Tara Brach - Refuge in the Wilderness – Pt 2 - Coming Home to Embodied Presence

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Refuge in the Wilderness - Pt2 – Coming Home to Embodied Presence - 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. Welcome. This is week two of two-part series called Refuge in the Wilderness and it's really unembodied presence coming awake in our bodies. and I recorded these talks a few years ago and if anything they're more relevant than ever in this increasingly online world we spend so much time in a virtual reality and yet at the end of life looking back the moments that mean the most are when we're feeling connected with our inner life with each other with the natural world when we're really present when we're awake.

So I hope as you listen and practice, you'll find yourself increasingly drawn to the intimacy of living in these senses, awake in this precious body. Okay, friends, may you enjoy. Namaste and welcome. Tonight is the second of a two-part series. You didn't have to be here for the first. They stand on their own, but you might want to listen to it. The title is refuge in the wilderness, the wilderness being nature, our senses, this body.

And so as you listen, you might keep inviting yourself back into what's right here, the aliveness right here. There's a classic story I've always loved of a novice monk in a monastery and he goes to the master. He's clearly been contemplating hard on something and he says, I need to know, please tell me, what happens after we die? And the head monk said, I don't know. And the novice got disturbed. He said, I thought you were a monk. And the response was, I am, but not a dead one.

Some of you were here when Ajumato was teaching on Saturday, and he described in Thailand how, when asked about what they're aware of, what the monastics do. When they're asked about mindfulness, they point to their heart. That it's not about thinking, it's really about a felt sense, a direct embodied experience of the life that's here. And this is where we feel things. In the Chinese script, the character for mindfulness is present heart,

which I really love. Isn't that beautiful? present heart. So, our mental activity, this kind of incessant inner dialogue that most of us are becoming aware of, fragmentation divides the world into kind of an abstract virtual reality. Serenar Sagina-Sargadatta says that the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. Yeah, I think that's so beautiful that we can see how our minds take us into a virtual realm and when we come into our bodies there's a kind of unifying that goes on and yet we leave regularly. So I'd like to begin early in this talk with a classic Zen story that I've shared before

that I feel helps to really focus attention on this process of, leaving and arriving again. And in this story, it focuses on a young girl named Senjo. She's an only child. And she and a neighbor, a young boy, Ocho, at a very early age, felt a real resonance, a connection. And even her father said, oh, you and Ocho, you'd make a great pair. He said it kind of jokingly, but she grew up to be a beautiful young woman and her father

found her a match, a suitable match from a couple of villages away, and I sat her down and told her that he had made the arrangements. And a nice young man and everything, she became immediately depressed and began to weep and was cast down and the word got passed around. And Ocho found out about it and he was heartbroken too. So dark, in the late dark hours of the evening, he got into a canoe, he planned just to leave. He couldn't stand to live with it. So he was boating away from the town and he saw a figure, a shadowy figure, and running it through the trees and it was Senjo. And she said,

I felt you leaving and I couldn't have you go without me. So she got into the boat and they boated downriver and they finally stopped and they got a plot of land and made a garden and worked the fields, built a house and had a couple of children. and life went on like this for several years. One day, he found her in the kitchen and she was crying and he asked her why she was weeping and she said, I miss our town, I miss my father, you know. And he said, me too, I feel the same way.

It's been a number of years. Let's go back and see if he'll re-embrace us and take us in. And so they did that. They packed up the boats and they put the children on the boat and kind of went up upriver. And they landed on the dock near to Sanjo's house, and Ocho decided he better go first, so he went to the door and he knocked and her father answered. And he said, oh father, I brought your daughter back with two fine grandchildren,

please forgive us for running away. And he said, he looked at him with really cold eyes and he said, he's astounded and angry. The father said, I don't know what girl you're talking about. Since the night you left, my daughter, Sanjo's been sick in bed, unable to speak. And he said, No, Joe said, oh, no, no, she's in the boat with your two grandchildren. Believe me, Father. And he sent a servant out because he couldn't even pay attention to this. He was too beyond belief. He said, you go see what's in the boat. And the servant went,

and sure enough, there was Sanjo with the two young children. He came running back to the house and saying, it's true, it's true. She's there with the children. And Father shook his head, and he strode into the bedroom where Sanjo was lying. Ocho's come back with another Senjo. And your two children, her eyes opened in a new way. They had not in five years, and she stood up as if walking in a dream, walked out the door and through the house, out front, down to the dock, and towards the dock.

And meanwhile, Sanjo is coming up in the other direction, and they embraced one another and became one. They embraced each other and she became free. So they returned to the father's home and they made a proper family and I don't know about lived happily ever after but life went on from there. So this is a classic Zen story and there's many dimensions to it. You know there's the dimensions of heartbreak and the dimensions of the grave choices that we make in our life and the levels of exile.

But I think in the most basic way, this is a story about when things feel like too much the way we leave. And we all do it. We do it when we're very, very young and we don't have the resources to deal with the shame or the fear or whatever's arising, the emotions that feel like too much. In some way we leave our bodies and leave the sight of the raw intensity and try to find ways to manage. It's a coping strategy. But this splitting off has deep consequences. When we're not in touch with the fears or the hurts, then we end up behaving in ways that actually

can cause injury to ourselves and others. So, the reality is that all of us leave some. We all have a kind of universal conditioning to get lost in thoughts in a virtual reality and kind of leave home. But if we're doing it regularly all the time, if we're unable to contact where the aliveness is and the difficulties and challenges and where the passions and the beauty are, the mystery, then we're not really able to live our life. So what happens when we leave regularly is our sense of who we are shrinks. And instead of resting in the wholeness of an embodied being, we become a kind of mental

self that's defined by either our geltz or our fears or addictions or whatever it is, but we get a very narrow identity and we live in that and we end up seeing others through that filter. What happens to us individually, it's a mirror reflection of what happens in the wider society where we sense an undercurrent of fear, of real insecurity, and because there's not a reckoning with, because there's not an opening to and being with and processing, the way it plays out is an addiction, in a place and an overconsuming, in an aggressing and in pushing some people down. I think right now one of my, one of the things I've been noticing and reading about more and more as many of you have, I know, is this national epidemic of opium abuse and

so many, so many people overdosing. Real dramatic rise in the depth from that. And so it's really uneven where it's happening. And it's soaring in areas such as the Rust Belt and South Bronx and the forgotten towns of New England. And these are places where people say they're lonelier and more insecure than ever, where there's a lack of meaning. And so there's a going into trance. And this is just an extreme societal version of it, this unbearable and tolerable experience, and then go into trance. In this case, using over. opiates. So all healing, and this is whether we're talking societal or in our personal lives, has the motif of reconnecting. There needs to be a reconnecting with the unlived life,

the suffering or the wounds that are within us, reconnecting with our whole body, reconnecting with each other, reconnecting with our earth. So we're going to explore for the remainder of class and the pathway of reconnecting in particular when we've left because it's really difficult. The last class talked about really different ways that we can come back into our body and be more awake. But I acknowledged as part of that that for many of us, the dissociating, the splitting has been for a long time and it's really, really deeply grooved habit. it's scary to start coming back. So I'd like to look at that together, but first name that

the tenacity of this body-mind split is really deep. And just to name a few different ways, on one level, just if you think of evolution, humans didn't get to the top of the food chain because of our powerful physiques. That wasn't it. You know, it was the cognition. I know there was one story of a teacher asking a bunch of fourth graders, you know, the purpose of the body and one response was, well, it's to carry around your head, you know. But think of it, this body is kind of this domain of vulnerability and when we feel threatened, we go into our mental control tower. You've noticed it when we're stressed or anxious, we just start speeding up trying to figure things out and planning and worrying and so on.

And that's for the major challenges, but even when we're in our just, our kind of everyday uneasiness about getting things done, we habitually don't stay with that uneasiness. We go into mental chatter, we overconsume, we have ways of distracting ourselves. Each one of us has our favorite strategies for leaving when it's uncomfortable. Some of us, I mean, it's so amazing nowadays if you're in a train station or an airport or a subway, the discomfort if you're not looking in a screen. It's the rarity. So we have ways of leaving.

story, a young medical doctor doing his residency in obstetrics. And he describes how embarrassed he was, he got really uncomfortable at first when he was, the first couple of years maybe performing female pelvic exams. And the way that he covered it up or left it was he had this habit of whistling and it was kind of unconscious but he'd whistle softly and that was his way of getting away. Well, he describes how one day a middle-aged, woman, he was performing the exam and she suddenly burst out laughing. So he got even more embarrassed and he said, you know, looked up from his work and he said, I'm sorry, was I tickling you? And she could barely respond because she had tears rolling down her face and laughing

started. She says, no, but what you were whistling was, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer weener. He didn't submit his name. So it's interesting. If you start monitoring yourself and just monitoring stress, with any sort of stress, there's an exit from the body. There's an exit to leave what's here. There's some escape activity and you'll notice if you catch yourself just caught in the normal worry planning, you know, figuring and you pause and check underneath, you'll find the hum, the biological hum of anxiety. We leave when we're anxious. Okay. That happened. across the board. It's exacerbated by really a lot of the religious views that got launched

from the Garden of Eden and onward where the body is considered to be this out-of-control domain and it's something dangerous, it's something lower, it's something that if we don't watch out, it's going to get us in major trouble. And so there's nothing trustworthy about the wilderness of being in the body. We're encouraged to transcend. I remember hearing a story about a little boy who was kind of messing around in the attic and he was looking at this old family Bible and out of it fell a pressed leaf. And he got really excited and he ran down to show his mother. He said, Mommy, Mommy, I found Adam's suit. So exacerbated by religions that basically mistrust women and mistrust the body because they are often merged, exacerbated as I've mentioned by the societies

that are driven by produce more, consume more. Produce more, consume more. There's a speediness that has us leave the moment because the body's living in the present moment. Leave the moment to be more, do more, get somewhere else. That's the message. We're on our way somewhere else. There's not enough time. And then it's exacerbated in our personal history to the degree, I like the language that there was severed belonging, to the degree that we did not have good attachment relationships with our parents, that there wasn't a real sense of being part of, of knowing that we were accepted and loved as we are.

And I'm not talking about perfect parenting, but I'm talking about good enough. so that there wasn't the message of you need to be different to be part of us. So for many, very early on, as happened with Senjo, something occurred and it might have been repeatedly that felt too much to be with. Some shaming, some ignoring or neglecting or abusing, whatever it was where our young self just be with that and how to develop some ways of leaving. And the coping strategies, you know, there are different ways our nervous system when it's overwhelmed, cuts off and tries to self-sude, anxious thinking, depersonalizing, numbing.

Often what would happen is we find strategies of leaving, of dissociating, but then there's a swing where we're either cut off and numb and way out there and virtual are completely possessed and swamped by the emotions that we've been avoiding, but no awareness around it. That swing is very common. So I'd like to step back then and just as a developmental model, you know, for looking at, because we're really talking about how do we leave the garden. You know, we leave the wilderness. And the way it helps me to think about it is, you know, a different interpretation of the

classic religious metaphors that we begin unconsciously embedded in the maternal matrix or in the earth or in our world. We're unconscious and we're embedded. And then as self-consciousness starts coming, we first identify the self as a body. We're very young, you know, age one, one and a half two. And then as our mind starts getting more complex and developed, we start increasingly identifying as a mental self that owns a body. Most of us would be in that category. And then that's not the end of the evolutionary story. There's actually a domain in the frontal cortex that correlates with mindfulness.

But we have the capacity become aware of that identification, open to a wider sense of awareness that sees the what we are, the beingness beyond just a body self or a mental self and can re-inhabit the body with awareness. And that is the gift of mindfulness. It lets us re-inhabit the garden, the whole garden. Okay. So the pathway of return, the practice that helps us wake up out of a limited identity and reconnect with the senses, mindfulness of the body means that in this moment, right now, Notice where your attention is. You might close your eyes for a moment.

Your attention might have been with some of the words or ideas I'm tossing around. The pathway of return coming back to the garden is to feel that you can bring your awareness to fill this bodily self, to feel from the inside out, the sensations, the vibrations, the pleasantness or the unpleasantness that's here, to stay, to stay some, And it's not just a gateway to presence of its feeling good. As Pema Chodrin puts it, this very body that we have that's sitting right here, right now

with its aches and its pleasures, is exactly what we need to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive. So the essential practice of awakening, is moving from the cocoon of familiar thoughts into this wilderness, this living body, moving from concepts and ideas and mental pictures, into the sense of what is happening right here? What are you aware of? Rumi says, step out of the tangle of fear thinking, flow down and down into widening rings of being. And the centerpiece of the practice is if we can come back into the body, we can start

sensing in the background this beingness. This is awareness that's here. That awakeness that even can perceive sensation. The beginning trick is to notice the difference between any thought and the wilderness right here. And you might experiment a little. little right now as you're reflecting by bringing your hand up in front of you into the air in front of you. Open your eyes and just look at your hand. Roll it around a little, see what you like or don't like. Maybe you have a ring you like or maybe you have wrinkles or skin that you don't like, age marks, maybe there's a coloring, maybe there's something about your nails you like. Just notice hand.

even mentally whisper a hand and then keep your hand up but close your eyes and begin gently moving the hand in front of you just back and forth slowly but now moving from the idea right into the awareness of the sensations itself feel from the inside out vibration ting engling, perhaps pulsing, our temperature. Notice if there's a center or a boundary to the experience. Notice the difference between any thought of hand and this living, vibrating experience right here, gently putting and resting hand back down in your lap. So the training is being able to show you.

shift from the virtual realm to a recognition of what's right here. One of the mantras that Ajum Samedo offers is, it's like this, that we put aside all the thoughts and ideas and just the thisness of what we call hand, this changing, moving constellation of sensation and vibration and the awareness that's right here noticing it. But the challenge is coming into the body when it's not just kind of neutral, usually it's pretty neutral in the handle, though some people have hurting hands, but often it's neutral but it's harder when you're coming into the body and what you find there is very unpleasant.

So there's degrees of how intolerable it is. We can train to come right into the body when it's tolerable, unpleasant but tolerable, what we find is that by learning to come and stay for a little bit, there becomes more and more space internally around what feels unpleasant and there's less of a fixation or a resistance that causes suffering. So I'll give you an example of this. We'll just do a brief practice of moving from virtual to the body when it's a little bit unpleasant. Again, you might close your eyes and let's just check this out together. Scanning your life today, yesterday, if you need to go back a few days, for some situation that

caused you some stress. Now, not to pick something that caused you the kind of stress that felt off the charts, but just something that felt difficult. Some anxiety, feel pressure. and be afraid you'd fall short and performing in some way, some relational edginess with someone. And start by presenting it to yourself as a story. You know, to see the movie of it, see the images or soundbites that go with it, with the situation. So you're telling yourself the story of what was going on.

You bring yourself to the most stressful juncture in the situation. and then as if you could shift your attention instead of looking at the movie screen or hearing the voices, as if you're making a U-turn come right into the body and sense how your body experiences that stressful situation. And let your only intention be to feel and breathe with whatever it's like. You might even let that mantra, it's like this. A clean, direct contact with your body's experience. If it's hard to be with, you might increase the kindness quotient. For some it helps put the hand on their heart or just to say it's okay or this belongs.

So you're breathing with it offering kindness but staying in your body. It's like this. Where do you feel it? The throat, the chest, the belly. Sense that there's a witnessing, an awareness that can include what you're what's here, just the way the ocean can include waves, feel them and yet you're not possessed by them, you're not identified by them, you're including the wilderness, feeling the aliveness, pleasant or unpleasant, you're here. I'm going to take a few full breaths, open your eyes. This is the heart of the practice.

when you're off, in the mental movie, when you're talking to yourself, and gently coming back, being with, breathing with, feeling what's in the body. Now, what if it feels like too much? It's not always wise to come into the body. Sometimes you can re-traumatize. You can actually get possessed by the emotions that are there and not actually serve healing. So there's a gradualness. The intention in the long run is to come back to the garden.

This is the way Alice Miller, the author and psychotherapist put it. She said, there's no way ultimately to avoid what's in the body. She says the truth about our childhood is stored in our body and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our convalued, our conditions manipulated, our conceptions confused and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bell for it is as incorruptible as a child who's still whole in spirit will accept no compromises or excuses and it will not stop tormenting us until

we stop evading the truth. So those are powerful words. It's basically saying if there's something to be felt that's going to keep on asking you feel it in some way or other. But there's wise ways to gradually do that. It's not like you have to jump off a cliff. Some of the wise ways is to just get more engaged gradually without going right into where the wounds are with embodiment. This is one rabbi who, he says, he's worked with the fears and wounds women and men have around body for many years. He says, in its wisest teachings, Judaism holds sexuality in the body as sacred

and recognizes that to abuse it, the body is to abuse what is divine. Now, after many years of being a rabbi and of healing, I've started learning yoga and movement and Jewish dances. I realize that the energy of the body is the energy of God. We have to value it. Everything comes through it. So, I start with this with the message from this rabbi and from Alice saying, we can't really avoid if we want to live fully. We have to be listening and contacting this living body if we want to heal, but there's

ways to go about it. We will begin to move towards the body if in some way we sense it as a source of healing, that it actually heals us to come into the body. So in that spirit I'd like to share with you a reading that helps us to tap into that realization that this very body that you're living with can be your source of freedom. So you might close your eyes as you're listening. This is an anonymous reading. It's been called the Felt Sense Prayer.

As you read, just feel yourself right here in this moment, I am the pain in your head, the knot in your stomach, the unspoken grief in your smile, I am your elevated blood pressure, your fear of challenge, your lack of trust, I'm your shortness of breath, your fragile low back, your bloated abdomen, your constant hunger. I am your symptoms, the causes of your concern. You tend to disown me, suppress me, ignore me, inflate me, coddle me, condemn me. You usually want me to go away immediately. More times than not, I'm only the most recent note of a long symphony, the most evident

branches of roots that have been challenged for seasons. But I implore you, I am a messenger with good news as disturbing. as I can be at times, I am wanting to guide you back to those tender places in yourself, the place where you can hold yourself with compassion and honesty. If you look beyond my appearance, you may find that I am a voice from your soul, calling to you from places deep within that seek your conscious alignment. I may ask you to alter your diet, get more sleep, exercise regularly, be more mindful, breathe more consciously.

I might encourage you to see a vaster reality and worry less about the day-to-day fluctuations of life. I may ask you to explore the bonds and the wounds of your relationships. I might have you laugh more, spend more time in nature, eat when you're hungry and less when pain or bored, spend time every day if only for a few minutes, being still. I am your friend, not your end. I have no desire to bring pain and suffering into your life. I am simply tugging at your sleeve too long immune to gentle nudges.

My charge is to energize you to listen to me with the sensitive ear and heart of a mother attending to her precious baby. You are a being so vast, so complex, with amazing capacities for self-regulation and healing. let me be one of the harbingers that lead you to the mysterious core of your being where kindness and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart. Let me be one of the harbingers that lead you to the mysterious core of your being where kindness and wisdom are naturally available when called upon with a sincere heart. So opening your eyes when you're ready.

So the beginning of returning to the garden is knowing it really is a garden that can be a source of awakening for us. And then the process is gradual. I'll share with you a story that I have in radical acceptance that it gives you a sense of the gradualness and how much support we sometimes need in coming back into the body. it's something that can require other people accompanying us, therapists, friends, keeping us company when it feels unsafe, and it can take many rounds of practice. In this story, a woman's adult daughter asked her to come into therapy with her, and in

therapy this woman found out that her ex-husband, her daughter's stepfather, had abused her when she was a teen. And this woman had been drinking and clueless. And so she went as anybody that's a parent would know, I mean the idea of having been inadvertently standing by as your child was abused, it was just intolerable. She went into a rage and went into shame and became suicidal. And she went to see a Jesuit priest who had been a teacher of hers in her college and told him what was going on and it was too much for her to be with. I mean, she had actually come

to classes, she knew about mindfulness, there's no way. And what he did was he took her hand in his and he drew a circle right at the center of her hand and he said, this is where you're living right now. It's a place of incredible, you know, horror and aversion and fear and anger and so on. He said, you'll have to be able to feel this. But first, he put his big hand over hers, he said, trust in this. This is really the mercy or the forgiving heart of the universe, the mercy of God. And he said, if you can remember and trust this and open to what's here, you'll discover a compassion and love you never knew was possible. So the message was, yes, you have to open into the body, but you need help. Remember

mercy, remember forgiveness. You need something large and beautiful to help you arrive again and again in this body. So her practice was just that. She would, all the waves that were so horrible of raw feeling would come up and she'd first, she'd remember his hand over hers and then gradually she felt a sense of just the space of loving presence, you know, a forgiving, merciful force in the universe and gradually that became her own. awakened heart holding herself. It took time so she could more and more open through the knots of rage and shame over and over again, till gradually she was not the ashamed and rageful mother but she was that really that space of compassionate care that could hold that

and her body again became alive and flowing. she could then be with her daughter in a different way, where she could actually hold a space for her daughter's suffering and they could connect. But she had to first come into her own embodiment, process what was in her body, to have that intimacy with her daughter. So we come in gradually and there are many ways to do it. There are practices you can do that help you to come into your body gently. One of them is the kind of breathing I sometimes introduce in the guided meditation.

We do a long, deep inbreath, about six counts and a long, full out breath, six counts. And that coherence breathing helps to soothe and quiet the sympathetic nervous system. You can put your hand on your heart when you're feeling a sense of agitation and there's actually a neural, neural cells around the heart that get activated during stress and the warm hand on the heart calms them down. It helps you come into your body. It helps to walk outside. There's so much research now on nature and how nature helps us come into our nature. It creates, it's a larger surrounding of the elements that help us reconnect with the elements within us. We come back to the garden gradually, but what matters is that our longing and intention to re-enter this

living body is there, it's conscious. Now, I'd like to end with just really looking at the gifts that happen when we reenter the wilderness. And one gift is aliveness. I mean, I have so many people talk to me and feel that they are skimming the surface of their life but not really living it. They're on the way to the finish line, but missing out, and not really feeling vibrant and awake and alive. And it's because of being dissociated. It's because our habit is to be lost in thought and we're not inhabiting our bodies. So one of the great gifts of this practice of moving from thoughts into the body is that

awakens our senses. we start becoming more sensitive to sound, taste, to the colors, they become more vivid, more nuanced, smells, fragrance. Eduardo Galliano writes, The church says the body is a sin. Science says the body is a machine. Advertising says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta. Okay, so one of the fruits is you get to feel your vitality again. Second fruit, you kind of heard this a bit in the story I told you about the woman and her daughter is that as we come into our body, we come into the region of our heart.

You can't feel love in a visceral way if it's abstract and mental. It's not until we learn to come back right here that the feeling of love has a sense of warmth, the felt sense of tenderness, of spaciousness, embodiment. One mother described that she said she felt like she was spending more time with her teenage son judging him and worrying about him than actually loving him. And so her training, her practices, whenever she was feeling worry or judgment, I asked her to, okay, that's your cue, come into your body. So she'd come into her body and she used her hand on her heart and I'd say, okay, what are you feeling? And it was fear. Okay, breathe with it,

feel it. And under the fear, she could sense this care. She just wanted him to be okay. Oh, breathe with that, feel that. It reconnected her with love. Many rounds, though. The patterning is really thick to be spending a lot of time and worrying. Come back to where love is. Another quick story of a woman whose father had Alzheimer's and she was described how busy she was trying to deal with all the logistics and with the residential center who was at and so on and she hadn't had time to grieve. And so, for her to come out of all the planning, we're invigoring and let herself open to the grief of what was happening, you know, the feeling of what was there and that reopened her to the loving

because grief always is a portal to loving. The poet Hafei says, please stay near to me, stay right near to me and Heves will spin you into love. right here, come into this body. So aliveness, more of a visceral sense of love. And then the last gift of coming into the wilderness is realizing truth. We cannot experience reality through our thoughts, their images, their soundbites, their representations, to be able to realize reality directly, we need to experience reality through our senses and discover the awareness that's always here in the background. That is the pathway, the portal, when you really open and you close your eyes and you feel

the aliveness that's here and you're not lost in thoughts, you can begin to sense behind that aliveness, the awareness, the awareness that is a stillness that's perceiving vibration, the silence that's listening. You begin to sense that silence and stillness, that mystery of awareness, which really is our deepest nature through this portal of direct aliveness. So we started with Senjo. with how we leave. And we'll end with a brief guided meditation on coming back into the wilderness as you become still

let your attention and your awareness fill your body. You might begin by noticing if there's any part of your body that wants to let go a little to loosen to soften. You might take a few full breaths to collect the attention and then awaken the senses. Listen.

Listen to the space that's around you, the soft sounds, listening in a global way, not just with your ears but with your whole awareness. Maybe you can detect what's called the sound of silence, that background, hum, sensing the space of awareness, that perceives the sound of silence, sensing the stillness that experiences this vibration and aliveness in the body right now. Can you sense that everything is changing, that nothing's holding still? Can you open entirely to this changing flow of aliveness?

Just to say yes to it, to let go into the river of the senses. Is there anything that's solid? Is there any center to experience? Any boundary? Is there any self in this world of sensation? You don't have to think about it. Just keep arriving more and more into this aliveness. It's right here.

It's like this. You might explore if it's possible just to let go a little more into the changing flow. moment to moment. The poet Dana Falls writes, Settle in the here and now. Reach down into the center where the world is not spinning and drink this holy peace. Feel relief flood into every cell.

Nothing to do. Nothing to be but what you are already. Nothing to receive but what flows effortlessly from the mystery. mystery into form, nothing to run from or run toward. Just this breath, awareness knowing itself as embodiment, just this breath, awareness waking up to truth. Namaste and thank you for your attention.