Tara Brach - Skeleton Woman: Embracing This Living and Dying World

Episode Date: July 6, 2018

Skeleton Woman: Embracing This Living and Dying World - (A favorite from the archives) Based on a wonderful myth told by Clarissa Estes, this talk looks at the way we run from "lady death" and the blessings of opening our arms and heart. If we can embrace the whole of our nature with unconditional presence – including the inevitability of change and loss–we discover deep wisdom and enduring love. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations 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. So I've been reflecting about how on every continent and through history, people have been doing what we're doing. They've been gathering, sometimes not in a Unitarian church, a bunch of people, you know, but they've been gathering and intentionally quieting, intentionally listening to their hearts. to their minds, just being present. It's not a big percentage of people. Not everybody thinks it's the way to spend an evening, but more and more and it's getting so much more attention. So it's an exciting time. And if we really investigate, you know, what

is it that motivates us to do these kinds of practices? I like the way one teacher put it, Munindraji, he was asked, you know, why he practiced and he said, well, it's so that when I walk into town, I'll notice the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road. He says it's to live the life fully and to really know who we are. And I think the image of the Bodhi tree in the Buddhist mythology is a powerful one because it quite simply has to do with the sacred pause, with just stopping, stopping our busy tumbling into the future, do you know what I mean? Just stopping and deepening our attention to what's right here. And there's an understanding that it's really only in this full presence that we can feel love.

It's like love is nowhere else. It's only when we're present. We can have ideas about it. But the visceral sense is right here. and same with creativity or joy. So there's a kind of commitment to presence and an understanding that when we can stop and arrive, our lives then flow from presence.

It's not about being inactive. It's like the way we speak and the way we engage, it flows from that presence. A famous Zen teacher, Suzuki, said that on the fourth day of Shashin, that's a retreat, he described how everyone had aching backs and legs. And he was, so he was talking to them. He was talking about the doubts they were having about it, you know,

acknowledging that when you go to retreat and it's really hard, you start saying, you know, what am I doing this for? I could have been, and there's all sorts of other things. And so he started his talk this way. He said, the problems you are now experiencing, and they all expected him to say, we'll go away. But he said, we'll continue for the rest of your life, you know. Of course, it broke them all up.

But I really liked that because it acknowledged that it's not going to stop. There's going to keep on being this stream of there's going to be pleasantness and there's going to be unpleasantness. There's going to be what we call the stuff happening that we want

and there's going to be the stuff where people don't cooperate and we don't like what's happening. And the Buddha describes suffering, samsaras, the prison of suffering as this conditioning we have to constantly try to control that. I think that's like the simplest understanding of suffering, is that it's not going to stop being pleasant and unpleasant,

but our suffering is that we're mightily trying to manage things rather than arriving in this presence. I find that we forget the most basic truths, and one of the most basic truths is that what we long for cannot be found when we're trying to control things. It's only found when we really stop and arrive in our hearts in the moment.

So the way that we train, as we explored last week, I sometimes call it the two wings of attention, is how to really recognize what is happening here. It's honest, courageous, what's really going on? and the other wing is a kindness that holds what we recognize. The two wings. I wrote about the two wings and radical acceptance

and someone sent me an email saying, I was reading your book and for some reason the two wings of clear seeing and compassion were really affecting for me and I cried and I lost a contact. I get really weird emails. I just want to say, I really do. Anyway, I like that.

So we're going to continue tonight exploring these two wings because it's the gist of the whole deal. You know, how do we come back? We have tons of conditioning to leave. How do we come back? There is a wonderful Native American story. It's an Inuit story. And every time I reread it, it's like any great teaching, it sinks in a deeper way. So I thought I'd share it with you. Some of you might remember it. I think I brought it in here. few years ago. And it was told by Clarissa Estes, who wrote women who run with the wolves. So you can sit back and listen to,

I'll read bits of it to you. It's called Skeleton Woman. She had done something of which her father disapproved, although no one any longer remembered what it was. But her father had dragged her to the cliffs and thrown her over into the sea, and there the fish ate her flesh away and plucked out her eyes.

As she lay under the sea or skeleton turned over and over into the currents. One day a fisherman came fishing. He had drifted far from his home place and didn't know that the local fishermen stayed away, saying this inlet was haunted. The fisherman's hook drifted down through the water and caught of all places in the bones of skeleton woman's ribcage. The fisherman thought, oh, now I've got a really big one.

Now I'll really have one. In his mind, he was thinking about how many people this great fish would feed and so on. how long he'd be free from the chore of hunting. And he struggled with this great weight on the end of his hook and the sea was stirred to a thrashing froth. Hunter turned to scoop up his net so he didn't see her bald head rise above the waves.

When he turned back with his net, her entire body, such as it was, had come to the surface and was hanging from the tip of his kayak by her long front teeth. Ah! cried the man in his heart fill into his knees. he screamed and he knocked her off the prow with his oar and began paddling like a demon towards shoreline and not realizing she was tangled on his line he was frightened all the more for she appeared to stand upon her toes while chasing him all the way to the shore no matter which way he zigged his kayak she stayed right behind ah he wailed and he ran aground in one leap he was out of his kayak

clutched his fishing stick and running, and the coral white corpse of skeleton woman still snagged in the fishing line, bump-dity-bummed right after him. Over the rocks he ran and she followed, over the frozen tundra he ran and she kept right up. Over the meat laid out to dry he ran, cracking it to pieces as he bore down. Throughout it all, she kept right up. Finally, the man reached his snowhouse and dove right into the tunnel and on hands, and knees scrambled his way into the interior. Panting and sobbing, he lay there in the dark, his heart a drum, a mighty drum.

Safe at last, oh so safe, yes safe. Thank the gods. Safe at last. Imagine when he lit his well oil lamp. There she, it lay in a tumble on a snow floor, one heel over her shoulder, one knee inside a ribcage, one foot over her elbow. He could not say later what it was, perhaps the firelight softened her features,

are the fact that he was a lonely man. But a feeling of some kindness came into his breathing, and slowly he reached out his grimy hands and using words softly, like mother to child, began to untangle her from the fishing line. Oh, nah, nah, no, no. First he untangled the toes and then the ankles. Oh, nah, nah, no, no. on and on he worked into the night until dressing her in furs to keep her warm

skeleton woman's bones were all in the order a human should be and she in the furs uttered not a word she did not dare lest this hunter take her out and throw her down to the rocks and break her bones to pieces utterly the man became drowsy slid under his sleeping skins and soon was dreaming and sometimes as human sleep, you know, a tear escapes from the dreamer's eye. We never know what sort of dream causes this, but we know it is either a dream of sadness or of longing. And this is what happened to the man. Skeleton woman saw the tear glisten in the firelight and she suddenly became so thirsty. She tinkled and clanked and crawled over to the sleeping man and put her

mouth to his tear. The single tear was like a river, and she drank and drank and drank until her many years long thirst was slacked. While lying beside him, she reached inside the sleeping man and took out his heart, the mighty drum. She sat up and banged on both sides of it. Bum-bum, bum-bum. As she drummed, she began to sing out flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh, and the more she sang, the more her body filled out with flesh. And when she was all done, she also sang the sleeping man's clothes off and crept into his bed with him, skin against skin. She returned the great drum his heart to his body, and that is how they awakened, wrapped one around the other, tangled from their night in another way now, a good and lasting way. The people who cannot remember how she came to her first

El Fortune, say she and the fishermen went away and were consistently well fed by the creatures she had known in her life underwater. The people say that it is true and that is all they know. So in this fable, a skill to a woman represents the instinctual life, death life, nature of our beings. It's the ever-changing, mysterious forces of creation. and dissolution that shape our very existence. So it's like Vishnu, Shiva. It's very scary and mysterious and wild and totally out of our control.

We live and we die and we're reborn, creation, destruction. And the reality is, as we move through life, skeleton woman is in the background at all moments. There is no time that in some way that instinctual force, that we don't feel it, realize it or sense it. I mean, I know in myself that in some way

when I'm having trouble, when I'm struggling, in the background's a sense of the fragility of this life, that it's really out of control. And so many know the feeling of a pain in their body and how quickly we translate it to what disease we have, right? We know that. Or when a loved one comes home, is late to come home, how quickly we think of accident.

but the reality is things do happen and losses are inevitable. We live with Skilt and woman in the background. So the question on the spiritual path is how do we relate to the reality of this existence that everything's coming and going? If it's unconscious, we relate in a reactive way and as the Buddha described,

we're just always trying to manage things. In the story, the way it's described, the failure to face the inability to love fully, skeleton woman, how it all is, makes it impossible to love in our life. We're always in some way anxious and defended and trying hard. And on the other hand, when we are able to embrace the whole of our nature with unconditional presence, all that's going on, there is an enduring love and a deep wisdom that emerge. So let's explore what it really means to embrace. And the first step of the path, as many of we've explored a lot, is to recognize, to recognize how it is in our life. So this stops being

an abstraction. Like, how are we each running away from skeleton woman? How does it happen? And there's a wonderful saying that we're all fishing for what can feed us and understanding that the heart is the lonely hunter, that on some level we're moving through our life, looking for the love or the nourishment or whatever, we'll feed these hearts and minds and beings. We're all doing that. And inevitably in seeking what we want we get what we don't want, that we might seek love and experience rejection or in some ways, other ways.

separation, that it's what Clarissa says, the not beautiful happens. The not beautiful happens. And it happens in each realm. In some level we want health, we want to feel our longevity, and the not beautiful is the reality of aging, the reality of dying, of physical pain, of decay. I got sent this on my birthday This is G. Burns You know you're getting old when you stoop to tie your shoes and you wonder what else you can do

while you're down there. So we know it. I mean it's like one friend recently gave a Dharma talk all about aging and it doesn't matter how young we are. We're all dealing with this changing process of our bodies and our minds in some way.

are the aging of someone that's very obvious near to us. And the other, we all are seeking in some way to be happy and we all inevitably, it doesn't matter what our biochemistry is, we all hit anxiety, depression, grief, anger. I mean, so often we have an idea of we're supposed to feel a certain way and it's just not the way we're feeling. Many, many moments. That's the not beautiful.

We get caught in the depression or the fear. We all have wants to do with our work, that it's creative and fulfilling, and how many of us know the inevitability of the mistakes we make. Like we can't do it right. We're going to fall short. We're going to in some way let ourselves or someone down. We're going to feel that we're not making the contribution we think. There's not enough behind the lines.

That's the not beautiful. That's skeleton woman. For many of us, it's most obvious in our relationship. relationships, that we have a deep, deep longing for intimacy and we have so much program to avoid intimacy, so much wounding, so many ways it doesn't work. And then of course in spiritual life we have a longing to be free to experience realization to really trust and know the sacred within us and we get caught, whether it's the deep dark night of the soul or whether it's just feeling like in some way we're too busy to really arrive in our spiritual life,

that's the not beautiful. So then we begin to look at our particular patterns for how when it's not going right, we run away. In other words, what do we do when the mistake happens? What do we do when there's a sense of rejection? What do we do when we get nervous about what's coming up? Do we overconsume to numb ourselves? Do we blame somebody?

This is roomy. He says, he's reminded of the mother who tells her child when you're walking through the graveyard at night and you see a boogeyman run at it and it will go away. But what replies the child? if the boogeyman's mother has told it to do the same thing. So some of us, you know, when things aren't going right with the not beautiful, we get aggressive. And that's really common that we blame.

For many of us, I think when the not beautiful happens, when there's rejection or a sense of personal failure, we turn on ourselves. And that's, to me, the deepest, most pervasive suffering. When we encounter the something's wrong sense, it's somethings, wrong with me and we really go to war with ourselves. Some of us go into compulsive thinking. You know, if you're caught in your mind, you cannot feel your beingness. There's no way to feel the sacredness of what's here if we're lost in our mind and yet that's one of our main reactions when things don't go our way. And then we of course have many ways of trying

to numb ourselves or just lose ourself in stimulation. I mention email pretty much every week since that's one of the ones I'm working on. It's like we just are addicted to leaving. This is from deep thoughts, remember Jack Handy. When I was a child, there were times when we had to entertain ourselves. And usually the best way to do that was to turn on the TV. That's all, he says. He says, there is uncertainty, there's a mystery,

of not doing and we lose ourselves. One of the ways the Buddha described the domain of awakening is if we can sense where we're running away and stop running. In other words, if we feel a sense of failure and we're trying to make up for it in some way and prove ourselves, stop doing that false refuge. It doesn't mean we don't try hard, but just stop. Be with the feelings. If we're feeling rejected and we're blaming someone else, stop. Feel what's actually here. This is called shadow vows, Robert Johnson. He says, the night before their marriage, they held a ritual where they made their shadow vows.

The groom said, I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself. The bride replied, I will be compliant and sweet, but underneath I will have the real control, If anything goes wrong, I'll take your money in your house. They then drank champagne and laughed heartily at their foibles, knowing that in the course of the marriage, these shadowy figures would inevitably come out. But they were ahead of the game because they had recognized the shadow and unmasked it.

Do you understand? And it takes a kind of bravery. If we can begin to get real with the places that were most reactive, We might feel like we have equanimity or freedom, but where we react, it may be around finances, it may be when another person criticizes us, maybe when we blow it in some way, that's the place. It might seem like it's not deep, but that's where a skeleton woman is, because deep down the sense of inadequacy or failure has to do with our basic survival, our basic okayness.

So in the story, once we recognize and really face, okay, so this is where I'm running away, as the fisherman did, he felt a kindly impulse to untangle skeleton woman, untangle her bones. And this is the next step. Okay, we've identified where we get caught. We've identified where we're reactive. The next step is out of kindness, out of care, to be willing to untangle what's going on, to be willing to bring mindfulness to what's going on inside us.

And that takes a commitment. That's what the fisherman did through the night, but I think that the beginning point is that he felt a tenderness in him. He cared enough. There's a saying that to face the skeleton woman, one need not go into armed battle, one need only to care enough to untangle her bones.

One of the reasons or reminders about this story what inspired me to bring it in this week was a friend of mine who I've been in touch with from New England long-term relationship she'd been in 28 years or something ended. And she put it the way many do, that she felt like it was a death and that she had lost part of herself. And so she was really...

And she's meditated for a long time, so she was very committed to sensing her own reactivity and really waking up through this. She was taking to heart, the Buddha's teaching, that the place where most stuck has the potential to be the place of true liberation.

It's not when we have, when we're cruising through the day or when we have one of those meditations where everything just kind of quiets and feels good it's at times when we're really in reaction that we actually just by staying a little just by being a little kind

touch of very deep freedom so this for her was her place she knew it she knew it in terms of the shape of her life that being with this intensity and she had the intentionality of care of regarding her own hurt with care. So then it's how to untangle the bones

and how to be mindful. And the key teaching on untangling the bones, on being with what's really there, what's inside us, is to recognize our story about what's going on and connect with where it's all living in our body. That is the key. If there's anyone training in mindfulness meditation,

notice the story you're in and keep coming back to where it lives in your body right now. So this is what she did. I mean, she found the story which would kind of flip back and forth pretty regularly from something's wrong with her to something's wrong with me.

So lesbian couple. She blew it. She was not deep enough to hang in there. She couldn't meet me to, I just wasn't attractive or interesting enough or engaging or whatever. she would flip back and forth. She could see her tendency to anticipate future rejections,

to obsess. So her untangling the bones was to bring presence to how that was living over and over again as a clench in the chest, as a squeeze in the throat. There's a teaching, be quiet, and don't believe your thoughts, and don't believe your thoughts, and don't believe your thoughts.

And that came in very handy for her, has been. It allows an opening to the layers of what's really in there. And as many of you know, if we really pay attention under the blame, under the anger, there's grief. Grief is the core that is brought up in us in response to skeleton women. We sense the pain of separation from what we love. for this woman and this is what's described

as the wisdom that comes from being present with skeleton woman there are insights if we can untangle the bones in other words if we can stay instead of running away there are certain insights that naturally emerge

truths about the nature of reality and the insights is one of the reasons it's called Buddhist insight meditation that arise are very universal. The first insight that arises is that if we're with our experience directly, we're not telling stories about it,

we find that it's out of control, but it keeps changing. It keeps changing and changing. Sometimes fear, sometimes grief, sometimes she'd go out as New England fall and it's just this exquisite brilliance, sad, exhilarated, alive, depressed. if we think we lock in our bodily states, we lock ourselves in.

You can stay depressed for a very long time if you keep telling stories about how it'll never be different. If you can get out of the stories and feel your body and your aliveness, everything changes. It's the nature of things. So this is one of the insights for her is just seeing how the relationship came and when life comes and goes, the moment-to-moment experience comes and goes. And there's an understanding that really renunciation is just acceptance that everything passes, that we can't hold on to anything. And while it might sound fatalistic, okay, it's all going to go and die,

so just let go, let go. For her, there was actually a freedom in sensing, okay, this life is changing, it's moving. We all see it. There's this woman who's reading her child, Grimm's fairy tales, her own version of it. And she's reading, and the prince kissed her, and they fell in love, and they dated for a while, and they moved in together, and broke up and got back together, and got married, had a baby, got separated, got back together, broke up again, divorce,

spent time alone, rediscovered themselves, met someone new, fell in love, and repeated the pattern habitually ever after. We repeat our pattern. if we're fighting what's happening. We repeat them. The second truth, this is the second truth, the Buddha called a duca are discontent or unease, which is that to the degree that we try to hold on or push away what's happening. To that degree we suffer. A wonderful equation has been pain times resistance equals suffering. If there's pain and we resist it, we blame somebody, we numb it, it turns into suffering. So for her this was very, very clear.

She saw it looking back in her relationship. The more she expected and grasped, the more disappointment, the more she wanted her partner to be different, the more she felt pushed away. She could just see it very clearly, but also saw it in how skilled and woman was appearing now, the sense of loss, that if she in any way tried to avoid it, try to to tell herself stories about it, anything other than leaning in and touching it, suffering. The third insight when we're present with skeleton woman is that what's happening is not personal. It's not personal. It's not owned by a self.

It's not caused by a self. For many people I know this realization of what's called no-self or anata comes most naturally with other people when get together and start sharing what's going on for us and share the things we're afraid of and what we're avoiding and how we've been heard and we realize it's not my fear, it's the fear. It's not my grief, it's the grief. It's just the universal currents of how these body minds respond to skeleton women, to the inevitability of loss. Realizing it's not personal is liberating. It's absolutely liberating. The suffering is that we think this is happening

to me. It's like one friend who runs a hospice described a 94-year-old woman who came in, it was kind of registering in, and the first thing she said to him was, why me? And it's sad, yet we get it, you know? The suffering is when we take it personally. in the moments that were purely present with the fear are the grief, that were really present, the power of that presence is that it shifts our sense of identity. And for this woman, rather than being the rejected self, the self that was going to be for the rest of her life alone,

when she stepped out of the stories and just felt the squeeze of grief, and then the changing shifts of emotion in her, she shifted from that the victim or the hurt one to the presence that was aware. And it's that shift in identity from a small self that's oppressed or victimized or struggling and taking up personally to the awareness that's tender and present with the nature that's here with skeleton woman. that shift is our freedom. It's often described as in the metaphor of an ocean and waves, when we move from the story of our life,

which is like a set of waves, you know, I'm a depressed person, I'm a this person, a successful person, to being the ocean that includes these changing waves. We're back home again. We're home in no self but belonging to everything. Our training here in moment-to-moment attention, is a training in untangling the bones.

It's a training in being present with this changing nature and realizing these insights, these liberating insights. Well, just for a moment, and I'll review the insights, we'll just take a few moments just to reflect right here

before we conclude this talk. So, if you will, just sit in a way that allows you to pay attention and just sense for a moment your sincerity about exploring presence right in these few moments because what unfolds comes directly out of that care just as the fisherman cared to untangle the bones just to care to sit for a few moments and honestly be with our experience creates an atmosphere for freedom

And you might sense right as you're sitting here if there's any way that you don't feel at home in your experience. It may be that you're tired and you feel like, oh, I'm not going to do this right. That's feeling not at home. It might be that there's some physical discomfort and it's hard to make peace with it. It might be that you're going through something in your life right now and you can feel it's residue emotionally. Or perhaps you do feel at home.

And part of untangling the bones is just being present. present to how it is right now for you. So feeling the inflow and outflow of your breath, feeling the sensations that are predominant in your body, feeling what might be living in your heart right now, the state of your heart. And just notice is anything holding still, can you sense how everything you're paying attention to is moving? The breath is moving, the sounds you're listening to are ever-changing. The feelings are really a pattern of changing sensations. Can you just get a glimpse of this radical impermanence that in the same way that everything we experience in our body is changing, we can sense that this evening is moving,

is almost over. For some of us, our children have grown up, parents are aging, our own bodies getting older, the changes of the globe, it's all moving. The first realization when we're present with truth is that it's changing. We can sense the possibility of just letting go into this flowing river of change, just letting it be, letting it live through you. The second realization or wisdom of being present with skeleton woman is that any resisting or running away causes suffering. She runs faster after you.

You might notice in this moment what happens when you put down all resistance to whatever your experience is, when you say yes in a cellular way to this changing dance of life? Notice what happens if you even let the yes go deeper. might whisper the word yes or if the word doesn't work for some I consent, just agreeing, surrendering. Can you sense who you are when you're truly saying yes to the life that's here, the spaciousness and beingness that's here? The third realization is that it's not personal. You might sense how there's hundreds of other people sitting with you tonight, each feeling currents of aliveness or fear, sadness, sleepiness, happiness,

each feeling sensations, listening to sounds. It's all just happening, sensing this oceanness of being this awareness, and that these waves are just living through us. No one possessing or causing anything. When we can remember where the ocean of awareness these waves, these temporary forms that come and go are held with a tremendous tenderness but there's no grasping.

In fact, we watch them come and go and there's a real deep loving that arises, a wonder. The poet Javis talks about it this way. He talks about skeleton woman, death change. He says, death is a favor to us but our scales have lost their balance the impermanence of the body should give us great clarity deepening the wonder in our senses and eyes

of this mysterious existence we share and are surely just traveling through. If I were in the tavern tonight, Havis 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 taking a few full breaths and I'd like to just name the last few elements of this myth and how it points to freedom so the fishermen stayed up all night oh na no nah no patiently doing just what we're doing here

just being with what is, untangling the bones, touching what's here, whether it's woundedness or tiredness. And then he slept. And as I read, a tear escaped from the dreamer's eye, the tear of compassion. And the teaching here is that when we can be with skeleton woman, when we can touch the wounds that are here, when we can face the reality of loss, there's a natural opening of the heart. Our heart doesn't open because we're aloof, because we're above and beyond it, it opens because we let ourselves feel, let ourselves feel the reality of loss, of hurt. There's a Sufi saying, shatter my heart so a new room can be created for a limitless love. So we opened a skeleton woman and it shatters open our hearts. The Buddhist called the sure hearts release.

The tear, the dreamer's tear is healing. Again, in myths and stories from so many cultures, the tear binds together. It brings reunion. It restores sight and health and wholeness. It's a good thing. It's a good thing to be touched and to care and to have that tear of compassion. And we know it within ourselves that when we have run from our own sorrow and we finally

stop running and let ourselves feel that kind of outshy I sometimes talk about of this hurts. This loss hurts, this rejection hurts, this feeling of failure hurts. There's a kindness that comes that returns us home to a fullness of who we are. There's a kindness. So he had that tear and then if you'll remember what happened, this is the last part of the story, she pulls out his heart and bangs on it. She's chanting flesh, flesh, flesh, and that brings her body to fill out and come alive. And this represents the creative power of giving our whole hearts to our life,

of living wholeheartedly. And this is really the practice we are exploring this whole evening with skeleton women, this wholehearted willingness to pay attention to our lives. And when we bring it to our lives, we come alive. We can't come alive by being selective I'll be attention to this, but I'm going to go numb on this one. It's wholeheartedness that frees us.

So this is the gift of facing skeleton woman of caring enough to be present. As we started the talk tonight, it's we get to live the life fully. If we stop running away, we get to live the life fully. This is Rilke. May what I do flow from me like a river.

no forcing and no holding back the way it is with children. Then in these swelling and ebbing currents, these deepening tides moving out, returning, I will sing to you as no one else ever has, streaming through widening channels into open sea. So taking a moment again to give yourself that gift of just feeling that presence that's right here that no matter how this evening's been to you

you can start fresh in this very moment with the simplicity of caring caring to pay attention just for these few moments bringing a kindness and a courage to just being here it's in our intimacy with our inner life, our openness to skilletin woman, that we become intimate with our world, that we really

can bring our love and our presence into the world. Close again with the words of RELCA, may what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children. Then in these swelling and ebbing currents, these deepening tides moving out, returning, I will sing to you as no one ever has, streaming through widening channels into the open sea. Namaste. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.