Tara Brach - Letting Go Into Living and Dying

Episode Date: April 25, 2013

2013-04-24 - Letting Go Into Living and Dying - Our capacity to live and love fully is directly related to our acceptance of change and loss. This talk explores how we avoid the pain of loss, ways of practicing that open us to this changing world, and the gifts of letting go into the flow.

I'd like to begin tonight's talk with a story. It begins this way. Far, far away, in a country now lost in the midst of time, an old king and a queen lived, and their son, a young prince, was proficient in the matters of war, clever and affairs of state, and self-centered, disinterested in people's troubles,

impatient, and headstrong. So the king and queen were worried. The king was old, he was ailing, the queen's concerned about the care of the kingdom, so they went to a sorcerer and told him their concerns. And his response was, what is he really like? What's he passionate about? And they said, not much, maybe horses, that's about it, that's all they could think of. He said, that'll do.

So he told the queen to bring the prince to the palace gardens the following day. he did so and at the end of the gardens beautiful white horse was awaiting the young prince so of course the prince wanted it and immediately was saying how much you know that kind of thing the sorcerer said first can you ride it and of course with all the hubris in the world he jumped on and galloped away and he began to gallop faster and faster and faster he's thrilled out to the surrounding farmlands and into the hills and high and to the mountains and overpasses and the horse didn't tire and the prince didn't tire. And finally they slowed down for a walk.

They're in this deep forest and he realizes, whoops, I'm lost. So it comes upon a small cottage and of course there's a beautiful young woman who comes to the door and answers it and she's never heard of the kingdom. So he stays over that night. The father is a woodcutter and welcomes him warmly. Next morning he sets out to find his way home, and he asks every person he runs into, but anybody he asks has never heard of the kingdom he comes from.

Happens day after day after day. Eventually, he starts helping the old man with his work and cutting the wood, and he started growing wise in the ways of the forest. attracted to the daughter so they married and took on a new life took on the trade he gave birth to a son and daughter

and kind of took over the family business simple life took care of their needs lived happily peacefully and the memories of his former life faded he'd often walk in the forest and on one walk he walked into a glen that had a beautiful beautiful deep pond

and he'd visit that regularly well one day he heard a cry and his two children come running out of the forest they're chased by a tiger and before he could do anything the children ran into the pond and they disappeared

and the tiger jumped in and disappeared and then his wife who was running up after them also jumped in and disappeared and his horse galloped up and leaped into the pond and disappeared and then the waters stilled

and they were very clear and there was no trace of his family, his horse, anything. So in the space of two minutes everything in his life had vanished. The shock of the loss came over him and he fell to the ground sobbing, crying, crying. And he felt a hand softly touching his shoulder. And he looked up and he looked into the eyes of his mother, the queen and the concern faces of others from the court. The palace gardens, the horse was standing silent, quietly right there. The queen was very relieved. She told him that as soon as he had climbed onto the horse he just fallen to the ground and he'd been lying there in trance for two to three minutes.

Two to three minutes, no, no, cried the prince. It wasn't meant it was years. I had a life, I had a family, I had a trade, people I loved, a wife, two children. I had things that matter to me. I lived my whole life. It wasn't two to three minutes. It's not possible. Dazed and bewildered, he stood, and he walked away. The old man bowed to the queen, took the horse, and laughed. So the prince was profoundly altered by the loss and by the mystery, and his attitude changed.

His heart opened to every moment of his life. After his father, the king died, he ruled wisely. and well attentive and caring about the welfare of his kingdom. So that's our story. So one of the great truths in spiritual living is that we can't open fully to this life that's right here if we're in any way ignoring or warding off the truth of impermanence, of mortality, of death.

that this living world is absolutely hand in hand with this world that passes away. This is probably one of the core truths in all spiritual paths, that if we're not awake to the reality of impermanence and change, and when I say awake, not conceptually, but in a very visceral way, we can't fully give ourselves to the moments. So it's interesting if you imagine of all your important decisions, if all your responses to dear ones, of all the choices you made, were in some way informed

by the brevity and the mystery and the preciousness of moments. So in Buddhism this is called this changing world, the poly words anicha. And in many spiritual traditions, just opening, to this reality of change of the arising and passing is portal to the deepest wisdom we can touch. In fact, if we really understand impermanence, we are heir to all the blessings of living and loving fully. These are the teachings that we're exploring tonight. I was, as I do, I was kind of scanning the different materials I have and the practices.

And I always know whenever I am, you know, kind of honing in on the subject material that my own practice, that's where I'm, you know, paying attention. And of course, things come to me that seem to be relevant. And I'm going to read you one thing that I received in the email tonight. You can decide whether it's relevant. This is a Buddhist question-answer. How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a light bulb? None.

They are the light bulb. How many does it take to change a light bulb? I'm asking it again. Three, one to change it, one to not change it, and one to both change and not change it. That's typical Buddhism. How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a light bulb? Tree falling in the forest.

How many Buddhists does it take to find a missing light bulb? light bulb. Four noble sleuths. So was that relevant or not? Probably not, but it did come my way. So here's the inquiry for us and we'll be of course exploring the layers of this. How many of you would say that you've had very big changes and losses that have dramatically shifted your perspective in life? have changed how your heart relates to life. How many has that really been one of the portals? So for those listening, mostly everybody, we know that.

There's so many stories. This came to me today. This was in a lawyer's journal, ABA journal. The call came on Friday afternoon, the kind of news nobody wants to hear. But Timothy Tosta, then 41, and a partner in Baker, McKenzie, San Francisco, office missed the call and it wasn't until the following money that he learned he had

melanoma. The doctor told Toaster that he had maybe two years, it was time to put his affairs in order. That was the part he didn't tell his wife are there three children right away. What came next wasn't death but surgery's personal introspection and ultimately against the odd survival and a quiet transformation. He began reading psychology, philosophy and comparative religion. He rediscovered music. Yoga and meditation followed, then volunteer hospice work, and gradually a new level of mindfulness, all while continuing to develop his career as a respected land-use attorney. As it turned out, the new approach made him a calmer, more compassionate, more focused lawyer.

I hear stories with this theme of the wake-ups, maybe more than any other kind of story. Another reason was a friend's mother who had a heart attack and the gratitude she had, she said that she felt she finally was, she wasn't skimming the surface, she was arriving in her life. Knowing that she could go at any time made the moments rich. She said previously it seemed like there was this endless stretch that she was just passing on by. She was just living in this endless stretch but not there. So as it said in the Carlos Casciano books, when death makes even the slightest gesture, all the pettiness falls away. We see

clearly. And then what happens? We forget, right? I mean, how many of us, I asked for hand raised before, had an amazing sense of waking up from something like that and know that the forgetting is thick. Can I just see by hands? Yeah. We wake up and we fall asleep again, which is why this reflection, this exploration of tonight is considered to be such a key portal in spiritual life, a key entry. So while it's often not in our consciousness, humans have a kind of unique awareness of all the other animals of death, of change. We're able to sense a future and we're able to apprehend it. It's inevitability.

And there are two implications. And it's really interesting to me that one of the implications of that apprehension of what's going to happen is our survival systems more revved up? We're more charged, we're more anxious, we have bigger death fear. So we get more violent and more fearful. And it leads us to behaving in ways that then end up making it so we're not there for our life.

And then, of course, the other implication of being uniquely aware of death is spiritual awakening. So let's look at the first one. how that awareness can end up deepening the trance. And the understanding is that impermanence means that all the moments that you're here, all the moments through today, all the moments tomorrow, there's an unending experience of pleasantness

or unpleasantness or neutrality, but they keep on shifting around. And our system is designed to want to hold on to pleasantness. We want to hold on to life. And our system is designed to want to push away unpleasantness, we want to avoid loss and death. And so what that means, we are perpetually in reaction. We're perpetually trying to get more comfortable. We're perpetually feeling a restlessness and tensing against things.

The core experience is wanting things a certain way and resolutely. resisting the change. If it's pleasant, we're resisting having it go away. If it's unpleasant, we're resisting feeling it. We're resisting change. Now, it comes through, it expresses, in a very central kind of experience that most of us have, I think, which is not enough time. I know some people that say there's too much time. I'm kind of like floating in too much time. And for most of us, there's a sense of there's not enough time to get what I want. This undercurrent, the time's slipping away, it's running out, that we need to get something done, we need to get what we want, we need to beat the clock.

There's something very curious about how we get about missing planes. And in a way it's like missing a plane is as deep an experience, it touches into that sense that we're going to miss life, that life's going to go on without us. that our plan, our trajectory, where we're going, we're no longer on that one. We've kind of disconnected from our route. So this not enough time means that we try to collect and accumulate and consume and get enough. There's kind of a drivenness about it. It's like the squirrel that's storing all the acorns,

but we don't get around to really enjoying. There's no resting and feeling satisfied. There's rarely a sense of enough, like this moment is enough. So check it out. Again, these are the kind of teachings about how it is with impermanence, that we have a sense of not enough and we're constantly leaning in. One of the early letters to the Insight Meditation Society to IMS was addressed to the instant meditation society. It's like, make it happen fast, you know.

So we're rushing on to what's next, and we're racing past what's here, and there's an impatience with what's here. Woody Allen, life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering, and it's all over much too soon, you know. So that's one dimension, this discontent, where we want the next moment to contain

what this moment does. not. And there's a story from, this is from Zorba the Greek, that really touches me on this theme. I remember one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree, just as the butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out. I waited a while, but it was long and appearing and I was impatient. I bent over it and breathed on it to warm it. I I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes faster than life. The case opened, the butterfly started slowly crawling out and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled.

The wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them. Bending over it, I tried to help it with my breath in vain. It needed to be hatched out patiently, and the unfolding of the wings needed to be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late. My breath had forced the butterfly to appear all crumpled before its time. It struggled desperately and a few seconds later died in the palm of my hand. That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience, for I realize

today that it is a mortal sin to violate the greatest laws of nature. We should not hurry. We should not be impatient. But we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm. So one way that we deepen the trance is we perceive impermanence and we take it as there's not enough time, I need to rush, I need to get more, I need to consume more, I need to do more. the other version of not enough time is there's not enough time and I'm on my way to trouble and I have to prepare more

so something bad doesn't happen. Does that one resonate for you? The sense of having to prepare ourselves? I'm very aware of that one and I think anybody has certain deadlines is that there's a sense of something very bad can go wrong if we're not ready. And so there's this inner pressure

and it's never, the consequences are never so bad but we have it associated with the ultimate thing we're avoiding which is death, loss, the big losses. So in some way we're living with that same kind of motor or hum in us that's very, very anxious about not having it together, not being prepared. So we have this thing about, our to-do list. There's a really big thing about being able to check things off. I was

aware in the last few days, I sent out a few emails, one to my sister, one to Janet, saying, is such and such taken care of? And what I got back was just the word done. And I realized done was my favorite four-letter word. Story that Jonathan passed on, an old man's dying, and he smells coming up from the kitchen below apple pie that his wife had made. So he tells his grandson to go downstairs and ask his wife to bring him a piece. And the child comes back and he says, sorry, grandpa, she's saving it for the funeral service tomorrow.

So you get the idea that our to-do list, the things that we're afraid we're not going to be ready for, take such precedent that we're really not able to remember what matters. This is the trance. This is a shadow side of impermanence. I think the piece of research that for me was most compelling about this one was that Good Samaritan study that Princeton did and many of you will remember it where the seminarians were given a practice sermon and half of them were given the sermon of the Good Samaritan. Half of them were given another Bible story.

And then they were supposed to go to another building to give the sermon. But on the way to that other building there was somebody on the ground kind of moaning and distress. So the real question for the study was, will the seminarian stop to help? And it was determined by how much time they thought they had before they had to give their sermon. If they believed they'd be late, they didn't stop to help. that this was true even for those given the Good Samaritan talk.

I mean, think of that. Here you are. You're, you know, it's like I'm on my way to the class to give a talk about generosity and kindness and someone I'm cutting off people on the beltway. You know, that didn't happen today. So, again, we're talking about our kind of how our survival system reacts to the threat and feeling of impending loss. loss and the biggest way is denial. That we, our biggest mechanism is to turn our attention

away from that reality so that we don't have to open to what is so painful. From the mouth of children, here we have one story. It says the children had all been photographed and the teacher was trying to persuade them each to buy a copy of the group picture. Just think how nice it'll be to look at it when you're all grown up. There's Jennifer. She's a lawyer. That's Michael. He's a doctor. A small voice at the back of the room rang out, and there's the teacher. She's dead. So denial is a actually important mechanism, and we need it at times. It helps us to be functional to put aside certain things so we can operate. But because we do it in such a blanket way, it deprives us of the reality that gives us access to the deepest wisdom and love.

And it also, by not paying attention to the reality of loss, not grieving loss, not facing the truth of the brevity of life, it makes it so we can't respond intelligently and compassionally to what's right here. So what happens? I mean, if you think of it this way, and I can describe what happens when we don't grieve. I've seen so many people who have gone through something and known they weren't really touching in and at some later point sensing what happened from not touching in. I think of one client, and I wrote about this in True Refuge,

whose wife was killed in a car accident, and he felt so angry. and so betrayed by God that he just threw himself in a very kind of enraged way into social action. And it was ostensibly good work. And he brought so much anger into it that he really alienated all his allies. I think of another couple, and this one I wrote about two, and after a real long struggle with leukemia, a local couple, their child, died many many tests, worked NIH and so on. They went through a lot. And in her distress at having lost her son, she just in some way blamed her husband for not saving his

life. It was not rational. But rather than fully grieving, it was blame. So anger, so blame. Thinking of another couple that got divorced and rather than really processing the grief, there was a hardening against each other that the children felt and suffered from. The reality is we all instinctively armor against the full rawness of loss. The big thing we're avoiding in life is the pain and fear of loss.

That's the big one. So we all have the habit of armoring which is why it's so important to pay attention. because in that armory against loss, current loss, future loss, we're unable to really respond to what's here and we're unable to be intimate with ourselves or others. When we're blocking off rawness, we're blocking off our heart. We see it collectively in ways that really are horrific. We can see in the cycles of wars how over and over again they'll be killing,

there'll be one side experiencing loss and then the anger and hatred reprisals and so on and it just keeps cycling. I love that teaching that vengeance is a lazy form of grief. That if we don't grieve what's here, it's going to come out in all sorts of contorted ways. And then there's the denial around the suffering of our planet. Perhaps the denial that is most causing widespread suffering. Here we have the changing of climate, the destruction of species of ecosystems, environmental systems. The hugest suffering is to the poorest and most vulnerable on our planet.

A few days ago in the newspaper there was one headline that said, in China breathing a childhood risk. Some of you might have seen that. I mean, if we're adapting in our minds to the awfulness of what's happening on the planet, that's denial. So what happens is it feels so huge, it feels so out of our hands, so hard to control, that we push aside. We can't go into that despair. And yet avoiding it, not grieving it, means that we don't actually respond in the ways that we can best respond. So we violate the very life that needs our protection. So our survival system is rigged to resist change. We apprehended in the background we're rigged to resist. And here's the other side of it. We also

are gifted with a consciousness that can begin to notice that. Notice the suffering. that comes from it. Notice how it keeps us from wholeness and keeps us from connection and begin to deepen our attention. So this is the essence of the Buddhist teachings, which is that it's a given that there is suffering. In permanence, life, death keeps happening. There's going to be tension and stress and pain around that. That's a given. Okay? The second truth is we lock into that suffering when we resist it. It's that simple. If we don't open to it, if we resist it, deny it, control, whatever it is, we lock in, we're in trance. And the hope and possibility is waking up our attention

and saying, okay, I'm choosing to be here. I'm choosing to open to, to, this mystery, this rawness to dying and to living. That's where the possibility comes. The process of opening is letting go of resistance. It's kind of relaxing the armor. Ajin Shah put it this way. He said, if you let go a little, you'll find a little peace.

If you let go a lot, you'll find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you'll find absolute peace and tranquility. So the process of waking up is one of noticing where we are tense, noticing where we're avoiding, noticing where we're fighting or flighting, noticing that and beginning to bring a very soft open attention. Now, I just want to comment here that, that, Letting B, would say we notice that there's loss going on in our life and that we're, and that something very injurious is going on that's causing that loss. Letting be doesn't mean that we don't respond to what's going on in our life.

It's not a passive kind of surrender. It means that we put down our resistance to feeling the rawness so we're free to respond from the depth of our intelligence and compassion. Accepting the reality that our planet is suffering is not a passive act. It means that we're acknowledging in our hearts the pain of it. It's what will give us the juice to respond. So what I'd like to do is for the last part of this talk is explore three key domains where we can begin to wake ourselves up around impermanence, where we can begin to let go,

in a way that taps us into our deepest wisdom and deepest compassion. Suzuki Roshi teaches that renunciation is not giving up the things of the world, but accepting that they go away. So the first domain that I'd like to explore, and you can begin to think in your own life where this is relevant, is what we haven't been accepting, that's here. Sometimes I just ask myself the question, one of my ways of coming into meditation will be just to say, well, what is it inside me that wants acceptance right now? And if you

just close your eyes and ask that question, the very inquiry, what wants acceptance, helps to shine a light on the very places that we're running away from? What wants acceptance? So a story from my life about 30 years ago, and this is a year, I had my son Ryan about 28 and a half years ago, so about 30 years ago, before I had my first and only child, I had a miscarriage. And I was really, really thrilled to be pregnant and very distressed to lose the child. But I kind of soldiered on. I was living in a very intense time then. I was right in this transition where I was leaving the ashram,

the spiritual community I had been part of for ten years. So all the stresses and sorrows, everything seemed to kind of flow together and some of it got buried as I was kind of navigating. So it was delayed grieving and it showed up some years later and I was on one of my first, I think it was my first Buddhist, retreat. And as I was paying attention, I started sensing this kind of heaviness in my heart and I started realizing, wow, that's kind of there a lot. You know, it was one of those things that I had just been accustomed to. And I, and as I paid attention, it had a kind

of depressive quality like something's missing and I'll never get it kind of feeling. And so I asked the question I just shared with you. I kind of just checked and said, so what really wants acceptance. And there was a loneliness there. So, okay, accepting loneliness. And then that kind of opened and I said, what's really, what's this loneliness wanting? And there's some missing, some connection and some sense of missing connection. And I started weeping and as I was weeping, I had, the image came up of wanting to cradle a young, a tiny little infant girl. And it got me confused and I felt a little bit guilty because I have this beautiful boy that I love dearly.

But I had to pay attention to what was there. So the image was of cradling this child. And in the cradling there was a sense of a tenderness and an intimacy that for whatever a tipple reason of the feminine that she called out. So I allowed myself to just feel the grief of that not being as much a part of my life as I wanted, that very, very intimate closeness. And the more I let myself grieve it, the more that very thing I was grieving, that tenderness just absolutely permeated my body and my heart.

And what I found is that it was through grieving the loss of that child that I actually got access to a whole other level and flavor of loving. And I've seen this so many times in my life, especially after my father died, that I, you know, the times that it wasn't like I was saying, okay, I'm going to grieve now, but the times that really, really washed over me, just the, his dearness and goodness and the loss, and just let my heart break, it would break open into just that purity of loving. The gift of not resisting change, the gift of opening in that deep way to a sense of loss is we also open to what we long for in love, which opens us to the loving itself.

The more rounds, the more familiar we get, the more that loving is available to us. story about Kafka as an older man. He would spend time sitting in a park and one day a little girl walked by him and there were tears running down her face. So he asked her what was wrong and she said that she had lost her doll. So he said, I'll help you look for her. So they looked around but they couldn't find the doll. So he said, you know, come on back. I'll try to find her for you. So she went home and a few days later the girl returned. Kafka was there, but he hadn't found the doll, but he had a note and it read, I've gone off to travel some around the world. Please don't worry about me. I'm fine.

So the girl was somewhat relieved. She would return to the park every week or so, and Kafka would be there with a note from the doll, regaling her with adventures that the doll was having. So Kafka then much sicker at one point went to the park for his last time. And this time he had brought a doll. And he handed it to the girl and said the travels had really changed her. So some years later when the girl was a young woman, she found that there was a little note rolled up in the doll's hand and so she unrolled it and read it. And here's what it said. You will lose everyone you love, but the love will always return in new forms. So this really is one of the great teachings of impermanence, that if we can let go, grieving

is a letting go, it's letting be and letting go, new life enters and the loving that's always and already there is a timeless loving, then is felt through that new experience. So you might just take a moment to check in for yourself. We're not going to do a long meditation on this, but just a check-in. So we're really exploring the different domains of letting go, of accepting, opening and letting go. And you might just sense, is there a place of loss in your life right now or one that you're kind of anticipating? Just to ask yourself, you know, how How have I been relating to this without any judgment? Just to notice, has there been an openness, have you been kind of turning your mind in a different

direction? Have you been trying to fix and busy yourself in certain ways? In other words, has there been a reactivity or an openness? I mean, it's a gift when we discover, oh, okay, I've been pulling away from someone. You might even ask that question, what wants acceptance? What about this wants acceptance? And pay attention to your body as you ask that. This isn't about ideas, this is to ask what wants acceptance and feel into your heart,

perhaps your throat, your belly, and if it helps to put your hand on your heart and just for a moment, this is a process you'd be continuing on your own just to send that message of I'm here, I'm paying attention. It's my intention to be here for this. It's my intention to open to what's true. The real, probably most accurate words for bringing presence to loss as a letting be, that we let be the feelings of hurt and pain, the feelings of a breaking heart, And in that letting be we discover the space and tenderness that are there. So this is one level, you can open your eyes if you want, this is one level of our intentional practice when we look at impermanence, is to sense, you know, where are we holding back in some of the challenging parts of our life where there is loss?

And can we lean in? Can we say what wants acceptance? can we allow the rawness to be there and then discover that tenderness? Now, the second area is really what we might call the moment-to-moment experience. And the training we do in Vipasana, and in mindfulness meditation, it was the same, where we are letting go of thoughts and noticing what's happening this moment, the sensations, the sounds, the feelings, the feelings, the feelings, the feelings. feelings and just staying with the moment to moment experience is a training in letting go into impermanence.

And our conditioning is to pull away in thoughts. Any time you are in your thoughts, you are pulling away from the flow of impermanence. It's your way of, it actually defends against this wild, organic unfoldings. unfolding of life. It puts us in this kind of mental control tower where we're watching things, thinking about things, but it fragments the continuous flow of experience. If you're meditating and vary in your body and varying your senses, sound, sensation, you can feel what it's like. It just, everything keeps playing out. As soon as in your thoughts, it becomes static, fragmented. So one of the key trainings to kind of come back into our

embodiment and experience the living flow is to let go of thoughts over and over and over again. And the training of letting go into thoughts is probably the most powerful training in opening to impermanence that there is. Some of you might remember, this is probably my favorite teaching on letting go and this is Ajun Samato. And he writes that 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 try 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 learn Pali and Sanskrit and then the Majumakaya,

then the Prajna Paramehāya, and 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 Buddhist conferences, just let go, let go, let go. I did nothing but this for about two years. Every time I tried to figure things out or understand, 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. let go, let go.

So that's the key practice. Every time we let go of thoughts, we re-enter the stream. And it's practice in letting things be as they are, letting things come and go, letting go. There was a very interesting study done. Gallup did it about, I think it was two years ago, on the elderly. and they found out that the elderly are happier than when they were younger.

In other words, elderly people in their 80s are happier than they were when they were in their 20s. And they don't have a explanation on why generally elderly people are happier than people that are less old. But some of the understandings are that there's been so much change and so much loss that there's been a kind of adapting or a capacity to be with it, let it come and let it go. There's more open-handedness. There's more of what Ajan Cha described as letting go you find some peace. They found in that same study there's less afflictive emotions, less anger, less reactivity. There's more equanimity.

So that's one basic practice, is letting go of the thoughts and opening, to what's right here. Then there's a deepening of that where you begin to discover radical impermanence which is where you really start noticing what is happening moment to moment and pay attention to change itself. So I'd like to invite you just to close your eyes and let your senses be awake. You might begin by just listening and notice that the sounds are continually changing. Be aware of the sensations in your body and if it's hard for you to feel your body, feel your hands, just your hands. Notice how everything's moving. Sounds are changing, sensations are moving. The inner and outer weather is constantly in flux. If you watch your breath,

you'll notice that it's completely every moment changing, changing, changing. You might sit as still as you can. Can you sit still? Is anything holding still? Sensation. Give yourself permission now just to let go into the stream, just be this changing flow. Can you find a center to this field of change? Check that out. Is there a boundary, an outer boundary, to this field of change? Is there anything solid? Can you find a self? in this changing field of change. If everything changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances,

something boundless and infinitely spacious in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Letting go into the flow of change, sensing the space of equanimity, the peace that holds it all, It's like being the ocean, incredibly vast and deep all the waves on the surface. You can just ask again, who am I? And then just let go into that flow and into the space that holds it all.

Keeping your eyes closed, you can just sense tonight's exploration, this opening story of life is kind of a dream and yet the moment's so vivid and precious, that if we let ourselves open to change, we discover that we can give ourselves fully to the moments. So the gifts of impermanence, this wholeheartedness that we can engage with, the gifts of impermanence, sensing that happiness

or peace it comes from being able to let go and let go and let go. the gift of impermanence, sensing this radical changing flow and this timeless space of awakeness that holds it all, the wisdom of who we really are. The gift of impermanence sensing when we open to the losses, this timeless love. I'd like to close with a poem from Mary Oliver This is called When Death Comes.

She says, When Death comes like the hungry bear in autumn, when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me and snaps the purse shut, when death comes like the measlepox, when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity wondering, what is it going to be like that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility. And I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, towards silence. In each body a lion of courage and something precious to the earth, when it's over I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms. When it's over I don't want to wonder if I've made of my life something particular

and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument. I don't want to end up having visited this world. So we close tonight in meditation, just feeling with our senses this mysterious changing world and sensing in the background this awareness or presence that's the deepest experience of our own being, sensing the possibility of embracing this changing life, moment to moment, responding to our world with clarity and kindness. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered.

If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.