Tara Brach - Grieving and Timeless Love

Episode Date: October 15, 2021

Grieving and Timeless Love - How we relate to change and loss is directly connected to how fully we live and love. This talk looks at the classic ways we avoid opening to the realness of loss, and how our sorrows and grief can become a portal to awakening our heart and spirit. 

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome friends. I'd like to start our reflection today with a story some of you might remember and I find it really valuable as we explore the themes we'll be looking at. And this is a story, it's a Zen story, that's a Zen story, that may character Senjo. Senjo is born into a family. She has an older sister and her mother both died in a tragedy. So she's living alone with her father. And as she grew up, the boy who lived nearby, his name was Ocho. They would play together and they played very well and the father would sometimes, you know, just laugh and say, you know, you two will make a great pair. And he loved

daughter very much. They heard him, they believed him, and in the course of time their love for each other grew quite deep. But because Senjo was very beautiful and there were a number of suitors who came to seek her hand, when she came of age her father actually had her sit down in their small house and said to her, I've made a really fine match for you, this young man from several villages over, the son of one of the great families of that village. And he told her all about it, and she began to weep and was cast down and depressed immediately. So when word got around the village, it got to Ocho, and he heard about it and his breath stopped and his heart broke. He could hardly speak.

So that very night he packed a few things and went down to the river, took a small rowboat and got in it to leave the village forever. He just couldn't bear it. And there in the moonlight along the edge of the river he saw a shadowy form among the trees and she was running. It was Senjo. She called to him and he asked what she was doing and she said, I could feel you leaving and I knew I couldn't live without you. So she got onto the boat and they went down river.

And they finally stopped. They got a plot of land and made a garden and worked the fields and built a house and had two children, a family, and the years went by, five years. One day, Ocho came in and Senjo was sitting at the table, a tear rolling down her cheek. When he asked her why she was crying, she said, I miss my father, I love him so much. He's my only family. And Ocho confessed that he too was lonely for the village. And he said, let's go back. Maybe they'll take us in. They got into the boat. They rode their family upstream, arrived at their village around dusk, and they landed on the dock near Senjo's home, and Ocho decided he better go first. So he went to the door and he knocked and Sanjo's father

answered and he said, what do you want? And so you said, oh father, I've brought your daughter back with two fine grandchildren, please forgive us for running away. And the father looked back at Ocho with cold eyes. He was astounded and angry. He said, I don't know what girl you've been talking about. Since the night you ran away, my daughter's been sick in bed and unable to speak. And Ocho said, no, no, she's in the boat with your two grandchildren. Believe me, father. And he said, absolutely not. But then he sent his servant and said, you go look and see what's in the boat. and the servant went and sure enough there was Sanjo and two young children he came back to the father and said you know yes she's there with two children she's on her way to the house and the father shook

his head no and he strode into the bedroom where Sanjo was lying and said Ocho's come back with another Senjo and your two children and her eyes opened in a new way that they hadn't for five years and She stood up as if walking in a dream. And she walked out of the door and she walked towards the bode. And at the same time, the other Senjo was walking towards her with two children. And the two Senjo's embraced one another. And they became one. They returned to the father's house, made a proper family, came together.

So they embraced. She was free. So this is a traditional Zen story really about facing loss and Joe facing the loss of her beloved and the deep pain of separation. And what happens when we don't face and process our losses, our grief and our sorrow? What happens is we split off from our full aliveness. What we saw in the story was a kind of dissociation. We go into trance.

We live in a kind of distorted partial reality. And that trance that we're in keeps us from the very thing that we didn't want to lose, which is a sense of loving connection. And this points to a fundamental principle in Buddhist psychology, which is that avoidance in some way resisting the reality of what is imprisons us. us in a limiting sense of separate self, in a sense of separation, in a sense of deficiency of not okayness. That's what happens when we resist the reality that's here. It obscures the essential awareness and love that's here. And this is the same truth that we find in Western

psychology and some of it. Carl Jung writes that the source of our suffering is the unfaced, unfelt parts of our psyche. That unprocessed experience prevents us from evolving into wholeness. And especially in our fast-paced, addicted contemporary society, the experience of loss, full grieving is often pushed away. So this is where we're going in our reflection today, what it really means to face loss, to open to the reality of loss and truly embrace this living, dying world. The basic theme is that how we relate to change and loss is directly connected to how fully we live and love.

there's a wonderful book by Francis Willer. It's called The Wild Edge of Sorrow. Highly recommend it. And in it, he talks about becoming an apprentice to sorrow. An apprentice to sorrow. It's just, it's a really wonderful phrase. I love it. And as we become an apprentice to sorrow,

you know, as we honor sorrow, as we open to the fears of loss and the grief itself, we discover that this really is soul work. You know, it's work that reveals the most deep and beautiful dimensions of our being. So I'll be inviting you to consider losses that you've experienced or that you're currently facing and where you might deepen that process of becoming an apprentice to sorrow. And it's natural that as you reflect and you might consider now that there are a range of losses, really for all of us in an impermanent world, loss is a given.

You know, we lose our youth and we lose our health and many lose physical and our mental capacity. for some we lose jobs, homes, friendships, the lives of those we love. And then if we widen it in a sense globally, we're experiencing a dramatic loss of species of our fellow beings. We're experiencing the loss of the health of our larger body, this earth. So our first inquiry, the first part of this, reflection is how do I habitually relate to loss?

And for Senjo, she turned away from loss and a part of her became immobilized in depression. And another part went on automatic, moving through the surface of life, not really living. And so there are different modes of holding back, different ways we operate to ward off the rawness of the pain, the vulnerability of loss. And they're sometimes called our vulnerability management strategies. And we're going to review them, the ways that we classically pull away from that process of grieving, from being truly with our losses. And many of you are familiar with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and she names the first stage of avoiding loss as denial. And in denial for as long as we can get away with it, we'll deny that we're maybe seriously

sick or that our adult child is addicted to substance or maybe we're, we'll deny that we've been wounded by a rejection. So we navigate along and not really facing our pain. You might know one of George Carlin's classic quips. He says, they show you how detergents take out bloodstains. I think if you've got a t-shirt with blood stains all over it, maybe laundry isn't your biggest problem. So denial. And we do it as individuals, see it in families, denying addiction, abuse, often through generations. One man I worked with, when he was very young, his older sister was killed in an accident, a car accident, and there was so much denial covering over grief in the family that he and his sister really suffered greatly.

They always had that undercurrent of something was wrong with them and life and they could never sort it out. They could never really process the loss as a family. And of course we know the huge suffering of societal denial, such as the denial that we're all conditioned by racism, the denial of the history and continued violence of this racism, or the denial that the earth is suffering, that life on earth is suffering, including ourselves as part of that life, that it's being destroyed. And so when possible, we'll deny, and that very denial prevents facing and healing the source of woundedness.

Let's look at some of the other ways that we resist vulnerability. And again, just listen with the ears of sensing, well, what does this resonate in your life? So some of you might know that mem, and I'm giving you a stereotype warning here, but it goes like this, that when women get anxious or insecure, they shop. And when men get anxious or insecure, they start wars. So that's the men. But it captures to the two main ways that we avoid just being with the reality that's here. Rather than opening to vulnerability, we'll women shop, will grasp, will cling. And rather than opening to insecurity, will aggress, will get angry, we'll act out in those ways. So if you take each one of them for a moment with clinging,

you know, we leave the sense of vulnerability, perhaps the losses that we don't want to face through addictive behavior, overconsuming or overworking, you know, using drugs. Could be relational dependency on others, chasing after approval or possessions. In some, way we're grasping onto the next moment to contain what this moment does not. We're trying to get away from this moment to some other better time, to be somebody else who's better, to, we're leaning forward, anything but sitting back and opening ourselves to what's here. And then, of course, part of clinging on to things is rationalizing our clinging so we don't have to face what's deeper, so we don't have to face what we're covering.

over. There's a story of a man who goes to a bar and he orders a drink and the bartender gives it to him and he pushes it off to the side and he orders another drink. The bartender serves it to him and this time he drinks it. Then the bartender says, you know, what gives here? And the man said, well, I go to AA and I hear regularly that it's really the first drink that leads to trouble. So clinging. The other way that we resist our vulnerability is anger or aggression. And this is Kouva Ross's second stage. Often our anger is towards ourselves,

the recrimination for not doing enough, not being good enough. I remember for myself, and I've talked often about having maybe five or six years of serious illness, a kind of downward spiral for the first many months. I was losing mobility and I had to give up one thing after another. I had to give up doing yoga because when I would stretch, I would injure myself, I had to give up running, then I had to give up walking up inclines. And I have a great love as much as much as a many do for moving, and particularly outside. It's really a refuge for me. So rather than directly facing the loss, just feeling that grief, I kept turning on myself and saying, well, what am I doing

wrong in my self-care? Or why am I always overdoing things and injuring? Or why can't I be more quantumous and gracious in the midst of feeling sick? It was like I fixated on turning on myself. And it took quite a while for me just to sense that underneath that there was something really painful I wasn't paying attention to, which was I was grieving my life. I was grieving the loss of one of the main ways that I feel alive. I've seen this for so many that instead of directly opening to loss, turning on the self. And of course, as we know, we also turn on others. We aggress.

We try to control others. And I've seen again in that realm so many examples of rather than facing vulnerability, facing our fear of loss, facing what's here, in some way attacking and trying to control another person. There's a story of a woman sauteing vegetables when her partner bursts into the room and he says, careful, you're cooking them too long, keep stirring them. Now we need some more oil. They're going to stick. Hurry up. Are you crazy? Don't forget to salt them. You always forget to salt them. Use the salt, the salt, the salt. Our partner turns and says, what is wrong with you? And he very calmly replies, I just want to show you what it's like, what it feels like when I'm driving.

So the controlling, you know, just trying to keep charge of things because there's somewhere we don't want to go. And of course, it pushes others away and it keeps us divided from our own inner life. And here's the thing. We have to keep on controlling to keep that vulnerability at bay. One Tibetan teacher said that we're like a bunch of tens of ten, muscles protecting our existence. You know, always tensing against what's around the corner or aggressing against. So for Senjo, her vulnerability, you know, protection strategies

where depressing her life energy are staying on automatic. And what are they for us? I was aware of how, for one, couple, it was clear that the strategy that they had of aggression ruined their relationship. They had lost their teenage son to leukemia. And after his death, they started turning on each other. And the woman knew it wasn't rational. It was almost like every time she saw her husband all she could think of was her the son not being there. But she started blaming him for not doing enough during the illness to make a difference or she started blaming him for her now. He was turning his attention to work and not really being there for her. And he was really stung by her anger and then he got angry at her anger and they separated within

eight months. You know, for both, instead of opening to the depth of their grief, it was blame and anger. And I stayed in touch with her, worked with her over some months. and the impact of her unfaced grief tainted other relationships. She was chronically feeling like people were letting her down, that, you know, for them, the event was horrible, but it was history, but they weren't staying with her in it. You know, they weren't getting where she was and feeling wronged. And the anger and blame kept her from the one place where healing was possible, opening to the grief. So this is one common way we avoid the rawness of loss, that we lose ourselves in anger and blame.

It can be the years suing a doctor for malpractice, which of course can be appropriate, but also we can lose ourselves in it. Or as a society condemning generations to endless cycles of blaming and warring against each other, against those who have caused pain instead of pausing in some way and really feeling the raw hurt and pain and grieving, beginning the healing. There's a movie I saw many years ago called The Interpreter and I want to just read you a little bit of it of the transcript from it. Everyone who loses somebody wants revenge on someone, on God if they can't find anyone else. But in Africa in Matobu, the coup believed that the only way to end grief is to save a life. If someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual we call the drowning man trial. As an all-night party

beside a river at dawn, the killer is put in a boat, he's taken out in the water and he's dropped. He's bound so that he can't swim. The family of the dead then has to make a choice. They can let him drown or they can swim out and save him. The crew believed that if the family lets the killer drown, they'll have justice but spend the rest of their life in mourning. But if they save them, if they admit that life isn't always just, that very act can take away their sorrow. As the coup put it, vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. So we're talking about the different ways we cover over grief. And we've talked about denial, we've talked about vengeance or anger, the clinging. The third stage that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

describes as bargaining. And classic bargaining is basically we're trying to impact the outcome, get our relationship back, our health back by upping our game. It's like for me, when I was sick saying, okay, I'll slow down, I'll cut back on work and teaching, I'll not teach that retreat if maybe I can get my health back. And of course, this isn't about not doing what we can for our well-being, but it's about ways that that bargaining mind keeps us from just feeling what we're feeling. It might be that a relationship's ended and it's really done. And yet there's still this sense of, oh, I'll do anything to win that person back. There's a Sufi, wise man, fool. He's called Mullah Nazardine. And as the story goes, he loses

his wife's bracelet and he's panicking. And he says, okay, dear God, help me find it and I'll double my tithing. Tithing is a donation. You give to the temple. week. And all of a sudden he sees the bracelet behind the pillow and goes, never mind God, it's okay. I found it. So this is bargaining. In some ways, dear God, I'll be who you want me to be if only you let so and so live or if only I'll just do anything but face the realness of what's happening. Okay, vulnerability management. I'm trying to control not to feel the loss and one of the main ways that we do it, Kubla Ross also talks about, and we see with Senjo, is depression, withdrawn, numbness.

You know, there's that story. This was on a Spanish TV about this gentleman who knocks on his son's door and he says, Jamie, wake up. And Jamie answers, I don't want to get up, Papa. The father shouts, get up, you have to go to school. Jamie says, I don't want to go to school. Why not ask the father? Three reasons, says Jamie.

First, because it's so dull. Second, the kids tease me. And third, I hate school. And the father says, well, I'm going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it's your duty. Second, because you're 45 years old. And third, because you're the headmaster. So we use sleep, numbing depression to not

connect with the life that's here. I'd like to pause here. The final stage after the denial and after the anger and after the bargaining and after the depression, the final stage of moving towards grieving is acceptance. But before we go there, I'd like to just reflect for a few moments, invite you to kind of tune into yourself. And if it helps you when we do these kind of reflections to close your eyes or lower your gaze, please do. You might take a few breaths, scanning your life. Bring to mind one very real change, loss in your life, one that's maybe happening that you're facing into right now or maybe one that's already. happened, some loss that may be asking your attention, asking for attention or care.

Perhaps it's related to current times, pandemic, maybe the loss of a dear one. Maybe it has to do with a divorce or distance from a friend, maybe a loss of a job, maybe something on a more global level that you really haven't been reckoning with, that you know's there. Once you have this loss or loss that you're facing into in mind, just sense how you've been relating. And maybe it's been with some presence and care. But you also may intuit that there's something more that's asking for your acceptance. And you might notice if there's been one of those vulnerability management strategies, usually

we have a combo in action. And just noticing without adding any judgment, we all have them. Notice if perhaps you've been denying or ignoring this loss. Or maybe if you've been in some way blaming yourself or others, either for something to do with the loss or other things, just keep yourself from really looking at this. Or maybe it's an addictive behavior, that speediness, the consuming, being buried in work, maybe depressing yourself, numbing, maybe getting unautomatic. And if you sense one of those types or a few of them of those strategies, just noticing how

they impact your body, your mind and your heart. Notice how avoiding the vulnerability is affected relationships with others and really with your inner life. In this sense, if you can notice the kind of prison of separate self that happens when these strategies are running our life. And just know that the path of homecoming, being an apprentice of sorrow, is to pause and without judgment just acknowledge the resistances and then deepen attention with curiosity and kindness. And we'll return to this. But you might for now just try on the phrase, apprentice to sorrow and sense what would it mean in your life? What would that mean? Yeah, so opening your eyes if they're closed. So I want to pause in a way and clarify something, which is, I never think of resistance

as some bad thing. It's completely our natural way of protecting ourselves against vulnerability. And especially during a great loss, you know, it's not always the time to open directly to grief. It might be compassionate or wise to step away from the fullness of the pain, to keep occupied some, to get really immersed in work or reading or maybe surrounding ourselves with others with company. Or maybe we need to withdraw from some regular activities in socializing. Either way, we may need some time to regain our energy, our perspective, our balance. But the suffering comes when over time we lock the grief away inside. when like Senjo, the unfaced grief causes us to split and lose contact with our whole heart

and awareness. And it blocks our continued evolving, our continued growth. Resistance isn't bad. Resistance is a place that's asking for deepened attention. And as we're going to be exploring now, opening to that grief, deepening our attention, opens us in ways we couldn't have imagined. This is the poet David White. Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the will of grief, turning down through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, will never know the source from which we drink,

the secret water cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering, the small round coins, thrown by those who wished for something else. Often the pathway to that glimmering, the soul work being an apprentice to sorrow, begins by attending to the flags, the vulnerability management strategies.

In other words, starting to notice, oh, self-blame, judging others, addictive consuming, what might be under this? And the invitation is to deepen attention and be curious and gentle. You know, what's going on here? What am I unwilling to feel? And then that becomes the place for our mindfulness and compassion.

I have, in my life, a dear one's extended family, like a sister, have known her since I was really young. And she's had through the decades a lot of ups and downs, struggling with self-aversion and compulsive eating, and conflict and relationships. So we talk once every few months, and often when she's upset, and over these years she would tell me the story of what was going on, feeling stuck in some way in work or relationship or around food.

And my habit was to respond in some way by being, here's what you can do, directive, coming up with ideas, plans, somewhat controlling, one in some way wanting to fix. And underneath that there was some judgment, you know, that it's not okay to be having these difficulties. Something has to change. In more recent years, that controlling, that judging has been a flag for me. And there have been several times that after we'd have our conversation,

I would deepen my attention and I'd sense the place of judging and I'd open underneath it, you know, what's really happening here? And I'd find huge grief, that sense of feeling helpless in the face of her with her life passing and being turned on herself and having so little happiness. So what's happened is now I have more contact and familiarity with that sorrow. It is really here. And it frees me so that I actually can listen when I'm with her and be less directive and more present. And there's actually more of a flow of care and affection and actually more ways that

we can enjoy each other. There's both sorrow and a cherishing. There are times, you know, for me in this situation, I had access to the grieving. But there are many times when the grief is so big and so buried, it often takes the presence of others to help us unlock it. It's almost that sense of connectedness softens us. It could be a therapist or a friend or someone who feels like a kindred spirit or maybe a group that feels caring and that helps us open to the magnitude of what hasn't been grieved. I think of my father-in-law, Ernie, Jonathan's dad, He was in World War II and on the front of action several times. And one horrific incident, there were boatload after a boatload of soldiers crossing the Rhine.

And his squad was the last to cross and his boat got hit. They got bombed. And so they all had to jump ship. And he grabbed onto two metal helmets. He drifted in and out of consciousness through the whole night and the next morning a boat saved him. He was the only one to make it alive. So he lost huge numbers of his friends and comrades. And, you know, my husband reports through his years of growing up most of his adulthood.

His father was very emotionally cut off, really removed, and he had flares of anger at war itself. You know, he was a Quaker and really worked for peace. But when people would say thank you for serving, it would make him crazy. It upset him because he's so hated war. Really deeply benevolent person dedicated to helping, just very cut off. Well, towards the end of his life, when I knew him, something started thawing. And something happened when he started telling his story. He, a few times at Quaker meetings, he'd start sharing and that would kind of soften him a bit to his past.

And then there was a woman who wrote an article interviewing people from war that described what others were living with. And that began to make him feel like he could name his own stories and describe his own stories more. And I remember with us once he shared a story with the end of the war who was about to fly back to the States and his name got announced for exiting. And then a high-ranking official heard his name announced over the speakers and said, I know that officer because it turns out this man was the head of his training unit. And then they talked. And as he told us that story, and this is decades and decades later,

it unlocks something. He started weeping because he realized the enormity of the comfort of a real connection after the horror and the trauma of so much loss of all of his friends and comrades. So he felt that mix of the terribleness and the cherishing of life. But it took being in relationship, sharing a story to be able to feel in contact. And yet it's started opening him. So it takes some moments where we really have that to begin the thaw. I'd like to spend a little bit of time now looking more closely at grieving the loss of a loved one. And I mentioned self-judgment as one of the ways we hold back from full grieving. But the mind fixates on, you know, what's wrong with us and what we regret, how we didn't

show up for the person, how we acted hurtfully when they were alive, maybe, you know, the unfinished aspects of that relationship. Well, I saw this in a powerful way with a woman who came to me after her high school daughter had committed suicide. Daughter was bipolar, really bright, creative spirit. And they had gone in and out of being close. but during the last eight months of her life, daughter had shut her out. And this woman was suffering with horrific self-recrimination, that sense of, I failed her.

So we explored it together. We used Rain to explore it. And the beginning of Rain was her self-blame, recognizing it, letting it be there for the moment. And for those that aren't familiar, Rain is the acronym for Recognize, Allow. investigate and nurture. And that's a way of bringing mindfulness and compassion to what's there. So she recognized and allowed the self-blame. And then when she started investigating, she contacted those feelings of catastrophic failure, that belief that she had failed. And just, you know, the way she put it, just when she was most hurting and vulnerable, I didn't catch the signals.

And so I invited her as we do when we investigate, really feel in her body the pain of that self-blame, that squeezing, clamped feeling of the heart. And it was feeling like her heart was clutching onto the pain. It was like holding on tight. I'm going to believe this. I'm going to feel this. And so part of investigating was saying to that self-referral,

recriminating part, what are you trying to do? And it said, I'm holding on to her. Well, what would happen if you stopped holding on to her so much? I'd lose her. So what she was finding was the part of her, that self-recrimination part, was trying to hold on to her daughter who she loved. It was a misguided part. And so I asked that part, well, What do you need? What would help you to relax, to open that clutch fist? I'd need to trust. I did all I could that I loved her. Then I said, if you look through your daughter's eyes, how would she see it? And what would she want for you?

And without skipping a beach, she'd say, forgive yourself. I know your love. She knew my love. So she just had to take that in, just take that in, that forgiveness, that she loved her daughter. And that's what opened up the weeping that was really a pure kind of grieving that that self-recrimination had kept her from. Many, many long minutes of just sitting there with the pure grief of the reality that her daughter in form was not with her. her. And the nurturing was just to hold that grieving, just to be with that grieving with compassion, just to let it happen. And in some time she described a sense of that she was grieving what she loved and then she just felt like she was dissolving into just loving her daughter, just loving, loving, loving. And after the rain is when we sit and just experience what's

here and it was during that time that she just felt merged with her daughter. spirit, that she was no longer a flawed or grieving mother. It was just that field of loving. And I want to say that, of course, over the weeks and months of fall, there were many arising of thoughts of self-blame and they had less and less hold. There was more increasingly that pure grieving because she had a pathway to move from self-blame to grieve, to grieve, and then to the gift of grief, which is realizing that that timeless love that's embedded in the grieving, the place where she and her daughter were not separate. Friends, this is the blessing of the soul work, opening to a formless dimension where there's

not self or other. And grief's the portal. It's the portal into a continuous field of loving. And it's accessible, it becomes accessible, when there's an acceptance of loss. When grieving has released the holding to a temporary form. There's a poem I read as often as I have, as is appropriate, from John O'Donohue, that I think really speaks to being an apprentice to sorrow. He writes,

There are days when you wake up happy, again inside the full, of life until the moment breaks and you're thrown back onto the black tide of loss. Days when you have your heart back, you are able to function well, until in the middle of work or encounter suddenly with no warning, you're ambushed by grief. It becomes hard to trust yourself. All you can depend on now is that sorrow will remain faithful to itself. than you, it knows its way and will find the right time to pull and pull the rope of grief until that uncoiled hell of tears has reduced to its last drop.

Gradually, you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed. And when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. So embedded in grief is love. It's a loving presence. It's not tied to time and space. I felt it so many times in grieving my parents.

I'd feel the grief and the loss and then the loving that nothing can remove. Ticknat Han teaches about this beautifully. It's kind of like a poem when you listen. He describes when his mother died he considered it one of the great misfortunes of his life and he grieve for over a year and then he had a dream. In it they were having a wonderful talk and she was young and beautiful and he woke up in the middle of the night and had the distinct impression he had never lost his mother. His mother was alive in him. When he stood, stepped outside of his monastery hot and began walking amongst the tea plants, he had the sense that his mother was still with him. As he says so beautifully, she was the moonlight caressing me,

as she had done so often very tender, very sweet. Continuing to walk, he sensed that his body was a living continuation of all his ancestors and that together he and his mother were leaving footprints in the damp soil. So for much of this reflection I've been focusing on individual grieving and it's crucial if we're to evolve as a society that we collectively open to our grief for our world. There's a message. This is the message from Joanna Macy who I consider one of our wisest elders and she gave it almost 30 years ago the necessity of feeling the despair, the grief, the sorrow because it's only by feeling and processing that grief for our earth for each other that will respond with the purity of love, will respond by taking care.

So we open to the fears of loss to the grief and we do it so we can open to life. so we can really fully love. So like Senjo, we can move from that trance to a wholeness of being. And the given is the losses keep happening in this ever-changing life. The healing of grief's never a one-shot. The habits keep coming up to avoid whether it's blaming others or blaming ourselves or addictive behaviors going on automatic. and then without adding judgment to them, we let them be a flag. We just say, oh, okay, deepen attention. There's something underneath that wants my acceptance.

As one teacher put it, we meet our edge and we soften and we do it again and again, opening to what's here. So I'd like to close with a brief meditation. This is an invitation to open to sorrows and to grief. And you might practice it on your own and take more time with it. But this is a simple core practice in becoming an apprentice to sorrow, deepening on the path of freedom. So take a moment to, again, come into stillness

and perhaps close your eyes or let your eyes be downcast, feeling your breath and feeling your body. Let your intention be to attune to some loss that might call you it might be the loss you were exploring earlier. It can be a loss that you're facing or that's already occurred. And as we did earlier, noticing any of your vulnerability management strategies, just noticing if you've been in some way denying that this loss is there blaming yourself or others,

addictiveness, numbing. And just for now deep in your attention with real curiosity, with care. And sense what's been lost. Sense what you're facing, what you might be unwilling to feel. The hour of rain is to recognize what's there. So you might just name whatever you're aware of.

Fear, sorrow, grief, numbness. you can whisper it. The allowing is just to make room for it to be here right now. You might say this belongs like a wave in the ocean. Just let it be. It's not forever you're letting it be. You're just saying for now that allow you to begin the eye of rain, investigate, and just sense into what's the most difficult part of this.

What it is that makes you fearful or sad. are feeling empty or upset. In other words, what's most asking for your attention, your acceptance? And it may be this straightforward pain of the loss, the missing, the pain of separation. Your heart knows. Just sense how loss is living in your body. And to help you access you, you might let your face and your posture express it. If you'll ride into where there's the most full,

vulnerability and with continued care, interest. Sense what this vulnerability is asking for, what kind of a nurturing presence. How does it want you to be with it? Is it understanding, company, forgiveness, compassion, love, acceptance, in touch with the place of vulnerability but also calling forward so that you can feel your high self, your most awake heart, and just offer that acceptance, that love. Offer what's needed in this moment and if that's difficult you might call on a spiritual figure or somebody that expresses wisdom and love, your ancestors, whatever can help you in offering care, presence,

acceptance to the vulnerability inside. Just let it be bathed with that caring presence, sensing the possibility with whatever is arising right now, offering a nurturing presence. And after the rain, we simply notice. the quality of the presence that really is right here. More openness, more tenderness. You might sense who you are when there is that unconditional presence with the life that's here. You might intuit the heart space, the vast, empty, radiant heart space, where there's no self or other. When the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hear in your soul where your

loved one has awaited your return all the time. Thank you, friends, for your presence, your willingness to explore reflect together, wishing you all blessings. Namaste. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.