Tara Brach - The Sacred Pause

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

The Sacred Pause - When we are lost in the trance of doing, our lives are on automatic, and contracted by sense that something's wrong or missing. This talk explores the challenges of learning to pause, and the blessings that arise when we step out of our incessant mental and physical activity and reconnect with the being-qualities of presence, wisdom and love (a favorite from the archives). "The deepest expression of love is this non-doing presence because that's when we are inhabiting who we really are."

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste friends, welcome. The talk today is entitled The Sacred Pause. And I've always loved that phrase because it expresses this truth that our access to what we most cherish in life involves pausing. We need to somehow rather step out of the incessant inner dialogue that keeps us removed from our hearts and senses. And we need to step out of that kind of driven busyness of our lives that blocks real intimacy with our inner life and with the world.

Sometimes it seems like we're racing to the finish line. You know, racing through the day, racing through our life and what's the finish line? it's death, and that we're actually speeding along the surface rather than allowing ourselves to drop in, to really inhabit this moment. I heard a story years ago about a young mother and she was diagnosed with cancer and told she had a year to live. And her mantra became, I have no time to rush. No time to rush. So whether we have one year or 40 years, if we're rushing through our life, we're not living fully, we're not able to lovefully. And I know during holiday season it can actually feel very compressed. So I hope this talk invites you to pause.

touch that aliveness and that loving and that mystery that's always here, it's intrinsic to our deepest being. May you enjoy? I was moved by an NPR story this week that I wanted to share with you. It was about some trauma workers, a team at the University of Virginia emergency room, and they described having over time been with so many people that doctors, that there was a kind of numbing going on. Recently, after one of the patients died, one of the nurses just stayed for some moments. She took a pause and she just offered her prayers. And then the next time it happened, the whole team stayed with her.

And they all paused for a few moments and each one reported feeling really touched, like that that allowed them to sense the wholeness of that being, that this was not just a an object that was checking off. The list was like a being and they sense a kind of sacredness to the process by taking those few moments to pause. And then after that, teams through the hospital picked it up and now it's kind of spreading around the country which is so wise and beautiful and we can sense it in our bodies that we need to be able to pause when we encounter.

whether it's death, our birth, our stress, our beauty, our moments with each other in a certain way, that it's in the moments of pausing, that we really, the pause actually creates a space that light comes through, that we actually touch into kind of a natural luminosity, presence, intelligence, creativity. I've often quoted a Martha Pastaway, the poet who writes that line, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life. And it's what an amazing line. We all can feel it.

So pausing is really a way of reconnecting with what I sometimes call being states, very essence states. It express who we are. At one point the well-known pianist Arthur Rubenstein. was asked, how do you handle the notes as well as you do? And I loved his response. It was really immediate and passionate. He said, I handle the notes no better than many others, but the pauses.

Ah, that's where the art resides. So you understand, right? We'll actually have the pausing and learning to pause as the theme of our reflection together and we'll emphasize really pausing when we're a causing. and reactivity and stress. That's when we most need to pause. But really it's pausing as a part of the healthy rhythm of our lives. In another poem Judy Brown, this is called Fire, says, What makes the fire burn is the space between the logs, a breathing space. Too much of a good thing, too many logs packed in too tight, can douse the flames almost as surely

as a pail of waterwood. So building fires requires attention to the spaces between. A fire grows simply because the space is there with openings in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way. So we know that if we build fires and we know that as a wisdom that can guide us in our life, if it's too packed with activity, if there's no pausing, there's not space for for that more universal flow of wisdom and love and creativity to move through us. There are two related reasons, I mean there's probably many, but two main reasons why it's really, really hard to pause.

And one of them is that we are just completely habituated to activity and we are on automatic and it's just our program and we're kind of in a doing trance. They talk about human doings versus human beings or in this doing trance. And so much of the time we're just on automatic, it's just our habit to do. And the second reason, totally related, is that much of that doing is driven by our primitive brain that's saying something's wrong. I need to do something so I'm ready for what's around the corner. Something's missing.

I need to do stuff so I can make sure I get it. You know, we're driven by the more primitive parts of our brain. And so it's very difficult to pause because those primitive doing, driven doings at least give us a sense of controlling things. We manage threats and we go for advantages by doing. Illustrative story, an elderly man lived alone and he wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was difficult work because the ground was hard. So his only son, Vincent, who had helped him in past years. years was in prison and the old man wrote a letter to his son and described the predicament.

He said, Dear Vincent, I'm feeling pretty sad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year and it's given me so much pleasure. I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here my troubles will be over. I know you'd be happy to dig the plot for me like in the old days. Love Papa. Okay, so a few days later, he gets a letter back. Dear Pop, don't dig up that garden. That's where the bodies are Love Vinny. Okay, 4 a.m. the next morning, the FBI agents and local police arrive. They dig up the entire area without finding any bodies.

They apologize the old man and leave. Same day he receives another letter from his son. Dear Pop, go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances. Okay, so the reality is there are threats to avoid and there are advantages to take advantage of and go after and we need to respond and be active in our life. And the problem is this, that we get hooked on that. We get hooked on thinking there's always something that's missing that we need and there's

always something that we're fearing or that's threatening. and so we get locked into incessant doing. And there's nothing of that breathing space that we can intuit, just the way of fire, to burn brightly, for our lives to burn brightly. We need some spaces. We know it. We need to sleep in order to physically have our full health and our vitality. Well, we need to mentally pause.

We need to stop the incessant narrative. the stories going on our mind to have a space where a deeper kind of wisdom can move through us. So there is a training that is involved and it starts with this intention to, okay, you know, let's see if we can pause more both through meditation and through the day. And one of my friends who is into publishing, is an editor in a publishing company, was working on this after reading the chapter on the sacred. would pause in radical acceptance. And he described he'd go to work and he'd sit at his desk

in his first, you know, he had at certain times he was going to pause, he was going to pause he was going to pause before he started work and then when he, after he finished an email he wanted to pause and a few different times but he just completely would forget. So he put up a sign and he described when he even remembered to look at the sign because a part of him was like not looking at the sign either. He described. it that every time he'd pause he'd feel this enormous push in him, this kind of anxiety, the sense that by sitting there he was going to miss out on something, that something was going to go wrong, that he wouldn't be ready for something.

And we're talking about a 20-second pause, okay? But mostly what he said, it was, he felt intolerable because he said in those moments he felt like he wasn't in control. And this gets to the heart of it, that the challenge in pausing is that when we pause, when we really just, and when I say pause, I mean stop goal-oriented activity, okay, when we just stop, that while that creates a space for the light to move through, first it creates a space for us to feel the vulnerability that's there. We have to be willing to feel the kind of hum of vigilance and anxiety that's really part

of our organism and kind of make peace with that and then we find the space that life can live through. So don't take my word for that. Just I'm hoping that you'll deepen after this reflection, deepen your commitment to pausing experiment and notice when you just stop in the middle of things. the incredible push there is to just regroup and get back into action. There's an anxiety or restlessness in us. So instead of pausing when we're stressed we do the exact opposite, which is the primitive

brain drives us into activity to defend ourselves or to grasp and we end up instead of pausing being engaged with doings that cause harm. and lock us in a doing self. They lock us in the feeling of a self that's in trouble, that's deficient, that's separate, that needs to keep doing. Before class tonight I was meeting a wonderful group of a mix of teachers and students from the University of Maryland and Baltimore. We're talking about what this pressure is to keep doing so much and touching into that belief that so many of us have, that when we're not working hard, in some way we're falling short.

In some way it reflects badly on who we are. Deep in the culture. And of course when we're with each other and there's a sense of feeling threatened rather than pausing one of the big ways that we react is aggressively. And how many times have we regretted we didn't pause instead of making that hurt comment. We were hijacked by our limbic system and because we didn't pause we did something that created more distance with someone. How many times we regret pushing the send button before pausing? I could do a hand raise, we all know it, you know? How many

times we've regretted, you know, hurtful gossip. We just kind of get caught in the swing of it and we feel a little slimed by it. Do you know what I mean? So, we're, we're we get caught in behaviors that because we didn't pause and come back to what I think of as our more evolved sense of our being, we behave in ways we regret. And of course, the addictive behaviors we get caught in, again, because we don't pause, the urge moves right into the grasping, whether it's for more food or, you know, the third bowl of Ben and Jerry's or whether it's gambling or whether it's sexual addiction, whatever it is.

I often quote a 12-step sponsor who said that learning the art of the sacred pause is more valuable than a year of meetings. And of course it's not an either-or. We need all of it. But it's incredibly powerful to be able to stop. And I see it in spiritual life, how we bring in our kind of fear of not getting where we want to get and our wanting to have certain states. And rather than pausing and arriving right here, there's a kind of leaning forward and grasping

or a judging. One Zen story, a new student comes to the monastery and says, you know, to the abbot I want I want to join and how long is it going to take me to be enlightened? And, you know, the Abbott's, you know, and you can feel the energy of it. You know, this is not a pausing, stepping back into things. Abbot says 10 years. And so the student goes, well, what if I work twice as hard? And the Abbott says, 20 years, you know. Well, wait a minute, you just said 10 years for you 30 years, you know. We can, we can send. it. We can sense the energy of it. I remember seeing a cartoon of a bunch of monks at the

national mall and one's got a megaphone and he's saying, what do we want? Mindfulness, when do we want it now? You know? It was perfect. So again, I'm describing what happens when we get kind of hijacked by the limbic system and don't pause. We just get carried into the behaviors. And one of the places that it causes the most trouble is that rather than pausing we have lifestyle habits that keep us distracted and immersed and mental preoccupation and working so hard that we're not really able to pause and be with each other. Because just as we don't want to pause and feel the anxiety of the moment internally, when we pause and really are really, our

are in presence with each other, it opens us to the fear of, well, am I going to be accepted, am I going to be seen in a bad light? So we don't pause so much with each other in that open-ended way without an agenda. And that creates a lot of distance. There was a study I read about University of Michigan and they put together the findings of 72 studies. They're tracking the empathy in college students and they said there's a 40% decline in empathy in college students. Most of it's happened over the last 15 years and it's related to texting because when a group of students get together rather than having

a conversation and really letting it go deep, at least a few of them are texting while they're talking. And it's the general understanding that we're, it's not safe enough to have deeper, more vulnerable kind of conversations, the kind that lead towards empathy. And this is a broader comment on, and I think that Nicholas Carr did it beautifully in the book The Shallows, that as long as we're hanging out in virtual reality and getting pinged and trying to track a lot of our channels at once, we don't drop in to the kind of pause that lets us really connect both with our own.

being, and with others. Ah, thank you. We needed that. Let's let that be a call to take a pause. That's beautiful. I do spend time really on how our inability to pause with each other and how our multitasking affects relationships. Because as much as important as I believe it is to train ourselves to meditate on the cushion. I feel like we need training to be with each other and stay present, not go into our habitual strategies that in some way are defending and hiding, our judging. How do we undo that? So I invite you to check my website if you want to explore this. It's radical because it means being vulnerable but it also means opening up the possibility of loving without holding back, really.

So pausing is what I'm calling a portal and it's a portal really to our potential in terms of full intelligence and love and Victor Frankel the most, this is the quote that I use the most almost and I think of it as a mantra almost which is that between the stimulus and the response there is a space and in that space is your power and your freedom. and also your love and your wisdom. So we need to know how to stop. Sometimes I just say to myself, stop and it's not an authoritarian kind of stop or a demand, it's more of an invitation.

Please, just stop. So we have strong conditioning not to pause but we also have this capacity to, and it's to me, an evolutionary marker. It's one of the big markers in our evolutionary unfolding. It's a central theme in the story of the Buddha, in the mythology of the Buddha. Some of you might remember this that Siddhartha, Gattama, the Buddha to be, was seeking enlightenment and before he got to the Bodhi tree, he was seeking it in the striving kind of ways of, you know, all sorts of austerities and the like. And after several years, he was, you was emaciated and sick and close to death and he said there's got to be another way.

At which point he had a kind of memory or vision of when he was a child and he had been brought it was during the annual celebration of the spring plowing and he was there sitting kind of with under this rose apple tree and the older men were plowing away and he was watching and he saw the oxen's draining to pull the plow and he saw the oxen's draining to pull the plow and he saw in the cut grasses, the freshly overturned soil, the eggs of insects, and you see the insects dying. So he could see the suffering and that kind of opened his heart to the, really the suffering that all beings experience in this living, dying world.

And in that open tenderness, he also saw the blue of the sky and the graceful soaring of the birge and the scent of the rose apple tree and he sensed the joy. So it was like he was in this space of relaxing back where there was room for the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows and he touched a real experience of freedom, of just that open presence. Well, that memory basically let him know that it's an innate capacity to come home into our freedom and it doesn't happen because we're striving really hard to get somewhere. What happens in the moments when we pause.

We pause all the doings and relax back into that being place. And this is what then guided him to sit under the Bodhi tree and many of you are familiar with the story where this is the total archetypal pause, you know, where he came to rest under the Bodhi tree and it was non-doing. It was just full presence with what is and in that presence, in that space, in that space, that space of non-doing, the light of the universe flowed through him. He saw the reality of who he was, that that radiance, that compassion, that presence, that really is our nature.

So I share the mythology because it's really in every tradition that at some point the most radical way that we can wake up is to stop the grasp into something else and stop the pushing away. Stop the controlling. Just stop. Maybe in that spirit, why don't we just take a pause together? I'll do a little guided pause. You might sense all of meditation as a pause where we're intentionally stepping out of our automatic or habitual doing. In meditation we're discontinuing goal-oriented activity. And then within In meditation, we get lost in thoughts that are trying to get us somewhere, figure something out or worried thoughts and we just keep re-waking up.

We relax back into that non-doing presence. You might sense with meditation there's subtle goals like let me try to quiet my mind or relax in my body. But they really are goals in service of pausing and non-doing. So, experiment for this next short while, this kind of undoing, this relaxing back over and over so that no matter what comes up, you just notice it and re-relax, relax back into these senses, the experience of right here. Relax with what you're hearing, relax with the sensations in your body, and in this pulse

pause, relax with whatever is true in your heart. When a thought comes up to carry you away, and you notice that you just re-relax, just pause for a moment and relax back again, inhabiting the pause. In a way the practice of meditation is forgetting, is forgetting and getting caught in some doing, some thinking, and then remembering again and relaxing open and pause. yet again, inhabiting the pause, not doing anything, just being. So as you open your eyes you might take with you the consciousness of a pause for this next piece where we'll be exploring a bit how do we pause when we're in reactivity,

but first to say you practice the pause and build the muscle of pausing, that's what meditation is doing. It's basically saying, get lost in doing, recognize it, relax open and pause again and just arrive right here. And then we can practice informal pausing through the day. And I hope you'll, after reflecting on this, just give yourself different times of the day that you say, well, 20 seconds. It's amazing. Your whole biochemistry and your whole perspective shifts with a 20 second pause. You can do it after you hang up the phone or after an email. Or you can do the 20 seconds as you're walking outside, just stop. It's amazing. Just stop. And completely drop everything and just open your senses.

Or while you're conversing with a friend, if it's a person that doesn't think you're weird, just stop together, pause together. Or when you first sit down at your desk in the morning, I like to do it when I drive somewhere and when I stop the car before opening the door, just stay for a moment. You'll find that it disrupts the trance and brings you here. So what we'll notice when we pause and as I mentioned is you'll feel a real tug to get into activity and the trick is to just stay. There's a, I saw a little cartoon with two dogs in a conversation and one was saying, I had my own blog for a while but I decided to go back to just pointless incessant barking.

I thought that was cute. So when we seize activity, we kind of wake up out of the trance we're in, the doing trance, and we actually touch into a very unfamiliar kind of, it's a mystery. In the non-doing, when we're really not doing, it feels like a mystery,

and it's a lot of aliveness. It's most necessary, though, to be able to start extracting ourselves from the trance when we're in reactivity. So let's just talk about pausing when we're reactive. Now, one of the best pieces of research in a relational field was John Gottman, who described he'd work with couples when they were hijacked. You know, they're in a reactive place with each other.

He had them wired so he could track that. And he would tell them, oh, something's wrong with the equipment. We need to take a break for a moment. He'd send them to do different places. And 15 minutes later, he'd bring them back, rewire them. And they would resume the conversation, but very much more mature, resourceful, and able to work out what was going on because what had happened. They had a 15-minute pause, the classic timeout, and your adrenaline gets absorbed back

into the system in a certain way in 15 minutes. And so they had kind of come out of their limbic hijack and they were more online. The frontal cortex was more engaged and they could work it out. Well, that, interestingly, that research is done without any practice. So not only, so they were just, the pause worked just because with time, the 10, you know, count of 10 works, right? There's some chilling out. Add into that the strategies of mindfulness where you actually are intentionally pausing

and intentionally arriving and inhabiting the moment. and it doesn't take 15 minutes. So the way I usually invite people to practice the informal pause is to be intentional, know you're stopping, take three full breaths that like very long in breath and a very slow out breath because that right away starts to relax the sympathetic nervous system and help you kind of reacclimate and then just on purpose wake up your senses so you know you're here. To pause and occupy the pause, know the sense, you're listening to sound right here. The forms you're seeing are right here. The sensations in your body right here. Okay, so three

breaths, open up your senses and then just in some way invite yourself to be here kindly. That's it. And if you practice that in a lot of different situations, you'll start getting the knack of homecoming. Okay. A few examples. here. And this is one story that I love of a woman who was with her mother and her mother told her that she was spending the evening with her mother and her mother let her know that she had breast cancer. And so here's how the reactivity came up. She, as soon as her mother said that of course she felt the sadness and then guilt and anger and future tripping and regret, all like boom boom, because you know the initial shock is really intense.

And then she went into control mode, planning mode, and what needs to happen, what are your treatment options, how soon do we get the lump removed, you know, you get the idea, right? So this is where rather than pausing she was going into the control mode. And then she says, thank God for this work for learning to pause and arrive because despite the complete spiral I was in I still had enough presence to ask that all-important questions question, what am I noticing right now? That's the beginning of a pause, right? Instead of the goal-oriented, grasping and fearing activity, okay, right now. And so she says in that moment I was able to see something I would have missed otherwise. My mother didn't

want to talk about any of those things. As I was weighing her options, whether it's a biopsy, mastectomy, et cetera, et cetera. She sat in the high top chair in my kitchen staring blankly into a cup of coffee. I was trying to be strong for her sake in mind but it suddenly became clear that wasn't what she needed. She was scared and needed to be scared. I debated whether to give her a hug which sounds terrible I know but I was barely holding it together and scurrying around making dinner pouring over doctors reports. Staying busy was my way of avoiding a total collapse but being present pausing and being present allowed me to shift to her way. I took a breath, walked across the room, and wrapped my arms

around her. It was an awkward sideways hug, but it was also a long, necessary one, and then something happened. Slowly she started rocking side to side like a mother rocks a child except the child was now the caretaker. It was a sweet, tiny moment I'll never forget, and one that I surely would have missed were it not for the power. of mindfulness, the blessing of a pause, this shift that happens in a pause from being in the grip of the controlling self, which is our more familiar identity to in that pause opening to inhabit really love in presence, a sensitivity that can then respond to our world with some wisdom. So that's an example I wanted to share because our whole sense of identity

shifts and also how we relate to our world. Now in another situation one man had a repeating nightmare and his nightmare he was being chased by this kind of shadowy partially masked figure that was terrifying and he couldn't directly look at the figure and felt like if he did he would die. So each time the dream would repeat he'd just be right. running until he'd wake up in a cold sweat. And so as we explored it together, I suggested he at least had the intention when he was in the dream to stop, to stop running, to turn around and just look, which he didn't think he could do.

But actually, that's what he did. One of the times he stopped, he turned around, he looked, and as he looked more closely, What he saw was a kind of caricature of the Phantom of the Opera, a cartoon, which actually as a child had totally frightened him, which I can relate to because that was one of the scariest things to me as a child. But anyway, that's why I remembered the story. It was like a cartoon of the Phantom of the Opera and then it just, the cartoon figure dissolved. And that was the last time he ever had that nightmare.

It's radical to pause and the times we most need pausing and one of the women in our group talked about this today before class, when we most need it is when we're most stressed. We need to stop. One more story for you. This is another mother-daughter story that really always has stayed with me. And in this one, a woman was talking about what a standoff she had with her mother and her mother both terrified her and enraged her. And when she kind of opened up to some imagery, her mother was like a dragon, breathing

fire and the fire was always criticism and it went really deep. So she either avoided her mother, she was running from the dragon or she would burst out in rage that seemed really inappropriate. It was just built up. So in therapy we just practiced when she'd start having those feelings pausing and being with them until in time in the pausing and being with she started finding she had the space for them, which is the gift of mindfulness. That when we're with, then we bring a clarity and a kindness, we find their space for what's there and we're no longer in reactivity to it, we're larger and that shift in identity is the whole deal because then we can respond with wisdom.

So in therapy she had many rounds of that and what she most wanted was when she was in person with her mother to be able to pause and actually pull that. off, stay with herself. So it happened when her mother confronted her over the holidays when they were all together. She confronted her, this is a young woman in her 20s, with not having a job, she was between them. And a lot of stuff got stirred up but she didn't shrink or attack. Instead she responded in some way that didn't give her mother fuel, in which case her mother turned the attention somewhere else. But inwardly she kept pausing and all the stuff that was stirred up, the agitation, the sense of fear, the shame, because

her mother made her ashamed of herself. She just breathed with it. She stayed in the pause. And she knew how to say, this feels horrible and I can handle it. Because that's what happens when we learn to pause. We actually get that we can deal with it. And so as she stayed with it, as happened when she was in therapy space opened up and not just space, but a real sense of tenderness and she could feel her own woundedness but also feel the sorrow that you know she started being able to look at her choices with it with more clarity. She could stay, she could leave, she could confront her mother, she could let it slide. But see in that space she had more choices.

As it happened she stayed and she started being able to witness her mother because she had more of that kind of presence from that pause. and be able to see this woman who was really ensnared in her own insecurity, who had kind of her hands and fists or words or tumbling out of control. And it really touched a sense of compassion with her so much so that she told me that when they parted later that evening she was actually able to look her mother in the eye and kind of touch her lightly on the arm and smile and compact. So this is again what I call the sacredness.

art of pausing and it's much more challenging when we're in the midst of something with another person but I thought given the practice that we just experiment right now give you a chance to sense into bringing the pause in this kind of radical way to a situation where you get stirred up. So just take a few minutes to try this and it's short so try it on your own after class. So, of course, we try the pause in vivo but the more times when you've practiced on your own, the more you've got the pathways in your brain and the feelings in your body that'll help you when you actually are in the situation. So you start this meditation with a pause.

Not doing anything, simply relaxing open into what's right here. I might just notice your body breathing, let your senses be awake. You might bring to mind a situation where you pretty regularly get caught in some level of reactivity where you may be act in ways that don't express the most mature or awake part of your being. It could be something at work, at home, with a function. friend or family, children, partner, parents. It's something that involves another person.

And let yourself remember that situation. In other words, kind of do the lead-up as if you're watching a movie to what's going on. So you can hear what the other person may be saying that is provocative or look on that person's face, sense what's going on that really is triggering you. And just pause at the keyframe. Pause when you, right before maybe you've reacted fully. Pause when you wish you could pause.

And in that pause, as I described, go ahead and take those breaths. As right now, take those breaths. A nice full in breath and a slow out breath and again and again. And naturally when you're with another person, maybe there's not time for that. But for now, just to really sense the pause. Let your senses be awake. Take a moment to really pause and inhabit and experience the vulnerability or whatever is triggered off in you.

So rather than running away, running from the dragon or running from the vulnerability, you pause and sit down into what's here with a relaxed and gentle attention. Just breathe with it. Just like the woman with the dragon mother, you can sense, okay, this doesn't feel good, and I can be with this. You can let the space of a pause have some kindness to her. You're just opening to what's here with a gentle quality of attention. And then let the pause include attending to the other person.

And you might notice what else you perceive when you have the benefit of a pause. What else do you see about that other person when you're not in the grip of reactivity? How might that person be caught in their vulnerability, in their insecurity and their unmet needs? This is the woman whose mom was diagnosed, could see, oh, she needs to be, she's afraid, she just needs to be you with those fears. You might sense what this person's needing or feeling. When we really inhabit the space of a pause.

The flames burn brightly. We are really filled with light. We can see more, feel more, respond to our circumstances with more awakeness and open-heartedness. Sense out of the pause how you might respond, how your deepest nature can come through and guide you. And you can trust in the days and weeks to come that even a short pause, pause. Even a short pause begins to give access to those being qualities, that deep intelligence and love and creativity that is really our nature. Now, if you'd like to open your eyes,

please do and if you want to listen with your eyes close, that's fine. Do a little, just a tiny bit more here. So as we awaken, much like building a fire, becomes more and more intuitive and spontaneous, oh, need to create some space, need to stop, need to stop figuring out because I'm going in a kind of circular little trance here, just be. We just know when to stop more and more to create the space to let that light shine through. And similarly, just as we're opening to the joys and sorrows in us, we sense with other people how to rather than fix them or do something or react, how to create some space.

to create some space to let what needs to happen happen. I remember some years ago hearing a story about a four-year-old child whose next-door neighbor was an elderly gentleman and he was recently widowed. And so one day the little boy noticed the man sitting out on his porch crying and he went into the yard and he went into his yard and he climbed on his lap and just sat there. And his mother looked over and she saw her son. and the old man sitting together. So when her child came home, she asked him what he had said to the neighbor. And his response was this, I didn't say anything, mommy. I just helped him to cry. The deepest expression of love is just this non-doing presence, because that's

when we're inhabiting really who we are. Now we've been exploring this really on an individual level thus far, that when we create the space to pause, this life burns more brightly, the light comes through. And the same process unfold in a societal way, rather than the cycles of blame and reactivity, when we can begin to, when conflicting people can pause, okay? We can begin to step out of our agendas and our fears and our reactivity. That's where there's this magic that happens where we see past the matter. mask. When people of different skin colors, of different races, of different beliefs or religions

or lifestyles, whatever it is, that are in conflict, that have conditioned fears and aversions, actually pause together and deepen presence, they see past the mask and then we begin to see, oh, just like me, you want to love and be loved. And just like me, you that fears that keep you pulled back. We get to see the reality. This is what we really need in the world. We need this training to pause and arrive in mindfulness and in present. So I'd like to close in a very simple way to invite you yet again to just sense, okay, right here, right now, let me pause. Just to close your eyes, you don't even have to adjust how you're sitting. I know how we tend to want to compose herself or sit.

But just to take a moment again, you might have that voice inside your mind that says, just stop, really stop, come home into this being. You don't have to try to be aware. The awareness is what you are. And pausing is just a relaxing back to inhabit it. And it's natural even as we sit still that the mind leaves the pause and goes into activity. And so our practice is just notice that. Notice and re-relax, settle back again.

It's a radical thing to just have that intention to keep relaxing back, not doing anything, not controlling anything. Utterly awake, senses wide open, utterly open, and non-doing, present. We close with the wisdom and poetry of Pablo Neruda. Now we will count to 12 and we will all keep still. For once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language. Let's stop for one second and not move our arms so much. It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines.

We would all be together in a sudden strangeness. strangeness. Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales, and the men gathering salt would look at his hurt pans. Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victories with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade doing nothing. What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about. I want no truck with death. if we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening

ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Now, I'll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go. Namaste and blessings.