Tara Brach - Freedom from the Prison of Limiting Beliefs (2020-09-23)

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

Freedom from the Prison of Limiting Beliefs (2020-09-23) - (dedicated to Ruth Bader Ginsburg) - We suffer when we are caught in beliefs of our own or other's badness, unworthiness, or lack of value. These beliefs hurt our bodies, lead to violent and/or addictive behaviors, and separate us from our own heart and each other. This talk explores how we can discover who we are beyond these beliefs by recognizing when we are trapped, and learning how to turn to presence and love.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome my friends. Joseph Campbell, who most of you have heard of, described all religions as starting with one word. They all came out of one word and the word was help. And we humans perceive our mortality. We perceive how everything's changing and in the deepest ways it's really out of our hands. So we're looking for something that can protect us, that can guide us and help us make it through. And so that deep inquiry is really what will give us refuge in the face of an uncertain world. A reading that I've always liked goes like this.

It says, this life is a test. It is only a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do. Remember, this life is only a test. I remember when I first heard this and it really struck a chord and I feel we can really sense this in our current times. So much is up for grabs. You know, the coronavirus and economy and really the rights of vulnerable populations and democracy. and our earth is in distress. So the degree of uncertainty is really spiked and we can sense how

with this little security we're all trying to sense how to navigate. You know, what's the best guidance on how to proceed? So if we look closely, we can see the ways that we take refuge. for many we take refuge in that online rabbit hole that we fall into for incredible stretches of time, that trance. We take refuge in staying busy, we try to control the people around us. It might be through food or drugs or alcohol or sleep that we're trying to take care of ourselves. And, and this is the other side in a way, for many there's increased refuge in caring relationships and really being close with others and connecting with others and in meditation. Many people have started and deepened their practice, refuge in nature, refuge in serving

others. In my book, this is I think 2012 that it got published, True Refuge, I looked at how we react to life's basic insecurity, to that sense of help, how what we take refuge in really varies. And I distinguished between the refuges that serve to wake up our hearts and minds and those that are a kind of substitute that give a temporary, maybe a hit of relief, but in a way keep us trapped. And I called the latter false refuges, not because they're bad, but really because they keep us from a pathway that really allows true healing and freedom. So tonight I'd like to reflect on the primary mode of false refuge that underlies other false refuges and keeps so many of us trapped and that's our fear-based stories and beliefs.

and when we're insecure, how we even grasp more tightly to those fear beliefs, those limiting beliefs, and they turn us against ourselves and against others. They keep us separate. So I'd like to look at this together and then how our meditation practices can free us from that prison of limiting beliefs. And I want to dedicate this class to our beloved Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who helped our entire society wake up from stories about limited worth or limited value, how she woke us up in a way that really directly extended to honoring the rights of all beings.

She focused on women and many oppressed populations. because her basic caring, she just basically honored the intrinsic value of all. And if we look at our limiting beliefs, that's what they don't do. They forget that. So we can't transform our society and we can't heal or free ourselves. We don't examine and undo our limiting stories, our fear-based beliefs. They're the root of suffering. So, as a way to ground our reflection, I'd like to invite you right from the start to scan and

explore for yourself in your own life, these kind of beliefs. So you might right here just take a moment to close your eyes and take a few full breaths as I ask you these questions. So sensing what you know about yourself, what are the most negative beliefs? that you regularly cycle around, the stories you tell yourself about yourself that have real negative judgments, ones that in some way diminish a sense of your value or your goodness or your worth. What are the negative beliefs? Now, as you sense in, for some it might feel very basic, a core belief, I'm flawed, I'm just plain unworthy, unlovable, bad. That might be very familiar. But for others, as you sense your limiting beliefs, they might be more in the form

of I am too, and then you fill in the blank, greedy or needy or angry or hurtful, ways that you think you need to be different. You might sense them in terms of I need to be different in order to be okay or for others to love me and here's how. Maybe I need to be more helpful or more happy or more fun or more intelligent or interesting or successful. Or maybe it's the belief I need to be less insecure. Maybe I need to be more spiritual. What do you believe about yourself that's judgmental and negative? And as I'm speaking, if you decide you'd like to write down or journal here or some of my

negative beliefs, if that's helpful, please do. But if you center right now on one belief about yourself that feels pretty core of where you fall short, what makes you in some way bad or not worthy. And then just take a moment to sense the landscape of your life and how it's affected your life. How is it affected your life to believe that you're always falling short in some way. How has it affected your relationships? Your capacity for intimacy, your creativity or gratification at work, your ability just to enjoy moments. If you'd like, you can continue to reflect a bit, you can journal. For now, mostly sense that we're, we're just being mindful of beliefs. And we're going to practice with this towards the end of our

time, but you might wonder why would these fear-based beliefs, like, you know, I'm flawed, you know, I'm too greedy, I'm too needy, why would a belief like that be a refuge? Why would that be a refuge? And what we see if we look carefully is that fear is our primitive survival energy. It's trying to protect us. And our fear-based belief, beliefs, like I am too greedy or too angry, although it's unpleasant, it got constructed for self-protection. In other words, if you're regularly telling yourself that you're falling short, it's because you're trying to prepare or protect yourself from failing, from rejection. We would rather the security of a negative belief and know where we stand, be oriented,

than the insecurity of not being certain, not knowing. You might consider our evolutionary negativity bias that we had more chance of surviving if we remembered and focused on what could go wrong or what was wrong with us. In other words, as one good friend says, that we're Velcro for negative and Teflon for positive. And we're a social species, so survival's not just physical, it's also relational. So we focus on what's wrong with us. Now, just to name that we need fear

to be alert to danger, but what happens is that the on-button jams and we get habituated in continuously thinking these fear thoughts and fear beliefs. And not only do we have a negativity bias, we also have a confirmation bias, which means we go around life looking for evidence that supports our beliefs. So we actually really are very sticky when anything comes to evidence that something's wrong with us because we have that belief and we're proving it to ourselves. So this lean towards the negative gets amplified in times of widespread societal fear. And it's as we're currently experiencing and we can see how fear hardens our beliefs about others, they become bad others and it leads to violence. And it also deepens our own sense

of personal inadequacy and unworthiness. And we, in a sense, are energetically violating ourselves. And this is where we're going to spend some time. Because an intrinsic part of the spiritual path is learning how to step out of this prison of fear thinking, fear beliefs. We need to a way of turning from fear beliefs, which is a false refuge, to true refuge, which is a refuge in presence and love. And just to think of it that our fear of beliefs keep us feeling separate and threatened and acting out of that. And when we turn to true refuge, we can step out and it reveals our heart and our awareness, who we really are, and then we can live from that. I often think of this quote by Carlos Castagnada. He says, you talk to yourself too much.

Now, you're not unique in that. Every one of us does. We maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A man or woman of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. Now, one of the deepest ways we talk to ourselves is by continually cycling the stories of what's wrong with us. And the world will change completely when we stop telling ourselves these limiting stories. I mean, you might sense for a moment, if nothing's wrong with you, if nothing's wrong with you, then what's here right now? if nothing's wrong with you, then what's here right now? The world changes completely.

So the first step in this process of unhooking from limiting beliefs is we have to realize they're going on. We have to realize that we're talking to ourselves, that we're telling ourselves stories. And I always love this cartoon of a man who's on this straight, long highway, he's entering the desert and there's a sign and it says, you and your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles. And it's like that. We live in this cocoon of our thoughts and our beliefs and they keep us feeling a certain way.

So if we don't know that we're thinking, if we don't know that we're fueling those beliefs, there's no way to step out. So the first step is being mindful of that. And there's a foundational understanding that supports stepping out. out and it's also revealed when we step out, which is that the thoughts and stories we're telling ourselves are not reality. And the message really is this, don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts and don't believe your thoughts.

If you, if at the end of this talk there's a few degrees more of a sense of a sense of of, oh, I don't have to believe my thoughts. That's a few degrees of freedom. So here's why. Your thoughts are a mental representation of reality. They're like a map. You know, they're like a picture of the landscape. They're not the actual living earth. They're not the blossoming flower. They're not the fragrance of the flower. They're not the actual roll of the hills or the wet of the storms. They're a picture of it. They're not reality itself. They're images and soundbites that are produced in the neurochemistry within your brain. They're real, they're happening, but they're not reality. And that's why I love that expression of real but not true,

or real but not truth itself. Now, that's really clear to us when we look, develop mentally through the species and through the lifetime of the kind of thinking and thoughts of humans. We know that primitive thinking is magical thinking. We can see it in mythology and even in children. I love the story of this little girl who asked her mom, are you the tooth fairy? And the mother figures, well, it's about time, she's old enough now, so she tells her the truth. and then the child kind of mulls over that for a few hours and then comes back to her and says, Mom, how do you get into other children's houses? So we can see it.

We just hold these stories. But whether it's primitive thinking are highly evolved, conceptual, abstract thinking, it's still a mental map pointing towards a reality. It's a representation. and some maps are better than others. In other words, some thoughts and beliefs are quite useful. You know, they guide us in navigating well and they guide us in communicating with each other and medical and scientific breakthroughs and building homes and doing our work and helping others. And on the spiritual path, we need skillful thoughts to guide us in practice.

some of our maps, some of our thoughts and beliefs are harmful, which is of course what we're talking about here. They create separations from ourselves and from others and they can fuel addictive and violent behavior. Some of our thoughts and beliefs make us lock into hating ourselves or they keep us anxious or depressed. Now, when we're habitually anxious or fearful, That means a lot of our thoughts are driven by fear and then they just feed more fear in the body. So there's a circling that goes on. And that happens especially during stressful times. And so for many of us, we can watch our minds right now kind of trapped in that circling

of obsessive, kind of anxious thinking, what more is going to go wrong, you know, and sensing our own deficiency and bad othering, and that creates more fear in the body, that creates more of the obsessing in our mind. So it's a sign, again, it's a wake-up. This is real but not true when we are creating bad other or bad self. I think of it as really harmful fake news on an inner level. There's a key teaching of the Buddha, which is whatever the practitioner frequently thinks and ponderes upon, that will become the inclination of their mind. Whatever the practitioner frequently thinks and ponderes upon, that will become the inclination of their mind. Now, this is something you might think, well, that's pretty, that's common sense,

you know, that whatever we practice we get stronger at, whether it's creating harmful states of our body and mind are positive. And yet it's really profound when we look closer in. I mean, you might pause again right here. And if it helps, you might close your eyes. Take a full breath and release it. And feel yourself right here. And now just start telling yourself words like this. Trouble. There's going to be trouble. It's a problem. something's wrong. Trouble. There's a problem here. Something's wrong. Something's wrong with me. And keep doing that for a few moments. Let the tone be certain. This is trouble. This is a problem. And check your body. Check your heart. Sense the space, quality of your mind and presence.

Notice what happens. Okay, let's break the state. Take it. Take another nice full breath. Inhale, exhale, you might shake your arm, shake your hands, just move a little bit because moving helps to break states. Okay, now coming back into stillness. Just these words. Okay, remember kindness, care. May this be a chance to open my heart. What might I learn?

Continue on your own for a moment, kindness, care, what can I learn? opening a heart and bring your attention to your body and notice what happens. Notice what happens to the mind. Neuroscientists have scanned the brain while people are having different kinds of thoughts and when we have fear thoughts, the learning centers in the mind shut down. When we're feeling bad about ourselves or ashamed, the learning centers in our mind shut down. We have way less resourcefulness. So, again, thoughts and beliefs are not reality, but they're real and they directly impact our body and our capacity to respond to life. So we need to be mindful of the fact of thinking. We need to be able to say to ourselves, okay, this is a belief, this is a thought going on,

so we have some choice. And this is called metacognition when we're aware. of our thoughts, because if you're mindful of your thoughts, then you have some choice. Another story, child, parent. Child says to his mom, Mommy, imagine you are surrounded by 10 hungry tigers. What would you do? And she tries to think of, you know, clever escapes, but she goes, I don't know. And then he said to her, stop imagining. And so, it is. And this is really the basic gift of mindfulness, that you learn to recognize thinking and open back into the senses. And it's a crucial training. Because if you can recognize your thinking and come back to your senses, if you know the difference between virtual and reality,

then you can make some choices. And I have seen over and over again, especially when people deep in practice at our retreats, that the big takeaway, I am not my thoughts. I don't have to believe my thoughts or believe my beliefs. We can start discerning between, oh, so this belief is, as much as I might believe it, is really hurting my body, hurting my heart, not making me respond well to the world. So my first pitch really in this talk, is a daily practice to some degree where you're just simply practicing, waking up out of thoughts, noticing it as virtual reality, noticing the difference between that and being right here in your senses. Now, here's where the challenge comes up. And that is that when the beliefs are

very strong and insistent, insistent, such as the belief that I'm fundamentally flawed or unlovable, they're very, very sticky. And it's not just the mind saying that. The body feels it. We're in a full limbic trance. It's like our most primitive brain is taken over and those are the feelings in our body and they keep on generating the thoughts and the beliefs. So, whenever you are suffering, you're believing something untrue and yet you're hooked. And so the rest of this exploration together is how do we unhook? And one piece that's helpful in setting the frame for unhooking is to just sense, well, where did the belief come from?

I mean, did you get born feeling flawed? Born believing you are flawed? Were you flawed? You know, limiting beliefs are seated. They get installed by caregivers. And, you know, really, we learn who we are through their messages and their mirroring and by our society. We are thinking society's thoughts. We are believing society's beliefs. I mean, we don't get born thinking we're inferior or superior because of our skin color. We learn it. or that you're supposed to have a certain symmetrical featured face, or your body shape is supposed

to be a certain way, to be attractive, or that you're supposed to have a certain kind of intelligence. We're taught all these things. We're taught that other types of people are wrong or bad. And our reality is hugely shaped by social media. And this is a more recent part of, that's the key instrument in current days. that is shaping our sense of what's true and we're believing it. When you think of it and what I'm going to be saying these next few moments, I listen to a very, very powerful Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, the Social Dilemma and I really recommend it. It was very

revealing to me. Social media is designed to sustain our attention. It's driven by capitalism, sustain attention so that we then respond to ads and so on. So it's designed to sustain our attention. And what most grabs our attention? Well, stuff that fuels our anger and our dividedness, we get fed stories that have had the impact of further hardening opposing realities. We don't have a consensual reality on truth at all anymore. It creates bad others. It makes dialogue more difficult. So, if you want to have more understanding of how our realities are shaped by technology, that is a fabulous documentary. And it shows in particular, and this is one of the most heartbreaking pieces in it, that since social media, since it became much more active, like

around 2012, 2013, we have had a huge spike, especially in middle school girls and high school girls in anxiety and depression, a huge spike and in suicide. And it's heartbreaking how the messages that come through social media have led to not liking ourselves for these younger girls. So coming back to looking on an individual level, whether your belief is that you're superior to others are inferior, we are unable to realize the intrinsic value, the basic worth of ourselves or others whenever there's a sense of superior or inferior. In other words, we're blocked from recognizing that sacred essence, that basic value. And we're focusing right now on how our beliefs that something's wrong with us blocks that.

And by the way, when we feel flawed, we are looking through eyes that are going to be looking for what's wrong and others too. And that sense of separation will make it impossible for us to truly see and trust the goodness in others. So how to unhook from the beliefs that separate us? And the first thing I've mentioned is catch on to the fact that you're having a belief, that there's a map going on in your mind and it's causing pain. And then, the trick is to find a pathway to remembering and reconnecting a more whole true sense of who you are. And that pathway is based in presence and in love. As most of you know, when we are feeling like we're terrible person, we're down on ourselves,

another can't talk us out of it, it can't be cognitive, an argument on why you're a good person. What really wakes us up out of that is some taste of love and presence. I'd like to share a story with you. It's one of the stories that's most touched me. It was shared by Frank O'Sesteskeskes, who wrote the five invitations, and that's where it is. He describes accompanying a young man named Matthew, who's dying of AIDS. Matthew's gay, longtime Buddhist practitioner.

So he's suffering from high fevers and pneumonia and also in the fear of his passing, he is grasped on to a very old fear belief. Now, background, he was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family where the commandments of a punishing God had really been beaten into him by a kind of fire and brimstone preacher, man of a father. So this was the belief that as he was close to death, he felt certain that God would condemn him to eternity, for eternity and hell for his sexual orientation. So this was a limbic fear belief that took over.

And this is the story intrinsically bad. And then the fear of failure and rejection and condemnation, his version. So Frank tried to support him, and he oriented him towards mindfulness and compassion practices, the ones he had studied in love for these many years that this man had been practicing, and he created an altar at his bedside with his beloved Buddhist statue, but it didn't calm him because the belief was coming from an earlier time in his life, and he held his hand and he massaged his feed and he played favorite chanting music still, no change. So finally, the doctor ordered a sedative, and even that didn't work, he was so gripped by

the trance of fear and by the dominance of that fear belief. And this is what Frank writes. He says, by two in the morning, I was exhausted and feeling ineffective and powerless, and I chose to go home and get some sleep. On the drive there, for some unknown reason, I thought of my first Holy Communion, the Catholic ritual that ushers young innocence into the loving lap of God. When I got home, I searched through my storage closet to find my memory box, a small collection of a Mentos I hold dear.

Here I located a five-inch plastic figurine of Jesus surrounded by lambs and little children. Instead of going to bed, I drove straight back to the hospital. As Matthew continued to moan and shout and toss and turn in agony, I took down the Dhanka and replaced the Buddhist statue with the small. small plastic Jesus. Just as I was smoothing the altar cloth, a cleaning woman named Dina came into the room and spotted the figure. Setting her mop to one side, she said with great enthusiasm, Merciful Jesus, when His kindness is with us, everything is all right. At once Matthew's eyes locked onto Dina. An angelic smile spread across his face as he pivoted toward the altar to gazed

at the plastic Jesus statue, and then back in Dina's direction. His entire body relaxed. In that moment, the punishing God of Matthew's childhood, the one whose wrath had been taught to fear and whose judgment had made him feel like a terrible person, was transformed into the merciful God he also knew and loved. The one who adored all his children, no matter their so-called faults and failures and flaws. A kind of forgiving, all accepting, and benevolent God. Dina's faith in God's love was so secure that it lent Matthew exactly the strength he needed

to defeat his inner critic. I left them there together. They didn't need me. When I eventually returned to the hospital later that afternoon, Matthew was sitting up in bed, smiling, and eating a bowl of jello. I think you can feel it in this story, this shift from this trans of fear where we're caught by this kind of limbic brain belief. And he was caught in the god of his limbic brain to a larger benevolent presence,

trusting in something much more beautiful and loving and inclusive, which actually correlates to the more evolved brain, the more sense of a whole brain. And I wanted to share this with you because it's such an example of what happens when someone is deep in the trance of separation and self-hate and how hard it is to shake that and of what's needed. And what's needed really varies. It comes in different shapes and forms for each of us, but it always has to do with some pathway of remembering love, of remembering a larger belonging, whenever our heart is touched,

it softens and we feel a part of something larger. And it can happen because we remember to offer ourselves compassion and messages from our own high or awake or loving self. And it can happen when we imagine some spiritual figure or friend or dear one offering us care or when we're actually in another's company and we feel their love, a moment of truly feeling loved, of truly feeling love, can start to undo a whole lifetime of feeling flawed. This, my friends, is really the end of rain. It's what I mean by nurture. In some way, we nurture ourselves back into feeling the belonging to something larger, that that's the essence of our goodness, that belonging, that sacredness that

is part of this whole world. And it's an ongoing practice as we undo these limiting beliefs to nurture. And it's most impactful if we first arrive and full presence, which is why doing the rain practice, which ends in N, is an amazingly effective way to begin to transform and awaken from limiting beliefs. Let me share a story of how it worked with one woman. She was in her mid-40s, single, and I was meeting with her right after a relationship she was in, broke up, and she was very, very gripped by the belief that I'll never find a partner. They'll always leave. It will never work. I can't be close with anyone. So we brought rain to it and the R was recognizing what was going on in the moment. For her it was a sense of

depression, despair, loneliness. The A of rain, allow. Let that be there. And it's kind of like saying, pause, just let it be there. The eye of rain is investigate. And this is where you begin to shine a light on what's really happening. And so as I invited her to investigate and I guided her, I asked her, what are you believing when this is going on? And the core belief, I'm just not lovable. I'm just not lovable.

And I asked her a question, I said, is that really? really true. And she said, look at all the evidence. It's never worked out with anyone. And I asked her again, I said, are you certain that it's true that you're not lovable? And she says, well, it feels true. I don't know for sure, but it feels true. And then I asked her how long she'd believe that she was unlovable. And as it turns out, her father left, I think, in first grade, and she always felt like he left because of her. It was her fault. And so that's how long she could remember believing that in some way nobody would want to be with her. And I asked her another question. I said, well, can you sense the effect of believing that you're

unlovable, what it's had on your life? And she said, well, I never trusted I could ever, anybody would really like me, that I could ever be close with anyone. And it stopped me from, like never be spontaneous. I couldn't take risks. I'd always too afraid of failing. So I just, she summed it up, it stopped me from living my life. I felt like I was always waiting. And then I asked her, so what's it like right now as you bear a witness, seeing the effect

of believing that you were unlovable through all the, those years. And that's when there was this huge wave of sorrow and she started grieving. And I often think of this as kind of the ouch moment when we sense the landscape of our life and how many moments we've lost from not trusting ourselves. How many moments we've lost from thinking we were bad in some way. And there's grief that can come up with that when you really contact that with presence. And so then I asked you, you know, really, what is this part of you that feels unlovable? What is it most need from your most wise self? What is it most need? And she said, well, she needs to know she's okay and

that she's lovable, that she's loved, that she's really, that she can be embraced. Then we went to the end of rain, that's nurture. And I asked her to call that, that wise self fully forward and to offer that to the part of her that felt unlovable. And she also called forward what she thinks of as the divine mother, the love of the universe to back her up. And she sent some messages to that part of her that felt unlovable, which were just, you know, trust your goodness. Trust the brightness and honesty and longing to grow. That's really who you are. And she also sent the message, I love you and I'm not leaving. After some moments, she just rested, and this is the part of rain that I call after the rain. And it's a crucial part of the practice.

And I said, so what's here now? She said, well, you know, there's just a tender presence. I said, just rest in that. And then I asked her, what would your life be like if you didn't think anything was wrong with you. And she said, I just got a lot of energy from that. I'd be more adventurousome. If there was nothing wrong with me, I'd feel alive and free. And then I asked her another question. I said, who would you be if you didn't think there was anything wrong with you? And she said, I don't know, just more open and happy. And as she rested in that, there was a real shift in identity. I mean, she went from a person in the grip of feeling unlovable, personal badness, to really this field of a much more free, spacious, tender, open

kind of presence. Now, a little bit of a postscript for you because I know her well, I've been tracking, and she is in a long-term relationship now and still working with insecurity. she's done many, many rounds of rain. And the question she most loves that she asks herself a lot is, who would I be if I didn't think anything was wrong with me? Who would I be if I didn't think anything was wrong with me? And she said because it gives her an instant taste of the freedom that's possible, the aliveness outside of the prison of the mind.

The writer Veronica Tugaleva says this. She says, we speak about losing our minds as if it's a bad thing. I say lose your mind. Do it purposefully. Find out who you really are beyond your thoughts and beliefs. So let me review a few bits of what I just described in terms of using rain to work with beliefs, uprooting, limiting beliefs. And if this is a pathway that is appealing, you can find a lot more in my book Radical Compassion. There's a whole chapter just on working with beliefs. The key thing is that, as you notice, we spend a lot of time investigating. And to be able to free ourselves from beliefs, we have to bring them into the light of awareness. And the question, is it true? you might have wondered when I said to her, is it true that you're unlovable?

Well, we habitually think what we're believing is true. So just asking that question opens the possibility of a larger understanding that this is a map. It's a painful map and we really don't know what the truth is. We have to find our way to that. But believing the map is not going to help us. You might have noticed I asked her, how long have you been feeling this and what's the impact on your life? Well, if you can see the suffering that a limiting belief has caused through your whole life, if you can really see it and let yourself be present with that, you'll get tender. Your heart will open to yourself.

We don't want to see our own being suffering. It's a kind of soul sadness that comes when we see the landscape of our life and that we've been trapped. So it's a powerful question to sense, what's it been like to believe this through my whole life? That's part of investigating. And then for the nurturing piece, a reminder that nurturing can come from any source. You can sense yourself nurturing from your own most awake heart, or you can invite somebody else into your mind that you trust and imagine and sense the nurturing from them. And as you saw with Matthew, the nurturing can come from whatever pathway spiritually that is deeply familiar to us and we can call on a spiritual figure if that resonates. It's really any message of love

that can help to deepen our sense of belonging. So the power of the power of the power of for this woman was, who would you be if you didn't believe, you know, that something was wrong? And it's a really powerful question to ask yourself because there's a deep shift in identity when we are able to step out of our beliefs and loosen them some. Then as Veronica to Galeva says, we find out who we are beyond our thoughts and beliefs. We find out that field of awareness and presence and love that's really our home. So a reminder is this, that the Petri dish for fear beliefs is feeling separate, disconnected, isolated, and not belonging.

To heal, to remember our intrinsic worth, we need to reconnect. We need to find our way back into a sense of belonging to ourselves and to each other. and to our earth, we need to reconnect in love. Now, the beginning of the talk, I dedicated the talk to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And it's because she's really a model of someone who gave her life to ensuring that the intrinsic worth and value of each be honored. This is in the societal way. In the moments that we feel, as I mentioned, inferior are superior, we've lost touch with that

sense of worth, of that sacredness. Our judgment of ourselves, of each other, it obscures the goodness, the goal. So the prayer here is that will deepen dedication to honoring our own intrinsic work. earth because that allows us to widen the circles so that we can realize the sacredness of all, life everywhere. And this is absolutely needed for the healing of our world. So let's practice. Let's close with a practice and take a few moments if you'd like to shift your position so that you're comfortable. Take a few full breaths. Now, scanning your life. You might bring to mind a repeated experience in a relationship that brings up suffering.

Could be with a partner, somebody else in your family, friends, somebody at work. When you've identified an experience where you end up feeling hurt or angry or distanced, ask yourself, well, what am I believing about myself? See if you can recognize, are you believing that you're not lovable, that you're not worthy, that you're not able to handle things well, that you're going to be rejected? What's the deepest belief about yourself? So, recognizing whatever you can, that you're believing, and for a moment allowing, and allowing doesn't mean you're agreeing with what you believe, it means that you're pausing here

so that you can begin to shine the light of awareness and begin to investigate. And you might ask yourself, is it true? Is that true about me? Is it really true? See if you can sense the possibility of real but not true. You might ask yourself, how long have I been believing this about myself? There may be some image that comes, some feelings, and then asking yourself, what has it been like to live with this belief, this limiting negative

belief? How has it affected my relationships, work, moments, at leisure? How has it affected my body, my heart? And from the place in you that's most caring and wise that's witnessing this, you might sense what's most needed. What is this part of you most need? How does it want you to be with it? What's the message that you might offer right now? What might you ask yourself to trust or to remember? If it helps to call on a spiritual figure or a friend, part of the natural world to help you offer care,

just feel that you might have your hand on your heart right now that you could offer care through your hand to your heart. Care and the wish or prayer to trust your goodness, to trust love, to turn towards love, to take refuge in love. And to take some moments to notice the presence that's here. The shift from the beginning of feeling a self that's in some way limited, the negative beliefs about yourself, to just as presence. It might be just a few degrees of more open and tender,

are very profoundly so. and you might ask yourself, what would your life be like if you weren't believing something was wrong with you? Perhaps you can feel it in your body, increase freedom. Who would you be if you didn't believe something was wrong with you? And to feel in the depth of your heart that longing and that dedication to waking up to the truth of who you and we all are, to that sacred presence that lives through this life. When you're ready, please take a few full breaths, opening your eyes. And thank you, friends, for exploring this with me. Thank you for your presence. And I look forward to when we next are together. Namaste and blessings.

For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.