Tara Brach - Love, and Death - Retreat Talk (2016-12-29)

Episode Date: February 3, 2017

Love, and Death - Retreat Talk (2016-12-29) - To live our lives fully, we need to embrace the natural unfolding of birthing and dying. Yet we are deeply conditioned to resist loss, to pull away from fear and grief. Through a powerful Inuit story shared by Clarissa Estes, this talk explores how our practices of presence can open us to what we avoid, and free us to love without holding back. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and good evening. It's very sweet to be with you. I've been reflecting on how on every continent and through history, people are doing what we're doing. and it's actually more and more, gathering and listening, you know, to our hearts and our lives and our world. It's just happening everywhere. It's still a very small percentage.

I mean, for many people, this would be utter insanity, you know. The night of the living dead, you know, when you see people walking slowly, that kind of thing. But, you know, it's interesting to sense into, well, what is it that really, motivates us. I mean, there are other ways to spend a week. And I sometimes think of Munindraji, who is a Bengali teacher, and he was asked that question, you know, what motivates you to this practice? And his response was so that when I walk into the village every day, I won't miss seeing those tiny purple flowers by the side of the road. He basically, his teaching was to live the life fully, which in a sense just means to really be present for this life, not miss out on

it, sensing this reality that everything we really cherish, feeling loving, creative, feeling a sense of full aliveness, connectedness, everything is sourced in presence. We have to be here for it. So that's the motivation. And the challenge is that a lot of the time we don't want to be here. Have you noticed that some of you coming into the room sitting down and that there's a part of you that says, I don't want to. Have you noticed the I don't want to part that just doesn't want to contact reality? So that's in most of us, at least some of the time.

And I heard a story about a gentleman who knocks on his son's door, and he says, Jamie, Jamie, wake up. And Jamie answers, I don't want to get up, Papa. And the father shouts, get up, you've got to go to school. Jamie says, I don't want to go to school. Why not, says the father? Three reasons, says Jamie. First, because it's so dull.

Second, the kids tease me, and third, I hate school. Father says, well, I'm going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it's your duty. Second, because you're 45 years old, and third, because you're the headmaster. So we get into our dream or our trance, which is, I don't want to. And this is actually, I sometimes think of it as our evolutionary predicament. and we're all in it. We all are creatures of evolution. And we have two distinct poles on us at all times, really. And one of the poles is that we have active, the primitive parts of our brain,

you know, the reptilian and limbic systems that basically perceive separation and operate off of a system of go towards pleasant and try to hold on, push away from unpleasant. This is the Vedana that Jonathan was talking about last night, and it's very automatic, and our minds do it on a more complex level. They're constantly moving and churning to get us towards pleasant and away from unpleasant. And this is all going on, you know, just think of a little amoeba and you poke it and it tightens up. And you put a source of food near it and it opens up. Well, we're on the same automatic reflexive system.

And this is one of the poles of evolution, where we're in some way on automatic and we're trying to control our experience to protect what we perceive as a separate organism. Okay? And when we're operating off the primitive parts of our brain, the identity that forms around that and gets solidified is, I am a separate entity, I am threatened, I need and want that, I don't want that.

And it's going on all the time. That's one of the poles. Remember the circle and the line? that's operating and we're not aware of it, we're below the line. Whatever you're not aware of you get identified with. The egoic self-organizes itself below the line off of those more primitive parts of the brain. Okay, that's one of the forces. The other pull of evolution is the pull towards awakening, just the way a flower is pulled towards flowering and releasing its fragrance and its beauty to the world. There's a pull in us to manifest fully our potential,

our potential of awake awareness, our potential of loving without holding back, our potential to really be right here, really listening, to be, our potential to be, and not to be contracted around some idea or narrative of a self on their way somewhere else. That's our potential. So the identity that gets contracted under the line, the more that is brought into awareness, the more that identity is freed up to rest in that being presence that includes the different waves and experience,

but it's not hitched to them. Every day we have this predicament, one writer called it the big squeeze, whereby we forget, we're under the line a lot. We're kind of operating out of that idea of a separate self in that bubble navigating, generally feeling like something's wrong with us or wrong with the world. And most days, more than we think we actually have pauses or spaces, when there's a resting, when there's a gratitude, when there's a quality of loving or presence

or taking in beauty or appreciating our quietness, it's really valuable to get to know those moments more. But we have those too. So we move back and forth. And really, one understanding of the spiritual path is that we're on purpose paying attention in a way that wakes us up, that we can spend more time in that awake awareness. So one of the places I'd like to bring our attention to tonight is this process of including what we've excluded in awareness, the unlive parts of our psyche, the places.

we've run away from. And I'd like to share with you a story that I love. It's an Inuit story, one of the great Native American stories, that is taught by

Clarissa Estes, who wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves? How many of you have read that? Women who... Okay. She has beautiful teaching stories. And this one really has to do with, to me, one of the most compelling places in my own practice, which is the realization that you can't separate death from love.

That the more you face an open to dying, the more in that openness this natural radiance of love shines through. Death and love. You have to die to love and you have to experience loving to be able to let go. they're inseparable. And if those seem abstract now, I hope by the end of our reflection there'll be a little more embodied sense of that.

So the story, I'm going to read pieces of it. The title is Skeleton Woman. She had done something of which her father disapproved, although no one any longer remembered what it was. But her father had dragged her to the cliffs

and thrown her over and into the sea. And then, the fish ate her flesh away and plucked out her eyes, and as she lay under the sea, her skeleton turned over and over in the currents. One day a fisherman came fishing. He drifted far from his home place and didn't know the local fishermen stayed away, saying this inlet was haunted. The fisherman's hook drifted down through the water and caught of all places in the bones

of skeleton woman's ribcage. The fisherman thought, oh, now I've got a really big one. Now I really have a good one. In his mind, he's thinking of how many people this great fish would feed. He might be free from the chore of hunting. So he struggled with this great weight on the end of his hook, and the sea was stirred to a thrashing froth. The hunter turned to scoop up his net,

so he did not see her bald head rise above the waves. And when he turned back with his net, her entire body, such as it was, had come to the surface and was hanging from the, the tip of his kayak by her long front teeth. Ah, cried the man and his heart filled to his knees. Ah, he screamed again and he knocked her off the prow with his oar and began paddling like a demon towards the shoreline. No matter which way he zigged his kayak, though, she stayed right behind.

He wailed as he ran aground. And then she was right after him. Over the frozen tundra he ran. And throughout it all she kept right up. And finally the man reached his snow house and dove right into the tunnel and on hands and knees scrabbled his way into the interior. Panting and sobbing he lay there. Ah, safe at last.

Oh so safe. Imagine when he lit his whale oil lamp. There she, it lay in a tumble on a snow floor, one heel over her shoulder, one heel over her shoulder, one knee inside her rib cage, one foot over her elbow. He could not say later what it was. Perhaps the firelight softened her features or the fact that he was a lonely man. But a feeling of some kindness came into his breathing. And slowly he reached out his grimy hands and using words softly like mother to child

began to untangle her from the fishing line. Oh, non, na, nah, no, nah. First he untangled the toes and then the angles. Oh, nah, na, na, on and on he worked into the night until dressing her in furs to keep her warm, skeleton woman's bones were all in the order of humans should be. The man became drowsy, slid under his sleeping skins, and soon was dreaming. And sometimes, as humans sleep, you know, a tear, a skin. from the dreamer's eye. We never know what sort of dream causes this, but we know it is either a dream of sadness or longing, and this is

what happened to the man. The skeleton woman saw the tear glisten in the firelight, and she became suddenly so thirsty. She tinkled and clanked and crawled over to the sleeping man and put her mouth to his tear.

The single tear was like a river, and she drank and drank and drank and drank until her many years long thirst was slacked. While lying beside him, she reached inside the sleeping man and took out his heart, the mighty drum. She sat up and banged on both sides of it, bum, bum, bum, and as she drummed, she began to sing out flesh, flesh, flesh. And the more she sang, the more her body filled out with flesh. And when she was all done, she also sang the sleeping man's clothes off and crept into bed with her body filled out with flesh. him skin against skin. She returned the great drum his heart to his body, and that is how they

awakened, wrapped one around the other, tangled from their night in another way now, a good and lasting way. The people who cannot remember how she came to her first ill fortune say she and the fisherman went away and were consistently well fed by the creatures she had known in her life. under water. The people say it is true and that is all they know. So the skeleton woman represents really our instinctual life, death, life, energy. It's the nature of our beings, the nature of reality. It's this, the ever-changing, mysterious force of nature and creation that really shape our whole existence. And the primitive brain resists and tries to control these forces. And as we evolve in that capacity for presence, the most recently

evolved part of our brain can notice what's happening without reacting, can hold with compassion. Rather than controlling skeleton woman, the possibility is a genuine being with, engaging with. And every part of the Buddhist, every tradition in Buddhism has teachings on how to be with skeleton women. Every tradition teaches whether it's the charnel grounds or reflecting on one's own death that in order to live and love and be awake, we have to not only conceptually but in our bodies open to the changes and the losses and the griefs and the rebirths. We have to open to it. So the reflection this evening is really how are we relating with skeleton woman, with

the very core energies of this natural living and dying world. In Sage, one was asked over and over by many, many people, you know, really the secret to awakening, he would swear them to silence and say, I have one question for you. What are you unwilling to feel? What are you unwilling to feel? The pathway to facing and embracing skeleton woman is through that kind of the way. through that question. You know, the poet Rumi describes this path and sense of that we're night travelers and were companions willing to face towards our own fears. Night travelers.

So this is the reflection and we're exploring it as individuals. How do we face that which we're afraid of losing? How do we feel? face our fears. But it's also an absolutely essential inquiry as a culture because we're a fear-denying, death-denying, denying, denying culture, you know, and it gets us into really big trouble. You know, we don't have the rituals and the ways of presencing. And so what happens is, you know, we, out of our fears, we go into over-consuming fossil fuels and over-consuming everything else. and out of our fears we go into having to oppress and violate others. There's a little saying that when women get depressed or anxious, they go shopping,

and when men get depressed or anxious, they start wars. And this sounds like a real sexist way of putting it, but the point is we run away from the deep and difficult feelings, and we all have our own particular styles of running away. So that's what we're going to be looking at. What are our ways of running away and how do we turn and be with what's there? It's a universal to not want to turn towards fear and death.

Everybody encounters organismic resistance. I remember seeing one cartoon with a guy hitchhiking and a herst, funeral hearse, stops to pick him up and give him a ride. He goes, oh, no thanks. I'm not going that far. So it's like, that's not where we want to go. So one of the big signs of running from fear, and you can just kind of listen to them a sense, oh, what are my ways? And being at retreat really shines a light on them because we don't have all of our normal ways of distracting and preoccupying. The big way is getting lost in thought. and compulsive thinking, obsessive thinking.

It's that part of us that's always trying to plan things and always worrying and trying to make sure something doesn't go wrong and rehearsing and kind of bargaining and judging and fantasizing. Okay? So there's a way that our minds try to escape that energetic restlessness and uneasiness. And sometimes we do it in really in our own little styles of some people describe music, just getting caught and listening to the music in their mind, and others of us are just talking to ourselves. One man described, this is a young medical doctor who's

doing his residency in obstetrics. And he described a very embarrassing situation where he was performing pelvic exams for women and he just got really, really self-conscious during it. So the way he tried to cover his embarrassment was, and he said it was unconscious, but he had this habit of whistling softly. So some of us think a lot. He was just whistling all the time. And I don't know if you're a woman here, imagine you're the guy that's doing exam whistling. Well, for her, he said this middle-aged lady upon whom I was performing this exam suddenly burst out laughing, and that even made me more embarrassed. I looked up for my work, and she busily said, I'm sorry, was I tickling you? And she replied, and she had tears running down

her cheek. She said, no, doctor, but the song you were whistling was, I wish I had an Oscar Meyer weiner. So we have our unconscious patterning. Sorry, that's one of my favorites, though. So one way that we try to escape is through our thoughts, and that's the big one, our mental control tower. Another way we try to control is by behaviorally controlling things by self-soothing. Again, this is the overeat or alcohol or drugs or whatever. We try to control by sleeping, and many of us find the addiction to sleep. We try to control by ways we control others. And it's just really natural. It's like we're trying to get away from our discomfort. We want others to behave in a certain way. One of the ways we try to control things is by proving ourselves and

proving ourselves right. Have you ever noticed how uncomfortable it is to feel like you're wrong in a conversation? It's a certain kind of dying or a death to the self that wants to have it together. One story, a little girl was talking to her teacher about whales and the teacher was saying it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because the mammal's throat is too small. But the little girl stated, well, Jonah was swallowed by a whale. And she was Jonah was swallowed by a whale. And teacher said, no, it's impossible. And she says, well, when I get to heaven, I'll ask Jonah. And then the teacher said, well, what if Jonah went to hell? And the little girl said, then you ask them. We want to be right.

So there's getting lost in thought, all the different ways. There's behaviorally self-soothing, controlling others, trying to be right. And then we have emotional reactions that are often covers for that really root fear. And many of you have noticed them. A few people today, we explored how anger, you know, if you get under anger, you can find that vulnerability, the sadness about it. lost, the fear, the hurt. So there's these layers, depression, to push under the feelings that feel like too much. And then anxiety is often the overlay to a core root sense of fear.

There's the emotion of shame. For so many of us, the deep fear of loss and the fear that it takes is something's wrong with me. We have a very quick switch where we go from feeling bad to I am bad. If under the line of awareness there's a bad feeling, the self identifies with it and becomes bad. So if there's anger, if there's hurt, depression, sorrow, it's in some way it reflects on the self and it's owned by the self. Again, I'm bringing up identity because the more that we're not aware of the contents of our psyche, the more unlived life, the more the ego solidifies around it. And we're caught in a self that's smaller than the truth of who we are. And that's suffering. So one exploration is, well, how am I running away? How am I doing

it here at retreat? Is it in judgment, worry? Am I doing it through food, through sleep? What are the different ways? And then there's the what do we think we're running from? How many of you are aware of a background hum of fear or anxiety in your body frequently? Can I see by hands? Okay. I am. I notice that almost any time, time I fully pause and check in, there's some contraction or squeeze that I can detect. Sometimes it's very slight and usually it's not suffering. There's just an awareness of it. It's not like my identity is having a story, but it's a background kind of organismic defending against what's around the corner, what might go wrong. And often for most of us, it hitches,

to what seemingly small stuff in our life. But it hitches, that background hum, hitches to, you might have noticed here, anxiety will hitch to, well, what am I going to say in the interview groups? You know, there are so many of us, all we need to do is speak in a small group and all of a sudden our heart starts pounding. What are we afraid of really? We get afraid in the food line, we get self-conscious eating in front of other people. ball. We get self-conscious walking. Are we doing this retreat right? Are we really going along

with the protocol? It can be kind of hairy in here. You know, it's all quiet and some people seem to know like what they're doing and others that are newer might think there's something they should be catching on to. Like do you bow at certain times and what does that mean? And are we really doing it right? So our anxiety hitches. And then for each of of us, and this is Clarissa Estes puts it really powerfully, she says it's inevitable that the not beautiful, meaning the life going the way we don't want it to, skeleton woman appears. So what that means is that here in this room with a hundred people, there's a good number of us having certain landscape that we're in in our lives where skeleton woman's quite a

There's a lot of us facing illnesses that are scary in different ways or pain that's scary. Many, many that has someone that they love that is in some way sick, dying that we're worried about. That's skeleton woman. How many of us have an angst around relationship where there's a sense of real loss or a sense that we don't have what we want that we urgently want before we die, you know. That's skeleton woman, not having the life that we want. There's so many ways that skeleton woman appears. Sometimes it's to do with work, that feeling that we're not, our life isn't meaningful,

we're not making the contribution, that we're falling short in that way. So the beginning of facing skeleton woman is to start turning towards that inquiry what am I unwilling to feel and I just invite you to pause here

and maybe close your eyes and you might sense as you close your eyes that you can for some moment scan the landscape of your life it said that underneath every experience that's challenging

there's a core sense of fragility, that there's something we might lose. Where do you sense skeleton woman, this living, dying, uncontrollable, natural flow of the world? Where do you sense it? Is it in your own aging, your own sense of physical decay or mental loss? Is it in what's going on for someone else? your fear for someone else? For some, it's a sense of a life lost to addiction and it can be not just the obvious addictions,

but the addictions to sleep or withdrawal. And you can ask that question. So what is it that I'm unwilling to feel? The beginning of turning towards our fears, towards loss. This is really the recognizing and allowing portion of rain Before we can untangle, we need to recognize the landscape. Clarissa Estes says that the appearance of skeleton woman is the place where we discover love and freedom. It said that to face skeleton woman, one needs not to go into armed battle.

One needs only to care enough to untangle her bones. One needs to care enough to untangle her bones. This is what we're going to explore a little more of, that when we begin to sense, okay, so this is the area that there's unlived life, there's unfelt fears or ungrieved grief. This is where we untangle the bones. So how do we do that? In the story, and you're welcome to sit with your eyes closed, are open.

in the story, the fisherman has this feeling of some kindness that comes into his breathing. Okay? So that's the very beginning of untangling the bones. Notice how the heart comes right in there. You can't begin untangling. You can't begin to, as Rumi says, you know, turn towards the fears unless there's some care about your life, unless there's some softening of the heart. right at the beginning. A feeling of some kindness came into his breathing and using words softly

like a mother to child, he began to untangle her from the fishing line. Oh, no, no, nah, nah, he worked into the night. So that's the beginning that we bring a kindness right into the untangling. And as we've been exploring here, there's an inquiry, there's a what's happening here. We untangling. by sensing where are we feeling the experience. In the story with the fisherman, as he touches the woundedness, there's a liberating wisdom, realizing the presence that holds this living, dying nature of being,

and then he slept. And a tear escape from the dreamer's eye, the tear of compassion. So there's kindness, we begin to untangle, and as we begin to untangle, the heart breaks open. There's compassion. This is sometimes described as the awakening of the fearless heart, because fear's still there, but the identity is no longer hitched. You're resting in a heart space that can include the fears.

There's a book I am reading that is called The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Willer, and he says that we need to undertake an apprenticeship with sorrow. an apprenticeship with sorrow. Now that is not to say that in our path that our entire attention is supposed to go towards suffering. And I want to just take a pause here because it can sound like if the path is facing skeleton woman, all we're doing here is turning towards the fear and turn in towards the fear and it sounds like a pretty intense, rugged journey, as much as we need to turn towards the sorrow, we need to open to the joy. this particular talk, I'm emphasizing the path of untangling the bones with the sorrows.

And the way Francis Willer describes it, if we don't open to the sorrow, we can't discover the love. Now, it doesn't always present a sorrow. When you first turn towards skeleton woman, it may be that what you run into is your anger or your depression. So I want to get to you give you an example of untangling the bones from a man I worked with some years ago, who's an acupuncturist, and he was in his mid-60s, and he had been married for eight years. This was his second marriage, and he felt like it was the love of his life, and she left him. And back story is he was adopted when he was very, very young, and this marriage dissolving and catapulted him into a very, very primal sense of abandonment.

And as he described, he didn't know if he could live. It just was that bad. He didn't know if he could live. So he got very depressed. He withdrew. He had to back off to working part-time. Mostly he slept, he ate, he worked a small amount, and every morning he'd wake up with dread.

it was very, very rough. So untangling for him, he had a therapist and he needed support in it, and he also was working with himself. You know, he did know how to meditate, but he had to totally stop any classic kind of meditation. The only meditation he could do was he could walk and sometimes tell him to, you know, breathe in, breathe out, step, step, step. You know, that's as much as he could do.

The untangling, he would get, he'd ask that question, okay, what's happening right now? And he'd feel really panicky. And then when he'd say, well, what am I believing right now? Because that can be a very powerful belief if you're having a hard time to say, well, what am I believing? And it's not intellectual. Just kind of ask and see if there's something there. Always, if you're suffering, there's some belief that goes with it.

you can sense it and sometimes you can't. For him the belief is there's absolutely no one here. I'm completely alone. He said the image was like, you know, being in outer space and having the tether cut and just floating off, you know, that the most dread aloneness in the universe, just floating off in outer space. As he, he would pay attention to that panicky place in him that felt completely alone. And the sense of that the deepest unmet need was to feel companionship. So his practice for months and months and months was just a kind of sense of a rocking

and sending a message of, I'm here and I care. I'm here and I care. That was his practice. That was the untangling. To recognize panicky and just offer that very young place, I'm here and I care. when I'm sitting here rocking because that's what he was doing. He also would say just this moment,

just all you have to do is be in this moment, just to get himself into this moment. And sometimes he'd remind himself by this moment, he'd say, feeling myself sitting here, cushion, bottom on the cushion, looking out the window, feeling breath. He'd named the things just to anchor him in the moment. As he continued to do that, he started sensing, inside that panicky, a grief and a loneliness that, again, felt like death.

And Chokhunghāhā has a phrase that he says that our practice is to meet our edge and soften. He says just keep meeting your edge and softening. So this is what he was doing. He was kind of feeling that panicky place and feeling it was like a hole of grief. And his biggest fear was he was going to fall down that hole of grief and be a number. annihilated. But he did enough soothing with that, you know, I'm here and I care, that he began to meet his edge and soften into the grieving. And over and over again he do it. And he finally, he's described one time that he said, okay, just let go, just let it be here,

let the grief be here. He said he wept and he wept, but he found that inside that grief there was this kind of glow that started becoming more pronounced, and it became just pure tenderness. It's like at the very center of the grieving was pure tenderness, that he said started filling out and filling out until he felt that he was absolutely held in love. He fell through this hole of grief into love, and I want to share with you

when I was thinking of telling you this story this is from David White says those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the will of grief turning downward through its black water to the place we cannot breathe will never know the source from which we drink

the secret water cold and clear nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else. So his pathway of untangling the bones was to bring some kindness to the place that was most afraid

and then to begin to meet his edge and soften into that hole of grieving. And he had to do it over and over and over again. This was not a one-shot where he'd witness, he'd catch himself that he was really sinking in some way, depressed, or feeling that anxiety or dread, and over and over again,

he'd do the comforting, and then he let himself open to the grieving, meet his edge, and soften. In the Lakota-Su tradition, a person who is grieving is considered to be most wakken, and that means holy. So, grieving,

when you get to that place, where you're completely sad or grieving, that means that the walls of the armoring around your heart is beginning to soften and get porous. This is where you're beginning to die to the old defended self and come above the line into more open-hearted presence. A person whose grieving is considered most walken, most holy, there's a sense that when someone is struck by the sudden lightning of loss, and openness to that which is beyond this world can occur.

The state of holiness is respected. Grieving people's prayers are considered especially strong. It's proper to ask them for help. Again, we're talking about a shift in identity that happens when we untangle the bones. The tangles when we're resisting, when we're pulling away from the fear or the grief, and the untangling when we begin to face it and investigate and bring nurturing to it,

the untangling allows us to inhabit that space of awareness or wakefulness that can include the fears. We come home to a fearless heart. For this man, I just want to kind of give you a little bit of a wrap on this story. I found this to be kind of interesting that I mentioned he was an acupuncturist. The rounds of grieving opened his heart in a way that he really had access to universal currents of healing energy. And it really changed how he was as a healer. He said that he wasn't there doing the healing.

He'd been in acupuncture as a little bit more like a surgeon performing. and he said that it just was flowing through him. And so he was in a very creative space for about a year before he got diagnosed with lymphoma. And we spoke again and, you know, I was really, you know, I was concerned like he had just kind of come out of that depression and that heartbreak and his heart had broken open and he was in such a creative, vital thing, place. And what he told me was, he said, Tara, I already died. I know about dying. I really

already died. And if I can love, I can handle loss. He said that he had never lived his life so fully, that life was completely precious. And I really can say I understand that. I know for myself that when I got sick, as many of you know, because I've talked about and written about it a lot, there were a handful of years where I had no sense that I was going to get better. And, you know, I had lost a lot of mobility. And so I was, before I had gotten sick, my biggest attachments were physical activity. I just like love being embodied and moving and playing on the earth. And so it was really intense to have that taken away from me. It was like my identity shifted, my sense of access to what I loved. I felt like life was being pulled away from me. And my first set of

reactions and resistances were to blame myself for in some way not taking good enough care of myself, to be constantly trying to figure out how to take care of myself and fix it, to try to work really hard to see if I could keep on being productive in other ways, you know, in a way keeping my mind from it. And it wasn't until I really started grieving, you know, accepting, okay, it's like this right now and grieving, just plain grieving, okay, losing life, losing life, like feeling that very core sense of losing life, that I started finding real refuge. and the real refuge in a loving awareness that's not holding on to life being a certain way.

And I know that I'm much better now, and I know that if I got really sick again, I'd have to go through a lot of it again. So I don't want to pretend it's like it could happen again and I'd just piece of cake, you know, I'd have my loving awareness right there. All the resistance, because I can see it with small sicknesses, how I immediately tense up and start going through the same routine.

And I have a faith and a trust that there is a knowing. There's a knowing of a pathway home that knows about grieving and grieves regularly. Like I have much more access to sadness. And when I get even a bit of it, I invite it. You know, when sadness comes, it's like, oh, yeah, foo, because right in the heart of sadness is joy and love and beauty and mystery. Being an apprentice to our sorrow is really quite a beautiful path. Now, there are times that skeleton woman appears, and it's just too much.

It's not like we can have a courageous art, but it's still too much. our body may have experienced traumas and losses that were so intense when we're young that our nervous system is not able to open to it. And it takes a lot of compassion and wisdom to know that when the fears are there, it's not always the most intelligent thing to go and jump off the cliff, to jump into it. There are times we have to go really slowly and this is with one group I was using the words gentle our way in, you know, really slowly and really

carefully and that's the path and it wakes up a whole lot of compassion that we get that these organisms want to live and don't want to be overwhelmed. So we, instead of just boldly opening and investigating and feeling fully the intensity, instead of softening right into the hole of grief, we spend more time doing the loving kindness practice. We spend more time doing the compassion practices. We spend more time in circles where we sense with other people that we're not alone. To be a night traveler means we really are in it together.

part of the field that's created here and it's very visceral is that we all are opening to the exact same energies. Every one of us is dealing with loss. Every one of us longs to love without holding back but has ways we hold back. So we soften and move towards it, move towards skeleton woman by being with each other, by being with healers, with therapists, with friends, by offering as much kindness to our inner life as possible. Frank Osseskeskes, who's the founder of Zen Hospice, tells a story that I think is a wonderful description of how we can begin to be with what feels like too much. He was very close to an elderly man who was dying of stomach cancer. and had a huge amount of pain.

This was a story about being with too much physical pain, but it's the same for emotional. And the man asked him to guide him in a meditation, so he could some way find a way to be with what felt like too much. So Frank began, but the guy said, quickly, it's too much, it's too painful for him to meditate with this. So then Frank offered to place his hands on the guy's belly just to keep company,

because that's what we often need. You know, if we have belonging, then there's space for what's there. The man said it's a little better, but still pretty intense. So he put his hands a little further away, create that space for what was there a little better and even just a little bit further. And the man said, ah, that's lovely. And then Frank invited him to rest in that space. And then the man said, just rest in love.

rest in love and that became a mantra rest in love and every time the pain was really intense and he'd use morphine and rest in love because love

and death or love and pain inseparable in a certain way that we need to open to the dying to feel the openness that is truly love And we need to feel the tenderness of love to open to what's painful, every one of us. This isn't the end of the story, though, because if you'll remember back to the fisherman,

he had the tear of compassion and there was that opening to a timeless kind of love. And, at the very end, she pulls at his heart and bangs on it, chanting flesh, flesh, and the body's filled out alive. That's where the story ends. It's in that aliveness of them spending their life, feeling the precious moments, and living creatively in their world with the fish nourishing them they'd gotten to know.

So this represents the creative power that unfolds when we've opened to skeleton woman. Life becomes really alive. It's in the bodhisattva tradition that leads to compassion and action. We live out of presence. The Bedans talk about being a child of wonder. There's a sense of awe when we've really opened.

If you haven't opened to death, there's always a sense, something around the corners too much and there's guardedness. When you open to it all, wonder. The other thing that you open to is this enormous sense of appreciation, a kind of innocence. Sendak, the illustrator of children's books, has a story that I love. He describes sending a little boy, receiving from a little boy a charming card. And the card said, you know, that he had a little drawing. The boy had done a little drawing. And he said, I love what you do. And so Sandack really was touched by this, from this little boy, getting a drawing from a little boy. So he sent him

a picture of a wild thing. And he said, Dear Jim, I loved your card. Then he gets a letter back from Jim's mother saying, Jim loved your card so much he ate it. He said, that to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care it was an original Mory Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it. He loved it. He ate it. So the path, rather than landing in this kind of empty, open loving,

awareness is lived. It's a lived path. And it's a lived path that each of us is exploring right here, that in any moment that you die to the thoughts of the moment, that you let go and open, you discover this amazing aliveness that's here. I'd like to close tonight by inviting you to close your eyes and explore this a little. We've been talking about skeleton woman really in terms of the larger shape of our landscape of illness and death, the bigger losses. But in a way, when we come above the line, we wake up into full awareness. every time you let go of the storyline and you open up into your body and into the moment, there's a certain dying.

You're letting go of the kind of virtual reality that you've been living in. You're dying to that and opening to a larger space of awareness. Every time you let go of thoughts, you're practicing dying. you're opening to reality. Every time you let go of thoughts, you're opening to the uncontrollable energies of the moment. Right now you might want to explore by just collecting the attention, feeling the breath. And as we did this morning in the instructions, to sense what is here in the space between thoughts? One teacher says to ask ourselves, am I dreaming right now?

Is there a veil of conceptualization? Just to notice and then drop, let go. You can even gently but firmly say stop, open into the reality that's here. It's a completely vibrant, changing flow and sensing in the background, this timeless present, tender and awake. It's quite natural that thoughts collect.

You can just simply again, am I dreaming? Suravail, and then drop, just drop. The blessing of opening to the unlived life is this openness that is intrinsically radiant, loving, and free. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.