Tara Brach - Part 1 - The Answer is Love: Evolving out of "Bad Other" (2019-08-07)

Episode Date: August 9, 2019

Part 1 - The Answer is Love: Evolving out of "Bad Other"(2019-08-07) - These two talks address the inquiry: How do we awaken from the contempt and hatred that causes so much suffering in our world? The first talk looks at how we can use the practices of mindfulness and compassion to decondition our habits of self-blame and self-hatred, as well as the importance of helping each other defuse the trance of unworthiness. The second talk extends the use of these practices to situations where we've locked into external "bad othering." These times need our deepened dedication to love: By intentionally arousing compassion for ourselves and others, we directly contribute to the evolution of consciousness in our world. Join Tara's email community at http://eepurl.com/6YfI, to receive exclusive updates, events, and meditations. - Get a free download of Tara's 10 min meditation: "Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease," - plus a bonus gift: "8 Essential Tips to Nourish Your Meditation Practice."  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. Some months ago, I read a book by Arthur Brooks and it's called Love Your Enemy. He's a Harvard professor and president of the American Enterprise Institute and the main theme was about our societal addiction to content. contempt. Contempt is defined as anger that's mixed with disgust and it's a very toxic form of othering as you know. Contempt is really a way that we kind of dehumanize the other and

it leads to violence. It's also the greatest predictor of divorce, contempt and a relationship and when it's turned inward in forms of self-hade and harsh criticism and so on, it really puts us in a kind of prison where we can't enjoy our life, where we can't really be a creative or really feel much love for our world. So since the domestic terrorism of last weekend, this word keeps coming up for me. I've been thinking about the book that I read and how much suffering arises out of contempt, how fueling fears of bad others just leads to violence. violence and it's often racial and I've also been thinking of course of Tony Morrison

who is just much loved and recently passed a noble laureate and she really used her language to combat the kind of dehumanizing ideologies really and I always come back to one phrase that she said it just struck me so much which is that in this country America is being white and that everybody else has to hyphenate. And it just strikes me as, you know, just how deep the othering goes. So there's an underlying inquiry that comes up for me and it comes up over and over and I'd like to explore it, which is what helps to evolve us out of othering. Really, what helps to evolve us out of hatred, out of contempt.

So I'd like to explore this this week and next week in my talks. And this talk will focus on the hatred or contempt our aversion that we turn inward because as we know, our self-hatred and our fears of deficiency often then get projected outward. This is from James Baldwin. He writes, I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hate and prejudice so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain. And when we kind of think intuitively about this we can sense if somebody is truly at home

with themselves, and if somebody is really in touch with themselves and has embraced their inner life, then there's not going to be a need to put down others. Does that make sense? sense? So we'll explore this together and as I often do I like to start with an evolutionary perspective because I feel like it actually shines a light on this is not personal, it's not like we're bad because we make other people bad, it's really deep, deep conditioning over millions of years and I think that's really important to register. When we look at the evolutionary perspective we really get a sense of how come we're getting stuck

you know, and what's our potential, and then how do we facilitate it? So a brief sideline, a fish lies on the ground outside his tank dead. The two remaining fish in the tank are talking to each other. What happened, one says? The other response, I don't really know, he just yelled, evolution and he jumped out. So that's an example of what doesn't work to facilitate. We need a little bit more training in the tank. Okay?

Which is what we're going to explore. But first let's just look a little bit at the evolution of our brain, which is, I think it's really fascinating that we all have, every one of us has a survival brain that is completely committed to making us safe. And you would not be functioning if you didn't have that. And that survival brain is totally fear-based. It goes around scanning for what's going to go wrong. It's got a negativity bias, looking for what's going to be able to.

go wrong and it fixates on wherever it senses danger. So for millions of years, what could go wrong to our humanoid hunter-gatherer groups was other hunter-gatherer groups that were slightly different or greatly different from us. And the way we knew they were dangerous is they looked a little different. And that's what could go wrong because in those days there was real competition for scarce resources. It really was a danger. So this is millions of years of conditioning and this limbic, you know, the brain stem and limbic areas saying, uh-oh, different type person danger. Not only that, early humans had names or epitaphs for the different groups and they very regularly, the names for them meant

not human, less than human. They felt disgust, they felt anger, they felt threatened. So I'm naming this because that's what lets them then go ahead and violate or put down or get rid of. So that's, those millions of years are in us and the primitive brain holds on to sameness, it's inflexible, it reacts to change, it's adverse to plurality and difference. our more recently evolved frontal cortex and our brain, which is now integrated with the frontal cortex, has changed and that's as of about 10,000 years ago.

So we're talking millions of years, 10,000 years. And we have the capacity to be quite adaptive and flexible and inclusive. And the newly developed parts of our brain can include the survival. survival brain, like take messages from it but knows how to downregulate it when it gets out of order, when it's functioning well, when it's well integrated. And what's interesting is the key elements that have evolved in this, you know, frontal cortex that really have moved us forward are mindfulness and compassion. Mindfulness lets us see what's going on inside us and therefore not be so hooked by it.

compassion lets us see our connectedness with each other and be more collaborative. And evolutionary psychologists say that it's our compassion and our capacity to collaborate, which has allowed the human species to survive and flourish. They say that cooperation has been more important than competition in our evolutionary success. So to me this stuff is like the opposite of dry. It's really interesting. It's really like, okay, so we see the trajectory we're on to develop this compassion and to collaborate and that's really what's going to bring us all the real benefits.

And we know we've got all these millions of years of conditioning and when there's trauma, when there's a lot of stress, we regress, we get stuck. In fact we get hijacked by the primitive brain and we're all about safety and tightening up and feeling endangered by others and reactive. I like the words limbic hijack because that's what happens. It's like fight, flight, freeze takes over. We lose access to our sense of, oh, others feel this too. Oh, others just like me have subjective feelings of fear and insecurity.

Our mirror neurons are not sensitive and active. We lose that sense of, oh, this can hurt you. I don't want to hurt you. I'm bringing this up as you all can imagine because we're witnessing both. We're witnessing the hopefulness of how our brains and consciousness are evolving. We wouldn't all be here either right here in Bethesda or here globally tuning in if we didn't really want to wake up our hearts and minds and be part of that movement towards a much more connected world, the caring world. And we're also bearing witness to all the ways

that we find in ourselves and in our society where there's that regression that's so scary and so painful. So the hope and the answer to my inquiry to myself of what can really move us forward is the intentional cultivation of compassion, doing it on purpose. This is one of the first poems I learned when I was in high school, Edwin Markham. He drew a circle that shut me out, heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle and took him in. So really we're talking about in Buddhist terms it's the Bodhisattva path. It's the awakening being that the Bodhisattva really is an expression of our full evolutionary potential.

And we're all on that path. We're all waking up. And the expression, the full spiritual maturity that we would hope for is where our hearts really love this whole creation. It's like this whole living world feels like part of our hearts. That if anybody's suffering, we care. It's all inclusive. And to grow into that spiritual maturity means that we have to embrace the hard stuff

and we have to be able to do it inside ourselves. And that's the pathway. It's like we all have a limbic brain that brings up jealousy and fear and anger and stuff that we don't like and we have to learn how to be kind towards what we don't like about ourselves. That's where we're going in this particular exploration tonight. And the given is for each of you, when you get really stressed and particularly if you've had a lot of trauma in your background, the given is that your limbic brain is going to

get activated and you're going to lose touch with a degree of at least the resources you most value. That's the given. And we don't like it when that happens and it brings us up huge self-doubt and we start thinking we're a bad person and we think of a bad person and we think it's a good, and we think it's our fault. It's not. It's millions of years of evolution that has created that way of reacting and all sorts of conditions that we couldn't possibly be controlling in our lives that make us end up reacting. So, we easily turn on ourselves. That's the bottom line.

This is a new... from a New Yorker magazine about 12. 23 years ago. And there's a man sitting in a family room and he's really angry and upset. You can see the storminess. Now here's what each in the room is thinking. The woman's thinking, was it something I said? The dog's thinking, was it something I buried? The cat is thinking, was it something I dragged in? And the parrot's thinking, was it something I repeated? And I like that because we all take it personally. It's like that. Washington Post had a T-shirt award of the year and the winner was I suffer occasional delusions of adequacy.

So one of the things I've found over the years is since I wrote radical acceptance, one of the most valuable things about the notion of the trance of unworthiness which is what I really call this habit of turning on ourselves was that when people realized it was a kind of pervasive feature that we all get into it, at least some of the time, it actually helps to loosen the trance. Like if you get it that most of us go around at least at times, really feeling contracted by a sense of something's wrong with me, I'm doing it wrong, I'm to blame, I'm falling short,

But we start realizing it's not so personal. It's just kind of part of the wiring and the way we're rigged. And it's very much built in through the ages when you think of original sin and the message of original sin. I've always liked this little reading, Annie Dillard. She says, somewhere and I can't find where, I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, if I did not know about God and sin, would I go to the way? to hell, no, said the priest, not if you did not know.

Then why asked Eskimo earnestly, did you tell me? So this is the message carried through so much of what we get that there's some original bad flawedness and beware of it. So much so that this is Garrison Keeler, he says, my ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time. So you get the idea. It's a big one.

So between our limbic brain and the millions of years and societal messages there's strong forces towards self-doubt, self-must, leading to sometimes contempt and self-hatred. Let me ask you to check in. This is a good moment for us to pause together, if you will. And maybe you might want to close your eyes and just to, if you will, scan today and scan the last few days and since if you've been at home with yourself and by that I mean accepting of yourself, kind. And if not, just to notice what's been between you and feeling.

at home with yourself. Maybe for a moment you could step into the place of the inner critics you can remind yourself what has the critic been telling you about yourself? Have you been judging yourself or falling short in some way in maybe a close relationship or at work or maybe it's the way you're eating or maybe there's some other some addictive process going on that you've been judging yourself for. Or maybe you haven't been liking yourself for the way your mind's been going. Maybe you've been feeling judgmental or angry. Just notice if you've been at home with yourself

or whether there's been some undercurrent of being down on yourself or maybe it's not even an undercurrent. Maybe you're very aware of it. How have you been relating to yourself? Have you been liking yourself? And as you attend, sense that you can do this in a kind of witnessing way with interest, not adding anything, just curious. As if you're watching kind of your limbic brain and has your limbic brain been turned on yourself.

Usually what it is is our limbic brain doesn't like itself. It doesn't like its own self-centeredness or insecurity or jealousy or or, or or anger, our neediness, our addictiveness, witnessing, witnessing the trance of unworthiness if it's there and just sensing that the freedom comes if you learn to draw that circle that includes what you've been rejecting. So you can keep your eyes closed if you'd like or if you are in the mood you can open your eyes. But the title of this talk, at least at this moment I thought would be the answer is love, colon, evolving out of hatred. And I really believe that if we want to have

an inclusive heart to our world that we have to be able to notice where we've turned on ourselves and deepen our commitment to loving ourselves into healing. deep in our commitment to embracing the parts of ourselves we don't like. If we can't do that, we're not going to be able to open our hearts to the world. We're not going to be part of the healing of hatred. And it's not easy because we have a lifetime of stories that keeps cycling through our mind about what's wrong and feelings that then solidify our self-judgments. So we have to learn to work with that.

So when Arthur Brooks talks about a culture of contempt, he says we're addicted to a culture of contempt, we're also addicted to a culture of turning against ourselves in our contempt. It's an addiction to not like ourselves. So what are our tools of undoing that? And I think of them in a broad way as mindful self-compassion. I'm going to name three particular tools and we're going to practice together. I'll show you how we can use them through, I'll give you to share a story that touched me and then we'll practice.

So the three basic tools, the first is becoming mindful just as we've been doing of what's happening and this is where the frontal cortex comes in. We start noticing, oh, turned on self at war with self. So, interesting me that the foreign press when it's been describing what's been happening in this country has said it's kind of like this country is at war with itself. Well, we are at war with parts of ourselves. So the first, recognize that, recognize, oh, okay, turned on self. Because if you can see it, if you can see the thoughts of I'm bad, I'm falling short,

this is bad, I shouldn't feel angry, I shouldn't etc. If we can see it, we can start to free ourselves from it. That's the first one. You can begin to unhook. The second one is to mindfully open to the actual feelings that are there. So this is the movement from head, unhooked from the thoughts to the vulnerable heart. That's a key move on this healing path of embracing our inner life. Okay, so mindfully recognizing the war, unhooking from the thoughts, coming into feelings and the third self-nurture.

It's as the psychologist Kozalino writes, we're not the survival of the fittest, we're the survival of the nurtured. That's the way we evolve. I thought I'd share a story, this is from a good number of years back, a young woman, Jamie, who I knew when she lived here in Bethesda because she went to high school here locally, knew her family. She went to graduate school on the West Coast. Her mother lived back here, divorced, living alone.

And her mother had been through a difficult year. She had a hip replace. She had a cancer scare. Best friend had passed away. So it was a hard year. And so Jamie was coming for a visit in the summer for a number of weeks during summer break. She really wanted to be a supportive presence. But when she came to check in with me, which was during a day-long workshop we had here, she

said that she and her mom were at war and it was really painful. And what was going on, because they were very, very close and mesh kind of close. And what was going on was she was feeling kind of enraged by the way different things her mother was doing. And there were small things and she knew it. Let's see. She said her mother forgotten to get her the hard to her. her mattress that she had promised when she visited.

And her mother didn't warn her about other guests that were going to overlap on the visit. And she kept interrupting and finishing her sentences and then freshener about future work, just typical stuff. But she was feeling enraged. And the hardest part was that the anger made her so she couldn't be the caring person she wanted to be. And so I asked her, well, what was the worst part of all of this? Because sometimes that's the question that can get us in.

And with a lot of tears she said, I hate my angry self. I hate still wanting her to take care of me that I'm needy. I hate myself for being selfish. I hate myself for not moving back and being with her and taking care of her, which of her mother was never asking her. And she was weeping by this point. She just said, I feel so guilty that I'm not showing up. And she was in a very young place and she told me that she told me that she was,

that as long as she could remember she was feeling that guilt and like she was falling short. So she was angry at her mother but even deeper than that, as I described earlier, her anger and hatred was towards herself. So here we were and she was doing the first thing. We were bearing witness, here it is, you're at war with yourself, that's number one. You know, can you unhook from the thoughts? What are you actually feeling? And when she got inside, what she was feeling was the pain of Ambad, which is profound shame.

It's just shame. It's like core badness. I know many of you know what I'm talking about. It's a sinking, aching, empty feeling. It's got fear all around it because if we're bad, we're also going to be rejected by others and nothing's going to work out in our life. So it is fear and shame. And so as she got really in touch with it, the third part, what does that part need?

What's the flavor of nurturing? Because self-nurture could mean a lot of different things. For some people, self-nurture means, okay, I really, I see this is happening and I'm here and I'm not leaving. And for someone else it's a kind of forgiveness. And for someone else it may be a complete imbenture. embrace. And for her she said she needs in some way to know that it's not my fault. It's not my fault that my mother's suffering, it's not my fault that I can't show up,

it's not my fault that I'm feeling angry. And so I asked her to do what I often ask people to do and I said, see if you can look through the eyes and feel with the heart of your wisest self. Like if you could just call on your wisest self and I'd just call on your wisest self and to put her hands in her heart and sense that that wiserest self is seeing the struggle and send the message that you most need to hear from your wiser self to that young, young place. And that's what she did. She just kept saying, it's not your fault. It's not your fault.

She did it during, we had met during the break at lunch, but all afternoon I could see her there with her hand in her heart. I knew the message she was sending and she told me that by the end of the afternoon, she felt this sense of that there was a lot more space that the who she was wasn't the bad person, the bad stuck person, who she was was really her high self that was holding compassion, the younger one. She was a field of compassion. And I asked her a question that I ask often, I said, and this was when we talked later,

I said, you know, who really, who are you if there's nothing wrong with you? Who are you if it's truly not your fault? And you can ask that question to yourself at some point, if there's really no problem, if there's really nothing wrong with you, then who are you? And for some people there can be this radical opening, like, wow, I don't know. Oh, but there's much more space and freedom. This was her practice that she left with, to keep noticing when she was turned on herself, to feel in her body the feelings and to offer that really loving message, it's like she

was saying to herself, sweetheart, you can't help that, it's not your fault. And she said that without that the edge of... self-blame that she was feeling she became much more naturally kind and she and her mother in some way found their way back to resuming and the way they normally could their playfulness and their humor because they had a lot of tenderness between them but I want to pause here and what I'm sharing because I'll often describe the power of getting that it's not my fault And some people wonder, well, wait a minute, doesn't that make me that I'm not going to be accountable? I won't be responsible.

I mean, if I tell myself it's not my fault. I remember one man who hated himself for his anger because he lashed out at people and he was hurtful. He hurt his wife. He hurt his teenage daughter. He was hurtful. And he said, how can I forgive myself? I'm hurting people I love. And so I said, well, is your blame, is your self-hatred and blame helping you to behave better?

He could get the logic of that. He said, but for me to forgive myself, and I looked at him and I said, and I actually had my hand on his shoulder, I said, your anger is not your fault. It really isn't your fault. And something cracked, and he began sobbing. And I'll never forget how when he really could let it be true that it wasn't his fault, he saw as he was meditating, had memories of his father and how his father he could remember a time when he was a young boy watching his father throw dishes and anger, breaking dishes in the kitchen,

and afterwards the remorse. And he remembers thinking, oh, he couldn't help it either. This is a father he had hated for four decades. The message of it's not your fault to him, what happened was it broke him open to a level of self-compassion that he started being able to work with the roots of his anger, his real feelings of powerlessness and fear. And he told me a year later that his wife said to him, for the first time in our marriage I actually feel safe with you.

Getting that it's not our fault, that there's millions of years of condition that we can't control the limbic brain, that we can't control the trauma that's come in our lives. It says one writer put it, the title of his book is, it didn't start with you. And I'm forgetting the author's name, I wanted to tell you it. But if you just remember that, it didn't start with you, you'll find it. But he talks about past generational trauma, everything that shapes our psyche. It's not our fault.

It doesn't mean we're not responsible. What actually happens is if we stop blaming ourselves, we become able to respond to the wound. We become responsible. It's the pathway to responsibility to let go of that contempt and self-hate. I will add, because I've been rather serious about how I'm making my points here, is that not not everybody ends up condemning themselves when there's something wrong because Yogi Berra writes this, he says, I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up I change bats.

After all, all I know is it's not my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself? Yogi Berra. So some of us blame ourselves, some of us blame others, some of us blame life or the bat, But there is no healing as long as we're condemning ourselves and thinking it's our fault for the limbic reactions that have been rigged in our system for eons and eons. So I'd like to do is practice a little bit and just explore for you to explore a place where you feel you've turned on yourself. It may be just a slight judgment or it may be in deep, harsh, harsh.

contempt, but just to get a little more freedom. So as you come into stillness, you might scan and sense where in your life you might be turned on yourself some, or you might be blaming yourself, or in some way creating a bad other of some of your inner self. Might be for a way you're behaving in a relationship. Maybe you feel you're being too needy or too aggressive or too selfish. It might be, as I mentioned earlier, an addictive behavior. behavior, it might be the way you're handling something that's difficult, like sickness

or somebody else's sickness, just a sense where you might not be really accepting and kind with yourself. And you might begin with intention just to sense some wise place in you that really wants to draw that circle and include all parts of you. of yourself and your heart and be part of the healing, the evolutionary healing that can end the hatred in our world. Just feeling that commitment and that intention. You can begin the first step of simply recognizing mindfully, okay, so this is where there's

a turning against self. This is maybe the limbic system not liking itself. You might name what's going on, self-judgment, self-hate, harshness, contempt, whatever you're noticing. So there's a little more witnessing when you can name it. And then ask yourself, well, when I'm believing or feeling my badness, what's it like? And then let yourself go into your body to find out. So when you're believing it is my fault, I'm bad, something's wrong with me, what's that feeling like in your body?

This takes a little bit imagining into, like really letting yourself buy into the story and sense the worst part about it and what's the worst thing about you and sensing the fears that you have around that of being bad or failing. You might sense how familiar it is, how long in your life you've been feeling some sense of personal badness. Notice what happens when you sense how long you've been living with this and maybe even the effect it's had on your life. How has it affected your life, your relationships, your capacity to enjoy, to be turned

on yourself? And even as you ask that, you might put your hand on your heart to deepen the listening inwardly and to establish that contact with your own heart. And sense what is the part of you that feels most vulnerable or most bad, what is it most need from you or what is it most need from your most wise or high self? What's the nurturing it needs? Does it need to trust that it's not its fault, that it's really essentially there's goodness inside you?

Does it need to feel care? that there's a presence that's staying with you and cares about you? Does it need to feel forgiven? Does there a certain message it needs? You might sense how the wisest part of you and most loving part of you wants to respond to this vulnerable place right now. Is there some words of comfort? Perhaps the touch on the heart can even become more tender.

and you might mentally whisper some message to yourself that might be healing. Perhaps you might even use your name. And if it helps to sense the message coming from someone that loves you that you trust, that's fine too. Or from a spiritual figure. But letting a message be sent inward of comfort, hearing it again and again, and letting the feeling be like a wash of warmth or care that moves through you and through

that place and perhaps you can sense a little more space when there's a message of kindness that the who you are is actually resting in something larger, more of that compassionate presence. You might even ask if you really trusted that there's nothing wrong with you, who would you be? What would it be like right now? Just sense that. If you really trust it, it's not my fault, there's nothing really basically wrong. Sure, like conditioning, there's waves in the sea, but you're bigger than just the waves.

Who are you if there's nothing wrong? The tools for evolving out of hatred are the tools of presence of my mind. of mindfully noticing when we get stuck, feeling our feelings, offering, nurturing. Now, feel free to keep your eyes closed if you'd like or if you'd like to open them, you can take a few full rest and come on back opening them. In addition to the tools of our own inner practice, part of evolving is we need each other, just the way in evolution, what... evolutionary psychologists show is that it's through collaboration that humans can make it.

We need to collaborate spiritually. We can't do it alone. We need each other. That man I described, he needed me to tell him it's not your fault. He just needed another voice reminding him. He had plenty of people telling him it was his fault early on, so he needed a reminder so he could then internalize that. One of my favorite quotes in the whole world comes from Arne Garborg.

He says, to love someone is to learn the song in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten. Isn't that sweet? So I want to tell you a closing story. Some of you might remember that to me is a beautiful expression of what Arne writes, just reminding somebody of the song in their heart. And this is a story that I read in Frank Osteriskeskes book, The Five Invitations. I recommend that book highly to everybody, the five invitations. And in this story, he was accompanying a young man who was dying of AIDS and he was gay,

he was a longtime Buddhist practitioner, and he was in a deep misery because the more he he started suffering from high fevers and pneumonia, the more of these deep fears that had been buried emerged. Now he grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family and really the commandments of a punishing God had been beaten into him by a fire and brimstone preacher father. And now that he was close to death this was all coming up and he was really certain that God would condemn him for eternity due to his sexual orientation. So this is, this is close to death. So this is real activation of the limbic system. You're bad.

You are condemnable. So Frank tried to orient him to mindfulness and compassion practice that he had studied for years and they had a Buddhist statue and an altar and so on. He held his hands, massaged his feet. But nothing really helped with that deep fear. So by two in the morning, and I'm going to read you at Frank Rowe, because it's so beautiful. He says, I was exhausted and feeling ineffective and powerless and chose to go home and get some sleep. And on the drive there, for some unknown reason,

I thought of my first Holy Communion, the Catholic ritual that ushers young innocence into the loving lap of God. So when I got home, I searched through my storage closet to find my memory box, a small collection of amentoes I hold dear. And here I located a five-inch plastic figurine of Jesus surrounded by lambs and little children. Instead of going to bed, I drove straight back to the hospital. And as Matthew, the young man, continued to moan and shout and toss and turn in agony, I took down the funca and replaced the Buddha statue with the small plastic Jesus. Just as I was smoothing the altar cloth, the cleaning woman named Dina came into the room and spotted the figurine.

Setting her mop to one side, she said with great enthusiasm, merciful Jesus, when his kindness is with us, everything is all right. At once, Matthew's eyes locked onto Dina. An angelic smile spread across his face as he pivoted towards the altar to gaze at the plastic, Jesus' statue, and then back in Dina's direction. His entire body relaxed. And in that moment, the punishing God of his childhood, the one whose wrath he had been taught to fear and whose judgment

had made him feel like a terrible person was transformed into the merciful God he also knew in love, the one who adored all his children, no matter their so-called faults and flaws, the kind, forgiving, all-accepting, and benevolent God. Dina's faith in God's love was so secure that it lent Matthew exactly the strength he needed to defeat his inner critic.

I left them together, there, they didn't need me. We need each other to remind us sometimes of our basic goodness and that there's a love in this world that's here for us. We need each other. So we started this class talking about the culture of contempt and we're all well aware and our hearts are broken by how that leads to violence and how many beings are living not just those that have died and those that have lost people, but are living in fear

because of the environment and our culture and that really our path and this is the hope that we can consciously evolve our hearts. We can wake up our hearts out of hatred and we need to be the ones to do it. We, meaning all of us that care to. starts with embracing the parts of ourselves we pushed away. And as we'll explore in the next class, we then open ourselves to those that are difficult to include and that's the practice. So let's just take a few final moments together if you will, coming and sitting up and closing

your eyes, allow yourself to arrive right here. Just feeling a kind of intimacy with your body and your heart. you might remind yourself of the pain in your own life when you're not feeling at home in yourself, when you're down on yourself and the realization that others feel this too. Just to know that right in this moment or whenever you're listening to this, there are so many others that are honestly acknowledging the way they turn against themselves. We all do it. It's pervasive.

And you might bring to mind someone you know who maybe is struggling with self-contempt or self-hatred, someone you know who might be stuck with self-blame, who thinks something's wrong with them, since yourself including them in your heart space. And just feel your intention to remind them of their goodness, remind them of the song in their heart and send some message of care, some message of kindness, letting them know that what they thinks wrong is really not their fault and that their goodness is there. You might sense how perhaps in real time you might be able to be a mirror of goodness, help others draw that circle and include the disown parts so that together we can

and awaken that heart space and help to bring a healing to our world. So 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.