Tara Brach - Soul Retrieval

Episode Date: February 17, 2010

2008-09-24 - When we become stressed and reactive, we lose contact with our natural spontaneity, wisdom and openheartedness. This talk investigates the ways we become caught in the stress-trance and the key elements in awakening: pausing and remindfulness. Using the gateway of the senses, we explore both the pathway of presence and the gifts of reconnecting with soul, spirit, essence.

So how many of you feel more stressed than usual? Just honestly. Just and keep your hands up if you don't mind. And if somebody next you has their hand raised comfort, but no. Thank you. Thank you. How many is it the sense of the economy?

Can I see my hands? How many of, yeah. So that's definitely rippling through. I asked because I've talked to a lot of people. get emails and so on. And it is a really, it's in the psyche of our country, and it's all over.

There's a sense of trouble, and trouble equals stress. And as we know, when it gets personal, it really grips our bodies. So if it's not somebody in another country who's potentially going to lose their IRA, but it's, you know, us,

or, you know, if it's something that happens to my body or my child, all of a sudden the stress is like a real grip in us. And in Buddhism, if you study Buddhism, there's the four noble truths, what they really come down to is that stress is universal, that it's part of the package of being alive. for you know we have different bodies and some of us experience more and less in different circumstances but stress is a universal and the difference between being caught in the trance of suffering and having a sense of freedom is really how we respond to it you know the glib phrase is that

pain is inevitable and suffering is optional that's that's the way it's put so it's a really interesting inquiry of how do we respond when things get stressful and it's really I think the essence of all spiritual practice in a way is that it doesn't matter what lofty ideas we have about spirituality it's very revealing to sense what disturbs us you know we might want to be very big-minded but when we really are honest and we see what trips us up it's humbling It's really humbling. So when we begin to investigate our way of relating to stress, we'll find that if we're having a hard time,

it's because we're leaving home. That's the bottom line. If we're stressful and we exit out, in other words, we leave our body, we trip off into compulsive thinking. We basically are trying desperately to control the experience. And that's the key word. If we're desperately trying to control the experience, we lock into suffering.

And I'm using the terms to do with soul retrieval tonight because some of you might know that's part of some of the psychotherapies now. One is called soul retrieval. And the idea is that if you've had major traumatic abuse when you're young, there's a sense of dissociating in a way that you're you, you really leave your aliveness and you leave that free heart and you leave your spontaneity and you leave your soul. And the Buddhists don't use the word soul much but I think it's a kind of I like the word. What I'm sensing a soul is the kind of unique expression of what's timeless.

How it moves through these bodies and minds, the unique expression of wisdom and love and creativity for these particular impermanent forms. That's the soul. And we lose touch with that when we get stressed. In a big way if we've been dramatically stressed, but any time we enter stress, in some way we lose touch with that vastness and that mystery. It's what Emerson called the soul of the whole.

He said that we have thoughts that it can be brilliant and we have creative impulses and we have love And it's all sourced in the soul of the whole. And it moves through these souls. And we lose touch. So in a way, this inquiry of how do we respond to stress has everything to do with soul retrieval, with being able to come back home to really a fullness of who we are.

And usually what happens is when there's stress, we postpone spirituality. We get into a mindset of, I want to take care of this, fix this, get through this, and then I'll go to the top of the mountain and meditate and have a great experience. So it's like we sequence things. We're on our way to a better time

when then we can be spiritual and then we can be generous and then we can, you know. And the irony is when those times happen that you're most bothered, that's exactly when your particular karma is coagulating you around a separate self-sense,

most intensely, that's the time when there's the most potential to really wake up to the depth of who you are when it's challenging. So we sometimes call it a Dharma doorway. You know, the Dharma is the path, and it's almost like it's a doorway when we find that our system's really collecting. And you can see it in terms of societies also. Now I'm going to speak tonight on an individual level, but I invite you to translate

because it's right in our face. You know, they talk about the 9-11 of one level of violence and then this is our version in the economy and how do we respond? Do we respond from a wisdom and a presence? In some balanced place? Or is there an old pattern of getting fearful, and tight and reflexive in our response.

So if we want to begin to look at our way of responding to stress, the keyword, as far as I can tell, is how much is there a sense of trying to control things? And the flag, the flag of proliferation of being in that kind of selfing that's trying to control is obsessive thinking. So it's Ajang Buddha Dasa was asked to describe this world Great Buddhist Thai teacher I think it was And his response was lost in thought

And when we're stressed we're lost in compulsive thought And the themes are something's wrong Something's going to go wrong It's happening to me Maybe it's my fault or maybe it's your fault but it's somebody's fault, always. And we're in trouble. So what happens is that we go into figuring and blaming and strategizing,

which can, you know, these mental functions are necessary, but when they're fear-driven, they never take us outside of the normal loop. In other ways, we really don't come up with something that's wise and creative, because our past conditioning keeps on creating the same kind of thoughts and the same inner biochemistry of fear, and we're in a loop. It's never creative. It's never informed by wisdom when it's fear-driven like that.

What it confirms this obsessive thinking is, I'm a self, I'm in trouble, and there's this kind of frenzy to try to solve it in the old way. So part of the way we try to control it is we try to make explanations and make sense of things, which is really natural. Just read you a quote. This is the experience of separation or uprootedness is sustained by compulsive thinking. It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really shrinks

and we lose the ability to sense the interconnectedness of all that exists. thinking cuts reality up into lifeless fragments thinking obscures the oneness the timeless presence the soul so again it can be a tool but when we're caught in the incessant streams of obsessive thought it cuts us off now as I mentioned one of the main themes is that we are trying to figure out what's happening have you noticed how many moments

moment you spend trying to figure out what's going on on some level. Just trying to figure out. Story I like. I seem to have a lot of parrot stories. This is a parrot story. There was a magician working on a cruise ship. He had a parrot that was always ruining his act, saying in the middle of the trick, the card's up his sleeve. He has a dove in his pocket, or he slipped it through a hole in his hat. One day the ship sank. The parrot and the magician. found themselves together on a life raft. For several days, the parrot sat silently and stared at the magician. On the fourth day, the parrot said, okay, I give up. What did you do with the ship? So we try to create a story, and it doesn't matter whether it's a painful story or not. We'd rather

have a story about what's going on, including that I'm bad, I'm deficient, I've blown it, and I failed. We'd rather have that story than really not having any ground. anywhere to land. Now, it's not that you're thinking. Thinking just happens. It's like saying, I'm digesting. You know what I mean? Or I'm circulating my blood.

It's kind of crazy. We feel very responsible for our thoughts, especially there's a saying the mind has no shame, you know, it just does anything. We feel kind of embarrassed about sometimes what goes on in our mind. But it's just happening.

It's just like, enzymes being produced. It's just happening. But as I mentioned, because the mind is conditioned by the past, it keeps running in familiar loops. Like we're in this familiar cocoon. And I've sometimes noticed that if anybody was whispering in my ear all the stuff that I tell myself, I mean, I wouldn't put up with it for a moment, you know. So it just goes on and on. And what happens is that When stress hits, we go into familiar patterns of self-justification or blame if somebody's criticized us. Or if there's financial threat, of course, it's a pattern of worrying and planning and scheming. And if it's conflict in a relationship or we've been rejected in a relationship, it might be self-aversion.

And it's really been that nobody ever really would want to be close to me. But whatever it is, we immediately lock back into stuff. people tell me that they can't believe that they're in the same place they were 30 years ago. It's very deeply conditioned and it's not our fault. The challenge is that if we don't have a way of becoming aware of and stepping out of this trance, we keep living our life in the same ways. This is called Thinkers Anonymous. Started out innocently enough.

I began to think at parties now and then to loosen it. up. Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone. To relax, I told myself, but I knew that it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally, I was thinking all the time. I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read and think about Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, what is it exactly we're doing here? Things weren't going so great at home either.

One evening I had to turn off the TV and ask my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mothers. Anyway, one point I headed for the library in the mood for some Nietzsche with a PBS station on the radio, and I roared into the parking lot and ran up to the big glass doors, and they didn't open. The library was closed. To this day, I believe that a higher power was looking out for me that night. As I sunk to the ground clawing at the unfilling glass and whimpering for Zarathor 3,

A poster caught my eye. Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life? You might recognize that line. It comes from the standard thinker's anonymous poster, which is why I am what I am today, a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video. Last week it was Porky's.

Then we share experiences about how we've stepped out of thinking since the last meeting. I still have my job and things are a lot better at home. Life just seems more peaceful, easier somehow as soon as I stopped thinking. So in a way, it seems kind of silly, but we're addicted. We are really addicted to our thoughts. And if you look at today and sense how many swaths of moments were there where you weren't in some way lost in the thinking? How many swaths were there were, you actually could feel your breath,

our sense, it's been these incredible stretch of days that really feel the air, see the sky, or look at somebody's eyes and just see that kind of glow. How much space was there between the thoughts? I'm not going to ask for a hand raised on this one, but we know it. And the reality is that the more stressed we are,

and this is the flag of stress, we speed up. I think I've mentioned many times in here that Chinese character for the word busy is similar to heart killing. And that feels very important because in a way when we get stressed, our reflex is to get busier, to think more, to tense up. We go to war. I mean, it's like there's threats. So we go to war with either our inner life or the world. But we get caught. off from our soul. It's there, but we're not in touch with any sense of the mystery that's here. There's no sense of wonder. Our compassion is abstract. In other words, we feel sorry for people or bad about things, but it's not visceral because we're not really very much in our body,

because when we're stressed, we're mostly busy in our minds. What this points to is that that if we want to begin to deepen on the spiritual path, a fabulous place to begin to deepen our attention is when we start sensing the flags of stress. Oh, I'm leaving home. I'm leaving my body. I'm caught in the habitual patterns. What would it mean to come back home now?

So I'm going to talk a bit now about the ways back home, how we begin to, I mentioned a space between thoughts, how we begin to pause enough that we can find that space. And that's where that light shines through. That's where the soul of the whole kind of is luminous and shines through these bodies and minds. I remember one's coming in here, and somebody handed me this little cartoon,

and it had two robots, and one was just leaping up and down off the ground, this huge grin on her face saying, I'm free, I'm free at last. I've overridden my manual button. my manual override button. So she was free and happy. And the truth is that we are on,

in a robotic way, we're on habitual a lot. And the path to waking up is noticing that and coming back right here. It's moving from a sense of a self that's controlling to a quality of presence. from controlling, thinking, doing, doing, to a sense of beingness here. Now, it doesn't mean that we don't act.

We're going to get to that. We absolutely are designed to be engaged, but our engagement can come from a quality of beingness. In other words, we can have our activities come out of a quality of soul presence, not out of that mechanical, driven, fear-based kind of a mood. The basic practice, one of the words I use to describe it here is re-mindfulness. Okay, you know, mindfulness is noticing what's happening.

The two questions are, what's happening in this moment? You can just ask it right now, just sense, okay, so what's happening in this moment, and then just listening into your body, to your senses, what's happening? happening. And the second question is, can I be with this? Can I let this be either way? So presence is this quality of noticing and allowing. It's a wakeful space. Remindfulness is when we notice, oh, I've left. I'm off. And then there's, because we have a sincere caring about presence, there's a, oh, come back. It's not directing. It's not directing. It's not. pushing, it's not strong arming, it's not saying back to the breath. It's this recognition

of, oh, I've left home, I've cut off from my spirit, my soul, my being, oh yeah, come back. Re-mindfulness. So the first step is usually to notice when we're doing this kind of a training in remindfulness, the instructions are if you get lost in thought, don't judge that. that's just adding another layer of stuff when you get lost in thought it's like oh okay that's an opportunity to listen to the sounds that are here

to be with what's right here we're not trying to vanquish thoughts in another cartoon there's these two monks that are sitting there side by side meditating and one saying are you not thinking what I'm not thinking so it's not about vanquishing thoughts it's really just

simply not being lost in the train of thoughts, it's finding the spaces between the thoughts again. There's a lot of suffering when we spend our time drifting around in the thoughts because every thought has a kind of chemical correspondence in the body and most of our thoughts have a kind of tension to them that keep us in a chronic state of unease in our body and then that unease generates more thoughts of what's wrong and we keep in this cycle, remindfulness breaks that cycle. The more there's a sense of quieting a bit, the more the body quiets,

and we begin to discover a kind of an inner space that really allows our natural creativity and heart and wisdom to come through. So we're talking about kind of cutting the conditioning a bit with remindfulness and being here. I'll like just again to invite you let's just get a taste of it and then we'll keep going so this is the most

fundamental practice to de-stress so as you pause right now you can know that there can be many types of pauses in your life you can pause as we do on Wednesday nights for a half

an hour meditation or as we're going to do right now for a minute you can pause and just take a couple of breaths what they have in common is the sincerity to come back home, to reconnect with what's here. You might listen. Again, see if you can relax and let the sounds wash through you. Listen to and feel the sensations that are here.

You establish a sense of the senses awake, aware of sounds, sensations, aware of whatever mood or emotions here. Let that intention be when drifting happens, which it does, to notice when you do and practice re-mindfulness arriving right here. So continuing in presence, you can open your eyes, but just continue the sense of here.

Any moment of beingness begins to decondition, our habitual stress response. The more moments of being in this, the more we're remembering that soul of the whole and less inclined to get caught in the stress trance. Now the challenge is that when we get really in that cycle and our body's really locked in, it's not so easy to say,

oh, I'm going to pause. I'm going to rely. It might be easier on a Wednesday night, but we know what it's like when we're revved up. And in particular, when something really, really difficult has hit in our life and we've gotten a real jolt, it's very, very difficult to say, oh, here, be right here.

And yet that's the gateway. When it's most difficult, the only place it can save us is this hereness. The only way we can save ourselves is to step out of the busy cycle of thoughts because they will just keep us imprisoned in that biochemistry of fear. they will keep us imprisoned in grief.

Barbara Kingsolver, this is from High Tide in Tucson, she says every one of us is called upon probably many times to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job, or a limb or a loved one, a graduation bringing a new baby home. It's impossible to think at first how this will all be possible. Eventually what moves it all forward is the sub-futable. of the Mediterranean ebb and flow of being alive among the living. In my own worst seasons, I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard for a long

time at a single glorious thing, a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window, and then another, my daughter in a yellow dress, and another, the perfect outline of a full dark sphere behind the crescent moon, until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim, retraining new parts of the brain to grass-lossed skills, I have taught myself joy over and over again. So this is a liberating discovery that we can shift from our unhealthy stories, from the efforts to control, to this riveting kind of presence that reconnects us with creativity and spirit.

It's an amazing discovery and this is the invitation of a spiritual path that we can step out of our habitual inner dialogue and look at the red geranium and just say this, just this much. We can step out of our pattern of blame, we can step out of our pattern of self-aversion

and just say, okay, just this breath, and now this breath and now this breath it takes kindness there's no way if you're caught in a painful kind of stressed clutch that when we say

just be with this much that it's possible to soften into the present moment without kindness it takes kindness one friend of mine from the Bay Area some months ago had had a biopsy

and as some of you know, sometimes the lineup is that you have it and then there's a long weekend or something or something and you end up waiting. And the waiting is just really, really difficult. And this is what happened to her and she was really, really scared. And she felt very lonely. It just kept building until she basically remembered the words in one teacher, I don't remember who said it.

He just said just this much. That can save you. If you just say the words, just this much, just this breath, just this step, just the sound of the breeze, just this squeeze of fear, just this bird, you know, just stay with the moment to moment.

It's when the mind starts proliferating that the suffering is created. So she practiced just as much, and when she said just this much, just this fear, just this grip, you know, tremendous kind of grieving broke open. She was grieving and, you know, the potential of loss.

And so she described how she was curled up in her bed, crying and saying just as much, and sensing what she wanted more than anything in that moment, was sensing in some way some motherly energy curled around her holding her. If you're ever in fetal position, there's something in you that knows. That's probably one of the best expressions

of the universe's kindness. So she felt this longing to have kind of the divine mother wrapped around her and she conjured it up and she kept saying just this much and then she started feeling just this energy around me

just feeling held just feeling held and she really let herself dissolve into being held in that way in that just this much experience until it was almost like she said it was like

the soul that I am was holding the scared part of me and this is the shift in identity that's possible when we respond to stress versus stay in the trance of thinking. That her shift was from this scared person that was alone

that was waiting for a diagnosis, that the worst thing in her life could happen, to just as much, to feeling the kindness. Sometimes I describe it as putting your hand on your heart and just sending the message, as one teacher put it. This is a Hawaiian healer. He said, say, I'm sorry. And then you say, I love you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry as I care. And I love you.

I'm holding this life. And that was what the divine mother was like for her. It was that kindness. So the key to responding to stress in a way that can free us is this presence, instead of controlling, instead of thinking, this presence that says just this much, just be right here and does it with kindness. That's the entirety of the Dharma in terms of practice. To move from controlling to a caring presence. And the first step, notice that you're

caught and pause. And I want to end, last part of this, is to talk about the gift of soul retrieval. Because for this woman, as I described it, by just staying, being with the fear and the grief and sensing it being held kind, Finally, the gift was she felt her soul again.

And it was almost like she could deal with what would happen because she was in touch with her soul. She ended up, her result was negative and she's okay. But that's really not the point because if it was positive, it's like someday it will be positive. Someday we will lose these bodies. Can we have a way to come home to this soul presence that's big enough for any loss, that's big enough to keep on living and celebrating the moments and not be stealing against the future.

The single greatest tragedy of our habitual stress reaction is it deprives us of our moments. If we're spending our moments stealing against what's going to go wrong, figuring out the future on our way to something, postponing our love and our spirit, we've missed out on our life. And when we're honest, we can see that we spend a lot of our time in that stress response. So the gifts is this retrieval, as with this woman, is that when we stop trying to control and get very present, there's a tenderness that arises. And that's the flavor of love or compassion. That's an intrinsic expression of our soul. When we stop controlling, stop being so busy, that heart killing, our heart reopens.

When we stop things so busy controlling, as Emerson put at the soul of the whole, this deep wisdom of the universe moves through us. There's a natural intelligence we contact. And that intelligence guides us on how to act. I mentioned here that in the Zen teachings, the whole Zen Dharma is described as to be able to respond appropriately

to any situation. Now what that means is not to be in our reactive trance but to be coming from a depth of presence. And then if somebody needs help, we naturally respond by helping. If our countries in the middle of an election and we have strong feelings,

we naturally go out and register voters and speak our truth and do what we feels right. That is being aligned with our heart. It's to respond appropriate. not in a reactive way. The world is out of control. The only place we have control, when we're in a stress reaction,

we're trying to control it, it's out of control. The only place that we have control is this choice to come into presence, to reconnect with our soul. That's the only choice. There's a, see if I can find it, I think I brought it. Do you ever get that strange feeling of Vujaday? Not deja vu, Vosier de.

It's a distinct sense that somehow something just happened that's never happened before. Nothing seems familiar, and then all of a sudden the feeling's gone. Vujaday. So there's this sense with soul retrieval of this kind of mystery. that we open into. When you stop controlling your moments, it gets very mysterious and alive.

You'll find that there's not any sense of certainty about what's going on. That stuff falls away. You just don't know. In fact, don't know mind predominates. It's very mysterious. In fact, if you come upon somebody that acts like they know where they're going

and what they're doing it, well, life's all about, you kind of, you kind of, How could they? Because we don't know. So it's a mystery. So I want to share a story that's really affected me in this way. Oh my God, David, no, cried Linda, when she saw the bright lights headed straight for their car.

As a squeal of tires struggling to grip the road became one with her own shriek of helpless terror, she knew she had lost her husband forever. moments before the car came crashing through their windshield, the couple had argued over something silly and had been sitting in resentful silence. They had had these little scuffles before, but unlike all their previous skirmishes, this time there would be no opportunity to apologize and reconfirm their love. Three years after the accident, Glenda sat with me in a dimly lit hospital chapel. At her request, I had arranged a meeting between her and the young man whose life had been saved by the gift, of her husband's heart. The heart recipient and his mother were almost a half hour late for the

meeting and I was ready to suggest to Glenda that we leave. The issue of recipients meeting donor families is a very sensitive one and I understood why the man may have changed his mind. As I stood and shook Linda's hand, she said quietly, no, we have to wait. He's here in the hospital. I felt him arrive about 30 minutes ago. I felt my husband's presence. Please wait with me. Glenda is a practicing family physician. She is well-versed in bioscience and as I do admires the rigor and healthy skepticism of modern science. Now, however, the power of something that transcends what science calls common sense was tugging at her heart. David's heart is here, she added. I can't believe I'm saying that to you, but I feel it. His recipient is here in this

hospital. At that moment, the door opened and the young man and his mother walked hurriedly down the center aisle of the chapel. sorry we're late said the young man with a heavy Spanish accent we got here a half hour ago but we couldn't find the chapel after introductions and awkward attempts at humor about a heart-to-heart meeting between the young wife and her husband's heart the usually shy glinda burts blurted out this embarrasses me as much as it must embarrass you

but can I put a hand on your chest and feel his I mean your heart the young man looked at me and then his mother put his hand to his chest and finally nodded his head. As Glenda reached forward, he unbuttoned his shirt, took her hand and gently placed it against his naked chest. What happened next transcends our current view of brain, body, heart, and mind. Glenda's hand began to tremble and tears rolled down her cheek. She closed her eyes and whispered, I love you, David. Everything is copacetic. She removed her hand, hug the young man to her chest, and all of us wiped tears from her eyes.

Glendon the young man sat down and silhouetted against the stained glass window of the chapel held hands in silence. Speaking in her heavy Spanish accent, the young man's mother told me, my son uses that word copacetic all the time now. He never used it before he got his new heart, but after a surgery it was the first thing he said to me when he could talk. I didn't know what it means. He said everything was copacetic. It's not a word I know in Spanish.

Glenda overheard us her eyes widened. she turned toward us and said, that word was our signal that everything's okay. Every time we argued and made up, we both would say everything is copacetic. Our discussion about the magic word that seemed to reveal a code of the heart within him stimulated the young man to share story after story

of changes he experienced following his transplant. Described by his mother as a former vegetarian and very health conscious, he said he now crazed meat and fatty foods. A former lover of heavy metal music, He said he now loves 50s rock and roll. He reported recurrent dreams of bright lights coming straight for him. Glenda responded almost matter-of-factly that her husband, Love Meat, had played in a Motown rock and roll band while in medical school

and that she too dreams of the lights of that fateful night. So I share this story because our lives are out of control. You know, it's just not, there's not a self that can control it any more than the thoughts in our mind or the things that happen. And if we're willing to pause and step out of that effort to always try to make things be a certain way, we touch into a very vast mystery. There's a connectedness in this universe that we can't begin to touch our sense until we're willing to step out of our habitual ways of figuring out things or blaming

or controlling, and get quiet and listen, get quiet and just sense what's right here. The poet Gary Snyder says this, about this heerness, is coming into our senses and through our senses into the beauty that's here. Snow melt pond, warm granite, we make camp, no thought of finding more, and nap and leave our minds to the wind. On the bedrock gently tilting, sky and stone, teach me to be tender. The touch that nearly misses, brush of glances, tiny steps that finally covers worlds of hard terrain, cloud wisps and mists gathered into slate blue bolts of summer rain, tea together in the purple starry eve. New moon soon

to set, why does it take so long to learn to love, we laugh and grieve? Our path here, and this is called the perennial path, it's not one that's specific to Buddhism, it's really one to sacred presence, is really learning to pause, learning to step out of the habitual cocoon of thoughts, learning to awaken, the life. The sense is right here with a really profound kindness. And in that kindness, it comes alive as a mystery. It comes alive as the soul expresses its love. And there's a deep wisdom that holds this life. Soul retrieval. We retrieve our souls. Let me ask you just, we'll just close taking another pause. And if you'd like to sense as we close

some place in your life that you'd like to feel more intentional about waking up in, that's fine. If there's some place where you feel the stress grips you, and you'd like that to be more of a Dharma doorway into this presence, this mystery. Just even to name that in your mind, just the intention will help you to be more awake and of that situation and the stress of that situation is something you actually can sense into right now. Let this be a time of just pausing and feeling what's here with your senses awake. If it helps to put your own hand on your heart and just offer that kind of kind presence so you're sending a message to any part of you that's stressed

that your intention is presence. Your intention is to awaken. Your intention is to reconnect with your soul and hold this life, these situations, with an awake and kind heart. This presence that frees us is really the essence of what we are, and that's what connects us. It's the essence of all beings, this loving presence. So we'll close the way we opened with the sound current of own,

just relaxing and letting the sound express your heart, letting the sound connect you with the soul of the whole. We'll chant again three times. Please inhale deeply. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you would like to contact the Insight Meditation Community of Washington to make a donation or to learn more about our programs, please visit our website at www.imcw.org.

Thank you.