Tara Brach - The Blessings of Embodied Awareness

Episode Date: April 27, 2011

2011-04-27 - The Blessings of Embodied Awareness - One expression of our suffering is homelessness--feeling cut off from the presence and aliveness that is our source. This talk explores the existential and cultural forces that foster disconnection from our physical and energetic being, the practices that enable us to embrace our unlived life and the gifts of homecoming. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

like to begin by reminding us of one of the most quoted of the Buddha's expressions, which he says that the entire Dharma is to be experienced in this fathom long body. He said all the teachings of the Dharma of the path we find in this fathom long body. He said we see suffering. We see the cause of suffering. and we see freedom from suffering. And it's an amazingly important teaching to remember because one of the biggest misunderstandings

about spiritual life is that in some way we're trying to exit out from this earthly plane and experience some transcendent bliss somewhere else, right? And so the Buddha is saying, no, it's actually when we bring a full presence right here to this living being right here, that's the only place that we can experience love, our creativity, our joy. In other words, everything that you cherish is found by bringing a presence to the aliveness that's right here.

So I'd like to explore that. The beauty of embodied presence and the spirit we discover in embodied presence And to begin with one of my favorite writers and teachers and philosophers who passed away a few years ago, John O'Donohue, who calls this the temple of our senses. And he says that our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. It says it's our minds that make our lives so homeless. Isn't that beautiful? this phrase, it's our minds that make our lives so homeless. So we'll explore together how it is that we leave home because we do over and over every day

and the practices that really help us to come right here into this life and into this spirit. And the fundamental teaching that you find, and this is not just in the Buddhist tradition, it's in the whole perennial philosophy of how spirit and life unfold itself, is that coming into existence means that we have a sense of this separate being that has to control things. And so that we're always moving, navigating. And then this navigating, when there's something pleasant, there's a sense of really needing to hold on

and when it's unpleasant to push it away. And one of the metaphors I find really helpful is to think of what you are, this body mind, as a room. And you're consistently trying to get the temperature right and the experience right inside this body room. And just like the weather out there, it's entirely impossible, right? I mean, you saw what today was like. If you're in D.C. area, I mean, it was beautiful, sunny, bright, blue spring day and then all of a sudden the clouds came in and there was thunder and the world became much smaller and darker and then moments later you know and it's inside it might not be

so rapid fire change although for some of us it is right but the weather is uncontrollable we really can't control these changing emotions we can't control the different sensations but we try. So we're trying to always turn the thermostat in some way and adjust things and control things. And when it doesn't work, what do we do? We leave the room, right? Don't we?

When we can't make things feel okay inside, we leave. That's our final control strategy. We totally exit. And we do it a lot. In fact, the trance of thinking. We spend most of our time where we've left in some way. We leave this temple of the senses.

So you might take a moment, just close your eyes and just check inside. And a valuable reflection or inquiry is just to ask yourself, is there anything right now between me and being at home? Being at home in my body. Now, for many, what we find is there's usually some

physical discomfort, some restlessness, some anxiety, some distractedness. And you might just ask yourself, stay, just stay. Stay here. You might find that you're really hot and uncomfortable. Stay. And what we start discovering is that it's unfamiliar. It's not familiar to stay. We're used to in some way controlling it, not letting it be just as it is. So we'll come back. We'll keep revisiting this, our habit. But what we find is our habit is to leave, and until we see that and start on purpose choosing to hang out here, we miss out on large swaths of our life.

Now, this leaving is very much reinforced by our culture. We're in a culture that has pretty much has a focus on dominating nature, not being with nature, but dominating, controlling nature, including the nature of these bodies. So what happens is that we feel pain and it's automatically considered something bad. You know, we anesthetized ourselves. We over-medicate. Our burs are in hospitals. Again, over-medicated.

our deaths are in institutions usually. You know, we dress up our corpses as if they're on their way to a party, right? You know? And so it's very much that in some way, aging and sickness and dying, these natural things are considered to be something wrong or bad and definitely something to control. Okay, we're not, we don't stay. We're trying to manipulate instead.

So that's one piece of it. And then we find that part of what makes us homeless is that not only do we not stay, we really take residence in this narrow place called a mental control tower, where we're thinking, thinking, thinking. And in the West, we worship rationality in the mind, and there's, you know, incredible gifts and beauty to the mind, but we get very caught in trying to figure things out. and we get very caught in speeding up.

This is again John O'Donoghue. He says, we rush through our days in such stress and intensity as if we were here to stay and the serious project of the world depended on us. Does that feel familiar? So here we are. The sense of homeless comes from this busyness and this busy mind and the speediness.

The first place I went for a meditation retreat was the Insight Meditation Society, and it's up in Massachusetts, Insight Meditation Society. And there was a story that in one of the first few months they were open, somebody sent a letter to them addressed to IMS, the Instant Meditation Society. So speed, and we know that speech, disconnects us and we know it for our children the toll it takes when we're so

caught on speed and electronics and technology that there's less physical activity there's less connectedness to the earth and natural cycles and so you get stories like one with a three-year-old that goes breathlessly to his mother mommy mommy daddy and I just went out and saw kittens and we saw two males and two females and the mother said well how did you know you know you know And she said, oh, daddy just turned them over. I think it's printed on the bottom. Or else you have the story of a math teacher who sees a little boy who's not paying attention in class.

And she asks him to quickly, she says, okay, Johnny, what is 4, 228, and 44? His response, NBC, CBS, HBO, and the cartoon now. So we know where the attention's going, right? So these are some of the cultural conditioning and one of the ones that I think is biggest is from the religious traditions often which is in a way the putting down to the feminine archetype

a kind of distrust of pleasure and sexuality and sensuality and it doesn't mean we're not totally addicted to pleasure it just means we have a kind of torqued relationship with it whereby there's a sense of really trying to control and in the religious message being that there's something less about living in this earthly plane and enjoying embodiment and these layers of pleasurable experience. It's less than spiritual. And I have another story. Some of you might remember, I think, is kind of telling of a lady approaches her priests. says, father, I've got a problem.

I have these two talking parrots. And priest says, well, what do they say? And she says, that's the problem. All I know how to say is, hi, we're prostitutes. Want to have some fun? And I just keep saying that over and over again. He says, I have a solution for you. I have two parrots also.

Males. My two parrots are very religious. You know, they'd be a help to your two parrots. So why don't you bring them over and, you know, we'll see if we can help. They can learn. I've taught my parrots how to pray and how to meditate and so on. Praise and worship. So she goes, oh, thank you, thank you. So she brings her two female parrots to the priesthouse, and his two male parrots are holding their rosary beads, you know, and they're praying in the cage. Okay, so the woman brings her females and puts them into the cage, and the female parrot immediately goes,

hi, we're prostitutes. You want to have some fun? And one male parrot looks over to the other and exclaims, Put the beads our way. Our prayers have been answered. So this is the body-mind split. That we have this cultural conditioning. This homelessness, I think we see it most distinctly emotionally. One of the most immediate ways that we split is that whenever there is real wounding, real pain,

whenever there is rejection, whenever there's a sense of our needs, not being met it hits to such a raw place that it can feel overwhelming and we'll pull away from that so some of the deepest layers of our of our being we have chosen not to stay with not because we're you know lazy or bad but because when we were wounded we did not have the resilience of the tools to be with them so the more personal wounding the more we have pushed away way that rawness and again exited we've left the room so what happens out of that well when we've

left our emotional life when we haven't been listening to the emotions that are there our behaviors get torched and it leads to addictive behaviors because we have to keep on soothing and covering over it leads to a real difficulty with with intimacy again another story for you I heard of These two guys are at the end of the day, you know, after work talking, and one was really kind of upset, felt chagrin. He had made an inappropriate remark. He was attracted to one of his colleagues, but by mistake, something popped out that really was off color. It had kind of a sexual innuendo, and he felt really embarrassed. And his friend said, it happens all the time.

It's called a Freudian slip. In fact, just the other morning, I was having breakfast with my wife. I meant to say, please pass the sugar, but instead I said, you damn bitch, you've ruined my life. And that's all of my examples for tonight of these things. But here's the situation. The more stress, the more stress that we're in, if we don't have a way of being with it, we cut off. And there are two core principles that I just want to emphasize here. And one is described as an equation, which is pain times resistance equals suffering.

So if there's pain, if there's some raw pain, if we felt rejected or we felt wounded, or there's physical pain that's too much to deal with, to the degree we resist and we leave home, there's suffering. There's a suffering of homelessness. And for each of us, it happens to some degree. And it creates what I think, and this is the languaging I'm really liking, when we leave home, it creates unlived life. The life that's there, we're not processing and experiencing.

It's unlived life. And as Carl Jung put it, and I refer to this particular quote a lot because it's had such an impact on me, which is really that the greatest influence on our own life and that of our children is the unlived life of the parents. That when we leave home, when we leave the temple of our senses

because it's been too much and we don't know how to be with that rawness, whether it's physical or emotional pain, we create this unlived life and it comes out in different ways. I mentioned a few examples, but one of the ways that we have, one of the flags of unlived life is tiredness. Because it takes energy to push things under and to constantly exit somewhere else.

I've talked about it as a kind of a bicycling away from the present moment, that the more stressed we are, the more there's something here we don't know how to be with, the faster we pedal. we speed away so if you see yourself speeding in your life and also tired there's something you might be running from

you know you might be tired because you're overworking and you need to get more sleep too but generally that's a push you know we're running away so that's one flag of unlived life another flag is that when we push away pain we actually

create more unpleasantness So many people that have chronic pain, there's a way that they're tensing against their pain and that very tensing against creates more pain. And we see that with childbirth, we know the instructions. You know, when the contractions come, don't contract against the contractions, right? Right? Because that makes things more difficult. We spend a lot of moments tensing against this unlived life. Okay? So there's two times. tiredness. There's that unpleasantness. A third thing. When we're pushing away the

unlived life, there's a kind of chronic apprehension that sets in our system. Because even though we're leaving the room, something in our nervous system knows it's still there, what we haven't faced. And so we might not be conscious of it, but there's still some kind of existential feeling of uneasiness like something bad's going to happen that we haven't dealt with. Okay, so tired, physical unpleasantness, this sense of kind of chronic anxiety or apprehension. And then in a very deep way, when we leave, when there's this kind of homelessness, we're in this trance of thinking, our sense of who we are becomes narrowed. rather than resting in a sense of beingness or wholeness,

we're living in a very small dimension of our being. And it's a very defended place. It's a very defended place. If I had to say, you know, the kind of core suffering and the Buddha causes Dukar suffering, it's that when there's unlived life, it obscures our spirit. We are so busy organizing around not feeling what's here.

We're living in a smaller place. We're not able to sense the radiance and openness and tenderness of what we are. So I'd like to share a story that touched me about how this kind of cutting off affects us. And it's a story that I encountered reading Rachel Naomi Remen, who's a physician and writer, and I greatly admire her work. Rachel does workshops with cancer patients, and she's really brought into the whole field of medicine a much more humane, spiritually based, heart-based way of coming home to what's going on with us, to the unlived life. and she in these workshops has cancer patients get into pairs and she'll have them do hands on healing with each other and much like I do with this hand on the heart

just sensing where the rawness or the pain or what we're running away from is and just to begin to bring attention there because that is the way home we bring attention to the place we're running from well she did a workshop for physicians and had them do the same exercise. Now, physicians don't do that kind of thing.

You know, their patients do it, but you know what I mean? So it was a very interesting process, and one man wrote about his experience, and he described that he was partnered up with a woman, her name's Jane, who's a general surgeon, brilliant woman, intimidating woman, rather cool and distant woman, and he's a little nervous about doing this exercise with her,

but he had just been going through a divorce, so he decided to take a chance and tell her. So he says, I've been going through a divorce, and she says, so what are the feelings about it? And he couldn't put words on it, but he said, I feel it right here. So he laid down on the rug and kind of waited. And for a few moments, nothing happened.

And he felt himself seized up, and in his mind he said, she's not going to put her hand on me. She's just kind of doing something like that because she's so distant. But then she did. And he described her hand as very firm yet gentle and completely there. And I want to read you. Jane put the palm of her hand on my chest and I was astonished by how warm her hand was

and how gentle and tenderly she touched me. A little at a time the warmth of her hand seemed to penetrate my chest and surround my heart. I had a sort of strange experience. For a while there it seemed to me As if she was holding my heart in her hand Rather than just touching my chest That's when I felt the strength in her hand How rock steady she was

And in a funny way I could feel that she was really there for my pain Committed to being there And suddenly I felt I was not alone I was safe That's when I started to cry He had turned to her and he said I had no idea who you were Your patience are lucky

But then it continued because Jane teared up and what she described was that she felt that she threw her medical training and the expectations of a very masculine profession and culture that she had kind of had a cut off from her softness and her gentleness and her warmth from the vulnerable places in her she had to cut off because there was an approval in the medical world for this and she had thought these parts were lost and her tears were these tears of homecoming

because she had felt homeless. She had felt cut off. And this was kind of this invitation back to something she cherished. What feels really important as we think of our own lives and just consider this story is that the message is from the culture

and the messages from our own conditioning are don't go there. It's not safe. Others won't understand. It's not respected by this culture to be scared or weak or needy or tender or soft. And then what happens is we push away and the shadow side comes forward, this kind of tangle. So our challenge is how to be with it in the way that Jane's hand was, how to offer a presence to the unlived life.

here's what's interesting we each have a really strong conditioning to keep pushing it away and you'll find it re-presents itself over and over again that something in us will find our exit strategies and awareness comes back

for all the tangles it's almost as if imagining that any part of our being that's been pushed away awareness wants our wholeness and comes back for it. Anything that's been pushed away. So the more we start waking up, the more there's some place in us that wants to be with what we've been running from

and is willing to be. So how? The first thing is to know there's a kind of attitude. If you want to more deeply commit yourself to embracing the unlived life, the attitude, really patient, doesn't have to be all at once. Interested. There's an interest. Like, really, what is this?

What is it that I've pushed away? What's here? Gentle. Like Jane's hand, really gentle. So the way in, we awaken our senses, much as our meditations do. When we gather, we start by coming through the body, perhaps doing a body scan. Well, you might even write

this moment as you're listening, wonder if you've been listening and left your body. How many of you, should I ask you? Maybe. We forget. Come back again. So you just kind of scan through your body and re-relax, re-soften through the body. Open your senses. There's a listening not just to the words but to sounds.

listening to your heart. So part of coming back and embracing the unlived life is learning to come back to our body and scan through our body and inhabit ourselves from the inside out. Okay? Now, it really helps to ask the question, what is wanting attention?

I mean, if you're listening inward right now and you just close your eyes and say, what most wants attention inside me, just ask the question, and then listen with interest. Listen with interest. What you'll find is that what wants attention is whatever places in you

you might have been moving away from. Maybe it's a feeling of a physical discomfort right now, heat and prickliness. Maybe there's some fear around that or thirstiness. maybe there is some restlessness in you or some sadness that you've been moving away from so these are some elements

we approach ourselves with gentleness with patience we wake up our senses and then we sense what wants attention now for many people and if you'd like to open your eyes you can I'm going to speak a little more and I will have you practice some it's very very gradual and I find this more for men

than for women. I've been with men that have said I really can't feel from the neck down except for when I'm having sex. You know, and they're not joking. I mean, just like, you know, and especially if there's been trauma, it's very, very dangerous to come into the body. So very, very gradual. Sometimes with the assistance of therapists and healers is really the wisest way to begin to establish this embodied presence. But there are many kind of supports that we can explore. So an example of one man and how it worked for him just to give you a sense of this, the guy in our community here in Washington owned a business, a good number of employees.

And when the economy started crashing, he was a lot of. he was in a position of having to lay off many, many people that he had worked very closely with and it set him into really a painful place of guilt and anxiety and he was just spinning. His mind was obsessing all the time. And so, you know, it fixate on the balance sheet and what was around the corner and he'd see the face of somebody that he knew that he was going to have to lay off and it was really, really in pain. And so when he started exploring it with me, we knew that he was going to need to come and befriend

and in some way contact and make peace with the places in himself that were most raw and most vulnerable and felt most challenged. But he couldn't do it all at once. One of the first things that helped him was to begin this kind of belly breathing. And it activates the parasympathetic nervous. system and it calms down the sympathetic, which is fight-flight. So his first part of his practice was not to be mindful of the panic in a system, but it was to just concentrate on breathing, long, deep breathing.

And the second thing that he did at the same time was he went for a lot of walks outside because there's more and more research that's showing that when we walk outside and we are in the elements, because he would walk in a Rock Creek Park, that it really brings internal balance. So he was doing those two things, and then the third was he would start practicing when he felt really agitated, just putting his hand gently here,

much as I described in Jane's story, and also I teach a lot, just putting his hand here. Then we began the inquiry. Okay, so what wants attention? And he'd sit here, and you'd just feel his hand here, and he'd say there's a squeeze in my heart,

you know and and I'd encourage him just stay stay you know and again not longer than he felt he could but stay and he'd have his hand and his heart and then the teaching as many of you know with the staying is can you just name what it's like and say yes in some way so that became his practice

he would just say tightness pressure squeeze feeling of tearing anxiety guilt he'd just name what was there and he'd say yes to this, yes to that. Yes, not meaning that I like this or I want this to stay. That wasn't what he meant. Yes was, I'm willing to be with this life that's here. I'm willing to be with it.

And what he started finding when he stayed and when he stayed and when the yes got deep and I got really sincere, yes, I will be here with this life. I'm not going to leave it. was that he found a space of what he called courage, courageous presence. And for him it became stronger and stronger until he felt like what he had going for him was that anything could happen

and he had found a space of presence that could handle it. One teacher called it a heart that is ready for anything. which I think is such a beautiful description. And it comes out of staying, not leaving. As long as we leave, we think something's around the corner that's going to completely level us, right? It's like we're tensing against our life

and there's no way we can relax. But when we actually stay and we just let everything play itself out, and we become the space that's present. And for him, it was a very courageous space. And by the word courage is really a greatness of heart. He just had his hand on his heart, and he felt like he became this heart space that had room.

So he told me that he found through this experience that the space that was present, he felt what had the intelligence and the strength of the universe. It wasn't him. He said it wasn't personal space. It was through being present, through not leaving. He tapped into something universal.

And this is what I call one of the blessings of coming home to the unlived life. Is that in that presence, we tap into the qualities of heart-mind that are really our effort. essence, courage, wisdom, kindness. So I want to kind of close tonight by just exploring with you, what are the blessings of this homecoming? And the first one I think of is of aliveness. I've seen, I've worked with many, many people that in this process of being with the unlived life have come to me and said, you know, I have like five times the energy I used to have. I'm staying up. you know, I can't sleep at night time.

You know, that works itself out, by the way. But there's like a lot of energy because, you know, when we've been putting a lot of energy into suppressing, and we're no longer doing that, there's a lot of flow that we're tapping into. So there's a sense of,

by being present with the body in this way, that we belong to life. And there's this aliveness. Eduardo Galliano puts it this way. The church says the body is a sin. Science says the body is a machine. Advertising says the body is a business. The body says, I am a fiesta.

So there's a sense of in this homecoming, the challenge is that what we're coming home to is wild. It's out of our control. We're in that room. We cannot turn the dials. We just have to open the windows and doors and let the winds of life move through. And yet when we don't control, we reconnect with our wildness. I read you from John O'Donni here.

He says there's nothing as wild in the universe as the presence of God. That wildness of the divine expresses through the earth through the native wildness within us. And then he asks, what have we done with that wildness? wildness. So that's part of this experience of homelessness is that life can feel a bit canned. And like we're repeating cycles. One woman described as she got older that it was like she felt like she was getting up and having breakfast every five minutes. You know, it's like it kind of speeds up, but it's all the same. So that's one of the sirens or wake-ups when things are feeling like we're repeating and it's been there, done that. And when we start coming home to the body, it starts

feeling very wild, like we're on this ride. And yet we're really the space, this kind of courage of heart that's really letting this life live through us. And we're tapped into something very wild and very vibrant and very dynamic. So that's one piece that we find. And that brings up in us a sense of wonder. And I read from Albert Einstein here. I like the way he puts it. He says, the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is a source of all true art and all science.

He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead. His eyes are closed. So this homecoming is opening our eyes. and it includes a deep sense of wonder. So one of the blessings of embodiment is this sense of the aliveness, the wonder.

The second blessing is love. It's so interesting to me that many people confide this that they know they love other people, but they don't feel the visceral sense of loving. It's kind of abstract. And I hear this a lot. One woman told me that this was when her daughter was a senior in high school.

She said, I spend more time judging and worrying about my daughter than loving her. That's really, that's such sorrow with that. The separation. Another parent had a parent with Alzheimer's and was incredibly busy trying to focus on how to deal with all the different dimensions of the challenge there. spend a lot of time, you know, working with fear and upset. And then when her father actually was dying and there was starting to be this grief for the loss,

realized that so much busyness and had that, you know, not a contact with the heart. So the message here is don't wait, you know, just don't wait. This trance of thinking we're in, can take up huge swaths of our day-to-day life. And if you're honest and you think about your life, you think about today, how much time were you here in contact with this living body?

How many moments were your senses really open so you were taking in the weather that was outside and inside you in an immediate sensory way in the temple of the senses? How many moments? And this isn't to bring a judgment but more to sense that this life is a flash. It's like a dream. It's a flash.

It's very, very quick. And if we want to really live from the place in us that knows how to love, if we want to really experience wisdom and truth, we need to be right here. So love is something most of, of us really want and we can't experience love unless we're in our bodies. And it's that simple. If we're cut off from our bodies, our love is academic, it's intellectual, it's one step

removed. The poet Hafez says, please stay near to me and Avase will spin you into love. Stay near to me. Stay right here. Come back. I think of it is there's so many. moments that we want to help and we want to act ethically and we're helpful but our hearts aren't alive with that caring. So this coming home to our bodies is not some self-centered, you know, go off to a mountain top, just pay attention to our own navel. It's our way to connect with this living heart so we can really hold this world in love. You might just take a moment. We'll just do a brief reflection on this. Just take a moment to pause. And notice if you have disconnected from your body that you can invite yourself back right here in a very simple way.

Just feel your breath and sense the possibility of relaxing with your breath. I might notice if you can let your shoulders relax back and down a little. And if you can soften your hands. Let the chest be open. So you can feel the breath. so you can feel the breath now filling you more fully, expanding, relaxing. And just to bring to mind one person in your life that's a dear person, somebody you care about. As we do with the loving kindness practice, just bring them close in.

Imagine that person that he or she is right here in the room. And see what it is you see in that person that allows you to feel your appreciation. your love. You might imagine that person looking at you with affection or care. You might sense that person, their humor, their brightness, their goodness. To sense that person's essential goodness. And as you do, just stay connected with the sensations in your heart. Feel your heart in a visceral way.

You might imagine that you in some way letting that person know your love. You're expressing it to them. letting them know their goodness, expressing your appreciation. And as you do, imagine how that person is touched by what you say or do. It may be that you hug that person. Imagine putting your hand on their cheek or heart. And just communicating what you see, what you love,

and feel your heart as you do. It helps to touch your own heart. Feel your heart as you're feeling your love. love. When we're connected to the flow of the heart, we're connected to grace. There's a naturalness that becomes expressed. So continuing to feel yourself in your body right here if you'd like to open your eyes, you can. So the blessings of this homecoming is feeling our own vitality, the aliveness of our bodies and energetic aliveness, feeling our hearts come alive. And then the third and last

piece I want to mention is that when we are at home in our bodies we awaken a wisdom that's penetrating and liberating. When we're in the trance of thinking we cannot see reality

directly. We can't see reality as it is. We're one step removed. And yet in the moments that we're embodied right here we can see the truth. It's Kabir says it so beautifully. He says, if you want the truth, I will tell you the truth. The God whom I love is inside. Right here.

So what happens? What do we see? What is the truth we recognize? If we're really here, and just pay attention to this, you might even close your eyes and sense it. If you're right here feeling directly this living body, it's very clear. that everything's changing. Nothing is holding still. Now, if you begin to think about it, it'll become more static. But just like the weather and the seasons,

this inner aliveness is in a constant changing state of flow. So one realization is it's always changing in the most minute immediate ways and in the broader swaths. Everything's changing. another realization is if we try to hold on to anything we suffer one person put it at the end of a retreat it's like trying to hold on to a moving rope we get rope burn right well in our lives everything's moving if we try to

control it if we try to hold onto it if we push it away we suffer the only way to not suffer is inhabit the changing flow be the flow So that's two of the realizations, okay? It's changing. There's suffering when we try to control it. The third realization, which is so beautiful, is that when we are right here in this living, changing experience of our energy, we realize that what we are is so much vaster than any idea can ever capture.

we're not who we think we are we'll keep on going back to a story of a self but in the moments that were directly right here I mean here in a non-conceptual really here way there is a changing flow of aliveness and there's just a resting in the awareness that knows that we cannot be defined by anything smaller so the Buddha

taught that all the teachings, all the teachings arise in this fathom long body, everything. And it's natural that if we pay attention deeply and we inhabit this living universe that's right here, we live in widening circles of being. We just live in a wider and wider place, a place that's vibrant, loving, and clear right here.

and wise. And that's the invitation. The invitation is to keep coming back, keep coming home, and discover that radical freedom. So I'd like to end with one short meditation for you, if you will. Again, just to invite you to close your eyes. So again, that Tibetan teaching, do nothing with the body but relax. See if it's possible to let go just a little more right now. as you relax let the senses be wide open again from the Tibetan teachings utterly awake senses wide open utterly open non-fixating attention changing sounds so that you're listening but not just with your ears come into a state of listening with your whole awareness sounds come and go the changing

sensations like points of light in the night sky, just dancing. See if you can let everything happen. As you bring your presence right this moment to the life of the body, explore what it means to say yes in a cellular way, not opposing anything. You might notice, is there anything that's not moving? Is there any self that you can find in this world of sensations? Any center, any boundary? Just relaxing and letting go to inhabit this aliveness. The poet Dana Falls writes, trust the energy that courses through you.

Trust. And then take surrender even deeper. Be the energy. Don't push anything away. Follow each sensation back to its source in vastness and pure presence. Follow each sensation back to its source in vastness

and pure presence. Emerge so new, so fresh that you don't know who you are. Welcome in the season of monsoons. Be the bridge across the flooded river and the surging torrent underneath. Be unafraid of consummate wonder.

Be the energy and blaze a trail across the clear, night sky like lightning. Dare to be your own illumination. Namaste. 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.org. Thank you very much. Thank you.