Tara Brach - Remembering What Matters

Episode Date: January 30, 2013

2013-01-30 - Remembering What Matters - Our conscious aspiration toward awakening is what energizes the spiritual path. This talk reviews the main characteristic of a vital aspiration, the conditioning that obscures our deepest intentions and offers guided reflections to connect us with what most matters. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

So tonight I want to start with a story, a once upon a time kind of story. And in this one, there's a good king who's seeking an heir to his kingdom. And he's aging and he's without children. And he wants to ensure that the kingdom continue to flourish, as it's been doing, that the population's in good hands. So being an open-minded sort, he decided he'd invite anyone who is, interested to apply for the job, so to speak, you know, an equal opportunity employer, that kind of thing. And it's also used to an egalitarian mindset. Not only that, he decided

he'd have everybody come at once to the palace, and so that nobody would be able to appear in a more impressive way than anyone else. He opened up all the wardrobes from the kingdom. He let everybody pick what they wanted to wear and making sure that they'd appear their best. And the Great Day arrives, a huge stream of people come through the palace gates. They're very excited by the opportunity of being king or queen. And the King and his minister waiting patiently

upstairs in the chambers for when they're ready. And so first the people get to enjoy the bath houses with all the special soaps and so on, and they spend hours dressing and adorning themselves and arguing about who gets one, and flirting with each other, and admiring and criticizing and so on. And because the Good King didn't want anyone to go hungry

while they're waiting, he also provided a banquet. So, you know, they're all, you know, taking these heaping portions of food accompanied by much wine, and there's entertainment, and they're solving puzzles and playing games. So it's a raucous occasion. a lot of competition and fun, fighting, and play. And meanwhile, the king and his minister are waiting hour after hour for the applicants to come upstairs for their interviews.

Finally, the king doesn't understand what's going on. So he sent his minister down to the hall to see what's happening. And when he returned, the minister reported sadly that, well, everybody had left and they had taken with them the remainder of the food and the clothes they had tried on, the jewels, even the silver where it was all gone. They were full and they had been tired and they finally, they forgot why they came. That's the once upon a time story which is also a story of now. The moral of the story being we forget about what matters and we have moments of clarity.

We have moments of extreme clarity when a child is born or when we're saying our wedding vows perhaps or when someone dear is dying. When we see something really beautiful, we get struck. But huge swaths of time, we're on automatic. Huge swaths of time. It's as if there's these long seasons of our life that we're just moving through the day. trying to get through the day sometimes. And for many, if we were at the end of our life looking back,

we might recognize this really is a trance. And we do spend a lot of time in a trance. A trance meaning that our world has shrunk and our attention's fixated and we're forgetting the mystery that's right here that we're living. in. We get small. So what we find if we look carefully at that trance is in those times we're operating reflexively off of shoulds. You know, I should be doing this. Our expectations, our fear, are trying to get more comfortable, trying to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. You know,

that there's all sorts of motivations operative and we're kind of just being steered by them. So I've described a number of times now how one palliative caregiver put it that it's the biggest regret of the dying of not living true to themselves. I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago when I was teaching, you know, that not living true to ourselves, the feeling of at the end of life looking back and sensing I lived for other people's expectations or even my own internalized expectations, but not true to what really matter. So I spoke about this and after class one woman here came up and said, yeah, but what if we just don't know what matters? You know, you just make it sound like we know but we're, you know, what if we just don't know?

And I thought it was a really important question because when we're stressed, when we're operating off of fight-flight, when that's the chemistry of our body. We cut off. We cut off from the parts of our brain and our being that remember the big picture. We cut off from a kind of depth or sensitivity or tenderness that really is tapped into what we might call our heart's deepest longing. We do forget.

And if we're stressed a lot of the time, it feels like we don't know what matters. There's a deep forgetting, a deep trance. Even when we're not so stressed, even those that we might say, well, yeah, I think I know what matters. Most of the time when we're saying that, what we're knowing is a mental or pre-packaged version

of what we've already concluded is important. And for us to really be in touch with what matters and tonight's an exploration of this, what we call aspiration, our deep aspiration, it has to be so fresh that we're rediscovering it right now. It can't be an idea, it can't be mental. So what we find out is that if it's mental, if we are going around saying, yeah, I'm a spiritual person, I'm on a path, I want to do good, it's important to be. be loving and we have all those ideas, but their ideas will find they don't actually inform

how we navigate. And the sign is that we feel a little like there's compartments in our life, that we have times that we've meditated and we remember, but we spend a lot of time feeling like we're in a whole different world. We're back in our stressed out persona and we're not in touch. That's because our aspirational. is primarily mental. I remember reading that Chief Justice Douglas said that 90%

of the decisions of the Supreme Court were made out of emotion and 10% was the rationalizing that went around trying to make sense of the emotion. What drives us is emotion. And a lot of a time it's the emotions

that are constrictive, that are fear-based. It's our worries. is it's our insecurities, it's our feeling of something might be wrong with me and I need to, you know, prove myself in some way. What we begin to sense when we're honest with ourselves is that we're often like those people at the palace, we're kind of caught up in the competition or the consuming or other distractions or we're in another dream and we're racing to get somewhere and check something off a list

but we're in some sort of a trance and we're forgetting why we're here. So maybe as a way to ground this just for a few moments just to invite you to check in and since today just kind of let yourself kind of review the landscape of today with the lens of

well was I in a dream was that a trance Was there the quality of presence where there was a sense of what mattered and some alignment to it? How much was I here today? And see if you can review without judgment, just interest. Interest will carry you. Just a curiosity because the more you can recognize trance, the more you can wake up from within it.

As you're scanning, you might stop somewhere. where you had an interaction with somebody and just kind of peer a little more closely and sense, well, what was my intention during that interaction? Was I intending presence, helpfulness, connection? Was I intending to get something I wanted to defend? Or was I in complete automatic just going through the motions? So the beginning of, you know, what we're exploring tonight, which is aspiration, is to notice the trance and notice also that something in us really does want to be here, that there is an aspiration in there. In one of her poems, Mary Oliver's kneeling prayer-like in a field and she's contemplating

with wonder, a grasshopper, who's gazing around with these enormous complicated eyes. These are her words. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? So we'll explore this tonight and I think in a simple way, a little bit more reflections, I'll speak some, then I'll invite you to just sense for yourself what's true. to set a context when I use the word aspiration, and I'm talking about spiritual aspiration, connecting with the deepest aspiration,

there are three characteristics that I think are really kind of key that bring an aspiration alive. And one of them is the domain it's addressing, which in the deepest aspiration is really manifesting innate potential. that aspiration, it's like a flower that aspires to bloom, to realize its fragrance, to celebrate beauty, to bring happiness to others, it's being all that we are. So aspiration doesn't have to do with something else out there, are being different than we are. It's really unfolding and manifesting the truth and the fullness of what we are, realizing what we are.

what we are. I remember reading about these Bantu tribesmen. And the description was the children would be sleeping in a hut and the father would go around to each one and offer a blessing. He'd whisper a blessing. And the blessing was, be who you are. Be who you are. It's like inhabit and be that which you are. So the aspiration in some way and the deepest way is to become fully what we are, or if we have an aspiration for society that we may manifest our collective truth and identity and goodness. And that's in contrast to, let's say, the aspiration to, you know, hike the Appalachian Trail,

which is fine and it might be in service of something or a good goal, but it's not this deep aspiration I'm talking about, or the aspiration to create an app, for instance, Samadhi. You know, that's an idea that we could do and it could be an achievement but it's not an inner opening. Or the aspiration to make sure our partner uses the app every day, you know. Now that's trouble. That's total trouble. Okay, so part one, it's manifesting what we are. Part two, aspiration is embodied and this is what I was talking about before.

It's not an idea, and it can have idea form, but it's, the heart fuels it. For an aspiration to be alive, what you'll notice, the words that come to mind for mere sincerity, which comes from an old English word meaning without wax that's not covered over. It's like raw, pure, sincere heartfelt experience. There's an innocence. There's no been there done that with it. There's a prayerful quality. There's a yearning.

So when I say embodied, it means we really care about it. That's part of what energizes aspiration. This is Oprah Winfrey. She says, before you agree to do anything that might add even the smallest amount of stress to your life. Ask yourself, what is my truest intention? Give yourself time to let a yes resound within you. When it's right, I guarantee you that your entire body will feel it. Okay? So when we really are coming into our heart's aspiration, our whole body feels it. Okay? So it has to do with unfolding who we really are, that it's embodied, heartfelt.

and then the third is aspiration always relates to this moment. It's what is our spiritual aspiration for how we are right here and now? Because there's no other place to go and be. It's always anchored right here. It's easy to say, well, I have an aspiration to be patient and kind and have an idea that that might come around once you've finished raising your children, and getting them out to, you know, getting them out of the door and maybe you've retired and then you're, we have this if only and it's kind of like St. Augustine who says,

Dear Lord, please give me chastity and continence, but not yet. Okay, so when our aspiration is towards being what we are, when we're really caring about that and when the longing's fresh, it's right here and now, it's like wanting to manage, and inhabit our beingness right this moment, that's when aspiration is in its fullness. And that's when it carries us to freedom. Because what we long for is what we are. It carries us home. So Suzuki-Roshi put it in a way that I just reflect on this one all the time, that the

most important thing is remembering the most important thing. That's his basic teaching. And as we know, the whole path is remembering and forgetting. So the given is that we go into trance and we get removed from a sense of heartfelt aspiration. That's just a given. We go into a trance and live from something smaller. And so we begin to the first, one of the first parts of coming home to aspiration is just to get more familiar with how that happens. That's why we did that first reflection.

And we start noticing that whenever we're suffering, whenever we're suffering, it's because in some way we've disconnected from our heart's aspiration, we've disconnected from that wholeness and that depth, and we're living from a small place. If you're suffering, you're believing in a self that's small and separate and usually some way not okay. That's the suffering. We're leaving out, we're forgetting our wholeness and you can see it in the larger society that when there's suffering, when there's disconnection in our larger society, what happens? When there's disconnection from the earth, what happens? We destroy the earth. We get violent towards the earth.

We overconsume. We don't take care. When there's disconnection from our own heart. We don't hold our own being with compassion. So we watch in our own lives in a daily way and if you look close you'll see that there are certain real signs of that disconnecting. And one is addictive thinking. You'll find that if your thinking is obsessive and you're just lost in thought all the time you're not going to be guided, you're not going to be aligned with your heart. They don't go together. Similarly, judgment. You'll find that if you're disconnecting through judgment, if the mind is judging others or judging ourselves, in a similar way, we're disconnected. We can't

remember what matters. We're living from a smaller sense of our being. One of the main ways that we disconnect is through going into virtual reality online now, through entertainment. You cannot become familiar with your heart's aspiration if you're living in a lot of thoughts, a lot of judgment, or if you're living in a virtual realm. Somebody sent me a bunch of years ago. These are letters, Dear Abby admitted she was at a loss to answer. one of them says Dear Abby

what can I do about all the sex nudity foul language and violence on my VCR I just love that I think that's such a good one so it's the virtual

and then of course I mentioned judgment and I'll read you a few of the Dear Abby's from that one Dear Abby my mother is mean and short-tempered I think she's going through

mental pause dear Abby I was married to Bill for three months and I didn't know he drank until one night he came home sober. Dear Abby, this is Dear Abby, our son writes that he's taking judo.

Why would a boy who is raised in a good Christian home turn against his own? One more. Dear Abby, my 40-year-old son has been paying a psychiatrist $50 an hour every week or two for two and a half years. He must be crazy. That's dated, isn't it? $50 an hour?

Who is that psychiatrist? I'm just naming some of the ways we habitually disconnect and then of course the very speed of our lives is a setup to not be able to feel our hearts. We go around with the idea that there's not enough time and I know that that's a familiar one. There's a sense there's not enough time so we speed. And in that speeding, in that stress, we don't create the spaces that allow light to shine through,

that allow us to remember who we are. I see, there was an ad I read, this is for Equiosync, that was describing all the virtues of meditation and really how meditation allows our life to unfold in a beautiful way. And then it goes, well, why don't people meditate, given all the benefits? Takes too much time. Here's what it goes. What would you say if we told you that with just a press of a button, you could have access to the same deep, highly pleasurable, extremely beneficial meditative states as those with decades of experience

and get the same results in much, much less time? Well, thanks to Equosync, you can achieve precisely the same electrical brainwave pattern a profoundly deep meditation, safely, simply, and effortlessly. A few minutes of your day is all you need necessary to transform your life. So that's, I remember with the Insight Meditation Society, this is one of my home meditation centers up in Barry, Massachusetts. I heard about one of the first letters they ever got that was addressed to the, addressed to IMS.

It was the instant meditation society. So for many, it's not until the earth shakes under us until we really get the rug pulled in some way that we realize, oh my gosh, what have I been living in? How come I've been spending my time this way? How come I've been forgetting? And one woman came to meditation regularly and I had met with some

I got breast cancer when she was very young she was in her 30s her daughter had just turned two when the biopsy report came back and her first thought was well I live to see her grow up very very serious cancer she didn't know

so she survived she's in remission she talked to me about this crisis as a gift that she wouldn't trade as many people do when they, when the most challenging things in their life came. And she said, it made me realize what mattered. That's what people realize. For her it was quality time with loved ones. That's what people often realize. Before the diagnosis, she had been speeding around like the best of us. You know,

she felt as if she never had enough time and she was always letting someone down and she had to do it faster. But after the diagnosis, she had a mantra that I've talked about a lot because I found it so powerful. She said, I have no time to rush. And this is really the truth for all of us. This is a fleeting, fleeting life we've been given. And we spend so much time rushing through it as if we're racing to a finish line. And what's that? I have no time to rush. So from the vantage point of the end of our lives looking back, it can be clear to us the way we leave ourselves.

And the power of bringing aspiration consciously into your practice, like having it as a foundation, practicing remembering aspiration, is that it guides us so we don't get thrown off course. so much. This is the poet Rumi. He says, gamble everything for love if you're a true human being. Half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. That's pretty good. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. The practice of connecting with

aspiration is actually ground in exactly what we do together, which is a present-centered awareness. And the more we learn to pay attention to steady our mind to be here, the more we remember, oh, what matters is presence. So you're going to see a circularity here, right? the more you practice pausing and touching into the moment and saying oh yeah this is what matters the more of that sense of this is what matters

will guide you to come home again so they absolutely reinforce each other if I asked you in the middle of intense stress I said okay what really matters to you right now you'd say to get the hell out of the situation or to feel better

to relieve this you know you just go for the surface once. If you had some moments to settle a little, if I say, okay, just feel the breath, relax a little bit, just get here, get here, and what really matters, you might say, well, to be kind or, well, you know, to be able to really see clearly what's true or, you know, come up with something deeper. We have to pay attention. So the challenge is that our mind is very, very condition to fixate in an auro and superficial way. I like to read you again up home.

This is called Flickering Mind. And it's by Denise Levertov. And she says, Lord, I stop to think about you. And my mind at once, like a minnow, darts away, darts into shadows, into gleams that fret unseasonally over the rivers purling and passing. Not for one second will myself hold still, but wanders anywhere, everywhere it can turn. Not you, it is I am absent. You are the stream, the fish, the light, the pulsing shadow, you the unchanging presence

in whom all moves and changes. How can I focus my flickering? Perceive at the fountain's heart the sapphire I know is there. So, part of this practice of establishing our aspiration is to come a little more steady, quiet down some, be able to get here enough so we can remember what we cherish. So what I'd like to do is a brief guided practice where we take a few moments with that quieting and we'll use a particular frame to really ask this very deep question of what matters. See how this works for you.

Closing your eyes helps often just in terms of bringing the attention inward, collecting the attention. You might take a few full breaths, inhaling very deeply, filling the lungs. spilling the chest and then a slow out breath. Letting go. Letting go. Again, a deep, full in-breath. Then breathing out slowly so you can feel the sensations of letting go. One more time, inhaling deeply.

And with the out-breath as you release, sense the possibility of softening and relaxing through your body so that when the breath resumes, it snaps, cycle. You can continue relaxing with the breath, the in-breath like an expanding balloon, just opening to receive, relaxing open with the out-breath, releasing, settling, resting. Know that you're here. You might mentally whisper the word here and see if you can make yourself a little more at home in this moment. Senses awake, listening again to the sounds, around you

and with the same receptivity that let sounds wash through listening to your heart sensing a sincerity that really is open to listening connecting the first question is

if you had a year to live and ask your heart this question what would you do what would matter how would you live? How would you live. If you had a month to live, what would you do? How would you live? And what would most matter? If you had a day to live, what would you do? How would you want to move through

or experience your moments? What would matter? If you had an hour to live, what would most matter? If you just had a few moments to live, what would most matter? And just letting that matter right now. This is it. So, for some people, if that frame is held of, you know, really getting that we're here for just so much time, it allows us to tap into our wisdom and into the realness of what is important to us. And if we can remember that we can remember that in the midst of daily life, it allows us to align ourselves at times that we might in some way create suffering and instead move towards healing. And this to me is most obvious or one of the areas, I'm going to name two ways that aspiration can come alive in the midst

of our lives. One is in the midst of when there's some distance with another person. some conflict, some stress. And if we're able to in some way tap into that, you know, hey, we're both going to die, you know, we don't have that long on this planet. What really matters? If there's some remembrance, even a glimmer, there's a little more creativity, a little more flexibility to not lock in to our ego stance and sustain the distance. So as an example, just to share with you, one woman had had a kind of lifelong standoff with her older sister.

This woman was the kind of non-traditional bad girl of the family. She'd gotten to trouble when she was younger. She'd say the wrong thing, be misunderstood. She felt unappreciated. She didn't get invited to one of the nieces' weddings. Her sister and her had a particularly bitter argument. but their dad had died and their mom was six, they were forced together for the holidays.

So as she described it, there's Thanksgiving and she's ready for difficulty and they get into a disagreement about her mother's diet because she, of course, suggests gluten-free and she's very holistic and so on. And her sister's going, oh, everything's got to fit your philosophy. And so finally she walks out of the room all injured and heard and convinced her sister hates her

and convince there's something wrong with her, but there's also something wrong with her sister, and that she can't make her like, I can't make her like me, she doesn't understand me, she doesn't care. So she, you know, she's practicing meditation, she goes, okay, so she pauses and gets that she's having a hard time and just says, you know, tries to offer some kindness to herself and deepen her attention.

And she starts asking the question we're talking about tonight. Okay, so what matter? what's my intention here? And the first layer that came up was I want to be respected, you know, I want to be seen, I want her to understand me. And she felt that was a young place. And so she asked again, so what really is my intention? Just to put it on hold, I'm going to make a comment here which D.H. Lawrence, I think, put it the best

when he said, you know, that we, he described our layered wants and he says, is it's not what the self wants, it's what the deepest self wants, and it takes some diving. Anytime we pause and say, what's my intention, there's going to be layers there. We're not going to come up with some real deeply, you know, noble kind of intention instantly. We might come up with all sorts of other layers as she did, but just to keep asking. So what is it really? It's an inquiry. So for her, as she deepened, as she started diving in, it was loving connection and she also

wanted to be helpful. So that became her prayer. You know, can I bring this intention to, may I create some more understanding and care and love between us? So for the rest of the evening she was more there and she didn't need to assert her opinion or defend so much, fine, that ended. Month later, they're back again, Hanukkah, more ease. laughing together over some old family story. And later that night, her sister shared with her tough time she was having with her teenage son. Something had shifted. She thanked her for listening, for being a good shoulder. And for this woman, she said that she realized in between the two holidays that she had been living with this demand that her sister understand and appreciate her.

There was this inner demand. And that when she shifted from this ego's intent, I will be understood, God damn it. Sometimes the ego's well to the heart's well, and I've mentioned that phrase a few weeks ago, that made all the difference. Because she shifted from a small egoic self's intention to an intention that really arises

from the who we really are and carries us home to the who we really are from my will or my ego's will to the heart's well so there's really that question do we want to be awake or do we want more loving presence I mean do we want to be right scrape that let me start again on that one there's that question do we want to be right

or do we want to have more loving presence and we get addicted to being right so it's not an easy one So again, if you just reflect for a moment, you might close your eyes and just sense briefly just to touch into the possibility here a situation where you encounter conflict with someone that is close to you. Now, not major conflict, not the kind of conflict that you go into rage, but more just where there's something that creates tension or separation. and let yourself bring up that situation in your mind for a moment.

Now in these situations things happen fast and we don't often have the chance to leave the room and process. But for the sake of this practice, slow it down and imagine the situation and just slow down the pace so that you give yourself the space in your imagination to ask the question. Okay, what matters here?

what's my intention? And when you're in the midst of the kind of more the conflict and the strain or just sense what the ego's intent is, what's the ego's well, what's the demand you have on the situation or the resistance. When there's conflict, the ego's well is usually coming from some fear, some holding on to wanting power, rightness. Just keep asking, what's my deepest? intention. Not in any way judging yourself, just with gentleness. What's my deepest intention here?

What really matters in this relationship? You might imagine how things would unfold if you were able to remember the deeper intention. Just keeping that in mind again, the challenge is that when we're stressed. We forget. We get in fight-flight, we fixate, we want to be right, we're driven by our fear-based experience and we don't ask the question. So what will remind us to even ask the question, what is my intention? What will help us is if every day when we're not stressed at when we're maybe meditating for a few moments getting quiet, we remind ourselves, of our aspiration. We reflect on it. You know the phrase that neurons that fire together, wire together, that what we pay attention to, say it's our aspiration to connect, that becomes

more and more the energy behind our words and actions. In other words, where attention goes, energy flows. So the more moments you remember your aspiration, the the more your neural patterning, the pathways will lead you there, will lead you to that remembrance and will inform your action. Now one of the universal ways that I found is really, really helpful in considering how to bring this into practice, this is kind of a universal aspiration, which is that when you hit suffering, then things are difficult to basically have the prayer, may this serve to awaken. That no matter what it is, and this is called the Bodhisattva aspiration and the Buddhist

tradition, Bodhisattva is an awakening being, that no matter what it is that's going on, whether it's facing your own mortality, whether it's a divorce, whether it's an accident, no matter what it is, if you want to start to start with you. practicing with aspiration just to sense, may this serve to awaken, meaning awaken love, awaken wisdom, awaken me to freedom. If you can remember to add that frame, may this serve awakening, then rather than being the ego's separate self that's caught in the suffering, you will remind yourself of a bigger possibility of who you are. For me, this became, went from a really cool idea to a turning towards freedom when I hit bottom in terms of getting sick.

When I hit bottom, I couldn't exercise, it couldn't walk uphill, I was weak, got to cancel a lot of different engagements. And so in my mind, I had no idea if I was going to ever get better. It seemed like I was going to continue to get worse. And this went on for a few years. So I went through a lot of grieving and feelings of powerlessness. And I remember in one particular walk on the river, it was flat, it was somewhat easy, and even then I was feeling pain with most of my steps. And I hit this kind of despair, like, what's the purpose, that kind of feeling?

And so, and I knew about the Bodhisattva prayer. So I just started muttering it. First I was really muttering it just almost dutifully like, okay, this is what I should be doing now. You know, I'm on a spiritual path, now I should be, you know, asking for this to serve awakening. But there was something, there was grace that I remembered even to mutter. Because as I did it, the possibility of awakening re-entered into my mind stream. And I began to sense, wait a minute. no matter how I'm thinking about this, this sickness is part of the path.

And this sickness has the potential to teach me. All of a sudden there was meaning where there wasn't meaning. You know, Victor Frankl talks about it's not what we're seeking is not happiness or is not a particular state of mind. We want meaning, meaning a sense of being embedded in something larger, being part of something larger, which is waking up to who we are beyond the ego excel. So that prayer may this serve awakening was saying, please teach me. How may this sense of grief and loss in some way, how do I find freedom in the midst of this?

Teach me to find freedom in the midst of this. And just the prayer opened up space. And I began to learn. And the way I began to learn was just finding myself in just this moment, just this moment. There was space, there was wakefulness, there was tenderness. In other words, the prayer helped me come home to a larger sense of being that had room for what was going on. And subsequently, especially through writing through refuge, because I've worked with so

many people that have been facing something often way larger than what I was facing. It wasn't until they shifted from feeling a victim of the situation to sensing the possibility of awakening through it that their life came back into having meaning and hope. Victor Frankel writes, We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offered sufficient proof

that everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances to choose one's own way. By remembering what matters, we're choosing our own way. By remembering what matters, we're waking up out of the ego, well into the heart's well. So try this if you will, just to our final reflection

here. And as you pause, feel your breath, be aware of the sounds around you. And sensing your life right now you might bring to mind something that's going on that feels challenging, that you perhaps wish wasn't happening, that you might want different. Some set of sense of circumstances that cause anger or fear or hurt. And notice how you've been regarding it. What has your attitude been towards it? What's your habitual attitude been towards it? And you might look towards when you sense you're kind of in a more of a trance or reactive place. Have you judged yourself or somebody else? Have you been caught in obsessive thinking,

trying to fix, feeling victimized or oppressed. Again, without judgment, just to notice how you've been relating. And then sense the possibility. Try on this bodhisattva's aspiration, mentally whispering the words, may this serve awakening. You can use your own language, may this serve my heart opening,

may this serve compassion, may this serve wisdom, may this serve more freedom, whatever resonates for you, whatever your aspiration is, may this serve your spiritual awakening. And notice if you say it again and let it drop into the most sincere part of you, that which really longs to be free. Just notice the difference between the reactive way of, relating to difficulty. And what happens when you bring it into the realm of aspiration, when you remember what you really care about, may this serve freedom, may this allow me to love

without holding back, may this teach me about awakening. So close with the words of RELCA, he says, you see, I want a lot, perhaps I want everything. the darkness that comes with every infinite fall and the shivering blaze of every step up, you have not grown old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret. You have not grown old and it is not too late to dive into your increasing depths where life calmly gives out its own secret. Namaste and thank you for your attention.

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.