Opening Into the Places that Scare Us; Reading from Being Bodies

May 9, 2023 Tuesday Evening, Living Awake Class

Opening Into the Places that Scare Us; Reading from Being Bodies

Aaron: My blessings and love to you. I am Aaron. It is a beautiful day here, and I hope it is where you are also. I hope the external weather and the internal weather are both sunny and joyful.

We’re coming to the close of this semester. We’ve been talking recently about the path of sacred darkness, which of course is non-dual with the path of sacred light. Light and darkness must interact with each other. You cannot know the light except in contrast to the darkness, and you do not know the darkness except in contrast to the light. And yet, they are one, part of each other, not different in essence.

At the Emerald Isle retreat we worked quite a bit with access concentration and knowing access concentration as not an end result but a doorway. That’s why it’s called access concentration. You come into this degree of presence which opens the doorway to the opening of the citta capable of the experience of touching on the Unconditioned.

Many of you through the year have opened to access concentration and become somewhat stable there. Others are just beginning to explore it more, not yet stable, and that’s fine.

Through the last three years of Dharma Path, and through this year, we’ve deepened in many practices. Vipassana. Pure Awareness. Practices of the heart. Knowing access concentration. Being present in the mind and in the body. Understanding the path of dependent arising and how you proceed through that path with a predominant object arising that is either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, liking it or disliking it. But there’s no grasping or aversion, and that’s what leads you into access concentration. That spacious presence with it, not getting caught in the stories.

As we come into these last two classes, and especially as we come into the retreat—and I hope many of you will register for it. We have 10 or 12 registered now, but a very experienced, wonderful group registered, a group capable of going deep.

Rather than a lot of repetitive instruction at the retreat, what I hope is to help you use this precious time to meditate, to sit, to walk, to sit again, perhaps to chant or do yoga or other mindful movement, to sit again and really watch this whole process of dependent arising.

Coming into access concentration and knowing it as the doorway. Here you are, the citta capable of perceiving the Unconditioned are open. What are you going to do with that precious opportunity? How do we take it from there and go further?

It’s hard to do in a daily sitting of 45 minutes, and this is why your retreat is so valuable—to have the opportunity to look at, if I can phrase it in this way, the resistance to going deeper. Because there is an attachment to the small self. There is always that feeling, will I annihilate myself? What if I move through the doorway?

Opening… Opening the door. Opening the door through your consistent practice, shared with your sangha, where you have the support of your teachers, your sangha, and your loving heart.

So I hope many of you will consider this as a very wonderful opportunity. I understand that some of you have other obligations during that week. One of the wonderful things about an at-home retreat is that it gives you the opportunity to come to the instruction period, if you can, or to listen to the recording that you get a little later in the day. To do not just one sitting in the day but a number of sittings and walking periods even if you must also do some work or take care of children, pay the bills, whatever it is you must do. Doing it mindfully and sitting again, because it’s only this way—repeated effort; holding the effort not with grasping but from the deepest intention to awaken for the highest good of all beings and for your own freedom. But (with) this beautiful heart-centered effort there can be further awakening. But as I said, it’s very hard to do that in 45 minutes a day.

So, if you’re unable to join the retreat, sitting and walking and sitting and the whole program, please don’t let that stop you from coming, but commit to sitting as many sittings or walking periods or whatever as you are able during the day, being mindful for the rest. Deepening, opening. Using access concentration as a doorway to that opening.

Why is there resistance? Your practice is asking you to go places that are scary. Barbara remembers hearing at I think her first Buddhist teachers conference a very senior teacher, a woman then in her seventies; somebody asked her, “What is vipassana?” and she said, “One insult after another.” That’s kind of how it is. All the things that you’ve avoided seeing come up. All the places where you’ve closed yourself off come up. You have to want that awakening enough to be willing to look into these places of darkness, of fear, of obscuration. You have to want it enough not to hide out in the lovely and blissful experiences, too, because it’s all spiritual bypassing, whether you’re hiding out in the blissful or whether you’re avoiding the frightening.

Human incarnation is challenging. It’s meant to be that. If it were easy, why would you be here? Why would you bother? You’d choose to hang out in some heavenly plane where it would be blissful. You wouldn’t awaken there, but it would be comfortable. You’ve graduated to the point where you are no longer interested so much in comfortable as truth—not just your own personal truth but the deepest truth of love. And the only way to get to that love is to go through the darkness.

For me, that darkness came in numerous lifetimes, but in my final lifetime it came. I think you’ve heard this story, that the man who was my brother, his eldest son died, so he came to the monastery telling me he would take his younger son, who was my senior disciple for over fifteen years. He demanded that son come home with him to help with the various children and family. He was bereft; he was scared. And I did not respond well. Instead of hearing his need with compassion, I had fear: he’s going to take this beloved monk from me, who is the closest thing I will ever have to a son in this lifetime. He’s going to take him away.

Of course, it was the younger monk’s free will choice, but he did not want to go. He would have listened to me if I had said, “You must go, but you need not disrobe. Take another monk with you. Go spend a month and help your father get settled and then return.”

But my fear contracted me, and I simply said, “No. If he doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t have to go.” So this one who was my brother, he was so angry, he was so afraid. He didn’t now how he would handle his deceased son’s family, numerous children, the affairs of his farm, all the weight that fell upon him. He pulled out a knife and threw it at me, he was so angry at me.

The monk stepped in the way of that knife to protect me and was killed. My brother’s beloved son, my beloved disciple.

I sent some monks with my brother. I settled my own part as the senior teacher in the monastery and then left to wander in the forest for ten years. And in that ten years I had to look at the darkness inside myself. The one who wanted to take some kind of refuge in spiritual life, believing it in some way to be better than mundane life. Believing myself to be in some way better than my brother.

But I had the same grasping for this son—this nephew, this son—as my brother did. I was not beyond grasping. I was not beyond selfishness. I was not beyond reactivity.

The effort, though, was not to blame myself, or anyone else. It was to learn compassion, which is what this human lifetime is mostly about. The third density on earth is a density of compassion. Wisdom, too; but wisdom comes after compassion, not before it. Wisdom can mask compassion. There has to be a depth of compassion, and that’s what this earth plane is so wonderful at offering.

So I wandered for ten years in the forest, mostly alone. It was very hard to look honestly at myself, at the one who still subtly wanted to be better than my brother. Wanted to believe that if I lived this spiritual life as a monk and the head of a monastery, I was somehow beyond human passions, human hatred, human fear.

You know how that ten years ended. You’ve heard the story of my awakening under that thorn tree. But that awakening did not happen in a vacuum; it happened after ten years of going into the darkness. Seeing that which was ashamed and afraid and angry in myself with honesty and compassion. And it was only then that I was capable to have compassion for the tiger snarling at my feet, and compassion for myself. Only then that I was able fully to awaken.

You, my friends, have been wandering for ten years and more in a forest, you all have, each of you in a forest of your own making. Each of you has areas of darkness which bring up fear and resistance. Until you are able to, I don’t want to say penetrate that darkness and resistance, that fear, but at least hold it, you can’t go any further. And that’s what we’re encouraging here.

I believe you all know the story of the urn, holding and polishing. In order to awaken, you have to hold this urn and to polish it. If you keep polishing and pushing against it but are not holding it, it just pushes out of reach. And you can hold it forever, but if you don’t polish the surface of it, the tarnish, you’ll never penetrate into the center.

Holding and penetrating, vitakka and vicara. These factors are so beautiful. This is something else we’ll be working with on retreat when we have the time, in repeated sittings, to go deeper and then to pause and step back and ask, “What frightens me? What am I not willing to allow myself to see?” But always tenderly and compassionately for the self, never with force.

The intention has to come from deep within the heart—the bodhisattva who chooses to more fully awaken for the service of all beings, for the freedom of all beings. Each of you has worked with these practices over and over, and in the retreat I look forward to pulling it all together. John, Barbara, and I will be giving, not so much detailed instruction that you’ve already heard, but reminders of how to hold it together. And the compassionate small groups in which you can share what’s coming up in your practice and feel the support of your sangha to bring it together, to weave it all together. This is why I consider this retreat the culmination of this year.

I’ve asked Barbara to read something to you, and I’m going to come out of her body for ten minutes or so and let her read. And then I will come back with some final words, maybe a chance for some questions.

Perhaps 20, 25 years ago, Barbara published a chapter in a book called Being Bodies. It was an anthology; Buddhist Women on the Dilemma of Embodiment; I’m not sure of the exact subtitle Barbara wrote about opening to her deafness. It so deeply illustrates what I’m talking about that I think it would be helpful for you to hear it. Some of you have read it previously.

I’m going to release the body to Barbara now, and I’ll return. I am Aaron.

Barbara: Thank you, Aaron. Okay, friends, Aaron wants me to read this to you. We’re starting part way through.

(journal entries)

…I hate the deafness! I hate the silence! Why do I hate the silence so much?

I walked around the meadow yesterday with Mike [my 11 month old son] on my back. He fell asleep so I walked around the marsh and through the woods. It’s the longest I’ve walked since I got sick. While walking, I realized I’m deaf here too but there’s no anger. My mind is very still when I walk, not asking for entertainment. What’s the difference? I feel connected to the trees, the sky. There’s nothing I’m pushing away; therefore I don’t need diversion.

[I had been speaking on the prior page of working here in this room, in my sculpture studio, and missing the diversion of playing music. That there was nothing to divert me; I just had to be there and weld bronze together, or hammer, or file. No diversion. And I didn’t want to be present.]

The singing is diversion, not from the boredom of grinding sculpture but from the intensity of the anger and pain of isolation.

(A day later) While meditating this morning a wisdom deep within whispered, “Breathe….”

Later: I started working with the piece that still needs seams bronzed, using the welding torch. I must pay attention or I get burned. Breathe? I realized that when I work with the torch and am paying close attention, breath is very present. I began to watch myself breathing as I worked; no that’s not quite right. I began to watch the breath moving in and out, the way I hold it with each circular motion of torch to rod, release when the bronze drips, hold it again as hand moves closer to the fire. It flowed all together, hands, fire, bronze, breath. I started to feel a great joy, like I was part of a dance. I don’t understand it at all, but the morning’s work flowed effortlessly, even joyfully, past.

[I had been complaining on the prior pages of how boring it was to work in my studio on the busy work of filing and welding without any entertainment.]

Today I tried breathing while I filed. Attention shifted, almost imperceptibly, from breath to the movement of the hands, but the experience was different than last week when the noting of “up, down” was disconnected from the actual hands. Today I was just watching the hands, not forcing them, engaged in the same “dance” as with the breath and welding. I experienced something rather strange that I don’t have words for, almost an intimate connection with the file and sculpture, a kind of love-making. It most definitely wasn’t boring!

I still don’t know what “boredom” is.

Today I found myself crying silently as I worked, just feeling sadness and letting tears run down my cheeks, not trying to push the reality of my deafness away. The sadness is clean. It’s uncomfortable, but workable.

What changed the same filing from “boring” to deeply connected ? It’s continued that way for five days. With “boring” there was anger, not at the work but at the deafness which kept me from diverting myself from the work. I couldn’t get away from “look what happened to me – not fair;” and all of that. It burned. By ending “boring” I allowed some of that pain without all the “stop feeling sorry for yourself” shit I’ve been spouting. Feeling sorry for myself doesn’t solve anything, but maybe judging my feelings doesn’t solve anything either. When I stay with the work, with my breath, with my hands, my mind stops trying to use thought to lead me to safety. I’m just there.

I can’t control my mind with conscious will. Therefore, I can’t keep myself safe and comfortable. I don’t know how to phrase this. I’m beginning to see that my deepest pain is not from what’s happening or not happening in my life but from my relationship with it. My pain is not from the deafness but from how much I want to be rid of the deafness. But how can I ever make friends with this silence which so devastates me?

Non-boredom is connection! It doesn’t accompany connection; it is connection, a mind state in which I’m totally connected! Boredom is separation. When I’m separate from myself (i.e. disallowing my thoughts and feelings), I’m separate from my family, from my work.

(A month later) Has it really been just a month that I’ve been working this way? I find deep joy in it, am finding I very much look forward to being in the studio. It’s become a time of deep focus and peacefulness. At one level mind is jumping around and at another level it’s totally concentrated, just watching the jumping with much spaciousness and no obsession to control. It’s the most peaceful thing I’ve ever done. I enjoy grinding seams! The bronze seems alive, responsive. Even “boredom” has become interesting!

It took me many years to really understand the nature of my suffering and even longer to understand and heal my relationship with my deafness, For all those years my day-long practice was just to breathe and create, breathe and file or weld, breathe and be. I spent hours a day, month after month, in this way for over a decade.

In those years my meditation practice changed and deepened. My suffering was less intense but still present and increasingly, practice led me to investigate the nature of that suffering and to understand how it grew out of a sense of separation, an agony of aloneness. What was separate? How had I become ensnared in what my deepest meditations taught me was illusion?

******

So, moving from that point where I lost my hearing and was dealing with the immediacy of it. Watching my children get older, from infant to ten years old. Living my life and sitting daily, sometimes several sittings a day. Working with metta, with compassion for myself and for others.

All of you have had areas of trauma in your life, of pain, of anger, of fear, and you’ve learned to work with these deeply in practice; to hold space for your pain and for others’ pain. To not take it personally; to see it’s just arising from conditions and passing away, and not get caught in the stories that are presenting themselves.

Where do we take it from there, when it’s become more stable and we’re at peace? I think that’s where many of you are, that you’ve more or less made peace with what’s happening in your lives. And there’s still something that you’re holding out there. “I’m not going to let this get too close to me. Keep it away from me.” We use our practice in a way of shielding ourselves from our pain.

But at a certain point it becomes vital that we open to that pain and use it as the doorway into deeper insight, deeper awakening. I’m going to read you a little bit more now…

At one point I began to have nighttime dreams of a giant surf, of wanting to swim but finding the waves huge and forbidding. Every morning when I sat to meditate, the question would arise of whether I wanted to go down to the beach in my meditation, to a non-physical but still wild sea. My answer was always “no.” It became harder and harder to meditate. My back began to ache, first just while I was sitting, then in anticipation of it. I knew I was running from something, but I still wasn’t clear what it was.

Finally, one morning during meditation I said “yes.” and went to the beach, opening to the experience of the waves while I sat. What follows comes from my journals.

The surf is huge, the waves dark. I understand that I must submerge myself. I must take a single step into the unknown. [We try so hard to go into that unknown!] A wave crashes down. I step into its ebb and see the next wave tower above me, black belly, white foam, feel it slap me under, roll me in its power. I am drowning. I can’t breathe. Desperately I force my eyes open. I breathe deeply, gasping breaths of cool air in the safety of my room. I stop trembling. I close my eyes. I am back on the same beach. I do the whole thing again. Over and over and over. How much time goes by? My watch tells me later that it really was hours.

I beg for help. No! Wisdom assures me that I can do it. Suddenly, in the midst of a terrible wave, Barbara the strong swimmer takes over. “Don’t fight it,” I hear my voice saying. “Be one with it.” I start to swim with the wave. I gather momentum, I dive down and come up in the calmer swells beyond. I return to shore and do it again, and again, until I can enter the water, not without fear, but knowing how to harmonize with this previously overwhelming force. I am complete. All that I need to bring to this wave is within me.

Now, I did not consciously create this metaphor; it’s just what came to me. I allowed my meditation practice to lead me.

Coming out of the sitting, I began to reflect: death is not an end but just another step. It is the step before birth. I need fear neither. It is all part of the process.

I began to do metta meditation. “May I be healed; may I find peace; may all beings be healed and find peace….”

So I had accepted my deafness as a death, and I had learned that I could survive that one step into the unknown, could allow myself to be overwhelmed, but I still didn’t know where this was going.

This morning I felt like I’d never meditated before. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t quiet my mind from its turmoil. My back, which has continued to hurt through these weeks, ached horribly. My legs were cramped; my forehead itched; I was alternately freezing and sweating. Most of all I felt so totally alone. “Sit with it,” I told myself. “Just watch it. Watch all the pain and anxiety and see where it’s going. Watch yourself wanting so desperately for things to be different.” After well over an hour I got up. I walked around for a few minutes. The aloneness, the agitation came with me. I sat again.

The isolation became overwhelming. Searching for something that might help, I reached for the lines of the 23rd psalm “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil…” Into the space I had opened through this small kindness to myself came the understanding: “You are never alone, but this is the isolation into which you’ve bound yourself. When do you remember feeling like this before? When do you last remember really needing that psalm?

And with a rush all the memories came back. I saw those first weeks of my illness. All sound was gone. I couldn’t focus my eyes. To turn my head even a bit brought waves of dizziness. I felt helpless and alone. I realized, in this morning’s instant of remembered pain, that in 16 years I have never cried for my pain.

When I understood how I’d buried this pain, I just sat there on the floor and cried, and cried. The remembering hurt, but not nearly as badly as burying it had hurt. I wept for the loss of my hearing, I wept for the aloneness, I wept for the fear, I wept for the one in a glass prison, seeing, but totally cut off from the world. All that week I remembered and cried.

I had raged at my deafness but never allowed the pain into my heart. I simply buried it, and met any feelings of self-pity with contempt. I see that my deepest separation was from myself….

******

I won’t read to you any more. I will make it available online so that you can read it. But this was the opening that I needed. I needed to reconnect with myself, to go into that darkness and open to myself with love. I already had the practice. I was already at that point very able to rest in access concentration, but I was using it to escape from pain rather than as a doorway. And I needed to be willing to go through, to experience—in this case—this personal pain of isolation, which was needed to begin to heal the karma, to begin the heal the feelings of separation, to begin to see that separation was an illusion.

And then I was able to use access concentration to move on to much deeper experiences of the Unconditioned. If I had experienced the Unconditioned earlier, it would have been an escape. It would not have been wholesome. I had to heal this first by just being willing to let myself experience the pain. And who wants to experience pain? So we block it.

We each have different areas of pain, feeling abandonment, feeling unworthiness, feeling unloved, feeling ashamed, feeling scared. We each will have our own ways to open to it. But the mix of vipassana, Pure Awareness, and the Brahma Viharas will take us there.

We begin to open into this darkness that no longer seems dark. It’s filled with light and rainbows. It opens up into a way of awakening.

So, this is my little bit of experience of it. And I’m sure many of you could share similar kinds of experiences, because a lot of you have done very deep practice, too.

My point here is simply to bring to the light the idea of opening into the places that scare us and finding the compassionate ability to do that without force, with kindness. But knowing I have to go there. If I really want freedom, I have to go into the places that scare me, and then I’ll find the light in those places and it will be okay. And then the doors will be open more and I can go further into the direct experience—the very healing and magnificent experience of the Unconditioned.

Aaron, is there anything else? He says that is sufficient. He’s thanking me.

Aaron: I am Aaron, with thanks to Barbara for her illustration, here. It must be gentle. You cannot force yourself, but love leads you on. To a large extent the bodhisattva commitment, that even if you’re too terrified to do it for yourself, your deep aspiration to help all beings awaken helps you to go through what you must for yourself in order to be able to give it to all beings, to help all beings wake up.

Each of us carries a portion of the terrible parts of the human experience as well as the blissful parts and the opportunity to release and heal those frightening parts. To move through the darkness and learn that it’s never really been dark and that we’ve never really been alone. It takes courage and a deep commitment to the dharma, a commitment to the refuges.

Buddham Saranam Gacchami

Dhammam Saranam Gacchami

Sangham Saranam Gacchami

It’s a beautiful path.

That’s all I wish to say. Are there any questions?

Q: Earlier this week, I started to think about how our minds are socialized and enculturated to understand space and time and object separation as part of being human in human culture. So, when Barbara was reading the part about the wave coming and taking her under in her meditation and fearing that and being thrown and being killed by that wave, did she somehow know that that would happen later in her life at Emerald Isle? Was she entering this place where the past and the future can be known differently than we humans allow ourselves to understand knowing time?

Aaron: Thank you, Q, I hear your question. My sense is that each being has different karma, different repeated karmic experiences. For Barbara, drowning, tidal wave, lost in a storm at sea, these have been repetitive through past lives, so it’s the image that came up for her. It was not foreknowledge of something that would happen because nothing is ordained. It might happen; it might not happen.

She did not create that Emerald Isle experience of the wave, but she certainly participated in it. But if she had had different kind of karma, it could have been a different kind of experience. A house could have collapsed on her, or something of the sort. Does that answer your question?

Q: Yes, it does, and it brings me to another one. While I was at Emerald Isle, I had the opportunity to speak to several people who had had some sessions with Barbara to learn about their karma and felt that it helped them understand their meditation path and deepen in their following the path. I have not taken advantage of that opportunity to work individually with Barbara around karma, and I’m wondering if that is something that would help me.

Aaron: I cannot say it would or would not help you. When you are ready to see it, you will see it. At that point you may be ready to invite talking about it, and that will help to bring it closer to deeply understanding it. But if you are not ready to see it—first of all, I will not share a past life with somebody who is not ready to see it. I think you are ready to see it, so part of your looking at the darkness will be looking at the question, what am I afraid to know? What is that I want to hold apart from myself and don’t really want to know?

You may not get an answer to specifically what it is but just the sense, yes, there’s something out there that I’m scared to know. And I’m increasingly ready because my awakening depends on opening. And you will find it’s not really darkness, once you get into it, just as my experience with the thorn tree and the tiger was not dark, it was filled with light. It was awakening.

Q: Thank you.

Aaron: Barbara does not see into the karma; Barbara is simply channeling me.

Q: At the Emerald Isle retreat, it occurred to me that the vitakka and vicara, the holding and penetrating, isn’t something that’s only done on the mundane level. So my question is, is the ability of mind to hold and penetrate something that’s carried through all the different levels of its ability?

Aaron: It’s a growing ability. Basically, it takes deepening in the intention, “Whatever it is that I must look at, move into, I am willing because of my deep bodhisattva intention, because of my deep commitment to the awakening of all beings.” Then it’s not just for yourself, and that gives the intention so much more power.

Then it becomes part of your constant everyday experience. You’re always holding and polishing, and holding and polishing, and going deeper, and going deeper. But there’s not a sense of “I will go deeper,” there’s just a sense of awe at the unfolding of the dharma. A joy at the unfolding, even if it’s hard to see it.

Q: Does the choice to move to hold something, is that included in vitakka and vicara? Is the choice to move to an object of mind part of vitakka and vicara, holding and penetrating?

Aaron: Yes and no. There can be no force to it—”I’m going to hold onto this now!”, because that’s cruel. “I am ready. I choose to, if it’s for the highest good. There’s an area that I have held away from me, and now I’m holding my hands out to it and allowing it to come close to me, if it’s for the highest good.” And when it’s phrased in that way, and held in the heart in that way, you will connect with what you need to connect with. But there’s no ego involved in it, no “I’m going to surmount this now.” Whatever is for the highest good, I open to it.

Q: Okay, thank you.

Q: In your teaching, you’ve taught many, many times we have free will. I was reading Anna, Grandmother of Jesus, about when he was in the cavern. At this point, he says (or the channeler says), “Right away, I set myself the task of surrendering my will to the source of my being.” So, could you talk a little bit about what that means?

Aaron: The ego may hold the intention to armor yourself and not surrender to the inner source but to keep the ego in control, or the essence of you says, “That’s it. I release the ego a bit more and open to Source—Source that is not separate from me.” But it’s a surrender of domination by the ego, into moving ahead from the place of love and connection with all that is.

This is not an either/or; it comes in degrees. You know that. So, it can feel like there’s a lot of release of the ego, but there’s still a small part of it that’s saying, “No, I want it this way.” True surrender is not saying, “I prefer it to be this way, but Thy will be done.” And “Thy will” does not mean something separate from you but the highest divine will for the highest good. I am willing to allow that to come forth, even if it’s not pleasant.

Does that answer your question?

Q: It does. Thank you very much, Aaron.

Aaron: I’m glad you’re reading this book.

Q: Aaron, you have taught us about the opening of the lokuttara citta, the citta that are able to perceive the Unconditioned. And I’m wondering, is holding and penetrating, the vitakka and vicara, involved in that opening?

Aaron: Yes. Short answer: Yes. Because the lokuttara citta that can perceive the Unconditioned ask you to…You can’t open to the Unconditioned unless you can hold and penetrate into the Unconditioned. As long as there’s any wall between the self and the Unconditioned, the lokuttara citta may be open and able to perceive it, but it’s seen as at a distance. You’re not within it; you’re outside the doorway looking through, rather than right there moving through the doorway.

Q: Okay, thank you.

Aaron: I’m very enthused about this retreat. It may be small; that’s okay. But small with a number of very experienced practitioners, I think we’re going to have an opportunity to go very deep.

So, if no one else, let me pass this on to John.

My blessings and love to you. I am Aaron. I love you all very much. You are the children of my heart, and I offer my deepest blessings to you, that you may find that for which you seek, and you may find freedom and love and the deepest awakening of your heart.

May all beings everywhere find that awakening, stay free, and find peace.