Surrendering To Breath's Song: Radiance Sutras Verse 32

So today we're reading from the Radiant Sutras,

This beautiful translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra by Lauren Roche.

Today we are reading number 32 of the Yukti verses.

And if you have the book,

We're reading page 67.

If you don't have the book,

Or even if you do have the book,

I highly recommend just closing our eyes and listening with our heart.

So let's close our eyes and just breathe deeply,

Feeling the belly expand as we inhale and contract as we exhale.

Let's just release all the other thoughts,

All the other sounds around us.

And come into your heart center.

And let's just listen.

Strong or soft,

Wild or serene,

Wherever breath flows there is a song.

Hear it whisper,

Touching behind the face,

Singing in the throat,

Dancing spirals in the sanctuary of your heart.

In this practice of listening,

A moment may come when you just want to lie down.

This is a doorway,

Surrender.

Fall into the wide open embrace of life.

You are the instrument breath is playing.

All the meditations you have ever loved are vibrating in this luxurious hum.

Continuing even in sleep and dreams.

This is your school,

Just you and infinity.

The texture of the self is untamed freedom.

How does that make you feel?

Or what words stay in your mind or roll through your thoughts?

Light,

Joyful.

That's yummy.

Meditations hum through the body.

Tingly.

The breath playing you like an instrument.

Untamed freedom.

Wild,

Free,

No boundaries.

You are the instrument breath is playing.

We are tuning our instruments while meditating.

This is your school,

Just you and infinity.

I felt time expanding as I floated through the doorway,

Wild and free.

Untamed freedom,

The ultimate goal.

I want to talk a little bit about a couple of things they talk about in here.

Then we're going to get into a more literal translation of it.

I've had a few experiences where I felt I want to just lie down.

Mowing the grass one day,

Listening to Pink Floyd.

Stopped,

Laid down on the grass and saw my first ever corona around the sun.

Oh,

Amazing.

Well,

That's actually what I wanted to talk about.

The phrase,

In this practice of listening,

A moment may come when you just want to lie down.

This is a doorway,

Surrender.

Fall into the wide open embrace of life.

You are the instrument breath is playing.

When I read that,

I think of the times in life when it's almost like you get so tired.

You kind of give up.

You don't give up on life,

But you give up and you just surrender to the fatigue.

There's this sense that we so seldom want to give up.

We don't want to surrender to the fatigue.

We have to keep going.

We have to keep trying.

We have to keep our spirits up.

We have to,

Whatever,

We have to keep going.

We can't let go.

We can't let go.

It's almost like we feel like if we let go,

We might not come back.

There's a certain level of stress we have to keep in the body all the time.

Even if we're really depressed,

Even if we're really in a bad place,

It's like there's still this level of engagement that we have to just go,

Go,

Go,

Go.

But imagine in your day,

Even today,

If there's a moment that you're actually tired.

Because this requires deep inner listening.

We are so externally focused,

Right?

We're so out there.

What am I going to do?

What am I going to accomplish today?

What are my goals this week?

But when we stop that and we go inside,

And we slow down,

And we breathe,

There's something in us that actually has to let go.

It has to stop the train completely,

Disengage the wheels,

Take them off completely,

And actually let your body rest.

And as soon as you rest,

You come into a stillness,

Like a complete stillness,

Which I think we're often quite afraid of.

It almost feels like death compared to the ego's world of doing and accomplishing.

But it feels like this curious death.

It feels like this curious death.

But my sense of this kind of stillness is it is a portal to somewhere else.

It's a portal to our true life,

Our true selves.

But we have to be able to surrender to that quiet.

I even watch myself,

Especially over the last couple of months,

Doing this cleanse and not having coffee so much,

How often in the day that I'm really tired,

So my programming says,

OK,

You better go have a coffee.

And it's like,

But I'm tired.

And if I'm wise,

I just go over and I lay down on the bed for five minutes or ten minutes.

If I have something I have to do,

Then I set an alarm.

And I actually just surrender to the fatigue.

And this bliss flows over you as long as we don't let our brain override us.

But how often does that happen in our life,

That we're constantly trying to override what is?

You know,

For me,

I was reading on the weekend about Ramana Maharishi.

You know,

We talk about sat and satya.

And they described sat,

Which is truth,

As essence.

Truth isn't like some opinion.

It's the essence of life.

It's what is.

It isn't just,

Well,

This is my truth right now.

This is reality right now.

So something even like fatigue,

What if the universe is slowing us down intentionally to actually slow down,

Come back?

What if fatigue isn't some character flaw?

That it's actually,

Come on,

Come back,

Stop,

Get off the hamster wheel for a minute.

And let's just sit still.

Let's go into the other place.

It's very interesting to me.

Excited energy,

Dancing vibrations.

We are the instrument creating the music of my soul.

It's like a trust fall.

Totally.

Yeah,

Sat,

No.

It's just,

It's so interesting how I really feel like we so often live in a secondary reality.

There's this reality,

Our essence,

Our breath,

Our energy level,

Our energy.

And then there's this other level,

This other layer that is what we want to be today.

Like maybe I'm really tired today.

Maybe it's just a day that you're supposed to meditate more.

Or you're supposed to sit quietly.

And it's interesting,

You know,

All the media,

The social media,

The Netflix,

The Prime.

How important it is to have very clear boundaries around that.

Because imagine you're tired and your soul is calling for something else.

And we think,

Oh,

I'm tired.

Well,

I'm just going to watch a movie then.

But what if I'm tired and the idea is to come into the breath and completely rest,

Surrender,

And go through that portal.

Can you feel that in your body?

Like to actually imagine you're tired and you lay down on your bed,

You lay down on the couch.

And you actually surrender to the fatigue.

For me,

My whole back,

Like it's like all my vertebrae somehow release apart as if they were in two parts and they just relax.

And then this energy kind of flows through my spine.

Fatigue is not wanting to do the thing you're doing.

The body and soul require something else.

That's what I did this weekend.

I had a never ending do list.

I was so tired.

I decided to lay down in the hammock and took a nap.

Felt so much better.

So I'm going to read to you another version of this.

And this comes out of this book,

The Sri Vijnanabhairava Tantra,

The Ascent,

By Swami Satya Sangananda Saraswati.

They use a word,

A phrase called dwadash indriyas,

Which are kind of,

It's not really this,

But it's like our senses.

So here's a literal translation.

Having meditated on the gross and weak shakti in the dwadash indriyas,

One who enters the heart space and meditates there attains mukti and becomes liberated.

What they're talking about is,

You know,

In previous sutras and stuff,

We can focus on what we see,

What we hear,

The world around us.

And we can even focus on our breath in a very,

What they would call gross and weak way,

Which is an interesting term.

So gross meaning physical.

So if you actually sit here right now,

While you're listening,

And just breathe,

But be really aware of the physical breath moving through your nose.

So you can be very focused on that physical breath.

But continue the breath,

Continue your focus on the breath,

But come into your heart center.

And feel the breath rising and falling through your heart center.

And then go back to the physical,

Going through your nose or your mouth.

Feel the breath moving through,

Feel the belly expanding and contracting.

And then come back into the heart.

Can you feel the difference?

You can still feel the breath in the heart.

But it's really subtle.

And what's interesting is they talk about how if you focus on the physical breath,

They call it gross and weak.

Whereas in the heart,

It's strong and eternal.

And your Casey,

After breakfast,

Rest a while after lunch,

Rest well.

After dinner,

Walk a mile.

Your Casey's awesome.

Lately,

I haven't had the most time to go inward.

So the hamster wheel is spinning.

And I know I need to rest.

So my goal is to come home and stay a while.

Get comfortable and don't feel like I have to jump back up as soon as I get a chance to breathe.

The only place I need to be is here.

This hamster wheel,

We are so used to.

How do we deprogram?

I'm currently on leave for burnout.

And I've gained so much insight from you and Insight Timer.

But I can't seem to deprogram.

I am practicing or trying to be mindful.

It's a long road.

Thank you for this.

I would recommend that you do a little bit of meditation.

I would recommend finding a good book on Wu Wei.

This is the art of non-doing,

Yet everything gets done.

Well,

That's exactly what I was going to say.

If you read the Tao of Pu,

And then the next book was called the Tai of Piglet.

I highly recommend these books.

Because the challenge with deprogramming,

This perpetual doing,

Doing,

Doing,

Is we actually need a new philosophy for living.

We can't deprogram while we believe that doing a million things all the time is what life's all about.

Okay,

I'm just going to give you a weird example.

Sometimes I'm really interested in how we came to be in this place,

And why we see work as being so central to our lives.

And I also see the world in terms of a worldwide caste system,

Where there really are these elite castes everywhere,

And everyone works for them.

Everybody.

It doesn't matter who you are.

It was the same when they installed the caste system in India,

And the Brahmins said,

Okay,

Well,

This is how these people will serve us,

This is how these people will serve us,

These are how these people will serve us.

But it was just created to serve another group of people.

Why were we raised to believe that work was the only thing life was about?

To really think about that,

To really ask ourselves,

But that's not what it is to be human.

We're not robots.

But to really think about who created the system that teaches us that poverty is a good thing,

That working hard is a good thing,

That money is evil.

Do you know what I mean?

We have to unpack the belief system we have about this.

And then to imagine,

What if being human was a good thing?

What if being human isn't about working?

What if living together in community means that we come together,

And we make food,

And we create shelter,

And we dance,

And we sing?

What if that's what life's about?

But this Puritan ethic that says,

Life is about work,

Life is about buying the car to get to work,

Life is about having the big house so everyone knows how hard you work.

For me,

I like to question where that comes from.

And then once I sort of understand that,

Wow,

We've literally been told that being good little slaves is a good idea.

And that's ethical and moral.

It's just interesting.

So then if you imagine something like the Radiant Sutras,

And here they're saying to go deep within and focus on the subtlety of the breath.

And when we close our eyes and we feel that,

It's real.

There's something real and tangible in it.

I was reading this book about the Ramana Maharishi.

Well,

As soon as he had his realization of self,

He didn't want to be in the world at all.

He just was so connected with source energy,

He didn't care about eating,

He didn't care about people,

He didn't care about anything.

And I personally,

I have no interest in that.

I have no interest in completely disentangling from the world,

And work,

And people,

And the village.

Which is why I love Tantra so much,

Because Tantra is about the merging of these two.

But what if we got to play in the world from that heart space of breath,

Of insight?

And this is why to study Wu Wei is very interesting.

Because Wu Wei goes along those lines.

Because it's the effortless living.

You flow with the river.

It feels like you're not doing anything,

And yet everything gets done.

But it's from inside,

Not outside.

And that's what makes all the difference.

To actually imagine that what we're studying here in the Radiant Sutras is real,

And it does apply to life.

That when we actually become deeper,

And more subtle,

And more aware,

Life is actually easier here,

In the world,

In the Matrix.

It's not separate.

I reprogrammed it years ago,

But it goes a little too far the other way.

But I still check in with people in the Matrix.

What if I see myself living inside the doing,

And yearning to give up what I've signed myself up for?

I do it to take care of,

Afford it all,

Etc.

I see what my heart is speaking for.

To exist without signing up.

To know my breath again.

I think there's something important about loving and accepting where we are.

Sometimes we are in situations that we don't know what to do.

That it doesn't seem that we can be that free.

Maybe we've got the marriage,

And the expensive house,

And the kids,

Or the way of life,

Or the family,

Or whatever.

And it doesn't seem like we can get out.

Then that's interesting to me.

Because then,

It's almost like that becomes the arena for our spiritual growth.

What do we do inside of that,

To actually observe the players in the arena?

How many times have we all been in the arena before?

Maybe with different faces and different circumstances.

But if we find ourselves in a position that we don't feel like we can get out of,

That feels very karmic to me,

Not in a punishment way.

But in a pattern way.

And that's interesting.

And it makes me think,

I'm supposed to be in this arena for a little while longer.

There's some deeper things I need to experience.

And that's where we just close our eyes and we ask for guidance.

And we say,

Okay,

What?

Maybe it's a personal practice that you add into your day.

Maybe it's 20 minutes of meditation,

Something really subtle.

And you just add that into your day.

And you allow the ripple effects to go through this curious.

.

.

It feels like a prison sometimes.

I remember when I was married for 10 years,

I decided to go back to university.

I had.

.

.

What If You Could Skip the Cancer,

My book came out in 2009.

People were coming to me.

It was actually before that.

Yeah,

It was before that.

It was in between there because I was sick in 1999.

I was married in 1993.

And after people found out that I had gotten better,

They started coming to me for counseling.

And I started doing healing work with people.

But I realized that my math degree really wasn't helping.

So I went back to university and studied psychology.

And I so loved it.

I loved being on campus.

I loved going to school.

I loved doing assignments.

I just loved that stuff.

And I used to drive.

The university was an hour and a half away from the farm.

And I remember driving home and sitting in the car outside the house,

Outside the farmhouse,

And not wanting to go in.

And the word that kept coming through my mind was,

It's like a prison.

And these were the people I loved more than anyone on the planet.

It's not the people.

But what I had created was like a prison for my soul.

And I was not able to do anything that I wanted to do.

There was no getting out of it.

Like that was the life I had created.

And so you just start to feel like you're not alone.

And you start doing small things.

And those small things start to have ripple effects.

And then all of a sudden little things change here,

Little things change there.

Now,

20 years later,

My life is completely different.

Much more in line with who I believe my soul is.

So I would be very gentle with ourselves if we're feeling we're in a place that I don't feel like I can get out of,

That I feel like perhaps I signed up for.

Then if I can't get out,

Then I'm not supposed to get out.

There's other things to do,

There's other actions to take.

And then eventually it'll come out.

You know,

We do get out eventually.

They talk about how to get out of a riptide.

I think it's a riptide.

When the water is like shooting out,

That if you swim against it,

You're just going to be exhausted.

So you have to swim with it and then slowly out.

Just take small little adjustments until you're out of the riptide.

Well,

Let's do a meditation.

Find a comfortable seated position.

If you're on the other side of the world and you would like to lay down because it's bedtime,

Also awesome.

We're going to do a meditation with a pranayama.

And then I'm going to read the sutra again in Sanskrit and in English.

So let's close our eyes.

So let's close our eyes.

Really pressing our hips into the earth.

Feeling roots forming down into the ground.

Out of our first chakra.

As the roots go down into the earth,

Feeling your spine become tall.

Crown of the head reaching up to the sky,

Shoulders relaxing down your back.

Your chin tucking in just a little bit.

Just straighten the back of the neck.

And first,

Let's focus on the sounds around you.

Just be aware of the world.

Just be aware of the world.

Breathing deeply as you inhale,

Expanding the belly.

As you exhale,

Contracting the belly.

Then be aware of the temperature.

Be aware of the air on your face,

On your hands,

On your arms.

Be aware of the parts of your body that are touching other parts.

Then become aware of the taste in your mouth.

The water,

The saliva.

And even be aware of the smells around you.

And now let's deepen our breath.

Breathing through the nose if you can.

If you can't,

Breathing through the mouth.

Really being aware of the physical breath.

Feeling it cool coming in your nose.

And warmed as it comes out.

Conscious of expanding the belly as you inhale.

Contracting as you exhale.

One of the interesting things about meditation is that it's only between you and infinity.

If you practice meditation,

It's between you and infinity.

If you practice an asana or a posture,

You can compare yourself to others.

You can imitate how someone else does it.

But when we meditate,

It's just you.

There's no way to know if we're doing it right.

So we just trust the breath.

We trust the breath going in and going out.

Being very aware of the breath.

To think of all the times you've breathed in your life.

The times you've stood by an ocean and breathed in the salty air.

Or gone for a walk in the woods and smelled the wonderful forest.

Or walked by a bakery and smelled the yeast of the buns rising.

Being aware of this physical breath flowing through your body.

And allowing that breath to slow way down.

As you inhale,

Consciously expanding the belly nice and slowly.

Not in an uncomfortable way.

In an easy way.

And as you exhale,

Slowing the breath down.

Feeling your navel moving towards your spine.

Breathing all the way out.

If your body suddenly feels like yawning,

That's all good.

But slowing the breath way down.

And as you observe the breath going so slowly,

Feel the hum inside of you.

The hum of pleasure.

The hum of joy.

The hum of ease.

Contentment.

Feel this vibration through your arms and your legs.

Your heart.

In your face.

In your toes.

And then moving into the heart center.

Feeling the breath rising and falling in there.

Releasing all attention to the physical breath.

But now feeling the pranic breath in the heart.

Feeling the prana flowing through your body.

Through meridians,

Through nadis.

From the tips of your toes to the crown of your head.

Knowing that this breath is our life.

It's who we truly are.

It's who we truly are.

Apnayat.

Strong or soft.

Wild or serene.

Wherever breath flows,

There is a song.

Hear its whisper touching behind the face.

Singing in the throat.

Dancing spirals in the sanctuary of your heart.

In this practice of listening,

A moment may come when you just want to lie down.

This is a doorway.

Surrender.

Fall into the wide open embrace of life.

You are the instrument breath is playing.

All the meditations you have ever loved are vibrating in this luxurious home.

Continuing even in sleep and dreams.

This is your school.

Just you and infinity.

The texture of the self is untamed freedom.

Let's take a deep breath in together.

Exhale.

Let's come back.

Thank you so much for being here.

I hope you have a wonderful day.