Tara Brach - Part 1: Hope and the Spiritual Path

Episode Date: June 29, 2013

2013-06-26 - Part 1: Hope and the Spiritual Path - This talk looks at the difference between egoic hopes and fears, and the quality of hopefulness ("holy hope") that is an essential demension in spiritual experience.  We reflect on the three components of hope that serve awakening: Aspiration, Trust and Dedication of energy.

Okay, so first off, I just want to say how happy I am to be here and see all of you. I had a great time away, and I was really, really looking forward to being here. And I know that there was a terrific lineup of teachers. I hope that many of you got to enjoy it. I have immense gratitude towards Gina and La and Hugh, dear friends and fabulous teachers for being here. So I hope you enjoyed that part of things. So tonight's talk is a talk I've never given before, and it's something I've been reflecting on a lot over the last few years.

And it's really the role of hope on the spiritual path. You know, what is the role of hope of trusting these unfolding lives, trusting ourselves, this world? And I find that hope is something we're not necessarily monitoring for. oh, I'm feeling this amount of hope right now. It's kind of an invisible quality in our awareness, but it impacts how we take in the world. It impacts all parts of our life. It really determines whether we're open to the possibilities

that are actually always right here. And it determines how engaged we get in our lives and how wholehearted we are and whether we're aligning ourselves with what most matters. So we'll explore this a bit, and since I've never talked about it before, it may be a little bit meandering, and I may end up saying, well, more next week.

We'll see. I'd like to start with one of my favorite stories, which is about this arrogant young samurai who bursts in the door of an old monk and bellows monk, tell me the difference between heaven and hell. So the monks sit stalled for a bit And he's kind of reflecting And his response is

You call yourself a samurai warrior? He smirks Why look at you You're nothing but a mere sliver of a man You'll never amount to more Well, the samurai You know yelling what? He reaches for a sword And the monk says

Uh-oh I can see you reaching for the sword I doubt you could even cut off the head of a fly with that The samurai is so infuriated That he pulls a sword out and he lifts it above the old monk's head about to strike, and the old monk looks into those seething eyes and says gently, that is hell.

At this, realizing the monk had risked his life to teach this lesson, realizing the possibility of compassion in this universe that the monk was exhibiting, he puts his sword down and he falls to his knees with gratitude. The monk says softly, that is heaven. So hell, when we're in hell, and it's a trance as we know, we're believing in our own badness or wrongness or somebody else's badness or wrongness, are that life basically is not unfolding as it should. That's the view of trance, that there's no possibility,

there's no innate intelligence or goodness to what's happening. We're caught in that trance of something's wrong. What I like about this story is that the wake up happens so clearly from the moment he realizes connection. In a moment that we are in a trance and somehow we realize connection, either the love of another person or we reconnect to some aliveness in our own body, or a sense of kind of a presence that realizes what's happening. In that moment, we come out of trance and this,

whole world of possibility opens up. Then it becomes possible to live in a way that has gratitude or to serve or to savor. We wake up. So I like this kind of contrast of the view of hell being this small trance where there's no possibility and there's no trust in the universe basically. There's no trust in the universe. And we know that when there's no hope or no possibility, it feels like an eternity. If anybody's been depressed here and I know a huge percentage of us have, we know the hellishness of that, that there's no sense of something better is possible. One of the, somebody sent me this a while ago about a guy that goes to hell and Satan

greets him and shows him three doors and says, you have to spend eternity in one of these rooms. And one of the rooms has a whole group of people and they're standing on their heads on a wood floor, hardwood floor. That doesn't look good. Fraternity, you know? The next room opened the door and they're standing on their head,

but it's cement this time. The next room, they're actually standing around and they're all drinking coffee. They're up to their knees and shit, but they're drinking coffee. And he goes, you know what? Better than the other rooms. So he decides, he's kind of feeling good about himself.

He chooses that room. And 10 minutes later, Satan says, okay, coffee break is over, back on your heads. So, you know, Woody Allen, he goes, life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering. And it's over all so short, it's too short, it's too short. You know, it's like wall-to-wall badness. So it makes me think when I start reflecting on suffering and freedom,

on the suffering of really having no hope, no vision, no sense of possibility, of Einstein's famous question. Some of you will remember this. And he said, this is something that is the most important question for all of us to consider, which is, is this world a friendly place? Do we have a sense that there's some basic benevolence, not that we look away from the insanity and the cruelty and the horror, but there's some basic intelligence and benevolence to this unfolding creation. Is it a friendly place? And I pose that or I bring in him posing

that because how we respond to that, this is our view of whether there's some basic goodness, will determine in a very direct way our sense of hopefulness. If it's, it's, not a benevolent place, if there's a fundamental danger that we're at risk, will always be contracted and not open to possibility, not sensing the creativeness and the flow and the dynamic unfolding that's going on. If we say it's neutral, which many people do, which is kind of a, you know, okay, well, it's not good, it's not good. If we have a neutrality position, as Einstein puts it, it's like God's playing

dice, we're kind of a victim of whatever way it goes. And then if it's friendly, what happens? So that's just, I'm just putting it out there again. This is to have you begin to reflect and I'd be curious if you just close your eyes for a moment. And of course we're going to explore a lot more of what we mean by hopefulness. But just at this point, as you reflect on, yourself, your own way of experiencing life, beyond the immediate ups and downs that happen. Just sense, do I consider myself basically hopeful? Just sense that for yourself. Keeping your eyes close, I'm going to ask for a voluntary hand raise only if you're in the mood. That means I'm the only one that gets to know, which is if there's low level of hope, medium, and high.

I'm going to name each one of them and just raise your hand on where you sense you are. How many of you feel you're kind of on the low end of hope? Thank you. And honor yourself for just being in presence with that. How many a medium level of hope? Thank you. How many feel like you're very hopeful, high end of hope? Thank you.

Just so you know, I would say it was about 20% low, 40, 40 for medium and high, just for your interest. But take a moment just to be present with your own experience on this and just sense whatever openness there is to exploring further how you might learn about and open to hope when you'd like to open your eyes. Okay, thank you. So, again, I'm talking about this because, in a sense, I want to say that hope matters.

And on the more, you know, societal level, there's been an increasing amount of research about hope. It's considered a soft science, and yet it's getting more and more honored or recognized as being a really key facet in people's experience of happiness. And one of the more recent books, a book called Making Hope Happen by Shane Lopez, who comes from the positive psychology tradition, describes some of the research that's gone on that says, you know, on emotional level, to the degree we have hope, it buffers us from stress, from anxiety, from the effects of difficult events. that in studies of workers over time, those that are hopeful,

experience more well-being, people that feel hopeful, you know, this is a study of a million people in a Gallup poll, say they laugh and smile more than people that aren't. Just stuff that we might already say, yeah. The opposite is, hopelessness is the main predictor of suicide

along with isolation, that we can't live without hope. On a physical basis, most of you are familiar with all the placebo research, which is really about hope, which basically says that those who hope that they're going to heal, that have a sense it's possible. And when I say hope, possibility, not that they're fixed on, yes, it'll have to happen, but possibility, heal.

Those that think there's possibility have a better shot at healing. And hope, like all mind states, affects our neurochemistry. So what that means is that endorphins get released in the brain means less pain. It means that our immune system can get strengthened and Shane Lopez-Rides affects respiration, circulation, motor function. So we also know the other side. When somebody loses hope, there's no will to live and the life force dwindles. On the behavioral level, again, Lopez shows studies that hope promotes healthy behavior.

So if you have hope in life, you're more inclined to, here goes, the specifics, eat fruit and vegetables, exercise regularly, practice safe sex, quit smoking. Again, you get the general idea that when there's hope, we engage in activities that move us towards our goals. if we sense the possibility that we can learn or become wise, we study or we listen. If we sense the possibility of intimacy, we learn how to be more present with each other. We take the chance to be vulnerable. If we sense the possibility of spiritual awakening, of realizing more who we really are, we are willing to spend the time stepping out of stories and really being with our moment-to-moment experience.

In other words, we will engage and apply ourselves if we sense possibility. So the opposite of that is that when we are hopeless and the Buddha described doubt as the big freeze to spiritual practice, when we have doubt that anything good can happen, all that's available to us behavior wise is fight, flight, and freeze. That's it. So it matters. Hope matters on this human plane and the way we operate it matters. And yet, if you listen to different spiritual teachers and read the writings,

you'll hear a lot of warnings about hope. How many of you are familiar with that strata, that you hear warnings about hoping. Don't hope too much for things. Can I just see by hands? I'm curious how many have encountered that. So I want to bring that into the conversation. because one of my favorite quotes is T.S. Eliot who says, I told my heart to be still and wait without hope.

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing. So there's that sense, oh, so what are we really hoping for? And then in Buddhism, a lot there is a warning about hope. This is Pema Chodran. Hope and fear come from the feeling that we lack something. They come from a sense of poverty. We can't simply relax with ourselves. We hold on to hope and hope robs us of the present moment.

So how do we bring this together? What I'd like to propose is that we distinguish between what we might call egoic hope or the shadow side of hope, a small hope that's coming out of the ego's wants and fears, and distinguish that from what Hamida Lee calls holy hope. and there's a sense of a hope that really expresses a certain kind of wisdom or realization about how it all is that allows us to trust and engage in a very beautiful way and that we distinguish between these and the markers of the shadow side of egoic hope are the classical grasping fear and delusion and I'll just very briefly go over it

you can start tracking in your own life when you're living from maybe small self-esel hope versus when there's kind of a happy for no reason and a trust and an engagement and a sense of hopefulness that is not hooked to specific outcomes. Okay. So grasping when we say, you know, what is the shadow side of hope, it's when we're, there's a fear that something's wrong or a need or have to have something be a certain way. and we can sense it, you know, I'm really hoping for that job promotion, and underneath that there's a grasping. I'm really hoping my child gets into that school or this person approves of me,

and it's always bound with the fear it's not going to happen. The sign of egoic hope is that there's a fear that it's not going to happen. We're hoping for the wrong thing. Often it comes straight from fear, our heart. there's a story of that atheist who's out in a boat fishing and the lock nest monster appears all of a sudden flips the boat and opens its mouth as if he's going to swallow the man in the boat so the guy cries out god help me you know that kind of thing and at once the scene freezes okay and the atheist is hanging in mid-air and the voice comes booming through the clouds

I thought you didn't believe in me you know give me a break I didn't believe in the lock nest monster either, you know. So there's that kind of grasping that comes when we're afraid in any moment. Then grasping fear, and then there's delusion which is magical hope or the kind of fantasizing that we all can get caught in where we're just daydreaming, coming up with a new idea on how to, you know, make a fortune or whatever it is and not really recognizing limitation or reality. because true hope isn't something that says, oh, I hope I can never die. You know, it's not that kind of thing.

There's this thing called management learning, and one of their lessons goes like this. A crow is sitting on a tree doing nothing all day. A small rabbit saw the crow and asked him, ooh, can I sit like you and do nothing all day? The crow answered, sure, why not? So the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow and rested. All of a sudden a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit, and ate it.

Management learning. To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up. So we have to watch what we're hoping for. You might just take a moment. Let's pause here and see if you can anchor this in your life. And because my sense is that for each of us, we have an intuitive sense of ego hope versus a more spiritual kind of hope, you might sense where ego hope is going on in your life.

You might sense if there's somewhere you're fixated on having something happen a certain way, that a project you're doing works out a certain way, or you get a job, or that somebody in your life behaves a certain way, and to the degree that there's real stickiness. You might sense where is there real stickiness? Where is there something you really want to happen a certain way that if it doesn't, it would really pull the rug? Where is your sense of okayness dependent on something going a certain way?

And if you land on something, just sense what happens in your body when your hope is fixated on things going a certain way, what happens in your mind, and most important, because it's entirely natural, every one of us has an ego that's been constructed to hold on to things, forgive it for being here, but know you want to learn, you want to be awake. Forgive the ego hope, just regard it with mindfulness,

and then begin to wonder, So how does ego hope unfold itself into a more enlightened version? Now, whenever you'd like, you can open your eyes. So we all have signs in our life when we're caught in ego-a-cope. When I do that exercise and I'm fixated on wanting, and I got to kind of scan my own life using this filter a lot over the last few weeks because I was, I had, the week started where there was a lot of demands. I was teaching kind of back to back to back to back on the West Coast

and I had a shuffle a lot of, you know, papers around. I had a lot of different people I was meeting with. And in the moments when I wanted things to go a certain way, I watched how I went into all my stories. I was very conceptual. I left my body. You know, it's like that is me on egoic hope. And in the moments when there was a more natural sense of hopefulness,

you know, it's really, everything unfolds the way it's going to unfold and it's really okay. I wasn't in my stories. I was actually feeling alive in my body and it became very distinctive to me, kind of like a signal system of, you know, oh, controlling, mental, And my stories, okay, fixated hope. You know, I could see the difference. When we're in the hopefulness that has a sense of possibility, we are walking on what's called the Bodhisattva path.

The Bodhisattva path is the path of an awakening being that's living to wake up through all circumstances. and aspiration is right at the heart of it. So what I want to do is offer a kind of a definition for more enlightened or spiritual hope. And the language that I use for myself on this is that it's the aspiration and the trust that life, that includes us, life, unfolds to manifest its highest potential. that our hope, what it's aiming at and our trust, what it's aiming at, is manifesting what's already here. We're not hoping for something different.

Whatever we're hoping for is already part of us. We're hoping to manifest our potential. And it's not just our potential as individuals. It's we're hoping that the earth, our larger body, can manifest its potential for full health and resilience and resourcefulness. Manifesting what's already here. So, again, the difference is not with hope is not that we get what the ego wants,

but that we manifest our potential for loving, for creating, for wisdom, for full presence. I was reading Vaklav Havel's description of hope. He describes it as an attribute we carry in us always when it's this more spiritual hope. He says it's a state of being that's not dependent on any particular outcome. So it's a dimension of soul. And again, I mentioned Hamid Ali, I think, earlier.

He describes hope as holy hope, that it's actually one of the expression of awakened heart-mind. So for the rest of this talk, I'm going to describe the three components that make up this holy hope, this hope that's really liberating hope. And the three components I'm going to cover are aspiration, that we have this longing to manifest, trust that we sense the possibility of manifesting, and dedication that we actually invest our energy into the manifesting. Okay? Aspiration, trust, and dedication. And so this gives us a kind of a context and then this week and in following weeks we can start

exploring how do we nourish those each of those but I'll go over kind of first I'll go over them each one and aspiration for aspiration to be real aspiration for our longing to be real longing it can't be conceptual it can't be an idea that I want spiritual freedom or an idea that I want intimacy, it has to be a felt embodied longing. And it has to be a longing for something that actually can be experienced right here and now. There's never in the future. It's always a taste of it's always here now. So, just as a flower longs to blossom or an acorn has this urge to unfold itself into an oak,

aspiration is again about manifesting what's possible and that's the Bodhisattvas aspiration that we all have the seeds of Buddha nature every one of us here has those seeds of consciousness of love of aliveness that if we nourish can become fully radiant

enlightened heart-mind so aspiration is felt it's a felt sense of longing, longing to belong to our fullness. And it's also got a vision to it. There's a clarity of seeing. You can actually imagine, image in that manifesting because it's already, like the oaks already in the acorn.

So there's some template inside us so we can have a vision of what's possible. And we need to have a vision. A vision isn't like we're taking ourselves out of the present moment. it's embedded in the present moment and we're making it conscious. Does that make sense? I know this is some of this sounds a little abstract but you can actually practice with it and it works. So the Hebrew prophets warn that without vision, people perish. We need this core element of hope, this aspiration. Some of you might have read an article that came out in June's New Yorker and it was really interesting. It was about

Japan and the suicide rate in Japan. Can I just see by hands how many of you read that? Just look around. It's always interesting to me there. Thank you. The gist of it is Japan is experiencing three times a suicide rate of this country. Like once every, I think it's 15 minutes, somebody kills themselves, and there's these favorite places that people go to,

and there's a lot that supports it in the culture, that as opposed to the creed in the West that it's a kind of violation of our life. There's some pride and some glory to it. So this article talks about a young monk who has dedicated himself to working with people who are suicidal because they're so deep the depression and the suicidal tendencies in the culture.

And I'm going to talk a little bit more about what he's doing a little bit later, but one thing he does is he has these workshops, or people come together. And one of the exercises in the workshop is something some of you might remember doing with me or elsewhere, where he'll ask these questions and people will sit with a piece of paper in front of them, and the questions are, if you had three months to live, what would you do? What would you want to do? And if you had one month to live, I'm going to consider that, what would you want to do? And if you had a week to live, what would you want to do?

And if you had just 10 minutes to live, what would be important to you? Okay? I think he frames that if you got diagnosed with cancer and this is what you knew you had, but you could do in those ways. And then there's this inquiry of like, okay, if you had a week to live or 10 minutes to live, what would you want to do? And what would it be like? What is it you're really wanting?

So in the article they described one man who was weeping after those questions were posed. In fact a lot of people were. Remember, these are people that were suicidal and his paper was blank and he had only thought about killing himself. He had not, for as long as he could remember, considered what he would want to do, what really, really mattered. In other words, he hadn't reflected on that aspiration. What does your heart long for?

So just recognizing that, that insight was freeing from, and it turns out he went back to work and he went back to his life. And again, suicidal depression means usually a pulling away in a very big way from life, including the largest wage, which are the shut-ins, where the people that just completely withdrawn to their house don't go outside, don't do anything. total contraction from the life flow. He reentered.

Just with that inquiry, what would you want to do? Now, you might not be suicidal, but often we don't remember in an embodied way what we care about. I mean, when you think about today, how much of today was there some sense, okay, here's what really matters to me. And how much of today were your thoughts, your actions, your attention aligned with what really mattered?

Not to judge, but just a sense. Last year, a friend of mine was upset and anxious, and it was just because she had spent a long time with this research project and she wanted to get it published in a top journal and she was feeling like the chances were rather slim after all this work she'd put in. And so her hope was fixated hope, right? That's egoic hope.

Fine. So we worked with it a little, and I asked her, and this is going to show us a little bit of how you can move from egoic hope to something larger. Okay. So I asked her, what is so important or meaningful about getting your work published in this journal? And she says, well, it'll help validate the whole protocol for trauma.

It'll make it available to a lot more people. And I say, yeah, that's a really good thing. And what's really important about that? It says, well, it means that more people will be healed. And I said, so what's going on is that you really, your aspiration is healing. You want to serve healing. And she said, yeah. And I said, so what does it feel like to just to feel that you care about that?

That that's what you long for. you really want to serve healing, people getting out of that trance where they're disconnected and isolated and so on. And she could feel a shift in her body and an opening. And I said, so if you stay with that and then sense this process of getting your journal, you know, get the journal reviewing your article and so on, can you sense any difference in how you're holding that? And as you can imagine, of course she did. In Shane Lopez's book on Hope, he, he talks about how people that are really hopeful and have these aspirations and so on, there's a lot of different pathways to going for what they want. And if one doesn't work, there's flexibility,

they're held lightly. This is non-grasping because there's some basic hope or trust on how things work out. And that comes when we stay right with the very essence of what we care about. If we care about healing and one route doesn't work, you know, we still care about healing and there's still energy and there's incredible possibility in a creative way on how we can take another step. Okay. So number one, the first piece that we're talking about tonight about Holy Hope is to connect energetically with the essence of our aspiration.

And we're going to practice this. We're going to close with a brief practice on this. The second, trust. Okay, so what is trust? Well, for her, the trust came when she reconnected with the caring and realized that the essence of what she was longing for was kind of embedded in that, that if she felt that caring, that was part of the healing. There is a phrase you can only get there from here.

And this is a phrase that Jane Lopez likes and used from another person, and it's very much in the Buddhist tradition. tradition, that the starting place, we start right where we are. And the trust comes with the sense that whatever we're wanting, just start right here. The way to what we want is in the hereness and what's right here in our bodies, aliveness, what's right here in our hearts, what's right here in our awareness. So again, there's a sense that everything that's happening right here is part of the path and conserve it if we're open to possibility, if we trust that.

Great example from our culture. Is a reporter asks a bank president who's very well known in the business world, what's the secret of your success? And the response is two words. Okay, what are they? Right decisions. Well, how do you make the right decisions? One word.

Yes, sir. So what is that? Experience. Sir, how do you get experience? Two words. And what is that, sir? Wrong decisions. But you get it, right? It's like if there's trust, if we trust what's right here, it becomes a portal to whatever we're wanting to. If we belong to the moment, it'll take us to what we long for. So the metaphor again is the oak and the acorn that

the acorn has this urge to become an oak, and its oakenness is already there. If we tap into our oakeness, we tap into what we want to manifest, that helps it to manifest. Thoreau says this, though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. convinced me that you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect wonders. So what builds trust for us?

How do we start trusting the seed is here? In the story of the samurai, the trust got perked because he had a direct experience of loving presence, right? That was what the monk showed. Any time we touch heaven, we touch the aliveness of the present moment, moment, we touch a, we have a gesture of kindness and feel just a little softening and opening.

Anytime we feel another's kindness, anytime we sense that kind of presence that realizes, oh, I'm aware right now, there's an awareness that's bigger than the fixation of the moment. We're touching heaven. There's a little more trust that builds up. This is why we meditate so that we can quiet the thoughts and begin to touch. that aliveness, that flow of love and awareness that gives us trust, that the entry's right here. We get there, whatever we think we're longing for, by coming right here.

Okay, so that is the second piece. We have this longing, the aspiration, and then we have the trust that you start right here, the seeds right here. Third piece, dedicating our energy. and this is key because hope's not passive hope is not some sense of

oh I hope that someday such and such hope is this engaged process and so trusting that it's already here and the seeds right here enables us to actually get active and we begin to sense well what are the pathways

in my big question to myself and I think many of us have this where we keep posing a question to ourselves is You know, what will serve awakening in this moment? So the longing is for awakening, the trust is that it can only happen right here, and then the inquiry, the active inquiry, what will serve this moment? And for me, the energy that I dedicate is usually comes by pausing.

and in a very active and receptive way feeling just what's going on right here. Now let's say you decide that your longing is for more love in your life. Then the question is, well, what will serve that? And you may decide to, you know, I tell a story about a woman who had cancer and only a a short time to live and her mantra was there's no time to rush. So maybe that will be your your way of dedicating to create more space and time with the people you care about. For you it might be that what you, your aspiration is to heal the larger body of this earth. You know, we have this idea that the earth is something else. Well, this aspiration to manifest what we are means

manifesting, letting the larger body of this earth find some healing. So then we ask that question, what this moment will help at? And what are the pathways that can grow out of that, where we can be part of making a difference? Einstein, as I start in the beginning, said that this question is, is this universe a friendly place? if we have some sense of this hopefulness

that there's some goodness in what's unfolding if we have some aspiration to help that manifest if we trust that it begins right here and if we can just give ourselves to it I want to read you the rest of this quote he says he asks the question is the universe a friendly place and then he says for if we decide that the universe

is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries, and our natural resources to destroy all that which is unfriendly. If we decide the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God essentially is playing dice through the universe, then we are simply victims to the random toss of dice and our lives have no real meaning or purpose. But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries, our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives.

God does not play dice to the universe. So we begin in this third part, this dedication to ask what will serve, what we long for. And often it's going to be presence. It's going to be paying deeper attention. It's going to be connecting with other people. It's going to be taking a chance. A story for you back to the New Yorker article of how this unfolded,

these three elements unfolded of hope for one young man. I mentioned that some of those who he worked with or suicidal were shut-ins. Well, he, for about seven years, this monk, his name is Nomoto. he had a website and it was designed so people who were feeling suicidal

could communicate with other people because one of the big findings that we all intuitively know is that once we get into relationship we're reentering a flow in some way and we begin to activate hope. So he had people in contact with each other

and he made himself utterly available so available that he was overwhelmed with phone calls and emails and he responded to everybody that reached out to him, and he'd have some calls that would come, people would kind of like be inarticulate and fumbling and circling around, then they'd call him back. And he felt like people were spinning, but in some way the contact gave them a lifeline. But after seven years, Nomodu became really sick, like really, really sick. Ended up in a hospital.

He started letting people know he couldn't keep up with the emails and the phone calls, which really upset people because they, They kind of said, well, we're sick too, we need you, which really shocked him. But when he found his way to healing, he found he needed to be taking better care of himself, he knew he still wanted to completely engage with people who had lost hope because he found such an amazing, creative venture to sense how people could go from hopeless to sensing possibility. But he knew I had to do it differently. So here's what he did. He basically said if you want to work with me, fine, but you have to come to my temple. And his temple was

really pretty remote. So people had to really make this pilgrimage to his temple, but he basically figured that if they didn't care enough to make the pilgrimage, they weren't going to be helped, really. Okay? So, story of one man, suicidal and a lock-in. He heard about Nomodo and about his glow, his wisdom. So just hearing about him, being in that field of hearing about him, awakened some sense of yearning, some aspiration, well maybe I can, aspiration means you have some hope. Maybe I can reenter life. So he wanted to work with him. He wanted to have him guide him. So he decided to walk all the way and it took five hours. Now remember he was a shut-in which means he hadn't been outside, he hadn't been experienced weather, he hadn't moved his body for a long time.

Okay, so he starts this walk and, you know, he knows in some way he wants to climb out of the depth of, he's like dead inside. So there he is in the sun and he's walking and he's sweating and he's feeling his body move and he's trying to sense, well, what am I going to say? I haven't talked to anybody for a really long time, but he's taking another step and sweating and moving. and with every mile he realized he was feeling lighter and freer. And when he arrived he told this monk that he had already achieved understanding and he no longer needed his help and he turned around and he walked home. So what happened there?

I mean to me this is like, I had tears when I read this story because there's something in what's possible for all of us. And I think I'll probably next week be exploring what happens when we really feel hopeless and how come some of us have more hope than others and how do we pull out in a more, you know, specific way. But there's something in this story that he recognized what he wanted and how did he recognize it? Well, somebody else had it a bit. It's contagious.

Hope is contagious. If you can put yourself in a field where other people are hopeful, have a sense of possibility, we're in a field together, we affect each other, it'll start to wake up. So just being in some way in the field with Nomodo and hearing about him woke up that yearning. And then he, so he had that and he had some sense that, okay, there's a possibility, it's here. And then he put his energy out, he dedicated himself, he moved, he took a step. You have to take a step to activate the hope. You have to take a step.

And he sensed the answer, how? His body came alive. You don't find hope by thinking about it. You don't find hope by fantasizing. You don't find hope by controlling things. You find hope by sensing, okay, it's right here in this moment, this step, feeling for him the flow of aliveness of his body. We have to re-enter the flow because hope is in the flow

of life and in the flow of presence. This is Barbara Kingsolver. She says, here's what I've decided. The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do

is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it. Elementary kind. What I want is so simple, I almost can't say it. Elementary kindness.

So let's just practice a little, let's tune in a bit. So when we explore hope, the basic understanding is when our hope comes from the egos, wants, and fears, it actually cuts us off from the very source of true hope. it does cut us off from the presence that gives rise to a true sense of what's possible. So we begin with the simplicity of reflecting on what matters to us. And you might bring in the same way as that exercise that Namoto did in his workshop, you might just imagine if you had a month to live.

Okay, so what would you do? What would really matter to you? What if you had a week? How would you live your week? What would be the quality of heart-mind that you'd want? Quality of relating? What would matter to you in that week? You have a few hours.

What matters and how would it feel if what mattered was really, what you mattered, what mattered to you really was right there. You're touching it. touching it. Can you sense how the seas of what matters are right here? King Selver says the most you can do is live inside that hope, not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof. What happens if you live inside it? Just feel it from the inside out, the love or the awakeness or the connection or whatever it is that most matters. Just become it, be it. And with the sense of, okay, so we're all going to die and you still

sense that aspiration, but sense your life right here and now, tonight, tomorrow, and feel the dedication, that sincerity towards whatever will serve what matters to you most, what will serve it? How will what matters to you come alive or manifest tonight when you leave this room perhaps? Tomorrow how will it manifest? What's possible? What's your vision? And just sense who you are when you're really feeling the sincerity of your aspiration,

that trust that it's here to unfold. Who are you? What's your sense of your own beingness right now? What's your sense of possibility and how you express that beingness? Possibility with other people, possibility with the earth, with movement, with work, with life. Good, let this sound be a reminder right here, right now. Namaste and blessings, 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.