Tara Brach - Part 2: The Lion's Roar

Episode Date: May 16, 2012

2012-05-16 - Part 2: The Lion's Roar - The Buddha taught that faith--trust in our true nature--is intrinsic to the spiritual path and the expression of wisdom. These two talks investigate the practices of presence that awaken our faith and the freedom that arises when our faith becomes radiant and full. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations make a difference!

Last week, the talk was entitled The Lions' Roar. And the Lion's Roar is a phrase that comes from the Tibetan tradition. And it's a proclamation that everything is workable. It's a proclamation of faith that this life whatever presents is workable. Now, by workable, it doesn't mean that you're not going to get sick and get old and die and lose jobs and things like that. that's not that kind of a it's workable it's a deeper sense that whatever happens whatever happens it's possible to find a sense of peace and freedom in the midst and that when we do that gives us a heart and this is the phrase i love the most a heart that's ready for everything a kind of undefended openness

because we're not tensing against the future, we get to live this life. That's the gift of faith. We get to live the moment and because our hearts aren't so armored against what's going to happen, live in a very, with a very undefended heart. What I'd like to do tonight is continue exploring this heart that can be ready for anything, this lion's roar.

And do it by just talking some more about what, ends up nourishing faith, and what gives us faith, how we get caught, how we get caught in doubts. And then mostly I'd like to talk tonight about some of the gifts or blessings that come as we come home to this knowing that it really is workable.

If I just said in a nutshell, what is the source of faith? And this is, I think, common to all spiritual traditions. Our faith grows as we come to realize our nature is not limited to this ego, personality, or body. As we begin to taste in a very experiential way, a belonging to something larger, you might call it to loving presence or to spirit, to God, to this whole web of aliveness, and we have different flavors of it.

but in any moment that there's an enlarged sense of belonging, that in some way nourishes our faith. It's really okay. This life is really okay. So, as we know, our conditioning is to identify in a very narrow way, especially when we're stressed. It's like any sense of openness, we kind of tighten up, and we quickly become separate, and the world's out there,

and we've got to defend and we've got to promote and we've got to present. The conditioning kicks in quickly. And the origin of the conditioning, all things that come into existence have a perception of separation. That's just part of the design. It's part of our evolutionary design. The brain is designed to have a dualistic look at things. So we come into the world that way.

And I always think of Joseph Campbell who said, the beginning of all religions is the cry help. Because we're in a predicament. We feel separate. There's uncertainty. Things can go wrong and they will go wrong. And our separate self feels very much at risk. So that's the kind of given.

That's the setting that we're in where we have a sense that we're living from either or self, that there's no place to take refuge in the self. Either we're empty, there's no one here, or else what's here is deficient and limited. And the only possible answer to help is maybe out there. So then we get fixated out there. And we don't pay attention to the one place right here, right now,

where we can experience love, where we can experience aliveness, where we can touch awareness itself. We fixate outward. So the pathway is to learn to pay attention in ways that connect us with our belonging. And that's what we're doing here. That's what each week we come together

and we say, okay, come into the body, feel the aliveness, listen to your heart, connect with your heart. And then we open it and sense, the beings that are here, we sense our belonging, we chant together. What I've noticed is that beyond formal practice, where many people get a taste, I mean, that's what people keep coming back to meditation

because it gives us a taste. We quiet down some. We get outside our thoughts. We feel some sense of peace. But we all have tastes outside of formal meditation. Each one of us has a taste of that kind of belonging or well-being. We get that. Sometimes it's just in nature. Sometimes it's beauty. I remember some of you might have seen the Shawshank Redemption and there's a scene in it that I'll never forget where there's a

prisoner in the library and he turns on classical music. And for some reason the sound system is open and this very beautiful classical piece is spread throughout the entire premises. And in that time that it spreads throughout the prison, this jungle of a prison system where there's little beauty, every prisoner becomes silent and still. There's this moment of awe at beauty. They're all transfixed for that moment. And so sudden and unexpected that in the heart of that awfulness

that there would be this beauty that entrances, but that touch something devotional. And we touch that. There are moments of beauty, of having a sense of our belonging with another person. There's moments of quietness, of sensing the night sky and the vastness and the mystery, that connects us with a kind of inner vastness and mystery.

And we, for those moments, sense that belonging beyond this ego self. Those are the moments that fuel faith. So as I've described, we have this conditioning to touch that, to feel drawn, to begin spiritual practices, and also we know when we're honest with ourselves, and we look at our day, like if you just review today, I can do it and feel a kind of bemused embarrassment sometimes,

the uptightness and the reactivity and the small-mindedness, every one of us. We have this at times, this tender openness, and then we get little, we get small, we get self-involved, so that the universe all has to do with us, and we're just this ego computing, basically everything that happens is either good news for us or bad news for us, or else we don't pay attention to it, but we're always filtering things. And sometimes it's a real rationalization, it's difficult, and in some way we feel like, okay, this is here to teach me something. It's like the universe is contrived to teach me something or to punish me, you know. There is a little cartoon with this guy, God's talking to an angel, and he's saying to the angel,

it's a bit embarrassing to admit, but everything that happens happens for no good reason. So it could be a letdown, but the universe is not so focused just on this cell. But when we're in that narrowed self-sense, then our dance with each other also, we're very much computing. Are we going to get approved of? Are we going to be seen in a way we want to be seen? Is the other going to accept or reject us?

Are they going to suffocate us? Ask too much. So there's a control piece that goes on that's actually, it's there a lot, that in some way we're trying to control how another experiences us. And we're trying to control when people are close in

what they do that then affects us. So a story for you on this. Some of you might remember a guy named John invites his mother over for dinner, and during the meal, the mother can't help but noticing how beautiful John's roommate is. So she's long been suspicious

that there was a relationship there, but this even made her more curious. So after watching the two interact over the evening, she really assumed there might be more. And reading as mother's thoughts, John volunteered, I know what you might be thinking, but I assure you, Carrie and I are just roommates. Okay, so she goes home a week later,

Carrie comes to John and says, you know, ever since your mother came here for dinner, I've been unable to find the beautiful silver soup ladle. You don't think she did something with it, do you? I doubt it, but I'll just. email or just in case he says. So he wrote down, Dear Mother, I'm not saying you did, or I'm not saying you did not do anything with a soup ladle, but it's odd that it disappeared after the dinner. Do you know anything about this? Later, he received an email from his mother that read, Dear son, I'm not saying that you do sleep with Carrie, and I'm not saying that you don't. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the soup ladle by now, love mother. This is titled, don't lie to your mother. So when we're in that ego self,

the ego is designed, it's the executor of our business, so it's designed to control. But when we are fully identified with it, that becomes the predominant activity and that rules out presence. You can't be controlling and be fully present at the same moment. You can't try to control another person including what they're thinking of

you in that moment and have your heart wide open. Right? Doesn't that make sense? So this identifying with a smaller self blocks out the very experiences that actually nourish our trust. Now, interestingly, even when we're having trust, even when faith or something comes in the form of hopefulness, sometimes we get really hopeful. And then the question is, how does that really really to faith when we get hopeful. And some spiritual teachers actually teach, you know, hope is danger. You know, there's a danger in hoping. And I want to speak to that a little because I feel like it's a really important area

to bring some wise attention to. That we can be hopeful about being safe and happy, but it's often narrowed hope. In other words, our hope is hitched to certain things working out certain ways. that's a recipe for trouble when our hope is hitched to something being a certain way and there's fear that it won't be

then our system is tight and tense and so yet it's really quite natural I mean you think of your life and for most of us we you know will hope let's say for me I remember my son applying to grad school like the fixational may he get into this school

and that kind of thing are we hope for a job we get take an interview, we hope we're going to get it. Or, you know, we hope that we find the right mate. Or we hope, you know, these are things that are really natural in being human. And to degree that the hope has a grasping, you know what I mean, that the hope has really got this kind of energy

that we're in trouble if we don't have it come true. We're on this roller coaster of hoping and fearing that actually tightens our heart. So there's narrowed hope. there's narrowed hope. But I also want to say there's a wise hope that I feel is essential to our health. And that's a hope that really holds open to possibility. It's the hope that our deep aspirations will manifest. It's the hope that this heart really can awaken. It's the hope that we can love fully without holding back? It's the hope that somebody else can find happiness, that

kind of hope that's wide open, that actually is just keeping the door open to possibility. It's creative. It's with the flow of things, with the infinite amount of different ways things can work out. That is nourishing hope. We can see it with health. When somebody is sick and they have some disease that they don't know how it's going to turn out. And there's hope in becoming more healthy. But it's not real tight hope. It's kind of just hope in the possibility of health. The immune system responds, right?

We know this now. We know about the placebo effect. When we have a thought or belief that something's possible, we're receptive and we get more aligned to having it happen. The same things, true in spiritual life, that to the degree there's some hope that we can let go of controlling so much, that we can enter the flow. There's some hope that we can let love in. I know so many people that, you know, we'll start doing some deep work together and when I get to the point

of, well, can you feel that that person loves you? There's like, because I'm not worthy of loving. We're going to talk a little bit more about that later. So hope is this open to possibility is part of the grounds of faith. It's part of what creates an atmosphere for faith. And that faith grows as we keep touching into presence. Every time we touch into a sense of belonging to the flow of this moment-to-moment experience, there's a little less of the ego self being solidified. in a little more space.

Every time we pay attention to the love with another person, we feel enlarged and there's a little more faith. I think of it, the word faith is a little misleading. In a way, the practice is one of faithing. It's like, it's a verb, that our practice is one of entrusting ourselves to the moment, entrusting ourself to love.

Taking this ego self and taking the chance of the give ourselves to something larger. It's not faith, it's faithing. And the more we're doing this faithing practice, the more that lion's roar, that heart that's ready for everything begins to glow. So one of the ways I think it's useful to think of it, and I often use the metaphor of a space suit self,

that we move around our egos like a space suit that's got certain ways of defending and certain ways of navigating and the delugeesion delusion is that on the space suit and we forget who's looking through. We forget the awareness and the tenderness and the space of connecting this that's much bigger than any space suit covering. When we practice this entrusting, just letting go into this moment, that space suit becomes more transparent, more fluid, more porous. And what happens is the

the light of this universe begins to shine through. You begin to sense who you are. I'll read you from Emerson. This is one of my favorite Emerson quotes. He says, within each of us is the soul of the whole. When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius. When it breathes through our will, it is virtue. When it flows through our affections, it is love.

Within each of us is the soul of the whole. and we begin to trust that when that space suit becomes a little more transparent and fluid and that soul of the whole shines through from within us and it shines into us we belong to something larger very beautiful you're just letting the image kind of come into your body you can begin to sense so what if the sense of the story that I live in wasn't so fixed in my day What if we had more moments

We were just smelling the honeysuckle or feeling our breath or appreciating another person That's when that light shines through So we look at then What does faith appear like When we start trusting

Okay so there really is something larger I can depend on One teacher says Is there something beyond death we can depend on Beyond these bodies coming and going It's the soul of the whole So what does it look like? How do we begin to relate to difficulty

when there's a little more of that trusting? I was sent this last year. One Sunday morning, everyone in one bright, beautiful, tiny town got up early and went to the local church. Before the services started, the townspeople were sitting in their pews, talking about their lives, their families,

and suddenly Satan appeared. They appeared in front of the church, and everyone started screaming and running for the front entrance trampling each other in this frantic effort to get away from evil incarnate. And soon everybody was evacuated from the church except for one elderly gentleman who sat calmly in his pew, not moving, seemingly oblivious to the fact that God's ultimate enemy was in his presence. Now this confused Satan a bit, so he walked up to the man and said, well, don't you know who I am? And the man replied, yep, sure do. Satan asked, aren't you afraid of me? The response,

was, nope, I'm not. Satan was a little perturbed with this, and then he queried, well, why aren't you afraid of me? And the man calmly responded, been married to your sister for over 48 years. So it's a silly story, and here's the teaching point in it, because there is one. Sometimes I stretch on my stories, but this one I had a reason. for many of us the trials of our life the failures and the losses and all the encounters with our own shadow

they can go they can go one way or other they can either amplify mistrust like get us fixed on something's wrong with me in the world are if we're on a path of entrusting our self-depresence even when it's difficult in trusting and trusting

being with what is then the very difficulties that arise the shadow side actually becomes what they call manure for Bodhi it becomes the actual place of awakening it becomes a place where we actually learn to find the peace and the freedom within

our experience it's the place where we learn to take refuge in our own awakened heart and that's the gift that's the gift that's the gift of difficulty. So what I'd like to do with the rest of our time is explore how in the lives of a handful of pretty extraordinary people that happened in the expression of their faith, how they practice faithing and trusting and more what the gifts were. And this really is an invitation to sense in our own lives, this possibility of a kind of

of a surrendering war into the what is. And as I'll talk about, it's not, it doesn't lead to passivity. It actually then allows us to live with a real spontaneity and creativity. Okay. So one of the first gifts of faithing, of this entrusting, is that we, in the moments that we've kind of surrendered, and there's more of that porousness and fluidity to that space suit itself, are now, Natural intelligence shines through very, very strongly. When we have this healthy faith, this faith in true belonging, then we just open to this universal intelligence and it comes through. Example for you tonight of that is the life of Harriet Tubman.

And many of you have heard of her, so I'm not going to speak a whole lot, but just to say that she's an African American, at the time of the Civil War was known for her bold role and aiding slaves to escape through the Underground Railroad. And so her, if you had to say, her place of fathing, of finding belonging was she gave herself to work for the freedom of enslaved people. She gave herself to something larger. It took her out of that spacesuit self,

and it gave her access to something really phenomenal. because as I learned more about her life, she took trips every year into the South. And of course she was in danger. She was, they had a lot of money on her head. But she took these trips into the South. She had an uncanny way of finding her way to where there were different groups of fugitives

ready to go north. She'd take 10 at a time. That's a lot of people to sneak through all the authorities that were armed and ready to kill. And she had a legendary second sight. She was able to anticipate where people were going to be and be able to guide these fugitives through these hair-raising situations, narrowly escaping capture.

And she had the reputation of being guided by angels. So what was described about her, she had no military training, but she had this capacity to come up with these brilliant creative responses to situations. In other words, her intelligence was adaptive, and that is the key in an evolutionary way of the highest level of intelligence, an adaptive intelligence. She was creative.

I could speak a lot more about her because I think she's an amazing, fascinating character, but she had faith. She entrusted herself to this work for freedom. She entrusted herself to God, and for her God was that intelligence, that spirit, that love that guided her. totally entrusted it.

So she just listened. That's how she knew what to do. She listened. This is not a passive faith. This is an act of faith. Now, Albert Einstein, very different kind of thing, and I won't speak much about him either, but he and a number of other scientists

that made some of the most radical breakthroughs in history had the same sense that it was when they had to do a lot of rational thinking, and they had extraordinary logical rational minds. And it was in the moments that that went to the wayside, the rational thinking quieted, and there was a kind of intuitive sense that the most dramatic breakthroughs and realizations happen. Now, Einstein described this as intuition. It's the same thing of faithing.

He just would kind of let go and entrust himself to that presence so that intuition could come through. And here's what he wrote. He says, the intuitive mind is a sacred. gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. The way we access that gift, it's a letting go of control. You know we spend so much time trying to figure things out. It's entrusting our self to presence. Stop figuring out. Let go of the thinking. Just open to what's here and there is an intuitive knowing that can come through. We see the same creative

intelligence in artists and in artists it's this kind of full giving surrendering into their work and the example that kind of captured my interest was Keats. He's a pretty dramatic guy and Keats started off very ambitious as an art as an artist actually he wanted to be the best and many of you might know he died when he was 25 so he hit his luminosity as this amazing writer and poet right before his death and he had a sense of moving from being this ambitious poet the doer the one that was going to really write things

to being an instrument he surrendered himself in a way and here's how he described it he called this negative capability, which means rather than controlling this willingness to live in uncertainty. Okay, this is faithing. This capability of surrendering, and he calls it annulling the self. In other words, coming to that place that is not bound by the self,

enlarged beingness. So his practice was much like what we describe as unconditional mindful presence. He talked about embracing all the different facets of life. We talk about the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows. For him, the language was to bear all naked truths. Sometime before he died, he anticipated his own death. And in anticipating his own death and opening, a surrender of room presence to that being okay,

that's when his poetry reached its peak of creativity. of luminosity. He wrote, The world of pain and troubles is necessary to school and intelligence and make it a soul. The heart must feel

and suffer in a thousand diverse ways. And then as his biographers describe it, he embraced beauty, change, loss, and creativity just poured through that openness.

You get a sense of how the world opens up when we do this kind of a surrendering presence, a sense of opening to what's larger than our stories, our self, our self-concern. We also open to the creativity and intelligence that lives through this universe, the soul of the whole.

Okay, so we've talked about intelligence. Another capacity of faith, a faith thing is love. That's what flows through too. An example that just say a bit about is the Dalai Lama, who again and again has had this kind of. of openness to what happens, this kind of surrendering open presence. And he enters a stadium of a thousand people and you can look around and people start crying when he enters a stadium because he's such a pure expression of an open heart. And we long to sense that.

And so our heart opens, it's contagious, we open when we sense them. I remember in California, at one point he was at a hotel where there was a conference and he asked to meet with all of the everybody that in some way had helped make it possible including the janitors and the women that had cleaned the rooms and the cooks and everybody so they all stood in this long line including all a secret service man and everybody was in this long line one by one

one by one he bowed to them And with each one, it was that same thing that this, what was coming through was this just really unconditional presence. Each person felt special. And I can attest to it myself because I've been in one of those lines with him and given them the kata, you know, which is a devotional gift. And those moments that he just was right there. What lets us be right there? it's when we're not preoccupied with taking care of a self defending a self proving a self so intelligence love there's another quality to faithing and faith which is you can feel it in the term the lion's roar which is there's a certain kind of power or empowerment that comes through it's like we open to the power of the universe and i'll talk a little about gone

on this one. Again, a friend of mine wrote a book that's going to be coming out in about six months, and he tuned me into some of these figures and some of the aspects of their life. His name is Stephen Cope, and his book is called The Great Work of Your Life. And I endorsed it, and really, when it comes out, I'll talk more about it and have it on the reading list. So I want to give credit to Stephen for kind of attuning me to some of these lives and biographies. Okay, so Gandhi, as a young boy, he was skinny, he was bullied, and he was scared. And he was so scared that finally one of the family servants got really fed up with him. And she said, look, it's okay to be frightened. That's okay. You can admit you're frightened.

But when you're afraid, don't run away. When you're afraid, stay. And in your mind, just say Rama, Rama, Rama. Rama is the name of God. So she taught him in the face of fear to stay and to take refuge. And here we're calling refuge Rama, this loving presence. He grew through his life. He was known to be constantly, constantly reciting Rama, Rama. So his life became more and more belonging to God, belonging to spirit. And as many of you know that when he was shot, when he was assassinated, that was it. He said, Rama, Rama. So courage and a certain power, because when you have that courage, you're free to act.

And you're free to act in a way that brings a tremendous amount of passion and clarity. So for Gandhi, the way he described it, was that you reduce the self to zero and become an instrument of soul force. You reduce the self to zero through this faithing, through this surrendering. Whether you call it surrendering to presence, surrendering to God, to Rama, to love, it's through that surrendering, that letting go, emptying out the selfing, all the defendedness, you become an instrument of soul faith.

What a beautiful image. So Gandhi, you know, he says, be the change you want. He inhabited that. He inhabited that kind of empowered beingness. And you can sense, you know, they talk about faith moves mountains, that his entrusting himself, that trust gave him the power to just do things that were incredibly creative. And like Harriet Tubman, he was completely unpredictable. Like the English said that they couldn't work with, oppose him

because every time they think he'd be in one place and do one thing, some intuitive twist would happen and he'd come up with another strategy, another campaign in another place. They could not track the guy. There was a creative brilliance. What allows us to have that creative brilliance? When there's not that interference of the self-ing, I think when I was reading about God,

what came to me was Gertas, a very famous quote about commitment because this entrusting, when we entrust, it actually gives us the energy to really commit ourselves. And I've run into so many people that in a way they're getting older and older and they're saying, you know, I never really gave myself to what I loved. I haven't really committed myself to creativity or to loving or to letting in love. So, here's the quote. He says, until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. begin it now. I was talking to a very dear friend a few weeks ago, and she was sharing her insecurity and her relationship she's in with someone and how she, in some way, even though she mostly mentally knows there's love there, at times she gets tight and can't really trust this person really loves her.

There's a sense of not deserving. I'm not worthy of it, you know. It just couldn't really be. which I think a lot of us can relate to that to the extent we're caught in our egos and our fears it's very hard to really get it like really let it in let our hearts really feel bathed

feel held and loving very hard so this is what she was talking to me about and because I was were really close I made a more direct suggestion which was on this one take a chance take a chance that you you can trust loving. Take a chance. You know, whenever we're faithing, whenever we're entrusting,

there's a sense of chance. I mean, the ego wants to protect. Entrusting is to let go of our strategies. This doesn't mean all the time in any situation that we have the balance or interstability to let go. Sometimes we need to hold on to our strategies, and that's compassionate too. So I'm not trying to give an all or nothing kind of invocation to letting go. But it is possible for each of us to find where our edge is and soften some. And for her to take the chance, just to take the chance that you can trust this loving.

So later she returned to me and said that those phrases kept rebounding in her mind just to take that chance. And we're talking like, what's the alternative? What's the alternative? you know, to not open to that possibility, to stay safe, to stay in our little comfort zone that's really pretty lonely because we're not letting it in. So I just wonder if you can sense in your own life,

just for a moment, where you would like to take a chance and entrust yourself more to life, to aliveness, to creativity, to loving, You know, just to reflect on that for a moment and to sense, well, what would it mean for you? What would be challenging? And can you sense the longing?

Because I think it's a longing, really, to take another step in that direction, to take a chance. You don't have to take a chance, huh? Just the rest of us. You can just be held, you know. We're blessed to have a young one with us. Yeah. So what happens is there's a positive spiraling,

that when we take a chance, and we just take as much of a chance as we can in this moment. This moment, you might think of a situation is difficult and just sense, okay, I'm going to let myself be a little more forgiving of myself or a little more open to this person, or take a risk here, or go ahead and be creative and not necessarily meet somebody else's expectations. you might have something like that

and you just gentle yourself into faithing you know it hasn't have to be a shove in fact it can't be so there's this positive spiral that when we feel our edge and soften and entrust a little bit more

we touch something some space some presence that we know feels like home has that feeling we were chanting ah that you kind of let go into and you sense something you belong to some in large sense of being and that then

deepens faith so we can do the faith in more and it's a spiral of surrendering and then surrendering the surrendering until there really is a sense that the ego can play itself but we know who we are that is absolutely mysterious

and unconfined and loving and aware we just know that That's our home. That feels more true than any story about ourselves. Then faith really is a radiance. Then we have a heart that's ready for everything.

So, this is the last piece. I've mentioned the gifts of faithing and of faith. I've mentioned intelligence, and I mentioned love, and I've mentioned that empowerment, to really be part of the transformation, to serve healing. The last piece I want to mention, is a kind of freedom, a taste of freedom. The Tibetans call it that you can live your life like a child of wonder.

So many of us go around and see problems. Like life is a problem to solve. And as now it's out there kind of quote goes, it's really a mystery to be lived. Really, you know, it's really a mystery. And if we go around and there's a sense of wonder, we're expressing that, freedom in that faith.

Child of wonder. So my example of that, there's a book called The Snow Leopard by Peter Matheson. And in one part of it, he's visiting a llama in a very remote, very secluded part of Tibet, very isolated.

And this llama has crippling arthritis and he knows that the llama will never again leave his place, his monastery, because he just wouldn't be able to walk and do it. And he wonders what it would be like to know you can never again leave a place. So the question comes out to this Lama.

And I want to read you the response. And this is how Peter Matheson writes about it. He says, and this holy man of great directness and simplicity, big white teeth shining, laughs out loud in an affectious way at the question, indicating his twisted legs without a trick. of self-pity or bitterness, as if they belong to all of us. He casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and dancing sheep and cries, of course I'm happy. It's wonderful, especially when I have no choice. Isn't that great? Of course I'm happy. It's wonderful,

especially when I don't have any choice. That's an expression of the controller, has been dissolved. He's no longer identified with that smaller self that needs to control. He's living in an enlarged belonging. Of course he's happy. So to say as a part of closing that this is not to set yet another far-off goal

that we're going to surrender our lives and never control and live in this bliss, it's more of a sense of this is what's possible and we don't have to wait. What's possible is you can find in your own life the places where there's some yearning to be more free, some yearning to love and be less defended, some yearning to be more creative, some yearning to not live inside the box of your own or other's expectations to feel more creative in that way. And let that be the edge that you experiment with. Sense what happens if you take a step

and if you do take a chance to let love in, to express love, to live this moment more fully, even when part of you wants to figure something out and do something else. To go ahead and not turn away from the fear, to stay.

And your way of, instead of Rama-rama-rama might be to stay and in some way put your hand on your heart and say, you know, sweetheart, it's okay, or it might be in some way to offer it to Kuan Yin, or it might be in some way,

okay, this is just fear. It's fear, and there's more. Whatever your practices, to play your edge, to take a chance, and then to find that the gifts are a more free life. Okay, so we're going to do a closing,

just a very brief sit. And what I'd like to do is a way of leading into the sit, is I'd like to close with a very lovely poem from Mary Oliver. So just let yourself come into this pause. This poem is called Hallelujah. Everyone should be born into this world happy and loving everything. But in truth, it rarely works that way. For myself, I've spent my life clamoring toward it. Hallelujah. Anyway, I'm not where I started. And have you too been busy? Have you too been trudging like that, sometimes almost forgetting how wondrous the world is,

and how miraculously kind some people can be? And have you too decided that probably nothing important is ever easy, not save for the first 60 years? Hallelujah, I'm 60 now and even a little more, and some days I feel I have wings. Into this moment of presence, you opened a possibility. relaxing into the moment, whatever's here, kindness to the moment. Letting go into this changing flow of sound, sensation, letting go into this heart space, honestly sensing the experience of the heart with a tremendous tenderness, tremendous tenderness. Letting go can't happen unless we're kind.

Faith begins with a prayer, that longing to open to who we truly are, to trust who we truly are, to live from that loving presence. So in this last moments of silence, just to feel your own words, your own prayer for your own being, offering yourself blessings, extending this prayer to hold the whole world in our hearts. May all beings entrust themselves to loving, presence, realize their very nature as loving presence. May all beings awaken and be free. 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.