Tara Brach - True Belonging - Refuge in Presence and Relatedness

Episode Date: April 21, 2010

2010-04-21 - We become homesick when our insecurity compels us to find refuge in exclusive affiliations, in over-consuming, in avoiding intimacy or grasping tightly to the approval of others. This talk explores how we come home to the truth of who we are by connecting with our moment to moment experience, and by developing the capacity to be wakeful, giving and receptive in loving relationship.

So I hope you enjoyed last week with Sherry, again, a wonderful teacher. I feel really grateful that I get to have these people come in when I'm not here. I know last week for some was a tense week with taxes and so on. Somebody sent me this. I thought I'd share it with you. That a man wrote a letter to the IRS saying, I've been unable to sleep knowing that I cheated on my income tax. I have understated my taxable income and have enclosed a check for 150.

$50. If I still can't sleep, I'll send the rest. I hear class on virtue and thought we'd start in a good way. So death and taxes, and for some people, pollen, that's the other one this season. One of my favorite reflections, as many of you know, is around the phrase that our true sickness is homesickness. And I reflect on that a lot. Somewhat in the language, I guide meditations,

that when we feel at home, at home in our bodies, in our heart, and with each other, there's a quality of freedom. And that if we're suffering, if we check, it's usually because in some way we don't feel at home in our lives, in some way. And usually the signs are, we're anxious or we're restless, or angry or we're in judgment. And if we look on a societal level, all the social else that we are aware of

come out of feelings of disconnection. I mean, think of it this way. If you're really at home and yourself, are you going to be inclined towards addictive behavior towards overconsuming? Or if you're really at home with other people, are you going to be inclined towards resentment or lashing out or judgment or starting wars,

you know, are if we're truly at home on the planet with the seasons and with the earth and with the life that's here, are we going to violate our planet? What we start seeing is that violence, violent activity comes out of some, there's been some break in the sense of connectedness.

And you can even sense it with our bodies. It's not that our bodies are meant to sicken and age and die and so on, but we can see how so much of what illness comes up is exacerbated by a sense of stress, of disconnection, that when we're caught in fear, when our sympathetic nervous system is kind of on and on and on, we have sleep disorders, we have eating disorders. We have hard time digesting. There's all sorts of research that shows heart disease, strokes, compromised immune system.

So we begin to sense more and more that there really is this relationship between the deepest levels of health, all levels of health, and how at home we feel in the moment. And our culture is really one of not at home. I mean, when we look at our culture, it's an incredibly speedy, competitive, we're fixated on screens. We're kind of like fixated outwards. Sirens going off. Things are happening. But this, you know, the disconnection of our culture is not a new thing.

I was rereading some of D.H. Lawrence recently. And this is from Lady Chatterley's lover, 1928. Okay? Because he's talking about the same kind of disconnection from our deepest need, our feelings of not being related, not being connected. He says, man has little needs and deeper needs. We fall into the mistake of living from our little needs till we have almost lost our deeper needs in a sort of madness. Let us prepare now for the death of our present little life and reemergence. in a bigger life in touch with the moving cosmos. And then he says we must get back into relation through daily ritual.

We must practice again the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, of kindling fire and pouring water. He says, for the truth is we are perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs. We are cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow eternally in the universe. Vitally the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.

I think that image of this uprooted tree with the roots in the air, there's something about that that for me is really powerful, the sense of uprootedness. and so what I'd like to explore with you tonight, and of course we'll do it, I'll speak, and I'll also invite you to do it through a kind of reflection, is really how do we get uprooted? I mean, how does that happen?

And sometimes the question that's so powerful is really what stops me in this moment, right in this moment from feeling at home? Like if you just check in and say, well, what stops me? this moment from feeling at home. How do we replant ourselves? What does it mean to replant ourselves in the universe?

And one of the metaphors that I find helpful in exploring this, I've described as the wheel of awareness, whereby our awareness, this open awareness is, we've got like this wheel, there's a hub, there's spokes, there's a rim, And our attention is chronically, consistently, perpetually leaving the hub, leaving home, and kind of going out through one of the spokes, either a worry thought or a planning thought or an obsessive thought or something like that, and kind of fixating on the room and just circling around and around.

So we're kind of circling around, but not right here. We're just spinning around out there. And a spiritual path, and it doesn't mean a path, a Buddhist path or a Hindu path. A spiritual path is one that calls us back home to presence, to love, to life right here. And so meditation practice, and you can find it in all the different traditions, all the contemplative traditions, usually has two parts. And one is, how do we kind of come back?

Tonight, as you notice, the coming back is, okay, let the breath be a kind of home base. so when you notice you've drifted, find that breath again and come back. But that's not the end of it. The end of meditation is not being with the breath. That's a misunderstanding. The second part of meditation after we come back is being here.

Can we just stay right in the life that's here? That doesn't mean we don't think about things and plan about things and in some way lean into the future at times, but do we have the capacity to spend more and more of our life actually here, you know, in touch with these bodies and with our hearts and with each other? So coming back is coming back to the hub, and being here means we stay here some.

And the hub is not some small center. Actually, the hub ends up being a very edgeless, space of presence that includes the spokes and the rim and the whole universe, the clouds, the seasons, everything. It's very inclusive. So planting ourselves in the universe in some way is coming back home to this vast center of our being. Okay, so the first part, how do we get uprooted? And this in both Western psychology and in the Buddhist teaching, and many of the mystical traditions, there's an understanding that incarnation, the nature of incarnation,

is that we perceive a sense of separation. We come into these bodies and this sense of what we are, and it feels separate. There's a sense of, here I am and here, and here you are out there. And that's the way we're designed to perceive things. It's not the end of our evolutionary,

experience, but it's part of what happens. And what happens is when we perceive separation, we start organizing around a separate self. And that organizing is there's a kind of a, and this is biological, there's a kind of fear that something out there is going to hurt this self. And there's a sense of needing and wanting that there's something I need to be okay. Something's missing, something's wrong. So this is a sense of needing. And there's a sense of needing and wanting that there's something I need to be okay. So this is the beginning of leaving home, is that we get caught in the something's missing feeling, the something's wrong feeling, we try to start controlling our world, and as this becomes our habit, we're no longer here. We're spending our time controlling life, not living life. Does this make

sense so far? Is it kind of setting the context here? So that's when we start sensing. Well, if we even ask the question again, what's between me and feeling? at home in this moment. And you can just ask that. You might close your eyes and sense, do I feel at home? What's between me and feeling at home? And we often notice there's a kind of restlessness or an anxiety, or just a feeling of busyness, that there's not a lot of space. Often there's a sense that it's just not safe or okay to settle and be here. There's something churning, something kind of tugging us around. Now that may not be so for everyone in here. Some of you might feel very much at home. So you've graduated, you can leave now. No, it varies for us. But this is

really an invitation to keep checking. I mean, just that question, am I at home right now? Am I at home in this body right now? Or is there some wanting to kind of get away from it? I'm at home in my feelings, in my heart. Am I at home with those that are here? Is there a sense of here we are together? Am I a part of this web of life? And when we ask that, we find that usually

there's a kind of self-centered thinking process. Again, not self-centered like it's our fault. It's just that there's a preoccupation with, am I going to be okay, what will make me more comfortable, what's going to go wrong? And they're even under that, there's just this kind of restless energy. So depending on our culture and our personal history and what's gone on today, that not at home feeling can be exacerbated. And for many people, it's chronic. You might not think of it that way, but there's rare. a sense of, ah, here, now, this is what matters, it's okay, don't need to be somewhere else, doing something else. Depending on, as I mentioned, culture, family, and so on, there can be more

or less of that unease, that not-at-home feeling. And the more it's there, the more we tend to have behaviors and thought patterns that keep us from home. The more we're restless, anxious, the more we then do things that keep us from actually settling. We're trying to soothe ourselves. For those of the view that have been with me frequently, I call them false refuges. We're trying to find a home in the moment that makes us feel better, find something that comforts us.

And these are ways that we actually get in the habit of leaving home more and more through our moments and our days. Now, one of the most familiar, familiar false refuges is what I sometimes call the doing self. And this activity is necessary and beautiful in a part of the expression of being alive. This isn't about activity. But we get into this self that is so restless that we can't stop in some way doing. If we're not doing with our bodies, we're doing with our minds.

You know, that sense of always trying to figure something out. like there's always something you need to figure out that's a mental doing or just physically always needing to in some way feel like you're checking things off the list. William James described this as this ceaseless frenzy again this is over a hundred years ago so this is not this is not just contemporary he says that we're in this ceaseless frenzy of always thinking we should be doing something else can you relate to that I mean I can't it's very very hard to think, no, this is fine. There's some sense of there's something more.

There's this kind of tumbling into the future. That it's rare that we're at home enough to truly pause and inhabit a pause. Let me read to you Thomas Merton. He says the rush and pressure of modern life or a form, perhaps the most common form of contemporary violence, to allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects,

to want to help everyone and everything, is to succumb to violence. Now again, this doesn't mean that there can't be an incredible beauty and freedom to the generosity of serving. What it means is that if we're addicted to this doing, we violate our natural rhythms. We actually undo our capacity to be at home in our hearts. It's more like we're doing from an outside place,

but not from our hearts. So that's one of the false refuges, is this addiction to doing. The other false refuge is with others when rather than being at home or being present with others, there's some sense of trying to get something that we're chasing after approval or affection or attention.

But we're on our way. We're trying to get something from others not being there with them. Now in this story, an honest seven-year-old admitted calmly to her parents that Billy Brown had kissed her after class. How did that happen, gastromather? It wasn't easy, admitted the young lady, but three girls helped me catch him. So that's one of the false records.

is trying, is some sense we're trying to get whether it's somebody's money or somebody's time or somebody's approval. And just track yourself to sense when you're with others. Is there some this is a false refuge, something you're trying to get. And then of course the other one is something we're trying to avoid that we're in this some way we're pushing away or defending against. We're trying to control another because we're trying to manage how they view us because we don't want them to see something about us that we don't like. And again, just watch and notice how much of your experience with others has as a filter that you're trying to present something, appear a certain way, not have something happen. We usually have an agenda. False refuge. Another is that we

leave home by obsessive thinking. Perhaps the most ongoing way that we leave home is being lost in thought. And this is where a meditation practice is essential. That I don't know anything else that can really begin to have us recognize and wake up out of the dream as much as some intention in meditation. to start noticing how much we're gone, how much we're planning, our worrying, are judging. Now, another false refuge

that I wanted to talk about tonight is spoken about a lot in what's called terror management theory, TMT, and terror management theory talks about the strategies we employ to defend

against the fear of death. And it's pretty interesting how they describe we have all these different ways that we try not to feel this basic fear of mortality but one of the most basic that we try to get away from mortality

fears is by affiliating by finding an affiliation with something that's more sustained or larger or greater or more powerful than we perceive ourselves so hence we fix our sense of self

to a hero or to a nation or to a tribe or to a religion. And there can be a wholesome side to that. But I'll first mention the shadow side, how that's a false refuge. Because you can see it through history that there have been narrow exclusive affiliations. This is my group, my tribe,

that creates an other, right? And part of that affiliation, the glue, is that other is less than our bad or something we need to defend against or something we need to get something from. affiliation can cause trouble. There's an experiment that was done in Germany and it was to see how reminders of our impermanence

affected our attitude of affiliation towards nation. And there were these interviews and some were done by a shopping mall and some were done by a cemetery. And later they found that there was a lot more of a sense of affiliation and a favorable attitude towards Germany in this case when people were interviewed by the cemetery, German food, Germany is a place to vacation, Germany is going to win the World Cup.

You know, it just leaned it, it biased it. And this is just a subtle thing, where your interview is being held. But we know that the more people are afraid, the more narrow and rigid and destructive the affiliations can be. they compromise our sense of who we are. In other words, rather than paying attention to what matters to us,

to the creativity of who we can be, the need to affiliate, to conform, to belong, means that we will pretend, that we will repress or suppress parts of ourselves, do anything we can to fit into, whether it's a professional group, or whether it's a social group, or a dysfunctional family,

some of you might have watched 60 minutes recently with the interview with John Gatti Jr., who part of the mafia family, who described how even though it meant almost certain imprisonment and death, if you really were in the family and on the street, he said the loyalty to the family in the street, because that was the only belonging you knew, was in some way more nourishing than the knowledge of what it would lead to. And it was a very interesting interview in that sense that you could see the power of it even though they knew what would happen.

After listening to this 60 Minutes about this particular affiliation, this was sent to me. An old Italian lived alone in New Jersey. He wanted to plant his annual tomato garden, but it was very difficult work as the ground was hard. His only son, Vincent, who used to help was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son and described as predicament. Dear Vincent, I'm feeling pretty sad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year.

I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here, my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days. Love Papa. A few days later received a letter from his son. Dear Pop, don't dig up that garden. That's where the bodies are buried. Love Vinny. Love Vinny. Okay. At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologize to the old man and left.

That same day, the old man received another letter from his son. Dear Pop, go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances. Love you. Love you, Vinnie. I thought that was pretty creative. So this is really, we're talking about how we leave home, and one is a narrow affiliation. And again, William James, over 100 years ago, he wrote that all religions start with the cry help.

That in some way we perceive our insecurity, our fragility, our mortality, and we're looking for something to find a way to make peace that we lose everything. We lose these bodies, we lose who we love. So out of that cry for help, we sometimes latch on tightly.

Okay, we latch on tightly to the tribe or the religion or whatever and there's a sense of us and there can be a superior us and an inferior them. And sometimes, and this is really, when you think of the evolution of consciousness,

that same cry for help can have us intuit a belonging that really is true and wake up to it. And this is what you might describe is the difference between a narrow affiliation and an authentic spirituality that doesn't pit one thing against another

but really awakens us to a an inclusivity, a belonging that lets us find ourselves at home with this earth, with each other, with all of life. So that is what we call true refuge. True refuge is finding belonging, but finding a belonging that really honors the vastness and the love and the awareness. That's our shared source. So then we explore, again, as D.H. Lawrence puts it. He says, we must once more practice the ritual of dawn and noon and sunset, the ritual of the kindling, fire, and pouring water, the ritual of first breath and the last. We explore, okay, so what does that mean to us? How do we begin to plant ourselves in the universe,

to come home to true belonging? How do we learn to really belong to these bodies? right in this moment rather than leave them in obsessive thinking. How do we belong to our day rather than leaving in an unnecessary busyness? How do we belong to each other rather than getting caught in our fear and our habits of presenting something? How do we belong to the awareness that's here? Really rest in this vast awakenness. how do we come home? So in a way we'll look at, I sometimes think of them the healing fields,

how we kind of open our attention. And one is the training that we do very regularly here and are done in many different communities of really learning how to come back and with courage connect with the life that's right here. And that's even when it's a difficult life. How do we develop that mindfulness, that mindful awareness of what's right here? And the centerpiece of mindfulness is having some way of realizing we've been drifting in thoughts

and coming back. And the senses so that if right now you're able to listen to the sounds and able to feel the movement of your breath. And if you can pause enough to start feeling your body again, even if your mind was kind of playing with ideas to feel that, the senses are our earth that we replant into over and over and over again. One of the best teachings I've ever heard is don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts.

And don't believe your thoughts. Just notice them. Some of them are incredibly useful. Some of them are absolutely essential to survive. But you don't have to live in them. Because there's this incredible mystery and vastness right here. Each time you say, okay, pause, come back. What's actually happening here?

So we practice meditation. This is the first way of planting herself in the universe. Come out of the thoughts. and anchor yourself right here in this breath, in this breath, and in this breath. So a story for you, with one man who came to me and described his anguish commuting on the subway, that he said he'd have this morning meditation. And he said, it would be a great meditation sometimes. Sometimes it wasn't a great, but either way he'd be more at home, he'd be center, he'd be balanced,

and then he'd go off to work, and he said it got trashed every day, no matter what, that he was on the subway, totally trashed. And he would describe he'd get on there, and it wasn't just the press of the bodies. He said it was the rudeness, like, that each person was not just out for themselves, but there was like a hostility almost. And, you know, we do know it, that there is a bit of a self-against the world thing when you're trying to get somewhere. you know how people talk about traffic and traffic is always the other guy we're never part of traffic I mean we might be there driving

but traffic's everyone else so it's the same thing but for him it was the it was the rudeness primarily that something in his nervous system could not you know say this is okay too and so

we talked about how this could become as practice and how what would it mean for him to plant himself in the universe in those moments? Because it's not enough to plant yourself in the universe when you're, for me, walking by the Potomac River, when you're on the mountain peak or in that perfect sanctuary. You know, it's in the hard times. And so he committed himself to letting his breath and, you know, just feeling his breath and his senses be a kind of home base. And he would, you know, he kind of would use what I described as saying coming back,

you know, if the wheels, if he's spinning around feeling, you know, angry, resentful and irritated at the crush of bodies and rudeness coming back and he just feels his breath and he just start naming in his mind. You don't have to name it out loud, but this is really helpful. Okay, irritated, agitated, angry, hot in here. heart pounding, tight. He'd just named what he was aware of and he'd keep breathing and gradually he said he'd started

looking around more and really looking at the other people there. A little bit of stealth looking, you know, not like gaze eye into eye in a soulful way kind of thing or he'd get knocked out you know, but just starting to notice

it's almost like as he started to pay attention to what was going on inside him, he started to pay attention in a more curious way. And curious was his word. He said, I got curious. He hadn't been curious before. The more at home he was in his senses, the more he started noticing. And he'd start noticing and start in a way in his mind sensing, well, what's the story of that person, but not in a kind of cognitive way, but a feeling way. Like, oh, that person is really anxious or worried or sad, are excited,

are feeling really, really zippy or buzzed or whatever it was. He'd just start noticing and noticing other person's humor and other person's kindness or another person's upsetness. And on some level, he said, he got the sense of here we are. And for him, just those words, well, here we are. It wasn't like self and world anymore. He had come home to his senses and then it just here we are, this mix of beings.

And for him, that was a bit of a taste of freedom. Now it's one thing to come home, to plant ourselves in the universe when nobody's directly violating us or when, you know, we're not really caught in a strong emotional tangle. but those are the times that homecoming is hard. Homecoming when we're with somebody that's very, very upset with something or with us, or homecoming when somebody has treated us poorly or when something really difficult has happened in our lives. Some weeks ago, I was teaching in New England.

I started introducing what I'm talking about with you. This really the practices of, you know, that the essence of freedom is coming back right here and then being here with what's going on. So I started in the weekend like that and very early on, somebody raised your hand and said, look, I lost my job a few months ago. I spent decades getting to that job. I feel terrible about myself and I'm scared about the future.

And when you say come back, I'm just coming back to feeling terrible about myself and scared about the future. Why would anyone choose to hang out with that? and everybody looked at me expectantly because why would we? And why be present, you know? And so we worked a bit with that. And the first step was that what she was coming back to

was a swim of thoughts about what else was going to go wrong, how she'd never find a job again or never feel good about herself and how evil the world was, in a sense, evil her corporation, but really the economy. But it was thought. So I said, okay, the first step is notice the thoughts, but just start breathing with what's really going on in your body and just see if you can just try breathing with that

and tell me what you notice. And what she mostly noticed was the fear, and there was a story around of it, is I'm a failure and I'll never feel successful again, but it was fear. And when I said, okay, what would happen if you just let it be there and keep breathing with it for a bit, very quickly, very quickly, when she just let it be there,

she found under the fear of this grieving that she had lost something, just kind of pure. She had lost her tribe in a way. You know, she belonged to something she had lost. And of course there was a fear that she wouldn't find another tribe, but it was just loss. So I said, okay, before you make stories more around that, just stay with that.

And I even asked a question I often ask, which is how does that place want you to be with it? And that was an important question for her, because that grieving place just wanted her to accept that there's grief. It's kind of like a child, if you sense a child wants from us, you know, on one level maybe they want us to fix everything, but in another they just want us to be with them as they are and know this is how I feel, just to acknowledge.

to let it be real and to care. And that's what her grief wanted. Let the grief be real. And it wanted to feel that she cared, just that there was care there. So as often, as many of you that have practiced with me know, her practice was to put her hand on her heart, to just with a physical touch kind of send that message in,

this is grief, and I care. I care. And so she sat and through the weekend, many moments I noticed her sitting there, kind of like I am now. She actually used two hands. And she was offering just what her grief wanted from her, okay, feeling disconnected, feeling lost, caring, caring. She shared at the end of the weekend a shift that was really, really beautiful, which is she said, the difference right now is I really, really want, I feel like there's a refuge that I can come to, a place where I can hold this and I want to offer this refuge to others because I know so many people

that have lost their jobs, so many people. And so in a way to me the shift was she belonged to something larger. It was not so much that separate self, the world out there. And so, there, I've had a devastating blow. It's all of us in different ways are struggling with different things. And I'm part of the all of us. And it was a shift from suffering to the pain of that, but not having it be so personal and so much anguish. Does that make sense, that shift?

In the spiritual traditions, this is the basic mechanism that moves us from suffering to freedom. It's a shift in identity. Rather than identifying as a small, beleaguered, oppressed self, there's a sense of belonging to something larger, belonging to presence, belonging to each other, belonging to life. And when there's even a little of that belonging,

we're belonging to the aliveness of this body right now. We wake up out of this story of separation, and we begin to discuss. truth, freedom. So one of the pathways to this belonging is this radical presence, where we just say, okay, even if I don't see any reason why I want to be with this, I'm going to put aside the thoughts and just breathe and be with what's here. That's one of the pathways to belonging. Another one of the pathways, which is very hand in hand, is directly turning to sense our heart, directly turning to sense our heart

to kind of plant ourselves in what I think of as relatedness what do I belong to in terms of each other the field the Buddha talked about two wings of waking up and that one of the wings is what is happening right here this mindful noticing but the other wing is really the wing of

who are we together what's this heart that's here that shared And truly on the spiritual path, it's not one or the other. We keep on training ourselves to be present and we train our attention to sense how can we really wake up our heart with each other. It's an act of training. Maybe share a story with you that I love

that takes place in springtime that talks about the healing that comes when we sense this belonging. Several years ago in Seattle, Washington, there lived a 52-year-old Tibetan refugee, Tenzin. He was diagnosed with lymphoma. He was admitted to the hospital and received his first dose of chemotherapy, but during the treatment, this usually gentleman became extremely upset and angry. He pulled the IV out of his arm and refused to cooperate. He shouted at the nurses and became argumentative with everyone who came near him. The doctors and nurses were baffled.

Then Tenzin's wife spoke to the hospital staff. She told him that he had been a political prisoner by the Chinese for 17 years. They killed his first wife and repeatedly tortured and brutalized him throughout his imprisonment. She told him that the hospital rules and regulations, coupled with the chemotherapy treatments, gave Tenzin horrible flashbacks of what he had suffered. suffered the hands of the Chinese. I know you mean to help him, she said, but he feels tortured by your treatments.

They're causing him to feel hatred inside just as he felt toward the Chinese. He would rather die than have to live with the hatred he's now feeling. And according to our belief, it is very bad to have hatred in your heart at the time of death. He needs to be able to pray and cleanse his heart.

So the doctor's discharged Hansen and asked the hospice team to visit him in his home. I was a hospice nurse assigned his care. And I called a local representative from Amnesty International for advice. He told me that the only way to heal the damage from torture is to talk it through. This person has lost his trust in humanity and feels hope is impossible. The man said, if you were to help him, you must find a way to give him hope. But when I encouraged Tenzin to talk about his experience, he held up his hand and stopped me.

He said, I must learn to love again if I am to heal my heart. Your job is not to ask me questions. Your job is to teach me to love again. I took a deep breath. I asked him, so how am I help you to love again? Tenson immediately replied, sit down, drink my tea, and eat my cookies. Now, Tibetan tea is strong black tea laced with yak butter and salt. It isn't easy to drink, but that's what I did. Several weeks, Tenzin and his wife sat together, we drank tea. We also worked with doctors to find ways to treat us physical pain, but it was a spiritual pain that seemed to be lessening. Each time I arrived, Tenzin was sitting cross-legged on his bed, reciting prayers from his books. As time went on, he and his wife hung more and more colorful Tanca's, that's Tibetan Buddhist banners on the walls.

The room was fast becoming a beautiful religious shrine. When the spring came, I asked Tenzin what Tibetans do when they are ill in the spring. He smiled brightly and said, we sit downwind from flowers. I thought he might be speaking poetically, but Tenzin's words were quite literal. He told me to bed and sit downwind so they can be dusted with the new blossoms, pollen, that floats on the spring breeze. They feel this new pollen as strong medicine. At first, finding enough blossoms seemed a bit daunting. Then one of my friends suggested that Tenzin visits some of the local flower nurseries. I called the manager of one of the nurseries and explained the situation.

The manager's initial request was, You want to do what? But when I explained the request, the manager agreed. So the next weekend, I picked Tenzin up with his wife and their provisions for the afternoon, black tea, butter, salt, cups, cookies, prayer beads, and prayer books. I dropped them off of the nursery and assured them I'd return at 5 p.m. The following weekend, Tenzin his wife visited another nursery.

The third weekend, they went to yet another. The fourth week, I began to get calls from the nurseries, inviting Tenzin and his wife to come again. One of the managers said, oh, we've got a new shipment of Nikotianna, is that am I saying it right, coming in, and some wonderful fuchsias. And, oh, yes, some great Daphne.

I know they would love the scent of that, Daphne. Oh, and I almost forgot, we've got some new lawn furniture that Tensin and his wife might enjoy it. Later that day, I got a call from a second nursery saying they had a colorful wind sock that would help Tensin predict where the wind was blowing. Pretty soon the nurse.

were competing for Tenzin's visits. People began to know and care about the Tibetan couple. The nursery employees started setting out lawn furniture in the direction of the wind. Others would bring out fresh hot water for their tea. Some of the regular customers would leave their wagons of flowers near the two of them. It seemed that a community was growing around Tenzin and his wife. At the end of the summer, Tenzin returned to his doctor for another CT scan to determine the extent of the spread of the cancer,

but the doctor could find no evidence of cancer at all. He was dumbfounded. He told Tenzin he just couldn't explain it. Tenzin lifted his finger and said, I know why the cancer has gone away. It could no longer live in a body that was so filled with love. When I began to feel all the compassion from the hospice people, from the nursery employees,

from all the people wanted to know about me, I started to change inside. Now I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to hear, heal in this way. Doctor, please remember that your medicine is not the only cure. Sometimes compassion can heal as well. Now the message of this story is not that when we turn towards love, when we take refuge in love, when we come home to relatedness, that our bodies will necessarily heal from cancer. It's that our hearts will heal, that we will come home in a way that most matters, that most gives us freedom regardless of what happens to these bodies that the medicine is love.

Two wings. What is happening in this moment? And can I hold this with kindness? Two wings. So we know through science there's been more and more research, the power of relatedness. And we know we've seen so many studies now that loneliness increases people's risk for heart disease and stroke and other ailments. In one study, the effects of loneliness and isolation, they say, is as bad for you as smoking cigarettes. And we know that connectedness heals. There is a sense in community of homecoming.

And it's not that false narrowed affiliation. There's more of a sense that just of belonging in a way to a field of beings, that remind us of our shared awareness, our shared heart. And it happens in the moments of just simple presence and in the moments when we're giving from the heart and in the moments when we're receiving. And the receiving is really important. Because some of us have this training that it's really good

and right and important and virtuous to give, give, give. And if we really get honest, we'll find that it is painfully difficult to take in and that we actually have a hard time trusting and receiving other people's appreciation and love. That it might be that you can think of someone who loves you and mentally say, yes, I know that person loves me. But to have a visceral sense of just letting that wash through you, that's not as common. It involves giving and receiving because it's in giving and letting out that love and expressing it that we wake up out of that sense of tightness and it's in letting it in and wash through that we also discover that non-separation. In a way that this is the meaning

of blessing, that this relatedness is a blessing. A blessing is whatever wakes us up to a larger truth of what we are. Rachel Naomi Remen, who is a wonderful writer and and teacher describes her experience when her grandfather died. She said she was seven years old. She writes, I'd never lived in a world without a minute before, and it was hard for me. He had looked at me as no one else had and called me by a special name, Nishumala, which means little beloved soul. There was no one left to call me this anymore. At first I was afraid that without him to see me and tell God who I was, I might disappear. But slowly over time, I came to understand that in some mysterious way

I had learned to see myself through his eyes and that once blessed we are blessed forever. Many years later, when in her extreme old age my mother surprisingly began to light candles and talk to God herself, I told her about these blessings and what they had meant to me. She had smiled at me sadly. I have blessed you every day of your life, Rachel, she told me.

I just never had the wisdom to do it out loud. So we're exploring tonight the pathways of homecoming, and one is really to commit ourselves to this presence, the wake up out of the trance of thinking and just be here. And the other is this pathway of loving where we give of ourselves and we receive. We let the blessings come and go. And in the training of the loving kindness meditation we often do in the Buddhist tradition, quite simply we, we, see the goodness, just as Rachel's grandfather did, and we acknowledge it. We let others know. We let others know because we offer them our prayer in a silent way, but we also express it. And we train ourselves to let ourselves feel love and to let it come in. And both of those trainings is really part of this pathway to feeling our communion with each other, that we really are not separate.

that we really can come home to a sense of beingness that's very vast and very alive and very free. So we'll do a practice of these pathways, just a short way of closing tonight, as we often do, just to sense that this too is a pause, that rather than tumbling into the closing of the evening and going home, that you're pausing again. and that itself is a way of offering a blessing.

To just stop. It's radical and it's very mysterious to invite yourself to come back right here to the hub, to this presence that's right here. Perhaps to feel the inflow and outflow of the breath. This is a home base. It's kind of a friend that connects you. moment to moment. One of the pathways of homecoming is to simply notice and allow the life that's right here.

So you might scan your body and your heart and if there's something that stands out, if there's physical discomfort, or excitement, or tingling, or heat, or if there's some emotional discomfort, restless, anxious or maybe some pleasant emotion, peace, love. You might mentally whisper what's here. To replant yourself in this universe just to notice what's happening and let it be if what's there in the moment is difficult, very intentionally kind. In fact, if it's difficult and helps to put your hand on your heart

and just as that woman did and I described it with her two-hand, just presence, it's okay what's here. I care about this suffering, I care about what's here. And just sense the intimacy that comes when there's a little kindness and presence offered inwardly doesn't mean it goes away, the discomfort, but you're belonging to your own loving presence, something larger, that's homecoming.

And then we take a few moments to explore our relatedness with others, first sensing someone that's just easy for you to feel your care for. Somebody in this world that you trust cares for you, that you sense understand you. It could be somebody very close to you or even somebody's not so close to you, but you trust the connection. And bring that person right into your awareness right here so you can see his or her face and see his or her eyes. And sense how that person looks at you or can express their love with their face, with their eyes,

since the person sending the message to you of care. And see if it's possible to let that energy in. Let the sincerity of that love bathe your heart, wash through your heart, hold you, and sense that blessing of non-separation, the feeling of belonging, and how that lets you be at home in something larger. And sense your own heart responding to that person, see that person's goodness, sense that person when they're happy, sense the glow in that person's eyes, the humor, the intelligence, how that person shows love. You can sense how that person lives in your heart.

And you might mentally whisper a message of love to that person. And imagine that person receiving that. Imagine that person being soothed and uplifted, gladdened with your love. And then letting go of any image of another person or yourself just to feel that loving presence. Feel that kind of edgelessness of heart that really includes life,

the life that's right here, your family, friends, this living earth, all beings. So we'll close tonight the way we open, chanting the sound current of ome, of connectedness, of homecoming and belonging.

I'll just chant three times again, centering at the heart. Please inhale deeply. So thank you for your attention. and a few things before we leave. One is that you might feel your intention to maybe greet one person you've never met before and just sense who you're a part of here,

who's here in the way we've talked about tonight. Blessings, thank you for coming. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you would like to contact the Insight Meditation Community of Washington to make a donation or to learn more or better, programs, please visit our website at www.imcw.org.