Tara Brach - Three Attitudes that Nourish a Liberating Practice

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

Three Attitudes that Nourish a Liberating Practice - A key spiritual inquiry is, "In this moment, what most serves awakening?" Rather than a particular style of meditation practice, it is our way of relating to our experience – our attitude – that frees our hearts. This talk explores the attitudes that are an expression of our innately open, wakeful and loving awareness, and that carry us to realization. (a favorite from the archives) Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. As some of you know, I took much of the month of January off and I began with a self-retreat at home and then went up to the Forest Refuge in Massachusetts where I did a more kind of formal silent retreat, which is just lovely, a chance to slow down enough to really take in the moments and feel some real stillness and silence. And I missed the blizzard down in Washington.

Anyway, I came back to a lot, a lot of emails as I do and one of them said, Atara, may your medication bring you peace, happiness and bliss. friend who knew I was coming back. When I come back after I've missed a bunch of weeks, it's pretty intense. I knew I was coming back to the swirl of our culture, sent me a little story about a guy who had returned from a nine-day Vapassan retreat and went back to his job at the zoo. And seeing out how chilled he was, you know, the headkeeper put him in charge of the tortoises. So this guy, Dave, he walked slowly over. to the cages. And at lunchtime, the headkeeper checks in on him, only to see the cage door wide open,

and the tortoises are all gone. So he says, he runs up to him, he said, what happened with the tortoises? And Dave said, well, he says, we're talking real slowly, I opened the tortoise cage door, and it was like, whoosh, you know. So it can feel like that after you're in slow-mo. This culture is on hyperdrive. So I want to... to share one of the kind of central inquiry that I find is with me a lot and particularly alive on retreat, which is really in any moment what is the way of paying attention that is going to be most liberating? I mean, what really frees our hearts and minds right now in this moment? And when I say liberating, what I mean is that really wakes us up.

out of that dream or trance of being a separate limited self. What really wakes us up and allows us to realize the awareness and loving that's really intrinsic. So that was my inquiry really, what is it? And what I've noticed over the years is that it doesn't matter what formal practice tradition or spiritual or religious path we're on. It doesn't matter if it's Buddhist or Christian or Jewish or Sufi or whatever it is. Really what it comes down to when I watch people over the decades now, what really unfolds towards more freedom has to do with attitude, a way of holding our spiritual practices and our spiritual life.

Not the particular technologies. So what I'd like to do, what I felt drawn to do was share tonight some reflections I had on really what you might describe as the three most fundamental attitudes that are really, what I would say are the grounds of freedom, of really, waking up. And what I'll do is I'll use some of my experiences on the last few weeks just because they're quite with me right now to highlight. But to even before we speak of attitude, underneath that's aspiration. It's like what really brings us to the path? Because that's what energizes all of the unfolding. That's what shapes our attitude. And it's a quite

I ask pretty much at the beginning of every meditation, right? You know, what's your intention? So when we start investigating, and this is pretty much most people I've seen that are practicing with, you know, what's intention, realize that they're layered. And if we're coming from, you know, a hyper busy day and we say, okay, what's my intention? You might come up with some prepackaged ideas but we're not going to be connected to that depth of sincerity. So they're layered and sometimes and it's quite natural the more superficial level of intentions

have to do with shoulds. You know I should be doing this to be a better person or to meet some standard in some way. It's some guilt kind of to do with it. And there's other intentions like wanting some immediate relief from stress, some ease, wanting to feel good about ourselves, wanting to actually control our lives better. If I can get more centered, I'll be on top of things. So there's a kind of a control thing. Sometimes people meditate so they cannot feel certain things.

Meditations easily use as an escape. So there are layers like that, but in a way if you stay with them, you stay with them, you you'll find in the seeds in each of those go down much deeper to a place in us that really longs to know the truth, longs to know reality. Like there's something in us that wants to know, you know, what is this? What is this mystery that we're involved with? And there's a deep longing in us that wants to be free to love

without holding back. There's a deep longing in us just to be fully what we are, to manifest. So that's what I call the deeper levels. And they're not coming from egoic intention, which is trying to control and feel better and not feel bad. They're coming from really the awareness and love that's calling us home. When we're in touch with deep aspiration, that's what it is. And there's signs.

You can feel the sincerity. your body feels more sincere. So it's easy to forget. It's easy in our habitual daily trance to lose touch with what really matters and get very immediate and gull-oriented and fixated. And then we find that we have to slow down and quiet to get back in touch.

I remember my first Buddhist retreat was about 27 years ago. I kind of have to remember it from when my son was born, how old he was. And I remember that after a couple of days I really started settling and getting, you know, quite quiet. And then at one point, there was a real sense of, in that stillness, this quality of tenderness and open-heartedness and loving love. And that's kind of the words I had in the moment. I love love. And then I burst out weeping, crying, you know. And there was such sorrow about how many moments of my life I live

and I'm not remembering that. I'm living on some other level, you know, and I'm missing out on that, that deep aspiration. And I've noticed that this has continued over the years, that sense of getting quiet and remembering what I've forgotten. Because I practice with aspiration a lot, there's less forgetting, but it happens every day. And when there's a remembering, there's always, if not sadness, there's a gratitude,

like, ah, I'm back again, you know, that kind of feeling. A very good friend of mine who many of you probably know, he's a fairly well-known Dharma teacher, James Barras, just spent some time with him, so he's been on my mind. there's a story he tells that really captures this to me so well about the power of that aspiration. And he describes in his early days of practice he was alone, he didn't have a community. So he describes at one point after the initial zest of it getting dry, mechanical. And so it turns out that Ram Dass, who again many of you are familiar with,

as one of our generation, one of the great spiritual teachers. He was in town. So James went to visit Ram Dass and told him that his practice and how it was kind of missing something. So Ram Dass looked at him and, you know, kind of, hmm. And he said, do you love Jesus? And James said, I like Jesus. I mean, I don't love Jesus, but I like Jesus.

Jesus, you know. And so Ramda said, do you love Krishna, you know, God Krishna? And James said, well, I like Krishna, you know, that kind of, do you love God? And James said, you know, I kind of, I grew up Jewish and in a way God was always, you know, this guy with a real long beard and a staff. And so it wasn't quite where the relationship is. What I I really felt a connection with a love for is the Dharma. And the Dharma is really the nature of nature. It's the essence of the path and of aliveness. And so Ramda said, ah, so you love the Dharma.

He said, I want you to repeat after me. I love you Dharma. You say it and then I'll say it. We'll do it together. And so James said, I love you Dharma. And Rambra said, I love you, Dharma, and James said it a few more times. And then around the fourth time,

that's when he started weeping. Because he realized this cherishing, that this was at the very heart of who he was, nothing outside him. This love, he was loving love, he was loving nature, loving life. This is aspiration. It's that very pure energy

that is so in love with the waking up, with the realizing what we are, that it fully energizes our practice. And when our practice, whether we are following the breath or using a loving-kindness practice or concentrating or mindful attention to different things, whatever it is, when it's coming out of that love for waking up, up, it's going to be very vibrant and alive.

So that's the beginning. That's the groundwork. If we have some connection with aspiration, then there are some fundamental attitudes or ways of holding our practice that will emerge, that will carry us home. And so this is what I want to talk about the rest of the time, which is the three attitudes that I feel like are pretty right at the heart of the path. And I'll tell you, I'll name them, and then we'll just take them one by one, and we'll do a little practice with them as we usually do. The first of the attitudes is to relate to whatever's happening with a quality of relaxation,

to relax about it, to discover kind of openness that can hold it, to not have to control it. So relaxed. The second one is interested. to draw on our natural interest about truth, about life. Relax, interested, and the third is friendly to regard what's happening with a quality of kindness or tenderness. And if you cultivate those three attitudes, it really doesn't matter what practice you're doing.

Those attitudes themselves will wake you up into who you are. So let's, maybe as a way, a contexting way to put it, is that each of these attitudes is an expression of a basic characteristic of awareness itself. That the attitude of relaxed or open, awareness is wide open. It doesn't interfere or control. The attitude of interest, awareness has a wakefulness, it notices. and the attitude of friendliness, when awareness comes in contact with these human hearts and lives, there's a natural tenderness and care. So when we develop these attitudes, what we're really doing is aligning ourselves with our natural state,

with the very pure awareness that's home. Okay, so let's look. Let's take each one at a time. So the first one is relaxed. And relaxed actually is what allows us to re-inhabit the space that's here. When we're not relaxed, when something comes up, when we feel fear or anger, and then we go, oh my God, I'm feeling this, our whole being contracts and we lose contact with the space that's here. If you imagine an ocean with waves, it's like when we get reactive,

we confine our being to a certain set of waves and we forget our ocean. We forget our larger belonging. So the basic teaching here is it doesn't matter what's happening. What matters is how we're relating to it. And to be relaxed means to remember some of that ocean-ness so we can let the waves come and go. That's the most simple way, to let be.

But our egoic trance does just the opposite. There's a reason why when we lead meditations and we say, okay, now just relax, that we're just as a killer. It's like just relax. It's like that's not what our system's doing. And it's part of our conditioning, especially when there's unpleasantness,

to contract and try to push it away and try to control it. That is so instant. So we're countering that conditioning. Okay, so a classic story here is a novice who's introduced to her new cell at the monastery, and she's told that there's a silence practice. There's no talking,

but every five years she'll have an interview with Mother Superior. And in that interview she can say three words. Okay? So five years passed in the interview, Mother Superior has her enter the room and she says, so my child, how's your practice going? And how are you doing? And the novice answers,

bed too hard. So Mother Superior says, keep practicing, keep practicing, keep praying. Five years passed. The same thing goes on. Mother Superior says, how are you doing? And then this time the novice answers, food is bad. Mother Superior again responds, keep practicing, keep praying. So next interview, it's been 15 years. Mother Superior, you know, asks how she's doing and the novice says, I quit now. So Mother Superior looks at her and says, you know, I'm not surprised you've been doing nothing but complaining since you got here.

So the habitual conditioning, we go around with a lot of complaints. I mean there's something in us that when there's unpleasantness doesn't like how life is and rather than relaxed and open we are contracted. And so the key to awaken from ego conditioning is to counter this by in some way remembering a larger sense of space. And in one particular domain this is really helpful, which is to know about, which is our habit is to frame things as a problem. If we look at our lives, we spend a lot of moments thinking we're trying to solve a problem.

And I remember my first Papasana teacher was Joseph Goldstein. And I'll never forget I'm saying, every time I think there's a problem, I decide there isn't one. That has been so helpful because as soon as we think there's a problem, we're caught inside a small self-identity. But in the moments that there's not a problem, that unwinds a whole lot. Example for you, again, this is from the last few weeks for me. Over the last month or so, my siblings and I have been in a kind of dicey place and financial workings around a property that we inherited and there's been disagreement. So we've all thought, oh, this is a problem.

So I was on retreat and I found myself kind of thinking about it some and I said, okay, you know, the first attitude, relax. So I said, I'm going to sigh this is not a problem anymore. So every time I would come up, I'd say, not a problem. It's unresolved, it's difficult, it's sticky, but it's not a problem. It was amazing. Just deciding it wasn't a problem, it was like there was a little more ocean-ness, a little less fixation, made a difference. I could feel that the selfing wasn't so strong.

So I want to say that this is not a delusional practice where we see harm being caused and we say, oh, not a problem and we turn away. It's like we can recognize, oh, that's harm and we need to respond and take care of it. The key is not to lock into bad, not to lock into shouldn't be happening. Because reality is just being as it is. We can respond intelligently without making ourselves and others wrong, without creating a problem. Let's pause here. I'm going to invite you to reflect on this for a moment.

you might close your eyes, bring your attention within, and bring to mind something going on in your life right now, not something that's extremely awful, but kind of moderately a difficulty that you've been having, something difficult that brings up inner experience of fear, anger, some circumstances that are challenging. It could be to do with a relationship or finance, work. And when you have it in mind, let yourself honestly sense what's going on.

But have your intention be, okay, what would it mean to, instead of relating in reaction, being able to regard this with a more relaxed, spacious attention. See if you can acknowledge what's coming up, what it brings up in you, and allow the experience to be there. You might even use the magic mantra, this too. It's like you're saying, okay, so this too is part of life. And you might ask yourself, how do I experience this if it's not a problem? Still difficult, still unpleasant, but not a problem.

The sense of that reveals a little more space. What if this isn't a problem? You might extend this and scan your life, more broadly, just scanning your life, and just ask yourself, who would I be if I didn't believe anything was a problem? It's just life happening. Pleasant and unpleasant. You might bring it right into the moment and say, really, who am I if there's no problem right now?

No problem. This is the portal into that attitude of being open, relaxed, includes what's here without pushing away, not making it a problem or bad, just its life. And the teachings really are that there's no freedom as long as we're trying to control things, as long as we have an assumption that it's wrong or bad. as long as we have assumption that something needs to be different in order for us to be okay. You can open your eyes if you'd like or not. But final example about the power of relaxing and opening as a portal to liberation.

And this is one of my favorite stories from the sutures in the time of the Buddha. Ananda was the Buddha's cousin and his really is most devoted to someone. disciple. And after the Buddhist death, a great council of enlightened followers where it was planned, but Ananda wasn't going to be included because Ananda, as devoted as he was, he worked at it strenuously for years, he wasn't enlightened. So the eve of the council meeting came and Ananda was determined to practice all through the night vigorously and not stop until he attained his goal. But of course, as you can imagine, all he succeeded in doing was becoming exhausted, you know, becoming exhausted and discouraged. So there was not the slightest progress due to his efforts.

So finally, it's coming towards dawn and he just decides to let go of all his striving and his efforts and just rest. So he leans back on his pillow and in that state where he was not efforting, there was no greed for anything to be different. no striving, he became enlightened. And I think this is one of the most powerful teaching stories in the whole Buddha Dharma. What freedom? It was in the moment that he let go of all the striving, of wanting things to be a certain way.

It's our striving and controlling that's the glue that keeps that self-sense together. It doesn't mean that we don't be motivated and energetically engaged and creative, it just means that striving and thinking it shouldn't be like this, it should be different, keeps us hooked. So this is the first attitude, relaxed, inclusive. This too, letting life be just as it is.

And in those moments that we do that, where we say, not a problem, we start to inhabit really the awareness that's here. I'm going to close this little segment with a poem by the poet Hafeus. You might close your eyes and listen to it. It's a sweetie. Just sit there right now. Don't do a thing.

Just rest. For your separation from God is the hardest work in this world. Let me bring you trays of food and something that you like to drink. And you can use my soft words as a cushion for your head. just sit there right now don't do a thing just rest for your separation from God is the hardest work in this world

okay the first attitude really is that relaxing open discovering the space that things are happening in but it's not passive it's not dreamy it's actually engaged with knowing and presence, which brings us to the second attitude, which is interested.

It's amazing. You can have almost anything go on, the most challenging stuff. If you can regard what's happening with a quality of interest, there's an atmosphere of availability to learn and grow and wake up that's amazing. So interest is a quality of awareness. It's, if you think of, I like the metaphor of a sunlit sky, if you think of the open sky as relaxed, open space, the first attitude, it's the light of the sun that's the interest, it's that knowing quality.

And it's intrinsic to all of us. I mean, the youngest children have an interest. You can see their awareness. It just wants to know what is what, you know. So, story, a little girl was sitting on her grandfather's lap. He's reading her a bedtime story. From time to time she take her eyes off the book and reach up to touch his wrinkled cheek. She was alternately stroking her own cheek and then his again. Finally she spoke up, Grandpa, did God make you?

Yes, sweetheart, he answered. God made me a long time ago. Oh, she paused. Grandpa, did God make me too? yes indeed honey he said god made you just a little while ago and feeling their respective faces again she observed god's getting better at it isn't he so we want to know so i find that it's that attitude of interest that um it gives us the willingness to be changed by what we see we become available again a story from the last couple of weeks weeks. When I was up there at the Forest Refuge, I got a stomach bug like 99% of the world. And at one point I called my doctor's office just to see what I might expect or what's going on.

One of my questions was, you know, how long does this thing last? And in my mind I was thinking, you know, three to five days. And the nurse said, well, yeah, three to five weeks, you know, which of course wasn't what I was hoping for. And it turned out that wasn't the case I had a different version But the point here is that I Because you know My body was going through unpleasant states

And because you know I could see all that conditioning Of how long is this going to last And if it was really going to be three to five weeks Have to cancel the Wednesday night classes Can't go to San Diego You know it's like you know I was rolling ahead into the future So I got real interesting

interested in that. And I started noticing that every time my mind began to think about sick person problem, I was removed from what was actually right here. And then I got, I'd start getting interested saying, what's really going on right now? And right now was sensations, it was heat, it was achy, it was, you know, uncomfortable, but also right here right now was a liveliness and some space and some kindness towards it and a mystery that's right here when we really, really get quiet that was so far more gratifying and a feeling of at home than any of these storylines I was running and it was because I just was interested that it kind of unhooked me and allowed me to come back again to the

in an engaged way to what was actually right here, into this reality right here. I find that interest and caring, you know, these are the two, and we're going to get to caring, really can save us when things get challenging, and it's not just in a meditation. If we start seeing the patterns of our life, we can either see the conditioning and go and get discouraged by it and bury our head or hate ourselves or whatever our reaction is, are we can get interested, i.e. be willing to learn. And I read a book recently that had a beautiful illustration of this

that I wanted to share with you. And this is a book called Between the World and Me by Tanahisi Coates. And it's a very, very powerful story written by an African-American man who describes, and he's in the son he's narrating he's narrating to his son

about his life and he's describing how it is for people of color to be living so much with bodily fear. Not the psychological fears many others live with but with a real fear for one's bodily self, especially

men. And so this is the lens for the world moving through. It's that vigilance and that fearfulness. So, he describes his first trip out of the country as an adult. He went to Paris and how hard it was for him to shake living in that kind of prison of something bad's going to happen to me that's affecting my body, that very limbic primal fear for one's body.

So he describes making a new friend in Paris and this friend wanted to improve his English as much as the author wanted to improve his French. And so they meet together one day, they go to an outdoor cafe, and the friend orders a bottle of wine, and they're together this heaping platter of meats and bread and cheese, and then his friend pays.

And he's thinking, okay, this is some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me, like he's suspicious. Then his friend says, I'd like to show you the architecture of a building nearby. And so he's guiding him. And again, the author's thinking, he's waiting for this guy to slip into an alley and where some dudes are going to be waiting for an attack. It's like that kind of mentality.

But here's what he writes. He says, but my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonsoire, I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear. He goes on to write, what I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible. What I love about the book and I love about that story is that he's looking at his conditioning with interest so as to wake up. And again, I think of that metaphor.

We have talked about the attitude of being relaxed, that's contacting kind of the space that makes room for life, doesn't control it, the space of awareness. This is the light of awareness. This is shining a light on what is that reveals reality. This is the sunlit sky. Now there's one more attitude. And that's the warmth of the sun. That's the friendliness.

This is the final one, that when we have an attitude of friendliness towards what's happening, it dissolves the armoring. It dissolves that contraction that keeps our hearts from really feeling connection with others in the world. I know for myself, when I even have a remembrance of the intention to be kind, Like if we pause this moment and there's something in us that says, well, what if we just were a little bit kinder right this moment towards our inner life or towards others? There's immediately a softening and opening. There's a shift from that prison of separate selfness to more of expansive, connected feeling. I find for myself that it gets more subtle, but that any facet of self, of self-conditioning

that's not included with open-heartedness, any facet keeps us in trance. That's a very big statement. What it's really saying is that we have to love ourselves into freedom. And that the self that's loving itself, it's not the ego self, It's like we have to in some way call on and bring into presence the love that's here but sometimes is buried and love that conditioning to dissolve our identification with it. We have to love it.

That's not so easy. And it doesn't begin with loving it. When I encounter something difficult, I don't start with just loving it. I start with saying, okay, you can be there and then warm up gradually. So I'll give you again an example. Before the retreat, I was part of a meeting that had a lot of tension in a small group meeting about a new initiative.

And out of that meeting, I felt a sense of blame and a sense of being right. And those are very strong feelings when you really feel like you're right and it's hard to let go of. So at the retreat I was watching that part of my ego kind of an aggression and a holding on to being right and feeling how much I didn't like that. So of course that's the wake-up, okay.

So what would it mean to become more unconditionally friendly towards this aggression that's here? And so that became the intention. And at first, as I mentioned, I said, okay, this too, just let it be here. So there was more relaxation and space. and there was interest kind of investigating it. But then I very intentionally looked and sensed underneath that aggression. I could sense the vulnerability, like that something in me felt vulnerable. And I really called on loving presence, on compassion, just to be with that vulnerable place.

And when I do that, we all have different... We all have to experiment, really, to call on love. There's different ways. I kind of imagine this field of warmth and love and light just washing through me. I just imagine that. I imagine it, the brow and just kind of bathing myself in that loving presence. And then what happens is there's some melting inside and the love that was already there starts unfolding

until I just merge with that field of loving presence. So it's not like there's something out there and there's something in here it just becomes loving presence. But the beginning place is very intentionally calling on love and trying to bring love to the conditioning, the place that's difficult. I think of RELCA's line about the dragons within us and all they're really wanting is our love. And it's true.

It's really true. There's this radical freedom that happens. when we unconditionally bring that, that loving energy to whatever's appearing in us. So this is that third attitude and it starts with accepting that something's there and then regarding with tenderness and then a much more full unconditional loving. And we can put our hand on our heart. I sometimes use the phrase, it's okay sweetheart, or just it's okay. It requires a kind of intentionality because we're reversing a core element of the egoic trance,

which is the ego does not like itself. The ego does not like its own conditioning. That doesn't mean the ego doesn't get caught and sometimes feeling greatly superior to everybody else, but it doesn't like its own conditioning. So we're going to explore this last piece in our closing meditation, but I want to bring up one other kind of domain before we do. Thus far, I've been talking about these three attitudes of relaxation or openness, the space of the sky,

the light, the interest, and the friendliness. In terms of inner, these same three attitudes are what creates the beauty and intimacy. and connection with each other. If you can imagine being with another person and bringing that attitude of that space that really lets the other person be just as they are and that light of interest really interested,

who are you? Really. And then of course that friendliness. Those are the attitudes that give rise to what sometimes described as Bodhi Chita, the awakened heart. So I wanted to share a Bodhi Chita story and then we'll do a final meditation.

Okay? All right. So this is written by Richard Seltzer who's a surgeon and a writer. I stand by the bed where a young woman lies her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve,

the one to the muscles of her mouth has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh. I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her husband, her young husband, is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight isolated from me, private. Who are they? I asked myself.

he in this rye mouth I've made who gaze and touch each other so generously. The young woman speaks, will my mouth always be like this? She asks. Yes, I say it well. It's because the nerve was cut. She nods and is silent.

But the young man smiles. I like it, he says. It's kind of cute. All at once I know who he is. I understand and lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter. with a God. Unmindful he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate hers to show her that their kiss still works.

It's Bodhita. This is the awakened heart that unfolds itself naturally when we have these qualities of openness and interest and care. So if we know what matters, if we remember, if we even get a glimmer, oh yeah, what matters to me is realizing truth, is waking up my heart. In those moments, we're naturally available for these three attitudes to really carry us home. So I'd like to close by just giving you a taste of bringing them together and just a few moments of sitting. So if you will, just to adjust how you're sitting to be comfortable, be at ease. As you come into stillness, feel the aspiration that is most true for you right now just for

these next few moments. Your heart's prayer for presence or opening, deepening. You might choose something going on in your life where you'd like to wake up these attitudes more. You'd like to have more access to them. Some situation where you'd like to really have more freedom touch into your resourcefulness. It might be the situation you brought to mind earlier or something different. It could be a conflict with something. someone, some challenge in your own behaviors, letting that be in your awareness and sensing this first attitude, your intention to regard with a quality of openness, relaxation. And just sense, so what if I didn't frame this as a problem, what's it like to just behold

this situation and what it brings up in you without trying to feel this as a problem? fix anything right in these moments without trying to control, just allowing the experiences that come up in you to be there, whether it's fear or confusion or unresolved feeling, anger. This too, can you find a little space with this too rather than making something a problem? This doesn't mean you're not going to respond. It just means that you have the capacity to be with from a relaxed perspective, an open, inclusive perspective. And then bringing in interest, the light of awareness, looking more closely at what's going

on, what goes on in your body and your heart when you get stirred up. What most wants attention? What is it that's difficult to feel? It's bringing your interest to investigate a little, to engage directly with your body, your heart. You might even sense whatever's going on, whatever's stirred up, what is that part of the most need? Interest, curiosity. Does it need more acceptance, more love? And with whatever you find, this third thing.

third attitude, this is the warmth of the sun, just to offer and let wash through you friendliness, kindness. It helps to put your hand on your heart and just invite in the warmth and tenderness of the universe to wash through you, to let your deep intention be to let in love, to be able to relax into and surrender into love. You might sense who you are when your heart and mind has these attitudes of being open, inclusive, interested, and caring, who are you? Just sensing that shift from being caught inside the small self that's trying to control

things to this awake and open-hearted awareness. We'll close with these words from poet Dana Faults. settle in the here and now, reach down into the center where the world is not spinning and drink this holy peace. Feel relief flood into every cell. Nothing to do. Nothing to be but what you are already. Nothing to receive but what flows effortlessly from the mystery into form.

to run from or run toward, just this breath, awareness knowing itself as embodiment, just this breath, awareness waking up to truth. Namaste and blessings to each. Thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.