Tara Brach - Part 1 - Do You Make Regular Visits to Yourself?

Episode Date: September 14, 2011

2011-09-14 - Part 1 - Do You Make Regular Visits to Yourself? - These two classes cover the basic instructions for Buddhist mindfulness (vipassana or insight) meditation. The first class explores the attitude we bring to meditation that makes it rewarding, and the training that helps us in "coming back" from thoughts. The second class guides us in "being here," in cultivating a mindful awareness that recognizes and accepts what is happening in the present moment. Both classes include guided meditations and valuable reminders that can support you in developing a rich meditation practice. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

This class and the next class I'll be doing are called the basics of meditation. And they're really designed not just for people that are new, but for those of us maybe that have been doing it a really long time and want to be fresh in how we're approaching meditation because the great shadow side of practice is that we get habitual. So with that in mind, one of the questions, I guess, it a lot and I just was interviewed a few months ago and I was asked is so how come meditation is so popular and something in me has a kind of good news bad news response which is the bad

news is people are so stressed we are so speedy a culture there is so much anxiety and and depression that there is a real yearning for something that and help us to slow down and come back and be here for our lives. There's a sense I hear from people of, it's kind of like we're on the surface racing to the finish line. And what do you get at the finish line, you know, death, and not dropping into our moments. So that's the, it's not bad news,

but there's a kind of sense of there's a lot of suffering. And the good news is, and I really sense this, that there's an evolutionary unfolding going on, whereby there's more and more of a sense of what's possible, that it's really possible to touch a great freedom, that happiness, that loving without holding back, that really living from our fullness is possible. And then there's this yearning to find the way,

of paying attention that allow us to really live from our fullest. So I find that there's both of those elements in it and it's always interesting to me, I think of it like exercise, that just the way exercising the body makes us more healthy, exercising the mind works. It really does. there's now probably over 10,000 pieces of really good research that are showing the benefits of meditation on everything, on the benefits on our physical health, you know, on our immune system, on sleep disorders, on addiction, anxiety, on different ways of working with pain.

And so one of the most interesting ones is that a number of my friends are working on research on helping to slow down cognitive decline. Really interesting. And so sometimes we think about, you know, all the different workshop titles you can have in terms of come and learn meditation, learn to lose weight, improve your sex life, gain intuition about financial stock market. You know, it's like, of course it's popular, you know, gives us all these powers in a different way. But in the deepest sense, the research is validating really what the mystics have been in some way saying for millennium, which is that when you learn to pay attention, you end up coming home to your own natural wisdom. you come home to a boundless quality of loving and you have access to real freedom

and I think in a very deep sense we're drawn to that level and there have been these gatherings of scientists and meditation teachers all kind of pointing to the same thing one of the first gatherings like this was in Washington and there were a lot of the neuroscience community was there tons of researchers the Dalai Lama presided which was fun

and a story that I love was because he had just come out with his book The Revolutionary Art of Happiness and the network news was interviewing him and they asked him to share his happiest moment

so he thought for a little bit and he gave that mischievous look he gives and he said I think now And isn't it true? You know, that the only moment that we can be happy is if we're right here, like really happy. And the only place we can truly feel love, we can think about love, but to live it, to inhabit it, is right in this moment.

And creativity, this moment. It's like everything we really cherish. involves a homecoming right here. So how do we arrive? How do we practice? I read a verse. This is from the Desert Fathers. Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?

As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning. Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe? to make sure that you're not asleep when the sun begins to rise. So we come here to train our minds, so we're available. In a way we're saying, so we're available for freedom, so we're available when we're with someone that we care about to really listen. Or so we're available to look at this moon that's, you know, this big orange moon that's out. right now. So we're here for this life. So the Buddha taught that what we cherish, this wisdom,

this love is already here. And meditation isn't, we're not trying to get somewhere else. It's almost like we're undoing the ways that we distract ourselves so that we can experience what's already here. And I think that's a really important way to understand it. We're not trying to get somewhere. We're actually creating the condition so that the what we are can shine, can shine freely. And one of the lines I most love, this is Rumi, is this. He says, do you make regular visits to yourself? That's it. Isn't that wonderful?

Do you make regular visits to yourself? So I'm retitling these two classes with that. do you make regular visits to yourself and what we find is that they're suffering when we leave home and we all leave home I mean if you look at today what was today like

I mean how many moments did you leave your body and in some way just lose track of your body and your senses how many moments did you leave your heart leave the kind of tender quality of the heart that sensitivity we leave home we disconnect from our belonging

to this natural world to the earth we leave home and what happens is that when we leave home regularly we lose touch with what we most value and so a question I love to ask and I invite you right now you can't ask it too much

is and you can close your eyes to to census is there anything between me and being at home right now. Is there anything between me and being at home right now? You might scan sense in your life if there's something going on. And then just bring it right into the moment. Is there anything this moment between me and being at home right now?

There's an understanding that our real sickness is home sickness when we pull away from this body and heart and being. you can open your eyes. There's also just to share with you a bumper sticker that says that if you lived in your heart, you'd be home right now. And I think that's another way to think of it. When we begin to review the basics of homecoming, of making visits to ourselves, I'm going to be emphasizing formal practice.

Sometimes it's called on the cushion sitting, but it could be formal practice of standing. but it means taking a kind of period of time that you know this is dedicated to presence, that's simple. I'm emphasizing formal practice, but it's not even relevant unless we bring this awakeness, this tenderness, this presence to our moment-to-moment life. That's the reason. So the core of this wise practice and the basics of

practice or I'm going to divide into two segments and one of them is intention. What's our attitude in approaching meditation? And the other is attention. How do we train ourselves to pay attention? In the past, every time I've taught something like this, one of these kind of back to basics, I've spoken for a few minutes on intention and then the rest of the time has been how do we train our minds. I'm doing it differently now. I'm spending a lot more time on what's our intention.

Because what I've found is it doesn't matter so much what practice you do. You'll notice that there's tons of practices out there if you look up meditation. What matters is the quality of heart and sincerity and how you're approaching it. If you're wholehearted, your practice will wake you up. If you're rigid, it won't. So I want to go into this a little bit because here we're saying, you know, do you make regular visits to yourself? Now, what's your attitude when you're visiting yourself? Because you might consider if you're visiting another person, what's your attitude?

You know, if it's Aunt Myrtle who you're doing out of duty, right? You're visiting her out of duty and you're thinking, she's just going to repeat the same stories, she's kind of judgmental, and it could be talking about your own mind, right? Same story is judgmental. But you know you're going to get bored or you know you're going to get reactive. What's your attitude and going towards that? So we start to sense that when we visit ourselves, it might not always be comfortable what we come to.

And what's our approach to that? For many of us, and the reason this is so important to me, I've watched thousands and thousands of people start meditation and drop it. And when I talk to them, because sometimes they'll come back eight years later. And when I talk to them, they say, well, you know, it was just, I was adding another exercise, another should. And I didn't think I was doing such a great job at it anyway. And it just ended up being not fun or boring. And that's because of the attitude in how we're visiting ourselves.

So I want to acknowledge some assumptions that are built into any meditation class that you'll go to, and so that we can get them out front. And one of the assumptions that most teachers I know, including myself, have, is it's valuable to practice regularly. Okay? That's one assumption. It's valuable to practice regularly. That that really serves waking up. Another assumption is that there are certain ways of practicing that are going to benefit you,

that there are good ways to practice. And then the last assumption is that there are benefits to this. Now, the reason I bring up these three assumptions about it's good to practice, there's good ways to practice, and there's good benefits, is as soon as you have good, you have bad, okay? And it's a setup, which is maybe I'm not. practicing regularly so I'm falling short on how often I practice. I'm not practicing right. I'm not doing this right and I'm not getting any benefits. And so it's a setup for judgment and failure. And I see so much judgment circling around the world of meditation.

So if tonight's talk can help you if you're an old-timer to let go and have more fun in the practice. And if you're new, spare you the judgment, I'll be really happy, really happy. We want results quickly. You know, we're impatient. It's like being impatient around our microwave. You know, it's so amazing to me, you know. You have to wait a minute for something that used to be 40 minutes, and we're like pacing, you know. It's our culture. And, you know, in the magazines now, They have these ads for meditation, you know, just four weeks and meditate like a monk, you know, and you can, and all you have to do is listen to certain sound beeps and, you know, and not that some of these sound current technologies are great. And it's playing into something, as you know, this instant grad kind of culture.

When the Insight Meditation Society, IMS, set itself up 20-some years. ago, whatever, 30 years ago. Early on they got a letter addressed to the instant meditation society. So you get the sense of it. So we have this feeling like it's supposed to be working, it's supposed to work a certain way, it's supposed to work fast, and we're in some way on the sidelines, just to alert us to that. The inquiry is this. How? How do we honor the centrality of practice without turning it into another activity that brings up all our sense of, am I accomplishing, am I succeeding, am I doing it right? All that, in Buddhist jargon, all the selfing, you know, all that stuff about our ego.

How can we do it differently? Let me ask you to reflect for a moment. Just close your eyes. And this is just going to, just to begin this process of our attitude in meditating. And this is for anyone who has any sort of a practice in meditation. And if you have not yet practiced in meditation, but have explored other practices that are kind of like it, then the same question applies.

And the inquiry is this. What is your relationship? with meditation practice. In other words, what's your attitude as you maybe sit down to meditate when you're going to visit yourself? I'll ask you some more questions inside that. Is there a sense of striving? Is there a sense that you've dragged yourself to the cushion?

Is there a sense of half-heartedness that you're doing time? Maybe you've set your little timer and you're just waiting. Is there a feeling that you're not doing it right as you sit? Are you kind of sensing, well, I'm going through the motions, but I'm really not doing it the way it's meant to be done? Is there a feeling something more should be happening? Do you have some feeling you're just not cut out for it,

that it's just not right for you? Do you have a feeling that you're not doing it enough, long enough, frequently enough? See if as you just reflect on, this you can not add another judgment for the fact that you're judging yourself. You know, just notice it. What's the attitude? And how do you want to approach it? How do you want to approach these practices of homecoming? What do you want the attitude of your heart and mind to be? Just keep that in mind, open your eyes when you're

ready. Many years ago, Tknat Han, a Vietnamese Zen teacher, went to a San Francisco Zen Center. And Zen centers are very rigorous, as some of you know. And on one of the days that he was teaching, he was asked by the students how they could improve their practice. And I want to read you what he said. You guys get up too early for one thing. You should get up a little later.

And your practice is too grim. I have just two instructions for you this week. One is to breathe and one is to smile. Can you sense the tone there? I can sum up what I have found as the essential ingredients of an attitude that can carry us all the way. And there are really three words that I like, and one is interested, that you take the time to train your attention because you're interested in the nature of reality. You're interested in who you really are.

behind the mask, behind all the conditioning. You're interested in who we all are. You want to be awake. That's one, interest, real curiosity. It's that question like, what is this? It's all such a mystery. That carries you a long way. The second quality is care.

There's a sense of caring about presence. I know for myself that there came a time that didn't matter what I was experiencing in my body, it was more interesting to be in the present moment than often any thought. Even when my thoughts felt better, they just weren't as interesting as this immediate unfolding mystery.

And that doesn't mean that out of habit, I don't still veer off and not pay attention to that, but interest. And then care, because I cared about presence. So there's interest, there's care, and then the third is relaxed. If you just keep asking yourself, is it possible to relax just a little bit more this moment? It'll help you. So I share this and I've taken my time on it with you new students because I so cherish what's possible in these trainings of the heart and mind that I'd love you.

you to be able to enjoy it and design a practice for yourself that you can enjoy, even if it's just a few minutes a day. And there's many variations on how you can do it. But not to set it up as yet another thing to feel bad about. And for you more experienced students, I don't know anyone that doesn't lock into practice and have some assumptions they don't need to uncover and start fresh with. In the Zen tradition, the invitation is again and again to come into beginner's mind.

This is from Suzuki, he writes, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few. So if we all, and I'm going to be having us practice a little together in this class, if we approach it like, this is the first time. If you really approach it with that openness, I don't know what's going to happen.

With that real open-mindedness, free of any assumptions that narrow the lens, that openness will actually lead to a very wonderful adventure. Beginer's mind. The way that you can establish your attitude, with each formal sitting is before you even start, take a little bit of time just as we did tonight, at the beginning of the evening, and listen inwardly and listen to the most sincere intention in you.

Remind yourself of what matters, and that will help your attitude really have those qualities of interest, care, and relaxation. Okay? Okay, so training our attention. If you travel around the world and you kind of interview everybody about the kind of meditation they're doing, it will primarily fall into two categories. Many people do a concentrative kind of practice where they choose one object to meditate on

and they bring their attention to it and try to stay with that object. It creates a stillness, a tranquility, real deep kind of peace. so that's called concentration and brings tranquility. The other whole area of meditation is mindfulness, where rather than trying to aim and direct the attention to one object like the breath, the intention is to notice what's happening, moment to moment. It's to be aware of your moment-to-moment experience. So the practice that the tradition I come from is Vapasana,

which is a form of mindfulness, meditation that draws on concentration. We use concentration as a supportive practice to help quiet down. But the goal is not to stay with the breath. The goal is to see the very nature of reality to really awaken our heart and mind to what's true in the moment. And so that's the style that we'll be exploring together. I have always loved the story of the book. Buddha when he had his realization under the Bodhi tree. And the morning after, you know, he had this great realization of who he was and just a sense, you know, won't even go into what he realized, but the nature of reality.

And then he started walking around and he was probably looked pretty good since he had just been enlightened, you know, kind of glowing and so on. And people started asking him who it was. and are you a magician? No. Are you a sage? No. Are you a saint?

No. More. Well, who are you? And his response was, I'm awake. I'm awake. And so that's really what we're going for. It's just to wake up this heart and mind. And as we know, we fall asleep a lot.

thought. Ajum Buddha Dasa, great Thai monk, was asked to describe this world and his description was lost in thought. We're gone, we're in trance. And so we start to become aware of the transfer and we notice that not only are we in thoughts, we're very speeded up a lot of the time. You know, the difference between if you walk down a path in nature or if you're bicycling or if you're going 60 miles an hour in a car, how much the difference in how much you notice in each of those. We need to slow down. This is Thomas Merton. The rush and pressure of modern life, he says, are a form, perhaps the most common form of contemporary violence.

to allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. I share that because speed is a really big thing in our culture. It keeps us entranced and it affects our hearts. I often share that in the Chinese script, the word for busy and the word for heart killing are very similar.

Heart killing. So meditation is getting less busy in our minds, getting less busy in our bodies. And the way that we'll explore it is in two parts in this kind of way of undoing our busyness. And one part is what I call coming back. How do we, when we're lost and trans, come back. Just take some time with that this evening. And then the second part is being here.

How do we stay? How do we stay when our emotions are difficult? When we're feeling angry and we want to just lash out, how do we stay? Really important to learn to stay. So for the rest of the evening, we'll be exploring coming back. Coming back here.

And the metaphor I find really useful in coming back, which I've shared with some of you before, is this wheel of awareness. And that presence is the hub of the wheel. And we're constantly busily leaving. We go out the spokes, our thoughts just take us out until we're pretty continuously circling around the rim in our trance. Okay.

And so with meditation, we notice that. We say, oh, okay, thinking. And we invite ourselves back right here. And we keep on inviting ourselves back. And it doesn't matter that we keep leaving. You are changing your neurocircetry. Every time you notice you left and you gently say, come back. It doesn't matter if you leave again.

It's just you're learning more how to undo that pattern. So it's coming back again and again. The beginning of coming back is to get a, taste of what it's like to be here. So I always start a meditation with a taste of presence. And what that means is that we relax, because as you begin to relax, you start coming home again. And it means we open up our senses. We pay attention with all our senses. So what I'd like to do is have us do that right now, because this is the first step of coming back. A taste of presence. So in this pause,

just become aware of being right here. Just feel immediately a sense that awareness is here. And as we did earlier, you might sense that smile spreading through the eyes, the corners of the eyes up a bit, and softening around the eyes. The slight smile at the mouth, just feel the inside of the mouth smiling.

So the face is soft. You might soften the shoulders, Let the shoulders relax back and down. And then feeling the hands, feel them from the inside. So you can feel the aliveness there, softening the belly. And then see how much you can notice as you scan through the body with awareness. If there's any areas of obvious holding, relaxing and letting go. So that in this relaxing, it's a relaxation that's filled with awareness.

It's not just slashing. back, dead weight. It's a softening that allows this aliveness, this space of awareness to be experienced. You can surrender your weight to the floor a bit. Just allow the tissues of your body to return to their intended place, aligning with gravity. See if you can imagine this whole physical form as a field of sensation. Can you feel the movement and quality of the sensation? the tingling or vibrating. The heat are cool, hard or soft, tight or flowing. Just awaken this whole sense of sensation, this dance of sensation.

Awaken listening, just open to the space around you, listening to the sounds that are here. You imagine receiving this symphony of sound, letting the sounds wash through you. You might sense the eyes awake, even though you're not sitting with open eyes, perhaps just sensing the play of color, of light, of dark, of flickering behind the lids, and receiving that in awareness.

Sensations, sounds, image, feeling your breath and sensing the space around you, be receptive to any sense that might be in the air. So you can let all your senses be wide open. Your body and mind relaxed and receptive. And as you're aware of the sounds and sensations, feelings in the body. You can also be aware in the background of presence itself, that which is aware.

Just know you're here. Now some of you might be thinking, well, that's the whole meditation itself. That was as much time as I'd be spending or whatever. And it can be a whole meditation. You might just let your meditation for the time being be, I'm going to have a taste of presence this morning or this evening. And just as we did, just take some moments to relax your body and to wake up your senses.

Know that you're here. That's a beautiful way to start the day. If you want to continue in the practice, the next step, as I mentioned, this is, well, just sense. Well, what's going to happen? Let's say you've awakened your senses, okay, and you're relaxed. What's going to happen next? What do you imagine? Are you going to stay present?

The mind's going to get busy, right? I mean, the mind will get activated. So there you are in presence and all of a sudden the mind starts going. So the next step is how do we work with that when the mind takes us off into thoughts? And what we can do as a skillful way of supporting ourselves is pick a home base. And there are many home bases that you can choose from. Some of you and the most classically traditional one will choose to be with the brass. that you'll let the breath be right at the center, kind of in the foreground.

And you'll let, when the mind travels, you'll go, oh, come back, come back, you'll relax, and you'll find your way back to the breath. The breath is a valuable home base, especially if you want to refine the attention and get it very, very quiet and precise. But there are other anchors, and I want to mention them, because it's kind of like being an artist and you have a palette, and you can really, you're going to be painting your own picture. So you're going to have to choose what colors you want to use.

And some of you might find the breath is too hard to stay with. So what else is possible? You might listen to sounds. As you listen to sounds, you'll sense there's a real spaciousness and openness. Now there's a downside to every home base. With the breath, you get very refined, but you might get narrow and rigid. With sounds, you get very open. but you might get spaced out.

So that's just the other possibility. For some people, it's very helpful, especially at the beginning, to let your whole body be an anchor, to feel your body sitting here. And you might feel that right now, just to feel the sense of your body sitting here and just know that whenever the mind travels

and you want to have a place to come home to, you can feel your body right here. Just feel the whole space of it. the body, the posture. For some, just feeling the hands and the feet is helpful. You can combine it. Now, the danger of giving you too many options is you can then go home and think, okay, and you have a whole list, and this is one of the problems in our cultures. We have too many choices at the supermarket, and I don't want to create that for you. So you might let the breath be the first thing you explore. But just to know that it can be sound or it can be the feeling of your whole body

gives you some flexibility. So then what happens is what we sometimes call remindfulness, which is the mind goes off into thoughts and something in us remembers, oh yeah, I wanted to be here. And it calls us back. You know, I sometimes like to use the, go back to the story of the Wizard of Oz. remember Dorothy and her companions are there and the great and wonderful Oz is you know doing his thing who pulls the curtain do you remember toto the dog right yeah so we have an inner Toto okay they can go oh thinking thinking and pulls the curtains and says okay I get it thinking thinking and then you know just can invite us back and so this is pretty

essential in the whole practice is to recognize thinking and if you sense what are you recognizing what are thoughts their images their sound bites okay they're just phenomena going on in the mind

and yet we get really attached to them you know one one writer says you know we have 80,000 thoughts a day and 95% of them we had yesterday. So we have this familiar cocoon of thoughts going around, and a lot of the time we're just surfing the channels. And it's not like anybody's, nobody's actually doing it.

They're just surfing by themselves. And just to say that many of our thoughts are really, really important and valuable. I mean, we wouldn't be here unless we had thoughts. we wouldn't have buildings and poems and medicines and everything and we wouldn't be able to communicate so a lot of our thoughts are productive creative serviceful but really when you think of what happens as you go through the day how many of your thoughts are really in that category

you know I sometimes say how many of your thoughts are like Discovery Channel or Planet Earth versus all the other commercials that we you know, end up spending time on. Not many. So we begin to sense that we need to have a way to wake up and come back home again. This is a reading from Ajan Samato, who's an American monk in, but he's in Great Britain. He says the practice of letting go is very effective for minds obsessed by compulsive thinking, which is most of us. You simplify your meditation practice down to two words, letting go. Rather than try to develop this practice and then develop that and achieve this and go into that and understand this and read the sutas and study the Abidama

and then learn Pali and Sanskrit, then the Majima Chaya and then the Prajima Paramita, rather than getting ordinations in Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vadriana, write books and become a world-renowned authority on Buddhism. Instead of becoming the world's expert on Buddhism and being invited to great international Buddhist conferences, just let go, let go, let go. I did nothing but this for about two years. Every time I tried to understand or figure things out, I'd say let go, let go, until the desire would fade out. So I'm making it very simple for you to save you from getting caught in incredible amounts of suffering. There's nothing more sorrowful than having to attend international Buddhist conferences.

We begin to train in noticing these thoughts. And letting go doesn't mean we vanquish the thoughts. It just means we're not lost inside them. And there's a difference. I suggest that when you notice thinking, you might just noted thinking, thinking, and then become interested in what's really happening right here, your living present moment.

Because most of the time, our thoughts are not really serving us. There's one wonderful cartoon I love of this guy driving into a desert and the sign says you and your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles, you know. So we come home because it's more interesting. Mostly a way to think of it is we're training our minds so we have a choice. I mean we have a choice because so many of our thoughts not just are uninteresting, they create separation. They create an us and a them. They're filled with judgment and they end up

making us feel bad about ourselves. So we learn to wake up and have a choice. One of the biggest breakthroughs that I see when people come to our residential retreats and I've had people at the end and the closing circle say it many times is I realized I don't have to believe my thoughts. Now you hear that and go, yeah, right? But think of it. We spend most of our time having this movie of the mind and believing that that's what's real. All our bodies responding to our thoughts as if they're real. We get agitated, we get excited, we get angry, as if the thoughts are real. So what if you could pause and just say, okay, just a thought. That is revolutionary. That can change your life. And it's a training. So as I mentioned, the key is that we do it

with a gentleness and a kindness. You know, there's a poem I love that describes how to work with our neurotic patterns. And it says, repeat yourself as long as it's interesting. And I think it's the same thing. We keep on going into the same thought patterns. what's wrong with me, what's wrong with you, what I have to do to be okay. And finally there comes a time where something in us says, wait a minute, I don't want to live in that trance any longer. And so we don't try to go to war with our thoughts because that never works. If you're at war with your thoughts, she'll be at war for the rest of your life.

We can honor them. We can say, thank you very much. And what's actually happening right here? And take refuge in what's present in the world. the moment rather than the storyline. This is St. Francis DeSales. He says, what we need, and this is in working with the mind, is a cup of understanding, a barrel of love, and an ocean of patience. He says, bring yourself back quite gently, and even if you do nothing during the whole of your time, but bring your heart back a thousand times, though it went away. Every time you

brought it back, your time would be well employed. It's important because I can't tell you how many people come to me and confess that they have busy minds. I mean, as if they're the only mind in the world that is kind of addicted to thoughts and busy, you know. This mind creates, you know, just secretes thoughts, just like the body secretes enzymes. It just does it. And we need our thoughts to survive, but we don't have to be addicted to them and lost inside them. So tonight's really the message is we can train ourselves, but it needs to be with a really gentle touch. It's kind of like Julia Childs when she says, you know, if you drop the lamb, just pick it up. Who will know? You go off and thought, just notice it. Okay, what's happening here? By the way, if

If it's grim, it won't work. You know, you really need to have a playful quality in it and be easy. So let's practice. Let's just do a little. It's just a short one. Just in a simple way, because you know it's just going to be short, so you don't have to tense against it and go, oh, here we go. Just, you know, feel your intention.

Okay, may these few moments, may I be wholehearted. May I bring these qualities of interest and care and ease? And you might imagine that you've already just done that first piece of establishing presence, tasting presence, but feel it again. Feel your body, inhabit your body, and see if you can just relax a little bit more right now, letting your senses be awake, just for the time being sensing your anchor, your home base. and without going into much choosing, you might just let the breath be your anger for now.

Gently feel the inflow and outflow of the breath. And see if it's possible to really relax as the breath comes in and relax as the breath goes out. You can feel the breath that you might also be aware of the sounds that are here, of the larger realm of sensation. So it's not a tight attention to the breath. And in these next moments of silence, the practice is simply when you find the minds drifted,

when you become aware of that. With interest, with gentleness, discover what else is true right in the moment by reconnecting with sound, with your body, with your heart. Come back to what's alive and real, real right here. It's more important that you arrive in a relaxed way than that you even catch the thought. So keep inviting yourself once you realize you've been thinking, ah, relax

back. These sounds, these sensations, this moment. What's happening? Interested, kind, easy. Each time you come back with interest and kindness, you're planning a seed of mindfulness, creating a new habit, a new way of being in the world. This is the poet Wu Man. He says, 10,000 flowers in spring. The moon in autumn, snow in winter, flowers, 10,000 flowers in spring. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

I'd like you to listen again to Wuman since I said it wrong. And it's so beautiful. 10,000 flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow and winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. A couple of closing words to send you, you off with that like any form of mastery, piano, sports, anything, it's a 10,000 hour kind of

practice. You know, we just, the more you do it, the more it inclines your mind. Just to invite you, if you haven't already done it, to commit yourself to even a few minutes a day, there's something about the dailiness that's a gift to the soul. I mean, it really is something in you knows you're giving yourself this gift. And when I say sit every day, any time you carve for yourself that is just dedicated to presence, it could be standing, it could be walking, but the intention is to keep coming right here into the moment touching presence. So give yourself that gift, because as they say, enlightenment is an accident, and practice makes you accident prone. Okay? So, enjoy this week and I look forward to being with you next one. Thank you. 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 tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is imcw.org. Thank you very much.