Tara Brach - Happiness is Possible: De-conditioning the Negativity Bias – Part 2 (2017-06-07)

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

Happiness is Possible: De-conditioning the Negativity Bias – Part 2 - There is an inner freedom that expresses as happiness and peace, and it is accessible when we arrive in openhearted presence. As the Buddha said, "If it were not possible to find liberation, I would not teach about it." In this two part talk, we will look at the conditioning that blocks happiness and two primary pathways of practice that evolve our consciousness and free our hearts. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks 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 welcome. This talk is part of a two-part series called Happiness is Possible, really addressing our capacity for deep contentment for what's sometimes called Happy for No Reason. And I'd like to begin with some verses from a Japanese monk, because I feel it gets captured so beautifully, the spirit of happy for no reason. His name is Gensai.

Trailing my stick, I go down to the garden edge. Fall floods have washed away the planks of the bridge. Shouldering our sandals, we wade the narrow stream. I dabble in the flow. admiring how firm the stones are. The point in life is to know what's enough. With the happiness held in one inch square heart, you can fill the whole space between heaven and earth.

So we sense this possibility. There's something intuitive in us that senses this, and we know the deep conditioning we have to hitch our well-being to things going a certain way. And most of us are familiar with what I sometimes call the inner complainer, right? You know that one. You know, the inner complainer really starts squawking when we have to wait in line or traffic's really bad or we can't get the reservations we wanted on a certain airplane or we run out of just the thing

we need in the refrigerator to make the casserole we're making or mostly it's when others aren't cooperating, right? but we know that and so there's a sense of how many moments rather than that knowing what's enough

we're wanting things different I've always loved this it's in the classified woman writes free to a good home and there's two pictures and one's got a picture of a cat and the other's got a picture of a man

and it says beautiful six-month-old male kitten orange and Carmel Tabby playful friendly, very affectionate, ideal for family with kids. Are handsome 32-year-old husband, personable, funny, good job, but doesn't like cats. Says he goes or the cat goes. Call Jennifer, come see both and decide what you'd like.

So we'll continue tonight looking at what really nourishes well-being. And this is based on two pathways to happiness. and one of the pathways which we explored in the first talk is the grounds of really well-being, which is this capacity to meet whatever arises with presence, to open our hearts to whatever is here and eventually to really learn to love the life that's here, love what is.

That's the very grounds. But there's another pathway that weaves with this. which is where we intentionally gladden the heart. There are practices that actually directly wake up a feeling of gladness. And so that's what we're going to explore tonight. As I was considering this talk, I remembered a conversation I'd had with a woman in our community some years back. She described talking to a friend who, and this woman that I'm referring to, to as a cancer survivor and the woman she was talking to was a fellow cancer survivor.

And the friend asked, what would it feel like for you to think that something good was going to happen rather than something not so good or even bad was going to? That was the question she was posed and her response was totally weird and uncomfortable. And then the friend said, good, try it now. You might check that one out for yourself right now, just for a moment. What's it like to in some way tell yourself that something good is going to happen? Something may be unexpected and a surprise that's meaningful or touches you in a certain way is going to happen or it's around the corner.

And notice how that sits in your body and your heart when you hold that frame. For some, there might be something enriching and aliveness, connecting that's ahead, but we're just not used to being open to and considering that. So it's unfamiliar. You can open your eyes if you haven't already. So in happiness research, one of the common denominators of those who are deemed happy is the sense that they're actually choosing to be happy,

that there's some turning towards it, some willingness and invitation towards it, that happiness is intuited as a possibility. Henry Nguyen, who's a Catholic mystic and writer no longer alive and deeply, profoundly wise, a good writer, this is what he says. And he goes further with just from choosing happiness. He says, joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and then keep choosing it every day. And it really makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that this would be the case. It's not surprising that this woman I was talking to felt totally weird envisioning a positive thing happening because our brain is designed to mostly fixate on what might go wrong.

You hear me talk about a lot if you listen to these talks. It's described as the negativity bias and it's part of survival, it's part of our survival wiring. And it's this filtering process that just scans for what can be a problem and then fixates on it. So we get very loyal to our anxiety and our mistrust and our vigilance. We really stay true to that. And of course it's a very good strategy for avoiding some real physical threats, but it's not a good strategy for savoring, for enjoying for celebrating, which is also part of being alive, especially if we just have this short time on planet Earth, we're missing out if the negativity bias rules. These practices that I call gladdening the mind, this pathway of intentionally directing our attention in ways that uplift

undoes the negativity bias. It creates a kind of an inner atmosphere that'll be a lot of allows true happiness to unfold itself. And it's based on the principle of neuroplasticity, which I know more and more people are familiar with now, which is really that how we pay attention can rewire the brain, that the structure and the function of our brain can change depending on how we're paying attention. It said that where attention goes, energy flows, you know. So, it's an important understanding because if you have fear thoughts, if you are in the habit of worrying about what's around the corner, or you have judgmental thoughts, or you have mistrustful thoughts about how other people are perceiving you and you keep running

them over and over again, they keep evoking certain biochemistry in your body that then keeps more of the similar kind of thoughts going. So you're in a looping that's a looping that's a stains a certain kind of wiring in the brain. Does that make sense? Yeah. The idea is whatever you practice grows stronger. And if you're practicing judgment and anxious worrying, that goes stronger. The grooves get deeper. In reverse, if you practice, let's say, gratitude, are sending well wishes to people, then those pathways get stronger and the biochemistry they bring up, which is actually oxytocin and dopamine and feel-good chemicals that actually change your mood totally. So what you practice grows stronger.

One good friend and colleague Rick Hansen calls this positive neuroplasticity. And it's really part of positive psychology. It's a growing basic domain for people into meditation and psychology. There is a woman at Spirit Rock, which is one of our part of our network of communities out on the West Coast, who was doing a year-long training for people of color. And she's a community activist. And she had experienced a childhood of poverty and trauma and abuse. You know, she had faced illness, divorce, racism, of course, and the single parenting of two children. So at this training, she talked about the years of social.

struggling to educate herself and stand up for her beliefs and how she had become a radical to fight for justice in her local community. She was very grimly determined and at war a lot. But then at the last meeting of this training, I want to read you what she announced, she said, after all the struggles and troubles I've lived through, I've decided to do something really radical. I'm going to be happy. And I love that because it didn't change that she would be a warrior for truth and for social change, just meant she was open to this possibility that Rick calls neuroplasticity, that we can actually cultivate a quality of gladness in our heart and mind. Rumi says, when you go to a garden, do you look at the thorns or the flowers?

Spend more time with the roses and jasmine. By the way, the point isn't that the thorns aren't there and that if we get scraped, we shouldn't bring a kind and full attention to where we're scraped. That's not the point. It's that we spend so many moments rehashing what's happened and expecting bad things to happen rather than savoring where there really is beauty and goodness and moments of freedom. We can learn to love the life that's here. Now, people often ask me, so isn't there grasping after happiness? there's a lot of articles in different popular magazines and so on, you know, talk about how

you can become happy, three easy steps, and isn't there grasping? And yes, of course there's grasping, but you can tell the difference between grasping after a certain feeling and the intention to open to your potential for well-being. And you can tell it in your body. It's really interesting that if you're grasping, let's say I'm grasping after the part that will finally make me feel whole or met or whatever, you know, I'm grasping after that change in job that I'll finally be able to give what I need to give to the world, you can feel it in the body as a tension and a tightness. And that feels really different from some place in you that senses, wow, it is possible to break out of some of this habitual grimness and be more

open to what's beautiful and good. And that doesn't have a grasping. That has a sense of space and availability. Does that resonate for you, the difference? Okay. There's a story that I think illustrates this, this willingness to open to that possibility. And I tell it whenever I have a chance, it's, I first heard, it's from Marty Siegelman, positive psychology. and he describes how this story is about his daughter who was at that time five years old and he says, I was out weeding in my garden last summer with my daughter Nikki. Now, you should know I'm a very serious gardener. And this particular afternoon I'm very focused on what I'm doing, which is weeding.

Nikki, on the other hand, is having fun. Weeds are flying up in the air, dirt is spraying everywhere. Now, I should mention here that despite all my work on optimism, because Seligman's known for positive psychology here. I've always been somewhat of a nimbus cloud around my house. And despite all my work with children, and despite having five children of my own, ages five to 29, I'm really not that good with kids.

And so kneeling that afternoon in the garden, I yell at Nikki. Seligman at this point, he's looking down, reliving that moment, because it hurts, you know. Then he goes on. He says, Nikki got a stern look on her face after I yelled at her, and she walked right over to me. Daddy, she said, I want to talk with you. And this is just what she said.

From the time I was three until I was five, I whined a lot. But I decided the day I turned five to stop whining. And I haven't whined since the day I turned five. Then she looked at me right in the eye and said, Daddy, if I could stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch. Ah, the wisdom of young ones. Let me ask you to check in on something again. Let's do another little reflection.

Sense what happens when you let yourself say, I want to feel happy. I'd like to experience the well-being of full presence. I'd like to feel content. Just find the words you'd like, but just what happens when you sense the or express the long, longing to be happy. For some of you you might notice that it actually brings up the doubt of what's possible. Maybe you might want to bring up a question of deserving. For some it

might bring up a sense of excitement of possibility, even openness to it. This is the first step though, which is the conscious intention to uncover our natural capacity to be happy. So let's look at the ways that we can nourish positive mind states. And you just think of the mind as a garden and we can plant seeds and we can nurture with mindfulness, with kindness. So we're going to explore three related ways of gladdening the mind in this talk. One of them is gratitude, one of them is serving and the other is savoring. What they have in common, the reason they're interwoven, is that each of them is serving,

Each one, gratitude serving and savoring, each one connects us with a larger sense of being. It takes us beyond the habitual small self that's just kind of egoically churning and it's looping and its patterns. It deconditions the habits that block happiness. Okay, so with each one we'll practice a little bit. So with gratitude there are two things that many of us might have noticed in people who are really grateful and that it's generally unrelated to life circumstances in the sense that income level could be it's unrelated to people that are having work challenges or life challenges

or health challenges unless it's really extreme it seems to be not correlated gratitude's not correlated with those circumstances and the other which is pervasive grateful people are not unhappy. They're happy. As I mentioned, the ego habit of blocks is often that we have this inner complainer that's basically saying something's wrong or something's missing. And check in your life now and then, just pause and say, is there some part of me right now that's thinking this moment should be different? Something's wrong or something's missing in some way that we're losing out or missing out. A new business was opening and one of the owner's friends wanted to send him flowers for the occasion.

And so the flowers arrived at the new business site and the owner read the card and it said, Rest in peace. So the owner is angry and he calls the florist to complain. And after he told the floors of the obvious mistake and how angry he was, the florist replied, Sir, I'm really sorry for the mistake, but rather than getting angry, you should imagine this. somewhere. There's a funeral taking place today and they have flowers with a note saying congratulations on your new location. Okay, the right side. So gratitude is a deconditioning of this habit to think something's wrong and there's been a whole lot of research on gratitude

and more recently a lot of research on the effect on people that have chronic anxiety and depression. One of the earliest, Seligman did, one of the earliest studies with severely depressed people. He had them write down three good things that happened to them each day for 15 days. At the end, there was a 94% decrease in depression and 92% said that happiness was increased. He said them one of the most effective things in training was for each person to write a one-page letter to somebody they felt gratitude towards and to read it to that person and then to listen attentively to the response. There's more research that I could describe, but I just ran across something that came out

today, which means it was completed some months ago. And in that research, they said that even if you don't send the letter, if you just write down your gratitude towards someone as if you're speaking it to them, that ends up doing the same thing. Very, very powerful way of really changing your biochemistry around. I've always recommended finding a gratitude partner and at the end of each day just emailing three things you're grateful for. A person you don't have to do any of the other niceties with. You just name your three things. It's such a powerful practice. I know for my husband, And Jonathan and I, we do each week we do several mornings where we meditate together and check-in.

And the very beginning of our check-in is to share with each other things we're grateful for. And why? We also want to share things we're upset about or things that might be difficult. But if you start with gratitude, it creates a real soft, receptive, open space in the heart that really has room for other things. So very, very useful to get that positive uplift of the heart. Where attention goes, energy flows. There's a story about Kabir, who's a shoemaker,

and as he works, he's always repeating the mantra, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram. And Ram's the word for God or the sacred or the divine. And he's saying it with great gratitude and great happiness. It does this day in and day out, even through the ups and downs. Rom, Ram, Ram, with gratitude. 20 years.

And one day, Ram appears. And Kabir says, who are you? And Ram says, I'm Rom. And Kabir says, well, why are you here? And Ram said, why have I come? You've been calling me for years. And now I've come. What do you want?

Kabir says, I don't want anything. And Kabir says, what? And then Rahm says what? And he goes, why have you been repeating my name? And Kabir said, I just love repeating your name. Then for the years to come, wherever Kabir would go, he'd be followed by Ram and the sound, Kabir, Kabir, Kabir, Kabir. I want to say that gratitude's not always easy.

And I've been in meditations where somebody has said, now, review what you feel grateful for. And it's been the last thing I wanted to do, because that's just not what. where I've been, I've been feeling either hurt or fearful or whatever. And so just to say in practice it's not the first step. If something strong is gripping you, then begin with being mindful of it and offering compassion to it just as we practice being real. And then as you do that, as you bring some kindness and presence, there's some space and then you can feel grateful for a little bit of that space.

voila, things keep unfolding. So, it's not one of these things that you're supposed to like pull out of the hat at any moment, but more just know that it's a practice that totally rewires if you do it regularly. Henry Nguyen, the choice for gratitude rarely comes without some real effort. But each time I make it, the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little less self-conscious. So let's practice, okay? As you come into stillness you might bring that slight smile to the mouth. Sense the inside of the mouth smiling.

Soften your eyes. Take a few full breaths. The invitation is to reflect on what you're grateful for and to whisper out loud, I am grateful for, or else it might be I am grateful to. but just keep whispering whatever comes up and then after you've whispered just pause for a moment to sense the experience that comes with that gratitude in your body okay begin whispering don't be shy

nobody else is really listening to you whispering what you're grateful for and picking one thing that you've named that really resonates for you whispering it again a few times It might be the name of a child or something very precious to you that you're grateful for. Whispered and feel your sincerity becoming more and more real and alive. Feel in your body what it's like when gratitude is flowing, is filling you. Notice the sense of your being, the unconfined quality of presence, of open-heartedness.

This poem that I'll read is by Raymond Carver. He says, no other word will do for what it was. Gravy. Gravy, these past 10 years, alive, sober, working, loving, and being loved by a good woman. Eleven years ago, he was told he had six months to live at the raid he was going, and he was going nowhere but down. So he changed his ways somehow. He quit drinking.

And the rest? after that it was all gravy every minute of it up to an including when he was told about well some things that were breaking down and building up inside his head don't weep for me he said to his friends I'm a lucky man I've had 10 years longer than I or anyone expected pure gravy and don't forget it's opening your eyes and we'll go on to the second of the ways of gladdening our mind and that is serving. And I suspect you are familiar with this, that those that are most depressed feel like they're locked into a self-centeredness, into a world that's very closed. And it's not

a self-care. It's just a fixation on how bad it feels. It's a fixation on what I'm afraid of, what I need, what's wrong with me, and it reinforces separateness. It reinforces suffering. So there's one of the ways of deconditioning that separateness is through serving. And I've worked with so many people who discovered a widened sense of being with helping others. And it's interesting that evolution seems to reward helping behaviors. I was again reading an interesting experiment research where volunteers were asked what made them happy and what brought satisfaction to their lives

and those that described it coming from more like service to others, generosity, that kind of thing, ended up having more antibodies that represented less inflammation, stronger immune system than those that had their pleasure or happiness for more ego-based kind of consuming, owning, and so on. It's just interesting that evolutionary rewards serving. It's just part of what allows us to become more connected and really viable as a species. And we know intuitively in witnessing with one another, this is the way Switzer puts it,

He says, I don't know what your destiny will be. But one thing I know, the only ones among you who will be truly happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve. And this doesn't mean serving in some formal way that, you know, could be a soup kitchen, but it could be serving in the way that we find that we are with certain people and we're able to be comforting. It's like all the different levels. in the deepest way, happiness is linked to a widening sense of identity.

Happiness is linked to becoming more a part of the whole. And one of the stories that really touched me about generosity I heard that was about an advertising executive who was diagnosed with very severe debilitating multiple sclerosis and she lost use of her hands, a vision in one of her eyes, numbness throughout her body. So she pursued all these different kinds of healing. And she called on one healer. This is an African medicine woman who gave her a prescription that has its roots in the Dagara African ritual. And here's what the prescription was.

Give away 29 gifts in 29 days. And the gifts had to be authentic and mindful. So she's skeptical, but she's committed and the gifts she did were simple. Be a clean-nex to one person or a kind word or a phone call or a seashell, you know. But by the end of the month, her health had dramatically improved. And even more, her mindset, there was a feeling of joy. So this medicine woman shared the wisdom behind the ritual and she said it like this. Healing doesn't happen in a vacuum, but through all our interactions with others. Most of us go around feeling a sense of lack, low esteem or unworthy.

We forget we belong to the greater whole and many gifts to offer. By the way, this woman, Cammy Walker, who, this is her story, she ended up writing a book called 29 gifts, How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life. So it changes our body around to serve, and it changes our heart. We get happier. And it's not from a should kind of place. It's not the ethical imperative. Thou shalt be a server to be a good person kind of thing.

We're doing it because we feel more truly at home and who we are. And the given is I often do a sharing, share recent acts of kindness. And people share their acts of kindness, but often they'll come up to me and say, you know, I did that, but I have to say there was a lot of ego in it. I wanted to feel good about myself. Or wanted that other person to think well of me or whatever. That's okay, really. You know, the depth of us cares and wants to express caring.

And there's all sorts of parts of us that also want to feel better about ourselves or look good. one story of a bunch of kindergartners are on a school trip and one little girl brings the bus driver a handful of peanuts and he's surprised and he's touched and he says thank you and she does it again 10 minutes later she comes up front gives them peanuts the third time he says honey you and your friends can share and enjoy them and she says oh no we just like sucking the chocolate off of them

still it's generosity Let's take some moments to reflect on this one together, okay? As we did earlier, just take a moment to become still, to feel this body sitting here breathing. Again, you might sense a smile spreading through the heart, mouth with a slight smile. And scanning your life, you might remind yourself of a time where you did some secret act of kindness

are not secret where you help someone, are to imagine a situation of helping someone. Either way is fine. But see if you can, whether it's a memory or an imagining, bring the details in. So you sense the place, what was happening, the look on the person's face, sensing the person in some way relieved, comforted, supported. by your words or actions. Just a taste for these moments what it's like to feel that sense of helping, what it's like in your body and your heart,

the sense of your own being when you're helping. Again from Henry Nguyen, every time I take a step in the direction of generosity, I know that I am moving from fear to love. Okay, so opening your eyes. In a way, each of these, and that we're going to move to savoring, is an expression of the evolving of consciousness, of moving from fight, flight, freeze, grasp,

staying in our egoic realm, where we get kind of grim to shifting to really bringing the more recently evolved part of our brain into action, where we can really feel that empathy and that compassion and mindfulness and live from that. This third, savoring, E.G. White puts it the best. He says, I wake up each morning torn between the desire to serve and the desire to savor. And the ego, rather than savor, what's going on, we either grasp at it or we angst that it's temporary, or we shut down and barely notice what's going on, or we grasp after substitutes, but we rarely pause when there's something that's delicious or beautiful or that brings up wonder.

We barely pause and really take it in. We just don't pause much, which is really the essence of savoring. So you remember Blake, kiss the joy as it flies by, not to grasp it, but just So to decondition that ego that wants to grasp or shuts down, we need to give our whole heart to the moment. This initially was thought to be Einstein, but now that's been a little bit debunked, but it's a great line. If you're driving safely and kissing a girl, you're simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. Wholehearted attention to the moment. There's a couple that are friends of a friend, and they love traveling, living fully.

He got the diagnosis of Parkinson's, and friends were concerned that their life would be severely altered and that they wouldn't be able to enjoy things as they had. But this is how they continued. They had a very lively engaged life with a lot of capacity for joy, and when they were asked about it, they had a very conscious attitude, and it was this. We make a conscious effort to make each day as good as it can be. That's simple. Where there's a will, when there's willingness to open to possibility, we can show up for the moments.

The Uruguayan political prisoners, writes author Eduardo Galliano, May not talk without permission or whistle, smile, sing, walk fast, or greed to other prisoners, nor may they make or receive drawings of pregnant women, couples, butterfly, stars, or birds. One Sunday, Didaco Perez, schoolteacher tortured and jailed for having ideological ideas, is visited by his daughter Malay, age five. She brings him a drawing of birds. The guards destroy it at the entrance of the jail. The following Sunday, Malay brings him a drawing of trees.

The trees are not forbidden and the drawing gets through. Didaco praises her work and asks about the colored circles scattered in the treetops. Many small circles, half hidden among the branches. Are they oranges? What fruit is it? The child puts her finger to her mouth. Sh! She whispers in his ear,

Silly, don't you see their eyes? They're the eyes of the birds that I smuggled in for you. For most of us, there's a lot that's accessible if we could slow down and take it in. There's just a lot of beauty that arises regularly. I think so much it's always the very simplest things, whether it's the sound of the rain or the beauty of the night sky or just witnessing kindness, witnessing someone being kind or a loved one when they're laughing.

I mean, it's music. If we could pause just a little and take it in, it actually changes our biochemistry. Again, there's all sorts of research that describes how if we can just pause for 20 seconds and really let that goodness wash through us, our brain patterning starts changing. I know for me, because one of my regular practices is walking,

most mornings by the river and I have a real intention to savor. I do this kind of random pausing where I'll notice something and I'll even surprise myself, I'll hear a voice saying, stop now. And I'll just stop. And there's something profound, the contrast between moving

and in some way in our mind thinking I'm on my way somewhere, even when it's a nice stroll, there's still, I'm on my way, to the stopping and the stillness that absolutely is receptive, to the sound of the wind and the trees or the birds or the smells of, you know, the river and the sounds of the currents, whatever it is. Pause. We have a lot to take in. And then the trick is to really memorize the experience of that appreciation. Get it really entrained in your body. This is from Mary Oliver. It's called peonies.

I had wanted to read this poem about three weeks ago when they were out here in this part of the world. This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready to break my heart as the sun rises, as the sun strokes them with his old buttery fingers, and they open, pools of lace, white and pink, and all day the black ants climb over them, boring their deep and mysterious holes into the curls, craving the sweet sap, taking it away to their dark underground cities.

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot into the garden, and softly, and exclaiming of their dearness, fill your arms with the white and pinkers, pink flowers, with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling, their eagerness to be wild and perfect for a moment before they are nothing forever. This life is like a flash, it's so brief. And we usually are in this mindset of on our way somewhere else. Even right now there's, we're moving towards the end of a talk and then da-da-da-da-da-da,

whatever's next in your life. And it's radical and transformative just to pause and sense the goodness right this moment, to drink it in, to feel it. You might close your eyes right here as we've been doing just to pause enough to feel that body as it's sitting here, breathing, again inviting that smile to the eyes, a slight smile the mouth and smile at the heart. We've been exploring the ways of gladdening the mind, that along with this direct pathway of presence,

we gladden the mind to seed the garden. So we begin to more and more have this atmosphere that lets us be happy for no reason, that sense of enough. And it's contagious. The more we sense that quality of well-being, it actually invites others to the same kind of open-hearted presence. So we close with a simple reflection just to invite you to bring to mind something you love.

It can be a person, place, activity, but something you really cherish that really values meaningful in your life. And that's what it is that makes you love this so much. What is it about it? about this person or this experience or activity or place. What really brings up the sense of cherishing. And feel how that loving and cherishing is felt in your body, the warmth, the fullness, the brightness. Let it be as big as it is.

You might sense how this cherishing or loving presence is really quite inclusive that there's a lot. There's much that you could bring your mind to of this life, that would be included in this heart space, in these last few moments, just honoring this possibility of feeling well-being, that open-hearted presence that really senses enough, just this moment, enough, the fullness, the aliveness, the depth of right here, right now. We can be happy for no reason, it's possible, to feel our shared prayer that all beings everywhere, might discover the well-being that is our shared potential,

that all beings everywhere might be happy, that all beings everywhere might touch a deep and natural peace that all beings everywhere might awaken and be free. Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.