Tara Brach - Part 1 - Embodied Spirit

Episode Date: September 19, 2012

2012-09-19 - Part 1 - Embodied Spirit - Our body--this changing field of sensation--is a portal into pure Being. These talks explore the resistance we have to embodied presence, the pathways that enable us to awaken through our bodies, and the blessings of realization that arise as we let go over and over into the aliveness of our senses. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

The last few classes, we've been exploring really how to open ourselves, both to people that we might write off or judge or push out of our hearts and also to our own life within us. And tonight I want to go right to what I consider the ground level, which is our entire capacity to have that openness. to life comes from being able to be open to the experience of sensations in our body. All of the reactivity we have, any aversion we might experience, any disgust or fear or dislike or whatever it is towards ourself or towards the world is experienced in the most

basic way as difficult unpleasant sensations. So it's not until we we have the capacity to let go of our resistance to being right here in these bodies that we actually can come into the presence that includes the world. That's our theme. And I'd like to maybe begin our theme with a story. Some of you might remember for a few years ago, it's one of my favorites as a Scandinavian tale about Princess R and the serpent. and the princess's parents had fallen on some pretty difficult times.

They were out of cash, basically. So they had to turn to the dragon to see if maybe they could get a loan from the dragon's hoard. And the dragon said, well, certainly, just for one small thing, you know, in exchange, like to marry your daughter. And they, you know, they felt terrible about it, but, you know, they knew they had to do it. So they went to the princess and said, dear, we've decided on the proper betrothal for you, and you're going to be married to the dragon. And, of course, she was a resourceful young woman, and although she was frightened and upset, she knew to turn to a very wise woman that lived on the edge of town with her, you know, 15 children and 45 grandchildren and the like.

And so she went and talked to this woman and poured out her story. And the wise woman first asked, well, do you want to marry the dragon? The princess said, absolutely not. And she said, and then the wise woman said, well, I have a way, I think you can do it that will help you to feel safe. And she whispered in her ear for a while. And one of the first things that she had to do was to get a number of, wedding gowns, 10 in fact. So the wedding day came and all the people came to court and it was a difficult day of course, big celebration and tough for her, but then they retired to the bridal chambers and

the dragon turned to the princess and said, well dear, isn't it time to consummate our wedding? And the princess responded, yes, my dear husband. For me to do so, I must remove my wedding gowns. Isn't that so? And he said, absolutely, my dear, joyfully. And so she said, well then I have one small favor to ask of you in return. And she said, since I must remove my gowns to be pleasing to you, would you not remove a layer of your own to be pleasing to me? So she took off her wedding gown and he had a few decorative things on his dragon body. He took them off.

Okay, fine. But to a surprise, he noticed that she had another wedding gown on, the second of ten, right? So she took that one off And then the dragons are used to taking off their scales Of course, because reptiles have to shed now And then so he peeled off a thin layer And said, well, yes dear And oops, she had another gown

So as she took off each layer of wedding gowns Four, five, six The dragon's claws had to dig deeper and deeper Into his own flesh and skin To peel off yet another layer And on the eighth wedding gown she took off, the dragon was down to taking off parts of him that were stuck. And his form began to change. And on the ninth, it changed more remarkably. And when she took

off the tenth gown, and by this time the dragon had pulled off so much dragonness that what was left as happens in these stories was, you guys are tuned in. A handsome prince. Yeah. And then She took the advice of the old woman from far beyond the marketplace that had all those dozens of children and grandchildren and had a very blissful wedding night. So that's our story. And what we find with the practice of meditation is that we feel the layers of our being opening. Hour by hours we do, what becomes revealed is an underlying beauty and aliveness. and a spaciousness. It's really a nobility of being.

It's your own Buddha nature, your true nature. And so this is really the path we're on, which is a letting go of these scales or layers that really are resistance to what is. And that's really what we're exploring tonight is the ways we resist coming into our body and how to let go of that. And not all at once

because we have our own organic timing, but to take off the scales, all the resistances, and come into that aliveness in a very full way. So the ground level of defense, as we know, against releasing the armor is our thinking, so we wake up out of thoughts and come back and again and again.

And what we discover, and I hope you felt it a bit with the guided meditation, is that while it can be difficult at first, as we really begin to find our presence in this body, where really the presence goes deeper than sensation, we really discover a very subtle energy and aliveness. It's very pure.

The body really is a portal of awakening to everything that we cherish. You know, I think that we sometimes move through life disappointed because we know about love, but it's often abstract. And to get the felt sense of love, to really inhabit it, we have to be awake in our bodies. And I think we get disappointed. We hear about compassion and we feel it some that it's more abstract. And to have that be alive, we have to be in our bodies.

And it's the same with creativity. There's a certain amount of thinking, but there's an energy that we need to be in touch with. Wisdom. Yeah, there's some thinking, but really there's a knowing that's very embodied, a gawking of what's true. And I think we intuit that and feel us, and kind of sense that we're not all there because we're not all here. The words of Kabir, inside this clay jug, There are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. The God whom I love is inside.

So in the early Taravada text, this is Buddhism. A very simple and powerful way it's put is that the ultimate spiritual realization is described this way. It's described as touching enlightenment with the body. So it's not just a technique when we talk about mindfulness, coming into the first foundation. That's the way it's described of being awake in this body. It's not just an on-your-way technique.

This awakeness in the body reveals everything. So we'll explore this. And I think it's particularly important because often meditation has been misunderstood as a way of transcending the body. We're trying to get out of this earthly realm and into some heavenly realm and where there's dazzling crystal lights and rainbows and so on,

and, you know, blissful light-filled spaces. And what we discover is the shift that helps us realize that the sacredness that we yearn for is discovered through coming home to what's right here. So I love the way John O'Donohue describes this. He says, we need to come home to the temple. of our senses. And he puts it this way. He says, our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. Our bodies know that they belong. It is our minds that make our lives so homeless. Isn't that good? Yeah. Our bodies know they belong. The body is always in the present. Now that's

not saying it feels good. Our presence with our body has to include all the different ways it feels Our bodies know they belong, though, to aliveness, to spirit. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. Now, this isn't a diatribe against thinking. I mean, when we're mindful, then thoughts are the most amazing servant of creativity. They guide us on the spiritual path. They help us make life better for many people. They allow us to communicate.

So this isn't down on thoughts. It means not to be lost on thoughts. and leave our bodies behind. Okay, so the pathway we explore, and we're just gonna keep coming back to us again and again, because really the teaching's simple, it's hard but simple, is to wake up out of the trance of thinking and come right here.

And you might just try it now, just close your eyes for a moment and just let the sound of the gong be an invitation right back here again. Just being receptive to the aliveness, of our being and sensing the mystery that's inside that, the not knowing. So the challenge is that instead of presence, we're in a trance often and we're on our way somewhere else. You know, again, I'll read from John O'Donohue, wonderful poet, teacher, passed away about five years ago.

He says, we rushed through our days in such stress and intensity as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. You can open your eyes if you'd like. I've seen a lot of people with closed eyes. It's fine if you want to, yeah. And isn't it true? I mean, we have a universe in mind that's kind of, we're right at the center of it, and our, we're important, our life's important, and we're important, and we're, we're,

really serious about it. It's that thousand serious moves I've talked about that suffaces a phrase. So the mental armoring, these are the scales that keep us disembodied. These are when we're lost in thought. That's what's between us and this aliveness. And I like to talk about the flags that can help us to realize, oh, in a trance, come back, come back. And one of the major flags is speeding around, when you just sense, oh, this busyness that we're in, this on my way having to get things done, this map of life trying to get somewhere and cross things off the list is one of the flags. You know, where are we going to? I think sometimes I've been talking about my dog Katie a bunch because she's really teaching me stuff. And one of the things I notice is how she,

we go out for a walk and she's constantly she's this low thing that's like tugging and aiming and barreling forward and you know I ran into one person that was kind of weird joking

how dogs go on walks to get their pee male you know they're sniffing around and so on but she's barreling along and I sometimes wonder like what she's such in a rush to get to the end of the walk

you know but we're like that of course for her she's having a blast and she has a blast when we're done with the walk so she's not losing herself so much, but we're so busy and intent on getting somewhere.

Okay, that's one of the flags. Then, of course, another flag is getting caught in judgment. That keeps us disembodied. And how, you know, we have this mental assessing machine going on all the time. It's kind of this motor in our brain that's just humming around, just always monitoring, how am I doing? Is there a problem? What do I have to deal with?

are things okay, you know, and often its focus is negative. Yes, there's a problem and you're the problem or I'm the problem. That's just very common. This is the negative bias of the brain. So that's another one that when we're in it, when somebody's letting us down or when we're on our own case, we're disembodied. Then, of course, the more subtle flag is the story

we're always running about our life. And, of course, we're the protagonist in it. And there's a sense of this self as the doer. That we have this story that we're the doer or we're the controller. And then sometimes it flips. And instead of being the doer or the controller, we're the victim. But we have this story about ourself that we're constantly running. And we're in that story.

We're not inhabiting. Story of a man, Jim, 50 years old. He runs into one of those midlife crises where he feels like he's ponching and he's lost his edge and his life isn't going anywhere. So he decides to take things under control and he gets a fast, sporty car, and he goes on a diet and he exercise so he loses weight and he builds up his muscles and goes to sunrooms. And, you know, he's trying to get it together here. He buys some new vests that look good on him.

Goes to a barbershop, finally. He gets a haircut. He's walking out of the barbershop. He gets hit by a truck. He dies, he gets killed, he goes to God, God, how could you do this to me? And God's response, well, to tell you the truth, Jim, I didn't recognize you. So he get caught, shift from the controller to the victim. In the moments of speeding around on our way, in the moments of judging, in the moments of judging,

in the moments of being inside our stories, those are the moments that were, disconnected from our moment to moment experience. We're not living in our body. And we're the way John O'Donohue described it. We're homeless. We're not perceiving our belonging to life, to spirit. So just to say what the causes are behind this disconnecting that we go through, part of it is intrinsic to survival mechanisms, as we know,

that the body secrete opiads to numb us out when there's too much pain it's nature's way of protecting us that when there's trauma or too much fear when we're young there's mechanisms that go into place to help us dissociate because we cannot handle

the intensity of the emotions that are flowing through our bodies so this is part of survival but as we know it gets very amplified by our culture So it's not just with the really big physical pain or emotional pain that we exit town and we go off into our thoughts and get busy. We really don't have much toleration for discomfort.

So in a cultural way, if you look at how we relate to nature, that gives you an idea of how we relate to our bodies. How much the West has got the idea of nature being this, other thing out there that we're going to dominate and make use of and suck as much out of as we can. It's dominating. It's like we are separate from nature, but we're going to control it. And we're going to try to make sure not too much bad stuff happens to it while we try to get the good stuff. Think of how we're relating to our bodies. We don't trust the body. The body feels like a dangerous place because there's unpleasantness and intensity and pain and feelings. In the same way we

don't trust, you know, the world around us. So pain's not natural. It's considered a problem. It's a problem to solve with a lot of medication usually. In the same way, emotions. Grief is supposed to have a timetable. Our fear feels like it's my fear and it's ugly, you know, even though every human and every organism is wired with fear. So we make something wrong out of this naturalness that's right here in our culture. What do we do with aging as a culture? Everything possible to avoid it, at least the appearances of it. It's amazing. It's considered as this, in the most mild sense, as an imposition and in the major sense as an insult, and especially to women who show it. We all are doing it. And yet we're doing everything we can, most of us,

in this culture, to in some way try to ignore it, our... fix it. We fight it. And then getting sick and dying. It's kind of like an embarrassment. It's considered wrong. Does that make sense? Is this resonating?

Watts writes about the guy who's winding his watch on the ways to the gallows, you know. Isn't that way? I don't want to think about it, you know? We dress up our corpses as if they're going to a party. Isn't it true?

So it's very, you know, we anesthetize births and we interfere with the dying process. We're a culture who's not comfortable with the natural cycles. It's the best I can say. And we take refuge in the mind. You know, that's our place where we fear more comfortable. So we worship the rational mind.

We're addicted to thinking, to figuring things out. So a lot of the time that's what we're doing, rather than opening to the aliveness right here, we're trying to figure something out. We even do it with spirituality. I mean, there's that line, Zen and reading all the books about Zen, you know, something seeking in some way this coherent understanding. Like we want coherence, we want things to be familiar,

so we're always trying to figure things out. And I can speak for myself. I'll sometimes be having a meditation where I'm just really inhabiting the aliveness. And then I realize I've gone into the thoughts that are trying to make sense about reality. Oh, so this means that reality's like this. We want to get a handle on things

to control them. That's it. We look for coherence because it gives us a sense we can control our life. One story about a really beloved rabbi, Rabbi Schechter, he's on his deathbed and people are surrounding him they're waiting for his final words to them.

Because final words might let us know, here's what it's all about, you know. And he says in a faltering voice, life is like a fountain. And so it's right around, I'm circled right around and passed the word out, you know, through there's crowds and crowds of people, pass the word out through the crowds, and the word goes down a long line of people in the hall and down this twisting staircase. They're whispering it. It's like a fountain. like a fountain. It's like a fountain, you know. And then out through the crowds and it spreads

and spreads. So everybody's going, life is like a fountain. And then finally it gets to this little boy who's like right at the edge of the edge of it and the edge of the crowds and goes, well, what does that mean? They're going, well, not sure. We should ask the right. So the question goes up, what does that mean? Was it mean? Was it mean? You know, it goes up the stairwell and up through the line and so on, to finally, it goes through those circling around the rabbi to his closest assistant, and he whispers the question into the rabbi's ear. And the rabbi responds, so maybe it's not a fountain. We don't know, you know, it's like, it's such a mystery. We talk about love or we talk about this universe, or we talk about, you know,

how it all is about. We don't know. We move through this life as if we know what we're doing. So we spent a lot of time trying to figure it out and get a comfortable handle because entering into our body

is entering into this uncontrollable zone, this sphere where it's just all happening. and everything happens including the most intense weather systems it can be very violent in there can be very peaceful deliciously pleasant anguishingly unpleasant

we're out of control and we don't like that can't control that either so it brings me to technology or toll on children I mean our children are just like hooked into a cyber field right? They are you know, video games and so on

less and less in the body, less and less in nature and of course we see it with obesity and so on it's just like not staying in contact with the natural rhythms so one teacher described interviewing children

about the importance of the body and one child said it's meant to carry the head around another story of boys sharing this little boy, I think, you know, like kindergarten, he announces that his cat had kittens. And, you know, they were saying, well, what sex? And he said, oh, there were three females and three males. And the teachers said, well, how do you know?

He said, well, my daddy picked them up and turned them over. It must be ridden on their bottoms, you know. This disconnection. So another cultural conditioning is that there's a mistrust of pleasure. You know, that we, and this is very, Much from religious traditions, including some interpretations of Buddhism of being wary of the body, being wary of the sestuction of the senses. This idea that the physical world is less worthy, that sacredness is when we transcend, as I was mentioning earlier.

I remember hearing in the early days of the Insight Meditation Society, this is in Massachusetts, they had a three-month retreat, and it was led by a Burmese teacher, a Burmese Buddhist teacher, and this took place in the 70s, just to give you a setting. And during the retreat, this Burmese teacher was asked about sex, and his response, sex is base, gross, and disgusting. This is the 70s. Remember this, okay? They're at this retreat.

the 70s. Well, afterwards is a way of integrating and so on. Some of the students were doing some skits. And in one of the skits, they had one of them playing this Burmese teacher and another was the students saying, Sayyadau, can you please describe, tell us something about sex? And the Sayada said sex is basic, engrossing and worth discussing. So we're talking about really a body, mind split that's perpetuated by the culture. It's amplified by emotional wounding, as I mentioned at the very beginning, the more wounding there is, the more our nervous system has the strategies to dissociate so we don't have to feel what's there. So if we look closer and say, well, what are the core principles here. What we find out is that in this embodied life, pain, our unpleasantness

is absolutely inevitable, but suffering, as I say, is optional, that if we fight the pain, in other words, if we pull away, if we dissociate, if we're unwilling to take off the scales and be with what's here, then we suffer. We never discover that beauty and awareness and beingness of what we are. We never let the body is not a portal. And we don't discover our full aliveness. The equation that a lot of us like sharing is that pain times resistance, equal suffering. It's, you know, kind of one of those kind of faux formulas. It's not, you know, great, but it gives you the sense, right? That to the extent that we tense against what's happening, there's more tension.

So the opposite of that equation, or the flip of it is that when there's unpleasantness or when there's pleasantness, or unpleasantness times presence equals freedom. No resistance, no scales. Okay? Back to the drag in one of my favorites, this is a related story. is of Swami Satchananda, Hindu yogi, who was asked by one of his yoga students, do I have to be a Hindu to practice yoga? And his response is, no, no, no, no. I am not a Hindu. I am an undue, you know? But you get the idea that we're taking off the scales. We're taking

off and letting go of the resistances to what's here. The whole path is not a doing path. The only doing we can describe is some willingness to let go of the scales to drop the armor. It's an undoing. So we come back to our naturalness. Let me invite you again just to take a moment to perhaps step out of any of the ideas that I'm helping to create swirl around in your mind. Just close your eyes. and you might even ask yourself, is there anything in this moment between me and being at home

in my body, really inhabiting my body, being here? And let the sounding of the gong be an invitation to maybe let go just a little more of the armoring to arrive. Even a short pause is a real gift to your soul, just to sense the difference between any thought and this living beingness that's right here. So simple. Yet our conditioning is so much not to come home. So we'll continue a bit.

What we find when we ask, is there anything between me and being at home, my body is that I wasn't remembering, that I was often thought, and that there's a resistance to this unpleasant feeling in our bodies. It's kind of a wrestling. or an angst, or a fear. There's layers of tension in our body that don't feel good, so we don't feel like hanging out with them, which is quite natural. But as I mentioned,

pain times resistance equals suffering. So what's the suffering? What happens when we decide not to come home? What happens when we resist what's here and stay with our arms? armor in our scales. Well, one thing that happens is that it takes energy to wall off the life that's here, so we get tired. I'd say a lot of the fatigue we experience is in some way pushing away the life that's here. It takes work. Doesn't that make sense intuitively? It takes work. So, you know, like a dragon We're weighed down by the skills It takes a lot to carry around those skills

It takes a lot to fight what's here So that's one of the ways that resistance creates suffering Another is that When you tense against something As I mentioned it creates more attention So we actually create more physical unpleasantness in our body

By resisting what's here and you sense that with all the wisdom around birthing that the advice when a woman is experiencing contractions is not to push against the contraction, not to contract against the contraction, it's to breathe with it, let it move through you, not resisting. Okay, so tiredness, more physical unpleasantness.

The third, and I think this is a really important kind of thing to tune into, is that when we're pushing away something inside us, there's some part of us that knows there's something there that's difficult. And so we're living with a chronic apprehension. There's a sense that around the corner something is bad that's going to happen because we know we're pushing away something. So it's a mental tension and it tugs on our psyche. We can't really relax.

finally, when we're pushing away a part of our aliveness, our identity contracts, and we get identified with what we're pushing away. We get identified as the defended self, the controlling self, the fearing self, the wanting self. So if you're pushing away fear, you actually get more hitched to it. It creates a stronger identification. So like the dragon, the more. more we resist, the more we live with our armoring, the more we are unable to be intimate with the life that's here. We're homeless. So, of course, the good news is that while we're conditioned to build up some armoring, every one of us, like if you get a wound, we're conditioned to have a scab. Nature also as a way of knowing how to let go of that scab when it's time. Okay? And each one of

us intuits that, intuits that resisting, carrying around armoring, being lost in thoughts is preventing us from full aliveness and full realization. We intuit that. And so we get drawn to practices

that help us to let go. That's as much a part of nature as the fact that we have survival mechanisms that armor us. That's the good news. maybe the story to share with you about the process of the letting go one of the main themes for me has been working with physical illness and pain over the last years

and I've all my life been very I'd say attached to physical activity I was quite a jock and a yogi kind of person that had some vanity around it but more than that, a great joy in moving and exercising and fitness and so on. And as some of you know about 10 years ago, I went from this real flexible, part of the reason I was good at yoga is very, very flexible. Well, I found that I had a genetic disease that was contributing to that flexibility to do with my connective tissues. So the very thing that I was proud of and let me be a great yogi turned out to be something

that my joints started not holding together. And so it's been a precursor to all sorts of challenges with movement. I had to go from running to walking, so I'd start walking the hills, but then I couldn't do hills anymore, and then I couldn't do sand, and more and more limited, not able to bike, all sorts of things I couldn't do. My reaction was without knowing it so much, and then I began to catch on, was to armor ourselves.

And my scales took the form of, first of all, a sense of my body's betraying me, so there was some sense of being at war with my body, like it became an object that wasn't doing good things. Does that make sense? It was not cooperating with my plan for life. There was a mental kind of obsessing, what I've described as the thousand serious moves

where I was constantly fixated on how to fix myself and trying to plan and work out the problem. So I was living in a problem mentality. That's another layer of armoring. And I think the deepest was the sense of a self that kept swinging between the controlling self. I'm going to deal with this this way and that way and trying to navigate to a victimized self.

But there was a self-sense that was the very thick story of I am now a sick person. So I'm kind of giving you a sense of the layering that came up, you know, that my dragonness, you know, that I was carrying around, that would contribute to just feeling disconnected. And of course, this wasn't wall to wall, and I was using the practices to say, oh, look what's happening, come back to presence, and so on.

But I remember going to a six-week retreat. and it was just when I was most aware that running was out of the picture and so was a lot else. And even there I couldn't do yoga and sitting in certain, I mean, because at these longer retreats you do a lot of hours of sitting, sitting, you know, I wasn't able to sit so I was having to lie down and just, you know, keep doing body scans and so on. but I became acutely aware of how I had created this armoring, how I was living in that story and planning and caught inside something that kept me from really just being with the body.

And just to say the pain wasn't so terrible, it was chronic but not terrible. But I was leaving because what was terrible was the idea of living a life where I wasn't going to be so mobile or fit or anything like that. So during the retreat, I became more aware of all the judging and obsessing, of course, because that's what you do at retreat. You become aware of what you weren't noticing. And as I have many times, it became my deep intention to keep meeting my edge,

keep meeting where the pain was and softening. And that's the language from trunk. Rimpaparimpa-Rimpaseh, a Tibetan teacher who's not alive, but wonderful teacher, just to keep meeting our edge and softening. So rather than meeting our edge and going off into thoughts and planning and more scales, just keep softening back into what's right here. So that was my practice. And it opened me to a deep grief about loss. And it really, under that, just to this changing flow of pleasantness and unpleasantness. And then to just a quality of heerness, a very simplicity, kind of the simplicity of, okay, right here. A lot that was really refuge, just keep coming home. And I found that if I could keep on doing that, just, it was kind of the idea of just this much,

just this sensation, this feeling, just stay right here. I reentered activity, and by activity I mean slow walking, a little bit of chigong, you know, just a little bit of movement that I was doing, body scans. I reenter the doing activity with a tremendous amount of presence more than before when I hadn't had to deal with having a body go. So it was like it got me to pay attention on a much more subtle level.

And with that, there was this savoring. So it was just like appreciating aliveness itself. The shift that happened for me was rather than losing myself and the stories of what was wrong through coming back into the pleasantness and the unpleasantness, this presence started waking up

where there was just this simple appreciation of aliveness. It was like just loving the aliveness itself. And in that, there was a sense that what I am is this space, awareness, this wakeful openness that aliveness is moving through. A shift in identity, no longer controlling so much. Now I left that retreat and I want to say, it's not even as much a confession, it's just acknowledged that it came back and I went in and out and in and out and it's been a number of years and I've got in the knack of seeing that story. I'm not,

I'm much better than I thought I'd be. I kind of plateaued and then even gained back. some of my health but still face limitations that you know I hadn't planned on but my point is that in being with our body we find out who we are beyond this physical form and then have this capacity to cherish I want to share with you another story that's kind of parallel to mine that really moved me this is a spiritual teacher who says I had a large abdominal tumour it was removed. This is a serious bout of cancer. And she said, and with it, when it was removed, all I had clung to ascertainties in my life went. I quit work and I stopped the spiritual

teaching. I turned to anything I thought might help me change what had led to that cancer from acupuncture to depth therapy. I became humble before the body. That was 15 years ago. and I can now say that it was the biggest turning point and awakening of all. I had used my body to practice. Now I had to inhabit it. You sense the difference? I'd use my body to practice.

Exercise this thing, feed this thing, you know, practices. Now I had to inhabit it and respect it and love it with all the feminine force and nurturing and understanding I had withdrawn into my spiritual life. You see, there had been a split. And now she was entering the body. This is the spiritual life through this very body. She said, keeping my heart in my body became my practice. And just sense what that means.

Keeping my heart in my body became my practice. And it's become glorious. She said, even the first awakenings into perfection and grace did not come close to showing me the joy of living in the body, in the senses in each moment, I love my life in a new way, this has become the place of freedom. Keeping our heart and our body. So we bring this courageous, heartful presence to these bodily sensations, to these energies that are here. And the very act of bringing presence here allows tangled energies to untangle and flow more freely. We love our life. We love our life, in a new way. You might just check this out. Just close your

eyes for a moment and well actually first open your eyes again. Let's start differently. Take a moment to look at your hand. I think this is really interesting. Just look at it and see the form of it. Let's check out this hand of yours. Whatever history you've had with this hand, however you react to the way it looks,

what it's done for you or not. And then close your eyes. and keep the arm up and just slowly move the arm and the hand through space just slowly enough so that all your attention can go to the physical sensations of the hand. The physical sensations.

And you can even slow down until you just are still, you're not in motion, but feel the aliveness from the inside. And notice, is there a sense of a balance? where hand ends. If you take away the word hand, what is this? Just letting go of the scale of even a concept. What is this? Can you sense the space that's inside the activity of hand, of this aliveness, that it's emanating from, the space around it, that this is awake space. It's awake, formless space, and the sensations, the aliveness, this energy, this subtle energy,

can open us to this being quality that's here, relaxing the hand down, keeping the eyes closed, and just feeling this whole body again as a field of sensation. Body's always in the present. If we want to open to the truth of what we are, the invitations to relax the scales, the defenses, and come home to what's difficult, home to the pleasantness, come home to the aliveness, just as you experience the aliveness in the hand, you can feel through the whole

body, the shimmering, pulsing, vibrating, tingling, heat or cool, pleasant or unpleasant. What happens is if you let go completely into this aliveness. Be fully everything it is. It's what you are when fully present and inhabiting this aliveness. The words of Kabir, inside this clay jug, there are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. the God whom I love is inside. Day and 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.