Tara Brach - Part 2 - Embodied Spirit

Episode Date: September 26, 2012

2012-09-26 - Part 2 - Embodied Spirit - Our body--this changing field of sensation--is a portal into pure Being. These talks explore the resistance we have to embodied presence, the pathways that enable us to awaken through our bodies, and the blessings of realization that arise as we let go over and over into the aliveness of our senses. Part 2 specifically addresses the challenge of arriving in embodied presence when we are facing traumatic fear, and other intense and difficult emotions. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

Last class, we began a two-part series I'm calling Embodied Spirit. And the basic teaching is that to realize freedom in this life, the body needs to be the ground. And what I mean by that, which is that if you really want to have some understanding or realization about what's true, if you want to experience love, the aliveness of love, If you want to love life, serve life, then, and in the deepest way, you want to sense that spirit, that stillness or silence that's really underneath or behind it all. The portal is through this living body.

We really can't be here for our life if we're not awake in our bodies. So I like to often through the cycle of the year come back to how do we wake up right here in this very, as the Buddhist. said this fathom long body. And the challenge, as we know, is that as we begin to say, okay, I'm going to come into my body, there's this huge wash of intensity. Sometimes it's very pleasant, but sometimes it's very unpleasant. Like the weather, our emotional weather just can unfold in ways that are really difficult to be with. And in the most basic way, when we're really awake in our bodies, there's a sense. that in some way we really can't control life.

We're living it. But that's scary to us. We try to control things. So there's a lot of conditioning rather than really inhabiting our bodies, and you might just be trying it as I'm speaking, just to really occupy and inhabit this aliveness. There's a lot of conditioning to leave.

And I often liken it to being on a bicycle and the more stressed we are, the faster we paddle away from this present moment and away from this living body. So it's a way of trying to control what feels like too much. We all have our own strategies, but we're trying to control.

And what I'm mostly want to communicate is it's not personal. If we find that we live a lot in the trance of thinking, if we find that when I bring up the theme of embodied presence that we get that we're kind of living from here up or whatever it is, it's a very universal tendency to leave, really is. And yet the degree of how much we pull away,

how much we end up in the prison of the mind and really cut off from aliveness, that degree is what causes suffering. So we start intuiting that, if we want more intimacy in our life, we need to get more intimate with the life that's right here. We start intuiting that. We start intuiting that if we want to heal what I sometimes call the unlived life, and that's a term that Carl Jung used, you know, where the wounds are, you can't do it unless you do it through the body. You have to go to where in the flesh that contractions

living. So we start intuiting that to heal and wake up, We need to come back, but it's not so easy. And Western culture exacerbates the tendency. And I say that because in our Western culture, there's this, first of all, there's a sense of this incredible busyness that we kind of, our entire economy and our cultures about do more, produce more, be more. You know, it's, you know, the economy is absolutely hitched to ever higher levels of production. There's never enough. Well, what does that do to our psyche? It's never enough.

So we're pressing against time trying to get more done. There's always this sense of not enough time. Have you noticed that in your lives? How often that plays? There's not enough time, you know. I remember a cartoon with, you've got. in heaven and his angels handing them all these like feedback cards from from earthlings and each one saying well more time need more time the day oh not enough

time to get this done and he says and then he goes jeesh I know what I'll do different next time I heard a story about three construction workers who are standing in a row and they're in traffic and they're carrying signs and the first the first one's carrying this really big stop sign and the second one this one and it's carrying these flowers, and the sign says, smell the flowers. The third one is carrying a sign

that says, okay, resume tearing through your life like a maniac, you know. So we begin to sense how in our culture there's a sense of speed, how our culture is not about celebrating and knowing

we belong to the natural world as much as trying to control it to feed, greed and fear. So there's a lot of controlling and with our own bodies we over Medicaid and anesthetize and so on in ways that disconnect us

and we know it for our children. I mentioned last class how much our children are because of this virtual world that they're living in how disconnecting it is. The math teacher saw that little Johnny wasn't paying attention in class. She called in them and said,

Johnny, what are two, four, 28, and 44. Little Johnny quickly responded, NBC, CBS, HBO, on the cartoon network. So we can feel it with our kids. It's scary. I mean, this is not new. I, when my son was, you know, I wrote about this a lot because of the fear they came up and man, how much he was in front of a screen. You know, it disconnects us from the rhythms of life from birthing and dying that that becomes unnatural remember another story of a father and son walking on the beach and there was a dead seagull and the child was upset and he said what happened and the father said well he died and he went to heaven a little boy said did god throw him out you know why did god throw him back you know so there's that disconnection now now

What I'd like to explore more tonight is what happens when due to the wounds in our personal history, due to trauma, we really get cut off. Because often we talk about coming into our body and those that have a lot of trauma in their bodies find it's not only not so easy, it might not even be wise. Okay? So that's where we're going a little bit tonight. and share a story some of you remember I hope because it's one that I find really valuable I like going back into it

so I hope you do too if you've heard it and it's a Zen story and the lead character characters are a young woman Senjo and a young boy actually their girl and boy when they first meet Ocho and they lived right close together and played constantly together

San Jo and they played together very well. And the father enjoyed watching them play and he, you know, he would say, you know, someday you'd make a good match for each other. He said it kind of jokingly. But they took it to heart and grew to love each other well. And Senjo's mother had died when she was very young. So she was an only child. Well, when she came time to really get married, her father found her a match from a nearby village because they were, you know, a little, wealthier and he felt like it would be the best thing for her. And so he told her that this is what, he was a nice young man and this is what she was going to do. And she immediately broke down and

wept and became depressed. When the word passed around the village, Ocho heard about it and his breath stopped and his heart broke. Well, he couldn't speak. So that night he packed his few things and he kind of snuck down to a small boat and he was going to row downriver and leave the village forever and he saw a shadowy form in the woods and he had a feeling who it was and he called out San Jo and it was her

and she said I couldn't let you go I knew you were going to leave and I have to go with you and so she got into that boat with him and they left their town and left all they knew and went down river went down river a few days of travel and got out of their boat and found some land and set up their home there

and ended up having a few children and farming. One day, Ocho came into the house, found Senjo in the kitchen and she was weeping and he asked her what was wrong and she confessed that she missed their lives. He missed the village and all the extended family and she missed her father. And he confessed that he too was,

was missing their old life. And they decided together that they would go back. He said, you know, maybe your father will understand. Maybe he'll take us back in. We can have a family together. So they went back up the river those few days and rode back and got to where the dock was that was right by San Jo's home. And Ocho decided he better go first.

And he went up to the door and knocked. And father comes to the door. and he's looking very stern and Ocho says, Father, I've brought your daughter back, two fine grandchildren. Please forgive us for running away. And the father looked at Ocho. He was astounded and angry. And he said, I don't know what girl you're talking about.

Since the night you ran away, my daughter has been sick in bed and unable to speak. So Ocho said, no, no, she's in the boat with your two grandchildren. Please come see them. and father's absolutely not, but he said to the servant, you go see what's in that boat. So sure enough, he went there and there was Sanjo with two young children. He came running back and said, yes, it's true. It's true. They're there.

And the father shook his head, no. And he strode into the bedroom where Sanjo was lying and said, Ocho has come back with another Sanjo. And your two children. And her eyes opened in a new way that they had not in five years. And she stood up as if walking in a dream. and walked out the door where a father followed her and down the road and from the dock walking up towards her was the other Senjo

and they walked right to each other and they embraced and became one so they embraced became one returned to her father's home and they did make a family together so Senjo embraced and became free this is an old and traditional Zen story and it has many levels of it, the levels of a broken heart and grave choices,

levels of exile. It's a story of splitting. It's a story of when we can't handle what's happening, a part of us leaves. And it's not until there's that coming together that there's a sense of wholeness and freedom. Does that resonate for you? Does that?

Yeah. So we each have our ways of leaving presence and taking what I sometimes call false refuge, which just means it doesn't work. It's not bad. It's just we have ways of leaving that end up turning on us. And some of us numb ourselves. You know, we have ways of numbing ourselves through too much sleeping or food or alcohol, drugs. Some of us leave through judgment through a chronically judging mind, blaming. most of us through obsessive thinking. We just leave. And we disconnect from presence

and we go into the past or the future. And the Buddha called this being in a dream and most every spiritual tradition I know in some way describes that we are in some form of a trance or a dream. We're not here. And that really if you say, what is the spiritual path?

It's not going into a spirit that's in another world. it's coming back into this heerness and experiencing the full awareness and aliveness and love that's our nature when we're present. So how do we come back? How do we embrace the parts that have been too difficult at some point to embrace? And it might sound abstract when I say come back and become whole, but we know it.

I could to speak with any one of you and you'd say, I know when I get kind of lost and there's a sense of being cut off and I get tired because I'm not connected with my full energy and I know what it's like when my heart's kind of closed. We know all the flags of trance

when we're not resting in just a more open sense of ourselves and our life. We know when we get tight. Even when we're not struggling with a strong emotion we leave. We're very, inclined rather than to be here in some real presence to be trying to figure something out.

There's, and this is very much, you can see this very much in Western science, there's some ongoing restlessness in our system, the sympathetic nervous system in some way is being vigilant saying we've got to assess things, got to look for problems, around the corner there might be something I can't handle, got to be prepared, that's alive and will in these bodies. And so even when there's not some huge trauma we're dealing with, we still leave and we still are buzzing along trying to figure stuff out. It's like I share that telegram Jewish mom sends to her son,

you know, start worrying details to follow. So we know that, that we're kind of getting ready for something. And so in the last class on this, A lot of the training that I emphasized to come and really this embodied spirit was to notice when we're lost, this basic training and meditation that is precious. Notice when you're lost spinning out and thought. And again and again, a thousand times again, just come back to this hereness. And notice the difference between any thought you're in and the vividness and the vividness

and the aliveness and the mystery of right here. That's the basic training. So there's many ways we can support that. The way I like is to not just come back here, but reopen the senses. So that you can, right now, if you'd like just to close your eyes, I say open the senses, but it helps to close your eyes

because you can really pay attention to your experience a little more. When our eyes are open, we see forms and shapes, but we quickly associate into thoughts and ideas. So as a training, it's helpful to sometimes close your eyes. But if you really want to be awake on planet Earth, then we need to learn to meditate with our eyes open to.

But for now, so you close your eyes and you say, okay, wake up senses, let me just listen. You wake up and listen. Notice the sounds that are actually right here. And you might even sense to smell. Just let the senses of the gustatory senses be awake, taste, and the kinesthetic. Feel the aliveness in the body as we did with the guided meditation, this vibrating space.

This is the most basic pathway home. Wake up from the thoughts, come back to this living, vibrating world right here. And then the guidance is, and if it's difficult, we'd be. begin to learn to soften and with kindness and presence, open to that too. So the training is to say yes to this life. You might explore what that means right now, just to gently say yes to what's going on inside you. Whatever it is, pleasant, unpleasant.

And if the word yes in some way distracts you, it's an energetic yes. What does that mean for you? an energetic yes to the life that's right here. If you'd like just to take a nice full breath and open your eyes, that's fine. What we find is that if there's not a strong, unpleasant experience going on inside us, it can be an interesting adventure coming back home again. And if we learn to stay, as we might, let's say, in a longer sitting,

and we really learn to stay with this living experience and not be off in thoughts, we start having some very profound openings in terms of our understanding of what we are and what life is when we learn to stay. But, and here's where we're going to spend a little bit of time, for a good percentage of you, you who are here and those of you listening to the podcast,

you'll find that you start coming back into the body and it feels very uncomfortable and the idea of staying here starts to feel intolerable like there's a really strong unpleasantness that you might find you want to get away from and I like to bring that up because when I give a talk on saying yes

there's another side to it okay and I'll read you an email I got. Because what I'm trying to bring up is that the teaching is not so formulistic as come into your body and say yes. It's not always wise to do that. Okay, so here's an email. I just listened to last week's podcast, and I think I've done what you suggested there, taken off the armor, pulled off the scales. And the result right now is I'm feeling overwhelmed with the pain of what remains. I'm not finding so much beauty, just longing and pain and

overwhelm, trying to sit through it and wondering if I'm doing something wrong, question mark. Okay, so that's, and then after class last week, similarly, a few people here came up to me and said, you know, when I try to be with what's here, I feel like I'm getting trapped in anxiety and fear. I'm feeling it, but it just keeps going on and it feels like too much. What should I do? So the point is, if it's really intense weather, the guidance that's wise is not to always gut it out, not to always throw ourselves into the middle of the storm. Why? It can get us tired out, discouraged, and in the deepest way, it can be retramatizing. What that means is that rather than going directly into the body and into what's difficult,

sometimes we have to cultivate what I consider more resilience, more space. There's something else first. And the metaphor that I think is most useful, it's really worth exploring how do you be with what's difficult when it's too hard to be with, is the one of ocean and waves. That when the waves are really, really rough, and we feel like by being with them,

we're going to get rolled, get tumbled, you know, just get washed around too much. We need to spend a little more time remembering oceanness. We need a little more space. Imagine putting dye in a sink, and it could be very, very strong in color and color the water, but if you put that same amount of dye in a lake, the lake is big enough to absorb it, right? So we need to find a way to enlarge our space of our heart and mind. We need a pathway to that and then touch into the waves.

Remember a little more oceanness and then begin to open to the waves. We can't get around opening to the waves, but it's not always wise to do it first. Is this making sense? Let me just check around. You can nod or go like this and I'll... Okay. All right. So for Senjo, let's go back to the story.

At the time that they discovered they were going to be broken apart, going with that, opening to that, opening to what they were feeling was too much. So metaphorically speaking, they took off. They did something else. They farmed, they got into the earth, children relationships. They had other ways of getting big enough so they could go back and be with what was there. she became resilient enough to go back and embrace the part of her she left behind and the story doesn't have to be a perfect parallel

but you get the general notion sometimes we need to take some time first for one man went to the Dalai Lama and he had a lot of fear and he was trying to figure out how to be with that fear and how to be a warrior and he asked the Dalai Lama for a meditation on how to be with those waves and the Dalai Lama's response was imagine that you're being held in the heart of the Buddha that's the oceanness

that field of heart space so sometimes we directly contact the waves but sometimes we bring our attention to what reminds us of something else that's true but forgotten which is a larger space of heart of belonging the earth the life that's here for another woman that I worked with

a lot of emotional trauma to do with her mother and it was bringing up a tremendous amount of physical pain and emotional fear and anguish for her her practice was rather than saying okay I'm going to go be with what's in my body first she'd bring up three very close friends she considered them her spirit allies she'd imagine them surrounding her

she'd feel her belonging You know, she feels a sense of being larger. She belonged to something larger. And then she began to very carefully and tenderly be with the places in her that were afraid. She got to the point where she could look at her mother's picture and imagine the child that her mother was when her mother was vulnerable and young and feel like she was being a spirit ally to that child. So she really opened up. She had to be with the waves, but she first had to feel her belonging.

the ocean. So there are many, many pathways we can do this when there's pain, physical pain, our emotional pain in our bodies and it feels like too much. If it's strong trauma, definitely the help of another real live living human will enlarge a sense of your field and help to make room. Okay? But if there's no one else around, there are ways that we can enlarge with our awareness, just the way that woman brought her spirit allies in. We can enlarge in some of the ways I like to do it. Sometimes just what I call grounding where you feel yourself sitting on the earth

and you feel gravity and you feel belonging to the earth. You feel the pressure of your feet and your bottom. You sense the earth around you. I sometimes lean against trees and feel a larger belonging. Other people lie on the ground. Different levels of grounding. There are ways we can breathe that actually relax the sympathetic nervous system and give more activity to the parasympathetic,

which means we feel more spacious and at ease. Slowing the breath, deepening the breath. Using that smile down that I often teach, actually sends a signal to your body that helps you to feel more resilience in space. These are just some general idea on how you can do it. But the point is that we need both spaciousness and contact with the waves. And what I'd like to do is guide you in a very simple meditation that kind of gives you a feeling for how you can then bring them together. Okay? So if you will, yeah, just any adjustment in

how you're sitting so you feel yourself fully here. And this will be just a short practice on embodied spirit. So this is going to be, we're going to use the support of the breath as a way of working with the ocean and waves. And the idea is that with the in-breath, you're contacting the waves, with the out-breath, the ocean. With the in-breath, the waves, the out-breath, the ocean. And you might just begin by standing through your body, letting the awareness scan through the body, and feel yourself, just invite yourself to sit down into your body. your body, to feel the awareness that fills the shoulders, the arms, and the hands, to feel that

awakeness and space in the heart, chest, and the belly. And notice as you scan, if there's any part of your body that is difficult to be with, and you can practice with that a little. And if there's none, that's fine. You can just practice with a generic meditation. But if you have something in your body that feels hard to be with, some constellation of pain that's sore, tight, aching, or perhaps its emotional pain, fearful, grieving, angry, tight. For many of us, if we feel down the center line of the throat, the chest, the belly, we can find some of that contraction. And if so, just begin to breathe into that area. So you're breathing in and contacting the waves the exact actual experience in the body. But breathe out and sense

that you could let go some into the space around you. So begin that way, just breathing in, contacting whatever waves are predominant in terms of physical sensation, and breathe out and sense the space that you're breathing into as if you could release into that space. It'll help you if you listen to sound a little, it'll help to stabilize a broader kind of awareness. Breathing in and touching the waves and breathing out and sensing space. Now, if you find you're having a hard time feeling the waves, then emphasize the breathing in and just feel from the inside out, the throat, the chest, the belly. And it helps you to put your hand on your chest or your hand on your throat

just to help direct attention, that's fine too. But if you find that the feelings are very strong and that you really need to emphasize the out breath, the sense of space around you. And visualize space, open sky, let the sounds draw the attention out. So you're dissolving outward with the out breath. I'm going to take this a little bit further with you,

breathing in and touching, contacting a part of the body that's difficult. But as you breathe out, sense the space that's inside the discomfort and unpleasantness, as if you're sensing an atom and the space between the particles. So you breathe and touch what feels like living energy, tightness, soreness, but you're breathing out and sensing the space inherently inside it, the space it all appears from. Imagine and sense the space inside the experience with the out-breath. So be begin to ventilate fully your experience.

Breathing in and contacting the exact sensations. Breathing out and sensing the space inside and around them. So you can begin to sense everything's floating in continuous space. Everything is floating in continuous space. Everything is vibrating space. You can begin to sense there is room for whatever is here. is here, that whether you're breathing in or breathing out, you can sense in the background, this open presence, the light of awareness, that this continuous space is filled with the light

of awareness. You can explore this when you have physical pain, just breathing into the painful areas, and then breathing out and sensing the space inside and around it. This is what Annie Lindberg writes. She says, go with the pain, let it take you. Open your pocket. calms in your body to the pain. It comes in waves like a tide and you must be as open as a vessel, 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 when reaches a kind of inner freedom from pain as though the pain were not yours but your bodies.

You become the ocean, this vast presence and the waves come and go. on the surface. The power of letting this body be a portal is that there's a shift in our sense of who we are. And rather than being a kind of egoic self that is dealing against pain, controlling pain, fighting pain, running away from pain, we become that oceanist, that presence

that includes all the waves of aliveness. includes them all and yet is not defined by them is not fighting them is not limited to them so just to go back to the beginning here we all have it's universal the conditioning to pull away from unpleasantness every one of us

depending on our background we might be locked into more dissociation or less it's not our fault just what happened and our nervous system learned how to dissociation see it. The culture exacerbates it. We're in a culture where there's really severed belonging. So we don't belong to our bodies. We don't sense of belonging to the earth body. And what happens when we don't feel our belonging is we don't bring care to this being here and we don't bring care to our enlarge being the earth. We violate the earth. If we felt our belonging to the earth,

if we felt that the earth is our larger living body, we couldn't do what we do to this earth. We couldn't let it happen. Does that resonate for you? Yeah. D.H. Lawrence, ahead of his time, of course, describes, you know, he says we have been living from our little needs and we've made the mistake and we've lost touch with our deeper needs.

It's a kind of madness. He says, it's a question of relationship. We need to get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos and the universe. He said the truth is we're perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs. We're cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources that flow eternally in the universe. Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air.

we must plant ourselves again in the universe. I think that's so powerful. This great uprooted tree and the roots in the air. It's like we're going around this egoic selves like we don't belong to this living world. We need to replant ourselves in the universe. So the last piece of tonight is really what happens

when we begin to really dedicate ourselves to replanting. ourselves in the universe. When we dedicate ourselves to waking up out of this trance of thought and honor and cherish and inhabit this living body. When even though the weather's

difficult, we find our ways to experience the waves fully and sense our oceanists. What happens? What are the blessings and gifts that come in our life when we really do this path of embodied spirit? And the three that I'd like to just spend a little bit of time on in closing, the three gifts that I really sense come from this portal of embodied awareness

are aliveness, love, and a deep wisdom. The aliveness, so many people that come to a week-long retreat, after coming back again and again to the body, report the same thing, which is their senses become magically in line. and so that the colors are exquisite and the sounds are like a symphony and this natural world becomes like pure mojo just magically beautiful.

There's this appreciation that's so big. I know the, I love the story of Munindraji, an Indian teacher who was asked why he meditated. And his response was, so when I walk into the village each morning, I can see the beautiful flowers, the beautiful purple flowers on the side of the road, to live the life fully.

So we practice coming into the body so we can feel this full aliveness. And when I was reflecting on this, I was remembering a story, I hope many of you remember, because I think it's such a good one to share with our children and our friends. It took place in 2007 in a metro station,

in Washington, D.C. And during that time, a man with a violin played six Bach pieces, 45 minutes. And during that 45 minutes, oh, there was a middle-aged man who just slowed down a little but then hurried up to meet his schedule. And a young man leaned against the wall to listen to him for a little bit, but looked at his watch and started to walk again. one three-year-old boy really wanted to stop and listen

but his mother tugged him along and he tried to come back and listen some more and she yanked him away. 45 minutes he played continuously only six people stopped really listened and he collected a total of $32 finished playing

there was silence nobody applauded and I'm going to read the rest no one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bill one of the greatest musicians in the history of the world He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth $3.5 million. Two days before he sold out a theater in Boston where the average seat was $100.

This is a two-story, and it was kind of an experiment in social behavior. It was done by the Washington Post to really sense people's priorities. It really affects me to think about that story because every day the mystery is right here in every part of our life, in every moment, in every person when we look into their eyes, it's looking back at us,

in every turn of the season. So what are we missing out on? When we're herring along, trying to cross things off the list, what are we missing out on? I mean, are we seeing the gleam in our child's eye? Are we hugging someone and really feeling, wow?

this being matters? Do we slow down enough? You know, are we noticing this rolling into fall and the beauty of these days and really savoring that? So, aliveness is one of the gifts that the body lives in the present moment. It really does. When you come into your body, there might be pain and unpleasantness and it's part of the healing to open and view with that. There's a tremendous aliveness we reconnect to. The church says the body is, a sin. Science says the body is a machine. Advertising says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta, said Eduardo Galliano. Okay, that's fruit number one. The second fruit is that we cannot experience living love unless we're awake in our body. You can have thoughts about love,

you can have a kind of abstract sense of, oh yes, I love this person. But to have that warmth, to have that tenderness, to really sense tender space and the boundaries softening so we sense belonging have to be in the body. Here, try this for a moment, just closing your eyes for a second because what happens is that when our care is visceral, it really ripples out and touches people.

Just sense for yourself the difference between knowing you love somebody and looking them in the eye and saying the words with their name, I love you. And you might just breathe into your heart for a few moments, you can feel your heart. Bring to mind someone who's easy to love,

someone is not so complicated. Imagine looking into that person's eyes. Imagine sensing that person and their care for you. So you can kind of see it in their eyes. And just imagine and mentally, whisper right now. Hear the words. And if you are willing to, whisper it even out loud, softly. I love you and put the name in. And do it again and again, a few times now, just whispering to the person you love. I love you in their name. And see if you can arrive in

the sincerity where you're speaking your truth from your heart with living heart energy. Just try it. Imagine the person receiving. receiving, getting it, feeling good from it. Just imagine the look on that person's face. And they just receive love. And then sense the felt sense of loving become as large as it wants to be in your own body. Just let it feel you. We love this life, we take care of this life.

When we love this body, this being that we call self, we take care of ourselves. When we feel the aliveness in the heart with another, we act on the other's behalf. Gary Lawless writes this. He says, when the animals come to us asking for our help, will we know what they are saying? When the plants speak to us in their delicate, beautiful language, will we be able to answer them?

When the planet herself sings to us in our dreams, will we be able to wake ourselves and act, few full breaths and come on back. So the first fruit is aliveness. The second fruit is to be awake in our body so that the love is visceral and so that it can ripple out and touch others. The last fruit is really a realization of truth

that we cannot see the nature of reality if we're off in our ideas about things. It's an experience of knowing that comes from an embodied presence. When Senjo's in her trance, you can feel it. You can feel that there's not a full life going on, and you can see that there's not a seeing into the nature of things. When we're controlling our experience,

we can't see our experience. This living universe is beyond any idea that represents it. So we come into our body and wake up into a presence that can perceive. we come into a heart that can understand. We come into this understanding that we're not humans on a spiritual path, but that we're spirit awareness waking up through this human incarnation. That's the realization. So let's just, we'll just finish here with a brief meditation and close.

And this is rather than putting my words to it, a way that you can explore the realizations that come from embodied spirit. The language in the Buddhist tradition is recognizing impermanence, that it's an ever-changing flow. Recognizing the suffering comes that when we try to control things, we separate, and recognizing that when we're fully here in this body, there's no self we can find.

We belong to the universe. So right now as you just sit still for these last few moments, you might sense the breath and let your attention relax with the breath. So as the breath comes in, it's like a balloon expanding, just relax open with the breath. And when the breath goes out, dissolve outward.

Dissolve inward, just let go. So breathing in, opening, relaxing, breathing out, breathing out, dissolving, letting go, let your senses be awake, where are the sounds around you? And with that same listening, non-interfering, receptive listening, listen to and feel the life

that's in this body right this moment, full allowing, just let this life lift through you. If there's a place in your body, you're aware of tension, you can soften a little, because tightness in the body is a way of resisting the aliveness. So soften and then notice the aliveness that starts flowing. Feeling this body is vibrating space. And just sense, is there anything that's holding still?

Can you find anything in this living body that's holding still? Is there anything that's solid? One of the first great insights when we come fully awake in the body, fully awaken the body is that it's constant change. On a cellular, on a molecular level, we're made of the elements like the earth. We're made of air, water, fire, changing molecules, moving a dance.

Is there anything that's not moving? It's just a changing river of sensation, images, sounds, nothing static. And if we keep paying attention, paying attention, is there any self in this world of sensation, of vibrating space? If you answer with your mind, you'll just say, oh yes, I'm here. But if you feel into the body, is there any self that's there? If only exists through our thoughts, concepts, without concepts, just changing sensation.

Is there any center to this field of sensation? Is there any boundary? We really get that it's empty of selfness of any entity we can sense that it's just full of awareness. Vibrating space, continuous, filled with the light of awareness. Is anything missing? In these last few moments,

just rest in this wakeful presence, sensing continuous space, illuminated with the light of awareness, vibrating space. I'm sensing in the background that pure presence, the stillness and awakeness that's our formless nature. Howard Kabir says, inside this clay jug, there are canyons and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains.

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