Tara Brach - Stress and Everyday Nirvana - Part 1 (2016-06-29)

Episode Date: July 1, 2016

Stress and Everyday Nirvana - Part 1 (2016-06-29) - Our habitual view of stress is that it is a bad thing, an obstacle to healthy living and spiritual realization. These two talks look at how our way of relating to stress determines our happiness, and invites listeners to engage with practices that radically shift our response to stress and bring a healing and freeing evolution of consciousness.  Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. I was having a conversation the other day with a friend talking about kind of the non-stop quality of challenges, demands and so on, that kind of stop the world I want to get off. Can't we just have a little pause? and she sent me this cartoon and it's there's a graveside funeral and a man is looking at his iPhone and it's reading auto reply I am dead and we'll have limited access to email it doesn't stop you know and most of us have lives with a pretty ongoing sense of that we're constantly being something's being asked of us that

there's pressures and it doesn't matter what mood we're in or whether we're tired or feel sick, they just keep on coming. And what happens is this triggers, and this is of course to different degrees, anxiety about how things are going to turn out. And we carry a pretty existential sense that around the corner it might be too much and I won't be prepared, that I'll fall short, that something will go wrong. And so that's this kind of. kind of, this experience of stress can be a climate, a background climate that informs pretty much everything. And of course it's a matter of degree. But for most people, in addition to feeling that sense of pressure and demand and maybe I won't be ready or prepared, there's

an assumption that stress is a bad thing, that it's wrong, that it's a problem. How many of you kind of assume that, that stress, a lot of stress is a problem. Just honest, okay. For those that are listening to the podcast, that was a lot of us here. There's an assumption that the pressures of finances or the pressures of work or the challenges that our children are encountering at school or conflicts in relationship, whatever it is, that this is a bad thing and it's in some way interfering with our path and our progress and for people that are thinking in terms of spiritual progress, it gets in the way, is the idea. And there's some sense that we just need more time

and need things to be different and less stressful. What's interesting is that evolutionary psychology, current research, and Buddhist psychology actually offer a radically different perspective. and what we see is that whether the stresses of hunger are the stresses of feeling rejected or a stress of failure that it's not the stress that causes the suffering it's our view or attitude towards stress it's the way we're responding to the stress and to me one of the most interesting pieces of research on this came out came from kelly mcgonical who's a

health psychology professor, researcher, and so on at Stanford. And she starts in one of her talks saying, something that I've been teaching is doing more harm than good, which is that stress makes you sick. So what she did, she did some studies that tracked about 30,000 people over a period of eight years, and she asked a few questions. And one of the questions was, how much stress did you have last year? do you believe, second question, do you believe stress is harmful to your health and then she tracked who died?

And what she found out is this. Those who experienced lots of stress last year had 43% more risk of dying. But that was only true for those that believe that stress was bad for their health. Okay? The lowest risk of anyone in the study were those with high stress but didn't believe it was bad for them. Okay, so this is, we're going to explore this, a number of dimensions to this, but the core exploration is we all experience stress and our way of relating to it determines suffering our happiness. In Buddhism, it's pretty clearly laid out in the four noble truths and the first of the noble truth says stress is universal.

It's just a given. If you emerge into this universe in a form and a body, you're going to experience stress. Your body is going to keep changing. It's going to keep needing to be fed and wanting this and not getting that. And on all levels there's going to be stress of not getting what we want or getting what we don't want. That's the first noble truth. The second noble truth is if you respond to that stress by adding on grasping and chasing after things

or pushing away and resisting things, then you suffer. The third of the noble truth is freedom is possible. And the fourth noble truth is it's possible when there's kind of a shift in how we pay attention. And there's kind of eight areas of how we can bring and wake up attention in our lives. So we'll explore this together.

The title for this, it's going to be a two-part talk, I'm going to do one part this class, another part next week. The title is stress and everyday nirvana. And I'll explain more about the title later, okay? But the given, as I'm saying, is that we all experience stress, and it's through our engagement with stress that we actually wake up a sense of compassion and wisdom. It's not because stress isn't there.

It's because it's there and we meet it with a quality of wise, attention. And the best summation I know of that is that little saying, no mud, no lotus. Okay? No mud, no lotus. I remember my, I think it was my first retreat up at the Insight Meditation Society. One of my teachers, Joseph Goldstein, said this, sort of these words, close to these words. He said, every time I think I have a problem, I just side I don't have one. But that really stayed with me and that's very much again the theme

of what we're exploring that the things we consider a problem, they can be challenging, painful, they can be everyday knowing things or they can be big life ones of divorce and custody and disease. But the frame of problem

is what will cause the suffering. So we'll look more at the evolutionary perspective, which is actually the same. And from the evolutionary perspective, stress, which tension, fear, wanting, that's stress, it's information that moves all organisms to survive, to develop, to keep adapting, to become more agile, to transform in the face of inevitable change. So, stress is what has transformed flippers into arms. It transforms beaks into different kinds of beaks. It transforms humans.

We're pretty puny compared to other creatures. We lack most of the sensory acuity of many, many other creatures. That's stressful. That makes us lower on the chain, right? So what do we do in response to that stress? We develop these monstrous frontal cortex. cortexes, right? So we can begin to strategize and plan and become the dominant species on the planet. So stress keeps us evolving. Now, broadly speaking, in terms of evolution, we evolved, you know,

we got stressed out by our punyous, we evolved into a much more mental creature. So the stage we're at in an evolutionary perspective is what sometimes described as the mental egoic stage where we, identify as a mental being. We're identified with our mind and the way our minds work. And we are self-reflexive awareness. We have self-reflexive awareness, which means not only we're mental ego, it means we have a story or narrative about our self that is pretty much the map of our reality. So as I mentioned, it has a real benefit. This, you know, mental, this development of our mental capacities to really have a lot of control on planet Earth. And then of course with every evolutionary stage there's new stressors that arise.

And our stressor is that we're most powerful but we're also most destructive to ourselves and each other. So that's when we're working on now. That's our stressor right now that we need to attend to and evolve out of, relate to in a wise way. And we can see it globally. We can see how when humans feel threatened, because what happens in this mental egoic state is we become more aware of our mortality.

We're more aware of our vulnerability. We're more aware of feeling separate and threatened by others. We have less of a natural sense of belonging. Okay? So with that, with that sense of our mortality and our vulnerability, when we feel threatened, we get extra violent. We quickly make enemies of people of difference. So we'll make enemies of refugees or enemies of immigrants

or enemies of those with a different sexual orientation or different race. We also get greedier because we feel vulnerable, because we feel threatened, because we look ahead and we're afraid there's not enough. we overconsume, we destroy the earth. So we can also see it individually, and this is where we'll spend most of our time, how our thinking and emotions and sense of a separate self creates a kind of stress,

a sense of ongoing loneliness, isolation, fear, anxiety, depression, it creates stress, feelings that if we, don't respond to in a wise way, we get locked into that sense of separation. So what happens, and I'm going to be inviting you to pick areas in your life where you feel you get caught up and stress reactivity. What happens for the human egoic separate self is that when we get triggered, the habit is to go into fight-flight-flight-freeze. Now, for many of us, the triggering is that we feel physically unsafe. But for most of us, it's actually more psychological.

For most of us, the threats are more like of a poor performance report or of others rejecting us. Our stresses are fear for our children, our child's getting bullied, or has attention deficit disorder, our partner has gotten a biopsy comes out positive. It's those fears. But whatever they are,

whether it's a rattling of a snake or a poor performance report, whatever they are, they trigger off the same biochemistry. And the biochemistry then moves us habitually into fight-flight freeze. So here's the big inquiry is, both globally, as humans globally, and individually, when we get triggered, which we will keep on getting triggered,

how do we shift from the old habit of fight-flight freeze, which keeps us suffering and keeps the earth endangered, to a more evolved response? How do we make that shift? The grounds of making that shift are when we begin to realize that the stress the actual experience of tension, of pressure, of demand isn't something wrong, isn't a problem that it's actually the mud that lets the lotus unfold. When we shift to that frame, when we can look at in our life the places that there's pressure

or tension and say, okay, this is the actual portal for me to wake up. That's the ground. And if that ground is there, it actually makes it. possible for us to interrupt the reactivity and actually start witnessing, well, what's my habit been? You can start looking at how your habit of reactions been. What do I do when I have a deadline? What's my habit when I get stressed? So I'm going to pause here and say that, this is kind of by way of confession, that it often happens that whenever I'm, I pick what I'm going to share and do a talk on, then that becomes the thing.

And that's why for years I wouldn't write a talk. I didn't do a talk on death and dying. I figured I don't want to go there, you know, but I ended up going there. But as would happen, you know, I had a handful of pretty strong deadlines, which would have been fine had life not kept on happening on the way to them. you know how that goes. So I landed up this morning with, you know, all these kind of miscellaneous ideas about what I wanted to explore,

but it hadn't cohered and that created stress. And so I had to keep on sensing, you know, and for me it's the feeling of I'm going to be unprepared and I'm going to fail. That's the, you know, narrative. And then the old response is to speed up, go faster, try harder. But that doesn't work for what we call a Dharma talk, a talk about the path. It just doesn't work. So I got many, many moments where I got to be able to say,

okay, bear witness. So what's the habit here? Well, the habits to try hard or work faster, nothing comes out of that. You can't touch into a place of love or clarity or presence from that. So for me it was again saying, this isn't a problem. It's not a problem that there's this pressure of unprepared and feeling of unprepared. This is the place that's asking for attention.

This is where there can be waking up. And as soon as we make that shift, where we reframe it from problem to this is the place where there can be unfolding. This is where the flippers can turn to arms or, you know, the puny physical body can develop another mode of operating. Then it gets interesting. It really gets interesting. And I've learned in my own life that when I start getting interested, in a way some of the ego

selfing is falling away. I'm actually living in a larger space of presence when it's interesting. So what unfolds from this shift of problem to, oh, this is a portal, is then we can begin to more clearly witness the old habit, sense the suffering of that, and be available for what wants to emerge. We don't have to figure it out. It's like just by pausing and witnessing and having some space, are all. our body knew how to develop arms. Nobody had to figure it out. You know, our brain knew

how to unfold into having a frontal cortex and we know how to respond to tensions in our life from a higher level of wisdom and love. We already know that if we're willing to pause and pay attention to the suffering of the old habits. I think of it a lot like the chrysalis and having the caterpillar and the chrysalis and there's certain pressure as the caterpillar is more ready to occupy a larger space and be more free. It's the pressure, the container, that actually is part of the signal. The pressure is a signal to grow.

It's a hard switch because we're so programmed to think something's wrong. But that's the ground level. Not a problem. This is just what's happening. And this pressure is an invitation to deepen attention, to bear witness to what's going on and create some space. So let's look closer at that next piece. How do we deepen our attention?

How do we really bear witness to our chain of reactivity? Do you know yours? Do you know what happens when you start feeling that you might fail, that you aren't prepared, that something might go wrong. If we start looking close and investigating, we'll find that the first thing is some assumption of wrongness or badness,

the system's alarmed, and our body tenses. The biochemistry of stress, all stress has the same basic biochemistry. And this is, we're going to now move into why we have the type of, for the talk. And the biochemistry of stress on a cellular level is that the cells get fired up. There's heat, there's inflammation. Cells get inflamed, especially when it's chronic, they get chronically inflamed. So heat. Now why is that relevant? Everyday nirvana, the word nirvana means cooling. Rather than a reactivity that heats up and speeds up, nirvana is that space,

of where we're not grasping and we're not resisting and there's a natural cooling spreading out. In fact, interestingly, in physics, as temperatures go towards absolute zero, the properties change of matter

and we move from kind of separate forms to kind of convergent waves. In other words, our identity shifts. My knowledge base is no bigger than that, so I can't go beyond it. But there's something that's parallel in there that you can kind of intuit, right? So nirvana is at cooling.

It's in the moments we're not grasping or resisting. Coming back to that, but just to say that the body tenses on a cellular level, there's a heating up and inflammation, the mind begins mentally perceiving the problem and the badness of what's going on and obsessing and worrying. And, of course, the primary control strategy of fight-flight-fries is blaming. That's the aggressive one. We start blaming others. We blame ourselves. And then behavior-wise, often one of the main behaviors when we're stressed is to grasp

onto something that's going to make us feel different, that's going to comfort us, that's going to soothe us. And we rationalize about that. We have different reasons we think we're doing it. Example. Man goes to a bar, he orders a drink. Bartender gives it to a and then he pushes it off to the side and he orders another drink and the bartender serves it and this time he just drinks it, throws it back and the bartender says what gives and he goes

well, you know, I go to A meetings and I hear regularly that it's the first drink that leads to trouble okay so we we do things to comfort ourselves this is fight-flight freeze we also you know we deny we deny our own

responsibility we defend ourselves there's a lot of self-justification to try to make ourselves feel better when we're stressed. Somebody sent me this years ago. This is on insurance claims when car drivers attempt to summarize the details of an accident. Now, accident means you did something wrong, right? So here are some of the responses to this question about what happened.

I'll just read you a few. coming home I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don't have I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way the guy was all over the road I had a swerve a number of times before I hit him in the attempt to kill a fly I drove into a telephone pole I had been driving for 40 years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident my car was legally parked as it backed into another vehicle I'll just read one more

I pulled away from the side of the road glanced at my mother-in-law and headed over the embankment so we paint a world that's kind of self-justifying but the big one as many of us know when we're stressed we get irritable and we lash out we lash out because either

I am wrong or you're wrong and one of the examples I've shared before some of you might remember is of a husband's laid up in bed and he's got both legs in a cast, and his partner's mopping his brow, and he's got tears in his eyes. You said, you know, you were right there when I fell off the roof,

cleaning the gutters yesterday, and you were there before that when my business failed. You were there when I had that horrible car wreck. Now that I think on it, you're bad luck. Okay, so we basically get the idea that it gets aimed outwardly. And so we're talking about fight-flight freeze and kind of I'm being playful, but we all have our versions of trying to self-soothe, addictive behaviors, including not only over-consuming but overworking

to try to get rid of that sense that we're going to fail in some way. We all get the body tension that comes, the body's kind of defending itself. and most of us either blame ourselves or blame others. The effect, most of you are familiar with neurons that fire together, wire together. Every time we feel stressed and we in some way react on any of those levels, we're reaffirming that separate egoic self. We're reaffirming a narrow identity.

We're reaffirming a sense of, of not okay, of either being the victim or the perpetrator. And that sets the grounds for more reaction. So there's a kind of equation here which is stress times resistance or fight, fight, freeze, whatever, equals suffering. It keeps us, it's a developmental arrest. It keeps us locked at that ego level. Does this make sense right now?

That's the old style of, you know, how we're, that we're beginning to bear with. witness and see, oh, okay. So when I get tense, I end up blaming or when I get tense I eat or whatever it is. And you're already doing that. You wouldn't be here listening. You wouldn't be listening to a podcast right now unless you'd already been bearing witness to the patterns that you sense are keeping you smaller than who you are. And you're also bearing witness to a sense of that there's something else possible. It's like we keep on evolving and something in us knows that we're still evolving.

And I think of it sometimes like that the oak is already inside the acorn. There's already the sense of what can be possible in us. So we both sense the suffering of the old conditioning, the old reactivity, and the potential of responding in a different way. Ajan Budidasa, who's a 20th century Thai monk, he's the one that had the term everyday nirvana. And I've loved it.

I actually talked about it a little in radical acceptance. As I mentioned, nirvana's that coolness. And what he says is that we might not have a stable experience of nirvana. and most of us don't have that ongoing non-reactive presence. But we've all touched it. In fact, we wouldn't be alive. We wouldn't survive unless we touch it. We just don't notice it often.

We don't notice the moments that we're actually not grasping onto something and pushing away, the moments where there actually is some quality of resting. We just don't really pay attention. But those are moments of freedom, whether it's right before we're going to sleep, just kind of a, letting it all down, okay, done for the day, and just kind of suspended or when gardening or walking outside or having a hug with someone

or cutting vegetables or sipping tea or maybe sitting here and listening right now. There's just a place that's just open and engage in some way and not resisting, not trying to get somewhere. and there's a touch of peace in that. Ajin Buda Dasa says, without such moments, living things would either die or become insane.

Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness and ease. It is this that sustains us. It's this taste of that kind of presence or we're not trying to control anything that gives us a taste. it's of what's possible so that when we notice

our reactivity to stress we sense, oh, this could evolve to a different way of being in relationship with my life. So we've talked about the groundwork of it's not a problem, it's a portal, it's part of our evolution, and we've talked about that we bear witness,

we start noticing, okay, how does it happen in my life? And what's the suffering of it? You might reflect for a moment. We'll just check into that right now. It's grounded in your own experience. Wherever you've been, let this be starting fresh in this moment, a pause. Just feel your breath and feel your body.

You might inquire for yourself what a very kind of notable or ongoing, stressful element is in your life. something that is uncomfortable, challenging, might be a conflict with somebody, it might be deep worry about somebody, might be a domain you feel you're falling short in, fear about a job, fear about hell, might be the stress of our politics, our society, that triggers you.

So something that triggers you in a regular way, way. And when you've identified that, just bring up a recent way that you've been triggered, way it presented itself. I describe for myself the trigger of feeling unprepared and seeing the tendency to speed up and try harder and push other things away and tense up. What's it for you? If you're just witnessing how do you habitually relate to this stressor when you're triggered? Do you have a background assumption that something's wrong, that something bad is happening? Is that the evaluation? What happens in your body? Can you tune in enough and sense what's it like in my body when this is triggered? You might be able to imagine and sense that activation, that

inflammation on a cellular way. And what happens to your heart when you're triggered? What's the kind of habitual way or experience of the heart and your mind. Can you sense how the mind speeds up or fixates, narrows? You might sense the kind of collective sense of yourself, if you're liking yourself, not liking yourself in those moments, whether there's an undercurrent of blaming, I'm stressed and I'm not dealing with stress well, that kind of thing, the second arrow. And you might sense how all of this is here, that stress times reaction we get stuck. And it's natural that we keep repeating old strategies, both individually as a society, and the more you bear witness to this pattern, the chain of what happens in your body, your mind,

the more you get the suffering of it, how it makes you small. the more it becomes a fertile ground for evolving, just to be willing to pay attention right now and not judge it, but witness it. You become more that caterpillar in the chrysalis that's ready to morph and have it a larger space. You can open your eyes if you'd like. So this is the groundwork of, you know, this deepening of attention is the groundwork for being able to allow what's ready to emerge a new, fresh, more evolved response to be there. Einstein's favorite quote, that we can't solve a problem on the same level it was created. And I didn't want to necessarily use that quote because it has the word problem in it,

but the idea is that we can't deal with something, respond to something in the same way as from that fight-flight-free's mentality, or we're just continuing. fight flight frees. So we need to come from a more awake dimension of our being. And again, we know how to do that. We've done it. We have emerged. We've already evolved through life stages and as a species we've emerged. So the next equation is if stress times resistance equals suffering, stress times that non-judging presence. If we can create a little space for non-judging presence, interrupts the patterning and allows us to evolve. And this is where we're going with it.

And it happens in small ways and it happens in the face of the deepest challenges of our life that we can learn to interrupt the old patterns. So, let's just reflect a little bit together. If you'd like to close your eyes, it might be helpful, but you don't have to. for many of us one of the kind of everyday stresses is a sense of too much to do and not enough time and even if your eyes are closed if that's one of yours would you raise your hand so I can just

a lot of us too much to do and not enough time so here's what I'd like you to imagine imagine that you're perhaps doing errands that you're doing errands and racing through your to-do list while you're doing them, planning the next one, what order to do them in, and that you could pause and witness your mind and body as you're racing around doing errands and doing your planning, you could witness that, that you could actually, it's kind of like send your awareness to a corner of the car, corner of the space you're in and take a look at yourself and notice the self

that's trying to get a million things done and is planning while you're doing it and not feeling the movement of the car, feeling your breath, just notice how it is that you're in fight-flight-freeze. And in the noticing, imagine how you might come home just a little bit in that moment. Instead of racing around doing errands that you might inhabit your body, let your senses be awake and be here. That's evolution. If you can do your errands with more presence, that's interfering with fight-flight freeze. Maybe you're someone that when you clean the kitchen, you race around cleaning the kitchen, you do it really fast to get it done with. Could you witness that and pause and actually wash the dishes more slowly and feel

the warmth of the water and the suds. Or maybe in the shower you take a shower and plan and think and review, could you witness that and actually feel the beating, pressure, flow of water on your back and body? Or maybe when you eat, you eat fast. Could you slow down? Or when you drive, you always put on the radio. Could you maybe not put on the radio?

There's so many ways that if we bear witness, there can be a different choice that brings us more into presence. This is also true in the relational dance. You can open your eyes if you'd like. In our relationships, the way we react to stress then triggers our partners or our children or our parents and then they react and so it creates a kind of dance and that one man was describing he's got a five-year-old who's an angry, defiant and so on with him.

And when there's time pressure, it just triggers him so much. He raises his voice and he constantly uses threats. He finds he's always using threats to try to get control his son's behavior. So that's what he started bearing witness to. And he started bearing witness to how he didn't like himself with his son, which meant that he started not liking his son. He loved his son but didn't like his son. Okay, this is not an understanding.

usual one for parents. And so it really motivated him because he started seeing the suffering of his fight-flight freeze reaction in time pressure situation with his five-year-old. So when he witnessed that, he knew he needed to breathe more in those moments before he said anything. So his commitment was three long, deep breaths. And then he would speak. And the speaking always then came with at least a degree more calm and a degree more respect. Just a small example. This is everyday stress. And yet we can evolve in the midst of it. It's also true with the stressors of dying, of other people dying, of the biggest

rejections in our life, the biggest betrayals. I want to give you an example of the shift from fight-flight-freeze, to a much more evolved response that I read about in a book called Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle. And I've mentioned this book a number of times because it so inspires me. Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest and he writes about just the tragedies going on in the worst gang-violent neighborhoods in L.A. and his stories are filled with both tragedy and also the amazing power of the human heart.

So he writes about a woman, her name's Saldad, and she's a mother of four, and she's really proud when her second son, her second oldest son gets his diploma, goes to the Marines, and she's serving in Afghanistan, and then he comes back home for a visit, goes out to pick up some fast food,

and she hears shots on the street near their home, and then Ronnie, the son, dies in her arms right outside the door. So soon after this happened, her oldest son, Angel, pulled off something very few in the hood do, which is he graduated from high school, and he helps pull her through the hell she's living in. So six months after Ronnie's death, he pleads with her to put on some clothes with color, do her hair, be a mom to her three remaining children. That afternoon while sitting eating a sandwich on their front porch, Angel is shot up by kids from a rival gang.

So this is a true story. So Gregory Boyle's writing this about Soldat and he says he found her later that day sobbing into a huge bath towel. He writes, the few of us there found our arms too short to wrap around this kind of pain. Soldat is locked in the anguish of separation. So he spends a lot of time with her over the next few years and at one meeting when he asks how she's doing she says, you know, I love the two kids I have,

I hurt for the two kids that are gone and then crying she says, the hurt wins, the hurt wins. Forward a few months, she's in an emergency room for some chest pain several months later and a kid with multiple gunshot wounds is rushed in on a gurney to the spot next to her

and no curtain is drawn So she witnesses him fighting for his life and recognizes him as from the rival gang that killed her boys. And she knew that her friends would say, pray that he dies. Okay, the hurt wins, the hurt wins, the anger wins, the aggression wins. Pray that he dies, but that's not what happened. As she hears the doctors yelling, we're losing him, something in her cracks open. I began to cry as I'd never cried before.

and started to pray the hardest I've ever prayed, please don't let him die. I don't want his mom to go through what I have. And the boy survived, and Boyle writes, as did Soledad's capacity for loving, it got ripped open by grief and in time became an unimaginable vastness. Think of this as a kind of bodhisattva story,

the archetype of the bodhisattva, the being with the awakened heart, because it's an evolving from one level of response that most of us can get stuck in, of the contraction and the separation and the pushing away and the blame to really that sense of us, of holding others in our heart. it's a shift in response from fight-flight-fraise to an attending and a befriending that embraces others. And if you look into your own life, and I would suspect this is true for most everyone,

we can see how the times that were most difficult, the times that we really got pushed up against that wall of our own sense of loss or betrayal or grief were the times that evolved us. I know for myself, I'll share with you, one of those times that stands out was when I was 28 years old and I had a miscarriage. I wrote about this in radical acceptance and a day or two after my miscarriage, the teacher that I had been following in our ashram community who had a lot of influence on me and others in a very public arena, criticized me for having caused the miscarriage because of my, what do you say, I was self-centered, too caught up my work, I didn't really want to have a child to accuse me of that.

And I was very, very vulnerable, so I felt very shamed, very betrayed. It was devastating. And I remember going to meditate with that. And as I was meditating and watching my reactions, such a strong. strong, strong tendency from what we're calling the egoic level to turn totally on myself and feel I'm a horrible person, or to turn totally on him, how could he? But those were the two, that was very strong conditioning. And I could feel it and I could feel how either way, when I went in that direction,

this is the old conditioning, how it kept me small and tight, I was in the that cocoon, I was pressured, it was suffering. And because I was meditating had a lot of taste of this, I could sense a different possibility and that's when my prayer shifted to, please, may I trust my goodness, may I trust this heart, may I trust what's waking up here. It was a pivotal moment in that I did this what I often call the U-turn from the fight-flight-frease where I was blaming to coming around to hold the wounded place with compassion and to begin to in a very, very deep way

be dedicated to trusting Buddha nature that's waking up through me and all beings. But that was an example for me of the most terrific thing I could have imagined happening in those moments, very abusive, actually that stress evolved me. And I'd like to invite you as part of our closing now to again take a pause and check in a little.

Just to invite yourself right here. We've been exploring kind of the meaning of the phrase, no mud, no lotus, that without stress, we don't evolve. Stress is just the life we encounter. And as Joseph Goldstein said, if it's not a problem, if we decide it's not a problem, but we recognize it as really the grounds of how we wake up,

we can begin to witness the suffering of our habits. We can begin to sense what wants to emerge that is really coming from the deepest, most awake part of our heart. We can feel our prayer that what's going on right now, and this is really the Bodhisattva prayer, may whatever arises, whatever is arising right now, may this serve the unfolding of my full potential. May it serve compassion.

This includes diseases of our own body, betrayals, includes everything that's happening. So you might reflect right now and sense for yourself again a stressor in your life, maybe the same one you considered before. And you might, with some curiosity, sense the possibility of regarding it as really a ground for waking up. This is a place where you can discover what wants to evolve, the flowering of a deeper part of you and feel a sense of your yearning for that. You might sense that bodhisatt for prayer.

What happens when you ask, may this serve awake? What happens? What happens if you really feel a prayer in your heart? May this stress in my life be the path. May it bring forth a wisdom and a compassion that really is part of freedom. You might sense this area of stress and have the question, the deep question, how might this serve? Just real open to another dimension of presence and kindness, interest, curiosity. How might this serve? In the next class we'll explore how we can really wake up the wings of attention to bring forth what wants to come forth. For now we'll close in a simple way with the words of Mary Oliver, this is a poem

When Death Comes When Death Comes Like the hungry bear in autumn When Death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse To buy me and snaps his purse shut When death comes like the measlepox When death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades I want to step through the door

Full of curiosity wondering what is it going to be like that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility. And I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending as all music does, towards silence, and each body a lion of courage and something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say, all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was a bridegroom taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of arguments. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world. Namaste and thank you for your kind attention.

We hope you've enjoyed these teachings. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule and special online offerings, please join my email list by visiting tarabrock.com.