Tara Brach - Three Blessings in Spiritual Life – Part 3: A Mirror

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

This 3- part series explores three capacities we all have, that when cultivated, bring spiritual awakening and serve the healing of our world. Drawing on an ancient teaching story from India, we explore together the power of a forgiving heart, the inner fire that expresses as courage and dedication, and the inquiry of "who am I" that reveals our deepest nature. The three qualities often described as the essence of awareness: wakeful, open, tender."

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. Thank you for being here. So this is the third week in a three-week series based on the story of Natchikata, which really explores the three inner strengths that can really serve us on the path. And the last of these strengths is spiritual realization insight into the nature of reality. So I thought as a warm-up to that, I would share a poem that I love from my friend and poet Dana Falls. Settle in the here and now, reach down into the center where the world is not spinning and drink in 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. Nothing to run from or run toward. Just this breath. awareness knowing itself as embodiment. Just this breath, awareness, waking up to truth. Okay, my friends, wishing you all blessings.

There's a story in which there's a shipwreck and three men end up being stranded on a desert island. And they managed to keep themselves alive for a couple of weeks but it's getting really tough. But their good fortune was they find one of those lamps that has a genie that comes out and says, well, each one of you gets a wish. So the first one says, I want to see my wife and children. I want to be back home. Vush, he vanishes. Second one says, oh, me too, my dog, my work.

Send me back. Vush, he vanishes. And the third one goes, I'm lonely. I want my friends back. We are on the third of a... three-part series that really has to do with three wishes, but they're all granted to one person. The theme is coming from the Upanishads, an ancient teaching tale that I've always loved. And I, once a year, every couple of years, like to build a talk around it because it's a live one for me.

So in this particular story, Nachi Keta, who's the protagonist, gets into an altercation with his father and there's a really deep conflict and he's also just lost some friends so he's in a pretty much of a crisis his father basically says go to hell which in their language is go to lord yama the lord of death so natchie kato makes the grand journey and goes through fatigue and goes through all sorts of hardship to get to the land of lord yama and lord yama is so impressed with with his perseverance that he grants Natchikata free wishes. And Natchikata, in contrast to our friends on this desert island, is really deeply in touch with what we might call the wisdom of impermanence. He's very aware of the fleetingness of life,

and so his wishes, his aspirations reflect that wisdom. His first wish is the wish for a forgiving heart because he recognizes that to be free, to be able to really live fully, we need to let go of the armoring that encases our hearts. And it's that same understanding that we can imagine if we're at the end of our life or with someone at the end of their life, so much of the pettiness and the resentments can fall away given what we see in those moments. So Natchi Keta had that wisdom and he was granted that wish. The second wish is the wish for what's called inner fire. And inner fire is being aligned with our true aspiration. It's that longing to really know truth and to live from love. The inner fire

is that energy that really propels us on the spiritual path. And the understanding is that for each of us, and we can look at today and yesterday to see if it bears true for us, we get waylaid. We forget what most matters to us and we get caught up in all sorts of pursuits just to be more comfortable or obsessive fantasies or defenses or judgments. We lose track of really what matters. in some way we're grasping onto what you might think of it. The surface waves are kind of swishing us around. We're not living from our depths.

I think Julia Child sums it up in her own way. She says, in department stores, so much kitchen equipment is bought indiscriminately by people who just came in for men's underwear. We get waylaid. So getting aligned. The third wish that Natchie Keta had was to really know the truth of who we are, to know himself. In response to this wish, Lord Yama said, I can't tell you that or show you that, but he

gave him a mirror and he said, really it's learning to look back into your own heart and mind that'll reveal the truth of reality. So that was the third wish. And this is what we'll be exploring for this final class, is this process of really discovering the nature of reality, who we are. This third wish and all the wishes correspond with our most evolved capacities. They correspond with the most recently evolved part of our brain that has a relational network in it that is capable of compassion and empathy and forgiveness, that has the capacity to reflect

and see the big picture and remember what matters, not get so hijacked by fears and wants. And then this third, this mirror, we have what's called reflexive awareness. And what that means is that rather than living inside our thoughts, inside a kind of movie of this life, we have a capacity to look back and notice what's happening. Oh, the thoughts are there, but I'm not my thought. That's the depth and level of it, that we can see what's going on and not be hooked. When we don't have that, when we're living in what you might call the trance of believing our stories, our lives get very small and confined. In fact, if there's anywhere in your life you're aware of suffering, it's because you're

believing in limiting thoughts and ideas and stories about yourself with all the emotions they bring up. You're not living from the truth of that mindful awareness. An illustration, this is written by Bruce Holland Rogers. It's a little bit longer so you might sit back as you listen. When he was very young, he waved his arms, mashed the teeth of his massive jaws, and tromped around the house so that the dishes trembled in the china cabinet. Oh, for goodness sake, his mother said, you're not a dinosaur, you're a human being.

Since he was not a dinosaur, he thought for a time he might be a pirate. Seriously, as father said at some point, what do you want to be? A fireman then, or a policeman or a soldier, some kind of hero? But in high school they gave him tests and told him he was very good. with numbers. Perhaps he would like to be a math teacher. That was respectable. Or a tax accountant. He could make a lot of money doing that. It seemed like a good idea to make money what was falling in love and thinking about raising a family. So he was a tax accountant. Even though he sometimes regretted that it made him, well, small, and he felt even smaller

when he was no longer a tax accountant but a retired tax accountant. Still worth a retired tax accountant who forgot things. He forgot to take the garbage to the curb, forgot to take his pill, forgot to turn his hearing aid back on. Every day it seemed like he had forgotten more things, important things like which of his children lived in San Francisco and which of his children were married or divorced. Then one day, when he was out for a walk by the lake, he forgot what his mother had told him. He forgot that he was not a dinosaur. He stood blinking his dinosaur eyes in the bright sunlight, feeling the familiar warmth on his dinosaur skin, watching dragonflies flitting among the horse tails at the water's edge.

We get lost in a trance of who we think we are or who we think we're supposed to be. And you can sometimes look back at your life and see that really clearly certain seasons when you're very caught up in a certain reactivity, might have been around a conflict or a loss, or an infatuation, or a love. But we can see it sometimes in retrospect how caught we were. Well, in the kind of the view that we're exploring in this class we're caught a lot in an idea about life in our stories but not in the immediate. experience of what's really going on and what's really here and who am I.

So from the evolutionary perspective, it's totally natural to get identified as a separate self with the stories that keep us limited. That's completely natural and we learn who we are through our culture and our parents. So to get into the trance is natural. I sometimes describe it as a space suit that we take on to make it through a difficult environment. We have a story about ourselves and we have defenses and approaches and strategies to make things work.

And most of us forget that we're not the space suit. And that's actually part of our developmental design to think, okay, that's I'm the ego. And it's also part of our evolutionary design to go beyond that. to recognize who's looking through the mask, to recognize that tender heart space, that that which is listening, that which is looking through your eyes right now. So this is our, this is the developmental potential and if we stay arrested at the level of believing in the separate self with the stories and limitations, we suffer. What we discover as we start looking closer at what happens when we're suffering is usually

it fits into one bucket or the other, we're either suffering because we have this feeling like something's missing. Like you're on your way to something and life isn't okay right now, but maybe if only this happens or that happens the partner or the losing the weight or the right job or getting over the sickness, then we'll be okay. So there's the something's missing. And then the other, which is they're completely interrelated, is something's wrong. Something's wrong.

And scan for yourself, check this out, how often when you're moving through the day, there is a background idea that there's a problem and that something's wrong. I think of Joseph Campbell and he said that the beginning of every religion is the cry, help. So developmentally, this is part of what unfolds, is sensing I'm separate and something's wrong and I need help. Rabbi Alan Liu says, this is real and you are completely unprepared as he talks about. about this life that we're in. There's that existential angst that comes with feeling like

a separate self developmentally. And when it's there, we can't deeply relax. We can relax some, but we don't deeply relax and we don't feel a deep sense of intimacy with the world around us. We can't really feel unconditional love because there's that defendedness and that anxiety about what's going to happen. On some level, our system is being driven by fight, flight, freeze, or a grasp. We're trying to control versus that receptivity and openness that comes when we step out of trance. Most moments, and that you can ask this question, there's a sense that I'm not enough. I need to be more. I also are also. as I mentioned, life's not enough.

So one story is shepherds on a hillside in, he's watching sheep, playing the guitar, you know, just really enjoying the clouds drifting over the valley, and alone comes an American tourist. You know, you could really turn this into something, buy a bit more land, more sheep, owner slaughterhouse, export the meat, you know. And then the shepherd says, well, what would that do for me? well, then you could take time just to relax and play the guitar and enjoy the clouds.

You get the idea, right? So I think of it metaphorically as, you know, an ocean, that we're an ocean of being and we have these waves of experience. And in daily life, when we're caught in a trance, we're really getting identified and washed around by the surface waves. and the spiritual path, and this is where Natchikato was pointing, is to begin to look in the mirror and recognize who we are beyond the surface waves. Who are you beyond the daily stories that you tell over and over against yourself?

That cocoon of familiar thoughts about where you have to be and by when and what can happen and what shouldn't happen. the poet Wei Wu-Wai says, why are you unhappy? Because 99% of what you do is for yourself. And there isn't one. So some part of us gets it that we are awfully organized,

very centered around this sense of moi and that there's more of a world. And then it's a big hook because the needs feel very compelling and the sense of identity feels very solid. And in fact, we've been outfitted through evolution to pay attention to the needs that are here we're supposed to. We can't survive unless we notice what this self wants and needs. And again, it's just that it's not the end of the story.

you can continue to take care of and attend to the needs of a separate self and realize a more timeless presence in the background that's truly a refuge. That's where we're going right now. It's a both end. We're not trying to extinguish what we need to do in daily life to get by. to take care of these bodies and take care of our finances and so on. But it's just that's not the whole of our life. There is a presence, a wakefulness, a love that's possible to open into that doesn't

have to be hitched to the stories we're regularly circling around in. This is a story told by Rachel Naomi Raymond. about one of her, she actually included in one of her books about a doctor whose father died of Alzheimer's. And here's what he writes. He says, for the last 10 years of his life, she writes this part, Tim's father had Alzheimer's disease. Despite the devoted care of Tim's mother, he had slowly deteriorated until he had become a sort of walking vegetable. who was unable to speak and was fed, clothed, and cared for as if he was a very young child.

One Sunday while Tim's mother was out doing the shopping, his brother then 15 and him 17 watched football as their father sat nearby in a chair. Suddenly he slumped forward and fell to the floor. Both sons realized immediately that something was terribly wrong. His color was gray and his breath and even in rasping. Frightened, Tim's older brother told him to call 911. Before he could respond, a voice he had not heard in 10 years, a voice he could barely remember interrupted. Don't call 911, son.

Tell your mother that I love her. Tell her that I'm all right. And then Tim's father died. So Tim is cardiologist, and he describes this. and that the law required an autopsy and that his father's brain was almost entirely destroyed by the disease. And he writes, for many years I've asked myself, how could he have spoken? Who are we really? I've never found the slightest help from any medical knowledge. Much of life cannot be explained. It can only be witnessed.

So I share that with you because there's a mystery behind all of this. And when our minds are fixated on our stories, we miss out on that mystery. There's a Tibetan teacher, Sogiel Rimpashe, who puts it this way, he says, if everything changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? there's something of fact we can depend on that does survive what we call death. So this inquiry turns us to the refuge of pure awareness.

This is where we start saying, okay, how do we use this mirror? How do we look back and begin to discover what we miss out on so often in our day-to-day life? And we can sense that if our experience of who we are is hitched just to this temporary form this body or these particular thoughts, this kind of patterning of our mind, we're going to live with ongoing fear and resistance of what's around the corner because we know that these bodies and minds are impermanent. When we recognize the timeless, the ocean, then we're not afraid of what's around the corner. It said that if you know you're the ocean, you're not

afraid of the waves. And of course, if you don't know you're the ocean, you're going to be seasick every day. So when there's that intuition of a timeless presence, we're not spending our life trying to defend ourselves against death. It frees our hearts to love. In fact, my experience is that the more I get really, really awake to mortality, the more absolutely unconditional love feels, that there's a complete, inseparable dynamic that has to do with opening to death and opening to love. This from Kafka, or it's actually a story about Kafka. So when Kafka was an older man, he spent time sitting in a park and one day a little girl walked by him and she had tears running down her face and he asked her to stop and tell

him what's wrong and she told him that her doll was missing and she was lost and she didn't know what to do. They looked around together and couldn't find the dolls. So he said, come back again. I'll see if I can find her. A few days later the little girl returns and Kafka's there and there's no doll but there's a note and he reads it and the note says, I've gone off to travel some around the world. Please don't worry about me. I'm fine. The girl's somewhat relieved and she returns to the park every week or so and Kafka's there

with another node from the doll and the girl's too young to read so he would read and tell her about the doll's adventures. Fast forward a bit, Kafka is much sicker and he went to the park one last time and this time he had brought a doll and handed it to the girl and said the travels had really changed her. So some years later the girl is a young woman and she found that there was this little note they'd been rolled up and placed in the doll's hand that she hadn't seen and she opened it up and here's what it read, you will lose everyone you love but the love will always return in new forms. So this is a gift of looking in the mirror that as we begin to sense that space,

that kind of timeless presence, it really gives us room for life to come and go but to sense the love that really shines through all these different forms. So we're going to explore now the how-toes because it is a practice really how we learn to look within. And we're And I think of it as two primary domains of training in terms of looking in the mirror. And the first is one that we do a lot together as we practice mindfulness here. And that is that we look into our body and our heart and our mind and we notice what you might call the waves. We notice the changing forms. We notice, oh, a wave of thought and oh, a wave of feeling in my heart and, oh, sensations in my hands.

And these are, we're looking back and sensing the changing forms. And this is a really important part of practice. And it's not an easy part. Because when we first begin to look inside ourselves and we start quieting the busy mind, what often happens is the parts of us we've been running from become more available. We de-repress the shadow, as they say, in psychobabble language.

but you get the idea that the stuff we haven't been paying attention to is more available to us. So, often there's a layering of waves that we encounter that are our unfaced fears or loneliness, or places of jealousy or fears of failure that we just haven't been really looking at. I remember when I first went to meditate at the Insight Meditation Society, there was a little sign up front and it said self-knowledge is not necessarily good news because we start paying attention and that's sometimes the first that we get

when we're looking in the mirror the waves of kind of what we might call our unfelt life the parts of our lives that need to be included in awareness. Lily Tomlin puts it this way. She said, I always wanted to be somebody but now I realized I should have been more specific. So, domain one is we look at the waves and it's really unwise and not helpful

if the waves are intense and sticky and demanding your attention to say, oh, I don't want to look at the waves, I want to see the ocean, I want to be one with timeless presence. How come that's not so wise? It's an avoidance. We're trying to actually push away part of life and we might have some ideas of that vast timeless presence that we catapult ourselves into but there's going to be a subtle level of tension in our system that actually makes it so it's not really a liberating presence.

It's very much of a kind of false refuge. So if the waves are strong, the teaching is start where you are, turn the mirror in, just be with the waves. being with the waves, as many of you know, really has to do with befriending, that there is some deep commitment to not pushing away of the waves, that the only way to transform when we turn the mirror and look at the waves is a full presence with them. The gift is when you're fully present with the different ways of the waves, you're fully present with the different ways of experience, it will reveal the ocean. Okay? Now as you're going to see,

when you're fully present and open and occupying the ocean, it allows you to fully love the waves. So this goes both ways. So how do we be with the waves? I'm going to talk about this briefly because this is what we spend a lot of time in the talks I give, exploring. But I'll give of how the waves reveal the ocean with one couple that I was in close contact with, especially over this last season as we were leading up to the fall elections here in United States. And as with a number of couples and families around the country, this couple was divided. And I'm sure many of you, if not your own lives, know of where this has come, about, really divided in what their beliefs were, what was right. And there was a real deep sense

of anger and alienation. I was more in touch with the woman and she was saying how horrible it was not be able to talk about all the stuff that was unfolding nationally and expressed her feelings with her partner because they were so at odds. And there was a really a feeling and she felt like they both were experiencing where they were disrespecting each other. If you look at the research for couples, disrespect is the key feature that can drive a wedge in our relationship. So it was very painful. It was really crippling. So we practiced how do you bring mindfulness and heartfulness to the waves? How do you turn the mirror and look and see what's happening and be with it?

using, as many of you know, the acronym Reign, which is really a way of systematically bringing mindfulness and heartfulness. So she recognized the anger and our reign is to recognize. A is to allow. So she said, okay, these are the waves of the moment. I'm not going to like pretend they're not here. I'm not going to try to get rid of them. I'm not going to judge them. Just allow them to be here. And then she began to investigate, I is investigated, and she found that under the ways, first of all, there was a belief that was cooking, that in some way he was betraying her, that in some way she had this notion that they were on the same views or had the same values and he was betraying values.

Just a belief, not forget the right wrong, but this is just what she was believing. And then the sense, I can't trust you if I can't trust your view. So there was mistrust. And as she continued to investigate, she felt real fear. Real fear that they were going to lose their connection, fear and the pain of separation. This is investigate. Now, the N is to nurture. And the nurture means, in a very deep way, to bring a kind and accepting and gentle presence to what's there.

She used the words, this belongs. In other words, this fear, it's part of me, it belongs, not to try to get rid of it. You might try this at some point when you're feeling fear or hurt because we so quickly make it wrong like it shouldn't be here. The most nurturing thing we can do is, oh, this is a wave in my ocean right now, it belongs. just by saying it belongs, there's a dissolving of the resistance that actually keeps our identity

hitched to it. Does that make sense to you? It's releasing the resistance. So that was her way of practicing to just send this message to the place of the pain of separation. Okay, this too, the words this two are really helpful, not to push it away, this belongs. And then to deep and bring real compassion to it. And as I often teach for her hand on the heart and just bringing care and kindness to that part of her that was scared, scared she was going to lose a relationship that she had valued. As she brought the nourishing of rain to that place, she began to feel more spacious and more tender. And this is the shift that happens with presence. that we begin to occupy a larger space.

Rather than being caught in the fearful self or the angry self, she was becoming that presence, that ocean, that was including the waves. It was a larger sense of being. She wasn't so threatened. And that's when she could begin to, and this, by the way, not one round, it's never one shot. That's kind of a fantasy. A number of rounds. But she began to this, then sense her husband and imagine that he was caught in the same kind of bind of feeling the separation, a feeling in some way the mistrust and the distance and the herd at that

and the fear. And so when she could imagine that he too was in some grip that she had already been in touch with, she could start naming what was going on and that invited him forward. They could name together their pain, which of course brought more. of a field of compassion. The edge didn't go away but there's more space that they have to work with it. I don't want to pretend that everything gets you know happily ever after. But there was more capacity by learning how to be with the waves to discover that space, that ocean space that could make room for what was going on with them, that they could work it out or they're in process, it's still fresh.

When we are fully with the waves that arise, we turn the mirror and we see them, open to them, recognize, allow, investigate, nurture, we discover in the space that opens up the oceanness that the waves are made out. Now, there's a second domain that I want to make time for here with you. There are times when we're not so. stirred up with a lot of waves. We kind of turn the mirror and yeah, there's different thoughts or there's some feelings but there's some space between the thoughts and it's somewhat quiet in there. And those are times when we can deepen the exploration and look not just to the

waves, the separate forms, but start sensing the presence of the ocean itself. Here's a way you might think about it. Imagine what it's like. to be in a movie theater and how it is when the movie is going on and you're kind of sitting back and you're looking at the screen and you get kind of entranced and you're really in the story and involved with the whole movie. And then it might happen sometimes that there's some gaps in the action that you notice. You know how it slows down? All of a sudden you become aware of, oh, I'm in a movie theater and I'm sitting here and I never finish my popcorn. Then you might even become aware inside of, oh, I'm a little bit tired. And then so you start beginning

to be more aware of what's going on inside you. Well, in a similar way, you can keep turning the attention backwards when you're at that theater. Instead of looking at the thoughts in your mind, remember, this is the movie of the mind, if you turn the attention back, you start noticing a series of changing images that are created by the beam of light on the screen. And you start noticing the light itself, like just turning back and seeing the projector at the back of the movie theater. And then if you really keep attending, you can sense the mind of the being that created the movie. Awareness. So rather than fixating on the story, you're turning the attention back to sense the awareness.

and light that's really looking, the one who's looking. I hope that's a helpful metaphor and this looking in the mirror because for me that really, it's like we are spending most the time in the theater looking at the movie of our mind. And this is saying, oh, shine a light backwards, sense the one who's looking, the awareness itself. Now, if it sounds esoterror, you You can try this out. This is one of my favorite exercises and it doesn't matter if you've done this a lot of times. I do this all the time just because it kind of flashes me awake a bit. So close your eyes for a moment.

This is an exercise that you're going to be doing for 15 seconds. For the next 15 seconds, try not to be aware. Try not to be aware. Try not to be aware. Okay. That's enough. You can open your eyes. So how many were successful? Can I see?

Okay. What we notice is awareness is always here. Usually we're fixated on the objects of awareness. Okay? We're fixated on the thoughts, the stories, the feelings, the waves. So we don't notice that wakefulness. We don't notice that it's here. I think it was Aldous Huxley, who described it as a reducing valve of awareness, that to survive, our consciousness reduces the amount of information we take in to primarily that which is causing threats or might give us some satisfaction or give us a way to connect or whatever it is that we're wanting or fearing. It tells us about that, but it leaves out a whole lot else. So what we're doing is as we evolve, we're using looking in the mirror to reopen to the whole domain

of awareness, the background of awareness that we have been missing. Now again, if we turn the mirror and we get a lot of waves, then the message is start with the waves. Start by bringing your meditation practice to your waves. But if it's quiet, And maybe some of you have noticed this when you're meditating that there's a kind of sense of a ghost self in the background, there's kind of a sense of a background, someone who's meditating. You can kind of almost sense that. When it's quiet or you can begin to turn the mirror and look at that.

Now, we're going to practice this together tonight, and for some of you, it's going to seem confusing and not too relevant. And to others, it might even seem. a little bit like jarring and to others it'll be, oh, wow. It's not like a hierarchy. It's better to say, oh, wow. It's that we're in different mind states at different times and things are useful at different times in our life.

And you'll find that even if it doesn't serve right now, it's something you can come back to with some interest. Oh, so let's look back at the projector and let's look back at the light. the one who's paying attention. There's an attitude that really makes a difference as you are practicing turning the mirror. And John O'Donohue described it this way, he said, what you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. So, when you turn the mirror, one way to sense reverence is a profound interest and openness and care. Just, what is this

really, a sincerity? In our culture, we tend to strive, like, okay, what is behind the mirror? What am I seeing? What's there? It's got to be more receptive, more laid. back, more relaxed. So one way that we begin is that we start where we are with the senses awake and then we turn back to what's behind that wakefulness. So we'll practice now. Take a moment to find a way of sitting that's comfortable. Keep it very simple. These will be short explorations and then you might choose to explore more on your own. So as you close your eyes and bring your attention inward, feel your breath and relax with your breath. Notice if there's any part of your body that wants to let go a little bit right now.

As you relax with the breath, you might notice whatever changing waves are going on inside you. By that I mean, whatever you're aware of the sounds right now, maybe you're aware of the sensations of breathing or maybe you're aware of sensations in your hand. So be aware of whatever experiences are calling you. And then you might ask yourself, what is aware of this right now? What's aware of these sounds or these feelings? What's witnessing?

Can you find a witness? Can you sense the part of you that's aware, witnessing sound and sensation? Is there a place that you're, aware of witnessing from? Is there a felt sense of witnessing? Then you might ask, and what's aware of this? What's aware of the witnessing? Just relax back, just be awareness. Sometimes described as the backward step, noticing what's happening. Where's the witness to that? And what's even aware of that witness? As one teacher describes, as you watch your mind,

you discover yourself as the watcher. When you stand motionless only watching, you discover yourself as the light behind the watcher. The source of light is the source of all knowledge and love. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there. That's reading our Sargadatta. Now again, be aware right this moment.

What's calling your attention? Maybe sounds, feelings. So you're turning the mirror and noticing the waves. What is witnessing the sounds and the feelings? What's aware of that? As you watch your mind, you discover yourself as the watcher. When you stand motionless, only watching. You discover yourself as the light behind the watcher.

The source of light is the source of all knowledge and love. That source alone is. Go back to that source and abide there. When you sense the awareness that's aware, what are the qualities of awareness? When you turn the mirror on awareness, what do you notice? Become familiar with the quality of presence, this background of awareness that's here. Can you sense that it's wakeful? You sense that awareness is awake.

There's a cognition, there's a knowing. Can you sense that awareness is wide open? There's no center, there's no boundary. You sense that whenever awareness becomes aware of waves, there's a tenderness, a natural tenderness that includes. These are the three qualities. often described as the essence of awareness, wakeful, open, and tender. There's nothing more vast and mysterious and loving than the awareness that's your nature.

It's a refuge. If you want to open your eyes at any point you can, we're going to take the last few moments as we conclude to say that the same awareness that we usually are not so aware of, that's in the background because we're kind of fixated with our attention on the movie screen. The same awareness is shining through the eyes and living through the hearts of every being you meet. It's the source of every being. And yet if you look to see it, you'll see their face or your heal of their words. It's not like you can land on a something.

In fact, the Tibetans describe it that, that the true seeing is a seeing of no thing, and yet you can experience it. This is Juan Ramon Jimenez, how he describes it. He says, I unpedaled you like a rose to see your soul, and I didn't see it. But everything around, horizons of lands and of seas, everything out to the infinite, was filled with a fragrance enormous and a lot. I am peddled you like a rose to see your soul and I didn't see it. But everything around, horizons of lands and of seas, everything out to the infinite,

was filled with a fragrance, enormous and alive. So we're coming back now, this is a conclusion really, to say that when we open to that ocean, that timeless awareness, it absolutely has us full and lovely. every facet of this living world. And in our journey with these three gifts that Natchiketa developed really, these innate capacities revolving consciousness, we start discovering that each of them is absolutely essential for that freedom. That in order to be free, if our hearts have any blame, any judgment, we're divided. We're divided from ourselves. Our experience of who we are become small and tight. Others become other. So the first gift, can we let go of the blame and anger,

the judgment, the resentment. The second gift, if we're whaling, if we're distracted, if we're chasing after this and that, and we can't remember what most matters to us, our days will be actually lost in a spin of trance. So we keep coming back, what really matters? And then the third, can we look within and sense that background of awareness that allows us to celebrate this life? And I'll read you at the end of the story of Natchikato. We see the young man bowing to Lord Yama a final time totally at peace.

then as if by magic the landscape of the kingdom of death changes to the spring rice fields of his native India. In this a last secret is revealed to him, death and birth are not separate. Renewal comes by dying when we have faced death and aloneness, when we realize the formless, we're unafraid to live and light flowers under our feet. everywhere we go becomes holy ground Natchikata knew this in his heart and walked off towards his home to embrace his father and start a new life so we'll just end with a moment of silence coming inward please

if you will closing your eyes we'll just take these few moments to feel in our own hearts and bodies the blessings of these three gifts the first of a forgiving heart. Just sense this moment if there's anything you're holding against yourself. There's any judgment at any level, any thoughts, anything you're holding from the last hour or day or week, and have the intention to forgive. You might just gently put your hand on your heart and just say, forgiven, forgiven.

And notice how even that intention, of forgiving softens. It's when we begin to soften our heart that we can remember most what matters to us to take these next few moments to sense as you move into whatever's next, today, your life. What's the quality of heart and presence

that really matters to you? What do you want to live from? What do you want to express? The sign of inner fires, you'll feel kind of sincerity, like you're really lined up with who you are. law. This is what matters to me. And then as if you could look into a mirror back into your own heart and mind, just sense the source of that, sense the awake, tender presence, that

alert inner stillness in the background that's here now, it's always here, the loving awareness that's our true home. So as we close together, those sitting right here, those joined in the field through podcasts. We can sense that loving presence and sense the vastness of it and how it can include our own life and those that we know, those we don't know, that we can hold the earth, our mother, and our lap, and all beings in our heart. We close with that simple prayer. May all beings everywhere remember and trust

the loving awareness that's our source. May all beings everywhere live in natural and great peace. May we touch true joy in living. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Namaste and blessings.