fully. There's a saying that I remind myself of a lot which is the way you live today is the

way you live your life. And that scares me a lot. You know, because sometimes my day can be pretty trancy or mundane or preoccupied or reactive and then I go, oh my. So, But I think it's an important reminder that this moment matters. It's that we're not here listening to this talk so we can then do that so then we get to the week. We have this idea of on our way somewhere. And it's only when we can begin to let this moment, like right, this moment, this moment, that this moment matters.

that quality of care and reverence and heerness that we begin to realize that the life isn't down the road, it is right here. But we have to wake up out of the story to get that poignancy of this moment. So how we do it, the practice, is we begin to, as I said, establish a real embodied awareness. and again I'd like to invite you to, as I've been saying, just to feel your hands again. Just start there.

The trick is many times a wet day. Feel your hands. You might close your eyes and feel your feet and feel the life, the aliveness that spreads through your body. Poet Jane Hooper says, please come home. Please come home into your own body, your own vessel, your own earth. Please come home into each.

every cell and fully into the space that surround you. Please come home. So we begin to feel the breath and we begin to feel the aliveness of the body and we let this be a home base. These are the words of poet Dana Fault. She says, trust the energy the courses through you. Trust and then take surrender even deeper, be the energy. that, just be the energy. Trust the energy that courses through you. What does it mean to trust?

You kind of take the surrender even deeper, be the energy. Don't push anything away. Follow each sensation back to its source in vastness and pure presence. Emerge so new, so fresh, you don't know who you are. Trust the energy, the courses through you. you. Trust and take, surrender even deeper. Be the energy. Emerge so new, so fresh that you don't know who you are. Welcome in the season of monsoons. Be the bridge across the flooded river and the surging torrent underneath. Be unafraid of consummate wonder. Be the energy and blaze a trail across the clear night sky like lightning, dare to be your own illumination.

So we train by becoming familiar with this aliveness. And I invite you to keep reopening to the aliveness itself. It's natural that we leave it in thought. but since what happens if yet again you relax with the aliveness, the hands, the feet, feel the inner body, the inner aliveness, so that if you consciously put forward a thought in your mind, perhaps remembering something that happened today that was interesting, unusual or challenging, exciting, just something. and let that story move through your mind.

And begin to breathe again and feel your body again. And feel the aliveness again. And notice the difference between the thoughts, the movie and the mind, and this living presence. Notice the difference between the story and this vividness that's right here. Now to take the reflection a little further, choose something that we've called one of your top ten and run that through your mind, run a piece of that through your mind, something you're occupied with these days. So you're choosing a piece of that story of what somebody did or didn't do, of something that you did right or wrong or somebody else.

did right or wrong, of something you're afraid that's going to happen, or upset that already happened, take the story and run a piece of it in your mind without judging it, sense that you can put a frame of mindfulness around it so you're noticing it. But then open into your body again and sense how is that story living in your body? Is it creating in your body? Feel your heart. Breathe into wherever the feelings are strongest. You can reconnect with the living experience, sensing the effect of the story in your body

and meeting that with presence and kindness, noticing how you become more whole as you arrive again. Right here, forgiving the story. out of the confinement of the story, back into a larger presence, aware of your body, your heart, aware of the quality of now-ness, of being right here. Even if the story is very sticky, sense the possibility with practice, with commitment, of finding the space around the story. which is really a space of wisdom.

That's where the light shines through. It's what'll allow you to respond to situations and not react. It's home. Okay, opening your eyes. I'm going to take this a little bit further because I think that there's a challenge in saying, oh, okay, here's the story, let go of the story, come into your body, body, what happens, it's not always so simple to just let go of a story. And I want to share with you something that a friend told me a couple of weeks ago that she had gone through

that has very much to do with the suffering of a story and yet how a story can actually be our gateway or kind of a portal to healing. And this friend of mine, described how her now adult daughter, young adult daughter, has over the last year or so repeatedly told her that when this young woman was a teenager that her mother had been emotionally abusive. And my friend, you know, tried to be very open and say, I get that that's your experience and I'm so sorry that's the way you're experiencing things and so on. But it wasn't real for her. In other words, she didn't believe her daughter and it didn't seem real to her. Well, more recently, her daughter reminded her of some incidents that had caused her great pain.

This time, my friend, instead of saying, well, that's your story, or that's a story, actually tried it on and went, oh, okay, so my behaviors truly. did create pain. Okay, that's the story. My behavior is created pain. And so she stayed with the story. She let it be there. She let it kind of swim around in her mind some and she let herself then go into her body and feel what it felt like to have the story the way I acted caused suffering because that's where she didn't want to go. And in her body she felt horror and remorse and guilt and sorrow. And there's a story, this life has impacted another life. And what happened was the more she stayed with the experience in her body of remorse and guilt

and sorrow, the more she stayed present, the more she contacted a presence that let her be both compassionate towards her daughter and towards herself. But this time it was real compassion. It wasn't, oh dear, I'm sorry you're holding that story. And it was like she had had to go through experiencing the story and in her body what that story meant before she could come to compassion. But by staying with the experience in her body, there was not a stickiness of I am bad. There was just this happens. This happened.

being caused suffering to this being. Now the reality is each one of us has caused hurt to other people and each of us has been hurt by other people. But if we keep running the story of you hurt me, you're bad or I hurt you, I'm bad, all that happens is a looping that creates separation. What if instead we say okay so the story is that I hurt virtue and we let that story be there. We really don't just, we don't put it aside too quickly. We don't too quickly come back to our breath. Do you see what I'm saying? We let it be there and we feel what it feels like in our body. The very presence with that vulnerability awakens compassion. Now the trick, because this is where there can be more suffering,

is to take the story I caused you suffering and just hold on to the I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad. And then that becomes, we're wedded to the story and we have not access to deeper presence. So the pathway I am describing to you tonight and it takes a real sensitivity is when stories arise in our mind to not too quickly go,

go, oh, it's just a story back to the breath, okay? Because that's another way of aversion and denial. It's to let it be there a bit but not to believe the story instead to come into how it's living in the body. Now as some of you listen that may bring up a lot of confusion and a lot of fear of, you know, what is that supposed to be? mean or how am I supposed to do that? And so the training I'd like to suggest is to get really, really skilled at feeling what's going on in your body. Over and over again, can I feel

the energy in the hands? Right now? Can I feel the energy in the feet? Right now? Can I let that spread to feel the aliveness through the body? Can I feel the heart right now? For my friend, there was a question that helped her, and it was, can I go from my will to my heart's well? Now, my will would say, I did this, I'm wrong, this story means this, I need to do that. My heart's well can just feel the pain and hold it all with compassion and then be responsible. We can't be responsible if it's my will. That's just the ego reacting. If it's my heart's well, then we can respond with wisdom.

My will or my heart's well. So I just offer that to you as if you feel confused as you listen. Well, I hold the story for a bit but then I go into my body. Just come back to the body and sense, what's my heart's well? What's my heart's well? So final meditation. Let's sit together for a few moments. Can you notice whatever thoughts or whatever the imprint of recent thoughts is in the mind and relax open into what's right here. Feel the breath, feel the aliveness, the energy that's here.

The story behind some of the more drama stories is really the story of self. And as we open to this living awareness, this living aliveness, this presence, we wake up out of that core story that keeps us separate. Just listening to the sounds right now and you can inquire what is knowing these sounds? Really what is knowing these sounds? Can you sense the presence, the silence, that's aware of sounds, feeling the vibration and aliveness in the body.

Can you sense the presence, the still vast presence, that's aware of this aliveness, this stillness, this silence, this beingness is your true essence beyond any story, By coming home over and over to what's right here, right now, you take refuge in your true nature. May we awaken from the trance, from the stories that keep us separate from each other, from the earth, from our beingness. May we live from spirit,

and may that presence bring healing to the earth and to all. to the earth and to all beings. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or 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.