Tara Brach - Being with Love, Death and Grief: Tara Brach and Frank Ostaseski

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

Being with Love, Death and Grief - Grief is our natural way of expressing loss for what we love, and learning to open to grief serves the deepening and widening of our loving. This event, given at the Upaya Zen Center on June 25, 2023, includes short meditations and talks by Frank Ostaseski and Tara, and a powerful session of questions and responses.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Well, I want to say good morning to my dear friend Tara. Nice to see you, my friend. Happy to be with you and to share this time. Mutual. Thank you. Shall I start us off with those small meditation, short meditation? Okay. So let's just find a way to settle in to

this breath and body, this precious body of ours, this sometimes frail, sometimes strong, human body of ours, and fling open all the doors and windows of the senses of seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting, of touching, the doorways and windows to the mind. And in the sensing, you might become aware of your breathing, not the thought of the breath, but the direct experience and to notice where you feel that most vividly. Is it at the tip of the nose where the air dances? Or in the chest, the way the ribs lift and separate? Or maybe at the diaphragm.

The way it expands and contracts when the belly empties and fills. Or for some of us, we feel the breath in the whole body, whole body breathing, letting our attention. Just rest wherever we feel the breath most vividly. There's communion between awareness and the breath. And maybe I can draw your attention to the experience of hearing. And as your attention becomes more settled there, you might notice the silence. How big is that silence?

Does it extend beyond your head? Does it fill the room? And you might notice that sounds come and go in that silence. But the silence itself, it's undisturbed. The silence welcoming everything. pushing away nothing. And just the sounds come and go in the spaciousness of that silence.

So too our thoughts and our emotions, our moods. They too can be known in that spacious silence. Nothing pushed away. No part left out. We're never just sitting for our sounds. We're always sitting with each other. And so we're ready. Here we are.

Finding our common ground. finding our connection to each other. Thank you for your practice. It's a lovely thing to find ourselves in each other, to find our common ground, in this simple act of just breathing together, yeah. So Tar and I had in mind to speak a little first and then to spend the remainder of our time in dialogue with you as best we can,

using the technology and putting up for the technology. Okay. So maybe I'll lead off, Is that okay with you? Sure, please. Well, in thinking about this morning and being with you all, first of all, I got very happy at the idea. And then I was reflecting on, you know, what did I have to say that would possibly be useful

to you in this territory of loss and grief? Of course, everything I know and share has come to me from being with people. in their losses. There was a young woman I remember at the hospice. Her name was Cindy and she was dying of breast cancer. And her parents lived in Illinois. Her father, Clyde, I remember his name's Clyde. And he worked for 40 years in a meatpacking plant on a night shift. And knowing that Cindy's death was coming soon, I called Clyde and I said that he needed to come quickly if he wanted to be with him. with his daughter before she passed away.

And so he said, all right, I'll take the train. I'll be there in a few days. And I said, oh, Clyde, you know, you gotta come quicker than that. He'd never been on a plane. And a while later, he'd go back to say that he booked a ticket, and he would be there at 10 o'clock that night. And so I went to Cindy, and I whispered in her ear, your dad's coming, your dad's coming.

He'll be here at 10. And she was a little confused, but she started mumbling over and over again, 10 o'clock. 10 o'clock, 10 o'clock. And as her father's plane touched down at the San Francisco airport at 10 that evening, Cindy died. And we had this habit of bathing her body and honoring her indigenous roots. We covered her in flowers from the gardens of sage and lavender and lemon bomb and bale

and laurel, rather, and geranium. I remember, and it was my job. I remember to meet Clyde at the front door of the hospice and tell him that his 30-year-old daughter had died. I can't tell these stories without entering them. And I remember we walked up the staircase and I brought him to Cindy's room and he couldn't go in. And so one of our volunteers stayed with Cindy and I stayed with Clyde, one to bear witness

to death, one to... Stay with grief. Mostly we stayed close, you know, without any interference in a way, modeling what's possible with grief. And about three in the morning, I said to Clyde, you know, Clyde, I've got to go home. I'm tired now. And I need to get my kids up or to go off to school in the morning. He said, it's all right. I'll stay here. And I remember that I came back about 8 in the morning and Clyde was sitting on the edge of the bed with his daughter and he had his hand slipped under the herbs and flowers and he was holding Cindy's foot and he had a bagel in the other hand and he was and the phone tucked in his shoulder and he was making funeral arrangements for

his daughter back home and clearly there'd been a shift in Clyde not just because of time but because he could enter into the truth of this loss and this grief. And I remember saying to him, you know, Clyde, I can't imagine what you must be experiencing. It's so strange to have your daughter die before you do. And Clyde was this kind of plain spoken guy, you know, and he said, you know, I realized something, Frank. It's kind of familiar. And, you know, he wasn't talking, saying that he had another daughter who died. Often when we think about grief, we imagine it's this overwhelming sadness that's connected to a single loss.

For example, the loss of someone we love. But what Clyde was kind of helping me see was that if we look closely, we'll see that grief spent our companion for a good part of our life. Clyde was talking about the everyday grief of our lives, you know, the multiple losses, the little deaths that we experience all the time. An abrupt breakup with someone we love, a financial crisis, the challenges of infertility, the loss of dreams. And sometimes our grief is about what we've had in Lost, and sometimes, maybe a lot of the

time, it's about what we never got to have. I think of grief as being ever present in our lives. And then it's more than an emotion, you know? I'm speaking to you now about these things because it's very alive for me. I'm feeling a kind of tenderness and grief and I have been for a while now. A few months ago, two months ago, my brother died. That was the second of my three brothers to die. And a while back, my marriage ended.

Now I live alone and I have to face illness and my limitations for my strokes and can't drive anymore and I'm half blind. and I'm lonely often. Sometimes I'm scared. But when I can muster it, and I can bring loving awareness to all of that, I find that the process of grieving is what becomes less about missing someone

and repairing my history and more about being fully alive. The grief is to be human. When we don't grieve, when we do not grieve, we hardly exist. And so my question for us today, and always really, is how do we move towards the light of absolute truth and still accept and honor our very human nature? I don't think it's by suppressing our grief nor attempting some spiritual bypass around

the difficult and sometimes really dark emotions that we feel. Don't make believe you're not feeling it. Like grief happen and allow yourself to know it completely. The more we try to push it away, the more it clings. Like in the meditation, we can develop the quality of spaciousness around it, and awareness of the grief so that it has room to move, to unfold, to show us all its faces. Sure, a lot of us want to transcend grief, you know. Our spiritual friends tell us, just let go.

But there's no letting go until it's letting in. The feelings of loss, they're not something I want to transcend. Trying to transcend those kind of states of mind and heart that are associated with grief, it feels false to me, like I'm denying some part of my humanity. So wiser and, I don't know, maybe a more compassionate approach is to trust the process of grief, to recognize it as a path to wholeness. Sadness is only one of the faces of grief, you know. It's a whole constellation of experiences.

There's sadness, of course, and there's also loneliness and blame and shame, and there are periods of anger. And sometimes we feel so numb, it seems like we're walking through molasses. So today I want to explore together with you how allowing grief allows us to pass through to non-grieving. I don't mean that we'll never have grief again. I mean that a relationship to it doesn't have us by the throat, that we can be in life and include this grief, and that this helps us to come to a kind of fullness of our humanity and even a kind of aliveness, actually. So, you know, later as we respond to questions, I'll talk about what helps, you know.

That's all I want to say at the beginning because I really want to hear from Tara and see what we can discover together, okay? That's why we're here. We just want to try and discover together what actually helps and find our humanity and our losses. Okay, I'll be quiet now. Thank you, Frank. I listen and feel my heart just kind of dissolving open and I was trying to put a word word on it and I feel accompanied and that accompanied is in part just feeling this field of us being together for all of you that are listening. I had this urge, I really wanted to see you and technology did not permit and so what

I did was I've been leaning into just energetically feeling us together and Frank, words really deep in that sense of it. Like Frank, it's been a season of very real personal losses for me. A cousin who's like a sister and a best friend since I was 16 and my beloved pup. And so I too have that tenderness linked to immediate loss. But there's something more that I keep finding in myself, and that is just this sense of how much is in our wider community that's unfaced and unprocessed. I mean, there's been so much. We know it, whether it's the generation of boomers who are older, having the frailties and losses of their bodies and loved ones, but it's more than that. It's the pandemic. It's our larger body of the earth in such pain and dis-ease. It's this pace

of change. I know that you know what I mean. It's more than our nervous system can keep up with so that we can arrive. And something else that feels like this domain of loss for me is this increasing immersion in a kind of digital trance that separates. Again, I think you know what I mean. You know, I'm thinking of one woman who I was with some months ago, a high school teacher, and she wanted to meet because she had been depressed and anxious for a couple of years and just didn't know if it would ever change and had been really super busy years like so many where she was, her teaching went online before it got back live and she had children home and she lost her mom who was in nursing home during COVID and now her teaching was very, very

demanding. And when we paused, I asked her, you know, do you miss your mom? And she kind of visibly shrunk, you know, like she slumped. And in a way she's said, I've barely been able to attend there's been so much. And I said, well, here we are. What wants attention? You know, what wants to be felt? And she said, I have this feeling if I miss her, my world will fall apart. I said, okay. And she said, okay. And then she started talking to her mom and just saying, I miss you, I miss you until the tears came. And as Frank was talking, about, it became an ocean of grieving. It wasn't, it was her mom and it was more, it was her teens in the world that they were living into. It was our planet in its distress. And it was her,

the teen she was teaching. I know many are aware, the, you know, kind of the canary in the cage, how much anguish, how much anxiety and depression. You know, I read that the sea in 2021 to the 25% of teens wrote suicide notes. Can you imagine the state of heart-mind to write a suicide note? Many of you probably can. So for this woman, it was personal, it was societal, and she was just in touch a few days ago, which brought her to mind. She said that connecting with this pain, as Frank was saying, allowing it. was the beginning of coming back to her spirit, her soul, that she just was feeling alive and it hurt and it was good.

It reminded me, you know, hearing that in the Lakota Su tradition, a person who's grieving is considered most walken, it means most holy. And there's a sense that when someone's struck by the sudden lightning of loss, there's an openness to that which is beyond this world that can occur. And that state of holiness is respected. They say that grieving people's prayers are considered especially strong and it's proper to ask them for help. That there is something about opening to the grief. It is more than an emotion and embedded in it is a love and a wisdom that is beyond any of the particulars. Some know the author Francis Weller.

He writes about becoming an apprentice to sorrow. I like that phrase. It just means truly honoring all the flavors and sorrow is one of the flavors but leaning in, getting in close. And as we do, it becomes a portal into this mystery. And as Frank was saying, it's not easy. not necessarily the first thing we do. I mean, grieving, grieving is a wilderness, it's our naturalness, it's intrinsic to our nature. And opening and entering into our nature is not

supported by society. You know, in much of the developed world, humans feel separate from nature and we focus on controlling nature, you know, arming with these mental ideas about what's going on and pulling back from direct experience. There's a classic Zen story where a novice asked the abbot, what happens after we die? And the response is, I don't know. And the novice is upset by that response. He says, but I thought you were a Zen monk. And the response was, I am, but not a dead one. And we try to think our way into freedom. We try to hold on to certainty and the whole deal with grieving is opening to the groundlessness where it's completely not certain. There's no control.

But our habit is we get busy sometimes or compulsively worry or plan or judge or blame. So one of the first steps is to totally forgive that. It's just part of our conditioning. I mean, we know that there are classic stages of grief and I actually think of them as really just a natural process of undoing resistance, undoing resistance. I know for myself when I open and allow sorrow, grief, whatever's happening, I'm coming home. I spent about, I think it was about five years spiraling down in terms of my health and I'm much better now but for those years I didn't, for much of the time I didn't know why

I was failing but I went from being athletic and just loved all forms of playing outside to at the most extreme time having such limited mobility. that I couldn't walk up an incline. You know, I couldn't move around. And I had to cut back severely on my work, which I love. And I remember spending a week in a cardiac unit at a hospital and spinning into this huge fear, obsessing about what was wrong, what else could we do, what was I going to have to cancel, you know,

what more was going to happen, and really feeling the sense of, the possibility of dying and all the tension and fear. So I knew because this is what I was trying to live and teach, it was all about practicing with that fear. And so I became really intentional every time I found myself obsessing and spinning, there was a phrase that really helped me and it was to meet my edge and soften. just to meet my edge and soften. And, you know, I'd come back from the obsessing and I'd feel it and then I find myself obsession again.

I just keep whispering, it's okay, sweetheart. You know, meet your edge and soften. And what I softened into was this whole of grief. It was the direct apprehension of loss that I was losing the life I loved. And that was heartbreaking. and heartbreaking open, that it was an ocean of grief and as I kept meeting and softening, meeting and softening, it became an ocean of tenderness, just a mystery and there was not a me there, it was just belonging to that ocean of tenderness. And it became so clear that the fear

was trying to manage and the managing was keeping me separate, keeping me afraid, and that meeting my edge and softening allowed me to relax back into really what I am. I think of John O'Donohue. He says that we manage our lives so powerfully externally as to forget the incredible mystery we're involved in. We manage our lives so powerfully externally as to forget the incredible mystery we're involved in. We can only enter the wilderness of allowing if we want to be here, be awake, be free. Like once wise sage people would come with their suffering and he'd say, what are you unwilling to feel?

It's a beautiful question. One of my inspirations for willingness for allowing is Rosemary, Watola, Traumae, you might have heard of her, she's a poet and she's a very wise, beautiful being. She experienced akin to what Frank was describing the terrible loss of her son Finn taking his life. So in that way it had a different flavor. And she describes in the moments, in the many moments after Finn died wanting to scream, no, when, and this is how she put it, she said the only real choice was saying yes to the

world as it is. So that became her practice. Her prayer over and over was, open me. That was her practice as she encountered the infinite expressions of grief. Yes, open me. She writes this, she says it is possible for love to grow after death. If there is a secret, it is perhaps openness, the way air lets light move through. So friends, I love that prayer.

Please open me. Are the prayer, please, may I feel loved or may I know my belonging to loving awareness? Sincere prayer is the voice of awareness calling us home. The bridge between longing and belonging. I know for myself when I get sincere when I'm praying from that place of real innocence, tenderness, I've become porous. It's like the light that's always been there can shine through. The love can shine through.

So opening to what is, meeting our edge, softening. It's really a life path and it's a daily practice because the truth is there's birth and death in every moment. Pure wilderness. It's entirely groundless. I mean, this is taught in Tibetan Buddhism and Western science. One million cells in your body die in are replaced every second. All the cells within 80 to 100 days. So there's a new you, sort of.

And through the day, there's a continual arising and passing of thoughts and feelings and images and sounds and larger sweeps. We know it, the beginnings and endings of exercise, routines or work, relationships, seasons, birth and death. And this includes the birth and death of our physical body and all those who are dear and our species and stars and galaxies. So change is always happening and this path we're pointing to is really about how we relate to that groundlessness. Do we resist and control and try to find ground, in which case, forgiven, forgiven, that's part of the path, open to that, or do we say yes, do we pray, open me?

So it's a daily practice and this might sound morbid, but I found this teaching from Bhutan which is to contemplate death five times a day brings happiness. Nothing is so powerful. Five times a day brings happiness and it really resonates. I mean, I found that to the degree I'm facing the reality of impermanence and death, to that degree love is waking up through me. You know how the dependents put it. If everything changes, then what is really true?

Is there something behind the appearances, is something boundless and infinitely spacious, innately loving, in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place. I mentioned one of my best friends died. And so one evening, this was a couple of months ago, I was with her and I was talking with her and then we'd be quiet and feeding her little bits of watermelon and then stroking her head, just feeling her love and our love. And I'd been grieving for months because we all knew there were no more treatments left. And I was looking at her face as she went in and out of pain and

it was so clear, the transparency was so clear, and I suspect many of you have experienced that, that this cancer-filled body was not who she was. It could feel her spirit, something timeless. our spirit communing. You know, we've taken so many walks along the river right here, the Potomac. I walk now and I can feel it. We commune. Again, Rosemary Watolotroma writes, I have no phone receiver to connect me to the other side.

But every day I speak to my beloved's through candle flame. It is possible to be with someone who is gone. It is possible to feel what cannot be. be seen, to sense what cannot be heard, to be held by what cannot be touched. So grieving, entering the wilderness, the groundless nature of being opens us to formless presence, that mystery. I saw this a few years ago when I was with another mom who lost her teen daughter and this seems to be a theme here, but I'll share it, again, who took her life? And instead of open me, she was just lost in this horrific self-recrimination that she had failed her daughter.

So we explored it some. And, you know, I asked her what I sometimes do, what's that blaming, self-blaming part trying to do for you? And it was to help her hold on to her daughter to keep her. Well, what would happen if you stopped? I'd lose her. We'd be completely cut off. So this part, the self-blaming part was loving her daughter, but it was misguided. So she called in her daughter's presence. They said, call on her, call on her wisdom, call on who you know she really is, and just ask her what she wants. And it was so immediate. so spontaneous, forgive yourself, forgive yourself. So she put her hand on her heart as I am now, I often do it.

That was her prayer, please, please may I forgive, may I forgive myself? And as there was this loosening, this declenching of the blame, there was a wash of tenderness, that heartbrokenness, and in some time a loving that was so pure and so old, open that she felt this merger with her daughter's spirit, a communion she could not have imagined before. She put it this way. She had her hand in her heart and she said, where could she have ever gone? She's here. John O'Donohue sharing with you a few of my favorite little verses. He says, when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned

to wean your eyes from the gap in the air and be able to be able to do that. to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. Maybe as last thing I'll say, because I really want to hear your questions, we can't will the unfolding of grief. We can be willing, we can be patient, curious, gentle. and know there's a wisdom in us that just yearns to surrender into the groundlessness, into the reality. We want to entrust ourselves to the waves. There's just a conditioning to resist.

I'm going to read you one last verse from Rosemary Watola Tromer. She says, she didn't weep until she did. She wept until she didn't. She sat until she forgot she was sitting. She sat until there was a clearing in her, the way the river will eventually clear after it's been muddied by the rain. There's no magic number for how many minutes or hours or years it takes to clear. It is perhaps sufficient to know clearing happens. It is perhaps sufficient to know clearing happens. Our very nature is openness, love. So, friends, here we are.

community which matters so much. Our society does not tend to grief and honor the power, goodness, beauty, necessity of grief in a healing way. And so here we are tending together and the invitations to have the intention to open into the groundlessness, the wilderness of what's here with patience, curiosity, gentleness. And if we can't open to be forgiving and just simply let it be our prayer. Okay, enough words from me. Maybe we can move into some time

to hear your questions and get to be with you a little more. Yeah, so if you have a question, Noah, would you explain to them how they go about doing that again? Yes, okay, so if you have a question, please raise your hand and also we're going to open the chat so please go ahead and chat your quest put your questions in the chat not in the Q&A and okay you have to enable raise hand all right so now you can raise your hand Roshi Joan will be sharing some questions from the chat and I will start to

bring people in from the raised hands to be panelists and please only raise your hand if you want to have your camera on, your video on. And then raise your hand again once you're a panelist. We'll make sure we get to you. OK, so go ahead, Roshi. Yes. This is a question. Hold on.

First of all, I have to thank Tar and Frank for your words. I think they touched all of us so deeply. And I see a number of questions here. Let me just scan to it says, finding that difficult balance between navigating life and doing this important work. Lori asks that, how do we find that balance between navigating life and doing this important work?

Oh, boy. Well, I think one of the things is that, Though sometimes we may feel it, we are not victims. You know, we can calm ourselves. We can come into the present. We can say, sweetheart, open to this moment, you know. And then the resources of our innate compassion help us to make wise choices, I think. I think one of the things that helps us in this regard is that we can share our grief with others,

like we're doing now, there's a power in naming our grief, I think, you know, that gives us an ability to be in this ever-changing, difficult world of ours, you know? We can inhabit some silence and some aloneness. We can trust our, the kindness of our wise hearts to be a reliable guide. Maybe we'll just keep going because I want to try and respond to as many of these as possible, and I will go back and forth. Thank you, Frank. There are a lot of questions in the chat, and we also have several people here who have raised their hands.

So if you want to go with live people, you can just let me out. Let's go with some people. I'd like to see some people and have a bit of a dialogue with them if we could. If they can turn their cameras on, that would be great. Thank you. That was a wonderful opening, and you hit right where I am, Tara. And so I'll just, I have a question that I have. I put in the chat. I'll just read it. I have recently had a first time heart failure,

and then processing loss around how my new and fragile heart condition has finished off my life as an independent senior athlete, high alpine hiker, and strong activist person. This has been a great loss to me, and I believe asks for a process of grief as described by you, Tara, in your opening words. Can you talk a little more about this kind of grief and how it interacts with the larger grief, the grief of the massive suffering and loss that I experienced from witnessing via global media those sufferings and losses that come from war, extreme weather events, climate scientists, predictions, and self-centered, blindly partisan world politicians and leaders? So thank you. It's been a well-thought-out question.

and I really am looking forward to your responses. Yeah, well, first, Kuaa, thank you for what you're bringing. I can feel your care for the world. I can feel your belonging to the world and that it's a bigger grief than for your own body and it's also for your own body and your engagement. So I just want to honor that. And I want to start by asking you, what has been your purpose? process of grieving thus far? What have you found has been meaningful to you?

Good question. I think it helps me quite a lot to give myself permission to separating the feeling of sadness from grief, but still allowing my sadness to affect my body. and move me into crying from time to time. And the other thing is that if I can turn my awareness to the suffering of others, that helps my suffering make more sense. Like I had a moment when I realized I'm not the only person with a heart condition.

That helped quite a lot. Yeah, so yeah. Well, you know, I was listening to, and I'll share personally, that my sister just a few months ago found out about a heart condition that she has that changes the shape of her life. And as you're speaking, what you're doing, what you already are finding is healing is so powerful, whether you call it the Tonglin meditation, are you familiar? you with Tunglin? Yes, I am. Yeah. Where you just totally honor the personalness of it, the immediacy, the pain, the clutch, all of it. I mean, totally yes to it and breathe with it or feel it as let it be as big as it is and then include the others that also are experiencing this. And then all

of us who are a part of this living, dying world, it gives a space and it honors the immediacy of what's right there. So I'm bowing to what you brought in because I feel like it's a reminder to all of us, yes to this and then yes to how this is with all of us. We need to grieve together. We need to feel our togetherness. Well, Coria, thank you so much for your question and Tara for your reflection. So there is a question from KCC Media asking about how can you help healthcare professionals with their grief,

particularly the ones who are not inclined to meditate or talk about their feelings. Well, I want to say something to all the healthcare professionals out there who are witnessing suffering, every day, witnessing loss every day. And it's to say you're not normal. You're not normal. It's not normal to witness this every single day.

And so the regular ways that we have of coping with loss, you know, coping with bearing witness to this kind of suffering, going home and having a glass of wine and watching Netflix, it's okay, but it's not going to be sufficient. It's not going to be enough to help you, metabolize this experience, you know? Carr mentioned Francis Weller the other day, and he said, you know, we have this capacity of metabolize sorrow that can be something medicinal for our soul and for the soul of the

community, actually. So we need to find a way to stop. That's the most important thing, to find a way to stop and not to fill the next moment with something else, you know? I go to my cushion because it helps stabilize me, but that's not enough. You know, I, I do, I go to get some body work because it helps, that touch on my body helps me to feel and include the losses in my life, you know? That helps enormously to me. So you've got to find what's right for you. It's not a, I can't give you the answers to that.

except to say the normal coping strategies aren't sufficient. And please keep turning your attention to discover. And if you can't talk to the people at work about it, find somebody outside of work who you can speak to, who you can share the unusual experiences that you've been bearing witness to. Anyway, that's just a first thought. Maybe Tara has more. Maybe just that and

we need to express as soon as we start communicating we start communing which means we start touching into a larger space that has room for these currents that are so real and human and some people say well I don't have anyone to communicate to and that may be so I mean we might try to play our edge and find somebody that we feel safe enough or it feels appropriate enough. But if not, communicate through prayer, your own version of it. Express what you're feeling in the quietness. Just express it to the universe and sense that there's space because there's a real power in naming and expressing, no matter who we think we're expressing it too. Thank you. Yeah, perfect. Thank you, Tara. Just so you know, you can look at Speakerview and there are about 20 people

in the room now who all have questions who have raised their hands so you can feel free to call on them or if you want me to call on them. Why don't you call on them, Noah? Yeah. I think Gary is next. Yes. Gary, what's on your heart, Gary? Well, thank you very much, Frank and Tara. I really, really appreciate your hearts and wisdom. My question is about getting in touch with grief. and how to do that. I retired about nine years ago. I was a health care worker, and I thought I was going to be able to just kick back

and enjoy life. And within a few months, I plunged into a very deep depression. And it was dangerously deep. And I became, I had a lot of despair. And I finally got into a, a program, a 12-step program that really focused on self-love and also the notion that unprocessed grief can express itself as depression. So I started working on, well, how do I grieve? Okay? Let me help me to grieve. And I did, you know, for a while I was getting a little bit

in touch with my grief. And then I did a program about four or five months ago that was very intense about my parents. I didn't even know I loved my parents until I did that. And I just suddenly experienced deep grief about not only their death. That was not the most of it. What was lost between us that never happened. And ever since then, I've been, you know, trying to quote, get in touch with grief and be a good griever. And sometimes I can get a little bit in touch, but it's really hard for me because I'm so used to going numb, I guess, and distracting myself. So my question is a little more about, well, what does something do really values, sees the value now of grief? And how do you be more in touch with that or experience that more directly? And I just,

I know you can't control it, but a little bit of help in that direction would be great. Gary, I mean, you worked in health care for a long time, it sounds like. One of the things I think is most useful there is to understand that vulnerability is not weakness. And in that world, you know, as well as I, that there's a kind of conceit there. It cuts us off from our hearts, you know, makes it difficult for us to be with our own for with others. But I like what you said about your parents and how sometimes you just didn't get what you wanted, you know, or needed. It's not that you had this great experience and then they were gone. It's that, oh, something was missing. So can you, can maybe you say a word just

about what you miss about your parents now? Well, quite, it's easy for me to explain that. feelings and emotions were never dealt with. So that was part of the habit that was there. And so if you think about it now, if they were here now, what would you say you miss? In them, not just in what didn't happen, not just in the dynamic, but yeah. Well, I would say to them that I miss knowing who, you really were.

Uh-huh. You really felt and what your inner life was about. You wanted to share something of that. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and I missed you seeing me in my inner life. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You would have liked to have had them know you in that way. Yeah. Yeah. And mostly, what would you have liked them to know?

Oh, I went through a lot of some shame at times in my childhood. I really think I was, by the time I was a teenager, I think I was depressed. So if they, maybe they could have been witness to that shame or accompanied you in that shame. Exactly. Yeah. And what do you imagine that might look like or feel like? Oh, to be, I remember I had gotten in so much trouble as a, I was a little juvenile delinquent. Yeah.

Gotten in so much trouble with the police. and the school, went home that day, and I thought they were going to send me away. And my mother, much to her credit, simply said, don't you know we love you? I didn't know that. I just sort of fell apart. So it would look or feel like that, what your mother was able to do for you, at least that one time. That's right. To say, don't you know that I love you?

Yeah. Yeah. You are worthy and lovable and cared about. Uh-huh. Yeah. And boy, you're saying it so clearly, Gary, you know exactly what you need. Yeah. And is it something you can offer yourself?

Well, I'm working on that. You're doing really well right now, Gary. You're doing really well. Wow. You're so clear. You know exactly. Your heart's telling you exactly what you need. And that's how. You were asking the how.

You just discovered it. You just showed it all to us. To say it to yourself again and again, I love you just as you are. With all of your foibles, yeah? Do you think that... Very rarely... A question about grief,

is that a part of allowing yourself to grieve by loving yourself kind of. I don't know, Gary, but I think it's a good place to start. Yeah. What do you think? No, I think that's good. I think it's really good. And I really think that grieving what I learned a few months ago is there's a deep connection

between grief and love. Yeah. It is the way you love when someone isn't here anymore. It's the way you love, Gary. And it isn't a technique. It isn't a methodology, you know. It's just the most natural. expression of your heart for what you miss, for who and what you miss.

Grief is the way you feel and express that love. You can see it right there in your face, Gary. There it is right there. Oh boy. There it is no technique required. It's the most natural thing, Gary, and you know how to do this. Your wise heart will not let you down. It will not abandon you.

It will be a reliable guide. Okay? Thank you. You're very welcome. Thank you. Okay, someone else, Noah? Thank you for this beautiful talk about loss and grief. I'm trying to make a sense of what kind of intention to set when it comes to breathing.

Like, is there intention to heal from one grief and then make. space for another loss because it just seems like as I'm growing older, I'm feeling more and more and more losses. And last week, the person who sank in the Titanic, this Titan ship, I knew this person. And I haven't met him in 10 years, but I'm just so absorbed by this because I've been thinking about his family, I'm thinking about like what it could have been and everything. But this is not my grief. Like why I'm already sitting in my own losses and then this thing is happening. And then normal life is also happening at the same time.

So I'm like flipping. A part of me just wants to sit alone and just in my heart. Because the speed of society is so fast that there's not. much time to heal and all the responsibilities and sometimes it's just freezing the hearts, not even consciously, it just gets happened and then it's so difficult to unfreeze it again. Just navigating through that and curious to hear your thoughts on, should I be trying to heal from grief? Like what should the intention be?

I'm trying to set an intention. What if you began in this moment and your only intention was to feel what really wants to be most felt? So if you just ask yourself when you scan all the losses and you just say to yourself, what's really most asking for attention inside me right now? And just take your time here because it takes some listening, like what really wants attention? the tenderness in me, which needs attention, and I'm not able to find the time because there's a whole story. Like there are all the stories about icon. Okay.

So wait, wait, wait. So right now, since we're here, where's that tenderness? Have you give yourself permission and just say, okay, I'm checking in. Yeah. Okay. So you can feel where it is. And we can all use a pause right. here? What if each of us just took this moment to feel what's most real and alive and tender

and breathe with that and honor it? Maybe even that prayer opened me, you know, really without any resistance, just allowing. And maybe there's something that tenderness wants you to know, want you to feel more of. Just a gentle listening presence right now. How does that tenderness want you to be with it? Yeah, the voice was something along. Tenderness and

it's not tenderness or. Yeah. Oof. Yeah. Exactly. So you're making more space for what's there. Tenderness end.

Yeah. Take one another moment. just because the habit is that's beautiful is to keep being willing to attend, willing to attend. And just sense if there's anything else that place wants you to know, want you to listen to, want you to feel. Just some fear showed up and that fear was as if like if this tenderness and fear can it coexist. And again, the fear goes to stories. It's interesting how the stories keep pulling and they're fear-based.

So you are being mindful. That's mindfulness. You're noticing, oh, the stories, the story contracts into more fears. What happens if you keep coming back to your body and saying, yes, there's room for the fear and the tenderness and whatever else. There's room for it all. And I think for now, my sense is that I can feel your. understanding that you get it. That this is the path that just keep on opening to what's here.

And what I think you're also sensing is that tenderness, it's like all the different wills of grief and loss go to that same vast tenderness. So whatever one comes up, it's just come back to this place. Yeah, thank you dear. Yeah. You know, I don't think our goal is to overcome these states of body, heart, and mind, you know? The grieving process isn't like when someone's sick

and we helped them get over their illness, you know? When we think that way, then we're imagining that people will be through their grieving and then they're better, you know, and that's a mistake. You know, grieving is an ongoing human experience. It's an ongoing, it's a natural response to loss, any kind of loss. And so it's not something we get over.

It's something we learn to include, just as the way we were doing, just as the way we were discussing just a moment ago. So Noah, I don't know, maybe we can, I'd like to make some time for our friends in, or non-English speakers, people speaking in Spanish, Italian or or Portuguese. My mom has dementia. And for me, it's a big loss. At the same time, I feel that when I practice compassion, and I take care of other people who are having a hard time,

I go back to my heart, and this helps me see my mom, see beyond her illness. And this is, it's always like this. I mean, sometimes I cannot do it, but, and when I feel that there is resistance and I feel it in my body, then I know what to do. And it's a part of me still is resisting. if I know, even if I have the tools, but still I can feel that sometimes I resist. For example, the fact that I'm here tonight with this connection with everybody else, with all of you, I find it very powerful, very inspiring to continue, even if sometimes I have

this resistance in myself to stand up again and try again and try to get in touch again. gain with this part. I just wanted to say this. CERTO, Sylvia. You know, in Zen practice we have this expression, fall down seven times, get up eight. So we understand that the resistance is part of the experience. The resistance isn't something separate than the grief, it's an expression. of the grief. And the fact that you're willing to meet it with some degree of kindness and tenderness

in yourself, this is already a kind of healing, yeah. Okay. Yes, yes. So, please. Okay. I think that Sylvia has answered her own question. That you can continue to see your mother as more than her illness, that you can continue to to know that there's a whole human being there, despite the distressing disguise of dementia. Thank you, Sylvia. So we have someone else, Trinidad Jimeno de Carlos. What's your name?

Prinidad. Can you hear me? My name is Trinidad. Okay, so my daughter passed away, and I can understand grief, But something that is really difficult for me to understand is this pain, the pain she went through, the pain that the whole family has gone through. It was a very, very cruel and hard illness and very long illness. She was sick for more than two years and a half with COVID in the middle on the pandemic.

And I told that suffering, I cannot forget that suffering. I try to forget the suffering, but I cannot. I try to think about the good moments, but I cannot even remember the good moments because bad moments are so strong. I don't know if you can help me with this. Can you tell me something? Tara?

Yeah, well, I'm glad to begin. First, I am feeling with you right now how hard it is to get our arms around how big pain can be and that we actually can't. Our mind can't get around it. There's nothing. It just keeps on being there. And so it's really asking for a profound compassion to hold it. and so then if you ask well how do we wake up that compassion for ourselves what helps me is just to keep saying what is this pain asking from me what does it want and what I find is that it wants just to accept that this is part of reality this is just part of it it is just part of it

it changes, the pain gets less because like all waves, waves come and go, but it's asking for acceptance in some way. And I feel like you already know that and it's just hard to endure and that you're not alone and that really makes a difference to remember that if you look at the other people here, you look at me and Frank, our body minds feel that intensity of pain at times. We are together in that predicament. Thank you for your words.

Trinidad, I want to add something, okay? You are her mother. You are her mother. And no mother wants to see their child in pain. It's sometimes impossible. But it is the job of a mother sometimes, isn't it? And when she was little, when she was little, you had to care for her pain, yes? And when you did, what did you do when she was little?

Huh? With love. I was embracing her, I was gazing at her, I was looking at her. Right, you could sit next to her, you could hold her, you could express your love to her. Yeah. And you could say, oh, sweetheart, I'm so sorry that you're hurting. Yeah? Yes, yes, and I have done this during her old sickness.

I've been there with her holding her hand at her bed, I was there all the time, all the time. And I tried not to express my pain in front of her. I didn't want to be there suffering in front of her. But now this grieving, this pain is in my head. It's like my head is full of this. I cannot think. Sometimes I don't know what to do with my head.

My head is like noise. I cannot sound noise. It's very physical. It's something very physical. Absolutely. Trinidad. So do what you just were doing there. Put your hand on your head. Go ahead. Ah, yeah, they would like that. Now, can you remember when your daughter was very young and you would put your hands on her cheeks and on her head? Remember all the love you could transmit through those hands of yours, those mother's hands? You did it many times, many times. So you know how to do it. You know how to give love through your hands. Do it now. Do it now for yourself. Trinidad. Give yourself this kind of attention, this kind of love, huh? Oh, I'm hurting so much. I just need my love. I just need someone like me to hold me. I'm doing it with you now, Trinidad. Can you

feel it? Can you feel the love from your own hands? You can feel it good. God. That means it's possible, Trinidad, it's possible. That's what we can do for the pain. That's how you can bear the pain. That's how you can, how the pain begins to lessen and heal. Through your love, it's beautiful what you're doing. That's what you do. You know how to do this. You're a mother.

You have this capacity. All your life, you know this. Okay? So when all the thoughts come and they're just so troubling and they, you can't think, don't worry about thinking. Just put your hands on your head like that, like a mother would. You know how to be a mother. You know how to give love.

Now you have to be a mother to yourself. Okay? Okay? See, see. Thank you so, so much. You know how to do it. You know how to do it. Roshi, do we have a question in the chat that we can respond to? We have many.

I'm sure. Yes, over a hundred. Yeah. So we take one in time. Yeah. like, oh my goodness. So this is a beautiful question. It says, and it's from Marsha. Can you please detail what it means more specifically to be with your grief or to be with your emotions? What does that mean exactly to be what with? What does that look like? What is the process when you're feeling an intense

anger, for example. Well, you see what we just did with Trinidad? I mean, oh, it's overwhelming sometimes. And all we can do is do this. It seems impossible sometimes. And so we do it like that. We hold ourselves. We put our hands on our heart, as Tara said before.

That's the specificity that we sometimes need. And then our wise heart will keep showing us what comes next. It's not like there's a one, two, three strategy here. You know, we learn to trust our wise hearts, not just our emotional heart, yeah? And it guides us in this process. So we start with something simple. We put our hands on our hearts. We put our hands on our heads.

We say to ourselves, this feels impossible, but I'm not going to leave you. This feels impossible, but I'm not going to leave you. So that's the first step in my heart and mind that I could offer. Tara, maybe you have some other specificity you could suggest. It doesn't always appear as grief. So you start right where you are. It can be anger, it can be depression, it can be numbness, it can be shame, to honor the flavors. Because in the moments of truly saying yes, what's there, and in feeling in the body, like

keep inviting yourself into your body, your throat, your chest, your belly, it frees up what's there to keep unfolding and teaching and guiding and expressing. And I know for some there's a sense that I'm numb, I'm cut off. You know, I know something's there. I want to feel it. If you feel cut off, sense that there is in you a longing to feel and just feel that. feel the numbness and feel the longing to feel. There are some times that I just pray to be intimate with what's here, to have a way to be intimate.

So I really want to invite you to pray, to communicate even to and from the numbness if that's there, because that starts movement, that makes us more porous, that opens us up into the tenderness. Thank you very much. I see that Lola has her hand raised. Can we go to Lola? Hi, good evening. Thank you very much for this opportunity. My husband passed away one year ago after a very horrible month in the intensive care unit.

And I felt also, what I feel with Trinidad, because it was horrible for me to see him suffering. And I, and still I feel, I feel these images come to my mind, this images come back to my mind. And during this time, I, I, I, I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel, these images come back to my mind. During this time I discovered Tara speaking, it helped me a lot and this is why I am here today. My husband and myself, we were Buddhist, I am Buddhist. So Tara, you said today something like something like, possibility of keeping the connection with this love that can grow after the beloved one is dying or is dead, or the connection with his mother, with the daughter after suicide.

But for me there is a contradiction because I am a Buddhist. So I learned as Buddhist that mind goes on, reincarnate in another body. So how can I How is this possible? How can I think that I can be in contact with him? But if can I keep this connection with my husband

although he maybe is in another body or he has gone on with his traveling? Thank you, Lola. It's a beautiful question. And if we say beyond Buddhist or Hindu or anything, there's a mystery. And I think you can feel that. There's a mystery about what is and who we are, that field of who we are together, is a mystery. And so it helps to put aside any mental idea of, oh, he's in another body. And let yourself open to

the unknowing of the mystery and sense, well, what's essence? What is the essence of his being? And just almost invite yourself to open to what's the essence? Who are we beyond our separate cells in our togetherness? And just see what happens without having any ideas about it. I'm going to pause here and just ask you, what is it like to hear those words? I would say, I had never had this experience yet because, in a way, as I thought that this was like that, that he has gone away that I should release. that I should not grasp to him, I didn't try to establish any connection with him, but honestly speaking, when I was listening to you, I thought that was so beautiful, so hopeful, if I could have in any way any kind of connection with that person that I love so much,

that I will love forever. Tell me what happens when you feel your loving right now, right this moment. When you feel your loving for him, what is it that you become aware of? And take a few moments to sense into that. In this moment, it's strange, but I feel like, in a way, he's here with me. In a strange way, he's here with me. I've said it other times, but I thought this is not possible, because he has gone away and I'm here in this world in this body. I don't know where he is right now, but now I have this feeling, I have this contradiction that in a way he is with me.

So here's the thing, Lola. trust your experience and see if you can keep putting aside the ideas. The loving itself, just trust it and let it unfold itself as it wants to. No need to add any other interpretations. There's love and it's here and it feels alive for you and that is beautiful. That's beautiful. I can sense you understand. Thank you very much. So Tara, you know I'm to have a difficult time with time.

But I think our time is coming to a close now, if I'm correct. You are. Oh, that's magical. That is the mystery at work. So, you know, I just want to, as we close here, I just want to remind us all that we have lots of culture and religious habits and about managing our grief, you know, and getting over our grief, you know. that causes us to sometimes be very impatient and afraid of our grief. And it leads us to hurrying ourselves along or hurrying others along through this process. And I'd like to just encourage us in this closing to take our time,

to understand the grief has its own rhythm and its own pace, and there's no one way through it. It's just your way. Okay? And that when we come together like we are today, we begin to understand the many, many faces of grief, and the many ways in which we come to include it in our life. And that's really what it is. It's about coming to include it in our life,

not getting over anything, yeah? So I wanted to say that in closing. And then I want to thank my dear friend Tara for saying yes to this. And it's always so much fun and so inspiring to be with you and to learn from you. And I'm very, very grateful. And my dear friend Roshi and my dear friend Roshi

and my dear friends at Yupaya, I have a great love for you all. And I am so grateful that you do this, that you somehow have made this possible for us all over the world to participate like this. And I would ask to all of you who are participating to express your thanks, to express your generosity in a gift to Yupaya. They're struggling, and he won't tell you that, but they're really struggling right now.

They're trying to keep the doors open, trying to keep these lines open. And if you help us now, if you help Upaya now, it will benefit so many people. So please, if you can, Noah has put in the chat, the way in which you can make a gift to you, Paya. And whether it's small gift or a very grand gift, every gift is deeply appreciated. And so please protect this jewel. Care for it with great love, please. And Torah, I want you to have the last word and maybe however you want to practice or speak, it's good with me. I have a great love. Well, bless you, Frank.

It's just the field is so beautiful right now with all of you. And I feel so much gratitude to Upaya to Roshi Joan, Noah, the translators that have graciously given your time. It just created some magic that's really beautiful. And I guess if I had a final word, it's so easy to make grief, to have a sense of something bad or wrong. And it's such an essence part of our beingness and embedded in it is love. And it's there's so much, there's difficulty, sorrow and beauty.

So I'd like to just close with a brief meditation if that's okay. okay and start the meditation with a poem. So if you will, wherever you are, take these moments to let yourself feel your body and your heart and feel your breath. This is Mark Nippo's words in a drift. He says, everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I've lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger,

in the very center under it all what we have that no one can take away and all that we've lost face each other. It is there that I'm adrift. feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything. I am so sad and everything is beautiful. Taking these moments, perhaps sensing the spirit of that prayer, open me, just opening wide into the joys and the sorrows, letting life live through us, discovering how deep that yes can be. Right now, what wants attention?

What can we meet with kindness, with an intimate presence? And can we sense how that presence is a field that we share that's holding all of us, that's holding our hurting world, our beautiful world? Can we sense that that heart space is really the essence of who we are? Perhaps closing by feeling a sense of bowing or honoring that presence, that's living through all of us, feeling it living inside you, through you, around you, and all of us. And that prayer that this world can wake up to that loving presence and live from that loving presence. Blessings, my friends, it's an honor to be with you.