Tara Brach - Part 1-Realizing Our Natural Joy

Episode Date: April 14, 2010

2008-04-23 In the buddhist teachings, joy is a natural expression of our awakened heart. In these two talks we will explore how we block off joy, and ways that we can cultivate and embody this intrinsic facet of our being.

So maybe to say that there's an understanding about the spiritual path as a kind of process of maturing and that in a kind of in the early phases of saying, oh, I'm on a spiritual path. I'm a spiritual person. There's a kind of a sense like we're climbing up a ladder and trying to perfect ourselves, trying to become more something, more a wise, more balanced, just polishing ourselves up in some way, more perfect. And that as the path matures, there's a sense that instead of climbing up a ladder

to be some better being, actually we're turning around to really embrace this world, all parts of ourselves and all parts of all beings. In all its messiness and confusion and mystery and beauty. So it's a difference between a path to perfection

and a path to wholeness. In a way, the more quickly we realize that that the quest for perfection brings us nothing but heartache and hassle, plus we hassle other people when we're on that track, and that there is an incredible sweetness and open-heartedness when we sense that this movement to wholeness,

to coming into the fullness of what we are and including other beings in that wholeness. one of the most direct expressions of feeling whole of not excluding anything is joy when we meet someone that's pretty awake that quality of joy it's just there there's not a grimness there can certainly be a sadness

what choggi and trunfah calls unconditional sadness because our world has so much suffering but that's not in that's not as opposed to to. There's a joyfulness too that comes from really this vast space of including. So this week and also next week, as those of you that have been coming regularly know, I tend to, I've finally figured out that I can never cover whatever I think I'm going to cover in the week. I always end and realize I still have two more major things. So we'll do two weeks where we explore this becoming more whole, really including what we have been excluded.

and what are the different teachings and rememberings that actually let us come home to a natural quality of joy? A story I'd like to begin with is a classic Zen story like so many of them are. I pull it out now and then because I love to reflect on it and I hope some of you remember it

because it's a real beautiful one. It's a story about Senjo. She was born into a family. She had an older sister who with her mother and some tragedy died, so she was left alone and grew up with her father. And as she grew up, a boy lived nearby who she played with named Ocho. And they played together very well. And the father, who loved his remaining child incredibly used to laugh and say,

you know, one day you'd make a good marriage. You know, he said it jokingly, but hearing this, they believed him. And in the course of time, their love for one another deepened. But because Senjo was very beautiful, and there were a number of suitors who came to seek her hand when she was of age it didn't work out that way and her father called her to sit down in their small house and he said

you know I've made a fine match for you this young man from several villages over the son of one of the great families of that village a nice young man he told her all about it and she began to weep and was cast down and depressed immediately when word was passed around the village and got to Ocho he heard it

and his breath stopped and his heart broke he could hardly speak. So that very night he packed a few things and went down to the river, took a small rowboat and got in it to leave the village forever. And there in the moonlight, along the edge of the river,

he saw a shadowy form among the trees, and she was running, and it was Senjo. She called to him, and he asked what she was doing, and she said, you know, I could feel you were leaving, and I knew I couldn't live without you.

So she got into the boat, And they went down the river. Finally stopped, got a plet of land, and made a garden, and worked the fields and built a house. And they had two children. Family. Five years passed, and then one day Ocho came in and saw Senjo sitting at the table, a tear rolling down her cheek. Why are you crying? He asked.

And she said, I miss my father. I love him so very much. He's my only family. And Ocho confessed that he too is very lonely for the village. let's go back maybe they'll take us in so they got into a boat rode their family upstream arriving at their village around dusk they landed at the dock nearest to sanjo's house ocho decided he better go first so he went to the door and knocked and sanjo's father answered what do you want he asked oh father i brought your daughter back with two fine grandchildren please

forgive us for running away he looked back with cold eyes at ocho astounded and angry. I don't know what girl you're talking about. Since the night you ran away, my daughter's been sick in bed and unable to speak. And Ocho said, no, no, she's in the boat with your two grandchildren. Believe me, father. And he said, absolutely not, but he sent the servant. He says, you go look and see what's in that boat. So the servant went, and sure enough, there was Sanjo. And the two young children, he came running back to the house and said to the father, yes, sir, she's there with two children and she's actually starting to walk towards the house right now. Father shook his head and he strode into the bedroom where Sanjo was lying and said

Ocho's come back with another Sanjo and your two children. And her eyes opened in a new way that they had not in five years and she stood up as if walking in a dream and walked out the door her father following her and down the road. and from the dock came the other Sanjo with the two children. They walked towards each other, they embraced one another, and they became one. They returned to her father's house and made a proper family with her family and his. They came together. Sanjo came together. They embraced and she was free. So this is a old and traditional Zen story with kind of many layers to it.

and it's the layers of the broken heart and of the grave choices that we all experience, levels of exile. And in some basic way, the splitting off of our being, the splitting off from our wholeness that sometimes becomes necessary

we think when we meet really difficult times. So maybe part of the Cohen is who was the true Sanjo. So in our... life, each of us, if we look close, we can find out that we've all split off parts of our being, parts that were too difficult to live with or feel in some way. Like Sanjo, we kind of either inhabited part of ourselves and pushed another under or the other part, but there's places pushed under. It can be for some of us just not reckoning with the depth of our loneliness, just not being willing to face that.

Or for others a sense of the shame that in some way we've failed. Or yet for someone else it might be the fears we have about others really embracing us. Or it might be a sense that we don't trust, we just don't trust that who we are is ever going to be good enough. And so there's these parts of ourselves that we can feel them in our thoughts, but in some way we've pushed them away and there's a splitting and we get identified, with a self that's always trying to make things all right or appear a certain way. In other words, our identity gets clustered around the ways we compensate and we split off from the rawness. The whole idea of splitting is we're not so aware of it.

But then what happens? And this is one of the things that happens with meditation. It's why meditation is not all that popular. Is when we pause and slow down. I'm going to ask if you've noticed this. If we really start paying attention, we can start sensing that there's some restless, anxious, vulnerable, uncomfortable place in there that we really don't want to sit down into and feel.

I'm looking around to see if there's any nodding heads. So it's hard to pause and be present because in some way our habit when we've split is to keep on running and moving away from what we don't want to hang out with. In some way, the running away is that we're waiting for something to change. There's a sense if we really look that we're here, but we're kind of waiting for something to change or get better. There's an idea of time and that we're like a character in the story in time or going

somewhere, but it's very hard to drop that whole thing and just be because there's some angst like it's just not okay to be right here we're wanting something different now as we've talked about it's the most probably the core buddhist teaching about how we operate is that we're rigged to be very reactive and when it's pleasantness we chase after it and when it's and there's a grabbing on a tightening and when it's unpleasant we tighten and we move away but either way there's a sense of tightening up. And in those moments, in a fundamental way, we split off from Heerness. Do you see that any time that we're contracting that we're trying to control our experience

and get somewhere else, we have split from the fullness of pureness. Watch it in your meditation. You'll be sitting and I'll say, okay, now just listen to and feel the entire moment. and there we are in the entire moments here, right? Right here. And then have you noticed what happens? The mind gets drawn into something, a commentary, the past, the future, and our whole being kind of contracts, and we're in that until we're reminded, oh yeah, here.

And here is very edgeless and mysterious and out of our control. But we very quickly kind of contract back into something smaller. So it's natural. it's part of our conditioning to split off from this heerness. In other words, from the wholeness, to split off from that because there's something inside us that's difficult to be with because we're feeling like we want something more or something different. And yet when we're doing that, we're missing out on where the joy is.

It's like if you imagine that you're going on a... trip, say, to California. And you're fixated on getting there fast. That's one of the things, because usually we're trying to get somewhere fast. You're fixated on not getting speeding tickets. I'm getting a good-sized meal for a little bit of money on your way. Finding the best radio stations.

You know, if you have certain fixations out of your fears and wants, you're not really going to enjoy the landscape because the mind has split off from the heerness. A more real example is if you're with another person and you have an expectation of how they're supposed to be. In any moment, how they're supposed to treat you, how they're supposed to act, so you feel safe and comfortable and so on.

In those moments that there's any expectation, there's no way of having that quality of open-heartedness that really sees and appreciates who's here. We've split off from the wholeness of presence. So the basic teaching is that in the moments that we've contracted, that we're running away from something, that we're grasping on to something, that we're judging or expecting something, we have left the life that's here. And as Carl Jung put it, and I have shared this here before, he says nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment, of course themselves, especially their children, he writes,

than the unlived life of the parents. Then the unlived life of the parents. The more we split off, the more unlived life there is. The more we're preoccupied with the future, the more we're not wanting to feel a certain rawness in our body, the more we're trying to make things different, the more we have those moments of on our way somewhere else, there's unlived life.

Now it's real obvious if we say, okay, you're with your child and you're not living the life of the moment, clearly that preoccupation means there's not going to be an intimate presence there. But it's our life habit. to split off from this heerness, from this presence. So now there's two major ways that we split off that I want to experiment with tonight and open to.

And one I've already mentioned is that we split off from the unpleasant shadow side, from our jealousy, our fear, our shame, our loneliness. And the main way we split is that we add the second arrow. I've talked about the first arrow is the unpleasantness, And then the second arrow is, I shouldn't be feeling this, something's wrong with me, it's my fault, it's their fault. In other words, in the moment that we're blaming what's happening on ourselves or someone else, we split. So one way we split off is from the unpleasant shadow side.

We also split off from intensity, passion, and pleasure. And I know that doesn't sound like, I mean, we probably think to ourselves, well, I'm wide open to being with the pleasure and the beauty and the aliveness. here, but it's not so. We find it very difficult actually to open to the raw aliveness and beauty and pleasure

and just be with it. We either clutch saying I want more or this is going to go away or I don't deserve this. In other words, we're not that easy. We have two writers their names, let's see, Gay and loose Hendrix called the Upper Limits

Problem. It's a great, I think it's a great concept, which is we begin to approach happiness, could be bliss, rapture, inner freedom, and then we immediately have this reflex to bring ourselves down with worry, with guilt, with shame, with fear. And we have this, we've internalized this program that goes, something like if something feels good, it's dangerous because something bad's going to follow.

If a good thing's happen, I'm not deserving it, which means something really bad will follow. And others we get punished for enjoying something we didn't deserve, Is this making sense to you all? Okay. So it's not just that we're splitting off from the shadow side. It's not just that we split off from what seems bad in us. We split off from the intensity of passion and pleasure and beauty and aliveness.

So let's explore our pathways back to really living in a more whole way. and the most basic tool that I'd like to mention is that the mechanism of splitting off is getting lost in thoughts in fact if you had to say the trance that were in what the main qualities of the trance of splitting okay the way senjo just split off is you know we go off into we first of all we speed up we get we get busy leave town have a garden build a have a family build this do this do You know, we get busy.

I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago that the hardest thing in the world when there is difficulty is just to stay and feel it. And so we start to soothe ourselves by getting busy, which in a really sad way was the immediate response at 9-11. Rather than feel powerless or feel the tense anguish or grief, we have to do something, attack back, in some way feel our power, you know.

Well, we do it in all sorts of swel. small ways. As soon as we feel uncomfortable, we speed up and get busy and the main way is in our mind. So one big flag of trance when you're splitting is a busyness and the mind getting very busy. Second big flag, we leave our bodies. Are you in your body right now? To be whole is to be embodied. So splitting. We get busy, our mind speed up. We leave our body. And we leave our body. And generally, we are living with some sort of a judgment about ourselves and others and our others. Those are the big signs.

So the most basic tool is to have the intention to recognize when you've been lost in stories and thoughts and develop the most basic tool of a meditative mind, which is, oh, thinking, oh, story, I don't have to believe my thoughts. Remember that one? I don't have to believe my thoughts. And coming back to feeling this body right here. If you want to know the alchemy of joy, of freedom, of peace, this is the most basic gateway, is getting the knack of waking up out of the stories and thoughts and coming back into our bodies.

Now, it's not always easy because what we initially encounter in our bodies is difficult. and we talk a lot about how to bring rain, how to bring this presence in a way that investigates and releases and opens. But for now, the initial step is this courage to go, okay, thinking, let me come into an awake embodied presence. Einstein described the mind as a powerful muscle,

but he said it doesn't have much personality. The truth is our, our thoughts can be incredibly creative and rich and alive and they can be part of what serves the healing of the planet. So this isn't a diatribe saying thoughts bad. Get rid of them. It's more saying develop the capacity and not be enslaved by them so that you can wake up and feel the aliveness that's here. This is Wu men poet. He says, 10,000 flowers in spring, the moon and autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow and winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. Isn't that beautiful? If your mind isn't clouded by

unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. So again, there's some necessary thinking. Small percentage of our thoughts are necessary. But if we can begin to develop this capacity to recognize, okay, just lost in this internal incessant dialogue, let me wake up back into the magic and mystery of here. We begin to touch that joy. We begin to discover this is the best season of our life. That is the possibility that this can be the best season of your life.

So first step is to let go of the unnecessary thinking and open into the body. And then the challenge, as I mentioned, is that when it's difficult, when we feel vulnerability, we get busy and we get into doings. And so I call this a false refuge, the way we spend so much of our time hooked, and we each have our own particular versions of it, on kind of running away from our fear and our discomfort by making certain things happen. You know, we feel soothed by checking things off the list, by being busy.

Somebody, I know most of you heard about American Airlines, and you know the feeling of when your flights canceled and that powerlessness, and there's absolutely nothing you can do, it's almost the worst feeling in the world, is when you're powerless and can't do anything, or angry and can't act on it, are afraid and can't take care of things. Anyway, this was a,

some flight crew engineers respond to maintenance complaints on airplanes. And here were some of the, they would list the problem and then the action taken to solve the problems. And I thought I'd share a few of these with you. Problem left inside main tire,

almost needs replacement. Solution, almost replaced, left inside main tire. Problem, something loose in cockpit. Solution, something tightened in cockpit. Problem, dead bugs on windshield. Solution, live bugs on backwater. Problem, evidence of leak on right main landing gear.

Solution, evidence removed. Problem, DME volume, unbelievably loud. Solution, volume set to more believable level. Problem, suspect crack in windscreens. solutions suspect you're right problem aircraft handles funny solution aircraft warned to straighten up fly ride and act serious

problem mouse in cockpit solution cat installed so we get into this thing of in some way thinking there's a problem most of the time in fact if you watch your mind usually the assumption is that there's some problem you're trying to solve there's something you're trying to figure out.

So those little airline things were silly, but it's important to see how we take false refuge. And one of the main ways is we set up this story of a life of a self trying to get on our way somewhere, trying to solve a problem. And notice how fully that can take you from being right here. And I invite you to come back again, right?

Even this moment. And feel your breath. and feel your body and be here. So the flags of trance, of dissociation, speeding up, the mind, busy, disconnecting from the body, and then judging. And the way back home is to slow down, let go of the thoughts, feel what's here in our body. Give you an example of a friend of mine who sun drop. out of college a few years ago.

And he was at one of these kind of very competitive schools. And basically he got through, I think, somewhere in his junior year. And it just got to him. It was like maybe on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but he was just very stressed and anxious and just too much pressure. So his parents said, okay. So he left school and was living at home. And I don't know how many of you have had that experience

of having an adult child living at home, but there's some sort of a question of, am I enabling, is this okay, are they going to be okay? It can be really hairy. That's what happened to her. She did everything she could to be helpful to help her son find his way,

find one part-time job after another, and gave him a lot of love and encouragement, helped him find a therapist to work with. You know, just kept trying to help, but it was very much, chronically worrying about, is he okay? Am I doing the right thing? And so on.

And so when we started talking about it, I asked her, which I ask a lot, what do you believe in? In other words, what's the story that you're living in right now? And the story was that something's wrong here, that he's never going to be happy and that it's my fault.

Now, this is not good for the biochemistry of joy. and it's also not good for the biochemistry of being helpful as a mom. Okay? It's just, that's the story she was living in. So I invited her to say, okay, so this is a story. It's like kind of putting a frame around a picture and say, okay, no, what is really happening in your body when that story's going on? And she could feel in her body how, you know, her throat was clutched. It's almost like she wasn't really able to talk with him because her throat was so tight.

and she could feel kind of a clutch in her heart, which was that even though she loved him, the love wasn't flowing because she was so anxious about something's wrong with this, something's wrong with you, something's wrong with me. This is when I said we split and there's the judgment, this is that second arrow of the judgment that nails things.

So she got in touch with that clutching in her body and began breathing with it, the more she breathed with it and just drop the story and breathe with it, the more she started discovering a kind of space of kindness. She kind of opened to a space of kindness. So she was breathing with and being with this fearful place in her, but she wasn't living out of it. Another, she was responding to it, but not reacting from it. This is the shift. When we're split, we're reacting to something in us, but we're reacting in a way that's believing the story and actually perpetuating and sometimes even bringing to fruition the story's fierce.

When instead of splitting and believing the story, we come and feel what's in our body, we start contacting a much deeper sense of who we are, a kind of a wise heart that's just caring. So what happened was she loosened up, being intimate with her unlived life. She was, does that make sense? There was unlived life she was reacting out of, but she got in touch with it. And when she was intimate, she became more whole, more present, more kind. And she actually, you know, I mentioned her throat, she actually began to have more casual conversations with her son.

And they began, you know, they hadn't had that much time together in high school. Well, they actually developed a kind of a sort of. spontaneity and a playfulness and much more of a real relationship. And then some months later he went back to community college. You know, it just things relaxed. And I think that she was locking things in with the story of something's wrong. And when she stopped subscribing to the story, she stopped sending that message that of course as her son, he would be internalizing and it gave him more freedom to just

be more relaxed and then find his way. It's not that it always works out happily ever after, but what does work out, and this is the promise, is that if instead of being split off and reactive, we come home to more wholeness, inevitably our behaviors in this world will be more healing, more freeing for ourselves and others. So a key here is to notice the beliefs and notice the blaming. Of course we blame ourselves and others.

And we also tend to stop ourselves from joy because there's some basic complaint about the world like we're being mistreated by the world. And again, I invite you to notice in the daily trance, just pause and senses. There's some way that there's a complaint in you about things. We move around with a sense of a complaint. it's just not right, it's not fair. Whether it's a complaint about it shouldn't be this way the traffic or it shouldn't be this way the way the primaries are going

or it shouldn't be this way on any level. You know, it's like it's instead of just opening to what's here, there's this, we put on the world it's supposed to be different and that stops us from the fluidity and openness of presence. We contract. Arthur and Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote Expecting the world to treat you fairly Because you are a good person

It's like expecting the bull not to charge Because you're a vegetarian I just thought that was a great line But again we're talking about splitting And one of the ways we split Is we lock into the story of how it should be How it should be Just keep your eyes open

I'm just trying to name some of the ways that are flags for when we leave the moment and leave a sense of wholeness. We speed up. We believe our thoughts. We leave our body. We blame. We have complaints. And of course, we blame other people. Here's a note.

The man was mailed from his furniture company. Dear Mr. Jones, what would your neighbors think if we had to send a truck to your house to repossess the furniture that you still have not finished paying for. They got this following reply. Dear sirs, I've discussed this matter with my neighbors to find out what they would think. They all think it would be a dirty trick

of a mean company they would not want to patronize again either. Sincerely yours, Mr. Jones. So in some way to notice I've mentioned here before that one of my main practices is whenever I have locked into blame, doesn't matter how right I am, you know, because I always think I'm right, but just to know that blame blocks our heart and that we can be right or we can be free. And that's the bottom line.

Do you want to be right or do you want to be free? And there's no joy. It's Joe Beck put it best way. She said our failure to no joy is directly related to our inability to forgive. Our failure to know joy is directly related to our inability to forgive. We can't be a joyful human or a joyful culture if we're locked in blame, if there's a bad other. And we can't be joyful if we don't forgive ourselves. So our practice that we spend a lot of time on coming back into wholeness is to bring a presence to what's happening in our bodies when we're caught in not forgiving, when we're

caught in leaving and running away from the fear are the loss or the hurt, coming back again and again. Now I mentioned this, I wanted just to read you, I think, a beautiful Sufi saying, overcome any bitterness that may have come because you are not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to you. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart. Each one is part of her heart and therefore endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain.

You are sharing in the totality of that pain. You are called upon to meet it in joy instead of self-pity. Now that doesn't mean that we have some artificial thing where we go, oh yeah, I'm suffering. It's not like that.

It's more to meet with a wholehearted presence to not take it so personally, to know that it's not as much the my suffering, but it's just the suffering of being on the planet that every one of us encounters the losses. Every one of us is insecure about our okayness, about feeling really loved,

being able to be intimate. And in some deep way, knowing that we lose the beings we love, we lose these bodies. So there's this vulnerability that we share and we're called upon rather than a kind of complaint towards an unfair universe

or blaming towards ourselves or blaming towards others to have that courage to pause and to be with the experience with a tremendous kind of tenderness. That's part one being with what's difficult

and I also mentioned this upper limits problem that we all also are called to meet the beauty with an open heart to really honor this incredible mystery we're in. And we have this mythology that I want to name because I feel like it's really important that we have to work through all sorts of karma to be genuinely happy. We have to do a whole mess of retreats or a whole mess of service or a whole mess of that we've got X, Y, and Z we have to do before really we're going to be entitled to or able to be

happy. Like we're on this path and there's stuff ahead of us between us and really being able to enjoy. We're so accustomed to that. We're just kind of addicted to a grimness like we're on our way somewhere else and maybe sometime it'll be different. But now it's not so possible. Imagine the effect if you really think about it about thinking that enlightenment, our freedom, our happiness isn't really, we're not cut out for it yet. That it's down the road and certain things have to happen first. The most basic effect is that our sights are set forward and we don't arrive in the one place

that actually reveals the depth of joy and freedom and peace. We are chronically habitually thinking we have to wait and get somewhere and do more and try harder. It's the mythology that keeps us in prison. That there's only a handful, a rare handful, that are kind of constructed to be enlightened. And a lot of them happened way back then in an exotic other country. But ushleps, you know, we just work hard

and maybe we get to be a little bit more balanced and a quantumist but not that luminous freedom. It's just a story. Every one of us, every one of us, every one of us our deepest nature is to awaken. The most profound truth of what we are is luminous, loving awareness. And the pathway to realizing and living that is actually this hereness, this coming back here.

That's the pathway. It's not trying anything. It's relaxing back right here. So part of the relaxing back is this willingness to open to the pleasures. You know, the Buddha and the Suta said he wouldn't be teaching you about happiness if genuine happiness and freedom were not possible. Slow down, let go of thoughts, and right this moment arrive in this presence that's here. Now there's the habit to just steamroll right into the future.

So I'd say part of the practice of awakening to joy is a commitment to pausing. Just to counter that conditioning. You might try this week because it's spring. This is a nice reflection. Go for a walk and keep on remembering that you're not trying to get anywhere. Really, just that. that you're not on your way to the end of the walk or on your way to your afternoon appointment or anything

but keep on re-reminding yourself because it's so insidious in the sense of it so deeply planted in our psyche to think we're on our way somewhere can you arrive in your steps and in this breath and in the feeling of this breeze or this blossom I say that because I go walking every day

I take my dogs and usually I'm trying to get some exercise and I'm moving fast and I have to get back for something. And I get annoyed because the dogs keep stopping and sniffing the bushes, you know. One of my friends I was walking with said that they're getting, they come down to the river to get their pee mail. I thought that was great. Anyway, I was walking this weekend and doing what I was suggesting for you to do, which is I was pausing. And I kept saying, this is it. I'm not on my way anywhere else. powerful phrase, this is it. It's not some other time. This is it. So I was pausing a lot and

and just being, being, being. And I had this one of those kind of silly but real insights that, you know, I'm constantly coaching myself to stop and smell the roses. But what's the difference when my dog stop and do their sniffing? It's the same exact thing, isn't it? You know, that we're all trying to pause and they're just more natural. I'd say one of the biggest things that stops us when we're in this mode of splitting from really enjoying, really being open to the mystery and the beauty, is an idea that we know something. In other words, this kind of certainty that we're thinking, oh, been there, done that,

I've done this, I know what this is. there's a really beautiful book Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. And the basic teaching is in the beginner's mind. There are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are a few. This is a secret. Always be a beginner. So when you go for that walk,

and I really hope you do, it be fun to hear how it is, where you're not going anywhere, where this is it. You might also consider don't know mind that absolutely you don't know, you don't have to make identifications, you don't know what's happening,

you don't know where you're going, you don't know why you're just completely fresh and open that secret of beginner's mind. Rachel Carson, the great naturalist, wishes this kind of beginner's mind on us. She says, a child's world is fresh and new and beautiful full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us, that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world would be a sense of wonder, so indestructible it would last through life. So this is the invitation of the Dharma of the path to wake up from our thoughts, from our sureness, our certainty, from the beliefs that limit us, from the judgments, and have that quality of Hearness that makes wonder possible, that makes that awe possible. So I started tonight, I want to kind of wrap this up a bit and we'll just close with a meditation with the story of Senjo. And in her case, the splitting off was a splitting off from out of pain. You know, I can't have this or I can only have that and then she split off in some way

and wasn't open to parts of her being. The path of joy is a path of opening to what the Taoists call the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows. it's opening to it all and the joy is the openness itself in other words it doesn't matter so much

the content it doesn't matter what the weather is if we let go of unnecessary things this is the best season of our life this season and then this season and then this season because there's an openness because we

experience our being as that space, that radiant kind space that the seasons roll through. Perhaps the most simple way of describing this quality of openness is that we keep surrendering whatever resistance, whatever grasping is there. We just notice it and surrender it. The poet Javi says, what is the difference between your experience of existence and that of a saint? The saint knows that the spiritual path is a sublime just game with God and that the beloved has just made such a fantastic move that the saint is now continually tripping over joy and bursting out in laughter and saying, I surrender. Whereas, my dear, I'm afraid you still think you have a thousand serious moves. So let's practice a little, this kind of surrendering into the

flow, this unconditional opening to what is, just as a way to honor our potential to touch a natural joy. And again, joy doesn't mean that your body feels good. Joy doesn't have to do with pleasant or unpleasant. It's that openness to what's here. See if you can relax into the moment. again give yourself that gift of letting go relax and feel just pausing and letting that kind of settling into heerness feeling the sensations listening to the sounds what all to be a kind of surrendering presence that just let's go and let's go into this changing stream of experience surrendering and becoming that silence that's listening, that vast stillness that feels this life living through,

saying yes in a cellular way to the movements of life. Deep yes. It's from this place of wholeness and presence that we can offer our shared prayer, that all beings everywhere discover the gift of pausing, opening, and awakening into the moment. That all beings realize their nature as love as presence. That there be peace on earth, peace everywhere.

That all beings awaken and be free. Namaste. 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.