Tara Brach - Part 1: The Lion's Roar

Episode Date: May 9, 2012

2012-05-09 - Part 1: The Lion's Roar - The Buddha taught that faith--trust in our true nature--is intrinsic to the spiritual path and the expression of wisdom. These two talks investigate the practices of presence that awaken our faith and the freedom that arises when our faith becomes radiant and full. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations make a difference!

Tonight I wanted to begin by sharing that, as many of you know, we just got back from one of our retreats. It was our spring retreat. And one of the experiences I have as, you know, bearing witness to people moving through retreats is I see folks at the beginning and they come in road weary and bedraggled. And we have our first interviews on groups that meet and share on Saturdays. and you can just feel the stress of life and the anxiety and the self-criticism that's kind of really entangling minds and hearts. At the end, I look around

and I see all these different bodies and faces, but this same kind of shine coming through and it's got the spirit of a confidence or a faith that has been deepened or strengthened. And it's really beautiful because what people find is that through the retreat, it wasn't all pleasant, it was a mix, but that through that time, by being present, they discovered they could handle the ups and downs. One student put it this way that after a real roller coaster, she said that the real gift, the real learning, the real freedom, isn't getting real, that we just are real with ourselves.

So I was reflecting on this because one of the great gifts of the path is this confidence, perhaps more than what we might think of as happiness, this faith, this confidence that we can handle life, gives us a freedom in the moment that we're not tensing against what's around the corner. And the Buddha described faith as really the beginning of all good things. It's the first of the spiritual

faculties that he described that both awakens us and energizes us and also expresses our wisdom. Now, we all have some faith. I mean, you wouldn't be here if you didn't have some sense

of possibility, some intuitive sense of something possible, some growth, some unfolding that was possible. You wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be listening if you're one of the people listening if you didn't have some faith in that. When that faith is full-blown, the Tibetans have a name for it, and it's called the Lions Roar. The Lions Roar. And I love that. I love the term. And I'll read you a little bit, Tibetan teacher Chogium Trunkpa has written a lot about it. He's where I first heard the term.

Here's what he says. He says the Buddha speaks of the lion's roar. The lion's roar is the fearless proclamation that anything that happens in our state of mind, including emotions, is manure. You know, manure for Bodie. You know, it's the grounds of waking up. Anything that happens. He says, whatever comes up is a word.

workable situation. It's a workable situation. It's a reminder of practice. It's a way to proceed further into this path of practice. You might imagine for a moment what it would be like if you truly discern that whatever came up in your life was workable. You know, anything. It's workable. So this is what I'd like to talk about tonight and also next week, is this sense that the lions roar, this possibility of really trusting this life, trusting our beings. I'd like to talk about how we cultivate that and the blessings, the gifts that that gives us. and I like to begin by looking at, this is very interesting, what is it we want to have faith in?

And I'm going to use the words faith and trust. You know, I'm going to kind of swing back and forth between them. And one of the things that we wish we could have faith in is that there's going to be a happy ending to everything. When we say it works out, everything's workable, That means it's workable. Like, I'm doing okay. I'm not going to get sick.

I'm not going to die. I'm not going to lose relationships. You know, life's workable. We want it to have happy endings. There's a little story of a father on the beach with his children, and the four-year-old runs up to him and grabs his hand. He leads him to a seagull who's lying dead in the sand. Daddy, what happened to him?

The son asked. Well, He died and he went to heaven. Did God throw him back down? So you get the idea. So we want it to work out. That's our idea. We wanted to go our way.

Another thing that we, you know, wish we could have faith in is related. And that's that in some way that it's predictable, that we can anticipate what's going to happen. We can plan for it. We can deal with it because, you know, it follows certain kind of understanding we have about how the way things should be, right? So it's not out of control. So this story for you, an atheist was out fishing one day when the lock nest monster suddenly attacked his boat.

Things like that happen, you know. So it flipped the boat into the air and opened its mouth to swallow the man and the boat. The man cried out, God help me. and at once the scene froze in place with the atheist hanging in midair and a voice came booming through the clouds I thought you didn't believe in me at which the guy said

give me a break I didn't believe in the Loch Ness monster either okay so we want things to work out our way we certainly want them to be predictable controllable manageable and we really want to have faith or trust ourselves but can we I mean, I remember for myself, and it was like one of those aha moments in my early 20s,

when I realized completely there's no way I can trust this self. This ego self is guaranteed to, I hurt myself with, I make myself promises, I'm going to not eat too much today, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, break them all the time, I couldn't trust myself. I'd hurt other people be competitive, be selfish how could I trust this cell can we

you know these cells get depressed they get anxious they don't do what we tell them to do so that one's kind of exed off I'm just exing off what we can't trust what we can't have faith in of course trusting others

can we trust others can we We certainly can't trust that others aren't going to hurt us. We can't trust that they'll cooperate with the way we want them to act. Anyway, so we're going to cross that off too for now. We can't trust humans. I mean, collectively, what's happening? Humans are threatening every other species on planet Earth.

Can't trust humans. Things might not work out for the Earth, so we can't trust that. We also see the destructiveness of misguided things. faith. I mean, how many of us have read stories about these wild-eyed people that are convinced that their mission is X, Y, and Z, which includes destroying other people, right? That's misguided faith. So we can't trust that faith doesn't get really narrow and fear-driven. Yet there's something in us that still intuit that having faith, that having faith, that and what is healing and true,

what our heart senses as true, will energize and support our path. So that's there too. So let's explore a little more in sense, well, what can we trust? I mean, if you ask yourself that right now, what can you have faith in? What can you trust?

And if you said it just in a few words, and I'm going to open it right now just ask for a few people to just say what comes to mind. What can you really trust anyone? The heart? Your dog? What can you trust about your dog? You can trust that your dog has faith in you, okay?

What else? You can trust that the sun cups in the morning. Okay, what else? What do you trust that matters to you? What can you trust that really matters to you? Yeah. That underneath all that happens in my life, there's a benevolence. Thank you.

What else? Somehow, rather, no matter what happens, it will be all right, including dying and including losing other people. So there's some basic sense that it's okay. Anyone else? By the way, there's no wrong answers. We're just trying to sense what's in the room here. Yeah.

No matter what happens, I'm going to keep breathing. But what about when you die? up until then up until that point you won't need to trust in something outside yourself you mean the illusion of being a human will will be gone

okay okay yeah you can trust that the part of you that exists your personality what about it beneath the personality so now we've had a few people that have said things that point to that that there's personality and conditioning.

We know we can't trust that that personality and conditioning will operate as we wish it would. But there's something we're sensing underneath that that is there, that's benevolent, that's heart, that somebody mentioned, somebody raised their hand, that everything's always changing. So on all the levels, everything's always changing, and there's something benevolent.

Now, here's a way that I think, might be useful for us to think about it, that we can trust in the possibility of awakening, that we can trust in our potential to be loving and awake, that there's a benevolence of goodness that's always here and we can trust that it can become more and more expressed and lived. How many of you, as you hear that, I'm going to say it once more, how many of you find that resonates that we can trust our potential to be loving and awake. How many like that one? We can trust our potential. So that says that there's something intrinsic, some intrinsic awakeness in love, goodness that's there that we might not be in touch

with a lot of the time. In fact, we might be really caught up in those surface waves if we have the ocean wave metaphor. But there is an oceaness of vastness, something timeless, something beautiful, that can wake up through us. That's possible. That was the message of the Buddha. And that's the message when we look really

at any contemplative or mystical path, that this is our potential. And again, we wouldn't be here if we didn't have some faith in that, some faith in that possibility. Now in Buddhism, they described the cultivation of this faith as going through three stages that I think are interesting. And the first stage is sometimes called blind faith, and it's kind of just a young faith. It's an early faith. And in that faith, something inspires us. It might be listening to talks. It might be reading something. It might be that you were with the Dalai Lama at some.

gathering and just sense the purity of his goodness. Something inspires us about that possibility. And we get energized. We want to practice meditation. We want to gather with like-minded people. That's the beginning. We sense. We get that glimmer.

Ah, there's something I want to realize and live from. The second phase is called verified faith. Verified faith is what you'd imagine. We start practicing presence and we touch into some truths. We start realizing, oh, that love and awakeness really is here. And then our face starts really lighting up. It's like, oh, that's more who I am than that personality. Is this all making sense right now, this unfolding?

The final phase of faith is called unshakable faith. And that emerges when realization is very deeply integrated and steady and strong, that we really know and trust who we are. Sometimes called Buddha nature or God consciousness, we trust that awareness, that loving presence as our nature. It doesn't mean there's still not surface ways. It just means our identity. It's not sticky.

We don't get hitched. So that's the unfolding. That's somewhat described as the path of realization. And one of the first questions that then comes up for us is, well, what is right now in my life between me and really trusting, really trusting in this Buddha nature, in this awareness and this love? What, you might even just sense that right now. Just let that question drop in. It's an important one. So what is between me and trusting life? Trusting it's really okay, trusting who's here, the deep being that's here. What's between me and really loving life without holding back? You can keep on checking in but for many people as we investigate this question, what we get is fear that there's so much fear that, well, we're saying that everything's okay, but it just doesn't feel okay. It's like in here, it feels shaky. It feels like around the corner something bad is going to happen, which is, of course,

our survival nervous system the way it's been conditioned over the eons. So in a way, faith is challenging because our existential perception is, well, there's a separate self in here that needs to defend and protect itself. And on one level, that's the truth. On one level, that's the truth. So we have a body mind with a nervous system that is inclined to mistrust in order to survive. Now, if we grow up in a family or in a culture

where there's a natural way to belong, and the word belonging is going to be really, key in this exploration together. If we have a natural way to belong to our tribe, to our earth, okay, there's a belonging, we feel a part of something larger, then that existential sense of separation, the fear does not possess and define us. Rather, that sense of belonging becomes more and more what we rest in. Most of us did not grow up in that kind of milieu. Our environment gave us mixed messages. There was love.

There was some belonging. But for many, more of a sense of having to jump through hoops in order to be okay. And the more severed belonging, and by severed belonging, the more there really wasn't a sense of being part of. The more we felt separate,

the more we felt either rejected or neglected or abused, the more were part of a group that the society marginalizes through racism, through sexism. The more that we felt severed belonging, the more mistrust. Because we're feeling more separate, more we have to pull up the fight-flight to make it. So it gets exacerbated by our families, by our societies. And then what happens is everything we do to try to protect ourselves from the pain of feeling separate makes us feel more separate.

We get caught in a catch-22. We try all these strategies to feel better, and they actually make us feel more separate. And I'll give you some examples, like one of them that's really obvious, one of our main strategies, when we feel severed belonging, when we feel rejected,

when we feel not apart, we get aggressive. It's like, okay, I'm apart, I'm going to oppress or pull. put down or judge in some way someone else to inflate ourselves, to feel better. And of course, we further identify with the insecure self that needs to react. So the more in our history that we felt rejected, the more we're going to mistrust that anyone could ever accept us.

A wife comes home late at night and quietly opens the door to her bedroom. From under the blanket, she sees four legs instead of two. She reaches for a baseball bat and starts hitting the blanket as hard as she can. Once she's done, she goes to the kitchen to have a drink. As she enters, she sees her husband there reading a magazine. Hi, darling, he says. Your parents have come to visit us, so I let them stay in our bedroom. Did you say hello?

It's pretty bad, I know. Pretty bad. Anyway, but you get the idea. When we act out of her insecurity, how do we feel about ourselves? More insecure. right? So it's just the catch-22. The second major strategy when we're feeling, when we come from a background of severed belonging, is that we, to soothe it, we do anything we can to prove ourselves. I mean, we spend a lot of time and you can look at today and look at yesterday and

how much of our day is in some way we're trying to prove to ourselves or others our worth. how much of each interaction are we in some way wanting another to approve of us? In one book I read, there was some statistic about people that were working on their computer and when their computer said, good job, you did a good job, and they were actually wired to some sort of a machine, the part of the brain lit up that lights up when we win a huge amount of money or it's a reward system, Just hearing a computer say, you did a good job. But again, this is severed belonging. Something's wrong, needing that kind of a feedback.

So a lot of us have imposter syndrome because we do a lot to feel better about ourselves and it's coming from a place of something's not okay here. So we move through the world in some way feeling like people aren't getting it. They've bought our presentation. They don't know who's under. Now this is sweepingly pervasive imposter syndrome.

I read one statistic. They did a research study just looking at asking psychologists, how many psychologists experienced it. 70% of psychologists experienced imposter syndrome. Paul Newman said, I always have this feeling that someone is going to push through the crowd, grab my arm and say, it's over, Newman.

It's all been a mistake. So we have this pressure to present a good self. And then we doubt who's underneath. And even when we sometimes in a workshop, we'll do these sharings, we'll say, think of a good deed you did, some kindness, some random act of kindness, and share it, and we'll share in a group. Afterwards, this is what gets me. Afterwards, people come up and say, well, what that exercise showed me was how much any

nice thing I've ever done on some level I feel like well it was self-serving you know it came out of guilt or in some way I was trying to feel better about myself you know they doubt their sincerity so the reason I'm sharing it with this with you is that the sense of doubt can be very deep doubt in okayness and if we don't feel we're okay we're not going to feel like everything's okay because we are life it's not like like there's a life out there separate. If we don't trust ourselves, we're not going to trust others. And when I say, again, trust ourselves, I don't mean our ego self. If we don't trust that benevolence, if we don't trust that potential to be awake and loving, we're not going to see it

in others. When doubt is very deep, when doubt is really deep, when we get sunk in it, we get paralyzed. And I've worked with a lot of people that the very things they need to be doing to help them get healthy and free, they can't do because the doubt is so deep. The sense that there's no possibility is like a prison. That is the suffering of doubt. The Buddha described it, this is the fifth of the five

difficult forces the Buddha talked about, and in many ways it's the most difficult because we get completely stuck in our world. completely stuck in our tracks. There's no energy. So how do we work with it? Okay? Because this is, and we'll see how far we get tonight. We'll continue it next week. But we have this experience of severed belonging. We act out of it. We get locked into a sense of who I am is small and not okay. So I think that one of the best stories in the myth of the Buddha is the story of the Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree.

That whole night he spent in some way dealing with the challenging energies just like we do in life and in retreat or wherever we are. He dealt with the way we practice of bringing presence and compassion. The attack on him of these difficult forces, of course it was his own shadow,

but it was called Mara, the energy of Mara, the God of greed, hatred, and delusion. So Mara just was hurling all night, these arrows and bows and slings and whatever. The Buddha's meeting it with this great heart and great presence. Each thing that was hurled at him got transformed into a flower paddle,

fell down at his feet until there was a great heap in front of him as the morning star came out. and the Buddha was still not free. That's when Mara issued his final challenge. And I'm wondering how many of you know what that is, the final challenge. What is it? Who do you think you are?

It's a great challenge. Who do you think you are? It's that basic challenge. It says, you don't deserve either to exist or be loved or be approved. And certainly for the Buddha who is taking the seat of awakening, you don't deserve to be awake. Who do you think you are, you know?

So through the night the Buddha had been meeting Mara with this presence, but he shifted his strategy then. And this is why I like the story so much. He didn't make a spiritual muscle and say, I'll show you who I am. He reached down and he touched the earth. He called on the earth goddess to bear witness. Now what this means is rather than any sense of I, my spiritual prowess can meet this challenge, he called on his larger belonging to earth, to the web of life, to the sacred feminine, the beloved. He called on presence and love. He touched the earth.

And in response, the skies darkened and there were lightning bolts and thunder and the whole deal and Mara withdrew. So it worked. It was a good strategy. And the Buddha was free. That was the moment of freedom when he met the final greatest challenge of doubt. When he touched the earth, when he called on his belonging, he realized his belonging. it was in realizing the truth of who he was that he became free.

The reason I like this myth so much is because we can get deluded into thinking we're sharpening our spiritual skills so we can handle the attacks of our shadow. And that's another version of spiritual ego. When we, in some deep way, sense, wait a minute, everything, every bit of what I'm experiencing

belongs to something larger. It belongs to awareness, aliveness, love. In those moments, we're coming home, and that's when our faith shines brilliantly, like all the stars in the universe,

because we know who we are. That's the freedom from the egoic self. It doesn't mean the egoic self disappears. It doesn't need to disappear. We need an ego. ego is part of our survival strategy we need a body we need a nervous system we need fear we just don't have to be possessed or defined by it and Sanskrit it's called Jiu-un-mukta awake it means dying while yet here you die to the ego and you're still living on this earth

you can have the ego be like a servant an instrument but you know who you are okay so So the practice that develops this confidence, this light of faith, I'm going to call it for now touching the ground. And what it means is that we begin to entrust ourselves to something larger. And what we're entrusting ourselves to, and this will be the rest of the evening, what we'll explore, could be considered entrusting ourselves to the whole life of the present moment. others who are letting go of all control and just saying okay i'm opening to exactly the life that's here

that's in a way entrusting ourselves to the earth to nature to the nature of the liveliness of right now and the second when we touch the earth we're calling on love we're calling on the goddess the heart of the goddess so let's talk about these two ways of entrusting just to say that that Mahatma Gandhi described this process as dissolving our self to zero. That as we entrust ourselves to our true belonging, that ego self dissolves. And that's when we become a vessel for soul force. This is a sneak preview of the next talk,

because the next talk will be describing, when we open to our true belonging, when we have that faith, we become a vehicle, the pathway. the first pathway belonging to the moment our faith grows as we can let go into our moment to moment experience in some ways

when it's difficult we're learning to stay our faith grows when we stay with things and discover the things we were running away from that we actually can be with and handle and that frees us because if we know we can handle it as I mentioned early our body doesn't have to tense

against what's around the corner. There's so many moments when we watch ourselves that our mind and bodies leaning forward, anticipating. When it's really difficult, this is the inquiry of how do we have the confidence to just stay when it's really difficult? One of the things that Chogh M. Trunkbook describes

is when we encounter that kind of difficulty is to actually go towards the unpleasantness. He doesn't even say just open to it. He literally go towards it, lean into it. So here's what he writes. He talks about turning toward the emotion. He says, go through it, give into it, experience it.

And when you begin to experience this process of going towards emotion, towards the fear, the grief or the anger, rather than emotions coming towards you, then you begin to make a journey. Turning toward means encountering with mindfulness, but not like a detached observer. It's a mindfulness that's entirely engaged and contactful. That last part is my description of it.

Many people think of mindfulness as, you know, I'm going to sit back and open and notice what's happening. And that very word notice, it makes a distance contacting. Why? because whenever things are difficult, the way our sense of self emerges is in the way we tense against it. Our resistance gives us our sense of ego excel. In the moment you actually go towards it, that you intentionally move right into the experience, you have put down that resistance and the self- dissolves, a sense of self- dissolves. There's a freedom there.

So our minds tell us otherwise. Our minds tell us to, when things are difficult, keep figuring things out, keep judging, you know, keep doubting. One woman says, this is Shira Milgram. She says, if logic tells you life is a meaningless accident, don't give up on life, give up on logic. If your mind is telling you, spend more time figuring things out, preparing, rehearsing, judging, you know, see you. if you can let it go and actually come into where the body is living. That's the beginning of really touching the ground. We touch the ground when we come into the body. Fearing Paris. Suppose

that what you fear could be trapped and held in Paris. Then you would have the courage to go everywhere in the world. All the directions of the compass open to you, except the degrees east or west or true north that lead to Paris. Still, you wouldn't date put your toes smack dab on the city limit line. You're not really willing to stand on a mountainside miles away and just watch Paris lights come up at night. Just to be on the safe side, you decide to stay completely out of France.

But then the danger seems too close even to those boundaries and you feel the timid part of you covering the whole globe again. You need the kind of friend who learns your secret and says, see Paris first. See Paris first. So what are you running away from? That's the place to lean in. There's a saying in the Dharma teacher circle that you're only as good as your last Dharma talk.

It's a terrible saying, it's a terrible idea, especially for those of us that speak a lot. Because no matter what it sounds like inside us, we've got all these computations of what's working and not working. So for me, I would, you know, because I talk a lot, you know, and there are many talks that my idea of what I wanted doesn't happen, you know, what I wanted to express. And, you know, sometimes they're a little bit garbled in my mind or not clear. And sometimes they're too long. You know, at the last retreat, it was definitely one was too long. And I went going, oh, you know. But so some years ago when I, you know, I noticed afterwards the proliferation. I'd give a talk when I didn't like it, I'd, I'd, you know, kind of walk around in a funk sum, you know, a little embarrassed to myself. And it would color things. Well, I started writing True Refuge about five or six years ago and really started exploring what we're talking about tonight, which is faith. It's like, okay, if you really trust, if you really have faith,

how are you going to hold these things? And this thing of, well, when something comes up, the pathway to faith in those moments it's just to touch the ground, just to enter in, turn towards the feeling. In Polly, the word for faith is translated as resting your heart in what is true. Resting your heart in what is true. So the pathway to faith is to rest your heart in what is true. Resting your heart in the truth of the present moment. Resting your heart in the truth of love.

So I began practicing that. I would come out of a talk that was n-i-and- I could feel myself kind of contracted. And I go, oh, okay. I get interested. I say, okay, this is a chance. So rest your heart in that feeling, that kind of yucky feeling. And I would just start breathing. And resting your heart has such a, it has a kindness to it too.

So I would just be with it, be with it. And what I'd find is when I leaned in, when I leaned into the feeling, that sense of an ego self that was evaluating herself sort of dissolving and they just became changing sensations and feelings and sounds and the space they were happening in and then just the remembrance again of who I am underneath all that ego conditioning so this is the pathway to faith and the more times that we move from that place of I am this ego that is in some way not okay to remembrance faith

gets stronger. That sense of, oh, I can handle this life. That confidence grows. So this is the first of the pathways. And just take a moment. We'll just practice for a moment to give you a taste yourself if you want to close your eyes. Consider this a pause. And like all pauses, it's an opportunity just to come right here. Whatever you've been thinking about, whatever I've been talking about, it's history. So let yourself arrive. You might feel the breath. Zen master Rio Khan

says if you want to know the Buddhist law, drift east, drift west, entrusting yourself to the waves. So this is the first pathway to faith, this touching the ground, entrusting ourselves to the waves of the moment. So sense what that means to you right now.

What does it mean right this moment to entrust yourself to the waves? It's just to rest your heart and what is true right here, right now. This pathway that faith takes in attentiveness, you have to notice the waves, what's here, what's happening? And then sense the entrusting. What happens when your body entrusts itself to the waves? You sense a kind of surrendering presence in your body.

It happens when your heart entrusts itself to the waves. When you rest your heart and what is true, It's a deep letting go into what is. And it's not just one letting go. You let go and then you let go of the letting go until you just sense the waves are happening, the sounds, the sensations. And you can begin to sense the oceanness,

the presence that it's happening in. This vast wakefulness. As faith grows, there's a sense it's really okay. whatever waves come and go, this remembrance of oceanness can include all the waves. If you trust through the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves.

You're opening your eyes. So one pathway, touching the ground, this is this sled and go into the waves, the second pathway. The Buddha called on the earth goddess to bear witness. We call on love. I'll give you a share an example

that happened at retreat with one friend who her way of this is going to sound grandiose she called on the earth goddess by calling on me to bear witness to something forgive me if it sounds grandiose

because it was really it was actually cute because she had heard this story of the Buddha touching the ground and what she was bringing was something really

poignant which is she said that she has a kind of neurosis that feels so embarrassing that it's really hard to say out loud, but she moves around feeling like in some way everybody's looking at her. She was, I feel like people are always looking at me and watching me and judging me and sometimes judging me maybe positively, but then I'm going to let them down and sometimes negatively. But in some way, I'm always thinking people are, are kind of tracking what's going on with me. And she said that. It's just so narcissistic and it's so embarrassing to

tell you. And so in a way she was saying, you know, bear witness, let me know it's not terrible, which is, of course, what I did. You know, I said, there are a lot of us, and we're all self-referential. We all in some way feel like we're center stage and the rest of the world are props and, you know, everything's on us. And we affirm our existence all the time that way. And a lot of us are very vigilant. And the more that we had a dangerous background, the more we're constantly computing what's going on. with other people vis-a-vis moi. Well, that mirroring was a really big relief to know it was normal, it was okay.

She was not sick. And what happened was by having somebody that she trusted cared about her, mirror that made it okay enough that she could then just start paying attention to the pain of it. And then she could begin to bring compassion, her own compassion, to just this tendency to be so, be so self-absorbed, which is painful. It hurts. So this is an example of she reached down. She called on something that she felt was larger to reflect, you're okay. And we need to do that. We need the mirroring of each other. It's part of the power of 12-step groups that we realize

that whatever we've been feeling so ashamed about, there's a lot of other people that have that same conditioning that's lives have played out in the same painful ways. We're not alone. There are many ways of touching the ground and calling on love. The meta practice is a beautiful way of calling on love, just to keep on training ourselves to pay attention to the goodness. That wakes up a sense of larger belonging. To pay attention to the vulnerability in each other and sensing it's shared.

There's research on couples. that love, you know, very loving couples that I think is great, where, you know, you see how, if the woman is given a shock in her ankle, this is kind of ground-baking research at the time, they measured the amount of anticipatory anxiety for the shocks and the actual pain. Then they did the whole thing again, holding the hand of her husband. This is with good relationships.

Holding the hand of her husband, redo the measurements, everything's reduced. there is no limit to what love affords us. When we feel belonging, a larger belonging, we can handle living and dying. I've seen it again and again. Dan Gottlieb, he's a radio show host of very popular voices in the family, Philadelphia, and a wonderful guy.

And when he was much younger, I don't know his age, I think in his 30s, he was getting going as a psychologist when he got into a terrible car accident. He was in intensive care for quite a while, paraplegic, has lived since then as a paraplegic. There was a while when he was in the hospital that he didn't know if he could live. He didn't know if he wanted to live. In fact, he thought he didn't want to live. So there he is in the ICU, and this nurse came up to him. and knew, had heard of him and said, oh, so you're a psychologist, can I talk to you?

And she talked to him for a while about the pain in her life. She was suicidal and just told him what was going on. And he could really feel a very deep, deep sense of compassion and so on and offered her that presence. I think it was the next morning she came back and said, you know, that talk, it really, it really made a difference. difference. When she left, that was the moment that he closed his eyes and he said, I can live with this. I can live with this. Now, what had happened? He went from the severed belonging state of an ego who felt no longer do I have anything to offer, any reason to be alive, to realizing, oh, I belong. I belong. He felt a little bit. He felt a little bit.

belonging, that enlargement, reconnected with his beingness. He knew he could be part of this life. Love is always here, presence is here, awareness is here, but we're not always connected to it. So this path of awakening faith is touching the ground, it's reconnecting, but it's hard because our conditioning is to run away. So this is a poem, David White. He says, I want to write about faith. About the way the moon rises over cold snow night after night, faithful even as it fades from fullness, slowly becoming that last, curving and impossible slither of light before the final darkness. But I have no faith myself. I refuse it the smallest entry. Let this then my small poem, like a new moon, slender and barely o'clock.

be the first prayer that opens me to faith. Let this then my small poem, like a new moon, slender and barely open, be the first prayer that opens me to faith. So even as we touch the ground, if all that we do is pray to be open, pray to trust in our potential, that opens the door for some light to shine through. shine through. So let's close for just a few minutes coming with our eyes close.

Again, in this simple way sensing, what does it mean to entrust myself to the waves? What does it mean to entrust myself to love? To rest my heart in love. You might even bring to mind a person where loving comes easily. Just a feel sense of the shared loving there, the goodness of that relationship, what you appreciate, to feel the shared loving, and then just let the idea of that person vanish and just feel the love and let it be as big as it is. Rest your heart in that loving.

Can you sense as you rest your heart in presence and love? Just the beingness that's here. That which you are behind any of the conditioning, loving awareness, So Gil Rumpashay says, if everything changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious, in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place?

Is there something, in fact, we can depend on that does survive what we call death? May our trust in timeless, loving presence, deepen. May that trust free us to live. from that loving presence. May all beings live from loving presence. May all beings awaken and be free.

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, Thank you very much.