Tara Brach - Part 4: Opening to Joy

Episode Date: March 7, 2014

2014-03-05 - Part 4 - Opening to Joy - Our innate capacity for joy is blocked by our habitual ways of paying attention. This talk explores three key pathways of presence that connect us with our full openness and aliveness.

These last classes have been part of a series on the facets of awakening heart, the different expressions of love. And so we explored loving kindness, which is the expression of love that arises very naturally when we bear witness to beauty and to goodness, to the mystery that's here. And then the facets of compassion and forgiveness that arise when we allow ourselves to really touch the suffering.

There's a tenderness that comes. So tonight we'll be exploring joy, which is really both. Joy is when we've opened to what the Taoists call the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows, when we're just wide open and letting that aliveness move through us freely. And that is the experience of joy. It's kind of a wakeful aliveness. And it was an interesting thing to know I had kind of designed in advance that I was going to do this sequence.

And as I've shared in past talks, my mother entered hospice a few weeks ago. And so I was wondering what it was going to be like to be reflecting on joy. As you can imagine, it's a time that's filled with poignancy and beauty and sadness. And she's doing it very, very well. and today's her birthday, 88th. And so there was an interesting moment I'll share with you where one of my sisters suggested that the siblings and my mom get together and we do a picture.

And we kind of gussied up for it a little. Well, I didn't as much, but we kind of prepped a little. And in the background in my mind, I said, oh, we're taking this picture and then it'll be something, you know, when we're having a memorial service or something. There was this kind of a sense of, again, the poignancy and the container of it. And there we were all set up, you know, in our positions and posed. And just as the camera started shooting, my dog with her muddy paws and all just landed right on my mother's lap.

And so there was this kind of hilarious moment, and that was actually the best picture of them all. And as I was settling around that, I just felt in a way what I described as joy, which is the sorrow, the sense of the space that knows the temporariness and the beauty and the fun and funniness and the sweetness and then just letting it all just swirl. And in that largeness that it was swirling in, that was a moment of joy. You know, then there was moments of annoyance when another dog came up and started pestering. We have two.

You know, so it goes in and out. So I wanted to maybe begin tonight's talk, as I often do when I'm reflecting on joy with Andre Geed. And these are his words. Know that joy is rarer, more difficult and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.

Now, rare. When I talk about joy and when I talk to people about joy, I can sense for many of us the initial responses, this is not something I feel a whole lot. Most people do not feel a whole lot of joy and also start feeling, oh, there's something wrong with me. If this is an expression of our spiritually awakened heart, there's something wrong with me that I'm always so grim

or so, whatever. So, we get how easy it is to lock into this mentality of a stress person trying to get things done and how often our life gets small

and we're not in that wide open space. So rare feels true to me. Now the word obligation. I don't, I don't, when Gide says we should take this as an obligation,

I don't think of it in the traditional or classical sense of obligation. For me, it's more of a sense of a deep commitment because we intuit that joy is part of our capacity or our potential. We intuit it and that it's part of what we're dedicated to to unfold all that we are, that this is possible. And so we give ourselves to serving that in that way. I also think of what many of you are aware of, which is described as our evolutionary bias,

where we all practice patterns of thinking and feeling that are inclined towards what's difficult or problematic. And it is part of our evolutionary conditioning to do so, to protect ourselves from things going wrong. And so we're more involved with fear and with anger than with happiness and joy. It just, that's the way we are designed in a way. So it takes intention to begin to shift that condition patterning. One woman I heard about, discovered it in a quite lovely way.

She was part of a diversity group that was meeting on the West Coast. A friend of mine was in and described this. This is an African-American woman who was sharing, the challenges of raising her four children as a single mom, the bouts of illness she had been through, and particularly having illness. And then, as you know, when the market crashed, it hit so many of us and it hit her quite hard. And then she says that one day I realize that this is hard, but I have a choice in attitude. This was a really pivotal moment, the sense of I can be a victim, oppressed by circumstance and really carry that around in my body, my face, or I can choose

to be happy. And so she ascribes that it became the very center of her spiritual practice to give herself permission to internally slow down and really sense what she could enjoy, to open up her capacity for joy. And not in a polyana-ish way, but just to begin to undo this habit of grimness. And if we're honest and we kind of look at ourselves, we get that there is a certain swath of moments where in some way there's an internal complaint. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Well, let's reflect for a moment. We'll just take this as our first moment to check in. And you might close your eyes. Just take a breath or two. And with a kind of curiosity, You might just review this last week.

We're on a Wednesday, it could be a Wednesday to a Wednesday or just the last handful of days. With the filter of moments of joy, was that there? Were there moments of real ease, of savoring, of a kind of inner freedom where you felt just happy about just being? And as you're considering, you might sense what happens when you... It's just the possibility of deepening your commitment to choosing happiness, to choosing joy, to bringing your attention in a way to life that might cultivate joy. What happens when you consider deepening your commitment?

Do you feel drawn? Do you feel like it's hopeless? Do you feel like it's manipulating your own consciousness? What happens? So we'll continue to reflect together and I invite you to give yourself permission to explore as if for the very first time what it means to choose joy, to choose to let this be part of your experience. So we begin by looking a little closer and sensing, well, how to you? How come so little? I don't know how much it's cultural, but how come so little for so many of us? And one basic understanding for me that helps to bring some clarity is that any moment that we're controlling our experience or controlling another person,

doing any controlling to try to make something happen or avoid something happening, are moments that we're not going to be experiencing joy, because joy is a really open-handed allowing. So if we're tensing against what's around the corner, and we know how often that is, that we have a sense something's around the corner that's too much to handle, or if we're preparing,

or rehearsing, or feeling that there's not enough time, that's going to go counter to a feeling of joy. which is why actually we see a lot more joy in children. It's interesting before their personalities harden. There's just less habituation around doing, around defending, around fixing, around not enough time. There's just more free spaces where spontaneity and play

is free to unfold. If you've been with me before, you'll remember from last year and probably the year before, this is one of my favorites. This is a story that was shared by Maurice Sendak, the children's illustrator. And he says, once a little boy sent me a charming card with little drawings on it, I loved it.

I answered all my children's letters, sometimes very hastily, but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card, and I drew a picture of a wild thing on it. I wrote, Dear Jim, I loved your card. Then I got a letter back from his mother, and she said, Jim loved your card. so much, he ate it. Now that to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it. He loved it. He ate it. So the alchemy of joy,

again, when we're understanding these different expressions of love, the alchemy of joy is not controlling. There's not the tension of controlling. Rather, there is a very open space that allows for the flow of life. And for those of you that were with us for the guided meditation, and I recommend it for those that are listening on the podcast, it's very specifically how do we contact that dynamic presence where there's openness, just letting the aliveness happen.

It doesn't happen when we're controlling. And many of you might have heard this line from the poet Hafeis. He's describing in a poem the difference between, us and saints who are very filled with joy. And this is what he says. He says, I'm afraid, my dear, you still think you have a thousand serious moves. And doesn't that feel true? That we are going through our life and there's a sense of these important next steps and then there's this and then there's that and we're kind of plotting along. And also we add to that that we're not doing it so well and that there's not enough time.

And that just is a recipe for non-joy. So we'll look a little bit more closely now inwardly, what gets between us and joy. And in Buddhist terminology, the near enemy that gets in the way of joy, it's just another expression of the shadow side, is attachment. And this isn't the healthy attachment bond between child and parent. is the attachment where we're holding on. We want to keep something. We're not letting go. William Blake, I think, puts it most beautifully. He who binds to himself a joy does the winged

life destroy, but he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in eternity's sunrise. So we're not conditioned to easy come and easy go. When there's something we like or want, there's a grasping. And the more we have unmet needs, the more tightly we'll grasp. And that blocks joy. So, for instance, if there's a new romantic infatuation, that can set the stage for attachment that's masquerading as joy. And I remember last year a friend was in a new relationship, and she was really, really excited.

But each step, she was aware of what was next, what had to happen for this necessarily to be the one. So there was that overlay of, I want it to be the one. So it made it very hard to just enjoy the unfolding process. When we have something we're grasping to, it's very hard to enjoy. And we know what it's like. I saw one little cartoon with a teen on a cell phone outside a restaurant. And she's saying, I can't decide which is more exciting. Being with him or telling my friends about being with him. So we know about the ways that the attachment gets in the way. You can sense it on a vacation. We have a narrative about how our vacation should be. And a lot of vacations are on our way to what's supposed to be the really

fun moments, or on our way back from the fun moments, and some tension about making sure that they happen the way we want them to happen. There's a saying that a truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour. Isn't that so? I mean, how many times do we get tugged around and things aren't working the way we want them to work? And if in those moments we were able to say, oh, this too, this is the life too. we'd have a lot more of our step-by-step experiences of life included in our heart.

The grasping is most obvious with food. Anybody that's a food addict, and that's a huge percentage of us, knows that there's a lot more moments that go into the craving, the fantasizing, and the obsessing, and the moving towards the food, or later the regretting of the food, than the actual moments where we're tasting and swallowing. In fact, usually when it's really something we like, we at most get the first three bites where we're somewhat mindful of the deliciousness, and then we kind of trance out.

Check it out. It's really interesting. So, again, you might think for yourself of something where you really like or take pleasure and or want and just start tracking how much are you really enjoying and how much is the grasping around it, getting in the way. How much is that attachment? The winged life destroys, you know. Okay, the full shadow of joy is pushing away or resisting of enjoyment.

It's the aversion to happiness. It's that in us which says no to life. And the metaphor might be that kind of keeping windows closed, not letting fresh air in because you expect a storm. You know, it's like we're not letting the life move through us. And a lot of it, a lot of this full shadow expresses as cynicism. I'm very aware in myself and others a quality of it can be kind of jadedness or been there, done that, or just slightly cynical.

And usually it's because deep down we're cynical about ourselves. we're feeling disappointed and how our own ego is playing out. But then we're mistrustful and cynical of the world. And that really is toxic when it comes to that freedom to enjoy. There's a grimness. And there's several beliefs,

and you can check yourself for these, that really get in the way of joy. And the most obvious one is that it's dangerous to relax and enjoy because then something battle happen. It'll get followed by a punishment. I get almost some, it seems like I wish I could do a hand raise, but I won't do that to you. Like, how many have that believe? But when we have that one, it's like keeping our guard up because we're unworthy or undeserving of enjoying. And if we

dare to relax our guard, and this usually comes from some childhood experience where this really happen, following the good times will be something that will really be painful. So that's one of the beliefs. Another is that it's bad or wrong to relax. It's kind of like an ethical thing, that we're just a better person morally and ethically if we're always doing things. And William James talks about us being in this, and this is 180 years ago. He says, says we're in this relentless frenzy, always thinking we should be doing something else. Are some of you familiar with that one that whatever you're doing there's something else you really need to get to or should be doing?

So it's bad or wrong to relax and be just with this. There's no time for the fresh air. Something will go wrong while we're loitering. belief is that I can't relax or open to presence because actually if I do, I'll get in touch with something really painful inside me. I think that maybe is one of the biggest that as soon as we really begin to open to something, and I've had many people tell me this at retreats. When they begin to relax, there's this fear that kind of comes in, that there's something that they've been pushing away that they're going to get in touch with. And we sense that unless we keep busy

and occupied, we might end up getting in touch with some real deep fear, our loneliness, our shame. So the understanding is that there's no joy possible if we keep defending against what's difficult. We really do have to make room for the 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows. And Rilke, I think, says it really beautifully. In one of his poems, he's talking to God and he says this. He says, embody me. Flare up like flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you.

Beauty and terror. Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. So there's a bigness. There's like this real courageous willingness to let that friend air move through, not keep on controlling and manipulating the windows. Zorba, the great example, talks about loving life. He says, am I not a man? And is a man not stupid? I'm a man, so I married.

Wife, children, house, everything, the full catastrophe. So that joy is that space of presence that includes the full aliveness. And as I mentioned for me, it means the aliveness of a very very, very deep sorrow right now in my life and a very poignant loving and all sorts of beauty. It's just really letting the mix live through us. So next part of this exploration is let's look at how we actually entrain ourselves. How do we decondition from the ways that we kind of push away because it feels like life will be too much or we get preoccupied? How do we train ourselves to open.

And I'm going to do, I have only time for this tonight, just go over three very powerful training elements, pieces that we can do, that if we did regularly, if we practice them, instead of practicing the kind of judgment or rehearsing or preparing that we usually practice in our mind, if we practice these, there would be a much more full, blown capacity for joy. And the three are, one is saying yes to the moment, no matter what it is, the beauty or the terror. The other is learning to save or get familiar with moments of joy. And then the third has to do with possibility, sensing inherent in moments possibility. It's a very creative place to be aware of. So we start with saying yes.

and this is our basic training and mindful awareness. This is, if there's anything we come back to exploring time and time again, I hope you're aware that it's how to come out of the thoughts and the trance and sense what's here, whether it's a feeling of excitement or happiness or curiosity or anxiety, and then agree to it, really, let it be there. So in this one, we're starting right where we are.

It's you sensing in your body and your heart right now, what's here, and agreeing to it. And if we agree deeply enough, because when I say saying yes, there are degrees of saying yes, if you're just doing a glancing attention at anxiety and saying, okay, yes to that anxiety, the presence is not going to be full enough to allow for that real space. and aliveness. If there's a little more attention to anxiety and saying, yes, I'll be with you, but there's some sort of a bargaining if you'll go away. That's usually there because we don't like it so much. Then there's a little more presence, but it's not full-blown. If we really say yes, and there's this curiosity and availability to feel it in our bodies, one of my friends,

when he's describing anger, he says, let it rip. You know, it's like, let it really be there. that fullness of presence taps us into the very space that joy emerges from. I'll share a rather recent example from my own life. As many of you know, I was in January, spent 10 days on a silent retreat. And there were many moments of strong, unpleasant experiences that I was practicing, you know, opening to, and then moments of beauty and peace or rapture I was opening to. One experience was more confused, and this was one that really required more deliberate choosing. Where I was practicing, as many retreat centers, has a strict protocol because a lot of people

are there for long stretches of time. It gets very, very quiet and still. And so there's a lot of ways that we go out of our way to respect that with our silence and not talking and not writing notes to other people that are on the retreat. It's very slow and quiet and still there. So when Jonathan and I went and we knew we were going to be ten days together, we knew that we were going to be in our own orbits, and we could in our hearts and minds send prayers to each other, but there wasn't going to be any contact.

So I said goodbye to him, and he was going to be. in room 214 and I'm room 201 and there was going to be no eye contact. We were ships passing and so on. Six days in, I was, you know, felt like a little bit of a tiny bit of a scratch in my throat and I found my emergencies. We both used emergencies when, you know, on retreats if we need them. And I realized that I had a bunch of them but I hadn't given, I had like four or five, hadn't given any to him. And then I started obsessing. You know, it wouldn't hurt to just slip some emergencies under his door. And, you know, it's a little love gift.

And so finally, I just got to that place where, yes, this would feel really good to share my emergencies with him. So I took two of my five emergencies, and I put them under the door, and it was kind of like was really being sneaky and made sure nobody was around. And then I got up and looked up, and I realized it was the wrong door.

So there I had, there's probably some yogi that had been in there for a year, and all of a sudden he's seeing emergencies come under his... Oh, God. So I dashed back slowly to my room and got two more, went back to his room, looked at the number, put it under. Back in my room, I was this swirl of stuff,

and there was a mix. Part of me was like, I've broken the rolls, I've done it now. You know, some yogis really disrupted and thrown into complete puzzlement. Samadhi's gone, you know. So I felt kind of embarrassed and guilty because I've been doing, I've been going to retreats for a long time. I should be going by the rules, you know.

And then, but then there's another part of me that was feeling like, you know, I only had one left and I really was happy that Jonathan was going to have them. So I was feeling that. And then there's a part of me that thought it was all pretty funny. So I just said, okay, just let your body feel what it feels. And it just went through all this different stuff. But there was something in choosing in that moment, I said, this is attitude. I don't have to get tugged around by the gilts, or tugged around by being misgenerous,

or tugged around by anything. Just let this body play itself. So it was that sense of, okay, the beauty and the terror, the guilt and the generosity, you know, just letting it play and finding in that openness, where I'm not the person that was doing something, it's more kind of a dissolving back into a space of dynamic presence and joy. Now, sometimes what we're saying yes to is really difficult. This wasn't a super difficult one. It was a matter of being really awake and choosing. But it's really the same process that something in us intuit that by saying yes, we start coming home. That's a thing. That's

That is the practice. This is a poet Dana Fault. She says, there is no controlling life. There is no controlling life. Try corraling a lightning bolt containing a tornado. Dam a stream and it will create a new channel. Resist and the tide will sweep you off your feet. allow, and grace will carry you to higher ground.

The only safety lies in letting it all in, the wild and the weak, fear, fantasies, failures, and success. When loss rips off the doors of the heart or sadness veils your vision with despair, practice becomes simply bearing the truth. In the choice to let go of your known way of being, the whole world is revealed to your new eyes. Resist and the tide will sweep you off your feet.

Allow and grace will carry you to higher ground. Let's close our eyes and just practice a little bit with the simplicity of saying yes because this is really the entry for cultivating joy. And if the word yes, is not the right word for you. It's the spirit of yes. It's that allowing.

It's like with that in-breath, that yielding and allowing the prana, the life energy, to fill you. You might listen to the sounds that are here and just let them wash through you. You're listening with your whole awareness, not just your ears. And although your eyes might be closed,

you might sense the flickering of light in darkness. Just feeling the body from the inside out, this whole movement of sensation. Just explore the spirit of yes of agreeing or allowing this life to live through you in this way. If there's something particular in your heart you've been carrying,

something wanting attention, you might include that very consciously. You can even mentally whisper yes to any place in you that you can sense wants acceptance or inclusion. There may be physical, unpleasantness, pain, anxiety, sadness. There may be excitement, peace, happiness. What happens when you totally allow, let everything happen to you, the beauty, the terror, sense your heart space, including this universe,

of experience. As you take a full breath and as you're ready opening your eyes, the second part, first part saying yes. The second part is learning to savor the goodness, savor what happens in as we've been discussing with this evolutionary bias as now the cliché is almost that we're Velcro for bad experience and Teflon for good experience and that negative experience it's registered immediately because it helps survival. And positive experiences have to be held in awareness for five seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, in order to really be registered in our emotional memory. In other words, it has to be deliberate.

We have to actually pause and savor them for them to be registered. Rick Hansen describes it this way. He says, negative experiences trumped positive. of ones, a single bad event with a dog is more memorable than 1,000 good times. So part of this commitment that I'm describing to really rewire the brain, to be available for joy, is actually a willingness to when you notice something and you're appreciating it when it's pleasant, when it feels good, when there's mystery, when there's some beauty, to actually pause and take it in.

One man from the Ticknot Han tradition who describes ten breaths as a really powerful strategy and you might experiment with this that when you notice something that brings pleasure it might be an expression on a loved one's face or sound to someone laughing or just the look of the fresh snow or whatever it is. You pause and you take ten completely full conscious breaths

as you feel the sensations and experience of that goodness. Ten breaths. This is actually a way to repattern the brain. Different neural circuitry. Ten breaths. That's just one example. Nietzsche says, for happiness, how little suffices for happiness, the least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing,

a lizard's rustling, a breath, a whisk, an eye glance. Little maketh up the best happiness. Be still. So we begin to practice in this way, which is very intentional, where you actually pause when there's something delicious or sweet or beautiful. And whether you use your breaths or just your attention, stay and get to know the feeling, get familiar with it. Okay? Now the third area that I mentioned, which is possibility, is the one that actually we don't think of that much. Sometimes it's the sense as, oh, we're meditating, it's about this present moment, not something in the future. But actually, in the present moment, embedded in the present moment, is this kind of fertility, this possibility, this creativity that we can attune to.

This is C.S. Lewis. He says, all joy reminds. It is never a possession. It intuits what is about to be. It intuits what has always been. It intuits the truth of wholeness, our original nature. So there's this imminence, this sense of infinite possibility, and it's in the background.

And you might say, well, you know, how do we sense possibility when in reality things are impermanent? Like, for instance, again, the experience of being with my mom, and I know there's not so much time, so how am I supposed to sense possibility? But this isn't about possibility in a linear temporal way, like, oh, what can happen in three months. This is about the possibility that is unfolding creatively right now.

And you might close your eyes and check this out for yourself. It's the possibility if you ask yourself right now, how can you make this even? the remainder of this evening absolutely as good or poignant or deep or beautiful as it can be. And just ask yourself that and know that there's infinite creative possibility if you're open to it. If you're in touch with that creative potential, then you're available. How can you make tomorrow? Whatever you have planned, how can you make tomorrow? the best day possible. Right in this moment can you sense possibility as you come into presence

right here just for the rest of listening tonight to this talk, possibility. So we have three ways we can train ourselves to more consciously say yes to the moment, really embodied, to savor and to open to possibility. And each is a way of choosing, we're making a choice because our habit patterns are to say no to the moment, to control things, to kind of skim over sometimes what's really wonderful or beautiful, and to have in mind a game plan that rules out possibility. We can choose our attitude. So, as part of closing tonight, one of the things that we can start discovering is that as we train our attention and as our patterning,

shifts. So we start practicing something different. Instead of practicing our old pattern of feeling oppressed or paying attention to what's going to go wrong, we start practicing in a way that allows this natural joy to arise. We actually start expressing it in a very real way in our lives. When we have that openness to the aliveness that's here, we actually start living true to what we love. We start feeling more spontaneous, more free to express what we love, that our lives actually become an expression of that. And I wanted to give you an example that really touched me. This is from a book called On the Res. It was written by a guy named Fraser. And he wrote about the story of Sue Ann Big Crow, a woman on the Pine Ridge Reservation. And she was kind of a hero of the

tribe. And part of what made her such a hero was she had this real capacity to respond to the suffering there, which is a lot of poverty and drug abuse, but also to embrace life with this incredible vitality and spirit that we're talking about. As a young girl, she was told that to be good at basketball, she had a dribble a thousand times a day. So her family went nuts because they lived. They had a concrete pad next to where they lived, and she was out there every day dribbling, and she went on to be the star basketball player who led the Pine Ridge High School to a state championship. But he describes one game that I want to tell you about, and this is a high school basketball game in South Dakota between the town of Leed and a team from Pine Ridge.

And the background of this is that Leeds had taken land originally that belonged to First Nation peoples. So Leed is this gold mining town, mostly white, and had taken land from those that lived in the Pine Ridge Reservation. So that's the background. Okay, so Fraser describes the scene as the Pine Ridge girls are waiting to take the floor, and the visiting team is responsible for going and dribbling around the court and so on. And as it turned out, the girls were waiting to take the floor, and the lead fans were yelling epitets like squaw and gut eater, and some were waving food stamps,

a reference to the reservations receiving federal aid. And others were yelling, where's the cheese? That's a joke, meaning if Indians were lining up, it must be to get commodity cheese. Okay, so this is what's going on. as the team of the high school girls were waiting to go on. And then the lead high school band joined in with a fake Indian drumming and a fake Indian tune. So that's a setup.

So the oldest girl who was supposed to lead the team onto the court didn't want to do it. I mean, she just, it was just too much. And Sue Ann said, I'll do it. She was, I think, the youngest, but she went ahead and did it. She led her team into the gym and stopped at center court, according to Fraser's account. She took off her warm-up jacket, draped it over her shoulders, and began a traditional shawl dance singing a Lakota song. The crowd went completely silent, Fraser wrote.

Then Suan picked up a ball and dribbled around the court. Fraser continued, the fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted the basket, went up in the air and laid the ball through the hoop. with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game. It says that not only that, Sue Ann's bold act led to friendships developing between some members of both teams. So this story spread very wide, gone to national press. Some years later, quite recently, a reporter from South Dakota did some digging around.

He started claiming that the story was filled with exaggerations. He interviewed people from Leeds. you guess that. So there's this disparity between the tribal version and leads, and who knows what's exaggeration or where the truth lives, but to me in a way the story became even more poignant, because there's a mythology that's grown around it, that First Nation people are holding dearly, the Sioux tribes holding dearly. And myths have archetypal truths.

and in this one expresses the longing in every heart that our inherent goodness, our dignity, our worth be understood and appreciated. And it also honors the courage and joyfulness of someone who can love what she loves and express it to do that shawl dance, to sing that song. What if we could be really in love with our lives and really let that be, that be expressed the contagiousness and goodness of that. So I started tonight with Andre Geed talking about joy being rare

and the importance of a commitment to it. When we start saying yes to the moments and sensing our capacity to really let in the joyful moments and when we start opening to possibility which really, really allows us to open to the flow of life, in that openness and in that engagement, we discover what has been described as being happy for no reason.

It's not that joy is based on things going our way. If it is, then it's got a tightness to it. Joy comes when our own way doesn't matter so much, when there's just a simple presence with the life that's there, there's an openness and aliveness that's just who we are. And I love that term happy for no reason, because it's a true happiness. It's not conditioned.

It's just inhabiting a presence that loves what is. So I'd like to close with a very brief guided meditation. If you will, just find your way of sitting that feels most comfortable. and allow yourself to check into the present moment and sense what it's like for you right now. Just with curiosity, feeling the sensations in your body and how your body feels, pleasantness and unpleasantness. And see if as you do, there can be that gentleness where you contact what's there with the breath and with that spirit of yes.

also feeling your heart, whatever the state of your heart is, just giving a permission to be just as it is, taking some moments to bring to mind someone in your life or some experience in your life you've had recently that brings up a sense of gratitude. And you might let yourself sense what it is that most brings up the appreciation about this person or experience and just feel kind of inner bow. You might mentally whisper, thank you, and then whispered again. With your breath, just to feel that sense of appreciation, there's a sweetness to it. You might bring to mind someone you care about who's having good fortune right now in some way, who's opening, who's healing, who's deeply

happy. A very beautiful part of joy is called sympathetic joy or joy for the joy of others. You might even send that person a prayer. May you prosper, be joyful, may you appreciate the blessings in your life. And to sense finally your own commitment and yearning, perhaps, to be all that you are, to discover that natural joy of being alive, that happiness for no reason, sense what it might be like to commit yourself more fully to that. reflect together as a closing poem. This is called Eagle Poem by Joy Harjo. To pray you open your whole self to sky, to earth, to sun, to moon, to one whole voice that is you. And know there is more that you can't see, can't hear, can't know except in moments steadily growing and in languages

that aren't always sound but other circles of motion. Like Eagle that Sunday morning over Salt River, circled in blue sky and wind, swept our hearts clean with sacred wings. We see you, see ourselves, and know that we must take the utmost care and kindness in all things. Breathe in, knowing we are made of all of the, this and breathe knowing we are truly blessed because we were born and die soon within a true

circle of motion like eagle rounding out the morning inside us. We pray that it will be done in beauty, in beauty. We pray that it will be done in beauty, in beauty. Amashtay. Thank you for your attention. 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.