Tara Brach - Part 2 - Freedom: Taking the Backward Step

Episode Date: July 4, 2012

2012-07-04 - Part 2 - Freedom: Taking the Backward Step - This talk investigates the core conditioning that creates and sustains trance. We then explore two gateways to realizing and inhabiting our true nature - inquiry and letting go. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations make a difference!

One of the ways I thought maybe just to say, we know it's July 4th, and we know that the word that gets around in these circles is its interdependence day, as you might know. And so tonight's talk is on, it is on the freedom that's possible when we realize our belonging to what's larger than our habitual notion of self.

And that is a continued exploration from our last class. And I'm looking around and I think there's some of you that might have been around when there were answering machines, right? So one of my friends had an answering machine and you'd call and it would say, what I want to know is, who are you? And what do you want? And I got in the habit of when he wasn't there and I got that message of saying, okay. This is the universe telling me to just, you know, actually ponder those questions. You know, who am I? What do I want? They're deep questions.

I mean, we might get caught in some moments with the who am I and immediately go into a narrative of roles or the qualities that we don't like or habits, fears, wants. So we might ask that question and go to a very deep place. of who am I? I don't know. It's a mystery. That there's something very sacred and universal

that's living through this body mind. You know, there's a whole, and there's degrees in between. What do I want? You know, we might have some pre-packaged formula of our life aspiration. We might really stop and check in and sense what matters.

So what I find is that depending on how much stress and reactivity is going on, there's very different levels of our response to those deep inquiries. And a week like many of us have had, and if you're listening and you're anywhere in the region of, you know, East Coast, Washington area, D.C., and actually a good chunk of the country, many lives got turned upside down, you know, many people in this hot streak without air conditioning and so on. And it was interesting for me to use my experience as a kind of a filter for these questions, because as I've shared often, whenever I'm giving a talk on something, whatever's going on in my life, that becomes what I'm, you know, I'm kind of using as a

So this inquiry of, you know, what does it really mean to be free? And who am I taking myself to be? So my experience during this storm that Friday night was that at its peak, a very, very large oak tree fell down on my house. And I was about 20 feet from where it fell. And so my world got really rattled. And it destroyed a lot of three rooms in my house. So it was a pretty big deal.

And of course there's been no power. I live in a place that's very treasy, which means the good news is it's beautiful. And the difficult news is that those trees, you know, collapsed pretty regularly. And so this one did in a bit of my house. And we, I have a generator, but the generator was kind of flaky. And so it's been an interesting handful of days. And what I noticed was that at times, my sense of who am I was beleaguered and anxious and kind of driven and a little bit

testy with like the generator guy who you know had to come back a bunch of times because he didn't get it right the generator wasn't working or and so I was in a kind of small-minded place at times and that at other times it just didn't feel so personal you know it wasn't like my house, a tree fell on my, it was like, this is just what's happening. And it's hot and this and this. And there was kind of curiosity and space and a kind of tenderness that, okay, so this human life is caught in some of the really same stuff of so many people. And then actually a real, real sorrow for how, for many people, it's so, so bad. I think of the wildfires. and really this is the predicament of our southwest.

Really, really difficult. And then I think of other disasters and other people whose lives are entirely dismantled because they live in a war zone, let's say in Syria right now, or there's a famine or drought. Or I think of the animals that are living in the places where there's wildfires. You know, there's so much.

So it became less personal. And I kind of found myself going in and out of both. And if I had to say, what made the difference between a degree of freedom, not detachment like I was unattached, a dissociation,

but a freedom that could hold it. And when I was caught, the difference was either I was in a story and believing my story or there was a quality of presence. Okay, there's this, and there's this,

and there's this, and there's this. this and with that presence there was some room. Does that make sense? It was getting caught in the storyline. So tonight what we'll be doing is a handful of reflections together on what can help us to loosen up that stickiness of the storyline and help us to come back into a sense of more the truth of what we are. And so we'll do some reflections on you know how do we get caught in that kind of limiting self sense and how do we relax out of it because you can't fight your way out of it or you just kind of create another persona of a self that's fighting, you know. So I like always beginning

with you know the Buddha taught you know started with suffering he said they're suffering and here's how come and here's the way out and I tend to like to start with the trance Because in Buddhist psychology, often our habitual daily way of moving through life is this perception that we have, that there's a self in here and a world out there. And there's problems to solve and there's things to do. And this self is threatened or encumbered or this self needs to promote itself. But there's a whole world of a story and emotions that go around. the kind of themes of something's wrong or something's missing. So that's the trance.

And it doesn't mean that there's not pain. And it doesn't mean that there's not things to do. But what it means is our story about our self, that it's me and it's happening to me and it's bad or on bad separates us from a larger truth. There's a forgetting that goes on. This is what the Buddha meant by living in a dream,

that we live in this story of a small self that is threatened or missing something. So what we find out is that if we're suffering and we start looking at the suffering, we'll find out that there's a storyline going on. It's either I'm bad or you're bad, but there's a storyline going on about what's wrong. And if we take the broad view,

we know that's part of the evolutionary, design, right? And we're designed. Our brains are designed to kind of fixate on where the problem is. Of course, we overdo it, but that's the way we're kind of meant to be in certain ways. And the metaphor I like the best usually is ocean and waves and that we take ourselves to be a constellation of waves. And that constellation compares itself to other waves and it wants to have the surfers like it the best and that constellation feels threatened by waves or it wants to expand itself and be part of a larger group, whatever it is. But we forget our oceanness. We forget that these are temporary shapes that are coming and going, but there's something timeless and beautiful,

something sacred that's living through these body minds. We forget that. So the pathway is really, can we remember oceanness? And one of the maybe little practice, and we'll try right now that I think is real helpful. So I'm going to invite you just to kind of come and get ready to pay attention. Okay, you're all ready to pay attention. I love the way we all sit up a little taller to pay, and compose ourselves. Now for the next 10 seconds, I'd like you to try not to be aware. Okay, close your eyes and try not to be aware for 10 seconds.

Okay, that's enough. Come on back. Now, did anyone succeed? Can I see? Hands? So a few people succeeded in not being aware. Most of us found what? That you say, okay, I'm not going to be aware, and then there's this whole world of stuff happening

and you can sense that you're aware of it, right? Right? Is that what happened? Okay, let's try this again. Okay? Close your eyes again. And this time, let awareness be as it is, this kind of sea of wakefulness.

Just take a few moments to notice awareness is here. Just notice what it's like. What's it like to even notice awareness? Okay, that's enough. And I just take a few breaths and come back. Because it's a little bit tricky or strange sometimes. What we discover is that as we move through the day, if we really stopped and paid attention,

we'd find awareness is always here. It's always already here. But we rarely notice it. We rarely are aware of awareness. Think of your day. How many moments? There's some pausing and a sense of, oh yeah, this wakeful presence is here. It's here.

We don't notice. Now, noticing it actually is part of the training, but I'm not going to go there yet. First, I'm going to talk a little bit about how come we don't notice. One cartoon had these bugs in a carpet of fur, and one saying to the other, is there really a dog? Do you get it? That sense that, you know,

just so locked inside a perspective that we don't sense what we're part of? Chokhian Trunkin did it this way. He put out a big white piece of poster paper and he did a little V. Okay, and he asked everybody to weigh in. He said, so what is this? And what did they say?

Well, a bird. And he asked others. Everybody came up with the same thing, basically. They might have said a seagull, but it was a bird. And he said, no, it's the sky with a bird flying through it. Now, this speaks to how we pay attention. Our minds, especially when we're in fight-flight, narrow and fixate. They fixate on objects.

They fixate on thoughts. They primarily fixate on a movie going on about, called self, with the protagonist, and what's wrong and what might go wrong or what's helpful or might be helpful. You know, we're all living in our own home movie about self, aren't we? It's like every one of us. We're sitting here, there's a huge group, but maybe 150. We all have these movies going on through most of the day about the, it's got starring self, right? So what's this V?

Well, it's a sky. There's awareness with these thoughts and feelings moving through it. And if we keep fixating on the storyline, we can't remember that openness, that luminous awareness, we can't perceive it. So the freedom that we describe, and I like doing it in two parts, there's freedom from and freedom too. The freedom is from a limiting sense of self. we are in some way on this path to wake up out of a idea of self that is deficient

in some way are too needy or superior whatever it is a narrow sense of self and freedom too freedom to live from our wholeness you wouldn't be here if you didn't intuit in some way

of beingness or something vaster and more loving and more creative than you might regularly have access to. You wouldn't be listening if there wasn't something that was drawn to a practice and a path that could bring you home to really the fullness of who you are. That's what draws us, the freedom to be who we are. In the Zen tradition, the way to enter that freedom is sometimes described I love this term as the backward step. And here's why. Typically, it's like we're watching a movie.

We're fixated on the screen, usually the storyline of ourselves, but it could be fixated on pain in particular, or fixated on a particular judgment or whatever it is, but we're watching a movie. And we're forgetting that the movie is just an emanation coming out of this camera of lights, a play of light, you know, different forms. and that it was actually created out of the mind of the person who created the movie,

which is really, it all comes out of mind. So instead of watching the movie, the backward step is we kind of turn the attention backwards and sense that awareness is there, and then just relax back into it and be the awareness. The backward step is not a doing. The understanding or wisdom is that we're coming home to what we already are,

that this awakeness, this tenderness, this intelligence, this vast space of being is what we are. And rather than doing something, we're kind of undoing and relaxing back. Now, if as you're listening, it sounds confusing. If I talk about awareness and relaxing back into awareness, It just doesn't, it sounds like a far cry from how your day-to-day life might be going. I'd like to suggest an attitude as we continue this kind of inquiry tonight.

And that is of just curiosity of knowing you can put down what doesn't seem to fit. And mostly of trusting that if you relax with the inquiry and relax with the exploration, in that relaxing space opens up for truth to come through. One of my favorite stories that has a bit of that message. A woman describes a while back an old tired-looking dog coming into her yard. And she said she could tell from the color, although there's no tags in the well-fed belly, that the dog was clean, the dog had a home.

And so he followed her into the house. He walked down the hall and he went to the couch. He just lay down to the couch and took a nap. And so she let him nap. And then she writes it. She says an hour later he went to the door and I let him out. The next day he was back resumed his position on the couch and slept for an hour. This continued for several weeks.

Curious, I pinned a note to his collar that I wrote, Every afternoon your dog comes to my house for a nap. I don't mind, but I want to make sure it's okay with you. The next day he arrived with a different note pinned to his collar. He lives in a home with three children. he's trying to catch up on his sleep. May I come with him tomorrow? So in a way, I think of it like

the only way we can start opening to this kind of mystery of awareness is this attitude that we're going to let our ego and our judging and our figuring out, let us just take a little nap. Let it take a rest. Because you cannot figure out with your mind the nature of who you are.

The mind is a part of what you are. It's like looking through your eyes and not being able to see your own eyes. You can't see as you look out. But you can be what you are as you relax back. Does that resonate a bit? Are you getting that a little? Okay. So let's look at what prevents, what keeps us sustaining the trance,

what keeps us fixated on the movie and in the narrative. And it's a very basic existential predicament, which is we perceive separation and we get insecure and we feel like we have to be vigilant. What? Take a nap? There's problems to solve. There's things to do. There's things to protect.

There's things to create. We have this idea that we can't afford to take a nap or we can't afford for that ego that's so judgmental or striving or whatever to just rest a bit. And yet resting is what's needed. Okay? So that's what happens is we're in a mind state of too dangerous, too much I need or want, cannot just notice what's in the moment and rest. Instead of noticing a moment in what's resting, here's what happens.

We come into this world and we start noticing that it's tough. So we develop this space suit kind of self that, that helps us to navigate and get what we want and avoid what we don't want. It's as if we've created a mask for ourselves to get through. And we keep painting and adjusting and playing with and making the mask as better and better as we can, sometimes called a persona. It's our ego presentation.

So a lot of energy goes into our ego presentation. It's like resting means you're putting down the mask, right? but we're addicted to having that persona energized that ego energized so we keep on doing it and the the problem is this it's like in the Greek uh the Greek word for persona meant sing through okay which is like the actors had a mask and they would play through the mass their parts but the actors would when they were done with the play put their masks down but we don't do that We don't put down our space suit self. We don't put down the doing, fearing, worrying, defending self.

We keep the mask on. And we think that's who we are. We move through the day, identified with the mask, and we forget who's looking through right now. Okay? So out of fear we get identified with this presentation, this ego self, and we forget who's listening or looking. the pain of it

that we then live out of the wants and needs that were identified with and we forget to listen to and attend to the deeper source of our being the deeper longings so a story for you when he was very young he waved his arms gnashed the teeth of his massive jaws

and tromped around the house so that the dishes trembled in the china cabinet oh for goodness sake mother said you're not a dinosaur you're a human being since he was not a dinosaur he thought for a while that he might be a pirate seriously his father said at some point what do you want to be a fireman our policemen or a soldier some kind of hero but in high school they gave him tests and told him he was very good with numbers perhaps he would like to be a math teacher that was respectable or a tax accountant he could make a lot

of money doing that it seemed a good idea to make money what was falling in love and thinking about raising a family. So he was a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted that he was because it made him well small. He felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant but a retired tax accountant. Still worse, a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curve, forgot to take his pill, forgot to turn his hearing aid back on. Every day it seemed he had forgotten more things, important things, like which of his children lived in San Francisco and which of his children were married or divorced.

Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling the familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horse tails at the wetter's edge. as written by Bruce Holland Rogers. It's called Dinosaur. So as many of us have heard, I've mentioned many times that the regret of those that are dying,

and this is, you know, a palliative caregiver describes this. Really one of the major regrets was that I didn't live true to myself. I lived according to the expectations of others. You know, and it's not only the others because we internalize it. it. So we live according to some ideas or standards, the shoulds, the ought tos that we've internalized, rather than true to our own hearts. This inquiry, who are you and what do you want? Actually can save us if we go deep enough into it. Because most of us live at least a portion of our life in this trance where we are identified with that ego self that's

operating according to the shoulds and the fears. And then as I mentioned, if we don't break out, that is the regret of the dying. I just did not live true to my heart. So if you want to begin to investigate, and I think it's critical, you know, where is my life energy getting kind of fixated and identified? What's the self-identity I get trapped in that stops me from really living from more of a sense of wholeness. We start looking and the way that the signs, the flags are when we sense where we have the most fear are unmet needs.

Do we have an unmet need to have attention? Do we have an unmet need to feel that we're approved of or respected, are loved, our value? Do we have a fear we're going to fail on something or that we've already failed? because those are the places around which we build the space suit and get most identified. So we start looking at it and we start sensing that if the unmet need in some ways to feel safe

that maybe we get identified with the persona of the attic because we know how attached and fixated we are and having certain substances to soothe us. or if the unmet need is to feel safe, maybe we need to be in control because if things are chaotic, you know, we feel so at risk. So our personality gets organized in some controlling way. We have to be the boss in some way. There are many ways that we kind of narrow ourselves. Sometimes the need is to be, you know, if we're not a really good person,

then we'll get rejected so we get identified as the meditator or the person on a spiritual path. that's an identity. We get attached to our roles. It's interesting to watch. So we each have a kind of, I think of it a kind of resume or whatever of who we are

and that we kind of give out to the world. I remember my husband Jonathan having a conversation with somebody who had his had just looked at his website and the guy asked and it was about eight months ago,

the guy asked him, Well, I see you have Jonathan Faust, he had a few different initials and he says, CSA, what does that mean? And Jonathan's response was Cub Scouts of America on his resume, you know. He also had something like certified termite inspector and then in parentheses expired. But I liked it because, you know, we have our resumes and they matter to us. And it might not be that we have a formal professional resume, but we have this thing of who I am and what I've done

and how attached are we to it? You know, how much do we need to be in that role? For many people, the role is being affiliated with a something. I am part of a this group or this religion or a this whatever. And now the affiliations can, of course, be very positive community feeling, but we also have a sense of getting our identity, our meaning from that. And I remember watching a 60-minute interview of someone from the mafia who described how he watched the people in his family. And he knew that his destiny was either he was going to be in prison or die before he was like 40.

He just knew it. And the question was, why did you stay? And it was, that's my family. That's who I am. So there's a sense that that's who I am. A little side story, an elderly man lived alone in New Jersey, and he wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work because the ground was hard.

His only son Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament. Dear Vincent, I'm feeling pretty sad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year, and it's given me so much pleasure. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here, my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days.

Love Papa. A few days later, he received a letter from his son. Dear Pop, don't dig up that garden. That's where the bodies are buried. Love Vinny. At 4 a.m. the next morning, the FBI agent and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies.

they apologized to the old man and then they left that same day the old man received another letter from his son dear pop go ahead and plant the tomatoes now that's the best i could do under the circumstances love vinny i think i just wanted an excuse to read that so but the point is that when we get identified in anything smaller than what we are you know I am a teacher, I am the boss, I am an addict, I am a whatever, it obscures the larger truth. It obscures the light and love and tenderness of our being. And what happens is we get disconnected from our capacity for real healing and disconnected from our natural intelligence. And we get rigid, unable to change.

that's where rigidity comes from there's an older story of a guy who's a smoker a lifetime smoker and was hospitalized with emphysema and after a series of small strokes his daughter urged him as she often had to give up smoking

and he refused to ask her to buy him some more cigarettes and he told her I'm a smoker this life and that's how it is but several days later he had another small stroke and apparently it was in one of the memory areas of the brain and then the next day he without a concern he stopped smoking for good

and this wasn't because he decided to he woke up and forgot he was a smoker okay he forgot his identity you know into the extent that we're caught up in our roles and unable to put them down we suffer so it happens to each of us a roomie writes that whatever comes into being gets lost in being drunkenly forgetting its way back. So we forget. And yet the invitation of I think all of the wisdom traditions is that as much as we are conditioned to forget who we are, we have a capacity to remember and come home. That that's the promise, that's the invitation. We have that capacity. We have the capacity to remember really that spirit that limbs through us.

Now, there's a fear I want to mention that stops us, sometimes from really looking into awareness and really relaxing back, taking that backward step, which is, well, if I do that, and I really discover this vast, beautiful presence that's my nature, will I still pay the bills, you know? will I still remember how to function in day-to-day way? And there's a great line which is praise Allah

and tie your camel to the post. You know, that it's both end. We can remember our oceaness, spirit, that which is sacred. And hold lightly these spacesuit cells. You know, you don't have to feel. fight your ego and we certainly can't get rid of the ego. It's kind of part of being incarnated that we use it to navigate but we don't have to be identified with it. That's the,

teaching. And the pathway is to begin to pay deeper attention to where we're stuck. And I want to, the last part of the last 15, 20 minutes, I want to describe two ways that we can deepen our attention that help us to really inhabit that wholeness. And one way is inquiry. If we ask questions, it directs our attention in a way that's very, very incisive and lucid and revealing. So one way to disidentify, to undo the tangle, to remember who we are, is this inquiry. Like, what is really true? And the second way is going to be that we're going to explore is this letting be where we really let be. Okay?

And we're going to do this with very short reflections. And don't worry if I ask you to inquire and you don't come up with an answer. Because that's not the point. The point is just to get a taste of asking questions and then continue to explore on your own. Okay? Now, the first place of inquiry is, you know, we sense like, what are the ways that we get identified. Well, we get identified with our bodies. When it's painful, we say, I have a painful

body. I am feeling the victim of pain. Something's wrong with me and my body. We get identified with the body. We get identified with the way our body looks deeply in this culture. Very identified. So the first reflection for us is if you just, and you can, if it helps close your eyes just to senses, is to sense where you might find that there's strong wanting or fearing around your bodily self. Where are you wanting things to be different? Where are you very aversive?

And it may be with your sensory experience or it may be your appearance. For many it has to do with weight. To sense where that is for you and let yourself contact the realness of the experience I like this, I don't like this. And see if you can sense that that realness, that aversion or that wanting,

just see if it can be received or felt in awareness. You're sensing this background, awakeness, the witness, some people call it the witness, that you're experiencing the pleasant or unpleasant, the aversion, the wanting, It's being felt, the felt sense is in awareness. And just ask yourself, is this body what I really am?

Is this body? This sense of a self that looks this way. Is that what I really am? Can you sense the pleasant or unpleasant, the aversion, the wanting, as a liveliness that's playing in the field of awareness? So you can sense the enlarge being that's also here. Can you sense resting in the background, like sensing that awareness and just resting it

and letting the storyline and the wants and the fears play, letting them be there, but resting in something larger. Is this body what I really am? Are these sensations, these fears, these wants? And we move into identification with emotion here and you might sense either this, what you're already paying attention to, or if there's some strong emotion in your life right now that seems to take over a lot.

Anger, fear, grief, shame. If there's a situation that arouses the emotion just to touch in a little right now, if there's something going on in your life. See if you can let yourself tap in and feel. feel it, can this be felt with a kind, open awareness? And the inquiry, are these emotions, what I really am? You can bring to mind a role that you play that you're very identified with. Father, mother, sister, brother, boss, employee, artist, healer, spiritual person, unspiritual person. just a sense of role

and again we're not taking a whole lot of time on each just to give you the flavor sense the storyline your narrative you in that role the images that come with it maybe some of the feelings

the self-sense that collects around that role is this who I really am now sense a belief you have that you know gets you in trouble it may be a belief that I'm failing right now

or I'm going to fail or I'm too aggressive or people don't like me or I'll never really be close to anyone or if I don't work really hard I'll end up not being accepted or I'll never get what I want. See if you have a belief that you know is floating around in there. And for now, and you can keep on looking for a belief as I'm going to invite you to if you'd like open your eyes. I'm going to speak a little more about beliefs because our beliefs are where we get most identified and they're the ones that are the most challenging to untangle. We're often not aware of the beliefs. We're not aware that we're moving through the day but on some level we have

the belief that I'm falling short or with another person and we have the belief that if they really knew me they wouldn't like me. We're not aware. of them so much. We're not aware that we're sensing in some way a powerlessness like I can never really make a difference. So if you asked, if I asked you the question, if you landed on a belief just now, like I'm intrinsically unlovable or I'm flawed or whatever it is, and I said to you, is that belief really who you are? You might say, yep, it is. I mean, that feels very real. And that's me. You know, I am unlovable.

I am an unlovable person. I am a failure. If there's a strong belief, it's very, very sticky. If it wasn't sticky, we wouldn't suffer. Okay? Does that resonate? If it's sticky, we're identified with it and we suffer. And so there's, you know, Malo Nazardine is a Sufi saint and fool,

and he's all these teaching stories. And in one of them, he goes into a bank and the man. manager says well can you please identify yourself so he pulls out a little mirror and looks and goes yep that's me all right so so this is our identity these beliefs really shape our sense of who we are and it takes a real commitment to inquire and attend to them to begin to loosen them so the light can shine through them because we take them as true and I've used this phrase now the last few weeks,

Sokney-rimpichet introduced me to it, and I think it's great. They are real, but not true. Your belief, whatever it is that's keeping you in a small sense of self, it's a real belief in the sense that it exists, it comes up, and it brings up real feelings, but it's not truth.

There's no way a belief can capture the truth of what you are. It obscures it. and anything that obscures who we are needs to be investigated, needs the light of awareness shined on it. So we begin to look. I'll share one story. One student actually was a retreat, one of the retreats we did here,

and his belief was, I'm like my father. And that was the belief. And he said, I'll always push and try, and I'll really never get anywhere. Because his father just never made it, according to his own standards.

And he had the same feeling that he was destined to not really make it. And so I had him get in touch with those feelings, but I first asked the question, is that true that you'll never make it? And he said, it feels real. It feels real. But then he said, I don't know. It feels real, but I don't know.

To right away ask, is this belief true? It's really helpful. This is really true. And the reason it's helpful is you might, say yes but just having the question in there opens up a little space of awareness so you're not just automatically assuming it's true there's still a question in there the question's powerful so when you hit that belief just say is it true and then what i had to adam do is just ask me what's it like to live with this belief so he tried it on it didn't take much and he said it's

exhausting it's exhausting to live with it and it's depressing and it's depressing It's like I have no future to trust and he described himself like Sisyphus He just felt like he was pushing and pushing The king of Corinth He was condemned by the god of Hades To take that boulder And push it and push it and push it up the hill

And then it would just tumble down And then he had to push and push and push And it would tumble down He was he was just pushing And then it would fall down And he'd have to push again So exhausting made a lot of sense So then I had him feel then

And I said, who would you be? What would your life be like if you weren't believing that? Just for a moment, just sensed that. And it was like he had let the boulder fall and he just was like that. He said, light. I wouldn't be pushing light, open, free, energy. To challenge a belief is to begin to bring attention to it. And it just needs attention because the wisdom in us are deep,

wisdom knows that a belief is made out of fear and it doesn't represent the truth. But we are so, we've got so many mind moments of our conditioning believing it that it needs the light of awareness. Now, this far, I've been talking about inquiring into, but if at some point we don't inquire and then just relax, we don't actually end up inhabiting the truth of what we are. There's a wonderful story about Ananda, who is the Buddha's devotee and right-hand man and so on. He was always, he was the attendant that it was always by the Buddhist side. And he was also his cousin and very devoted. But after the Buddha's death, he wasn't yet enlightened.

So there was this big council that was held after the Buddha's death. And only our huts who were enlightened were allowed to come. And up until that point, Ananda hadn't awakened in that way. And so the night before the meeting, he committed himself to practicing really vigorously. Like he was going to go for it. And so all night he was just, you know, trying to pay attention and trying to break through and so on.

And he just got exhausted and discouraged. And so finally, right before dawn, a lot happens right before dawn. myths, you know, right before Dawn, he just gave up. He just said, you know, he just kind of lay back on his pillow and in the moment of giving up the effort and lying back, that backwards step, he was free. So the message is not that we shouldn't make an effort towards cultivating a wise attention. There are many ways that it's very skillful to develop some concentration and to inquire. These are all, they all take some effort. But if we don't have the

wisdom that knows how to just let it all go, you know, make the effort, see more clearly, get more loose, but then relax, we're unable to really inhabit what we discover. I'm going to read you a short quote from Adjashanti because in a way I hope this is a warm up towards what he shares next week. He says, don't try to hold on to what is realized, be what is realized. You cannot maintain realization or sustain it. In order for it to always be, you must be it yourself in your humanity. Backs back and inhabit this awareness that's here, but we live it through our humanity. This isn't about becoming some, you know, luminous space out there and saying, oh, no more with that body mind, you know, I'm done with that.

This is experiencing this life as animated by spirit, living a life from spirit through these body minds. Maybe we'll be closing in a few moments with another reflection, but one of the understandings I found is really useful, sensing that we usually have this notion that I'm a human on a spiritual path. And if we can flip it and say, what I am is this awareness, the spirit that's waking up through this human incarnation. Then we get a little bit of a taste that what we are is that ocean. And it's like the wave is happening and we're discovering our oceanness through these bodies, discovering that spirit as we move through our life. There's one last story I'd like to share with you

and then we'll practice a little. And this to me, it's a story about Ticknat Han and he basically shares how his mother's death devastated him. He said the day my mother died, I wrote in my journal, A serious misfortune of my life has arrived. I suffered for more than one year after passing away of my mother, But one night in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother.

I saw myself sitting with her, and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing down. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk to her as if she had never died. When I woke up, it was about two in the morning, and I felt very strongly I had never lost my mother. The impression was that my mother was still with me, was very clear. I understood that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me. I opened the door and went outside.

The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hell covered with tea plants and my hut was set behind the temple. Walking slowly in the mood light, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so very often, very tender, very sweet. each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me I knew this body was not mine alone but a living continuation

of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents of all my ancestors these feet that I saw as my feet were actually our feet together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil

from that moment on the idea that I'd lost my mother no longer existed all I had to do was look at the palm of my hand and feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me available at any time. So I share that as a part of closing because there's a way in which we have to honor our humanness and grieve and let the fear be there and the hurts and the wants and the anger and they're real. Ticknaut-Hans grief was real. But there's a meaning we make out of things

that's not true. And if we can begin to pause and honor the realness with great tenderness, we can begin to relax back into that presence that's timeless and know who we are and not get caught

in the trance. So for me, that's the meaning of interdependence days in a way that we realize our belonging as vast, as boundless, and from that realization, our actions come are naturally going to respond to each other with caring, with intelligence, with spontaneity. So let's close with a little sitting. As you pause and close

your eyes, just let yourself become aware of the life that's right here. Notice the aliveness in your body, sounds around you, whatever might be going on in your heart right now, whatever or mood, whatever feelings. And then also sense this background presence, this alert, inner stillness that's aware of all the changing phenomena. You might look back and just say, what is aware right now?

What is this awareness? Very gentle inquiry. What is this awareness? What is listening right now? The mental question, it's like you're turning and looking right into the awareness itself, and then just let go and relax, just be it.

Just rest in the sea of wakefulness. It's just sensing how everything you experience is part of what you are. Sound, sensations, feelings, space in the room. Rest in wakeful openness. We close with the simple prayer that we might wake up to realize this loving presence, this timeless presence, that is our deepest nature. and that our lives might be an expression of that, that all beings everywhere

might awaken to realize the truth of who they are and discover the possibility of peace on earth, of healing, of freedom everywhere. Namaste. 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.