Tara Brach - Evolving Beyond "Unreal Othering" (2018-06-27)

Episode Date: June 29, 2018

Evolving Beyond "Unreal Othering" (2018-06-27) - What motivates us - as individuals and as a society - to build walls and knowingly hurt others? This talk explores the evolutionary roots of "unreal othering" and how when we are hijacked by fear, it can take over and disconnect us from the very real suffering of others. We then look at how meditative strategies awaken us from othering, and reveal our intrinsic belonging. Finally, we apply this to our own lives in a reflection that helps us respond to someone we have turned into "unreal other" with compassion and wisdom. 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. Well, as I mentioned a little bit ago, to the local group here, I'm really happy to be back and engaged as I've been broadcasted some. I've been on the West Coast for a couple of weeks, and I got to be back. to behold my, the birthing of a granddaughter. It was amazing magic to watch.

And then a couple of weeks, the first two weeks, you know. And so I was basking in the mystery and how the love of this universe was kind of just flowing through this sentient, newly incarnated being. And I remember one morning, my son and daughter-in-law were kind of bleary-eyed, and I was like waxing poetic about the mystery of the universe. But you know what?

They were nodding. They were ecstatic and exhausted both. I could tell, you know, a little bit of jaundice, when's the milk coming, is it? You know, the whole deal. And it was just as so many know, a wonderful, just dipping into the what matters. And in case I sound a bit airy-fairy about it all, I did take the 6 a.m. shift. in terms of, you know. So, but it was beautiful to witness the psychology and the biology and the spirit of this being belongs

and just this natural flow of just dedicating to what is part of us. And of course I was, it was poignant to feel the juxtaposition of the news in our world because here I was in this sense of all this bold. belonging and the news coming in fast and furious about the suffering of separating of families and the suffering of yet another African-American youth unarmed, killed in the streets of Pittsburgh and then now just very recently the suffering of targeting Muslim countries in terms of travel. So just feeling this contrast. And one person was expressing to me his revulsion, you know, aiming it towards a well-known political figure.

And I was struck, and I've been struck a number of times by this about how misguided the anger was and directing towards any individual feels so misguided to me. It's like it feels like kind of pointing at a rash when there's a dis-ease through the whole body. I don't know, that's just kind of one way that it comes to me, that, you know, what is the real disease that's going on? And I'll just say it to you that I had a totally different talk plan for tonight. And then this morning I was walking and taking in the world in many ways and just started weeping and realized I couldn't give the talk I had planned. So what you're getting, I just kind of, this is where I am right now, just to talk about this, the disease that's in the whole body, you know, this whole question, what drives us to cruelty?

It's like I couldn't not talk about the heartbreak over cruelty and so on. And so what drives us, what makes it even possible to be cruel? cruel is this very deep, primitive conditioning of othering to make others unreal, that they're not real humans. We can't hurt someone if they feel real, if they feel like I feel, you know? Then they're like my granddaughter. It's like, of course I, you belong to me. But we can if we're dissociated and those others aren't really humans.

Does that make sense? It's the unreal other. So that's what lets, you know, I just read Algeria forcing tens of thousands of people into the desert migrants. That's what lets the Buddhist majority genocide against the Rohingya. It's that unreal other. They're not real humans. And that's what's behind building the walls on all the levels that I know you understand.

And so I want to honor that there's many different feelings, and I'm not assuming anybody feels a certain way, but we can reflect together. And I'd like to anchor this very much in our own lives. Like, how is that dis-ease in me? How do I have a habit of making somebody unreal and then acting in a way that could be hurtful? Because it's not until we bring it to that level that we're not. we actually can be part of a true transformation. And we need to act.

We need to organize. We need to, I mean, there's rallies this Saturday all over. People are supposed to wear white and we need to vote and we need to engage. And if we don't look deeply into how we're creating unreal others, including my friend who was speaking with revulsion, that's creating an unreal other. We're not going to be able to actually transform and heal the disease. So one of the stories I thought maybe I'd start with that has always touched me so much as of, somebody I admire very much, as a long-time meditator and a long-time prisoner, Jarvis

Masters, and some of you've heard of him. He was in the exercise yard at San Quentin as the story goes. And a big young inmate raised a rock and he was going to throw it at a pigeon. Now usually when you're in the yard the rule of thumb is mind your own business. You know, it's, you know, the people get into fights very, very quickly. But Jarvis immediately raised his arms to stop the guy and super antagonized. The young man said, what are you doing? You know, so everybody's tensing up because this is how fights start.

But here's what Jarvis said. He said, this is real spontaneous. He said, that bird has my wings. That bird has my wings. And immediately the tension dissipated. The guy put down his rock, kind of shaking his head, like, you know. But it's interesting for days after inmates would come up to Jarvis kind of individually and say, so what do you mean by that Jarvis?

That bird has my wing. And in a way, as you listen, something in you knows what that means, right? It's like when we pay close attention to another person, like really attend, or when we pay close attention to our dog or to our favorite plant or to any part of this living world, that life form becomes a part of us. It starts belonging. It matters to us. We started tuning to how we do share wings.

We all have the same longing to live fully. We have a longing to connect and we have a longing to be free. It might be buried by free but we have those longings. But if we're preoccupied, if we're off in our mental worry, plan, obsess, if we're judging and throwing stones, we're cut off from that heart-whip, we're off from that heart-whiphip, we're off. art wisdom. That's the disease. We get cut off from that knowing. We forget, that bird has my wings. So this is our potential. If we want to have a shared vision, if we're feeling despair at the cruelty and we want to have a vision of what's possible, I think it's what

Jarvis was expressing that we can, this is the Bodhisattva path that's in Buddhism, the path of the awakening being, we can begin to sense our belonging to everybody else and then we want to take care of each other. That's the possibility and in order to wake up to that we have to get how we get caught into the trance where others become unreal. You know, how does it happen societally? Because this is what we're looking at. And how does it happen for each of us?

And if we look at the evolutionary roots, and this is kind of a brief, very simplified, but millions and millions of years, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers, and they lived in these little communities and they were very far from each other, actually. Small and independent groups of hunter-gatherers, and they needed to have a high degree of in-group,

coherence and identification to survive. And they actually, the way that the perceptions went is others, other groups had names. They named them in ways that inferred they were less than human. So they had these epitasse and it meant that they were not feeling, thinking, beings like they were. And as long as we do that, then we can go ahead and be aggressive and violate and take what we want.

We can continue in that kind of a way of relating. Millions of years, deep in the primitive brain, okay? Unreal other, go ahead and attack. Then, 70,000 years ago, we had this super acceleration in cognitive development. Some describe it as a cognitive revolution, where the frontal cortex just started, like, shooting off all these little networks and really what that translated to was we developed the capacity for metacognition. We could step back and see the big picture,

we could even see our thought patterns, and develop the capacity for compassion and empathy, which led to collaboration, which is what makes the human race actually the most dominant race on the planet, collaboration, communication, and a sense of global interdependence. We're actually in touch with every other community on the globe. So this is the evolutionary trajectory, mutual belonging.

And as we know, we have widening circles of belonging. You can see it in your own life when your heart starts opening. You start caring more about more people, more people that are different, more people that are in that wider circle. And as the brain develops, this frontal cortex with all its potentialities, we still have a strong, strong primitive reptilian and limbic brain that when it's overactivated, hijacks a system. Okay? So civilization is going towards this interdependency and a world where we have this capacity for compassion and limbic hijacks happen.

So as Gandhi said when he was asked, you know, what do you think of Western civilization, you know, his response? It would be a good idea. Okay? So let's look a little more at this capacity to experience belonging and this limbic activity of unreal othering. In each individual human life, like the species, it took us a while developing, for, as we develop in an individual lifetime, one of the first tasks is individuating and feeling separate, you know, like I'm an individual, separate human,

others are out there, we have, we, we grow like that. And so it's completely natural, and we're rigged. It's natural for children when they're needs aren't met to get grasping or get angry or to blame others. I mean, this is just the way we're rigged. One story, a boy announces proudly, I'm going to marry grandma. And the father gently says, son, you can't do that. Children don't marry their grandparents. He said, why not?

You married my mom, so I'm going to marry yours. So this is just developmentally. There's that get back. remember with my own son that if anything happened to him, like somebody pushed him, he had to push back twice as hard. There's some way that we developmentally kind of get into or the set selfness. And there's a bit of the unreal other there. It's natural to be self-centered when we're really young and not attuned to the realness of others. Another story I heard, a woman's driving a carpool. And when she goes to pick up one little boy, she notices that an older woman's hugging him

before he goes to the car. So she asks if that's your, is that your grandmother and the little boy said, yep, she's come to visit for Christmas. And then the woman said, oh, where does she live? Little boy said, oh, she lives at the airport. Whenever we want to see her, we just go and pick her up there. My grandmother jokes, as you can tell him, preparing, right? So these are, I'm just, these are natural developmental processes. It's also natural when someone acts differently than we've been conditioned to experience people acting, if they act a way that seems strange in some way, that initially we get defensive and worried.

I mean, we get alarmed. It's, again, this is natural. And in yet another story, there's a church, a preacher's wired for sound with a lapel mic. But as he's speaking, he's kind of walking briskly around the platform. He's kind of jerking the mic cord as he goes. He's not really used to being linked up that way, and he's also trying to make these real emphatic points about gospel and so on.

So he's moving to one side, and then he gets wound up in the cord, and he kind of nearly trips, and then he jerks it again. Meanwhile, after this happens a bit, a little girl in the third pew leans towards her mom, and she whispers, if he gets loose, will he hurt us? Finally, developmentally, and this is now, We are rigged to have emotions so that if we feel assaulted or threatened or violated, that we want to protect ourselves.

The other, we might say, okay, this is a real other, but it's a dangerous real other and I'm going to protect myself. And I think often of Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, he described this that I thought so profoundly, he said, there is a story fairly well known about one when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we the natives had the land. They said, let us pray and we dutifully shut our eyes. When we open them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible. Right? So humans can be manipulative, hurtful and it's completely natural developmentally and appropriate.

that we would feel wary and when we get threatened we do what we can to protect ourselves. The question is this, can we have all this rigging to take care of ourselves but still learn to see others as whole and real humans? Because if we can have our array of emotions and do what's appropriate to take care of ourselves but not forget, in other words, not get cut off from our frontal cortex. Stay integrated ourself, we can begin to move this world towards more healing. The challenge is that we are living in a fear-based culture and there's a circular process going on whereby fear stories get told, to create more of a bad and threatening other.

And then there's a reaction to that bad and threatening other that's punitive, that pushes away, that oppresses. And then more stories, more reaction, and we're locked into a very deep kind of a patterning now where many have become bad, unreal others that set off that triggering for that. that limbic hijack of, oh, dangerous, push them away. That's what's happened.

How do we undo it? There is a lot of research now that shows that the more we consider somebody an outsider, the more they're different and outside, the more we rate them as having fewer human qualities than ourselves. That's researched. There is so much to fuel the sense of outsider. It's important to listen to the stories on the news, the threatening stories of what the bad guy is going to do.

They're going to take our money, they're going to rape our women kind of stories. That's what fuels unreal other. And research also shows this. Research shows that if we start practicing mindfulness, awareness, then racial bias and other biases start decreasing. In other words, unreal othering starts decreasing. So this is where we're turning in our exploration right now. If we want to develop the capacity that when you're criticized something and you can remember, okay, it

hurts and I need to defend myself, but this bird has my wings. There's some way that here we are together. You don't get cut off. You don't get that limbic hijack. If you want to have a way of remembering when you get in a conflict with your children or your parent or your friend, still having way back home to this bird has my wings, that's where training our attention. Training and mindfulness can revolutionize our psyche. I think of meditation as exactly the training that's designed to evolve our consciousness so we don't get hijacked so much. So this is Mahatma Gandhi who was very aware of the regressive forces of othering and he took a day a week. He took off Mondays, every Monday. Some of you might know this.

where he meditated. And he said that if he did that, then when he was with people that could actually listen to them, he wouldn't, you know, like project or imagine or shut off. He actually could listen. They became real. So let's look at the practice then. How to rewire our conditioning so we don't create unreal others.

And there's two major conditionings that we have to rewire. One is, it's hard to admit it, but we move through the world with this bubble of me and how everything affects me and what I want. And it's not that natural for us to pay deep attention to each other so they can become unreal others, so they can stop being unreal. So we're very self-centered. That's one conditioning that needs to be shifted. And the second conditioning is we don't want to feel other people's people's people's

pain. We're okay hearing about it from a distance. We don't want to get close in with pain. This is what Kafka said was the one suffering we could have avoided. We tried to keep people's pain mental but we don't want to feel it. And to wake up the frontal cortex which relates to caring, the compassion, we have to let ourselves be touched by the realness of people's suffering. It's really easy to hear pretty terrible things in the newspaper and to have a mental conceptual sense of, oh, this is awful. And it's harder to close enough in so our hearts can get broken open. And yet, and we're afraid of it, and yet when we let ourselves get broken open, It's an interesting thing but evolution rewards us.

And again, research. When electrodes are connected to brains and people meditate on compassion and start letting in people suffering, it wakes up a part of the brain that correlates actually with more pleasure. It's not that we're happy to see the suffering, but we feel more at home in ourselves when more connected. We feel more tender. There's actually a gratification or happiness when we start feeling the realness of caring. It's more who we are. Evolution rewards it. So it's hard, but it gets rewards. And the last piece of what I want to explore with you then is a more

active sense of, okay, so how do we do that? How do you take a situation? I'm going to ask you, as I often do, as we, at the close of this talk, to pick somewhere where you know you're doing some unreal othering, where there's some conflict, you've in some way put another person as you're just not able to feel them in your heart. They're the bad guy. How do we shift that? And what we'll do is we'll use the rain acronym. since rain, for those that aren't familiar, is really includes the wings of awareness.

Recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. Okay, I'm going to explore how we can use that to undo unreal other. Okay? And the basic idea is we have to bring awareness first to what's going on inside us, and then we have to look more deeply at each other. That's how we undo on real other. Start inward and then you go outward. Why do you start inward?

You have to be embodied and in touch with your own emotions to be able to then look effectively at another. The key piece we're going to be emphasizing or one key piece is the investigating. We tend to gloss over when we see each other. We don't really say what's it like for you. One of my great inspirations in how to break through unreal other using meditation was civil rights activist Ruby Sales. And I first heard about her in an interview in 2016 with Krista Tippett.

It was a fabulous interview, if you haven't heard, just look it up. Krista Tippett, 2016, Ruby Sales. A few pieces from this interview. Ruby describes one of the pivotal experiences she had that changed her approach to being an activist. And as she described as she was having her hair done, her locker was doing her hair, and her locker's daughter came in. She had been out on the streets all night. And something in Ruby said, ask her this question.

And she did. She asked this question to her. she said, where does it hurt? Where does it hurt? And this woman's daughter had a lot of trauma locked up and her had never told her mother, but when Ruby asked that question, Shelly, where does it hurt? It poured out. And there was something about having the interest in care and looking deeper. Like, what was there? That changed her whole approach to activism. And the way it really has unfolded in recent years is here's this icon of civil rights.

And instead of talking about racism per se, her focus has been on what she calls the spiritual crisis of white America as the calling of the time. There's a spiritual crisis. Here's something she says. She says, I don't hear anyone speaking to the 45-year-old person in Appalachia who's dying of a young age who feels like they've been eradicated because whiteness is so much smaller today than it was yesterday. She says, what do we say to the white person in Massachusetts who's heroin addicted because they feel their lives have no meaning? She looks around here or there the next place and sees this lack of meaning. this sense of impotency, of not mattering, of not having a relevant role in the society.

Rather than targeting people and saying you're bad, saying you're a rash, she's looking at the dis-ease, the hurt. Where does it hurt? We need to start asking that question. So the pathway to that bird has my wings first to recognize and allow whatever's going on inside us when we're in reaction. Okay, here's what's going on, recognize and allow it, investigate what's really going on, and bring nurturing, and then do the same for the other person.

And I'll give you an example of this, of unreal othering from my own life. This is one that it was a very painful situation for me and I actually needed help moving through it from someone else as I'll explain. Because when we're in conflict, when we get into conflict, it's like a flash that somebody all of a sudden becomes a bad guy. And this is what happened to me. I was in a multiracial group some years back. And I had been openly sharing about how I needed to space out the meetings.

I was hoping people would be willing to do it because I was going through a really bad period in terms of my health and fatigue and so on. And it was pretty vulnerable sharing. And so I shared that and the next moment I was like shut down. I was hurt, angry, stunned at what I thought was this incredible insensitivity from one of my African-American friends because she responded really, angry at my request. She was really angry. She challenged my commitment to the group. And here I was feeling like I had been, you know, open and vulnerable. You know, I've been involved

with a number of mixed-race groups and one of them for like two and a half years and it was terribly important to me. Didn't she know? You know, that kind of feeling. Okay. So rain, here we are. This is the situation that I'm sharing with you. The first part of rain is to recognize and allow inside myself the feelings of being hurt and angry, right? Recognize them and then just let them be there. Allow means just let it be. Don't try to do something about it. I was hurt and angry. And then I investigated and I felt betrayed. I felt like I had kind of exposed myself and been slammed and the belief was she doesn't understand, she doesn't care. Okay? And then I did the nurture. And as you know, many of you that have been with me, I often do nurture by hand on the

heart. And I just brought kindness inside, you know, kind of it's okay, sweetheart, this belongs to, just brought a kind of a gentleness. And that created more space, as I describe it. After the rain, there's just more space, more beingness, okay? It was a familiar process. I knew how to be with myself. But when I tried to bring it to her and, you know, really sense what was going on for her, I was really stuck. I just couldn't. So I was talking to a mutual friend who's a wise woman and I told her how I had done, I could recognize and allow this friend of ours from the group, you know, what was going on, I could recognize she was upset and allow it. But when I investigated, that I couldn't get what was really under it.

And here's, I want to tell you what my friend said to me. She said, Tara, for you, it's about spreading out some meetings because of your health. These meetings are optional for you. For her, an African-American woman, these meetings feel like life or death. And in a moment it really made sense. Because in a moment I was thinking, oh, right, she was a grandson. in jail. And then I was remembering something she had written that described how she felt like any of this African-American men in the streets who were targets of racial violence were her sons.

I was remembering how she was living in continual fear for people's lives. Her body was. And that the meetings mattered to her. We were her Sanga, her community, that she was her allies, you know? So, my heart broke open. I mean, she was becoming more real and then we met as we did. And when we talked it was really quite natural to listen to her sharing what she experienced and to genuinely care. And she did, she had done her work, she had done rain too, you know, and she could be with

me and say, you know, she could get where I was coming from. there were some really key takeaways. We became real to each other. I'm mostly aware of, as she became real to me, just how important it was that I could see my white privilege that my life didn't depend on these meetings and that it blinded me. And I really needed to get in my bones more how she was living in fear.

I really had to get that in my bones. And one of the big takeaways was we had a clash and hang in there to come out closer friends. What I'm meaning by that is that in each of the multiracial groups I was a part of, one of the deep intentions was to be able to wake up from that trance of unreal other, to be able to see both how our lives really were different, real difference, and also had how this bird has my wings. And that's the gift that came from this one. I got to see that more.

So the invitation for us all is to, out of our care, out of our heartbreak, when we see cruelty, is to act, but also in our own life sense, on whatever level it plays out and in our own lives, how are we creating an unreal other? You know, after, you know, I was reflecting on this, and then yesterday I was reading in, I think it was the New York Times,

I was reading about the funeral for Antoine Rose in Pittsburgh. Some of you might have read this. And Antoine was the young African-American boy, I think it was a senior in high school who was killed by a place, and his friends read a poem he had written two years ago. I want to read that too. So this is what Antoine wrote two years before he was killed. He said,

I see mothers bury their sons. I want my mom to never feel that pain. Try my best to make my dreams true. I hope that it does. I am confused and afraid. Who's this real thinking, feeling, human? feeling human. He didn't want his mom to hurt the way other moms did. And now she does. And I was reading that and I actually felt he's my son and it really mattered. So my friend,

you know, it was more in my bones. You know, a lot of people have gone down now to look at the detention centers along the border, right? You're hearing a lot of reports. And one of the report describing these cages that people are, they're separate, you know, they're separate, into. And they consider the women and children aren't separated if they're in cages in the same giant room, different cages, can't see each other. And the women describe hearing their children cry at nighttime and not being able to do anything. That bird has my wings. It's a real potential for us. And if we can wake ourselves up to widening the circles, then we are changing the consciousness that needs to do.

change on the planet. By the way, Catholic charities of Rio Grande, they're doing a lot to help. So if you want to find a way just to be able to offer some money and support right now during the emergency, that's one that I just found out about. Okay, so to sum up and then we're going to meditate together. We're talking about how to bring our practices in a way that can evolve our consciousness. And often I get the question, because the conditioning we're undoing is the conditioning to be me focused and also to kind of in some way block out the realness of others' pain. And I often get this question, well, but I'm thin-skinned already. I'm already so oversensitive. You know, it's like if I open to the pain of those women who are

separated from their children, I would get flooded. I would get overwhelmed. And I sometimes I just think of the Wadi Safa dedication to save all beings and there's a misunderstanding and the idea is not for a separate individual self to get washed over by a massive flood of horror or to try to save the world. That's why we need to begin with bringing awareness and love and presence inside to create a kind of space and presence that has room for what's going on. If we're already tight and afraid and offended, we're already somewhat cut off and we're limning in a more primitive scared place if we're feeling hypersensitive.

So first soothe, comfort, relax, open, relax our own being, and then lose more space for, it's kind of like breathing in and breathing out that we can breathe in and let ourselves feel the reality of what others feel. and then breathe out our prayer. Let it be held by this universe. A small self doesn't have to hold the pain. I get another question too, and that is, I'm angry.

I'm angry about what's happening. It's nice to go off and take time to meditate, but right now there's very young children, hundreds under the age of four, that are separated from their parents. What about that? Please act. act. You know, Valerie Carr, who's an activist and her movement's called Love Revolution. The

principles are exactly what we're talking about right now. One of her phrases is breathe and push. It's like labor. And I'm, you're getting some themes here tonight, I admit. We need to breathe. In other words, we need to come home to presence and heart and act out of that. If we act and we haven't come home, we tend to replicate the same energies, the same othering that already is out there. We bring our same anger, we bring our same blame. But if we can first do rain, the wings of bringing presence here, and do rain for each other.

Then we can act with more intelligence. We can push, we can act with more intelligence and love. So yes, act, but have it come from an awake place. Ruby Sales says there's a really big difference between redemptive anger and the kind of anger that just replicates and seeds that unreal othering. Redemptive anger is that energy that says, wow, there's something going on, and you it absolutely needs to be addressed and I'm going to work and I'm doing something about it. And then we go in and breathe and so we can come from our best self in acting.

So let's practice together, okay? Let's just take a moment to come into presence. As you're settling, I read you a poem from a favorite poet of mine, Palestinian woman Naomi Shaib Nye Here's what she writes The Arabs used to say When a stranger appears at your door

Feed him for three days Before asking who he is Where he's come from, where he's headed That way he'll have strength enough to answer Or by then you'll be such good friends you don't care Let's go back to that. that as you scan your life right now, you might sense if there's a person who's become an unreal other for you where you're in some way reactive pushing them out of your heart.

And I don't recommend you pick someone who's a source of trauma for you. That won't serve you in this reflection. Start a little easier, okay? Ideally someone you know but if you don't have someone you know that you feel that unreal othering with and feel free to pick someone who you don't know but you have a reaction to. Once you have somebody in mind you might let yourself bring up whatever situation you feel has caused you to react, whatever has in some way had it so that they're wrong or bad in your mind. You feel kind of cut off and closed off to them. This is what I sometimes call a bit of a limbic hijack where there's just what's activated is more of that more primitive part of the brain where other is other, bad, wrong.

And begin by bringing rain inwardly and the first thing is just to recognize what you're feeling like where you've been hurt or where you've felt scared, where you've felt diminished in some way. So just to honestly recognize that in yourself. What's gone on? What are you feeling? When you recognize, just let it be there. That's courageous, that's, you're not pulling away from it, you're just allowing it to be there.

This is the recognizing and allowing. The investigating deepens. You're really starting to ask yourself, okay, so where does it really hurt? inside me or what's really upsetting me. What am I most afraid of? Where am I feeling this in my body? What's the worst part of this? For me in that conflict I had, it was just kind of a sense of being betrayed, revealing myself and being slammed. What is it for you? Sensing into where you feel most vulnerable? And it might help you as you sense in and investigate, you can even at this point put your hand on your heart just to bring the attention inward

and begin to even now offer some nurturing, just some kindness to whatever you're feeling. You might even notice what happens as you offer some kindness inwardly, how that softens things. There may be some words you can offer to yourself. You might sense your future self, your wisest self-offering care to whatever part of you is hurting. You have the bodhisattva, or most evolved part of yourself offering care inwardly. Sometimes words just like, it's okay, sweetheart, or I'm sorry and I love you. Or this belongs, it's okay, forgiven, forgiven. Something comforting.

And for some of you, you might need much longer at this phase before, you bring rain to the other person so when you're on your own, take your time. But for the sake of this exercise you might begin to bring the other person to mind and start with rain for them. See if you can recognize what might be going on for them. Just what you're most aware of initially. Maybe it's their anger or their judgment or their withdrawal. The allowing is just to let that be there for now.

now, don't add another layer of judgment, and the investigating is that question, where does it hurt? How might this person be hurting? You might experiment and since you're investigating from your future self, your most evolved, awake being, bringing your wise heart to look at this other person and sense, okay, what really is the, what might this person be afraid of, how How might this person be hurting? We sometimes use that metaphor of how might this person have their leg in a trap, be stuck. You're investigating. Sense of your investigating is helping to bring them to become more real.

Whether you can begin to offer some care, just in the way of your hand on your heart, you can imagine that this person all beings are in your heart and in some way offers some message of care and if you don't feel you're there yet, you might say my intention is to sense you as a real being and open my heart. It's my intention. There's a power to your intention. And we now widen the meditation, again, the hands on the heart, sensing this shared heart, all of us here, this shared heart that really includes all beings, that our hand is

on that shared heart, offering care, sensing all those that have been pushed out in some way. Just whoever comes to mind that has been created as an unreal other, that you want to sense this moment, including in our shared heart, just imagine and feel those beings floating, included, belonging in this vast sea of loving presence. Beyond time and space, this field of loving presence that can hold all beings, that all beings belong in our heart, to feel your prayer, our shared prayer for the well-being, the inclusion, the well-being, the healing of all beings. And again, we'll close with the simple

words of Naomi Shaiab Nye. The Arabs used to say, when a stranger appears at your door, feed him for three days before asking who he is, where he's from, where he's headed. That way, he'll have strength enough to answer. R, by then, you'll be such good friends you don't care. Let's go back to that. Namaste and blessings. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.