Tara Brach - Belonging to Each Other – Part 3 of 3 (2019-10-23)

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

Belonging to Each Other – Part 3 of 3 - Mother Teresa writes that if we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. These three 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. This class is the third in a series on Deepening Belonging. And in the first class we explored deepening belonging to our inner life and waking up our sense of care and connectedness to dear ones. And in the second class, we explored deepening belonging when with others in our life there's some conflict how to find our way back to connectedness.

And this class we will be widening the circles to explore how do we feel our belonging with those we don't know so well or don't know at all. How do we really discover the invisible threads of connection that really unite all of us everywhere? If you haven't listened to the last few, that's fine. You might want to listen to them. Each one stands on its own. But the form is really in the traditional loving-kindness practice, which is as Rolka says, I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

I may not have completed the last one, but I give myself to it. So it's like widening the circles and really seeing how much much of this world we can include in our hearts. So Mother Teresa writes, and I've brought this in each week, that if we have no peace, it's because we've forgotten our belonging to each other. If we have no peace, it's because we've forgotten our belonging to each other. And the word forgotten is important because what it says is the belongings here. It's just that we get hurt in this life or got hurt in past lives or what we're

whatever and the ways that we got hurt cut us off from being able to perceive it. And our pathway is to rediscover it. And really that's the heart of every spiritual tradition to rediscover our belonging, our sense of oneness and connection. So a really good starting point for each one of us is to recognize, well how today did I habitually and maybe unconsciously block that understanding and feeling? How do I move to the world and not feel it? What's going on?

And when I say that it's not like it's our fault that we block belonging. It's universal that we do it. Every one of us gets cut off and especially when we're stressed. When we're stressed, when we're in some way really driven by unmet wants and and unfulfilled needs and fears and so on, we don't pay attention in a way that will reveal our belonging. Our coping strategy is to turn the attention inward and get really self-centered. And by the way, self-centered, it's not a bad thing.

We all get self-centered. It's very different from self-care. Self-centered doesn't make us feel good. centered actually cuts us off more. So we get self-centered and we then when we're with each other, we're not seeing the other, we're seeing an object that we're perceiving through a veil of needs and wants and fears. Does that make sense? When we're self-centered, the way we perceive is affected by the twerking of our wants and fears. And so others become either an object to fulfill our wants, or an object that we have to defend against because they're going

to hurt us in some way, are they become irrelevant. They have nothing to do with the way we're organized around our wants and our needs, so we in some way ignore them, we don't see them, they're of no value. And I have a favorite example of this which if you've been around you might remember where a guy's in his living room and he hears a knock on the door and he opens the door and there's a snail there. So he picks up the snail and he throws it as far as he can. Three years later, there's another knock on the door and he opens it and the snails are saying, well what the heck was that all about?

And you get the idea. It's like we write off certain life forms, they're just not real. So a lot of what we're going to be exploring is how do we move? through our day kind of making unreal others because in a moment that another is not real, we're also an unreal self. We're identified with a very small part of our own being. Okay? So let's look closer at the ways that we, in our self-centeredness, we, the self is the

protagonist of the story and it's like we're on a stage and the other players or bit players or significant players, but they're kind of all in relationship to Mois, the center of the world. So to whatever degree we're caught in stress, we're in that self-centeredness, there's wanting and some others are going to become the object of our wanting. And in many interactions if we really put a close in lens, there's something we're wanting from that person and we have conformed our behaviors in certain ways so as to get them to think well of us, to approve of us, to like us, to be attracted to us.

But that's how we're being organized in the moment. They're an object and we're trying to get something from them. When we have an agenda, they're not real anymore or at least not fully real. So there's a guy walking down a city street and he's eating a bag of chips and he, as he's passing this ledge, there's a pigeon sitting there on the ledge and the pigeon says to him, hey, nice jacket. And the guy says, hmm, well thank you. And then the pigeon said, be ashamed of something were to happen to it.

And then the pigeon says, leave the chips. Unreal othering. There's a wonderful saying from Asia that when a pickpocket sees a saint, they see the saint's pocket. So that's what unreal othering is like our aperture of our consciousness narrows and we're just seeing what our wanting self wants. And you might reflect for a moment. I want to pause a few times during this to have to have.

you check in, if it helps to close your eyes as you're doing this, please do. And you might scan for a recent interaction with someone that you didn't know so well. Maybe at work or meeting or social event as you're moving through the day on errands or whatever. But a person that you don't know so well where you wanted something, whether it was information or help or recognition or approval or them to do the job they're supposed to do for you or whatever it is. To someone you don't know so well when you're wanting something.

Take a moment to deepen your attention to this and how much did you notice about that person? Did you notice anything about their mood? I mean maybe their insecurities. Do you notice anything about their goodness? Are you aware of a sparkle or their intelligence or their humor or their kindness? In other words, were they dimensional to you? Were they more than a two-dimensional figure on the stage? Were they dimensional?

Are they real? If we look at situations where we're really wanting something from somebody it becomes even more clear that we get blinded, we can't see who they are when we're really wanting something from them. You can keep your eyes closed or open them if you'd like. So that's one way that people become an object, they become unreal and the other way is if we fear them in some way, if they perceive them as a threat or if we have some averse of reaction to them, they're a source of unpleasantness, trouble to us.

And then what happens is we contract and they become an object out there. We're afraid that they're going to not like us, not see us, not approve of us, criticize us, reject us, put us down, or maybe they're going to take our time. So we go into our reactivity, which is to judge and blame them or to hide from them or to withdraw or to offend. In those moments we can't see who's there. If you feel threatened by somebody you can't see them and you can again check it out for a moment.

You might reflect as you just did. Somebody who you don't know so well, again work, meeting, social situation but where you might be in some way feel insecure or uncomfortable, anxious about their opinion, it's a good time is to scan the people in our life that we see just in passing, but where we're not so comfortable and how much do we notice? How dimensional was this person? How real? So what happens is, you can open your eyes, is whether it's a small degree or a large degree,

if we have a lot of wanting, a lot of fearing, there's a veil. And then our thoughts and actions come out of the wanting and fearing and they create more distance. That we either try to promote ourselves, we present ourselves in a certain way to get an effect, or we defend ourselves, or we control them, or we push them away. A friend here, Gary, shared this with me a few weeks ago about a woman who's in a job interview and the interviewer asked, well tell me, what do you think your biggest character does that defect would be.

So her response is honesty. And the interviewer said, honesty, I wouldn't consider that a defect. And the applicant replies, I don't care what the heck you think. So again, we get caught in our own little world. We're not seeing the other person. So I'm being light about unreal othering because every one of us does it. I mean, really, it's just pervasive. The more we're stressed and caught up, the less other people are real.

And we forget and they become objects to us and either again they're something we want something from or we fear something from or they're not relevant and we're anxious a lot and often we're not reacting to them, we're just preoccupied, we're in our trance of busyness right? And what happens when you're busy and you encounter? another. How much do you notice? Today, Christy, one of my assistants sent me this cartoon of God looking at his appointment calendar and it says, where, everywhere, when, all at once. There it goes. So we have habits that keep us small and keep others as unreal others and as

we know it's not a personal flaw but it does form the foundation of violence in our world. Because when someone's unreal then they don't hurt like we do and we can hurt them. We can violate them. We can participate in violating them. Unreal othering causes this lack of sensitivity to who's there. So a bit of a story for you. When my son, Narayan, was six years old, for his birthday, I gave him an ant farm. And he loved the ant farm.

He just was fascinated. He watched them as they created their network of tunnels and he watched them create an ant's graveyard where they drag their dead comrades over and deposit them and he watched all their struggles and their progress. He was just fascinated. Well, one day, a few weeks after his birthday, I picked him up from school and he was really, really upset and he got him to the car and he told me that the kids in the playground were making a game out of stamping on ants.

He was horrified that they were like having fun hurting these creatures that he felt like were friends, that he admired. And you know I tried to comfort him by explaining that when we spend time with living beings, when we pay attention to a living being, we find out they're real, you know, that they're changing, animated, hungry, social like these aunts were, and that their life is fragile and that they want to stay alive. We just feel the subjective realness when we deepen attention. And so it is that whenever we deepen attention, beings come alive.

I mean there's a reason we're utterly, passionately in love with our dog. We like others people's dog, but we love with our dog, right? And why is that? We've just paid so much attention that their particularness has enchanted us. We're just, we feel their sentience. It takes attention. So this is really to me the essence of what in Buddhism is called the Bodhisattva path, which is this path of awakening beings, awakening our heart and mind, is to pay attention

in a way that we can trust and live from that sense of belonging. Because when we pay attention it shifts from I, that self-centered eye, to the we. And then we act in ways that serves the way, in ways that are healing. It takes a training and attention and what motivates us. Well the reality is if we're honest with ourselves, most of us live a lot of time where we feel connections maybe with a very small number and we play in the realm of somewhat connected and interested and concerned with some more. But we're mostly in that cocoon of, you know, what I need and what I want and what I fear.

And there's an undercurrent of something's missing and something's wrong in our lives. There's a kind of anxiety, a fear around what's around the corner and we don't like ourselves so much. when we're not feeling that wholeness and connectedness. And the reason we don't like ourselves so much is because we're living inside too small a self. It's not who we are. It's like we're not liking ourselves because we're not inhabiting really the wholeness of who we are. The wholeness of who we are has this capacity to really feel that we're including everybody.

We're part of everybody. So this is reinforced by neuroscience that as we feel more compassion and love, as more and more beings we feel that sense of tenderness towards them, a sense of seeing behind the armoring and the conditioning and feeling that here we are feeling. As we wake that up, it correlates in the brain with an activation of the reward neurocircuitary in the brain. It feels good. In other words, love and compassion feel good.

And that is evolutionary way of rewarding us, encouraging us towards it more. It's like, you know, it doesn't feel good to feel separate. It doesn't feel good to blame. It doesn't feel good to judge. We're actually designed to feel better when we remember our connection. So that's the encouragement. If we want motivation, it's like built into our brain. Does that make sense? Now, we also have really strong conditioning to keep regressing back into separateness and it's not our fault. That conditioning gets strengthened if there's a lot of

wounding or if we're in a culture that really has a lot of aggression and addiction in it. So, we need to train ourselves. That's really what it comes down to, is that we have the capacity to evolve our own consciousness but it takes practice. The more we practice and whatever we practice gets stronger. And if we practice judging, we become more judgmental. if we practice looking past another's conditioning and seeing their who they are, that gets stronger.

There are two key practices or trainings that wake up the sense of belonging and so this is what we're going to spend the last part of this talk on. And the practices are learning to see the vulnerability that's in every single being. our shared vulnerability, the other practice is learning to see the sacred in every being, our shared goodness. And the first vulnerability, it's the compassion practice in Buddhism, it's called Karuna, and it's the understanding is be kind. Everyone you meet has a hard struggle.

Just being in these bodies, these bodies go down, these minds go down, we lose others that we love, that we love, be kind. So it takes actively looking and seeing how others just like we are feel insecure, fear or loss. It means that we're in some way have this lens of what's it like being you, that we're interested. Just like looking at that ant farm there was an interest in what's it like? What are you doing? How's it work? for you, we're interested in each other. So again the challenges are we have strong forces towards going inward and being as soon as we're with others in this trance of reactivity where we're not looking.

So there's a few supports that you can use if you want to do these bodhisattva trainings and one is to set your intention every day. What I often do is all when I'm at the end of my sitting, is I'll kind of sense the landscape of my day, who I'm going to be with and what I'm doing, and I'll in some way try to imagine and sense remembering with each of those interactions that the deep yearning is to feel our belonging, to feel the love, and to remember to sense that vulnerability and keep our hearts tender. The prayer I have used over the last handful of years has been, please, teach me about kindness.

And I love that prayer. In some way it's humble but it makes me really open to learning more about how to stay present and tender. The other support and training ourselves towards compassion is when we're with each other is to use the anchor of our body. Keep coming back to feeling okay, I'm here in my body, I'm breathing, you know, feel your heart. A trick I love is to look at people's eyes and sense the color of their eyes because as soon

as I'm paying attention like that I'm more receptive to the soul that's behind the eyes. And the third thing is to reflect on people when you're not with them and get in the habit of looking towards sensing, so what's it like for that person? Just to bring them to mind, you know, what's difficult? Just to feel that tenderness. And what happens over time is we start shifting our habitual reflex and actually noticing when we're with people that we're more sensitive, we're picking up more. Catherine Ingram tells a story about a friend of hers.

who was in a grocery store in California and the friend was going up and down the aisles and she became aware of a mother with a small boy moving in the opposite direction. And this is how the friend describes that they were meeting us head on in each aisle. The woman barely noticed us because she was so furious that her little boy

who seemed intent on pulling items off the lower shelves as the mother became more and more frustrated she started to yell at the child and several aisles later had progressed to shaking him by the arm. At this point, my friend spoke up. A wonderful mother of three and founder of a progressive school, she had probably never once in her life treated any child so harshly. I expected my friend would give this woman a solid mother-to-mother talk about controlling herself and about the effect this behavior has in a child.

I was braced for a confrontation. Instead, my friend said, What a beautiful little boy. How old is he? The woman answered cautiously. He's three. My friend went on to comment about how curious he seemed and how her own three children were just like him in the grocery store,

pulling things off shelves, so interested in all the wonderful colors and packages. He seemed so bright and intelligent, my friend said. The woman had the boy in her arms by now on a shy smile came upon her face, gently brushing his hair out of his eyes. She said, yes, he's very smart and curious, but sometimes he wears me out. My friend responded sympathetically, yes, they can do that. They're so full of energy.

As we walked away, I heard the mother speaking more kindly to the boy about getting home and cooking his dinner. We'll have your favorite. Macaroni and cheese, she told them. You can feel in that some how for this schoolteacher, she may have in the past felt judgmental and been critical and come out with it even, or kept it to herself but had a tightness, right? Certainly for most of us when we see a parent treating a child like that, that's the reaction.

Yet something in her inner training saw beyond this woman's behavior to someone who was worn out and was kind of past her window of tolerance and was, you know, just was reacting from a place of really being exhausted or frustrated or whatever and her heart was open and she actually responded in a way that could reach this woman. Had she been critical, it would have been pure defense. It was a bodhisatt for a moment. That's the training and seeing past the condition. to the vulnerability, pass the behavior.

Now the societal challenge that most intensifies unreal other and makes it hard for us to feel vulnerability are the biases that come with our hierarchical kind of a society. We then are more, rather than seeing who's there and seeing the vulnerability, we demean, diminish, and distance. And this happens most obviously with racial differences, gender, those different classes. You can think of a country with a class system. It's very hard to see past from one cast to another and see a real human with real vulnerability. Hierarchy and the bias that comes with it blocks our sensitivity.

It blocks our hearts unless we intentionally train ourselves. Now, one woman who trained herself, Ruby Sales, a social activist, leader in spiritually based community building, and the way she trained herself was to ask the question, where does it hurt? She would see others of difference and ask that question to open herself up, to widen the circles. And for her as a woman of color, she was able to see past race. racial violence, the violence of white males in particular to what she called the spiritual crisis of whiteness.

And she describes being able to see behind the anger and behind the hatred for those white males that have that violence and bias, feelings of being increasingly irrelevant, life without meaning, disempowered. crisis of whiteness. Now, the habit is for those high in the hierarchy is in order to maintain privilege, they don't want to pay more attention. It takes more when you're higher on the hierarchy to commit yourself to paying attention. And that means that for the dominant population, for white people to face the suffering

created by white supremacy, to really honestly face. the fear and pain. It creates generation after generation in people of color to be able to see real others. That means that white people will then have to give up their privilege. And so there's real benefits off to give up, access to power and wealth. So I'm saying this because it's a very real place that we get blocked. Our compassion gets blocked when there's bias. Others are unreal. They're less than and they don't have to. have the same subjective reality as we do and our hearts don't open. So it takes conscious training.

I'm going to mention another area of bias where we don't look and that is species bias and it's perhaps the most blinding because every day billions of animals on our planet are in factory farms living shortened, unnatural and tormented lives. And these are living beings that feel pain. Yet our species, humans, have a bias that blocks us from being touched by the realness of that. We wouldn't be able to participate in the animal industry if we weren't, if we were attending to the realness of that suffering. Does that make sense? And if it was really real to us, how could we continue doing what we do, but we are conditioned not to pay attention.

So what motivates widening? Well, here's what it is, that you wouldn't be here if your heart and mind weren't waking up. And the more we wake up, the more that we discover that any part of life that's excluded keeps us from being free. Any part of life that we're not including in our hearts keeps us from being free. So it takes a strong intention. This is Karuna, the intention to include all of life without condition which means to keep on paying attention to where the suffering is. Okay, the second training is seeing goodness. And again, we are

incredibly strongly conditioned to look for flaws and when we're with others we're much more quick to see how that person's not behaving the way we think they should or doesn't look the way we think they should look or act or treat us or whatever it is and of course in our trance of busyness we don't pay attention very closely to others and then add in if there's a social bias just the way social bias It blocks empathy, it blocks seeing the sacredness. So we have to deepen attention. Story a friend of mine shared, he trained to become a doula for those who are dying, to attend

to people who are dying and become a companion for their final days. And he was doing this with primarily low-income people in Baltimore, people that didn't have family. And so he was brought to spend some time with... one man who was unable to speak. And he's there, it's the first day, they're together. And the man is trying to, he's in his bedroom, the man's trying to communicate,

and keeps pointing to the door of the bedroom. So my friend was trying to figure out what he wanted and needed and he kept trying to ask different things and point to different things, couldn't figure it out. But the guy was really focused and he struggled to get up. So my friend had him put his arm around, and he helped them to stand and they walked to the door of the bedroom. And then the man pointed into the kitchen and at the fridge.

He pointed to my friend in emotions. He was trying to make sure that my friend helped himself to something to eat. So he realized that this man was being a caring host that he wanted to make sure he was comfortable. And he realized also it was so easy for him to see somebody as older, and impoverished with cancer, whatever, and forget that sense of innate goodness and dignity and generosity. He was seeing him as a little bit as a victim and this is called the shadow side of compassion

when there's pity and it can be woven with caring but the pity is because in some way we feel removed and we're the helper from above rather than... were in it together. The other like us loves to love, wants to wake up and be free. So one of my friends who's a white male wanted to wake up that sense of being able to see the goodness where he was blocked, go beyond some of his bias, he's not only white male but wealthy and he's aware, he's working with the privilege thing. So he created a practice for himself where he'd go around the streets or wherever he was and

when he'd see somebody that in some way he realized watching his own consciousness he registered as a different class, a different kind of person, a different race and unreal other, he would mentally say thou as in I am thou. And the word thou, as many of you might know, has to do with really seeing the sacred and all beings. It's like namaste, I see the divine in you. So that became his practice as he would just go around and look at someone and go thou. And then he'd look at someone else to bow.

And he said that as he said it, it just like it deepened his attention so he could experience the beauty and goodness and others. They started undoing that veil between him and others. Mother Teresa, if we have no peace, it's because we have forgotten that we belong together. When we start touching that belonging it really does bring peace. If you imagine yourself just a few minutes or moments from dying, it's actually a really powerful reflection just to imagine there you are and you're just really close to dying and what matters most in those moments?

What matters most? For most of us, I know this is true for me, it's to really know and trust my belonging to love, to loving presence to others, just to trust that this being, this life, this spirit is part of a greater whole to really feel that belonging. Love is our refuge. Belonging is our refuge. Woman who was a hospice nurse described being with a patient. He had been in prison, he was forty-four years old, he was dying from complication of

AIDS. He didn't want to call his mother because he was so ashamed of his life but she talked him into it. So the mother arrives and she's 80 and frail in the sight of him obviously brings up grief. So she's entered the room, sees a son who hasn't spoken to her for some years, in prison garb, he's actually handcuffed to his bed. Hospice nurse is afraid that this mom who looks kind of dignified, stern woman will be judgmental but that's not what happened. After initial greetings they just kind of looked at each other, their eyes locked and it seemed that all the roles and customed in everything just fell away.

As the nurse described it, his mother gazed at her son like a newborn child like a saint witnessing a miracle with the vast heart of all mothers. And he and his mother saw in one another their secret beauty, forgiving, timeless, eternal. They sat together for an hour and just held hands. There wasn't much that need to be said. And when his mother left the man said he could now die in peace. To live well and to die in peace, we need to trust our belonging. And so in these three classes that we've done, we've been kind of exploring how we

widen the circles of that, sensing our shared vulnerability, sensing sharing shared vulnerabilities, shared goodness, that secret beauty, and the gifts of that belonging. And I thought I'd maybe close with a personal story that took place a few years ago, as you've heard me speak probably a number of times I walk by the river, the Potomac, most days of the year. And so this was in the fall and I heard all of a sudden the loud bark of guns and it was a little bit of up river and it was hunters shooting geese right outside the park. And I just started weeping, just hearing those sounds and I watched the geese most days,

either they're flying in formation or they settle by the side of the river and these rocks and I've watched them with their babes in the springtime and it felt like somebody was shooting and hurting my friends. And then, you know, so I was just reflecting on that and holding that and I started thinking as I mentioned this evening of all the animals bred for food because I often think of my dog and I think of these animals and it's like if I knew any close in it would be just horrific torture to even sense what they go through and felt like okay these are my friends just holding that.

The geese are my friends, these animals and then I saw my My dog was just sitting there looking at me and I, you're my friend, you know, we're friends. And then I looked at a tree and I said, okay, we're friends. I just started like whatever I saw or whatever I thought of, whatever, or whoever, we are friends. That it this morning, I passed a tree and I put my hand on the bark, we're friends. Immediately, just by bringing my attention to that possibility, the belonging's already there. So in this instance I was like brought to mind those I had recently passed on the trail walking were friends and just kind of widened it out.

And with the sorrow there was this wash of belonging that no living being is an object. It's a world of subjects and I could never be alone. I could never be alone. It's just a world of subjects. We all belong. And that realization, it's not like I always live in it. I many times I'm in the self-centered stressed, somebody's taking my time or I need this or I want that or I fear that.

I mean that mood takes on but that background knowing gives a tremendous amount of peace. It deepens my faith and it is part of the motivation to keep paying attention. so that that can be the lived reality more and more moments. So in that spirit I thought we'd do a final reflection together, starting the reflection with a reading from the poet Dana Falls. Everything, everything, every little thing is unique at its surface and indistinguishable at its core. I want to remember this today, the oneness.

the oneness underlying our differences and the truth that we can never really be strangers. Even if we never laid eyes on each other before, I want to remember this today, the oneness, the oneness. As you sit quietly, letting your attention go inside, noticing whatever is predominant, whatever mood or feelings are here. And with a tenderness, a friendliness, sensing they belong, this belongs. And if it's difficult, let the tenderness be more full, this belongs. So bringing that friendly, inclusive heart to the life inside you.

Bringing to mind someone that is very dear that you care about. taking a moment to deepen your attention to sense that person's vulnerability, just the ways they're like all beings insecure, fear or loss and sense beyond any conditioning the goodness that lives through that being, the goodness, the godness, the sacredness, the light of spirit, the awareness, the love. And as you do, you might just sense we're friends and the depth of what that means. We belong, widening your attention to someone who's sitting near you right now or who you've been with recently who you don't know as well and let yourself sense that being's human

vulnerability or insecurity and the goodness, the consciousness, the consciousness, the light that shines through those eyes, the heart that wants to love and be love. You might mentally whisper, we're friends. Pause it as the reality and it becomes so. Bringing to mind a person of difference in some way that you know a person you know who's different from you, class, race, religion, gender, but a difference that feels like a difference that might make them less real. And again, sensing the vulnerability.

the insecurity that person might live with, letting your heart be touched by that, and sensing the goodness, the sacred, the consciousness and love, sense what flows through this person and mentally whisper, we're friends, and let it be true. And bring to mind this earth, our larger body, some part of this earth, tree, flower, some part of this living earth may be a tree that you live near, maybe a flower that you bring to your mind. But again, to sense the temporariness and fragility and the preciousness and beauty

and the basic aliveness that's living through this part of the earth. And sense what happens when you mentally whisper, we're friends. And then since now, the quality of heart space that's here. The heart space that includes all parts of your own being, other beings, that you can hold the earth, our mother in your lap,

and all beings everywhere in your heart. And we close with a shared prayer. May all beings everywhere be filled with loving presence, held in loving presence. No loving presence as their deepest nature. May all beings everywhere touch a great and natural peace. May all beings everywhere know the natural joy of being alive. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free.

Namaste and thank you for your presence. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.