Tara Brach - Letting Go of Controlling – Part 2: The Path of Freedom

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

While it's natural to try to control our life experience, our chronic controlling cuts us off from presence and obscures the loving awareness that is our essence.  This series of talks explores how we can let go in four key domains of controlling: clinging to thoughts, resisting feelings, holding tight to beliefs and armoring our heart. We look at how egoic controlling manifests individually and as a society; the process of awakening from exclusive identification with a separate ego/self; what it means to die into a larger reality and the similarities of psychedelics and meditation in the process of letting go. The gift of releasing the grip of controlling is true freedom; inhabiting the intrinsic beauty of our beings, and having our lives be an expression of creativity, wisdom and love.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, my friends. This is part two of the series on letting go. And I'd like to begin with a personal sharing that after recording part one and then midway in the midst of composing this talk, I got an eight-week old puppy. And, you know, as many of you know, a bundle of pee and joy, you know. So my computer has kind of been set up right near the puppy play area. And of course, I'm having to race out every half hour to make sure she has in PN side, my approach to having to working basically has been fragmented and composing a talk, it's another world. So I have this real ego attachment to my process. And

what I'm just discovering, I'm so attached to having my quiet space to really immerse and sense what feels important to say. And I'm much more scattered. So I felt that this real agitation, wanting my quiet space, fearing that I wouldn't come through, fearing that in some way, you know, I'd fall short. And it's been an amazing time just to practice letting go, you know, over and over again letting go for this last week into the flow of her biology, her moods, and making peace with imperfection. So, classic story that many of you might be familiar with where a man is chased by a tiger

and he jumps off the edge of a cliff hanging by the root of a tree and, you know, tiger's pacing above and ragged cliffs below and he yells out, help. Here's a booming voice, yes. He says, God, God, is that you? Yes. Well, help. God says, just let go. And the man says, is anybody else there?

And we know that from the ego's perspective, the last thing we want to do is to release the grip, to let go. It's core conditioning that like all living creatures in the face of fear, we hold on tight to whatever we think will protect us from loss. from death, controlling comes from feeling threatened. And while certainly we're trying to protect ourselves from physical death, a lot of the time we're trying to protect ourselves, it's really protecting ourselves from ego death, you know, from being rejected, from being judged like me in this talk from falling short in some way. You know, I think of Anthony DeMello who says that enlightenment is absolute cooperation.

operation with the inevitable. It's about surrendering and letting go of the resistance to the small and large losses and deaths. And of course, we are totally rigged to control. In another story, a man writes that he had recently picked a new primary care doctor and he has two visits, all these lab tests come back. And his doctor, and his doctor, says, well, you're doing fairly well for a person of your age. And this guy gets really upset. You know, so they have this conversation about it. And so he says, well, do you think I'll live to be 100? And the doctor asks him some questions. He says, well, do you smoke, you know, tobacco or drink beer or wine or hard liquor? And he says, oh, no, you know, and I'm not doing pot or psychedelics

either. Then the doctor says, well, do you eat sweets, desserts? Guy says, not at all. I've read about how how bad sugar is for you. Well, do you spend a lot of time in the sun, like playing golf or boating, sailing, hiking, bicycling? Nope, I don't. I'm not risking, you know, skin cancer. Doctor said, do you do intense sports, you know, drive fast cars or have a lot of sex? No, says the man, and the doctor just looks at him and says, well, why do you even give a damn? And the problem is that while controlling in some domains is absolutely necessary for survival, when we over-control, it's not the recipe for flourishing. And as we explored in the last talk on letting go, we get habituated to controlling our lives,

to controlling ourselves, to controlling others. defending, judging, judging, planning, worrying. And that over-controlling causes suffering. You probably know your favorite control strategies. You know, ways of controlling really define our personality, our sense of self. I mean, for me, when I'm anxious and I go into control mode, it comes out being bossy or getting lost in planning, fixating, and getting things done.

For some people it's being dominating. For others it's being accommodating when they're trying to control by protecting. For some it's chronic worry, for some it's judgment. For many of us it's a whole grouping of them. So the moments when we react to fear by going into our favorite control modes, in those moments we disconnect from our body, we're lost in and believing our thoughts, and Our thoughts are primarily fear-based, so the whole background mood in our body-mind is anxiety. And in our world, it blocks intimacy.

We can't really be intimate with ourselves or others when we're in control mode. It blocks the felt sense of love. You know, it blocks creativity. Controlling obscures a deeper truth of love. of who we are. So if we enlarge this and look at the broader society, societies that are really characterized by fear-based controlling. It's reflected in religious institutions, in education, which becomes very narrow and rigid in the

type of ethics that are adopted with others. relating to ourselves, it becomes confusing and difficult to sense really an ethical guide. One man, Butch Hancock, says he remembers growing up in a small conservative town. He says, it taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. And the other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth. And you should save it for someone you love. Okay, so the challenge of rigidity of societies.

that are fear-based. The big one we know is that they tend towards fascism, oppression, and war. So, while the conditioning to control is part of our evolutionary story, we are homo sapiens, which means beings that are aware, and that awareness by nature is capable of seeing how the controlling causes suffering and of enabling us to wake up and relax the grip, to become more collaborative, conscious, open-hearted beings. That is the hope and the trajectory of humans. And awareness is our superpower. Awareness allows us to see what's going on. It allows us to see, oh, fear and this reaction to fear makes me small. And then it, allows us to face fear with more presence.

And then rather than controlling to kind of loosen our resistance and feel our feelings, and as one teacher put it, to meet our edge and soften. When we do that, when instead of control, we become present, it opens us to the loving awareness that is our true home. So it feels like one of the most deep and important inquiries on a spiritual path and also for society to look at is how do we relate to our fears of change, of loss, of dying? Do we reflexively tighten and go into control mode? Or is there some capacity to deepen presence to let go of controlling and to awaken through our fear to a larger pressure?

presence and truth. For one woman, when her mother told her that she had breast cancer, she felt this huge swirl of emotions, you know, sadness, guilt, anger, regret, but then immediately her mind went into planning. She was asking herself, what needs to happen? What are your treatment options? How soon can we get the lump removed? That kind of thing. And then she writes this. She said, thank God for this meditation practice because she was able to to pause and say, what am I noticing right now? Awareness. Coming back to presence. And in that presence, just being with the swirl of emotion, she was able to also attune to her mother who didn't want to talk and didn't want to plan. She was scared. And her mother needed to be scared. So this woman

writes, I debated whether to give her a hug, which sounds terrible. I know, but I was barely holding it together and scurring around and making dinner and pouring over doctor's paperwork and staying busy, this was my way of avoiding a total collapse. Being present, letting go of that control and allowed me to shift to her way. I took a breath, walked across the room, and wrapped my arms around her. It was an awkward, sideways hug, but it was also a long, necessary one. And then something happened. Slowly, she started rocking side to side like a mother rocks a child except the child was now the caretaker. It was a sweet, tiny moment I'll never forget. The one that I surely would have missed were it not for the power of mindfulness, of awareness,

letting go of controlling, being here. And when we look at back at our lives, how many moments do we wish that we had that presence, that instead of controlling and reacting, we could pause and say, what's happening? That we could let go of our busy thoughts, that we could feel our feelings, that we could feel our hearts, that we could attune. controlling creates separation, letting go, letting be connects. This is our theme you'll hear over and over. So humans have had a deal with the consciousness of change of our inevitable death through millennia.

So they've had to deal with this reflex to control. So for me, it's helpful to see these two. basic ways humans respond to fear of death and loss from a historical perspective, you know, whether going into controlling or deepening presence, because it reveals the relative health or suffering of society, and it can be a guide for our present world. So I want to ask you to join me for a few moments. We're going to go back thousands of years in time. Many are familiar with the Greek myth of Persephone.

So she was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of the crops. And Pluto, who is the king of the underworld, abducted Persephone. She was picking flowers in a meadow. And her mother, in her great grief, seizes to care for the world. So the crops all wither, the earth goes barren. Zeus agrees to help get Persephone back, but it's a compromise. she gets to be on earth for half the year and in the underworld for the other half. And so like all good myths, it offers some reflection of reality.

In this case, the naturalness, you know, really allowing, accepting, opening to the naturalness of the cycles of birth, death, and renewal. It's a way for they to change. So this myth, life, death, renewal, became the foundation of what are called the Lucian Mysteries, which are the most famous and revered religious rituals from the ancient Greek world. People would come from far and wide each year to participate, and they took place in Lucius, which is located about 11 miles northwest of Athens. These mystery rights lasted over 2,000 years.

Just think of that. That's as long as Christianity. They drew people from all over many well-known participants, people you've heard of, famous Greek philosophers. Plato referred to the experience of participating in the mystery rights as blessed sight and vision in a state of perfection. Aristotle said that initiates came to. elucis not to learn something but to experience something, direct transformation. I'll read you something from Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, said on the Elysian mysteries, for it appears to me

that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those mysteries, for by means of them we have transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity and have been civilized. Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life and have grasped the basis not only for living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope. Three hundred years later, Marcus Aurelius, this is second century AD now, his emperor of Rome, he was called a philosopher. initiated into the mysteries, and he was also key in rebuilding after the site had some destruction. So it's really interesting what drew all these people, known and unknown, women and men, privileged slaves,

the mystery rights were said to give initiates the experience of facing and transcending their fear of death. facing and transcending their fear of death and opening directly into the mysteries of existence, experiencing spiritual awakening, a sense of connection to the divine. People were drawn for those inner experiences and for the deep bonds then that emerged with others. And so it's interesting to sense what was going on in those mystery rights. that allowed for this profound spiritual awakening. And here's where we come to our theme that we're exploring, is that the mystery rights allowed participants

to transcend the control and ego to deepen presence, real surrendering and letting go. Here's what we know about them, that people would prepare for many months. There was a long walk there in the natural, world. There was fasting. There were rites. It was all conducted by women. And then they would drink the sacred Kaikian. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right. It's both K-Y-K-E-O-N, which is a beer that's made from barley and it contains psychoactive substances, Ergot, which is a fungus that LSD

comes from. And they do these ceremonies with the dramatic reenactment of the myth. you know, birth, death, renewal, and in that way face their fears of dying. So here they were, you know, fasting and contemplating and doing psychoactive plants, medicines, and here they are. it formed the roots of Greek philosophy with Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, as I've mentioned, and also the early Christian church. So I'm speaking of this because we are already very familiar, many are aware that around the globe, sacred rights have been done by so many indigenous cultures, and they've included these

kind of elements of the sacred medicines, a psychoactive substances, the chanting the rituals for a direct mystical experience, a letting go of the ego and a transcendence. We know that. And to me, it's so powerful and so fascinating to sense how this longing to be able to let go and open beyond ego, this longing to realize transcendence has lived in Homo sapiens around the globe. It's so interesting to sense the power of that, and also interesting to then follow on and sense how was it suppressed. Here's the story historically in the 4th century Theodosius, who was the Christian emperor, wiped out the mystery cults. and any participation of women.

Just wiped it out. It was all in a short period of time. That included wiping out the use of the psychoactive. They were using also in the Dionysian rite psychoactive wine. It became regular wine, though it was still called the Blood of Christ. So then we might wonder, why was it all wiped out? And why am I going into all of this? Well, for the controlling ego, for the shadow masculine, the mystery cults, the nature practices

were a threat. That's why the Roman emperor wiped them out. I mean, why would the church target and demonize and demean women as witches, attack the natural healers, attack indigenous practices? Because they're threats to the controlling ego. Martin Luther pointed this out centuries later. He said that the direct access to the mystical, which is what the mystery rights were all about,

meant no power to the middleman. The Christian church was built upon powerful men as intercessors. This is the controlling ego. So followers had to rely on their words and concepts rather than direct experience. This is Alan Wollinger. lots. He says nothing could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven.

So, as we know well over these last centuries, the shadow masculine, the controlling ego, has been at the helm, and this control mode has extended to colonizing, to oppression, to genocide of indigenous cultures to controlling the earth as a resource. And for humans, it's led to a real disconnection from the natural world and from spirit. The controlling ego has led to destroying the earth and creating huge divides with each other. Because here's the thing. A society that does not encourage connecting to body.

to body, to heart, to spirit in direct ways. A society that fails to incorporate mystical experience is flawed. It has disease. Yates at the end of World War I wrote in the Second Coming these words that just keep coming back to me over and over again. The center cannot hold. Many have felt that in recent days. and something in us knows that without direct experience of the sacredness of life, the sacred

feminine, we become physically, mentally, and spiritually L. And the forces that cut us off are especially strong in patriarchal societies with rigid dominance hierarchies in industrialized, militarized societies. So, after Yates, 10 years after Yates, D.H. Lawrence wrote this. That's one of the verses that stays with me. He said, It is a question practically of relationship. We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe.

Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe. I love that line. We must plant ourselves again in the universe. So, friends, I took time with the historical perspective because you can kind of get the sense of the mystical roots that were so nourishing through these mystery rights,

through the practices and teachings of indigenous cultures, and the kind of uprootedness that has come about over last. centuries with the more dominance of a control and ego and it shines a light on our current suffering and also on what's needed to reconnect. You know I think of our our current global challenges and trauma as severed belonging. And it's a call to awaken awareness to replant in the universe, a call for deepening presence, for letting going, letting go of the controlling ego and letting go into our bodies, the natural world, spirit.

My sense is that many of us are feeling that calling, feeling that longing to awaken beyond ego, to touch the mystery. And while you might be listening right in these moments for different reasons, this longing is in us. We know that. So along with our growing crisis of severed belonging, we're also witnessing the growing access to pathways of letting go, pathways of reconnecting. We can see it in the many forms of meditation and yoga, increasingly mainstreamed. We can see it also in the resurfacing of plant medicines. It's so interesting that research shows similar pathways of impact with meditation and

plant medicines, both allowing and helping us to do the letting go that frees us, both having the capacity to quiet the conceptual mind, quiet the parts of the brain that keep filtering by separating and cataloging and naming and judging. Joseph Campbell talks about releasing the masks of God. Those are the masks of God, the mental activity. Plant medicines and meditation both help dissolve a kind of solidity of sensing of a separate self, sometimes described as a dying of the exclusive identity with ego. Dying while yet alive, allowing this realization of beingness, of that sacred, formless,

timeless presence beyond our changing thoughts and forms. dying while yet alive. And plant medicines are most impactful when they are combined with practicing meditation. I mean, I know people who have been facing a year to live with cancer, and psychedelics allowed them to open to their fears, rather than trying to control open to their fears and live so many precious moments because they accessed and trusted in a larger belonging. I know people who have been facing trauma, all sorts of childhood traumas and the combination of doing psychedelic medicines and meditations allowed for profound healing, again, sensing of who they are beyond the

scared self. Many of you have heard of Roland Griffiths, who's a friend and a pioneer in the field of psychedelics. His final study, which is soon to be published, hasn't quite come out yet, he had a group of leaders for many world religions, and they all did plant medicines, and each claimed it was one of the most meaningful experiences in their life that deepened their direct realization in their own particular faith and enhance their work as a minister, as a leader. And on my own path, it was psychedelics that first gave me a taste of what's beyond ego, beyond sense of separation. I remember the first time I had an Aurelia plant in my room that's just like this one here, actually, which is part of maybe why I love it, my version of the Bodie tree,

you know. And I realized that the same life consciousness animating this form of this plant is the same that's animating this form here, this body and all life. And that pure loving awareness was more true than any story about myself. And then in another early experience with psychedelics, which was more challenging, I realize that this separate self-former entity is impermanent will die and really opening to that core fear, a lot like the mysteries, the hallucine mysteries, but not having resistance, really opening and discovering how awareness could permeate the fear, how it was interior to the fear, until the whole universe was this vibrating energy filled with light and tenderness. there was no one home. But opening to fear, not resisting. I opened a sense of being beyond that

separate self. And I'll share with you. I haven't shared this before, but I was sitting very still after that for a long time. I had some clay and I shaped a Buddha. That had no real experience with anything to do with Buddhism, but I shaped a Buddha. And afterwards, I was inspired a Buddha. I was inspired to go to yoga and meditation classes and found that those practices serve the very same taste of freedom and yet in a more integrated way. So for those wondering, you know, my current life's psychedelics, the use of psychedelics is very infrequent. I kind of consider it, as mentioned, it's kind of a reboot of surrendering and opening

to the mystery and meditation in a daily and ongoing informal way is what keeps on waking up beyond ego. Okay, for the remainder of this talk, we'll look directly at the letting goes that offer this freedom. In the first session on letting go, we looked at thoughts, and it's so crucial to train ourselves, to release the grip of thoughts, the trance of thinking, it's the first step of replanting in the universe. It's the first step if we want to open into the body and the heart and the spirit. And if you missed this part one, I encourage you to listen. For this session, we'll look at the other letting go's, letting go of resistance to feelings, letting go of the armoring around the heart, letting go into awareness. With feelings, the shadow ego, the controlling ego in all of us

does not want to enter the wild uncontrollable realm of the body. It's habit as to resist, you know, to try to control and stay in thoughts. So training and letting go of the resistance to feelings begins with that simple question, what am I unwilling to feel? Just being curious. And then we can start to attend to the body and undo that resistance. It's radical to feel our feelings. You might reflect, and we've done this before, just clenching your fist and feel the clenched fist.

And this is like resisting, resisting, resisting. Just feel the squeeze, the tension. And now let awareness naturally grow, both around the fist, penetrating into the fist, feeling awareness from the inside out of the fist. and as you let awareness grow, just sense a natural undoing of the clenching, just awareness alone, softening. So it's not like you're doing something with letting go, you're undoing the clench. And awareness is what's undoing it. And notice how as you soften, it gives access to feelings inside and out.

to our body is a process of awareness. Awareness will relax the resistance. It will help us connect with the aliveness. Another way of saying this is that letting go of resistance is like saying yes to life. Now the supports for letting go, its attitude that we're curious, so what am I unwilling to feel? That we're gentle, that we're friendly. It helps to name what we're aware of, clenching, tightness, tension, brings the attention more to it. It helps to breathe. You might feel a sense of long out breath as you feel and feel and feel what's there. But the key is to let awareness infuse the experience. And of course, I want to bring in the reminder that whenever there's trauma, it's a gradual letting go. First establishing

safety, some sense of resilience, and then very much at your own pace, paying good attention to yourself, beginning to lean in. So another brief reflection of letting go into the body. I'd like to invite you to pause and sense a recent situation that triggered you. Maybe a five out of a ten might have been making you anxious, irritated, angry. and bring yourself to that situation. Just notice what's going on. Go to where it's intense. And see if you can let go of thoughts

and find the roots in the body. Where are the sensations and feelings the strongest? Scanning your throat, your chest, your belly. Maybe putting your hand where you feel strong feelings. And breathe with it. Maybe a short in-breath. and then a long out breath. Feeling the feelings, breathing with them,

let awareness suffuse them. So you can feel the awareness around, permeating from the interior, relaxing the clench of resistance, feeling feelings, noticing if there's anything between you and intimacy with this experience. And maybe your sense,

aversion to the unpleasantness, not to judge. Simply offer presence to the experience of aversion, not resisting it, not making it wrong. And you might find perhaps a growing sense of space for what is, because letting go of resistance leads to letting be, a kind of yes to whatever's in the body. And you might sense if the yes is full and just explore that, that kind of deep surrendering to say yes to what's here. Who are you? Who are you? If there's no resistance, if there's a yes to life, who are you? Take a full deep breath and if your eyes are closed, open your eyes.

Now some might have sensed that there really was no resistance and there was yes. and maybe not such a sense of a solid separate self, more of a field, presence, maybe more of that mystery and openness, maybe compassion. Others might have noticed a pulling back, not a full letting go. And that's totally fine because this is a life practice. Whatever you practice goes stronger. And the more you sense the freedom of letting go, the more you'll naturally remember and go, oh, okay, let go of the thoughts, feel the feelings,

be here. Okay, so the first letting go is letting go of the thoughts and stories. The second is letting go of resistance, feeling your feelings. Often what supports letting go into the body and what deepens a full letting go into reality is letting go into love. Love heals fear. Love removes the feelings of separation that keep us clenching. And because we've been wounded and we have pain around relationships, we have huge conditioning

not to let in love, to hold back from opening to love. In the deepest ways, letting go into love is like dying to the small separate self. It can be felt a lot of vulnerability when we start opening to love. And yet if we're willing, what we discover is this field of loving that has no division and allows us to have a fearless heart. So it's a process. And every time you tend towards feelings of connectedness, every time you practice dying, to separation, you're undoing the clench. Frank Osseskesh, who's a dear friend and the founder of Zen

hospice, who's very close to one man he was accompanying before his death. The man had stomach cancer and a lot of pain. And he asked Frank to guide him in meditation. So Frank began, but soon the man told him it was really too painful to meditate with. So Frank offered to place his hands on the man's belly to help hold the pain. And the man agreed, but he said, yeah, it still hurts. So Frank put his hands a little bit away from the man's belly and said, how's that? A little better. He put his hands a little bit further from the man's belly, and the man said, oh, that's lovely. And Frank invited him to rest there for a little bit. And the man said, just rest in love. Rest in love. because that's what he was experiencing.

And from then on, you know, he'd have a lot of pain. They'd push the morphine pump. He'd say to himself, rest in love. Rest in love. Because he couldn't penetrate into direct sensations. He couldn't will into that. But he could find space around it, the space of loving. And his relationship to the pain shifted.

Just the way our relationship to the ego shifts. when we bring loving presence. In this situation, the man's wife came in the next day and she was very anxious about his dying. And he looked at her and he said, rest in love because it works for all fears. To feel this life and to feel the ocean of loving that it belongs to. I love that mantra, rest in love.

Love undoes the armoring. Love undoes the armoring. So in any moment that you let in love, that you offer yourself kindness, that you have the intention even to be kind, or that you offer love to another, you're relaxing the armoring. It's letting go. There's a dying to the separate self and an opening to that unified field of loving, to a heart as wide as the world. So let's just do a brief taste of this, of letting go into loving presence. This is a simple practice. It was inspired by the desert mothers and fathers. So just background, many of the desert mothers and fathers had described prayer as bringing your thinking down into your heart. And this is actually the practice,

letting go of thought and letting go into heart space. And I found this and adapted it from a meditation led by Richard Gore. Okay, so again, take a pause and this time allow a difficult situation with another person in your life to come to mind, where there's some negativity or irritation towards them in your mind, where you feel some separation. Now bring attention to your heart, you might imagine, just feel a smile, imagine and sense a smile spreading through your heart so that you can sense a bit of heart space with some light there. And letting go of the thoughts about this person, just sense that you're bringing this person into your heart space. Just imagine and sense that. That it's your intention to let go of thoughts and simply bring

this person energetically, the felt sense of this person, into your heart space. Notice what happens. Perhaps you can notice that thoughts and stories reinforce separations. Protective armor.

They're part of our control and ego. In the heart, you can sense a space of aliveness, presence, warmth, sensitivity. When you're fully inhabiting heart space, when you're letting go into love, it's difficult to judge to create the storyline. Instead, you're in a large space of being, embodied, awake, tender, and present.

So perhaps in the days and weeks to come, when you're having difficulty with another, when you're in some form of control mode, you can let go of thoughts and just gently explore bringing them from your mind into heart space with the intention towards kindness and noticing just what happens. Okay, again, come on back if your eyes are closed, open them. So taken together, letting go of the story, letting go of resistance to feelings, letting go into love, they offer us a path of true presence. And it's not abstract.

Increasingly, we can apply in daily life. So I shared how this week it's been good practice letting go into the flow with a puppy, you know, relaxing that clenched fist of trying to do more and having certain outcomes, just pausing, breathing, feeling, letting be yes to what is. And I would call this a very modest level of difficulty in terms of dying to the controlling self. The puppy's, you know, pretty much oxytocin flowing, but still letting go. The more challenging practice is when the controlling ego is operating off a very charged wants and fears, when there's a real suffering of not letting go, we can kind of see it.

And a story that gives you more of a sense of that is a few years back, I was working on a project with a group of people and received an email from one that was the whole group was cede. And it was framed as trying to be helpful, and it was very disparaging of me, of my role in terms of social causes and how I used my voice. And I knew there were some good points to pay attention to, some truths to learn from, there always are. And so, while I'm usually open to feedback and I want to learn, this was delivered with a good

good amount of animosity. And so my mind knew that, you know, that that that was coming from the person's own suffering, but it didn't matter. I was, I felt bothered. I felt misunderstood. I felt embarrassed by such a public attack. So I could feel that clutch fist of my ego. And I found myself constantly writing email responses, defending my views and my actions. Usually happen between 2 and 3 a.m. I'm sure you're familiar. So I began to practice these different pathways of letting go. First, I asked myself, what am I thinking and what am I believing? And I was believing there must be something bad about me to drought such as charged attack. And I was also believing others are going to think less of me, my reputation. And thoughts kept circling. So there were

many rounds of just let go of the thoughts come into the body, let go of the thoughts come into the body, and then in the body, what am I unwilling to feel? I hope this is sounding familiar. Again, these are the inquiries that help to serve letting go. Okay, anger and the feeling that I should be above this, I should be able to let go of the anger. Embarrassment, shame. So I kept opening to that, you know, as I often do, put my hand on my heart, breathing with it. letting awareness sink into it, permeate it. And then another question, can I meet this with care? And I imagined it felt love pouring in through my hand, again, just bathing the feelings

with love. The pain was cradled in an ocean of caring. And I often will say, rest in love, rest in love. And there was a lot of quieting. There was no control in just a quieting and a sense of a loving presence that was more truly who I am than the injured ego that had a control. So this is an inner dying to a limit itself, remembering a larger truth and many rounds. I also knew I needed to respond to the situation.

So my question there for myself is, what is love asking from me? My controlling ego's strategy was to ignore the email, not respond. But I reread it carefully and I found something useful that I could learn from. I wrote a short note kind of thanking and honoring that this person cared deeply or wouldn't have reached out. And I acknowledged that it was difficult for me to receive and I appreciated what I learned. And that helped me find even more freedom. It deepened the sense of dying to kind of ego and reputation and inhabiting a larger space. Also, it gave me a kind of genuine capacity to see the other suffering, not just mental,

but just to feel that to appreciate their hearts. Now, if I'm making this sound easy, I apologize because it wasn't. It took a while. And here's an important piece. I really had to let go of the idea that this should. shouldn't be happening, that I shouldn't be reacting, that I should let go. Because the ego can't let go, we can't well letting go of control. We can only be willing to be present with what's happening. And that is the root of letting go. It's the presence, the awareness that naturally releases the

clench. Again, letting go arises naturally from full presence. Full presence is what's arising. So the sooner we remember, like that woman who was with her mother, her mother had the diagnosis of cancer, and she remembered, oh, what am I noticing right now? Can I be with this? That's when there was some of that surrendering of the clench. So it takes patience. Because, well, we can't will it, we can feel our longing to let go. And that increases presence. Friends, this is intrinsically a path of surrender, of undoing, of releasing. And it can go very deep. We can be surrendering the surrendering. Really trusting awareness itself will dissolve the tight identities that we live in in an organic way. And trusting,

this is key, because what we long for is always and already here. The releasing of control in no way means we're inactive. You know, ego is a terrible master, but it's a great servant. And the possibility is that our activity arise from openness, that it's guided from caring, that it's filled with creativity. And then our ego is guided by that. that and our activity can actually express who we are. I think again of that woman with her mom who had cancer that after she let go of all her control and her planning, her busyness, she naturally attuned to her mom and that hug will be with her probably for the rest of her life.

For me, when I could let go of all the controlling and just be with what was there, I was unable to respond, I could act, but in a much less defensive, more open-hearted way. So I want to close by saying that the path of letting go and letting be, it's a life path. And every day, it's natural to get caught in over-controlling and tensioning up in ruminating and planning and worrying, not to judge, not to think it should be different. The path is forgetting and remembering. And we'll notice because we care about noticing. And then we can pause and do just as we've been talking about,

okay, let's let's let's let go of thoughts. Let's feel the feelings. Let's meet our edge and soften, soften the heart. And then the gift, the gift of letting go and letting be, which is the same gift found by indigenous people around the world, the same gift found over those 2,000 years of the mystery rights, the Lucian mysteries, the gift is an awakening beyond ego. It's a homecoming to the truth, to the love, the spirit that expresses who we really are. Okay, let's close. In this final

practice, in this practice, we'll explore the key domains of letting go, letting go of thoughts, of resistance to feelings, letting go into love, letting go into awareness. And I encourage you to explore on your own each of these letting goes and all of them. So in these moments, allow yourself to arrive. You might take a few long, deep breaths, become aware of your senses, listening to the sounds that are here, listening to and feeling the aliveness in the body, feeling whatever mood is in your heart.

And for these next moments, continuing in awareness, and when thoughts arise, just simply let go and reopen the attention to the senses. You might imagine that there's no roof on your head, that the mind has merged with space, the sense of space between thoughts, the experience of your being when not lost in thought, wear of sound, sensation. And you might ask yourself, is there anything I'm unwilling to feel? Bringing a gentle, intimate presence into the body. Seeing how fully you can relax with, open to the life in the body, we unclutch, we

let go of resistance by awakening awareness in the body. We let go of the armoring around the heart by offering kindness to what's here. Perhaps you can put your hand on your heart. And just imagine opening to the love that's around you, that's through your body, this interior, warmth, light, permeating, filling, the sense that resting in love. No resistance, yes, to love.

And sense the experience of your being when resting in love, undivided, the field of loving. And in these final moments, let your intention be the letting go of any control them. To let life be as it is. This is the pure heart of meditation. Letting life be as it is. resting in and as awareness itself, sensing the mystery that's here. Formless, timeless, the field of beingness that's naturally open and awake and tender.

Control and separates. Letting go, letting be, reveals our innate belonging. This mystery, this freedom. That's our very source. As you feel ready, you might again take a few breaths consciously. Just feel your intention, your aspiration, your longing. To remember. To let go, to let be.

Thank you, friends. Thank you for being part of this. Thank you for your good hearts. Thank you for what you bring to this world. Much love. Thank you.