Tara Brach - Part 2: Entering the Wilderness

Episode Date: September 27, 2013

2013-09-25 - Part 2: Entering the Wilderness - On all spiritual paths, we journey into the inner wilderness to discover the nature of nature - the truth of who we are. The entry is through bringing a kind and full presence to the life of our bodies. These two talks explore the conditioning that leads us to dissociation, and the blessings of full aliveness, open heartedness and wisdom that arise when we come home to embodied presence. 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!

I'd like to continue tonight our theme of the last class, which is embodied presence and what we called formally entering the wilderness. And I thought I'd begin by sharing that in my own life on my own kind of way of waking up on the path, there are two continual places that I find I'm having to re-remember regularly. And one of those places is this recognition that whenever I am in thoughts, presence, the vividness and immediacy of presence is obscured. So it's not that I'm saying thoughts are bad, but I have to keep remembering that if I want to be fully here, I need to step out of thinking.

And that's a remembering. And then the other place that I have to keep rediscovering, is to forgive myself for forgetting. So you see they go together, right? So we'll be exploring that because there is such huge conditioning to leave presence. I mean, if you think of today

and kind of sense where were you, we can begin to realize that many moments, huge swaths of moments. We were in some way preparing for something else, planning, worrying, reviewing, right? So there's that wonderful cartoon that has this guy driving, and he's right about to enter into a desert, and the sign says, you and your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles, you know. And then from the 12-step universe, you can listen to these.

questions carefully. Do you lose time from work due to thinking? Is thinking making your home life unhappy? You know what to substitute here, right? Is thinking affecting your reputation? Have you ever felt remorse after thinking? I like this one. Do you crave a think at a definite time daily? Do you want to think the next morning? Do you think to escape from worries or troubles? Here's a big one. Do you think alone? If yes, on any of these, you may be a thinkaholic.

Okay. So without adding judgment, a very deep part of the dedication to a spiritual path is a dedication to stepping out of our trance, stepping out of our trance over and over and discovering what's here. And what we find is that everything we most cherish, a feeling of loving, the feeling of aliveness, creativity, insight, it all arises in the moments that we've stepped out of the trance of thinking

and we're inhabiting the living moment-to-moment experience. It's always right here. So again, one of my favorite verses from Kabir, 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, So we might use the language of embodied spirit that to recognize our spiritual essence, the portal, is through stepping out of our ideas and into the wilderness.

And as I mentioned last class, in most spiritual traditions, there's some external metaphor of the wilderness where we're going off into the desert or into the mountains or into the deep forest. to discover our beingness in nature. And ultimately it's our beingness in the nature that's right here. So when we learn mindfulness, the instructions we get are relatively simple and they are in a basic way

be mindful of the sensations in your body as the first training, called the first foundation. And the instruction instructions are when you go off in thoughts. Don't make it wrong. It's the nature of mind to think. But when you notice it, it's also the nature of awareness to wake up to itself. So be glad you've noticed and come back here. Come back to this living presence. Those are the instructions. They're pretty straightforward. Just moving over and over again, noticing the thinking, come back. The challenge is what are we coming back to?

to. And as many of us know, we're coming back to this changing, ever-changing flow of unpleasant and pleasant and neutral. It goes back and forth, back and forth. And it's really the dance of the elements. It's like the stars, the exploding stars, and all the materials of the universe are playing through these bodies. So we're having the dance of the elements and it might be if it's the earth element that it's incredibly heavy and dense and tight, if it's water it might be flowing or it might be torrents, if it's heat it might be fiery, it's the dance of the elements. And sometimes they're deliciously pleasant,

and sometimes they're really intense, our emotional weather can feel unbearable. So the challenge is, when it's difficult, we're rigged to pull away. When it's intense we're rigged to pull away. When it feels unfamiliar, which for many of us, because we spend so much

time in our minds, intense bodily sensations, unfamiliar. We pull away. And it's a universal conditioning that we're in some way wanting to control what's going on rather than opening to it

and being in the wilderness. Now this is particularly, It's not really true when there is traumatic fear are really strong emotions. It can feel intolerable. So at a very early age, because we have no way to handle it, we learn to leave, dissociation, and whatever is there, undigested stays in the body and in the nervous system as undigested, unprocessed pain, it's there. But we're living, you know, as I think many of you've heard the line,

Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. This is James Joyce. We live kind of apart from this bodied experience. So this is for each of us the predicament in different degrees. To the degree that it was too much, it felt too hard, too much to handle when we're young, we've learned to leave and for many of us that locks in as a habit. In other words, even when we're more resourceful, our habit is not to be here,

not to feel our bodies. So over the years of teaching meditation, what I've run into again and again, and I don't think it's talked about enough, is that we give these basic instructions of, okay, open to the sensations in your body, notice what's going on and huge numbers of people can't feel what's going on in their body. Sometimes if you really tense your muscles you might be able to feel but it's not such easy access. I've had many people say that they can't feel really from the neck down other than intense pain or sex.

And that's a very real experience. Alternatively, some people find that they're either numb and cut off or they swing into feeling overwhelmingly possessed with unpleasant experience and it's just kind of a back forth. Last year when I gave a talk on embodied presence, I got this email. I just listened to last week's podcast and I think I've done what you suggest there, taking off the armor and pulling off the scales. and the result right now is that I'm 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. So I'm betting that many of you here and many of you who are listening right now have wondered the same. That we talk about the God whom I love is inside. but you might find that you go inside and it doesn't feel like divine love in there. It just feels like a cauldron of, whether it's physical pain and our emotional unpleasantness, it feels hard.

So I want to name that because there's a reason we spend so much time in our minds. I'm going to read you a paragraph that I think is really powerful from Alice Miller, author, psychotherapist, because she lets us know that there's no way ultimately to avoid what's in our body. She says we either pay attention to it or we suffer the consequences. Now her words. The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill,

for it is as incorruptible as a child who's still whole in spirit will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth. So those are strong words. And basically what she's saying is that And it's natural to associate when we can't handle the difficulty of what we're experiencing, but if we don't find some way to come back and process it, our body will keep letting us know. And so it is that for most of us, when we're hanging out in the trance of thinking,

there's an undercurrent of not being at home. We get signals. And sometimes the signals are restlessness or boredom or anxiety or depression, exhaustion. And I mentioned last class that it takes work to keep pushing away aliveness, exhaustion. Sometimes the signal that we're not paying attention is that we are running away into addictions and to overconsuming or activities that we know are trying to keep us distracted. The undercurrent of all of this is a dissatisfaction. When we're running away from whatever is here,

there's going to be some sense that either something's wrong or something's missing, that we want it different than it is right now. And that dissatisfaction is there for a good reason, because we have an intuition that in some way we're missing out, on our full aliveness. And we have an intuition that we're kind of hanging out and skimming the surface, but not really living from the full life that's here

and creativity. We know we're not that spontaneous. So there's something inside that knows that we're not inhabiting ourselves. We have an intuition about love too. We love love and we know that we're in some way defending against it. that we don't let it in.

And when I say let it in, really allow the love of other beings to wash through us. We know that. We know that we hold back, that we really don't, we're not free to really feel and express our loving. It's all part of this dissociation. And in a very deep way, we have an intuition that there's a presence, something timeless, something vast, something mysterious that we're just not letting ourselves touch into.

So when Alice Miller talks about our body will torment us, sometimes the torment is this subtle dissatisfaction that we're just not living from our wholeness. And sometimes it's torment as in driven to addictions that we, that make us wretched, so it can go the whole spectrum. But the bottom line is that we need to, to find a way back home, which is really what we're going to be paying attention to tonight. How, given the fact that we often leave because there's something difficult to be with, how do we come back home? There's a wonderful healer, teacher from Africa. His name is

Maladoma Some. And he tells a story that really struck. me. He went to a Catholic boarding school for 20 years. He was sent from his home village to the school. And when he returned home, he found it to be in some way strange to him, because in the village, though they didn't have electricity, had natural ways of creating light at night if they wanted to. But they'd often choose not to. And what the elders would say is, let's turn off the light so we can see. So Maladoma was told that if they lit their lamps they wouldn't be able to see. Village elders explained it this way. You can't see anything real in the daylight. You can only see what you want to see. When you turn the lights off in the night, you can see

what wants to be seen, which is a whole different story. So how do we understand this? I mean, I think of the light, the artificial lights is really kind of our habitual ways of thinking. We're trying to shine a light on things, figure things out. We're kind of caught in a kind of artificial light and we take it to be the real thing. But it filters our attention in a narrow way. We can't really see what's here when we have all sorts of ideas and assumptions about it and judgments about it. So the teaching of the old is we have to kind of turn down all that busy stuff that's trying to see things a certain way in order to have that receptivity to really experience the universe unfiltered and direct.

I think that's a really beautiful teaching that the night skies like just opening to the wildness without any artificial, you know, props of our thinking, stepping up. out. So how, when we're in fear-based association, do we start stepping out of thoughts and coming into the wilderness, which is something we're afraid to do? And in contrast to the basic instructions we often receive, it's important to know that if you have a feeling, when you start coming into connecting with sensations and feelings in your body, if you have the sense that this is scary or feels too much, that's a message that it's not always wisest to bring a direct attention to where it feels dangerous. So what I'm going to suggest is two different ways

that we kind of gentle our way in, okay? Two different ways that we begin to dim the artificial lights, you know, not punch them out totally, but dim them. And then strengthen the inner resources, the sense of safety and well-being that allows us to feel that we can be with what's inside and have some balance, some resilience. Okay? I offer often the metaphor of ocean and waves because what we're really learning to is to open to the waves and in order to open to the waves of intensity, passion, feel, and confusion, in order to open to them, we have to kind of remember our ocean-ness so we know

there's room. Okay? So just keep that in mind as we take these two pieces now of dimming the lights and building our resourcefulness, which is really our sense of ocean-ness. The first, and this is something that pretty much every time you hear instructions you hear, is to begin to notice thinking as thinking. and not to believe it. In other words, get the knack of noticing when you drifted off into thoughts and going, oh, okay, that's a thought. And you can even lose the word just.

It's just a thought. And what that means is that you find yourself an anchor that feels good. And when I say feels good, if the breath doesn't feel good, if the breath feels scary in some way, many people that have been traumatized, the breath doesn't feel so good, then the breath isn't going to be your home base. Instead, you might listen to sound, or you might feel the sensations in your hands or your feet, or you might feel the sensations of sitting on your chair with your feet on the ground. You can try this as they say it and just sense the kind of gravity, the

belonging to the earth and the stability of that. And you can let just the, just the, you can just the sensations of the warmth and pressure under your bottom and under your feet be a kind of home base. For some people the anchor is sound. You come back to the actual changing sounds that are right here. So the first step is to establish a home base so that when your mind goes into the trance of thinking, you start noticing, oh, I'm not here anymore. And then you gently just, you're just, You're dimming the light, you're not getting rid of the thought, you're just reopening and connecting with your anchor. When you do, and this is a real key piece, if you want to start not being caught in the

stickiness of thoughts, take a moment to notice the difference between the thought and the vividness and aliveness of what it's like to be right here. Notice the difference. start understanding directly that whatever you're thinking is an image and a soundbite, but it's not reality. You'll be able to say, oh, it's real, but it's not true. It's real in the sense it's happening, but it's not truth, it's representational. The reason this is important in terms of coming back into the body is that we live as if the thoughts that are going on are the truth and a lot of those thoughts are fear-based. They're not real

in the sense of the reality they're pointing to. If you're hungry, it's very, very helpful to imagine, oh, I want a snack, I'm going to have an apple and to visualize the apple, know where it is and make a plan. That's all mental. But how different is that from the actual feeling of crunch and the burst of flavor? That's the difference from the difference from the their thought and the reality. Thoughts aren't real in the sense of living real and they're often fear-based and they're very often unreliable. I mean how many times have we spent our time spinning on a channel that really did not serve us? Sometimes they're downright misleading. I had somebody a few years ago send me these signs that were up in

different countries in English, an airline ticket office in Copenhagen. We take your bags and send them in all directions. And then at a Hong Kong tailor shop, order your summer suit. Because this big rush, we will execute customers in strict rotation in a cemetery. Persons are prohibited from picking flowers from any but their own graves. And then in Tokyo hotels, rules and regulations, guests are requested not to smoke in bed or do other disgusting behaviors there. One more. In a Bangkok temple, it is forbidden to enter a woman, even a foreigner if dressed as a man.

They go on and on, but you get the idea. So we practice by creating a safe anchor and start to notice when the thoughts are there and get it. This is just a thought. These are just words. these are just images, they're not the reality. And then we gently say, come back. So one friend was describing his practice recently,

his way of trying to stay with what's going on right here in the moment, and he said, he wrote me this, I've been experimenting with different mantras, I find myself saying with each breath, moment to moment awareness without judgment, while noticing anything sensory that arises. It just boils down the instruction to me in a very concrete way. So I was sitting yesterday and my mind wandered a bit

and I realized and I had just said to myself, moment-to-moment judgment without awareness. Flipped. So even our instructions to ourself gets confusing. Come back, come back. This is the basic attitude is this. that it's very easy because the trance of thoughts is so persistent to make war with thoughts. And if you're at war with your thoughts, you'll be at war till the end of your life.

So there's an attitude in waking up which is truly to know that we are designed to think. We have to think for survival. We really do. And yet we have this self-referful. self-reflective awareness and can start to notice thinking as thinking and give us more choice. So if our attitude is friendly and curious, we can begin to wake up from the trance. I love this poem by Kavuri Patel called Thanking a Monkey. She says, there's a monkey in my mind, swinging on a trapeze, reaching back to the past

or leaning into the future, never standing still. Sometimes I want to kill that monkey, shoot it square between the eyes so I won't have to think anymore or feel the pain of worry. But today I thanked her and she jumped down straight into my lap, trapeze still swinging as we sat still. So this is part one that we begin to quiet the artificial light so we can begin to see more. And we do it by having a kind of home base that is comfortable and it's pleasant. to be in. Then the next question is how to, when we quiet, we begin to touch into what might feel in the wilderness like real vulnerability. And if it's not too strong, you can

simply bring your anchor with you. You might feel, let's say breath is your anchor, just breathe and feel like you're bringing the breath to the place in the heart that feels clutched or the throat or the billy that's in knots. You just breathe with it and you'll find that the breath gives you somewhat of a larger platform of presence so that you're not so easily overwhelmed. The idea is this, that if you put dye into a sink, it colors a sink in a very strong way. You put that same dye into a lake and that doesn't happen. So an anchor can help you have more breath, more vastness to your stance. your presence, so that whatever is going on you can be with it and not be overwhelmed.

So we bring our resource anchor. We also cultivate stronger resource anchors in addition to let's say the breath what we come back to. And what I mean by that is that we might start bringing to mind a person or a spiritual figure are a part of the natural world, or somebody that we know loves us as a way to remind us of something bigger so we can then enter the wilderness with more strength. And I'm going to talk more about that, but I'd like to maybe illustrate first with a story of how one woman did it, a story that I shared in radical acceptance, and that has really was very formative for me and

understanding a lot and I feel like it's helped a lot of people. So I want to share this with you. It's really how a woman who was traumatized found her way into her body. And she had gone through a guided meditation or guided journey with me and then wrote a story based on it. And so I'm going to share the story with you and then we're going to unpack it a little. Okay? So in the story, she's seven years old, she's hiding in a closet, terrified after an unexpected attack by her drunk and enraged father. And this little girl in the closet's praying. She's basically saying, help, I can't take it anymore.

And she opens her eyes to see a fairy in a haze of blue with a glittering wand. And she lets the fairy know that her father's been beating her and her mother doesn't help. And she feels like they both just wish she was dead. And the fairy listens with tears in her eyes and then tells, her that while she can't make all this pain disappear, she can help her get through this time. She can help her forget and then remember later when she's able to handle it. So with a wave of the wand, the good fairy says, I'm going to send things into different parts of your body and they're going to hold them for you until you feel strong enough to let them

move freely again. And then she explains that she's going to tighten and dull the little girl's pelvis and her belly, she's going to constrict her heart, her throat, to protect her from feeling the raw intensity of hurt and fear and brokenheartedness. So this, I'm going to read you the last part. She says, you will have trouble feeling and being close to people, but it will be your way of surviving. At those times when the pain erupts, you will find your own ways to control it, ways that may not look good to the world, but will be of temporary comfort. And you, my darling, will be a fairly functional human being in spite all this because you have a strong mind and you can hold this all in, and I will

be helping you. The child looking directly into the fairy's eyes asked, how will you help? How will you come back to see me? You will not forget everything. I will leave a voice inside you that will urge you to reconnect with your whole self. It may be a very long process, but in time you will feel an urge you calling to step out of imprisoning beliefs, to unwind your body and release what it's been holding all these years. You will learn the art of sacred presence. There will be physical and emotional pain as you open, but you will have what you need, the compassion and wisdom, the support of others, to be a whole person, spiritually awake, but still the same.

This is because your soul has always been there, just hidden by the scars of this lifetime. Good fairy put her arm around the child's shoulders and gently led her into bed. She waved her wand and stood by as the little girl finally relaxed into deep sleep. She gazed tenderly at the small innocent face and then whispered her goodbye. When you wake up you will forget I was here. You will forget you asked for help. You will forget the sharpness of your daily pain. This is the only way I know to get you through this.

You are a beautiful child, I love you, and in fact your parents love you, although they're incapable of showing it to you. You will have to love yourself enough to heal so that when you're older, your life will be powerful, full, and free. One day you will know who you really are. You will trust your goodness and know your belongings. longing. Until then, and for always, I love you. So first to say that when she gave me permission to share this, and I actually shared

it here probably 10 years ago, I had more people than I've ever heard from tell me that this was them in some way. And part of the reason they were deeply moved is because it stopped making at their fault that they had in some way dissociated and had these different strategies for keeping the pain away. And I think that's the first step of all healing is that if we make wrong our strategies, whatever they are, whatever ways we run away from ourselves, if we make them wrong, then we don't have a way to come into a real full presence that heals. So to help to release that shame around association that many people feel. For this woman, the process of this guided meditation writing the story helped her to do that.

She really got it, that it was too much for her to handle when she was young and some kindness allowed her to have the space she needed for some years but now she needed to come home. So that's what our therapy. Our therapy was basically bringing in meditation practices that we do of scanning through the body, just as we do almost every time we do a guided practice to come into an awakeness right here and aliveness in our body. But we went slow, we went gradual, and she had resources with her as she did it. If she hit a patch that was hard, and I told you where she had kind of,

constriction where she was constricting so not to fuel the pain because that's what tension does. Tension helps us pull away from what's actually the aliveness right here. She would sometimes imagine the glow of the fairy so she'd she feel like this presence, this loving presence was there with her. She learned how to breathe, how to touch parts of her body with her hand and feel there was gentleness and kindness coming in. In other words, she called on a more ocean feeling, something larger, to help her be with the places where the vulnerability was living. We did it really, really slowly.

Gradually, she really, in a deep way, got the knack on when it's hard, call on love. When it's hard, call on love. and so she would feel a lot of fear and a lot of clenching, and she would breathe with it, touch it, she'd pull all her resources together to call on some sense of loving presence to be with what was difficult. This same dynamic works in a very simple way

if you're experiencing severe and chronic unpleasantness in your body. If there's a place that's particularly acute, let's say you feel a real stabbing feeling in a place in your back, If you just begin to feel the area around it, the space around that stabbing area, you're starting to be the lake, not the sink. You're starting to open again.

So anything we can do to widen our perspective, whether it's finding another part of the body that has some pleasantness or at least neutrality, that could be just feeling the hands while you begin to then feel where it's more vulnerable. That helps. Our listening to sound. Our calling on, for her, the good fairy became the divine mother in some way. Each of us at certain junctures in order to have an honest and true contact with what's here, to be in the wilderness, has to remember something larger.

There's a wonderful story about a healing ritual in Africa that storyteller, writer, healer Michael Mead teaches. he says, and this is a healing ritual, if a member of the tribe becomes ill, emotionally or physically, the belief is that one of their ancestors is suffering from a toothache. The ancestor, as well as a sick person, can be healed only when the tooth is extracted and the persistent pain relieved. This is done at a gathering in which the entire tribe sings, dances, and drums throughout the night.

During this time everyone reveals their own personal problems. Through this communal truth telling, the tooth is extracted and everyone healed. Can you sense how this is the same dynamic of calling on something larger in this case community and that presence of Sangha or community or the field of others helps to be with what's there in a way that releases our identification and lets it start freeing. up. For many people, the company of another person helps them to be with what's difficult. There's research now that shows that when a loved one holds your hand, the experience of pain changes. That's the ocean being with the waves. Does that make sense? This widening

of attention. This is Rumi. He says, when water gets caught in habitual whirlpools, dig a way out through the bottom to the ocean. There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope. The hopers would feel slighted if they knew. Look as long as you can at the friend you love, no matter whether the friend is moving away from you or coming back toward you. So when we're in the habitual whirlpools, we're just, we're dissociated, we're spinning in our trance. The way out is to come right into this wildness, dig away out through the bottom to the ocean. But we need to remember that love to have it be safe enough to be here

when it feels really difficult. So we're going to practice a little together tonight. We're going to use the remainder of our time to explore this coming into the wilderness. And as a way to begin, I'd like to invite you you to stand up and when you stand up to move so that you have room to stretch your arms like this. Begin by standing with your feet shoulder with apart and just stand up in a way that you can relax your body, close your eyes and we begin with standing meditation. And what that means is with interest and attention, discover what your body feels like and the standing posture. We rarely just stand still and then say, oh, what's this like? You might

feel the weight of gravity so you can feel the pressure at your feet. And as you do, you might let the feet relax and see if you can let the feet widen. So you're feeling your connection to the earth. And then just soften the backs of your knees. Take one hand and put it on the lower belly, the other on the sacrum behind you. Now see if you can soften your belly a little. We tighten up and armor our belly. It's one of the areas we protect ourselves with. So it's like a two-year-old with an undependent,

undefended belly, just soften. It helps us soften over and over again in the belly because we digest life experience there. Now with your palms still there, invite the tailbone to relax, the ground. You might only feel a small movement, that's fine. And then gently allow your palms to float in space back towards the sides. Relax the back of your neck and the occipital ridge at the base of the skull. So there's just a mental suggestion of lengthening there. You may notice

that the chin naturally goes parallel to the floor. Palms floating in space, opening all the senses. Rotating the palms so they're facing out. This is where we'll be doing this eagle movement. You might inhale as you gently raise the arms up, inhaling up. And then rotating the palms out, exhale down. You might let the arms gently swing the wrist crossing in front of you and then again And again, inhale, palms up, swinging up.

Exhale, swing down slowly enough so you can feel the sensations of moving through the air. That's right, good. And again, inhaling up. Go down, tail down. This is the last time now, inhale, sweep up. Keeping the arms up, relax the breath. And as you very slowly let the arms float down, let it be like micro movement. very slowly feeling the aliveness and the sensation inside the arms, the hands,

just feeling the life from the inside out. The hands float through space and then when they're down again just relaxing. Again just with interest, sensing this field of sensation we call body, feeling the tingling, the vibrating, sensing if there's any real boundary, to the body that you can find an aerial center. Continuing with mindfulness, just be aware of the sensations of moving slowly

as you find your way to your seat and you might sit down and let the eyes close. I'm going to continue this meditation seated now. So again, just find your way of sitting so your posture allows you to be upright. Keep noticing if you leave that it's possible to come back. and soften, maybe just soften the hands, soften the belly.

And just feel yourself here. In the same way as when we leave our body, there's a kind of dissatisfaction. There's real blessings as we learn to be here. And one of the great blessings is that we, when we enter the wilderness and just let go of controlling, just open to the life that's here, we can find that we're just for

filled with aliveness. You get access to a very creative energy and the senses get awake. For people, sometimes they leave at the end of a retreat where they've spent a lot of time in an embodied way and notice that the colors are brighter and there's a symphony of sound to open to a whole dance of sensation. This is Alison Lutterman, she says. This is written with the understanding if you seize your demand on the moment and you just be you discover a wholeness that's here so she says some drapes a buttered scarf across your shoulder rose opens herself to your glance rain shares its divine melancholy the whole world keeps nibbling your ear like a neglected lover be here edward o galleon

Anna says, the church says the body is sin. Science says the body is a machine. Advertising says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta. So, aliveness, we get to reclaim our aliveness. There's a second blessing, and that is really that of being able to love, to get touched by the sorrows and the beauty and the goodness. and the mystery to really love this life. We all know there's moments we act ethically, we're helpful, but are our hearts alive with caring? When we inhabit our bodies, it's living love. And you might take a moment to reflect.

Just bringing your practice to a person that you know you love in your life right now. Could be a person you know well, a person you don't know as well, but you really feel that heart connection. And take a moment to sense what you love about them in some way, some expression of the goodness that you pick up from them. It might be this person's sparkle in the eye or their humor, their kindness, what it's like when they're loving you. Just feel in your heart what it's like to appreciate this person

and experiment by mentally whispering, whispering, thank you, feel your heart, experiment perhaps by saying I love you and open to the felt sense of loving as large as it is, living love. When we enter the wilderness we discover this aliveness, we discover this capacity to feel and express loving. And I want to name one more blessing. When we enter the wilderness, we come in direct contact with truth. with the nature of reality.

We can't see into the nature of reality when we're pushing it away. But when we inhabit it, we come into beingness. We open to our beingness. You might sense the aliveness that's right here. Again, meditating as we've been doing, just feeling the tingling,

trembling, heat, cool, the sounds around you. And as you do, just to notice this alert, inner stillness, that which is aware, can you sense that all of this is happening, the sounds and sensations, and you're the space that's happening in, the silence that's listening. 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. So before we exit, I want to say again that this process of embodiment is gradual and to be very, very gentle, forgiving and loving as you enter the wilderness

and practice during the week. The more you pause and just very briefly say, okay, so what's happening in my body, the more you'll start developing this habit of coming back, and being here. So it's a real invitation. 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.