Tara Brach - The Path of Peace

Episode Date: October 6, 2010

2007-10-03 - The Path of Peace - Awakening from the Trance of Separation - We all have conditioning that can keep us at war with our inner life, and fuel violence in the world. These universal tendencies can block our natural attunement and capacity to respond with compassion to life. The practices of presence allow us to recognize this conditioning and awaken to the truth of our connectedness, to the wisdom and love that make peace possible. Please donate at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you!

So this has been, for me, a fairly intense week. As I mentioned, I just moved. I actually moved today. Literally, the moving van took me across the river. Also, a very heavy-hearted kind of week. The events in Burma have been very close in. As many of you know, there's a vipassana meditation, the style of meditation we do here, was sourced in Burma.

And many of my friends have spent a lot of time practicing there, know the monks, the monastery as well. And it's a very religious country, and the monks are the soul of the country, really revered by many. And as one friend put it, the military shot into the soul of the people. And it's way worse than the press, the most the press of people that are getting information that's more true. from my understanding, and it's really horrendous what's happening. So it set off in me a reflection on human violence, on what it is that brings us to places of blame and anger and hatred and what heals us in our personal lives and really interpersonally as a culture.

So I hadn't expected to talk on this, but I actually, given that we have Ruth King coming this weekend, it feels very appropriate to as a Sanga warm up to me what's one of the most important reflections on the planet. And I will talk more about Ruth coming this weekend, but if any of you haven't heard about it and are available, she will really drop it deeper for you. So it's too big a talk to, you know, how does a voice?

violence arise inwardly, interpersonally, how do we heal it? So what I'll focus on really is how the qualities of our spiritual practice, the practice we can do this moment, this evening, this week are the ground of peace, how they really create a path of peace. It's helped me to take in the perspective of Dr. Ari Yaratne, who's in the Gandhian and Buddhist tradition and Sri Lanka has as many of you know decades and decades of horrendous civil war there

and still going on but he's brought a kind of perspective in his plan for peace which is called it's a 500 year peace plan and I think it's helpful to think of it that way a 500 year peace plan and the name of the movement that he

started as Sarvodaya which which means the awakening of all. And this peace plan, this 500-year peace plan, is to eradicate poverty. It's a social justice plan, and to eradicate spiritual poverty. It's everything about community, about learning that we belong together,

about learning that beyond our ideas of separateness, that really give rise to all the conflict, there is a deep place of awareness and awakeness and heart that is our common ground. This is the language I'll be using as those of you that have been with me know that I think of it as the trance of separation. That it's a basic part of our human conditioning and it's not like a mistake or something wrong. That all beings incarnate and have the nervous system for seeing. see you separateness that there's a self in here and a world out there.

That's just part of it. And that as I've said that here many times the primal mood of the separate self is fear. There's an uneasiness. When we're living in this sense of me and here and world out there, there's an uneasiness. There's a restlessness. There's a fear. And as we know, the truth is all life forms, eat other life forms, and have to defend against them and protect themselves and compete and so on. So it's not, this isn't a mistake, but it becomes suffering and violence if in our human development we get arrested in the trance of separation and don't continue to recognize a larger truth, which is really the truth of connectedness.

It's part of our evolutionary potential to experience empathy and compassion. In the same way that fight-flight is rigged in our nervous system, our nervous systems are designed. We have this capacity for attunement to perceive when others are hurting. And in the moment of perceiving, oh, someone's hurting, there's an immediate movement towards action. In other words, the motor parts of our body actually instantaneously start responding. The code in the brain is the same for perception and action.

So we hear a scream or we sense someone's anguish and we're instantaneously preparing to act. So compassion, and the Dalai Lama talks about this a lot, is not just sensing the suffering and feeling the tenderness, it's the response to care, to want to make a difference. So here's an important inquiry. If it's our evolutionary potential, it's built in to perceive separation, but also to perceive connection, attunement, to want to help, how come we don't help more regularly? How come we don't feel more of that arising of compassion?

How come we get so stuck in the separateness? Underneath that's the question of what obscures the kind of attunement I'm talking about. Mindfulness has been described as attunement. That to be mindful, to be present means we attuned to what is happening inside us and attuned to what is happening inside another being. What obscures that? What gets us kind of glazed over and so preoccupied with moi that we don't see? I think one of the big ones that we probably all would agree is the case,

is that in our culture there's little natural sense of belonging. And even our most frequent contact is distancing. I mean, the flurries of email, the commuting to places, and the lack of real local community, it mutes empathy. in order to feel a very visceral sense of compassion, the pain we see, the suffering we see has to be close in. Why is it that I'm responding more to what's happening in Burma than Darfur or some other part of the globe

is because my friends and my friend's friends and the traditional men? So it's not like this is more important suffering, it's just closer in so it touches me more deeply. we don't get close in to where the pain is. We manage to block it. We spend a lot of time controlling our contact with each other. I shared the story of Postmaster General Edward Day,

and he wrote in his book How to Stop Long-Wended Telephone Callers. He says, you hang up while you're talking. The other party will think you were accidentally cut off because no one would hang up on their own voice. So I thought that was good. So our contact's not close in. That's what I'm trying to say. We don't really get close in.

There's a lot of distance. We're also in a culture that rather than being intimate with the earth or our bodies, we try to control nature. We are very, we dominate. It's got a very masculine, kind of in the shadow side of the masculine of controlling.

And so, you know, rather than being intimate with the earth, we're there to recreate on it and to take pictures where there's beauty and to control the temperature through AC and to use its wood to build our homes. We use and control nature. We don't take care of the earth because we don't feel like we are the earth. It's an object. Same thing with our inner life.

What stops us from being attuned to our inner life? We live in stories about what's going on. stories about what we have to do, where we have to go, what others are thinking of us. So we don't stop to get intimate with what's happening here, which, as you know, is really the training of meditation. The main thing that pulls us away from that attunement is that we believe stories that are based on some perfectionistic ideal

and where we're not meeting it. And I talk about this a lot because when we don't get that that's happening, when we don't get that we have these internalized messages of how we should be, whether we got them from our parents or their culture, it doesn't matter. But when we don't get that on some level we're moving around thinking we're falling short, then we're not attuned. Any moment there's a should. I should be different, you should be different, should.

there's a standard. There's not attunement to how it is. Some of you heard this church bulletin. I like this one. Sermon this morning. Jesus walks on the water. Sermon tonight. Searching for Jesus. I also heard one. This is a bulletin. Low self-esteem support group will meet Thursday at 7 p.m. Please use the back door. So we get these messages and we internalize them. about basically something's wrong. Somewhere, I can't find where I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, if I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?

No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why asked the Eskimo earnestly? Did you tell me? So we're talking about what obscures attunement, and part of it is the culture, and part of these messages we're living with that stop us from really paying attention. We're living in a story of

something's wrong, should be different. And what happens is then because we feel like it's not okay, we end up being dishonest because it's not safe to be our natural self. And there's been all sorts of studies done recently and I forgot, I wanted to bring in one of them that describes how many times a day we lie on an average.

It's a lot. We lie a lot, like little lies, but we lie because in some way, there's some not relaxed about the naturalness that's here, some edge that makes us think we have to look or present or be different. And certainly in politics, we assume lies. We assume lies in the whole political world. We assume lies when dealing with bureaucracy. Somebody sent me this some time ago about people responding on insurance claims and some of the things they said on their claims.

And I really like them. Coming home, I drove into the wrong house and collided with a tree I don't have. I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way. The guy was all over the road. I had a swerve a number of times before I hit him. In attempt to kill a fly, I drove into a telephone pole. I had been driving for 40 years when I fell asleep at the wheel and had an accident. I was thrown from my car as it left the road.

I was later found in a ditch by some stray cows. I pulled away from the side of the road, glanced at my mother-in-law, and headed over the embankment. So they're fun. But again, what I really want to be kind of looking into is what stops us from being attuned? And there's this fear in our system. It's not okay how I am. Others will judge me.

Others will reject me. It's not safe in this world. And then what happens is that we disconnect from our inner life and we disconnect from others. We don't really pay attention. When others are an objective other out there, in other words, when we don't sense their humanness, their subjectivity, their realness, we can hurt them.

Because they're not like us. They don't, their hearts don't feel like our hearts and they don't have the same experience so we can hurt them. When others are what I call unreal others, we can be violent. And when we're disconnected from ourselves, when our own heart doesn't feel real, we hurt ourselves, we turn on ourselves, and we treat ourselves our bodies, our moods in a cruel way. So Karo Yong said that our suffering and our neurosis comes from the unseen, unfilled parts of ourselves and from the unseen, unfeld parts of other beings

that we don't include in our hearts. The way we stop the war, a path to peace, is to bridge the gap, to not have it be an unreal other, and not have this life within us be unreal. Lewis Thomas said, I don't really understand the source of our great cultural sadness, except to see that perhaps we have come so far without really knowing ourselves.

So this 500-year peace plan is really a plan that allows us to find out who are we and who are you. Next weekend I'm going to Los Angeles. I'm presenting at a conference that's, you know, on Buddhism and psychotherapy, and Ticknathan is giving the keynote. And one of his teachings is peace with every step, that if we have any idea that peace in the world

is unrelated to how we eat our dinner or how we speak to our child, or how we relate to traffic, we're confused. That it is absolutely imperative that we link our caring about global peace to every step we take. So I'll tell you a story from my own experience two days ago is that I was sitting in meditation. I got quiet and very still. And then I had the thought of Burma and that at the very moments that I was sitting quiet

and still the monasteres that had been so silent and such a haven, such a refuge, some of them have been completely devastated, whereas initially there were reports were that some 200 monks had been arrested. In fact, it was more like 3,000, and hundreds and hundreds of monks killed. And so I was thinking of this,

and I was feeling this heartbreaking feeling and how incomprehensible it is in the sense that some young boys get recruited into the military from these poor families and some young boys go to the monastery and then the young boys that go to the military in some way get in the state of mind that they'll go into the monasteries

and slaughter monks that are not violent that are defenseless, they have no weapons. what would be the state of mind that one would do that in, rounding up people and slaughtering them. So I was kind of, it was that sense of incomprehensibility. And then I heard one of our dogs out back barking. And the bark became louder and it was like piercing the silence. And I immediately felt this enormous surge of anger. And I had this image of taking this dog and hurling him violently out and

a space like hurling him. A violent hurling. Now, just so you know, he weighs about as much as I do, so it would not have happened, but in my mind it happened. So I went from reflecting how this cruelty could be humanly possible to this very spontaneous violence in my mind. And it was really humbling. It was really humbling that for each of us, given certain conditions, I mean,

Every one of us, our human wants and fears, can proliferate in a way that causes suffering and that we can violate ourselves and we can violate each other. And we're not that far from the conditions that can do it. It can happen pretty quickly. This is Solzhenitsyn says, if only there were evil people out there insidiously committing evil deeds and it was only necessary to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being

and who among us is willing to destroy a peace of our own hearts so the starting place on this path of peace the starting place to awaken from the trance of separation is honestly recognizing how the conditioning is playing through this body, heart and mind right here honestly recognizing it. For me, I sometimes ask a question because I found that one of the most powerful gateways

to waking up is any judgment or blame that runs through my system. So it's really my sodden or my practice to notice when blaming is going on. And I ask myself, I inquire, what would I have to feel if I wasn't believing my story of blame? So if I wasn't believing this dog is, you know, is ruining my meditation and he's so, he's not well trained and he's just, you know, it's harder to blame a dog than a person. But anyway, I was doing it. And feeling very imposed on and in some way kind of violated, like the sound was violating me. That was the feeling. I really was reflecting on it. I was feeling this violated feeling. And so I started to reflect, you know, let go of the idea of, you know, putting a muzzle on the dog or hurling him in to

space and just okay so what's going on here and I found that I was holding on for dear life to quietness it's like I was holding on really hard and when I really deepened my attention I realized I was trying to hold on to the quietness because I didn't want to open to the disturbance in my body that I was so upset about what's going on in Burma like I wanted to be quiet and reflect on it but I didn't want to like open right into where my heart was breaking and feel it inside out. So when I stopped blaming the dog and opened inward, I ended up crying and crying a lot. And it was a healing kind of crying because I'm just really sad about the horror of what's going on over there. But I found that whenever there is unpleasantness, and it could be

the unpleasantness of a shattered silence, or it could be something. somebody insults us. It could be something much more intense. The immediate reflexes blame. And in cognitive science, they call it the least resistance pathway. That it's much easier to blame to say who's wrong and try to fix things to open to where the vulnerability is. I mean, it's hard for me not to have the Burmese military generals as like kind of the Darth Vader

to the nth degree. it's like because you know it's just feels personal but then if I let that happen again I lose contact with the place in me that's heartbroken and the place in me that cares this is Thomas Moore and he's speaking to we have an evolutionary capacity even though our reflexes to blame and lash out we have a capacity to wake up from that and to drop into to a deeper place of compassion. It's often said accurately that violence begets violence. There is a virus buried deep in all violence that is contagious

that inspires an equally brutal and mindless response. A terrorist blows up a bus and an army comes out to settle the score. This exchange of violence and this contagion of terror have been handed down for eons from family to family and from nation to nation. It is a chain of terror made up of people Ghanemak with anger and those justice disturbed with their feelings of virtue and righteous vengeance. But there is good news. The gospel of Jesus, the Dharma of Buddha, the Tao of Lao Tzu,

and the Tariqa are way of love and Sufism, all teach that you can let go of your grip on this chain. You can be free of it. When obscene violence interrupts your life, you don't have to respond with virtuous, justified, and reasonable force. You can choose not to be part of the destructive cycle, and that choice not to participate. That choice not to participate is a first step towards peace.

I think one of the reasons the Saffron Revolution, the action of the monks has caught so many of the monks, attention is just because of that, that they are an example of engaged spirituality, completely coming from that place of nonviolence and care and yet active. What makes that possible, it can't come from a place of hatred or vengeance. Otherwise, it's sowing the seeds of more. one of the stories that help me understand more, the role of vengeance of getting back, whether it's getting back because we kill someone or because we mentally hurl a creature into outer space or because our mind just has a dismissive thought. Getting back causes our own suffering.

And I learned more about it. There was a movie called The Interpreter and it had a story of an African ritual that I have shared here before and I want to share it again and deepen our reflection on it. I'll read a piece of it to you. In Matobu, the coup believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life. If someone is murdered, a year of morning ends with a ritual that we call the drowning man trial. As an all-night party beside a river at dawn, The killer, the person that killed someone from a family, is put on a boat, taken out into the water, and dropped bound so he can't swim into the water. The family of the dead then have to make a choice.

They can either let him drown or they can swim out and save him. The coup believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they'll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning. But if they save him, if they admit that life isn't always just, that very act can heal their sorrow. Vengeance. Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Vengeance is a lazy form of grief.

We're wired to want to get back. We're wired to judge. We're wired to blame. And, because it's a least resistance pathway, and it doesn't allow us to process the unlived life that needs to be felt so we can heal. Every moment of judging or blaming keeps us from the very place in us that if we could pay attention would awaken and free our hearts. There's a Buddha sage, Budagossa.

And he said, who can untangle the tangle of this world? And the response? the awakened heart-mind that lives through each one of us. We can't well forgiveness. We can't will acceptance. I think it's one of the kind of new-agey things

that gets us in trouble thinking, oh, what I'm going to learn is how I'm going to accept myself or I'm going to accept you or I'm going to forgive. The ego or the self can't do that. If we say, I'm going to forgive, what happens. We find out that it's not, it's organic and it can't be legislated or commanded,

and then we feel like we're not being spiritual. We can be willing. We can be willing to come into presence. As Ticknad Han said, peace with every step. We can be willing to pay attention each step of the way as well as possible, just willing to notice. Oh, so what's happening? happening inside me right now. Oh, so blame. If I wasn't blaming, what would I have to feel?

Presence recognizes the stories of blame. Presence recognizes the fear stories. And presence when we inhabit it, because it's what we are, reminds us of this vastness and this heart that don't have to be hitched to the story. I really like the drowning man trial. I think that's an incredible, the punchline that vengeance is a lazy form of grief. It really resonates because it takes a tremendous courage and willingness to open to what's difficult to the vulnerability that's here. It's much easier for me to try to muzzle my dog than to open to my feeling of being victimized are violated. And yet there is no freedom when we don't notice the reflex and then come home to what's really happening inside us. So as I'm saying that it's, if it was easy, if this forgiveness,

if this letting go of the story of blame and resentment was easy, we do it. There's a saying that, you know, everybody thinks forgiveness is a great idea until they have something to forgive, you know. it takes a tremendous gentleness because what's happening is the not forgiving is our way of keeping away from feeling vulnerable

anger has a power to it it feels good temporarily people get addicted to anger because there's a biochemistry that feels a lot better than feeling powerless and vulnerable and out of control so which where are we going

it takes a lot of courage and a lot courage means greatness of heart. It takes a tremendous tenderness with our own being to not play out the story of anger but instead stay with what's here. Ticknad Han again. He writes a poem called Two Hands.

No, I am not crying. I hold my face in my two hands to keep my loneliness warm, two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving me in anger, two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving me in anger. So to stop the war, we have to, in our individual personal lives, forego what's easier, making an enemy. Either I'm back, or you're bad, and forego retelling the stories of badness, and actually open into an honest

presence with what's here. For those monks rather than anger, it's real care. Care for the people, care for the poverty, and also care for freedom. This is what begins untangling the that instead of acting out of anger, we come home first to presence. And when we do, there is a shift of our sense of who we are. There's an opening so that we start not taking it so personally. Like, I am the victim. I've been violated. Somebody's doing that to me. And we start sensing that the same pain and fear and hurt,

and hurt and vulnerability lives through every body mind. Pema Children told a story that really I found helpful about a young woman who wrote to her from a small town in the Middle East

and one day this woman found herself surrounded by people jeering and yelling and threatening to throw stones at her and her friends because they were Americans. Of course she was terrified and what happened next surprised her. Suddenly she identified with every person throughout history who had ever been scorned and hated.

She understood what it was like to be despised for any reason, whether relating to race, ethnicity, sexual preference, gender. She understood what it was like to be despised for any reason and something cracked wide open and she felt herself standing in the shoes of millions of oppressed people, including those who hated her. Somehow, through simple heartfelt gestures, the young woman and her friend managed to survive, but the realization changed her entire way of thinking.

Her whole limited perspective opened up. She felt a deep sense of connection, of belonging to the same family. She awakened a great compassion for all of life. So tonight really we're exploring what we explore every week, in some way, which is how do we wake up out of delusion, out of feeling separate, not okay, in some way isolated or apart from, and realize that belonging, that everybody we encounter is struggling hard in some way, that everybody loves and wants to be loved, that we start realizing

that. And there's a natural awakening in any moment where when we are caught in the stories, that we're willing to pause and say, okay, what's really happening inside me right now? When we see that we're telling our self-stores that create separation, when we really get it, oh, okay, that story is dividing me against myself and that hurts, that story of self-blame. That's just creating more division in this world. Or that story of bad other, that's creating pain and division. we feel it in our bodies, they start losing their grip. It's in the moment that we see the story

and feel the pain it creates, that there's less identification with it. And we start realizing that we'd rather love than be right. We'd rather be confused or groundless but awake right than have certainty about things. We'd rather be attuned than live in a kind of self-absorbed vacuum. There's a description in Slaughterhouse-Fives. Many of you, I'm sure, saw the movie, but at one point there was a description of what happens

when one night a World War II movie is accidentally shown backward. Do you all remember this? I'm just going to read you it because I think it's so great. American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards,

sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for the wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their Bombay doors, exerted miraculous magnetism, which shrunk the fires, gathered them in cylindrical steel containers and lifted the containers

into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. There were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to the base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks

and shipped back to the United States, where factories were operating dead, and night dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did the work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never, ever hurt anybody again. We let the pain of separation be close in, when we let it touch us.

When we sense the truth of how painful war is, hatred is, violence is, there's a great compassion that arises. And with that, a feeling of the kind of care that wants to wake up and help others wake up from that trance of separation. So it's a practice in daily life. Now, I'm emphasizing here because it feels actually more radical and direct and powerful. that every step we take, how we speak this evening to someone after class, how we drive home, how we regard our own inner life, the quality of attunement to our own inner life, how we speak to our children, our friends, our partners.

That is the path of peace. That's where it's possible. If we're willing to let judgment and blame be awake up, Not to feel bad about ourselves for it. That just adds another judgment or blame, right? That's just proliferation. That's more violence. It's more.

Get interested. Life gets really, there's a fascinating thing that happens when you start saying, well, okay, there's this conditioning to blame. There's this conditioning to blame myself. Can I pause? What would happen if you weren't believing that story? What might you feel? When we can sense the pain those stories creates inside us,

we start opening into a presence that's naturally compassionate and naturally has the capacity to engage in a healing way. I am going to talk after we're going to do a little final meditation about ways that we can support. the monks in Burma because it feels appropriate and right to do that. And I want to say that whatever we do on behalf of action in the world, it's got its power and its purity from the quality of heart that's right here. Are we divided from ourselves? Or can this moment we come home in a way that really cherishes the life that's here? Can we meet with another and look

look at the eyes that are there and see the divine that's looking out at us, see the vulnerability and the goodness. That's the path of peace. Let's take a few moments. We'll just do a short meditation. Let yourself arrive here. Whatever has been going on inside you. Let this moment be fresh. See if you can relax into this moment. So you're just noticing how it's just noticing how it is, listening, feeling, right here. And as our personal peace meditation that actually lets us connect with the universal, we start with anywhere in our lives where there might be a distance with someone you care about, anywhere where there's more distance than you want. And sense in your being what story or attitude is part of creating separation.

Is it feeling injured by something? Is it feeling like you're not coming through in some way? What's the attitude, the judgment, the blame, the story that in some way is creating separation? And you might ask yourself, as I described from me earlier, if you let go of that story, let go of any sense of blame towards yourself or another, what might you have to feel? What difficult might you have to feel? And just be aware of your body.

This isn't a mental inquiry as much as just feeling whatever is in your body or your heart right now. Breathing with that. If it helps to put your hand gently on your heart, I sometimes do that as a way to just keep company with whatever's here. It's a kind of gesture like Ticknat Han says two hands,

gently holding. It can be one hand or two hands. But in some way, just gently being with whatever vulnerability is underneath that distance, whatever it is. You might feel there's hurt or anger or sadness. So in some way, you're sending the message to your own vulnerability. It's okay, I'm here with you. As the woman in the Middle East discovered, she'd begin to to sense others and what they were going through, just sense with this other person, what might they be going through? Can you sense underneath whatever story they might have their vulnerability? And there's no empathy when there's distance. So see if you can just make it close in the realness of another person's humanness, their vulnerability. So you try it on and

feel it from the inside. And just take a moment to offer whatever wish for yourself, for this other person for your relationship really resonates for you right now. Just the most sincere wish for this moment to yourself, the other, and to the two of you. And just to say that many relationships are quite complicated and this could be a process that more you would do over weeks and months than in a short meditation. But you can get a taste of the honesty and the power of just bringing some presence to where there's been any sort of a dance of distance, that that is the path of peace, this willingness to honestly sense what's true. Nikki Giovanni, the poet says,

and if ever I touched a life, I hope that life knows that I know that touching was, and still is, and always will be the true revolution. So we widen the field of attention now to sense our shared hearts here that we all come in some way wanting to wake up to love more fully, to touch peace, and to sense our prayer for the world right now. There's so many places of suffering. So much loss to sense our prayer that all beings everywhere might remember the presence and the love that's their essence, that all beings everywhere might touch natural peace at home in their being, at home in belonging to each other in the world, that there

might be peace on earth. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace on earth. May all beings everywhere. Awaken and be free. Namaste. 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.