Tara Brach - Part 2 - Do You Make Regular Visits to Yourself?

Episode Date: September 21, 2011

2011-09-21 - Part 2 - Do You Make Regular Visits to Yourself? - These two classes cover the basic instructions for Buddhist mindfulness (vipassana or insight) meditation. The first class explores the attitude we bring to meditation that makes it rewarding, and the training that helps us in "coming back" from thoughts. The second class guides us in "being here," in cultivating a mindful awareness that recognizes and accepts what is happening in the present moment. Both classes include guided meditations and valuable reminders that can support you in developing a rich meditation practice. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

Our last class was on the basics of meditation, and this one is the next round. And as I mentioned, in recent years, I've been teaching meditation differently. And whereas in the old days, I had a primary emphasis really on technique. How do we do this? What I've found is that far more important

and then technique, then skillfulness, then the how-to, is the quality of our heart, our attitude, and how we approach it. I found that over the years, this has been decades and decades now, that unless you like to meditate, you won't keep doing it. I know that sounds really like, okay, duh. But I love meditating. And I've gone through phases where I've done it in a kind of type A way. But even then, there was underneath that

a profound interest in coming into presence and understanding the nature of reality. And this part of me that just something in me knew that life would be more rich and full if I could be here more. You know, that kind of simplicity. If we go at meditation and there's a tension

and there's a sense of should, on some level it's going to feed the part of us that can easily feel like we're falling short. Once again, we're not meeting a standard. It's such a pervasive suffering in us that, please, if you can bypass that one and approach meditation as this incredible gift to your own soul,

this way of coming home and you can go at it in whatever creative way helps you to want to pause for a little bit of time or a lot of time and sense what's here in this moment. That's simple. So we meditate so that all of life becomes real life. And that's why we practice. It's not so that we can have a, it's not the kind of church on Sunday thing where we're just getting, you know, doing our time in the morning and then on to regular stuff.

I remember hearing that Suzuki Roshi was once asked by a student what, you know, what he suggested a Zen practitioner do with his spare time. So Suzuki first looked really perplexed and then he repeated the phrase spare time. And he repeated again a few times, and then he began to laugh uproarously. There was no answer to the question. You know, it's like, we're not meditating for any other reason so that all the moments of our life come alive. You might remember that last week I shared that phrase from Rumi, do you make regular visits to yourself?

Remember that phrase? Do you make regular visits to yourself? to yourself. So we'll continue in that inquiry that we practice, we do formal practice. We set aside time for formal practice because it gets us in the habit of making regular visits to ourselves. So as I mentioned, we begin often, and I really encourage you to do this, even if you're coming into stillness only for three or four minutes, just remind yourself of your intention. It's amazing. Just even if you say it in a rote way, okay, my intention is to be present, something in you remembers and gets a little moist or tender.

Okay, yeah, that matters. Just ask yourself what you care about. Set your intention or in a way it's called aspiration when it's deeper and wider, when it's like I really, really want to wake up. I want to know who I am. I want to open this heart so that I can. can be with others and not hold back my love. You know, that remember what matters. So you begin with that and the sign of remembering is you'll feel a kind of sincerity.

And sometimes it takes a little bit. You have to kind of say, well, what matters? And then just wait a little and listen. And you might come up with something wrote. And as I said, that helps a little. Listen a little more. And it drops deeper and deeper. So we begin with that.

we begin by remembering that we're doing this as a way of coming home. So interest, care, relaxed. I'm hoping you'll remember those three words if I say them enough. Interest. I'm interested in what's going on right here. I care about this life. I care about this moment. And relax. Let me relax with what's happening. Okay? So we begin with that

and then we're going to begin practicing and somehow rather we have to land. We have to get here because generally we're if we look at how we move through our day and this is when we're in what I call a trance where we're not fully here

there's a few flags of trance. One of them is we've left our body. You know if you watch yourself through the day you'll find that you're not really inhabiting this what the Buddha calls this fathom long body. You're not aware of your hands from the inside. Are you right now? You're not aware of your feet from the inside, not aware of this body's aliveness. So we tend to leave this body. We tend to

speed up. Not everyone. Sometimes when we're in trance, we slow way down. It goes and we're going to freeze, but a lot of us speed up. And we tend to judge. We tend to be evaluating moment, moment by moment how that person is and how we are and what should happen and what shouldn't happen. We just do that a lot. So we have to land by coming back into this body and slowing down a little, letting go of some of the judgment and just waking up our senses. So it's kind of, you know, earth calling Earth, landing, I'm here, you know, just getting here, getting here. So we spend perhaps a little bit of time getting here. And you'll notice when I

lead you in the meditation, I'll spend a longer period of time just to give you the sense of what it's like to listening to the sounds, listening to and feeling the sensation, sometimes scanning through the whole body, getting here. Then the training in formal meditation, I usually have two labels for it. One part, part is coming back because we leave. So we just keep practicing, coming back, coming back. And the other part's getting the knack of staying here, a really deepening presence, learning to stay. So what happens is that we start practicing coming back. We have a home base that we pre-establish so we can have something to come back too. And for many of us it's the breath, but also it's quite fine for your home base to

be the whole feeling of your body sitting here. That's a really good home base. It's a little broader. It's not as precise and refined. If your home base is the breath, your attention can get sometimes more refined and precise. If your home base is sound, your attention might get more open. There's different flavors to each home base. But experiment. Find something that helps you to get here. So we keep coming back and what we notice because the mind is so busy is that goes off a lot in thoughts. And so a lot of the training in formal practice, what we're getting the knack of is just noticing, oh, in thought, that's a virtual reality. Nothing wrong with it. And as I'll mention, there's a lot we need about it, but it's not here. It's thought. I mean, thinking's

happening here, but it's about something else. So we train ourselves to notice thinking and be back in this heerness over and over again. And it's a gentle training. In fact, if there's any judgment in noticing thoughts and coming back from them, even if you've been thinking the whole meditation and you think you deserve judgment. You don't. It's sometimes the best metaphor is as if we're training a puppy. And, you know, the puppy goes off and does stuff

and we say, come back, come back, sits at. You know, the puppy will go off to the corner of the room and pee, right? Well, our minds do worse. I mean, the minds have no shame, you know. And if we're training a puppy in a way that's effective. We're not going to be heavy-handed.

Gentle. Come back, come back. Some of you might remember there was this necklace I saw. It had a bone on it. And the words on it were sit, stay, heal. So we learn that way. Come back, come back.

So now there's a question that comes up when I give these guidelines, which is, but we need to think. You know, how can we go through our day, go through our jobs, go through, you know, relating with our family, et cetera, and not be thinking. We can't just all be with the breath

or how can we live our life that way? So just to say we can't, and that's not the point. That's not the point. I mean, thinking is one of, nature's creative wonders. And, you know, we wouldn't, we can't survive and we can't thrive without thinking. You have to think to write a poem or to build a building or you have to think to

design a garden or plan a business strategy or to have a meaningful conversation with your child or your partner. You have to think. And I spent hours of thinking when I'm putting together talks, hours. So it said that the mind secretes thoughts like the body secretes enzymes. It's just a part of it's a part of our life. So the problem is not thinking. The problem is being lost in thought so that we have no sense of what's right here.

And because our thoughts are so often fear-based, and I invite you to stop in the midst of thinking and find out, is this actually a useful, helpful thought? or is this kind of really turning through because of fear because there's so much fear energizing our thoughts, when we're lost in thought, we're really identified with what's called the fear body or the body of fear.

Does that make sense? So what happens is we spend huge swaths of our time, you know, in this kind of familiar cocoon of thinking, and a lot of its worry, thoughts, kind of planning as if something is going to go wrong, rehearsing, judging. And what happens is that we get identified with the thoughts, and that's our body state,

and our whole sense of who we are becomes small. So again, the problem's not thinking, and the point's not to eliminate thoughts. The training is to become aware of thoughts so we can choose, really, what's going on. So we can say, yes, I want to continue to explore this through concepts are, come back here, be with the breath,

be with the body, be with what's right here. We can use thoughts wisely. I share a good friend of mine, another teacher, Wes Nisker, says this, and this is about his relationship with his mind. He says, we're still friends and we still live together,

but I'm no longer codependent. The evolutionary thrust of thinking is to anticipate what's going to go wrong to fix things. When that takes over our sense of self there's no access to presence we're just living in this perpetual worry machine so we choose to come back because we intuit that as much as thinking is valuable the only way we can experience viscerally experience

love and the only place that we can really discover the source of our creativity, see truly the nature of reality is when we're fully present. That's why we choose to come back over and over, because we know that presence is really the source of everything we cherish. So we do this forgetting process, as I mentioned, and when we do, we start getting it that when we're lost in thought, it actually causes a lot of suffering. We start seeing that when we go into trance, if we're sick, our mind fixates on how we're never going to get better and how something really terrible is happening inside us. If there's a relationship breakup, we fixate on how we're damaged goods in some way. You know, it's just, the mind just goes and goes.

If there's a conflict with someone else, our mind gets riveted on blame and on resentment and cycling through that. You know, if we've been trying to diet and we break the diet, it's we're in this, in our mind, we're in this spiral into being huge and everybody in the world seeing us a certain way. Our minds are really, really, you know, they terrorize us. And so we have to find a way out. And they create distance from others.

When we're lost in our thoughts, our fear thoughts, we can't really see who's here. One of my favorite little stories, I'll read you about a, century or two ago, the Pope decided that all the Jews had to leave Rome, and naturally there was a big uproar from the Jewish community. So the Pope made a deal. He would have a religious debate with a member of the Jewish community, and if the Jew won, the Jews could stay. If the Pope won, the Jews would leave. The Jews realized they had no choice, so they picked a middle

age man named Moisha to represent them, and Moisha asked for one addition to the debate. To make it more interesting, neither side was allowed to talk. The Pope, The Pope agreed. Okay, the day of the great debate came, and the Pope sat opposite each other for a full minute before the Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. Moisha looked back at him and raised one finger. The Pope waved his fingers in a circle around his head, and Moisha pointed to the ground where he sat. The Pope pulled out a wafer and a glass of wine.

Moisha pulled out an apple. The Pope stood up and said, I give up. This man is too good. The Jews can stay. an hour later the cardinals were all around the pope asking him what had happened the pope said well first i held the three fingers to represent the trinity he responded by holding up one finger to remind me that there was still one god common to both religions then i waved my fingers around me to show him that god was all around us and he responded by pointing to the ground showing that god was also right here with us now i pulled out the wine and wafer to show that god absolves us from our sins he pulled out an hour to remind me of original sin. He had an answer for everything. What could I do?

Meanwhile, the Jewish community had crowded around Wisha. What happened? They asked. Well, he said, first the Pope said to me that the Jews had three days to get out of here, and I told him that not one of us was leaving. He told me that this whole city would be cleared of Jews, and I let him know

that we were staying right here. Yes, yes, and then asked the crowd, I don't know, said Moisa, he took out his lunch and I took out mine. So this is just a bit of a teaching on what happens when communications are going. We have these ideas about things. How much do they match reality, you know? For many years, I had a T-shirt. I actually gave away to one of our auctions and it said,

meditation, it's not what you think. So it's a gift, as I mentioned. a gift to our soul to be able to learn to be able to pause, to stop to sense, oh, virtual reality. And then we sense, is this valuable? Or is this in some way reaffirming a separate self, a deficient self, a bad other? We start to have that wisdom to discriminate. So these are the first pieces of our meditation training.

To land here, to kind of establish some sort of a home base. and to keep coming back so we get to sense the difference between being here and being in a world of concepts, of ideas. Just to know the difference gives you some freedom. So now we turn to the next major piece.

If one of the pieces of the training is coming back, the next one is being here. And being here is another word for a mindful awareness. It's an unconstitutional. unconditional presence. One of the metaphors, I think, is useful is if you imagine that this first part of coming back

is kind of taking a camera and you're adjusting the focus to get right here, you're bringing everything together, collecting it in the focus, clarifying the focus. If that's concentration and coming back to your home base, taking the picture is mindfulness. So mindfulness is actually knowing

what's happening. happening. It's that awareness that knows. And the definition, if you want a definition that I think will probably serve you the best with mindfulness, it's that mindfulness is, this is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, okay, that's the first part, paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience, moment to moment. So on purpose, in this present moment, without judgment, to the unfolding of experience. And there's two facets that I find that if we just keep remembering, that's all we really need,

is that as we're paying attention, we're recognizing what's happening. It's that question, what is happening inside? Recognizing. And the other facet is allowing. that we're not just recognizing what's happening, there's a space for it. A mindful awareness does not oppose or interfere or judge or do anything to mess with what's right here.

It just allows. It's space. There's recognizing that's wakefulness and space. Okay? So the given is that our conditioning is not to rest in a mindful awareness. we are highly conditioned when anything comes up to have a reaction to it. And if it's pleasant our reaction, like we're trying to hold on to it,

if it's unpleasant, we're pushing it away. We don't just go, oh, recognizing, you know, sharp stabbing into my lower back. Oh, wow. You know, it just doesn't, you know, it's not like that. So, again, a story that has helped me and many people and deepening our sense of, well, how does mindfulness, work. And this is, some of you might have seen the movie Gorillas in the midst. And I, and I refer to it often because the background to it is that George Scheler was a

primate biologist who went in to watch these, went into the wilds. And he got from his expeditions more intimate and compelling information about gorillas than any of the past generations of biologists and researchers had been able to do. None of the scientists had gotten it. He could give detail, remarkable detail about tribal structure and family life and the intimate habits of the gorilla. And he attributed all to one thing how he was able to do this. He didn't carry a gun.

All the previous generations of scientists had gone into the wilds. He's rifle-toating men. And these gentle creatures, these gorillas in some way picked up their fear or their aggression or something and did not make themselves available. They stayed hidden. And I think that's so interesting. I mean, this is real. We're very connected with other creatures and with our inner creatures.

What happens when we carry a gun? I found this story about how the... Gorillas allowed him in, and then in the, in gorillas in the midst, Diane Fossey, one of his students, was able to do the same thing, sit amongst the grillas and learn their ways. So this story captures the spirit of mindfulness that we're paying attention with interest. Okay, real interest. What's going on inside here? And with care, we're not carrying a gun.

There's a kind of relaxed quality. You heard the three again? Right? Interest, care, relaxed. That is really, that's the atmosphere that allows us to wake up, that allows us to find healing and freedom, this being here. So I often think of our inner life as a kind of wilderness. And there's all parts of our being, there's inner weather,

there's these vulnerable parts of us, I sometimes call it the unlived life, the parts of us that we have and yet fully open to. And they won't come into the light of consciousness unless these qualities are present. Okay? The parts of us that we have not yet been with unless there's a really caring, non-judging presence. So what happens often when we begin to touch these, when we begin to touch the kind of restlessness in our body. You know, if you stop in the middle of your day, if you're in your busyness, and you all of a sudden

say, okay, just stop for a moment. Okay? And you check your body. You'll find that stopping is really uncomfortable. And if you keep just stopping, you'll find that there's a kind of a push to keep moving and a restlessness and an anxiety. Like if you don't keep doing, you're doing something. something bad's going to happen.

So we do a lot to cover over that kind of primal anxiety that comes from feeling separate and vulnerable and not okay. And we each have our strategies. I mean, some of us race around like crazy busy. Others of us, you know, do a lot of that kind of self-numbing with food or substance. We have many ways of distracting ourselves. often share the story of the man and the woman sitting in the living room and he's telling his wife, you know, if I ever get into a vegetative state, please pull the plug, at which point she goes over to the TV set and yanks the plug. And I love that because how many of us are completely plugged in?

I mean, how many screens do we have nearby? You know, we do. We are really hooked. So the primary way we leave, we kind of get away from this, is that we start obsessing. And our minds are very much addicted to obsessive thinking. And often it's about how others are perceiving us, what we need to do to have others perceive us in a certain way. We're self-conscious creatures and how are we doing in the world, dis-evaluating this judging. I read you from Pema Children.

She says being preoccupied with our self-image. It's like being deaf and blind. It's like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with a black hood over our heads. It's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs. I read that because I think that's such a powerful teaching. that when we're in our obsessive thinking, it's like our eyes and our ears are blocked

to the life that's right here. And we block out that restlessness, but what else do we block out? We block out a sense of who else is here. And we block out underneath that restlessness, our capacity for a presence and a love and a creativity that's really part of our innate nobility. It's part of who we are.

But we block it out. So the pathway home that we train in is to come back and to have this intention, not because we're doing a formal training, but because we want to be with our life, to stay, to put down the rifle, to simply notice what's happening. Now, the training has different domains to it,

And in classical Buddhist teachings, the way we start is with the training of the physical sensations in the body. And the understanding is that if you can be with the sensations, the aliveness that's here, then you can open to the emotions that build on that aliveness that are, that's the aliveness is the essence of them. You can discover the thoughts that are going on when you leave. you can be really with this whole realm of experience. So we start with the body. And then we build in that training as part of our practice, learning to get very familiar with different emotional states.

And then we widen it to including the different types of thoughts and thought processes. So we begin with the body, and the Buddha taught that this entire world exists within, this fathom long body, that we can learn the whole Dharma, everything about suffering and freedom from suffering, if we can bring this mindful awareness to aliveness, to the liveliness in the body. And so we begin to practice. I like reading from John O'Donohue. He says, our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. Our bodies know that they belong. And he says, it's our minds that make our life so homeless.

So our bodies know that they belong. So we begin to take refuge in our body, bring mindful attention to our body, and we'll practice that now, just this first foundation of mindfulness as a way of homecoming. What I'd like to invite you to do as a way of practicing is to practice standing up.

So if you will, to come standing up and find a way of standing so your feet are apart in a way that gives you a comfortable sense of balance and just let your body move around a little bit without knocking into anybody else just so that you can kind of stretch out and move a little and feel your muscles and tendons and breathe that's it good and then when you come into stillness close your eyes as you feel yourself standing here, feel the feet and let the feet widen. Just feel a sense of the feet widening without moving at all, just from the inside out. Feel the feet widening.

And just start feeling your connection to the earth. As if there's roots that go deep into the earth, earth energy coming up into your feet. And as you're standing, you might soften the backs of your knees. Okay, feel the backs of your knees and soften. And then taking one hand and putting that hand on your belly, the other hand on your sacrum, see if you can soften your belly. It's like a two-year-old, an undefended belly. You know, we repeatedly contract, and so it helps to soften in the belly over and over.

See what that feels like. Belly is where we really digest life experience. Soffening the belly, keeping your palms there, you might invite your tailbone to to relax towards the ground. It might just be a small movement. Soft belly. Now very slowly allow your palms to float back down

towards your sides. Very slowly. Relax the back of your neck and the occipital ridge right at the base of the skull. So it's just a mental suggestion of lengthening. You might notice the chin going parallel to the ground.

Sense that your palms are floating in space, opening to all your senses. Where are sounds, listening, aware of smells, if you could sense, fragrance, whatever's around you. It's very receptive. And listening to and feeling the sensations in your body. So that when you open your eyes,

just open them up enough so that you can gently find your way to sitting down but move very, very slowly and mindfully, feeling the movement as you step back and as you lower yourself again to your chair. And then close your eyes and find with subtle movement your way of sitting so that you're sitting in a very sensitive way that you can be alert. The spine is tall and that there's any re-relaxing. that's helpful, softening the shoulders, the hands. And as you come into stillness, feel the radical aliveness of the body.

So you're out sitting very, very still, but everything is moving. Being aware of vibration, tingling, places of hardness or pressure, places of flow. you might explore imagining this. Imagine that you're an enlightened being, a Buddha, Jesus, Kuan Yin, the Bodhisattva of compassion,

awareness that's wide open, awake, free, loving. Just imagine that. Experiening world, life around you, within you. And take some moments to attend now, specifically attend, to the life inside your body. Just sense what it's like. You're an enlightened being. Just receiving the life of this body.

Sense what it's like. Pleasantness, unpleasantness, tingling, vibrating, flow, letting everything happen just as it is. Sometimes we get surprised that we can imagine being an awakened being. And yet that's our essence. So continuing to meditate,

we practice in this very simple way, mindfulness of sensations, just to recognize what's happening and in some way allow it. For some people, it's helpful to imagine bowing to whatever's predominant. You might notice tightness in the shoulders, and you might even name it tightness,

and then bow. You might notice a pressure in the small of the back, pressure, bow, or else you might say yes or this too. In some way recognizing and allowing what's here, you might sense heat. Ah, hot, hot. And again, bowing, saying yes. In this way for the next little bit of time to be mindful of the changing flow, recognizing and allowing, letting life live through you, paying attention on purpose and without judgment to this changing moment-to-moment experience. There is no controlling life. Try corraling a lightning bolt containing a tornado. Dam stream and it will create new channel. Resist and the tide will sweep you off your feet. Allow and grace will

carry you to higher ground. It's Danifolds. Take a few full breaths and let's come back together and we'll explore this a little. So this is the first foundation of practice that we begin to get some familiarity with simple presence with this changing flow of aliveness. And as we do, we begin to be able to find room for

the emotions that are built on this aliveness, the emotions of sad, happy, angry, depressed. So one of the things I've heard about Tibetan art, if you look at the temples or the tankas, mandalayas, there is this motif whereby in order to get to the center, in order to get to presence, to freedom, to liberation, you have to go through these animal-headed goddesses. You have to kind of enter through them. And that's the goddesses of, you know, the wrathful goddesses, the fearful ones, the angry ones, the jealous ones. And so it is with presence that sometimes we can come home and I'll say, just come back

to what's right here. And there'll be a delightful feeling of bubbliness or aliveness or sweetness. but often there's something angsty. We have to go through the animal-headed goddesses. We have to find a way to encounter and be with. And our habit is as soon as I've mentioned, as soon as we get even a glimpse, we usually go bicycling off in the different direction.

So I love this image that much in the way that we name and bow to the sensations that are coming up that we encounter, similarly when you encounter difficult emotions, fear, anger, hatred, jealousy, to be able to name it is the first step. The shaman say that to be able to name fear is the first step of not being in the trance of fear. If you can name something, you're not caught in it. And this speaks to what I call the magic of mindfulness.

And I just want to say in a few words, what it is about mindfulness that's not just something that relieves stress and helps our immune system, but something that actually serves spiritual freedom. And that is this, that when you're paying attention to sensations that are here, or when you're paying attention to strong emotions, and instead of reacting, you're staying present, what, happens is that your identity, your sense of who you are shifts. When we're reacting to sensations, if it's unpleasant and we're pushing it away, or when we're chasing after something, or when we're afraid and we're possessed by the fear, we become a wanting self, a fearful self, an angry self. In other words, our whole sense of our being contracts. When we are mindful of what's going on, when we notice it, the who we are begins to inhabit that which is noticing. So we enlarge from the reactivity of a small self to that space of

presence that includes what's going on. It's like an ocean includes the waves, but our sense of beings not confined to the reactivity. So that is the power of. It's a shift in identity that instead of fighting the animal-headed goddesses, by being present with them, we arrive in the presence that includes all the gods and goddesses and fears and loves and beauty and hatred. And we are that awareness that's more. We come home. So we'll be doing a final meditation in a few moments on this homecoming. But I just want to say that in a very immediate way, this capacity to pause and step out of trance enables us to establish a sense of relatedness to our world.

Every time we're reactive, we separate from others. One of the stories that's always moved me, we shared it just recently at a teaching some of you were at this weekend. And in the Army, they sometimes, if somebody has anger difficulties, they'll recommend a mindfulness-based stress reduction program for anger management. And one man had gone through this, this mindfulness program for anger management. And he was on leave, and he was at a supermarket. And he piled up his cart, got into line. It was not the express line, but the woman in front of him only had one item in her cart.

But there she was in his line. And not only that, she had a little baby, and when it was her turn, she passed the baby to the clerk, and they ooed and odd over the baby, and he started getting angry. You know, I'm an important guy. I have things to do.

I've got stuff I've got to get done. This is taking my time. And she went on and on, and he's sitting there with his whole pile of groceries. She's got one item. He realized he was getting angry, and he paused. Okay, the sacred art of pausing. And in that pause, he did just what we're talking about here.

He brought his attention inward and he started sensing, okay, so what's happening? Recognize, right? And what he recognized was underneath the anger was a sense of fear. I'm not going to get things done. And sometimes for many of us, not getting things done means failing. Okay. So he got in touch with that. And he said, okay, you know, there was some kindness to that.

and then he felt a sense of space, which is what happens when we bring presents to what's going on to the animal-headed goddesses. We become that presence. So he opened his eyes and looked through the eyes of presence, and he saw the child was cute. So when it was his turn, he said,

the woman left with the child. He said, you know, that little boy is really cute. And the clerk just, she beamed, she said, oh, that's my child. In fact, my husband, was in Iraq last year and he was killed and this is my mom and she watches the child for me and she brings him in each day so I have a chance to be with him and so as I share that just to say you know we might think well not everybody we're encountering has had such you know

has had such a tragedy but the truth is everyone we meet is struggling hard everyone we meet in some ways living with a body that goes and in the uncertainty of losing others and losing what we love. And what would it be like if instead of racing through to the end line, we learn to pause and come back. Come back. Okay, let's come back here. And what would it be like if we paused and came back and really just stayed. with what's here

enough so we could begin to look at each other and not look through the veil of trance but just see who's here. We'd have a different world and this is the promise in a way of a path of presence that we give ourselves this blessing of coming home

and being intimate with our inner life and also intimate with the world around us. And so it's with that kind of invitation that we sense okay practice matters and we want to establish a way of practicing so that we really can wake up our hearts and minds and not you know run away from it because it feels onerous and so I'll just mention a few things about that before our closing meditation and and one thing is as I've as I've said that our attitude if our attitude can be

quite simply okay I'm interested. You know, I care, relaxed. It makes all the difference in the world. And if we commit ourselves to sitting regularly, we get into this habit, this familiarity with what's right here. Familiarity with homecoming. My own experience was that I was in an ashram or spiritual community which supported me in practice so that for, you know, 12 years, I had a group. of people I could always sit with. But I left the ashram, the spiritual community, and immediately had a new child. And so there I was with a new child and no community. And, you know, my practice got a little shaky. And I remember at one point finally realizing that I really wouldn't

be happy unless I made more regular visits. And so I committed myself to stopping every day and practicing, this homecoming, no matter what. But I had a backdoor, and I want to tell you that so you can design your own practice like this, which was it didn't matter how long. Now, that's a really huge back door. And it's a little bit of a trick because I end up practicing pretty regularly.

You know, I practice 45 minutes an hour a day. Well, that's because it's really been so much a part of my life. But even when I don't have long, I'll say, okay, I can just practice for three minutes. And I'll sit down and, you know, just kind of quiet myself some. And sometimes that's all it is. Sometimes it's the end of a busy day. And I'll sit at the edge of my bed and I'll quiet down a little.

I'll feel my breath. And I'll just wish blessings to everyone and, you know, go to bed. But often it's not like that. As soon as I sit, something in me goes, oh, yeah. Okay. The breath. I'll feel the breath, and I'll just sense, oh, right, this matters. And then it kind of stay longer than I expected.

But the reason I bring this up is that, like all parts of this universe, rhythm matters in terms of our daily practice. And if you take some time each day to just have some space of homecoming, there's a part of you that will remember more and more often. and it'll start spreading through the day more. So it's just an invitation. And for some people, it's actually not the right strategy. It's a setup for feeling like you're not doing something right.

Put it aside. If that's the case for you, find your own way of really welcoming yourself to the practice. Because as I mentioned, it really is the most precious gift. So let's close with a bit of just sitting for a moment. Just be aware of this as yet another pause. And invite yourself into this moment. It helps to relax the body some.

And it helps to relax the heart. You might sense your own path, what matters to you in this life about waking up, about relationships, about freedom, about happiness. And sense for right now, whatever wish or intention most resonates for you around meditation practice. How you'd like to hold it, how you'd like to either deepen or experiment or open up your meditation practice. What will most support you in coming home to happiness, to peace, to freedom? Namaste.

The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to you'd like to like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.