Tara Brach - Training for Intimacy with Life

Episode Date: May 23, 2012

2012-05-23 - Training for Intimacy with Life - "Enlightenment is intimacy with all things" teaches Zen Master Dogen. While we long for this intimacy, we are conditioned to avoid the vulnerability and fear that an intimate presence can arouse. This talk explores how our mindfulness and heart practices cultivate the capacity to be intimate with our sensations of aliveness, our emotions and the beings in our life. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations make a difference!

Tonight I'd like to begin by sharing a story that a friend sent to me, true story, about an elephant whisperer. And his name's Lawrence Anthony, and some of you may have heard of him because he's a renowned conservationist who died in March. And his fame comes primarily because in South Africa, there have been these herds of wild, rogue elephants that have been so violent that it's become, you know, over time, the habit to just to kill them. And he found a way through his presence and sensitivity and capacity to communicate to actually calm down and rehabilitate,

so to speak, these elephants. And what was so powerful is that after he died, I think, let's say, it was Mark seventh, there was this solemn procession of these herds of elephants, two of them, to his compound over the next two days. And it said that elephants do mourn their own dead. Somehow, they attuned to the fact that this friend of theirs had died and solemnly just crossed, you know, miles and miles and then for two days kind of stood vigil in front of his compound. So I read a little bit more about him because I was, that kind of gave me chills, you know, the good kind of chills of sensing this level of nonverbal relatedness and intimacy that's possible. And he described a bit of some of his experiences in working with these elephants.

since one female and her baby, she was really, she was kind of a leader and particularly animated, angry, and violent. And if she hadn't in some way cooperated with him, her and her babies in the whole herd would have been killed off. He managed to talk to her and then attend, just take her in in a way that made contact. He describes this moment of recognition in some way that there was caring, that there was safety, that there was kinship. Okay, so I bring this up because my sense is that true service and true fulfillment

comes from this capacity to cultivate these connections, this kind of, bonding, this kind of having this attunement where we can communicate our love and our understanding in a way that wakes us up beyond our own sense of separate self

and allows us to feel a shared belonging. That that is what heals. One of my favorite teachings in the Buddhist tradition comes from Zen Master Dogen. He says to be enlightened is to be intimate with all things. And I love that expression, you know, intimate with all things with elephants and toddlers and

elderly and the cycles of the moon and the stars in the sky and the blossoms in front of us and the rain and our own sadness and our own excitement to be intimate with life. And this intimacy, I think it's a wonderful word and there's a reason we named our retreats here in the Washington to an area, intimacy with life. Because it really encompasses the whole spiritual path. Intimacy, the true meaning of it, we often think of it just in terms of romantic relationships. But the broad and deep meaning of intimacy is this realization of our mutual belonging, of our shared belonging, and the quality of care and understanding that arises. on that. I think of Lawrence Anthony and I think of that that mutual recognition and the

intimacy that he had and and how what does it all come from. How are we able to cultivate this quality of belonging, of sensing our belonging, communicating in that way. And it comes from paying attention. Paying attention is the key to being intimate. It said that paying attention is the purest expression of love. So tonight I'd like to kind of do some reflecting together on meditation as a training for intimacy. For intimacy with life.

And it's a huge broad subject so I'll kind of focus on certain domains. But the starting point, when I talk about intimacy with life, this unconditional presence and open-heartedness is it's possible. You know, we might not be able to, you know, have wall-to-wall intimacy with life,

but it is possible to really have, truly have swaths of our life where we're living in that sense of connectedness. I remember the Buddha teaching, you know, this is a very, very simple teaching about what I think of as our evolutionary potential. And he said, I would not teach you this path.

if it was not possible. So it's possible. And as most of us know, if we really look honestly at our day and at what happens moment to moment, is that we have this very universal conditioning playing through us that has us grasp after things

and push things away and try to control our life in a way that impedes intimacy. Every one of us is rigged with that. So we have the conditioning and intimacy as possible. I think part of what I'd like to emphasize tonight is that our moments of true intimacy are when we stop controlling,

that we have to let go of the controls in order to experience that contactfulness and tenderness. And you can see it in the small things. If you're nervous about an upcoming social, event and you start rehearsing, you know, and thinking about what you're going to wear and kind of planning it in some way, you're not intimate with those moments. You're not intimate and in touch with your own anxiety. Rather, you're busy kind of trying to protect your future. We can see it.

We can see how we move away from intimacy with our inner life. And when we're with another person, if there's any agenda to get something, to get their approval, to in some way have them be different, you know, in those moments we can't be attuned to what's happening and open-hearted. Our attention has narrowed and tightened. So you might just as we begin this kind of exploration. Reflect on today for a moment. Let's just scan today. And this isn't so that we judge ourselves and say,

oh, I'm a flop. I wasn't intimate for like 10 seconds. But just take a moment to just look at today so we sense our patterns. You know, just consider for yourself how many moments were there where there wasn't some controlling, where you might have just been

resting in the present. You know, moments where you were aware of the changing stream of sensations inside you. Or maybe listening to the thunder and the rain and just listening. Maybe just in some way with another person listening without an agenda. Or maybe for some moments present with your own heart or whatever feelings were there of nervousness or happiness or whatever it was. Were there moments when you stopped? Might be reviewing and sense, well, you had a lot to do today.

And when you have a lot to do, there's obviously this kind of goal-oriented and we get caught in thoughts and thinking and isn't that natural. And the truth is it's totally natural. But to accomplish what we need to accomplish, we do not always have to be in that trance of leaning forward, always planning, always figuring. it's possible to be inactivity and still be here. It's possible. It's possible to pause

and take some breaths and come back. So the question is, what stops us? What keeps us on that kind of train that is just tearing forward, trying like crazy to get everything done because we think there's not enough time to try to get somewhere and always on its way somewhere else

other than here. What stops us from coming back? You might sense that for yourself. What stops you? Or maybe imagine, if you pause in the middle of things, what do you feel? What do you get in touch with when you just stop for a moment

and sense, okay, what's going on inside here? I can say for myself, what I get in touch with is a mix of anxiety and restlessness. Anxiety like something's wrong, something's going to go wrong, and restlessness like there's something more to do or think or feel or get to. And what I found when I interview people about this is that's pretty common

that most of the time there's a current of that underneath. So we start looking and we start sensing the ways that we're avoiding being here, that in some way we're racing away from the present moment because we don't want to feel that uncomfortableness that something's missing or something's wrong. So I invite you to just not necessarily believe that that's true, but check it out for yourself. Is there something that's keeping you kind of racing from the present moment? I like the image of bicycling away from the present moment and that the more that anxiety is there, actually the faster we're pedaling, so we don't have to feel it. We're under this illusion that if we pedal faster, we'll get enough done to soothe the anxiety

so then we can rest and then we can enjoy, you know. Okay, so one of our big ways of not being intimate is speeding around. Can you be intimate with your inner life if you're moving fast? I can't. Can you be intimate with another person if you're on your way somewhere else? Speed's a flag. It's so much a part of the culture. It's really an accepted mode of being.

yet when we're rushing away from the anxiety in the present moment, we're not available. But I sense how pervasive it is. I was at the bank the other day, and the teller was having trouble with a transaction that she was doing, and just every, like, 15 seconds, she kept saying, thank you for your patience, thank you for your patience. And I realized, oh, she's really used to how impatient we are,

that we all feel like we just don't have enough time, And that's part of customer relations is the faster you get it done, that more they're going to like your bank, you know? So thank you for your patience is like a way of saying, I get it, and I'm really trying, and I'm addressing what you're worried about, that it's going to be slow. But what's it like for you when you're waiting in a long line

or in traffic? We start getting in touch with that rawness, that anxiety that we're really trying to get away from. So I'm speaking more generally of how we avoid. being intimate with our moments in daily life, we can also see it in a formal meditation practice. You know, one of the elephants in the Roman, this is a different kind of elephant with meditation communities, is that there's an underlying teaching that really formal practice like physical exercise, this

mental exercise of paying attention, can transform our life and wake up our hearts and really bring a lot of freedom. And it takes practice, you know. And the elephant is that, and I can ask you this, how many of you have the sense of either you're having a really hard time practicing at all or you're not practicing enough? Like you really aren't doing what you wish you could be doing. Can I just see by hands how many of you feel it's less than what you would hope? Okay, so I would say that's about 75, 80% of who's here. I'm saying that for those that are listening to podcasts or watching, that that's pervasive. Most of us have these things we know would be good for us.

And meditation's one of them. And yet, what makes it so hard? Well, what is meditation but sitting down into the present moment and actually contacting the layers that we are pretty busy trying to run away from a lot of the time? I mean, there's parts of meditation that don't feel like that, where we're just relaxing and maybe just, you know, being with the breath. But when we start being mindful and opening to what's here, there might be layers that aren't so pleasant.

So it's uncomfortable. And because we don't feel like we're good at it, you know, because all of our minds are designed to be distracted, so we think we have a busy mind different than everybody else's busy mind, you know. We don't think we're doing well and we don't like doing things that we don't think we're good at. does that make sense so we're trying to avoid not feeling good and we keep busy now what happens in our relationships with each other how do we avoid intimacy that presence with each other and that that gets to be a pretty juicy area to look at for many people if I said okay so this is about training ourselves using meditation as a training for interesting

intimacy, there's a number of people that want to make for the door, you know, that that's the sign of racing to the exit. You know, they get, they get chills, but not the good kind of chills, you know. I remember Jules Fifer cartoon where she's saying, but I love you. And he's saying, don't you threaten me, you know. And from the point of view of the separate self, I mean, what is intimacy? We want it like crazy. I mean, we long for belonging. longing and for the separate self, it's a dangerous, risky prospect. We might get rejected, we might get possessed and suffocated. Things go wrong. So for many people, instead of, you know, going for it's like we want it, but we hold on tight to the controls because we're protecting ourselves. And the controls protect us in a way from intimacy. So you might sense. you know, today. What was it like? Was there presence with others?

Or was there an agenda of some sort, a protection of some sort? I mean, think of the ways we protect. Think of the ways that we keep control. For many of us in relationships, one of the major ways that we do it is there's a demand on the relationship. You'd be a certain way.

You know, I love you, but I'll really love you. change and be like this and cooperate and hold up your end in the household or whatever it is. We want our partner or our teen or whatever to adjust and be different. Some of you might remember this story about a couple celebrating their golden wedding anniversary and their domestic tranquility had been the talk of the town. And so a local newspaper reporter wanted to find out, you know, what was really their secret to this long, happy marriage?

And the man said, well, it dates back to our honeymoon. We visited the Grand Canyon, took a trip down to the bottom of the canyon by mule. We hadn't gone too far when my wife's meal stumbled, and my wife quietly said, and my wife quietly said, that's once. We proceeded a little further when the mule stumbled again, and she spoke again. She said, that's twice. We hadn't gone a half mile when the mule stumbled a third time, and my wife promptly pulled a revolver from her pocket and shot. I started to protest over her treatment of an innocent creature and she looked at me and quietly said, that's once.

I apologize for the cruelty to any animal that's embedded in that joke. But you get the idea that we actually have unsaid, sometimes they're unsaid and sometimes they're stated rules and how the other has to be for us to be okay with them. and that's for real. I can see it with my son that, you know, whenever I have an agenda, you know, we have our phone calls and if there's something in the background

where there's an agenda, we don't have a real sense of connection. He can feel it. For a long time, the agenda was, did you get your grad school applications in? But there's other ones. Did you call the doctor? I mean, I feel like the classic Jewish mother,

did you get that appointment? did you pay this tax? You know, whenever I have an agenda in the background, it's tight. So sometimes when I'm good, before I'll pick up the phone or when I'll see him on there, you know, I'll say, okay, just, this is just presence. Nothing I want from him, nothing I want from me. And there's a spontaneity that happens and a warmth. And there's something real that we can sense our belonging.

So we have different ways that we control, that we disconnect. You know, often it's that we want something from somebody. We want their approval. That's a big one. How many moments are with somebody, and there can't be real intimacy because we're wanting them to have a certain way of experiencing us. So we're not being natural. We're presenting the self.

We want them to see, right? That's not going to make for intimacy. are for many we have ideals in our mind and now I'm talking about especially with love relationships ideals of really the kind of person that then my life it's the if only mine then it would work out and I think of this one of the best singles ad that I've ever heard about single black females

he's male companionship ethnicity unimportant I'm a very good looking girl who loves to play I love long walks in the woods riding in your pickings truck, hunting, camping, fishing trips, cozy winter nights lying by the fire. This is meeting someone's ideal, right? Candleight dinners will have me eating out of your hand. Rub me the right way and watch me respond. I'll be at the front door when you get home from work wearing only what nature gave me. Kiss me and I'm yours. Call, gives a phone number and ask for Daisy. Over 15,000 men found them talking to the Atlanta Humane Society about an eight-week-old black

laboratory retriever. I shared that with you because I just went through the last month of adopting a pup from one of these places. And I know how I was scanning online because I was looking for the perfect pup, you know, and you fall in love with who's there. But we have these ideas and they get in the way. Even when we're with somebody and again, this is more in the romantic realm and things are going pretty well. I have a friend that's in a case that she was everything was really cooking but something in her instead of enjoying it she was computing is this gonna last is he really the right one am I gonna do something that's gonna call you know she couldn't just be intimacy is

hard it has it means that we have to keep watching all our habitual exit strategies judging you know in some way pulling back when we feel threatened, lashing out, all the ways that we in some way keep ourselves occupied instead of really being there. So what I've mentioned thus far really is intimacy as we move through the day with the moments, you know, being here for our breath or for the rain

or when we're walking from place to place, feeling our bodies as we're moving, not living in a virtual reality. So intimacy with aliveness. And I mentioned the other, intimacy that can be when we kind of block when we're with each other. Now what I'd like to mention is that our capacity to tolerate the pulls away from intimacy. So we have these poles, our restlessness and our anxiety and busy mind and impatience.

Our capacity to tolerate that and go, okay, come back, come back, and then show up in a relationship or show up during the day. is very related to our relationship with our care giver as an infant. So now we go into the realm of psychology. It's strongly affected by the infant caregiver bond. Okay. So we're social creatures. We know that.

We're at the core. And our brain development is directly impacted by the quality of attunement that we received. And attumment means the capacity of our caregiver to be present, to notice what's happening, and to respond with care. Does that sound familiar?

Because these are the basic capacities of a meditative attention. If our caregiver had enough of that to notice when we were wet we needed to be changed or when there was some kind of kind of sense of anxiety or fear, maybe what would be soothing and calming in a tone of voice, or when we needed to be held, or when we needed space. If there was some resonance, some sense of attunement like that, then we grow to have some trust in our belonging that we matter,

that there's some larger beingness that we're part of. If not, there's more of of an acute sense of separation, more need to defend, and our tendency, instead of really going for intimacy with others, is to find substitutes. Because we don't think it's going to work out. Rather, we think it's going to hurt. Does that resonate for you? Yeah.

So if we don't have good attunement, there's a difficulty in trust. And the substance. that we go for we're familiar with. I've sometimes called them false refuges. False not meaning bad, just meaning they don't deliver intimacy really. So we'll go the most obvious ones and the and most early is food, something that soos. Now it doesn't really give us a sense of connection and belonging, but it soos temporarily, right? And then we go for certain kinds of relationships that are more dependent or relationships where we have power

because power dependency gives us a taste of being involved but it doesn't really deliver. And we go for achievements. If we can prove ourselves worthy, then maybe we can find our way to intimacy. As we know, to the degree that our lives are organized around the substitutes, we are unable to cultivate the quality of presence that allows for intimacy. Story for you of a woman who was describing time with her father when he was dying

and he had been a larger-than-life figure for her and a well-known, highly respected architect, and he designed buildings and urban centers and many praised pieces of work. And so they had had a really distant relationship for most of her life and he was very work-focused, and that had caused her a lot of pain. She had to do a lot of inner work. And yet now at the end of his life,

they were spending quite a lot of time together. So she recounts asking him, what of his accomplishments he felt most proud of? There was a long pause. And then he looked at her and he said, why you, of course, there were tears in his eyes. I just am imagining

that there was something about coming into reality and not regretting his creativity and his accomplishments but regretting the degree to which there was some probably some striving and narrowing that stopped him from

really relishing and savoring a loved one that was there. I mean how many of us have we sensed well, I'm at the end of my life looking back, what matters, if we do that exercise. How many of us kind of sense our life and sense, well, what matters is that quality of intimate presence? Not like I'm on my way somewhere else, but I'm here and here we are. And it's not like this is for the sake of something else, but we're here. And these connections matter.

open-heartedness sincerity realness I think if we're at the end of our life looking back belonging is right at the center knowing and living from our sense of belonging

so sometimes it takes you know that kind of end of life jarring wake up but for most of us you would not be here you wouldn't be interested in a path of presence unless there was that yearning to bring that presence into life now, to find that intimacy now. So when we begin

to sense, okay, so how do we cultivate it? Our practices here, mindfulness practices are actually training in self-attunement. And I want to just emphasize that phrase again. Attumment is the critical peace in having us feel trust and belonging in our relationship with our caregiver. Well, what we're learning here is how to offer that same quality of present inwardly. And the healing and awakening that comes from that is what we might call the capacity to be intimate with life. That's the frame for the remainder of time we have, that we are practicing this self-attunement. And what's really interesting to me, you know, because it's these two wings

of the bird that we talk about often. We're learning how to notice what's here, how to understand and contact what is here going on right this moment inside me, awareness of this breath, of these sounds, maybe awareness of loneliness, of sorrow. What's going on? That's one wing of the attunement. and the other wing is a quality of acceptance and tenderness that we hold that in, the two wings of the bird. Now what's interesting to me, just in a more kind of on the science side, is that this training in mindful awareness,

this training of these two wings, this inner attunement, actually affects the same part of that is developed in the infant's brain with attunement. Now there's the frontal cortex and the limbic system are affected by self-attunement. Same parts of the brain. So let's hone in a little more and look at how we bring these basic practices of self-attouement, of mindful attention to the domains of our life. And the three domains I want to bring it to is a sensory present

because we start in these bodies. We can't be intimate with the world if we're not. not aware of sensations in our body. Now what happens right now when I ask you, are you awake inside your body? What you might notice is, well, maybe now I am, but I wasn't, you know, right? Because generally when we're listening and thinking, what happens? We shut down our other senses. We're not hearing the sounds that are here. We're not feeling the sensations in our body, the emotions. So the first part of training and intimacy is intimate with the aliveness, expressions of aliveness in this body. There's different ways of waking up the body and waking up the senses. What we practice

here often is kind of scanning through the body. And I find that if you just for a moment, close your eyes and do a quick scan and you say, okay, I'm just going to do instead of, you know, Tarr's 10-minute scan, I'm just going to, you know, just do a quick scan from top down. And you just feel the face, relax the face, and just feel the sense of the softness around the eyes. And I just feel the shoulders from the inside, the arms and the hands. You start feeling sensation,

and you're waking up a little. Chest open, soften the belly. And just feel the attention scanning down to the legs so that you're aware of the feet from the inside too. hands, the feet, and then widen it. So you feel your whole body, this field of sensation, you're here. Now keep the attention within you for a moment. It can be very powerful to awaken all the senses

as a very brief exercise of being intimate with the moment. You feel the aliveness of the body. Now just listen to the aliveness of sound. nothing to do. It's outside, listening into the space of the room. So you can feel sensations, including sound. You might sense light and darkness through the lids if your eyes are closed or if your eyes are open, just take in image, form, color. So there's sensation, sound, light. I wonder if you can sense smell. It's a sense that you're taking in and receiving the space around you

with the subtle fragrances and odors so the senses are wide open wide open and you might sense with the senses wide open that your experience of who you are shifts that as we become intimate with our senses with this living world the self-story kind of falls away

there's a belonging to a liveliness. You might listen to these words from Mary Oliver. This is a poem called White Flowers. Last night in the fields, I lay down in the darkness to think about death, but instead I fell asleep, as if in a vast and sloping room filled with those white flowers that open all summer,

sticky and untidy in the warm fields, When I woke, the morning light was just slipping in front of the stars, and I was covered with blossoms. I don't know how it happened. I don't know if my body went diving down under the sugary vines and some sleep-sharpened affinity with the depths, or whether that green energy rose like a wave and curled over me, claiming me, in its husky arm. I pushed them away but I didn't rise. Never in my life had I felt so plush, are so slippery,

or so resplendently empty. Never in my life had I felt myself so near that porous line where my body was done with and the roots and the stems and the flowers began. Splendently empty

in that porous line where we sense our belonging so this is the first realm that we begin to explore that we sense this aliveness that's right here and an intimacy with that and a certain wisdom that arises that when we really open our senses

we realize we're not who we thought we were We're not inside that small, confining story anymore. We're splendidly empty and belonging to aliveness. Now, the second domain of intimacy is what I sometimes call intimacy with the animal-headed goddesses, which are all the emotional realm. And in Asian art, and in the temples of Asia, you'll also see it in the mandala's,

that to enter sacred space, to get to the center of the mandala, to the center of the temple, to that space of freedom and peace, you have to go through these animal-headed goddesses, these deities that are wrathful and passionate and fearsome and scary-looking creatures. If you look at the cover of Tricicle magazine right now, it's got one of those kind of deities, the wrathful deities. It's an issue that talks a lot of that. that anger, which is good.

And the basic teaching is to get to sacred space, the deities are part of the trip. These emotions, this aliveness that we call, you know, sometimes we call the inner weather systems. They can, we sometimes wish weren't there,

the fear and the anger and the jealousy and the sorrows. These are actually the energies that transform and awaken through us. So to get, get to sacred space, we have to be with the deities. We have to bring presence to emotions. And so that's something that we have explored here a lot. I mean, it's something that

I talk about a lot in terms of rain using that acronym to help unpack these emotions so that we can bring the two wings of seeing what's going on. Okay, seeing this fear. Okay, fear, fear, sensing how it's playing in my body. What are the beliefs that are going? with it. How does it really affect me when the fear, when I'm getting that felt sense fully? Can I bring kindness? Can there be a sense of tenderness? And in the moments that we bring an intimate attention to fear, it no longer possesses us. In those moments, we become that presence that's larger than fear. We're like that ocean that can include the waves. We're no longer suffering, being with the deities.

Story from Naomi Rachel Remen, who's a physician and healer and teacher and writer who I deeply respect. And she uses art and meditation and presence, a healing presence and working with people that are going through cancer and major illness. And one of the stories she describes a young man who was 25 and he had a have one of his legs amputated the hip in order to save his life from bone cancer. So she describes that when she began with him, he was just filled with kind of grief and rage. And they're so great. It took several years of this healing presence, of working through drawing pictures and

feeling and being with and being in dialogue with and the whole thing. Because he had a heal not just his body, but his spirit. So he worked hard and he did that healing and developed quite a compassion for others that were dealing with the deities that come up when there's great loss, the fear, the anger, the sense of oppressiveness. So I'll read you what he began to visit people in the hospital who had also suffered severe physical losses. On one occasion, he visited a young singer who was so depressed about the loss of her breast that you would not even look at him. The nurses had the radio playing probably hoping to cheer her up. It was a hot day and the young man had come and running shorts. Finally, desperate to get her attention, he unstrapped his

artificial leg and began dancing around the room on one leg, snapping his fingers to the music. She looked at him in amazement, and then she burst out laughing and said, man, if you can dance, I can sing. Now, when this young man first began working with drawing, he made a crayon sketch of his own body in the form of a vase with a deep black, crack running through it. He redrew the crack over and over, grinding his teeth with rage. Several years later, to encourage him to complete his process, therapist showed him his early pictures again. He saw the vase and said, oh, this one isn't finished. And when she suggested he finished it, he did. He ran his finger along the crack saying, you see here, this is where

the light comes through. With a yellow crayon. he drew light streaming through the crack into the body of the vase and said, our hearts can grow strong at the broken places. So this is key in understanding a path to intimacy. That the very wounds and hurts and pain we feel that makes us want to run away

is exactly the place if we're willing, if we have the courage to pay attention, and often we need so. important in doing it. That's exactly the place where our heart most wakes up becomes luminous and tender and as wide as the world. Those are the portals. In fact, every emotion has an intelligence that if we pay attention to it, it transforms and our sense of our own being enlarges and that energy is released to really be a creative part of our own.

our life. Intimacy with the deities. Okay? So that's the next one that I really want to mention because there's a wisdom that comes from it. When we're suffering from emotions, when we're in battle with them, when we're turned on ourselves because of our emotional life, when we're contracted, in those moments they have our identity. We are identified. I am the fearful person. I am victimized by fear. I'm using fear as an example. When we bring the two wings of attention, when we become intimate with fear,

there's a shift in identity. There is a wisdom that wakes up that gets it, that that story of a self, oppressed by fear, was just a story. And that what we are can't be defined. It's that edgeless ocean, that it's a compassionate presence that's with the fear. We're not a fearful self.

That's where the freedom is. Okay, so I've spoken to a bit of intimacy with this living world, these senses, intimacy with the emotions. It's the last piece, as you might imagine, is intimacy with others. What we know is that to be intimate with others, it's like widening circles. we have to be able to be intimate

with the aliveness of our body and the moods of our heart. That's the ground level. That self-attune wakes up the part of the brain that is capable of empathy, compassion, presence with others. It just does.

So we begin to learn to pay attention to each other without controlling because a meditative presence, and mindful presence is not controlling what it's aware of. It's simply aware without judgment, just noticing. So we begin to pay attention to each other like that, where we're interested and we care, but we're not there with an agenda.

And so that's the training, is this attuned, undefended presence with each other. And I think of it, and you can just think of it as listening and speaking, what happens in those realms because so much of our world with each other is in communication. How is it that we pay attention

when we're listening? What if you chose one person that in one situation that you knew you're just going to practice, like I mentioned with my son, okay, this conversation, I'm going to see if I can keep letting go of the controlling and just be there.

and in that being there there's a natural interest sometimes I have to say to myself I have all the time in the world because there's so much of this tightening by the sense of we don't have much time so that kind of open-endedness

just here with each other again the training means you have to kind of pick you can't say okay I'm going to always listen in this open-ended way to everybody from now on it won't work. It just won't pick somewhere, pick someone. And then see what happens if there's no agenda and see if you can offer undivided attention.

Now they're speaking too. This is Adrian Roth, she says, An honorable human relationship that is one in which two people have the right to use the word love is a process of deepening the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

So we listen in that way with that agenda and we speak not to get approval, not to influence, not to impress, but rather the truths that are difficult. And again, it's not with everybody in every conversation, but what if you pick somewhere where you're going to play that edge of going to a deeper level of life? realness. This is what nourishes intimacy. So we're talking about that kind of presence and silence, grounded in the senses, open to emotion, that the natural responses care. And we practice that with loved ones, with someone we know. But there's another level I want to speak to also, which is, you know, Einstein sometimes describes it that has described it that we limit our love,

to just a small circle of people. So what does it mean to really nourish intimacy and intimate attention and openness with a lot of people? And I'd like to share a story I ran into some years ago that touched me on this front. The person writes, During my second month of nursing school,

our professor gave us a pop quiz. a pop quiz. I was a conscientious student and breathed through the questions until I read the last one. What is the first name of the woman who's here every day cleaning the school, the custodian? Surely this was some kind of joke. I'd seen her regularly. She's tall, dark-haired in her 50s, but how would I know her name? I handed in the paper leaving the last question blank.

Another student asked, will the last question count towards the grade? Absolutely, said the instructor. In your careers you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello. I've never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorothy.

What if we each chose one person that we see regularly but we don't pay close attention to or we don't really put out, just one person, and explored what happened, and this is part of the Metta, our loving kindness training, if we just brought more attention, if we wondered, well, what brings happiness to this person?

Or what does this person need? How might this person be suffering? And just offered our smile, a few words. It enlarges who we are. Our self-sense is really just this person, just operating in this way. We become larger. Our heart opens more. Admit something, writes Hafiz.

Everyone you see, you say to them, love me. Of course, you do not do this out loud. Otherwise, someone would call the cops. Still, though, think about this. This great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying with that sweet moon language what every other eye in this world is dying to hear.

So we live in this world with so many ways that we separate, so many ideas of who's part of us and who's them, to really move through and it becomes an adventure that there isn't anyone exempt, anyone that we have to exclude from our heart. rather it is possible just to have that openness, that tenderness that responds in the moment. It doesn't take so much time. It just takes a little more attention.

So our training to be intimate with all things is a life training. Because we're talking about being intimate with people and intimate with our inner life and intimate with nature, intimate with the sound of the thunder and intimate with the sound of the rain and the smells. and this is a training that takes a lifetime. And it's an adventure. You know, there's not an activity or a person or a moment that it's not possible to wake up our heart

if that's our intention. So we'll do a final kind of closing meditation, if you will. Let yourself come into a nice posture and a stillness. Just to feel the intention. to be intimate with just these moments. You don't have to do it for the rest of my life kind of thing, but just that sincerity of starting fresh in this moment, really fresh,

because it's a mystery when we start fresh, opening your senses so that you can feel the aliveness in your body. It can help just to even feel the hands and the inside and the feet. And just let the awareness spread. just awake in the body, aware of the sounds that are here. And relax your heart opens. You can just sense what's in your heart right now,

an intimate presence with your own heart. If the heart's troubled, that intimate presence can be an active offering of kindness. Sometimes I just say, it's okay, sweetheart. That's kind of amazing that just those words or just that simple gesture, of gently touching your own heart, brings an intimacy, an intimate presence, with the life that's here. But if through the day we pause,

just for this, we've just been 30 seconds or so. Feel the body, let the senses be awake, listen to our hearts, offer some kindness, and then sense how much this world lives in our hearts. You can sense the space you're in and the beings that are here that are really part of your heart.

and family and friends and the other creatures on this earth that we sometimes don't think of that really belong to us because we're part of the earth together. The elephants, the bees,

creatures that run, the creatures that swim, the creatures that fly, that you can feel you're holding the earth or a mother in your lap. All the world in your heart. Intimate with life, closing with a short poem.

sun drapes a buttered scarf across your shoulder rose opens herself to your glance rain shares its divine melancholy the whole world keeps nibbling your ear like a neglected lover sensing this world this aliveness you belong to sensing this vativeness you belong to sensing this vabre awareness that's right here, awake and tender and open, our shared belonging, that oneness, that one presence, that there's really only one here offering our collective prayer that all beings everywhere might discover the beauty and blessings of living intimately with this life, of embracing the life within. life everywhere, in that intimacy discovering the peace and the love that is our potential.

May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Amaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.