Tara Brach - Loving the Life Within Us (retreat talk)

Episode Date: July 29, 2016

Loving the Life Within Us (retreat talk) - If we don't love the life we consider "self," we will not realize or live from the loving awareness that is our essence. This talk guides us in bringing a kind, accepting presence to our inner life, and discovering the vastness of what we really are. 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. So just to pause and sense where we've come from, it's last time sitting up here 24 hours ago and you were sitting there and I don't know if it felt like 24 hours to you. How many felt like it was like a much longer stretch of time than that? Yeah, right. One of the interesting things, there's so many moments of either pleasantness or unpleasantness, and they get intensified when we're at retreat, because even if it felt like you were sleeping through things or lost in thought, you're actually a lot more awake or present than in everyday life. And there's a power to having a formal intention to pay attention.

So you notice more of the pleasant and unpleasant moments. And I know from the groups that many of you notice what we traditionally are called the hindrances. I think of them as the universal challenging energies that every human experiences on the path. And you might have noticed them to take them. today. Some of us have more of one type than another. But if you're not familiar with them, the first of the universal challenging energies is sometimes called wanting mind. It's that part of us that just want something where I want a nap or I want food now or the fantasies are going on. And in some way we just feel like we're trying to get somewhere else. I mean, how many

have you noticed that? The kind of the fantasy. Yeah, right. By the way, keep your hands up for a moment and look around as I'm going to ask you, okay, so here's our wanting crowd. The second of the types is the averse of mind. That's the mind that's basically saying, I don't like this. Okay, that's the aversive mind is either angry or annoyed about how it is, judgmental about how it is, in some way upset or distressed or fearful. but it's a reaction of push it away. Don't like this moment.

How many of you noticed a verse of mind coming up? A lot of us, okay? The third of the forces is traditionally called sloth and torpor, which is just the language that's been used over the ages. It's the sleepiness that comes. Now that's usually very popular, okay? Yeah, especially on the first day. Then the next one is restlessness.

Just feel like you're just jumping out of your skin, just don't want to sit still. How many of the rest of it do we have? Again, just check around. Last one is doubt. Like, this isn't working. This isn't going to work. Something's wrong with this or wrong with me. How many had doubt?

Yeah. Okay. Now, I saw a bunch of hands go up more than one time. So you had multiple hindrance attacks, right? Yeah. Some of you might have noticed the version that we call the second arrow, and it's really the multiple arrows where we feel aversion, and then we have aversion towards ourself for having that aversion. Then we're averse towards ourself for even getting caught up, and the aversion towards the... How many of you notice the second arrow?

Yeah. Okay, now, I purposely wanted to have us raise our hands, because... The real suffering in these, when these weather systems comes through, is that we take them personally. If you're not taking them personally, there's just not going to be suffering. If it doesn't feel like my jealousy or my fantasies or, you know, my doubt, if it's just, okay, this is that constellation that humans have experienced through the ages, then there is enough residing in something larger in the mindfulness that's here, that it's not pleasant, but it doesn't have you in its grip. And I think that one of the values of groups is that it really reminds us of that truth.

We really get it that this is not my fear, it's the fear. It's like when we are sitting here, and Jonathan mentioned this last night, the one of, what on earth was I thinking when I signed up for this, you know, that kind of thing? I mean, I think that through the ages, if you were at different monasteries and on different continents or at a sundance or at another ritual, there are going to be a certain strong percentage of people sitting there thinking, God, when's this going to end? You know, through the ages, that's just one of the voices of,

of averse of mind. But we take it personally. So one of the things that brings us here is that we have a deeper wisdom that knows that it's not until we make friends with the different energies that come through us, that in some way that we learn to attend and befriend that there's any freedom. There's something in us that knows that, and yet when we get caught in trance and the sleepiness comes or the cravings come, instead of attend and befriend, we either ignore or we get fixated and we're fighting and judging. So tonight, I would like to explore how we awaken those two wings of attend and befriend. In other words, how do we deepen presence in a way that we kind of step out of our flinch response to what's coming up

and regard ourselves with a much more cognizant and compassionate attention? How do we attend and befriend? I think the underlying theme is, I mentioned this last night, that ultimately it doesn't matter what is, coming up. It doesn't matter if we've just gotten back a biopsy and we get that we don't have that long. Or it doesn't matter what, you know, whether there's an experience of rage because we've been betrayed. What matters is how we are relating to the experience. That's what determines freedom our suffering. So how do we attend and befriend?

There's a reading from one of the teachers that's most impacted me, who I've never met, I just get very inspired by the depth of his wisdom and realization, Srinor Sargadata. And I'd like to share it with you and unpack it a little and then use it as kind of the main teaching that we'll come back to again and again as kind of the juice of attend and befriend. Okay, so here it is. All you need is already within you, only you must approach yourself with reverence and love.

Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. deny yourself nothing. Give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them. You are beyond. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing. Give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them.

You are beyond. So first, the word love. I like the way Krishna-Murti describes it. He says that our full attention is the deepest expression of love. That love inherently has these two wings of really seeing what's here and profoundly allowing what's here. If you're fully recognizing what's here in the moment and there's zero resistance, there's just pure allowing space, the tenderness and warmth we describe of as love naturally is there full attention so what does he mean

by making love of yourself perfect and my understanding is that it's not a narrative of self- we're not talking about make love of the story you're carrying about yourself perfect it's making love of the dynamic, alive experience we call self. Make love of this constellation of feelings and thoughts and sorrows and ways of responding to the universe. This experience that we're having moment to moment make love of that perfect. And there's a difference because we're not loving a story. We're loving an experience that's unfolding. Now the word perfect, and that's a sticky one because it's not intended as another, this is not another standard you're supposed to go out and meet, okay, am I making my love perfect enough? You know, because then that's just real, that's trouble, that's suffering.

So let me just say my way of taking that is that it's really in the spirit of an invitation to commit ourselves to loving what is, no matter. matter what. It's kind of this wholehearted dedication. And in spiritual life, it takes that wholeheartedness. It takes commitment. We have to really get that something matters. So the promise is that if we bring this deep, profound, allowing attention to the life that's right here. Completely bring it right here. Commit ourselves to that. That will reveal that we're beyond. That will reveal the essence of what we are. So let me just ask you to check it out for a moment, just so that it's not a lot of words, okay? You might just, if it helps to close your eyes, close your eyes. And take a moment as you pause right now just to sense

what is the experience right here? You're going to be loving something. What is it you're going to be here loving? Is it tiredness? Are you feeling a sense of sensations that are achy or uncomfortable? Is there a sense of liveliness and curiosity? Sadness, happiness? What's here?

And then the inquiry is, what does it mean to you to make love of this self, of this life right here perfect, right in this moment, to explore making love of yourself perfect. And what you might find is you have to keep on staying connected, recognizing what's actually happening right here. You can only be having that full attention if you notice the aliveness we call self.

So you re-notice it, and then what does it mean to really love what's right here? What is that like? For some of us it might be that we're in a fairly present place and it can be, there can be an exquisite sense of, oh yeah. It's really sensing, holding this life with a tenderness and reopening. And for others, there can be some reactivity going on and really a sense of that's just an idea. This is a mechanical effort because it's an idea. when it's most difficult to make love of our self-perfect is when we're in any form of real reactivity.

If you think back to today, at any moment when you are in some way contracted, when you are either reacting to sleeping a lot and feeling like you're missing out on your retreat, or when your mind was obsessing and you weren't able to get here, are when in some way you were judging something and feeling small from that, in those moments, if you say, okay, let me bring these wings of love and presence right here, what happens?

We don't deserve the love in those moments in our mind. We don't want to love ourselves. There's some sense of right now, I don't deserve it. It's my fault that I'm feeling this way. I should be better. I should be different. In other words, when we're in reaction, the moments we most need this loving attention are the moments that we most deny ourselves, because we feel like it's our fault that we're that way. So even when the contraction is not obvious, any moment that we're caught in a kind of habitual, egoic mode,

in reactivity and trance, on some level we're not at home with ourselves. We're not really liking ourselves. And this to me was most beautifully illustrated in the myth of the Buddha. I say myth, because it's mythic, it's archetypal, and shows us a lot about our own lives. That he sat under the Bodhi tree through the night, and he first concentrated and collected himself, much like we're practicing right now, really touching a sense of, okay, peace and balance, calmness, and then directed the light of attention to what's here and encountered the shadow side. And that was Mara.

And Mara expressed through greed and hatred and delusion and all the hindrances and difficult forces we're talking about. Now the Buddha was sufficiently collected and awake so that when he encountered these challenges, he kept waking up more and they turned into flower petals. landed at his feet until by morning, by the beginning of dawn, there was a big heap of flowers at his feet. But then Mara came up with his final challenge, which I think many of you know what the final challenge was, right? Say it loud. What was the final challenge? What rate do you have? Who do you think you are?

It was doubt. Doubt was the final challenge. Now, I want to just slow down and say, what does that mean to us? The doubt is the final challenge. That in some way, the Buddha was waking up out of this egoic trance and discovering his nature, this awake, compassionate nature, and yet the core layer that was keeping him stuck was some part of his ego that didn't like himself or trust himself enough. He didn't trust that he deserved to be a Buddha. So this self-distrust, the self-doubt is right at the core. And if we kind of look closely at it,

you know, the core perception of the egoic self is it shouldn't trust itself. The ego doesn't like and trust itself. And even when it's feeling inflated underneath that, it doesn't trust itself. Don't believe my words. Just check it out. When you're feeling a sense of your egoic self, the self that's wanting something and fearing something and trying to get somewhere, are you really trusting yourself? I'm just going to put it out there. So we're going to return to the Buddha story, but the importance of it is that doubt, this mistrust in our own capacity in who we are, is the most paralyzing of the challenging forces. Because if we're thinking this isn't going to work. Other people are cut out for it, but not me. Somebody mentioned

today, I know the science is really good on this stuff, but I might be the one it doesn't work for, you know, that kind of thing. If we don't trust our own capacity or the capacity of these practices of attention to wake us up, then we lose the energy to take the next step, which is really all that needs to happen, the next step into presence. So it can be, this ego can be like this hall of mirrors. We were talking about this in one group that everywhere we look, the ego pops up again, and even when there's some spiritual unfolding, the ego claims it. Then we go, oh my gosh, the ego again. And it's like we're at odds with the sense of an egoic self that we know is less than all we are. So I have this cartoon here that's got this doctor

looking puzzled and this guy is sitting there with a huge knife in his back and the doctor saying it's got to come out of course but that doesn't address the deeper problem you know I'll pin it up for you you got to see it kind of but if we don't recognize that we're doubting ourselves mistrusting ourselves turned on ourself then in some very deep way it's going to to be very, it's going to be difficult to heal. We have to remove that second arrow. We have to, in some way, find the kindness and the presence to not be caught up and being turned on ourselves. That dividedness keeps us completely in prison. So if we just took a look at what makes this sense of doubt so pervasive in core, and I'll just do that briefly, sometimes we call it the

process of selfing, which is really just the process of the ego taking form and believing in itself and getting more and more solid. And it is part of the design of evolution that awareness identify itself with forms, with objects, that there's a narrowing that goes on, that our attention pulls away from formless beingness, and awareness thinks mistakenly that it's less than that. In other words, it becomes identified with a set of waves and forgets that vastness. That's part of the way things are. It's the part of the design. And that when there's separation from that beingness, with that comes wanting and fear.

That separate self feels a sense of wanting to be more complete, wanting to belong, and fear of endangerment, fear that the rest of the world out there might hurt me or reject me. So there's this basic sense of I'm the wanting self, I'm the fearing self. With that comes a sense of deficiency. In the most basic way, we feel deficient because we're living in a smaller sense of being than the truth of what we are. We're identified in the story of a self and something in us knows there's something larger.

But the ego knows it's like living in something smaller. It's almost like our deepest judgment is that we're not enlightened. Our deepest judgment is that something in us knows that we're forgetting something and we're judging ourselves constantly for that forgetting. Does that make sense to you as I say that? Because this feels more and more clear to me

that with any sense of ego there's mistrust because we know we're caught in something less than the truth. So, that distrust gets deeper and deeper, the more solid our identity with ego becomes. The more we forget the ground of our being, the love, the awareness, the wholeness, the more we're identified with something small, the more we mistrust, the more we feel deficient, the more we feel afraid, the more we feel wanting. The degree of that is very much exacerbated by our early caregiving. You know, if our parents didn't create a kind of holding container where there was attunement

to our needs, so we felt some sense of belonging to them in that way, connection there. If there wasn't a mirroring of our goodness, somebody that can see the beingness, the forgetting goes deeper. We really forget who we are. So it happens in really big ways when we're abused or neglected, that that is this kind of severed belonging and we really forget that we are part of something larger. And it happens also in a lot of little ways that are perpetrated just by mindlessness and by self-centeredness of caregivers. One of the stories that for me always has touched me that has that level in it is called

ordinary heartbreak. She climbs easily onto the box. It sits her above the swivel chair at adult height, crosses her legs, left ankle over right, and smooths the plastic apron over her lap while the beautician lifts her ponytail and mocks coarse as a horse's tail. Then as if that's all there is to say, the woman at once wax off and tosses its foot and a half into the trash, and the little girl who didn't want her haircut but long ago learned successfully how not to say what it is she wants, who even at this minute cannot quite grasp her shock and grief is getting her haircut. For convenience, her mother put it, the long waves gone that have been evidence at night when loosened from their class, she might secretly be a princess. Rather than cry out,

she grips her own wrist and looks to her mother in the mirror, but her mother is too polite or too reserved or too indifferent to defend the girl. So the girl herself takes up indifference while pain follows a hidden channel to a place almost unknown to her, convinced as she is that her own emotions are not the ones her life depends on. She shifts her gaze from mother's face back to the haircut now so steadily as if this short-haired child she sees were someone else. So there's a way in which the insensitivity or lack of attunement has us not be attuned to ourself,

has us feel that we don't belong to our own heart and our own emotions, has us deep in that sense that something's wrong. Now, it's reinforced, as we all know, by the culture. The culture gives, our parents are really messengers for that, where we're told to meet expectations all the time. So we live a lot in this idea of the standards that we're trying to reach on who we should be.

And sometimes they're the real typical ones of look a certain way, have a certain kind of body, intelligent, success, and so on. And even in spiritual life, I say even, it's sometimes more painful, this idea of, I should be going around being generous and kind and thinking about others and feeling grateful, but instead I'm in this self-centered slump and all mulling around as more. You know, we easily feel we're not meeting standards. So what happens is that this ego self, the more we feel that we're not good enough, the more the ego tries really hard. And I can say for myself,

I remember when I was in my early 20s, when I realized it was this flash that I was always trying hard. And it was that blanket of thing that on some level I was, always trying hard to be different or be better. And underneath that was a sense of something's wrong. And we have our strategies to strive and prove and achieve and accomplish and check things off the list. And part of our strategies when we're feeling deficient are to numb and to avoid

and to get preoccupied with, you know, entertainment or whatever. Sometimes it's to be really aggressive towards others. Sometimes it's just trying to be more perfect in every way. Somebody sent me this recently. I recently picked up a new primary care doctor after two visits and exhaustive lab tests. He told me I was doing fairly well for my age. I just turned 60-something. A little concerned about that comment. I couldn't resist asking him, do you think I'll live to be 80? He asked, do you smoke tobacco or drink beer, wine, or hard liquor? Oh no, I replied, I'm not doing drugs either. Then he asked, do you eat ribby steaks and barbecued ribs? Uh-uh, not much. My former doctor said all red meats unhealthy. She spent a lot of time in the sun,

like playing golf, boating, sailing, hiking, biking. Nope, I don't, watching out for the sun. He said, do you gamble, drive fast cars, or have lots of sex? No, I said. He looked at me and said, then why do you even give a shit? So this is, this is the selfing thing that we Keep becoming more and more of this tight self trying to do it right or avoid feeling bad. And the more we're playing out our strategies, whatever they are, even the ones that the good meditator strategy, I'm doing it right, on some level it solidifies a doing self. It solidifies a self that's trying to be better.

And it also reaffirms underneath that, I'm not okay. So one of the most basic sufferings is that when we're caught in that egoic self, it really blocks our remembering of basic goodness, of our intrinsic belonging. I remember many years ago a story that came out of the Waldorf School that my son was attending where this is the kids in art class and they were sitting at Taylor. tables for at a table and they're all drawing pictures and one little girl was really into her picture and she was just completely absorbed and the teacher stood behind her and watched her for a while and then asked her what she was drawing and the little girl's response was I'm drawing God so the teacher kind of chuckled and said you know hon nobody knows what God looks like and without

skipping a beat without even looking up she said they will in a moment. I think about John O'Donohue died about five years ago, and he equated wildness with God, you know, the natural wildness of being, and he said, you know, what have we done with our wildness? You know, how did we get so into our little box of how we do things, and we forget, we forget who's here? Now, we don't forget completely because not one of the of us would be here if we didn't have glimmers and intuitions and some deep sense that the what we are is so much vaster and beyond the story we live in. We get glimmers.

We get glimmers whether it's in nature when we kind of just relax and just feel a part of the elements or when we feel that in love feeling with beings in our life. We get quiet and that silence, that Luisa, that beautiful reading from last night, there's something in us that it reminds us of who we are. The silence reminds us of something that's a homecoming, that's beautiful. And every day we get caught in something smaller. Everybody I know, we get caught in some small-mindedness where we are, self-conscious or reactive in some way.

So Pemmo Chodrin calls us the big squeeze that we live in, where our conditioned self just plays out and plays out, that ego in the hall of mirrors, and yet there's still something, some light that's shining through that we know is there, are we wouldn't in some way be committing ourselves to deepening our attention. So we begin to look then at how these practices,

can start bringing us home. And we use often the acronym Rain as a way of waking up the two wings that I describe, this wing of really seeing what's here and this wing of loving. And so for those of you that aren't familiar with Rain, it's something you might find is an easy-to-remember handle

for when you get in trance, bringing yourself back. And sometimes we wake up the two wings slowly, and sometimes it's much more sudden. But rain goes like this. The R is recognized. So that means right this moment with rain, you just recognize what's happening inside me. And the A is allow.

And allow doesn't mean a full embrace, because often when things first come to our attention, and we're way too tense against it to embrace. But the A means that you're allowing, you're creating a pause and saying, okay, for these moments, let me be with this. You're agreeing to let it be there without fighting it. Okay?

A, allow. Now, sometimes the R and the A, because that's the essence of mindfulness, recognizing and allowing, is enough so that whatever has arisen, there's no identification with it. It just comes and goes. And we're resting, inhabiting a larger awareness. Sometimes that's the case.

And I had an experience last week. I was at an aneagram conference. How many of you are familiar with the aneogram? Can I just see by hands? So 50%. Okay. Neogram is a system that has nine basic types. And the types are kind of constellations of

emotions and beliefs and so on that have kind of a distinctive personality. And each aneogram type is a reaction to some loss of the wholeness of being. It's like the way different ones of us react to losing our sense of wholeness. It's a very powerful system. It's very sophisticated typology and there's a lot of variation and fluidity. So I find it interesting. And Helen Palmer was one of the initial people in the West to bring it to everybody's attention. And she was at the conference, and we had lunch together, and we were talking about how she saw the power of it. And she said, you know, basically it's about presence, but what do we bring our presence to? And if you're very aware of your patterning, it's quicker that you

bring your attention to that patterning to dissolve the identification. So if you know that, for instance, for me, I'm in a neagram type number three, which means that I have a tendency to try to find my sense of love, love by performing well, so people will then think I'm great and then love me, and then I feel like I'm okay. If I'm hooked on my threiness, I'm not going to trust my essential goodness, right? So if I know that's my pattern, that means I'll be tracking ego inflation and deflation because they both, you know, I'll be watching it and it'll be a wake up like, oh, okay, this is keeping, this is part of what's keeping from beingness, deep in attention. What does it mean in this moment to make love of myself perfect?

What does it mean when there's pride to make love of myself perfect? Well, it's hard when there's pride. What does it mean when there's shame? So Helen's configuration is you don't do anything about what you see. If you come across your pattern of being judgmental or angry, you're a number one, a perfectionist who feels like everybody's letting you down and you're resentful. Or you're number five and you find you've once again removed yourself from everybody as a way of protecting. You don't do anything. She says you just see it and relax in the moment of seeing it.

If there's any instructions to just see it and relax, like, ah, just make space. I think of that as RNA. It's another configuration of RNA. Now, part of the reason I'm bringing up the aneogram is because they have people get together in panels, so they're like panels of twos that are dealing with all the ways that they, you know, try to get people dependent on them so they'll feel okay about themselves. And you have these panels where they're all just cheerfully naming all the same. all the shadow side. It's terrific because the second arrow is not happening. They're naming the

pattern, stuff that we don't like, because by the way, every type has the most discussed towards their own pattern, which is really a big deal for me to be able to say, and I'm a three well, that doesn't come that easily, especially since I'm here presenting, which plays right into the three, you know. But there's something really freeing about naming what's difficult with other people that either know it themselves very personally or know something similar so we can all go, oh, recognize and allow. That's the power of 12-step groups. You can begin to just to recognize the addictions as not mine. It's just this common force that we're experiencing that's painful. Are in the groups today, you might have felt that some, less personal.

So this is the R and the A where we begin to, and it's really, really powerful to know that you have different ways of doing the A. You can say yes and just say, okay, just leave space right this moment. You're basically, I mentioned last night, not anxiety about imperfection, you're not adding the second arrow for the fact that in this moment you're off balance. So this is a core training in how to dissolve doubt. Our doubt comes from all the second arrows that have penned us into thinking, I am the imperfect self. If each time it's recognized and allow, it just becomes imperfection, not owned by self. Does that make sense? Now, we have a Buddha here, over here, And I just want to give you a little bit of the background on that Buddha,

especially because Louisa's here also. Louisa and I gifted this Buddha over here to our Sangha about 10 years ago, maybe. More? 15? About 15 years ago. We were up in Provincetown together, and we decided we were going to find the perfect Buddha. We went shopping, and we fell in love with that Buddha. We just thought, there's the expression.

and a little androgynous, kind of had both the kind of the feminine quality, heart, but also we're excited and we, some fanfare, one the first night we had it at the Wednesday night class. And I noticed after class that people were standing in front of the Buddha and they were kind of looking at it like this, a whole group of people kind of like this. And I went over and I was standing there and I started going like this too. It's a leaning Buddha.

It's the cast isn't perfect. It really is. It's not, it's not made perfectly. And, and eventually, we came to look at it like, what a gift that the Buddha for this Sangha here

is a leaning imperfect Buddha. It's like it gives us all permission to have our different aneogram types or constellation of stuff and not add that nail of, it's mine, I'm bad, I can't trust me.

myself. If you can experience the egoic self and not identify and think something's wrong with me, then you're beginning to really touch freedom. So what do we do when we're in that tangle of the egoic self, but there's really nothing in us that can say it's okay. Nothing in us that can have some quality of space and tenderness. So this brings us to the next. next step, which is the eye of rain. We've done the recognize, we've done the allow, the eye is to investigate, and it's to investigate with an intimate attention. What we're doing is deepening the two wings here.

We're not just recognizing, we're beginning to investigate, adding more attention, and not just the allowing, we're really bringing an intimate attention to it. And with the investigate with an intimate attention, the process sometimes is helped by having somebody else do it with you to help ask questions. Inquiry is very powerful, but you can ask the questions to yourself. So just to give you an example of Rain, the Investigator with an intimate attention, to share a story of one woman that I worked with,

and I included this story in True Refuge. I brought a manuscript because I want to read at the very end of it to you. But this is a woman who had a very wounded narcissistic mother who was really much more concerned with herself and her way of appearing in the world than her daughter. And when this woman came to talk to me, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and didn't have that long to live.

And she was the primary caretaker because all the siblings were out of town. And she was really upset because she knew she had this incredible dislike and anger towards her mother, but here she was being the caretaker. It's a difficult position to be in. And she told me, here's one of my earliest memories, Tara. She said, I was three years old. My mother said, it's time for your bath.

I went to the bathtub, and she says, just go take your own bath. It was upstairs. She goes to the bathtub. There's three inches of very lukewarm water in the bath. And she said in that moment of getting into the bathtub, I had the clear recognition that this is all I was going to get. This is it. So the feeling of the anger towards her mother

and that she was going to be taken advantage of again in some way was very fresh in her body. And so we started practicing with rain, recognizing and allowing the anger's there. And she had some fear that if she let the anger, anger be there that she would be destructive in her life. So we included the fear and the fear gave the anger permission in these moments to express itself. Investigate. Okay, so what's going on with that anger? Well, the belief is that something was taken away from me, that something's in the

way of me ever getting what I want. There's kind of a rage there. And so I invited her to feel how that felt in her body and there was kind of an explosive feeling. and I said give it permission to let it rip, just basically let it rip. Go ahead. And this is now, she had to come out of the story. This is what my mother is like. This is how she'll still treat me. Keep coming out of the story and into her body. Now that was a challenging piece because she kept wanting to go back into the storyline.

Part of investigate is to know what our stories are, but to keep finding the energetic aliveness in the body. that we tell our thoughts, you're real, but you're not true. This is not the truth. This is a real thought in my mind, but not to believe the story. Come into the body.

So she kept saying, okay, let the anger be full. Finally, she said, okay, it's just bursting out through your office, through this whole room. I said, okay, now see what wants to happen. She said, it's exploding all the windows, and it's spreading through the East Coast. So, okay. It's like a fireball.

It's just like it's exploding the earth. You know, just keep going. She said, yeah, and then it just kept going out and out. Really huge, huge rage. Okay. And then she got quiet, and I said, what's happening? And she said, well, there's something outside the anger. There's just, the anger's kind of getting dimmer.

I said, what's there? it's just completely empty. I said, okay, allow that. Because it's always you're recognizing and allowing. Okay, empty, empty. And then it was, there's absolutely nobody here. There's nobody here to love me. I'll never be loved.

And then grief. So when she let the anger explode and be all that it was, emptiness, grief. And in those moments, she then in the investigations, what is that grief most need from you? And at that point, what it needed was just her acknowledging and just offering a kind presence.

Just that. And I put my hand on my heart, because as most of you know that have been with me, that gesture, it's an embodied way of saying, connecting, I'm here, just the warmth of the touch, the tenderness of the touch. For her, the mantra, and that's one that I think, found really useful, I'm sorry, and I love you, was really powerful. So she just sat there and she said, I want to be there for this part of myself. Now, towards the end of that session, she had this

fear that she would go back and be with her mother and everything would close down again, because what she realized is that little girl in the bathtub, she was so angry at the world that she had neglected that child. So this was kind of a homecoming, okay, I want to be with that child. But she was afraid she'd close down again. And as soon as she said, I'm afraid I'm going to close down again, she got it. She said, oh, okay, I'm sorry. And I love you. Just like keep coming back. Make love of yourself perfect. Many, many rounds for her of doing this. But I guess the important thing to say is that in holding herself with kindness, she had much more capacity to be a balanced being with her mother. I'm going to come back to her story. But to say, with rain, sometimes you get

to the eye and the investigate and you can bring an intimate attention. But what happens if you come across something that feels like too much and you can't really hold yourself with kindness? What then? What do we do if we really can't offer an intimate attention? We come upon something that either brings huge self-aversion or huge

terror. So let's come back to the Buddha under the Bodhi tree. He hit the final challenge, which was doubt. Who do you think you are? And he realized he didn't trust in that moment. So what did the Buddha do?

Some of you know what he did? Yeah, seeing people do it. You can do it. You can put your hand on the ground. He touched the ground, and he called on the earth goddess. It really expresses the larger belonging, the living web of life, the heart of the world. He called on the earth goddess to bear witness. He called on the earth goddess to kind of remind him of his own compassion, his own Buddha nature. I think this is a really essential piece of the mythology

because the idea of a self liberating itself doesn't work. If we think we're sitting under the Bodie tree and that whatever comes our way, we're going to pull out our arms and say, okay, meet this with compassion, meet this with mindfulness, do this, do that. If there's a sense of a self-doing that, deep down we're not going to trust

that this self is a Buddha. So there's a kind of a letting go and a reaching out to the truth of who we are. Touching the ground and calling on the earth goddess is just an expression of that. In a way, the goddess was offering perfect love, offering mirroring. So each of us, in a way, at times,

needs to find a pathway to that which feels more whole, more full with love, that can help us remember who we are. This is RELCA. He says, I yearn to be held in the great hands of your heart. Oh, let them take me now. Into them, I place these fragments my life, and you, God, spend them however you want. I yearn to be held in the great hands of your heart. So we each find, what is it? when we're investigating and coming across the forces that feel like we're just too small to be able to make that love of ourselves perfect, we call on where we sense that love is, we call on what we sense the source of that loving is.

For one friend in the community who also was facing her death, her way of doing it was to imagine her mother who was no longer alive and say please love me please love me please love me please love me and imagine her mother's love just bathing her filling her surrounding her and then she'd imagine saying please love me to trees and to plants and to her friends in her mind and she every time that she asked from the depth of her heart it has to be very sincere when it's prayer it has to come from the depths of sincerity. Please love me. She would feel it just radiating back at her

until she realized that she wasn't calling on something outside herself. She was calling on her own awake, realized presence. But sometimes it takes first reaching out and touching the ground for us to discover that the earth goddess is really who we are, which is what the Buddha discovered because he became enlightened. For myself, I'll often, And when I feel like, you know, there's something in me that knows I need to let go, to surrender, to let in something larger, I'll actually, I have a kind of gesture like this that I'll either do physically or in my mind.

And it's like just the ego just kind of bowing and recognizing there's something more than this. But in a way of kind of humility and sincerity that just opens to me to the what's more. So there's many rounds for us of recognizing, allowing, paying attention, either regarding the experience, the stuck place with a clear and loving attention, ourself, or calling on that. The N of Rain, with R.A. and I, there's some activity. We're recognizing, allowing, investigating, offering care, receiving care. The N of Rain, there's just a. and I, there's some activity. We're recognizing, allowing, end of rain, there's no doing at all. The end of rain is a realization that we're not identified. It's a realization of beingness. It's a realization of what's sometimes called natural awareness.

That whatever we were living in that was a sliver of our being, that ego self, that was suffering, when we've deepened our attention through rain, when we've deepened our presence, we actually become that presence and realize that those waves are part of us but don't define us. This shift in identity is the essence of the spiritual path. Going from when awareness is identified or hitched to an object, a small self, to remembering beingness again. When we reconnect with our own sense of vastness or beingness, we are able to look at others and see past the mask. If we're living inside an ego self, we're going to look around and everybody we see is going to be another version of an ego self. We're going to

to see twos and threes and sevens and fours, but we're not going to see the beingness that's shining through. Does that make sense? How we perceive ourselves to others? When we start more and more having those glimmers and deepening and sensing this presence, this awakenness, this is what I am. This tenderness of heart is what I am. Then we start looking at each other and we see the defenses and we see all the different stuff

but we see what's shining through. So this happened more and more for Amy and I want to read you just a little bit at the very end of her story she told me this is at our last meeting how our mother had woken up a couple of early mornings before very hot and sweaty. And Amy had taken a cold cloth to her forehead and cheeks and arms and feet,

just kind of giving her a bath that way. And her mother looked at her and gave her this really wistful smile and said, you know, no one's ever bathed me. Now you'll remember Amy's experience because she went right back to the little girl in the bathtub in the few inches of water. And she and her mother both had tears in their eyes. And Amy told me that she got it, that they had both gone through their life feeling neglected, as if they didn't matter. They're both the little girl in a bathtub, nobody really bathing them.

But in that moment, there was a moment of recognition, she said, as she was bathing her mother. And she said that right now, in our own ways, we were experiencing the full intimacy of care, and it was a moment of uncomplicated love the first. She said that it was the first one I could remember, and it was one I knew I cherish long after my mom was gone. In Buddhism it said that the heart of the practice is compassion, and the heart of compassion is compassion for ourselves, that there's no way around it to make love of ourselves perfect,

to really bring that full attention of love to the lives within us, is like this portal to loving all of life everywhere. And over and over we see that, I've watched it so many times, this widening circles that when we start getting kind towards ourselves, that kindness naturally ripples out. And when we start seeing more clearly our own patterns and what's behind, we see more clearly.

We're more there for other people. So I think of it as that when we're making love of ourselves perfect, we're doing it really for the benefit of all beings. These two wings of love, the wing of seeing what's here and truly allowing, are part of the evolution of consciousness. And if you look at the brain, it's a most recently evolved part of the brain

that actually correlates with those capacities. It's the hope of humanity. If we here use these practices to wake up these two wings, to make love of ourselves and our lives perfect. We are bringing the consciousness that can change the world. And I bring this up at a time, as I mentioned last night, and in our society where there's so much making of enemies,

whether it's political or the terrorists that are out there. And we see it with the centuries of racism. And we see it with the centuries of all the isms that the path to healing is this shift in consciousness. Or rather than me, this separate self and you out there, we realize this shared light and love that's living through all of us. I wanted to, I got something from last year from a woman who was living in Uganda and she made a weekend trip to Rwanda to a genocide memorial center.

she saw a plaque on one memorial and it struck her so much that she wrote it down and emailed it to me and it was the author I'm not going to pronounce the name right Felician Nataga Jandwa but here's what he wrote he said if you knew me and you really knew yourself

you would not have killed me if we see past the cover if we see the light that's there, we just want to serve each other. We can't harm each other. Louisa said this beautifully last night. We just sense the heart space that we're sharing. So we're looking tonight at what frees us, what frees us when we feel caught in something less than who we are, and we wake up these two wings. We wake them up in ourselves and we begin to see each other more clearly and we savor that. So I'd like to close again that same brief reflection and just

see where it leaves you. So if you will, just sitting in a way that allows you to pay attention. And as you have so many times today in this pause, just notice what's happening. The beginning of making love of ourselves perfect is to simply recognize what's happening right here and allow it. Let it be. And you can. can deepen your attention, sensing how you're experiencing your body, your heart, your mind. And you might again ask yourself what it means to you in this moment to make love of yourself perfect. Is there a quality of forgiving, of softening, of more space? Whatever you're noticing, is it possible to include this too in a gentle heart? From the Yoga Sutras, the Radiant Sutra,

there is a place in the heart where everything meets. Go there if you want to find me. Mind, senses, soul, eternity, all are there. Are you there? Enter the bowl of vastness at his heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon. Quiet ecstasy is there and a steady, regal sense of resting in a perfect spot. Once you know the way the nature of attention will call you to return again and again, and be saturated with knowing, I belong here. I am at home here. Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again, and be saturated with knowing, I belong here. I am at home here. Namaste. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.