Tara Brach - Part 1: Stress and Meditation

Episode Date: May 25, 2011

2011-05-25 - Part 1: Stress and Meditation - When we are suffering from stress, we are paying attention to our world in a narrow and rigid way. Through meditations that cultivate a wakeful and open attention, we can dramatically transform the feelings of anxiety and aloneness that underlie all stress. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

So tonight I'd like to talk about the main reason that most people in the West come to meditation, which is something in them goes, you know, I'm really stressed out. And then I really need to do something about this. And stress is the word that for most Westerners gets us in the meditation door. more generally the Buddha described stress in terms of duca which really means unsatisfactoriness so stress is this tension that comes with all living organisms we all have it this duca is this tension and it gives us the feeling that in some way something's missing something's not quite right in this moment or something's wrong okay it's one of those two

and it leaves us restless. Rather than kind of sitting and being and living right here, when we're stressed, we tense up and we start leaning forward. Or we start looking back, but we're unable to inhabit our bodies and our hearts and our beings. Okay, so that's the theme, the undercurrent of any tension, slash, stash, duka, is a sense that this being is separate and threatened. Something's not right.

The Buddha talked about this and said, okay, as soon as that comes up, on some level, our system goes into holding onto things and pushing things away. In some way, there's attraction, there's aversion. We go into reactivity. And that much of our life has lived in this trance of reactivity. activity, that very rare moments where we're in that still point that we're just here. I talked to a friend of mine yesterday who's really happy and he's happy, that kind of happiness

for no reason happy. He's really very free inside and he just kept saying, you know, it's like whatever's happening, it's enough, you know? So that's when we're not, that's the freedom that's possible. So we're going to explore that a bit and one of the things that many times you'll find in the trauma literature and beyond is a description of how wild animals deal with stress. And you often will hear about lions and gazelles and on one level when a lion detects that in a herd of gazelle one is injured, that sets off stress wanting, you know, fight, flight, it's the fight action, the aggression. The lion's muscles start getting tight, the adrenaline,

and everything gets revved up biochemically, it's ready for the chase. And then it goes and does what it does. And after the chase, it settles. And rather than that fixated attention that comes with stress, its attention gets wide and diffuse, and the multi-sensory, more relaxed, at ease. If we're on the gazelle side of things and the lion is chasing us, and let's say we happen to be fortunate enough to go into freeze

and the, you know, where the gazelle becomes like dead and sometimes the predator will lose interest, if that so happens. So first the gazelle flees, then it freezes. If the lion loses interest, then the gazelle comes out of that traumatized freeze state, shakes it off, shakes it off, and then goes back to normal. Normal meaning diffuse, wide open attention, relax, the muscles aren't tense, and so on. Humans don't do that, especially at least the humans that I've run into mostly in the Western culture. What we do is that we live with, sometimes it's described as our foot on the accelerator,

where we go in, we're in stress all the time. We're always perceiving it like we need to either fight or flee. We're always perceiving it like there's a problem. Does that feel familiar, the sense that we're on some level sensing, I'm living in a life that's got a problem to work out, and we're trying to figure it out, and our attention's kind of fixated on either getting something done, are avoiding what's around the corner

fixing something with that in the body tension, tightness there was about five years ago a movie it was a TV made for TV movie called runaway car

and I don't know if any of you saw it I didn't see it I just read about it and that was plenty runaway car is a story about a car a woman and a couple of other people in her car including a young child, where the accelerator got stuck down, and so it was going at 100 miles an hour around a big city

and just avoiding, you know, collision after collision. And the entire, whatever, hour and a half movie was about this car that was out of control. I mean, who would go to that movie? But there is something about it that our bodies and minds are kind of like a runaway car. We're on the accelerator button is, pedal is jam. and we're just speeding along.

You know, we're toppling into what's next and what's next. And either we're speeding or we're stuck, just kind of jam stuck because the other side of the stress reaction when we've done a lot of adrenaline and the cortisol's been flowing is exhaustion. So we're either like speeding along or exhausted and stuck. Those are the two ways. So we start looking more closely, and this is what's happened for the last three decades now, is that science has gotten very clear on the effect of chronic stress.

When on some level our system is always perceiving that something's wrong, when we don't have those rest like the lion does, we just always, in some way, tense. And what are the effects? We see it with the emotional body that were irritated, are anxious. Depressed is sometimes to push under some of the anxiety. That's one of the primary ways we have for depression. Bored, impatient, restless. So that's kind of the chronic stress level.

Physically, because our muscles are so tense, there's back aches and there's headaches. And when we're in fight-flight, it's the sympathetic nervous systems on, that tamps down the digestive tract. So there's often irritable bowel syndrome as one of the big ones that people report. The immune system activity goes down, you know, with stress. So immune diseases. Stress reduces blood flow to the skin. So people have rashes and sexual dysfunction.

I could go on and on and then fatigue. Mentally, when we're in fight-flight, what happens is there is reduced blood flow to the left prefrontal cortex of the brain and to the frontal lobes. And when that happens, the executive functions get diminished. So we're able to dart our attention to this, this, this, and this.

But the potential to do have a more lucid kind of mind where there's real critical thinking and decision making, more penetrating and deductive thinking, it's not there. So what happens is that, and this explains in part, attention deficit disorder, is that our brains are in reaction

and are not able to really be in that kind of receptivity and listening where insight and creativity is possible. This is epidemic proportions. This is so familiar we think, you know, it's just like, oh, so that's how it is. But it's epidemic that most of us are, to some degree, locked into a stress response that prevents us from accessing the parts of our brain, prevents the activity in the parts of our brain that are most creative and intelligent, It prevents us from the social brain, which is really able to listen and attune to others.

The mirror neurons and the other networks, the other neural networks that can really perceive what's happening with others, they're not so activated when we're in stress response. We can't really tell what's going on. The most important single factor about the stress reaction, is how we're paying attention. When you are stressed, when your body mind is in a stress reaction, it's a narrow focused attention.

One writer, Les Femi, psychologist, who's done a lot of work with how we pay attention and how to shift it, describes it as narrow objective attention. If I go back a bit to Aldous Huxley, really been one of my heroes for a long time. He describes our attention.

He describes the brain as a reducing valve of information. And that just to survive on the planet, because there's such a massive amount of stimuli, we have to reduce what we take in and pay attention to some things versus another, and that's survival. But what happens when we have this reducing valve is that we lose sight of,

or lose our connection of great mind or one mind, of the sense of the oneness, that one intelligence or love that's here. And instead, our attention focuses on objects in a very narrow way. The more stress we are, the more rigid and narrow our attention. The harder it is to meditate.

And you'll notice that when you're really stressed, when your system is jammed into and stuck in fight, fight, flight, you'll try to come into stillness and the mind just keeps buzzing on and the body's like kind of rushing and there's a sense of you're kind of going against the currents

because everything in you wants to do the opposite of come into stillness and do nothing and then if you're very much in fight-flight and you're with a child that wants your attention there's impatience and it's really hard to just sense the space to let another being play

themselves in your awareness because there's a sense of edginess and restlessness. The attention gets narrowed and fixated and then it darts around. That's the sign of the fight-flight stress reaction. What we do is we fixate on the foreground of awareness, you know, certain thoughts, sights, sounds, and we forget the background of awareness. And I'm going to come back to that a little bit later because what we're doing tonight is I want to kind of describe the narrowing of attention and then explore how meditation can actually widen the attention in a way that really frees us from this habit of body mind that keeps us from our wholeness. So the genesis, what we look for in, you know, how is it that so many of us are living

with our nervous system rigged this way. And it starts, you know, in childhood, it's both the family and the culture and our genetics, but in childhood, the most simplistic way to say it is the more unsafe we felt, the more our biochemistry gets locked into a stress reaction, and our attention becomes narrowed and vigilant. Hypervigilance comes because unsafe,

have to keep scanning the environment. So for a child, to the extent that a child felt not loved or not seen or not understood, that's unsafe. That is the risk of, threatens us that we don't belong. If a child's bullied, if a child in school has a sense of always having to take tests but not being prepared, that's threatening. There's a risk of failure of being ostracized, kicked out. So we see how childhood affects us, and it's very much, if you look at the larger picture of our culture,

that our culture fuels a sense of being separate and threatened, that there are not natural ways of belonging. There weren't natural ways of belonging and being assured that we belong to our caregivers, but it's not just that. We have to meet certain standards to be okay, whether it's school or work or spiritual communities. So there's not a natural sense of belonging to others and to the earth.

That sets off a sense of fear and of separateness, disconnection. Our cultural rewards a narrow attentional focus. it does not reward a meditative attention. And we can see it, you know, it's this goal-oriented, competitive, kind of a society that we're in that's very about increasing production,

increasing production, and those criteria lead to a narrowed kind of attentional focus. We have to wade through enormous amounts of information. I read somewhere that there is more information in our Sunday New York Times than anything available to anybody that lived in the 15th century to read or to learn about. I mean, just more information just in our Sunday, New York Times.

It's like we have an enormous amount of information. And so then what happens is that we have to narrow our focus to wade through, and then a lot of the information is scary, you know, what's happening in the news around the world. So our culture really rewards. It rewards children that can concentrate and focus, and it punishes those that daydream. I read you this. This is in the early 1850s.

This is how far back things go. American painter James McNeil Whistler spent a brief and academically unsuccessful period at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy. The story goes that when he was assigned to draw a bridge, he drew a romantic stone one, complete with grassy banks and two small children fishing from it. get those children off the bridge said the instructor this is an engineering exercise whistler got the kids off the bridge he drew them fishing from the bank of the river and resubmitted the drawing the angry instructor yelled i told you to remove those children i get them completely out of the picture but the greater verge was too strong in whistler his next version had the children completely out of the picture indeed. They were buried under two small tombstones on the river bank. But doesn't that say it all about

the values of the culture? I mean, it kills the kind of creativity and imagination. We've got these ideas of how a child should be and any deviance ends up giving the message internally of you're not okay. That stress leads to hypervigilance. So we have a longing to ratchel. We have a longing to ratchel. it down or to open. You know how Gandhi put, he said, there's more to life than increasing its speed, right? He also, he's asked about what he thought of Western civilization. His response was, it would be a good idea. So we have an urge, a longing.

We wouldn't be here. If there wasn't some part of us that knew that our potential, and our wholeness and the freedom of our heart really has to do with being able to in some way step out of this trance of reactivity in some way relax our bodies and minds so that we can

we'll still have that reducing valve of information so that we can operate but we don't have to always live inside it we can rest in what's described as boundless awareness open-heartedness So the path to freedom in the midst of the stress trance is shifting how we pay attention. You'll hear it again and again

in the meditation communities and teachings that it's not what's happening. It's how we're relating to it. And our training is shifting our attention. Shifting our attention. There was a Zen student who once asked Zen master EQ, 15th century Zen master, to sum up the highest wisdom.

And the master responded to the question with a single word etched in sand, which was attention. And dissatisfied the student pressed EQU to expand upon it or deepen the teachings. And so the response was, as he wrote in sand, attention, attention, attention. It's what it's about. Everything we value, creativity or love, intuition, freedom comes from how we're paying attention in this moment.

So we go back to the Buddhist time and say, okay, so what is the attention that we're trying to live from? And it's really got these two wings that I often describe as this wing of wakefulness, of seeing what's happening. and this wing of compassion that really has a quality of openness, open-heartedness, open-spice. Wakefulness, openness. The Buddha's time, and this is one of my favorite stories, was after the Buddha passed away. It's about Ananda, who is his cousin and his most devoted disciple. And after the Buddha's death, there was a great council gathered of enlightened ones, all the Arahats, which are enlightened monks and so on, that were to gather.

And Ananda was not invited because as devoted and wonderful as he was, he just didn't happen to have, he hadn't experienced enlightenment yet. So he was being left out. So on the eve of the council meeting, he got very resolute. And he decided that no matter what by dawn, he's familiar with the Buddha story, he was going to be liberated. He was going to experience full enlightenment. so he tried all night and he really really worked hard and all he did was managed to make himself exhausted and discouraged

because he was trying so hard and so they're really not the slightest amount of progress no matter how hard he was working at it so towards dawn he decided to let go of all his striving and his efforts and he just relaxed back on his cushion and in that moment he was enlightened that moment. So what freedom?

He let go of the striving. Now let's just to say that he was plenty present as in wakeful. And it takes a certain intention to be wakeful. So we're not talking about a kind of letting go

where we are just resigning into kind of collapsing into a stupor. We're talking about wakeful letting go, a wakeful surrender. Interestingly, and I just read this book called Open Focus Mind by Les Femi, who's a psychologist who runs a Princeton biofeedback lab or center, in the 60s, because he's been at this for a while, when equipment didn't exist, he built his own biofeedback equipment, and he was

really committed to training his brain through biofeedback to go into alpha brain which are the brain waves that correspond with a relaxed alert state. And it was not just alpha, but a kind of synchronous alpha, which means that many of the parts of the brain are in synchrony with alpha. So as his story goes, and this is a familiar one, he was trying really hard to get into alpha. He was really trying hard. He had tried music and incense and all the different ways he knew to finally

direct his attention. and he too got exasperated and frustrated and finally he accepted he couldn't do it that he could not direct his mind into alpha and I think you know where the story's going in the moment that he accepted that he absolutely couldn't do it he accepted failure then the equipment started going bleep bleep bleep

however equipment does it with these biofeedback ways right into alpha so there's this openness that's absolutely essential in waking up out of this fight-flight stress response, a kind of an open attention. Some of you might have noticed that in the guided meditation,

there was a real emphasis on space, on openness. And you can experiment with that because these two wings absolutely both have to be present. this wing of wakefulness and of relaxation, openness, and kindness. Okay. So I'd like to do for the second kind of portion of this talk is explore how we can cultivate this relaxed attentiveness, this wakeful relaxation in the primary domains

of what are called the refuges are the arctippal refuges, that really are the ways that we really train ourselves in coming into freedom. And the refuges go Buddha-Dharma-Sanga, Buddha meaning awareness, and the Buddha historically as a being that expressed that freedom and that awareness. Dharma could be described as path, and it's also the actual what's happening right in the present moment. And Sangha is the field of relatedness. It's that experience of our togetherness, our belonging, loving relatedness. So we start with Dharma and say, okay, so how does this work as we wake up with the actual

moment-to-moment experiences that are going on? And what keeps us locked into stress, what keeps us identified with stress, what keeps us in fight, flight is that we have an ongoing, a very kind of incessant inner dialogue that keeps telling us what's going to go wrong or what already went wrong. That keeps telling us what's missing. We're addicted to our thoughts and I've described here before that while emotions, the natural life of an emotion might be something like 15 seconds or so, it takes the thinking to have us completely get caught and stuck in a certain emotional state. So we're addicted to our thoughts,

and one kind of thought is what's going to go wrong. They teach us how to worry, how to judge, how to blame. I am walking down a street of Manhattan, one woman writes, Fifth Avenue in the lower 60s. There are women with shopping bags on all sides. I realize with some horror that for the last 15 blocks, I've been counting how many women have better and how many women have worse figures than I do.

Did I say 15 blocks? I meant 15 years. I read that because it's in some way so familiar that our minds keep comparing us to other people, to people that are more successful or more attractive or more intelligent, are to people that are less of those qualities, but we keep on comparing. We compare to our own inner standard.

Most of us walk around most of the time with an idea about how we should be. I should have this kind of emotion going on, this openness, this easiness, I should be patient, I should be kind, I should be generous. We have these shoulds. And shoulds are a flag

because then we're comparing to that and that sets off stress in the body, in the heart, and in the mind. contracted focus. So comparing mind. The problem that comes up is that we believe our thoughts as reality. Some of you might remember this is one of my favorite examples. A couple from Michigan decide to go to Florida to thaw out during a particularly icy winter. They plan to stay at the very same hotel where they spent their honeymoon 20 years earlier. Because of hectic schedules, it was difficult to coordinate their travel reservations.

So the husband left Michigan and flew to Florida on Thursday, and his wife flew down the following day. The husband checked into the hotel. There was a computer in his room, so he decided to send an email to his wife. However, he accidentally left out one of the letters in her email address, and without realizing his error sent the email. Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston,

a woman had just returned home from her husband's funeral. He was a minister for many years and had been called home to glory following a sudden heart attack. The widow decided to check her email expecting messages from relatives and friends. After reading the first message, she fainted. The widow's son rushed into the room, found his mother on the floor, and saw the computer screen which read, To my loving wife, subject, I've arrived. Date, March 20th, 2011. I know you're surprised to hear from me.

They have computers here now and you're allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I've just arrived and been checked in. I see that everything's been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then, hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. P.S. sure is hot down here. So when we...

believe our thoughts, they create a body-mind state that's very distinctive. So one of the basic kind of instructions in meditation training is don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts. Our thoughts lock us in and the training that we're actually practicing together is a training. in bringing mindfulness to thinking so that we start recognizing, oh, okay, been lost in that trance, and come back and start getting the knack of seeing the difference between thoughts and what's actually happening here. Really training in noticing the difference. Now, it's also a training, not just in coming out of thoughts, but in learning to stay with what's here. There's a reason

that were, as I often describe it, bicycling away from the present moment all the time. We are in fight-flight because right here in the present moment there's that tension I mentioned, that kind of universal duca, our uneasiness. So when we come out of thoughts and come back here, what we're coming into often in our bodies

is a feeling of uneasiness. And that can be okay if we're willing to stay. But it's kind of like we come back and it's like we just jump off again really quickly. In the moments of learning to stay, we start finding a space that actually is quite fine. But until we train that way, we come into this uneasiness and there's no tolerance for it. It's like we'd rather stay looping and spinning in our reactivity. So I'll just give you one story of one man who took refuge, in this presence, this bringing this wakefulness and openness in the face of his anxiety.

This is a few years ago he came to actually classes here. Very chronic stress. He had a special needs child as well as had just been divorced, so they were sharing custody. And at the same time, and this as you all know, the economy really was crashing a few years ago. not that it's great now, but he was transferred in his job to something parallel, but actually meant he had more hours and less responsibility, less control over things, which is one of the reasons for stress and we don't feel control over things. So his whole life was out of control. That was the feeling. And he found that he was talking to himself a lot. In fact, when

we started exploring what was going on, he started realizing how much he was constantly in some way saying, okay, now this is going to go wrong, or okay, now I've screwed this up, our complaining. And a lot of us know what that's like, having a kind of chronic complainer inside our mind. So he began committing himself to this mindfulness training. And I emphasize mindfulness, because it's not just about noticing what's happening, but it's about stepping back or opening back into some sense of space. Since he was talking to himself anyway, what he would do is he used noting, mindful noting. So instead of the judgments, he would say, oh, aware that I'm judging. He would just name it. So for a while he was talking to himself a lot,

but it was a labeling, a mental labeling, which is very, very helpful. If you're working with fight, flight, and there's a lot of busyness in the mind, Just start naming what's happening. He would say what he was doing in his mind, like, now I'm judging myself. He'd also say, now I'm walking. Okay, now I'm just breathing. Now I'm doing email.

Now I'm driving. So there was some way that he just started, when you name something, you open up into the space that's aware of it. You're not as locked in. So we're moving from narrow focused attention to a wider attention. When he was with his son, now we're eating together.

Now we're doing math problems. And most important, now I'm listening. And he would say, now I'm listening and I have time. Just give himself space. Now I'm listening and I'm hearing what he's saying. Now I'm listening to what's behind what he's saying. There's two wings here going on, naming what's happening, but then finding the space.

then he began to really track what was going on in terms of his senses and we did a kind of training of waking up the senses which I find really useful when we're caught in a lot of stress which is to pause and you can do this right now you can just close your eyes for a moment and as you pause just sense what's going on in your body just feel the sensations that are here so you're aware of sensations

then include sound listening and listening and listen also to the space the sounds happening in. So you can listen to and feel your experience. You're listening to sound. You're aware of sensation. And you can listen to and feel what's going on in the heart. Mindfulness means listening and attending from this fullness of presence,

where there's room for what's here. And you can keep your eyes closed, but over and over again for this man, he'd say, okay, feeling what's here, sensations, feeling the body, listening, sound, sense the space sounds happening in, okay, now the feelings of the heart. So there's room for the anxiety and the understanding is that just as when a dye is put in a sink and it colors the water, if that same dye is put in a lake, it does not affect the water. So if we can open to the spaciousness of attention, mindfulness.

Then when the waves of anxiety are here, there's room. For this man, I often use the language of if you trust you're the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves. For this man, trusting that he was the ocean, became the key to finding freedom and stress. He'd over and over again, note what was going on,

sense the sensations in his body, the sounds, feelings in his heart, and sense that he was the ocean, being aware of the waves. So I invite you to continue with your eyes close and keep sensing this awakeness of the senses. So you're letting yourself feel the sensations in the body, listening to the sounds, sense the space the sounds are happening in. With that spacious listening attentiveness, include the feelings of the heart, moods, emotions. You sense and trust you're the ocean, this mindfulness, this openness, not afraid of the waves.

There's more room. So if you'd like to open your eyes, please do. So what we've explored so far is what I consider as refuge in the Dharma. are in what's actually happening right here where as happened for this man he would name it he'd notice what was going on right here but part of what's going on right here is that there's space

so noticing naming listening to open up a sense of space we can be the ocean aware of the waves this is one way to begin to work with the stress now I want to talk about also refuge in the Sangha because part of our way of discovering our oceanness is with each other. And we need each other to trust that.

The childhood experiences that got us hypervigilant usually had the message to them that we weren't unconditionally loved or seen. So in community, in relatedness, we can repair that. We can discover our belonging. And I've shared here before, one of my favorite cartoons has two women having a cup of coffee together. One woman's son is on this step ladder and he's wearing this mask, these goggles, he has a blowtorch. And he's writing into the wall. He's like burning into the wall, I need love.

And the mother's saying to her friend, oh, he's just doing that to get attention. and it's not really funny. It's really sad in a way, but the way it's drawn out is kind of amusing. But the point is the same that more than anything, we need to know our belonging. We need to trust our belonging.

When we trust our belonging, our biochemistry is not in fight-flight. A 15-second hug can stimulate the production of oxytocin, which is the biochemistry of feeling, connection, belonging, communion. If somebody, even a stranger, holds your hand when you're afraid, the biochemistry of fear settles down, the amygdala, and chills down, not so activated. So we take refuge in Sanga and this relatedness.

We can do it through our meditations in any moment that you're stressed and you can remember in some way to turn the attention to where is love? What do I appreciate? Who do I care about? Who cares about me? In those moments,

there's going to be some deactivation of the stress response. A couple of weeks ago, I was on a radio call-in, a call-in show with Dan Gottlieb from Philadelphia, and he's wonderful

if you haven't heard of him. And we were talking and it was a wonderful interview but I felt like what he shared was the pinnacle of it for me. Dan is a paraplegic and he got into a near fatal accident

when he probably 15, 20 years ago and was paralyzed from the chest down. He was in the ICU and they realized he was going to live but he was never going to be able to walk or do anything like that again and he didn't want to live. and then as he described it

when we were speaking on the radio a nurse that was in that in his wing or whatever had heard that he was a psychologist and came to him and began to tell him the pain in her life and because he was in such a deeply vulnerable

place his heart was so open he was in such a space of compassion that he was able to offer a very deep loving presence to her and she came to him some days later I think it was and said I feel better you know she had kind of pulled away from the edge that she was on and she said something started opening since we spoke she left he closed his eyes and he said I can live with this that was the turning point He went from not wanting to live to realizing he could live with being a paraplegic

because his life had meaning if he could serve someone if he could feel their belonging together, their connection his life had meaning. The deepest meaning in our life. If we're at the end of our life looking back the moments that are going to matter are the moments that in some way

we're with a loved one and know that who we are, who's looking out through those eyes is no different than who's looking out through these eyes and we just cherish each other. Anytime we hold hands, any time we help someone and really feel like we just did it not because we wanted,

not because of our good personhood project, just because of we're together. Anytime we let in love, we're so bad at it, but when we let in love, those are moments that it shifts. We're no longer in that narrow focused attention. We're back in that open presence

that really is at home with the truth of who we are. So we begin to, as we start exploring, waking up out of the stress trance, we begin to explore really how in our relationships with each other we can really sense the truth of belonging. because it frees us from trance. I mean you might just close your eyes for a moment. We'll just take a moment to sense into this.

You might wonder, okay, so I'm in the midst of stress. How do I come from the place of stress? And stress always means separate and threatened. Keep that in mind. How do we go from feeling separate and threatened? And what if you could pause? So you might just sense, okay, what's a situation that's stressful for you, where it really brings up anxiety,

where it brings up fear, where it brings up fear of failure, just to take a moment and let one of those kinds of situations where you get stressed, and it feels like you don't have enough time, you're going to fail, something's going to go wrong, you'll be rejected, you won't perform. imagine one of those situations and see if you could just imagine pausing in the midst just imagine that and then there's a little bit of remembering this is suffering this is stress just tell yourself that and it's part of life like all beings experience this I'm not alone others experience this too and may I relate to

this with kindness so say those phrases again this is suffering this is stress It's part of life. I'm not alone. Others experience this too. May I relate to myself with kindness? And if you have even a few more moments in that pause, you can breathe in and just let yourself feel within you where the stresses or anxiety is in your heart, in your chest, in your belly.

And just breathe out and just offer it out. Offer it as if you just want to give it space, give it love, give it openness it's kind of like you're ventilating in the most positive sense it's like you're letting the wave be held by the ocean as you breathe in as you breathe in and feel tension or tightness or fear you can sense with the breathing out you're just may I be free of fear may I relax may I come home and you might feel as you breathe in now that you're breathing in for all of us and this is an important piece that we're all

experiencing this. It's the truth. The truth is every one of us experiences this kind of tension, this kind of anxiety. So you breathe in for all of us and you breathe out offering in some way, some prayer, some care, offering some prayer, some care. So this can be done as a quick pause or a longer pause to begin to untangle the anxiety and some care. sense in a relational way. This is suffering. This is stress. It's part of life. I'm not alone.

May I relate to this with kindness? Relate to my own stress and all of our stress. Come on back and open your eyes. One more piece to this. So we've talked about moment to moment what's coming up in us and how to begin to bring a wakefulness and an openness to it. talked about how to sense ourselves in the relational field.

And the last piece is how to really call on awareness itself as we're working with stress. And I'd like to go back and tell you again with Les Femi, who I've been referring to tonight, because I found his description of narrow focused attention really useful. Again, he had an experience of working with volunteers this time, And he wanted to help them to accomplish what he was doing with himself, which is to get this into alpha, the brain waves into alpha,

and a kind of synchronous alpha. And he had them experiment with different relaxation techniques, very non-striving, because you'd already learned that lesson, okay? He already knew about the not striving. But he was guiding them in through different relaxation techniques to see which ones would most awaken. in the alpha brainwave states

and finally he said to them at one point can you imagine the space between your eyes okay close your eyes and just sense that can you imagine the space between your eyes can you imagine the space between your ears

and as soon as he invited the volunteers to start imagining the space imagine the space that's filling the mind the sky like awareness as soon as he had them imagine the space in their body, objectless imagery, nothingness, alpha again, became the predominant brainwave. So this is a really big discovery, which is that the realization of space without any object,

nothing in the foreground, just space, is a key thing. As he put it, when there's a realization of space, it resets, resets the neural networks. And there's a synchrony of alpha brain waves possible. It also affects vision and opens up other senses as well. Now this is a very basic part of the Buddhist training, which is that there are two fundamental ways that we train attention.

And one is to the objects. We're training with the breath, with sensations, with emotions. But the second is turning to experience the presence it's right here, the awareness, this wakeful openness. So I'd like to close with a brief reflection, again, on this kind of openness quality. And as you're setting yourself for it, it's come into a position that you can be comfortable in.

Just say a few words, because we're going to close with the meditation. I started tonight talking about this runaway car where we get kind of locked in fight-flight, where either the accelerators jammed down or were stalled out, but in some way there's a clench, there's tightness. All the contemplatives I've encountered,

whether there's Buddhist, other meditative systems, and now also Western science, has really validated that we can train ourselves from this narrow focused, hyper-vigilant kind of tightness of the mind and body. And that this training, just like the lion that knows how to relax, it doesn't mean we're always in an open-focused attention. There are times we need fight-flight. So this isn't about that there's just one attention.

It's having that capacity to step out of this tight, reactive chain, that we get in and remembering the presence that's here. Relaxing our heart, relaxing our being. Yates says it this way, says that, you know, we make our minds so like still water

that beings gather about us that they may see it may be their own images and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet. that we each have this capacity to come into a place of stillness

and space and quietness, that we can step out of the trance of thinking that keeps the stress reaction in place and open to a quality of wholeness, which is sometimes described as our Buddha nature, our true nature. So if you'd like to close your eyes if you haven't already, just to begin with this pause,

by inviting your senses to be awake to be aware of the sensations and aliveness in your body and it helps as you're aware of that to relax you might soften the shoulders feel the space in the shoulders soften the hands soften the belly let the breath be received deep in the torso

this breath and this one you feel this field of aliveness it's here listening to the sounds, you're listening to the sounds and letting them wash through, sensing the space they're happening in, including the currents of the heart, emotions, so that you're sensing in the foreground, this aliveness of the sensations and feelings and sounds, and becoming aware of the background, your own presence, this most subjective experience of wakeful openness, kind of an alert stillness, kind of an alert stillness,

So if a thought comes up, we can just notice that as a kind of virtual reality and relax back open into this vivid open wakefulness, the gift of which is that rather than being in this kind of a reactive place in our lives, we actually get to take in our world. I'm going to just close with a poem from Mary Oliver that points to the blessings of this open wakefulness. She calls it what is there beyond knowing. 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 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 grass and the weeds. 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. I just want to mention, as I have in the last few weeks, that part of the way we have our classes designed is there's no fee, but your donations let us keep going. And I really want to thank you for your generosity. If you haven't already offered Donna, there's the table and baskets out front.

But it really does make a difference. And I thank you from my heart for what you offer. so I wanted to say that. 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.