Tara Brach - Introduction to Mindfulness: Mindfulness of Thoughts – Part 4

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

This talk examines how the trance of thinking imprisons us, veiling our full aliveness, love, and spiritual essence. Through contemplative reflections and short guided practices, we'll explore pathways to awaken from this trance and open to the light, awareness, and wholeness of who we truly are.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Greetings. Thank you for being with us, friends. This is the fourth of a five-week series on the basics of mindfulness meditation, cultivating heart presence. So we began the first week with the life breath of really coming home, to presence again and again, feeling the inflow and outflow of the breath, letting it be a home base to gather, to collect our attention. Then we extended a kind of intimate attention to living sensations in the body.

And last week we explored how to open to feelings and emotions. This week we're going to be looking at waking up from the trance of thinking. I speak of it that way because as many of us are aware, we spend much of our time lost in thought, not aware of the fact of thinking. There's a story I heard Rabbi Zellman share about his youngest daughter, Shalvi. She was about five years old at the time. And according to the story one morning she woke him up and said, Father, do you know how when you're asleep and dreaming, it seems so real. And then you wake up and realize it was just a dream.

When you're awake, can you wake up that much more and realize this is just a dream? Wow. So, take a moment and think of what it's like when we're dreaming. I mean, when we're in that mind-generated dream world, it's, we're caught inside feelings and reactions. and perspectives and there's zero choice because there's no conscious awareness realizing, okay, this is just a dream. And this is what it's like when we're moving through our day and lost in thoughts and emotional reactivity. We're not realizing we're lost, we're just in it and our sense of our being shrinks.

We become a small, separate, stuck self without choice. We're in a dream or a trance and we're mistaking it in those moments for reality. Maybe you've had a sense of this, how much of our day we're lost in thoughts in a dream, the past, the future, and we're not really here. And maybe you've also, like Shalvi, intuited how much more awake we can be. So I shared last week that Carl Young wrote about suffering. He said suffering comes from the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche, our experience. And the Buddha said in a similar way,

2,500 years ago plus, whatever's outside of awareness controls us. In others, we get identified with what's not in awareness and then reactive to what's there, keeps us in a trance. We're not inhabiting the fullness of our being. So, friends, this progression of mindfulness it's a training that helps us awaken from the dream. And we're learning to include more and more in a clear, non-judging, awake awareness, which of course then allows us to spend more of our moments living from a wholeness of being where we're accessing our intelligence, our creativity, our love. We're responding not reacting from awake awareness.

So the first step in waking up really is getting familiar with the fact of being in a trance, noticing what it's like. And I find it helpful to think of it kind of metaphorically that we're living inside a home video. And it's a home video that features moi. You know, the star of the home video is me. And this video often has an incessant dialogue. And it just involves all the same. all our concerns about ourselves, what's happening to me, what I'm worried about, how others

are treating me, what I need to get done, and of course it includes those in our circles that are important to me. You know how it is when we're in traffic and we think of the world out there is traffic? We're not the traffic, it's the world out there. Well, it's kind of like that. There's a comic strip, has a man in a bar and he's talking to the bar. tender and he says, you know, I know I'm nothing, but I'm all I can think about. So, not only is our inner dialogue incessant, but our thoughts are quite repetitive. You've probably noticed that.

You know, I read somewhere that we have 60,000 thoughts a day and 98% of them we also had yesterday. And I think it's captured by a cartoon that has a man on a highway and he's driving and he's about to enter a desert. And there's this sign that says, you and your own tedious thoughts, next 200 miles. So the challenges of this ongoing movie in our mind is it's repetitive, it's primarily about ourselves. And then add to that the themes that are often spinning in our mind often make us miserable. You know, try a brief experiment for a moment, if you will, just to lower your gaze or close your eyes.

And I'm going to swipe two different words out of the air. And the first word is trouble. And just let the word trouble be in your mind. Run it through. You might mentally whisper it to yourself. Trouble, trouble. Just notice what it's like to have the word trouble floating around inside. Okay, that's enough of that one.

Take a full breath. Now the next one we're going to pluck out of the air is the word kindness. And just for a moment, let the word kindness move through you. The idea, the thought, kindness. Mentally whisper it. and notice what that's like. Okay, when you'd like, you can open your eyes. So as we begin to check out the thoughts that are moving through us,

we start discovering that different thoughts create different kind of inner atmosphere. And it's an interesting inquiry. What kind of thoughts regularly populate your mind? You know, when we're in the trance of thought, the thoughts create a very real physical experience, an emotional experience. You might have sensed that. And because evolution has us rigged to be vigilant about potential threats, this is the negativity bias, a whole lot of our thoughts are in the category of worry, our judgment, or anxiety

about what's going to happen. so they perpetuate that inner atmosphere of tension and fear. The Buddha taught that whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind. And I find that a really powerful statement, that whatever we're regularly thinking about, that becomes our inclination. Yes, neuroscience, modern neuroscience, says it this way, that neurons at fire together wire together. So our thinking's habitual and what happens is it perpetuates certain emotional

states, the range of weather systems that come up for us. It's interesting if you read about the experience of neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor. She describes how it takes 1.5 minutes for an emotion to move through. 1.5 minutes to move through. Emotions naturally move through. Emotions naturally move through and that's without the fuel of thoughts but once you bring in the fuel of persistent types of thinking it locks us in to that atmosphere that mood anxiety depressive thoughts angry thoughts so we're still talking about the trance or prison of thinking when it's not in awareness because what this means is that incessant thinking traps us in moods or weather systems that can be really unpleasant for long stretches of time.

It's the thinking that perpetuates them. And that's why rather than just having an arising of anxiety or an arising of sadness and having it come and go in that 1.5 minutes, we can lock in for long stretches. There's a little story of a young child says to his mother, Mommy, pretend you're surrounded by ten hungry tigers. What would you do? And she looks at him and says, well, what would I do? What should I do?

And he says, stop pretending. Okay, so we need the capacity to wake up from our thoughts. Let's pause for a moment here and you might reflect a bit about your own experience. You might consider just today what was your home video like, your home movie, just these last hours. How much are you aware that you're lost in thought? How much do you notice when it happens? How much do you have that sense that there's a kind of a self at the center of your thinking?

Can you sense that? repetitive are the thoughts, just to examine your own home movie. We all have them. What's the feeling tone? Do your thoughts arouse a sense of care or interest or possibility? Because certainly some thinking can be really valuable. Are they more the kind of thoughts that are habitual that aren't necessary that might fuel and anxiety or fear, discontent, a sense of separation from others. Just notice. Try not to judge.

Seeing begins real freeing, keeping your eyes closed, your gaze down. You might listen to these words. Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. That's the poet Wu Man. So friends, you can trust that just seeing this, seeing how the mind gets clouded, gets lost in the trance of thinking, it's a major part of waking up, of stepping out of that mental world. There's a wise saying that thoughts are a good servant but not a good master.

And they are a good servant. I mean, thoughts give us a representational map of the world that we need to survive. They help us predict, they help us to respond to their environment. We wouldn't be able to survive or flourish without thinking. It enables us to communicate, to treat diseases, to build buildings, to write poetry, it's part of the spiritual path. You know, contemplation is part of every path. So it can turn us towards love, towards freedom, and towards what's right here. But thoughts don't guide us well when they're in charge. Our mental maps of the world, they're often misleading, and most of us

know our memories faulty. And when we live with these limiting beliefs about ourselves, it's so many of us do, we're in a prison and we project a lot. We misinterpret. One of my favorite stories, and you can sense this is age, technologically age, but it's a good one, or about a couple vacationing in Florida. So he had to go down a day earlier because of work and schedule. They came from a very cold northern environment. So he goes down to Florida, he arrives at the hotel, he sees a computer in his room and decides to send an email to his wife. But he leaves out just one letter in her email address and then sends it off. Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston, a woman has just returned home from her husband's funeral. Now, he had been a

minister and he was called home to glory, you know, after a sudden heart attack. And so she, the widow, decided to check her email expecting messages from friends and relatives. But she read the first message and she fainted. So her son came in and here's what he saw. This is what you saw on the computer screen. To my loving wife. Subject. I've arrived. Date March 20, 2004.

I know you're surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you're allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I've just arrived and been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then. hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. P.S. sure is hot down here. So, we misinterpret things and sometimes in ways that cause a lot of suffering for ourselves and others.

You know, when we believe our thoughts, when they're the master, we're living in a virtual reality. It's a prison. It's a dream. It's a trance and it's shaping our life experience. Another kind of example read an article in the Washington Post years ago about a tiger who lived in the D.C. National Zoo, and her name was Mohini. And she was this royal white tiger. And she was housed in a very small cage. It was 12 by 12. And she just paced back and forth all the time as caged animals do. So at one point, the biologists and staff decided they're going to create a natural environment for Mohi need to give her acres and acres of land with hills and ponds and so on. They're so they're really excited about releasing her into this natural environment, but it was

too late because when they opened the doors of her cage and transported her and led her into the compound, this new compound, she immediately went to one corner of the compound and began walking back and forth in that corner and she paced an area of 12 by 12 till it was worn bearer of grass. And she did that for the rest of her life. And I share that story because there's something tragic that our lives are filled with so much possibility and yet the movie in our mind, those limiting beliefs and thoughts, keep us in prison. Carlos Cassinata in his writings about the shaman Don Juan, he put it this way. He says, we maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A man or woman of knowledge is aware

that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. So the purpose of our training and mindfulness isn't to stop thoughts altogether, to stop talking to ourselves completely. It's to begin to discover the space between our thoughts and to stop taking our thoughts as reality. You find practices in all contemplative traditions aimed at waking us up from the domination of thoughts of the thinking trance. I mean, think of it. The silence of Zen monks Zazin to the Sufis' whirling dance, to the chance of Benedictine mungs or the stillness of the Himalayan yoga, yogi and samadhi are the breath-focused prayer. of Christian mystics, vision quests, drumming, sweat lodges of indigenous peoples.

Mystics through time have found portals into the numinous by quieting the mindsome and stepping beyond the story, loosening the grip of the thinking mind so they could awake into what's vast and timeless and sacred. So the path of healing and spiritual awakening, it's not about learning more or believing more, it's about waking up from the trance of thinking and entering the mystery that words can point to but never touch. It's a mystery that's always already here in the presence beyond conceptual mind. So let's look at how we practice. The first step in bringing awareness to thinking, it's simple but challenging, and that's to be able to, sitting there and purposely recognize the thoughts are happening when they're happening.

So in a moment of mindfulness, a fullness of awareness, we become aware of the thoughts or thoughts. We get it. Okay, this is a thought. It's not the reality itself. It's the map, not the territory. I sometimes think of it, like if you're in an airplane and you've flown into a cloud and it looks like the cloud is the whole world, that's like when we're inside a thought. And then when you move through and out again, you sense the sky and the whole space around you.

And the clouds there, it's part of it, but it doesn't define your universe. You're inhabiting a larger space of awareness. And then you can say, oh, this is just a thought. It can be here. But when we're back in reality, it's larger, it's more true. I notice when people begin meditation, especially when they've come to meditation retreats, perhaps the biggest breakthrough that people report is, I don't have to believe my thoughts. Or another language for it is, I realize I'm not my thoughts.

There's incredible power when we begin to bring awareness to thinking, that we include thinking in the field of awareness. So I'd like to practice a little exercise that helps build that strength. So take a moment again, if you will, to come into stillness, maybe take a few full breaths. You might close your eyes or lower your gaze. And just take a moment to feel the posture you're in from the inside out so you can feel the sensations of aliveness inside you. Feel the sensations of breathing, the movement of your breath. You might be aware of the sounds around you so your senses are awake right here. Now we'll practice mindfulness of thoughts by imagining that you're a cat and you're sitting right outside a mouse hole and you're bringing great

interest to the appearance of any mouse that might dare to poke its head out or even more come racing out so that whenever a thought arises, that's the mouse, you're going to notice it quite fully. So beginning, thoughts may might appear as words or as pictures. Your only job, this next minute or so, is to be fully like that cat, fully attentive to when the thoughts arise. And when you hear the bill again, you're going to begin to count the thoughts. When you notice them, count them. You don't have to count the counting. Just count the thoughts. Okay. Okay, so we spent about a minute or minute and a half, some of you might have noticed you just had a few thoughts. Some had 20 thoughts,

maybe some 30, 30 plus. Now for some of you, it might have been that because you were purposely paying attention, less thoughts came up. And for others, it might have been the opposite. Because you were paying more attention, you noticed more thoughts. So some of you might have had less thoughts, but there were longer thoughts. It's hard to say, but what's interesting is that you can begin to notice, oh, a thought is happening. And that's the beginning of real freedom. We begin to sense as we start noticing thoughts, well, what exactly are they? Some of you might have noticed them as words. You might hear a background like voice in the background speaking, like little sound bites. For others, they may appear as pictures.

And if there were pictures, it might have been a still shot or maybe a series of still shots or maybe a fluid kind of movie, more like that home video that I was talking about. Some of you might have noticed, or as you continue to practice, might start noticing, that the thoughts are body-based, that there's a real kinesthetic feeling with them. Some of you might have known as real sneaky ones, like the ones that said, hmm, there haven't been any thoughts yet, are, hey, it's getting quieter in here. And some of them might have been more emotionally tangly like, I'm not doing this right. The value, and this is a continual process, is that as we become aware of thoughts, we start seeing what's sometimes called the waterfall,

which is that there's an endless stream of thoughts, commentary, memories, plans, judgments, and especially for those of you that are brand new, if you're starting fresh in meditation, that can be discouraging. It's like how will I ever be awake if I'm always lost in this waterfall? I've seen many new meditators judge themselves and come to the conclusion of, I'm not cut out for this because I have a really busy mind. I'm just not doing it right. And so it just becomes another project we've taken on that we feel a sense of failure in.

So I want to emphasize right here that having a lot of thoughts is not your own personal pathology. You know, our mind secrete thoughts like the body secretes enzyme. It's nature. It's part of our evolutionary design to be thinking a lot. And it's part of our impact as a species for better and for worse. as we know. Mostly, it's just not our fault. We're rigged to scan for danger. When it's stressful, when the world's stressful, that picks up pace. We have a default network in our brain where if we're not occupied with a formal task, our brain automatically starts scanning the

past and the future to keep us oriented in time and orienting us in our narrative of self to stabilize us. So what happens when we meditate? We don't have a project. So the default network kicks in and we start, the brain just starts scanning for things. The good news is this, that we have the capacity to be, it's called metacognition, to begin to go meta to that and realize, okay, thinking is happening and to let go. To relax open from the grip of the thinking and be, like opening from the cloud and becoming the sky of awareness, so we're relating to the thought,

not from it. This is from Ajun Samado. He says, the practice of letting go is very effective for minds obsessed by compulsive thinking. You simplify your meditation practice down to just two words, letting go. Rather than trying to develop this practice and then develop that and achieve this and go into that and understand this and read the sutas and study the Abidama and then learn Polly and Sanskrit and then the Maja Makaya and the Prajana Paramita get ordinations in Hinnayana, Mahayana and Vadriana, write books and become a world-renowned authority on Buddhism. Instead of becoming the world's expert on Buddhism and being invited to great international conferences, just let go, let go, let go.

I did nothing but this for about two years. Every time I tried to understand or figure things out, I'd say, let go, let go, until the desire would fade out. So I'm making it very simple for you to save you from getting caught in incredible amounts of suffering. There's nothing more sorrowful than having to attend international Buddhist conferences. Letting go. Letting go is not pushing away, it's not judging the thoughts, is simply recognizing and relaxing

the grip, reopening the attention to our full sensory presence. It's moving from virtual to reality. The moments that you are recognizing and waking up out of a thought are pivotal moments on the spiritual path, pivotal moments in this training. They're full with potential. Because when you notice the thought, you can either feed the old habits of judging how you're doing, thinking that something bad was happening and trying to control your mind, are you can notice the thought, to relax open, and have a new way of being, see it a whole new way of being that's filled with friendliness and curiosity. Ah, so what's reality like right now?

Here's a short poem from the poet Kaviri There is a monkey in my mind swinging on a trapeze reaching back to the past or leaning into the future never standing still Sometimes I want to kill that monkey Should it square between the eyes So I won't have to think anymore or feel the pain of worry

But today I thanked her And she jumped down straight into my lap trapeze still swinging as we sat still. So relating wisely to thoughts, to see the movie in the mind, and if it's not useful, not serving, let go, come back to living presence. Okay, I want to tell you where it becomes difficult and then we're going to practice some more. The challenge is that sometimes we become aware of thinking. It's one of the top ten tunes. and they can be incredibly sticky and addictive. Over and over, they keep coming up.

And we know this worry's not serving or we've rehearsed what we're going to say 50 times or we're running the litany of blame towards our partner or teen and really sticky. The most sticky is I'm screwing up. I'm screwing up everything in my life. I'm taking too much space up on the planet. So the sticky thoughts come.

It's very difficult to open up our, hands and just let go of the grip. So when sticky thoughts come, here's how we work with it. First, as you practice, practice recognizing the thoughts that aren't so sticky. So you just get the knack of relaxing, open the grip and coming back to the present moment because that itself is a muscle that will really help you. Have a home base that you're coming back to, the breath or sounds or sensations in the whole body, so you really arrive in sensory presence so you know you're here. And of course, the mind will drift again. So simply honor this process of sitting, having an anchor, drifting, and coming back.

That does build a muscle. And then, when the charge ones come, first of all, you can inwardly note, name the kind of thought, the repeating harsh self-judgment or the fear of thoughts or the angry thoughts. And then you come back into presence, but rather than going to your home base, first check the body where you're feeling feelings because underneath charged thoughts, there's a clench of feeling in the body. And if you don't come back to the roots under the thought, you'll just immediately pop back into the thinking again.

So it's only by coming to the roots where you feel it in the body and breathing with that and opening and letting that feeling unfolds some that you actually start undoing the roots of the thought and have more of a sense strength and stability in your presence. By way of example, I was doing a webinar last month and during the time where we sometimes do question, response, and also I work with people, work with a young woman who meditates and she may be losing her job due to federal budget cuts. So her mind is very much caught in anxious spinning. She sits down to meditate and all she can do is get caught in the what-ifs. And it affects her time with her children when she's not meditating with them. She's still spinning

in thought and she knows it's not helping. So we practice some, naming the thought, Okay, anxious thinking, anxious thinking. Coming into the body not back to the breath but just to that clutch in her heart and she would kind of put her hand on her heart to breathe with what's there. Because once we bring presence to what's there, that presence allows it to soften some or to move through. She tried responding to the feeling by just simply saying thank you for trying to protect me.

I'm okay right now. We did a few rounds of it and she found that when she came into the fear in her body, she wasn't so caught in the anxiety thoughts, there was more space. And her assignment was really to explore that through the day, that she could notice the anxious spinning, go, okay, anxious thinking, come to the body where she felt it, thank you for trying to protect me, breathe with it, and then move on. What happens when we do this is that we basically are cultivating a presence that is bigger than the thinking and the fear.

Give you another example of a man who's, he works for an environmental organization that may be losing its non-profit status. A lot of angry thoughts, circling. and when we practice together, you know, okay, noticing the angry thought, come into the body and what he found in the body was a real, his throat clutch because it's kind of like he wants to speak out and there's not much he can say, fear, and then as he stayed with it, he could feel just this caring like that he's been dedicated for 30 years to the work, to environmental work and sensing the obstacles that they're facing and just this care. So breathing with that and that gave him more space.

It gave him a pathway to work with the angry thoughts. I can share for me personally this week the power, mindfulness of thinking when about six days ago I twisted to pick up my new puppy, which is kind of right over there on the floor. And I had stuff on another hand and I get back spasms and it was just an utterly klutzy, unnecessary thing to do. I just could have made one more extra trip upstairs but I did it. So first the cycling thoughts were, I can't believe I did that, I can't believe I did that,

because it's just like I just was calling myself stupid. it. And then, okay, mindful of thinking, come into the body, breathe, breathe. And then as I was, I couldn't sit right away, I mean that day, couldn't sit for two days. I had to meditate lying down. But I'd still feel pain and when I'd feel pain, it would go right into anxiety thinking about what am I not going to be able to do and, you know, what do I have to plan around and so on. And again, it was, okay, see the thinking, come back to the body, feel the clench of fear, offer some kindness. I had a pathway back so I wasn't spinning the thoughts and fueling more anxiety. Okay, so I'm trying to give you examples because it's so helpful

to build this muscle of recognizing the thinking and coming back to the body, letting go, coming back to the breath or of its charge to where you feel the experience in your body. It gives you, it takes you out of the trance and into a larger reality that has more kindness, more intelligence, and more space for what's going on. What you practice will get stronger. Over time, you do build this capacity to wake up from the thoughts and the beliefs that are limiting, to wake up into a space of much more healing and perspective. The Christian fathers put it this way. They say, it takes a cup of understanding, a barrel of lug,

and an ocean of patience. Bring yourself back to the point quite gently. And even if you do nothing during the whole of your time of meditating, but bring your heart back a thousand times, though it went away every time you brought it back, your time would be well employed. It's okay if much of our time were drifting and coming back to gifts that come directly from this mindfulness of thought. One of them, you're taking back your life. I still think of Shalvi and her, you know, thinking what happens if during the day we're dreaming, couldn't we be that much more awake? So many life moments are lost to being in a virtual reality, the future, the past, judging, worrying, thoughts that diminish us, thoughts that separate us from each other, thoughts that keep us in

fear. Learning to wake up from the trance of thinking gives us back our life. We can start to choose what thoughts we want to be with and pay attention to the thoughts that serve, the thoughts that bring up kindness, the thoughts that serve creativity, the thoughts that help us reconnect with each other. and when we come back into our senses out of the thoughts, we're in the one place that we can really take in beauty, mystery, aliveness, love, doesn't happen when we're lost in thought. We have to be here. So that's the first gift. We get our lives back.

The second gift is that waking up out of the trance of thinking brings a profound wisdom and spiritual awakening. And I don't always include this as much in an intro series, but each of us is a spiritual being waking up, and it's a powerful portal. One of my favorite stories is of children in a second grade art class and all the children are drawing whatever they're wanting to be drawing, and the teacher sees one little girl who's really seems completely immersed in it. So she stands behind her and watches a bit and then she asks her what she's drawing and the little girl says, I'm drawing God. And the teacher kind of chuckles and says, well, hon, nobody really knows what God looks like. Without skipping a beat, without even looking up, she says, they will in a

moment. And I love that. That beyond this realm of thinking, we can tune into and we can experience something vast, something mysterious. I think of John O'Donohue who says we're so busy managing our life that we forget this great mystery we're involved in. And the primary way we manage? The mental control tower, planning, worrying, figuring, creating a map that will predict so we can make it through. Thoughts create a map of reality. But wisdom are arises as we directly, intimately experience the terrain itself. I mean, consider a map of your neighborhood and the difference between that map, that

image, and the actual living, breathing trees and squirrels and humans and flowers and earth and sky and weather, the whole living changing process that we call neighborhood. The terrain, the living truth is only accessible, can only be experienced when we're not lost in the map, when we're not lost in the stories and the images and the sound bites. One of the teachers no longer alive that has most touched me is three Narcadatta. He writes this, The real world is beyond our thoughts and ideas. We see it through the net of our desires.

divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It's not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes. Every mystical tradition at its core trains the mind to become still enough to see beyond thoughts. When we quiet the inner chatter, reality reveals itself as sacred and alive and whole. being mindful of thoughts enables us to become aware of awareness itself. Here's a way to think about it. One teacher was teaching and had a big piece of poster paper and drew a V on it and says,

what is this? And most of the students answered, well, it's a bird. And his response was, no, it's the sky with a bird flying through it. We fixate on thoughts, the mental net of ideas and concepts, we miss the sky of awareness, this great reality that permeates all existence. So as we become mindful of thoughts, aware of the fact of thinking, we can start discovering the space between thoughts, around thoughts, prior to thoughts, this awake space, this light of awareness that shines through.

true home. Again, Srinar Sargadatta, when the mind is momentarily free from its preoccupations, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light and love you have never known and yet you recognize it at once as your own true nature. Okay, we're going to end with a short practice of being mindful of thoughts. And I invite you to find a comfortable way of sitting so you're alert and at ease. Let your body become still, turn the attention inward. You might close your eyes or lower the gaze. Let the gentle movement of the breath, the inflow and the outflow help to gather your attention. and as you feel the breath you might be scanning the body to sense if there's anything that wants to let go.

Perhaps with the out breath, just letting go of tension wherever you notice it. Now let your attention rest fully in your chosen anchor or home base and it might be the movement of the breath. For some it might be feeling this whole body breathing, might be sound. Let there be some home. base. This is where you can return to when the mind inevitably gets drawn into thoughts. Let your intention be to notice thoughts. Let your intention to be to be in this sensory awake reality. And then when you do notice the mind is drifted to gently reopen the attention so you relax back to the aliveness that's here,

noticing again and again where the attention is. And if the mind is often thoughts, sound bites, images, remembering, planning, to gently notice that and sense what it means to relax open. So you're shifting from the cloud to the sky, coming back into the sensory aliveness of the moment. sounds, sensations in the body, resting then in your home base, the in flow and outflow of the breath.

If you sense the thought is charged, that it has emotional roots, then come back not to the home base, but to those roots, breathing and feeling what's underneath the thought, bringing a kindness and presence to what's there. And when you sense there's some easing up, some shift, when that presence has some space to it, then gently back to the home base. And next time you wake up from a thought, notice the difference between being inside it

and including it in mindfulness, being back here again. See if you can sense the vividness and immediacy of presence, compared to the virtual reality. These next moments you might sense if you can notice the space between thoughts. When the mind is momentarily free from its preoccupations,

it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet and stay in it, you find that it is permeated with a light in love you have never known and yet you recognize it at once as your own true nature. opening your eyes if they're closed. Thank you, friends, for being part of this journey.

Really a deep journey into the foundations of mindfulness practice, really cultivating heart presence. Next week, our last week, we'll explore how to bring these practices alive in our daily life, so I'll look forward to seeing you then. Blessings.