Morning,
Good afternoon,
Good evening.
I'm going to read a little something from Charlotte Joko Beck.
I read more from her than anybody else because I just think she's so clear.
Nor jargon.
She doesn't mess around.
There is a foundation for our lives,
A place in which our life rests.
That place is nothing but the present moment.
As we see,
He explains what is.
If we do not return to that place,
We live our lives out of our heads.
We blame others.
We complain.
We feel sorry for ourselves.
All these symptoms show that we're stuck in our thoughts.
We're out of touch with the open space that is always right here.
And that open space is what I'm trying to point to.
It's just that we're intoxicated with thoughts.
That's really it.
And becoming familiar with that.
I love you.
I've referred to it in the past as the House of Orcanus.
The present moment is like a house where everything's okay.
Nothing can touch us.
In the words of the Buddha.
And he says when we're not living in our heads,
When we are present,
He said,
We're touched by nothing,
But moved by everything.
Which is a beautiful way of looking at it.
We're not out of touch,
We're completely intimate with life.
We don't see the whole of life as external to us.
This is what the Dalai Lama is talking about.
He said,
I can't hurt another human being,
Because I hurt myself.
But when we live in our thoughts,
It creates this little.
.
.
A sense of a little me,
This little bundle of vulnerability.
And that's where it comes from.
So what she's saying is open to this spaciousness.
Course you're still you,
You've still got all your foibles,
You know,
I'm still a,
You know,
I'm still very good at times and I'm a,
You know,
I'm a womble at other times,
You know.
It's what we do.
In some ways you change a lot,
In other ways you don't change.
Your suffering begins to fall away,
The self-inflicted suffering.
There's more a life of ease,
More ease enters your life.
But he can't,
There's no space for it if you keep going to the poor me.
Whatever the stories are.
Off we go worrying about some imagined future.
This is all imagination.
This functional thinking Preparing for the future.
Even dogs do that.
I'll give her a bank of your bone and she'll bury it.
So that's functionality,
That's natural functioning.
Memory.
If we stick to a memory.
And devastate us.
I'm not talking about memory per se.
And looking back on a nice holiday,
Fine.
But it's when we want to relive that,
Are we going over it?
She did something,
I'll never forget her.
And it happened 20 years ago,
Or three years ago.
And it's hold God is in its grip or we've got in it in our thoughts going over and over and over.
Let just let go.
There's nothing there.
It is coming to the Kali presence,
The present moment,
Beingness,
Space,
Open space.
And it's full.
It's not an empty void.
And we open to it gradually.
But there's resistance.
We don't want to.
We want our personal drama,
See.
Addicted to them.
I'm not saying if anybody's doing you wrong that you don't do something about it,
Of course we do.
But we're looking after ourselves.
So right now.
.
.
Let's come into this so-called open space.
Which includes our being,
Our body,
Our arms,
Our legs,
Our breath.
It's really just coming out of thoughts.
It may not feel like an open space immediately.
Just rest here.
Feel the breath.
Allow yourself to relax.
No forcing is allowed.
The mantra is always there to use if you need it.
Where are you now?
Anything that's not of the five senses.
Is really imagination.
Did you just come back to one of the senses?
Feeling of the breath.
The sound of the birds.
Even the sound of silence.
Where is your attention right now?
The open space isn't an object.
To focus on.
It's a relaxation.
This is not gritted teeth concentration.
And just rest the attention on the breath.
Just like a cork on water.
Just flowing with it.
Not controlling it.
Not breathing in a special way.
Where are you?
Are you spinning?
Are you in reality just hearing and feeling?
Let the world replace your story.
Your drama.
Just relax into the open space.
Into spaciousness.
Don't try.
And we try,
We move away from it.
In obscurity.
Relax.
It's already here.
Okay,
That brings the end of the session.
A little stretch.
