Tara Brach - Loving and Losing

Episode Date: April 11, 2014

2014-04-09 - Loving and Losing - The way that we relate to impermanence and loss shapes our capacity to live and love fully. This talk, drawing on Mary Oliver’s poem “In Blackwater Woods,” explores three elements in our response to this fleeting, precious life that are integral to our healing and freedom.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Last week, I began sketching out a talk that I thought I'd offer tonight, and I had to completely trash it because it wasn't in the flow of my life, and that happens. As a number of you know, I think word has spread some. My mom died last Saturday, and so what became very much, the place to pay attention was this whole realm of loving and losing, which is what I'd like to have us have a kind of shared reflection on tonight. And with this understanding that being close in to birth and death and loss and change is what really is our entry into the mystery. It's where words kind of dissolve

and we really enter what's most real and alive. And I'm curious to ask of those here, how many of you are living with either a recent loss or an impending loss? It's a real alive place for you in your heart. How many of you are in that? Thank you. For those that are listening,

I would say that was about 30, percent maybe of you. And I know that because it's so universal, even if it's not immediate or impending, that each of us were mortals, everybody we love is mortal. You know, this world is changing. Each of us inevitably have seasons of our life where our hearts get really gripped by the ache of loss. And I shared, I've been pretty public actually with this, and I had a lot of people invited comments on Facebook, and the sharing, whether it was losing a child

or a best friend or a parent, Alzheimer's, the sharing's, the depth of collective wisdom, because I really said, what have you been discovering in this world of loving and losing? That was kind of the question. So as I explore tonight, I'll be drawing on both the spirit of a lot of the themes that came up for other people, and a few directly I'll read for you. But the real place of our attention is that how we relate to impermanence and loss,

to the inevitability of loss, really shapes our capacity to live in love fully. how we relate to impermanence and loss when it is what arises in our life directly affects our capacity to love. I'd like to, in a way, let us the kind of organizing of this reflection be around Mary Oliver's poem in Blackwater Woods.

It's a poem I've loved for a very long time. She writes this. Every year, everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this. The fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world, you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal. to hold it against your bones, knowing your own life depends on it,

and when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. To live in this world, you must be able to do three things, to love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones, knowing your own life depends on it. And when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. feels in the flow to be attending to Mary Oliver's words because she's in the final season of her life too. She's very sick.

And as one of the poets that's really her wisdom and hearts rippled out to touch so many, I just want to honor her for that, for all that she's offered. So in paying attention to these three things that we learn in living and loving fully, We find that each one of them is a challenge on the spiritual path. It's one of the things we're conditioned not to do. And each one of them is actually a direct way to true refuge, to salvation.

Her word salvation. It's so powerful. The other side of loss is salvation. Is this refuge in timeless love. So we begin to reflect on this. and we'll begin with her first of the three things. But I'd like to remind us of, I've read this before. This is Sogiel Rimpichet.

He says, 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? Is there something in fact we can depend on that does survive what we call death? If everything changes, then what is really true? So this is an inquiry in the background. This is the inquiry that says, well, there's loss, this living changing temporal world,

these mortal beings, there's loss, it's an out-old, and the other side is salvation. That there's something larger, there's some place of refuge, refuge of formless, loving presence that if we open to the loss, we can discover. The three ways. The first is to love what is mortal. And as most of us know, and Ralka says it the best, it's not so easy. He says, for one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks. So we look in our daily lives and we might say, oh, I love so and so. And of course,

I, you know, and just throw the word around. And yet how many moments are we living in that heart space that's tender and open and truly knowing that beingness that we're loving, really sensing that being and unconditionally being with with our hearts? space. And how many moments are we really inhabiting that? And we know, if we're honest with ourselves, that we're often a trance a lot of the time. We're in our habitual mode and we're not contacting that tenderness, that responsiveness. So our habit is to forget or deny mortality, just to have our attention fixed state on smaller things and live in what I sometimes describe is the trance of separation where there's a narrative going on all the time about who

I am and what I need and what might be wrong with me or wrong with you, but there's a self in here and a world out there and that self is somewhat in a bubble and we're not feeling so connected. That's the trance. And we're monitoring. We're monitoring for how do we meet our needs? How do we avoid what can go wrong? And so this project, we're where the self is the center of the universe isn't a great setup for feeling that we're loving what's mortal. We're loving this changing life within and around us. Many of you've heard, I think, of Anthony DeMello, who's a Jesuit writer and teacher. And he describes us as living our lives asleep. He says that we never understand the beauty of existence. All right.

all the love that's here, because, you know, he says, even though things are a mess, all mystics agree on one thing, all is well in the most fundamental way. And yet because we're asleep, we don't tap into that. We stay in that trance of something's wrong and something's wrong with me, and I need more of this and less of that. He's described this when he, after the teaching about we're walking through life asleep, he said, this year on Spanish television, I heard this story,

about a gentleman who knocks on his son's door. Jamie says, wake up. Jamie answers, I don't want to get up, Papa. The father shouts, get up, you have to go to school. Jamie says, I don't want to go to school. Why not ask the father? Three reasons, says Jamie.

First, because it's so dull. Second, the kids tease me. And third, I hate school. And the father says, well, I'm going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it is your duty. Second, because you're 45 years old, and third, because you're the headmaster.

So we avoid the rawness of impermanence, of loss, by living in these dreams and trying to navigate and control things. And we actually do it in two ways, in one way that we really avoid being honest with, loss until we get kind of slammed usually is that we're kind of on a project of grabbing pleasures wherever we can. It's like Thoreau says we go fishing, not realizing that it's not fish that we're after, and we spend our whole lives doing it. Okay, so that's one way. That it's really in some way that we're just narrowed to fixate on another pleasure or another acquisition, our approval, or achievement.

Woody Allen. He says, I love this old watch. It was my grandfather's. When he was on his deathbed, he sold it to me. We avoid the vulnerability, keep on acquiring and owning. And then the second way, of course, that we avoid the vulnerability of loss is that we are aggressive. We try to fight to protect ourselves.

and judging in whatever way we have our own modes. I saw a little cartoon that took place in a video store of a husband and a wife, and she's standing there with her arms crossed, and he's saying what she's told him to say. And he says to the clerk, do you have anything where the hero talks about his feelings while blowing stuff up? You know, they're saying that when women are depressed,

they eat or shop, And when men are depressed, they attack another country. So our death denial and our strategies not to face loss actually cause trouble. You know, they have us as a society consuming and accumulating more and more and destroying the earth. And so we play it out either by acquisition or, as I mentioned, by aggression. rather than being with the fear that's here, being with the pain. So this is blocking the loving. When Mary Oliver says, love what is mortal,

it means we have to put down our strategies of leaving, of falling asleep, of judging or acquisition, and start being right here. So what if, what if in our... practice and on our path, we stayed closer into that remembering of the black rivers of loss. What if we stayed closer into the realness that everything is coming and going? So Carlos Kachanata wrote really a lot of the perspective of the shaman writes this. He says, death is our eternal companion.

It is always to our left at arm's length. How can anyone feel so important when we know that death is stalking us? The thing to do when you're impatient is to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you or if you even catch a glimpse of it or if you just have the feeling that your companion is watching you. value of remembering our own mortality, the fragility, the fleetingness, the fact that others are going to die, the value in a way he describes two elements of it. I love that phrase that immense amount of pettiness is dropped if death makes a gesture,

but we know it's true. We know the moment we really face, we're with somebody and we really get, oh, we might not see this person much more. I mean, we're not going to get into our little narratives of blank. or disappointment in those moments, they just fall away, right? So that's one piece, is that we kind of drop the pettiness, the habitual narratives that have to do with either aggression and judgment or wanting something from a person.

Things drop away. The big thing that drops away, when we get real about our vulnerability, is self-importance. The sense of the self as the center of the universe, center of the universe, the sense of how we should be and how other people are viewing, we'd get less fixated on self. Carlos Castanada just adds one more line I'd like to mention. He says, as long as you feel that you are the most important thing in the world, you cannot really

appreciate the world around you. You're like a horse with blinders. All you can see is yourself apart from everything else. So one of the gifts of the the rivers of loss when we're willing to face that, is this possibility of that kind of self-importance dropping away, the blinders dropping away, that separate us from really loving what is mortal, loving each other, loving our own life. So what we see when we remember impermanence is that it is fleeting and it's precious. And we've heard this infinite times that when we really get that it's passing, we cherish it.

We fall in love. And the expressions of it are a kind of sensing the goodness that's flowing through things, sensing the beauty that's here. And it comes out as appreciation usually, as gratitude, as thankfulness. Anthony de Mello again. He says, anytime you are with anyone or think of anyone, you must say to yourself, I am dying and this person too is dying. I am dying and this person also is dying. Attempting as you're doing this to experience the truth of the words you're saying. If every one of you

agrees to practice this, bitterness will die out, harmony will arise. So it's a truth. Ticknachthan described it too. He says, you know, in that hug that I've often described to reflect, I'm going to die and you're going to die. And we have just these moments together. And if we really let that register, oh my God, those moments are, we're in love. We're cherishing.

To love what is mortal. This is the first of what Mary Oliver recommends to let those blinders of self kind of fall away. and part of why I chose to really focus on the poem is because my mom has taught me so much about that quality of thankfulness. I've rarely run into somebody that she was always grateful. But, boy, as it became very clear, there was no recovering.

There's some way that her, some of the personality that was more thick kind of got more transparent and that thankfulness was just shining through. when Betsy and Darshan got her a bird feeder and she was just so every bird that would appear and it could be the same one over and over again each time it was like oh you know now dementia can play in a bit with repeating you know like oh my gosh can you see that bird

but the wonder and the appreciation so beautiful we took her for within a week of her death we took her for a last trip to the river. And the only way we could do it is if Jonathan literally carried her to get her into the car. And we drove in her, she has an 18-year-old cabrio that's this, it's Cinebar, this kind of orangey cabrio convertible. And she got to ride in it. But last time she loved convertibles. And she got, and her, her thankfulness had a childlike quality. It was like, wee, you know, this is so fun, yeah. And she was, and then down at the river. And she was, uh, the radiant

of the sycamores and she was transfixed by that or just seeing the geese, it didn't matter. So I don't want to romanticize because thankfulness is really natural and it comes out this appreciation when we sense the fleetingness. And what also can come out is an immense amount of fear and holding and there can be pain. And we have a conditioning in us to think that something's wrong and that can take over. it's not so easy many times as we really come close to the truth of mortality. One friend of mine described being with her father as he was dying, and for her, she was living with this ache of the unresolved hurts

that he had judged her so much. It was very hard to just drop it even as he was getting closer to dying. And so part of her practice was she would actually imagine him gone. She would see him and just imagine kind of almost like vanishing the image of his body and him being there. And as she did that, she sensed kind of the reality that he really was going to be gone. And he became more transparent.

She could start sensing how he also was wounded but even beyond that, just the goodness inside, underneath the ways he expressed his woundedness of a deep generosity, a real caring, a lot of creativity. She said it was so precious that she had paused to sense the realness of him being gone, both the form and the formless, to see that spirit shining through. So we'll take a moment. We'll just do a brief reflection right now. So Mary Oliver says, that to live in this world you must be able to do three things and the first is to love what is mortal and that loving comes from really getting mortal getting change getting

that we lose what we love and we register it either through our own mortality or seeing it in another and so you might begin as we do this brief reflection just to let yourself come fully awake in your body. It helps to relax areas that might be just habitually holding tension. For many of us, the shoulders, see if you can let there be a little dissolving in the shoulders, and let the hands be soft and the belly soft. And as well as you can imagine, sense that you have a year to live. and just sense what would most matter knowing that you had a year to live. What would you want to do? What would you want to experience?

In the most deep way, what really would matter? And letting it be as real as possible if you had a month to live, what would you do? What would you want to experience? What would most matter? And seeing if you can let it be true again that having a week to live, live now? A week, what would you do? What would you want to experience to know, to trust, to feel? What would most matter? If you had a day to live, what would you do? What would you

want to experience? And what would most matter? And if you just had a few moments, you just had a few moments, what would most matter? Taking a few breaths. Sensing your intention to let death be an advisor, to bring you back home to what most matters, to awaken our hearts so that we can step out of that trance and truly love what is mortal, love this changing life. So we move on to the second of the three things, to love what is mortal is the first,

to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it. To hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it. So if we really come close to the reality of loss and dying to the truth of our vulnerability, there's a natural response of caring. There's a natural response of wanting to take care. There's a natural response of wanting to take care. of wanting to receive, to be held, to give.

There's a realization that we're all in it together. Every creature that has ever incarnated in the history of the universe takes a form and dissolves back into the formless. Every creature has learned and knows the experience of dying. They could all do it, we're going to do it, every future creature is going to do it, going to do it. We're in it together. We're inextricably woven in this living, dying web. And part of realizing that is to then hold each other, when she says to our bones, it's like truly taking care. We take care. We offer and we receive. We breathe in and out.

To be profoundly engaged in this way in this living compassion is, again, as with the others is really challenging because our conditioning in this trance of separation is to be afraid to take in feeling something's wrong with me and I can't let others in really and we give out and yet we're really in some ways holding tightly. It's very hard to be fully generous because we feel like we don't not have enough. There's a sense of scarcity. So we don't let in and we don't give out so much. We don't hold this life to our bones. Instead we try to control things.

We keep others out. And I know for myself in perhaps my most kind of ground-shaking experience of facing into my own personal loss with my own body mind was years of descending into illness, and I've shared a lot about it, it so I won't say a whole lot right now except for that I could see very well how for the first phase my conditioning as I was getting sicker and sicker and it went on for eight years where I didn't know if I'd ever recover a certain amount of physical mobility and there was a

tremendous amount of grief and loss in it but for the first phase my conditioning had me pull in and not really let others know so much terrible at being helped with anything I tried to overcompensate by actually, you know, really, you know, I can deal with it kind of thing. In other words, I didn't let the vulnerability really be felt by the world. I kept a certain kind of coding around it. And of course that caused more suffering, more sense of separation. And suffering is just basically a message that we're not living aligned with truth, that we're forgetting something.

So, of course, that my practice deepened. and I became aware that I was really feeling vulnerable, and to control my way out of the vulnerability only created more suffering. So it was about staying with. Compassion is always about staying with vulnerability. If we want to hold life to our bones, the second part of Mary Oliver's kind of teaching, we need to be willing to feel the rawness,

the rawness of vulnerability. And so for me it really had to do with feeling, okay, I'm feeling cut off, I'm feeling bad about myself. And in some way the words that came out from that vulnerable place was, please love me, like there was a yearning to take in. And at first my taking in was much easier I could be by the river and take in the flowing life there and take in trees and nature.

and then I began to slowly let myself take in from others. But it wasn't until I stayed right there with that place of real vulnerability and loss and grief that I actually began a kind of healing, what Mary Oliver calls the salvation or finding that refuge that was big enough to hold the loss. And that's what it's about. salvation is the space, the heart space, that's big enough to hold the loss.

So, just say a little bit more about this second part, that when we are aware of our vulnerability, the natural response is to offer care inward and outward. And I was teaching about this, oh, about, you know, seven or eight years ago, down at Seven Oaks at a retreat about impermanence and about facing it and finding that refuge. And my mother was at the retreat. She actually came to, oh, she's probably been to 12 retreats with us, week-long retreats. And I thought this is a really good thing. She's entering this final, you know, phase of her life and Buddhism and these meditations really can help her

navigate through this impending mortality. So I was feeling like this is just real fitting. And so I remember giving a talk and I could see her sitting there and see her. I felt like, oh, she's really, you know, she's really still. She's taking it all in. Really felt like, oh, this is great.

And afterwards she came up, she always broke the rules and spoke, you know. And she whispered, and I thought she was going to ask me a question maybe about, you know, how to work with some of the challenges of loss. And she came up and she whispered in my ear, darling, are you eating enough?

Classic. So just to let you know that oh, it was about five days ago or six days ago maybe she had a day that she was actually and this happens often right before one dies that she was actually feeling quite well and she had in her mind that maybe she'd get to come back to class here

and come back to her seat over there. And she asked me when she came to class, if she could make an announcement. I said, sure, what do you want to make? And she said, I want to tell them to bring their parents. And for her, it was like, you know, she was the only one in her 80s, now and then somebody in their 80s come.

But she was more on the elder side, and she felt like it makes such a difference when we get older to have this refuge of knowing how to get quiet and how to find a space that's big enough for what's going on. So since she couldn't make the announcement, I'm making it for her. So presence with impermanence, with vulnerability, brings out that caring, that connection from some of the responses from Facebook. One woman writes this, she says, I've been standing

by as Alzheimer's has been slowly robbing aspects of my mom. She has more. She has more than mostly unresponsive, yet has moments where I wonder what she is understanding. Today, when I told her how she has always been a beautiful example of caring for others and is remembered fondly for this, she had one beautiful tear well up. I took this as a sign of connection. To live in this world fully, to really be who we are, we must hold it to our bones, fully engage in this giving, in this receiving. So that's the second, fully engaged.

The third, she writes, and then when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. This is the last part of our reflection tonight. Suzuki Roshi, Zen master, writes this. He says, renunciation is not giving up the things of the world, but accepting that they go away. We don't have to let go as in, like, it's not like that. It's more like just opening in an honest way

to the reality that things come and go, facing that, being with that. Some of you might know that on Saturday Peter Matheson died. He was the author of Snow Leopard and a number of other books. Wonderful man. And so I thought maybe I'd share with you his teaching about this letting it go. In the snow leopard, he was visiting a llama who had crippling arthritis and lived in a really isolated section of Tibet. And he was wondering in his mind, how does it feel for this llama knowing that he's so crippled

he'll never leave where this region again? He's stuck there for the rest of his life. And so he asked his translator to ask that question. What was it like for him to know that, that he was never going to leave? So the question was asked, and here's what Peter Matheson writes. And this holy man of great directness and simplicity, big white teeth shining, laughs out loud in an infectious way at the question, indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness

as if they belong to all of us he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains the high sun and dancing sheep and cries of course I am happy it's wonderful especially when I don't have any choice you understand right isn't that great that line of course I'm happy it's wonderful especially when I have no choice.

Matheson goes on to write that he feels as though he's been struck in the chest with the power of this wholehearted acceptance. What freedom. To choose what's here. To truly agree. Remember again, Anthony DeMello, he describes it as wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable.

It's a great line. Yeah. So our... Our habitual way, again, our conditioning, and it's just part of our nervous system, is rather than face and open up to and accept and celebrate what's difficult, it's to contract and to judge, and to end up in that contraction feeling more lonely and more separate. So this is this third teaching when it's time to let it go, to let it go, is really deconditioning. deconditioning that clinging, deconditioning that all the different ways we were trying to control things. Some of you might remember this little essay one day when the Sultan was in his palace at Damascus, a beautiful youth who was his favorite rushed into his presence, crying out in great agitation

that he must fly at once to Baghdad and imploring leave to borrow his majesty swiftest horse. The Sultan asked why he was in such a haste to go to Baghdad, because the youth answered, as I passed through the garden of the palace just now, death was standing there. And when he saw me, he stretched out his arms as if to threaten me, and I must lose no time in escaping from him. The young man was given leave to take the sultan's horse and fly.

And when he was gone, the sultan went down indignantly into the garden and found death still there. How dare you make threatening gestures at my favorite? He cried. But death, astonished answer, I assure your majesty I did not threaten him. I only threw up my arms in surprise at seeing him here because I have a trist with him tonight in Baghdad.

So our practice of letting go, of letting be, of accepting what's here is really the training we do when we meditate. Every single time we agree to pause and deepen our attention, we're beginning to practice this very very very, very deep quality of willingness to be here. And then when we find we leave, there's this gentle noticing, and just this willingness again,

we're choosing presence. That's letting go. We're letting go of all the conditioning to leave. We're letting go of that which, that habit of trying to acquire more or achieve more or find more pleasure or defend ourselves. And we're just resting. in this undefended allowing presence. And the given is that we leave. And sometimes the given is that we judge that we leave. So then we open to that and say, this too. There's a magic

to the phrase this too, because then no matter what happens you can always go bigger than it and say this too and rest in that enlarged sense of presence. Allowing. This is our practice. It's allowing, recognizing what's here and allowing it over and over and over again. So we find that over and over and over again we do that and over and over again there's that grip of trying to control things and leave the vulnerability and the rawness and the unknowingness because it's all so, as soon as we get present, there's nothing we can control and we're in this world that's actually doing its own thing. you know. So we want to have control and what loosens the grip of controlling? Because the controlling is what keeps resurrecting our sense of separate self.

Is that there's an inner knowing in each one of us that the only way that we can come home is by, in a sense, resting back into what is. That if we're fighting reality, if we're trying to manipulate, we're not going to be at home with ourselves. and we're not going to be at home and loving. There's something in us that knows that. Again, the other side of the rivers of loss of this vulnerability is salvation, is that timeless love. But we can't experience it unless we allow this changing world

to be just as it is, just as it is. Okay, another reading from the comments from Facebook. One man writes this. He says, our daughter Brianna died suddenly at the age of 20, five years ago. We came to realize that our grief was so big because our love for her was so profound. Your words, that grief can open the door to everlasting love, are the truest things we have heard spoken. Grief can open the door to everlasting love. While we would gladly sacrifice all the wisdom we've gained since her death to have her back, we also would not wish for one less ounce of grief that meant having to love any less.

I was really, really moved by that. Grief is so huge. It's that hole, that ache that feels so inescapable and so painful. and to know that it's by opening to that depth and bigness of grief that we discover that timeless space, that heart space. Let's us go ahead and grieve. And for each of us, mourning is absolutely necessary. We need to mourn what we lose.

We need to let ourselves feel that, because embedded in that morning is the loving. I share that and say that, and there's a beautiful description by Eckertoli. He says that death and loss, that they tear a hole into our hearts, but it's through this painful gaping hole that the winds of grace can pass.

So beautiful. But I want to say that that has its own organic timing, that again, it's not to romanticize, that we can get tugged all over the place by grief and feel that we're not doing it right or that the timetable is wrong. And it can feel like in some way we're very, very isolated in it. So it's to be very patient with all the different ways that it emerges. Again, a reading from one of the sharings.

And this man, an elderly, like in the 70s, psychologists. Recently, I've gone through an ordeal like yours, and I confess that it's been and still is too hard to me accepting my dear son's departure. I am very grateful for your sharing the sorrow. Your expression, earthly self, has meant a lot to me. It means an implicit affirmation that our dear one stay alive somewhere. I must believe that, indeed, we haven't lost them. Again, that inquiry of Sogill Rimpashay, if everything changes then what is true? Is there some spacious place of awareness and love that holds us all that we discover?

I must believe indeed that we haven't lost them. Another woman wrote to me, Ah Tara, sending you love and healing, she'll never be too far. That one had me crying. never be too far, that the loved ones here in some way. So coming to a closing here about this letting go, this grieving, letting go, and discovering a larger truth. And I'd like to share with you the poem that's probably influenced me the most about grieving. And this is John O'Donohue, and the title is For Grief. There are days when you wake up happy, again inside the fullness of life, until the moment breaks and you are thrown back onto the black tide of loss.

Days when you have your heart back, you're able to function well, until in the middle of work or encounter suddenly with no warning, you're ambushed by grief. It becomes hard to trust yourself. All you can depend on now is that sorrow will remain faithful to itself. That sorrow will remain faithful to itself. More than you, it knows its way and will find the right time to pull and pull the rope of grief until that coiled hell of tears has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed. And when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air, and be able to enter the heart in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. So loving and losing and being true to the grief and the sorrow until it does itself, it undoes itself,

and we discover in our own beings that timeless loving that's always been there, but we needed to come home to it. So as a way of ending perhaps to say that the fires of loss are part of reality. They're part of reality that if we avoid, we'll feel isolated, shut down, uncreative, that we won't feel loving. And that if we open to with a courage and a tenderness, they'll remind us to love what is.

We'll love what is mortal. We'll hold that dear and be able to give and receive in a genuine compassion. And we'll learn that letting go into a timeless love. That's our really our true home. Before ending, I had one more sharing from Facebook that I wanted to read to. She said, I don't know you, but us Native American Indian women

have a full moon ceremony where we honor all those women who have walked on Mother Earth before us. So from this point forward, look up to Mother Moon when she's full and be with your mother as she continues to watch over you here. Much love to you

as my mother crossed over 12 years ago. That's many moons of comfort. Let's sit together for a few moments. The invitation tonight is to be awake. To be awake. To allow this changing flow of life to live through you and to offer a profoundly allowing presence, right this moment, so that whatever is arising in you, whatever it is, there's a recognizing of it,

and a deep yes, loving what is mortal, the life that's right here, a tenderness towards it, that we can even in some way send that message of, I love you, or I'm sorry for the suffering, and I love you. Real tenderness and the letting go that really allows this life to be just as it is. Gradually, you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed, and when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal, and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hearth in your soul

where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. Namaste and blessings. Thank you. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.