Tara Brach - Homecoming to Loving Awareness (Retreat talk)

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

We have strong conditioning to identify as a separate self, and to feel all the fears and attachments that arise from not realizing our true belonging. This talk includes teachings and several experiential reflections that help us wake up from the trance of separation. As we grow familiar with the awareness and love that is our shared true nature, we naturally live from that loving, and experience a growing freedom and joy. [Spring Retreat, April 2024 - Art of Living Retreat Center]

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste, welcome. Most of you are familiar with the word namaste, yeah? Its meaning is I bow to the sacredness inside you, you, you, you, inside my own being inside this life. And I was just reflecting before I began on how it's become more visceral in this space, the sense of just a field of goodness, of tenderness, of awakeness that's living through us. Makes me happy. So here's a poem from the poet to Karam.

I was meditating with my cat the other day. day and all of a sudden she shouted, what happened? I knew exactly what she meant, but encouraged her to say more, feeling that if she got it all out of the table, she'd sleep better that night. So I responded, tell me more, dear, and she soulfully meowed, well, I was mingled with the sky. I was comets whizzing here and there. I was suns and heat. Hell, I was galaxies. But now look, I am landlocked infer. To this I said, I know exactly what you mean. What to say about a conversation between mystics?

Landlocked infer. So there's this experience, and some of you may have noticed, where you do touch something that has that sense of sacredness of peace, maybe you touch some stillness, maybe there's the heart broken open feeling, the tenderness, the compassion. Maybe it's this kind of sparkling aliveness. And it feels like something you cherish. And then a couple of sits later or a few minutes later, whatever it is, it's plunk.

And you're in some way back in some familiar neurotic self. You're landlocked in self. How many is that somewhat familiar? that, yeah, okay, here we are, we're together. Okay, good. You know, I often reflect on the teachings of this palliative caregiver who's become a friend, Bonnie Aire, where she describes how the greatest regret of the dying is just really not living true to our hearts, feeling of having gone through the decades of life and been driven by anxiety or insecurity, others' expectations, you know, our own judgments, but not living aligned with what most matters. And when I first

read that, my thought was, and that's probably true for many of us, there's an undercurrent of disappointment, that somehow we know there's a possibility of really living in a feeling of intimacy with others in life and gratitude and openness. And yet we're so aware of how we shrink each day into a kind of busy, worried, planning, anxious, get more done kind of state. And that creates, over time it can create, the word that comes to me is a kind of soul sadness that a sense of missing out on what's possible, that we're kind of skimming across the surface, racing to the finish line, and what's that? You know, it's death.

And are we really inhabiting our heart, our being, our spirit? So I think of the words landlocked infer as that kind of self-centeredness that keeps us from feeling the belonging to the whole. And let me ask you this. How many of you feel like you're too self-centered and judge yourself for it? Can I see my hands? I mean, I'm going to raise my hand. I'd say that's probably the biggest judgment I have of myself

is like how many moments I'm circling around my concerns for self, my stories about self, what I want, what I fear. We talked about this in the last group, that there can be real shame about it. And if we really take a bigger perspective, we're all self-centered in the sense. that we all have this conditioning, depending on how threatened or endangered we feel, to keep focusing on what's going to help me be safe, what's going to help me get what I need, and

the more wounding, the more we have to fixate, and that's not our fault. It's just the way we're designed. So, I'd like to use the word today, that's word self-centered without a derogatory covering and just say it's just how it is when we're insecure and we're all to some degree insecure. But that is landlocked. That means that we're cut off from something larger. And our path is really how do we remember a larger belonging? How do we soften that self-centeredness? How do we open beyond it?

And in Buddhism, and this is true in many spiritual traditions, regardless of how self-centered, even if it feels like it's really small and tight, we're never actually separated from the awareness and the love that is our essence, any more than a wave is separated from the ocean. And those might sound like words, concepts, but they're actually why we're here. Because something in us intuits that there's a sacredness, a beauty, a truth, a love, that's what we are. And we're homesick. You know, all sickness is homesickness. To bed and book of the dead, the clear light is a split second, a half breath away.

that love and the awareness is always here. And as many of us have referred to, we're in a trance of forgetting a lot of moments. And that's okay. It's like it's part of the design. And it's also profoundly intrinsic to the design that we wake up and see that, that you're here noticing the trance.

And you are. There's not anybody in any group I've been with that hasn't been shining a light on the forgetting. So, both Buddhism and Western psychology, and it's really clear in neuroscience, says that it's our universal conditioning to believe in a self and it's illusory. We keep on recreating it, but we do believe in it. And this is pretty much my favorite understanding of meditation, is meditation is a process of paying attention that undoes that illusion, that undoes that sense that what I am is this separate, little, neurotic, insecure, special, important, but really not very good self.

I just describe my trance. Meditation doesn't do something, it undoes something. Does that resonate? It's an untwisting, it's an untwarking of this illusion. So what happens is we're shifting from identifying as this set of familiar waves to the ocean that's experiencing changing waves. And with that, there's joy and there's freedom and humor and intelligence. The universe lives through us. When we're intelligent, it's not our intelligence. It's that we're open enough, it's grace, that the universe can flow through.

When you're feeling that broken open and feeling loving, it's not your loving. It's the love of that field, that awareness living through you. So what I'd like to dive into today, or to getting a bit of the atmosphere, and this is carrying forward from what we've been in. exploring each day is how our practices open us in a very experiential, direct way to sensing that ocean ness, that field of awareness. And we'll ground it with a lot of practices. But what I want to emphasize is that when we have any taste of that larger belonging, any taste it all, that we get to know it, okay, that we actually, that we really pay attention, and I'm going to talk more about that, but get familiar with it, so that whether we're

thinking of it as our Buddha nature, our true nature, God, the divine, the beloved, you know, whatever we call it, that when we get a taste in the form of gratitude, our joy, our still our silence, our tender-heartedness, we pause and oh yeah, okay, this is a taste of homecoming. Let it get more and more familiar because here's the thing. The more you touch truth, the more you'll trust it and the more they'll actually be like a gravitational pull to it. Neuroscience describes it as a state of feeling expansive or connected or open-hearted becomes a trait. It becomes, oh, this is truth of who I am, state to trait. And the Radiant Sutras, which is a collection of non-dual poetry,

they say it in a much more beautiful way. It goes like this. Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again and be saturated with knowing, I belong here. I am at home here. Once you know the way, this kind of opening from the waves to this oceaness, this just opening. Jonathan said it so beautifully. Just opening out of the thoughts, opening the heart, opening into awareness. Once you know the way the nature of attention, it's like neural pathways, really, will

carry you to over and over again to that homecoming. And there's a knowing, and I had a quote from there, and I can't say it again exactly yesterday, but how he described it once there was that sense of, oh, this truth, this homecoming, he knew it as truth. It becomes a cherished truth and that becomes more the living force of your life. So in a deep way you really would not be here listening unless you have touched a taste of this. It's what brings us here.

Some taste. So name some of the ways we tasted here. The mind gets a little quiet, the heart breaks open. There's a sense as Jonathan described it that the thoughts are happy. But you're not the self and the thoughts. You're resting in the awareness that's aware of the thoughts. You just get bigger. We also experience this kind of homecoming, the sense of belonging,

sacredness at births, at deaths. In nature, sometimes when we lose ourselves in dancing or beautiful art. There's a poet who, I love, her name's Rosemary, Watola, Trauma. She's my most recent, most favorite poet. I love a lot of poets, but I've just been really kind of immersing myself. So she tells us about how, I think about 15 years ago, her son took his life. So she writes this, she says, six hours later after it happened, she says, I'm walking in the heat of a Georgia summer night on the

same street where he and I had walked and laughed and made plans only two nights before. As I wept in the darkness, my friend Wendy said through the phone, He has given you his love light to carry. What a gift will grace those words. In that moment of despair, my friend helped me frame my life as a chance to be in service to a legacy of love. I wish I could whisper those words to everyone who has lost to beloved, that they have given you their love light to carry. If we let ourselves slow down to reflect on that,

we start getting a sense of what's timeless, what is undying. If we really start opening to it, there's grief, there's loss, there's pain, but there's a love that's big, enough. Does that make sense? There's a love light that is bigger than the comings and the goings. So this in a way is the gift of homecoming, that we're inhabiting a formless, awake, loving, present. All the waves of feelings move through, but there's this knowing of

something larger. Brief reflection just to get a sense of the difference between landlocked and that openness. So if you'd like to, you don't have to do too much adjusting of your posture, this is very short. Let your attention go inward. And just notice what's here, your experience of the moment. Bring to mind a person you care about, you really care about and you judge regularly if there's such a person or that you judge irregularly but you judge and take a moment to remind yourself of what brings up the judgment let yourself feel what triggers you or bothers you kind of the worst part of it what really gets to what you're thinking what you're believing how it feels you know how to do this now just get in touch with that

the judging self. And notice, witness, become aware of the judging self. What's the sense of that? Notice, see if you notice the shrinking, the tightening. How does the heart feel? Does the mind get smaller? How much more solid or centralized, separated? It's curious. This is the landlocked self. And see if you can do this without judging, really interested, okay, the judging self. Familiar. And just know that there's a couple of hundred other people attending to a judging self. So you're not alone. You're not the only person that judges. And then take a full breath. And now remind yourself of what brings up your care, your appreciation, your love for this person. You know, as if you're at the end of your life looking

back, what would matter, what would you want to, how would you want to feel with this person? What would you want to be communicating? You might imagine just being with this person and letting them know what you appreciate. You might say, I love you, using their name, seeing their eyes, feeling them receive your appreciation of love. Just sense of what that's like people love feeling, being cherished, let them sense how they're enjoying that, and feel their loving, their care. Then you might even drop all the images and just feel the sense of loving, just the kind of that fueled of loving, viscerally, as warmth, as space, and with curiosity now, what's the

experience of self now? Where's the self? Is there a felt sense? I mean, can you find a centralized self, noticing what you notice, resting in what's actually here, the space of awareness? And to this extent you might notice a shift from the landlock self, the separate self, to this openness or tenderness, get familiar. This is what we mean by coming home.

So part of being very forgiving, good-humored, and accepting about our lives is that we have long swaths in the trance of forgetting. We all do. And it's almost like the atmosphere for remembering is forgiving the forgetting. Does that make sense? That if we start blaming the forgetting, it's just a deeper, we're digging a deeper hole. So it just becomes really useful to... notice without judgment, oh, okay, it's a big stretch of forgetting. I often think of the

story because we're forgetting is what most matters to us. This is way back when my son was in a Waldorf school in the art classes, they would sit at tables of four, many art classes do it. And one of the stories circulating was, you know, they're all drawing pictures and a teacher was moving around the class looking out what they were drawing, and she stood by one little girl who was really into, really focused into what she was doing. And the teacher asked her what she was drawing, and the little girl said, I'm drawing God. And the teacher kind of chuckled and said, well, no one knows what God looks like. Your response was, they will in a moment. But what I love about that.

And this John O'Donohue says it best. He says we're so busy managing our life so as to cover over this great mystery that we're involved in, this vastness, this awareness, this sacredness. We are busy managing. That's what keeps us landlocked. You know, we're managing to try to protect ourselves. We're managing to try to extend ourselves. you know, in some way we're move around, we're in our busy persona.

I know for myself that in the moments that I'm busy, goal-oriented and kind of taking seriously what I'm doing, my heart is not open and tender. I'm not so empathetic. I can sound it, you know, I can say the right words, but it's not a felt sense. You know what I mean? because when we're in managing mode, you know, our system's somewhat on fight-flight-freeze

and we're not attuning. So I'd like to do is take a closer look at this shift from the landlocked self to that self-centeredness like how we, as meditation does, we untork, we undo into the truth of who we are. And if we look and say, well, there's a few different dimensions we get stuck on that keep us torqued and small. And if we ask that question, well, what's between me and present? You know, if we look back at just today and say, the moments that I was in trance, what was going on?

Many of us will probably say, well, I was often thought, right? which is why Jonathan did such a really, like a beautiful job at kind of framing, like, okay, this is a territory that really deserves our attention because that's a big one of trance. Annie Lamont writes this, she says, my mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. So we live most moments lost in thought. It's a virtual reality and a lot of our practices going from virtual and really catching it and it gets subtle. Sometimes we're thinking about our meditation.

We don't realize we're not actually here. We're in an idea about here. It gets very subtle. Thoughts are images, sound bites. They're just flashing away and it's like flying and being inside a cloud and not realizing it. We're inside them. So what we find out is that these thoughts and we start catching it when we wake up from

them, they're representations of reality. They're not the living thing. You can think about eating an apple. It's not the same as crunching into it. So our ideas are not reality, and sometimes there's a real big distance. There's one story of a priest who was offering a children's sermon, and the whole congregation was there as he was doing it. So he asked the question to the children, who knows what the resurrection is?

And one little boy raised his hand, wildly waving in, and then he says, if you have a resurrection that lasts more than four hours. You're supposed to call the doctor. So the point is, we have a virtual reality that might be useful, but often does not match the world, especially when our virtual reality is telling us that we're a bad person or other people are bad people, you know, when it's limiting us. So a large domain of practice is waking out from the stories we're telling ourselves because they create our whole life experience. They fuel the limb-like self, that's self-centeredness. Carlos Kassignata in the stories about Don Juan, the shaman, says,

you talk to yourself too much. You're not unique in that. Every one of us does. We maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A person of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. This isn't about seizing and desisting and shutting off thoughts. It's about opening into that presence that senses the thoughts are happening, but no longer believes that we're the character in the thoughts.

again, these stories, these voices in our head, as Jonathan described this morning, they're going to go on and on, but we can remember that we're the awareness that's aware of them. There is no single breakthrough that I've seen for people that's more kind of profound early in retreat as, I am not my thought. I don't have to believe my thoughts. Srinor Sorgadatta has it describes it in a beautiful way. He says that our thoughts and our ideas create this huge net of reality. But it's not a problem because the net is filled with holes.

Hence we practice. One of the kind of mantras or inquiries really, it's more an inquiry that helps me a lot. came from another non-dual master who said, as you're practicing, just periodically ask yourself, am I dreaming? You know, even if you ask it right now, am I dreaming? All of a sudden there's an awareness shining a kind of lens, a light, on how much fabrication is going on in the mind, how much you're living in something smaller than the vibrant, radiant, awake essence. We can sort of see the film that we're still in. Am I dreaming? Okay, another brief exercise. Let's practice a little. Otherwise it's a lot of words, more virtual. Take a

few full breaths and then as the breath resumes in its natural rhythm, take a moment to see what wants to soften or loosen or relax. And then simply be the witness now with the intention to notice thoughts, a less elegant way of saying it is imagine that you're kind of a cat by a mouse hole and that the mouse, you're going to be really noticing every time a mouse appears at the mouse hole. Swatching, you might notice a subtle thinking about thinking or an image or periodically the spaces between the thoughts. See if you can notice them, relaxing the witness. So there's a witnessing without effort. A simple noticing. You might ask, am I dreaming? When you notice the thought,

you might compare the thought, the experience of the thought with the living reality here and now, with the vibrant immediacy of what's right here. As you want, as you watch your mind, you discover yourself as the watcher. Again, take a moment, being the witness, watching. When you stay motionless, only watching, you discover yourself as the light behind the watcher. The light behind the watcher. Go back to that source. Rest in that as pure, undivided awareness. Some of you may sense a taste, just a taste, that there's the thoughts and there's that space of awakeness behind. Some may have a very profound sense.

Wow. Witnessing and then the light behind the witness, wherever it is, however it is for you, just know that when you have a taste, go ahead and get really interested and immerse of it in it. So this is one of the gateways of shifting from landlock, that self-centeredness, to that vastness. The second gateway emotions, which we've been exploring a lot. And the shift happens, we bring attention to emotions, and when we really bring that presence and that kindness, this is what meditation does.

It dissolves the selfing. It opens us to something larger. after the rain. So, I want to just remind you of a metaphor I introduce that if you think of the landlocked self as that kind of ice-cubey, kind of tight, it's still water, still made of awareness, but it's ice-cuby, it's tight. And meditation, the light and the warmth of the sun dissolves it. And then that ice-cuby self actually rejoins the whole and enriches it. So, So the place I want to emphasize in our practice now is that when there's a little bit of that opening, how we can really rest in it more fully.

And I'll share it by way of a story of a woman that recovered alcoholics, spent many years in program. She was estranged from her adult daughter who was pregnant. And she felt really guilty about the way she had caused harm. And so when she'd visit her, there's just that guilt and that self-consciousness. It just created a real distance. And the daughter was tense too. They had an edgy relationship.

Inside, it just kept her coming back to feeling like a bad person. So she wanted to do some rain with me because it was that sense of I don't want to go to the end of my life and have this distance. I don't want to be at the end of my life and feel like I, you know, I did. didn't bridge it. And so because it brought up that soul sadness I mentioned. So we did reign, the recognizing and the allowing and the investigating of that sense of bad personhood.

And what she got to was a very young part of her because she also had been kind of abandoned or neglected from her alcoholic mother. She grew older, she could never meet her mother's needs. She felt this sense of falling short of her life. So there was a very young part in her saying, don't leave me, please love me, please take care of me. So in Rain, we opened to that and then the nurturing somewhat she was able to feel that young child. And then she also kind of called on the divine feminine to help her basically sending that message,

I'm here, I love you, I'm not leaving. That loosened it up, that opened her up. And in after the rain, she was really resting in quite a sweet, open, tender presence. And I asked her the question that we have brought to you a few times, you know, who would you be if you no longer believed that in the badness? It's really interesting. She said, well, I would be just this openness, this light. And I asked her, you know, what would your life be like if you really would. really did not believe anything was wrong with you.

And her response was, I'd be free to love. That became her mantra. She just kept, you know, every time she would first have to go into the wounded place and hold herself and so on, but then she'd say, I'm free to love, I'm free to love. And she'd start in her meditation bringing in her daughter and feeling like that space that was holding her own inner child could hold her daughter, I'm free to love. So, as you can imagine, that's a powerful rewiring and it affected the atmosphere with her daughter. Things loosened up.

And, you know, she shared some of her process with her daughter. Daughter's eight months pregnant now. She told her how much she wanted to be there for her, and her daughter was more open. Daughter gives birth and unexpectedly it's twins. So her mother became very handy. I was like, really helped. And so she told me about one afternoon, they're both holding a twin.

And they looked at each other and there was in the silence and they smiled. And then there were these tears that they both knew they were going to be okay. And they just knew. She told me she'd never forget

that moment what it meant to be living from that sense of, I'm free to love. That's after the rain. That's. when some expression of awake awareness becomes really familiar, where we really start trusting more in who we are than in the story. Let's pause here again. Give you a

chance to ground this in your own experience. You might just you need to shift around. It's fine, but just let the attention again go inward. and feel your breath. Let your breath be felt at the heart. Just feel your breathing in and out of your heart. As we've explored one of the main narratives that keeps fueling the landlocked self has to do with self-judgment. So you might just pick one typical way that you judge yourself. And just as we did before when you're judging another person,

let yourself get into it a little bit, you know, What it means that you, whether you're judging yourself for a daily thing like I'm not exercising enough, or I don't respond very, I don't have very much grace in how I respond to this person, or I get overreactive with my kids, my temper, whatever it is. Get into judging yourself right now so you can actually feel the sense of the inner judge when it's activated. And get to know the landlock self, the self-centered, judging is one of the main ways to bind us to self-centeredness. And this time, just feel the hurt of it.

Just feel how it's a squeeze, how it's armoring your heart, making you small, and as if you're at the end of your life looking back how you'd want to be with yourself. If you want to put your hand on your heart, please do. Just the touch of kindness. It doesn't take much. Even the intention to be kind. Even if you're not feeling it right now, just the intention. Oh, come on, lay this short.

Soften up. You don't have to tell yourself stories about what's wrong. It gets in the way of loving. You might sense who you'd be if you didn't believe something was wrong. And as we've been exploring, just sense the taste of freedom there. Really? It's amazing. You can get a glimmer.

What would your life be like if there was a dissolving of all those stories about longness, badness? You just feel that sematically in your body, the freedom, free of love. Rumi puts it this way, I am water. I am the thorn that catches someone's clothing. There's nothing to believe. Only when I quit believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul.

Now, in this ocean of pearl and courage, I've lost track of which was mine. Only when I quit believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Day and night, I guarded the pearl of my soul. Now in this ocean of pearl and currents, I have lost track of which was mine. So thus far, we have looked at the trance of self-centeredness, the landlocked So, with using the flags of suffering, of getting lost in thought, of getting caught in emotion and kind of relaxing that back into openness. The last piece. And for some, this is the most difficult, and just take what's useful and put aside what's not, really,

on everything that we say, really. It's all customized. You just keep customizing for yourself. But this last piece is really that we can turn directly towards that awareness, directly towards the ocean of wakeful awareness. It's especially possible during the times when your mind is somewhat quiet, when there's not a lot of sticky emotion. You can start exploring this more and more during the quietness.

And I'll just pause here and say that many students, we start talking about awareness and they say, well, when I look for awareness, I just land on the thought or feeling. And there's just frustration. It's because there's a striving because you can't look for awareness. You can't land it, land on it or find it. Striving doesn't work. You remember this is one of the classic ones of a novice going to a Zen monastery. and he tells the abbot, you know, I want to enter the monastery,

how long will it take to get enlightened? And the, you know, abbot says, 10 years. And this young novice says, what if I try really hard? The abbot says, 20 years. And he goes, wait a minute, you said 10 years. For you, 30, you know. So it's not striving. This is where there's not a willfulness.

This exploration. here of the nature of who we really are is more, it's better understood as the backward step that you're relaxing back into what already is. So we'll practice, words aren't as good, we'll practice a bit. And as a way of starting, you know, just put down if you're writing anything, just put it down and again adjust your position if that helps. like to close your eyes you can, if you want to lower your gaze, you can, however you want to do it.

For this next 30 seconds, try not to be aware. And I'm actually watching the clock. Okay, please begin. Try not to be aware. Okay, stop, stop, stop. So I am going to ask, how many were able to do it? Can I just see? Because there's usually a few.

Don't be embarrassed. Okay, first time I did this with my mother was at a retreat. And her hand shot up. Nobody else, but, you know, I was my mom. She'd like it if I told you. Close your eyes again, please. Just let your attention go inward. Again, try not to be aware,

and you can notice that awareness is always here. You might not be aware of it. But there's a spontaneous knowing. Sounds are heard. They're known spontaneously. These words come out and awareness is listening, knowing. Just don't have to go anywhere to find it. Notice if you feel the sensations inside your hands,

how you can also sense that awareness is in your hands feeling sensations. Sensations are known. feel your shoulders and then soften and feel inside them. Awareness is aware of tightness and loosening, heat and cool. Let the breath be received deep in the torso, this next in-breath, softening the belly, and then breathing in and softening again.

So you start feeling the liveliness through the body and the awareness that knows that aliveness, As I mentioned, you might imagine the sensations are like subatomic particles that are actually coming out of awareness. Sense the space between the cells, between the sensations. This is interior and through your body. And as you widen and listen, awareness is listening. There's a vastness, a boundlessness. It's continuous space.

interior and through your body and through all space beyond the further stars, continuous space filled with the light of awareness. Now noticing, is there a sense of a witnessing self? A self who's following these instructions that's doing a practice, an eye that is meditating? Sense if you can find where the witness is, just play with that. Play with that. Locate the witness. Maybe it's behind you or above you. Maybe a kind of amorphous shape or maybe inside your brain.

But just sense the self that's witnessing. And then invite the witness to relax in and as the full field of awareness to dissolve. So for these next few moments, experiencing from wholeness and the whole feel of awareness and the whole field of awareness to dissolve. So for these next few moments, from wholeness and the whole field of awareness, letting life be as it is like waves that come and go. Keep relaxing back, the backward step, inhabiting wholeness. It's natural that the mind contracts, focuses, fixage. And our practice is simply awareness noticing that. And then just the invitation to relax back, dissolve.

rest in and as the fullness of awareness. This undivided awareness is what we are. All existence happens in it. One teacher guides us to reflect, I am loving awareness. The awareness itself that receives all of these changing experiences. Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again, and be saturated with knowing, I belong here.

I am at home here. Namaste, friends. Bowing to the love light that's flowing and shining through each and all of us. Blessings.