Tara Brach - The Blessings of Embodied Presence

Episode Date: December 29, 2011

2011-12-29 - The Blessings of Embodied Presence (retreat talk) - All that we cherish - love, creativity, wisdom and aliveness - becomes available when we come home to an embodied presence. This talk looks at how the two wings of mindfulness and compassion guide us in the midst of difficulty to our inner sanctuary of freedom. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

There is an inquiry that a number of us find really helpful. We use it a lot in teaching and with ourselves, and you've heard it. And it goes like this. It's this question that we ask ourselves, what right now is between me and feeling free? And you might just check in, even in this moment sense, because it has a very radical quality. It can be illuminating. What is between me and being free? Or being at peace in this moment.

And if we really check in, perhaps we'll discover there is quite a lot of freedom. Or we might discover that we, just by asking that question, realized something we hadn't noticed, a certain kind of tightness or clench or cloudiness, a quality of not really being here and open and awake.

Any time we're suffering, whenever there's suffering, whenever there's unsatisfactoriness, on some level in the body-mind, there's some tightness, there's some holding, there's some resisting. It's some form of contraction.

And really, unless there's full freedom, that's the hindrance that's going on. There's a contraction that's keeping us from resting in and knowing the fullness of what we are. So what I'd like to do tonight is continue with exploring these different, they're really these universal energies that we tend to contract around and solidify around. And I say universal, every body mind on planet Earth has the same makeup to experience wanting, something that's pleasant, to experience wanting to push away something that's unpleasant. We all get sleepy, we all get restless, doubt.

So to the degree that there is a contraction around any of those energies, to that degree, we leave our wholeness and become small. So that's what I'd like to explore. But really where I'd like to take it is how do we awaken through that? and in a different way to put it is there's this transformation that's possible by staying present that is truly liberating

and one of the best metaphors for it that I've run into we find in Asian art that if you look in the temples and in some of the mandolas what you'll see is these wrathful goddesses and they're goddesses of anger and greed and hatred and lust and longing.

And you see images of them. They're incredibly energized and some of them look really terrifying and, you know, some of them are just awe-inspiring. And in all the art, whether it's going into a temple or in these mandala's, the pathway is through these deities. In other words, it's through engagement with the deities that we enter, sacred space. It's not because we managed to come in the back door. It's not because we had a retreat without any stormy weather. It's because the natural energies arose and they'll arise

in every one of our body minds and we stayed engaged. We moved through. Last week in Bethesda, I titled my talk after a necklace I saw a friend of mine and I went for a walk and she she was wearing this necklace and she said look look and I look close and it said no mud no lotus so that's pretty much the theme of this talk because if if you leave this room tonight with a little more of a intuitive trusting that what you might sense as the mud what's difficult actually is the very energy that when you attend to it brings alive your spirit, your understanding and your heart. There'll be a little less lag time when the energy's hit that you'll go, oh, this is bad, bad thing, bad thing, you know, don't want it

to happen too. Oh yeah, okay. Let me be with this. So a bit of this is really a talk about attitude, how we encounter the inevitable. Now the pathway through to the center of the mandala, to sacred space, is through these bodies. There's no way around it. This is what we were given. The Buddha said, within this fathom long body is found all the teachings, is found suffering,

the cause of suffering, and the end of suffering. So all the gods and goddesses are the energies that play through these bodies. That's where we encounter them. And it's important to kind of emphasize that because there is even in many spiritual traditions a kind of false impression that the goal is to transcend the body,

to get out of the body, to have out there experiences, you know, crystal dazzling rainbows of light, and that that's higher and better than what goes on in here, John O'Donohue. Here's what he wrote. He said, we need to come home to the temple of our senses. Our bodies know they belong to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. Our bodies know they belong.

It's our minds that make us so homeless. This pathway, a lot of what we practice, as you've been noticing, is that we wake from the trance of thinking, which does not mean we try to obliterate thinking. We're not trying to get rid of anything, but we don't want to be lost inside it because we want to be able to include this fathom-long body where we encounter all the living energies.

So it becomes important to investigate how our minds make us homeless. How do we leave? I love this teaching from Ajan Buda Dasse. He describes when asked to talk about this world that it's lost in thought. That's his description of the whole world. And then his advice, he says,

don't do anything that takes you away from your body. Don't do anything that takes you away from your body. And yet, as we know, like all living organisms, we react to pleasantness by grasping and often leaving our body in thoughts and fantasies of how to have more. and get somewhere else and get more of it. Sometimes we leave pleasantness

because we have what's sometimes described as upper limits toleration, which means too much pleasantness sets off fear. It's this incredible intensity of aliveness that sets off fear and we back off because of that and we leave our bodies. Just unfamiliar. And then as we know,

when it's unpleasant like all organisms, conditioning is again to leave. We try to control what's going on and we immediately make an assessment with unpleasant. And if you can catch the assessment, you'll actually have more chance finding the space of presence. We very quickly name it as wrong and bad. Unpleasantness very quickly gets translated and then our minds begin to judge and assign blame and complain. And it's interesting to notice how much our minds grumble.

My son, Narayan, when he was pretty young, started becoming a real complainer. He would just fixate on what was wrong. And so I got into the habit of calling him King Kavetch, you know, King Kavetch. And then he got into the habit of calling me Queen of Denial. Now, I don't know if he even knew what he was saying, But now he's trying to get into grad school in psychology, so maybe that was like advanced warning.

But at one point I told him this story that I just remember today we're talking at lunch. And this is 16th century Japan. And there was a nun. Her name was Ono. And her teaching was very, very simple. She said she would repeat over and over again this mantra. Thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever.

Thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever. And she had this aura, this radiance, and she had a disciple that practiced it for 10 years and came back to her and said, you know, I'm doing it, but it's just not working. And then she repeated it. Thank you for everything.

I have no complaints whatsoever. And of course he was liberated on the spot, right? That's how they all go, those end stories. But so I told my son this. I told him this mantra. And I'll never forget within a week of telling him the story, driving him to the dentist and running into traffic and getting, and I was just like so pissed off.

And we were going to be late. And I remember him nudging me with his elbow. Mama, thank you for everything. He said it right back to me. So that's been circulating our family for a while. So we assess and we complain and we judge. Now the more uncomfortable we get, the more restlessly are, the more we don't want to be here, the more we speed away from our body and from the present moment.

And we want things to be different and we want them to be different quickly. Even in spiritual life, there's an impatience. You know, we have a sense of a timetable and where we are on the map in terms of progress. and there's just wanting it to be more and better. I remember in the early days of the Insight Meditation Society at IMS, one of the letters they got was addressed to the instant meditation society. So we exit. And this is a conditioning that's organismic.

It's also something that you can sense it that there's not a trust of aliveness. that in this body's aliveness, there's the heat of fire, and then there's cold, and then there's weight, and there's the winds and the intensity, and the crushing. There's all the intensity of this natural world moves through these bodies. We're made of the elements. So we don't trust that. And what happens is we pull away. And what I sense is that the more the culture is removed from the earth, the more we're a kind of culture that doesn't

have that much involvement with our natural environment, the more controlling there is of the body and of the earth, and the more we are in this habit of being separate. And it's really a dis-ease of our culture. The more removed we are from our bodies, the more we medicate instead of really knowing how to listen to and trust our own process of healing, we're not able to really listen to our bodies in those cases. The more we move from our body, the more consume what we don't need on all levels. And of course, as a society, the more we consume and we try to race to overproduce and end up in a deep way injuring our earth in a way that may be a repairable. So there's a real price to pay for leaving this body and our earth body.

And in religious traditions, and the more patriarchal they are, the more you'll see it, There's that same mistrust of this archetypal feminine. We're afraid of living, dying, this out of control, earthy, bodily being. And so there's a controlling and a mistrusting. And so you get Eve in the Garden of Eden as the seductress. You can see it in this story. A lady goes to her priest one day and tells him,

Father, I have a problem. I have two female parrots, but they only know how to say one thing. What do they say? They say, hi, we're prostitutes. Do you want to have some fun? That's obscene, the priest exclaimed. Then he thought from a moment, you know, I think I have a solution. I have two male-talking parrots whom I've taught to pray and read the Bible. Bring your two parrots over to my house and we'll put them in a cage with Francis and Job. My parents can teach your parents to praise and worship, and your parents are sure to stop saying that phrase.

Thank you. The woman responded. This may very well be the solution. So the next day she brings the parrots over, and he ushers are in, the priest ushers are in, the two parrots are inside their cage. They each have rosaries. And they're praying, and she's impressed. She walks over and places her parrots in with them. And after a few minutes, the female parrots cry out in unison.

Hi, we're prostitutes. Do you want to have some fun? There was a stunned silence. Finally, one male parrot looked over to the other and exclaimed, blame. Put the beads away, Francis. Our prayers have been answered. So we see it in the, we see it in the hierarchical religions that there's this sense of sexuality, sensuality, the earth, the body, bad, control it, transcend it. The heavenly realm is up here, out there, or something like that. Now in our personal history, and I'm giving you just the

different layers of what has us leave our body. and leave this realm of aliveness, the more emotional wounding we've had, the more our natural reflex, and it's very, very natural, it's not something to get down on ourselves for, is to pull away from the place where we feel the rawness of the wounding.

We don't want to feel our feelings when they feel like too much. So to the extent we felt that we didn't receive unconditional love or we weren't seen, to the extent that we felt abused or traumatized, it's going to be our habit to dissociate from that rawness. So, again, it's our conditioning,

and the point that I'm making is not that we should, you know, avoid comfort or that we shouldn't take medicine or that we should dive into where the rawness is because sometimes it's just too much. So this isn't like a machismo kind of a teaching. You know how George Carlin said it. He said my motto is, no pain, no pain. Our bodies, our minds are organized around this pulling away,

and yet something in us intuits that if we don't look and investigate and explore how to instead stay, if we don't learn to stay, we miss out on this portal that I've been describing this pathway to sacred space. So there's a core principle that you'll hear, if you haven't heard it already, in the Viphasana circles. And that is that pain, that these life energies that we experience, including all the different forms of unpleasantness, is inevitable, but that the suffering is obvious.

optional, that we can change our relationship with it in a way that relieves the suffering. That's the core principle. And it goes hand in hand with an equation that you'll hear a lot, which is pain times resistance equals suffering. To the degree that there's unpleasantness in your being and you push away, or to degree which is there's wanting and you grasp, either way you're leaving what's actually here. and that creates suffering. So what I want to do is just describe four key ways that it creates suffering

because I think it helps to kind of start looking at it more close up. Carl Jung said that our suffering comes from the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche, which means that when we leave the rawness that's here, the longing that's here, the fear that's here, it becomes unseen and unfelt. Okay? And that's what he said the suffering comes from. So what happens to that walled-off experience when we're not sitting down into the life that's here? One thing that happens is we get tired.

Sometimes it's a physical tiredness and sometimes it's a mental tiredness, but we get tired because it takes a lot of energy to keep leaving. That makes sense? That when we're tensing against something, even if we don't know we're tensing against it. Our bodies get tired. It takes a lot of work to keep on pushing away. So the second way that it causes suffering is that whenever we have tension and we block an energy flow, it actually creates more physical unpleasantness. It might be an indirect or a secondhand kind of pain. And you know the common example is with labor that the idea is when you're giving birth not to contract against the contractions. Well, anytime we contract against some form of pain, it's another contraction.

We're creating more tightness in our body. The third way that it creates suffering when we are not with what's actually here is that we experience a chronic apprehension, which means that even if we've pushed away the raw fear, there's this sense of impending doom, that something around the corner is going to be too much. Because it's not that the fear is all gone. It's just, it's one step removed and still sending out its tentacles, letting us know that it might be too much down the road. So we're never able to really relax. Okay. The fourth way is the most central to our inquiry here, which is that in any moment of contracting against something, our sense of who we are gets identified with it.

We are linked to whatever we're grasping or resisting. So we move from this open presence, a sense of wholeness, of aliveness, of beingness, of wholeheartedness, to a story and a set of feelings that's smaller than who we are. And if we're chronically wanting or chronically resched, resisting, then we're chronically living inside a smaller sense of self. So we suffer from the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche. Now, as I mentioned, even though we're really conditioned to pull away, each one of you is here because you have a wisdom within you that intuit the freedom that's possible, the who you could be, who you really are when you're not resisting. and grasping. It's like we have a longing to be who we are. That's what it really comes down to.

And so even though sometimes I get asked in the classes with beginners and so on, why would I want to sit down and have to feel this unpleasantness? You know, why wouldn't I rather just be in a fantasy or something? And, you know, it's hard to answer on one level because, yeah, there are more pleasant intermediate states in the long run, the answer is no mud, no lotus. You know, if we don't open to the what's actually here, we don't contact the aliveness that frees us. So we intuit that. There's a, I gave this book called the Radiant Sutras to Jonathan for Christmas and immediately took it away and I've been reading it ever since. I love them. It's from the yoga tantra tradition. Because it's really basically talking about coming through this gateway of the body,

to the aliveness and to the beingness that's always here. And we get this through yoga and through chigang and through viphasana when we go through the first foundation of senses and breath. When possessed by lust or anger, greed, arrogance, fear, stop. Dive deeper. Witness the elemental motion of emotions. Fire, burning, illuminating, water gushing, cleansing, air inspiring, soothing, earth, supporting, holding, space, expanding, embracing, go deeper still and rest in essence, awake to infinite spiritual energy surging into form. Now that describes this pathway, but as we know, the beginning.

beginning of this pathway isn't like we just go into the emotion, feel the aliveness, and feel spirit. There's these layers that aren't so easy, so I'm not going to skip over those. Our pathway often starts for many of us with a kind of flag where there's some behavior in our lives that have caused pain and it might be a behavior that stops us from feeling free with other people or intimate or close might be something that actually creates outright conflict might be an addiction that keeps us in some way violating ourselves or at war with ourselves but there's usually some flag that has us pay attention that that takes us from

our bodies and makes our lives homeless in some way that experience was exploring with one of the groups today that you know one of the painful things that happens with these patterns of grasping and avoiding and that we do them in our lives and then to find that we're still doing it and we've been with it with presence but it's come up again and then 20 years later we're still noticing the same pattern and and so some members of the group of reporting the discouragement with that and it feels really important to share I don't want to discourage you with my own story but I can see the same patterns that I remember from my teens still playing through, the same kind of thoughts and the same squeeze in the body and the same insecurity still playing through, the same tendency to want approval.

You know, I can see them in action. The difference now from then is that they don't feel like me. They just feel like they're playing through. There's so much more familiarity with the sense of being this that's not hitched to those behaviors. It doesn't mean they're pleasant. They're still unpleasant. And sometimes there's a twinge of embarrassing or whatever. And sometimes there's more stuckness than less than other times.

But there is, because I have so many rounds encountered them. And I say that because it's okay if there's many, many rounds as far as I can tell. Because each round that you come into the body and encounter the same, you know, routine that's been playing out in your body, you are a little less identified and get a little more familiar with, oh, so those are those beliefs and those feelings. They don't define me. They don't limit me. They don't express the fullness of who I am. So we repeat them. And some of the ones we named, controlling, lashing out, blaming, accommodating. You know, we, they become a flag. One of my favorite stories about these outward behaviors is actually a story of a dog. A guy's driving down the backwoods of

Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty talking dog for sale. So rings the bill, the owner appears and tells them the dogs in the backyard. The guy goes into the backyard and sees a nice looking lab sitting there. You talk, yes? Yep, the Lab replies. After the guy recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says, So, what's your story? Lab looks up and says, well, I discovered I could talk when I was pretty young. I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA. In no time at all, they had me jetting from country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders, because no one figured a dog would be eavesdropping. I was one of their most valuable spies for eight years

running, but jetting around really tired me out. I knew I wasn't getting any younger. So I decided to settle down. I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering near suspicious characters and listening in. I uncovered some incredible dealings and was awarded a batch of medals. Got married, had a mess of puppies. Now I'm just retired. Guy's amazed.

He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog. $10, the guy says. $10? This dog's amazing. Why on earth are you selling him so cheap? Because he's a liar. He never did any of that shit. So how many of us try to impress or get approval?

We know it. So the first step, we see the flags of our repeating behaviors that in some way keep us from resting in our own sense of wholeness, of being. That's the first step. Then we notice the thoughts that are swirling around, and the invitation is to come and be right here in this body. Rumi says Step out of the tangle of fear thinking

flow down and down into ever widening rings of being so we come out of the thinking and into our body but the first ring of being is often not the fear thinking but the actual sensations of fear so I'd like to now share

two different examples of how when we are coming into this living body, there can be this transformation with these energies. And the first is a story of aversion. The second is a story of craving. In this first story, and this is a couple of years ago, a woman I was working with,

had severe rheumatite arthritis, and she was a dancer. And so this was huge, huge thing. Very limited movement now. So that any unpleasant sensation was a trigger. She had a few layers, but what had she done wrong to get punished? Was the big one? She felt very much in some way a victim.

And she was angry at herself, like in some way she had not done a lifestyle that worked, and then she was angry at God. And of course, she was very much afraid of how much worse it would get. So the identification was sick person, victim, angry, person, fearful person. And so her longing really was, and she came to me with the question of refuge, because she knew that's something I like that language. And so we begin to practice together, and the practice always has these two wings. And you've been hearing about them, maybe not in this exact language. There's always the wing of what is happening

right here, of mindfulness, of noticing. And the other wing is this letting be that is really a space of tenderness and compassion. So mindfulness and compassion. And the Buddha said that we have to have both wings to fly to freedom. There has to be that seeing of what's happening and that tenderheartedness. So we worked with it and the beginning of the process really was for her to begin to sense the fear she was living with. And she, you know, because that was the main thing, this fear of, I've already lost so much

and how much more am I going to lose. And I asked her question that I often ask, and Jonathan, I think, mentioned it, and it's very, very useful, which is really, what does this fear want from you? What does it need? and her response was it needs me to accept that it's there just to accept that it's there not try to make it go away

and I want to slow down here because it's really important that there's parts of us that they just need for us to accept that they're there there's something about being present with something and just letting it be there so that was the beginning

of when she could accept that it was there the anger unfolded itself because that's what happens. Things unfold themselves. Energy just keep moving to a deep grieving, that sense of just that purity of loss, that ouch, when you just really know that this is this basic thing

that you care about, that you're losing. And so for her, then the natural response was compassion with that. She could start to be compassionate with herself. And so that was her practice. whenever there was the unpleasantness of pain, she would feel the kind of upsurge of fear. She'd say, okay, this too, this too, accepting, accepting. And that would let it unfold to the grief, which is more of a place you can come into compassionate presence with. And for her, and I use this metaphor a lot, there was a shift from being caught in these waves of unpleasantness and fear and

and anger and victim to a sense of this ocean of presence that could compassionally hold the waves on the surface, but her identity was no longer lost in the waves. And as I mentioned this morning, that's the shift. That's the transformation. When we encounter the goddesses, the wrathfulness doesn't go or the fear or the hurt. but what shifts is our experience of who we are when we're really present with what's in our bodies. For her, this shift of being with this experience

brought a kind of clarity and spaciousness. And what she told me, because she wrote to me after she was emailed to me, is she said, I used to move gracefully on earth, and now there's more grace in my heart and spirit. but she went on and said, and I have more ease physically because I'm not tensing against the experience.

So she regained some of her physical grace, but more, what is grace? It's when we're not resisting what's happening. We come into grace, we come into alignment with the flow of the universe. We come into alignment with the natural intelligence of the universe. It flows through us. with the tenderness, with the creativity, that's grace.

One of our friends, poet Donna Fault, says, Go in and in. Be the space between two cells, the vast resounding silence in which spirit dwells. Go in and in and turn away from nothing that you find. So that's story number one. The second story of taking these energies of contraction

that keep us from who we are and coming home man in his mid-30s and again this was a few years ago had been through a series of unsuccessful relationships and he finally got involved with she seemed like the one

his soulmate their sex was passionately the lovemaking was such that he came into full communion and it was really riveting for him but it was more than that. Every chakra met up, you know, is that kind of thing. Anyway, I'm just giving you a little bit of his language. So, as you might have guessed, this passionate thing,

someone's in, the same passion went into conflict. And the conflict was that he really wanted to move it forward, and he was more ready to commit. And she wasn't so ready. And the more he sensed her not so ready, the more grasping. and then a young place in him, a needy place came out. Even the word needy was, again, that's his, but it's what he started feeling. And she backed off.

So when I actually met him, it was a year and a half later, and he was pining for her and lonely, and he still felt in anguish, which happens. So we started with that loneliness, and there's a beautiful phrase, from the poet Hafiz, which says, let the loneliness cut more deep. He says, let it cut more deep,

because it's only when the loneliness cuts really deep, do we get in touch with our longing for God. If it doesn't cut deep enough, we keep on grabbing onto the wrong thing. Does that make sense? It has to cut really deep. So he just opening, opening through the loneliness,

and he got in touch with this huge longing, but she was the object. and again I'm bringing it around to what we were talking about this morning. This is huge desire fixated on an outside object, his lost soulmate. And so I asked him to start really investigating this longing. And what he was wanting, I said, well, what are you really wanting? He said, well, I want communion.

I want her and I emerge. I want to feel that oneness I felt. And I said, more. Tell me what it was like. what is it you're really really wanting to experience and he said okay I want to feel warmth and I want to feel that incredible aliveness that has no bounds it's just alive it's like living light boundless living light and I asked him are you feeling that right now and he had this kind of a rapturous look and I said it's already here in you it's

in you. It's like Kavir says the God you seek is inside. It's here in you. Now that doesn't mean that he didn't very quickly fixated back on, well, she's the source. She's what makes it possible. Of course he looped into that, but that became its practice. And we call it tracing back the radiance. Rather than looking at the object, we're going in and in and in to the experience of the aliveness in whatever way it expresses to the actual space it comes from, which is spirit, in and in and in. It takes many rounds. Our minds are conditioning is very much to fix on objects, whether it's what I don't like. We're waiting to latch on to something wrong. We might have an inner sense of, you know, I'm going to be betrayed or abandoned or,

mistreated and then we latch onto experiences. We're like ready to latch outside us. We're ready to latch onto what can complete us outside us. So it takes many, many rounds of feeling the longing or the fear, whichever it is. And rather than I'm afraid you're gonna do this and I'm afraid and I need you to give me this, it's feeling the want or the fear and then going in and in and in until the very presence with what's there takes on the energy, the energy essence. When I studied with Sokney Rimbusha, who's a Tibetan teacher, some of you know, one of the questions he got was, you know, what's the purpose of emotions?

I mean, what can emotions do for us other than just wanting to, you know, get unstuck for them? And he was adamant and it was really beautiful. He says, the emotions are the juice of practice. practice. He said emptiness would be totally dry if you didn't go through your body and experience embodied emptiness. There's no aliveness to it. It's a juice. Now I want to say that sometimes it's too much to go in and in and in. And I mentioned it before because sometimes it sounds like up front where these cheerleaders for face your fears and dive into the anger and the burn and the rage

and it's not always possible are wise. There are times that the storms are so violent or we feel fragile, and there's just not enough resourcefulness. And what happens is that the lesson we learn is just how terrible we can feel and how battered we can get by being with what's right here. So there are times that it's actually wiser and more compassionate to seek somebody

that can help hold the kind of, container. It's times that it's just saying a mantra of loving kindness and not trying to go into the body, listening to sound, putting on your favorite music. There are many, many ways to soothe and comfort and stabilize that are wise and eventually, eventually. We want to take what's called that one seat, you know, that one seat where we just are saying, I'm staying, I'm here, and where we start bringing those two wings of attention to what's actually going on inside us. So the last piece of this kind of exploration is that just to begin to explore what actually

happens when we open without resistance to these energies that move through us. As the Buddha talked about this mindfulness of this body is the gateway to total freedom. You didn't just say, you know, it'll help you just to feel this or find that out. He said, total freedom, this gateway through this living being. So we shift from relating to the body as this object to this pathway of awakening. And I'd like to name three of the blessings, the gifts of transformation that happened, when we stay with the goddesses that occur. In other words, three of the fragrances of the lotus is what I'm really talking about,

that I feel like we intuit. And the first one I've mentioned a number of times, which is we become more alive. And we want to feel alive. Aliveness is one of the dimensions of being informed that gives us joy. So by honoring and attending to the body with presence, we connect to this sense of belonging to life. Eduardo Galliano says, the church. 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. We can sense it here. The more moments we've come into our body, the more our senses really wake up. We go outside in the silhouette of the trees, you almost can feel the character and personality of the different trees with their arms and branches out and the colors of the sky. And our sense of smell is much more intimate with the world and the feeling, the sensations of walking.

Our body comes alive. Now, the second of the blessings, when we bring this aliveness together with presence, And only when we're feeling aliveness, can we then respond with love and compassion to our world. There's no way to wake up these hearts. If you sit in the meta practices, you will not feel a visceral sense of tenderness if you're not in your body. So it's this embodiment that makes it possible for us to be intimately engaged with our world to feel love, to feel compassion. A story I love written by a surgeon. He says, I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish.

A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh. I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. her young husband is in the room he stands on the opposite side of the bed together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight isolated from me private who are they i asked myself he in this wry mouth i have made who gaze and touch each other so generously the young woman speaks will my mouth always be like this she asks yes i say it well it is because the nerve was cut she nods and is silent but the young man smiles I like it, he says. It's kind of cute.

All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a God. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, an eye so close, I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate

to hers to show her that their kiss still works. I remember that the gods appeared in ancient Greece's mortals, and I hold my breath, and let the wonder in. It's only through this living body that we have this capacity for tenderness

to our own life, to others. So this is the second blessing. It's touching the aliveness and this heart's capacity as you respond. And the third is that this being in touch with our aliveness with deep presence reveals beingness itself. It reveals our true nature, what you might call awareness, spirit.

And there's a switch that happens from this idea that we're humans on a spiritual path to realizing that we're spirit discovering itself in a human incarnation. I'm going to say that again because to me it really, that's very, very deep. that we move through life most of the time thinking where these human beings on a spiritual path we're trying to get somewhere and as we wake up we realize that we are awareness

we are this wakefulness this openness experiencing itself discovering itself through these human forms these temporary human forms so what we rest in is timeless the way we discover that is these many many rounds of unconditional presence with the layers of sensation, of emotion.

What we find at first is that our habit is to feel like a self that's having a hard time. But the more we bring these two wings to those layers, the more we wake up out of that selfness into the presence itself. Now again, I'd like to read you one of the Radiant Sutras, if I can find it in this massive stuff I have here. This one talks of going through these layers when you encounter fear. Secrets are hidden in darkness and difficult nights.

You awake into a pang of aloneness, a howl of separation. This is the call of the dark one, the roar of life seeking its source. This is the call of the dark one, the roar of life seeking its source. The union you long for is within reach. Throw off all hesitation.

Become one with the fear, plunge into the uncanny blackness, eyes wide open, as if there were no other choice. Vibrating with fierce tenderness, breathe intimately with the Lord of Infinite Space. Vibrating with fierce tenderness, breathe intimately with the Lord of Infinite Space. of infinite space. So we go in and in and in and in. And the alchemy is both simple and very hard to grasp that the more presence we bring to the energetic forms in our body, the more we discover the pure flow and beingness that's our essence. It's almost as if we're encountering the deities and dissolving the identification and taking with us the attribute of that deity. So we might encounter anger and we dissolve the identification

and come away with discriminating wisdom, sharp and clear. We encounter fear and we dissolve the boundaries and come way into this very vast space. That if you trust you're the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves. We discover that oceanness. So to just, just, last few words say it's completely natural to pull back. And I find that one of our patterns is to watch ourselves pull back in some way go into one of our old patterns and then top it off with judgment. And if you can be on to that one, if you can know that it's part of our shared human conditioning to pull back from presence, that every one of us, the only reason we're learning to meditate is because that's what we do.

It's not that it's wrong. And to meet that pulling back with kindness, with humor, with interest, then that very engagement again brings the two wings that free us. Okay, so let's just do a short closing meditation together.

And just take these moments to pause and connect in this pause with quietness. with your own beingness. For these moments, assume that you are an awakened being.

Just assume it. You're a Buddha, an awakened, looment being, a bodhisattva, open, clear, aware of the world around you and inside you. From this awareness,

this Buddha awareness, just attend to this living body that's right here. Notice what it's like. from the vantage of open presence to experience this human incarnation, this bodily being. Notice what it's like from this openness and presence, this awakened mind, to experience the emotional body, whatever might be there in the heart, whatever mood, how your awakened mind that empty, open presence receives that.

as you receive the aliveness of this sensations, emotions, just perceive your own beingness, innate wakefulness that's here, just letting go into that wholeness of aliveness and beingness. And finally, sense how your heart experiences that, that presence, that aliveness and beingness. Srinarsar Gadata says, wisdom tells me I'm nothing. Love tells me I'm everything. Between the two, my life flows. Namaste and thank you. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered.

If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.