Tara Brach - The Power of Inquiry in Spiritual Awakening - Part 2

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

How can the simple act of asking a sincere question awaken us from the trance of our habitual thinking? In this talk, Tara Brach explores the transformative power of spiritual inquiry—a practice that guides us beyond our stories and into direct, embodied awareness of what is truly happening within us. Through reflection, teachings from Buddhist wisdom traditions, and guided inquiry, Tara invites us to investigate questions like "What is happening inside me right now?" and "What am I believing?" These questions help reveal the beliefs and emotional patterns that keep us stuck and open the doorway to greater freedom, compassion, and presence. You'll also learn how inquiry supports the RAIN practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture)—a powerful method for meeting fear, self-doubt, and emotional suffering with mindful awareness and kindness. By bringing curiosity to our inner life, we begin to loosen the grip of limiting beliefs and rediscover the spacious awareness that is our true nature. In this talk, Tara explores: • How spiritual inquiry helps awaken us from the "interpreted world" of thoughts • Questions that deepen mindfulness and self-awareness • Using inquiry within the RAIN meditation practice • How investigating beliefs can free us from fear and self-judgment • Opening to the mystery and aliveness of present-moment awareness   Our introduction music is from "Opening" by Adrienne Torf, © 2025 ABT Music

Welcome, friends, to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week, I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com, where you can also join our email list. Now, let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Namaste, welcome. Many of you know of Dorothy Day,

the Catholic social activist, canonized saint. And one of the moments that shaped her life was when she was eight years old. She was a young girl in San Francisco during the earthquake of 1906. So she was living in Oakland. And she watched people emerging from that, devastation. She watched all the adults around her starting to, just caring for strangers in

ways she had never seen before. And with that kind of clear-sightedness of a child, she sees that somehow they knew to do this all along. They knew how. And then she asked this question, why can't we live this way all the time? And that longing for a loving world, that inquiry you, why can't we live this way all the time? It was a driving force in her life. And so here we are, friends. Our entire world is quaking. And as I speak, many are feeling the devastation, feeling enraged, feeling underneath

that kind of heartbreak from the entrenched hostility and violence between humans, the weakening of democracy. such a scale of suffering. And so while our larger body, this earth is heating up, all life systems are threatened, the clock is ticking. And it seems that we need to ask that kind of a question, Dorothy Day's question, in the face of this quaking, burning world, what stops us from joining hands,

from caring for those who are suffering and for our suffering earth? You know, what will break that limbic trance of aggression and fear and hatred and greed? So these kind of questions are so powerful. And when we bring them into the moment, if we ask ourselves right in the immediate way, what is happening in our lives, let's say we bring a relationship to mind where there's a real distance and we say, what stops me from opening my heart here? That kind of inquiry can reveal the fear or hurt that's asking for attention, that if we don't tend to, can hold back our love for decades.

So this is my introduction to our theme for today's reflection. We are going to listen to Part 2 on the Power of Spiritual Inquiry. It's a key current in my own practice, so I really felt drawn to sharing this series on it from the archives. May you enjoy? I find it helpful to think of spiritual practice as cultivating primarily three domains. And the first domain is one of an open, awake awareness, mindfulness that brings awareness right here and now. And the second domain is that inquiry that really shines the light on what's happening

and reveals the truth of nature. And the third domain are the practices that really cultivate the heart, that awaken a natural open-heartedness. What I'd like to do tonight is it's continuing what we did last week is explore the second of those three, which is the... domain of inquiry, of shining the light of awareness on what's happening in the moment. And I thought I'd begin with reading a piece that I read in the last talk that for me has been, I find one of the most beautiful and powerful on this, and this is by Heldegaard of Bingham.

And she writes this, we cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light. The interpreted world is the world that has in some way been fed to us, through our caregivers, and our culture and has been internalized so it's the world of assumptions that we have. It's the world of beliefs that we've built up that act like a kind of veil and that anything we experience is filtered through that veil.

And so the purpose really of inquiry is to energize and deepen our attention so we can begin to decondition that trance. we can begin to get, oh, okay, so I'm experiencing this because I've interpreted it this way. I have a belief or a bias or an assumption that's shaping things in a certain way. And what we find out is that if we don't have interest in what's true, if we don't on purpose examine what's there, we're actually living in a very automatic way in a very confined world And it's painful. You know, I read one little quip, a coach is talking to a former football player and he's

saying, well, what is it with you anyway? Is it ignorance or apathy? And the response from the player was, you know, coach, I don't know and I don't care. So it's fun but we each know that experience of times that were cut off from that sense of caring and we're just cut off from our sense of engagement and interest and it hurts. So we're living in a real small world at those times. I think one of the most important and powerful messages of the Buddha was summarized in the polywords ehipasico which translates roughly to you come and see for yourself.

And the Buddha, you know, lots and lots of teachings and their oral teachings that got passed down. But in the final analysis he basically said all of them were to invite us to turn around and look at our own hearts and minds and really look into the nature of reality and we cannot realize and trust what's true unless we engage in that way. So inquiries really it's considered one of the inquiry or investigation is considered one of the key elements, one of the key spiritual factors for awakening. So, in the last class, we took inquiry some of these, you know, what are the questions we can ask and the ways we can attend that really unfold things? And we brought them to emotional tangles and invite you if you didn't

listen to part one to listen to part one. Because we basically said, okay, so when we're suffering, when we're caught in a constellation of beliefs and feelings that are making our world small, that is a flag that we need to deepen attention. And there are questions we can ask. You know, if you're suffering, it means you're believing something that's not true. Okay? And so we can ask, well, what am I believing right now? about myself, about others.

And I find typically for myself that when I'm in a bad mood in some way I'm believing I'm falling short. That's usually an undercurrent. And if I can even catch that, it doesn't immediately dissolve it. I don't immediately feel like, oh, everything's fine. But there is an essential shift that happens just in noticing the belief. And that shift is there's a little bit more of what I am resting in awareness and a little less caught up in the belief.

So in inquiry, what am I believing right now? And then the inquiry goes, and what's actually the experience, the felt sense in the body? And if we don't bring inquiry into the neck down, we cannot untangle the tangles. Our emotional life lives in our body so inquiry needs to be embodied. and one of the big misunderstandings of inquiry is that it is kind of analytic, that it's conceptual, it's not. Inquiry is primarily shining in the light of awareness to what's actually happening, moment to moment in our bodies.

So, last class was really kind of looking at the emotional tangles and beginning to loosen them and beginning to bring some really deep questions so that we, we can start sensing this insight that frees us all which is, oh, so these are waves that are coming and going, we start seeing that directly and they're not so personal. It's not like it's what I am, it's just waves in the ocean of what I am. One of the questions I posed and you can try it on right now is what really am I? or who am I if I'm not believing something's wrong with me? Really, this moment, just for a second check.

Like, who am I if I'm not believing there's something wrong? Or if I'm not believing there's a problem to solve right now? Who am I? There's no limit to the power of inquiry when we bring an authentic kind of curiosity and interest. There's certain attitudes that make inquiry work. The core one's what I just said, if you're really interested. And each of us, when we're not distracted and preoccupied, there's something in us that wants

to know what is reality, you know, what is this? So when we're really interested, that there's a brightness and a penetration to the light of inquiry. And then it's like getting the knack of what questions to ask ourselves. So last, as I mentioned, last time it was the emotional tangles. What I'd like to explore in this class is how do we bring the light of inquiry into the relational field. So we're not just saying what is this, what is who am I, what am I in terms of undoing emotional tangles, but we're saying who are you?

You know, beyond that veil of my interpretations, who are you? We're going to look at that and then we're going to explore the deepest level of inquiry, which is the deep sense of what am I beyond any of the particular ways of emotions and thoughts. That's what we're doing over the next like 32 minutes. So we'll see how far we get. You know, I often use the phrase unreal other and it's one that actually over the years has become increasingly meaningful to me because I'm regularly stunned by how often I find myself and others moving around in a bubble where others are kind of players, you know,

like secondary players and we're the, you know, kind of the protagonist or the main character in the play of our lives and others are very two-dimensional and we rarely look deep to sense, well, what's it like being you? In fact, we carry around kind of impressions that are very, very superficial and don't really get at who's there. We're not aware of the filters and the assumptions that we're living with. One friend described, I just got together with he and his partner this weekend and he's become a doula. Usually doula's our company people when they're birthing. but they also accompany people when they're dying.

And in contrast to a midwife, a doula is keeping company right in those final days of passing, the person's passing. So it's a really a live, edge, mystery place for him to be exploring. And for him, he's being a dula for people that are primarily low-income people who don't have family. So he described one of the first people who was with and he was brought in, introduced to in keeping company with this elderly man who had some kind of cancer and couldn't speak. And so there he is the first day and the man has a kind of urgency. He's trying to communicate something to my friend and he's pointing to the door of the bedroom

and my friend kept trying out different things and the guy who kept shaking his head. So finally he kind of struggled to get up so my friend helped him put his arm around him and he helped his old man get up very frail. So they got up together and they're walking slowly. to the door of the bedroom. And then the man points and he's pointing to his refrigerator and he's pointing to this guy and he basically made, so he was telling him, please, I want you to eat. Feel free to take some food. He was being a gracious host. And for my friend, just imagining that he shifted from dying man, I'm here to serve dying man, which is a

kind of two-dimensional characterization to this being that had a heart that wanted to share. And I was so touched because I realized like how much do we miss? You know, it's just everybody wants what we want, which is to be safe and connected and feel good and you know, these beings that we look at somebody and say, oh, dying for and we forget the humor and the sensitivity and the world view and the kindness and play and love and all these qualities of humanness. So how to train ourselves and this is where inquiry comes in to look deeper is it begins with starting to recognize or inquiry starts looking at what are the distortions?

We start getting, oh, I'm really seeing through a little. lens. Now, our lens is particularly distorted when we're hurt or wounded because all of a sudden the other becomes not just unreal other but they're bad other, really not okay other. We have a negativity bias. We just focus on the feature that's what's wrong and when we're fixated it's an interpreted world. We're not seeing the other things about that being. And then we think of public figures. We have these ideas of who they are and they're built on what? The scandals and whatever else the news can focus us on that'll sell papers. But that's our idea of that person. Story. A minister, a priest, and a rabbi went for a hike one day. And they're

perspiring and exhausted, they come upon a small lake. And since it was fairly secluded, they all took off their clothes and jumped into the water. Feeling refreshed, the trio decided to pick a few berries and enjoy their natural freedom. As happens, they're crossing an open area and who should come along but a group of ladies from the town. Unable to get to their clothes in time, the minister and priest covered their privates and the rabbi covered his face while they ran for cover. After the ladies had left, the men got their clothes back on, and the minister and the priest both asked the rabbi why it covered his face rather than his privates. The rabbi replied, I don't know about you, but in my congregation it's my face they'd recognize.

I don't know if that was a good illustration or not at my point. Somebody sent it to me and I thought I'd share. My point really is that when we fixate, whether it's because we're hurt or wounded or scintillated or whatever, the rest of the human disappears. We just don't see. It's most distorted when we're saying. when we're subjected to the biases of our culture because like a fish in water we don't see, we don't know what we don't know, so we don't realize what we're looking through.

I think of it so often with, you know, there's an increasing recognition of what we don't see in terms of racial difference, how often it is that white people don't get the danger of being a person of color driving, let's say. a whole article a few weeks ago about a professor, a woman who got pulled over for a parking violation, put in handcuffs and taken into jail. We don't get it. We don't get what it's like. The potential violence in any police encounter for a person of color. Leaving a store, clerks wanting to see the receipt. We don't get how internalized the sense of, I'm speaking as a white person, the sense of superiority is because most white people say, oh no, I don't feel

that. This is one writer, DeAngelo, who writes this, he says, living in a white, dominant context, we receive constant messages that we are better and more important than people of color. For example, our centrality and history textbooks, historical representation. presentations, our centrality in media and advertising, our teachers, role models, heroes, heroines, everyday discourse on good neighborhoods and schools who's in them, popular TV shows centered around friendship circles that are all white, religious iconography that depicts God, Adam and Eve, and other key figures as white. While one may explicitly reject the notion that one is inherently better than another, one cannot avoid internalize.

the message of white superiority as it is ubiquitous in mainstream cultures. I share it because we have a lens, an interpreted world that as long as we don't challenge with inquiry actually creates the suffering of profound separation. It keeps us in prison, all of us. So, we need to look. We need to look and see what's it like to be. be another person who feels like they're living in danger? What's it look like to be a person who feels like they're inferior, being told they're inferior?

Thoreau says the miracles to look through another's eyes for even a moment. To look through another's eyes for even a moment. I remember when I was writing True Refuge reading about and then sharing it about these Israeli and Palestinian teens that were brought together at a summer camp. And it was pretty amazing to read about because they'd get together and then they had a lot of training, how to speak from their hearts and listen. And they went from the beginning of their time together, total hostility, living in an interpreted kind of life where the other was the enemy.

And here one Israeli girl at the end said, If I don't know you, it's easy to hate you. If I look in your eyes, I can't. So inquiry trains us to look. It intains us to, helps us to decondition the biases and the interpretations that keep us from reality. So naming a few ways that we have an interpreted life, but actually, for most of us, because we spend so many moments caught up in a sense of our own self-story

and a world out there, even those that are close in, our family or friends, they're still unreal others. We're not really looking. So just, I'm going to, since I've been talking a lot, invite you to check in for a moment. Just do a very brief little reflection. if you will, bring to mind someone that you see pretty regularly, that's an important person in your life, somebody you care about. Just notice when you bring that person to mind what you think about them, what comes to mind really, maybe if there's an image that comes to mind or

a certain place that you see them in, certain feelings come up about that person or certain characteristics about that person are apparent to you. Just notice for a few moments what comes up when you bring this person to mind. Now, shift your attention and simply connect with your own experience right now. Connect with the sensations of the moment, the sense of listening, notice your mood. Notice the presence that's aware of sight sounds and sensations, just your beingness. And consider this, that that person you are just reflecting on is more like this, more like this subjectivity than any idea you might have had of them.

Just as if you look at that person and see their eyes, what's more real is what those eyes are seeing. How do we get beyond this habit of projecting our two-dimensional unreal other? other, how thin it is. You might listen to the words of Annie Truitt who is an artist and psychologist. She says, unless we are very, very careful we doom each other by holding onto images of one another based on preconceptions that are in turn based on indifference to what is other than ourselves.

She says, I notice that I have to pay careful attention in order to listen to others with an openness that allows them to be as they are. The opposite of this inattention is love, is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery. Our interest in what is true about another equals love. So how do we train that interest? How do we awaken that sense of inquiry? And the first step is just this intention. that we set our aspiration to understand. If you leave this class with a little more intentionality to pause and deepen attention with another, for one friend the trick was, can I notice the color of that person's eyes?

Because when we begin to say, well what's the color of those eyes? We start getting that there's sentience there. We start dropping past that mask, past the interpretive world. What's it like being you? This is Pema Trojan. She says, we don't set out to save the world, we set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts. That's inquiry.

It's that interest in others. Now, if we're feeling reactive to another person, inquiry starts with what we explored in the last class, which is what are the emotions and beliefs being tripped off inside me? Can I wake up to that awareness that's not caught inside those beliefs and that reactivity? And then we can bring that interest in a very clear, clean way to, so, what's happening for you? Let me give you an example this year or two ago.

I was working with a business executive from this. area, from DC area, and he'd come in because he wanted to work on, he's very impatient and judgmental of other people and friends had sent him a podcast to talk I gave on blame and so on and mindfulness helps. So he thought, okay, let's see if I can, his friends did him a favor and they also did themselves a favor as it turns out. So we practice as we do. Okay, when you're triggered by another person, pause, bring the attention inward.

Ask those questions, what's happening inside me right now? Not to judge the fact that he's angry, impatient, harsh, whatever, but what's going on inside me right now? What am I believing? He found out that when he was really feeling judgmental towards other, he was feeling out of control and he had the belief that he was going to fail. And so he was kind of striking out because he was afraid of his own failure. And he learned to breathe and feel that fear and bring some of the fear and bring some of

some kindness, there'd be a little more space, a little more clarity. He'd kind of start inhabiting a larger sense of his own being and then he could start being with others in a much more intelligent and kind way. He shared one instance of how this happened for him. He told me that he was meeting with one of his project managers and this guy admitted that his team at fallen pretty far behind on a major project that he personally actually was responsible for letting some things fall through the cracks. So this guy I was mentioning felt this rising in irritation and he did his practice, he paused, he breathed internally, he knew that it was about feeling out of control and he quieted himself. And then he kind of looked and really looked,

sought to understand, to see the other. And in him he, he was. saw this guy that, as he had known for a long time, but he really was getting it, who was incredibly sincere and dedicated, a guy that really was committed and also that he could feel was under some pressure. So he mirrored that. He said, you know, you're one of the most committed people I've run into and you, I deeply appreciate what you've offered and I can feel that something's going on. And the manager confessed to him, he said, well, I wasn't really actually going to say this, but it is a tough time.

And he told him that his wife had stage four breast cancer. He told him that he had two teens and that it was one of the hardest times of his life. And they talked some more and hugged, which doesn't usually happen in these environments. And this man told me afterwards, he had tears in his eyes and he thought, wow, you know, some months earlier I just would have in some way nailed this guy. You know, he would have been living in that trance. And instead by pausing, by asking those questions what's going on inside me, by being with his own vulnerability and then by looking and saying, what is it like for this guy?

he actually had an experience of intimacy that was really precious. So this is the power of inquiry that can help us step out of habits that we've been living for decades of the way we see each other but it requires this basic intention to slow it down, and to wonder what's it like for you. Let's pause again together. Let's check this out a little bit. Let me invite you to again close your eyes if you will. Take a moment to collect and bring your attention right here. You might feel your breath and take a few full breaths, sense your body breathing and letting the breath be in its natural rhythm. Bring to mind another person, Again, someone you see regularly.

And this time someone you know who's having a challenging time, not something that brings up, not a person that brings up a negative reaction in you, just somebody that you care about who's having a hard time. And you might for a moment notice how you typically are relating to this situation, this person in their situation, how close in you've let your attention get. And see if you can do that without judging. Has it been a kind of story that mentally you felt a sense of concern about but maybe not really felt your heart inside it or have you felt overly associated and maybe really reactive?

What's it been like thus far in relating to this person's hard time? might deepen your attention and sense, well, what is it really like for this person? Perhaps if you can imagine just being inside that person's body and mind and looking through those eyes at the world, how's this person viewing the world right now? What is, maybe what is he or she or what are they believing? Is there a sense of failure, feeling unloved? What's it like with that person's heart? It's that person feeling.

Can you sense what that person most needs? Maybe from you or others, what would be most helpful? I'm feeling your whole being right now from the wisest and tenderest, most awake part of your being, your wake heart. You might sense just offering whatever that person needs energetically, perhaps offering a message of words of love or encouragement, sensing energetically a kind of holding or a touch. You might even imagine that person receiving it. Noticing how with inquiry the heart opens when we begin to look more deeply.

That when the mind contacts what's true, the heart experiences that as love or tenderness. You might even ask, who am I when I'm opening my heart and mind to the experience of another in this deep way? And opening your eyes if you'd like to, you can keep them closed too. This carries us into the final domain of inquiry that we're going to explore together, which is sometimes called self-inquiry and it's the kind of core question of really who am I or what am I. And we, if you consider how we typically think of ourselves, our self-concept and our self-understanding

really emerges out of the mirroring of our caregivers and our culture. And so it's, you know, if you think of it, our parents out of their wants and their fears and their interpretations give us messages about who we are and who we should be and who they hope we'll be, you know, but we develop a sense of our being based on that and we internalize it so we don't go around thinking, oh, that's the person my parents thought of, it becomes our story. And then we've moved through our day continually, this incessant inner dialogue that continually reputs out that story about who we are, what's right, what's wrong, what's good, what's bad, what we need to do to be better, how others are.

looking at us and we tell that story to other people. We present that and communicate that to other people. One of the stories that love about my husband is, you know, and it comes from this, the sense of that we present certain elements to ourselves over and over again about who we are, I'm a recovering addict or I'm a businessman or I'm an intellect or I'm a liberal. Well, my husband has a resume that he put out, Jonathan Faust, he put out. He put out on his website and elsewhere. And if you look at it, next to his name, you'll see M.A, CSA, his name, then M.A and then CSA. So a couple of years ago, someone for the first time said, CSA? What's that? And with great dignity, he explained the Cub Scouts of America.

He left it on there for a really long time. Okay, so he has a list of past employment. it's a very long list. Here's the final one. Certified pesticide applicator for the state of Illinois expired. That's the resume. So what do we tell each other about ourselves? What are we trying to put out there? And more important, what are we believing about ourselves? And the importance of seeing that is anything, any story we tell about ourselves is not the truth. It can't be. We can't fit in the beingness. This awareness, this love, this mystery of what we are cannot fit into our stories.

And yet they cause so much suffering, they keep us so small and we so much ride on how others react to us in where we're living in our story. We're on this roller coaster every day with most people on some level we're so influenced. We so want approval. Watch it, just watch in every interaction how much that matters and how much it's shaping our story. One cartoon I saw there's a wizard reading a crystal ball and a woman's listening eagerly to hear about what he's going to tell her and the wizard says, you'll fall for anything. And her thought bubble goes uncanny.

I love that one. So, Ahi Pascico, we need to look for ourselves and in a fresh way, a clear way, a way that really wants to know. So really, who am I? So inquiry in the most profound way deconditions that story in our mind. I love the way Tibetan teacher and writer Sogiel Rimpashe writes, puts it. He says, if everything changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious in which

the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something behind the appearances, behind the stories and the feelings and the beliefs, these changing waves? Is there something behind the appearances? boundless and infinitely spacious in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place. If you ask the question, who am I and your mind is full of thoughts, you'll get another thought. That's just what'll happen. You'll say, well, I'm me, of course, or I'm this woman, da-da-da-da, or I'm this person who wants to serve, you'll just get a thought.

which might be pointing to some facet of your being that is true or not, but it's another thought. It's not a direct experience like Sogiel Rumpashe is pointing to of a kind of formless dimension that we can't see or have a thought about but we can experience. So how can inquiry bring us to an experience? So, as I said, if there's a lot of waves going on, a lot of thought waves, we'll just keep seeing the thought waves will have ideas of other waves, they won't get the oceaness that really makes them up. But if we're quieter and this last practice we'll do really is most alive when we're

most quiet. If we're quiet and the sense of that the self, we haven't been telling ourselves so many stories so we're not so solidified or centralized. If we're quiet, there's more like there's kind of a ghost self in the background, there's still some sense of someone there that's perceiving or things are happening to, but it's much more amorphous. And so if we're quiet and then we start saying, well, who's really here? What's aware right now? Then we begin to open into a mystery that can't be shaped by words, but that can feel like home. The Tibetans have a saying that the true seeing is the seeing of no thing.

That in those moments that we say, well, who's here, who's aware? It's not like we see a thing. In fact, if you see a thing, oh, there's this shape of the way. light, or you have another thought, or you have a feeling, oh, that's it, that's not it. That's just another wave. It's a nice wave. But we're not sensing the waterness, the infinite beingness that's permeating at all. The true seeing is the seeing of no thing.

So, deep inquiry, the kind of inquiry that we're kind of winding up with right now, takes us past all conceptualization into a more formless quality, into a more beingness quality. And in the Zen tradition it's described as the backward step. It's like when we're holding onto our ground or our ideas, that keeps us in a smaller world. So we just keep stepping back and saying, oh, okay, there's that, but then just resting in something larger. But then we find we kind of contract again and then we go, oh, step back. back. It's kind of a backward step until there's nowhere else to step. We are that beingness. I think of Choghjomtranpa who at one point he had a big white poster paper and he did a little

V-on and he said, what is this? And students said, well it's a bird, you know, it's wings of a bird. And he said no. He said, it's the sky with a bird flying through it. That's the shift. where instead of fixating on the waves of, oh, I'm the person with these behaviors or these sensations or these thoughts, we start sensing, oh, there's a beingness and awareness that's noticing these waves but not confined by them, identified by them, hitched to them. Here, let's, again, we'll try something here. I love the way you automatically start composing yourself to meditate. It's beautiful.

So it's helpful probably to close the eyes for a moment. And if you've done this with me 15 times, it doesn't matter because each time you'll sense it fresh. For the next 10 seconds, I'd like to invite you to try not to be aware. Okay? 10 seconds, starting now. try not to be aware. Okay, that's enough. Good, good, good. So, how many were successful in that?

Can I see? Usually there's a few hands. I like to share that when I once did this, my mom was in the group and she was the one hand that went up. So we realized that awareness just is. You can't find it. It's not like you can point to it. It just is. And yet we don't notice it because we're aware of the objects of awareness. awareness. So again, just close your eyes for a moment again. You might pose that little invitation, okay, try not to be aware and immediately sense that okay so awareness is here. And just turn the inquiry to what is this awareness? And with interest, what do you notice? What are the features or characteristics of awareness, this ever-present awareness. What is it?

Can you sense that awareness is complete openness? There's no boundary? Just keep investigating. Can you sense that there's a wakefulness to awareness? There's a cognizance, a knowing quality. Can you sense awareness as the silence that's listening? Can you sense the stillness here in awareness? It's the stillness that perceives sensation.

Can you sense that if you experience awareness at the level of the heart that there's an innate quality of tenderness or warmth? If you bring to mind a loved one and just let that be received in this awareness that's here, in this open, awake space, that there's loving. Just be that presence, be that loving. Love is the warmth, the tenderness of awareness. As Gungaji puts it, the love that you search for everywhere is already present within you. It may be evoked by any number of people or events.

A mountain can evoke this love, a sunset can evoke this love. But finally you must realize you are this love. When we inquire what is awareness, what am I? I? We can't land on anything solid, but we can come home to a wakefulness, an openness and a tenderness that's our true nature. So as a way of closing, just to kind of put a maybe a frame around this class and the one before it, Inquiry is one of the key parts of spiritual practice that takes the light of awareness and helps us deepen attention so we can penetrate and see with clarity what is true. It brings up truth and it turns life

into adventure when we bring it into our daily life. This is Henry Miller. He says the moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. It becomes an adventure. So we practice bringing this interest to our lives. We bring it to the emotional tangles. Well, okay, what's going on here? What am I believing, feeling? What's needed? And what we find is in the moments that we really inquire with curiosity, there's a shift in our identity. We're no longer the trapped, fearful self, we become that awake awareness that's aware of the waves. We bring this inquiry into our relationship with each other and we find instead of that routine of just seeing an unreal other

and reacting in the same way over and over, our identity shifts. We're seeing a mystery that just like ourselves wants to love and be loved is sentient and we get to dance in that mystery, so much more interesting and enlivening than a reaction to an unreal other. And finally, when we bring the light of awareness and look back into what we are, we see past the story that has kept us trapped in feeling unworthy, insecure, separate. We see past the stories into a mystery of aliveness, awareness, awareness, and love that's truly our home. And when we start living from that, our life becomes full of wonder.

So we'll just close for a few moments, well, just to sit up, close your eyes. In the spirit of our theme you might ask yourself what's happening right now inside me. Feel this living world here, this aliveness, you might also sense the space. space that everything's floating in, that everything arises in, the sounds, sensations, all happening in this space, all arising from space. It's relaxing back and be the silence that's listening, the openness that everything's happening in. You might even ask who's aware of all of this.

Just with a very light movement of attention, turn the awareness to awareness itself. Who is aware? And then just let go, just be that awakeness, that openness, that tenderness, sensing the awareness that receives the life of the heart, being that heart space. We close with the words of Rumi, I am water, I am the thorn that catches someone's clothing. There's nothing to believe. Only what we are, we are, when I quit believing in myself, did I come into this beauty? Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul. Now, in this ocean of pearling currents, I've lost track of which was mine.

Namaste and thank you for your attention.