Tara Brach - Remembering Being

Episode Date: May 11, 2013

2013-05-08 - Remembering Being - Our fear-based doings block us from realizing the formless dimension of our Being, and living from that source of wisdom and love.  This talk explores the habitual control strategies that keep us from presence; and the role of mindfulness and lovingkindness in reconnecting with the ground of Being.

So another question for you tonight is how many went to see the Dalai Lama when he was here? Can I see by hands? Not so many. He was here yesterday at University of Maryland. And it's always wonderful to have the Dalai Lama just in the vicinity. His main teaching always in some way is that every one of us wants to be happy. Nobody wants to suffer. I remember in 2005 he was here for a conference,

and that was the first year that there was a real sharing of how much science was showing the effect of meditation on mental health, on physical health. He had just come out with a book on happiness. Network News was interviewing him. The big question for him was, so what was the happiest moment of your life? That was their question. And he sat there and kind of gave that little mischievous look and he said, I think now.

I love that story because as we know, the whole training and meditation is to be able to arrive and come to the one place right here where it's possible to get in touch with loving presence, where it's possible to be creative, where it's possible to really find happiness and healing. And the really good news is this understanding is spreading, just like people get it that exercise helps our body. This is, I don't know how many of you know, but this is called Mental Health Month. I don't know if you're familiar with that,

but there's a mental health caucus on Capitol Hill, and so this is Mental Health Month, and they're paying a whole lot of attention to this research on the effects of mindfulness, on addiction, and on emotional healing. So much so that yesterday I taught a class on Capitol Health for staff and legislators that they sponsored. They and Congressman Tim Ryan because they're, and now they're beginning to do a regular class on capital health, a meditation class for those there.

This is good news. Yeah. Yeah, it's happy making, consciousness. So the Buddha highlights a really great paradox that is what I want to explore tonight, which is that our happiness and freedom arises from what I'm calling presence, which is this awakeness, this awakeness and openness right here. That's the source of our happiness. And yet in our daily pursuit of happiness, we leave over and over again.

keep exiting. Okay? You're all with me, I'm pretty sure on this. And it's tracked in Buddhist psychology to a basic perceptual misunderstanding whereby we sense that our happiness depends on having life a certain way. We are conditioned in our pursuit of happiness to try to do, when there's something pleasant, hold on to it or get more of it. And we're conditioned to think that if there's something unpleasant, we can't be happy, we have to get rid of it. In other words, our wiring is such that pleasantness and unpleasantness, which continually is happening, is a trigger to leave the present moment. So the one place where if we can learn to stay and open, we can end up finding the space and the freedom that really is

what we're yearning for, we exit. Okay, so that's the paradox. And really one of the ways to think about it is that as part of our survival equipment, these egos, our executor, have a kind of navigating system and it's very much like other animals in the way that we reflexively move, you know, away from unpleasantness and towards pleasantness, so that we're always trying to control our experience. And if you begin to investigate in moments of controlling your experience, or controlling other people, we do that too, we're not fully here.

We've left. We've left our wholeness, we've left our being. So we do it a lot in a mental way. Most of us do it pretty continuously through our judging, our planning, our rehearsing, or our mulling, our ways of obsessing. That's our primary way to try to control what's going to happen. We strive. We either strive or we procrastinate, but a lot of the times we're striving.

The classic story of one Zen student goes to the monastery and he says, his basic question to the abbot is, well, how long will it take me to get enlightened? And so the abbot says 10 years. And then the question was, well, what if I try really? really hard. 20 years. Hey, wait a minute, you just said 10 years. For you, 30 years. For you, 30 years. It's part of our survival equipment just to try hard, to try to get what we want. And you know, if you think of it, if our parents weren't intentionally drawn towards seeking out pleasure, we wouldn't be here, right? And if we didn't try to

avoid pain, we wouldn't be able to stick around long. So it's universal, but when we live in a continual reactivity where we're constantly managing and controlling, it blocks out our capacity to love in a way that's visceral. We can have ideas of loving but we are not in our body in the moment to really feel that tenderness. When we are constantly in that control mode, we're not able to perceive much about others. When we're in control mode, we are disconnected from our bodies, we're not feeling our belonging to the earth.

We're really not able to perceive our very beingness. We're cut off from that background of awakeness and openness that's really our home. So what I want to explore tonight is this way we get cut off and caught in the doing, controlling kind of egoic mind and the way we come back. And Buddha's psychology describes it, you know, that Buddha described a trance or a dream, that we're busy with our ideas of what it's going to make us happy and what's going to save us from harm. And we get very busy with it and take it very, very serious.

and we're a very important protagonist in the drama of how we're going to navigate each day. So we're in this kind of trance, and when we're in that trance, we have forgotten who we are, and that's the suffering. We are cut off from the beingness, the dimension of beingness, that really is home. Now, the question then that's really central for all of us in our lives, is how do we wake up from that controlling ego that's overdoing? Because this isn't about not doing. I mean, activity is fine.

It's the obsessive overdoing, the controlling that keeps us cut off. So that's what we'll be exploring tonight, is going from this kind of overdoing to more of the quality of beingness in our life. And I'll share with you a really, really terrible joke. This is passed on by way of Jonathan. He says it's terrible too. So Socrates says, to be is to do.

Sartre says, to do is to be. Sinatra croons, dooby, dooby, dooby, dooby, doby, doby, doby. Of course, there's Fred Flintstone, too, right? You all know that one. Okay, so I just want to again say that we're going to explore moving from doing to being, but it doesn't mean a passive life. In fact, you know, it's not like we're going to let the kids, you know, forego anything creative and just get glued to the screen and it doesn't mean that in some way we're going

to give up exercising at the club. We can still be doing. The idea is this, that only by learning to rest in being in that presence does our activity come from a more enlightened, more wise, more compassionate place. So it's not stopping doing, it's doing from a place of wholeness. First place of attention for us as we explore really shifting the proportions in our life, because that's what I think of it as. is getting very familiar with our control strategies.

And we all have them. I mean, every ego is navigating and most of us have particular strategies that help us to feel more secure that give us a temporary sense of pleasure or relief. They wouldn't work if they didn't give us something. And this is, you know, if you think of it, it's very impersonal, our control strategies. Every mammal, every animal has them. And so we have a kind of complex version of what other animals and mammals do. And it all goes by operant conditioning. Most of you are familiar with the way operand conditioning goes, that these control of behaviors, well,

we do something, it brings us some reward. And then we do it again and it brings us some reward. So we get habituated to it. It doesn't bring us ultimate happiness. It doesn't bring us ultimate love, but we get enough relief or enough pleasure for the moment that we're hooked. So what are they? Which are the strategies we're kind of hooked on that are hard to give up? So you think of a rat in a lab pushing a lever for pellets, right? So how are we pushing levers for pleasure? And you can see it, you know, that we perform certain ways to get approval.

We have to show off certain things. we kind of compulsively show off certain things about our lives to get others' approval. And we strive to accomplish, again, to feel better about ourselves, or we inflate in some way to impress, or we accommodate people to win their affection. You know, we have all our different ways, and a lot of them have to do with consuming, very across-the-board ways of consuming to soothe, in terms of food, using alcohol or drugs, do either stimulate or sedate?

One story, a man and a woman are in an airplane, and the woman takes out a tissue, she sneezes, gently wipes her nose, and then shudders quite violently for 10 to 15 seconds. A few minutes later, she does it again. She sneezes, pull out of tissue, wipes her nose, and shudders. Quite violently, actually. The man's becoming very curious about the shuttering. So when it happens one more time that she wipes her nose and shudders, he couldn't restrain his curiosity and he asked her what was going on.

He says, you've sneezed three times, you've wiped your nose with a tissue, you shudder violently. Are you all right? Her reply is, I'm sorry if I disturbed you. She said, I have a rare condition. When I sneeze, I have an orgasm. Man was a little embarrassed but even more curious. He said, you know, I've never heard of that before. What are you taking for it?

Her response, pepper. So we push the lever over and over again for the pellets and we get addicted to it, even if it's not really the pellets that we're ultimately looking for. We keep pushing in the same way. And then, of course, we have all our control strategies for defending, just the way of cattle bristle. You know, we have ways of defending against harm or predators.

We threaten, we criticize, You know, we deceive, we withdraw, our energies, we withhold, we procrastinate. And of course we do a full-throttle attack sometimes. So we have our strategies and they kick into action when there's in some way some stimulus. It says, I'm threatened with something or I have a chance of getting more of something. They swing into action. They swing into action when life does not cooperate in some way. So a lot of it's mental, the blaming, the self-validation, the grasping, the figuring.

And as I said, if we get a temporary reward, we do it more. One of my favorite illustrations is of an elderly man who lives alone in New Jersey and he wants to plant his annual tomato garden, but it's very difficult because the ground's really hard and he's getting older. So his only son Vincent, who used to help him with the gardens in prison. so he writes a letter to his son. Dear Vincent, I'm feeling pretty sad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year.

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'd be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days. Love Papa. A few days later, he receives a letter from his son. Dear Pop, don't dig up that garden. That's where the bodies are buried.

Love Vinny. At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived. They dig up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologize to the old man and they leave. The same day the old man receives another letter from his son. Dear Pop, go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances. Love you, Vinny.

So when it works, when our strategize, strategizing and are manipulating or controlling or figuring works. It's like we keep doing it. Now the sufferers I meant suffering is when we're addicted to it. When it takes up the big swaths of our life that we're trying to make things happen and there's really no arriving in presence and you can think through today. Let me just reflect for a moment of what today was like. And certainly you'll notice that there were natural.

things that you needed to do as part of your responsibilities. It's all, much of its, you know, wholesome natural activity, whether we're feeding ourselves or others or doing our job at work. But how much was the mind off in planning ahead or figuring or judging or judging or criticizing or whatever it is in an unnecessary way? How often and were you able to just let go of the doing and be here for whatever was in the moment in your body or your heart or with someone else, really listening? When we scan, we often find that we kind of tumble forward through time that we're rarely pausing and really arriving.

We might have our meditation period. And then we're trying to do it formally, but then we get into the day and it's mostly we're on our way somewhere. We're trying to get something done or we're thinking about what just happened, but heerness, not so often. So when we're addicted it causes trouble. It prevents us from really being in touch with who we are and it ends of causing violence because when we have fear in our system,

our way of controlling ends up becoming such that we injure ourselves or others. Doesn't bring happiness. We end up in a chain reaction where we're not at home. And I like this description of how it happens in the biggest way. This is Kurt Vonnegut. And in the novel, one of his novels, man sitting watching television, watching a movie from World War II. You know, there's endless black and white movies from World War II.

But in this one, someone's put the reel on backwards, and he's there and he's sitting, and this is how it looks to him. Okay? American planes full of holes and wounded men and corpses take off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards and sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for the wrecked American bombers on the ground and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames.

The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers and lifted the containers by magic into the billy's of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks, but there were still a few wounded Americans, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again and made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from their racks and shipped back to the United States, where factories were operating day and night dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals.

Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground and hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again. When we look at it globally, we can see the horror that happens that comes out of this basic fear conditioning, the conditioning to grasp. And we can see how it leads to war, how it leads to devastating our Earth's environment. We can see the results of these control strategies that humans have when they go awry and we get addicted.

So the question is, how do we undo? You know, how do we put the film on backwards? And so we end up putting it back into the earth in a way that's safe, that's healed so we can be at peace. And so I'd like to take the rest of tonight to really explore how we can move from that chain of reactivity where we're doing and controlling and be able to touch into that beingness where we really can live from the kind of wisdom and compassion that brings healing to ourselves and each other.

And I'll do it in two pieces. and the first is how when we're in the thick of it, when we're in doer mode and it's coming from a fearful place, we're just in our activity, how do we learn to pause and touch into that beingness? What motivates us? And the second part is when we're non-the-grimp, how do we get more familiar with beingness?

For many of us, it's just not part of our habit to pause and just arrive. How do we have that pathway become more alive and easy and available? So part one, when we're kind of caught in the thick and I'll share with you what one woman, this is Judith Durrick. This is excerpted from circle of stones. She says the balance between doing and being is the most important and dangerous question. If I am guilted or lured into achieving too much and lose the stillness at my center, then

it takes a long time to regain it. My foot taps, I swallow food whole, I spill the coffee as I pour it, I burn myself on the stove. There's a violence that takes over every act. I am finding that it takes a lot of time to be a human being, to have a feeling of space and breath, a chance to sink into myself. As long as they take time every morning to light a camera. candle to my life, it remains my life. But if I hurry into work without that small moment of quiet, then I've already lost myself and the day. So finding this balance, the first step

is that has to matter to us. In other words, there has to be something in us that starts getting that are habitual ways of moving through the day where we overdo, our overthink, our overjudge, or whatever our strategy is with others to have them cooperate with us, is actually interfering with our capacity to have love relationships with others and with ourselves. It's interfering from... It's like that idea that life is a problem to be solved rather than a mystery to be lived. We lose our life, as Judas says. So the first step is having it matter, because we will...

not pause in the midst of things and begin to try to find our way back to presence if we don't get that being caught in the controller, being identified with the controller, is actually blocking us from really living a life that's fulfilled. We have to get that. So for many of us, it has to be stark. Like we really hit bottom and an addiction and we get that. the controller that's keeping us addicted is really harming us. It's a failed relationship. All of a sudden, our partner says, you know, it's not working. And we realize that for the last 15 years, our tension and our way of controlling things

has blocked any spontaneity or real flowering of the relationship. Or it might be physically that the controller, which is really stress-driven, has port-apeutic. of our body breakdown, or emotionally we realize we're spending our whole day anxious. Now for me, many versions of the controller but it became most stark. Of course, when I got sick and the controller made a wild grab for power, you know, trying to do my main ones, obsessing about how I could, you know, work this out and find my way to health and what was wrong and judging myself or not taking care of myself. And, you know, this was the controlling self, trying to manage things. And I got pretty motivated when I realized

that the sickness kept going and the controller wasn't helping and I was giving my life over to, you know, obsessing and judging and struggling with it. So I kind of came to a peak. At one point I ended up in a cardiac unit at Fairfax Hospital right here for about five days and they didn't know what was wrong with me and no one could diagnose it. So it was because, you know, if we have in our daily life, we've got so much to do that there's often not time to sit back and say, wow, the controller's active. I think I'm going to pause and check this out. If you're in the hospital for five days, you got plenty of time.

So this was my retreat on hanging out with the controller and You know, I'd notice how over and over again my mind would start harping on, I'm going to have to find substitutes for the Wednesday night class. I'm going to have to cancel that retreat. How am I? Should I be seeing another doctor to check out this? You know, it's like I was going and going, and something in me would say, okay, it's the controller, you know, stop.

And so I would start, you know, the mantra I used, which was Chogium Trunpa, Tibetan teacher, advises us to when we, when stuff's going on to keep on meeting our edge and softening. He says meet your edge, the edge being where it's really hard or difficult or you're struggling where you're caught and then just soften and soften means that you're recognizing what's happening but you're just making room for it. Now this is the diametric opposite to the controller who doesn't want to meet the edge wants to run in the other direction and doesn't want to soften, wants to manage everything,

right? So this is like counter conditioning. This is turning the film and running it backwards. Does that make sense? Okay. That became the practice. Every time, oh, the controller, okay, I try to meet my edge and soften. I found that it would work, I'd do it for a bit, the controller would come back.

And I started catching on that it was okay, that it wasn't working for once and for all. And I want to share that because it takes a lot of patience. These patterns are really deep. But because I had a lot of time to keep on noticing and saying, okay, stop, soften, it became really interesting. I'd soften, I'd start opening. And what I had to open to, it wasn't like, oh, open to presence. It was like open to the raw fear that I was running from, right?

So it's hard to, you know, you have to be motivated because when you open into presence, it's not necessarily peaceful, blissful presence. It's the very thing you're running from. So then the practice really is meet your edge and soften and learn to stay some. Don't leave too quickly. What helped me a lot in that and this meeting my edge and softening and staying was I would say, you know, stop, just be here, and I'd add the word sweetheart. I'd say, it's okay, sweetheart. And just that touch of kindness, so it's meet your edge, soften, touch of kindness,

actually was what kind of gave me the room and the ease to just stay with it. And as I did, towards the last day or two, this is kind of what I want to share is I started getting more familiar and more at home with that sense of just being, just being with what's there, that space kind of tender, some agitation on the surface, than the controller. The controller was more and more like this character in a movie that I would kind of be smiling Riley at and saying, oh, okay, here it is again. It's not like the enemy, it's just the ego doing its thing but overdoing it. So you can't make war on the controller.

The controller loves it when you make war on the controller. It just gets more tough. It's really meet your edge, soften, it's okay sweetheart, or whatever your language or gestures is for kindness. And we begin to have a bit more space. We start becoming at home and who we are as a being rather than the small self as a controller. So in the Buddhist psychology, this is described as waking up from the trance.

because the trance is when we're identified as the controlling self. Does that make sense? It's a kind of narrow sliver of what we are. And the waking up is, oh, okay, so there's this space of awareness, of kindness, that's noticing the controller but not caught inside. Let's practice this part one together. So you put down whatever you're writing with

and sit just in a way that lets you feel alert and relaxed. So you might close your eyes and take a moment to connect with your senses. So that might mean listening to the sounds that are here, bringing your awareness into your body so that you can feel where there might be habitual tightness and let go a little. Take a nice full breath and maybe another one. And reflecting now, you might sense for yourself where in your life there's a situation, where in some way life's not cooperating or you're not cooperating, but there's stress. A situation where you know that the controlling, doing part of you really leaps into action.

And it might be that in some way you notice how the wanting is strong in those situations or the craving or the fearing is strong. And what's your strategy then? What's your control strategy? You might sense that you get busy, or frenetically busy. You might sense that you start thinking compulsively. Maybe your controller turns to judging, that's probably the most common and popular strategy. Maybe in those situations you get very controlling or of others, threatening others.

trying to get others to do what you want, guilting others. Just sense in a stressful situation how the controller is behaving and see if you can sense the effect of it, the suffering of it, how by getting caught in the controller, there's more separation from yourself,

separation from others, how easy it is to cause harm, how much we miss out on. not to add another layer of judgment, not to add the second arrow, but rather to just with honesty and gentleness observe the effect, the repercussions of being identified as the controller and getting caught in the controller so that you can sense what you really wish,

to sense your heart's aspiration when you see that. You might sense it in whatever language works for you, that in some way there be some waking up from the controlling self, some touching into beingness, into your heart, into your consciousness, that you can undo some of that patterning. Just sense your intention to wake up in whatever way is natural for you. Just for a couple more moments and just let yourself enter the situation as well as you can. Imagine kind of transplanting yourself right into it where you get most stress, most reactive, most caught in the controlling self.

And make it as real and vivid just for the sake of this reflection. See if there's others involved, what they're doing, what they're saying, the looks on their face. Sense what's provoking you, what the situation is, what you're afraid is going to happen. Let yourself be really aware of what you believe or fear is going to happen. what's going to go wrong. And sense the possibility of pausing in the midst of that situation. Just run through it in your mind, your body, your heart that you could pause.

And just sense what it would be like if you could have a time out where you can pause and explore this meeting your edge and softening. Explore staying right here and breathing with what's going on in your body and your heart. So that you're just taking a time of your edge and softening. just taking a time out instead of doing whatever the behavior is, you're pausing, and just connecting with what's actually going on inside you. You might offer a message of kindness to see what happens if you offer a message of kindness or if you want to just gently put your hand on your heart so that you're experimenting

with kind of just the way in Vonnegut's story like unrolling or undoing the habit pattern Instead of the controlling behavior, pausing, meeting your edge, softening, offering kindness inside, let yourself detect the presence that's here that we miss out on when we're in our actions in our addictive controlling behavior but the presence, the beingness in the background right here. Let yourself rest and sense who you are in a deeper way when in a sense that you are in a deeper way when instead of acting on the impulse, you pause and you bring attention to your life right here. You can take it deeper as you listen to these words of this poem from Dana Falls.

She says, settle in the here and now. Just settle in the here and now. You can just rest. 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 and to form.

Nothing to run from or run toward. Just this breath. Awareness knowing itself as embodiment. Just this breath. Awareness waking up to truth. settle in the here and now. Reach down into the center where the world is not spinning and drink this holy peace. Okay, open your eyes.

So as with all these guided meditations, I try not to judge how you do them because we do such a short amount of time and usually they take longer. So I just want you to know it's something you can explore in your own, both in meditation when you're not in the thick of the doer or controller, but also when you are even a short pause, even just getting it, just saying, okay, it's the controller and taking three breaths begins to interrupt the patterning, begins to give you some more options. You know how they say the 10,000 hours we need for mastery? maybe 10,000 times that you notice this rigidity and something in you says, okay, meet my

edge and soften, but you'll find that what's waiting for you is a quality of beingness that feels like home, that piece that you can really take refuge in. So that is one piece. The other piece I wanted to touch on in our last little bit here together is that when you're not in reactivity in the times in your life when things are fairly balanced or easier, those are times when you can intentionally explore and rest in this quality, this formless dimension of being this till it becomes very familiar and very alive for you. So what I'd like to do is guide you in just a few different ways that you can begin to experiment and come into this formless dimension on your own. So again I'm going to invite you to close your eyes.

Okay? And we begin with, to me, one of the most simple and beautiful ways that we can begin to take what's called the backward step and rather than fixating on the phenomena of life, our stories or the things that are going on in our mind or even the sounds or sensations, we begin to sense this awareness that's here. And the simplest way is to begin by just awakening your senses and make sure each sense is awake so that you take some moments to listen, letting the sounds wash through, soften and open receptively, let them really wash through you. and then listening to and feeling the sensations in your body.

And as you do that, you'll find that if you soften in certain areas, you allow more flow, more aliveness in the body. So softening the shoulders, loosening and softening the belly. There's a kind of opening to the life of the body. Aware of sounds, aware of sensations, aware of any feelings or moods that are here. Discover what it's like to have your senses wide open. not opposing anything or resisting anything. Totally letting this life live through you.

So in the foreground, sensing this entire changing dance, nothing's holding still sounds come, they go, they come again, they go. Sensations arise, bubble up, move. Points of light in the night sky. This whole happening world, sensing that in the foreground, But see if you can sense in the background the openness that includes everything, this openness of awareness that everything's happening in, sensing in the background a quality of knowing that everything that's experienced, sound, sensation, it's known by awareness.

Just rest in that knowing you can begin to sense is that stillness that stillness that we see seek, isn't it true that it's already here? Can you sense the stillness that's aware of all this activity, vibration, sensation? Can you notice the silence that's listening? There's a great space that holds it all. There's a silence that's listening to thoughts, to sounds. Sensing this presence in the background is sensing your most deeply subjective truth of who you are. Just rest in that beingness, just be that awareness. So Gil Rimpashe writes, if everything changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious in which

the dance of change and impermanence takes place? This is a way of closing to say that there's a whole world to explore when we begin to shift the attention into beingness. And for many people, because our minds are busy or sticky or fixated on what's going on in the story world, it's very difficult to begin to quiet enough to rest in that silence and stillness. Not to worry. something that when you do find a moment of calm, just sense, oh, okay, let's see in the

background if I can just sense the awareness that's here. Just relax into it. Don't make it a struggle because you can't get anywhere with struggling. But tonight what we're really looking at is how we have this addiction to in some way trying to control what's going on. And if we can begin to catch the places where it's most, keeping our lives small, we can begin to practice in a way that undoes the habit. Just the way opera and conditioning installs the habit of controlling, we can use operand conditioning to learn more and more how to be in this quality of beingness, of presence.

The gift, and the gift is freedom ultimately, but one of the ways, one of the ways of phrasing the gift that I really like, is a heart that is ready for anything. That when we have gotten familiar with this quality of beingness, of presence, when that's more familiar than any story about ourselves, there's a certain confidence that arises. And it's this confidence that we can handle whatever comes our way. And it's not a hubris, it's more of a sense of what we are beyond this living, dying form.

It's Srinargaradatta puts it this way. He says, as long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing amongst things, you seem short-lived and vulnerable and of course you'll feel anxious to survive. But when you know yourself to be beyond time and space, you'll be afraid no longer. Putting our 10,000 hours into becoming familiar with beingness is becoming familiar of who we are beyond time and space. and there's a fearless quality of the heart that arises that then allows us to relate to this life right here, right now,

with a tremendous spontaneity, with a tremendous quality of compassion, with a tremendous wisdom. We're not so caught in the waves, we can embrace the waves, we can play in the waves. So I'd like to close with just another brief reflection, just if you will to close your eyes and as if for the very first time just sense okay this is a pause time to not do anything nothing to make happen just to notice what's actually here

the teacher to lopez says let go of what is past let go of what may come let go of what is happening now. Don't try to figure anything out. Don't try to make anything happen. Relax. Right now and rest. Closing with a prayer of loving kindness, may all beings everywhere come home to the love and the aliveness and the purity of their essence being. May all beings discover heart that is ready for anything. May all beings know great and natural peace. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is

IMCW.org. Thank you very much. Thank you.