Tara Brach - Part 2: Three Blessings on the Journey

Episode Date: January 28, 2016

Part 2: Three Blessings on the Journey - Drawing on a wonderful teaching story from the Upanishads, these two talks explore the role of forgiveness, inner fire and looking at our own minds, in finding freedom. Free download of Tara’s new 10 min meditation: “Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease” when you join her email list.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Tonight is our second in a two-part series and what we've been doing is exploring through a really lovely teaching story from the Upanishads, how we encounter impermanence and difficulty and the three gifts that can be. really powerful in helping us to awaken. For those that weren't here or didn't listen to the last talk, it's okay, you'll find this stands on its own, but you might go back at some point and listen to it. The story is about Natchiketa, and Natchikata is a young Indian man, and he and his father got into a real heavy-duty standoff kind of conflict, and his father, in

his rage, said, I give you to Yama, to Lord Yama, and you. Yama's the Lord of Death. So as I said last week, it's like saying go to hell, you know. He just said, out of here. Natchikata being a sincere and taking things concretely type guy, said, okay, I'll do it. So he went into the forest and he went searching for the realm of Lord Yama. He found that domain and for three days waited for the Lord of death to appear and endured hunger and pain and and exhaustion and so on. Lord Yama appears and he's so impressed with this

dedicated young guy that he says okay any three wishes you want. So Natchie Keda had his three wishes and last week we explored his first wish which was he said let me come to peace with my father. So he had the wisdom to know that his spiritual journey began with releasing the armoring around his heart. Let me learn the art of forgiveness. And so that's the first wish that Lord Yama granted him and it freed his heart. It freed his heart to then go deeper into his journey. And so it is that we in our lives, whether it's a major wound, where we really need to bring our attention to the pain, pain and the vulnerability that's there, with a real compassion, so we can then begin to include

the other with compassion, are the daily ways that we get caught in the small judgments, the small blames, the resentments that carry with those even closest to us that we love, that make a distance, that creates separation, that if we were at the end of our life looking back, we'd wish we hadn't spent time fixating on what was wrong. So this cultivation of a forgiving heart was the first boon or wish that was granted. The second one, which we will be exploring now, is called Inner Fire. Very, for me, powerful quote from Robert Frost. He said, something we were withholding made us weak until we found it was our

self. Something we were withholding made us weak until we found it was ourselves that in these lives, when we kind of move through the day in a trance, which we do, we're in our thoughts and in our reactivities a lot, we withhold our hearts, we withhold the fullness of our being. We don't move through with a wholehearted, engaged presence. And so this is the the gift of inner fire really is the love and interest in our life that lets us wake up from that trance and just give ourselves to our lives. So it's this love of life, it's the love of truth, it's the love of love. It's what we really cherish, that we're remembering it.

And in that remembrance there's a kind of energy that is very creative and very satisfied. There's a misunderstanding I run into a lot that mindfulness practice is dry, that meditation practice is dry. So we're just sitting here and coming back to the breath and just noticing what's happening and, you know, what's the deal? What gives, you know? And it's always when we start tracing back, well, what does it really give us? What is this training?

It's a training to come into the center of now. into that mystery. And it's only when we're right here that we can actually in a visceral way embody love. Otherwise, it's just an idea. And it's only when we learn this hereness that we actually are living in a spontaneous

or creative way. And when we're right here in the moment what this mindfulness training allows us, we can see into the nature of reality. We can see what's true. So when you enter your practice and you're in contact with, well, what's really mattering to me? I want to be here. It matters.

I don't want to skim the surface and get to the finish line and say, wow. You know, I raced through my life and I didn't arrive. The inner fire is that in us which longs to arrive to be here for this life. I find the markers of inner fire. the main one is sincerity. When you run into somebody that you can feel it, their sincerity, that there's some innocence in what's moving them into action. It's not coming from guilt or duty or one of the shoulds.

Well, I was brought up to think, I should do this for this person and should be responsible here. Inner fire has a purity that really comes from this loving of life, this interest in life. So there's that innocence and there's also a quality of wholeheartedness that you feel in a moment that somebody's, it's like they're fully there in that moment. This moment matters. It's not like we're waiting for something else. It's not like we're on our way, like we have this map in our mind and we're doing this because we're trying to get to the end of this meeting or the end of this to the weekend or to vacation.

that this moment right now matters as much as any moment ever. And I really mean that this moment. I'm not just talking about it. So our wholeheartedness is when something in us gets it, that this moment, you can listen wholeheartedly, I can speak wholeheartedly, we can pause together and sense this vivid, alive mystery that's here. So there's a wholeheartedness with inner fire. And as I mentioned, we all have habitual ways of pulling back, of not engaging with that kind of fullness of our heart and energy. So I'd like to invite you for a moment just to close your eyes perhaps and just ask yourself,

how do I get waylaid? How do I hold myself back? And this is the inquiry. How do I hold myself back from loving the ones who are close? What are my ways of forgetting or blocking or numbing or preoccupying? You know, how do I hold myself back from really engaging in work or in service, whatever way I'm putting out my energy? How do I hold back from creative expression?

I'm asking an inquiry that's quite deep and could take a lot of time but I'm just offering these questions that you might... taken to your heart. How do I pull back, how do I hold myself back from the spiritual path, from really discovering and inhabiting the fullness of who I am? It's a beautiful question to say, how am I holding back from being fully present in this moment? It's a sense in the body if there's resistance or tension or the mind pulling you somewhere else. Again, I offer these questions for you to touch right now, but explore. This is the words of Rumi.

He says, gamble everything for love. He says, if you're a true human being, half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. Isn't that an amazing line?

I'll read it again. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. It's an important question, this one, of how do we hold back? It's not meant for us to judge ourselves. It's more that as soon as we begin to see the ways that we pull back that we're afraid or conditioned not to be fully engaged,

if we see it, then we have some choice. So I'm going to name a bit of some of the ways that we pull back For some of us it's because our minds are really fixated on the future and what's going to go wrong. And that's a big one. I mean, the more that we're anticipating what could go wrong and we're tensing against life or what could go wrong with other people, then we're not actually here to enjoy, to serve, to save her. There was a story of a woman. She invited some people to a dinner party and spent the whole afternoon speeding around,

I'm very nervous and worried, and are they going to all like each other, and is this going to taste, you know, this food is going to taste good? So the guests arrive. They're at the table, and she turns to her six-year-old daughter and says, would you like to say the blessing? And the little girl says, but I don't know what to say. And so the mother said, just say what you hear mommy say. The daughter bowed her head and said,

Lord, why on earth did I invite all these people to dinner? the voice of truth, right? So we all know it in our lives how we do that, that rather than being here, we set up things, but rather than really living them, we're anticipating what's going to go wrong and tightening against that. And then there's the way that we buy into a storyline

of who we are and what our life is like. Well, this is how my life is. We kind of buy into it. you know, I'm being a responsible person and I don't have time for such and such I don't really have it in me to be a real meditator I mean, you know, my mind's too busy I can't tell you how many people have

confessed to me as if they're the only one in the world that they have a busy mind it's like all of us really, it really is so we have this story of limitation about what it takes to be intimate you know we kind of give up on real intimacy you know I don't think if people really were close to me they'd want to be or that I just don't have the courage to be who I really am.

We give up on being creative in some way. Other people are the ones that are doing pottery or writing poetry. So we kind of have this trance, these stories, we tell ourselves over and over again. One of my favorite old-time Charlie Brown stories, Lucy and Linus and Charlie Brown are lying on the grassy mound. and Lucy points at the sky. If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in cloud formations.

What do you see, Linus? Linus as well, those clouds up there look to me like a map of the British Honduras on the Caribbean. And that cloud up there looks a little like a profile of Thomas Aikens, the famous painter and sculptor. And that group of clouds over there gives me the impression of the stoning of Stephen. And I can see the Apostle Paul standing there to one side.

Lucy says, uh-huh, that's very good. What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown? He says, well, I was going to say I saw a duckie and a horsey, but I changed my mind. A duckie and a horsey. There was some T-shirt awards a bunch of years ago, and one of them says, I have occasional delusions of adequacy, you know. So you get the general notion. So that's one of the ways that we pull back, you know. we pull back because we think there's appropriate behavior in any situation, don't we?

I mean, isn't it true? We think, oh, you're not supposed to laugh like this or speak like this or dress like this or wear your hair like this. And so we, rather than just being who we are, we confine ourselves. It's true. So thank you. Another way that we hold back is that we're in half, because of our fears and anxiety, we're in habits that numb us.

We overeat in a way that numbs us. we over drink or we over shop or we over surf the web or whatever it is, but we numb ourselves. And then another way is that we get very mental and we observe from a distance so that we're looking through a window at life, we're analyzing but we're not engaged. We're not in our body. We're reading the book reviews but not the books, you know, and we're thinking about nature but we're not actually breathing and feeling it. It's called Zen and the art of reading all the books about.

Zen, you know. So the last thing I want to mention on how we hold back, it's actually not a way we're holding back. It's how our inner fire gets torqued, which is that we have it, but then because of our fears, that energy kind of gets twisted and it becomes sometimes controlling. So you might find that your inner fire is going towards trying to get your child to be a certain way or get your partner to change something. And When the inner fire is torqued, when it's going towards something that in the long run it's not healing and healthy, rather than judging it to know that there's energy, there's passion, there's aliveness there, but there's fear that's kind of contracting it, we need to trace back to the purity of the core drive.

So let's say you find you're trying to control your partner into being different, so things change. And if you keep tracing back and tracing back, you'll find that place maybe that wants that person to be different so you can feel better about who you are in the relationship so there can be intimacy

so that the real love that's possible can flower. And maybe you want your child to be different because something in you thinks they need to be different to be happy. So there's a delusion there that's twerking the inner fire. Does that make sense? It's still inner fire. We trace it back.

I find for myself that the way inner fire gets twerked is a kind of overdoing. I was talking to Janet today about this, a kind of perfectionism where I sense I'm going to know I've got a talk coming up or I just recently did a recording with sounds true. And the preparation will have a tightness. So the inner fire will be there but I'll be tense and trying to get it done and getting it done right. And if I trace it back, underneath that is this love of the Dharma, you know, love of these practices and love of us all waking up together and loving being part of that.

But then some fear, some self-doubt makes it torque so I in some way push more than I might, you know, it's not a pure expression of the inner fire. so if I can slow down for instance today my best example I sent out or Janet did Janet did everything she sent out an e-blast and there were a couple of words

after I saw it that went out that I realized I had wanted to change this is to like 5,000 people so and my first I tightened and I realized you know and then if I trace back that inner fire it's just wanting to communicate in a way that would be helpful

to people but you know in the moments of the tightening, I wasn't in touch with that. So, every one of us has inner fire. Every one of us loves life. Every one of us wants to know truth. Every one of us wants to be who we really can be. And because of our conditioning, it gets torched or else we hold back. It's a beautiful practice to begin to investigate this. Find that inner fire wakes up, it kind of becomes more purified as we deepen our attention to what is true. So I've seen people that once they are

doing a regular meditation practice and there's more capacity to stay with the moment, there's more touching into what really matters and that inner fire starts shining brighter. Sometimes and often and what we're paying attention to that wakes up our inner fire is the suffering within and around us. It wakes up that fire that really wants to heal, wants to experience our own healing, wants to help others heal.

I want to read you what I consider an example of this. This is written by a friend and poet Anita Barrows very recently, just a couple of weeks ago. I lay down under broad leaves shielded my eyes from the sun that shone in one fierce place among them. I lay down under broad leaves. Six children killed in a garbage dump in Afghanistan by a bomb dropped from an American plane. So many hours of my life under trees, maples and elms of my childhood eucalyptus on Pinehaven Road that died in a frost regenerated, returned again to cover the

hellside. The children had been foraging in the dump for food. Jeffrey Pines, Douglas Fur of the Sierra, reaching over me through the night sky as I slept beside the small tent where my daughter slept. I cannot live anymore, I said to my friend, without holding fierce love in one hand and outrage in the other. I cannot live anymore, I said to my friend without holding fierce love in one hand and outrage in the other. Trees that have stood vigil over my life, my daughter's sleep. Stench of ruined cities were children die searching for something to eat. The government, making its standard apology. They had been looking for shelter among mounds of debris, where they burrowed each night to escape the cold. So holding in one hand this

fierce love and in the other this outrage. And they both have that purity of inner fire. And they're both part of us when we face suffering, injustice, blindness, cruelty. Now when the inner fire gets torched, what's happening is our outrage gets stuck in a kind of anger that's blaming. And then it's not as pure. It's an okay and it's a natural step. But if we stay in the storyline of blame, we don't contact the power of the inner fire and the power is that we care about life.

You won't remember your caring about life if you stay circling in blame. Does that make sense? That's why Nachicata asked first for the forgiveness. then the inner fire comes through. We hold the outrage and we hold the love and we act and we have to act. The same part of the brain that is compassionate with a tenderness and caring is right where the motor cortex is that says act, help, serve, relieve suffering. So the inner fire leads us to act and it leads us to act wisely if we're in touch with its essence

of love and cherishing. We don't. act so wisely if it's torched with the blame. So I'm talking right now about what wakes us up to the inner fire and for Anita Barrow's one of the elements is facing the horrors. Sometimes the jolt is in our own personal life that wakes up our inner fire. I've known so many people that have had something happen like this woman who teaches in elementary school. She was diagnosed with breast cancer, and people began to let her know how much they cared about her to the point that she really began to let it in that she was loved for the first time. In remission now, and a teaching she found her commitment, and this is her one-pointed commitment, is to find some way to

let every child she teaches know that she cares about them. Now imagine if all the, all the teachers everywhere had this commitment that any child that was in their classroom in some way I care about you and I care about you and you that we have some way of communicating it what it would do to our world. So as I mentioned so many people have described to me going through the terrible trials and how it wakes up that inner fire that knows that they love and lives more aligned with that love. I was reflecting as I was, you know, kind of putting this together to share with you about a very good friend in our Sanga who last year almost died. And he, young man, early 30s, and Jesse had serious heart

disease-related problem with his lungs. And he wrote a letter to a number of us that were really following the saga. And around Mother's Day, his parents were told to prepare themselves because the doctors didn't think he was going to be able to make it. And I know for myself that all through the spring during my morning meditation I would be praying for him and more than I had remembered kind of breaking down to tears because so young, so full of life, you know, very devoted, he's right behind, very much behind bringing mindfulness to children to teens.

So there he was and they had been told, prepare for him to die. His friends and his family create this huge campaign to rally to save him. They did a ton of research. They built a shrine in his hospital room. So people came with know the nurses and the doctors. This is somebody that, you know, we're really behind. We're not letting him go like that. A surgeon was willing to perform a very risky operation to connect him to a heart-lung

bypass machine to stabilize them in case there was a possible transplant. And one came through. Very, very sadly, a young. man in Tennessee was killed in an accident, his family donated his heart and his heart now lives on in Jesse. He's recovering. He says he's feeling almost normal. Now what happened was Jesse heard from so many people how, especially because of his youth, how much what went on for him just got them in contact with how fragile this life is. It woke up their inner fire. not wanting to waste time, not knowing how long we have, staying in touch with what matters.

He heard that for many, many people. So I want to read a little bit of what he wrote as he would get these letters. He said, I'm not scared of dying anymore. I'm not even scared of not being normal again. I'm actually scared of being normal again, of returning to some ordinary existence like I enjoy before. where I let so much of the beauty of life passed me by, where I didn't take time to look up and notice the leaves changing colors,

are taking a deep breath and smell what autumn smells like, or notice what my food tastes like, are here with the verge of the traffic or the crying baby on the airplane sounds like to pay attention, to really pay attention to what people around me are saying, to what's going on in their lives. I'm scared that I'll forget all this and just go on with my life, not fully living, not noticing how inextricably interconnected it is with every

other life on the planet. So his fear of losing that inner fire that was woken up in us, and I've heard many people at the end of a retreat or after a very deep, shaking experience in their life saying I'm in touch with something I cherish, I don't want to lose it. So those are the words of Jesse and he said, here's what he reflects on to keep it a And I just want to share some of the pieces of what he reflects on because he started by saying that he reflects on all the care that he received. Just as this teacher did, he let it in from the professionals, from his family, from loved ones, from his fiancé. He says he reflected on a story of change.

And he said, it's a story about a cocky young man who spent 30 years building me. And just when he thought he was on top realized what true human. humility and true love is, to lose control of your life completely, to regain it, and then to live for something greater than themselves. So his reflection, and this can be ours too, is on what really matters. That's the reflection when we're exploring the inner fire. As he put it, what really matters is this love that's pouring out of every seam of our lives at every moment of the day and holding it all together. He says, I think this must be what we were put here to discover and share.

And now that I've caught a glimpse of it, I hope I never lose it. And I hope we all can catch it sooner rather than later because tomorrow is not promised. Back to the Upanishads. The story of Natchikata is a story of a young man who faces the Lord of Death, right? every one of us is the protagonist in that story. I mean, every one of us is facing impermanence, these bodies, losing people we love, change. And the big inquiry is how do we bring a very courageous presence to that and remember

what matters? Jesse names it really cleanly, it's love. For someone else, it's realizing truth, realizing who I am. For Jesse, for this teacher, it was serving in some way having other people feel the care, the love. This is where we get to the kind of pure essence of the inner fire. So we'll reflect a little together, just get a taste of the inquiry that can help us to contact and wake up this gift from Lord Yama, the inner fire. The beginning of contacting inner fire is simple presence.

So invite yourself into this pause right now. Let this moment matter. You might become aware of the sensations in your body, bringing the attention from the mind right into the body. You might be aware of the breath, feel the breath at the heart, and feel the heart also. I found that sensing the essence of the inner fire is like peeling an onion that first we get in touch with the things that are really compelling to our attention

and then we trace it back. So you might sense right now what's mattering in your life, what your current wants and fears are. Is there something you're really wanting to happen or wanting to avoid happen? Just to honestly acknowledge that. Maybe you're wanting something for another person to go a certain way. Maybe you're wanting your own health to be different. Maybe you're wanting to do really well on a project of some sort. Maybe you're wanting someone else's approval or love. Whatever it is you find that right now is important to you, just begin to trace it back a little.

You can just ask yourself, well, if I got this, what would it really give me? What is it I'm really wanting? You can draw up to this deeper question, what really is my heart's longing? can be helpful to imagine that you're at the end of your life looking back. What would matter about this life? Is it that you lived it fully? That you really were here and present for the aliveness?

Is it that you embodied love? You reached out to others? Can you imagine how your life might be different? If you live more moments guided by this inner fire, this purity of longing, You might sense a particular relationship or something to do with work or creativity what would happen if you remembered what mattered

if you had that view from the end of your life looking back how would tomorrow be different or the next day how would the rest of this evening be different this moment as Rumi says this turn to what we really love saves us so thus far on this journey we explore facing impermanence death change and letting go of blame

when we encounter the difficulties not blaming ourselves not blaming others and then awakening and touching into the inner fire, our longing, our deeper intentions so we can be guided by them as we live our lives. You might open your eyes if you haven't already come on back. So we move on to the third gift. This is the third boon that Lord Yama

gave Natchikaten, for those of you that were listening last week, it was a mirror. And the mirror was so that he could look into his own mind, his own nature, and see the truth of who he was. This question that is in all the great traditions, who am I? So the mirror is a way of seeing that which is timeless and eternal. Now, just to say that there's a training in looking in the mirror, and we're just going to explore it a little for the rest of the evening, because when we first look into our own minds, it doesn't always seem so timeless and eternal, right? I mean, what do we first contact? Here's Lily Tomlin. She said, I knew I wanted to be somebody, but I guess I should have been more specific, you know?

I remember at IMS, the Insight Meditation Society, there was a little sign when I first started going there that's not there anymore. It said self-knowledge is not necessarily good news. So we look within and what do we see? Well, first we might see the stories we're telling ourselves of limitation of what's going to go wrong. We might see the anxiety. We might see our blame and judgment, chronic incest and commentary on how things are and how things should be. We might see a pile of shoulds, you know. And then we just get caught in the stories of our minds. So looking in the mirror, first we kind of get caught with what I sometimes think is the surface waves. You know, we just get riveted to them, fixated on them. We don't sense the depth

and the vastness and the mystery of this being, this ocean of being. We fixate on something. We fixate on certain patterns of waves, surface activity. And then we don't trust. We don't trust who we are because we're that pattern of waves. It's like Charlie Brown thinking that he, you know, didn't really have a good enough mind or whatever our sense of limitations. We believe in that because we aren't sensing the vastness that's there. So then the question is how do we begin to relax and open how we're looking so we can really see what's here. And the first and central training that helps us to use this mirror to really discover that which is liberating is that we quiet our minds a little bit. You'll find that in most meditation systems

and most spiritual paths. There's different ways you can quiet your mind through dancing or you can quiet your mind through chanting or you can quiet your mind through prayer and then listening. And here we have a very simple practice of becoming mindful of thoughts. And quieting our mind does not mean vanquishing thoughts. It doesn't mean we're fighting thoughts. It just means we're becoming aware of them so we're not lost inside the story. This is Srinar Sargadata. He describes what happens when we quiet down, when the mind is momentarily free from its preoccupation, when we can begin to sense the space between thoughts.

When the mind is momentarily free from preoccupation, it becomes quiet. If you do not disturb this quiet, if you stay in it, if you occupy it, if you be that quietness, you'll find it's permeant, with a light and love you've never known and yet you recognize it at once as your own nature. This quieting of the mind happens naturally if we just have the simple intention to notice thoughts. They settle. They don't settle right away and if we have an idea of how they should settle or how fast or what kind of thoughts we want, we're in trouble. But if we have this simple intention, just okay, may I notice when there's thoughts?

And so there's this kind of as you notice, the moment of noticing, and this is the magic of mindfulness, the moment of noticing something, you're no longer hitched to it. You are then inhabiting a larger space of awareness. So you're not inside the thought. The thought can be there, it can be floating like a cloud, but you're bigger, you're the sky. So we begin to notice thoughts, we begin to sense the space between them. when you sense the space between the thoughts just be that space because that's where the light

that sacred light of presence shines through so in all the teachings that I've run into there's some message of quiet down and then look within and this is what the Buddha did on his mythic main night of sitting under the Bodhi tree he came into stillness he quieted his mind and he turned his attention inward. And that's when he really discovered this radiance and vastness, rather than the busyness on the surface, he became that ocean. He became who he was.

So I'd like to practice that with you a little bit, this practice of let's just quiet a little and look back and I'll give you some invitations, but I first want to just put one kind of caveat out that this practice of looking into our own minds is one that is utterly liberating and not always a match at specific times in our life. If we're very agitated by the waves, rather than trying to see the nature of who we are, those are times to bring a kindness and a presence to the actual waves so that we can let them untangle. We work on that level. But if the mind, and you can feel for yourself tonight, if there's some quietness, if there's some settledness, it becomes the most fascinating journey

in the universe to begin to sense in those gaps between the thoughts, the light that really is what we're made of. Okay? So an attitude that helps as you're looking in the mirror, curiosity, open-mindedness, relaxed. Okay? Okay. So, so. Please come sitting whatever way helps you to be here. Invite yourself right to this moment. You might feel the inflow and outflow of the breath. And just see how possible it is to deeply relax with it, to let your awareness and your body merge with it,

to feel where it's most pleasant, and merge with that pleasantness, relaxing as the breath comes in, relaxing as the breath goes out, sensing the play of sounds around you, the space in the room, the vaster space that's holding all the sounds you can hear to listening to the sounds and also listening to the silence between the sounds, listening to and feeling this changing dance of sensation, the center of now, where of this whole dance of creation, the sounds, the sensations. Also aware of this background of presence, your own presence,

that which is knowing, that alert inner stillness that's aware. You're looking into the mirror, who am I? You might ask the question. Just with interest. And just look back into that presence, that awareness. Is there any center that you can call self, any boundary that you can find? anything solid. It's not a mental inquiry.

You can ask again, who am I? Just look back into awareness and then just let go and be the experience that's here. Be the silence that's listening. Be the stillness that's aware of sensation. Be the openness that includes everything that you could possibly name or experience. The mind naturally contracts

moves back into a self-centered view, you can just again listen to the sounds, feel the sensations come right here and sense this background of presence, your own presence. Looking into the mirror, who am I? What am I? Sometimes what is the more powerful question for some people? You look into the mirror and then just relax into whatever scene

just be it these are the words of RELCA He says Center of all centers core of cores almond self-enclosed and growing sweet

all this universe to the furthest stars beyond them is your flesh your fruit now you feel how nothing clings to you your vast shell

reaches into endless space a billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be when all the stars are dead. A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be when all the stars are dead. There's nothing more vast, more mysterious. more loving than the awareness that's your own nature. So this is the gift.

The third gift is this capacity to look into our own being and sense that which is infinite, timeless, presence. If you'd like to open your eyes, you can, just to finish off then. What basically Lord Jama did was offered the three gifts that help us to face this living, dying world and discover a profound quality of peace and happiness and aliveness in the midst of it.

And we find this at the end of the story of Natchikato, which I want to read to you, because we see at the end a young man bowing to Lord Yama a final time and he's totally at peace. Then as if by magic, the landscape of the kingdom of death changes to the spring rice fields of his native India. In this, a last secret is revealed to him.

Death and birth are not separate. Renewal comes by dying. When we have faced death and aloneness, when we have realized the formless, we've looked within and realized this timelessness, what happens is that we're unafraid to live and life blossoms under our feet. I want to say that again. When we've looked in the mirror, when we've recognized this timeless presence, we've faced death, we've recognized this timeless eternal presence that's here. We're not afraid to live in this incarnation and life blossoms under our feet. Everywhere we go becomes holy ground. Natchie Keta knew this in his heart and walked off toward his home to embrace his father

and to start a new life. So this is the gift. This is the gift of this deep presence that we then can step on this earth. We can meet these balmy days, our cold days. We can meet this life. We can meet the beings in our life with this awakeness of the inner fire,

with a forgiving heart, and with a profoundly tender presence. So with that, we'll just take the last few moments again to invite you to close your eyes. and to just invite yourself here, remind yourself once again that this moment matters. It matters as much as any moment in the world, relaxing into what's here, sensing what matters to you in this life, what this inner fire means to you, and sensing how, by remembering this inner fire, how, how life, how life. can blossom under your feet. Just imagine how that can be possible for you. Namaste and blessings.

Thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.