Tara Brach - Fear and Love (retreat talk)

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

Fear and Love (2021-11-01) - Only when we face our fears can we discover the freedom to love without holding back. This talk looks at how unprocessed fear contracts our body, heart and mind, and on a societal level is the cause of othering and violence. We then explore how arousing mindfulness, compassion and prayer can enlarge our basic sense of Being. As we deepen attention to the nature of awareness, we discover a refuge that is timeless…a refuge that is our true home (given at the IMCW 2021 Fall Retreat).

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. So, Namaste, greetings. I'm loving being with you. Feeling the shifting, this kind of growing presence and warmth in the field as we're practicing together. And I love looking, you know, I'm scrolling. and just getting familiar with faces, old friends, new friends. You know, I read recently that if you place two living heart cells from different people in a petri dish, they'll tune in and in time they'll find and maintain a third common beat.

They'll come into coherence, you know. And so I feel like that's, you know, here we are. And we're in this virtual Buddha Nature lab coming in. to coherence together. Mark Nippo, who's a friend and poet, writes that there's, he says, there is in the very nature of life some essential joining force. This inborn ability to find and enliven a common beat is the miracle of love. For if two cells can find the common pulse beneath everything, how much more can full hearts feel when all excuses fall away? How much more can full hearts feel when all excuses fall away?

It's good, you know? So I was reflecting on what I wanted to talk about over the last few weeks, really, kind of honing in and asking myself, well, what feels most alive? And it's really this, this possibility of what can unfold when we're free to love without holding back. Because isn't that what we long for? So if we say to ourselves, what is between me and loving, you know, this moment, any moment, what we encounter, what we realize we need to face is fear.

It's that core vulnerability that gets you. gives rise to all the excuses, you know, to all the defenses and the daily ways that we can distance ourselves. It's the mistrust and the violations. It all comes from fear and it happens on the individual level, the group level, society-wide. And I think part of my daily reflection really, it's my age and it's what's happening in our world, is death is every day a part of my awareness, as is the wonder of this creation, love. They're both there and it seems so clear to me, I'm kind of going right to the heart of this, that the only thing that's large enough to hold fear, including our fear of dying,

is loving awareness. It's really remembering the truth of a larger belonging beyond this ego. separate self. And the pathway to that larger belonging requires that we go through vulnerability, that we have to feel the fear. And so it's kind of a spiraling towards freedom. You might kind of sense this that the more we're with vulnerability, the more our trust grows and what really we are, that loving awareness, that gives us more confidence to go through the vulnerability and on and on it goes. That's kind of one feeling of the of the path.

So this will be the theme we'll be reflecting on and it'll be reflecting on together because I'll ask you to feel into places where you get caught in fear, sense how you're relating to fear. And I really see this as a natural building on the teachings that have been offered so beautifully. You know, each teacher, the grounding in embodiment and then opening with deep care to what's here. We've seen it in every session really.

There's a phrase that I heard it long ago, I don't remember where from, and it really always has resonated and it's that the primal mood of the separate self is fear. So if you're here listening and you have any identification with a separate being, a separate entity, If you have any sense of an identity that there's a self in here and a world out there and that this self is owning experience and this is the self that's doing things, then please raise your hand and actually don't because I'm mostly kidding. But I mean really, we all have that. That's kind of rigged as part of the system, that sense of separate and with that sphere.

I read somewhere else more recently of a contemporary Buddha. who falls out of a window of a 15th-story building, he's on the 15th floor. And he's falling down and as he's passing the eighth floor, somebody pokes their head out and says, hey, how are you doing? And the Buddha says, oh, so far, so good. And I have to say, I suspect for even the most realized being that fear operates. I can speak for myself a being who's very much in process, that most moments, if I am willing to slow down enough, if I can really pause and I sense inward, I can usually sense into

some constriction, some holding, some kind of a backdrop or hum of existential fear. It's not bothersome, it doesn't feel personal, but I can sense, you know, I'm sensing into it right now, I can sense the contraction. And of course in the moments of sensing it, there's more space and freedom around it. But it isn't personal, you know, it is part of our survival design, really. We are meant to apprehend threats, you know, to these temporary, you know, to these temporary early separate forms and a thread around the corner and it energizes us in tensing against. And I'm aware that when I give talks, I mean when I was younger I was, I'd get anxious

at times more than others. I don't get anxious, but I can feel a kind of an excitement, tension, agitation sometimes. And most of the time, before I start, I'll reflect. we are friends, you know, just since we're friends. And just, even if I'm not feeling that fully, just the reminder, something melts some. And of course, there's less fear that I'm getting ahead of myself. So, fear underlies most of the painful parts of our emotional life. And many of you have been investigating, you know, in the groups with so much courage and honesty, I really just so honored you. And you're finding how under the anger or under the

self-aversion there's fear, or under the depression, or under the numbness. It's a tensing against that sense that something bad's going to happen. And you probably, and many of you've noticed that I've been with, that along with the frightened self is the shameful self. You know, I am fearful because I'm bad and I don't belong and I'm bad and I'm afraid I'll be rejected. They just go hand in hand. And if we keep investigating fear, we can sense with it, the configuration of a very solid, isolated self. But rather than me speaking the words, let's do a brief check-in together, okay? You willing to, okay, to do a bit of reflecting together?

Yeah, and as you've been doing 10,000 times, you might let your attention turn inward and take some breaths. Just call yourself home right here into this body mind, this breathing body, and remind yourself in the last few days since you've been doing the retreat of some moments of anxiety or fear. or where you felt not trauma, because it's not as useful to work on trauma with a very short exercise, but if you can't just some time where you felt the tension of it, anxiety, fear, and you might just remind yourself of the circumstances and what was triggering you. And if you put yourself a bit back into it, can you sense how in those moments there was

a sense of a kind of a contracted, separate, separate, sense? self and maybe to sense how you were relating to that self, whether you were liking yourself, befriending yourself, or whether there was aversion. And as you're looking, exploring, just sense when you're caught in that and the anxiety or fear, how are you regarding others? Do they seem far away, out there? And if you have a sense of where fear or anxiety lives in you, you might just offer some gesture of kindness, it can be the touch to the heart, even if you're not feeling kind, just

that intention to be regarding with kindness, knowing that that matters to you to be kind, is enough for now. Just knowing this hurts, this is suffering, may I be kind. And notice with even that intention what happens. The fear arises when we anticipate a threat to our being and in an existential way it means we're anticipating the loss of what we love most fundamentally. It's the loss of this self, this body mind. I remember I've had for a long time a cartoon of a psychologist with a patient and the

patient's the grim reaper and the psychologist is looking at his watch. psychologists do towards the end of a session. And the grimrie for shaking his head is going, no doc, I'm afraid it's your time that's up. So that's the bottom line, you know, is the sense of impending this mortal being is going to go. And so our predicaments, we live many moments of our life in a fear contraction. And again, fear, it's universal. It's not personal. It's natural. Fear's there for a purpose. If there was no fear, we'd be brain dead, okay? It's nature's protector and we need it.

If you're, if the driver of your car has been drinking, you know, or if you're inside with a group of unmasked people, or if your child is playing on slippery, dangerous rocks, you get the idea. Fear motivates us to survive. But here's the thing. When fear turns to suffering, it becomes what I think of as the trance of fear, or what we call the body of fear, when it locks into overtime. And then we're overreacting.

Just anything can trigger it. It's like the on button or the accelerator's jammed and it takes over. And by taking over, it defines us. It starts defining our life. So this is being imprisoned in the trance of fear or the body of fear. And it's just unprocessed fear. And it happens. It happens when for so many people that fear turns to suffering.

When we have this regularly repeated experience in our early life of threat, the caregivers who were unattuned or negligent or critical, punitive, abusive. Maybe we were regularly bullied at school. It comes if there's prolonged threat from war, from natural disaster. pastors from the pandemic, are, as we know, by the structural violence of a society that aim towards the non-dominant populations that leads, for example, so many black people in this country to feeling ongoing threat to physical safety, what Rezma-Mennicum talks, the pervasiveness of black body trauma.

And it's important to name that in this juncture of history, you know, with our pandemic and with our climate emergency, fear is spiking. And whether we're looking right now at our individual lives or our well-being as a larger society, when fear is unprocessed, it becomes toxic. There's a growing mistrust and violence in our societal movements that we can see. We can see it in the virulence of white supremacy and fundamentalism. It's very contagious. And we can see it individually in the levels of addiction and loneliness and depression.

Okay, so that's the suffering of where our species is right now, that fear and aggression. It's part of our survival brain, it's completely activated, it can take over, it can dominate. And the good news, we're not just talking about the dive into fear, the good news is that it's also part of our evolutionary story. that we have this capacity to awaken our awareness, to perceive connection, to perceive interdependence, to feel compassion and love, and to sense it's not so personal, that mindfulness, it senses this is a wave, but on the ocean there's some equanimity. And it's all that we're exploring here. That's why this Dharma is so revolutionary. It's the hope of our species and of evolution

really. And in a basic way, what it is is allowing a shift from identifying as a separate self that'll always be scared to identifying with a sense of wholeness where really the world's all part of us. And when that happens, fear's still here, but we're the ocean, we can hold it. One teacher, you know, he drew on a big board. He drew the words, illness and wellness. And he said, what's the difference? And then he circled the eye of illness and the W.E. of wellness. I and we.

I often think about what's been called the big squeeze. This is kind of like our daily predicament where we can sense the forces in us that we live So many moments on automatic where underneath we're being driven by that sense of a separate self that where something's missing or something's wrong and it's fear-based and there's a lot of self-judgment. And we also so regularly on some level touch in to who we really are. We touch into the wonder, we touch into the tenderness, into a more spacious perspective. And this predicament, this big squeeze, is really the same contrast that we see in our larger

society. One person, Butch Hancock from Texas remembers his life in my hometown in Texas taught me two things. One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. And the other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and should save it for someone you love. So, forgive me, I just find that so cute. But we can feel the big squeeze, you know, if we look through an evolutionary lens, we can see it. We're a pro-social species.

Our trajectory is towards waking up consciousness to realize interconnection. And we get really hooked by being triggered by our survival brain and fighting out of a sense of difference. But pro-social is the direction we're going. Hopefully in time we'll see. You know, as you know, there's many pro-social species and they're highly successful. You know, the monkeys, birds, ants, bees. I get really inspired by trees.

You know, I have kind of a love affair going with trees right now. And I'm thinking of the Redwoods right this moment in the Northwest. There are these, you know, just grand, beautiful, tall, you know, and you know, I'm thinking of the Redwoods. tall trees with very shallow roots. And there's huge winds and so on that come and, you know, blowing them around. So what allows them to stay steady and strong in the winds is that even though their roots are shallow, they're utterly intertwined. I just think that's so beautiful.

They're totally intertwined. Can't we know that our roots are intertwined? I get inspired by the work of Canadian scientists Suzanne Smard. Some of you have heard of her. Her book is called Finding the Mother Tree. And I've only read articles from her. I haven't read the whole book. But she talks about how trees are linked to neighboring trees by this whole underground network of fungi. And it resembles the neural networks in the brain. It's like a wholesome internet. And like old trees and dying trees send extra nutrients and other signals to surrounding trees to kind of serve the regenerative capacity of the new forest going

forward. And the benefits are not just for kin. Samar describes watching as this Douglas fur that had been injured by insects sent chemical warning signals to a ponderosa pine growing nearby. The pine tree then produced exactly the offense enzymes it needed to protect against the insect. the trees are sharing information that serves the well-being of the whole forest. We have an illustrative image, okay trees, let's get naked. And you see these trees in the Douglas fir, you see them dropping their leaves except the last frame says, WTF, Douglas. It's better to see it than hear me, but that's one of my favorite cartoons in the world.

So, each tree according to its own nature, and yet they're in radical interdependence as this whole web of life is. So part of our evolutionary story is to feel separate and get hijacked. You know, primitive survival brain takes over and we have this capacity to wake up, to trust that our roots are so entangled that there really is we. So this is the shift in identity that really the whole Buddha Dharma. talks about waking up from that separate selfness to the belonging to the whole, knowing our belonging.

So now we're going to hone in and look at the pathway, like what facilitates that, and particularly to do with fear. And in facing the trance of fear, mindfully, this body of fear, we're facing vulnerability that expresses as physical sensitivity. as mental activity, as emotions, and as behaviors, all of it. There's a lot of layers. That's why this morning it was so beautiful. Solvazi just gave us a sense of all these different dimensions that we're paying attention

to. I like to think often of Joseph Campbell describes a circle of awareness. Many of you are familiar with it, this big circle and there's a line going through and as he describes it, whatever we're aware. of is above the line and whatever we're not aware of is below the line. And our identity gets hooked by what's below the line. You know, our suffering is from the parts of our psyche that we're not feeling or seeing. So so much of this path and in much of wholesome psychotherapy is bringing above the line

what's here. Bringing all the levels of the body of fear above the line so we can meet it with awareness and in doing that, transform it. So just to go through some of the layers a little bit with the body of fear, one layer that first might catch our attention is our fear behaviors. And we all have them. I mean, every one of us, if we look at our lives honestly, we're going to see ways that we try to reduce fear, get rid of fear, pull away from fear rather than be with fear.

And some do it the more obvious ways of overconsuming or numbing with drugs. Many of us do it with our work. The way we, it's not that we're being creative and passionate about our work, it's that we're workaholic. We are addicted to kind of speeding and doing and checking things off lists. You can see here, and so many of you have named it, how the attraction to distractions There's something uncomfortable we're trying to get away from. And so we distract ourselves, we're trying to control what's there.

And then there's ways when we're around others that we pretend. We present it together self because we don't want to feel the vulnerability of what's right here. We try to meet others' expectations. One of my all-time favorite little essays was a woman described, vacationing each summer in New England in the same town as Paul Newman, and for those of you that are younger than me, famous actor. So she'd go every Sunday morning, she'd go for a run and then she'd go to this bakery,

this ice cream bakery coffee place to get her favorite double-dipped chocolate cone. And one time the only patron there was Paul Newman, who, you know, and her heart skipped because he has these famous baby blue eyes and he smiled graciously and she responded demurely. But inside what was going on was like near a panic attack. You're 42, you're a married woman, mother of three, what's wrong with you? Pull yourself together. You know, she was just, you know, shaking with a sense of who she wanted to look like but didn't look like.

Don't be a teenager. He can tell. Just be cool. Don't look over there again. Just get your cone and get out of here. So she got her cone. She put her change in one hand, the cone and the other. Without a glance in this direction, she kind of glided out the door.

And she got to the car and realized she didn't have her ice cream cone. She goes back in, it's not on the cone rack or with the clerk, and then she looks over at Paul Newman and his face broke into this familiar grin and he said, you put it in your purse. We know how many mistakes. mistakes we make, you know, I mean, you might not have put an ice cream cone in a purse, but we know the mistakes you make when we're fearful. We just start behaving in ways that take us away from ourselves, really. So how do we deal with it? If in the midst of fear behaviors

or if after them, you can pause and acknowledge, just acknowledge, okay, fear here. Forgiven, forgiven, you know. Just say it kindly. It brings us. It brings us. It brings us. It brings, it above the line more. If you can do it in the midst of a fear behavior, even pause for 10 seconds, you're beginning to interrupt patterns that have been, you know, lodged into our psyche for ages. More above the line. So that's one layer is the fear behaviors. Another layer is mental activity. And when we're fearful, our mind circles around in fear thoughts, obsessive worry. You know, what's wrong, what's going to go wrong, planning. figuring out, I mean, how many moments do we spend trying to figure out things?

Because we're really trying to make our future certain and protected. The content of our core fears is, as I mentioned, the loss of our bodies, the loss of loved ones. But for primates, when it's not a life-death issue, the default of the mind is to compare to others to become aware of relationship and then the fear turns into, I'm going to going to lose respect, I'm going to lose love. Relational failure. It's big. So it's important to bring it above the line, you know, to bring those thoughts above the line, what we're believing. When we're suffering, we're believing something not true that's limiting about a separate

cell. The Buddha said, whatever you regularly think about, that becomes the inclination of your mind. I think that's so powerful. whatever you regularly think about, that becomes the inclination of your mind. And we keep running the fear thoughts, which of course create a biochemistry of fear and it keeps circling and looping. So it becomes really important to catch that looping. Fear thought, creating fear in the body. Thinking of Anne Lamott, she had a great line. She said, my mind is my main problem. almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out, but it likes

to come with me. Okay, so we bring the thoughts above the line and this is where as we were exploring this morning, just becoming aware, mindful of the thought, just mindful of it. You can say to yourself, don't believe your thoughts, don't believe your thoughts. And even if you believe them, even just saying that helps to create a little bit of a wedge, a little bit of distance, you're a little more above the line. You can say to yourself, this is just a thought, or I am not my thought, or I don't have to believe my thought, but some reminder helps to both acknowledge fear thinking and also bringing it into the light of awareness. We're talking about the layers of the body of fear, and then if we can recognize the fear

thoughts, we can then start sensing where the fear lives in our body as emotions, you know, whether it's as chronic anxiety or maybe anger or depression. And if we can keep present and kind, we can start to face the vulnerability that's right there as a felt sense, as sensations. We know that phrase, the issues in our tissues, until we can actually actually we can actually actually experience in a full way, an intimate way, bringing above the line and being with the fear in our body, it still grabs at our identity. We're like what one to bed and described as a bundle of tense muscles defending our existence.

So this is the body of fear. And again, I've been speaking a lot, so let me ask you to check in. just do a very brief reflection on the body of fear. And I might be asking you to pay attention to fear when you're not feeling any fear and that's fine. You can just get in touch with what happens to be there, any vulnerability. So again, let the attention turn inward and you might bring to mind a recent time and it could be the same experiences before or another where you felt in some way stuck in that body of fear, just call it. and the thoughts and the feelings.

It might be something that repeats often in your life where you perhaps related to your work where you feel you're failing or going to fail or in a relationship where you're afraid of what's going to happen. And sense your intention to bring above the line these different elements of the body of fear. You might notice what are the behaviors? What are your fear behaviors? Do you distract? Do you blame?

Do you try to numb yourself? Do you get busy? With whatever you see, whatever you discover, just to see it and forgive it. Let your intention be to forgive it. It's not really your body of fear, it's the body of fear and this is what we humans do. You might notice what thoughts come with the body of fear for you. you. What are you believing in those times? And to find out, just kind of go inside the fear and say, just sense what's the fear's view? From the fear's perspective, what bad is going

to happen? What's wrong with you or someone else or the world? And with whatever you notice, these are thoughts, these are beliefs. You don't have to believe. And sense if you can feel into your body with what's there, whatever emotion. are there, naming them. Feeling right into the sensations and it helps to put your hand on your heart, to in some way keep yourself company right now. This is the portal, this vulnerability in our bodies. This is why we practice coming into our bodies. You might listen more deeply to the fear place and sense, what are you trying to do for me? What are you trying to do for me? You might sense whether it's useful or not the way this fear is trying to protect.

And you might even explore saying thank you. Thank you for trying to protect me. And notice what happens. Thank you for trying to protect me. You're bringing above the line how this body of fear is trying to in some way protect you. keep paying attention. You might sense in that place that's trying to protect, that vulnerable place, what it's longing for. It's really longing for in some way safety, belonging, knowing

all rightness, feeling loved. I'm just witnessing this in an intimate way that this is the suffering, this hurts. There's longing. There's feeling. of unsafeness, and you might even acknowledge this hurts or ouch, you know, I sometimes say, ouch, this is suffering and notice what happens. Just the honest recognition, this hurts. Notice if there's some more tenderness, some more space. You might take some moments just to widen your attention and remember you're here with hundreds of us.

not as much my fear as the fear, it's the body of fear. Not so personal. It's a limbic protector. And again, regard your experience and all of our experience with that kindness that sees it hurts and that there's some larger space of belonging that's possible. You might notice what happens if you just let yourself relax back a bit and sense the field of belonging that It can include these different currents of fear, not my fear but the fear, our fear, our shared fear. It says Srinar Surgadha put it, the mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses. So friends, we're really exploring how we bring into awareness what's been outside of awareness that it can be integrated into a larger field, held in something larger.

And it's really helpful. I just want to highlight a few things we just did, maybe flag them, that we have to see how fear creates the abyss and appreciate its intention. It really makes a difference. This morning, Solwazi described it so well. He said he sends part of himself the message, thank you, buddy. I know you're working for me. If parts of us are acknowledged, not pushed away, we don't call them resistance or bad, they're

just acknowledged. Every emotion has an intelligence. Acknowledge it, even if it's no longer useful. That's the beginning of establishing a relatedness inside us. I like that. Thank you, buddy. I know you're working for me. So good.

So now here's the challenge, and this is especially with strong fear or shame, which is the last piece I'll get to on a kind of individual level, is that our mind is very conditioned to generating the abyss, in other words, keeping us from processing what's in the body. We know that with trauma. Many of you know of Bessel van der Kolk and he wrote the book, The Body Keeps the Score. And the theme of the book is really that the mind does whatever it can to prevent us from experiencing how the body is keeping the score. Our mind tries to keep us removed. It just tries to push things away. So we need others to help us create a safe space to be

able to really open into what's there. And we can on our own explore also how to do it. We can use rain, which is basically the two wings of mindfulness and compassion. And we can explore how do we deepen a nurturing presence. So, I'd like to just mention to you that that's a process for all of us. Every one of us is trying to find our pathways to belonging to something larger. And I'll share a personal story that kind of shows how I found my way and now keep on repeating and repeating to deepen the pathway. So my repeating trance experience over the years was to build up evidence of falling short

and then sink into some sense of self-aversion or shame. And at the root was fear of failure, you know, if I fail to be a good worthy person, then I'll lose love. That's my, you know, shorthand psycho bio, the fear of failure in losing love. And I had a really strong uprising of it one year and it happened right after the holidays and I'd been with my family and I went to the forest refuge, retreat. And of course, as you're finding out, as soon as the distractions are gone, it's like, you know, free time for everybody, every shadow part to have its day.

And I just dove into stuckness, this familiar place, you know, how my family had triggered parts of myself I don't like, where I get controlling, judgmental, inattentive, self-centered, sensitive, you know, things I don't like saying out loud but happen. And there I was on my own at retreat, just having to face that these beings I love so much, I had been in a reactive space and created some separation. My parents aging, you know, sibs that I don't see so often. So there I was and I decided to do rain with it and I recognized self-aversion, allowed it to be there.

I investigated and found this kind of core sense as I described of bad personhood, you know, this failure or loss. And I could feel it in my body, you know, as fear and shame, a kind of sinking hole and my gut and kind of my heart bound. And I breathed with it and I offered words of nurturing and it didn't budge. I mean, nothing. Nothing. Zero.

I just couldn't get near it. I got this really sick, desperate feeling. It was almost like the parts of me that believed in my badness were digging in their heels saying, no, this is true. You really are failing. Something really is wrong with you. And so I just want to make a comment standing back that the inability to nurture is an invitation to deepen attention to the vulnerability. That's all it is. If we can't nurture, it's the some place and I'm saying, no, you got to go deeper, get more intimate. So that's what I did. I went inside that feeling of failing and that fear and that core not lovable place and gave

it a voice. I just said, you know, okay, what do you want, what do you want to express? And it was this almost like a pleading, please love me, just please love me. And I just kept, there I was at the forest refuge in my own little room just whispering and weeping and weeping, over and over, please love me. And here's the thing. The more it became a totally pure yearning, like utterly full, the more there was an inhabiting of that yearning. That was the world. The more equally purely, I felt this loving presence bathing me. The deeper, that almost anguish longing, the more pure, that sense of being absolutely bathed in loving presence and it was bathing me from, you know, like white loving light from outside,

but it was also emanating from space inside me. It was everywhere and it was just saturating the fear that was becoming increasingly porous and the fear, its intensity became a light-filled intensity and energy that actually intensified the loving presence. It just kind of became part of that, I so often think of these words that the prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging. And if you can feel the vulnerability and from that place pray from it, it brings in that loving. And for me, the next piece was what we call after the rain. And I want to emphasize this because that's where the integration happens. people can just skim over it and not even mention it sometimes.

And that's when we just noticed the quality of presence that arose. And we be that awareness, just be that awareness. And that's what happened. There was this clear shift from where I started, from this averse of fearful self to being this field of loving awareness. Then and also through every day of my practice, my path is getting familiar with it. So it becomes more the truth of who I am than any narrative, any set of beliefs. So I stayed then.

I stayed with after the rain and that's when at one point a phrase I love from Punjaji, an Indian teacher, came up spontaneously. Love is always loving you. Love is always loving you. And I could sense how from the perspective of the separate self, the more trust deepens, the more we know that. And in after the rain, in that sense of being awareness, it was so clear that the love is what I am, what we are.

So I'm emphasizing this because I want to invite you to get familiar with the presence. even if it's just a bit of presence that arises after you've brought that mindfulness and compassion to what's here. Srinor Sargadatta puts it in a beautiful way. He says, wisdom tells me I'm nothing. Love tells me I'm everything. And between the two, my life flows. Wisdom tells me I'm nothing.

Love tells me I'm everything. between the two, my life flows. So this is the waking up that's possible when we go through that vulnerability and we're looking at inner practice, I want to spend the last bit of time what it really means to wake up fear in a more societal way. Because just as crucial for crossing the abyss is our relational practice, how we are with each other, so that we can see past the fear-based cover. You know, that I can see you and not just see your defenses or personality or talents,

but see behind that the light, the goodness, the awakeness. And the great challenge we face is this, that we don't think our own thoughts are perceived through our own mind. We are thinking society's thoughts and we're perceiving with the lens of society and society conditions us with delusions that are based on other people's coverings. We have these competitive standards, we create hierarchies, we create caste systems that lock in the delusions. So to free ourselves, to see the gold shining through all coverings, it actually takes

a really dedicated conscious practice. And yet we do so for the sake of truth and love. I mean, it's clear in my life, and I realized this some years ago, and it was very stark, that as long as I have any sense of being above or below another, I'm in trance. And it's also clear that it's not only the ostensibly oppressed that are suffering, and I'm speaking now as a white woman, that I suffer, I miss out from true belonging because of the conditioning of this society, the lens that it installed. I miss out on that level of belonging. It cuts us off from inclusive loving. So, as with the inner work, the key pathway that allows

us to see our shared belonging, see the gold in the relational field, is getting up close and intimate with each other, with our shared vulnerability. As we're doing here, you can feel what happens in the small groups, how it goes from individuals, each in our own little boxes to a field, right? Last night, Kanda used that fabulous word proximate, so strong, so good, you know, and that question, what's it like being you? You know, there's a French philosopher, Simone Wiel writes, The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to them, what are you going through?

imagine that, that we in some way encounter each other and there's something in us that wants to know what's it like being you? What are you going through? Because if we can see the vulnerability, it undoes our hearts armoring and then we can pick up the goodness that shines through. Kylie Schwartz, third grade teacher from taught students from underprivileged backgrounds in Denver, Colorado area. She shares notes from students about what she might not be aware of about them. In other words, she asked them to write, if my teacher knew, I wish my teacher knew and then dot, dot, dot, dot.

I want to read you what some of the responses are. I wish my teacher knew that my dad works two jobs and I don't see them much. That I don't have pencils at home to do my homework. that my mom doesn't sign my reading log because she can't read. That after my mom got diagnosed with cancer I've been without a home three different times this year. That I'm smarter than she thinks. That my little brother gets scared and I get worried when he wakes me up every night.

That my mom and dad are divorced and I am the middle child of seven kids, all the rest are boys. That I love animals and I would do anything for my animals. I would love to work at the SPCA so I could help animals get adopted, that my family and I live in a shelter. Van Jones, who is a friend, a news commentator, a social activist, also has dedicated the work to proximity, bringing people together. He brought together people from South Central LA, black organizers focused on the crack epidemic. And he brought brought them to West Virginia to meet with white people from the community there trying to

address the opioid crisis. And they were together in a conference room for like a week or something. And these are like hugely different people, very different lenses conditioned in them from society, different political parties and races and cultures and views. And over the week they started to get to know each other. They're approximate. And at one point, each pulled out a photo of someone who died in the epidemic. So they're each holding a photo and talking about who that person was in their life.

And in the documentary I saw one man had his picture up and he said, the last thing I told my son was, you got yourself into this, you get yourself out. And shortly after his son had overdosed. And at the end, they looked at each other entirely different way. They shared so much, there was a shared field. All hierarchies that devalue the preciousness of some lives create separation. And one of the greatest divides, the one where we desperately need to widen the circles, the one that translates into climate emergency and the destruction of our larger body Earth,

and Conda spoke to this last night, humans have placed ourselves above other. species. We've disconnected from the living web. You can't think other species are the Earth as an object and really feel belonging. And we have treated the Earth as an object for our disposal. The Earth body becomes a source of resources for us and a sewer. So we push away the realness of non-human animals and other animals become livestock. I mean think of that word, stock, this object, to treat cruelly or else they become irrelevant. And only 4% of the world's mammals are wild. The rest are either human or those live stock that we put in concentration camp-like facilities to meet our appetites. And we will continue to feel fundamentally separate and fearful

if we don't sense the sacredness of all life. So I have a practice I do. I want to share with you. It's a version of Meta. And it arose some years back. I was walking by the Potomac. I spent a lot of time there just watching the geese, you know, the ducks, watching them feed and keep company and the bonding of the pears and the babes in the springtime. It's a lot of joy actually. And this day there were hunters upriver and the shots rang out from them and I was just like

flooded with horror. It was, you know, these innocent, powerless beings being killed and, you know, these innocent, powerless beings being killed and I started weeping, just imagining their confusion and their grief over losing a maid. And my heart and mine were riled at the violation. Something in me was going, these beings are real, they're vulnerable, they feel, they're precious, they're my friends. And I kept walking and breathing, they're my friends and then I just started looking around at everything else that was there. You know, this aliveness around me. dog, Katie, and I just said, we're friends, you're my friend. And the sycamore tree,

you are my friend. The cardinals were friends. And my mind went to the animals around the world, the pigs and the chickens and the cows that we think of as food. You're my friends. No matter what came to mind. And I found along with the sorrow, this sense of belonging to this world of living beings that each mattered, each was precious, part of me. And just opening to that shared sense of aliveness and sentience, it was a real surge of joy and this sense that I can never be alone. I can't be separate from any part of life. I can't be alone. You know, there was that sense as Sri Nurse Arga-Data put it, that wisdom tells me I'm nothing, love tells me I'm everything. And my life flowing between the two. So we're going to close with a short meditation. And I had started with the

cells in the Petri dish, you know, the Buddha Nature Lab. And here we are. And together we're facing vulnerability of these human hearts. And we're together discovering these pathways to timeless loving, to our refuge. So maybe as a way of closing, take a moment to again let your attention go inward and find and fuel your breath. And sense if there's anything inside you asking for acceptance, asking for kindness, and offer what's possible, hand on the heart, some message, or at least your intention I want to be kind, your prayer to be kind.

Notice who are you when you're beholding with presence, engaging with presence. Let yourself relax back and sense the field, the field of love and awareness that we regularly forget but it's always already here. Namaste friends and I look forward to being with you. you again. Blessings. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.