Letting go of Controlling: The Path of Freedom 1

Welcome, friends, to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com, where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste Namaste This fall we experimented for about six weeks with including an ad before this podcast. and we've decided not to move forward with any more advertising. Many of you shared that it disrupted the flow of your listening and I really understand it didn't feel aligned with the spirit of this offering. These teachings and meditations will continue to be freely available and your support truly makes that possible. Thank you, friends. Thank you for whatever you've offered and for your continued generosity in whatever form feels right to you. Namaste. Welcome. Thank you for being here, friends. I want to start with a favorite story from Tom Wolf's book called The Right Stuff. And it starts out going, in the 1950s, a few elite U.S. Air Force pilots were assigned to a life-or-death mission to fly higher than ever before. And beyond the Earth's denser atmosphere, they discovered that the familiar laws of aerodynamics no longer applied. So a plane could suddenly tumble end over end, it was like a cereal bowl on a wax form like a counter. The first pilots responded instinctively and they were frantically working the controls trying to stabilize the aircraft but the more they intervened the more violent the tumbling became and you could hear these panic calls to ground control, what do I do next? And they were followed by fatal crashes. This pattern continued until Chuck Yeager stumbled upon the only solution. When his plane began tumbling he was slammed unconscious and helpless the aircraft plunged for miles until it re-entered denser atmosphere where normal aerodynamics returned and Yeager regained consciousness and then he could steady the plane and land safely. So the lesson was stark and counterintuitive. The only way to survive was to do nothing, to take your hands off the controls. As Wolfe writes, it was the only choice you had. So in spiritual life we continuously encounter parts of ourselves trying to survive by managing. And in the domains that most deeply impact us, and here I'm speaking of aging, sickness, dying, love, intimacy, serving, creativity, presence, controlling doesn't work. Our flourishing, our freedom comes from letting be, from letting go of the controls. I sometimes think of it as decommissioning the inner controller. So this is the theme of the next two weeks and it's one of the most popular from the archives. It's this radical practice of letting go of controlling, of opening to our fullness of being. So may it serve well. I'd like to begin with a classic story where a novice wants to enter a monastery, he's talking to the abbot and saying, well, how long will it take me to be enlightened? And the abbot's response is, 10 years. And then the novice says, well, what if I try extra hard? The response is, 20 years. Hey, wait a minute, you first said 10, for you, 30. And, you know, we get it that ego striving is not going to work, you know, that trying to get somewhere is not what liberates. I think of willfulness and striving and controlling as kind of a clenched fist that we're actively squeezing and it cuts off life. So that the understanding is we can only experience real ease, aliveness, freedom by relaxing open, by letting go of the clench. And the Buddha taught something really radical which is that freedom, love, peace, happiness is always and already here in the moments of non-clinging, of non-resisting. In other words, in moments of presence, when we're not trying to control life, when we're not trying to make it different. So of course there's a reason that we don't have that many moments of peace and freedom and that is it's not easy to let go of controlling. It's not easy to open to life just as it is because we have this deep conditioning to think that something is missing, that something is wrong, and then to clench, you know, to in some way tighten in our body, to have our mind clench into, you know, small-minded thoughts, to clench into judgment, into beliefs. I'd like to share a story about Lester Levinson who was the founder of the Sedona Method. Some of you may have heard of it. It's a psychological, spiritual healing process. So Lester when he was in his 40s he got really sick. He had heart failure, he had colon cancer. one point his doctor just sent him home basically to die. So, you know, he was facing this death sentence and he began to reflect deeply. And he had studied all the world philosophies, you know, he was very educated and learned and he looked at everything he had learned and said, well, where has this brought me? What has it given to me? And he dropped his ideas about life. And he very directly inquired, he really is inquiring right to his colon in a sense, what is your belief? And he realized the belief was actually a demand that the world be different, that he was always living with this belief, this demand that the world be different. Then he asked himself, well, do I really need this? You know, he was becoming aware, do I really need this? And he realized he didn't. And then in the time that followed, he let go, he dropped that demand, and he healed. You know, he sensed that beingness that's beyond the separate self, the separate self that demands life be different. So his pathway was a letting go and unclenching the fist that was holding the belief. This is going to be the theme of our reflection, this letting go that frees our heart, that reveals the fullness, the truth of who we are. And we'll do it in several parts. We'll be centering on four key domains of letting go. Letting go of our clinging to thoughts, letting go of our resistance to feelings, sensations, unhooking beliefs, and letting go of the armoring around the heart. So we start in with definition. Letting go – it's misunderstood. Sometimes we think of letting go as another activity we're doing and it's not that. It's not some willful, egoic act. Letting go actually is an undoing of the clenching. It's an undoing of the ways we're holding on. And that happens naturally as we bring awareness to experience. To get a taste, and we'll be doing this a few times, I'd like to keep touching right back into direct experience in this talk. So let's pause. If you can, close your eyes or lower your gaze. And just begin to notice what's going on inside. And take a few full breaths. Gather yourself. Bring yourself here. from the Tibetan teachings. Let go of what is past. Let go of what may come. Let go of what is happening now. Don't try to figure anything out. Don't try to make anything happen. Relax right now and rest. Even a taste of letting go is a taste of freedom. And there's a good reason we hold on so tightly. So if your eyes are closed, feel free to open them. So here's the thing, to survive we need to control some, we need to do what we can to avoid danger, we need to pursue shelters, mates for many. In other words, we need to be motivated to do whatever helps us and our kin thrive. So it's part of our evolutionary design and our unfolding to develop an ego that tries to control life. That is part of the deal that we are rigged to try to control ourselves and others and the world. It's part of trying to promote survival. So our mechanisms – we grasp, we hold on, we resist, we push away – we have that clenched fist. And if we begin to explore that – and it's really interesting to investigate – we'll find that our deepest, most familiar sense of self is that felt sense of the me that's trying to control life, to get what we want. We're trying to control life and get more food or promotion or approval. That's a very familiar sense of self. Or we feel that sense of that self that's trying to avoid what we fear, trying to avoid getting sick or falling short in some way or avoid another's judgment or avoid uncertainty. That's a very familiar core sense of self, this controlling self. In a similar way, if we investigate during the day, you know, as we're moving through the day, we'll find that most moments there's some background sense that something's missing or something's wrong that we need to control, that we need to do something, that we need to do something to avoid what's right around the corner that could really cause trouble. We need to in some way make life more safe or more comfortable or more pleasant or more complete. Take any conversation you had today, yesterday, and just remind yourself of it. It's more than likely that the ego itself was controlling, trying to in some way create a certain impression in the other person's mind, trying to be liked, trying to be respected, trying to be understood, trying to have the other person do something a certain way, trying to protect yourself from judgment. On some level, rather than a spontaneous free sharing based in presence, there's that bit of that clenched fist. We can see it. And if we investigate and look at the controlling moment to moment, we can see in the most subtle ways the way we want this moment to be different. That we're trying to change this moment by moving away from it with our thoughts, by physically moving, by avoiding in some way the unpleasantness, seeking more comfort. We want the next moment to contain what this moment does not So we control Now here the challenge with controlling While there are domains in daily life where we often can and may need to control it part of survival, you know, controlling perhaps in a day-to-day way when we get up or making sure our children, our pets, our fed, that we're fed, you know, what tasks we're going to prioritize, taking our supplements, paying our bills, who we're going to text, who we're going to email, this whole realm, you know, stopping at a red light. There's a certain domain we can control. But the most important dimensions of life are beyond our control. And you know what I'm speaking of. You know, aging, sickness, the economy, you know, world events, how others behave. Life is essentially unpredictable. It's uncertain. You know, I think about this Sylvia cartoon. Some of you may have seen these. She's in the role of psychic. And the woman that's talking to her says, you know, my husband, he won't talk about his feelings. And she's upset about that. And Sylvia said, well, all right, we'll see what we can do. So she looks in her crystal ball. And then she says, you know, in February 2024, men will start talking about their feelings. In moments, women across the country will be sorry. So we try to control what is beyond us and ultimately – and here's the root of it – this self does not want to die and most controlling is rooted in our efforts to manage our fear of death, of great loss and death. So here we are, we are in this impermanent life, it has inevitable pain and loss. And if we're chronically trying to control, if we're always wanting life different, trying to secure ourselves against loss, we become a bundle of tense muscles protecting our existence. You know, we're not living fully. One of the most basic truths found in Buddhism and other spiritual traditions is that our ongoing compulsion to control, to grasp and resist what's happening, it's what gives rise to suffering. And in Buddhism the word is dukkha which is really a much better word than suffering in a way because it can range from – and this you are familiar with – that kind of subtle background sense of uneasiness, off-balance, not fully here, to real anguish. And dukkha arises because basically we're at odds with reality. We're in some way trying to control, fight, resist how it is. Like Lester, we're wanting life different. So here's the thing. Our ego, our controlling ego is a good servant. You know, we need to navigate as wisely as we can, but not a good master. Chronic controlling, always wanting something, fearing something, it makes our life small. And this is an abstract. I mean, you might reflect for a moment. Again, just review maybe the past day or so and remind yourself of a time when you were caught in some sort of anxious doing kind of mode, just take a moment. Just a time of stress in the last few days. And just try to sense in what's it like when you're anxiously managing life, when there's that tightness can you also feel present to have access to a wise perspective to feel at home in yourself do you feel connected to others creative it's not that hard to see I can do it myself so easily that the clenching is there that there's thoughts kind of circling in a repetitive small-minded way the body is tight it's not a sense of inhabiting and and feeling the aliveness of the body there's just a tightness greatness, heart's not open, disconnected from others. This is the clenched fist, the controlling ego. And when we're in control mode we're not able to inhabit a larger truth. You know, John O'Donohue said it so beautifully. He said, we're so busy managing our life that we forget this great mystery we're involved in. We forget. We forget the larger beingness that really expresses who we are. Okay, so this core identity we have as an ego-self with the habit of control, it's part of the evolutionary story. It's all of us, humans from the get-go. But it's not the end of the story. We also have this capacity to wake up, to let go into something larger, to experience who we are beyond that separateness. And if you're listening, you've touched this. You know intuitively that your essence is deeper and vaster than ego, than the thoughts and the behaviors and the personality. There's a deeper mystery. And you might taste this when you're experiencing the arising of love or compassion, when you're feeling real energetic aliveness, connectedness, stillness. That sense of something more can occur in nature, you know, when you're with loved ones. maybe births, deaths, meditations, and moments where there is presence and no controlling. Let's pause again, my friends. Let's just pause. Take a few full breaths. maybe close your eyes or lower your gaze. Let go of what is past. Let go of what may come. Let go of what is happening now. Don't try to figure anything out. Don't try to make anything happen. Relax right now and rest. Perhaps as you do so you can sense a little bit of a wider space of awareness, mystery, something more, and you've touched it. We've all had moments of relaxing the fist, not controlling. But we tend not to pause and savor and appreciate them. And you've probably also noticed that the experiences that we have of enlarged beingness where we feel we're touching something more, a deeper truth, they quickly get compartmentalized. In other words, you might have a really good morning meditation and feel really open and peaceful. And then as soon as you begin daily tasks, contract right back into that anxious, controlling, managing ego. I'll share one of my most humbling experiences. And this is… I did my first long retreat. My son was young and my ex-husband was taking care of my son. And at the end of the retreat I was feeling just, you know, in love with the world, the whole world in my heart, very spacious and open and just kind. So I got home and it probably was within about five minutes that I blew up at my ex-husband. He hadn't mailed a bill that I'd asked him to mail. Now, I'll say right here that aggression, you know, losing it, shouting, that's a form of controlling. It's the clenched fist. So it really brings up this question, you know, if we get so compartmentalized and that awareness doesn't bleed into daily life, what wakes us up to a larger reality in a more full and stable way? And the answer I think many of you might have a good sense of which is dukkha. It's really the pain that wakes us up, the pain of our anger or our fear or our shame or our hurt that it invites us to deepen attention, it wakes up awareness. And awareness is our superpower. The ego doesn't let go. It's awareness that undoes the clutch, relaxes the resistance. I think of it sometimes, the image I have is the ego as kind of this ice cube and it's clenching and preserving and protecting its separate ice cube-y form. And awareness is the light of the sun and it dissolves the clinging. It relaxes and dissolves the ice which is really just another form of water back into the flow. And in my case, on that time after blowing up at my ex-husband, my ice-cubeness lasted through the day. In other words, the continued squeezing occurred as I ran all my self-righteous, indignant thoughts and blaming thoughts and so on. He should be different. Should is always a controlling ego word. It's a clenched fist. Finally, later in the day, I started feeling these deep waves of disappointment and sorrow that I was so stuck. And just that pain of separation. You know, he was my ex-husband, but we were very fortunate. He's remained a dear friend. So it was painful. So enter Dukkha, you know, the suffering actually started waking me up and it made it possible to bring awareness to the angry thoughts and feelings. So I wasn't inside them believing them. The awareness allowed me to inhabit a larger space of presence. And then it allowed me to… The awareness could then tend to the underlying fears, a sense of powerlessness. And as awareness deepened it filled with tenderness. There was this letting go and inhabiting a larger space beyond the ice cube-y controlling ego. And that is the process. That awareness dissolves the clinging. It allows the letting go into a larger space, a relinquishing of a smaller identity, you the angry self – into more openness. There's another metaphor. I hope mixing metaphors doesn't create a problem. But I like the image of a caterpillar in a cocoon and how natural it is to be in the caterpillar phase and be living in what we'll call the egoic identity where we're reacting and protecting and doing those things. And it's developmentally natural to evolve to a larger wholeness, to the butterfly that has the freedom of a much larger space. So dukkha is the pressure of the cocoon saying, it's time. You need to inhabit a larger being. it's time to let go. There is more to experience. And that of course requires awareness, you know, letting go of clinging to it's not so easy because it's familiar, a cocoon is familiar and safe and the cocoon is our habitual thinking and the cocoon is our judgment. It's painful. And Duga saying, it's time to open into the mystery. I'm spending time on this, on dukkha, on suffering, anger, fear, because it's not bad. It's not a mistake. Let dukkha be our signal, our calling to let go, to let go of the obsessive thinking and the limiting beliefs and the resistance to the feelings, the armoring in the heart. Let go. Let go into a bigger reality. Okay friends So for the remainder of this we are going to talk about how meditation can help us undo the clench, the fearful ego, and open more into a larger beingness. And today, as I mentioned, we are doing this in several parts, the key focus will be letting go of our our obsessive thinking, our fixation on thoughts. And this is a critical primary domain. And the reason is thinking is our major strategy of control. And we spend huge amounts of time in our mental control tower, you know, worrying, planning, rehearsing, preparing, navigating to protect and further the egoic self. You know how when we're in traffic everyone else is the traffic? You know, it's like we're living inside a home video, incessant inner dialogue. And of course, the main protagonist is moi. It might be extended to moi and moi's close kin, but it's moi, my concerns. You know, what is happening to me? That's the main theme. What we're worried about, how others are treating me, what needs to get done. This is the movie we're in and we're holding on to it. There is clinging to this movie. You know, there's… One of my favorite little comic strip cartoons is this man in a bar and he's talking to the bartender and he just says, I know I'm nothing, but I'm all I can think about. And it's so understandable. You know, we're addicted and we're hooked on thinking and we believe our thoughts. I mean, consider today for a moment. Just let yourself kind of review the day for a moment and just notice how much were you inside that movie? Lost in thoughts, all centering around, organized around, swirling around self. You've probably noticed that our inner dialogue is not only incessant and self-focused, our thoughts are incredibly repetitive. I mean, I read somewhere that we have 60,000 thoughts a day and 98% of them we had yesterday. You know, in another cartoon you see a man on the highway and he's about to enter a desert. And the sign says, You and your own tedious thoughts, next 500 miles. So the key challenge with this ongoing movie is that because evolution has rigged us to control by being vigilant about potential threats, because we have that negativity bias, most of our thoughts are worry thoughts, judgment. Our thoughts perpetuate an atmosphere of tension and fear, the clutched fist. Evolution also rigged us to meet our needs and we get habituated to thoughts about what's missing, what more we want and need. So that's craving and fantasy. And that's also the tension of a clutch fist. So the Buddha taught that whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind. So just to consider that, you know, what kind of thoughts do you frequently think? That becomes the inclination of the mind. Neuroscience says it in a similar way that neurons that fire together wire together. You can sense it. Our thinking is habitual. And of course it perpetuates sticky emotional states. I think often of neuroscientist Jill Bolte-Taler who says that it takes 1.5 minutes for an emotion to move through without the fuel of thoughts. But if we're thinking, those incessant thoughts will lock it in so it can become a mood. It's like the story of a little boy who says to his mother, mommy, pretend you're surrounded by ten hungry tigers. What would you do? She says, I don't know. And he said, stop pretending. So we live in this mental atmosphere. And, you know, just like the ego, our thoughts are a good servant. They're not a good master. You know, a good servant, they're essential to human survival, to flourishing. You know, the capacity to think enables us to communicate and treat disease and design buildings, write poetry. Wise contemplation is part of the spiritual path that turns us towards love, towards the mystery, towards reality. So this isn't saying thoughts are bad. it's when they're the master. They don't guide us well. You know, our mental maps of the world are often misleading. Our memory is faulty. You know, again, that negativity bias. We live with painfully limiting beliefs about ourselves. You know, our thoughts seem to fixate on faults, our own, others. And then of course we project, we misinterpret. Story from many years ago about a couple that decides to go to Florida to thaw out during a very icy winter up north. And they're going to stay at the same hotel that they spent their honeymoon at 20 years earlier. But they have these really hectic lives and so they have to fly different days. So the husband leaves on Thursday and the wife follows him down the… she's going to follow him down the day after. He checks into the hotel and there's a computer, so he decides to send an email to his wife. However, he accidentally left out one letter in her email address and without realizing his error, he sends it off. And meanwhile, somewhere in Houston. A widow has just returned home from her husband's funeral. He was a minister and he was called home to glory following a heart attack. So the widow decides to check her email and she expects messages from relatives and friends. She reads the first email, screams, and faints. The widow's son rushes into the room, finds his mother on the floor, and sees the computer screen which reads, this is what you got, to my loving wife, subject, I've arrived. I know you're surprised to hear from 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. Sure is hot down here. I love that story. This is many years ago where you have to have a computer in your room, not an iPhone. So, okay, so here we are using our mental control towers to protect and further ourselves. But when we believe our thoughts, when they are master, we are living in a virtual reality that is shaping directly our life experience. The movie of the mind is keeping us in prison. We are kept in the sense of a fearful, usually deficient, egoic self by our thoughts. A young man I was with on – he was at a retreat I was teaching, we were talking about this and how his mind was a tyrant and kept giving him messages of what was wrong with him. And he was believing them. And he told me he reminded himself of this tiger in the D.C. Zoo. Her name was Mohini. She spent many years at the Washington, D.C. National Zoo. And for most of the time she was housed in this lion's cage, this 12 by 12 cage with iron bars and a cement floor. So Mohini would spend her days restlessly pacing back and forth in these cramped quarters. So eventually the biologists and the staff worked together to create this natural habitat for her that covered several acres. It had hills and trees and a pond, a variety of vegetation. So they were really excited to release her into her new expansive environment. But it was too late because the tiger immediately sought refuge in a corner of the compound. And she lived for the remainder of her life in that corner. be pacing back and forth an area of 12 by 12 feet that became worn bare of grass. You know, it's like the caterpillar that stays in its cocoon, you know, arrested development. When thoughts are the master, when we don't know how to wake up out of thoughts, they control our world. And we're living in a limited world. I think of one of the shamans who wrote, we maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A person of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. As many are aware, learning to let go of thoughts is a key part of most meditation training. And it's a lifelong process. Again, it's better understood as realizing that we are lost in thought. Because in that realizing, awareness actually melts the ice cube, allows us to inhabit a larger space. So this is the gift of mindfulness, training to recognize thinking, training to open into something larger. Because in the moment we are mindful of the thought, we are no longer living inside it. It's not the master. We have opened to a larger field. I often think of being in an airplane and you know how when you fly through a cloud for some period of time it can seem like the cloud's the whole world and then when you fly out of it there's a larger space the cloud could be still there but you're aware there's a larger reality that's the gift of being mindful of thoughts of being able to let go of being exclusively identified with lost inside a thought. There are major breakthroughs when people start meditating and training and letting go of thoughts. I mean, the basic realization is, I don't have to believe my thoughts. That is powerful. I am not my thoughts. They're not the master anymore. We're not being… our life isn't being clutched, squeezed. This is a reading from Ajahn Sumedho. He's an American Buddhist monk living in Great Britain. He says, The practice of letting go is very effective for minds obsessed by compulsive thinking. You Simplify your practice just down to two words, letting go. Rather than try to develop this practice and then develop that and achieve this and go into that and understand and read the suttas and study the Abhidhamma and learn Pali and Sanskrit and then Majumakaya and Prajnaparamita, get ordinations in Hinayana, Mahayana, Vajrayana. Write books and become a world-renowned authority on Buddhism instead of becoming the world's expert on Buddhism and being invited to great international Buddhist conferences, just let go, let go, let go. I did nothing but this for two years. Every time I tried to understand or figure out things, I'd say, let go, let go, until the desire would fade out. So I'm making it very simple for you to save you from getting caught in incredible amounts of suffering. There's nothing more sorrowful than having to attend international Buddhist conferences. Every time you become mindful of thought, letting go into a larger field, perhaps the breath, the senses, it's practicing dying to the limited egoic self. You're undoing the clench, Letting go of control. Okay, again, let's pause. Let's pause, close the eyes or lower the gaze. Feeling the breath. Let go of what is past. Let go of what may come. Let go of what is happening now. Don't try to figure anything out. Don't try to make anything happen. Relax right now and rest. With even a little bit of letting go perhaps you can sense what this self here like What the sense of my own being And notice it not so solid There more space There more of the mystery shining through. If your eyes are closed again, opening them if you'd like, you don't have to. So I want to name it takes practice. It is a life practice, letting go of thoughts. There's such deep conditioning. And for most the training involves letting go of thoughts and opening to arrive in the senses. breath, body, sound. I'm so aware, and this is for new but also experienced meditators, it can be discouraging. There can be a lot of self-judgment. I mean, I know so many people have said, well, I just have a really busy mind. I'm probably not cut out for this. I'm not doing it right. And I just want to say it's not personal, and most of us have busy minds. Thoughts are the primary way we control life. You know, our mind secretes thoughts like our body secretes enzymes. We have a default network in our brain, which means that when we're not engaged in goal-oriented tasks, the mind is designed to move back and forth between the past and the future, And it's trying to re-establish a sense of self, of orientation, of being able to manage things. I've shared that I walk in the woods by the river almost daily. And usually my intention is presence, to be awake, to sound, sensations, communing with life. And it's so clear, especially when I'm stressed, the compulsion to think. You know, it's not productive. It's more kind of this protective thinking that gives the illusion of being in control. You know, that if I'm alert and vigilant and preparing for what might go wrong, then I'm safer. It just happens. And the point is not to stop thoughts. We're not trying to get rid of them. That's more ego control. It's simply to become aware, to inhabit a space that's larger than thought, that can relate to the thought with some curiosity and kindness. And then we get lost again. And then we go, oh, okay, thinking, thinking. And in that noticing, there's more awareness. There's some space around the thought. we're inhabiting a larger space. Now, I want to name that waking up from thoughts becomes more challenging if they're charged thoughts, you know, really strong fears or shame or craving. And awareness then needs to fully connect with the emotions underneath them. If we don't, they'll just keep circling back into more thinking. So we have to learn this is going to be the next letting go we'll explore in the next talk, really how to let go of our resistance to feeling feelings so we can move from the sticky charged thoughts into the feelings that we've been avoiding. But the basic waking up from thoughts, just getting more and more the knack of just seeing, thinking and kind of opening up some, waking up to that ceaseless inner dialogue of commentary and worry and planning, it opens the door. It begins this liberating process of letting go into freedom. We manage life with our thoughts. Thoughts cover over the mystery. So as we begin to see, oh, thinking, thinking, we begin to sense the space between the thoughts. There's a bit more space. We sense the space around the thoughts. It can get to be, and I love this image, that we're in a house with no roof when it starts getting quiet. We're in a house with no roof. You can sense almost that the mind is merging with the sky and we're not living inside the clouds, we're inhabiting the space of the sky. House with no roof. I often, in addition to that, sense being headless. And if that sounds strange to you, I invite you when you're meditating to imagine it in some way that above the shoulders there is space, there is no formed head because we are so identified with the head that when you imagine being headless it dissolves that identification, we expand. This is the poet Rumi, be empty of worrying, think of who created thought, why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open. Move outside the tangle of fear thinking. Live in silence. Flow down and down in always widening rings of being." So, friends, we're going to close by practicing a little with thoughts. And I really invite you as you move through the week to let your intention be just to notice more when thinking is happening and to explore what it's like to notice and open, to listen, to feel, to open to a larger space of being. So for these moments, and this will be short, just a taste, as we've been doing, let this be a pause, your eyes closed or the gaze lowered. And again to feel the breath as a way of connecting right here and now. Perhaps a long deep in-breath and a long slow out-breath. A nice full deep in-breath and feeling the out-breath as a letting go, letting go, letting go. Breathing in. Slow out-breath, letting go, relaxing outward, releasing. Then as the breath resumes in its natural rhythm, just sense a scanning through the body, noticing whatever might want to let go in this moment, perhaps tension in the shoulders, softening, dissolving, softening the hands, letting the chest be open and the belly soft relaxing down through the whole body perhaps opening the attention to also sense sound so you're listening to and feeling the whole moment right here in your senses, senses awake. Let this be home base. And the only assignment here is when thoughts arise to simply become aware of them. Let the awareness loosen the grip so that you can again listen and feel open to more of a spacious sense of being. Thank you. so noticing what's happening inside you and if there's subtle thought or more of an overt thought just to be aware of it Gently opening. Again, listening to sound, feeling sensations, noticing the difference between a thought, virtual reality, and the realness, the vividness, the immediacy of presence. Sense if you can notice the space between thoughts. The space around thoughts. Imagining that house without a roof. mind is free to merge with the sky. Headless. Abound the space of wakefulness, interior wakefulness, wakefulness around you. Continuous space filled with the light of awareness. Let go of what is past. Let go of what may come. let go of what is happening now don't try to figure anything out don't try to make anything happen relax right now and rest Thank you. Well, thank you, my friends, for your presence, for your attention, for your care about waking up. So this week we explored the letting go, the opening, beyond thoughts, and we will continue as we move forward the other dimensions of letting go, deepening that taste of homecoming. Blessings and love to each.