Tara Brach - Part 1: Entering the Wilderness

Episode Date: September 20, 2013

2013-09-18 - Part 1 - Entering the Wilderness - On all spiritual paths, we journey into the inner wilderness to discover the nature of nature - the truth of who we are.  The entry is through bringing a kind and full presence to the life of our bodies. These two talks explore the conditioning that leads us to dissociation, and the blessings of full aliveness, open heartedness and wisdom that arise when we come home to embodied presence.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!

I'd like to begin tonight's talk with a story I've always loved about the magician Houdini. And as it goes, he would travel around Europe and tons of different stunts, but one of his favorite was being strapped into a straitjacket, and then he'd be put into a little cell, and he'd get out of his straitjacket and unlock the lock and, you know, delight anybody that was watching. So he did this, you know, did his rounds. in Europe and he got to Ireland and then he had a little trouble because they put him in a straitjacket and in the cell he was fine getting out of the strait jacket but for whatever

it took he could not unlock the lock he could not get out of the cell that he was put in and the townspeople and the newspapers were pretty disappointed they all kind of left so finally he asked the jailer to unlock him and and asked him you know, what kind of newfangled, sophisticated lock he had used. And the response was, it's actually a quite ordinary lock. The thing is, I didn't lock it. So his efforts were locking him in. Everything he was doing was keeping him locked in.

So I think you get the message on this one. But I'll just say a bit, which is that many, many moments, we have the conditioning to assume a problem or assume trouble or assume that we're trying to figure something out or get to something else are in some way get out of a situation. And it's an underlying that set, basic something's wrong, got to do something. Our efforts to feel better,

our efforts to in some way figure things out and make things different and get somewhere, actually are what create our prison. They're what keep us trapped in a sense of separateness and not okayness. So the teaching is that the doors are always open in any moment that we just become still, just occupy presence. So there's always a interesting inquiry,

and you might ask it right now, and it helps sometimes to close your eyes when you do these. But just to ask yourself, what is really between me and being at home in my body in this moment? What's between me and being at home in my body in this moment? And just pay attention for a little bit. Is there anything between you and really resting, being here?

Now you might say, well, I just wasn't paying attention before, but keep paying attention and notice, is there anything that prevents you from being at home? And you can explore that perhaps on and off through this class. What we find with a little exposure to meditation, which is really an invitation to be here with what is, we start discovering all the resistance we have, how we actually don't want to be here. It's that simple. We find out how we don't want to be here. What we find out is that being here is uncomfortable in some way. It's sometimes hard to put a word on. Sometimes it's just physical discomfort, but there's something deeper, some kind of restlessness

or unease we contact. Because when we're really here, when we're really awake in our bodies, there's a groundlessness. It's all just changing. There's nowhere to land, really. It's groundless and often it's raw and it's intense and most important it's unpredictable, uncontrollable. When we're in our bodies, we're in nature which is doing its thing and it makes us uneasy. So what we find is that we're tensing against that wildness. We're in some way we're trying to control it by going into our thoughts. We keep leaving. It's not too easy to stay with this changing life of our body. Let me just ask, for how many of you does that resonate?

Let me just see it. You get it. So it's hard to be here sometimes. So I really do think of it like we're going into the wilderness when we start training, that in meditation, that we're seeking refuge, we're seeking that, that we're seeking that, place of balance and awakeness and openness, but we're seeking it by going into the wilderness, going into reality. We're actually going into nature. And if you think of our typically different spiritual paths, it's either going into the desert, the desert fathers, or for many of the Buddhists going into the forests, going into the high plateaus if you're Tibetan Buddhist.

You know, it's, there's a going into nature, the natural world, and it's, in its deepest sense, we're going into our inner nature. And when we do, we're subject to all the wildness of nature, to all the storms and the incredible heat and all the droughts and all the rawness. We're subjected to it. So this is what we'll be focusing on. this class and the next. How is it that we do this, this entering the wilderness, because in some way there's some intuition that it's a path to freedom. So I was going to call it responding

to the call of nature. You know, we had an idea that there'd be a video with three easy steps to responding to the call of nature. Then I realized I was going to call it entering the wilderness. It might be a better, simpler title. So what we'll do is explore our habitual ways of resisting being here. And we'll explore really how as we have that willingness to open to what's here, we discover this body as a portal to everything we cherish. It's a portal to loving presence, to creativity, to wisdom. Here's 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 one Buddhist teacher puts it this way, he said, make your practice this simple. Just don't do anything that takes you

away from your body. And what we get when we start training in mindfulness is that the first foundation of mindfulness is to wake up to this play of sensation so much as in the guided meditation today we find a way to kind of open to and relax with and wake up inside these bodies so that there's really a knowing. What is it like right now? You might feel your hand from the inside and say, what does it really feel like? What does it really feel like? And it takes softening and relaxing and attention. So we explore this first foundation,

and this is a lot of the practice here. And one of the reasons it's so important is there's this huge misunderstanding, I think, in a lot of spiritual writings and teachings, that in some way this medicine, meditation takes us beyond the body, that we're meditating to transcend. It's kind of a disembodied floating and that we're trying to discover these blissful states, this crystal rainbow of light, and just, you know, kind of be out there. And the shift to what I consider

a true spiritual path where we're really moving towards wholeness is that we discover that that sacredness and spirit that we yearn for is intrinsic to aliveness. The God I love is inside. This is John O'Donohue. He says, we need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make our life so homeless. It's our minds that make our life so homeless. So much of this. this path is learning how to recognize the trance that we're in much of the time, this thinking trance that takes us away. Just to recognize it, know that thoughts are absolutely necessary that they're a precious part of living, they're in support of a spiritual path,

but if we're lost in the trance of thinking, we've left this domain of living aliveness. left the place where we really discover firsthand that sacredness. So what we start looking at is the ways that we leave home. And that's what I want to kind of move through with you. And one of the ways I think about it is that we are training to notice when we've left in thought. And if you are doing a sitting like we did today and you found that you drifted, you oh, 80 times, and that now and then you'd notice that, you know, oh, gone and you'd

kind of come back, but a lot of times you maybe notice it a little but keep on drifting. That's the practice. It's that one out of maybe eight times we really notice and come back and that's an eighth of our life we've reclaimed. And that can move into our day, it can bleed into our whole life, and the proportions get larger. So we learn to come back. Some part of us is sitting and we realize, oh, I'm off again. And the way I like to think of it is the Wizard of Oz. Like, if you think about it, who was it that pulled the curtain and discovered who the wizard really was? Toto. So we're

kind of developing our inner Toto, right? And there's some flags. of trance, some ways we can sniff it out, you know, that will really help us to recognize, oh, I've left. I'm in that homeless ground, you know. And one of the biggest flags of trance is speeding, that when we're in trance, our speed picks up because there's some stress there and some anxiety. And we have an undercurrent of a belief that there's not enough time. How many of you have noticed that belief in the background? Okay. Who's never, no, I was better say you've graduated, you know. Okay, so there's not enough time. So one of them is speeding, so we're kind of barreling into the future in some way. I mean, just notice for yourself

if you're driving and the frustration of having a really slow driver in front of you. You know that feeling like of a red light when you want to get somewhere, we can feel that everything in us is moving forward, we're leaning forward, which means now is not so important. In fact, trying to be in now will get you right there in touch with all that restlessness. Okay, so speeding. Second one is judging. Judging's one of the biggest that, you know, Houdini just assumed there's a problem here. We assume that something's wrong and it's either us or someone else or life but when we're judging we've left our embodied experience. When we're judging we're in a trance. So that's the basic assumption that things should be different. Okay, so there's

not enough time, things should be different. The third flag I'll mention is when our minds are in kind of worry planning mode where we're obsessing and figuring. things out. Have you noticed how many moments you're trying to figure something out? It's like Houdini, you're kind of going like this. And how often it really isn't so necessary? That's the third one. And we are mostly assuming that around the corner something's going to happen and we need to be prepared. So we spent a lot of our lives preparing for something around the corner. Last week I ran into somebody on the trail that I hike on who told me that there's a rumor going around our area that a mama bear and two cubs were hanging out in this field

that I go to a lot of time in the evening and walk around because you can see the moon and so on. And so ever since I heard that, I've been thinking, you know, and this is one of my life rituals. I've been thinking about, well, what part of the field? And what do I need to do if I'm going to, like, what do I do with, what would happen with my dog? Because she kind of runs free. I have a little beeper thing. Anyway, so it reminded me of a favorite story. Some of you might remember about these, in some of these national parks,

there have been kind of extra bears around. And so they've been doing these precautionary warnings to hikers and hunters and so on. And they advise people to wear these noise-producing devices, you know, and little bills on their clothing so that they can alert the bears, not startle them, just alert them. And they also advise carrying pepper spray, you know, in case of an encounter. And they say it's good to watch for fresh signs of bear activity, and people should recognize the difference between black bear and grizzly bear droppings. Listen to this.

black bear droppings are smaller and contain berries and possible squirrel fur. Grizzly bear droppings have little bills in them and smell like pepper spray. The best laid plans. So those are some signs of trance when we're worrying and planning and figuring out, when we're judging and blaming, when we're speeding around. And the bottom line is whenever we're engaged in that, way. Whenever we're in those busy doings, we're missing our appointment with life. That's not my line. I don't remember whose it is, but we're not here for what's happening.

So what do we miss out on? You know, if we're with our children but we're preparing for something else, we're not really taking in something they're trying to tell us or something new or discovery or just the gleam in their eye. It's like when we are busy, and these are all kind of the trance of busyness, our heart is not so available. Our empathy is not so activated. We're not here for our life. Einstein said, I never came upon any of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. It's just interesting. We have this idea that when we're thinking things out,

we're actually going to come up with something, you know. But the real creativity and the deep intelligence does not come from our kind of circling thoughts. It comes from a presence that really lets a more universal intelligence flow through us. So we get hooked. I had a young woman talking to me a few weeks ago and about navigating a new relationship. And she said, I've made so many mistakes in past relationships. It's very hard to trust my intuition. And so we talked a little more about past relationships. And what, you know, she kind of talked about was how as soon as things started getting real in a way,

how much her mind would get busy trying to figure out really how should she act and what's really going to make it work and trying to predict what was going on for the other person and sensing how quickly they should be moving together just a lot of activity and it's kind of like Houdini she was creating her prison and when we're in this trance and this is for her what it really was empathic connection really is not possible and we're not in touch with our intuitions. You know, to have our mirror neurons activated, we need to be embodied. And when we're not, we actually make mistakes.

We don't pick up what's going on around us when we're disconnected like that. One of my favorite examples or stories is of a Catholic priest, Baptist preacher and rabbi who are all chaplains at a major university in the North And they would get together a few times a week and talk about shop, you know, how their different faith traditions were doing. And one day they decided to do an experiment, kind of a little competitive between them. They'd all go out into the woods, find a bear. You can see I'm on a bear mode right now, preach to it an attempt to convert it.

Seven days later they all came together to discuss their experiences. So here's what we got. Father Flannery, who had his arm and 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, and when I found him, I began to read from the catechism. Well, that bear wanted nothing to do with me, began to slap me around. So I quickly grabbed my holy water, sprinkled him, and Holy Mary, Mother of God, he became gentle as a lamb. The bishop is coming out next week to give him first communion and confirmation. Okay, Reverend Billy Bob spoke next. He was in a wheelchair, had one arm and both legs in a cast,

and an IV drip. In his best fire and brimstone oratory, he claimed well, brothers, you know we don't sprinkle. I went out and I found me a bear. And then I went, read my bear, God's holy word, but that bear didn't want nothing to do with me. So I took hold of him and we began to wrestle. We wrestled

down one hill and up another and down until we came to a creek. So I quickly dumped him and baptized his hairy soul. And just like you said, he became generals a lamb. We spent the rest of the day, praising Jesus. Hallelujah. The priest and the Reverend both looked down at the rabbi.

He was lying in a hospital bed. He was in a body cast and traction 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 ideas of the world can be different than the way the world really is. And when we don't come back to this living presence, we do not have the intuition, the empathy, the intelligence and the heart that really carries us through our life. So that story was to help us sell you on staying here in the body.

So one thing to say that feels important is that dissociation, like really leaving, is actually built into our survival system. So this isn't making it wrong. It's just not the end of the story. And I said that because we all have a default network in our brain that is designed when we are not doing a purposeful activity to actually keep checking forward in time and back in time to keep us oriented just in case.

So if you sit here and meditate and you find you just for some reason keep leaving and going somewhere else, Well, you have the same programming as all the other primates. I don't know about other creatures, but primates around. So we're rigged in a way to have wandering minds. And we're rigged to move away from unpleasantness. So if our body is feeling scary or unfamiliar or out of control or intense or raw,

it's part of our conditioning to do what we can to get away from it. So we go into thoughts because that's a safer zone. We have natural opiates when pain is too much, and with trauma we dissociate. When it's too much, we leave. So it's not a bad thing or a wrong thing. It's just that when that becomes the habit, then we don't have a choice to really be in our bodies and we miss out. It's not the end of our evolutionary story to dissociate.

We tend to think things are too much too often. So that's amplified by the culture, depending on which one we're in. But in ours, we have a cultural narrative that it's important and good to dominate nature, to control the body. So the wilderness is considered a dangerous other. Do you know what I mean? Like there's danger out there and there's danger in here. It's intense, like the weather, it's uncontrollable in our bodies.

So we over-medicate. We anesthetized birth, we interfere with dying in ways that stop more consciousness as possible. We put a timetable on grieving. There's a slight embarrassment or not so slight around aging and sickness. Does that resonate? That we have this view of this natural process as being something to control and something that's not good. So we get removed from it in all our control.

controlling and we not only take refuge in our mind, we worship rationality and kind of put the mind on a pedestal like it can figure it all out. And it's especially distressing the toll on children. I think so often about the impact of our virtual world. I mean, we're all doing it. Children are doing it even more. I mean, how much, how many moments they're plugged into something that's just a screen rather than having hands in the earth and climbing a tree. That really, it's just not being part of this living, dying world. There's one story where father and his son are walking on a beach

and they see a dead seagull in the sand, and the little boy says, Daddy, what happened to him? And the father said, he died and went to heaven. And the boy thought for a moment and said, did God throw him back down? But you get the idea And it's not just, you know, with death.

I mean, there's another story of a little boy who's proudly announced in kindergarten that their cat had kittens, three females, three males. And when the teacher asked him how he knew that, he said, oh, my father turned him over, the labels on the bottom. So the reason it affects me so much is that our earth is in such trouble. And if our children are not in love with the earth,

Don't feel the earth as part of them. Then they won't have that consciousness to be stewards of the earth. We really can't even wait for the next generation, but that's just a place to think of. They're in a virtual world. Are they going to love this earth enough? So I'm talking about the different conditionings that have us dissociate from our body,

and the culture is a big one. And then probably the largest is to the degree that we've had emotional wounding, each one of us, and we've all had some, we leave. When we get wounded, we're usually very young. We do not have the strategies to work with that degree of pain, so we shut down. And the places we shut down, we close down in the belly area, which is actually where we have access to our sense of empowerment. But we close down there with trauma. We close down in the heart area, which gives access to feeling and emotions, and emotional intelligence.

So there's a closing down and a disconnecting with trauma to different degrees for different ones of us. When we pull away from the body, just to say we're not only pulling away from unpleasantness, we also pull away from pleasantness, we pull away from intensity. I know many people who, when they start meditating and they start relaxing and feeling pleasurable sensations get absolutely freaked out, frightened, freeze, and dissociate because there was some message that when they relaxed or when they were having a good time there was going to be a punishment. That happens. You know, they'd get excited, spontaneous

kind of joy and a parent would find that being too disturbing too much and, you know, kind of squash it. So we also have sometimes what's called the upper limit, you know, for pleasure, you know, where we can just take so much and then we shut down. So in summary, I'm going to just name the core principles of our relating to the wilderness, the inner wilderness. And one is that pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. And what I mean by that, that's a very common phrase now out in the Dharma circuits. And what I mean is that if we're in a body like the earth body, there's going to be inner weather system.

that are going to be uncomfortable and some are going to be really intense. That pain's inevitable. But we have the capacity to relate to this living body in a way that doesn't have suffering. That's the first one. And what it leads into is that pain times resistance is what equals suffering. To the degree that we resist what's happening, happening in our body, we suffer. And that's probably the most, that's kind of an equation that's just a useful way to hold it. But the basic teachings of the Buddha are that we want

it different. That if we're resisting how it is in this moment, we're going to suffer. And if we turn it around and say it the other way, pain times zero resistance equals zero suffering. If we open to however it is this living body, we discover a very powerful sense of presence and freedom. So let's look at this. First, just to notice, if you're resisting, if in some way there's stuff going on in you and you're exiting away, you're not being with it, what happens? What are the ways suffering shows up? Well, one way, that's really clear, and I can see this in myself when I'm kind of in some way trying to get away from what's going on, this running away, is tiredness. It takes energy to leave

the body. It takes energy to block off what we, you know, kind of push away and block off what we don't want to feel. So there's tiredness and there's a lack of energy because we're not accessing our body's aliveness. That's one. Another is the more we tense against what's going on inside us, the more physical unpleasantness there is. So there's a proliferation of physical disease when we leave the body. The third thing is when we leave the body, even though we're temporarily getting some distance, we come, we have chronic anxiety because there's a part of us that knows there's something we have not felt and open to. So if there's tiredness, if there's a lot of physical and pleasantness, if there's that sense of chronic

anxiety, it's a sign that we're trying to distance ourselves from the life that's here. The deepest part of the suffering is that in leaving, when we contract away from the moment, we get identified with the self that's defending and running away. There's a a sense of being small and not okay and there's a lack of wholeness. We become the controlling self and that's where we're kind of homeless. We're not resting at home in our aliveness. So this is this first part of the talk and the last is really how we wake up to our body is to say that every one of us has really strong conditioning to disconnect from our bodies. every one of us. And it's part of our existential predicament. We feel separate. We get anxious,

we get tight, we pull away from unpleasantness. We want to control what's going on. But in the evolutionary unfolding, we also have an intuition about wholeness. There's something in us, some wisdom in us that intuits that the only way to be free is by being with what's here. And I see, and I work with people that have really dissociated a whole lot, and there's still something in them that knows that that's the way. They don't want to, they don't know how, but it's still the way. Listen to this poem by Denise Levertov. She says, Lord, I stop to think about you in my mind at once,

like a minnow darts away, darts into the shadows, into gleams that fret unseasing over the rivers purling and passing. Not for one second will my self hold still, but wanders anywhere, everywhere it can turn. Not you, it is I am absent. You are the stream, the fish, the light, the pulsing shadow, you the unchanging presence in whom all moves and changes. How can I focus my flickering, perceive at the fountain's heart the sapphire I know is there. I think that's so beautiful, the sense of this mind. She says, well, my self

holds still, but no, it wanders anywhere, everywhere it can turn. How can I focus my flickering, perceive that the fountain's heart, the sapphire I know is there. So we intuit it. We intuit that we run away, that much of our activity, mental and physical and doings, is in some way moving away from that restlessness, uncomfortableness, that sense of groundlessness. We're trying to seek ground. It's very hard to rest in the changing flow. We want more certainty. And yet as one, there's a bone-shaped tag, you can put it on a cord and what it says is sit, stay, heal. We know that. So our practice. practice is really a training to decondition this running away, to wake up from the trance

and to enter the wilderness. And one of the metaphors that helps me the way I think about it is that we are the Earth and we keep leaving and orbiting in these little mental movies like little satellites. We just keep leaving, going to these little satellites where we're looking at a movie and seeing kind of a virtual reality and then we realize, oh, I'm in that little movie, kind of that satellite spinning around and then we say come back and we come back and re-inhabit our earthiness and the vividness and mystery of what's really here. And again and again in our practice, that is the process. We're going from that virtual reality, the stories that seem so real from those little

satellites are spinning around that we're in, back to this heerness, this aliveness. That's the practice that's usually I term it coming back and being here in that simple way. A good buddy, Wes Nisker, some of you might have heard of him, he writes this, he says, after years of meditation practice, one of the most significant changes in my life has been my relationship to my mind. We're still living together, of course, and we're remain friends, but my mind and I are no longer codependent. I'm slowly but surely gaining freedom. So we're going to practice just a little bit, this coming back to this embodied presence,

and there's an attitude in this that's really important. And here it is, that we've been leaving for a lifetime because it's difficult. And for some of us it's more difficult than others. If there's trauma in there, the wise practice is not to plunge in, to enter the wilderness. It's to very gradually feel our way in. And I'll be talking about that more in the next week when it's really, really difficult. So for now, if you know that there's a lot of trauma, go easily. The attitude is very simple.

This world of trance, these thoughts, they seem to be. real, they're real in that they're happening, but they're not the truth. When you're in that mental movie and that satellite, that's a virtual reality. Just the way if your kids playing a video game, that's not, it's real, it's a video game, but it's not the real world. So your thoughts are real but not true. That's one part of the attitude. The other is don't judge the fact that you keep on leaving Earth and hanging out in a satellite because every one of us has that conditioning. And the attitude that will help you to come to Earth more is one of gentleness and humor and curiosity, not to be punishing. If you're

punishing you're just in another kind of satellite, a kind of more difficult satellite to work with. Okay? You're believing another story that something's wrong. Does that make sense? The judging thoughts is just another satellite? Okay. So we, sometimes the metaphor, it's like you're in relationship with a puppy that you're training and, you know, the puppy will do all the sorts of stuff including pee in the corner. But you're, it's just the mind knows no shame, you know? It just does stuff. So we just keep noticing and coming back. Come back, come back. Okay, so let's just take a few moments to be in our bodies so that we can explore the rest of these practices together.

Right now, just sense what happens when you close your eyes, you sit still, and you bring your attention inward so that your awareness is inside your body. Just notice what it's like. You might gently lift your hands so it's suspended in front of you in the air and and just still with your eyes closed, feel your hand from the inside. And notice the experience, if you let go of any idea of hand, just the direct kinesthetic experience. Can you feel the pulsing, tingling, activity, energy?

Is there a way that you can feel where the hand ends? Is there any capsule that tells you this is hand and this is not hand? is not hand. You might let your awareness extend up your arm so you're feeling your arm and maybe the shoulder also so that as you gently relax your hand into your lap. Again, again feel your shoulders as we did earlier and just experience the shoulders as a constellation of sensation. Be really curious. What is, we use this word shoulder, what does it really feel like and let it be okay if there's some tension. and see if you can say yes and just feel it from the inside out, squeezing, tightness,

flow, tingling, heat, vibrating. You might feel your feet. Again, just feel them from the inside out. How much can you experience very directly if you dissolve the idea on the word foot, what What does this feel like? So you're inhabiting them. What's it like to inhabit your whole body all at once, simultaneously the whole body? Let your body this awake, vibrating, alive, fueled.

Be your home base. Just notice how the mind will get activated and you'll go off somewhere. But when you do, without any judgment, just be careful. be curious. Notice how it is to arrive again right here and notice the difference between any thought, one of those mental movies, a satellite that leaves the earth, and this living earth of your body, this alive, vibrant, changing field of energy. See if you can maintain this sense of awakeness in the body and open your eyes and just last few parts of this talk to share. It says you're listening but you're also right here awake that sometimes

what happens is we are in our body and some thought comes and it's got a lot of emotion to it. And then the question is do we get lost in it or can we notice? Notice the thought, but discover where the emotion lives in our body. So that's the next training. One training is, notice we've left and come back and this next is when there's a strong trance really discover what's going on in the body underneath the thought. Because if we don't, the thought will keep on reinventing itself. It'll just keep on coming.

One woman discovered the power of this, shared a story many years ago, she was keeping her mom company during the last phase of her life. And they'd been estranged for decades, but they made a truce kind of, and they weren't close, but the anger was gone. Her mother had been very controlling and judgmental and in her life in general. But after her diagnosis and she knew she was going to die, she really wanted to make amends. So her intention was with all the people around her,

be not such a judgey, edgy person. And one day a bunch of relatives came over, they had a visit. And after they left, she asked her daughter, was it better? And she said, you did really good mom? And her mother shook her head and said, no, I did well. Now, this had been a, she, her mother kind of drifted off into a, you know, she drifted off into kind of some sort of a sleep. But for this woman, it just like evoked this rage because ever since she was very, very young, her mother was correcting her. So she felt this huge anger and she felt it in her body and knew to just say, okay, be as much as you want to be and just let, it kind of exploded in her body enough so that she could feel underneath it a kind of despair or kind of a hurt in a despair, never good

enough, she'll never really love me. And then she let herself feel that in her body. Now that feels like a heart that's breaking, heavy. She stayed with it, stayed with it. And as she stayed with it really let herself feel the intensity, she felt this natural tenderness towards herself. It was like by really allowing an opening to what was in her body, she became that openness and she was able to really hold herself with a real kindness. And then she could look at her mother and she saw differently. She saw behind the judgmental critical person to a frightened person that she had been controlling because she was so scared and she was trying to make things right all the time. But she saw the frightenedness and underneath that this woman's

longing to connect. So it was at the end of her. her life that she was able to, in some way, she had been with her own body and felt her own tenderness towards herself extend that tenderness. And for her, the learning was really, really clear that when she erupted, if she went into the trance of I'm bad or she's bad, that was the prison. It would keep on proliferating like Houdini going at the lock. she could come into her body, she would contact the intelligence and compassion to have more space and freedom. This is the gift of our body. Our body has in it an intelligence. It's the presence in our body that has that intelligence and a love. So I'd like to end by saying that

it's time that we cultivated a different relationship with the wilderness. And I mean that as a society, that we know that the wilderness, this natural world is what we are. We are nature. And that our path is to get to know that nature in an intimate way. And the more we know it intimately and love it and respect it and listen to it, the more will respond to our lives from a place of wisdom. So I'd like to close with a prayer called a felt sense prayer. that I think you'll find really helpful. I'd like to invite you to let it be a meditation. You might close your eyes and just open up your heart mind and take it in.

I am the pain in your head, the knot in your stomach, the unspoken grief in your smile. I am your high blood sugar, your elevated blood pressure, your fear of challenge, your lack of trust. I am your hot flashes, your cold, hands and feet, your agitation and your fatigue. I am your symptoms, the causes of your concern, the signs of imbalance, your condition of dis-ease. You tend to disown me, suppress me, ignore me, inflate me, coddle me, condemn me. I come to garner your attention to enjoin your embrace

so I can reveal my secrets. I come to reveal my secrets. I have only your best interests at heart as I seek health and wholeness by simply announcing myself. You usually want me to go away immediately, to disappear, just link back into obscurity. You're mostly irritated or frightened and many times shocked by my arrival.

From this stance you medicate in order to eradicate me. Ignoring me, not exploring me, is your preferred response. More times than not, I am only the most recent notes of a long symphony, the most evident branches of roots that have been challenged for seasons. So I implore you. I am a messenger with good news, as disturbing as I can be at times. I'm wanting to guide you back to those tender places in yourself, the place where you can hold yourself with compassion and honesty.

If you look beyond my appearance, you may find that I am a voice from your soul, calling to you from places deep within that seek your conscious alignment. I may ask you to alter your diet, to get more sleep, exercise regularly, breathe more consciously. I might encourage you to see a vaster reality and worry less about the day-to-day fluctuations of life.

I may ask you to explore the bonds and the wounds of your relationships. I may remind you to be more generous and expansive or to attend to protecting your heart from insult. I might have you laugh more, spend more time in nature, eat when you are hungry and less when pained or bored. Spend time every day, if only for a few minutes, being still. Wherever I lead you, my hope is that you will realize that success will not be measured by my eradication,

but by the shift in the internal landscape from which I emerge. I am your friend, not your enemy. I have no desire to bring pain and suffering into your life. I am simply tugging at your sleeve too long immune to gentle nudges. I desire for you to allow me to speak to you in a way that enlivenes your higher instincts for self-care. My charge is to energize you, to listen to me with the sensitive ear and heart of a mother attending to her precious baby. baby. You are a being so vast, so complex with amazing capacities for self-regulation and healing. Let me be one of the harbingers that lead you to the mysterious core of your being,

where insight and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart. Namaste and thank you for your attention. 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.