Tara Brach - Remembering Our Belonging – Part 2 (2020-12-09)

Episode Date: December 12, 2020

Remembering Our Belonging – Part 2 (2020-12-09) - Our deepest suffering comes from feelings of separation, and as a species, our great task is realizing our belonging—to our bodies and hearts, to each other, to the living web of all beings, to formless loving awareness. These two talks explore how healing and true belonging become possible as we deepen our capacity to face truth – within ourselves and with each other – and hold that truth with compassion.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. So I'm really glad to be with you. We're exploring tonight part two. It's a continued reflection on belonging and the pathways to belonging. And as you know, as social beings, belongings, the urge for belongings in our DNA and the research, the growing research on our need to belong is so, it's very, very striking for us humans that how much the sense of connection having active relationships impacts are health or happiness or longevity. And it's true for poor, for wealthy across all populations.

relationship and feelings of connection matter. And as we know, of course, there's all sorts of unhealthy versions of connecting. I heard one story of these three novices in a seaside monastery and they got caught in a kind of mini-sunami and got stranded on an island. They had been boating, got stranded on an island hundreds of miles away. And so after keeping themselves alive, for several weeks they found a cave and it had zaffoos in it, sitting cushions, you never know, on these desert islands. And they sat down and the spirit of the cave began communicating in an echoing voice saying, you know, you found your way to the feng shui spot on the island and you properly assumed zazen, I will grant you three wishes. And so the first one of the

novices says, well, my wish is to return to the monastery. And vush, he disappeared. He was gone. And the second said, I also want to return to the monastery. I, you know, I want to learn at the feet of my beloved abbot. Svush, he was gone too. And the third said, you know, these friends have been my songa, my community. I miss them and I want them back. Vush. So, as you As you know, when we don't have a secure sense of belonging, we develop either it's unhealthy attachments or kind of like codependence and the like, are we move more towards avoidance, where there's some aversiveness towards others and we either push away or we withdraw ourselves. Yet if we step back and we really look in the deepest way, even when we think we think the deepest way,

when we've had bad formative attachments, even when there's a sense that our belonging has been severed, you know, through harm from our caregivers and trauma and the way the society treats us, the reality is we can never be removed from this web of living dynamic energy that we belong to. The reality is our living forms are inextricably embedded in this natural world. I read an interesting article in the New York Times. This is research that's been done in deep forests and how there are fungal threads that are connecting all the trees and all the different, even trees of different species throughout the forest. And they're responsible for communication between the trees and a flow of new trees. nutrients often from the older trees to the younger trees. We are made of and embedded in this living

world. You know, our deepest nature is that basic aliveness and awareness and love that really gives rise to this world. So we're reflecting on belonging and the gift when we intuit and trust our innate belonging is a very profound sense of peace. You know, when we belong, when there's that sense of oneness or connection, there's nothing out there that threatens us. Everything's part of our hearts. And for me, the best words that describe belonging are feeling totally at home. You know, at home for me with my inner life and the world. there's a sense of being part of the living world, part of a presence that's larger than our small self, and also one with that larger presence. So we're holding the world in our heart.

Now, some of you may be listening right now, and what I'm saying sounds abstract, you know, just otherworldly. And yet, most of you have had tastes of true belonging. You might not have had conscious tastes because we tend to kind of skim over those moments and re-fixate on fears really quickly. Yet we couldn't long to belong unless we had some taste of it. So you might sense when you've had taste. For many of us it's when our minds do quiet down. It doesn't happen often but it can happen.

Perhaps there's a sense of belonging when there's that upsurge or wave or of loving for a dear one, could be outside that wonder at the stars or gratitude when someone's kind, you know, maybe a feeling of care or compassion when there's someone who's hurting. Or maybe for you, belonging happens, you get into flow when your body feels fully alive, when you're moving in water or biking, gliding downhill, making love. For some, it's really in meditating. We get quiet enough and relax with the breath and there's a sense of oneness. The basic experience is that it feels good.

There's a sense of flow, safety, at home, it feels good. So let me ask you to reflect. Just take a moment. You've been listening to a lot of words, pause, come right here, and I'm very I invite you to scan and sense where you had some taste of belonging, of that feeling at home. And it might have been in nature or with another person or with your inner life, but a taste. And if nothing comes to mind, just imagine the feeling of belonging. Imagine what you'd like to feel, what you imagine belonging to feel like.

you might have a situation in mind. Let yourself go right into your body and your heart and sense, what's it like when I'm feeling belonging? What are the basic ingredients of feeling belonging? What has to be part of the experience for it to happen? Notice for yourself, is there a quality of presence, of non-conceptual presence where you're not often thoughts? Is there a sense of embodiment where you're actually feeling alive in your body. So there's a sense of sensitivity to your heart, awakefulness in the heart. If you want to, you can open your eyes, we'll continue exploring this or you can listen and just be internal. One of the key features of moments of belonging and this makes intuitive sense is that we're not focused or fixated on a separate self.

and what happens is that, and this is what's important to remember, is that when you are caught in incessant thinking, your thinking is going to keep on circling around a sense of a self. Most of our thoughts are driven by fear or wanting, and so they imprison us in a way in our story of self, what our self wants or needs, what I need to be comfortable, what I need to get done to feel good about myself, what I need to do to have somebody else, you know, accept me or appreciate me. In the moments of heavy thinking, there's a sense of separation. Our thoughts separate us. I love the way John O'Donohue, poet, mystic, puts it. He says, our bodies know that they belong. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless.

It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. So the pathway back to belonging to that homecoming is to reawaken to our embodied being, to make that move from the head to the heart. And we'll explore that. But first, it's helpful to recognize that if you're going around, you feel lonely or you're moving around in a kind of bubble of yourself and you're thinking about yourself a lot, that's absolutely a natural part of our evolutionary development. We all do it. Sometimes in the Buddhist world call it selfing where our thoughts and our feelings are just very self-focused.

And it's not a mistake. There's a universal perception of separation. Organisms emerge and there's a sense of, well, in here, inside this capsule or inside this skin is me and out there is the world. It may be a very primitive sense of it, but there's a sense of it. And the primal mood of the separate self is fear. You know, so even the most primitive organisms, they perceive self and other and they contract in fear or they're grabbing onto something for food. You know, they say, it's always about the four Fs, feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction. So this is our survival conditioning to be organized around a self-sense or a group of selves. We also do that, who have to defend and protect from the world and grasp

for what we need. So this is, everybody has this kind of wiring or conditioning. And as humans, when we are in our survival brain, our brains generate a lot of fear thoughts and a lot of beliefs that then lock us in to that limiting sense of a separate self. I mean, you might review just today, just think back through the day and just ask yourself how much time was I in that kind of bubble where I was in a thinking trance, where I was selfing, where it was pretty organized around moi, around me, and see if you can be curious, not judgmental. How many moments? And if you investigate those moments, if you actually were in them and you paused, you'd find that that bubble was characterized by some level of anxiety,

that around the corner something bad can happen. That's self-ing. So in Buddhism, Dukha, which sometimes described as suffering, it's dissatisfying. It's always wanting life different. It's always kind of in some way grasping on to what's next or pushing away something. It all arises out of that perception of a separate self that has to defend itself and it has to enlarge itself and protect itself. So, this feeling of separation from the survival brain can either be healed, in other words, we can come to really trust our belonging, or it can be exacerbated, and it all depends on the quality of the relational field that we're operating in. If you had caretakers

that were really attuned, really understanding, really loving, you're going to be living with more of a trust of your innate belonging. If you had caretakers who were neglectful, abusive, always a spectrum, there's going to be a lot of mistrust about belonging. If you have the habit of relating to your inner life with presence and care and clarity, there's going to be more belonging. If you have the habit of relating to your inner life with judgment and aversion, there's going to be less of a feeling of belonging. And then on a societal level, if you're in a society that's relatively just and compassionate, that's going to help to nourish belonging. If you're in a society like most of us with a caste system in the United States a very toxic

racial caste system, a system that violates and opposes and excludes non-dominant populations, everybody has some severed belonging. You might belong to a small, in-group, but that's not true belonging. That's not the belonging that brings peace and freedom. So it's not hard to see on a societal level that in the seasons when there's more of a felt sense of dividedness, there's more suffering, you know, more anger, animosity, fear, and violence. But current times notwithstanding, the good news, and this is from both science and the mystics, if you look at the overall trajectory of our species, we are evolving and we're evolving towards an increased sense of our relatedness. We're evolving past just kin relationships.

You know, it's been over the last 20,000 years in a very distinctive way becoming more pro-social and it's noted that collaboration is the key feature. It's a key factor for our success as a species. and that includes being able to communicate, being able to co-create with others. It includes compassion and empathy and care and in the deepest way this dedication to working for the well-being of all of us. This is our potential. This is our evolutionary potential. And the tool that facilitates that potential is meditation. So the remainder of this reflection is how can meditation or evolutionary tool really help

us to move from feelings of separation, of loneliness, of selfing, to a true sense of belonging that's really all-inclusive and where we're belonging to our inner life, to each other, to awareness? So, we'll look at two key pathways, and the first of the two pathways to belonging is by paying attention to the vulnerability that's here, to the expression of suffering that comes from not belonging. And the second pathway is by deliberately paying attention to goodness, to love, awareness. Now, each serves the same end, which is, each way of paying attention helps us to wake up from that bubble of selfness and experience our embeddedness or belonging, experience the world as part of us. So the first pathway to

belonging. Many of you are familiar with Rain and as we do with Rain the first pathway starts with whatever suffering or dissatisfaction or fear or hurt is arising in the moment. And it may be it's arising because of what's happening in our society or because of our history or own biography with our caregivers. But we just start with what's arising and we learn to move from the cycling thoughts that keep us locked in trance into our body and our heart. And I'll give you an example of this first pathway to belonging, something that I thought I'd share from my own life. I think it was 2012. I was part of a mixed-race group that met for several years of meditators and the

purpose of the group was we wanted to really understand what is like. life like for you? What was life like for somebody that was different from ourselves? And there was very beautiful open sharing those first few months. I remember listening to those from non-dominant populations, kind of violations, the daily violations and the historical violations one black woman sharing childhood experience of witnessing her father's humiliation when he was pulled over and disrespected by police for no reason and a black mother speaking about her fears that were very current for her teenage son when he was any time he'd go out at night.

So there was this growing intimacy in the group for many and yet for me as a white woman I had lived my life in a mostly white bubble and I felt incredibly stilted and self-pile conscious and I was always afraid of making some insensitive misstep. And I remember after one meeting that we had had at my house, it was a day long, I was really disturbed and I had been sitting with this weighty crushing sense of the centuries of trauma perpetuated by white people and then the daily violations that my friends were telling me about. And I could witness myself through that day in the group feeling kind of defensive about my whiteness but even more guilty about it and wanting to prove myself as a good ally, you know, to the people of color

in the group. This is all the stuff of white fragility. So this was my separate self doing a lot of selfing and a lot of negative talk. So I, after the meeting, decided to do some rain to see if I could really kind of come home some to myself. So I went from all that busy, circling mind of thoughts and I connected into my body and it was just a very distinctive felt sense of shame. I felt like a bad person. I mean the belief was I'm part of the problem and I'm not doing enough to help. And as I investigated with Rain, as we do, I could feel in my body, that sense of powerlessness and despair and separate, deep sense of separation. And as I opened to that, there was a real, very tender longing to belong. It was like this

voice in there saying, please, I want to just love and be loved. Let me be connected. And with that, something broke open. And it broke open into the pure, steepest grieving. This heartbrokenness for all the suffering that comes from making fellow humans the other. And my mind just filled with the images of lynchings. That was just the big one just coming through. And the other was children being taken from enslaved parents, families being split up. And just the dehumanizing and keeping down of black people I knew and cared about. So I grieved. I grieved for us from the dominant race, you know, how our hearts, my heart, had gone through all these decades, numbed and dulled and defended. I was taking part in a system that violates

fellow beings and just how many of us, myself included, live in this artificially divided and confined world, how much we lose out on. I grieved and then I quieted. And many of you know with after the rain, after you do the steps of investigating and nurturing, because of course I was quite kind with the grieving, after the rain is when we really sense the quality of presence that has emerged. And there's a lot of wisdom and insight and come in those moments. And what came to me was I just felt like this kind of ocean, this presence, and I could sense all the waves of conditioning from my identification with the dominant group, with being white.

But there wasn't a bad self. There was just that conditioning. It was harmful conditioning, harmful conditioning to feel superior to keep others down. So I could open to the searing pain of that conditioning, but not take it personally. That was the gift of after the rain. And so with this shift from guilt, because I started out as a guilty self, to broken-heartedness and open-heartedness, that was what enabled me in the months that followed to really become intimate with the others in the group. I could belong because I wasn't protecting a bad self. Now, that's not the end of the story because white fragility is very slippery and it takes a lot of attention.

So in these last years I've been in different white awareness groups, I've done with buddies, I've explored things. It's a process of over and over again naming and feeling the conditioning of white supremacy and letting our hearts break open so that it's not a matter of personal badness, it's just a matter of caring deeply. And it's super uncomfortable, but it has felt crucial to do this with other friends so that I can over and over again sense the very real conditioning that perpetuates suffering, not take it personally, but then be able to respond more.

So, I share this because that's my prayer is that if I can let myself have my heartbreak, then I'll really be part of the repairing. But I share this with you because it was so clearly a pathway back to belonging, to come out of all the thoughts about bad personhood, come into my body, open to the real suffering in a way that I could grieve, and then realize it's not personal badness, it's conditioning and we have to feel the pain of it in order to respond in a way that's helpful. So we're looking at pathways to belonging and this is an example of how guilt was separating me. Our minds make us homeless and if you investigate

your own life, if you have a place where you're suffering, maybe conflict with another person, conflict with yourself, with your life in some way, that means that you are believing something that's keeping you separate. You know, something that's fed by our society or by caregivers, you're believing something about a bad self or bad others or a life you can't trust. Our mind makes us homeless by recycling these beliefs and thoughts. But our bodies and hearts no belonging. They can be the pathway. So the healing comes when you see the thinking, you sense the suffering, and you have the courage to come into your body and feel that vulnerability. And you can use rain for this, come into the vulnerable place, and patiently nurture.

And do it with others too because you'll discover that when you're present with the vulnerable parts of your own being and present with others, you open to a presence, a presence that connects you to all beings. It's a beautiful healing pathway. So I mentioned that there's two pathways and that's one of them. The second pathway is crucial as a kind of very good weave with this. and the understanding is that our minds habituate to the negative to what's wrong. So if all you do is say, okay, I'm going to open to all the vulnerability and, okay, have at it, you know, and just let it, let it be there, you'll get exhausted, you'll get disheartened, you'll get numb. So we need to also directly engage our hearts, directly engage our hearts to remember goodness,

to remember what we love. I'll share with you one of the quotes that has been such a guide for me, and this is by one of my favorite teachers, Srinargarata. He says, The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. We have to make that that journey, that wakes up out of the thoughts. And we take refuge in thoughts. They feel safer. We don't want to feel the rawness, but we can't cross the abyss unless we open to our bodies.

And we need to be able to activate our hearts and remember what our hearts love to give us that courage. So, if we perpetuate separation with our thoughts and our judgments, of course, there's these neuropathways that keep on running and get deepened and really grooved. When we remember what we love and remember goodness, we're creating new and fresh neuropathways that actually help us be more resourced. So what are the ways? the way that is getting more and more air time and is just sweet and precious is gratitude. That's one way I want to mention.

It's actually an easy practice because here's the thing. Even if you don't mean it, even if you recite what you're grateful for and you're doing it in a grim, rote way, because gratitude is an innate expression of your awakened heart, your spirit, just going through the motions can help to call it forth in its naturalness. Now, of course, if you're in the thick of really painful emotions, then go back to Path 1. That's when you courageously open to the vulnerability in your body and nurture. But if you're not in the thick of something that's really grabbing you, practice gratitude. it really helps to commit, and it's so quick that you can do this, to commit to every day

reflecting on a few things you're grateful for. And if you can, when you reflect on them, see if you can feel it in your body, that gratitude. Jonathan and I have a few rituals that we've developed over the years, and one of them now is that before we go to sleep, we just name a few things about the day we're grateful for. and then failed to mention that Jonathan is my partner. And then in the mornings, we have a couple of mornings a week that are our meditation together mornings and we start with gratitude. After we've sat silently, we say what we're grateful for.

Wherever you are, you can find somebody to email with, just say at the end of the day, you don't have to write anything else but just the three things you're grateful for. keeps you accountable. And of course, it really becomes a sweeter life when in your texts or emails, you just keep on tossing in appreciation and gratitude. It really softens and opens the heart. So that's one way. The other way is a meta-practice, a loving-kindness practice, which means any way of attending that really warms and opens your heart, where you can reflect on goodness, your own, another person's, and then you offer a blessing of some sort. In the classic practice, there's some sets of phrases, but you can customize however you'd

like. So I'll share one of the ways that I've customized for myself. I feel like I've shared this with some of you before, and it's really a fun way of Meta. And it started a few years ago, it was this time of year in the fall. And I was walking by the river as I do almost daily. And I heard really loud resounding shots, and I knew right away it was hunter shooting geese. I immediately teared up because I spent so much time hanging out with flocks of geese by the shoreline and I see their babies in the spring and all the ducks. I just have such a good time just kind of watching them and being with them. So I whispered, you know, I was right at that point watching some geese that were quite near me.

And so I looked at them and I said, we are friends. And I knew it was true. I mean, not only projecting there's a different level of sentience for them, But just this warm feeling of connection, there's some caring. It's in the universe. I felt a connection and friendliness. And my dog Katie was sitting next to me so I looked at her and said, we are friends. And of course, you know, that one's easy.

I could feel that right away. And then we have a lot of these huge sycamores leaning over the river and I was looking at one of them, we are friends and felt that cardinal landed in a branch, we are friends. We are friends. Other people walked by at one point and I just reflected we are friends. And I realized as the entire world was there in my heart that just this reflection of we are friends when I really wake that up, I just knew I could never be alone. Never be alone.

So since that time on the river, especially when I feel a sense of separateness, I just start doing it and like I've mentioned before it can be wrote but then there's something that sweetens things and it really comes alive. And now often on online gatherings, especially if there's gallery view and I have some time to look at people, I love the reflection of seeing somebody and mentally viving, we are friends and then feeling my heart warm up. example that I'll share with you. I have one friend told me about this for him. As many of you know, Martin Buber describes I, thou, and that the I-it relationship is self to an object that's separate.

But when you're relating I, thou, so I look at you and I see you in the eyes and I say I, and I think of you as thou, like we are friends, there's a spiritual, heart space that opens up and there's a sense of really honoring and cherishing that that sacred essence that's living through all of us. It's a lot like the word namaste and the way in Asia people will go namaste and it means I see the divine anew, thou. So back to my friend, he said that he would walk through the streets of Washington and he'd see somebody, especially somebody that looked different from him, that he knew that he had had some, you know, kind of an overlay of, oh, you're a stranger, you're different, he would

just mentally whisper thou and feel a tenderness and an honoring that's quite beautiful. And so I'm mostly inviting you to experiment with ways of breaking through that bubble of separation and it becomes kind of an adventure where you feel like you're moving through the world and it's like any situation with anybody, whether online or in person, there's the possibility of, and I mentioned those tendrils and fibers of fungus, of sensing our invisible connection and waking it up. So tonight it's two pathways to belonging I really wanted to emphasize. And the first, you know, moving from the head to the heart and opening to the vulnerability that's here and nurturing and then helps us to see who we really are and the

presence that connects us. And then the other is directly cultivating that heart that sees goodness. And to honor that the deep challenge is we often sense, and this is a conditioning that's in all of us, that we're separate and not okay. And, I'd like to share just a brief story that many find has kind of been helpful in working with that. About 15 years ago, my friend Luisa Montero Diaz, who's a fellow teacher and a beloved one in my life, we went out looking for a Buddha statue for our D.C. meditation community and we found one.

It was kind of an androgynous Buddha, who had both masculine and feminine qualities, wise, loving, put it on the altar at the Wednesday night class we had until recently with the pandemic in Bethesda, Maryland. Well, the first night that the statue was there after class, I saw a group of people kind of looking at it and they were standing in front of the statue and they were all kind of leaning to the left. And then someone pulled me over and pointed out that the Buddha, our beautiful Buddha that we had gotten for our community, had been in a cat, that was imperfect and the Buddha itself was leaning to the right but it became a really valuable message to our community. Some of us jokingly called ourselves the Sangha of

the Leaning Buddha just to relax around imperfection. It's just the casting, you know, the conditioning, it's not who we are. So there's an understanding here that's really liberating which is that our forms, our personalities, our psyche, inevitably all of us are conditioned by our society, by the fears and the wants and the unmet needs of the world that's lived before us. We suffer when we start believing the stories and the thoughts that tell us that we are the casting. You know, we're all leaning, but when we start believing I'm bad because I'm leaning, you know, that locks us in separation, our mind is making us homeless when we identify with the casting, with the conditioning.

We're caught in a trance and we're unable to see others in a true way to. It's like if we think we're leaning and something's wrong with us, then we look around and we're going to notice every other person who has imperfect casting and forget the Buddha part, the Buddha nature part, the awareness, the love that's living through all of us. So the practice of meditation is really so we can deepen our attention and so we can see past the casting, see past the mold that we're into the goodness. And then what's actually so powerful is when you realize who you really are and you feel the tenderness and the open-heartedness of that, then that care can help you to bring repair to where the casting is causing suffering.

The mind creates the suffering. The heart crosses the abyss. I'll share this from Ram Dass. He says, when you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees, and some of them are bent and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens and some of them are whatever, and you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it's the way it is. you sort of understand that it didn't get enough light and so it turned that way. And you don't get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you're constantly saying, you're to this or I'm to this. And that judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees, which means

appreciating them just as they are. So can you imagine if other people, others in your mind and yourself, we're all trees and it's okay that we're leaning. You know, the conditionings due to sun or what are unmet needs and there's still basic goodness, still the treeness, the Buddha nature's there. So we'll do a closing reflection my friends. We'll explore a little bit of these pathways of awakening to belonging and if you've been sitting really still for the last bit, you might move around a little, then you can reset yourself. So feel this as a pause and an invitation to bring your curiosity and your care to these pathways

of belonging. And we begin by scanning to sense, you know, are we at home or are we feeling separated. You might feel your body right now and see if you can feel from the inside out. And that might take letting go a little, seeing what wants to let go. That might take softening the belly and letting the breath through you receive deep in the torso. And just notice, can you feel a sense of belonging to the aliveness of your body, of being at home? Can you let, whatever feels a little difficult belong. Let it be a wave in the ocean. Very gentle, letting whatever is difficult be held in heart space and yet whisper this belongs. In a similar way, scanning your mood, whatever emotions here, and sensing if you're at home with your inner

life, if you can let be wakefully the waves of emotion. And if there's a sense of something's blocked, something feels not okay. In the similar way, let that be all right. Let it belong, even the feeling of not okay, this belongs, so that whatever's here in some way your wise heart can very gently send the message, this belongs, bringing someone in your life to mind that's important to you and sense if you're feeling belonging. with that person. You're feeling a quality of togetherness at home with and if there's something between you and belonging in the same way, just feel that in your body. Maybe there's some fear, some hurt, some numbness. And again, let that wave of experience belong. So,

nothing's excluded. And since as you've been exploring sensations, your experience with others, sense in the background that awareness that's always here, witnessing and aware and awake, and sense what it means to belong to awareness, to be the awareness, sensing that tender presence that's beyond any conditioning, that which is awake, open, sensitive. It's from that open-hearted presence. invite you to bring to mind a dear one, someone that's easy to feel loving with. Just sense that being, sense your connection. You see their eyes what they're expressing when they're happy, what they look like when

they're loving you, and mentally whisper their name and say, we are friends, and feel your heart knowing what belonging means. Then pick someone else that's perhaps not as close. but somebody in your circles, just see their face, sense their being. And again, we are friends. Or if you'd like to explore thou, just saying thou. Again, sense the felt experience of belonging. Now choosing someone who's from a group in our population that's very different and perhaps unfamiliar to you.

maybe a different group racially, ethnically, by religion, maybe to do with a disability, maybe to do with age, bringing someone to mind, seeing the image of that person, and mentally whispering, we are friends, and then say it again in the most sincere way you know. Bring you to mind an animal, any animal that comes to mind, we are friends. sense the realness of that. And then perhaps a tree that you're familiar with. We are friends. Letting your heart space be wide open in all directions, feeling the earth, our mother in your

lap, all beings in your heart. We are friends. Sensing the invisible threads, the profound relatedness, the one awareness, that light and love that shines through all beings. And we close with our shared prayer. May all beings everywhere awaken to the truth of belonging, the trusting, the love and the awareness that lives through us, that lives through all beings everywhere. Namaste, my friends. I'm feeling you in the field and sending you so much love, so many blessings. I'll look forward to being with you next week.

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