Tara Brach - From Judgment to Self-Compassion (retreat talk) (2018-12-30)

Episode Date: January 4, 2019

From Judgment to Self-Compassion (retreat talk) (2018-12-30) - When we've turned on ourselves with blame and aversion, it's very difficult to arouse self-compassion. This talk looks at the role of nurturing in freeing our hearts, and offers practice in three key steps that enable us to embrace ourselves with a healing presence. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and good evening. I'd like to start by really bowing to you and your practice. It's been really something and we've talked about it a bit over meals, just beholding the quality of realness and willingness and honesty and heart opening that is here in the space that's here.

So it just feels like a real pleasure to be with you. And the talk tonight is a bit in the spirit of this. It's really how to let vulnerability be truly a pathway to freedom. And it's following very much, I hope, in the footsteps. of I just loved the way Louisa kind of outlined and shared with us just these ways of being with these challenging energies. And then Anam Thubten's just beautiful presentation and sharing about just the nurturing of compassion, the beautiful ways we can do that.

So I'm hoping to continue in that vein. Maybe thought it'd start with a couple of stories that actually take place in true. churches. And this is, the first one is little girl and her brother were sitting together in the church, and he's, I think, four years old. And he's giggling and really in his own little world talking out loud and tumbling around on his chair and so on. Finally, his big sister has enough. And so she's going to kind of teach him something. So she says, you're not supposed to talk out loud in church. And he says, yeah, who's going to stop me? You know, that kind of thing. And she points to the back of the church and says, you see those two men standing back there?

Yeah, they're hushers. They're going to get you. So the reason I thought of sharing is because here we're in this silent retreat, and I was kind of imagining our stationing hushers around for, you know, when your mind gets busy, you know. And of course it doesn't work with our minds, and we have these inner hushers, you know, these kind of parts of ourselves that are monitoring how we're doing and telling us we're supposed to have a quieter mind or different kind of thoughts or a different mood or, you know,

those are our inner hushers. And I was really thinking about how when we're at war with how our mind is, when we're at war with the fact that there's thinking, that our minds get busy, that our minds are get obsessive, we're going to be at war for the rest of our lives. Because these minds just do what they do and these body minds produce these emotions and we live in this world where there's all these rules and regulations and standards that govern how we're supposed to be. All the time we move through this life with this superimposed idea or map of our

really how we should be looking. You know, how are we dressing? As spiritual people, how should we look as whatever people? We have these ideas about how we're supposed to behave. And at retreats we have these ideas about what's supposed to be going on inside us. And then sometimes the thinner husher gets really punitive because it seems like something is wrong. And I wonder if you just even reflect on today, if there were any moments that, you know, something was going on and some part of you thought it shouldn't be going on like this. I'm not asking for a hand raise right now. Okay, another church story, another young child's acting up during the morning worship service

and the parents are trying to control them doing the best they can to maintain some water. Finally they give up and the father picks the little fellow up and Sterlingley's walking them, you know, up the aisle on its way out. And just before he gets out the doors, the little boy calls loudly to the congregation, pray for me, you guys, pray for me. So what I really liked about is we have this, I think of it as the second arrow, these inner hushers and the punitive husher and the response to it really when we start getting that we're on our own case is really to call for compassion to pray, to really ask for compassion to come in. Because in a deep way there's never healing or waking up because of some sort of punitive

measures. It doesn't work in prisons and it doesn't work internally. And I think we can understand it and that's one of my, I turn to evolution all the time in my own mind because it helps me to have things not be so personal and to be clearer. There's a teaching story that most of you have probably heard. It's circulated a lot and it's the one where an elder, an elder grandmother's asked, you know, how did you become so wise and spiritual and, you know, open heart and so on and she says well there's two wolves in my heart okay and there's a one of the

wolves is the wolf of love and the other is the wolf of hate and she says and I know that everything depends on which one I feed so I remember hearing that story at first and going yeah that's right which one I feed and then I went wait a minute you know the wolf of hate what happens if we don't nourish the wolf of hate? And what do we really mean by feeding? And isn't it that primitive... Think of our brain. The wolf of hate is really our reptilian and limbic system, right?

It's the wolf that... It's the part of our body mind that is designed for aggression and defending. and the more there's unmet needs, the more it locks into a wolf of hate, right? And we don't get born hating. We get born with the capacity to defend in a grass, and it becomes hatred if we have unmet needs. So how do we relate to the wolf of hate? The more there are unmet needs, the more our sense of who we are gets identified,

with the primitive wolf. Does that make sense? The more our needs are not met. And by the way, we all have unmet needs, and if it's not through our, even if our caregivers were great, we're in, remember, that PTSD society, we're in a society that its very nature is to condition us in ways that are hurtful.

It's not our conditioning. It's our society's conditioning. And our society has the primitive wolf in our society is that all those tendencies towards consuming an addiction and all those tendencies towards unreal othering, making others bad, creating fear, need to defend. So one of the ways that we often describe this is from Joseph Campbell who describes awareness as a big circle and there's a line going through and many of you are familiar with us and I want to come back to offer it for tonight's reflection that anything below the line in

awareness that is outside of our awareness and we get identified with it. In other words, the unfelt, unseen parts of your psyche are the very ones that your identity gets wrapped around. parts of you that you don't like, that you push away, that's actually where you're most identified. So what happens is, back to the wolves, when there's unmet needs, the energy gets stronger, it goes more below the line, we get more identified. If there's trauma, way below the line, way identified. And the major reactions from the wolf, from that identified place, is to blame.

And that's where we're going to spend our time. When we're identified, when we're hijacked by the limbic system, when we're caught up in the primitive wolf, our tendency is to blame ourselves and blame others. The second arrow is when we're caught up, you know, we're feeling shame and hurt and fear and anger and then we add that arrow of I'm bad. And that's the final thrust of the primitive wolf to really trap us. I'm bad. And of course we say you're bad too. So our theme, our exploration is going to be really how do we heal and evolve for you.

from being identified with the primitive wolf. In other words, how do we really open up to our wholeness? And one of the teachings I find most powerful came from an attachment psychologist, kind of evolutionary psychologist, Kozalino, who said, it's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the nurtured. It's not survival of the fittest. the fittest, the one that can win, fight, fight, freeze the most. It's survival of the nurture.

So the inquiry for us really is when we're stuck, how do we nurture? Remember it's unmet needs always. When we're acting and others are acting in ways that are harmful, it's unmet needs. How do we nurture? There's some wisdom that knows that we need to love. ourselves and each other into healing. So I want to share a story that is for me a powerful illustration of both our need to feel nurtured and the complexity of it.

This is a woman writes, my mother always assured me that unspeakable punishments were bound to befall any child as naughty as I. I was. If I were you, she said I'd be afraid to go to sleep at night for fear God would strike me dead. She would speak these words softly, regrettably, as if saddened by her errant daughter's fate, and I thought myself unloved and unlovable. In addition to threatening me with thoughts of eternal damnation, mother also gave me fear of strangers, germs, disease, and food poisoning. A precocious and imaginative child, I added to the lists and bizarre fears of my own, falling into the fifth dimension, spontaneous human combustion.

When I was suspended from my private school at the age of 15 for a harmless prank, the head mistress referred to my behavior as damnable. This was no big news to my mother or me. What was news was that I had the highest IQ and the lowest grades in the entire student body. I took pride in the fact that although I was dysfunctional and an underachiever, or at least I wasn't stupid. The most devastating words my mother ever spoke to me came when I asked her if she loved me. I had just been escorted home by the police after one of my many attempts to run away so

it was bad timing on my part. She answered, how could anyone ever love you? It took me almost 50 years to heal the damage from all her ugly remarks. Recently discussing eating disorders with my therapist, I related a childhood ritual of mine, intending it to be an amusing anecdote to illustrate how far back my eating problems went. I even laughed as I spoke, poking gentle fun at myself. It was only when I noticed she was watching me with sympathy rather than amusement that I became aware of the tears on my own cheeks.

This is what I told her. From the age of five or six until well into my teens, whenever I had trouble sleeping, I would slip out from under my covers and steal into the kitchen for bread or cheese and I'd carry it back to bed with me and there I'd pretend my hands belonged to someone else, a comforting, reassuring being without a name, an angel perhaps. The right hand would feed me little bites of cheese or bread as the left hand stroked my cheeks and my hair, my eyes closed. I would whisper softly to myself, there there, go to sleep. You're safe now. Everything will be all right. I love you.

So we see here the intelligence that's saying in some way nurture, nurture. And we also see how it gets kind of marbled because when there's unmet needs we can often turn to substitutes to nurture. So nurturing needs to be wise. Many people say, well, couldn't my self-compassion be indulgent or pitying? It needs to be wise compassion. And what allows compassion to be wise is if we have contacted directly, wakefully, the vulnerability. That's usually what's missing. We try to nurture, but it's kind of a way of getting away from the vulnerability, not coming out of the contact with it.

Does that make sense? I'll say a little more. One of the little mythic stories I like is of a sage who is known to be very, very wise and people would travel long distances through the wilderness and over mountains and cross raging rivers to get to him. When he'd come, they'd, you know, they'd have to meditate for a while and then he'd swear them to secrecy. And finally, when, you know, they'd tell him what was going on and then he'd say, I have one question for you. What are you unwilling to feel? What are you unwilling to feel? And if we're really honest with ourselves,

we'll start noticing how we pull away from directly feeling discomfort all the time, how we stay busy during our day and daily life, we stay busy thinking and doing, because to stop, to really stop, to let go of the doing means opening to what we've been trying to avoid. We get kind of plunged into an undefended presence and that kind of existential vulnerability. So, what do we do? Instead, when we're alone, we always think of things to do and we try to figure things out. Have you noticed how many moments you spend trying to figure something out? Like we're on our way to the next thing and always trying to work out stuff?

And then when we're with others, rather than feel the vulnerability, we fill in the silences with conversation, we try to present ourselves or look good, we try to avoid making mistakes We don't risk spontaneity because there's something about controlling so we don't have to be vulnerable. There's a story of a Baptist pastor. All my stories have a similar theme here. He's presenting a children's sermon to a group of children. And he asks them if they know what the resurrection is. and now answering a question for a child in front of a congregation is a big deal. So he asked them this and one little boy just starts waving his hand so he goes, yeah, yeah.

And the little boy said, I know that if you have a resurrection that lasts more than four hours, you're supposed to call the doctor. It took them ten minutes to quiet down the congregation. A resurrection that lasts over four hours. So, the more below the line, the more the unmet needs, the more there's a feeling of vulnerability we're trying to get away from and the most direct strategy is blame. I'd like just to check that out a little bit, if you will, just to check in for a few moments. Let me just ask you a few questions.

The first question is if you bring to mind somebody that you're chronically in the habit of blaming or resenting and this is not somebody where there's trauma maybe but just somebody where you just feel a lot of annoyance and blame. Some of you might not have somebody in mind like that but if there is and it could be someone you don't know that's in the more political realm. Leave it to your imagination. But sense where you're blaming and sense, you know, kind of what triggers the blaming, and here's the inquiry.

If you had to put aside the idea that that person's bad or wrong, really put it aside, what is it that's difficult that you'd have to feel inside you? Would you have to feel powerless? fear, hurt, your own flaws. Well, if they're not wrong then I'm wrong. Related reflection. Since somewhere you're blaming yourself. Something you're blaming yourself for that really has some charge,

somewhere that you get on your own case. And again, if you had to put aside, like really put down the idea that you're in any way bad or wrong. In other words, if you had to put a side, side that blame, then what would you have to feel that's difficult? With both, can you sense the vulnerability, the layers of vulnerability that are underneath blame? And so there's an invitation to keep exploring this when blame comes up.

Well if I wasn't blaming, what would I have to feel? Is there something I'm unwilling to feel? So you can continue to explore that on your own. own, sit with your eyes closed or open, blaming, feeling punishing towards another, not only does it block the vulnerability but it's really blocking the one place that needs attention that can lead to healing. There's a story saw in a movie that's called Drowning Man's Trial. It's a ritual that an African tribe has where if somebody commits a murder, the family of the person killed goes down to a riverbank and the person that committed the murder is

their hands are tied, their legs are tied and they're thrown into this river and the family has to choose whether to let the murderer drown or to save them. And it said that if they let let the murderer drown, they'll get justice but no healing. But if they say they agree to save the murderer, they say that then they'll begin this long process of healing and the understanding is that vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. It's a lazy form of working with fear, working with hurt. When we act out of blame, we can't pay attention to the unmet needs inside us that really need attention.

So what I'd like to do now is explore the three basic steps when we're deepening attention that help us turn blame into a portal for freedom and awakening and healing. And I thought the way I'd do it is to show these steps through a story. I thought I'd share a personal story of one of the, I've only been blaming maybe three or four times in my life, one of those times. Now this story involves Jonathan. I want to tell you that I mentioned to him that I was going to share the this share a story with you about him tonight and his response was, watch out, I'm giving a talk

tomorrow night. So, but I'm not going to censor anything. When I first met Jonathan 2002 or 2003, I was really, really physically active. I was running five days a week and, you know, swimming, hiking, biking, the whole thing. And within two years of living together, I had gone into an illness and spiraled down. It's a part of hypermobility, a genetic disorder I have. So I could barely walk up an incline. I couldn't swim, nothing. In fact, my first gift to him was very early on in our relationship I gave him a wetsuit because

I wanted a playmate going boogie boarding and things like that. Well, within two years we were up in Cape Cod and I couldn't even walk on sand nonetheless get into the ocean. I want to say that I spiraled down, leveled out and have come up a lot of much recovered. So when I tell this I want to, I need to tell you the ending is that I'm much better because I get a lot of notes otherwise. So there we were, we had gone to Cape Cod, I couldn't do anything. In fact, to get to the beach, I remember at one point some people had to carry me because

I couldn't walk. And we got home and I really withdrew and I was depressed but I was also felt very distance and I was very irritable and I felt very judgmental and whenever Jonathan would try to help, I think of it like fixing and so I got really blaming. and irritable about that. And of course I was blaming myself. And I remember one day being, we have a hammock and being in the hammock and just realizing, okay, this is the suffering of separation. You know, I'm feeling that suffering. This is, blaming him, blaming myself. This is, I was pretty miserable. So I decided to practice rain as I often do and it's

rain on blame where I'd sense, you know, the irritability and sense. on and very quickly recognizing allowing it and then investigating I could feel right under it was this sinking feeling that was a lot of fear and very specifically really insecure about our relationship. And if there was a belief to name it was, well I'm not the woman he married so maybe he's not going to want to be with somebody that's this infirm and no fun. and real, real insecurity and ashamed, like ashamed of my sickness. So I got in touch with it very, very in my body, that sense of the core feeling of unlovable.

Like my lovability was very conditioned on being a fun, healthy person so I felt unlovable. And that was very deep squeeze in my heart. So that was the investigating. And when I, the final bit of investigating is asking, well, what is this place need? That's the transition into nurturing, okay? So I asked myself, what is this place need? And this place needed to feel lovable and you can deepen the question of what does it need, look, what will allow this place to feel lovable?

And for me, the pathway that works the best of the best, you know, what does it? best for nurturing is I imagine and sense a formless and a loving presence, but it's a very, it's not just this vast loving awareness, it's very intimate, kind of sentient presence that feels both personal and impersonal. It's like right here with me but it's also vast. And just to sense this loving presence really offering love and blessings right to my brow and just washing through me. And so that's like to feel lovable.

It was that washing through, washing through. And what happened is the more I opened to a sense of that nurturing, the more there was a dissolving into just being that presence. There was no longer a self-wanting nurturing. There was just this feeling of compassionate presence. And in those moments, and this is a really key juncture, a key step, in those moments, there's this realizing that this loving presence is more the truth of who I am than any story of a sick self or a well self or a self that's insecure or a self that's okay.

It's this, this is really home. This is the truth. And for me it's really important to stay there, not to go on, get off the hammock and run up until Jonathan my insight, but just to really register and resonate and be in that presence because it's so easy to quickly go back into our narrative. And the more moments we spend in that non-cognitive realization of, ah, this awake, open tenderness is, this is it, it's empty, it's radiant, it's loving, this is it, you know. The more familiar it gets, the more quickly I can come back to it.

So as it happened I did get off the hammock and I did, you know, at some point we talked And it was still hard because it's a vulnerable thing to say, you know, I've been feeling these insecurity and underneath my, you know, orneriness is this insecurity. But because I was in such a real place and Jonathan was able to say, well, you know, the fixing, underneath the fixing was this helplessness because I love you and I want you to feel better and I felt powerless. And then in that connecting, it was more intimate. then, you know, the vulnerability led to a really profound kind of intimacy.

So there are three pieces I want to flag in what I've just shared that really have to do with any time you find yourself stuck and the primitive wolf is in reactivity, in hurt, in shame, in blame, in anger, how to wake up out of it. And just to name that for me it's not one round, it's always many rounds of waking up. And the first step is that when you find yourself stuck, there's always going to be some storyline about what's going on, about, you know, that person wouldn't have done it unless there was really something wrong with me or that person's bad because or whatever it is, make a U-turn and instead of aiming your attention at the storyline, make the U-turn

and come right back, what is I'm unwilling to feel? Where do I feel most vulnerable? What's really happening inside right now? And it's very... The investigating, as I mentioned, it has some cognitive elements often. Like I realized I had a belief that if I'm not physically healthy and I'm not physically healthy and fun, I'm not going to be desirable and attractive and want to and a good mate. I had some beliefs.

But it was more I had to get under that to the very feeling of the insecurity, the feeling of unlovable. If you don't contact the felt sense, the nurturing will not be full, it will not be complete. So that's step number one is to contact that vulnerability and really sense where does it hurt. we really feel it. This is Annie Lindbergh. She says, I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable. That's the conscious choice. That's what we can choose, this willingness

to stay. So that's step one, really contacting the vulnerability, letting it be a portal. And out of touching vulnerability there's a tenderness that arises. But we need to find our, each of us, each of you will find a path or separate, or separate you. several pathways to what I'm calling nurturing, which is really arousing compassion, contacting the compassion that's larger than a separate self. It's your drawing, you're really calling on the compassion that is this universal loving that's here. For me, you know, I had the pathway I described.

I had this sense of a loving presence and this imagining and feeling at Washington. through, there's a line from one spiritual master, Punji, Love is always loving you. Love is always loving you. And when I call on love in that way, there's a sense that it's always been there, I just didn't pay attention. So we each find our pathways. And for some, the pathways putting your hands on your heart, it's so counterfeit to the habitual way we relate to ourselves. Our habitual way is to, in some way, be judging,

rejecting, telling a story about ourselves. But to pause and genuinely offer tenderness, that can rearrange our conditioning for a lifetime. Of course you need to do in many rounds. To find out if there's certain words that that vulnerable place needs to hear. To sense that if you're small self, if you feel very caught in a small self, you'll get what one friend of mine just yesterday termed self-compassion fatigue. And I think it's a great term and thank you, thank you, because if we keep trying to offer compassion to ourselves but we're feeling really regressed, it's going to be like that little kid that feels like, well I shouldn't have to be holding myself, I should have something

larger holding me. And that's fair. We have an unmet need for a larger, more universal embrace. So reach out. You can use your imagination, imagine, image in, to reach out whether it's as that sense the image of the figure of a deity. Or you can imagine somebody you love that's alive or not a love and sense that you're them looking at you a certain way or feel your hand on your heart and imagine that

it's their energy flowing through. You can use that as a bridge. I want to share one story of nurture that feels important to me of the way one man was nurtured because it speaks to how each of us needs to find the pathway that resonates. It's always ultimately formless love. Love is always loving you. But it comes through different channels and your own personal biographical history will sometimes help you find your way to that channel.

So this is a story told by Frank Osseseske who founded Zen Hospice and has accompanied many people and they're dying. And he was accompanying young man and he was a long-time Buddhist practitioner. He was gay and he was dying of AIDS and he was suffering all sorts of high fevers and pneumonia and he came from a super fundamentalist Christian family and had a very punishing God and his father was this fire and brimstone preacher kind of guy. And so deep down as he was approaching his death he felt certain that God was going to condemn him to an eternity in hell for his sexual orientation.

And this happens often that long-buried cultural mores and early religious training all of a sudden can jump to the fore when we're in very, very vulnerable places. So Frank just tried to support him all the ways he could and orienting him towards mindfulness and all the compassion practices that this man knew and he created an altar by his bedside with a tanka, that's a traditional Tibetan painting. and that didn't calm him, and he was massaging his feet and so on. And finally he ordered a sedative because this guy's name's Matthew was so upset. He was living in such shame and dread.

So Frank writes this, he says, by two in the morning I was exhausted and feeling ineffective and powerless and chose to go home and get some sleep. And on the drive there, for some unknown reason, I thought of my first Holy Communion. And then when I got home I searched through my storage collection. closet to find my memory box, a small collection of amentoes I hold dear. And 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. And as Matthew continued to moan and shout and toss and turn in agony, I took down the

Thunka and replaced the Buddha statue with the small plastic Jesus. Just as I was smoothing the altar cloth, a cleaning woman named Dina came in the room and spotted the figurine. 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 gaze and at the Jesus statue and then back in Dina's direction. His entire body relaxed in that moment

and in that moment the punishing God of Matthew's childhood, one whose wrath he 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 flaws, a kind, forgiving, all-accepting, and benevolent God. Deina's faith in God's love was so secure that it lent Matthew exactly the strength he needed. I left them together there. They didn't need me. Because love and loving awareness is really our nature, our source, there are many ways we can turn to reconnect to it.

And it's one of the most beautiful experiments you can ever have to find out what is the touch, what are the words, what can you visualize? And the trick is you might find something and it might just open up a little bit of space. Like okay I feel a little softening. We have these neuropathways that have been grooved in so in order to shift the conditioning. We need to practice over and over. So when I describe calling on that loving presence and sensing this light and warmth, showering through, I do this every day many times a day. I've done it today many times. It's very, very quick. There's not a lot of,

there's not mental steps, there's just a sense of some sense of whatever disconnection or solidifying into a story of something smaller. And then there's that, just that in some way I'm bowing my head and I'm feeling that and in a moment that space, my being is inhabiting that space and then there's room for all of me and all of us. And it goes away again moments later so it's many rounds. So the first step, contacting the vulnerability, that's what will give you access. access to nurturing. It has to be embodied.

The second step, find your pathway to nurturing to in some way offering compassion or calling in compassion. The third step that I want to emphasize is once you've started nurturing is to really pause and sense who you are. Who is it that is receiving and feeling nurtured? Who is it that's offering the nurturing? and take your time because this is the fruit of the whole process. To use vulnerability as a portal to freedom, once you've experienced that sense of compassion,

sense the formless presence that's there. Sense that tender spaciousness and sense that this truly is more who you are than any of those stories of the stuck person. Let's practice this a bit right now since we're talking about it, might as well anchor it and experience and what we'll do, just adjust if you need to adjust as you're sitting. We'll walk through it and sense it as something that you can return to because inevitably I'll walk you through faster than really will work to get fully in touch. But sense the template.

Again, this is rain, it's always these two wings of seeing what's happening and offering care. You might bring to mind some place where you can sense that the primitive wolf is blaming some place. And I don't recommend if there's, if you feel like there's deep kind of trauma, it's not going to serve you, but somewhere where there's some charge, between four and seven on a scale of one to ten. It could be that your blame is directed towards someone else, but if there's somewhere that you're blaming yourself, why don't you start there?

Some place where you feel that you've harmed others or you're hurting your own life, maybe? It could be for something in the past, something current. Or it may be that you want to explore freeing yourself from some chronic way that you get irritated and blaming towards another, some resentment you've been holding. And it'll help if you hone in on, if you're watching a movie right on the frame where that's evoking the blame, whether you're blaming yourself or another. sense what's going on if it's some situation at work or in a relationship, some addictive behavior, and sense how the blaming takes shape, you know, what the thoughts are going on

when you're blaming, the thoughts of your own or another's badness and what's really wrong about what's happening. And then as we explored, just recognizing and allowing, oh, this is blaming, but make that you turn and see if you can turn the attention. from the stories of what's wrong with you or somebody else to what's going on inside you. What's it like inside you when you're blaming? If it's a blaming of another person, what's the hurt, the wounded place? If you're blaming yourself, what's the feeling of shame or loss? What's the feeling of in some way the felt sense of personal badness

that second arrow that says, I'm bad, which is one of the deepest prisons that the primitive wolf creates, the on-bad feeling. Just let yourself feel that in your body. Maybe there's fear that comes with it, that if I'm like this then no one will ever love me so it may go into I'm unlovable and the feeling of that, the aloneness, the loneliness, And if it helps, you can begin nurture as you're investigating by putting your hand on your heart. It'll help you to accompany your own experience. What's under that blame?

What is the feeling in your body, your throat, your chest, your belly? And if you could go really inside the most vulnerable place in you and sense, what is this place most need right now? What would most be nurturing for this place? Is it to feel forgiven? To feel loved, accepted, seen? And how might this place feel nurtured? What would be a vehicle? Is it, can you offer that to yourself? Can your own wise and loving self offer a message? future self, the most devolved part of your being, offer a message, an energy of love? Or is there a sense of something larger that you can call on? Perhaps the love and understanding of a mother, father, of a spiritual figure, of a formless

energy, experiment. and sense if you can let love wash through and let yourself receive it. Mark Nipo calls us the exquisite risk to let in love. Why not? Can you be willing to let it wash through you? Relax open and open into that compassionate presence. And to sense who are you when you're loving and being loved. loved, nurturing and being nurtured.

I sometimes think of it as the holder and the held. Who are you? In these last few moments, just to sense if there's any lurking, judging or blaming about how even you're practicing this exercise and sense the possibility of choosing to include this too in a tender heart, this too. We can love ourselves and each other into healing. The entry, because we all have unmet needs, is vulnerability to see it in ourselves, to see it in each other and to choose at our own pace because it's not wise to go jumping off

the cliff but at our own pace to gentle into the vulnerability, to let ourselves be touched, find our pathways to nurturing and to get to know that presence, that awake, loving, tender presence, that's our true nature, our true home. Thank you for your presence tonight, very beautiful presence. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.