Tara Brach - Befriending Irene

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

Befriending Irene - While Tara is away, this talk is from 2011 after Hurricane Irene hit us with fury. Dorian is now leaving its destruction behind, just as we work with our stormy weather within. Whether you face chronic anxiety or more violent storms of fear and anger, you can cultivate the wings of freedom–the mindfulness and compassion–that free you. This talk explores how the habit of being reactive causes us suffering and the ways these tools of meditation can be applied to the inner weather systems that most challenge us. The flute meditation at the end of the talk is given by Akal Dev.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. One of the most notable things about this most recent experience with Irene, with our friend Irene, was that there was an amazing amount of planned response. I mean, we had so much warning that we were able to, in most parts of the region that were affected had had a chance to prepare. And of course, there were some that still got very terribly hit. Not always the case with intense weather systems. There are quakes and tsunamis and other things where we don't have a chance to prepare. And it's also true in our inner life that things happen to us. We have accidents or problems with our health

or financial difficulties or loved ones, things that happen. And there's not really a chance to prepare ourselves. And instead of that readiness, which really makes a difference in our life, quality of presence and readiness that really can handle, we flip into reactivity. And I'd like to share one of my best examples on this. This is a man who's responding to a request from an insurance company for more information. He says in response to your quest for additional information in block three of the accident report form,

I put in poor planning as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter I should explain more fully. I trust the following details will be sufficient. I'm a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I had 500 pounds of bricks left. Rather than carrying them down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel attached to the side of the building. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out, and loaded the brick onto it.

Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to ensure a slow descent of the 500 pounds of bricks. You will note in block number 11 of the accident report form that I weigh 135 pounds. Due to my surprise of being jerked off the ground so suddenly I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming down. This explains the fractured skull. Slowing slightly, I continued my ascent, stopping when the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep in the pulley. Fortunately, by this time, I had regained my presence of mine and was,

able to hold tightly to the robe in spite of my pain. At the approximately same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel. Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 50 pounds. I refer you again to my weight in block number 11. As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I again met the barrel coming up. This again. accounts for the fractured ankle. The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell onto the bricks. Fortunately, only my toes were cracked.

I'm sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in pain and unable to stand up and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my presence of mine and let go of the rope. This is entitled Unknowing When to Let Go. Tonight I'd like to use the metaphor. of the storms that occur in our life and how often rather than being prepared in the sense of presence of mind, we do flip into our own chain of reactivity. And it might not be as dramatic and interesting as this bricklayers, but we do it. And I very much like the metaphor of weather. I talk

often about our inner weather systems. And the reason I like this, I like this, I like, like that, you know, we all of a sudden will encounter an inner weather system and how do we handle it? When we consider the outer weather, this hurricane that came up, we are interested, we track it, we prepare, but we don't take it personally. It's not like it's my hurricane and I did anything to cause it. You know, we're not angry at our self-word, nor do we blame others for the weather. unless of course we're catching a pattern that we know has to do with global warming, in which case appropriately we make the connections, and that's wise. But this angry blaming that happens when the inner weather comes up,

when the anger comes up or the fear, it's very personal, and yet it's weather. It's really weather. So what I'd recommend is we explore this tonight together, because we're going to be exploring how do we bring our intelligence, our compassion

to the intensity that does move through us that we consider as with outer weather there's a quality of interest that can help to guide us that can bring out our intelligence if we're tracking it

if we start seeing the patterns, right? I mean if we start getting the notion of it when this comes up, I react like this and I tell myself this story and I do that. When we start tracking the patterns, we're better able to interrupt them, right? So one element I'd like to encourage tonight is just like a meteorologist. Let me try it again. Meteorologist.

I didn't quite get it. But you know who I'm talking about? With that interest, kind of bearing witness. Okay? And the other quality when the inner weather arises is like a grandparent. Just as a grandparent with a child that's caught in a kind of temper tantrum or is upset would bring a real care to that child that's caught in something, that we bring that kind of friendliness to our own inner weather systems.

Interest as the observing scientist and friendliness. you know it's how I got around the first one anyway okay so we do those two so we start watching what happens when we have a trigger and most of the time we're spending our bodies are in some way experiencing

that we're either in a storm like right now there's trouble right now there's a problem right now there's fear or anger or disappointment or jealousy or else we're anticipating a storm, and it's kind of pre-stress in our body. We're getting ready in some way, but there's tension.

So either way, we're in a pattern that starts to become reactive. And what I consider a full-blown storm, when we're over the top, we'll describe that. But look at how it begins. Let's say you get an email, and the email reminds you of something that you're supposed to get done that you have a deadline for. And then you feel the tension in your body.

And then you start obsessing on how it's going to work out. And then you're in some way speedy and impatient with somebody in your family. And that creates a kind of distance, right? So we've gone from kind of something happening, creating kind of a weather system, to one level of what I'm going to call violence, which is that we have violated a kind of

harmony and we create separation. But it gets, of course, as we know, much worse. As we know, we often go from feeling impatient to having the kind of conflict that creates really deep separation and moving into blaming the other person or blaming our self. And that's when our identity gets hitched. The violence of these storms, when we go into reactivity inside, the violence of it is our identity gets caught.

And we either become the victim, we're the one that bad things are happening to, or we become in some way an aggressor. Either way, we don't like ourselves. So what we're going to explore tonight really is how do we catch this chain reaction that lands us up not liking ourselves, that lands us in an identity that's less than and smaller than who we want to be. Victim aggressor. I was talking about this last year, about how we kind of spiral out of control and we get reactive. And somebody sent me this little cartoon and you have a picture of a crocodile in therapy and she's looking completely

wretched. She's miserable. She's confessing to her therapist. Whenever Mother's Day rolls around, I regret having eaten my young. And I like that because, you know, some identities are harder to break than others. So if you're a reptile, the reptilian brain is strong, right? So anyway, that was a stretch, I know. So we can see the storms, the kind of the way emotional storms come into our wider world. We can see how in the last decade, how easy money set up kind of grasping and a kind of greediness that ended up leading to an addiction, a real addiction in terms of consuming and using money, and then a lot of greed on behalf of those that were loaning until we landed up in violence. That financial crisis was violence. It violated, injured a lot of people.

It was a storm that built up, a storm of reactivity, of greed and grasping. We can see how storms build up when there's been a lot of fear that develops. So 9-11 occurs 10 years ago, and what happens? What's the spiral out of that? Fear, blame, attack. More fear, more spiraling. That's a storm on a global level. So these storms are violent.

and they create our culturally wide storms, create identities as a culture, an addictive culture, a violent culture. Does that make sense? That's the storm on a societal level. Our personal storms, when any one of us gets caught in feeling, I'm the oppressed victim, somebody's taking advantage of me,

that storm ends up shrinking us. Or if we get into that storm, a feeling that, that in some way I have to have something I don't have. We get addicted to food or addicted to achieving or proving ourselves. We separate from who we are. That's the violence.

So first we begin as a scientist looking at this and sensing, well, how does this reactivity build up? How does it happen? Because we want to be able to catch it. That's what's important. Mindfulness is catch. what's happening so we can open back into a larger sense of who we are to our intelligence, our heart.

So we first look at these patterns of reactivity and we get that our nervous system is deeply rigged to go into reaction so that whenever there's pleasantness we are rigged to want something and then we're rigged to go after it. When there's unpleasantness, we're rigged to not like it, and then we're rigged to in some way fight it or flee from it. Okay?

So that's the basic, the bottom line. How does this then proliferate? I want to go back to the storm metaphor and say, just imagine that our thoughts are winds, okay, and our emotions are waters, and the more that we think, the more we whip up the waters until they get into a flurry of waves, and that flurry then sets off more winds,

and it just is this circular, spiraling process of thinking and emotions. I think I've shared a number of times here that the average length of an emotion left to its own devices is 1.5 minutes. That's how long an emotion lasts. What keeps it going? The winds of thoughts, right? You have to keep thinking.

You have to keep having these thoughts to keep stirring up the waters. So somebody offends you in some way, and you feel that upsurge of anger, and then the mind starts obsessing about how could they possibly, and you start going into your defense, and how you're going to do something about it, and that stirs up more of that heat, and anger in the body, that then trips up more thinking.

So we get into the looping. It happens with fear all the time. If you have a fear of failure, and then you start imagining all the ways you're going to fall short, it's going to set off more fear in your body, which is going to trip off more of the thoughts of what's going to go wrong. So we're regularly in this looping, and this is the looping that we need to learn to step out of. Now, we're primed to react to certain weather systems, to go into them and to have them

really take over. And it depends on our personal history, and sometimes it's cultural, but very much to do with our family history, that if you had certain experiences when you're young, you're going to be more prone to reacting. And there's a wonderful phrase in neuroscience now, which is that neurons that fire together, wire together. And what that means is that the past, let's say in the past, if you were evaluated for your performance a lot,

if your parents told you were falling short, if you felt a sense of shame, then any time you have thoughts of performing, those feelings of shame are going to be linked in. So it's just going to, it's, those are completely wired together. So anytime in the future something comes up, a weather system comes up, a feeling a sense of, oh no, I'm going to, I'm going to fail, I'm not going to perform well. The thought feeling looping will be much more exaggerated, much more stormlike.

That makes sense? Okay, I want to make sure we're all together here. So as I mentioned, the suffering, the violence, of the storms is what happens to our sense of who we are. That's the deepest pain. We violate others when we act out inwardly. When we're caught in the storm, we've disconnected from a sense of our own dignity and a sense of our own tenderness and a sense of our own intelligence. We've disconnected. There's a very useful model I've seen. I've seen. and Dan Siegel is the one that brought it to my attention

of seeing how it happens in our brain that we lose it, we disconnect, we get caught in the storm. And he, when you watch him, he'll show you his hand and he'll say, this is the brainstem. So watching me, this wrist going up into my palm is the brain stem. My thumb is the limbic system, okay? So this is the brain. You've got your brain stem, your limbic system,

and this is the frontal cortex that folds over it, right? Okay. Now, in a healthy operating brain, you have an information flow going up and down. So life energies and instincts and aliveness go up through the limbic system. And then what comes down is awareness, empathy, memories, useful perspectives. So this cortex modulates the emotions of the limbic system.

system. Okay? Now, what happens when there's a lot of charge in the limbic system and there's no adequate activity in the frontal cortex is we flip our lid. Isn't that great? Don't you like that? But we totally lose contact with the kind of the mediating mechanism, that which gives us the information we need so that the emotions can be there, but we have a way of holding that. The storm happens, but we have a way, we're prepared, we have a way of responding. Okay, so meditation teaches us to reactivate the parts of our brain that are needed so that we can once again modulate the emotions and remember a larger sense of who we are. It's in this frontal cortex that's the seat physically of what we call compassion and empathy.

It's in this part of the brain that we access awareness. It doesn't mean awareness is I'm not trying to be materialistic, but this part of the brain gives us access to mindfulness. Okay? So how do we begin to interrupt these patterns and activate the parts of our being that we need when we're caught in the storm? Again, I'm going to turn to science

because I find it so interesting. that there is some research done by Dr. Benjamin Lippett, who is a research physiologist, I think. And what he discovered is the part of the brain that's responsible for movement is activated before there's any conscious intention to move. So when you go to pick up a tissue, the part of the brain that is readying yourself to do that has already gotten into motion before you have a thought, oh, I need a tissue. Now that's interesting because it challenges our sense of the seed of well. You know, we blame ourselves for what we do, but the brain is on its own doing this stuff

before we've even had a thought about it. That's the first finding. The second finding is, so there's this quarter second, really, between this beginning to activate in the brain and the body moving. And then there's another, I'm sorry, and the thought happening. And then there's another quarter second between the thought happening and the actual movement. You have what's called a magic quarter second before you have a thought to do something and you actually do it. And it's in that quarter second that you can call on mindfulness.

and interrupt the patterning. Tara Bennett, who wrote Emotional Alchemy, coined the term Magic Quarter Second. I think it's wonderful because it gives us a sense that there's all this activity going on of thoughts and emotions. But there's pauses between,

there's space between. And if you become the meteorologist who's tracking and noticing and sensing the patterns, you can pause. You can pause. And call on mindfulness. You can interrupt. So let's say you're playing with your child and you have

this thought of, I'm too busy. We need to stop. And child saying, please, just one more round of this game. So you have the thought, we need to stop. But instead of saying, I'm sorry, honey, I've got it too much to do, there's the thought. And then something in you goes, pause. And there's a little bit more remembrance right up here in the frontal cortex of, wait a minute. What really matters in this life? You know that saying, no time to rush. There's a little more remembrance. And mindfulness, one of the descriptions of mindfulness, remembering, reconnecting.

Say you're about to grab the cigarette. You have the thought, I need a cigarette. Same thing. There's that quarter second. Pause. Sometimes that quarter second will bring the activation you need to shift your behaviors wisely. Sometimes it won't.

But it's the practice that actually strengthens that muscle of mindfulness. Even if you pause and remember, but go ahead with the activity, you're still beginning to change your neuropsychotry. So the magic quarter second. I share very often this phrase, in between the stimulus and the response, there is a space. And in that space is our power and our freedom. I shared it a couple of years ago

and an AA sponsor, a guy that's very well known in his area and very beloved. And what he did was he said he felt that five seconds of the sacred pause, just pausing for the sacred pause,

was the equivalent to attending a year of meetings. Learning the sacred pause gives us access to the resources that really are the depths of our heart and freedom. Now, by the way, that comment about AA meetings, it's not an either-or. There is, for many people, no substitute with the support and the process of AA. But what he's pointing out is the power of that inner capacity to pause is precious. So the next step, once we have paused, is we bring in these what are called the two wings of the bird,

the wing of mindfulness, noticing what's happening, and the wing of compassion, the scientists that's seeing what's going on, and that grandparent's heart that's holding it with kindness. So I want to talk about how we bring alive those two wings, and we'll be spending the rest of the evening talking about that, using the acronym rain, because we're talking about weather and I thought it would fit in, but it's actually a wonderful training. If you are wanting to train in how to wake up out of

any of the inner storms, any of the weather systems that are difficult for you, whatever you get caught in, learning to pause and then simply using this acronym for mindfulness will give you a handle because it's so easy when we're stuck to get confused and forget and have nowhere to start. We just don't know what to do. We kind of something in us remembers meditation, but it's like that's just an idea. Rain. Recognize what's happening. Okay. Allow. Okay. This is what's going on. Let it be right here. And then we investigate with kindness. That's the eye of rain. Investigate. with kindness. That's where we start getting intimate with our experience.

The Anne of Rain is the freedom of it. You don't do anything. When you've investigated with kindness, you've come into a presence that has room for the weather system and you're no longer identified with the weather system and is not identified. You're back in that great sky of awareness, that great heart of being.

You're not identified. That's the freedom. So I'd like to share a time. tonight an example of being caught in bad weather and using rain. And I thought I'd share one of my own examples. I have infinite numbers. This one took place some years ago. Christmas holidays, I was at home, and many of us know how many weather systems can get tripped off at home with family of origin. Your family of origin could be wonderful, and the weather systems are still berserk, right? So it was for me that I was surrounded by my family and annoyed by every single

member of my family. And nobody was being mean-spirited. They're all really nice people. But I was in my own kind of irritable, judgmental orbit. And in some way, I felt like each one was exhibiting their well-worn pattern of being the victim or in some way being needy or oblivious to what other people needed. I'm sure you know those in your family too. So I'd only been there two days, but I was really churning with resentment. And during prior months to this gathering, it had become increasingly clear to me judging mind. I just started more and more noticing how whenever I'm judging, I'm creating separation. Whenever I'm judging, judging myself, judging another, I'm creating separation.

And I was getting more and more sensitive to that, to the suffering of that. So I committed myself to whenever I caught myself judging to bringing rain to it. I called it bringing rain to blame. It was easy to remember. So here I was, and I said, okay, I'm judging. I'll bring rain to blame. But I was really not in the mood at all. I was really grumpy and tired and wanted to curl up with a book,

but I knew I needed to do it because I had promised myself. So I threw on my park and boots and went outside. This is up in New Jersey, and it was cold and gray and wetish. But I could feel that I could sense the suffering of it. So I began walking, and the beginning of rain is just to recognize and allow. So I just started recognizing all the ways that I was kind of poke and blame at different people. and I just kept saying this too, okay, this too, this is what's going on, until I let it all be there, the realness of how big it was, how much kind of tension there was in my system towards everybody.

And then I began to investigate and felt this really tight knot in my chest. This is the investigation. You really come into your body when you investigate, what's this like? And it was a kind of sharp-edged knot. It was compressing my heart. And so I did something I often do, which is I imagine going inside that knot. This is the investigation getting very intimate and sensing how that knot was viewing the world. And what was the view of that knot?

What was the perspective from that place, that crunched place in me of the world? And what I saw was that wherever I was blaming, on some level I was feeling really bad about myself or something. When I was blaming, because somebody that was being snippy, in some way I felt like I wasn't being the peacemaker I wanted to be. When I was blaming, you know, my son, I was really falling short. I was the parent that made him the way he is, you know. And on and on. Each place I was blaming outward, really I was feeling a sense of insufficiency inward. Now, this wasn't new news.

I've known for a long time that when I'm in blaming mode, I'm not feeling great about myself. But every round I seem to have to go through blaming and then deepening attention to realize, oh, I'm down on myself. So that's what was happening. So I then deepened the attention to that place of being down on myself and started breathing with it and sensed how many moments underneath I get to be at war with myself. And that brought up a real sadness. And that's where the kindness started coming in. I was walking and as I've shown you here,

sensing, okay, you know, this is sad, this is painful. And the more I felt that compassion, the more there was a shift in identity. Rather than the aggressive blaming person or the person who's a bad person, I was that awareness that was holding with wisdom and kindness my own being. That's the shift in identity that brings freedom. That's where rain really liberates us.

We pause, we deepen attention, and when we're stuck inside the weather system, we're in a small identity. When we start recognizing, allowing, investigating with kindness, we open into that presence that is really the enlarged sense of our beingness. So I felt freed up. I started walking home and it poured.

This was classical. Here I was. I did my rain meditation. Then all of a sudden it poured on me. But it was fine. I started reviewing the people in my family again. And with each one, I sensed their quirkiness and eccentricities. But there was room in my heart.

My heart space had opened. And I remember that night my mother started, went to the piano and started playing Christmas carols and we were all singing together and we were horribly off key. And I remember us laughing about it and going on singing and having that same feeling of it can be so imperfect and so okay and so much love anyway. And this was for me the gift of rain on blame to shift from a way. weather system of something's wrong to a sense of space, of coming back home to a larger sense of being. So I teach it a lot. I remember, oh, some years ago, just when I teach it, I let people

know that it's usually not a one shot. It's not that, okay, I've worked through all the blame of my family and now I'm forever after harmonious. No, it comes up again. But the more times you've deepened your attention to a certain weather system, the more quickly you remember. It doesn't seem so oppressive, so strong. It doesn't have such a grip on us. I was teaching a month-long retreat at Spirit Rock some years ago. And these month-longs are very intense.

People get into a very deep place, go through a lot of layers of their psyche. And there was a man that was all. also working on judging. And his commitment was to really notice it and bring presence to it every time. Every time he got caught in that. And at first there was huge self-aversion.

That was interesting for me to see it, much like lay my own. He said it must have been 10,000 times during that month long that some version of judgment would arise. But by the end, there were just these waves that would come up and go and he was just very quick, he noticed that there might be a little tightening, but very quickly

he was back in that sense of oceanness, that the waves were there, but they didn't define him. That's what I mean by a shift in identity, that we have space for our humanness and for our vulnerability. So the message here is it's not what's happening. It's not the weather system. It's how we're relating to it. If we can pause and just, No, oh, this is happening. There's a possibility of coming back into a fullness where we're not identified. This same retreat, this month long that I was teaching, Jonathan, my husband was sitting that retreat as a yogi.

And during that retreat, he one day, after lunch, was sitting in the hall and he was sitting in the back of the hall. And he had something he observed, and he wrote a haiku about it. and I want to share his haiku. Great Hall is silent. Pinto beans for lunch. And now, some lean left, some right. It's a sleeper.

Would you like to hear it again? I thought it was brilliant. Of course, he's my husband, but, you know. It's another version of this great equanimity with our humanness. It does fit somehow, doesn't it? So thus far I've described how we practice rain with our own psyches. And I want to just briefly mention what it means to bring this practice when we get into a storm that involves another person. Now, I could be doing a whole talk.

I could be doing a whole year, you know, the rest of my life on how to work with interpersonal storms. And this is going to be a kind of tiny, tiny little. sliver. But I want to mention it just because it's possible. And then what we'll do as a way to close is I'll guide you through a brief meditation where you can pick somewhere where you know you get caught in a weather system and just practice a little. So I'm asked regularly, okay, I can deal with my own rising of fear or hurt or whatever, but what do I do when I'm with somebody and the way they act keeps bringing it keeps on re-triggering it it's just exhausting do i have to just do rain the rest of my life and they just keep getting to be the way they are you know and and so

there's two responses and one response is possibly but rather than it being an honorous chore um any time that we have something where we're caught in a small identity just because it's not triggered doesn't mean the tendency and that smallness isn't in our nervous system. So if it gets triggered, we're just getting a lot of practice in waking up into who we really are. And that can sound polyana-ish, but it's actually freeing. It's actually freeing. So one of the most beautiful teachings, the Dalai Lama was asked by some Western teachers what we all needed to know the most here in the West. And he said, to trust the power of your heart and your awareness to awaken through all circumstances. So whatever the weather system is that's triggered off, no matter

if somebody keeps triggering us or we're in situations, it seem really terrible, we have this capacity of our heart and our mindfulness to really become free in the midst. That's our capacity. So that's one thing. And it doesn't mean that you like it and it doesn't mean you think that you want it to happen. It just means that you're dedicated to finding that inner refuge, that space of freedom, and that that's what you're going to be able to do.

Now, sometimes you're with a person who has the same interest in waking up and there's a willingness to do rain together. And I want to give you a brief, briefish example of a couple I worked with that did this. And I've seen friends and all sorts of people in great conflict using these same mindfulness tools, sometimes under different names. In this case, in this couple, they came to me when their marriage was really on the edge.

And he had been a carpenter, a really wonderful carpenter, and he got limes and within about a year. year, he had to give up his entire profession. As many of you know, limes can be devastating. And he was depressed and really unable to do much of anything, really exhausted most of the time. His wife took over a lot of, she worked double time. She did a lot of extra shifts, and she also had to take over a lot of the work at home. So what they locked into, the beliefs and weather systems look like this. He felt that she begrudged the situation and he felt guilty. She felt that he didn't appreciate her efforts and she felt that she was never enough. It didn't matter how much

she did, he was still in some way grumpy and depressed and didn't acknowledge her. And they locked into this and it was very, very painful. So in the session, I had each of them share and unfold as much as possible about how they were feeling and what it was like for them. And then I had them do something that's done very commonly in couples therapies, so I had them shift positions.

So one at a time, she took his position, and she sat and imagined herself in his body and his situation. And she started speaking from that. She started saying, here's what I'm believing, and here's what I'm feeling, and here's what it's like for me.

And so she began, and he did the same. And so when she did it, she began to get that, because what he had said was, I don't feel you understand the magnitude of the loss. And I don't feel like you understand that the loneliness that I feel in this loss. So when she went inside his experience and started bringing rain to it, okay, this is what's happening, investigating it with kindness. her heart broke open for him. Her heart broke open.

She was filled with compassion. She was no longer identified as the one that felt in opposition. Similarly, when he stepped into her shoes, so to speak, and he began to sense for her how much grief there was in feeling the loss of their old life together and how powerless she felt that she couldn't help him. He opened in compassion. So they both, their identities opened by going inside each other. So we can do rain by hearing from another person

and then really allowing ourselves to recognize and allow and investigate what's this like? And a natural kindness emerges. When you do rain for another person and you really go inside their experience, your heart will become tender. That's the gift of it. The beauty of this practice is that we learn to pause, and in that pause, as we call on presence, we can dissolve the violence that we're caught in.

We can dissolve that identification with the weather system. Presence dissolves our stuckness. It's like this gentle rain that really allows us to release where we're hooked. Now, the biggest realization I think people come to when they start practicing rain regularly is that you can't do it without the kindness piece. If I just said recognize, allow, investigate, not identified, you find it wouldn't work. Our identity doesn't shift just by being the scientist that's observing the pattern. We need that tender-heartedness for us to really,

really start inhabiting the fullness of who we are. So keeping that in mind, we'll do our closing practice together. I shared in my own experience on doing rain on blame that I was very intentional. I really got the suffering of blame and judgment. So when I would stop and pause to do rain, I knew it was really part of me healing and freeing myself up. And I invite you in the same way as you sense a weather system you get caught in just to feel your own sincerity.

That this is a weather system that keeps you smaller than the being you really are. You forget who you are when you're caught in it. You forget your goodness, your creativity, your heart. And when I say you, I mean, all of us. So these practices are a way of coming home to your true nature, to your wholeness. As you sit, let yourself bring to mind one place, and let it be discreet enough that you'd like to bring a deeper attention to. One place where you go into reactivity. That's what I mean by a developing storm, where the stories and feelings start.

spiraling and you perhaps act in ways that you regret or inwardly turn on yourself. So for some you might be considering conflicts that occur with certain people or something to do with work or an addiction. If it's hard for you to think of which one or where to go with, it, just consider the last week or so when you were in a situation where you felt stuck where you felt caught in a real unpleasantness of anger or fear, shame or hopelessness. The sign of these reactive weather systems are these painful emotions. And let yourself bring to mind a situation that most expresses what's happened when you're caught in reactivity. You might be bringing somebody to mind, a particular person, a conversation

you're having, or a situation at work, or when you really got caught in an addictive behavior in a certain place, a certain room. Make it real specific. See, you have a visual that is real for you. You can remember perhaps the words that were spoken. Remember the feeling of the time. And as you do, as you reflect on this, this is recognizing. You're recognizing what you're what's happening? You're asking that question, what really is going on inside me right now? Just start recognizing. What's this like? And recognizing goes with allowing. Just let it be as it is. This is you giving it space. You can't interrupt a pattern unless you let there be an allowing presence. So you're willing to examine. Sometimes it helps with the allowing just to say yes to it.

to say, and yes doesn't mean I like this. It just means this is the actuality. This is what's happening. This reactivity, this pain. Just like I had to say yes. Yeah, it's true. I'm blaming. I'm creating separation.

It hurts, but yes. Or you might use the words, I consent. The beginning of rain is simply recognizing and allowing, letting it be. And then we begin to investigate with kindness. And I invite you as you investigate to sense what's the most difficult part of this in your body. What is it that most wants my attention in my body? What do you feel in your throat, your chest, your belly?

You might even let your face make the expression that you most sense goes with this experience. It'll help you to contact it. And if your body's posture wants to go into a certain posture, that's fine too. just to help you get in touch with, what's this like? This is investigating. You might sense what you're believing, what's the point of view of the painful part of you, is that I'm not loved,

I'm going to fail, I'll never be happy, people don't care about me. Of course, if that brings up a lot of thinking, just drop the question, because you want to stay with your body. You might sense what feels most difficult and ask that place, what do you most want for me?

How do you want me to be with you? So if there's fear or hurt or grief, how do you want me to be with you? And I recommend as you inquire, if you put your hand on your heart, you'll already be actively inviting and offering a tenderness. So you might experiment with that.

So you're asking that place that's in reactivity, how do you want me to be with you? And just sense, what does it want? Does it want kindness or acceptance? does it want understanding, does it want compassion? Experiment right now and sense yourself offering to this place whatever you feel is needed. It might be a message, it might be that you vary the touch, might be an image, but offer something that you sense this place in you that's in reaction most needs.

Just this moment. just as an ocean can cradle its own waves, just sense that you're holding this part of your own being with the quality of attention that it most needs. Recognize, allow, investigate with kindness, kindness, kindness. And as you do, just sense in these moments, the experience of your own being right now, the who are you?

Can you sense a shift in ideal? identity, kind of a coming home to something larger than the victim or the small self-caught an emotion. It doesn't mean the emotion's gone. There's just a sensing of the ocean-ness of something larger. This is the non-identification, the end of rain. And I close by offering yourself whatever blessing, whatever wish feels, appropriate right in this moment. What do you most wish for yourself? And then just widening your attention to sense that all of us get caught in these storms, in this reactivity, and sense your wish for the freedom, the healing, the peace that each of our hearts yearns for. And then in the quietness,

we'll sit quietly for a bit, and then we'll be listening with our hearts. We're with our receptivity to the sounds of the flute. Thank you, thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.