Tara Brach - The Fires of Loss

Episode Date: February 27, 2013

2010-06-16 - The Fires of Loss - We all encounter the great losses of our own health and life, and of cherished others. We are conditioned to resist opening to the rawness and grief that comes with loss. This talk describes the refuge of presence in the face of loss, and the gift of timeless love that arises as we make peace with the reality of this living, dying world. NOTE: Tara was traveling this week, so offering a well-loved talk from 2010. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

So to begin tonight's talk, I'd like to mention an article I read last week in the Science Times that was a Gallup poll kind of study that headlines, people get happier as they get older. And the more specifics are that from 18 years on, people start feeling worse and worse about themselves, and it hits the bottom at age 50. But then after that, it starts climbing up. and so that by 85, get this, by 85 you're more satisfied with yourself than you were when you were 18. And on other measures of enjoyment and happiness, we kind of decline, decline, decline until we hit 50, but then we start perking up.

And there's only a slight dip between 73 and 83, but still better than younger years. So for those of you that are creeping on, this is good news, eh? Now here's some interesting things. They said that it didn't really matter in explaining this whether people had a partner their employment status or children at home. Some theories on what might account for this, some may be to do with hormones as you get older, might have to do with decreased demands from the society

in terms of competition or less stress or pressure to prove. improve yourself. One psychologist framed it this way. He said happiness level is not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life, things on the outside. It's something quite deep and quite human that seems to be driving this. And I'd like to propose, and this is really a Buddhist perspective, that as we get older, the more time we're on planet Earth, the more we are living with the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows. Stuff happens. There are inevitable losses.

And what happens, and this, of course, isn't to everybody, but the potential is a wisdom around impermanence that basically has the realization that it's passing, it's precious, it doesn't help to hold on, and by opening to what's happening, you get to find the present moment as quite precious. So basically, with aging, there's a potential for a kind of acceptance that gives a really deep inner ease and happiness. The losses that come, the inevitable losses that come with being on planet Earth,

are our deepest teachers. Most people, when they start writing poems or essays, or realizations they've had, it comes from having to come face to face with the mystery and the pain of loss, most people. I like the way Carlos Costagnata puts it. He wrote the books about the shaman Don Juan. He says, when you realize that death is sitting on your left shoulder,

all of your pettiness falls away. So we get real with the life that's here. So one of the great inquiries in spiritual life is really how to relate to the suffering of loss, how to find peace and open our hearts in the midst of loss. And it could be the great losses, or it could be actually what's happening moment to moment, which is there's ongoing process of loss.

I get a lot of emails, a lot of people contacting me, that when they are encountering the big ones. And the inquiry is always the same. And I use the language of refuge. The inquiry is always, how do I take refuge? How do I find some refuge that can help me to be with what's going on? A few weeks ago, I got an email friend in the community who has a brain tumor and doesn't have very long to live.

She says it's really hard to meditate. right now, which of course it is. What's my refuge? At the, this weekend, we had a training for therapists that want to integrate mindfulness into psychotherapy. And one woman and I were talking for her chronic fatigue and chronic sickness and the feeling that she's losing her life to it. How does she take refuge in the face of that? Another friend in the Sangha, lost his wife several years ago, the crushing grief. How do we take refuge? So tonight will be a bit of a talk that's more like a series of reflections, perhaps,

on how we relate to what I sometimes think of as the fires of loss. And I'll emphasize loss that it's experience with chronic sickness and loss. and loss that's experienced when someone we love dies. But there's just, there's so many different things I could emphasize. Those are just to be for tonight. But really, the key is when we find a way to meet loss with an unresisting presence, then it becomes like a fire. It becomes like a fire that burns through whatever is separating us.

from timeless love and awareness. Loss becomes like a fire that burns through the veil when we're present with it. So the thing we most resist, actually when we pay attention, it can be liberating. So we'll take it bit by bit, just to say that the beginning of learning

to be present with loss is to realize what are my habits of shielding myself. You know, how do I try to avoid feeling loss? We all have our control strategies. I mean, every one of us, we're designed to have control strategies. And just to say in advance, even though the true refuge with loss is absolutely unresisting presence, it's not meant to be that we are able to do that all at once or at any old time. That's what the potential is.

but we need to very compassionately find our way to that. In reality, we're rigged to do anything but be present with what we don't like or don't want, anything but. And what we begin to find as we meditate is that we each have our own kind of chain reaction of what we go through when life isn't the way we want it. A kind of chain reaction of tensing our body and having certain thoughts and doing certain things to get away and blame it.

We each have our kind of own type of chain reaction. One of my favorite illustrations, some of you might remember, is in a letter to an insurance company that a man writes. And I'm going to read it to you. He says, in response to your request for additional information in block three of the accident report form, I put in poor planning as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter I should explain more fully. I trust the following details will be sufficient.

I'm a brick layer by trade. On the day of the active and I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I discovered I had 500 pounds of brick left. Rather than carrying them down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel attached to the side of the building. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out,

and loaded the brick into it. Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to ensure a slow descent of the 500 pounds of bricks. You see the problem here, right? You will note in block number 11 of the accident report form that I weigh 135 pounds. Due to my surprise of being jerked off the ground, so suddenly I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid wrist.

rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming down. This explains the fractured skull. Slowing slightly, I continued my ascent, stopping when the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep in the pulley. Fortunately, by this time, I had regained my presence of mine and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of my pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom

fell out of the barrel. Devoid of the weight of bricks, the barrel now weight approximately 50 pounds. I refer you again to my weight in block number 11. As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I again met the barrel coming up. This accounts with a fractured ankle. The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell onto the bricks. Fortunately, only my toes are cracked. I'm sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in pain and unable to stand and watching an empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my presence of mine and let go of the rope.

This is entitled on knowing when to let go. So I share this little illustration of how we're not taking step-by-step mindful action. We're not being present and necessarily attuning to a situation and responding from that presence. No, we're very reflexive. You know, it's grab this, push away that. You know, anticipate that this with fear and tighten up and clench and not be present. We do whatever we can to control fear, whatever we can. So we distract ourselves a lot. We keep busy.

We obsess on how to fix things. We obsess on what will go wrong. Now, how does that actually relate to chronic illness? Let's just look at the kind of control and reactivity that kicks in with chronic sickness. First off, when physical pain arises, sensations that are unpleasant, we immediately term it pain. In other words, we solidify with the term pain.

So it's no longer a changing constellation of unpleasant sensations. It's this kind of idea of pain. So unpleasant as it comes. there's becomes pain and then we proliferate with thoughts and the thoughts go something like it's not going to go away it's going to get worse I won't be able to function or I won't be able to do the things I most enjoy I'll be separate from other people okay so we so we start spinning in thoughts about what's going to happen we leave this unpleasant constellation of sensations and go into thoughts about the future that usually are telling us bad things are going to happen.

In addition, and this is my own experience and many, many people I've talked to that have struggled with chronic sickness, there is a strong tendency to add on the second arrow of blame. Not only is this sickness here, this pain and sickness, but it in some way is my fault. I did something to cause it. I deserve it in some way. I'm not taking care of it in some way. Does this sound familiar to some of you? This blame we add.

So not only are we feeling sick, not only have we been struggling with a lot of sickness over time, but we add this layer of it means something's wrong with me. It reflects badly on our sense of who we are. It's one of the saddesty things that I see with people that are struggling with sickness, is that not only are they living

with the unpleasantness of sickness, but with the unpleasantness of a sense of a self that is in some way tainted because of it. Not only that, because when one is sick, there's more self-centeredness and more grumpiness and more irritation, there's another level of the second arrow which says, and I'm not handling this well. I'm being a bad sick person. So I'm just trying to give you a sense of in addition to unpleasantness, we proliferate.

There's a chain reaction, and this is what the Buddha described as the creation of trance. Because in the moments that we move from unpleasantness to, I'm not handling this well, or it's my fault, or I'm not going to be able to function

tomorrow because of such and such, the self gets incarnated. If it's just unpleasant sensation, that's all it is. Add on the wanting and fearing thoughts, and there starts to be a solidity, a sense of self that then is a not okay self, an insufficient self, a self that's failing in some way. So the Buddha described it this way, basically that there is an indefinitely. inevitability of loss and dissatisfaction and pain in our lives. That's inevitable. Suffering is optional.

The first noble truth says, it's going to happen if you're in a body on planet Earth. You're going to get old. You're going to get sick. You're going to die. You're going to want things different. But if you lock into that wanting things different, the second noble truth tells us if there's grasping onto how you want things, if you're pushing away what's happening, that's suffering.

that's when the self gets incarnated and gets very solid. The Buddha was sometimes described as the great physician. And so the diagnosis was lots of suffering if you're resisting and pushing away. The freedom, the medicine, mindfulness. Notice what's happening. Bring presence to what's right here. And I like to describe this kind of a wheel of awareness that we can use. So if you're one of those people that struggles with chronic fatigue, our struggles with chronic physical discomfort,

and you find that you proliferate, you obsess on how to fix it, you obsess on what's wrong with you, you find you're obsessing on a future that's going to be problematic, there is self-revelling. salvation in mindfulness. Now the wheel of mindfulness, and I like this kind of metaphor, basically says that the hub of our being is presence. Presence is here, but we leave over and over again. And I've given you an example here of how we leave when there's unpleasant sensations. And in this metaphor of the wheel of awareness, it's like we each spoke is another way that we leave. dashed down this spoke in our plan of what's going to happen in the future and that one in our blame and so on until we're just circling around the rim and we've left right here we're not here

at all the rim is virtual reality okay just circling around in virtual reality so a mindfulness practice has two basic pieces and one of them is how to come back and the other is how to be here. Coming back and being here. So coming back, and again I'm emphasizing tonight, this kind of proliferation if you're moving from unpleasant sensations into the whole trance of a sick self, coming back is noticing all the thoughts that are going on and dropping them and noticing what's actually happening right here. That's coming back. Now one of the useful tests that are techniques that I learn, and this is through Byron Katie, who teaches a lot about beliefs and really, really good work, is it can be helpful if you're leaving the hub and you drop your thoughts about the terrible future that's going to happen. You're coming back to just state what you're actually doing in the moment.

That'll help to anchor you fully right here. Oh, walking on a path. are, oh, washing dishes, or, oh, taking a shower, about to go online. You know, just what's going on? To come out of this virtual reality, it helps to anchor yourself right in this reality right here. And then there's being here. Now, if you've left because of unpleasantness, being here means being with unpleasant sensations, right?

So then the challenge is, really, how do we be with what we call pain? And one basic tool is to just note the changing constellation of experience, twisting, burning, pressing, squeezing, heat, chill. If you close your eyes right now and feel the body from the inside out, closing your eyes right now, you might first sense as you bring the attention to the constellation of sensations here, Is it pleasant or unpleasant or is it neutral? It can be very useful if you're feeling sick to shift the language to, okay, unpleasant. Just to notice that it's unpleasant. If you're sitting here and you're feeling quite robust, maybe you're feeling pleasant.

Maybe there's a lot of aliveness, lightness, energy, movement. Or maybe it's neutral. and then to refine the attention and whatever seems predominant maybe you're feeling a lot of heat maybe there's areas of pressure maybe there's tightness maybe there's an achy area

so this next step of mindful presence is to contact the changing sensations and notice what's predominant Now, if you're a person who's struggling with a serious illness, chronic illness, sometimes the unpleasantness is really strong and staying at the hub, that's what we're talking about, with unpleasantness is a struggle. It's exhausting.

It's like you're working to be with something. And at those times, it's really wise to very consciously take a break. So again, we're talking about how to work with difficult experience. It's wise to take a break when you're getting worn down by trying to be present. To redirect your attention, perhaps to the space around you, to sounds. Perhaps take a break and take a shower, have a cup of tea, talk to someone. But eventually, and this is the basic principle, what we resist persists, the more that we avoid the sensations in the body,

that very avoidance keeps us trapped in fear because there's a sense that, oh, there's something there that's too much to handle. And that chronic anxiety shadows us. It's not until we fully open to what's here that we actually wake up out of that transit that's so fear-based. So staying here.

Part of what we find if we stay here is that there's fear. You might feel sensations in the heart area feel fear. And part of it is perhaps grief, like realizing, oh, there really is loss going on. And then this is what's asking for attention. So we begin to name what's going on. Now, give you, if you'd like to open your eyes, if you haven't already, you're welcome to.

in my own experience, because this has been one of my great teachers, has been chronic sickness. In my own experience, what I found is that the chain reaction that goes on with chronic sickness, one of the most strong elements of it is the thought process of what's going to be taken away in the future. That what I love doing, I will not be able to do. And I've worked with so many people now that are struggling with chronic illness, that I found that that's a major theme, that it's not exactly what's going on right now that's so difficult, but it's the anticipation of what is going to be lost in the future.

And then what happens is, for me, there's a sense of, oh, the things I love, I won't be able to walk or run or play in certain ways on the planet Earth that I love that give me pleasure. and aliveness and then that brings up grief so what to do what to do when grief comes up mostly our habit is rather than be with the grief we either leave and go into trying to figure out how we can fix things are we go into depression and sleep are numb but we don't feel just the purity of accepting oh change loss. Okay. So what I have found for myself is that it's only in those moments that I in

some way go, oh, grief, and then say to that grief, and this is literally sending a message to my own heart, be as much as you want to be. In other words, I invite it. I say, okay, grief, feel it, be it, be here, as much as you are. There's a kind of a surrender. of any resistance to grief. And it's only when there's a surrendering into grief that there is this opening to this kind of vast tenderness, a shift from the self that's stealing against loss to this very, very spacious quality of tender, loving presence.

It's a shift from a self that's missing something she loves to loving itself. Here's the thing. We wouldn't grieve unless we loved. Love is embedded in grief. There's a process by which if we allow the grieving, what happens is we think that we're losing, I mean, there's a feeling of loving

that's contingent on an object. For me, it'd be contingent on loving the aliveness I get from hiking by the river. For someone else, the grieving is losing someone and sensing, well, if I've lost this person, I've lost the love I have with this person. We think it's contingent on some outside object. But if we allow the grieving to happen, if we allow it fully, what we discover is that the loving doesn't go away.

The loving is still there. And the more deeply we allow and open to grieving, the more we become the openness that's really a timeless kind of love. it's an openness that is love now with chronic sickness there's many many rounds of going into the trance of a self that's going to lose something a self that's got to figure things out

that's got to fix something to just saying okay it's like this and feeling just the fear or the grief of what's going on and then opening to loving again there is a real power to this practice in being with

whether it's chronic sickness or any acute illness that I want to mention. But the first thing to say is that the more that we can go from the trance of thinking into what's actually happening here, the more we have the realizations that the Buddha described as wisdom, one realization, everything keeps changing. We think it's going to be always like this, but it's not. There's an upcoming book called How to Be Sick by Tony Bernhardt, Be Out in a few months. She got sick and hasn't gotten well and writes about how do you come to accept living with sickness and truly find peace and happiness and love.

It's a really important thing. We don't know what we're going to lose and how soon and how much. can we find a way no matter what happens to find some peace with it? And one of the things she describes, she has a metaphor with sickness, is that the weather keeps changing and the winds blow in and the winds blow out. So one moment she'll find she's filled with this kind of unpleasantness

and another moment that's gone and it's something else. And there's a tremendous solace in knowing it keeps changing, that you just rest in the changing flow. There's less grasping from, it to be a certain way. The second realization to mention is we really don't know what's going to happen. We just don't know. You know, it's, we think we might maybe not recover, or we think we will recover,

or we think we're going to feel this way, or we don't know. So there's this profound freedom and openness and realness in resting in don't know mind. But the bottom line is, can we practice this presence that allows us to really open in the moment to how it is? Now I'll read you something written by one woman who describes the gift of this practice for her. She says,

My days are short and as I grow weaker, I experience so much gratitude for my meditation. Not only the joy and ease, it brought but the hard parts. For every bored and restless sitting and every fearful fantasy and every pain and ache I sat through

and every itch I didn't scratch was a training for kindness a training for the muscle for bearing witness for the trusting spirit that carries me now as I face my death. So for this woman

who is no longer alive The Dharma, this practice of presence, gave her a quality of heart and awareness that was big enough for this changing, passing life. That's the possibility. There's a very powerful reflection that I sometimes do where I'll imagine that I only have a few minutes left. and I try to really talk myself into believing that and I know that sounds a little weird but just to say well what it would it be really like if there's just you know a few minutes a minute

you know just a little bit of time so just check that out if you can I mean see if you can see if you can put yourself into that mind state for a second that like this woman you know your days are short in fact you really don't have but a few moments just a little bit of time and then that's it for this incarnation. Just a few minutes left. If you imagine there's just a few minutes left, what is it that most matters to experience, our realize, our trust, right now?

What is that holy longing? What is it you most care about? What do you want to know or realize, our trust? And for now, this isn't something about others, where you'll be communicating with others. This is just your immediate experience. What is it? You really want to realize, trust, know, experience in these last moments. So maybe if a few people wanted to say, what is it?

You would want to trust or know. and I'll say it back out loud so you can hear each other. Just a few people would be willing to share. It'd be interesting to see what's in the room a little. Anyone? Presence. More than anything, if you knew you had just a few moments presence. Okay, thank you.

Yeah, who else? Yeah. Loving presence. So you'd like to realize and feel and experience loving presence. Yeah, please. Universal love. Thank you. Yeah.

I'm loved and I always will be. Please. Inner peace. Thank you. Gratitude. It's in those last moments, just gratitude. Yeah. Yeah.

You'd like to in some way communicate your love to others. Yeah, please. So you lived your life true to your heart. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Anyone else? Yeah. It's feeling your full awareness of all these other people

just like you, the basic connectedness. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. So the sense of anticipation of the passage and the soul awaiting you as you arrive. Anyone else? Yeah, please. So whatever is happening in this natural world

to be receiving it fully. So first of all, thank you very much. So if I had to take all the... Gary, I'm sorry, I didn't see your hand up. Huh? So your last few moments... moments would be, oh, no, I don't want to go. I'm glad we have a diverse

group here. When I do this inquiry with myself and with others, there seems to be a common denominator and there's different language, whether it's presence or loving presence or connectedness or nature. In some way, it has to do with

realizing a larger belonging, realizing the truth of our larger belonging to each other, to love, to love, to presence to whatever it is. And I love the word holy longing because my sense is that deep in our awareness, we all, because we do belong,

because awareness and love really is our nature, there's a longing that wants to come home to that. and that in the face of sensing the end of this physical incarnation, that longing can be very, very, it can be woken up. And there can be a sense that we can see the transparency of this physical self because it's almost gone. And in that transparency sense that really we just want to be home in the truth of our wholeness, of our radiance,

of the love or presence that really is our true nature. And for many, many people, in the face of sickness or in the face of death, feeling a kind of prayerfulness of, please, may I feel that presence, that love, that homecoming, that longing itself carries us home. And so I want to bring in the word prayer

because it's sometimes not in the Buddhist don't, Arama talks, that prayer has a truthfulness. It's coming from something in us that already knows we belong and wants to experience it in its fullness. So thus far, what I've described is if we're dealing with chronic illness, and at the very end I gave you this reading from a woman who's on her way to death, there is a way to take refuge. And the way to take refuge is to step out of our thoughts and really, come into the present moment, into this changing flow that's happening here. Of course, if the changing flow is too intense at times, to have the compassion to redirect our attention and gain

our resilience, but ultimately to open to the changing flow, and in that opening, we find this openness, this unresisting presence. That's one piece. This training we're doing here is that piece. Another element is to feel our longing to believe. along to the whole and that very longing can carry us to that fullness. As we begin to detect the who we really are beyond this living dying body as there's this kind of some cracks and the lights start shining through we actually express from a more awake and deep and loving place. That's why so many times people love to be around people that are dying because they're

actually living from a more enlightened. consciousness. They're not so fixed on the wants and fears of a separate self. One woman described this story about her father's death. In the weeks before his death, my father, a blustery man's man of a guy who had difficulty communicating anything that was not strongly held opinion, became someone else who I had vaguely sensed was there in him but had never before met. I could talk to this other father in ways it would not have been possible in all the years before. She writes, as you know, because she's telling somebody this.

My father was outstanding in his profession, and in one of those last conversations I asked him, what he felt was the contribution he had made to the world that made his life feel worth it to him. I thought he would point to one of his many award-winning projects, but he had smiled and said, you, of course. I do not recall ever having another word of praise from him in my whole lifetime, but it was enough.

There's a gift that comes when we loosen our grip to wanting this life a certain way, and we find our refuge in the spirit, in that radiance and in that love that's really our true nature. And there's a phrase in Sanskrit, Jivan Mukta, which means, to die while yet alive. And that's really the possibility that if we keep allowing the stream of life to happen rather than trying to control it,

if we let go of controlling, there's a letting go of this kind of a narrow self-sense that really opens us to that spirit, that awakeness, that tenderness. We live more from that place. So I've spoken to,

some about when we are encountering our own bodies dying or sickness. What about when we're losing others? How do we work with that? Basically it's the same practice of presence. It's the same practice of letting go of the controlling and opening to the moment-to-moment experience. The story that some of you might remember, I've shared it with some of you. I'd like to kind of unpack it a little more tonight of one woman who lost her husband. Before her husband died, she came to a retreat, a weekend retreat. And she announced to me towards the end of the retreat that she was there, but her husband really had a week or two to live, and that he had asked her to come because they were Catholic, but he didn't

want the priest to be guiding his passing. He wanted her. So he kind of sent her to the retreat to kind of strengthen her mindfulness and so on. So there she was. And she confessed to me that her deepest fear was that she'd fail him, that she wouldn't be able to keep him company in a way that was really a wise way. And she asked me what she should do. Should she read the Tibetan book of living and dying? Should she study different parts of the Abidama or the Buddhist teachings on Haddhick?

keep people company when they're dying. You know, she just wanted to kind of do a crash course and how to be with the dying. And as you can imagine, I said, you know, there are things to read. But really, this is about being present, loving presence. This is about loving presence. And she was afraid she wouldn't build a show up. So I suggested to her the language I had heard from Father Thomas Keating,

who I had taught with recently, a weekend on compassion. And in the same way that I teach a kind of yes meditation, he teaches the words, I consent. He says when you hit something that's difficult, just to say, I consent. And that creates a kind of a softness. It lets the river flow through.

So I shared that with her, and she was game for trying. And she had some more presence, but she still was pretty chronically trying to fix things. and control things and make things better. And one night, he started talking about dying. And her response was, oh, Han, today was a good day. Let me make you some tea.

That just cut off the contact. There was a silence that was a really dead kind of silence. She felt like she had just really severed intimacy. And when she was making the tea, she started praying, please, please, may I remember loving presence. Please may I remember loving presence? And that was her dedication. And so then the practice of I consent went much deeper.

And when she was afraid or nervous or uncomfortable or confused, I consent. When she felt his pain and just the anguish to feel his pain, I consent. And when the grief came, the grief that just needed to be agreed and felt, I consent. And she described it that the more deeply, and I consent is really, I mean,

presence means to recognize and allow. This is deep presence. She said the more deeply she just let what was happening happen, she said she knew how to be with him. She said she knew how to touch him and she knew how to be quiet and when to sing. And the intimacy became very full. and very alive.

And when she called me after the retreat, because he died pretty quickly within a couple of weeks, she said, he's gone, but the field of loving, who we really are, is always with me. Her presence with his passing was the refuge that let her discover what I sometimes think of as a love that will not die.

So just as in losing our own health and losing another, there's a grieving process. And I think of grieving as the natural human experience, it's not just humans because other creatures grieve too, but the natural experience of accepting the actuality of loss. It's honest and it's purifying. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross did the kind of ground-baking work that showed us all the steps,

all the stages of reactivity, of going into trance that we will, do will do anything but accept and grieve, anything but. So grieving is this expression of accepting the realness of loss, and it opens the door to a love that's timeless. This is a poem I shared here a few months ago that I found when there was a woman who had lost her partner, and this was the poem that I found and sent to her. And then I'd like to read it, it's John O'Donohue. He describes the process of grieving. He says, there are days when you wake up happy. Again, inside the fullness of life, until the moment breaks and you are thrown back onto the black tide of loss. Days when you

have your heart back, you're able to function well until in the middle of work or encounter, suddenly with no warning, you are ambushed by grief. It becomes hard to trust yourself. All you can depend on now is that sorrow will remain faithful to itself. More than you, it knows its way and will find the right time to pull and pull the rope of grief until that coiled hell of tears has reduced to its last drop. Gradually, you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed. and when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal, and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air

and be able to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. Let me read this last part. Gradually you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed, and when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. So many of us that are listening right now have lost someone that we cherish.

And we know from the inside out that you can't will yourself to let go, to say, oh, there's a timeless love. There's a very real yanking of the heart, a kind of a squeeze of missing that just is there. And even when we've done the work of grieving, even when we've found that timeless love, that connects us. There are waves that re-arise where we just feel that soreness and tenderness of missing. We know that. So what is the path?

I know with my father, who died in 2003. And I had a very sweet and uncomplicated relationship with him, especially as he got older. Many waves of grief, after he died. And yet I found more and more that when the waves would arise and I'd feel them and let them move through me, I would just be left gradually more and more with a sense of, ah, what goodness, what a dear being, and then just love, just love. But that's not at first. There's a process. And there's a process of being.

with that we can't get around. Now the process isn't one to be done alone. It's really important to say one of our friends in the Sangha lost his brother recently, and he described to me that what carried him, the only thing that carried him, was the love of his friends. So sometimes we find that larger belonging, not because we meditate our way into it, but because truthfully we're in contact with dear ones that remind us that we belong. to others. We belong. There is a connectedness.

As one person said, it's happening to everyone. Everyone here is losing their own bodies. We'll eventually lose their minds unless they die younger. We'll lose others. Everyone here. One woman, very dear person

in our community, Lucinda, died a few years ago, and she told me again and again how it was a sense of Sangha of community that allowed her to have space for all the fear and all the grief about knowing she was leaving. So whether we're leaving or whether someone else is going, remembering our belonging, our connectedness. When Bill's mother entered the room, she saw her son

who had not spoken to her for years in prison garb, handcuffed to the bed. The hospice nurse was afraid that the dignified and stern mother would look at her son with judge. and disappointment. Instead, after initial greetings, they looked one another all over. Then their eyes locked in the circumstances and sufferings, the roles and costumes, all dropped away. Nurse said that Bell's mother gazed at her son like a newborn child, like a saint witnessing a miracle with the vast heart of all mothers. Bill and his mother saw in one another their secret beauty, forgiving, timeless, eternal. They sat together for an hour and held hands.

There was not much that needed to be said. When his mother left, Bill said now, he could die at peace. So that holy longing that I describe to belong, we can experience that belonging with presence, with prayer, and with each other. one of the most beautiful reflections the Tonglin meditation that's a meditation on compassion allows us to touch into our own

hurts our own griefs and then invites us to remember all those that are suffering in the same way and there's a profound realization that comes with that we wake up out of the delusion that it's happening to me and it's personal

and we wake up into the truth that this living, dying world is being experienced by all of us and that there's a spirit and awareness, a shared belonging that really is our home. That brings peace. So I'd like to close by reminding you of the word fires of loss because this is a bit of a somber kind of talk, it seems, you know. And yet loss is just, as much as there's life and birth, there's loss and death. And if we let the losses that come be our teacher and our guide, if we open, we discover that which is shining through.

Things get transparent. Everything I have learned, writes Mary Oliver in my lifetime, leads back to this. The fires and the black river of loss, whose other side is salvation. Let me say that again. Everything I've ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this. The fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation. She goes on. To live in this world, you must be able to do three things.

To love what is mortal. to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it and when the time comes to let it go to let it go. In the deepest way the letting go is ongoing. One friend of mine describes the whole of the spiritual path that's just letting go and letting go because the reality is life doesn't cooperate with the way we want it so we tense up

and we have to keep letting go of that tensing up. We have to keep letting go and letting life be as it is. Because we can argue with reality as much as we want, but we'll never win. It just keeps being the way it is. So we have to keep letting go into letting it be as it is. Letting go and letting go. So there's a courage in that.

There's a courage to love without holding back. And when there's a natural condition to hold on, because love and holding on come together, just to again practice letting go, letting go. The gift of this practice of this training is that we begin to become aware of where we're holding on. We can't will letting go, but we can be willing, we can be willing, we can intend presence. And that intention is profound. So I'd like to close with a brief reflection that we can do together. the Buddha describes three refuges

in the face of this changing, living, dying world. The refuge of presence with what is right here, the refuge of love, and the refuge of awareness itself. So we just begin in a simple way with this final reflection, opening to the life that's right here. And you might listen to the sounds that are here, listen to and feel the aliveness, the sensations that are here,

and see if it's possible to entrust yourself to the waves, to just let go into this aliveness. No resistance. If there's anything difficult to sense the possibility of offering a very tender kind of presence, so that you're not just saying yes, but there's a quality of true gentleness. Okay, yes, with kindness,

to any unpleasant experience in the body or if your heart is carrying something difficult, something going on in your life, sense you're belonging to others that might be experiencing the same. So you're saying yes to not just my fear, but our fear, the fear. And in this kindness and presence, just sense the awareness that's here, the background, openness and wakefulness.

That's really your true nature, your home. To live in this world, you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal. To hold it against your bones, knowing your own life depends on it. And when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. in these last few moments just sensing the freedom of letting go not holding on to anything

not resisting resting an open presence the teaching you have received has been freely offered if you would like to contact the Insight Meditation Community of Washington to make a donation or to learn more about our programs please visit our website at

www.imcw.org Thank you.