Tara Brach - Part 2: The Mystery of Who We Are

Episode Date: July 27, 2011

2011-07-27 - Part 2: The Mystery of Who We Are - Everything we cherish--love, creativity, wisdom, aliveness-- arises out of our capacity to arrive in Beingness. This talk explores the stress that leads us to cut off from our natural state of being, and two key pathways home. Included are guided meditations that explore the nature of our awareness, the essence of who we are. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

So our last talk was on the title of it was really the mystery of being, the mystery of who we are. And I want to continue that tonight, that theme. And I'd like to do it by sharing a story, a personal story from this last week. And as I sometimes share with you, I go for regular walks on the Potomac. It's part of my morning meditation. and one morning Jonathan, my husband and I were walking together and I spotted, he's the camera guy and I spotted ahead of us a beaver on a rock

and I was like completely thrilled and he was clueless, he had no idea it was there and I'm kind of snapping my fingers and going like that and of course as soon as I gestulated wildly the thing went plunk and of course he ridiculed me for my subtlety you know The next day, I was alone on the walk, and I had learned my lesson, and I kind of went really quietly, and sure enough, it was there again.

And it must have heard me approach, because it went under, but then it came up right by my feet, like right along the shoreline and, you know, put its little claws around a piece of wood and so on. So I was thrilled, you know, and I pulled out my iPhone, which I happened to have. and I'm, you know, wildly grabbing shots and really excited. And then I got enough and I just kind of stopped. And that's when I actually looked at the beaver. That's when I actually looked into those eyes and I saw this brightness and this sentience, you know. And in that stopping, in that pause,

I felt this love for the beaver. in my mind I was going, I love you. And now I didn't, I wasn't under some false illusion that it was gazing at me seeing my sentience and going, oh, and I love you too, you know. It wasn't that kind. There was a connection on some level, but I was experiencing and probably on some other way. But I felt like I was, you know, seeing its, its form, its slicked fur and its little eyes and

its claws. And I was also just seeing beingness. And in that stopping, there was a real arising of loving feelings. What I was reminded of is that it's fine to take pictures, you know, and it's fine to be on our way somewhere, and it's fine to be thinking, and it's fine to be doing. And it's in the moments of being. You know, in the moments that we pause and we stop,

that we're available to receive this one, world in a way that really arouses the depth of loving. We need to stop. We need to be here. So I share this because being states, this isn't saying that we shouldn't be doing, being states actually inform our doing. When we know how to pause, what comes out of that has an intelligence. What comes out of that has a compassion. When we know how to tap into being states, we actually have the space that brings that description I used last week of happy for no reason. And when we know how to tap into being states, our heart can really hold the sorrows of the world. And I bring this up because I'm very well aware, and I've been in touch actually

with a couple of people from Norway. And I'm just very aware of the depth of the sorrow. And of course there's nothing really we can do except know that we're keeping you company, that we are, that there's a caring. And I say this, to those of you in Norway, I say that our hearts, as we're very present, can feel the suffering in the Sudan,

the horror. Our hearts can feel the suffering in the hot spots of the world and also where they are in our own body and mind and in each other's. So these being states give us a sensitivity

so we can really respond to our world. And it's so clear to me that the violence arises because of a disconnection from being states. that it's only possible to create others that are unreal when we're disconnected from being.

We don't violate people. We don't hurt them. Our animals are the earth. If we're resting in presence and living out of that presence, because others are real, they're sentient. Just the way I felt towards that creature, that bear, it's like there's a realness there. I wouldn't have caused harm.

So to the degree that we're separated from our beingness, we live in a way that the world becomes objects out there. We lose a sense of oneness that is the possibility. So tonight I want to explore that. I want to explore how we disconnect from our innate sense of being, of presence, and continue exploring these two pathways of homecoming. And I'd like to remind some of you are familiar with this story, but some aren't. And I was so touched just about eight years ago when I heard about in the capital Sukhata, the ancient capital Sukhutai in Thailand, that there had been this period of drought.

And there was this statue of a Buddha, this huge enormous clay and plaster statue there. and it was not a handsome or appealing statue in the sense of its aesthetics. But people loved it for its staying power. It had survived, you know, hundreds of years of invading armies and weather systems and trouble. But at the end of this period of drought, these cracks appeared in the statue. And so one enterprising monk kind of shined his flashlight

into one of the cracks. And what shone back was the light of gold. So he then put his little pen flashlight in another crack and another and another. And wherever he looked, that the light of gold shined back. So, of course, they took off the covering, this plaster clay covering,

and it turned out that this was the largest solid gold statue of the Buddha in this entire area of Southeast Asia. Now, monks believe that, it was covered over to protect it from the years of danger, just in the same way that we cover over our innate purity and goodness because life is difficult. And then what happens is we become identified with the covering. All the defenses, the ways we're trying to navigate, become our definition. And we lose sight of the gold. We lose sight of the beingness.

So how does that happen? How does it happen through these times of difficulty that we build this covering? And I think probably the simplest way to consider it is that it's stress. That stress moves us to create these defenses, these mechanisms. And for some of us, we're born genetically with more fear than others. Our bodies feel and receive and are sensitive distress more than others. Some of us were born into places where there is a lot of violence, and that locked our system in distress and reactivity,

and a disconnecting, a dissociating, because it wasn't safe to rest in that golden Buddha, you know. It wasn't saved to rest in presence. For some of us within our own family of origin, the caregivers that were with us, there was really not an expression of love, our safety, our seeing, clear seeing, that allowed us to feel at home in ourselves. So we disconnect. We create a false self.

For most of us, there's the culture that all, the messages of a culture that keep on revving up the violence and the greed, that keep us thinking we should be getting more and spending more. The messages of a culture that tell us that in some way the earth is just this receptacle to take our waste and to give us what we need to consume more and more. So there's in the culture the messages that create the stress and keep us identified in a narrow way. Each of us develops a kind of repertoire of behaviors to help us feel better, to help us soothe ourselves.

Most of us self-soothe in some way through substance. It's not a totally clean relationship, you know. It's just pervasive. And then we all feel secretly embarrassed about it. Most of us in some way use or misuse work or busyness. You know, we get overly busy. So sometimes we're self-soothing. Sometimes we self-deny.

That's our way of armoring. There's a punishing. Sometimes instead of being productive, we end up procrastinating because it's too dangerous to even take the risk to be engaged. So there's different ways our behaviors have us kind of lock into this kind of plastic or clay identity and lose touch with ourselves.

The more stress, the harder it is to be intimate. The more we're in reactivity, the more we leave a sense of our okayness. When we're identified with our defenses, we know we're not home, and we know others will detect that. So there's a sense of being an imposter. There's been research that describes the huge percentage of people that all in some way, especially the higher we're on the chart of achieving, that consider themselves impostors. Interesting. So stress, it makes this kind of difficulty in relating. There's this

one of the sayings from Jewish Buddhism that I like, the Torah says, love your neighbors as yourself. The Buddha says, there is no self. So maybe we're off the hook. Anyway, I see it that in many of us, one of the main ways that we work with stress is in some way to blame. Now, often we blame ourselves. If only I get rigged so I can make myself different, then I'll be okay. And often we, it's outside. You are this country or something is causing the problem that's making me feel terrible. And of course, any time we hitch our well-being to another,

other, no matter what it is, no matter what it is, then we've given away our power. Story of a magician working on a cruise ship and he has a parrot that's always ruining his act saying in the middle of the turk, you know, the cards up his sleeve or the rabbits in his hat, you know, that kind of thing, or is a dove in his pocket. He slipped it through the hole in his hat. You know, he's always giving it away. So one day the ship sinks and the parrot and the magician are finding themselves on the same life raft. And for several days the parrot sits silently and stares at the magician. On the fourth day,

the parrot said, okay, I give up. What did you do with the ship? So most of us live with our story about what's going on. And the story says, I'm wrong or you're wrong. Something's wrong. And whenever we're living in a story, we've disconnected from being this. The more we're living in our thoughts, the more disconnected we are from the one place where we can tap into our intelligence and our intuition and our kindness. So homecoming, homecoming is a remembrance of who's under these thoughts behind them, of who's here when the personality is playing out, its defenses or its aggressions, who is here? And it's a homecoming that's really who's behind all this reactivity. So in the last talk, I described two pathways to coming back. And one pathway was a pathway

of paying attention to the what is happening here. Now that's the pathway that we mostly practice with mindfulness where we're noticing, okay, I'm upset, what is happening, and we're tracking the sensations and the feelings and the thoughts, and we stay with them until in that presence with what's happening, we come back home to natural presence itself. We remember who we are. So one person I was working with feels fine sometimes until he really lets himself think about what he has to do in the future. And then he rapidly proliferates into a sense of overwhelm. And the overwhelm can bring up an anxiety that's debilitating.

You know, it can bring up the kind of anxiety that once he locks into this, there's a sense of I'm going to fail. There's a sense of something around the corner is so bad that it's really going to affect everything about my life. And then he can't play with his children. You know, he can't enjoy the moments at all. He's just, he's caught in, you know, a stress reactive state. So, so his practice became, you know, ideally, the sooner he could catch the process, the better.

As soon as he could start getting the fact that looking ahead, tracking the to-does. As soon as he got that, breathe. come back. But often it didn't work. It would already be down the track enough so that the sensations and emotions would be stirred up in his body. So then his practice was to stop. To stop. And again to breathe, his breathing can help to say, okay, come here. And for him, what was really helpful was to say, okay, this is suffering. And the Buddha calls it Dukha, the stress that we experience. He said, this is suffering, and others experience this kind of overwhelm and anxiety, too. I'm not alone. It really helped him. It's like, okay, this is not just my thing.

Other people are, you know, look around, you know, other people are overwhelmed too. I'm not alone. So he would start with that and then he'd have his intention, be compassionate, okay? And compassionate for him meant stay. Don't go off into more thinking, stay. So he's would have this intention to keep on letting go of the thoughts, okay, letting go of the thoughts and coming back and feeling where it was uncomfortable. Now that takes bravery. To bring a mindfulness to what's happening right here takes a kind of courage because it was uncomfortable. But he kept saying, okay, thought about the future, come back here. And he, as I often gesture, he, he kind of had the knack of just going, okay,

and then breathing with it and bringing a kind presence and just noticing what was here. And sometimes he'd name it. Sometimes he'd go squeezing in the heart, squeezing in the throat, heart pounding. He'd name it.

But by breathing with it and staying with it, what happened was there was a shift in his sense of who he was. And this shift is the very essence of freeing up. He went from being the anxious overwhelmed person, okay, which is kind of the covering to the Buddha, you know, this kind of the emotional covering, back to the presence, the Golden Buddha,

the light of awareness that was noticing what was happening. Okay? From the anxiety to the presence that's aware. This is an opening, back to beingness. So I share this, because this is one example of a very powerful pathway that we're exploring together when we explore mindfulness meditation.

The pieces are step out of the thoughts, come into the body and do it with kindness. A friend of mine emailed me the other day. Aisha Lee was reminding me of a wonderful parable in the story of the Buddha

where somebody, a once devoted follower got jealous and decided he was going to get rid of the Buddha. And he arranged to have this mad elephant, this huge bull, let loose. And so it could kind of mow down the Buddha as he was walking into town or something. And so it happened. This huge elephant came tearing, raging, ragefully at the Buddha. And the Buddha just stood there and just presence, beingness, emanating, love and kindness. And the elephant went down on its knees, you know, bowed its head,

and the Buddha put his hand on the elephant's forehead and offered it the blessings of loving kindness. Now, not everything that rushes at us will come down on its knees like that, necessarily. But here's the promise. Any time you come into presence and notice what's happening, and in some way remember kindness in any fashion it could be remembering that you wish you could be kind

towards this feeling of jealousy or hurt in you because the mad elephant's inside us right I mean it's outside us too but we're mostly dealing with what's coming up in us you know it's sometimes a mad elephant and sometimes it's a victimized you know whatever the elephant trampled it's the victim you know that's a victim you know

that's in us. But whatever it is, if we can in some way remember kindness, the moment of remembering the intention to care, something loosens and we begin to come back home to being this. So this is one of the pathways and the gift when we have that shift of identity, when we start coming home to remembering the golden Buddha. Buddha means awake. The yoke. They awakened one within us. The gift is that a certain confidence arises. We start getting it that whatever happens, whatever comes at us in this life, we know how to pause and come home into beingness.

We know how to come back into something large enough that life is workable. It's workable. And that feeling of confidence brings a deeper sense of happiness than the temporary pleasures that we might get or, you know, be chasing after. The sense that whatever arises, we have the capacity, the heart and the awareness, to be with that, to work with that. It frees us up to live our moments. It frees us up to live our life.

The Tibetans have a phrase for this. It's called the Lions Roar, which I think it's a great phrase, which is that unconfined presence and freedom to be who we are when we know we can handle what's here. So the first pathway, recognizing what's happening. Now the second pathway, which I want to deepen our exploration of, is really the pathway of directly turning towards being itself. Rather than paying attention to the forms and saying, okay, anxiety or okay, fear,

okay, anger, there's the kind of inquiry of what's afraid right now? Who is afraid? Who's really here? Sometimes I'll ask myself when I'm on kind of a busyness trip or kind of a self-importance, like my stuff is so important to get done. You know, is this self-important person really who I am? Or is this anxious person who's afraid of falling short and not performing who I am or whatever it is. It's that inquiry. Who are we really? So instead of paying attention to form, it's turning right to what we might call the formless dimension, our formless essence. So there are different pathways to it.

And what I'd like to take some time with tonight is a pathway of inquiry. where if we ask a question, you know, what is this awareness? What is this beingness? That the question then directs our attention, our energy, right back into awareness itself. We could just rest in openness. And as you sense today in the meditation, that kind of meditation, instead of attending to this particular sensation, we're sensing space. and then we begin to sense the space outside us.

And then we begin to sense this continuous space that's really the who we are in this world is arising and passing in this space of awareness. So we can explore like that. And we can also begin to ask the questions of who is here, who is aware, that actively engage our attention. They create a kind of lucidity in our mind. When the Buddha to be, when Siddhartha sat under the Bodhi tree, his final night of enlightenment, his intention, his resolve was to realize who he was.

That was his question. Who am I? And he looked into his own mind. That was the process. Who am I? What is reality? What is truth? So we shine the light of awareness on itself. This isn't about just asking questions. I mean, we spend a lot of time kind of asking questions because we have a kind of grasping around information because it makes us more secure. Now, that doesn't mean we also don't have an authentic interest in that information isn't extremely valuable for our well-being.

But in terms of awakening, we're kind of hitching to get answers versus this deep inquiry that's really about realization. It's about a non-conceptual realization. So we sometimes go down the wrong track, and one of my favorite examples is of a Zen novice, you know, novice in a monastery. You'll notice a lot of these examples are a Zen novice and an abbot or something. So in this one, the novice is asking this Zen monk, you know, what happens after we die, you know? And the Zen monk says, I don't know. And this upsets the novice.

He says, but I thought you were a Zen monk. And he said, I am, but not a dead one, you know. So when we begin this, it's kind of a training really, in how to turn our attention, really start investigating who's here. Who's here? One of the things I like to encourage is to explore our attitude. Because if you check your attitude right when you begin, and we're going to be practicing tonight, and that's why I'm kind of setting you up a little bit right now, Just to put aside any striving, to put aside any seeking, to put aside this idea of getting a goal,

that there's some high spiritual attainment, okay, now this is the formless, this is the real stuff, you know. Just to put that aside because really our freedom arises out of a kind of freshness and a kind of innocence. that this is kind of a sincerity is maybe another word where we just truly are interested in truth. Okay? This is an interest in truth, a curiosity, and this kind of a longing that wants to be whole, that wants to come home to who we are.

So when that's there, it's that sincere longing that carries us home. So I say that because as we explore this, some of you might find that this inquiry is either confusing or upsetting or just doesn't land at all. And that's just a sign to be interested, to put it aside when you want to, come back at another time. There's no reason why everything should fit any one of us at any time. But interest really opens us some. So we'll do our first practice together. Let's find, you know, if you've been sitting real still, just move your body around a little so that you're in your body, you're here, and then come into stillness again. Even with this investigation and the formless, we begin right where we are.

And I'd like to invite you as you sit with your eyes closed to let your awareness come into your body and just feel the aliveness that's here. You might sense as you inhale that you can feel the breath filling your whole body and that as you exhale the sense of space and aliveness is even more vivid. Let the senses be wide awake and open so that you're aware of perhaps visual images or light flickering in the eyelids and so that you're aware of the sounds that are around you. So you're listening not just with your ears, but with your whole awareness and with some interests

you might ask who is listening or who's aware right now and then just to gently turn the attention to see what's true and then just to let go into whatever you notice just let go and relax

and the letting go and relaxing rest again in awareness you might notice the changing play of what's going on with the senses, sounds, temperature, sensations. Just let it all happen. Nothing to do. A listening attention, just receiving experience.

And then just gently posing the question, who or what is aware right now. It's turning, look and see, look back into the mind and see. Who's aware? What's aware? aware. What is listening to these words? Just whatever you become aware of, just let go into that. Let go and just rest. Let's let go and rest in the sea of wakefulness. You might be aware of different experiences, sounds, sensations, and with just some curiosity, interest, asking who or what

is aware right now looking to see and just let go now let me ask you this how many of you notice then when you looked back to see what was aware you couldn't find anything can I see by hands how many of you notice that yeah sometimes we land on something we'll go oh what's aware is and it's kind of feels like a block of feelings or what's aware is me we'll have this name for it and then the practice is to say okay now who's aware of that do you understand this is called the backward step that sometimes something comes up that feels solid like we think oh so this is the self it's this kind of feeling of pressure and squeeze here and it's the name me and then what we do is say okay so what is aware of that pressure and squeeze

and then we just gently look back and there's kind of a backward step And eventually, if we keep asking the question, we find out we don't know. It's a mystery. The Tibetans say the true seeing is the seeing of no thing. There's nowhere to land. So what we discover is that this realization of no-thingness, that there's no center here, there's no boundary,

there's nowhere to land. There's no place we can call self. This is considered the first basic dimension of awareness. This dimension of what's either described as openness or emptiness. It's the same thing. That there's just nothing solid, no selfness. It's empty of selfness, of a center, of a boundary of anything. But what you might have noticed some of you is that while it's empty of thingness,

your awareness is very alive with wakefulness. There's a knowing quality. How many have you noticed a kind of just a pure knowing quality? Can I see by hand? Yeah. So when we say, well, what is aware, there's no thing, but there's just knowingness. Just knowing is aware.

So there's this wakefulness. It's a kind of a cognizance. And this is described as the second, dimension of awareness. So there's openness and there's wakefulness. Now for the third dimension, I'd like you to close your eyes again. Again, just check your attitude because if you're feeling like, uh-oh, this is absolutely, I'm not getting it, then that, then with loving kindness and with good humor, just, you know, kind of give yourself a gentle kind of hug, kind of a kind of a mental hug and just be curious.

So we quiet again and just let your senses be open. The most direct way to come into a natural awareness is through the state of listening. So just listen. Sense the sounds close in and more distant and sense that these sounds are all appearing in an open space of awareness. Let the listening include.

to listening to sensations, feelings. So they're aware in the foreground of these experiences of the sensations, the tingling, the heat, the sounds, and also to be aware in the background of your own presence. Recognize your own presence, this innate wakefulness and openness. Can you sense that alert, inner stillness, that inner space that's aware of the sounds, the life that's here.

Now, if you bring this awareness, this wakefulness and openness to the heart level, notice what happens? What is awareness like at the level of the heart, this open presence? Just feel it. What happens if into this space of open, wakeful presence at the heart you bring to mind someone that you're close to.

What happens? What's your response? As we start exploring this, what we discover is the third quality of awareness, which is that when awareness encounters life forms, when awareness is fully here and awake and encounters this life, the natural response is love. Love is the third quality of awareness. There's openness. There's wakefulness, which is our intelligence,

and there's this natural warmth, this tenderness. Hav Hayes, the poet, says, One day the sun admitted, I am just a shadow. I wish I could show you the infinite incandescence that had cast my brilliant image. I wish I could show you when you are a lonely, are in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being. So take a full breath and come on back. So as we begin to practice turning the attention to awareness that's right here, or perhaps we practice

opening our senses and then saying, can I feel right now in the background my own presence? or perhaps right now you might say to yourself, and you can try this, just close your eyes and just say the word, I am. Just say the words I am. And then don't add anything to them. Can you sense the stillness and silence that's there? There's these different pathways of turning towards awareness.

An inquiry is one of them. What I invite you to do is just there are many guides and meditations and resources for it you can find on our websites but the basic key as I said is interest this kind of sincerity and not to judge yourself just as a kind of exploration to periodically stop and say who's aware right now

or just the words I am are perhaps noticing all the experiences that are going on and then saying, can I feel my own presence right now? So you start over time getting more familiar with the formless dimension. We know our self as form. We know the covering of the Buddha in the statue. We're not so familiar with that light, that luminosity. We're not so familiar with sensing the who we are that's looking through the mask. Does that make sense? So this This is a training that's not to say we don't keep paying attention to form, but we start paying attention to this timeless dimension that allows us to meet this life with a profound confidence. Because if we know who we are beyond these fragile, temporary changing bodies, if we know this timeless loving presence, we have the space for this living, dying world.

And then we live it more fully. So I want to end with sharing with you. There is an understanding that the more we are aware of our beingness, the more we have what's described as a heart that is ready for anything. This is a confidence I talked about. If you know you're the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves, right? So if we know and trust this beingness, we have this heart that's ready for anything.

And I want to just share with you some of the particular ways that take shape in our life. And one gift, when we have this heart that's ready for anything, is we know how to respond wisely to loss. From this place of beingness, we still grieve. It's part of this human body and heart to feel loss and grieve and that's beautiful and necessary.

We know how to open to the inevitable losses. We grieve our lost youth and we grieve our lost capacities and we grieve those who pass. It's part of our humanness. We also bring a courageous presence to loss and we are so present that we then are available to the love that's there.

Buried in grief is love. And I bring us back for a moment to, I mentioned at the beginning hearing from some folks in Norway. There's been some beautiful on the news, one teen that was on the island describing how his wish that what happened might turn in some way bring some turn towards goodness, towards healing. And one of the women that wrote to me, I'd just like to read you what she wrote to me

because I was so touched by it. She said, I think we're lucky to have Norwegian politicians and commentators in the newspaper, radio, and television that mainly focus on a kind of on oneness. That these days we should spend together in grief, talk with each other, comfort each other, and eventually this tragedy may contribute to attitudes leading to increased openness in society, caring for each other and strengthening democracy. It may seem that we to a large extent are able to stay in the grief and may be learning what you've been mentioning in some of your talks, vengeance is a lazy form of grief.

Yesterday, 200,000 people gathered in Oslo, this is the capital with only 500,000 inhabitants, to pay their respect to the deceased, singing together, bringing flowers, amazing. touching. So this is a heart that is ready for anything that can respond with this kind of a wisdom that doesn't lash out but seeks to deepen understanding. And then we, in this heart that can be ready for anything, respond to others' pain. This kind of this beingness that's ready. And when others are hurting, we respond. And I share a story, a kindergarten teacher shared when the children in her

class heard about the Iraq war, they were appalled that we were sending bombers. And their question that they asked was, do they have children over there? Do they have children over there? And when she heard, when they heard yes, she said they, people couldn't know that. And so what they did was they, in their playground, they used different materials to write the word Iraq and have a child drawn. to try to let people know that there were children over there. This is our innate capacity, this heart that's ready for anything that responds with care. Then when we have a heart that's ready for anything, we're available to the goodness. There's one teacher, Ajan Buda Dasa said,

it wasn't Ajan Buda Dasa. I don't have the name right now. Anyway, he was asked, you know, why he meditated, and his response was so that I can see the tiny purple flowers along the road as I walk to town each day. I love that. So we see the goodness and we see the goodness in each other and we see the goodness in all creatures. We begin to see the sentience. We see the golden Buddha, this light that's looking out at us. So we stop later this evening and maybe we're talking to someone here.

and there's a little bit more of a slowing down and a sense of who's here to look at the eyes as one of my friends as Jonathan my husband teaches look at the color of a person's eyes it'll help you to see who's behind those eyes okay

so we begin to see the goodness and finally the last thing I want to say is when we have this heart that is ready for anything when we're in this quality of beingness we're free to be who we really are. You know, we're free to be our animal cells. We're free for that wildness and that passion and aliveness to be expressed because the wildness gets covered over. We get over-civilized.

You know? And we're free to be our human selves and to find that that intimacy and contact and to produce and to create. And we're free to really not hold back the spirit that's living. through us to sense, as Hafei said, that illuminating light. We're free to embody all of that. So we'll just close with a brief meditation, if you will. And this meditation as you're setting yourself and as you feel yourself coming into your body and into presence is a Tibetan meditation that really helps us to let go some of the real blocks we have to who we are. The block that says it's down the road, my freedom's down the road, it's somewhere else, it's not possible now. Or the block that has a stay in our thoughts about the future and the past.

Are the block that has us work really hard trying to get somewhere? Or the block that doesn't trust the possibility of happiness and joy. So there's four reflections that we'll be exploring. exploring. And the first one is that this awareness, this precious loving awareness, is closer than we can imagine. You might take a moment to sense this refuge of awareness in this way. What if letting go of suffering wasn't possible tomorrow, or finding happiness or completing any project wasn't possible tomorrow? that all you had was right now, was this moment.

Can you allow yourself to go into the center of now, to arrive in the center of now, and just open to this living presence that's always here, that's closer than you can imagine? The second, it's more profound than we can imagine. We veil it over with thoughts, ideas about what awareness is. What happens if you stop for a moment? and just sense the space between your thoughts.

Can you let yourself rest in not knowing? Can you sense this mystery, the profound depth, the profound wakefulness of inner space? More profound than we can imagine, and then the next one is easier than we can imagine. We strive so hard. Awakening unfolds as we cease trying to make anything happen. You might ask yourself, can you imagine, isn't it true that what I seek, the love, the peace, is already here?

Notice if you deepen attention and ask it again. Isn't it true that the love and peace I seek is already here? It's what we are, what we seek. is what we are. This presence is right here. It's easier than we can imagine. We end with more wondrous than we can imagine. We tend to have limits on our happiness that a Bedan Buddhists describe living awake and engage as a child of wonder. Can you imagine moving through the rest of this evening, through tomorrow, through your life as a child of wonder, awake, engaged, serving, and savoring from beingness.

More wondrous than we can imagine. 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.