Tara Brach - Pathways to Trusting the Gold

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

What would it mean to truly trust the goodness that lives within you? In this talk, Tara Brach explores what she calls "trusting the gold"—awakening from the stories of deficiency, fear and separation that keep us from recognizing our deepest nature. We may spend much of our lives trying to improve ourselves, earn approval or finally become "enough," while overlooking the loving awareness that is already here. Tara explores how our early experiences of nurturing and belonging shape our capacity to trust ourselves, and how mindfulness and compassion can help heal the places that feel unworthy, unsafe or unloved. Through the practice of RAIN and what she describes as a "U-turn," we learn to step out of familiar stories, turn toward our vulnerability with care, and discover the wakeful presence beneath them. Ultimately, trusting the gold means learning to recognize and rest in the awareness, goodness and love that are intrinsic to who we are.   In this talk, Tara explores: - Awakening from the trance of unworthiness - How early conditioning shapes self-trust - RAIN, self-compassion and "spiritual reparenting" - Moving beyond limiting stories and beliefs- Recognizing our intrinsic goodness - Resting in loving awareness and true nature   Our introduction music is from "Opening" by Adrienne Torf, © 2025 ABT Music

Welcome friends to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Namaste. Welcome, friends.

One of my favorite metaphors is that we all develop spacesuits. They merge through our development through life. And the space suit is what you might call our ego structure, our defenses, our aggressions, our beliefs. It's all the strategies we develop to get love and approval, to feel safe, to protect ourselves, to have some control over what happens. And to some degree, we need these spacesuits to navigate our world. It's not an easy world.

The deep suffering is that we come to believe we're the spacesuits and we forget who's looking through. We forget the awareness that's listening right now, the heart that gets touched. that loving awareness that's our essence. There's a beautiful line from Kabir. Inside this clay jug

there are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. The God whom I love is inside. I think many of us have a longing to really know this,

not just the idea, but to directly experience that this light, this love, the spirit is living through us. It's intrinsic to who we are. So today's talk is one that I chose from the archives that explores this awakening to our deepest, our true nature, and how we come to recognize and trust that it's here. I gave this talk at a meditation retreat, and that setting allowed for a certain depth and spaciousness, the exploration. So, friends, I hope you find it valuable. Namaste and good evening.

We often begin things and end things with bringing our palms together and saying namaste and yet never even created any context for that or naming of that and I just wanted to share what it means to me. That namaste in a literal way means I bow to the spirit or the light or the beauty or the goodness that lives through you and me and this whole living universe. So there's something in a pause and a bow that just is part of that remembrance of what's living through us, which is very much the theme for tonight's talk. But to begin with the say, you've been here enough days. that I would suspect for many you've pretty much sensed this range of the possibility

of a quietness and yeah, right here, some sense of that arriving and ease or presence. And then for most also know what it's been like to be in what we've been called the forgetting in that trance of completely, that incessant inner dialogue and the star of the show is, moi, right? You might remember this is one of the guys in a bar talking to the bartender and he said, you know, I know I'm nobody, but I'm all I can talk about or think about, you know.

And it is interesting when we start bringing the inner dialogue above the line just how much our world circles around what I want, what I'm afraid of, how I can be more comfortable. And then of course we add that second arrow of, God, I'm so self-centered, you know. And it's the way we all are. It's the design of the mind. And we have a background story of a self, moving through time, and wanting to feel like we're making progress. That's one of the backstories of retreat. I bring that up because when I look at that sense and it came up this morning, one of the

questions of moving through time, it's very, very compelling kind of illusion that we're in this bubble of self navigating through time trying to get somewhere. Most of the time we feel like we're on our way to something. In fact you might have noticed that the precious moments here are when that does fall away. Have some of you noticed? So if I look back at my own kind of biography in terms of spiritual practice, I moved into an ashram when I was about 20 and it was one of those very vigorous kind of ashrums we spent two and a half hours in the morning doing yoga and meditation and prayer and chanting.

And I would often get up about 45 minutes early. We got up at 3.30. I'd get up about 45 minutes early to get in an extra meditation. And I don't say this with pride. I was like all the early symptoms of Taipei yogi, type A yogi, you know, we're there. And I had some notion that it would take about seven or eight years. to get enlightened, and I have no idea where that came from, none, but I was definitely on one of those tracks that I thought, you know, and I'm going to work really hard and I'm going for it.

And I remember asking at times the teacher of our ashram and the teacher of the teachers and so on, so what else can I do, you know, to wake up? And inevitably the response was some version of, just relax. And then I go, okay, just relax. That would become my next project. But one of the stories that, because I was enough aware that I kind of was on to my striving self, one of the stories that always resonated was of this muscle. deer that got a whiff of this heavenly fragrance and then dedicated its life to finding the

source of the fragrance and it went through the densest jungles and over the highest mountains and through vast dry deserts, you know, seeking that sacred source. And then finally at the end of its life it was completely exhausted and as it crumpled down and its death collapsed, its horn pierced its belly, and the scent that it had been chasing all those years just spread through the air. And so it is that we intuit the deepest truth, it's considered the absolute, our ultimate truth, that what we're seeking is always and already here. You know, it's the eye that is looking for God is God's eye looking, you know.

Kabir says, the guess that you love is inside. We intuit that. In fact, most of us will, yeah, yeah, that really resonates. And yet, the way we live most of our waking hours is as if something's missing or something's wrong and we're working on this thing trying to shine it up or get somewhere different to finally get there. And the truth is that if there's any notion of being on or away somewhere else, we can't fully rest in and realize and trust that light of awareness, that loving awareness that's here.

You know, the kind of essence Buddhist teachings, and this is in all the mystical traditions, is that even though we can get really, really lost in our suffering and our neurosis, and no matter how confused and hopeless we are, it's this wakeful, loving presence is still here. It's like we can't be separated from it any more than waves can be separated from ocean. There's just a forgetting. And one of my favorite books that I've ever read is Serena Sargadata, who the book is called I Am That. And in that book, and I do highly recommend it, it's a powerful book.

I was talking to one friend here a couple of days ago and it's one of those books you can open to almost any page and you just, whatever you read is, it's just very clean, clear, deep truth. So, in that book he describes his own awakening. He says this, my guru told me I was the divine, the source, the pure awareness, that loving awareness. I pondered that for several years until I knew that it was true, until I became it. then he adds, I was lucky because I trusted what I was told. So I thought maybe we could try that here. I'd like to tell you all something right now.

What I really like to do is have an invitation as we continue to reflect. And it's really been the invitation of our retreat and the invitation of the path, which is to have the intention to trust the gold, to trust your goodness. have that as an intention, to feel your yearning because we want to, we want to trust who we are. But to bring it more into consciousness actually brings the path more alive. So there are two elements and we're exploring more really how to trust the gold, how to trust the light and the awareness and love that's here. And there are two elements that Sri Norsar Gadata is referring to and the first is my guru

told me something. So the first element is he got some really good mirroring, right? Because his guru looked at him and said, you are it. The light is here. It's in, when I'm looking at your eyes, what's looking back at me is that loving presence. It's inside you. So that's the mirroring. And we're going to talk more about mirroring both how we need it and what happens and we don't get it, and also how we can do that, that mirroring of our own being from our highest awareness and how we do it for each other. And then the other piece was he pondered it. That something in us says, okay, I'm not fully trusting the goodness here or I'm actually filled self-doubt, but I'm willing to pay attention and look towards and ponder. And we're

going to explore that too. So the first inquiry really is as we kind of go deeper into this, and I want to name that this isn't like a separate talk from the rest of the talks. This is really, hopefully you'll feel the continuity of these last days. The first inquiry is how can we can feel so separate and so far away from this fundamental intrinsic goodness that we're talking about? I feel so separate from it. One of my favorite lines from Rumi is, whatever comes into being gets lost in being, drunkenly forgetting its way home.

Whatever comes into being, whatever takes form, gets lost in being, gets identify with that form. They think, I think on those waves, this particular set of waves, that's me, drunkenly forgetting its way home back into, oh, I am the ocean and these are the waves that are the waves that are coming and going. Okay? So, the first part of our, you know, kind of exploration is that it's universal and natural to forget. It's not some horrific mistake, it's not some mark of our badness or our, you know, spiritual thickness. Everybody forgets. I mean, everybody, we're designed to get identified. It is the design of our organism. I mean, life, you senses itself as a separate expression, okay, and then out of that separateness, the primal mood

of the separate self is fear. Okay, I'm separate, something out there is going to threaten me or else I need it to complete me, right? So we grasp and we defend and we go through all that and there's the basic sense of something's missing or something's wrong. Okay, so that's our primitive limbic survival experience. I'm separate and I need to protect myself. And out of that, the more stress, the more we get caught in that dream and sense of separateness. There's a story of, it was on a Spanish television show that someone shared with me. This gentleman knocks on his son's door and he's going, Jamie, wake up. Jamie, wake up. Jamie answers, I don't want to get up, Papa. Father shouts, get up, you have to go to school.

Jamie says, I don't want to go to school. Why not ask the father? Three reasons, says Jamie. First, because it's so dull. Second, the kids tease me, and third, I hate school. The father says, well, I'm going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it's your duty. Second, because you're 45 years old and third because you're the headmaster. So, we go into the dream. We get into the trance. And as we're exploring here, it's also a universal and natural part of our evolution to wake up. And part of waking up is being able to facilitate waking up, which is what we're doing here. And this evolutionary shift, I think is summarized best in this statement by Corzolino, a psychologist who said,

it's not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the nurtured. This is the shift that really is the key characteristic in the unfolding human psyche that's not survival of the fittest, it's not fight-flight freeze that has us, you know, really make it. We have to have that, but there's more. It's survival of the nurtured. And when I say nurtured, nurtured includes both mindfulness and compassion because a parent can't really nurture a child without the mindful presence that lets them attune, right? Let's them know what's going on. So it's the two wings. So our degree of trust, of trusting the gold,

of trusting goodness emerges out of or is very much conditioned by the quality of nurturing that came to us. And that's a toughie. because there's a good number I would imagine that our reckoning with this week where the real gaps were, where it was either neglect or abuse, are really conditional kind of messages. So this is part of what we look at is, okay, so there were ways that we encountered our family in our life that where it was imperfect to worse nurturing, and that severes a sense of belonging. It happens in family, it happens generationally, and it happens as we'll look at somewhat culturally and through, you know, the play of dominant and non-dominate groups, the deficit of nurturing.

So when there's good nurturing, it reinforces trust and belonging. It actually facilitates, it activates the growth of neural pathways that make up a neural net in the relational part of the brain that lets us be intimate with others and feel safe and operate in a way that we call healthy. And then you look at chimps and I sometimes refer to research and I don't know how it was conducted and I would imagine this would violate my ideas of conscious, compassionate research and it's the information from it is that chimps that received neglectful erratic mothering ended up with addictive and eating disorders and being violent, antisocial and depressed and anxious.

And it's intuitive, right? I mean you can kind of sense it how that would be. So, what happens, and let's just bring it closer in. What happens to us when we go into that limbic trance? And by that I mean when the groundwork of not having full trust gets activated. And I would bet that each person in some way would be able to report things you noticed about when you went into or got caught in the last few days because you've been watching. in the fears and in the shame or the anger, whatever that comes out of that.

But I'm just going to name a few different signs of the mistrust that can happen when we, you know, how it plays out. So you can sense when we have the messages of not capable or not worthwhile, we come here and our whole approach to meditation. is how am I doing an idea of how I should be doing, not just meditation, but the whole retreat, and a constant monitoring in my meeting a standard. How many of you have noticed that monitoring for yourself? Okay, thank you.

It's big. We get self-conscious. We are judging our moods, judging if we're doing things right. They're striving, there can be resigning, there can be pretending, like, you know, doing walking meditation and you're walking, but most of your attention is noticing how other people might be perceiving you walking. You know, it's so there. It's very difficult when there's that sense of not worthwhile.

There's a lot of efforts to, in some way, prove there's comparing to others, there's subtle competition. It's very difficult just to be ourselves because we don't trust how we are. just as we are. Okay? There's two men, and then this is getting into real life, the chronic efforts to win respect how we know how driven we are and how bad it is when we make a mistake because if we're questioning our worth, making mistakes feels terrible, losing arguments, being wrong. Two men, Robert and James are competing for an engineering position. Both have the same qualifications so they're asked to

to take a test by the department manager. Now they take the test and they both only miss one question. So the manager goes to one of them, Robert, and says, well, thank you for your interest. We decided to give James the job. And Robert's outrage. Why? We both correctly answered nine questions and, you know, I believe I should get the job because I've actually lived here longer and so on.

Ander says, well, we made our decision not on the correct answers but on the one that was incorrect. And then he said, well, how could incorrect answers one be better than the other? Simple, said the manager. James put down on number five, I don't know. And you put down, neither do I. It's a little bit of a sleeper, but... So part of what happens to us when we, you know, have the messages of not okay or not lovable, then play out in how we experience each other in the relational field. And I do feel like it can be really in the light of awareness

because we do these meta practices. And on some level it shines light and, well, is my heart open or not? Do you know what I mean? It's like we do meta and, well, when we're widening those circles, do we actually feel a sense of tenderness towards all living beings or is it just an idea or is there a bit of a cynicism like yeah right? I'm right now completely in another zone. Then of course we add the second arrow to that.

So we can see it when we feel cut off relationally here at retreat. There's a lot of judgment that goes on. It's hard to admit it because we feel like that we feel like that we're not. we shouldn't be judging, but there's judgment of people that are taking up too much space or making too much noise or moving too faster. We're judging ourselves for doing things, for being selfish, self-centered. But that plays out a lot relationally. Even in the silence, there's a lot of activity, a whole lot, right? I mean, you know it, right? And then of course, in home life, when we feel cut off and that lack of belonging, it plays out in relationships

can be either the pursuer, the grasper, the really needing and wanting people to be, you know, paying attention to us or the one that's like that, those that in some way can play out relationally but internally know that they're cut off, they're numb in some way. In one story, two men are playing golf and one's about to take a swing on a funeral procession appears on the road next to the course, so he stops mid-swing. takes off his cap, closes his eyes and bows his head in contemplation. And his companion comments, well, that's the most touching thing I've ever seen. I mean, you're a very feeling man.

Man recovers himself and replies, yeah, well, we were married 35 years. And I realized I just took a swipe in both of those little stories at males. I want to humbly apologize. I hadn't intentionally done that. So what we're looking at just to set the context is that depending on how we, the messages we received, we come into situations like this and it plays out. For me, it went into the ashram and all my conditioning to be approved and loved if I was like this, this, this and played out of wanting to achieve in a certain way in spiritual world. And so we can just track our patterns that way. And I'm naming the individual level, but also happening on

the group level, that when there has been violation, domination, then it's just really natural to come into a situation and have the group identity lead to feeling I don't belong. And sometimes there are explicit violations, sometimes there's the micro-violations, but there's the sensitivity that's constantly there, that's painful. And I'll share that one, for me, one of the books that read about four years ago that was most woke me up in this realm was Tanahishi Coat's book, it's called Between the World and Me. it's another hierarchy man.

And he writes his book to his son. And the central message of it that he's sharing is the way people of color live with a fear for their bodily self. That people that are whites might have many layers of fear, but it's not so often for bodily safety. But bodily safety is threatened being a person of color in this country and in many countries. And I want to share one story from this book that stayed with me.

And he's writing this one. It's the first time out of the country. He goes to Paris. And he's writing about how hard it is for him to shake. He grew up in Baltimore, right down the road from here. How hard it was for him to shake his fear and mistrust. Now there he is in Paris. I'm going to read.

A few weeks into the trip made a friend who, wanted to improve his English and he wanted to improve his French. So he describes at one point meeting up with this man and going to an outdoor cafe and the friend orders a bottle of wine, a heaping platter of meats and bread and cheese and then pays. And he's thinking, this is all some elaborate ritual to get an angle on him. Then the friend wants to show him the architecture of a building and he guides him. They're walking at nighttime and he's waiting for the guy to slip into an alley where some dudes will be waiting to attack. This is what's going on in his mind.

He writes, But my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonsoire. Jonathan's not, how do you say it? Bonsoir. Okay, Jonathan would have come in afterwards and said, I can't believe you said. Gave a fine bansuar and walked off

into a wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear. And then he writes, and he's writing to his son, what I wanted was to put as much distance

between you and that blinding fear as possible. There's a really deep inquiry. that goes here, where there's a need to respect limbic fear because it's in us to protect us and there are truly dangerous situations. And he talks about that, that there's a value and a need for the survival strategies. and he talks about how if it becomes habituated, if it becomes locked in, so there's no way to say,

oh, this actually is a safer situation. What he wanted for his son is not to have his eyes blinded by fear, let fear be an intelligent messenger but not be blinded. Does that distinction make sense? And so it is for all of us to whatever degree we have become habituated to our survival reactivity, that there's a need to look carefully, that for many of us the feelings of, I'm unsafe, I'm not worthy, I'm unloved, have become built into these storylines that keep perpetuating our life experience. It's Gandhi put it that, you know, our thoughts and beliefs create our feelings and our feelings

create our behaviors, our behaviors create our character and our character creates our destiny. We keep planting the seeds of our future every time we run a story, a narrative about what's wrong with me and don't pause. I mean, law so beautifully demonstrated the power of, well, when the narrative's going to come, that's not the question. It's just when it comes, do we have the wisdom to pause and say, wait a minute, that's this familiar story and then awaken through it. Let's just pause here and reflect together for a moment, if you will, just to close your

us. We're really looking at, you know, here how the different kind of mirroring, nurturing or lack of has generated our stories, our feelings, our actions, our life patterns. And you might just out of curiosity, go back, back in time a bit. And, um, call to mind a space place that you might have been pretty regularly with early caregivers, the significant people in your life. Might it be a living room or kitchen or dining room table or a place where the TV was or whatever it is. But a room and imagine back when you're maybe five years old, six, seven, eight, at some age where you kind of have some visual memory of a place that you spend some time

with parents or caregivers and in some way sense a situation where they'd be looking at you where you're kind of aware of them, they're aware of you. And sense their faces, their eyes, them looking at you and take one at a time, but sense what message is coming through their eyes and facial expression about how they see you or relate to you, think about you, feel about you? What are they wanting or not wanting, liking, not liking, fearing or trusting? How are they relating to you? You might tune into how they want you to be or don't want you to be? Just notice how it makes you feel what your sense of yourself is. in their presence. If it's familiar and perhaps if you've been bringing this into the light

of awareness in recent days, how you've been relating to it and keep this in mind, we're going to be doing a little practice in a bit but just to keep this in mind as a place just to bring into awareness because if it's in awareness then you have choice. You have choice to do it. I sometimes describe as spiritual reparenting and to recruit others to be part of that process because we need each other. Okay, so the inquiry is now, how do we awaken from the limbic trance, from when we've really solidified stories based on early experiences that keep us feeling that severed belonging, that keep us removed to some degree.

For some people it's a lot, some people it's not as much, but to some degree I'm really inhabiting and trusting who we are. And the practice, as you know, begins over and over with saying, oh, that's the story, come right here. And that's the key practice we're doing is coming from the storyline back to what's actually alive right here. He says, you talk to yourself too much. He says, you're not unique in that.

Every one of us does it. We maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A man or woman of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. So the first step, which is absolutely radical, is that we're catching on to when the story is happening. Oh, okay, I'm telling myself that I'm not safe, I'm telling myself that something's wrong with me, I'm telling myself I can't trust anyone.

Okay, it's just... And remember, don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts, we get, okay, that's that, come back, so that's the beginning. What we've been practicing here I sometimes describe as a U-turn, that we get caught in that and we're bringing our attention back here and we're practicing the wings of rain. And we're just coming here and saying, okay, let's recognize, oh, there's fear. Okay, allow it, let's just make some space, pause. And then we investigate and we nurture.

Now I want to make a few comments on that and then we're going to take it the next step. Like how does that lead into really trusting who we are? And just to say, as a way to context, some people think of this as a double U-turn, meaning we make one U-turn from the storyline to bringing rain to the feelings, the waves that are here, but then we make another U-turn to actually sense the formless presence that's behind the scenes. And that's where we're going tonight. But we'll take the first U-turn first and just a few comments on it because we have explored at some here. And one is that, and these are kind of reminders, is that if you want to be

able truly to be the survival of the nurtured, you have to fully contact what's in the body. And that means going gradual sometimes because if there's trauma we have to go slowly, but it takes going into the body and contacting what's there. We have to get to the point where we can sense that, ouch, this hurts. One woman who was in a prisoner in a maximum security prison, a friend of mine was teaching mindfulness classes there, did an eight-week series. She was the bully of the word.

I mean, she really was kind of merciless with a lot of people, and she took this course, and she sat silent and scowling through the whole thing. At the end, she was the last person to share, and her sharing was this. She said, what I really like was that poem about the pirate. She was talking about Ticknod Han's poem that goes,

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond and I'm also the grass snake who approaching in silence feeds itself on the frog. I'm the 12-year-old girl refugee on a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate and I'm the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. Please call me by my true names so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once

so I can see that my joy and pain are won. Please call me by my true names so I can wake up and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. So she said, I like that poem about the pirate. And then she went on and she said, well that got me thinking, made me know something, and she spoke really soft. She said, you know, all my life I was the problem one.

And now I know I'm suffering too. And those words were the beginning of the change. Most of us when we're having a hard time, instead of saying, wow, this is suffering, we think others have it worse. or I don't deserve to be kind to myself or I should change my... There's a should in there. Rather than the pure undiluted, this hurts its suffering.

So that's one comment on the practice of the first you turn is we have to feel in our body and get out. This hurts. The second comment is there are many, many ways of nurturing. just like when we talk about meta-meditation, what meta-meditation means is any way you pay attention that begins to soften and open your heart. And it can be images, it can be touch, it can be words, whatever it is.

And it's the same thing with the end of rain. When you feel that ouch, then it's an exploration. What will help to bring a sense of kindness inwardly? And sometimes, especially if we practice a lot, we can begin to really sense that even just the idea of kindness, like, okay, I'm going to be kind to myself, start softening. Like for me, when I even have the remembrance, oh, I need to be kind, it all starts happening, hand on the heart, offering it inward, but sometimes we can't. So, we begin to sense what are the sources of love that we have some sense of trusting.

And just with you all in the last few days there have been so many beautiful touching into that whether for one person it was being with the earth and the trees and the sky and for another remembering their cat and just the love that comes through the eyes of their cat and another sister or friends. For others, a kind of formless sense of the beloved, of formless love. So the truth is we wouldn't be functional if we didn't have some sense of belonging. It's there but we often need to look for it. See where there's even a bit, I call it a tendril that we can activate and wake up.

This is the beginning of reparenting. We're reparenting ourselves. We're learning how to pay attention so we see the pain, we can, oh, it hurts and bring kindness. Now let's say you've gone through these steps and you've sensed the fear and you've created some space and you go, oh, this hurts and others feel it too and yet it's real suffering and brought some kindness and there's some more space than what? And this is where we talk about after the rain and this is really the second U-turn, that

if we want to trust the gold, we have to get to know the presence that arises after we brought those two wings and activated them. This is where I want to kind of have us look together, this second U-turn and I thought I'd describe it in terms of just a very, very recent experience of mine whereby this was the week before coming here. And as I think I shared with you or some of you, I got a wicked virus and I was pretty sick for a number of days and they were just the days when I needed to be gathering my notes and in some way have some shape of a sense of what I was going to be sharing here and I had a

Wednesday night that I do, plus a Wednesday when I get home that I know I don't have time between. So I had like this lineup of talks and I was in that misery. And I remember one night I was putting notes together on this one. And it was God awful. Like I was kind of like hammering away and like pulling out files and trying to sense, you know, and so here I was striving to shape this talk on true nature about trusting your true nature and I was like banging away at it and if you happen to be in a teacher training program that's not the way to do a talk you know like it was really very frustrating exhausting and at one point law and I began texting about um the retreat and um I was not just I was multi multi multitasking because I was

so all over the place. But it was great. We were texting about the retreat and we landed up, you know, Law sent me a picture of their isalia's and I sent my granddaughter's pictures. So I came out of that and I was a little bit bigger and I looked at it and I said, whoa, this is just a small self feeling really, really limited and deficient, trying to write a talk about trusting the gold. No.

I had the wisdom, thank you very much for texting, to go to bed. But the next day I was still wicked sick, so this became really my practice of how can I feel really crummy and pretty unresourced and, you know, do the minimal now. I knew I could come here and tune in more. And for me, talks are actually a very creative, it's not like I write them out. It's, I immerse into the themes and it's a very creative process. And it's a very creative process. It wasn't feeling that. So, it became a practice where I would just kind of pay attention and tune in and I'd feel the arising of kind of frustrated or blocked and I'd just do rain. I'd, you know, okay, recognize and allow, feeling kind of anxious because that's what

it was, unprepared, anxious, anxious, you know. And then I'd, you know, make space and I feel it in my body and then in some way with that... messaging inward of it's really okay, it became okay to not feel okay, it became okay to not have my scene together, it just really became okay. And what happened then in that kind of okay about not okay was then I would ask the question, okay, so what is the quality of presence right now? This is the beginning of the same. second you turn where you're really turning from, you've made peace with the waves, okay, so what's the presence like?

This is just to give you a taste again, Srinir Sargadatta. As you watch your mind you discover yourself as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover yourself as the light behind the watcher. That source alone is. back to that source and abide there. So witnessing it and often nurturing and then sensing the light and the space and the presence behind the witness and resting and resting and resting in that. And there's some inquiries that are sometimes helpful in that including if there's no problem

then what's here? just a sense that we are so, our self-sense is organized around thinking there's a problem, around thinking we need to figure something out or that we should feel a certain way. If there's no problem, right now, if there's no problem, what's here? That you turn, if we don't add more ideas, begins to open us into that mystery where there's really nowhere to land. Sometimes described as the backward step, where we're paying attention to the waves

and we're caught in this self-idea and then we take this backward step and rest in that beingness that is really the source. What I'd like to do before I put too many more words on it is invite you to explore these two U-turns and just see what you find. You might scan today and sense today or yesterday when you became aware of being caught in some form of what I've been calling a limbic trance, kind of stuck reactive inside a smaller

sense of self. To the moment when there's some strong emotion, maybe you're buying into some belief about something wrong, how things should be different. and see if you can re-enter it enough to sense, you know, really, it's part of you witnessing, but just reentering it enough to sense, you know, what it was, you weren't liking the sense of something wrong, feeling not okay. There may be something that's still very accessible that you're working with. Or in some way you're believing not okay, not worthwhile, not lovable, not doing it right,

can't trust, can't trust others. And just a sense how the body and the mind are holding all of that. So you're recognizing and allowing this is going on. There's kind of a witness that's recognizing this right now, letting it be here. See if you can sense in the body with investigating just a bit more contact what it's like when there's that stuckness. A few days ago we had the body posture in the face, anything that helps you just feel the stuckness right now so you can feel in your body where it's vulnerable, that's really

where it goes. And as you do from that witnessing place, that sensing the vulnerability sense with that vulnerable place even in this very moment most needs because we can always use nurturing. What is it right this moment? It could be simply feeling seen, just a little more above the line. It could be a sense of acceptance. It could be that just those words, forgive and forgiven, forgiving, touching your heart and saying forgive and forgiving, forgiven can be so sweet.

It's just a very light way of saying not to hold. You don't have to hold against yourself right now. Forgiven, forgiven. It's okay. Or it could be that it belongs, just recognizing this too belongs. So there's that nurturing and there's that taste of that this is that spiritual reparenting. This is each time we do this there's more of a sense of that we do belong. You might sense how that can deepen if you really take a moment to send care inwardly

or to send some source of caring that's bigger than you and just let it wash through. And we take the second U-turn by then with an interest sensing, well, what is the presence that's right here? This is where we're pondering, as Srinosargodata says, we're pondering and feeling and happening, sensing the presence that's here. If there's nothing wrong, who are we? If we're not believing that story anymore? If there's no problem to solve, who are you?

and turning the attention back to awareness and just let go into whatever you sense. Let go and be that, just be that formless presence, that undivided being. From the Zen tradition, just dip into this awareness, rest in purity for one second, 10 seconds, 30 seconds. back and being, surrendering, allowing whatever sensations to be and to move, keep resting in this place. Soon you will see it is your home, it is your essence, keep resting. You might now, might sense let your senses be awake. So there's the sounds, the sensations, feelings in the heart and there's this background of presence that's aware of all of this,

a tender heart space, the silence that's listening. In any moment you can make the U-turn again because we re-coagulate and just say, what's aware right now? What's listening? And keep your eyes closed if you'd like or open your eyes. As we begin to close here, there's a gift of returning again and again and that it becomes that this formless presence, this sense of a tender, wakeful space of presence, becomes more familiar and true as who you are than any story.

So you stop believing the stories and you start trusting this. And the gift of it is in a deep way that trusting the gold, this true nature, this formless presence, that you're never apart from the ocean. It allows you to cherish the waves. They can come and go. This living, dying world can appear and disappear and there's a sense of presence and cherishing. One of the ways that I felt this was most beautifully expressed was in Ticknott Han's description of losing his mother.

He said the day my mother died, I wrote in my journal, A serious misfortune of my life has arrived. I suffered for more than one year after the passing away of my mother. But one night in the highlands of Vietnam, I was sleeping in the hut in my hermitage. I dreamed of my mother. I saw myself sitting with her and we were having a wonderful talk. She looked young and beautiful, her hair flowing. It was so pleasant to sit there and talk as if she had never died.

And when I woke up, it was about two in the morning and I felt very strongly that I had never lost my mother. The impression that my mother was still with me was very clear. I understood then that the idea of having lost my mother was just an idea. It was obvious in that moment that my mother is always alive in me. I opened the door and went outside. The entire hillside was bathed in moonlight. It was a hill covered with tea plants and my hut was set in the temple halfway up and

walking slowly through the moonlight through the rows of... tea plants, I noticed my mother was still with me. She was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet, wonderful. Each time my feet touched the earth, I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine alone but a living continuation of my mother and my father, grandparents, great-grandparents. This feet I saw as my feet were actually our feet and together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil. All I had to do is look at my palm of my hand and feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me available at any time.

Trusting this formless presence, the ways are free to come and go and yet we feel our connection. Mark Nippo writes, everything is beautiful. and I'm so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light sprang through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat.

The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I've lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. in the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all that we've lost face each other. It is there that I'm adrift feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything. I am so sad and everything is beautiful. We're exploring together this evening our evolutionary potential to trust the loving awareness that's our source.

And the Buddha said that I would not teach this if it were not our potential. It's there for each of us. So as a final reflection again, just to feel yourself right here and ask once more, if nothing is wrong with me, then who am I? Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again and be saturated with knowing I belong here, I am at home here. Thank you for your presence and your attention.