Tara Brach - River of Change - Part 1 - Bringing a Wise Heart to this Impermanent Life (2017-10-04)

Episode Date: October 6, 2017

River of Change - Part 1 - Bringing a Wise Heart to this Impermanent Life - These two talks look at how we relate to change - especially the notable changes involving loss of relationships and our own body and mind. We examine our strategies for avoiding uncertainty and fear; the consequences of resisting reality; our refuges of presence and compassion in the face of grief; and the gifts of opening fully to the river of change. 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. Namaste and welcome. It's really nice to be back again. I've been away for a month. I really feel like I went away. I was kind of diving into writing and part of what I was so aware of was just how much was changing in the midst. I left when it was something. I came back and it's a different season. And on many levels, I left and I just found out I lost a very dear friend.

During the time I was away, another dear friend told me they were pregnant and then another one's become grandfather. And then in the larger world, our world is imperiled, you know. It's a very, very scary time globally. We've had horrific tragedies from... from man-made natural disasters to man-made disasters, recent loss in Las Vegas. So changes a lot. Hence, this week and this class and the next one will be on impermanence.

The title is The River of Change, Bringing a Wise Heart to an Impermanent Life. I ran across this a letter from Abraham Mouselow. famous humanistic psychologist. I thought I'd start with this. He had a near-fatal heart attack, and this is a letter he wrote right after. He said, the confrontation with death and the reprieve from it makes everything look so precious, so sacred, so beautiful, that I feel more strongly than ever the impulse to love it,

to embrace it, and to let myself be overwhelmed by it. My river has ne'er looked so beautiful. Death and its ever-present possibility make love, passionate love, more possible. So how many, when you listen to that and you sense death, really sensing the possibility of death makes love more possible? How many does that resonate for? Can I just see? Is that something that, yeah. I know it does for me. And I know how many of us have been right there at the edge of the world's when we've had a major loss and sensed both the poignant see of the depth of the sorrow and right

side by side some luminosity, something very mysterious and beautiful both. So we'll be looking at how we relate to change, how we relate to loss. We'll look at change both in a kind of change. of what I think of as radical impermanence, that microscopic, can we sense into the moment-to-moment change that's going on in a very immediate way, to the broader sweeps of changes in our lives? And how do we relate to change? I mean, for most of us, there is programmed in some resistance and tension when that change seems to signal threat.

I mean, it's just part of our psychobiology. But how much have we been able to recognize that and in some way open ourselves? So that'll be the kind of the invitation to look at. And I really do hope you'll this class and next, let it be close in in your life, this examination, because we all have places that we've hardened ourselves so we wouldn't have to face the change that's going on for us.

I know for myself that there's some realizations that repeat over and over, and one of the ones that is most full and intense and big is that every time my heart gets broken open by loss, there's more of an attumment to what it means to be unconditionally loving every time and and yet I know that for many when we talk about opening to loss and opening to change there can be a misunderstanding

it's almost like okay change has happened I lost this job or I lost this relationship and it can and opening can have a feeling of resignation or passivity, like this disaster happened, okay, we're accepting it. And so I want to right from the start say that my understanding of really opening our hearts to this changing life, the sorrows and the joys, is what enables us to then respond to our life with courage. and I'll say really in a very particular way if we hear news

like there's been a mass slaughter of humans in Nevada in Las Vegas and something in us really gets the realness like that could have been my son or my sister and sees the faces and gets the real ouch the pain of it like this is real

then it's a natural response to want to make a difference in some way to prevent others from suffering more. We don't want those kind of weapons to be available. We act more. So the kind of opening to impermanence I'm talking about directly leads us to courageous engagement with our life. It lets us live more fully, more honestly, more... true to our hearts. So impermanence, looking at it, the practices of impermanence are central to almost every spiritual and religious tradition I know of in some way. They're like right at the heart of it. And because impermanence is the nature of reality. It's the nature of nature. And so

to open to truth means to open to that it's all changing, it's all moving, that our body is replacing its cells with new cells at a rate of millions per moment, millions per moment, that we develop, we're continuously developing through a lifetime, changing beliefs, changing our outlooks, changing our behaviors and so on, and that everything in the universe is changing, whether it's galaxies or trees or whatever, every body in the universe arises out of the void and plays its time, keeps on moving, and dissolves back into the oneness. And most of us get impermanence.

We know the seasons are changing and we know things are happening mentally. But as soon as it has to do with this body or a body that we love, all of a sudden it's not part of the natural flow of the universe. It's like it's me and it's not okay. It's so interesting. This is from the Bahagavita. It's the place where Arjuna is talking with Lord Krishna. He says, what's the most amazing thing you've seen created on this earth?

The most amazing thing. The response is that human beings can see people all around them aging and die and think it won't happen to them. Amazing. So here we are, and it's at the center of all of us, and it's at the center through our whole life, we see it. And for some, it's through lifetimes. I saw this cartoon of these two monks, and they're kind of giggling. And one's saying, ha-ha, you tell that one in every lifetime. It never gets old. So it can go through lifetimes. In our contemporary culture, age, aging, sickness, dying, rather than being a natural part of things, in some way has this overlay

as bad. And I know for many people, and especially when I talk to women about it, aging has this kind of feeling of being embarrassing or being kind of an insult or something that we're basically fighting. I don't know, I'm not going to do a hand raise on this one. I'll raise my own hand. I know what that one's like. And sickness is something we sometimes get subtly ashamed of, which is so sad.

And that one I know big time, I've gone through enough rounds of it to know that on some level, it's not just taking it personally but thinking I did something wrong or it reflects badly on me. And then dying, you know, it's like it all has this kind of in some way this covering of it's not okay. Joyce Sufen writes, this is called Living in the Body. Body is something you need in order to stay on this planet

and you only get one. And no matter which one you get, it will not be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful enough, it will not be fast enough, it will not keep on for days at a time, but will pull you down into a sleepy swamp and demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake.

Body is a thing you have to carry from one day into the next. Always the same eyebrows over the same eyes and the same skin when you look in the mirror and the same creaky knee when you get up from the floor and the same wrist under the watch band. The changes you can make are small and costly, better to leave it as it is. Body is a thing you have to leave eventually.

You know that because you've seen others do it, others who are once like you, living inside their pile of bones and flesh, smiling at you, loving you, leaning in the doorway, talking to you for hours, and then one day they're gone. No forwarding a dress.

So this realm we're exploring, is something we mentally get, we emotionally can resist, it's scary, it's mysterious as all get out, I mean, you can't understand it in a conceptual way. So it's disturbing and it's reality. And it's a reality that when we have the willingness to open to, profoundly, changes our entire being. It awakens us to really who we are that's larger than the changing flow. So we'll look at it now, our relationship to change and loss. And one view is, you know, from an evolutionary perspective, humans are uniquely aware of the inevitability of death. We might not consciously keep in mind it's true for more.

but we get it in the sense that it expresses itself as anxiety. And we have this feeling like around the corner, something could be too much to handle. Do you know that feeling? Like you're kind of tensing against what might be around the corner? There's sometimes a sense that, you know, I dodged that bullet, you know, but in not too long, you know, the other shoe will drop. I'm mixing metaphors terribly on it.

Sorry. But you know what I mean? It's like the sense that something's going to go wrong and that's our nervous system intuiting and permanence. And so we have a... Our survival system has its very primitive rigged reaction to any threat that we experience

that we kind of cling on to what gives us a sense of comfort or safety or gratification and tense against what might not. I remember a story of Ajan Shah, he's a Buddhist monk from the forest tradition in Thailand. And he used to kind of walk around the temple grounds and when he'd see somebody looking like they're having a really hard time, like they're suffering, he'd go up to them and kind of pat him on the shoulder

and say, must be very attached. Because isn't that what it is? that the more we're kind of gripping on to our existence or defending our existence, the more we suffer. So we see it in a lot of different ways, you know, the sense of the ways that we try to hold on tight or prevent the inevitable. You know, I talked about women, but it's not just women. And one story, when Jim hit 45, he had a midlife crisis.

and decided to change his lifestyle completely so he could live longer. And he went on a strict diet, he jogged, he swam, he took sunbass, and just three months' time, he lost 30 pounds, reduced his waist by six inches, expanded his chest by five inches, new wardrobe, slick car, got a Mazda Miata, and so on and so on, reinventing himself. So swelts and tan, he decides to top it all off with a sporty new haircut. After that, he steps out of the barbershop, and he gets hit by a bus. And so as he's lying dying, he's saying, God, how could you do this to me?

And the voice from the heaven said, well, to tell you the truth, Jim, I didn't recognize you. Okay, so it's not the greatest example of resisting impermanence, but for now. So we have this, this humans have this heightened self-awareness of our mortality. and that same self-awareness when we deepen it really helps us to recognize how our survival system is keeping us in suffering and helps us to wake up, which is really what we're going to be exploring, that we can bring our mindful awareness to our strategies of avoiding and grasping in a way that helps us to break those patterns, interrupt them, and really open to the changing flow and not keep trying to control it.

So that's where we're going to look. So the first step is to get familiar, what is your pattern for trying to manage impermanence? You know, it's just one way of putting it. A metaphor that I like, I find this helpful because I spend a lot of time by a river, is to imagine, you know, this river of life is moving through us all the time, but we tend to remove ourselves from it. And we kind of create like a, it's like creating a tidal pool where we're kind of wall out the whole river and we kind of try to manage things in that little title pool.

And because with a title pool it's blocking the whole flow. things can get filled with algae blooms and get stagnant and so on, but that our life gets kind of small and the more we wall off the flow of impermanence, you know, the more controlling we are, the more unwilling we are to live in uncertainty, you know, the more we get rigid and static and it's suffering. and what we're really playing out fully, the management strategies. So what are they? I mean we can see them on a societal level that when people get afraid,

this is a now I'm talking, you know, in the culture, there are certain management strategies to deal with that fear and one of them is to create an enemy. And we see it over and over in history, don't we? You know how humans get scared and they actually get whipped up into fear and then that's the enemy. That's how people in control and empower get people in their domains to go to war, you know? Get them scared, they'll create an enemy. Basically, in a societal level, when people get afraid they build walls.

They build walls around their title pool to keep others out. They build walls against others within. In other words, within your own title pool, you'll create another title pool that's separating out because to try to protect yourself, you have to put others down or feel dominating or are superior to them. We create other and we build walls in our heart. So what happens on an individual level, we're wired to protect ourselves physically. So we encounter impermanence and encounter a

threat and our muscles tighten. And they tighten over and over again in time so that we actually are not even aware physically that our posture has tightened and gotten armored in protecting ourselves against impermanence. You know, our shoulders go up, we go forward. We're tensing. That's our body's way of creating the walls, okay? We do it mentally. Our vulnerability management strategy mentally is to leave our body and spend a lot of time in our mind obsessing, overthinking, over figuring, blaming, judging. It's a lot of obsessing. We try to control other people. That's a big one. When we are trying to control life, our control or tries to control others. A man observed a woman in the grocery store with a three-year-old

child in her basket. And as they passed the cookie section, the child asked for cookies and her mother said, no. And the little girl immediately begins to whine and fuss. And the mother said quietly, Now, Ellen, we just have half the aisles left to go through. Don't be upset. It won't be long. The guy passed the mother again in the candy aisle. Of course, the little girl began to shout for candy. when she was told she couldn't have any she began to cry and the mother said, there, there, Ellen, only two more aisles to go and then we'll be checking out.

The man again happened to be behind the pair at the checkout where the girl immediately began to clamor for gum and burst into a terrible tantar upon discovering there would be no gum purchased today. The mother patiently said, Ellen, we'll be through this checkout stand in five minutes and then you can go home and have a nice nap. The man followed them out to the parking lot

stop the woman to compliment her. I couldn't help noticing how patient you were with little Ellen. The mother broke in, my little girl's name is Tammy. I'm Ellen. So some of our control strategies are for others, and of course we also are, okay, Ellen, three more aisles to go. In a big way, I think one of our biggest,

again, I'm calling these vulnerability management strategies, a big way is to is to blame ourselves and it sounds like well why would we do that if we're already feeling bad but blaming ourselves gives us some sense that we can control and change things one student

she's in her early 70s I think talked a few weeks ago to very overwhelmed at work very anxious and noticing kind of a cognitive deterioration that she's afraid it's going to affect her capacities at work. And so there's this fear coming up, you know,

I'm not going to be able to do my job, right? And I'm my, and she's single, I'm not going to be able to really take care of myself. And the emotion that came up with that was shame. You know, the sense of impermanence of, you know, my mental capacities and the shame that in some deep way, this shouldn't be happening. Like something's wrong with me that this is happening.

and so impermanence is very, very personal and rather than just opening in a kind way to, oh, this is hard, bad me. The other thing we do with impermanence to try to manage it is just blaming other people. One man blaming his employees and his partner just found he was in a kind of chronic chronic irritation and blame and when we investigated together he got under and he had this sense of this fear of failing at work and also his body just had a hip replacement and couldn't exercise and was feeling something didn't work with and he was feeling very vulnerable and it was kind of like he said it was like being on the savannah and being the weak one in a herd and about to be

plucked off and so he's just his vulnerability strategy being angry at everybody. So again I'm just naming them because what is ours? Like how do we try to control things? How do we try to manage things? I often think of John O'Donoghue has this phrase he said that we're so busy managing our life so as to cover over this great mystery. history we're involved in. And I can feel it in myself. I can feel when I'm anxious and busy in some way I'm kind of like skimming the surface, trying to keep everything together and

it's like I've completely separated from just moment to moment this astonishing universe. It's like whenever I lose that sense of amazement, like, whoa, I know. I know. I'm in management mode because it covers it right over. So it's important to know that we chronically overestimate how much we can manage and control of this existence. There's a very narrow band we can manage. The big stuff like aging, sickness, death and other people's behaviors are way way out of our control.

We can't do anything. So, again, with the tidal pool, you know, it's like we think we're creating this little container but the river can flood, wash everything away, or the river can go really, really low when everything dries up, or stuff happens. So the inquiry for us, and this is where we'll spend the second part of this talk, is given that, how do we, in the face of inevitable change, What can we take refuge in that's true? That really allows us to navigate in permanence in a way that wakes us up, that's graceful,

that's heart-opening. And where we come to, and this is the most basic kind of principle in our teaching, is that we awaken these two wings of presence. And I love the metaphor of two wings that, you know, in order to fly and be free, we need the wing of mindfulness or understanding. So we see what's happening. Can we see that we're in some way tensing against something around the corner? Can we see that we're controlling?

Just that recognizing, that witnessing. And then the second wing is this tender-heartedness that embraces what we see with kindness. So it's not like we analyze our management strategies and get down on ourselves, it's more like, oh, of course, this organism's trying the best it can, can we be kind. So the most basic level of our training, if we want to begin to open to impermanence, is to wake up out of thoughts and come into our senses. That's the ground level. And I I think in almost every meditation training you can get on some, in some way there is a way of practicing that moves us from being inside the storyline to being in touch with this living,

moving, changing, aliveness. What keeps us in the title pool is thinking. As soon as you open into the space between the thoughts. As soon as you inhabit that pause, you're no longer living inside a tidal pool. You've opened yourself to the river. That's the core of the training. And gradually what happens is we start being able to tolerate the groundlessness and the uncertainty of letting it all happen. Okay, that's as succinct as explanation as I know in terms of opening to impermanence. Come out of the thoughts which keep things static, okay? Thoughts are representational.

Come into this wild, changing flow of experiencing and gradually get the knack of tolerating, not knowing, uncertainty, not controlling, just being. Let's just practice that for a moment because that's the ground level. Let me invite you to, yeah, just if there's anything in your lap you want to put down, let's just take a couple of minutes. You might consider this a pause with the intention of opening to this river of change. As your body settles a bit and becomes still, you might sit down into your body.

is if you're letting go into the aliveness. It's a moment to moment feeling of opening to the sensations in your body. Sometimes it helps to soften the hands so you can really contact the aliveness in the hands. Sometimes we have to relax a bit to feel the moving sensations even because we're so frozen and rigid by habits so you might soften in the shoulders. Feel the movement and aliveness of energy there, loosening the belly, begin to sense this field of sensation, including sound, listening to and feeling. This moment to moment flow, it's quite natural to keep pulling away from it into that tidal pool of thoughts.

So we just relax back. See if you can sense how everything is moving. Is there anything holding still inside your body? Is there anything in the field of sound that's holding still? If you can let go and be the flow, if there's a vulnerability or difficulty that's hard to be with, let it be tenderly. You're gentling and relaxing with. Hajan Shah says if you let go a little you'll find a little peace.

If you let go a lot, you'll find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you'll find absolute peace and tranquility. I take a few full breaths and as you're ready, opening your eyes, coming back. This very ground level practice of waking up out of thoughts and coming into this river of changing experience, we develop a kind of strengthen it, where it becomes more and more familiar, that sense of really resting in a moment-to-moment experience. And as we do, there is a sense that we can trust it. It's kind of like when you first are swimming and you first float and you realize, wow, this life holds us up.

You know, the water does hold me up. It's like you can relax more and more over time into the changing flow. And then what happens is when things get difficult, there's a little more capacity to rest in it. But I want to take the last bit of time to explore what happens when we are facing the changes that are really challenging and our system is really tensed against it, against it. How do we work with it then? That'll be the last piece we'll explore tonight.

And one of the stories that has struck me over the years, and I was leading a weekend retreat about 10 years ago, and a woman came and her husband was dying and he had actually wanted her to come to the weekend, just to kind of help her find some. some support and resources and centering, they decided together they weren't going to have a priest come and that he really wanted her to accompany him. So towards the end of the weekend she pulled me aside and she said, you know, I am really afraid I'm going to fail him. Because this is like the biggest thing I've been ever asked to do. And then she asked me what she could read or study on how to accompany someone who was dying and like, you know,

dying 101, Buddhist dying 101. And my basic response was really, just offer him your love, just love him. And I did share with her because they were Catholic, that, because I had just recently done a weekend, a number of us from different faith traditions presented on compassion, Father Thomas Keating was there, and he had shared the words, I consent. He said, if you can face things on. on some level, say to the life that's presented, I consent. It's like yes. It's like you're opening your cells and your heart and your being to the life that's right there. You can find in the

midst of things a beautiful presence. So I shared those words and that was what she brought home. Her intention was to try to open to what was going on and love him well. And she described one evening that he was talking about dying with her and she said, oh honey, today's been a really good day. Let me make you some tea. And as she went to make the tea, everything in her went, oh, I blew it. Because she felt more distance in those moments from having cut him off. Like he wanted to talk about dying and she was making it all right, you know. And it was in those moments making tea over the tea kettle that she prayed, please, please, may I truly open with presence to what's happening. May I truly love him through this? And that deepened awareness.

She saw her vulnerability avoidance strategy, which was staying busy, okay? Trying to make things okay. Trying to do things. She was a doer. And she saw it. And she could feel in her body the distancing, because when we create the walls to try to make ourselves safe, we're a million miles from the other and from our own hearts, right? So from that moment on, it was like, I consent went to a whole deeper level. It's like the difference between mentally whispering yes to something and having your whole being just truly open to the life that's here. And she said that in that, in some very deep place, she would consent to the fear she was feeling

and to the utter feeling of not knowing and uncertainty and how to work, how to be there for him and she'd be opening to the, of course, to the movement of the grief that was there and whatever came up. And she said, in that consenting, in that yes to the changing movement of life, She said she found she did know how to respond to him. She knew when to be quiet and when to sing softly to him and when to climb into bed and hold him and when to just be the kind of the space around him that was very still. She knew intuitively

because the reality is that when we stop fighting the river and just become the river, the river knows how to move around rocks and how to be in a spontaneous way. And there's another knowing she had and this is what she wrote to me, she said, and this was a week or so after he died, she said, he's gone, but the field of loving who we really are is always with me. What she discovered in that letting our heart break open was that openness that knew who they were beyond their forms. And I think those that have lost dear ones can sometimes sense how that is that there's the profound sorrow of missing the form but also some deep truth that were in the field

in this field of love together. That is the gift of opening to. and permanence. It's realizing who we are beyond the forms that are changing. But there's a training and the training is for her I consent in some way being able to stay with what's happening. One woman who is a Dharma teacher when she was dying wrote this. She said, my days are short and as I grow weaker I experience so much gratitude for my meditation not only the joy and ease

it's brought but the hard parts for every bored and restless sitting and every fearful fantasy and every pain and ache 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

spirit that carries me now as I face my death. Let me invite you to reflect for a moment and you might close your eyes. So we listen to these words of really how when we deepen presence we begin to trust the flow. And we know within our own hearts that we're on a path of deepening trust and we all have ways that we resist. Those are really our portals for learning, wherever we're still resisting. So you might reflect for yourself on how you feel you're relating to areas of change or loss.

Maybe there's something going on right now or something you're anticipating. There may be a loss in relationship, maybe death of a loved one. or dissolution of a marriage, or maybe some conflict, or maybe how you're relating to your own aging or death, how you're relating maybe to ways you haven't felt you manifested your potential. That's a kind of way, a place of loss, or maybe something to do with work, or some sense of impermanence and the way you're relating to what's happening to our earth.

the destruction of our larger earth body, or maybe how you're relating to the changes and losses to those that are most vulnerable, the humans and to other species. So you might just sense for a moment how do you relate to the areas of loss in your life? Perhaps pick one, one area of loss. Are there ways you're trying to manage it? The ways instead of opening to it that you're either blaming yourself or blaming another or trying to control others to get lost in thinking and obsessing. What is it that you're unwilling to feel?

In other words, what wants acceptance, inclusion? What happens if you imagine opening to the different dimensions of this loss with deep kindness, really letting the river move through you? You can continue with your eyes close or if you prefer opening your eyes. Kind of sensing that there's an attitude that lets us have the courage to move towards opening to the losses and it really has to do with this being willing to be uncertain to not know. When we start to open to them and when we start to really let the river move freely through us, we find that we get more and more fearless, our heart gets fearless.

We have what we get what one teacher called a heart that's ready for anything. So, just to kind of wind up here, there's consequences to not opening. We stay small in that kind of title pool that keeps us separate. Well, there's gifts to opening, to being willing to look right now as you are as you're listening and say, oh, well, this is an area that deserves my attention and to opening. and the gifts are what I want to kind of close with. And one of the gifts is, as Maslow talked about at the beginning, that when I started the talk,

is that when we sense the realness of loss, that it's going to go, we actually start loving more fully. We remember what matters. One other friend who had serious cancer and knows it probably will recur, know she could go at any time. She said, finally I'm arriving in my life. And she said, I understand now what namaste means. That by realizing she's going to die, it has let her

look at herself and others and see the sacred, see the light that's shining through, because if you know you're going to die, you say, okay, what matters? Well, I want to see the truth of who you really are. I want to see that light. We stop. We start fixating on the what's wrong and we open to the depth of the purity and the light. I want to understand the truth. I want to be with truth so we start seeing what's there in each other. I understand Namaste. Ticknod Han at the closing of the only retreat I ever went to with him and it was like probably 25 years ago,

he taught a hug that I thought was just. the most powerful experience. And I went with my dear friend Luisa Montero Diaz. We drove down together. She's a fellow teacher and we hadn't had much time to hang out over the last while and thought it'd be fun to do this retreat together. And so she was my partner with the hug. And the way the hug goes is first you bow and say, namaste, I see the divine in you. I see the light that's living through you. So we did that with each other. And then we held each other and the way you do this with the first breath you reflect together, you're breathing in, breathing out, I'm going to die. And then you breathe in and out, second breath,

and you're going to die. And then the third, and we have just these precious moments. When we remember impermanence, when we're willing to open to the losses, we open to the love. And if we're remembering these moments matter and we don't mess around, we just want to be here for them and love in them. So that's one of the great gifts. And another great gift I'd like to mention is that when we start really opening and letting this universe live through us, there's the way Sogiel Rimpashe put it, and I think it's a beautiful question.

He said, if everything is changing, then what is true? And when you start opening to the river living through you, you start sensing the space it's happening in. And you sense the stillness that's aware of the moving river. And you sense the silence that's listening to the sound. And you start intuting a formless and loving awareness, a timeless awareness, a timeless awareness, awareness. That's more the truth of who we are than any story we could ever tell about ourselves.

So we become the space the river is moving through and the river. And in knowing that we truly have a fearless heart. We truly get to live the moments, not tensing against what's around the corner, but totally engaging, you know, with courage, with heart. So with that I'd like to invite you to close your eyes, take a moment for a final few breaths and a pause. You might imagine that hug I described and just bring somebody to mind and imagine bowing, looking in their eyes,

Namaste, seeing the goodness, seeing the beauty, holding that being in your arms and reflecting on the truth that this body, mind, being you call self, is here for just a while, and that this other being that you're holding is here for just a while. You're going to die and they're going to die. And you have just these moments. Be aware of what your heart cares about. Aware of your own beingness when you contemplate the truth of impermanence.

From the poet of Face, a poem called Deepening the Wonder, as a way of closing our reflection. Death is a favor to us, but our scales have lost their balance. The permanence of the body should give us great clarity, deepening the wonder in our senses and our eyes of this mysterious existence we share and are surely just traveling through.

If I were in the tavern tonight, a face would call for drinks and as the master poured, I would be reminded that all I know of life and myself is that we are just a mid-air flight of golden wine between his pitcher and his cup. All I know of life and myself is that we are just a mid-air flight

of golden wine between his pitcher and his cup. If I were in the tavern tonight, I would buy freely for everyone in this world because our marriage with the cruel beauty of time and space cannot endure very long. Death is a favor to us, but our minds have lost their balance. The miraculous existence and impermanence of form always makes the illumined ones laugh and sing. Namaste and blessings.

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