Letting Go of Attachment, with Stone Exercise; Q&A with Barbara, Aaron, and Love

March 4, 2020 Wednesday Evening, Awakened Heart Class

Barbara: Good evening and love to you all. As with the transcript from the book, we’re 20 years later, but on this class 20 years ago, Aaron said, “I want to talk about stress, the alleviation of stress, the use of stress in your life.” And then he’ll come back to progressing through the book. We’re going to go with Aaron’s shift for this week.

I’m receiving a lot of emails from people recently who are feeling really stressed. A lot of anxiety about the world, about politics, about the environment, about the coronavirus—about all kinds of things. People just feeling, “Aaaah! I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do!” We go through this in cycles. Periodically we really don’t know what to do, and we so badly want to know what to do. And so, when we lack certainty it’s very stressful.

There are no clear answers to anything. Last week with the Dharma Path class I received an answer to something I sent out; I received a beautiful poem. I want to start by reading that to you, and then Aaron will come in and talk.

It’s called “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye, who is apparently a well-known and much-loved poet. I’m reading it off the screen…

(complete poem below; Barbara reads a portion)

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho

lies dead by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night with plans

and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,

(Barbara: And I would add ‘compassion’; she used the word ‘kindness’, I would put in ‘compassion’.)

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day to mail letters and

purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

it is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

–Naomi Shihab Nye, from The Words Under the Words

We so deeply do not want that kind of sorrow. We don’t want to lose everything. We’re terrified of losing everything. And yet this can be a direct path to really opening the heart to wisdom and compassion.

I’m going to ask you to meditate now with this for about 10 minutes. Think about what I just read. Think about your relationship to all the things you hold onto.

(meditation)

The dharma states it so clearly: grasping, holding on, is the root of all suffering. When we’re holding onto this, we can’t open ourselves to that. Everything changes every moment. And when we’re stuck right here in this place, we can’t see and appreciate, even cherish what’s coming to us.

I’ve been doing a lot of reflection about this, in part based on my own experience and in part based on the many questions and fears that are coming my way through phone calls and emails. People saying, “I don’t know what to do about my fear of this virus, my fear for the environment.” One dear friend who is a very centered person is feeling, “Our planet is over—the environment is a disaster.” A lot of fear, a lot of pain.

Let me say one more thing, here. It’s okay to feel pain about the world today, about the bullying and hatred in our politics, about the state of the environment. Such pain can encourage us to really work hard to bring forth the changes we want to see.

How do we stay fluid and open? Not stuck in “It has to be this way” but “If it’s not going to be this way, how else might it be?” We don’t know. There are so many billions of wholesome possibilities. We don’t know what’s coming, only that every conditioned thing in our lives will end.

Aaron pointed out in this class or a different class last week, in 150 years nobody who’s alive today will be alive. The world will be totally different. Think back 150 years ago—1870. Think back what life was like in 1870. We’d just come out of the Civil War, a totally different world. World Wars I and II had not yet happened. Who knows where life is going to be in 150 years. What do we each envision today as beautiful, as joyful? And for me the question is, how can I best co-create that in the world today? And it’s never through fear. Fear won’t do it; fear will never do it.

Okay, enough said from me. I’m going to get quiet and let Aaron talk…

Aaron: My blessings and love to you. I am Aaron. I so much love looking into your faces. You know I have lived many lifetimes, over 500 years since my final lifetime. I’ve looked into thousands upon thousands of eyes and faces, and it never ceases to bring me joy and wonder to see what a magnificent thing the human being is. You are so tender, so loving, so desirous to share yourselves with others. Some of you not so much, of course, because they’re younger souls and working through negative polarity. But in 500 years they will also be loving because they are made of the essence of Love.

If you have a pile of vegetables and a not-yet-cooked chicken on your kitchen counter, and I say, “Do you see the soup?”, do you see the soup? If the vegetables are there, the water is there, the chicken is there, the soup pot is there, and the heat is there, not yet turned on, the soup is there. But you have to have vision or you’ll never chop the vegetables, you’ll never cook the chicken. If you say, “No soup here,” and walk out, the vegetables will rot on the counter. The chicken will spoil. It will all become garbage. You have to have vision.

With that vision you can imagine. Imagine the perfect world. Imagine the world that you want to co-create. So, you start to chop the vegetables, and then the power goes out, and you think to yourself, “How will I cook the soup?” Are you going to walk out of the house, throw it all in the garbage can? Your neighbor knocks on your door and says, “I know you were going to make soup. The power’s going to be out all day. But I’ve built a big fire in the back yard and I have a good grill over it. Put everything in your soup pot. Let’s carry it outside and cook the soup.”

There are going to be a lot of people needing soup today because everybody’s power is out. You make the soup. Somebody else brings over bread and they form some kind of an oven over the coals. A dozen, two dozen, a thousand people gathered, all sharing food, all of them powerless and yet with enormous power of love and the ability to co-create and to be flexible about the new situation.

Your job in life is not to attain some kind of perfection, as some of you seem to believe, but to deepen in love. It’s as simple as that. Given any set of conditions—some pleasant, enjoyable conditions and easy to work with, some challenging conditions, there’s always going to be a mix—how well are you able to bring love and creativity into the situation? Furthermore, my experience is that when you become a bit stagnant, life sometimes has a way of bringing you new challenges just to say, “Hey, wake up! Wake up! We have work on learning to love, still to do. Wake up!”

And so, you wake up, and you work with what has come to you, sometimes comfortably and sometimes very uncomfortably. The more you can work with it with spaciousness, the easier it will go. But in those times when you cannot access spaciousness, where would spaciousness have gone?

Watch my hand. Spacious, spacious. And then it closes into a fist. Where did the space go? Of course, the hand can open again. The space is always there, sometimes apparent and sometimes not so apparent. What is on the inside of the fist? Can you see the spaciousness inside the fist? Hand open—what’s in there?

I wrote “LOVE” on that open palm—I’m not sure if you can see it—LOVE. Love is here in the open hand, love. Fear (hand closes)—where did love go? Is love still there? Where did it go? Ahh, opening—here is love! Aaagh, something attacking! (hand closes) Where did love go? (opening hand) There it is again.

Your practice is to keep remembering how to return from a place of fear and contraction, which drives you into the sense of separation, and to reconnect all hearts together. Ram Dass talks in the beginning of a film or book about being born and entering a period of “somebody” training. All of you enter “somebody” training as babies. Barbara was Skyping with her one of her sons yesterday, and the 20 month old little boy is very much in a period of “somebody” training. “Me—look at me!” And of course, this is what children have to learn. They have to become somebody, with a strong sense of self, develop a healthy ego, as your psychiatrists would put it, before you can create appropriate boundaries for themselves, then move beyond those boundaries and remember you are a part of everything, connected to everything.

The issue with this becoming somebody— “Me! Me!”—is that you forget that it’s a phase, a phase to enter into, learn, and then move past. So I think there is real issue for many humans in the world today of never having allowed themselves or been guided how to appropriately move past this ego, this small ego self, and open into the big Self, which is that self that’s connected to everything, the self that’s capable of unconditional love.

From that Self, going back to the poem for a moment—

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment…

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go…

The poem is accurate and yet lacks something. It’s a beautiful poem; I’m certainly not criticizing it. But on another level, you realize that in letting go of what you thought you had, you gain everything. “I no longer have to hold onto this; everything is available to me.”

I’d love to do an experiment here, but there are only 4 of you here in the room. I’m not sure if we can do it. We can try. That basket that has small stones in it… Please choose one for yourself, one that you love. Each of you please choose one that you love…

(They each choose.)

Would you take the basket and come right up close to the camera? And hold a stone out one at a time so they (on Zoom) can see clearly. Who wants that one? C—put it down on the table; that one belongs to C… (They continue choosing stones for several minutes.) Choose one that looks colorful and beautiful; the black ones don’t show up well on the screen…

All right. I’m putting these all into the bowl. Each of you has chosen a stone; put the basket back and then please come back to me…

Now I’m going to ask each of you to put your stone that you chose into the bowl. Put it in… You chose that stone so lovingly. Are you attached to it? Now I’m going to stir them up a bit. Close your eyes. I’m going to simply close my eyes and pull one out for each of you. So, we have E… C… (continues assigning stones as he pulls them out)

Do you see yours as I’m shining them up there (in front of the Zoom screen)? “Oh, somebody else is getting mine.” Pass them around; each of the four of you take one that remains…

Stop and breathe. How do you feel? Did you lose something? Or has something that you loved simply moved on to someone else for a while? Can you feel the sense of both “Ah, I wanted that one” and “I let it go. It came to me. I never really had it; I let it go.” We never really have anything, it just comes to visit us for a while, maybe for a minute; maybe for 60 years. It just comes to visit. Letting it go…

Give me the basket back again, please. Put your stones back in….

We’ll start with D again. Close your eyes, D. Inviting the right stone for you. Give (the bowl) back to D… (The others each choose, then Aaron holds stones in front of the screen again as he assigns each to a Zoom user)

Stop and breathe. Receiving, letting go. Receiving, letting go. Watching any attachment. Do you like what you ended up with? Those of you who are out of town, I’m not going to pack these up in envelopes and mail them to you, so you’ll have to claim them sometime when you’re in Ann Arbor. But we’ll keep this batch of stones in the cup for you to claim when you’re in town.

Are you happy? Are you sad, wanting something different? Wanting what you’ve got—”Oh, it’s wonderful!”?

We had a wonderful experience at the Casa. I gave out stones to people. I think it was at the Casa or at a retreat. Somebody came to me an hour later and said, “Aaron, you gave me a beautiful stone and I had it in my pocket, and I leaned over the toilet to flush the toilet, and it went down the toilet! It’s gone! My stone!” Will you still have this one 50 years from now? It’s doubtful. Where will it go?

Picture the little child walking down the street near someplace where there’s sewage and seeing something glinting in the sewage. Reaching in with a stick and pulling it out and saying, “Oh! What a beautiful stone! Look what I found, there in the sewer!” Nothing ever goes, it just changes its teaching place. It comes to you and it goes. It comes again and goes.

You four in the room, are you happy with the stones you ended up with? You can put them back in here… (They do.) All four came back! Will you bring me that basket again? These recycling one more time, recycling… So pass the basket around and you may each choose a stone. Then I want you to hold onto it for the coming weeks. Look at it every day. Try to decide, am I attached to it or can I simply love it, able to let it go in an instant, if I needed to?

The eight of you online, I have eight stones here, and I will tell Barbara what they’re for. They’re saved for you. You can find your stone in that bowl.

Watch what happens to your relationship with this object.

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment…

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go…

And yet, nothing is ever lost. How could anything be lost? It may not be immediately with you, but how can it be lost?

I remember a very profound discussion with a mother whose child had died. She went through the normal stages of grief, of anger even before the death, knowing the child was going to die. Anger, feeling desolate, feeling helpless. And finally, a few years later, she said to me, “Aaron, I realize my child has not died, he just lives now in my heart. I miss that I can’t hug him and play with him, but he is always with me.” How could anything be lost? And this knowing, I think is what kindness is, kindness to ourselves and to our world. Because when you develop this relationship with things—with people, with ideas—you know that that which is of most value is eternal, is truly an expression of the Unconditioned. It cannot be lost.

When you know that, you have reached a readiness to move beyond suffering, beyond attachment, and only then can you truly begin to work for change in the world. Because the word “change” means change! You help to co-create something that’s beautiful, and then it’s gone. What will take its place?

That soup that you made so lovingly, it’s been eaten. It’s gone. What will you make tomorrow? What will the new soup be like? Everything changing. Everything recreating itself into something new.

The important thing, I think, is to understand what is at the base of what you wish to co-create, which is love. However, that love will express itself, love is at the base.

So here I am simply going to bring Love in, invite Love to come into the body and spend some time with you simply helping you to remember the experience of love. You are love. When you try to hold on, you lose track of that love. Barbara described her experience, the sadness she’d been through and the fear, these past weeks, wondering, “Hal is so vulnerable. How do I best protect him?” Which means for her, how do I hold onto him? Of course, she would like him to be healthy and herself to be healthy. But anything that one attempts to hold onto through fear is already gone. Can you feel what I mean by that? If you try to hold onto it through fear, it is already gone. Does that make sense to you?

Before Love comes in, then, a few more words. Our vipassana practice gives us the opportunity to watch the arising of fear, of clinging, of closing and contraction, to note it. We do not note it to fix it, just to say ah, this has arisen. And beyond this contraction, beyond this fear, beyond this anger, beyond this clinging, can I find the spacious heart, the heart of Love?

Our class is called Awakened Heart for a reason. The intention is to help you know and trust and rest in this awakened heart so that when fear and clinging and other such emotions arise you are not misled by them into actions based on these things but can keep coming back to love. Your vipassana practice then is vital to keep re-centering in love.

Thank you. I probably will not come back, so I will just give you Love, and I will say good night. My love to all of you…

Love: My love to you all. I am Love. You are Love. What does it mean to be Love? It means to remember the essence of what you are. If we were painting the house and I spilled a bucket of blue paint on you, so that the hair and clothes and skin were drenched in blue paint, would you (Aaron is feeding me the words) freak out? “Aaaagh! I’m blue! I’m blue!” Or would you simply get a hose and rinse yourself off?

Anger will arise. Fear will arise; all conditioned objects. Why do you let them define you? This essence of Love that I am, invited you to express from the essence to bring Love out into the universe, knowing that because you are human, the various distortions of Love will present themselves. I am not afraid of them. But you with your more limited vision, you are afraid of them. “I shouldn’t be angry. I shouldn’t be afraid. I shouldn’t be confused.” Even, “I shouldn’t be sick.”

Sickness is something that happens. Fear is something that happens. Anger is something that happens. Confusion is something that happens. All arising out of conditions, impermanent; arising out of conditions and passing away. When fear passes away, what remains? When anger passes away, what remains? When confusion passes away, what remains? You are that. You are that beauty. You are Love.

Aaron, it’s been many years since you’ve done this. Perhaps it’s time to run this past people again… the perfect sheet of white paper. Does it seem perfect to you? Can you see any imperfections in it? (holds out an unblemished sheet of white paper, then crumples it up; then opens it back out and the wrinkles show,) Where is the perfect sheet of white paper? Can you see it? You can all see it. It’s right there.

The human is created with a capacity to wrinkle. The innate perfection remains. You are Love! I love your wrinkles because through these wrinkles you learn. You begin to stop identifying with the wrinkles and let the radiance shine out. A few wrinkles, gray hair, wrinkles—some of you that are of this generation, I think you’ll agree with what I’m saying, that you still feel the 10 year old within you wanting to dance, skin unblemished, hair shining. You are perfect, and yet of course the body ages. Who are you? You are Love.

When in the beginning there was nothing but Love, there was no teacher. Love looked around and said in order for people to deepen, there must be teachers. So first let there be light, and then let there be darkness. Let there be spaciousness, and then let there be contraction. Let there be joy and let there be sorrow. Let there be coming and going. Thank you, teacher, thank you. You are Love. You have never been anything but Love. And the rest is all disguise, costumes, and teacher. You are Love.

We’re going to take a short break and then Aaron may come back, or Barbara, and talk a bit about how the vipassana practice can help you remember to return to Love.

I love you all. You always have my blessings and are in the center of my heart. You are Love. We are love, forever.

I’ll release the body to Barbara…

(break)

Barbara: We come back to vipassana practice. Vipassana and pure awareness practice both, these have been life-changing practices for me, and I know those of you who are longtime practitioners would agree with what I’m saying, really finding the changes these have made in our lives.

I described how I was sitting with Hal and feeling a sense of sadness. I can’t predict the future. I can try to make wise decisions, wise choices based on what I think I know, but I have to make those choices from a place of love, not of fear. Making a choice from a place of love means acknowledging I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I don’t know what the results of my choices will be. I can only choose from my heart as best I can.

So, I was sitting there with him and feeling that sadness, wanting to hold onto him. He was watching TV; I was holding his hand and meditating. Just breathing in and holding Hal’s hand, breathing out and letting go. Breathing in and holding Hal’s hand, breathing out and letting go. Breathing in and loving Hal, breathing out and feeling the foreverness of my connection with Hal. Breathing in and feeling fear, breathing out and going through to love. Just present with all this array of feelings and knowing the feelings will keep arising out of conditions. Can I move through this confusion of feelings into “all that really matters is love”? When I’m centered in love, I have much more confidence in my ability to make wise decisions. When I’m caught up in fear, I’m running around, saying, “Aaah! I don’t know what to do.”

So much grasping that comes up, and there’s so much suffering in it. D, do you remember that retreat at Howell Nature Center, and the little girl who was rowing on the lake and lost her water lily pad? The counselors pulled the boat up. We were in our retreat center off to one side of where the camp had access to the lake, and they brought her in crying, a 5 or 6 year old girl, “I want my lily pad!” She was inconsolable. She was crying and crying, and repeating, “I want my lily pad!”

We (John Orr leading the retreat, and I) were worried at first that this was intruding on the silence of us meditating just 50 yards away from the beach. But then countless people came up to me and said, “She really broke my heart open. She really touched that place of ‘I want! I’m afraid!’ And my practice encouraged me to move through that and find love, to let go of all of those stories of ‘I want! I must have!'”

Coming back to the poem…

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment…

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go…

so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

The little girl inconsolable. And so many people at the retreat crying with her, not about her lily pad but about their “lily pads”. It broke everyone’s hearts open, opening the heart into the place of true tenderness of the heart. Aaron says, what Love was talking about; the place where we know we are love. The wisdom of the heart that knows what to do because it knows it is love.

So the vipassana practice is central for me in my ability to do this. I watch whatever the emotion might be, or the physical sensation. I’m with it with as much presence and as much kindness as I can give it. And then I really begin to develop the wisdom it’s impermanent, it arose from conditions, it’s not of the essence of a self. As it dissolves, what remains? And I keep coming back to that spaciousness, love, kindness, wisdom, that remain.

Eventually, we start to know ourselves as that and not as the conditions. It’s life-changing. So those of you who are newer to vipassana, I strongly urge you to go deeply into this, to work with it.

We have about 20 minutes, so let’s open the floor to questions or things you want to share…

Q: Is there are relationship between love and spaciousness?

Barbara: My experience is that love is the essence and has a multitude of expressions. Spaciousness is one expression of love. Luminosity is one expression. Loving kindness is one expression. Patience is one expression. Wisdom is one expression. So, love is the core. That is my experience. I’m not claiming that as an ultimate truth, only that is how I experience it.

The thing is, it’s hard to say what love is. When Love is incorporated and comes through, I gather you feel Love’s energy very strongly, and that you can say, “Oh wow, that’s Love!” But how do we put words abound that? What is the experience of Love? And then we get into the expressions. Okay, when I am resting in Love I feel spaciousness. I feel joy. I feel loving kindness. I experience luminosity. Does that answer your question? (Yes.)

Q: How can Love be love/Love and also talk through Barbara as if it is an individual being?

Barbara: I experience it incorporating into my body—the process, the beginning of that incorporation—as I do anything, except that it’s a much higher, bigger energy. Yeshua is vast, but Yeshua still has boundaries, of some sort. When I experience Love coming through it just explodes with energy. And then I’m gone, so I don’t experience it the way you’re experiencing it. Let’s let Love answer that…

Love: I am Love. I express in the smallest flower, even the little ant on the ground. I express in the new spring leaves, just tiny and beginning to bud on the trees. I express through a mother feeding her baby, through the sea lapping on the shore, through the sun breaking through clouds, through the smile of a child. Why should I not be able to express through Barbara? I express through each of you. Have I expressed through you today? Undoubtedly. I express through each of you. So here I am simply coming forth using the mental body, as it were, using the ability to cognize and form words. You think of Love as an energy, but Love is also an intelligence with the ability to form words and express thoughts.

Q who has asked this, has Love expressed through you today? (smiling) Okay, that answers your question. I’ll stay here for now to see if there are further questions for me.

Q: The sound you hear is Banner loving on his bone…

Q: As you describe Love, it sounds like the energy of what we call God.

Love: At some point in the past month I spoke of this. I could come to you and say, “I am God. I am Goddess.” But that’s an awkward term for some of you. What is God? What is Goddess? (I am asking Aaron’s help for articulation; my English is not yet perfect.) Your Bible says, “In the beginning there was light. Let there be light.” Light might be called the first expression of Love. We do not say something ordained that there would be light, because that would imply a time when light did not exist. Love has always existed. It expressed into the darkness! I don’t want to say Love and God are different or are the same, only Love IS. Love has no beginning or end. You can call it whatever you wish. The great holy OM, Love, God.

The important thing is to remember that Love is, and that you are part of it, that you are an expression of it and that you have always been an expression, even before the human that you are existed. You are always an expression of Love. And before any karmic ancestor in your flow of karmic ancestors, before any of them existed, you were still Love, you simply had not yet expressed. Once you express, we might call it walking out of the Garden. Out of that place of total immersion with and non-separation with Love, with the Divine, and into the illusion of separation. And then the whole karmic flow begins with that illusion of separation. “I am”—I as separate from other things, and the whole flow of arising of fear, of separation, and then finally of moving beyond them, which is what we call awakening—awakening to knowing the true self and living from the true Self. Then you are not really back in the Garden. You’re in the Garden and fully out of the Garden at the same time. Can you see that? This is Aaron’s “Bridge”.

So that’s what we’re after—not to put you back in the limited Garden, not to have you lose the Garden, but to live in the Garden and out there totally, non-separate. It is there that you are able to truly manifest the Love and Light that you are in the universe; there that you are able to make a difference where there is darkness, fear, and hatred. If you hide in the Garden you cannot make that difference. If you lose the Garden, you have not the ability to make that difference. You must be connected to Love, must know your innate connection to Love.