Tara Brach - Reconnecting with Our Lives - Healing from Dissociation (2016-06-22)

Episode Date: June 24, 2016

Reconnecting with Our Lives - Healing from Dissociation (2016-06-22) - Dissociation is the universal mechanism for pulling away from the pain of "too much." While it's necessary and natural for enduring certain situations, the ongoing habit of dissociation cuts us off from our full aliveness, creativity, and capacity for love. This talk explores the process by which we disconnect from our bodies and feelings - individually and collectively - and the practices that directly enable us to include the "unlived life" - the fear and shame, passion and loneliness - that we've pushed away. By including the raw energies we've been avoiding, we come home to a fullness that can embrace others and the whole of life. 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 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. There's a somewhat contemporary meditation master. His name is Buda Dasa and he was once asked to describe this world and his response was, Lost in Thought. I've always loved that response. It really resonates. In fact, most of the wisdom traditions, the contemplative paths, describe our suffering in terms of a trance or a dream,

that we spend huge swaths of our day, either planning and worrying about the future or remembering the past. In some way we're time traveling and we're in a kind of virtual realm and we're not here. Usually it's that we're waiting for something or we feel like we're on our way somewhere. We're living in a map of time and now's not so much what matters. It's something around the corner that's either threatening or exciting or whatever. So there's a little essay I like that's called reverse living. I'll read it to. The most unfair thing about life is the way it ends.

I mean, life is tough. It takes a lot of your time, all your weekends. And what do you get at the end of it? A death. What's that? A bonus? I think the cycle's all backwards. You should die first.

Get it out of the way. Then you live in an old age home. You get kicked out when you're too young. You get a gold watch. You go to work. You work 40 years until you're young enough to enjoy your retirement. You go to college, you party, you get ready for high school, you go to grade school, you become a kid, you play, you have no responsibilities, you become a little baby, you go back into the womb,

you spend your last nine months floating, you finish off as a gleam in someone's eye. So the suffering of trance of always being on our way somewhere else is that, were cut off from the full aliveness and the mystery and the sensitivity and tenderness that can only be touched in that quality of heerness being right here. And when we're in trance we lose our capacity for spontaneity. I mean our habits are pretty automatic and so it's not a quality of freshness. that's going on. We're living from a smaller place. It's a place when we're in trance where we're living in the stories about our life and about each other and about what's going to happen.

So we're not able to really register or understand or sense the real awareness and aliveness and heart that's here. So what I'd like to do in this class and this is what we'll explore is the ways that we cut off from that aliveness, both individually and collectively, and then focus on the process of reconnecting, of really coming back home to a quality of wholeness and of awake awareness. So I'll start with a story that I share now and then. It's an old Zen story. It's a very, it's a traditional Zen story about a, a very, a traditional Zen story about a, a

a young girl named Senjo and she grew up and nearby had a friend, his name was Ocho and they played together very well and had a great time and father sometimes jokingly said you know you'd be a good marriage someday when you grow up and hearing them they actually believed him and over the course of time their love for each other deepened and they became very, very close. Now, Senjo was beautiful and from a kind of wealthy family and she had a lot of suitors and her father decided that she should marry a young man from a neighboring village and planned it out and told her all about and she immediately wept and was very depressed. And when the word got to Ocho, he was brokenhearted and his breath stopped and he just couldn't handle

So he packed that very night, he packed all his goods and he decided to go down to the river and took a small, he was going to take a little robo and just leave the village forever. Well, there, as he was about to leave in the moonlight, he saw a shadowy figure and she was running and it was Senjo. And she called to him and said she could feel him leaving and that she just couldn't live without him. So she got into the boat and they went down the river. They finally stopped and got a plot of land and had some children and family and grew some

vegetables in their field and some years went by. Well, one day Ocho came in and he saw Senjo sitting at the kitchen table and with tears in her eyes and he asked her why she was crying and she said, well, I miss our village and I missed my father, and he confessed that he too missed their life back at home. So they decided that they'd go back with their children and perhaps the father would understand and they could be a family together. So they got in their boat and they rode the family upstream, arrived at their village around dusk, they landed on the dock right near Sanjo's house, and Osso decided he better go first. He went to the door and they knocked and Sanjo's father's

answered and he said, what do you want? And Ocho said, oh father, I brought your daughter back and your two grandchildren please forgive us for running away. And father looked with very cold eyes at Ocho and said, I don't know what you're talking about. Since the night you ran away my daughter's been sick in bed and unable to speak. Ocho said no, no, she's in the boat with your two grandchildren. Believe me and he said absolutely not. But he sent a servant who went down and looked and the servant came back, said sure enough, yeah, it is Senjo with two young children. So the father shook his head and no and he strode into the bedroom where Sanjo was lying and said, Ocho's come back

with another Sanjo and your two children. And her eyes opened in a new way that they had not in five years and she stood up as if walking in a dream. walked out the door, Father followed her, they went down the road, down to the dock, where the other, towards the dock where the other Ocho with the two children were, and the two ochos embraced and they became one. They came together and became one and this became a full and loving family. So they came together and embraced and they were free. So what is this, this is a real traditional Zen story and what does it tell us? It's got a lot of layers to it.

You know, the experience of broken hard and having to make really difficult choices. But I think most fundamentally, it's about a kind of splitting in our being, about a kind of dissociation that can happen when we encounter situations that are too much for our hearts to bear. and in this particular story you saw the splitting with one Senjo kind of pulling away from the aliveness and the pain that was there and just becoming depressed and not talking and the other Senjo was kind of grasping as if on a dream to substitutes but not really alive in it and we can see this in our own individual lives that when life

is too much, and this happens very early, the way that we are designed to respond is to pull away from the pain, to dissociate. And I'll be speaking of dissociation, both the kind of traumatic dissociation, which makes it clear what's happening, but also the dissociation that really is very universal. We're designed when something is really uncomfortable, unpleasant, to pull away. And we can see it. We can see it in our lives that we get, we go on automatic, we leave our bodies, we feel either depressed or disconnected or we're chasing after something,

but we're not resting in our being. There's a restlessness. We've lost touch with our depth. We can certainly see it in the culture. We can see in the culture the dissociation when we're living in the spins of journalism or when we're caught in addictions, such an addicted society, or when we're consuming the earth's resources at a rate that's not sustainable. We can see it.

So this process of dissociation, I'm going to invite you to sense in your own being where and how you feel like you've cut off. But what it does is it cuts us off from a sense of our full aliveness and from a sense of the full open-heartedness. And as we'll see in a deep way, it's any habitual rejection of what's going on. Any moment that we're saying, no, this is not okay, this pain in my body or this fear, or this loneliness or this shame, that we pull away from it rather than open to it, there's some level of dissociation.

We're pushing away a part of our own being. Now, there's a contemporary story that I think of it as kind of a contemporary senjo story that I thought I'd share, because it happens in all different ways that we end up leaving a part of ourselves, disconnecting. This is a short essay by Deborah Nystrom called Ordinary Heartbreak. She climbs easily onto the box, it seats her above the swivel chair at adult height. She crosses her legs, left ankle over right and smooths the plastic apron over her lap,

while the beautician lifts her ponytail and mocks, coarse as a horse's tail. Then as if that's all there is to say, the woman at once wax off and tosses its foot and a half, half into the trash. And the little girl who didn't want her haircut but long ago learned successfully how not to say what it was she wants, who even at this moment can't quite grasp her shock and grief is getting her hair cut. For convenience, her mother put it, the long waves gone that had been evidence at night when loosened from their class, she might secretly be a princess. Rather than cry out, she grips her own wrist and looks to her mother in the mirror,

but her mother's too polite or reserved or too indifferent to defend the girl. So the girl herself takes up indifference, while pain follows a hidden channel to a place almost unknown to her, convinced as she is that her own emotions are not the ones her life depends on. She shifts her gaze from the mother's face back to the haircut now, so steadily as if this she, short-haired child she sees with someone else. So it's not her first experience of being unseen, but we get to sense how she stops seeing and listening to herself. She dissociates.

So this pulling away from our inner life is what Carl Young called creating an unlived life. I really like the way you put it. You said that what's going on is that the the suffering of the parents and also the children are due to the unlived life of the parents that when we don't live the life, when we cut off, we create suffering for ourselves and for others because we're not able to be in relationship. So we begin to sense, you know, what am I cutting off from? What is it that's been too much, too difficult to feel? There's one wise sage who said the question that is most important for all of us is,

what am I unwilling to feel? And we can ask it in a big way in my life, what am I unwilling to feel, but we can also ask it in a moment. And we'll find that we very habitually pull away from our bodies and our emotions to try to control things. So as I mentioned, this process of dissociation happens in very severe or acute ways when there's trauma, but also it becomes a kind of habitual process even when the pain is not traumatic pain. But it's useful to consider trauma because it's so clear what goes on that when a physical

or emotional experience is too much to process, to integrate. And the work of Peter Levine, who's done a lot of trauma research, shows this very clearly. He describes how in the wild with animals, when they have an experience of being that's life-threatening and they freeze and you can feel the trauma in their system, afterwards they shake it out. They move around and they shake out the trauma. But we humans don't do that. Instead, and I don't know whether it's we've been civilized or cultured out of or whatever, but instead of shaking out trauma, we cut it off, we push it away and occupy some other realm,

usually mental turning and burning or obsessing mind. So we get kind of physically numb and we immerse in our anxious thinking and behaviors basically aimed at soothing ourselves. Then what happens is that when we get triggered, we swing, we get flooded and possessed by rawness and then we cut off again and get kind of numb and habitual. Again, even if it's not trauma, even if it's the different kind of normal levels that many of us felt unseen or neglected or not attended to, not approved of, not loved in the way we wished we were, that's deep pain and we have ways of pulling away from it.

So what happens and this is what's really interesting to me is that not only do we pull away from what's difficult, in other words it feels bad and we push it away and disconnect from it, but then we add what's called the second arrow where we in some way feel shame or blame about what's there. So what's interesting about it is that there's a sense of something bad in there. We've disconnected from it but we still perceive that there's something bad in there that we've disconnected from and therefore a sense of I'm bad. Personal badness.

So dissociation goes hand in hand with a sense of shame and personal badness. Just nod your head if this is making sense, okay? I just want to see how I'm doing here with you. Okay. That's an important recognition because if we want to understand where we're stuck, where we're identified, we need to begin to sense that we've cut off from difficult feelings, shame, loneliness, fear. We're identified with whatever we cut off from. Because it's in there and some part of us feels completely hooked with it. And we're also identified with the shame about it. I remember one of the first times I went to the Insight Meditation Society.

There was a little poster, it had a cute line on it, it said, self-knowledge is not necessarily good news. That's Lily Tomlin. So the culture reinforces dissociation, especially for males, because there's such shame for males classically around vulnerability. Women have a little more tolerance of vulnerability, but this culture definitely makes it difficult for men to contact feelings more than for women. I remember one cartoon I loved that I saw around the character Sylvia who's a fortune teller

and people come to her and so a psychic kind of. And so one woman comes here and says, you know, I don't have enough intimacy in my marriage. My husband won't talk about his feelings. And Sylvia kind of says, well, what else is new? but okay I'll look in my crystal ball and then she looks in and she says, you know, beginning January 2017, men will start talking about their feelings. Within moments women everywhere will be sorry. So it's fun and yet like Senjo, much of our cutting off is a collective phenomenon.

You know, if you think of it collectively, how long have we collectively denounced, are neglected the great suffering of the earth. How is it possible as earthlings, as beings of this earth, that so many of us have not paid attention to the great dis-ease of this earth? That's association. It's collective. Too much. Too much despair, too big, too much heartbreak.

We dissociate from other suffering. You know, we have these mirror neurons that let us pick up a lot from each other, but we cut off from them and you have to be in your body to feel that resonance field, but we cut off from our body and we cut off from each other's suffering. We're afraid it's going to be too much that we can't handle it. And then that's collective. And then we have these collective standards that our dominant culture tells us, here's how you should look, you should have the anorexic body of a model and you should have a left brain

intelligence and you should be of a certain skin color and you should if you're male you should be more alpha and if you're whatever you should be hetero and it tells us that you should have a particular gender orientation and what's inferior and what's superior and if we don't match those standards then we dissociate from the parts of ourselves that we feel bad about. We push them away. We turn on ourselves. The suffering of dissociation, let me name some of the signs, because it's really a contraction on every level. When we dissociate, we're tightening.

And it's on body, mind, heart. Mentally, when you've dissociated, the signs are obsessive thinking, That's the big one. Where there's just a lot of worrying, planning. Big one is judgment. Because we dissociate and we're cutting off out of fear, the fear then takes the form of you're bad or I'm bad. So we get very hooked when we're dissociative

in a sense of badness, our own and others. And we get very caught in the stories that are going on. And sometimes it's when we're dissociated. in the storyline, it's very acute. And the obsessions, it's nightmarish. But other times it's more of an ongoing habitual self-consciousness where we're just talking to ourselves about things. And usually the talk is saying that something's wrong or going to go wrong.

One of my favorite examples of this that if you've been with me before you'll remember from last year is a one of the one. woman who vacationed in a New England town where the actor Paul Newman would vacation. And she liked to go to this one bakery coffee shop after her Sunday morning hike and get herself a double-dipped chocolate ice cream cone. So one day she does that one Sunday and who's there but Paul Newman and only other patron in the store. So she goes in and then her heart skips a beat and she gets really self-conscious and she tries to pull it together. In fact, she tells herself, okay, hold it together, you're a married woman, you've got three children,

be composed, you're not a teenager. And so she kind of glides through the store and she ignores him totally and she orders her cone and gets the change in one hand and she's made her order, she goes out the door and she avoids even a glance in his direction. She doesn't even look at him. Okay, but she gets to her car and notice she has the change, but she doesn't have the ice cream cone. Okay, so she has to go back and she thinks that maybe it'll be on the rack, you know, or maybe the clerk has it, but when she goes towards a counter, that's not the case. So finally she looks over at Paul Newman and he has, you know, that those blue eyes and that big smile, and he said, you put it in your purse.

So when we're dissociated, we also are not so effective in what we do, you know, we're just not all there. Okay, the big marker mentally and emotionally of dissociation is self-doubt because we know we're not at home. So it's very hard to trust ourselves, okay? when we're dissociated there's a sense we can't trust our decisions our inner life or our heart or our goodness because again remember

we've dissociated because there's a sense there's something bad in there and dissociation kind of confirms the badness so we can't trust ourselves and so we then kind of get dependent on other people we get dependent on what the outside world is telling us

on how things are We don't trust what's going on inside. I remember another cartoon that had another one with a wizard that's reading a crystal ball. And this one, a woman's listening really eagerly. And here's what the wizard says. He says, you'll fall for anything. And her thought bubble says, uncanny. I thought that was perfect.

So what happens to our behaviors when we're dissociated? I already told you about the Paul Newman story, but we do other things too. When we're dissociative because there's fear in there, we get very defensive, we get aggressive, we end up blaming, getting in fights, or attaching to others. So there's this ongoing defending and a need to justify. I was, yesterday I was traveling back from Europe and my first one, my first flight was canceled and so Jonathan and I had a flight in Newark instead of Washington, D.C., got stuck in Newark for about six hours until they finally let us know that our connecting flight to

D.C. was canceled. You guys had a lot of storms down here. So we ended up on a train and the man I was sitting next to was on his iPhone for a good long time and it reminded me of the story. After a tiring day a commuter settled down and his seat enclosed his eyes. The train rolled out of the station, the young woman sitting next to him pulled out her cell phone and started talking in a loud voice. Hi, sweetheart, it's Sue, I'm on the train.

Yes, I know it's a 6.30 and not the 430, but had a long meeting. No, honey, not with that Kevin from the accounting office, it was with the boss. No, sweetheart, you're the only one in my life. Yes, I'm sure. Cross my heart. 15 minutes later she was still talking loudly.

When the man sitting next to her it had enough, he leaned over and said into the phone, Sue, hang up the phone and come back to bed. Sue doesn't use her cell phone in public anymore. Okay, so justifying, defending, attacking. And then the other sign of dissociating is addictive consuming. again, because there's vulnerability that we're trying to leave, and yet it's in the background, it's kind of back there ready to be touched and that rawness is scary. We do a lot to self-soothe.

I feel like most of us have some level of eating disorder because that's the most primitive and easy and early way that we try to self-soothe to get away from agitating feelings. but we have many other strategies too. Of course, alcoholism is a big sign of a dissociative society. You might remember this one where a priest and a rabbi and a vicar walk into a bar and the barman says, is this some kind of joke? That's the whole one. That's it.

Okay, so again, remember, I just want to remind you, this is all of us. I mean, some of you may not feel, I don't have any major addiction, but all of us leave. The reason we practice meditation is because we know we leave and there's a longing to come back home. And the biggest thing to say physically about what happens when we leave is that we get unhealthy. When we leave, there's kind of a closing down of parts of our body, a tightening so we won't feel those areas. Our throat can get tight, you can feel the voice sometimes gets higher, and that's a way of repressing or dissociating emotionally on the throat level. And then of course our heart gets tight so we won't have to feel heartbreak and our belly

tightens up and we lose contact with our power. And then the pelvic region tightens so we don't have to feel the sexual energy that feels dangerous or the creative energy. and there's a lot of fatigue because it takes a lot of effort to keep leaving. It's not a one-shot. We are continuously pushing down the energies of our body. Alice Walker, author and psychotherapist, lets us know that ultimately there's no way to continue to dissociate

and leave our body without suffering. That we either suffer or we learn to be. pay attention to it. She says, the truth about our child has distorted up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, conceptions confused, and our body trick with medication. But someday our body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who's still whole in spirit will accept no compromises or compromises. excuses and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.

So what is it you're unwilling to feel? That's the question. The process of integration, of reconnecting is really another way of describing spiritual awakening. We're moving back towards wholeness, re-embracing what we've pushed away. So how do the two Senjo's really come together? How do the parts of us that we pushed away get re-included as streams in the wholeness of our being? How does that happen?

The practices of mindfulness and compassion, there are several layers, and one of the practices that is pretty core is that we start training to notice thinking, because we dissociate and go into our thoughts, and come back into our senses, over and over. Not because thoughts are bad innately, we have to think to prosper and survive and heal and be whole, but when they take over, we're not here. So we start learning to notice, oh, okay, I've been lost in thought, come back. And that becomes more and more spontaneous and reflexive the more we practice it.

And we start practicing how to scan through the body and wake up in our body. so we start waking up the very parts of our body that we've been pushing away, that are holding the pain. And many of you might have noticed that it's really hard to scan through the body. There's parts of the body that you are still numb or difficult to feel or scary to feel. So it has to be gradual and gentle. This isn't the process of reconnecting, especially when there's trauma,

needs to be done with tremendous compassion and wisdom and often with support. Because if we try to reconnect and we don't have the resourcefulness or the resilience or the space for what's there, we can get re-traumatized. So even with the body scan, if you find that some parts of your body it feels really scary to go very, very gently. Touching maybe around the edges and then pull away again. really needs to be gradual. But the body scan and getting practice in it

is a way to gradually come into these bodies and reconnect. And the third thing I'll mention, and this is the ongoing practice of mindfulness, is that when something comes up, rather than charging away into thoughts or getting emotionally reactive or behaviorally reactive, learn to stay. Learn to stay and bring the two wings.

What's going on in this moment? Can I open to it? Those two wings, wisdom and compassion, to what's right here. When it's unlived life, it often takes a real commitment to establishing enough safety and presence and care to be able to open to what we've been running from for a really long time. So I want to give you what I thought was a fantastic illustration of the quality of the attitude that makes reconnecting, reassociating possible. This is the attitude that helps to decondition disassociation, helps us come back.

And I'm drawing now from the movie The Horse Whisperer. How many of you saw it? Oh good. Okay. So in it, for those that haven't seen it, Robert Redford plays the role of a man who agrees to tame a traumatized horse named Pilgrim. And at one point he's created a relationship with Pilgrim and he's actually gotten him to calm down a bit. But then Pilgrim gets triggered, a woman's cell phone goes off, hadn't been turned off, so

gets triggered. And he really starts contorting and writhing and then he runs off into this open pasture. So the response of the trainer, this is where we get some real indication of the kind of wisdom we need when a part of us has run off or been pushed away, okay? The trainer didn't chase him. In other words, he didn't try to chase him down and lasso him and drag him back. He didn't try to force him into submission. What he did instead was he very patiently and calmly started moving in his direction but

But then he stopped, actually stopped even though the horse was still at a distance and he kneeled down in a form of submission saying I'm safe, you know, and he simply attended to what the horse was doing and needing. He was waiting until Pilgrim was ready to cooperate. And then after some time Pilgrim slowly walked to where the trainer was kneeling. He came closer and the trainer stayed still, was very present, very still, and finally pilgrim lowered his head. That's a horse's sign of trust and submission and readiness.

And the trainer gently stroked it and then with one finger guided the horse back home to complete his training and his healing. So he guided him back home with one finger. What does that tell us about how to relate to the parts of our own being that we've been unwilling to feel, that we've been pushed under because they felt too scary or too shameful? Or how does it tell us in terms of relating to another person when it's difficult? For me, one of the first words that came to mind was the word respect.

That there's a respect, that dissociation happens for a reason. It's an intelligent mechanism. It's the way we can handle life at a certain time. It doesn't mean we're not going to make the effort to re-include, but to respect that and respect there's something raw and difficult. So rather than controlling, there's a sense of respecting, and then attending. Remember, he knelt down, he just attended and befriending.

He made it safe enough for that horse to come back. we can make it safe enough with our attention and our heart for the parts of our being that have been pushed away to be reintegrated, re-embraced. The metaphor I like that helps us in terms of this process of attending and befriending when we're re-establishing a relationship with a cut-off part of ourselves is the sense of a wave in an ocean that we, that we're, there were contacting a wave of experience. And you might imagine breathing in and sensing,

okay, there's a part of me that's unlived life, I'm going to breathe in and touch it. And then with the out breath, we're sensing the space, the heart space, that's big enough to be with it. That this is the practice of bringing the two wings of attending and befriending to a part of ourselves. Breathing in and touching what's there.

breathing out and offering it real space and kindness, heart space. So what does that look like? Imagine you're approaching an interview or a presentation or a social situation or something that you know triggers off some fear of failure. We each have our versions. And the habit would be to get anxious, the habit would be to just perseverate, be obsessed, maybe overeat, maybe get irritable with somebody else.

So we notice it, okay, these are the signs of dissociation and we pause. That's the beginning of reassociating. The trainer just gets still. That breaks the patterning, okay, rather than chasing after trying to control and lasso the horse. And then in that stillness, attend and befriend. and can we begin to breathe in and just directly feel where that anxiety is in our body? You might feel right now that you're able to breathe in and feel your throat, your chest, your belly.

So you breathe in and each time you breathe in, it's just this intention to contact it with your attention. And the breathing out, imagine and sense you're releasing feelings into a larger space, a heart space, filled with presence and caring and peace. That's the practice, attending and befriending. Now there's some adapting it. If it's really hard for you to get in touch with your body and feelings, you might emphasize

the in-breath for a while, emphasize the contacting, can I really pay attention? You might even put your hand on your body, put your hand on your throat and breathe into your throat or your chest or your belly. Just to get your attention there. If it's hard to get in touch, emphasize the in-breath. Now, if it feels very unsafe, very scary, in fact, you're really in touch and it's really raw, emphasize the out-breath. Emphasize the out-breath.

Emphasize letting it be held in something larger, that big feel, that big spaciousness, and you could feel it with the trainer, that he wasn't getting too close in. He was giving it all a lot of space. We'll breathe out and keep exhaling out and sensing the space that can hold what's there. Sometimes you need to spend months with the out breath. It's like it doesn't matter how long that trainer had to wait. Sometimes you just have to wait and do the out breath where you keep sensing that there's enough space

so that when you do contact what's there, it's not traumatizing. It's a life practice, this touching in and then letting it go, letting it be held by something larger. It can be situational or it can be in the moment, any moment you want. Oh, what is it I'm unwilling to feel? And then breathing in and touching what's here, breathing out, letting it be held in the space that's here. Eventually, as we open fully to what's there, when there's no dissociation,

there's a feeling of full dynamic aliveness, vitality, awareness. Let me read you a poem. Dana Falls, who's a friend and a wonderful poet, and it's called trusting prana, trusting the energy. Trust the energy that courses through you. Trust, then take surrender even deeper. Be the energy. Don't push anything away. Follow each sensation back to its source in vastness and pure presence. emerge so new, so fresh that you don't know who you are. Welcome in the season of monsoons. Be the bridge across the flooded river and the surging torrent underneath.

Be unafraid of consummate wonder. Be the energy and blaze a trail across the clear night sky like lightning. Dare to be your own illumination. I sometimes think of this as the fearless heart, that when we start being willing to touch what's there, the fear, different expressions of fear, we discover that space of fearlessness, the fearless heart. Now, I've been talking primarily about embracing

what we've pushed away within our own being, but it's the exact same process with what we push away in each other. Typically, when we're aversive towards someone, we're aversive towards something that is projected from ourselves that we don't like in ourselves. That's very, very typical. So the including, in other words, when we're trying to attend and be friend, it's just including the other but we're really including what we don't want to feel in ourselves.

It seems like we're opening up to include another person but really including feelings within ourselves that have been triggered that we've been pushing away. So it's the same process that we deepen our attention and we create a lot of space for the other. We can use the breath. In other words, you can be with another person and if you want to reassociate, open up, feel that connection, breathe in and sense, oh, what's it like to be you? I want to feel that sense of being you. really feel into it empathetically and breathe out and sense the shared heart space that's there. It takes paying attention. I saw a YouTube a couple of weeks ago that really moved me that to me felt like a real expression of this.

There's a filmmaker who the setting was Berlin and what he did was he paired local people from Berlin with refugees and he'd have a pair and they didn't know each other and they're mostly refugees from Syria who had just been in Germany for less than a year. So he'd take the two people and they'd just sit together

and he had them look eye into eye in silence because there's a lot of, there's research that shows that if you just look into someone's eyes for a few minutes there's a profound level of intimacy that can emerge.

So he just had them sit there looking eye and eye. and to me this is like okay deepening attention this is attending and befriending in the most dramatic way and I invite you to watch this YouTube Janet will post it on Facebook when this talk is posted because you get to witness the spontaneous opening of heart and beingness they don't know each other and it's the first time they've ever met and then you You see this kindness and aliveness and the hugs and the tears and the laughter. It's just so moving.

And before they did that, the tendency is, and I like that it was with refugees, is to have a kind of stereotype, think of them as unreal other, that's dissociation. we have somebody in a category. And so the healing of it is to get to know each other, to deepen our attention. And then we shift from unreal other to feeling a part of each other. Very beautiful. When we're in trance, when there's unreal other or when we're cut off from parts of ourselves, we're cut off from wholeness. We can't feel a full sense of loving, our alone, our aliveness or awareness. And so it was with Senjo, she was either depressed in bed one part of her or she was living in a dreamlike automatic way, another part of her. She wasn't whole,

she cut off. Or the girl with the haircut who just couldn't, it was too much pain, she couldn't feel her feelings, she didn't know what she wanted, she cut off from her passion. And like that for so many of us, unwilling to feel the loneliness that we don't want to admit, or the feeling of unloavability, or the fear of failure, whatever it is, we cut off and live in this kind of mental busyness. So our pathway home, it's kind of as that model of the horse whisper, becoming that for ourselves, where we very patiently and very lovingly decide to stay. We stay, we're not trying to control.

We're not trying to do anything but rather stay, offer our attention and offer our care to the parts of our being that we've pushed away. That's the invitation that can bring us back to the love and the awareness that's really our shared source. So I'd like to close with a brief meditation or practice that explores. this. Take a few moments to come into stillness, to feel your breath, to feel your body breathing. And you can sense right in this moment that inquiry, what am I unwilling to pay attention to, to feel? There may be some emotion or hurting place in your body or there may be something going on in your life that immediately comes to mind. What is this that I'm really not wanting to touch or feel? As you inquire, keep checking with your body. The body knows. I feel your throat,

your chest, your belly. And whatever feels uncomfortable or restless or presents itself, begin to breathe right into the place that you feel it the most. That's that attentiveness, that willingness to stay. And if the breath doesn't work for you, you can let go of the breath, but bring the attention to contact what's here in the body. And then with the out breath, sense that it could be suspended or float in a larger space, in a heart space that's big enough, like the horse whisperer, staying, attending, offering space

with real respect as you sense into vulnerability, discomfort, pain. If you feel that it is too much, is linked with trauma, then out of respect, you might You might choose to go very gently, just around the edges, or it might not feel like the time at all, just to trust your own instincts. But if it's possible to breathe right into that vulnerability and say yes, to breathe in and say yes, to breathe out and sense that what's here can be held in a space of tenderness and openness in a healing way. Welcome in the season of monsoons.

Be the bridge across the flooded river and the surging torrent underneath. Be unafraid of consummate wonder. Be the energy and blaze a trail across the clear night sky like lightning. Dare to be your own illumination. The blessing of learning. to stay is a homecoming back to the wholeness of being, the fullness of aliveness, the fullness of

aliveness, the fullness of loving, and the vast, radiant space of awareness itself. Namaste and thank you for your kind attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.