Tara Brach - Introduction to Mindfulness: Part 2 - The Power of Heart Presence

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

NOTE - Tara offers a meditation you can use as a practice during this introduction series: Mindfulness Meditation—Intimacy with our Inner Life. Whether you are new to meditation or an experienced practitioner, the foundational teachings of mindfulness—heart presence—offer a timeless medicine for navigating these challenging times. This fresh introductory series invites you to bring alive ancient practices in ways that are directly relevant to the emotions and reactivity arising in today's world. You'll be guided to discover an inner refuge—a way to meet your personal life and our collective world with greater presence and wisdom, courage and love. In this session, we explore how to awaken mindful awareness of sensations—the first foundation of mindfulness and the ground of all experience. Everything we cherish—love, wisdom, wonder, creativity—arises from embodied presence. To truly receive the gifts of the path, we need to be here: awake, present, and intimate with the living currents of sensation.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste, greetings friends. Thank you for being here. So, here we are. This is the second week and a five-week introduction to mindfulness, meeting our life with a present heart. And I shared last week I'm offering this kind of back-to-basics in mindfulness training. because so many, myself include are sensing that the global crises of these times, they're calling on us to find an inner refuge of calm, of clarity, of open-heartedness.

You might remember that well-known teaching from Tikna Han about the crowded refugee boats. If even one person on the boat stayed calm, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive. And then he says, please, may you be that person. So we need inner calm and steadiness so we can respond to this world with our full courage and intelligence. And here's the thing. The more stress there is, you know, the more overwhelmed, the more fear, anger, heartbreak, the more we need the pathway of mindfulness for homecoming.

I find it helpful to imagine this, to imagine we emerge into these forms and develop the spacesuit to help us navigate and survive difficult environments. And the spacesuit is our ego and our computing, predicting brain and our personality and our defenses, and we need it. And the more stress, the more spacesuit activation. You can sense the mental computer whirring along and just all the activities of defending and protecting and figuring. And we're often on autopilot just to get through the day.

The point is the spacesuit self goes on overtime. And there's a trance. There's a trance of being the spacesuit, forgetting who we really are. I mean, forgetting the consciousness that's here looking out through these eyes. that consciousness that takes in beauty, forgetting that creative life force, the prana that animates us, forgetting love, forgetting this inner space of stillness and calm. Then we look at others, and if we're identified with our space suit, that's what we see in others. We see their ego. We forget spirit. So we have left home in those moments. We need a pathway of homecoming.

And what we're doing in this program is exploring the homecoming to heart and spirit, the pathway of tending to what are called the foundations of mindfulness, which are the body and sensations, which are feelings and emotions, mindfulness of thoughts, mindfulness of awareness itself. And the understanding is that the more that's included in awareness in mindfulness, the more we become the ocean that can include the waves but not be tossed around by them. So last week we did mindfulness of the breath and it kind of shows us this beautiful bridge from virtual conceptual reality of the space suit to living reality. And if you missed,

I invite you to check it out. And this week, it's mindfulness of the body. The feel of sensation, which includes the breath. And there's a very common misunderstanding about meditation, about the spiritual path, really, that in some ways we're practicing to transcend the body, to transcend our earthiness and have these blissful experiences of rainbow light-filled states. Now, the path leads us to what's beyond this embodied being. and while out-of-body experiences are interesting and are valuable, it's actually through embodiment, through right in this moment being aware of the aliveness that's here that we awaken from trance,

that we have a portal to love and to natural wisdom. And I remember the first time I really became conscious of this. I've shared at different times that in college I was very involved with political activism, kind of leftist activism, and we'd have meetings and rallies. And there was a good amount of, I mean, there's a lot of passion, but also a lot of us of them and stride and see and anger. Then I go to my weekly yoga class and, you know, it would be a very different experience. and I remember one evening after class as it was springtime walking in the fruit trees

and just stopping, smelling and feeling the air, and realized that my body and my mind were in the same place at the same time. Same place, same time. And there was just this vibratory aliveness and presence and sense. of oneness and open-heartedness. And when thoughts came, the thought was mostly, this is what the world needs to transform. The love, the wisdom that arises from this living presence.

And the reality is, intuition, true intelligence, wisdom, it doesn't arise from thinking. It's from realizing our belonging to the alive, that's here, to the natural world, to awareness. There's a story about Mullah Nasrudeen. He's a Sufi saint, and he's also a comic figure too. So he was resting under the shade of a tall and luscious walnut tree. And as he sat there daydreaming, he noticed huge pumpkins growing on delicate vines,

and they were snaking across the ground. And then he looked up and squinted to see the tiny walnuts growing. on this magnificent tree. And he said, how strange Mother Nature is, you know, to make these plump pumpkins grow on spindly vines while the little walnuts have their own impressive tree. And just then a walnut fell from above and landed with the tuk, you know, on Mullah Nazrudin's head. And the mullah rubbed his sore head and picked up the fallen walnut and looked high up towards the branches of the tree and then he looked over thankfully at the swollen pumpkins growing safely on the ground and he said oh mother nature you are wise I love the stories about it's so much

wisdom and good humanness in it there's a reason that so many of us take refuge in nature and it's because we are nature. We feel like we're coming home, coming home to the elements, coming home to stardust. And when we relax into that naturalness, there's a real sense of peace and ease. We kind of open out of that spacesuit ego self, you know, the trance, and we regain some access to trust, to wisdom, to love, to what arises when we feel true belonging. So what could happen, weather systems like anger and fear might arise. But when there's a sense of homecoming, when we're resting in a larger belonging, we can sense how those emotions, those weather systems have an intelligence, we can let them guide us. But we're resting

in a larger space of perspective and presence. So, homecoming to the aliveness, to the sense of belonging to this natural world gives us freedom. And here's what's important is it's not so easy because most of us are habitually disembodied. We move through a lot of our day not really awake in our bodies and senses. and instead we're navigating the spacesuit self from a mental control tower. There's one meditation master who was asked to describe the world, and he said, Lost in Thought. You know, and we start meditating, and this is immediately what we find.

We find this incessant, you know, movement of thought coming through. And it's encountered not just by new meditators. I mean, one friend shared, he said something like after 20 years of practice, I finally dropped into my body. And it said, how nice of you to visit? So you might just check in for a moment. Let's take a pause here and look back through the last few hours, perhaps, through today. And just notice how many moments was there a sense of feeling the aliveness of sensations in your body, having your senses awake, listening to sound, receiving the sensations and feelings

of the moment, having some sense of intimacy with life. And as you review, you might also sense how much instead was it really planning and worrying and figuring and judging or reacting? How many moments were you in that spacesuit self? The mental computer. or whizzing along. With whatever you're noticing, let this moment be an opportunity to pause and return. Just take a few full breaths. Let your shoulders relax back and down some. Feel your hands.

Chest open, belly soft. Feel your feet. Right here. and just notice the difference between this heerness, it's aliveness in this moment, and any thought, any concept, any idea. Just the vividness, the immediacy. The poet Kabir says, inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains.

the God who my love is inside. So as you continue to listen to what follows, you might listen with maybe 20% of your attention and let 80% be grounded in the awareness of body and sensation. Just let it be an experiment. Notice what happens. I pretty much can guarantee you you won't miss anything. So embodiment, feeling the aliveness of,

our bodies, it's radical. You know, it's an essential grounds for responding to an increasingly insane world. If we want to rebel against the inhumanity and cruelty and delusions that are so pervasive right now, we need a pathway back to our body and our heart and our awareness, to the source of true power. D.H. Lawrence writes this. He says, when we get get out of the glass bottles of our ego, and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright, but things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Ool, unlying life, will rush in, and passion will make our bodies taught with power. We shall stamp our feet with new power and

old things will fall down, we shall laugh and institutions will curl up like burnt paper. You know, we really, you can kind of sense we need to return to the source, come home to our earthy aliveness, to the living truth of this body. And it's important to recognize the collective challenge of doing this so that we don't run smack into this habit of being disembod and in some way take it personally. We're in a culture that fosters disconnection, in a culture that seeks to dominate and exploit the earth, which disconnects us from the earth,

to dominate non-human animals, to dominate fellow humans of difference, subjugate females. So society conditions us. It conditions us to habitually control, objectify, and judge our own bodies. That distances us. We control sensations. We get addicted to drugs and overconsuming, distracting, to numbing.

And there's a cartoon I saw of a woman or husband in the living room and they're talking and he's saying, you know, if I ever get into a vegetative state, please pull the plug. at which point she reaches over and pulls the plug from the TV set. We can see it though. We leave our bodies. Our society right now is so spiking with fear. And what that means is the tendencies to control and to get disembodied are actually on overdrive. Our collective survival brain is trying to protect and it's keeping us in fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

they're all contractions from full embodied presence. They all disconnect us. And you can see how this plays out in the chronic pressures to be productive, to speed around, to do more, and the sense of failure underneath that. And I can sense in myself, when I'm anxious about the to-do list, I'm not embodied. I'm being run by the spacesuit self and that mental computer.

We can see it with the fire hose of news, how it agitates and tightens our system, takes us away from presence, from a full body presence. And in a big way, this disconnection is amplified through addiction to screens in the digital world. And I think of this as this kind of critical appendage to the spacesuit self, our screens. Because when we're looking in a screen, you know, we're in the mental control tower and we're cut off from the wholeness of our living being. You might check it out periodically. Just to pause when you're online and in the midst of things and sense,

okay, am I awake in my body right now? What does my heart feel like? How much of a sense of that sea of awareness, that openness. And we start noticing virtual reality really is virtual. There's a real difference between our experience when we're looking in a screen and when we come back and take those full breaths and feel the body, this living body breathing, and hear the sounds and take in the sights and there's a sense of presence.

So here we are, we're in this entranced disembodied society, and of course it's not just a recent challenge. I mean in 1905, James Joyce wrote these words. He said, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. This is universal. When we're anxious and fearful, when there's a sense that something's missing or something's wrong, we humans are conditioned to disconnect from an embodied presence and go into a mental control tower to try to deal with the fear and the wanting.

And we consider this, that when we encounter unpleasantness, we contract a stomach ache and insect bite. fatigue, or we have an anxious thought, we contract. It's like a sea an enemy, all creatures. If there's unpleasantness or some sense of danger, we contract. And when it's pleasant, we also contract in a certain way, a pleasant sensation or taste object because there's some form usually of grasping for more. You think of our addiction to being on our screens, it's dopamine, we're grasping for

more, we're afraid of missing out. in any moment of grasping, any moment of resisting, we're disconnected from embodied presence, from wholeness. So, I'm beginning this way because the awareness of body sensations, including our breath, it's considered the first foundation of mindfulness as essential for true presence and freedom. and if we start investigating and gets very interesting, we'd start discovering that everything we experience, all emotions, all thoughts, all behaviors have a substrata, a physical sensation so that if you're lashing out your partner for not doing their share of the work,

underneath that are some unpleasant sensations driving the behavior. or if you're attracted to someone, you're obsessing about ways to connect, underneath that are pleasant sensations driving the behavior. And if we find that the sensations are not included in presence, that we're not mindful of them, we're actually living in an unconscious kind of waterfall of reactivity. We're disconnected from our full intelligence and heart. We're not actually able to make choices. You've heard the phrase, our issues are in our tissues.

There's no healing, no freedom without re-inhabiting the body. The Buddha taught that embodied awareness cut through the trance of grasping and fear. It helps undo or wake us up from the spacesuit cell, and it leads to the full fruits of the path, aliveness, living compassion, intuitive wisdom, freedom. And without homecoming to this living body, we can't experience spontaneity or joy. I love a story from Maurice Sendak, the author, he says, once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it, I loved it. I answer all my children's letters, sometimes very hastily, but this one I lingers.

over. I sent him a card and drew a picture of a wild thing on it. I wrote, Dear Jim, I loved your card. Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, Jim loved your card so much he ate it. That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it. He loved it. He ate it. So take a moment, friends, and just conceiving. consider in your own life, perhaps the times that stand out as most precious or valuable or meaningful, and sense what's going on during those moments. What's going on in the moments when you're really experiencing beauty or feeling love,

are experiencing humor, our wonder, or some sense of sacredness? we have to be here for it. We have to be awake in this living body. As one Zen poet writes, to receive the love letter sent by the wind and the rain, by the blossoms and the moon. We have to be here. So our path is learning the way home to the temple of our senses, to the aliveness of body. It's really shifting from a mental world to aliveness. I often think of John O'Donohue who writes that our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. So I'd like to do a short practice together that explores this path of homecoming,

feeling the aliveness of the body. And you might find a way of sitting or a posture that allows you to feel both upright alert, also at ease. And I'd like to invite you to take your hand and bring it in front of you and take a look at it. Okay, look at your hand, turn it around, and for these next few moments,

just notice what your hand looks like visually to you. And notice whatever thoughts come up about your hand's functions, whatever history you have with your hand or feelings about your hand. You might even mentally whisper the word hand. So seeing your hand, thinking about your hand, keeping your arm up, close your eyes, and just begin gently moving your hand back and forth in front of you.

So you're not seeing it anymore, but you're feeling it. And feeling the sensations of moving through space. Feel the sensations within the sense. sensations. Just aware of the aliveness that's here. You might even pause the movement and just feeling from the inside out, sensing, is there any shape or boundary to the aliveness? Let yourself sense the difference between any idea of hand and these direct sensations, the immediacy of the experience sits right here. And then allow yourself to gently lower your hand and just rest. As a cup is filled with water, this whole body is filled with awareness.

You can bring the same quality of inside-out attention to the whole body. You might feel the length and weight and volume of the arms. And then sense from the inside out so that a liveliness that's in the hands can spread through the arms, sense it as a vibrating aliveness, to let your shoulders fall away from the neck, and then feel the inside of the shoulders. Inside out, you might imagine a melting of ice to water and then water to gas. And sense the sensations, the inside out of the shoulders. Let your chest be open and let this next breath be received in a softening belly, this breath. And now this one, and again. And since the whole torso now

filled with awareness and aliveness, belly soft, the aliveness spreading, moving, you might sense the legs, the length and the volume of the legs, and just feel them from the inside out. Might be aware of the pressure and warmth where your feet are and feeling them from the inside out. and then widening the lens of attention to include the whole body now, simultaneously sensing this body as a field of sensation, let everything be just as it is, sense the possibility of resting in a vast, open sea of awareness,

letting this play of sensations, this changing dance of sensations move through, not controlling or opposing anything, truly letting life live through you. And notice if it's possible as you open your eyes or bring your attention to what comes, if you can sustain that sense of this living field of sensation. Okay. So now I'd like to explore the two major challenges to practicing this kind of embodied presence.

and one of them is that it's difficult to feel sensations for some people. And the other one is that for some people they feel the sensations quite strongly and often they're unpleasant and it's difficult to stay with them. Why would I want to spend time with unpleasantness? Okay, so the first one, hard to feel sensations, which is as we've been discussing we have the habit of being disembodied and not feeling much. Again, this is why I talked about our culture because it's not personal, but it's amplified when in our personal lives, if early on we felt unsafe, if there was trauma, or if we belong

to a social group that's being oppressed or persecuted or has through past generations, there's fear. And that contraction has us leave our body. We dissociate to protect ourselves. And it's a universal conditioning. It's not our fault that we leave our body. It's really not our fault. So if you've tried and practiced to be here and present and feel the aliveness and instead

there's numbness or dullness, it's really natural. And there are ways that you can ease back in. And the key is to know that it's a relaxing back in with curiosity, with kindness, that actually will serve you. and the other thing is that keep remembering there's a good reason that we habitually pulled our attention away from our body and it's avoiding vulnerability so reentry takes patience compassion and understanding so i find it's helpful to start as you're reentering and exploring and training to feel life directly start with the parts of your body that are

most easy to feel. So for many people, it's the hands, the sensations and the liveliness in the hands, or it might be the feet, but it might also be other parts of the body. Start where you can feel sensations and then let the feelings extend out from those areas. If it's helpful, you can practice tightening and softening muscles because that helps to bring attention to certain parts of the body where you might otherwise not be able to feel sensations. There's an important teaching that where attention goes, energy flows. So the more attention you pay to certain parts of the body, the more the energy will start flowing.

You can also use light touch, hand on your belly, other parts of your body to help guide attention to the interior. Many people who feel like they're quite habitually disembodied find the guided body scans as one of the most valuable meditation practices, and I have many of them on my website, and you can find them offered by many teachers. As you do a body scan, it's really useful to keep asking the question, what does this feel like from the inside out? that helps invite the sensations forward.

Just remember that it's not, mindfulness of sensations, not observing from a distance, is very intimate, engaged. It's also receptive, like listening. You're experiencing and allowing the life of sensations to move through and play as they are. Okay, so if you don't feel much, the attitude is patience, inviting the aliveness to come forward. curious, experiencing from the inside out. Okay, if your challenge instead is, let's say you're feeling a lot of acute or chronic discomfort and you don't like it, just to know we are rigged, our nervous systems are rigged not to like

unpleasantness. So we naturally have this tendency to judge what's happening as bad and pull back. and a great mindfulness hack when this is happening is to mentally whisper unpleasant. Just name it. Oh, this is unpleasant. Don't like. You don't even have to say I don't like. You don't have to bring an eye in there.

Just say unpleasant. Don't like. And right away, the power of noting what's true gives more space. It gives us more of a witnessing presence. If the discomfort is strong, take some time first. with establishing presence with your home base. It might be the breath or sounds, might be a combo of both. You want to have a home base that's neutral or pleasant to establish the presence and then gently touch into the discomfort. Get curious and say, well, what happens if I stay a little,

just five to ten seconds? We can do that. And then breathe with it, relax with it, be curious what it's like and then go back to your home base, feel the breath again, listen to sounds. And again, you might return and maybe lengthen if possible. When you're in contact with the unpleasantness, seek to notice what it's really like and you might name the sensations. Again, that gives a little more space to the presence. This is sharp. This is stinging. This is hot. This is burning, this is tingling, aching. Notice if there's change, how the experience changes, how it shifts in location or quality. We think it's solid but it's not.

And see if you can sense the space around it and even interior to where there's discomfort. Here's the thing. if you can get familiar with feeling unpleasantness and letting it be okay, letting it unfold in a space of presence, this is where the freedom is. This is where you get that sense of being the ocean that can be with the waves. For those of you who like research, there's a really interesting study that John Kappitz did, you know, that really has this inquiry of YB with pain, he took two randomized groups and there was a tourniquet around the bicep and the arm placed in ice water so there was no more blood flow.

The arm gets painful very fast. And then he measured how long you could keep your arm in the water as a function of two different strategies and one strategy was distraction. How long could you keep it in there if you distracted yourself and thought about other things and tuned out the pain? And then the other strategy, mindfulness. How long could you stay in if you paid attention to the sensations, really moving into them, being with them as non-judgmentally as possible, just letting them be there? Well, in the early minutes of staying in the ice water,

distraction worked better. There was less awareness of discomfort because you're telling yourself a story. but after the arm is in cold water for a while, mindfulness becomes more powerful than distraction for tolerating pain because with distraction alone, once it breaks down and doesn't work, you've got nothing, you're just fighting pain. But with mindfulness, when you rest in awareness, you find there is a peace and a sense of balance even when the waves of pain arise. That is the power of mindfulness.

Now, I want to say that for some, you might be wondering, yeah, but what if the pain just feels too much and that you can't find any balance and so on? It's not always wise to try to stay. And I can say from my own experience, there are certain kinds of sickness, stomachache, nausea, back spasm that it just felt like too much and that it was exhausting or overwhelming to try to stay and it's no longer a wise or compassionate practice so instead you might need to fully shift your attention either to your anchor home base or else to something else take a walk have some tea you know take medicine if you need it whatever it is to take care of yourself so what I'm

trying to say is this is not a formula like thou shalt always be present with unpleasantness. But having said that, it's important to recognize we're so programmed to pull away from unpleasantness that there's an amazing power and freedom that comes when we learn to lean in a little. And what's our motivation? You know, I often think of Carlin who said, I tell myself no pain, no pain. But actually, Actually, chronically avoiding discomfort in the body creates more suffering. And I want to say that again because most of us do it and it's important to see that it's creating more suffering when we are chronically avoiding the discomfort in our body, finding

ways to distract ourselves or to remove our attention, it creates more suffering. And one of the reasons is that it takes energy to resist what's here so we get tired. And some people describe chronic fatigue and often it's because we're chronically pushing away the experience in the body. There are many causes for chronic fatigue but that's one of them. Another outcome from resisting is that it actually creates more unpleasantness. And if you think of birthing and the wisdom of not contracting against contractions, letting the contraction roll through, it's the same with other unpleasantness.

and tensions in the body to not tense against it because that creates a secondary level of pain or suffering. The third problem that comes when we resist what's unpleasant is that our psyche still knows something's there and that we're pushing it away. So there's a chronic sense of apprehension. Some of you might know that sense of feeling that around the corner something's going to happen that's too much to handle. There's a sense that we're pushing away something and it's too much. You know, we may not be aware in the moment of what we're pushing away, but the psyche still

knows. So there's kind of a background of free-floating anxiety or apprehension. The last suffering I'll mention that comes from not being present with what's here, but resisting it, and this is really the most fundamental, is we get identified with the resisting self, with the defending self, the controlling self, the fearful self, and we get contracted in that. So we're more locked in the space suit that's trying to control things and further from a sense of our own wholeness of being and from a sense of openness and a sense of presence. and a sense of love. You can kind of sense that. If we're pushing away pain, we're not going to be resting in something larger. So there's an equation that might be useful for some of you.

It's a kind of a FAA equation for working with pain, which is that pain times resistance equals suffering and pain times no resistance is the path to freedom. That the pain is inevitable, the suffering is optional. And when we learn not to resist unpleasantness, we actually find our way to a very profound sense of freedom. So what I'd like to do is share an illustration of the power of meeting pain and unpleasant sensations with mindfulness. And it just stood out in my memory, so I thought I'd share it with you today. This is of a man who came to the practice of meditation and to awareness training in his mid-40s. And when he came, he had a pretty good degree of stress and pain in his body and in his life.

He had generating dishing his neck and it was causing a lot of discomfort. And by way of history, as a high school student, he had been really athletic. He had pride in the athleticism, you know, football captain and so on. But by the time he got into his late 30s because of work, demands and family stress and so on. He had lost his fitness and gotten heavy. And so he went from a sense of pride to really a sense of an embarrassment about his bodily self. And he had this kind of fight with weight and wasn't feeling like he was who he really wanted to be. So by the time I met him in his 40s with those degenerating discs, it wasn't chronic pain, but it could be

pretty acute and it limited his movement. And so he was living not only with the pain, but with a lot of fears about it worsening and a lot of obsessing on how to relieve it. And he felt betrayed by his body. And I share this because I've run into many, many people as the decades past that have ended up feeling that kind of betrayal and that the body's the opponent. So for him he started letting these practices of mindfulness be a guide on and how to work with sensations, especially during the periods of discomfort with his neck. And the key for him was, how can I be interested in this? Can I bring an interested and gentle attention to how I'm experiencing this?

One of the steps for him was not calling it pain anymore. Instead, he just named the actual kind of sensation that was experiencing. And for him it was heat. He'd name it. He'd allow it to be there. and sometimes pressure, ache, sore, sometimes throbbing, sometimes stabbing. So he just would sit there and just with kind of curiosity of what's it like, okay, soft naming. And each time he'd name what was there, he would just then let it be.

He was like saying yes to it. It's like, okay, this is the reality of the moment. And by yes, I don't mean yes, I like this, but just as actuality. just creating space for it. What he found was that he could really contact and notice what was coming and going with some presence, but it took some time. It took him some weeks of practice. But what he saw was that rather than solid pain, there was this ever-changing constellation

of sensations. And he started finding enough space to let it have. that there wasn't any suffering anymore. In fact, he discovered in the moments of saying yes, just letting it be there, there was space, there was interior space inside the sensations and around the sensations as if they were floating, as if they were floating and morphing in wakeful awareness. Now again, what I'm describing happened over weeks and weeks of practice, but this intention not to call it pain, just as sensitive as sensations, and to stay and to name with curiosity what the sensations were like.

And he described finding that presence with the sensations as a really deep shift in his sense of himself because he went from fighting pain to being the space it was happening in. And I want to say that again because that is the shift. He went from fighting the pain, that's a space suit cell, to being the space it was happening in, and happening of full awareness. And when he described the change over the years, he said, I went from, and I'm going to quote him, I went from my body being an object of pride to being an object of embarrassment,

and it crescendoed into being the enemy, and now this living body is a sacred place of awakening. A sacred place of awakening. on a practical level, the way it affected him was that in the past, whenever he would try to exercise, he'd overdo it and injure himself, and then he'd become inactive. But being mindful of sensations gave him the attunement to gradually strengthen the muscles he needed to regain fitness. He could listen inwardly. So I share the story. I took some time with it because it really shows the power of relating with a mindful awareness of sensations, not resisting.

And the more we're offering a really clear and tender and open attention to the moment, the more we become the ocean that includes the waves. And we can sense when we're the ocean, including the waves, that we're resting in a depth and a stillness that really can touch some peace in the midst. So maybe as you listen, you can feel this as a kind of invitation, to explore letting sensations in the body be a portal, to discover that presence with them and then rest in that presence. And you can trust as you practice mindfulness, you'll start discovering an increased capacity to find that space of awareness and tenderness that includes

what's arising. That is the gift. And a key part of that is the quality of heart. Remember, this is mindfulness is heart presence. And I'll share a favorite story when I heard from Frank Ossestescu, who's the founder of Zen Hospice. He's had a lot of experience accompanying people with pain. So Frank was very close to one man he was accompanying who had stomach cancer and it was very excruciating at times. And the man asked him, he said, Frank, guide me in meditation.

So after beginning, the man said, it's just too painful. it's too painful to be with. Can't be with the pain. And so Frank offered to put his hands on the man's belly. And then the man said, that's a little better, but it still feels like too much to be with. And so Frank moved his hands a little away from the man's belly. And then the man said, it's better, but not there yet. And then he moved his hands even further away from the man's belly.

And so he could really sense the space around. And the man said, oh, that's lovely. And Frank invited him to rest a bit in that space. And the man said, just rest in love. Rest in love. He had found this tender space that had room, space of loving presence. So there was a heart energy there. It was allowed him to feel enough of that sense of the ocean

that he could be with the experience that was there. And what's interesting is from then on, whenever the pain was really strong, he'd use his morphine pump. but that was his mantra, rest in love. Rest in love. He was resting in a larger space that could tolerate and be with what was there. Rest in love. I mean, the great gift of this training we're doing, friends,

is that it changes our relationship with experience. So we start getting that it's not what's happening. It's not the particular ways for the moment. It's how we're relating to it. You know, can we be the ocean holding the waves? It's not that the results of the biopsy are positive or this pain in my neck is really intense or this divorce is happening. Our world is unraveling into tyranny and chaos.

How are we holding the experience? Because the more we meet what's here with embodied presence, with heart presence, the more inner freedom which gives us. us the capacity to respond from that inner strength with our full power. So for the last part of this session, I just want to review the three major gifts of embodied presence. And one of them I've been touching on is that it increases your quotient of aliveness, of energy, vitality. I mean, so many of us feel like we're living on just some of the cylinders that are here. it allows us to really fully connect with this living world.

Especially important in these times because there's such a negativity bias, such grimness. One Indian teacher, Menendraji, was asked why he meditated. His response was, so that when I walk from here to the village each day, I'll notice the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road. So we've become more awake in our bodies and our senses and we have that experience of heart of gratitude that are actually in our body, visceral.

We become more awake and see the colors are brighter and the symphony of sound is so beautiful. The creativity of this universe that can live through us. I love the way Eduardo Galliano puts it. He says, the church says the body is a sin. Science says the body is a machine. advertising says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta. Okay, so one of the gifts is this gift of aliveness.

The second gift is the gift of realizing the nature of reality, truth. You know, if we're resisting the life that's here, if we're grasping after something else, pushing it away, we can't see the truth that's here, and we can't realize who we are. the body lives in the present moment. The body lives in the present moment. And when you're awake and aware in the body,

you can perceive the reality that's here, this ever-changing flow of life. And you can perceive the background, this timeless tender awareness. There's a quality of homecoming to the mystery and peace of our deepest nature. and then when we act in the world, our words, our behaviors, it carries a wisdom or perspective, a power. We can be the one in the boat that helps others find some balance and clarity and courage.

The third gift is love. It's feeling love. Many people doubt their capacity to feel close to others. They doubt their capacity to love. Love's intrinsic. We're made of love. And if we're in the space suit in the mental control tower, you know, 24-7, chronically managing life, controlling life, we're not here to feel it. So this shift from the head to the body allows us to regain access to the tenderness of our heart. Okay, those are three gifts. Love, wisdom, full aliveness. This is from the poet John Seuss. To be a the earth is to know the restlessness of being a seed, the darkness of being planted, the struggle towards light, the pain of growth into the light, the joy of bursting and bearing

fruit, the love of being food for someone, the scattering of your seeds, the decay of the seasons, the mystery of death and the miracle of birth. We'll be closing in a few moments, with a short practice. But first, just a few words on how to bring this home. And this is my weekly pitch for practice that out of love for life, out of love for truth, out of love for love, just sense that practice really builds this muscle of attention. It strengthens our capacity to be with our experience. It's a gift to the soul. So I'm really inviting you on your own to explore some of the practices that are in this course. And I've also want to offer you a 15-minute daily practice

that brings together all the elements we're exploring through the course into one full mindfulness practice. And you can find the link in the talk description. Okay, friends, let's do this final practice now. Again, sense the posture you're in. make sure you're sitting or in a posture that's alert, upright, awake, and also at ease. And you might close your eyes or lower the gaze. And then feel the body's posture from the inside out, making whatever subtle adjustments

allow you to feel most aligned. Take a few full breaths. With each, as you release the breath, just sense of letting go, letting go. of tension, letting go of thoughts, letting go. And as the breath resumes in its natural rhythm, sense the possibility of relaxing with the breath. So you relax with the inflow might feel like a balloon inflating, receiving, yielding, and then with the outflow, letting go again, softening, releasing, collecting the attention with the breath, resting with the breath, letting the breath be a kind of home base and still aware of the breath you might gently scan through the body

and if there's areas of obvious tension or tightness, just invite a softening, a letting go with the out breath, loosening through the shoulders, softening the hands, letting the chest be open and the belly soft so that you can feel in the foreground this gentle movement of the breath and in the background to feel this body is a field of sensation. And now, if you notice any particular area of sensations that become strong, that are calling your attention, you can let go of the breath in the foreground. You might continue to breathe with the experience. But let that constellation of sensations be right here.

Feeling fully, contacting them, saying yes. allowing the life that's here, just as it is. It might grow in intensity, it might decrease. If it's no longer calling the attention, just come back to the breath. And if you find there's an area of sensation that's challenging, particularly intense or unfamiliar, unpleasant, bringing that into the foreground. If it's difficult and unpleasant,

might even note that, unpleasant, not liking. And with some curiosity, begin to name the sensations, what are you noticing? Maybe it's burning or tightness, twisting, pressure, throbbing. Just name and allow. See if you can sense the space that's around the intensity, even interior. Let the sensations float in space. The heart of this training are really two basic questions. that you might ask yourself, what is happening inside me right now? And the others, can I be with this? Can I let this be? You might find some guidance in the words of Ken Kee's. Hokusai says, look carefully.

He says, pay attention, notice. He says, keep looking. Stay curious. He says, there's no end to seeing. He says, look forward to getting old. He says, keep changing. You just get more who you really are. He says, get stuck, accept it, repeat yourself as long as it's interesting. He says, keep doing what you love. He says, keep praying. He says, every one of us is a child. Every one of us is ancient. Every one of us has a body.

He says every one of us is frightened. He says every one of us has to find a way to live with fear. He says everything is alive. Shells, buildings, people, fish, mountains, trees, wood is alive, water is alive. Everything has its own life. Everything lives inside us. He says, live with the world inside you. It matters that you care. It matters that you feel. it matters that you notice it matters that life lives through you contentment is life living through you joy is life living through you satisfaction and strength is life living through you peace is life living through you he says don't be afraid don't be afraid look feel let life take you by the hand, let life live through you. In these final moments, what's it like to let life live through you?

Sensing who you are when life lives through you. Sensing the mystery, the spaciousness, the openness of what's here. And if you'd like to take a few full breaths, if your eyes are closed, open your eyes, please do. Thank you, friends. This week, may you, explore mindful awareness in your moments and may you let this life live through you. Yeah, I'll look forward to being together again next week. Take care.