Tara Brach - Meditation: Listening to Life (2014-11-12)

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Meditation: Listening to Life (2014-11-12) - The attitude of meditation is one of engaged listening – a relaxed, receptive yet intimate attention. This meditation explores how we can listen to sounds, listen to and feel sensations, and then relax back into the ocean of awareness that includes and perceives the changing waves. In this relaxing back, we realize the peace and freedom of inhabiting our wholeness and essence. This meditation ends with a tribute to Thich Nhat Hanh's life and a reading from his writings on death and life.

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. As you close your eyes, just feel from the inside out, the posture, take a moment to let the attention come to the heart and sense what the state of your heart is right now. It's feeling and listening to your heart, whatever mood is here, without any judgment.

and just being aware, deepening the listening, and sensing really what your deepest intention is for this evening. And take some moments with this, so you can really sense a sincerity, a kind of innocence that comes when you really connect with what matters to. It's from the place of caring about awakening, about open-heartedness, about presence, that we chant together, this simple mantra own,

as a way of coming together as community. And whether you've done this once or thousands of times, just let it be fresh in the moment, feeling the sound current from the heart, letting yourself go into that sound current. We'll chant three times, and if you'd like to begin by bringing the palms together, this helps to tenderize and open

and that quality of devotion and love in the heart. Inhaling deeply to begin with a relaxed attention, just scanning through your body and noticing if there's areas of particular tightness or tension, bringing the awareness to wherever you sense holding and see if that presence invites a kind of untangling, a loosening. You might soften the eyes and let the brow be smooth, We tighten up in that area, the more we're thinking and the more we're stressed.

So just consciously bring some ease and receptivity to that area of the brow. Slight smile at the mouth. Ticknathang calls this smile yoga because it sends a message to the whole nervous system to connect with more ease. You might feel the inside of the mouth smiling and relax way down to the root of the tongue, feeling sensations and vibration in the face. Imagine the throat expanding to fill the neck and just feel relaxation and ease there. Maybe letting the shoulders relax back and down a little.

You might imagine a dissolving from ice to water as you feel inside the shoulders. Ice to water and water to gas. Sensing the movement or flow of energy and sensations in the arms right down into the hands. Notice if you soften the hands the increased awareness or sensitivity inside the hands. Can you feel the tingling there, the vibrating? The same sensitivity and awareness can fill the whole body. can fill the whole body. Fill the chest area and you might imagine smiling into the heart.

Bring a smile, fill the heart and chest area, not to cover over but to help you connect with the space and aliveness that's there. Loosening the belly and letting this next breath be received in a softening belly. This breath, now this one, and again. Feel that waking up of awareness deep in the torso. So, feeling sensation and aliveness through the pelvic area, right down through the legs, feel the feet, the contact with the ground, place of pressure or warmth, and the interior of vibrating, tingling in the feet, still aware of the hands soft and awake, widening the attention to

feel this whole body simultaneously, this energy. energy body, a field of sensation, not stopping anything or opposing anything. Just letting this whole flow of aliveness move through you, ever-changing dance, including the display of sound, the appearing, disappearing of sound. So you're listening not just with your ears but with your whole awareness, close in, sounds, these words and the space between sounds, listening to the sounds in the room, and the more distant sounds, sentencing the most distant sounds you can perceive, of the vastness of space of awareness that includes even the most distant sound.

With listening, there's nothing to do. sounds are known spontaneously by awareness. Rest, that wakeful vastness listening to and feeling the changing flow of experience. Sensing in the midst of this changing flow, the sensations of the breath, perhaps the in-flow, outflow at the nostrils, or maybe the rising, falling at the chest,

the movement of the belly, Or for some, the breath is this whole body experience of expanding and settling. Every cell is relaxing with this primordial rhythm of breathing, still aware of the different movement on the surface of sound and sensation. But sensing this home base so that when the mind drifts, you can gently arrive again, pausing and relaxing back, aware of the sounds and the sensations, and aware of this simple experience of this life breath, moment to moment. You can begin fresh in any moment.

Just noticing where the mind has been in a moment of mindful recognition that we've been in the story, there's a waking up or relaxing back into the awareness that's here, just recognizing thinking and opening back, sensing the sounds that are here, the air of the sensations in the body, perhaps giving yourself the gift of relaxing a bit more, the shoulders, the hands, the belly in your heart. Again, you can feel this life breath, it's aliveness, sensation, and sound. And in the background,

that alert inner stillness, that timeless presence, that's really our deepest nature. We close tonight with a prayer, feeling our hearts with Ticknaut Han, who so many know as a beloved meditation teachers and master, writer, poet, leader. For us just to hear some words, a writing that he offered in his book, No Death, No Fear. This body is not me. I'm not caught in this body. I am life without boundaries.

I've never been born and I have never died. Over there, the wide ocean and the sky with many galaxies all manifest from the basis of consciousness. Since beginningless time, I have always been free. Birth and death are only a door through which we go in and out. Birth and death are only a game of hide and seek. So smile to me and take my hand and wave goodbye. Tomorrow we shall meet again or even before, we shall always be meeting again at the true source, always meeting again on the myriad paths of life.

So smile to me and take my hand and wave goodbye. Tomorrow we shall meet again or even before. We shall always be meeting again at the true source. meeting again on the myriad paths of life. So taking these moments to feel in our hearts the blessing of the form, the being who arose Tikna Han to serve and guide and lead and touch so many and also to sense that beingness that's never been born and never dies, that presence that's the essence of Tiknaan, and each of us that is always meeting, is always together, and is innately free.

May Tickna T'an's love and deep wisdom continue to ripple out and touch the hearts and beings everywhere. May all beings everywhere realize their deepest nature as loving presence. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Namaste.