Tara Brach - When We are Lost

Episode Date: February 23, 2011

2011-02-23 - When We are Lost - It's part of our make up to get lost in the trance of thinking-- to believe our thoughts to be real and to live in the story of a separate, endangered self. It is also our capacity to recognize our trance and choose presence. This talk explores how the practice of pausing and arriving in the aliveness of our senses opens us to our natural compassion and wisdom, and enables us to experience the great mystery we are part of. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you!

So as a way to begin tonight's talk, I'd like to ask you to close your eyes and let your mind wander somewhere else. So this is a purposeful wandering. How often do you get those instructions, right? Yeah, so just take some moments, you know, a recent experience maybe today, something that stood out or a future plan, and just enter into that. Okay, come on. back and here's the deal. This is what modern science has now confirmed. No matter what you were imagining or no matter where your mind went, you will not be as happy in your daydreaming. You'll never be as happy in your daydreaming as you will be if you're present moment to moment

for this talk or for whatever you happen to be doing, including being present if you're in the supermarket going down the aisle or being present if you're in the car in traffic or being present washing the dishes or going from the metro to the office or whatever it is. Probably a number of you've heard about some of this happiness research. There's been a whole lot of it and it's really interesting, but one batch of it, the New York Times reported this in the Science Times. They monitored a lot of people on their iPhones. they would just interrupt whatever they were doing

and find out whether their minds were wandering or whether they were present and they, you know, tens of thousands of people and what they found out was what meditation masters through the centuries have been teaching, which is the wandering mind doth not bring happiness, that there's not a happiness when the mind is wandering.

That reality is more gratifying than virtual reality. And you might say, yeah, but what about reality when I'm at the dentist? Very good friend of mine just had dental surgery, you know. Like, isn't it better to drift then? You know, you might wonder that. Or when your child's having a temper tantrum, that's not really a reality you want to hang out in or whatever it is. And the teaching is that it's true that you're not necessarily going to feel better right away by being here now.

but ultimately if you learn to get the knack of being here and staying, there'll be a true gratification, true happiness, true capacity for peace, and true capacity for love. You cannot wake up the heart if you're not here. And so what that means is being here means you have to be here with the layers that aren't so pleasant. That's what it means. This is a poem, David Wagon. that I've always loved and I'd like to share it with you. So you might just, we'll come back to it a few

times tonight, so you might just close your eyes and listen. It's called lost. Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger. Must ask permission to know it and be known. the forest breathes listen it answers i've made this place around you if you leave it you may come back again saying here stand still the forest knows where you are you must let it find you so we don't stand still so often we spend most of our time lost You know, in some way we're trying to race away from the aliveness that's here and we go into our thoughts, our trance of thinking.

Many of you might have heard this is Ajambudadasa when asked to describe the world, said, lost in thought. That's our world. And when we're honest with ourselves and we look back at a day, we can sense the swaths of our day. we were off somewhere else, a lot of it. A lot of it. And then when we say, well, where were we?

Well, our thoughts are these constructions of reality that sometimes correlate, like a still photo does to reality, and are sometimes really useful maps, and we'll talk about that. And yet, a lot of the time, they're not. Often we're trying to figure something out, and we're just basically in a loop of worrying because we're very, very conditioned and geared to worry. So we just make these maps that aren't really good correlations

and keep ourselves uptight. There was a magician working on a cruise ship. He had a parrot that was always ruining his act saying in the middle of the trek, the card is up his sleeve. Or he's a dove in his pocket, or he slipped it through the hole in his hat. So one day the ship sank.

The parrot and the magician found themselves together on a life raft. For several days, the parrot sat silently and stared at the magician. On the fourth day, the parrot said, okay, I give up. What did you do with the ship? So we hold tight to our ideas about the world, you know, and spend a lot of moments in this trance of thinking. And just to say, I use the word trance a lot, because I think it's a very accurate representation of what's happening, which is We're in a kind of sliver of reality, and it's distorted because it's a sliver, and we're believing it to be the real thing. That's trance.

So what we found, and this is not just the Eastern mysticism, but some of the best thinkers of the West, have started to shine more and more of a light on the limitations of our rational mind. This is William James. He says, our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness, as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. I'm going to read you just a few more.

This is Aldous Huxley, and one of the books that really opened up my awareness was Doors of perception. I don't know how many of you read it by Aldous Huxley. He says to make biological survival possible, mind at large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. Okay, so this little measly trickle of consciousness is our habitual daily thought patterns. It's that a coon of familiar thoughts we live in. Measly trickle, I just like that. He says, to formulate and express

the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol systems and implicit philosophies, which we call languages. And this is more broadly thinking. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition

to which he or she has been born. The beneficiary, in as much as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience. The victim, insofar as it confirms in him the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness, and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words, for actual things. Just a few others. This is Albert Einstein.

I never came upon any of my discovery. through the process of rational thinking. I think that's pretty good. Really. And the last one I'll read you is Robert Frost. He says, the brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and it does not stop until you get into the office.

So what that speaks to is we need our brains, and our brains are really important, and yet they're our servant, and how well do they serve, and how much are they our master? How much are we living in a trance of thoughts that just reconfirms a very limited story about ourselves and our world. So that'll be our inquiry tonight. I'd have to say that when people come and talk to me at retreats or elsewhere

and really are sharing their suffering, I'd say one of the deepest expressions of suffering is a sense of I'm skimming the surface of my life, but I'm not really arriving. I'm not really living it. it's passing me by. I'm not touching into I'm not living love. I'm not living a creative life.

That kind of thing. And when I begin to investigate, I find what keeps us trapped on that kind of skimming the surface, not really arriving, is that we are lost so many moments

in that familiar cocoon of thinking. and that the training that is such a precious gift is learning how to wake up out of that trance and arrive in this aliveness and this mystery that's here. And so this is the Buddhist teachings. The first foundation of mindfulness, this is kind of the ground-level teaching, which if we're going to go deep into spiritual life,

we come back to over and over is this simple. Notice your thinking and choose to come right here into this breath and this body and this aliveness. There's an amazing magic or mystery that we find. So here's something just to explore. Take your hand, your right hand, and just look at it and kind of, you know, just think yourself, oh, hand, and kind of whatever thoughts about your hand come up, you might think you've got a nice hand with slender, tapered fingers, or you might not like your hands, or you might look at the chip nail polish, or you might think strong, or whatever it is. Just kind of look, wrinkled, old skin spots. I'm just doing my own right now. Just looking, kind of take in hand, and just keep, you know, mentally hand, hand. And then,

close your eyes and feel from the inside out this that you've been looking at and just begin to slowly move the arm back and forth in front of you so that you're moving through air and feel the aliveness directly intimate immediate from the inside out if you hold still and keep feeling, you might notice if there's a boundary that you sense. Is there a edge to what we've called hand? Can you begin to sense the difference between any concept and the living, vibrating mystery that's right here? Relax your arms down. Feel your breath. And even you let this moment be one of really inviting yourself into your senses. So we begin to, with this training of mindfulness,

and if you'd like to open your eyes, you're very welcome to. In this training, we're not trying to vanquish thoughts. There's an understanding that the mind secretes thoughts like the body secretes enzymes, it just happens, and they're a critical and precious part of our evolutionary unfolding. They're necessary for surviving and thriving. They're part of communicating. When thoughts are wise thoughts, thoughts that are serviceful or is called skillful means.

They create an environment for service and creativity and love and adventure. And thoughts are amazing. And if we don't have the capacity to wake up out of thoughts, We can't discover that what all this Huxley calls big mind, what William James talks about as these amazing realms of consciousness, and we can't discover in the most simple language, love and wisdom. Can't discover it if we're living in the trance of thoughts. So they're useful, but we need to be able to wake up out of them. So what happens when we begin to sense,

okay can we be here as we listen to the meditation instructions and some of you've heard them many many times okay come right here invite yourself into the moment now just be here relaxed with the breath and you'll notice the word just is used now I think that's an unfair word you know just relax that's like saying you know just be different than your nervous system is because we have a nervous system right we really do So what I'd like to start off by saying is that this training to come out of our minds and into these bodies and learn to stay some in the present moment, this training goes completely against the grain of our conditioning. I mean, we inherited non-meditative minds in an evolutionary sense. and I often think of this kind of, I get this in my mind,

if we imagine our mammalian ancestors, these kind of little creatures scurring around, and imagine one that's basking in the sun and maybe decides to do some Tai Chi and, you know, empty the mind, empty, empty, relax, you know, and then this giant mammoth hoof goes squash, you know, it's like it's not good for survival. the ones that handed their genes down to us

were not quieting their mind and basking on rocks, right? They were nervous creatures. Does that make sense? You know, we get on our case. Almost everyone I know that decides, okay, I'm going to train in meditation, on some level has a notion that they're not a good meditator,

they're not doing it right, and their minds aren't cooperating. And what we find out is, that, you know, we are, our minds are geared to fixate on what goes wrong. You know, as they say, we're Teflon for positive experiences and Velcro for negative, right? That's the way we're designed because it's really to our evolutionary advantage. Remember what goes wrong, so you don't let it happen again. So this is what we inherited, this kind of vigilance.

Somebody sent me this a few years ago. A crow was sitting on a tree doing nothing all day. A small rabbit saw the crow and asked him, well, can I also sit like you and do nothing all day? And the crow answered, sure, why not? So the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow and rested. All of a sudden a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it. The learning, to be sitting and doing nothing,

you must be sitting very, very high up. So even though in our, kind of evolutionary situation, the physical danger is reduced, and we know that. We're psychologically endangered. That's the way it feels. And the mind feels like there's

something that's going to go wrong, and we have in the brain what's called the default network, and the default network, as soon as we relax and don't have a task, it flips on, and it has us go into the future and then into the past, and then the future and past so that we keep on reconstructing a familiar conceptual frame to orient us. So we're designed not to meditate.

We're designed to keep vigilant and keep oriented as a, in our idea of a self. That's the design. So we time travel all the time. Somebody wrote, do you ever, oh, is George Carlin. Do you ever get that strange feeling of Vujah Day? not deja vu it's a distinct sense that somehow something just happened that has never happened before

nothing seems familiar and then suddenly the feeling is gone so this is in a way our conditioned situation it's the one we take very personally my mind isn't cooperating and what we start finding out is that most

minds are pretty compulsive pretty addicted to thinking and that they take the thoughts for truth and this is the biggest delusion that we live in that in those swaths when we're in the future of the past our idea about what's going to happen we're thinking about a meeting we're going to have you know we're planning something that's in the future on some level this encounter we're going to have or this idea about how somebody views us, our own self-assessment. This is truth. We take our notion to be the reality. So our motivation for waking up out of this trance is that when we're suffering, if we start investigating, we'll find out we're suffering

because we're telling stories in our mind and we're believing them. And we say that again, if you're suffering, it's because there's a story going on in your mind that you're believing. It's a story about something's wrong with me, or something's wrong with you, or something's going to go wrong in the world. Just check it out. I sometimes just, when I'm in some way off, unhappy, disturbed, I'll just stop and say, okay, what am I believing right this moment? I'll just ask that.

And I'm always believing something, for me, the familiar one is in some way I'm falling short. Like I should be doing something better or I'm not planned or prepared for something in the future and I'll fall short then. Those are my two variations on the theme. So along with the thought that we're believing, there comes painful feelings. You know, whatever is going on in the mind has a complete representation in the body. So we have the painful feelings. And so we live in that. So the realization that comes when we begin to practice,

when we start getting the knack of, oh, thinking, okay, come back, is we start realizing that the thoughts are thoughts. And that might sound really simplistic. but just getting that the thoughts are not reality. I'm not my thoughts. These are just sound bites and images. They're not necessarily a very good map of the truth. And at best they're just a map.

They're not the real thing. When I teach a retreat, you know, a week-long retreat, probably at the end of the retreat, the realization or insight that is most, most freeing that I hear so often is getting that. These thoughts, I don't have to believe my thoughts. I don't have to believe them. So we have this reducing valve of the brain

that's conditioned by our culture and our genes and our family history and so on that gives this trickle of conditioned thoughts that we believe. And we think they're my thoughts, that's one of the beliefs we have, and then we believe their content. And the good news is that we have this awareness

that can begin to train and recognize that's going on and not be so identified. And one of the great conceptual leaps in science and the great understandings is neuroplasticity. That these patterns of thoughts, of these beliefs and feelings, that really shape our moment-to-moment experience are changeable. That we have a happiness set point because we're caught in this loop of thoughts and feelings.

And we can learn to pay attention, wake up out of that looping, and literally shift the patterning so that we have more freedom, that that's possible. So we look at how it goes. And the Buddha taught that the training is to, come back into this sensory alive body. John O'Donohue says, our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit.

It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. The minds create the abyss, the heart crosses it. So we begin to say, OK, come back. We know that we live in a story where we feel separate and that there's something wrong. a refuge in the present moment that can free us from that. So we come back. One of the metaphors that I find most useful in understanding this refuge in presence is the wheel of awareness. Where we get it that it's kind of like there's these spokes and we're constantly leaving in our thoughts and going out to the rim of the wheel and just kind of cycling around in our trance.

and that the coming back is right back to the hub, to this heerness, right here. And the hub isn't like this confined central point. It's more this space of presence. So just invite you again to close your eyes, if you'd like to imagine the wheel of awareness, to sense that any thought, even the most skillful ones, takes you out of this kind of living presence. And then for these next few moments, we're just going to explore being right here. And one of the ways that can be very helpful in establishing this sensory presence

is to first invite yourself to listen, and then with that same listening presence, listen to and feel the sensations of the body, and listen to and feel the heart. With the kind of tenderness, just feel whatever's here. sensing this aliveness, this mystery of sound and sensation and feeling, and in the background, this vast presence that's aware, that which is aware, this mystery, this hub, that when you're lost, you can stand still,

stop talking, walking, thinking, and come right here to this hub, to this refuge of presence. Now the challenge of the training, these are the basic elements, is that we get lost and that there is a way home. And it's a sacred pathway, this pathway of saying,

okay, come back, come back, stand still, be here. The challenge is that when we're stressed, when we come back here, it's not so easy. It's not like, oh, okay, I've come home again to sacred refuge. of presence and it feels good, it doesn't always feel good. Have you noticed that? That coming into presence doesn't necessarily feel good? How many of you have noticed that? Let me just do a hand. Okay, okay, just sometimes I ask you and I need to make sure we're here together. Okay.

That, you know, it's like if you take the metaphor of the forest, it's kind of wild and scary. It's like the reason that we're leaving into thoughts is because there's anxiety here. So we come back and it's kind of quaky and shaky and uneasy. So then the inquiry is really, why bother? You know, if our virtual reality is kind of a little more soothing at times, yet some intuition in us knows that it's a portal. Coming into presence is this portal that can bring us home if we can have the courage to stay in the hub.

and that there's layers of emotions that want our attention and we've spent sometimes a lifetime running from them in our obsessive thinking or compulsive behaviors and when we start paying attention to them they're not easy but they need our attention and if we deepen our attention we find in that very presence a quality of compassion and space and ease that really is homecoming

but we have to stick it out. Okay, we have to stay. I'll share with you an example of this kind of coming into presence and having to stay and letting it be a portal, as I'm describing it. The couple that I worked with a few years ago, it was a little bit of a classic kind of thing where he was somewhat busy, preoccupied,

passionately immersed in his worth, loved doing things, didn't love doing intimate processing. In fact, the words we need to talk struck fear and horror and, oh my God, I don't want to die kind of feelings, you know. So, and he was very sensitive to criticism. He felt with his wife that, you know, she had a demand and that she was going to be let down. So he was just anticipating it and pulled away. So that's him.

They came to me, by the way, when they were on the verge of breaking up because she wanted to probably. She felt there were things to talk about and he was always pulling away. For her, she needed more focused time to connect and was very judgmental of his way of having priorities because they were priorities that really were designed to keep him away from just being there with her. So she felt pushed away. She would focus on what he was doing wrong and attack. So I had them do what I have people do individually are when they're there in couples, which is just like in that poem, the far stand still. Okay, stop and pause, you know, just, okay, what's happening right here? Connect, contact. You know, and then that question, well, what are you believing right now? And what even more than believing are you, what's the felt sense? In other words, I'm asking people to feel the wildness that's out of control that they're not wanting to feel. For him, it was fear. If I go near to being with her, then I'm not as good as her at naming the emotional stuff. Then I'm never enough. I'm failing. It's just fear. So that was his

felt sense. For her, the belief was that if he's acting this way, that means he doesn't love me. I'm not special, pushed away. And so her felt sense was a kind of a crush, kind of hurt and shame like she wasn't somebody he wanted to be around. So then the process was to first, you know, bring a quality, just feel a kind of kindness like, okay, I'm afraid. So there's something very forgivable and you can get kind towards that or okay, I'm feeling hurt. So bringing some kindness to their own experience. And then I would have them do what sometimes is called role reversal or mirroring where they'd go inside the other's experience until he could really get the sense of, oh, feeling pushed away, like I don't matter, that kind of feeling

and have that compassion. And she could really get the feeling of how threatening it was to try to show up for something that she wasn't good at and then fail and not be enough. In time with practice and their assignment was pause the action. pause one couple I know they do startovers you know when they they run they get into one of their loops of reactivity okay start over you know pause re-contact so that they got into this practice of pausing and then naming what was going on and then once they could be in touch with their own inhabit their own feelings and feel that compassion then they'd roll reverse mirror it for each other. So this is

a version in my examples with a couple of being in the forest and standing still until we come back to here. And finding in here that there's layers that are really painful. And yet in the presence with that pain, we find

compassion. And that compassion makes it so we have space for the pain. It's pain but not suffering. And in the Buddhist teachings, that's the most critical distinction that we're in this human body and on the planet earth, we're going to keep on having waves of fear and pain and hurt and so on. But it doesn't have to entrap us in suffering. It's possible to stop, be present with what's here, and find that space of compassion. So that is one of the gifts of this.

practice but I want to mention that it takes a lot of bravery to be here when there's deep wounding and it's and it's meant to be gradual and if it's traumatic wounding it's meant to be gradual and with a lot of support and one friend of mine and the Sangha reminded a group of us a couple of days ago of of this situation that I think is really compelling to bring to mine which is imagine you go you're approaching a dog and you go to pet it and the dog growls and kind of does this attack like you know like right at you and snaps threateningly and you step back and okay so that's your

experience and then you look down and you realize the dog's leg is in a trap a painful trap what's the relationship then to what's going on well as this story goes on as this metaphor continues every one of us has to some degree because of our conditioning and our parenting and so on has our leg caught in a trap. Every one of us and in some ways kind of reacting to the environment like, are people going to like me because we have that wound of maybe we weren't feeling so secure? Am I going to fail? Because maybe we have that wound of, oh, somebody didn't think I was doing it right.

Whatever the wound. So we're in some reaction. We have a bit of that leg in the trap. what happens? Do we act out? Do we attack? Do we reject others that attack? Or do we as if we're in the woods go, wait a minute, stand still. There's reactivity right now. Whatever your reactivity is, stand still. Okay, there's some wound here. There's some need. Can I be present and with that presence come back to compassion? So that is one of the gifts of this coming back to the felt sense in the body is really coming back to our hearts. Two more gifts I want to go over with you tonight of this kind of coming back to home base here in the body. The second one is wisdom that when we're in our heads, we're in a story that's smaller than the reality. And I want to read you a short story, one woman's experience that she learned during a

walking meditation at a retreat. She had resistance to the practice. At retreats we do, you know, maybe 45 minutes of sitting, 45 minutes of a walking practice. And as in response to her resistance, one of the teachers suggested she walked for a half a day. So here's what happened, okay? She negotiated, but here's what she does. She writes a note. She goes, long walking meditation all morning. Assignment completed. Thank you. Now I can. meditate while moving. I thought I might discover why I'd been so resistant to it, but no, circumstances taught me something else instead. I chose to walk in the annex walking room because it's a small, beautiful, and usually quiet place. Today, however, it was noisy as hell. There was some guy

in there walking as a little engine that could wearing noisy little boots. Well, thought I, surely he'll be gone when the walking period ends. No such luck. This madman pounded his way through an hour and a half, except when he paused to drink or remove a noisy layer of clothing. I tried meta. Surely he must have a lot of pain to be so driven. Then I realized that I wanted to kill the SOB. I stood there noting hate, hate. Later I stood in the middle of the room and wept, tears, tears. Then I got to the point that I realized that whatever problem he had was his, not mine. After that, I got quiet, and he was just sound. And so I walked. and breathed and he paced and pounded and pretty soon it was all the same to me his noise my breath

the moving of my body after an hour and a half he left and it was incredibly quiet which was different but not as much better as I'd expected mostly just different thank you now this is a story of coming home to equanimity that we start in reactivity but in some way we say okay just be here, pause, come to what's right here, and eventually it becomes sensations, feelings, sounds. And then circumstances might shift, and it's different sensations, feelings, and sounds. But we've arrived in the presence that has room.

We're not in reaction to it, so it's just different. Our suffering is because we're hitched to having things a certain way. we are constantly trying to manipulate our world so it'll be the way we want it sometimes it cooperates and we get hits of pleasure but often there's an uneasiness and it's not until we have this courage to say okay stand still just be with what is stop trying to make it different that we find that presence that can be at peace with however it is.

That's freedom. We usually live and this is kind of, if we look at our conditioning we'll find it. We usually live with, we have an experience and we add on to it a story of it should be different or it's not enough. On some level, we're on our way to something else. It should be different. It's not enough.

To find equanimity means come back, be right here. If we can make peace with what's right here, we wake up out of that story and our life begins to come alive. Stand still. Be right here. This is the moving from the head to reality. Now, the last piece is that

in that coming home to reality to this moment, we find something that is we can't even put into words. In our trance mode, in virtual reality, we're usually living in a notion of life is a problem to be solved. That's our normal mode. When we start coming here, and we start standing still and arriving, it's just a mystery to live. That's it. Now I read you another story. A young couple were driving on a rainy night having a bit of a marital argument when an out-of-control truck crossed the divide and came crashing into theirs, killing David and

wounding his wife, Glenda. Three years after the accident, Glenda sat with me. This is a doctor parasol that's telling the story. Three years after the accident, Glenda sat with me in a dimly lit Hospital Chapel. At a request, I had arranged a meeting between her and the young man whose life had been saved by the gift of her husband's heart. The heart recipient and his mother were almost a half hour late for the meeting, and I was ready to suggest to Glenda that we leave. The issue of recipients meeting donor families is a very sensitive one, and I understood why the man may have changed his mind. As I stood and took Glenda's hand, she said quietly, no, we have to wait. He's here in the hospital. I felt him arrive about 30 minutes ago. I felt my husband's

presence. Please wait with me. Glenda is a practicing family physician. She is well-versed in bioscience and as I do, admires the rigor and healthy skepticism of modern science. Now, however, the power of something that transcends what science calls common sense was tugging at her heart. David's heart is here, she added. I can't believe I'm saying that to you, but I feel it. His recipient is here in the hospital. At that moment, the door opened and the young man and his mother walked hurriedly down the center aisle of the chapel. Sorry, we're late, said the young man with the heavy Spanish accent. We were here a half hour ago, but we couldn't find the chapel. After introductions and awkward attempts at humor about a

heart-to-heart meeting between the young wife and her husband's heart, the usually shy Glenda blurted out, this embarrasses me as much as it must embarrass you, but can I put a hand on your chest and feel his, I mean your heart? The young man looked at me and then his mother put his hand to his chest and finally nodded his head. As Glenda reached forward, he unbuttoned his shirt, took her hand and gently placed it against his naked chest. What happened next transcends our current view of the brain, body and mind. Glenda's hand began to tremble and tears rolled down her cheek. She closed her eyes and whispered,

I love you, David. Everything is copacetic. She removed her hand, hugged the young man to her chest, and all of us wiped tears from our eyes. Glenda and the young man sat down and silhouetted against the stained glass window of the chapel held hands in silence. Speaking in her heavy Spanish,

accent, the young man's mother told me, my son uses that word copacetic all the time now. He never used it before he got his new heart. But after surgery, it was the first thing he said to me when he could talk. I didn't know what it means. He said, everything was copacetic. It's not a word I know in Spanish. Glenda turned towards us and said, that word was our signal that everything's okay. Every time we argued and made up, we both would say everything is copacetic. Our discussion about a magic word that seemed to reveal a code of the heart within him stimulated the young man to share story after story of changes he experienced following the transplant. Described by his mother as a former vegetarian and very health conscious, he said he now craves

meat and fatty foods. A former lover of heavy metal music, he now loves 50s rock and roll. He reported recurrent dreams of bright lights coming straight for him. Glenda responded almost matter-of-factly that her husband loved meat had played in a Motown rock and roll band while in medical school and that she too dreams of lights of that fateful night. You know, we can go around acting like we know what it's all about. You know what I mean by it, right? You know, that we understand this life or we know what love is or we know birth, death, the whole thing,

but we don't. The mind can't understand. It's bigger than the mind, bigger than the mind. and bigger than thoughts can understand. It's the same thing. With birthing, anybody that's been at a birth, it's miraculous and unbelievable to put into words we can't. So there's this mystery in this creation,

and when we are in the forest and we pause, we stand still. When we come into this aliveness, in this wildness, we come into the mystery. We come into that and it starts informing our life. It takes a willingness to explore not just in a formal meditation sitting but through our day. I know some of you might be very familiar with the kind of experience of being for a walk in a lovely place and just stopping.

I completely stop walking. And all of a sudden in that stillness, the whole universe opens up. All of a sudden you're part of this vibrating, humming. amazing universe. Or if you take a shower and just intend to not be thinking about other things and actually feel the heat of the water and the pressure of the pounding and the sensations of standing there and the sounds of the splashing, all of a sudden life wakes up, walking, standing, moving through the day. I want to share with you this is David Brooks

and if you know David Brooks is a Republican columnist for the New York Times and this is from something he wrote in the New Yorker he says and though history has made us self-conscious in order to enhance our survival prospects we still have deep impulses to erase the skull lines in our head

and become immersed directly in the river okay this is the river of of aliveness. He says, I've come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose that self-consciousness and be confused with other people, experience, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you're lost in a hard challenge or when an artist or craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you're playing sports or listening to music or lost in a story or to some people when they feel enveloped by God's love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. So I read this because I started tonight with that little

exercise in wandering mind and this science now that says our happiness is when we're here in whatever we're doing when we step out of this trance of thinking and immerse in this aliveness that's right here, sometimes called don't know mind. And when we're here, we can start to sense that what's attending is a mystery, that right now what's listening in you is a mystery. What's looking out through your eyes

is a mystery. And when you meet others, rather than assuming, oh, this kind of person or that, you start sensing there's a mystery looking out through those eyes too. Let's take a moment again.

This will be the last time. It's come into quietness. So we feel our intention much as the poem lost describes that we know it's the conditioning to get lost. And we just feel that simple and deep intention to choose presence, to choose presence and come into that compassion or tenderness that can hold what's here, to choose presence and come into that wisdom of equanimity,

that freedom that can be with whatever arises. Choose presence and discover this life is a mystery to be lived. So in this very moment, to listen, to listen not just with your ears, but your whole awareness, just be that space that's listening, that silence that's listening, listening to and feeling the aliveness, the sensations that are right here.

This is standing still and opening to the wildness, that's right here. Listening to and feeling the heart, whatever mood, emotion is here, sensing the possibility of a natural kindness in relating to the life that's here. Sensing what happens if you completely say yes

to this whole experience and to sense this mystery that's playing and unfolding in consciousness. Mary Oliver writes, truly we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood. How grass can be nourishing in the mouths of lambs. How rivers and stones are forever in allegiance with gravity while we ourselves dream of rising.

How two hands touch and the bonds will never be broken. How people come from delight are the scars of damage to the comfort of a poem. let me keep my distance always from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say, look and laugh in astonishment and bow their heads. 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.