Tara Brach - The Dance with Pain (2015-07-08)

Episode Date: July 11, 2015

The Dance with Pain (2015-07-08) - “Pain is inevitable and suffering is optional.”  In this talk Tara explores the difference between pain and suffering and examines the most common, yet often unconscious, ways we resist pain. She then shares practices that help us find balance, equanimity and awakening in the midst. Your support will enable us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time. Visit: www.tarabrach.com. A guided meditation on "Radical Acceptance of Pain" is available on the "Guided Meditations" page.  With thanks and love, Tara

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Namaste and welcome. I was talking a few days ago with some old friends who are both old friends and older. And we were talking about body stuff, which is sometimes a conversation that happens. And one of them mentioned that this is how it is when you get old. You have an organ recital. and which reminded me of a story that I thought I'd share with you of a group of seniors who were talking about their ailments and one of them said, you know, my arms have gotten so weak, I can hardly lift this cup of coffee.

And another one said, you know, I couldn't even mark an X at the election time. My hands are so crippled. And a third one says, speak up, what? I can't hear you. Next one, I can't turn my head because of arthritis in my neck. Another, my blood pressure pills make me so dizzy. I forget where I am and where I'm going. One more is I guess that's the price we pay for getting old, whence an old man, as he slowly shook his head,

and the other nodded in agreement, but then one person spoke up cheerfully. Well, count your blessings. Thank God we can all still drive. Tonight, what I'd like to explore, because this really asks, how do we relate to the inevitable challenges? And I'd like to, in this class,

explore the particular challenge of physical pain. and physical pain will be investigating it and the focus will be physical although the understanding is that it's entirely linked with mental pain. When we are emotionally in pain, we feel it physically in our bodies so you can't really separate them.

But I'd first like to start as I sometimes do and check in with you and ask how many of you have really struggled with acute pain. I really experience acute pain and struggle with it. Can I see by you? hands? Good number. How many chronic pain? Good number. And how about chronic acute? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. For those that are listening and not here, there's about half hands went up for the first two and less for the third. But the truth is, we're all in an ongoing

dance with physical experience. And, you know, depending on how we relate, it can range from feeling that we're suffering greatly to really finding a sense of ease and balance and okayness in the midst. And so how we relate to pain, and really this is emotional and physical pain, determines our whole life experience. And the reason is that there's always sensations going on with a felt sense. So we're always having a changing play of either unpleasant sensations, our pleasant sensations, our neutral sensations. And when these sensations arise, we are entirely conditioned

to not like and push away what's unpleasant and to try to hold on to pleasant. So if we were really, really awake, we'd be noticing moment to moment how we're in this dance, and this is constantly happening. So what we'll do during this talk is first to reflect on the difference

or the relationship between pain and suffering, and then we'll explore the primary patterns of reacting to pain that can cause us suffering, and then we'll look at ways to dance with pain that actually serve awakening and freedom. So this would be the three things. And as we often do, we'll practice a bit with unpleasant sensations. And if anyone hears completely without them, we could get Glenn, the manager, to come around with a Zen stick or something.

I haven't warned them, but if you're listening to the podcast, you'll have to hire a friend with pliers or something like that. So, first of all, the relationship between pain and suffering, because this is key. And the phrase that goes around a lot in these circles is that pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. Okay? Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. So pain is universal. Like any creature that incarnates experiences pain.

and as I mentioned, every moment we're having a variety of sensations and they're actually meant to alert us and to motivate us and move us and affect whether we have sex or whether we hide in a cave or whatever we're doing but our body's sensations are telling us how to operate and the experience of unpleasant sensations on their own are not suffering so you can have unpleasant sensations arise, you can have pain, and not have suffering. What causes the suffering is what we add to the unpleasant sensations.

It's an add-on that we do. And it arises when we have a reaction of aversion to the unpleasantness and then we contract against the pain. So we fight it, we resist it, and there's a lot of levels of how we do it. But the reality is that in any moment that we're resisting what is, when we want life different, we suffer. Now why is that? In the moment that reality is unfolding itself and there's a pushing away of what is, that contraction brings a sense of separation.

We're in opposition. We are no longer feeling part of the flow, part of a belonging to the whole. And that's the grounds of suffering. So the kind of faux formula for this is pain times resistance equals suffering. This is going to be the ground of everything we're exploring. If you watch yourself through the day, you'll notice that you're always trying to make yourself more comfortable, trying to move away from discomfort. It's going on all the time.

and if you become more and more conscious of it, you'll notice in a more and more subtle way that in the moments that you're trying to control things, you're not fully here. Does that make sense? That if we're trying to control pain and pleasure, we're not inhabiting the moment, or certainly not listening,

or certainly not really engaged. So the teaching is that pain times resistance equals suffering, pain times no resistance equals freedom. That's the other side of it. And I think childbirth is probably the most easy to get example that women are trained in childbirth that when the contractions arise to do what? Not fight them, just go with them. Let them move through you, right? Let life live through you.

And they're also trained, understand that if a contraction arises and you tense against it, it actually creates more suffering. And this is the principle for all of life. Anything we tense against creates more suffering. But you can really get it in childbirth, and I can say for myself, I remember this now a little more from a distance, because I don't have all the chemicals flooding through me, but I remember I had my son, Narayan, at home,

and I had a midwife and I wasn't medicated and I had done all sorts of tons of yoga and meditation and being with it and breathing with things and letting stuff move through me. So, you know, I was doing quite well for quite a while, you know, and then at a certain point, you know, and I wasn't contracting against the contraction, but a certain point, this is when he was crowning,

which means the head was just kind of coming down the canal and about to come out, the pain level shot up to a quantitative, different level. And I remember thinking, oh, something's gone wrong. Okay? And this is a cue to what causes the suffering. With that add-on, it was no longer just intense unpleasantness. There was the add-on of something's wrong. And then I tensed against it. And then I started fighting the process, not going with the process. And I remember my midwife had to reassure me and say, that's what happens at this point of things. It gets worse. It gets intense. It's okay. It's actually.

part of it. And when I got the It's How It Is, it became again intensely unpleasant, but I could be with it. So what we're talking about in the Buddhist tradition and Buddhist psychology is called the second arrow, that the first arrow is the intense unpleasantness and the second arrows, we add something to it like this is wrong, it shouldn't be happening, it's bad and then all of a sudden we're suffering a lot more it's like when we get sick or injured and we add to it this anxiety about how long is this going to last

or how much worse is it going to get you know then we get you know am I going to get sidelined in terms of work I'm going to lose physical capacity that's the second arrow we go from just this moment it's unpleasant to a feeling of squeeze and disconnection and suffering Okay, so these are the words from the Buddhist scriptures. The Blessed One, that's the referral to Buddha, said, When touched with a feeling of pain,

the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person, sorrows, grieves, and laments, beats his breast, becomes distraught. So he feels two pains, physical and mental, just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and right afterward were to shoot him with another one. so that he would feel the pain of two arrows. In the same way, when touched with feeling of pain, the uninstructed run-of-the-mill person's sorrows, grieves, and laments,

beased his breasts, becomes distraught, so he feels two pains, physical and mental. I have to confess that I went and looked up run-of-the-mill and found out it was a phrase from the late 1800s in America, so I figured the Buddha was really forward-looking but I get off my point here. So something happens when we have an experience and then we add to it.

And yet it's very much our conditioning, especially in contemporary culture, when physical pain arises, we add something to it. And I think it's part of, because we're so much more disconnected from the earth, we're so much more disconnected from natural rhythms, we're living so much in a cyber world that nature is out there

like maybe in a national park somewhere but we don't sense this body as nature do you know what I mean it's like it's something to control to manage to dominate but it's not natural and unlike more earth-based cultures we get very alarmed

with pain and try to overmanage it so we don't trust it over-medicate, we anesthetize birds more than we need to, we interfere with dying, grief has a kind of timetable, there's an embarrassment in our culture around aging as if the appearance of getting older is something to be ashamed of, that it's not natural, that it's not okay. You see, it's the not okay thing that causes the suffering, that something's wrong. So it's especially remarkable

that when we think of this generation of children more than ever the disconnection from nature there's much less playing outside a lot more in front of a screen and it takes its toll this kind of not being

part of the living dying world one story of a child's on a beach and he sees a dead seagull and asks his dad what happened and his father said well the Siegel died and went to heaven. And the child looked positively and he said,

well, did God throw him back? So when we're not feeling a belonging to the living, dying world, we develop these strategies or styles for resisting. And that's just what we do. And basically we do anything but let be and just feel the discomfort. We don't have much tolerance for discomfort. This isn't totally new. George Burns said, in those days, the best pain killer was ice. It wasn't addictive and it was particularly effective if you poured some whiskey over it.

So, I think one really wholesome way of understanding pain is as nature's messenger. It's a messenger basically alerting us to what's going on in our body or mind. And that our job is to be present, to listen, to take care of. best as we can. So sometimes the message is for immediate action. We feel, you know, burning heat and we move our hand from a fire or there's acute chest pain and we, you know, shortness of breath and we call 911. And other times the message is to avoid further injury by staying still. But still other times it's by moving more and getting our body in action. And when we're dying like an animal seeking solitude, pain can be a message to guide us to find a kind of inner sanctuary of quiet and peace. So there's a message that comes. And yet as we know for most of us, when pain gets intense and when it's something unfamiliar, our mind kind of goes crazy and we make the pain

wrong, we make it an enemy and we go into resistance. So we're going to explore that a little more. And some of you know in the old days when a tyrant or a king or a dictator didn't like the message he was giving, he'd kill the messenger, right? Okay, we know that one. So that's what we often do, you know, that the pains the messenger and yet we in some way kill it. And I want to kind of name some of the most common ways that we kill the messenger. And the most basic is that we leave town. In other words, we leave our bodies, right? We dissociate.

It's like in a James Joyce novel, that line, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. You know, that we step, one step removed, so we really don't have to feel directly what feels unfamiliar and scary. One teacher asked her classroom, her children, what the purpose of the body was and the response was to carry around the head

you know. So, you know, we occupy this mental control tower and we try to manage things and try to manage the physical symptoms and we distract ourselves whenever possible. If we don't have to feel it, we try not to. Some of you might remember that story about a man and his wife in the living room and she says, you know, or he says to her, if I ever turn into a vegetable, please pull the plug, at which point she goes to the TV set and she yanks out the plug. you know. So if it's not too intense, we ignore the messenger and we stay busy and we kind of get distracted. I remember, you know those old commercials where they have laundry detergent, they show how good it is at taking out blood? Well, this is Jerry Seinfeld says,

if you have a shirt with blood stains all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem. So other strategies that we have, when we can't get away from it, we start running a lot of stories about it. And one of the stories is the worry story about seeing if we can predict what's next, what's going to go wrong. You know, we obsess about what it's going to mean in our lives. And that's the one where we often can get something slight,

like, you know, a little kind of an ache or a ting in a certain part of our head and we immediately, you know, go brain tumor, brain tumor. or it can be anything like that, any part of the body, it's not familiar. And we have our pathways of the worst possible scenario. We know that, we do that. So that's one way. We kind of are wrapping around to try to steal ourselves for what's around the corner. Another one is the obsessing on how to fix it.

And that was a really big one for me. I shared many times. I had years and years of chronic and sometimes a cure. pain and it would spin me off. I'd spend so much time way past what was at all useful trying to figure out what was wrong and how I could fix it. Anything but just sit with the unpleasantness. So that's one is a big one, how to fix. And then another one is blame that we can get into the story of how we blew it, how it's our fault that we're sick. And I feel a lot a sorrow when I think of that. How many of us feel sick, that's the first arrow, and then

the second arrow of I don't know how to take care of myself well, I always overdo it, whatever it is. And again, I share this from knowing it from the inside out, that in some way I felt embarrassed that I was sick as if I had done something wrong, the second arrow. then of course we can also feel sick and then start blaming others around us it's just a way again to leave ourselves in one story a husband was laid up in bed with both legs in a cast and his partner's mopping his brow and he has tears in his eyes he said you were right there when I fell off the roof cleaning the gutters yesterday you were there when my business failed

you were there when I had that horrible car wreck now that I think on it you're bad luck. So we can get victimized. So what I'm doing right now is just sharing, having us really look at all the different ways we do anything, but simply be with the changing flow of sensations. So I'd like to invite just for a moment, we'll take a pause,

and just to have you consider what your dance with pain is. and just to let yourself sit still and as you begin to reflect let your intention be to bring a curious and gentle attention to your own patterning because to add judgment is just another form of resistance

so the inquiry is what is my dance with unpleasant sensations How do I relate when this messenger comes forward? Is there perhaps a recent time that stands out when you felt sick or you injured yourself? Maybe you had a migraine, maybe you had a flu with a lot of aches, maybe something, some food poisoning and nausea, maybe something muscular skeletal, was pain the enemy. Was there a sense that something is wrong, it shouldn't be like this?

Was there a kind of positioning of trying to control? Or did you try to distract? Ignore it as long as you could get away with that. Was there any mental obsessing? How should I fix this? What's the ramifications? Or maybe your dance was a dance more in the flow with a listening? What's the communication here?

and with a presence. Sense your dance and notice whatever the dance is, whether you're in opposition to pain or in the flow of it, your sense of yourself. When you're opposed to the pain, making it wrong, can you sense the separateness

in some way feeling oppressed or victimized or smaller? Just notice. I'll name some of the symptoms of being at odds with pain, making it the enemy, and one is that we get tired more often because it takes energy to keep walling off pain. Another symptom of having pain be the enemy is actually more physical unpleasantness because when we're tensing against something, that contraction causes more tension in the body. Another symptom of making pain the enemy is a kind of chronic apprehension. In other words, we sense that we're pushing something away

and then there's the fear of it being too much. And then in the deepest way, when we're pushing away pain, we get identified as a defended self. We get small. When we pull away from our nature, our naturalness, we lose connection. We get small. John O'Donohue puts it this way.

He says, our body knows it's belonging to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make us so homeless. Okay, so opening your eyes. So again, you can be listening to this as both physical pain or emotional pain, but when our response is to make it the enemy, our physical pain, our depression, our fear, our hurt, or anger, when we make the unpleasantness the enemy, we disconnect from a sense of wholeness.

We become homeless in a way. We become a separate self, a offended self. So there's a wisdom in us that recognizes that. There's something in us that knows that when we resist how life is, it causes trouble. We know that. And that knowing is what turns us to deepen our attention, to learn to be more awake in our dance with pain. And that's where we're going for the rest of this talk

because this is really the invitation of the path, that we have this capacity to deepen our attention and to change our relationship to pain, to have pain become a portal so that when we feel physical discomfort or emotional discomfort, rather than the enemy, it is the way. It's the way to a deeper sense of presence and wholeness. It's actually a portal.

So let's look at this now. I think of the basic guideline is instead of resisting, some of you might have seen this, there's a bone-shaped necklace. There's like a tag. It's like a bone with a cord to it. And the words on it are sit, stay, heal. So that's really what it is.

It's like stay. Stay right here. So the first step of the training in shifting this dance is really the practice that so many of you have been engaged in which is to become awake in our bodies

and mindful of sensations. Can you right now just pause and feel sensations inside your body, whether they're pleasant or unpleasant or neutral? To be mindful of sensations, is to notice the particular texture or density,

the particular ways that they change, you might name sensations. And if they're unpleasant words like twisting, burning, pressing, the first arrow, these unpleasant sensations, if we can be mindful of it, is just pain. It becomes suffering when we add something. So the second place of mindfulness is to notice our attitude. Notice if as you pay attention to sensations, is there an attitude or reactivity?

That judging, that feeling oppressed, that feeling victimized. The attitude that most serves as you begin to deepen this presence and dance with pain, first is to forgive the resistance, because resistance is typically they, and if you start saying, oh my God, look how much I resist pain and then get caught up in that, then you're just living in another second arrow, right? Okay? So first, forgive the resistance. It's just part of your human body's conditioning to not like pain.

Forgive it. See it and forgive it. And then get interested. Interest will take you a really long way if you really say, what is this constellation of sensations like? And how is it changing? Where is it? What is it communicating? Get interested.

And the last piece of attitudinal positioning is friendliness. See how kind you can be. Then the next piece to mention is, when we are in reaction to pain, this is important to know. Our attention fixates. And this is a survival mechanism. We need to be paying attention,

so our attention fixates, but it goes way beyond what we need for survival. We just get riveted on it and we don't leave it. You know what it's like when you have a chip in your tooth and you cannot keep your tongue from it? It's like that. So part of the finding a dance with pain is to sense the space that's here

because if we're fixated, there's going to be tension and we're going to be at war. So I'd like to explore with you how to work with space so that you can actually come into a balanced dance with unpleasant sensations and then we're going to practice a little. One of the strategies

has the language of zones and zone one is the area of where you feel unpleasant sensation. So you just become aware of zone one and you say, okay, this is unpleasant sensation. And just get to know, you just say, okay, it's right in this area, it feels squeezing, pressing, burning, twisting, whatever it is.

But then you find Zone 2. And it's really important not to hang out in Zone 1 too long because you want to make sure you've got Zone 2 which is going to connect you with something that's got more space and freedom to it. Zone 2, there's a lot of different options, is a part of the body where you feel pleasant sensations or at least neutral sensations.

Because if you can establish a zone 2, 2, you can begin to train yourself to hang out in Zone 2 and then just very tentatively dip in and out but you've got a resting place where you're not so contracted, where you can have more resilience and more grace in being present. Is this zone thing making sense so far? Raise your hand if you feel confused just so I can, because I might re-explain if there's any confusion. So zone one is the intense unpleasant sensations themselves and zone two is anywhere you can find in your body. I find sometimes my hands are very easy. Now if our hands are very authentic that's not going to be zone two. Then we find maybe that there's this that kind of

flickering and tingling and vibrating in the eyelids or the lips or the feet. Okay? But we find a zone 2. And so you spend some time really establishing presence in zone 2 and then you can begin to dip in to zone 1. The more intense and disconcerting the unpleasantness the more you stay in zone 2 and you might even extend zone 2 further out which means perhaps instead of a part of your body zone 2 is sounds. Listen to sounds. Or you might sense zone 2 as the colors or dance of shadows outside of you. Or the space outside. So you take it into the outer world.

Okay. Now we're going to keep exploring these zones but bring it a little more close in and subtle. Because if you're doing zone 2 and it's kind of let's say it's your hands and you're mostly staying there and you're just dipping in, there's still a sense of tentativeness and we're not really opening. and that's kind of setting up a little more balance. But if you want to begin to bring a more full presence, you still have zone one as the intensity, but zone two is the space that's right around it.

So you would feel with zone two, wherever you feel a lot of discomfort, that you'd feel right around it, the space that's surrounded as the zone two, and you'd start to sense in the intensity, interior of the painful sensations, the space that's there too. So you're emphasizing space, but it's much more intimate with the sensations. At this point, you're coming very, very close into the sensations with finding the space

right there, right around it and inside it. In one quote, it says, pull it close, so close it is that it's with you. This is the unpleasant sensations. The deepest part of you, the part that exists to hold the pain. Because really the pain wants to move through you just as much as your deepest being wants it to move through. As Rumi says, the cure for the pain is in the pain. So here we're going right into Zone 1 and finding right within and around Zone 1 the space that gives that balance. And with that space, you can begin to do what in psychotherapy is called pendulate.

And just to explain pendulating and then we're going to practice it. Pendulating means that we feel both the space and the contact with the sensations, and we go back and forth, back and forth until there's no more back and forth, there's a simultaneous sense of space and sensation and there's no struggle because we can inhabit the space and let the sensations live through us. We're not in opposition. It's like we're the ocean and the waves are part of us. Let's practice because those are words and I want you to get a taste of it.

So as you're coming into stillness, just to know that when pain is really, really strong, it's not wise or compassionate to try to force yourself to be with. Being with is not always the best way to wake up. At times it's completely wise to take a break, to go into a different world, to listen to music, drink tea, get a massage, watch a movie, be with a friend. In other words, we can get exhausted by trying to be with unpleasant sensations. And if we're always trying to move away from them, then we are living apart from our naturalness. So this practice is incredibly powerful and precious to begin to learn how to be with,

and in a direct and immediate way. I'd like to invite you to scan your body. As I mentioned before, some of you might have easy access to unpleasant sensations and others, not so much, but just see where you feel any constellation of unpleasantness in the body. And let the attention notice enough about that area

so you can feel where it is, just notice the quality of the sensation and consider that zone one and find your zone two and you might begin if you can to find just some part of the body where really is pleasant or neutral as I mentioned for many the hands

the lips or eyelids, the feet and when you feel yourself there just let your attention rest there and if the pain is very, very strong then stay in zone two for a while. But if the paint's not so strong, you might begin to practice this pendulating, where you feel the neutral or pleasant area, zone two, but also dip back in. So you can feel where the concentrated area of unpleasantness is.

So you go into that some and then remind yourself of the space by feeling zone two, where it's okay, easier, and then touching into, again, where it's more intense, inflamed, angry, tense, tight. And if that feels relatively easy for you, bring more attention into Zone 1 now, going right into the sensations themselves,

and just sense that you can really contact, right at the center of where there's most intensity. And as you contact that, sense the space that's around it. So you can inhabit that space but still feel right into the intensity. See if you can find the interior of the intensity that there's space. So you're feeling right contacting the intensity of sensation and sensing the space around and inside it. Let it float.

You might find the attention's, pendulating from the sense of space right around or inside to the actual sensations back and forth until you find that it's all there at once inhabiting the space of awareness where there's room for the sensations to unfold themselves to float to change to be as they are and learning to dance with pain attitude is really at the heart of it so just to end this little meditation with that intention to not judge, to forgive resistance

and just stay curious and friendly. Open your eyes when you'd like. I'm going to talk about a few other dimensions of learning to dance with unpleasantness before we close. So thus far it's really pure mindfulness, sensing the space, contacting directly. I'd like to also mention that there is a heart quality that is often missing, that when we get caught in pain and we're oppositional,

we forget to just sense, oh, this is suffering, this hurts, just to have a quality of care. One man just did an experiment. He had psoriasis on both arms, and he sent meta to just his left arm. Meta is loving kindness. And his left arm healed up, and his right arm didn't. and that's an N of one. I haven't asked other people to do it,

but you get the idea that when we have a quality of kindness, it's nourishing. And I've seen it in many times with people that the space that's needed when they're in pain comes when there's a quality of kindness in the atmosphere. It just gives space. And the story that most touched me about this,

I heard from the founder of Zen Hospice, Frank Osseskeskes, who was very close to one man he was accompanying as he was dying who had stomach cancer and was in a lot of pain and he asked Frank to guide him in a meditation. And mindfulness would not work. It would not work to try to stay right close in and notice what was going on. It was just too painful. So what Frank did was a lot of kindness. He just put his hands on the man's belly to help hold the pain. In other words, to give some added space to be with it. And the man agreed, and he said,

but it still hurts too much to be there with it. And so Frank put his hands a little further away from the man's belly, and he said, how's that? The man says it's a little better, and then Frank put his hands even further. And what this is, is he's creating more space for this man to be aware of. And the man said, that's really lovely.

And so Frank invited him to rest in that, and inhabit that space. And the man said, just rest in love rest in love and from then on there's a lot of pain he'd push the morphine pump but he just keeps saying

rest in love rest in love and when his wife came in the next morning and she was very concerned about his dying process he looked at her and said the same just rest in love and when we're in pain if there's anything that can cut through the second

arrowing if there's any that can give us a sense of the space and presence that allows us to have it be pain but not suffering. It's remembering that quality of kindness, that heart that can hold. In a related way, when we remember we're not alone in it, it really makes a difference. When we can remember other people feel this too, it immediately opens the field and we're not so fixated, we're resting in something larger. This was very alive and real

for me when I was most sick that I was very much since the community of loss. I had a lot of people I knew that were sharing with me because this is how it goes when something goes on with you other people that have the same share. How much they were living with pain and loss.

And I remember in the moments that I was working, let's say I was on a retreat and helping to keep company with someone else going through a lot. Those were the moments when I could feel the pain in my own body and yet there was so much space that it was really okay. There's something about really knowing that we're part of something larger that makes room for the pain. It's not, it goes from my pain and my resistance to the pain and the reason. And the resistance, makes a huge difference. So what we're exploring really in this class, in this

dance with pain, is that in the moments that we oppose and fixate, we become a separate self at war. In the moments that we lean in some and open and find some space but stay in contact, we reenter the flow. And that's the meaning of grace, really. Grace is when we're not opposing the flow. We're actually in a dance that is really filled with presence and with heart. So the promise of the path, that we all have this capacity to let pain be a portal. Because every one of us experiences pain, physical, emotional pain. and when it arises to let it be a messenger, a call for presence,

where we sense, okay, let me get interested, let me get friendly, let me lean in and find the space I need so that I can have some grace in this dance. When we do that, instead of that tight, separate self that's all defended, we discover that loving presence that really feels like home. Close with the words of Rumi and then we'll just sit quietly for a few more moments.

Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to say. From an embryo whose nourishment comes in blood move to an infant drinking milk, to a child on solid food, to a searcher for wisdom, to a hunter of a mortarship, of a more invisible game.

Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo. You might say, the world outside is vast and intricate. There are wheat fields and mountain passes and orchids in bloom. At night there are millions of galaxies and in sunlight the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding.

You ask the embryo, why stay cooped up in the dark with eyes closed? Listen to the answer. There is no other world. I only know what I've experienced. You must be hallucinating. There is another world when pain arises. We don't have to collapse into that dark, contracted place.

There is another world that has love and presence and grace and ease, and it becomes available just by choosing presence, intelligently but choosing presence. So let's close tonight, just take a few moments, if you will, to again close your eyes and in the stillness again scan your body. Notice if there's any part of your felt sense experience that you're at odds with. Feelings of discomfort that bring up fear that have you pull away, contract. Just take a moment right now to forgive the resistance.

the reaction, to forgive or allow the pain, to sense it's possible to witness with a clear and gentle presence, the life that's here, and to sense that mystery, a vast, wakeful presence that's who you are when you're allowing the flow. May we rest in loving presence. May we know loving presence as the deepest truth of what we are. and may this loving presence ripple out in all directions to bring healing to our world. The teaching you have received has been freely offered.

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