Tara Brach - Namaste: Seeing the Truth of Who We Are (2021-02-24)

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

Namaste: Seeing the Truth of Who We Are (2021-02-24) - A gift of evolving consciousness is the capacity to recognize and honor the sacred awareness that lives through our own and all beings. This capacity is blocked by our identification with our "mask" or ego self, and not seeing past other people's masks. In this talk we reflect together on some key filters of superior/inferior and good/bad that shape the trance of a narrowed identity, and then explore how mindfulness and kindness free us to inhabit the vastness of our natural awareness. We close with tasting the possibility of bringing the spirit of Namaste to ourselves, others and all beings.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. Those of you that are listening regularly, we always start with this gesture and word of namaste. And you might be aware that the word namaste is a way of greeting or bowing or honoring the divine that lives through all of us. And the gesture of the palms together and a slight bowing of the head

is part of the embodying that honoring. And I love that. I do a lot of bowing in my own practice because in the moments of going like this, there's a tenderness and care that wakes up through it for the life that's really living through all of us. And I often contrasted in my mind to, because in Asia, people go around all the time, Namaste, you know.

And then in the West we shake hands and the origin, 5th century BC, is my hands empty, I'm not carrying a weapon, you know, I'm not carrying a gun, which is a great step, as we know. I'm safe, which is beautiful. I sometimes think that, you know, because we're in this time of different currents around the globe, inter-influencing, how it would be in contemporary society if that became part of our living ritual with each other, whatever way we wanted to adapt it, but that we saw each other in some place in us, you know, looked into the eyes that were there, and you might do this right now, just you can close your eyes even, but just sense, okay, this is a moment

of really honoring and bowing to the beauty and goodness in all beings and just to bow your head slightly and sense that, mentally whispering perhaps namaste if you'd like, and sense whether it brings you home to a tender-heartedness, an open-heartedness. So we begin this way because of the theme for tonight and I'll just begin by saying that The Buddha taught that the core of our suffering is a forgetting of who we are, that we live in an idea of a limited self, a fearful self, a wanting self, a winning self, a losing self, and we forget the love and the vastness and the light that really is living through us.

And one of my favorite stories I heard many, many years ago when my son was still in Waldorf school here in Washington, and I think he was like in fifth grade and in the art classes the children would gather around their art tables, maybe four at a table and one day the teacher was circulating around as the children were drawing and one little girl was like really into it. I mean she was really into her drawing and so the teacher stood behind her for a while and then finally she asked her. She said, So hon, what are you drawing? And the little girl didn't respond right away but then she said, I'm drawing God. And the teacher just kind of took that and she says, well, you know, nobody really knows what God looks like. And without skipping

a beat, without even looking up, she said, they will in a moment. And I often think about John O'Donohue poet said this. He said, what happened to our wildness? You know, that wildness of God, of the divine, of that sense of really being connected and we kind of get civilized out of us a bit. And Thomas Merton puts it this way, he says, life is this simple, we're living in a world that's absolutely transparent and divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or fable, this is true. It's true.

So, what we'll explore in this talk is really what gets in the way of Namaste, what stops us from being able to genuinely feel and see and sense and intuit that intrinsic goodness and honor it. What gets in the way? And to say that if we take that the evolutionary perspective, the delusion, the forgetting isn't like a mistake. It's just part of the process that we come into form and we get identified as something smaller than what we are and that as we evolve we begin to recognize all the patterns that keep us small. And in that recognition we start inhabiting a larger space

of being, that that really seems to be the direction or the pattern of evolution. But when we're in the smallness, at the juncture of our smallness, where it often describes we get fixated at the egoic level where we really are running a lot of stories about I am this separate self in here and others are out there. And what we're seeing is what we often would call the mask or the persona, you know, we're just seeing the defenses and the aggressions or the different aspects of the personality and we're not seeing the dimension, sometimes called soul recognition of what's shining through. So I'd like to frame our exploration.

I'm going to ask you to do a bunch of different reflections tonight as I often do, but I'd like to frame it in a story I like to tell once over a few years because I find it really inspiring. It's called King Arthur and the Loathly Lady. So I'm going to read you some of it. King Arthur was on one of his expeditions. He encountered an enemy, a knight who had a lot of dark powers and could cast a spell over him. And it created him, it made him terrifying,

and he was powerless against a spell. And the knight said, you can have your freedom back, and I'll take off the spell, but you have to be able to return in seven days and answer a question. And the question is, what is it that all women most desire? I'm going to pause here and say, how many of you have heard this story? So you're going to know the punchline?

A smattering. Okay. Because you may begin thinking to yourself, well, what would the response be? Like, how is King Arthur going to get out of this mess? Okay? So he agreed. And he went around asking everybody, you know, every, expect women mostly, smart guy. He asked, you know, the girl hurting the geese and the al-wife and the great ladies and so on,

but none of their answers rang true. And so the final morning he finally realizes he has to go back to the knight's castle and he has a heavy heart because he has to submit to what happened and really die. That was the end of it. But deep in the forest he encounters Lady Ragnel. And Lady Ragnall is covered with jewels, but she's a loathsome. lady and the description her face is red, her nose is runny, her mouth too wide, her teeth yellow and hanging, her eyes blurry and so on. And he encounters her and he's horrified by her

but she said, Sir Arthur, your life is in my hands and he says, well what do you mean by that? And she said, I know the correct answer and you must grant me one wish if I'm going to tell it to you and he agrees. And so she said, my wish is that I want to marry one of your your knights. And again he's horrified because how can he give away one of his knights to marriage to this lowly lady? In fact, the knight she wants is Sir Gawain who's his own nephew. So he asked to ask Sir Gawain, he goes back and asks him, and Sir Gawain agrees.

He says, you know, as your friend and to save your life, of course. So they return to the woods and, you know, Arthur says, okay, I agree to it. what's the answer to the question? And Lady Ragnell says it's not beauty, it's not wealth, it's not power. But what women desire beyond all else is to have sovereignty. To have sovereignty. We're going to come back to what that means. But that's what women want.

They want sovereignty. So Arthur goes to the enemy knight and says, I've got the answer. and he tells the answer and he's right because he was given the right answer and he has to release a spell. So here's what happens. Soon after Arthur Gawain and some of the knights ride out into the woods to keep the promise, fine Ragnall bring her to the court. Upon sight, some of the knights were sickened, some even insulting. But Sir Gawain looked steadily at the lady. Something in her pathetic pride in the way she lifted her hideous head caused him to think of a deer in the hound's sight. Something in the depth of her bleared gaze reached out to him like a

cry for help and he reprimanded the other nights and right then he knelt before asking for her hand in marriage. She offered him a way out but he was steadfast and she accepted saying, You shall not regret this wedding. They married in the chapel all came forward to offer words of congratulations but they could barely speak so horrified were they by Sir Gour Wayne's fate. Ladies came up and touched her fingertips as briefly as might be, but could not bear to look at her or kiss her cheek. Only cabal the dog came and looked her hand with a warm, wet tongue, and looked up into her face with amber eyes that took no account of her hideous aspect,

for the eyes of hounds seemed differently from the eyes of men. At last it was over, and the couple led to their chamber. There, Gawain sat in a deeply cushioned chair, gazed at the fire, reluctant to glance in the direction of his bride until she said softly, Gawain, my lord, and love, have you no word for me? Can you not even bear to look my way? Gawain forced himself to turn his head and looked and then sprang up an amazement, for there between the candle scouts stood the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

He stared speechless and wonder, and finally, finding his tongue, asked her, how could this be? I've been under an enchantment And because you have taken me for your wife It is partly lifted But only half Listen for now a hard choice lies before you I can be fair by night and foul by day Are foul by night and fair by day

Decide which you want Well What do you think he chose Going and thought for a while pondering the events that led to this moment, and then it dawned on him what answer he must give. Whichever way it is, it is you who must endure the most suffering. And being a woman, I am thinking that you have more wisdom in such things than I. Namaste. Make the choice yourself, dear love, in which ever way you choose, I shall be content. She cried out in joy. My lord,

you are as wise as you are noble and true for you, have given me what every woman and genuinely desires the answer to the riddle, sovereignty over herself. You have broken the spell completely and I am free of it to be my true self by night and day. For seven years Gawain and Ragnall knew a great happiness together and during all that time Gawain was a gentler and a kinder and more steadfast man than he had ever been before. Then after seven years she left, no one knows where she went and something of Gawain went with her. So, what do we make of this? We begin with what we mean by sovereignty, because it's certainly not the traditional kind

of sovereignty in the sense of seeking external power, though to experience sovereignty is completely empowering. It's not independence because we are entirely interdependent, although sovereignty means we're not attached. But in this sense that we're exploring together, sovereignty is a spiritual freedom and it's realized when we're not any longer living with the filters of the mask. We're not identified with something smaller than who we really are. We're free to inhabit our awake heart, our awake spirit.

The understanding being that the real change, the real prison is the prison of our conditioning when we get identified. When we're conditioned by messages that say we're less than who we are and we believe them, then we're not sovereign. So others can help us be more sovereign by help us remembering who we are and the path that we're all on in our own ways with whatever practice, our reflectors, actions work for you is really an evolutionary path of increasing sovereignty, increasing freedom from conditioning that keeps us small.

So we're going to look at this a bit more. The gift of sovereignty is that we're living in a kind of a perpetual namaste of a deep seeing and honoring of the sacredness. What Thomas Merton described so beautifully, as this transparent world, it's very transparent when we have that freedom. So let's look a little bit at what blocks. What is the conditioning that blocks us from really inhabiting what's possible? I invite you to reflect because we need to be able to see the movie that we're in, how

we're taking ourselves as the protagonist of a movie to be able to step out of the movie. And so the first reflection is just to, if you want it, you can close your eyes, just to sense maybe recently when you met someone new, met someone for the first time, or maybe you were at a gathering and you met a handful of people. So we're first going to look at just the first takes, which sometimes go the thin slicing, the blink, the flash that we get. What do we see when we meet someone new? This is very telling and compelling.

Can you sense the social filters that are there that in some way let you know right away who's more powerful, who might be superior or inferior? These are the obvious ones or race or class. Are you aware of those filters? Are you aware of the biological filters that instantly let you know what you're attracted to or not attracted to. There can be a scan for symmetry and features, certain body types, certain smells. There's more filters. There's filters that immediately are sensing a person's view. Are they like me? Do they believe like me? Do they vote like me? We like people that think

like us. Just notice if you're aware of these filters when you reflect on meetings, someone new. We have filters that are evaluating other people's intelligence, their personality or they, do they have the kind of personality that's got something to offer me that's going to make me feel comfortable, gratified, connected, or a personality that's going to make me feel threatened, judged. Now, these filters and these evaluations happen in a flash and they're largely unconscious and they don't stop and they keep going with everybody that we're with including ourselves. We're continually evaluating and then we're reacting and if you'd like to open your eyes

you can or you can keep on reflecting with your eyes closed. But we are continually in a process of taking in information and reacting with I like I don't like. This is good. bad. This is higher, this is lower. And if we don't see that it's happening, this filtering we're doing, we're in a trance. We're just seeing the mask, we're not seeing who's there. Some of you might know that in Greek theater the mask, the word persona came from a mask used in Greek theater and the actors would just, they'd, you know, use their personas

and then they put them down. Like when they went home, they put them down. They were no longer that character. But we get identified with the mask. We have certain key roles, certain key beliefs that we organize around. And when we do that, the filters we use for others are tighter. We can only see their masks. So we're fed a lot of our filters by the society in ways we're aware of. This society tells us what the standards are for being attractive, what the standards are

for intelligence, you know, a certain kind of left brain intelligence, which of course leaves a good percentage of our children feeling like they're not smart. This society tells us about morality and what morality is supposed to be, what kind of personalities are good, how we should be productive, the value of contributing. So we internalize. And if you start watching your own mind, I can speak for myself, there's a voice that's going, well, how am I doing now? So here I am giving a talk, okay?

And I can say that voice is back there, I'm aware of it, and there's standards I have for when I'm here giving a talk. And one of the standards is, am I actually in my body feeling sincere or am I just kind of talking the concepts. Do you know what I mean? Like am I really feeling it? And then another is, you know, how am I doing? Is there like, is there some synergy like a sense of connection with those here, we're live streaming one of the first times, is there a sense of connection with those of you that are part of that, of those that will be part of it? Is there like open-heartedness? And so I'm watching and inevitably with that question, how am I doing

now, we don't go right match our standard of perfect. So if we're not aware of the gap, the gap hooks our identity. There's a sense of a not enough self. Does this resonate for you? Okay, so this monitoring. If you don't see the monitoring and you don't see the standards that you've set and that then there's living in this confined self. Now, one of the big areas that hooks us where we're living in a mask and not in our wholeness

is what you might call the doing self. Like how many of us really have our sense of identity very closely hooked in to the what I do? A lot of us, I know. You know, how much am I doing, how well am I doing it, what's the status of the role I hold? So we have a narrative about who we are and we have this like resume that we're presenting to ourselves in the world all the time on some level. My husband Jonathan has his resume, his real resume on his website and elsewhere.

He's got his name and it says M.A. CSA and a couple of years ago finally someone asked him what is CSA and you know what it turned out to be? Hub Scouts of America. Let me tell you what he put under past employment. It's a long list. The final one was certified pesticide applicator for the state of Illinois. Expired. So much for a resume.

So our good bad self, because basically the how am I doing is either feeding more of the good self-sense, the bad self-sense. It's pretty ongoing and it's hitched a lot to doing, that sense of a doing self. And so I ask you just again to reflect for a moment and you might close your eyes and scan with awareness for how you sense you're identified with the doing self.

How much is your work? Are your primary roles in helping others really a key part of your sense of good self or bad self? Imagine for a moment if you were stripped of those activities, some of you are already retired, but you might just imagine retired, not doing the work, not responsible or taking care of others. Okay, so here you are, you just, here you are. What's that like?

Who are you without the identity of the doing self? without feeling good or bad about yourself for how well you're doing. What's that like? So we're talking here about the filters that really interfere with realizing the wholeness of who we are and that's a big one. Now, our filters, our masks are reinforced in our interactions with each other because that's where we present the self we want to get approved of. And it's way clear when we're in that stress of being in a hierarchy, where we're with

somebody that we feel is superior in some way, more powerful, that we want their approval. There's a wonderful story I heard about Franklin Roosevelt. He often endured these long receiving lines at the White House, and he complained that nobody ever paid attention to what he was saying. And so one day he decided to try an experiment. So there is. He's going through the line, and to each person, he leaned over and murmured in their ear, I murdered my grandmother this morning. And to a tee, they would say, we're proud of you, sir. God bless you, sir, and that kind of thing. It wasn't until the end of the line, the ambassador, I think,

from Bolivia or whatever, I heard him, and non-pluced his responses, he whispered, I'm sure she had it coming to her, sir. So in our interactions, we maintain and sustain that limited self, trying to present the self we think will get back the response we want. And again, I want to ask you to reflect and check in and bring to mind a recent interaction with someone whose opinion you care about, somebody you would want to think well of you. And in order to see where is your identity hitched. What is it that you would really want to make sure they see?

What is it you want to show? What is it you don't want them to see about you? What is it you'd want to cover up in some way? When you sense yourself in that situation, showing some parts of yourself, trying to hide others, can you sense the mask and can you sense the experience of who you are in those moments, the ego mask and how it confines, how you're not inhabiting your wholeness. You're not able to in those moments really sense that namaste, your inner life are to the person.

As we continue, because we're just again trying to get a feeling for how we leave ourselves and actually live in something smaller. Perhaps one of the most unconscious and big ways is in our social identities. Right now we'll look at gender identity and there's of course some awakening going on on all of these identities, a lot more fluidity and so on, but there's huge unconsciousness around gender identity. Males are supposed to be this way, females are supposed to be that way. I ran across this recently, if Emma, Suzanne, Deborah, and Michelle go out for lunch,

they will call each other Emma, Suzanne, Deborah, and Michelle. But if Mike, Phil, Rob, and Jack go out for a beer, they will affectionately refer to each other as fat boy, Godzilla, peanut head, and useless. Nicknames. Guys do it differently. So there's a huge amount of our self-concept organized around our our idea of how we should be as female or as male and for some of us as more fluid. And one of those areas for women that is hugely, hugely where the identity gets hitched, you can see

in this woman's statement, she writes, walking down Fifth Avenue in New York City, for the last 15 minutes, I've been comparing my body to every other woman's body I see. Did I say the last 15 minutes? I mean 15 years. There's so much suffering around bodies. And it's these messages that are hitched, that make us feel like something's wrong with us in contemporary society, that there's so much pressure for women to have a certain kind of body and the same thing stigma and social injustice that comes from large weight, huge. So, Damragnell, in the King Arthur story, it's well chosen that of course she would be a woman and presented as an ugly woman. Women lower on the hierarchy, women, so much of the identification around, am I

attractive enough? How do I look? That was the trance. Now, I want to say males, of course, are also under a tremendous amount of pressure to gender conform. Huge, in terms of appearing powerful and capable and strong and rational thinking and so on. So again, I want to acknowledge that there's waking up out of this and a lot more fluidity than any other time in history and it's a huge trap of identity. And again, I invite you to check in and sense how much you feel identified by the traditional characterizations of how male or female should be? How much is that identity hitch to having the right body, to looking attractive? And can you sense past the trance of identity where we get hooked into certain characteristics

being enough, not being too much, who you are beyond male or female, who's here. As you continue to reflect the hierarchical roles that cause the most suffering that are toxic, that are oppressive, are the ones that we often talk about the most, what is race, that's big one, we can sense again the filter of race, we're waking up to it and yet it's still so unconscious. It's the norm to think white superior, non-white inferior. And so much the norm that you read the news and they'll talk about someone and the assumption is they're white unless they say, oh, this is a person of color, this is Latino, this is

an Asian American. It's like Tony Morrison said, Americans are white, everyone else has to hyphenate, right? We get it, except for that we are blinded by it all the time. So for white people, the unconscious identification with whiteness and superiority separates, it blinds, it blocks empathy. For people of color, the messages of inferiority are internalized. They're often believed. This is James Baldwin.

and his renowned author, gay African American, he says, it's from, they can't turn back, the essay says, it took many years of vomiting up all the felt I'd been taught about myself and half believed before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here. So we're talking about the power of the social filters now. We have all these levels of filters that keep us in a small identity. and it's sustained by thoughts. The Buddha said whatever we think about regularly, that becomes the inclination of our mind.

So how do we think regularly to maintain this ego mask that we wear? You know, there's research I was reading about with mice that if you shine a light on the brain in a certain way, it activates neuropathways related to love and the mice are all over each other. In this cage, they're seeking connection. And it's so interesting that so soon as we stimulate certain neuropathways, you know, that changes our whole way of being.

And we can do that by shifting, watching how we're thinking and shifting it. This is Thoreau. He says, as a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path we must think over and over again the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives. So, we're going to shift now and start looking at

if the given is that we live in a sea of conditioning, that each of us moves through the world and we spend a lot of time thinking thoughts that keep us caught in a sense of self that is often less than and separate, in some way falling short of the standards given by our caretakers, given by society, the standards and of superior inferior that come with the roles, the hierarchy of roles in our society, that we live in that and it's unconscious, how do we wake up out of that? How do we see past that so that we can really bow and experience and live from the wholeness? And I'd like to explore that by sharing a story and this is more on the individual relational level story on a one woman's

process of kind of waking up out of the enchantment or the spill that kept her small. So this is a mother that I worked with some years back and she had a four-year-old and a six-year-old at the time. And she was locked in this dance with the older one. She was totally angry that her older one, the six-year-old wouldn't cooperate. And this little girl was just having tantrums and when she wouldn't get her way and she was bossy and domineering and hard on her little sister. And so the mother, you know, at the end of her rope, tried to control her.

her by punishing, by threatening. The stuff that we know ultimately doesn't work, she was doing a lot, like timeouts all the time. And the worst part was that she said, I don't like my daughter. I mean, I know I love her, but I really don't like her. And that was so shameful for her. To be able to say that out loud, it was just a lot of shame. She hated herself for that and she regretted losing her temper. and she basically told me, a mad mother is a bad mother.

And she felt like she didn't deserve self-acceptance. I mean, we were talking about acceptance and forgiveness, I don't deserve it. I'm hurting her. Her filters, all her filters from her society in her upbringing were, I'm bad, and her filters were also making her daughter bad. So this is the state we were in, a kind of mask-to-mask war, right? No namestine going on. Just to say that, okay, so what's the bridge then?

Because she's caught in what I sometimes call that spacesuit self, you know, where things are hard and she's living inside this repeating narrative of what's wrong with me and what's wrong with you and failing in her mind. So I began to ask her some questions and the first question I asked was, does blaming yourself in any way make you a better mother. And I ask this of you too because one of the strategies, when we feel caught in an ego mask, we don't like it and we blame ourselves. Just blaming ourselves for our egoic state ever help to loosen the grip?

Does it ever help to have us inhabit a larger space of heart and mind? So I asked her this and it was of course she knew and I knew the answer because she knew that the more she judged herself the worse she acted. Okay. So then we started practicing rain which is really mindfulness and compassion with what was going on and so she was like Thoreau described she had many many rounds of walking the pathway of your bad and on bad. So that was where she started.

recognizing those pathways, recognizing the way her mind and her feelings were basically locked in anger and blame. And then we started to investigate and what she was basically finding, that sinking place in her body, that shamed place was pure failure, I'm failing. And I invited her to do something often do and you can explore this yourself. If you're looking at your filters and the ego mask you're living in, make it bigger in a way by embodying it and letting your facial express. And so for her it was like she got into the body of her angry ego self and the facial expression.

And she got into it and I went right and I said, okay, what's the most vulnerable place inside you when you're that way? And it was this very young place that had been criticized by her mother and just felt utterly not okay and there was this voice saying, what is wrong with you? So she went right inside that place. It helps to embody it. You get into the tight, small place that is where you're living from. You get to feel it from the inside out, but you also can find out what does that place

really need? And that's the question that can begin to shift from the enchantment, the negative trance, to more freedom. Because when she asked that place, what does it really need from you? she said, it needs to know that my heart is loving, that I can trust my heart. And so that's when I asked her to really get in touch. I said, call on who you are that's beyond the mask, beyond this contracted space. Just call on it and ask that place to send you the message, you know?

And that's what she did. So that was her practice, just to keep on letting that message come in from a larger heart space. You know, you can trust this heart. your heart is loving. You can trust this heart, this heart is loving. And there was a shift in that process. This is the nurturing of rain, where she went from being the bad mother to being the open heart space that was holding that bad mother persona. She went from being inside the persona identified to the space that was bigger that could included. She went from the waves, a set of waves, to the oceanists that includes the waves.

That's awakening from trance. That's when the spell is dissolved. She had to do many, many rounds, but she started seeing her daughter differently. And instead of seeing an obstinate child, an enemy, oppositional other, she started seeing a young kid that was distraught, that was having feeling is so hard for her to tolerate anxiety and fear and so on. And she started finding ways to soothe her, comfort her, and be playful in a way that could call out her mischievous, lively creative side. And she even got her start drawing her feelings. She just started finding ways that her daughter could pull out of the spell because she was deep down able to see her daughter more in that namaste way, who's really there than seeing the ego self.

This is the shift we can make in our lives. Each one of us, we all go into the spell like Dom Ragnall was in, in some way of being caught in something smaller than who we are. We all see each other and we see the coverings when we're in that. The first step is inwardly. it's to go, oh, okay, so what are these thoughts that are keeping me small? What's going on inside me? Can I feel it fully and can I bring kindness to it?

And in the moment that you bring kindness, if you even remember to make a gesture of kindness, like even just go through the motions, the spill gets thinner. It's like Merton saying, It's transparent. Things get more transparent. The lights start shining through. Take a moment to reflect again as we've been doing, just to practice a bit. And this time, bring to mind a recent situation with another person or you suspect that you are both a bit

in a kind of reactive egoic trance, both living from inside your masks, not something that has trauma to it. Just something where you're in disagreement and edginess, a tightness, some hurt, you might find that you were inside the ego mask of a victim where you felt like you were being violated or you're identified with the ego mask with the perpetrator, you felt like you acted out wrong, you should be different. That's typically, we typically fall into those two. So begin with the, whatever the kind of thought. thoughts, beliefs of your position, your mask. And see if you can, we call this the U-turn rather than looking at what's going on with

the other person, bring the attention in a U-turn and sense, okay, so what's really going on inside me. When I'm caught in this position, when my mask is appearing like this, what's going on? And if it helps you, you might let your face take an expression. an expression in your body a bit of when you're really in that, when you're feeling angry or hurt or blaming, just to get in touch a little bit more. When we're identified with an ego mask, it's very bodily. It's got strong emotions.

And see if you can find the most vulnerable place inside you, the place that's having a hard time. And just sense, what does that place need? If there was something from your most awake, full, whole-beingness that could be given to this part, what would it be? Sometimes call this our future self, the self that's not caught inside the mask, that awareness, that love, that wisdom. If you could call in that place, what from that place might you receive? What is the vulnerability need?

And you might gently put your hand on your heart. This is the N- or the nurture of rain. And just sense that in some way you could offer kindness, understanding, forgiveness, forgiveness, care, whatever is needed most to the place that's stuck inside. You can imagine the warmth of your hand, it's being kind of a channel for really the wisdom and love from your most awake heart into the vulnerability. Just feel it bathed. There may be a message.

It's okay. Or you belong or I'm not leaving, I'm here with you. Just sense the shift that's possible when there's some offering of kindness, how the who you are is no longer so stuck inside the mask that you can't. can inhabit a larger space of awareness, kindness, presence. And you can look through the eyes of wisdom more easily now to see the other and see if you can see past the others mask. This is the practice of soul recognition, just seeing first the vulnerability that's there,

how this person might be struggling in some way, insecure, feeling self-doubt, confused, hurt, anxious, disappointed. The first recognition when we have soul recognition is of that vulnerability or common humanity. The next recognition is the goodness that's there. See how this person deep down wants to love and be loved. And in the deepest way, just to sense the awareness, the one awareness in light that's living through that being, it's the same awareness living through you. You might sense in this, there's that spirit of Namaste that there's a possibility of responding

differently in this situation. There's more choice that opens up, more creativity. So again, if you'd like to relax your hands you can, you can keep the eyes closed and just meditate for this last part of our reflection or open your eyes if you'd like. To move from the spell to inhabit. really the wholeness of who we are, there are two different basic pathways. And one we've been exploring is to go right into seeing, recognizing what are the filters, what are the stories, what's the feelings that's here, what's needed, and to bring that gesture of

kindness that can free us to inhabit our open-heartedness, then we can see others more clearly. This is soul recognition. We see the vulnerability, we see the goodness, we see the awareness it's here. And that brings us to a natural way of honoring. The second pathway really is the pathway of practicing when we're not stuck. And this is something that we all can do and we can do and it's really fun and beautiful, is throughout your day, wherever you're you have a chance, whether it's with a person in person or not, practice Namaste.

In some way, your own way, but in some way, sensing the goodness that's there and appreciating it. And for some of you like me, you might find that the gesture actually helps embody it and there's certain words that help and that it, that there's something that really glows in you when you do it and you'll find your own way. and sometimes do it out loud with another person. You might find there's most people that wouldn't work with because they just would feel awkward, but there might be somebody that just becomes the way when you see each other.

And it's so sweet, it's so beautiful. So we'll close in that spirit. This is just a little poem from Rumi before we practice it. Rumi writes, are you searching for your true self? Then come out of your own prism. Leave the little creek and join the mighty river that flows into the ocean. Like an ox, don't pull the wheel of this world on your back, take off the burden, whirl and circle and rise above the wheel of the world.

There is another view. So in this class we're exploring this other view of seeing past the wheel of the world on our back, that's spinning of all the thoughts and of all the filters that keep us, whether it's because of our social conditioning or our parents, all those messages that say, how am I doing now? That we can open out of it, that we can be the stream that joins the ocean and look through those eyes that really, really bow in namaste to our inner life and the world around us. in that spirit, let's do our final little practice.

I invite you to bring to mind someone who's really easy for you to love. And it could be a child, it could be a dog, could be a partner, a grandparent, somebody that's not alive, doesn't matter. Someone easy to love. And imagine that you can look into that being's eyes and that that being's looking back with love. that you can sense in that being the natural vulnerability that's there that we all live with, the natural fears, the losses, the sorrows.

You can see in those eyes that express the love that you love, the goodness, so that as you imagine looking into that being's eyes, you in your own way can express your namaste. You're honoring. You might imagine it and sense bow. You might just feel your hand on your own heart and just tilting your head a bit. It may be purely energetic, it may be some words, that in some way say, you know, I see and appreciate the sacredness that lives through you. So take a moment and don't feel shy if you'd like to just to bring your palms together and

sense that bow, please experiment with it. Invite you to bring to mind someone else that you care about but it's not as easy, a person who there may be some static but you still care. This gets you more flexible and able to stretch on the Namaste. Bring to mind someone you care about but it's a little more difficult, more edgy. And again, allowing yourself to see that being close up and reminding yourself of the natural vulnerability that's there, how this being too lives with uncertainty and fear, has endured losses, self-doubt.

So your heart can just sense the realness of that and to remind yourself with the goodness of this being, how this being wants to wake up, wants to know what's true, wants to love more fully, wants to know what it is like to feel loved, really feel loved. And in the deepest way, sensing the awareness, the consciousness that you share as one consciousness, one wakefulness, looking out through your eyes, listening through your ears. And so that again you explore that namaste, that honoring of the sacred that lives through that being and as a way of closing, sensing the life that's right here. fear this life we call self, the vulnerability of this life, that we sit here with this beating

heart and we don't know. We don't know what's around the corner. And there's inevitable loss. And we all live with that. There's fears, there's fears of failure, there's feelings of separation. So we open our hearts to our own feelings of vulnerability. You might put your hand on your heart and just let yourself be in touch with what's here, sincere and real. And as we reflect we sense the intrinsic goodness that's here, that in us which really wants to wake up to know truth, that wants to love without holding back. And we sense beyond words the awareness that's right here attending, that background of space and awakeness that's aware. Life is this simple. We're living in a world that is absolutely

transparent and divine. The divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true. So we close, sensing that bow of namaste to the life that's right here within us, to the life that's in each of the beings we brought to mind, spirit that shines through them and that bow of Namaste to all beings everywhere, to that sacredness that lives through all beings. Namaste and blessings to each. Thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.