Tara Brach - Reflection: This Living Body - Our Portal to Freedom (2016-03-23)

Episode Date: March 26, 2016

Short Reflection: This Living Body - Our Portal to Freedom (2016-03-23) (12:15 min) - Our habit is to leave home - the aliveness of our body - and seek happiness through avoiding unpleasantness and chasing after pleasure. This short talk and reflection point to embodied presence as the gateway to genuine openheartedness and freedom. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks 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

The following reflection is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or reflections or to join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. I'd like to start with a mid-eastern story that I heard some time ago about a man who was falsely accused as a criminal and he's put in jail. And a friend came to visit and gave him a prayer rug. And he was really disappointed because he had wanted a hacksaw or some tools to help him get out.

But, you know, so he realized, okay, this is what I got, I might as well use it. So every day he'd kneel down and bow and pray. And he started to get more familiar with the pattern that was woven into the rug. And one day it struck him that the image in the rug was really the diagram of the lock that he could unlock to step into freedom. So, the pathway that frees us, the portal to freedom, is always right here. It's what we're standing on, it's this aliveness in our body that's right here. It's just what's going on.

And probably the biggest illusion in the world is that it's something down the road that we have to wait to learn and get and so on. Right here, the prayer rug right on. under our feet. And what's so interesting is when you consider it is that everything we experience, a sense of fear, a sense of joy, excitement, whatever, it's always registered in this living body. So if we want to enter reality, reality, true reality,

we absolutely have to experience aliveness in our body. It's the way. The Buddha said, it's through this fathom long body that we experience the whole universe. And Kabir put it this way. The God that I seek is within. As we begin to honor and tend to the body

in a present way, we actually increase our level of vitality and aliveness. I've seen people that come to a week-long retreats where we're over and over again coming back, feeling the life of the body, describe the awakening of the senses like seeing, going outside in the springing, seeing that new green of spring, that kind of lime yellow and saying, I could feel it in my body, you know, or hearing the sounds of the birds and saying

it was a sympathy. You know, you could just, wow, you know. And that's what's possible that these senses wake up. And you begin to get these nuanced sounds and tastes and so on. on. So the first fruit is we actually get to live more fully. We get to, and such a, I love exploring this particular theme in the spring because it's already, we're already kind of drawn to it and it brings it alive. So that's the first fruit, is that aliveness. The second fruit is that when we're embodied and feeling that aliveness and we bring the attention to the heart, the heart becomes an incredibly sensitive, sensitive space. So we're talking about the fruits here, and one fruits is a saliveness and the other is becoming

really tender, taking whatever portal, whatever's going on and through our bodies, finding that heart space that's tender. The third fruit I want to mention is the fruit of realization, of freedom. the fruit of wisdom of really seeing what's true. If we're avoiding reality, if we're in any way controlling, in any moment controlling what's going on, we can't experience reality. Any controlling and we're one step removed we're separate from, we've divided ourselves away.

But in the moments of embodiment, of opening to the sense of the form and sensation, we start discovering that space, that formless empty space it all arises from, and the love that suffuses that space, the awareness that suffuses that space. So we started by sensing that prayer out that it's actually right here, it's under us, that the illusion is we have to wait, we have to figure something out. We have to practice harder in another place for 30 days to whatever it is. And the reality is, is that any moment that you say, oh, right now, come back, right here, you can begin to sense that presence and that space that's really home. So I'd like to close with a brief meditation where we can just taste the fruits of embodied presence.

As you close your eyes and let yourself become still, just briefly scan through your body and sense any part of your body that wants to let go, wants to soften or relax a little right now. You might soften the eyes. There's these little micro-muscles around the eyes that tighten when there's thinking and when we soften them it helps to relax the mind open. You might sense a slight smile at the mouth. You might let the shoulders drop away from the neck and just soften there. Softening the hands.

Let the belly be soft so you can let this next breath be received in a softening belly, this breath. And again, just relax your heart. Sense you can smile into your heart not to get rid of anything but to create the space that has a room. Let that sense of space and aliveness spread through your heart. your whole body so you can feel this field of sensation, this living body. Points of light in the night sky. Just let everything happen.

Sense is awake. You might notice that everything is changing. Nothing's holding still. Sense what it means to just open and surrender to the changing flow. Just let it happen. Very deep yes. A very deep yes to the life that's living through you. Even when you feel you've surrendered and opened, you can sense an even deeper possibility

of allowing and surrendering, not opposing anything, letting it live through you and sensing the space that this aliveness is suspended in, playing out in, moving through the space between the cells, the interior space that sensations emerge from. the space that surrounds us, sense that it's filled with the light of awareness, and to bring this living, awake awareness to the level of the heart now. And in a very particular way in this human life, to let yourself bring to mind someone you care about, and sense how this heart space holds and experiences a dear one,

to sense this being's goodness, feel the sensitivity and tenderness of the heart, aware, registering, sense the unconditional accepting presence. This is the fearless heart that's got room for life, that's free to love, that's free to include all of life in the heart. Since this heart space wide, wide open, including this whole world, all living beings.

We close in a simple way with feeling the prayer of the heart. May we each be blessed to come home into this aliveness and into the awareness, the loving awareness, that's really our essence. May we live from loving awareness.

May this loving awareness be inhabited expressed in a way that brings healing and peace to our world. Namaste and thank you.