Tara Brach - Intimacy with Our Inner Life

Episode Date: August 29, 2012

2012-08-29 - Intimacy with Our Inner Life - Jung wrote that our suffering arises from the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche. This talk explores ways we can establish a healing presence by recognizing and communicating with the parts of our being that we habitually ignore or judge. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

One of the great teachings from the Zen patriarchs is that to be enlightened is to be intimate with all things. And I like the word intimacy so much so that for the last probably 15 years we've called our retreats here in the Washington area, intimacy with life. Now, a very related teaching is that if you have any real preferences, and read in by that, judgments and so on, that puts you a million miles from that intimacy that we so love, which puts us in a conundrum because we have a longing for connection and intimacy and a strong, strong conditioning to judge.

Does that sit well or not well? Okay. So one of the basic principles we run into is that in understanding each other, is that if we want someone to be different, if we have an idea on what we're hoping they'll be or how they should be, in those moments, we really can't see who's there.

We're seeing our projection of what we want and maybe what's not there. I remember one story of a woman, a physician, who was driving her young daughter I think seven years old, home from school. And the daughter picked up the mother's stethoscope and was looking at it with what seemed to be real interests. So her mom says, oh, my heart be still.

You know, maybe this is the profession that's meant to be for her. At which point the little girl picks up the stethoscope and goes, welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, please? And that's pretty benign. and we all know what it's like, whether it's a partner, a child, a parent, a colleague, that when we're living inside how we want them to be, we're not seeing clearly.

And when there's really a strong judgment, you should be different. We've created real separation. Whenever there's a you should, should definitely put up your attention. You should be different. Painful distance. So I wanted to share a story. This is somebody I worked with at a retreat a couple of years ago. Massage therapists and he came from a poor family. His parents are Irish.

He was a bright kid. Did real well in school. He was on a track for med school. His father worked very, very hard to make it possible. Well, he was a year. was a year and a half in to med school when he realized it really wasn't for him. He really didn't want to be there. And he tried to explain it to his dad, but his father was, you know, just insistent and threatening. So he cut off and got very defended, and there was just a lot of heat and anger between them.

He didn't yield. But it was, it created a lot of alienation. So he quit med school in the long run He became you know he went into herbs He ended up becoming a massage therapist His father was enraged Then as his life went on He married a Jamaican woman

That created more of a split And he tried a number of times To kind of reach out to his dad But there was a real there was a wall That was really Could not be broached And so his father closed him out And 20 years went by

Minimal communication Then his mother got diagnosed with cancer and it was treatable but terrible protocol and he was visiting a lot. And he'd come and he'd bring baskets of raspberries and nature DVDs and so on. His father was formal and distant. Mother appreciated his visits. She was having a lot of trouble sleeping so he started really giving, putting his energy into massages. And one particular day she had had a really hard night. He was giving her a massage and she kind of, you know, he was at one point working on her feet and you could see her face. She was really relaxed and so on and kind of drifted off to sleep and he turned and saw his father

had been watching and his father had tears in his eyes. So he went out and walked into the living room where his father was and they just embraced. and they talked and it took a while. I mean, this was not, there was that kind of sudden opening and then a kind of a shyness, but it cracked open. The wall was crumbling. And what, you know, as we talked about it, and it became so clear that the wall between people can only be sustained.

It can only be sustained when instead of communication, We live inside our judgment. But if there's some communication, and it can be verbal or nonverbal, some paying attention, you know, it's said that we are a flow-through of information. That's what we are. And when we let it flow through, when we receive information from each other and we give it, we become more than a separate self. We become a part of each other.

We know each other. but if we contract into judgment and live in that virtual reality that story we're seeing a sliver of somebody we don't know them we're not taking in their information and the wall can go on for decades so

when I hear reconciliation stories I'm a real softy like I almost always cry at them even if I like just now when I was telling you I've thought about this story a lot, especially as we because I knew I wanted to share it, I could still feel that well enough. And I think the reason is it just seems like such a tragedy that we cut people out of our hearts.

It seems so sad that, you know, for them it was two decades. And it also feels so beautiful that it's possible to reopen and have communion. And so I'm talking about grief for the loss of not just, the huge estrangements where there's the real big cutoffs like this story or you know marriages that fail or families that you know where somebody doesn't ever reconnect but I also feel that the sorrow for all the small ways in daily life we're not maybe formally estranged but the resentments and the blames keep us from really loving each other from that freedom to love without holding back. So often I reflect that, you know, if we were at the end of our

lives looking back, what the perspective would be, and certainly it would be a sorrow at letting the smaller stuff get in the way of loving. So the path to intimacy, that's really what we're exploring. And we'll be exploring it this week and next week. And what I'd like to do this week is explore intimacy in an inner way with our inner life and then intimacy with each other because to bridge the gap with each other to be able to do that it starts with being able to communicate with our inner life we have to be able to know ourselves be in touch with ourselves we now know this more even on a you know functional structural level of the brain

that the more that we are able to we have that pro preceptive awareness that can notice what's going on emotion wise and name it and feel in our own body the more we can register how it is for another person if we're cut off from ourselves we can't be intimate with others hence we do these trainings

we're not training so we can go off into a case and be solo for the rest of our existence, we do this training so we can be intimate with life with the loneliness and the mystery and the beauty of what's within us and around us. What I'd like to do as I explore this with you, this kind of pathway to intimacy, is talk about, have the whole filter be communication.

How when we're paying attention, we're actually in communication. with ourselves. And the communication is going on all the time. Every part of us is communicating in some way with other parts of us. And there's blocks, but there's also some things going on, and there's messages that aren't so useful, messages that are useful, but it's going on inside us.

If we become more conscious of that communication, we can have it serve communion. When it's unconscious and when it gets cut off in certain directions, we end up being fragmented and reactive. So that's a lot of words. I would like to kind of see if we can drop into that sum. The basic undercurrent that we usually need to explore, the message we're usually responding to when we're in trouble is,

something's wrong and something's wrong with me. Those are the messages. when you're in trouble, when communication isn't flowing, when you're contracting, there's a message going on that you're believing that something's wrong or something's wrong with me. They're the same thing, but they have a little bit more tag in one of them. So maybe just to begin, because I talk about this a lot on purpose, this trance we go into of a flawed self. This trance we go into that what I'm feeling is bad and I am bad.

Okay? So what I've, the reason I wrote radical acceptance and even and with true refuge, the same point is if we don't recognize that we're caught in that, if we don't have a way to communicate with the parts of us that are believing that, then our life is imprisoned. So brief reflection, just because this will give you a chance to choose some place you'd like to pay attention to tonight for yourself, which I think brings it alive a little more. If you'd like to close your eyes and pause, check in a little. So the inquiry we begin with, we're beginning by the way of starting to communicate with our experience, is just asking, you know, today, yesterday, right now, Am I experiencing this life and accepting what I'm experiencing as it is? Am I accepting my experience of life?

Am I accepting myself as I am? Ultimately, they're the same. So what you're exploring, is there anything between me and being at home with my life, with myself? So you're scanning and sensing. Is there somewhere that you've tagged as this is wrong, this is bad, this is not okay? It might be something to do with your health. It might be your experience of somebody else. It might be some behaviors that you're experiencing in yourself

that you can't accept. Is there anything between me and being at home with myself, with my life? Just notice if there's a place in you or some feelings that you've in some way tagged is not okay. And just send that message inward. that you'll be back. You'll be back to deepen your attention to this. Really, we're here because we want to wake up, which means deepening our attention to the places that might be still in our unconscious, still in trance. So send that message. I'll be back. And if you'd

like to open your eyes, you can. When I do that reflection a lot, and I remember a few weeks ago I did it and I was I've been fighting an infection and had kind of was a bit under the weather and you know a little more grim a little harder to respond to the calls or the emails and so on and I've shared sometimes in here that when I'm sick you know there's I end up finding that I have some dislike for the sick dragging self like I don't like myself when I'm sick So not only am I having an aversion to the unpleasantness of the sensations of sick, I don't like the self that's identified as the sick self that's not quite self-pitting, but really oppressed, beleaguered, kind of, you know.

So when I asked that question, you know, is there anything between, it wasn't so much the unpleasantness of being sick, but I found, oh, what's between me and feeling at home is, kind of turned on that sense of self who's not being a graceful sick person, you know. And when I could name that, oh, turned on myself. Then the next thing that came was, oh, may I be kind? May I be kind to that place? May I be forgiving?

May I loosen up? I've been through this so many rounds. Can I just, you know, be easier on myself? And it was very genuine. It was very spontaneous. As soon as I could see it, then there was a kinder response. But when I was inside it, I was kind of grumbling and sour on my own being. Now, I give that as an example, because if we look,

what is the core principle of transformation of movement from suffering to freedom? It's this. That we pay attention in such a way that our identification loosens. so that rather than being the sick self or the judge of the sick self, by noticing, by naming, I opened into a larger space of awareness. You become the awareness that's aware

and not so hitched with a set of feelings or an idea of a self that owns those feelings. If you can understand that and feel that from the inside out, this sense, this shift from the something wrong with me, I'm not a good person feeling, to the beingness that notices that. It's visceral. You actually feel more spacious.

And then there's a lot more access to kindness and to humor and to flexible behaviors and everything. So this shift is what we're going to be tracking today and next week when we look at what happens. when we start communicating more consciously? What happens when we start noticing and naming something to ourselves and sending messages to ourselves? Are letting the place in us speak?

Something shifts. We're not as trapped inside an experience. So what we find for each of us is if we start scanning our life and sensing the pattern of, let's say, turning on ourselves the way I did, we start getting a lot more committed, there's a commitment to waking up out of it. We start noticing when it's happening, and that's when we commit ourselves

to having a fresh relationship with ourselves. And I'm wondering if you just ask yourself, have I noticed that I relate to myself in a way that's often not friendly and not with a quality of understanding? Can you sense how often you relate to your spirit, in a way that does not hold yourself with respect. If you start noticing that,

there's a natural compassion that arises that wants it different. So I found in working with people over these decades that the key is to have some commitment to relating to ourselves with more love. It says, Srinargarata, one of the key one of the teachers I most love said, he said, all I ask of you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. Now, by perfect, he didn't mean this is another standard and don't fail on this one. Okay? That's not what he meant. What he meant was commit yourself to embracing this life

for the sake of happiness and the sake of peace and the sake of freedom. Because the most important truths are the ones that we most regularly forget. And one of the most important truths is if you can't see and embrace the life that's here, you'll not be able to embrace and find peace and happiness in life at large. It starts right here. Make love of yourself perfect. So we think of it within our own being as can we create a more loving environment? Can we communicate in a way that includes the parts that are estranged? And then if we think of the world, I mean, is it going to be possible to move towards more peace on earth without communication between warring nations or between races, our ethnicities, our religions?

can we have peace without coming to understand each other? It's not going to happen because of political agreements. It's going to be happening because our hearts understand each other. And when we know each other, we don't want to harm each other. Similarly, when we come into relationship with ourselves, we don't want to harm ourselves. So, Coral Young put it this way. He said our suffering comes from the unseen, unfelt parts of our psyche. when we don't know ourselves, when we're not in communication with ourselves.

A healing relationship, when we begin to communicate with those parts of our being, when we invite them into the light of awareness, when we say, I see you, what do you need? What's going on? What can I offer you? There's communication. So then the question comes, how come it's so hard? I mean, every one of us here has parts of our being that are not so seen

and are not so felt and not so welcomed, right? And then we all do. How come it's so hard to start communicating and including bringing all parts to the table, the peace table, right? And it is hard. And I think a simple way to put it is that we have a conditioning to contract away from unpleasantness.

So there's two things we're trying to do. One is that there's a part of us it knows that healing comes by embracing these parts and another part of us is conditioned to go yuck and pull away. That's what's going on. Really? And the more injured we've been, the more we get that yak or the more stressed we are, the more we contract,

and we're no longer having the wisdom to say, okay, be with this experience. We just flinch. Does that make sense? Okay, here's a story to illustrate. This is a man who was responding to an accident and he's writing out his acts in a report form. And I want to read you what he wrote. He said, you request for additional information in block three of the accident report form.

I put in poor planning as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter I should explain more fully. I trust the following details will be sufficient. I'm a bricklayer by trade. One day of the, on the day of the accident I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I had 500 pounds of brick left. Rather than carrying them down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel attached to the side of the building. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the brick into it.

Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to ensure a slow descent of the 500 pounds of bricks. You will note and block number 11 of the accident report from that I weigh 130. 35 pounds. Due to my surprise of being jerked off the ground, so suddenly I lost my presence of mine and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming down. This explains the fractured skull.

Slowing slightly, I continued my ascent, stopping when the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep in the pulley. Fortunately, by this time, I had regained my presence of my mind. and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of my pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel. Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 50 pounds. I refer you again to my weight in block number 11.

As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I again met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the fractured ankle. The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell onto the bricks. Fortunately, only my toes are cracked. I'm sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in pain and unable to stand and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my presence of mine and let go of the rope. This is entitled on knowing when to let go.

So it's a wild example, but don't we all know how we get tugged around, and we make a mistake and we get frustrated and we move faster and then something else goes wrong and it and it proliferates okay this is our reactivity we pull away from unpleasantness from shame from loneliness from fear from vulnerability we pull away so rather than embracing the unseen unfeelt parts of our being we push them away and we do it in a number of ways you know we ignore we neglect or we judge. But however we're doing it, we've cut off communications. And when we cut off communications, we contract.

We're not hearing their message. We're not hearing what's needed. We're not able to respond to what's needed. And so what happens is we're cut off not only from our sense of being able to respond, we're cut off from the place of wisdom that knows in a broader way how to navigate. We're in reactivity, just like this guy who's just kind of zipping up and down the side of a building, right? Now, I think of this as being at war with ourselves in a way. Because whenever we neglect a part of our being, we don't really listen to the loneliness.

Are we cover over the fear with busyness? In some way, we feel ashamed, but we try to just keep on improving ourselves. Whenever we do that, we're actually in some way cutting ourselves off from a part of ourselves. We're at war. And clearly, some people suffer from this contraction and being at war with parts of themselves more than others. Some people have more strong, aversive experiences, and then more aversion towards the self. And that can be explained by genetics and, you know, infinite causes. It can be explained by culture.

It can be explained by our familial situation. I put a lot into how we were treated by our own caretakers. And I think that this is a very big generalization, but to the degree that the people that took care of us were able to communicate with us, and at first, of course, it's fully nonverbal, but to the degree that there was attunement, So as a very young being, our facial expression and our sounds and our movements expressed what we needed and there was somebody listening and responding, that's communication.

To the degree that that communication was fluid and attuned, we actually learned to listen to and respond to ourselves. To the degree that there was severed belonging, there was a lack of communication. Our parents maybe through no fault of their own were distracted, afraid, preoccupied, caught in anger, caught in fear. To that extent, we end up not knowing how to be with ourselves if they weren't with us. I'm reading a really wonderful book right now. It's called Thinking Fast and Slow by David Kahneman. And I'm curious how many of you are reading that or have heard about it. Yeah, okay, good.

Really, really interesting book. And you'll probably hear me refer to it for the next eight months because I think that's how long it'll take to read it. It really explains in a profound, intelligent way, what shapes our decisions and our judgments and describes two basic systems in us, and one's the fast-thinking system. And it's correlated generally to the limbic system.

And this is a survival system that doesn't have time to think things out to have us move through things. It uses intuition and impressions and beliefs, associations. It's driven by emotion and it's quick. And then we've got our slow system, which you might say has to do more with the frontal cortex where there's deliberate thinking and analyzing and it's logical and also mindfulness, a bigger perspective. We need both. And they're both in communication with these.

other the fast thinking informs the slower thinking of the slower thinking says is this true how do we deal with this and sends a message back to the fast system so there's there's a looping of of communication going on now when we get stressed we get really stressed so an old charge pattern appears you know we've been criticized or we make a mistake or feel rejected or out of control or some craving comes up when it's when it's intense the fact system often takes over. And again, we're like that guy that was just being tugged around by the rope and the bricks that we lose contact. He said, I lost my presence

of mine. We lose what in this book is called the slow system. We lose access to mindfulness, to wisdom, to vision, to perspective. And for many of us, depending on our early childhood experience and our biochemistry, because we encountered so much stress, we're much more permanently on that fast system with some seared connections to the more slow thinking, our mindfulness, part of our being. So we end up in this aversive looping where something really painful comes up and we have a reaction to it and then, you know, we don't like the self and then we have more reactions and there's this looping and the sense of self gets completely contracted and narrow. We're just,

identify with the sliver of our self. We're identified with the angry self, the judgmental self, the needy self, the craving self. So the communication's broken down. Now this is what significant. If you can understand that, okay, communication breaks down. It happens in every one of us at times. Whenever you're suffering, there's a communication breakdown. You're caught in a smaller looping in your being. And there's signals. for it. You can sense the signal sometimes that it's really the insecure self, the identities with the insecure self. And then we go very up and down with how others perceive us. Because we're insecure, we get very defined and reactive to what others say. We believe and disbelieve, you know,

we can't trust ourselves really. So we take it in. There was one cartoon I saw of a gypsy's kind of reading a crystal ball and she's saying to this man, you'll fall for anything and he's thinking uncanny I thought that was great so another sign is that because we're

cut off from our own wholeness we're living inside the fast system and the limbic and we're cut off really from our perspective and so on we feel very isolated and there's a sense that I'm alone, I'm the worst. Nobody else experiences it like this. You know, nobody else has things like this happen to them quite so bad.

I run into it so often the sense of I'm the extreme example of this. And again, a cartoon for you. I had this on my office for many years. There's a little mouse inside a mouse hole, and he's the therapist, you know. And the cat is sitting outside the mouse hole. you know, being the client, and he's looking really dejected. And the therapist is saying, don't worry, fantasies about devouring the doctor are perfectly normal.

So we have ways of getting small and feeling isolated and thinking we're the only one and something's really wrong with us and having others, you know, affect how we experience things. Let's look at the other side. What happens when there's attunement, when there is good communication? How do we relate? So let's say others have mirrored us well They've let us know their experience of us

And they've attended and listened And we offer that attention inwardly That mindfulness so strong emotions arise And there's a sense of listening to their message Not making them wrong We can say yes to what arises That doesn't we can sense real but not true That okay this is a real feeling

But that doesn't mean what it's telling me is true. There's that discrimination because we're listening from a broader perspective. Real but not true. We can send messages back to our more vulnerable parts that guide us. When things go wrong, which they inevitably well, we don't make it about us and we can learn from it. So there's a way of relating to imperfection because we're not identified with the bad self or with the wrong self or with the needy self or needs can happen.

We can make mistakes. We can be angry. We can lose our temper. But there's a larger sense of what we are. So we can learn. Some of you might remember the backforth when a reporter is interviewing a bank president and he asks him,

Sir, what's the secret of your success? And the response from the president is two words. And the reporter says, okay, what? and goes, right decisions. And how do you make the right decisions? One word. What's that, sir?

Experience. And how do you get experience? Two words. And what is that, sir? Wrong decisions. Okay, so here's the principle behind this once again, that if there's communication between the parts and communication between awareness

and the different parts of us, you might think of it like an ocean in waves. If the ocean is in relationship with the waves, then there's a way to have perspective and navigate. And what happens is that all the energy of the waves is included. We feel vital, we feel alive, and yet we're not ruled by the particular distorted perceptions that inevitably happen when we're living inside a smaller part of our being.

We have a vaster perspective. So there's a sense of access to the vastness of the ocean, that wisdom, but that aliveness of the waves. One of my friends, Rich Simon says, it's like when there's communication, it's like we're a lit-up Christmas tree, you know, because everything's firing. It's like when there's communications between the two parts of the brain, that's when we really have access to all our resources. So the challenge is that communications gets cut off. when we go into reactivity, and we need to find a way to reestablish communication, where the mindful, awake part of us is able to notice what's happening, send messages,

listen, respond, reestablish connection between the parts of our being. How do we do it? Now I look at my watches, see how much time I have. The most basic way in this practice that we have is that, that mindfulness notices what's going on and names it. Naming is powerful. Naming is the beginning of communication. It's like when Mara appeared,

Mara is the god of greed, hatred, and delusion, and the Buddha would encounter Mara, the first thing he'd do, I see you Mara. He's just naming, I see this, he'd name it out loud. And what that means is no longer am I identified with it, I'm seeing it. the eye is enlarged.

So naming is the first thing, and there's a lot of research that has shown that in the brain, in the moment, if you have strong emotions and you name it, in the moment that you communicate from the frontal cortex to the limbic system and name it, the limbic system quiets down,

the frontal cortex is more activated. So that begins to establish communication. You're no longer lodged in a smaller part of your being. Is this making sense? I'm having to look around because I haven't quite talked in exactly this language before. Okay. So we name it. We sometimes can immediately be prepared if it's really strong energy just to send a message that we've already know about.

We might say the way I did when I saw, oh, I've turned on myself. Okay, this is suffering. I know this suffering. And I'm not alone in it. Others have this one too. Please, may I be kind? So I'm beginning to communicate again from a larger space, right? Now, I'd like to give you an example of one person I worked with that establishes, reestablished communication when there was a cutoff,

where I supported him, and just to give you a sense of some of the different ways that you can explore it within yourself, okay? In this story, this is a student who worked with me at a retreat last year or something. And his mother was living with increasingly going into dementia, and he was having a real hard time with it. As a child, his mother was pretty unreliable and disorganized. They had a kind of chaotic household, very distracted and sometimes in a tent. you know, loving, generous, but just distractible and inattentive at times. So now, even though at this time, even though he knew her confusion and her forgetfulness

and the repeating questions and so it was not her fault, he had a resentment for her being so untogether. And he just was very intolerant of her mistakes and wrong decisions and so on. And it hardened his heart. He just felt like he was tight against her. And in addition, as you might imagine, he hated himself for his lack of compassion. So he's having an aversion to her and hating himself for his aversion. And by the way, that is a really common pairing.

That when we're aversive, we're also not liking ourselves for the aversions. You need to get both layers. So this was a situation where he was disconnected. he was disconnected from his access to a wider perspective. He'd go into just a pure reactivity. Now, before going on, I want to give you a visual for this that I got from Dan Siegel, who's a wonderful psychiatrist, neurosychiatrist, and it's written a ton, so keep track of him, Dan Siegel.

He describes it this way. He says, think of the brain stem like this, part of my hand, if you're looking. the thumb is the limbic system so reptilian brain mammalian if you like that language and this is the frontal cortex my four fingers and this is the way our brain is okay and when the fast system takes over

and we lose contact with our frontal cortex we flip our lid right okay so it's just a way to think of it that you're no longer have contact here you're just living in a much smaller universe okay so this is what happened to him when he was with her you know he'd have all the good intentions of the world but he just hardened and he'd go into this very tight place and it was his emotional centers were taking over and he had

no access to any perspective his mind might be saying she can't help it but his body was feeling something different okay does this resonate for you yeah so I asked him to give me a situation an example so we could work with it and the example he gave me was a time that he went to her apartment and there was food with mold in it in the refrigerator and unpaid bills and even growing up he had always there's always food that had been in the refrigerator for six months or eight months in fact the family used to joke oh this is back from 1987 that you know and so anyway here he was again looking at his mother's refrigerator and

moldy food and but it was you know she wouldn't let him keep track of the help keep track of the bills because she she really wanted a sense of her own independence and so on and became very defensive when he'd point out that you know if you don't pay that the utilities will stop you know she didn't go with that so when I asked him what he was aware of of course he named the anger and I asked him just to say what it was actually like you know hot explosive And I just started mirroring. I just said, okay, so it's hot and explosive and let it be that way, see what happens.

And then he went into ashamed. Something's wrong with me for feeling this. And then I mirrored that back, ashamed, sinking, feeling, powerless feeling. I mirrored that back. And then he got to despair, just despair, powerless. So it's almost that anger was a way of defending himself from this despair. this powerlessness when he was with his mother and he stayed there and said this is very young this is very young and so i said just listen to that place and now he's beginning to have communication

he's named something that's true that means he's no longer inside the powerless despairing place he's resting in the mindful awareness that's noticing it and now listen to it what's it what's it really what is it communicating and that place is basically communicating, let me look at my notes, I need help, there's no one to help me. That kind of thing. I just need help, help, you know. And I asked, you know, what does this young place want from you? Now, if you listen to the language of that, what that presumes is there's this young place and there's a you, there's an awareness, there's something larger.

Again, creating communication, not being merged, fused, fused, with a young place. What does it want from you? And just to know I'm here, to listen, to care, you know. And then I said, so if there's any, you know, and then he said, and, you know, to have to forgive, forgiveness, like he felt bad about himself. So, so then I invited his high self, the wise place in him to communicate, whatever he felt would be valuable to communicate. And that's when he, you know, in some way just offered himself care and said it's okay. The way we do so often here. Just a communication from our awake heart to a place that's vulnerable. And there are tears and he became more peaceful. Now I'm giving you a very abbreviated version. But what his

realization was, because now he's resting more in a place of awakeness and wisdom, was just as she can't help being out of control, just in the same way that her mind is to take. and she can't help it. When I get into this young place, I can't help it. It's just, it's not my fault that my heart hardens. It's not my fault that I'm angry. And that was very freeing. It's not my fault. Seeing that, it didn't make him less responsible. It actually gave him more capacity to respond because he wasn't adding on another arrow of blame. He's just saying, okay, this is the conditioning that's happening. So he was able, and just so you know that he just, since the retreat, he would just keep doing many, many rounds where this would emerge in him. And he'd, you know, on the spot he couldn't talk to himself, he couldn't work with it, but he'd leave.

And he'd start that same thing. He'd name it, anger, anger, and then feeling powerless and that despairing feeling. And just, what do you need for me? Just be with it, be with it. Forgiving, forgiving. It's not my fault. And then he'd start being able to look at her through different eyes and really see, you know, both how this independent together woman was, you know, from the past was trying like crazy to hold on to her existence and the sadness of that and her goodness. And he could, then he wasn't fixated on this confused person. He could see who she was, see that generosity and good heart shining through.

So there's a lot more humor and ease in their relationship. So the reason I wanted to take the time to go through that is because when we flipped our lid, when we're caught in reactivity, we need to find ways to start the communication again with the larger part of our being. And there's many different ways that we can do it. Now, sometimes when we begin naming things, and say, okay, fear, fear.

And we start sensing how does it want me to be with it? We realize, oh, the part of me that's naming it is judging it. It shouldn't be here. There's a part of me saying, get a life, you know, stop being so. So then you deal with that part. It's like anything that comes up, you go, oh, okay, name this. Anything that comes up is another wave that if you remember, you can relax open to this awareness

they can notice it with some kindness but it takes time it just takes practice so what we begin to do is learn this art of catching the fact oh suffering I'm caught in that looping of a small self pausing and just begin naming what you notice that'll create a little

little more space. And then you start inviting that place, listening to that place, listen to the needs, respond to the needs. Communication is resumed. And the gift of communication, this is why we're talking about this tonight, is that when there's communication, the sense of who we are is no longer hitched to just a small part of experience. And we can rest again. in that vastness and that love and that awareness that's our nature. We're freed to come back to who we are. We can be intimate with the different parts of our life without being snagged. That's the gift.

So I'd like to practice with you a little on this, if you will. And perhaps the best way as we do right now is give yourself a chance. Like just move around a little in your chair and get yourself in your body. Like if you want to roll your shoulders, if you can stretch your arms without, you know, knocking into anybody that's nearby. This is a non-violent venue here, you know. So that when you come sitting still, just allow yourself to close your eyes and begin with your intention. That for each of us, there are parts of our being that we push away. And it's possible to have this love of our being become more and more unconditional.

And for the sake of your happiness, for the sake of love with others, and for the sake of realization, realizing the truth of who you are, the pathway is to learn to recognize and embrace the life that's here. So just to feel your own intention to come into that very tender relationship, that intimate relationship with the life that's here. You might even wonder, what would it be like if I could make love of myself perfect? And know that when we use the word self, we're really talking about love of the life that's here, not some story of a self, love of the actual life that's here.

What would it be like to do that? truly embrace this aliveness in all its expressions with understanding and tenderness. So we begin in a simple way with that inquiry from earlier, which is really, is there anything right now between me and feeling at home in my life, at home with myself? Either question. And if there's some situation that brings up strong feelings, just let that situation be right in front of you so you can contact a little more what might be have been unseen or unfelt. And know that this is just, you're just doing a test run right now and you're practicing

this more on your own. But just invite the feelings to be there. What is it that's difficult? What is it that you're afraid it's going to happen? What is it that feels unacceptable? Just sense what we're calling the unseen, unfelt parts, the part that you wish wasn't there, the feelings, the reactions you would like to get away from or ignore, or that you judge. And for now, instead of any of those things, just name it a little.

Just name what you're aware of. Like this man named anger, you might be naming fear, confusion, grief, anxiety, sense what your body feels like, what you're believing is really wrong. The naming is a mental whisper. And you might name something and then sense if that's it. And if it's not it, then just name again.

But that man, that anger turned into kind of powerless. And then there's that shame and then it's despair. So listen to what's going on inside you. This is a communication and there's an awareness that's listening. Part of that listening as you're listening, if you were listening to a young child, is just to listen to the need. What is this part of you need? The part that really doesn't feel at home with life. What does it need? What does it want from you? And sense what's sometimes called your high self, that awareness that's listening, that awake heart

that cares and sense that you can respond to this place in you that's having a hard time. And just experiment a little with your response. You might send a message of words. But see what happens when you in some way send energy, a message. You might send touch. I often explore having a tender touch of the heart. it's very very powerful to physically just put your hand on your heart

and then vary the touch a little so that even the pressure itself is a communication very powerful we respond a lot more to physical communications than we do words at times what happens if you offer yourself touch words care so there's a quality of your own awake presence, offering, communicating, listening, caring.

And just sense your own experience of your own being when you're in communication with a difficult part of your experience. Who are you then? Again, Sri Narasar Gadata, he says, all you need is already within you, only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. All I plead with you is this, make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing. Give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them.

You are beyond. Closing this meditation by letting your attention widen out to sense yourself with others, others that are here right now in this room and others that are listening or watching and on the same path of really embracing this life so that we can offer our prayer to ourselves and each other in all beings. May we embrace this love and life with unconditional presence. May this very moment be held with loving presence. May every part of our being be held with loving presence.

May that loving presence include all beings everywhere. May all beings everywhere awaken this heart and mind in a way that allows for peace and happiness and freedom. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com,

our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.