Tara Brach - Opening the Lotus of Your Heart

Episode Date: February 22, 2012

2012-02-03 - Opening the Lotus of Your Heart - (from 2012 Women's Retreat) Our reaction to life's stress is to contract, and we live many moments with a tight body, clenched heart and narrowed mind. This talk explores how deepening attention can reconnect us with our natural openness and radiance. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

Let me ask you a question. I'll probably ask you a few tonight. And one of them is how many of you perceive that your awareness in some ways waking up over time, just have sensed that over years, whatever, what for you are the signs of that? Like, what lets you know that awareness is waking up? Let me just hear, we'll just hear in the room, just like a word, like Anybody, just raise your hand. Just give a word. Yeah, what? Less reactive.

What else? Yeah. Space. Yeah. Softer. Patient. Equanimity. Clarity.

Purity. Curious. Curious. Yeah. Yeah. Anything else? Slower heartbeat. More forgiving, open.

More feelings, yeah, so more in contact with feelings. Flow, oh, that's a good word. Yeah, flow. Gratitude. So that's fun. We could just keep doing that. I like that. That's the transmission.

I feel like it's very valuable to take time and pause and recognize this happening. It's described in one scripture's this miracle of awakening. Just to trust it nourishes it. To recognize it and trust it nourishes it.

Now another question. When you have moments where you're sensing inner freedom, what has changed about your sense of yourself of who or what you are? Just consider that. What's different? What do you notice?

Again, it could just be a couple of few words. Yeah. Compassion, that your sense of yourself is more compassionate? You're more compassionate. If you take it down to the level of like, what's your actual sense of who you are? Yeah. Less of a sense of who I am. How many of you notice that?

There's just less. Yeah. The Buddha's basic teaching is that we suffer because we don't realize who we are. That in the moments that we're reactive, we are subscribing to a story of some story of a small and limited self. And that when we're awakening, that hand in hand with that, what we sense of the awakening,

all the words we named here underneath it, there's less of a solidity of self. There's less of a solid, here I am, and things are happening to me and I'm doing things. There's less of that. So the path, the spiritual path really is one of discovering who we are. And that's the kind of the simplicity of it. And let me ask you, if you will, just to reflect again for a moment. This time you might close your eyes.

And just for a few moments right now, just imagine that within you is the consciousness of an enlightened being. You know, Buddha, Christ, Bodhisattva of compassion. So just a sense, okay, this consciousness is here, this awareness, this wide, open, compassionate, vast, awake presence. and just take some moments to receive this life with that consciousness, these bodily sensations. What's it like to receive and witness these bodily sensations with this consciousness, this enlightened, awakened consciousness? What's it like to receive the life of the heart, the mood, the emotion right now? I just sense your own mind, thoughts.

activity with this consciousness of vast awareness. How many of you felt like you could get a taste of that? Just inviting that in and just trying it on. Raise your hands higher so I can just see. Okay, thank you. Sometimes when we investigate in that way, I work with some people, and I find they're surprised, in a happy surprised way, you know, that it's actually not so hard to say, okay, enlightened mind here, now, what's it like? And it's there. And there's a really good reason for that, which is that in every wisdom tradition, the understanding is that what we are seeking is who we are, that it is no place else. It is right here, this radiance, this awakened mind. And that it's truly the source of our being and we're here because it's our capacity.

to become conscious of it. That's our capacity to realize it and to truly trust it. The sweetness of trusting that that's what's here. So a very valuable inquiry in any moment is what right now is between me and experiencing this living presence, trusting that it's here. What's between me and really?

me and realizing this living radiant presence. What stops me? What gets in the way? It's a useful inquiry. It goes right to the heart of our conditioning. And what we find in some way, and this is the structure of tonight's talk, is that what stops us is a kind of contraction, kind of physical. like contraction. And it's a contraction that happens in three major dimensions. And one is that

there's this contraction that kind of pulls us away from the aliveness of the moment. In some way, we've contracted and we're no longer fully connected with the full flow of life. We've gone into thoughts, basically. And we'll feel when we're not aware of this enlightened presence that the heart has a contraction that's pulling us away from a natural open-heartedness, a field, an open, spacious sense of oneness. So a contraction, I'm showing you parts of the body because he's correlate with the chakras traditionally in the yogic tradition. And in the last few years, I've really gotten into Qigong, and I found that by sensing

where this lives energetically in the body, that I actually get more in touch with both the contraction and the opening. So I'm just sharing that with you just as you explore tonight. Because I'm going to have you check in a few times on this. Okay, so one way we contract, we tighten against just the flow of aliveness itself. And somebody named flow is something that happens when we're open. Our heart gets contracted. So we're pulling away from that natural compassion and responsiveness.

And the mind gets contracted into thought forms. So we've pulled away from the wholeness of being, from really recognizing our full belonging. So these are the three archetypal domains of contraction, and you might sense it's like a lotus that there's a contraction, but the possibility is to relax and open in each of those areas. The main thing we discover when we're contracting is that this organism is trying to control. So this talk is in many ways a talk about control, that we have a deep conditioning to try to control our existence. And that creates that fist that pulls us away from aliveness, from love, from open-mindedness.

Is this making sense thus far? I mean, are you kind of with me? I mean, I'm going to build it out, but I'm looking around to sense how much confusion I'm creating. I think I'm giving myself permission tonight. There's something about a women's retreat that makes me feel more free to kind of explore a little in this way. So maybe just check in, just close your eyes again, and just sense in yourself whether there is an openness to the aliveness that's here, whether you're closed, what degree of availability there is. And you might even sense in the belly area what happens if you intentionally unclench the fist,

you intentionally open to the aliveness that's here, softening, inviting, really receptive. the opposite of controlling is this lotus that opens and you might feel in the heart what happens when you intentionally relax the control, relax the armoring and just imagine a lotus opening in the heart, open tender and then the mind, the contraction would be the thoughts just to open out of any thoughts and sense that vastness when the lotus opens in the mind

with each of these this opening is really resting in what's true in the truth of the aliveness that's here in the truth of this connectedness this open-heartedness and in the truth of really timeless awareness this openness of the mind so this is a very embodied way of taking refuge and you can open your eyes as you'd like in Polly the word for faith

very close to trust, is to rest your heart in what is true. And I love that phrase. Law mentioned it last night. Resting our heart in what is true, because it's so embodied. You get the feeling that it's not just mental. It's like you're resting yourself. You're opening up that clenched fist and just relaxing into the truth that's here. And the three refuges are the truth of the alive.

liveliness that's here. To stop trying to control it, but open into it. The truth of the love that's here to just stop being so offended and open into it. The truth of this vastness, this wakeful vastness. So I'd like to explore as we keep moving through is how we shift from the close fist to the open lotus. Okay? I mean, we just tried it and maybe you found you went right into it, and some of you might have found layers of resistance. So how do we more and more open these beings to what we really are? And maybe to begin by saying it can happen in a moment. I mean, there's tons of trainings we can do over decades,

but to trust that it can happen right this moment is an essential flavor of enlightenment. that in any moment you can just go like that. Because it's not a doing. What you're really is undoing the clench. Do you see what I mean? It's like you're not really, the doing is the clenching. The freedom is in the, just the relaxing the doing.

So Pema Chowdron has this line, this phrase, the big squeeze. And we all are caught in this big squeeze, every one of us that I know. run into anybody not. And the big squeeze is that every day we have some, we touch in some way into, when I asked you, you know, do you sense awareness waking up? Every day we get, we get the flags of it. Like there's something that touches us, some kindness, some beauty, some sense of wonder, you know, some recognition. So it's like awareness is revealing itself every day discovering itself. And every day we get caught in trance. Every day there's that contracting into a storyline of a self that's less than the truth of who we are every day. Now maybe some

of you have more of an experience of freedom than I do, but I can say for me then I should probably speak for myself. So this is the big squeeze that we get caught in that small self-story, yet we know something else is possible. At ground level, it's existential and it's part of our evolution. We're meant to clutch. I mean, that is like the nature of life. When awareness takes form,

it tightens and identifies with the expression of form. So there's some tightening in existence. Now, that doesn't mean that it's our destiny to always be tight. We can wake up to realize that clenching, but we clench. And what happens is that you can see in other mammals, not just humans, both the clench and the waking up so that we're not caught in the clench. And I want to give you my best example, which is rats, to make it a little less personal. So here you go.

This is on rats. And this came out in December. That there was this experiment at the University of Chicago. And I want to say, personally, I don't know if I would approve. I don't know if I'd approve of the experiment because I'm very sensitive to how animals are treated, but the information feels something to share. The question was, would a rat release a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it could? And the answer is yes.

I'm going to read you a little. The free rat, occasionally hearing distress calls from its compatriot, learned to open the cage and did so with greater and greater efficiency over time. astonishingly, if given access to a small hoard of chocolate chips, the free rat would usually save at least one treat for the captive, which is a lot to expect from a rat, right? That's pretty cool. So what we're getting here, this is a model of empathy. And mammals, many, many levels of mammals have brains that if you look at, you know,

we have the brain stem, right? Then we have the limbic system, and then we have the cortex. Well, and it's like this. Have you seen this model of the hand? It's really useful. Brain stem, limbic system, cortex like this. Well, we have messages going up, fear, and giving fight-flight information, but as long as there is this, this cortex, there's this possibility of relating with empathy

and understanding and mindfulness. So these rats, many of them, responded that way with empathy, but not all of them. So here's what's interesting. I think it was six out of 32 did not. They were all males. I would share this in a mixed group, too, but anyway, they were males. Now, here's why. Come back to this again.

If there's strong fight-flight messages going up like this, and you don't have a way of down-regulation, which means you don't have strong mindfulness and empathy developed, you flip your lid. And what that means is that you don't respond with empathy. Females have more downregulation. Why? Because they're the caregivers, their bodies, have to be able to handle stress,

downregulated, and still respond empathetically to offspring. So females are, males have compassion and empathy too. they just don't downregulate as well. They get more caught in the fight-flight because it's just biologically not as much in their system. This is a hypothesis on how come it was the males. Does that make sense to you so far? Okay.

So what we get is that the more that the intentional cultivation of mindfulness and compassion will help you to endure the stress of fight-flight but still respond with compassion towards yourself and others in a moment. moment. Okay, that's our science for tonight. But you see in children, you see in all beings, but you see in children that you have both the limbic, self-centered, I want, I want, and you have the empathic and the generous. I heard a story of a busload taking kindergartners on a school trip, and one of the little girls took a handful of peanuts and gave it to the bus driver. And he was really, really, he said, that is so nice of you. And he ate the peanuts. Five minutes later,

she's back with another handful. And he took and said, thank you, hon. When she came the third time, he said, no, dear, why don't you keep these, you and your friends, keep the peanuts for yourself? And she said, oh, no, we just like sucking the chocolate off of them. We all have these different forces in us. So now we look at the society, you know, we've got these different levels, but we look at the society, and we can see in our society where empathy and compassion is beginning to play out more. We can see creativity in the arts. We can see service in humanitarian projects. And we can see the enormity of the, you know, kind of primal limbic system brainstem going on in war. We can see it in our economy, this grasping, this can't be quenched grasping that we have this economy

that has to keep growing, or it will collapse. The insanity of the grasping, fear-based grasping. So much so, we have a billion dollars of advertisements to keep us thinking that it's not enough what's right here. I mean, if more of us,

if even a small percentage had that sense of enough, just live a little more simply. Our entire economy would collapse. It's reliant on us wanting more. It's kind of amazing to me. And then we see the incredible suffering from this limbic system of not just war, you know, countries against countries, but the war we make on each other,

the war we make on those who are more vulnerable, who are different. The enormous tragedy of this control, it's trying to control, trying to manage, and the aggression of it. I want to read you. This is from the Sun magazine, which is one of my favorite. Am I gorgeous, my child asks, drawing the word out like pulled taffy? Yes, I say you are. The pink and teal dress is probably made of highly flammable material, some chemist approximation of tall and satin, pudgy fingers decorated with pink polish, trace the sequins on the bodice. I, I love this. A giant pair of bubble gum pink wings, flap slowly, little feet dance and sparkly red slippers. I'm just like a real princess. Yes, I say you are. The thick blonde hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, flawless skin.

This child is the American epitome of beauty. This child, my son. He's four years old and prefers to wear dresses. Maybe it's a phase, maybe not. Even as I wonder how I produce such an angelic-looking creature, I wish you would put on some pants and go back to playing with toy tractors, not because it matters to me. It doesn't. But because I'm already hearing in my head the name-calling he'll face in kindergarten. Many adults already seem a bit disturbed by the dresses.

Strangers utter awkward apologies when they realize he's not female. This culture wants little boys to dream only of baseball trucks and trains. This culture has no room for little boys who want to be gorgeous. He picks up a parasol, a neighbor gave him, and opens it jauntily over his shoulder. Am I beautiful, he asks? I sweep him into my arms and plant a kiss on his cheek. Always, I say. So in this...

deep conditioning we have that runs through our bodies and our society to control, we end up severing the belonging of parts of us and creating suffering. And so then we track it in our personal history, and that's something we each can do, to the degree that you experienced severed belonging growing up. In other words, to the degree that you weren't seen or understood, to the degree that there wasn't someone else to mirror that basic goodness. To that degree, you'll pick up ways of trying to control things to protect yourself. We all need to.

They're not bad strategies. It's just what we need to do. So one woman described to me how she became numb. And I want to read you what she sent me. I must have been about seven. I had golden hair that flowed down to my waist. I loved my hair. After school, I'd wrap myself in fancy scarves and dance around and feel like I was a beautiful princess.

Then one afternoon my mom told me we were going to the hairdresser that my hair was a nuisance. I knew that word, nuisance. It meant pestering her for a puppy at the pet store, getting a new dress dirty because I'd played in it, or trying to get her attention while she was grading papers. Being a nuisance often led to closed doors and being a little. This time I pleaded. I promised to keep my hair in a ponytail. I cried and cried. My life dependent on this, but she just dragged me to the car and told me, it's time to grow up. The hairdresser could see how upset I was, but she just laughed at me. You'll be cooler in the summer, she said,

and then she went ahead and chopped off my long locks. Sitting there at the beauty poll or something in me knew that I didn't matter. What I was feeling didn't matter. I was invisible. No one cared. That's probably when a part of me stop living. So there's a way in which if our feelings don't matter to others, we have to numb them. And then we get the messages. And again, just to keep us where we're going, these are the messages that sever our sense of belonging. And that then makes us have to try to control to be safe, to get approval. We get the messages, you're too much. You're bad in some way. So then we feel shamed about our own feelings. And then it goes down to that very deep place of doubt. Am I worthwhile? Am I okay? And even when it's not crippling,

for many of us, there's enough that it's nagging and it ends up interfacing with our day-to-day life in a way that we're not really living with a sense of confidence or creativity or trust and how we are with each other. So I share with you an example from last year, and Law, I'm sure you won't mind me sharing this. That Law and I had a conversation on the phone, and I hung up, and I had this feeling like something was unfinished, that maybe Laude had something on her mind

and didn't express it because she knew I was really busy trying to meet a deadline with this book I'm writing and so on. So I was feeling bad, so I emailed it to check in and said, you know, I'm here. if there's anything up, I'm here. Now, those of you that have emailed with Law know she's online a lot and she's very, very responsive. Nothing. Two days go by and then I went, uh-oh, something's really wrong here.

Finally, she wrote me an email saying, did you get my email? And I said, no, and I was going, oh, few. And then nothing. She would rescind it, nothing. So I locked into, we have had a miscommunication. I in some way hurt her feelings. And I had thought, I had felt really loving in the conversation, but I did something wrong.

And it was in my body. It was that sinking sore. Finally I called. And Law immediately told me that Irene had been eating her emails, you know, it was that time of Irene. And so I shared my projection. I said, you know, I'm really glad, and I shared that whole thing. We laughed.

And then she confessed that just three weeks before that, she had emailed me something she was excited about. I didn't respond. And she went through a whole process of thinking maybe I didn't respond because I thought she was attached in some way that wasn't healthy to which. Anyway, you get the idea that, you know, we had both done the exact same thing within a few weeks. Now, the insanity of two people that adore each other and are very supportive of each other, both because of a delete, delayed email going into that kind of self-doubt. And this is like, this is daily stuff for so many of us. Self-doubt is painful. So then what happens? When we have this undercurrent of something's wrong with me, something's missing, something's wrong. Then we take on those strategies that I talk about a lot. I call them false refuges.

And all of us have our repertoire of ways we try to feel better about ourselves. And we know the outward ones. I really do talk about them a lot. A lot of us are into working very, very hard and trying to prove ourselves that way. You know, always driven by not good enough, have to do more, have to be better. And we have the other ones. We have the over-consuming. Many, many of us use food or other drugs, alcohol, to assume.

in some way. We have the ones of material acquisition and of obsessing and blaming. You know, we try to, how many of you feel like you're on to your false refuges, that you pretty much know what your strategies are? I'm just curious. Okay. That's really, that's helpful. What happens is that some of them are very subtle. Sometimes we don't catch it in the moment that with almost every everybody we're with unless we're really present and free, we're in some way doing something to try to control how that other person experiences us. Like on some level right now, I'm watching it right now, like what in the way I'm speaking is so that you'll then experience me a certain way and like me or respect me.

So we do things, we have strategies to have others relate to us and get approval and love and avoid rejection. We have strategies to get people to agree with us, to convince them. Illustration, a Catholic priest, a Baptist preacher, and a rabbi all served as chaplains at a major university in the Northwest.

They would get together two or three times a week for coffee and a talk shop. One day someone made the comment that preaching to people isn't really that hard. A real challenge would be to preach to bears. One thing led to another, and they decided to experiment. They would all go out into the woods, find a bear, and preach to it

an attempt to convert it. Seven days later, they all came together to discuss their experiences. Father Flannery, who had his arm in a sling and had various bandages on his body and limbs went first. Well, he said, I went into the woods to find me a bear. When I found him, I began to read to him from the catechism. Well, that bear wanted nothing to do with me, and he began to slap me around. So I quickly grabbed my holy water, sprinkled him, and hold him. Mary, mother of God, he became gentle as a lamb. The bishop is coming out next week to give him First Communion and confirmation.

Reverend Billy Bob spoke next. He was in a wheelchair, had one arm in both legs and cast, and had an IV drip. In his bestfire and brimstone oratory, he claimed, well, brothers, you know that we don't sprinkle. I went out and I found me a bear, and then I began to read to my bear from God's Holy Word, but that bear wanted nothing to do. with me. So I took hold of him and I began to wrestle him. We wrestled down and up the hill, down again until we came to a creek. So I quickly dunked him and baptized his hairy soul.

And just like you said, he became gentle as a lamb. We spent the rest of the day praising Jesus. Hallelujah. The priest and the reverend both looked down at the rabbi who was lying in a hospital bed. He was in a body cast interaction with IVs and monitors. running in and out of him. He was in really bad shape. The rabbi looked up and said, looking back on it, circumcision may not have been the best way to start. So our theme here is controlling through false refuges. And what I think is really interesting to investigate this for ourselves is that when we are caught in a false refuge, when we're trying to control our experience through drugs, through alcohol, through eating, through overwork, through blaming, through any of these,

we end up getting very identified with the refuge. We don't trust the controlling self. What that means is when you're in control mode, you're not liking or trusting yourself. You might temporarily feel a sense of energy. You might temporarily feel relieved from something. but if you look deep down when you're in the midst of one of the more compelling of your refuges and I invite you to kind of check it out

as I'm speaking, see if this rings true for you. When you're doing one of your false refuges, one of the more compelling ones, how do you feel about yourself? Do you like the person that's doing it? Do you like the striving self or the blaming self or the addicted self? So part of the problem,

is that we feel bad, we do things to feel better, and then we feel bad about ourselves for doing the things we did to feel better. That's my nutshell summary. Does that make sense? Okay. So again the inquiry, how do we move from this controlling self that's really just trying to manage a difficult existence to opening that fist? How do we begin to open the lotus and let go of the controlling. And the last part of this is really looking at the two main elements on the path that I know of. And one is attitude and the other is attention, how we pay attention. So attitude is that if we take the evolutionary perspective, we are designed to control. It's part of our wiring on every level.

We're designed to control and get caught in reactive emotions. It's just part of the design. And if you look at Asian art in the mandalay's and the temples, you'll see that there are these wrathful deities, okay, and they're controlling. They're controlling with their anger and their passions and so on, grasping an aversion. And that if you want to get to the center of the mandala,

or if you want to get to the center of the temple, you need to go through the wrathful deities. You need to bring your presence and your attention and your heart to the wrathful deities. You have to go through them in order to get to come home. It's not that we have to try to sidestep them or wish them away. The message is that the only way of really freeing ourselves is to be profoundly forgiving and compassion and understanding

to all these tendencies to control, to react. The big question is, how are you relating? I have a friend that has this necklace, and the necklace says no mud, no lotus. You understand, right? That that's part of it. That's the earthy stuff, this contraction. No mud, no lotus.

It's through bringing attention to the places of contraction that the lotus opens. The way that we can deepen this attitude of really not making it wrong. That's really what we're saying. It's like as soon as you sense the clutch, don't make it wrong. Don't make it wrong because that adds a clutch to the clutch. The way that's more proactive, when I say don't make it. wrong is choose love. Part of a wise attitude is kind of a choosing and without getting into the philosophic debate about free will because it doesn't, it won't take us anywhere. There can be

conscious intention to choose love and to choose presence. In the Tibetan teachings there's a phrase, decide on freedom. It's very powerful. Decide on freedom. It's like, like, well, who's deciding? Who knows who's deciding? Forget that one. But deciding can happen. There can be a rallying of your intention to decide on love in one of our groups today. For me, I re-recognized it when I was inviting someone else to do it. Like, I can choose this moment, no matter how much I'm feeling, you know, because I'm aware as I'm speaking, you know, am I being clear? Is this resonating? So there's a part of me that has those doubts underneath. Maybe I'm not. And then in a moment that I remember, I can say, okay, choose kindness right now.

It's okay. It's really okay. And just by saying that out loud to you, something in me loosens up. Does that make sense? So attitude means getting it that there's nothing wrong. with what's happening, with the fist. It's not wrong. It's not wrong if you felt numb today. And it's not wrong if you felt disappointed or angry or hurting or scared or doubt. That's the fist. And in the moment that you choose presence and love, you start creating the perfect atmosphere for that clenched fists to begin to relax open. So that's part one. attitude and I'd like to invite you a brief reflection on that just to kind of check in and in this pause choosing to come home to presence right here and as we did earlier just inviting this enlightened

awareness right here so that you're looking through the eyes of your highest wisdom your awakened heart and as you do just allow yourself to look at a situation in your life that brings up suffering, where you end up contracting, where you get caught in painful emotions, where you get stuck in the mud some. So just looking through the eyes of wisdom, the awakened heart, just witness that. Witness how you get caught in some experience of fear or hurt or loss.

And as you bear witness, bear witness also to the ways that you habitually try to control from that situation. either with your doubts, because that's a way of trying to control or judgments or actions, striving, cutting off. So just bearing witness right now to how you get stuck in the mud and then stuck more with the controlling. And from this place of wisdom and compassion, sense the attitude that liberates, there's nothing wrong with this.

There's no fault. So it's that forgiving heart. And then can you imagine choosing presence, choosing love, in relating to what's going on, letting this wisdom turn you towards this choice of presence and love, that you're choosing to rest your heart in what is true, to let go of the controlling. So just sense when there's not controlling right now, when there's just being with, just being with the situation, being with what, comes up, not making it wrong, not controlling. And here's the inquiry. Who are you when there's

no controlling? Opening your eyes whenever you'd like. So this is the kind of the ground of the training we're doing here really, which is that whatever comes up, this is the simplest way I can think of to say it whatever comes up. It's our intention to rather than control it, push it away, add a storyline to it. It's to be with, with kindness. And these are the two ways. wings we talk about that allow us to fly to freedom, that we're paying attention to what's here and holding it with kindness. So this is our training. And as Sherry emphasized so beautifully, that what's key in that is to notice the thinking and keep coming back to what's actually here over and over again. And that is this recognizing and relaxing the mental fist of thinking

is critical because of false refuges that we take thinking, trying to figure out, obsessing, judging is our primary false refuge. That's the fist that most disconnects us. So if you haven't relaxed open that lotus of being caught inside the storyline, you won't be able to access the aliveness in the heart. So then there's the question. Let me see. if I brought it with me. It's critical not to be at war with your thoughts. Opening the fist in the mind doesn't mean that you go to war with something.

It means you just relax open and pay attention. Here's the poet Kaviri. She says, there's a monkey in my mind, swinging on a trapeze, reaching back to the past or leaning into the future, never standing still.

Sometimes I want to kill that monkey, You shoot it square between the eyes, so I won't have to think anymore or feel the pain of worry. But today, I thanked her, and she jumped down straight into my lap, trapeze still swinging as we sat still. So you can feel in this. There's the fist of thinking that it's not punishing the thoughts. There's the kindness of just recognizing. And with the kindness, there's no longer the identification. The fist opens.

The only way to wake up from trance is to wake up from the stories and from all the subtle ways that we're controlling things, the way we tense in our body, the way we tighten our heart, to recognize it. We need to recognize the fist. So I want to share with you one of my most memorable wake-ups from the controlling self. and you might think of you know each of you has a version of the controlling self that's really familiar and so this is my this is the one that was most familiar that I had to come face to face with

and it was really really hard and it happened oh my gosh it was in the 70s and I don't want and that doesn't to say like so I'm all done with that but this is like one of those big wake-ups so I was in an ashram then

and I had moved into the ashram because I really, the sense and the possibility of awakening and sensing this was really a path that was beautiful. I cherished it. And I was in this perfection project. Like, there was something wrong here and I wanted to get it better. Okay. So both were going on. So this story, I ended up titling this story because I put it in the book True Refuge. The perfection project collapses because this is a collapse of the project. So I was director of our yoga center in Harvard Square in Boston at the time. And if anybody was around in the 70s, I feel older than a lot of people here.

It was a real juicy time there and so on. And we were putting together the major program of the year. And this was quite a popular yoga center. And things were really cooking. So I got called into a meeting with the head of our ashram. and he held up the brochure that I had made for the program and right on the front of it was the wrong date. And so I'd really screwed up.

And there were 3,000 copies printed and they were already late. So we continued the meeting and I was really trapped and self-discussed, but I got really defensive at one point. I said, well, if anybody else had been around to even help me a little and proofread, maybe this wouldn't have happened. and when I left, my world crashed because not only I had made a mistake, I had then been defensive, and it was just ugliness. And for whatever reason, everything, when I say crash, it's like I felt like I came

face to face with every possible way that I was an unappealing bad person. It's like I started just rerunning my life all the ways I was, you know, back then I was, I was very, very flexible. And then I said, I'm a show off. I'm just really, you know, I teach yoga classes, but on some level I'm feeling like, what a yogi am I, you know, that kind of thing, are exaggerating to some other, to people to look good. I went lying to get out of a social obligation, gossiping with a friend to kind of be more

like an insider. I mean, I was just like fixated on this not good person. it. And I really sunk. Like, something happened that in some level I was on this perfection project and I was just unsalvageable, you know, really bad news. Well, the women in the Ascham formed the sensitivity group and that summer, and I decided I'd go and confess. And my confession was going to be, you know, I might look like I'm, you know, a together, okay person, but, you know, And this is what I actually said, but I'm not. And I told them all the ways my ego was just, you know, how much I was out to just be, you know, everything was numerous uno here.

And I looked like I was being serviceful, but it was all self-serving and so on. I left the group. I have no idea what they said, you know. But I remember leaving and just curling up in fetal position and sobbing because I, you know, Now I'd expose myself. It was even worse. That's the way it felt. So that night was the night that I was sobbing. And then at one point I said, okay, I'm going to get up and do some yoga. And I don't remember what else, but in some way I was going to get it together. And then I realized that's just more of the same. Here I am. Now I'm trying to do something to take care of, you know. So something in me said, okay, no matter what happens, I'm just going to let it be. I'm just going to let whatever comes up come up. I'm just going to be with it. And so as soon as I agreed to not try to control anything,

I felt completely washed over by fear and then sunk in this hole of shame that to me is like death. And I kept having to say to myself on some level, let it be, let it be. And finally, that just letting it it transformed into a grief that was a very pure grief where I just started getting all the moments of my life that I had sacrificed to this not okay. I'm not okay feeling. Like just so many moments of relating to people and doing things that the undercurrent was, I'm bad. And so the grief

was very, very pure. And then finally there came this stillness. And then what happened afterwards was really, to me, it changed me in some way. I had this bubbling up of images of myself in all my different modes of whether I was teaching a yoga class or whether I was working in our community restaurant or being with my parents or whatever. And in each one of them, I was in some way trying to make something good happen. I was trying hard. It was a trying hard thing. And with each one of them, I asked, was that really who I am? And it became clear that none of the controlling self-characters were me. They were just, it was like this surface of the ocean. It was like, these were just waves, but they couldn't begin to capture this vastness and

tenderness and presence that was right here. There was a way in which seeing that, woke me up out of a trance. And seeing that showed that the controlling does go on, but it's not who I am. And it was that realization that actually helped to loosen the grip of the controlling. But it's gone deeper over the years. But a gratitude in that moment

kind of unfolded that's been with me ever since. That this controlling just happens. It's built into our nervous system. It's not who we all. are. And if we pay attention and we're forgiving, the fist, it just unclenches. It opens up. Now, in this story, my entry was, start right where you are. I was just with and with, let be, let be, let be. There are times that we start instead with the other wing, with the wing of compassion, that we have to decide on love and let that be right in front of us, because it's not

safe enough and there's not a soft enough heart to really touch what's there. So there have been many times subsequently that I'll find myself in a bad mood and I'll start inquiring, well, what am I believing really right now? In some way I'm believing that I'm failing or falling short. And as soon as I catch a whiff, and this is my current practice right now, as soon as I catch a whiff of bad mood and underneath that I'm failing, there's something in me goes, okay, stop. Just stop. May I be kind? Just pause.

May I be kind? It's like choosing kindness. And it's amazing. The more I do that, the more it's like in an instant, it doesn't have to be a long process. In an instant of choosing kindness, there's this softening that happens

and immediately a realization that that self that was not good enough is not who I am. Nor is the judge who's saying not good enough. And it's that freedom that shift in identification that begins to create a real liberation. This is Cassia Berman. She says, The mother of the universe refuses to let me worship her outside myself anymore. She's withdrawn inside me and tells me, if I want to know her, I have to come inside too, which is the last place I want

to be. Although she's been telling me this for years, she's never gone to this extreme before of actually hiding inside me. If I want a lover, I can only do it by loving myself now. So I started by saying that we have this clench, and it has three different ways it manifests. It manifests a clench that pulls us away from aliveness, and a clench that pulls us away from open-heartedness, and a clench that pulls us into a virtual reality

and out of this openness. this third domain we usually discover by being with the aliveness and with the love if you're fully present loving what is and then you say

well who is loving right now and who is it that's loving you'll discover this presence that's timeless and there are many ways into it One of my favorites is to just sense all the changing. And you can just close your eyes right now just to sense this.

Just sense yourself the span of this lifetime and how this body has changed, changing emotions and moods, your values or your point of view, how much that's changed, your sense of who you are, your confidence. So Gil Rimbusay says, if everything changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances? Something boundless and infinitely spacious in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something a fact we can depend on that does survive what we call death? This is the refuge of awareness.

This is the refuge that has us understand you are not a human on a spiritual path. You are awareness discovering yourself through this human incarnation. Again, we have this map in our mind and a storyline, but you're not a human on a spiritual path. That humanness is a very changing fluid. It's the waves on the surface.

You are awareness discovering yourself. through this human incarnation, discovering yourself through the experiences of beauty and pain, longing and disappointment. So that right now you might sense what you're aware of most prominently. And maybe you're aware of the sound of my voice or the sounds around you. Maybe you're aware of the sensations in your body. Maybe you're aware of the mood in your heart. And you might sense all of that in the foreground and in the back,

ground, this alert, inner stillness, this changeless awareness. When you can just inhabit that, just be that awareness. That's the lotus opening up in the mind. Just be the awareness, the silence that's listening to the sound, that listens to thoughts. And this vast space that everything's happening in, Lotus opening up is recognizing this presence it's awake, boundless. It's your home. So as a way of concluding,

just to continue meditating. The blessings of letting go of control, you sense letting go of control and letting be the aliveness that's right here right now. And just imagine and sense that opening of the lotus, at the navel, opening to this entire experience of aliveness.

The blessing is to live fully, in the flow. The church says the body is a sin. Science says the body is a machine. Advertising says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta. That's Eduardo Gagliana. So feel that fiesta. Feel that celebration of life when the fist opens, the lotus opens, and you completely let go of control, of controlling sensations, letting be this aliveness, let it be as big as it wants to be, as vast, as vibrant. And then we come to the heart area and feel the lotus at the heart and sense what it means to have an undefended heart.

You might imagine someone that you love, bring them here. What's your heart like when you're with that person? No effort to make them different, not controlling that person or yourself. Completely accepting, completely open. to the goodness of that being. You can sense physically, viscerally, the opening of the lotus at the heart. If you ask who is loving, who is present right now,

just sense in the background this empty radiance, that's the opening of the lotus in the mind. So we close with a poem from the Radiant Sutras that brings us right to the heart. It says 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 that is the heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon. Quiet ecstasy is there in 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. Thank you for your presence.

The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is Tara Brock.com, our IMCW site, which, is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.