Tara Brach - Part 1 - Freedom: Seeing Who is Looking Through the Mask

Episode Date: June 27, 2012

2012-6-27 - Part 1 - Freedom: Seeing Who is Looking Through the Mask - We suffer when we are identified with our egoic conditioning and unable to recognize the spirit - the love and awareness - that animates our own and all beings. In this talk we explore how recognizing our vulnerability and basic goodness helps us to see through the mask and realize who is here. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations make a difference!

On this early summer Eve, I'd like to share one of my favorite stories, one of the legends from King Arthur. And if you've been with me before, I think about a year and a half, I might have shared it. And if this is a familiar legend, then I'd like to invite you as you're listening to sense what characters you identify with. So in this story, King Arthur is out wandering and, you know, doing his hunting and going to through the deep forest and encounters an enemy. He encounters a shadow knight who has great powers and he casts a spill over King Arthur that renders him terrified and powerless. And he basically says, I'll give you your life and your freedom if you can return in seven days with the answer to a question. And the question is, what is it that all women most,

desire. That's the question. Okay. So you can start thinking about that if you haven't heard the answer already. So he agreed and he went around asking anyone he encountered. He asked the girl hurting geese and the al-wife. He asked great ladies and you know they said different things but none of their responses really rang true. So he the final morning he was very heavy heart. because he realized that he would have to submit and die. He didn't know the answer. So I'm going to read you one of my favorite versions of it.

I'll read you the rest of the story. He says it was he rode again into the woods and through the forest. And on this ride this time going back to meet the shadow night, he ran into a hideously ugly woman. and one that it says was uglyness was so great that the original texts go on for many a verse describing it. I won't. So she stopped him and said she had the right answer and can save his life if he agreed to her terms. And he asked her what they were and she said this, my name is Dame Ragnall and I want to marry one of your knights, Sirger Wayne.

Well, Arthur's heart dropped because he goes he couldn't just commit Surger Wayne to. to marrying what he considered to be this ugly old hag. And he said, I'll have to ask, you know, I can't just say so. But he went back to the court and immediately Sir Gawain said, of course I will. I do anything to be of help. So he said, even if she was a devil. So Arthur returns to where Dame Ragnel is waiting

and tells you that Gawain has agreed to marry her. And she gave him the answer. Okay? She gave them the answer. And on the appointed day, so Arthur goes back to meet the Shadow Knight and has a little fun with him, tells him all the wrong answers first. But then finally he goes, wait, I have one more answer. And he gives that answer, and the Shadow Night roars with frustration because he's right and he has to keep his word. And Arthur's won his freedom.

And how many of you know the answer? Do some of you remember? Some of you, a few of you, yeah. So the answer to the riddle was sovereignty, that beyond all things a woman desires sovereignty. So you can think about that a bit. And so Arthur had to keep his promise. So Sir Gawain and he and some of the knights rode out to the woods

to find Ragnell and Bruner to court. But upon sight, some of the night, knights were sickened and some even insulting but sir Gawain looked steadily at the lady something in her pathetic pride and the way she lifted her hideous head caused him to think of a deer with the hounds after it something in the depth of her bleared gaze reached him like a cry for help and he reprimanded the other nights right there before her he asked her for her hand in marriage and she offered him a way out but he was steadfast and she accepted saying you shall not regret this wedding so they married in the chapel

and all came forward to offer words of congratulations but they could barely speak as they were so horrified by sir Gawain's fate the ladies came up and touched her fingertips as briefly as might be but couldn't bear to look at her in the eye and kiss her cheeks and only cabal the dog came and licked her hand with a warm, wet tongue and looked up into her face with amber eyes that took no account of her hideous aspect, for the eyes of a hound see differently than the eyes of man. At last it was over, and the couple was led to their chamber. There Gawain sat in a deeply cushioned chair, gazed at the fire, reluctant to glance in the direction of his bride, until she said softly, Gawain, my lord and love, have you no word for me?

Can you not even bear to look my way? Gawain forced himself to turn his head, and he looked and then sprang up an amazement for there between the candle scones were the most beautiful woman he ever had seen. He stared, speechless and wondering, finally finding his tongue, asked her how this could be, and she said, I've been under an enchantment.

And because you've taken me for your wife, it's partly lifted, but only half, since for now a hard choice lies before you. And here's the choice. I can be fair by night and foul by day, or foul by night and fair by day, decide what you want? And what do you think he chose?

Think about it. So he ponders, and he ponders the events that led up to the moment, and then it doms on him what answer he must give. He said, whichever way it is, it is you who must endure the most suffering. And being a woman, I am thinking that you have more wisdom in such things than I.

Make the choice yourself, dear love, and whichever way you choose, I shall be content. She cried out in joy, my Lord, you are as wise as you are noble and true, for you have given me what every woman genuinely desires the answer to the riddle, sovereignty, over herself. You've broken the spell completely and I'm free of it to be my true self by night and day. This is the final bit for seven years Gawain and Ragnel knew a great happiness together

and during all that time Gawain was a gentler and kinder and more steadfast man than ever he had been before but after seven years she left no one knows where she went and something of Gawain went with her So that's the legend that's the myth

And then the inquiry really is, well, what is sovereignty? What is spiritual sovereignty? So we know spiritual sovereignty is not seeking of external power, right? It's even though it's fully empowering. It's not power over. So spiritual sovereignty, my understanding, is that it's freedom from any limiting sense of who we are. any identification with a small or narrow sense of self.

So there's a freedom from with sovereignty. We are free from some limiting story of who we are. But there's also a freedom too. We are freedom, free then to live from our heart. Live from our wholeness. Live from our creativity. Live from our love. so free from a limiting story or identification

and free to live from our Buddha nature that's spiritual sovereignty so one of the ways I like listening to it is with Joseph Campbell is he says that the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are really being who you are like inhabiting the fullness of who you are so then the inquiry is well what

makes it possible? What makes it possible to really awaken past those stories? And the way that I think is really helpful to understand it is that we have this capacity to see the truth. And sometimes it's been described as soul recognition that we can see through the trance, through the conditioning, through the ego covering, not make any of that wrong, but we can see through, we can see who's there. And of course, that means seeing who's here, that we can see past the trance and recognize our own soul. And by soul, you might say, what is soul? I think of soul is the way that spirit or consciousness expresses uniquely through this particular

body mind. We can see that spirit, that light, in ourselves and others. So we'll explore this week and next week, this process of recognizing who we really are, recognizing within our own being, recognizing in each other, and living from it. And there are three ways of training that I'd like to emphasize as we explore this soul recognition. and one of them is the training in presence that allows us to see, and these are all universal, see that every one of us is insecure. I mean, every one of us is living in a changing universe that's out of control. Every one of us is mortal.

Every one of us will lose what we really, really want to hold on to. We're insecure. So that's the first seeing that we look at each other and there's that vulnerability that's shared and that brings up the compassion that allows us to see through the conditioning. The second seeing is that we see the goodness that every one of us has this aliveness

and this love and this creativity and this basic goodness and we see that. And that allows us to see through the trance. And then the third, and next week is when I'll be emphasizing that, is there is what might be called beingness itself, that just as we, instead of getting fixated on the waves, we can sense the ocean, the pure beingness of who's here,

who's really looking out through those eyes, the consciousness itself. Okay? These are the three trainings that allow us to see past the mask, past our own and each others. And by the way, you cannot separate that training. You cannot just say, oh, I'm just learning to, you know, see my Buddha nature. It's impossible because if you're seeing your own Buddha nature, then you're going to be seeing from a place of wakefulness that absolutely has the lucidity and the tenderness to see who's there in others.

And if you begin to see who's there and others, absolutely opened you to yourself. So in a way, we're talking about the bodhisattva path. A bodhisattva is an awakened being who actually has this capacity to remember Buddha nature and to call it out.

And you can see a bit of that in Sir Gawain. You know, I love the way it was described, in this story that, you know, he sees her bed and he sees something in that, behind that patheticness that's calling to him. He sees that universal vulnerability. And then, of course, on the wedding night, he gets to see her beauty outer and enter her glow.

And then in that final fantastic choice he made, he sees that she's got the wisdom. It's in her. That Buddha nature. that consciousness itself. Let's explore first, which I think is really valuable. These are the three seeing of truth that we'll be going at. We first say, well, what prevents us from seeing that?

How can we go around and much of the time, that's not what we're noticing? How come we get fixated on the what's wrong, what's missing in ourselves and each other? Because we do, you know? And in the broadest sense, it helps to understand, and if this is the evolutionary perspective too, that we come into existence and there's this vulnerability.

And every organism finds a way to have a shell or some skin or some toughness to protect. You know, viruses use camouflage, just the way other animals use camouflage. We have to deceive. That's one of our really important strategies to survive. You can see it through nature. So we have these coverings

that are actually meant to cover over what we think might not be okay. There's a, you can come up and look at this later if you want. This is a cartoon, and it's called serial killer whale. It's got this, these whales being dragged out of his house by the police. He's in handcuffs, it's huge whale. You see the neighbors are gossiping,

and they're saying, yeah, he was quiet, kept himself, always paid his rent on time. Anyway, it's real cute. So what happens is very early on. We get that there are forces in this universe that are threatening to us and that in some way we need to cover over and that there's something about us that we need to protect and not show others some vulnerability,

maybe some neediness in some way. So we cover over. there's a story of a little boy who opens the big old family Bible he's fascinated he's looking through the pages he's turning them and out of one of the pages falls this dried leaf that had been kind of compressed in the in the Bible and he's so excited he goes mama look what I found and she says what do you have dear and he says look look and it's with an astonishment he says it's Adam's suit so it goes way back in our evolution

and in our mythology that we cover over And it goes together that when we start seeing through it, you know, seeing through our covers, we see through others too. You know, Mark Twain says that when I was 14, my father in particular was such a fool. He was embarrassing to have them around. I marveled that at age 21 how in seven years the old fellow had learned so much. So with mindfulness, we become more transparent, okay?

The covering, when we're mindful, the covering does not create as much illusion. When we're not mindful, whatever our defenses are, whatever our way of moving through and protecting, we get identified with it. So our personal story, our narrative, becomes really narrow. Okay, we get identified with our covering, with our ego covering, with that conditioning. And when we become mindful, we start seeing it as conditioning. And that seeing is the beginning of waking up from the trance. It's no longer so much my ego as just ego conditioning.

And that's a world of difference. And if you can really get the difference between my aversion or my nastiness or my jealousy or whatever it is, my aggression, with, Okay, this is the conditioning of aggression. This is how the organism responds when it feels threatened. It sounds heady, but it's not. It removes that sense of, this is me. Okay, we're not as identified with the mask.

So what do we see? And I'm just going to give some of the more common presentations of how we go into trance that we can start being mindful of. And as you listen, you might reflect, well, when I'm with another person, how do I go into trance? And by that I mean, how do I just start believing in the mask, seeing my own mask, believing in the other person's mask? What happens so that I stop seeing who's there? Okay, so our main ways of going into trance. One of them is when we're really wanting.

And you can sense when you're with somebody, what happens when you really want to, their attention or you really want their approval. You really want something from them. And you might have in your mind somebody that you're really wanting something from. You want their money, their time, their approval, their attention. Wanting. You can sense this for yourself. What is your experience of who you are? Can you sense the tightening, the unpleasantness of needing or wanting, the kind of leaning forward? When you're wanting, how much do you see of the other person, who they really are? What's maybe difficult for that person right now, where they're feeling vulnerable,

what brings them alive? How much do you see? When we want a really clear look at this, we can kind of consider romantic love or infatuation. I think that's the best example. When we're in, in fact, the delusion that comes then, how much do we see then? Who are we then? Who's the other then? I think that's when it gets most interesting. There's a saying that when you're in love,

it's the most glorious two and a half days of your life. So this is biochemical cocktail. It's like cocaine, and it definitely has a twist on things. This is Irving Yallum, who wrote the book Love's Executioner. I do not like to work with patients who are in love. perhaps it's because of envy I too crave enchantment perhaps it's because love and psychotherapy

are fundamentally incompatible strong language the good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection I hate to be love's executioner now just to say this again is just to distinguish between the kind of

infatuated romantic love that he's talking about and a deeper love that's really selfless and open and all pervasive and then there's many gradations in between but when we think of it for any of us that have ever been infatuated and I won't ask for a hand raise here you know what it's like you look back on and then who was that crazy person anyway you know it's hard to believe and a little embarrassing because we take it personally. So the wanting mind that twerks it. And then there's aversion. When we are really thick in judgment or hate or anger, who are we then? What's our sense of who we are then? Maybe there's somewhere right now that you're caught in feeling really judgmental towards somebody. It's helpful to bring these things to mind while we're reflecting

together. Somewhere where you know you're really stuck in some sort of dislike our judgment. And when you're in that, and these are trances, what's your sense of who you are? Do you like yourself? Are you living from your fullness? We know it's very narrowing, very tight. And what do we see of the other person? We can't see the other person's heart or fears or vulnerability in any way that really has empathy. Why? When we are caught in strong wanting and strong fear, our limbic system is active. It's almost the reptilian and mammalian parts of us are really full throttle ahead. But the parts of our frontal cortex that have to do with empathy and compassion and seeing clearly, not

so activated. So this is in a way another description of trance. We're cut off from our wholeness when we're caught in wanting something from somebody, really wanting their attention, when we're caught in fearing. One woman just talked to me recently, her daughter's a senior in high school around here, and she's now beginning to get the reality that she's the last of four, that it's the reality of the emptiness. And it's living with a lot of regret because she feels like for the last couple of years, she's been very caught in being the critical mom

and seeing everything about messy rooms and undone homework and not doing your share and inconsiderate and now downright rude, but it's become the habit of the filter is what's wrong. And she realizes how much her heart got small and she actually lost sight of who her daughter was. She wasn't paying attention to the rest of her daughter. There's something called object-fixated awareness where we get really narrow and really fixated

and we lose that receptivity to truly take in another and when we're narrowed, we're not taking in who we are either. And for this woman, it's not too late. And she feels that. and she felt that when she was talking to me but we're not always aware of how much we're carrying judgment towards somebody we're not always aware of whether we're living in something of

you know she doesn't really care she doesn't really listen or he doesn't hold up his end or whatever and then we're also not aware of how much we stereotype how quickly we put somebody into cluster them with a group of people that have certain characteristics and we stop seeing who's there. We do it with socioeconomic differences and we do it politically and racially,

sex orientation, religion. We do it very, very quickly. We do it just with physical appearance. I mean, I remember being in college and I wasn't aware of how much, and I was kind of, you know, hippie, you know, appearance and so on. And I wasn't aware at that time of how much I immediately categorized any guy with really short hair.

I mean, I mean, it's like it was instant. It was, you know, it was kind of a, it was really a big deal when I think back, that I really made all these assumptions based on short hair. And some of them have carried over, so my poor husband is afraid to cut his hair, you know? That's not totally true. So, and then I left, you know, being in college and being hippie to join an ashram, and then I wore this white garb with a turban and went around, and then everybody categorized me.

You know, we got called towelheads and cone heads and so on. It really is very, very intense. It was great learning to be on the other side, and wherever I went, I was different. And often that difference meant. that I knew people were making assumptions about my weirdness that were probably partly true, but they were doing it. So it's a trance. It's a trance when we move through the world and we categorize.

One woman described how she did it with, she said, walking down 7th Avenue in Manhattan, realized for the last 15 minutes, I have compared every other woman's body size to my own to see who's heavier and who's lighter. did I say 15 minutes? I meant 15 years. So we have these filters

and they're quite painful because they don't, we can't see through the mask our own or another's. One of the biggest ways that we go into this trance is when we're trying to control another person. In any moment

that we're trying to make somebody different, in any moment we're trying to control what they think of us or how they behave, in those moments we don't have the presence to see what's true in the moments of whether it's really

gross manipulation are just subtly presenting ourselves in a certain way to make an impression we don't see I mean some of you might remember the story of guys driving down the backwoods of Montana

he seems a sign saying talking dog for sale and so he rings the bell and the owner appears and says the dog's in the backyard. So the guy goes into the backyard. He sees a nice looking lab retriever sitting back there. And he says to the lab, you talk? Yep, the lab replies.

After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says, well, so what's your story? Lab looks up and says, well, I discovered I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA. And no time at all, they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years running,

but the jetting around really tired me out. I knew I wasn't getting any younger, so I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, you know, wandering near suspicious characters, listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings. I was awarded a batch of medals. Got married, had a mess of puppies. He's, no, I'm just retired.

Guy's amazed. Goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog. $10, says the guy. What? $10? That dog's amazing. Why are you selling him so cheap? Because he's a liar.

He never did any of that shit. So again, the common denominator of, and the reason we're talking about this is, very natural response to our world of how our ego is designed, to prove ourselves, to get approval, to want things from other people, to get infatuated, to judge. There's nothing wrong with them. It's just that if we're not mindful of that ego activity, we become identified with it. We become the needy one who wants somebody's attention. Or we become the angry one who's kind of nasty. So, the

The inquiry is how do we learn in the midst of this natural ego activity, not to judge it, and then become the judge of the ego, because that's just another identity, right? But how do we see through? So I'd like to share a story with you that's utterly out of season, but is to me a story that taught me a whole lot. and I heard it on Christmas Eve when I for many years went to church. I grew up Unitarian. This was at a Unitarian church. It was told by a Unitarian minister.

So a woman, she didn't tell the story, but the woman's also in the store as a Unitarian minister. It was traveling with her husband and two children on Christmas Day, and they were going on this long, grueling trip, and they stopped at an empty diner, nearly empty diner. and as they're waiting for their meal her one-year-old begins waving from his high chair and calling, hi there, hi there to somebody that's sitting on the other end of the restaurant

and to his mother's dismay, it turns out to be this wreck of a guy with tattered clothing and dirty clothes, he's unkempt, he's unwashed, he's obviously a homeless drunk. But he's waving back to her boy and calling, Hi there, baby boy. Hi there, big boy. I see you a buster. So they're getting this thing going, this kid and this guy. And she and her husband exchange looks. A few other patrons in their restaurant were raising eyebrows, shooting glances at each other. So nobody's amused by what's going on.

They eat their meal and the disturbance continued. Now the old guy was shouting across the room, do you know Patty Cake? Atta boy, look at that. You know peekaboo? And hey, look, he knows peekaboo and that kind of thing. So the woman and her husband were cringing with embarrassment. Even their six-year-old says, Why is that old guy talking so loud? So she tried turning the one-year-old's chair around, but he screamed and twisted to face his new buddies. So that didn't work.

And not even wanting to finish their meal. Her husband got up to pay the bill and took the older son to the car. The woman lifted her baby in her arms and prayed to herself that she could pass by the old drunk without further commotion, get to the door. clearly God had other plans though as she writes it she approached him and her young son reaches out to his new friend with both arms and that kind of child's pick-me-up signal

and she could see in the man's eyes saying please would you let me hold your baby so there wasn't time for an answer the boy propelled himself into the old man's arms and for a few long moments there was a communion an old man and a young boy in a love relationship. She could see the tears beneath the man's lashes as her son laid his head on his shoulder.

And he gently rocked and cradled the boy, and then he looked straight into her eyes. You take care of this baby, he said firmly. And when he reluctantly handed the baby back was as if he were tearing away his own heart. His final words to her were, God bless you, ma'am, you've given me, my Christmas gift.

So she mumbled something and returned and rushed out to the car, her own tears flowing freely, and her only thought was, my God, my God, forgive me. So after the minister finished telling the story, there were just no dry eyes in the room. I mean, everybody was with it. And I know for myself,

what it set off in me was this kind of, kind of reflection of how many moments of my life have I dismissed somebody, you know, just made assumptions and dismissed, like not seeing the humanity, like her not seeing that this being had this love and this tenderness in him, not seeing his vulnerability. We get very two-dimensional. For me that it set off a reflection that is an ongoing one because like everybody it's I find it's just very easy to get in especially when stressed just see the mask and not really look not take the time not look so if we then sense to ourselves okay well how do we

deepen our attention I think the inquiry that's really helpful in any moment is how in this moment am I creating separation? How in this moment? Because if we ask that, we can just honestly sense in ourselves that way that we're getting identified with our ego. So how do we then begin to really look? And I'll share an example of how we can use this mindfulness, this attentiveness in action. And the example is a woman, this was several years ago. She was calling me for phone sessions, New York, and she said, you know, that her parents had dementia, and she called me because she had just had a crisis where they changed their

will. And they got, it wasn't vindictive towards her. They were just confused, but they changed their will in a way that, really left her very, very threatened financially. And when she heard it, when they talked about it or she saw it, she called them up and she flew into a rage. And she said, I was bewitched. I mean, I was in a rage. I used words like stupid, don't give a shit. And she just was, she went absolutely nuts. And, you know, and we talked. It's like how many of us have lost it and felt, you know, afterwards that, that sense of remorse or astonishment.

at how whacked we can get. You know, when we lose temper with our children or get suspicious of our partner or jealous of someone, you know, we can go crazy. So for this woman, then her next step of trance, first she's completely, you know, in this rage reaction,

and then she turned it on herself. You know, it's like, I'm bad, I'm evil. You know, how could I do these, you know, her parents are in dementia? How could she do that? So bad self. So she was both the victim and the aggressor. Okay, again, we're looking at the identification with the mask.

She was caught in both of them. And when she's in that, she couldn't see her parents as anything but the enemy as, you know, some sort of, you know, stupid and weak and, you know, messed up people in some way. So you might be thinking, well, that might be thinking, well, that might be. might sound like a trance, but in fact, she was greatly threatened by what happened, and she also acted in ways that were aggressive and hurtful. So I'd like to remind at this point us

Sokney Rimbushe has a very powerful set of words, which is real but not true. That it's real that her parents were in dementia, and it's real that they would do things that could cause her heartache and insecurity. And it's real that her ego felt incredibly threatened and went into rage, so that's all real. But the trance is out of the interpretations we make.

I'm bad, you're bad, this is me, this is you. Does that make sense? It's real. The feelings are real, even the beliefs we're having are real beliefs, but they're not true, the content. the interpretations aren't true. And we go into trance when we believe it, when we take it personally.

So for her, this is all about how do we see past the mask, all the conditioning, she was very committed to deepening her attention to asking that question, you know, how am I creating separation from myself? How am I creating separation from my parents? And so she asked herself,

what am I believing? And what she was believing is they don't care. That was one of her beliefs. You know, even though she knew they were confused in a dementia, her belief in her body, you know, how she felt, they don't care. And her other belief was, I'm bad. I'm just a bad person, nasty person. So her process was to sense those beliefs.

You know, I'm not, the belief I'm not worth caring about, I'm bad. And then feeling how she was carrying them. and then starting to feel this grief about living in this narrowed world. I'm bad, your bad kind of world. And that grief, that presence with the pain of it and the grief started softening the trance. As soon as we touch into sorrow, a kind of a soul sadness, we're beginning to enlarge.

There's moisture. There's softening. There's opening. And for her, she was able to sense, oh this is really painful start having compassion for herself so there's a shifting in identity here from being identifies as the victim and aggressor to the space of compassion that cares that's the shift and from that shift so she was just as with the lowly lady is what they call the damragnell just as sir gawain could see that that real behind the bleary eyes that that

pain. She started seeing that in herself and she could see it in her parents. Their confusion, their disorientation. Shifted to compassion. So that's the first seeing, seeing the vulnerability. And then from that space, she could again remember, I love them. That's seeing the goodness. As soon as you remember you love someone, you're reconnecting with your goodness. And then she could look at them at who she was loving and see their dearness. And then in that space it opened up, in that sensing the goodness and the dearness, there was a stochality of being, of being present, of their being, of her being. And again, this is what I mean by soul recognition.

There's a kind of attention that begins to see through the mask to the vulnerability, to the goodness, and to the beingness. For this woman, that seeing enabled her to then talk in a way, that over the next month she could straighten things out. She was coming from a place of intelligence and sanity and balance so she could communicate. But what was important to her was seeing the possibility of seeing past the mask.

Because when you learn to pause and sense, okay, there's a trance going on here, what's really happening? How am I creating separation? How am I identified? You begin to have the possibility of connecting in a way with others that is filled with love and filled with creativity and filled with spontaneity because you're not relating from ego to ego.

So we'll practice a little as a way to close, but I just want to say that the word soul recognition, if they don't resonate for you, there are many other ways of languaging this. but what we're really talking about is seeing who we are. As the Bantu tribesmen put it, you know, when they put, there's this description of putting children to sleep in a hut

and going to each one and saying, be who you are, be who you are, be who you are. But this is the possibility that we can pause and deepen our attention, and see who we are and live from that and invite that in others.

One of my first mentors in psychotherapy had a, his practice was he, with each client, he would just sit and be with them and his first and deepest intention was to see the divine.

He was more from Christian orientation to see the same. To see the same. sacred shining through. And he said, and it didn't make him less savvy about the patterning. In fact, he was able to see the patterning with a lot of clarity and work with people with their patterning. But what made the healing possible? He was holding it in the space of seeing who they were, calling that forward, mirroring that. What a gift we can give each other. When we look and we see that.

So let's practice just for a few minutes and then we'll close for the evening. If you want to have this reflection be an alive one, you might just feel your intention right now to see past whatever trance is here, see who you are, truly. See past the mask of ego. to move through the world

with this capacity of soul recognition just to feel your intention you might begin by bringing to mind somebody you care about it could be somebody you know well or maybe somebody you care about from more of a distance it's okay but since that person here is if you could just really

call them into presence right here see if you could look into that person's eyes To sense in this person that universal vulnerability or insecurity that we all share, how this being like yourself has fears of failure, fears of loss, feel doubt or mistrust about his or her okayness. So just sense that vulnerability. And the second way of seeing is to sense that being's goodness.

what he or she looks like when she's feeling love and expressing love, the eyes, what here she's like when really relaxed, when happy. You can sense the goodness, the aliveness, the sense behind any particular quality, just that sentience, that the same being missed that's looking out through your eyes, looks out through that person's eyes, that shared. beingness. It's like the Bantu tribesmen. You might just sense that prayer, be who you are. May you live from that wholeness. Imagine being with that person and really letting them know their goodness, calling it out. You might bring to mind somebody you encounter regularly, but go into

kind of a judgmental trance. This will be a little more challenging. You really get caught in judgment. This is an opportunity to see if you can see past the mask a little. sense that person's vulnerability, what that person might be afraid of, how that person might feel hurt, insecure, confused. So you can sense that what it is your judging is in some way trying to, their way of trying to protect themselves. See, you can look past the mask to the goodness. This person wants to love and be loved, wants to be happy, that heart wants to be free. and in the deepest way sense that who's looking out through those eyes, that consciousness is none other than your own.

It's the same beingness that lives through you. And again, that prayer, be who you are. May you know and trust and live from your wholeness. In your attention to yourself, sensing what it's like when you are in that judgmental trance. When you're caught in trance in any way, grim at work or irritable with children or caught in an addiction or having to be right, controlling, whatever it is, can you see past that mask, that identity? Can you sense your own vulnerability?

You might feel it right now, just feel your heart, your throat or belly, and just sense there's some often the sense of some apprehension about what might go wrong, what's wrong with me what's around the corner just to sense the human vulnerability inside you and to sense the goodness to sense your sincere yearning to wake up

to spiritually wake up to love without holding back to live from your wisdom from your heart so that's part of soul recognition to sense that goodness in you in the most basic way sense the being that's here. Just this innate wakefulness, awareness, be who you are. You might sense your own prayer. May I live from the truth and wholeness and love and awareness that's here. With the words

of Huffease as translated by Daniel Ladenski. One day the sun admitted, I am just a shadow. I wish I could show you the infinite incandescence that had cast my brilliant image. I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being. So, blessings, 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 are 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.