Tara Brach - Part 2 - Awakening our Body's Awareness (2018-03-14)

Episode Date: March 16, 2018

Part 2 - Awakening our Body's Awareness (2018-03-14) - Mindful awareness of our bodies is a portal to full aliveness, wisdom and love. These two classes will explore the trance that takes us away from our body, the pathways home, ways of working with pain, and the gifts of an embodied presence. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. In our last talk we explored coming back to the wilderness of our own bodies as a real portal to freedom. And we'll continue that tonight. the basic teaching being that it's only if we're awake right here in this living body that we really can connect with what we most cherish in life, whether it's wisdom, it comes from being awake in the moment in this body,

intuition, love, creativity. I always think of an Indian teacher whose name was Munindraji who was asked, how come he meditated, and his response was so that I'll see the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road as I walk to town each day. And his teaching was to live the life fully

and that the only way come right here into this body. And I can say for myself that if there's one repeating realization I have over and over again, it's at the way home, the way back to everything I value, is to notice I've been often that virtual reality of thoughts and to say, oh, okay, come back. And it doesn't matter how deeply I know that, of course, I go off into the trance of thinking

and have to go, oh yeah, oh yeah, it's about being really here. So we'll explore that. And I often share at the beginning of a talk on being in our bodies. One of the monk, you know, in a monastic story is where a novice monk is basically asking the abbot, you know, well, what happens after we die? What happens then and what do we do? You know, how do you really understand this reality?

And the abbot, the head monk, said, you know, I don't know. And it really upset the novice. And he said, you know, I thought you were a Zen monk. And the response was, I am a monk, but not a dead one. And so it is that we just, we can't think our way to freedom. You know, we're very reliant on our brains, but that's just not the way we end up becoming liberated. Our thoughts can be a servant. I mean, contemplation is really useful, reflection's really useful.

But it's outside of the realm of thoughts that we really start coming home. I mean, think about it. You can have all these thoughts about what a hug is, let's say. You know, you can describe it to yourself and think about it, but there's no comparison to being enfolded, to feeling embraced and to embracing. We really miss our lives. We're skimming the surface if we're living in our thoughts.

So we'll explore in this talk how we really can inhabit these bodies. And what I want to do is pay particular attention to how do we come back to our bodies when we're really experiencing a lot of pain? And maybe just to ask you right now, how many of you are in the midst of experiencing some either chronic or acute pain in your life?

It's familiar and don't be shy and I'll raise my hand because I certainly am. Yeah, so I would say for those, that aren't watching, maybe we had about 40% or so. Just to share with you that whenever I choose a topic that I'm going to be talking about for the week, it becomes like a magnet, and I've learned to be wary because it's like no matter what I choose, all of a sudden that's what my life gets filled with. And so, of course, I, you know, I was doing a body talk and I knew I was going to go into being, you know, how do you really

be present with pain. And sure enough, I'd been on the West Coast, I caught something on one of those metal tubes that flies and all the bugs going around. And so I had to sit there going, okay, how do you be meditating with this cold where you can barely breathe, how do you be with your breath, you know?

Or when you're, you know, that sick body feeling or everything in you just wants to like, you know, crash and it's all achy and yucky. Well, just what's it like to sit with? with that. So I got to that place that so many of us know, why bother? Why would we want to be in our bodies when they don't feel good? And you know how George Carlin put it. He said, let's get the word, he goes, I'm not into working out. My motto is, no pain, no pain. So we don't like it. And what we do when our bodies are in pain is we either

dissociate, we find a way to leave, or we fixate on it and it becomes the enemy. Those are our two strategies in general. So the first thing just to collectively look at is just how tenacious the pattern of exiting our bodies is. I mean how often we live, really one step removed from our bodies. This one teacher whose instructions are don't do anything that takes you out of your body. And so if you just for a moment as we're doing, we're sitting, just close your eyes and just for this little bit, just let that be your intention, okay, I'm not going to do anything that

takes me out of my body. And notice what happens. You might be partly out of your body wondering when this little exercise is going to end. Or maybe you've had little tugs of thoughts that have pulled you out. Or maybe you're there and you're still in the background thinking I don't like this or I don't want to be here. Or maybe you've really stayed and there's a sense of inhabiting. You can open your eyes.

If we let this exercise go on without question you'd find how quickly it's not that you're doing something to leave your body. the habit of mind is to exit. In fact, it's really, there is a default setting in the brain that when we're not on task in some formal way, the mind immediately starts scanning the future in the past just to orient us and reassert a self that's there that's on its way and kind of taking care of business. It's just what our brains do. It's a universal experience that as a way of,

an organism that's trying to control its life that when something seems unpleasant, there's a contracting away from the present moment, a pulling away from that. We leave our bodies. When something is pleasant, there's a contracting to try to hold on. We leave that open inhabiting experience. And then even when nothing's particularly pleasant or unpleasant, we get dull, so we leave. So the first thing to say about this, really this body-mind split, which is really what it is.

We live in our minds and think we have a body, is that it's universal, that conditioning. And when you think about it, humans did not get to the top of the food chain because of our physiques, you know. In fact, we were in the middle of the food chain for millions of years and it wasn't until approximately 70,000 years ago when there was a kind of a cognitive revolution and we did this really speedy development of certain parts of our brain so we could speak and think and plan and basically conquer the world with our mind that we get to the top of the food chain. So our tool was thinking.

That's what got us there and we're very addicted to it. And what happens is the more we're stressed, the more we think. Have you noticed that? how much figuring out there is, and especially when you're, you know, the looping. I often think of it like we're on this bicycle and we're peddling away from the present moment and the more tension in our life, the faster we're pedaling. So this is universal. And it's, you know, Andy Lamont puts it this way.

She says, my mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave her in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. It's very hard to put down. When we're very, very tense, our mind speeds up, and then when there's even slight dis-ease or discomfort, we end up going into either worry mode or some sort of habitual self-talk or mental chatter. One physician described what he called,

quite a humiliating experience that had to do with this when he was doing his residency in obstetrics, and he described how he'd get really nervous when he was performing pelvic exams on women. And he had this unconscious habit of whistling softly to try to get his scene together and be more on and whatever. So during one exam, a middle-aged woman started laughing. She burst out laughing while he was doing his exam,

and it got really embarrassed, and he said, oh, I'm so sorry, am I tickling you? and she had tears running down her cheeks as the story goes from laughing. She said, no, doctor, but the song you were singing was, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner. So we leave. We have a million different ways of leaving when we're nervous or uptight, but we do it. And just to say that the body mind split, and I often think of it like leaving the Garden of Eden.

It's like as we started thinking, we really left our inhabiting the wholeness of of our being, very much reinforced by patriarchal religions, which basically said the body is out of control, it's a sight of trouble, you know, passion, emotion, and the attitude was to dominate the body in some way and it's lower, it's dangerous, live in this more pristine realm of the mind and whatever. And of course we see that more generally in patriarchal society of dominating women. you know, dominating the sight of aliveness and wildness, dominating the earth. So that's the body-mind split,

and it gets exacerbated in our personal history so that to the degree that you experienced what I think of a severed belonging, real wounding when you were young, the young person finds it's too much, it's just too much to be with and digest and process. So there's a leaving, a splitting off from the sight of pain, of wounds, and it can happen with an accident too. If you had a serious accident or sickness, there's some trauma, this fear of being in the body, it's too dangerous.

So we leave and we leave in different ways, but there's a dissociation that happens. and then there's often a swing where we're either cut off and numb and not feeling our bodies and our hearts are possessed and really caught, but there's not a balance kind of inhabiting. There's a metaphor that many people find really helpful in just understanding what it's like when we're leaving our bodies. And if you imagine that downstairs in the living room of your body, okay, there's a child and it's hurting sometimes and it's wanting things and it's demanding. It's just being a child with all the different emotions and you're stressed and you're trying to quiet with food

and trying to meet the demands but it's just too much. It's just never quite satisfied. And so you start leaving by going to the office and turning on your computer and the kids in the living room and you leave but you can still hear the crying and the demand so you put in your earplugs and you really go off into cyber world, off and off and off. And okay, so there you are in your office. The door is closed, there's still a child in the living room and there's still something in you that knows that, but you're really cut off from it and living in another realm. You're removed.

You've left the garden. And then you start sensing, well, what happens when we leave when the child or the aliveness, the wildness is there but we've left it? happens. So here are some of the things and they're signals of having dissociated. And one of them is that there's fatigue because it takes a lot of energy to keep shutting off a part of ourself. Doesn't that make sense? To keep on closing the door and putting in the earplugs and going off, it takes pushing under, takes energy. So there's fatigue. There's also chronic anxiety because even though we've left the sight of the wounding and the child,

there's something in us that knows. And so we can never really relax because there's a sense there's something wrong and it's unattended to. So we get that chronic sense that something's wrong or something's going to go wrong or something around the corner is going to not work out because the child's there and unattended to. Then there's a sense that we've cut off

and our hearts aren't feeling as much. as we want them to feel. I think a lot of us have this sense that we value love but we don't feel as loving as we want to feel. Well, you can't leave your body and feel as loving as you want to feel. Because love is viscerally felt as warmth and openness and tenderness. So it just becomes abstract when we leave the child in the living room. So we cut off from the heart in that way. We also cut off from what's described as the belly or the pelvic energy, which is really the place of when we fully inhabit our bodies of being empowered. We're cut off from the kind of the foundation of our body and that energy.

So there's a sense of being disempowered in different ways. There's a sense that when we're cut off, we're really not able to listen to the signals of our body so when we get physically sick or emotionally sick, we don't really know how to take care of ourselves. We're going to circle around to that. And the last thing I'll mention when we leave is that we become confined in a small identity. We become a small self that's avoiding something

or trying to control something and not a feeling of wholeness. It's a limited sense of self. So that is the reason that in most traditions, meditation, paying attention, when I say meditation, training our attention, is in good part to reconnect, to come out of the virtual and reconnect with this whole living body. You might want to take a moment to sense right now that you can come back in. Can you just sense right now even by...

inviting, just to invite yourself in that you can fill your body again with awareness. You can be here. And if you do that, you'll find very soon if I ask you again that you've left. And that's because that is our conditioning. So the pathway of return is to really learn to inhabit this body and we're not just inhabiting something physical. It's energetic. When we begin to really inhabit our body, we start inhabiting a kind of energetic field

that's way beyond our physical body, that's really connected with the universe. We become permeable and a part of. Very profound. This is Pema Chodern. She says, this very body that we have that's sitting right here, right now, with its aches and its pleasures, is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive. Okay? So that's part one of this reflection and it's to mostly have a sense, hey, this matters. If you can leave here or leave

listening to this talk with a little bit of sense of that your heart really cares about re-inhabiting your body, even if it's slow in a long process. Because if there's trauma, it is slower and that's okay. It's compassionate to take our time, but we can do it. So how do we then, what's the skills of returning? And the first skill I've mentioned already, it's learning to notice, okay, I'm off and thought, okay, the mind has drifted into the future of the past, time traveling. He says, step out of the tangle of fear thinking, flow down and down into widening rings

of being. The thoughts that we get trapped in are fear thinking. They're usually driven by fear. Come back. So this is the centerpiece of mindfulness practice, to know you've been in thoughts, to come back and know you're here, and to really know that you can inhabit this body. exercise I like a lot. If you take your hand and you look at it for a moment and just, you know, just turn it over and sense it as a familiar part of your body and maybe you

have likes and dislikes about your hand. Maybe your hand looks old and vainy to you like mine is looking right now. Or maybe your hand feels strong and it's done really good things for you. You know how dexterity, that it's got dexterity, but just look. looking at it and sensing it visually and its meaning. And then close your eyes and just begin to gently move your arm through the field in front of you back and forth a bit and start to let your awareness and attention and attention really fill your fingers, your palms, just moving slowly and inhabiting your hand from the inside out. And keeping it in the air, you might just stop the movement, but just feel from the inside

out and notice from the idea or word hand what's actually the experience inhabiting the hand. This mysterious aliveness of pulsing and vibrating, of space, of sensing there's not really an edge to hand. There's space and aliveness, space and aliveness. And you can gently let your hand float down and sense that if you soften your other hand, you can feel in both hands that space and aliveness. And that if you practice, and this is really the practice of mindfulness of the body, the first foundation of mindfulness, you can start filling the whole body, with your attention. Just as a cup is filled with water,

this whole body can be filled with awareness. Now you might open your eyes. So the question is, how do we keep on inhabiting our body and relating especially when there's unpleasantness, when there's pain and when everything in us is going, I don't want to be here?

And there is an equation that's very, very useful when we explore this, which is pain times resistance equals suffering. Pain times resistance equals suffering. It's a useful one. When you just sense for yourself, well, what typically happens when there's pain? Well, the habit is we don't like it, we want to get rid of it and we tend to. against it. This is Dave Berry. He says, if you've ever experienced a medical symptom, such as itching, you can go to the internet with just a few mouse clicks, you'll discover the reassuring truth.

There might be a worm in your brain. Really, Medline Plus. Itching can be a symptom of a condition called visceral larvae migraines. Literally, a worm is in your brain. Another symptom of brain worm is, and this is a direct quote from Medline Plus, irritability. Anybody have worms in their brain here? So, this is what happens when we have pain, is that there's a signal that something's wrong, and then it starts proliferating. So it's not just pain, but there's resistance to what's there, and then we lock in to suffering. Now, I mentioned to you how knowing I was going to do this talk and got that cold and I'm kind of at the tail end of it.

But in addition, a few days ago I was swimming. I swim pretty regularly and I strained or pulled something behind my knee. Now, my two major ways of exercising are hiking and swimming. And so it was medium pain. You know, I could feel it with my steps. And so it was in my awareness. But it wasn't the unpleasantness of the pain that had me start resisting. It was where my mind went.

Oh, my God, I'm not going to be able to swim. I'm not going to be able to hike. All my techniques for my antidepressants in this world are gone. I'm going to go downhill. How long is this strain going to last? What should I do? Should I not even be walking? You know, you get the idea, right?

That's where we start locking in. It's not just the physicality of pain. It's what our mind does with it. So pain times resistance equals suffering, pain times presence equals freedom. And let's look at how that can be the case. The first step is when you find that there's pain in your body, just out of interest, start checking. Okay. How am I resisting?

What's the resistance? and what you'll probably find if you look close enough is where there's discomfort, there's a tensing against it you know, there's like a pushing away and you'll also notice that your mind doesn't like it and that there's thoughts about it that are trying to get rid of it so you'll start sensing the different layers bring that above the line

you know we talk about the circle with the line going through and what's below the line is where you're unconscious and of love the line is consciousness, bring resistance above the line because if it's below the line, the contraction will end up creating more suffering. That's part one. The second thing is drop the word pain and just sense what's there as changing sensations. And you might even be sitting here right now and feeling your body and maybe there's an area in it that's uncomfortable that hurts.

hurts. The practice is to shift from that fixed concept pain to, okay, this is moving sensations and get interested in seeing if you can feel them just as we practice with the meditation from the inside out. Can you feel the center of them? Can you feel the space they occupy? Can you notice how they're changing? Maybe there's even some words like swirling, squeezing, aching, you know, tight, burning, cool. Just see if you can notice a lot about them and start discovering as you pay attention that way this kind of dynamic presence, this space that you can inhabit that isn't so caught in the pain. You're not reacting to it, you become the space of presence. There's a real shift in your identity. The bottom line trick is

to know that the sensations of unpleasantness belong. In this life, it's inevitable. They say pain is inevitable, suffering is optional, you know, it's inevitable to have the discomfort. So let me tell you about one woman that was one of my inspirations in working with unpleasant sensations in the body. And when I met her, she was 20 years older than me. And she had been a dancer, but between an injury and arthritis and so on, shoulders or knees, she not only stopped dancing, but she did less and less exercise, gained more and more weight.

And she became very ashamed of her body, aversive. And whenever there was pain there, it was kind of like a groaning and, oh, I'm going downhill and kind of pushing it away. And so when we talked about, what does it really mean to re-inhabit your body? This was not a pleasant prospect. I mean, because any attention to her body got her in touch with hating her body, really. So the work of the practice was to notice the layers of the resistance,

not liking my body, not trusting my body. feeling betrayed by my body, when pain comes up, oh, it's only going to get worse, this arthritis, all the thoughts and all the ways that she tense against and pulled away. And her practice became to undo the resistance just to say, it's okay, this belongs. In other words, whatever the waves were there, the waves in her mind, the waves in her body, the unpleasantness, this belongs. Now, the power of saying this belongs, or I sometimes say this too, is every time you say it, there becomes more space for what's there.

And when it becomes really a very ongoing wise response, there's more and more of a sense of resting in the space that can include what's going on. So she kept saying, this belongs and shifting from pain, arthritis, and the story to just sensations. Okay, burning, tightness, pressing, squeezing, and noticing how they change and softening around them. That's one of the really powerful things you can do when there's discomfort, is to soften around and in a sense of space around the discomfort. And so she started getting the knack of being able to inhabit her body, the different parts of her body. She started with where it was easier. Her feet, her feet were not in pain. She could just feel and you might feel

it right now again that you can bring your awareness inside the feet and inhabit the feet. And although she had a little arthritis in her hand, she was able to inhabit her hands and then start spreading that awareness through her body. And what she started discovering was a sense of this very alive presence inside, a sense of vitality. She became more vibrant and a real sensitivity to energy flows. And just to move forward on the story, she began to teach children dancing. And after a couple of years, she basically told me that by inhabiting my body, Tara, she said, I got my life back and my spirit.

It doesn't matter that there's pain. What matters is how we work with it, how we relate to it. We can't always be with the pain. Sometimes it's too much. So what I want to move to is say, well, what if it's really, really strong? What if you can't just go and feel it as sensations and be with it? Okay? Well, there's a few different ways of working with intense pain. If you want to try to be with it, one of the most powerful practices I know is find another part of your body. And you might do this right now, just sense in your body where it's either neutral or pleasant. So, for some people, the neutral pleasant zone is their hands. Some people, the lips. It may be a part

of your face, it may be your feet, but find a neutral or pleasant zone. And we'll call this zone, zone two, because zone one is the unpleasant zone. So you've got a neutral or pleasant zone. Now, zone one is the part of your body that is unpleasant where it's really hard to stay. And you might notice what it feels like. Some people, it might be a stomach ache, a real discomfort in the stomach, others it might be something in the neck or the back, to notice it, notice what it's like, but then to go, that's zone one, the unpleasant, but then go to zone two and really get to know it. In other words, feel where it's neutral or pleasant.

Allow yourself to inhabit that area. And then the practice is that as you feel able, you can move back and forth. Establish yourself very well in zone two, the pleasant or neutral, but then just you're check out. Just take a little movement of attention to zone one, feel it a bit, and then come back to your hands or your feet or whatever is more pleasant. Sensing that back-forth movement. You can practice this on your own but by having an anchor, a place that's neutral or pleasant to rest in, you can begin to gain resilience. It gives you a little bit more space to be able to be with the area that is painful.

Now I'd like to add that there are times that it's not even wise or compassionate to be with pain at all. Okay? So that this is the last piece and then we're going to look at some of this and we're just going to shift a bit. But there are times when you're in so much pain that it's throwing you totally off balance and into a reactivity, and trying to be with it is, you know, just absolutely going to drive you more into being exhausted or uncomfortable. And at those times, it's really wise to shift

the attention somewhere else that's really supportive and nurturing and helpful. And it may be that you're, you know, you shift it to medicine and take whatever medicine. This is not about trying to grin and bear it. But I'll share one story that I, I, I love for a man that was in a lot of pain. And his companion, Frank Ossestescu, who's the, who's a very dear friend and the founder of Zen Hospice, well, he was close to this man. This man was dying. He had stomach cancer. He was in a lot of pain. And the man asked Frank to guide him in a meditation. And Frank began, but it became very clear quickly that it was too painful to meditate with. So what Frank did is he offered to put his hands on the man's

belly to help hold the pain. You know, it's like creating a pleasant, neutral place to pay attention that sits right outside the pain and gives it some space. And the man agreed and he said, yeah, but it's still too much. And so Frank put his hands a little further away and he said, that's a little better. And then even further. And the man said, oh yeah, that's lovely. And so Frank invited him just to rest a bit and just to sense his hands holding a space around the man, just a space to rest in. The man began to whisper, rest in love. Rest in love.

And what he was doing, this is what's key, was he wasn't riveting his attention on being mindful with the pain. He was finding something that was present and true but other than the pain. which was that space, that container of love. Rest in love. You don't always have to go and be with and penetrate into the unpleasant sensations. At times, going in that direction,

will actually free you from creating the enemy of pain and help you discover a really powerful sense of space and presence. But other times when the pain's much, turn towards where there's love, turn towards where there's some sense of healing, turn towards where there's space or beauty or something that is big enough for you to rest in it and help you to make room. So as a way of beginning to close this exploration of working with unpleasantness, the suffering

of leaving, of just unconsciously leaving the way we typically do, the way this man left, he wasn't leaving unconsciously, he was consciously turning towards love. But our reflex to leave our body is that we start living in a very small identity of a self that owns a body but's living in the mind and is not really experiencing full aliveness. We don't get to see those beautiful flowers and feel our sense tender, tenderly, our heart with others and to be really able to sense the reality of the moment in a direct way. We're just not here. So learning to inhabit is the way back and as we inhabit, we begin to sense what we've

been missing, this this open-heartedness. As Hafei says, he says, please stay near to me and a face will spin you into love. near. I often, when I teach about working with pain and unpleasantness, I talk about a kind of eight-year period where I was in chronically ill. And I was spiraling down. I have loose connective tissue. It's a disease or genetic disorder. And so it leads to easily injuring myself and for about eight years it was just getting worse and worse and I was losing mobility and it was very challenging and it was out of that period of working with the pain and the illness that I wrote the book True Refuge which really was what I was discovering about how to be

in the midst of that kind of discomfort emotionally and physically and find some real peace and freedom. And one of my main discoveries which I've shared and which was really important to me was similar to the woman I described, the dancers, I'd go through these bouts where I'd be in a lot of structural pain and I'd have a lot of fear about what I was not going to be able to do. And I'd get caught in a very small sense of a fearful self and trying to fix it, tightening against what was in the future, just a very small, not okay self. And the practice became, okay, how much can I really open in this moment and let what's here be here? How much can I say this belongs? Just like any wave in the ocean, it's part of the ocean. And what I found was

the more I could say this belongs, the more I was occupying the space of the ocean. Every time there was a wave of fear. This belongs. Okay, there's a little more space. I wasn't the fearful self. I was occupying a much more open space of tenderness relating to the fear. It's not whether or not pain arises. It's how we relate.

Loving presence arises when we can say this belongs. This is Annie Morrow Lindberg. She says, Go with the pain, let it take you, open your palms and your body to the pain. It comes in waves like a tide and you must be open as a vessel lying on the beach, letting it fill you up and then retreating, leaving you empty and clear. With a deep breath, it has to be as deep as the pain. One reaches a kind of inner freedom from the pain as if as though the pain were not yours

but your bodies. The spirit lays the body on the altar. With a deep breath, it has to be as deep as the pain, one reaches a kind of inner freedom from pain, as though the pain were not yours but your bodies. The spirit lays the body on the altar. So this is one of the gifts, I'm going to name two gifts of embodiment. And one of them is that through opening to the waves and saying this belongs, we sense that oceanness, we sense that spirit, that loving presence, it's fast.

I want to name one more gift as part of closing, which is, one of the sufferings of leaving our bodies is we lose communication. We can't really listen to the wisdom of our body. So we really don't know how to take care of ourselves. And we're not so attuned energetically to others and can't respond as well to our world. And so one of the gifts of coming back to the garden, sensing ourselves as the garden, sensing all of us as the garden, is that we come into a very living, energetic, and intelligent relationship with this world.

And I think you can hear that in this poem, you can hear how this comes alive in us when we start coming into awareness of our body. And you might close your eyes and just listen. It's called a felt-sense prayer. I am the pain in your head, the knot in your stomach, the unspoken, greaseless, grief and your smile. I am your high blood sugar, your elevated blood pressure, your fear of challenge, your lack of trust. I'm your hut flashes, your fragile low back, your agitation and your fatigue. You tend to disown me, suppress me, ignore me, inflate me, coddle me, condemn

me. You usually want me to go away immediately, to disappear, to sleep back and to obscurity. More times than not, I am only the most recent notes of a long symphony, the most evident branches of roots that have been challenged for seasons. So I implore you. I am a messenger with good news, as disturbing as I can be at times. I'm wanting to guide you back to those tender places in yourself, the place where you can hold yourself with compassion and honesty. I may ask you to alter your diet, get more sleep, exercise regularly, breathe more consciously. I might encourage you to see a vaster reality and worry less about the day-to-day fluctuations of life. I may ask you to explore the bounds and wounds of your relationships.

I am your friend, not your enemy. I have no desire to bring pain and suffering in into your life. I'm simply tugging at your sleeve too long immune to gentle nudges. I desire for you to allow me to speak to you in a way that enlivenes your higher instincts for self-care. You are a being so vast, so complex, with amazing capacities for self-regulation and healing. Let me be one of the harbingers that leads you to the mysterious core of the core of your being, where insight and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart. Let me be one of the harbingers that leads you to the mysterious core of your being, where insight

and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart. I keep your eyes closed as we end together. together, really we're exploring how to decondition this habit of leaving, how to learn to stay, how to return to the garden by inhabiting our body, how to become the whole garden, really this whole beingness. And to know it requires a flexibility and approach that there are times that out of compassion when pain is strong, we redirect our attention, and many other times that we choose.

We invite ourselves right back here. It says, author, our poet Jane Hooper says, she says, please come home. Please come home. Find the place where your feet know where you know where your own trail home. Please come home. Please come home into your own body, your own vessel, your own earth, earth, please come home into each and every cell and fully into the space that surrounds

you. And so for these last few moments to invite yourself home fully with interest, with care, you might let your awareness pour into your hands and just fill your hands with aliveness, feel the tingling and vibrating there, relaxing the arms, letting the awareness spread through the the arms so you feel the volume and the length of your arms, feel your feet filled with awareness, tingling and vibrating. Feel the length and volume of your legs. Fill them with awareness. And softening the belly, let the awareness spread so you can have it your torso, feel the face, tingling, the eyes soft, and having this whole body. And if there's somewhere in your body,

that is asking for attention, whether there's unpleasantness. See if you can breathe with it and just feel it as a constellation of sensations. Perhaps soften around it, feel the space around it, and feel right to the center of it, noticing what changes, still breathing, still aware of this whole body as a field of sensation. You might sense the space around you, the space in the room, and sense how the aliveness and space inside the body and outside the body are like continuous space. Build with aliveness. How porous the boundaries of the body.

Sensing this dynamic presence, this space of aliveness that you're home. Please come home. Please come home into your own body, your own vessel, your own earth. Please come home into each and every cell. fully into the space that surrounds you. Namaste and many blessings. Thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.