Tara Brach - Planting Ourselves in the Universe

Episode Date: March 29, 2014

2014-03-26 - Planting Ourselves in the Universe - When we are lost in the trance of thinking, we disconnect from the aliveness, awareness and love that is our source. Mindfulness, a key capacity of our evolving consciousness, awakens us from an identification with thinking and enables us to inhabit a wider realm of Being. This talk explores the confines of conceptual mind and the simple yet powerful practices that cultivate mindful awareness.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. I'd like to start this class with a poem from Mary Oliver called Mysteries Yes. Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of the lambs. how rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising how two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken how people come from delight

or the scars of damage to the comfort of a poem let me keep my distance always from those who think they have the answers let me keep company always with those who say look and laugh in astonishment and bow their heads. When we connect with what's most meaningful to us, whether it's being just an awe of beauty and nature, whether it's a sense of that love with another person or the creativity in a moment that we experience our birth of a child, our death.

When we're in those moments, it's so clear that it's beyond any conceptual understanding, that our minds can't get around it, it's bigger than our ideas. And we're in what's often called don't know mind, or the Zen Buddhist call beginner's mind. It's that openness that's bigger than thought. And this has become very poignant to me in accompanying my mom, who I've shared with many of you,

is in hospice now and in her final probably weeks, the sense that there's nothing ahead. There's nothing to really plan for or talk about that's conceptual. And there's no way that my mind can grasp this mystery of coming and going, of these things, beings. It can be experienced, but it can't be grasped in ideas. So I've been reflecting on how these cognitive capacities we have are incredible. They're themselves all inspiring. They're this evolutionary achievement and they allow us to build skyscrapers and have these amazing breakthroughs in medicine and they allow us to communicate and they are actually a part of the support of the spiritual path, this capacity to think about things. And they're

an incredibly limiting domain way more than we think they are. And in a way, perhaps most simply said, our concepts about life cover over the mystery that's here. In a moment that we're in conceptual mind, we're not really getting. how mysterious, how unfathomable it all is. So our minds habitually cover over that sense of wonder, the ideas cover over a more intuitive kind of wisdom, and when we're really lost and thought, we're really disconnected from our hearts.

So I think that one of the ways that helps me to understand conceptual mind is that from an evolutionary sense, it's the most powerful tool that really makes us what we are as humans. It's essential for surviving and for thriving, for flourishing, and it's our most limiting default mechanism. And many of you have heard about the different research that's gone on that shows that in one way when we're not involved with any activity, i.e., like when we're meditating at times, the mind is programmed, this is the default activity, to go into scanning through the future in the past just to see what might orient us, because we're trying to grab onto, okay, I'm here, this is what I need to worry about,

this is what I can plan about, this is what might give me pleasure. if we feel like, oh, well, I'm not a good meditator, my mind wanders a lot, that's the way we're designed. It really is. So I remember one little story of a mom writes, sends a telegram. This is back in the telegram days to her son. And the caption is, start worrying details to follow. And it's like that. So what happens is that thinking can give us a false sense that we're taking control of matters.

Notice what it's like when we get stress. We automatically go into overdrive. I heard a story of two parents that were talking about their, both of their offspring were in the 20s, and one said, well mine's taken up meditation, started an intensive practice of meditation. And the other parents said, well, I don't really have. really understand what that is. What is meditation? And the parent that was talking first said, I don't know either, but at least he's not sitting around doing nothing. Little did she know, you know. So it's part of our evolution to develop this thinking mind that can strategize and make us the most powerful and potentially destructive creatures on planet Earth. And it's also

part of our evolution that we have the capacity for mindfulness, which means a fullness of attention that actually is meta to the thinking, that can recognize the thinking process and therefore not be trapped in the stories that we're telling ourselves. When we develop the capacity to have a mindful awareness, when we're not always habitually lost. in thought, but we're resting in a mindful intelligence and awareness. What happens is we can choose what thoughts we follow. So there's choice. We can break old patterns of behavior. And most important, we get familiar with a quality of presence where it's like the universe's intelligence flows through us. The universe's love flows through us. We're not.

bound in something smaller, we're available. So you wouldn't be here or listening if you didn't intuit the possibility of resting in something larger than conceptual mind. I mean for some it may be feel like a glimmer or a far-off glimmer and for others it's just a very growing part of your experience that kind of quietness and lucidity and an enlarged sense of being, really. So the class tonight is, I hope, something simple, which is really how do we continue in our evolving to shift from the addiction to thinking, where we're living inside a conceptual frame of reality, to resting in this larger presence.

and then having thinking be a tool, a cherished, amazing tool, but not the process that defines our reality. Okay? So that's for this class. And maybe just to say that as part of evolution for the ego, thinking is the tool. It's also the most prize control strategy. So it's very, it's very, difficult to let go of. And one of the stories that came to mind for me as I was reflecting on this theme of moving out of our addiction to thinking into something larger was from a book that Tom Wolfe wrote called Right Stuff and he describes in it the pilots in the 1950s who were these really highly skilled guys that were attempting to go to heights,

to distances past the kind of ordinary atmosphere of the Earth, that were ordinary aerodynamics, the laws of aerodynamics no longer ruled. So they were going to these high altitudes. And what would happen is, as soon as they'd get out there, the plane, and I'm going to quote now, would skid into a flat spin like a cereal bowl on a wax formica counter and then start tumbling.

not spinning and diving, but tumbling end over end. So that was a tough situation to be in for these pilots. So the way they would try to deal with the situation, and this is what gets so interesting, they try to stabilize the plane by doing all their habitual corrections, and they tried one thing and another, and the more they would try, the wilder the ride would get. And as they were plunging helplessly to their deaths,

they'd be screaming, what do I do next? That was the dying words. So this occurred several times until finally Chuck Yeager inadvertently struck upon a solution. When his plane began tumbling, he got knocked unconscious so he couldn't fiddle with the controls. So what happens is his ship plummeted towards Earth and seven miles later, once it had entered the Earth's denser atmosphere,

when the standard strategies could be implemented, he came to, was able to, you know, steady the plane and land. So we discovered the only life-saving response that was possible. You take your hands off the controls. In fact, you have to take your hands off the controls. It's the only choice you have, even though it countered all training and even the most basic survival instincts. It's exactly the same with thinking. We can continuously get into situations that we are, as soon as we're stressed, our minds are trying to figure things out. We're comparing and judging and planning and figuring and there's only one way out when we hit the really tough stuff and that's to take our hands off the controls.

In other words, until we stop thinking, we're stuck in a very small, reality. Before I go on, I shared this story a few years ago and a friend told me that the Navy actually uses a similar strategy that when there's a super major storm coming, they'll take the biggest boats and take them out of the harbors and put them into the open sea. Because in the open sea they can survive the big storms and then they've come back into the harbor where it's better for. normal weather. Same idea. So what I like about this kind of metaphor of taking the hands off the controls is it doesn't say you should never control anything. It doesn't say don't think. We need to think. We need to within a certain realm where we can just side things and control things. We can, with our work, our family, as we move through the day, take care of

having food, money, shelter, etc. We think our way through things. We think our way through things. We can, things. It's part of surviving and thriving and making our way. And one of the stories I like best about the valuableness of it has as its main protagonists, a standard poodle. And I spent many years owning standard poodles or living with standard poodles. I can't even think like I own them. But so this one, a wealthy guy goes on a safari and Africa and decides, to take his beloved poodle. One day the poodle starts dashing around and chasing

butterflies and liking, finds himself totally lost. Then wandering around trying to find his way back, he sees a leopard rapidly heading his way. The poodle thought to himself, uh-oh. Luckily, the poodle noticed some bones on the ground close by and immediately

turned his back to the approaching cat and started to chew on them. Just as the leopard was about to pounce, the poodle called out boy, that was one delicious leopard, but I'm still hungry. I wonder if there's another around. Upon hearing this, the leopard halted his attack in mid-stride, a look of abject terror on his face. He crawled off into a nearby tree thinking, phew, that was a close call. That creature nearly got me. Meanwhile, a monkey had been watching this whole scene from a high in a nearby tree.

The monkey called out to the leopard promising some valuable information in return for the leopard's protection. The leopard agreed to the deal, and of course was furious to learn he had just been made a fool of. The leopard now with a monkey in his back took off to find and eat the conniving canine. Once again, the poodle saw the leopard this time with the monkey on his back approaching. Poodle quickly put two and two together while realizing he wouldn't have time to escape. So he sat down with his back to his attackers pretending he hadn't seen them. And just when they got close enough to hear, he exclaimed, where is that damn monkey?

I sent him off an hour ago to bring me another leopard. So it can pay to be clever and it can pay to connive and plan and so on. So the point of my story, well there's no point to that story beyond just I wanted to share that. But that within certain confines, thinking is appropriate,

it's necessary, and it can be really valuable. And in an evolutionary way, we become developmentally arrested when we get addicted to thinking. And it happens when we overestimate the domain it's useful for, and we chronically do that. In other words, rather than sensing, okay, thinking is helpful here and noticing when at other times we're just in a constant looping narrative, we get addicted and thinking which is really a map of reality we take to be reality itself. And if you slow down in sense what does that really mean beyond the words?

And just imagine today and just imagine where your mind was today and where your attention was. You might get a sense of how many moments you had some story of the future or what you were going to do, or what needed to happen in your mind. And that world, that became the world. There was no difference between that and reality. It wasn't recognized as soundbites and images in your mind in those moments. When we're very regularly lost in thought,

our whole sense of who we are becomes hitched to our stories about ourselves. In other words, we lose contact. with this really moment to moment aliveness, the creativity, the intuitive, the awareness that's here, and we become the small self in our storyline. We identify with the narrative. And if we're stuck in that egoic state, we can't contact visceral loving. We can't be really creative. So this is called a trance. This is in the Buddhist tradition. it's often that we're in a dream, that we're living inside thought forms, not reality. And the way out of a trance is to recognize it.

In other words, the training that we're here, and the reason I'm calling this simple, is really to recognize, okay, thinking, what's this moment like? And then to begin to sense the difference between any thought we have and this vividness and mystery right here. So in that spirit, just take a moment just to close your eyes and come back again. The meditation practice has got really two parts

coming back and being here, so just come back and even let all these words and ideas about thinking kind of just fade back. And sense what's right. right here by opening your senses. Listening, feeling the sensations in your body, just sensing the aliveness that's here. So that even as you continue to listen and reflect on this theme, keep checking back with your body what's right here.

So the way out of trance is to recognize it. And I'd like to just review three ways that a trance is really a narrowing of reality. And that's the meaning of trance. It's where rather than living in a whole awake presence, we're limiting, we're narrowing and seeing a kind of distorted view. And the three ways that jump out that we can sometimes sense it is that we get caught in believing in an unreal self. In other words, we're believing in a story about ourselves, not what's really here. An unreal other and an unreal life. I'm just going to kind of give you three

examples. For unreal self, you might sense how much time you spend ruminating about either getting another's approval or how another person's relating to you or how many moments in some way you're living inside a judgment about yourself or falling short. You have a story about the standard of how you should be versus how you are. And how many moments there's a sense of insufficiency. In those moments we are disconnected from our living world. And I like the way Pema Chodin puts it. She says, being preoccupied with our self-image is like being deaf and blind.

It's like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with a black hood over our heads. It's like coming up on a tree of singing birds while all wearing earplugs. It disconnects. So there's unreal self. We're not living in our aliveness. And then when we are lost in thought, living in concepts, others become unreal. You can consider how often you've had an experience of a bad other that comes from what you read in the newspaper or the media. Nothing, no first-hand experience, but we have a very-hand experience. But we can consider how often you've had an experience of a bad other that comes from what you've read in the newspaper or the media. but we lock into a sense of others being not okay. How often our sense is shaped by stereotypes,

not seeing who's there, not seeing past the mask. And I was thinking for myself of some years back, well first just to say, every time I have an idea of someone and then I get to know them and the real person breaks through my ideas, I love it. I mean, that's one of my things. favorite things ever. Like, I just want to have locked into a notion of who someone is and it's completely disrupted. Okay, so it happened in a big way, a bunch of years ago where I was supposed

to meet with a CEO of a kind of medium-sized corporation. This is a corporation that wanted to bring in some mindfulness and other strategies for health into their programming. And this guy was a wealthy Caucasian man. And I had a kind of mind-sum. set of what he'd be like. And I also knew that his corporation had been targeted, a target of a class action suit because of their discriminatory hiring practices against women and particularly African American women. So I was biased. I already had an idea. This is not my kind of person. So we met. And it was interesting because a little bit, you know, I felt like at first I sense him trying to impress me, but then something in me kind of tenderized

because he was trying to get comfortable. And then he told me about his mother having a triple bypass surgery, and his son had juvenile diabetes, and his wife was having a hard time because he didn't have enough time on the weekends to really be with the children. And he was crazy about his kids, and he was really angsting about it,

how he'd always get these urgent calls last minute on his cell phone. And he looked at me at one point, he said, you know, can mindfulness help me not feel like everything is a demand all the time? He was a human. And it was like, whatever, I'm sure our politics and so much were very, very different, but my idea was not the truth. So we go around with ideas of others that make them unreal. And then the last piece is our own life is in a way unreal.

We have this idea about how our life. should be and we have an idea about how we need to be doing things a certain way and we live inside the expectations of our culture and the expectations that our family hands down so that we don't connect with the realness of our own longings and our own creativity so often not saying all of us all the time but very often we create an unreal life that we're living inside so this is an example That's a story written by Bruce Holland Rogers that I find powerful. When he was very young, he waved his arms, gnashed the teeth of his massive jaws,

and tromped around the house so the dishes trembled in the China cabinet. Oh, for goodness sake, as mother said, you are not a dinosaur. You're a human being. Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time that he might be a pirate. Seriously, his father said at some point, what do you want to be? A fireman, policeman, soldier? some kind of hero. But in high school, they gave him tests and told him he was very good with numbers.

Perhaps he would like to be a math teacher. That was respectable. Our tax accountant, he could make a lot of money doing that. It seemed a good idea to make money, what was falling in love and thinking about raising a family. So he was a tax accountant, even though he sometimes regretted that it made him, well, small. And he felt even smaller when he was no longer a tax accountant

but a retired tax accountant. Still worse, a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb, forgot to take his pill, forgot to turn his hearing aid back on. Every day it seemed he had forgotten more things, important things, like which of his children lived in San Francisco and which of his children were married or divorced. Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake,

he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling the familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horse tails at the water's edge. So we sometimes might wonder how many decisions we make, big ones, are out of shoulds, out of fear. How much is the shape of our life? How much is this trance of thinking of how things should be narrow that sense of our life. The last piece I'll mention about how our thoughts can trap us

is what most of us experience every day when we hit something that's really challenging. Could be illness or conflict with loved ones or struggle of our child or some sort of loss or might be addictive behavior and how often we try to think our way out of it. How often we try to figure out an answer. And so I think Einstein maybe put a frame around this that's most useful, which is that

no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. If we want to transform, if we want to change our patterns, it means stepping out of our habitual thoughts. It means really asking ourselves, well, what do I regularly think about? And you might ask yourself that right now. What do you regularly think about? What are the most common thoughts?

What are the stories that you're running through your mind? Where is your attention? Because if you start noticing where you're paying attention, you'll start seeing the patterning, the looping of thoughts create certain feelings that create certain behaviors, that then create certain life patterns, that we can stay stuck in for decades and decades. There's a story about the magician Houdini that I really like shared before, that he traveled through Europe and he would visit small towns and challenge the local jailer to bind him in a straitjacket and lock him in a cell. And he didn't have any trouble at all with this until he

reached this small Irish town where in front of a group of a crowd of people in the village and news reporters they did the same thing, put him a straitjacket, locked him up. And it easily broke free of the straitjacket, but he couldn't unlock the cell door. So he's trying every little trick he knew to unlock the lock. And everybody finally left because it was taking a really long time. And then he admitted to feed and he asked the jailer what newfangled kind of lock he had put on that door. And the jailer confessed his trick. He had never locked the cell door. Houdini had only succeeded in locking himself in. So to me, this is a really powerful story of how we create our own suffering. That we keep thinking.

thinking ourselves into our own prison. We keep telling ourselves the same stories about what's wrong with me or what's wrong with you or what's wrong with life, what we should be doing different. And these repeating stories keep us bound in what's described as the separate egoic self. We keep reincarnating a limited deficient self that's having a hard time. through our thinking. So if we come back to evolution, we're meant to think, we're actually designed to get addicted to our thoughts in some way to hold on real tight to our strategy, and being adaptive creatures, we're designed to see what the limits are, and then we have this capacity with mindfulness to recognize, oh, stuck, stuck inside this prison, stop doing

this, just open the door, step out, mindfulness. get a little quieter, notice what's happening. So the rest of this class is going to be really how we step out of the kind of entrapment of thinking. And I'd like to share with you a reading from D.H. Lawrence, this is from Lady Chatterley's Lover, that I think says it beautifully. We've little needs and deeper needs. We've fallen into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness. Let us prepare now for the death of our present little life and the reemergence in a bigger life in touch with the moving cosmos.

It is a question practically of relationship. We must get back into relation, vivid and nourishing relation to the cosmos in the universe. The way is through daily ritual. We must once more practice the riftness. of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of kindling fire and pouring water, the ritual of the first breath and the last, to these rituals we must return or we must evolve them to suit our needs. For the truth is, we are perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs. We are cut off from the great sources

of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe. Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe. Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe. So the title of this talk, by the way, is planting ourselves in the universe and that

image for me of this uprooted tree that we've kind of lost our connection with the earth and with our bodies and our roots are up there kind of in cyberspace somewhere, you know, in the world of thinking is so apt. We need to replant ourselves, come back to our senses. So this movement from thoughts to a larger reality and just to know that evolution doesn't dispense with lower functions as we keep evolving from more primitive functions we still have access to them but we have access to something greater. Einstein described flashes of mystical insight

as he was going through his life and then he said he would have that flash and there would be some revelation and then he'd spend the next decade articulating it using that brilliant mind of his to put words and concepts around it so he could deliver it. So we get this, you know, all the most breakthrough theories of physics. They came from mystical insights and a brilliant mind they could think. It's not dispensing with thought. So the two aspects to our training that really help evolve us so that we can rest in something larger than conceptual mind.

The first piece is coming back. Coming back meaning that we notice thinking, oh, lost in thought, and reconnect with the present moment. And so we begin that, and as many of you that have been sitting, doing these guided meditations, find is helpful,

is we have some anchor, some home base that's sensory. It could be the breath, it could be sounds, it could be using our whole body sensation, so that we know when we've left. We need to kind of get the knack of realizing, oh, I'm off again. And then we have a place to settle again. So we notice leaving.

But how we return, and this is I'm getting into the practicality, of meditation. How we return, how we notice we've been off and thought and come back to planting ourselves in the universe, the attitude is what really makes the difference. If we notice that we've gone off and thought and we feel a sense of failure and a sense of discouragement and I'm just one of the people that just not cut out for this stuff, my mind, you know, that kind of thing, that energy is going to be what seeds the next moment.

We're just going to end up having more aversion and more aversive kind of thinking. If instead, the best metaphor is probably training a dog, there's a sense of firm, yes, I'm going to come back, but friendly, kind, you know. It's like there's a saying that the mind has no shame, you know, it goes everywhere and anywhere. Well, it's like a dog might pee in the corner. We're not going to punish it. You know, he's just like, come back. This is how we do it. The mind has no shame. It really doesn't. It does everything. Come back, come back, come back. So even if you leave a thousand times, you're actually building new neuropathways by recognizing and saying, ah, come back.

Kaviri Patel in a poem that I find really useful says, There's a monkey in my mind, swinging on a trapeze, reaching back to the past or leaning into the future, never standing still. Sometimes I want to kill that monkey, shoot it square between the eyes so I won't have to think anymore or feel the pain or worry. But today I thanked her. Today I thanked her. And she jumped down straight into my lap,

her peeze still swinging as we sat still. It's our attitude towards thinking. If we're trying to vanquish thoughts, we'll be spending the rest of our life at war with thoughts. Just the part of our design, like the body secretes enzymes, the mind secretes thoughts. So we're not at war with them. It just can we recognize them so we're not lost in the storyline?

So that's part one, coming back. just noticing coming back. Part two is being here. So we're actually planting ourselves in the universe of this body and of this moment. Okay? And that planting, I find, is the most direct way is to wake up the senses. So you might, for a moment, just close your eyes and we'll just practice a little bit together again. Sometimes when I'm lost and thought, when I'm living in a trance and I have enough remembrance to say, okay, let's plant myself back in the universe. The first part of planting is just to listen to the sounds

that are actually right here. So you might just open up the attention to listen to sound. And then with that receptivity of listening, listen to and feel the sensations in the body. I invite you with your eyes closed just to lift your hand and just let it be suspended in front of you. and let the awareness fill the hand so you can feel it as a

constellation of sensations and you might move the hand slowly back and forth and just allow yourself to feel the aliveness that's there notice the difference in any idea of hand any mental image and you can again let it just be still

any image or idea and the actual sensations that are suspended, playing, unfolding, vibrating in space. With your eyes closed still, sense is there a center to what we might call hand? Can you detect any real boundaries? Is anything really holding still in what we call hand? You might gently allow the hand to lower

feeling both hands as sensations, the feet, the arms, the legs, just letting the whole body light up as a field of sensation, points of light in the night sky, tingling, vibrating. Is there any center to your body, to what you call yourself? If you feel there is, let the attention go right there and keep finding a center inside that. Is there? Is there any boundary to this body we call self?

Sensing this living presence, this aliveness, wakefulness, space, that when we move from thoughts to our senses, what a mystery it is. It's Rumi says it this way. He says, be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought. Why do you stay in prison when the door, are so wide open, move outside the tangle of fear thinking, live in silence, flow down and down

and always widening rings of being, opening your eyes. So what happens to us is that we can start quieting and touching into this aliveness and sense it's mysterious, it's vivid, its presence, and then know that we get dragged all over the place. So it takes a real dedication to keep practicing both in formal meditation and informally, whether we're walking or showering or washing the dishes or whatever, to keep our senses awake. And one of the inspirations is when we sense what it really does for us. And I'd like to, for some of you, remind you of one of the, I think one of the best,

social science experiments in history. In Washington, D.C., this was in 2007, so it was, oh gosh, a bunch of years ago, a man with a violin paid six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. It's in the metro station. During that time, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

After three minutes, a middle-aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed down, but then he picked up, then he had hurried on to meet his schedule. Four minutes later, the violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw it in the hat and went on without stopping. Six minutes later, a young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started walking again.

After ten minutes, a three-year-old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard, and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly. At the 45-minute point, the musician played continuously.

Only six people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32. One hour. He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition. No one knew, but the violence. violinist was Joshua Bill, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written

with a violin worth $3.5 million. Two days before, Joshua Bell sold at a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100. Okay, so this is a true story. It was, for Washington folks, it's a little more familiar because it was in the post. So he was playing incognito in this metro station. They organized the whole thing.

as an experiment about perception and people's priorities. They're kind of asking in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate time, do we perceive beauty? That is so interesting to me. I mean, it really gets to how much are we missing? When we are in our trance of an unreal life, which is, I have to be getting somewhere else, now is not what matters.

I'm on my way. How many of you have that a lot of the time? I'm on my way somewhere else. Do we notice the beauty that's here? Do we notice the love that's here? The possibility right here. How much are we missing out on? It's a really important question

because for most of us there's a deep yearning to live more fully and also a fear and a disappointment that our lives aren't what we're wanting. There's something more. We intuit there's more. So my hope is tonight, and in this class, more simple than sometimes other talks, just this sense that there is a training

to move from thoughts into our senses. Ajum Buddha Dasa gave a very wonderful teaching. He said, don't do anything that takes you away from your body. That's what a way to practice. You just sit and just don't leave your body. Just stay here. It's a way of planting ourselves in the universe and of being available for the mystery and beauty that's here.

So we'll close in the way we've been kind of touching in through the talk just to close your eyes again for a few moments and again letting go of all the ideas, the thoughts, the notions. And just sense what happens when you, on purpose, reopen your senses. Listening, feeling the aliveness in your body, softening your heart, feeling the heart space that's here, always here. Just letting go again and again into this great mystery. Close with a short verse from the poet Dana Fawls.

It only takes a reminder to breathe, a moment to be still, and just like that, something in me settles, softens, makes space for imperfection. The harsh voice of judgment drops to whisper, we can remember again that life isn't a relay race. That will all cross the finish line, that waking up to life is what we were born for. As many times as we forget and find ourselves charging forward without even knowing where we're going,

that many times we can make the choice, to pause, to breathe and be, and walk slowly into the mystery. Namaste and thank you for your attention. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org. Thank you.