Tara Brach - Intimacy with Life - Part 1

Episode Date: July 20, 2023

Intimacy with Life (Part 1) - Zen master Dōgen teaches that enlightenment is intimacy with all things. These two talks explore teachings and practices that cultivate intimacy - a liberating experience of relatedness and oneness with our living world.

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. The title of this talk is Intimacy with Life. And I begin with a favorite story. Some of you might remember this woman describes how a tired-looking old dog wandered into her yard and into her house. And she could tell from the collar, there weren't tags with the collar, well-fed, pop,

and, you know, clean. The dog had a home. So the dog followed her into the house down the hall and fell asleep on her couch. And her dogs didn't seem to mind, and he seemed like a good dog. So she figured, okay, let him nap. An hour later, he goes to the door and she lets him out. And then the next day, the same thing happens. arrives, walks in, resumes his position on the couch, sleeps for an hour and leaves.

And this goes on for several weeks. So finally, she decides to write a little note and she pins it to his collar and it says, you know, every afternoon your dog comes to my house and for a nap and I don't mind and I just want to make sure it's okay with you. So the next day, the dog arrives again with a different note pinned to his collar and the note says he lives in a home. He lives in a home. with three children. He's trying to catch up on his sleep. May I come with him tomorrow? Well, in addition to it just plain being fun, I love in that just the sense of fellowship of respect and empathy. Most of you now are aware of all this research there's been on how good relationships are the greatest determinant of

our health and our happiness. And it's been highlighted in studies of blue zones. Those are the places on the planet where humans have the greatest longevity and well-being. And in each of them, the emphasis is on community, on social support. And importantly, it's not just between humans. There's a sense of relatedness and care that really extends to the living Earth in the Blue Zones, it's really, it's characterized by a sustainable development and primarily plant-based eating, love of the lands and the waters, a real belonging to life. I often think of a Zen master Dogen who wrote that to be enlightened is to be intimate with all things, intimate with life. and it's always resonated in part because it's a really practical kind of teaching.

It invites us to sense in any moment, is there a quality of intimacy with this person or with this person I know well, with this stranger, with this dog, with this plant, with the river, with the rocks, with my inner life? you know, is there a quality of intimacy, of closeness, of warmth, of openness? You know, and then in the deepest way, it points out how when we do become intimate with our living world, it's enlightening. It reveals an intrinsic sacredness or oneness. intimacy reveals our shared belonging, our shared source. Most people have a deep longing for this, for realizing oneness, for communion.

I mean, you can sense for yourself, you know, really what most matters, and our hearts long for that. We want a more loving world. You know, I often think about John Lennon's song, imagine, just to maybe remind you for a moment. Just one verse, imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for and no religion to imagine all the people live in life and peace. You may say, I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us and the world will be as one. I listen to this. a few days ago, him singing it. And I can't listen without tears. If you haven't listened for a while, you might try. Because I sense that we have this shared longing for a more loving world.

And the tears, the sadness, is that I think we can sense this as the possibility and also just this pain at how much time is spent in the trance of, of othering, you know, what I call unreal othering, where others become an object and there's just so much violating and cruelty in the world that comes out of that. So it's possibility and then the sorrow at the distance we are from it often. So here we are and even as we look into our most personal relationships, this sense of radical belonging, of real unconditional lovings, often just a concept. Easily goes out the window in the trance of daily life where we get into a kind of self-centeredness.

The self is in here and there's a world out there and it's not intimate. And this is true, you know, even as we formally think, okay, this is part, here I am on the spiritual path. You might remember years back there was a personals in a Buddhist magazine called tricycle and it went like this, tall, handsome Buddhist looking for himself. And there's that sense of that inwardness, of course, that's not what we really mean by looking for ourselves, but there it was. But we do. We compare to others and we judge others and others can feel like this. And others can feel like they're getting in our way. It's a self-other. I saw a cartoon recently. This young woman is in a meditation hall and she's practicing meditation next to Darth Vader. And what the caption says is

your breathing is making it impossible for me to concentrate on my breath. You know, okay, so intimacy with life. What I'd like to focus on in this talk and the next is how we cultivate the capacity for true intimacy, how we cultivate this remembrance of our belonging to each other and to all of life. And more specifically, how do we move out of that trance of unreal othering? And the first domain we'll look at is what it really means a sense and intimacy or belonging with the non-human parts of our living world. And then we'll close in on our fellow humans. So I've been mentioning the trance of unreal othering.

And by trance, I mean that we're perceiving a partial our torqued dimension of reality. And it occurs when the lens of perception narrows. and the more different others appear. Certainly the difference between humans, it could be race or culture, ethnicity, and the more difference between humans and other species or life forms, the more the lens narrows. Difference narrows the lens. We lose sight of the subjectivity, the aliveness, the realness of others.

they become unreal. So the more different, the less real. By way of illustration, a grasshopper walks into a bar and the bartender says, hey, we have a drink named after you. And the grasshopper looks surprised and asks, you have a drink named Steve? So unreal others, whether it's other species, other life forms. Not only when there's unreal other,

not only is the other a separate and kind of objectified, the other becomes really devalued. An object that can be ignored, misunderstood, used, violated. And we know the horror of this when we think of how humans have objectified this living planet. And what happens when we do that, the way we inflict. so much unconscious violence, our conscious violence, and we can see the outcome in our current climate catastrophes, the rate of extinction, the suffering of so many beings on the planet, and it happens as we objectify our larger body, the earth. I'm going to read you from Ticknod Han. He says, change will happen on a fundamental level only if we fall back in love with the planet. The earth cannot be

described by the notion of matter or mind, which are just ideas, two faces of the same reality. He says, the pine tree is not just matter as it possesses a sense of knowing. A dust particle is not just matter, since each of its atoms has intelligence and a living reality. When we recognize the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection. Love is born. So intimacy with life means intimacy with our entire living world. And I want to share with you from a book I've been reading. It's called Braiding Sweet Grass and I know many are familiar with it. The author's Robin Wall Kimmerer. And she writes about a field botanist. And here's what she says. She kneels along the trail to an

inspect a set of moose tracks saying, someone's already been this way this morning. Someone is in my hat, she says, shaking out a deer fly. Someone, not something, someone. A being, not an it. So I read this and it became part of my practice actively. I'd be walking outside and I'd hear a bird and, oh, someone is singing. I'd get curious and say, oh, who is this? So attuning to a someone, not a something, or see a tree. You know, someone is rooted here. Or who is this? Or a squirrel on the branch, someone's on the branch, or somebody would walk by me on the trail with their dog and I'd say, oh, someone has a wagging tail. And I used the word someone just to get closer into the realness.

there's a being in there, a beingness. And I can say for myself, the more I perceive this world as expressions of sentience, the more belonging there is. I can never be alone. It takes intention because it's not our habit. Our habit is to make others into things. Here's what Kimmerer writes about this. imagine seeing your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and then saying of her, look, it is making soup. It has gray hair. We might snicker at such a mistake, but we also recoil from it.

In English, we never refer to a member of our family or indeed to any person as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship. reduces a person to a mere thing. So it is that in most indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we do for our family because they are our family. I find that so powerful. It gets me just as I read it to sense this world of living forms as our family. with an inherent value and preciousness and sentience, that it's all life-loving life.

Echo theologist Thomas Berry writes, puts it this way. He says, we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. The subjects, this is the sentient life forms of our global family, ourselves included, are always in communication. They're subjects that are totally interdependent, interrelated, taking in and expressing information. I was really interested in reading about some research at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and they collected nectar from evening primrose flowers before and after exposing them to a range of sounds. And the sounds included the recordings of bees and also synthetic noises. and only in the response to the bee sounds, did the roses quickly make their nectar sweeter?

They hear, they hear the particular sound of a bee and respond. Prim roses and bees exchanging information, communicating, communing. So this is the intelligence that Tikhon Han is talking about. when it says everything is alive and sentient. And it's a kind of primordial love when you think of the from roses and the bees. So our language can either reflect and honor this living, communing, interdependent world, which nourishes love. We fall back in love with our planet.

Or instead, our language can present a really fractured static world of mostly separate objects, which of course then cuts us off and armors our heart. And the English language is 75% nouns and 25% verbs, which means it lends greatly towards classifying, dividing, objectifying. It separates. It doesn't open the lens to perceive and participate in this living, communing world. In contrast, indigenous languages are 25% nouns and 75% verbs, which impacts perception. It comes from a wider lens of perception and it sustains it so that we're able to sense that indivisibility of life, that life is animate. It's a communicating living world. In her book, Kimmer describes the preciousness of indigenous language as the way her people see the world.

And she describes it as a language of animacy, a language of animacy, because it reflects an animate world. A world where spirit lives through and connects all beings. The primrose communing with the bee. The pine with the winds. she writes about the forced assimilation that we all are now learning about more and more of Indian children at government boarding schools and how they weren't allowed to speak their own language, which is a violence that threatens the indigenous languages of the Americas, and by extension threatens a sacred way of perceiving with this sensitive, wide-open lens.

this communing world. So I bring all this up because since our language, most of us are speaking English, those of you who are listening are, so I'll emphasize English here, our language and related worldview is so deeply ingrained. You know, a self-in-here and object world out there, it requires deepening attention to begin to undo. do that narrowed frame or a way of rigidly perceiving, opening the lens of perception.

So we're going to explore the next part of this talk. We'll explore two related pathways of widening the lens of perception so we can re-engage, participate, belong to this living world. And the first is simply a direct reflection on the intelligence, liveliness, presence of life forms, of living life forms. Kimmerer wrote as I described that someone is here. You know, we see this girl and we say someone. We see the tree and we say someone. It's that reflection of really sensing the beingness that's there. I want to read you a poem I just came across today, so I've never read this one before, called Feeding the Worms by Danusha Lamaris. Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple peels

into the compost bin. Imagine the dark writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots. I'd always thought there's a menial life, eyeless and hidden, almost vulgar. Though now it seems they bear a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to enhance it however I can, forgetting a moment, my place on the menu. I hope you can sense the mystery and the powerfulness of that. Every living creature with the sensitivity to take in information and express, every being sentient, every being life that's loving life.

And what happens when we engage with our world, with the wide lens seeing that, we become part of that living world. It opens the heart. So that's the first pathway. And we're going to be practicing this, which is directly reflecting on the sentience of beings. And the second, which brings this recognition alive, is to consciously communicate or commune with forms. It's kind of that sense of as if, communing as if they're sentience because what that does is it wakes us up to the truth that's always there that we have not seen because of our conditioning. It's a way of coming into active relationship. So how do we communicate? For many it is taking in a part of the natural world that

is beautiful, as brings wonder, brings awe, perhaps the fragrance of the flow, and the flowers or the flowing sounds of the stream and saying thank you. Just expressing gratitude. In some way we become part of the flow. It starts the communion kind of waking up into consciousness in a moment of saying thank you from that sincerity of our heart because our heart has received the goodness and is expressing it. Thank you to the worms. Thank you to the trees for their shade. One of the practices I do and by means of communicating is when I'm kind of hanging out with a tree or a plant or another human, I will mentally reflect, we are friends. I'll in some way be putting that out.

We are friends. And in the expression of that from my heart, the truth of our inherent friendliness of the good. goodness that's communing together, the information flow that in the deepest way is this mystery, that comes alive. We are friends. You know, just as I say it, I'm feeling those who are listening right now and the truth that we are friends. And it just dissolves boundaries, just the conscious communication of that. For some, Another way of communicating is asking permission, before taking flowers that we might want for a bouquet or asking permission to any part of the natural world for our consumption that we're enjoying in some way.

May I? Just respect. Another way is to stand before a part of this living earth and say, please teach me. because the trees are our teachers, the plants are our teachers, the way water flows around the boulders, it's all teaching us. The point is this, that when we communicate, we are relating as if sentience is here. And this brings forward the truth. We discover ourselves opening into a field of belonging. Let's practice a bit together, friends. You might if you can find a position where you can be still,

where you can take a few full breaths and let the breath gather your attention, where you can feel a quality of presence right now, aware of the breath, aware of sensations, aware of sounds, aware of being aware. And I invite you to bring to mind a non-human animal in your life, life. It could be a dog or a cat. Or it may be that you're looking outside and there's a squirrel or a bird. But to bring to mind a familiar non-human animal, one that you can visualize and sense and if they happen to be in the vicinity, see and smell and take in. And bring your mind

close into that and your heart close in and sense that you can really perceive and register the aliveness of this being, the brain, the nervous system, the sensitivity of this being, that this being has sentience, this being feels, takes in information, sounds, senses, that someone is here. And you might communicate we are friends just explore that or if you'd prefer thank you or please teach me or whatever resonates as something to communicate that feels authentic notice what happens since the quality of connection oneness notice what happens to your heart notice heart space And you might bring to mind a, now a non-human part of life, the plant world that's familiar,

that's close in, part of your life could be a tree that's nearby, a plant in your house or a plant outside. But let it be close in in your awareness if it's not right there nearby in the vicinity. Open the lens of perception to take in the inherent aliveness. and intelligence of this life form. This is life-loving life, wanting to live, taking in information, taking in nourishment,

expelling, breathing out into the world, that someone is here, a sentience, a presence. You might sense we are friends. It might be thank you, please teach me. some communication that lets you commune more fully. Notice the quality of connectedness,

of belonging, the heart space that's here. And you might extend the attention to the entire living world and feel the whole natural world here as sentient. All the trees and the plants, full with presence and aliveness. as Ticknodhan says, the atoms in the water and the dust, the aliveness and sentience that fills your body,

the bone, water, air, earth, inside you, and around you. Just feel the sentient world and perhaps just simply thank you or a bow to the wonder, to the aliveness, to the consciousness, to the spirit that lives through everything. Relax back, just rest as part of, as belonging to this aliveness. A communion of subjects. Aliveness sourced in awake awareness.

As you're ready, take a few full breaths. And thank you. Thank you for exploring. Thank you for your willingness to, I hope, bring some curiosity. engagement to this. It's a life practice, this attuning to sentience, this communicating, this nurturing intimacy with our living world. And so here we are, we're exploring how we can widen the lens and deepen attention. We communicate to commune with our non-human world. And in order to truly extend to humans, which is where we're going, we need to look more closely at the habitual ways in our daily life that we narrow the lens. You know, how our fears and our

wounds and our unmet needs blind us to that shared sentience, to that basic goodness. There's a classic story of a traveler who arrives at the edge of town and asks the question, you know, what kind of people live here? Ask this wise woman. And her response is, well, what were people like back home? And he says, well, they're untrustworthy. People were greedy and nasty and dishonest, ill-tempered. And her response is, okay, well, you'll find people here likewise. The next visitor comes to town and approaches the same wise woman and says, what are people like here? Well, what were they like back at home? Basically good-hearted, sympathetic, generous, kind. You'll find people here likewise. So we have habits, we have patterns, both as individuals and as a society, ways that we

relate to others, and it's not our fault. Wherever there's stress to the degree there's stress, it can narrow perceptions. So we're largely conditioned by the degree of stress in our upbringes, how safe was it, how much attumement was there with our caregivers, and we're conditioned by the stressors in our society, the degree of violence, oppression, hierarchy, our own social position in terms of race, caste, gender, socioeconomic. So stress, when there's a sense of not safe or an unmet need, it narrows the lens. And when the lens is narrowed, as we've been talking about, we objectify the world out there. It's unreal others. When the lens is narrowed, we see only the coverings of the unreal other.

You know, for humans, we'll see the ego defenses and the personality and qualities like attractiveness or dominance or insecurity. We'll see what might threaten us or enhance us and we'll miss that sentience, what I sometimes call the gold, which is the loving awareness, the spirit that lives through. So our inquiry is, as we explored with non-human parts of life, how do we widen the lens? And in our next session, we're going to explore how we can recognize our narrowed perceptual filters in relating with humans and how we can draw on the mindfulness and compassion of the rain practice to widen the lens.

to enlarge our view so that we can be intimate, truly intimate, in communion with each other. What I'd like to do in the final part of this session is explore a life practice that is both the grounds for widening the lens with rain, and it's also the fruit of rain. Just as we explored earlier with non-human life, we can directly reflect on each other's sentience, on the spirit that's here, and we can communicate from that place. We can listen and we can express. We can commune with humans in this way. And perhaps most familiar example would be with the word namaste. Many are familiar. It's from the Sanskrit word, from Asia, and it has to do with seeing the

sacred, seeing the light in each other and in all beings. So, Namaste is actually more than a word. It's a practice. It's a practice of seeing and taking in the information that lets us sense the spirit, really. And it's a practice of expressing, of honoring that sacredness, communicating, taking it in, expressing, expressing, it and in that communicating we commune we become one there's a similar practice that is from the west many are familiar with martin buber a jewish philosopher who talks about i and thou and thou is in the moment of saying thou you're recognizing the wholeness the beingness the sacredness of another very much like Namaste.

I'll share one student who was using I, Thou as a way of trying to recognize and then go past his habitual biases and stereotyping. So he described how every day he'd go to work on a subway and he'd see someone of difference who he might habitually have an idea about who they are and where they belong in the scheme of things, and he would just keep saying, vow, vow, until the place in him that was perceiving was wide open to take in thou. So beautiful. Really, what he described was this basic sense of respect and reverence, this undoing of separation. And he said that the times there were tears when he'd say thou and then sense that sentience and basic goodness in another and realize

and this is where tears come from the sadness of how much it's not there how much we live in that trance of unreal othering so that's a beautiful practice thou namaste i saw the power of it in my own life and I've seen it many, many times, but in a very poignant way with my mom, I talked about her a lot. She lived with us for the last six years of her life and we were really close and maybe in the last year or two she had increasing dementia. And one of the expressions was a paranoia, that sense that somebody was stealing from her, which I found out very quickly was really, really common. Well, for her, she was convinced that the person stealing from her was my ex-husband, who's a dear friend, part of our extended family and spent a lot of time

with us. And they at times had a wonderful relationship, but it turned towards the end. She just, her suspicions, had a land on someone and he was the one. So many rounds, she would say, oh, my purse is missing. He took it. Or my brain. or my good coat and she would be really alarmed and angry and distressed and, you know, want attention to it. And I'd, you know, I'd go and find what was missing and I could feel inside me this helplessness and I felt impatient and irritated at times. But mostly it was just powerlessness because, oh my gosh, the suffering of feeling helpless and that somebody is stealing from you. You know, wow.

And one of the worst parts of it for me, it was a feeling of grief that my mom was hurting and she felt like I didn't believe her what was going on and I wasn't confronting him. I wasn't taking care of her. I didn't have her back. So here I was her main ally in life and not with her. And so what I'd do is I'd honor her feelings. I wouldn't be judging her but I wasn't pretending I shared her reality. And it was really painful, really painful to feel her suffering and her vulnerability, that she felt hurt by me, really painful. So I had a lot of compassion for both of us, but what I want to share with you was the center of my practice during those months, because it was a period of months really, was to keep

intentionally remembering and communicating to who she really was, thou. to keep seeing past the coverings to, and it's not hard, it wasn't hard with my mom, she had a heart of gold, but just to keep sensing the fundamental kindness and wisdom and her humor and just this creative, intelligent beingness, and knowing that it wasn't her fault, these coverings. It was a, it was a disturbance in the field. And I would just over and over again on some level see the who she really was behind it and communicate Namaste, communicate that honoring as much as possible in, you know, both energetically, but in ways that I spoke to her. And I also, by the way, was turning it inward, reminding myself of who I was. I wasn't the irritated, impatient daughter.

That's a covering. There was a beingness that was loving her. So I share this with you because I realized that during that time for me to engage and have a quality of healing presence with her, I had to have it routed in this conscious remembering of who she was, in this real respect, a genuine respect, and have my communications come from that. And so that was my practice. And over the months, her disturbance got soothed, I think, just by the quality of us being together and me continually affirming our basic togetherness and my love and trust for who she really was. I remember talking with her. I can't remember the context, but her, you know, after some months where she was feeling hurt and upset by all of this, her saying, we're good. And then she said,

we're good. I know we're good. And then she said, no, this is what I'll never forget, is that when I go, I know you'll be going with me. It's like she knew that we were. timeless companions no matter what. So intentionally widening the lens so we can see the timelessness. We can see what's beyond the forms. We can see the undying love. And so many of us have experienced the wounds and the traumas from our upbringing and our society so it can get covered over by waves.

Like my mom struggling with many struggling with physical trauma. emotional, cognitive challenges. Our coverings get disturbed, then we react to each other's coverings. We need a pathway of namaste, of remembering who's there. So to become intimate with all life, we start with the lives that we're encountering all the time of our friends and our families and our colleagues, our non-human animals, trees, deer flies,

you know, can we see the coverings? Can we also remember the spirit that shines through? That someone is here, a beingness, a presence, that there's life-loving life. So this is the practice, this essence of namaste, and we'll explore it right now where I'll be inviting you to see past the coverings to the light in others, in yourself, to take a moment, if you will, to find a way of being comfortable, sitting, whatever position. Let yourself come into stillness. You might take a few full, deep breaths. And you might begin by bringing to mind a person in your life where you feel a lot of relatedness,

care, where it's easy, where it's easy to feel connection. and as you bring that person to mind, bring them close in so you can imagine looking into their eyes and with real receptivity, you know, taking in information, sense who's there. Notice what you can take in about them. If you can sense thou, if you can sense the spirit that's there, that's looking through those eyes, the life that loves life, the sentience. Communicating means taking in, letting you. yourself, perceive that, that spirit that's living through them, and namaste, perhaps in your

own words in some way bowing, honoring, acknowledging that basic goodness. If it helps to use the word thou, mentally whisper thou, taking in and honoring, communicating and experiencing the communing, sense, who are we? in this togetherness. Just let go into that, into that field. And from this open presence you might bring to mind someone you care about who's having a hard time, someone who's struggling with wounds, trauma, physical challenges, as you do bring them close in. So you can sense the coverings where they're reacting to what's difficult. And you can also deepen your attention. And you can also deepen your tension, wide in the lens to include what's beyond the coverings, thou, just sensing the spirit of

that being, the sentience, that this is life-loving life, communicating by taking in and registering that beingness, and in some way communicating, honoring, could be thank you, or Namaste, offering your love, your care, and sensing into the field of your togetherness, sensing who you are in that togetherness. Invite you to stay in that field of open presence and bring to mind someone who's a more casual kind of acquaintance who you don't know so well,

perhaps someone you see with some regularity, but you don't have a real familiarity. bring them close in in your mind's eyes. You can see their eyes. And again, communicating to commune, taking in who's there. You might mentally whisper thou. And sense the spirit, that sacred and sentient beingness that lives through all beings, shining through, that mystery. And in some way honoring it, expressing, it could be thou. It could be we are friends, namaste, whatever resonates for you, honoring their beingness and then sensing the togetherness, the field of communing that you open to.

That field of presence bringing to mind someone who seems quite different from you because of their race, their socioeconomic position, their religion, their ethnicity, something about social location that creates a real difference. And bring that person to mind and again, bring them close in. You sense you're looking in their eyes, you're receiving, you're sensing. Who's here? Someone is here. again that receptivity of vow and sensing the spirit living through them the sentience the intelligence life-loving life and communicating appreciation namaste we are friends whatever resonates as an honoring of spirit

noticing what opens up, that field of communing, of togetherness, of oneness. And finally, from that field of presence, sensing your inner being, the life within, sensing the sentience, the awareness that's here, the loving presence that's here. Namaste. Honoring the life that's here. And then being that loving awareness, resting in that field of loving awareness. that all life belongs to. Poet Mark Nippo writes, my soul tells me we were all broken from the same nameless heart and every living thing wakes with a piece of that original heart aching its way

into blossom. This is why we know each other below our strangeness. Why when we fall we lift each other or when in pain we hold each other. Why when sudden with joy we dance together life is the many pieces of that great heart loving itself back together well thank you my friends for your attention for engaging i'll look forward to being with you again to continue this exploration of how we widen the lens to to sense our shared spirit our oneness and how it is the essence of of waking up in our own lives on the spiritual path. And really, it is the healing potential for our living planet. Blessings. Thank you. Much love.