Tara Brach - Part 1 - Presence and Aliveness

Episode Date: January 20, 2010

2010-01-20 - Part 1 - Presence and Aliveness - These two talks explore how we leave our bodies, the challenge of working with pain, the pathway home to embodied awareness, and the gifts of presence and aliveness.

Tonight I'd like to begin with a very brief inner reflection. So if you, after you've been sitting, meditating, just again let your attention go inward. Notice how this is a pause that actually invites you to be alert and attentive. And in these few moments, imagine that you are an enlightened being, a Buddha, Jesus. Anyone who represents an enlightened being may be an awakened person like the Dalai Lama, but imagine that's you. And just imagine the awareness that's here in that enlightened beingness. So sensing the awareness of enlightened being,

that openness, awake, free, how that awareness experiences the world that's here around you, inside. Take some moments from the space of awareness to sense what it's like to experience your body. Awareness of enlightened being, what is it like to experience this bodily being? Just check that out. You are the Buddha experiencing the body. Okay, enough for right now. Come on back. So if we were in one of the workshops I sometimes do, I'd be asking, well, so, what happened, what was that like? And what I find,

the first thing is that people are often surprised that it's possible to sense that you're a Buddha or an enlightened being, at least for a little bit. You know, obviously as soon as we get in our car driving somewhere, you know, we can recontract and so on. But it's possible to sense awareness. And what most is surprising is the experience, is the experience of the body

from the perspective of awareness that rather than this kind of solid object or something that were in some way pushing away or wanting different, there is an enormous sense of aliveness. How many of you noticed aliveness as you kind of rested in awareness on? I see, just raise your hands a little higher

so I can get a sense of it. So the reverse is true also. When you meditate and bring mindfulness to your body, it awakens the awareness of a Buddha. It awakens presence. It goes both ways.

Rest in awareness, you'll feel aliveness. Pay attention to aliveness. It opens you into awareness. Which is what I'd like to be talking about this week and next week. A little different angles, but I'm going to be talking about

presence and aliveness. and how they are interrelated and inextricable, really. And the Buddha basically taught that we cannot experience the fruits of the spiritual path. Can't really experience compassion, full love, can't experience joy, can't experience equanimity, can't experience wisdom, unless we can bring mindfulness, this on-purpose, not controlling, not judgmental attention right here to this body.

He called it the first foundation of mindfulness. So this is the gateway. The language I like is really that we're learning to come home to the temple of the senses. We're learning to live in this aliveness that's here. John O'Donohue puts it this way. He says, our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. Our bodies know that they belong. Our bodies know that they belong.

It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. It's that trance of thinking that take us from home. And again, this is not a diatribe on thinking bad, non-thinking good. It's not this black-white thing. It's being lost in thoughts to the extent that we are, living inside thoughts to the extent that we are, is what makes us homeless. We lose track of the aliveness of the body.

We lose track of the heart. We lose perspective on really the nature of things because we can't see the nature of things when we've got a lot of static in our mind. So the pathway of homecoming, and this is what we really explore in the Dharma, again and again, is learning, getting the knack of waking up

out of the trance of thinking. and it's not the kind of thing where we're at war with thoughts where we're judging ourselves for thoughts it's just having this love of presence that makes it so that we want to train ourselves to not be lost we want to have the choice to be here

okay so any talk about embodied awareness this choosing to be here by nature is going to mean talking about how inclined we are to be disembodied. I mean that we have to take a look at that because that's what gets us like okay I need to make more attention to this. That's what motivates us. And the Buddha classically all of the Buddha's teachings takes the form of the noble truth where he says the

beginning is be aware of suffering, be aware that there's disconnection, that there's separation, that we're not really at home. And then the next invitation is to look at how come. look at how we're pushing away things and grasping on and then he says freedom's possible it's possible to come home to this aliveness to this heart what we explore then is how do our minds

make us homeless and I always like this this is George Carlin he says do you ever get that strange feeling of Vuzha day not deja vu Vosja Day he says it's a distinct sense

that somehow something just happened that has never happened before nothing seems familiar and then suddenly the feeling's gone Vujaday and isn't that perfect because if you're in your mind it always associates to something familiar

and there's never that wonder thinking doesn't go hand in hand with wonder you can have an experience of wonder and then add some thoughts about it. But the direct mystery, that's what he's talking about. Rousa Day.

So we can start watching our lives and sense how, what's happening when there is that sense of mystery and wonder and what's going on when we're in something small. We can sense that. I had a experience

that was rather telling a few, days ago I was walking in the early morning on the river with Jonathan, my husband, and all of a sudden we were both struck because we saw in the water these white swans. And I had remembered from last year that there were something like the Arctic something or whatever. Well, we started trying to name them and finally we got tundra, it was a tunderswan and they come through for just a few weeks in the winter. And we were thrilled, but we were also really upset because he didn't have his telescopic lens with him. He only had his regular calendar.

So we're going back and forth between looking at these beautiful swans and thinking, should we go home? If we got back, are they still going to be here? I didn't even have my binoculars. You get the point here. They're incredibly beautiful. They're lovely.

They're kind of extra exciting because they just pop in for a few weeks. And there we were torn between savoring the moment and trying to get something to and memorialize the moment. So I went home. I plucked out my book of Mary Oliver poems and I thought I'd share this one. This is snow geese. It's a little different, but the same idea. Oh, to love what is lovely and will not last. What a task to ask of anything or anyone. Yet it is ours. And not by the

century or the year, but by the hours. One fall day I heard above me and above the sting of the wind, a sound I did not know, and my look shot upward. It was a flock of snow geese, winging it faster than the ones we usually see, and being the color of snow catching the sun, so they were in part at least golden. I held my breath, as we do sometimes, to stop time when something wonderful has touched us. The geese flew on. I've never seen them again. maybe I will someday somewhere maybe I won't it doesn't matter what matters is that I saw them I saw them as through the veil secretly joyfully clearly I think one of the expressions of despair that comes my way sometimes when I'm talking with students

or meeting with people is a sense of racing through our lives, it's kind of like skimming the surface, trying to get to the end line, which is death, but racing our lives, but not arriving. A sense that we're kind of, I've been using the metaphor, pedaling this bicycle away from presence, but we're not really arriving here. We're on our way somewhere else. And it's as if we know where we're going, our minds are leaning forward. Again, John O'Donohue puts it, this. this way. He says, we rush through our days in such stress and intensity as if we were here to stay in the serious project of the world depended on us. So we have this project of this self

that's on his or her way somewhere. And it's not so common. It's kind of rare that we have that sense that this is it. I'm not living for something. coming up, this is what matters. Like that moment Mary Oliver had with the snow geese of seeing through the veil with that joy and that clarity that this is it. And of course if we have a notion that we're supposed to only have this is it moments when we're seeing a flock of snow geese, then we're really in trouble, right? It's this. It's right this moment. And truly I mean it this one. And if something in you didn't go, oh, we might. We may be, we mean like this, right, this, this moment of the class,

not when we get to the climax of a talk or to the end of the evening or to spring vacation, but this, then we're going to spend our lives on our way and not touch into this awareness of the Buddha that senses this aliveness and really has that wonder. So if you reflect right in this moment, and let me ask you again to check in and ask yourself to pause.

Just invite yourself to pause and sensing the possibility of this is it. It's right here. To inquire and sense is there anything between me and being at home in this aliveness of the body, right? This moment. Just sense that.

Is there anything between me and being at home in this moment this aliveness right here. Really letting this life happen, this changing dance of sensation. Is there anything between me and being at home in this aliveness? And be honest, you might notice that what's in the way is that it feels physically uncomfortable, that there may be some physical pain,

or maybe there's some emotional restlessness, or anxiety or distractedness. So you can check this out some more in a bit, but you can open your eyes now. It's an important question because we aren't here so much. Some of you might remember the James Joyce line that Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body, you know that one, which is so good because we move through the day and it's just a short distance. And the house, and the habit is not to be at ease in our bodies. It's not a familiar thing. We're not comfortable. We're not at rest. And we know that we spring away from our bodies and go into thoughts into a kind of virtual reality. And even in spiritual life, it's a lot of it's figuring out what's

happening or figuring out what we should be doing or figuring out if the meditation is right. some of you that have been he'll remember one of my favorite Zen stories is of a a new monk approaching a kind of an abbot and he's saying what is it that happens after we die and the abbot said you know the senior monk says you know I don't know and he goes but I thought you were a monk you know a senior monk and the response was I am but I'm not a dead one you know and and what I like about that is it's so

it's so a part of the path that we have these questions about how it is that are conceptual and the only place that wisdom happens the only place we can see reality is right here it's happening here so we leave and it's very much in our culture one teacher describes interviewing children about and asking them about the importance of the body and the response being well to carry around the brain you know that kind of a thing

and children start off of course much more concrete and everything's fascinated with belonging to and playing with the earth and then we train them into this symbolic world in ways that are partly necessary but also the cultures

really separates from the body I read in one story about a classroom the first day of school a kindergarten teacher says if anyone has to go to the bathroom hold up two fingers. And there's a little voice from the back. How will that help?

It's dangerous instructions. So our children do more than ever grow up in a virtual reality, video games and TV and computer and texting. And it's very, this leaving the bodies very reinforced by the culture. I mean, in spiritual, religious communities, there's a mistrust of the body. There's, especially in the, where there's a real imprint of the kind of shadow masculine of controlling the body and not getting seduced by pleasure. You see this in the modastic communities.

And of course we know in this culture there's a mistrust of the body with pain, that pain is wrong, it's bad, it's to be controlled. And again, it's totally wise and compassionate to use medication when appropriate. And we so overdo it. so afraid of pain. We think that aging and death are kind of an embarrassment or an insult in some way. And then we anesthetized births and we way over interfere with dying. So it's a split. We get split from our bodies in this culture and it gets very much amplified with emotional wounding. if you really consider that the pain of our emotions lives in our body. When that emotional pain feels like too much,

especially when we're traumatized early, we have to leave. We have no other way to handle it. Emotional trauma makes us leave our body. The more emotional wounding there's been, the more we've left our body. It's pretty directly correlated. And so we push away the immediate experience of the pain in our body

because we're designed to try to anesthetize that much pain. And the point, again, is not that we should avoid what comforts. It's not even that we should stick with something that's overwhelming. Again, I think of George Carlin. He says, my motto is, no pain, no pain. Which I think is really, he also wrote this. He said, show you how detergents take out bloodstains. I think if you've got a t-shirt with blood

stains all over it, maybe your laundry isn't your biggest problem. So the reason I'm spending time on this part, because it's, the truth is our life gets very organized around avoiding unease and unpleasantness. It really does. And it becomes important to recognize our flinch responses, our intolerance to physical discomfort or to a difficult emotional weather, because the habit is so quickly, without even being conscious of it, to leave our body and go into what I sometimes think of as the mental control tower, where we try to work things and maneuver things to feel better. We don't stay. And one of the best phrases I know is in terms of describing meditation is learning to stay. Not in a way that's uncompassionate, not when it's too

much, but gradually getting the knack of noticing we've left, noticing we're often thoughts, and reconnecting with this aliveness. So you might just take a moment again to pause, because even as we're listening, we don't have to leave our bodies. You know, it's possible to one of my friends describes it this way to listen to a Dharma talk and have 95% of your attention still right here with your senses. To feel your breathing and feel your body

and trust that whatever is useful to remember cognitively you'll remember. So we get the knack of pausing and in some way relaxing a little and as we relax in the

body you can start feeling the aliveness again. So see if you can continue to check in on your own. Notice if you've left. There's two core principles that are related to each other that really guide us in recognizing why we want to be here in this body. And one is the, it's become a kind of classic Dharma phrase, which is that pain or unpleasantness is inevitable, but suffering is optional. And it's important to know that, that we're in these bodies on planet Earth. There's inevitably going to be unpleasantness. But we don't have to suffer. And the way the suffering happens, and this is the second principle, it's kind of neatly wrapped in an equation, which is pain

times resistance equals suffering to the extent that there's unpleasantness and you push it away you go off into a virtual reality you tense against it that's suffering and the opposite is

when there's unpleasantness and there's no resistance I mean really no resistance there's no suffering there's just unpleasantness the suffering is when there's resistance, your identity contracts and your sense of who you are becomes a self at war with what's happening. That's the suffering. When there's no resistance, there's a sense of awareness.

You're the Buddha again. And life is just happening. There's pleasantness and unpleasantness, but there's room. And that space makes all the difference. The way that it helps to understand is look what happens when there is resistance. What happens when we wall off experience? What happens when we wall off experience when we push it away some. Well, the first thing that happens, when you're moving through the day and in some way there's some emotional or physical pain that you're trying to push away, it takes energy to push away unpleasantness. We get tired. So many people I know with fairly chronic fatigue are working hard to get away from something. Does that make sense that it? It takes energy to push away unpleasantness.

Yeah? Okay. That's one thing that we can find. This is how it starts creating suffering. Another is it kind of like you know with birthing that the idea when the contractions come is to not contract against the contractions. It's the training.

When we contract against unpleasantness, because the body, when it's trying to get away from it, contracts, it actually creates more unpleasantness. it creates more dis-ease and there's all sorts of physical illnesses, somatic-based illnesses because we're pushing away against unpleasantness. The third is when in some way you're trying to not be with what's there. Even if you numb out and disconnect, some part of our awareness knows that there's something we're running from

and we are caught in a kind of constant apprehension. There's an undercurrent of anxiety. There's no way to really relax if we're trying to get away from unpleasantness. Does that make sense? This undercurrent of anxiety? And then the last, which is perhaps the deepest and most painful, is if we're contracting against unpleasantness and disconnecting, we can't be present. We can't have that this is it moment,

where we actually are in love, are creative, are connected, are able to see the nature of reality. We can't be here. We're tensing and pushing away. So the inquiry that comes a lot is when there is physical and pleasantness, well, why bother trying to stay? And again, if it's a machismo kind of effort, like I'm going to muscle my way into staying with pain.

That just adds another karma, which is we're in some way fighting our way to staying, which is another kind of tension. So rather the intent comes from a very pure place in us, this intention to be in our body, which is something in us knows that if we leave our body, we can't live this life so fully. We can't realize the fullness of what we are.

That's why we choose to come back. I worked with a woman a few years ago and she had rheumatite arthritis. She had been a dancer, very talented dancer, very athletic, and by the time we were meeting very limited movement. A lot of emotional pain swirled around the physical pain. pain, the emotional pain of in some way feeling she had done something wrong in her life

and this was God punishing her. That's kind of a sense of punishment and an anger at kind of shaking her fist at the heavens for what was happening and a lot of fear about how it was going to keep getting worse. And so her pain exhausted her and her fighting against her pain exhausted her. but the worst was that she felt that she had contracted into being into this identity of a sick, oppressed person. That her sense of her, you know, who she was in the world, that was the identity she was living in. And so this is how her mind was making her homeless. She was fighting against what was going on in her body and disconnecting from others, disconnecting from herself. So that phrase really, when she and I explored it together, that her mind was making her homeless was really part of the wake-up for her.

So she began to bear witness to her attitude. And I speak of attitude a lot because there's what's happening. Okay, unpleasant, sad, scary. And then there's our attitude, which says, oh, this is bad, something's wrong with me. I should be different. she started looking at her attitude with the intention of letting go of the judgments letting go of a lot of the thoughts about what was happening and that was her practice

was can I notice the thoughts and the attitudes swirling around this and contact just what's happening in the moment in this body and the way we work together she would breathe and she would begin to hold her body, the soreness and the aching joints and so on with kind attention.

And she holds her fears and her grief with kind attention. And she used the image. This is a classical image in the loving kindness practice of a mother holding a child. She used that image of a mother kind of cradling a crying child, just a sense that her kind attention was being with the pain in her body and the pain in her heart. And she did this a lot until she found that

that image and that intention not to get lost and the ideas about what else was going to happen, that presence started to create a space. Again, space, this awake space

that we can relax, open into, makes life manageable. It makes it workable. And for, for her, being able to kind of rest in a space of awareness, actually allowed what was going on to move through and to some of the tightness against the pain started dissolving.

Then she would do is rest in that space and then hold in her heart other people that were also in pain. So at some point we reflected together on what Annie Morrill Lindberg discovered during the birth of her child, And I want to read this to you because this has always touched me deeply. This is her lesson from childbirth. She says, go with the pain, let it take you, open your palms in your body to the pain.

It comes in waves like a tide, and you must be open as a vessel lying on the beach, letting it fill you up, and then retreating, leaving you empty and clear. With a deep breath, it has to be as deep as the pain. One reaches a kind of inner freedom from pain, as though the pain were not yours but your bodies. The spirit lays the body on the altar. You just read a part of it again. With a deep breath, it has to be as deep as the pain.

One reaches a kind of inner freedom from pain, as though the pain were not yours but your bodies. The spirit lays the body on the altar. Now I'm spending some time with unpleasantness because one of the main reasons we split off from our body is the fear of unpleasantness. And in the moment of splitting off, we get identified as a self at war with unpleasantness.

And for this woman with the rheumatite arthritis, As I think Anne Morrill Lindberg says so beautifully, the shift was in a shift of identity that rather than my pain and something to fight, by breathing and opening in that way, it became the body's pain, the earth's pain. And who are we, if it's the earth's pain or the body's pain? This is the same thing with fear or grief.

Who are we? we rest in something larger. We're no longer identified. We've come home to the space of awareness of heart that has room. So this is the alchemy of transformation that the Buddha talked about. And the gateway of the body is such a direct and powerful way. If you can begin to sense the possibility of pausing and really learning to stay

and open to the life that's right here, there's a coming home to wholeness. Now, I want to again say, I think I've said it three times, that sometimes it's too much to stay. And there's nothing noble about strong-arming ourselves to kind of steal ourselves to endure.

It just is not wise. So there's a kind of compassion that knows, okay, be with what's here, and sometimes it feels like too much like we're really thrown off balance by it and then we take a break. Now there's wise breaks and unwise breaks.

Okay, you know, an unwise break might be medicating or using drugs in a way that's not so wholesome or overconsuming something else or we know our unwise breaks. A wise break is just very mindfully saying too much right now and walking or having tea or taking the ibuprofen if we need them, are, you know, in some way being with ourselves in a way

that gives us some relief. Getting busy is okay as a break sometimes. We just do it too much. But the deep teaching is eventually we need to make peace with what is. Pleasantness in our body, the unpleasantness, and the changing quality. Because if we're not making peace with it, If we're leaving, then we're homeless again.

Our bodies know they belong to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. So the first step that we talked about tonight is recognizing the attitude, the thoughts that are keeping us trapped, that are keeping us separate, letting go some, coming into the body. And John O'Donohue talks about it coming into the wildness of the body. because that's what's happening.

When you're really in here in this body, in this moment, it's wild. It's completely just doing its thing. Let me read the way he puts it. He says, nothing is as wild in the universe, as the presence of God. And that wildness of the divine expresses through the earth, through the native wilderness within us.

And then he asks, and I think this is a great question, what have we done with that wildness? What have we done with the wildness and aliveness that's right here? He says the reason people find so little sense of the divine, of wonder, of love, is that we've lost contact with our own wildness. We've disconnected from these bodies, from this earth. Then we begin to explore this path, and we're going to continue it next week. I'm not going to speak for too much longer.

of learning to realize we've left and just when we can come back. Say this is it, just this moment, and come back and open to the aliveness that's here. This is what the Buddha described as the first foundation of mindfulness. We begin to shift from relating to the body as an object that looks a certain way or that's cooperating

or that's betraying us to feeling our breath and feeling the body from the inside out. What happens as we do this, and this is really where the liberation is, and I'm going to speak more next week of the gifts of embodied presence, the freedom that comes. But what happens,

as we begin to feel our bodies from the inside, when we're awake in this way, we no longer are identified with our bodies. in the moments that you just feel the body's aliveness, you're no longer identified with the body. You're open to that awareness that's just present. In fact, what we open to is a being quality. We move from this human doing and activity

and on our way to being quality. I started the talk tonight with Mary Oliver in a way saying how this doing quality keeps us on our way somewhere, always thinking we're going somewhere else and that this is not it, and that really the body's a gateway into being. And I want to close with another Mary Oliver poem on the power of waking up out of our virtual reality and coming into this wildness that's right here.

what is there beyond knowing that keeps calling to me? I can't turn in any direction but it's there. The far off fires, for example, of the stars, heaven's slowly turning theater of light, are the wind playful with its breath, our time that's always rushing forward or standing still in the same, what shall I say, moment?

what I know I could put into a pack as if it were bread and cheese and carry it on one shoulder important and honorable but so small while everything else continues unexplained and unexplainable how wonderful it is to follow a thought

quietly to its logical end I've done this a few times but mostly I just stand in the dark field in the middle of the world, breathing in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name but breath and light, wind and rain. If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet. I simply go on drifting in the heaven of the grass and the weeds. So let's take a little time Since this is really a talk about going outside of the words and into the experience,

let's close together tonight with again a short meditation. To explore what the Buddha really described as this shift, where we move from the self that's controlling life, that's on its way somewhere, to this beingness, not identified, awake, alive, and free. So in this pause, take a moment in whatever way works for you to feel yourself arriving right here. You might gently whisper the word here, sense a quality of now-ness.

I might feel the natural inflow of the breath and let the breath help to collect you, to bring you home right here to this moment. See if it's possible to relax just a little bit more right now, to let go just a little more. You might feel what happens if you relax or soften the hands, even more. And just to feel the hands from the inside. Can you feel the subtle feelings of aliveness there? I might notice a tingling or a vibrating, but just a sense in a very pure way, this energetic aliveness, this in the same.

hands. Let your attention go to your feet and see if you can sense that same subtle feeling of aliveness. Now see if you can feel your hands and your feet just noticing this pulse of life, including the arms. Just feel beyond any notion of arm, just that field of vibration and aliveness that's there. Perhaps you can include legs on the torso. Let it fill with awareness. Just as a cup is filled with water, this body can be filled with awareness and with awareness, this expression of aliveness, this changing dance of sensations, face included, so that you can feel the inner body as a global sense. sense of aliveness of life energy. Just let everything happen. So there's not resisting anything,

not controlling. You can sense this aliveness and sense this still inner alertness, this being quality of presence. The more you let the aliveness, the more there's a resting in this open, awake field. This body awareness not only helps to anchor you in the present moment, it's a gateway into beingness. Again, the words of Mary Oliver, I just stand in the dark field in the middle of the world, breathing in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name but breath and light, wind and rain. If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet. I simply go on drifting in the heaven of grass and the weeds. So thank you for your presence.

We have sheets tonight available on walking meditation, and I wanted very much to have them here for you, and it's also posted on the IMCW website. If you want to begin to purposefully wake up this body-awarely, The walking practice is a beautiful part of the tradition. So I'd like to invite you to explore it on your own. And if you have questions, come check with me next week after class. But if you're coming this week and next week,

you'll find the walking practice is a wonderful bridge. So just to invite you to explore that. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you would like to contact the Insight Meditation Community of Washington to make a donation or to learn more about our programs, Please visit our website at www.imcw.org.