Tara Brach - Listening with an Awake Heart - Part 1 (2018-04-11)

Episode Date: April 13, 2018

Listening with an Awake Heart - Part 1 (2018-04-11) - Deep listening - to our inner life, each other and our world - is an intrinsic expression of our awakened heart. Yet because we have strong conditioning to be caught in wants and fears, there is often much interference in the field of communications. These two talks are an opportunity to intentionally deepen your capacity to listen in a way that leads to increased understanding and connection. You'll have the opportunity to investigate what gets between you and deep listening, and to practice the key elements that nurture receptive presence. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. We begin this class with a little illustrative story. In it, there's a new priest, and he is concerned about his way of listening to confessions, and he wants an older priest to sit in and listen a little, can give him some feedback. So after a few rounds of confession, the older priest asked him to come out of the confessional to give him some feedback. And he said, why don't you try this? First,

you know, cross your arms over your chest, you know, just, he says, and rub your chin with one hand. The guy does this, so he's copying him. Because now say things like, I see, yes, go on. Yeah. And how did that feel? young priest does that and then the old priest says now don't you think that's a little bit better than slapping your knee and saying no kidding what happened next

actually I think the way the young priest was doing it actually sounds better so it's fun and what it points to is how integral listening is how we listen to pretty much everything that happens in our life

It's the listening, the inward listening, that's so necessary if we're going to be intimate with our inner life and then being able to listen to each other for there to be a real touching, connecting, knowing. And then for us listening into our larger world so rather than unreal others, we can sense the realness of humans and respond to what our world means, what our earth needs, listening to the earth. and in a spiritual way, it's that deep listening into the very nature of who we really are, the awareness, the love that's here.

So listening is pretty much at the center of much and when I talk about it, I often think of this story I heard many years ago. I'm going to read you a bit of it. I share it now and then. It's a story about an African, tribe and the birth date of the child's counted not by the days from when they're conceived, as some cultures do, but rather from when the child was a thought in the mother's mind. That's when the child was truly conceived, because everything we do is out of mind, out of

awareness. And then when the woman decides she's going to have a child, that feeling fills her and she goes off, sits under a tree by herself and listens until she hears the the song of the child that wants to come. And then after she's heard that song, she comes back to the man who'll be the child's father and teaches it, and they make love to physically conceive the child. Some of the time, they sing the song to the child,

and that's their way of inviting it. And then when the mother teaches the song, she continues to teach the midwives and the old women of the village. So when the child arrives, those that are around her can sing the song to the child to welcome it. And then as the child grows, the other villagers are taught the child's song, and if it falls down, hurts its knee, someone picks it up and sings a song to it. Or it does

some great thing like rites of puberty as a way of honoring that person, they sing the song. And it goes that way through life. Through marriage, the songs are sung together. And finally, when this child's ready to die, all the villagers know their song. And so when they're lying, they're ready to die, they sing it for the last time to that person. So when I heard that and whenever I kind of reflect on it, that kind of speaks to a deep level of attunement, of listening past personalities, of listening to essence. And it's a capacity of ours.

We each of us have this capacity for deep listening and then we often have it blocked. And so that's what we'll explore. We're going to explore that this week, this class, and the next one, what I call listening with an awake heart. We'll do reflections together as we often do during these classes. And my hope is, because I feel like listening is something that it's a domain that can keep going deeper and deeper and deeper.

There's not like a limit to how well you can listen. It's like, is there a limit to how profound your presence can? be. So, and yet it's one of those areas that when we get very intentional, it really shifts all these different layers of our life. So my hope is that you'll join me. When I do this kind of a series, I take it on as something, okay, this is my sadna. Sadna is a spiritual practice. I'm going to deepen attention and I really use the reflection. So I'm hoping you he'll join me. And they'll be on Facebook.

We'll have some different clips and pieces to do with listening. And next week I'll be taking some questions that you might have about it. And if you're not here, if you're listening to the podcast and you'd like to ask a question, just email it to my email address on my website, Tara Brock.com. And I'll try to weave the responses into next week's talk. and also take live questions. So it feels, and I suspect many of you are thinking the same way, that listening is really, really missing in our contemporary society

and that the faster we move and the more contentious we are, the louder and louder we in some way try to communicate and the less actual listening is going on. And so as it said, the more stress, the more mistrust, the less we listen. You know, the tweeting goes out of control and, you know, you just hear more and more condemnations and people trying to prove points and less receptivity.

From Will Rogers, a person in Congress gets up to speak, says nothing, nobody listens, and then everybody disagrees. And that's how it goes. So these are noisy times. and to have the message of listening to the song, however we want to think of it, if we can start practicing that, it does ripple out. It really does make a difference.

And for me, a key understanding is that listening is not another capacity on our checklist of good personhood. You know, it's very profound. It really has to do with receptive presence. How much can we stop doing and defending and grasping and come into a quietness that lets us listen? So we'll begin with a short reflection, if you will. And if it helps you to close your eyes, it does for me. Please feel free.

I'd like to invite you to bring to mind someone you know who you consider a really good listener. And for some you might notice when I ask that it's quite a select. few. But sense someone that you feels a really good listener. And then as you consider that person, sense what is it that characterizes good listening? Let some words come to mind, what qualities really characterize good listening? What is it you pick up in the other person that lets you know they're really listening? You can continue to consider this, but maybe if we could just hear a little bit in the room just to say a word and we'll just hear some different words in the room that are part of what makes up good listening. If you raise your hand, I'll point and

just speak loudly, okay? Yes. Respect. Respect. Attendant. Space. Empathy. Empathy without interruption. Still. Trust. Thank you. Trust is really important. Yeah. Self-awareness. These are, by the way, every one of these is beautiful. We're kind of creating a mandala here. Yeah. Acknowledgement. Thank you. Speak loud from back there. Non-judgmental. There was somebody else over there? Same thing. So just to, these are beautiful. And in a sense, these are all expressions of presence, if you think about it. Space, you know, respect. present, there's a respect in it, self-awareness, non-judging, interest. For me, when I'm with somebody I can sense it's a real interest, that's listening, care,

you know. The archetype in Buddhism in terms of a listening presence is Kuan Yin or the Bodhisattva of compassion. And it said that Kuanian listens to the cries of the world and that listening is so open, receptive, still, respectful, that in that tender receptivity, she's then able to respond with compassion. So, anytime we talk about the archetype of a bodhisattva, we're talking about a capacity that's in each of us is actually part of the way our brain is evolved. We have the capacity for that quiet listening to really discover what's going on, to understand.

And yet as we know, and there's tons of research on it now, not listening is pervasive. And I'll just, I just pulled out a few of the little factoids. 85% of what we learn is through listening. It's the essence of good communication. 75% of the time were distracted, preoccupied, or forgetful. Okay? after listening, we immediately recall about 50% and then one hour later, 20% of what we heard.

Pretty bad. The average person listens at only 25% efficiency. And against all the stats, when people are asked to self-assess, how good a listener are you? Everybody considers themselves above average. So an old man is wondering if his wife has a hearing problem or wasn't listening so well.

So one night he stood behind her for a while while she's sitting in a lounge chair and he speaks softly to her, honey, can you hear me? No response. He moves a little closer and says again, honey, can you hear me? Again, no response. Finally, he moves right behind her.

Honey, can you hear me? And she replies, for the third time, yes. It's never us, right? So we don't listen well, okay. We're only using 25% efficiency, and it's getting worse because technology, the medium that we operate in is down-leveling, are listening. There's so many books on it now,

one of the ones I read about a year or two ago, Shallows by Nicholas Carr was very interesting, describing how we're gaining this capacity to filter massive amounts of information. We can take in a lot of information and process it, but not in a deep and absorbent way. Instead, the more plugged in we are to the Internet in front of the screen,

the less capacity to concentrate, the less capacity to make deep associations that are meaningful to immerse ourselves, the less capacity to slow down. In other words, we need our stimuli to come faster and faster. We don't have the space to listen and take in. Now, the deal is that if you really start looking and sensing for yourself, what keeps you from listening, there's the basic understanding that while we have the capacity,

in our most newly evolved part of our brain, the frontal cortex, when the limbic system is activated and starts dominating, in other words, I want, I have to have, I'm afraid I don't want, I don't like, all of that, when it starts dominating, our listening who's which basically says when we're stressed we can't listen very well, which I know everybody knows, but think about it. We're mostly stressed. So we're not listening. So the more plugged in, the less we take. And there was one little story of a math teacher seeing little Johnny is very distracted, not paying attention in class, not listening. So she calls in him and says, Johnny, what are four to 28 and 44? And little Johnny quickly replies NBC, CBS, HBO, and the

cartoon network. So next part of this exploration is we're going to look more directly. I'm going to invite you to check and sense for yourself what gets in the way of listening. Okay? And this is going to, we're going to, I'll speak a little and then we'll do some reflections. If we look at our conversations, if we have any agenda, when we're talking to somebody of wanting them to be a certain way. wanting the conversation to go a certain way, wanting to make an impression, wanting to be

approved of, wanting to get their time, money, energy, if there's any agenda to be right, to show how right we are, to show how knowledgeable we are, I think you get the idea here, right? Any agenda like that at all, the lens narrows and we can't take in what's really happening. We can't take in the person. we can't take in the situation when we have wanting mine is one of my favorite illustrations is a woman sitting on a park bench

and a guy gets off a bus and he sits down and she says so how are you doing what's going on and goes oh I just I just got out of prison she was oh what for he goes well I murdered my wife

and she goes so you're single. I love that one. And I will confess, and I've never confessed this one before, but I remember very vividly my first conversation with my husband Jonathan. And I remember in that conversation, in the back of my mind, wondering whether he was married or was in a relationship or whatever. And so I remember the point of the conversation, I said,

So, do you have family around here? And he didn't, you know, and by family I was trying to... But we all do it in very subtle ways or very not subtle ways, and it makes it so we're not there with that receptive presence. Now, sometimes the wanting that pulls us away from listening doesn't have anything to do with the other person. Sometimes I want to get somewhere else and do something different, right? And that stops us from really being in the conversation.

So let's pause here. Let's just take a moment and invite you to check in, just close your eyes, and identify for yourself a recent conversation, ideally today, where you can tell as you scan that the wanting agenda was there. And in some way you are wanting help with something, approval, affirmation, you wanted to be right, you wanted to show off something, you wanted to get something. And just to get familiar so you're more alert because the whole deal is being alert to how the limbic system interferes.

Just rerun the conversation, just notice for yourself how that wanting agenda in some way narrowed the lens, torched things so you didn't really listen from a whole place, a whole being place. You didn't keep that in mind and either keep your eyes closed or open them, but just the way the wanting agenda from the limbic puts interference into the airwaves, so does the fear and dislike and judging agendas. I mean, you know what it's like to be with somebody and be listening and what they're saying has to do with something that they're critical about, about you, and what happens to listening, how much are you really taking in, are when they disagree. They have a different political perspective. You know, we don't listen

so well. So we are pulled away whenever we feel in some way threatened, in some way aversive. There's a little cartoon I saw that said, four words that will make men run for the hells. We need to talk. That's for couples. When we're feeling judgmental, when we're feeling blamed towards a person, very hard to listen. There's also an understanding that it's hard to listen

and this is more in terms of societal roles when there's an imbalance of power. So take a situation where somebody in a work situation, workplace status is higher, the listening gets torqued because one person is in some way threatened, could either be hurt or rewarded by what's going on in the conversation. That tightens us. We don't listen so deeply. You can see with the imbalance in race,

if a dominant white person feels superior, they're not going to be as interested, caring, respectful, and taking in. If somebody that is a person of color feels inferior, they're going to feel more threatened and not so free to be able to just listen and take in from the dominant culture. So there's this sorting to protect or defend. Now again, as with wanting agenda, the aversion of fear that hijacks listening is not always to do with the other person.

Because sometimes we don't want to listen because we feel I don't have enough time. How many of you have noticed how much I don't have enough time affects listening? Can I see by hands? Yeah, I know that one very well. So, okay, we'll do the same thing we did before. Let's take a little moment to pause. and this time just scan and bring up a recent conversation where you were aware of that agenda of aversion in some way you're either bored or intimidated, anxious about something else,

judgmental towards the person, felt superior, therefore disinterested, felt inferior, therefore not free to really take in. notice how it affected listening, how it affected your potential to have a non-judging presence, your potential to seek to understand and connect, continuing to investigate, there's a very deep level and more subtle fear that stops us from listening and it's the fear of not being here. So just for a moment, reflect on this. that rather than listen, we're preparing to reassert that we're here. Just sense how that might be the case.

That when somebody's speaking, we're uncomfortable or embarrassed if we don't have something to say back. We don't know who we are when we're not planning our response. So this is a very strong tendency to assert a self who knows something who exists. We don't listen to understand. We listen to reply. This is the basic part of the separate self-sense. So what we're exploring in this class are really the different forces or agendas, the limbic agenda of wanting something, or fearing and aversion, are even in the most core way, this existential piece about just knowing or here

that stops us from really being open and receptive. And the reason we start with exploring this is in order for us to commit ourselves to deepening, listening, we have to notice what's getting in the way. I often speak of that circle of awareness and the line that goes through it and everything above the lines in consciousness and below the line is when we're not in consciousness. Well if you're in a conversation and you're not listening and you're in some way wanting it to go a certain way or wanting the compress or feeling judged and pushing away and you're not aware of it, then you don't have any choice.

So this gives us choice. Continuing to reflect, this is the last, for this part of our exploration, I'd like to invite you to choose one person in your life right now that you'd like to, in particular, you'd like to deepen your listening capacity. capacity. You want to listen with an awake heart. It might be a child or parent or friend, partner. Somebody in your life you want to, hopefully you'll practice with a lot of people, but one person you definitely want to practice this with. And if you can bring up a recent conversation and just ask yourself, what was between me and truly listening with an awake heart?

Which of the agendas? Did I feel there wasn't enough time? Did I want to be doing something else? Was I anxious about something? Intiminated in some way? Was I wanting something like approval, cooperation? Was there a bit of a hierarchy in terms of power? Superior or inferior? You might notice how you might have controlled the experience, distracted into your own thoughts,

tried to cut off the conversation, tried to make something happen. The most important sense your intention to listen more deeply with this person, to notice when you're getting in some way cut off from listening. This is the Bodhisattva intention, the intention of the awakening heart, to listen so that we understand another, to listen so that we connect with another. You just sense your intention so that you can imagine the next encounter perhaps, the beginning of the encounter knowing I really want to listen with an awake heart and being more there, more present.

Mark Nipo says, to listen is to lean in softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear. Listen with that freshness, that openness. And feel free to open your eyes now. Okay, thank you. So, listening like any other training, something that's described as deliberate practice. It takes 10,000 hours plus some to really shift into that trait of receptive presence. Okay? And there are three steps when we're stressed that help us to come back home to

to our potential, to listen well. And the first step we've just touched on, which is to have the intention. It makes a really big difference to enter into an engagement with a conscious intention to be present, to listen. The second is the capacity when you're engaged for an inner listening so that you're noticing what's going on inside that might be stopping you when you're noticing the interference or reactivity. because if you try to ignore it, you just won't be there for the other person.

So the first thing's in tension, the second is a kind of inner scanning and listening, and the third is then opening that receptive presence to another, so that you have what St. Benedict calls the ears of the heart, that you're really listening with an awake heart to who's here. So give you an example of this process, so you can practice it more with those in your life. And there was one woman who'd come to a workshop with me and we had explored one of the pieces was listening

and she decided that she would practice with her brother. The family would get together once your extended family on a vacation. And her brother was a professor of economics. He had done so for decades. and she found him very self-absorbed, kind of dominated conversations, very opinionated, and she got really, she dreaded it, she dreaded the time of, she usually tried to find any excuse to leave the conversations. So she figured, okay, we're going to be together for a week, good time to practice. And so that she went with the intention and at first it

was very, very difficult. She described a difficult was, and her brother, would talk incessantly about himself or going to diatribes about child rearing or world affairs and so there was no room for anybody in the conversation and that's when she typically exit but she stayed she used her breath as an anchor and that can be helpful to have an anchor something that says okay be right here it's okay you can be with this while he would be speaking she'd do a bit of that inner listening in order to recognize what was going on inside her, recognize and allow that there was frustration, there was impatience, she felt a lot of judgment towards hymns. She felt that aversion like, I don't exist, you know, when he's speaking. And so,

her way of that inner listening was to notice all the aversion and say yes to it. And by saying yes to it, what I mean is not, oh, this is great, but this is reality, it's okay, just what's happening. This is the weather of the moment, the inner weather. So she would feel all her reactions and just say yes to it. And that helped her relax more and then pay better attention. So this is step three now. She started deepening her attention to him and she coached herself to stay curious. She would mentally whisper to herself, okay, so what's really happening here? There's time. What's behind his words? Like who's really there? Can I hear who he is? That kind of coaching to deepen presence. And as she listened, she began to feel her brother's

need for attention, his need to feel like he mattered, that he was interesting to people. and she could feel his insecurity. So when she could let that in, that's when she, her heart softened, and it kind of softened to a full listening presence. She found herself able to rest in that listening presence. So after a few days, a very interesting thing happened for her, he started confessing to her that he was really agitated.

It was, this was right after summer break and he had gotten his performance evaluations which, as you know now, students are very, very active and very public in posting everything about everybody. And so his eval was not really good, especially compared to a lot of the more dynamic, interesting teachers that would draw people out. He didn't know how to draw people out.

So they found him kind of pedantic and boring, which he was. So, he's telling her this and he's talking about it. And then at one point he said something she didn't expect. He said, I'm not the person I want to be. And his eyes were wet. And he said, well, who do you want to be? And his response is someone who can connect and engage and interest these young people. You know, the world's a wreck.

and they need to understand what's going on and be able to be part of what's going to change our systems around. So they started talking and she asked him what got in the way and started asking and started asking him about listening whether he, you know, what he did to bring them out and he had just never flipped it. It was all about that and not about this. So it was like this light bulb went up in his, So the day that he left, he had a whole lot of gratitude, he said, you know, how much

he needed her, he said, you've been just so here for me and you've reconnected me with my purpose. Now, what she had done was non-judgmental listening. And what she had done was give him a space so he could unfold through his habitual patterns and then start speaking from a deeper and more real place. And one of the ways that I love to think about this is a metaphor of that our life and spirit is like a fountain that when we haven't been listened to, it gets clogged with the unprocessed hurts and fears. And the more we push away our painful feelings, the more they impede that flowing aliveness. So when somebody starts to listen to us,

This is what's so beautiful. The debris starts to dissolve and the fountain can start flowing. When we listen to each other, we allow the other person to come from a deeper place and speak for more authenticity. When we don't listen, all we end up giving each other is the shallows. Do you know what I mean? So she made space for his fountain to start flowing. And he started off in his habitual way and it was really hard to endure.

But she stayed. Ticknacht Han, wonderful Zen master, teacher, says deep listening is the kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person. You call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose to help them empty their heart. Even if they're saying things that are full of wrong perceptions, full of bitterness, you're still capable of continuing to listen with compassion because you know

that listening like that, you give the person a chance to suffer less. If you want to help them correct their perception, you can wait for another time. For now you don't interrupt. You don't argue. If you do, they lose their chance. You just listen with compassion and help them to suffer less. One hour like that can bring transformation and healing. So one of the deep motivations in listening is to understand, to connect,

and also to give a space for another person that's truly a healing space. Rachel Naomi Remen is an author, a physician, very wise woman. And she tells a story about one of her colleagues who was a physician and in an East Coast University. And he saw patients in his office. And one of his patients was a homeless woman. And all her possessions fit into two carts. And she would come once a week to their session

and the way she'd get up the steep hill to the clinic he worked in and she would lash the shopping carts alternately to parking meters with a belt for she'd tie one. and then wheeled to the other to the next meter and uphill and then go and get the first one. So that's why she brought herself and her possessions to the clinic. So he saw her once a month on a Wednesday. Her speech was sometimes rambling, her clothing was eccentric, and as the story goes, this deeply kind and respectful man wasn't at all troubled

or distracted by this with his usual grave courtesy. He welcomed her into his consulting room. listened to the details of her difficult life and do what he could to ease her burden. After he'd been seeing her for some time, he became aware that she sometimes came to the hospital on days that he was not there. The clinic nurses were puzzled by this at first, as she seemed to know in some mysterious way that it was not her day to see the doctor. After talking with her, they determined that she simply wanted to go to his consulting room.

she was there, she didn't go in, but would stand on the threshold and slowly and deliberately place her right foot inside the empty room and withdraw it again and again. After a while, she'd be satisfied and go away. The places in which we are seen and heard are holy places. They remind us of our intrinsic goodness and worth. They give us a story. They give us a strength that go on. Eventually, they may help us to transform our pain into wisdom. So we're talking about really the three steps that if we engage with, it helps us to listen with that awake hard. The first one is that we really intend it, that that matters to us. The second is to have the capacity for that inner listening so we can sense our reactivity

so it doesn't control the game. And third is to open up our attentions in a way that truly is saying, I've got the time. This moment counts. I'm listening. Who's here? Who's really speaking?

As a bit of a... Just to close, I've been speaking a lot about, on a personal level, the same capacity to listen to each other is really the hope of bridging the separations and resolving the violence around the globe.

It's really not until we are able to listen to people that we've considered as the unreal other, like really the getting to know by listening, that we can then include them in our hearts. And one of my favorite examples of this, There was a camp in rural New Jersey called Building Bridges, and I think they may have held the same camp in other places where they'd bring together

groups of people that hadn't been able to connect because they were in conflict. In this case, it was Palestinian and Israeli teenage girls. They'd bring together, they'd fly them in, and then they'd spend some weeks, I don't remember how many, in this process of getting to know that really had a lot to do with compassionate listening. And I'll tell you one story, a Palestinian girl shared in the group

how Israeli soldiers had barged into her family's house, beaten up everybody, and then after finding out there at the wrong place, left without apology. So the group facilitator then, and this is the compassionate listening, asked an Israeli teen to repeat the story and repeat it in first person and to include the feelings, the rage, the terror that she might have felt. And so she did this. The Israeli girl listened to the story and retold it, and at that point the Palestinian girl began to weep.

And she said, my enemy heard me. It brings chills to me. My enemy heard me. And the two girls cried together and through the remainder of the time they became close friends. One Israeli girl put it, if I don't know you, it's easy to hate you. If I look in your eyes, I can't. This is the receptive presence we're talking about that bridges the gaps. It bridges the gaps between humans that know each other will but aren't listening,

between those that are unreal others. It bridges the gap in the deepest way that we can listen to our world around us. Gary Lawless puts it this way. When the animals come to us asking for our help, will we know what they are saying? When the plants speak to us in their delicate language, will we be able to answer them?

When the planet herself sings to us in our dreams, will we be able to wake ourselves and act? Can we listen to what is going on, the dis-ease of our mother, our greater body this earth? Can we respond? I'm sharing this way because I actually don't think it's a different capacity, the capacity to listen to a good friend and the capacity to listen to the earth. It's the capacity to quiet inwardly, to be the earth. to be the awareness that's listening to the thoughts,

the awareness that's listening to our own heart, the awareness that's listening to each other, listening to our earth. So we will close in a very simple way, if you will, the final reflection of this class. And in this pause, you might take some moments just to open the attention to listening to sound, listening in a global way, taking everything in, letting sounds wash through. And as you're listening, see if you can let go and soften in the body, relax your heart.

So there's no resistance. Fully receptive. Letting the sounds wash through. Sensing the awareness that's listening as open, awake, tender. It helps to have an anchor, a home base, perhaps like a sound. the breath, so that when the mind wanders, you can kind of notice that and come right back to breathing and listening and then bringing to mind the person you'd like to practice with. Again, there may be many, but picking one.

Imagining a situation where you'll practice listening with an awake heart with them, reminding yourself of what makes this important to you, listening so there'll be that intimacy and connection, listening to help create a space where their fountain can flow, listening to understand, imagining the situation, perhaps feeling the anchor of your breath, and imagining the listening right now as you are is with them, including the sounds you're hearing loud, letting it be. Imagine listening to this person. Perhaps with that inner coaching, there's plenty of time. Now what's happening?

What's behind the words? Who's here? In a relaxed way, you might go back to listen to the sounds that are actually right here in this moment. The more you know how to listen, how to relax back into the presence that listens to sounds in the moment, the more you'll be able to listen to the sounds, the communications. of another when we're with them. We close with

a poem by Anne Emerson called Birch. Choose one low-hanging leaf, heart-shaped, still attached to Mother Birch and listen to all it has to say. The sound its slender veins make turning light to sugar, the excitation of wind,

water-sipped through straws of branches up from the packed black, well of the roots, how it and its sisters communicate with birds and how it refracts the sun in your eyes searching for the right thing to say and when. The cue will be obvious when it's your turn to speak. Its palm will fall upon yours face down, the line sentences touching, the breath of your hand then whispering the language that green understands. Choose one low-hanging leaf, heart-shaped, still attached to Mother Birch, and listen to all it has to say.

Namaste and thank you for your listening attention. Thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.