Tara Brach - The Wings of a Liberating Presence

Episode Date: February 13, 2013

2013-02-13 - The Wings of a Liberating Presence - No matter what is happening in our lives, if we relate to our experience with mindful recognition and an allowing presence, it becomes a portal to freedom. In this talk we explore how the cultivation of these wings of presence awakens us from the identification with an egoic self, and reveals the awareness and love that is our true nature. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

So on Monday night, we have a monthly gathering where people, we sit for 45 minutes and there's questions and sharing. And one of the questions this last Monday night was really about how, in coming to the West, the practices and teachings of Buddhism have been in different ways affected. And the question was, has the deep wisdom been diluted? And have we impose our Western ego on the spiritual path in a way that contorts it some? Kind of like what Chogh Mtronfa described as spiritual materialism, which means that in some way our meditations become either we're striving or we're proud or we're inflated, I'm now a meditator, some attempt to control the mind and feel some achievement in that,

or use the techniques in a very narrow way. I just trying to soothe something or, you know, just relieve stress, but not really remembering what's possible. And certainly we can see in the yoga, which is part of meditation world, yoga apparel accounts for $6 billion industry a year, six billion. You can buy a Gucci yoga mat for $700. Really? Is that amazing?

So again, is it about firming up our abs and our butt, or is it about, you know, experiencing the truth of who we are? So when I use the word ego, I'm going to use it some tonight. It's a messy word. Because ego, it kind of refers to that sense of the self that's being the executive, that's kind of making the decisions and guiding us on the path, it often revolves around

in the strongest ways a wanting self and a fearing self that's trying to make it through. When we look at what's the, how does ego enter into our spiritual activities, it's a given that our intentions and motivations are always marveled with what the ego wants and fears.

It's a given. It's okay. It just happens. And this isn't just in the West. It's got, egos have different shapes and different cultures some, but there's still a sense of wanting to be a certain kind of person and wanting to fit the standards of our particular culture and how spirituality fits that. So I think what we can say is that we have this pure longing to be who we can be, to

awaken, to really live from an open-heartedness. We have that in us. And we also have an egoic need to control things and to try to find more comfort and to try to avoid what's difficult. So the deal is sometimes the ego is very, very tricky and it assumes a very subtle kind of spiritual look. It kind of has an appearance. And some of you might remember a story where you have a helicopter with a rope

and there's 11 people that are holding tight to that rope. They're dangling from the helicopter and 10 are men and one is a woman. And they agreed that somebody had to make the sacrifice. Somebody had to let go of the rope so that the rest

could make it or else they'd all be killed. So there's a much a lot of back and forth and finally the woman said, okay, I'll do it. It's because women are the ones that have to give and have to surrender and have to serve others and make sure everybody else their needs come first. I'll do it. That's what we do. Then all the men started clapping. Tricking. And it's not just, you know, it's this egoic cunning starts at a pretty early age. I love the story of a woman who's preparing pancakes for her son, Kevin, who's five, and Ryan, who's three. And they're arguing, like, who's going to get the first pancake?

You might remember, maybe that happened in your family. And so the mom saw this opportunity for a spiritual lesson, and she said, you know, if Jesus was sitting here, he would say, let my brother have the first pancake. I can wait. So Kevin, the older one, turns to his younger brother and said, Ryan, you can have the first chance at being Jesus. So we're talking about spiritual materialism, how we torque things. And I've shared many times my own experience of being, you know, very type-based, striving,

trying to do well in school, trying to do well in this, trying to do well in that, move into an ashram. And then next thing, I was trying to be the best yogi and trying to get up earlier than everyone else and impress teachers and get approval and, you know, the whole deal. And it was very kind of competitive perfectionistic thing. It was definite spiritual materialism. And at the same time, I was simultaneously trying to purify the competitive part and purify the perfectionist part and purify the judgmental part. So here's what I got. This is, I've I moved into an ashram, I think, about 35 years ago, is that it does not pay to be at war with the ego.

It does not pay to make it want to go, to try to want it to go away or to try to make it go away. I mean, any more than it pays to try to fight with our thoughts or fight with the way our body is feeling. It's just a part of things. But it also doesn't pay to ignore the egoic patterns that keep us creating separation from our own hearts and from each other. So the big inquiry here is we know ego is a part of life, we know just like you put on a space suit if you're going into outer space, we need these strategies to survive, some of them are more wholesome than others.

The big inquiry is really how to relate. I mean, how do we relate? Knowing that this marvelled emotion, marbled kind of intention and that we need to be awake, but not to make it wrong. That's the big one, not to make it wrong. You might reflect for a moment for yourself just to check in and sense, well, what comes to mind for me when I say my ego. And if that word doesn't work, you know, my self, how does this self doing? What is this egoic self like? What comes to my when you think

of my egoic self? Sometimes ego is such a disparaging word. You know, we very rarely hear somebody say, oh, she has a very graceful ego, you know? It's, how do you relate to your ego? Is there some sense that you're trying to get away from it or not have it be seen or trying to work it so that it doesn't control you? Or do you have a sense that it gets away with murder and you're not paying attention? How are you relating? You might wonder what is really the wisest way to relate to our strategies, just to consider that. And I'll tell you a classical story as you're kind of mulling on that,

which is that there was in the north of India a Buddhist monk who was known as a brother of mercy. So he was a healer that he could breathe with people and hold the space for them and help them hold their sorrows, help them heal. So he was really a being of a lot of compassion, just very allowing. And he did this for years, but he found that after decades he was actually exhausted, he was dispirited. So he heard about a great teacher who lived hundreds of miles of south. She's an older woman whose reputation has spread far and wide. And she's a Buddhist nun, deep meditation practice,

and she was known for her wisdom teachings that were really training training to see clearly what's happening and to investigate, kind of more directive and engaged and understanding, what's the nature of this experience, to help people strengthen their capacity and know themselves. Well, he felt this need for her wisdom and her clarity and he vowed to walk barefoot across the country and meet with her. So he walks halfway and he stays at this kind of pilgrimage where people that are traveling go, where pilgrims stay. It's kind of a temple. And he encountered there in this old nun and told her his story how he had spent his life trying to help but became exhausted. He lost inspiration. So sympathetic with the situation,

the old woman offers to guide him to the resident of the great teacher. So they arrive at the edge of a bustling village, warmly received, and he found out that the old nun had been none other than the much-loved teacher he was seeking. So he spent years with her. And over the year she taught him how to empower others by allowing them to discover their inner capacity, how that we could investigate and engage with our experience. Many years later, as she lay dying,

the old nun beckon the monk to her side, and she said, there's something I never told you. On that day we met, I too had lost heart. I was headed north seeking a great healer I had heard about. And then she smiled and squeezed his hand and passed away peacefully. So what is it that we get from this story? They each had something really beautiful they were offering. He was offering this space, this allowing.

And she's offering this engaged inquiry, investigation, what's true. And those two elements are what the Buddha described as the two wings of the bird that together fly to freedom together. And I think it's so, I love that story because you start recognizing that either alone can be subject to what you might call the shadow side or Mara or, or, or, you know, our old fight-flight reactivity. If you're just in that allowing space, allowing can degress become kind of disengaged.

Some of you might remember Jack Handy from SNL from Saturday Night Live, he said, first thing was I learned to forgive myself. Then I told myself, go ahead and do whatever you want. It's okay by me. So this allowing space, it can be in a way,

kind of a guise for apathy, for indifference, for dissociating. Just see what I'm saying? You can allow, but you kind of back off from things. It can be disengaged. And then we fail to see, you know, really the strategies of the ego that are actually causing separation and harm. So that, that allowing can feel delusion. We're not seeing what's true. On the other hand, inquiry, seeking to understand this engage path,

If it's not balanced by that compassionate space, that can go off too and become a way of controlling. It's like the ego takes over and okay, I'm going to figure out what's wrong with me and I'm going to control it and I'm going to push down those feelings and I'm going to get rid of those thoughts. So do you see how that too can fall into the hands of our fight-flight reactivity? So we need these two wings. We need them both together. And the truth is that no matter what's arising in your life right now, no matter what the struggle or the conflict, no matter how difficult, if you begin to bring these two wings of just

recognizing, really attending to, like feeling what's there and allowing it to be as it is, contacting and offering space if you can bring those two wings the experience becomes a portal to true nature whatever it is that becomes your entry to a profound unfolding of who you really are

of the love and the awareness that's here we think we're supposed to get rid of things or if only I could get over this period of this pain my body, or if only I could just resolve that conflict with my partner, or, you know, if only this anxiety or depression. And this doesn't mean that we don't also use skillful means to adjust things in our life in ways that are sane and wise. This is not saying you don't take the migraine medication. Okay, my migraines, my portal, you know. It is, but also take your medication, you know, like they say praise Allah and tie your camel to the post, you know.

So how does this work that these two wings, we bring them to what's going on in our life, and they actually open us to freedom? And I'll give a very simple couple of sentences, but more I will explore it. I'll give you a kind of example, story. But in the moments that we bring presence to the waves of experience, presence intensifies, and we realize we belong to that presence more than to any of the story of what's going on. So our sense of who we are shifts, we go from fighting the waves and identifying as a cluster of waves to that oceanness, that awareness that includes them,

but it's not so identified. That's the freedom. It's not that the fear stops. It's not that the anger goes away. It's that the identity of victim or angry person no longer grabs us. We're living in a bigger space. I heard from a student that had come to a retreat a couple of years ago.

We'd on and off been in touch. come to several actually. This is a woman who's 30s. She teaches in a small college single, and she gets battered around by a critical mind pretty intensely. You know, it's how she's falling short. She's always comparing herself to other teachers that seem to be more popular, or her been publishing more, other people that have gratifying relationships. And so she compares, and then she gets angry at herself for being so stuck, and angry at herself for comparing. And then she kind of numbs out a little with food or sleeping

or romance novels, something like that. Okay, so she came to this retreat, and she was really attacking herself. And then she was attacking the critic that was attacking herself, and very bound. And so she just began in this simple way, these two wings of recognizing and allowing. It's like just mechanically at first, naming it.

Okay, critic again, feeling victimized, feeling angry. And each time she'd name it, she'd just pause and just let it, her idea was to say yes to it, let it be there. So she's the nun naming it, recognizing what's happening, the monk holding the space. It starts, first it was kind of mechanical,

But gradually, what happened is she'd start naming it and feeling the intensity of the struggle and how familiar it was and how many moments of her life she had been ripped by the sense of something's wrong with me. How many moments. And what happened with that is that then holding a space or that the space got filled with a kind of sorrow. And I sometimes think of this as a soul sadness because she was kind of sensing the shape of her incarnation and how many moments in her incarnation? You can sense this for yourself because we know this one. We're sacrificed to judging herself, to not believing in herself, to feeling deficient, to feeling self-conscious with other people, to hiding out. So she could see it's almost like

she was mourning the huge swaths of her life that had been lost to the trance of unworthiness. And that soul sadness brought up compassion. And the kind of the response that she gave herself, she said, okay, I really just want to say, I'm giving myself permission to be imperfect. I'm giving myself permission to be imperfect. That became kind of a mantra. So she went home and she felt more hopeful. And when she wrote to me, the hopefulness was not because the critic went away. These patterns are very deep. Not because she didn't get frustrated, not because she didn't get stuck at times, but because she had begun to taste that experience of recognizing and holding what's happening and realizing, getting just that taste of, oh, I'm not the judge,

and I'm not the judge." What I am is the one who's watching. She had a night, it was almost like the judge, the judge were these characters in a movie. And she was watching and feeling what was going on, but she was the watcher and the feeler, not the judge and the judge. Okay, so this is the shift in identity that's really at the heart of all the contemplative, mystical, spiritual teachings. It's shifting from buying into this story of a self, an egoic self that's got this strength and this weakness, is making it on

the spiritual path or is failing on the spiritual path. Moving from that to the space of awareness or presence that's holding it, recognizing, it being there. So I just want to again say that for her, Mara, these, the, for her Mara was a lot, the who do you think you are, the doubt, you know, the anger, the loneliness, would still arise. But she got the knack of pausing, naming it, feeling it, and then giving herself permission to be imperfect. In the moments of giving permission to be imperfect, She said those were the moments that there was kind of a softening and an opening that was very visceral. You can try it out.

It's kind of a powerful thing. Mostly what happened is rather than relating from ego, she was learning to relate to ego, rather than relating from that identity of a separate self, just relating to the appearances. So the gift of these training and cultivating these two wings, of awareness, is that the real shift is that rather than I am a human, I'm a self on a spiritual path, we start experiencing we are spirit, our awareness, or love, however you want to call it, realizing itself through this human incarnation. We are the awareness that's waking up to realize what we are through these bodies and through these egos and through these thoughts,

through these sensations. And in the moment of being with, we shift from identifying with the waves to, oh, oh yeah, awareness. Now, the challenge, as we all know, is that when life doesn't cooperate, i.e. when we're stressed out, some way life is either something's missing or something's wrong feeling. The conditioning is for those wings to kind of collapse and for the shadow or the survival strategies to take over. And if we scan through our day, any one of us, we can see how that happens. And it happens most often with the people in the closest circle. We just get triggered. And all of a sudden that very early, early message or belief that something's wrong takes over and rather than, oh, notice it and allow, we go into our chain reaction and we, it's very humbling.

It's very humbling to see it, to recognize how persistent it can be. Okay, another story for you. This is written by Natalie Goldberg, it's wonderful writer. She says, my parents are visiting me in my new home in Santa Fe. It's a cool late July afternoon. We're sitting on the porch. Amazingly, we're not eating. We're just staring straight ahead at the high adobe wall 100 feet in front of us. We're sitting in a line. I'm in the middle.

Hey, Nat, my father begins. What is meditation? Well, it's hard to explain. And then because I am young and still incredibly foolish, I have a brilliant, daring idea. Do you want to try? And before they can answer, I run into the house and get a bell. Accoutrements, I think. It'll make it official. Okay, when I ring the bell, you just sit and feel your breath go in and out of your nose. If your mind wanders, just bring it back gently to your breath. We'll sit for ten minutes.

Okay, they both say, suddenly eager, this will be fun. And they wriggle in their chairs to compose themselves. The bell sounds three times, and we settle into this most ordinary thing, people breathing next to each other. My father's on my right, my mother's on my left. I can't believe this is happening. Here we are, all paying attention. The ten minutes feel spacious, luscious, and forever.

The shade is cool. We're all quiet. This must be what heaven is. Time is up. I rang the bell once to mark the end of the meditation. Well, how was it? I asked. Did you have a lot of distractions?

My father shrugs his shoulders. What's the big deal? Well, did you discover how much? much you think? Was it hard to concentrate? No. I didn't have a single thought. None, I asked, surprise? Not a one. Well, did you feel peaceful? Not particularly. It was like how it always is when you don't talk. That's why human beings talk. Nothing's happening otherwise. I turned to my mother. Well, I was aggravated the whole time about your friend. She must think I'm awful. At dinner the night before, my mother had blurted out that she thought the chapters

of my novel were awful, and my friend Francis, who was there, told me later that my mother was jealous. I had confronted my mother that morning, and she apologized profusely. I don't know what came over me. Your chapters are lovely. Let's try again, my mother says. This time, I'll do it right. I start to explain there's no right or wrong, but instead I just say, okay. This time I want to ring the bell. My father grabs a stick. He ceremoniously hits the bell three times. We're sitting there. for two and a half minutes when my father suddenly belts out, hello, Dolly, well, hello, Dolly, it's so nice to have you back where you belong.

Meanwhile, he's ringing the bill continuously to accompany himself. Buddy, please, my mother tries to interrupt him, just struggling to reach across and grab the bill. My father won't stop. He's having a ball. I'm the only one still staring straight ahead at the blank adobe wall. still attempting to notice my breath. I decide right then that I don't have to save my parents. They don't count as sentient beings. They're in another category altogether.

So we have our ideas. I mean, we enter situations. Some of you might know the feeling if you're going on the holidays to be with extended family and you have your intentions, right? You know, and how you're going to be. Doesn't cooperate, right? Never, not never. So the suffering in it, in those moments, and what I'm really talking about is all the moments

that were our identities narrowed and in some way we're trying to prove ourselves or defend ourselves or be more, not be less. The suffering is that we're forgetting who we are. It's really that simple. forgetting who we are, we're a human struggling to be on a spiritual path or be a better person or whatever it is. And when that's going on, the identities with the ego self, we're just trying to get it right. So that's all going on for a lot of us a lot of the time. And regardless of that, there's waking up happening through our beings.

It's just happening. Even though there's this very persistent patterning of self-playing out, waking up is happening too. And it's unfolding regardless of the trance we're in. I mean you would not be here or you would not be listening if you're not here to this talk if there wasn't an intuition of who you are beyond the ego itself. intuition of something more, of a capacity for loving, of a presence that is something treasured. So there's some intuition of it. I have a way of describing to myself a kind of spiral of awakening by which we get drawn

to a spiritual path and it's because in some way we're living inside a it's like a caterpillar and a cocoon, it's limiting, we're ready to burst out, and we feel the pressure of the egoic self. We feel the tension, the squeeze, of living in something smaller than the truth of who we are, that we're not being true to our self. We're not inhabiting our fullness. So that's the suffering, that's squeeze. And then we have that intuition.

I just mentioned that there is this something more. It's like something in our caterpillar being is intuiting our butterflyness. We're intuiting it. It's in there. So what happens is that squeeze and that sense of something more has us start to train our attention. This is, it's our evolutionary gift that we can train our attention in a way that evolves our consciousness. So we start training ourselves to pay attention.

And what we're training in are these two wings. We're training to notice moment to moment what's actually happening right now, engaged, feeling it. And we're training to let there be space that makes room. So what happens is as we train ourselves, every time we start meeting experiences with this awareness, we start trusting more. that, oh, that awareness is here. It's really a refuge. It's what I am. More and more. Every time there's more and more of a sense of that awareness and presence becomes more the familiar

truth of who we are than the storyline, more and more. So that encourages us to practice more because we get it that paying attention wakes us up into the presence that we are. And then the trust increases. Trust goes hand in hand. It's the gift of the two wings, is this trusting in who we are. There's a confidence that comes that I think is a happiness deeper

than any temporary pleasure because we start getting that we don't have to defend against what's next. We have this confidence that this heart and awareness can keep waking up through whatever arises. It's that sense of heart that's ready for everything. There's a freedom in that.

When I talk about it, sometimes it's making it sound like we're doing this in a vacuum. But this trust and this sense of who we are beyond the egoic self can only happen in the swim of relationship. We're constantly interacting with each other and just the way the shape of our ego is influenced by our culture and our family, so that reconnecting with this essential goodness and awakeness and tenderness comes through the mirroring, the inter-influencing.

When we're seen, that goodness gets invited out. Another story. This is a woman that says a few years ago I was with a close friend in a grocery store in California. As we snaked along the aisles, we became aware of a mother with a small boy moving in the opposite direction and meeting us head on in each aisle. The woman barely noticed us because she was so furious at her little boy who seemed intent on pulling items off the lower shelves. As the mother became more and more frustrated,

she started to yell at the child, and several aisles later had progressed to shaking him by the arm. At this point, my friend spoke up. A wonderful mother of three and a founder of a progressive school, she had probably never, once in her life, treated any child so harshly. I expected my friend would give this woman a solid mother-to-mother talk about controlling herself and about the effect this behavior has on a child. Brace for a confrontation, I felt a spike in my already elevated adrenaline. Instead, my friend said,

What a beautiful little boy. How old is he? The woman answered cautiously. He's three. My friend went on to comment about how curious he seemed and how her own three children were just like him in the grocery store, pulling things off the shelf so interested in all the wonderful colors and packages. He seemed so bright and intelligent, my Fred said. The woman had the boy in her arms by now and a shy smile came upon her face.

gently brushing his hair out of his eyes, she said, yes, he's very smart and curious, but sometimes he wears me out. My friend responded sympathetically, yes, they can do that. They're so full of energy. As we walked away, I heard the mother speaking more kindly to the boy about getting home and cooking his dinner. We'll have your favorite macaroni and cheese, she told them. The author of that book is Catherine Ingram, who's a wonderful teacher, good friend. So we offer a space for each other, where there's both that accepting space.

You know, our friends see all the egoic stuff, stuff that's functional, the stuff that's dysfunctional, but there's this space that holds and allows and sees beyond the mass to who we are. And as we bear witness to goodness in others and see it shining through, it really awakens a kind of trust. in spirit. When we see goodness, it feels good. You know, there's this thing going viral right now on the internet, and I put it on my Facebook page. And if you're not here and you're listening and you want to take a break, you might go on my Facebook page and look for the Jonathan and Charlotte Britain's Got Talent piece. And for you all here, you might watch it later. It's interesting to sense what happens when things go viral. Like, how come? What's catching on? What is lighting people

up? And on this one, what you watch is this awesome, awesome, like brings out awe, talent, bursting through someone whose physical appearance for most in the culture would mask it. So his appearance is very obese and sloppy and awkward and it's painfully shy. Just don't expect it. And then, you know, God comes through in the singing. It's like Mother Teresa said Jesus in his distressing disguise. So the joy, and one of my friends put it really beautifully in watching this. And you watch, I mean, I just weeped. It was weeping and it was kind of a joyfulness. And she called it a kind of a sense of triumph for these kind of sacred moments of witnessing purity and goodness. It just gives us faith. That's there. So faith deepens when we

see that in others, when we're in the presence of a very awakened, loving being, someone that really expresses what you might call divinity or the sacred. And as we, just to come back to our theme for tonight. It keeps deepening as we meet our moments with this presence and we start sensing that this presence is our essence, our faith deepens each time. So it's wonderful and a gift when we can remind each other. I feel like that's like the gift of friends and lovers and parents and children. It's that in some way we remind each other of who's there. who's behind the mask. And just to invite a brief reflection for you on this one,

on this part of the exploration, you might close your eyes and just sense for a moment who it is that helps you in this kind of homecoming. Who do you know that sees and allows for the, what we'll call the egoic conditioning, you know, get your impatience or your temper or your insecurities or whatever it is.

And it's okay. These are waves in the ocean. Somebody or people that can kind of see past and help you to trust who's inside, who's looking through these eyes, who's really listening. You might kind of hone in on this reflection and just bring to mind a person who is loving and accepting. And if you don't have a person, just let your unconscious generate some figure.

You might call a deity or some energetic being that you could imagine and sense love, acceptance, maybe a known spiritual figure like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or any of the spiritual leaders or heroes. It might be Kwan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, but imagining the eyes of a loving, accepting being, seeing you, just imagine that, the eyes are looking at you of this person you know or being you don't know, seeing you, seeing the self in the story. In other words, seeing your strength, seeing what you want,

to be seen. What is it about yourself you want that being to see? Your humor, your intelligence, your good works, your helpfulness, and also seeing the parts of you that you might not want to be seen. Imagine this being sees that too, where you feel more ashamed, what you really don't want others to notice. As being sees, strengthen the weaknesses, sees and understands what you go through and physical,

way, an emotional way, and sees behind it all to the presence that is you, to that which has a pure longing for truth, to that in you which longs to love and be loved, and to the loving presence that's the source of that longing, is being seized that. You might sense the capacity to relax back and just inhabit that awareness that's seen. Just to recognize you are awareness, your spirit awakening to realize yourself through this human incarnation, through the strengths and the weaknesses, through this body, the stories, the wants, the fears, you're the awareness that's awakening to your own presence. So to continue in your own way to sense that and we'll just come to the last part of

this exploration, we're exploring how these two wings of recognizing and allowing can open us to who we are. And I think of it that the allowing, when we're allowing what's here to be here, in the moments we say yes, we're really opening to the aspect of our awareness that's skylike, that's open that is boundless and edgeless. So you can just sense that in the moments of really saying yes, of totally allowing what's here, the boundaries dissolve and you just, there is a very vast space that opens up. And that the quality, the wing of understanding, understanding is that wakefulness, it's like the sky is illuminated with the light of awareness.

So there's vastness and there's light. A sunlit sky when both wings are fully, fully activated, fully awake. And the sunlight sky of awareness is naturally emanating warmth and love. It's the very ground of our being. When we remember, we're home. When we forget, as one person wrote, when we're not remembering the ocean, we're seasick every day because we're kind of living in that self that's just going up and down and in and out.

This is Srinarsar Gadata. He says, as long as you imagine yourself to be something tangible and solid, a thing among things you seem short-lived and vulnerable, and of course you will feel anxious to survive. But when you know yourself to be beyond space and time, you will be afraid no longer. So not only does this refuge in the awareness that's here release us from being afraid of the waves, we begin to relate to the waves, because this was the question right at the beginning, how do we relate to this ego and to these waves of fear and wanting and grasping and proving and hiding, how do we relate to it?

We begin to relate to the whole, you know, it's written, Kuzn Sakhis, the whole catastrophe, the messiness and the beauty. We begin to relate to it as the Tibetans describe it, like a child of wonder. We begin to walk this world, and there's a sense of wonder. Thomas Merton says, as Merton says, see the divine,

the sacred shines through everything. It's not a story, it's true. So we begin to see this more and more that when we wake up from this idea of we're humans on a path and sense, okay, this is awareness, waking up through this incarnation, we begin to embrace this incarnation with a kind of wonder. And I'd like to share a poem that came my way. Gottlieb, I was on a radio show a few days ago and he shared this on the show and I, so I copped it from him. It's called Happiness and it's by Ellen Bass. I had a student once who was so depressed

she wanted to die. She was a young single mother, lonely, poor, watching other girls go to parties and bars while she was home cutting the crusts off peanut butter sandwiches, reading the Berenstein Bears in a bad dream. Then she collapsed with heart disease and spent the the next few years waiting for a transplant. The strange thing is now she was happy. Every day, almost every breath was semi-extatic. She was a modern-day Chicanoomi, hanging out with the beloved, grateful just to touch his hem. I find I'm telling myself all the time now, look how you lift one foot and then another, all the nerves and synapses firing together. Look how you reach for a carton of blueberries

and eat each dusky globe one by one. Look at the spotted dog tied to the newsstand, drops the saliva sliding off his tongue, and the cracked bick lighter in the gutter, shining a watery turquoise blue. Even when your heart is a used tea bag, you can lie down in a warm bed, even though you cry half the night,

with the window open a little, to let in the stars. There is a way we can practice with this shift of identity that frees us to engage with our world through the day that I think is really powerful. And you can do it as you're sitting and meditating also, which is just a simple inquiry, which is how is awareness experiencing this moment?

How is awareness experiencing these sensations? are these sounds? It's just an inquiry that can begin to shift your perspective from a self trying to figure out things, do things, react to things, to resting in

something larger. So I'd like to close with a very brief reflection like this, if you will. Just to close your eyes and as you pause and sense of space that's right here just notice what's going on inside you. Notice the aliveness of the body, whether there's pain or

pleasure, tightness or pulsing or flow, tingling, heat or cool. You just begin with the simple two wings of noticing, recognizing, feeling, and then just allowing the deepest yes you know, how to however it is right now, including the sounds. How is awareness experiencing what's happening? How is awareness experiencing this aliveness in the body? Can you sense how awareness doesn't oppose anything or control anything? How is awareness experiencing these sounds? Can you sense the boundlessness of the spirit?

space of awareness? Can you sense the luminosity of this moment to moment knowing of what's happening, this wakefulness? Awareness at the heart level sometimes described as the empty awake heart. How is this empty awake heart experiencing feelings, awakening to itself through this human incarnation? When spirit awakens through this incarnation, the world of form, these waves of experiencing become sacred, closing with a simple prayer that all beings everywhere may awaken to the love and awareness that's their true nature, that this awakening may bring increasing peace to our planet,

increasing joy and wonder to the hearts of all beings. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, are about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.