Tara Brach - Part 1 - Healing Anxiety - How Meditation Frees Us (2018-11-28)

Episode Date: November 30, 2018

Part 1 - Healing Anxiety - How Meditation Frees Us (2018-11-28) - Anxiety and the fear of failure is a pervasive suffering around the world. It is also increasing—along with the pace of life, over-consuming, addiction, noise, polarization and fears for our planet. How do we calm ourselves in a way that brings inner freedom and serves the healing of our larger world? These two talks explore the power of awareness in evolving ourselves beyond the anxiety that grips and confines our lives. 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. In this class, I'm going to be beginning a two-part series and the focus is on healing anxiety. And in the second part, we'll also look at directly some of the most painful parts of anxiety, including sleeplessness. But I wanted to hone in on this

because anxiety is so big. One woman I've been corresponding with, a writer, Carol Peterson, describes it that we have a PTSD culture. I think that's a gem of a way of describing it.

A PTSD culture, and the pervasive expression of that is anxiety. And I remember a couple of a couple of years ago. Some of you might remember this also in the New York Times. There was a woman, a 37-year-old social media consultant who was focused on in an article because she had texted a friend in Oregon about an impending visit. And because her friend didn't write back right away, she kind of freaked out. And so she posted on Twitter to her 16,000 plus followers. I don't

hear from my friend for a day. My thought? They don't want to be my friend anymore. And she wrote a hashtag, this is what anxiety feels like. And that set off a whole thousands of people offering up their examples of this is what anxiety feels like. So it said that we have switched from, you know, this country, the Prozac Nation to the United States. states of Xanax, right? It was marked in 2017 by the appearance of a fidget spinner. And I'm curious, how many here have played with a fidget spinner? Can I just say, okay, so it's out there some. So anyway, anxiety disorders are the most pervasive of any disorder worldwide. And, you know, while some people have really extremely, extremely severe symptoms,

most people have some, and it gets triggered at sometimes in their life more than others. The formal list of symptoms, feeling tense, nervous, are on edge. I'm not going to do a hand-raised. A sense of dread, dwelling on negative experiences, being unable to sleep, overthinking a situation. Oh, my God. We're all there. Restlessness, being unable to concentrate. fixing on what will go wrong in yourself.

I saw one cartoon and you see this guy in heaven or wherever. He's got angel wings sitting on a cloud and he's got his cell phone. He's saying, hello, Doc. This is the hypochondriac. Guess where I'm calling from, you know? So there's that. And then with anxiety, of course, there's all these projections like, oh my friend doesn't want to be friends anymore we project things and in another cartoon you have

the therapist and of course on the couch is a dog for dogs they're always on a therapist couch and the question that the psychiatrist is asking now when did you start seeing the invisible fence I love that so are symptoms so there's all this written on how to handle anxiety, and if you Google on it, you'll find within one or two taps you'll be at meditation. And yet, it's very thin what you'll get because many people find they're assigned meditation by somebody and they're just way to, like the very times they need it, probably a lot of you can relate to this, we're way too antsy or restless to, you know, it's like we're the opposite of meditative. So one challenge is that meditation doesn't match the mood, it's hard to

even start. Another challenge is that sometimes when we're in the grip of anxiety, unless you're really skillful knowing what kind of meditation, meditation can actually amp it up. Mindfulness, if you're mindful of your anxiety, it can make anxiety get stronger. So how to have you. How do you work with that? For some people, meditation is a little escape-like and it does kind of calm down the nervous system, but then as soon as they're back in their world of triggers, like going online, it's up again. So the real inquiry is how can these practices and teachings really transform our experience of anxiety. How can we relate to it in a radically different way and actually have a shift

in a whole sense of who we are rather than being an anxious person to recognizing the awareness that's here and that has room for the different currents of anxiety that naturally go through any human body mind? So that's kind of the inquiry. And to even say it more clearly, The goal is not to get rid of anxiety. The goal is really of meditation, is to awaken our full potential, which means to realize who we are beyond the anxious person. If you start getting a real taste of or glimmer of,

the presence and love and tenderness and awakeness, that's this vast field of beingness that who you are your real essence, then there is room for what is in this PTSD society, which is there's a lot of edginess and there's aggression and there's addiction and stuff in the air, but we can relate wisely. So to ground us in that larger perspective before we start going into the specific strategies, I'd like to ask us to take a moment to reflect. Okay? So we'll just do a brief practice.

You might close your eyes and take a few full breaths and let the breath be natural. Let your awareness fill your body so you can sense where there's areas of tightness or tension and just take a few moments to re-relax so that you're inhabiting your body some. from this increased presence to a degree you might take a moment to reflect on the last day or to some situation that provoked some sense of anxiety it won't help to pick something where you felt traumatized and went into a major very charged experience

but something where you felt some sense of anxiety and if you've been really chill for the last couple of days and go back in time further, or ahead to what you might experience around the corner that's anxiety-provoking. And whether you're going into the past or the future, go into the situation enough so that you can kind of freeze the frame at whatever you sense is most going to agitate you. It might be seeing somebody and hearing something they're saying that is, you upsetting or get you nervous. It might be your to-do list. But just freeze the frame when you're in the midst of an anxiety-producing experience. And imagine you could, it's like pressing the

pause button and this is when you get to actually cheat because everything's on pause and you're going to call on whatever version of the Buddha resonates for you. So that means you call on the historical Buddha or you could call on somebody that you know embodies incredible mindfulness and wisdom and compassion. It could be a spiritual figure or a living person or somebody that's not alive. But call on some being or entity. It could be your own future, awake self, your most high self, that in you which you most trust. But call on that right now. Visualize and sense and imagine that enlightened mind and heart right close in. And just invite it to fill you. So you're inviting your version of the Buddha to fill you so you can just feel

your cells and your body and your heart and your mind filled with that enlightened energy. that awake, open-hearted, wise, compassionate beingness. Let it fill you. You can feel with the heart of a Buddha and look out through the eyes of wisdom and feel your embodying, your body is filled with that enlightened energy. Notice what that's like. How does it feel? to be filled with the energy of an awakened being.

And what happens when you look at the situation, feel your way into the situation again, unfreeze the frame and let this Buddha body and Buddha heart and Buddha mind navigate a bit. What's the view? What perspective do you have when you look through the eyes of the Buddha? How does your heart relate?

And what new options or choices of behavior open up for you? These are the words of Rumi. Be empty of worrying. Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought. Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? move outside the tangle of fear thinking, live in silence, flow down and down in always widening rings

of being. Just taking a few more moments to sense the experience of an anxiety-provoking situation from the heart-mind of a Buddha. And when you're ready to open your eyes. So one of my favorite expressions is that if you trust you're the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves. So the deep transformation that's possible around anxiety is to let anxiety be a portal that we start learning to open to anxiety in a way that actually shifts our sense of who we are.

We become the ocean and there's waves but there's waves. there's room for them. So we begin our kind of journey and working with anxiety with the attitude, the wise understanding, as sometimes described as no mud, no lotus. Meaning, if there's no aggravating energies that we're really learning to be with, we don't discover the presence that can be so rich and full and awake. Let anxiety be a portal. If you're, if you're you're listening and you know that you get smaller with the energy of anxiety, then the commitment's not, you know, how do you numb it out? It's how does it become a portal for spiritual awakening?

How can your anxiety help you realize the ocean-ness so you can be with the waves? So that's the key is that attitude. And then we look at now, let's hone in a little more and say, you know, what is anxiety? actually going on if we start witnessing it. And what we see is there's this looping and there's anxious or fear thoughts, the worry thoughts, right? And then they trigger feelings in the body that are, you know, biologically fight, flight, freeze feelings, the clench, the twist, the unpleasantness, which then stimulates more fear thoughts or anxiety thoughts and looping around and around we go. Let's say you're anxious about an upcoming date or some sort of a business trip or finishing

a project on time or whatever it is. And you start thinking about the future and that gets the anxiety going and it's not just in your thoughts, it's in your body as well. It's very, very physical. And the more that happens, the more it becomes a habit of anxiety and most of us to some degree or other have a habit of anxiety. I mean, think of it. We know from neuroscience that when an emotion comes up, its life is typically 1.5 minutes.

But how come emotions turn into these like locked-in weather systems that just won't go away? The thoughts. We keep having the thoughts that keep triggering the feelings, that keep triggering the thoughts. So we get caught in this looping. I like the way Anne Lamont puts it, Annie Lamont. She says, my mind is. My mind is my main problem almost all the time. I wish I could leave it in the fridge when I go out but it likes to come with me.

So most of you are familiar with neurons that fire together, wire together. We have this looping and it just creates the neuronal pathways that we, that are now familiarly what we call anxiety. And so when that habit's there, even when nothing's ostensibly wrong, our thoughts are like these heat-seeking missiles, we're looking for something to worry about. Have you noticed it that you're all revved up around Thanksgiving or maybe this is for some of us and how that's going to happen? As soon as it's done, it's like the what's next. We just reland on the next thing. So then it becomes interesting to say, well, what's the

difference between anxiety and fear? So fear is an emotional state that arises in response to a perceived threat. Okay, so car swerves in your lane or you're in a crowd and it looks like there's going to be a riot and, okay, fear, alarm and our body starts sweating and our heart starts beating and the blood flows right to our arms and legs so we can run away and our digestion shuts down and all the chemicals start going.

So that's fear, right? Perceive threat right there. Well, with anxiety, anxiety is an anticipated threat. It's some notion that something around the corner is going to happen. It's more vague, it's less specific. It's like I tell this very often. This is one of the first jokes in my family. You can tell how dated it is.

A woman sends her son a telegram, and it says, start worrying, details to follow. So anxiety is like that. It's like we're just revved and worried because there's some sense that around the corner, life is going to be too much. There's something we're not going to be to handle. Something's going to collapse or go wrong. Okay, so how come we're so inclined like this to either get hooked on fear,

which is always feeling something's an immediate threat, whatever's going on, are this more vague sense of anticipating something going wrong? and we know that the basic reason is because we're still dealing with that survival negativity bias installed in us ages ago that was really good for all the physical threats were there and we had to pay really close attention because if we didn't we would get decimated and wouldn't pass on our genes so we still have that we fixate on what's going to go wrong and we remember what's going to go wrong we anticipate what'll go wrong way more than the good stuff. But what's interesting is what exacerbates that? Like how come some of us

have this survival bias but manage to, you know, through meditation or through exercise or whatever, really keep remembering, okay, there's the ocean and there's room for the waves. But others of us are getting slammed around by the waves all the time. How come? And this is where we go back, I think to our PTSD culture and say that it's exacerbated in all of us to some degree because our culture has so much fear in it.

And if you look at the news, we're so fixated on the bad news and there's so much of a sense of a bad other that's going to in some way take our jobs or hurt us in some way. way, you're going to come in and ruin our economy or the bad other that in some way is going to violate us. There's so much of that polarization. And then a PTSD culture leans on militancy. Just the way an individual that's got PTSD will either go for aggression or really

closed down in defense, so does a culture. It aggresses and it builds walls. That's a PTSD culture. It also is filled with addiction. Speed. Thomas Merton says, the rush and pressure of modern life or a form, perhaps the most common form of contemporary violence, to allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything is to succumb to violence. This too is the dis-ease of a PTSD culture, that speed and that anxiety that we've just got a race ever faster to get everything done, to do enough, to be good enough. So there's the cultural level that exacerbates that sense of anxiety. And then it's, of course, installed on an individual

level with our caretakers. So you might think back to your caretakers. And you might just sense what kind of message was delivered? And was there a message that there was something to be worried about, that something bad was going to happen around the corner? Are the messages that you were going to fail or you weren't going to be enough? That's the way caregivers helped to fuel the anxiety. Their own anxiety is contagious. It also, when our caregivers are anxious, there's a lack of resonance.

Anxiety blocks the parts of the brain, the more recently developed parts of the brain that are really relationally attuned. They get blocked when we're anxious. We don't pick up so much about others, so we can't respond to our children with attunement. Okay, so early on, if we're in a PTSD culture and our parents, we're in our parents, we're are doing the job of delivering that energy, we very early on develop this mind that fixates on what's going to go wrong.

And as the Buddha said so well, whatever you regularly think about, that will become the inclination of your mind. We get habituated. So what we're fixated on are ways that we imagine life's going to be. They're distorted. You know, they're torqued by the nought.

negativity bias, which means that they're often wrong. We're often predicting these wrong things. The most famously put by Mark Twain, some of the worst things in my life never even happened. Okay? You know that one. But not only that, our anxiety that things are going to go wrong actually makes things go wrong. Do you know what I mean? Like the more anxious we are, the more mistakes we make. It's amazing. It brings the very thing that we think's going to happen then happens. So there's this story about an actor. He'd been out of work for 15 years because he always forgot his lines. Because he was anxious and he'd forget his lines and so on. So one day he gets a phone call from a director who wants him for a big part in a play and all he has to say is,

hark, I hear the cannon roar. So after much worry, the actor decides to take the role. An opening night arrives and he's waiting in the wings and the actors muttering to himself, hark, I hear the cannon roar. Hark, I hear the cannon roar. He's getting himself red. Time for the entrance and finally he comes out. He makes his appearance. He hears a loud, boom. He turns around and says, what the hell was that? Okay, maybe not the greatest example, but I think you get the basic message there. So I've been talking about the habit of anxiety because really we're going to be doing a saying, how do we decondition that?

And Gandhi showed us this chain that we can sense, which is, you know, our beliefs create our thoughts. So we believe something's wrong with me or something's wrong with the world, and they create thoughts. And the thoughts and the feelings that are looping around then create our actions. which create our character, which create our destiny. So this is the prison.

When Rumi said, you know, these worried thoughts, step out of the prison, I sometimes get really moved by that when I just realize how much we really do day by day live inside a prison of our minds. It's like we are hooked on and identified with this looping. And it affects our body and our nervous system and every part of our being. In fact, the word worry in the, you know, one of the original, if you track it back,

was the same as the word for strangle. And I find that's so interesting. So if you start sensing, how does that looping affect us? Well, there's a strangling going on in our body so rather than the flow that really allows for health different organ systems and so on don't get as much as they need and there's tightness and tension in our body

until our body actually starts holding postures that are defended postures or aggressive postures in a way that's unhealthy for us. We can see that our cognition does not work so well. As I mentioned, when we're anxious, we don't think so well. We don't think so clearly. It cuts off executive function.

We know what happens to our behaviors when we're anxious. We're in some version of fight, flight, freeze, and grasp. We're in some way trying to control our lives. There really is, and I'm sure many of you have sent. it. There's that sense that around the corner something's going to happen that's too much to handle. So in some way we're girding ourselves against that or doing things to prepare. I remember long ago hearing this story about in the national parks, there were a lot of bears coming around in one season. So the rangers were encouraging extra precautions.

And they advised park visitors to wear little built. on their clothes, so they make noise when they're walking, you know, and also to carry pepper spray just in case the bear was encountered. Then they write this. It's also a good idea to keep eye out for fresh bear scats. You have an idea of bears are in the area. People should recognize the difference between black bear and grizzly bear scat. Black bear droppings are smaller and contain berries, leaves, and fur.

Grizzly bear droppings tend to contain small bills and smell of pepper spray. So we end up the very thing that we're trying to avoid our anxious behaviors end up causing more trouble. So I talked about strangling. It's not just our cognition, our behavior, it's our heart. You know, when we're anxious or I'll speak for myself, when I'm in anxious mode and it's usually as I'm not going to get enough done, you know, it's like in some way there's an equation that if I don't get enough done then the world will fall apart. It quickly goes from one to the other. My heart is tight and I can, you know, my persona has learned how to appear somewhat, you know, present and gracious and so on, but I know the difference between when I'm

actually fully here and when I'm on my way somewhere else. Do you know what I mean? there's not a tender quality there's not that moisture in the heart so it strangles that and then of course the deepest way the strangling is we get cut off from whether you want to call it spirit or God or Buddha nature

that vastness of awake awareness that's our home we get cut off we're living in a much smaller container That's the suffering of the anxious self. The anxious self believes it's a self, it believes something's going to go wrong, and it's organized around control. How do we break that habit?

Well, time's up, gang, so... No. Okay, let's see. Checking in. So we're going to... I'm going to explore one domain of practice for the rest of this class, and then then several others. And tonight I'd like to just stay with the two wings of mindfulness, which is how when we get caught in the grip of anxiety, can we skillfully bring that present

attention and kindness in a way that unhooks us? And I thought what I'd do is share an example first of a woman I was working with, and then we'll kind of go through the steps together. And I'm hoping if you've been listening a lot that nothing will sound new. I really mean that, that this will not be new, but it'll get you more inspired, energized, and ready to actually let anxiety be a portal. I mean, so often, when we're feeling anxious, we're basically feeling. like we shouldn't be feeling anxious, we're wishing it will go away, we're trying to get past it. What if when it came up we actually said, oh, wow, this can be a portal to actually

discovering who I am beyond the anxious self? So in this story that I'm, the woman in this is a grad student who was almost completed getting her degree in counseling therapy, counseling psychology on the West Coast. And I was doing some phone mentoring with her a couple of years back, actually. And she practiced meditation. And the reason she wanted to connect was because she had such a lot of anxiety about failing. She was in an internship and she was afraid she was not going to do well with her clients there, you know, not as well as the other interns. And that she wouldn't pass the licensing exam and that she'd have a hard time then setting up her own practice and just a lot of comparing mine. She also was anxious in her relationship that her partner

would lose interest and so on. So it's pretty pervasive. And so we looked at, you know, kind of broke it down and I said, well, what would let you know you were good enough, you know, as a therapist with your clients or good enough as a partner in your relationship. And she said, never, you know, there's nothing that would, no matter how good I think I am in any moment, I always have to keep reproving myself as worthy. She was very, very self-critical. I mean, she kept, you know, the fixating attention on what's wrong.

I'm too shy, I'm too introverted, I'm too self-conscious, I've got too much weight, I can't concentrate, I've got a poor memory. So then I asked her, well, what would happen if you weren't judging yourself so much and so anxious about failing? And her fear was that if she stopped being anxious about herself, she'd never improve. In fact, she'd get worse. So she had this belief that she needed her anxiety in order to keep improving herself.

Can any of you relate to that one? If I'm not anxious, I won't get, thank you for somebody brave enough to raise a hand. It's so deep in us, though, that if I let go of worrying, then I really will blow it. I won't remember to do certain things. I really will fall short. I will never improve. And yet she saw how her anxiety and worry was separating her from her partner and from her capacity to enjoy life and from the quality of her work, the more anxious she was with the

client the worse she did. So she could see this suffering and her wise self knew she didn't that it wasn't healthy to live that way but small self felt like she didn't know how to do without her anxiety. So I shared with her this phrase that I think is one of the best in the whole world which is from one of the Zen patriarchs that really to be enlightened is to be without anxiety about non-perfection. You know, okay, so we're imperfect. We're not perfect. And you can imagine just for yourself right now,

what if you even just for a moment could let go of anxiety about not being perfect? I mean, what if you really could just take a pause? And for now, just not to be anxious. about imperfectness. And for me, when I get little, I do that, I stop, I pause, and I sense that like right now as I'm sharing with you, that, you know, I want to be helpful,

this will be imperfectly helpful, you know. If it really is okay, there is a glimpse of pure freedom. If it's really okay to be imperfect. So I introduced that phrase, being without anxiety about non-perfection. And I made a promise. I said, if your imperfections get worse, I promise you you can go back to judging. But we did an agreement that she was going to do, you know, anxiety is a portal for a month

and that when she was anxious about her imperfections, she was going to go, ah, yo, that's where I'm getting stuck. That's going to be her alert. And so I had her work with Rain, which is the two wings of recognizing and allowing, and then deepening it with investigating and nurturing. I had her work with rain on anxiety. So here's how it went. We picked a situation where her self-judgment and anxiety got triggered. The one that was coming right up was she was about to go for the holidays to meet her partner's family.

And so we named it, okay, this is anxiety about imperfection or non-perfection. And I suggested that when she recognized it, that she just remembered that she's not alone, that so many of us are doing the same deal, same dance. So recognizing it, okay, anxiety, and then allow. Now, just to remind you that in rain, recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. allow doesn't mean you like it allow is this willingness to just let it be

for a pause for a time so that you can have some time to deepen your presence and attention so allow is like saying yes for now okay yes again doesn't mean I like it but yes I'm going to let be for now that was recognized in the last

Now. Investigate. Okay, here she was, anxious. Investigate is primarily the investigation of the felt sense in your body. Investigate is not a mental investigation of, well, what does it mean to me to visit her parents, you know, and what's going to happen and so on? Investigate is what's going on inside this body mind. You might say, well, what am I believing?

Well, I'm believing that anyone who meets me is going to think I'm a loser. You might have that as background, but you want to then say, what's that like in my body? How does it feel? Where do I feel it? Okay? Investigates very embodied. And for her investigating, you know, she could directly feel the fear and kind of the shame about herself and a basic flawedness that she was...

And then I encourage people to breathe with the investigation. be with it. And just the way I'm beginning to touch my heart right now, I find that investigation, if you put your hand on your heart, the investigation becomes more of a kind of process and you're beginning to call forth the nurturing, which is quite healthy. So she got in touch with really the underneath her anxiety,

the kind of grief about how much her anxiety separates her from, herself and for life. And then nurture is, well, what does this place most need to be comforted? So that's the inquiry. What is the hurting place need? What is the anxious place need? Because we're looking at anxiety right now. You might begin to ask yourself that. What is the anxious part in me need? And so for her, and she's like this at this point, she called on her wiser self and and you know said, okay, please comfort this part of me. And it was really to hold that anxious place like a child and to tell her that she could trust herself, her goodness,

that she could relax, that she's okay, real nurturing. So, again, this was a phone session. She's there on her end, you know, kind of giving those messages to the anxious child because that part of her had been anxious since she was a child saying, you're okay, you're good, you can relax. And she felt some calming down and then I always encourage people after the formal steps of rain to experience what I call after the rain.

And that's where we can experience that profound shift that has occurred from being that anxious self to really being the space, the awareness, the compassion that's holding and that cares. That shift in identity is everything. That's the shift from being caught inside the waves to remembering you're the ocean. It's everything. And I asked her during that after the rain, you know,

what would it be like if you could be without anxiety about imperfection through your life? What would happen? Who would you be? Ask yourself that. Who would you be if you weren't anxious about imperfection? Who would you be? Well for her she whispered to me, I'd be a good mother. But then she went on and she said,

if I wasn't anxious about imperfection, I'd be so creative. She'd say, I'd be so confident in the deepest ways. I'd be so loving. And you can ask yourself that because I'd be so creative. yourself that because it's such a really powerful and important question, who would you be? So let me just say a few comments about the rain practice that we just explored and then we're going to practice it as a part of our closing here. I'll invite you to think for yourself of an anxious situation and explore it.

But just to say a few things that it really helps with recognizing anxiety and allowing it, just say, okay, it's just anxiety. Now, why just? Because it's universal, it's so pervasive, it's running through all these body minds, others are experiencing it too. Others put it in perspective. Recognize and allow.

And then we make what I call the U-turn. We're rather than fixating on the anxious thoughts, we come into the felt sense. Investigate, feel it. feel it in your body and ask that incredible question that really unhooks us, what does this place need? And then offer it. Offer it with as much kindness as you can.

The power of this is that you get unhooked from that identity of an anxious self and you get to inhabit again, that oceanness. Now just to come back, for a moment and say, before we close and practice a little, is that we began by talking about, I mentioned this cultural PTSD that Carol Patterson, the author writes about, we all get this limbic hijack. We all get tugged into it. And so to not take it so personally will actually help us to invest in

and nurture better. If you think of it as my anxiety, then it sounds really burdensome. But if you think of it like just the anxiety that's part of cultural PTSD, it's a lot more workable. And if you decide you want to give out fidget spinners for Christmas,

I have to tell you that I've found, I heard that there's a Russian jewelry specialist that sells one for $16,000, $800, $16,800. So isn't that amazing? You can get a fidget spinner now for $16,800. That's our PTSD culture. Okay, so there are a lot of ways that we all have, like, our favorite techniques for dulling our anxiety.

Probably the number one most popular is how much more can I get done? How many of you know that, that if you get more done on the list, then you'll soothe your anxiety? That's my favorite strategy anyway. There's many ways we do it individually and there's many ways we do it as a culture and as a culture we numb or we aggress. I wanted to kind of be foreclosing say that because each of us by letting anxiety be a portal of awakening in a way that can ripple out to our culture. We need people that instead of getting hijacked can be calm. I want to share a story that a war correspondence told at the early

days of Iraq when everything was super tense on every side. Nobody knew it was going to go on and he described a disaster in the making that he was watching and he described how a small unit of American soldiers was walking along a street in Najav when hundreds of Iraqis poured out of these buildings on either side and they had their fists waving and throats tawed and they were pressing in on the Americans who are glancing around at one another in terror. So this could have been total limbic hijack into the way he described, this war correspondent, he said, this is it. A shot will come from somewhere. The Americans will open fire and the world will witness the Ma'ai Massacre of the Iraq War.

That was his thought. So here's what happened. At that moment, an American officer stepped through the crowd, holding his rifle high over his head with the barrel pointed to the ground. Against the backdrop of the seething crowd, it was a striking gesture, almost biblical. Take a knee, he said. Take a knee. And the soldiers looked at him like he was crazy, but then one by one,

swaying in their bulky body armor and gear, they knelt before the boiling crowd and pointed their guns at the ground. The Iraqis feel silent and their anger subsided. The officer ordered his men to withdraw. The reason I share of this is that we don't have to get hijacked by anxiety and act in ways to either attack or defend. We don't have to get strangled. We don't have to and it doesn't have to happen as a culture,

but we cannot change it unless we, in our own lives, deepen our commitment to letting this natural tension in our system be a wake-up, be an invitation to wake up. So it's with that in mind that we close with a brief practice of rain on anxiety. and I invite you to, because this is just a template, we're just going to walk through it briefly, I invite you to continue on your own, and then when we continue,

we can start exploring some other dimensions of practice with anxiety. For now, as you come into stillness, notice your experience. Be aware of there's thoughts and images buzzing around in your mind. Let your awareness come down into the body and take a few full breaths. And let your attention then scan your life and choose some situation that you can imagine bringing up anxiety, somebody you have to talk to,

some situation when you're late for something, conflict with somebody, something that agitate your system. It can be some situation you've already been in that you know could reoccur or something you're anticipating in the future and let yourself as we did before go right to where you get most triggered and then pause in that spot. Recognizing what's going on, the R of Rain, just noticing, okay, anxious, agitated. It might be, as it is for so many, anxiety.

about failure, imperfection, to name it and consciously allow, make some space for it to be there. Not alone, there's many, many of us in the same way deepening our attention, making room, so we can begin to investigate a bit and just sense how that anxiety lives in your body. You might feel the throat, the chest, the belly, and just breathe with it. If it helps you to put your hand on your heart and even right as you're investigating, begin to just accompany yourself, kind of a kind investigation. Breathing and feeling where the anxiety is.

The investigating starts into nurturing as we start just really sense, well, what is this anxious part of me most need right this moment? What is this place need? You might sense the place feels very young. young, very familiar, what message, perhaps an image, touch? Just in these few moments of quietness, calling on the most loving part of you, the wisest part of you, or some love and wisdom in the world to just offer care. Whatever soothes and comforts this part, perhaps the words that might be comforting.

and then rest for a few moments. This is after the rain with however it is. Noticing to whatever degree that shift where you can sense the presence that's here, that in some way there's a resting in a larger awareness in the wakefulness, a compassionate space that's larger than that small anxious self. to be without anxiety about non-perfection, that freedom, that loving awareness that can include the waves. Again, Rumi, be empty of worrying.

Think of who created thought. Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open? Move outside the tangle of fear thinking. live in silence flow down and down in always widening rings of being 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