Tara Brach - Trusting Your Basic Goodness: Part 2

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

This talk continues the exploration of what causes our distrust of ourselves, others and life, and the pathways to realizing and trusting who we are. We explore the steps of awakening from limiting beliefs, dissolving the resistance to direct embodied presence, and discovering the space and tenderness – the formless dimension – that is indivisible and whole.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. I'm often asked the question, you know, what has changed over the decades of practicing meditation? And in a deep way, what I can say is that I have more trust in unfolding reality. You know, more trust in the basic goodness, the Buddha nature in myself and in others. And even when there's clear self-centeredness and delusion and aggression playing out, there's a deep place to me that sees these waves on the ocean and really trusts our potential for goodness.

And trusting that brings me a lot more. more ease and energy and happiness and open-heartedness. So I'm focusing on trust last week, this week. Trust, realizing our belonging, which is what allows for trust, it really frees us to live fully, to lovefully. There's a quote from Srinar Sorgadatta, one of my teachers, that I go back to over and over again that I'll share with you right now. He writes this. He says, when you look at anything as separate from you, you cannot love it, you're afraid of it. But when you know beyond all doubting that the same life that flows through you, flows through all that is and you are that life, every living being in the entire universe

are included in your heart. So this is the radical belonging that allows us to trust and it's something that we can cultivate with meditation, which is the theme of this second part in my talk on trust from the archives that I'm sharing with you. So, friends, I'm wishing for you that you may touch that radical deep sense of belonging that so nourishes, our hearts, that it'll allow you to love without holding back. Thank you. This class is part of a two-part exploration and last week we really kind of had this inquiry of what would our life be like if we truly trusted our basic goodness, if we trusted the awareness and heart, it's really right at the source of our being and if we looked at others

and trusted that same goodness. And so we're going to continue in that. And it's really a larger question even of just trusting life, trusting the benevolence, a basic kind of benevolence or goodness that's here. So the inquiry is partly what stops us and partly what nourishes trust. And there's an underlying recognition, no matter where we stand in this, that we're all, this is universal, we're all preconditioned to, it's kind of the bias, the evolutionary bias, to assume something's wrong.

It's part of our survival equipment, that we assume something's wrong and we assume it with ourselves. If we feel separate, we tend to feel like we're in some way deficient and we assume it with others, that something's wrong, and with life. So if we just bear witness to today, we can see that rigging in action in the way the mind works, that a lot of moments there are worry thoughts, we're planning and trying to make sure something doesn't go wrong. I heard a couple of years ago about a prank that some high school kids did in Montana.

that struck me, they released three goats into their school and they painted on them number one, number two, and number four. And then school teachers and the administrator spent the whole rest of the day looking for goat number three. So you know that saying that we move through life as if it's a problem to be solved, not a mystery to be lived. that there's that mentality of something's wrong and we've got to pay attention to it. And it comes from our, it's this universal design that we incarnate and we feel separate and

that's all beings have that. But the effect of it, and there's a lot of reasons for this, but the effect of it is to be over vigilant and often to get hijacked, have our whole lives hijacked by fear, by anxiety anxiety, by kind of reactivity. There's a study I thought was really interesting that was done with young rat pups and the researcher observed them for quite a while and how they played freely with each other and then he introduced to their environment a single hair from cat's fur, single hair put it into their play environment, totally the play stopped and then it never resumed to its

levels from before. And so it's an interesting question that what happens when there's a signal of danger introduced into our lives and the writer says if you happen to be really young or really vulnerable can mean that life is never the same again. And so it's an interesting question, what is the cat's hair for us? Because if there's a single cat's hair in our environment and it's not addressed, then nothing else is important until it's no longer a threat because we're in reactivity. We can't be fully here.

The cat's hair triggers it's not safe. I can't relax, I can't really be present, I have to be vigilant. So in a lot of our practice we're saying, okay just recognize. that's red and learn to see, okay, I'm really okay. You know, that was then and now is now. But here's the twist and that is sometimes a cat's hair means there really is a cat nearby, right? Okay? And that if you're a baby rat, does this whole notion of trusting basic goodness mean that you rely on the cat's dedication to nonviolence or something? You know, to its higher consciousness, you know.

Maybe it's on its eighth life and it doesn't want to take any chances. But this is really relevant. You know, I just got back from teaching a retreat and one of the, every true retreat I teach and that I attend, there's a touching into a quality of openness and feeling more of a sense of connection and belonging and this yearning to be able to go home and at work and with partners or family or whatever, be able to stay with that less defended quality of being. And there's the question, how do you do it if there's hostility awaiting you? How do you do it if others aren't trying to be more conscious and are actually caught in their

own reactivity in a way that can be hurtful? So this is really a question about, well, what does it really mean to trust basic goodness if there's danger around, you know, or should we be trusting ourselves? You know, what if the question comes to me over and over again, well, how can I trust myself when I see how I keep on hurting myself or hurting others? How can I trust myself when I'm doing an addictive behavior that I know is ruining my life? These are really important questions. So I don't want to kind of gloss over them as we talk about basic trust because in some way we use our

mistrust and our self-judgment to motivate ourselves to be different. Chief Executive of a large company was greatly admired for his energy and drive, but he suffered from one embarrassing weakness, which was that each time he'd make a report in the President's office and this was happening, I think once a month he'd wet his pants. So this was really embarrassing. So the President advised him to see a urologist at the company's expense. But when he appeared the following month before the president, his pants were wet again. So the president said, didn't you see the urologist?

And the response was, no, he was out. I saw a psychiatrist instead and I'm cured. I no longer feel embarrassed. So this is a question about what do we trust? What do we make peace with? And I think one of the best teachings around it's an Islamic phrase, it's praise Allah, and tie your camel to the post, both. Meaning, we can trust some essential sacredness or goodness

and know that there's human conditioning playing out that we have to take care with. It can be both. But let's look a little closer when we say, what is it we're really trusting? Like if you ask yourself, what can I really trust about myself? You might check that out.

What can I really trust about myself? What can I trust in all circumstances? You might ask that question and realize that, well, at any given point, your conditioning can kick in and hijack everything. We know that. So what can we trust? A way that I've come to understand this is that we can't trust that we can't trust that we'll be immune to conditioning that's universal. We can't trust that we're not going to harm others

and we're not going to harm ourselves. But what we can trust is we have the potential to wake up. And Dalai Lama said once he was asked the question, what would he recommend for Western students to most pay attention to and most put their faith on? He said, the capacity to awaken and through all circumstances. That no matter what is arising, we have this potential to awaken love and to rest in a quality of presence as profoundly wise. We have that potential. What lets us trust it?

You wouldn't be here right now, or for those of you, other places around the globe, wouldn't be listening right now if you hadn't already touched and had a glimmer of and a taste of basic goodness. If you didn't have some intuition of this that lives through us, this potential to really love without holding back, this potential to be really touched and care about others, and this potential to be very, very awake to feel a sense of wonder and deep presence, we've touched it. And of course, because we go into trance, along with having experiences of love and awareness, our deepest longing is to have more of that. So sometimes we're actually touching something and sometimes we're just feeling the longing

to touch it but it's from the same source. It's there. I was talking to my mom a couple years ago on the way back from class, she'd drive back and forth with me and she'd be here. And her Barnard philosophy major came out. She went into a role and she started challenging me. She says, well, so what makes this loving presence more basic than greed and aversion and aggression and cruelty? And then she said, maybe we're just trying to believe what we want to believe that this is the source and everything else is conditioning. Are we manufacturing the spiritual experience we want to have. Not bad questions, right?

These are fair? She was into epistemology. She really was into this stuff. So the truth is there's nothing mentally or conceptually we can prove. That's why after a certain point, you know, there's Dharma talks and Dharma talks. It's really our own practice where we touch into what feels like truth to us. but there is a way that we can examine this that can be very helpful. So let's just take a moment to reflect for ourselves, okay, to put the intellect aside and

just in a more direct way reflect on our experience. And so we're really exploring, you know, how can we trust basic goodness? What lets us trust it? What's it like to trust it? And maybe to begin with bringing to mind a situation that makes you doubt yourself deeply. We all have them situations in our life where we've in some way caused injury to another person. I mentioned addictions where we find our ways of consuming or acting out, are causing

us harm, our ways of being codependent, our ways of being codependent, our ways of being pushing people away. We have situations where we feel like we've really failed and that maybe we feel we're going to always fail. So what's a situation that makes you doubt your basic goodness where you feel caught in imperfection and really not okay? We'll take a few moments to examine this if you have a situation in mind and sometimes I'll ask you to come up with an idea or situation and maybe it's not there and that's fine. You can feel your way in to it anyway and perhaps explored another time. But for now when you believe you're flawed, what's it like in your body to believe that? How does it feel? Just note what does your body

do? What's the experience in the body when you're in mistrust and feeling deficient and flawed? And your heart, how does your heart feel? When you're feeling and believing that you're deficient and flawed and not trustworthy, what's your capacity in relating with other people? How present are you? How much can you perceive about others? What's your habit in terms of others? Is it judging? Or do you see them as good? When you're feeling deficient, when you're not trusting yourself, what's your tendency in terms of behavior? What does it bring you and what type of activities come out of that? What's your energy like? And if you're you...

You just ask that most basic question, who am I when you're sensing deficiency, doubt. What happens when you ask that question, who am I? Now take a few full breaths and you might inhale and extend the arms up and exhale and then relax the breath but keep the arms up and open and close the fists and shake the hands a little and then inhale again, stretch way up. Deep inhale a little more, a little more. And as you exhale, just let the arms flow gently down. And again, relax, come into stillness.

It's called a state interrupter. We need to go into a different state now. Okay, this time an experience or situation where you sense some love that you trust, where you sense the quality of awareness, where you sense a quality of perhaps wonder, where you're in touch with beauty. So it may be being with a certain person or a certain activity. It might be when you're in a state of being prayerful.

So some situation or experience where you feel like you're touching goodness. It's not an ego kind of good personhood, but really deep. That kind of innocence or sincerity. where you sense your honesty, your truthfulness, your capacity of love, that you're really in this to wake up your heart. Let yourself feel that sincerity and notice when you do what your body feels like, what's the experience inside your body when you're touching this deep goodness. And what does your heart feel like when there's a sense of trusting and touching goodness?

When you're feeling in touch with your own heart and awareness, what's your presence like with others? How are you with others? What do you perceive about others? That asks that question, you know, noticing how you might behave, what kind of activity or behavior comes out of this inner sense of being aligned, trusting, sensing goodness. Then the most basic question, when you're feeling that love and awareness that's here, trusting it. What's a sense of who you are?

It's the deepest sense of your own identity. You might just take a moment to imagine how might your life change? Change if you dedicated yourself to realizing and trusting this basic goodness. It's sometimes called Buddha nature or loving presence that's within. How would your life change if this became the very conscious and central part of your path. Just bringing your attention now to a little bit more of an exploration. If you'd like to open your eyes, it's fine. Come on back if you'd like. Okay. So the challenge, as we know, is that the attention gets narrow, gets fixated, we get identified with our wants

and our insecurity and we forget what's called the timeless dimension. That that's space of heart and awareness over and over again. So we forget Allah and we get obsessed with how we're tying the camel to the post and not obsessed with how it could get stolen or how we're doing things wrong. And many different, there have been many different wise descriptions of this kind of chain reaction that happens inside us when we're forgetting. And it often happens unconsciously where we have a certain feeling that might be anxious and then the thoughts and the beliefs start going of, you know, this is what's wrong with me

or this is what's wrong with the world and this is how I have to change and this is how you should be, that kind of stuff happens. And then the emotions get stronger and then we have a behavior that comes out of it that might be defensive or aggressive. And this starts creating our character. And as Gandhi said, it creates our character and our character creates our destiny. Because it happens over and over again that we have these feelings and these thoughts and they lead to the behaviors and then our identity gets more solid

and that becomes our destiny. We keep replaying the patterns. And the patterns are one that have the suffering of mistrust. That's the most basic suffering, that there's some sense of severed belonging and that I'm bad or that you're bad. And it comes in a lot of different ways. In the most extreme ways when we're feeling really a whole lot of mistrust, emotionally we're chronically anxious, depressed, angry, not all of them at once but sometimes.

We're constantly afraid of being rejected or replaying conflicts because it's too scary to get close. And of course there's a whole slew of addictions that come with that. But it's not always that extreme. a lot of us that have many moments where we're not trusting and we're not at home and we're not really in touch with that basic goodness, that deep sense of love and presence. So we're not living from our full creativity and intelligence but it's not like a crippling emotional thing and so it's more kind of the social self-doubts like people aren't going

to be interested in me or it's or it might be at work a sense of of a fear of being judged for performance and just not being able to be as creative and natural as we want to be. So that we move through that in our spontaneity and our humor and our playfulness and our intelligence doesn't come through because what happens instead is that we're on some level hijacked by a sense of something's wrong. One of my favorite examples of this is a woman who came from Michigan to New England in the summers to vacation.

and she went to the same town that slowly Paul Newman was vacationing in. And her ritual was that every Sunday she would go for a long hike and then she'd go to this coffee house bakery place that had ice cream and she'd get this double-deck cone of ice cream, chocolate ice cream and so on. Well, she goes in one Sunday and there he is. And so he's the only patron there and he's having his donut and coffee and her heart skips a beat as she sees, you know, those famous baby blue eyes and he nods graciously and this star-struck woman is smiling demurely but inside she's going

pull yourself together you know you're a happily married woman with three children you're 45 years old you're not a teenager don't blow it don't blow it you know it's like self-doubt the clerk fell saw her daughter she gets this double the chocolate ice cream cone in one hand or change the other so she goes she glides out the door without even a glance in his direction goes to the car and realizes that she doesn't have her scream gone. Back into the store she goes and it's not on the rack, it's not in the clerk's hand so finally she looks over in his direction and he you know that familiar warm grin breaks out on him and he says you put it in your purse. Look what you did. So it's not always deep suffering but there's something that happens when we're not in trusting

ourselves and in touch and at home with ourselves and I sometimes think of it in terms of grace, that when we're in the flow and really trusting life there's a certain quality of grace but when we're mistrusting we're at odds and we get awkward. Okay? Sometimes really awkward. And basically we keep replaying patterns and that's where the suffering is for many of us that we can see that this pattern I was replaying in high school I'm still doing. You know, that there's still the same kind of patterning with other people.

I was talking about this years ago and to a young man who described, said that he reminded himself of the tiger at the D.C. National Zoo. Her name was Mojini, this regal white tiger. And she lived there for many years in this 12 by 12 cage pacing back and forth in her cramped quarters. Well, finally the zoologists and naturalists and staff worked together to create this natural habitat out I think was by Front Royale. Several acres had trees, pond, little hills, variety of vegetation. So it was really with a lot of excitement and anticipation that they took Mojini out to be in her new compound. And when they let her into it, what she did was she went right to the corner and began pacing in the corner.

and she paced an area 12 by 12 that was worn of grass and she did it for the rest of her life. She just paced. And so it is with us that when we have this kind of self-doubt and sense of something's wrong with me or something's wrong with you, that the patterns that come out of it keep on replaying until we begin to notice how much suffering it's creating. you might have noticed as you reflected when you're believing that you're flawed, the whole body mind contracts. We separate from our awareness, from our heart, from this natural capacity for intelligence

and love. We just get tight. So the deep inquiry really is how when we're caught in that mistrust do we begin to shift experience so that we can touch into and begin to come home to something more large and true. How do we come home? In our last class we explored one pathway that's really powerful which is intentionally looking to see goodness.

You're reflecting on ourselves and really looking to see the goodness and if we can't see it in our, you know, the qualities that we sometimes look towards just remembering our aspiration that deep down each of us sincerely wants to be happy, wants to love well, wants to realize truth. Just to realize that is the beginning of softening towards ourselves. So the value of this pathway of looking for the goodness in ourselves and in each other is that we have this core conditioning to see what's wrong and it begins to decondition that. We begin to wake up out of that conditioning and see more of the truth.

This class we're going to be looking in a different way and really we're going to be exploring how can we actually come into and relax into reality as it is so that we trust the life that's right here, the being that's right here. And there's a deep understanding which is we will never truly trust our life that's right here. ourselves and our life, as long as we're trying to control it. As long as we're trying to make ourselves and others different, on any level, as long as there's some manipulation, some control in, we're going to be mistrusting what is. The only way to trust what is, open to it, feel it, discover that this reality we're

trying to manage is what we are. We are this reality. That's the homecoming. That if we want to understand the real meaning of grace, it's letting go into the flow and then realizing we are that flow. That there's nothing to fear. There's nothing outside of what we are. So there's some steps to this because we live in a very tight way of believing that we're

separate, that it's us here and the world out there. And then that whole patterning I described of beliefs and feelings and behaviors and destiny comes out of that. So I'm going to give you the steps that those of you that have been exploring this path of mindful awareness and compassion are familiar with, but it's valuable to look at them with this lens of how do we deepen our trust. And the first step is we need to get the knack of stepping out of our own. our narrative, out of the storyline. Carlos Casignata, who writes about the sorcerer

Dom Wan, has this. He says, we maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A man or woman of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. This is, to me, really profound, that when we see stop, listen, it doesn't mean we have to vanquish thoughts. It means we have to stop believing our thoughts. And that's the key. John O'Donohue puts it this way. He says, our bodies know that they belong. Our bodies belong to life. It's our minds that make us so homeless. If you're lost in thought and believing your thoughts, you're living in a world where there's a sense of a self that's apart from the world that will bring up fear and mistrust. We need

just step out of our thoughts. Part of it is to start noticing the content of the thoughts, how they create a sense of self and a sense of separation and a sense of wrongness, but even more so sensing how in the moments of thinking when we're lost in the thoughts, we're in a virtual reality. You know, we're living as if the images and the soundbites in our mind are the real thing and we're actually cut off from our senses. As you practice meditation and wake up from thoughts and come back, you'll notice that when you were in thoughts you weren't listening to the sounds that are right here. And when you're in thoughts you're not feeling the body that's right here or the heart that's right here. So that's the first step is to wake up

out of the thoughts and the profound realization that will carry you the whole way is you don't have to believe them. They're just thoughts. Or as one of my teachers puts it, one of my favorite phrases is they're real in the sense they're happening, but they're not true. They're not the truth. They're just sound bites and images. That's step one. The second step is you come into the life that's right here and recognize what's happening and let it be. Recognize it allow it. Now in order to recognize and allow it, the word allow is key to really let be, there is a tendency to resist so we have to relax the resistance. And another way of saying that is we have to forgive. Forgiving simply means to let go of our resistance.

We have an armoring to the life that's here, an armoring against raw feelings, an armoring against what feels like it might be too much or what's unfamiliar. So by very intentionally forgiving what's here, are offering kindness to what's here, we begin to soften that armoring and allow life to be just as it is. So that's step two, is to recognize and allow, which means often some gesture of kindness to help dissolve the armoring of resistance. Step 3, we often miss, which is then deepen and fully inhabit the aliveness, the yes. In other words, you're saying yes to life, not like I love what's happening or this is

great or may it go on forever. It's not any of those things. But yes means that we honestly recognize this is the actuality. We're actually letting reality be what it is. That's three, really deep in it. And the fourth step is that we're aware of the waves of reality and also aware of that formless dimension, that awareness, that presence that's here. And we rest as that.

You might think of it as waves in the ocean that we keep opening to the waves, opening to the waves, saying yes to them, forgiving them, then we inhabit, then we feel them, and then we realize, oh, this is ocean-ness, this is awareness. The more regularly you move from the narrative that says something's wrong to this full embodied presence, the more your sense of who you are will shift. And it's a shift from believing the self that is portrayed in the narrative that self-carriage that's busily trying to do things to be better and avoid things that are wrong or bad are going to cause trouble, to resting in a sense of awareness and love that includes the

waves but you're not identified as that small self. Let me give you a sense of how one woman navigated this that might give you a better feeling for it, this movement from feeling that doubt. to feeling some freedom. And this was many years ago, a woman I worked with who had rheumatide arthritis, and she had been a dancer and was a teacher. But now she was having increasingly limited movement. And every time she would feel unpleasantness, it triggered a cascade for her.

It triggered a cascade, and it felt like not only was her physical unpleasantness, but she was being punished, that in some way she had done something wrong and that her life, she had lost her grace and without the capacity to move with ease and without that grace her life was downhill. So something was stolen from her. So her identity was a sick person, oppressed by a condition, a fearful self and totally mistrusting life. Life took away what she loved. she couldn't dance and she couldn't even move with grace.

So that's the set up. And her mind was making her homeless. I mean, the more her mind ran that narrative, the more she disconnected from herself, she and her partner. I mean, she was becoming very bitter and distant. And she had done what she could medically. So we were working together. And first we spent some time having her just witness the attitude,

the narrative that was going on. You know, I'm wrong, this is bad, I have a terrible future. And so the first part of the training was just to get the knack of saying, okay, these are thoughts, real but not true, these are thoughts. I don't have to believe them even though she believed them, she didn't have to believe them. That was the first step. And then learning to come into her body, feeling what's there and what she found there,

kind of a sore gripping feeling in her chest, fear. So what she did, because there was resistance to feeling that, was a little bit of loving kindness where she, there's a phrase that Ticknod Han offers. She says, darling, I care about this suffering. So she would offer the fear of that phrase. She would say, darling, I care about the suffering. And that loosened the resistance some. So she could inhabit more what was going on inside her and then the grief was free to flow.

letting the waves of grief come, being with that, recognizing and allowing the grief, until asked the more she would let what was there be, the more she discovered a space that was infused with tenderness that was around it, inside it, holding it, and then she'd inhabit that and say yes. And the way she ascribe it is that she would, by continuing to be inhabiting the experience of reality moment to moment. She said that she sensed the whole world was living through her, flowing through her, and there was a sense that this is true grace. Okay? It's different than body being able to move a certain way. This is true grace when she was so allowing that this whole life could flow through her. She said,

I am the universe and all life is moving through. So, she had a practice this hundreds of times. This was not like, oh, I've experienced true grace, got that one, you know. Hundreds of times every, because you know, rheumatoid arthritis is a lot of pain. It comes and goes, it came and went for her. It wasn't all chronic, but when it came it was there and it would trigger off the same chain so she'd have to do that same process real but not true, come into my body, feel the fear, be kind, open, really inhabit, really say yes.

And when yes becomes full, there's space. And we begin to sense that the light and awareness of the timeless dimension flowing through. So she kept in touch with me and she basically realized that she used to move gracefully on earth and now there was a kind of inner grace that she felt. And she, professionally she shifted and she started working with young people who had different physical disabilities and limitations. Because in the same way that she found her own basic goodness, that the central grace that was living in her, she could see, she could help young people that were having

a hard time begin to find their way to making peace with their conditions. and finding some inner freedom. So I spent some time with this because I wanted to give you a kind of living example. For many of us, whatever is coming up, the feeling of blame is very, very sticky and blame ourselves and blaming others. And so the last part of this talk I'm going to spend on working with blame because blame is our most basic control mechanism. If I blame myself, then maybe I'll change. If I keep judging you, maybe you'll be the way I want you to be. Do you know what I mean? It's like this is like really basic way to try to control. So letting go of blame is really courageous and scared.

and gets us in touch with the very, very raw feelings that we've been trying to cover over. For myself, one of what I realized is that the ego can't command the ego to not blame. It doesn't work. And I remember I started about, I shared this in True Refuge, about a decade or so, that ago, I came into another round of heavy judgment. I've gone through different rounds of it where I got kind of caught on something. And this time we often either deflate or inflate. And I had judgments about what I called special person. And it was way more embarrassing to get caught up in special person who had a feeling of self-importance than it was to be

flawed person. It was a deeper flaw, to be special. And the way it would come up is I'd see it, you know, with my husband, the assumption that, well, I'm so busy you should do the errands or something like that. Or, you know, feel, or, you know, I have a talk to prepare, you know, that kind of thing. Certain invitations would come my way and kind of a sense of inflation on that or flattering emails or being in an interviewer at a conference and feeling in some way, not noticing until afterwards that I was feeling in some way, separate, that's painful but special. I wanted to get rid of special person. I really did.

It was like the judgment, it was like I wanted to do anything I could to get rid of that configuration in my ego because that felt far more shameful than anything else. So I went at it with everything I had and this is only about 10 years ago so I mean I had a lot of tools in my arsenal and I tried, you know everything I could, I tried noticing it on the spot and pausing and I would forgive it for being there and why strategies. So here was the turning point was that I remember a particular meditation I was really feeling quite free and open but there was still some sense of some very thin veil where I could still feel that persona in the background and I remember thinking I've tried everything I can and what else

can I do to not have this persona there. And there was kind of an anguish feeling and there was a very gentle voice in my mind that said, sweetheart, just stop. Just stop. Just stop trying. And so there's this like I already knew about okay, it's important to surrender and so on but my body was really holding on because I did not like having special person there so the voice was again, sweetheart, just please stop. So I did something I do now

and then where I'll kind of bow my head and just it's like I'm taking all that's here and it's offering it. It's not I'm trying to push it away as much as saying okay this is here, let this world hold it, let it be here but let it be held by all that's here, you know, the vastness that's here. It was a surrendering. It was in some way saying let reality be as it is. And when the struggle stopped, because it truly stopped in that moment, everything dropped away. Any words, any concepts, any sense of who I thought I was or shouldn't be or should be, it just all dropped away. And there was just quietness. And then there was a little thought of, wow, look what I did. I surrendered it. Oops, she's back, you know.

But I smiled at it and again it was just stop, just stop. And that quiet presence was there again which is home. And when there's a resting as that, just being that presence, there's no intellectual debate about what's more essential than what. It's just home. It's just true. So many rounds since then. I can go into a flawed person or special person still, almost at whim, you know, sometimes.

But it's still there but very much less belief that any of it holds any reality. In other words, the sense of what's true, the who I am beyond any of those personas is more and more just what's there. And I really believe it's thousands of rounds for many of us. Some people just have a sudden wake up and that's it. They're established stably and in that. But that hasn't been it for me. Okay, I found it.

So this is Rumi. I've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. self. The universe and the light of the stars come through me. I am the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival. I've gotten free of that ignorant fish that was pinching and twisting my secret cell. It's one of my favorite of all verses from Rumi, that when we're at war with ourselves, or with others or with reality, we can't be that reality. We can't come home and just occupy the truth of what we are.

That ignorant fist is just a misunderstanding really but it's a conditioning that turns us on ourselves. So one of the most beautiful ways to dedicate yourself not only to your freedom but to the freedom of others because when you start trusting the awareness and heart that's here, you start looking around and that's what you begin to see. It's there. Just the way the woman who said, that dancer who started sensing the grace within her, she could feel and sense that grace and goodness within others and draw it out of them.

So I'd like to close in this spirit. We'll just do a very brief reflection to give you a chance just to touch into some of this within yourselves. And as you pause, let yourself, invite yourself to arrive. Invite yourself to relax back and just inhabit this moment. This reflection is going to be short, so the invitation really is to, on your own time, explored in more depth. And ultimately it's something you can do many, many times to start really resting.

and trusting and who you are. We begin with, as I invited you earlier, to check out a place of self-doubt that you might want to loosen some so it doesn't have such a grip on you. Something that causes you to mistrust yourself, to go to war with yourself. It might be the way you inflate and feel special and important or the way you deflate, some flaw. And be aware of the narrative that goes around it, what you've been telling you. yourself, how you've been positing yourself as not good enough or not right, bad in some way.

For a moment, just let those thoughts and beliefs be in your awareness as real but not true. give yourself the potential to step beyond them. And then touch into your body and sets once underneath them. When the mind is at war, there's a lot going on in the body. And you might need to forgive it or offer kindness to what's going on. Sometimes just assuming that you just a little gesture of kindness, just putting your hand on your heart and saying it's okay. I care about this suffering.

Or as I did it's okay sweetheart. I often use that. Or I'm sorry and I love you. Just some gesture of kindness will help to soften the resistance and let you just feel what's here. Feel the sense of fear or shame or maybe grief or anger. And feel it as physical sensations. And let your only practice right now be a very tender yes.

to whatever's here. And notice what happens as the yes becomes more unconditional, that when you truly are allowing reality to be here. There's no argument. You're entrusting yourself to the waves so that you're really allowing even on the cellular and between the cells the life to be just as it is. Unconditional presence. Just notice. who you are when there's no resistance to reality. So if you can sense that formless dimension, that alert stillness that's tender and present, noticing what's happening, it's that silence that's listening, the formless dimension of loving awareness that's truly home.

I've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. the universe and the light of the stars come through me. I am the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival. Namaste and thank you.