Tara Brach - Happy for No Reason - Part 2 (2016-05-25)

Episode Date: May 28, 2016

Happy for No Reason - Part 2 (2016-05-25) - These two talks explore the two different kinds of happiness, the blocks to happiness, and the ways that mindful presence and intentional gladdening the heart (positive neuroplasticity) can open us to our full potential for true happiness. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks 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 matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome. Tonight is part two of Happy for No Reason. It's a second in a class series. I wanted to start by sharing with you about a conversation a woman had who was from our community. she had just gone through chemotherapy and she was talking with a fellow cancer survivor and her friend asked her,

well, what would it be like? What would it feel like for you to think that something good was going to happen rather than something not so good or something bad? What would that be like? So this woman thought forbid and she responded completely weird and uncomfortable. And then her friend said,

good, then try it. So I just wonder what happens for you and you might check in if you just sense for yourself, okay, there's something enriching or enlivening or connecting ahead, something that you value around the corner. Not to create a particular expectation but rather that openness to life experience. Something enlivening, something that something you might learn and grow and touch your heart, whatever. So here's the deal that we have most of us a very deep habit of sensing instead of that that around the corner trouble, that we're going to encounter something that's too much to handle.

And sadly, it cuts us off because every moment that we encounter has the possibility of creativity and connection and insight and awe. It's always possible. And yet when the habit is to think around the corner something bad's going to happen, we're just not available to having that experience. So the last class on Happy for No Reason, the inquiry really was, well, what is between me and happiness? and we looked at how we have this habit of feeling like life should be different.

What's happening right now shouldn't be happening. It's a mistake or it's bad. I should be different. You should be different. Something's wrong. Something's missing. You know, those kind of things. And we can see the negativity bias that I'm describing in the wider culture.

There's a reason that if you look at the newspapers, it's just, you know, the eyes gravitate towards trouble, problems. So we see it. We see how bad news captures attention. So we have this habit of bad things around the corner and it kind of reads a sort of cynicism, a contracted kind of attitude. One of my favorite examples is a linguistic professor who's teaching his class one day.

He says in English, two negatives make a positive. But in some languages, for instance, Russian, two negatives still remain a negative. He said, in no language are two positives a negative. And then a voice in the back pipes up, yeah, right. So there are, when we begin to go deeper on this path of meditation and waking up, there are two basic streams and they're completely interrelated of practice and that really evolve us and that open us to our full potential, happiness. And one of those streams is radical unconditional presence. It's being exactly with what's here. It's really opening and connecting with the life that's right here without any

filters, without pushing anything away, without grasping. It's just pure presence. And the other, the second mode is sometimes described as gladdening the mind. It can sometimes describe as resourcing, it's paying attention in particular ways that decondition the negativity bias and open us to our potential for feeling peace, happiness, joy, mystery, awe, positive mind states that are actually the very atmosphere that helps make us more available for that complete full presence. They go together. And in fact, if you look at most any tradition, contemplative or wisdom tradition that teaches about awakening, you'll find that it's a real weave between practices that train us to have that bold quality of contacting exactly what's here

and practices that help to create an atmosphere that makes that possible. For instance, the most basics are concentration which actually narrows the attention and aims at an object and what it does is it steadies and quiets the mind and it actually creates a... it manufactures or it... it's instrumental in kind of creating a temporary state of tranquility and peace and ease.

It's not permanent because as soon as you start letting your mind move around again it can go away. But it helps you to get familiar with peace, familiar with that calm and it actually makes it possible to begin to con. contact what's happening. There's less thoughts. It gives you training and presence. Other examples are the Met to our loving-kindness practice. They go really beautifully with practices of mindfulness because when we soften and open our heart it's much easier to then

be with what's right here. There's more heart space. So we're going to explore that tonight in terms of gladdening the mind how we can purposefully train our attention in a way to that cultivates wholesome states, wholesome mind states that are really conducive to allowing true happiness to arise. And it's all based on, in terms of neuroscience, on neuroplasticity, which basically says how we pay attention rewires the brain. When we pay attention differently than we normally do, the brain gets rewired. That neurons that fire together, wire together.

We've got habits. When we change how we pay attention, it changes the wiring. It's kind of where attention goes, energy flows. So we, one friend of mine, Rick Hansen, who some of you might have read his books on Buddha's mind, he calls it positive neuroplasticity that we can train our minds in certain ways that actually change the structure and the function of our brain. So it's an important understanding that this is possible, that if our habit is to worry a lot or judge a lot, what that means is when those thoughts are going on, it's evoking this biochemistry

of fear, anxiety, tightness, anger that then fuels more thoughts and we're in this loop. And if we want to gladden our mind, we'll notice the looping, take a pause and begin to strategically shift our attention to give us a access to other states of mind. So what happens when we start meditating, when we start quieting the mind and then mindfully noticing just what's here in the moment, real presence, is that we interrupt that looping. And sometimes what we get in touch with is some ease because we're no longer running the same worry thoughts and we kind of have some space in ease.

but what can also happen is that we de-repress some of the raw stuff that's underneath that our busy thinking mind has been avoiding. So it can be that we really get in touch with very intense emotions. Now, in order to heal, we need to be present with them and we need these positive states that I've been describing. And the reason is, if you're training in meditation and you bring your normal habits to practicing meditation, it can become grim filled with striving and easily coded with a sense of personal failure because that's our habit.

How many of you have ever judged yourself for how you're meditating? Can I see by hands? Okay, so you understand. And here's the thing is that it can be a really, it can become like another duty we have that, okay, now I have to meditate to get somewhere, to be a better person. And that doesn't bode well for having a sustained practice. Unless there's some sense of gratification, we will not continue. you. There's a story about Ajan Cha who is a Buddhist monk from Thailand and he was visiting

the Insight Meditation community and society up in Barry, Massachusetts. And up there in these longer retreats people walk around very slowly and they're moving slowly and sitting, doing deep practice and he was watching them move around and he stopped a few of them and he gave them a really sympathetic but kind of naughty mischievous look and he said, and he said, said, I hope you heal from your illness and can go home soon. But you understand that we can, we bring the same attitude to spiritual life that we bring to work life and family life and so on, which can sometimes be feeling very oppressed and sometimes like we're falling short and not doing it right. We need to have some delight, some pleasure, some calm, some peace.

So the classic metaphor is like we're creating a garden of our being, beingness, and in addition to the light of presence, the sunlight, we need to tend the soils and break it up and add fertilizer and plant the seeds of happiness for there to be a really wholesome springing forth. Okay, so here's for me an interesting piece of research and that is that people who are happy that it's a real kind of authentic, feeling a sense of well-being, are actually very intentional about being happy. That it's on purpose. That there's a recognition that we have to kind of decondition the habit of grim.

And so there's a kind of on-purposeness that we're shifting that set point, you might remember from the last talk, where we have this happiness set point and we have these attitudes that keep us locked in. And to be happy takes a kind of intentionality that I don't want to live in that kind of oppressed, narrow mind state. I was very moved by one friend shared a story from Spirit Rock, which is a West Coast sister community to the Insight Meditation Society. And they had just participated in a year-long training for the people of color affinity group there. and one woman in the group, community activist, so she had experienced a lifetime of a lot of poverty, trauma, abuse.

She faced a lot of illness, divorce, of course, racism, single parenting of two children. So she talked about, you know, as part of the group, it was very open, people expressed, you know, what was going on for them, the years of struggle to educate herself and stand up for beliefs and how she had become radical to fight for justice and local and national politics. She had been really grimly determined. You can remember I read you last class that we're all caught up if we're not really remembering what's true.

We get caught up in the thousand serious moves. You remember that? She described it like that. She was very serious. So the last meeting of this group, this is what she announced. She said, after all the struggles and troubles, I've lived through, I've decided to do something really radical. I'm going to be happy.

I really love that. It's not a grasping onto happiness. It's a sense of, hey, there's something else possible. It's part of our potential as human beings. And it doesn't mean I'm going to be a polyana and bypass anything. It just means I'm going to open to my potential. Rumi says, when you go to a garden, do you look at the thorns, are the flowers. Spend more time with roses and jasmine. So often when I give talks on happiness,

there's a couple of questions that come up that I think are really important and one is what I just started to mention what which is if well if I start intending to be happy aren't I going to really be in some way avoiding presence like bypassing the difficult stuff? And of course if there's a grasping after happiness, that can be the case. And of course, if there's an aversion to being with what's difficult, we'll say, oh, well, I'm into being happy and we'll be like, you know, covering over and avoiding. But it's possible to be really dedicated to presence and also dedicated to discovering our natural capacity for happiness both. and what that means is that we're willing to sense that we have this conditioning

towards a negativity bias in an evolutionary way and the part of waking up is to sense that old conditioning and that we don't have to live by it. Now, another question is, but what about if there's really a grasping towards happiness? And again, we can do that and often the sign of it is what we're really, the way the grasping presents is that we're actually holding on to substitutes for happiness. Remember, if only mind? Yeah? So we're grasping on, okay, I want to be happy so I really have to have this partner, you know, or I want to be happy so I have to have this

job, or I want to be happy so I have to lose that 20 pounds. So it's, you'll know, you'll get the sign that it's grasping if it's after a substitute. But that's very different. than a kind of, you'll feel it in your body, an energetic sense of, wow, I want to open to what's possible in terms of really feeling a sense of well-being. And it's not grasping, it's a sense of, oh, an intuition that there's something that's what we are that we haven't yet open to. One of my favorite kind of stories about this comes from Marty Seligman, who's the father of positive psychology, who, in positive psychology is basically the Western kind of

equivalent to what we're talking about which says we're not tapping our potential if we don't open to that capacity. And Marty tells a story at a conference I went to and he's told it in many different conferences. He says, I was weeding my garden last summer with my daughter Nikki who had turned five, some 11 months earlier. Now you should know a very serious gardener. In this particular afternoon, I'm focused on what I'm doing, which is weeding. Nikki, on the other hand, is having fun. Weds are flying up in the air, dirt spraying everywhere. Now, I should mention here that despite all my work on optimism, I've always been somewhat of a nimbus cloud around my house, and despite all my work with children, and despite having five

children of my own, ages 5 to 29, I'm really not that good with kids. And so, kneeling that afternoon in my afternoon, that afternoon in my garden, I yelled at Nikki. Okay, so Nikki got a stern look on her face and she walked right over to me. Daddy, she said, I want to talk to you. This is what she said. From the time I was three until I was five I whined a lot. But I decided the day I turned five to stop whining and I haven't whined once since I turned five. Then she looked him right in the eye.

Daddy, if I could stop whining you can stop being such a grouch. wisdom of young ones. Let's reflect together for a moment, okay? Let's just take a few moments here to just sense inside where we are. And as you pause, allow yourself to feel the life of your body, just let go of ideas and thoughts and just take a moment to feel your body, your aliveness, your breath. And now notice what happens when you let yourself say, I want to feel happy to experience the well-being of full presence. I want to be happy, to experience well-being. You might phrase it as a wish or prayer for yourself, may I be happy, may I experience

well-being? Just notice what it's like. You might notice, and this is just without judgment, just honestly, does it bring up a sense of doubt, like, well, that's what I want, but it's just not going to happen. Does it bring up a question about deserving? Does it bring up some excitement at the possibility? Does it bring up a sense of care about your own being that you would wish this for yourself? Because this is really the first step in gladdening the mind and opening to wholesome mind states that we haven't yet open to is the simple intention to uncover a very very important.

natural capacity for happiness. So now we're going to continue and we'll look at three different ways that we can, the very related ways that we can glad in the mind, that we can shift our wiring. This is positive neuroplasticity and the three ways we're going to explore are the way of gratitude, of serving and savoring. Those are three pathways. And you'll see with each of them that each decondition a kind of egoic habit of self of grasping an aversion and each allows us to connect with a larger sense of being, with a more true sense of who we are. And we'll practice with each one a bit. So the first one is gratitude.

And as we know, we have a habit of having an inner complainer. And most of us have noticed at some point of how much we gripe inside our mind about things, especially on certain types of days. And there's a tendency to sense that we're, you know, something's wrong and we're resentful of somebody or we're losing out on something. One woman described leaving a retreat and she got to the airport

and she bought a cup of coffee and a small package of cookies. She goes to a table, there's no unoccupied one so she's sharing a table with somebody else. She's reading her paper. She becomes aware of some rustling at her table and from behind her paper she's flabbergasted to notice that the young man that's sitting at the same table was helping himself to a cookie. So she didn't want to make a scene so she leans across and she takes a cookie herself

and a minute or so past some more rustling he's helping himself to another cookie. So by the time they're down to the last cookie in the packet she's very angry but she couldn't bring herself to say anything and then he broke the cookie in half he pushed half to her and he ate the other half and he left. So sometime later the public address system calls her to present her ticket and she's fuming and you can imagine how she felt when she reaches into her bag and finds her package of cookies. So what are we inclined to be thinking in different situations? So how we decondition is what you might imagine is that we on purpose reflect on what we're grateful for.

And Seligman did some research on this with severely depressed people where you write down three good things each day that happen for 15 days. At the end, 94% had a decrease in depression and 92% said happiness increased. Just by writing down three things a day that they're grateful for. In its training, she says, the most effective thing you can do is to pick someone you feel gratitude towards, write a one-page letter, read it to that person, and listen attentively to their response. So there's a lot of different ways we can do it. It's a really beautiful spiritual practice. To have a gratitude partner.

Some people I know just will email at the end of the day the three things they're grateful for and there's no requirement to say anything more. You just have a partner, you're just sending that out to. Jonathan and I, my husband, we have a few check-ins each week where we kind of meditate and then see how we're doing and if anything's going on between us and so on. And we have begun, we started a few months ago

where we begin our check-in by first sharing with each other what we're grateful for. And that creates an atmosphere, a kind of, again, a heart space that makes room for if there's challenges to name. We've already kind of softened and opened and remembered a bigger picture. The key to gratitude practice is to say what you're grateful for but then feel in your body the gratitude. That's what entrains us to actually a different state, to feel it in the body. so you actually start memorizing the feeling of being grateful. Again, where attention goes, energy flows. So it takes practice.

It really does. And one of the best examples of the gift of this practice is a story shared by a very dear friend and meditation teacher, James Barras. and he describes his mother, she's no longer alive, but visiting her, she was 89, she was very much of a half-full type person, okay? And so he was describing, he was doing a lot of teaching on the awakening of joy and he was describing the benefits of gratitude much as we're exploring right now and she was very skeptical that she could go in that direction

and he was too actually but they designed a game and that was that every time she complained, she'd add on to her complaint, and my life is very blessed, okay? You know, so it might be, you know, they're at a restaurant and the food's really bad and she'll say, you know, this soup is terrible. And my life is very blessed. Or her daughter didn't get in touch with her for Mother's Day, and my life is very blessed and so on. They did it for a while and the new habit supposedly created a revolutionary change in her. and during the next months, she was actually losing her eyesight, but when she hit 90, she sent James a card with a poem in it,

and I want to read you the poem. I'm happier than I've ever been and truly mean each word. The thoughts that cause the worries now all seem so absurd. Though my eyesight has been dimmed, I see clearer than before. The glass is not half empty, it's overflowing to be sure. 89. And as James says, if my mother can do it, I fill in the blanks.

It's not always easy. If we're feeling in a very stuck state in our biochemistry is one of anger, our version or something, it'll feel mechanical. And at those times, it's really important to first just open with real compassion to whatever we're feeling,

not to bypass it. Okay, anger, fear. hurt, whatever it is. But then after there's a bit more space to go ahead and remember what we're grateful for, even if we're not in full resonance. I've found because Jonathan and I do it a lot now that there are times I'm really being perfunctory and what I'm naming, it still works. There's still something in me that knows, oh yeah, that's a bigger truth than my complaining self. It works. This is Andre Nuo. and I'm pronouncing his name wrong, a Dutch mystic, teacher, writer.

He says the choice for gratitude rarely comes without some real effort. But each time I make it, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little less difficult. Again, let's reflect together. Let's try it out. As you close your eyes, you might feel your breath and feel the breath in the heart area, as if you could feel and listen to your heart. A gentle, relaxed presence. And begin to sense what you're grateful for. It might be grateful for or grateful to.

And as you reflect, begin to whisper out loud what you're grateful for. And after each, after whatever you say, pause and see if you can feel the actual felt sense of the experience. Let it fill your body. And don't be self-conscious because everybody's listening to themselves, not to you, but begin to whisper whatever comes to mind that you feel grateful for. A little bit louder so you really feel that you're expressing it, pausing after whatever you name and letting yourself very honestly and sincerely feel in your body the sense of the gratitude.

Let it be as full as it is. Let your attention go to what you feel most grateful for, what most resonates right in this moment. It might be repeating and that's quite fine. But let it be right here what you're grateful for. Since what about this brings up your gratitude, what is it really? Let all ideas fall away so that you can just feel the sensations, the felt sense of gratitude, spreading through you, letting yourself memorize and train to this, knowing that the more you

turn your attention to what you're grateful for, the more you'll have access to the sweetness and the freedom of heartfelt gratitude. This is the first pathway of gladdening the mind that we're exploring and the second is serving. And I know from working with people with psychotherapy and, you know, working with meditation students, that those that feel the most depressed are living in a very self-oriented world. Or day to day, moment to moment, the thoughts and the activity are very much, what do I need? What's going to go wrong for me?

What do I have to do? It's very focused on self. Not like that's a bad thing. It's just a painful state to be in because it's very contracting. And so the deconditioning of that is to offer out to others, to feel a sense of helping others. In the moment that we really feel we're helping others, we're deconditioning that egoic prison and we're sensing a larger belonging. So it's quite powerful.

Albert Schweitzer puts it this way. He says, I don't know what your destiny will be. But one thing I know, the only ones among you who will really be happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve. So many of us know this that when we're of benefit to others we really feel good. And actually there's research that shows that when we're serving, when we're in that mode of generosity, our immune system actually is doing better too. There's real evolutionary rewards for being in helping mode.

Our happiness is linked to a widening sense of identity. When we're living in that self-world, we just aren't happy. It's very confining. Jan Adrian is a woman who founded Healing Journeys which is a whole kind of community now of women involved with supporting other people touched by cancer. And I thought of her because of the story I told you earlier. Well, she had gone through cancer herself and she was in recovery and then had a chest x-ray and what showed is that the cancer, they were seeing if the cancer had metastasized

to her lungs and the doctor calls and says there's a nodule on her lungs and they need to do a CT scan and she got it done on Wednesday and told she'd get the results the next day. A lot of people have been through this kind of thing so you're going to relate. She calls the doctor's office twice, there's a promise he'll call back, he didn't. So there she is Thursday night, she's reading and meditating, and she had gone through the whole day in that grip, and we know what it's like, that clutch of fear. And, you know, what if she had metastasized cancer,

all this healthy diet and exercise hadn't made a difference and she'd have to go through that fight and the horrific experience of the chemo again? So she was really living gripped. Thursday night she starts reading and meditating and then that's when she remembered and there's a remembering that's really part of homecoming her aspiration or prayer basically make me an instrument

use me may this life serve may there be a belonging to something larger it's really meaning it's having meaning in our life belonging to something larger so some part of her said who knows Maybe if having cancer against the way I can be most useful, maybe that's what's going on. Maybe that's the way I'll be supporting others.

So something in her shifted to trusting that would ever unfold, it's part of loving and serving. It's part of a larger belonging. And that reflection gave her a tremendous amount of calm and peace. At the end of the next day, she got back the results, and it turned out there was nothing to worry about. And she says this, she said, I celebrated, Because even though accepting that whatever happened would be part of a larger belonging,

I was really glad I didn't have, you know, mastacized cancer. But she said I was really grateful for the time lag because it got me back in touch with knowing what mattered. She said it got me in touch with an inner knowing that I will be okay no matter what. I'm not just a body. Someday I know this body won't go on and I will still be. be okay. I like being reminded of this periodically. And what was it that would let her be okay no matter what? She belonged to something larger than a self or a body that's inevitably going to go.

Serving makes a difference. Our acts of kindness in whatever way can be a thought that's a kind thought. It can be a hug, it can be a look. They feel good because in those moments we're living from a more true and a more open and a larger space of who we are. And the deal with serving is just like gratitude. If you want to gladden the mind and explore positive neuroplasticity, in those moments and when you feel that sense of enlargement, pause and entrain to it, get to know how it feels to have that sense of meaning and belonging. So again, let's just, Let's take a moment together and just practice. As you let yourself come into stillness, you might scan a little and just reflect on where

in recent times you felt that sense of reaching out to serve or help another person. Could be a secret act of kindness or in some way directly letting a person know you're there for them. Or if it comes more naturally you might imagine a situation in the near future or in some way you're reaching out to someone, helping that person relax about something or know that they're loved and whether it's a memory or you're imagining into the future, let it be a close-in imagining and memory so that you can sense the other person involved, you can and sense that person's relief or ease or cheering up or whatever it is and pause and get

to know the feeling of what it's like in the moments that you're helping when you're living from a larger sense of your own being. Again, from Christian mystic Henri Nuwan, every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I am moving from fear to love. So we evolve ourselves. Our identity begins to shift and open up in the moments of gratitude, in the moments of serving. The third area that we're going to touch on is savoring, which we do way too little. This is E.G. White says, I wake up each morning torn between the desire to serve and to savor.

So I thought that's it. Then he goes on to say it's a pretty good problem to have. But our ego self, rather than savoring, we're either grasping at things, or we're, there's an angst that something's temporary or we're shut down and barely noticing life's pleasures or we're grasping at substitutes. But it's not that common that we pause and really just, wow, I could die right now and just like this, this moment, enough, that feeling. So again, the savoring deconditions the ego self,

in the moment there's a savoring, and again I don't mean a grasping, but just where we stop the doing and just receive the grace that's here. There's an undoing of the ego self. And in those moments there's an enlargement, a sense of enlargement of who and what we are. I was touched by one story of a couple that loved to travel and he got Parkinson's and had a slow down after the diagnosis and... But their friends talked about how they continued, whether it was traveling or being at home,

but they had a commitment and the commitment was they had a, they were going to make a conscious effort to make each day as good as it can be. That's simple. make this day and each day as good as it can be. Again, it's a practice because we tend to tumble forward into the what's next. Saving is a practice of on purpose, pausing and letting in. I do it a lot in my morning walks where I'll kind of randomly just stop because when you're walking you, even if you're enjoying walking, you're still, there's some idea of getting somewhere. So I'll just stop and I try to do, I try to surprise myself.

as to when I'm stopping. But in those moments I will just take it all in. Whatever's going on, the colors of the green, the sounds of the wood thrush, the, you know, smells of the river, whatever it is, and then sense just the delight in that and then feel that in my body, like really entrained to it. I often think about, you know, I mentioned last class the research on the elderly that they're not actually more grumpy, they're happier and one of the reasons is that when we're younger we're much more fixated on the future and on accomplishing and with the worries and anxieties about what's around the corner but when there's an awareness of the truth of mortality and impermanence there's motivation to enjoy the moment that intentionality that I mentioned

but it's not just the elderly. Maurice Sendak writes this, he talks about a little boy who sent him a charming card with a little drawing. He said, I loved it. I answer all my children's letters, sometimes very hastily. But this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a wild thing on it. I wrote, Dear Jim, I loved your card. Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said,

Jim loved your card so much he ate it. That was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it. So in this final piece of savoring, sometimes one of the ways to think of the practice is just having ten breaths to take in the good, that in a moment when you're touched by anything,

the simplest thing. I mentioned the sound of the birge or the smell of the flowers or the gleam in a child eyes or whatever it is, to pause and just ten breaths where you just let yourself feel that you're receiving and savoring and enjoying that the sweetness, the goodness that's there. So tonight really we're exploring the pathway of gladdening the mind on purpose. You cannot gladden the mind unless there's already presence to notice what you're grateful for, presence to be

there to serve, to appreciate. They go together and yet like breaking up the soil in a garden and seeding a garden, it's a necessary part of spiritual practice to recognize our habit and we all have habits of getting grim and on purpose sensing what else is possible. So, over time, as we begin to get kind of the knack of getting to know who we are when there's a quality that's less grim, when there's a quality of gratitude, there's a natural sense of happy for no reason. It doesn't hitch to having life a particular way. There's a very profound sense of well-being that comes really out of the presence itself.

So with that I'd like to close and invite you to final little meditation together, a little reflection. Inviting yourself right here into the moment, feeling this life breath, feeling the aliveness in your body just as it is right now. And as we did earlier, just sense your intention to experience your full potential for well-being, for loving, for savoring, for serving, offering yourself that simple prayer, may I feel happy and offering it with sincerity, with care. You might mentally whisper it again to yourself, to your own heart. Just to feel the kindness that comes with that and the openness. You might bring to mind somebody you care about, bring that person close in in your mind,

you see their face, remembering what you care, what brings up that sense of care, reflecting just as I want to be happy, may you be happy. Imagine that person receiving your prayer and actually feeling that light and energy of happiness of well-being. Sensing this heart space that knows the potential for well-being and happiness and wishes it ourselves and others, sense it as wide, wide open, as wide as the world, We sense all beings as part of our heart. May all beings be happy.

May all beings know the joy, the natural joy of being alive. I like to close with a poem from Mary Oliver that fits the season. It's called Reckless Poem. She writes, today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over. It is heaven sent. It flows through me like the blue white. wave, green leaves, you may believe this or not, have once or twice emerged from the tips

of my fingers, somewhere deep in the woods in the reckless seizure of spring. Though, of course, I also know that other song, the sweet passion of oneness. Just yesterday I watched an aunt crossing a path through the tumbled pine needles she toiled, and I thought, she will never live another life but this one. and I thought, if she lives her life with all her strength, is she not wonderful and wise? And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything until I came to myself. And still, even in these northern woods on these hills of sand, I have flown from the other window of myself to become white heron, blue whale, red fox, hedgehog.

Oh, sometimes already my body has felt like the body of a flower. Sometimes already my heart is a red parrot perched among strange dark trees flapping and screaming. Today again I am hardly myself. It happens over and over. It is heaven sent. Namaste and blessings. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.