Tara Brach - Healing into Life and Death

Episode Date: March 2, 2011

2011-03-02 - Healing into Life and Death - Given the universal truth that these bodies get sick and they die, what allows us to find freedom, happiness and peace in the midst? This talk explores how, when we get caught in the suffering that arises from physical sickness, we can take refuge in presence and love. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you!

I'd like to begin tonight by telling you one thing I've heard from even the most long-term and dedicated meditators, which is when I get sick or when I'm struggling with a chronic illness, the last thing I want to do is meditate. The very last thing I want to do, it's really, really hard when we have a cold or a flu or a migraine or we're fatigued. there's just, we do not want to get still and pay attention to discomfort. Then people tell me something else, which is when I'm sick or when I'm dealing with chronic sickness, what I most need at those times is some self-compassion or kindness, and it's the absolute last thing I can do. I cannot offer myself any kindness at those times.

Second thing I hear. And then the third thing is, Tara, you talk about radical acceptance. Well, when I'm feeling sick. sick when I'm feeling miserable, or again, dealing with chronic sickness, really serious sickness. Deep down, I'm not accepting it. That's not acceptable. So those are some of the things I hear. Now, unless we get knocked off early, really early, there's really any of us that aren't going to be sick. And some for long stretches, some chronically. then eventually most of us seriously, and then dying.

So all of us are going to be dealing with this or already are. There are people in this room right now dealing with chronic and acute illnesses. So everybody's got this one or most of us, and we can't control it. And so the inquiry, and this becomes a really, really important inquiry, this is the Buddha's main inquiry. How do we find peace? not only peace how do we find happiness and freedom in the midst of these changing bodies

and minds in midst of this changing life where this body goes and sometimes very uncomfortably Stephen Levine wrote a book Healing into life and death how do we heal into life and death so I've been many times asked to talk more about working with chronic illness, working with dying. So that's what we'll be doing tonight. We'll see how it goes.

Just share some reflections. We'll do a bit of an exercise. One of the main little phrases you hear, and it's kind of Buddhist jargon now, is that pain is inevitable and suffering is optional. I just hear that a lot. That if you're in this body on planet Earth, there's going to be pain. It's going to be unpleasant sensations and emotions. But it's optional

whether we suffer and what makes it optional is that it all depends on how we're relating to the discomfort. Everything comes down to how we're relating to what's going on. So if we're suffering, it's arising because of the meaning we're making out of the situation. The story we're telling ourselves about what's happening. Reju, this has been circulating now for the last maybe five years, this kind of Jewish Buddha says, I don't know how many of you have seen these. So one of the Jewish Buddha says is, if there is no self, whose arthritis is this? You know, that's one of them, okay? And then another one, and this is really the meaning we're making out of things, right? Deep inside you are 10,000 flowers.

Each flower blossoms 10,000 times. Each blossom has 10,000 petals. You might want to see a specialist. How are we relating to what's going on inside us? Now, when we're suffering, here's what's going on. We're saying something bad's happening. It's happening to me. And often it's going to get worse.

that around the corner, and this is the hard part, around the corner, it's like even if now's not so terrible, around the corner is going to be something that's over the top that we can't handle, that's too much to handle. So that's the story that we're saying, that we're telling ourselves. And what happens is we get locked into the sense of being an endangered, frightened, separate self. We get locked into that. Then what happens is we try to control things. In other words, something bad's going on and I need to take control. So not only are we a frightened, endangered self, but we're a controlling self,

a self that's trying to control ourselves and the people around us and what's going on. And it's not a very pleasant identity. If you've been sick for any length of time, you know that the sense of who we are gets really narrow and tight. It's very hard not to go into that. So again, what I'm describing is this conditioning, not to just have it be unpleasant, but to tell a story about it. Something's wrong. It's happening to me. I need to control it. We shrink. Now, we're biologically designed to react to pain. And just to say that pain is our signal to pay attention and possibly to respond to what's going on in a way to take care of ourselves. So we're meant to, when we

feel unpleasantness, get alert and see what needs to be taken care of. So we're supposed to bandage the open wounds or take the ibuprofen with a strong headache or treat the cancer, whatever it is. We're meant to respond. That's intelligent. But what happens, happens is that we go beyond what's necessary, go beyond what's intelligent, and we end up looping around in stories that make us miserable. It's not necessary that strong pain make us miserable. There are many people, and I'm one of them, that gave birth and realized how unpleasant it was but wasn't suffering. I didn't suffer. because I wasn't telling myself a story about it,

but we add things to pain. We do the thing of, you know, it's not just, you know, this flu, but it's happening to me, and something's wrong with this. Again, from the Jewish Buddha, be aware of your body, be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation

is a symptom of a terminal illness. And then be here now. be someplace else later. Is that so complicated? They go on and on. I'll spare you the rest of them. But you get the idea, I think, that we add on. So there's an attitude that it's something bad is happening to me

and that we need to control it. And you might say when I say that, well, isn't it true? I mean, isn't there something often with pain that something bad is happening and it has to do with the loss? of, you know, something, maybe our health. And from the perspective of an ego or small self, yeah, there's loss and eventually loss of this life. And the response that's appropriate is compassion.

So yeah, pain, loss, have some compassion. But what that can also often leave out is a larger truth, which is that there is a refuge, a larger sense of belonging that has room for this coming and going life, that we can take refuge in a larger sense of belonging. And we've all tasted that. We know what it's like when we're having a hard time

to be with somebody else and feel comforted because we sense, oh, it's not just me. Or we sense, oh, there's some love and there's some safety and some people that are here for me. I've been in one situation, one dear friend who was dying of lymphoma, and he described that he said, for a while there was suffering, but that's when he thought he was going it alone. And when he started realizing how many people loved him,

he said that love tapped him into a reality that was bigger than the sense of this coming going life. And for the remainder of his life, it was one of deepening trust in that reality. So we're not denying that from the personal self-perspective, there's loss to be grieved and have compassion for. We're just saying there's something more, and if we block it,

if we don't sense this larger refuge, we're always going to be tensing against the inevitable. And what happens is that in culture, that are very disconnected that don't have a sense of a larger belonging. In other words, cultures that don't feel the belonging to the earth and to the web of life and there's not a sense of tribe or intimacy with others so much. Those are the cultures where there's the most distrust and fear of what goes on in these bodies. The more there's a sense of this world is alien and I don't really belong,

the more this body is alien and not only do we mistrust it we try to control it. So what do we have in the West? We have a situation where we jump to anesthetize, to numb. We try to disconnect from our body and try to manipulate it in different ways

and we do it to the earth too where we're manipulating the genetics of crops and we're manipulating the environment to extract as many resources we can and we cut off mountain tops and we pollute streams. In other words, we're not

in harmony because there's not a sense of belonging. The way we raise our children in this generation in particular, we can see it. There's less and less of a sense of belonging to the earth. Math teacher saw that little Johnny wasn't paying attention in

class. She called on him and said, Johnny, what are four, two, 28, and 44. Little Johnny quickly replied, NBC, C, CBS, HBO, and the cartoon network. So there's not this sense of the earth and the rhythms. One other story of fathers at the beach with his children and four-year-old son runs up to

him and grabs his hand and leads him to the shore where a seagull lay dead in the sand. Daddy, what happened to him? The son asked. Well, he died and went to heaven, the dad replied. The boy thought about this for a moment and said, did God throw him back? So there's a wildness here in this body that's out of control. And if we don't have a sense of belonging to the earth, to each other and to spirit, to love,

if we don't have a sense of belonging, that wildness is a dangerous place, and we're not so easy about inhabiting it. We leave a lot in our thoughts, and we try to figure things out, and we have ideas about it. We try to control. And the point isn't that we, as I mentioned earlier, shouldn't try to comfort ourselves.

That's not this machismo thing. I like the way George Carlin put it. He says, my motto is, no pain, no pain. So pain's a signal. And yet if we're not connected and listening, we get into a habitual overreaction. a mistrust that has us resist. We're in kind of a chronic state of saying no, of resisting. So there's a basic principle I'm going to put in here,

which many of you have heard, this equation, that pain times resistance equals suffering. So if there's zero resistance, pain times zero equals? Right, no suffering. To the extent that we tense against what's happening, that very tension locks us into a sense of a separate, disconnected, endangered self. The more we resist, the more threatened we feel. So our mindfulness training that we do here is really a training.

We start with the level of sensations and the breath, and we start learning how to be with what's here. And I'm inviting you right now just to kind of sense into your body, how we can, if we want just close our eyes and feel what's here. And if there's discomfort to put aside the word pain and with interest, just perceive what's here as sensations. Our practice in mindfulness is to pay attention on purpose and without any resistance.

So if you just take a few moments right now and sense, is that possible for me? Can I enter this body and habit this body with awareness and just let this play of sensations express itself with zero resistance? You might notice if there's areas of unpleasantness. Can your awareness be a kind of soft space around the unpleasantness

which truly allows it to be just as it is if it's not too unpleasant you might even bring the attention close in kind of like a microscopic lens and just feel right at the center of it heat

tightness burning pressure ache to sense what it is And notice what happens if there really isn't resistance. If you're energetically saying yes, you're allowing life to unfold itself. Notice how things change. Notice the space that's there if you're just allowing, allowing.

If you deepen and really sense pure yes, pure allowing. And then just inquire, who am I when I'm saying? saying yes. You sense that kind of opening out of any sense of a solidified self, just a belonging to aliveness, to presence. So this is our training to become intimate with this world of sensations and not add on something, just open without resistance. Then we sense, well, what stops us. We spend so much time not opening to what's here. And it says I mentioned we add on very quickly that what's happening is bad when it's unpleasant and that we add on it'll get worse and we feel that anxiety or we might add on it's never going to change or improve and then we get depressed.

each of these add-ons is rooted in a fear of loss. In other words, our fundamental tendency to take physical sensations that are unpleasant and then have that proliferate comes out of a fear of loss. And all organisms latch on to life and fear loss. So for each of us, when we are caught in the suffering around illness, it's because there's a fear of loss. And when there's a fear of loss, there's a reflex to try to control and say no to what's happening.

So what happens is we get identified with this controller, and that begins to take over our life. And then we have different ways we do. We each have our controllers false refuges. Some of us control what's going on by blaming ourselves or others, and some of us get obsessive about figuring out what's the cure that's really going to make the difference for us. And some of us just distract ourselves

and just leave in a lot of different meandering thoughts. But then the question comes up, what happens? Let's say we've got some physical sickness going on, unpleasantness in the body. What happens when we habitually leave, when we're controlling what's going on, trying to get away from that sense of vulnerability, get away from that fear of loss,

what happens when we leave? First of all, it takes energy to keep walling off what's there. So we get tired. So many people tell me people that are struggling with chronic illness,

how tired they are. Well, part of it often is because of saying no to what's going on. It takes energy to wall off experience. But what else is going on? Well, when we're tensing against what's going on inside us, that very tension creates more physical sickness. It blocks energy, it blocks flow, it blocks healing. What else goes on? Well, when we're saying no to that loss, that vulnerability

inside us, we might temporarily push it away and associate, but there's this chronic anxiety that's there because something in us intuits that there's something painful inside us still. We're avoiding it, but it's still inside out operating to keep us anxious. So there's a chronic level of anxiety when we say no to our experience. And then in the most deep way,

what happens when we're saying no to our experience? We become the self that's saying no. Our identity becomes organized around this resisting self, this controlling self, and fundamentally this scared self. So what's our pathway back home? How when we have chronic illness are when we're actually facing death, when we're in the midst of dying and there's a part of us that's resisting, that's struggling, that's afraid, how do we find ourselves that refuge of peace of balance? when I work with people and I notice the difference between people that have chronic illness and are fairly happy,

that actually have some peace in their being, people that are dying that really have touched peace. And I compare that to people that are clearly disconnected and struggling. There's one central element that I've seen over and over again, which is those people that are happy regardless have a very deep aspiration they're aware of. They're purposeful in their life. And they're purposeful. They're remembering what matters to them.

I'm going to say that again. The difference between people that are happy, that are content in the midst of illness and dying and those that are not, is those that are content have a sense of purposeful, of aspiration. They're remembering what matters. In some way they're remembering that love matters,

that presence matters, that belonging matters. There's a remembrance going on. And out of that remembrance, there's an intention towards presence, towards being here. Now, there's this wakefulness there, remembering what matters.

And that remembering has two wings as they describe it of awareness to it. Those that have found peace and happiness in the midst of illness are remembering this wing of what is happening right here, of noticing what's going on in the moment and this wing of love, of in some way regarding what's happening with love.

So I'd like to explore that further. I'd like to explore how can we awaken these two wings in the midst of when we're stuck, when we're dealing with illness and we're stuck. And there's three kind of stuck places I'll describe tonight. And one is the stuck place of when we're stuck in self-blame. I have run into many, many people that when they scratch beneath the surface,

people that are struggling with illness, they find that their whole heart and mind is contracted in self-blame. It's my fault that I'm sick. or it reflects badly on me. Does that make sense? The self-blame? I remember for myself that when it came most clear, I had just been up at Cape Cod

and I knew I couldn't go running any longer on the beach. So I thought I'd try speedwalking instead. And little did I know that speedwalking on a slanted beach and bare feet was going to be just as bad for my knees as running. And I came back pretty much, a cripple. I couldn't go up and down stairs and I was in bad shape and it took me weeks to

be able to walk without a lot of pain and my husband Jonathan had to do a lot to help take care of me and I kind of sunk into a real funk, into a depression and

I was pretty miserable. It was pretty irritable and grumpy and down and I remember one morning when I was doing my practice, I asked a question I often ask, which is, you know, what is between me and feeling present? And I felt all the subversion to how my body was feeling. And then I heard a voice in my mind saying, I hate my life. Okay, that's pretty dramatic. And then right on the heels of that, I hate myself. And now that was a little bit of a flag. Because I, you know, I don't

usually go around. You know, I can sometimes get on my own case, but I hate myself as pretty rock-bottom. So I took some time with that. And what I realized was that this sick self, the self that was feeling like life was wrong, that things were going to even get more wrong, that she was not handling it gracefully. Okay, I had this set of criteria as a spiritual person on how I was supposed to navigate and I was falling like way short, I had just gradually gotten more and more on my own case until I really felt like a failure. I was sick, miserable, and a failure. And then the sadness of that just hit me that here I was having a really rough time and adding on the second arrow, as many of you'll remember that term. The first arrow is that

there's just difficulty. The second arrow is that we then judge our for the difficulty. When I saw that, this prayer sprung forth of, please may I be kinder. Please may I be kinder. And I did a practice I often do of just offering forgiveness.

I just say forgiven, forgiven to whatever is coming up. And that's the second wing, by the way. The first wing, notice what's happening. The second wing in some way respond with kindness. And in this case, the expression of kindness, because there are different expressions of this second wing was forgiveness. I was talking to a friend this week who's a successful writer and a mom,

and she's writing a book right now about body, mind healing, and she has struggled herself with chronic illness. And she was working with a meditation teacher sometime back, and the teacher said, well, let's try the word forgiven, because this woman had described feeling very kind of stuck and having a hard time. And so this teacher said, let's try the word forgiven.

So this woman closed her eyes and mentally whispered the word forgiven, forgiven, as I do. And a torrent of tears just released a torrent of tears immediately. And she realized that underneath all her thoughts about her illness and all her, you know,

all the pain of what was going on was this lacerating sense of shame, of self-blame. So that's the first example I'd like to give, which is that with chronic illness, with sickness, even approaching dying, there can be a sense of embarrassment or shame or I'm not doing this right. And if we don't see that we've turned on ourselves, there's no way to find peace in the midst of this changing life. Okay, the second stuck place, fear. We get gripped by fear. There's physical discomfort and, pain and then there's the mind just spins into what this means and what it's going to mean for my life and what we tend to do is try to avoid that fear by staying busy by distracting ourselves by

being productive anything we can do then sit down into it then again i'll share with you from my own experience, this controller part of us, that when I first started getting more and more ill, which was about eight years ago, I tried very hard to push through. And I would have teaching commitments and say, well, look, I committed myself to this. I'm going to do it even when I was feeling pretty miserable. And I found that if I could be very productive and active, I could bypass being with the vulnerability, which was something was going on in my body, and it was really requiring attention,

and I was going to need to slow down, but I didn't want to. So I kind of pushed and pushed, and then this went on, on and off for a few years. About five years ago, I was leading up to teaching one of our New Year's retreats, IMCW New Year's retreat, and I was hell-bent on making it through that retreat. I told myself I could collapse afterwards,

but my body didn't cooperate. It collapsed before the retreat, and I had to cancel. I had to not be part of it. And I landed up in a hospital and just having to trail an IV into the bathroom and being really, really sick. I had bradycardia.

My blood, my heart was beating very slow. I was very weak, very vulnerable. And I remember being there and having these spinning thoughts of, okay, how am I going to cover my class? How am I going to cover this Wednesday night class? And again, the controller was trying to get into the action, figure things out. And at one point, a nurse came in to take my vitals,

and she put her hand on my shoulder and said, oh, dear, you're really feeling poorly, aren't you? And she laughed, and then it just, the damn broke. It's like the controller was sidelined. I just could not begin to figure anything out. I just had to sit down into the uncertainty and the vulnerability and the fear. And that's when, okay, these two wings, just be with it. Just let it be and notice it.

That's one wing. This is the wing of mindful presence. And then the second wing, the more I noticed the fear I found under it a grief. It was just this sense of, oh, losing life, separated from no longer. longer able to engage and be part of losing life. And with that grief came a tremendous compassion. So this is the second wing. I started kind of holding myself. I was lying in that, you know, how hospital beds are. They're kind of up, almost half upright and kind of on my side just hugging myself, sobbing quietly because I had a roommate. But what was amazing was that in those two wings

of just noticing and sobbing and offering compassion to myself, there was, you know, there was, you wasn't any controlling. There was just being there and there was a relief. It was like I had gotten real. I wasn't trying anymore to run away from what was happening. I was contacting that loss, not running from it. There was space. And in that space, the sense of who I was opened up. I was resting in a place of compassionate presence, not the controlling. self that's trying like crazy to get away from something wrong. Now, that wasn't a one shot. As soon as I felt a tiny bit better, the controller jumped right back in trying to plan how much I could teach, what I couldn't teach, how I was going to fix this sickness and so on. And so it is that we don't like hanging out in vulnerability and uncertainty. And I adopted a mantra during the hospital stay that I'll share with you. this is from Choghungam Trunkba who's a Tibetan teacher he says really that our entire spiritual

practice is to meet our edge and soften turn over to meet our edge and soften and to me these are like this is a very pithy and powerful expression of the two wings to meet our edge means to just see and contact what is here right now okay this fear this uncertainty this feeling this feeling of loss. And then to soften is the heart space. Does that make sense? We meet our edge, see what's here, recognize it, and then soften in some way. Now there's different ways of softening. When I got back from Cape Cod, the softening was forgiven, forgiven. When I was in the hospital bed, the softening was a kind of holding myself and sending a message of compassion. an N-word. There are different ways of softening, but the bottom line is this deep intention to be

present with what is. Now a question comes up that I'll share with you. This is a question that it's a combination question and confession that I get a lot, which is that when people are trying to be present with what goes on, they don't really feel accepting. It's like they're bargaining with what's going on. They're saying, okay, I'll be present with this pain so that it'll go away. Or I'll meditate to heal this illness so that I'm free of this illness. This bargaining mind, I mean, bargaining mind's the kind of phrase that a lot of the Vopassana teachers use. But it's a very deep thing that we're told to accept what's here.

You know, we're told in some way recognize and allow it, really allow. allow it. But everything in our body and mind is going, no way, I don't like this, I want it to go away. So even when we get into our meditator stance, okay, I'm allowing this, we're allowing it on this condition that we're going to work it through and have it go away. Is this familiar? I just want to check with you. Okay. So the basic stance or understanding is that we're not able to accept it. than some way we are at war with how it is. And I want to say that it's entirely natural that we want the pain to go away.

It's entirely natural that we want to get healed. In fact, it's healthy to be hopeful. But I want to be careful here because it's healthy to be hopeful, meaning open to possibility, available to the possibility of healing, of freedom, of deepening our belonging to aliveness, of more love. It's healthy to be hopeful when that hope is wide open. But what happens to us, and this is where the suffering is, is that hope gets

fearful and tense and it fixates and we want it to be a certain way. I want this pain to go away. I want this cancer to disappear. And they're suffering then, because when we have fixed it, our hopes, it might or might not happen, but there's a tension in our system that actually prevents us from the very presence that frees us. Our identity when we're hoping is still the wanting, fearing self. We're still narrowly identified. So here's the thing. We can't will ourselves to accept. We can't will ourselves to accept this depression or to accept this fear. are to accept this loneliness. We can't will ourselves.

We can be willing. So we're coming back to intention again. Remember how I spoke about the difference between happy people and people that are struggling? There can be an intention, a willingness that comes from a deep wisdom that knows that our freedom is when we're present. There can be a willingness. we can be willing to notice what's happening. We can be willing to notice when we're not accepting. In other words, you don't have to be accepting.

You just have to be mindful of being not accepting. If you're mindful of resistance, your identity is not so hitched to it. You're already more free. So this is our training that we, whether we're sitting here and the instructions are, okay, just open to the sensations right here. Or whether the instructions are open to the fear or the resistance that's here. In the moments that we intend to be present, we begin to rest in an enlarged sense of being.

We begin to find refuge. One woman writes, my days are short and as I grow weaker I experience so much gratitude for my meditation not only the joy and ease it brought but the hard parts

for every bored and restless sitting and every fearful fantasy and every pain and ache I sat through and every itch I didn't scratch was a training for kindness a training for the muscle for bearing witness

for the trusting spirit that carries me now as I face my death. What we're exploring tonight is a pathway home, whether it's physical discomfort or chronic illness, are dying, or whether it's some other difficulty in emotional reaction, that if it's our intention, our willingness to be here, we begin to discover a refuge, what I sometimes think of as an enlarge belonging.

We begin to intuit that what we belong to is awareness, is love, and that this belonging is big enough so that while we might not like the unpleasantness and while we might feel grief about loss, there's room for it. Because what we are is larger. I'd like to mention one last stock place. that's very difficult, which is when we're sick, when we're dying, it's possible to feel

incredibly isolated and utterly alone. Like others do not get it, they don't understand, and we're a million miles away from anybody else. And often when we go through the day, when we're struggling, we're not conscious that we're suffering because we feel so separate. That's kind of below our awareness or consciousness. And tonight I've been focusing mostly on the inner processes that help us find some refuge and peace in these really challenging moments. The most blessed sacred pathway is interpersonally is that we, as I describe my friend who is dying of lymphoma, we begin to recognize that we're in it together.

It's what I sometimes call the community of loss and really we're all part of it. We're really in it together and when we let each other know what's going on for us and when we let another help us and we offer our care to another, we discover a belonging, a field of belonging which is truth, which can hold us.

And sometimes when we're stuck in that isolated place we can't reach out in those moments to this community of loss. And so there needs to be a way that we can find it within ourselves. And this last story I'd like to share a friend named Francie is a story really of how we can use prayer to awaken that second wing of love. So again, every time we find refuge, it has these two wings. it's got a wing of noticing what's going on, mindful awareness,

and some expression of love. So Francie had a metastasized breast cancer and was very resolved to move through the process with presence and drawing on the Dharma teachings. And yet it got very difficult, and at one point she told me that she lost her faith. She felt like mindfulness, she had no access to mindfulness. that she was just tired and confused, and that for the most part, she was feeling nauseous and weak and just trying to get through the day.

But she didn't want others to see that. I mean, people knew her to be such. She's very bright spirit, and people kind of, she thought, counted on her to be that way. And so she didn't want to let them down. So when we met, she was very much in touch with this loneliness. And we did a practice where we began with these two wings, where she just, said okay lonely lonely feeling isolated isolated and I asked a question I often do which is what is that lonely part most want you know what if that lonely part could

could say something what's it saying and she said it's saying help which is what it says often and then I said okay so add some words on what's what does that part want and she was quiet for a few moments and then she said it's saying please love me so we explored some more and I said you know if there was a source of that love what would it be as her mom would pass away many years ago I said if you could feel loving what it would be like

and she described that she could feel her mom's warmth and light enveloping her and she could feel a very conscious presence loving her and taking care of her not some amorphous thing but a very conscious presence right here that was loving her So I invited her to start praying and just to say out loud, please love me. And she said it out loud and was quiet a bit and then started crying. And then she said it again and again. And it was from a deeper and deeper sense of longing.

And she started imagining her mom sending her love. And then she went on, she said, I was imagining friends. I would see a friend and say, please love me. And as soon as I'd say, please love me. me I felt like the friend was loving me and then it went to plants and trees and so this is her meditation and this is one that she by the way did after we I sent her home and this was her meditation she would feel that separateness and she would say please love me and she'd feel love coming from different parts of the world and tell us she

described it she dissolved in that love and she felt that the whole world was loving her and then it was her love, loving the world, and then there was no difference. This is the power of prayer. We start with the angst. It's like a tree that puts its roots into the earth, deep, deep, deep, into the earthiness of our humanness, into the loss and the pain and the grief. And then from that, we express our longing. It's like the tree rising up into the heavens. And the more your roots go deep into the pain, the more the longing will reach out with this incredible sincerity and power to what you perceive as the source of love. So this was her practice to feel the separateness and reach towards connection and discover it. And I often quote John O'Donohue,

who says that prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging. Francie and I got together. a few weeks before she died. And she said to me that when you accept that you're dying, it's not hard to feel one with God. When you accept that you're dying, it's not hard to feel one with God. So when you accept, when there's no resistance, you discover a belonging to the universe.

You discover that oneness. This is Rilke. You who let yourselves feel, enter the breathing that is more than your own let it brush your cheeks as it divides and rejoins beside you blessed ones whole ones you where the heart begins you are the bow that shoots the arrows and you are the target fear not the pain let its weight fall back into the earth. For heavy are the mountains,

heavy the seas. The trees you planted in childhood have grown too heavy. You cannot bring them along. Give yourselves to the air to what you cannot hold. The great question that really impelled the Buddha on his quest

was given the inevitability of aging, sickness, and death, how do we find happiness and peace and freedom right here? And as I mentioned, those that do find it have an aspiration to realize their belonging, to realize who they really are. And that doesn't mean a denying of the humanness of what this self-experience is. It just means realizing, Beyond that story, this belonging to the web of life, to each other, to love, to presence. And if our aspiration is to realize that belonging, then we can find that freedom. We can find the peace that surpasses all understanding.

So maybe as a way of closing, we're going to meditate in a few moments, is to say that standing in the fire of sickness facing mortality is probably the most powerful place of awakening I know about there's no way to do it and cling tightly to our story of a self there has to be a willingness

to touch the presence and to open to the love that's beyond our separate self-story So we explore cultivating these two wings And this is really the heart of our practice This wing of presence of seeing What is happening right here And this wing of love

Where we offer forgiveness Or compassion Where we reach out in prayer To soften and open the heart These two wings So I'd like to close A meditation on the two wings If you'd like to shift how you're sitting in some way

Please do so to letting this be a pause where you invite yourself right here, perhaps allowing the inflow and outflow of the breath to help collect your attention. You might sense your intention that wherever the difficulty is in your life, whether it's a chronic illness or some other challenge in a relationship or work,

to let yourself feel the intention that this serve awakening, that this be part of the path, this willingness to find presence in the midst. So this is a remembering of what matters, that presence matters, that love matters, that realizing your true belonging, the truth or wholeness of what you are matters. And then to see if there's a situation in your life, what you might call something that's that's an edge or a challenge or a difficulty that you'd like to bring more into your awareness, that you'd like to be more awake within.

And if you are struggling in some way with a health problem, your body is going through discomfort, then let that be the place you pay attention. I offered that phrase meeting your edge and softening, sense where the edge is in this situation for you. What is it you're afraid of? What is it that's disturbing or distressing? Maybe your edge is how you're relating to yourself in it, if you're down on yourself. Maybe there's a belief about failing, about things getting worse, about never being happy, about being rejected. To sense where

your edges. This is the wing of mindful awareness of noticing what's here. That includes contacting and experiencing in your body this edge. And feel your willingness also to bring the second wing, the wing of kindness that as you sense your edge, you soften. Softening for some might mean just simply saying forgiven, forgiven. For others it might be putting your hand on your heart and just offering kindness and comfort, recognizing this is hard. Simple compassion. Great healing with self-compassion.

And for others it may be a prayer. Please love me. It may be the prayer. May I trust my belonging to love, to presence, to spirit. The trees you planted in childhood have grown too heavy. You cannot bring them along. Give yourself to the air, to what you cannot hold. This surrendering presence, this saying yes.

We close just by simply feeling what it's like in the body to say yes, with presence, with kindness to the life that's here. Sensing how deep that yes can go. And sensing who we are when we're saying yes. This aliveness, this presence, this face of heart. 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.