Finding True Refuge in This Living Dying World - Part 1

Tara Brach

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4.8 • 10.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Finding True Refuge in This Living Dying World - Part 1 - This week, I began a two-part series inspired by Pema Chödron's newest offering, How We Live is How We Die. It's a powerful book that I highly recommend!

One of our deepest inquiries is how to find happiness and peace in an inherently insecure world. In these talks, we'll explore the ways we habitually try to control our lives, and the practices of presence that allow us to cherish this living world and find freedom in the midst of change and loss.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Greetings.
0:04.2	We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference.
0:09.3	To make a donation, please visit tarbrock.com.
0:31.0	Namaste. Welcome, friends.
0:36.4	So the title of this talk and reflection is finding true refuge in this living, dying world.
0:47.0	And maybe just to share from the start that in recent months, I've lost several very dear beings.
0:57.0	And I am currently accompanying several more friends who are in their last days.
1:06.0	So I wanted to reflect together on maybe one of the most, I'd say, central and often not named questions in our lives, which is what helps us face loss and death.
1:22.0	How do we open and learn to relax with the groundlessness, with the uncertainty of these lives?
1:32.0	And I know many of you are familiar with the story of the Buddha, how as the young Prince Siddhartha, he lived in these very luxurious palaces.
1:46.0	And he really never left the grounds of the palace area because it was huge until he was 29 and at that point he went on some outings.
1:56.0	When outside his father's kingdom, and he encountered three people, a sick person and old person and a corpse.
2:06.0	And this shook his world. And that's when the driving question his life emerged, which is how do we find peace and happiness and freedom given the inevitable losses, the inherent insecurity of life.
2:25.0	And so that set him off on his quest.
2:31.0	And so that psychologist William James wrote that all religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry help.
2:42.0	And there's really deep wisdom here that no matter how well our lives are going, we humans all face the same predicament really.
2:55.0	And so that's why we are not only insecure, but it's uncontrollable, and we all die.
3:01.0	Not only that, we lose that which we love. We lose others. And for many we lose jobs or homes or capabilities, feelings of relevance.
3:16.0	Even if we're sheltered from loss, kind of like the young prince, you know, even if we deny and we don't face the truth of change and mortality.
3:28.0	Part of us knows, you know, we we sense in the background that basic insecurity.
3:37.0	And so we look for ways to find some refuge, you know, to find what helps us with that existential angst and insecurity.
3:48.0	And I think often of this, it's an anonymous quote, you know, that this life is a test. It's only a test.
	...

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