Tara Brach - Part 1: Healing Depression with Meditation

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Most people get depressed at times, and many suffer greatly from bouts of major depression. At the heart of the suffering is the experience of severed belonging—of being imprisoned in the pain of separation, unworthiness, unlovability and hopelessness. These two talks explore several meditation practices that reconnect us with our natural aliveness, openheartedness and awareness. They empower us to develop our inner resources, energize us to awaken, free us from rumination and remind us that we are not our depressive thoughts and feelings. The growing realization of the loving awareness that is our home heals the very roots of depression.

Welcome, friends, to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week, I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com, where you can also join our email list. Now, let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Namaste. Welcome, friends.

I recently saw a cartoon. It was of two massive King Kong-type monsters and they're walking through a city high above the buildings and they've scooped up and they're eating handfuls of humans and one saying to the other

of course you feel great. These things are loaded with antidepressants. You know, I'm regularly asked to give talks on depression, including numbness, despair, resignation. And so it felt like given the times, I wanted to share a set of talks. These are two talks from the archives that explore the way meditation can support healing depression. And of course, since I gave these talks several years back, depression and anxiety has increased,

continued to spike. and it's alarmingly, especially in young people and especially females. So to you listening, if you aren't struggling, you probably know many people close in who are. A study this year found that over one-third Gen Z in the United States are taking prescription mental health meds, over a third. and Gen Z also is reported to be the loneliest generation in the United States. You know, when we feel depressed, it feels really personal and it feels oppressive and isolating and like it's a pathology, a sickness. And the reason I pay attention to the studies is that they tell us something important

that this surge in depression and anxiety is a symptom of a much wider societal disease, that it's exacerbated by climate emergency. I mean, we feel in our nervous systems the pain and suffering of the earth. It's exacerbated by our addiction to social media, by political divides, just this whole atmosphere of violence, the growth of authoritarianism. You know, we know that rising cancers reflect toxic food and air,

and in the same way, today's epidemic of despair reflects toxic conditions in our collective environment. So, these talks are intended to guide you as an individual. And I want to invite you to listen and as you do, to keep that larger context, in mind that others are experiencing this too, that it's not, it's my depression as much of, it's our societal depression and numbness and despair that's being experienced through

a sensitive nervous system. Now that friend who sent me the cartoon of those King Kongs grabbing the handfuls of us, she wrote, it reminds me that I'm not alone. And the truth is we're not alone. You're not alone. So may these talks on depression serve. Thank you. When I'm welcoming, as many of you know, I'm re-welcoming you that are right here in Bethesda and I'm welcoming you who are listening right now and spread around the world and those in the future who will be listening on the podcast because it does feel like a wonderful community that comes together, which brings me to our talk. And the title is Healing Depression with Meditation.

And it's the first time I've ever given a specific talk on depression. And as I started doing it, I realized, this is going to be a two-part talk. And it may be that it keeps going, we'll see. But as many of you know, there's supposedly by count, 300 plus million people around the world that are depressed. It's a leading cause of disability in the world. And of all of us listening right now, if not ourselves, I'm imagining that we know somebody very, very close in,

who really suffers from major deprives. And can I just see my hand raise how many here, either yourself or someone you know, really does suffer in this way? Can I see my hands? I can certainly raise my hand. This is most of us. And maybe a pause right now, and even inviting you to close your eyes and just sense the many people, ourselves included, who are part of this,

of this web, this community of, you might say loss, this particular expression of suffering, that live with something so difficult and just feel our hearts tender and open to that. Because one of the biggest illusions in depression is that in some way we're really alone and it's our fault, There's shame that comes with it in isolation. So one of the intentions of exploring this together is the sense that this is a really widespread and shared human suffering. Okay, and thank you for pausing in that way. So we're going to be looking at how meditation can help.

And when I say meditation, meditation is training our awareness. and there are many kinds of meditations. So in particular, I'd like to break it down some and say how different parts of meditation, our styles of meditation, can help in different ways to relieve this suffering, to bring healing. And there's a lot of research that's been done on mindfulness

and other meditations, and that preliminary research is showing helpfulness, you know, on a par with other leading, treatments and there's a long way to go. So part of this is that we're exploring this ourselves as practitioners, experimenting to see what works for us. The metaphor that I've kind of taken to that I like is to sense, if you know in the west there's these bending rivers and in logging areas, the logs can get jammed around some of the turns and at least in the past they used to have somebody with a long pole, they could, if they went right to the certain log, or a few certain

logs, and could re-angle them, then the logs could kind of readap just their positions and flow down the river. So I think of the constellation we call depression, you know, the thoughts and feelings and biochemistry called depression like a log jam, and that there are a bunch of different ways, different logs that we can target that can help to get things moving again. Okay, so that's kind of, and each of the leading treatments does that, whether it's cognitive behavioral therapies that might target certain belief systems and how we hold on to them and keep perpetuating, you know, the pain.

or sometimes it's physical exercise, they can dramatically change your biochemistry, or it may be different medicines, psychoactive medicines, they can do it, all the antidepressants. And a big, big area is relationships, friends, therapeutic relationships. I saw this on the web, it says, one awesome thing about Eeyore, you know, ER from Winnie the Pooh, is that even though he's basically clinically depressed, he still gets invited to participate in adventures and shenanigans with all his friends, and they never expect him to pretend to feel happy. They just love him anyway, and they never leave him behind or ask him to change.

So one quality of relatedness is this profound acceptance that doesn't make us wrong or bad for being caught in this log jam. Now, I mentioned on my list of, you know, treatments, and there's also a really opening in the field to recently research on the use of psilocybin and MDMA, and so there's a lot more coming down the pike in terms of ways to reboot the system, kind of shift some of the logs, whatever. But I want to just right from the start because antidepressants are in such wide use.

And so often I have people saying, yeah, but if I'm going to use antidepressants, isn't that going to in some way sabotage my spiritual path. And some of you might have wondered the same thing too. And so I'll just say a few words about that in a moment. But I just want to share that now about 15 years ago, I went to a conference that was on trauma. And one of the posters for the conference had a big, you know, the title there was, if there was Prozac back then. And first it had a picture of Karl Marx saying, you know,

hmm, capitalism could work if only we tweak it a little, you know. But my favorite one was Edgar Allan Poe, who's looking out the way. window and he's saying, hello, birdie. So, okay, so antidepressants, it's nice to have a hardline position and many people feel very strongly one way or the other. And I can say that over these decades, I have seen, for some people, antidepressants seem to be really, really helpful, make it even possible to meditate and exercise and this and that. And I've seen others get very habituated and seem to plateau, and who knows? So it's really individual how it works.

For some, there is a stagnation that can happen not to keep on investigating how to wake up and work with depression. Science has a long way to go on this. It's a very, it's a very in-specific science. Friends sent me a cartoon today, and there's a doctor and the patient sitting on, you know, the table they sit on, and the patient saying this, I think we should cut back on my antidepressant.

I watched old yeller, and it was hysterical. So talking about dogs, there are more natural ways. The same person sent me another therapist, a client, the client's on the couch therapist saying, go home and let your dog lick your face. Dog slive is the most effective antidepressant you can get without a prescription. So we're going to focus on the meditative strategies that can bring healing. And the important thing, I guess one important thing I want to communicate is that I think of meditation as rarely sufficient by itself. I think meditation is essential in really fully healing and yet it needs

other elements like a real focus on relationships. And for some people, you know, medication or for others, you know, really strong exercise regime or whatever, but it's not alone, but I do think of it as essential. And the reason why is because not only does meditation shift the logs around, I mean, you can actually do MRIs and see the shifts in the brain and so on, but it's empowering because we start realizing that we can direct our own attention in a way. that starts to heal and free us. So it shifts the logs around, helps to get us back into a flow state,

it's empowering, and the final thing is that the very nature of meditative attention is it helps us realize who we are, that we are not the log jam. You are not your depression. Your depression doesn't have to define you. And through meditation, we get those glimmers of that who we are is something more. We're that tenderness, that awareness, that kindness, that weakfulness, that we start to sense in the background. And those glimpses are really what's liberating.

So we're going to be digging into the different meditative strategies, but to set a bit of a context, the first is so what is depression? And there's different facets to it, but you might say it's a low and unpleasant, painful mood, and it's characterized by a loss of interest in life and engagement, and often a sense of helplessness and hopelessness, feeling numb or empty, disconnected. It's very often accompanied, as I mentioned earlier, by shame, like, I feel low and this is my fault and I'm bad and it reflects something bad about me.

So it's accompanied by that shame and it's also accompanied by anxiety because we feel at risk. So that's the kind of the cluster. You can see in the statistics that it says, you know, usually see women as higher up on depression and men is a bit lower. But many professionals feel like men present with symptoms of depression, like aggression or like anger or addiction, but underneath that is depression. So it's hard to tell.

An important thing to explore in ourselves and others is the difference between depression and sadness. sorrow, grieving. In this culture, we're not so good at creating the space for sorrow and grieving. There are some cultures that have a whole ritual around, you know, when somebody's had a major loss, creating a lot of open time where there's no demands, where it's just assumed that person's going to kind of burrow in. And the recognition is that grieving and sadness is entirely natural.

We see it in animals. I mean, I think of elephants because I have a few books I've read about elephants and articles and they're just such a fascination. But they live about as long as we do. They have really tight herds. And when an elephant mom loses a calf, I mean, she's in grief. Sometimes they have to leave behind the weaker ones. There's mourning and grief.

It's very visible. And with humans, we have all these losses that are inevitably part of being alive, whether it's the losses of our own aging and sickness and death or people that we love are the relationships that don't work out and break our hearts. our losses of job, our losses of freedom, you know, our loss of home, our loss of a place to live. It's just all these different levels of losses. And then we have the more subtle but very deep ones where we have the loss of, I sometimes think it was the unlived life, the sense of what could have been or might have been

or that we wish we'd have. And then there's the loss in our world. We see the loss of species and it breaks our heart. We see the suffering and loss of other animals that are alive and the cruelty to farm animals and it breaks our heart. There's loss after loss and then the human losses around the planet. So here is the basic principle that when there's loss and when there's loss and when there's loss and we don't feel it and grieve it, it converts into depression. Ungrieved loss, ungrieved sorrow.

When we haven't faced it, felt it, digested it. It's like a wound that never healed. It prematurely got covered over and then it gets septic in some way. Does that make sense? It's one of the great, you know, kind of spiritual crises in our culture is that ungree's life. It gets buried and it turns into depression. So, sadness is intelligent. It's adaptive. Sadness, you know, really if you sense, well, what does sadness do? It moves us towards accepting loss that something is past. And it moves us towards reconnecting in some way,

restoring connection. That's what sadness does. It brings us to often a more timeless loving. For me, I've found grief when I really grieve. I open to what's embedded in the grief, which is the love that's undying. That often happens when I'm feeling the waves of missing my parents, that I will feel the sadness, but then right in the very essence of that sadness

is just the loving of them that can't go away. So the difference is important and also the relationship between ungrieved, losses, and depression. Now, when we're going into depression and into major depression, just to look at that, the brain is no longer regulating our mood. We're out of wax, so to speak. and when we lock in, when the system gets low like that, it takes over and it defines us. Our life is defined by depression. It limits us.

And the challenge is itself sustaining and it kind of is virulent. It extends itself on its own once it begins looping. Because think about how we experience depression. There's depressing thoughts going on about what's wrong that reinforces a biochemistry that's depressed and there's also the level of the electrical messages, the neuropathways and so on. So all of that goes on, which then generates more thoughts, which generates more feelings, and on and on it loops unless we have a pole and we know how to move onto the logs, which we'll get to.

It also, part of the looping is that when we have the thoughts and feelings looping, they create behaviors that then sustain our situation. So the thoughts might be, I'll never find love, and the feelings might be that sinking feeling and the sense of shame and the fear, and then the behaviors that come out of it are not really open to relationship, which then reaffirms I'll never find love. and I know you get it. But that's what I mean by self-sustaining.

That's why when the weather system of depression sets in, it's very tenacious. Okay. So what inclines us? How come some people, I mean, we can all get set off and feel a real sense of loss and real intense stress. And all of us can go down a bit for into depression,

not just grieve it, but like in some way delay the grieving and avoid our feelings and get depressed. That happens to everybody I know. How come some people lock into major depression? Okay. It's 50 cents inheritable. So genetics, big one, okay? 50 cents inherited. Chemical imbalance in certain ways.

There can be, if there's trauma early on, it changes the neurocircuitary and it inclines us more to depression. If there's trauma in another generation, the circuitry from that generation get inherited. So there's pre-existing conditions that make us more inclined. But the key understanding, if you sense, you know, how come we go down into... depression is that we get stressed by something, some loss, some intense loss, or maybe it's ongoing pain because pain can go right into depression. I know that one personally how, you know, after a certain amount of chronic pain, my

system just became depressed and my thoughts were depressed thoughts and I just began looping. So some form of trauma, whether it's in a past generation or the this lifetime, a really severe stress, ends up throwing us off. In other words, our basic needs are not being met. The trauma of it could be starvation, but more likely not being nourished in relationships, not being seen, not being loved, not feeling safe, not feeling belonging. It throws us off. Poor parenting. So then we have severed belongings. belonging, that's depression. I mean, when severed belonging, the loss of connections not processed, we get depressed. And then we feel more disconnected, which makes us more depressed.

So depression is about disconnection. Everything we're going to explore in terms of meditation, moving the logs, has to do with reconnecting. to aliveness, to our hearts, to awareness. When we're disconnected, the limbic system basically is dominating, so it's not just depression, it's also usually shame and fear and anger and other stuff. And our frontal cortex, not so much of a flow of communication, so we lack access to our most important resources of empathy, compassion, compassion, mindfulness, humor, good reasoning. So that's part of the challenge. You can see it in animals and you can see it in humans.

I've always been struck by some of the studies, one study of chimps, and I share this and as I'm saying it, I'm realizing that I very much don't approve of and want to have any studies of primates that hurt primates. So I share you this with that understanding that in this study, the baby chimps were deprived, they had erratic mothering, the outcome of deprivation, maternal deprivation, binge eating, antisocial behavior,

withdrawn, fearful, depressed. When we don't get our needs met, When there's severed belonging and there's not a way of processing it, we get depressed. And you see it in humans too. You see it culturally. You know, in a culture where there's not so much natural belonging. How much addiction there is, how much depression and anxiety, and particularly in the most historically marginalized groups.

that have been traumatized. It's societally induced trauma. Severed belonging. Goes into depression. For anybody that's experienced, any of you listening, any that you know, being cut off from aliveness,

from hope, from feelings of connection, is a horrible biological, psychological prison. It's horrific. So that's context. Now the healing, as I mentioned, is we're restoring connection. And from the Buddha, he says, I would not be teaching you this Dharma, this path,

if it weren't possible to experience freedom and happiness. So the first message is, it's possible. Now, this is really important because the key feature of depression is, it's not going to work for me. Okay, so this is the core teaching of the Buddha. I wouldn't be teaching you this if it weren't possible. And modern neuroscience is saying the same thing. Neuplasticity, neuroplasticity, neuroplasticity, right?

that even though the patterning can be deeply grooved, the brain is plastic throughout our lives. So, we're going to be, for the rest of these two talks, maybe more, but we'll see. We're going to be looking at intentional pathways of reconnecting, and I'm going to be emphasized, I'm going to name them now, and then we'll get probably to two of them for the rest of tonight. The first pathway is reconnecting to our hearts' intention to what matters to us.

The second pathway is moving from thoughts to presence, being able to come out of the ruminations and coming into the here and now. The third that we're going to explore is mindful self-compassion, how to bring mindfulness and compassion into the present moment. And then the last is gladdening the mind. Gladdening the mind. And each one is a way to wake up to wholeness. And different ones of us need different emphasis at different times.

Okay, so we'll start with intention. Because that really is the opening of the door. And when we feel the logs are jammed, when we feel stuck. And stuck is the best word. It feels like there's no way out of the downness and the unpleasantness and all the self-negative and the disconnection. It feels like there's no way out. And yet there's something in us that wishes we could get out and that wish is the beginning of intention. A couple of years ago, there was a New Yorker article. and it was about a Japanese monk, his name was Nemoto,

that was responding to people who were severely depressed and suicidal. And he set up this website and so on. Japan's suicide rates twice that of the United States, or at least it was. So he was having a workshop at his temple, and he describes this workshop, and he did an exercise. We're going to do a kind of tiny little piece of it, a little aversion of it, but if you had three months to live and you were diagnosed with cancer, what do you want to do? That was the exercise. And he gave people paper and then he said

if you had one month, if you had a week, if you had 10 minutes. Okay? So let's say you decide that what's important is being loving or helping or expressing your creativity, with poetry or realizing your true nature, you just start writing about that and what it would be like. So you lean into it, really, what is it you want? How would you want to live? So one man was there weeping and he had a completely blank piece of paper. And he said that he, up until this moment, had only thought about wanting to die, about what was wrong and bad, not about wanting to live. and if he hadn't really lived, how could he want to die?

So the insight was really freeing for him. In fact, he returned to his job. He was a lot of suicidal people who just stopped doing everything. He had stopped doing everything. He had been adverse to communicate him to theirs. He started to do that, and his life really shifted. So the basic teaching here is that the logjam does not include a sense of positive intention. We're cut off from that part of the frontal cortex that imagines

and intends and has aspirations for something positive, but it can be activated. We can reconnect to that. So the challenge here is again that even when you bring this up for somebody that's really stuck, the response is a hopelessness. this habit of I can't change is right at the root. It's a deep, deep belief, the negativity bias, completely honed in on one's shell. So I was teaching at Omega last weekend, and one person who came up to talk to me was really, really hopeless about her life. And that was what she led with.

She said, I just, you know, I can do something here, Tara, you're leading this meditation, I can feel a little bit of whatever. But there's no way. I mean, in the force field of how my day goes, there's no way. And I get slammed around, and I just end up hating myself and feeling like everybody, you know, so she explained her how it was. And so I said, okay, so you're here. What brought you here?

He said, well, I want to feel better. And so I said, so what would that be like? And in a way that was like a shocking question, just like for that man in the story. And I said, just start there. What is better like? And she said, well, I guess I would trust myself some. Well, what would that be like? And we started going into it and what I really want to communicate is you can't artificially hope.

You can't say, okay, I'm going to be hopeful. But what you can do is start sensing your longing to move in a direction because it's in us. There's something in us that intuit a possibility. And you can build on that. Now, I want to pause here and say, there's a real difference between, you know, I want to live my life, I want to wake up my heart, and what you might call the more narrow attached wants. So if you ask a person, well, get in touch with your intention, and they say, well, my intention is I really want my ex-partner to come back and then I'll be happy. are my intention is I want to get this particular job and then I'll be happy.

You know, I want to be able to dance professionally, even though I've just had both knees replaced in the next two weeks, then I'll be happy. You know, and it goes on and on. I want to win a competition. In other words, narrow, fixated wants are not going to reconnect us with our heart's aspiration. A Baptist pastor was presenting. a children's sermon. And during the sermon, he asked the children that they knew what the resurrection

was. Now, asking questions, during the children's sermon, it's crucial, but at the same time, he asked in front of the whole congregation, so that was pretty interesting. Now, so he asked what the meaning of the resurrection was. The little boy raised his hand, called him, and he said, this is what the little boy said. I know that if you have a resurrection that lasts more than four hours. You're supposed to call the doctor. It took the congregation like 10 minutes to settle down after the... So this was a very bad example of when we fixate our wants. But what I'm really suggesting is there's a difference between narrow wants and when we start really getting in touch with our deep aspiration and one of the ways to sense a deep aspiration is it like an acorn

to an oak, it's that in us which wants to experience our full potential, to love, to live, to be creative. It's what's already here that we want to allow to unfold. Second example for you from the story about Nomoto, the monk. So we had this website and people that were depressed would, you know, wanted help, would write to him and call them. and he'd have these phone calls and these conversations would go on and on and people call him back and he felt like it was really, really circular and there was often no progress at all. And it was just him burning out, but he didn't sense people getting better. So he figured he was doing something wrong and decided that if people who were depressed wanted

his counsel, they had to come to his temple. And his temple was in a really remote place. So they'd have to really want help. Okay? So one man walks five hours to get to the Moders Temple and the walks like this heroic journey because he had been living as a Shadun. You all know what a Shadden is staying, staying at home, never going out. So there he is.

Suddenly he's in the sun and he's walking and sweating and moving and feeling his body active. And as he walks, he's thinking about what he's going to say and he's becoming really aware of what's really you know, okay, this is really what's been so challenging, this is what hurts, so he's actually paying attention to his inner experience. And it's been a really long time since he's spoken to anyone, so this is quite a thing to feel like he's having the courage to bring his intimate experience to someone else. So he's sweating and reflecting and walking, and he finally gets there after five hours. And that's the peak of the experience. five hours and he goes to Nemoto and he announces that he's achieved understanding

no longer needs his health when he turns around and he walks back home. So that's the prescription. But it's really interesting what happened there. This is a real story. I think it's kind of arctyple in a way which is why I wanted to share it. in some way he was in touch with his aspiration. He did want to get better. And what aspiration does, when you start getting in touch with the pain of not feeling like you're living who you could be, that's a loss and it's an ungrieved loss. When you start

grieving it and then feeling in that grief, I really want to be who I can be. That longing energizes you to take some steps. And the problem with depression is it's paralyzing. So aspiration gets you into motion. It lets you take a risk. It lets you walk in the sun five miles to a temple. And so that was the first thing. So he dedicated energy to it.

And then as he was dedicating that energy because things are moving and he's moving around, he's paying attention to some of the layers of what's there that aren't so static and so buried, reconnecting with flow and with aliveness. And that is, that reconnecting is the antidote to depression. The lag jam is there because flow is blocked. Connecting with intention and our energy to move and our bodies and the layers that are there starts to undo the jam.

He understood that. So we're going to do a brief reflection on this. The Hebrew prophets warned that without vision, people perish. So this connecting with what matters to us, it's really the core element of hope, of healthy hope, this imagination, being able to imagine, and sense into the potential. So this reflection right now,

if you knew right now that this is the last month, what would matter to you? What would you want to be doing or experiencing or paying attention to? If you bring to mind a few people you care about and imagine that in this last month you're with those people, what is it that's going to matter? And if you could sense you don't know how long you have

and feel into the prayer in your heart, please may I, and just fill in the blank, what's the longing? What happens if you lift that longing really silly? Like really mean it. Be sincere. And you're feeling sincere prayer or longing, what's your sense of who you are? Notice what it's like.

Can you sense the difference between the sense of presence and beingness whose avenue which is praying? And they stuck so inside the log gym. The sign of the meditative pathway and the healing is that shift, sensing who you are, the enlarged sense of being. Okay. Take a few full breaths. Okay, so the first way of reconnecting, getting in touch with intention. The second calling thoughts to presence and one of the key perpetrators of depression is ruminating thoughts.

And even if we're not depressed, we have, you know, most of us get carried away into virtual worlds and we lose touch with our aliveness. So one of the most basic practices is to have an anchor in presence. In other words, your breath, your body, feeling of aliveness right here. If you're, often people that are very depressed or cut off from full body awareness because trauma, you know, cuts us off from body awareness. So then use another sense. Feel the hands alive because you can feel your hands even when you're generally dissociated.

Or feel your breath or listen to sounds, but something that helps you be here. And once you set that anchor, then when, and kind of name ahead at it. time, what are the thoughts and beliefs that you know are the typical ones that keep feeling depression? Well, we know them. They're the ones that are saying, something's wrong with me, right? We know that kind. I'm not going to change. I'm trapped. I'm isolated. I'll never have what I want. It's that that range. So we start getting to identify those when they come up, Okay, limiting thought, limiting thought, come back to the anchor. That's a nutshell summary of how to practice.

That's the meditation and then through the day we kind of look for them. I mean, the Buddha put it this way, which I think is a great nutshell summary. Whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind. Whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will become the inclination of their mind. And neuroscience says, neurons that fire together, wire together, you know? The more you think negative self-thoughts, the more deep those grooves are, the more that becomes the habit. So, ahead of time, we say, okay, when you think negative self-thoughts, the more deep those grooves are, the more that becomes the habit. So, ahead of time, we say, okay, when those come up, we're going to notice

them and we're going to come right back to here and we're going to breathe ourselves right here until it becomes a habit of interrupting rumination. It's really important because that really shifts things. If the more we're in those thoughts, the more we're living in an idea of a a role that then perpetuates the very behaviors that confirm our beliefs. So interrupting the thoughts is a really big one. I heard a story of a lifetime smoker and he was hospitalized for emphysema and he had had a series of small strokes so his daughter was urging him, you know, she'd often done, to give up smoking and he's refusing and, you know, he's been pretty addicted for

for his lifetime. And he says, look, I'm a smoker of this life, and that's how it is. But several days later, he had another small stroke, and this one hit up the memory centers in his brain. So then without a concern, he stopped smoking for good. And it wasn't because he decided to. He woke up one morning. He forgot he was a smoker. You know? We're so used to thinking about ourselves as a certain kind of person, including an unworthy person or unlikable person or whatever, if we keep thinking it, it's there, and then our behaviors come out of it. Now, we hopefully don't have to have a stroke, but in a way, this kind of meditation can decrease the frequency and help to shift our sense of who we are.

So, in this cocoon of thinking, we have a lot of repeating thoughts. A lot of them are projection. The more we're under the grip of the limbic system, the more things that are going on with us, we project onto other people. So there's that sense of, I don't like me, you couldn't possibly like me. You know, that kind of a thing. An old man, another story was wondering,

if his wife had a hearing problem or just wasn't listening to him. So one night he stood behind her while she was sitting in the lounge chair and he spoke softly. He said, honey, can you hear me? No response. Moves a little closer and says again, honey, can you hear me? Still, no response. Finally he was right behind her and he said, honey, can you hear me? And she replies, for the third time yes. We project. Okay. So, As mentioned, we can shift the logjam by coming back to our body every time we catch ourselves in thoughts. And we can also begin to reflect because if you can catch yourself in thoughts, what you're doing is becoming mindful of thinking, which means you're bigger than the thoughts.

You're resting in the awareness that's bigger than the thoughts. which reveals, and this is the insight, you don't have to believe your thoughts. Now, if you can leave tonight with a little bit of a sense of it's possible to start catching on to thoughts, coming back to presence, and then not believing them so much.

Not believing them so much. Remember that line real but not true. that one Tibetan teacher taught me. You can get that, yes, it's a real thought going on, but it's not true, it's just the programming here. So you can start to sense from mindfulness that you don't have to believe them, that you can challenge them. Do I know this is true? How do I feel when I'm believing this? What's it like not to believe this?

Okay, so William James, this is to me one of the most fascinating historical examples of the log jam being moved by working with thoughts. Many of you know he came from a super accomplished family who was a very successful writer, and in his 30s he was unaccomplished. He wanted to be a painter. Then he enrolled in med school, but then he quit to do an expedition up the Amazon. And then he quit that, and then in a moment of record, of real facing his life, reckoning in his diary.

He questioned his capacity to be productive in any way in his life that he should be alive at all. So he was hitting bottom. And he decided that before doing anything rash, he was going to do a one-year experiment with his beliefs in his unworthiness, his beliefs that he would never be successful, his beliefs in his failure.

So his one-year experiment was that every time those kind of thoughts would come up, he kind of let them go and come back to that sense of change as possible. He didn't use the word neuroplasticity, but, you know, he, something, that was it. He was just going to say, look, change is possible. And he tracked in his diary and practiced every day. So his view was as if things could change. and that as if created a receptivity to opportunities and his energy increased. And he got more aligned with his deepest interests.

And he got married, and then he started teaching at Harvard, and then he had a study group with a metaphysical club, and this is what he wrote in a letter. I possessed for the first time an intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom. When we began, I described the power of these meditative strategies. They shift our mood for sure, but they do more. They're empowering because you don't have to have somebody else guiding you or be taking something.

You can do that too to support it. But there are actually ways we ourselves can shift our attention. to access our aspiration, to energize, to engage, and to step out of rumination. So we're going to end with a short practice on this too. And this is, as in many of these reflections, something that requires more time than we'll be giving it. So this is a taste and I invite you to practice on your own. But for now, just bring an area to mine in your life where you feel, doubt, or you don't feel as hopeful as you want to feel. It might be in work, relationships,

hell, spiritual unfolding, where you feel some stuckness. Maybe it's an emotional reactivity where you are not trusting that you can change your pattern. And once you have it in mind, sense what you're believing? You know, when we're stuck, we have some corresponding belief. Sometimes it's I'm going to fail or I'll never get what I want. I'll never find intimacy. I'll always let people down, always be rejected. What are the limiting thoughts that go through your mind or the beliefs that surround this stuck place? Maybe it's that basic, I can't trust that I'll ever change. Just recognize. And sense that you could really call on your full mindful presence,

what you might call your future self, your most awake awareness. So you can shine a light on the thought and a belief. And know this is one you want to track and keep waking up from. And for now notice what happens when you're believing it, sense how it imprisons, how it depresses and severs you from possibility, from openness, from receptivity to something different, and from your wisdom self, your highest self, sense that understanding that change is possible.

And just ask yourself, What would my life be like if I didn't believe in this? Just get a glimmer, a glimpse. What would my life be like if I no longer believe this? Who would I be if I didn't believe this? You might notice the difference between that sense of beingness, that mystery, that presence, and the one who believes and is God in the Log-Cham.

Just notice the difference. We close with the words of 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. Flood down and down and always widening rings of being. Namaste and thank you for you.

and thank you for your presage.