Tara Brach - Facing Fear in a Traumatized World

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

Facing Fear in a Traumatized World (2021-09-29) - Unprocessed fear cuts us off from our full aliveness and spirit, and it separates us from others. This talk looks at how we bring healing to the trauma and deep fears that cause us to dissociate from our body. We focus on ways we increase safety, diminish shame and then, with a courageous, embodied and compassionate presence, learn to contact and integrate fear into our larger awareness.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Welcome, friends. Namaste. I have a friend. He has two teens in high school. And he recently commented to me that he has these compartments of normalcy. It might be times he's immersed in work or watching a Netflix series with his partner. And then he gets jogged back into realizing he's living in a totally shaky, off-balanced world. And it just makes me think how, for so many of us, we've been waiting to get back onto TerraFerma, you know, solid ground. But then the upheaval just keeps on happening. You know, the pandemic continues.

The realization of what is happening with climate change just goes deeper into our bodies. There's these natural disasters and then the anti-democratic forces. And it just keeps going. And with that, there's this pervasive fear and anxiety, a sense of loss. And there's many different responses. For some, it's just this anxiety, a sense of being down, and that's what's so pervasive. And of course, when we're caught in that, it just doesn't bring out our best behaviors. As we know, unprocessed fear, unprocessed loss.

It creates a sense of separation that we act out. There was a story of a woman's husband that had been slipping in, and out of a coma for several months and she stayed at his bedside every single day. And one day he came to and motioned for her to come closer and he whispered to her, his eyes are full of tears. You know what? You've been with me through all the bad times. You know, when I got fired, you were there to support me. When my business failed, you were there. When I had that terrible car wreck, you were with me. when we lost the house you stayed right here when my health started failing you were still by my side you know what what dear she asked gently smiling he says i think you're bad luck so it's not our

habit to face fear and loss directly first we we blame others or blame ourselves we'll get back to that. But I'd like to say for now is that through all of human history, there's been trauma. There's been wars and natural disasters and plagues and so on. And many of us have experienced personal trauma, whether it's abuse or major illness or some deep emotional wounding, sudden loss. Huge number have generational trauma, such as the trauma that comes from racial violence and oppression. But we've never been in a collective trauma where the entire life system of our larger body, this earth, is severely threatened. And here's the thing about our traumatized world. While individually we might have more or less of a buffer, you know, it's dependent on class

and race and health and many factors, fear is contagious. And the fear level's been ratcheted up around the globe and it keeps on increasing. And our nervous systems register it. And what that means is that as there's increasing fear in society, hand in hand with unprocessed fear, there comes violence, there comes addiction, there comes fundamentalism, there comes a tendency towards rage, towards creating bad other, towards that dividedness. I got another email in the last week or so. Somebody wrote to me and said that they keep being surprised that they can even feel shocked

again, that things could get so bad. So I'm naming all this because I imagine that many of you listening, they're here with me, can sense this that the illusion of life is, as usual, you know, that sense of ongoingness of some level of certainty that whatever we took for granted about our society is there, it's been broken. This experience that so many of us are encountering, which is really a shift, this kind of real groundlessness, it's parallel to a pivotal moment in the life story of the Buddha, where Siddhartha Gautama, that's the Buddha to be, he lived his first decades, you know,

his child as a young man in the very secure and stable domain of his family's palaces, the palaces and the grounds. So he had a lot of security. And then at one point, he took some excursions outside the grounds. And that's when he encountered a person who was old. and then a person who was sick, and then a corpse, a dead person. And his illusion was destroyed because he realized, okay, this is going to happen to me too and to all of us. And that gave rise to the deep inquiry of the Buddha's life, which is also, I feel like, our inquiry, which is given the disillusion of all we hold here, given the groundless,

of this life. What is the pathway to peace, to inner freedom, to an open-hearted presence? So in this uncertain world, what matters and how we live each day? And I'm aware that for many, these aren't new questions. You know, how do we really find inner freedom? How do we live with an open heart? But what's new is that they have a real. real urgency and immediacy right now. Because if we don't dedicate, purposefully deepen our attention, life is easily hijacked by fear and ever more easily in these days. And sometimes it's not so evident. It comes more as a sense of being kind of chronically off-balance, or just worried a lot or difficulty really arriving in presence with others, kind of short-tempered,

maybe a sense of personal falling short. But for many, especially those living with some past drama, very triggering times. A real sense of being cut off of isolation and kind of more gripping fear. The shaman teach that when there's great fear, energetic parts of us shut down or leave. They just, we get cut off from them. And that disconnects us really from our soul or spirit, however we think of that, kind of more wholeness of being. This is spiritual disease.

And there's really a deep wisdom in this teaching that when we look at our own lives, when we're gripped by any level of fear, I can speak for myself. those are the moments that I'm just not as in touch with an actual visceral sense of loving. When there's fear there, I don't have access to wonder or to a sense of the mystery or what's beyond this finite world, the sacredness of life. And in Buddhism, this is the essence of suffering, that we get caught in living in this prison of a small, fearful, grasping self. We forget the truth of what we are. We forget the awareness that's here. So the shaman also teach about soul retrieval. So when we're in great fear, in some way the energetic parts of us and the soul

leave, get cut off, and that when fear is properly processed, we can regain that homelessness. And similarly, similarly in Buddhist practice, when we bring mindfulness and compassion to our fears, we can free ourselves from that prison of small self. We can reconnect with wholeness. And I've witnessed again and again, this is my personal life with others, working with others, as a therapist, as a teacher. When there's a really big experience of fear or of trauma, It can be generational from childhood, whatever.

And we dedicate to healing, to processing that fear, to facing fear. There's a profound spiritual awakening. As I say, in the broken places that's in the rawness and the vulnerability, that's where the light shines through. And of course for Siddhartha Gautama, it wasn't until he sat under the Bodhi tree and actually faced all the fears and reactivity of his nervous system, you know, the grasping, the disappointments, the guilt, the shame, all the shadow parts, all the vulnerability, that he found that unshakable freedom. So in this reflection that we'll be doing together,

first me speaking and then we'll reflect and practice together, we're really looking more closely at how in the face of a traumatized world, which is what we're facing here, how we can directly, courageously process fears, really reconnect with the wholeness of being, what some consider spirit or soul. And we begin maybe by just saying, well, what is trauma? and in moments of trauma, the nervous system's overwhelmed and our normal coping strategies don't work. And when there's not a processing, when we're not able to effectively fight or flee or discharge the energy, the fear stays in our tissues.

And we develop the symptoms called PTSD. And these are just the ways that our system continues to try. to cope and protect and digest and process trauma. And those symptoms include, and this should be real familiar, anxiety and depression and numbing and dissociation, hypervigilence, intrusive thoughts, sleep problems, avoiding behaviors, feelings of shame. Now many of us, and really more than we imagine, have experienced some form of trauma. We all experience great fear.

And so if we look at, well, what's going on inside us at these times? We can see there's a limbic activation. Neuroscientists show how in these moments the networks in the prefrontal cortex, the more recently evolved brain get deactivated and cut off. So we're no longer being guided by our wholeness, by our integrated brain. And I like the language of limbic hijack because it's really what's happening. Our primitive brain takes over and it's trying to take care of us through the patterns of fight-flight-freeze. I go back over and over again because I find so helpful the visual from my colleague and friend Dan Siegel,

psychologist Dan Siegel, where he says, think of your fist and you might make. make a fist right now as your brain. Okay, this is your brain and I'll just walk through this with you. And what you do is you raise your hand for a moment and place your thumb in the middle of the palm, your four fingers over the top. So this is your model of the brain. And what happens when we're stressed? Can you open your hand for a second? Your wrist represents a spinal cord and then you have coming up into the lower palm, the brain stem, and this is the limbic area, the thumb. And this works together with regulating arousal and emotions. This is the fight, flight, freeze response below the cortex, okay?

Now, here's your cortex. It's the higher part of the brain that allows you to think and reason. And this frontmost part of the brain, right behind your forehead, that's the prefrontal cortex. and that's where there's the capacity for mindfulness, empathy, that helps to downregulate the limbic and brainstem areas. Okay? So that's really important, this integration where we have this down regulation because in the contagion of a traumatized world, in other words, when we're in that fear space

of the world or when we're just stressed and tired, if there's. the prefrontal cortex not activated it, there's not that integration. When we get stressed, we flip our lid. And then rather than being attuned and flexible and having good judgment, we lose these capacities, we're not connected to them. And that includes losing the capacity for moral perspective. We don't end up behaving well. So I love this. I love this sense of when we're integrated, we can operate and give intelligent messages to the parts of us that might be acting out. But when we flip our lid, we're no longer coming from our wholeness and our intelligence. And there's two things I'd like to point out about these stressful lid flipping times we're in.

And one is that we need to do whatever we can to nourish and maintain the integration of our brain. that's where meditation comes in. And this is so much science now that shows us that just by sitting down for a short time each day, you are strengthening the communications between the different parts of your brain that end up creating what we call integration. It really makes a difference. And that's what gives you resilience. That's what gives you access to more lucidity, to more balance, to more centeredness.

I know for myself that during these times and really feeling how much is going on, it's called me to deepen my practice, my formal practice. I've always sat in the morning. Now I also sit at the end of the day and I take pauses through the day. So integrating the brain with meditation, big deal. But where we're going to spend our time is, what do we do when fear has the upper hand at any point during the day, whether it's episodic or whether it's ongoing? We all have moments where we do have that flip, you know, where we know we're not connected.

We know we're off. So we're going to look at the pathway back to integration. Like how do we process the fear with an applied meditation? And the basic process is that we contact or feel the fear in our body. But we don't do it in a habitual way where we're actually resistant to it, where we feel victimized by it, where we are feeling like it's a bad thing, we don't try to get away from it. Instead, with applied meditation, there's a conscious, willing presence. And it is, and this is what's most notable, it's mindful, meaning it's non-judging, it's aware in the present

moment of what's going on, and it's kind. And the reason it's so important, it's so important, important to contact fear with those qualities is that if you're feeling fear but there's resistance and judgment and tension against it, it actually deepens the grooves of the fear. In other words, what we resist persists. But if we instead encounter fear with presence and care, and by the way, I often teach this through the model of rain, which is applied meditation, it's mindfulness and compassion brought to difficult emotions. When we do it that way, it creates new neural pathways. There's a new reference experience and it increases our what's called affect tolerance. We start having this growing sense

of space where there's room for the fear. There's an okayness that the waves of fear, can be tolerated because we're more resting in a kind of ocean of awareness. But here's the thing. And this is what I want to really emphasize as we drill down. When fear is very strong or when there's trauma, we can't even do that right away. We can't directly contact it. We can't do rain right away because we don't have enough access to my mindfulness or kindness.

And just re-experiencing fear can be, or re-experiencing trauma can be re-traumatizing. So we're going to go through some preliminary steps when fear is strong that actually set us up to process fear. And the first step is we need to strengthen some positive resource states. We're going to call this resourcing, which is a very commonly used word in psychology. really means that we need to first do whatever we can, direct our attention, however we can, to strengthen the sense of belonging, of love, of safety. Because here's the thing, the very essence of trauma is feeling cut off, feeling separate.

So we need a degree of reconnecting to make it safe enough to then begin to directly process. I remember a little story of a young child who's in a thunderstorm calling out to his father, and his father keeps going into his room and saying, it's okay, son, God is with you. And it happens several times. And then the fourth time the father comes in and the little child says to his father, but I want someone with skin on. And so it is that we need some comforting in order to be with what's here. And there are many pathways of resourcing, of reconnecting.

We can go into nature. For some people, being in the woods walking or being by a stream or being by the ocean is a way of resourcing. A powerful way of resourcing is movement, as yoga or dance, My friend Jim Gordon works with traumatized people all around the world and he described being with a group of women in Haiti and what really helped them to calm their nervous systems was dancing wildly together. You know, can be singing, singing with others, creating rhythms with others, drumming.

And research of course shows how much relational contact, resources. us and reduces fear, just holding hands with a loved one. You can see neuroscientists can show how the activation of the limbic system gets reduced, getting hugged. And what's important to know is that you can resource if nobody's around through your own imagination. In other words, you can use meditative processes to resource by, bringing to mind a loving other, just bringing them to mind and imagining that they're hugging you.

There are so many different pathways you can bring to mind someone that you know personally. You can bring to mind a spiritual figure for one man returned from military service. I was working with him some years ago and we were exploring, you know, what is the resource that could help him most start coming into enough balance so he could begin to really process fear. And for him, it was just sensing the light of Jesus. He had an image of light, an image of what he sensed was the presence of Jesus surrounding him. For another woman, it was her grandmother hugging her. Another man I worked with is just bringing to mind his older brother when he was much younger, remembering him, protecting him from bullies and just

sensing that there are people who care. I want to spend a little time sharing one woman's story. She was a parole officer in a state prison facility, and she, African-American woman, had experienced generational trauma, but also directly being sexually abused as a young teen. And then continued to experience abuse with different men in her life. So she attended about four months of my class, my Wednesday night class in meditation. And she told me that she really couldn't feel her body. We'd do body scans. And she was pretty numb. And she's also described being very hyper-vigilant and a lot of anxiety and depression. And we worked together for a while. And it became clear that she was living with a lot of trauma, that she couldn't just start rain and bring rain to what's going on.

She didn't have enough mindfulness or self-compassion to be able to do it. So we started with resourcing, as I'm describing with you. And I asked her who she felt safest with, who she felt most loved by. And she mentioned her sister and her best friend. And then over the the weeks I got added into the group, we were her allies. And I had her imagine us kind of of surrounding her, us with her. And then I said, when you feel us around you, what does it feel like in your body? And she said, it's like I'm in a warm bath and my body can just relax and let go into it. And she added to that resourcing of imagining. us around her a message to herself as she was in that warm bath, which is, may I feel

safe? May I feel held in love? So this was her practice for many months. She wasn't doing rain. She wasn't trying to directly contact fear. Rather, she was just bringing to mind the sense of three trusted people, feeling herself in that warm bath, and offering self-compassion. May I feel safe? May I feel held in love? Now, it became more direct and I'm going to explain how, but the resourcing first was the atmosphere that actually allowed her to go deeper. And the self-nurturing becomes a really important part of that. For many of us, the resourcing can be things like, you know, you'll be okay. Trust yourself. yourself. You're held in love. I'm here. I'm not leaving. You know, thanks for trying to protect

me. I'm okay right now. Now, some of you might sense this is familiar because this is the end of rain. It's nurturing. But with strong fear, and this is what's important, you need to nurture up front before you go through the process of direct contacting. You start with nurturing. And I want to say that most everyone I know needs to have a way of resourcing themselves. We all get thrown off. We need ways of intentionally reconnecting, calming the nervous system so then we can be present with what's here. Because, and this is a very primary facet of our conditioning, we try to avoid unpleasantness. It's part of survival to dissociate from unpleasantness. That's why they say our issues are

our tissues because it's there, but we leave. We leave the body. So in order to return to the body, we need to be able to calm down the experience so it's not so raw and difficult. And resourcing helps us to do it. And the stronger the fear, the stronger the trauma, the more we need to resource. Many of you've probably heard of Bessel van der Kolk who wrote the book, The Body Keeps the Score, which is a highly recommend. and your book on trauma. And he describes how the trauma and fear is in our body. And he also describes how your mind make sure you don't face and keep score. In other words, the mind is very dedicated to keeping you from the body by forgetting, by denying, by repressing.

Now, of course, this creates a prison of suffering because if we're cut off from our body, body, we're still subjected to frequent limbic hijacks where we do get overwhelmed or possessed by fear. And more deeply, as the shaman describe it, we get cut off from our soul, from our spirit. But this is the circumstance of strong fear and trauma. We dissociate. And the mind does a lot to keep us dissociated. So it takes patience and resourcing to gradually come back and reconnect with the fear in a way that can be processed. Now, I'm going to pause for a moment and say, I'm aware as you're listening that different, different ones of you have different degrees of unprocessed fear of what you may have habitually or unconsciously been avoiding. But to whatever the

degree. It's the unprocessed fear that keeps us from what we most cherish about life. So I want to share a story that I have found so helpful in my own life and working with others that really explores what helps us to then move into processing and integrating fear. And this story actually is something that I was working with a woman years ago. And a part of her healing, she actually wrote the story that was very much about her own process. This is something she wrote. And in it she was seven years old and she describes hiding in a closet and being terrified after an unexpected attack by her drunk and enraged father. And the little girl in her story is praying. Her little girl saying, help, I can't take

it anymore. And then the little girl opens her eyes and sees a fairy in a haze of blue with a glittering wand. And she lets the fairy know how her father's been beating her and her mother doesn't help and how she feels like they both wish she was dead. And the fairy listens with tears in her eyes and then tells her that while she can't make all the pain and fear disappear, here, she can help her get through this time. She can help her forget and then remember later when she's able to handle it. And with a wave of the wand, the good fairy said, I'm going to send things into different parts of your body and they're going to hold them for you until you feel strong enough to let them move freely again. And she explained that she's

going to tighten and dull the little girl's pelvis and belly and she's going to constrict her heart and her throat and protect her from feeling the raw intensity of the hurt and the fear and the brokenheartedness. And I'm reading you this part. She said, you will have trouble feeling and being close to people, but it will be your way of surviving. And at those times that the pain erupts, you will find your own ways to control it, ways that may not look good to the world, that you may judge.

yourself, but they'll be of temporary comfort. And you, my darling, will be a fairly functional human being in spite of all this because you have a strong mind and you can hold this all in and I will be helping you. The child looking directly into the fairy's eyes asked, how will you help? Will you come back to see me? You will not forget everything. I will leave a voice inside you that will urge you to reconnect with your whole self. It may be a very long process, but in time, you will feel an urgent calling to step out of imprisoning beliefs, to unwind your body and release what it's been holding all these years. You will learn the art of sacred presence.

There will be physical and emotional pain as you open, but you will have what you need, the compassion and wisdom, the support of loving others, to be a whole person, spiritually awake, but still the same. This is because your soul has always been there, just hidden by the scars of this lifetime. The good fairy put her arm around the child's shoulders and gently led her into bed. She waved her wand and stood by as the little girl finally relaxed into a deep sleep. She gazed tenderly at the small innocent face and then whispered her goodbye. When you wake up, you will forget I was here. You will forget. you ask for help. You will forget the sharpness of your daily pain. This is the only way I know

to get you through this. You are a beautiful child. I love you and in fact your parents love you, although they're incapable of showing it to you. You will have to love yourself enough to heal so that when you're older your life will be powerful, full, and free. One day you will know who you really are. You will trust your goodness and know your belonging. Until then, and for always, I love you. I always get touch reading that because there's so much truth in it that we cut off from the pain, but it's a way to try to get through. We have to. I remember when I first told this story at a meditation class, a lot of people came up to talk to me afterwards and were sharing with me, how they'd always felt disconnected from their bodies, how a lot of tension was in their

body, how they used food to numb out the pain and drugs and their temper, kind of aggression, over-control, and how just hearing the story in some way it let them know that it wasn't their fault, that that's just part of trauma, that we have to dissociate and get away from the intensity, that there are ways that we move through life to cope that don't look good, but they get us through and that those strategies are trying to protect us. It's helpful to know that, and it's possible that's part of the story, to get more resourced, to have a pathway to healing. So I want to just just stay with the key piece here, which is that along with most trauma I've ever witnessed is shame. They just go hand in hand, that the dysfunctional behaviors, the coping strategies

that try to keep us, you know, moving and okay, actually end up being owned as a bad self, identified with as a bad self. And they were the best we could do to deal with overwhelming pain. They were well intentioned, of course, no longer functional. So if we're living with trauma, it's that story, we have our leg in a trap. We're going to have to have self-protective behaviors as addictive behaviors that aren't our fault. The last satsung I had last Saturday, one woman was sharing her addictive behavior, which is seeking and grasping after older women to love her, to take care of her. And then we went back in time and of course her mother neglected her terribly.

And she's trying to find that mother and it's not her fault. And the first step of healing is to forgive, to forgive ourselves. we can really get, it's not my fault. These coping strategies are not my fault. If we can get and dissolve that layer of shame, then we can begin to resource ourselves and move into the processing of the actual wound. Often, we have to do it with others. I've seen over and over again with shame that once we're with others and many people are sharing how they've been traumatized and how they ended up coping and not being the person they wanted to be and had to forgive what happens and I've seen over and over again, my shame becomes the shame. It's not so

personal. And we really get that this is just part of how it happens. I remember that long ago, there's a cartoon of two bears and they've trapped a man and they have them kind of hanging from a tree and the bears are talking. They say, his name's Bradshaw. Those of you, many of you probably know John Bradshaw's famous for the book on shame. They're saying, his name's Bradshaw. He says he understands I came from a single parent den with inadequate role models and he senses my dysfunctional behavior, shame-based and he urges me to to let my inner cub heal. I say we eat them. Okay, so we've talked about resourcing, about unpacking the layer of shame. And now I want to directly talk this final part about

how do we then process the fear. And here we'll now go to rain. We've done the nurturing, the pre-nurturing. And rain, for those that aren't familiar, it's an acronym that represents mindfulness and compassion, it's recognized, allow, investigate, and nurture. And by way of illustrating, I'd like to go back to Dana and that's the woman, the parole officer I mentioned, who spent months resourcing and resourcing by bringing to mine, me, and her sister and her friend and sensing that warm bath and offering herself self-compassion, spent months offering care to the places in her that felt ashamed of the way she acted and behaved in her life.

And then she began practicing coming into her body. And if we've been very dissociated, just practicing the body scan, and you'll find in many of my guided meditations I start with a body scan can be a way back into the body. And for her she had to start with the parts of the body scan that were easier. which were her hands and her feet. And generally what happens is that if there's been trauma you can gradually move and become more interior and the most difficult areas become the hard and then perhaps the belly and the pelvic area, exactly the places where the good fairy had tied up and constricted so there

wouldn't be so much feeling. So for Dana she practiced doing the scan. hands and getting into her body and then she began to practice rain with fear when it would arise. And when she'd feel fears, she'd recognize name, fear, fear, allow it to be there, try to just say, okay, for now, just be here. And then she'd investigate and feel where it was in her body, the squeeze that was there. And again, she'd put her hands on her heart and sometimes she'd imagine that gaze, the warm light of the fairy godmother, and she'd put her hands in her heart, and she'd, you know, sometimes sense the three of us around her, and she'd

different types of nurturing, you know, and often she'd say to herself, may I be safe, may I feel held in love? So different kinds of nurturing within. And when she did that, and she'd feel more space, more like, oh, I can handle fear. And there were times that she couldn't get through rain, and then she'd redirect her attention. She'd just stop. And again, just imagine the three of us around her. So, when there's strong fear, you might start rain and find out it's too much, or you can't allow, you can't do the A, then go back to resourcing. She practiced like this for a while and got better and better at being able to move through the whole rain practice. But then she had a very, very intense experience that I want to share with you. It was triggered by

her current ex-boyfriend, another man that in a way it had evolved the same way of her past relationships to being abusive. She was staying over at her best friend's house and she was sleeping in the living room. She had been terrified that he'd follow her and she started feeling a huge amount of fear. And so she called on her allies and she resourced her friend was asleep, but she did this as a meditation. And she started feeling us around her but then she opened right into the fear with rain. And it was very, very strong. She described it like hot broken glass tearing through her chest. That's how it was. And she kept having to resource, imagine us to stay with it. And as she did, she kept letting the fear move through her, letting it unfold.

And that's what happened. It felt like that hot broken glass tearing through her chest, but then it became a little more dispersed. And then gradually she started sensing that she was large enough and it started decreasing some. and when she got to after the rain and after the rains where you just sense the presence that's here, the fear was still there but there was way more space. There was a space of loving that was bigger than the fear. A space of loving that was bigger than the fear. And it was filled with a very warm, luminous light.

And she had this realization, this is the light of my own soul. By staying with rain and with the fear, she had opened to a space of awareness where she was reconnected with the light of her own soul. And she sensed that that soul space really was her deepest essence. It was more true. It was more who she was than that traumatized soul. she had been organized around for the past two decades. There's a poem I love and I shared it with Dana and I've shared it with you in the past. This will be a moment to pause and just take this in

from the poet Roshani Ray. There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy and a fragility out of whose depths emerge a strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being. There is a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open

to the place inside that is unbreakable and whole. fear is something we all don't like and want to get away from. And yet, when we have the courage to turn towards it, to open to it, it becomes the portal to realizing love, to realizing awareness, to homecoming. And it's a path that each of us has to go on. Everyone, on a healing and spiritual path, has to face fear, has to process fear. And it includes this kind of inner processing for all of us. At some point we need to be able to stay with and be with and feel. But it's not a solitary practice. We also need others to be part of it. Our great dis-ease is the illusion of separation.

There's no way to trust our belonging without awakening together. For Dana, I told you she was a parole officer. Several months after this experience, she was at work and she called a parole client who had missed an obligatory relapse prevention meeting and confronted him with that and he went into an aggressive rant, you know, cursing. And he ended up saying, you're like, all the rest, you don't give a shit about what my life is like. And he slammed down the phone. And she sat there and it was triggering. Her heart was racing. Her whole body shook. And she knew she needed rain. And she knew she first needed a resource. So she planted her feet firmly on her rug,

kind of grounding. And she called on her allies. And then she told me, she was able to be calm enough to walk through rain, she found her way back to that space where she said the inner light was back, that big me, the soul space, and I was holding myself with that kindness. Then something happened that surprised her because from that space she started bringing rain to her client, recognizing and allowing his anger and then investigating and suddenly she could feel his humiliation, his shame, his fear. And then when she asked herself, well, what does he most need? It was very clear that he needed someone to help him feel safe, to make him feel he mattered. When they met, she was really nervous, you know, going into that meeting, but she also had a

sense of confidence. She was resourced in herself. And at first, he was really sullen. He wouldn't even look her in the eye. But then she started asking him, questions and really showed her concern and he became animated and he was telling her how wild his old friends were and how hard it was to stay clean and before leaving he said you know maybe I got you wrong and I'm sorry about that and thank you for being on my team and she share with me that in the past she had been pretty armored didn't cut others much slack but through processing her own fear, reconnecting with her own soul. She found she was increasingly kind and empathetic with others. She was actually wondering, well, how can I help others feel safe? How can I

help them reconnect? And this is what happens that when we're less identify with that fearful self, we're more free to be who we really are. And there are many expressions of that wholeness. It can be creativity and can be humor and spontaneity, more intelligence, more love. I like the way Ralph Waldo Emerson refers to living from this wholeness. He says this, he says, within each of us is the soul of the whole. When it breaks through our intellect, it is genius. When it breathes through our will, it is virtue. When it flows through our affections, it is love. So friends, the pathway to this wholeness to being able to have the love and wisdom of

the universe flow through us is by processing and integrating fear into our larger awareness. Fears cut us off. That integrating makes us available. And as I hope I am acknowledging, it's hard and it takes courage. It takes a willingness. And what is it that makes us willing? You know, although the pain of trauma or emotional wounds, they can, they might lead us to believing that our spirit's been tainted or destroyed.

I mean, so many people feel like, you know, I'm flawed. It's not true. No amount of violence can corrupt the timeless and pure presence that's the ground of being. No amount of violence. And the ways of fear or shame may possess us temporarily so we start believing something's wrong. But if we continue to pay attention and to connect with others and to bring loving presence to what's going on inwardly, our lives become more and more.

filled with spirit and with grace. We become more aware of the sacred within and around us. And we intuit this. Even when we're living largely cut off, there's something in us that intuits a larger reality and that longs for that. Our hearts longed to live from that. So I began talking about our traumatized world. The greatest gift we can offer our world is to reconnect, reconnect with our bodies and our hearts and our emotions and reconnect with this earth body and with those we know and those we don't. I spoke of how Siddhartha the Buddha to be really dedicated to a path of awareness and compassion when he faced the reality of how uncertain this world is, the suffering.

And we can do the same. And these are the times that call for us to do it. That our unprocessed fear separates. It drives aggression. It drives bad othering. And this courageous path of facing fear enables us to be a force for healing. The guided meditation I'd like to lead right now, close with, is on healing fear. And I want to encourage you as you perhaps sit back and make yourself comfortable. It's a short meditation. Just to give you a taste, you'll have to take more time if you really want to go deeper. Choose something that's not traumatic.

choose a situation in your life that arouses mild fear, some level of fear, might be something to do with what the world is going through, pandemic, climate change, the political dividedness and violence, racism, may have something to do with what's immediately going on in your own life with relationships or health, whatever it is that brings up some sense of anxiety or fear. And we'll be starting with resourcing. But if at any time during this practice the fear feels like it's too much, go right back to the resourcing.

Don't try to directly encounter fear. The resourcing itself is a powerful way of setting the groundwork. bringing to mind situation and taking some moments to let yourself sense how that situation is living in you. We begin with what's called grounding, which is simply just feel the weight of your body supported by the earth, wherever you're sitting, whatever position. Just feel the weight of your body supported by the earth as if there's like a hug of gravity. And you can open your eyes and just sense this, look around, sense of space in all directions. You're grounding yourself and what's here,

noticing what's in the room or what's outside the window through the window. It helps to deepen attention by closing your eyes or letting your eyes be downpast, that's fine. And resource by bringing to mind somebody who gives you a sense of feeling loved, connected, safe. It could be a person you know that's alive. It could be someone who you've known who's no longer alive. It could be a being you don't know who gives you a sense of safety and love. It could be a spiritual figure. When you bring someone to mind and for some it's a formless sense of presence and that's fine too. Let it be close in. So you actually sense that being or the presence is coming through them as close in, as surrounding you, as filling you,

as Dana did, kind of bathing you. You might put your hand on your heart and offer yourself a reminder that supports that sense of inner safety and love, the kind of inner refuge. It could be simply you're okay or may you rest in love, be held, in love. What every reminder brings comfort and ease to your nervous system and heart. As you do, you might slow down your breath. It's slow, long, deep in breath and out breath, maybe four or five seconds. And again, now bring to mind the situation that brings up fear.

Let the situation be more close in now and sense what's the most difficult part about it what's most upsetting or scary. We begin rain, the R of Rain is recognized. And you might just name the emotion that you're most aware of with a whisper. It could be fear, anxiety, worry, distress. The A is allow. And that's just letting it be here without adding a judgment, without pushing it away or fixing. And if it's not possible to allow it, then then that's a sign to go back to resourcing, which is quite fine. But if you can allow it for a little bit, it's like you're saying for now, letting it be here, then you can begin investigate.

And you might notice what you're believing is going to go wrong, what your believe is wrong with you or wrong with somebody else. What's the belief that goes with the fear? And when you're believing this, just how does the feeling in your body correlate? What's the felt sense of the fear in your body? Where is it located? And I find it helpful to, again, bring the hand to the heart to keep you with your body and to start actually nurturing, a caring presence, an interested presence, to feel and contact the fear.

And if it helps to breathe and feel the breath is helping you contact the fear, feel where it is in your body. the shape of the fear and what it's like. And this is where it takes that courage just to be with, to feel, to breathe with, to be with. You might sense what kind of nurturing that fear most needs. What is it, how does it want you to be with it? And as you listen to and feel the fear, you might sense that you can, from your most spacious awareness, from the love of your awake heart, offer what might be needed in this moment. Might be simply the message, I'm here with you.

It's okay. Thank you for trying to protect me, but I'm okay right now. Or maybe trust in love, rest in love. Just offering whatever message deepens that capacity to be with the fear. might sense that the vulnerable place is really bathed, held by love. And then gently we move into after the rain, noticing the quality of presence that's here, the awareness that's awake, witnessing, including all that's going on, perhaps noticing the shift from the small, fearful self to more of a sense of spaciousness,

more of the ocean cradling the waves. Sensing the space, the tenderness that's holding the fear and knowing this spacious awareness, this tenderness is more the truth of who you are than any story of a fearful self, the freedom from being identified as a fearful self, resting as the awareness, the ocean that's cradling the waves. And in this resting, you might sense our whole world as waves in this ocean, all that's going on, sense our shared prayer that growing numbers come home to realize their essence as loving awareness, remembering our belonging and bringing healing to this precious earth into all beings. Namaste friends and thank you for your presence and your care.

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