Tara Brach - Soul Recognition - Seeing Past the Mask

Episode Date: June 15, 2011

2011-06-15 - Soul Recognition - Seeing Past the Mask - We each long to be true to ourselves--to live from the love, creativity and wisdom that is our essence. This talk explores how, by attending to three key domains, we train ourselves to see beyond ego conditioning. By deepening our attention, we can free ourselves and others to be who we truly are. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

So one of the great inquiries in spiritual practice is to stop in any moment, just to, you know, pause and just sense, well, what is in this moment between me and really feeling happy, feeling at home? It's a powerful inquiry. It just shines a light right away on, are we here? Or is there some interference, some belief, some tightness in the body, something that's keeping us from being really inhabiting our presence and our aliveness? And what we discover is that when we're not at home, there's a kind of narrowing of our lens of attention. and we've in some way fixated on the feeling and belief that something's wrong. We've gotten caught and I call it a trance, but this narrowing of attention. And often it's something's wrong with me.

Sometimes it's the world, sometimes it's another person, but there's something wrong. And the Buddha described really the source of all our suffering. He used the word ignorance a lot, which is really ignoring the truth or the big, picture. When you are suffering, it's because your lens of attention has fixated in some way and you're forgetting something really precious and true, which is the vastness and the love and the spirit that's here all the time. There's a forgetting going on. And so our training, and this really is all the training and all the different spirit. traditions in some way come down to this which is reopening this this lens so we can see

what's real so we can see who we are and we can be with each other and really see who's there and I like the language of soul recognition that we have forgotten and we come back and sense again a kind of soulfulness and if that word trips off some things that are narrowing for you then put it aside, but it's a recognition of some essence quality of truth, of spirit, of aliveness of goodness that we've not seen. So I'd like to on this, or almost in summer, this evening, share with you a story that is on this theme. And it's one of my favorite from the King Arthur legends. And in this particular one,

King Arthur is hunting in the woods and he somehow rather gets separated from his companions and he encounters an enemy and his name is, it's a knight named Grommer Somer Jor from now on I'll call him Grommer. And he has these powers to cast a spell over King Arthur

which he does and King Arthur completely gets rigid and frozen and is terrified and rendered completely unable to speak. And Grommer says that he can have his life back if in 12 months he can come back to him and answer the question that is key, which is, what is it that all women most desire? Okay.

So start thinking yourself. What is it that all women most desire? So King Arthur goes back to the court with a heavy heart. You know, how's you going to really, it seems like a trick. So he goes back to the court and he meets up with Sir Gawain, who's the only one that really asks him how come he looks so sorrowful. And he shares a story and Sir Gawain says, okay, well, we're going to go all around the kingdom and we will interview every woman

and we'll find out the answer. We'll keep a book and keep all the answers and figure out, you know, which one really rings true. He sounds like a reasonable kind of guy, right? So they set out and they do that. And they go for 12 months interviewing women about, you know, what is it that a woman most desires. The book gets filled with answers, but they have this deeply uneasy feeling that none of them are it. So shortly before the king is due to go back and meet Gromer, he's in the forest again, and he encounters a hideously ugly woman. She's called the loathly lady.

She's so ugly that the original texts go on and on on her warts and disgustingness. But I'm going to skip that. So she stops and she says, I know what's going on here. I know the answer you're looking for. I actually know the answer, and I'll give it to you on one little condition. And the condition is that my name's Dame Ragnel, and I want to marry one of your knights, Sir Gawain. And King Arthur goes, you know, I can't just give away this guy. You know, he'd have to agree with it.

So he goes back to the court, and he asks Sir Gawain, he tells him what's going on. And without a moment's pause, this noble knight says, of course I'll marry her. I would do anything for you. that. So Arthur goes back to the loathly lady and tells her that the deal's on as long as the answer's the right one. She gives him the answer and he goes to meet Gromer who, as he did before, appears suddenly and he casts this spill and he terrifies Arthur and he says, okay, what have you got for me? Arthur says, well, I've got this book with all these answers and Gromer looks through it and laughs and says, okay, prepare to die, you know. And then he goes, wait, and then Arthur says, wait, I have the real

answer. And he says it. And Gromer is, roars with frustration, but Arthur's one is freedom. Okay. So Arthur returns to the castle. He gets, he gets Sir Gawain and a few of the other nights, and they go out to get the lowly lady and bring her back to court and honor the promise. and when they ride out to the woods upon sight some of the knights are sickened some are even insulting and but sir gawain looks steadily at the lady and there's something in her pathetic pride and the way she lifts her hideous head that causes him to think of deer with hounds about it something in the depth of her blared gaze reach him like a cry for help so he reprimands the others and And he gets on his knees and quite sincerely asks for her hand.

And she says, oh, you two are jesting. And he goes, no, I'm sincere, lady. I, you know, he asks for her hand. So she says, you're not going to regret this. They bring her back to the castle. They're married in the chapel in front of everyone. Everyone comes forward to offer words of congratulations, but they can barely speak.

Just the words get stuck in their throat. They're so horrified by her, the lowly ladies. ugliness and by Sir Gawain's fate. The ladies come up to touch her fingertips, but it's as brief as can be because they can't bear to look at her or kiss her cheek. And only cabal, the dog, came and looked her hand with a warm, wet tongue and looked up into her face with amber eyes that, and I'll read this exactly word to word, took no account of her hideous aspect for the eyes of a hound see differently from the eyes of men.

At last it was over and the couple led to the their chamber and there Gawain sat in this deeply cushioned chair and he stares into the fire reluctant to glance in the direction of his bride. She says softly, Gawain, my lord and love, have you no word for me? Can you not even bear to look my way? Gawain forced himself to turn his head and looked and then sprang up an amazement for there between the candle sconces stood the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He stared speechless and wondering, finally finding his tongue, asked her how this could be, what had happened. And she said, I've been under an enchantment. And because you've taken me for your wife, it's partly lifted, but only partly. Now listen carefully, for you have a very difficult

choice. And this is it. She said, I can be fair by night and foul by day, or foul by night and fair by day. Decide which it is you want. It's a tough one. So he thought for a while, pondered the events that led to this moment and then it dawned on him what answer he must give. Whichever way it is, it is you who must endure the most suffering. And being a woman, I am thinking that you have the wisdom. You have more wisdom than I in such things. make the choice yourself dear love in whichever way you choose I shall be content so she cried out in joy my lord you are as wise as you are noble and true for you have given me what every woman genuinely desires the answer to the riddle sovereignty over herself

you've broken the spell completely and I am free to be my true self by night and day for seven years Gawain and Regnell knew great happiness together and during all that time Gawain was a gentler and kinder and more steadfast man than he had ever been before. But after seven years she left. No one knows where she went and something of Gawain went with her. So we begin to then examine what is meant by sovereignty. In many of the spiritual traditions, freedom, close word, is really considered the essence of what our heart are longing for and it's not the freedom our sovereignty is not an having external power over anything it's sovereignty is fully empowering freedom is

empowering and my understanding it's the freedom to be fully who we are that sovereignty is the freedom to be fully who we are to realize and express our true nature, our aliveness and our creativity and our wisdom and our heart. Interestingly, a friend sent me this. A writer is describing how for many years she took care of people in palliative care and her patients had already had gone home to die and she kept them company and the amazing changes that happen when we face our mortality, the amount of growth and awakening that's possible. And one element of it is a kind of perspective about our life, including regrets. And she describes the single biggest regret that people named as they were dying.

And that was, as she says, I wish I'd have the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. It's the regret that we really, not to be sovereign, not to be able to live from the truth of who we are, the sense of having to contort ourselves or shape ourselves or present ourselves so that we are meeting some idea of what the world wanted or wouldn't judge or would pat us on the back for. And in so doing betraying ourselves. So sovereignty is the freedom to be who we really are. And it takes a recognizing of who we are and then in inhabiting that. So what makes it possible, as we're going to be exploring tonight, is what I'd like to call for the evening's soul recognition. This presence that can see past the mask, our own mask, see past our own ego conditioning, see that when we get caught up in all the different emotions and behaviors, that does not express the depth of who we are.

because as soon as we think that's me you know I am you know as in the King Arthur story I am this presentation this appearance we lose contact with that essence that really is our freedom so what are the ways that we get identified and forget what are the ways we look at others and think oh that's that kind of person whether it's because of a person's race

our person's body shape or religion, our type of intelligence, personality. So there's a training, a training to seeing, and I'd like to maybe as a way to simplify tonight, divide the training into three domains. And the first domain, and they're going to come out of the story we just heard, the first domain is to be able to be able to

pause enough and see another or see ourselves and see the vulnerability that's there. See that kind of humanness that's afraid, that feels squeezed, that feels uneasy. Because if we can see into the vulnerability that's there, our compassion wakes up. The second domain is to see the goodness and the beauty. And the third is the quality of beingness, the consciousness. itself. So in the story, in the King Arthur's story, we saw that, we saw all three. We saw Sir Gawain seeing the lowly lady and seeing, you know, in her hideous aspect, and seeing through that to some, some, something calling to him, something in trouble, some basic humanness in difficulty, beyond humanness, creatureness in difficulty. And that

brought out empathy. Then we see him on his wedding night seeing her beauty, her glow. And then we see at the very end, and this is kind of a key piece, that he sees her wisdom. He sees her Buddha nature. You know, you can decide, you have that wisdom, that kind of quality of beingness itself. So these are the three scenes that we learn to have this capacity to recognize in our and others. And what stops us is that our attention gets narrow and we are in trance. We are in a trance where we are thinking something's wrong with me, something's wrong with you. So we begin as we start exploring how do we cultivate soul recognition. Can we notice our trance? Can you consider today and notice when were you most really in trance?

where you're looking at in a very narrow way, where your sense of yourself was very narrowed, do you have a sense? And I'll give you some different types of trances that we go into. There's some that are fairly benign where we're kind of in just a habitual mode, where we're very preoccupied

and we just quickly see a person and immediately put them in a category. and it may not be even a negative category, but we're not really seeing deeply. And one friend described a story when he was traveling in India, and he was sailing down the Ganges, and they came upon a boatload of orange-rope monks.

So they see this boatload of monks, and they pull out their cameras to shoot at this amazing site, and all the monks at the same time took out their digital cameras and took photos of this guy and his group, photowing them. So they're all photowing each other. And that was a moment of wake-up. It's like, oh, these guys have digital cameras too. But you know how they just had this notion that these were just going to be some traditional monks from centuries ago. They were going to photo.

So there's that kind of a kind of just a mindset where we're just kind of in our habitualness. But then there are really the kind of trance that's driven by few. are wanting. And in that kind of trance, we don't see who's there. When we are driven by fear or wanting, the aperture has narrowed. And so you might sense those are the moments when in some way you've created others as other, not just as other, but also as an enemy other or as a lesser person than other. It's when in some way you're putting down a a class of people, whether it's politically or a racial group, or it may be religion, or somebody it's not so physically attractive. I lived in a spiritual community for about a decade

where we all wore white garb. It was like a yoga ashram where there were turbans. And I left many years ago, but I remember some of my friends still involved with the community. After 9-11, what it was like for especially the men to be insulted and put down as they moved around the streets, you know, because of their garb. They were immediately stereotyped. There is research, social science research now that whenever people carry a belief that some group is of lesser value and is entitled to less. whenever they carry those beliefs, whether it's the lesser, whether women are less, are children or people of color, are lesbian, gay, whatever it is, if there's a group that is targeted as less in some way, those people are more inclined towards violence,

the ones that carry those beliefs. Now intuitively it makes sense that whenever we create separation, whenever we create separation and put others above or below us, we, our bodies have more fear in them. The primal mood of the separate self is fear. So the more that we do that, the more we have beliefs that put people apart from ourselves, the more we're going to be inclined towards aggression. So again, it's important to ask ourselves, you know, where today or where during this week was fear our wanting most blinding you, most creating a smallness, most creating a separation. You know, for some, it's with the wanting mind. I mean, we know what happens with infatuation, right?

We're not seeing clearly. This is not soul recognition, you know. Infatuation has the same biochemistry, I think, as cocaine addiction. Is that what it is? Yeah. Similar. So what happens then. The biochemistry and beliefs and so on are such that we're not really seeing who we are, who another is. Or take the other side when we feel betrayed. Very, very narrow lens that we're looking through with any kind of addiction. We know when we're on our way to trying to satisfy an addiction, how much do we see of who we are or who another is? It's narrowed. We know what it's like when we're trying to get approval. You know what your body feels like when you're trying to get someone's approval?

There's something small. We get smaller. And we know if we look back at periods of our life, the times when we really got completely riveted on an idea or a passion or something and we really got, and everything got torched, we really thought we knew the answer to something and we were going to make the money or make something happen. I know Leonard Cohen, some of you've heard of, when he was 75. he gave a talk. And it was at a talk that he had been to 15 years early, a place he had been

to 15 years earlier. And here's how he started. He said, last time I was here, I was 60 years old, just a crazy kid with dreams, you know. So there's portions of our life that we know that because of addiction or infatuation or whatever it was that we were not able to see ourselves or others in a full way. We know that there are times that we get kind of talked and we're always going around with a complaint of some sort. Do you know what I mean? When there's some way, there's some sense of a grumbling. It's like this little cartoon where I had four wealthy women meet for lunch at a deli in Miami and the waiter comes over to the table to greet them. Good afternoon, ladies. Is anything okay? No. Or what happens?

happens when we get bored and we start, you know, how our attention now is we get bored and we just start getting just lost in the web or we get lost in some sort of a behavior. This is one person's story. Working people frequently asked retired people what they do to make their days interesting. Well, for instance, the other day Mary, my wife and I went to town and visited a shop. When we came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket. We went up to him and I said, come on man. How about you? giving a senior citizen a break. He ignored us and continued writing the ticket. I felt a little silly. I called him Nutface. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn out tires. So Mary

called him stupid head. We were in bad form. He finished the second ticket, put it on the windshield with the first. Then he started writing more tickets, and we got more creative in our abuse. This went on for 20 minutes. The more we abused and the more tickets he

Just then our bus arrived and we got on it and went home. We try to have a little fun each day now that we're retired. It's important at our age. So we start reflecting on our trans states when we get caught in something that makes us smaller and then has us see others as only really a sliver of who they are. And at those times there's no soul recognition. So we begin to sense, okay, begin to ask ourselves, so write this moment what's between me and freedom.

And we'll find if we start investigating at those moments that the body is tight, the mind is tight, the heart is tight. And then we begin to investigate that tightness. And we sense that there's a belief in there. And the core belief is something is wrong or something is missing. at the moments when our lens is shrunk something is wrong or something is missing so I'd like to give you an example of how

we can begin to wake ourselves up out of trance so we can see who we are and who others are this process of soul recognition and I'll do it by sharing a story this is from a few years ago I was doing a phone session with a woman from New York whose parents have dementia and she was in contact with them and discovered that they had changed their will last minute and she was not as secure and so she got on the phone with them and she was telling me about this and she flew into a rage

when she realized what had happened she she got she she just said I was bewitched. You know, it was like no longer were they, her older parents that were entering dementia, but they were absolutely the enemy that were trying to get her, and she was the victim. And so she really got caught. And we each know what that's like when we just, whatever our idea of our self is as more economist or spacious or balanced or mature or wise, out the window, you know. And it happens whether it's with it usually happens with the people most important to us are the people we have the most attachment to so she lost it and and then what happened was afterwards she started blaming herself so it was the next chain reaction she not only was she the victim of these you know

no longer were they dementia there was something vindictive and she was being you know made insecure but she was also the aggressor who was a violent, untogether person did not match her idea of spiritual self. So you might ask the question, because for her there was no freedom in those moments, but you might say, well, wasn't there really something wrong? I mean, you know, she really was going to be more financially insecure. And that not everything's like a beautiful woman under a spell,

that all you have to do is see her soul and she comes back. And the reality is, yes, on this earth plane, these bodies get sick and people double cross us or talk behind our backs or hurt us. We get caught in addictive behaviors that really need attention. These bodies, these minds fail. So things on one level do go wrong. and the invitation of the spiritual path is that even in the midst of that the apparent not okayness

and this is what's key even in the midst of that it's possible to find that sovereignty that freedom to remember who we are and to live from that even as we're dying it's possible to find that sovereignty of remembering who we are of that soul recognition and living from it. The Buddha, one of the classic phrases, is that pain is inevitable. It's inevitable that these bodies and these minds will go and that we'll lose all that we love. And he said, suffering is optional, that we have a choice. in how we're going to relate,

that we do not have to go into that trance that gets narrow and tight and become a victim of life or become a person who's failing. That's not necessary. So one of the kind of basic teachings in the wisdom traditions is it doesn't really matter what's happening.

What matters is how we're relating to it. that it's possible to be in trance and have that feeling of stuff happening and wake up in the midst of it. How does that happen? Well, awareness is waking up. I suspect for most of you, you could reflect on your life or reflect on what you've been through in these last years and sense that there's more presence. There's more of a quality of knowing. Perhaps there's more kindness. That's awareness waking up. So awareness is waking up anyway and your intention, if you intend to recognize your soul or recognize other souls, that very

intention actually nourishes the waking up. So there are three ways that you can bring your intention to more presence and more awakening. And one, as I mentioned, is to catch that there's suffering going on. Okay, suffering. Pause. There's compassion when you do that. Catch the goodness that's there. Who's really here? The heart that's really here. And then sense into the awareness quality. And so let me walk through those all with you, with this story that I've been telling you, that for this woman who lashed out at her parents, as we spoke together, we said, okay, let's deepen the attention. Because that's what it takes. There's always this pause and this, okay, let's be more here. Let's investigate. And so for her, she started deepening her attention. She started saying,

well what am I really believing? What's the trance I'm in? And what she was believing was they don't care. There's this deep herd of they don't care. I'm not worth caring about. And then the grief of that. And as she began to sense how she lived with that belief and feeling actually a lot, not just in this occasion, but in some way the I'm not worth caring about was a part of her habitual psyche, a real sorrow came up, that she was carrying that. I sometimes call this a soul sadness when we realize how many moments we've been living

with a belief of fundamentally I'm not okay. I'm falling short. Others won't really care about me. I can never really be close with other people. Something's wrong with. me that either they'll reject me or I'll reject them, but this kind of fundamental sense of not okayness and how many moments of our life are actually shaped and contracted by that belief and feeling. And when we sense that, it's as if we're sensing the landscape of our life

and there's this quality of tenderness that happens. As if we're holding our whole life and our attention and going, oh, that is sad. In the moment of compassion, the trance starts lifting. For her, in that moment of compassion, of sensing, oh, sorrow, her sense of who she was shifted from the victimized bad self to that which was compassionate. So that's the first piece of soul recognition, see the suffering, see the vulnerability, in the compassion that arises, you enlarge to start occupying who you really are. Okay, that's the first step. She could begin from that place to see her parents. As soon as she could hold herself with tenderness, she could see them and totally get, this is not a vindictive maneuver. This was just confusion.

It's okay. And behind the confusion, see that they just wanted to love and be love. They were just so shocked by her going crazy on them. They just wanted good feelings. Most people do. Most people want to feel connected. And as she got that sense, she could see their vulnerability, their goodness. Again, that softening and opening.

Soul recognition. This is the next phase. the final was that she could feel they wanted to love and be loved, she wanted to love and be loved, and then she could sense there was really no difference. This was all the same consciousness kind of shining through or living through her and her parents.

And she just opened to that sense of beingness, consciousness itself. The masks had dropped away. Now for many of us, we might say, you know, it's not so easy to see through the mass and see consciousness pouring through and that we're all one. And it's true.

But you would be surprised if you have the intention next time you feel caught in trance and somebody's really an other and you're feeling small or they're in some way the enemy, if you have the intention to pause

and begin to say, okay, so where's the thing? the vulnerability here and start with yourself. The tenderness, the softening of the heart that comes with compassion will allow you to then see the goodness and will allow you to begin to sense what's shining through it all. This is the poet Hefez. One day the sun admitted, I am just a shadow. I wish I could show you the infinite incandescence. that had cast my brilliant image. I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness

the astonishing light of your own being. So it's a pathway of remembering who we really are. Just as I mentioned that great regret, you know, I lived to other people's expectations. I tried to be who others would approve of or who others wouldn't reject. It takes a kind of courage to pause and keep coming back to this presence

that says, what's right here? The vulnerability, the goodness, the beingness. It's a training. Now, what happens is that when we begin to do that, it's not like we're living in some etheric realm where all we're seeing is light pouring through everybody and we don't have it and there's nothing to do, there is a kind of inhabiting of our body, mind, spirit

that has a real intelligence to it. When there's been soul recognition of ourselves and each other, we then can deal with a situation, but with a lot more compassion, with a lot more intelligence. So this woman knew how to talk to her parents. It's like once she got over the trance reaction, she could talk to them and they were able to find it to make it work out better.

But it doesn't always work that way. Sometimes we can't work it out. But we're still living for more integrity, for more alignment with our hearts. We train to see our own being and soul. And we train to be able to really see each others because it helps to call them out. I'll share with you that one of my earliest mentors was a therapist who was kind of a supervisor

when I first began first clinical supervisor and he was a wise man and he described how when he'd sit down with a client the first thing he'd do that he'd kind of insist that they just sit a little bit and this was before meditation was the rage you just have them be quiet.

He believed in quieting. And then in some way, his reflection would be to see who that person was. He didn't use the language of Buddha nature. He didn't say, I'm trying to see the Buddha in you. He was just in some way to see the glow, the spirit, the soul, whatever we want to call it, to see who that person was. And his commitment, and this is intention,

was to have that remembrance that held whatever else came up. The magic was the people that would go see him felt seen, not just for their spirit, they felt that all their Mishogosh was seen too, but that it was okay because he saw what was most important about them. And he helped them to trust that.

It takes training. It's not easy. One man who was working with, me was having a lot of trouble with his son who had it was ADD and they were in a real kind of conflictual period son was acting in ways that were very disruptive very rude he had so he was forced to create these boundaries but he was unable to do it without being angry and so he was creating angry boundaries and rules and guidelines and so on that were then just creating more of the same behaviors. And so when we spoke, I said, you have to keep creating

the boundaries, because there's no question. There were things he had to do to protect his son in a way. But I said, add a meditation each day. And it's really a meditation of who is he? Who is this being? and he did something that that I think is really wise is he would sometimes when he'd meditate he'd have to imagine his son when his son was asleep that's okay it's cheating but it's okay actually he'd also imagine a someone he was young

or someone he was happy and that's all part of it but what he would do is reflect on who is he and I gave him these three dimensions of soul recognition who is he who is the vulnerable one in there and he started really reflecting and getting just how much for her son his son was going through in terms of feeling really insecure in his life and wanting to feel like he belonged to his friends just the angsts he was going through so his heart went out to his son he just there's a kind of a that was the melting the beginning of

melting. And then the goodness, it wasn't hard for him. It wasn't his habit these days, but it wasn't hard to remember the impishness and the humor and the brightness and the kindness, the innate kindness of his son. He meditated on that each day. And then third, he would see his son, he'd see his son's face, and then he would just imagine the energy of who his son was, and even beyond the energy, just the purity of beingness. And in that meditation, he'd realize we're the same. There was not separation. For him, this meditation changed the way he was relating to his son.

It carried over. It didn't mean it didn't have the triggering because we're just human and our kids trigger us and our parents trigger us and we trigger ourselves and it just happens. But there was more soul recognition in the midst. which created more space and his son could feel it. And they found their way to him being able to respectfully still create the boundaries. And they found their way to other activities where they could be together

and find their way towards connecting. When my son was young, I did a similar thing and I remember one of the inspirations. I heard about this ritual, these bantu. tribesmen that would have their children asleep in a hut and they'd go around from child to child and offer a prayer and the prayer was be who you are and I remember that was the most beautiful prayer I could offer to my son was to kind of sense and see and honor the who he was and really the blessing of may you be that may you be free to be who you are not the person I most of the day think you should be.

That was a trick, you know? And I feel like in raising him, that's always been the trick, to know that I've got my own conditioning to think he should be a certain way. And then just to remember and trust who he is. This is the gift that we can give to others to intentionally pause and reflect,

look to see it comes in the word namaste, I see the divine in you to have the intention to see who's there but it starts with the capacity to see ourselves every one of us goes into trance or most people

I can't say every one of us but most people I've met get small and we believe in a limited sense of who we are our idea of our self the small self story has narrowed and we're usually a small self in some way falling short

or something's missing or something else needs to happen. So if our intention is this sovereignty, this freedom, where we can really be who we are, we need this training of pausing, coming into presence, sensing what's between me and freedom right now? We'll find that there is a clench to the heart, a clench in the body, bring compassion. See that vulnerability and bring compassion.

If we stay and pay attention, we'll also sense that this heart cares that we want to love and be loved. See the goodness. And if we stay really present, we'll sense a kind of a silence and a space and a wakefulness that's our beingness. bow to that.

That allows us to inhabit who we are. And then our personality can play, but it plays in a much more easy way because there's a remembrance of who we are. I'd like to close with a brief guided meditation, and then we'll part ways. So the beginning of sovereignty or freedom is this intelligence that has a stop.

Just to pause. Invite yourself here. You might feel the breath as it flows in and out. You might notice the state of your heart in this moment. You might sense your intention to nourish the waking up that's already happening, this intention to see truly who's here, your own being and others. And as a way of practicing, you might imagine that you can just bring to mind

someone that you care about, just sense them right here. Let this be an opportunity to look more closely. The person's here, you can pause and sense. So what's the vulnerability, the humanness this person's living with? Let's take a little more time than perhaps you normally do to sense this person's fears or disappointments, insecurities, doubts. Just letting your heart feel that. your wish for that person to find ease or confidence, peace, and sense the goodness of this person. It's a beautiful part of this soul recognitions to just sense the humor and aliveness and intelligence, this person's capacity for loving.

My sense how this person expresses love to you. sense in the most subtle way the person's presence itself, this beingness, that is no different than your beingness. It's that which is aware. You might imagine being with this person and some way that you could mirror back their goodness, what you appreciate, and what that that might be like for that person, how it can call forth a person's soul and spirit when you're a mirror for that. The poet Rumi writes, what is the soul? Consciousness. The more awareness, the deeper the soul. And when such essence overflows, you feel a sacredness around. How long do you look at pictures on the wall?

Soul is what draws you away from those pictures to talk with the old woman who sits outside by the door in the sun. She's half blind, but she has what soul loves to flow into. She's kind. She weeps. She makes quick personal decisions and laughs so easily. What is the soul? Consciousness. The more awareness, the deeper the soul. And when you feel such essence overflowing, there's a sacredness around inhabit that sacredness. Closing by bringing the attention to this very life right here with an honest presence just sensing whatever vulnerability,

whatever tightness or tension in your heart and being is here. You might breathe with it, feel it, with kindness. Be the awareness, the compassionate presence that's holding your own heart. Take some moments to reflect on the goodness of being, your own goodness, the sincerity of your heart, your honesty, your care. And then just open to sense the presence that's here, the awareness itself, letting go and inhabiting that awareness, sensing the freedom of your own true nature.

May this awareness awaken to realize loving presence as its true home. May all beings everywhere discover the sovereignty and freedom of their own true nature. Namaste. Thank you. 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. www.org. Thank you very much.