Tara Brach - Releasing Limiting Beliefs (2015-09-09)

Episode Date: September 11, 2015

Releasing Limiting Beliefs (2015-09-09) - If we investigate patterns of emotional suffering or “stuckness,” we’ll discover that under our pain is a fear based belief. Until these beliefs are brought into the light of compassionate awareness, they control and confine our lives. This talk reviews key steps of inquiry and mindfulness that help us realize the freedom that comes with awakening from the grip of beliefs. 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. I'm Tara Brock, and I'd like to welcome you to these podcasts. While the talks and meditations are offered freely, we'd very much appreciate your support. To make a donation or learn more about my schedule, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org. Thank you. Namaste. There's a story Rabbi Zalman used to tell about his daughter, his youngest daughter, Shalvi, who was about five years old at the time. And one morning she woke up to and said to him Abba, which means father, you know how when you're asleep and dreaming it seems so real and then you wake up and realize that it's a dream? Well, when you're awake, can't you wake up that much more and realize that this is just a dream? Pretty wise, right? So when we

inquire in that way ourselves, when we explore, well, what's really this moment between me and a full presence, a full wakefulness, what we shine a light on is a kind of dreamlike state where there's a movie going on and it's starring moi, we're the protagonist, and there's a whole rolling and reactivity of feelings and thoughts and behaviors that we're living. living inside and we start to recognize that it's much of the time of virtual reality. In other words, we're living in a story about what's happening, we're not directly contacting our senses and what's immediate and what's right here. Last week the talk, the key element of the talk was really our thoughts and our inner

narrative and how much our thoughts keep fueling a kind of reactive looping. We're really our thoughts, we stay stuck and really to begin to unstuck ourselves, we have to be able to recognize thinking and step out of it, re-contact our senses and our heart. What I'd like to do in this talk is focus on a particular domain of thinking we call beliefs, and beliefs are really the very strong ways that we have concluded, this is how the world is, or this is how I am, or this is how other people are. And so we'll be looking at them. We'll be looking at how deeply rooted they are

and how when they're fear-based, as many of them are, they imprison us. This is Woody Allen. More than any other time in history, mankind faces the crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. I pray we have the wisdom to choose wisely.

So when we're caught in beliefs and fear beliefs in particular, the choices aren't great. They're very much of a limiting reality about what's wrong. And if we look at them and we kind of scan for ourselves, they often have the narrative of something's wrong with me or I'm not enough, I'm going to fail, I'm not attractive, people won't really want to be with me, people don't see me or understand me. Others will take advantage of me. And there's often an undercurrent of there's no possibility for changing this or for changing myself or for being happy. Okay, so those are some of the real common limiting fear-based beliefs. And what happens is

they prevent us from trusting ourselves. They prevent us from trusting others. They prevent us from sensing possibility, from taking risk, from expressing our full creativity. And in the deepest way, they prevent us from relaxing back and coming home into the love and the presence. It's really our essence. I call that our true refuge. They prevent us from taking refuge in what's here because we're so anxious and tied up in knots. In my book True Refuge, I actually, this is one of the main themes that runs through the book, the power of our beliefs, and there's a good amount of emphasis on it. So if you find this theme compelling from this talk, that might be a place to go to.

The challenge of beliefs is that we take them as reality. In other words, we believe our beliefs. And the deeper rooted it is, the more trauma behind it, the more tightly we tend to to hold on to them. They are the virtual reality we subscribe to. Anthony DeMello tells a story about a gentleman who knocks on his son's door. Jamie, he says, wake up. Jamie answers, I don't want to get up, Papa. The father shouts, get up, you have to go to school. Jamie says, I don't want to go to school. Why not ask the father? Three reasons, says Jamie. First, because it's so dull. Second, the kids tease me. And third,

I hate school. And the father says, well, I'm going to give you three reasons why you must go to school. First, because it's your duty. Second, because you're 45 years old. And third, because you're the headmaster. So we live in our dream. Now, just to take a look at the, what's the genesis of our limiting beliefs? And they're typically, in our personal life, they're built on wounding experiences.

experiences where we entered a difficult environment, our family environment, our society, and we got wounded or rejected, and we drew the conclusion that this is how it's going to be, and it's because I'm this way, and there's a range of beliefs we conclude, but the world becomes a dangerous place, and our body and our minds take on the armoring of that belief. Typically, it has to do with falling short of the standards. We're told of the standards we need to meet to be okay. And we've all been given standards by our families, by religions, by the culture, on how it is to be an okay good person.

And if we don't match those standards, then we lock into the belief of not enough. Annie Deller describes, she says, somewhere I can't find where I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, if I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, he said. Not if you didn't know. And then she says, well, then why asked the Eskimo earnestly? Did you tell me? So our beliefs, our beliefs about ourselves come from experiences where we felt rejected, violated where we're not meeting certain standards.

And similarly, our beliefs about others come from either associations, early associations with pain. You're like the person that hurt me, that kind of thing. Or they can be adopted from the culture. Our beliefs, we don't even realize how much of an effect our culture's standards of who's a good person, who's not a good person, affect us. It's like being a fish in water. We just adopt these biases. And they're basically set up by the dominant culture

that says if you're a person of this race, and usually it's white males at the very top, but at this race and these religions, Christians usually in this country, the one, and of this kind of intelligence, left brain, you know, how many of our children go to school and in some way learn to not feel like they're intelligent, because they don't have the exact kind of intelligence that this culture worships, right? It's very disturbing.

So we're supposed to meet these standards. And what happens is when we encounter people that we have unconscious biases or conscious biases towards, it cuts us off from the neuropsychetry that allows us to feel empathy and connectedness and realness with another. In other words, they become unreal others. When we encounter others that we have adopted the culture's biases, they become unreal others and we can't actually see who they are. And we don't realize that we're looking through the lens.

Does that make sense? So one of my, this is, some of you, if you've been with me for a while, I'll remember this one, but I think it's a great illustration. About a century or two ago, the Pope decided that all the Jews had to leave Rome. Naturally, there's a big uproar from the Jewish community, so the Pope made a deal. He'd have a religious debate with a member of the Jewish community. If the Jew won, the Jews could stay. If the Pope won, the Jews would leave. The Jews realized they had no choice, so they picked a middle-aged man named Moisha to represent them, and Moisha asked for one addition to the debate,

to make it more interesting. Neither side would be allowed to talk. Pope agreed. So the day of the great debate came and Moisa and the Pope sat opposite each other for a full minute before the Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. Moisha looked back at him and raised one finger. The Pope waved his fingers around a circle around his head and Moisa pointed to the ground where he sat. Pope pulled out a wafer and a glass of wine. Moisha pulled out an apple. Pope stood up and said, I give up. The man's too good. The Jews can stay. Okay, so an hour later the Cardinals all gathered around the Pope asking him what had happened and the Pope said well first I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity and he held up one finger to remind me there's still one God common

to both our religions I waved my finger around me to show him that God was all around us and he responded by pointing to the ground to show that God was also right here with us I pulled out the wine and wafer to show us to show that God absolves us from our sins and he pulled me out an apple to remind us of original sin. He had an answer for everything. What could I do? Meanwhile, the Jewish community crowded around Moisha. What happened?

They asked. Well, said to me, first he said to me that the Jews had three days to get out of here. I told him not one of us was leaving. Then he told me this whole city would be cleared out of Jews. And I told, I let him know we're staying right here. Yes, yes. And then asked the crowd, I don't know, Sid Moisha. He took out his lunch and I took out mine.

So when we talk about this in an evolutionary sense, we have stereotyping going on. We go into in-group and out-group. And we cut off from the prefrontal cortex, which is the site of the circuitry that allows us to really feel compassion and see beyond categories and sense who's there. and when we're cut off, and this is really where it becomes sad and tragic, when we're caught off from being able to see who's really there, others can become bad others, and that's really what allows us to go to war and to kill beings that we wouldn't kill otherwise, to violent action to ethnic cleansing.

You know, it's really, it's what creates the us and them. that's the, basically the core of violence. And even when it's not bad other, when we have unexamined beliefs about groups of people, when we have unexamined beliefs, in some way they become out there not so real and not so important because they're not subjectively alive to us. So for some, some people might hear the word refugee or migrant.

immigrant. What happens? You know, for some, clearly, that group represents an imposition, their invaders, something to push away, a problem. For many, it's a vague image of poor, uprooted people seeking better circumstances. And then it's not until we see Ilan Kurdi, the image of the three-year-old, a Syrian boy that was drafted. and the photo of him on the beach drowned went viral. But it's not until that that it cuts through the trance.

And all of a sudden, an unreal other becomes real and we can respond. In other words, we have access again to our whole being and our heart. So these beliefs, whether they're really very explicit bad person beliefs, I'm bad, you're bad. Are there just beliefs about, oh, that's kind of an other over there? We have kind of a vague sense of an other. Stops us from living and inhabiting in a full and caring heart. So if we look at our personal lives,

especially when we have conflicts with others, we contract and we see the others kind of an unreal other. We forget the fullness of who they are. And those beliefs of you should be different, you're doing something wrong, I can't be happy if you don't change. Those kind of beliefs can create chasms for decades and decades. There's a story, a friend told me who worked at hospice and she was volunteering and spending time with a woman who had cancer, large tumor on her tongue. and she loved to talk and could barely talk. But they talk some.

And after initially meeting her and getting to know her some, she returned a few days later, and the woman was sitting on the edge of her bed and she was dressed and about to go home. This is a woman who had very, very little time left. And this is the story. She said that a few nights before, she had had the worst nightmare of her life,

and she had dreamed that the staff at the hospice had told her she was next to die. So she woke up at 4 a.m. in the morning paralyzed with fear. And she was saying, God, no, no, I can't, this can't happen. And she felt a sense of separation not only from God, but from her husband. And she was aware of all the resentment. She had been carrying through the years because she had always believed he was a disappointment and he wasn't trying hard enough.

And if he really loved her, he'd be different. she was believing that he should be different, he was doing something wrong, and that she couldn't be happy until he changed. So all that resentment, bringing up their children, and she had this flash of realization, it's not my time. It's not my time.

I need to speak. I need to let him know I love him. So she went home. The tumor had shrunk, and she had enough time with him to speak from her true self and then she was able to return and die peacefully.

So I was really very moved by that story. There is a phenomena that often happens that as we experience the reality of our mortality it helps us cut through the habitual beliefs that have kept us separate from love. There's a lot of reconciliation that's possible

and, of course, we don't want to wait, right? So how do we wake ourselves up? How do we cut through more quickly? Because most of us have beliefs that keep us separate from ourselves so that we're not really embracing the life right here and separate from others. I know for myself that whenever I'm having a hard time in some way, I'm in a bad mood, I'm struggling,

I feel oppressed, whatever it is, I'll ask the question, what am I believing right now? And it's a very powerful question because if I ask it, I'll find out that I didn't even know it, but I was believing that in some way I was falling short, that something's wrong with me,

that I'm about to fail in something. There's some undercurrent of a belief that's contracting my nervous system. One Tibetan teacher describes beliefs this way. He says they're real but not true. And I adopted the phrase because it's so helpful. And we're going to be work. I'm going to invite you each to take a situation where you get caught in a limiting belief.

And that phrase I think you'll find comes in so handy. Because what it means is this. When I'm believing around the corner I'm going to fail, I can say that belief is a real belief. It's really going on in my mind. and it's creating a very real effect on my nervous system, tightness, anxiety, fear. But is it the truth? Who knows?

I mean, I believe it's the truth, but is it really? I mean, you can listen and say, no, it's not the truth. It's just an idea in your mind. But when we're inside it, it feels like the truth. So when we begin to say real but not true, it opens up that possibility that, oh, we're believing in a kind of virtual reality but there may be something more it might be just a limiting belief

okay so Srinar Sargadata who's wonderful, no longer alive wonderful meditation teacher mystic from India said that illusion exists because it's not investigated as soon as you start investigating these beliefs and the feelings that loop with them

you can begin to wake up out of their grip. And so that's what we're going to explore now. Like how do you wake up from the dream, from the clutches, really, of these limiting fear beliefs? And there are three related practices that come in together in a way that are very powerful. And one of them is inquiry, just starting asking questions, shining the light of awareness on what's going on.

And one of the, I think one of the standout, very brilliant woman pioneer in this is Byron Katie, who had very good and powerful questions to ask and being able to unpack beliefs. And there are other traditions that also use inquiry, and we're going to, we'll do a little blend of traditions here. So we ask questions and then, but that's not enough. You have to ask questions and then bring mindfulness and heartfulness to what's there. a real deep presence. So here are some basic steps in beginning to wake up from a virtual reality

of a limiting belief. And one of them is what I already mentioned. When you're suffering, pause, and ask the question, what am I believing right now? Okay? So that's the first one. The second one is very simply

putting in that question, is it true? I mean, do I really know that this is true? Which begins to help you open a little so that you're mindful of the belief but not living inside it and just assuming it's true. Maybe it's real but not true. Okay, so it gives a little more perspective.

The third step, and this is really important, is what is it like to be living inside this belief? And this is where it comes to, and this takes some real practice, entering into your body and feeling it from the inside out. As I mentioned before, there's a chapter in True Refuge that unpacks us very fully these questions

if this is appealing to you. What is it like to be believing it? How has this affected my life to be believing this? Then what that leads to is really beginning to sense. So what is the part of me that's most vulnerable under this belief need. In other words, there's an unmet need under these beliefs

and the belief's not going to let go until we meet that need. So what does it need? And we begin to then bring compassion to ourselves. So self-compassion becomes essential if you're going to be healing a fear and belief. The last question, and I love this, is

what would my life be like if I wasn't believing this? And here's a related question. who would I be if I wasn't believing this? Okay? So I'll give you an illustration. This happened a number of years ago. A man I was working with a young man, Marty, came.

He'd come to a handful of retreats before he moved. He's not around here anymore. So Marty was high-achieving, you know, from the outside, you know, bright, athletic, and absolutely could be paralyzed by self-doubt. and it really showed up in his relationships. But the background is that his parents, as many parents do,

were very, very reinforcing when he got it right. And he was a bright kid. So, for instance, he has a memory of his bar mitzvah and how he had memorized. He did a brilliant job memorizing and performing it, really. And he remembers at the end of the evening, and he got a lot of praise, the end of the evening, going up to his room,

weeping with despair, because how could he ever keep that up, be that good and get that kind of approval? In other words, worth was completely hitched to approval. And underneath that was a sense that he could, he had to keep it up, a lot of work, keep serious, keep trying, and he could fail at any moment. So where it showed up was in his relationships, that he'd get together with a woman and as soon as in some way he got any indicator that she was at all judgmental or critical he'd ended because he just deep down felt like well I'm not perfect and I'm going to be rejected so he anticipated that so we did this process and you know he was caught he came work with me right after a breakup so he was pretty much in the grip of it and

when I asked him what he was believing, he said, I'm not lovable. You know, I'll never be close to anyone, as was he, how he put it. And I asked him, okay, so is that really true, that you're not lovable and that you'll never ever be close to anyone? And he said what many people said, which was, it feels true and, you know, I don't know, but it feels true. So it's a real but not true kind of thing. And then I asked him, so what is it like?

to be believing that. And I actually got him into it. I said, okay, so believe that right now. Like really let all the thoughts and all the memories and everything that make up that belief be there. And what's it like? And he described the despair that came up. A kind of hopelessness I'll always be alone and a fear that came with that. So as he got that, I said, this is what you're living with, this is underneath what you're living with a lot of time, a lot of the time, this kind of undercurrent of despair. And as he realized how many moments he was living with that, that's when his heart started to soften towards himself. And I asked, well, what is that place in you that feels the fear and the loneliness and despair, what is it most need from you right

now? There's different ways of asking that question. What is that, vulnerable place most need? What does it need from you? That's what I asked him right in those moments. And he said to feel like I'm keeping it company not to leave it, not to make it wrong for being there. In other words, usually when he felt vulnerable he'd just go try to achieve more or make up for it. He'd kind of leave himself and just said let it be okay then I'm here just keep company. And so I asked him just to do that and he spent sometime kind of telling himself, okay, I'm staying, I care. Often it's useful to have some words to offer inward to the place underneath the belief.

He found more space with that. That kind of gave him more space. And then I asked him the next question, which was, what would your life be like if you didn't believe that you were unlovable? what would your life be like if you didn't believe that you're always going to be alone that you wouldn't connect and it was interesting that

when I asked that question he kind of perked up and he said I'd play more because he's a serious guy he said I'd play more it'd be more fun those were the he also said I'd have more love in my life and so on, but there was something about the playfulness

and the aliveness that I could feel it viscerally. I also asked him, who would you be if you didn't believe in that unlovable belief? Because our beliefs really create our sense of ourself. And he said, I don't know the words, but the feeling is that I would, like, fill the skies. I would be really big. More free.

So this was not a one-shot. And just in case it sounds like, okay, you go through your five steps and voila, you know, it's not like that, it's not that way. They're deeply rooted in our nervous system, the ideas and thoughts and feelings. So many rounds of pausing, what am I believing, is this really true? What's it like to be feeling this? What is this place need right now? What would life be without this?

Many rounds. But as they say in neuroscience, you know, neurons that fire together, wire together, and any circuitry that we've developed, any habit of beliefs and feelings, we can decondition. So he had many rounds of pausing and flowing new feelings and thoughts through till new kind of, it's kind of creating new currents in his mind and his heart. and became increasingly confident and increasingly happy and I do remember the last time he actually came to class here and he brought a partner and introduced me to her

and this is right before he moved and right before they left he whispered right in my ear were able to play which was exactly what I was hoping for for him So the pathway to really waking up out of the beliefs that in prison is deepening our attention and asking the questions and bringing that embodied mindfulness and that kindness is what frees us up. Now, it's important to respect, as I mentioned, that beliefs get installed and they have a super huge,

hold and there can be a lot of resistance to letting them go. So another important question is what's stopping me from letting go of this belief? And this is when we're going to go through a practice, I'm not going to run you through that now because it can be very deep but if you start investigating sometimes you can find out it's easier to believe something than to begin to drop into the vulnerability of not knowing, we'd rather be certain. We'd rather stand in certainty even when it's painful than not being sure of what's what and feeling like something can hit us from left field or whatever.

At least we feel we can try to do something about it or control things. So we hold on tight to even the most painful beliefs. There's a sense of not being able to control things if we say, well, I'm not not sure if that's true. It's also that our beliefs give us a, which kind of let us give up in a way, and it kind of gives us a rationale for going ahead and behaving in ways to give us temporary relief, but don't really heal us. Case in fact, a man goes to a bar and orders a drink.

Bartender gives it to him, and he pushes it off to the side. Orders another drink, the bartender serves it, and this time he drinks it. What gives, says the bartender. Well, I go to AA meetings and hear regularly it's the first drink that leads to trouble. I'm not sure that really illustrates my point, but he's kind of cute. So the belief has a lot of, it's tenacious and we'll hold on for a long time. But eventually, if we keep paying attention, what happens is suffering will keep waking us up. It'll keep saying, hey, you need to, you need to.

to really look at this. I look at suffering as it's when awareness is confined, suffering is that sense of the awareness being cocooned in some way. It's a sign of awareness that wants to become whole feeling contracted and tight. So it's a wake-up. It's an invitation to deepen attention. Now I'd like to spend the last bit of time on one of the most deeply held beliefs that's pretty pervasive, most of us have it. And that's the belief that around the corner something bad's going to happen. And basically it's that I'm going to die or you're going to die. There's going to be some great loss and it's going to be too much for us. And that belief, the way that affects us is that we're in some way tensing against the future

and we're not able to fully open to what's here. So what we begin to do is start noticing that. That's the beginning of it. But we find that it comes up very, very clearly when there's some hint at impermanence or when there's some real loss looming. We think it's going to be too much, we think it's bad, and that we can't handle it.

And it's interesting that in this universe where everything that's born dies, we've turned a part of this cycle of existence into something bad. I read you a little bit from Tickna Hahn because he expressed this wisdom in a way that really touched me deeply. he describes how he considered when his mother died it as one of the great misfortunes of his life. That sense of wrongness, I'm imagining, this is bad, this is a misfortune. So he grieved her as is healthy to do for more than a year and then she appeared to him in a dream. And in it they were having a wonderful talk and she was young and beautiful.

And he woke up in the middle of the night and had the distinct impression. This is no longer in the dream that she was, He had never lost his mother, that she was alive in him. The body was gone, but his consciousness, his heart still could feel love, still sensed her. And then when he stepped outside his monastery hut and began to walk among the tea plants, he still felt her presence by his side. As he says so beautifully, she was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet.

continuing to walk, he sensed that his body was a living continuation of all his ancestors and that together he and his mother were leaving footprints in the damp soil. So in my understanding, his year of grieving of experiencing this human loss directly allowed him to find refuge in timeless loving. It helped him wake up from this idea that there's something bad and that I can't handle it so that he could open to a deeper truth. It's real but not true that loss hurts and it feels bad. But the deepest truth is that

the being that we're grieving is always and already here in the moment that we sense that loving. That is timeless. That can't be taken from us. Again, his words, all I had to do is look at the palm of my hand and feel the breeze on my face or the earth under my feet to remember that my mother is always with me available at any time. So we get imprisoned by our beliefs. We become smaller.

As I just mentioned, the sense that we're going to lose and things are going to end and we can't live without them or the belief about unreal others. I mentioned the refugees or anyone that we say should be. different, okay? He's wrong or bad. And then of course our beliefs about our personal badness which keep us in so much pain with Marty's story. But with each of them the possibility is to pause and recognize this is a belief. It might feel real but it's not truth and then to begin to through inquiry and presence sense who we are beyond the belief. So I'd like to practice that a little with you right now, give you a chance

to explore it and then we'll close together. I like often with these reflections to just to feel your intention that this is a chance to experiment, to explore your inner life and maybe to find a bit more freedom. So just to feel your own sincerity in that. And if you can, to commit yourself to not judging your process, because as I mentioned with Marty, it's many, many rounds. And yet each round contributes in a really important way to our freedom. You might begin by bringing to mind a situation in your life where there's some stuckness, maybe conflict with another person, some way that you're down on your soul.

some way that you're caught in an emotion that's difficult, fear, hurt, anger. For many it might be valuable to pick a situation where you sense you've turned on yourself and let yourself go right into that situation so that you can be in touch with what's stirred up. Maybe what's the worst part of this situation? What are you afraid it's going to happen? Press the pause button and just ask yourself, So what am I believing when I'm in the thick of this? What am I believing about myself

or about myself in relationship to others, about my life? Is it that I'm falling short in some way? Deficient? Going to fail? Is it that I'm never going to be happy or never change? Is it that others won't love me? That I can't trust others? That I'll never be close to anyone? What is it you're believing?

And then just to pose the question, is the belief true? Certainly it feels real, but is it truth? Is it reality? Do you know that it's true? And just notice what comes up. You might have a definitive yes, you might have a, it feels real, but truly I don't know. Just asking the question. is important. And now ask yourself, what's it like to live in this belief? So when this belief

is strong, when it's really online, when it's commandeering your body mind, what's it like to live inside it? So this is a time just maybe exaggerate a little, like tell yourself the belief and really invite the whole mind and body state that comes with this belief. So you can get in touch with what's it like when you're living inside it? Can you sense the contraction, how the mind gets small, how the heart gets defended, the hurt, the fear, to sense that you can witness what's it like with some kindness? For some I find it's very helpful as we often do to put your hand on your heart as a way to keep company with this inquiry and really just to ask so what is this part of me,

underneath the belief, the part that's really hurting. What is it most need? What does it need for me right now? The part that's afraid, that's hurting, that's lonely, what does it need? Does it simply need to know you're there and keeping a company? Does it need acceptance, forgiveness, a message of love, to feel held and safe? see if you can at least have the intention to offer whatever this part need. See what happens. Notice what happens. Are there some words that you can mentally whisper

that might be healing to this part of you underneath the belief? Experiment. If you can breathe and feel the place in you that's vulnerable and just offer and imagine and sense that place held in loving presence. And then ask yourself, what would my life be like if I didn't believe this? Just open yourself to a glimmer. Right now, what would my life be like if I didn't believe this? What would I be? Who would I be or what would I be if I didn't believe this?

Just intuit that. And just take some moments to relax back. And just rest in whatever you intuit is who you are, beyond that belief, just to feel into the openness, the tenderness, the presence. The greatest gift you can give yourself to shine the light of awareness on these limiting beliefs. Wake up into the truth of who you are. We'll close with a short poem by the poet Donna Faults.

Why wait for your awakening? would you hold back when the beloved beckons? No, I can't step across the threshold you say, eyes downcast. I'm not worthy. I'm afraid and my motives aren't pure. Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining through the open door? Forgive yourself.

Now is the only time you have to be whole. Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the radiance of your trueness. nature. Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain. Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your stories of separation and failure. This is the day of your awakening. Day and blessings. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed these teachings. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule and special online offerings, please join my email list, by visiting tarabrock.com.