Tara Brach - Stepping Out of the Cave

Episode Date: January 16, 2013

2013-01-16 - Stepping Out of the Cave - If we are suffering it is because we are believing something that is not true. This talk explores the genesis of our core beliefs and the investigation, mindfulness and compassion that can release their grip. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

Last year, several times, I mentioned what I had read from one palliative caregiver who described the most prevalent regret of people when they were dying. And it was, I wasn't true to myself. I didn't live my life true to myself. I lived more for the expectation of others, according to the expectation of others. and related was, I worked too hard, or I didn't spend time with loved ones, or I just didn't allow myself to be happy. So I was reflecting on that and realizing that in a way many people I run into live with

that undercurrent of feeling kind of disappointed or that my life is really not aligned with what matters. and very acutely aware of the gap and that in some way there's a sense that perhaps the most critical inquiry we can ever really make is what right now is between me and living really aligned with what matters what is stopping me

and what I'd like to explore tonight is the way we have beliefs that are often outside our consciousness that get in the way from really allowing ourselves to feel at home with our own life, feel at home with other people, really enjoy the moments. So I want to explore beliefs tonight. I remember one of one friend of mine's wake up that was so pronounced about the kind of beliefs we have. with when she was with her mom as she was dying and her mom was in a coma for a lot of the time. But at one point she woke up and she looked my friend directly in the eye and she said, you know, all my life I thought something was wrong with me. And then she

closed her eyes, went back into a coma and died soon after. And for this woman who was accompanying her mom, it was in a way a part of her, and gift because she was, it was so obvious that that undercurrent, that what I call the trance of unworthiness really had her whole mother's life, you know, in a grip. And how that happens to different degrees to most of us, that we have beliefs that often reflect badly on ourselves and that we go through life in some way living. a smaller life than we needed to, and that's the feeling of disappointment or depression or tragedy that comes with it, that we were caught in believing something about ourselves

that kept us small. So as I talk about this, I'm really drawing from in true refuge in the book, the middle section, one of the middle sections is called the gateway of truth. And for those of you that are listening but are not here, the book will be coming out very, very soon. I think it is the 22nd. You can get it now. You can order it now. And I've been doing in the last few talks and I'll be continuing to do over this next month is take pieces that I think are really important for our day-to-day reflection. And the gateway of truth is really the reflection on what are we believing, what are we thinking, that keeps us in a virtual reality

and prevents us from discovering the truth of who we are. So beliefs. And as many of us know cognitively, our life is shaped by them. In the moment that you're believing something, one of the core beliefs, the biochemistry of your body is in a particular kind of composition.

And so if you're, for instance, anticipating being hurt, or rejected or anticipating failure, fight-flight is activated. We are in a kind of clench physically and the physiology of it creates a whole particular swirl of thoughts that then lead us to certain actions and as Gandhi says that create our character, our character creates our destiny. So if we have these certain cluster of core beliefs that most of us do, many of them are fear-based, they're constantly generating the thoughts and the actions that keep our patterns, our life patterns, the ones that we know we get stuck in, that keep them

fueled. So just to take a moment and say, well how are these core beliefs formed? And really the groundwork is we can describe in a more existential way. It's our perception of separation, that all beings, all of creation, we incarnate, and we are designed to perceive that the material inside this kind of membrane or skin or whatever is me, and the rest of the world is out there, other. So there's a sense of separation and with that comes in our body a sense of fear and some kind of understanding that around the corner something bad. that could happen because in fact to the separate self, mortality, we die, we lose a lot, we age, we get sick, we're mortal. So there's a sense of that and a sense of incompletion.

And then through our life experience as humans because we have this thinking apparatus, those that perception of separation and danger and incompleteness becomes hitched to self. I am separate, something's wrong with me. things out there could hurt me. I need stuff out there to make me feel better. The whole world of thoughts and beliefs evolves. Now we have a evolutionary negative bias to our beliefs. In other words, it helped their survival early on to be much more rigged to remember bad events and make conclusions about bad events than to focus on the positive and be grateful

because if we remembered bad events, we would organize ourselves to avoid them from happening again. So that's the evolutionary negative bias. So the sense of separation, we kind of, we look for things that could pose a danger. If we grew up in our individual lives, our personal history, in families where there's a lot of mature loving, where parents created an atmosphere, a kind of container, where there's a sense of belonging. You don't have to jump through too many hoops. There's not a lot of conditions and judgments. When there's good mirroring, so parents in some way can mirror back, you know,

to the little being there, your basic goodness and sense the sacred that shines through. and in that way really create a sense of belonging, that can provide a counterpoint and enough trust so that our beliefs aren't in a very core way, have that whole gravitational field if something's wrong. Okay, so in our personal environments, when there's enough of that unconditional love and safety, it balances out so that the negative bias does not.

not really grab us so much. But if, as for many of us, because of the kind of culture we're in and it's not our parents' fault, it goes back generation to generation, the fears get passed along, then there's what I sometimes think of as severed belonging, that rather than feeling safe and naturally a part of our family and our larger tribe, there's a sense of really being on our own, of needing to be in some way different and better if we're going to be approved of and if we're going to really be accepted and loved. So most of us grow up with the messages of how you are is not enough, sometimes how you are is bad, and you need to be meeting this standard, this standard and this standard

in order to be okay. So we have these beliefs of not okayness, that something is wrong with me. So if we wanted to take a look at how, you know, it happens in an individual family, if you imagine that you're a child trying to get your mother's attention, and you want her to look at a drawing or you want her to get you a drink, or you, and somebody want her to play a game with you. And at times she responds just fine to your needs, but at other times she explodes in anger at being disturbed.

She might be working a second job, she might have four other kids, whatever it is, but she explodes in anger. And she yells at you to leave her alone, she threatens to spank you. What happens? What do you remember? If you go through the years, you might find that your brain has registered anger and rejection, unpredictability, fear, hurt. So these encoded memories become constant. delated beliefs that about what you can expect from others. I'm too needy.

As soon as others pick up that I'm too needy they're going to put up a wall. People won't love me. If I bother someone I'll get punished. Nobody really wants to spend time with me. It's pervasive that because our parents and their parents before them grew up in a fear-based culture that these kind of messages come through and we make up our beliefs out of them. I want to say you cannot underestimate the impact of the cultural context. You know, the culture sets down rules, kind of a consensual reality of how we should be,

and because we want belonging, we get very hooked on the culture's standards. So there's a lot of pressure to conform. And this is to perform, you know, conform even when the rules or the standards are bad or insane. I mean, just think of fashion and how wacky it gets, and yet something in us buys in, you know. So somebody sent me this. This is some rules that people ran into traveling in a Bangkok temple. It is forbidden to enter a woman, even if a foreigner, if dressed as a man. This is the rule.

Who knows? In a cocktail lounge in Norway, ladies are requested not to have children. in the bar. In a cemetery, persons are prohibited from picking flowers from any but their own graves. This is from Tokyo. Guests are requested not to smoke or do other disgusting behaviors in bed. A sign posted in Germany's Black Forest. It's strictly forbidden on our Black Forest camping site that people of different sex, for instance men and women, live together in 110 unless they're married with each other for this purpose. Anyway, the rules from different cultures.

So, you know, I'm talking about rules and their effect, but when we think of some of the standards and rules that directly impact certain groups of people and how the impact is one of then feeling inferior, one of feeling shamed, then it becomes something that we start really registering as well. The effect of the culture is huge. Prohibiting marriage between homosexual people. The effect of that. What's the message? The judicial sentencing which targets African Americans.

What's the effect of that? How we set forth these standards on intelligence. What it means to be intelligence? So kids go to school and only a certain percentage of kids have the kind of intelligence that this society says, oh yeah, that's the way. You know, left brain analytic thing rather than honoring intuitive, honoring artistic, so many different kinds of intelligences. What's the message? A huge percentage of kids move through school feeling, I am not intelligent. I don't meet the grade. Then we have the insanity of how we think body should be and appearances should be so that most women don't fit the standard body and feel like they're off. How many men fit the muscled body that's portrayed? We have this whole

hierarchy of beliefs about worthiness and in terms of groups it puts, you know, white European men on top, women a tad below and then everybody else below. What's the message of our society? So we compare ourselves against the standards that we got from our parents that we get from the society and hugely from our peers which are of course set down from the culture.

I spent several years going to school in East Orange, New Jersey. I went to junior high school there, public school. And it was a very tough school. In fact, in my class I was one of maybe five Caucasians in a class of 40 or something like that. And it was very uncool to do schoolwork, really uncool.

I had to pretend that I was totally interested in academia to have any sense that I was part of things. And you never talked about grades, I mean, because that just wasn't where it was at. Well, how come? I mean, because the mainstream culture had all these beliefs basically sent the message that they didn't expect these kids to do it. well. A coach at Texas A&M, he says, he recounts what happened when he was talking to

a player who received four Fs and one D. Son, looks to be like they're spending too much time on one subject. And then we're shaved very much by religions and about the beliefs of religions. are kids giving their response to questions about Bible knowledge. The seventh commandment is thou shall not admit adultery. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption.

I'll just read a few of them. The Jews had trouble throughout their history with unsympathetic genitals. One more, one more. And a Christian should have only one wife. This is called monotony. I remember once seeing this cartoon of this dejected monk, I mean, he was really having a hard time. He was slumped over a table with this dim candle.

And there's this huge long scroll of paper. And he was writing one phrase over and over and over. And it was, celibacy is not so bad. Celibacy is not so bad. So in a way, I'm being playful. But there is so much shame and pain. and violence around sexuality, where does that come from? Where does this natural activity that is the source of life and pleasure,

so much pleasure? How does it turn to be so shamed and so contorted as to create so much violence in the culture? Again, we're coming to beliefs to how we live with these ideas of how we should be rights and wrongs, goods and bads, from parents, from the culture, and we come to these conclusions that end up making our life small. So the inquiry for us is, can we begin to notice when we're having a hard time, when we're suffering, what am I believing? To just start

asking yourself that, that one question, when you're having a hard time, to pause and say, what am I believing right now? And you'll find that if you're suffering, you're believing something that's not true, but you won't find that out right away because it'll feel true. So the process is to discover what we're believing and then bring a very dedicated, mindful presence to that belief, because you can begin to unpack beliefs. You can find out that they're real but not true. and release their power. Real because they're there.

They're moving through our brain and they're creating biochemistry and they feel real, but not true when we really begin to shine the light of awareness on them. So this is the remainder of this exploration, as you know with other classes, we'll do a little practice together on it, which is really to start looking at the beliefs that keep us small, asking really, is this true? What really matters? Am I aligned? Am I living according to a belief that doesn't need to control me about how I should be, how the world should be? And what does it really mean to step out of that belief?

Okay, a poem for you. This is called From Out the Cave. is written by Joyce Stutfen. When you've been at war with yourself for so many years that you have forgotten why, when you've been driving for hours and only began, gradually began to realize that you've lost the way, when it's been centuries since you watched the sunset or the rainfall and the clouds drifting overhead, when in the midst of these everyday nightmares you understand that you could wake up you could turn and go back to the last thing you remember doing with your whole heart.

Then you wake, you stumble from your cave blinking in the sun, naming every shadow as it slips. So the shadows are the limiting beliefs, the beliefs that keep us identified in an insecure egoic self. And as we start even getting that, wow, I've been living inside of our own, trance that's kept me small. We start stepping out of the cave, we start looking and we start seeing the shadows but letting them slip. We're no longer living in them. They're no longer controlling us. Okay, so we'll do a brief reflection together, okay? So we'll close your eyes. As we do, let the pause be one of a kind of invitation to reconnect with your body and breath. And with a...

interested and curious mind to sense perhaps situations where fear or self-doubt are really arising in your life right now. So you can just choose someplace in your life where fear or anxiety, self-doubt are emerging might be another form of suffering, anger, jealousy. So some situation where you feel you're in the grip, where you get caught, where you get hooked, where you get reactive, and see if you can bring it close in enough so that you can actually feel, you know, what it is you're upset about, what you're afraid's going to happen, what's wrong, and feel it as much in your body as possible. So you can actually now look through the eyes of that part of you that's distressed, upset, afraid.

jealous, angry. Look through the eyes of that part of you and just sense its view of you in life. What's it afraid's going to happen? What's its beliefs? What is that place in you believing? Is it that you'll fail or you can't handle what's around the corner? It's going to be too much? Is it that you're not lovable, that you're in some way flawed, that you'll never be close to anyone or intimate? What is that place that's distressed believing about you and your life? Is it believing you should be different than you are? Just seeing is the beginning of freeing, just beginning to recognize, okay, there is a belief

there and perhaps letting there be that possibility that this belief is real, but not necessarily true, just letting that be a possibility. If it's a very core belief, a very deep one, it needs a full investigating presence and we're going to revisit and the invitation will be for you to revisit more and more. But for now just to honor that okay there's a place inside that has a strong belief, the challenge of that and the possibility of unpacking, unwinding, and freeing. Okay, taking a few full breaths, coming back. There are two related processes or trainings in mindfulness that help us to release the grip of fear-based thoughts. The one is

what we do with our meditation practice regularly, which is to learn to step out of thinking, just to get the knack of, oh, okay, thinking, come back. Because if you can do that, you you can begin to sense, oh, these are thoughts. There is a present reality right here that's bigger than and more immediate than and prior to the representations in my mind. So you begin to get the knack of distinguishing between thoughts and this living reality. But that's key. That is step number one. I'll just spend a little more time talking about that before we go into the place where we start really investigating. Step number one means that you know how to say, okay, thinking, thinking, just be right here. And there are many, many pieces

to it. One example is today for me, I have a real paranoia about getting lost when I'm, and I inherited it from my mother and I don't know where my mother inherited it from, but But there's a, when I have to go somewhere and I haven't been there before, I start building up. And so today I had, it was a wonderful invitation to teach a guided meditation on Capitol Hill to a bunch of staffers there. This is with Congressman Tim Ryan. But the challenge is parking around there and getting to where I was going. So rather than saying, oh, how cool, this is really fun, this is going to, you know, this

could really help the ripple of meditation. my mind kept going back to how am I going to find my way my GPS is not going to work itself in those winding streets right around the capital and my mind would go forward to and I'm going to be late and then I'm going to let

you know you understand where it went so I kept saying okay come back to the breath come back to the breath or come back be right here be right here and it wasn't working because I kept kind of trying to yank my attention back so finally I started doing this thing where every

time I'd have thoughts about finding the parking. And they ended up reserving me a place and making it very easy for me, by the way. But I didn't know that right away. So every time I would come up, I would say, thank you very much. I know there's fear here. I was kind thank you. And then there was a little more space. And it wasn't like I came fully back to right here, but there's just a little more space

in ease and a little more humor. I remembered this poem and I want to share it with you. This is by Kaviri Patel and it's called Thanking a Monkey. There's a monkey in my mind, swinging on a trapeze, reaching back to the past or leaning into the future, never standing still. Sometimes I want to kill that monkey, shoot it square between the eyes so I won't have to think anymore or feel the pain of worry. But today I thanked her and she jumped down straight into my lap, trapeze, still swinging as we sat still. So working with thoughts, if we're making them an enemy, we'll have an enemy for the rest

of our lives. Just a natural part of what comes up. The way to wake up and step out of the thoughts is not to make it this project to vanquish thoughts but rather just to notice, just notice and in the noticing get curious, okay, what's actually happening right here? Or you can get friendly and say thank you very very. much but not right now. But not to create attention because the tension actually just generates more thoughts. So this is one of the skills we need. If we're going to wake

up out of the beliefs that hook us, we have to even notice that the thought forms are there so we can just get a little more space and say, okay, this is a heavy one, this is one of those core beliefs that gets me. Part two. That when we're working with the more intense ones, what we find is that just naming them, if we say, oh, fear belief about being fundamentally flawed, they don't just dissolve. You know, that in some with some thoughts as soon as you name a thought, oh, planning again, you can kind of come back. Not with the heavy ones. So what helps to, what helps to loosen the grip around them? Sometimes there's grace and life in some way reveals something that directly helps to unravel

a belief. Often it's that somebody loves us in a way that we begin to trust that love and some deep sense of severed belonging and I can never trust anyone gets countered. That doesn't always happen because we have a lot of resistance to letting the love in. But this is the way Rachel Naomi Remen put it. She said, one moment of unconditional love may call into question a lifetime of feeling unworthy and invalidate it. Sometimes in our living and our willingness to take a chance with each other,

we get that mirroring and we get that presence that begins to unravel the beliefs. Anytime we're willing to stay in a more intimate, engagement and we're with others that are willing to stay, we begin to help to dissolve the trance of separation and the beliefs around it. And that's the power of Sangha, our spiritual community and conscious relationships. And I was thinking as I was reflecting on this of this camp that was set up by a group called Building Bridges for Peace. And this this is included in True Refuge because they had this beautiful, these gatherings for Israeli teens and Palestinian teens, all girls in this case.

And they would just be with each other for two or three weeks. And at first their beliefs were that this is my enemy. And they were beliefs that came with a lot of hatred and a lot of anger that had a very immediate background of violence. So these are beliefs that are really strong. You are my enemy. But after three weeks that wasn't the case. The beliefs got undone

because they experienced something real that countered the beliefs. This is the way one of the teens put it. She said, you know, before I came, you were my enemy. She said, but if I look in your eyes, I can't hate.

you. So we undo beliefs by having the courage to be in relationship and find out really who we are in relationship. The core beliefs that we practice with internally, this is where I want to go, the way we dissolve the veil of them, require a really committed attention. And this is where the work internally has a lot of bravery to it, because there's many layers that are involved. Srinor Sargadatta, one of a really great non-dual teacher, said, illusion exists because it's not investigated. So let's look at how we examine our beliefs, because this is the last piece that I really want to explore with you here.

And I think what I'd like to do is share with you a story of how one person I worked with did it that used the basic strategies of mindful investigation. and this was a man who had came in, he had been priming himself with alcohol and cocaine to get through all the meetings and social gatherings that were part of his work. He was a lobbyist. But when he came to see me, the president of the Trade Association and his wife both said, if you don't stop, if you don't go to a 12-step program, you're out of the marriage and out of the job. So he came to me in quite a state because he was really angry about feeling others were controlling him.

He was rebellious, but mostly he was afraid. He was about to lose everything. Okay, so that's where he came from. So I did what I did with you. I had him go into the situation and say, okay, where and what are you feeling in your body? And he felt fear and it was like knots in his stomach. Then I asked him just what I asked you. I said, if you could just go inside that place of fearful knots, what's the view of the

world from that place? In other words, what are you believing? And for him that place believed that he said, it believes I'm a failure and anyone that finds out how weak I am won't respect me or like me. And he, you know, in time we could look at and see where did that come from. Well, he had been bullied in shame both by his alcoholic father and his older brother. He grew up outside of Buenos Aires. And he said, I wasn't like my brother, big and loud.

I like books and even as a kid and I didn't like to fight. So in front of his whole neighborhood, his father would call me a nina, a girl. It was the worst when he was drinking. So anyway, then he built up a persona. He built his muscles and he pretended to be tough and he used drugs and alcohol to help him feel more protected, more safe. So that was the setup.

And that's what he found out about the beliefs that he had. So then we came into a more active inquiry about them. And I asked him to pay attention again, go into his body. And I asked him how it felt to believe what he believed, that he was unworthy. This is the next step. You sense, okay, so what am I believing? And then, well, what's it like to believe that? What's it like to believe I'm flawed?

or that around the corner it's going to be too much, or that no one will love me, or that I'll never have intimacy. What's it like to believe that? And then you start tapping into really the layers that are there. For him, I'm ashamed, I feel totally alone. And that shame and loneliness feels very old. So he started tapping into the feelings underneath the belief. And then at the bottom there was a deep hollowness.

He said, it's like I've been building my abs for years to cover this one. hole. So as he spoke he was kind of making circles right around his belly that it's huge. It's this black hole that's pulled in my heart and everything else. So I had them then as we do with the meditation practice just bring a gentle presence to that, to feeling that hole, to feeling the ache, the hollowness. And I said, let it be as large as it really is and just stay present. So again, this is not a complicated thing on one level. He's just staying with what comes up. Here's the belief, here's the feelings under it, stay with it, stay with it. And as he stayed with it, he could sense how

it effect, how this unworthiness it affected every relationship in his life. It stopped him from being close to anyone. And so I just had him breathe with that intensity and in staying with it and this is to me the blessing. of mindfulness and just staying with the feeling of the hollowness and the ache and the shame and breathing and offering presence, he started sensing more space around it. He started sensing that who he was was the space of awareness that was observing and feeling what was there. His identity started shifting.

He just stayed with it for a number of minutes and when he, opened his eyes, there was more brightness in it. He said the pain was there, it spread and it spread but then it started dissolving and now it's gone. That doesn't mean it didn't come back but for those moments of mindfulness he really sends some space. Then I asked another question and this is one just to, if you really begin to pose this question to yourself, it's very powerful. What would it be like to live without this belief? What would your life be like? This is what I asked him.

What would it be like to live without the belief that you're weak and unworthy? Because we can get a glimmer. There's some wisdom that can sense the freedom outside of it. You know, I asked him, who would you be if you didn't believe this? It's a deep question, that's a powerful one. Who would you be if you didn't believe you were unworthy? Or you didn't believe that life was too much to handle? handle around the corner or you didn't believe that you'd never be intimate with anyone.

Who would you be? His response, I don't know who I would be, he said, but he said, but somehow not knowing feels good like all of a sudden there's space and I'm more alive. And then I said, what's clear is if I didn't believe I was unworthy, I could relax here, he gestured towards his heart, and he said, and then I could trust that Marcella, that's his wife really does care. I could trust enough to tell her the truth. that I love her. Now I want to pause here. Our beliefs stop us from expressing love.

We're afraid. They stop us from letting love in. We're afraid. So what he was saying is that as he started to explore it, if I didn't believe in that, I could actually express the truth of who I am. And I come back to what that palliative caregiver said, that we spent so many days of our life, not living true to ourselves, living according to the expectations that others have of us and the internalized expectations, which is I can't afford to be vulnerable and loving because I might be rejected or I might get suffocated, I might not be be able to handle the beliefs. So I wanted to share this with you because it's, you know, in its details because it's to me a beautiful example.

of real but not true. That for this man he started finding over and over again as he investigated that he really believed he was unworthy but the more that he brought his presence to it the more he could find a place of compassion and presence and the you know he went back you know he continued work he went to 12-step program. He this when he came back a month later I want to share this with you because it was so interesting. He said, when the urge to have a drink resurfaced, he said, I have a way of dealing with it that is pretty powerful. He said, I heard a prayer at our 12-step meeting that another man uses and it's perfect for my life. Not my will,

but my heart's will. Not my will. My will being all the ways that our ego and our beliefs kind of drive us down certain tracks, not my will, but my heart's well. That which is larger and deeper, that's really the divine in us that's guiding us. Not my will, but my heart's well. My will is compelling and familiar. The way we move through the day, the decisions we make, what I sometimes call the controller, the ego's executive director, you know, the controller is making decisions based on old and fear-based beliefs of how others are going to respond to us. We don't take a chance.

We're not free to be creative or spontaneous. My will is very familiar, compelling and somewhat safe. My heart's well is scary. We're not sure who we are when we're just going with what really matters. We had a group on Monday, the Monday monthly satsung, and one person just said it, said it so beautifully. It's just, like, if I went ahead and let in love or express myself, I just wouldn't, I wouldn't really know how to behave.

I wouldn't know who I was anymore. It puts us in this completely uncharted territory when instead of doing life according to our habitual expectations and others' expectations and the old fear-based beliefs, we asked that question, well, what if I didn't believe that anymore? This world opens up and it can be a little jarring, scary, and fundamentally filled with mystery and possibility. Okay, last piece. I've been talking about some of the deep beliefs that are very personal and difficult,

but I also want to name some of the pervasive beliefs, especially in our contemporary culture that keep us from living true to ourselves. And these are more in the genre of there's not enough time. How many of you have that belief in the background as you move through the day? There's not enough time. Okay. I'm not there yet. I'm on my way somewhere else.

This isn't the moment that matters so I can't really stop and hang out here. Is that feel familiar? That tumbling into the future? I need to do more, be more, have more, something's missing, there's a problem to solve. I'm just giving you a feeling of the... So we speed along the surface on our way somewhere else because we have these beliefs that we're not there and we have to do more and we're not having enough time to do it in.

And what happens when we're speeding along the surface? This is the trance. This is when we're still in that cave, that virtual reality and not really living and breathing in the daylight. I want to remind you of a wonderful article that every time I reflect on this, it actually is valuable to me to wake up. So here we are 2007, cold January morning, right here in Washington, D.C., in a metro station. And there's about 2,000 people that are going through the station. And after about three minutes, a middle-aged man noticed there's a musician playing. He slows down a pace, stops for a few seconds, and then he hurries to meet his schedule.

And it goes on like this. Four minutes later, the violinist received his first dollar woman through the money and as she was racing on. Six minutes later, a young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again. Ten minutes later, a three-year-old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kids stopped to look at the violinist again, but again the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. Every time parents, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly. Forty-five minutes. Well, this goes on and on, an hour. He finished playing, silence took over, no one noticed, no one applauded, nor was there any recognition. So the violinist

was Joshua Bell. I know many of you know this story, one of the greatest musicians in the world, He played one of the most intricate pieces ever ridden with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bill had sold at a theater in Boston where the average seats were $100 each. Okay, true story. This happened in the Metro. And it was organized by the Washington Post. It was part of a social experiment about perception and people's priorities. So it raised this question if you have a common place environment, is it possible to perceive beauty? Is there possible to live the moments

when we think we're on our way somewhere? And how often are we on our way somewhere else? To getting a project done, to crossing something off our lists, to getting to the vacation or the meal or whatever? How many moments are not really lived? This is the post- at Hafece, he says, what is the difference between your experience of existence and that of a saint? The saint knows that the spiritual path is a sublime chess game with God and that the beloved has just made such a fantastic move that the saint is now continually tripping over joy and bursting out in laughter and saying, I surrender. Whereas, my dear, I'm afraid you still think you have a thousand serious moves.

So we're going to end with a reflection and just to say that tonight is really how do we take refuge in truth? How do we see past the veil of limiting beliefs? As the poem says, you wake, you stumble from your cave, blinking in the sun, naming every shadow as it slips, how do we investigate these beliefs that keep us in the cave? So as you set yourself for this final little reflex, reflection, just close your eyes and take a moment again to feel yourself right here, wherever you are in this room on this Wednesday night here or as you're listening to a podcast or in this country and another country, just discover heerness with your breath,

this moment and feel what you might call your love for truth, that in you which is committed to knowing what's real and true and living from your truth. You might again sense a situation where you get caught in the difficult emotions. Let it be close up to you right now, let the situation be real. You can sense the worst part of it. Maybe what you're afraid is going to happen. what you don't trust, what's wrong.

And with a gentleness and a dedication to truth, just ask yourself, what am I believing? Again, since what you've been concluding about yourself, about what's possible, how have you limited possibility? What are you believing that you should be doing different or somebody else should be doing different? What are you believing that's creating fear, hurt? You might just ask yourself, is it true? Is it really true? And sense if there's at least an opening to the possibility that there's a larger truth.

You might ask yourself, what's the effect of believing this? How does believing this affect my body? Again, this is something you can continue to investigate on your own. But just to touch into that. What do you, when you're believing this, what's your body feel like? And if you've been believing this for a long time, how has it affected your relationships in your life, your work, your capacity to enjoy the moment? And if you can sense how much this belief has squeezed your life, taken life moments,

you might sense a natural compassion, just a sadness. Sadness is when the heart starts getting moist. You might just offer presence to that. and with some openness and interest, to ask yourself, what would my life be like without this belief? Who would I be without this belief? Those are two different but related questions.

Just to get a glimmer, what would my life be if I didn't believe this? How would my day be? My way of being with others. Can you get a little bit of a sense of the freedom and possibility? Who would I be? Would we know who we are?

Closing with the words of Rumi, I am water, I'm the thorn that catches someone's clothing. There's nothing to believe. Only when I quit believing in myself did I come into this beauty. Day and night I guarded the pearl

of my soul. Now in this ocean of pearl and currents, I've lost track of which was mine. Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul. Now, in this ocean of pearl and currents, I've lost track of which was mine. Namaste and 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 Mediard. Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.