Tara Brach - Part 2: Stress and Meditation

Episode Date: June 1, 2011

2011-06-01 - Part 2: Stress and Meditation - When we are suffering from stress, we are paying attention to our world in a narrow and rigid way. Through meditations that cultivate a wakeful and open attention, we can dramatically transform the feelings of anxiety and aloneness that underlie all stress. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

I'd like to continue an inquiry from last week, which was about how we can bring the power of meditation to stress. And I'd like to begin with one of the stories that some of you might remember that I feel is one of the greatest illustrations of the phenomenon. And this is a story of the magician Harry Houdini who traveled through. Europe to all the small towns and he would demonstrate how he could he could challenge local jailers to bind him in a straitjacket and to lock him in a cell and over and over again he'd amaze and astonish his audiences with how he could break out of a straight jack and break out of the cell but then he went to one small Irish village and ran into trouble because in front of a whole flock of people, he broke free of the straitjacket, but no matter what he did,

and he got tighter and more strained, trying to get that lock open, he could not open the lock. So finally disappointed the townspeople left, and the jailer, he asked the jailer, you know, what kind of new complex lock was that? And the response was, it was not, it's just an ordinary lock. I just figured you knew how to do all these locks, so I didn't bother locking it. In other words, he had been locking himself in. And I think of this, that his assumption had been that he was locked in. And so it is with us that we move through our day with an assumption of a problem,

you know, that there's something wrong that we're. We have to figure out. And we tense up and we narrow our focus and we worry and we get busy and we're, and I mentioned this, how many of you notice how often you're trying to figure something out. And it's not always when there's something really right there. It's this habit of mind to think there's a problem. There's a saying that we think that life is a problem to be solved rather than a mystery. to be lived.

So stress, and I think of this as a stressing trance that we're in, it's an activity we're in, is that we feel in some way the something's wrong sense, and then we do exactly the behaviors that keep perpetuating

that sense. We get busy, we get tight, we speed up, and then that sends more messages to our body and our mind that, yes, in fact, we're locked up in jail. There is something wrong. So you might be thinking, but there really are problems.

And there are. And our best way of responding, if we really want to access our intelligence and our love, our spontaneity, it's going to be when we step out of a chronic stressing trance and we're able to pause and widen our view. Otherwise, we're just like Houdini fiddling with that lock and locking ourselves in over and over. So tonight I'd like to talk about how we get trapped in the stressing trance and the way we move out. And most of you know that the three main patterns of stressing are flight, fight, fight, and freeze. Flight, you know, pushing away, moving away, pulling back, fight, moving towards trying to push, get rid of. and then freeze contracting and getting stuck.

And I'm going to contrast that to what deconditions us instead of flight, fight, and freeze, how we can move towards tend, befriend, and expand. Okay? Ten, befriend, and expand. Or if you're more online a lot, 10, friend, and expand is fine, too, either way. So we start with the roots of stress, which, whether it's from the Buddhist tradition or Western,

is really a perception of separateness on this separate endangered organism. Rather than sensing a belonging or a part of, when we're stressed, we feel isolated, and depending on the degree more and more, we feel separate. And we feel that either something's wrong or something's missing. And that propels us to that stressing activity. As I mentioned, when there's that basic perception, flight is any way that we are pulling away

and trying to leave unpleasantness. Fight is more of an attack mode. We move towards, we engage, we push at, and then freezes that contraction or that stuckness. But then what happens, The Buddhists call it Papansha. That's the polyword. That we don't just fight, like blame or attack,

but then it keeps proliferating. Papancha is proliferation. But it's a great word, isn't it? We go into Papancha, you know. That's our stressing trance. How does it proliferate? Well, we do one thing, and then it creates more thoughts

and another flush of biochemistry that then propels us to the next thing. So we flip back and forth from different fight-flight-free strategies. But we keep on like a wheel that's gone in motion. We just keep tumbling forward in it. I mentioned here before that the natural life of an emotion is approximately a minute and a half. That's how long it takes for it to move through our nervous system and our body. and in order for an emotion,

including the fearful qualities of stress, to stay, to lock in, we have to keep fueling it with thoughts. So if you want to understand the stressing trance, you have to understand that as long as we are generating and believing our fearful thoughts, we get locked in. We're like Houdini

who's telling himself there's got to be a way out if I just try this maybe if I do this approach maybe if I try this trick we're always trying to find tricks to make ourselves more comfortable and at ease

okay so we keep on thinking and fueling the biochemistry of stress now what research has shown and I find this really interesting we know most of the components in the body mind of the stressing trance. We know the cortisol goes up in the adrenaline

and we know the muscles tighten and so on. One of the elements of the stressing trance that I think is probably the most central is what happens to how you pay attention. When you're in the stressing trance, there's a narrow objective attention And I take that language from Les Femi who wrote the open focus brain. You can use other words, but the idea is our focus gets tight.

And we pay attention either to our inner life or our outer life in a very rigid way. So rather than remembering the background to experience, remembering other people, remembering space, remembering other sounds, remembering love, we fixate on it's very goal-oriented what's wrong what needs to happen where we're going next we forget the larger picture and it's something that our culture worships in other words our culture trains us in this narrow attention and children who daydream in school or don't keep their mind set on the task, get punished. It's the beginning of learning that there's something wrong

with you in terms of your intelligence, as if you don't come into this world and very quickly adapt to this culture's sense of how to pay attention. So part of what is essential if we're to wake up out of the stressing trance is to learn how to shift the way we pay attention. And the primary component here is that most of the time in this narrow objective focus, we're paying attention to this incessant inner dialogue that's going on. One great Indian teacher was asked, how would you describe this world? And the response was lost in thought. You know?

So we try to move then from this fight, flight, freeze, it's fueled by thoughts. You know, our flight is fueled by going off into the incessant inner dialogue of what's going to be wrong and what I need to do about it. And our fight is fueled by the thoughts of that person did something wrong and I'm going to get them. Or I did something wrong and I'm going to get me. That's fight too. Now, freeze does not have the fueling of thoughts.

Usually when we're frozen, our mind can be frozen too, but then what freeze moves into is a pattern of fight-flight, and that is fueled by thoughts. So how we decondition. So we're going to move from flight where we're leaving to tend or attend.

And I'm going to move through the three basic pieces that decondition stress. And the first one is tend or attend. How do we attend? Well, it's the training we're doing here, basically. We're learning to, instead of leaving in thoughts, we're over and over again learning to attend to what's happening here. So a painful emotion comes up.

And if we look at it, when we're having a painful emotion, we are sending messages to ourselves about either what's wrong with us or what's going to go wrong. And we're believing those. thoughts and that's basically the alchemy of a painful emotion we're having thoughts and we're believing them and they're creating feelings in our body that that drag us down so we're creating a virtual reality in our mind when we're in the stressing trance and we're believing it some of you remember Mark Twain who said that the worst

things in my life never actually happened you remember that well It's really interesting to me if you watch your mind, either even just getting emails, but just listening to the news, how the news kind of drags around our attention. And what's the news that we listen to? It's not truly the news of the world. It's the news that the human mind rivets to because it's usually alarming. In fact, they can't sell good news. It doesn't attract attention.

That's a whole different examination of how come. So what's the news we listen to? We get the news of cruelty and violence. We get the alarming news. It's not news of good deeds, sometimes heroic deeds, but that's really the exception. It's not the news of beauty and poetry and celebration and goodness. And yet that's true too, but that's not what we get.

So we get this narrow objective attention. We're paying attention to the news media. And not only that, as we know, it's often inaccurate and skewed. And yet we believe that it affects our body mind. I share with you. This is news also. These were considered the best verified newspaper headlines of the year.

I'll just read a few of them. Police begin campaign to run down Jaywalkers. astronaut takes blame for gas in space two sisters reunited after 18 years in the checkout counter something went wrong in jet crash experts say prostitutes appeal to pope stolen painting found by tree I'll read you I'm just going to read you one more I think

marijuana issue sent a joint committee so you get the idea that we get different kinds of information with different amounts of accuracy now we live as if what we're thinking is the actual reality and when you're moving through the day your mind's presenting thoughts but you're actually experiencing like that's real that's real life and so the big question is that we I mean we know that thoughts are essential in navigating but what are we paying attention to?

I often say it's like our minds are like this kind of TV set that's going from channel to channel to channel and how many of those channels are discovery channel in our minds. I mean how often are we on channels that have to do with doom and gloom and worry and what's wrong? And so the question is what are we paying attention to? Because what you're paying attention to will determine whether you're lock

yourself in that cell are whether you can step out and experience fresh air. The Buddha said that whatever a person frequently reflects or thinks on, that will become the inclination of her mind. That's the way our mind goes, which means our body goes that way. If you're thinking worried thoughts, your body is getting a steady stream of more adrenaline and cortisol, then it's probably happy with. So what are we thinking about it? Are our thoughts arousing a sense of kindness, of interest, of possibility? Are our thoughts arousing a sense of a kind of tightness or separation or discontent?

In science now, they say that neurons that fire together, wire together. So the more frequently you have certain kinds of thoughts, the more that's going to be the strong, inclination. So meditation training, which to me is incredibly radical because it gives us the potential of stepping out of this dressing trance, is to start noticing the thoughts and waking up out of them and having some choice as to where we want to pay attention. I mean, the message is don't believe your thoughts. Use them. Let them be a servant, but don't believe them. And a Lamont recognizing, this is a writer, wonderful, wonderful writer, she's recognizing where thoughts goes, she says, my mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone. But that's why we

meditate together, you know, it's like, here we are. It's only possible to stay in a living sense of who you are if you're constantly listening to your inner narrative, because your inner narrative keeps retelling you who you are. It keeps re putting forth the story of a self. I've found in all the different spiritual traditions I've encountered that in one way or another, there are practices to help wake us up out of this thinking trance, out of this kind of narrow, rigid, cocoon of thoughts that we spend time in, to break us free.

so we can then choose. And different, different processes. For some, it's dancing. You know, Sufi dancing or singing or in some ways, different kinds of prayer or chanting. Zen coens do it. You know, you reflect on a Cohen, and it kind of breaks you out of your rational mind.

And the Tibetan llamas, it's described how they'll go up to these high desert plains and dance around wildly and, you know, dance and scream and kick and flail their arms just to kind of break out of this kind of narrow bind of thoughts that we stay and they keep recreating the same small reality. Now, from the Westerners, I was sent this recent. This is a, it said how to keep a healthy level of insanity, you know, break out. And here are some suggestions. Every time someone asks you to do something, ask if they want, fries with that. I like that. Sing along at the opera. Finish all your sentences with, in accordance with the prophecy. In the memo field of all your checks, write for sexual favors. Put decaf in the coffee maker for three weeks at work. Once everyone's gotten over their addiction,

switch to espresso. When money comes out of the ATM scream, I won, I won third time this week. One more, one more. When leaving the zoo, start running towards the parking lot yelling, run for your lives, they're loose. So this is our Western version of waking up out of our narrow minded. Meditation training itself, though, to me is the most direct awakening from the stressing trance in that we're training our attention. We're establishing an embodied presence. We're letting the breath and the life that's right here be our home base. And so we can be more alert to notice, oh, okay, I've been lost in thoughts. And then we come back and there becomes more and more of a sense of the difference

between being inside any thought and this living, vibrant mystery that's right here. Our thoughts will keep telling us that life is something to be solved. coming back right here will give us the possibility of living it and of loving fully. So that's the training. Now, how does it actually happen when we're in the stressing trance? And I'll give you an example. So one of my best examples for myself has been in some recent months. I've been, as I've shared with some of you, I'm coming down the home stretch of a book project.

The book's called True Refuge. and it's due in September. And a lot of the themes of the book are really how when in the face of the different challenges of life, instead of our habitual ways of fight, flight, freeze, how do we come home to presence? Well, in approaching my deadline, I've been really stressing. So I've been living with a little bit of that sense of here.

I'm writing about this, and my stressing has taken the form of whatever comes my way that's an added request or demand, it feels like an interruption or interference. Like I have the thing I want to be doing and should be doing, and everything else is in the way. So I'm living a lot of my moments thinking, I should be doing something else.

And the other belief, there's not enough time. And when those two beliefs are there, I'm not able to inhabit what, I'm doing the other the other things and they could be anything I mean they could be that I'm a family member calls on the phone to say hello you know but I should be doing something else I'm not really there feeding the dogs you know whatever it is so there's a kind of stressing trance I'm in so I've when I'm in it I'm I get speedy and I get impatient and there's kind of a clench so I've been practicing with

that since it felt like, you know, it would be a little hypocritical not to. And what I keep finding myself doing is something will come up and I'll be pulled off what I want to be doing or should be doing and I'll have to pause. And in that pause, it gets really interesting because I'll start noticing the thoughts that are going on, which are how to get done with this as quickly as possible, usually. And I'll step out of those thoughts, which is really the practice, and come into my body. Now, my body is usually at that point there's kind of a clench in the heart.

So then the practice is stay. Instead of the flight response, which is to speed up and worry and try to get away from the moment, stay. So I start to breathe with that clench. And if I can stay, and it's really interesting, even for 20 seconds, and just breathe and just keep gently saying stay,

stay in the staying some space it's like it's almost like there's clench and all of a sudden i start finding some softening or space around the clench and it just untangles itself some and it doesn't mean it's gone but the who i am has shifted from this stressed person that's trying to get done with an obligatory something to a living in my moment and you know who knows if the world's going to end before next September. I'd hate to think I race through my moments on my way to something else, right? Now my example is a small one because you might be thinking of a stressor that feels a lot more you know, compelling and immediate and painful but the process is the same. When we're in the stressing trance, we're not here. We're madly trying to get away from our situation, fiddling with the

lock just like Houdini was, either blaming someone else or speeding up or resenting what we're doing like I was, but fiddling to try to get away from this. And what we're doing is we're locking ourselves into stress, into more feelings of I'm separate, more feelings of not okay. So let's just take a moment. Just practice a little. This is the first part of deconditioning. If the stressing trance is flight, fight, and freeze, tend, are what you might call attend, is the first part of homecoming. So just pause right here,

as we do so often, and invite yourself to arrive. If it helps you to feel your breath as a way to collect your attention, please do. You might notice if in your mind or in your brain, or in your body, there's anything that is stressing you right now in your life that you're aware of, that you're caring. And if nothing comes immediately, you don't have to go searching for it. But if there's something that's stressing you that's in the field of your awareness,

just to let it be here. Just like for me, the thought of a deadline, it might be that you have a deadline, something coming up, or a conflict with someone else, or something in your health, that's challenging you. So to let the stressor be there, and you might even know, as I did, what you're believing, what's the virtual reality that keeps you kind of charged in the stressing trance? It might be that there's not enough time, or that something very bad's going to go wrong, or that you're failing in some way. You can sense the stressing trance where it agitates to invite yourself just in this moment to let yourself sense there's nothing ahead

and there's no past to just see how fully you can be here. We begin to find refuge in the midst of the stressing trance when we step out of the thoughts and just feel this next breath really carefully and then this one, perhaps listening to the sounds that are right here, to feel the feelings and the sensations, in your body, including if there's emotions that are difficult, but just to agree to feel what's here

and breathe with it and stay and continue to stay and stay some more to tend, attend to what's here, to sense in staying, in attending that there's a refuge at the eye of the storm. And it's just this very present moment. And then this one, can you sense some space if you're right here? Can you sense the aliveness that's here, the consciousness that's here? What would happen in the midst of stressful situations in the midst of the stressing trance if you pause just for 30 seconds, stepped out of the thoughts and began to create your life out of taking reference? in this moment in presence. So we begin with the first step

in deconditioning the stressing trance, which is tend or attend. Okay, taking a few full breaths and opening your eyes. Now, the other primary stressing reaction we have is to fight, and that is just as much a part of our human nervous system, that when things go wrong, we get aggressive. aggressive. We try to fix them. We go on the attack. We blame others. We blame ourselves.

And so the second part of waking up from the stressing trance to befriend does not mean that we don't evaluate what's going on, that we don't set our boundaries, that we don't do everything we need to do to protect ourselves and take care of our world. We do. But where does that energy come from? can it come from caring versus come from hatred is the question so the second step is befriend or friend and what i found when i work with people that are really stuck in reactivity is that in the moment that there's some remembering to be kind to themselves even the intention even the intention Even the mind goes, oh yeah, I wish I could be kinder. Just that thought.

And there is a true beginning of a shift, of an opening. So this is the word meta and poly. This means friendly or friendship, kindness. When we start bringing in this quality of heart into the midst of a stressing trance, we begin to decondition it. We begin to step out. The Buddha said that good friends are the whole of the holy life.

That in becoming whole, it's this quality of friendliness that makes possible a kind of healing of the spirit. I want to share with you stories. Some very good friends just told me this weekend. These are friends that are from our community here that moved out west. Dori and Ted Langshaven and they're out in Washington. state right now. Ted, some years back, served in the military, and they decided together this year that they were going to participate in this event, this annual event called Run for the Wall,

which some of you've probably heard of. It's a cross-country motorcycle track of war veterans. And just as background, Dori and Tad have been, you know, ardent peace people at many anti-war rallies. And this was a very huge. huge and interesting experience for them to join in with these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of vets from Vietnam, from Iraq, you know, and a few, or I think a few from World War II, but mostly Vietnam and Iraq, that we're going on this cross-country track. Now, the purpose of this

track is for the healing of the vets. And especially for the new ones that join each year, there's an understanding that for many of them, first of all, the given is that war is trauma. The biggest stress in our lives is some form of war. Okay, so they've had the ultimate stressor. And then for many of them coming back into a culture and an environment where they were marginalized, that their way their trauma took shape was not treated, that it made it ruin their lives. And for the Vietnam vets coming into a culture that then turned to, you know, put them as the bad guys in some way or really not appreciating.

Huge, huge woundedness. So we're talking about an extreme stressing trance that's carried for many people over decades. Well, this run for the wall is considered to be like a beautiful healing process. And the way it works is they all get on these motorcycles and they go in formation across the country and towns across the country all receive them

and have food for them and places for them to stay and the populations greet them and thank them. They get thanked. In fact, part of the ritual is every morning, all the people that are new, all the vets that are new to the group, every morning over and over again, the rest of the group, the old-timers,

give them this kind of gratitude, thank you experience. And then they go to these towns where they're served and the people are saying thank you. And they go to visit some of the vets that are in hospitals in these towns. One description I heard of a World War II vet

that was as they were leaving town in formation, this one elderly man was standing there all alone with a salute, giving his thank you as they left. and as my friend told me this, he was weeping. Because he said, you can't imagine what it's like to see these guys, some of these looking, they appear to be hardened biker guys,

to see them after day two or three, being told that what they've done was appreciated and breaking down sobbing, that they held it in for all those years. He said, you cannot believe what it's like to see that. What he's describing to me is to befriend that when our stressing and what's going on inside us is met with kindness we're no longer having to pick the lock in the old ways

the door starts opening there's some freedom because that's what most of us need more than anything is to be a sense of being loved being seen and being loved So we practice with each other in community helping to wake up out of this dressing trance by just caring about each other. And it's the greatest gift we give each other. When we care about each other,

I mentioned last class, a 15-second hug changes our biochemistry in a profound way. We start oxytocin starts, you know, being generated, which is the chemical of bonding and of feeling harmony and ease. Well, that's what we do in community. That's the possibility and community and relationship and friendships is that we relax ourselves out of the stressing trance.

And how does it work? We remember our belonging. Remember that stress arises out of feeling cut off. If you're stressed, you're feeling separate and threatened. Any reminder of belonging, of connection. whether it's for these vets being told that they're appreciated or for you being hugged by someone or someone else just doing some other generous sweet act of kindness, a reminder of belonging reduces stress. So we train with each other in waking up in that loving way and we train in

offering kindness to ourselves. The loving kindness practice, the meta meditation, where we in some way offer care inwardly counter-stressing. It helps to decondition the stressing trance. One friend of mine described her meta practice which emphasized forgiveness because that's often the first step of meta. And for many of us, if we want to really wake up out of the stressing trance, the first step is self-forgiveness because we're stressed by blaming ourselves. We're believing our thoughts that I'm blowing it in some way. So it takes forgiveness. For this woman, single mom, she is a professor at a college,

and she has a son, and her life's very demanding. I think her son's five years old. And she finds that what will happen is that she'll get short with him and in some way blow up or get irritated and then turn on herself viciously. and what she's realized that if in those moments after she's in some way been really imperfect and she says I've been imperfect I blow it if instead of becoming vicious she can pause and befriend and for her befriending is very particular she says to herself it's not my fault

it's not my fault it's okay sweetheart it's okay sweetheart she uses the word sweetheart she talks to herself she says if she can just say that what happens is that her whole system shifts and she's able to come to a place with more space and more tenderness and then her way of being with her son she can apologize she can be spontaneous she's naturally more loving it's not my fault does not let myself off the hook that was perfectly okay behavior it's not my fault just recognizes

that there's infinite causes and conditions that create our behavior any moment, we would be different if we could be different in that moment, but that's what happened. Can we be kind? And interestingly, being kind and forgiving makes it so we can be more responsible, more able to respond with intelligence and balance and wisdom. So this is what she's found again and again when she just says, it's not my fault. It's okay, sweetheart. That's an example of befriend. So we'll just pause as we did earlier and just explore a little bit of this second part of deconditioning. Again, letting yourself as you pause and come into stillness, arrive right here. Feel the movement of your breath. Feel the life of the body. And you might

let come to mind some situation that you know you're in that trance. You know that in retrospect, back to your cot in some way in fight mode where you're blaming. That's your way of dealing with the stress, is you're blaming down on yourself. So you're choosing some stressful situation where you know you turn on yourself. Could be a situation at work where you feel like you're not performing well or in a relationship that's demanding or conflictual,

the home front where the demands are a lot, you act out in some way, might be on your own and find that you're not performing the way you want to, your mind's not working well, whatever it is, let yourself imagine and go right to that situation so that if you're watching a movie, you can take it right to the frame where you feel really stuck, where you're stuck and you're down on yourself. You might even hear in your mind what you tell yourself, or it might be a feeling in your body. Imagine it, and imagine if in this stressful situation, you could truly pause, as this woman did that I described, and very intentionally offer yourself some kindness. It might be that you put your hand on your

heart just for a moment and just with that kind of gentle touch, just send the message of, it's okay. I care. This is hard. It might be that you say, forgiven, forgiven, just to let go of what you're holding against yourself. Or it's not my fault. It helps you to talk to yourself. It's okay, sweetheart. Whatever it is. And you can experiment.

It's not a one, you have to choose something now, but one way of send kindness inward. Some kindness. And just notice what happens. When there's some remembrance that you can be kind towards yourself. What happens? When we're caught in this stressing trance, we're leaving our experience, so we come back by attending, by tending. We're often fighting against ourselves or others, so we come home by befriending.

We'll come now to the last piece of the pathways to freedom, which I call expand, just because 10, befriend and expand. Expand was the only word I could come up with. So, but it actually fits when you think of if it's fight, flight freeze and freeze is very stuck, expand is very much unstuck. We expand home and remember the background of experience, the space that's here, the awareness that's here. When we're in the stressing trance, our attention, if you'll remember, is fixed and narrow. So there's a certain freedom that comes when we completely open up our attention. Now, one of the teachers I love, Choghim Tronfah, no longer alive, great Tibetan teacher, once was with a large group of people, and he put up a big piece of white poster paper, pinned it up on the wall, and he put a little V on it. And he asked them, well, what is this? And they all basically said, it's a bird. And he said, no, it's the sky with a bird flying through it. You sense the shift there. You see it in Asian art versus Western art.

We're in Asian art. There's much more of an awareness of the space that everything's happening in. Western, it's much more of a focus of the objects, the foreground. I read you a poem that I love. And this is called Fire by Judy Brown. What makes a fire burn is space between the logs,

a breathing space. Too much of a good thing, many logs packed in too tight, can douse the flames almost as surely as a pail of water wood. So building fires requires attention to the spaces in between as much as to the wood. When we're able to build open spaces in the same way we have learned to pile on the logs, then we can come to see how it is fuel and the absence of fuel together that makes fire possible. We only need to lay a log lightly from time to time. A fire grows simply because the space is there,

with openings in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way. When we're in a trance, there's no space. We have forgotten the background of experience. So this third quality of paying attention, this remembering space is really intrinsic to coming into wholeness and freedom. If we really want to be fully awake from the stressing trance, remembering space. Now, a very brief vignette, Les Femmy, who's a clinical psychologist and researcher who wrote the open focus brain, and I've been referring some to it in the last two talks,

had been in researching stress, found more and more how when we're in our optimal non-stress state of relaxed and alert, like really a meditative state of relaxed and alert, the brainways are there's a kind of synchronous phasing alpha states. When we're stressed, it's high beta, you know, much faster, speedier.

But the high beta, our tensions narrow and fixed. with the relaxed and alert alpha states, here's what he found. He gave volunteers a number of the different kinds of meditation or attentional strategies with the question of, what will most get them into alpha? He wanted to know what was going to accomplish this relaxed attentive state.

And so they did all these different kinds of meditation. then he asked them to imagine the space between their eyes and you might close your eyes for a moment just imagine the space between your eyes and the imagine asked them to imagine the space between their ears and then the whole volume of space in their whole head and continue to asking questions like that can you imagine the space between your shoulders

to space between the front of your hand and the back of your hand, between your breastbone and your heart, and your heart and your spinal column, and the whole space or volume of the chest area. And imagine the space inside your whole body and the space that's around you, and that there's really no difference between that inner and outer space. So you can just let go and sense that space,

everywhere. What he discovered as he invited people to explore space, the sky, space between the logs, was that all the machines went to high amp alpha right away. None of the other meditations went right there, but as soon as people went to objectless awareness, just to space, that brainwave state, that synchronous brainwave state, was there. And what his theory is is that the realization of space resets all the neural networks. And then it affects vision and all your other senses as well. This is what's called open focused attention when we're not narrowing on a thought or an object inside our mind or outside. There's just that openness. So if you haven't already opened your eyes, it's fine to open your eyes. So this is the last piece of the

the training that deconditions the trance is to not only know how to pay attention right now to the sensations that are here, the sounds, to not only know how to befriend what's here, but to know how to turn the attention to a sense of the space that everything's happening in. How to become aware of the silence that's listening to sound or to the stillness that's aware of all the vibrational dynamic happening. The sky that the bird is flying through. It takes waking up out of thoughts. This is Srinar Sagadate. He says the real world is beyond our thoughts and ideas. We see it through the net of our desires divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner and outer. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do

for the net is full of holes. So we close with a final meditation. We'll take all these elements, these three basic elements of 10, befriend and expand. So we started with Houdini locking himself in, that busyness. Really the way of waking up out of the stressing trance

isn't more doing. It's a simple part. pausing, it's a relaxed attention. So wherever you are now, just to sense, the habit is to think this life is a problem to be solved. The possibility is to live this mystery and to love without holding back. We wake up out of the stressing trance

with the simplicity of pausing. Just to notice, right, this moment, the possibility of just saying, to yourself gently, okay, stop. Whatever thinking, whatever leaning forward, whatever notion of the future, the past, just to pause. And in that pause to tend or attend to what's right here, just to gently notice how it is for you. Fresh, once more, right this moment, to befriend what's here regarding the moment-to-moment experience with. with a gentle and kind attention.

You're sensing the foreground, sounds, sensations, aliveness, and also sense the background, the presence that's here, this wakeful openness that everything's happening in. To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so,

for the net is full of whole, just a sense the openness that's already here, the stillness that's here, the silence. As we come home to that space, that openness, we then can celebrate the life with a freshness and a tenderness, with a wholeheartedness of being. Namaste.

The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.