Tara Brach - Introduction to Mindfulness: The Power of Heart Presence – Part 3 (of a 5-week series)

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

Whether you are new to meditation or an experienced practitioner, the foundational teachings of mindfulness—heart presence—offer a timeless medicine for navigating these challenging times. This fresh introductory series invites you to bring alive ancient practices in ways that are directly relevant to the emotions and reactivity arising in today's world. You'll be guided to discover an inner refuge—a way to meet your personal life and our collective world with greater presence and wisdom, courage and love. In this session, we explore how mindfulness and heartfulness can transform our relationship with emotions, revealing them as gateways to the full aliveness, tenderness, and clarity of awake awareness.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. This is our third week of the introductory series to mindfulness. And as many are aware, mindfulness is being taught, it's being taught and embraced really in so many parts of our society. hospitals and prisons and schools and businesses and athletic teams. And often it takes on a very Western character. I remember seeing a cartoon with a group of monks on the National Mall.

And the head, in the leader of the monks is saying, what do we want? Mindfulness. When do we want it? Now. You know, and everybody's chanting. And you can get that sense that even with the practices of meditation and mindfulness, we can insert in it a sense of trying to make progress and make it fast. So I mostly am bringing this up because if you're feeling any impatience or judgment

about how it's going for you, you can write that up to the driven character of ours, society, hopefully let go. You can trust that mindfulness is like a muscle, that it gets stronger with practice. So the understanding of mindfulness training is that it's really a fresh way of relating to experience, meeting what arises with presence, with heart presence, and really becoming that ocean, that larger space of awareness that can include the ways, but not react or be controlled by the waves of our experience. And we're exploring this path with the recognition that in current times, the waves are intense. They're intense. We're in a kind of collective limbic hijack and that meaning that fear and anger, anxiety, blame, hatred, it's running strong.

The currents are really strong and they can easily take over. So when they do, we lose access really to the depth and goodness of who we are. We lose access to presence and to the sense of belonging to each other. So I think of the motivation for mindfulness training as really realizing and living from the truth of who we are, from our full intelligence, from our full heart, from our full awareness. Okay, a story for you. A woman was in a grocery store in California with another close friend of hers, and this woman was the mom of three children. She had started a progressive school. So as they're snaking through the aisles, as you do in a grocery store, they saw another young mother.

And she was with her two and a half year old kid. And the child was pulling things off the shelf and trying to run around some and so on. And the mother was getting very frustrated. She was getting upset. And in the next aisle when they crisscrossed them with them, she was shouting at her son. and then next aisle after that they saw her shaking the little child. And so this woman who had started the progressive school walked up to her. And her friend was thinking, oh my gosh, now she's going to get her, she's going to give this other woman a real talking to.

You just don't do that to a child. But instead, she walked up to them and she said, my, what a beautiful little boy. how old is he? And the woman answered cautiously, well, he's almost three. And my friend went on to comment about just how curious the little boy seemed and her own three children were just like him in the grocery store, especially when they were young, pulling things off shelves, so interested in all the colors and the packaging.

He seemed so bright and intelligent, my friend said. The woman had the boy in her arms by now and a shy smile, came over her face, gently brushing his hair out of his eyes. She said, yes, he's very smart and curious, but sometimes he wears me out. And the friend responded sympathetically. Yes, they can do that sometimes. They're so full of energy. And as they walked away, they heard the mother speaking more kindly to the boy about getting home and cooking his dinner. Well, have your favorite, she said, macaroni and cheese. So I heard the story and it really touched me. wanted to share it, and it would have been so natural, so common for the woman who had started

the school and so on to be appalled at this mother's behavior and to have interfered maybe a judgmental or angry way. And internally, she might have felt a real surge of anger and judgment. But whatever she was feeling, she had the presence internally to pause and to connect with a larger perspective and engage in a different way, one that actually cut through the trance of reactivity. Another, she was able to relate to another's vulnerability and really call forth their goodness. I share this because through this program, we are learning how to wake up from a trance of reactivity, where we're kind of caught in the thoughts and feelings that typically dominate our experience and create a sense of separation that really stop us

from inhabiting our wholeness, from homecoming. So for the first week that we got together, we explored the breath as a home base so that we can learn to steady and quiet ourselves with the breath, especially when we're getting triggered in some way, how to quiet the spinning thoughts and calm the body some. And also coming back to the breath so we can grow that muscle of just simply witnessing what's going on moment to moment without judgment. So that's a real gift learning to come back to the breath and being here. And of course there are other anchors or home bases that we might choose also if the breath doesn't work as well for us. Then the second week, last week, we widened the field of mindfulness to include sensations, all sensations,

and just learning how to open and allow the changing flow, whether they're pleasant or unpleasant, because sensations really are the ground of emotions in all experience. So when we're emotionally triggered, if we can bring mindfulness right back to the body and to the sensations that are there, we begin to awaken a kind of balanced presence. In addition, we become more awake in our body. We have more aliveness and we become intimate with the impermanent dynamic nature of reality. In other words, being awake in our body, you know, being able to step out of our conceptual frames actually gives us insight and perspective as to the nature of reality. We see how everything's changing and it deepens our cherishing of this life.

So that was last week. This week we're going to widen to include feelings and emotions. How do we be mindful of the different inner weather systems that we experience and that often run our life because consider for a moment the difference depending on emotional state of how your day turns out if you're in a kind of depressive state or if you're moving through the day angry or fearful or excited or joyful how different an experience everything gets flavored by emotion you know how we react when we're anxious or angry you know, how small-minded we get, how self-centered we get.

It's really profound how much our emotional state creates our experience and our ways of acting. So we're often not conscious of how much our behaviors and our choices and our views are driven by feelings. So much so that I love this quote from Will You O'Douglas, Chief Justice, he wrote, at the Supreme Court level where I work, 90% of our decisions are made on an emotional basis. The other 10% is used to rationalize what we feel. So it's not just us. It's just really part of our humanity that feelings guide how we live. So when we start to bring mindfulness, this non-judging, kind attention,

to what's going on, it allows us to relate to our feeling life with wisdom. So we're not pushing away feelings and we're not being possessed. The point is not to eliminate even the unpleasant feelings. It's really to have that quality of spaciousness and presence that we can let the weather systems come and go and rest in some sense of equanimity and back. balance in the midst. So we can respond to what's happening with intelligence, with compassion, not reactivity. And it helps me to kind of think of it as the difference between if you

put dye in a sink or die in a lake. I mean, if you put in a sink, the whole, all the water that's in the sink gets colored by it or stained, we might say. But if it's in a lake, when and who we are is more of that lake, that open space of experiencing, the emotions, the weather systems can come and go. So the challenges of course that as with sensations our conditioning is not to be in that presence that just sees and allows what's here. Our conditioning is to react to want some experiences and not want other experiences. In other words, we want the pleasant emotional states like attraction or love

or joy or excitement or satisfaction. And then we contract and resist the unpleasant ones like fear or shame or sorrow. There's a cartoon for many years back, Sylvia cartoon, where a woman goes to a fortune teller. And Sylvia's in the guise of a fortune. tell her. And the woman says, my husband just doesn't talk about his feelings. And Sylvia says, yeah, well, what else is new? But then she looks in her crystal ball and she says, beginning of 2025, men will start talking about their feelings. Women in moments all across the country will be sorry. You know, so it's just we want what we don't have and we don't want what we get. So let's just, we'll take a closer look at emotions and then how do we work with them?

And you might think of emotions as the stories and sensations that arise that get organized around what we want and fear. And under all difficult emotions, there's some sense that something, missing or something's wrong. And they have a survival function. They have a deep intelligence because they're there to help us meet our needs. So, for instance, anger is there to help us overcome an obstacle and fear to avoid a danger and shame to avoid being excluded socially. And grief is to process or adapt to the very real changes that happen in life and on it goes. So, emotions arise, but because of their pleasantness or unpleasantness, we either get caught in them or we resist them, or we judge them.

And in the moments that an emotional weather system arises and we react, we go into a trance. Last week I talked about this as the kind of space suit that we go into where we're trying to control what's going on around us. And whenever we are reacting, whenever we're an emotional reaction, we feel in some way separate and flawed. We might not be conscious of it, but we feel like something's wrong with us. And that's why I've talked for years about the trance of unwarrored. It's such a primary way we go into trance of this deep belief in our own deficiency.

And the story that really was a wake-up for me was one friend who described being with her mother and she was dying, she was in a coma and she kind of came out of the coma at one point and looked her in the eye and said, all my life I thought something was wrong with me. And then she went back into the coma and that was the last thing she said. So for my friend in telling for me to hear it, what a powerful thing to see how our whole life can be subsumed by the belief and feeling of personal deficiency. And yet that's what happens. We go into these reactive trances in our emotions

and we feel like we're bad, that something's wrong. And even when it's not acute, like, okay, I'm damaged goods, there's still a tendency to live in limiting beliefs with this background sense of falling short, never enough. So the point is that we're all wired to feel strong emotions. I mean, it's just part of our survival wiring. And given the conditioning of our larger society, it leads us to feeling like something's wrong with me

for having this experience, feeling separate, feeling deficient, that we really have a problem. And you might sense for yourself, in moments of strong fear, our anger, our shame, our distress, how personal it feels, how it feels like it's just a comment on who you are and how easily it can lead to something's wrong with me. What we forget, and this is the reality,

is that emotional suffering is, universal, that we all feel strong emotions. We all feel that squeeze. It's part of the insecurity of being alive. And I remember at my first meditation retreat when I first heard these teachings, the Buddha basically saying the first noble truth of suffering, that everyone feels that squeeze, feels that sense that something's wrong, and the relief. Oh my gosh, it's not personal. It's not some comment on me personally, you know, it's just the relief. This was kind of a universal predicament. And also at that first retreat, what we were really being taught was that if you learn to pay attention in a wise way, if you learn to

to meditate, there's this phrase, it becomes manure for Bodhi, manure for awakening, that these strong emotions actually become part of waking up. It's not like we need to get rid of them, it's like by paying attention to them, we actually deepen our presence in a way that really becomes very vibrant, loving presence. Ticknard Han put it this way, he said, no mud, no mud. no lotus. So this is the invitation of becoming mindful of emotions. And it's interesting to me that both Eastern and Western psychology have the same basic wisdom around emotions. Carl Young says, our suffering arises from our unseen, unfelt emotions. And the Buddha

taught whatever is outside our awareness controls us. We get identified. We get into that space suit of reactivity and we forget our true nature. And for both Eastern and Western psychology, the practice is really about in some way bringing these strong weather systems into the light of awareness. So there's a wonderful and wise story from Ticknaut Han that I think elegantly shows how we bring difficult emotions into the the light of awareness. So in this story, the Buddha's teaching in a field outside of a village and Mara, who is the kind of the god of the shadow side, Mara's our shadow, our fear and our hatred and our greed and our attachments, Mara personified, starts to circle around the edge of the field.

And Buddha's loyal attendant Ananda sees Mara there and it goes to the Buddha and he says, oh no, Mara's here, what are we going to do? You know? And the Buddha says, you know, in some way, don't worry, no problem. And he goes right over to Mara, looks Mara in the eye and says, I see you Mara. Come, let's have tea. It's beautiful because really that's the essence of the quality of presence that we can bring to our emotions. I see you. Let's have tea. So let's unpack that a little bit just to make it clear. The grounds of mindfulness are recognizing what's here and allowing it with kindness, recognizing and allowing. And so if you take the recognizing part, I see you Mara, there's a real power

to naming what's here. You might say it, you know, okay, fear is here. Our end. or grief or sorrow or embarrassment. In the moment of naming, you're actually strengthening mindfulness. There's an understanding that the shaman have that if you name a fear it loses its power over you. And now there's research showing that the activity of conscious recognition noting what's here activates the prefrontal cortex and it lessens the dominance of limbic activity. In other words, in a moment of naming a fear, the limbic system quiets down and there's more of that whole integrated brain and presence. We get perspective. We name and there's a little more spaciousness so we can observe and see what's going on rather than being

caught in it. Okay, naming. This is hurt. This is rage. This is joy. That's recognizing. Now, the allowing with kindness is not adding judgment. It's just simply acknowledging, okay, this is reality and doing it with kindness. And that too gives us more spaciousness and freedom. The story I'll share with you on this is one of my, it taught me so much that I like to share it whenever I have a chance of a therapist and meditation student at a retreat. treat and he was experiencing early onset of Alzheimer's. And he described to me the first time he had a really challenging experience with the disease

that he was teaching himself a workshop, maybe 100 or so people. and he got up front and he was about to start talking and he realized he just did not, he just went blank. He had no idea what he was supposed to do, what he was supposed to say, why he was there. He just went blank, he froze. But then he just paused for a bit. He put his palms together and he started naming what he was aware of. He said embarrassed and he kind of bowed to it, fear, heart pounding, confused. And after he had done this for a bit, one of the students said, you know, no one has ever taught us the teachings this way. Many of them had tears in their eyes. And what had he done? You know, first, instead of reacting in some way, he paused.

and then he simply started naming what was there, I see you Mara, and then having tea, you know, being with, honoring, allowing, saying yes. And that's the essence of having tea is befriending, you know. So it's important to say that when we're allowing, when we're saying yes to what's here, yes doesn't mean that we're agreeing with some judgmental narrative. So let's say what's going on inside you is self-hatred and you have a voice saying you're damaged goods. You're not saying yes and saying, I agree I'm damaged goods.

You're saying, you know, you're bowing and saying yes, there's the pain of self-aversion going on. Okay? You're not agreeing to the message. You're just acknowledging with kindness that this aversion is happening. Another thing to know about having tea, about allowing what's here, is that this isn't about externals. It's not saying, I'll allow someone to abuse me.

It's internal. It's saying, I'm allowing, I'm having tea with the pain or anger or shame or rage, that I'm feeling related to the abuse. So we're naming Mara and having tea with what's inside us, okay? We're not approving harmful behaviors. And the last thing I'll note about recognizing and allowing saying yes, is that if there's acute fear or trauma or panic, it might not be wise to have tea with Mara to say yes, be with it. And the reason is because we can get retramatized. So instead at those times when it feels

overwhelmingly strong, it's much wiser to direct our attention to whatever will calm us and resource us, you know, breathing, maybe loving-kindness messages, going for a walk, talking with someone who is wise and comforting, might explore what's going on with the therapist. We need a container for it. Practicing mindfulness is building a muscle. So we want to start with the emotions that are inside our window of tolerance and then expand gradually. So we'll work with something that's unpleasant and we don't like, but not overwhelming. Let's practice together for a few moments. Just this having tea with Mara and I think of it as a practice, this practice as a yes meditation that we're beginning instead of rejecting what's going on to just see it and allow

it, say yes to it. It can be here. So you might, wherever you are, just take a moment to pause, take a few full breaths. Take a moment to relax any tight, in the body, perhaps letting go in the shoulders, softening the hands, let the chest be open, the belly soft. So you can feel this whole body breathing. You can scan your life for a situation where you find you regularly get emotionally stuck where you get triggered in some way, anger, triggered in fear or self-aversion, but not something traumatizing. And once you found a situation, let it be up close so you can actually get in touch with what was going on. They're with somebody else, see the expression on their face or the words

they're using tone of voice. If it's by yourself, see the behavior, see the room you're in, let yourself experience the triggering, the worst part of it. Feel the emotion that's here and just notice what it's like, and notice how you're relating to what's happening. Notice how you might be saying no, this shouldn't be happening, I'm wrong, somebody else is wrong, this energy of no, just sense how it's there right now. You might even use the word no. Somehow, rather, that part of you that's making wrong what's happening, that part of you that's assuming this is a bad thing, I'm bad, So just sense the energy of no, what it's like when you're not allowing, when you're opposing the arising weather.

And sense how no is experienced in the body, the heart, the mind. This is what happens when Mara is around, but in some way we're saying, no, this is bad, shouldn't be happening. And then take a few full breaths. Same situation. In fact, reentered enough. you can touch into it, that you're getting emotionally triggered, noticing what's happening, aware of the anger or fear, self-aversion or whatever's coming up.

But with whatever the weather is inside, however Mar is appearing, notice what happens if you just name it and say yes, let's have tea. You're allowed to be here. Yes to the fear or yes to the anger or yes to the hurt, not to the judgmental message, but to the feelings, yes. Whatever waves are here they belong, yes. You can have tea with what's here and notice what happens. Notice what happens inside your body, your heart, and your mind when you're saying yes to the life,

here. I invite you to imagine in the days and weeks to come that when this situation arises, when there's some triggering, what might happen if you paused, read, and some way just named, okay, this is what's happening. Yes, let's have tea. And perhaps you can sense the radical possibility of real freedom, freedom to respond differently to your life, more choices. Your eyes are closed, you might open them. So as you did this, some of you may have noticed that saying yes, noticing what's here and saying yes, let's have tea, it opens up space. There's more flow, there's more awareness, you're not so stock. There's more choice.

Some of you might have noticed that when you said, yes, let's have tea, that the emotion got stronger. If you were feeling fear or sadness, maybe it got stronger. And that's not a bad thing. That actually, think of it like every emotion is kind of like a sine wave. It comes and it goes. And that you might have been touching into it as it's rising up and by saying yes, you let it move through more. That's really natural. Stronger emotions, motions getting stronger often happen when there's presence. It really allows the space for them to move through, letting life live

through you. Now, some of you might have noticed that it felt like, oh, this is too much. like I don't want to open to this. Maybe you felt like I, this feels unhealthy to open to. In that case, keep going and say yes to that. Say yes to say, oh, very unpleasant. Feels like too much. Okay, yes. In other words, you're saying yes to your no.

And you may choose and it may be very wise, as I mentioned earlier, if it feels too strong to say, not now. So again, this is not a rigid, yes is good and no is bad. It's more that you can actually say yes to your no when it feels like that's the most compassionate thing to do. Okay, what I hope you're getting here is that there's a real power to recognizing and allowing what's going on. If we don't recognize and allow it, we're in a dream.

We're just as we're at night when we're sleeping and we're in a dream and there really are no choices, we're caught in it. In our daytime dreaming, when we have the thoughts and feelings that start spiraling and really lock in, if we don't mindfully say, oh, okay, I see you Mara, let's have tea, we're in a prison, we're in a trance. And this is the key to undoing a trance reaction. We can undo the habits of defensiveness that distance us from others or the anger of blaming that are all because we haven't faced our own vulnerability, we haven't had tea.

So it's a powerful thing. We have very strong conditioning to avoid emotions try to push them away and stay in trance. And when we do, we are not able to act as intelligently and kindly as when we notice what's going on. So, a little story a few years back, there was a heavy bear season in some of the national parks here in the United States. And the online advice was where noise-producing devices such as little bills on people's clothing to alert but not startle the bears. And they also advise to carry pepper spray in case of an encounter with a bear. And in these brochures, they write, it's a good idea to watch for fresh signs of bear activity and people

should recognize the difference between black bear and grizzly bear droppings. Black bear droppings are smaller and they contain berries and possibly squirrel fur. Grizzly bear droppings have little bells in them and they smell like pepper spray. So we know it that our fear reactivity, it's not always wise. Okay, so as mentioned, when fear or anger or shame, when they dominate, they cut us off from the fullness of who we are. They also cut us off from morality, competitive. passion and empathy. And you can see that on a collective level. Globally, you can see with

our kind of limbic hijack of fear, this unprocessed fear leads to violence. It leads to, it inclines us to experience dividedness from others, to make enemies of others. It inclines us to strong men leaders, to authoritarian rule. We can see it collectively. And individually, when our life is commandeered by fear, either us avoiding it or being possessed by it, by anger, by shame, or cut off from any sense of wholeness and peace. We're not at home. So here we are, our pathway of awakening from trance, our pathway of homecoming. We're talking about having tea with Mara. What I want to emphasize next is that when the emotions are very strong,

we need to emphasize when we're having tea, heartfulness, kindness, caring, infuse it with tenderness. So it's not just, I see you, Mara, let's have tea, but let's have tea and really befriend. I think of one woman who was in a very painful standoff with her teenage daughter and she had a lot of self-judgment about parenting. and in their standoff they both would get angry at each other and she would act out and her daughter would act out. So she brought that into our session together and we practiced a little how to have tea with Mara in this situation.

And so she started with naming, you know, okay, anger, anger. And then having tea with it, being with it, letting it be there. and she found that under the anger there was a lot of fear. You know, fear I'm failing her. She's going to have a terrible life. And right at the root was this shame of, I'm a bad parent. She's going to reject me. I'm unlovable.

Others will reject me. A very core sense of unlovable. So that's a lot. Having tea and sensing that. And just by way of comment, when we interrupt our trance reactivity, in this case anger, it allows us to look more deeply and to find out what's under it. And for her, I asked her, I said, well, how familiar is this, this sense of failing

and being unlovable? And she basically said all my life. You know, I've always felt like I was failing in anything I was doing. any relationship and I always feared that I'd be rejected. And I asked her how that had impacted things and she said, well, it made it so I just never trusted I could be intimate with anyone and didn't take risks and so on. And as she was talking, she got what I sometimes call a soul sadness where she saw how many moments of her life she had been in that trance of feeling deficient, unlovable, rejectable, just the pain of seeing the landscape of her life

and how much she had been inside that prison, that trance. So I asked her what she most wished for that part of her that felt so unlovable and it was really, trust your goodness, trust you are lovable. And then she said, I need to know that I'm not going to be a abandoned and so I said, tell it to yourself that you're not leaving. And she had her hand on her heart. So this is having tea with Mara in a very loving way. Okay, so Mara, those layers of anger and fear and shame, she was just sending that message, I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving. This is heartfulness. She started feeling more of a sense of openness, of tenderness, space for herself, more space for her daughter. She had to do many rounds of having tea

with Mara, but it helped her out of that angry reactive trance to becoming more whole, more human, being able to talk to her daughter in ways that didn't end up creating defensiveness in her daughter, which was important because their daughter was like a year or so from leaving for college and they were able to touch back into what they had had. had earlier a closer experience. So I'm talking about this because having tea with Mara, those parts of ourselves that we've either been possessed by or tried to get rid of gives us new life. It changes our whole relationship with life. We shift our relationship with our inner life. It changes things with the life around us. And I've seen again and again

when we engage in this way, mindfulness, heartfulness, with what's inside, we respond to the world for more of who we really want to be. One of the stories I'll always remember of a lieutenant in the army and he was doing a program in anger management because he had a challenge with anger and it was a very wise program. It had a lot of mindfulness training in it. And so at one point, and he was forced to, by the way, take this training by his superior because his anger was really causing problems

in the way he worked. So at one point he went after a long day work to a supermarket and he knew he had more stuff to do when he got home so he was really in a rush. He gets into line. He has this full pile of groceries. In front of him, the woman only, she only had two items, but she wasn't in the express line. She was in his line.

And not only that, she handed her little girl to the registrar, the clerk, and they were ooing and eyeing over the little girl. And this guy just felt this surge of anger. you know he was you know she's like this woman is taking up time and I need to get home and a busy person I got a lot to do breathe pause you know some of that training kicked in that muscle of mindfulness and so he just noticed okay anger and underneath the anger as you started having to you was like fear you know I'll never get everything done my world will fall apart and then that kindness, it's okay, it's okay, you know.

So when he turned his attention back to them and the woman and her little girl left, he had noticed the little girl was really cute. So he said that to the clerk, oh, that was a really adorable little girl. And the clerk said, oh, thank you, yes, well, that's my daughter. My husband was killed in Afghanistan last year, and my mom takes care of her and brings her over twice a day so we have a little time to visit. You know, as I share that more, not everyone is such an immediate or acute loss as this woman, but everyone's struggling, including ourselves. And you know, what if when strong emotions arise, you know, instead of that reactive trance,

we pause and we deepen some presence and we respond to ourselves, with that, you know, okay, I see what's going on, it's okay. The chance that will respond to our world from a more awake heart is so much increased. You know, bringing our practice to emotions, the ones that typically take over, is intrinsic to freeing ourselves to be the best self that we can be. And to really be part of healing the world. So the thing is, it takes patience because these emotions arise again and again, the anger, the judgment, the fears, the self-blame, and it's not a sign of anything but being a human.

And we're in a very volatile society, so the emotional weather's stronger. Friends, be forgiving in your practice towards yourself and others. that creates a beautiful atmosphere, this forgiving heart for awakening and freedom. Okay, one of the most well-known of Rumi's poems. It's a lot of wisdom in relating to emotions. So even if you've heard it many times, you might listen with beginners' mind to this. This being human is a guesthouse. Every morning a new arrival, a joy, A depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all, even if there are a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture still. Treat each guest honorably. They may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes. because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

It speaks to the power of bringing presence to emotions. They shift from suffering to energies that can support us on the path. They actually transform to bring more vibrance and tenderness to our presence. So let's close with a short practice and I invite you to continue the practice on your own as you have time. You might in this pause here close your eyes or lower your gaze and take a few full breaths. The invitation is to bring to mind some challenging emotion that reoccurs that you work

with or experience fairly regularly. It might have to do with the trance of unworthiness. Ways that you turn on yourself, judgment, shame, self-meanness. It may have to do with ways that you turn on others. Different ways, different emotions that you find, take over and create distance. And in a simple way, let that situation be close in so that you can feel what the emotion's like when it comes. Name it. I see you, Marl, name it, and sense the possibility of allowing of letting it be here, having tea, so that you can really feel how it lives in your body, a gentle, respectful presence. What's this like? And as part of having tea, really bringing kindness, sensing what it most needs. How does it want you to be with it?

There may be there's a message that you can offer to it. I'm here, I'm not leaving. trust your goodness, it's okay. What's important is the sense of kindness that comes through the message, noticing as you have tea with Morrow, that you become more and more that space of awakeness and kindness, the dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes. because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

You might ask yourself, how might what is arising be a guide from beyond? How might it be inviting me to inhabit a true fullness of presence? You might sense, who are you when you're meeting this emotion with openness, with kindness, with presence? and sense what you want to remember as you move forward. If your eyes are closed, you'd like to open them, please do. I want to thank you, friends, for participating, being part of this five-week journey. There's such a power to going right to the basic teachings of heart presence.

I look forward to seeing you next week. We'll be exploring awakening from the trance of thinking. and I always encourage you to practice even a short time daily because it's such a gift to the soul. Okay, many blessings.