Tara Brach - Part 2 - Being Embodied: Gateway to Aliveness and Spirit

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

Part 2 - Being Embodied: Gateway to Aliveness and Spirit (2021-06-02) - All that we cherish—creativity, love, wisdom, realization—arises from an embodied presence. Yet as we know, the wounds and trauma of our society and individual lives leads toward dissociation. These two talks look at the challenges to awakening through our bodies, and the practices and teachings that guide us on the path. 

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Welcome and namaste friends. It's really great to be with you. The title of this talk is being embodied and this is part two, two-part talk I started the first last week. And I thought I'd maybe start by sharing that in recent days, I've become really kind of immersed in haiku. And this morning I was going for my riverwalk and I was composing and really, really inside it. And I walked right into a massive spider web. I mean, I got totally slimed by it. I was remembering one comedian describing if you were like 200 feet away, watching somebody, it's like, you know, so that was me. And of course, I was actually writing a

haiku in my mind about spiderweb. So just such a reminder, it really makes a difference to stay awake in our bodies for ourselves, for spiders, for other creatures. And the last week when I spoke, I really talked about we are a disembodied culture, you know, And by disembodied, I mean, we habitually seek safety and control by living in our thoughts. We're disconnected from the wilderness, the wildness of these living bodies and we inhabit a virtual world for huge swaths of the time. And if you just review any particular day or the last few hours, it's pretty easy to see how much we're gone. And there's huge suffering that arises from this fundamental disconnecting

when it's habitual. When we're disconnecting from our bodies, it's also from others. We can't really be intimate with each other. We consider the world more as an object and our body is an object to kind of operate upon, but there's not a real sense of communion or connection. And that actually leads to feeling like we can violate others because they seem unreal, especially when they're at a distance and it leads to destroying our living earth. So huge suffering. And one of the initial insights of mindfulness practice is just realizing how much we leave, how much we're leaving presence and lost and worrying and planning and figuring out things.

And it even leaks into all of our spiritual life. There's a story I've always loved about a novice who is talking to a Zen master and he asked the Zen master, well, what happens after we die? And the Zen master said, I don't know. And this was really upsetting to the novice. He said, you know, I thought you were a Zen monk. the response was I am, but not a dead one. We can't find our way to truth, the deepest truths through our thoughts, that it really is not the pathway. We have to be here embodied

to experience directly this living reality to understand it. So the challenge in this invitation here to become more embodied is that it can be very difficult actually inhabiting the wilderness, really being with the rawness of feelings, whether they're sensations or emotions. We feel them in the body and like the outside weather, it can get pretty intense. So it's hard to stay with it. It's easier to remove ourselves and go into the control tower of our mind. I think about George Carlin and he has this great line, he says, I'm not into working out. My motto is, no pain, no pain.

We don't like hanging out with pain, whether it's the physical pain or the emotional pain. leave it, we try to leave it, we try to fix it, we turn it into the anime, really. So what I'd like to do is take a closer look at our habits of leaving, the ways that we leave, and explore how we can gently, gradually, wisely, compassionately, re-inhabit our living forms and really experience our world in a much more intimate way. So the first thing to say really is reemphasizing that even when we have no strong, unpleasant sensations, we still leave. It's still the habit of leaving.

And we have in our brains a default network and the function of the default network is to carry our thoughts into the future and into the past and actually scan for problems. So even when there's nothing really bad going on, our survival brain is in action on some level, being vigilant and looking out for what might go wrong, that there's not some, you know, unseen predator around the corner, are some new food source that we're going to have to discover to be okay. So this is when there's no notable stress, we're designed to have a wandering mind like this. So if you've been blaming yourself when you are meditating for your mind continually going off, just know that this is our universal predicament.

We have a nervous system that does this. Okay, so then when we get more stressed, what happens? That wandering mind becomes really busy with the nervous system. planning and worrying and figuring things out. And I think of it like we're peddling on a bicycle and the more stressed we get, the more quickly we pedal away from this body in the present moment. We just go faster and faster, leaving with our mental commentary, our distractions, our plans, our worries. A story of a new young medical doctor. He's doing his residency in OBGYN, and he describes how he would find himself getting

really embarrassed when he was doing pelvic exams for women. And he said that to cover his embarrassment, he unconsciously formed this habit of whistling softly. So there he is, and he's got a middle-aged woman when he's doing the pelvic exam, and suddenly she burst out laughing. he gets even more embarrassed and flustered. He said, oh my gosh, was I tickling you? I'm so sorry. And she has tears running down her cheeks from laughing so hard.

She said, no, doctor. But the song you were whistling was, I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner. So we leave. We leave when we're just mildly uncomfortable. We leave when we're really stressed. Now, in our society, in contemporary society, we can see that this body-mind split that really is so obvious has been reinforced by societal

conditioning through the ages, really when you look at patriarchal religions and the message, the body's out of control. It's the site of compassion. It's of passion, not compassion. I mean, it's that too, but it's out of control. And this is usually to do with passion, It has to do with emotion. You know, it's the attitude is that there's something dangerous about this body that we have to control, that it's not trustworthy. So we are trained through our caregivers to, often to hide and cover over in all ways the realness of our animal self, our bodily self, our emotional self.

There's a little story of a four-year-old who opens up this big family Bible and suddenly this old dry leaf has been pressed between pages, been there forever probably, it falls out. And the boy is astonished and he calls out, mommy, mommy, I found Adam's underwear. So here we are, we have religions that really encourage us to transcend the body. The idea of spiritual purity is that we're above our animal body, which of course leads to shame about who we are and disconnection. Some of you might remember Mary Oliver's really famous line. It's in the poem Wild Geese.

And she says, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what you love. And I'm kind of putting this in here right now as a kind of contrast, really. It's the opposite of the message from patriarchal religions that basically says, you know, and this is delivered right through again, caregivers, you know, don't let your body love what it loves. Don't be intense or sensitive or needy or loud or rambunctious or sad. Don't be how you are. That's the message. And so we leave our embodied nature. We try to be different. As we know, the body-mind split is most fully exacerbated when there's been emotional

wounding and trauma in any big way. And it's because with intense emotional pain, it feels too much to handle and it's part of nature. It's a natural coping structure. strategy, it's part of the nervous system's activity when there's overwhelm to cut off feeling. Okay, so we leave the garden often when we're very young, you know, in some way. And it's important to recognize what happens when we leave. What happens when we regularly are taking refuge in a mental control tower when we're dissociating? And the first thing is, and many of us can relate to this, is that it takes energy to maintain dissociation.

So we get tired. It's like on some level we're always working to not feel what's here. So there's fatigue. That's one of the signs of dissociation. And another is, even though we're dissociated, a part of us knows that there's unfaced life and another part of our being, that there's something unprocessed, that that unprocessed life is in our tissues. So there's a chronic undercurrent of anxiety. Okay, so with dissociation, there's fatigue because we're constantly having to work to stay away from something and anxiety because we know

it's there. And then there's different strategies for dissociating, whether we're obsessing or we're numbing ourselves with overconsuming in some way, but we judge ourselves for leaving. So we add on to that with dissociation, some shame and judgment for the ways that we leave. When we're dissociated, we really aren't living from our hearts. We can't feel caring so much. So another sign of dissociation is we might value love, but it's hard to actually in a embody direct visceral way feel it. In another little story, two men are playing golf and one of them is about to take a swing when a funeral possession appears on the road next to the course.

He stops mid-swing, takes off his cap, closes his eyes, and then bows his head in contemplation. His opponent comments, wow, this must be one of the most touching things I've ever seen. You're a very feeling man. And the man recovers himself and replies, yeah, well, we were married for 35 years. You get the point. We cut off from the tenderness of love. What else? Well, when we're dissociated, we cut off from the belly, from the whole pelvic rea.

region, which is correlated with authentic power from our full energy and sensuality and creativity, vitality. We cut off from that. So we're really not living from our wholeness. One teacher was asked, why do you meditate? And his response was, so I'll see the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road as I walk into town each day. And I feel like in some way that captures it, that we miss a lot of life when we don't know how to really live from our bodies, feel our bodies. We cut off from our intuition and wisdom because the only way we can directly experience reality is through our senses awake. The only way we can really know about impermanence, how everything's changing, is when we feel it directly.

The only way that we can really sense into the selflessness of experience is when we get quiet enough and just feel in our bodies and discover that there's no centralized self behind the curtains directing things. How do we return? How do we come back? So this is pretty much the rest of our exploration together really is how do we come back home? And in the last week's class, I talked about how one way of practicing is when in our daily life when we notice, okay, I'm in trance and we do notice it, okay, I've been obsessing for a while on such and such, or I've been lost in judgment, you know, to interrupt when we can. And just even for a few moments, maybe three breaths, come back, feel what's here with kindness. And the

trick is to do many pauses through the day. And that begins to wake us up from the thickness of a virtual reality. Srinarsargarata puts it that the net is full. of holes, we begin to sense that. You might just pause right now. You've been listening. Words, bring up images and thoughts, just see what happens if you come back fully here. Listening to sounds, listening to infueling the body and maybe letting go a little in places that there's been a kind of clenching or tightness. You can start fresh in any moment. Just coming back, being here. That's one way that we explored it last week and the other was in a daily practice, learning to do the body scan is so powerful. In fact, most meditations that I lead

have some of a body scan where we're moving through the body and reawakening, remembering, reconnecting with the sensations through our bodies so that we can feel from the inside out. And it's an essential skill because if we can feel our body, then we can notice when we've gone off in thoughts and have a way to come back. And that is the essential movement of a meditation that awakens and frees us. Is that we're moving from virtual to reality and we're getting the knack of noticing, oh, that's a thought. it like to be in this living moment? Most of our thoughts are often rather limiting thoughts.

The poet Rumi says, step out of the tangle of fear thinking, flow down and down into ever widening rings of being. So this is the centerpiece of practice. We do the body scan and we just practice coming back again and again to our senses, recognizing the thought, knowing the difference between a thought and this vivid, mysterious presence, this heerness. You know, there's a way I love to just touch into this. You might try it right now. And that is to put your hand out, I'm putting my hand out, and look at it and just remind yourself of anything you've ever thought about your hand, whether you like it, whether

you're seeing age spots like I am and wrinkles and grinkles or whether you like or don't like the shape of your fingers, tapering or too thick or whatever, your nails, your palms, how they look and feel and have served you or not served you through this life. And then you might close your eyes and have your palms still up, your hands still up, and just slowly move the hand and arm in front of the body, perhaps moving at a foot to the left and foot to the right, and begin to feel fully from the inside out the sensations that are here, the tingling, the vibrating, heat or cool. And you might keep the hand up but just stop the moving and even more fully,

feel from the inside out, inside the fingers, the space between the palms, the outside of the hands, just to feel. And notice the difference between the direct experience right now, this field of sensation and any idea or concept of hand. And as you're ready, lowering the hand down, and if your eyes are closed, you want to open them, opening them. Pema, Children 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. What about when this very body we have really is feeling uncomfortable? when there's pain, when it's challenging being here. So we're going to look right now. Last week during our satsung actually two weeks ago, one of the men who spoke was 80 years plus a little. He had had decades of spiritual practice with the Sufis, many experiences of rapture, of oneness, of confidence,

in the path. And now he described how his body's failing and there's physical pain and he can't access the good feelings, the spiritual connection. And it's brought up really deep doubt and a lot of suffering. And it points so much to, and I think so many of us can feel that, that when our body feels good, it's much easier to feel expansive and open and have a sense of well-being. And so the question is, what helps us on the spiritual path and we're barraged by unpleasant sensations? And if you're listening, you are a human being experiencing a human body that's inevitably going to have bouts of sickness and pain. And if for you, presence or spiritual realization or well-being depends on being young and fit and

pain-free, it means it's all going to go away when the body starts deteriorating. So, this has been a really ongoing personal inquiry for me. I've spoken a lot about 10, 15 years ago, the period when I was really sick, lost a lot of mobility and chronic and sometimes acute pain. And I've recovered a whole lot of mobility and I'm much better. and, you know, I'm 68 and I have, still have chronic and sometimes acute pain, and I have a connective tissue disorder. It's genetic that, you know, makes a lot of joints ache and arthritic, you know, a lot of parts of my structure are cranky. Some mornings I wake up to meditate and

I'm sitting with a lot of unpleasantness. So it becomes a real inquiry of how to have unpleasantness and still find my way to a presence that is connected, has well-being, open-heartedness. A friend commented recently that it would be fine if she knew, okay, I have this bad elbow, and every day I'm going to always have this and there's pain there. But to wake up every day and have different unexpected new pains that we can't predict that's hard. And it's also a part of aging for many of us, that if it's not one thing, it's another and we can't predict. So how do we live with that? And this was really the Buddha's inquiry, you know, how to, given this impermanent life, how do we find peace and freedom in the midst?

There is a kind of faux equation that is useful conceptually, for this and it's that pain times resistance equals suffering. And when you think of it, what normally happens with pain? Well, if we observe that when there's unpleasantness in the body, there's a tensing against it. And it's not just the body tensing, the mind tenses against it with the ideas that I don't like this, there's something wrong, I want to get rid of this. And for most of us, this emotional pain, this mental pain, is more difficult than the physical. It's what's most asking for our attention when we talk about how do we work with pain. And I'm going to emphasize it a bit as part of this talk because it feels so important.

I can speak personally again on this a lot and let's say last week a new pain in one of my shoulders. And immediately the alarm, I mean, it was not a terrible pain. You know, it was some torquing and some soreness, some tugging. It wasn't terrible. But immediately, what does it mean? What's happening? What if it doesn't go away? The worst part is what if I can't keep swimming?

Because swimming is my salvation. It's one of the ways I keep myself feeling good. What if I can't lift things? So a lot of fear. And again, the sensations themselves totally, you know, I could be with them. But we know how it goes that you can have a headache and feel dizziness and go, oh my gosh, what if I have a brain tumor? Are some stomach aches that starts getting chronic and, you know, colon cancer.

It's like so quickly. We know that we're all going to die of something and we so quickly go from unpleasant sensations to worst-case scenario. So this, when we talk about pain times resistance, this is the resistance that most creates suffering. And of course the flip of the equation is pain times no resistance means no suffering. So it becomes really important to look at how we can meet the physical and emotional pain that comes up with the wings of presence, with, we'll use rain because that brings in compassion

and mindfulness so that we don't get stuck in the resistance that keeps us small, oppressed, and disconnected from our life. a story that I'll share on this that struck me, and this was a woman I met with years and years ago, and the story stayed with me. She had rheumatoid arthritis and I met her when she was in her early 60s and she had been a dancer, taught dancing, now very limited movement and a lot of unpleasantness going on in her body. And every time, every time, she had every time she would feel any sort of a streak of pain, you know, that tightness and so ness of the joints and so on, it was a trigger.

It just catapulted her right into, what have I done wrong? You know, because the body's attacking herself. You know, she felt punished and she felt ashamed like I'm not a full person. She was also angry at God, you know. And the fear was, how much worse is this going to get? So this is a primo example of ongoing physical pain, turning regularly into emotional pain and suffering. And her identity was in prison. She was identified as a sick person, a sick person.

And she felt like she wasn't really living her life, she was on the sidelines. This is a comment that anyone that's faced real illness might be familiar with how when we get sick, our sense of who we are shrinks into sick person, our world gets smaller. We forget our connection to something larger. So I shared with her the quote that I love from John O'Donohue that our body knows we belong to life, to love, to awareness. Our body knows that it's our mind that makes us so homeless. Because so clearly her mind was making her homeless. It was disconnecting her. And she was doing what she could medically. And by the way, on any of this, it's important

that we do what we can do medically to relieve pain. The big question is, can we also be with what's here. So we practiced rain together. You know, she'd describe how pain would trigger her. She'd feel that stiffness, the swelling of the joints, fatigue, sometimes redness of her skin, and it would just trigger her. And the recognize of rain was, okay, feeling fear, feeling anger. And then the A of rain, allow was, okay, just let that be here in the other. other words, not try to get away from anything that's going on. The eye of rain, which is investigate. She knew the belief, I'm failing. This is bad. I have a terrible future. So she could recognize those thoughts with the investigating and then open and investigate into her body. In other words,

choose some presence and this is over time. And she could feel the fear as this sore, gripping, feeling in her chest, contact it. And she just started practicing, breathing with it, feeling it, breathing with it. And what would happen, what came up pretty quickly, was a huge undercurrent of grief, the grief of loss. And then she knew what she needed to do for nurturing, and of rain as nurture. And as soon as she'd start grieving and feeling that loss, you know, she'd just like the image of a parent holding a child, she would hold herself and she put two hands on her heart and just as I'm beginning to rock, she kind of did that and would just say, I'm here and I care. I'm here and I care. And when she say that to her herself and she had

repeated number of times. It helped her to start resting more and more in the compassionate space that was holding the child. In other words, she enlarged. She was inhabiting a larger space of compassion and the unpleasant sensations were still there, even the currents of the fear about her future. But she was just larger, there was more room. I think of that line and if you trust you're the ocean, you're not so afraid of the waves. She was more inhabiting that sea of being. She wrote to me after some months she was working on her own with this, bringing rain to the pain and the emotional pain. She said, I used to move really gracefully on earth. And now I have more grace in my heart and spirit. I've loved myself back to grace.

and I love that. I kept it, I wrote it down. Grace is non-resistance when there's not resistance to the flow. That's what grace is. And we find grace in our lives when we stop controlling, avoiding, tensing against judging, whether it's physical or emotional pain. So for her, the critical moment to kind of open into that grace, was the nurturing. We really need to be able to nurture ourselves when we get caught in that

emotional reaction to pain. We need to be able to say, this is hard. It really helps to say that, you know, ouch, this is hard. It's hard to be with. And some part of us, if we can just register that our being is struggling, we'll get kinder. Okay. So this is a an example of when we're facing pain and the actual suffering is because of our interpretation, our beliefs, what we're adding on. I want to take a little time now looking how do we be with physical pain. And again, we take care as best as we can. We do what we can. With my shoulder, I was, you know, rubbed a lot of arnica on and one point some ibuprofen and I'm working with a PT and so on. We do what we can. And when it comes up through the day, because it's still here,

I'm having to just be with. So how do we be with? So the first step as we've been talking about is just notice if our mind is judging and making it bad. So if there's mental resistance, become aware of it, bring it into awareness. But then direct presence with the experience itself. many, it's helpful to let go of the label pain and just get curious and gently ease into the actual moving constellation of sensations. You know, it's moving from that fixed concept to a changing reality because pain still has that sense of an enemy. So we feel the moving sensations.

And you can feel the sensations, you can feel right into the center of the the sensations, I find it really helpful to sense the space inside the sensations that they're emerging from and that takes a real stillness and a presence and an openness to feel the space around the sensations. This is all with care and with interest. What's it really like? How is this changing? So you start discovering this presence that has room for the changing.

in constellation. You start sensing like, okay, this belongs. This is just part of experience. And when there's space for it and there's kindness, it comes and goes but it doesn't cause suffering. Now it's interesting that there's growing science on how we're in relationship to pain. And there's been several double-blind studies and that when we, instead of resisting, we soften and open to the unpleasant We have actually greater access to our immune system. The immune systems were active in bringing energy to the area of injury. So I think that's just interesting to know. It also helps us physically to not resist.

A friend of mine, this is many, many years ago, had psoriasis on both of his arms and he did an experiment of softening and bringing presence and loving kindness to one of the arms and he says after some weeks the surrius has disappeared on that arm. Now this is an N of one and who knows but I think it's an interesting story. Okay so this is being with unpleasantness, how we just agree to it and open to it and feel into it. But then what if it's strong? You know, what if it's throwing us off balance, whatever we're getting fatigued being with it. And then it's very useful to do what's called pendulating, which is going back and forth from the difficult area to another part of your body or something else you're aware of

that isn't difficult, that's neutral or pleasant. It might be a part of your body where there's no pain, like maybe your hands or your eyes or your lips. So you kind of go to that place and then rest and breathe and then come back and touch in to where it's unpleasant and then go away again. And so you find some balance of going back and forth, some more space in going back and forth. So those are two ways of working with unpleasantness when it's very tolerable or when we need a bit of a break and we want to go back and forth. I'd like to invite you just for a few moments to check it out.

to, if you like to, close your eyes or let your gaze be downcast. And then scan through your body. Just scan and sense, is there any area that is calling for attention that has unpleasant sensations? Now if something's really overwhelming right now, this is not a time to practice with pain. You might pay attention to your breath or to sound, whatever is helpful. But if you sense a part of your body where it's particularly tight or sore or aching, you might let the attention go there.

And you might sense what happens when you bring an interest, what's it really feel like? And put aside some notion of pain and just sense, okay, unpleasant sensations, and you might even name it, just say unpleasant. then let the attention sink in some. If it helps to breathe with the area, breathe, very gentle, if you're feeling the sensations, what are they like? Is this squeezing or twisting heat, pressure? What does it feel like? And if it's a cluster and you can feel into the center, you might feel right into the center of it. And you might even explore where it's most intense,

sensing if you can feel the space and sense of space that the sensations are arising from, like particles of an atom arising from empty space. And perhaps you can also feel the space around the constellation of unpleasantness. Just soften into that space too. And if it feels in some way really strong, really difficult to be with, you might pendulate, go back and forth, perhaps feeling your hands, or even listening to the sounds outside, resting there and when you're ready, just feeling in, touching into the area of unpleasantness, perhaps still aware of this other neutral or pleasant area and then moving away again.

so you wide in the field. Either way you might sense what does it really mean to be meeting what's here without resistance, letting it belong. You might take a few full breaths, bring yourself back. Okay, so we've looked at how we work with the emotional pain that we add on to unpleasantness and then directly how to work with unpleasant sensations. If the sensations are too much, and I started mentioning this as I was guiding you, if they're just overwhelming, it's not wise or kind to try to be with them. It actually can traumatize, it can end up having us feel more in prison, more stuck. So these are times where we start learning what are the ways that we can turn our attention that actually give us some space,

some healing, some comfort. And similarly, if it's emotional pain and it's too much, we move away. We turn the attention away. So for some it's going to be literally if we're sitting still, maybe moving and walking and grounding on the earth, it may be having a cup of tea or calling someone. In some way we're reconnecting with a larger field that feels safe that gives us a sense of belonging, some comfort. I heard a story, this is from the Director of Minds, which where they bring meditation to students and parents in the DC area. And they were doing this in the inner city and teaching about resilience. And a little girl who was taking the trainings said that when she got upset she started learning how to put her hand on her dog's

heart. And I just thought that was so beautiful, you know, that we find our way to some resource, some place of resourcefulness, and then that will give us the space, the presence, to be with what we need to be with. There's a story that Frank Osteskeskeskes tells, he's the founder of Zen Hospice, that I share a lot because it has been a real, uh, teaching for me. And he describes how he was with a man who was dying of colon cancer, I think it was. And the man asked him to guide him in a meditation. And so Frank was, you know, with the same intention of being with what's there without resistance and clearly it was too much pain for this man. And so Frank put his hand on the man's belly and the man said,

oh, that helps. That helps. But still too much to be with. I can't stay with this. And so Frank put his hand a few inches away from the man's belly. And the man said, better. There's more space, but still, it feels like a lot. And he put his hand a little further away. And the man said, ah, that's just right. And then after a few moments, the man said, rest in love. Just rest in love. This is not Frank saying that. This is this man who's on a morphine pump and he couldn't directly penetrate into his sensations, but he could find some more space around it. It's a relationship with pain. Rest in love. Wow. To me that's pretty much an answer to most everything. So, I mentioned Emil, who is a very lovely, bright, good-hearted person that I spoke with at

Satsun, and who was going through some real kind of crisis with aging and sickness, a loss of his spiritual life, doubt. I asked Emil, I said, what are you most missing? you know, what is it that you wish you could be in touch with? And I said, try to remember, try to imagine, imagine what you're wishing to be in touch with. And he started imagining into it, the sensations of aliveness and the taste of what it's like to feel a kind of communion really with the beloved, with God, the aliveness, the vibration, the light. And as he talked about it, I watched his expression changed. I watched

him, you know, really open. And so then we explored how, yes, it's hidden from view when his mind closes in and his body's having a hard time, but it's here. And his path now is to start trusting that it's here and finding his way there regardless of the state of his body. that this loving awareness he belongs to is already always present and that his longing, just the longing, if he pays attention to it, like what am I really longing for? He can imagine himself into it. He can feel himself into it. And that can make space for this living, dying, body, and life. Okay, friends, we're coming down the home stretch here. And I want to say that there are times when no matter what we do, we are trapped, we are

imprisoned in really bad pain. There are times like that for many of us. And I can say for most teachers I've talked to, there are times that doesn't matter what, trying to let go of resistance, trying to open to presence, turning towards loving awareness, nothing is working. It's just another struggle. It's another kind of resistance. And all that's left is in some way to give up, to just surrender, to give up the struggle

because there's some wisdom in us that knows it is impermanent. The weather systems of pain are impermanent and that all that's left is really letting it happen. That's the wisdom, including the reflex to resist it happening, letting that happen too. And what we find with surrendering is that for a while it's just awful and it's endurance. And then gradually there's a sense that there's some witnessing going on. There's some awareness that's aware of surrendering. And then gradually there's more and more space and we start coming home again to presence.

But sometimes there's nothing to do but just give up, let go. And there's a secret about practice that I want to share which is it's so natural to, and it's universal to pull away from unpleasantness. It's the reflex of our nervous system. So the bottom line is to forgive these bodies for being as they are, to accept how they are, to not make nature wrong, and to trust that are aware of that. that our awareness also has the capacity over time to wake up and to learn to meet our edge and soften, to sense that unpleasantness and soften and open instead of resist.

You can learn that and it's a gateway to freedom. It's a gateway to being able to then respond to your life in a way that's really filled with care. What I'd like to do is read a poem or it's kind of a mini essay that I share often because it serves so well and you might again let your attention go inward and just sense that this is completely addressed to you. So come inside yourself, feel your breath, feel your body sitting here. I am the pain in your head, the not

in your stomach, the unspoken grief and your smile, I'm your high blood sugar, your elevated blood pressure, your fear of challenge, your lack of trust. I am your symptoms, the causes of your concern, the signs of imbalance, your condition of dis-ease. 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, slink back into obscurity. You mostly are irritated or frightened and many times shocked by my arrival. From this stance you medicate in order to eradicate me.

Ignoring me, not exploring me, is your preferred response. So I implore you. I am a messenger with good news, as disturbing as I can be at times. I am wanting to guide you back to those tender places in yourself. 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 bonds and wounds of your relationships.

I may remind you to be more generous and expansive, or to attend to protecting your heart from insult. I might have you laugh more, spend more time in nature, eat when you're hungry, and less when pain or bored, spend time every day if only for a few minutes being still. I am your friend, not your enemy. I have no desire to bring pain and suffering 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 enlivenge your higher instincts

for self-care. You are 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 most. mysterious core of your being where insight and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart. You might keep your attention inward and just sense how one of the great gifts of embodied presence of meeting unpleasantness without resisting as we can listen to our life and respond to our life, care for our life. And we actually have the intuition and compassion

to then extend that care to others. Another gift in opening to the aliveness of body sensations is it opens us to the formless presence. It's the source of our being. You might right now just feel the sensations that are here. Feel the sensations as aliveness. particles of aliveness of energy arising from space dissolving into space, an expression of formless essence. You are being so vast, so complex, with amazing capacities for self-regulation and healing. That may be one of the harbingers that lead you to the mysterious core of your being. insight and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart.

Okay, as you're ready, friends, to open your eyes if they're closed. So thank you for being on this journey, on this path together, and I hope you find in the days and weeks to come that the interest in care will bring you more and more away. in these bodies and more and more in touch with that formless and loving spirit that really is our essence. Namaste friends, thank you so much for being here. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.