Tara Brach - The God Whom I Love is Inside (2012-12-29) (retreat talk)

Episode Date: January 23, 2013

2012-12-29 - (retreat talk) The God Whom I Love is Inside - Our suffering arises from unlived life--the fears and loneliness and hurt that we have been unable to digest and include in our heart. This talk explores our conditioning to become dis-embodied and the blessings of spiritual realization that arise as we inhabit our aliveness fully. 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 good evening and namaste. And I'd like to start by saying that for those of you that are new, you might have wondered about the bowing and the namasteing. So I thought maybe I'd say a word, which is that the word, the namaste means I see the divine in you, I see the sacred in you. And in Asia, in the West, we greet each other and say, hey, how are you? Or we show people our empty hand and then shake hands. I'm not carrying a gun, you know, that greeting. And in Asia, it's often namaste. I see the divine in you. It's just a

different flavor in the cultures, you know. But I was reflecting on it tonight because I just really wanted to bow to all of you. And there's something that is so, it's such a privilege to be able to be with a group of people and then witness the process of us paying attention to our own experience and sense in you such a just the dedication to presence in the groups in the hall so I feel a sense of thankfulness and just want to appreciate you yeah so it's been two full days and I'm always aware of the weather metaphor that we see it going on outside and you've probably noticed a lot of different systems going through inside and noticed perhaps also the difference between when there's some freedom around what's going on and when you sense

it's difficult and one of the things I really like about the groups is when we start hearing each other it's a little less personal. Let me ask you here, we'll do a little hand-raise. These are called the five hindrances or the five major energies that end up contracting us. How many of you have found that wanting mind has taken over, that desire for something more

or something different? Yeah, you can look around right now. The rules are changing. Just take a look. Yeah. Good. Okay. How about aversion? I don't like this. I don't want this. Okay. We've got a fair, oh, we got two hands up here. All right.

Let me ask you about sleepiness. I should say, who hasn't? Okay. Restlessness, that kind of itchy, just want to kind of jump out of my skin feeling. Yeah, I see some hands really high. And then what about doubt? I can't do this. This isn't working.

It's not, yeah. And if you were looking around, you would have notice that for each of those over three quarters of the room it's really powerful if there's enough of a pause to get this isn't my anger or my restlessness this is an energy and others feel it too there's something powerful and what we're really exploring together the training is how can we pause and relate to our experience in a way that really frees us.

And the kind of metaphor I like a lot in terms of that encompasses the practice are what the Buddha described as the two wings of presence. And that one of the wings which Hugh described was such lucidity last night, this wing of mindful attention that notices what's happening, the wing of recognition, of mindfulness. and the wing of heartfulness, of love or compassion. They're inseparable. We need them both, although we might be emphasizing or seeming to emphasize one or the other. Okay, a little story. There's this old town, and there's three stores, and they're all lined up on the same street, side by side.

And they each sell pretty much the same merchandise. So one day the owner of the store on one end puts up a sign saying, rock bottom prices. So the guy in the other end of the street puts up his sign, lowest prices in town. So the guy in the middle, there's all these aggressive maneuvers, and he's trying to figure out what to do. Then he gets an idea and puts up a sign and it says, main entrance. So tonight we're going to be talking about the main entrance, which is this important. embodied being, that no matter what's going on, if we're able to bring these two wings

of presence to the aliveness that's right here, we're going to be able to gradually wake up out of the trance that's so identified with what's going on and rest in something larger. That this embodied, alive, living form is our portal. is our gateway. And what I've noticed that we keep on coming to over and over again

just how much conditioning we have to leave. Like right now you might sense you were listening, was there any still here in the body feeling? You know, we leave so quickly. We leave so quickly. It's very strong

conditioning because this body is the place of living and dying and rawness, and it's not in our control. So we try to go somewhere else where we seem to have more control, which is our mind. We leave. The thing I have noticed the most, and this is over decades of teaching, is that when people plateau in their practice, or get really stuck, or just keep on repeating and repeating, it's because of being disembodied. That as long as we're not able to bring the awareness

into the wholeness of our being, the places where the wounding is stored are just left frozen. They're just left there. So tonight I'd like to explore how we can either very directly and radically or very gradually and gently and for many the intelligence and wisdom is gradual and gentle become more and more embodied zen master riocon has a beautiful verse it's to know the buddhist way he says drift east drift west come and go entrusting yourself to the waves so in a way this becoming embodied is a pathway of surrendering some it's kind of surrendering our grip on our thoughts and on virtual reality and kind of surrendering into the aliveness that's here. Just another way to consider it. And that as we do, everything

that we long for, as we really bring those two wings of presence to this aliveness, is free to blossom forth. The poet Kabir, inside this clay jug, there are cany canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. The God whom I love is inside. So there's very strong habit, even in spiritual circles, to posit spirit what we're seeking as something that's beyond the body self. We have this idea of, you know, rainbow lights of, you know, just glowing, glimmering, shining out there. And it's not so much considered that we're realizing this sacredness through the bodily being.

And it's interesting to me when I read about the time of the Buddha that it actually was, there was increasing urbanization then, increasing agriculture, political centralization, and in the different spiritual practices, as many of you know, kind of dominating nature. of the body you know doing all the all those the wild kind of practices of sleeping on beds of nails and starving yourself and so on and the Buddha tried it renouncing the body you know just trying to just sense that spirit was somewhere else and it didn't work for him and one of the phrases that has come through the ages that he used that he said was I follow the

ancient way In other words, he gave up this brutality towards the physical form and the ancient way is an embeddedness in nature, coming home through these bodily beings and the first foundation of mindfulness that he taught, the senses, the breath, being here, right in this body. One of my favorite stories of the Buddha's awakening was that they, you know, he had met the slings in our

arrows of Mara and turned them to flower petals with his presence, his compassion, his mindfulness. But when the greatest challenge came, the challenge of doubt was the moment that he reached down and called on the earth goddess, which is really the deepest acknowledgment of this larger belonging, belonging to the web of life. And it's really the honoring of the feminine. It's not like he was going to like muscle his way to enlightenment. He belonged to something larger and that shift in identity when we realize that this anger is not owned by itself it's just an energy that belongs to this field of aliveness frees us John O'Donohue he says we need to come home to the temple of our

senses our bodies know that they belong to life to spirit it is our minds that make our lives so homeless so we explore this pathway of homecoming and a lot of the training we do here, as you've seen, is to notice the thinking trance, to notice when we've been lost in a virtual reality, just to notice it, not to try to get rid of it, but in the noticing, we relax open to a larger space of being and we're no longer identified with the thoughts. We connect with a more direct experience of being alive. Okay, so let's take a moment. We're going to have to go in and out of listening and into being in our body.

So here we go. Just listen to the sound of the gong and invite your attention to the aliveness that's right here. Let your awareness settle into the body. Sense what it means to rest in the space between thoughts. One of the great instructions is don't do anything that takes you from the body. So what does it mean to entrust yourself to the waves? right in this moment and in trust again and again. Keep the attention in an embodied way, opening your eyes and we'll keep going a bit.

What we find often when we sense, okay, the space between thoughts is very quickly that space is gone and the attention is again fixated because we have such a strong habit of fixating the attention on thoughts. a sense of being on our way somewhere else. So our minds are leaning forward. So what makes it so difficult? I often use the metaphor of bicycling away from the present moment. And the more stress, the more tension, the more quickly we bicycle away into our virtual reality. How come? We've talked about it some. I mean that we emerge into form and along with that is this basic perception, I'm separate, there's danger, I got to figure out what's going

to go wrong, anticipate it, defend against it, you know. So we live with a sense of around the corner, especially because we've got these thinking minds around the corner is something's going to be too much to handle, loss, death. That's just, it's there. We're living with the sense that it's imminent and we're tensing against it. Somebody sent me a cartoon that has this psychologist and he's sitting there and his client who's lying on the couch is the Grim Reaper. And it's a pretty good setup. Basically the therapist looks completely terrified and they're at the end of the session and the grim Reaper is saying, no, Doc.

I'm afraid it's your time that's up. I'll leave it out for you. You've got to see it kind of, but it's good. So the sense that our time is up, not enough time. How many of you have noticed when you started just deepening your attention that some of the anxiety is this sense of,

this chronic sense there's not going to be enough time? Can I just see how many of you have noticed that? A good number. So what happens is our bodies feel this rawness and this anxiety about not enough time, something's going to go wrong, and we want to get away from it. So a huge amount of our controlling self is about get away from where the raw, uncomfortable stuff lives,

and we dissociate. We get disembodied. We leave. And we have all sorts of ways of doing it. Every time it's uncomfortable, that's our reflex is to get away from it. And especially when it feels like too much. We get away from it. We tense against it, we numb it out, we move into our minds, and then the energy that's there, because the energy is still there, that gets frozen and trapped. It's just sitting there. We've left it behind. Now this gets amplified, this whole process gets amplified when there's really deep emotional

wounding. The more we've been neglected, are abandoned, are rejected, not seen. The more we have, from very early on, had to find a little bit of the more we've been neglected. a way to leave because it was too much to handle. So we leave. It happens as we know through the culture too in a big way, that the culture provides all these false refuges for leaving. It's speedy, a lot of consuming. And so not only that, if we pay attention to the culture, we're going to be getting all these messages of how we should be, which, in the way, and amplify our unease.

And the culture basically tells us look good. I mean, if we feel that we're too fat, if we feel that we're too skinny, if we feel that we're of a race that is not respected by the mainstream or of a sexual orientation that's not respected or appreciated, from very

early on there is an angst or an anxiety that we're going to be running away from. The culture reinforces it. So what do we do? We do our false refuges. Most of you are on to your patterning. I mean, for some of us, it's through food. Some of us it's overachieving, getting over busy. For many, it's distracting. How many of you feel like you go online or get caught up in email more than it's just because you're doing your job or something like that?

You can feel the addictiveness of it. Me. One of my favorite cartoons is of a man and a woman they're sitting in a lot. living room and he's saying to her you know if I ever turn into a vegetable the vegetative state please you know just pull the plug she goes over the TV set and pulls it you know so so our major false refuge as I've you know been pointing at really and it's our addiction to thought and our survival brain drives it it's if we feel threatened it's very hard to step out of thinking because we rely on our thinking to keep on trying to plan and worry and anticipate.

And many times our thinking serves us well. So we get a lot of benefits from it. So it's like, you know, a lot of us have a persona that we know is keeping us trapped, but we've gotten so many kudos. It's the best thing going, at least for the time, right? It's hard to give up. Another story of this one, a guy takes his poodle into it for a safari in Africa. I don't know why he would take his poodle to go to Africa.

And the poodle gets lost. And so the poodle is lost, and he sees a leopard approaching. So he bends himself over a bunch of bones, and he's gnawing. And as soon as leopards anywhere near him, he goes, that was a great-tasting leopard. And the leopard's terrified, and he dashes off. Well, there's this monkey in a tree who witnessed it. And he goes over, he follows the leopard.

He figures, ah, you know, in exchange for protection, I'll let him know what happened. He tells the leopard the leopard is completely pissed off that he got tricked. So monkey jumps on his back. They return. The poodle sees them coming, puts two and two together, bends over the bones again. And as soon as they're within earshot, he says, where is that damn monkey? I sent him off for that leopard just an hour ago.

Smart poodle. Okay, so the biggest false refuge is that we go off into our thoughts. Most of us know we're addicted to thinking it's beyond just what's helpful. I often talk about, you know, there's our minds like different TV channels and, you know, some of them are useful to be looking at and give us information, useful news, not too many. Very fewer Discovery Channel or any of these shows that really teach us anything. So we're there and then the inquiry is, so what happens when we're so disembodied? What happens when we, and it's not just when there's been huge traumatic wounding,

it's most of us a lot of the time. Not here. What happens? So there's a line from Carl Jung that, that I reflect on a lot and I try to share whenever I can. He basically is teaching that the greatest influence on our lives and on the lives of parents and on the lives of their children are, it's really what's unlived. It's the unlived life that most affects us and it affects our children. And we're affected by our parents' unlived life.

And you can see the effect of the unlived fears and a cultural way. when we haven't faced fears as societies, we go to war. And when we don't face fear of societies, we over-consume. And we dominate the Earth because we're afraid and don't feel our belonging to the Earth body. If we don't feel our belonging to this body, we won't feel our connection to the Earth and we won't be good stewards of the Earth.

And so we see what happens. But I want to look more, well, what happens to our... us in an individual way. Because we know that, you know, we can, we know it, if we're disembodied, we go to war. Because we can not sense another's humanity and others' realness. How do things like Newtown happen? How do things like, you know, carrying, somebody told, I think it was Pat, mentioned that the statistics that in every urban area, every every day, 33 young male African Americans are shot. 33 every day. How does that happen? It's a disembodied culture. It's lost. It's lost in a trance that leads to violence

because we're not sensing real others. How does it happen in the Congo? We're having like the killing fields, the worst since World War II in the Congo right now. It's in the news, but it's not getting as much attention as it should. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of kids are displaced, are being raped, recruited into armies, facing starvation, disembodied. So in our own lives, what happens when we leave our bodies? One thing is, it takes a lot of energy to keep leaving

and walling off the life that's there, so we get tired. We get tired because we're fighting against something we don't want to feel. It takes work. What else happens? Well, it blocks an energy flow and it creates more tension and discomfort. So we're never really comfortable in our bodies when there's unlived life. Certainly there's no access to joy. If we're not embodied, we can't feel joy.

What else happens? When we disembodied, when we're walling off the life that's here, there's a part of us that knows it. So there's a chronic apprehension. There's a sense that something's in there and it's going to burst out in some way or it's got control, but I have to keep shoving under. So there's anxiety and there's some shame like something's wrong in there. And the last thing I'll mention is that to the degree that we're disembodying, there's unlived life, our identity then takes the shape of a defended self, a controlling self. a fearful self, a wanting self. In other words, our identity gets small

because we're not inhabiting the flow of aliveness of our body. So it says John O'Donohue said, we're homeless. We're not at home in our being. So the basic principles that then guide us in returning home, one of the basic principles that Hugh covered so well last night that it's absolutely inevitable that we're going to feel the discomfort and unease, the pain, I mean the weather systems come through, that's inevitable, that the suffering

is optional, that we know that when there's discomfort and we resist, the equation is pain times resistance equals suffering. That's the equation. It's kind of a pseudo equation, but it's a good one. You know, you can kind of get the sense of it. So to the degree that we create unlived life, that we resist the life that's here, we're going to suffer. And we're going to in some way be identified with the controller, the one that was scared to feel,

the one that has something in there that's shameful, the controller that's trying to manage. So pain times resistance equals suffering. Pain times presence equals freedom. any moment we meet what's difficult with these two wings of presence, we start touching freedom. Our sense of the identity of the controller starts dissolving and we start inhabiting something larger, which is the point of the whole practice. The point isn't, can you stay with your breath? The point isn't any of the skillful means. It's to realize the truth of who we are, to live from that. So, we're conditioned to resist and yet we have a yearning and we have different language

for it but we have a yearning to open. We want to. This is Alice Miller. She's an author and a psychotherapist and she says, the truth about our childhood is stored up in our body and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, and conceptions confused and our body tricked with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who's still whole in spirit will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

It's powerful language. But it's basically saying, until we contact the truth, we're going to still feel that uneasiness and restlessness, that homelessness. So there's these two key elements I've been mentioning, these two wings of presence. And when we speak about the wing of mindfulness, there's an engaged quality that I want to emphasize. that because of our habit of denying and avoiding and moving away, it takes an intentionality and a purposefulness to contact. Does that make sense? Okay, intentionality. So mindfulness is purposeful. It's like saying, well, what is really here? What really is the truth? Meaning,

what's going on this moment right here in this body, that kind of truth? What's going on? That's the wing of mindfulness. It's got inquiry, it's investigating, it's engaged. The wing of love, it doesn't have to present as the wing of full-blown love the way we think of heart love, tender, sweet. It begins with space and allowing. It's making room. It's accepting. You can think of it as contact, contacting the wave of experience and sensing the space that includes it, the ocean. In fact, I think of a lot of lot of the work we're doing in terms of that metaphor of waves and ocean, that moment by moment we're connecting with the wave of experience, but sensing its ocean-ness, sensing its larger belonging.

So when we bring this presence to the moment, it starts deconditioning the controller. We start arriving home again. I'd like to give you an example. I was kind of feeling into this and sensing that this time six years ago during the New Year's retreat, I had written my talk, I was completely ready for the retreat, I know that Jonathan and Pat were going to be teaching. I can't, there's one other person I think. We're set to do it and I had been kind of in my own way running from sick personhood for some months and really pushing myself and right before the retreat, ended up in a cardiac unit and I did a cardiac unit retreat instead of being down at this retreat which was hard. So I had been running because if I let myself really open to my body, open to

the life that was there, I would have found a life that was shaky and fragile and not so secure. like my sense of a future was shaky. I was that sick. And so it put me in touch with loss and death and grief. So I was racing. This is my way of not, that was the unlived life and I was on the go. But sometimes we get slammed over the head and I got kind of just creamed. I just landed up in this, in the hospital. So I remember the first night and you know how nights are at the hospital. You can't really sleep very well. It's just light. So I was just lying there and my mind was still doing the controller thing. Like, how long am I going to be here? Because that point I didn't know and what's really wrong and what should I do about it and how did I get myself into this? It was judgment. It was everything because the controller does it all. And an elderly nurse walked in and she looked at me and she said, oh dear, you're feeling poorly. And that just cracked me open. It was like somebody named it. It was like forget all the Mishogash of my mom. they just named, oh, this hurts, which is a powerful way to cut through. This hurts.

And so she left, and that freed me up to weep some and to start touching in a little bit to the fact that there was grieving going on. But I had a lot of days in there, like five or six days, and the controller just kept coming back into play, like without even noticing such a deep habit of trying to analyze what was going on. And should I cancel my Wednesday? class. I mean, I have no way of knowing and, you know, how do I find teachers to fill in? And I was just going and going and going. Many, many rounds where I would say, okay, come back, come back, come back. But I remember towards the end of my stay at one point, feeling like the controller was desperate and just grasping. And I, and I, at one point,

something just, I just realized it and I lay down and it just dropped and I just said, okay, I've gotta be with what's here. And there's a phrase from Choghim Trunkpa, a Tibetan teacher, where he just says, just meet your edge and soften. Meet your edge and soften. Now that's the two wings. See if you can keep hearing these two wings because they're really the two qualities of awareness itself, this wakefulness where we see our edge and recognize it. And the softness is the space that's all happening. meet your edge and soften. So I kept trying to meet my edge and soften,

but the grief was like this gaping hole. And I had a feeling that if I really entrusted myself to the waves, that I would die, that I'd be annihilated. That was the feeling. It would be too much. And I kept feeling like the controller was saying, nope, can't do that one. I kept pulling back, meet my edge, and tried to soften.

So finally at one point, and I do this a lot, as many of you know. I had my hand on my heart and I said, it's okay, sweetheart, just let go. And again, just like that nurse right at the beginning, there was something in the quality of loving presence that made it safe enough to just drop. And that was a sense, it was like dropping.

I dropped resistance. I didn't drop anything, really. I just stopped clutching. and dropped and it was huge, huge grief and just kept allowing and allowing until the presence with the grief, what really transformed was the who I was shifted from the grieving person

to that tender space that was just with grief. And I want to slow down because that's the shift where the freedom is. That's why presence works. that we bring these two wings of kindness and mindfulness, and if we stay and stay, gradually we remember that tenderness and presence is what we are. The identification with the small self that's fighting, resisting, grasping, dissolves. It's a homecoming.

So I'd like to say that that was the end of the controller. But I'd say every day, every single day, I'm more alert and less believing the storyline and therefore less caught. But every day I sense, you could call it the controller, there's many different names, that's just a name, but I sense that managing ego that is trying to make things be a certain way, have her way, prove something, defending it, you know, just see it happening. The beauty of this practice is that's fine that these constellations keep reconstilating themselves. What shifts is that we don't, we become more and more familiar

with that space of presence that's aware and tender and that becomes more the reality of what we are than any story of a small self. There's less lag time that we're caught. So that's story number one and the two key elements is to train ourselves and we do the training when we're not, when there's not these huge difficult energies and we just start learning more and more to find refuge in aliveness, to let, to just keep entrusting to the waves, the pleasant ones, the unpleasant ones. and the two qualities we bring to the attention to the waves,

noticing what's happening, real contact, and also sensing some space, a kind of surrendering and openness to move from virtual reality to inhabiting these bodies. So an exercise, just briefly take your hand and put it in front of you and look at it and let your mind think hand. Okay, this is hand.

H-A-N-D-H-A-N-D, hand. Words are so funny when you say them a bunch of times. Hand. This is hand. Let me say a Jersey like, this is hand. I come from New Jersey so I can make fun of Jersey. Okay, so you're looking at hand. And you might turn it over and just notice what it looks like to you,

and if you have any thoughts about it, and maybe what your hand's been like through your lifetime, time and how it might compare to other hands and whatever it is that comes to mind and seeing hand. And then to gently close your eyes and just slowly move your hand just across the field in front of you just kind of to the left and to the right, slowly enough so that you can feel the sensations of moving through air. start to feel the aliveness that's here in the hand.

And then just stop still suspending it in the air, eyes are closed, and let your attention really go inside the hand, your awareness. So you can feel the tingling and the vibrating. And with interest, notice what it is you're actually feeling. the tension, be very close in so you're engaging and just knows what are the sensations like? What are the sensations like? What is this? Is there any boundary to what you're feeling? Is there anything that's not moving? You might explore softening a little more. Just soften a little more and sense the space inside and around the hand, around the

vibration. From the Yoga Sutras it says, experience the substance of the body in the world is made up of vibrating particles. And these particles made up of even finer energy particles. Drifting more deeply feel into each particle as it condenses from infinity and dissolves back into it continuously. So we sense the particular, the actual sensation and this space that surrounds, is inside, and relaxing the arm down, just taking a moment to sense, as we often ask you to do, the difference

between the aliveness in these hands, in this body, the direct experience, and any idea we might have about the body. So this is a key part of the training move from the ideas into this living beingness. And yet the pathway is not cut and dry. And you can open your eyes if you'd like. For many people, especially when the body, the unlived life,

is filled with deep woundedness, when it's that sense of it's too much. To ask, to bring awareness to inhabit the places it feels like too much. The hand's usually easier, but to go to the heart or the belly or the genitals, if there's been abuse or wounding, as Pat mentioned this morning, can be retramatizing. So this is why I said at the beginning, sometimes there's a radical cutting through, but sometimes we need to have the wisdom to know how to gentle in and it takes really being patient.

So I'd like to share a story that speaks to this side of it, which is how we can begin to come into this embodied presence when we've been really disembodied because there's been real trauma. Because I feel like every one of us at certain times will have a sense of it's too much, and we need to know about this. And my story is a woman that came to me because it was way too painful for her to contact her body. She'd come to some meditation classes and been told, okay, the way is, and in the early days we used to give the instructions much more formulistically is, oh, something's going on, go from the thoughts into the body. Oh, it's difficult, open to it, meet it with kindness, but sometimes you can't.

So she came and as part of her healing she wrote a story that was about what was going on. and so I'm going to tell you a little about her story. She was seven years old in this story, hiding in a closet, terrified after an unexpected attack from her drunk and enraged father. And she's praying, help, I can't take it anymore. She opens her eyes and sees a fairy in a haze of blue with a glittering wand. And she lets the fairy know her father's been beating her and her mother doesn't help and how she feels like they both wish she was dead.

And the fairy listens with tears in her eyes. in her eyes and then tells her that while she can't make all this pain disappear, she can help her get through this time, she can help her forget and then remember later when she's able to handle it. With a wave of the wand, the good fairy said, I'm going to send things into different parts of your body and they're going to hold them for you until you feel strong enough to let them move freely again. And then she explains how she's going to tighten her pelvis in her belly so she doesn't have to feel the abuse that happened and constrict her heart so that she doesn't have to feel the heartbreak and constrict her throat so she doesn't

feel the urge to cry out. So she's going to protect her from the raw intensity by creating unlived life basically. So I'm going to read you the last part. You will have trouble feeling of being close to people but it will be your way of surviving. At those times that the pain erupts, you'll find your own ways to control it that might not look good to the world, but will be of temporary comfort. And you, my darling, will be fairly functional being because in spite of this you have a strong mind and you can hold all the sin, and I will be helping you. The child looking directly in the fairy's eyes asked, how will you help? Will you come back to see me? You will not forget everything. I will leave a voice inside you that

will urge you to reconnect with your whole self. It may be a very long process, but in time you will feel an urgent call to step out of imprisoning beliefs, to unwind your body and release what it's been holding all these years. You will learn the art of sacred presence. There will be physical and emotional pain as you open, but you will have what you need, the compassion, the wisdom, the support of others to be a whole person, spiritually awake, but still the same. This is because your soul has always been there, just hidden by the scars of this lifetime. The good fairy put her arm around the child's shoulders and gently led her to bed. She waved her wand and stood by as the little girl finally relaxed

into deep sleep. She gazed tenderly at the small, innocent face and then whispered her goodbye. When you wake up, you will forget I was here. You will forget you ask for help. You will forget the sharpness of your daily pain. This is the only way I know to get you through this. You are a beautiful child. I love you, and in fact your parents love you, although they're incapable of showing it to you. You'll have to love yourself enough to heal so that when you are older, your life will be powerful, full, and free. One day you will know who you really are. You will trust your goodness and know your belonging. Until then, and for always, I love you. When I first shared the story at a Wednesday night class, I had so many people that

talked to me about what was important for them and it was that they had blamed themselves for disembodiment. They had blamed themselves for dissociation. They had blamed themselves for all the ways they tried to wall off that life. And they realized it wasn't their fault. That this is just what we're meant. This is the most intelligent, wise thing we can do at certain phases of our life. And as we read with Alice, that view of our own, that view of our own, this is the, that view of our meant to, this is the, beautiful quote, the unlived life at some point needs to be processed and experienced and expressed in some way, digest it. So for this woman, just to give you the follow-up, we spent a lot of time. For her, the good fairy became the divine mother. It became basically loving presence,

that warmth, that field of belonging that she yearned for. And, we spent a lot of time cultivating the particulars of a pathway so she could call on that and sense that in a visceral way that there was something that cared about her. There was a love in this world that she belonged to. And then she had the safety and the comfort of being with me in my office. So that became a resource anchor. And I remember one time she was alone when things broke open. and she called on the Divine Mother and she basically said,

please be with me, please be with me, please be with me. And she felt that she had the strength on her own to entrust herself to the waves, to kind of let go into what was happening because there was something larger she belonged to. And that gave her a lot of sense of empowerment. But it was years, several years, of going through the body over and over again and finding that she could be in her body

and that it was safe enough until she started really sensing who she was beyond the defended self, the egoic self. In fact, as she described, she started realizing more and more that who she really was

was what she had been calling on, which I think is really so beautiful because that's what happens. We think we're calling on God or great spirit out there, the divine mother, the Buddha, and we're calling on our own awakened heart mind, but we need initially to feel that sense that we can call on something.

So what I've been talking about tonight are really different ways that we call on these two wings of mindfulness and heartfulness. And sometimes we can be here in retreat and be sitting and something difficult comes up and we can say, okay, be with it and open to it and feel it in the body and let it move and be kind towards it. But other times it's so strong, we need to find different ways that more slowly we have access to enough safety and enough love that we then have the space to more fully call on what's there and tap into it. As we do, over time, as I've been describing, the gift is a shift in identity. We open up. There's three ways it shows itself, this gift of embodied presence. And I'm going to just conclude with these three gifts.

that we get as we more and more come into what's sometimes called the wilderness of God, the way these bodies are. And one is that just we feel more alive. There's more creative energy. People leave retreats with that. They feel their senses are more awake. You might have noticed it when the snow came down. How much more sensitive and enlivened you were,

sensing the floating white soft particles in the way that the softness and the silence and the grace. Our senses wake up. 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. There's this sense that when we really get inside it, there's this living experience that's amazing and it's a mystery. We're part of this big mystery. The big bang started this universe, poured forth all this matter through space and some of the matter form stars, residue form planets. So everything, including the earth, everything on the earth, including these bodies, is formed out of the same material that form the stars and the planets.

This is cosmologist Brian Swimmy. He says, your bones are made of calcium and magnesium and there's seawater in your blood. You are the living Earth in this particular form. Four and a half billion years ago the Earth was a flaming molten ball of rock. and now it can sing opera. It's a mystery. So more aliveness. The second fruit of coming into these bodies,

of living the unlived life, is that we can love not in an abstract way, but in a visceral way. If we're not living in these bodies, we have ideas about love and thoughts about loves and little tweaks of tenderness that come up because it's there. but we're not here to feel it completely.

You might just close your eyes for a moment and just check this out. Probably many of you know the difference between knowing you love someone and the moment when you're looking in their eyes and you actually say I love you and your body gets engaged in what you're saying. So just for these few moments you might sense somebody that you care about and bring them into the room and bring them close by. As you feel them there, breathe into your heart so you can feel your heart in a physical way

and then sense you're looking into that person's eyes, mentally whisper their name, and just say, I love you, and feel your heart speaking. Let your heart sense that person receiving your message and being touched. You can keep your eyes closed as I describe the last gift which is when you sense love and you sense, well, who's really loving right now? You can begin to sense love as a field as something awake, timeless, just awake space, tender, awake space.

And this points to the third gift of awakening through our bodies is we sense these forms, this life, and we sense the awareness, the space. the awakeness that's aware of this life. The more fully you entrust yourself to the waves. You can feel it right now, just let go in your body, just sense what that means. Entrusting yourself to the waves, entrusting yourself. Sense what happens when you let go a little.

The more you entrust yourself to the waves, the more you discover the ocean-ness. Not transcending the waves of form or realizing who we are by deep and deep and presence with this aliveness. Entrusting yourself to the waves, see how much of your bodily self can let go into this living web, as if you're surrendering, releasing, like a river releases into the ocean. Just let the aliveness be all that it is without stopping anything. Is there anything that's solid? Is there anything that's not moving? Is there any self in this world? of sensation. You're empty of selfness, we're full of awareness.

Is anything missing? Sensing how everything that you experience, sound, sensation, vibration, everything is part of awareness. Everything's part of your own radiant, empty heart. Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. The God whom I love is inside. Namaste.