Tara Brach - Three Core Reminders for Spiritual Practice

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Three Core Reminders for Spiritual Practice - This talk explores three powerful ways you can direct your attention when you find yourself emotionally stuck: wake up from thoughts; feel your feelings; and remember love. We explore both the habits blocking these basic movements toward freedom, and what nourishes them. Together they can serve to open your mind, awaken aliveness and heal your heart.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarbrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. There's a story I like about a woman coming back from a meditation retreat, and she's at the airport. She buys herself a package of cookies. All the tables are occupied, so she sits with a stranger, and she's reading her new speech. and she reaches for one of her cookies. And to her great surprise and dismay, he then reaches and helps himself to one. And she, it's this terrible, audacious behavior, but she doesn't say anything. And, you know, she keeps reading. She takes another cookie. And he then takes another cookie. And finally, they're down to their last cookie, and he splits it. And he gives her half. And he

and then he leaves. And when it's her time to leave, she goes to, you know, she hears the loudspeaker calling her to her gate. So she goes to the gate and then when she reaches into her purse to pull out her iPhone or ticket, there's her pack of cookies. And she realized she had been eating his. One of my favorite ways of understanding the spiritual path is really being lost in a trance. you know, believing our thoughts, being caught in a sense of separation, being reactive, and then remembering, coming back to some presence to a larger reality beyond our limiting thoughts and opening our hearts. And if we are suffering and we investigate, we'll find that we've been caught in believing something that's not true, something that's limiting us,

that's contracting us. And the word mindfulness comes from the Sanskrit word satipatana, and it means remembering to remember. It's the skillful art of coming back from trans repeatedly. So I'd like to share a talk with you that I offered two years ago, and it's on what I think of as the three key domains of remembering, three key domains of awakening. And I just reviewed this talk a few days ago,

and it just feels ever more true. So I wanted to share it. My hope is that it'll help you if someone is eating your cookies or if you realize you've been eating theirs. It will help, I think, as it does for me, these reminders, and really moving through our daily life. with more of an awake heart. So may you find benefit.

Namaste, French, and welcome. So I am recording here from Cape Cod, where it's drizzling, and I send all my heartfelt best wishes to those that have been going through these incredible heat waves. What I wanted to talk about for this class is something I've discovered over the decades of spiritual practice, and that is that there are three particular reminders about practice that come up over and over again, and that I'd say

most guided my practice and many others I've talked to. I've felt the same that these three are the kind of key remembrances. And the first one is, Wake up from thoughts. Now move from that base of being lost in thought to witnessing the fact of thoughts so that we can release the grip of judgments and stories and beliefs that are keeping us small. Wake up from thoughts.

You know, one elderly woman recently spoke very wistfully to me about how this gift of learning to see, oh, it's just a thought. How much not having to believe her thoughts has made a difference in her life and how many years went by that she really felt imprisoned by the circling stories and judgments. So that's the first. Wake up from thoughts. By the way, that doesn't mean get rid of thoughts. It just means, no, they're going on.

Okay. second is feel the funerance that are here, you know, open to the vulnerability that's often in our bodies and hearts. And when we get the knack of that of staying present with vulnerability or difficult emotions, what happens is our presence intensifies. It becomes more spacious, more tender. And there's a real quality of freedom that comes with that. So we have to learn to stay, stay with what's difficult in our bodies. So that's the second one. Make up from thoughts, feel your feelings. And the third is, remember love. In some way, turn towards love. Express care, let in care. Even a gesture really softens the armoring around our hearts and reminds us of our

belonging. So these are the three reminders. And they evolve. consciousness, you know what. We'll see also they're entirely interrelated. So what we'll do tonight is explore the habits that block these gateways and also what really nurtures them, what cultivates these capacities. And I'm focusing on an individual level in this talk, but the societal level having these skills is crucial. I mean, right now my heart, mind is very aware of the violence that comes when we have other beings that we think of as lower than ourselves. I'm thinking of white supremacy and just the violence of that and how if we don't learn to challenge beliefs and to feel the fears that have been driving them.

If we don't do that as a society, then we won't be able to move. towards a more just and compassionate world. So these various skills we're talking about building ourselves or what we need as a society. Okay, I want to start with a personal story that actually got me thinking to do this talk in the first place. And I mentioned I'm on Pip Cod right now, so I was walking, this is about 40s ago,

I was on the beach, and walking on the sand and then I tend to walk and then I'll stand and meditate in one place and as I was walking I was feeling a lot of pain in my knees and pain in my hips and my lower back

and feeling really beleaguered because it's just been going on for some time and kind of grim and self-protective because the sand is on a slant where I was walking and kind of anxious about oh my gosh

just keeps going, you know, my body's failing. And so I became aware of the thoughts that were going on, that pain was the enemy. You know, the idea that I was kind of positioned in my mind of being at war with the pain and the deterioration and fears about the future. I have family and my grandchildren coming in in a few weeks. who will be visiting and cares that I will build a show up the way I want to and engage and play and really be available.

Because my body, you know, feeling self-protective of my body. And then also the thoughts and sense of being embarrassed about getting older, having an aging body. Okay, so wake up from thoughts, become mindful of that. So that was what I started having a little. little more space just noticing, okay, these are the thoughts and stories that are here. And then dropping into my body, feel the feelings. It was intensely vulnerable and unpleasant. You know, and I just have to, had to keep telling myself, stay. There's an image that I brought up, I got this for something I read years and years ago. I think it was a friend.

French writer described the emotional pain as an icy couch in our body, kind of in the throat and the chest that we actually have to. It's like letting our form sit down and rest in this icy couch. And that's what it was like coming into my body and just kind of in some way accommodating to feeling the squeeze and the pressure and the kind of agitated heat or ear in my body. be with that. Okay, so I stayed and I stayed. And gradually in the staying, as I mentioned earlier, more space opened up. There's just more presence.

And I started sensing, you know, the vulnerability was there, but so was the sound of the wind and the, watching the waves rolling in. And there was a larger room. And there was just more spaciousness and more tenderness. darkness. Okay, so wake up some thoughts, come into the vulnerability, feel the feelings, and then remember love. And in some way I started sensing a quality of care coming into me through the waves and from the sky and from the winds and from interior, the interior caring kind of from that kind of space inside, moving through the painful parts of my body and the vulnerable places. There's a quote I love, which is love is always loving you. And there was just

sense that, okay, there's love that's holding all of this. Wow. And with that, it became clear that I was no longer living inside the story of a beleaguered self. Really, there was a a resting in a much larger awareness and that awareness felt like home. So friends, I shared us because I have found so many times in my life when I feel stuck or small and reactive that I go ahead and hang out with it and be with it and it's not fun but the presence with actually helps me come home to presence itself. I've also found that when I get stuck, I potentially have a good story to share with others

and something that might be helpful, so I hope it is. So I want to go over each of those facets, though, and I want to go over it and explore it in a way that you can really find for yourself, what does it mean to wake up from that? You know, what does it really mean? How do I do that? And maybe I'll start that one with a short anecdote, a couple from the Northwest side to go to Florida one year when it was a particularly icy winter. And they were going to stay at the same hotel where they had their honeymoon.

But their travel plans, because their schedule is so hectic, they had to go one day apart. So he flies down on Thursday and goes to the hotel. checks in, and there's a computer in the room. She's going to come in the next day. So he sends her an email, but accidentally he left out a letter in her address. So he sent it, and it didn't get to her instead. Somewhere in Houston, a woman who's a widow, it just returned home from a funeral. Her husband, he had been a minister, and he was called home to glory following heart attack, is the minister that was conducting the funeral. called home to glory.

And the widow decided to check her email, expecting messages from relatives and friends. And she read the first message, and she screamed and fainted. And so her son rushes into the room. And here's what he saw on her screen. To my loving wife, subject, I've arrived. I know you're surprised to hear from me. They have computers down here now, and you're allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I have just arrived and been checked in.

I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then. Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. P.S. Sure is hot down here. So we live in a virtual world most of our day. You know, we're thinking about things. We're reading emails. We're sending emails and so on.

And we take our thoughts to be reality. We take what we see and read our interpretations as real, and we react. And the truth is that some thoughts are useful. They're good representations and can serve us in navigating life. And others are not. They're false news. They're misinterpreting. The thoughts that are really obsessive worry or judgment, they're not so useful.

So unless we're able to pause and be aware, this is a thought. This is a thought. We don't have the discriminating wisdom to really access a larger perspective. The key element that we're really cultivating here, this mindfulness of thinking, is known in Western psychology as metacognition. And it's our superpower that we have the capacity. to observe and recognize thinking. We can do that. And in a moment that you're mindful of thoughts,

you're not inside the thought. Think of the thought like a cloud. You're not inside the cloud. You're back when you're mindful in the sky that's aware of the cloud. You've become larger. Mindfulness enlarges us. And it gives you a choice

as to what thoughts to attend to. We can't and we don't want to eliminate thinking. We just want to have enough mindfulness to notice, oh, thoughts are going on. Is this even helpful or useful? As I mentioned with the woman, the elderly woman, the beginning, so many people find after learning mindfulness, their biggest realization and gift is, I'm not my thoughts. I don't have to believe my thoughts.

They're able to say it's just a thought. Very powerful. Right now, you might want to just pause here. And reflect on the last time you were out shopping or commuting or walking in nature. But it's the last time you're out doing something away from your home. Just remind yourself where you are. Maybe you're out right now, in which case, pick a time. yesterday. Remind yourself where you were and what you were doing. Now, short to observing this memory

as a set of thoughts. Okay, notice you were thinking. There were images, maybe sound bites. And it's clear that that's not who you are. You're right here. You're the awareness, the witnessing. It's a mental movie, right? Yet what you'll find is this capacity, this same capacity, and mind witness our thoughts becomes really difficult when the thoughts are charged with wants and peers. For instance, if you bring to mind a situation in the last weeks or months where somebody treated you disrespectfully or unkindly, if you bring that to mind, I'm not going to ask you to go deep into that, but you bring it to mind and you remember that, and then I say, now become aware this is just thoughts.

you may notice how much your sense of your being has become blended with the thoughts, how much they take over your minds and your feelings. So why does this matter? Why does it matter to wake up from thoughts? It's because when we're suffering, we're caught in a looping of thoughts and theorems. The thoughts are being driven by fear and they reinforce fear, are driven. by wanting and they're reinforced working. And we get locked in moods of dissatisfaction or craving of fear of anxiety, of depression.

We get locked in them because we don't have the capacity to step out of our thoughts to notice that thinking is going on. I think it was 11 years ago, 10 or 11 years ago, there was a Harvard study. It became very well known that. And they showed that 46.9% of the time our minds are wandering. It's almost 50% of the time our minds are wandering. And this is what's important. Wandering does not correlate with happiness.

Our habitual thought patterns, where we wander to, is usually fear-based. And it keeps a certain mood going in our heart, in our body. From Buddhist psychology, whatever you frequently think, and ponder upon, that will become the inclination of your mind. And it affects your heart and your feelings. So you might even sense today, what have your thoughts been circling around? And the point is, left to its own devices,

our minds will wander, and quite often, where they go, will keep us locked in limiting thoughts, limiting beliefs, unpleasant emotions, and truly a small sense of who we are, a separated, often a deficient cell. So there I was, you know, on this beautiful beach, fixated on my frailty, on the stories that were sheerhold. So it requires mindfulness to recognize thoughts as thoughts, and we have to tremor on that. We have to train in a way that we can see. helping this thought or is it in some way causing harm?

It's a little story of a child who said to his mother, mommy, imagine you're surrounded by 10 hungry tigers. What would you do? And the mother said, I don't know, what would I do? And he said to her, stop imagining. We need to stop. So here's the, here's the, some, a little bit about training and mindfulness of thoughts. And really there's two levels, and one is just to know we are addicted to thinking as a way to control our world.

So in some way, just to notice, okay, thinking's happening. You know, Annie Lamont says, my mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes to come with me. So these wandering minds, so we train by, as we do in meditation practice. We often have an anchor that's here and now, like the breath or the body. And it's a powerful and essential dream to learn to just sit quietly and notice the mind going off and gently say, come back, come back to the breath or come back to sensations. And we begin to sense the space between thoughts.

So that's the basic dream. But when thoughts are charged, it becomes more challenging. It's not so easy when we're anticipating something bad happening. Or we're judging somebody to just say, oh, okay, thinking, come back to the breath. Because there's a charge there. And this is when we become identified and we lose ourselves. They possess us. And here's the thing.

even though some of our stories are really, really painful, some of our beliefs are really painful, like thoughts about being unworthy and failing. We're invested in them. We're loyal to our suffering. And that's because we prefer the certainty of our beliefs than not knowing. So we hold on to painful beliefs. We also hold on to beliefs that reinforce us that give us a feeling of importance of being right. We hold on very tightly to beliefs that puff us out.

There's a story of a little girl who asks her mother, how did the human race appear? Mom says, well, God made Adam and Eve, and they had children, all mankind was made. And then she goes and asks her father the same question. And he says, well, many years ago, there were monkeys, and the human race evolved from monkeys. So the girl scoops huge, and she goes back to a mother and says, well, how come you told me the human race was created by God? And dad said that we're developed from monkeys. And the mother answered, well, dear, it's very simple. I told you about my side of the family, and he told you about his.

the one upmanship that either way whether the beliefs are you know putting us down or putting us up we have what's called a confirmation bias which means if we don't challenge the beliefs we actually move to the world with a filter looking for evidence that supports them and hence we have this huge polarization on a societal level because it's there's such an addiction to being right and to only taking in the evidence that supports our views. Okay, so the training. One of my teachers, Srinar Sarka Data, says that illusion exists because it's not investigated. The training in waking up out of limiting stories and beliefs requires curiosity and courage.

in a way we have to be more interested and have more love for truth than for the comfort of feeling certain. We have to be more in love with truth than wanting to be certain. And there's a basic understanding that I find really, really helpful in my practice, and I share it a lot. I got it from Sokney-Rampashe to Ben Teacher, is the phrase real but not true. And if you've been with me for a bit, you know it. It's very powerful. And real means, yes, our thoughts and stories are real. They're appearing in our minds and they're affecting our life.

But they're not the truth. They're not actual reality. I mean, our thoughts are representations of the world. And some are useful. And some are not. So when we assume our belief is truthful, we just assume it there's no room for possibilities for new information, for a larger perspective. We're hooked.

So again, the attitude that can make all the difference is a real longing to know truth. And by a true will me directly experience reality versus that certainty that we're right. And we can ask us, if you want to go the route of dispelling illusion, it really helps to ask questions, to try to loosen the grip, to try to reveal real, but not the truth itself. And one of the masters of asking questions about beliefs is Byron Katie, if you haven't seen her work, it's wonderful. And one of the questions she'll ask is when we're caught in something is, and, you know, you say, well, what are you believing? And then, is it true? Just ask you, is it true? Do you know for sure?

Pausing like that and just asking the question can begin to open the windows of our mind to fresh air. Now, I'll share a brief story. One client this few years ago started asking, himself this question, is it true during a painful standoff with his teenage son? Because he had assumed this was his belief that if I don't let him know I'm angry or disturbed about how he's behaving, if I don't let him know my judgment, he'll never become a responsible, productive adult. I don't let him know what I think is wrong. He will grow. That was the belief. He started asking, the question, is it really true? And it stopped him in his tracks because he realized that he really

didn't know whether his confrontation, his ongoing conversation with his son was helping. He continued to ask the question. He'd pause and he'd listen to what kind of came up and he started getting open to other possibilities. And he told me, you know, maybe it's more important that he gets that I trust him, that he's basically a good kid. than always hearing from me about what's ruined, which, as I say, it just brings up a lot of sadness because so often in our interactions we feel like if we don't let people know certain things, they won't change. And it doesn't help. It's really helpful to just pause and say, is it true? Is it true that this is right? So this is the first domain, and I spent some time on it on purpose.

because we get so buried in our thoughts and our beliefs, so it's necessary to wake up from them. And if we want to reduce the power and the grip of them, then it goes to part two, feel the fumes underneath. Because otherwise, the looping of thoughts and feelings will go on for days and for decades. And here's the challenge to feeling the feelings, part two of this talk, is that with any pain,

our first reflex is to pull away. And the more pain, emotional pain, the more we pull away and dissociate with trauma, fold dissociating, and also with trauma coming towards where the pain is can retromatize so we have to take care. The tool, the basic training, is to turn towards, to lean in,

to open, to contact, to be intimate with vulnerability. And as I mentioned, if it's traumatic, then rather than directly leaning in and touching the trauma, we go to part three, which is remembering love, finding safety. But for now, let's assume the domains, and I'm going to be inviting you to work with something that's challenging but not traumatic. This step is lean in. Just as on the beach, I said, okay, sit down on the icy couch. you, feel what's here. The supports that'll help you if you find you're not so used to

fearing feelings, the supports that'll help you get more embodied are to practice the daily meditations where there's body scans. And many of my meditations are a body scan that's designed to bring our attention back here into our aliveness. And also meditations that have a lot of to bring the breath to the foreground so we can breathe into our body and feel the breath. And then when things come up, just to invite yourself in, you invite yourself to say, what does this really feel like? And check your throat, your chest, your belly. Okay, a story, this is another man I worked with. He came to my weekly class and was a professor at an area of college. and his wife was divorcing him.

And he had been through their marriage, very depressed and removed, and she wanted intimacy. So I'm going to find it elsewhere. So it brought up a belief. And this is the belief, you know, because I always will ask people when struggling, you know, what are you believing? And the belief was people will leave me if they know me,

that I'm not worthy, that nobody really will want to. be close to me. And the looping that would happen, would he feel insecure inside because of it and defensive, and then he'd have more thoughts about how he really wasn't going to be likable or lovable. And he built his behaviors in his marriage around that and his life. He led with his intellect and did not open to vulnerability. And he had been very immersed in work and sports. He was embodied in the sense that he was athletic, but he was very competitive. He wasn't like really feeling into his body. So he was out of touch.

Well, the divorce cracked him open. So we, as I mentioned, that question, what are you believing? And it really came down to unlovable. And I asked him that question, is it true? He says, yeah, I'm one lovable. So are you sure? And I said, well, not sure, but it feels that way. And I'll just make a comment.

It's a really useful question to say, is it true? Very sure it's true. And even if you or the person you're asking says, yeah, it feels true, just the inquiry occurring creates some space for a question. It creates some notion of possibility of something different. So it's really helpful. It creates a wedge, even if somebody says, yeah, it feels. really true. So then the next question I asked, this is we're talking about really opening

from the thoughts and the beliefs, is what's it like when you're believing this? What does it feel like in your body when you're believing? You're on level. And this took some time, but over time, he started contacting the unlived fears he had about abandonment and the pain of abandonment. and the pain of loneliness. He had spent much of his childhood, either having his mother angry at him for disturbing her, for having needs. When it was very young, he would cry and she wouldn't come.

She was very narcissistic in the sense that she could be affected, but she could also be rageful, and he never knew which mother he was going to get. So she felt very uncertain. that she, and she did abandon him at times. So our work was feeling, feelings. Can he attend to that young part of himself and feel the rawness of that loneliness and that fear?

And also the shame, like, that she doesn't want to be with me, something's wrong with me. So this was stuff you've been running from for a lifetime. So I don't want to make it sound like it was a quick process, feeling the feelings coming over and over again, but increasingly, he learned to relate with a tender presence. And here's the thing. The more we actually get in touch with the vulnerability in us, the more there's a natural compassion that arises, which brings us to the third part of our exploration, which is remembering love, that there's a naturalness that will, get more tender. And when we become intentional about remembering love, that tenderness becomes

a powerful healing force. So this is a third element, turning towards love, calling on love. And the reason it's so important, our suffering comes from separation that we have forgotten our belonging. Trauma means cut off, disconnected. And even when it's not trauma, When we're having a heart turn, we're disconnected from ourselves in some way, turned on ourselves, or feeling disconnected from others. Any remembrance of love, of caring, helps to dissolve some of that murmuring around the heart, some of that sense of separation, and remind us of belonging. Let me share with your poem.

This is Jeff Foster. If abandonment is the core wound, the disconnection from mothers, the loss of wholeness, then the most potent medicine is this ancient commitment to never abandon yourself, this ancient commitment to never abandon yourself, to discover wholeness in the whole mess, to be a loving mother to your insides, to hold the broken bits in open awareness to illuminate the sore places

with the light of love. E. I think of this as spiritual re-parenting that if the wound is abandonment, if the wound is fearing separate, rejected, judge, then the medicine is to hold that wounded place with acceptors, with love. So how do we foster that?

And there are many pathways, offering care to ourselves and offering our care to others and feeling our loving heart. Because when we offer care to others, we feel belonging to. But I had a question very recently, what about someone who's never experienced being loved? And many people have felt they've grown up in a pretty loveless life. And what I like to say is that there's always a tendril of where we feel some connection. It might not be full-blown. But here's the thing. The nature of reality is that everything's connected.

Everything's connected. We're part of a web of life. The pain is the forgetting. but because everything's connected, there are tendrils. And so for many, it may be a feeling of belonging in nature. I heard the physicist Carlo Rovelli was talking about. He's a quantum physicist and brilliant and a very awake being. I love his work.

And he was talking about when he's asked to give a talk in public that before he goes and talks, He always goes outside and finds a tree and he touches it. And something happens. And he feels more whole and he's smiling and he feels confident and he goes and gives us talk. There's a tender for all of us. I know I heard about one little girl is part of a, she's in the inner city part of a meditation training done by minds, which brings meditation to children.

And she talked about when she was most upset, what she would do was she go to her dog and put her hand on the dog's heart. There's always something. It could be a spiritual figure that we resonate with or someone we don't know well, but trust is caring, are a grandparent or a child, our dog. So we find out whatever the tendril is that gives us most access to feeling some connection

of caring. And we practice attending to that because our brains are plastic. We can cultivate neuropathways towards more loving. We can grow it. So back to the story, this man Rod, who I was working with, and who is really paying lot of attention to that, that wounded child inside. I taught him about putting his hand on his heart, and it was awkward at first. But he found that it really helped because it helped him feel like he was paying attention to part of him inside. But at times it's hard for him to offer care to himself.

So what he did was he had a grandmother, she was the only person where he felt some sense of real love, unconditional love. And his mother, his mother, with leaving there many weekends. So he'd imagine arriving at her home. She always had a look on her face when she opened the door that was completely welcoming. Like, I am so glad to see you. And she'd have this big smile,

and she'd fold them into her, you know, big hug. He just remembered that and the feelings of that many, many rounds. And that would warm up as hard. That would help him kind of shift so he could then hold that inner part with more presence. And gradually, after a number of months, he more and more felt like he was the holder. You know, he was that compassionate presence. And I asked him a final question once that I think is so powerful when he was really resting in that presence.

who would you be if you didn't believe you were unlawable? Who would you be? And for him, the response was, I'd be creative, I'd be alive, I'd be spontaneous. So I want to say this wasn't a one shot of, you know, in terms of practice. It was developing all three pieces, seeing the thoughts, waking up from the thoughts, feeling the fuels, and offering love over and over again. But it left him over these last years. He's way more involved with humans and a real level.

And he's, you know, before the pandemic, he was swinging dancing and much more engaged. And he describes himself as, I have a lot of sense of hope, of possibility. My life feels like an experiment, a good experiment. So I started with the three reminders, you know, with my story and shared this story. They evolve our consciousness. They shift our experience of who we are. If we're lost in our thought and caught in our feelings but kind of staying away from them, we'll feel like a small and separate self.

And as we wake up, as we heal the feelings, as we open to a sense of love, we actually experience our being as loving presence, that we're more that awareness, that tender awareness than any story, and that ennobles to live from more confidence. And I'd like to say that each of these pieces of that takes commitment, but what we practice get stronger. It really does get stronger over time. So a final story. This I heard through Gil Farnsdale from his book, The Monastery Wingin. And he describes an engineer visiting the monastery regularly for many years. And the practice has made sense to him. He was pragmatic. And he hoped it would help him overcome this kind

of chronic unhappiness. And he felt deeply felt pain. and he tried all the practices that the Abbas gave them. And with each, he'd encounter this wall of suffering he couldn't pass, and he kept trying to think his way out of it. After many rounds, the Abbas decided to try a different approach, and she gave him a special practice, one he'd do outside the monastery for two years, and when he completed, he could come back for other teachings.

So here is this practice. He had a volunteer for 10 hours a week at a maternity ward at a hospital where there were babies that were born prematurely, and his work was to hold the babies because everyone knew that without enough physical contact, they couldn't grow in a healthy way. So he plunged in. He was just to hold these little fragile beings ever so carefully, and he would watch their every breath because they seemed in danger of stopping breathing. and he found the most effective way to hold them was against his chest. He just told them like that. He did this for six months, and then he started noticing something new, a little spot of warmth, of softness in the center of being felt foreign.

It didn't fit with his ideas of himself. He kind of ignored it, but he wasn't thinking it out, because that would have interfered with the warmth. But over the months, that warmth expanded to fill his whole body, and gradually that warmth filled him in such a way that it dissolved that dark, hardened wall the ruined his heart. So he completed his time. You returned, the abbess saw he was transformed. He was no longer lonely or desperate or just lost in his mind, unhappy. He wasn't trying to fit everything in just a conceptual framework.

And her new instructions were when you meditate, don't think about what's happening. Rather let your awareness be seated in the tender warmth you feel in your body. And if you do this, any meditation you practice will be fruitful. Don't think about it. Come into your body. Be you with that tenderness. And he found this to be true.

This was his pathways from head to heart to this tender awareness within our experience of life. Okay, let's practice a little. We'll do a short meditation together that really can help us free up our body, our minds, our hearts. And because this is brief, I invite you to revisit it on your own and spend more time with the different pieces of it. let it become your experiment. We begin finding your way of coming into stillness and taking a few full breaths. You might reflect what is a limiting belief about yourself that you get stuck in. It may be one of the core ones I'm unlovable or unworthy.

I'll never have an intimate relationship. I'll never be happy. I'll never be successful and bad at everything I do. But some belief about yourself that's painful. And as you consider this, consider a situation that brings it up.

Let the situation be close in, be aware of the thoughts and feelings. And begin by asking yourself again, well, what am I really believing here? What am I believing? You just sense the deepest thing you're aware of that this belief roots down into. What are you believing about yourself or your world or what's possible? And then to ask yourself, is it true?

Is this belief true? Am I sure this is true? You just notice what happens. And let yourself now sense the worst part of this belief. And again, reminding yourself a situation that reinforces it. And ask yourself, how does it? feel in my body when I'm believing this, my body and in my heart? When you're believing this, let's say you're believing your deficient in some way or unlovable, we'll never have a partner

or never be happy, whatever the belief is. How does it feel in your body when you're believing it? You feel your throat, your chest, your billing. And you might expand that question by saying, how is believing this affected my life? What does it deprive me out? How has it gotten in the way? What's the impact of this belief on my life? On the way I live, on the way I relate to others. And again, notice, as you reflect on that, how it feels to be believing this belief. And let yourself acknowledge if they're suffering there, the pain of that. And let yourself acknowledge, If there's sorrow, sometimes there can be a soul's sadness just for the shape, the landscape of our life, how our beliefs have caused suffering in our lives. Just have that honest acknowledgement. This is painful. And you might put your hand on your heart if you haven't already.

And keep company with that. Keep company with whatever you're feeling. in these moments just to honestly notice what's it feel like right now. See if you're going to be intimate with the feelings, breathing into them, holding them with some tenderness. And to deepen that caring for the vulnerability inside you, you might offer a message of care or just to feel the tenderness of the touch in your heart and to sense offering care within Maybe there's a simple message, I trust your goodness. Or maybe I'm not leaving.

I'm staying. I'm here with you. Or it's okay. And if it's hard to offer care to yourself, you might call on another source to offer you care. A tree or the waves or the winds or our dog, our grandmother,

our friend. Buddha, Kwanian, remember love. Let your intention be to let in love. And widening the attention is noticing the presence that's here right now. Just notice whatever has shifted, the quality of presence that's here, quality of tenderness. You might ask, who am I if I'm not believing something's wrong with me?

What in my life be like if I didn't believe anything was wrong with me? Again, just let go and open into whatever you notice. Soon, soon the possibility of being at home. This is a poem from my friend, poet, Dana Falls. Why wait for your awakening the moment your eyes are open, sees the day. Would your hold back when the beloved beckons? Your eyes downcast, I'm not worthy, I'm afraid, and my motives aren't pure. Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining through the open door?

Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. Now is the only time you have to be whole. Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the light of your true nature. Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain. Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your stories of separation and failure. This is the day of your awakening. Taking some breaths and if your eyes are closed, coming back, opening your eyes.

Thank you, friends, for your attention, for this exploration. I hope you'll continue to on your own experiment and deepen these practices. because they're so free. Many blessings. Namaste.