Tara Brach - How Hope Can Heal and Free Us – Part 2

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

What if hope is not something we cling to—but a capacity we can cultivate? In this talk, we'll explore how hope becomes a healing and liberating force when it is rooted in awareness, trust, and compassionate action. The mature expression of hope includes three interwoven elements: the aspiration to awaken our full potential, a trust in the possibility of that unfolding, and the energy to engage in service to life. We'll also look at why hope matters so deeply on the spiritual path, how it can support emotional healing and resilience, and how to recognize its shadow forms—when hope turns into striving or denial. Through mindful reflection, we discover how to nourish a hope that is spacious, embodied, and aligned with love. This teaching is offered for anyone seeking guidance in staying open-hearted and engaged during uncertain and painful times.   Our introduction music is from "Opening" by Adrienne Torf, © 2025 ABT Music

Welcome, friends, to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week, I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com, where you can also join our email list. Now, let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. This fall we experimented for about six weeks with including an ad before this podcast

and we've decided not to move forward with any more advertising. Many of you shared that it disrupted the flow of your listening and I really understand it didn't feel aligned with the spirit of this offering. These teachings and meditations will continue to be freely available and your support truly makes that possible. Thank you, friends. Thank you for whatever you've offered and for your continued generosity

in whatever form feels right to you. Namaste. Welcome, friends. Thank you for being here. At my first long meditation retreat, and this was over 40 years ago, the teacher that was speaking talked about Buddha nature, which is our, it's the awake awareness

that's really our shared source. And during his talk, he asked us to reflect and he asked a question. He said, do you trust that you have Buddha nature, that this light, love, awareness is your essence? And you might ask yourself that question. Do you trust that? For myself, first I said, sure. And then I went, well, sometimes.

And I thought of all those moments that I was caught in insecurity, and fears, in limiting beliefs, and feeling guilt and addictive behaviors, you know, the trance of unworthiness. And I would say that perhaps the biggest shift in me over the decades is that the same emotions and mind states can arise, but they don't obscure that deeper truth of who I am and of the hope and possibility of living more fully from that truth, from that life. from that love, from loving awareness. So this talk that we're going to be sharing together is part two of spiritual hope.

And the basic understanding is that hope arises out of that trust in who we all really are. And yes, of course, it gets clouded over. And yes, of course, that basic Buddha nature gets clouded over and we have potential for cruelty and for violence. And hope reminds us that we have the potential to evolve, to manifest light and love. So, just stepping back, I chose this theme starting early in the year, 26 here, because it feels that nourishing hope is crucial in a time of darkness. I mean, imagine the difference between a society marked by hopelessness and communities

that even in the face of great oppression hold hope and not a false optimism but openness to possibility that the goodness in us humans can emerge and can move us in ways that bring more loving to the world. So in our personal lives and collectively, it's spiritual hope that actually gives us the energy to turn towards the light. And it's not so much with a focus on the future. It's more manifesting what's here right now. I think of Thomas Merton often who said, do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work

itself. We don't know what's going to unfold, but we serve by staying open to what's possible and by choosing love again and again. So, friends, I hope these reflections on spiritual hope serve you as you enter this new year? The last session, our class, the focus was on the role of hope on the spiritual path and I was contrasting spiritual hope to egoic hope, a kind of more narrow, grasping kind of hope. And the mark of egoic hope is that we're wanting certain outcomes

to come to pass in the future. So I hope I'll get a raise or win the Olympic gold or whatever it is. So there's a kind of narrowed hope. And with it, along with the grasping, there's a kind of a fear that it won't work out. And there's a real narrowed attention. It's like we miss the universe around us because we've got this idea of we want just something in particular. A favorite example has always been this story of an older woman who's kind of sitting on a

a bench, a park bench in Miami, and a very disheveled man and tattered clothing comes and sits down next to her. And so she asked her, how are you? And he said, well, actually, I'm just out of prison 25 years. And she says, oh, what were you in for? He said, murdering my wife. And she said, oh, so you're single. So what happens is that we don't, we have an agenda because we're hoping for a certain thing and we're just not available to how life really is. The hoping for a certain thing to happen a certain way actually makes it so we're not receptive and available and attuned to the whole mystery that's unfolding around us.

And this happens even in spiritual realms when we have an idea of of we're meditating and we have an idea of how we want our practice to be. And when it's not the way we have the idea, it's not crystal rainbows and lights and so on, if there's anxiety that arises, our obsessive thoughts, we think, oh, this isn't supposed to be here. And rather than opening to what is and letting whatever is here be a portal, we're kind of searching for it to be different or grasping. And of course it happens for many people when we have a little.

ideas of the future and how things are supposed to evolve, what kind of heaven realms who want to be able to transcend into either during our life or in the afterlife. And there's a story about two friends, Norman and Irv, who had a deep interest in the esoteric. And they had this sense or this belief that after they died, there was some way to keep in contact with those still in form. And so they made a deal that whoever was the first to die would get in touch and kind of describe how it was to live in the afterlife and more transcendent realms. So Irv dies first and Norman doesn't hear from him for a year and just decides, okay,

there's no afterlife. But one day he gets a call and it's Erv and he goes, oh, so there is an afterlife, wow, because he's hearing his message, his voice in his mind. So he says, what's it like? And Norman asked, since this is Erv's response, he goes, well, I sleep very late, I have a big breakfast, then I have lots of sex, lots of sex, and I go back to sleep, but I get up for lunch, have a big lunch, more sex, take a nap, huge dinner, more sex, and it goes on and on. Wow, says Norman, so that's what Heaven's really like?

Oh, no, says Irv, I'm not in heaven. I'm a moose in Wyoming. So we have ideas, and they get in the way of our availability to really, really discover the reality of the moment. Any idea does. So spiritual hope in contrast to these ideas about how it could or should be, it arises from a trust of consciousness, that love is here, consciousness is here, it's living through us and it's timeless. It's not really a hope for something in the future, it's that hope and sense of openness that the unfolding of consciousness right here and now. It's described as an attitude of the soul and I really

like that expression, this spiritual hope. It's this wisdom that recognizes our potential to realize a fully awakened heart-mind. And that sense of our potential makes us available moment to moment to what's right here. Here's Hamid Ali, the way he just described it. He says, hope, and he's talking about what he sometimes describes as, holy hope, is a state of trust that everything will be okay. It's a feeling of optimism, an attitude of openness and true receptivity to what the unfolding of being presents to us. What makes it that everything will be okay? It's that the love and awareness that we belong to is living through us this very much.

moment. That's what gives us the trust. So spiritual hope doesn't have to do with the future. When I look ahead, when I think of the future, a lot of the time I just get anxious. You know, I just think of I have too much to do, you know, and it just gets me tight. That's what comes up habitually when I think of the future. And that's not to say there aren't skillful ways you can think of the future that serve hope. But they have to do. point you back to the value of being present. Does that make sense? If you have an idea of the future and it's like, and the message is, oh, everything you want is by being present, that's a useful one. So, as we're going to explore, fueling and nurturing spiritual hope

comes out of connecting right here more fully with our life. our bodies, our hearts, our awareness. It's a reconnecting. Now, in Buddhism, it's always, to me, it's just very striking that really the heart of Buddhism is this attitude of hope. That the first noble truth says, okay, there's suffering, there's discontent, and the second noble truth says that it arises because we're always grasping after things or pushing things away. And the third noble truth says, but freedom's possible. For any of us, freedom

is possible. This is the message. And the example of the Buddha is just the only value of it is it's an example of a human being caught in grasping, caught in pushing things away, that was able to come home to a larger sense of being to that awareness and love that's here. Freedom is possible. Fourth Noble Truth is the path to that freedom, how to manifest that potential. So the path is grounded in hope and when we're shy on hope, there are ways to nourish it. And that's what we're going to look into tonight. We're going to, two things. One is what blocks us? You know, what really blocks us from having that attitude of possibility? And the second is, when we're blocked, really, how do we move into that sense of, oh, okay, it's here.

I can draw on this. Hope gets blocked. It gets disabled. We contract away from a natural sense of openness or optimism when we have some experience of severed belonging. And I like that term. It's very much in the field of psychology that I think it's useful. It's really a felt sense of severed belonging. It's not actual severed belonging.

We can't be severed. We are awareness. There's no severing, but there's a felt sense from a small self-respective that we've been cut off in some way. It happens typically for many in early childhood because our parents also had severed belonging and are unable to create that kind of resonance field

We're seeing and gotten for who we are and we're embraced for who we are. So when there's not a really safe, loving, filled with understanding kind of attunement in our home life, that is a sense of being cut off. It's really interesting that researchers are discovering more and more how when there's enough when there's really good mirroring, you know, I see you, I get you, that is actually what activates the neural connections in the frontal cortex. So our capacity, especially the relational network in the frontal cortex that has to do with empathy and compassion, that gets activated when as young children we're in a resonance

field. And when we're not, in other words, if we don't get seen and we don't get seen and we don't get that loving, we don't get the full activation of her from the cortex. We're not able to engage in relationships so fully because there's not trust, there's some sense of danger. When that happens, instead of being guided by a wholeness or an integrated brain and a, you know, in a wake heart, we're guided by our limbic system that looks for what's threatening and dangerous and tends not to trust others. And it's really seen, there's some animal studies that show it in a very kind of dramatic

way, some studies with chimps when the mother is erratic in mothering. Sometimes there, sometimes not. And erratic is what sets off a sense of insecurity and trauma. When the mother's erratic, the chimed babies end up binge eating being antisocial, withdrawn, and fearful. Now, does that sound familiar? You know? I mean, how many of us?

So it really creates the groundwork for depression because when we're cut off from a sense of that connection with others, when we're living in anxiety, the tendency is to want to push under our life energy because it's so unpleasant. So that's one level that happens is in childhood when there's not good enough. parenting. But it also happens through our life when we have experiences of being violated or rejected or some threat to our health where we really sense that we could die when there's dramatic accidents. Any time we feel unsafe in some sort of ongoing way, that can end up creating that sense of severed belonging, mistrust, lack of hope. We can see

culture-wide when we really look at historically marginalized groups. So all these studies of Native American groups in Canada and United States and how generational trauma has created this experience of depression, addiction, anxiety, the same thing we see when we humans are animals. Make things unsafe and we lose access to hope and we go into anxiety, depression and addictive behavior. See it very much, it's so much in front of us right now with the ongoing oppression of violent sorts to African Americans. I was teaching on the West Coast, I was the one that gave a talk at sales force and one

of the women I was talking to there was describing how the fear she experiences when her partner goes out to the supermarket when it's late at nighttime because it's increasing police violence and, you know, black men getting stopped and never know when there's going to be some sense of right on the streets, either killed by police or attacked by a gang member. So she lives in fear. And Tama Hasey Coates describes as the fear for the bodily self. This ongoing sense of fear of severed belonging cuts us off from hope. We can't sense the possibility of what we might experience in our lives.

So its biggest expression is when there's full trauma. Full trauma means we're fully severed, there's full severed belonging, we're completely gripped by the limbic system. But for most of us, if we haven't had full trauma, there are ways we have felt severed belonging, each of us. And to the extent we have to whatever degree, that means that we're going to have some lack of access to really trusting our own body, trusting our heart, trusting that others care, trusting the earth, the web of life.

I think in particular about depression because it's such a one of the most common and really excruciating versions of severed belonging that when the leg of the legion, that when the energy just depresses what's there and the feeling of no hope. It's a real prison, a biological and psychological prison for anyone that has experienced depression knows it. When we don't have hope, it feels like torment. Hence we begin to look at, for any of us on the spectrum, how do we reconnect? When there's severed belonging at any level, how do we reconnect?

And the first thing is again to say, it's possible to reconnect, that the Buddha said that I wouldn't be teaching you this Dharma, this path, if it wasn't possible to be free, if it wasn't possible to reconnect, if it wasn't possible to be happy. So, freedom's possible, it's an intrinsic capacity within us, and there's a pathway. and we're going to look at now how to reconnect to the aliveness in the moment and to our lives. What I'd like to do, and this will be for the rest of this talk, is drawing some examples of different people who really kind of hit bottom. And sometimes that's more extreme, but I think in a way, often,

in order to find our way to hope, we have to hit bottom that all of our kind of false refuges, all our compensatory techniques, they don't really work. They don't bring us a deep sense of trust that allows us to move through the ups and downs of life. We're on a roller coaster usually. So the first person I'd like to bring in is William James and many of you know of them as American philosophers, psychologists, educator, and also as one of the well-known known people that really introduced us to altered states. The reality is not just this narrow version that we have of it. So his story, and it's an interesting story, he came from a really accomplished family and his brother, Henry was super successful writer, and William in his 30s,

he was unaccomplished, he wanted to be a painter, then he gave that up and went to medical school, but then he quit that to do an expedition of the Amazon. But that didn't work yet. either. And then in a moment of reckoning, and he wrote this in his diary, he questioned that he had the capacity to be in any way productive in his life and that he should be alive at all. Because that counts as hitting bottom, right? That's pretty good. So, he had, I guess, any possibility was there then if he really didn't have a reason to be alive, but he said, before I do anything rash, I'm going to do a one-year experiment. And this is what I, I think this was fascinating. So, he did a one-year experiment. He decided that no matter

what thoughts arose, no matter how hopeless, no, how depressed, he would keep turning his attention to the assumption that change was possible. That was it. He was going to, every time he had certain types of thoughts like hopeless, hopeless, I'm, you know, unproductive, never going to work, he would just turn to the assumption of change as possible. Not, I'm a great person and I'm getting better and better every day, you know, the thing you put on your refrigerator, but change is possible. Okay? All right. So, he tracked in his diary and he practiced every day as if things could get better, as if he could transform. And he became increasingly receptive to opportunities in that mind state. And his energy got engaged and he got more and

were aligned with deeper interests. He married, he started teaching at Harvard, create a study group, the metaphysical club. He wrote a letter after this experiment. He said, I possessed for the first time an intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom, free to manifest our potential. So this feels like a really super relevant story for us

because the training that we do in when we're practicing mindfulness and compassion, really it begins with being able to step out of the trance of thoughts that keep our biology and our mood and our attitude really small in that prison. We begin to notice, oh, if I'm thinking this, that this is my sense of who I am, I'm going to stay stuck in this pattern. So we step out of of certain thoughts. The Buddha said, whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind. So you see, a hopelessness has to be fueled by thoughts. That mood has to be fueled. So we begin to ask ourselves, what kind of thoughts do we have regularly? Are they thoughts that are going to keep us sensing limitation?

Are they thoughts that are going to open us to what's possible and bring us right back into this moment? A friend told me a story of a couple who really love to travel, we're living it very fully. He got a diagnosis of Parkinson's. And this friend described how they continued, very lively and engaged, very open, with a real capacity for joy. And the way they did it, they had this agreed-on attitude, which is that they are going to have a conscious intention to allow each day to be as good as it could be.

Not saying it had to be a certain way. Some days could be really hard, oh, exhausted all day, but they were open to even with that having the most presence or care, tenderness or curiosity, kindness. It's that openness and it's an attitude. So let's just take a little moment to practice on this level. This is working with the thoughts a bit. So one expression, a severed belonging, is limiting thoughts. And one way to re-establish belonging is to wake up out of them,

come back to the living experience, be open to what's possible right here. So I invite you to bring to mind an area in your life where you might feel some doubt, where you might have some limiting thoughts, not be so hopeful. It might be around work, or it might be in a certain relationship that feels very stuck, hurtful, dead-ended, reactive. It might be that you have some limiting ideas and doubts about your health, about your spiritual unfolding, or somewhere you feel emotionally stuck. And when you sense the area that you're, where you get caught in doubt,

you might deepen your listening and just sense, well, what is it your most believing or telling yourself? That you don't have the capacity to make things different or that you don't have the capacity to live with what's going on, what's unfolding, that it's too much, that something bads around the corner. Just take a moment. to sense whatever it is you're believing, how that belief imprisons. You might sense if you're running that belief through your mind when you're believing it,

when you're believing in your limitation, your lack of capacity, how it severs you from being available. It severs you from that openness, that receptivity, they're actually not so available to life. Just bring a very kind presence to both the activity of the belief and to the squeeze or the prison that it creates so that you're breathing and as if you're really from your deepest, wise as just bearing witness with real kindness, sense that you can perceive this from your highest and wise as self, how a smaller part of you is caught, and also see beyond how you're

the wisest part of you can sense possibility. And you might imagine what your life would be like if you didn't believe the limiting thoughts. Just get a glimpse. What does it feel like in your body? If you just for a moment sense, well, what would it be like if I didn't believe? Just let your body sense that. That sense of possibility, that mystery, that aliveness, that all of a sudden becomes available for now just to honor that, something that you can tap into. Like William James, you can notice when limiting thoughts come. And on purpose, invite in your deepest wisdom,

turn to the light to the sense of possibility, opening your eyes. So that's the first, first avenue back to belonging, is that we wake up out of the limiting thoughts. The second example of rediscovering our belonging is Henry Thoreau, we're back in history, males back a century or so. So, in his time, a neighbor put it, he was an irresponsible idler, a trial to his family, and no credit to his town. He was seen as a loser, and as a writer he was disregard, in fact, Walden languished on bookshelves

for years. So, age 26, Thoreau goes to New York City and wants to establish himself in the literary scene there. and he tries to develop his career in a conventional way and adopt the kind of style and fashion of the day. He tries to be like those that were popular. Totally crashes, rejected. So he goes home and he's doing a lot of soul-searching and he basically discovers what happened

that he had lost touch with his own being and trying to be the way the world thought he should be, or the way he thought the world thought he should be. Anyway, you know, meeting expectations. and so on. So he really asked himself, you know, what is it that I love? And he returned to his beloved woods with wisdom from failure, which was, you have to be who you are. You have to stay true to what you love. So he found the still point, the center of the natural world, and it was for him, 1.5 miles from home. And I thought it was interesting that his mother would

bring him cookies and sandwiches. So he was still this loafer, you know, but he was, was a loafer that had found his way back home again. And what he found was attentiveness to nature, this natural world, was a way to come home to the nature of his inner world. This was his pathway to belonging. So his message, this is a quote, one should be always on the train of one's own deepest nature, or it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the divine. So there's this homecoming that comes in the face of having to extricate ourselves from this idea of we're supposed to be a certain way because it's a deep, deep imprint on every one of us that we should act a certain way, we should be successful

in a certain way, we should look a certain way, so for us to imagine who would I be in this moment if I was not obeying any of that. What really matters to me? Rumi puts it this way, let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kiss the ground. So there's an inquiry here for each of us. Are we really kissing the ground in a way that aligns with our particular body, mind, spirit?

Personal story, my father was a lawyer and also a social activist. And when I went to college, my plan was I was going to go to college and then go to law school and do law and the service of social change. And so I went in thinking I was going to go to law school and I came out and joined an ashram, spiritual community. So something happened in there, some shift. My understanding is that I got very involved with tenants, rights organizing, community organizing, and left-wing activity that was really trying to address inequity in the culture.

And while the causes were fabulous, same causes I believe in today, the energy was very militant. It was very shaking a fist at the heavens and making others wrong and bad. It felt very polarizing and divisive. So I began to do yoga and meditation, and it was like I came alive. oh, we can come home to a sense of open-heartedness and presence with others that is that, that's the consciousness I want to live from and act from.

And I could tell I needed to really immerse myself. So I switched gears instead of law school, I joined an ashram. And just to say that I had a lot to face and work out in doing that because, you know, there was just some guilt that I wasn't being a social change agent in the way that my family most admired, you know, both of my parents real active. And not only that, I wasn't on an apparent career track at all. So I just want to name that my example comes with a lot of privilege. You know, I was in my early 20s, I didn't have anyone to support. I, you know, was joining pretty much of a commune. I didn't have to earn money and so on. And my parents were

were very supportive actually, they were actually fabulous. And still, even if we can't change our job so it fully matches energetically what we feel is the way of kissing the ground, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. And if we're not kissing the ground, if we're not doing what we love, then we're not nourishing hope. It says, Thoreau put it, that we really have to stay aligned with our spirit in this. So we'll take another moment to reflect if you will. Again, we severed belonging when through our parents, our culture, we leave ourselves,

we leave the life that really expresses what we love. And how do we reconnect? You might ask yourself, when you're feeling most alive and present, and in-flow and awake, what's going on? What are you doing? What is it you love? You might imagine an open space of time with zero demands and expectations. What do you want to do with that? Just as a starting point, we know the expectations are there, but first one, what do you love? Do you love being with certain people? Do you love gardening or hiking? Do you love serving, feeling that you love you love you love being with certain people? Do you love gardening or hiking? Do you love serving?

you're helping? Do you love creativity, painting, or dancing, or music? Do you love non-doing? Just being still. Take a moment to choose just one thing you love. You may love many, many. But one thing that you know you really love, just imagine it. Sense yourself engaged in what you love. sense what you most love about it, what's the actual felt experience, what's going on inside you, what's the quality of presence that arises that makes this so precious, just sense that background of presence, that being quality that you have access to, sense who you are when you're doing what you love, when you're kissing the ground, and know that this is another pathway to belonging, to your heart, to aliveness. This is the pathway to living with the sense

of possibility in every moment to take the time to kiss the ground. Rumi says, let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you love. Okay, so we've talked a bit about the severed belonging that comes when we get limiting thoughts and waking up out of them and explore now the sense of kissing the ground, coming back to what we love. Oscar Wilde puts it this way, he says, be who you are. Everyone else is taken. So when we belong to ourselves in our life, we rediscover that sense of possibility and hope. Next one I want to discuss is comes from the question of,

yeah, but I don't know what I love. You know, sometimes when we're really depressed, we don't know what we love. We don't find joy in things. mind joy and things. And so the next teaching on rediscovering belonging is the centerpiece of all Dharma, which is then belong to what's right here in this moment, including the misery and the pain and the sorrow and the sadness, belong to this moment's experience. The benefit is if you start right where you are with this moment, it will become a portal

to the presence that we long for. But we start by being with what is. Woman last week, again, last week I was out in the Bay Area and did a day long on relationships, on loving relationships. And she was describing the series of the habits that led to failed relationships for her. And what happens is she anticipates that she's going to be rejected in some way, that there's going to be an unevenness that she'll want it more and the partner won. And then she starts, when she starts detecting a pulling away, she grasped on and feels possessive or jealous or whatever. And then things crash, the person pulls away even more.

And then she gets depressed, kind of hopeless, it's not going to work, and then kind of stays in that for a while until something possible comes along and then she replays the pattern. So this has been what had been going on for a long time. And then she started practicing with mindfulness and compassion. And her practice became, as we described with William James, when she'd see the thoughts of this isn't going to work, I'm going to be rejected, she would put it like a picture frame around them and say, okay, these are the thoughts of my feelings if I'm going to fail, I'm going

to be rejected. Then she'd come into her body and underneath those thoughts were fear. And underneath that fear there was a sense of shame, of I'm not wanted, I'm unlovable. a loneliness and her practice would just simply be with that with a really deep compassion. She just told herself, I'm here with you dear, I'm here with you dear, I'm not leaving. And when she'd leave and the thoughts again of oh this is going to fail, I'm going to be rejected, she'd come back and feel the feelings again, I'm here with you dear. I'm putting my hand on my heart because that's a way to reconnect and establish belonging.

It was the thing her parents did not do when she was upset. They didn't know how to say, I'm here with you, dear. So she did it for herself. And she said there was a real wake-up one day when she sensed that the one who was offering care was tremendously tender, tremendously present, tremendously kind. She goes, oh, that's me. This is my capacity. This is my potential.

started paying attention to that, bringing her attention to that, this is me, meaning this is my more evolved potential being. Well, this started shifting the pattern and as she described it, you know, that with the next relationship she was able to hold it a little more lightly because she was trusting more, this goodness. And she was able to be more open about her insecurity because she didn't have to cover her because it didn't seem so toxic. She started developing a relationship and her way was, I'm with you dear, staying right with what's here. And I can say just to extend on this personally

that countless times every day I'll feel the arising of anxiety and it comes from a feeling of, you know, an old pattern of a separate self that's got too much to do, it's going to fail in some way. And that'll come up, that's severed belonging at some version of it, and each time fear becomes a portal to the fearless heart if I can just simply recognize it and stay a little in my body with kindness. So this isn't like only a practice for major dramatic incidents. This is like a daily way. We cultivate trust. We deepen that sense of belonging. But every time some the expression of the separate self, the severed self comes up, the response is, oh, let's be right here, be with it, kind. It becomes a portal and we begin to sense the potential

of who we are, this presence that is incredibly tender and awake. We begin to trust that. So this is the next way of belonging is to come home to ourselves in the moment and I want to bring up one more before we close, which is absolutely essential, which is to realize our belonging with each other. We cannot heal severed belonging unless we can begin to come out of our bubble, begin to let ourselves feel our vulnerability in the presence of another and open to that other and sense our love and our appreciation with that other. Otherwise, on some level, we're still going to be feeling ourselves as separate and operating

out of that separateness. It's the reason that 12-step groups work. Why do they work? There's so much research now. We cannot change habits if we don't trust the potential to change. So in 12-step groups, others are around and they're beginning to change habits and that inspires us. In 12-step groups we begin to sense, oh, it's not like I'm a bad-based, you know, I'm a bad-based

addict itself, it's the addiction we all have, the tendency we all have, less shame. Another story for you. One woman described how she's in recovery for cancer and she's in a group of people, a group of women that are all in recovery in some way and says it's deeply honest. In other words, they name all the fears they have of dying, all the shame they have for the way they look and feel, the insecurity that others will turn them into the seaward, the disease, all the pain about being helpless and needy. They're very, very honest, so it's very freeing because it's not my shame, it's the shame, just this human experience.

That helps to heal severed belonging. In addition, and this is what I wanted to share with you, this woman I was talking described how one woman was feeling a huge amount of angst because of not being there for her children, that she was just very feeling, very self-absorbed as she put it, although she was just working with what was there. But she felt this angst of letting down her family. And so they went around and they opened to the vulnerability she was experiencing, and they also went around the circle and each of them named what they saw in her, which was her humor and or deep caring and her capacity to have others, how much she helped others feel accepted

and cared about. And she let it in some and she really lit up and then this became part of their regular ritual that as part of healing severed belonging, they not only would share their vulnerability but they would go around in the circle and at different times take turns, look at each other and share what they saw as the goodness, that light and beauty and heart that shining through. Arn Garber, Norwegian writer says, to love someone is to learn the song in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten. So this is the other pathway. It's relational belonging and it's absolutely essential to mirror the light for this group, one of the other,

before we left the day long, this woman described how naturally some people relapsed. And for one, week before her death, she said more than anything in facing her death that this group allowed her to trust the timeless light that lived through her and it was what was allowing her to move towards her passing with a wide open heart, with a fearless heart. This is hope. Hope is not that we won't die. It's the hope that comes from trusting a timeless quality of love and presence that lives through us and shines through us and that will carry us as a refuge through all the ups and downs.

Tibetan teacher and writer Sogio Wimpa Shai puts it this way. He says, if everything changes, then what is really true? Is there something behind the appearances, something boundless and infinitely spacious in which the dance of change and impermanence takes place? Is there something in fact we can depend on that does survive what we call death? So when we have spiritual hope, it really brings alive that capacity to trust in what is timeless and open to our moment-to-moment experience with real sense of research. So as we've explored, we cultivate it, we step out of the limiting beliefs.

We kiss the ground, we do what we love. We reconnect by belonging to the immediate experience of the alone and discovering in a truly awake, intimate way, our belonging with each other. And these are kind of the pathways that remind us of something that's timeless that can really carry us. A closing story for you and then we'll just take a few moments to sit quietly. I've always loved this. This is a story about Kafka when he was an older man. He spent a lot of time sitting in a park and one day a little girl walked by him and she had tears running down her face and he stopped her and said, tell me what's wrong and she said, well I'm missing my

doll, my favorite doll. And he decided to help her look around. They looked around but it couldn't find it. A few days later, the girl returns and Kafka says, there's no doll, but there's a note and he reads it. What the note said was, I've gone off to travel some around the world. Please don't worry about me. I'm fine. So the girl's somewhat relieved. She returns to the park every week or so and each time she does Kafka's there with a note

from the doll. And the girl, you know, just each time he reads to the girl, you know, and tells us of the doll's adventures traveling around the world. So Kafka gets sick and he goes to the park one last time. This time he's brought a doll and he hands it to the girl and says, the travels had really changed her. Some years later when the girl was a young woman, she finds and reads a note that's been rolled up and placed in the doll's hand, she discovers it.

Here's what it says. You will lose everyone you love, but the love will always always return in new forms. When we opened change, we realize the changeless, that shines through us all. And trusting that changeless love, that awareness, and living from it is really the source of spiritual hope. So let's just take a few moments together to sit quietly. And in the spirit of this evening's reflection, you might begin, just take a moment to sense someone who you really love and what brings up that sense of loving, just the goodness that you sense in that person, sensing the way that person looks at you when they're loving you, caring about you, just feeling

the sense of connection, you might even mentally whisper the person's name and say thank you. Just let the feel and the belonging, just energy that's connected and part of each other. Just open to that and let go of the idea of the person and just feel that warmth and aliveness of belonging. Let yourself belong to this moment or what's actually you're experiencing right here in your heart and your body and your mind. And as you listen to the rain, you listen to the sound, sensing the awareness of the that's here, that tender, open space of awareness that's listening and feeling the moment,

sensing in the background, that awake openness of awareness, that tenderness that's really home. Timeless, loving, presence. Now, this is from Rilke. Center of all centers, core of cores, almond shelf enclosed and closed and growing sweet, all this universe to the furthest stars, all beyond them is your flesh, your fruit. Now you feel how nothing cleansed to you. Your vast shell reaches into endless space, and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow, illuminated in your infinite peace.

A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. but in you is the presence that will be when all the stars are dead. Namaste and blessings.