Tara Brach - Relaxing the Over-Controller - Part 2 (2017-05-03) (retreat talk)

Episode Date: May 6, 2017

Relaxing the Over-Controller - Part 2 (2017-05-03) (retreat talk) - We all have conditioning to do what we can to protect and promote our wellbeing. Our suffering arises to the degree that our life and identity become organized around controlling our experience. These two talks look at the emergence of the fear based "over-controller," and explore a wise way of witnessing the suffering that comes with over-controlling, and awareness practices that naturally relax and awaken us to our whole and natural Being. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I'd like to begin with a story that was told by Rabbi Zalman, when he'd be on the circuit about his five-year-old daughter, Shalvi, and I love this story. One morning she wakes up, and she says, Abba, which is father, and she says, you know how when you're sleep and dreaming, it seems so real, and then you wake up and realize it was just a dream? Well, when you're awake, can you wake up that much more and realize that this is just a dream? And I wonder how many of you have been sensing more and more, just more increasingly,

how many swaths of moments were inside that kind of a bubble or a dream. Can I just see? Is that something? Yeah. Okay. When we're in a dream, we're the central character. You know, it's like the world, it's like we're the protagonist moving through life. And we're usually talking to ourselves. It's about really getting what we want.

Here it might be, you know, can I get that hot shower, you know, or that nap, or, you know, be in front of the lunch line, or it's the self that wants the bill to ring, you know. And when we're in that dream, we're also avoiding what's unpleasant, you know, whether it's about being laid or being too hot or too cold or our leg falling asleep. But we're just in that narrative. I sometimes think of it like a colony of ants and they're all scelding around. They all have these thoughts about themselves and what they're supposed to do next and who's going to be the one to drag the dead companion away and, you know, because that's part of what they do. And, you know, but we're, we all have these stories going on about moi. And when there's stress, those stories get organized

around a sense of there's a problem, something's wrong, something's missing, and I need to do something to solve it. So when we're stressed, the protagonist in the story becomes the controlling self that's needing to navigate and deal with something. something. And we're the one that's then trying to manage the pain or we're rehearsing for a meeting. I don't think any of you were doing that at all with a teacher or anything like that, but, you know, it's the self that's just judging the self and trying to make things different. And at home, the controller is often a very harsh critic, is judging other people for mistakes. trying very hard to achieve something and not fail at something else, trying to make people change,

trying to make impressions. So the driving assumption of the controlling self is there's a problem here and I need to fix it. And if you investigate daily life, and this is what's so interesting to me, there's just many moments where in that dream or we're the self dealing with a problem. So to wake up from the dream means remembering who we are beyond the controlling self. It means remembering who we are beyond the one that's fearing that something is going to go wrong and wanting something to go a different way. So that's what we're going to explore tonight, which is, I call it relaxing the over-controller. And I'm just curious how many as you listen have that sense of that this could involve something that you're dealing with.

Can I do? Okay. Okay. I began, I did part one of this talk in Bethesda last week, and don't worry because it's all, you know, you've been dealing with it. the last few days you know it from the inside out. But the theme feels so powerful to me because so many of our moments are organized around that identity. And anything that we're organized around that's not in consciousness controls us. Keeps us stuck. So one of the best ways to understand this talk and where it fits in at retreat is that this is a very, very direct continuation of what Pat explored last night because what's the controlling self trying to do? Avoid mortality, avoid loss, avoid the changes that it doesn't want to have happen.

So this is, the controller is really the set of strategies that we all have to try to resist impermanence and control and organize our life so that we don't. don't suffer from it. One of the stories that I feel really illustrates well some of the dimensions of this was told by Tom Wolfe in his book The Right Stuff. When he was describing that period during the 50s when they were testing rocket planes at altitudes

that they had never explored before, where all the ordinary laws of aerodynamics didn't hold anymore. So when the rockets got that high, they would skid into a flat spin and then they'd tumble. And nobody knew how to deal with it. So it happened a bunch of times, and the pilots were recorded as they were going into their final dive, and they'd be screaming. And I've tried A, I've tried B, I've tried C, I've tried D. What do I do?

Well, the solution, it's interesting. It was Chuck Yeager, and he was knocked unconscious, so he couldn't do any. anything. And then when the rocket fill into the normal dense atmosphere around the earth, then he could use the controls to navigate and be able to land and he didn't die. So the solution really was, and defied every bit of training they had, was you take your hands off the controls. It was the only solution possible. Now, why I like this story is that But it doesn't mean we should never be managing things. It's not saying we should never try to control this or that.

In the denser atmosphere, that very thin skin around the earth, everything else is not the denser atmosphere. But in some little domains, you know, we can manage some things. But in the big stuff, you know, like aging, illness, death, the loss, loss of others, controlling the way others behave, that kind of thing. We try and we create more suffering. So the challenge with the over-controller is that even when there's not a lot of stress, even small stressors, it's a very deep conditioned reflex to try to tighten our grip and try control and manage things. We're just addicted to maneuvering the controls. There's a story,

a short, dumb story of these two guys are hunting somewhere in New Jersey, and one of them falls down, he's gripped by a heart attack, and it's lying completely still, and the other one is totally freaked out, and he calls 4-1-1, and he's yelling and screaming, and screaming, I don't know, what to do, what am I supposed to do, what should I do? And the woman that's on the other end of the line says, calm down, it's okay, I can help you. She says first, make sure he's dead, you know. So the next thing that happens is the sound of a shot. He comes back, he says, okay, what's next? So I warned you, right? It's really bad. So, but the point of it is that there are Two basic assumptions that the controller is going along with.

And one is, I should be able to control and manage what's happening. This includes all sorts of things that we encounter. I should be able to handle this. And the second is, I have to do something. It's like the last thing the controller wants to do is not do anything. Because what the controller is trying to do is get away from the vulnerability that's right here. And doing anything is better than not doing, which is why I think that silly story is actually quite a useful Dharma teaching.

You know, Alan Watts once wrote, it's like winding our watch on the way to the gallows. Again, there's a domain of what we might call appropriate control and we're very much designed to try to manage our life. I often use that metaphor of coming into this world and we take on a kind of space suit, which is all the different strategies of navigating through difficulty and encountering people and knowing how to respond and protecting ourselves and getting what we need, including food and clothing and housing and responding to work demands. And it's that whole constellation of ego strategies that's just part of,

of our evolving being, how we operate on planet Earth. And very key part of it is figuring things out and using our mind and when we experience danger or whatever, coming up with strategies to deal with it. So it's not to say that that is not appropriate. Example of story is an elderly man. Again, this is New Jersey. except for I was born there that I'm going back to New Jersey,

but he wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but the difficulty was getting older, the ground was really hard. He just didn't have the strength to do it, and he really was feeling a sadness that his only son, Vincent, who was in prison, wasn't there to help him write it. So he writes to his son in prison. He says, Dear Vincent, I'm feeling pretty sad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year,

and it's given me so much pleasure. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here, my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days. Love Papa. A few days later, receives a letter from a son. Dear Pop, don't dig up that garden, exclamation, mark, exclamation. That's where the bodies are buried.

Love Vinny. At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrive and dig up the entire area with that. finding any bodies. They apologize to the old man and leave. That same day, he receives another letter from Vinny. Dear Pop, go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That was the best I could do under the circumstances. So we do what we can. Ideally, we do it mindfully trying to manage our way through the day. But the challenge, and again, the suffering is there's a kind of chronic hum of the limbic system in the background of fear. And rather than

just doing what's appropriate, we overdo and we get very identified with it. And you can see it up close here with meditation, with the formal practice of meditation. What happens when we encounter something unpleasant? What happens when there's sounds that are really bothering us in the room? You know, what happens when we have thoughts about a conflicted relationship or we get the physical discomfort that we're dealing with right now. And how easy it is to get hooked into fixating on it, obsessing about it, trying to figure out how we can change it, either judging ourselves for what's going, or judging something here or judging another person.

So everything's about getting rid of it, resisting it. are controlling our meditation. Okay, I'll just focus on the breath. So I don't have, you know, just like really trying to strong arm ourselves. Anything but simply being. It's the last choice. Even when there's no strong stress in our meditation practice, and this is an important place, and we're going to return to this,

because it's so much our habit to control things, because there's some underlying sense that there's something vulnerable and difficult here. So I just need to keep controlling things. I need to make my meditation better. I need to be doing something to be really doing it right. I need to make something happen. There's this background sense of not enough or something more is needed. So we keep on being the one to kind of dial, trying to dial the controls,

the one behind the curtain managing things. So this brings up a very central inquiry on the spiritual path, which is when is it wise effort? And when is it not? And I found that this question is incredibly relevant for beginners, for people that are just starting, and incredibly relevant no matter how long we've practiced, because that identification with a self

is very quickly an identification with a doing self, a managing self. So if we aren't able to shine a light on it, that effort that we're making a meditation keeps us linked and hitched to a sense of a self behind the curtain. I see it with beginners in the simple way that... I like the way one yoga teacher described it. She says, her message is, you strivers relax a little, and you slackers, sit up a little taller,

you know? So it's like the balancing, you know, not to lose, not too tight. But then as we get into more and more refined states of attention, just beginning to notice that even then there's a sense in the background that somebody's there controlling the meditation. How many of you have noticed that? They call it the ghost self behind the curtain. Yeah, there's always a sense of somebody's there doing it. I think one of the wisest stories

that kind of puts a very helpful container around this inquiry about wise effort is about Ananda, who is the Buddha's cousin and his most devoted disciple. And after the Buddha's death, there was this great council of enlightened ones, Arahatsa was planned, Arahatsa, an awakened yogi or practitioner. And he wasn't entitled to attend because he wasn't, even though he'd worked strenuously for years, he wasn't considered enlightened. So the eve of the council meeting, he determined to practice vigorously all night. And he wasn't going to stop until he attained his goal.

He was just going to go at it, you know. And all he succeeded in doing was becoming incredibly exhausted and discouraged and dispirited and so on. No progress, despite all his efforts. So right before dawn, he kind of said, okay, I'm just going to give up the striving. I'm going to give up the efforts and just rest. And just, it said, just as his head fell into the pillow, into the cushion, he became enlightened. That's the story.

But there's really, to me, the interesting question is, well, what is it that freedom? So in one level you could say, well, he really let go. And when we let go, we're letting go really of the selfing. There was a letting go of self. But then don't we need some effort? And the reality is

anon to heaven. had been making an effort to collect as mine, quiet as mine, experience the different beautiful states of samadhi over decades. So he'd already trained the muscles of attention. He had done what I consider undoing. He was undoing over those years some of the conditioning that keeps us from freedom. So wise effort is an undoing of conditioning. It creates the atmosphere

for letting go of all effort. The key to remember, though, is it's kind of a hook to keep on doing those wise efforts of undoing. We get habituated to that. So it takes a real willingness to let go of that and just stop.

Stop controlling or doing or directing anything. Which is why You've noticed in the instructions we just say each time, you know, as if it gets quiet enough, just stop doing anything, just rest, just be. Only in the moments when we truly take our hands off the controls, can we see the nature of reality. Any control and create some obscuration. in those moments of full letting go, really can the light of the universe shine through us?

The space opens up. So in meditation and in life, the understanding is that if there's controlling and the more that it's not in conscious awareness and the more that it's chronic, there's going to be an identification with a controlling self. There's going to be an identification with a controlling self, a limited self, a story of a self that is separate from others and that is dealing with a life where something's missing or something's wrong. And that cuts us off from a larger sense of beingness.

In fact, that's why many of you are discovering, and this is not for many, it's been an ongoing process over years, that when we start opening to the vulnerability, there's a a kind of grieving that we touch into is we start sensing how cut off we've been, how the controllers actually deprived us of moments of living. We've been cut off from life. There's a story that really touched me. A woman described time with her dying father, and in her growing up years he had been, he was an architect and was very achievement focused. and he was very conscious of his status and very driven guy and somewhat self-absorbed. They had a really distant relationship.

He was not available. His work was the center of his life. And so that was a real cause for pain, and she had to do a lot of inner work on it. But now in the last couple of years before his death, and he was very old, and he had retired some years earlier, they had. and increasing amount of time together. And a few weeks before he passed away, she was asking him about his past,

and she said, which of your achievements did you feel most proud about? And there was a long pause, and he had tears in his eyes. He looked at her and he said, why you, of course. And what hit her was, was that it was true, and yet he didn't even know it in the earlier years, because he was cut off. He was living in that smaller, striving, achieving self. And the sadness, I think, you know, we sometimes, there's a palliative caregiver that describes the regret, the greatest

regret at the end of many people's lives, she's accompanied tens of thousands of people, is I didn't live true to myself. And it's because we were living inside the controlling self. And I don't think it's just the dying that have some deep sense of disappointment because many of us can feel the difference between the self that we live in many hours of the day that's in some way being driven by fear and wanting. And the difference, the who we intuit we really are. So we now enter, and this is the next phase of this reflection together is really what wakes us up from the dream, you know, what allows us to relax the over-controller.

And really what it is is that awareness wakes up when it experiences the suffering of the over-controller. the futility of it, how the over-controller is trying to help us and yet is really keeping us from a larger sense of wholeness. It's very easy for me to share personal stories in this talk. I know this is very inside-out, this over-controller business. And for me, the first waking up to it was very poignant. I was a college sophomore. I was experiencing a lot of depression. and doing psychoanalysis. And the only reason I ended up in psychoanalysis

is because some good friend said, hey, I'm seeing a good therapist. You want to go see him? And then I found myself on a couch. Who would have known? But anyway, so I had this dream that I was sharing of struggling to get somewhere and feeling exhausted,

which I think is a common dream. A lot of us have it. And then as I started talking, I had an image, because I was taking Greek mythology at the time, I had an image of Sisyphus and the boulder and pushing that boulder over and over and over again. And then I had an insight which was I'm always trying hard. I'm always trying hard whether it was in conversations with other people or in work or

I was very politically active, fixing myself, proving myself. I was always trying to make sure something happened, always trying to be as good as I could be better than others, you know, trying hard. On its heels came the next insight, which you can imagine, which is fear of other people's judgments, fear that I would lose or not get love and approval if I didn't try hard. In other words, I couldn't be with somebody and not be trying and assume that I would be accepted and loved. More insights followed in the heels of that, and it wasn't just in therapy. It was just over time of how much I was, afraid of other people's judgments and that kept me trying hard.

And that the more I tried, the worst things felt because I felt more and more insecure, the more harder I was trying. And then as you know, and this is something very familiar, so I was getting familiar with my controller, okay? There was a second arrow which is I couldn't stand my controlling self, the one that was trying hard. And we call it sometimes selfing. I was just like becoming more and more aware of all the selfing,

all the self trying to be good and trying to approve herself and trying to get approval, and I just couldn't stand the self that was doing it. So there's a lot of aversion. And the first major shift in that that I remember, I was, this was probably about eight years later, I had moved into an ashram, And I got up my nerve, and we had a women's group that would meet,

and I went ahead and exposed my shadow. I exposed the controlling self, how much I felt like a fake because I was always trying to present myself a certain way, whereas deep down I was like this. I don't remember what happened to the group after I exposed myself, except for that I went back to my room feeling utterly raw, and vulnerable and kind of broken apart. And I just remember being with that.

It was like at first I wanted to try to control that and I thought I'd do some yoga to try to feel better. But then I realized, no, this is more of the same. I'm still trying to fix something, do something. So I agreed to do nothing. And I just sat with it. And it went down to that deepest place of self-aversion and then grief at how many moments of my life had been stolen because of that self-aversion.

How many moments I had missed. And self-aversion seemed to be right at the root of the controller. It was the controller's deepest way of trying to change me. The grieving loosened it, and so that there was some space and tenderness, and I could start just observing this striving self. you know, this character that had emerged, this spacesuit character, whatever you want to call it, this ego cell, and see from a more awake, kind place, she just wanted to be loved. She wanted to be accepted. She wanted to know she belonged.

And that was the moment when my relationship to the controller became conscious and forgiving. And I share this because there was no, I mean, over the years I've become more and more familiar with that kind of ego cluster I'm calling the over-controller. But any more familiarity would only have been possible because I deeply forgave the presence of that ego. So I want to pause here and invite you to reflect for yourselves where this might be relevant to you. As you let the attention go inward, you might scan for some stressful situation that involves another person where you know you go into over-controller mode in some way,

getting either defensive or aggressive in some way wanting to change that person or maybe wanting to change yourself, whether there's judgment, yourself or the other or both. Let's take some moments to let yourself connect with where you're aware of where you might go into that over-controller mode to protect yourself or to make something happen. And include as you reflect how you feel about it. your controlling self, how you're feeling about the self that's wanting or fearing and reacting. If you will, just to let me know if you need a little more time to be in touch with that. I'll just take a few more moments.

For a moment, you might imagine you can move ahead in time and view this controlling self from really your most awake and high and loving being. You might consider this your future self, the awareness that's really fully manifested maybe five years, ten years, twenty years down the road, whatever is relevant to you, that you could look through the eyes of your most awake self and just witness with compassion and interest. what we're calling the controlling self, that self that gets stuck in the reactivity. See what you see.

And look, if you can, for what's most driving your controlling self. What's really behind the controlling you're observing? What's the longing? What's the fear? and sense the possibility of when the controller appears in this way, being able to regard the controlling self with compassion, with forgiveness, letting go of the second arrow, sense right this moment what that's like, to send some message of forgiveness or kindness to the controlling self.

For some, it's simply, I see you. It's okay. It's not your fault. Forgiven, forgiven. We'll continue to reflect together and feel free to open your eyes if you'd like. Because the controlling self is such a deep identity, it's often under the line, so to speak.

It's not in consciousness. We're doing the controlling, but there's not a recognition of how caught inside that limited sense of self we are. And so I'd like to look a little more closely at the process of recognizing and relaxing the controller. And it happens primarily when we register that this isn't working and we register how much suffering is being caused, that in some way we're resisting vulnerability because that's always what the controller is doing.

The controller is running away from impermanence, vulnerability, groundlessness. So, again, an example from my life of kind of a running from vulnerability is that in parenting, I took my habit of thinking it's good to strive for things and we should go after things and so on, and planted that on my son, Narayan, like, you too should be a go-for-it type of person. And Narayan's temperament's really different than my temperament. It's like in that yoga teacher's language,

I would be the one told to relax, he'd be the one to told to sit up a little straighter. He's really chill. I mean, Narayan is just really laid back. He was not academically very ambitious and so on. So, during high school, and I told a version of this story in radical acceptance, his capacity to party and capacity to endlessly be with friends and to not be too concerned about work was always, to me,

something that was this pesky thing that I could never, I mean, I couldn't let go of, and I was in a chronic judging state, upset and angry, and often it would take focus on his video gaming, because that's what he would do. He'd be behind the screen. And I had to text him recently to find out what game he was playing. It was Diablo II. Now, it's like this devil too, you know.

And as he described it, you know, when I was texting back and forth just recently, he said, those are my heavy dopamine years. Anyway, but back to the story. So I would be really enraged by it. and I realized that more and more that we were locked in this dance of the more angry and controlling I got, the more he was kind of like pushing me away. He's not an angry pushaway type. He just kind of disregard.

It wasn't working. And I was feeling worse and worse. So I started practicing, pausing, and feeling what was under all that controlling, judging, energy. And what I would find is underneath the judge, the one that wanted to, that really raging judge that wanted to take a boulder and throw through the screen of the computer that he was on, underneath that was fear. You know, and I was afraid he wouldn't have a happy life that if he didn't apply himself, he just wouldn't be gratified in life. It was just according to my ideas of how things worked. And then underneath,

that fear there's this powerlessness and when I opened to that really deeply, you know, powerless and afraid he's going to ruin his life, there was care. I just care about him. And then there was grief, which is the grief of how my way of tightening around that care and becoming a controller was creating a really big distance. You know, here he was a sophomore, it's a blink of an eye, you parents know, and they're gone, they're out of the house. And we were locked in most of the many moments, I was in resentment and blame mode. So, the more I opened to that vulnerability that I was really running from, the more I would get in touch with that caring place and then be able to still,

I still had to draw boundaries, but I could do it with a lot more intelligence and respect and care than anger, which of course he didn't have to defend himself against so much. much. So now he's 31, and I want to say that that old controlling part still peaks its little, you know, comes out. In fact, just when we were doing this back-forth texting I was telling you about, and he told me it was Diablo 2, he said, and hey, Mom, now I'm, let's see what do he say, he said, oh, now I'm playing with the spiritual successor of Diablo 2. There's another version. He called it a spiritual successor. So I said, say what?

And then he says, Mom, I can still feel the judgment leaking through. Anyway, so the controller releases when we fully open to vulnerability. It releases, a sense of who we are shifts. Now, the deepest vulnerability, as I am mentioning, is the loss of what we most deeply cherish. And to be able to open to that is what brings us to the openness

that is truly beyond that egoic over-controller. And that's why I really, on the spiritual path, it's not until we have totally faced an open to and touched the depth of the realness that it's all going. that we can open to the reality of the space, the awareness, the love that's here. They go together completely. The example of this that I want to share, which is probably the most prominent in my mind

in a number of friends here, because so many of us know Sherry Maples, who's a really wonderful Dharma teacher. Many of you might know that she got into a bike accident about eight months ago. And she may be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She nearly died. She was in hospitals, institutions for seven months. Went out there and visited, law visited,

a number of us that lover have been out with her. out visiting. And Sherry is in good spirits. She's open-hearted. She's more patient than she's ever been before. She's very clear and very intouchable that matters in life. She's in really good spirits. And if you ask her what happened, which I did, you know, how is it possible that you're holding this? I mean, her life is like, it was going one way and now, she's in a wheelchair. Her response to how it's possible is I had already faced the worst death so I can live with this. And what she meant by this, and when she has lived with this, not fighting it, but it's not a resignation. She's like living, you know. What she meant by it

faced a death is that the prior year, she had two years earlier, she had a breakup of a nine-year relationship that was utterly devastating and she went into a major deep depression. And underneath the depression, what she had to open to was a kind of a death of what she had, a death, meaning a loss of a relationship that just felt like a loss of her life. and her way of facing that as we've been exploring over and over again here is, and we use the acronym rain, is to keep bringing those wings of care

and investigation and presence to what's here. And I want to say right here that the nurturing is at the beginning, the middle, the end, and throughout. It's not like you wait till end, right from the beginning you recognize and with the allowing there's as much as possible a gentleness. And it's okay, this is part of life.

And then the nurturing goes deeper, you start investigating and everything that arises as well as possible, this too, tender, gentle. And then there's this alchemy that the more you touch into, the more vulnerability you touch into, the more tenderness is available. So I just want to make clear that nurturing, although it's the culmination at the end of this full embrace, it's a stream throughout. We can't even begin to investigate if there's not some softness and kindness in our hearts. Does that make sense?

Okay. So she went through this process and opened to the grief, which is what we all all open to. If we go deep enough, this life is going. Naturally we want to hold on. Naturally, as we begin to face the reality, there's that tenderness. And that's this portal that if we really have the courage to let go of the controller and open to, we discover a timeless kind of love and presence that is the who we are beyond the controller. John Jonathan a few days ago told us a story of a yogini in a cave that entertained the demons. You remember that? Had tea. And he mentioned there's a number of versions. Well, in one version,

this is Milarepa, who's a Tibetan yogi. He's in a cave welcoming the demons, as these Tibetans do, and we're learning to do too. And he, you know, he's very, you know, you're going to come and go again, just whatever, enjoy. They all left except one. And this is often how it is, for us, that there's one place that we really keep resisting. This one place we don't want to go. This one place where it's just too much. Okay? And so then he pulled the most brilliant move, which was he put his head inside the demon's mouth and the demon vanished. Because when the resistance is gone, the demons are gone. The controller keeps the problem there, so to speak. When there's a profound surrender, it dissolves. So the beginning of recognizing and releasing

this over-controller is, as we did and reflected, is right from the get-go getting that it's being driven by a deep sense of wanting love, wanting to protect and nurture these lives, to forgive. It's not our fault. It's just part of our egoic development to forgive it, to hold with tenderness. One man who was hooked on cocaine and hooked on manipulating others, very deep fear of, you know, as he started contacting what was underneath it, because he thought as controllers do that he should be able to manage it. I can control my cocaine use, and it should be able to live as he was living, but then between his wife threatening divorce and his boss telling him he had to go to a 12-step group,

he kind of hit a wall. So in therapy, he starts contacting the vulnerability, which is this fear. of being dominated and the shame. And that brought up in him when he really contacted it, the self-compassion we're talking about. And he found that the more he was kind towards himself, the more he actually felt empowered. Like he felt a sense of connection he had never felt before. And his strategy became, and this was kind of like a wise effort strategy, because he knew he'd get drawn back into his old habits was he would say to himself, not my will, but my heart's will.

So we find our ways of releasing the over-controller as we begin to sense belonging to something larger, belonging to our awakened heart, belonging some people sense just handing over to God or handing over to the divine or to the sacred. But I want to end, I want to in this last few minutes, just share what some of the gifts are that you're already noticing in the moments of releasing control. You've already noticed here, and many of you've named it, the moments of just being able to be outside and be available to take in beauty, that quality of beingness that just is receptive. And you've noticed many of you

moments of stillness where there's not a trying to get somewhere, a silence that's not so caught in the thoughts, a sense of tender presence. So these are the gifts and one of the gifts in daily life and our relational life that I think is the most precious is as we let go of the controller, we don't need to fix or change others. And a huge space of presence for loving emerges. Richard Seltzer, a surgeon, describes a bit of this in a story he tells. He says, I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face post-operative, her mouth twisted and palsy clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles

of her mouth have been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh. I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I'd have cut the little nerve. Her husband, her young husband's in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze and touch each other so generously. The young woman speaks, will my mouth always be like this, she asks?

Yes, I say it well. It's because the nerve was cut. She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. I like it, he says. It's kind of cute. And all at once I know who he is, I understand and lower my gaze.

One is not bold in an encounter with a God. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I'm so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers to show her that their kiss still works. It's like when we let go, there's a lot of space for our natural tenderness to emerge.

We can really love without holding back. And there's also a space that does make us available to joy. I mean, often if we're honest with ourselves, we get that we might have our ups and downs, but it's not so common that there's that openness that just lets it all move through. And there's a sense of joy. busy in some way preparing or figuring to make room for that. This is a very brief from St. Teresa

of Ella. She says, just these two words he spoke changed my life. Enjoy me. What a burden I thought I was to carry, a crucifix as he did. After a night of prayer he changed my life when he's saying, enjoy me. What a burden I thought I was to carry, a crucifix, as did he. After a night of prayer, he changed my life when he's saying, enjoy me. So the gifts, the capacity to love when we're not holding on tight, to receive and appreciate, then there's the gift of a fearless heart. the power, when we're actually willing to go right to where the vulnerability is, there's nothing to defend against anymore. Our hearts wide open. One teacher, when she was dying, wrote this, Dharma teacher. My days are short and as I grow weaker, I experience so much

gratitude for my meditation. Not only the joy and ease it brought, but the hard parts for every bored and restless sitting and every fantasy and every pain and itch I sat through and every itch I didn't scratch. It was a training for kindness, a training for the muscle for bearing witness, for the trusting spirit that carries me now as I face my death. Many of you know Ajan Cha writes, if you let go a little, you'll find a little piece. 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 last gift of letting go of the controller is reality. Truth. Realizing truth. Choghim Trunkpa 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. And that seemed really true. Only when we feel this is it, this is how it is right now,

without clutching towards something different, without resisting anything, can we directly realize and become that truth, that radiant, vast, light-filled awareness that's not in any way pushing or holding, just open, openness. So in tonight's talk we're really exploring awakening from the dream. One of the main ways that we stay in the dream is this identity of a self that has a difficulty or a problem and is trying to find their way.

and a movement from that identity to this beingness that allows the light of wisdom, the universal light of wisdom and love to flow through us. And it's in that spirit I'd like to do a final reflection with you. Just take a moment to any way you want to adjust to sit comfortably

and to begin by scanning and choosing some place in your life, life where you know you're getting caught in over-controlling. Like Sisyphish, you're pushing a boulder. They're caught in a lot of judging or striving or defending, trying to become something different, trying to make somebody else different, and gently feeling underneath the controlling activity, the humanness that's there, the wanting, the furious. with kindness, with gentleness.

You might imagine, just like Sisyphus, if he let the boulder just fall away, what it would be like just to let go of all ideas of something's wrong, just to let it go, to hand it over, to sense for yourself, if there's no problem, what is here? And again, just feeling this moment If there's no problem, if there's truly no problem, right this moment, what is here? Who am I?

What's the experience? And then just with that gentle intention to let go of any doing, letting everything be as it is, and sometimes we have to let go again, I often use the word stop, very soft stop. stop or drop. There's nothing to do. Relaxing back again. These are the words of Danifald's poet. Settle in the here and now, looking down into the center where the world is not spinning and drink this holy peace and 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 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. Blessing. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.