Tara Brach - Learning to Respond, Not React (2015-09-02)

Episode Date: September 3, 2015

Learning to Respond, Not React (2015-09-02) - When stressed, we often react with looping fear-thoughts, feelings and behaviors that cause harm to ourselves and/or others. This talk offers three interrelated strategies that can serve us when we’re triggered by stress, and help us find our way back to our natural wisdom, empathy and wholeness of being. By de-conditioning habitual reactivity, we are increasingly able to respond to our life circumstances in ways that serve healing and awakening. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at http://www.tarabrach.com/donate.html. With thanks and love, Tara

Greetings. I'm Tara Brock, and I'd like to welcome you to these podcasts. While the talks and meditations are offered freely, we'd very much appreciate your support. To make a donation or learn more about my schedule, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org. Thank you. Welcome. I'd like to begin with a quote that's pretty much anonymous, although I've seen versions of it from Christian philosophy. philosophers and Buddhists and Gandhi.

This is it. The thought becomes the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into the habit. Habit hardens into character. Character gives birth to destiny. So watch your thoughts with care and let them spring from love, born out of respect for all beings. So this is an expression of karma which really is saying that

causes lead to effects, that when we have certain beliefs and thoughts, they create certain feelings that then turn into actions and the actions become habits and those habits end up really creating our sense of identity and if they're really hardened become our destiny. And we tend to keep repeating and repeating and repeating or creatures of habit. So when they create our destiny and when they're based in fear these habits, they really become the block in our lives to accessing all that we can be, to accessing happiness and creativity and in a deep way a sense of our spirit. So I'd say that one of the deepest expressions of despair that comes my way is when

someone will report that, well, I've been repeating the same pattern. of pushing people away or grasping on or undermining myself or whatever it is all my life for as long as I can remember. That's a feeling of, there's a real feeling of despair because how can I ever change? It's so deeply grooved. So tonight's reflection will really be on how we can awaken from these habitual chains of thinking, feeling, and then acting, this stimulus reaction cycle. that we get caught into that really combine our lives.

And the title of the talk is really the freedom of responding, not reacting. Okay? And I think of this as a very universal kind of theme in terms of transformation. Because every one of us, if we're in any way suffering, we're suffering because there's some patterning that has locked in that's rooted in fear and that we keep playing out. over and over again and it's confining our sense of being. That's why we're suffering. So what I'd like to, the way I'd like to structure this is around three key teachings that have

really shaped my life, my spiritual life in a very deep way and I think of them as invitations. And the first, and each of these three teachings are ways of in a way freeing ourselves or waking up out of the chain reaction. And the first one, the way I language it is really, please don't believe your thoughts. Okay? That's the first one. And the second one is please just pause and come back into presence. And the third one is please remember love in some way, whatever way, but remember love. So that's going to be kind of the architecture, if you will, of our reflection together, these three invitations. But we'll begin by taking a look at what happens in our brain when we're caught in the stimulus reaction chain, and the ones, and they're very often relational, where we get

triggered and we go into this chain of reactivity. And my favorite illustration comes from Dr. Dan Siegel, who's a psychiatrist, he's a friend also, and he's one of the leaders in what's called interpersonal neurobiology. And what Dan does is he says, think of the brain. And he says, and he picks up his hand like this. He says, think of the brain like this, that your wrist leading into the palm of your hand is like a spinal cord going into the skull. So this is the brain stem, okay? And then he says, this thumb is your limbic system. And this is to do with arousal and emotions and relationships. You've got the brain stem that's really regulating your body and it's fight, fight, fight, freeze, okay? And then you've got the thumb that's emotions, it's a limbic system.

And he says, these four fingers, okay, see it like this, is the cortex, the frontal cortex. And this is what allows us to perceive the outside world and think and reason. And the prefrontal cortex is just the kind of bottom part of my knuckles right down here is really the source of mindfulness, attunement, empathy, compassion. So this is the brain. And what happens when the brain is integrated, kind of holding together, is there's a flow upward of,

uh-oh, danger, got to do this, got to do that, fight, fight, fight, freeze. And then downward, there's a, it's okay. We've been here before. We know how to deal with this. And so there's fibers, literally, that come down from the prefrontal cortex that soothe and deactivate the limbic system.

So there's a kind of upward flow and then a downward feedback. But what happens when we get stressed when there's a real shooting of fear or anxiety or it happens very regularly is we flip our lid, okay? And we go around a lot of times kind of like this or half open. And what that means is at those times when we're stressed and in reactivity, we're no longer getting the benefit of that insight and that perspective and that empathy that comes from the prefrontal cortex which is the most recently of all parts of our brain. Instead there's a subcortical looping going on that's got a lot of, you know, there's thoughts

but there's a lot of feelings and there's a lot of reactivity. There's a growing body of research that shows that the more we practice mindfulness meditation, the more we are strengthening and activating the prefrontal cortex, the more integration we are able to sustain. It's very interesting that it becomes a trait, that it becomes really a quality of our awareness, that we're in that remembrance, we're still getting the feedback from our mindfulness and our empathy,

a sense of morality, a sense of the bigger picture. So the question really is, when we have done this flipping, how do we reintegrate? And again, as I mentioned, we'll start with it's please, just remember, this is just a thought, don't believe it. Because when we're believing our thoughts, we're really fueling that subcortical looping that keeps us in reactivity. Okay. So one Buddhist teacher was asked to describe the world and his description was lost in thought, that we spend most of our time in a virtual reality. If you pause and even just think of today, I know this works for me, if I just glance back

at the day I realize how much of the day, the swaths of moments that I was living inside that incessant dialogue going on in my brain. And if we look even more closely and and say, well, what was the atmosphere? What was the kind of flavor of the thinking? Then we kind of get a sense of the experience we were living inside of ourselves and the world and whether we're the endangered oppressed victim or whether we were in some way being the hero, rescuer,

whatever roles we were playing, but we start getting a sense of the identity we were living in. Very, very interesting. When we start catching on to, oh, don't believe your thoughts, that means there's a little space around that virtual reality and a little more capacity to choose. Well, are these thoughts serving healing and serving connecting with others and freedom? Or are they serving that sense of a separate self, a deficient self and a beleaguered self? We start getting some choice because there's a little more space.

You know, when I'm on my way to teach a retreat and I'm very aware that when people come to retreats and spend a few days practicing this, really noticing thoughts and kind of waking up out of them and saying, okay, it's a thought, just a thought. The takeaway at the end of the retreat is really, I'm not my thoughts. I don't have to believe them. And there's profound freedom that comes with that. So if we look at thoughts a little more closely, we start getting that they are images in our mind and sound bites. They're representational, which means that if you're hungry and you think of an apple and you might have a really good thought of an apple, it's going to be different than the actual feeling. It's your favorite apple. For mine, you know, the honey crisp. I love

honey crisp apples. You know, it's a new discovery in the last four years or whatever. the feeling of the hardness and the actual crunch and the spurt of sweet sour and the smell. There's no way your idea is the same thing as that living reality. Thoughts are never reality. They're at best a kind of a representation that's useful. They're at best that and they're often misguided and they often lead to unwise action. A couple of years ago I heard This took place in a Midwest high school

Where some teens were doing a prank And they took three goats And they painted on the goats number one And then the second number two And then number four And they released the goats into the school And the administration canceled school for the day Because they couldn't find goat number three

So thinking obviously is totally necessary for survival. We need to be able to anticipate trouble and avoid and it's also necessary for flourishing. I mean medicine, architecture and writing a poem or building a piano, negotiating peace. It's a essential part of spiritual practice. I wouldn't have been able to compose this talk without thinking. So thinking can point us towards what's beyond words. But often because of our tendency to have fear thoughts, they're not in that direction. And most of you know we have what's called that negativity bias that's part of survival,

that's very much alive and well in us, which means that we have a, we tend to remember the things that are painful and pull them together and create our beliefs out of them. In a very simple way, if you have had a hundred encounters with a dog and one time you got bit by a dog, that's what you remember. And our tendency to lock into what's wrong with us is so strong that some child psychologist will say that you have to have five positive mirroring kind of comments really reinforce. forcing a younger person if you want to have one constructive bit of feedback because we tend to latch on so much to what's wrong, which is not only for during our life, this

is also for after this life. This is George Carlin. He says, you know what a frisbiatarianism is? It's a belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck. So just to say, fear thoughts can be adaptive in terms of real danger, but they become maladaptive because they become the habit of our mind. And the more we run them, the more they become the inclination of our mind. Because as a neuropsychologist say, neurons that fire together, wire together.

So the habit of fear thinking fuels difficult emotions and difficult emotions fuel more fear thinking. circular. But I always have been struck by Jill Boltey, Taylor, who many of you've heard of, again, neuropsychologists. She describes that it takes 1.5 minutes for an emotion to come and to go, one point five minutes, unless, of course, you're having thoughts that keep on fueling the emotion, which is, of course, what we do, that we keep on generating stress thoughts. or fear thoughts, or we keep talking about things that keep us anxious and they keep the mood going. Case and point, after a tiring day, a commuter settled into his seat and closed his eyes as

the train rolled out of the station, a young woman sitting next to and pulled out her cell phone and started talking in a loud voice. Hi sweetheart, it's Sue. I'm on the train. Yes, I know, it's the 6.30 and not the 4.30, but I had a long meeting. No, honey, not with that Kevin from the accounting office. was with the boss. She gets her voices getting more and more anxious and defensive. No sweetheart, you're the only one in my life. Yes, I'm sure. Cross my heart. And 15 minutes later, okay, she's still talking loudly. She's anxious. She's defensive. The man sitting next to her

finally had enough. He leaned over and said into the phone, Sue, hang up the phone and come back to bed. So it wasn't a great illustration, but I liked it. So the more we have the habit of the thoughts and the talking that has to do with what we're afraid's around the corner, what's going to go wrong, what's wrong with me, the more that generates the emotions that embody those feelings in our body and leads to the very behaviors that bring about the responses from the world that reinforce our beliefs. Do you all know what I mean by that? That when we're insecure and we have insecure thoughts and we act out of them, we create responses that then deepen our sense of insecurity.

So we're caught in this stimulus reaction kind of a cycle and what I'm calling the subcortical looping. And it leads to the actions that come out of our fears, well either we speed up, get tense, and really get our body sick, We also try to control others, we try to prove ourselves a lot, we try to defend and present a lot, and there's a lot of aggression, whether it's just our minds having judgmental thoughts, are in large ways bullying, attacking, hurting. So this is what I mean by flipping the lid.

It means that we're no longer living from what the integrated brain, which really in an energetic way means we're no longer inhabiting our awareness in our heart. We're not living from a more evolved, awakened sense of our being. We're reacting out of the more primitive parts of our brain. They've taken over, they've hijacked, and we need to find our way home. And we can see that in our individual life, how we act out in ways, we'll press the send button on an insensitive, email or say hurtful things or let loose our anger. And we see how in the larger society,

the subcortical looping that leads to the repeating cycles of war and oppression, we see what happens when the primitive brain hijacks were coming from a very small fear place. I read just recently in the post that the first five months of this year, police killed, more than two people a day, disproportionately African Americans. And we can see the fear and the fear meeting each other. We can see living with this kind of flipped wig, disconnected from the evolving brain and the danger that it creates. Bottom line, when we're living out stimulus react looping, this unintegrated brain, we're

believing something that's not true. We're living in a very confined reality of a separate and limited self, a reality that has us locked into a very small sense of who we are. Okay, so there's a smoker, an older man, a lifetime smoker, was hospitalized with emphysema, and after a series of small strokes, his daughter urged him, as she often had, to give up smoking. and he refused and asked her to buy him some more cigarettes. He told her, I'm a smoker this life and that's how it is.

But several days later he had another small stroke, apparently in one of the memory areas of the brain. And then without a concern, he stopped smoking for good. But it wasn't because he decided to. He woke up one morning and forgot that he was a smoker, powerful, this looping. We don't have to keep living it. it. But in order to wake up from it, in order to remember or reconnect, we need to begin to activate the prefrontal cortex. We need to begin to call on mindfulness. So the first

piece, and it doesn't have to be the first piece by the way, this isn't linear. You don't have to start with please, may I not believe my thoughts. You could start with please, may I remember love. And for many people to catch the thought patterns is often usually really a powerful way to start deconditioning the looping. Okay? Does that make sense? This isn't a rigid linear thing, but we begin by that practice of waking up out of our thoughts. And this is the pretty much the central practice that we start with when we begin mindfulness training. to use the breath as an anchor and notice when we're in thoughts so that rather than living inside them,

you're aware that they're happening. And the point isn't to get rid of thoughts, but to just know that they're there so you don't mistake them for reality. Does that make sense? Do you have a choice? If you can say, oh wait, this is a thought. It feels really real, it's really strong,

it's creating a lot of power, I even can tell I'm believing it, but there's even a little bit of you that says, please, let me remember, I don't have to believe it. You're on the right track. You're opening the door of awareness, letting the light come through. Rumi says, be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought. Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?

You don't have to believe your thoughts. even remembering that possibility even remembering that possibility is a radical shift in consciousness so we begin that that's the first step please don't believe your thoughts and by the way I like the phrase they're real but they're not true okay the thoughts are real but they're not truth

so we do that and that begins to quiet a little bit of the subcortical looping because there's we're not as identified, they're not charging the looping quite as much. Then we take the next step, which is this invitation to deepen presence. Please, may I pause, may I contact what's right here? You can sense that for yourself, just as you're listening right now, that if you even invite yourself, please, really sincere. please may I pause, may I pause and really arrive in presence, connect with my senses.

There's a tremendous amount of mindfulness research that shows that as we begin to step out of thoughts and become more awake and aware in our senses, it deactivates the limbic system and activates the prefrontal cortex. I love the John Gottman did a beautiful of research I find fascinating. He's a very well-known couples therapist and researcher. And he did a, in his experiment, you have a couple that was all hooked up to different physiological gauges, and he'd take a video of them discussing difficult issues. And he'd wait till their pulses were over 100 beats per minute, and then he'd interrupt their argument. And he'd say something like, you know, our equipment's having trouble, could you

just need you to wait for a little bit. And he'd send them into different spaces. They could just sit down and read a magazine, whatever. 15 minutes later, he'd have them begin again. And what he found is 15 minutes, they were no longer in high arousal. In other words, they were no longer doing the subcortical looping. And once out of the high arousal, more access, remember, to the prefrontal cortex, they were like entirely different people.

They could begin to find their common ground and come to some more resolution. Now, what's interesting for meditators is that when we pause, we're not just reading a magazine, we're actually on purpose noticing what's going on in the present moment. We're naming it some,

just naming and noticing and opening to it, which means we don't have to wait 15 minutes to have that coming back together, the brain, reconnecting with empathy and with perspective. Because we're on purpose, coming into presence. Now, the most challenging part though of when we say, please, may I pause and come into presence, is what we contact is all the arousal, the unpleasant, uncomfortable

stuff that's going on in our body because of that looping, that activation. The very stuff we've mastered over a lifetime to not hang out with, right? We've been, we've spent decades learning how to move away from unpleasantness. So this simple invitation, please, may I pause and be with what's right here, is actually saying, please, may pause and get myself ripped up and squeezed and squished and achy and sore and feeling all this like conundrum going on inside us. It's not easy. It's not easy to learn to stay.

Which leads us to the third invitation. Please, may I remember love? Because if we regard the situation, the context of the stimulus and the reaction, what's going on inside us, with a quality of tenderness, all of a sudden we find we can stay. There's just enough space, softness, kindness, so we can hang out with what's there. we're not so inside it and caught in it as a victim. Rather, when in some way there's a remembrance of love, the what we are opens and we become a bigger space of presence. I'm going to give some examples in a little bit, but just to say that when I'm talking

about remembering love, there are countless pathways and each of us, this is an experiment for each of us. I hear so many spiritual paths prescribing a particular way to open the heart or whatever. Truly, you have to kind of customize and try out things. But there are kind of genres, different kind of broad pathways. And one pathway of remembering love

is to simply have the intention to offer love or care inwardly. And it could be through words or an image, I often put my hand on my heart. And even having the intention and going through the motions works. Why does it work? Because deep, deep down, the who we are is loving presence. And by going through the motions, we begin to call that forth. We begin to reconnect with more of the truth of who we are.

Said again in terms of this brain analysis, we begin to activate this whole neural net in the prefrontal cortex that has to do with compassion and empathy. So one pathway to remembering love is to offering love inward. And another pathway is when we say please remember love, is to call on the love that we know is in the universe and ask to be held by it. And just the way a young child we know when a young child is really upset and their limbic systems hijacked and going wild and the mother's hug brings them online again. It actually helps them self-regulate.

Well, when we imagine feeling hugged, that imagining, and this has been shown in MRI, it's just imagining does the same thing. It begins to bring us back into that. integrated state. So just a call on love. I want to mention that one of my inspirations, the Hawaiian healer, Dr. Hugh Lenn, is one of what's been described as his, he describes his practice, whether he's responding to somebody else's stuck place or his own. He just sends messages. His most basic phrases are like, I'm sorry, and I love you. And so, I found for many people, a lot of time when I'm teaching workshops, just to practice,

what phrase works for you? Can you put your hand on your heart? Well, there's a reason that works. And when we put our hand on our heart, the actual warmth at this neural center right here in the heart area actually calms down the sympathetic nervous system. Plus, in a whole other way, You know, our relationship with our self is at best, it's harsh or distant, our neglecting. When we relate to ourselves kind of like others related to us in our early life, and for many real tenderness, a really understanding presence, an intimate presence, wasn't part of it. So what we're doing when we put our hand on our heart is we're actually cultivating a new relationship

with our inner life. So story for you on one example of somebody that's used these three invitations. And this is a woman who was in that sandwich time of life where her, she had a son in eighth grade who was having a hard time in his own ways and her father was in a nursing home. And the nursing home was about an hour away. so she'd go for a visit once a week. And he had dementia and would repeat himself a lot. But clearly the big message that he gave her was,

please stay, please hang out, please come more often. And it wasn't resentful. It was just, he really liked having her around. But her inner, you know, this was a stimulus, her inner reaction was feeling tight and resentful, feeling a need to justify herself because she felt she was failing. It triggered off her sense of not enough

that she was failing her son she wasn't showing up enough for her son she was failing her father failing on all fronts and then she was also living with the sense that she would be how incredibly regretful she'd be if he died and she was, this was their last

years together or whatever so this is what she brought her practice to okay the stimulus again was you know her father's saying, oh, I wish you'd be around more, her son acting out in ways in her, then going into that looping of what's wrong with me and also blaming them in different ways and then the feelings of fear and shame and so on. So her practice was first to notice the thoughts, you know, I'm a bad daughter, I'm a bad mother, and just whisper, please don't believe this. Just that.

please don't believe this. And then she would come into her body. She'd say, please just come and touch what's here, right here in this body. And she'd feel it was there, and she'd feel the fear and kind of shame. And then, please, may I be kind? Put her hand on her heart. And she used those phrases I just mentioned. She used, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, meaning, I'm sorry, these painful feelings are here. and I love you. So after one visit with her father, she sat in the parking lot and she was practicing this and saying, you know, kind of trying not to believe the thoughts and saying yes and being kind towards all the tightness and fear and really feeling the waves of tears and grief and realized that underneath it all, she just loved her son and she loved her father and she didn't want to let them down, but more than that, she just wanted to trust the loving. Just trust the loving. In a way, that was her realization, you know, it's like don't believe the thoughts, come into

a wise relationship with yourself, and then just trust the loving, trust who we are. And that was the gift of the three invitations, was that, and she had, by the way, many rounds with any of these practices of presence. It's like you have neural pathways that are deeply grooved of how we are, these habits. It takes a lot of rounds to decondition. And every time some part of us says, please don't believe this thought. Please come into presence. Please be kind.

round there is a loosening of the old identity. Every round there's a little more space, a little more homecoming to the awareness and heart that's really our essence to that spirit. Every round. So for her, after some rounds she started noticing more and more, she'd be with her father and when he'd say something like, oh, I wish you'd be coming more or whatever. rather than trying to justify herself, she would just feel a way of all. He loves me, I love him. It was okay. The imperfectness was okay.

And he'd be repeating what he repeated. He'd look at this tree out the window and say, isn't that beautiful tree? And she could just relax and really go, yeah, that's a really beautiful tree. Because she wasn't wound up in that looping that we've been talking about, of stimulus reaction, she was responding, not reacting to the situation. So we have many versions of how we have a stimulus reaction pattern, partial flip that keeps getting repeated. And many of the triggers are external, like for this woman,

it was something her father would say or some would do, could be the criticism of a boss or a teen that's left the kitchen, and messy or a partner that's driving too fast or a person that's hurt you in the way they've behaved. But we're also triggered by inner states of physical discomfort that we sometimes don't realize. I just wanted to name that too because often we're in a reactivity and we don't realize it's coming from a very physical state of our body. And I discovered this big time, about a decade or so ago, I've talked a lot about sickness. Part one element of it was chronic fatigue.

And that was a very particular element that when I didn't recognize, oh, this is the stimulus, I could be off on a cycle of reactivity for quite a while. And what would happen, I started catching onto the looping, is I would be really, really tired, and then my thoughts would become very, very grim. and then this complaining voice would kick in. And I'd have pretty much this oppressed beleaguered persona that was complaining about everything. And the way it would jump into my attention

is I started seeing the complaints be really petty stuff with Jonathan, my husband. And that was my signal, and that became my signal. Like whenever I'd start complaining about him in my mind, and I'm talking about really petty, you know. So he really wasn't doing anything. wrong, I promise. I would just say,

oh, please don't believe this. Don't believe these thoughts. Please be here. And please be kind. And I did it so much during that period because I had so much chronic fatigue because the complainer got so whiny and so

persistent. I got a huge amount of practice and it really got it really got installed. I mean, so that And I still get phases of like many people of fatigue that last in a way that all of a sudden catch, oh, okay, so it's this kind of thought, this kind of judgy or oppressed or whatever. And there's mostly I can say that it's installed, there's a lot less lag time between having the complainer come up and this, oh yeah, that just don't believe it. And I don't even go through the steps so much.

like a much more quick sense of relaxing open into a friendly presence, a kind of witnessing that's kind, more space, more ease. So now thus far I've been talking about this in terms of a solo practice. Okay, we're in our stimulus reaction looping and here's how we invite ourselves into not believing and being present and being kind. But I think it's important to say that we're waking up together and we invite each other into it. When we're really, really being in loving relationship with each other, we help each other to remember to not believe and to come back and to be kind. And it's really important because we forgetting, the spiritual path is all forgetting and

remembering and even the idea that we're supposed to do it on our own is another role and identity that we're hooked into it's some glorious hero spiritual identity thing we're meant to wake up together so it's in that spirit I want to share a story that I've always loved and it's written in first person when I was a freshman in high school I saw a kid from my class was walking home from school his name was Kyle. He looked like he was carrying all his books. I thought to myself, why would anyone bring all his books home on a Friday? He must be a real nerd. I had quite a weekend planned football game parties, etc. So I shrug my shoulders and went on. As I was walking, I saw a bunch of kids

running toward him. They ran at him, knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt. His glasses went flying and I saw them land in the grass about 10 feet from him. He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness and his. eyes and my heart went out to him. So I jogged over to him and as he crawled around looking for his glasses I saw a tear. As I handed him his glasses I said those guys are jerks. They really should get lives. He looked at me and said, hey thanks and there was this big smile on his face. It was one of those smiles that showed real gratitude. I helped him pick up his books and asked him where he lived. As it turned out he lived near me so I asked him why I'd never seen him

before. He had gone to private school and was now transferred over. I never hung out with private school kid before, so we talked all the way home and I carried some of his books. Turned out to be a pretty cool kid. I asked him if he wanted to play a little football with my friends and he said yes. We hung out all weekend and the more I got to know Kyle, the more I liked him and my friends thought the same. Monday morning came and there was Kyle with that huge stack of books again, I stopped and said, boy, you're really going to build some big muscles with this pile of books every day. He just laughed and handed me half the books. Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends. When we were seniors, we began to think about college. Kyle decided

on Georgetown I was going to Duke. I knew that we'd always be friends that the miles would never be a problem. He was going to be a doctor. I was going for business on a football scholarship. Kyle was valedictorian of our class. I teased him all the time about being a nerd. He had to prepare a speech for graduation. I was so glad it wasn't me having to get up there and speak. Graduation day I saw Kyle and he looked great. He was one of those guys that really found himself during high school.

He filled out and actually looked good in glasses. He had more dates than I had and all the girls loved him. Boy, sometimes I was jealous and today was one of those days. I could see he was nervous about his speech so I smacked him on the back. and said, hey, big guy, you'll be great. He looked at me with one of those looks, the really grateful one, and smiled. As he started his speech, he cleared his throat and began. Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through these tough years. Your parents, your sisters, your siblings, maybe a coach, but mostly your friends.

I'm here to tell you that being a friend to someone is the best gift you can give them. And I'm going to tell you a story. I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told you the story of the first day we met. He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his mom wouldn't have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. Thankfully I was saved. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable. I heard the gas go through the crowd as this well-loved boy told us all about his weakest moment. I saw his mom and dad looking at me and smiling that same great smile. Not until that moment did I realize it's depth. Never underestimate the power of your caring.

With one small gesture you can change a person's life. Sometimes when we're not actively involved with others it's really important just to bring them to mind, to remind us of caring and connection. The opening quote, I want to read it again as we begin to close. this reflection, we'll do some reflecting together. The thought becomes the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into the habit. The habit hardened into character. Character gives birth to destiny. So watch your thoughts with care and let them spring from love, born out of respect for all beings. To the degree that we suffer. We are believing thoughts that are not true and we're caught in some kind of

reacting looping that's keeping us identified with something that's smaller than the truth of who we are. So we all need ways to remember. I've been talking about remembering with each other. We all need practices of presence. I remember when I first heard Mahatma Gandhi's story said that I take off a day each week to meditate so that I'll be, then all my actions will come from the wisest part of my being, my highest self. We need to train ourselves. We need the time to pause and to learn not to believe our thoughts, to pause and to come into presence, to pause and be kind so that we can be living, inhabiting the highest, as part of our being.

And what happens when we train that way with each other and alone is that we more and more, it's again the word trait, rather than it being something like, okay, I'm going to switch from reactivity, responding it more and more is that we're expressing from our spirit.

It's almost like we've deconditioned the interference and that flow of light and love comes through in a very natural way. It's just spontaneous. There's a triggering and then there's a spontaneous remembrance and then a flow through. Short story of a great Argentina golfer who once won a tournament and after receiving a check and smiling for the cameras he prepared to leave. And he was relatively new at this so he walked alone into the parking lot and it was approached by a young woman who congratulated him and then told him that her son was seriously ill and near death. She didn't know if she could pay for the doctor's bills and hospital expenses.

And he, who is known as a gentleman, was so touched by her story, took the pen and endorsed the day's winning story, pressed it in her hand and said, make some good days for the baby. A couple of weeks later, he was at another country club. One of the officials came over and said, some of the boys in the parking lot at that last tournament told us what happened with that young woman you met and he nodded

well said the official I have news for you she's the phony she has no sick baby she has no children at all she's fleeced you my friend you mean there's no baby who's dying said Roberto that's right said the official

why that's the best news I've heard all week it just becomes who we are becomes who we are it's really that we've realized who we really are So we'll close together in a simple way, just taking some moments, as we've been describing, to pause together. And you might bring to mind some situation where you get triggered.

And I'd probably encourage you not to bring one where you get triggered in a very huge or traumatic way, but somewhat triggered, medium triggered, where you get, you get, you irritated or you get judgmental, maybe hurt or defensive, in some way reactive. It could be a situation with another person or if it's something to do with your health or traffic, it doesn't matter, whatever it is, whatever triggers you. Put yourself into the situation enough so you can get a taste of it right now. This is just to give you a taste and then you can practice. and practice as you go. But when it's going on, what are the thoughts that are going on in

your mind? What are you believing? Do you believing about other people or yourself? What are you telling yourself about the world? And you might explore just saying to yourself something like, please don't believe your thoughts. You don't have to believe these beliefs, the real but not true. And then invite yourself into presence, say, you know, please just come right here and feel what's going on in your body, your heart,

maybe your throat or your belly. Please, may I just contact and connect with a kind of intimate presence with what's right here. You might breathe with it. And the third invitation, and please may I relate with kindness. May I remember a love? And for now you might want to just with that gesture of lightly touching the heart.

And since if there's any message that would most bring healing, wisdom, comfort, more truth to your own being. And in this responding instead of reacting, just sense your own experience right now of presence. now of presence, the quality of heart and awareness that's right here, sensing the possibility of homecoming to a more full expression of your being, the light, the spirit, the heart, the truth that's really your essence. May we each discover this pathway of homecoming in the way that really allows us to trust our natural being. May we live our days from this presence, from this loving.

Namaste and thank you. We hope you've enjoyed these teachings. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule and special online offerings, please join my email list by visiting tarabrock.com.