Tara Brach - Relating Wisely to "Wanting Mind"

Episode Date: May 12, 2010

2010-05-12 - While desire is intrinsic to life, it can contract into the craving that traps us in suffering. This talk explores how we seek happiness yet become habituated to false refuges--substitutes like over- consuming food, dependent relationships, approval, achieving--that can never bring happiness. Our freedom becomes possible when we forgive the ways we get hooked, and offer a deep, mindful attention to the energies of craving and clinging.

I'd like to start tonight's talk with a story that I shared a few years ago here, and I really love it. And in this story, there's an elderly king who's looking for an heir, and he's a very democratic kind of guy. And he invites everybody in the whole entire kingdom who might be interested to come and be interviewed. And he's very gracious and welcomes and all these different people that come. And before he interviews them, he gives them some time and makes the palace baths available so they can be clean. He wants to be real egalitarian. And so he gives them dressing rooms to choose whatever they'd want to wear

and with great cases of jewels that the women can choose from and lavish array. And then he wants to feed them well. So there's this banquet that he has with all delicacies and music and dancing. And he's sitting up in his chambers kind of waiting for, the first to come in, hearing the merriment below, and hours pass. And nobody comes up to be interviewed. And finally, he asks his counselor, he's kind of depressed, saying, what's happening?

And the counselor says, Your Majesty, now they're all gone. And when they descended downstairs, there's all the litter from the party, and, you know, food's gone, the silverware's gone, and the place has kind of been emptied out, and the people have gone. and that's it. Nobody interviewed with the king. They forgot why they came. Now I suspect everyone here has a sense of what the Dharma teaching is in this one.

But if we really look at our lives, we spend a lot of time trying to get what we want, trying to meet what we think are our needs. and in the process we forget what most matters. We forget what we've come here for. In a sense, we forget what I sometimes think of as our birthright, which doesn't mean we fulfill our birthright, but we all have this birthright of realizing

and living from the fullness of what we are. Meeting the king is really meeting our own awakened nature you know, and living from that, and that's our potential. But we forget what matters. We forget the loving presence that we really long for and get sidetracked and spend days and hours and decades. I think it was the row that said we spend our life fishing only to find out that maybe it wasn't fish we were after.

And so if we look at our lives, then we'll be doing this a bit tonight, just to sense how many moments instead of presence, instead of being here for whether it's each other or the spring or whatever's going on. In some way we're on our way

to try to make something happen, get something, make something different. Most of the time we're trying to check things off the list. That's one of our biggest wants is to check things off the list. Or we're wanting to go online and connect with something there. eat another portion of something

or get someone's approval for something or whatever. And in a sense, we're postponing. We're living as if, well, once I do this, this, and this, then I'll get down to really being here for this life. We're postponing. So tonight I want to talk about perhaps most central of all the Buddhist teachings,

which is really that our liberation and our happiness comes in the moments of non-clinging when we're not chasing after anything, trying to get something, trying to make anything different. Non-clinging.

That underneath that teaching is that what we long for is already here. And, you know, I always feel like the most important teachings are the ones we absolutely forget most regularly. And one of them is that in any moment that we're caught up in wanting, wanting something more or different. In those moments, the very nature of being caught up and wanting makes us farther and farther from really being gratified, really

finding what we long for. It's, we're wanting is taking us away from the very place that our happiness, our love, our freedom can be found. So we'll explore, really how we come to take false refuge, to keep chasing after things that we think will bring us happiness instead of being right here, and how we awaken from clinging. And we might not explore it all tonight, it might be for the rest of our lives, but we'll see what we can, we can cover tonight. And as many of you know, I use the word false refuge. I like it. False refuge doesn't mean a bad thing. It's like we're all, we all get caught in thinking something's going to bring us happiness when it's not really the thing. In Polly, the word Upadana is the word for clinging.

And interestingly, and that's in Sanskrit too. Interestingly, the word means fuel. I think that's an interesting translation. Literally it means fuel. And what it means is that in the moments that were grasping after something, trying to hold on to something, we're actually kind of fueling the wheel of samsara, fueling our suffering. False refuges, the stuff we cling to, are substitute satisfactions. In other words, we have our needs and often our unmet needs, and we have our deepest needs for really waking up and liberations. and because in some way we don't feel able to get that. From a very early age,

we went for things that would give us a taste of feeling better or feeling safer or whatever. We went for substitutes and then got hooked on them because they give us a bit, but they never really satisfy. A false refuge never really satisfies. So what happens? It's like salt water. You drink something to quench a thirst.

First, it feels like it's going to do it. You're hooked on it, though, because then you get even thirstier. It's fuel. So then you have to have... It's temporary. If you go for the fix of food or approval, for a bit it feels better. But we know what it's like.

It's never enough. A man and a woman were sitting beside each other in the first class section of a plane. The woman sneezed, took out a tissue, gently wiped her nose and then shuttered quite violently for 10 to 15 seconds. The man went back to his reading. A few minutes later it happened again. She sneezed, took a tissue, wiped her nose, shuddered as violently as before. And the man starts becoming curious about the shuddering.

A few more minutes pass and the woman sneezes yet again. She takes out a tissue, wipes her nose and shudders violently. The man can't restrain his curiosity. And he turns to her and says, you've sneezed three times, wipe your nose with the tissue, and then shuddered violently. Are you all right? Oh, I'm sorry if I disturb you, the woman replied, I have a rare condition.

When I sneeze, I have an orgasm. The man was a little embarrassed, but even more curious. And he says, well, I've never heard of that before. What are you taking for it? The woman looks at him and says, pepper. So we get hooked. And the deal is that we want to feel holy. awake and alive and loving and so on, but we go for these substitutes.

And I was reminded, Jonathan was reminding me of one of the old S&Ls, Eddie Murphy singing the song, singing a song, and it was Woking for Nub in all the wrong places. Really, it's like, looking for nub in all the long place. You know, anyway, it's looking for love. Anyway, I thought that was great because that's exactly what a false refuge is. It just, we just keep looking for what we want. And where do we look? I mean, what are the places?

Okay. We know that we, as with the story, the Pepper's story, we chase after sense pleasure. And again, there's nothing wrong with sense pleasure. The suffering is when we have to have. It's very in our culture, though, the craving for more stimulation, having the radio on, fantasy.

I got this clip this from a magazine and has a picture of a Buddha. Of course, it says sugar high. Get Zen with a dose of antioxidants with a solid, dark chocolate Buddha, $60, Neiman Marcus.com. Boy, it's so America, isn't it? So we fixate on products that will bring us some sort of a mental or physical pleasure. I know the Dalai Lama, a story of the Dalai Lama, I loved you was teaching a course and each day he had a drive by this little kind of strip mall

and it had this huge electronics store with all these different items you know in the window and he'd drive by it and he and he say he said what he had them stop and let him walk around in it he's a bit of he's like that he's a techie and he said he commented he said I was wanting things I didn't even know about you know it's like some and then this from Safari being on Safari today. The iPad with a revolutionary 9.7 inch touchscreen and amazing new apps it does things no tablet PC network or e-reader could. When your iPad is resting on its stand, let it inspire you from across the room with beautiful and uplifting words from the Buddha. So that's the latest, it's a one-page app of all Buddha stuff. But you know how it is with the iPad?

There's this. Anyway, you get the idea. billions of dollars are spent on ads to keep fueling our desire and wanting. The economy would come to a grinding halt if that fuel of Sedona was not there, if that craving wasn't there. The biggest place I think we fixate with our false refuges is on whatever gives us the emotional fix, getting our egos affirmed. And for most of us, it involves approval. If we're really honest and we sense ourselves in many interactions on slum level,

we're trying to get the other to respect or be impressed or approve or are like us. We're going for something. We have an agenda, something we want to get. Often it's also something we want to avoid disapproval, judgment, being suffocated. But watch in any interaction, and there's some wanting, what we want and what we don't want going on. So Zen Master Rio Khan says, if you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things. Just stop. And the Buddha says that the very nutshell capsulization of all the teachings to cling to no thing whatsoever as I or mine.

So let's explore what is this source of this clinging that so easily gets diverted into a false refuge, into clinging, and takes us away from what we really long for. If we look at the source and the desire, the kind of fundamental urge within us for more, for something, and I'll start very cosmological, okay? That this universe arises out of formless, awareness and there is some impulse to take form. I mean, form exists. So out of this formlessness,

there's some impulse to form. And without saying a lot about the quantum physics of it, I find it really interesting that the more they discover about matter and antimatter, which has got the opposite charge of matter, what they find is that in the beginning of the universe, of the creation of the universe, there's just a tiny bit more matter than antimatter. And that in the apparent universe, it's made of matter, it would not exist if they were equally balanced. Matter and anti-matter rule each other out.

In fact, and if you look into an electron, they're just flickering in and out of existence in a balance. But in terms of the proportions in the universe, one part per billion more of matter than anti-matter, matter at the beginning of the universe. Something about this creator of this creation wanted to exist. I mean, there was some bias towards existing. I just think that's kind of an interesting way to think about it. Either way, form exists. It comes out of formlessness. And the way form forms is that there's some attraction. There's something that pulls together constellations of particles

into some discernible form for a temporary period of time. There's attraction. That's desire. Desire on a cosmological level is the urge or the force of attraction that pulse forms together. And you can see it in terms of this primordial force that it pulls together molecules, pull sperm to eggs, people into communities.

It brings us here tonight. There's some wanting, some urge. that brings us all together. Rahula, Buddhist writer, wrote what the Buddha taught, says that the arising of desire, of wanting,

is most essentially the thirst to exist. It's the greatest energy in the world. So what that means is that if we're down on ourselves for wanting or for desire, it's like saying,

I'm against life existing. We can't exist without desire. You are a product of desire. So desire and wantings not the problem. And on an everyday basis, the force of desire to survive and to thrive is behind all our doings. It moves us to get things done and to be nice to each other and to plan our day and to shift our position and to buy food and eat food and communicate. So it's just the energy of the universe. It's very, very, very, very basic to all things. How does it become suffering? How does this urge to exist turn into suffering?

So again, we're going to go cosmological, which is that you did not come to Earth. You arise out of Earth. You are part of Earth. It's like a wave arising out of an ocean. So as part of the urge to take form, the ocean produces waves and then it identifies. with the waves. So awareness identifies with the particular wave. Then that wave starts organizing on how to get its needs meant, how to maintain its particular waiveness and protect against other waves and associate with the certain waves it wants to. But anyway, our wave of being tries to perpetuate itself. Okay? That's what we all are doing. And this identification, then we get identified with that whole process of getting what we want. So that's part of our

evolutionary design, is to identify as a separate being, to have wants to promote our separate beingness, to be identified with that. That's not the end of the evolutionary story. Awareness wants to take form, but it also wants to realize itself through form. In other words, awareness wants to come home. So what happens is that although it's part of our evolutionary unfolding to get identified and caught in a wanting self, it's also part of our evolutionary potential to see that and realize our oceanness, realize a larger belonging.

And that way, we can do the needful, we can take care of ourselves, but remember our true home. We can remember something larger. And this, in a sense, is what spirituality about it's not about getting rid of wants it's not about saying we shouldn't do whatever is needed to take care of ourselves but it's about not getting identified so that we forget in our pursuit of wants who we really are can we take care of our waiveness and still remember we're made of ocean does that resonate a little we'll come back to some of this the suffer

When suffering happens when we get so fixated on meeting the wants of our waivedness that it obscures our true belonging. We forget what really connects us all. We forget the mystery that's living through us. We forget what our true home is because we're so fixated in a narrow way. and the path of awakening is one of recognizing that oh caught in grasping caught and resisting all organized around this particular wave I've forgotten sensing the pain of that and then finding our way back to wholeness

now the forgetting getting caught in this kind of separate wavelness is more extreme and there's more suffering when through our family and our culture there's a lot of unmet needs because what happens when there's been neglect or abuse in some way when we're in a particularly

greedy and violent culture what happens our basic needs for safety and love and belonging aren't met so we have to try all the harder to try to protect ourselves and get more our identity gets even more confined to that wanting, fearing self. We forget even more what we belong to.

And we go for substitutes. My sense is most everyone I know, including myself, being a product of this culture, has forgotten our belonging to some point and is hooked on some substitutes, everyone I know. And so a critical part of the spiritual path, it's a sense where we're hooked. You know, where are we spending our life moments

kind of chasing after things that actually it's like fuel keeping us hooked on that wheel. Where in our lives are we living with what I call if only mind? You know, if only mind, some of you are, you know it's that I'll be happy if only. I have the right partner or if only I feel more physically healthy

or if only this new job comes through or if only my son gets into that school he wants to get into. So in some way we latch our happiness over and over again to something outside us and that's that separate wave thinking something's going to work and forgetting something larger and truer and in the most basic way we're forgetting

what's right here which is the only place the only answer to if only mind. If only we could pause and relax with what's happening right here, we could rediscover that wholeness and that awareness and that tenderness that's really our home. That's the only answer to if only mine. But we get hooked. So maybe as a first reflection, let me ask you, if you will, just to close your eyes because it helps to reflect. We'll just do a little exploring of where you're getting caught in false refuges, where you're really forgetting. So you might start with the question, you know, just sensing your life. And you

might sense, well, what really is between me and being really happy? What in the broad strokes is your if only? Is it if only your body could be more healthy? Is it if only something could change in a relationship? Is it something to do with if only you could get over an addiction or get over a certain mental state? If only somebody else would change? Is it if only you could get past something that's looming on the horizon that you're anxious about? Are you waiting for something to be done? Are you waiting to complete something? Continue to investigate and sense recently today, yesterday, this week, when you really wanted something, when it might have been that you really wanted a substance,

food, drink, cigarette, it might be that there was a material possession that you wanted, more likely in a relationship that you really wanted somebody to respond to you in a certain way, to like you, be attracted to you, approve of you. Maybe it was something about wanting desperately to lose weight or be successful in some project. Maybe you wanted something for another person. Sense something that you, a time that you really wanted something.

And I'd like to invite you to get into that, like to go right there, into it and bring it right here. Just that sense of really wanting. Exaggerate it. sense how come you want it so much and what it's like to want it and in a way if you can with it and try not to be self-conscious even sense how you could sit

when you're wanting and what the look on your face is like just dramatize it a bit how does your body express wanting is there a leaning forward is there a tensing what's your facial expression when you're wanting

like oh please oh please or may it be like this or i gotta have or i have to have what is your mind like when you're wanting and mostly what's your body like just feel it from the inside what's your body like when you're really wanting what's the quality of presence when you're wanting things to be a certain way your sense of space or around you or are your senses noticing things your awareness of the world? How familiar is the sense of wanting? How much of your life is in that wanting on your way to something else? Wanting the next moment, our day to bring something this moment doesn't have. When you're full of wanting, what's your sense of who you are? Do you like yourself? Okay, take a few full breaths and when you're ready, open your eyes. So this is a little,

little bit of an investigation into the wanting self and it's something that I'd like to encourage you to do in this week to come just to notice when you're wanting and if you can to pause and just sense what's this like in my body and in my mind what's my heart like when I'm wanting you know and get familiar what many people report is that there's tension in the body what many people report is that there's fear that goes with wanting, that there's both wanting something to be a certain way and fear that won't.

There's wanting things, and there's the body as tense. And in the deepest way, many people don't like themselves when they're wanting. They're not aware of not liking themselves. They're more caught up in the wanting, but they don't like themselves in their wanting mode. But in terms of overall suffering, when we're wanting

we miss our appointment with the king when we're wanting and grasping after things it can be said that we miss our appointment with life because we're on our way

somewhere else does that make sense in the moments of wanting we're on our way somewhere else if I had to physicalize it there's a leaning forward we're not

right here balanced in this moment receptive to this life we're leaning forward, we're off balance. And the very word duca, which describes a wheel that's off balance, it's duca, we're off balance. So, D.H. Lawrence writes,

men are not free when they are doing just what they like. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self likes. And there's getting down to the deepest self. It takes some diving. Most of our moments, if we're not mindful, we are responding to habitual urge to just find more comfort, relieve our stress, and pursue false refuges. That's not the deepest self. And so if we want to wake up

from the reflex to chase after so many things, it takes some diving. So I'd like to explore what that means with you. Like how do we begin to see what we just saw a little bit? see okay so these are this is when my life and sense of being gets possessed by wanting how do I wake up from that and the training is exactly what you do in a meditation sitting which is you begin to recognize and allow just what's happening but you really recognize it it helps to name it just to name oh desire wanting tense have to have anxious put a little mental note on what's happening. There's been some very good research in the last two years

in California that says that when you can mentally label what's going on, it actually calms the mind. There's a little bit of space. What you've done is you've activated the left prefrontal cortex by naming it and you've quieted down the limbic system some. So just to name wanting gives you a little bit of space. You're not quite as identified. Okay, so that's the first thing. As with Rain, recognizing and allowing, investigating with an intimate attention,

non-identification, as with that sequence, the most critical piece, if you are to wake up out of wanting mind, is to recognize it and then allow things to be as they are, not to judge. And that's where we're going to spend most of the rest of the night because as I mentioned for most people there's a real aversiveness to wanting it's often called feeling needy right and I don't think there's

probably one person in this room that if you said what's it like when you're feeling needy that wouldn't have on some level a yuck response it's like uh almost anything but that please right anybody really equanimity has a equanimity around neediness. You don't have to raise your hand. Actually, you'd probably be the one that could. So here's what happens. When we feel ourselves as wanting,

when we feel ourselves as greedy, when we want to get that second portion, usually we get very secretive about it, right? Because there's something kind of, as I said, yucky about wanting mind. And what we're doing is we're adding what I've described as the second arrow. Remember the first arrow is that these are just energies that happen to us. The first arrow is, yes, of course urges come up, sexual urges, wanting safety, wanting approval.

Of course we get angry urges. Stuff happens. The second arrow condemning ourselves for the first arrow. So the biggest hitch to waking up out of craving and out of wanting is that we blame ourselves for it. Now, maybe the best way I can describe how to work with that is my own example. Because I, in my 20s, had a major crisis with the wanting mind, where I became overwhelmed with a sense of self-aversion because of wanting. So here's how it, kind of how it happened.

That I was living in an ashram, spiritual community, and as I've described to many of you that are here more regularly, I was a bit of a type A yogi. I got up extra early and did a lot of yoga and meditation. And part of it was out of a very sincere yearning to be free, to wake up, to realize what was true. And part of it was part of my never, ending self-improvement project and also my never-ending wanting to be great and have everybody see how great I was.

And so I wanted recognition for how good a yogi I was. And I also in this community wanted, I was working on our yoga center and I wanted to be heading it up and I wanted to be given a lot of responsibility for running the center. and then I wanted also probably more than anything, the attention and approval of our senior teacher who was also my boss in running the yoga center. And I had kind of a crush on him. So it was like I wanted, wanted, wanted.

So here we go. We all went off to our summer retreat. We had a summer solstice retreat that we'd go to. And it may be that this man felt my neediness. because that's how I felt for his attention. But all through that retreat, and it wasn't a silent retreat like our Buddhist retreats, all through that retreat he kind of ignored me.

And wanting and not getting put me face to face with the sense of the wanting self. And it was a needy self, and it was a pathetic feeling self. I mean, it felt terrible. This precipitated this kind of crisis of what I described as the crisis of the wanting self, where it felt like my deepest identity.

It felt like wherever I looked, I saw the wanting self. I saw my struggle with foods. Like I was in my 20s in particular, I was chronically trying to fight the tendency to overeat. And so that was an embarrassing thing. I wanted, as I mentioned, admiration. I wanted to hang out with certain people.

And it was just wall to wall. Like all I could see when I went to that retreat, treat was this kind of grasping, wanting self. And I was horrified and kind of devastated because it really did not fit my spiritual identity that I wanted to have at all. Like it was very far from it. So I realized that I hated my wanting. Okay? I hated my wanting. Now, I've run into this on much more subtle levels since then where any sense of kind of grasping, I kind of, kind of, hand in hand very quickly I feel a sense of not liking myself for the grasping. But this was like a full-blown.

So, and I couldn't let go of it. I mean, I could, there was, I'd see all this wanting, but particularly in this relationship with this teacher, I couldn't let go of it. I could not, you know, well myself. So I talked to a friend at that retreat, a younger, wiser friend, as it turns out. And she, but she said something.

And she basically said when you reject your wanting, basically you feed it. You know, you feed it. And it more and more will define you. The more you reject your wanting, the more it will be you, you know, which is now as a Buddhist that makes total sense. You know, we use that phrase, what you resist persists. And whatever you fight against in yourself, that more and more. cements the identification. Anything you don't like, you're more and more identified with. The opposite is true, too. Anything you embrace, you're no longer going to feel identified with.

But I wasn't there yet. That's jumping the gun. So this woman basically said, if you reject it, you feed it. And she shared with me a story that I've hence heard many, many times about the Tibetan teacher, Melarepa, who returns to his cave after gathering fire, would only to find it's filled with demons. And they're cooking his food, reading his books, sleeping in his bed, they'd taken over the joint. And he didn't know how to get them out of his cave, and he knew on some level they were a projection of his own mind.

They were the unwanted parts of his own psyche, the cravings, the fears. So here's what he did. First, he tried to teach them the Dharma. You know, he took a seat that was higher than them, and he said things about, you know, how everything's all one and compassion and equanimity. But nothing happened. They just were still there. Okay?

That was the first thing he did. And then he lost his patience. He got very angry and ran at them, and they just laughed at them. And finally he gave up and just sat down on the floor and said, look, I'm not going away. Looks like you're not either. So let's just live here together. And at that point, most of them left, except one. Now, this is the way it is for us, too, that even when we say, okay, I'll just be with this,

there's still something, some deep craving or fear or something. It's still there. So Melarapus says, oh, this one's particularly vicious. And so he didn't know what to do. So he just surrendered himself even further. He walked over and he put himself right into the mouth of the demon. And he said, just eat me up if you want to. And then that demon left too. And the moral of the story. And this is, Pema Chodron's rendition by the way. When the resistance is gone, so are the demons. Well, it's the same thing with craving. When there's no second arrow, when rather than hating ourselves for being needy, for being addictive, for being whatever it is, and I mean whatever,

rather than hating ourselves for it, there is a friendly and allowing attention. In those moments, we begin to loosen the identification and the identifications where the suffering is. So the message for me was, okay, get to know the craving, the wanting mind. And that's what I started to do. And as I started opening to it, I felt underneath all that wanting,

especially wanting attention from a certain person, was insecurity. Like I needed in some way to be mirrored back into sense I was okay. And as I sensed that, you know, as I sensed most of the, ways I was chasing after things were in some way to feel better about myself, to soothe insecurity, to feel belonging. My heart became more tender and there was a kind of forgiving

that the craving was there, not forgiving as in this craving is bad, just forgiving that, okay, this urge in life is here. The less I judged, the less there was an identification. And It's been part of a life practice. It was a really important lesson when I had my wanting mind crisis that any time I turn on myself for what's just here, this conditioning, that's when my identity is absolutely possessed by it. And in the moments I say, okay, forgiven, no matter how bad it seems. In those moments, the identification loosens, and I'm actually not so possessed anymore. I wanted to share that as I was putting together notes on this talk,

and really this seemed like the most important piece I wanted to convey, that we need to recognize our false refuges, recognize the ways that we chase after things, that they don't really work, but we can't begin to let go if we're identified unless we just forgive it. And so I got an email, yesterday someone who says

by not trying to change the conditioning but watch it play out and accepting that this is how it is over and over the freedom begins accepting this is how it is so accepting this wanting this craving and then she writes

sometimes when I'm completely identified with the emotions as who I am in other words I am this pathetic wanting needy creature it takes an incredible amount of awareness to say that there's a possibility that my thoughts might not be the truth that I am far from home

and this is only a passing wave and I am greater than this that is the key if we can begin to forgive the craving we can begin to see it as waves and reconnect with a larger belonging so Ajancha writes this he says

if you can let go a little, you'll find a little peace. If you let go a lot, you'll find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you'll find absolute peace and tranquility. The beginning of letting go. And letting go is a tricky word, because we cannot well letting go. It's not like we can take something, go, okay, I'm letting go of it. The beginning of letting go is really letting be, is letting be wakefully, letting be what's right here. In the moments that we recognize and allow what's here, that we notice it, in those moments, what lets go is our sense of identification.

And that's the only letting go that has to happen. Letting go of this sense of this is me. And that can only happen when we let be what's here. in the moment. In the moment of letting be, we begin to sense with craving how much when we're caught in it our lives suffer. We begin to sense that in the moments that we're chasing after something, that we have to have something a certain way. In those moments, we are farther from home than we could ever imagine. Adjantaj goes on. He says, even though we can't yet let go, we are aware of these states continuously. Being continuously aware of ourselves and our attachments,

we will come to see that such grasping is not the path. We know, but we still can't let go. But that knowing is 50%. He says, though we can't let go, we do understand that letting go of these things will bring peace. So to me, that's a really powerful statement. That it doesn't matter if you can let go in the moment. In fact, a self can't will itself to let go. But if the wisdom in you knows that letting go ultimately is the freedom, just knowing that, just intending to let be and let go, opens the door. Just intending. A friend of mine recently just kind of gone over the hump of a crisis and is now, on the track of divorce.

She's going to get a divorce. She had desperately wanted to save the marriage. Everything in her. She considered this man or soulmate. But he didn't agree. He didn't see it the same way. And over these last very terrifically painful months, she hasn't been able to let go.

But what she has been able to do is just what I'm talking about, is she hasn't blamed herself and she's let herself be with the pain of holding on. Be with the pain of holding on. And so everything in her knows that there's no freedom until she lets go. And just that knowing, just that recognition and her prayer to let go,

she's beginning to find space. And I just, as I'm keeping her company, it's so powerful to see that we cannot make, ourselves let go of our urge for way more food than our body needs, our clinging on to a certain person, our need to achieve more, our busyness, our speediness, anything that you found as your false refuge, you can't will yourself to let go. But you can be willing to deepen your attention. And if you deepen your attention, you'll find that the grasping and clinging is

taking you away from what you love. So tonight, what I'm hoping you're getting from this is that wanting is part of existing. It is built into every part of our being to condemn desires, to condemn life. And wanting can possess us. If our sense of waiveness and our sense of unmet needs makes it so that we fixate on false refuges,

the very things that we're, we most cherish, what the deepest self most cherish, become out of reach. Any moment you're pursuing, got to have things this way, have to control this, have to get that is a moment that you're bicycling away from the very presence that has absolutely the source of love and freedom. So it's intrinsic part of the path to become aware of our false refuges, to notice them, to forgive them and to pay attention to what it's like

when we're caught in wanting mind. That's what allows for grace. That's where the letting go comes from. This is Rumi. He writes, this is how a human being can change. There's a little worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly he wakes up, call it grace, whatever. Something wakes him. and he's no longer a little worm. He's the entire vineyard and the orchard too. The fruit, the trunks, a growing wisdom and joy that doesn't need to devour. So that's the blessing of non-clinging

that we come home to our true belonging in the moments that we're not chasing after. And I want to encourage you to notice any moment during your day when in some way you're not wanting it different. There are moments of non-clinging, otherwise we wouldn't survive. Our system would be so overwhelmed with stress.

There are oasesies, we just aren't conscious of them. So just scan now and then and pause if you notice, oh, so this is a moment that there's a feeling of enough. enough right now. I don't, I'm not waiting for something different, I'm not needing something more. Get to know those moments.

Get familiar with non-clinging because the more you inhabit those moments the more you'll discover what you thought you were looking for. The more you'll find that what you were looking for really is the one who's looking, this awareness that's right here. So let's close with a brief meditation that again will allow you to explore letting go of clinging,

how that's possible. And just enjoy pausing for a moment, sense the invitation to be right here. And as a way of taking what this Dharma of non-clinging is into your life more, you might just choose one area where you get caught in strong wanting, where you'd like to be a little more awake, less identified, more free. You might see the situation where it comes up, and just name it in your mind, okay, wanting. Or it might be attached or clinging or whatever word in some way expresses what's going on.

And sense if you can really allow it to be there, Sometimes the words, forgiven, forgiven, or it's okay. This is part of our conditioning in this culture and as humans. You might sense that there's some unmet needs behind the wanting or attachment or clinging to feel more secure or more at home in yourself, more safe, more loved. And if it's a wanting or a clinging that you really judge yourself for in a deep or harsh way, just imagine or sense a very understanding friend who's forgiving it for you.

Just intend to forgive it. You might sense, you know, what is it really that the deepest self is wanting behind the false refuge? What is it you're really wishing for? What do you want to experience? Is it love or belonging? Safety?

ease or peace, let yourself just open to the presence that's right here, just feeling these moments and sensing really when you arrive in presence with this breath, with these sounds, feelings, when you arrive in awareness, is anything missing? I mean, just right in this moment, in this nowness, what would happen if you just let go completely? completely into this now-ness. Again, the words of Ajan Shah, if you let go a little, you'll find a little peace.

If you let go a lot, you'll find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you'll find absolute peace and tranquility. Namaste. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you would like to contact

the Insight Meditation Community of Washington to make a donation or to learn more about our programs, please visit our website at www.imcw.org.