Tara Brach - Wise Investigation: Dissolving the Trance

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Wise Investigation: Dissolving the Trance - If we are suffering, it is because we are believing something that is not true and caught in emotional reactivity. A key tool in meditation is investigation–actively inquiring into what is happening inside us. When we investigate with sincere interest and care, the light of our attention untangles difficult emotions and nourishes intimate relationships. As this light is turned toward awareness itself, it reveals the radiance and emptiness of our true nature.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I'd like to begin tonight with a phrase from the Polly script. It's Ahi Pascico. And it's a phrase that I've always loved because the meaning is, come and see for yourself. And my sense is on all authentic paths, spiritual paths, transformational paths. You just can't simply listen and believe what you're told.

The only way the path comes alive is if you're then checking it out, if you're bringing your attention to your own experience and sensing, okay, how does this work? If you're experimenting. So in a way I, as a teacher, become kind of like the welcome doormat, like saying, hey, welcome, but you have to walk through the door. It's not my words, it's your experience of things. So Ahi Posico really speaks about investigation. And that's going to be our theme tonight, which is how do we take these minds of ours

and investigate our experience in a way that really reveals truth, that shows us what reality is. It's in the Buddhist tradition is described as one of the factors of enlightenment investigation because really it's this quality of interest that takes the light of awareness and shines it on the moment to show us what's going on. And what we find if we really start noticing

is that we're usually in a kind of familiar cocoon of thoughts and a familiar set of reactions. I often call it a kind of a trance, a habituated trance, and it blocks the kind of presence and insight that's possible. So investigation helps to shake us out of our habitualness. You might be in a habitual thought pattern and being able to make an inquiry, ask a kind of question that redirects your attention to the present moment

shakes you up. It kind of breaks the patterning some. So that's what we'll be exploring because what I've noticed when people come and work with me individually at retreats when we have interviews or write emails about what's going on for them, what often strikes me is not just the problem I'm running into, you know, I'm struggling with this addiction or this parenting problem or intimacy with my partner, how to deal with my own insecurities at work. It's not what's presenting. There's a kind of despair because it keeps repeating itself.

And so what I experience is that sense of that we can get, lose our confidence and get really almost despairing when we sense, God, I've been doing that since I was 18, you know, that same habit pattern. So what we find is that our trance gets sustained and it's because we really haven't investigated what's going on. If you're suffering, it's because you're believing untrue thoughts and beliefs and you have an investigate in a way that would release them. There's a phrase that history repeats itself, which is a thing.

good because most people don't really pay attention the first time anyway. But you get the truth in that. So I think of investigation as a way of deepening presence, that we take the interest in our mind and we deepen presence that way. And a traditional metaphor that's really useful for me is just to imagine we're living our life and it's like we're living in this dark room and because we can't see we keep bumping into the same furniture over and over again. And we might come to this idea that, oh, the bad furniture is in one area of the room so we never go over there. And then we live

with these ideas about what's really going on, but it's just a dark room. And so inquiry, we'll kind of, I'll use both words, inquiry investigation, is shining the light of attention on this room on our own mind, on our own heart. And as we do that we find we can start actually shining that light of awareness on each other too and see more clearly, oh, who's there? So in the bigger picture, light dissolves trance. The more we investigate, the more we see the less we're caught up in the repeating patterns. I'd like to name out loud the thing that is kind of behind the scenes which is it really takes a commitment because it means pausing when we're in that top.

tumbling forward of activity when we think we're on our way somewhere else. It's his willingness to pause and be with what's uncomfortable and take a look. So it takes a commitment. And the most basic training, if you start sensing, okay, I want to learn how to investigate my life. The most basic element of the training is this practice of being able to wake up out of this incessant inner dialogue. we're in.

We are addicted to our thoughts. There's rarely space between them. And this isn't a diatribe against thought because thoughts are part of what makes us exquisitely unique and human and able to communicate and they can serve all sorts of healing and spiritual awakening. And we spend a lot of moments lost in the trance of thinking. And I sometimes talk about it as where this is just like channels of a TV station that just go from one to the other randomly in our mind and how many of them are Discovery Channel,

you know, not that many. So I mean and a lot of them are very fear-based, you know, anxious about this, worried about that, planning that, very self-concerned. So the first level of commitment is can we train some? to step outside of this continuous patter going on in our brain so we can actually look into what's here. I sometimes think of it like a plane flying and they're going through clouds and when you're inside a cloud you can't see the rest of the sky.

But as soon as the plane exit the cloud you can see the cloud and other clouds and the whole big picture. So when you pause and when you step out of the thoughts you can get that a thought you can get that a thought is just a thought, it's not reality. That's the first commitment and the reason we commit ourselves is because we start getting it that when we're having a hard time, it's because our minds are fixated in a certain kind of theme of thinking and it's creating certain feelings in our body which are creating more thoughts and we're just caught in it and sometimes in a way that's really crippling.

The story I love to share and I do every now and then you might remember it on this theme has a couple in Michigan who are trying to take a vacation. They want to go to Florida because it's been a really long cold winter. And they're going to go to the same hotel where they had their honeymoon, but because of work they have to leave on different days. So he goes down on a Thursday and she's going to go down on a Friday. So he goes down, he checks into his hotel and they have computers there. he decides to send an email to his wife.

And so this is what he says. He sends the email but he doesn't realize that he had one letter wrong in the address. So he sends it to the wrong address. Meanwhile, somewhere in Houston a woman has just returned home from her husband's funeral. And he had been a minister and he had been called home to glory following a sudden heart attack. So he's gone, she's at home. The widow decides to check her email seeing what kind of messages have come from relatives and friends. And then after reading the first email, she faints. Her son runs in to see

what happens, and this is what he sees on the computer screen. To my loving wife, subject, I've arrived. Day the 20th of September 2012. I know you're surprised to hear for me. They have computers here now and you're allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I've just arrived and been checked in. I see that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then, hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. P.S. sure is hot down here. So if we don't investigate, if we take our thoughts as real,

we can get in trouble, right? Now, the thoughts that we take as real that cause the most pain and suffering, the most deep layer of uninvestigated thoughts are the ones that are our own self-concept, that we each walk around with a story about ourself, about who we are and how others see us and what else we should be doing and how we're falling short and we're constantly rerunning those stories. So we're caught in this whole idea of ourself that really blocks a larger truth.

And this is kind of the hub of our theme tonight that if we're living in the story of who I am and it's a limiting story, we're going to have all the tendencies to look at you and see a limited you. And we're going to be living in a world of me and you out there that's really fraught with insecurity and blame and a lack of intimacy and understanding. So investigating our self-concept, seeing how it's keeping us small, not only affects us but affects all our relationships, it actually creates a whole mood in a culture. This is Pema Chodhren.

She says being preoccupied with our self-image, you know, literally believing in it is like being deaf and blind. It's like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with a black hood over our heads. It's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs. So again, it's this moving around in trance, the uninvestigated mind that keeps us small and separate from each other. The other thing to mention in terms of investigation is that we have to be willing to be uncertain,

which isn't something we're real comfortable with. In our culture and especially you can see it for anybody that wants to be in power you have to project certainty. I know, I know the answer and I've got it right. and investigating when you think you already know is not good for science and it's not good for understanding social issues and it's not good for understanding our own mind. So you can sense that when there's an arrogance, a kind of certainty,

people are not open to the mystery. The world is not the way we imagine. So there's a kind of attitude of openness. One woman wrote, my ancestors, were lost in the desert for 40 years, because even back then men were too proud to ask for directions. So, part of this investigating mind that I'm talking about is putting aside certainty. And it's in the Zen tradition called Don't Know Mind. One of my favorite poets and writers, John O'Donohue, very simply says,

I would love to live like a river flows carried by the surprise of the, its own unfolding. So what motivates us, what might motivate you as you leave tonight to say, okay I want to pause more and look more deeply, is really a love of truth, that there is something in us and it's very intrinsic to us that's kind of saying, so what is this all about? I mean, what's really real? Who am I really? who are you, what matters, really wants to know in a deep way. For investigation to be real investigation, it's turning the light of awareness to what's happening in this moment.

So you might just, just to get a taste, why don't we pause right here, and let the pause be an invitation just to relax a little bit, take a breath that's conscious. And the inquiry, the question is, what is happening? inside you right now. What's the most predominant or compelling experience you're aware of? There's no right answer. Just what is it? What's going on?

Just this moment. You keep paying attention and just wonder what happens when the question is dropped in. If you're just sitting there and meditating and all of a sudden there's this question, well, what's really happening right now? What's the effect on your consciousness? Okay, you're opening your eyes when you'd like. So the intention with wise investigation is very straightforward. It's to arouse energy and to intensify the light of presence.

That you can just be sitting and have the intention to be mindful but when you ask a question what's really happening? You can feel that presence intensifies. Okay? So, a little bit on what wise investigation is not. And the first thing is that it's not any mental process that takes us away from presence is not wise investigation. So if you're figuring out things, it's not wise investigation.

You know, we have a tendency to always be figuring out like I'm feeling this way because of a really bad experience in college and that that's happened because much younger I really felt like I wasn't a special person and, you know, that's not wise investigation. That might be useful for some forms of psychotherapy, but the investigation that reveals truth that's liberating is investigating what's happening in the present moment. Why is investigation not problem solving? We're not trying to figure out how to get more things done or repair, broken printer, whatever we're trying to fix.

It's not that either. And it's not a moment of disengaging and stepping back. You know, there's a book called Zen and the art of reading all the books about Zen. You know, some of you might have heard of. So it's not this kind of thing where, okay, I'm just going to investigate and I'm the observer removed. Investigation needs to be embodied. Does that make sense to you when I say that in embodied investigation?

We're sensing the moment and really sensing how the moment is unfurbed. is unfolding itself in this body and this life, direct contact. So I'd like to look more closely and we'll take how we investigate and look at it in three domains. And one of, if we have time, I usually am overambitious so we'll see. One of the domains is when we're in an emotional trance, when we're stuck with emotional suffering. How can we shine the light of attention in a way that helps to dissolve some of the reactivity and the identification that's there. The second domain with each other, how does wise investigation help to serve more understanding,

more intimacy, more connectedness? And then the third area is how can we use wise investigation to really look into the deepest expression of our true nature into awareness itself. Okay, so let's, we'll start with emotional healing and see where we go with that. And many of you are familiar with Rain, the acronym I often use in teaching how to bring a wise attention to the moment. R for Rain is recognized, the A is allow. So the beginning of Rain is what's happening here.

Recognize and allow it. Then the eye investigate deep in the attention. So you begin to unpack, okay, so what's happening right now? What's happening in my mind? What's happening in my heart? What's happening in my body? So we begin to really check out. Now the whole deal with investigation in rain is it has to be with an intimate attention.

You can't investigate if you're at the same time harshly judging what you're seeing, right? And that doesn't work. I mean, imagine you have a child that comes home from school and they're really upset about something that happened at school and you say, and you're asking the question, well, tell me what's going on? And if you're saying, so what happened? Tell me what happened.

You look really upset. It's not going to bring forward the kind of caring. It's not going to create a safe environment. So it's the same thing within. that we need to be able to investigate our own experience and communicate a quality of intimate attention. It goes hand in hand. You can't investigate if there's judgment.

Truth will not come forward. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One example I thought I'd share with you a couple of years ago. A young man I was working with, he just gotten out of graduate school. He joined, he was working for a non-profit environmental group with a really very bright group of people. He was the new kid on the block and he felt he himself very bright together, articulate young man. He felt so out of his league that he'd go to the weekly staff meetings where they'd be doing presentations on one particular

thing they'd been researching and they'd be doing some brainstorming on their, you know, what they were going to do for their campaign for that and he just got a befuddled, he could not speak, his heart got really pounding and tight and his stomach was gripped and so he had a really, he was floundering and he was embarrassed about himself. So we did a little bit of rain together and when we got to the R and the A was, okay I'm insecure, this is real insecurity coming up. Recognize it, okay let it be there. Now the A doesn't mean you like it.

You're allowing, you're creating a pause. You're saying, for this moment I'm going to let this be here so I can investigate. The allowing lets you deepen your attention. So for him investigating we started saying, okay so what's going on? The belief, because I often will say what are you believing? If it spirals into too much conceptual thought we drop it. But often when you sense a core belief like something's wrong with me, I'll always fail, know, I'll never be loved, that kind of thing.

Then we come into the body. How do you experience that in your body? For him the belief was that they'll see that I'm inferior and they'll reject me. I'm sure a lot of us can relate to that kind of core sense that if somebody sees that we're deficient they'll reject us. So he was getting in touch with something pretty core. So I invited him to feel where it was living in his body. make it feel the fear, this kind of tight pressure in his chest and his throat and a kind of

a shame, hollow gut feeling in his gut. And I continued the inquiry, well what's it like to live with this? He said he feels like a kind of disconnected and like a very familiar sense of being very young and not okay. Then asked him to investigate and sense from the perspective of the fear, what did it need? What did the fear need? And the response surprised him. Because again, remember that when we ask these questions, we're not going in with the idea of

what we think we know. He's really asked the fear, what do you need? And the fear place rather than saying I need to feel like of course I'm good enough or that I'm safe or everybody will love me, it simply said that I'm accepted, that it's okay that I'm here. In other words, his fear did not want to be rejected. So that became his practice because he had been so upset that he had fear in him. His fear was saying, don't make me wrong, let it, it's okay, I'm here.

So his practice was every time he'd get anxious, he'd recognize it and in some way he'd say a message, he'd send a message inside, it's okay, it's okay that you're here. And just recognizing and giving spirit. space to the fear created some more space in his consciousness. He started realizing he could feel afraid but he could also remember that he was on a very fast learning track. Well, it really helps to remember something like that. And he could feel fear but also sense that you know, he had a lot of friends that were kind of in that situation, you know, insecure because they didn't have a job at all, you know, that kind of thing. He was afraid but he could

to remember in some way that things keep changing. So it was very, very powerful for him because it allowed his natural intelligence to shine more, having a little space around the fear actually relaxed him. More humor, more ease. Most basically, by investigating there was a shift in his sense of identity. He went from the feeling of the new kid on the block who's insecure to this kind of awareness that was present and responding to his inner life and the people around him. In other words, his sense of identity enlarged.

He wasn't caught in the trance of fearful, insecure person. And this is the key, this transformation in identity, in who we think we are, is the key to freedom. So that's the N of Raine when we're no longer identified with a small sense of self, not identified. The end of rain is we're back to our natural wholeness or awareness. So what we find is that for him he could then ask a question, well, is that tongue-tied person at these meetings really who I am?

And of course he realized they weren't. I mean that was, when you get big enough you can realize that that small identity that you're feeling bad about isn't who you are. I'll often ask myself that question. It's a very powerful inquiry. This week has been, in one of those weeks it's been very, very squeezed and busy, it's one of those ironies that I'm leading up to a retreat where we're opening into presence moment and after a moment and I'm speeding and racing towards that retreat trying to get

everything down like a lot of other people. So I keep saying to myself, is this speedy, uptight person who I am? And it's some waves that are expressing that are part of my being, but it certainly is not the definition. That makes all the difference. So maybe one of the metaphors that's helpful on this part is that there are parts of our being that to investigate they're like these shy, timid creatures that are in the shadow of the woods, our shame and our fear and our loneliness and they don't want to come out.

They don't want to come out into the meadow, into the light. So if our attitude, as I mentioned before, is one of sincere interest, if we have that fear part and we say, what do you need, what's it like to be you, what's going on, what's the belief? And we're asking out of a really sincere and kind place, those creatures will reveal themselves. And once revealed, we're no longer hooked. It's the parts of our psyche that are unconscious, that are not in the light of awareness, that keep our identity small.

Does that resonate for you? Yeah. Investigation brings it into the light so we can see the fears and the wants and the cravings but they no longer dominate our sense of who we are. This happened for a woman that, because many times the creatures in the dark are a very, very painful belief about ourselves. And for one woman, the core belief was basically that I'll never be in an intimate relationship. I'll never be able to be close with anyone. And I know as I say this for those listening, they're here and I know many of you listening

from podcasts and so on, this is a very deep and pervasive fear. I'll never be able to be intimate with anyone. And so we again did a process of investigation, mindful investigation using the rain teplate, okay, so recognize and allow, okay, living in this belief and in pain, suffering. So we started exploring the belief and I asked her a question and I asked a lot of times which is what's, how does it feel in your body to have this belief? I'll never be intimate with anyone. And at first there was a layer of fear, you know, I'll always be alone and what that meant.

And then there was a layer of kind of shame of this is a reflection that I'm just flawed, undesirable. I mean that, just to be honest, she felt undesirable as a woman. And then underneath that was this profound grief of separation, just this pure grief. And so she's feeling these layers of what she's living with and how long she's been moving through life with these feelings of fear and shame and loss and how that's ended up defining and shaping her experience. It's been her filter for so long.

And as she felt that there was a real deep sense of compassion for herself when she really got how many moments of her life she was living with these layers of pain, that that's how the belief was there. So compassion was added to it. And so that was when I could begin to ask her a very, very powerful question which is, what would your life be like if you didn't believe this story? What would your life be like if you didn't believe this belief? And I'd like to invite you to, when you have a chance, try it on.

If there's something you're believing, like I'll always fail at something, I'll never be loved or I'll never be close to anyone. It's like what would our life be like if we weren't believing that? There's a similar question. Who would you be if you didn't believe it? Who would you be if you didn't believe that you could never be intimate with anyone? For her, when I asked that question, there wasn't an answer but there was, what was there was a sense of aliveness and a sense of kind of a dynamic, creative openness.

But no answer, like who would I be, just this aliveness would be here. And it was a little scary but it was filled with possibility. So again, the purpose of investigation is that we begin to shine the light of awareness on what we normally run away from. And if we really can hold our attention, those places that we were so identified with, the identification dissolves some. We start seeing who's there, we start seeing the life they can live through us. Maybe just to ground this a little, let's try it out and give you just a chance.

Now as with all guided meditations, this is just a taste to using this pause to to come into presence and also just sense your own sincerity right now, your curiosity about deepening attention, that this is an opportunity to really have more intimacy with your own experience. I know that whatever you do here you can maybe touch in a little and then perhaps deepen it as you go practice later in the evening or tomorrow. You can pick right now a place in your life where you need to do. know you get stuck and caught in some sort of an emotional reaction that's difficult.

But pick something that's not traumatic. If it's too big, you won't have the time to do it justice. It might be something where you're caught in a conflict with another person. Or you're caught like this woman with a kind of belief and feeling about your life that's really weighty. Or maybe it's something that's going on with your health. or a reaction you're having to how other people are doing, what another person in your life is doing or how they're doing it, or how they should be doing it. The beginning of rain is just to recognize in a kind of the gestalt of it, like,

okay, so what's happening? What is it, what's the stuck place that's going on? So just recognizing, okay, so this is where my identity is getting kind of caught up, where I'm getting contracted. And just allow it. It's as if you're saying, okay, if we're right these moments, I'm letting this be, I'm going to make room to investigate and begin sensing, okay, so what's going on? Perhaps what is it that I'm believing about myself or about others, about my future?

Often it has the belief has something to do with our own deficiency, has something to do with our lovability or how well we can perform or how others are relating to us. Whatever the belief is and maybe you haven't landed on one and that's fine, when you're stuck in this situation and reaction, what's it like in your body and in your heart? You might just put yourself right into the situation in your mind's eye to really get a sense of it. If there's another person involved, see their face, their expression, what they're saying, listen. to the words or if it's something you're doing that you don't like, sense yourself right

in the midst of it. You can feel in your body and your throat, your chest, your belly. What's it like when you're caught? What's it like when you're believing this belief, when you're caught in this reaction? You might even sense how long this has been going on and how often in some way this contraction, of your being is taking place. Keep shining the light of attention, right on the vulnerability so that whatever's going on inside you right now,

it's not like some specific experience should be happening. Just pay attention to your body, your heart. And if there is a place of real vulnerability or fear or anger or hurt, you might ask it what it wants from you. How does it want you to be with it? Does it want your compassion, your acceptance, just for you to understand it's there? Sense the possibility of just responding to what's inside you with kindness and sense what happens when that's your intention to respond to whatever is going on in this moment with kindness.

What happens? You might ask yourself a question, who would I be if I didn't believe what? the stories around this, the limiting beliefs. And most important, who am I right this moment as I investigate and hold with a deep attention this inner life? What's your sense of your own being right in these moments? Who are you? Are you the character and yourself story?

Or can you sense something larger? Okay, thus far how to bring the light of attention to tangles within our own being with the understanding that the more that's brought into awareness, the more dissolves that kind of identification and we get to really inhabit a larger sense of our own being. Now, how do we bring this to each other? And really the question is how do we do it in a way they can really forge understanding? and we have the equipment to. You know, we are designed, we have this evolved brain

that is designed with the mirror neurons, the circuitry for compassion, to build to bring our attention to each other and in that same way that wants to know we can sense moods, we can sense feelings, we can sense a person's intention, we can sense a whole lot. Because it's really the basis for understanding compassion, this kind of investigating mind, where we're with each other and some part of us is saying, well, what is life like for you?

That's the possibility. And yet what we discover is that takes a lot of intention. Even though we have the equipment it takes a lot of intention because most moments, what's really going on is our thoughts are very not investigating our inner life but self-centered. Here's what I want, here's what I need, here's what I need to do to be more comfortable, Here's what I think I need to do so you'll like me. Whatever it is, it's self-centered so that our way of looking at each other is really through the filter of our own wants and needs.

That's different than this compassion circuitry that's seeing what's life like for you. We ask questions, but it's not because we truly want to know who's there. We ask questions out of being kind of habitual and we ask questions because we're trying to attune and how we can be safe or who's going to have more power or how others are relating to us. It's rarely from that purity that just is asking, what is life like for you? How do you experience life? Which is such a beautiful space to ask a question from. So it's humbling to realize that that self-concern comes into play with those that we live with and spend time with. We don't often look very closely.

you can just scan in your mind right now, somebody that you see perhaps every day, and have you been enough in a space of presence that you could just be curious and wonder and sense, well how are things going really for this person from the inside? And I don't put that out there to put us all down, but it takes intention. So, even more so with those we don't know who are different from us, they become unreal others. We don't begin to wonder what it's like for a person that feels very different from us. We rarely try to, the rope puts it this way, the miracles, to look through another's eyes for even a moment. We don't do that.

Yet, if we're to bridge the conflict and the pain and the gap between different peoples, between societies and between races, the differences between people of different beliefs, if we're to begin to move towards peace and understanding, it's going to take this intention to step outside our familiar zone of thoughts and feelings and say, what is it like for that person? are for those people. It's critical. And the reason is because as soon as someone's an unreal other and we don't sense their subjectivity that that person hurts, that that person wants to feel happy like I want

to feel happy, that that person does not want to suffer. If we can't sense that in a visceral way, they can become an enemy who are willing to hurt. won't hurt somebody that you've really paid close attention to because they become human and like us. So we need to be able to deepen our attention in an authentic way. And I think part of the reason that this is such a difficult season for so many of us and I've been wanting to speak to it some, this election season and the way things are in terms of the federal budget and the tension that people are feeling economically and job security.

But I think there's an undercurrent that makes it not just anxiety but distressing, which is that we're operating in a system where a lot of people feel a real loss of trust, that there is less and less possibility for real dialogue, less and less possibility that leaders will really look and see the needs and feel the needs and respond to the needs and it's more and more a play of aggression and greed and power. And I think that there's a kind of despair that comes when we sense how far we are from the possibility of authentic movement towards understanding needs and responding to them. Not only that, I think there's a kind of despair, a sense of jadedness or cynicism.

because there's not a trust that it's a fair playing ground. I mean there's been so much, so challenging around electoral fraud and really this level of suspicion that you don't know what's going on behind the lines that we might have had for other countries that seem corrupt that have now come into this country. I think it creates a mood that has people feeling very disenfranchised, like they can't trust this world that we're in. Now, I bring that up, I mean, there's a movement of foot called MindfulVote.org Some of you might know about that is seeing that, it's nonpartisan.

It's saying, look, if we're going to be committing to mindfulness and waking up in our lives, it has to do with how we live our lives with each other and in the society. And what that means, it's our responsibility to be engaged, it's our responsibility to vote, and it's our responsibility to be engaged in a moment, mindful way that doesn't create an unreal other an enemy, that our way of talking and behaving is not one of disrespect, that we're not wishing harm for others. That doesn't mean we don't fight like crazy for what we believe in.

But it's not from a place of hatred, it's from a place of care. And so that's what this movement is intending to bring forward because it's so easy to feel that sense of discouragement and just pull back and say, this isn't a world I want to belong to. So the miracle is to stay in the mix and begin to look through each other's eyes and have the kind of dialogue that forges understanding so we can respond to the needs that are here in a way that heals. The beginning of that capacity is if we're doing it in our own lives with the people we

see every day. So I'm wishing for us to do it on a sense. systems level, but it needs to be in our heart that we have this capacity to pause and see who's here? Because it's that sense of our mutual belonging that'll have us act for the good. So we practice for a moment again, if you will. This will be our last practice of the evening. And as you set yourself just to again frame this whole process, we're exploring to tonight that we have this capacity to bring our curiosity and our interest in the light of our awareness to what's here in a way that reveals truth, in a way that opens our hearts.

And we can do it with the tangles of emotions within our own being. We can do it when we sense what's happening for another person. And we can do it by then asking the question really, who am I? Who am I in this moment? Who's here? So we'll finish the evening with a practice that explores on that level, but just to say that when we engage ourselves in this kind of inquiry or we pause and look more deeply, it really turns life into an adventure because wherever we pay deeper attention we wake up.

I mean, Henry Miller put it this way. He said the moment one gives close attention to anything. Even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself. So the last meditation will be, how do we bring this investigation to another person and right into our own awareness? And so I invite you as you're sitting here now to bring a person to mind, someone you see regularly, who you know is having a hard time.

It's ideal not to bring up someone that you have a real reaction to because that's doable but more complex, but somebody who's having a hard time. And let these moments be one where you allow yourself to get closer into what's really going on for this person. So begin to investigate. What is it like for this person? Can you, as Thore put it, look through this person's eyes for a few moments? You might try on the person's body just since you're in that body.

You're looking through this face and these eyes. What is going on for this person in his or her life? What are the circumstances that are causing disappointment or anxiety, fear, anger? What's it like for this person? What's it like in this person's body and heart to feel that? Sometimes it helps if you breathe in and sense your willingness to just feel and be touched by what this person might be experiencing and with the out breath just sense that it's being held in something larger, that there's room.

But you're willing to feel this person's hurt, fear and you might sense as you do, what is this person most need? What's the quality of presence this person most needs from you? And imagine and sense yourself extending that quality of presence. feeling your care, sensing the person in your heart. So it's not kind of pity from an abstract or distant point of view. This is part of you. And here's the question for you.

Who are you when you're opening your heart mind to the experience of another? What's your sense of your own being? You can let go of any idea of another person. And let's conclude tonight by just opening to what's right here in this moment again. So I'm coming back to my first question for you, what is happening inside you right now? What's predominant? Are you aware of sensations? Are you aware of a certain mood?

Are you aware of the sounds that are here? See if you can let what you're aware of sounds or sensations or feelings be in the foreground. But also notice that alert inner stillness in the background, that which is aware, just look into that background, into that awareness and investigate, who am I? Just open and curious. Who am I? And then you can just let go then into whatever you see. Just be that, be that awakeness, that vastness, that mystery. I like to close with the words of Rumi, one matter, one energy, one light, endlessly emanating all things. One bright turning. One bright turning. diamond one, one, one. Ground yourself, strip yourself down to blind, loving silence.

Ground yourself, strip yourself down to blind loving silence. Stay there until you see you are gazing at the light with its own ageless eyes. Stay there until you see you are gazing at the light with its own ageless eyes. there until you see you're gazing at the light with its own ageless eyes. Namaste. And thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.