Tara Brach - Stress and Our Evolving Consciousness

Episode Date: April 5, 2014

2014-04-02 - Stress and Our Evolving Consciousness - The universal experience of stress (in Buddhism, called dukkha) is a message that we are not realizing, trusting and living from our true nature. Our habitual reactions to stress - grasping, aversion, resistance - deepen emotional pain and lock us in a limiting sense of egoic-self. This talk explores how, with conscious intention and deepened attention, the stressful difficulties we encounter can become the very grounds of healing and spiritual awakening.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. I'd like to start this talk with a poem by M. Truman Cooper. Suppose what you fear could be trapped and held in Paris. Then you would have the courage to go everywhere in the world. All the directions of the compass open to you, except the degrees east or west of true north that lead to Paris. Still, you wouldn't dare to put your toes smack dab on the city limit line, and you're not really willing to stand on a mountainside miles away

and watch the Paris lights come up at night, and just to be on the safe side, you decide to stay completely out of France. But then danger seems too close even to those boundaries, and you feel the timid part of you covering the whole globe again. you need the kind of friend who learns your secret and says see Paris first. So I like that poem a lot because I feel like it points to a critical inquiry that I feel that many of us are on on a path of waking up which is what is our way of relating to difficulty or fear?

What's our pattern? When we encounter stressors, when we feel a sense of agitation, what happens next? Do we try to kind of package it up and put it away somewhere or fix it or get rid of it? Or do we have some wise part of us an inner friend saying, see Paris first? So this class I'd like to explore the role of stress in the evolution of consciousness and really how relating to stress can directly serve our spiritual awakening. And I remember years ago, I was in a teacher training group with Jack Cornfield, and one of the, perhaps the youngest teacher in the group,

asked him a question which was really what would help her deepen in her teaching, you know, really come from the most profound and wise place in her teaching. And he looked at her and he came to her, kind of smiled and he said, just more suffering. And really the understanding is, and it's for each of us, is that it's often through encountering the inevitable losses and they are inevitable, the inevitable challenges. It's in, it's through those times that our hearts and our wisdom wake up. And the phrase I've used in the past from Ticknaut Han that I think captures it more,

way better than any others is no mud, no lotus. Right? Remember that, some of you? Now, that phrase is on t-shirts and jewelry. Check it out on the internet, it's pretty funny. But I think it's a wonderful understanding. So I want to kind of dive deeper into this. And you see this in the principles

that come through the four noble truths in Buddhism that in the most simple, way you might say that stress is another word for duca. Duka is sometimes called suffering, but it's really uneasiness, dissatisfaction, stress. It's that tension that we experience in our lives. And so the first noble truth is that stress is absolutely universal. Hand in hand with being a life form is experiencing stress.

The second noble truth is that stress increases and it locks in. it becomes what we might call suffering in the moments that we react to it with grasping an aversion. Okay? That's truth number two. Truth number three is that it is possible for us to respond to stress in a way that actually enables us to flower, to more fully unfold ourselves. That's a possibility to really experience our full potential. And then the fourth noble truth is really, here's how. Here's the way of living aligned with your truth, of deepening your attention, widening your attention that actually will enable you to, when the stressors come, actually grow through them, wake up through them, like the lotus flower

through them. So those are the four noble truths. And what's really exciting these days for many people is that a lot of the research, Western science is really kind of showing a lot of what the mystics have described over the eons. And evolutionary science has got a beautiful parallel with the noble truths. And then from an evolutionary perspective, stress or fear or wanting or tension is information that moves all of us organisms to survive, to adapt. to continue transforming in the face of inevitable change. So stress turned our fins into arms, and stress changes the shape and size of beaks for some creatures

and trains many in the arts of deception, the opposable thumb, that's from stress. And of course, for humans, on our human evolutionary path, we're real puny compared to other creatures, so we were having a hard time, so stress evolved our massive frontal cortex so we could strategize and plan and outwit other creatures on the planet and outwit ourselves by destroying the planet in the process, of course. But our frontal cortex, representational thinking,

telling stories, being able to sense the future, being able to have an idea of the future in the past, and therefore be strategic. And along with that comes a sense. of the story of ourself. So part of the pattern of evolution is that at every new phase that ends up addressing stresses

at a lesser stage, there's new problems that come up, new stressors that challenge further growth. And of course, the stressors that come up for most of us humans have to do with the egoic layer, that we have this thinking mind that's very most often fear-thinking, And that most often the fear thinking has to do with what's wrong with us and what's wrong with others and creates pain and separation. So that's the stress most of us are dealing with.

Most people, I mean many are dealing with more fundamental levels of stress of, you know, fear of survival in war, situations, or hunger. So I'm not in any way minimizing that. But many of us are dealing with the psychological level. and that comes from the storytelling mind that comes from the obsessive fear-based thinking so that's the stress that comes up with us and a lot of time it's a stress it's the mud but it doesn't produce a lotus

we end up reacting to it and causing ourselves more stress so how does that happen for any one of us okay so we have our daily stressors of feeling our finances squeeze, the fear of a bad job performance evaluation, our failing health. And there's, rather than just the immediate survival stuff, we start telling stories around it. So how do we react to that stress? Well, for most of us, when we encounter stress, we very quickly go into blaming ourselves or blaming the world, blaming someone else. A lot of judgment and a lot of obsessing. Story I heard years ago a woman leaving a

retreat and she was having to switch planes at an airport and so she put all her stuff down and got a small package of cookies, sat down at a table where she had the morning paper and she was kind of reading and then she was aware of some rustling at the table. And then behind her paper she was flabbergasted to see a neatly dressed young man helping himself to one of her cookies. She didn't want to make a scene so she leaned across and took a cookie herself. A minute or so passed, more rustling. He was helping himself to another cookie. So by the time they were down to the last cookie in the packet,

she was really angry but still couldn't bring herself to say anything. Then the young man broke the cookie in two, pushed half across to her, ate the other half, and left. It was sometime later when the public address system called her to her gate and she was asked to present her ticket, she reaches into her bag and she's confronted by her package of cookies. She had been eating his. We live in ideas about the world and we react off of those ideas and there is underneath our stress reaction, there's a story and it's an ego-based story because we're living in

living in this idea of a self. And the story is, underneath all stressors, something bad is happening to me or caused by me. Something bad, something I don't like. And either I'm bad and wrong or you're bad and wrong. And then what happens is those thoughts keep looping into feelings of aversion or guilt or anger or whatever, which then produce more thoughts and we're caught in a stress loop. Okay? So this is again when it's mud but no lotus, right? because a stress loop keeps us feeling like a separate, deficient, egoic self. We're stuck at that level of evolution. Okay?

I'll give you an example of recently talking to one, a parent of one teen. His son would act in ways that were very rude and disrespectful and then be very withdrawn, not forthcoming. And so he was in a chronic state, the father, a feeling offended. and angry and under-offended hurt. So his primary response was in some way he just couldn't stop himself from saying, this kid's wrong, he's off, he's bad, something's wrong with him.

And then he'd react in a way that would communicate that, and the son would be more withdrawn or more rude. And so that's a very common cycle people get into. And as part of it, he'd be blaming himself because part of him knew he was the adult and he should be able to see past the mask and be more big-hearted and compassion and know his kid was in trouble.

But that was his emotional response and that was his thought pattern. Something's wrong here, you're wrong. And then even the feelings of I'm bad made him more frustrated and he would take it out on his son. So they were looping. And that loop

represents what I think as a great equation for suffering, which is that stress, the feeling of offendedness, the feeling of anger, times resistance. The resistance is, rather than just feel that, we react, equals suffering. Stress or pain times resistance, equal suffering. It's a pseudo-pho kind of equation, but it's really, really powerful to understand that. That when we get triggered, if we then add on a story of blame, a judgment, a reactivity, we're kind of resisting the experience of the moment and that creates more suffering.

I also sometimes think of it as double duca because there's the duca of feeling offended and there's an angry and then when we add on the judgment, we lost. into a deeper sense of not okay self. It's been described in the Buddhist psychology as a second arrow. There's one bad feeling, we add unjudgment, it nails it, it nails it shut, we get locked in. So what we get locked into with this mud, no lotus,

is a deep and sense of an egoic self, rather than adapting to stress and evolving past the egoic self, we're locked in. So, then we get to the question, okay, we know with the third noble truth that when stress comes we have the possibility of responding in a way that evolves us. And I'd like to call that or describe that in the opposite equation, which is stress times presence equals evolution. We evolve, we transform. Stress times resistance equals suffering, stress times presence equals growing.

So all of this goes to say, the key to this whole thing of how we work with stress is our view of it. And that our habit is to think when we're stressed, when we're feeling tension, when we're feeling pain, when we're feeling anger, that something is wrong. That's our habit. Not that this is information that if I respond to it actually will evolve me, actually will help transform me. It's a critical, critical shift in view to not make wrong what's happening in our lives. Anything. I know that's a big statement, but not to make it wrong because it's all stress.

It's all duke in some way. In the moment we make it wrong, we're on the path of double duca. but no lotus. Okay, so I'm going to add on one more conceptual piece because I know this is a bit conceptual right now and then we're going to actually go into the practices that let us sense the alchemy of the mud, how it really can make us flower. And I'm reading a book right now and it's called anti-fragile. And the author is Nassim Nicholas Talib.

And I'm curious how many of you are reading anti-fragile or I've read it. I see one hand, two hands. Maybe I can't see up there. It's a really, it's brilliant and interesting and very much related to what we're talking about. So anti-fragile is in contrast to fragile. And the kind of definition of fragile is anything that, when it encounters stress, can be destroyed.

So it's whenever there's change or chaos or unpredictability, something that's fragile, breaks, shatters, gets destroyed. So if you're a fragile person, your makeup's fragile, when stress arises, you'll contract and replay the old patterns of reacting and fail to adapt. So it's rigidity and flexibility in the face of change. That's fragile. Anti-fragile, and it could be a person or a system or an economy or nature itself, anti-fragile, if you're anti-fragile, you benefit from stress.

You actually benefit from randomness, from change, from chaos, from tension. It's like, you know, the hydrant mythology that whenever there was a head slashed off just grew more heads. Or some of you remember the Borg from Star Trek? Yeah? Okay, so what happened with the Borg, anything that would come their way, they would, out of interest, assimilate and take all the qualities. That was the response was to assimilate anything unique. They're real adaptable. So an anti-fragile person adapts response to stress by listening to the message,

remember, all of our stresses information, by listening to the message, by calling on dormant inner resources and becoming stronger and more flexible. Anti-fragile is not just resilience, which means bouncing back. It means actually changing and transforming and evolving, mud to lotus. And so it fits with a lot of folk wisdom. This is not news. I mean, most of us have heard the different phrases of difficulty-built's character, necessity as a mother of invention, that kind of thing. Today, I had an experience that brought up this whole question of antifragile,

And the experience was that one of my regular rhythms in terms of my day is that somewhere around three or four, I take a nap and I take about a 25-minute nap. If I get that nap, I'm really, I have an evening ahead. If I don't, I get tired and tired until I have that burning sensation and that achy feeling that you can have when you're really, really tired. And it's hard to just hold one person in my vision. They become four and that kind of thing. So I didn't get my nap today. I know, poor you. So I didn't get my nap.

And so that was like this random chance variable, life out of control. And so the question for anti-fragile is, is there a way that that's... So the stress that played through me was a feeling not only of the sleepiness, but anxiety because there's a sense of, oh my gosh, you know,

if I'm really tired, I won't really, you know, with authenticity. And I knew I'm, and tonight's talk is completely, it's not a talk I've given before, and I knew it had enough concept that I had to make it juicy because otherwise I'd lose everybody. I don't know how it's going so far. So, so part of me goes, okay, but this is about, okay, anti-fragile, what does that mean?

And it didn't mean that I would adapt to the sleepiness and in some way overcompensate and get charged up. What I could sense anti-fragile would mean what would make mud into Lotus was that there would be not, it would in some way be a message not to have such a sense of self that needs to perform and that can either fail or succeed. Just let it be okay because it's not so much about that. And just even remembering that as an idea woke up that as a possibility. Do you know what I mean? in more on that. Final point about the value of stress is that it's even seen in the most extreme life situations that post-traumatic growth syndrome is a whole new field of study

whereby researchers have found in every culture that they've researched and I'll list some post-traumatic growth in Israelis who survived terrorist attacks. and in Palestinians who were held in Israeli prisons and Turkish earthquake survivors and Germans who survived the Dresden bombing. And one research describes growth in spouses of cancer survivors. But beyond that, you can look in your own lives and people you know. Trauma, and this doesn't always happen, sometimes it turns into PTSD that is absolutely a huge anguish. but there's also a huge amount reported

of how trauma then has a kind of a reckoning with a life and a new sense of what's meaningful, a deepening of relationships, really calling on compassion and so on. Let's just take a moment. I'd like to invite you to reflect. And just as a way to enter the moment, just to pause and feel your breath.

Just invite yourself right here. And let come to mind a time in your life when it felt like things were falling apart where the ground really got shaken for you. And ideally one in the past, so you have a little bit of a vantage point. If you're going through one right now, you can certainly ask these questions, but you won't have quite the perspective since you're in the midst. But sometimes it might be a death of a loved one or divorce, job loss, serious illness, maybe it was a trauma of an accident or being in a war zone, and just

with some curiosity, since that is one of the inevitable expressions of impermanence, of loss, of change, and then just to reflect for a moment, did it change you? How might that have changed you? And do you feel that in some way it brought you to contacting a deeper resourcefulness or wisdom, understanding, stress, the pain of loss? It's a message in our system. Is there anything you can find out about yourself and how it might have changed you? You can continue to reflect on that and we'll keep speaking for you. for a bit. I asked, I was talking to my mom earlier in the week and I asked her about that.

I said, you know, what would you say is a time when, you know, things are really falling apart for you. And she, for her, it was her struggle with alcoholism. She spent a number of years, probably about eight years where it was really intense and then has not drinking alcohol since then and that became her life actually she became the executive director of the National Council of Alcoholism in her part of New Jersey and that became her life path but she named alcoholism the struggle and I asked her how it changed her and for her she said I just you know it was humbling of it I became my empathy just grew for others and my intimacy she said that through 12-step programs she just became really

intimate with people who were being real with their woundedness. And also she said the valuing of life moments because she could see how much of her life had been swept away by addiction, that she wasn't there for it. So it was the valuing of life moments and wanting to help. So those are ways that it changed her. And this has happened as part of this process of accompanying her as she's dying. I've found that I periodically will ask the weightier questions. And during one round of doing it, one of my sisters accused me of trying to, having my net out for stuff for Dharma talks. Before I could even defend myself I was going to, but I wouldn't have been right.

My mother jumped in, she goes, oh no, I'm no font. She said, this is what she said. All I want is to be roaming like a wild horse, winds blowing my mane. And I thought to myself, well, dying is its own stress. It's a big one. and it can also, it's the mud to lotus, it can also make our spirit very transparent. It's like she's very sensing the freedom that's past this particular part of existence being in a body. So no mud, no lotus.

We have the capacity to evolve through the earthy stressors. And our spiritual path is not because they're gone. it's through them that we wake up. They're the grist. And we look around and we look at ourselves and if we're honest, we see how every day we get caught in stressful times and we're not in that alchemy of spiritually waking up through it.

We're really caught in our normal neurotic, ordinary, stressful reactivity. Right? Yeah? Okay. So I think the important in inquiry is what enables us to be more anti-fragile so that we're actually aligned in a way that as stress comes up in our system in whatever form, anger, hurt, fear, anxiety, that that's a message, that we have the presence to respond in a way that it's part of waking up. not just repeating patterns. So that's the inquiry. And I'll bring in at this point,

Albert Einstein's very famous quote from him, says we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. So if the problem or the stress is coming from an egoic self that's living inside a story of who we are and who the world is, we can't wake up from that stress or wake up through that stress with more stories and more thoughts. Okay? It has to, in others, we have to draw on some deeper quality of presence than the thinking mind in order to wake up out of the stress of the ego itself. And the way that that happens, the way, this again, this is the alchemy of awakening,

are through intention and attention. This is the last part of this talk is going to be how through our intention and our attention we can really experience that mud blossoming lotus being of what we are. So we start with intention and that's really what's our relationship to stress when things aren't going our way. So what happens the moment we're really rare, oh God, I'm really stressed out, what's going on? Well, most of us think we shouldn't be stressed out or resent stress the stress or feel oppressed by the stress.

And there's some wonderful research recently that our attitude towards stress how much it affects us on a physical level. And this is, I'm going to share the research of Kelly McGonigal, who's a health psychologist from Stanford. And she was part of research or describes research a study that traced 30,000 people. for eight years and asked three questions. And this is, I think this is great research. First question, how much stress did you have last year? Second question, do you believe that stress is harmful for your health? And then the third inquiry of the study was who died.

Okay? So how much stress? Do you believe it's harmful? And then they studied who died. Here's what they found. Those who experienced lots of stress last year had 43% more risk dying. But that was only true for the people that believed that stress was bad for them. The lowest risk of anyone in the study were those with high stress that didn't believe it was bad for them. Don't you think that's interesting? Here's what it's saying basically. It's saying that people die prematurely from the belief that stress is bad for them. It's that the belief is really impacting things.

How are we relating to stress? If we can look at it from an evolutionary sense and go, okay, stress, this is a message that's asking for attention, and if I can respond in a wise way, there's going to be some adapting and evolving that is going to be precious. Stress can be healthy. Now, if we look at that attitude and how do we cultivate it,

to me, the most powerful and beautiful example is in the actual reflection on what's our intention. And in the Buddhist tradition, there is what's called the Bodhisattva aspiration. And it's really cool because the Bodhisattva is an awakening being and we are all on the Bodhisattva path. And that's just a word, but we're all, this consciousness is awakening. And the Bodhisattva aspiration is what is the intention of our awakening awareness. What's our deepest intention? And there's a formal prayer in the Bodhisatt tradition that goes like this. May whatever circumstances arise serve the awakening of heart

and mind. May whatever circumstances arise. And this is like whatever is going on in our lives. May that serve the awakening of compassion and wisdom. Very powerful prayer. Let me ask you for a moment. Let's just try this out. Just explore the impact of that intention on our psyche, okay? Yeah, take a moment just again, put down if you're writing notes and sit back and just reflect for a moment. And we'll bring it current this time. This time, how about bringing to mind whatever you, you're going to mind whatever you sense is the biggest stressor in your life right now. Okay? And it might be your health, it might be the health or well-being of somebody you care about, it might be finances, it might

be anxiety about what's about to come around the corner to do with work or to do something social, it might be a conflict with someone. Just bring to mind a great stressor. in your life. And the first thing once you bring it to mind is just to ask yourself with curiosity, well, how do I relate to this? Just be honest, without adding judgment,

am I relating to it like this is a bad thing and I wish it would go away? Shouldn't be happening. It's kind of like a mistake in the universe. Do you feel oppressed by it, like kind of victim? Are you relating to it in a way that you're trying to ignore it or neglected? that are obsessing on how to fix it?

Are, is there some sense or some part of you that is recognizing this as part of your path, even as the ground of waking up, recognizing that where we have the most intense reactivity is the very place where we actually can discover the most healing and freedom? You might sense you're being holding. holding this stressor in your attention and exploring this prayer. Just mentally repeat the words or adjust them in whatever way resonates for you, but may these circumstances, may what's happening serve the awakening of my heart and mind, the awakening of love, of wisdom.

May this serve. You might let yourself repeat it, tell it feels like a sort of a soul. sincere prayer that you feel your longing to let this in a meaningful way serve healing, serve awakening. And you might with some curiosity turn it into a little bit of an inquiry. How might this serve? How might what's going on right now serve increasing freedom, realization? And just notice the power of offering this frame, this understanding to the stresses in our life. So part one is intention that we begin to align ourselves so that we can be more anti-fragile

so we can be more capable of transforming through stress. We begin to align ourselves by having that intention. May this serve awakening. The second part is attention. In order for it to serve awakening, we have to deepen our attention. In fact, if you get in touch with your intention for it to serve awakening, that intention will write by the very nature of what you're wanting invite you to deepen your attention. So we deepen our attention.

And attention has two basic qualities. And we explored a little bit of those two qualities in the guided meditation this evening. And one quality of attention is directly contacting the actuality of what's here. That means if you're feeling that stress for that parent that was feeling the stressor of feeling hurt and angry, you directly, like with the in-breath, it's like you let yourself contact that feeling. That's the first part of a wise attention. and contacting what is true right in this moment. And the other facet of presence is really allowing

what's there to be there. It's like sensing the space that really lets be. And there's a natural quality of acceptance and kindness in that. That's the sense of the out-breath, breathing out and sensing the space and the kindness and perhaps the love that really holds what's here. I like the metaphor of the breath because I think it helps us stay connected with with this practice of contacting what's here and also sensing space because we need both. You know, when I mention anti-fragile, I think physical exercise is a really good example because, you know, if you think of how we build muscles, you have to stress muscles, right, to build them. You have to kind of tear them down some.

And you also have to have recovery time. If the stress is the tearing down is kind of the message of breaking it apart and so on, you have to have the recovery time so that they can heal so they get stronger. And that applies to the heart and the psyche too. There has to be some breaking apart and opening from the habitual patterning and really contacting, letting the brown breed opened up in our being. And we need the space and the stillness and the awakeness to let that then integrate in a new, more free way.

Okay? Some of you might have heard of Anthony DeMello, as a Christian, teacher, mystic. He says, enlightenment is absolute cooperation with the inevitable. Absolute cooperation with the inevitable, which means the inevitable arises and our attention both contacts it and allows it. cooperation. I'll give you an example of a person who to me really illustrated the power of this anti-fragility of allowing the mud to become the lotus. And this was a story I shared in radical acceptance and every time I revisited it inspires me. So just to share with you, this was

a man who was attending a retreat and he'd come with his wife because he was in the mid-stages of Alzheimer's. And she had to be with him to get him to the right room at the right time, help him with his food and so on. And he was also a psychologist, been a therapist, and been practicing meditation for about 15 years. And I met with him. We have, at these retreats, we meet to work on how practice is going.

I met with him. And he was pretty cheerful. And he was kind of aware of what was going on in his mind. And so I said, well, what gives? you know, in this, what gives you this buoyancy, you know. And his first response was, I don't think anything's wrong. He said, it's like the fall, you know, when the leaves are falling. And it's not wrong, it's just a season.

And which was impressive to me. So that's the beginning, this kind of attitude of this is natural. Then he described an experience that he'd had earlier in the onset of Alzheimer's where he had been asked to give a talk and about a hundred, hundred people there and he arrived and he was about to speak and he went completely blank. Like not only did he not know he was going to say he didn't know why he was there or where he was or anything. So here's what he did. First he paused. He didn't do anything. And in order to break our patterning we really need to do that. He just paused. Okay.

So he didn't go into a stress reactivity. He didn't do the double duca. He didn't do the double duca. He didn't have a second hour, he just paused. And then he began to name what he was noticing. This is the wing of attention that recognizes in contacts. So he was kind of standing there, he just palms together and he began by saying confused. And then he bowed. And then he would say, anxious, bow, heart pounding, embarrassed. This went on for a while and then he said, you know, beginning to relax. Finally, he apologized and one person in the group said, you know, no one has ever given us the teachings this way. And what had he done? To me, stress had come up, you know, real stress, and rather than reacting, he had paused and he brought presence.

He, the two wings, he named what was going on and with the bowing, that's like creating that space. It's like honoring this is the life that's here. Absolute cooperation with inevitable. Full presence. Remember, stress times presence equals evolving. So what happened in those moments? There was a shift in identity rather than being the egoic self that was trapped and caught and

something off and scared and gradually in the naming and honoring what was here, something opened. He began to inhabit a larger sense of being. So the confusion and stress might have still been there, but his sense of his own being was large enough to include it. He responded to the stress in an adaptive way. That would be the evolutionary description. that allowed him to transform from an egoic identity to a sense of awareness, tenderness, presence

that really is the truth of our being, true nature. For every one of us, each one of us, has areas that still trigger off a stress reaction. And in the moments that we actually say, oh okay this is the grounds of waking up please may this serve awakening that intention invites us to pause and deepen our attention as this man did now one last piece on this sometimes the stress rattles us so much that we don't have the capacity to name and give space we actually have to find our way to space or safety or love first, so we have enough balance to be able to

begin to acknowledge what's here. So sometimes when stress arises, for primates, that's us, the thing that most helps us to come into presence is connection. We need to feel safe. There's all the evidence in the world that when somebody holds our hands or when we hug, when we feel our belonging with each other, that enables us to sense what I sometimes call it the ocean nest, so we have room for the waves. So there might be that order that we do it in too, that rather than pausing and beginning to name and honor,

we first in some way call on whatever helps us to feel that connection, that space. And I'll give you an example that I loved, I read in one person's blog, Post, she says, my younger brother Alan had Down syndrome and died four months short of his 50th birthday. He was terrified of thunderstorms. Our mom taught Alan that when a storm approached, he should put his hand over his heart and say, God's right here. After mom died, Alan stayed overnight with my family once a week. When a storm was near, Alan would come to us and say,

God's right here. Then he would calm down. Later, when the storm past he would come to us and say, Alan's all right. What a picture, what a wonderful picture of faith Alan gave us. When the storms of life threatened, we can follow his example and remember God's right here, right here in our heart every single day of our lives. Then we'll know we're truly all right. So whether our language is God, our timeless awareness is right here, or whether our language is right here I can feel my belonging in love with this person or feel that as a Dalai Lama put it to imagine you're being held in the heart of the Buddha or someone else would reach out to the divine mother and feel that energy and warmth surrounding whatever our way

is through a person through nature through a deity anything that reminds us of the truth of our connection is another way of responding to stress, remembering our connection, and then just honestly naming what's there. Tonight I've been talking about examples, sometimes the big ones, but really this practice gets very, very daily. In fact, the more you wake up, the more you'll find that even the small appearances of the egoic self have tension with them, not because ego is bad. but because there's something in us that feels we're living in something smaller

and more contracted than the truth of who we are? So there'll be a sense of judgment or comparison with someone else or a feeling of being special or important. And with that, even with when we feel we've done a great job, there's some inflation or something that there's a sense of a little embarrassment about it. And it's because something in us knows we're living in an identity that's not the truth of who we are. So that's tension too, that's stress too,

and that's a message too. Stress is good news. It's mostly our awareness letting us know that we're not living in the fullness of who we are. It's an invitation to come home. Okay, so we'll end tonight with a very brief meditation, a very brief sitting,

Right at the heart of waking up is that longing or intention to really discover our full potential to live from loving presence. So you might sense right now your own words for that, your own prayer, that in some way, whatever you encounter, may that be part of the path? maybe any physical pain or emotional pain or conflict. May that teach us, wake us up, be part of what frees us. And you might sense that intention gives you the courage, the willingness to fully connect with what's right here.

These last few moments just to let the breath deepen that connection, breathing in and feeling that with the in-breath, that receptivity and contact with exactly the experience of the moment, whatever's most compelling in the body, whatever sensations or feelings in the heart might most call your attention, to breathe in and touch that, undefended heart, breathing in and contacting the life that's here. And with the out breath, sensing that this aliveness is floating, is held in,

openness, tenderness. There's room. Rumi talks about the wounded place as the place where the light shines through us, breathing in, touching what's right here, undefended. and breathing out and sensing that openness, alertness, tenderness that holds this life. Close with the words of poet Dana Fawls.

Inside the hot, hard knot of raw sensation, here inside the heart of fear and pain, I find the flame of truth, my path is through, diving right into whatever past conditioning bids me hide or push aside. When I soften, open, accept and receive, the flow of energy is immediate. Nothing more is needed to awaken completely than the intimate experience of now. Namaste and blessings. Thank you. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.