Tara Brach - Intimacy with Life (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Intimacy with Life (Part 2) - Zen master Dōgen teaches that enlightenment is intimacy with all things. These two talks explore teachings and practices that cultivate intimacy - a liberating experience of relatedness and oneness with our living world.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste friends. Thanks so much for being here. So I'd like to start with a story in this story of man's driving through the country and it's a thick fog and he accidentally drives off the road and gets stuck in a ditch and he's not injured but his car is completely stuck in the mud. So he walks to a nearby farm to ask for help. And the farmer there says, oh, Warwick can get you out of the ditch. And he's pointing to an old mule in the field. And the man looks at this old mule and thinks, oh, my gosh, I don't know how much he can do. But the farmer's going, yep, Warwick can do the job. So the man figures he has nothing to lose. The two men and the mule make their way back to the ditch. And the farmer hitches the mule to the car. And with a snap of the reins, he shouts, pull Fred, pull Jack, pull Ted, pull Warwick,

and the mule pulls that car right out of the ditch. Well, the man's amazed. He's deeply grateful, as you can imagine. So he thanks the farmer, and he gives a friendly pat to the mule. And then he says, why did you call all those names before you called Warwick? And the farmer grins at him, and he says, well, Old Warwick is just about blind. As long as he believes he's part of a team, he doesn't mind pulling.

So, fun story, and it points to a deep truth, which is when we trust we belong. When we trust we're part of something larger. We're enlarged. We become resilient. And in a deep way, the wisdom and the love of the universe flows through us. So because the deep truth is that we belong, we're all made of stardust, we're all composed of the same earthly elements, we're all sourced in the same sentience, the same awareness. When we feel a sense of connectedness, of oneness, it feels like home.

So friends, this is part two of a talk entitled Intimacy with Life. and it's really about remembering our belonging. And I like the word intimacy. You know, in Washington, D.C., our retreats over the past 20 years have been called intimacy with life. I like it because it's a more kind of close-in embodied expression of love. It connotes closeness. It connotes warmth and understanding and connectedness. and intimacy is a yes to life.

So what makes intimacy possible is presence. I mean, if you investigate any experience of intimacy, moments of feeling, warmth, connectedness with another, you'll find that behind it there's presence, that that closeness is nourished by an awake attention. Yeah, I read somewhere that Krishna Merti, he's an Indian spiritual teacher, he taught that if you choose a rock and you place it somewhere in your home and you visit it daily, he said in a few weeks it'll become a sacred rock. It'll have meaning. You'll be in conscious relationship. And there's some wisdom in us. that knows this, that when there's deep attention, when we're paying deep attention, that attention

bonds us, it merges us, it activates love. I mean, if you think of a mom and an infant gazing at each other. So I often think about so many of us with pets that maybe you have a dog and you might like all dogs, but your dog is there's some specialness because you have a poured in so many moments of attention to the particulars of this life form, our attention bonds us. Our attention is the most basic expression of love and it nourishes love. So friends, here's what we'll be focusing on which is two pathways of deepening presence and attention in relating, in relating both inwardly and with others. And the two pathways are learning to listen to understand. In other words, having a very pure engaged receptivity where we can

take in who's here. And the second pathway is expressing directly from our heart. In other words, going beyond the mental habits of interference, interpretation, armoring, and just expressing from our hearts, not holding back our deepest truths, not holding back our loving. We are always communicating with our inner life and the life around us. We're always taking in what's going on and sending out information about ourselves. I mean, the quantum physicists say that all emanations of life are in communication. All parts of life are inter-influencing, like waves in an ocean, that all parts of life are inseparable from all others.

But what is important here is that when this communicating is unconscious, when we're not mindful are aware of communicating, the habit of the mind is to get blocked. That because we have fear, we think that the communicating is going on between a self and another. There's a sense of separation and it closes down. There's not a listening to understand. There's not an expressing in an unimpeded way. So the training here is, can we bring more? awareness to communicating, to unblock. So it really becomes communing, turning communicating into communing. And what we find is that the more presence, the more that sense of separation dissolves and there really is communing. Joanna Macy, wonderful Buddhist teacher and wise woman,

she calls true communication a flow-through of information and energy, a flow-through, that there's a real yes in taking in, it's undefended, unimpeded taking in, and a yes in flowing out, communicating from presence. And I find it really interesting that studies of the brain show that when we humans are experiencing that communing, that oneness, that yes, it actually correlates with less activation of the inferior parietal lobe. That's the part of the brain that generates a sense of self and other. Okay? So communing correlates with that deactivation. So there's more of a sense of we, more of a sense of belonging. So it's our capacity to be in communion with that deactivation. all parts of this living world into Missouith life. I like the way Ram Dass puts it. He says,

I'm only Jewish on my parent's side of the family. But this is our potential. And as we know, we spend many moments living in that trance, the more confined reality where we feel separate, where we feel isolated. And even more, the more stress in our lives, the more we're live in that kind of sense of separateness, a fear-based reality, where there's mostly othering. And that's the mark of today's world. It's bad othering. Our society, it's filled with so much violence and dividedness and anxiety that these times who are in are not conducive to that flow through of true intimacy where there's open undefended listening and sharing from the heart. So instead of that yes, that flow through, we're protecting ourselves.

We're protecting ourselves from fake news, from a sense of malevolent forces stealing our information. We're protecting against dangerous, bad others. I read somewhere one man wrote this. He said, my wife asked me why I spoke so softly in the house. I said I was afraid Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta and Facebook. I was afraid Mark Zuckerberg was listening. She laughed.

I laughed. Alexa laughed. Siri laughed. When we're stressed, when we're mistrustful, we take refuge in a mostly mental and virtual world. I mean, just consider how much we're relating through screens, not an energetic connecting, not a flow through. The perception is of stealth and here and a world of objects out there. And in this mental world, the heart's armored. I mean, true intimacy gets blocked. So I want to share a verse from Zen Master EQ. He's a poet.

And he writes this, because this always resonates for me, this pointing of the way from head back to heart. He says, every day, priests minutely examine the Dharma and endlessly chant complicated sutras. Before doing that, though, they should learn how to read the love letter sent by the wind and rain, the snow and moon. Okay, my friends. So a path of intimacy moving from the virtual to the real, from the head to the heart, awakening presence, experiencing all parts of life, our inner life included, shining through with that same sacred essence. Last week I shared a story of an indigenous woman, a botanist, and how she'd walked through the fields and she'd experienced the moose or the deer fly.

And with each, she'd say, somebody, somebody left tracks here, somebody is here. This is to me so radical and so powerful that if we can, instead of other, really sense with different beings the sentience it's there, the presence that's there, the presence is there, the realness that's there. Right now I'm in Cape Cod and it's part of the reason I chose to do this series on intimacy because just being so close in with the elements, it helps

to connect me to feel intimacy. So walking in the mornings, often there are a lot of seals walking along the bay here. They're called the Black Labs of the Sea because they're like black labs. As though this morning, about 20 feet out, one was swimming along. It was just so powerful to sense, okay, somebody, there's sentience there. I felt accompanied.

And then a few days ago, horseshoe crab that I found that was, oh my gosh, it was upside down, it was struggling because the tide was going out. And here's this ancient life form. They existed before the dinosaurs. They're more

spider than they are crab. Anyway, this ancient life form and it was really life-loving life, struggling for life. And of course, I had to turn it over. I could feel that somebodyness there. A few days ago also, I saw a big blackback goal and it had only one leg, which happens. and you could just send this here it is this this being that's adapted the survivor somebody Martin Buber I mentioned last week he writes about learning to sense thou that sentience that presence and others and how much that awakens us to spirit that we're never alone when we sense thou. Take a moment here to pause just so you can kind of ground in this, get a taste of this, take a few full breaths, invite you to reflect somebody close in, somebody who's dear to you,

human, non-human, just bring that being to mind and take some moments to pay attention to their goodness to their sentience, sensing that somebody, some awareness is living through this being, you might even mentally whisper the word thou, sensing that honoring of that sentience, thou. Notice what happens to your heart. The tension is the most basic expression of love. sense the connection. Thomas Merton writes, life is this simple. We're living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable. It is true. Okay, if your eyes are closed and you want to open them, please do. So, presence allows us to perceive this truth of the divine, the sacred shining through.

it allows us to feel connection, oneness. And as we know, there's deep conditioning not to be here, not to be present. There's deep conditioning not to have that open-hearted flow through to close down. So, France, I want to shift a bit here and name that in talks like these on intimacy, on love, unconnectedness, it can actually highlight just how much we do. don't feel loved or loving or intimate. It can actually highlight how blocked we feel. It can highlight the no. And it's often most striking how it's difficult to feel that loving and that intimacy towards our own being. I think perhaps the greatest suffering is that sense of being divided

from or at war with our inner life. And if we're divided and at war with our inner life, if there's not a sense of intimacy with our inner life, if we don't listen to understand inwardly, if we don't hold our own being with kindness, very difficult to have that yes, that flow through, that communication that becomes communing with others. So because of this, our starting place on the spiritual path, our starting place in awakening intimacy with life, is right here, this life that's within us. This is where we return again and again. And, you know, if you've been practicing with me, this is really at the center of the practice, learning to attend inwardly with curiosity, with care, you know, unblocking the communication with our inner life,

yes to the inner. And it begins by noticing and not. to notice with added judgment the ways we say no. You know the ways we ignore our loneliness or our longings or our hurts are the way we judge our insecurities or our cravings or addictive behaviors or the way we're chronically trying to fix or improve or change ourselves. To notice the no for many the attitude or the way we relate to our inner life is a reflect of how our caregivers and our society have been relating to us. We internalize messages about who we are. Brief illustration is a woman walking down the street to work and she sees a parrot on a perch in front of a pet store and the parrot says to her, hey lady, you are really ugly. Well, of course,

that's upsetting. So she storms past the store to her work and on the way home, same parrot out and again it says to her, hey lady, you are really ugly. So she's incredibly angry now. And the next day, the parrot, again, she passes it, says it again, hey lady, you're really ugly. And now she's so enraged. She goes into the store and she confronts the owner and says she's going to sue if it happens again. And so the store manager assures her that he's going to put an end to this. Well, at the end of day she's walking back from work and she passes a store and there are the parodies and he calls to her hey lady and she pauses and said yes and the bird says you know so point of the story we internalize messages from our caregivers from our larger society and our society is you know we think we're not

thinking our own thoughts. We're thinking society's thoughts. Our societies all have caste systems, just the kind of ranking of value of humans and also non-humans. And our sense of value is deeply impacted by our social location. In other words, whether we're of the dominant or non-dominate race or religion, what our socioeconomic status is, and more. And it's often a hidden impact, we may not be aware of it, yet we turn on ourselves if society demeans us. Or, if our society elevates us over others, you know, if we're white, if we're privileged, then we get disconnected from our heart and from realness and from sensitivity. So either way, we disconnect with society's rankings and say no to our intrinsic value,

cut off. We also turn on ourselves to the degree that our caregivers, who are the messengers of the society, say no. In other words, to the degree our caregivers, ignore who we are, don't see who we are, misunderstand who we are, neglect us, judge us, try to fix us. So we take on those attitudes towards ourselves. So if we widen the lens, I think a really valuable filter for understanding our lives and also the evolution of the species is that there are two basic forces operative. And one is the fear-driven energies that try to control us. And that's basically they have us avoid presence. It's a survival brain. It's basically contracting, saying no to life and trying to manage things. And then our wise hearts, that's the awakening

awareness that's really the call to connecting, to saying yes, to that flow through, to opening, unimpeded communing. So we have these forces and our evolutionary pathway as we evolve, as we grow, is to begin to have more and more awareness of the know of the survival energies, bring that into the light of awareness. Rumi said it so directly that the path is not to seek love, but to seek and find the blocks we've created to it. This is highlighted in one of my favorite parables where people in this domain with those with a lot of suffering would make a long journey to see and consult with a wise sage who lived off in the far off mountains in the hut.

And so they'd go through this journey and they'd finally arrive there and they'd meditate with her and she would swear of them to silence and say, I have one question for you, what are you unwilling to feel? So shining the light on what we've been saying no to, the portal to intimacy is to feel feelings. learn to bring a healing presence, a yes to the feelings we've been unwilling to feel to the wounded places, saying yes to those feelings. And here's what we're going to be deepening with now. Learning how to communicate consciously with the wounded places, learning to listen to understand,

and that's with our inner life and of course we're going to extend it to others. And also to hold and express care to those places. So a personal illustration or sharing, and this was the time when I had drifted very far from communicating with my inner life, very far from that yes, and I needed to find my way back. And this was when I was in that spiral downhill in terms of physical illness. And I became really cut off from my inner life, from Jonathan, my partner, from others. I was very reactive to the physical pain and also the emotional challenge of being so sick. So in particular with Jonathan, you know, our relationship grew out of, you know, just all these activities that we love doing together, hiking and biking and swimming in the ocean

and all impossible couldn't do it. I was too sick. And so I had to be very self-protective. I injured easily. And I was less capable in doing things around the house. And in that period of sickness, and it was about five years that it went on and I'm much better now. But during that period, I had a deepening sense of self-consciousness about just not being okay and then depression and anxiety about what was going on. One morning we were together and he was in some way, you know, trying to help me figure out how to deal with things and I felt the sense of him trying to fix me and left and realized how tight I was, how completely I was withdrawing and pulling away from him. You know, no to my inner life, no to him. So I went out to our hammock and

and just basically knew that I was dedicating that time to inwardly reconnecting. I needed to be in conscious communication with my inner life. So, listening to understand, it began with that question I just mentioned in the parable. I asked myself, what am I unwilling to feel? Such a helpful question. I mean, just in any moment, what am I unwilling to feel? and we find that we've been in some way saying no to part of our life. And for me, it was shame.

I was unwilling to feel how much I did not like my sickly, averse of depressed self. That's the way I felt about it. And shame about feeling deficient. I felt unattractive. I was no fun as a partner. I was basically a bad company. This is what the shame place was feeling. There was a sense of, I don't like me.

why would he like me? So it was a real deep insecurity about being lovable and the old wound of if I'm not offering something to others, if I'm not fun and capable and pleasant to be with, I'm not going to be loved and valued. Okay, so again, listening to understand, then the deepening of that was really that inquiry, well, how do you want me to be with you? I think it was like my my wiser, larger awareness was asking, how do you want me to be with you? And it was so clear that that wounded place really wanted to be accepted, that this fear and shame and insecurity wanted to feel attended to and accepted. It wanted to know it belonged. And that was really important for me to in some way communicate, this belongs. This just like waves.

in an ocean, this belongs. This shame and fear is part of it right now. So with that, there's beginning of yes. Yes, this can be here. I'm willing to feel. And so again, to continue to deepen the presence, I asked that place, what do you need? What do you most need? And if this sounds familiar, this is a very intrinsic part of the rain practice, recognize, allow, investigate, nurture, really listening deeply inwardly, investigating, sensing what's true. So when I asked, what do you need, that place in me said, please love me. It just said, please love me. And just taking that in was kind of like a heartbreaking.

open feeling. Again, the yes is growing because I'm paying attention. The flow through is happening. So I imagined and felt that sense of tenderness and light washing through the wounded place. And I, this is where the expressing from the heart, speaking from the heart, I put my hand on my heart and just offered the words that I've always found so powerful. This is from an Indian master I studied with, not when he was alive. Puntaji, he says, love is always loving you. So I just put my hand on my heart, you know, and the response to please love me was love is always loving you.

And I have my hand on my heart right now. I don't know if you can see it, but I'm sharing this with you because it's so powerful, this process of communicating inwardly, just gradually building that yes with presence, asking what am I unwilling to feel? You know, how do you want me to be with you? What do you need? Listening to understand. It wasn't mental.

It was real physically feeling the place inside me that was hurting, opening to it, accepting it. And then with that, please love me, that sense of love is always loving you, offering that care. and the experience was going from communicating with that place to a sense of communion, to a sense of this flow through where there was no separate wounded place. It was like I was the ocean and these were waves that were moving through me and there was intimacy with the waves. The vulnerabilities there and it was kind of floating in that awareness, that light, that tenderness. So I share this with you because I was enlarged.

There was not so much identification anymore with that narrative of being a deficient, sickly, unlovable person. More there was a sense of that presence, that light, that love that was holding the vulnerable places. So later that day, that kind of a shift that allowed me to be able to, communicate with Jonathan and and here's where the listening to understand and expressing truth came into relationship because I could express my vulnerability, the realness of what I'd been feeling. He could express his, the kind of helplessness and fear he was experiencing. We could both also express and sense the loving that was there, that sense of thou, the the sentience behind all of it. So that flow through that I first had to establish with myself

of communicating then could extend to my relationship with him. I just want to say it's just important to name is that the patterning of insecurity, the shame and the fear still arose over the next days and weeks. I'd move through the day and notice kind of getting contracted, the no, to my inner life, the irritability. And then I'd say, okay, listen, what am I unwilling to feel? And then again, it would come to that expressing love is always loving you, that healing. So there's huge power in communicating consciously with our inner life, to unblock, to move from no to yes.

And it's important to say, I couldn't start with the full yes. I couldn't just realize, oh, I'm stuck. Okay, love is always loving you. I couldn't jump to that. You know, just as in relating to others, if you think of cultivating an intimate relationship with another, it's a deepening experience of saying yes to each other, but it's gradual.

You know, first we start in some way sending messages that we're safe. You know, I'm not going to threaten you. There's some acceptance going on. And then we, you know, start getting to know each other by asking questions and listening to understand and deepening presence and yes with that way. And then as it unfolds, there becomes more and more of a flow through where we really are offering presence and fencing that communing.

So with our inner life, we need this pathway of befriending, of communicating, and it makes it possible then to get close with others in the same way. Let's pause here. Let's do a brief reflection on getting more intimate with our inner life. And I invite you, because this is brief, to explore more on your own. But for now, if you can, just to take a moment to pause, it always helps to take some conscious breaths and invite yourself right here into the moment. You might scan your life and bring to mind a relationship that matters to you where you might be feeling some distance, some emotional reactivity, not where there's trauma, hate, rage, but just some distance. maybe irritation, judgment, some hurt, some defendedness.

And as you bring the person to mind or perhaps have in mind a situation where you feel triggered, turn the attention towards your inner life and begin to communicate asking yourself, well, what am I unwilling to feel? See if it's possible to deepen attention to the body to wherever you feel most vulnerable. to breathe with that, to feel it directly, feeling in and through the experience. So you're beginning to communicate inwardly and say yes to what's here, to unblock, to open, listening to understand isn't so much cognitive as to really feel the feelings. And you might even ask that place of vulnerability, how do you want to be?

want me to be with you. Does it want to really sense your acceptance that this belongs, your kindness? Let the intention be yes, yes to what's inside. Not yes to your interpretation of what's going on with another person, but yes to the vulnerability. Be curious. communicating that turns to communion has a curiosity to it. You might ask that place in you, what do you need? And listen, what's the flavor of love that this part needs? You might explore putting your hand on your heart and communicating inwardly from your spiritual heart to your human heart.

what's the message that will serve? Could be love is always loving you. Could be I'm here with you. Or I'm sorry and I love you. I'm not leaving. I love you and I'm listening. It's not your fault. Trust your goodness.

Communicating is the pathway to communion since that vulnerable place taking in the message. You might sense it as a wave floating on the surface of a vast, tender ocean of awareness, that you are the awareness, the love that's loving, capable of being intimate with all waves. And from this space of openness, of flow-through, of communion with the inner, you might bring to mind the situation again with the other person. And just sense possibility that there are new choices and how to be.

communicate, you might sense your intention to listen to understand, curious, open, receptive, and to speak from the heart. If your eyes have been closed and you'd like to open them, please do. And thank you for exploring. Thank you for caring about cultivating intimacy, because this is what our world needs. So thus far, our primary focus has been on intercommunications, and that's the grounds for intimacy with life. But I'd like to now look more at how we commune with others, develop that presence with others. And the basic understanding here again is that the more stress, the more fears, the more blocking of the flow through, the less access we have to truly listening and truly expressing from the heart. One story, a man

called his mother in Florida and says, Mom, how are you? And she goes, not too good. And she says, I've been very weak. And the son says, well, mom, why are you so weak? And she replies, well, because I haven't eaten in 27 days. The son says, that's terrible. Why haven't you eaten in 27 days? Her response, because I didn't want my mouth to be filled with food if you should call. A bit of a misguided attempt at a flow through. listening and speaking truth gets blocked when we're caught and hurt anger and fear and shame.

It's a survival brain. It's contracted. It's saying no. It's defending. It's trying to get what it wants. You can see this hijacking in another story that I sometimes share of a woman in a job interview and the interviewer is asking, well, tell me, what do you think your biggest character defect would be? And she responds to honesty.

And he goes, honesty? I wouldn't consider honesty a defect. And her reply, I don't care what the hell you think. Again, not a flow through. When we're not present, when stress is contracting us, it blocks communication with our inner life. We're not in touch with what we're really feeling, what our deepest intention is,

and it blocks communication with others. We lose the capacity to listen to understand and to express them the heart. And instead, we're reactive or we're on autopilot. And I know for myself, you know, when I think of my daily interactions and especially when I'm busy trying to get things done, stressed, just to realize how often instead of listening, I'm in some way planning my response,

I'm distracted, I'm judging, I'm just connected. this is universal. It's not our fault. And because we are so deeply conditioned to contract, to not have that flow through, to avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings, to avoid presence, it takes aspiration, it takes intention to move towards intimacy. Intimacy has to matter. So for this last part of our reflecting together, I'm going to explore. some ways we can be more intentional in practicing, in practicing how to listen to understand and how to speak from the heart. And listening to understand comes out of a genuine interest. What's it like being you? Interest. What makes you think or act as you do? Classically,

this is described as perspective taking, but it comes out of interest, caring. You might remember, this is Kyle Schwartz, a school teacher. She wanted to better understand her students. She taught in an area with much poverty, a third grade teacher and an author. So she wanted to understand her students better, and she did an exercise where she asked them to respond to this prompt, which was, I wish my teacher knew. dot, dot, dot. I want to share some of the responses. I wish my teacher knew my dad is in jail and I haven't seen him in years.

I wish my teacher knew I don't always eat dinner because my mom works and I don't know how to work the stove. I wish my teacher knew I like coming to school because it's quiet here not like my house with all the yelling. I wish my teacher knew my dad died this year and I feel more alone. and disconnected from my peers than ever before. I wish my teacher knew I have ADHD and I'm different from everyone else. I wish my teacher knew that I got bullied on the bus. It made me feel sad. I wish my teacher knew how much I missed my dad because he got deported to Mexico when I was three years old and I haven't seen him in six years. These are real, real humans, young beings,

wanting someone to know, to understand, to care. Everyone is struggling hard. You know, we think we know others. We don't know really. So cultivating intimacy begins with wondering and inwardly asking, what's it like being you? Or maybe outwardly like this teacher asking. And to be open to being touched.

That's the yes. That's the flow through. Mark Nipo writes this. To listen is to lean in softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear. So, receptive listening presence, for me, this is a life practice to be with somebody, to be with myself, and to truly say, okay, listening, wide open. and to know that I'll keep getting distracted and so like any meditation there's going to be having to come back, come back, like using my body and my breath as a way to come back and say, okay, just listening, open. Again, Mark Nippo softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear.

This is one of the blessings, you know, when we can cultivate that receptive listening presence, we get the blessing of communing. And you might just pause here for a moment, a brief reflection, and bring to mind somebody in your life who's having a hard time. And sense the inquiry, what's it like being you? Just asking that to yourself, what's it like when you think of that person, what's it like being you? Where does it hurt?

And then listen, just take in whatever comes with the receptivity of yes, open and curious. You can also ask and wonder, what do you love? Sense what that person loves. Sense them as life-loving life. Sense their urge towards more aliveness and love. This is the power of attention. Attention is the deepest expression of love and it nourishes love. Okay. So there's a listening, and if your eyes are closed again to open them if you'd like, there's listening to understand and then the other element of engaged presence, speaking from the heart, which requires connecting with the heart, being in touch with ourselves, and then not holding back

what we say. And out of fear, and I express this in sharing my story, we hold back our insecurities and our vulnerabilities. We're afraid if we let other people know we'll be rejected so we withhold that. But I want to name something else here, which is we also hold back our love. We don't express love. And again, the fear is that's, you know, going to be too vulnerable. We won't be well received. And yet, when we do express from a pure place, it actually activates more loving within us and it reveals the fullness of connection. I mean, you may have noticed when you are present and embodied, if you're really looking at somebody and you say out loud the words, I love you, it actually brings forward in a visceral way that warmth of loving.

Again, just to taste for a moment to reflect and bring to mind a being where your loving is not complex, could be a child, a friend, a pet. And as we did earlier, as you bring that being to mind, see their eyes, how they express who they are, sense them loving you, letting in their love, letting in their goodness. So you're receiving, you're listening, you're taking in, letting that flow through happen. And then this intrinsic part of the flow through is expressing and just sense looking at them in their eyes, embodied, feeling your heart and saying their name and saying, I love you. Sense them taking it in. This is part of the yes, the flow through. You might say again, I love you, or you might say thank you, just appreciating them. And sense

what happens in your body, your heart, the sense of your being, you might let the image of the other drop away and just sense the shared field energetically, that shift of eye to we when loving is expressed, when there's a flow through. Communicating consciously becomes communion. Okay. There's a book called Evolving Toward Peace. It's written by Jalaja Bonhame. And it describes peacemaking circles. It's called Circle Work. And it's for the those who want to resolve conflict and deep in communication and connection. They've done these circles in many places of suffering around the world. And the basic practices are just what we're exploring, listening to understand, communicating

care, having that kind of communing, that eye to we. And I want to share with you about one circle that was held after the 1990s Yugoslav War. It was a circle of six Serbian people and six Bosnian, and they were meeting regularly to kind of heal the wounds of that horrible war. And in one session, a Bosnian woman named Medina was very triggered and expressing her rage at having been raped by Serbs in order to avoid having her children killed. Terrible situation. And after she expressed her upset, the facility.

facilitator requested that others take in what she said. In other words, listen to understand, and then express, express their care, their sorrow that this happened, speak from their heart. The serves that were present could not communicate sorrow. They couldn't do it. And it felt to them like this would be an apology and that they themselves were not guilty for what other Serbs did to her. They had never raped. So I want to stay. step back here and make a comment, which is a common block to listening to understand. The way we get blocked is if we feel in some way blamed or that we're being blamed by others or we're blaming ourselves, there's a block.

We feel a sense of having to offend ourselves. We don't want to feel bad. So we avoid that vulnerability. And that, of course, deep in separation because we're not really able to take in just the realness of okay, somebody's suffering. You can see this a lot in the United States in particular where white people, many, are not letting in the reality and the horror of generations and continuing violation of black people and not able to really feel and express sorrow, not wanting that personal sense of on bad. So instead there's a kind of aggressing, a fighting to have

the truths of history erased, not taught in schools, fighting the kind of reparations that might bring healing. Our fear of feeling bad closes down the pathway to communing. So back to this story because it shows another possibility of what can happen if even one or a few people start in the mode of listening to understand willingness to feel and speaking from the heart. The person in this group who did it was a Serb woman, Dejana. And I want to kind of read to you a bit of how Delaljebanim writes about this. She's describing Dejana in the group and she says, drawing her shawl across her shoulders, Jijana slowly walked across the circle and sat down in front of Medina.

Then she took Medina's hands in her own and very gently, very tenderly said, Medina, I believe you. I believe you completely. And tears streamed down both women's faces as they looked into one another's eyes. Convinced of DeJana's sincerity, Medina nodded wordlessly. This was the flow-through, was unblocked, this was yes. They really saw each other in that moment and everyone felt it. The room was totally silent. Those, present felt that something sacred was happening, something vast and liberating and holy. True intimacy, communing is possible and it's not from lack of conflict. The nose are going to happen.

I mean, our survival brains are going to play out. It's the capacity to see this and then to arrive in presence, to have the courage to listen to understand, on block, be receptive, just the way DeGina could take in the reality of Medina's suffering, take it in, let herself be touched, take in her need to be seen and witnessed, and then it's the capacity to speak from the heart, in this case communicating or understanding, but it could be speaking about our own vulnerability, speaking about our gratitude, our love. communicating when there's presence becomes communing. Friends, we are often so distant from one another,

so cut off from the inner life. And our world is just so painfully divided. This exploration is really pointing to the reality. We can bring healing. We can foster reconnecting. we can evolve toward peace as each of us dedicates to awakening presence in relating, awakening presence in our relating. And listening to understand and speaking from the heart,

these are life practices that radically shift what's going on, that allow us to commune. I mean, you might sense right now, who might you practice listening more deeply with? Sometimes if we say I'm going to do it with everybody, it doesn't work, but is there somebody in your life that you can really sense, okay, I want to listen to understand. I'm going to get quiet and let my breath be an anchor and really listen to understand.

And who might you play that edge with and explore being more real, expressing vulnerability, expressing love. We started with that kind of silly story of Old Warwick, the Mule. You know, you might feel that you're practicing alone. Please know there are many, many, many of us countless beings who are committed to awakening our hearts and that we're in this together, that our larger society, our personal relationships, our moments, in all of these, we can, discover the intimacy that we long for. We can waken to the truth of our belonging. We'll close in a very simple way with a short reflection. As we've been doing, take a few full breaths and invite yourself into intimacy with this very moment that yes, to the

aliveness that's here, kind of inner listening, receptivity, feeling this breathing body, just offering a kind, curious presence. Sensing this breathing body exchanging nourishment with the plants and the trees of this world. We couldn't exist without them. Sensing all of us, these breathing bodies that are made of stardust, these breathing bodies that are sourced in an awareness, the shared heart space, that loving awareness, that's our essence. Aheel Gabran writes, cover me with soft earth and let each handful be mixed with seeds of

jasmine, lilies, and myrtle. And when they grow above me and thrive on my body's element, they will breathe the fragrance of my heart into space. in these final moments, feeling our shared heart space, our shared prayer for a more loving world, feeling that prayer ripple out. Thank you, dear ones. Thank you for your attention, your presence, your care, wishing you all blessings.