Tara Brach - Presence and Empowerment

Episode Date: June 22, 2011

2011-06-22 - Presence and Empowerment - In the moments we feel threatened, hurt or dissatisfied, we often flip into controlling mode--our body, heart and mind become contracted and we disconnect from presence. This talk explores how we can shift from controlling, to an empowering presence. When we do, our deepest wisdom and compassion begin to shape and guide our life. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

As you know, meditation is becoming sufficiently mainstream that we have tons of paraphernalia now. I mean, there's all sorts of t-shirts and necklaces and so on. And one of the necklaces is this bone shape that has on it, and you can put it on a cord, and it says, sit, stay, heal. So I think that was really good. I mean, we know that whether it's... it's now in psychology or whether it's in spiritual teachings, meditation, that the invitation is to presence. Again and again, you're invited to come back here and awaken to what's right here,

knowing that this is the portal. And what we find initially, and people report this when they first start coming to classes, is really kind of excited, this new friend of the bread. and the sense of, oh, in the midst of troubled waters, I have an anchor, and it feels really good. And then pretty soon, coming into the here and now gets challenging. They find it's hard to stay, you know, and it's not always pleasant to stay. And sometimes it's even really boring, you know, to stay. So what I found is there's this kind of love-hate relationship with presence that

there's an understanding that if we stick it out, there's an intuition that there's a profound freedom possible, but it's really difficult. I mean, consider the instructions you get for meditation. You're invited to come into stillness. You're invited to relax. And usually it's described as just relax, you know, like that's easy. And then to follow the breath and just stay there with the breath. Not a chance, right? I mean, that doesn't happen. So what we begin to get is that I sometimes put it that we have this nervous system, you know, that our body is kind of restless and our mind is even more restless and the inclination is not to stay put. It's far different. the inclination is to meander all over the place and get lost in thoughts about the future and the past.

And one of the cartoons I share often, and some of you that have been with me, you'll remember, is of this family that are in a desert and the parents are on one camel and the kids on another and all their possessions are on the third camel. And you see that the child is saying something to the father. And the father is saying back, will you stop asking if we're almost there? We're nomads for crying out loud. You know, in our own body and mind,

that there's some sense of right here is not enough. That we're on our way to something else. I mean, you might reflect for a moment. And I ask you to do this maybe on just today. and sense today as you move through the day if there were moments of pausing and of really inhabiting presence of just being

just listening just breathing just feeling you know if there were moments that had that sense enough this is enough it does I don't need to have something else happen I don't need to get anywhere enough. So what we find is going to be varied.

Some of you may have just gotten off a three-month meditation retreat and today was really present and some of you might be, you know, encountering all sorts of deadlines and racing around. But the most common response that when we kind of check in is we realize that through most of the day, William James, I think, put it best. In the midst of this bustle,

there's this sense of we always should be doing something else. You know, the sense of whatever we're doing, it's like we need to get that done so we can get the real thing done. One person put it, you know, I'm trying to get everything in my life done so the last day of my life, I won't have anything to do, you know.

So the most important piece on this is not to take it personally. I really like to think of science and evolution on this one, that we have this survival apparatus and that our brain is literally designed to look for what's wrong or missing to remember the bad things, to not remember so much the good things. You know, they say we're Velcro for problems and Teflon for the good stuff, you know. But that's the way the brain's designed because it then helps us to make it. And those beings that passed down their genes were not the ones that were basking in open awareness and

reflecting on what they were grateful for, you know? They weren't. They were looking for trouble. So we do spend a lot of time looking for problems and riveting our attention, riveting our attention on what's wrong or what might be trouble. I heard about a prank that some students in a high school in Montana played and they got three goats and they painted on these three goats the numbers one

two and four and then they released it in their high school the administrations and the staff spent the entire day looking for goat number three the whole day I thought that was a good prank So Aldous Huxley has a really good description of how our brain operates, and I want to read you what he writes.

Each one of us is potentially mind at large. But insofar as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive, to make biological survival possible. Mind at large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. So it's interesting, this reducing valve of consciousness that keeps us fixated so that we can tie up loose ends or round up loose goats or whatever we think we need to be doing. And what happens when we have this narrowed attention is it's actually a way of trying to control our experience. And if we're honest and we start investigating what's going on,

we'll find that most moments we're trying to control our experience. That in most moments we're in some way trying to make sure something bad doesn't happen and become more comfortable. And this is going on most of the time, and I've sometimes described it as this is our space suit self. This is the egoic conditioning where we're constantly trying to navigate and maneuver by controlling things. And it takes a narrowed, fixated attention. We can't control when we're wide open and just being present. Presence and control don't go together.

Does that make sense? okay so we'll keep going on this one because what we find is that controlling is going on on all levels that most of the time we feel some stress by which I mean some sense that something's either going wrong or something's missing

and in those moments our muscles are somewhat tense you know our bodies are secreting the hormones of cortisol and adrenaline are up right? The mind is of course narrowed as I've mentioned so we're ready for fight-flight

and our emotions are usually in some way we're living inside emotions that have some tendency towards either anxious angry depressed you know where there's some irritation

some restlessness some not okayness and the mind is in stories when we're controlling our mind is generating stories about what we need to do

and what's going to go wrong and how others are looking at us and of course the center of each story is moi you know it's always it's always that way so we're worrying and we're planning and this goes on even in spiritual practice

that rather than just presence rather than just here when we start getting interested in spiritual life, there's a sense of having to work hard and a sense of trying to evaluate what we need to do and how much more we need to do. I remember one of the earliest stories I heard

of a monastery where a very eager new novice knocking on the door asking the abbot, if I want to join this particular monastery, how long will it take me to be enlightened? And the response is 10 years. And this guy's really eager, so he says, what if I work really hard? And the abbot says, 20 years.

And then he says, wait a minute, that's not fair. You just said 10 years. And the abbot says, for you, 30, you know? So what we get is that controlling goes on in spiritual life. We'll meditate and in some way try to get, we're trying to like turn the knob so our meditation gets to a certain place. There's controlling. We're thinking about it a lot. You know, it's Zen and reading all the books about the art of Zen.

You know, it's that kind of thing rather than there's one of the other classic stories because a lot of it is, this inquiry about, you know, how is this all working? Is one novice goes to one of the Zen masters, well, what happens after we die? And his response is, I don't know. And this kind of upset this young novice. And he says, but I thought you were a Zen monk. And the response was, I am, but not a dead one.

So you get the idea that we, rather than just presence, there's striving and there's asking a lot of questions and there's thinking about things and these are all examples of trying to control our experience and not being here. And you might be thinking then, well, okay, what if we need to sometimes control things and we can't always be present, what is wrong with that? And I mean, how else am I going to, you know, get my teenager out of bed or how else am I going to in any way meet my deadlines or get myself to do things I don't want to do? So we can have that thought of don't we need to be controlling. Don't we sometimes need to strive? And what I'd like to do tonight is offer a kind of comparison between

what we call controlling, which is really the habitual reaction that comes when we perceive we're a separate self that's either threatened or needs to get something. Okay? That's controlling, which really does lead to more separation, more suffering. And what we might call an empowering presence,

which is a quality of presence that naturally leads to activity, but it's more enlightened activity. It's activity that's coming from the depth of who we are, not from that tight place of feeling separate. So I want to explore really the inquiry of what does it mean when we're living

in an empowered way? Because when we're controlling, we're trying to make things okay. We're trying to be safe, we're trying to get what we want. The irony is that the more we control, the more we're cut off from the very resources

that actually make our life meaningful. If you think of yourself in the moments when you're most tight, most trying to make things be a certain way, most trying to get someone else to cooperate, most trying to get somewhere or achieve something, and sense what your body, heart, and mind are like in those moments, those are not moments of empowerment.

Those are not moments of being in the zone or being in the flow. and those are not moments that you're calling on your innate capacities. I mean, if you take the different emotions that we get caught in and you sense, well, what happens when we stay in the trance of those emotions? The ones that are, and emotions, by the way, are the energies that are trying to get us to move and do certain things. So if you sense where we're in self-aversion,

and rather than presence, if we lash out at ourselves, if we try to fix ourselves, it actually deepens the belief that something's wrong with me. The more we judge and try to fix ourselves, that's controlling, the more we actually deep down believe something is wrong with me.

Sense when we have desire, the more we chase after something, the more we grasp after the person or the item or whatever it is, the object, the food, the less there's, actually the presence that can enjoy. The controlling gets in the way. When we're afraid, afraid of somebody or a situation and we pull back and we get tight, we reinforce that we're in danger.

And when we face loss, and I'm going to talk about this some more tonight, in the moments we face loss and we go into any of the reactions of denial or anger or battling it, we cut ourselves off from the love that's underneath our grieving. We cut ourselves off. So the inquiry really tonight is how do we move from the habit of controlling where we get tight, we get narrow, we strive, we defend. How do you move from that to this empowering presence where you're willing to stop and tap into who you really are? And I'll just say another word about the word empowerment that you'll notice when you read about the Kala Chakra

and some of the Tibetan practices, and you see this in other parts of Buddhism too, that the word empowerment has to do with having this confidence that comes from tapping our own true nature. Our empowerment comes from the moments that we truly are recognized, the sacred that's living through us. It's not from the moments that the small self feels like,

ooh, I nailed that one. That is not empowerment. So the question is, how do we move towards that empowering presence that's drawing from the depths of ourselves? And I'll remind you, some of you might know Swami Sachananda, Hindu yogi, who's no longer alive.

There was a poster at a health food. store and you saw on that poster this long flowing beard and he's in tree pose this pot this yoga posture with a little orange loincloth and so on he's balanced on top of a surfboard it's on a really large wave and the caption says you can't stop the waves but you can learn to surf come meditate with swami satchit ananda and it tells the time and the date and so on and i thought that line was great. You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to serve. We can't control the waves. We can't control the fact that other people will not cooperate with our ideas. They won't agree with us. That's one of the most problematic. We know we can't control the ways of our own emotions. They just

come and go. But the invitation here is there's a training. You can learn. You can learn to surf and I think that the metaphor is fairly apt because with surfing for those of you that have surfed I have never surfed but I have been a fanatic boogie boarder in my day

every season I would be out there for hours and hours and hours and there are moments when you catch the wave and ride it you're not feeling oh this self is in control. It happens because there's a presence that has just been with the waves and is attuned to the waves and in a kind of flow. There's a kind of grace to it. So there's not a sense of, and this is with all sports that I've seen when athletes are in the zone of any sort. It doesn't

come because of a controlling. Definitely there's skills. There's skills that have been developed. But it's not controlling. It's a quality of presence, it's got a grace to it because there's a tapping into a flow. When we're empowered, we're tapping into the universe's wisdom, the universe is love, the universe's strength and power. So meditation is a training in this tapping in. It's a training in presence. And the reason it's challenging, well, all our habits make us want to control not come into presence. But so we do it so gradually it happens Gradually we start training to say

Okay instead of controlling Right now I'm just going to relax open And be with what's right here You know another way of thinking of it Is that meditation Deconditions this reducing valve That rather than tightening our attention Meditation keeps saying

Okay just relax open right here Come back right here so we opened a presence without controlling. I'm going to read you some words from a poet, Kaviri. She says, I've been searching for a place to call home, a place where I could always feel safe no matter what weather system was moving through the landscape outside. For years, I've tried to find the right anecdote to anxiety

to protect myself from the future or heal from past regret. I'm both humbled and amused at the place I return to again and again when I'm lost and looking for home, the present moment. I can drop all the storylines to what could be or what might have been, who I should be or should have been. Sometimes it's not so easy. Still, I find some peace with the following phrase said with utmost kindness and care to the anxiety.

Thank you for trying to help me. I'm safe here now. I remember the human brain and how it is wired for danger, stress, and negative experiences. I know the anxiety is only trying to help. So the waves keep coming. Our habit is to get anxious.

How do we come home? It's a combination of two things and it's often described as the two wings. We notice this is happening. We notice, okay, anxiety right now, fear. And we bring a quality of kindness as we meet it. And there are many different ways that we can call on that kindness.

But that's what allows us to decondition of this reducing valve that keeps us tight and controlling and access the presence that empowers. So it's these two ones. wings. And we come back to them again and again. If you've been exploring this practice over the years, you'll know that really the pathway home will always involve in some way these two wings of awareness and kindness. I'll just share with you an email was sent to me. Dear Tara, I was reading your book and for some reason the two wings of clear seeing and compassion were really

affecting me and I cried and lost a contact. He lost one of his wings. One of the descriptions in Zen of spiritual life is the capacity to respond appropriately. And I was reflecting on that and realized it's a very, very deep teaching that if in any moment whatever is arising, whatever waves are coming, we have this capacity to respond appropriately. That That means that we've come home to that presence. So what I'd like to do is share with you some stories of how in different situations, people I know I've worked with in different settings have come to this empowering presence. And I want to emphasize that it doesn't mean any sort of a passivity.

that when we let go of controlling, the alternative is not to lie down and be a doormat. So the first example I'd like to give you is a woman that was in a very abusive marriage, and her husband was fine and decent, for the most part, when he wasn't drinking. But then when he was, he would insult her and sometimes even physically handle her

and at one time raped her in front of the youngest child. And in general, he'd threaten her. And so then afterwards, he would apologize objectively, as is a pattern many rounds in these kind of setups. And she kept getting hooked in, mostly because she felt in some way that she was bad and deserving what was happening. And then she began to practice more,

meditation and got the message that in some way her empowerment was going to come from presence, not from, in her way of controlling, actually, in this situation, was either to be angry at him or angry at herself. And interestingly, for her, when she started meditating, coming into presence meant she had to sit with her fear. And underneath that, and she had to say yes to it and underneath that she had to sit with her her shame and she had to accept something she had to accept the reality that this is abusive and it wasn't until she came into that that presence stop the controlling stop just being lost in stories about he's bad and on bad and just came into that simple presence with these two wings of okay this

this is really painful, this shame, this fear, and then holding that with kindness, that she could with a really clear eye say, this is abuse. She had to be able to accept that it was abuse. Her body accepted the reality of the violence. And when I say accept the abuse, that doesn't mean accept this is abusive and it's okay.

It's just accepting the truth that this is. is violence. Like she had to feel that in her body. And when she did, she could then forgive herself for being in it. And she left the marriage. The only way that she could have left that marriage was bringing presence to the layers of emotions that were there. Anything else, any other form of trying to control things kept her hooked in the cycle of

being angry and then being reeled back in again. For another man who had been several years ago when the economy was at its worst laid off from his job and he was after he was fired immediately started looking for other jobs and so his way of controlling was okay fill in the blank reinstate yourself get back in good graces with the world, find your pride again, you know, because he felt so diminished

and demeaned by losing his job. For him, meditation, coming into presence, his reducing valve was on the seeking for another job, was to open it back up and just stop. He had a stop. He had to stop and just be with what he was feeling. And he found that underneath his fear about being diminished, being marginalized, being sideline, losing his worth, underneath that was a feeling of wanting to find meaning and realizing that it wasn't in the same kind of work. He did not want to go back to corporate work. And he's now teaching and he's teaching in a grammar school in the inner city and he is really alive with it and it's very hard. I share with you this again because it's this layering of when we come into presence,

we can, there's an empowerment. We actually tap into something deeper about who we are. Another woman, a lesbian, angry at her father for not acknowledging and honoring her sexual orientation. She stayed in her stories of anger for decades. two years ago started letting herself feel the anger and underneath that the grief

that was there and underneath that feeling of love how much love mattered to her and was able to then begin to communicate with her father in a way that's actually brought their relationship to a new level

of depth and authenticity and respect empowered because of presence Now the last I want to share with you Sometimes I even choose what I'm going to be speaking about Because of some of the things people write to me Or that I hear I've got an email from one man this week

And he described facing one of the great losses of a lifetime And just to say that when we face loss we kick in everything kicks in for survival and that's when we get most tight about controlling that's when we get most angry or get most in denial or whatever the stages are that we happen to go through our own sequence so it takes a lot to step out of that and I know for myself that

when I'm feeling sick that everything in me gets in me gets immediately organized around, what can I do about this, how can I make this better, what's wrong? And what I found because I'm chronically sick and I go through a lot of seasons of sickness is that I'm becoming aware of how many moments I've wasted. Now, wasted is a strong word,

but how many moments I was just spinning in my familiar loop of trying to control when I could have been there. So the practice, in the face of that loss, and it's a feeling of a loss of aliveness, come into presence, feel the sadness,

feel the fear, and inevitably, I come home to the aliveness and consciousness that's here and am re-empowered to inhabit my life. I forget a lot. But when I remember, it's a feeling of that I've,

this grace that I'm, back in a flow again because I haven't left and looped in this kind of attempt to control. So this man, the loss that his family just experienced was of his nephew, his nephew, Isaac. His sister was pregnant. It was her first pregnancy in about eight and a half months in things went off. And they had a C-section, the baby, and the placenta had detached. and there was a period of oxygen deprivation. So the child lasted four days.

And I want to read you some of what he wrote. He said our minds were spinning and it was really difficult not to spend all of our time thinking about the what-ifs, the if-onlys, and the what-now thoughts. What are we going to do? Okay, so this is the controlling, right?

He says that I had an aha moment. It was a moment of presence. I had realized the power before through meditating and practicing mindfulness, but never on this level. There was absolutely nothing else to do except stay present with Isaac and each other because we only had that moment. We had no choice but to feel every touch, every hug, every kiss, because we didn't know if there would be another. It was a paradox like no other. It was the most devastating yet the most beautiful time I had ever encountered, and our family has grown closer. because of it.

For him it was four days and for each of us we don't know how long we have and we don't know how long we'll have with the others that we love. And we in our controlling mind have a map of time that kind of goes on and on and we're on our way somewhere else and it makes it very difficult to arrive here.

Ticknaad Han teaches a wonderful practice and I've shared with some of you. I went to a reach retreat was about 20 years ago with him. And at the end of the retreat, he had each person stand up and pick somebody to do this with, and he had everybody, namaste. The word namaste means I see the divine anew. Namaste each other and partners. And then he had us hug each other. And during the hug, he had us reflect. And the reflection was, I'm going to die and you're going to die and we have just these moments together. These are the practices that cut through the controlling

mind that kind of pull aside the veil. I mean, just to take a moment, if you will, if you'd like just to close your eyes and just think of someone. Just think of someone in your life that you see regularly and that you know that your interactions are somewhat confined because of of being stressed or busy, that you know that you're in that space suit self and therefore not so present. And as you imagine that person, just think of a typical place you'd be and what you'd be doing together and what would happen if you paused inwardly and just had that reflection. I'm going to die. You're going to die. And we have these moments. What we start discovering is that when we remember, when we remember the truth, we're invited back to presence and it empowers our heart because that's when we can just draw on the love that's here.

The loving is not available when we're in controlling mode. It's there. We're just not awake to it. So if you'd like, you can open your eyes. Just to say that the meditation deconditions the habit of controlling, it allows us to then act and live from that in us which is most loving and most wise. I remember hearing some years back that Mahatma Gandhi would take off a day each week. And during that day, he would meditate and pray. And when asked, why do you do this? His response was so that I can be sure to have my actions come from the wisest, deepest part of my being.

So we could take a day a week, or we can take a pause every hour, or we can intend to have our moments as many as possible, have that remembrance of who we really are. An empowerment, when bestowed from the guru, is really this empowerment to remember that you are the guru, you are God, you are the sacredness that's living through all beings. It's a remembrance of who we are. It happens in presence. It doesn't happen when we're in control mode. In a similar way, when we offer that presence to another, it helps them remember. It helps them move from their defensiveness or their controlling. It helps them to come back into the depth of who they are.

Some years back, I read a book called Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen, a wonderful, wonderful book. And in that book, she describes a doctor, a wonderful physician who just lived a lot, modeled a lot of this kind of presence. She describes one of his patients who's a homeless woman who comes once a month to his clinic and he sees her and he says her speech is sometimes rambling

and her clothing was eccentric and this deeply kind and respectful man was not troubled by this with his usual grave courtesy he welcomed her into his consulting room listened to the details of her difficult life did what he could to ease her burden didn't try to fix her,

just offered that space, that space of presence. After you've been seeing her for some time, he became aware that she sometimes came to the hospital in days when he was not there. The clinic nurses were puzzled by this at first as she seemed to know in some mysterious way that it was not her day to see the doctor.

After talking with her, they determined that she simply wanted to go to his consulting room. Once there, she did not go in, but would stand, on the threshold and slowly and deliberately place her right foot inside the empty room and then withdraw it again and again. After a while she would be satisfied and go away. You understand. We create these spaces. We create spaces when we are present for our own

heart to wake up and our own wisdom to wake up. And when we hold that, presence for others when we're not trying to have somebody be different and by the way I think of that as the definition of love is the presence when we're with someone that absolutely accepts purely accepts and attends to that being as they are in that moment that is an expression of love it actually invites out that being so we're exploring tonight really this shift and it's it's a shift of a lifetime or many lifetimes who knows, but it's a shift from the egoic self's patterns

of being stressed and reacting to stress by trying to achieve more, prove, more, defend more, to a courageous coming back to the presence that actually lets us live from flow. One of the signs of this presence, this empowerment, is grace. It might not be that we're physically enormously graceful,

but there's some grace in life. There's a sense that we actually belong to something larger than what we are, that we're being carried by those winds or those flows,

and there's a kind of magic that goes with it. There's not a sense of I am in charge or I am controlling my life and making things happen. It's that life's unfolding and there's a real mystery and magic to it

and in some way we're just celebrating that. We're part of this mystery. You think of the Big Bang, started the universe pouring matter through space and some of that matter formed stars and then the residue formed other planets and everything on earth, including our living bodies, is formed out of the same material

that made the stars in the planets. So your bones are made of calcium and magnesium and the seawater is in your blood. And you're the living earth in this particular form. Just in contrast to thinking we're controlling things. We are the living earth in this particular form. And I like the way cosmologist Brian Swim says it. He says four and a half billion years ago, the earth was a flaming molten ball of rock.

And now it can sing opera. So to hold our doings lightly, you know, we take it very personally how we're doing it and doing it right and doing it wrong and let ourselves be held in the flow of grace some. Really trusting and presence to sense that that will give us the wisdom to know how to respond appropriately, lovingly, intelligently. So we'll close with a little meditation, if you will, put things aside. So let this be a sacred pause. No matter where your mind or heart has been in the past or where it goes in the future,

just really invite yourself right here. Let your senses be awake, see if it's possible maybe to relax just a little bit more. Just opening the attention and sense if there's some part of your life that wants a deepened kind of presence. if there's some place, some situation where you know you regularly go into control mode, where the space suit self takes over, and that you might explore a little more pausing, a little more presence. So it could be a place where you typically get defensive or judgmental, where you end up with wrong and pulling back.

where you over-consume, try to numb, where you overwork, you get ferociously or frantically busy. Just choosing some place in your life where you'd like to bring more consciousness, where you'd like to shift some from the controlling to the empowering presence, letting that situation be right here in your attention. So as if you're watching a movie, just stopping, at the frame where there perhaps is the most reactivity and sensing that you can freeze that frame and just imagine you're inside it, you're feeling whatever the feelings that are there are there, aware of them. Maybe aware of what you might be believing, fearing,

imagining is going to happen. It's very conscious in this pause, in this freezing of the frame of action and kind towards it. Perhaps as that one woman describes you can thank the anxiety. Okay, it's part of the survival apparatus. Or you can forgive the anger or you can be compassionate to the sadness. So you're calling on the love side of the wing, two wings in this pause of presence. Sensing in this pause as you bring mindfulness and kindness to what's going on, that you're actually tapping into your own presence, into the qualities of wisdom and heart that are here. That you are secretly a Buddha,

and that as you move back into this situation, you can look through the wisdom eyes of the Buddha and feel with the heart of the Buddha, or the Bodhisattva. And move now through this situation, Let yourself continue in it, having tapped into your own Buddha nature. See how it unfolds. In our lives, in any moment, we have this possibility of waking up from the trance of controlling and coming home to our true nature, through presence.

So we close just a simple prayer of metta or loving kindness. Just wishing for our own beings through our day, through our lives, may we remember, may we pause, may we come into presence. May we trust and live from the love and the wisdom that is our true nature. Our prayer rippling out that it might touch all beings everywhere, may all beings realize that love, that wisdom. May all beings live their lives in peace, in happiness, in freedom. Namaste. 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.