Tara Brach - Part 2: Hope and the Spiritual Path

Episode Date: July 5, 2013

2013-07-03 - Part 2: Hope and the Spiritual Path - In this talk we further define the nature of mature or spiritual hope as part of a trinity that includes trust and love, and explore what blocks its unfolding.  We then review how different people have "hit bottom" and found their way to the energy, receptivity and openness of hope.

last week, we explored the role of hope in spiritual life. And I spent some time contrasting what you might consider as egoic hope, which is hope that's fixated on certain things going well for myself or certain people. And it's usually got some grasping and some fear mixed into it. I contrasted that with what we might call spiritual hope. And spiritual hope perceives life as unfolding in a way of awakening consciousness. So there's some innate intelligence that's behind the unfolding and there's some trust in it and a love for that. And that gives what we call spiritual hope.

And I like very much the way Hamid Ali, a wonderful teacher described that he said, hope is a state of trust that everything will be okay. It's a feeling of optimism, an attitude of openness and true receptivity to what the unfolding of being presents to us. So there's this egoic hope and then there's a kind of hope that really can nourish our spiritual life. So I was on the phone with my mom a couple days ago, those of you that come regularly, my mom's 87, and she's very often at this class sitting over here.

And so she wanted to hear what I was giving talks on, so I told her about this talk on hope. And she started humming. So I thought I was boring her, and then she burst out in song. And the song was, I'm stuck like a dope with a thing called Hope, and I can't get it out of my heart. How many of you know, South Pacific? Anyway, it's called the cock-eyed optimist. So I thought I'd share that that's another version of egoic hope, and I promised her I'd let you know my channel for Dharma teachings was her.

It's another version of hope springs eternal. So mature hope. It's not about fairness. It's not like if I work really hard on this project, there'll be a just reward. There's nothing about deserving in it. It's not that personal. I read in one rather strange newspaper

a small article about Percy the Pigeon who flopped down exhausted in the Sheffield loft having beaten 1,000 rivals in a 500-mile race he was immediately eaten by a cat. The 90-minute delay

in finding its remains and handing his identification tag to the judges relegated Percy from first to third place. It's not fair, right? The basic teaching is that emotional hope, hope that has our idea about the future and expectation that takes us away from presence is egoic. That's a sign when it takes us away from a real,

sense of what's happening here. Some of you might remember a story written by a bagpiper. He says, I play many gigs. Recently, I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no family or friends, so the service was to be at a pauper cemetery in a Kentucky back country. As I was not familiar with the backwoods, I got lost. And being a typical man, I didn't stop for directions. Finally arrived an hour late, saw the funeral guy at ever. evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only the diggers and crew left and they were eating lunch. I felt badly and apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down the vault lid was already in place. I didn't know what else to do,

but I had a sense of something was possible, so I started to play. The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I've never played before for this homeless man, and I played amazing grace. The workers began to weep. They wept, I wept, wept, wept together. When I was finished, I packed up my bagpipes and started for the car. Though my head hung low, my heart was full. As I opened the door to my car, I heard one of the workers say, I've never seen nothing like that before, and I've been putting in septic tanks for 20 years. He writes, apparently I'm still lost. It's a man thing.

So it's not getting lost in some unreality. In fact, the best description of spiritual hope is what we're hoping for is the potential that's already here in this very moment. For me, one of the most direct framing of spiritual hope is in the Buddha's noble truth. The Buddha basically starts out with saying, suffering exists. It's one of these universal conditionings. The cause, we try to make things different than they are. we try to hold on or push away, grasping an aversion.

The third noble truth is incredibly small and incredibly powerful. It says freedom is possible. It is possible for us to discover the truth of who we are and live in an expression of that freedom. That's the third noble truth. The fourth truth is, and here's how, and it explains through the eightfold path of different ways, that we come home to realize our true nature.

So Buddhism, as with all, I think all of the spiritual past, different traditions, is innately hopeful. It's saying, this is possible. Okay. So I'd like to read, this is Rumi's version of hope, of the third truth. I'd like to read, and then we'll do a brief reflection together. This poem is called A Garden Beyond Paradise. Everything you see has its roots in the unseen world.

The forms may change, yet the essence remains the same. Every wondrous sight will vanish. Every sweet word will fade, but do not be disheartened. The source they come out from is eternal. growing, branching, giving new life and new joy. Why do you weep? That source is within you and this whole world is springing up from it.

Why do you weep? That source is within you and this whole world is springing up from it. The source is full as waters are ever flowing. Do not grieve. Drink your fill. Don't think it will ever run dry. is an endless ocean. So the message of all the paths is that what we long for, what we seek,

what we love is always and already right here. It's an interior, sacred presence that's right available when we learn to kind of let go and relax back into it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The promise is something's possible. So let's reflect for a moment. together if you'll just close your eyes. And in the pause right now, just sense that you have this capacity to put aside some of the habitual conditioning

or ways of thinking or skepticism and experiment a little because this is an experiment, this reflection. And we begin the experiment as we often do with meditations, with simply contacting what's real and alive

right here. So as we did with the meditation, just to feel the life of the body, just let yourself receive this life, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, just to feel the aliveness, a gentle attention, and let yourself receive the sounds that are here.

Let your senses be awake and open. So you receive this whole moment through the senses. sensing as you experience this aliveness, the presence that's here, that quality of beingness, what Rumi calls that endless ocean of wakefulness. And with that, this creative possibility that emerges moment to moment when we're completely right here. And begin to ask yourself, what would it mean to feel the open-heartedness of hope?

to really be open to possibility, to be optimistic. Just sense for a moment what that would mean, what it would be like. You might bring to mind the most hopeful person you know, someone who's hopeful in a spiritual way, and just let your experience co-mingle in the field with that person. So you're really trying on a deep sense of optimism, openness to possibility and paying attention. What's it like in your body to feel the open-heartedness of hope?

What's your mind like when you're living in that receptivity and openness? Hope is sometimes described as an attitude of the soul, just to sense this attitude. All shall be well. All matter of things shall be well. And as you close this exercise, just to let go of any judgments that might have come up as you experimented, because you can trust that whatever unfolds we can learn from it. Take a few full breaths and come on back. So our inquiry tonight is what blocks us from hope?

What gets in the way? And then, of course, how do we awaken hope? because it's a capacity within all of us. And to begin to say that the ground of spiritual hope is really to experience our belonging, our connections to the universe, our belonging to aliveness, that feeling of direct sense of the flow of life inside us,

and to sense that presence, what I call that background of wakefulness, that really is our own deepest being quality. the dimension of being or formlessness. When we're in touch, when there's a remembrance of this sense of immediacy of aliveness and beingness, when we're in touch, we're also in touch with the possibility that springs forth moment to moment. There's a sense of hopefulness. We're in Rumi's Garden in those moments.

There's a wonderful image that a friend I'm in correspondence with sent me. It's from the portal of the mystery of hope by a Catholic theologian and poet Charles Pagie, or Pagy, I think is the way it's pronounced. And he envisions three young girls walking together and they're holding hands, and the youngest and most lively is in the middle, and her name is hope. The sister on one side is faith, and the sister on the other is love. And he describes it that hope often runs ahead and then has to wait for the other two to catch up, which I thought was kind of cool.

And the teaching again is when we know our belonging and our on our on our oneness, our connection to aliveness and presence, then this trinity of love, hope, faith naturally arises. And they're interpenetrating. In true spiritual hope, there is a sense of love for life, and there's a sense of trust in how life is unfolding. Okay, so the three sisters might be helpful as you consider this. So our trust, our hope, our love gets disabled, gets smothered, gets in some way contracted and contained

if as a very young being our holding environment is not sensitive or responsive or attuned. This is our basic message from all the psychologies is that it matters when we come into this world what kind of container we come into. And our basic sense of belonging will make it possible to have hope and trust and if that's severed,

then we find it's very hard to be hopeful about what's going to happen. And you can see it vividly in studies, animal studies, of what happens with maternal deprivation in one with chimps and I always want to say that I share the outcomes of these studies

and to do a study on chimps that involves maternal deprivation is cruel and the results of it show the cruelty the results are when a mother is not as distracted because she's not always able to get the food she needs and has her own problem so she can't really attend in a consistent way to the chimp. The results are binge eating, antisocial behavior, anxiety, and depression.

Sound familiar? That's our society. Our holding environment with our parents and with the culture is one that's an addicted, violent, ADD culture. And of course it permeates and creates the messages we get in our family's system. So if we were brought up in an environment where there was trauma or our real abuse and violence and so on, our nervous system gets overwhelmed. To protect ourselves, we dissociate, we contract, there's a sense of powerlessness, of freeze, of hopelessness. In other words,

we've disconnected from our beingness and are contracted in an armored state. We don't have access to the very beingness and aliveness that gives hope. That's when it's extreme. But even when it's not extreme, even when for most of us there were some judgmental messages, you should be this way and this way and don't be that way. And so we had to shape ourselves to get the approval and love we wanted. In that shaping process,

we pull away from our beingness, from that openness and that basic presence. and sense of aliveness and flow that gives hope. So there's a pulling away from beingness. And this is the second part of the inquiry, we come back to a place of hope, of this kind of optimism, which is so much necessary for healing.

We come back to a place of hope with our sisters of trust and love as we begin reconnecting with beingness, with the presence and aliveness that's right here. And hence, this is really why we practice. Why do we practice these strategies of collecting, quieting the mind and touching into the body and sensing the awareness that's here? When we come home to beingness,

we come home to the source of where all hope arises from. So what I'd like to do for the remainder of the talk is give you some stories and examples because there's so many pathways back to that source of hope. Examples that I found inspiring that really describe the pathway to beingness. And most of them, most of the stories are well-known people who hit bottom, but some are not well-known. but in some way they lost touch with their beingness and how they came back. And the common denominator, what you can track through each of these stories,

are three elements that I brought up in the last talk that really comprise a full experience of spiritual hope. And one element is that there's some aspiration are caring about healing or freedom. in each of these stories something's triggered so that the person cares about waking up

that's one the aspiration the second piece is that they in some way contact their beingness that that that trust starts waking up

that oh right here there is aliveness there is a sense of presence and the third essential component of a full experience of hope is it then

there's an engagement energetically. In other words, each of the person in some way align themselves to be available for the possibilities to ride those currents. Okay? So let's, we'll just take a few of these stories and reflect on them together, but I would just want to mention on that third element that the receptivity and the sense of possibility that comes with hope is the precursor to all healing and awakening. In other words, if you're on a spiritual path, the sense of, oh, in some way we're intuiting,

it's possible to wake up, that this very heart and mind can wake up. We need to sense that possibility to then engage in a meaningful way that will actually allow us to flower. Hope is a precursor to the very activities that bring on healing and freedom. You can see it with spiritual aspects,

activism. I love Joanna Macy's new book, Active Hope, because she talks about the sense that we need to be able to sense the possibility of the healing of this earth body or enlarged body. We need to sense the pot long for it and sense the possibility of it. And if we are in that despair, we get isolated and we get despairing, we won't act. But if we start connecting with each other and sensing, we care, it's possible, then we get engaged and we actually bring our hope into its fullness, into its flowering. I sometimes think of this image, I don't know where I got it from, but it's of a straw that's in the Gulf Stream. And if the straw does not trust the currents it's in, If it's kind of at odds with the currents, it's just going to be tossed around and waste a lot of energy and it's going to have a rough time.

But if it in some way trusts the currents and trusts how the currents are unfolding, it aligns itself, then the Gulf Stream flows through the straw. And in the same way, when we have some hope and trust in the way things are evolving, that allows us to align ourselves. It's not like our activity is ego-driven. and it's more we sense what's unfolding and align ourselves so we become more of a channel for that. A channel for universal qualities of intelligence,

a channel for love, a channel for creativity. When we're in flow, it's not from an ego, it's because we've tapped into something bigger, right? Okay. Okay, story number one. And this is William James, and many of you know he lived I think 170 years or whatever he came from a very accomplished family

and his brother Henry hugely successful writer well William was in his 30s and floundering he was very unaccomplished he'd wanted to be a painter but then quit that and enrolled in med school but then he quit med school to do a expedition on the Amazon and then he ended up giving up on that So he had a moment of reckoning and he kept a diary so this is how we know about this. And he questioned his innate capacity to do anything productive in his life. In fact, he questioned if he should be alive at all.

So this is a serious moment of reckoning. And so he was hitting bottom but he decided he wasn't going to do anything rash until he tried something out. So he conducted a one-year experiment. And the one year experiment was a lot like our little experiment, our reflection, where he basically said, I'm going to act as if there's hope. That was an experiment, that whenever thoughts, limiting thoughts, you can, it won't happen, you don't have what it takes.

He would just notice them, step out of them, and just assume possibility. Okay? So he was doing the as-if things could get better and that as-if allowed him to open to possibility he started aligning himself, getting more engaged with what interested at him. That year he married, he started teaching at Harvard, he joined a study group called the Meta Physical Club.

He wrote a very buoyant letter sometime later. He said, I possessed for the first time an intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom. The freedom to manifest who we are. And that's what the hope is. Hope is for the freedom to really be all we can be.

So just to comment on his process, his way was he had some aspiration because he said, I'm going to conduct a year experiment, that means he wanted freedom. That's step number one. Step number two, he had a strategy for coming back to beingness,

which was to put aside the thoughts which really obscured presence, which is something we train in, to notice the thoughts that are getting in the way. The Buddha said, whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind. So do your thoughts, this is what we ask ourselves, do our thoughts arouse a sense of hopeful,

mindfulness and openness and interest, potential, creativity? Or do we have thoughts to tell us what's going to go wrong and what we can't do that create doubt and discontent? So that was his strategy. And as that started to work, he started finding that when those thoughts, the limiting thoughts were no longer obscuring what was here, his energy really woke up and he started aligning himself in a very kind of spontaneous creative way and found his way to being really one of a great

influential thinker of the century. Okay. So, William James. Now, the next example is what happens when that unfolding, what's really unfolding, includes horrendous loss. It's like when Rumi says, don't grieve. Well, what if there's huge grief? and I remind you of a story I wrote in True Refuge here

of the woman whose husband was dying and she was doing everything she could to try to fix the illness and bring every alternative treatment she could and then she had to give up on that and then she was trying to be the best possible wife with a dying husband and do it right and she came to a weekend

and really asked me for Buddhism 101 on how you accompany someone she and her husband were Catholic and practitioners of mindfulness and I shared that teaching from Father Thomas Keating of when something arises can we just say

I consent so this is a mindfulness practice where you just notice what's happening in this flow of being this what's presenting and you just say I consent so she went home to do that but there was still a lot of conditioning to get things

right and one morning as her husband said, you know, I don't think I have too long. And her response was, oh honey, you're doing great today so far. Let's just have a cup of tea. And in the silence that followed, she felt a million miles away, the distance from her having kind of denied what was there. And that's when her aspiration got strong and it shifted from the hope that she'd do things right or the prior hope that she'd save his life, those are egoic hopes, to the hope of may I love well. That was her prayer. That's step one, the aspiration. And then she started doing the practice. And when the fears came up of round his pain, she'd say, I consent and open. And when the grief came of this impending loss, I consent and open. You know, when the feelings of

of self-judgment, you know, and shame, like I'm not being so present. She'd open to that. She kept opening and opening, and she said, in that openness, she intuitively knew how to be with him. She knew when to sing to him and hold him, and she knew when to be silent, and she knew when to just pray with him. She knew.

She was aligned, like that straw in the Gulf Stream, that kind of intuitive wisdom. wisdom was flowing through. And as she put it, you know, she said he's gone, but that field of loving is always with me. So she sensed into a possibility that was innately within her. So again, this comes back to our practice here. She tapped into that quality of beingness that allowed her to really unfold in a beautiful way. And so it is that we practice this simplicity of mindfulness, which enables us to notice what's going on, notice the waves of experience, and say yes and open and reconnect with that oceanness, that space of awareness that can

appreciate the waves as they come and go. Then we're available to possibility. Then we're available to really live from the fullness of who we are. Now, next story. What happens when the culture really is imposing on us ways of being that cut us off from beingness? And we know how the culture does that, with its fast pace and its consumerism and its addiction and its demand to succeed in certain ways. It's hard. So that brings us to Thoreau. Now Thoreau, in his time, a neighbor put it that he was described this way,

an irresponsible idler, a trial to his family and no credit to his town. So he was seen as a loser. And he was disregarded largely as a writer. In fact, Walden languished on bookshelts for years. So at age 26, he went to New York City because he really wanted to establish himself in the literary scene there. And he tried to develop his career in a conventional way and he kind of shaped his prose to match the fashion of the time.

times and so on. Some of you might know the story. Well, he was a total failure. I mean, he just crashed. He was really not paid attention to. Really rejected. So that, of course, when we hit bottom, we do the soul searching. And for him, in that soul searching, he realized he had tried to fit into convention and lost touch with beingness. What did he do? He returned to bring his attention back to the natural world. He went back home. He set up shop, so to speak, 1.5 miles from his house. That's where he did all his natural observing and being. And through that time, his mother brought him sandwiches and cookies. I mean, he was like, this was not some grandiose thing. People still thought of him as this guy that was just hanging

out. But what was happening within him had some majesty to it, was holy. Because his love for this natural world and his observation of the nature around him and within him opened him. He got aligned and he became empowered. His writing became empowered because he was tapped into the source, tapped into beingness. So he could inspire people. continue to inspire people to be who they really are. This was his message. He says, one should always be on the train of one's own deepest nature, for it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature

that connects you to the divine. He sensed what he loved. He sensed the possibility of really manifesting it, and he engaged. So it's instructive to us because it is so clear, that in this culture, in the West, we are painfully disconnected from the natural world, so much so that we can even allow it to be violated, this larger body of our being.

And we're just connected from our own beingness, in our busyness, our activity. So his message is, know what you love, aspiration. come back and connect to being this and then find that you become like that's true that the universe will start flowing through you in a very organic and powerful way reading about the row and I thought of

Joni Mitchell's words we're stardust we're golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden and I've heard it for so many years but just hearing it again we've got to get ourselves back to the garden and that's where hope arises and carries us into the fullness of what we are.

This is Mary Oliver. She says, What can I say that I have not said before? So I'll say it again. The leaf has a song in it. Stone is the face of patience. Inside the river there is an unfinishedable story and you are somewhere in it

and it will never end until all ends. take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce but take it also to the forest the song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still I am of years lived so far 74 and the leaf is singing still so again I'm going to keep naming the components it's this longing to live fully

and then finding a way back into the garden garden for us here so many times it has to do is stepping out of the thoughts as keep us limited. Coming back to the body and allowing what's here, being in our larger body of nature and remembering the natural rhythms, knowing our belonging, and that aligns us. So our actions then come out of wisdom and serve healing. Okay, our next person, Bill Wilson, which many of you know of as the force behind the 12-step programs, Alcoholics Anonymous. So when he hit bottom, he went to a detox center, was given a whole mess of Billadonna, and then he said, you know, if there's a God, may he show himself. And he said, I'm willing

to do anything. Okay. So he had, there he was, hit bottom, recognized, can't do it, ask for help if there's a God may show himself and the place was suffused with white light and the white light experience and never had a drink again so he contacted beingness and then continued to contact it through prayer and meditation his sense of God and that allowed him to align and be a channel for creating an organization that's one of the most massive pure communities in the world that's hope-giving, help millions. So when we look at, well, what makes the 12-step programs work for people? We end up finding the same basic components we've been exploring tonight,

that they wake up hope that we can be abstinent and live free from addiction. And it happens in different people in different ways. I was talking to one friend just right before class and he told me his story. So I'll share it with you. So he hit bottom on alcohol and complete misery. And as the first steps goes, he was able to admit, I'm hopeless, I'm helpless, I'm defeated. So there's a recognition of hopelessness, which is really important. If we want to have the aspiration to unfold, we have to acknowledge the truth of where we are.

So he admitted it And he said even After he admitted it just Going on his way To his first meeting Hope started flickering up Because he could sense himself On his way to something

That involved people getting better That there was some possibility But he described You know things unfold at their own pace You know heard all the stories about Bill Wilson and this flashing bright light and there he was just kind of schlepping along, but he described to me how not that long after

he was bicycling, he was in New York and he was bicycling towards Grand Central Station and he had the thought, wow, I'm safe. I don't have to lie anymore. I don't have to pretend anymore. It's really okay to be who I am. Like there was this deep sense of safety.

And when he had that thought, his entire body energetically it was charged up. He felt zaped. And then he went, ah, so that's my white light. You know, this feeling of, this aliveness, this energy. Again, that channeling of energy that's enabled him now to help so many people and many, many young people

in trusting who they are and trusting their capacity to be strong, be confident, be bright lights themselves. So that's what our hope does is it becomes contagious. When your hope comes from a really deep place, from a wisdom place that knows possibility, knows it's possible to wake up,

when you sense, wow, this heart's waking up, there's more loving going on, this consciousness is waking up, when you sense that possibility, you know that it's not such an individual thing. universe waking up through you and it's waking up everywhere and you can be a transmitter of that hope. You can remind people of what's possible. It happens a lot in groups. In fact, the, you want to say the, a descriptor of hopelessness, when we're isolated and when our

storyline is nothing can work out for me. So a sense of isolation, fear, hopelessness, the basic thing we need to do is to plug into something larger. We need to be in an environment that's larger that can remind us. So, every spiritual community, Buddhism has spiritual friends groups. They're called Kaliana Mita groups. We've got about 30-some of them. Not just so if you're bottoming out, if you just want to keep on waking up, we remind each other.

There's a transmission in being with each other. and being with a group. People come to a retreat, to meditate, and they discover there's an energy in the room that's holding that possibility for all of us. It's a collective energy that just has this wise knowing that waking up is possible, and it's contagious. You see it not just in Buddhism and in spiritual friends groups,

but I'm reading a book that came out of Rick Warren's church, about the purpose-driven groups, the small groups in these mega-churches, exactly the same thing. It's with community, with each other, and in that field of connecting and belonging with each other, that we get that hope. So in AA, one of the basic ways that happens, sponsors and the group meetings, and there's also an internalizing and sensing, oh, that possibility, that that guidance can come from within. And there's a sense of a higher power. Now, there are many words for higher power.

For some, it's, you know, what my friend described, that kind of a liveliness of presence that came through him. For some people, it's described as, you know, the creative force in nature. And for others, it's Buddha nature. And for others, it's formless, late-filled presence. It doesn't matter. All the it is is what's beyond,

this ego self, it's that source that Rumi talks about of awareness and love that's beyond our personality, that we begin to trust and sense can guide us. Which brings me to my, I think it's my last story. It's going to have to be my last story. There are endless stories. In fact, every one of us has a hope story to tell of when we had doubts. because, you know, the Buddha described that doubt is the most challenging of the hindrances, and that's where the freedom comes when we face it, and then sense who we are beyond the deficient self. So we have Mahatma Gandhi,

and his gift to the last century and this century was hopefulness. Some trusts that its social transformation unfolding as a globe, as a society of humans is possible, not from violence but from love and dedication, non-violent transformation. And the purity of his hope and faith mobilized millions of people. Millions of people sensed, oh, there's some spiritual unfolding consciousness that I'm part of

and we can act from to bring more justice and healing into this world, more freedom. that's amazing. So he was a hopemonger. I mean, he's a great example. So what was the source of his hope? How come it was so powerful? What made him such a bright light?

It's a really interesting question. So as a young man, again, I know a lot of you know this story. He was shy, he was tongue-tied, he was plagued by fears and doubts, he was really mediocre in high school. He dropped out of college. He did terribly in law school.

I went to England and did a bat, job. He was famous in the Indian legal world for, he was asked to present a difficult argument for in one case and he freaked out and ran out of the courtroom. And so, you know, these are stories about him. So as a child who was obsessive, he was fearful, there's a story he told often of a family servant who he'd run into her arms after he was bullied at school. And she was kindly but also since something's got to change. So she said, whenever you're threatened, instead of running away, just chant the mantra Rama, Rama, which is the divine God.

And she said, this will turn fear into courage. So she's giving him his pathway back to being this, right? So he practiced it some but not intensively. and in fact when he left India to go to South Africa, he left in a way to save his career because his career was floundering. So the point is in growing up he was not a forceful, powerful man, but then he turned to this practice when he was in South Africa

and something shifted. Because when he returned, he became the Mahatma, right? The Mahatma means great soul. and what shifted was he really gave himself when he was challenged to what I sometimes think of as calling on some higher belonging, some greater belonging to kind of reach beyond his ego self

and call Rama, Rama, Rama, the sense of the divine or the sacred that's mantra. For some people, it's the sound of an iPhone that brings them back home It's true. Sometimes that does it. So for some people, it's a mantra. For others, it's the breath that brings them back home into beingness.

For others, there's some image that's quite beautiful for them that brings them so that there's this quieting and collecting of the mind. We all need it. William James had to do it. Every one of us has a mind that has a lot of thoughts that are not used to. So we quiet and we collect, whether it's with Rama, Rama, or whether it's feeling the breath or whether it's feeling the sensations of the body or listening to sounds. We begin to collect and quiet our attention and in that quietness as we deepen our attention

we begin to sense. What's revealed is this presence that we're calling sacred presence and it's our own presence. It's not like the light that Bill Wilson saw was outside him and he was removed from it. Art wouldn't have inspired him. It's not like Rama-Rama-Rama is outside. It's this sense that awakens that there is some sacredness, some presence, something we can trust that's right here, that source that Rumi talked about, that beingness,

that endless ocean and that's what gives hope. Then we sense there's this infinite potential and then as life plays itself we're available to it and so it was with Gandhi that he became available and he tapped into that wisdom

that knew that to change things on planet earth you cannot meet hatred with hatred by love alone can we heal he knew that and he helped wake up that understanding and others and he became an

instrument of what he called soul force. As did Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. You can feel it. These are all beings that, you know, he sensed Nelson Mandela in all those years in jail, and yet what was it? They kept him going. He sensed possibility.

He had hope. He said, in my country, we go to prison first and then become president. It was a great long. But I want to invoke him because here he is at the end of his life and oh my gosh, you know, just to sense his presence, you know, if we sense that and let that co-mingle with us in the field, we're sensing a transmission of trust. He had a basic trust in goodness, trust, and aspiration cared about this life, and that hope in what was possible, incredible force,

power, soul force. So as a way of ending just to say it really is one of the essences or grounds of all spiritual paths is a sense of tapping into our beingness and sensing incredible possibility. It's not a possibility that's out there at another time. What we're hoping for and what's possible is already seated right here in the source in who we are. So I'd like to end together with another meditation that's very much like our opening reflection and as a way of arriving, I'd like to invite you to breathe in fully. And with the out breath, just let go of whatever you might be holding leftover tension in the body that's just habitual, just let go.

And again, breathing in deeply, filling up. And with the out breath, slow, just letting go, letting go, breathing in deeply. And sensing again this letting go with the out breath, letting go of thoughts, letting go of belief, sensing the possibility of putting aside the skepticism or conditioning, anything that closes us off so that the breath can resume in its natural rhythm now. And you can feel the breath and also sense this whole field of aliveness that you belong to. This is one of the ground of belonging to this living, vibrating, this web of life, just opening to that, opening to that, sensing the sounds, sensing in the background, that which is aware,

this consciousness that's here, your own beingness. Shanti Deva writes in the miracle of awakening, as a blind man feels when he finds a pearl in a dust bin, so am I amazed by the miracle of awakening rising in my consciousness. So I am amazed by the miracle of awakening rising in my consciousness. It is the nectar of immortality that delivers us from death, the treasure that lifts us above poverty into the wealth of giving to life. So I am amazed by the miracle of awakening, rising in my consciousness, sensing this miracle of awakening, this ten-and-and-a-wakeening, this ten-and-and-a-wakening, this ten-and-a-waius, this tenderness of heart, this unfolding or evolving the way the universe is unfolding in consciousness

through you. And again, to ask, what would it mean to feel the open-heartedness of hope, to sense the potential of this being, to love without holding back, to sense the potential of this being, to open to that universal flow of creativity and wisdom. And again, you might bring to mind hopeful beings, those you know, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, anyone that represents that wisdom that trusts what's possible, just let that commingle in your field. What's it like for your body to open to that attitude of hopefulness, that you're part of this unfolding of universal consciousness that all shall be well.

What is your heart like when you're open to this attitude of hopefulness, your mind? Can you imagine how you'd enter the day tomorrow, how you'd engage with people, go about work with this attitude of hopefulness, possibility of really manifesting who you are? Close with Rumi again. Everything you see has its roots in the unseen world. The forms may change, yet the essence remains the same. Every wondrous sight will vanish, every sweet word will fade, but do not be disheartened. The source they come from is eternal, growing, branching out, giving new life and new joy. Why do you weep? That source is eternal. is within you. And this whole world is springing up from it. The source is full, its waters are

ever flowing. Do not grieve. Drink your fill. Don't think it will ever run dry. This is the endless ocean. 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.