Tara Brach - Stepping Out of Time

Episode Date: May 18, 2011

2011-05-18 - Stepping Out of Time - We spend much of our life on our way somewhere else, driven by the sense that something is missing or wrong. This talk explores the suffering that arises from our addiction to busyness and "doing," and the healing, loving and wisdom that arise when we take refuge in presence. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

Maybe to begin, there's a cartoon strip called the Robotics Department. Some of you might follow. And in one of the cartoons, there's a female robot who's jumping up and down ecstatically. And she's going, I'm free, I'm free, free at last. I've overridden my manual button, you know. I found my manual override button. And I love that one because just imagine if you could. You could find your manual override button for, you know, when you get caught in certain obsessive thoughts or when you're about to binge or, you know, or when you're about to act in any way that you'll later regret, you know.

So I thought I would explore tonight one of the domains where having that manual override button, which is really mindfulness. I'm assuming you know. it feels really, really critical in terms of our healing and our freedom. And that is to begin to wake up out of our habits of busyness, of always busily racing into the future. So that's going to be our theme. I have mentioned here before that the syllable, the Chinese syllable that has the word busy correlates to very commonly is heart killing.

And there is something about our speed and our busyness and our toppling into the future, which really separates us from what we cherish. And we know that as a culture, and we can feel it in our culture. You can tell that, right? I mean, we're together on this? Yeah. So, and it's very personally alive for me. I'm, you know, I have all these different layers of demands,

and I find that when I get into the trance of my life's about getting things done, then I'm missing out on what I know is a very precious fleeting life. And I also know that everything I do, and I think this is true for all of us, if we create space and we pause, and we come home again, then whatever it is we're doing is going to come from more intelligence and kindness and clarity.

So this is Chogium Trunkba. I thought I'd read to you. He says, give yourself a break. That doesn't mean to say you have to drive off to the closest bar and have lots to drink or go to a movie. Just enjoy the day, your normal existence. Allow yourself to sit in your home

or take a drive. into the mountains, park your car somewhere, just sit, just be. It sounds very simplistic, but it has a lot of magic. You begin to pick up on clouds, sunshine, the weather, your past, your chatter with your grandmother and your grandfather and your own mother and your own father. You begin to pick up on a lot of things. Just let them pass like the chatter of a brook as it hits the rocks. We have to give ourselves some time to be. So this is very, very, much the teaching of the sacred pause. This is with the story of the Buddha that we explored in our last class. This is the very key feature of the kind of archetype of waking up by

sitting under the Bodhi tree and pausing. Just stopping. And why do we have to stop? Because we're in this trance of tumbling somewhere else, of leaving. So in the story of the Buddha, it's really an invitation to us to value coming into stillness. And it's not to say that doing an activity is bad. It's part of our nature to be generative, to be productive, to do things in order to survive. And we are completely engaged with that. And if we don't find the spaces to stop, we miss out on our lives. A brief vignette is that I was talking to my father-in-law, Jonathan's father, a few weeks ago, and Jonathan's mom died now about a month and a half ago. So I was asking him, you know, because he's spending a lot of time alone and not doing a whole lot.

So I said, you know, so how's it going for you? Are you lonely? Are you bored? And his response was really not so, you know, at my age, you don't need to be doing a whole lot. And then he went on and he said, I actually enjoy just being. Just being is enough. And I just savored the moment with him because, you know, you might say to ourselves, well, he's 86 and he doesn't have to do things and we do. But that's not the reality. I mean, can we say to ourselves, just being is enough? I mean, do we have the capacity to just sit

or just listen to the rain or just feel our breath or just listen to someone else and not be in doing mode? So this is really an exploration of, because we're swimming against the currents, how it is that we are so addicted what they call to being a human doing, right? And you can look at our evolution condition and and begin to understand that we do even when we don't have to do.

And it's because for most of humans exist in some planet Earth, for the large proportion of it, if we had decided to close our eyes and follow our breath and just reflect on a mantra, you know, pounce. You know, we would have been kibbles for something, for a cat of some sort. and not able to pass on our genes. So we were wired to be vigilant and to always be wary and to be always scanning our environment. I've shared that we wake up 10 times a night

and just to check out and make sure everything's okay and then fall back asleep again. And unless we have a sleeping disorder, we don't remember that. But there is, and we can detect this, a kind of background hum of apprehension in us. And what's it about? Something around the corner bad is going to happen.

That's the way our system's rigged. We have this default network in our brain that works like this. As soon as we no longer have an active task that we have to do, this default network produces thoughts about the future and the past just to keep us oriented in our storyline of self and what we might need to be paying attention to. It just keeps generating stuff. Have you noticed that?

Have you noticed the same as you just, you don't have something you have to do? It just keeps on popping this brain of ours. It's interesting when we do take time to be, as in when we meditate, what happens, or when we take time to just be, you know, have time off. And one of the things that Jonathan and I noticed is that when we say, okay,

we're going to take some time to ourselves and we're just going to take, you know, a few hours and do such and such, go for walks, whatever. There's always a sense of it being this little capsule and it's closed in a map of time that knows that we're then going to be on our way to something else.

And I want to draw your attention to what I call the map of time in our brain because it's very rare that you have moments that are outside this perception of being moving from the past and on your way to the future. It's very rare that we have what I think of as open-ended moments. And this is what he and I kind of reflect on.

Like, are we really having open-ended moments? Are we in some way on our way to the next thing? Is there some tension of trying to still think we're getting things done? it's not easy to step out of the map of time into that open-endedness where there's a sense that just this, this is it. We're waiting for something.

We're waiting for the next moment to contain what this moment does not. So we start exploring what happens when we try to let go and be right here and what we find is that we're very rigged to kind of bicycle away from the present moment and the more tension we have, the more we're leaving the present moment and we're on our way to the future in some way, or we're remembering the past

so we can kind of, you know, make sense of things. So we live in this chain of reactivity. And it takes shape in a few different ways. We leave physically. So when I say to you, are you fully in the center of now, are you fully here? One of the ways that we leave here, is we leave our bodies, right? We tense. We're tensing against the future, and we tense and we numb, and we go into our heads. That's one way that we move away.

We're chasing after something. We're pushing away. Emotionally, we leave, where we just start spinning in a kind of anxiety or restlessness. And then we leave mentally. That's the biggest way, where we really spend a lot of time

on our way to something else with our plans. and our worries. And it's really valuable. If you want to start stepping out of the map of time, this linear thing of I'm on my way somewhere else, if you're feeling anxiety to first just sense, well, what am I believing?

What am I believing right now that's keeping me racing and pressured and stopping me from being here? What am I believing? And I'll name a few things because they all fit into the rubric of we believe something's about to go wrong. We think something's going to go wrong

and that's what stops us from really inhabiting our moments. Now one way that it takes shape, one woman I was working with who's tremendously productive but also very driven and compulsively driven type A personality, she described it this way. She said, if I stop,

my fear is, and this is my belief, is that the world will keep going and it'll leave me behind. So I'll miss out. Now that's a feeling of being abandoned in some way, that life will abandon me. The world will spin without me. I found that in a lot of people, actually. That one's easy to relate to.

For others, there's a sense that I can't just be, I have to produce an interesting personality or a helpful persona or in some way just show other people something that'll keep them engaged because if I don't do something about myself, I'll get rejected. So that's just one to check out. Like if you're feeling exhausted after you attend a social engagement,

how much doing was there versus just spontaneous engagement and just being and listening and enjoying. How much doing? How much did you feel pushed to present something to be accepted? Okay, so that's another belief. I have to be different, be something to be okay. Another one is really very pervasive also is that I have to defend myself. I have to watch out because others will hurt me. They'll take advantage of me. And so especially if we've had a past of trauma,

it's not so easy to say, oh, just open into the center of now and just be. It's not necessarily that some great creature is going to pounce on us, but somebody will, some human will hurt us. One of the stories I share sometimes, because I think it's a great one, is it's my favorite airport story, where this woman is very frazzled, and she has to switch planes,

so she kind of gets a package of cookies and a cup of coffee and puts herself down at a table, and there's another man at the table, and she picks up her newspaper, and then she noticed some rustling and he's eating one of her cookies and she's really angry but she just doesn't know what to do about it so she just takes one of the cookies and she eats it more wrestling he's eating another one of her and and she still can't get herself to say anything so she eats a cookie and it keeps going she eats one he eats one and then finally

he takes the package and he breaks a cookie in half pushes one towards her eats his half He leaves. She goes up to, finally she's called to present her ticket at the desk. She goes up, reaches into her bag and finds her package of cookies. She was eating his. So we're very rigged to anticipate. Sometimes it's not that others are going to do something bad, but they're thinking bad things about us. And that's really common. And are they? Maybe, but not always. So we live in this map. of what's going to happen, that right around the corner something's going to go wrong. And it keeps our bodies and our emotions and our thoughts kind of agitated, are restless or anxious. It keeps us uptight. Now, there's another brand of it. It's not necessarily something's going to go wrong, but now is not enough and what I want is in the future.

And that's, that this are the two flip sides of craving and aversion. that now is not enough. So either we're thinking something's missing or something's wrong. Now on the now is not enough side of the equation, we have a young man who once asked God how long a million years was to him. And God responded, well, a million years to you is like just a second to me. And he said, oh, well, how much is a million dollars? And he goes, oh, a million dollars to you is like just a cent to me. And the man kind of got up his courage. you said, God, can I have one of your pennies? And God said, sure, just a second.

So this is in a bit, I'm just trying to kind of set forth this, the map that we're living in, the way we're kind of navigating, which has the basic beliefs and feelings that something's missing or something's wrong, and it keeps us in a chain of reactivity. And unless we can see it, And this is really the basic teaching that you find in the meditative traditions is see the pattern. If you can see it. If you can see how your mind is looping, if you can see how your body's tensing, if you can feel how your heart is squeezing.

In the moments of recognizing there's a chance to step out of that chain of reactivity and come home to a quality of presence and being that really is who we are. and has some freedom in it. There is a sense that and the reason we get motivated and this is I've run into so often people come to me and those that are maybe most despairing

have a sense of they're racing through their lives and they're skimming the surface and not really arriving like we're on our way somewhere else but really not living our lives. lives. We're always putting out fires. We're always defending, we're always proving, but are we here? And so there's a sense of, with this map of time, that there's this suffering of not only not

being here, but that our hearts aren't here, that our love is more of an abstract kind of loving, that we know we love our family and we know we love our friends or we know that love matters. But there's not that many moments where there's that sense of the heart as wide as the world that really resonates and sense that are belonging to each other, that tenderness and intimacy that we long for. Instead, there's a sense that we're kind of always on our way. There's a story I heard some years ago a woman described being with her son and she had a very good friend who knew she had cancer, knew she only had a year to live. And she had a child and knew that this was the only year she had with her child. And this, I'll just read it a little bit. She said,

when this woman was pregnant for the first time she found out she had cancer, she had cancer. answer. She gave birth nonetheless to a healthy baby girl, but as the months passed, she and all those dear to her knew that she wasn't going to win the battle. She was dying. During that first year of her baby's life, the only year she would have lived to experience, she had a constant refrain. I have no time to rush. I have no time to rush. I was thinking what a fantastic mantra that would be for pretty much everyone in our culture. No time to rush. Now, you might say, well,

you know, there are times that it really, there are deadlines and there's, you know, traffic jams that make me late for appointments and so on. And every one of us knows the squeeze of rushing, but there are so many moments that we have the perception of, I don't have enough time. I have to prepare for something.

and it's not real, it's a habit. And it's possible, and this is the gift of spiritual practice, it's possible to free up very large swaths of time that otherwise we could look back at the end of our lives and see that we were kind of in a prison. It was kind of, we were kind of nailed in with these ideas of, I'm on my way somewhere else, and there's not enough time.

And we didn't arrive. So this is RELCA. The sonnets called, this press of time, we set the pace, but this press of time, take it as a little thing next to what endures. We set the pace, but this press of time, take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this hurrying soon will be over.

Only when we tarry do we touch the holy. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy. So we begin to look at our lives and know that we are kind of in this dream-like tumbling into something else. And that tearing, it's such a simple thing, oh, let's pause. And it's so challenging. So we'll look at that a bit. How do we really learn to step out of this map of time? How do we learn as Rumi says to sense there's nothing ahead.

Yes, in a conventional sense we can say, yes, there's this calendar and this is ahead. But if we can't in a moment say, okay, there's nothing ahead, this open-endedness right now, we can't really arrive. And we can't discover what's called the awakened heart. Because the heart's always a little squeezed when we're leaning into the future. Does that make sense? there's a wonderful way of understanding the meditation training and that's sensing that our whole life is this chain reaction

stimulus response stimulus response and yet in between the stimulus and the response and I think Victor Frankl said it the best he said in between stimulus and response there is a space and in that space is your power and your freedom So meditation is an invitation to sense the stimulus and then just notice what's happening. Don't tumble into the what's next.

So we practice here and as many of you have been with us as we just do the most basic instructions for mindfulness we begin to arrive. We let our bodies help us get here so that we're not often the trance of thinking. and our practices

I've described many times this kind of wheel of awareness where the spokes go out onto the rim and we start spinning around in thoughts but we just gently come back to the hub which is not like a central tight place the hub is this whole space of presence

so we leave we get caught in the stimulus response cycling spinning and then we go oh come back you can just even this moment sense okay come back feel your own heart saying come back right here to this space, this presence. So we train in this just to be right here. We train in being here and taking refuge in presence. And that means really taking refuge

and just noticing what is happening right here and just letting it be. So there's this open wakefulness. That's our refuge. When we learn more and more to, as the Buddha did, just come under the Bodhi tree, like in the midst of our lives. It can be in the midst of whatever to pause, to come back. Those moments of pausing refresh us. They remind us of our inherent wakefulness and tenderness. We can then re-enter activity and have it come from that kindness and that sanity, that balance. when we train and pausing like this.

There are three gifts. I'm going to just share that I found that when we really learn to step out of the map of time and just be right here, take refuge and presence, three gifts. One is emotional healing. One is a actual visceral capacity of loving. And then the last is deep spiritual realization,

recognizing what we are. So the first. The first is healing. And maybe I'll share my own example because I encountered this map of time and the sense of the suffering of a future very vividly. It was about four years ago when I landed up in a Fairfax cardiac unit for about five days. And I had been scheduled to teach our New Year's retreat and I last minute had to pull out. and nobody quite knew what was going on. I had my heart was just brady carrie de cardi.

It was very, very slow, and I was very weak. And, you know, I just was completely non-functional. So I was undergoing tons of tests. And all I knew was I was sick. Things did not look good. The future looked really, really bad. And I had all these things lined up, you know, teaching gigs I was supposed to do.

And should I cancel them? What was I going to do about the Wednesday night class? It was like my mind was spinning and agitated and between the physical discomfort and the emotional angst. I was not a happy camper then. That was not a good time. So one of the things that became very clear was any thought of the future brought up anxiety. Any thought of the future. So I set myself this question, can I live right?

now without knowing? Can I live without knowing what's going to happen? Like what would happen if I just said, I don't know. Okay? So that was that was the beginning. And so, you know, can I just live without knowing the future? Can I come and just be with what is going on here, which is physical, it wasn't great pain. It was just physical discomfort and anxiety and a little bit of kind of confusion and sadness because I was kind of pulled out of the game and not able to participate. So I made my practice during that time this kind of sense of, okay, there's nothing ahead. Can you just be with this? And I kept saying, it's like this. It's a wonderful phrase sometimes. You can try it out. When things are going on and rather than

battling with what's going on, if you can just say, okay, right now it's like this. It's kind of this with gentleness and firmness. Okay, it's like this right now. This is a phrase that I heard from Ajan Samado, an American monk who's an abbot of a monastery in Great Britain. It's like this. And then this, the this, would be really intense. And so I had another thing I was telling myself.

I was kind of calling on everything I could, which was Choghompa teaches that our whole spiritual practice is to meet our edge and soften. Like whatever you meet, just kind of soften. So it was kind of like I would say, it's like this and just try to soften with it. It's like this right now. Okay, fear, soften.

And it became a really, first of all, I did hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times because my mind kept spinning into the future over and over again. I would say, okay, all there is is this moment. It's like this. Just soften. and gradually I started getting more attuned in that softening to the space of the presence.

In other words, I started inhabiting this kind of compassion towards what was going on, but I wasn't so hooked. But it took hundreds of times. So I'm saying this not like this is an easy, quick fix. I just kept having to see my mind going to the future just right here. But here's what I can say to you. when I was fully just this just this

there was not fear I was not suffering now if there was this but with the kind of glimmer of what's to come around the corner there was some tension and then there was suffering there's nothing ahead it's like this just this softening the trick for me was not to believe my thoughts

my thoughts kept on throwing forth a future that wasn't looking really good It wasn't even helpful when I tried to believe my thoughts about a good future, by the way. This was about not believing my thoughts and being really, really nailed to the moment. So this is taking refuge in presence, and this is how it can be a healing refuge. We get out of the map of time. No future, no past.

There really is this vast, tender presence that we can discover when we're right here. and I've worked with many people especially people that are grieving and can't imagine going on in life without the person they've lost and if they can come right to this it's like this right now this grief

this feeling of loss and not keep rolling into what the future is going to be like it becomes bearable and not only that in this presence we discover a timeless loving. It's like, yes, in our story the person's gone, in our idea of the future the person's gone,

but right here there's loving under the grief. Presence is our portal to everything we cherish. You might reflect for a moment. We'll just practice a little with this stepping out of the map a little, stepping off the map. And even just to begin this reflection, and sense that you're inviting yourself to arrive right here so that you feel your breath, feel your body.

And now you're going to just dip a little into the story of your life. You might sense some circumstances that might be difficult right now. Not traumatic. Don't go for trauma. Go for just something difficult. Where you know you get reactive, where you in some way it's a stimulus reaction. you go into fear or hurt or anger, anxiety, busyness.

But in a way that you sense is not healthy. So it might be circumstances with another person where you get triggered, something at work, where a certain kind of project or pressure really set you off. It might be an addictive kind of process that you're in, where you drink or eat or do something that's in a way, that then brings up shame or self-aversion. When you have a situation, go in your mind as if you're watching a film to the place where

there's a stimulus and you're about to react and just freeze the film if you can. So you just sense, okay, what's the stimulus like when this person says this like this or when I know this is coming up at work or what's it like? So rather than go into your reaction, just imagine you could completely pause and just put aside the future. What if letting go of suffering wasn't possible tomorrow or in 10 minutes,

but the only time that you could find some freedom was right here? So you just let go of the story and of the future and just feel the body, feel your breath, Say right here, here, it's like this. Okay, there's anxiety, maybe there's anger. It's like this. And you might even let the voice, it's like this be so gentle

that it's like as if you're putting your hand on your heart, which if you'd like to do is fine too. It's another way to really come right into this pause. You're sitting under the Bodie tree and you're bringing compassion and presence to write what's here, letting go of the future letting go of the past

so you've stepped off the map of time so that you can begin to touch what's holy which is this presence and tenderness and just sense the possibility in your life if when this stimulus happened when the situation came up if even for

20 seconds you could pause and in some way remind yourself okay, just this, just this moment. Breathe, take refuge. There is a space and a tenderness and a wisdom that's right here in your own heart. It's taking a few full breaths and come on back. This is an example of taking our meditation

and applying it in daily life that we just pause. And sometimes clearly you can't. Sometimes the situation, such you have to keep talking or keep moving, but there are many times that you can pause, and you can say to yourself, it's like this, and breathe and come home. So that's one domain that we can begin to heal emotionally, find some freedom around emotional reactivity. The second domain is love. And Margaret Wheatley, who's a wonderful writer and teacher,

she says, we have to slow down. Nothing will change for the better. until we do. We need time to think, to learn, to get to know each other. We're losing these great human capacities in the speed up of modern life, and it is killing us. So again, as Thomas Meriden said it also,

that this kind of tumbling reactivity that we're in, the speed and busyness, is a form of violence. It says it violates our natural rhythms, and it also is a little rhythm, and it also is a form of violence. violence to our relationships. And I feel like it's an honest thing to recognize that. That when we're rushing, when we're busy and speed it up, when we're in our reactive kind of

chain, we can't really be here for another person. The whole nature of empathy, you know, if you say, well, what is this, the mirror neurons in our social brain need, we have to be able to pause and pay attention for the mirror neurons to then sense what's going on for another person. We have to slow down some. We have to listen. This is a story I brought in and I thought I'd share with you. It starts this man saying, well, when I was quite young, my father had one of those first telephones in our neighborhood. I remember Will the polished old case fastened to the wall. The shiny receiver hung on the side of the box. I was too little. little to reach the telephone, but used to listen with fascination when my mother used to talk to it.

Then I discovered somewhere inside the wonderful device lived an amazing person. Her name was information please. And there was nothing she did not know. Information please could supply anybody's number and the correct time. My first personal experience with this genie in the bottle came one day while my mother was visiting a neighbor. Amusing myself at the tool bench. in the basement, I whacked my finger with a hammer. The pain was terrible, but there didn't seem to be any reason and crying because there was no one home to give sympathy. I walked around the house sucking my throbbing finger,

finally arriving at the stairway. The telephone. Quickly, I ran for the footstole in the pallor and dragged it over there to the landing, climbing up, I unhooked the receiver, held it to my ear. Information, please, I said into the mouthpiece just above my head. A click or two and a small clear. your voice spoke into my ear. Information? I hurt my finger. I wailed into the phone. The tears came

readily enough now that I had an audience. Isn't your mother home? Came the question. Nobody's home but me, I blubbered. Are you bleeding? No, I replied. I hit my finger with the hammer and it hurts. Can you open your ice box? she asked. I said I could. Then chip off a little piece of ice and hold it to your finger, said the voice. After that, I called information please for ever. everything. I asked her for help with my geography and she told me where Philadelphia was. She helped me with my math. She told me my pet chipmunk that I had caught in the park just a day before we'd eat fruits and nuts. Then there was a time that PDR pet canary died. I called information please and told her the sad story. She listened and said the usual things grown-ups say to sue the child, but I was unconsolved. I asked her, why is it that bird should sing that so beautiful. and bring joy only to end up as a heap of feathers on the bottom of a cage. She must have sensed my deep concern, for she said quietly, Paul, always remember that there are other worlds to sing in.

Somehow I felt better. Another day I was on the telephone, information please. Information said the now familiar voice. How do you spell fix? I asked. All this took place in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. When I was nine years old, we moved to. across the country to Boston, I missed my friend very much. Information please belonged in that old wooden box back home, and somehow I never thought of trying the tall, shiny new phone that sat on

the table in the hall. As I grew into my teens, the memories of these childhood conversations never really left me. Often in moments of doubt and perplexity, I would recall the serene sense of security I had then. I appreciated now how patient, understanding and kind she was to have spent her time on a little boy. A few years later on my way west to college, my plane touched down in Seattle. About a half an hour or so passed between planes and I spent 15 minutes or so on the phone of my sister who lived there now. And without thinking what I was doing, I dialed my hometown operator and said, Information, please. Miraculously, I heard the small, clear voice I knew so well. Information? I hadn't planned this, but I heard myself saying, could you please tell me how to spell

fix? There was a long pause. Then came the soft-spoken answer. I guess your finger must have healed by now. I laughed. So it's really still you, I said. I wonder if you have any idea how much you meant to me during that time. I wonder, she said, if you knew how much your calls meant to me. I've never had any children and I used to look forward to your calls. I told her how often I thought of her over the years and asked her if I could call her again when I came back to visit my sister. please do, she said. Asked for Sally. Three months later, I was back in Seattle. A different voice answered. Information? I asked for Sally. Are you a friend, she asked? Yes. A very old friend, I answered. Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, she said. Sally had been working part-time

the last few years because she was sick. She died five weeks ago. Before I could hang up, she said, wait a minute. Is your name Paul? Yes. Well, Sally left a message for you. She wrote it down in case you called. Let me read it to you. The note says, Tell him, I still say. There are other worlds to sing in. He'll know what I mean.

Part of what I like about this story is, you know, this old phone in the parlor. It's like there's something that we can really get that our world is speeding up. And there's something to really cherish about slowing down and getting quiet and listening. There's a teaching that to be kind, we must swerve regularly from our path. And by that, I really think the meaning of it is our path, this map into the future.

Like, we have these goals and we have, it's set in our mind, and we can't really open our hearts to ourselves and be intimate, our to each other, if we can't step out of time. Step off that map and be here. So this is in a way the second area I wanted to mention, which is that we begin to free ourselves, to love each other in our world. As we step out of time, there's a poem, that's Hafei's poem, that goes like this.

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 this is part of the mindset of this map of time as we have all these serious moves to make. And we're serious about ourselves and we take ourselves very seriously and, you know, they say that angels fly because they take themselves lightly, right? Well, we get very bound in this map of time and our serious moves. So we begin to commit ourselves and this is really, I feel like, the, what brings us to the Bodhi tree is that we, something in us intuit the potential to keep.

and to love without holding back and to really enjoy our lives if we're not so seriously on our way somewhere else. Which brings us to the last of our domains, which is really learning who we are. And I find that the question comes up again and again, well, I can't really pause because I actually do have a lot of serious moves and my life is really stressed. And I want to say just once again, that no matter how stressed and how serious and how pressured, the answer is not that we race to the finish line all tense and grim. There's got to be another answer.

And that was what the Buddha said when he sat down, when he had done all these austerities and starved himself and beat him, you know, kind of was skinny and really almost dead. And he said, there has to be another way. And the other way is we still can be incredibly active and engaged and productive and do everything we need to do. We can still pause. We can still find our breath.

We can still invite ourselves into some silence. Like Gandhi, who said, you know, that he took a day a week for prayer and contemplation because he wanted his social action, his way of serving, to come from the deepest place within him. we can pause. So the final piece of this finding our manual override button is really saying, well, what happens when we stop? What do we find out about who's here?

And what we'll do just is to close is just a little bit of a reflection of what happens when we stop and really look within, just as the Buddha did, looked into his own mind. So there's this inquiry really in every spiritual, tradition of who am I? And we cannot find our nature. We can't find the nature of reality if we are thinking about it. We have to step beyond thoughts into a direct experience. So we enter this last pause with just this simple, sincere intention to sense, okay, so what's true? What's,

what's really happening right here? And it helps to enter any pause by first saying, okay let's see if I can relax into it. In Zen it's called the backwards step where you kind of relax back into what's right here. You don't have to seek for anything. So see if it's possible to soften and relax in the body some. And with some interest, to sense what's going on inside your body,

notice this whole dance of sensation and not to control anything. See if you can just say yes, to the experience. Let it be to include sounds. So there's an awareness of the sounds and sensations, feelings, just letting everything happen. And then just simply looking back and sensing what's aware of all of this, what's aware of these sounds, of these sensations.

And if the thought comes up just to let go of the thought and with real interest, just turn the attention back towards awareness itself. And then just let go and be that awareness. See that you can be the silence that's listening. Be the alert inner stillness that's aware of this whole dynamic existence. You can be the space that's happening in. Can you sense your own beingness?

It's pure wakeful openness that's right here. And if you sense that wakeful openness at the level of the heart, you can sense a heart that's as wide as the world, world, absolutely open. We set the pace, but this press of time take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy. Young ones, don't waste your courage, racing so fast, flying so high. See how all things are at rest, darkness and morning light, blossom and book.

All this herring soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy. Namaste and thank you. Yeah. So just a couple of things before we disperse. I spoke a little bit about the Donner donations last week, and I really want to thank you. I felt like from speaking about it,

But there's just a lot of kind of a heartfelt response. And so if you haven't already offered and you can remember on your way back, it makes a really big difference to us. I want to thank you for that. 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.