Tara Brach - Part 2: Awakening through Anger - The U-Turn to Freedom (2015-11-18)

Episode Date: September 14, 2018

Part 2: Awakening through Anger – The U-Turn to Freedom - While we have strong conditioning to react to aggression with more aggression, we have the capacity to pause, and instead deepen attention and connect to our natural wisdom and empathy. This talk looks at how we can directly engage in this evolutionary adaptation when we encounter trauma related conflict in our personal lives, and in a parallel way when groups of people who have been part of traumatizing conflict seek reconciliation and healing. (from archives - 2015-11-18)

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. The last class that we had, the topic was working with anger and working with aggression, how we can attend to this natural life energy with wisdom. And two days later, there was a violent attack. back Paris and it just felt so natural and compelling that we would continue our exploration of these energies that it just, there's so much heartbreak and care and prayer that

circles around and I know from myself there's something about, you know, with yet another very obvious on the surface round of violence, that prayer that can we learn? Can it teach us? Is there some way that this can actually wake up our hearts and minds? And I ended the last talk with a poem. And the poem was written by a local boy here, Maddie Stepanek. I think I'm saying his name right, Stepanik. So Maddie, 13 years old, a poet who has since died of muscular dystrophy and he wrote a poem the day after 9-11. So it just felt so pertinent to us because I don't know how many of you are feeling the same thing

but I just keep going back and forth on 9-11 and here we are and what's happened in between. There's all slants for what's happened in between, but some of the elements that strike me is that after 9-11, United States and others attacked Iraq, and 4,491 U.S. military died in approximately half a million Iraqi deaths, mostly civilian. Then there was the rise of ISIS. 9 million Syrian refugees since 2011. Last year, 9,347 Muslims were killed by ISIS. Then we had Paris, the loss of 130. Now we have 30 US governors trying to block Syrian refugees from settling in their states

and before Congress tomorrow there is a bell to block refugees coming into the country. Syrian refugees that are running from the same violence and aggression that we're exploring. So it really does seem compelling that we pay attention. And not with any kind of hubris

that, well, here's the answer, here's what we should do in a right immediate way in response, but more with the humility that our way in our individual life and in our collective life of responding to aggression determines the unfolding and the destiny really of our planet.

This is physicist Stephen Hawking. He was interviewed last year. He said, the human failing I would most like to correct his aggression. It may have had survival advantage in caveman days to get more food, territory, or partner with. with whom to reproduce. But now it threatens to destroy us all. The human quality he most wants to magnify his empathy.

He says, it brings us together in a peaceful and loving state. So the big question that I feel like faces us in terms of our human evolution and our survival as a species is whether we'll keep reacting to violence with violence. or whether the suffering of conflict will be impetus as it happens in evolution for a more adaptive response. When I say that, an adaptive response that calls on heart and wisdom. In the Buddhist tradition there's a very well-known teaching that hatred never seizes by hatred, but by love alone is healed.

is the ancient and truthful way. And the mythic story that many of you have heard and are familiar with, and I want to kind of bring the spirit of that in here into this talk, is that in the Buddhist mythology, the shadow side, and that would be aggression when we're caught in it. And just to reiterate that anger itself is a healthy, intelligent emotion, if you just listen to what it's trying to tell us, but when we get caught inside it,

when it takes over, then it's the shadow. So in the Buddhist tradition, Mara, the god Mara was the shadow side, as many of you know, and Mara is greed, hatred, delusion, aggression, jealousy, when it captures our identity. And in the Buddha's interactions with Mara, Mara appeared through the Buddhist life, So on and on we get the teaching about, okay, so these energies appear.

And when Mara would appear, as the story goes, he'd be kind of lurking around the field or wherever, the park, wherever the Buddha was teaching, and the Buddha's loyal attendant Ananda would be rather freaked out and disturbed when he realized Mara was there. And he'd say, oh no, Mara's here, God forbid, this is terrible. This is terrible. He didn't say, God forbid, actually. But you get the idea. He'd freak out, and then he'd go to the Buddha and tell the Buddha what was going on,

and the Buddha would basically, in some way, say, chill, it's okay. And then he'd go right to Mara, right to the shadow side, and he'd look Mara and say, I see you, Mara. Come, let's have tea. And what this represents in an evolutionary way, because the Buddha's modeling our evolutionary potential here, is instead of encountering the shadow, especially with a violent shadow with more violence,

I'm going to go to war against you, it's saying, I see you. This is from a much larger perspective, I see you. And, okay, so let me find out what you need, let's find out what's going on, let's find out how to resolve this. Let's do this in a way that allows for more reconciliation and freedom,

rather than being bound in a war again. So it's our evolutionary potential. And the last class we explored how we can cultivate this capacity to respond to aggressive energy from that kind of wisdom and mindfulness in our own lives. And we're going to revisit that again and add a few dimensions to it. And the reason it seems so important is that for there to be an evolutionary shift, shift in consciousness in our world. It has to be going on in our own psyches, right? And we have to be able to look honestly and say, okay, so where is there conflict and

aggression in my life? And can I sense the suffering in it and be willing to respond in a fresh way? Can I be willing to go deeper? And the way we described it in the last class, I use the image of the U-turn, that instead of buying in when we have anger at somebody to the stories of you're bad, you're wrong, here's how you have to change, to rather let go of the stories and make a U-turn and come back and say, okay, so if there's anger here, what's under it? And it's a very, very powerful question, you know, like what's behind the anger? Because when we ask that, what we'll find is that there's vulnerability, there's a sense

of some fear or something that was really important to us that there's an obstacle to, an unmet need, a sense of love that's being withdrawn or blocked. There's something that wants attention and there's no healing. There's no healing possible unless we make the U-turn, unless we come back. to what's right here. So this is facilitating the shift on an individual level that just getting it, that when we're, when anger comes up, we've encountered an obstacle to what we want or need. And before we can try to change the world, if we react out of aggression, are we going to get our needs met? If somebody's hurt us by withholding their love and we're angry,

is aggression going to get that love that we want? If somebody feels like a threat and we feel unsafe with them, is aggression going to make them less threatening? So the principle is that it's more adaptive to first come inward and sense, well, what's going on here and see if we can first bring presents and have tea with what's really going on inside us?

This wisdom of not responding to violence with violence was expressed very powerfully in a movie I saw some years ago in the story of how in an African tribe called the coup they dealt with violation and violence. And they have this ritual called the drowning man trial. That's really interesting to me because if somebody's murdered, that family will mourn and then after a year has passed,

the killer will be taken down to a river, hands tied, legs tied and they'll be dropped in the river. And then the family has to make a decision. They can either let the killer drown, and if they seek revenge, they'll have justice, but they'll never heal the wound of loss. Are they can swim out and save them? And if they save them, that's like admitting, okay,

life's not always just, but they're accepting the reality of loss. They're accepting the loss, and that very act can begin to heal their wounds, their sorrows. And this is the way the coup put it. They say, vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. That when we lock into getting back at, we can't actually heal the wounds inside us.

Now, it's not the end of the process to make the U-turn and bring. attention to what's going on here because we need to engage. So this isn't like saying become passive and all you need to do is work on your inner stuff and then the world will just move along just dandelie, you know, everything will be cool. Then we have to engage and we have to call our boundaries, we have to do anything we need to do to make ourselves safe, we have to start the process of communicating dialogue, reconciliation, whatever it is. But the beginning is to know that if we don't make the U-turn and come here first,

if we don't have tea with Mora here, we will not be able to call on our intelligence and our compassion as we engage with our world. So I look at this as a critical capacity in the evolution of our species to be able to move, and it's sometimes described as move from fight-flight-freeze, that reactivity to attend and befriend,

being able to pause. So I started mentioning Maddie in his poem, and I wanted to read you his poem. We need to stop, just stop, stop for a moment, before anybody says or does anything that may hurt anyone else. We need to be silent. Just silent, silent for a moment, before the future slips away into ashes and dust.

Stop, be silent, and no. notice. In so many ways we are the same. And now let us pray differently yet together before there's no earth, no life, no chance for peace. Stop, be silent and notice. You might consider in your life right now, just take a moment because as you know we'll come back to something in our own lives because we're really, it's our consciousness that affects consciousness in general. where there might be a pattern of blame, a pattern of anger, of conflict, where Mara is arising. And just take a moment to close your eyes and feel into that.

Where are the events of the world playing at in your own heart and mind in your own particular individual way? Where is there a place where in some way you are holding resentment? for the way another person has treated you, anger at feeling let down or disappointed. For some it may be that it's more directed towards yourself. Our conflict and aggression is often directed inwardly. And just to hold this pattern of blame or anger in your awareness knowing that you have a choice to either repeat old patterns,

which really deepens the groove of our ego identity, that sense of a self that's threatened, insecure, or you can use this as a way to evolve and awaken your own heart-mind. And in so doing, it's not just a personal evolving to know that you are contributing to the awakening of consciousness. This is what the Dalai Lama called the hope of our world, that we move from that relating from a separate cell

to a sense of that collective being. Just to take a moment and hold an awareness some pattern that you might bring more attention to, where you might as Maddie said, really stop, be silent, put aside the storyline and really notice Can this be a place where you might pause and really have tea with Mara really investigate? Bring some kindness and presence to what's going on inside you before acting from an old way of being. Okay, so take a few breaths and opening the eyes. We have very deep conditioning to create bad other.

We go into it very, very quickly. It's deep in our psyches. We spent 10,000 times as long in small bands of hunter-gatherers as we have in our current way of being in society, 10,000 times as long. And as small bands of hunter-gatherers, a primary tool, you know,

in terms of psychological tool, was judgment and blame because it was life or death to recognize your in-group, recognize who wasn't part of the in-group, and it was part of the way was to sense that those out there are not human. They are unreal others which enables us to violate them. We're no longer connect, all our empathy apparatus gets kind of disconnected

and we can go ahead and violate others when they're unreal. So us versus them is deep in our psyche. And one expression of it of course is the sense of the us is superior. We can see that whenever there's violence, there's a sense of us, it's okay, we're superior. This is Desmond Tutu, the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner from Cape Town, South Africa, tells us this. He says, there is a story fairly well known about when the missionaries came to Africa. They had the Bible and we the natives had the land. They said, let us pray and we doifully shut our eyes.

we open them, why they now had the land and we had the Bible. But you get the idea. There's a sense of superiority and then when there's unreal other, in other words, when we're in that version of fight-flight freeze where there's self in here and world out there, other does not have subjective feelings. We do not perceive another subjectivity. And my favorite little description that some of you'll remember of a guy sitting at home and he hears a knock at the door, opens the door, there's a little snail on the porch.

So he takes the snail and he throws it as far as he can. Three years later, he hears another knock at the door. He sees the same snail there, he opens it. The snail says, what the hell was that all about? But you understand that unreal

other, there's not a sense of subjectivity, of realness. It's a disson. It's a dissociative process. When we're in that mentality of us and them, it's a dissociative process by which we're being ruled by emotions and we go into the kind of thinking that is fear-based thinking and we get disconnected from the empathy networks. We get disconnected from our gut. We're not processing information, from our intuition, from our intelligence. So sometimes it's described that when we're in fight-flight freeze and when we're

in that reactivity, aggressive reactivity, it's head thinking versus heart thinking. We've lost contact with compassion and wisdom. And it's alive and well in our society. You can see, especially when stress, the others totally not real to us. We're not only aggressive or passive aggressive. One story of a guy scrapes another man's car or a person's car. in a parking lot and other people are watching and they see it happen. He gets out, he writes a note and he leaves it on the windshield.

I scratched your car while pulling out. People think I'm leaving my phone number. I'm not. And then as we know with the us and them mentality, them becomes an object to manipulate. So you watch how advertising is manipulating taste so people will end up buying more and then you notice how the news. is manipulating to have certain opinions, to vote a certain way, or our minds are manipulated to be willing to fight a war. There's a lot of manipulation of other when other is unreal.

And again, a rather silly example is of a Catholic priest, Baptist preacher, and rabbi are all chaplains at a university, and they have a competition. They decide they're going to see who can go preach to a bear and convert it, which of their faces? real faith. So they all got in the woods, find a bear, preached to it, attempt to convert it. Seven days later they come and discuss their experiences. Okay? So this is about conversion and thinking you're the one that's right and thinking that the ones you're converting are the unreal other, the object. Father Flannery has his arm in a sling, various bandages on his body. Well he said, I went into the woods to find me a bear and when I found him I began to read him

to him from the catechism. Well, that bear wanted nothing to do with me, and he began to slap me around. So quickly, I grabbed my holy water, sprinkled him, and Holy Mary, Mother of God, he became gentle as a lamb. The bishop's coming out next week to give him First Communion and confirmation. Reverend Billy Bob spoke next. He was in a wheelchair, one arm, both legs and cast. In his best fire and brimstone oratory, he claimed, well, brothers, you know we don't sprinkle. I went out and I found me a bear. And then I began to read to my bear from God's holy word and that bear wanted nothing to do with me. So I took hold of him and began to wrestle down one hell and up another and down another until we came to a creek. So I quickly dunked him and baptized his hairy soul. Just like he said, he became a gentle as a lamb. We spent the rest of

the day praising Jesus. Hallelujah. Okay. Now we have the priest and the reverend are both looking down to the rabbi. He's lying in a hospital bed. He's in a body cast and traction with ivies and monitors running in and out of him. really bad shape. The rabbi looked up and said, looking back on it, circumcision might not have been the best way. I'm sorry, I couldn't resist that one.

Okay, so if we look at kind of the evolution of the brain, what we've been describing so far with fight-flight-freeze and self and other and controlling other with opinions and aggression and so on,

is from the brainstem and the limbic part of our brain. and as many of you are familiar, the most recently evolved part of our brain, which is the prefrontal cortex, is where we have the potential for a more adaptive response to situations. So when Mara rise, it's the frontal cortex,

the prefrontal cortex that allowed the Buddha to say, come on, let's have tea, right? So again, I think of this as really this shift from fight-flight freeze to attend and befriend. Or as Maddie described it, you know, we really need to stop. Be quiet. You know, let our stories of bad other go to the wayside and really notice. So we're going to look at it a little bit more, how we can do that.

And just to name that it becomes most challenging when there's a little bit more, when there's been trauma. When either personally or as a society we've been traumatized, to be able to move from that natural reactivity that's been there for hundreds of thousands of years of responding with violence to violence, it's very hard to get out of that when there's trauma. So I want to particularly look at that because that's what's in our world right now, a lot of trauma. And it's not, and it's in many of us. And I see for for many of us that, you know, it can be trauma that is from the way we're brought up, from really feeling that we weren't safe or loved.

It can be trauma because we are part of a non-dominant part of the culture and we've experienced the generational trauma of oppression. It could be trauma because we've been in war situations. There's many different ways. So how do we make that U-turn? and have tea with Mara when there's trauma there. And it's particularly important to know that the whole healing that happens when we make the U-turn

is this capacity to be present with the vulnerability that's here. But when we've been traumatized, that vulnerability is so raw that it's really hard to tolerate. So we need some help in having tea with Mara. If you tell somebody that's traumatized, just make that U-turn and be with the vulnerability that's there, it won't work. Either it just, they won't be able to, or they'll feel even more trauma.

So what is it that lets us make that U-turn and be with the rawness when there's trauma? Is that we need to do some, what we call, resourcing first. We need to access some sense of strength and stability before we can fully engage and have tea. It's like in a way we have to, to have some coaching or a pep talk or something before we directly have tea with Mara.

And you might think of it in terms of a child who's having a tantrum. And if you try to say to that child, just get in touch with what's under your feelings. Or, you know, this way of acting angry is not going to get you what you want or, you know, whatever of the mental things we do. Or, you know, your blame right now is just separated. you from what you love, you know, it doesn't work, right? So what is it that helps? And in a way, that child needs to feel some sense of soothing, comforting, a larger belonging, holding them because the very nature of trauma is we feel cut off.

When we're traumatized, there's a sense of being cut off, very caught in something small and something very, very frightening. So there needs to be some sense of reconnecting to what feels safer, what feels more stable, where there might be some love and belonging. Example that I wanted to share that I was remembering from when I was five years old, I don't have very many early child memories, but this one really stood out to me. And I was five years old and I got into a very violent physical fight with a young girl.

I'm not going to call her a friend because we fought most of the time, but in a way she was a friend. We learned a lot from that, I think. Elizabeth, who, you know, we were in the front yard of this apartment building. We got into this really pretty violent fight and yelling and sobbing and some parents, neighbors came and they had to kind of pull us apart. And I remember I kept crying out that it was her fault and I really wanted at her. You know, it was like it was her fault, she'd really done something terribly wrong. And this was me with a flip-lit.

I mean, I was completely, you know, completely freaked out. And the woman restraining me and it was more like she was hugging me and she kept saying, I know, I know, yes, okay, yeah, I hear you, right, it's true. Yeah, I know. And it was like some part of me This is absolute truth I knew she didn't really know I mean she didn't understand

And this is true I was five years old and I knew that But I also knew that it really felt good To have her holding me and saying she knew And that it allowed me to relax enough I somehow rather felt vindicated Like I wasn't bad, I was okay I was somebody something larger

I was a part of So anyway, we were able to make up and we actually came to a very rational resolution which was we had planned fights where we would lie on a couch and our heads would be at either end of the couch and we just kick each other. And it was some pheromonal animal thing. We just, it was just chemistry. So trauma means being cut off and the way back, if we're going to have tea with Morrow, we need some sense of a larger belonging.

longing okayness, safety in order to even begin to engage directly with the vulnerability that's there. There are several steps to reconnecting that I found really make a difference when we're feeling that kind of anger and one of them is that we need to forgive that the anger's there because often when we're caught in that, there's a part of us that feels really ashamed or like this shouldn't be happening. So I often will just say to anger, forgiven, forgiven, when I'm caught in the grip of it.

And it's not like I'm saying forgiven, this is a bad thing, this is evil, but I'm forgiving it. It's more like this is the weather right now. Forgiven. And then there's, how do we find some larger resource for one man, who I worked with some years ago. He had been physically abused by his father. His father was an alcoholic. He was bullied at school.

And then he took martial arts and he became a bully. And he ran with a really rough gang. And as an adult, he ended up working in sales. He came to me because he was having a conflict with his boss and he kept being so outraged that the vice president told him to do anger management because he'd lose his job because of his... his outbursts, but he really hated his boss. And he just told me the guy has it in for me, he keeps me from important clients, he

criticized me in front of secretaries, and wants me to suck up, I'm not going to do it. He was enraged and it was very hard for him to control himself. So we started doing the U-turn and underneath it clearly there was a fearful and ashamed little boy who didn't want to look weak. That was what it brought up. Okay? So when we asked that question, well, what's under the anger? If you weren't angry and blaming, what would you have to feel?

That's what he had to feel. This kind of a shamed, weak little boy. And then I realized, okay, so he couldn't, but he couldn't really be with that. You know, if it's not really traumatic, then you could say, okay, can you bring some sense of care and presence to that young place? but it was way too strong, ray too ashamed and so on. We needed to do some resourcing. We need to, before he had two with Morrow,

we needed to have a little more coaching. So I asked him to tell me when he felt a sense of strength and when he felt a sense of confidence and when he felt respected. And it was in his martial arts class. That was the first time. He felt like his teacher respected him. And he felt like when he was in there, it didn't matter that he was sparring with others.

it was Taekwondo, they had a group sense and he felt part of something. And so I had him do many rounds of bringing that to mind and feeling what it felt like in him. And when he could feel a little bit of that sense of belonging and almost sense his martial arts teacher as kind of an ally, protector, energy around him, then he could start being with Mara, with the vulnerability under the real rage. And that brought a huge amount of healing. he was able to be at work he still hated his boss

and he still had a bit of an attitude that it didn't all change a lot really quickly but he didn't lose it he had more of a window of tolerance which is what he needed for another woman in AA when she was drinking she was angry and she would drink

because to soothe kind of some of the feelings that she didn't belong in the world but she got really alienated from her her son and her daughter-in-law and they wouldn't let her see the grandchildren because of her anger and her energy. So she went to AA and the way her U-turn happened was that it was really, I mean, underneath her way of acting out was a sense of totally being rejected and flawed, damaged goods. Again, it was way too much. But she found that the energy. of her sponsor really took her underwing and really accompanied her.

She started feeling a sense of belonging and at her meetings. And then when she started sponsoring people, it got even deeper that she felt a kind of meaningfulness that let her then start to be with Mara, be with the deep vulnerability and the deep wounds. I'm giving you these examples because it's not so easy as to say, just make that U-turn and be with what's under anger. We need help. And sometimes we can do it meditatively in our minds. And sometimes we do it with real humans. But the last piece I want to bring up is that this having to you with Mara, the healing that comes from it, is a shift in identity. In the moments

that we fully contact the vulnerability and bring full presence to it, right? Other than the separate, aggressive self, the victimized self, we become really that compassion, that awareness, that awakeness that's really our full being. And in the myth of the Buddha, during the night of his awakening, Mara kept appearing and the Buddha kept having tea in the sense of really bringing compassion and presence. But there was a final moment when Mara appeared. And Mara appeared in the form of doubt. Like who do you think you are?

And the Buddha reached out. He had a resource himself first. Does that make sense? It was such a deep challenge to his well-being. Who do you think you are? He wasn't able to directly have tea with Mara, so to speak. He wasn't able to directly be present. He first reached out and he touched the ground and called on the earth goddess.

to bear witness to his goodness and his heart. And at that moment in the mythology the sky's darkened and there were lightning bolts and thunder and then it was the Buddha's was mirrored in his goodness and his worthiness and Mara disappeared. So so it is with us individually and societally we need to reach out to a larger sense of what we're connected to, to be able to be with the vulnerability that's there. And this is happening now in a societal way,

in the kind of groups that are forming, where people that have been in conflict come together, different circles often. I think just the shape of a circle is so archetypal. But the first that became well known was the Truth in Reconciliation gatherings. where people will come together and speak their truth, but there'd be a field or a container of safety. There were rules, there were guidelines.

And so many described the power of being able to speak the truth of the violence. This is again, rather than reacting to violence with violence, naming truth, listening, bearing witness to vulnerability, and in that, that's having to you with Mara. the sense of a collective belonging and some healing. I read about a camp for Israeli and Palestinian teens that did something similar. Again, they're creating a safe space, a space with guidelines and rules. And at the end of one authentic truth-telling and listening,

one Israeli said to a Palestinian girl, if I don't know you, it's easy to hate you. If I look in your eyes, I can't. Having to you with Mara in a societal way means that we start bringing together people who have considered each other as the bad other. And it's only through coming together and speaking our truths and getting to know each other

and our vulnerability, that there comes this bigger sense of identity of we. If I look in your eyes, I can't hate you. We need to begin to have that kind of communication. I want to give you one example of the power of this. Jalalja Bonhim does a lot of circle work with traumatized populations. And again, when I say the Buddha reached out and called on something larger, the circle is an enlarged belonging.

It's a larger space that allows for this kind of connecting with vulnerability. And so she creates these circles. And in one of the circles, it was six Serbians and six Bosnians. This was in the 1990s after the Yugoslav War. And they met regularly to start healing the wounds and moving towards peace. And one of the Bosnian women got very triggered, during one of these circles and expressed rage at having been raped by the Serbs to avoid having our children killed.

So the facilitator made a request that those in the circle take in what she said and express their sorrow that it happened. Because again, in having tea with Mara to attend and befriend, naming the vulnerability, bringing kindness. So that's the process. But what happened was, this is really powerful. is that the Serbs could not apologize or could not express sorrow. Because they felt like if they did that, it would be like they themselves were guilty for

what happened. And they felt like, well, I've never raped anybody. Why should I apologize for that happening? So there was like this locked experience where this woman who was traumatized had expressed her trauma, but rather than the we hear you and the sense of that vulnerability we met with the group presence, there was no, we can't apologize for that. And the way Jill Alta explains that is that there's shame for their tribe's behavior, but they're protecting that vulnerability and going into head-thinking, that rationality of,

oh, it wasn't me and I'm not going to say I'm sorry. And it's a lot like a white person saying, I can't express sorrow for the generations of violence that have happened to people of color, to African Americans. I wasn't the one that enslaved. I'm not the one that is killing African American men in the streets. So I shouldn't be the one to apologize.

So it's not wanting to feel the un-bad feeling. So, as Jalalja says, in situations like this, where they're having tea with Mara, but it's getting shut down because there's not the possibility of meeting what's happening with compassion. She said, if one person is evolved in a way that they can respond empathetically, that can shift the sense of the identity of the group and the experience of others. And there was one person. Her name was Dejana. And so what happened was finally this Serbian woman drew her shawl across her shoulders

and walked slowly across the circle and sat down in front of Medina. And then she held Medina's hands in her own and very gently, very tenderly, said, Medina, I believe you. I believe you completely. And so both women had tears streaming down their face. They were looking into one another's eyes and convinced, of Dejana's sincerity and Medina nodded wordlessly. And in that moment, as a facilitator described it, in that moment they really saw each other

and the room was totally silent and there was a sense that something sacred was happening. And this is the shift we talk about that can happen within our own being and with each other and in groups, a shift of identity from separateness and selfness to we, that there's something, you know, how Maddie said it, can we see how much we're the same? So we can pray differently in our own ways but know that same hearts there. They touched into that sameness. We don't have to have answers for, you know, what this country should do at this particular moment in time to know that the path of healing and freedom in our own lives and in our world

is to move from meeting violence with violence to awakening empathy and compassion. And we also know that it won't happen in our world if it doesn't happen in our own hearts and minds. And we just keep coming back and sensing, okay, where right now in my mind, life, can I model, just the way the Buddha model having to you with Mara? How can I be at the edge of this evolution and help to inspire? So we end on that note where I'd like to invite you to take some moments to close your eyes and check inside. Earlier we've reflected and just to touch into one place where there might be some sense

of blame, resentment, anger. that we're carrying in our hearts, that we'd like to bring more consciousness to, more inward attending and befriending, where we'd like to evolve our response. So again, just to bring that to mind. One place where on some level you've been responding to aggression

or greed or whatever with your own sense of aggression. and just to again explore making that you turn and sense if you're not, if you're going to let go of making the other person wrong or bad for right now, let go of those stories and just bring your attention to what's right here in you. What's going on underneath that anger? What would you have to feel that's difficult?

Is it a sense of being powerless? Is it a sense of hurt or shame? Is it a sense of fear? What is the real vulnerable expression of Mara that you're being asked to be with? Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. It's also a lazy form of reacting to fear, to hurt. What is it that you're being asked to attend to?

And is it possible to bring some kindness to this place, in you. You might take a moment just as we often do to gently put your hand on your heart and just offer even that gesture that your intentions to deepen your presence with this place, that willingness, it's an evolutionary willingness to, and it's courageous, to turn the attention from bad other to bringing kindness, bringing understanding, bringing presence, having tea with Mara right here, stopping, being silent and noticing what's here with kindness. You might sense that part of you that underneath the anger what it most needs.

There's always an unmet need with anger, what we wanted from another person that we're not getting, whether it's respect or understanding or love. that need, that natural human want in there, safety, care, just sense your wish, your intention to feel held in that, to offer that kindness and understanding inward. And if there's a traumatic sense that you don't have the capacity to really be with this right now, like the Buddha reached out to the earth goddess, you might just sense something you can reach out to that can remind you of your goodness, your strength, that you're loved. Is there an ally you can call on?

Sometimes it helps to bring to mind a healer, a therapist, a teacher, a friend, a pet, a spiritual figure and just sense that that being's energy is moving through your hands to your own heart. And to feel as you offer presence inward, what is your deepest intention in looking towards this other person and how you engage with this other person? What's your deepest intention?

Know that if your intention is sincere, it will naturally draw you to finding a way. Again, we close with the words of Maddie that were so prescient that we need to stop. Just stop, stop for a moment. Before anybody says or does anything that may hurt anyone else, we need to be silent.

Just silent. Silent for a moment before the future slips away into ashes and dust. Stop, be silent, and notice, in so many ways we are the same. And now let us pray differently, yet together, before there is no earth, no life, no chance for peace. So we close with the prayerfulness that we may wake up these hearts and respond to our world from increasing wisdom and love.

May there be peace on earth. May there be peace on earth. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. And thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.