So I want to share a few words with you about your meditation and mindfulness practice.
In order to encourage you,
And perhaps to lend some confidence to the sense that your practice is of benefit,
Is a positive contribution to yourself and to your community and to the world given whatever crisis is maybe on the horizon.
Whether it's climate emergency or civil unrest or just the vagaries of aging and living in a world that is always shifting,
That is always surprising us.
And basically what I want to encourage you is to have confidence that training in fully inhabiting your experience and at the same time recognizing that that experience arises within a space that is ultimately free is a deep empowering thing.
And the more we train in this,
The more we recognize what a deep and empowering thing this is.
Because as we recognize this capacity to fully feel yet within a spaciousness,
We become able to be with the range of human experience without freaking out.
And even if we do freak out,
That freaking out is mysteriously held within this spaciousness that we begin to recognize.
And we begin to recognize this spaciousness simply through our continual paying attention.
The different forms of mindfulness and meditation you practice where you come into presence.
This presence is a wakefulness and it's an openness.
So it may be in the future that things could get very difficult with climate.
We may end up living in a time when it is pretty uncomfortable,
When we don't quite have the luxuries that we're used to.
We may end up living with chronic pain.
There are a lot of unknowns in life.
And I think a lot of anxiety that we carry is not about the events themselves,
But is about our capacity to meet those.
In other words,
The anxiety is that we won't be able to meet and fully feel and with dignity be with these challenges.
With the practices of mindfulness,
Meditation,
All the awareness trainings are bit by bit and sometimes in big chunks empowering us to be with whatever is going to come down the pipe in a different way than would be the case if we don't do these trainings.
In my own time in the monastery,
I began at a certain point being asked to give Dharma talks and I had an incredibly powerful fear of public speaking as many of us do.
It would be time for me to just give even a short talk and my palms would be sweating and water would be dripping out of my armpits and I'd be trembling.
But before those talks we would often be sitting in meditation.
And so I had a lot of experience.
A lot of hard-won experience of sitting in presence with intense currents of anxiety.
Sometimes even panic attacks thrumming through me.
And I learned that I can be okay with whatever feelings are arising when I tune into this birthright of ours that is presence.
The paradox of presence,
We fully feel what arises and yet we're free with it.
So eventually that anxiety that would arise for me before I gave a talk began to arise simply as a shimmering energy.
Simply as a vibrancy that became empowering rather than it being something that debilitated me,
It energized me.
And maybe this is what many performers that we may admire,
Part of their charisma on stage is that they've learned to hold and transmute the energy of anxiety into presence.
Letting the energy of emotion pervade and vivify presence.
And this is true with grief and sadness.
And this is true with pleasure,
Which we often too have a limitation with our capacity to feel.
So finally,
I want to say that any practice that doesn't,
First of all,
Involve the body and doesn't involve being with feeling and emotion is something I would be careful about.
Emotion and mindfulness is not about disconnecting into some kind of mental space where we're numb or we're detached from life.
I'll go out on a limb and say any awareness,
Mindfulness,
Meditation practice that is liberating will involve fully feeling and it will deepen this capacity for fully feeling and this will empower you whether the sky falls tomorrow or your life ends up being more or less bliss.
This will serve you and it will serve other people and it will serve the people that you serve just by being you who does this practice.
So please have confidence that along with all the other responses that you make to life,
That you make,
Let's say,
To climate crisis,
That you make to undoing racism.
Whatever you are moved to respond to,
This training in presence is also a deep and meaningful contribution to all of that.
Thank you.
