Tara Brach - Radical Acceptance Revisited (2015-08-12)

Episode Date: August 14, 2015

Radical Acceptance Revisited (2015-08-12) - One of the truths we most regularly forget is that if we are at war with ourselves, we can't feel love and connection with our world. This talk looks at the genesis of the "Trance of Unworthiness" and how the wings of mindfulness and heartfulness can dissolve the trance and reveal the loving awareness that is our essence Being. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at http://www.tarabrach.com/donate.html. With thanks 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. A number of years ago, the Dalai Lama was here for a mind-life conference, a gathering of scientists and researchers, teachers and the like that were all... This is really when the beginning of affirming some of the benefits. of meditation was really taking root. And at one point he was interviewed by Network News because his latest book on happiness had come out.

And the question they asked him was, well, what was the happiest moment of your life? And he thought for a little while, and he gave that, he has a mischievous look he gives. And he said, I think now. And to me it was perfect, because really the gift of meditation is to be able to really be right here

in the one place, the one moment, where we can truly experience happiness and love and creativity, where we can truly see the nature of reality. So the challenge is that most of the time we have this really deep conditioning to not be here, to be honest, our way somewhere else. It's often in the form of lost in thought. We're thinking that generally

the most important moment of our life is either ahead or it's already happened, but it's rare that we think this moment really matters. This is it. Right here, this moment. So it's really an interesting inquiry. What is it that takes us away so regularly from prayer? presence. And if we begin to check through the day and saying, okay, what's going on here, we'll find that much of a time we're in a trance of thinking, we're kind of living in a virtual reality, you know, we're not awake in our senses right here, and that in that virtual reality, there's an undercurrent of I want something or I'm fearing something. Okay, there's wants and fears. there's a sense something's missing, something's not quite right.

And that drives the thinking. And if we really check closely, we'll find that right at the core of our thinking trance is some assumption that what's wrong is ourself, that we're not right, that something's wrong with me. I was talking with a good friend the other day who was having a hard time, and when we started really investigating,

she said, it's this fear that around the corner I'm going to fail. And that goes hand in hand with the sense of something's wrong with me. Something's wrong with me and I'm going to fail. And I found over the years that this is pretty much the most pervasive form or expression of suffering that I encounter in myself and in those I've worked with. and it comes out as fear or shame.

And it has the kind of bottom line of I'm fundamentally either flawed or unacceptable or just not enough or not okay as I am. But there's not a sense of being at home with how we are. I remember I wrote radical acceptance as basically a kind of unpacking this and when I was on a book-tile-twenty, for radical acceptance. One of the places I stopped in, it's a Buddhist university, Naropa,

had a big poster. And the poster had a big picture of me. And the caption was, something is wrong with me. But we know it. It's so in our culture. I saw a little cartoon with the guy at his self-esteem,

you know, talking about self-esteem. And he's writing this diary, and he's saying, Dear diary, I'm sorry to bother you. you again. So what I'd like to explore, I'm calling it radical acceptance, revisit it, because you know, over the years of exploring radical acceptance, I find that I can't come back to it too often because it's a trance. We forget how common it is for our system to go into that sense of not enough or not okay. We need remembering. And I call it the trance of unworthiness

on purpose. And I like to check in always. And one of the questions, I have two questions for you and one is how many of you are aware of judging yourself too much of that critic inside? So that would be like most of us. And how many of you are consciously trying to lighten up on yourself and be kinder. Can I see by hands? It's almost as many. Thank you. So this is a big deal. It's something that most everyone I know has as an intention

to honor and appreciate the life that's here and not to be at war with ourselves. And yet it's really challenging. I mean, when we're in the trance of unworthiness, even though we know we judge ourselves too much, we're not aware of how much our body and our emotion and our thoughts have locked into that sense of falling short and that fear that we're going to fail.

We're just not aware of it. And the chance of unworthiness brings us to addictive behavior because there's a real deep, raw discomfort with feeling shame and fear. And so we try to soothe it. And it makes it very hard to be intimate with others, because if we have a sense, well, something's wrong with me, then we also have a sense that even if others don't know right away about that,

they'll find out. So it's hard to be real and spontaneous and close to other people. And the trance of unworthiness makes it hard to really take risks because we're afraid we're going to fail so we don't take risks. And most basically hard to really, really relax. Because right in the heart of the trance of unworthiness is we need to do something about it to get better. So not doing, resting is not a really safe thing. So the Buddha's probably the kind of core teaching is that we suffer because we forget who we really are.

We forget really the essence, the awareness and the love that's here. And we become kind of caught in an identity that's less than who we are. I love the description of our life, our sickness, our dis-ease and sickness being home sickness, that we don't feel at home. I remember when my son was in the Washington Waldorf School, one of the stories circulating was about a art class and that students were sitting at tables and fours,

And the teacher was circulating, looking at what the children were doing. And one little girl was really diligent. She was really industrious and really immersed in her work. And so the teacher stood behind her and finally asked, Well, hon, what are you drawing? And the little girl said, I'm drawing God. And the teacher, you know, well, no one knows what God looks like. And without skipping a beat, without even looking up, she said,

they will in a moment. So I think one of our big questions is, how do we leave home? And just to look at that, how do we come to this place where we believe in a not-okay self and we're not at home in ourselves? And a hint is from the poet now deceased John O'Donohue, poet and philosopher and mystic. And he says, we're so busy managing our life

so as to cover over this great mystery that we're involved in. We're so busy managing, controlling things, trying to avoid failure, trying to be the person we should be, staying busy, that we cover over the mystery the beauty and the goodness of this life. And we don't see who we are and we don't see others.

So we can sense that on a very existential level, how that happens, that all beings come into incarnate and have some sense of a boundary that says in here, the stuff in here is organized and senses self and out there is other. And when there's any sense of separation, the primal mood of the separate self is fear. So right away then we have, the organism has to control and manage to make sure it's not invaded or hurt or in some way destroyed and has to try to grasp to try to get what it needs.

So managing is like the first response to that feeling of separation. And then with humans, we do a lot of conceptualizing. We use our minds to try to manage things. Our minds to plan and our minds to worry and anticipate. And our minds end up creating a story

about who we are and how we need to be and what's wrong. and that locks in. So again, we're managing. We rely on our mind as a map. We believe the map of the mind to be true. And then the sense of unworthiness gets dramatically amplified depending on the culture we're in. Okay, so we already feel separate and we're already trying to manage things and we're already forgetting our basic spirit kind of hitched to a small story of self, but then the actual toxicity of that story, how contracted it is, how bad we feel about ourself, really has a lot to do with the culture we're in.

Now, in our culture, the fear of failure is really big, because we're very individualistic culture, and there's not an innate sense of belonging. It's not like a given that we belong. like, okay, we're all family and community. And yeah, you can make mistakes and doing this and that, but bottom line we're together. That's not there. So every step of the way we have to prove ourselves. And we have to prove ourselves in ways that kind of fit the standards

that are out there. We compete and we have this fear of falling short. So one of my favorite readings, if you've been with me for a while, you'll remember this, is called Spiritual Fitness. If you can start the day without caffeine or pet pills, if you can be cheerful ignoring aches and pains, if you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, if you can take criticism and blame without resentment,

if you can face the world without lies and deceit, if you can relax without liquor, if you can sleep without the aid of drugs, then you are probably a dog. We have these standards, Each one of us has them, and they're basically installed by the culture we're in. And the message of being inferior, being set up to fail, being not enough is particularly toxic for minorities. So consider in this country, consider in the United States our history, that for the African American,

That message of you're less than started right off the bat with slavery, was continued through with Jim Crow, continued through with restrictive housing and inferior education, continued through to today with the treatment by police. Now what message does that give? It's a culture saying you're less than, and that's what we internalize. And so for different degrees, for different those that don't fit the dominant culture standards,

there is an accentuated sense of not enough. We have these standards. Do you fit them in terms of financial success, in terms of the way you look, your body shape, your physical capacity, your gender orientation, your sexual orientation, I mean, for many of us it's yes, yes, well, no, yes, yes, no. And then where the noes are, deep suffering. So then it gets carried on the sense of the messages that start having us feeling not enough through our families.

And that's the domain of most psychotherapy. And that's where the messages are, you know, here's how you need to be to feel our respect and love. And parents are a different degree. were conditional in their love and understanding just because they were treated in that way and they're afraid that we won't succeed. So this is the message as they give us. One story of a little girl who was doing art and she figured out that if you put together yellow and blue it makes green. Little Melissa and her mom said, oh you show your daddy when he comes home.

So her father kind of comes in the house and he's a Wall Street guy and he's on his phone and he's continued business right through as he walks through the door and she starts tugging on him and saying, Daddy, Daddy, look. And he's just walking around the house with his cell phone and she's kind of tugging on him and he gets all the way into his office and she's still kind of trying to show him. And so finally he says, Melissa, what are you doing down there?

And she says, Daddy, I live down here. So this was an NPR story and I heard it and it really hit me that, you know, Sometimes it's not abuse. It's a different kind of a not-seeing or a neglect. So we have these standards, each of us. And we go around with, they're internalized, and we're always comparing against that standard.

And to agree there's a gap, that gap brings up that feeling of, I'm not enough, and I'm going to fail. It's around the corner. So the core wound, of course, is severed belonging, that if I'm not enough and if I fail, I won't belong anymore. So then we have to, as we grow up, and I call this developing a spacesuit self, because that's harsh, and there's a feeling of there's a lot to lose for not belonging. So we have to develop ways to manage ourselves, remember managing, so that we can be the person that will be loved and respected.

So we all take on strategies, our spacesuit strategies, to be loved and accepted. and we have different ones, but there are ways to compensate for that not enough feeling. And I won't spend a lot of time on them. I talk a lot about them, but you probably know yours. You probably know the ways you try to go about getting other people to pay attention

or to love you or to respect you and to get your own feeling of being good. I mean, for many of us, it's in some way, striving and accomplishing and proving our sense. For some it's there's this habitual busyness just to stay busy makes us feel more like at least we're on our way somewhere. Then there's the addictive behaviors to kind of numb out the feelings and then for many it's just looking good. It's like presenting a good self. One of the stories I like is of a young man who worked in a supermarket and an older gentleman comes over and asked

to buy half a head of lettuce and the young man says I don't think we do that but I'll go check so he goes the back room and he asks his manager he says yes this jerk back there wants to buy a half ahead of lettuce and then he realizes the guy's just standing there right behind him and he goes and this fine gentleman is offered to buy the other half you know a little bit later in the day later in the day the manager comes up and says you know I like a young man who can think on his feet is where where do you come from son and the young guy says well I come from Canada and he says oh well what brought you here and he says oh Canada all there are horrors and hockey players at which point the man stiffened he said my wife comes from Canada and the young man said oh what team

does she play for so our most basic management strategy is judgment and we try to manage things by judging others it's a way to feel better about ourselves and control of and then as we began this talk, we judge ourselves. And it's got a positive intention. We're trying to get ourselves to be the person that will be good enough, so we'll get approved of and loved. And as we know, it doesn't work that way, because the more we're judging ourselves and the more we're pushing ourselves

and trying to get approval and straining and striving and numbing, or whatever the strategies are, the further from home we are. The more we've covered over that mystery and that goodness and that heart. We're identified as a space suit self, and we forget who's here. You know, one of the stories I've always loved took place in Asia, this huge, huge statue of the Buddha for many years. It survived through the centuries, actually.

It was not a handsome statue. It was a kind of plastered clay statue. But people loved it for its staying power. And then one year, it happened about 12 years ago, it was a really long dry period. And a crack appeared in a statue. And so the monks brought their little pen flashlights to look inside the crack

thought they might find out something about the infrastructure. And what happened was when they shine the light in, what shined out was a flash of gold. And every crack they looked into, they saw that same shining. So they dismantled the plaster of clay, which turns out to be just a

covering, and found it was the largest pure solid gold statue, the Buddha in the soul, and all of Southeast Asia. And the monks believe that the statue had been covered with plaster and clay to protect it through difficult years much in the same way that we put on that space suit to protect ourselves from injury and hurt and that the what's sad is that we forget the gold and we

start believing we're the covering we believe we're the egoic defensive managing self and we forget who's here. So really you might think of kind of the essence of the spiritual path is a remembering, reconnecting with that, with the gold, and with that essential mystery of awareness. That's our essence, reconnecting. So the remainder of what we'll explore in this talk is how we wake up from that kind of narrow trance of being a limited, deficient fear of failing being and remember the goal, remember what's shining through.

The practice of meditation are coming into presence is described as having two wings. And the two wings are, one of the wings is mindfulness so that you actually see what's happening in the present moment, non-judging presence. And the other wing you might think of as heartfulness or whatever seen is held with tenderness, with compassion. So it's seeing what's here and regarding it with tenderness.

You can think of it as two questions. If you ask yourself, what is happening right now? It's like that attention that notices what's going on inside you right now. What is happening? And then the other wing is, and can I view at this? Can I regard this with kindness? So these are the two wings that we cultivate

to be able to wake up out of that trance of unworthiness, to wake up out of the space suit self and sense that the gold that's shining through, these two wings. And I'll give you some examples. I'm going to give you two examples tonight of how we can directly take these two wings to what's going on inside us, and loosen up so we begin to really come home

to a much vast or deeper sense of who we are and the first story is several years ago I was at a class one of these classes and afterwards a man came to talk to me and a friend had sent him a podcasted talk and he wanted to see if mindfulness could help him

and he was an IT executive. His problem was that he presented, that he said, he said, I'm incredibly impatient and harsh and critical of everybody, and it's really hard because I get feedback from my employees and also from my wife and from my team, so can mindfulness help with that? So this is some years back,

we met a couple of times. And so the basic thing I said is when you get triggered, pause. And I invited him to go through a situation that recently where he had been triggered and when he was feeling all the judgment and the anger. And I said the first step of waking up these two wings is you have to pause. And this is for all of us,

that the sacred art of pausing is a lifesaver. I've had AA sponsors say that learning the sacred pause is worth two years of meetings and it's not an either-or thing but it's amazing if you can just pause you get more access to your intelligence and your heart so I said pause and then find out what's going on you know instead of doing anything see if you can find out what's going on in those moments that you're feeling triggered when you're just feeling irritable and judgmental and so when he paused he said okay I'm believing that things are out of

control that they're going to go wrong and I'm going to fail. It's like they're doing something but it's going to cause me to fail. That was that was what he said. That's what he said and then I said and okay and when that's going on what's going what's the feeling in your body. He goes well it's anxiety it's like this clutched clenched fist in my chest. So I said okay let's just do the two wings now so you name that okay anxiety anxiety that's the wing of mindfulness recognizing it and naming it. And then the wing of compassion, just say yes, make space for it. Let it be there. In other words, don't try to make it go away. Don't do anything. Just let it be. So that was

his practice, that every time he got triggered, that he could remember, he was to pause, okay, what's going on, feeling it, naming it, and saying yes. And he did it over and over and over again. He'd feel that rising irritation, he'd pause, he'd breathe, he'd name it, he'd say yes, and then sometimes he would say something that was harsh and judgmental, and sometimes he wouldn't, but he had a little more space and with time more and more space, which is, by the way, a very realistic way this practice happens. It's not like right away you unfold the two wings and the trans dissolves and your crystal rainbows of light and, you know, compact,

passionate and the beloved, you know, in form, it takes time. But he, but it was happening. And some months later, he described an experience that he said was what made him commit to practice ongoingly. He had a meeting with a project manager, and the project manager admitted that the team was behind schedule on a major project, one that was really, really important to the sky. And that he had, the project manager also admitted

that he had personally let some things fall through the cracks. So this is exactly the setup. Like he felt the irritation rising. And internally he was saying, okay, angry, okay, anxious, okay, yes, yes, be with it, feel it. And he didn't blow up. And he, in fact, he just got more there. And then they began to strategize on how to deal with things.

and the manager was about to walk out the room and then he came back to his desk and he said, I didn't plan on saying this but I wanted to let you know a few weeks ago my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer and I have two teens and it's a tough time

and the two men hugged and he left the room the project manager left the room and the guy I was working with said that he had tears and it was for this man, but also that he might have missed that moment. Do you know what I mean? If he had gone through his normal chain reaction,

but learning to pause and bring these two wings to life game from a moment of human contact that was precious. So this is when we are caught, when we are stuck in our spacesuit self, to pause, what's happening? Can I be with this? Yes. Let's pause right now. I'd just like to give you a chance to check inside for a few moments. Take a bit of time just to settle,

to connect with your senses, to feel your breath. I'll just do a very short and simple exploration of these two wings. I'd like to invite you to come up with a current, situation in your life that brings up difficult emotions, not something that is traumatic, but something that brings up anxiety or anger, hurt, where you react in a way perhaps that you wish you wouldn't and let yourself go right to the part of that situation, bring to mind, visualize it and see it and move through it to right where you go into reactivity and sense what emotions are coming up in you.

Like for this man it was a clutch of anxiety in his chest. Take some moments to sense when you typically react, when you start to manage things by either lashing out or turning on yourself, withdrawing, whatever you do, just sense how that feels and you might even mentally use the word no. Managing is a way of saying no to what's happening right now. No, I don't like this. No, I want you to be different. I want to be different.

Notice what happens when you're saying no, when you're trying to manage things, trying to take control, resisting. So you're, get connected and aware of what the feeling of no is like when you're reacting in a tight way. from your spacesuit self. Sense how it is in your body, your heart. And take a few full breaths.

Call this a state interrupter. Just kind of breathe and feel your body right here fully. But let the same situation be in your awareness. In fact, again, let yourself remember the triggering, what gets you going, and what the worst part about this is. See if you can feel it. your body where it lives. But this time just name and say yes. Okay, fear, yes, let it be.

Anger, yes, just let it be. Hurt. Yes, let it be. So you're really giving permission to your body and your heart to feel what it feels. You're not saying yes to about the other person's behavior. Yes is a way of allowing and letting be the life inside you. Let it be as it is. It's very brave, very permissive, very allowing. Yes. In fact, no matter what's happening inside you right now, pleasantness or unpleasantness, tired, numb, dull, anxious, see what happens when you say yes. when you just give it permission to be as it is. And you might sense in the days and weeks to come

when this situation arises that it's possible for you to pause and awaken the two wings, that you can pause and really ask what's happening and name your experience inside you. And you can say yes to the experience and give it more space. And notice perhaps there's more openness,

more flexibility, that you're more at home in yourself when you haven't managed and gone into the old behavior. So as you're ready, open your eyes or if you'd like to sit with your eyes closed, that's fine. I'm going to make a few comments. Sometimes when we do this

and we get in touch with something an emotional tangle that's difficult and we name it and we're saying no to it. We're managing. It actually feels better because we're kind of keeping on top of things and we feel a sense of our own power

and like we're in charge. Even though over time that no ends up giving a sense of tightness, what most people find is that no is tight and yes has more openness. How many of you notice that? Okay.

So, ultimately, we want to be able to say yes to our inner experience, because unless we open the windows and doors and let the winds and light move through our being, we're not going to feel free. But sometimes when things are too much, we need to say no and temporarily be able to manage them. So it's not like yes is good and no is bad. It's just knowing the direction you're going is to increasingly have to be able to manage them. a capacity to name what's there and allow it. Say yes. And again I want to say that often people do this practice and say am I supposed to be saying yes to that person who's abusing me? No. You can say yes to your inner anguish, hurt, anger, fear and do anything you need to create the boundaries you have to do. But this is for the freedom

of your own heart and the healing of your own heart that you learn to recognize and allow your inner life. Now, a big challenge for saying yes is when we feel like we're bad. If we feel like I'm a flawed person, I can't say yes to that. I can't say yes to this shameful feeling. It's too much. It gets very, very difficult. When we're at war with ourself, it's sometimes difficult to bring that second wing of allowing alive. So I want to spend probably the next, most of the remainder of this talk on how do we bring the two wings to our experience when we've totally turned on ourselves.

We're totally at war with ourselves, okay? Now I remember one yoga teacher who used to say, put your right arm over your left and hug yourself. And then she said, now put your left arm over your right and hug your evil twin. Part of this practice of radical acceptance revisited is knowing that whatever arises,

whatever we can't embrace with love imprisons us, no matter what it is. If we're at war with it, we stay in prison. But I often have encountered it's been now, since Radical, I've said about 13 years since it's come out, the biggest fear I encounter is if I try to embrace myself, if I try to bring this wing of allowing and compassion to myself, I'll never get better.

I'll never be a better person. In fact, it's indulgent. I'll only become more of that person I don't like. That's the fear of radical acceptance. How many of you can relate to that? but if I start loving myself unconditionally, I'll get worse. I see? I mean, it's really natural.

We wouldn't stay so hard on ourselves, so we didn't think it worked. Okay? But I often quote Carl Rogers, psychologist Carl Rogers, who said it wasn't until I accepted myself just as I was, that I was free to change.

That, in other words, that this acceptance, this recognizing what's going, on inside us and this deep unconditional tenderness is the prerequisite to change. So I'll give you a story because I think the deal is that when we bring these two wings to naming it and saying yes, the yes, sometimes we need to infuse the yes with a profound sense of compassion. So let's look at that one on how that can happen. And this is a story, a minister that I was working with some years back, was in a real impasse in his marriage.

And his wife was so dissatisfied that she said, you know, if we can't work this out, I don't know if I can stay with this. So it was a very rocky time when he talked to me. And basically, she wanted him to be more intimate, more vulnerable, not so spiritually detached. she wanted him to be able to say I love you and look her in the eyes and he was very blocked and whenever she would ask for something that would make it even harder for him to feel

like he could be warm and friendly and so he was very defended but he knew she was right that he was not able to be intimate and so when we started working together and we sensed okay feel the defendedness and the block underneath it was a huge sense of deficiency as a human

being and a very harsh critic and he felt like an imposter and I found that many many high achieving very successful people feel like impostors feel like they can look really really good and achieve everything in the world and still deep down there's a sense of I can't believe people are taken in by this you know so he felt a sense of his own hypocrisy because he preached about love and he preached about human love and spiritual love, but he didn't feel like he embodied it. He felt like he had been ambitious in his process in the ministry and, you know, he was a, he was very controlling and he felt his ego got in the way a lot and that he could look good and he could comfort people as a spiritual advisory even, but he wasn't

really getting, he couldn't be close with people. So his inner critic was basically saying you don't deserve the position you're in and you don't even deserve your marriage. So he got in touch with a really deep sense of shame and aversion and when we started... So he started exploring the two wings and really sensing into the sense of that place that was feeling he would name it and feel it

and what did it most need. And what that place most needed, that really defective place, was to be forgiven. And he said, I need to feel like God sees me and knows I'm trying. And when he said that,

that's when that was, I felt like that was the outch moment. It was the moment when he really got his own suffering that he was trying and he couldn't help it. Who knows the conditioning that led to him being closed off?

but when he said that I need to have God see that I can't help that I'm trying and forgive me, that was the moment that the second wing came alive and that he could actually feel some tenderness towards himself. So in a way his practice was this. He would get into that place of feeling stuck and incapable of being close because he felt like he was just such a defective person. he couldn't bring that into a relationship. He'd see that, he'd feel his shame. And then the second wing of allowing compassion was,

please forgive me. And then it kind of went like this, a sense of forgiving himself. Now, as I described with the other story, with the IT executive, this was over and over again a practice, that every time he'd get triggered and so on, that he could be by himself in practice, he would feel his sense of deficiency and his fear about being exposed and he in some way the second wing was please forgive me

and then kind of forgive and forgiven over and over again and it took him a number of months but he shared that his wife he said with his wife for the first time in 26 years he said we're feeling each other's hearts So again, I'm sharing this because this is a shift in identity. He went from being caught and this is a space suit self and the deficient self and the critical judge self to a place of just simple tenderness of offering himself forgiveness and just feeling that tenderness of vulnerability.

And this is the shift in identity that each one of us experience. every time we even get a taste of these two wings. If you even, if you stop and pause and just name what's going on and say yes, there's a little shift in identity. There's a little shift from the self that's stuck to that witnessing. Do you understand? Just to name it and say yes, you move from being inside the story of the defective self

to that awareness that's noticing and kind, even a little bit. This is a poem by Pesha Joyce Gertler. Finally, on my way to yes, I bummed into all the places where I said no to my life, all the untended wounds, those coded messages that sent me down the wrong street again and again, and I lift them one by one close. to my heart and I say holy holy I lift them one by one close to my heart and I say holy so in this reflection for this class we're really exploring a key dimension of

what's called the bodhisattva path the path of spiritual awakening beings and the understanding is that the heart of the path is compassion and the heart of the path is compassion and the part of compassion is compassion for ourselves, that we need to step out of this trance of something's wrong with me by recognizing it and responding to ourselves with kindness. Recognize it, saying yes to the moment. And when we do that, when we're able to regard our own being with those two wings, then we start looking around and we see past the space suit self of others. You know, initially they look like others look like the ego self that's protecting and defending and managing. We see other managing egos. But when we've

seen past that in ourselves and we've touched that tenderness and that openness, we look at others and we can see the vulnerability that's there and we can see the mystery that's looking through those eyes of consciousness. And then we respond to in a way that affirms we're together, we belong together. Our society needs us, our society needs us to bring this healing to our inner life and each other. There's so much division, there's so much hostility, mistrust, so much disconnection from the earth and from each other that every time we bring the two wings to our own inner life, we

and start connecting, we're more able in the field to look at another person and say, we belong together. We're in this together. So we'll close tonight in a simple way. Just take a moment to check in one more time. And just to feel that inquiry, feel into the inquiry, is there anything right this moment between me and feeling at home in myself, at home and who I am? And just sense if there's any way that you're making yourself wrong,

any way that you're at war with yourself, that you're aware of right in this moment. And as you scan, if you find some place that you're holding some harsh judgment against yourself, that you feel unforgiving, that you're not able to accept something about yourself. Take some moments to just to note that with this wing of recognition. Okay, at war. judging, feeling deficient, ashamed. And you might sense how that a place in you that feels deficient or wrong or bad, what it most needs right now.

What's the quality of heart that it most needs? I invite you to bring your hand to your heart if you feel open to that and just communicate inward. It could be simply the word yes. It's okay, you're here, just to allow you to allow you to that. allow the feelings to be there. Or it may be the communication of it's okay sweetheart, something I use a lot or I'm sorry and I love you can be the word forgiven, forgiven. This is the second wing, the wing of compassion. On my way to yes I bump into all the places

where I said no to my life, all the untended wounds, and I lift them one by one, close to my heart and I say holy holy, widening the field and bringing to mind someone in your life that can use your healing attention, someone that you know is struggling themselves with feeling deficient, unworthy. And since that you could feel that person living in your heart, just recognizing the suffering and the love,

vulnerability, a feeling not okay. And just the way you put your hand on your own heart, sensed it energetically you could put your hand on that person's heart or cheek or embrace them and send a message of care, whatever message you sense would be soothing or healing. And sensing the heart space that's here that can hold all beings. This heart space, of wakefulness and tenderness. May all beings everywhere recognize their deepest essence as loving presence.

May all beings trust this essence and live from it. May all beings everywhere touch great and natural peace. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace everywhere. May all beings awaken and be free.

Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.