Forest Teachings, Part VIII: Everything Is Dancing – Relaxing the Illusion of Separateness with L...

On this hybrid Dharma Sunday, join Lama Liz for the seventh installation of the Forest Teachings, a series of Dharma talks inspired through exploring how the energies of the living world invite us into deep renewal, transformation, and reconnection with the more that we are and always have been. On this Sunday, we will explore how relaxation and non-separation can be understood as two sides of the same movement. We will ask ourselves: What would it mean to move through the world without continually tightening around the idea of being a separate self? When we look closely, there is a great deal of effort involved in maintaining the sense that I am here and the world is out there. I am the one who is experiencing, and everything else is what I am experiencing. I am the one who sees, and there is something outside me that is seen. I am the one who hears, and there is something outside me that is heard. When we are contracted around separation, appearances can seem heavy and solid and somehow outside us. But when that contraction relaxes, something about their nature can begin to shimmer. There is a kind of radiance that becomes available when we are not continually stepping back from experience and turning it into something we have to understand, control, or defend ourselves against. Together we will ask what would happen if the shimmer of luminosity we recognize in awareness could begin to move through us freely—like a river of rushing sensation, flowing through the body, flowing through perception, flowing through love, and pouring itself out into the world? These are not questions we have to answer – they are questions to live.