Tara Brach - Refuge in the Wilderness - Part 1

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Refuge in the Wilderness - Part 1 - When we live from our mental control towers, we are in a trance that confines our life. These two talks look at the primary ways we are conditioned to leave embodied presence, and the consequence of unlived life—being cut off from our vitality, intelligence and compassion. We then explore the teachings and practices that guide us to reconnect to our senses, and the sacred presence that underlies all lived experience.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste friends. Welcome and thank you for being with us. As some of you may know, I was introduced to meditation in college. It was almost five decades ago and one of the most central teachings, the one that arises over and over again is that we heal and awaken through an embodied mindfulness. We awaken through our bodies. And the reason I keep re-encountering is there's such a strong trance.

It's very deep in our culture. One teacher was asked to describe modern society and his response was, lost in thought. You might have noticed. We spend a huge amount of time in that virtual reality of our mind. James Joyce has that famous line, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. So if we look back on today, you know, how much really embodied presence awake in our senses.

And yet if we think of the moments that most matter to us, you know, feeling our hearts open, feelings of wonder, gratitude, aliveness. We're experiencing our body. So, this week and next, I've selected two favorite talks from the archives that invite us to explore this mystery and aliveness and the realization that arises as we wake up through our bodies. May you find benefit. Namaste and welcome. I got an email from a friend of mine in the community here in Washington.

She's a social activist, she's done a lot of wonderful anti-racism work and also a teacher and a healer. And she described in her email how she was reconnecting with her senses, her sensuality, her body, her aliveness and that this was the heart of her practice of self-care for the season. She writes, My showers are hotter and longer. My foods are made slower and are hardier.

My sleep is extended and deeper. I'm also trying to touch my own body more with scrubs, butter, and oils. I'm much more responsive to my body's needs than I have been in a long time. We need to be awake in our bodies, to be awake in our hearts, to really take care of ourselves and others,

and really to celebrate life. We need to be here in our senses. One woman describes who's teaching art at a college campus, her daughter asked her what she did, and a seven-year-old daughter, and she said, well, I teach art. And her daughter looked at her incredulously, and she said, you know, you mean they don't know how to draw? And I thought that was perfect.

Do you mean they forgot? our bodies know how to dance and sing and to give birth and to make love and to die. Our bodies know how to do all of this, to mourn, to celebrate. And we leave our bodies regularly. John O'Donohue writes, Our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. So this class and the next, I'd really like to explore coming home to our senses and it's

a theme I loop back to again and again because in my own life and pretty much everyone I know on the path it's the home base. It's like no matter what practice we think we're doing and I mean it doesn't matter what religion, what particular style of meditation, if we're not awake in these bodies, we're not going to be able to respond to our world with love, with compassion, with intelligence, with wholeheartedness. So I thought I'd begin with an article that came out a couple of years ago that I liked called, Hurry Up, Get More Done, and Die. And it's written by Mark Morford, who's a San Francisco columnist.

He goes, your terrifying word of the day is, microtasking. And it comes by way of a relatively humble, ostensibly helpful article I read via one of those little blogs that exist to tell you a million ways to tweak and hack your entire existence, to gain maximum productivity, efficiency, and improved overall time management because, well, if that's not the true meaning of life, of this manic American life, what is? The advice was horrifyingly simple. When you find yourself pausing in between normal, projects and work tasks for anything more than, say, 30 seconds, why not take those tiny moments and, well, do more things?

I mean, you're just sort of sitting there, right? What sort of things? Fast things, little things. Otherwise, inconsequential things you don't care about otherwise, like clearing your junk mail, refilling the stapler, changing your voicemail message, retweeting somebody's Twitter blip. We are, by and large, utterly terrified of silence, still not. spaciousness, the doing of nothing so as to feel the totality of everything. Meditation for most is disquieting and strange.

Deep quiet feels weird and dangerous. Avoid aching to be filled. The internet has us convinced that the world is a roaring fire hose of urgent information and if you can't swallow it all, well, something must be wrong with you. In any 48-hour period in 2010 says a stunning bit of information by the Atlantic, more data was created than has been created by all humanity in the last 30,000 years. 48 hours, 30,000 years. By the year 2020, that same amount of data will be created in a single hour.

Go ahead, swallow, hard. It is no longer possible to sit quietly on the day, sit quietly on the park bench without checking your Facebook feed, chatting with Siri, and waving to the CCTV cameras. It's no longer possible to be astonished at the wonder of your footfalls along the farthest path and not to feel the urge to check email. Find the nearest Starbucks. Hipsomatic, the hill out of that beautiful fallen tree. You cannot just sit in your car along a quiet country road without the GPS beeping that you took a wrong turn

as one star politely blows up your car. How easily we forget. Time expands, time contracts. Work will swell or diminish to fill a given space. You can do ten things in an hour or one thing in ten. You can go to Spirit Rock Meditation Center for two solid weeks and do absolutely nothing but wander the grounds in silence for 12 hours a day. And time will look at you like you're utterly insane as your breath

and body thank you for all eternity. You can conversely microtash until your heart implodes and time will merely laugh and snort and find someone else to destroy. Pretty heavy, right? What it's really saying. And it points to what we often describe as a trance and the meaning of trance is that living in a kind of fragment or sliver of reality, it's a torquence, it's a torquence sliver where we're disconnected from the whole. We're in a virtual reality, living in the symbols and representations and stories of our mind, not in our bodies, not in our senses. I love the way John O'Donohue put it, he says, what have we done with our wildness? We're so busy, he says, managing our life that we cover over this great mystery we're involved with. Well, what has we

What happens when we begin to come back home to our senses is we actually are opening to that mystery. I mean, you might check right now and sense, are you aware of the sensations in your hands? Can you feel the sensations in your feet, in your chest, in your belly? Today, this another beautiful day down here in the DC area, did you feel the air on your cheek? or smell of fragrance, or hear the wood thrush. Did you listen to another person and kind of sense into what might be going on for them? This is the magic of aliveness when we're actually inhabiting our body with awareness. This kind of engagement.

And what we know is, and this is for most of you that have had some exposure to meditation, whether it's small or even practicing for years, What we quickly find out is that we have deep, deep conditioning to exit, to leave that embodiment, that sense of the sensations and aliveness that's right here, to leave over and over again. It's a real challenge to stay. It's rare that we surrender into the changing flow, that we let the life live through us. usually somewhere else. I mean you might want to check again, just close your eyes for a moment, just so we anchor this

and what's going on. And I invite you to ask a simple question, what is between me and being at home in my body in this moment? Am I here? Is my awareness filling my hands or am I just aware of having hands? Entering the body in the senses is entering the wilderness. It's a realm that's changing, raw, intense, sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, it's out of control.

Can you feel the vibrations of aliveness in you? Can you feel your heart? Can you sense the mystery of really letting go, the mystery that appears when you let go into this flow of aliveness? What could be more amazing? And yet, as Morford indicates, silence, this presence, this non-doing, is really makes us uneasy. We tend to leave.

That's the habit. It's because the doing self is out of a job. If you'd like, you can open your eyes or if you'd like to keep reconnecting over and over again as you listen and reflect this evening, keep coming back to your senses. So part of waking up is realizing how much we leave and not to judge it, not to make ourselves wrong for it. It's a deep pervasive conditioning. And our children are leaving earlier and earlier, which is, you know, many of you know, they're

indoors, it's five to six hours a day in front of a screen for the average child in the United States, which is scary. The story of a little boy who proudly announces in kindergarten this cat had kittens. He says, three females and three males. And then some of the kids or the teachers said, well how'd you know? And he said, oh, my father turned her over, the label is written on the inside. Well, how much connected are our kids with living and dying and nature? I've heard that our children are outside 50% less than prior generation.

The obesity rate in children has tripled since 1980. Tripled. I say this because it's scary to sense a whole generation less connected to the aliveness of the world because it really has to do with less connected to this living embodiment and therefore going to be less attuned. So, what are the signals of trance? How do we see it in our life? Because really our purpose in reflecting is can we deepen our commitment to waking up from

trance and coming back to this mystery and aliveness that's here? And one of the big signs of trance is obsessive thinking. And I won't do a hand raise on this one because I know, I know. you know, the future, the past, a kind of ongoing commentary, when we're thinking and when we're thinking obsessively, we've lost contact with our senses. Check it out when you're meditating and you've noticed you've been lost in thought.

Were you aware of the sounds that are right here? Were you aware of the sensations in your hands, your belly, your heart? No, we leave. So, there's repeating visitors when we're in obsessive thinking and we start to get familiar with them, our worrying and our planning and our figuring out. I mean, how often are we preparing for what's around the corner with some anxiety, are trying to figure out what's dangerous, or with health stuff, how to fix something, fix our bodies? One of my favorite little essays is the Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart

attacks and the British are the Americans. The French eat a lot of fat and they also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British are Americans. Now the Japanese drink very little red wine and they suffer fewer heart attacks than the British and Americans. The Italians drink huge amounts of red wine and they also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British and Americans. You're getting the idea. The Germans drink a lot of beers, they suffer fewer hard. It goes on and on and on. The message or conclusion is eat and drink what you like. It's speaking English that kills you. So, obsessive thinking, we're gone, we leave our senses, we leave our aliveness, judgment. Judgment's another big one.

How many moments in some ways are mind computing that you're wrong, you're bad, you're falling short, you should be different, or I'm wrong, I'm bad, I should be different, or something's wrong, should be different. Many, many moments. And in those moments, we're not attending to the life that's right here now. As I always say, should is a major flag if you're trying to wake up out of trance. Third way I'll mention distracting and numbing ourselves. We have behaviors that we use to get away from the rawness that's right here.

And whether it's misusing and abusing food or drink or drugs are being online the way we are addicted to being online. We're leaving ourselves. And then the fourth way I want to mention is just the sheer degree of speed. Just notice, even as you're moving around your house, how much there's kind of a push to do things faster. There's a sense of in some way we don't have enough time. How many of you have noticed that, that don't have enough time syndrome? Can I see by...

Okay, most of us are together on that one. need to get more done. You know, at retreats, at meditation retreats, we explore mindful walking and invite people to slow it down some. And I've noticed that when I walk half as fast, I notice twice as much. It's a trance, the pace that we put ourselves at. One woman got a diagnosis of, I think it was stage four breast cancer, and was told she had a year to live, and she had a two-year-old son.

And her mantra became, I have no time to rush. And I think that if we all took that one on, because, you know, who knows? Even if we have not one year, but even if we have 20 years, if we're rushing through them, it's the same effect. We get to the finish line and what happens? we've skimmed over the surface of life. No time to rush. Okay, so our basic ways of trying to control experience,

trying to manage our lives, as John O'Donohue says, and we cover over the mystery by we leave, we obsess, you know, we judge, we distract, we rush. And in those moments of doing that, We've disconnected from that wholeness that really is where our freedom is. So the consequence, one consequence that's at the core, is that compassion requires embodiment. If we hear the news and we're not awake in our bodies and awake in our hearts, we will have an abstract compassion.

We'll hear about the famine that's still in Sudan and go, oh, how terrible. But if we're in our bodies and we actually consent into real people struggling for their lives, our heart gets tender. We start caring. We have to be in our bodies to care. We have to be in our bodies so that when someone else is having trouble, we can actually resonate with it. And there's literally a neuro-nexus of, it includes mirror neurons and other parts of this kind of social networking in our brain that's able to attune that doesn't get

activated unless we're fully here. And you know it, you know, I can speak for myself, when I'm busy, when I'm on my way somewhere else, my heart is not responding tenderly to what's right in front of me. We need to be embodied. In order to be intelligent, to touch our natural wisdom, we have to be embodied. We have to be here so we can see clearly what's right here. We can't see the life that's here if we're off in ideas about things. One of my favorite myths from the King Arthur legends,

Smith of Percival, one of the knights, comes upon what's called a waste. And in the wasteland, people are basically in a trance. And the king's in a trance. And the whole place is basically the land is not thriving. Everything's dying away. The king is dying. And it's because people in that trance have forgotten their connections with their body

and with each other and with the earth. It creates a wasteland. And so that makes me think of our world. and it makes me think of if our children are watching in front of a screen for six hours a day and if we're in front of screens and we're not connected to our bodies, how able will we be and are we able to be to respond to the crisis of our earth? How can we be good stewards? I mean, most of us have noted that the greatest collective threat to humanity

is the destroying of our larger body. You know, the land, the air, the water. You know, read in the papers this week, the rising level of carbon dioxide, and you see videos of miles of ice sheets melting. It's our shared body, you know, with getting toxic and bloating and dying off. And how come such a delayed response?

and we get it that, you know, we look at the current regression really, the rollbacks, you know, of regulations and defunding agencies that monitor what's happening and we say, you know, how come, how could we be in such denial? And it's possible because we live disconnected from our natural belonging. If you're outside and in love with nature, you will try to save nature because it's not other than Does that make sense? It's similar with each other. If we're awake in our bodies and hearts and attuning to each other,

we will not do things that cause injury. It's not just compassion that we lose touch with when we're in a trance. It doesn't just cut off the suffering from our awareness. It also cuts off the beauty. Some of you might remember this from 2007 right here in Washington, D.C., that on a cold January morning, a man with a violin played six pieces of Bach in a subway for 45 minutes. And during that time, I think about 2,000 people crossed through the station. Most of them were on their way to work.

And he played continuously, and only six people stopped for a short while, a little bit of money. Maybe I think $32 totally. The only people that really stopped and listened were children, but then their parents kind of rushed them along. So he finished playing and silence took over, and no one noticed, nobody applauded, and no one knew that the violinist was Joshua Bell. And that, you know, he was one of the greatest musicians in the world.

He was playing one of the most intricate pieces ever written on a violin worth $3.5 million, two days before he had been at a sold-out theater in Boston, seats averaging $100 a seat. So this is a true story and I think it's one of the best social science experiments that I've heard in history. It was done by the Washington Post having him play incognito in a metro station. And the question was, in a commonplace environment, at an inappropriate hour, doesn't

match when you're going to a concert. Can we perceive beauty? and we stop to appreciate it. And if we don't have the moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, what else are we missing in our lives? So this is why we're reflecting on coming back home to our senses, because if we're not here in our senses, if we're often a trance, we miss our appointment with life. And that wasn't my line, I can't remember who said it.

But we miss out. I mean, you might consider for yourself for a moment and this is a kind of inner reflection some life experience that's really, really been precious to you. Might be one that happens now and then, but something that you really cherish, maybe an intimate moment with others, or maybe it's a moment of awe when you're beholding beauty, or maybe it's something creative, or maybe it's when you're engaged in healing with another person, some way of serving. What are the moments that if you were looking back at the end of the life, you'd really say,

wow, this was being fully alive in these moments, this had magic. And notice in those moments are you connected to your senses? Are you awake in your body and heart? Again, if you'd like to keep your eyes closed, it's fine. I remember for myself one of the first conscious moments that I said, wow, this is what sacredness is. And I was a junior in college and I had just done a yoga and meditation class. And we did a lot in the body and I was feeling awake in my body and it was spring and

I was walking back to my apartment, you know, fruit trees were blossoming, I could smell the scent of the trees and feel this gentle breeze on my skin and I just stopped for a moment. And I realized that my body and my mind were in the same place at the same time. Now, how simple does that sound? My body and my mind were at the same place at the same time. And in that, it's like in that space there was a sense of the sacred. It didn't matter the particulars, whether in the darkening sky I was seeing the silhouette of branches or what the smell was, it was the quality of presence.

It was a kind of sacred presence. Kabir talks about it this way. Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pines. mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. The God whom I love is inside. So our pathway to the sacred is through the aliveness that's right here. Carl Young describes the suffering of being cut off from this aliveness and from the sacred in more psychological terms.

And the way he puts it is this, he says, one of the greatest influences on their offspring and on themselves are the unlived life of the parents. So when we are cut off, when we're not living the life that's here, it affects our own capacity for happiness, for lovingfully, and it affects the people around us, the unlived life of the parent. Now, in some ways that might mean the unlived life means I didn't pursue music and I really wanted to.

But there's other levels. It's like I never really opened to the fear that was keeping me so small. I never opened to that squeeze of unworthiness that stopped me from really connecting with the world, or to the passion and the longing that was here. I never opened to my love of life, unlived life. I never opened to the spirit that was just manifesting through this body. So that's what trance means. Trans means that were cut off from the life that's here in its wholeness and its fullness. And you can check your own life and senses.

I've talked to so many people who have a kind of sense of disappointment in how their life's going, that it feels thinner than they had imagined or wanted. And that might not be the exact language, but it has that sense. A kind of disappointment, like missing something, like there has been some skimming the surface,

there's some intuition of living on automatic, having a lot of swaths of the lot swaths of life actually on automatic, on our way somewhere else. So there's this important inquiry because there's a way in which we're trying to get away from the moment and a way in which we know the moment is our portal to being fully alive. And we're trying to get away because there's something that we're uneasy about. The question I love is, what are you unwilling to feel right now? Because there's an edginess. It's like when we're coming back into our body, some of the layers we have to live through

are uneasy. That's okay if we're willing because we find in that willingness a quality of aliveness and presence and tenderness that's really home. But we have to be willing to be with the uneasiness. Does that make sense to you? Okay. So there's a convergence in Buddhist psychology and Western psychology that really points to this, that says really our suffering comes from anything that's outside of our awareness.

And when we're disconnected from our senses, the world of our senses, we're disconnected from really the ground of our aliveness. So I want to circle around and say that one of the main ways we go to the way we go to the off and trance is we have this kind of anxious thinking that's always trying to figure out what's going on and figure out how we can be more comfortable or get something more done or in some way protect ourselves. Carlos Costagnano put it this way, he said, you talk to yourself too much, you know. That constant incessant inner dialogue trying to figure things out keeps us from our senses.

And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't take time to plan and figure and analyze and contemplate. It just means not to overdo it so much. This is Choggyam Trunkpa, a Tibetan teacher. He says, as long as we are trying to figure out how we can escape from our present situation, we can't notice much about it. Only when we feel that this is it, this is how it is right now. without any clutching towards something different, will our intelligence really come alive?

Now this is an important understanding that our trance is always trying to make things different, try to have something to be better, try to avoid what can go wrong. And what he's saying is, it's only when we say, this is how it is right now, that we can come into an authentic presence with it's just when we can come into an authentic presence, with the moment and discover the wisdom that comes when we're contacting what's here. Otherwise we're cut off from our intuition and our intelligence. You know, I saw this really clearly with a young woman I was working with some years ago. We're exploring how she might navigate this new relationship she was in.

And she told me she'd made so many mistakes in the past that she didn't feel like she could trust her intuition. So we started to investigate kind of the patterning and what we found out was in much of the time in the past she'd get involved with somebody and she was spending most of her moments trying to figure out what was really going on, running stories about how she should act or what interpreting how the person she was with, what was behind what they were doing, I'm trying to sense how really the best response for things were, judging, she was living in that trance. So what we started practicing was recognizing the storyline about analyzing the relationship and coming back into her body, actually checking with her body

as to how things were. And what she'd find a lot in her body habitually was insecurity and anxiety. Because if you pause in the middle of a trance and you say what's going on in here, very often you'll find the anxiety that was driving the trance. That's okay. Hang in there. Because if you stay with the anxiety,

you'll start discovering the presence that's much deeper. And so for her, she opened to the anxiety that was there. She brought it recognizing and allowing it to be there. and she just started using the language, this belongs. Like not to make it wrong. Because you see, if we make our anxiety wrong, we can't come into relationship with it and there's no healing. But if we say, oh, this is another wave in the ocean, this belongs,

then we can actually bring an authentic presence to what's there and discover a larger space of who we are. So she just said this belongs and bring compassion to it. She also started seeing there was excitement there and that she sensed some possibility and sense feeling enliven. And then she was able to start bringing her partner into awareness because she's much more embodied and sensing his insecurities too. And then being able to start naming what was going on in communication from a more embodied

place, they opened up a relationship that was much more real and intimate than what she had experienced before and what changed. She just kept stepping out of the trance that creates a division between us and others, contacted her body and had the courage to stay with what was there. And in that staying, she had that quality of presence she could communicate from a different place. So, in a way, the teaching is that reality, you know, our senses, what they're experiencing, is a true refuge. If you're caught, you're confused, you're replaying old patterns, come right into the moment,

this breath, this body, these feelings. When we do, we start waking up our compassion, and we also start waking up the part of us like in her that was feeling possibility and excitement. I love this story from Maurice Sendak. He says, once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it, I loved it. I answer all my children's letters, sometimes very hastily,

but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a wild thing on it. I wrote, Dear Jim, I loved your card. Then I got a letter back from his mother. said, Jim loved your card so much, he ate it. That to me was one of the highest compliments I'd ever received. He didn't care it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it. So if we step back a little, trance exists because we're in some way trying to exit the present moment. It feels too intense, too unfamiliar, too scary, too

profound, to whatever. And so we try to manage our life. We go into our mental control tower and we try to operate from there and we obsess and we do all the things I've named. As long as we do that, there's going to be unlived life. As long as we do that, we're not going to have contact with our body and therefore the parts of our brain that allows us to be empathetic,

to be compassionate, and to celebrate. So we intuit, most of us intuit that the way home is we need to come back, we need to be here. And it takes practice because the patterning is so deep. We've been kind of resisting life for so long. Ticknod Han has, you know, there's, I think through one of the websites that sells things related Ticknod Han, there's this bone-shaped tag on a cord that you wear around your neck and it says, sit, stay, heal. Just stay. One of my friends, Buddhist teacher West Nisker puts it this way. After years of meditation practice, one of the most significant changes in my life has been

my relationship to my mind. We're still living together, of course, and we remain friends, but my mind and I are no longer codependent. I'm slowly but surely gaining my freedom. So this is the heart of our path here is that we're learning to come back home into this field of aliveness here and stay even though it's uncomfortable. Mariah Mountain Dreamer puts it this way. She says, I am learning to befriend restlessness, to spend fewer moments sleepwalking are giving into continuous movement disguised as productive activity, learning not to resist by collapsing into endless distraction and dissatisfaction. So many shiny objects disappoint.

I am learning to ground in the scent of here, the taste of what is, the soft sound of my breathing, the color and texture of landscapes inner and outer. After all these years of longing, I am learning to be here. So again, we pause because the gateway to hear is the pause. Take a moment and notice for yourself with this invitation to come home into the wildness of this embodied being what your pathway is. What helps you to really connect with the aliveness that's here? Does it help you to feel your hands and soften in your hands and to sense the tingling

that's there? Does it help you to soften the whole atmosphere of presence with a smile, a slight smile? Does it help you to take a few full breaths, the grounds of everything we cherish? of healing, wisdom, love is in our capacity for presence right here. You might stay with your body, stay with your heart, if you'd like to open your eyes, you can or not. In one story, going around about a four-year-old child, his next-door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had lost his wife and the little boy noticed

The man was outside and was porch crying and he went into the yard and he climbed him to his lap and just sat there. And his mother looked over and saw her son and the old man sitting together. And when the child came home, the mom asked what it was, he said to the neighbor and he replied, I didn't say anything, mommy. I just helped him to cry. It's so rare that we don't have an agenda of fixing or what we think we should be. or how another should be, but instead are just inhabiting our being and offering that kind of presence. It's like in that inhabiting presence, real spirit shines through. So I began by describing this social activist friend of mine who's learning self-care by coming back to her senses.

and I've seen so many through the decades in whatever domain, whether it's immersed in family or immersed in activism or academia or healing or whatever it is, find that it's by coming back again and again, courageously, persistently, regularly, learning to be in the life that's right here that actually deepened their capacity to serve and live. and whatever field they were in. It's like this wildness, the wilderness, is our nature. We need to keep coming home to it.

Now the challenge, as I've been alluding to, is that the trance, the leaving, comes out of fear. And in our next class I'm going to be exploring more, well, how do you come back when it's scary to come back? Because for some of us, especially if there have been a lot of, of wounding, early childhood wounding, especially if we've had a lot of wounding through the culture, the society we're in, it feels dangerous to be here. So I want to name that and acknowledge that and know that it takes a very gentle, gradual

entry, often it takes support, that it's not a judgment. If you've been listening and thinking, well, I live from here up, it's very hard for me to even feel my body, it's not your fault. I mean, that is our instinctive response when something feels too much. So, the first response is to totally accept, embrace, and forgive that. It doesn't mean it's the end of the story for us. It just means we begin by recognize, okay, I go off in a trance because I had some experiences that made it way too hard to live here. And, we have the capacity to heal and retrain our attention in a way that we can gradually re-embody this life.

We can gradually re-inhabit our moments. That's what's possible. So I'd like to, in that spirit, a kind of gentle return into the wilderness as a closing meditation. and just to invite you to take a moment to find a way of sitting that's comfortable. This is what I consider an applied practice, where you can, through the day, do a mini version of it when you find yourself speeding along or caught in judgment or obsessing.

And you might even right now as you're reflecting, scan your life and sense a situation where you know you get into a much more small mind, place where you get hooked in some way, whether it's racing towards a deadline and knowing that your very speediness makes you inaccessible to others, are getting caught in judgment, our anxious circling of worry in the mind. You might think of a situation where arises repeatedly where this is the case and it helps to visualize the place, whoever else is around, and know that in the moment you may only be able to touch in for just a brief window into awakeness and into your senses.

But even that helps you reconnect with your heart. So right now, sensing that situation and letting there be a fly to you. Just identifying a flag that says, oh, okay, I'm caught, there's a trance going on. I'm not really living in my wholeness of being. Just imagine pausing, imagine pausing and taking some moments to recognize, okay, been off, been reactive. Just allow that to be there. And then sense what's going on inside you. This is really moving from the head back into the body and the heart. What's going on inside you underneath the worry thoughts or the speediness?

Maybe you can sense where fear lives in the chest or there's some sort of a tightness in the belly, clutching at the throat, and just breathe with what's here. Breathe and breathe kindly with it. as a way of keeping yourself company, if it helps you to put your hand on your heart, just feel yourself right here. You might even sense a slight smile as a way to send a message of relax, be at ease. Let whatever's going on inside you know it belongs. It's just part of the weather of the moment.

So you're not trying to make it go away. You're just offering your presence. awake, in your senses, in your body, with your heart. Just notice the possibility of the shift you can experience from the harried person or the victimized person or the speedy person, whatever it is, to this presence that's right here. Sense the presence that's right here and you might drop all ideas of the situation or anything else, let that all recede into the background so that you're here right here in this moment. See if you can relax with the life that's right here. Radical direct contact,

opening to and relaxing with the changing experience of life, feeling the energy where it's strong in your body, feeling your heart, sensing the sounds and the space around you, and sensing in the background, that presence, that sacred presence that includes this changing life, that lives through these forms. It's relaxing back and listening as we close this with a poem from Mary Oliver. The spirit likes to dress up like this, 10 fingers, 10 toes, shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morning, in the blue branches. of the world. It could float, of course, but would rather plumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body, lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids.

It needs the body's world, instinct and imagination, and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility, to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns, where no one is. So it enters us. In the morning shines from root comfort like a stitch of lightning and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star. Spirit likes to dress up like this. 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.