Tara Brach - Part 2 - Healing Anxiety - How Meditation Frees Us (2018-12-12)

Episode Date: December 14, 2018

Part 2 - Healing Anxiety - How Meditation Frees Us (2018-12-12) - Anxiety and the fear of failure is a pervasive suffering around the world. It is also increasing—along with the pace of life, over-consuming, addiction, noise, polarization and fears for our planet. How do we calm ourselves in a way that brings inner freedom and serves the healing of our larger world? These two talks explore the power of awareness in evolving ourselves beyond the anxiety that grips and confines our lives - includes working with sleep issues. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. Welcome to all of you who are here, all that will be listening in the future from wherever, and to our live stream friends, welcome to you. This class is part two of a series on anxiety, the second and final part. I wanted to spend some time on this because it's probably the single most pervasive suffering in the world. And this is whether we're chronically anxious and, you know, have some DSM kind of a diagnosis

are just gripped periodically. It's a big one and it impacts our relationships and impacts work. It certainly impacts our health. I know with one man who was worried about how his type A personality and drivenness was impacting his health and he was seeing a new doctor and he had an exhaustive kind of array of tests that were given and his doctor told him he was, this is a guy in his mid-60s, his doctor told him he was doing pretty well for his age. So that got him alarmed. He said, well, am I going to live till I'm 80? And so the doctor asked him some questions.

He said, well, do you drink? And the man said, no, and I don't do any recreational drugs either. He says, well, do you eat rich desserts? Nope, nope, my former doctor discouraged any sweets. You know, do you spend time in the sun, you know, golfing, boating, sailing, biking? Nope, no, no. Fast cars, lots of sex, nope, no, none of that. And the doctor said, then why do you even give a damn?

So even if we aren't chronically anxious, we know how deep the grip is when it does arise. And so thus far we've been looking at how mindfulness and compassion can help us to loosen the grip. And I introduced, as I have many times, the acronym Raine, which is really an acronym that shows us how to get into action on mindfulness and compassion. and what I'd like to do is deepen that exploration, introduce a few other supportive practices that can help us in a very deep way make a fundamental shift, which I think of as the shift from that sense of

I'm an anxious person, an anxious self, to that spaciousness that knows that anxiety is coming and going but we're not hooked by it in a way that causes suffering. So that's our terrain. And I thought I'd share a repeating dream I have that I've had for many decades, and I think it happens about twice a year. That's about the regularity. And in the dream, I'm in high school,

and I need to take some final exams to graduate. And I'm on my way to those exams, but the subject I'm going to be tested in, I have no idea about. I haven't studied. It's like statistics, which is always the thing that was always hard. No familiarity with it.

And in addition to that, I'm lost. I'm trying to find my way to a room, and I don't know where the room is. It's in a big building, and the building's usually my grammar school. So then I wake up, and I have to reassure myself that I did graduate, at least from kindergarten with honors, you know,

but I got through it. And then, you know, so this is the dream. And then, of course, for many of you, you read an article last week in the Washington Post. Some of you might not have read it that says this dream is incredibly common. Many, many people report pretty much this exact dream. In high school, need to take a test, don't know the subject material and often lost also. Someone to ask you, how many of you have had something like that? that dream. Okay. I hate to be alone in things. So here's the lesson. This life is a test.

It is only a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received further instructions on where to go and what to do. There's a description of anxiety, of this kind of existential anxiety of just not being able to handle what's around the corner that really struck me deeply. And it was something that was written up in a book by Rabbi Liu, L-E-W. The title of the book is, this is real and you are completely unprepared. Pretty good, right? This is real and you are completely unprepared. And he says that the phrase completely unprepared really does strike a deep chord

because it names something that's a kind of universal in the human psyche that we're not often in touch with it. But there's an undercurrent of this life is totally out of control. Anything can happen. We know these bodies are going to go. We know we're going to lose loved ones. We're imperfect, we'll make mistakes, anything can happen. And he writes this, he says, if we look at our lives honestly, the events that really shape us,

that make us who we are, the events we didn't prepare for, couldn't prepare for, like a serious illness, the loss of a loved one, the failure of a relationship, the loss of a child. Or suddenly, he says, child appears surprisingly, or we fall in love. There's all sorts of things. but we weren't prepared for them. And those are what shapes our life. And he also says we spend most of our time repairing like crazy. Like we're preparing our professional life.

We're trying to prepare our body for more health or self-improvement. And he says it's kind of like we live life like kind of a Maginot line, the line of defense the French built to ward off the Germans, and they ended up coming from a completely different direction. Our life is like that. It comes at us from a different direction than we think it's going to. It circumvents all our defenses

and leaves us feeling very unprepared. So this creates a bit of a frame for our exploration on anxiety that we anticipate something's going to go wrong. We're trying to prepare. We really can't control it. We really can't. And the main domain

that most of us are anxious about is our own personal failure. We are afraid we're going to fall short. And there's a sense that there's statistically 94% of people have unwanted thoughts, and most of those thoughts are about in some way our own self-doubts. I remember the Washington Post, they have a T-shirt of the Year award. And one year it was, I have occasional delusions. of adequacy.

And on the same theme, this is Charlie Brown. He says, sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, where have I gone wrong? Then a voice says to me, this is going to take more than one night. So, sleeplessness and anxiety, and we're going to return to that in a little bit. Often our anxiety about ourselves and our failure takes the shape of worry about, about other people judging us. I remember doing a workshop a couple of years ago on fear and we got into small groups and explore,

well, what am I most afraid of? And the majority of people in the room said they were most afraid of other people's judgments. So that's again, this anxiety about falling short and what's going to happen. When we are anxious, we are, what I call under the line. And some of you might remember

the circle of awareness, and there's a line going through it. This is Joseph Campbell's figure. And everything below the line's unconscious and everything above the lines in awareness. When we're caught in anxiety, we're below the line. Now the reason I say that

is because anxiety is energized by a looping. It's actually you can think of anxiety as a verb. It's a looping of thoughts about what's going to go wrong and body feelings that are fear that then stimulate more thoughts about what's going to go wrong and more body feelings. So we're caught in a looping. And our whole sense of who we are narrows. So our identity, our sense of our self is as that anxious self.

and we lose sight of the who we are when we're feeling love for others, or who we are when we're feeling a sense of wonder, or who we are when we're feeling creative, really alive. There's a whole lot of other things that go with anxiety too that all have the same sense of getting small under the line. I read a couple of little factoids that I thought I'd share and one was that people with anxiety disorders tend to label neutral smells or odors as bad.

Neutral ones as bad because fear gets mixed into the olfactory system and our primal mood of fear is something's wrong and smells one of the main ways we go around sensing is something going to hurt me. So it gets merged and things don't smell as good. Another factoid that I thought was interesting is that people with anxiety are more quick to notice changes of expression in other people's face and also more quickly misread them,

overthink what's going on and come to conclusions that are fear-based, not accurate. So these are just small examples, but the bottom line is when we're in the grip of anxiety, our perceptions, including our most basic perception of who am I, is shrunk, it's limited and it's distorted. So, to be able to wake up from anxiety, we have to bring more awareness, shine the light of awareness on the unconscious in a way. Somebody sent me this recently. This is Jackie Mason doing a monologue and he's talking to his psychiatrist and a psychiatrist. And his psychiatrist says, we're here to understand your unconscious. And Jackie Mason says, my unconscious is none of my business, which is cute.

And it's also actually the way we operate, that when it's unpleasantness in our unconscious, you know, that looping and the unpleasant feelings, we actually don't want to hang out there. So in addition to being under the line, we also use behaviors to keep us under the line. We speed up rather than say, oh, what's going on inside me? How many have noticed when you get anxious, you just start rushing around? You don't even have to raise your hands on that one, right? Because we know, we know. And then, of course, when we get anxious, we do other things to numb the anxiety.

The big one is to try to get more done for many of us, but sometimes it's the other way. We kind of go into freeze mode or we try to numb the anxiety in some way. Most of us, when we're anxious, go into a kind of obsessive thinking, of planning and worrying to try to figure out our lives so that we can extract ourselves from the problem. It doesn't work, but we do it. If we look more closely, and this is where I find that the Buddhist psychology is really useful, if we look at the four noble truths, the first noble truth says basically that the nature of being alive is stress. It's like saying the nature of being alive is we're in bodies that are changing are going to die.

It's basically saying we're unprepared. We're living in that unprepared feeling. That's the first noble truth. It's like, let's just accept it. We all are unprepared. We can't prepare. It's uncontrollable. Okay, truth one.

Truth number two is what gets us into trouble is we try to control it. And I'm not talking about the trying to control it by saying we try to make a living and have shelter and eat food. And that's one level. But it's that we grasp and we resist.

and we tighten. And that's where the suffering comes. We try to resist change. When we're anxious, we kind of go like that. We do a lot of worrying trying to think things out, and I mentioned in the last class that the derivative of the word worry is strangle. Okay?

So this is the second noble truth that, yes, it's out of control, but the suffering is just like a river's flowing and you can't really control how it's going to go around the different rocks. The suffering is rather than flowing with it and being awake in the flow, we try to desperately to control it. The third noble truth is freedom is possible. We don't have to suffer. It said that pain or unpleasantness is inevitable, that uncontrolled feeling, but suffering's optional.

That's the third noble truth. Freedom's possible. The fourth noble truth is, here's how. And then there's in the fourth noble truth a lot of different ways that we can wake ourselves up. But the core of those ways is learning to deepen attention by noticing what's happening in the moment

and opening our hearts to it. And so that's where we're going to continue on because the understanding is to come above the line we have to deepen our attention. We have to shine the light of awareness. When we're anxious, we need to pause and say, okay, what's going on inside here? And what will sense is that we've been caught in these waves of thoughts about how we're going to fail and feelings about it. and by paying attention we start becoming the ocean again.

So the waves aren't gone, but we're the ocean aware of the waves not caught inside them. We're enlarged. Okay, let's look more closely at how we can make that shift from being an anxious set of waves to being an ocean of being that is compassionately attending to the waves. and the beginning is kind of a quality of intentionality that if you, after reflecting together during this talk

or these next days or weeks, decide, I want to let anxiety be a portal for awakening. Rather than thinking of it like this oppressive thing that happens to me, ah, I want anxiety to be one of these ways of these entries into awakening, that intention will actually help you to transform. Let me give you an example from my own life. My mom lived with me for the last five years of her life, and I started noticing this pattern. And I'm not like on the spectrum of anxious people.

I'm not a particularly anxious person, but my version of anxiety gets to be a very anxious person. but my version of anxiety gets charged up when I have passed a threshold of how much I have to do with the deadline, especially when I have to travel and present at conferences and so on. And then, you know, so for several years when she first was living with me, I had a crazy schedule and I noticed, and she lived, she actually was in a guest house right on our property and I know she'd wander into my office when I was working or whatever, and it was like I would act friendly and be welcoming, but inside me, everything in me was,

how can I get back to work really quickly? And I noticed that we'd have dinner together, and I'd be thinking, how can I get back up to my office? And I noticed I'd be driving her to a doctor's appointment, and I'd have that tension. And then I had one of those, and many of you probably know this, one of those kind of wake-ups where I just realized she doesn't have that long.

I mean, she was already 83 or 84. Lymphoma, you know, the whole thing. This is insane. You know, what am I doing? So I made it my practice to let anxiety be a flag to deepen attention. I think of it like I was reigning on anxiety, like bringing the mindfulness and compassion of rain to anxiety. to anxiety. And by the way, if you didn't listen to the first talk in this series, that'll

explain rain more fully. So I started every time I would, you know, feel like this, all these thoughts about, you know, I've got to get this done, got to get that done, even if she wasn't around, I just started doing this short pause where I would just say, okay, stop, and I'd breathe then I'd feel what was going on inside me and I'd say it's okay, sweetheart, and I'd just bring a kind intention and attention to it until I could interrupt it

and come back a little bit above the line to remembering this is what matters. It matters to be present that her life, looking back, I don't want to regret that I was caught up. And I can say I didn't regret it when she died

that I had not been present, that that really shifted things. We don't make that intention to wake up from anxiety just for one particular person or situation, but sometimes when we start noticing the impact of our anxiety on our life, how many moments are rushing around when we could have actually been a little more there for our child, are taken in the silhouette of the trees against the winter sky or whatever it was,

how much life do we miss because we're in that trance of being anxious person? Does that make sense? So you might pause yourself just to take a moment and close your eyes because if your intention is there, you can find freedom. and you might take a few full breaths invite yourself to be right here and as if you could maybe witness from your most high self,

your most awake, wise, being, I sometimes call this our future self, it's really who's evolving, the sense of beingness that's evolving in you. And just from that place witnessing, maybe somewhere you very clearly do get anxious, some situation, some set of circumstances, maybe certain person gets you anxious or certain activity.

And in that when you get anxious, just notice the signs, what's going on in your thoughts, how does your body feel, your heart. In teaching about the first noble truth, the Buddha is basically, saying recognize, things get out of control. There's a lot going on, there's stress. And then notice where the grasping and resistance is, noticing anxious self, how it incarnates. Notice how anxiety shapes your moments and who you are when you're anxious and most important what you miss. Just looking through the eyes of your future self, your wise self. sensing from that awake heart space, what your intention is, in whatever language works for you,

some aspiration to come above the line more, to recognize anxiety and perhaps pause and deepen your attention some, to sense who you are beyond the anxious self. As you're ready, we'll, you can open your eyes or if you prefer to keep your eyes closed and we'll explore now. How do we do that. Let's look more closely at how if you've gone so far as flagging the anxiety, sometimes when you're caught in the thick of it, you're in the midst of a busy day and you can't just sit down and close your eyes and do a nice long meditation, right? So sometimes it's a very short pause, but even that can interrupt a pattern that's been going on for a really long time. So what are the ways that when we're stuck,

we can begin to unhook from anxiety. One of the most basic ways that we can do it, and by the way, I'm going to name some that you can do in a very brief period of time and some that take a longer stretch of time. And in particular, we're going to go into what you can do when you're anxious but lying in bed and you can't sleep. Before we get there, when you're stuck, one of the things that really helps

is even just to notice the kind of anxious thoughts that are circling, and just name them, just call them anxious thoughts, frantic thoughts, worry thoughts, planning thoughts, and just sense, okay, I can unhook so that you're watching the thoughts but you're not caught inside them. It's very powerful to name thoughts. It's very powerful if you can name thoughts and unhook and then scan through your body, a body scan where you just take a few moments to say okay feeling the shoulders relax the hands the chest the belly we're going to practice a bit in a few moments but just scanning through the body really helps to bring your attention from this mind that's generating worry thoughts

into the moment your body is in the present moment. Your mind isn't. Okay? Then there are calming breaths and they are very, very useful. I mean, they've been researched well. There's a lot of different ones. The breath that I like is doing a five or six count in breath and a five or six count out breath. And it's a very slow out breath. You can feel the sensations of the letting go. And these really calm the sympathetic nervous system. Some people prefer even a longer out breath than the in-breath. Some people like a square breath, which means counting in four parts, hold for four, exhale for, hold out for four. There's a lot of different breathing techniques you can Google and find out about

them, but being able to direct your breathing, A, it takes you out of your busy mind that's generating anxiety and it actually calms your body. Another strategy is putting your hand on your heart and a hand on your belly. There's a nexus of nerves here and here that when they feel the warmth and the pressure actually calms you down. I go to sleep each night when I lie down. I do put one hand on my heart, one hand on my belly. I have a slight smile and I do that five part or six part in breath and six part out breath for a few minutes every night. And I find it really allows me to drift off nicely.

That's one set of ways that you can calm down anxiety. The other related, the two wings of the bird, the other one is compassion, which means sending some sort of a soothing message to, ourselves. I'm curious, how many of you do some self-talk on purpose, like send yourself messages? Can I see by hand? So what happens for most people with self-talk is because it's a real training is that we start and we're tossing stuff in there and sometimes it carries some of the same energy as our anxiety. Sometimes it's got more judgment than it does compassion. Sometimes it's very, very habitual and gradually over time we get the na.

of sensing what the anxious self wants most needs to hear and offering it. But before we get there, when we're whether we're in action or meditating, we tend to talk to ourselves in a way that's kind of habitual. I'll share one of my favorite stories. Some of you might remember it from last year where a man's in the supermarket and he's going up and down these aisles and there's a woman in front of him. It turns out it's a grandma and her badly, behaving three-year-old granddaughter.

And it's obvious, Tim, that she has her hands full with the child, who's screaming for sweets and biscuits and this is and that's, whatever. So meanwhile, the grandma's working her way around saying in a controlled voice, easy, Ellen, we won't be long, easy, hon. Another outburst, and he hears the grandma calmly say, It's okay, Ellen, just a couple more minutes and we'll be out of here. Hang in there, babe. At the checkout, the little terse throwing items out of the card,

and the grandma says it again in a control. was Ellen, Ellen, relax, sweetie. Don't get upset. We'll be home in five minutes. Stay cool, Ellen. Very impressed. The man goes outside where the grandma's loading her groceries, the little girl into the car, says to the elderly woman, it's not of my business, but you were amazing in there. I don't know how you did it that whole time. You kept her composure, no matter how loud and disruptive she got you, you just calmly kept saying things would be okay. Ellen's very lucky to have you as her grandma. Thanks, said the grandma. But I'm Ellen. This little terror is Jennifer. You get the idea. So that was actually very skillful. It's okay, Ellen, just to cover.

So the supports for anxiety, when we get caught in it, we can do this unhook from our thoughts, come into our body. Do a body scan or relax through the body. Do a breathing that helps us to relax. Hands, slight smile, the self-talk of compassion. And what I wanted to say now is that many of these are exactly what you'll find when you're trying to sleep and you're sleepless can work the best. And what I did a couple of weeks ago was on Facebook.

I invited our Facebook friends and community to share what their wisdom was on what works when you can't go to sleep, when you're all stirred up, when you're anxious and you can't go to sleep. And I got so many fantastic, great recommendations on what to do for sleeplessness that Janet, who works with me, has created a web page and we have it on the web now. So if you want to see what the extent. community said, the wisdom on going to sleep, go to my website tarbrock.com. On the right side, it says featured offerings, and you'll see it, you'll see the community wisdom on sleep,

and you can get it there. And I'm going to share with you a few things that people mention, okay? But check it out because there's so many good ideas. A lot of it had to do with attitude. One woman says, I had insomnia as a child, and it still crops up now and then. I returned to the advice my pediatrician shared with me. No big deal. Your body can still get lots of rest even when you can't fall asleep. You'll be okay tomorrow even if you're a little tired. Basically, taking the pressure off usually allowed me to relax and fall asleep.

So I want to say, hear here to that one, that the more you panic about trying to get to sleep, the harder it is to get to sleep. Insomnia, one person, writes, is like a Chinese finger trap. The more I fight it, the more I get stuck. So I try not to get anxious about not sleeping and just accept that at least I'm resting my body and that's good enough. Another person, when nothing's worked over years of insomnia, I've learned to not be afraid

of it, to accept it. When I wake up at 3 a.m., I'll put a hand on my heart or listen to the sounds of the night, beats fighting it. more, I've gotten to the point where I just let it be an accepted. There's a part of me that now enjoys the solitude and quiet that can be found in the middle of the night. A few people talk to about anxious thoughts. I remind myself that my thoughts are usually more irrational and fear-based in the middle of the night and I try to breathe into it. Another, I find when anxious cyclical thinking disrupts my ability to rest, I will intentionally

recount and envision memories that filled me with peace. Each time I feel the anxiety shadow draping over me, I speak to it, telling it, I see it, I love it, I picture myself cradling it like a baby, rocking it with compassion as I recount whichever memory visually which washes over me with restoration. One person says, when I become aware that I'm in the old habit of ruminating, I begin repeating thank you. The gratitude can be focused on anything, my warm bed, healthy kids, just coming back to thankfulness helps me untangle and relax into sleep. Another, I find it helps to visualize putting the thing I'm thinking about in a drawer

and sliding it shut until tomorrow. If I can picture putting it away, it allows me to let be. One person talks about how you go to sleep, she says, I learned from someone who taught at Stanford and worked with neurologists that you often wake up the way you go to sleep. She told us that the mind prunes itself after you sleep and that by focusing on positive visions for the next day, you're bound to wake up an arrested, calm, happier state. I've tried this and it works.

Apparently this is the case with anesthesia as well. My friend who is an anesthesiologist tries to keep people calm going in because that's how they'll wake up. Another person, I list today's blessing before sleeping, a conscious inhale and exhale letting go and smile with a hand on my heart. Another, I go through the alphabet and try to list someone I'm grateful for under each letter and send up a tiny prayer for them. I thought that was really beautiful.

I let my mind go to the thousands of people who are awake in their beds at the same time as me and send META to this community of sleep-challenged night watchers, holding it lightly. We're the ones who make sure everyone else is able and safe to sleep. So I wanted to stop with that one and say, next time, whether it's tonight or whenever, that you are stuck and you can't sleep, just imagine there's a bunch of us with you. Okay? And we're all sleep challenge night watchers. It'd be beautiful to do it together.

So again, I invite you to check out the community wisdom on sleep on the website. And let's practice a little together, these techniques of how to calm and bring compassion to ourselves when anxious. As you come into stillness, I'd like to invite you again to bring to mind a situation that have a or evokes anxiety. It could be a different one that you have already come up with or the same one. You might imagine yourself, transport yourself into it. And even if in reality you wouldn't have time for a long pause, let yourself go to where the part of the circumstances where you're feeling most agitated or anxious.

And imagine you can pause and freeze the frame there for a moment. Again, aware of the kind of thoughts that are going through your mind and what your body's like. Maybe you're rushing around. Maybe you're sitting still but really tense inside. Start by unhooking. Just see if you can imagine and sense that you're unhooking from thoughts. And you're traveling those whatever six, eight inches down from the head to the body to the heart area.

And just begin consciously relaxing your body. You might let the shoulders fall away from the neck. Maybe imagine that melting ice to water, a melting sensation and water to gas. Let your hands be really soft. We tense up even those little micro-muscles in the hands. Let the chest be open and the belly soft so that you can take it. Take a few full breaths now, since the breath being received deep in the belly, slight smile at the mouth, and listening to that anxious self-pardon you, the part that's upset, tense,

worried, listen from your future self as if your most awake, wise being can listen in and sense what is this anxious self-need? What's the message? What expression of care would most comfort the anxious self? From that place of wisdom, kindness, send a caring message inward. You might add a touch to the heart, placing a hand on your heart if that can deep in the presence so that you're really, from your wisest future self-offering care inward, notice the difference between the anxious self, that vulnerability in this bigger presence, to who

you really are. Perhaps you can sense the shift from being caught in those waves of the anxious self to more of that ocean of being, that awareness and compassion that's really home, who you really are. Taking a few full breaths, opening your eyes when you're ready. What we're exploring together, every one of us is in the same existential predicament, that first noble truth, the feeling of unprepared. What we're exploring is how instead of the grasping and the resisting and the cycling of thoughts that get us into the anxious self, how we can discover the freedom of noticing what's happening

regarding it with presence and kindness. And thus far we've been talking about offering it in meditation to ourselves so that we can come to that larger sense of who we are. But we also come to a larger sense of who we are with each other. So I want to in this final piece of things say that there's tons of research about fear and how if somebody that you care about holds your hand when you're afraid, and they're testing your brain, you can see the fear levels go down. When we sense that we're part of something with each other,

when we sense belonging, then that unprepared existential predicament is there, but we're part of something larger. We have room for it. A story by O'Rea Mountain Dancer has always touched me. She describes being after a class that she was teaching, a workshop, a woman came up to her, asked her, you know, can I do this meditation on my own? Yes, I said, I am sure you can, although many people find it easier to establish a meditation practice

with the help of a group. It's just hard to keep up the discipline on your own. Then the woman said, but what will it give me? What will I get if I do it every day? Her voice took on a whining quality, and I felt my mind. my irritation rise as she continued. How fast will it work? Will I feel a difference after a week? How will I know it's working? This is exactly the kind of thing I detested. The quest for a quick fix, the desire for guaranteed outcomes, a simple answer. Do this and you'll get that. My sons were

waiting for me and I wanted to go home. I took a deep breath, looked directly at Isabel, and set my nap-sack down on the floor. I tried to slow down my words thinking that maybe if I spoke slower, I'd feel more patient. Well, I said meditation is more a process than a goal-oriented activity. It can help you become more aware of what's going on in and around you, and this can help reduce stress. My best advice is to try it, but just be patient with yourself. I picked up my bag and started to button my coat. I really did have to leave, and I wanted to get out while I was feeling virtuous for not snapping her head off. But as I started to move away, Isabelle suddenly reached out and grabbed my arm with surprising strength.

But what I want to know, she said, her voice rising at a crescendo that bordered on real panic, is will it help me find God? If I meditate while I have an experience of something or someone out there listening, something really with me. A wave of desperation swept out from her through me, and I was surprised to find my eyes filled with tears. This woman wasn't looking for an easy answer or guaranteed formula because she was lazy. She didn't want a simple plan because she was unable or unwilling to think critically about

what would work. She wanted something she knew would work and work quickly because she was hanging on by her fingernails. She wanted something that would work in a week because she was afraid she simply wasn't going to make it through months or years. I put my hand gently over Isabelle's where it gripped my arm. It's okay, Isabelle. We all feel desperate at times. Nobody does it by themselves. We all need help. Her hand relaxed a little beneath mine and she started to cry. We talked a while longer. There is no them. There's only us.

When I left, I did not leave one of them. I said goodbye to one of us, a human being doing the best she can, searching for the home for which all our hearts long. As we close together, Just to sense that anxiety is a pretty universal condition in contemporary society, we all feel unprepared. We can practice with anxiety if we get very intentional and free ourselves. And the way we free ourselves is by bringing an incredibly present, kind heart to what's going on. And by extension, what happens is that in those moments, instead of being caught inside

the anxious self, we become the ocean, the space that has room for the waves. In a similar way, when we sense our belonging with each other, we reconnect to that ocean-ness. We all are unprepared and in our shared caring we can sense that we can hold the waves. So I'd like you do one more time now, close your eyes. This is our final practice with anxiety. This practice is really how do we get familiar with the true self, the ocean of awareness, that compassionate presence that holds the Isabel's of the world

and our own anxious self and all those that are afraid? How do we get familiar with that true? self. And you might again return to some experience when you feel caught in the anxious self. Take a moment to remember again. Remember the setting and who you're with and what's coming up. And from that witness part of you just notice, okay, this is the anxious self. Just feel the mood, the self-sense, the thoughts, the body. body, the heart. And then shifting, bring to mind a situation where you feel affectionate towards someone or grateful. It could be a sense of your affection towards a dog or a child

or someone where there's a simple relationship uncomplicated or something that you're feeling grateful for right now in your life. Just notice the experience of your affectionate self, your grateful self, who you are when you're affectionate and grateful. And staying in your heart and your body sense what is aware of both? What's aware of all of this, of the anxious self, the affectionate itself? And just allow yourself to become aware of the awareness itself. Silence that's listening, that stillness, that space, It's that tender ocean of being that can include all the waves.

I'm sensing the anxiety as ripples of waves on the surface, not your whole being. And you might even ask, who would I be if I was no longer anxious about imperfection, about not being prepared? How would I live my day? I'm going to close with a comb called The Watch by A.R. Amunds. You might relax back and listen, you might listen as if it's time to go to sleep and you really want to be able to surrender into sleep. Let go, unhook, relax back. Now close your eyes, sleep.

Shut out the world from the dark, sweet freshening of your quiet hearts. Lie loose in the deep waters. Do not be afraid to give yourselves up To drowning in undefended rest If a dust storm blows up out of the west I will run down the mountain and go through all the homes and wake you up If a new fire appears in the sky I will let you know in time so you can know it should claim you

It claim you I will have all your beings in mind burning like a watchfire and when the night has grown thin and weak, and the full coyotes have given up their calls, I will move up close to the eternal and saying nine praises commend you to it and to the coming sun. Now close your eyes, sleep,

shut out the world from the dark, sweet freshening of your quiet hearts. Lie loose in the deep waters. Do not be afraid to give you. give yourselves up to drowning in undefended rest. Namaste and thank you for your presence. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.