Tara Brach - The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 1

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

The Path of Spiritual Surrender: Part 1 - Cultivating a surrendering presence allows us to release the identity of a small, separate self, and open to the truth and fullness of who we are. These two talks explore misunderstandings about surrender (such as the fear that we will become passive or condone injustice) and the practices that create the grounds for surrender, emotional healing, transformational activism and spiritual freedom.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Welcome, friends. So glad you could be here. Last week we explored the very powerful theme of letting go. One of the basic understandings of the spiritual path is that it's really all about letting go, letting go of any of the blocks we have inside us. to presence and love. And given how central this is for so many of us, I thought we'd continue in this domain and want to share with you a two-part series that I recorded a couple of years ago,

very alive for me and many people I know right now, which is called the Path of Spiritual Surrender. And so I hope this is for you a way of continuing and deepening in this really profound process of awakening inner freedom. May you enjoy. Namaste and welcome. So I start tonight with a very classic teaching story. The way it begins is a man who falls from a precipice and he finds himself perilously hanging from a limb and there's a tiger just kind of pacing above and jagged rocks below and he calls out frantically, help, is anybody there? And he hears a resounding yes. And he goes, God?

Yes, booming. God, can you help me? Yes, you need to do only one thing, anything, let go. And he says, is anybody else there? And so I've been sharing this particular teaching story. for as long as I can remember because it's the very last thing we want to do when we're feeling threatened is to, you know, we're caught up and protecting and grasping and the last thing we want to do is let go of control to let go.

Ajin-Cha was a great Thai meditation teacher. One of the stories he was known for is he'd walk around the monastery when different monks were meditating and when he'd see somebody who was struggling who was seemed to be really suffering he would say to them, oh, must be very attached, knowing and this is what we're going to look into, that when we're suffering we're holding on really tight at that time to the sense something's wrong, something's wrong with me, our defenses, our judgment We're in control mode in a deep way. And so the teaching, and this is an integral part of any spiritual path, is that the freedom

comes when we learn to loosen the grip, when we learn to let go some. And from Ajan Shah, these are his words, if you let go a little, you'll find a little piece. If you let go a lot, you'll find a lot of peace. If you let go absolutely, you'll find absolute peace and tranquility. So this talk and our next one, this will be a two-part series, will be on surrender on the letting go or surrendering that frees us. And I want to acknowledge this is not a good word if you're running for political office

or you're managing a corporate board meeting or if you're in the thick of battle. you know, it can be a dicey word. But the inner art of surrender, this inner capacity to release the grip, to let go of the resistance, to open to what's here is intrinsic to waking up. So that's what we're going to explore. It's intrinsic to being a wise leader. It's intrinsic to being a good parent. It's intrinsic to being a friend and an awake human. So, we'll start by saying, well, what does it really mean to surrender? And I'll even start before that saying, here's what it doesn't mean. Surrender does not mean that we're resigning, that we're submitting ourselves to some illegitimate authority,

doesn't mean we're giving up or that there's passivity in the face of injustice or violation. Because each of these are actually forms of denying what's going on or avoiding or dissociating. Letting go and surrender doesn't mean we say, oh, I'm angry, I'm just going to surrender my anger or let go of my anger or my jealousy. It's not a cutting off or a dropping of the emotions that we're feeling. illustrative story of a couple that's been married for 60 years. And throughout those 60 years, the wife kept a shoebox in a closet. And the only real demand she had of her husband was never open that shoe box. And so he actually didn't think about it for the 60 years, but then she

became gravely ill, and he knew that she wasn't going to make it. So he was sorting out their affairs and sitting by her bedside and she agreed it was time for him to see what was inside the box. So his eyes widened when he saw that inside the box it was $95,000 and two hand-croached dolls. She said, when we first got married, my grandmother told me the secret of a happy marriage was to never argue. She said, when I got angry with you, I should just keep quiet. and crochet a doll.

So he's deeply touched and the two dolls meant that she was angry with him twice in 60 years, that's pretty good, you know. And he's overcome with emotion, he's saying, honey, that explains the doll, but what about all the money? Where did the money come from? And she said, oh, that's the money I made

from selling all the dolls. So that's by way of saying the most open and true and deep and intimate relationships with ourselves and others don't come because we cut off, drop, surrender the lived feelings inside us. And I wanted to take another moment with that because in spiritual circles there's what's come to be known as premature transcendence, where whether it's forgiveness or surrender, rather than actually going through the process which is hard of being with what's there and getting to a legitimate real with integrity kind of forgiveness or surrender, there can be a sense

of, well, I'm a spiritual person, I'm just going to surrender my ego, I'm going to surrender the impurities. And that actually bypasses because it takes a dedicated and courageous, you know, it takes a dedicated and courageous presence with what's actually here to arrive at surrender. You can't bypass. So what is surrender? And I'm kind of pointing towards it because surrender is the natural release of grasping or resistance that arises when we have a full, tender, embodied presence.

It's like this willingness to be with and say yes to what's here actually releases the controller. It's that process of letting go of the controller. And I do think of it in a way that we surrender any moment that we begin to say yes to what's right here. And sometimes it's a tentative yes. Like I don't really want to be with this, maybe if I'm with it, it'll go away. kind of yes, but there's still a kind of leaning in or kind of saying, all right, I'm going

to kind of gentle in towards it. To the profound yes that just allows life to unfold itself. There are two gifts. The more we cultivate this capacity of letting go and letting be. And one of the gifts is, if you think of it in the reverse, when we're controlling, we're we solidify a sense of a separate controlling self. We solidify the inner sense of something's wrong, I got to protect against things, I'm bad, you're bad.

When we begin this surrendering, this loosening, this opening, we actually wake up past that separate self and discover a larger belonging. We surrender into a larger truth of who we are. We're going to explore that more. This is sounding abstract, but that surrender lets us open to a sense of the sacred, the oneness that's true. The second gift is it actually allows us to live from our higher self or a more expanded

sense of being. And a favorite surrender story I have that I'm going to be telling a few different versions or not versions, but approaches to surrender and we'll explore what makes it relevant to you in your life. Where in your life is there a stuckness, a repeating pattern, something that's really asking for that kind of presence and letting go? That's going to be the kind of inquiry. But this first story.

So this is about Lester Levinson who some of you might know of is that. the founder of the Sedona method. So, Lester, when he hit his 40s, became super sick. He had heart failure, he had colon cancer. In fact, at one point his doctor sent him home and said, when you just don't move around much, but there's no real way to heal. I mean, it's kind of, there's just palate of, it was a death sentence. So Lester started reflecting Now, he was a super educated guy, he knew about all the world philosophies, et cetera, but he realized that all his education and all his accomplishments, he was a successful entrepreneur. Nothing was in any way helping.

Where did it get him, you know? So he began this inquiry and he basically became very present with his body and his heart and he directed a question to his colon. He said, what are you believing? And what he got was that there was a demand that the world be different. That he was moving through life and there was an undercurrent of this demand that the world change and be different. I'm not willing to be with life as it is.

It's not okay. And he started seeing the suffering of his ways of controlling things, trying to control things and make them the way he wanted them. And when he saw that suffering, was present with that suffering, that's what allowed him to release that demand that the world be different. Now for him, it was such a profound awakening, this kind of surrendering of this demand that the world accommodate him. It was so profound that he created a whole method of inquiry and presence and opening based

on it. But the core, which is something as we'll see we find in pretty much every healing and meditative tradition is that when we're suffering we're like tight and resisting, wanting things to be different. And you might even take your hand right now and just experiment, just make a fist and clench some. And just on purpose clench it's like I want things a certain way, I don't want things a certain way. and just sense this is the controlling self, clenching. One teacher said we're a bunch of tight muscles tensing against our existence. Now what is letting go?

Letting go is actually just discontinue the clenching. Feel the pain of it and just discontinue. You're kind of surrendering the clench and notice the feelings that come up in your hand. Surrender dissolves the no, the clench. and it makes room for the flow of life. Letting go is not like we're dropping something. Letting go is a discontinuing or a stopping of the clench. We do it, we clench in our body as we go through the day tight.

We clench in our mind with our worry thoughts or obsessing. We clench emotionally when we tighten and numb and armor our hearts. We clench behaviorally when we defend or aggress. So it's letting go of that, a seizing and desisting. So you might just take a moment to sense for yourself because what we'll do is, you know, invite you to pick a place where you feel stuck. Where do you sense that the wisdom of letting go could be freeing for you? And you might check your body and just notice.

what happens if you soften the muscles in your shoulders and you might not have noticed already that the shoulders were knotted some so you start noticing in your body where the habitual tightening is or maybe you scan today and you notice that your mind was had a lot of judging going on the clench of judgment that was kind of pushing other people people away with your judgments. Or maybe you notice that today there was kind of obsessive worry or planning, kind of fear thoughts. So that's a place where we get a lot of freedom and space if we let go some. Or maybe you've been noticing that you've resisted really honestly opening to your loneliness or your grief.

You can kind of sense that that's there and you can sense the wisdom of letting go of that resistance and opening. Maybe you've been hell-bent on trying to change somebody and that's a place of letting go. Or maybe of having a second or third drink at a social event or extra desserts sometimes in the evening. Maybe you notice the belief deep down that you're failing or you're not looking or you're not lovable, like Lester, that things need to be different for you to be okay, that you

need to be different. Is there a belief like that? In the deep way for all of us, what we're learning to surrender is the story and identity with a separate, fearful, deficient self. We're learning to surrender that. And if you think of your whole evolution and the evolution of our species, it's really this awakening consciousness that's surrendering those stories of being a small separate self and opening to a larger domain of being and love and connectedness.

So keep in mind for yourself where in some way letting go could be freeing and part of what reveals it is we start to know. noticing where the suffering is. We start noticing where it's hard to let go. The anger it's hard to open to and see what's going on, the fears. I often refer back to the work of a palliative caregiver who described the greatest regret of the dying that she sat with thousands of people. And the report that came most regularly was the regret that I didn't live true to myself. You know, I lived according to other people's expectations or according to my own judgments, but I didn't live true to myself. And I have come to sense that this

is really how most of us are feeling a lot of the time, that we're not living really true to who we know could be, you know, the heart that we know really could be more loving, that could love without holding back, or we're not living true. to our potential in some way. And the shift that lets us live more true has to do with in some way cultivating a surrendering presence. So let's look more closely at how we do that. We'll close with a meditation.

And the first is how do you relate to things when you find you're stuck? If you know you're caught in judgment, in defensiveness, in feeling hurt and angry, if you know you're caught in depression or shame, how do you then relate to that? And for most of us, when we're stuck, we immediately add onto it, this is bad, this is wrong, I'm bad for being stuck. In other words, there's an evaluation. So the first step of surrendering is to let go of making our stuckness bad. I'm going to say a little more.

About 30 years ago when I was training in neuro-linguistic programming which has got a lot in common with a lot of other therapeutic and other processes, one of the mantras was whatever comes up is feedback not failure. And I thought that was a really good phrase. It's feedback not failure. It's like whenever we're stuck there's some message from inside us that, hey, there's some freedom that's needed. We need to be more freed up.

Pay attention. It's feedback, not failure. And the understanding on the spiritual path that it's not a bad thing when we encounter the fear the depression, the jealousy, the hatred, the anger, it's actually a natural part of the human realm and that our spiritual awakening comes when we actually bring a full presence to those experiences. Not because they're not there, it's the going through which requires acceptance and letting be and a surrendering presence.

Let me give you an example from Rachel Remen. who's one of my favorite teachers and authors. She wrote Kitchen Table Wisdom. That's one of the good ones. And my grandfather's blessings is another good book. And she tells us, she's a doctor and wise woman. And she tells the story of a young man named Jeff, who she said was the angriest patient she had ever treated.

And he was diagnosed with sarcoma, osteogenic sarcoma. And to save his life, doctors had to remove one of his legs. And he woke up from surgery an angry man. So his stuck place was that he's now a guy without a limb and he believed his life was over. He believed that everything that was going on was wrong and bad and he fell into a depression, began to use drugs, drinking, further deepening it. So that's when he got referred to Rachel, to Rachel Remen. So she asked him to draw a picture of his body.

And he drew a picture of a vase and had a really large crack in it and, you know, it's like made the crack really jagged and horrible. And he hands it to her. So she put it in her desk drawer. And then soon he started asking about how other young people were living with amputations and eventually he started volunteering at a hospital with other young amputees like a So one day he meets a 21-year-old woman, and I'm going to read, she's recovering from double mastectomy, horrible history of breast cancer, 21 years old.

And the young woman who barely look up from her hospital bed. So after several attempts, Greg looked down at his leg, he took off his pathetic device, dramatically dropped it, he started hopping around until finally he heard the woman start laughing. and she looked up and said with a smile, fella, if you can dance, maybe I can sing. So he went from angry, this is bad, to, okay, this is what's going on, how can I help other people

to actually pulling her out of what she was into. By the way, they got married. This is one of those stories. I didn't write it. It's just what happened. Anyway, so I want to tell you about his last meeting with Rachel Remen. and he walks into the room and she pulls out the drawing of the crack vase that he drew nearly two years earlier. Studying it, Jeff took the drawing and said, you know, it's not really done.

And he took a yellow highlighter from her desk and drew vibrant yellow lines extending out from the crack in the vase. And she gave him a puzzled look and he smiled and said, this is where the light comes from. This is where the light comes from. the cracks, the fissures, the imperfections, what we call the diseases, the feelings of failure, the feelings of how imperfect we are. That's the place where the light can shine through. You might know Rumi's very famous line, he says, keep your gaze on the wounded place.

your gaze on the wounded place, that's where the light enters. This is the first level of surrender. When we get stuck, can we surrender the idea that this is a bad thing? When we're hurting, can some place in us remember, this is feedback to deepen our attention because if we deepen our attention, that's where the light will come through. Okay, so that's the beginning of a path of surrender and I can say in my own life there's a prayer that is used by the Bodhisattvas, the Bodhisattva is a word for awakening beings which is may whatever arises may this serve the awakening of compassion and wisdom.

And I love that prayer because it's like saying okay no matter what happens to me. today, I was really excited to be back and come in and be with you and I love this theme we're talking about. It's a very alive one for me. And I woke up this morning and I had a really bad back spasm and I was so, you know, everything in me was going, okay, what am I going to do about it? How am I going to fix it? I've got to get in but maybe I can't.

Jonathan can he teach? And I went into this whole spiral and I said, wait a minute, this is what I'm teaching about tonight. Stop. No, what does surrender mean now? And the first step it was means that whatever this is about, what matters is if I can bring presents, like open to how it is, then there'll be some light that shines through whether or not I get to come.

As it is, I'm in a pretty delicate state. I may end up even standing up to do part of the talk, I'll see how my back is. But it's so amazing that if we can remember when stuff happens not to make it bad or wrong and the more difficult it is, the more potential for light to come through. I remember when my husband and I got married we built it into our wedding boughs, may whatever arises between us, may this be a place that wakes up compassion and wisdom. So you might reflect for a moment, let your attention go inward and you might first ask yourself, you know, where you feel you've made, there's really been true growth in your life, like

where you made it through a difficult situation, maybe betrayal or divorce, maybe an early trauma, It doesn't mean you're on the other side of it, but it's been like a source of transformation for you. The loss of a dear one, maybe the loss of your own health. How did it grow you? How have you grown in relationship to that difficult situation? Can you sense maybe what beliefs you had to let go of about yourself or others or life? But old ways of reacting you let go of to emerge more into who you are.

How did that difficult place that the wounded place become a sight for light shining through for enlarging your sense of who you are? And with that informing you what right now is a place for awakening? There's some stuckness or woundedness that can be really the place that light can shine through. There can be some awakening. And you might sense this first level of surrendering by not making the difficulty wrong, but rather just opening to how it might serve. more freedom, more love, more wisdom.

So as we continue now, the message of a place of suffering is pay more attention, deepen your attention. So I'd like to now talk about the three ways of presence and letting go that allow the light to shine through. And very briefly, I'll say it briefly and then both. this class and next one will be going into it further. The first big letting go is getting the knack of letting go of your thoughts that keep you in a virtual small reality about things, learning how to let go, not to believe your thoughts.

The second one is letting go of the resistance to feelings so you can open to the aliveness that's here. And the third is letting go into a larger field of intelligence. and love. So back to the thoughts, letting go of thoughts, it's what we're practicing in meditation all the time. Notice when you've been lost in a cloud of virtual reality and you don't have to try to vanquish the cloud, just notice it so that you can be the sky and the clouds could be there but you're not stuck inside them. You're not living in a contracted world. You're not believing the message of the thoughts. Don't believe you're not believe you

your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts. That's the trick. So we, that's the first place of letting go and there's a story that I heard some years back about a guy who was a lifetime smoker and he was hospitalized with emphysema and after a series of small strokes his daughter encouraged him as she'd often done to give up smoking and he basically asked her to buy him more cigarettes and he said, look, I've been a smoker all my life, that's who I am, that's the way it's going to be. But several days later he had another small stroke and apparently in one of the memory

centers in his brain, he woke up the next day and without concern he stopped smoking for good. It's just because he was not, and he wasn't able to in this case, remember and cycle those thoughts of I'm a smoker, I need to smoke, I have to smoke, I can't quit. Those beliefs just weren't, he just didn't have access to them. Well, meditation actually trains you to disentangle and to step out and to witness but not by the thoughts. It takes many rounds but that is the liberation of the practice.

You're not who you think you are, really. So don't believe your thoughts and this is a quote by Veronica Tugaleva. She says, we speak about losing our minds as if it's a bad thing. I say, lose your mind, do it purposefully. Find out who you really are beyond your thoughts and your beliefs. Right? Don't believe your thoughts. That's the big letting go.

Then the second that I mentioned, let go into, open up to the vulnerability. that's here. We are absolutely designed to avoid feeling that edginess, that fear, that anything we can do to stay away from vulnerability, we will. So a part of the training of surrender is to on purpose say yes to what's here and we do it over time. And I often think of that vulnerability like these shy creatures that hide in the woods and you know you can't force them out but you can say hey I'm here I'm willing I'm not going to hurt you I just want to be with you to that vulnerability and it's like this light of the sun in the meadow gradually

they'll creep out if you're not judging and you're not going to turn on yourself so we begin to learn to say yes to the loneliness and yes to the sorrow and yes to the shame and yes to whatever's there and be with. That's the second level of surrendering. The third, I think of as remembering love. It's like to surrender our separateness, to surrender into something bigger. And there's different pathways of doing it. This is what the whole loving-kindness practice is about, that in some way we start to learn

to give ourselves love and then something dissolves and we feel more part of that field of loving. There are many different ways. I'll tell you a couple of examples. I learned a whole lot about surrender when I was writing my books. When it first started with radical acceptance, I remember I'd be on a roll and then all of a sudden hit the typical writer block thing. But it was painful.

It's like I lost all contact with any sense of a flow of creativity. It all seemed like blather. like, you know, it was just like repetitive stuff. I was glazed over by what I was writing. So I was getting exhausted and cycling and spinning and I started practicing more consciously okay pause, this is not failure, this is feedback, it's not a bad thing, it's just I'm in a difficult thing deep in attention so I started with that. And then I did the let go of thinking thing.

Like, no, I just stopped trying to think my way into what theme and what illustration and what teaching point. I just said, okay, just drop it, drop it. And then I could start opening to what was underneath and there was an anxiety about failing. Like it meant a whole lot to me to be able to get the book out and a feeling of I can't do this. There was like a belief of I can't do this. which really made sense because I was so caught in the small sense of self that of course

that small self couldn't do it. That wasn't the source of the writing. But when I was inside it, it was a feeling like I can't do this. That brought up a sense of vulnerability and that's when I could start calling on a larger sense of intelligence and love. It was almost like saying, this little self can't. can't do it. So you're going to have to do it this bigger field of loving presence.

The name that at that time, Prajna Paramita is the description of the, really the mother of the universe which is really the light and wisdom and heart wisdom that lives through all of us. So I was calling on that heart wisdom. And in a sense there was the surrendering, the best way to describe it is, you know, I was this book doesn't belong to me, it belongs to you. It was kind of like, take it, you know, flow through me because I can't do this. But it was in those moments of surrender.

I can't do this, let something larger, that I became larger. Does that make sense? That I was no longer sitting inside a small egoic self. There was just something larger and I would rest and meditate like that for a bit and then I'd go back to my computer. and it just, things moved. The wisdom of it is that I realized there really wasn't a self-writing a book. There's not a self-doing anything.

It's the universe flowing through more or less at different times. That was a powerful part of surrendering for me and then it happened again in writing true refuge and more recently in Radical Compassion, which is coming out next year. I'd hit a stuck place and I'd realize, oh, there's a small self-trying hard and need to surrender. Now a different kind of approach has been whenever I get caught in the trance of unworthiness

and feeling unlovable, like the many, many, many rounds of getting stuck and feeling not okay about myself. And again, it requires, okay, let go of the thought. thoughts, open to the feelings, step one, step two, and in some way call on love to reconnect. Surrender is something larger. And for me one of the pathways was in some way in that place that felt really unlovable to have a prayer, please love me. And it was like a prayer to the love of the universe just to love me and in the sincerity

of that prayer, there would be a washing through, a feeling of love happening. I read you, this is one of my favorite poems by Clarissa Estes. She says, refuse to fall down. And if you cannot refuse to fall down, refuse to stay down. And if you cannot refuse to stay down, lift your heart toward heaven. and like a hungry beggar, ask that it be filled. You may be pushed down, you may be kept from rising, but no one can keep you from lifting your heart towards heaven only you.

No one can keep you from lifting your heart towards heaven, only you. We can't control things. We get pushed down. We get stuck. But there is a surrendering of in some way. offering ourselves into our calling on the larger field of loving. And even if we're not familiar with it, there's something in us that senses that we belong to something larger.

So we can begin to call on it. So most spiritual traditions in some way teach this kind of surrendering of letting go of our smallness into something larger, letting the river empty into the sea. Every religious tradition that I've run into, from Pontanjali, the Yoga Sutura is it's a kind of a surrender into the Lord into oneness. From Buddhism, and this is you take refuge, you take refuge, to surrender into the truth of the present moment, that's Dharma. You surrender into Sangar, the relational field, and you surrender into awareness, the truth

or oneness are pure wakefulness of your being. Christian's not my will, God's will, or 12-step programs turning your will over to a higher power. It's all over. So here are the questions that often come up when exploring surrender with different students that I want to name because they're really important to acknowledge. One is people will say, well I've tried but I can't because I'm just so hooked on my beliefs that something's wrong with me that I can't get out of those beliefs and feelings

enough to, they just keep locking me in a small self, I can't sense anything larger, that others actually help to confirm that reality that I'm small and I'm not okay. It is hard to send something larger when we're really stuck. Somebody sent me this like a year ago with a dog on a psychiatrist's couch and he's saying, it's right on my fence. Beware of dog. How is that supposed to make me feel? So we have these messages coming at us that you're bad, you're this, you're that, you're

that and how are we supposed to surrender into a bigger field? And yet, and here's the deal. Even when we feel stuck, there is an intuitive sense in us, and this is what we sense from that paleo caregiver who said I didn't live true to myself, that there is more freedom, there is a larger sense of our being. We're not in touch with, it feels out of reach, but there's some sense that it's there and that we're holding on tight as something smaller. But there is that inner wisdom.

And I read something from Ajan Shah teaching that I thought was really useful about this. He said that you see yourself clinging and you know it. We all can see it in our lives. I'm clinging to myself as a depressed self or as a bad self or an unworthy self. And we know it but we still can't let go. But this is 50 to 70 percent of the practice already. There isn't a release but we know that if we could let go that would be the way to peace. Even sensing that it's possible that if we could let go there be more peace means that we

have an intuition of what's that through that wound the light can shine through. So to honor just the process of knowing that you need to let go and you want to let go. And the second big question that comes up a lot is that, okay, I'm trying to surrender, but it just feels like a small self doing more controlling. Okay, my small self is going to surrender now. And I just want to suggest that when that happens, pray in your own way, but from a very sincere place in you, please may there be a letting go, please. And the more sincere you get, the more there'll be a dissolving of the crustiness and

a surrender. Prayer really helps. Finally, if it becomes like a move, like you're meditating and something comes up and you say, okay, surrender and then you have some idea of something, but you feel like you're just really like, again, doing the controls. the surrendering. Okay? So there's a, okay, I'm going to let go and then let go of the letting go.

And there's like a, it's called the backward step, just keep letting go of what comes up and let go of that and let go of the idea of letting go and let go that you should be doing it differently. And gradually what you'll find is that there's space, that you can re-relax into space. Okay, to summarize, letting go of the idea that something's wrong when you get stuck. That's the attitude. And then letting go of the thoughts, just don't believe them, letting go of the resistance to the feelings, and then letting go into some larger sense of love and of presence.

And we'll explore them more, but I want to get a taste right now. So let's take a few moments to meditate together. So this is a simple practice of surrender, letting go, of cultivating a surrendering presence. And we begin by just scanning and you might scan your life and sense someplace that you get stuck and reactive where you know you get caught in your small self. that if you were the end of your life looking back you would feel regretful that you stayed stuck in that smallness. A place you get judgmental or defended or aggressive, addictive, greedy and let yourself sense a very

real life situation where this has happened. Just holding the gestalt of it that this is a state. a stuck place. Begin by seeing if you can let go of any judgment of badness, like this is wrong or bad and senses that this is the wounded place that Rumi is talking about. Keep your gaze on the wounded place. There's something going on here that's asking for attention And there's a potential wherever we're stuck for the light of freedom to shine through. This is where the work can happen. So you might feel that bodhisatt for prayer, may this serve awakening.

May this help awaken my heart and my wisdom and let yourself deepen your attention to the situation so you can begin to sense what's going on inside you. Maybe you can notice what you're believing. Whenever we're suffering we're having some belief that's limiting and untrue. I'm bad, another person's bad, I'm failing, they're failing. If they're treating this way they couldn't love me. If this doesn't change something very bad is going to happen, just notice whatever thoughts or beliefs are circling.

And then see if you can sense when you're believing these thoughts, what's going on in your body, when you're really believing what the fear thoughts are saying, if you drop the thought, just feel what's going on in your body. Maybe there's something you've been unwilling to feel. Can you gently open into your body and say, I'm here, what wants to be felt? What wants attention? And sometimes you can get more in touch with what's there if you let your face take the expression of the feeling, tightening your face or scrinching, clenching your jaws or knitting

your brows, sometimes that helps to get in touch with what's in the body. It can help if you put your hand on your heart because that can, that's kind of a signal that you're keeping company, I'm here. It's like inviting those shy creatures out of the woods like I'm here. Let whatever wants to be felt be felt. You might even let it be as big as it wants to be, like let it fill your body, let it fill the room, let it fill the sky if it's fear or hurt or sorrow. So we let go of thoughts and we let go of resistance to the feeling and then the final letting go is letting all that you're feeling be held by something larger.

You might sense the vast field of this living web of life and the intelligence that lives in it and the love that you're feeling. that's here and potential in each of us and around us. Or maybe there's a spiritual figure that helps remind you of love. Maybe there's a person you know. But sense that you can surrender or let go of the woundedness into something larger, let it be held, imagine loving, bathing this place, be held by a larger presence. and be patient.

It can take many rounds sometimes to learn to surrender the pain of the small self into something larger. Just have the prayer and the intention. Please may I let go, let go into love. Please may I let go into love. Rumi puts it this way. He says, be ground, be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are. You've been stony for too many years.

Try something different. Surrender. You've been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender. So as we close, you might sense yourself that this is a life practice of learning to surrender the thoughts and surrender into the feelings and surrender into that larger loving space and that you can feel from your own intuitive wisdom

that remembering your belonging to something larger is a pathway to peace and to freedom. And just knowing that we'll keep calling you home over and over. Taking a few nice, full deep breaths and as you're ready, opening your eyes, Namaste and thank you for your presence. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.