Tara Brach - Hands Off the Controls

Episode Date: November 14, 2012

2012-11-14 - Hands Off the Controls - We are deeply conditioned to respond to impermanence and inevitable loss by trying to control our experience. Our egoic reactivity prevents us from responding wisely to our life, and living the moments fully. This talk looks at how we can let go of controlling, open to the groundlessness we run from, and reconnect with the deep intelligence and love that flows through our being. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

This weekend I was up at Cropallo doing a couple of times a year I do a weekend that's actually applied meditation. It's bringing meditation to the challenges of life. And there were a number of people there with the normal, you know, chronic stressors of life. But a notable number that came with very, very difficult losses and pending losses. One friend, her niece who was 27 years old, had just died of an overdose. And other parents grappling with children's struggle with drugs, with mental illness. People came, a few of them had been hit really hard by Hurricane Sandy and lost a lot, including one who lost her home that mentioned it.

And people dealing with divorce. with custody, struggles. And what happened that always happens, and it's because of the power of paying attention, is that by the end of the weekend, I had so many people say, you know, I'm going back home and it's exact same circumstances,

and there's more space in my heart and mind for what's going on. You're just more kindness, more clarity, more of a sense of just being able to take the next step from a place of, you know, intuition and intelligence. And I mention this because, first off, bearing witness to people struggling with these very huge things and sensing the possibility of finding more freedom in the midst is what gives faith. And for each, you know, the pathway to refuge was that through the weekend, more than they're used to, they were learning to stay with and contact what was going on inside them. So the healing happens when we learn to stay.

When we, I use the words, attend and be friend. And last class, the title of the last class was practical Dharma for stressful times. And this class is Dharma for really stressful times. It's just going to enlarge it a little bit. But really the question is when life is clearly out of our hands, there's just no way that we can manage. How do we shift from that? way that we're addicted to trying to control things anyway,

how do we shift from this trying to control our life to responding from presence, staying, coming home? So that'll be the inquiry. The Buddha described our suffering as wanting life different. And the way it expresses itself is this continual reactivity we're in where we're trying to get more pleasant,

and push away what's unpleasant and basically manage our moment-to-moment experience. In a way, it's quite rare when we put it all down and there's just a sense of letting it all happen. Most of the time there's a sense of an egoic self who's navigating and trying to make it work out. So that's quite natural. And it's interesting to start investigating.

So what is it we're trying to control, really? And what is it that we're so, that feels like we just have to make sure we're on top of? And when I investigate, what comes up most poignantly is that the controlling is to avoid the loss that's inevitable. That every one of us is in this impermanent fleeting existence and whether we're facing it or not in the back of our awareness is going, going, gone, that these bodies, these minds, the people we love, it's all temporary. So there's some existential angst that just says, okay, I can't open to that groundlessness. So if it's all going, going on, it's out of control, it's uncertain. And so we try to get certainty. We try to put a stake in that groundlessness

and say, I'm here and I'm doing this, and by doing this, it's going to protect me from that and get more of that. And that gives us a temporary sense of, okay, there's some container around all this, you know, mysterious changing flow of whatever. But of course, it's very temporary, so we have to keep trying and controlling and managing. John O'Donohue says that we manage our life so vigorously so as to cover over this great mystery we're part of. So the managing puts us in a trance. But as I mentioned this our psyches have a very hard time with the groundlessness with not knowing with the uncertainty. Shinrose Suzuki Roshi great Zen teacher said that renunciation is not giving up the things of the world but accepting

that they go away, accepting that they go away, our youth, our world, whatever we're holding on to. So it's, again, as I mentioned, it's completely natural that we're designed to hold on to our lives. And George Carlin puts it this way. He says, I was hitchhiking the other day and a hearse pulled up. And I said, no thanks. I'm not going that far. That was great. You know, one definition of death is Patrick Henry's second choice, you know. So the, it's a given, it's part of our nervous system that rather than accepting an opening and full recognition, you know, this, this changing the joys and the sorrows and just saying, okay, that's just how it is, we're rigged to control, to hold on and to try to create some ground. and we do it by tightening in our body.

The tension in your body is in some way these muscles are saying something's around the corner that's too much and I need to protect against it. What stops us from really relaxing? Dangerous. Something bad might happen and we won't be prepared. Does that make sense? Yeah. So we tighten our body and then of course we tighten our mind.

Our minds, when we're trying to control things, our minds become small and fixated, and there's this incessant inner dialogue that keeps us in that trance of something's wrong or something's going to go wrong. That's our world. And when our world's that way, there's very little space and there's very little of that aliveness that we explored in the guided meditation. In fact, when we are in control mode, our senses are not wide open. More, the body's tight and the mind is busy. And we're not listening to the sounds of the wind or the rain or the birds or the person really that's talking to us. Not too much gets in.

So what we're really exploring is this very primal and deep. deeply ingrained reflex in the face of impermanence, in the face of loss, to keep doing. Having our body hold on tight, our mind turning, our behaviors, we just, we stay busy. And the more stress, the more it feels busy for most people, unless we're in complete freeze. So this ego activity gives us a sense. when we're doing, we feel a little better than just facing the impermanence because there's some part of us that feels like if we're doing something, there's some control. It gives an illusory sense of control when we keep on doing things. And yet as we kind of intuit, when our lives are organized around this kind of fear-based egoic doing,

we're in a trance where we really can't sense being as I mentioned there's not the senses aren't awake there's not a quality of in the moment at all and you can check it out if you look at a day where you've been stressed and trying to control or manage or make it through

you'll notice that there were very few moments where there was a sense of savoring where there's a sense of wonder or there's a visceral sense of love why when we're in fear-based egoic doing we're cut off from really the deep

qualities of being that are really most our essence that love, that awareness we're cut off not really cut off but we're not aware of being in touch so one of our challenge So one of our challenges is, because as I mentioned, this is the quickest reflex we have when there's stress is to go into fight, flight and do something versus relax open and try to touch what's here.

That reflex is very, very quick. And the more stress we are, the more quickly we go into defense or aggression. So the very moments in our life, and I'm bringing us back to what I was saying about some of the people at Kropole, where it's really out of our hands. Somebody's died, somebody's dying. We just got the diagnosis ourselves. Our house has been done in. Our child is, you know, having a major struggle.

Now, clearly there's things, practical things we can do, and we do the best we can. But on some level, it's out of our hands. And what we most need to do is open to that. Instead, we do the opposite. we get tighter, more busy, more defended, more aggressive, more down on ourselves, more down on others. We go the opposite direction. So the real inquiry is how do we turn around that conditioning?

How do we turn towards presence and awareness rather than tighten into fight-flight? That's really the inquiry we keep encountering over and over again. Maybe just to clarify one thing that I think comes up a lot, which is when I talk about not controlling, when I talk about seizing from all the managing, I'm not talking about inactivity. The process of shifting out of the egoic fight-flight is a process of coming into presence with what's here and then from that presence responding, in the Zen tradition, they say responding appropriately, that the whole path is responding appropriately

rather than from an egoic reactivity. When we respond appropriately, we're responding from our deepest intelligence. We're responding from our heart. One of my favorite examples of this, Tom Wolfe in his book he wrote about in the 1950s these highly trained pilots in the U.S. Air Force and they were set for this life-death task of flying at the highest altitudes that had ever been attempted before. So they were going beyond the Earth's denser atmosphere.

And what they found is that, and this is to their horror, was that the laws of normal aerodynamics no longer applied out there. So all the ways they would normally fly didn't work. This is in the right stuff by Tom Wolfe. And the plane could skid into a flat spin. It was like a cereal bowl, he says, on wax formica counter, and then start tumbling. Not spinning and diving, but tumbling end over end. So it was whacked out trying to fly out there. And what they would do when it went out of control is they would get frantic and try to stabilize

by applying correction after correction. and this is the pilots. And the more furiously they manipulated the controls, the wilder the rye would come, become. So then they would start screaming helplessly into the intercom saying, you know, I've tried X, I've tried Y, I've tried Z, what do I do next? And they would be screaming this as they were plunging to their deaths.

So this tragic drama occurred a number of times until one pilot, and this was Chuck Yeager, inadvertently struck upon the solution. So when his plane started tumbling, he got knocked unconscious. He wasn't trying to control anything. He just was knocked unconscious. The plane pumbleded towards Earth. When it re-entered the planet's denser atmosphere,

he came to, and that's when the more the classical navigational strategies could be re-employed, and he, you know, studied the craft, and he landed safely. So he discovered the one life-saving response the only life-saving response he could do. And it's don't do anything. You take your hands off the controls.

This is Wolf. He says, it's the only choice you have, and it counters all training and even basic survival instincts, but it works. So I'd like to say the same goes in spiritual life, which is that when things feel like they are totally out of control, let them be take the hands off the control

all our normal strategies of fight flight will only like those frantic pilots mostly our strategies take place in this spinning of our mind that is trying to battle against how it is that's trying to solve

it to fix it to make it go away when it's out of control take the hands off the controls now you don't do what Chuck Yeager did necessarily. It's not getting knocked unconscious. It's actually coming into consciousness, like, okay, what's going on in this moment, and now this moment, and this moment, and this moment, it takes courage. Because as I mentioned, trying to control things gives us a sense that maybe we're going to be on top of it. But it's a false sense. In fact, the only

refuge in those moments is to take the hands off the controls, come into it. to presence and then as we really inhabit presence, there will be an intuitive way to respond to our world that most serves. If I had you take some time to reflect on different situations in your life, you would know the difference between the egoic doing that occupies the swaths of time where we're really tense and tight and on our way somewhere and trying to get things done and trying to get other people to do things a certain way. And there's just a tightness.

We know the difference between that and the moments where there's some sense of what's called being in the zone where it's not so much of a self-doing. It's kind of we are responding and engaged with the currents. And, you know, we're, There's a sensitivity and a sense that the universe is doing it.

It's, we're being guided in some way. Yet, as most of us know, the egoic activity is what's most familiar. We get some satisfaction. It's temporary. This is the thing with false refuges, as you do get a little bit of a benefit so it keeps you hooked. Like we cross things off the list and we get a temporary sense of relief that lasts about 2.7 seconds. and then back we are to the next thing on the list. But there's a sense of, well, I'm doing this as I want to get my way.

And we get our way. And that feels like a success, although we've won the battle and lost the war when we get our way with other people. We might, you know, get the temporary benefit of feeling like we've prepared or defended against an attack or some damage. You know, we might feel like we, you know, are watching. got us through some terrible circumstances. My favorite damage control story is of a young man working in a supermarket.

Some of you might remember, he's in the produce section, and this older guy says he wants to buy a half a head of lettuce. So the guy goes into the back room, and he says to his manager, some jerk wants to buy a half a head of lettuce. And then he realizes the guy standing right behind him. And he said, and this gentleman kindly is offered to buy the other half. So the manager is pretty impressed. Later on in the day, he finds this employee, he says, you know, I really like the way you handled that.

You know, that was pretty cool. I was impressed. The way you got yourself out of that situation, we like people who think on their feet. Where are you from, son? Young man says from Canada. Why did you leave Canada? The manager says, well, the young guy replies, there's nothing but horrors and hockey players up there. Really, said the man.

My wife is from Canada. Really? Who did she play for? So there, you know, we get certain benefits from having an ego that's quick on its feet, so to speak. The truth is that we will continue and as we all know, having an ego that's a well-functioning ego is part of the equipment we need to survive on planet Earth. The question is, are we identified with it? Do we know how to draw on who we are that's beyond the ego? And we will only begin to step out of the unhealthsome egoic doing when we recognize the suffering that's there.

When we start to really get how much our obsessive thinking is keeping us from connecting with us, ourselves or connecting with others. When we get how our blaming is creating separation, when we get how our defensiveness is stopping us from really discovering something that might be true, we begin to open up. And there are some zones that can become very clear when we're in control mode and realize this is really causing pain. One of them is, you know, we start recognizing how we are in some way trying to control our experience of another person dying or of our own mortality.

I remember one woman that I was in touch with, and I wrote about this in true refuge, was struggling and fighting valiantly to keep her husband alive. She had tried everything. And he was clearly dying. But when he mentioned it to her, her response that particular day was, oh, darling, don't talk about that right now. You're having a good day.

After she said that she felt this big gap between them, she realized she had created distance in her denial. And her prayer was to please, let me be present with what's true. Let me just love them through this, not deny what's happening. So that's a form of control, is denying the pain that's here, denying the loss, not being willing to name it or say it. And we start seeing that, or perhaps our way of dealing with mortality is anger, or bargaining, or any of the classic ways that we try to stay in charge.

We start noticing that and realize that we're losing a precious opportunity to be more intimate with ourselves or a loved one. Another way that it might become apparent is if we're fighting aging, because we'll lose. I promise. But we can see it that there's a sense of the insult of aging and feeling beleaguered by it and struggling to try to keep your body, your mind, your way of being looking different than it is and in some level sensing something's wrong. Okay, that's the control, this judging and striving. And there can be a sense of that is getting in the way of living the moments. We can see it not as clearly when there's controlling addictive behavior.

It's like, well, I've got to control this. It's going to do me in. I see it a lot with overeating. and yet the control mechanism is usually self-blame, our punishment, our restriction, which I found always leads to fuel more addiction. Controlling only temporarily gives us a sense that something's working. It backfires.

And see it with controlling difficult emotions in our hearts that we either deny that we're suffering, are we in some way try to fix it, try to make it go away rather than just be with, take the hands off the controls.

Now one of the big places we go into trance is controlling each other. And that is the place that often needs the most attention. Can we stop expecting others to be the way we want them to be?

Can we stop stop trying to make others cooperate with our idea of how they should behave. So we begin to see the ego strategies of how we withdraw our affections or we threaten or we punish and get the suffering. This is getting in the way of intimacy. These lives are short. You see it with partners, the rules we have and parents the way they use guilt to try to to create a certain behavior and how it backfires into resentment.

One little girl was sitting watching her mother do the dishes at the kitchen sink, and she suddenly noticed her mother had several strands of white hair sticking out in contrast to her brunette head. She looked at her mom and inquisitively asked, why are some of your hair's white mom? And her mother replied, well, every time that you do something wrong and make me cry or unhappy, one of my hairs turns white. Little girl thought about this revelation for a while and said,

Mommy, how come all of grandma's hairs are white? So controlling others. It's fun, but we know that we do that, and we also do a lot of controlling because we present ourselves and talk and act in a way to get other people to respond to us in a certain way. That's controlling. We're trying to control others' impressions of us. I heard a story about a guy who had scraped another car in a parking lot

and others see him get out and write a note and he leaves it on the windshield. And when the note was opened up, it said, I scratched your car while pulling out. People think I'm leaving my phone number. I'm not. So the controlling to make an impression. And we know it doesn't work.

doesn't work in between individuals. It doesn't work when you try to control an ethnicity or race or a country. I remember a few years ago in China, there was the news that China was trying to tell the Tibet's llamas to obtain permission before they reincarnate. What kind of law would that be? I mean, think about it. Think about it. You're a llama and you're about to reincarnate. Whoops, got to go get that form filled out. It's pretty wild. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. So the control, and I'm thinking right now, I'm reading a book that's quite beautiful on the condition of our earth

and how the human ego's attempts out of fear and greed to control this earth, to get all the resources to meet our needs for ever-increasing consumption, what that's done, the pollution, the destruction of the habitat. Ego-based control causes harm.

Fight-flight causes harm. And part of the control is to deny that it's actually happening to this earth, that the global warming does not indicate anything. So again, controlling takes a lot of different forms. And just to end this piece of this talk by saying,

We bring it into spiritual practice. The ego becomes a spiritual ego, and it co-ops spiritual practice. So spiritual practice becomes yet another instrument of the ego to try to control the self into being a more perfect self and a more spiritual self. And we have standards that we're trying to meet in spiritual life, of I'm having this kind of a good meditation, and I'm a generous or open or patient person.

And again, there's this monitoring, and there's still that sense of an ego trying to make something happen. Okay? We do it a lot with our minds. There's a way in which in spiritual life we're trying to figure things out so we have control by having the knowledge

of how it all is. And as you know, concepts, spiritual concepts, end up being a veil that covers over, this mystery that's beyond words. Some of you might remember that great story of a new novice Zen, Zen practitioner goes up to this great monk and says, what happens after we die? And he says, I don't know. And then he's very disappointed. He says, I thought you were a Zen monk. And the

response was, I am, but not a dead one. You know? Again, the theme here is that whenever we have gotten into trying to control or manage experience, we block out the mystery that's here, and we cut off from our own deep qualities of compassion, intuition, wisdom. So the inquiry is given that, we start finding that suffering is our flag to take the hands off the good. controls. That when they're suffering, that's a message to, okay, stop managing, desist from the fight-flight activity, whether it's the turning of the minds trying to figure things out or blame or judge, or whether it's your activity, an addictive activity to get away from the moment, whatever it is, pause, take the hands off the control and come back. And one of the ways

that one of the metaphors that's been helpful to me is to consider the difference between, you know, you're in very rough waters, the currents are against you, there's all sorts of winds blowing in all different directions, and, you know, you're paddling like crazy and becoming exhausted and angry and, you know, banging the paddle against the boat because the paddle's not doing what it's supposed to do and blaming yourself and blaming the wind. That versus you put aside the oars, you put up the sail of presence and you let the wind you know you just do that gentle

appropriate response you know kind of with the rudder and let the winds the universal winds of wisdom and love guide the boat we can't do it the ego self cannot do it we can't liberate ourselves we can't do anything for others there's an incredible moment of wisdom when something in you says, I can't do this. That's actually a moment of perceiving that what you are is larger than that I, and of course that story of the egoic self can't do it.

So there's a shift in identity. When we take our hands off the control, we shift from being the controlling fear-based egoic self to opening to a presence that's vast and has access to universal wisdom. That's the shift. Now the challenge is that in taking off our hands off the controls, we have to encounter the fear and the pain of loss

that we've been running from. And sometimes it feels like it's too much. In other words, when things feel really horrific and we're getting blown around and we feel very stirred up inside, Sometimes we can't immediately just say, okay, I'm not going to control anything. I'm going to open to the winds and be buffeted by the winds. We might wake up in the morning with dread about some upcoming project.

Or maybe our teens out late with a car and we're gripped by fear. Am I going to get that dreaded phone call? Or maybe somebody's anger has brought up old trauma. That's not a time to say, okay, I'll take my hands off the controls and just feel what's here because it may feel like too much. So first, in this last portion of the talk, which is the kind of how-to portion, I'd like to say there's a step before taking your hands off the controls when you can sense that it just feels like too much to contact what's here and raw. And I call that step resourcing, in some way accessing some resources that we need to help us find a little more balance and stability. And in a way, there's a number of different ways we can direct our attention so as to calm down our nervous system.

It actually helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and quiet the sympathetic nervous system. So what are those ways? We can direct ourselves to our breathing and just take a few minutes of breathing consciously a little bit longer on the in-breath, slower and longer in the out-breath. it changes around our nervous system just to breathe like that. We can ground ourselves, and that is saying, okay, I'm here and feel the pressure of sitting on a chair, the feet on the floor, and senses belonging to the earth. When you remember gravity and feel that stability,

it actually, again, sues the nervous system. We can offer meta, loving kindness, put our hand on our heart, offer some well-wishing, or we can reach out to someone else and let contact and a larger belonging help to, again, calm us. So there are ways to calm ourselves down that are intelligent, and this resourcing actually is what will allow us to then be stable enough to then say, okay, let go, let go.

So that's not cheating. I just want to say that. is not one of these radical jump off the cliff things, where you have to just say, okay, it's a good day to die. You know, it's like you can first do some things to settle down when things are feeling wild. And then explore the not doing and the pure being with.

So let's talk about how that can happen. I was thinking as I was reflecting on this of one man a few years ago from this area who had, when there was a real dive in terms of employment, lost a job he desperately needed. I really relied on it. His family, he was very shaken, and his way of trying to control things was obsessive thinking about what was going to go wrong and how he could get a job. And, you know, he just was on, he was just churning on it and also drinking too much and

eating too much. So that was, those were his control strategies. and he'd wake up in the middle of the night in a panic. And so for him it was not, okay, let go of the controls. First for him, it was teaching him that breathing and then just a few phrases that I found can be very helpful when we are feeling isolated and freaked out, which is this is suffering.

Other people experience it too. This is suffering. other people experience it too. I'm not alone. And then may I be kind? If you've read Kristen Neff's book on self-compassion, she has this a little more elaborated as these phrases that can begin to be like an anchor

in the middle of really rough weather. So he would do that. And that helped to sue them. And gradually he was then able to practice rain, which I won't go into right now, but practice some mindful awareness where he just stopped controlling and he just started investigating

and being with, kindly being with, the dread he had about the future. And what happened in that process, he discovered the fear and he also discovered the shame that he had for losing a job, even though people all over were losing jobs, discovered that. And in that process of being with,

just moment to moment, he could find that in the moment, nothing terrible was happening. It was just unpleasant. And in the moment he started feeling more of a kindness towards himself and started finding space. Started finding space. And this really opened up over a period of a few months. So then, yes, he did mindful, actively start, continue to search, but it was coming from a very different place.

Much more balanced, much more quantumous. Three steps there. first do some self-soothing, what I'm calling resourcing, then let go of controls, be with, stay, be with, find that space, and then act from presence, not from that egoic, fearful, striving, aggressive, defending place. For most of us, I think we need to do both, both the resourcing and the letting go. Most people I know there's kind of a back-forth, so as you experiment more, you hit that suffering, you say, okay, this is the time I should stop controlling. You might find it's helpful to find ways to calm yourself first. Now, let's look a little more

closely at how this happens that we actually take the hands off the controls, because that can be a very conscious moment of this ego can't handle this. The strategy I'm using to try to take care of what's wrong. The fight-flight strategies I'm using aren't working. It's not working. An ego can't do this. There's a moment there of illumination, of realization that's really powerful. So I'm going to give you a few different, it's kind of the closing here, a few different examples of ways that we can do this surrendering of control that you can just experiment with. And then we'll do a short meditation on this. And one, for me, very powerful story, and as a parent, I think that for those that are parents, you can really relate to it, was a woman who, for a decade, I think it was, was accompanying her daughter as she was struggling with addiction very, very severe.

the daughter would go in and out of recovery. It was addiction to heroin but also cocaine. It was just many, many rounds of relapsing. Then her mother would help to save her and take her into the house and give her money and help her get into another program and the hopes would build and then they'd be devastated when her daughter would call and she had been homeless and drugging again and many, many rounds.

And inside this woman there was this swing between total rage at her daughter for not cooperating, not getting it together, and then this fear that was the most gripping fear she ever knew that her daughter was going to die. Okay, so that was, and that fear and rage was keeping her in this egoic doing, which was being totally amashed and codependent and trying to save her when she couldn't save her. It wasn't working. Okay? So this is an example of it wasn't working. It's very clear that her way of trying to cope was not working. So she said it was very distinct. The time, the round when her hopes had been high, they got plunged again. She got the call. And something in her said, really got it,

that it's out of my hands. This is bigger than what this ego can manage. And something in her just, said, okay, may this be handed over to the, for her, it was kind of the divine mother, the mother of the universe. Let this, this isn't the hands of something larger, whatever happens, happens. And in that process, this is letting, taking her hands off the controls, she was, is, she's described it like this bottle that got unplugged and all the grief about loss that she was was holding in her, fush, came out. It was like as long as she was trying to save her daughter, she wasn't completely plunged into the grief about loss, but she had to face that. And for several months, her process of take the hands off the control was a real honest process of grieving

of just getting it. She may die. She's already lost a lot of life. Really, that knife, cutting through the heart, breaking it open in grief. Until what she described of staying and staying, fear and grief still there, huge, huge vast tenderness. And she said, I was finally able to feel this compassion towards my daughter that I hadn't felt when I was busy trying to manage things

and total capacity to set the boundaries, to say no. but to hold for her daughter a mirror of potential, of possibility. She sensed possibility, but she was able to say, no, it's not going to be because I save you. And that in more recent years contributed to her daughter's recovery, and I can say it's been now a few years. But the purpose of me sharing the story is she wouldn't have taken her hands off the control if her wisdom mind hadn't registered, I can't do this. And then there was the courage to be with what she was avoiding.

So we're banging up against the wall, and there's different ways we recognize and let go. For another man I worked with, and this is another story, I'm beginning to share the stories that I included in True Refuge, because it's coming out so soon. And for one man, he was struggling with cocaine and with anger issues, and he was in a 12-step group, and he heard another man shared with him as mantra, which was, not my will, but my heart's willingness, you know, to keep shifting, not my will, not what I want, I think you should, they shouldn't,

but my heart's willingness, just to keep coming to a kind of willing heart. For this man, that shift, he was already a leader, even when he was in his fight-flight mode, because he just had a charismatic personality. But he became a true leader. And he became a leader in the recovery field, you know, just one of those very tremendous amount of wisdom and heart. And in his work environment, too. He blossomed, not my will, but my heart's will. Again, it's the shift in identity from thinking I'm doing, I'm going to protect myself,

I'm blaming, I'm blaming myself, I'm blaming you, I'm controlling to not this ego self, but something larger that we belong to, whether we consider it our awakened heart, our Buddha mind, divine mother, loving presence, something larger can come through. And then the wind can blow through ourselves. And there's not a sense of a self-doing it. For me, I often find that just this, when I'm feeling like I'm encountering something in me that won't change, and then I realize I can't change this, you know, an ego can't change in ego, or something in the world that I just can't handle that's causing pain to me or to another person, and I have some idea that I want to make that other person better,

and some idea that I should be handling it better and I can't. I take the whole thing in two hands, the whole experience of this ego trying to do things, and I do this gesture like this, which is a kind of bringing my palms up and offering it into something larger. And I know I'm just, in a way, it's just another symbolic gesture saying,

okay, this ego is an idea and a story, and there's energy around it, and there's belonging to something larger, to consciousness, to love. So I'm handing it over to something larger. In a way, what we're talking about tonight

is the whole of the spiritual path, that over and over, we re-coagulate into a sense of a doing self that has to fight or flee or prove or defend. It just happens every day over and over again. We keep reinventing ourselves. And really the path is about recognizing that. And in that moment of recognition, just kind of a letting go, a relaxing back,

and just being in the flow, being the awareness. And over and over again, so where there's the more tangled issues, 10,000 times. They say our deliver practices 10,000 times of recognizing, sensing the suffering, we can feel the suffering in it. With any identification with a separate self, there's suffering. It might be the overt anguish of something's terribly flawed about me. Or it might be a more subtle kind of suffering of just a restlessness or a sense we're not quite at home yet.

But there's some tension that's a reminder to, okay, there's a story of self-identified. Let go of the controls. be with what's right here. And if we do it the 10,000 times, each time there's that shift in identity from that kind of smaller, tight, solid sense of me to this much more amorphous field of presence

until that field of tender presence becomes more familiar as the truth of who you are. than any story of a beleaguered self, a victimized self, a perpetrator's self, a doing self. It becomes, that's, that experience of that field of awakeness and tenderness becomes home. So let's practice a little. Just take a few minutes to explore this, pausing to let your attention go within. and scanning your life to sense if there's somewhere that you feel you've been caught in the controlling ego,

trying to make life different and know the strategies are actually just keeping you stuck. It might be trying to control others, maybe trying to control your own unwanted behaviors, trying to protect yourself in some way, prove yourself. Just in a way as if you're putting a frame around a picture, just let that be right center of your attention

where the controlling is going on. You might notice how you're doing it. Whether there's a lot of blaming, a lot of obsession, a lot of fixating, whatever your style is of trying to manage. And just sense your intention to explore taking your hands off the controls and said touching what's underneath the discomfort,

the fear, the hurt, the pain of loss. It takes some courage so you might sense your heart's willingness to come home to something larger. By simply taking your hands off the controls and explore right now, what is asking for attention if you couldn't keep controlling around this situation what is it you might have to just open to embrace make peace with

the fear of loss the pain of loss breathing with whatever's there right now just touching it some you don't have to you don't have to dive in deeply but just opening some so you're letting go of defenses letting go of obsession and just opening into what's here. Gradually as you open into what's here, you'll find some openness. And if you bring kindness right now to what you're experiencing, you'll find a tender

openness. So you might continue putting your hand on your heart and just offering some kindness to whatever you're discovering, whatever's in there, letting go of thoughts, letting go into to what's right here. Aten Cha says, if you let go a little, you'll find a little peace. If you let go a lot, you'll find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you'll find absolute peace and tranquility.

So stopping the war, bringing presence to what's inside us, and resting in that presence. You might sense if you could, instead of controlling, bring a quality of presence, to this situation, how you might respond with more balance, more equanimity, more love to your life. A closing poem by Michelle Rivers. When words stop, you can hear the songs of the sea. In silence, lean on each other.

We are together in the same boat. Let go of the oars. trust this hole the rudder knows answer and questions gently let all movements bring you closer to the divine current gently let all movements

bring you closer to the divine current the all-embracing sea waves break the oyster melts with love look what happens when you let go gently let all movements bring you closer to the divine current the all-embracing sea

look what happens when you let go namaste thank you for your attention 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 our IMCW site which is IMCW.org thank you very much Thank you.