So,
Huh?
There is something about this time of year that invites us to pay attention to change.
I look out my window and see that the leaves are turning.
And you may notice that the light is shifting and the days are getting a little shorter.
The trees are letting go of their leaves and our gardens are dying back.
And much of the world is moving towards winter.
There's a kind of beauty in this.
You know,
We don't look at a tree.
Shedding its leaves and think that it's failed.
And we don't imagine.
That the tree should try to you know,
Try harder or find a way to hold on.
To what it has,
Its leaves.
You know,
We understand that.
This is the time of year that trees do what they do.
They are participating.
In the changing season.
And yet,
When it comes to our own lives,
Letting go in this way,
This simple dropping of leaves.
Can be a different matter entirely.
We all understand.
That everything changes and we know this.
We know this intellectually.
Um,
Maybe we know it a little bit physically,
You know,
We've watched our children grow up.
Clearly the body is aging.
Relationships over time have changed and the people that we love sometimes leave our lives.
We've seen difficult periods come to an end.
Feelings that we thought would last forever eventually pass.
Circumstances that we couldn't imagine surviving.
Become part of our past.
So in this way,
We know change is happening all the time.
But knowing and then being at ease.
Are two different experiences.
You know,
In our meditation practice,
We can notice a sound arising and then disappearing or a sensation coming and going.
And the mind moves,
You know,
As the mind does from worry to relief from energy to tiredness and in some ways we start to.
See and navigate,
You know,
Understanding that our inner life is a little bit like the weather.
The clouds gather and then the sun comes out and eventually the clouds return.
And when we pay attention in this way.
We begin to see that even the things that we take as solid.
Also continually changing.
And I think the trouble.
The trouble is,
When we get up from our meditation cushion,
Um.
.
.
We forget this.
We want our experience in our daily life to be more reliable than it is.
We want the people we love to stay as they are.
And we want our bodies to keep doing.
What they've always done.
You know,
We want the good times to last and we want the difficult times to end.
Always being drawn towards some assurance that If we do everything right,
We can protect ourselves from what is truly just the uncertainty of being alive.
And so what do we do?
Well,
We make our plans and we develop our routines.
We work on ourselves,
We meditate,
We go to therapy,
We exercise,
We try to create lives that feel safe and predictable.
These are valuable and these are valuable activities.
There's nothing wrong.
With caring for ourselves or trying to make our lives better.
No amount of effort.
Can exempt us from the basic conditions of being human.
We will age.
We will experience illness and loss.
The people we love will change.
And one day,
Unknown to us,
We will die.
And our spiritual practice doesn't take these things away.
What it can do.
Is change our relationship to them.
And in this way,
What we're doing by gathering.
Maybe every day we sit or only in the community.
Three times a week.
Our practice.
In this way is what we do is we stop running from the reality.
Of these.
Truths.
You know,
Instead of running away.
We face,
Hopefully with some grace and some compassion.
The limits of our humanity.
As well as the beauty of it.
I feel like this group in particular,
And our in-person group in Basalt also,
We've created our time together as kind of a temple.
A place where Kind of a place of mercy.
Where we are learning to hold what is hard to bear in our lives.
Because you know what?
We will all continue to meet things that are hard to bear.
It's not that we won't get those things.
It's how we work with what we get.
And having community has been really beneficial in my life and I hope in yours.
So,
So change.
Is simply the nature,
The nature of things.
The nature of the body,
The nature of the mind,
The nature of everything in the world is to change.
It happens to everyone and everything.
So attuning our life as a process of change?
Like seeing clearly and repeatedly the nature of our experience is us.
Part of the flow of life.
Really working with this as a as a truth?
It deconditions.
Are very deep habits of holding on.
The more we see change,
The more we're right with the experience of change.
We don't have to do anything.
The mind naturally lets go.
The.
Insight teacher,
Joseph Goldstein.
Has this saying.
It's actually a bumper sticker.
Um,
Uh,
It's in the bumper sticker,
It says empty phenomenon rolling on.
So he did a talk years ago and talked about this empty phenomenon rolling on.
So whatever experience we may be having,
It's empty.
Empty of self.
It's just what's happening.
It's rolling like the river keeps moving towards the sea.
So as we practice,
Whatever experience may be happening in our lives,
Becomes the object of mindfulness.
You know,
We become the investigator of experience.
We investigate,
We see what's happening.
Oh,
And it's changing.
And then the letting go happens.
It's not that everything is changing.
And we pull back from experience,
That may be a habit pattern that you have.
It's learning not to hold onto experiences as fixed.
It's empty.
It's rolling on.
It's just right now.
A lot of our ideas of permanence.
Belong in the world of our thoughts and our perceptions and our concepts.
And you may notice that our concepts don't change very much.
For example,
When we think of a tree.
The concept of a tree.
The image of a tree.
You know,
In your mind right now,
It may be an image from long ago or a tree that's directly outside your window,
But you carry that image.
That concept.
And that becomes.
Virtually permanent in the mind.
So if we're thinking about things.
And relating to the world through our concepts and ideas and perceptions.
We actually have a much stronger sense that things don't change.
And so we bring mindfulness awareness practice to our practice.
What are we believing?
What is the concept that I have?
And this is where our practice can be really helpful.
When the mind settles in meditation,
Hopefully,
And we're practicing this,
We don't live in our ideas so much.
We don't live in our concepts so much.
We actually can incline the mind to be here and keep bringing it back.
And when we do that,
We notice on a very subtle level that things are always changing.
You know,
You might have started your meditation practice really sleepy,
And then now there's a little bit more energy.
Or perhaps there was a pain in your neck when you started and now it's moved to your lower back.
Still changing.
Maybe unpleasant.
But still changing.
So as we practice attuning to change.
It actually becomes the first thing we start to see in our life.
Instead of something that we're trying to avoid seeing.
And this can be deeply liberating.
Loosen our grip.
Not because we care less about our lives.
But because we see more clearly.
What our lives mean,
What being alive means.
This movement.
The leaves turn yellow and they fall.
Some years ago,
I heard a wonderful teaching from a non-dual teacher.
His name is Sam Harris.
Maybe some of you have listened to his podcast.
He's a funny guy.
And he invited us to consider that om all the things in our life.
We will at some point experience for the last time.
And he pointed out that everything that we do,
We do everything for a finite number of times.
And so much of the time,
All we're doing is really trying to get through things.
Like we're rushing towards the end of experience,
Waiting for the next thing.
Without realizing that one day,
Will do that very thing for the last time.
And I remember this with my son when he was about a year and a half old.
I would get up several times during the night to nurse him.
And his room was right next to ours.
And when I heard him crying,
I would more or less sleepwalk into his room and pick him up and begin nursing.
And it was pretty exhausting.
And yet there was something really sweet and intimate about those nights.
And then one night he didn't wake up.
And I slept until morning.
And I didn't know it at the time.
But that was the last time that I would nurse him in the middle of the night.
And looking back,
I even miss those nights a little bit.
So something that was difficult while I was in it,
Became a precious memory.
And I find myself wondering how many other last times have come and gone.
Without my knowing it.
Think about that.
When was the last time?
That you swim in the ocean.
Or went backpacking.
When was the last time you laid on your back and looked at the stars?
When was the last time you held a child who has since grown up?
When was the last time you spent time with somebody that is no longer here?
You know,
We don't know when these moments will be our last.
And the point is not to make ourselves anxious about that or turn every ordinary moment into something that we must desperately cherish before it's gone.
It's simply an invitation to pay attention.
To notice the life we're actually living rather than spending so much of it trying to get somewhere else.
And this brings me back to the fall.
This season that we're in.
As the leaves fall from the trees here.
They don't fight the season.
You know,
They don't cling to the branches,
Insisting that summer continue.
There's a tenderness towards this movement of the natural world.
Towards the season of ripening,
Which is our summer,
And release,
Which is our fall.
And we too.
We too are part of that movement.
We're growing older and changing and moving towards endings,
Whether we're ready or not.
And this practice that we gather and do together can help us meet the truth.
Like this truth with a little more grace.
What we're learning is to recognize the impulse that we have towards holding on.
To feel the fear or the sadness underneath it,
And instead of clinging tighter,
To soften our grip.
Letting go doesn't mean that we stop loving.
It means that we can love without demanding that things stay the same.
And perhaps this is one of the greatest gifts of this mindfulness that we do.
We become more at ease with the changing nature of our lives.
Our lives are the river,
And we're part of it.
And we can be present for the sweetness without needing for it to last.
We can participate more fully in the life that we have.
Because we're no longer spending so much of our energy trying to keep it from changing.
So perhaps as you enter into this fall day,
Wherever you're coming in from,
As we watch the leaves let go,
We might remember that we too are part of this beautiful fleeting world.
The seasons turn,
The light changes,
The people that we love change.
And all along,
Life is asking us to be here for it.
Not to hold still,
Not to hurry it along,
But to meet it tenderly as it comes.
And perhaps this is what our practice really teaches us,
To love what is here,
To bless what is passing,
And when the time comes to let go,
To let go like the leaves falling into the open hands of the earth.
So I offer this for your consideration.
And I thank you for your attention.
