Tara Brach - Part 2 - Presence and Aliveness

Episode Date: January 27, 2010

2010-01-27 - Part 2 - Presence and Aliveness - These two talks explore how we leave our bodies, the challenge of working with pain, the pathway home to embodied awareness, and the gifts of presence and aliveness.

Because I teach a lot about mindfulness, I get interesting things that are sent to me, and I want to read one of them to you. This is about a group of friends who had never gone boating and decided to have an afternoon of fun and rented a boat and trailer. And they drove down to the water, put in the boat, started the engine. The boat seemed to move a little, but then it completely stopped, and they had no idea what was wrong. They turned on and off the engine, but it seemed to be fine. Check the gas. Everything seemed in working order, but the boat just didn't move. move. So they were frustrated and one of them drove back to the marina and one of the boat

mechanics followed him back to where the group was waiting. The mechanic checked the motor, the gas, everything seemed fine. He was really baffled so he decided to get under the water and take a look at the boat. He came up choking and doubled over with laughter. He couldn't speak and all he could do was just point under the boat. Finally he let them know that the trailer was still under the boat. Story of mindlessness or inexperience. It's a silly story, but I was reflecting

on how most of the mistakes we make we make because we're not here. In some way, we've left. We've sped up and got careless, got preoccupied. We just weren't paying attention. When we pay attention,

when we really pay attention, when we're really here is when we're creative and clear, and there's some wisdom. So last week I taught some about this relationship between presence and really being alive and being fully what we are. And I'd like to continue that, this understanding that when we train to be here and when we connect with the aliveness of the body of our senses,

That is when we wake up an intuitive kind of wisdom. And it's also when we wake up our heart. And it's also when we move through the world from a quality of presence that is of benefit to others. And the Buddha very clearly in teaching about meditation encouraged his followers to start right with the body. He said, just here's how you do it. be mindful. Mindful means you just notice and allow what's going on, but bring that mindfulness

first to this domain, and I hope you can do it right this moment, just bring the attention right here into the body. And if you even have the intention to, you'll notice that you weren't there mostly, right? We very quickly leave. Start with the body. And last week shared a line that I've always love from John O'Donohue, which is that our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. They know they belong. It's our minds that make our life so homeless. Now, this doesn't mean that thoughts are bad. It just means being lost in a virtual reality. Being lost in our thoughts makes us homeless. We disconnect from this aliveness slash presence that we're exploring. these few weeks. In fact, we're always exploring it, but I want to kind of hone in on this a bit.

So the reason it's so hard to be present and to use this gateway of the body is because our bodies are continuously experiencing pleasantness and unpleasantness. It's just a changing flow. This is being embodied on planet Earth, maybe on other planets, I'm not sure. But we have this ongoing, you know, we have the backaches and the migraines and anxieties and the strong passions and the uneasinesses. And it's like the elements. It's like the outer weather. Sometimes it's, you know, balmy and easy. And sometimes there's hurricanes and volcanoes and it's really intense. So we have this universal conditioning rather than staying and being in this body to exit. to try to control things,

to not be around for what's intense or mysterious or unfamiliar whenever it feels like too much. And as I mentioned last week, if there's been strong emotional wounding, our tolerance for what we can take is less. So we more quickly leave. And this is intuitive and easy to understand

that when we've been wounded, we have a flinch response. We don't want it again. so we quickly exit. I spoke last week about how much this tendency to leave home is exacerbated in our Western culture. I mean, we really are very, there's a lot of cement, there's a lot of parking lots,

there's a lot of air conditioning and heating and not being attuned to the rhythms and to the earth. It's the shadow masculine archetype that the way to do things is to control. So we try to control our environment. So we control our bodies when there's unpleasantness or pain. And not that there's anything wrong with taking an Advil, but we're so quick to think something's wrong.

I've got to quickly turn the dial and make it better. Very, very quick. We over-medicate. We create sterile environments for birthings and death. We over-consume. And then as we bring up our children, and it's scary. I read something in the newspapers over the last week

that the amount of hours children spend in front of a screen is more than adults spend at work. It's scary. So they disconnect with some of the natural cycles. A three-year-old went with his dad to see a litter of kittens on returning home. He breathlessly informed his mother that there were two boy kittens and two girl kittens.

How did you know, his mother asked? Daddy picked them up and looked underneath, he said, I think it's pridden on the bottom. So it's in our culture and religions. All of them have parts of them at least that encourage the body-mind split, kind of a hierarchy that says the body's lower, it's sinful, it's trouble,

that really to be purest to transcend the body. This is true in parts of Buddhism too, that there's this wariness of the body and of the seduction of the senses and all sorts of injunctions to why. watch out, to watch out. One of the great stories from one of the first three-month retreats that took place at the Insight Meditation Society, there was a visiting teacher from Burma there, and at one point,

there was a question-answer period, and these students have been sitting in silence for quite a while. Now, this is, I think, the early 70s, maybe before even. Anyway, and one of the questions that they asked him was, what do you think of sex? And his response was, sex is base, gross, and disgusting. So this is plunked into the middle of this silent three-month retreat. So at the end of the retreat, the students put on what were called Dharma skits.

They kind of took little things that had happened during the retreat and put them into action. And one of these skits, they had somebody playing the student asking the question and somebody playing this Burmese Sayyadau who was sitting and responding. So the student posed the question and the Saidao, the one playing the Saadha responded to the question, what do you think of sex this way? He said sex is basic, engrossing, and worth discussing. The Western slant. Are universal conditioning, though, in the face of the wildness of these bodies to

feel everything is to pull away and to try to control experience. And the primary way that we pull away, this is something I try to talk about every week because it's pretty much forms the basis of where we need our training. The primary way we pull away is we go into thoughts and we get lost in thoughts for hours and hours and hours most of the day we're off in thoughts. And we believe our There's a story of a Sufi, wise man slash fool. His name was Nazrudin. And he agreed to teach at one of these large temples. And the congregation was very excited to have him.

And he opened up by saying, well, who here knows what I'm going to say? And no hands go up. So he left. He just walked out. Well, they're very confused. upset and they invite him back. He goes back and he says the same thing. He says, who knows what I'm going to say? And everyone raises his hand, raises their hand. He leaves again. One last time they invite him back and this time he asked the question and half the group raised their hand. He goes, great, then you

teach you. He has them teach the guys the hands down. And what I liked about this story was that at times were so certain about our beliefs and we're so convinced that our judgments are truth about politics that we really, that we're right. We really think we're right. Don't we? I mean, isn't it true? Or our sense of our own lack of self-worth.

Whatever does we think it's true. And at other times, it's equally interesting to me that we live with the chronic sense that we don't know enough and that in order to be happy or free we need to figure out something so we're always kind of going around trying to figure out something trying to consolidate our knowledge base trying to predict what's going to happen and you can just check in and sense how many moments of the day are you kind of trying to work out something figure out something be more sure of something so we each have our ways of leaving presence prime one being

thoughts, but we are always in some way trying to get some more comfort and avoid more discomfort. And whether it's numbing ourselves or judging or blaming, it's, we get into our routine and then we replay patterns through our lives and we wonder why we're doing the same thing in our 50s that we're doing when we're in our teens. This is a woman reading her child from Grimm's reality fairy tales. The grim reality fairy tales. And the prince kissed her and they fell in love and they dated for a while and they moved in together and they broke up and they got back together and they got married. Had a baby, got separated, got back together, broke up again, divorce, spent time alone rediscovering themselves, met someone new, fell in love and repeated the pattern habitually ever

after. Grim fairy tales. So the challenge of meditation and of spiritual life is that we leave and we disconnect from the present and we disconnect from our bodies and we disconnect from our hearts because they go together. They go together. We might still have ideas

that are of doing something nice for others or caring about others, but we're not connected to our body and our heart in a visceral way. There's not a visceral tenderness. So we're in a trance when we're,

disconnected. We're living from only a fragment of what we are and the path home and this path of moving back through our bodies and into presence is really the way of waking up from trance. And one of the images I find very helpful in understanding this whole practice of homecoming is of our awareness being like a great wheel. And I want to describe this and then we're going to use this metaphor a bit as we practice together, that there's a wheel of awareness and the hub is this presence and aliveness. When we're right here, we're in this hub, we're in this presence and aliveness. But typically our attention goes out through the infinite spokes, out to a rim of obsessive thoughts or emotional reactions, or we're just listening to that sound on the, that

song on the radio, or we're having that memory, or we're planning how we're going to do the day, But we've left. We keep leaving through the spokes, out to the rim, we leave the hub. We leave home. Our practice has a few different parts to it. But the first part of the practice, and this is a key part of all meditation training, is what I call coming back. It's what you're doing when you're meditating,

and I say, have you noticed you've drifted off into a thought? Come on back. Okay, is that familiar? First part, come on back. We often have the breath or some anchor. Okay, come back. You've noticed that you've been, you know, often some daydream. Okay, just recognize thinking and pause and come on back.

So the first part of practice is we come back to our home base. We come back to the hub, the breath, to the body, to being here. The second phase, which I really think of as being here, and we come back and then we be here is mindfulness we're here we're here in the hub we're feeling our breath but we're including everything that's going on we're including the different sensations in the body or the moods that that arise in our heart are the sounds that come nothing's pushed away and the more that we're being here the more the hub expands to become very very vast and very bright. It's not a small hug. It's a vast presence. In fact, when we're in that being here phase

and we're not controlling anything, we're not pushing away anything, in that hereness, we enter what I call natural presence, which is really there is a sense of resting in awareness and the whole wheel is just floating in that radiance. All of life is included in our heart. hearts. So there's coming back, there's being here, and then really in that uncontrolling presence, including the world in our experience. The key that the Buddha taught as a kind of stepping stone in coming back is to let our home base begin with the aliveness of the body, with really connecting with what's here. That's the way we ground ourselves. That's the way we really come to the hub. So as I mentioned, the challenge is that when it's painful, we leave. And I'd

like to share one story. Some of you might remember, because I told it a year or two ago, it really touched me, of a woman who was having a hard time staying, who was leaving home a lot. She had come to a weekend with me, and she had asked for some Buddhist teachings on how to be present with someone who's dying because her husband was very, very close to death. And they were Catholic, but they decided that she would be the one to accompany him in his passing. And she wanted to, in some way, do a crash course, and how do you be with someone when they're dying? Should I read the Tibetan book of living and dying? Or there's some Taravod in scriptures that tell you how to do it. and as you can imagine given that he was dying in a few days

although even if he was going to be dying in years I would have said the same thing I said don't bother reading or studying anything just be with them just love him and we talked about how that might be possible her challenge as I mentioned was that she'd be around him and she'd busy herself she kept wanting to fix things she kept wanting to make it better At one point

he had said something like I'm not afraid of dying and she said oh honey you're looking a lot better today here let me make you some herbal tea she was not wanting to sit down and come home to the hub and be with the grief with the fear

with her own feelings of insecurity so we spoke about it and I shared with her something that I had just recently had learned when I was teaching with Father Thomas Keating a course in compassion up in New York. And he described this kind of coming into presence as saying, I consent. And I found that a very powerful phrase. Just saying, I consent. Whatever is going on, this fear, this grip of anxiety or insecurity, this grief, I consent. It's much like I teach. the word yes. Just saying yes to what is. Yes doesn't mean I like it. Doesn't mean I wanted to

continue. It doesn't even mean that I'm not going to respond in a proactive way. It just means in this moment I am coming to terms with the reality that's here. I'm not pretending it's not there. I'm not pushing it away. I'm here. So we explored her saying I consent. And then she went, she left the weekend and went home. And I actually heard from her several weeks later and it turns out he had actually died maybe four or five days later but she said that when she allowed herself to pause and come back to the hub just to feel what was going on right here and say I consent really arrive in this hub over and over again come back from her busyness feel what was here feel her body or fear her hurt and say I consent what she

to me was that she knew exactly how to be with him. There was an intuitive wisdom that knew how to sing to him or hold him or just be quiet. She was at home. She was coming from that hub that was incredibly spacious. And she described something else. She said that when I really arrived, there was no longer a sense of him or of me. Rather, we were a field of loving, total openness, warmth, light. She said, he's gone, but that living field of loving is always with me. So this is really the practice of coming into presence and aliveness, to sense how we leave, to come back, to be here.

Say I can sense. Since as we say I can scent that that hub, that presence gets very, very vast, and in that vastness we discover loving presence. And it's timeless. we touch what's timeless in this homecoming. So this is what I think of as really the pathway of using the body and being with the senses. And what I found again and again is that sometimes our way of leaving is overt.

Sometimes we know it. We're just tearing away into obsessive thinking or into getting busy on the planet Earth. but sometimes it's a lot more subtle. I want to speak to that for a moment. I was working with one woman a few years ago who had gone through a lot of chronic sickness. The kind that you can't exactly pinpoint,

but she was so sick that she had to leave her job and really stay at home. It was kind of like fibromyalgia combined with chronic fatigue combined with, I don't know what. But she was told by her healer that unless she rested, there was no way that she was going to be able to reenter her activity.

And so she stopped everything. I mean, she canceled everything. And she went in for a treatment. I don't know exactly what kind of Healer this was. But her healer told her, you know, you're still not resting enough. And she was kind of flabbergasted. Like, what else can I not do?

you know but then as she started deepening her attention you know because it was the same thing how am i leaving how am i staying busy she noticed that her way of her spokes and going out to the rim of the wheel wasn't in the obvious ways but it was much much more subtle it was almost like her nervous system was still was still in some way trying to do something was still thinking it was on its way somewhere, was still trying to make something different. It was very subtle. So she established a co-in for herself, which is a little question, or it's kind of a Zen set of words that help us to wake up from where we are. And her co-in was, what does it mean to rest fully in this moment? Part of coming back and really being here, this is part two,

in the hub is resting profoundly. We're such a doing culture. There's such a sense of a self trying to make something happen that to really wake up into this fullness of presence requires a kind of surrendering that's not just letting go, but then it's letting go of the letting go. It's really resting. There are some profound fruits,

like to the last piece of this talk is the fruits of really arriving and fully inhabiting this kind of hub, this space of presence. And the first of the fruits that I want to mention is a sense of aliveness because for this woman, when she put forth that Cohen of what does it mean to really rest in this moment? And she did it over and over again. She said she was doing it hundreds of times a day. And maybe just to ask yourself that right now. If you close your eyes and just sensed inside yourself

and sense your body, what does it mean to rest fully in this moment? Just to sense the possibility of a kind of, a kind of inner surrendering of any doing, just a wakefulness. For her, when she came into that kind of nowness of absolutely not doing, just stopping, but deeply stopping, she said she tapped into an aliveness

she had never felt inside her before. What happens when you really rest in this moment and there's just the nowness right here? If there's a deep attention, what springs forth is this flowing aliveness. Sometimes people that get involved with practice, and you can open your eyes if you'd like, and as practice gets deeper,

find that the aliveness is almost jarringly a lot. They have what's called Kundalini experiences of energy kind of pouring through parts of their bodies that they had never experienced before. All that's happening is that our heart, habitual ways of clamping down, of staying busy, which is a contracting, have been released. We have decontracted. We have released our repressing mechanism. And there's a lot of life energy that starts moving. I mentioned last week that one of the reasons we're so tired is so we're so

busy controlling our experience. Resting means we're not controlling. It's a courageous thing to do. So for her, she started getting back her aliveness because there was a subtle level of nervous system doing she had not realized what's going on. So there's a flow that comes alive and there is with that joy. We sometimes wonder why we don't have much joy in our life. It's very hard when we're controlling or judging or blaming

or pushing away life to feel joy because joy is the opposite. Joy is the full allowing. Eduardo Galliano writes, The church says the body is a sin. Science says the body is a machine. Advertising says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta. You can see, I see this most on the residential retreats

because the attention gets very much more clear and dedicated to presence, is coming into the body and the aliveness and mindfulness of sensation that for so many people the senses wake up and they report oh my God seeing the silhouette of the branches against the trees and the blue of the sky

and feeling the soft receptivity of the earth as I walked and all this sensitivity it's here in us but when we're not back home in the hub connected with our aliveness it's not there. We lose that sense of wonder and of passion and of aliveness. I remember being so moved when the question was posed to the Indian teacher,

monendrogy, I wasn't there, I heard this second hand, third hand, fourth hand. Question was, why meditate? And his response, so that when I walk from here to the village square each day, I'll notice the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road. Why meditate? So we can come into this presence and aliveness that's really living it fully. So we begin to practice and the senses wake up. When we're not controlling things, we receive this life in a more profound way. We perceive the beauty that's around us. And there's a kind of sense of celebration. It's like Ravi Nashman of, I think it's

Bratislav says. He says, if you never want to see the face of hell, when you come home from work each day, dance with your kitchen towel. And if you're worried about waking up your family, take off your shoes. So the first, I want to do three short guided meditations that really explore the gifts of this kind of presence that we're talking about, of waking up through the body, this aliveness. And the first one has to do with this aliveness directly. And if you will, just, it's very short

just to close your eyes. And as with all liberating practices, we begin with a pause. A pause is the beginning of stopping, of stepping out of a kind of trance-like activity.

It might be by figuring things out, judging, evaluating. whatever it is, just pause, stop. You sense this wheel of awareness. You're inviting yourself to come back right here to the hub, to this now-ness. And then to be here.

To be here means to bring a relaxed attentiveness to the life of the body. It might be pleasant, it might be unpleasant. You might sense. such as the woman whose husband was dying, just saying, I consent or yes, to whatever way this aliveness is playing through you right now. Sense how profound your yes or I consent can go.

Really letting be. Sense how in this now-ness, this openness, the vast flow of aliveness, the universe's aliveness, moves through. To get familiar with this what's called sometimes the inner

body, the energy body, this aliveness, is to open to a vast and timeless presence. I just take a few full breaths. I'll speak to the next fruit or gift of this arriving in this wheel of

awareness of coming home again to the And I described in the story of this woman with her husband how her pathway was to notice her busyness and just come back, come back, feel what's going on in the body, I consent, and how the more deeply she consented really let be the more vast her heart became. And there's an understanding that the very essence of love is acceptance.

in any moment that you truly are consenting or accepting the life that's here, huge space opens up and you're including the life, you belong to the life. There's a profound connection there. And the natural response is loving. It's true for loving in a way that feels compassion and a loving in a way that's celebrating. Now last week I shared a few poems from one of my favorite poets Mary Oliver because she in such a powerful way writes about coming into presence

and opening up these capacities and I'd like to read one that speaks to this fruit of loving how when we come into the hub come home to presence this heart wakes up she says here's a story to break your heart are you willing this winter the loons came to our harbor and died one by one of nothing we could see a friend told me of one on the shore that lifted its head and opened the elegant beak and cried out in the long sweet savoring of its life which if you have heard it you know is a sacred thing and for which if you had not heard it you had better hurry to where they still sing and believe me

tell no one just where that is the next morning this loon speckled and iridescent and with a plan to fly home to some hidden lake was dead on the shore I tell you this to break your heart by which I mean only that it break open

and never close again to the rest of the world. So this is one of the gifts of coming home, of coming back and being here and discovering in that hereness, this openness that truly includes life in our heart. When you're home, when you've come back to the hub and are living in that spaciousness, no part of life is not a part of you. There's nothing that's painful out there that's not felt with some sense of tenderness. Similarly, there's no beauty that isn't sensed as precious and as sacred. So we do our second meditation on this second fruit or gift of presence. And then again, just as we did together,

sense that stopping, that intentional pause, as Mary Oliver says, are you willing? That willingness, rather than fixating on the rim of the wheel to come back right here, to feel the breath and the body, to feel the aliveness that's right here, this nowness, to consent, to allow what's here,

a gentle, yes, willingness to be with the life that's here. Allow someone to come to mind somebody that's dear to you and feel him or her. right here in this space and sense as you do what it means to totally allow this being to be as

he or she is. Just for a moment to sense totally accepting just as this being is and sense the space and the hub of the wheel that opens up just as this being is totally accepted

you might bring another person to mind also. I sense again what it means to fully allow this being to be as they are, a deeper and deeper kind of acceptance that taps you into a space of heart that is absolutely tender and loving, taking in the next few moments perhaps someone else, sensing how acceptance, totally accepting the life that's here is love. There's a natural tenderness that infuse the space of heart. Meister Eckhart says, when I was the stream, when I was the forest,

when I was still the field, when I was every hoof, foot, fin, and wing, when I was the sky itself, no one ever asked me, did I have a purpose? No one wondered if there was anything I might need, for there was nothing I could not love. It was when I left, when I left all we once were, that the agony began, the fear of the questions came,

and I wept and wept. So I returned to the river. I returned to the mountains, and I begged. I begged to wed every object and every creature. And when they accepted, God was ever present in my arms, and God did not say, where have you been? For then I knew my soul, and every soul has always held God. Taking a few breaths and opening your eyes. What I love about those verses is the understanding that when we leave home, when we fixate, we separate and we lose sight of loving. And when we beg to come back, when we call ourselves back, when we agree to come back, we find that the sacred has always been within us, that that space of the hub is vast, is luminous.

is divine. So this brings us to the third gift. The first gift is as we come back to the hug, as we pause and call ourselves back and come home to presence, there's an aliveness that opens up. The second gift is that that aliveness is absolutely filled with love and real openness. The third part that I want to mention, the last piece, is that in coming back and being here, we awaken a penetrating and profound wisdom. And that is that when we're fully here, not pushing anything away, not grasping onto anything, when we're not controlling in any way,

we can see clearly what's true. It's that simple. When we're fully here, we can see reality as it is. And the Buddha said is one of the most well-known lines is that this entire world exists within this fathom long body. All the truths, all the realities can be seen if we pay attention to the life that's right here. Everything.

We can see if we really stop and pay attention that everything's changing. Nothing holds still. We can see if we pay attention that in the moments we try to control things, they're suffering right away. and in the most deep way we can see in the moments that we really pay attention to this aliveness

we can sense this timeless presence that is what we are we can sense a kind of an emptiness of any solid entity and a vast oneness a vast belonging so with that without adding much words I'd like to invite you to the last reflection on the fruits of this presence. Shift a little how you're sitting so that you can find a posture that is really balanced.

And you might lean forward a little and lean back, lean to the sides, and then settle so that you feel aligned for this final, very short sitting. As you come into stillness again, sense your intention to pause. And to come back right here to sense this nowness that's so radical. Notice how your senses wake up when there's nowness.

Can you feel the life of the body right now? Begin to investigate and sense, is there anything that's not moving? Very relaxed attention. Is there anything that's solid? If we open up out of any concepts, we can see that we are change. We are a changing river of sensations, images, sounds, nothing static.

Sense if you can find any self in this changing world of sensation. Of course, if you have an image or another thought, that'll create a sense of self. But just let be this changing flow. Is there any center to it? Is there any located center? Is there any boundary? Can you sense if you once again perceive nowness right now, how the hub expands and includes all that's going on,

sounds, sensations, aliveness of the body, sensing this all in the foreground, and sense the alert stillness that's aware. This presence is the most subjective truth of what you are. empty, vast, and luminous. As Srinarsar Gadata, the Indian sage, says, Wisdom tells me I'm nothing. Love tells me I'm everything.

Between the two, my life flows. Namaste. Next week, be exploring some more of this wheel of awareness and how this leads, how this leads, how this guides us in the art of practice, and there will be time next week for questions about your practice. So I wanted to let you know that. We'll also make sure that gets put up on the website and so on.

So if you have questions, just come in with them. Might not have time for everybody's question, but we'll do what we can. And meanwhile, enjoy the evening and your week. Thank you for being here. Yeah. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you would like to contact the Insight Meditation Community of Washington

to make a donation or to learn more about our programs, please visit our website at www.imcw.org.