Tara Brach - Part 2: Conflict - From Fight Flight Freeze to Attend Befriend

Episode Date: May 1, 2014

2014-04-30 - Part 2 - Conflict - From Fight Flight Freeze to Attend Befriend - How do we reconcile conflict when caught in reactivity sourced in trauma or deep wounding?  This talk looks at the need for a larger field of belonging - a trusted other person or safe group - to engender the presence and compassion that enables us to relax and reconnect with our own wholeness and with others.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Class was on the theme of conflict, and we were exploring the movement from a kind of when we get caught in an inner dividedness or a conflict with someone else, towards reconciliation, and how does that happen? And in a way, this is a real archetypal theme of all spiritual paths, just the word reconcile. You see in so much religious literature that in a sense

we have we just by nature of being incarnated we leave the garden we in some way through our ignorance our craving our resistance we leave the garden we leave our at-homeness with the divine

and go off and get kind of caught up and stressed out and reconciliation is finer way back home. into that sense of oneness or connectedness, which includes home with each other. So the notion is that leaving home is a given for all of us in terms of the conditioning of the ego, that we all have that sense of separation at times at least and disconnection from our inner life and from each other. So that's kind of a given and that we're conditioned to, react to our unmet needs, our unmet needs for love or safety,

in ways that affect and influence other people. So that's what conflict comes out of, the ways we're reacting to unmet needs. So the big question that we were exploring and will continue to explore is do we continue to use the same old strategies of dealing with our stress, in the same ways that we get defended? defended or aggressive, judgmental, whatever it is, in which case we perpetuate conflict and a sense of egoic self, or do we let the stress of conflict in our life, whether it's internal conflict or with others, be a kind of wake up to explore more adaptive strategies,

ways of relating to stress that actually can free us. And the underlying theme of this all is that that is our evolutionary potential. Our evolutionary potential is to move from the habitual reactivity of fight-flight-freeze, just our normal strategies, to what's described as tend and befriend, or I like to say attend and be friend. But that's our potential. It's to shift our response to stress or conflict. And what that means is that wherever, in your life right now, wherever, there's a sense of either very subtle separation to very large sense of antagonism,

that's the very grounds for you. That's the portal should you want to deepen your attention to waking up. So I'm hoping that we'll bring that filter into this exploration again in this class tonight. Now, last class that I spoke, I was emphasizing our one-on-one relationships when we don't have really strong trauma or wounding hooked into it. How do we step out of blame and really process emotions when there isn't major kind of trauma? But I want to up the ante for this class and ask the same question, which is, how do we move from how do we move from fight-flight-freeze to attend and befriend when we're living with really deep wounding, when we're living with either trauma or abuse, either individually or for groups that have been traumatized

due to racial oppression or due to being in a war situation? How then do we deal with the conflict that's coming up in our lives? That's the, that's the, the, the, the, inquiry. And I'll again go back to the basic template of our evolving brain and say that our primitive brain, the brain stem and then the reptilian brain and then the limbic system, is the part of us that perceived separation immediately and reacts to stress with the fight-flight freeze. And this through, if you think of it, through hundreds of thousands of years, playing out as in a tribal kind of setting, the one of the primary expressions of fight-flight freeze

through all these years, we were in tribes for a thousand times as long as we've been in our current societies. For all that time, blame, making somebody else, the other tribe, the bad other that was lesser, was actually a primary adaptive strategy for survival. It gave cohesion to the tribe. It gave a sense of identity. There were these fear-based belief that allowed them to do what they needed to do to ensure safety. So it's very deep in our conditioning to create the other as bad or wrong. And it's very natural to sense that opposition. And I call it unreal other, but the other is the enemy. So that's deep in our conditioning, the us versus the opposite.

them right and wrong. And we have the more recently developed brain, the frontal cortex that includes a networking of a neuronal networking for compassion that includes the capacity for mindfulness. And this gives us an ability to respond with attend and be friend. So that when the brain is, when the frontal brain is activated, the frontal cortex activated, we can respond differently to stress. This is our evolutionary potential coming from the newly evolved brain. And the reason that this newly evolved brain works well is because human survival is actually dependent on our capacity to cooperate. In other words, it was our capacity to care for our young and make affiliations not just with people within our own clan,

but enlarge them. It was that kind of networking that comes from attend and be friend that actually has enabled the species to do so well. I'm not sure how good that is for the rest of the species on Earth, but we've done quite well. But it's actually true for all social species that they actually thrive and flourish. So the gift of this frontal cortex,

the gift is really a happier life, more well-being, because we can feel more safe, we can feel more gratified, more loved, meet our basic needs through this cooperative attending and befriending. You know, you can see it with our relationships with mammals, that when we're training other mammals, it's positive reinforcement that creates a kind of sense of teamwork. You can see it with dogs, horses, dolphins,

And when it's not there, there's poorer bonds, more conflict. And when I was reviewing this, it reminded me of a story I heard about this took place, I think the University of Michigan in the story. There's a Catholic priest and a Baptist preacher and a rabbi, and they're all chaplains to the students there. And they'd get together a few times a week and have coffee, and they started talking about how preaching to people isn't really so hard at all. But the real challenge would be, how do you preach?

to preach to a bear. So one thing led to another and they decided to do an experiment. They'd all go out into the woods and they'd find a bear and preach to an attempt to convert it. So here's the story. Okay. So seven days later they come together to discuss their experiences. Father Flannery, who had his arm in a sling, was on crutches, went first. He said, well, I went into the woods to find me a bear. When I found him, I began to read from the catechism. Well, that bear wanted nothing to do with me and began to slap me around. So quickly grabbed my holy water, sprinkled him, and Holy Mary, Mother of God, he became gentle as a lamb. The bishop is coming out next week to give him first communion and confirmation. Okay, Reverend Billy Bob spoke next. He's in a wheelchair, one arm in both legs and a casse, had an IV drip. In his best fire and brimstone oratory, he claimed, well, brothers, you know that we don't sprinkle. I went out and I found me a bear.

Then I began to read to my bear from God's holy word, but the bear wrestled and didn't want anything to do with me. so I took hold of him. We began to wrestle big. We wrestled down one hill and up another and down another until it came to a creek. So I quickly dumped him and baptized his hairy soul. And just like you said, he became gentle as a lamb. We spent the rest of the day praising Jesus, hallelujah.

The priest and the reverend both looked down at the rabbi who's lying in a hospital bed. He was in a body cast, a full body cast, and traction, with IVs and monitors running in and out of him. He was in really bad shape. The rabbi looked up and said, looking back on it, circumcision may not have been the best way to start. So what does that relate to in this talk? Sort of not too much, but if we're maturing on a path of human potential, when tensions arise, when conflicts arise, we have this capacity to shift from the old patterns of fight, flight, freeze,

wrestling people to the ground, so to speak, to attend and befriend. And the tool that evolution has provided us to do this is that we actually can train our own attention to deepen. In other words, we get caught, we can actually intentionally train ourselves to tune in more mindfully, to wake up our hearts, to respond differently. So we actually can evolve ourselves by purposely training our attention. So what I talked about last class was that the basic principle in this training is understanding that if our relationship is stuck, if we're stuck in conflict with another person, that means an emotion inside us is stuck.

When we're not connecting with others, it's because we're not connected with ourselves. Does that make sense, those two kind of related principles? I'm going to say them again because I feel like they're really important. important. If your relationship is stuck, if you're rerunning old patterns, it's because there's some stuck, unprocessed emotion inside you that you haven't paid attention to. And that if there's a sense, if you're moving through the world, and I know this for myself, where I just realize I'm not feeling connected really to anybody, it's because I'm not connected to myself. So in this process of shifting to attend and be friend, what we do, will

when we are in a stuck place with another person, and there's blame, which is, again, our tribal first response. We've made the other, the enemy. The first step is to go, okay, let go of that idea of blame and come back here where the emotion is living in here. Okay? That's the first step in being able to really reconcile. We come back here. And we come back to an embodied presence and we start sensing what is going on inside me. And we start bringing compassion and presence to where the stuckness is. And the gift of mindfulness and self-compassion is that it unstucks emotions. That's a professional word.

It loosens things up because when we start to pay attention in the light of attention, the clench starts loosening. And the sense of who we are starts shifting. We move from being the angry person or the aggrieved person, the oppressed person, the fearful one to being the awareness and kindness that's paying attention. And that shift in identity is the whole deal. When we talk about evolving, we talk about evolving consciousness. It's a shift in identity from that stuck egoic place that says right, wrong, good, bad,

you're my enemy, to that attend and befriend place that attends and befriends the stuck place inside us. And then as that begins to lose it, begins to loosen, we're able to communicate with others in a way that moves towards reconciliation." This is a quote from Anthony DeMello and I shared it before and again it feels to me right kind of at the core. The visitor says, my life is like shattered glass, my soul is tainted with evil, is there any hope for me? Yes, said the master, there's something where by each broken thing is bound again and every stain made clean. What? Forgiveness. Well, whom do I forgive?

Everyone. Life, God, your neighbor, especially yourself. Well, how is that done? By understanding that no one is to blame, said the master, no one. This is the core insight. No one is to blame. no one. And if we can be caught in a stuck relationship and in some way go, okay, it's stuck, there's some stuck place in here, okay, no one's to blame, then we can begin to have an honest and healing presence with what's here. As long as there's blame, there's not going to be that presence to be able to unfold and process the emotion. Does that make sense? No one is to blame. the theme. But we're going to actually challenge that a little bit in a moment. So stay tuned. So the question is, what happens if we're really stuck in fight, flight, freeze, and the trauma

is really strong, and the fury action is really strong, and so we're just locked into enemy out there. And the visuals that I think are most useful come from Dan Siegel, Dr. Dan Siegel, who's a psychiatrist who says, okay, take this hand and imagine that this is the brain stem, okay, reptilian, this thumb here is the limbic system, okay, and the four fingers are the frontal cortex. This is your brain, okay? And this is your brain when it's intact, it's integrated, there's a upflow of information, uh-oh, danger, but then there's a downflow saying, but it's really cool. That's actually a reminder of what happened 20 years ago and you're okay. So there's a communication process that allows us to have a kind of perspective and mindfulness and compassion. But what happens when we get

strongly triggered is we flip our lid. Okay? And what that means is there's a disconnection so that we're living from the limbic system and the brainstem where all the fear is where it feels like absolute reality that I'm endangered and we have no downflow of information saying, wait a minute, that's a really old feeling and it was true back then, but you're actually okay, are here's some resources, we're disconnected. Now this is really important because if you've flipped your lid and it happens not just with trauma, we have very strong emotions that charge us and we just lose contact with our mindfulness and compassion. When we flipped our lid and we're living, identified in this limbic area,

and somebody says, well, no one's to blame does not compute. We're back in tribal mentality. I'm endangered and that's the bad guy. Does this make sense? So it may be a truth and it may be part of our evolutionary healing, but in certain stuck places we're not going to get it. it's really important to have space for that. If we tell somebody, let go of blame and come into your body right now

when they flip their lid, either the body is so intense that there's been a cutoff and they can't, and a lot of us can't get into our bodies when we are trying to feel what's going on, are that instruction could actually lead to flooding and being retramatized. So sometimes it's absolutely wise and healing to come into our body and process what's there, but other times we either can't or can be not so useful.

Nothing's really simple. So we'll keep going here. Because this disconnected reactive place when we get into conflict and we kind of flipped our lid is something that I suspect all of us have experienced. We just have no access to so far. called sanity. And it certainly is a place that is part of, there's sometimes, some people live in a perpetual flip-lid when there's a lot of trauma.

And certainly where there's been trauma over generations such as racial oppression, institutionalized racism, when there's the trauma of war situations, we get really cut off. And that's when there's living in the hatred and blame and no access to a attend and be friend. So let's say how do you then begin to reconnect when you've really left the garden and you're really in reactivity because it feels relevant to all of us. And just draw a little bit from relational psychology and that more and more we're finding in looking at neuropsychology that infants the whole way the brain, you know, it's opposed to some creatures that have their full brain development before they're hatched.

Humans keep on developing the brain way, way after being hatched, and a key part of that is the relationship with the caregiver. The way a caregiver pays attention, the mirroring, the resonance field, that actually stimulates neuro connections. It stimulates cognitive development. development. Okay? So what we know is that relationship activates the prefrontal cortex, activates its information flow, and it allows more integration. And so what that says is that when we're cut off, the larger relational field can be part of through mirroring, okay, through attum, and can be part of what allows us to reintegrate. Does that make sense? We're cut off. The larger field can help us to reconnect and reintegrate.

So I want to share a story, and it's in radical acceptance. And I want to remind, for those that have read it, remind you of it, because I think it shows a bit this whole process of the flip lid and what we need, what's needed in order to reconnect to ourselves and then to others. So this woman that I was working with, this is now many years ago, wrote a story that was very much about her own healing. I'm going to read you bits of the story. But first to say that she was in a pretty chronic state of trauma, disconnected, and the way it came out was, you know, she was turned on herself, a lot of self-aversion, a lot of rage, a lot of anxiety, very much difficulty in connecting with other people. because of the mistrust. You know, she was in her limbic system,

and it was like everybody was a danger to her. So she was very, she would push people away. It was more passive, aggressive, than active, and basically shut down. So her, this is the story. She was, she says, seven years old child, seven years old hiding in a closet, terrified after an unexpected attack

by her drunken and enraged father. Little girl's praying, help, I can't take it anymore, and opens her eyes to see a fairy in a haze of blue with a glittering wand. She lets the fairy know how her father's been beating her, and her mother doesn't help, how she feels like they both wish she was dead. The fairy listens with tears in her eyes and then tells her that, while she can't make all this pain disappear, she can help her get through this time.

She can help her forget and then remember later when she's able to handle it. And with a wave of the wand, the good fairy said, I'm going to send things into different parts of your body, and they're going to hold them for you until you're strong enough to let them move freely again. And she explained that she was going to tighten and dull the pelvis and then billy and constrict the heart and the throat so she could protect her from feeling the raw intensity of hurt,

of fear, and of brokenheartedness. Read you the last part. She says, you'll have trouble feeling and being close to people, but it will be your way of surviving. And at those times that the pain erupts, you'll find your own ways to control at ways that may not look good to the world, but will be of temporary comfort. And you, my darling, will be fairly functional, human,

in spite of all this, because you have a strong mind and you can hold all the sin, and I will be helping you. Child looked directly into the fairy's eyes and asked, how will you help? Do you come back to see me? You will not forget everything. I will leave a voice inside you, that will urge you to reconnect with your whole self. It may be a very long process,

but in time you'll feel an urgent calling to step out of imprisoning beliefs, to unwind your body and release what it's been holding all these years. You'll learn the art of sacred presence. There will be physical and emotional pain as you open, but you'll have what you need, the compassion and wisdom, the support of loving others, to be a whole person, spiritually awake, but still the same.

This is because your soul has always, been there, just hidden by scars of this lifetime. The good fairy put her arm around the child's shoulders and gently led her to bed. She waved her wand and stood by as the little girl finally relaxed into deep sleep. She gazed tenderly at the small innocent face and then whispered her goodbye. When you wake up, you'll forget I was here. You'll forget you ask for help. You'll forget the sharpness of your daily pain. This is the only way I know to get you through this. You are a beautiful child, I love you, and in fact your parents love you, although they're incapable of showing it to you. You will have to love yourself enough to heal so that when you're older,

your life will be powerful, full, and free. One day you will know who you really are. You will trust your goodness and know your belonging. Until then, and for always, I love you. Now keep in mind, this is the story that this woman wrote, kind of a fairy story redoing her childhood or shining light on her childhood. And I remember the first time I shared it was here. And afterwards I had so many people tell me, and the main takeaway was,

I'm looking back at my life and realize how all my life I've judged my strategies, my anger, my defendedness, my addictions. It was my way of handling that woundedness. In other words, there was this relief in a way that it wasn't their fault. And I'm going to say it to us. It's not our fault, our coping strategies. I mean, every one of us in different ways had unmet needs and some real violations, and the only and best way to handle them were strategies we had early on that we know now are not so helpful. But it wasn't our fault.

It was the best we could do. And for this little girl, the metaphor was really that she had to kind of shut down her body. And for this woman, it was also involved eating disorder and being passive-aggressive with others and so on. We have these strategies. And so one of the basic strategies we have when there's been really deep difficulty early on

is to feel endangered and have a sense of blaming, blaming others and then blaming ourselves. So we go into, we get locked in this limbic place of fight-flight freeze. That's the point. And the first step is to forgive that. And it's hard because we have this idea that we should be different and yet we get stuck in it. And if we don't forgive it, there's no way to reconnect.

As long as we're blaming it, we're actually fueling it. It's just more of the same strategy. Does that make sense? You know, I can say for myself that when I feel strong anger arise, my practice right now is to mentally whisper, forgiven, forgiven. And it's not because I'm saying, oh, anger, it's sinful, I forgive it. more just the reflex that I've developed is to right away not make it wrong. It's just another

weather system and it's what's there. And if I can regard it that way, there's some possibility of sensing what's under the anger and unwinding it. So the message here is that every emotion is intelligent. Even when we're just caught in the intensity of fight, flight, flight, freeze, we need to forgive, accept, and listen to the message of it. And if there's an, and And if we're not able to do it or if someone else isn't able to help us do it, we stay caught in this disconnection. You know, I have a memory, and I don't have very many memories from my childhood, but one of the most vivid was that I was in a very ongoing war with another five-year-old girl, Elizabeth.

And I remember being, and I lived in an apartment building. She was in the apartment building, too. I remember being, here I am five years old, and we're playing out front with a bunch of people, and Elizabeth and I got into it. And we were just completely at war fighting in a whole tangle, and everybody started yelling, and they called parents, and these two parents pulled us apart.

And I remember it was very violent, and I was sobbing and screaming, and the main thing I was screaming was, it's her fault, it was all her fault, you know. And the woman holding me, she was restrained, me, but she was also hugging me, and she kept saying to me, I know, I know, it's okay, yeah, I know. And so I was blaming Elizabeth, and she was saying, I know, I know. And even then, I knew that it wasn't like she was agreeing with me, but it didn't matter. Having this voice

that was truly there to soothe me, say, I know, I know, my limbic system calmed down. There was like, you know, she kept hugging me and telling me I was okay. So I got safe enough. You know, it's like we need something that's safe and validating enough to reconnect. And I remember Elizabeth and I actually making up, and of course we got into a fight right away again, but we actually came to this really strange thing. And this is very rational, but we decided that we were going to fight a few times a week, and what we would do is I had a real long couch in my apartment, and we each have our head at one end of the couch,

and we just kick. And for some reason, it was a pheromonal thing. We just had to get it out, our animal nature. But that was more boundaryed. Point of my story is that when we're stuck in the limbic system and disconnected, we need some reminder of our belonging to reconnect. Just as the infant brain needs some mirroring

and some attunement, to make the different connections in the neurons, neuronal patterning, we need some belonging to be able to come back together and be integrated. And it could be through others, it could be through a teacher, through a parent, through a friend. It can also be through a group. And one of the final things I'd like to talk about is how we can, groups can move. us if they're conscious, meditative, communicating groups, being in a group can move us from fight-flight freeze where there's the hostility to attend and befriend.

But first I'd just like to ask you to check something out, just do a little brief reflection for yourself on what you notice when you are stuck and disconnected. We're going to do two little meditations as part of this tonight, and this is the first, just to send what helps you when you're caught in your limbic reactivity, move from fight, fight, fight to attend and be friend? And I'd like you to think of a conflict where you felt so aroused that you didn't feel, at least for a while,

capable of letting go of your anger or your blame or your hatred. At a time when you really didn't have access to any more, mindfulness, where you knew you were swept away in the currents of saying things that were only going to fuel the fires, that kind of a time. And some of you may not have that to pull on, but where you really feel cut off from your own resources, upset, and take a moment to sense what was upsetting you, what was triggering you. So you can really feel the stuck quality of you're just totally possessed in those moments, just the way I was totally possessed by wanting to get at

and violently fight with someone. That's all I wanted to do and had to be held back. This is when you felt really caught in your reactivity. And just fantasize for a moment that you could be transported to a different setting. You can just be wushed off, you know, and that you're in a different setting with just the right person who could help you to shift.

And just sense for yourself what that trusted or loving other person might do or say, remind you of, the way they may touch you. What would most soothe you and help you to reconnect with your whole self in those moments of rage and blame. How would that other person communicate their understanding or their love, their affirmation of you? What would you most need to help reconnect with your own wholeness? Go ahead and imagine that happening.

Just sense the possibility of some other... offering something that helps you feel more belonging, more understood, more connected, that gives you more access to your own resources, your own wisdom, more open heart. When you're ready, open your eyes. So meditation is the inner process that really evolves us, that trains us and attend and be friend. And as I'm pointing out, there's also interpersonal meditations that we can do in groups that let this happen in a relational field, and that are absolutely essential, given the dividedness

we have between races, often between sexes, between ethnicities, between warring people. We have to get people together in groups and have interpersonal meditations so that we can reconcile. And this is the possibility on earth for peace. That the same process we're talking about doing internally we do with each other so we can reconnect. And it's happening. I mean, the most famous of the peace and reconciliation hearings in South Africa. And I was always touched by one story, a young man told.

He was blinded when a policeman shot him in the face at close range. And then they had these hearings. And he said, I feel what is broad. brought my eyesight back is to come here and tell the story. I feel what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn't tell my story. Again, think of it this way. When you're cut off, you can't tell your story. There's no belonging to a larger communication. It brought them back together again. And around the world, there's these different versions of bringing together people in conflict. One of the, I read about a camp where you had, you had, you

teenage girls from Israel and from Palestine that spent time together in the same way with this kind of interpersonal meditation of learning to communicate, to speak what feels true, and to listen, and in that way, create a larger sense of belonging. And one Israeli girl, after some authentic truth-telling and listening, said to a Palestinian teen, if I don't know you, it's easy to hate you. If I look in your eyes, I can't. So blame and hatred, which this is the limbic armoring around our hearts, it's released as we come into contact with a larger sense, a larger field, with others' vulnerability, with others' compassion.

We begin to open up, but if we don't, we hold on to the defenses of our limbic system. One of my favorite examples of this I'd like to share with you, Jalalja Bonhim writes a book about circle work, which I really recommend. And she's been creating these circles all over the world where there's a lot of conflict between people. And the main principle of circle work is that you're creating a sacred container. Carl Jung talked about circles being the archetype of wholeness and divinity. So you get people in a circle.

And there's a kind of ritual, a container, so that, yes, there's conflict between individuals, but there's a larger hole holding them and a process to help reconnect, help move from the fight-flight-free stance to a shared field of attending and befriending. Okay? And in each of them, they're taught the skills

to be able to begin to speak from what's true and how to listen and how to give the empathic response or mirroring that lets another person know they're heard. So one example of this that I found really powerful was she was working after the 1990s Yugoslavian war with the Bosnians and Serbians and there were six Serbs, six Bosnians together in a circle,

and they were meeting regularly to heal the wounds. And one Bosnian woman got very triggered and during one of these gatherings, and she expressed her rage at having been raped by Serbs to avoid having her children killed. Now, just to pause, and imagine the tension in that circle that had to be dealt with. Imagine what kind of limbic reactivity the circle's holding,

because here she is, and it wasn't that long ago that she was raped by a group of Serbian men and there are Serbian men in the circle. Okay, so that's the situation. So the facilitator made a request that those in the circle

take in what she said and just express their sorrow that had happened. So what happened was the Serbian men refused. They refused because they felt

that it would be like saying we're apologizing for what happened, but we weren't the ones that were guilty for doing it, so we can't do that. And they were in a really stuck place because you had this woman that had been violated was an extreme reactivity of hatred and anger and hurt and desperately needed a container that could help to move it. But then you had the one that she was considered as other, making her other and saying,

we didn't do it, it's not our fault. Hey, hey man. not even, they couldn't say sorry. So what Jolalajah described this as, and what she felt was that they were caught in their own limbic tribal self-protection. That, you know, it's a tribal mentality of, you know, I wasn't part of it, I'm part of this, and this is still separate from you.

And they couldn't reach out and do the empathetic. response, which is very much like you might see in different diversity meetings that happen in this country and elsewhere, where a person of color will be expressing the enormity of what it's like to live in a place where there's been generations of oppression and it's still completely institutionalized and so on. And then the white people will say, well, I wasn't the one that did that to you, and I'm not in support of that. So creating more separation versus a moving towards with the empathic response. So in situations like this, when there's a circle and there's that kind of a standoff and different people are in their limbic reactivity,

if one person has the capacity to move towards attend and befriend, the atmosphere can change. that the whole feeling tone can change. So I want to share what happened in this situation because one Serbian woman, Dejana, was the one that did that. The second Dejana stood up, the circle got very quiet. I'm now reading from this book. It's called Evolving Towards Peace. You could have heard the pin drop.

The air felt charged with electricity. Drawing her shoal across her shoulders, Dejana slowly walked across the surface. and sat down in front of Medina. Then she took Medina's hands in her own and very gently, very tenderly, said, Medina, I believe you. I believe you completely.

Medina, I believe you. I believe you completely. Tears streamed down both women's faces as they looked into one and other's eyes. Convinced of DeGina's sincerity, Medina nodded wordlessly. It goes on to describe how this kind of heart response cut through the tangle that was created by that kind of limbic reactivity of kind of a rationalization and an offense and is still creating unreal other. Just one person's capacity, that evolved capacity of a tandemity friend, shifted everything.

So the teaching here for me is that when there's that kind of flipped lid, to restore connectedness, we need to feel safe enough. We need to feel understood, cared about. Again, it's like the infant that we need something larger to belong to that lets us then relax and reintegrate. Now, I've been talking about groups, but I just want to again say that our ongoing practice of meditation, what we're all exploring here, really is a continual practice of attending and befriending.

We're basically saying, let me pay attention to whatever arises, whatever comes up, and notice it, and then we have the two wings of notice what's happening, recognize it, and allow it with a quality of compassion. So we're building the muscle of attending and befriending through meditation. And what that means is that it's easier to maintain that inner connectedness, that integration. And then when we do flip our lids, there's less lag time. It's easier to kind of remember and go, okay, okay, that's the blaming thing.

And I know it feels like they're the enemy and it feels like I'm endangered. One woman on a teleconference I was on said this phrase that we're less endangered than we think and we're more resourceful than we think. So there's some part of us that because we've been practicing attending and befriending, we have easier access to it again. We can get back to it. And when we practice self-compassion, that sues. And meditation is like taking a pause.

I mentioned last class. It's a real wonderful study that was done with couples that were, you know, very much agitated. And the way the study was set up, I'll repeat it because I think it's such a powerful one. This is John Gottman. And he talks about how the limbic brain, this flip-lid, how that reactivity hijacks couples in their interactions. So he took couples and he'd hooked them up to these physiological gauntal. and then he'd do a video of them as they process different problems. And he waited until their pulses went over about 100, beats per minute.

Then he'd interrupt the argument and say, whoops, our cameras broke down, we need to fix them. You guys go over here and just sit quietly and read a magazine. Fifteen minutes later, he'd get them back. He'd say, okay, cameras are fixed. And this is all set up. Cameras are fixed. And they'd have them resume. Well, their arousal had gone down and they were then able to address what they were, the difficulty from a much more integrated brain, more flexibility, more creativity, more

intelligence. They weren't hijacked anymore. It takes 15 minutes for adrenaline to be metabolized. Meditation is a time out. Meditation is we're actually practicing in a way that we're attending, befriending, and letting the parasympathetic nervous system, you know, gets stronger, it deactivates a sympathetic arousal. This is the bottom line, though,

that we don't meditate on the cushion just to be on a cushion. We meditate so that can be our response to our life, that we can attend and befriend in every situation. And for each of us here, wherever there's conflict, inner conflict, or conflict with others, that can be the place to practice attending and befriending. The encouraging news is this, that contrary to what we thought, evolution can actually happen much more quickly. In fact, changes can be seen in one generation. And in my eyes, and I don't

think it's just because I'm living in a small little container, meditation, these practices of training our attention are absolutely bursting out all over. And so there's an incredible possibility. I feel hopeful that if we keep on training our attention and working with where there's conflict, that this can kind of ripple out and really be part of the healing of our earth. I'm going to close in a simple way with you tonight, if you will, just take a a moment to close your eyes and let your attention go inward, noticing the feeling tone in your body, whatever is predominant, pleasant or unpleasant. Just letting your simple intention be whatever you're noticing, attending, offering your attention, and letting it be a quality

of friendliness, gentleness. So you're honoring the life that's here. There's something difficult going on in your heart to even come in more closely, more intimately, with the attending and befriending. Just take a moment to sense what your experience of who you are is in the moments that there's attending and befriending. Sense of you can notice that kind of tender awareness that's not bounderied, that heart space, what some call the empty-awake heart that's really holding this life, and sense how vast it is so that you can bring to mind others in your life, and just feel the intention to regard whatever expressions of life that come to mind with the same friendly attention.

Our closing prayers from Diane Ackerman. She writes, in the name of daybreak, in the eyelids of morning, and the wayfaring moon and the night when it departs, I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace. In the name of the sun and its mirrors

and the uttermost night and the crowning seasons of the firefly and the apple, I will honor all life wherever and in whatever form it may dwell on earth my home and in the mansions of the stars. Namaste and thank you for your attention. The teaching you have received has been freely offered.

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