Tara Brach - Belonging to Each Other - Part 1 (2019-10-09)

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

Belonging to Each Other - Part 1 (2019-10-09) - Mother Teresa writes that if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. These two talks explore the causes for severed belonging, and pathways to deepening the felt sense of belonging to our own body, heart and spirit, and to all beings. Together the talks offer a natural and powerful progression of lovingkindness or metta reflections, that when practiced regularly can open us to the peace, joy and freedom of trusting our mutual belonging. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. Most of the time before I actually begin speaking, I have an inner reflection that I'll share with you and it goes something like just sensing us all here together and I often will say we are friends. And just kind of reflect on, here we are, and we're friends. And I noticed that when I intentionally move to that,

just feeling our connection, some of the selfing that can habitually arise around being in the role and being the teacher and about to convey something of importance that I want everybody to get and I want to do a good job doing it, some of that selfing stuff, it just softens. And it makes a lot more room

for a kind of awakening together, for a flow of truth and caring that is much more vibrant and alive. We are friends and so we are, feeling it for a moment publicly. One of my favorite messages from Mother Teresa goes like this, she says, if we have no peace, it's because we've forgotten that we belong to each other. have no peace, it's because we've forgotten we belong to each other. And it feels so simple and so true and it's really perhaps the centerpiece of awakening our heart is rediscovering belonging. So I'd like to have this be a centerpiece really of the talk tonight and the

talk the next class that we have, really how do we deepen our felt experience of belonging, not some abstract idea of it, but our felt experience. And I'm aware tonight is Yom Kippur, so deep out all those who celebrate the high holidays and the essence of Yom Kippur has to do with at-one-ment, right? That coming into harmony, into belonging. So it's fitting in that way too. Okay so a little bit of a map of the talk. What we'll be doing is first looking as I often do, we'll actually invite each of you

to reflect a bit on how do we cut ourselves off? How do we get cut off? How can we don't feel belonging? Because it's more common not to. How do we cut off? And then we'll look at the different pathways of reconnecting. And in a way you can think of this all as pathways of loving kindness of metta. That's the Polly word for loving kindness.

And one of the most basic translations of metta is friendliness. And I've often thought that if that was our whole path, if our whole path was to attend to how the quality of friendliness towards our inner life in each other and widening circles, our world would be okay, it would heal. So friendliness. We will explore this in widening circles. We'll start with befriending and belonging to our inner life and then widen it out and widen it out.

And you might think of these two classes or talks as really one long meta-meditation because we're going to do a lot of little reflections during this. And if you happen to be listening to this as a podcast in driving, you might re-listen when you're not driving. So you can really attend. So we start with Thomas Merton, who once said this. Of what a veil is it if we can travel to the moon, if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? Of what a veil is it if we can travel to the moon, if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?

to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves. This is the most important of all journeys and without it all of the rest are useless. So this abyss is what arises when we're living in a small and confined sense of a limited self, when our sense of who we are, our identity has shrunken and we're living in beliefs of what's wrong with us and how we're separated from others, that's when there's an abyss. And at those times we cannot connect to our full aliveness. When we're living in limited stories about ourselves, we cannot feel the vitality and

aliveness of our bodies. And we're not open to the whole range and dimension of our heart and our feelings and our minds are not open to really sense the vastness of this living reality and the mystery of it. We're living in a very small world. That's when there's an abyss. And in a way what Thomas Merton's talking about, this journey, is really the evolutionary journey of awakening consciousness, that we are moving from a sense of separateness and if you think of it in terms of the brain where there's really a kind of dominance of the primitive brain, of the reptilian brain and the limbic

system that keeps us in fight-flight-freeze. I'm separate. The world's out there. I need to defend. It's a journey from living in that very confined kind of distorted reality to a journey of really wholeness which is expressed by the most recently evolved brain that's a very integrated brain where the parts talk to each other and there's a synergy and a balancing. So that's the movement that we explore when we do this journey of befriending, of moving

from that separateness to that connectedness. And we all have a survival brain. Every one of us is listening right now, right back behind our neck at the base of our neck, there's this hub of the reptilian brain and we very often have it take over. You know, we get stressed and it gets more activated. We get really stressed and it's calling the shots, you know, so we all have this reptilian brain. And so the question is we come into this world and there's a sense of separateness. We get identified as a self as in here and a world's out there and our brain actually operates

to make those distinctions. we often have that limbic brain in charge dominating and what deepens the abyss? How come some of us still manage to find our way back into belonging and for others it's really difficult? Well the first thing to say is it's not our fault if belonging is difficult. We didn't sign on for a culture and caregivers or genetic. that cause a harder time with belonging. And those are some of the elements.

Genetically, we might have a makeup that makes us more prone to depression or anxiety. It's harder to feel connection. We get more self-oriented and protective. We might have had trauma, which is really the meaning of trauma is severed belonging. We lose our sense of being part of a greater whole and when that happens and there's that pain of trauma, our basic coping strategy is to dissociate from the pain. We get cut off, there's an abyss.

So this includes all the different kinds of trauma and for huge groups of people it's generational trauma. Think about it. The trauma of slavery. If ever there's such a thing as severed belonging, take a thing as a separate belonging, take a a whole group of people from their home and from their continent and displacing them and then separating them from their own families and enslaving them. It continues on through the generations because all the oppressive and violating mechanisms

of slavery carry on through current institutions. So that's a way of creating the abyss. It continues in other forms of societal conditioning that we all are subject to, whether it's the overconsuming and addictiveness of our culture, the dividedness and the violence we're feeling it so much right now I know so many are aware of. That creates an abyss, that separation. And then for each of us, if you look into your own family or if you didn't have a family, whatever your upbringing was, whoever were the key significant players, the sense of belonging

comes from healthy attachment. But most of us had either maybe half healthy to not healthy and it's not our parents fault, it's that they were creatures of the culture. So what happens? If your parents weren't able to attune to your needs, if they were not weren't able to see you and sense really who you were, if they weren't able to be nurturing. Remember it's survival not of the fittest of the nurtured. If they weren't able to be nurturing, if they were suffocating or if they were driving you

or if they had a lot of criticism, that's less than perfect attachment, which means that we feel some cut off from belonging and then what happens? Instead of feeling a sense of belonging to our own bodies and hearts and to each other, we create coping strategies that actually perpetuate the separateness, keep us in that bubble, keep us from belonging. And you can think of your coping strategies in two big piles. And one big pile of coping strategies are, these are kind of the control strategies so we can meet our unmet needs so we can begin to feel safer.

Are the aversive ones? And those are all the strategies where we pull away from people and push people away and judge others and keep them at a distance and in some way it sometimes can be passive-aggressive or we withhold. But it often is aggressive, judgmental and bottom line it's creating a distance. And so somebody sent me this, two guys, we'll call them Earl and Bubba, are sitting in a boat fishing and drinking beer. And suddenly Bubba says, think I'm going to divorce the wife, she hasn't spoken to me in

over two months. Earl takes a long, slow sip of beer and says, better think it over. Women like that are hard to find. So the aversive kind of domain is where we in different ways are strategies that come out of severed belonging, increase severed belonging. The most common is judgment. The other big domain is grasping. It's where didn't have good attachment and holding on really tight and trying to in some

way make you mine, make you love me, make you want me, make you approve of me. It's possessive, it's jealous, it's clinging. And most of us have versions of both, in some way we get attached. Sometimes rather than attaching to another person though, when we have unmet needs for love will attach to substitutes and the substitutes could be food or drugs or whatever, substitute could be approval or getting more power. here's a substitute that one person talks about. I love to shop after a bad relationship.

I don't know. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. It just does. Sometimes if I see a really great outfit, I'll break up with someone on purpose. You get the idea, though. Now, I've called these false refuges in my book True Refuge because they come out of unmet needs where there's been some severed belonging

and we have unmet needs to be loved and understood. And these are the best coping strategies we can do early on. And the problem is they become habituated. They give us a little bit of a taste of something, but they don't really satisfy, but we get hooked. So in a way they create a developmental arrest on this journey. We can't cross the abyss. We can't reconnect with ourselves and each other

as these strategies keep us feeling separate. So the path then becomes about, and I feel like this is where we all are, is how do we give and we all have some of those strategies, how do we begin to deepen our attention and our presence so we can continue this journey of belonging? And an image I love for this is from D.H. Lawrence who described how, and this is really early in the 20th century, describes all the disconnection back then. And he says, for the truth is we're perishing for lack of fulfillment of our greater needs, we're cut off from the great sources of our inward nourishment and renewal, sources which flow

eternally in the universe. He writes, vitally the human race is dying. It's like a great uprooted tree with its roots in the air. we must plant ourselves again in the universe. And I think that's a beautiful image of the roots in the air. It's like we're trying to get something, but it's not what we really need is to re-root in our bodies, come back home into these living bodies,

and re-root and connect with our heart and the places we've pushed away in ourselves, re-root in awareness, really opening to the awareness that's right here, and to the living beings that are with us. So we talk now, we're looking now at how does the loving kindness practice help us to re-root, to find that belonging. And although we're emphasizing the loving-kindness practice, you can't talk about loving kindness without talking about mindfulness.

Because in order to really hold with care this life, we have to be able to be present and see what's here. So there are two inquiries that help us in deepening belonging that will be tracking as we do these different practices. And one is what's happening here? What's going on right this moment? And if you ask that, just ask that question, what is going on inside me right now? Perhaps you can notice the power of a question to deepen your attention, to bring you more

here. That's the first question. What's happening inside me right now? The second question is, and can I be with this with some kindness? And again you can just sense, okay, what's happening inside? And can I be with this with some kindness? And with these two inquiries, the first question, you can I just sense, okay, what's happening inside? inquiries, the first one brings up our interest and our attention and the second equality

of tenderness, we begin to establish belonging. We begin to re-root ourselves in our body and our heart, crossing the abyss. So we start, as I've already been speaking, with the rerouting inside ourselves. Many of you are familiar with the loving-kindness practice and it widens the circles and widens. So we talk about ourselves and then dear ones and neutral people maybe and difficult people and then the whole world, all the by-wingeds and those that creep on the ground, we include it all. But the big secret is we have to embrace the life that's right here inside us.

It doesn't mean we have to do it in a particular sequence. For some people it helps to think of their dogs. and wake up that warm feeling and then come and think about themselves. So it's not a sequential thing, but the bottom line is we need to befriend our inner life or we can't really open to loving our world. We can't love without holding back. Because it'll always be parts of us that are feeling like something's wrong and we'll get re-hooked in that small self.

The first practice that we're going to explore is opening and befriending and creating the longing inwardly and by way of example or story. And this is a story actually that I have in my coming up in my new book in Radical Compassion. One woman that I worked with a while ago was a new executive at a company that she had just kind of joined on the team. And she was really intimidated by the CEO because he was a kind of a very harsh critical guy and for her the weekly meetings with the team were absolutely hell. I mean she would build up all this anxiety before it and then she'd be in there and she'd have kind of brain

freeze and she's used to herself as a very articulate and clear and you know creative engaged person and she just became small and so that's what she wanted to talk to me about until we explored it some about the anxiety that built up before those meetings and so on. And I'm sure many people as you're listening can think of something that when you approach, you just feel it building and you start getting more stirred up and actually lead you to making more mistakes and not being who you can be. And this was what was going on. So I encouraged her to do a practice of belonging and connecting and getting in touch before

before the meeting. And we did rain, which many of you are familiar with, which is bringing these two wings of mindfulness and compassion to her experience. So I had her get in touch with the squeeze of anxiety and she could feel it, it was very visceral and many of you know you can feel, I feel it in your throat, you can feel it in your chest, you can kind of feel it maybe in your belly, she could feel that. And then I had her, and this is part of rain, really asking, it's a really key question, is what is this place in you most need? And really, what would be most healing for this place to know or remember or feel? It's a really beautiful question. When you get stuck, what is that part of you most need? And when she asked

that, the response from that place was that it's okay that I'm here, that I'm accepted. that's all right that there's anxiety. So she began her practice where she'd feel the anxiety and she'd just say to herself, it's okay, this belongs. That's a powerful phrase, this belongs. Just to step out a bit, if you sense your experience as you're this ocean of being and there's ways of anxiety and there's ways of hatred and there's ways of love and there's ways of curiosity and the whole shebang, in the moment that you say this belongs, it's just letting that

wave be a wave in your ocean, but you get to be the ocean, you're not fighting the wave, you enlarge. And so what she found was when she said, it's okay, this belongs. Not that it went away, there was still a bit of a clutch, but there's just more space around it. In fact, the who she was shifted by saying this belongs. She shifted from being the victimized self, victimized by anxiety and by the guy causing it to the space of awareness that included the wave.

Does that make sense that shift? That became her practice. That she would, before the meetings, she'd breathe with the anxiety and she'd just say, okay, it's okay, you're here, you belong. And even during the meeting she'd mentally silently whispered to herself, this belongs, it's okay. And she said over time it created enough space that she really reconnected with herself. It's not only did the anxiety belong but she was belonging more to her whole self.

She got access to her intelligence again basically and to her voice and to her power really. There is empowerment when you let a part of your you you've been rejecting belong? So this is the beginning of our meta practice of befriending where we include what's been pushed away and it's a courageous position to take because we have all sorts of beliefs that it's not okay that it's there. But there's an intuitive intelligence in us that knows that as long as we're pushing something away inside us, it actually makes it stronger and her identity gets more hooked

to it. Okay, enough, I think enough words about that. Let's practice this one. This is part one. As you close your eyes and come into stillness, you may take a moment to feel your breath and just allow yourself to arrive right in this moment, right here. You might sense in your life right now if there's a place where you're feeling stressed and reactive and caught in difficult emotions, something's going on where you get more cut

off from yourself than usual. It's not going to help to pick something traumatizing because that'll be overwhelming right now. So picking something that's on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being high trauma, something in the 4 to 5 range maybe, where you're stressed, where there's some difficult emotions, where you can sense you're a bit cut off from yourself, you're not really, you're not belonging to your own full experience, you're in reaction. Let the situation come to mind and you might sense what's the worst part about it, what's

most triggering or activating, what are you afraid it's going to go wrong, maybe what you're believing about yourself that you're failing or somebody else is not caring or whatever it is that's setting you off. Let yourself go from that story right into your body where you're feeling things and check your throat and your chest and your belly and it helps to anchor in your body more because to belong to our body sometimes we have to feel our body you might just put your hand on your heart or if it helps on your belly or your throat but just have some contact here and let it be kind contact, gentle.

I'm breathing with where you, wherever you feel vulnerability or anger or hurt or fear, or just breathing with it. Remember that first question, so what's really happening inside me? It's really a somatic inquiry. What's it feel like? Where does it feel most squeezed or sore or empty or? or aching. Where is the feeling the strongest of sadness or anger or hurt? So breathe with it and sensing what that part most needs. Sensing what that part would need to hear or feel

or sense to feel some healing and begin by letting it belong, letting it know it belongs. It's okay, this belongs. And then any other message or sense of kindness that you want to offer to this place. Really from the wisest and most loving part of you, just offering your care. I'm here, I'm not leaving. This belongs. So you become the ocean that's in some way cradling the wave, caring.

If it's difficult, know that that means the waves is a really strong wave and it's going to take some rounds of practicing this inner befriended. and that's okay too. You might even send the message to that strong feeling that I'm with you and I'll be back. This belongs, I care. And just notice as you regard your inner life in this way a sense of your own being. Who are you when you're sensing that the waves belong? Who are you when there's kindness towards the parts of your being? It's like to feel a sense of belonging with the life within you, with your own heart. We begin our loving-kindness practice with the inner just to get that taste of, okay, we start

by belonging to the life that's right here, including the life that's here, to begin to get familiar with what that's like. You can take a few full breaths when you're ready and if you prefer to sit with your eyes close it's fine. If you'd like to open your eyes, we're going to widen it out and we're going to widen it out now and look at how do we include those in our circles of friends, family, maybe those we work with? And for now we're not going to be exploring those that we're in conflict with but really those

where there's never uncomplicated relationships with those where there's not outright conflict but those that we see regularly perhaps how do we deepen a sense of belonging with them? And the reality is that we can get very habituated and very unautomatic with people. You probably noticed it. The more stress we are, the more we're on automatic and we actually don't feel that heart connection. And there's not that rootedness where there's kind of we're just sustaining the abyss and what's needed to create the belonging is one simple thing that we deepen our attention. in relating, that we very intentionally say, okay, I'm going to deepen my attention with

this person. And it's no small thing. Everybody that we meet is struggling hard, everybody in our circle. Everybody's dealing with the body that sometimes feels not only sick but very vulnerable and it can be scary. Everybody's dealing with a sense of maybe there's something we're going to be very, we're wrong with me, maybe others will reject me. I've done okay so far but at some point my luck's going to go on and I'm going to fail. Everybody's dealing with insecurity. Everybody's dealing

with the loss of others they love. Everybody's struggling hard. And everybody that you know has that light of spirit shining through. And part of deepening attention is to see both of those things so that when you encounter somebody your attention notices their vulnerability just like yours and their goodness. There's a story heard many years ago. It took place in the Midwest in some town that offered the random acts of kindness awards to different citizens once a year. And one year it was offered to, I think it was like six, six years.

years old, a six-year-old boy. And as the story goes, his family lived next to a family, an elderly couple, and the wife of this couple died. And about a week after she died, this little boy's mother saw her son on the front porch with this elderly gentleman. He was in his rocking chair and little boy sitting right next to him another chair. And when the little boy came home, the mother said, well, so what did you two talk about all that time? And his response was, Mama, we didn't talk about anything. I just helped him to cry.

And I just always cherish that story because it's this kind of instinctive kindness that deepens attention and knows that the purest expression of love is paying attention to someone. And it's not our fault that we don't pay attention much. In fact, the more trauma or the more stress, the more our organism is designed to turn its attention in a self-centered way to try to protect itself. It's just the way we're designed. It's not our fault. and we can very intentionally train ourselves and it's a delicious training.

Like it makes life so interesting to move through the world and wonder what's like life for you right now? I mean what's it really like being you? And to move to the world with that kind of interest in receptivity and also to move through the world where we look more deeply to see. the awareness that's looking back through those eyes, you know. I sometimes shared that this was a trick, I think Jonathan told me about some years ago,

of when you're talking to somebody to notice the color of their eyes. Because if you do, you're going to be noticing their eyes, and if you notice their eyes, you're going to be sensing sentience. And if you're sensing sentience, you're going to be sensing that behind these separate bodies is a field of awareness that you both belong to, that they're looking, the one that's looking at you is looking from that same place. Yes, there's conditioning that's different, but more of our conditioning is alike than different. So we start paying attention in that way. So let's practice that together. And we're going to do this in two parts,

this belonging to each other practice. And the first few moments allow yourself to arrive again. The more you come back into your body, like relax your shoulders, soften your hands, let the chest be open, soften your belly so the breath can be nice and full. I'd like to invite you to bring to mind someone that you trust, that has a healing presence. And if you don't have somebody in your life like that, to make it up.

Imagine somebody like that. A very wise and healing being that's trustworthy, that's accepting. And imagine you're in a stuck place in some way you're caught. It may be stuck in the way you already have been meditating on. And since really how you want them to be with, with you, what would really be just right? What would most in your fantasy, in your imagination, most comfort and heal? How would they let you know they're interested?

Because we need to feel another is interested, they want to be with us, they're curious, they want to know what life is like for us. How would that come through? that beings interest and imagine the kind of presence they offer, what kind of words or gestures or touch? What might they say to you or tell you? And what do you most want them to see about your goodness? What do you want them to get about you?

Maybe it's your sincerity or your love of love, your love of truth. Just imagine them getting it, understanding, seeing you and just sense the belonging, the sweetness and depth and peace of belonging that comes when another being cares and comforts and appreciate your goodness. What does that belonging feel like? This is the field of loving kindness, the crossing of the abyss. He's feeling that field and sensing your own most loving self and bring to mind someone who's in your closer circles, again, where there's not

not a lot of conflict or whatever. And take some time now. This is your time to really deepen your attention with this person. Notice their vulnerability where they're insecure or scared, they're unmeted needs, in some way offering comfort or care, whether it's energetically or with words and them receiving that. And see their goodness. fresh, see what you might not be always seeing, the light in their eyes, their curiosity

or their dedication to truth or honesty, either humor, creativity, their way of showing love to you, to see their goodness, perhaps behind that, that spirit, that light that really lives through them. And imagine letting them know in some way of their goodness. and what that's like for them. And sense who you are, since who you are when you are

seeing another and offering your care, sense the quality of belonging, that sense we are friends in the deepest way, and taking a few full, deep breaths. So we've explored the matter, loving-kindness that brings a sense of belonging to our inner, inner to a person who's not challenging so much. We're going to begin a little bit in these last few minutes to sense the possibility of

widening the circle, even when somebody's a bit difficult. Ramdao says, one of the greatest things that happened my relationship with my father was when he was approaching death, I finally allowed him to be who he was instead of trying to make him into who I thought he should be. And he stopped trying to make me into who he thought I should be and we became friends. What a sweetness and also a bit of a sadness that it was really only in the final part of his father's life. So we have this inquiry for ourselves that we can spend a lifetime in relationships where

we're trying on some level to have the person be different. Many of us go through decades, on some level, not really accepting the persons the way they are. And to the degree that on some level we have an agenda that they should be different, to that degree we're not able to feel real belonging. Remember that wave, we need to let the wave belong as it is. It doesn't mean that we drop all boundaries and we ignore harmful behavior, anything like that. It means that in our hearts we truly embrace the being who they are and then we find our way with each other and what agreements are going to work best for us to live together.

There's a basic understanding as we approach this terrain and this is going to be one that I can feel as I look at the clock that I don't want to rush through this terrain of how do we create belonging when we have in our relationships. relationships where there's some conflict. So I'm going to just do a little piece on it right now and then this is where we're going to be picking up on the next class. But there's a basic understanding when you have somebody in your life and you're in conflict with them, it's not your personhoods in conflict.

There's a conflict of unmet needs. Whatever your background and conditioning and genetics and culture and this and that, caregiving, and their culture and care of Ving and Gen X, there's some unmet needs in there that are triggering each other. And it happens in most every relationship we're ever, ever in. It's not a problem necessarily. If we can accept that there's going to be edges, there's a wonderful story of prickly porcupines that, you know, we're going to have to work out the getting poked around a bit, but

But we can, we can. But we need to understand that when somebody, when we and somebody else are at odds, when we're thinking you're wrong, you're bad, you don't understand, you need to change, that there's unmet needs going on and we cannot find a way to mutual belonging until we do two things. And the first thing is that we make what's called the U-turn and we get in touch with our own unmet needs and bring kindness. And then from that place we begin to see the other more clearly. Ultimately we get to this, this is what Ram Dass writes. He says, when you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees and

And some of them are bent and some of them are straight and some of them are evergreens and some of them or whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand it didn't get enough light and so it turned that way and you don't get all emotional about it, you just allow it, you appreciate the tree. Now the minute you get near humans you lose all of that and you're constantly saying you're to this and I'm to this, that judging mind comes in.

And so I practice turning people into trees, which means appreciating them just the way they are. What I'd like to invite us to do because we're going to pick this up as I mentioned is to begin to sense whenever there's conflict that there's some unmet needs going on and that we're all trees and we're growing and we're never perfectly formed and just to begin to soften a little and open your perspective. sense, hmm, what are my unmet needs? What are your unmet needs?

And then you'll find you have some space to move forward and we'll explore the moving forward in the next class. I'd like to close with a little reflection with you if you will. We begin this with a very brief verse from the writer Andrea Shah. A certain Bhaktashi Dervish, that's a Sufi, was respected for her. his virtue and his honesty and clarity and when anyone asked him how he became so holy he always answered, I know what is in the Quran. One day he had just given this reply to an inquirer in a coffee house when the newcomer

asked, okay, what is in the Quran? In the Quran said the Bektashi, there are two pressed flowers and a letter from my friend Abdullah. essence of loving kindness is this open-hearted quality of friendliness. It's sacred, it's precious. And as Mother Teresa described it, when we sense that belonging that comes with friendship, we really touch peace. So we close in that spirit to just sense in your own heart the intention to befriend the life that's within you and take a moment to hold the life within you with the quality

of care. Feel in your own words your prayer to befriend this life, to love yourself into healing and widening our attention out to sense those in our life, those close in, those that we don't know. beings really, to sense that intention to discover our belonging to all of life everywhere, and in that discovery to know the joy and peace and freedom of being awake and alive. Namaste and thank you for your kind attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

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