Tara Brach - Realizing Your Deepest Intention (2019-01-16)

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

Realizing Your Deepest Intention (2019-01-16) - The Buddha taught that this whole life - including our thoughts, feelings and actions - arise from the tip of intention. While our intentions are usually marbled with wanting and fear, when intention comes into the light of consciousness, it unfolds into its most pure essence. This talk explores ways that when we are stuck in reactivity, we can become aware of intention, and find our way to the aspiration that expresses our most awake and loving heart.  Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. And always a welcome to those that are with us on live stream. We begin tonight with a story that comes from a long time ago before any of us was born. Good king who wanted to ensure that there was an heir to his kingdom. He didn't have any children, he was growing old. But being a democratic sort, a kind of egalitarian guy, instead of just choosing someone, he decided

he'd invite anybody that was interested in the job to come to the kingdom. And in order to really make it equal, he, before they were to come up and be interviewed for the job, he provided this amazing room where there was wardrobes and all sorts of goods they could all just be wearing whatever they felt like they wanted to wear, nobody was going to be shown up as less than someone else. So it appears their best. So the great day arrives and a huge stream of people comes streaming through the gates excited by the idea of being king or queen.

And the king and his minister were waiting patiently in the upper chambers as the people first enjoyed the bathhouses and put on special perfumes if they chose and the dress. and the jewelry and of course they were graciously supplied all the foods that they might like. And so they kind of, all the people were milling around, kind of flirting and admiring themselves and each other and criticizing because and again the king didn't want them to go hungry so they were also enjoying the food and some puzzles and games and so on and hours went by. And the king and the minister wondered why nobody was coming up but they could hear the sounds

of people having fun and fighting and playing and the whole deal. So finally it got quiet and the king sent the minister down to see what was going on and he reported as when he came up sadly that everyone had left and they took with them the remainder of the food and the jewelry and the clothing. They were full, they were tired and they forgot why they came. So that's the story. It's really a story of all of us forgetting why we're here each day, really, probably each hour. I sometimes use the language of the big squeeze that we live in where we go into trance all

the time and then there's some part of us that knows it and knows that the who we are and the mystery of being here and the depth of spirit in each of us. us is shining through but it's every day we forget. Every day we move through carried by what we might call habit energy. We all have it, every one of us. And to different degrees we're in some way trying to control our way through the day, trying to get others' approval or to get gratification of getting things done or making money or whatever it is in terms of meeting other people's expectations, or protecting ourselves

against making mistakes in some way manipulating behaviors. So we basically get what we want. I was thinking about this habit energy and came across this cartoon of a man's walking in a city street and he's eating a bag of chips and he's walking by this ledge and the pigeon is standing on the ledge And the pigeon says to him, nice jacket. Second frame, the guy says, thank you. Next frame, the pigeon says, be a shame if something were to happen to it. Last frame, the pigeon says, leave the chips.

Manipulation on all levels. So the big squeeze, we forget why we're here, and then deep down there's this intuition of, of this love and presence and awareness that is waking up through us and that we're here to experience its full manifestation. In the forgetting, they're suffering. Theroux said, we go through life fishing only to realize it wasn't fish we were after. So from the Zen tradition, one of the great all-time, elegant ways of framing the

this is that the most important thing is remembering the most important thing, okay? And that's going to be really the theme of this reflection we'll be doing together. The Buddha put it that this whole world lives on the tip of intention, that your intention in any given moment like right now create your experience. So how aware are we of our intention? And for instance right now, if I had to say my intention it's to be awake in this heart right now so that whatever is expressed as part of that we can wake up together, that I can wake up and we can wake up so that we can experience that love and awareness and that's my intention.

to be really sincere, not to give a talk in some sort of habitual way where I know the ideas and they're packaged but to be inhabiting it. And I'm taking my time speaking even that right now because the more we pay attention to our intention, the more it comes above the line and for those of you that aren't familiar with that, that means just imagine a circle and a line that's going to be. through it and what's below the line is outside of awareness. What's above the line is in our awareness and the line moves the more we practice present. So by becoming conscious of our intention we actually can inhabit it more, live from it.

Does that make sense? This is what we're going to explore, how to bring intention above the line, how to see when we're coming from an intention that's fear-based. which is totally natural, but if we can bring it above the line then we have choice. So each moment our intention is either I want more of this, or I'm afraid of that, or it might be that as we're waking up more that our intention is towards connection or towards spiritual realization. It could be any of those levels of our being.

And in any moment, if we can see what's running our intention, then we can drop into a more pure expression. So to give a taste, we'll just start right in right now with a reflection. And that's an invitation if you'd like to kind of go inside and check this out. So if you will, bring up something that's coming up in your life that you're anxious about. And when I say anxious, I don't mean terrified. and panic attack kind of anxious. I mean anxious.

Like maybe it's something that, a deadline that you've got or a talk that you have to have with somebody or something that you're doing that others are going to be evaluating in some way. It may be something that happens all the time, just something that you're anxious about that's every day at work when you have to be with a certain person

or do a certain type of activity. Maybe you're anxious about something going on with your health. Maybe you're anxious about what's going on for another person that you care about. So come up with something. And as you do, begin to investigate and sense the part of you that's anxious, we'll call the anxious part that has some intention to manage things or to try to have things come out okay. to protect yourself. It's a part of you that generates obsessive thoughts, part of you

that tenses up physically. And as you get in touch with that part, just sense your experience of yourself, the who you are. Notice how familiar it is. Notice if you like this self. Notice how this self is in relation to other people, whether you feel more separate. This is when the intention is to control out of anxiety. Take a few breaths and keeping in mind what you're anxious about, sense how there's a part of you that really wants to learn how to wake up in the midst of the challenges and stressors of life. There's a part of you that notion of no mud, no lotus that really wants to sense the

the lotus in you, the resources in you waking up so that even when there's stressful situations you have more equanimity, more balance, the part of you that really wants to find more freedom, just to get in touch with you with the part that has that intention or aspiration to find more peace and freedom in the midst of difficulty. And as you do, and you feel that sincerely, notice. Notice the sense of your being now. Who are you when that's the intention? Rather than managing what you're anxious about, your intentions to wake up and find a sense

of balance in the midst, to be bigger, to be more spacious. And notice the difference of who you are when you're driven by the fear-based intention. versus the intention for waking up. You can keep that in mind if you'd like to keep your eyes closed and keep reflecting as I speak it's fine or you can open them. Typically for most of us, our intentions are marbled. And what I mean by that is when we're anxious, there's parts of us that are obsessing and wearing and trying to controlling,

but there's a part of us also that has the intention to see if we can find some space in the midst of it and be more awake. They're just mixed like that, which is really natural. For instance, love and attachment are mixed. You might totally love your child and also being attached to your child being a certain way and performing a certain way and cooperating with you and both energies are there and when you're really in that love energy you can feel you get more spacious and when you're

really the controlling whatever parent you get smaller and they're mixed. they're mixed, even at sometimes right around the same time. And the same thing with loving a partner and being attached to a partner. You might have a real deep appreciation for someone but also get possessive or controlling or jealous or demanding, wanting to be treated in a certain way. So we have mixed intentions and you can sense it in the ways that we get, and we can sense it in the ways that we get habitual and relating to others, that sometimes we're driven by the intention to kind of inflate ourselves and we might gossip or speak poorly about somebody,

kind of putting them down and feeling a little bit of smugness or satisfaction in teaming up with somebody and putting that down somebody else and, you know, it comes from insecurity and it's not a very skillful way to bond with people and by putting down others but that can happen and that's one level of intention are then there's a part of us that sometimes really speaks well of others and appreciates them and that and there's just a sense of inherent respect and that's coming from a very deep and different part of us. This marbling is totally conditioned by our culture. I mean it's not our conditioning it's our culture's conditioning and you can sense it.

And we're given all these mixed messages by our culture. Now a very dramatic example, one guy, Butch Hancock, describes the messages, the religious messages that came from his hometown in the backwood, so to speak. He says, Life in Lubach, my small hometown, taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. And the other is that sex is the most awful filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love. You get the idea, mixed messages here. So each of us has our particular blend of wants

and fears that are driving us and then the more awakened intentions of wanting to live from caring and live to truth and speak from truth. And so we get caught in some habitual patterns and we sense our potential to live from our deepest highest aspiration. The challenge is again, they're below the line a lot. So it takes being intentional about looking at intention. This is D.H. Lawrence. He says, we're not free when we're doing just what we want, we're only free when we're doing what the deepest self-likes. And to do what the deepest self-likes takes some diving. Okay, so how do we dive? In the Buddhist tradition, I the attention to aspiration or intention, really meditating on it, is actually very central

to the practice. And so we're going to explore ways of diving. And the beginning is to sense how it is we become very attached to certain intentions that don't work out so well for us. And I think one of the best kind of descriptions that we hear is this, that the thought manifests as the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into habit, habit hardens into character, character gives birth to destiny. So watch your thoughts and intention with care. Let them spring from love born out of respect for all beings,

including yourself. So it begins, so we can sense that the thoughts and beliefs that are under the line are really generating our habits and our habits and our activities and if we're not aware of them, if we don't pause and start sensing, okay, well what's my intention right now? We keep playing out the same pattern. It becomes destiny. It was described in an illustration with three construction workers. They're standing in a row next to traffic and they're carrying signs.

Each of them has signs. First one has this big sign that says stop. The second one carries a sign that says, smell the flowers. And this woman's carrying some flowers. hours in her hand and the third carries a sign that says, okay, resume tearing through your life like a maniac. And we can see it that we get these reminders all the time to slow down. It's not like racing around really helps us achieve more.

And it certainly doesn't do anything for having intimacy. I find over and over again I especially see this on retreat that when I move half as fast, I take in twice as much. We don't have to rush so much and yet there's some deep intention in us that's fear-based to get more done. So we speed around a lot, not all of us, some people are much slower than others so maybe I'm speaking for myself here, but there's a tendency in the culture. It's part of the culture's conditioning to speed.

So let's look a little more closely, how to bring intention above the line and live more aligned. And there's a story and go back in time a little bit. I was teaching at a conference and this was 2001 I think it was. and the conference was, there were five opening presenters, I was one of them, it was run by tricycle and it was actually held in the Twin Towers three weeks before 9-11 which is why I share the story a lot because it's kind of a poignant memory for me. I took one of the pens from the building that actually had the address and so on. So I was one of five opening presenters and I was the only woman and I was a real newbie and this was a while ago and we were each

given 10 minutes and I was very nervous about it because I was going after a very well-known guy Richard Baker Roshi who's the Darmat Heritage Suzuki Roshi and so I was really nervous but I was really relieved because I was going second he was going first so I knew I'd have some time to prepare my thoughts and to breathe and so on. So Richard Baker Roshy gets up and the question that we're all supposed to address is, you know, really what allows people to heal and awaken and touch genuine freedom? Just that, you know, 10 minutes, piece of cake, you know. So I have this, start thinking of my stories and little poems and quotes and I'm thinking about

all I'm going to do. Okay, so he gets up there to speak and he says, transformation and awakening comes down to two things, intention and attention. Thank you very much. And he's down and I'm sitting here, oh my God, I'm on, you know. I wish I'd had the witch to say like he said, you know, if only, but I didn't, I don't have any idea what I said, but I do remember what he said. intention and attention and they go together. The more you become aware of your intention, like the intention to care, the more of that brings up attention, like you start paying attention more, which then brings out the caring

and that deepens your intention and they just feed each other in a really beautiful way. So it's not just about, let's say my intentions to care, it's not just about the intention, you have to pay attention in order to manifest it. And if you're not, if you're just saying, well, I'm intending this and I'm intending that but you're kind of blithely going along, what happens is you don't manifest. Intention and attention, you have to pay attention. Here's a, I think, a great illustration. A guy who's a bagpiper wrote this.

He says, I play many gigs. Recently, I was asked by a funeral director to play at a graveside service for a homeless man. He had no friends or family, so the service was to be at a pauper cemetery in the back country. Now, I wasn't familiar with the back woods. I got lost, and being a typical man, I didn't stop for directions.

I finally arrived an hour late and saw the funeral guy had evidently gone and the hearse was nowhere in sight. There were only diggers and the crew left, and they were eating lunch. I felt badly and I apologized to the men for being late. I went to the side of the grave and looked down and the vault lid was already in place.

I didn't know what else to do, so I started to play. The workers put down their lunches and began to gather around. I played out my heart and soul for this man with no family and friends. I played like I've never played there before for this homeless man. And as I played Amazing Grace, the workers began to weep. They wept and I wept and we all wept. together. And when I was finished I packed up my bagpipes and started from my car, though my head hung low, my heart was full. As I opened the door to my car I heard one of the workers

say, I've never seen nothing like that before and I've been putting in septic tanks for 20 years. So, intention and attention. Point of the story here. So I'd like to now give you an illustration of how when we bring both, when you start to. start setting your intention and paying attention, how they actually allow your heart and spirit to manifest. And this is a story of a woman, this is some years back, she told me how she had been in a standoff for decades with her older sister and she was the impulsive and non-traditional type and kind of the bad girl when they were younger and her older sister was always dutiful in

getting the grage and doing things according to, you know, schedule. Well, they just kind of parted way she always felt misunderstood and not appreciated. And they got more and more distant and tense to the point that she wasn't even invited to one niece's wedding after they had a particularly bitter argument. But now their dad had died and their mom was sick and they were forced together for the holidays. So this is where things begin. and they were at Thanksgiving together and she's all ready for difficulty. There's a disagreement about their mother's diet, you know, how they, she's suggesting

gluten-free and holistic and this and that and her, you know, naturally plant-based and her older sister's saying, well everything's got to fit your philosophy and left the room, you know. And she just was all hurt and angry and left the room and she just was all hurt and angry and left the room and thinking she really dislikes me, what's wrong with me, and so many times she had asked, I can't make her like me, she doesn't understand me, she doesn't care. So she brought some compassion inward which is always when we get stuck the first place is to pay attention and offer caring within.

And once she had done that you could say okay what's the intention that's driving me? What's under the line? And the under the line intention was she was trying to get respect, trying to get her sister's appreciation, trying to be seen. So it was from this young place in her. So she continued to offer self-compassion to that because that's completely understandable. It just wasn't getting her what she wanted. So she offered self-compassion and said, what's my deepest intention? Okay, so first she saw the intention that was more the ego intention, brought compassion, what's my deepest intention?

And her deepest intention was loving connection. Loving connections. That became her prayer. That deep intention was her prayer, loving connection. For the rest of the evening she was paying more attention and she didn't need so much to insert her opinion or defend or whatever. Month later they were back together for the holidays again and there was more ease and they laughed together over some old family stories and later that night her sister told her

about a tough time with her teenage son and something shifted. In fact the end her sister said you know thank you for listening for being such a good shoulder and she realized that this intention for connection it's like do you want to be right or do you want to have connection kind of thing really gave more space. It just made it it just released it just released the tension with her sister. And she deepened her, you know, that deepened her intention to stay with that. In fact, her language was not my will but my heart's will. You know, not my ego's well which wants to be right, wants to be seen, wants to be appreciated,

but my heart's well, which is really a willingness to connect and to be close and to be caring. Whatever your intention is, that gets communicated. So if it's marbled, that gets communicated and people are used to that. But as it gets pure and your intention is I really do care about you. That comes across. We communicate our intention. So again the sequence or the path is to start right where we are. It's not like all trying to kind of push ourselves into some noble intention, just start right

where we are. Oh, right this moment I want to look good or want to make an impression or whatever it is. And of course if you're in action then it doesn't go to it, you can't do it examine it with the same depth but let's say you're noticing it and you have some time to be with yourself, oh I want to make an impression and then you say okay well that's natural. and you're kind towards it. No, what do I really want? I want to feel close.

I want to feel connected. I want to feel that loving presence. And the deeper we go, the more we start living from who we truly are, from the most pure and clean and awake expression of our own being. So we're going to practice a little bit of this. And as we have in the past, take a moment to find a way of sitting and close your eyes that feels comfortable.

In the quietness, invite yourself right here. The more you start with presence, the more clarity in scanning your life and checking in. So feel your body here, feel your body breathing and habit your body with presence. And from this presence, scan your life right now and see if there's a little bit of your body breathing and See if there's a place of conflict or distance with someone you care about, that you'd like to feel closer. Some place of tension could be a person at work, person at home, family, where there's tension, where there's disagreement, where there's some repeating pattern perhaps that creates

distance and as you identify the person and bring to mind a particular situation that illustrates where the distance is and what's happening, just bring in that situation closer in so you can sense yourself in it and what's going on when you're feeling defensive about something or judged or whether you're feeling judging, let down, disappointed, misunderstood, whatever it is. Let yourself go right into the situation you might even see the person's face and what they're saying and what it's triggering in you. Notice how you're behaving and behind that, notice what your intention is.

Is your intention to get them to be different? Is your intention to be understood, to get their respect, to in some way win their attention or love? Is it to protect yourself from demands? Is it to push them away in some way? What's your intention? And since your whole sense of yourself when that intention is ruling your experience, the intention to protect yourself or assert yourself, get to the intention.

something, defend something, be right, have your way. Just sense the experience of your own being and if you like yourself. Because part of what's under the line is that often when we're being driven by a fear-based intention we don't like ourselves really. So bring that above the line too, that there's some self-aversion sometimes when we're caught in an ego intent. And then just taking some moments to sense the naturalness of this that, okay, there's something hurting.

There's unmet needs, there's something that you're really wanting or fearing and bring some compassion to that. The idea is not to punish the ego intent but to really bring kindness to the needs that are there. You will not find your way to a more pure or deeper intention. until you bring compassion to what's here. You might even put your hand on your heart and just offer really kindness to whatever needs are in you when you're in this conflict.

Just feel that you're offering a real sense of warmth and care and then from that place of presence and kindness, listen deeply, what is your most pure intention here now? What would be your deepest intention? with this person. What do you really want to happen? And when you sense your deepest intention, what new choices might come up and how to respond to this person?

Sense who you are, the sense of your own being when you're connected with your deepest intention. Can you sense how when your intentions deep and pure, you're actually touching the very essence of your your highest self, what I sometimes call our future self, it's who you're really evolving into, manifesting the bodhisattva within. On this path of awakening, intention and attention.

We pay attention, we notice the intentions that might be more fear-based, we bring a kind attention, we go deeper, we notice the deepest intention where attention flows, energy goes, You can open your eyes if you'd like. So thus far tonight in exploring really manifesting intention and our purest intention, the first major place we looked at has been how do we open up our intention and deepen it when we're caught in kind of an egoic place? How do we move from an ego intention to a more spiritual intention? I want to just touch on that when we're not in the grip,

We can also just reflect and ask what is my deepest intention in any given moment. And again it's part of the Bodhisattva path, this path of awakening, that we keep checking and sense what's my intention right now? Is my intention presence? You know, it's my intention to be open-hearted. People often ask me, well how do I know? Like I'll, every week here at the beginning of the practice say, okay, what's your intention for being here?

And I've often had people after class in the line say, well, you ask that and I have no idea what my intention is, you know. So first of all, it takes a certain amount of presence to notice your intention. So what you might do is after the meditation, after you've settled some, then say, what is my intention? But there are three signs of a liberating intention, three signs. And this has really helped me to use this as kind of a guide when I'm just paying attention to my own experience.

So I want to name them for you. And the first is a liberating intention always has to do with manifesting your innate potential. You know, it's not like for one person that just doesn't have any music. talent at all to say, well, my deepest intention is to be able to play in the National Orchestra cello. You know, it's like it's not that. It's really manifesting what's inherent in our being to love fully, to live creatively, to be able to serve, to realize truth.

So it's really going for manifesting who we are. And Lily Tomlin says, even if you win a rat race, you're still a rat. So, and by the way, the only reason I don't like that is because I actually think rats are just a great creature as a mouse or a hamster or a gerbil or any of them, but it's still, you get the idea, the rat race and the wheel, okay. So that's the first one that has to do with manifesting. Some people will think, oh my intention, I'm going to hike the Appalachian Trail, you know.

I'm going to get it, I want to, you know, like create an app for instant enlightenment, you know, or have my partner use that app or whatever it is. So again, there's all sorts of intentions you can have but it has to do with manifesting who you are, your love, your capacity for truth, your capacity to serve. Okay, that's the first one. The second one is that for an intention or aspiration to be, pure, it has to be embodied. If I say my intention is to be loving without holding back, but it's just this idea, this abstraction, it's not a pure intention. It has to be like really

sincere and in my body and feeling it to really have that aliveness. This is Oprah Rimfrey. She says, ask yourself, what is my truest intention? Give yourself time to let a yes resound within you, when it's right, I guarantee that your entire body will feel it. For a number of years, I kept toggling in my deep intention between this intention for love and I'd feel it and go, yeah, that's it. I just really want to love and be loved. I just want to be loving presence itself. That's it.

And then I'd be at another retreat and my intention would be truth. I just want to know truth. That's it. And it would be like really in my body like, whoa, just reality. I am reality. I just want to know and be reality. And that was it. And I kept thinking, God, I wish I knew which one, you know.

And then I realized that they're both it. You know, it's because in a way they're different sides of the same coin. But the point is your experience of your true aspiration, it's not like you have to have one that's, this is it for the rest of my life, it's going to have different flavors and expressions over time. All that matters is it expresses the who you are becoming or expresses your true nature in some way manifest and that you're inhabiting and feeling it in a very embodied way. It's the second part, but let me now tell you part number three, which is that your true

aspiration always relates to this moment. Though it's not like St. Augustine who says, Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet. You got the idea. It's not like down the road. It's what your spiritual life aspires to right in this moment, which again requires presence. Like what matters in this moment? Well, in this moment it matters to really be here, like awake, tender, really present.

So these are the three and why we repeatedly want to contact our aspiration? the more you contact it, the more you're in touch with your aspiration, the more you're actually going to pay attention in a way that will deepen it. I remember at my first Buddhist retreat, and this was about 30-some years ago, a few days in, I really got settled and quiet and I guess I had been really busy because I was I kept thinking, wow, you know, this is spacious and peaceful. And then it got, the stillness was so profound that my heart just opened and just filled this vast space. And then I burst out crying.

And there was a part of me witnessing it all going, why am I crying? But it was just this, but not really because I knew, you know, that happy, sad, of the joy of homecoming. and also this cherishing and this sense of, oh, I long for this, I want this in my life. And that that was a real moment of, I think it's Rilke calls it the winds of homecoming, that was a moment of pure aspiration. I really long to live from this kind of open-hearted presence. And I realized that touching that deepened my attention or

away that allowed me to keep on living for more open-hearted presence and that every time I got in touch with that longing it deepened my attention. So it became a practice after that at the beginning of meditations or at the end or whatever to get really quiet and sense, okay, right this moment, you know, what really in this moment is the aspiration for my spiritual life? and to feel it in my body. It needs to be practiced. We started with the king and all the people that came and didn't stay and just a sense in our

own lives that we know the ways each day we get lost in trance. I mean every one of us knows it and how much power and possibility there is, we know the ways is, if we just begin to on purpose say, okay, what matters? Before we enter a meeting, before we're with somebody where there's going to be a difficult conversation, right at the beginning of the day to set the day, like what matters today? One of my, the prayers that I offer most regularly in the mornings after I meditate is please teach me about kindness. Please teach me because there's something in me that just wants to keep learning about like,

oh, okay, this is a moment to pause, to get softer, to respond differently. That if we have that prayer to care, then we begin to pay attention to others in a different way. We start noticing our impact on others. Like we actually, and this is a really powerful one, if your intention is to live from love, to stop before you send an email and imagine that the email is written to you and reread it. Because we're usually stuck in our mentality and we don't get our impact on others. And yet we're always impacting or inter-impacting all the time. this is just a small example.

Well, have you pause and reread that email because ultimately it's so much more important that you send out a ripple of kindness, care, and understanding than something that will in any way create distance. So this is our inquiry. Do you know what's most important to you? Do you know right now what your intention is? and how can you remember it regularly?

Okay? So let's, we're going to practice together but I'd like to share with you this from Mary Oliver because closing your eyes if you will. She writes, before she writes this let me just give you, set it up. In this poem she's kneeling prayer-like in a field and contemplates with wonder a grasshopper who's gazing around with enormous, complicated eyes. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? We close, just listening to our hearts with patience. It may not be this moment, it may be some later moment today or tomorrow. But then we listen again and again and again. What is it that we most deeply care about? If you just had a short time before you're going to die, what would you most care about? If you're at the end of your life looking back, what would matter about today, about how you live the rest of today?

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.