Tara Brach - Part 2: Happiness

Episode Date: October 18, 2013

2013-10-16 - Part 2: Happiness - This 2-part series explores conditioned and unconditioned happiness: What blocks us from experiencing true well-being, and the skillful means that allow this natural expression of our being to shine through.

So this is the, as I mentioned, the second part of a series on happiness. And in the last class, I described two kinds of happiness. And the first kind of happiness is a conditional kind of happiness, meaning it's hitched to our life going a certain way. Our life is cooperating. And we're getting just the sense sensations we want, or we're getting some kind of a connection with another person that really matters to us, or we've accomplished something that we were really going for.

It can also have to do with status, achieving something on status, getting more possessions. Conditional happiness can be wholesome, yet if we're attached to having what we want to have, if we have to have it, then we get into trouble. We suffer. And some of you might remember one of my favorite little descriptions of one version of this kind of happiness.

It's called The Way to Achieve Inner Peace. It's to finish all the things you've started. So I looked around to see all the things I had started and hadn't finished. So today I finished one bottle of gin, a bottle of red wine, my Prozac, a large box of chocolate, a six-pack of beer, and a pint of Ben and Jerry's pistachio. You have no idea how good I feel. First form of happiness, then, is that conditional happiness.

It's things going our way. The second is unconditional happiness. happiness. The Polly word is Sukha. I love the expression, happy for no reason. It's not hitch to circumstance. There's a full presence with life just as it is and a sense of real well-being with that. So tonight what we'll explore is how we cultivate the qualities of heart and mind that set the, that make us available, I'd say, for this unconditional happiness. There's a story of an American tourist who was visiting Greece

and he encountered on a hillside he was doing a little hiking, a shepherd who was watching a sheep, playing a guitar and really just enjoying the clouds drifting over the valley. So the American tourists kind of stood next to him and crossed his arm and said, you know, you could really turn this into something.

You buy a bit more land, more sheep, own a slaughterhouse, export, the meat, you know, you could really, so the shepherd said, well, what would that do for me? Well, then you could relax and play the guitar and enjoy the clouds and you get the idea. So if we roll back into history and go to Greece 17 centuries earlier, this is a meeting between Alexander the Great and the mystic diogenes, I think, I'm saying his name right, but I'm not sure. So if I'm slaughtering the name, I'm sorry.

So Diogenes possessed nothing except a begging bowl, and then he threw even that away, and he was known for his serene and blissful state. And Alexander the Great, the world conqueror, knew of him and wanted to meet him. So it was one of the more interesting meetings in history. Diogenes was sunning himself along a riverbank as the conquer approached. Alexander looked into those silent, blissful eyes

and told the mystic that he greatly admired him and then asked that there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes paused a moment and he said, yeah, there's one thing you could do for me. You can move a little to the side. You're blocking my son. It's an eerie and beautiful reply because here's the most powerful man in the world

and he's offering him anything. And anyway, this mystic was a man who needed nothing. Alexander said, when I'm finished conquering the world, I'm just going to come and join you on the riverbank. and relax and joy. Diogenes replied, there is no need to conquer the world first. I have not conquered the world and I'm relaxing. What's preventing you? You can relax now. Alexander said, no, I must conquer the world first. Then Diogenes said to him, you will never finish. You will die in the middle of it. And Alexander did indeed. In the midst of a war campaign, he died.

this is our mind always needing to do something first. We always in some way have a reason not to pause and relax and open to what's right here. The very nature of the mind is to keep moving and creating a reality where this self is on its way and has to accomplish this and do that and avoid this before it can really, really just rest. It's rare that we really say this moment is it. It's like usually this moment is a moment on its way to something or after something. We're usually preparing. There's a little anonymous verse that says,

the mind is constantly trying to figure out what page it's on and the story of itself. close the book, burn the bookmark, end of story, now the dancing begins. So we know if we're around young children, it's a bit contagious and it's also true when you're with dogs, that we know that there is the wiring for happiness. We see it. We can see interest, curiosity, wonder, amazement, joy, playfulness. We can see it. And then somehow or other, we get civilized out of it. We get occupied. We get occupied so we're not so available.

And like the media, it's the bad news that sticks, so we get pretty contracted. About a year ago, I shared one of my favorite poems from the poet Hafeus, and I'd like to share it with you again. He says, he's asking really what the difference is between us and a saint. And he says, the saint knows that the saint knows that the spiritual path is a sublime chess game with God and the beloved has made such a fantastic move that the saint is now continually tripping over joy and bursting out in laughter and saying, I surrender. Whereas, my dear, I am afraid you think you still have a thousand serious moves.

And when we really honestly check in in our life, it kind of seems that way. We get kind of grim and we've got this idea of what has to happen. There's a tightness around it, a seriousness. So one of the places we're going to pay attention is how given the survival bias that we hear about that the mind does fixate on the negative, and one friend was telling me tonight that in recent article in one of the science section of the post, there's actually some genetic grounding to how we do that. But we know we do that. We fixate on what might go wrong.

There is a very essential part of spiritual practice that is to include what we're missing by deliberately paying attention to goodness and what's positive and beautiful. We keep going. It's almost like we're afraid if we don't keep focusing on what can go wrong we'll get slammed from the side unexpectedly. A linguistic professor was lecturers class class. was lecturers class one day, he said in English two negatives make a positive. He continued, but in some languages, for instance, Russian, two negatives still remain a negative. However, he pointed, there's no language where two positives make a negative.

Voice pipes up from the back. Yeah, right. So there are two modes of practice that carry us into well-being that we explore on this path of presence. and one is a kind of pure presence where we're just opening to the life of the moment as it is. And when we're really, really present, that leads to well-being. And then the other is this gladdening of the mind where we, on purpose, pay attention to what we're habitually not paying attention to that gives us more of a sense of brightness and openness and availability.

So you might be listening and hear me say, this is a talk tonight on happiness and be thinking to yourself, yeah, right. You know, where I am in my life, you know, you might be in the middle of a divorce or just working with some very serious illness in yourself or somebody that you love in trouble. And so it's not about manufacturing a kind of false cheer. The kind of happiness we're talking about is a profound sense of well-being that can actually be experienced in the midst of whatever is happening. You can feel a sense of real sorrow,

but in some way feel whole and at home and true. In fact, one woman went to a retreat, this is years ago, and so Story, another teacher told me, and she had one of those retreats that was a total rollercoaster ride where she went up and felt these rapturous feelings, and the next day she'd be really dealing with some deep, undelt with shame or guilt and then she was up again feeling excitement about how much she was learning and then she'd go down again feeling a sense of a grip of fear that just went up and

down and up and down and at her last interview she said I really feel like I get it the joy is in getting real that there is more true happiness in being real with what is than in any state that we might happen to be feeling in any moment. There's a teaching that pleasantness and unpleasantness, the 10,000 joys and sorrows, that is inevitable. But suffering is optional and it's different. You can feel pain but not be suffering. So one of the trainings of the two we're talking about tonight is this very very, very

deep training in coming back to what's right here and it's not the practice if you're feeling stirred up in a way that there's trauma you're feeling really off-balance and have no sense of inner resourcefulness then there's other ways of practicing to help find a little more resilience but ultimately to find that unconditional happiness getting real getting real in the moments that you're not often thought, it's not proliferating. You're just contacting what's there. The gift of really being able to be with what arises,

of learning to stay, is what's described as a heart that's ready for anything. And I love that phrase, Sayada Upandita, one of the great Burmese teachers, talks about this, that when fear comes up, and instead of doing your normal strategies to get away from fear, whether it's eating or getting busy or whatever it is,

you just stay. You find that it comes and it goes and there's some presence there that you start trusting can hold it. And the more of that trust grows, a confidence develops that we can handle this life. And that confidence brings more happiness than any passing state of happiness. Because we're no longer tensing against what's around the corner,

we're able to actually be here for our lives. Sometimes described as the lion's roar, which is this confidence that we know how to be in a quality of presence and heart that has room for this whole living, dying world. The lions roar. So we train ourselves in presence and we start, it's very useful to start with small things when you find yourself upset about something that's not like your whole life is falling apart,

but you get very interested, okay, what's it like to really just stay for this one? So one friend describes, you know, a few months ago, she's really, really responsible, never lets us happen, but somehow rather some bill that she thought was being paid online, she didn't pay it, she got, you know, the bill that says, here's your penalty of $32.75, which it really, bothered her. And so, you know, there was something, there's a sense of something's wrong. There's something wrong with me. It was like I really was irresponsible. I overlooked this. And then she said, okay, get present. And so instead of following the thought patterns of how

she hadn't been responsible and how it happened, she just felt in her body this sinking feeling of, you know, yet another place, the belief was yet another place I'm falling short. But she just state with the sinking feeling and breathed with it and with the frustration and the anxiety there. And gradually it just played itself through because, this is one neuroscientist described this way, the actual duration of an emotion, 1.5 minutes. How come an emotion usually stays longer? We keep thinking. isn't always so helpful.

And in this case, it's, some of you might know the story of the mother who sends a telegram to her son, start wearing details to follow, you know, which I've always loved. But it's that idea.

It's like, we are just cooking up a storm. So the more you think about what's going wrong and how you should have paid that bill, and it's not just the $32, it's also the this and the this, the more you're stirring up agitation. So that's why we stay in those mood.

presence cuts through. There's something in us that's saying, it's okay, just this. Just this. And if you stay with the just this, you can survive it and not only survive it, there's a quality of presence that grows that's bigger than the drama.

There's a sense of who you are that gets more expanded and at ease. So that's one example of, you know, when we when we end up staying with experience and don't make it wrong and just let it comes and it goes. Now, I do want to share with you the story of a CEO of a large company. He's greatly admired for his energy and drive. But he suffered one embarrassing weakness.

Each time he'd enter the president's office to give the weekly report, he'd wet his pants. Really embarrassing, actually. So the kindly president advised him to see a urologist of the company's expense. He appeared again the next week for his report, and his pants were again wet. Didn't you see the urologist? Asked the president. He said, no, I actually listened to a meditation, a guided meditation. He said, I'm cured.

I no longer feel embarrassed. So contrary to the implication of that joke, presence does not mean inactivity. A lot of times, I'd say it's one of the biggest questions I get when I talk about radical acceptance or opening to the moment or allowing, is that, well, you know, am I allowing so-and-so to just trample all over me with, you know, harmful behavior? The idea of presence is that we fully contact our experience in that moment, and the very quality of presence, when we're really in touch, actually enables us to respond. to situations with more intelligence and more compassion. Because we've paused long enough so that we're stepping out of our reactivity, which

is just more fight-flight-freeze, and actually occupying a deeper, wiser place. But it doesn't mean in action. We're always acting. The question is, where does the action come from? Does it come from a place of presence? Or does it come from an old habit of just replaying our pattern? of blaming and judging and so on. So, presence begins to give us a refuge of well-being.

I experienced just recently a round of having to be very intentional when, I think it was last Saturday, I was, oh, about 20 minutes before giving an afternoon presentation at the Budapest gathering when my back spasmed. And it wasn't one of the spasms where I absolutely couldn't move. And, you know, some of us know what that one's like, but it was pretty bad enough so I couldn't sit too well. And I started watching my mind go, and it was first like, oh, here goes,

I won't be able to be really on. I'm going to be having to be very self-protective of my body and watch how I move. so I won't really be present really with the group and then it went forward in time oh and tomorrow we had our graduation for our teacher training program I'm going to miss that

how am I going to be able to drive the hour and a half if I can't sit you know so I started doing that I went wait a minute this is what I'm about to get up and teach about you know to get it together so okay so it backs about so it was unpleasant it was not excruciating it was just unpleasant so I just unpleasant

unpleasant, just feel it, breathe, then the worry thoughts would come up, okay, it's anxiety, and then I'd just be with the anxiety until there was actually a real sense, not of joy in getting real, but a gladness of, okay, I'm right here with what is. And by the way, I did take ibuprofen, I did arnica, I did everything later, so it wasn't like I didn't act. But just being with what was with sufficient presence to be engaged with the group I was with, it goes even deeper, this possibility of presence and well-being. There's a friend of the Sanga right now who's in hospice and has a very short time left.

He's very aware of dying, and he's a deep attitude of open-heartedness towards his own experience. He's not fighting what's happening. So there's pain, there's confusion, there's grief, there's a sense of loss, all those things are moving through. But the largest space you sense when talking to him is actually gratitude, that he just feels so awake in what's happening and so tender and so vulnerable and so connected with the people in his life that there's like a sea of loving that people feel when they're, when

they're with him. The heart that's ready for anything truly carries us through everything. You might even ask yourself right now for a moment and you can close your eyes when you do it. What would it be like? What would it be like to have this heart that's ready for anything? This trust that like the lion's roar that really whatever happens, there is a presence. There's a loving presence that can meet it, move through, be a refuge. What happens when you sense this heart that is ready for anything? Albert Einstein says there's two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.

The other is as if everything is a miracle. So you can open your eyes when you'd like. When we're trying to control our experience instead of being present, there's no access to wonder. There's no access to amazement. There's no access to joy. So we make this deal that yes, we'll open to the 10,000 joys and sorrows in exchange we get to live our moments.

So this is one of the pathways that we're exploring tonight to unconditional happiness, it's just unconditional presence. The second that I mentioned, and it's an important one I want to emphasize tonight, is that because of the way our minds fixate, because of the patterns of our mind, it's really, really powerful to intentionally pay attention differently. This is Cahil Gibran, he says, and forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. So we can cultivate a capacity for happiness, we can be available.

And the key guideline is where attention goes, energy flows. Okay? That's like the key principle here. Where you pay attention, that's what's going to then arouse the body states, the mind states, the heart states. The Buddha put it this way, that whatever a practitioner regularly thinks and ponderers upon, that will be the inclination of the mind. Now this is purely intuitive and logical both. Whatever you do regularly, that becomes patterned.

If you call it neuropathways, the grooves become more greased. That's the way the mind goes. As the neuroscientists say, neurons that fire together, wire together. It's a really important understanding. It means that the more you have fear thoughts, the more you're going around worrying, are the more you're having judgmental thoughts and feeling aggression, the more likely your mind is to keep on generating fear and aggression. The more regularly your body will be in a biochemical soup

of whatever makes up fear or aggression. So we start asking ourselves, what, well, how have I, what have I thinking about today? You know, where was this mind? And it's a really important question. It's reinforced by, as now it's been to be, discover we have what's called the default network in the brain so when we're not focus on a particular task there's a part of the brain that gets activated that is

designed to go into the future and into the past just to keep us located in time and a sense of self and because our tendency is towards fear thoughts it there's kind of a buzz of fear behind the default network and what that means is that when our minds are wandering when we're not totally occupied we're generally reinforcing a sense of a fearful separate self. Meditation has been shown to quiet the default network. Interesting. Again, this is from the FMRIs.

So the saying is how we live today is how we live our life. It's not like we're really on our way somewhere different. We're reinforcing our patterning each day. The good side is that in any moment, you can choose to pay attention in a bigger or deeper way. You can change that patterning. And this is the finding of neuroplasticity, whatever the patterns are, of personality, of the way you do relationships, or the way you get down on yourself, or get narrowed or get addictive, or whatever the pattern is.

You can train your attention in a way to do, to access deeper resourcefulness and live in a more creative way. In any moment, like right now, that's what's possible. Like right now you can notice if you just ask that question, what is between me and really being at home with myself, with my body, with my heart, and what's between me and a loving kind of presence? And what most of us will find is that there's some habit. ritual tightness that we weren't paying attention to or some background belief that

something's wrong with our life right now or that we're not enough in some way. Just by asking that question, it shines a light on what we weren't paying attention to. And if we're willing to simply be present with that, we relax open into a quality of openness and wakefulness that's really our true home. We shift our sense of who we are. So the inquiry right now is to sense what are the ways that we can redirect our attention when we lock in to negative thinking?

What are the ways that we can gladden the mind? And that's from the language of the Buddhist time. And I'm going to give you three different strategies for gladdening the mind that you you can explore that I hope are extremely familiar to you. And they are gratitude, serving, and savoring. Okay? And we're going to take them one at a time.

There's a lot of really good science on gratitude now. That when we feel that appreciation for conditional happiness, whatever's coming up, and we feel appreciation and really inhabit that appreciation, our psyche shifts in a dramatic way. How many of you have noticed that about gratitude that you really feel at home and more who you are when you're feeling that gratefulness?

Can I see by hands? Don't be shy. Okay, yeah. So some of the research I mentioned Seligman last week, positive psychology. There was research with severely depressed people and he said for 15 days, each day write down three good things that happened to you. and at the end 94% had decreased in their depression, 92% said happiness increased.

Very, very powerful. In some of his training, Seligman suggests the most effective thing you can do is pick somebody you feel grateful towards and write a one-page letter, read it to that person, and listen to attentively to their response. It's very powerful. Another thing that a lot of people find helpful is to have a gratitude partner. And I did this for several years. I had actually different people at different times.

Our agreement was we were just going to write one email a day saying just one thing we were grateful for. And that was it. It was very low-key demand, you know. But it was kind of amazing how that became a kind of a gravitational field towards well-being. My son, Narayan, says that his gratitude practice is to, that when he feels something that makes him happier, delights him in some way, he always says it out loud. It's like that's his training to himself. So he'll be with his partner and they'll be playing with their cat and he'll just say,

I'm just so glad we'd land it up with this cat. Or they'll be having a dinner and he'll go, wow, this is really, you know, I'm really loving these tastes. Or to her, this relationship, I'm so grateful that we're, you know, so he says it out loud. It's like his sodna, which is his discipline. Now, the key to getting mileage out of gratitude practice is to when you feel grateful for something, pause long enough to feel what gratitude feels like in your body and your heart. Like feel the uplift from it. It's a really, it's one of the most delicious experiences, that sense of gladness.

So notice it, and the more you do, the more it will increase, because, where attention goes, energy flows. So this is gratitude practice. Even when life is more difficult, you'll start finding blessings in what's there. It's all on how we frame things, of course. There's a story of Saul and Mort. They're walking from religious service,

and Saul wonders whether it would be all right to smoke while praying. Mort says, well, why don't you go ask Rabbi Schwartz? So Saul goes up to Rabbi Schwartz and asks Rabbi, may I smoke while I pray? Rabbi Schwartz says, no, my son, you may not. That's utter disrespect to our religion. Sult goes back to his friend and tells him what the good rabbi told him. Mort says, I'm not surprised.

You ask the wrong question. Let me try. So Mort goes up to Rabbi Schwartz and says, Rabbi, may I pray while I smoke? To which Rabbi Schwart eagerly replies, by all means, my son, by all means. It takes practice. It really takes a commitment to, because we're switching our brain patterns around.

One of my favorite stories on gratitude practice that I love to share, a very good friend James Barras. Some of you might know him from his Awakening Joy book. And so he would be visiting his mother who just died last year. And his mother was 89. I think she died when she was 90 when he told us about this. she was definitely the half-full type. And so he's sharing with her the benefits of gratitude

and she's doing the old dog can't learn new tricks kind of response. But finally she said, all right, I'll try. So they played a game. And it was every time she complained about something, she would just add the phrase, and my life is very blessed. Okay, the food is too cold. And my life is very blessed.

So-and-so is coming late. And my life is very blessed. I lost one of my stockings, so whatever it was. So they had fun, they played with it, and he encouraged her to keep going. Well, over the weeks, the nurses, his sister, everybody that knew her reported radical, radical change. During the next month, she lost her eyesight during the next months.

So this was at her 90th, they have a family tradition of sending each other cards on their birthday. Here's what she wrote. I'm happier than I've ever been and truly mean each word. The thoughts that cause the worries now all seem so absurd. Though my eyesight has been dimmed, I see clearer than before. The glass is not half empty. It's overflowing, to be sure.

Sweet. So let's just take a moment. Let's tap into this incredibly sweet well of, gratitude and as you close your eyes it's a good time just to pause and feel yourself right here feel your breath and see if there's anything that wants to relax a little in your body usually the shoulders can always loosen a little in the hands and you might experiment a little with the smile that feeling a curve the smile spreading through the eyes a slight smile

out the mouth. This actually sends a message to the nervous system. It quiets down the sympathetic nervous system which is fight, flight, freeze. Give more ease just by the actual expression of a smile. And begin to let come to mind the different parts of your life, the people, the experiences, the places that you're grateful for. And for the next few moments, like to invite you just to whisper to yourself, but so that you can hear it. Anything that comes to mind that you feel grateful for. So we're going to hear a whole buzz of whispering right now. Those of you that are here right now, those of you listening to the podcast, just whispering

what you're grateful for. Pick one thing that stands out that you're grateful for and just whisper that one again a few times in a row. And as you whispered, see if you can feel as a visceral feeling the gratitude. Feel the heart, the upwelling. Feel what it does to your whole sense of your being when you really inhabit gratitude. You might just mentally whisper, thank you. Feeling yourself blessed.

And my life is very blessed. And my life is very blessed. So that's the first of the three of gladdening the mind is to make gratitude a practice. The second is serving, and serving doesn't mean, you know, finding a cause and this major kind of go out and be, you know, a hero. Serving means just in whatever ways we give. Schweitzer says this. He says, I don't know what your destiny will be. but one thing I know, the only ones among you who will be really happy,

are those who will have sought and found how to serve. Again, I want to say that serving, it could be through your words to other people, through your prayers, through your giving of money, through your giving of your time, but it's where your heart is. It's that your heart wants to give in some way. and there's a very interesting research article I read recently where they asked volunteers what made them happy and so the happiness was divided into two categories

for some people it was happiness based on more hedonic things where it was sense pleasure and so on and the others had a happiness that was based on really serving giving the meaning of being part of the larger whole So those were the kind of two categories they divided into. Then they took their white blood cells and looked at a genetic level, both at inflammation, the markers for inflammation, and also for immune activity.

And there was a real relationship between those who most sought their happiness from consuming in different ways had more markers for more inflammation and less immune activity, and those that were more into wanting to serve, and that's where the happiness and joy came from, less inflammation and more immune. And the theory is that our different gene expression is driven by an evolutionary strategy of working for the common good.

That there's a, you know, we feel good when we are grateful. We feel good when we're generous, and that then, you know, reinforces us. It's a reward that has us do more. However we look at it, there is a relationship between health and this kind of happiness of belonging to something larger. And that's what serving does. So it's part of our evolutionary unfolding that there's a widening of identity, that this unconditional happiness comes because there's not a self that's having strong preferences anymore.

We're free just to enjoy our moment. to enjoy our moments. Story of Roberto de Vincenzo, who's a great Argentino golfer. He once run a tournament. And after receiving a check and smiling for the cameras, he prepared to leave, and he's relatively new at this. So he's walking alone to the parking lot.

He's approached by a young woman who congratulates him and tells him that her son is seriously ill and near death. And she didn't know how she could pay the doctor's bills and the hospital expenses. And he, who's known as a gentleman, was so touched by a story, he took a pen and he endorsed the day's winnings over to her,

and he pressed into her hand and said, make some good days for the baby. A couple of weeks later, he was at another country club, and one of the officials came over and said, you know, some of the boys saw you in the parking lot and saw what happened with that young woman you met. He nodded. Well, said the official,

I have news for you. She's a phony. She has no sick baby. There's no children at all. She's fleeced you, my friend. You mean there's no baby who's dying? said Roberto. That's right, said the official. Why, that's the best news I've heard all week. So the second area that we're talking about is serving and the sweetness that comes from what you might sense as acts of kindness of any form. The third is savoring. And savoring again goes very much against the pace of our culture. You know, even when good things are happening and we're enjoying,

there's something in us that's driving forward to the next thing. So it really takes a commitment to pause. Really takes a commitment to pause. That when something delightful arises, it might be the sound of rain or the look of the stars, or the laughter of a loved one, or whatever it is that brings that pleasure, the practice is to really immerse in it, to really sense the appreciation or enjoyment,

and then feel how that is in our body. And it's helpful to practice with something or two things a day where you actually slow down and let yourself take in the enjoyment of it. I think one of the best ones could be a hot shower for many people. That's a fairly universal. But to actually be in the shower and go, okay, pleasant, pleasant, enjoying, feeling the pounding sensation, the heat, the pressure, just to pause and enjoy. It could be with your morning tea or coffee, could be hugging a loved one, seeing a child happy,

being struck funny, you know, when something's really entertained you and then really getting it, wow, this feels great to be able to let go of my little box I was in and get the incongruity and absurdity, just like really appreciate it, just slow down. So what we're doing is memorizing the experience of enjoyment in our body, which actually affects our neuropathways. Again, energy flows. Where the attention goes, energy flows, pay attention to enjoying. It becomes more of a habit.

So I have a practice when I take a walk most every morning as part of my, you know, just meditate, quiet, be in nature, and I kind of play a game where I'll randomly just stop, whenever I can kind of remember, just stop, because there's something about moving that still has a subtle on my way somewhere feeling. And in the stopping, all the senses wake up. So I'll stop and all the senses will wake up.

And if there's something pleasant in that, if there's the sound of the breeze and the leaves or a certain scent, you know, or certain feelings, sometimes just the feeling of the air on my skin, I will actually, again, memorize the pleasantness of it. It's a very powerful experience to start pausing and registering, acknowledging, ah, this is good. This feels good. You know, in psychology today, they did research on aging

and found that elderly are not more grumpy. They're actually happier. and the reason why they postulate is that younger people fixate on the future, on worries, and accomplishing what needs to be different, what will go wrong. And older are more aware of limited time and permanence, so they're more motivated to enjoy the moment, so they get more in the habit of just enjoying moments. And I can testify I get the good fortune of having a lot of time with my mom, and she has this incredible appreciation for her.

appreciation for all the simple things and it slows me down. Here's a poem by Ellen Bass. I had a student once who was so depressed she wanted to die. She was a young single mother, lonely poor, watching other girls go to parties and bars while she was home, cutting the crusts off peanut butter sandwiches, reading the Berenstein Bears and the bad dream. Then she collapsed with heart disease and spent the next few years waiting for a transplant. The strange thing is now she was happy.

Every day, almost every breath, was semi-extatic. She was a modern-day Chicana Rumi, hanging out with the beloved, grateful just to touch his hem. I find I'm telling myself all the time now, look how you lift one foot and then the other. All the nerves and synapses firing together. Look how you reach for a carton of blueberries

and eat each dusky globe one by one. Look at the spotted dog tied to the newsstand, drops the saliva sliding off his tongue, and the cracked bick lighter in the gutter shining a watery turquoise blue. Even when your heart is a used tea bag you can lie down in a warm bed, even though you cry half the night with the window open a little to let in the stars. So we unlearn the habits of tumbling into the future which come with fear, as we begin to pause and savor what's here. Last class I talked about one of the common denominator,

qualities that are found in all people that have real well-being, which is an intention towards it, that there's something in us that intuit the possibility. And again, I'm not talking about a cheerfulness, but a deep sense of well-being of gratification and contentment, peace, happiness. The Buddha said, I would not have taught you about happiness and freedom if it were not your potential to realize it. Every one of us has the potential just part of being more who we really are to step out of some of the habitual patterns that might keep us

small and tight or grim and to, through presence, really sense that heart that's ready for anything, that freedom to live the moments. And it's what happens when we are resting in that is our moments become creative. It's like this life, we have this sense of wholeheartedness and when we're living our life, we're not just trying to get through the day, which I know for so many of us is the frame that we carry. As part of closing, I'd like to share a story. I shared a couple of years. I shared a couple of years ago and it's about the violinist Ishtak Perlman and the story has been questioned and the veracity of the story but the value of the message is incredibly clear and there's

some streams that I know are true given his all that was been written about him many of you know Perlman was crippled by polio when he was a young child so at each performance he he has a slow entry on his crutches and he sits down he unclasped the braces and his legs and he prepares to play. Now, the story took place 1995 performance at Lincoln Center in New York. And on this occasion, he'd only play the first few bars when one of the strings on his violin broke.

And the whole audience could hear the crack when it snapped. They were wondering, what's going to happen? Is he going to put on his braces and have to walk across the stage and find another violin? But here's what happened. He paused. He just sat still and he closed his eyes. And then he signaled for the conductor to begin again.

And he re-entered the concerto playing with unimaginable passion and power and purity. And some of those there imagined that he was like reconfiguring and modulating the piece in his head so deep he was immersed in the creating. And so when he finished there was this odd silence. And then of course came the outburst of... applause from every corner of the hall. And Perlman smiled and he wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to quiet the crowd and then he spoke and as it said he didn't boastfully. It was kind of a quiet pensive tone and here's what he's said to have said. You know sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make

with what you have left. Sometimes it's the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left. We weigh down our lives, this thousand serious moves with our ideas of the future in the past. We weigh down our lives with our worry thoughts about what's going wrong. So when we have the courage to begin to just really stay with what's right here, discover that presence. And when we have the capacity to start appreciating and savoring our moments, there is an availability to life where we really can give whatever is left to give and savor and find wonder in the life that's here. So I'd like to close with you here at this point and just invite again this last reflection, just to send

where we are. And in this pause, just to experiment, sense the intention towards well-being, have a curiosity and openness, to really relaxing back into well-being. And sometimes the first thing that happens is we sense, you know, in a way, what is between me and really being happy. And then we bring that honest, gentle presence to whatever we find, that's the pathway to well-being. So just notice what's right here, notice what's going on in your body and see how much you can experience whatever's here with a gentle, kind presence, this body, this heart. You might sense what you're appreciating right now. What are you most grateful for in this moment and opening yourself to the light and the aliveness and the beingness

that's here when there's a gratitude or appreciation. Naomi Shaiib Nye writes this. She says, it's difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness, there's something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up. But happiness floats. It doesn't need you to hold it down. It doesn't need you to hold it down. It doesn't need anything. Happiness lands on the roof of the next house singing and disappears when it wants to. You're happy either way.

Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful treehouse and now live over a quarry of noise and dust cannot make you unhappy. Everything has a life of its own. If it could too wake up filled with possibilities of coffee cake and ripe peaches and love even the floor which needs to be swept, the soiled linens and the scratched records.

Since there is no place large enough to contain so much happiness, you shrug. You raise your hands and it flows out of you into everything you touch. You are not responsible. You take no credit as the night sky takes no credit for the moon but continues to hold it and to share it and in that way be known. Happiness floats. Namaste.

And thank you for your attention. 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.