Tara Brach - Navigating Conflict with a Wise Heart – Part 1

Episode Date: September 8, 2022

Navigating Conflict with a Wise Heart – Part 1 - This series of talks offers guidance in transforming conflict into a portal for awakening your understanding, flexibility and compassion. We look at how to heal our own unmet needs and not be dependent on others changing; and how to engage with another person when both are dedicated to mindful communication. We also extend our exploration to societal conflict. The talks are accompanied by reflections and meditations that can directly enhance your capacity to respond to conflict from the most wise and caring part of your being.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. I'd like to give you a little bit of a background on the talk that we'll be having this week and it's a two-part series of this week and next week. And to start with by saying that the one thing everybody agrees on right now, is how much dividedness there is in our world. And we see it on a global scale, you know, with the Ukraine war creating this rippling of crisis of famine and threat of nuclear disaster. And we see the conflict and crisis within countries. The United States is so divided that our

democracy is threatened and faltering. And conflict's been with us through history. It's in our personal lives. It doesn't matter how much we meditate, conflicts arise. And when they do, there can be huge suffering. In fact, I know for many people, the deepest suffering is the sense of distance or dividedness or conflict with people who are dear to them. So a deep inquiry for us is how do we bring our practice? How do we bring mindfulness and compassion to navigating wakefully through crisis. How can we awaken in our relationships when crisis arises? And how can we cultivate the qualities of awareness that can ripple out and really help

bring more wisdom and understanding to our divided world? So we're going to be exploring conflict this week and next, and it's drawn from two talks I offered in 2019 that I really hope and think you will find relevant to your life. May they serve connection and healing. Namaste and welcome. In Japan there was a seaside monastery and they got caught in a kind of mini tsunami and three of the monastics got stranded. on a desert island hundreds of miles away.

They just kind of floating around and that's where they got stranded and they were managed to stay alive for several weeks and they found a cave that had some zaffoos, sitting cushions in it, who knows, and they sat and they practiced and the spirit of the cave was very proud of them and they said in an echoing voice you've done well and like to grant you three wishes. And so the first one of the monastics said well my wish is to I'm just thinking of the morning bells at the monastery and the trails and the gardens and I want to go back to the monastery.

Vush! He vanishes. Second one he says, I'd like to go back to the monastery too. I'm just thinking about our beloved abbot and how much I love learning at his feet. Vush! He vanishes too. And the third said, I miss my friends. They're part of my sangha.

I want them back. So this relates to our theme. The teaching here is that conflict between different people, conflict with our inner cells, conflict with each other is inevitable. And it's really not a conflict between our personhoods, it's really conflicting strategies to meet our basic needs. We all have basic needs and sometimes the ways we go about meeting them land up in clashes. And if we frame conflict as wrong or as bad, we can't wake up through it.

But if instead we learn wise ways of responding to conflict, the conflicts that I know every one of us has in our lives, they actually become what I call a portal to awakening. They become one of the most powerful gateways to realizing who we really. really are and who others really are. And one of the phrases that I've always loved and if you've been with me for a while you know it is no mud, no lotus, that in order for us to wake up we need the earthiness, the conflict, the winds, the tensions, we wake up through it. So it's an important understanding that for most of us as soon as conflict happens,

conflict with ourselves, conflict with others. Our reflex is to think this is bad, something's wrong, it shouldn't be happening, I'm bad, you're bad, you know, it immediately gets a negative overlay. You might check it out, you might consider for yourselves a recent conflict with a partner, or child, or colleague, friend, or maybe something that's a little back in time, if you don't have something really recent, when it occurred? Did you feel like something was going wrong? Like, this shouldn't be happening to sense that?

Did you feel like you were wrong or somebody else was wrong and this was a bad thing that was going on? This typically is the first impulse. And I invite you to consider have you had times in your life where you had a real conflict with someone? and you worked it through and you landed up more intimate, more close, more trusting because you stayed with it. How many have noticed that?

Can I see by hands? Have woken up through a conflict? Okay. What I'd like to do in this class and the next one and probably the next one after that because I think it's going to take three is to explore conflict as a place of evolving consciousness. It feels really important.

to just sense, well, what's the alchemy that transmutes a conflict into deepening understanding and into awakening? And so that's what we're going to look at and you will benefit most if you try it out, try out the practices, we're going to do different practices, if you pick areas. And when I say conflict it doesn't have to be out and out war but places where you get into kind of patterns of irritability and reactivity with somebody where there's more creates a distance. From the evolutionary perspective, the way humans relate to conflict is a marker in our development. And if you go back in time for much of human history, we're living in a very rigid style

of reaction. And by the way, the way almost you can sense the development or evolution is the movement from rigidity to flexibility. And in early development of humans we're primarily responding with fight, flight and freeze from our primitive parts of our brain, our survival brain. There was not much flexibility in how we dealt with stuff when we felt threatened. And then over time, 70,000 years ago, whatever, when we had this kind of real brain spurred and the frontal cortex evolved and the whole relational network and mirror neurons and compassion developed,

we started getting more flexible and we started having clashes would still happen but we started getting more innovative and more skillful in finding ways to collaborate and work things out. It just started happening And I think of it as the shift from fight-flight, freeze to attend and befriend. We started being able to move in that direction. So that even if it doesn't look that way, there is a marked decrease in human-to-human violence. Stephen Pinker's been the kind of poster child in a positive way I respect his work with angels of our better nature. that we, you know, if you think back to, I often think about this, the Roman Coliseums, and the people just, this was the way they recreated to go out and watch, you know,

humans tear each other up or humans and animals tear each other up. I mean, even late 18th century England, you know, what are we going to do for our Saturday outing? Oh, let's go watch a hanging, you know, it was awful. and that there's something in the human psyche that took some pleasure in some way and that's not so much the case and I say not so much and I say that with a you know I'm slowing down here because as we know that more primitive brain is alive and well and we can see throughout our world

that there's still a whole lot of violence and a whole lot of rigidity. Jack Handy puts it this way. He says, I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate, and I can picture us attacking that world because they'd never expect it. Okay, so basic thesis is conflict is really a clash of strategies to meet needs. When you're in conflict, somebody's basic needs and your basic needs are, you know, the ways you're going about trying to take care of them aren't harmonic. And it comes across in different ways and you can watch it in your personal life to the degree

that often there's the inner wounds that make us feel insecure or lacking connectedness and it can lead to chronic judgment of others, a kind of attacking or attacking or emotional attacking, physical attacking, aggressing. You know, Rita Rudner, at some point she was writing that she said, my grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping. So we have these wounds and sometimes they lead us to attacking and sometimes they lead us to withholding.

You know, it's like because I'm wounded I'm going to withhold my love or my warmth or whatever. Many of the needs that clash are on the ego-psychological level, and what I mean by that, and I think the big one I'll name, is that we often have a need to be right, to be the one who's right. And when people disagree with us, you know, politically or for anything else, it creates a conflict because we, you know, are trying to go around and feel like we're the one that's right. I had a little cartoon that one guy is saying, I can't hear you over how right I am. And I thought that was so perfect. Because when we think we're right, you can't convince somebody of anything because they're emotionally

attached to their viewpoint. And it happens, of course, between religions in a big way. One of my favorite examples is of a Taoist master who was known to sit in his mountain hut naked without clothes when he meditated. And some Confucianists were really outraged at this. So they hiked up the mountain to lecture him on proper conduct and they get there and of course there he is nude and they say to him, well what are you doing sitting in your hut

without any pants on? And the sage replies, this entire universe is my hut. This little hut is my pants. What are you fellows doing in my pants? So I'm being light about it but we have our strategies. they create conflicts and the primary strategies blame. In fact, the way we perpetuate conflict is we keep on rerunning stories of blame.

You are wrong, you are bad. And it's part of our wiring also. When we're uncomfortable or in pain, we are rigged to try to find the source of that pain so we can control it. So we try to find a source and we blame usually outside ourselves. And in our individual lives, and here's what I'll ask you to look carefully, it can go on

for months, it can go on for decades, where we get habituated to in some way creating distance because we feel like the other has not been who they should be for us. We withhold affection, we criticize. And what I've noticed so much, and I see this in my own life, whatever I practice grows stronger. So if I practice these having certain kind of thoughts, they just have deeper grooves in my brain. And when I on purpose practice gratitude, then that becomes stronger. It's whatever we practice grows stronger. But blame is a really strong hook.

There was a woman from our meditation community who volunteered at a moment. a local hospice and developed a connection with one of the patients. And she described her as she was often anxious or depressed and she was increasingly unable to talk because she had a tumor growing in her throat. And this woman described how one morning she arrived and she found this woman really distraught because she had had a nightmare. And in the nightmare she dreamed that the staff at the hospice had told her she only had three days to live. And her voice is weak and raspy and she's really upset and she insists that

she can't die yet because she has something really important she needs to say to her husband. And to this woman's astonishment, three days later she arrived at the hospice and this woman was dressed and packed and ready to leave. Her tumor had shrunk sufficiently that she was able to leave. A week or so later when she came, the woman was back. And this was the story that this woman told her. She said, I was angry at my husband on his case through all our years together. You know, his work, his tennis came before me, he was too permissible with our kids, he couldn't express his feelings, he couldn't fix things around the house, the list goes on.

She said that after 20 years of her marriage he became close with another woman, he was honest about it and didn't sleep with her but I never got over it. I guess I already felt rejected, even from the early days I couldn't forgive him for not making me feel special. What I saw was a guy who was letting me down, not on my side and I forgot his basic decency and care. It wasn't until that dream that I realized I needed to tell him I was sorry and that I loved him, that I regretted nothing more in my whole life than how my judgments drove us apart.

So I told him and he listened. He shared some of his own regrets and when we hugged we both had tears streaming down our cheeks it was the first closeness we'd had in years. Now I'm ready to go. I was really struck by the story because not every one of us, you know, waits till the end of our life to try to make amends but when we look at our lives we can see how, you know, if we really remembered that we might not have that long, and we can't have that long, how differently we might be more flexible.

We might, the part of our brain and the part of our spirit that really does want to live from love would be more available if we were remembering. So what happens when we get caught in conflict is we're in a trance. It is a trance and by that I mean the aperture of our mind narrows And what we're seeing is not the whole person, we're just seeing through a filter of what they're doing wrong in terms of our particular needs. We're forgetting who they are. And this is what's so interesting, we're also in a trance because what we're living

from is not the wholeness of who we are. We're living from a small, from a part of our brain that's the most primitive part of our brain And we're no longer really in touch with the parts of our being that can experience the spirit that lives through another person and can love without holding back. We're out of touch with that. So you would not be here right now listening if you didn't have a longing to live from your full potential to not postpone your life. But we get in habits and the reason we

come to spiritual practice is that we don't want to live in the rigidity of those habits and miss out. We forget when we're caught. There's a student, a schoolboy in Japan and he wrote this poem. He said, in the middle of Japan surrounded by the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Acoast, the Japan Sea, the East China Sea at Furukawa First Elementary School, right now I am fighting. It's just so wise. You know, we get caught in our fight and there's this world to be part of.

So what I'd like to do is a series of practices that can help us wake up out of the trance and not do the decades in blame. And the first one is quite intuitive. It's a reflection really at the end of life looking back. So I invite you if you'd like to in any way

sit more comfortably, shift how you're sitting, we'll do this together. So as you settle to sense that this is an opportunity to get a wise vantage or view of relationships to wake up out of the trance that we get into all of us. Imagine that you can travel into the future and sense yourself close to death. You don't have much time left but you can look back now through the years. You might reflect on important relationships that were going on through the years and sense a relationship that matters to you but had conflict, got distanced by judgment or resentment, blame. And just imagine if this person was with you right now at these moments towards the end of life, the end of your life, how this perspective might guide you.

You might compare how you'd feel right now right at the end of life with when you're stuck in day-to-day life with this person in that more rigid reactivity. What's it like when you're in the trance with that person? Are you seeing them as bad, as wrong? Is there a sense you should be different? The word should is always important to be aware of. Do you have in your mind an image of what they look like when they're communicating anger or disrespect so your mind's fixating on that?

When you're in the trance, when you're smaller, when you're in reaction, how does your body feel, your heart? Do you like yourself? Do you feel like you're in a role of an angry or hurt victim or a self-righteous judge or a threatening aggressor? What's the storyline? And is this who you really are? Again, the end of life.

the truth, sense the truth of your heart, your awareness, your potential, the truth of your spirit, sense the possibility of waking up out of trance and having more choice, more flexibility and responding to conflict. And in the deepest way, sense your intention now that in some way that place in your heart that wants to wake up from conflict and move towards understanding and caring. And as you're ready to open your eyes, in the Buddhist tradition, the Bodhisattva is the awakening being and the prayer of the Bodhisattva is, may whatever circumstances arise, whatever is going on, may this serve awakening. So if it's a diagnosis of a malignancy,

or if it's a struggle over custody, or if it's in some way a major loss in the stock market or fire, whatever the circumstances, may this serve the awakening of compassion, of wisdom. So this is in a very particular way really useful when we have conflict. If you do that end-of-life reflection and something in you knows, if I could remember that, I really, really would respond differently. The prayer day-to-day that really can help link into that is sensing the conflict and saying somewhere inside you saying, may this serve awakening. May this serve awakening.

Let it be a portal. So the first practice or teaching is to get in touch with our intention to remember what matters to us. The second, when we encounter conflict, and by the way I am talking in this particular class and reflection on conflict in a personal level because it shifts a little bit when we look at on a societal level and we'll get to that. But on a personal level we sense really what matters and our intention to wake up, to be more flexible, not be caught in the trance.

The next step is how do we actually then work with the conflict? And the teaching I found in my life that's the most valuable is the language of 100% responsible. And what that means is that we have the capacity to respond to whatever's going on from our intelligence and from our heart. that we have 100% capacity for that and that it doesn't matter what the other person is doing. Now that does not mean that being 100% responsible that we don't set boundaries and do what we need to do, but we can take care of ourselves. And that's a critical piece.

It's not saying when there's conflict it's my fault, it's just that we can access the mindfulness and the care to work with our inner experience. I am not dependent on what you do to be able to be okay with in myself. Does that make sense? I want to say again that if somebody is being physically abusive, being 100% responsible does not mean it's not that you're saying, oh, go ahead and keep doing it. Okay? Being 100% responsible means you do whatever you need to do to make yourself safe.

and you can be 100% responsible to take care of the woundedness inside you. You don't have to have them change to do it. Because think of the alternative to 100% responsible. If we're not, we're dependent on other people being a certain way for us to be okay. That's why this is amazingly empowering. I find that when people get this one that I can be 100% responsible, for my being okay, no matter what you do, it's like things open way up. So here's a question that comes up, people in relationship, well, what if I'm 100% responsible

of my partner isn't? And it will affect the nature, the dynamic of working through things but it does not affect your capacity to heal your own being, okay? My favorite example is from a story about Nelson Madala I heard and I can't remember where I heard it but as the story goes after he had a number of years where he was in solitary and he was physically violated and you know they attempted all sorts of humiliations and so on and after a certain amount of time he got depressed which I think is really amazing that took a certain amount of time for him to get depressed but.

He got depressed for a bit and his depression was who can I love? It's like he really needed to feel that he had a way to love in his life. And he came to the conclusion, okay, I can love my guards. These are the guys that were really tormenting him. And he put all his, like everything he did was somehow rather holding that heart space that loved his guards. And they had to replace the guard he had because the guy melted, you know. know, on some level he was very responsive. And then they had to replace another one. And this was coming towards the end of his, of the time that he was imprisoned. As many of you know,

he had one of his main guards at his inauguration. 100% responsible is the key to freeing ourselves. Our well-being is not hitched to how others act. One last remark on Nelson Madala in one of his letters to Winnie, he said, the cell that I was in was an ideal place to learn to know yourself. He said regular meditation, say of about 15 minutes a day before you turn in, can be fruitful in this regard. Brings you to that place that can be 100% responsible, that can really bring that healing of a spirit.

So let's look a little closer on how then, here you are, you're in conflict with somebody, how do you be 100% responsible with your inner life? the key step, and this is a move, I call the U-turn, many of you are familiar with it, where you shift from, you're bad, you're wrong, here's what you should do differently, you make a U-turn and bring your attention to where the hurt and unmet needs are inside you. It's critical. All the moments you spend blaming another are moments you're not taking care of the unmet needs inside your own heart. Does that connect? That sound right? So, this is the key to being able to be

flexible, is that we have to sense we're blaming outward and pause and go, wait a minute, my attention's all fixated like that. That's the trance, narrow aperture to the mind, I need to make the U-turn. And as many of you know, Victor Frankl's wonderful language for it, that in between the stimulus and the response there is a space and in that space is our power and our freedom. We're hooked to the rigidity of the survival brain if we don't take a pause. More on that next week because we're going to talk next week about how once we've worked with ourselves we can begin to actually work with another person in a way that can maybe

make a difference. But the first step is the U-turn in working with ourselves, that we have to bring our attention inwardly to work with our own unmet needs. And I'd like to give you an example of this because we're then going to close by doing a practice of taking the U-turn so you can work with something in your life that's going on. So the story I wanted to share is a woman that from this area was in a painful conflict with her older brother over their parents' will. And she had taken care of her parents, her brother lived out of town, for 10 years.

And for the last five years her father died, and then for the last five years, just her mom. And there was pretty poor communications about their will. A lot of lack of clarity. The mother started getting into dementia, and this woman had a discomfort talking about money, especially with her brother because she was afraid of his being super rational or being critical. and they both had different notions of what was going to be happening. And so it turned out after her mother died there was really bitter wrangling between them. And it ended with a feeling for her of really being unfair.

She felt manipulated that as he had all his life, he was getting his way once again and it was really painful to her. And he, of course, felt in the right. So this is how conflicts are. For several years she was so angry about it that she didn't go to any of the family gatherings that went on and just very little communication and then towards the end of those two years that's when she and I met because she was feeling increasingly in that trance. She knew she was stuck, she knew her world, she knew she felt victimized and didn't like being the victim.

So we did the practice we did just now. We did that end-of-life practice and she imagined being with him, she imagined actually at his deathbed, which I thought was in her an interesting way. You can do it either way. I found it's very powerful if I'm in conflict with someone to imagine myself at their deathbed because what I've realized and I've sensed with people that I've had tension with, wow, if I was at your deathbed I would be just telling you I really love you. I really loved you and I'd mean it."

And that was what happened with her. That as soon as she was at his deathbed she knew, she's my brother, I love him and I do mean it. And she also felt a sense of the pain of that trance she was in, of being caught in the victim and of being so bitter towards him and realizing how much she was forgetting other things about him that she'd always really loved, you know, how playfully he could be and how creative and how fun and how kind at times. So she still felt hurt but she was more able now to say,

please may this serve awakening. She really wanted to wake up out of the smallness of the victim and she really wanted to sense how she could be 100% responsible for her own sense of being. She wanted that empowerment. So she was made the U-turn to where those unmet needs were and what she got in touch with was feeling hurt, feeling vulnerable, feeling mistrust.

And when she asked those parts of her, well, what do you need? She said, what she felt was, well, I need to know I'll have the courage in the future to speak out and to get behind myself. But the deepest thing she found she needed was to trust that she was loved. Because in some way the will had to do with affirming she was loved. It was kind of that was the main reason she so much wanted. inheritance that she didn't get because it was a sign of being loved. And so when she got to that, she was able from her own higher self to offer loving care inwardly to really feel that sense

of you are cared for. You know, I'm sorry and I love you. And that gave her a shift. She felt that kind of, okay, I can sense that I am lovable and I don't have to be dependent on having gotten the legal arrangement I wanted from the well to feel lovable, which is really empowering. And she could look through wiser eyes at him and see underneath his aggression and controlling that in some way he was feeling diminished and insecure and fighting for feeling valued too. So in a way they were doing the same thing. There started to be a thaw between them. She was still defended, he was still controlling in different ways,

but she was much more in touch with that wisdom place in her. She was much more inhabiting who she was, not the victim place. And she did tell me that when they had their first really honest conversation, and it took another couple of years, she told him about imagining him at his deathbed. And they both had tears and there was something in that that let him begin to look more closely at what was at play underneath for him. It was a real conversation.

But the point is for her to wake up through that conflict, to re-find her power and her presence, she had to, A, do that kind of end-of-life thing and remember, hey, I don't want to stay stuck. and she had to make that U-turn and take care of the place in her that had an unmet need. And so it is with us that in order to wake up out of the conflict that we get in, we need to make the U-turn and be with our own hearts. Now, when I teach about this, one of the questions that comes up often is, well, if I do that and I stop being angry, others will keep on taking advantage of me. If I don't fight and stay in the conflict I'll never get what I need from other people.

And so I want to slow down here and say that anger is an intelligent emotion and we need to listen to its message. It's natural, it's necessary. I mean, there's a function. It says, you know, there's an obstacle here. So we need to listen, we need to get the message and we need to create the boundaries that are important, we need to make the demands that are important, we need to go through all that.

By way of example, one woman that I worked with, she was in her mid-20s and she wasn't able to create a distance from her abusive father and she kept getting re-traumatized by his anger. And so part of what we needed to do is let her feel her anger because she kept trying to be forgiving but that kept her hooked into the cycle of abuse. So she had to feel her anger, feel its raw energy, feel the need to get away from him. So do you hear what I'm saying that it's important to get the message of the anger and do what we need to do? But then what happened, and this is what I think is really interesting to her, is that her rage,

hardened into stories of blame and she kept feeling the victim and it carried over into her current relationships where people were projected, you know, the projection of her father was there and it took a number more years to pay attention and start making the U-turn so she could really bring a healing attention to her inner life and not get hooked in the anger. One of my friends and fellow teacher, Ruth King, who's been here before, writes this, she says, anger is not transformative, it is initiatory. So that's the understanding I want to just keep with, you know, that we share that we need to listen to its message but then get the message and move on if we keep on blaming we'll

be like that woman at hospice who spent her whole life hooked in a trance. When I am angry, there are certain reminders that really help me and I just want to name them before we practice together. And one of them is, okay, my attention's on a wrong or bad other and I'm not attending to my unmet needs. So I'm just repeating what we've already talked about, okay, I'm just fixated outward, I'm not really taking care of anything right now. The next message I tell myself is if I email or speak right now while I'm angry, I'm not

going to get a good outcome, I'm not going to get those needs met, I'm just going to create defensiveness. Then the other thing is I don't need to suppress my anger and I don't need to act out on it. I can let its energy guide me in responding. I just want to name that because it's over and over again that we have to be able to remember that it does not serve us to fixate on bad other. Now, I'm going to name a couple of other questions people bring to me on this one,

because you might have them. And one is, yeah, but expressing anger works. It's the only way I get some cooperation. It's like my teen won't cooperate unless he gets that I'm angry. And we know that through history, humans and other animal species, use anger to scare others and get cooperation. It's intimidating. So it is effective. And then the question is, it doesn't lead to understanding our connections. So how much do we want to rely as a default on the survival action of anger and people get hooked on it?

It's the only way they think they can make things happen. And do we want the limbic relationship? that comes out of anger or do we want something more loving and dimensional? So yes, expressing it works. But then people say to me, but does that mean I can never just express my anger? I always have to pause and make the U-turn and no. You actually, there are some relationships that have enough of a container, there's enough trust that you can work it through and actually being able to express some, the other person can be with you in it. It's not going to get them so intimidated or offended that you've

kind of ended up severing any communication. But again, ultimately to heal and connect we have to make the return. As I mentioned, the next class we're going to talk about if there's some mutual willingness how we bring mindfulness into communicating when there's conflict. But right now, and you're going to have to do it again when we explore with others, it's the U-turn, how to bring attention to what's going on inside us. So if you'd like to change how you're sitting, please do and we'll do this final meditation together. So this is a meditation on evolving consciousness and shifting from the rigidity of fight-flight-flight-free

and instead learning to respond from really the depth of our human potential, from our spirit, from our awakened heart, and invite you to bring to mind a difficult situation with another person, one that triggers you, that brings up blame or reactivity in some way. And it could be with a child or parent, partner, friend, work colleague and as you choose, let yourself go to a time that really is illustrative of how you get locked in. When you know you're in that kind of trance reaction you're, you get small or anything. angry or you're triggered. And zoom into that situation so that you can actually see the setting.

Know the room that you're in. You might sense the furniture or the windows or if you're outside where you are. See the look on the other person's face, what the expression is communicating, the words, and sense what goes on inside you, what's being... activated. And as if you could freeze the frame, take a super sacred pause here. So you really sense, okay, this is it, this is where you've shrunk and that person shrunk in your mind's eye, you're seeing them as what I call the unreal other, the bad person, and you're coming from a smaller place in yourself. And this is the time to really call on

your most awakened parts of your being. Sometimes we call it the future self who you're emerging into, your awake heart, your caring heart, your big mind, your wisdom self. You can even imagine and get the felt sense of that awake dimension of your being filling you, really filling your body and your heart and your mind. You might even sense your posture shifting a little and your face changing right now. now, that your future self, your high self is really filling you. So you can witness this situation in a fresh way right now and begin by sensing from your most high self, what is your intention?

What's your deepest intention here? What is your intention? And making the you turn so that you're bringing, you're letting your future self really bear witness to what's going on inside you. Just sense what's been triggered. What are the feelings that are strongest that have been triggered in this situation? Is it fear? Is it hurt? What's underneath the anger? You sense the unmet need that's there. The need to feel respected, the need to feel love, the need to feel safe, the need to feel like you can grow, the need to feel connected and gratified. What's the need that's being blocked?

It's not met. And as you bear witness to this from your high self, sense the possibility of offering care inwardly right now. And these are the moments that if you've never done it or done it at that you've never done it or done it a thousand times, bringing the hand to the heart, light touch to the heart. And you can sense that your own most awake being is just offering in to the place that has unmet needs whatever might help to comfort and heal. Maybe there's a message that you're sending inwardly.

We become a hundred percent responsible when we can address these unmet needs. needs, sending in love, sending in care, sending in self-forgiveness, sending messages that we can trust who we are. And notice if you let that in, let that fill you and you sense the presence of your high self just really again just filling you completely that you can look through the eyes of wisdom and see more about the other person. that the trance begins to lift, that you might be able to see past their mask of being angry, being controlling, being disrespectful, whatever it seems to their own insecurities,

their unmet needs. You might find that there are new possibilities for responding and sent into that right now. Is there some more flexible way that you can respond to this situation, letting yourself be guided by spirit, by intelligence, by love? And as we close this meditation you might sense what is it I want to remember? What's the deep message for me as I move forward? What will help me to awaken through this portal of conflict? in the future. Taking some full breaths and just bringing yourself right into the present moment,

feeling the quality of your heart right now, the presence that's here, and as you're ready, opening your eyes. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.