Tara Brach - Repairing Our Hearts - Healing with the RAIN of Compassion (2020-12-30)

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

Repairing Our Hearts - Healing with the RAIN of Compassion (2020-12-30) - Living in a fear-based society fuels the trance of separation and unworthiness. This talk explores how we can bring an engaged compassionate presence to the suffering of this trance—in our inner work, and more broadly, in healing our culture (from the IMCW 2020 New Year Silent Retreat).

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Greetings, friends, welcome back right here now. So, our second almost full day together and I just want to start really by bowing to you to honor your practice. I have felt so much a sense of the sincerity and that presence and space that we're creating together. So it's delicious. And especially in the midst of such a reactive spinning, hurting world right now, it really matters that we're coming together like this in this relative quietness. I know it's not quiet for everyone.

more stillness, more connecting with hearts. You know, we miss so much when we're preoccupied, when we're speeding along on automatic and, you know, just reacting to daily stressors. I received an email, a woman wrote to me about her four-year-old and she was buckling her daughter in after, you know, typically harried morning, two working parents, baby, young children, two different schools. You get the picture. And this is what she wrote. She said, I noticed my daughter's nails were getting long. And I told her we'd have to cut them tonight and started talking about the other things that we'd need to happen in the evening, like taking a bath and detangling her curls. And she said, okay, mom, but let's care about now.

So I just love that because it's such a beautiful description of our practice, caring about what's here now. So this talk will be exploring really our primary challenge to this open-hearted presence, this caring about now. And it happens when now is unpleasant and we have this very deep conditioning when it's unpleasant. as we know, to react by pulling away, by contracting, and also to react by turning on ourselves. Especially when emotional pain, physical pain is strong and ongoing, it often comes with self-aversion and I invite you to check that out. So the title of the talk is repairing our hearts and if we want to understand how we perpetuate disrepair suffering, we need to begin

to recognize in the background of what's going on the stories that we're telling ourselves. In other words, we need to see how we move from a feeling that's unpleasant to judging it as bad, something bad's happening, and then moving on even further to saying something's wrong with me. And it happens very quickly. You know, something's wrong, something's wrong with me. And we call it the second arrow from the Buddha's teaching that the first arrow is some painful experience. And the second arrow, and this is what's critical, is this slapping on of a story about what's happening. There's a poly word I love. It's Papantia. And it's that chain of reactivity, the proliferation that happens. So rather than just feeling something's unpleasant,

we immediately start trying to figure it out, push it away, and blame usually. And usually we blame ourselves and we end up solidifying our identity as a flawed, separate self in that chain reaction. Now, I just want to name that, of course, the story about badness extends to others. You know, we often blame others and say, you're bad, and we blame life, life's bad. But deep down, if there's any rejecting of the present moment, we're not liking ourselves. We're mistrusting ourselves. And in Buddhist psychology, any moment of resisting what's right here, of wanting life different, is suffering.

It could be very subtle suffering because we're in some habitual way of distracting, it could be very profound. But either way, when we want life different, we cannot inhabit and live from the love and the awareness that's our true nature. So I want to tell you about a friend of mine. Some of you might have heard of him, Dan Gottlieb. He's a psychologist, he's an author, radio host from Philadelphia. And I interviewed him for my podcast. When he was 33, he had a very successful career family. And then he had an accident that landed him quadriplegic, chronic pain. So this is almost 40 years ago. And at first, after the accident, he wrapped what was going on in many, many

stories. I'll have a terrible life. I can't live with this. Then his wife died soon after, more pain, and it landed as a sense of personal badness. I'm in pain and there's something really wrong with me and life is bad. And he started realizing that his stories were what was creating the suffering, that it was just pain, but he was adding on all these layers of stories to the unpleasantness. And he realized that without the stories, he trusted that he could deal with his life. He could have a good life. So the reason I share this is because over the years, he really trained himself to release the story of badness, especially personal badness, And Dan's emerged to be, I would say, one of the most happy, grateful, open-hearted beings

I've ever met. The classic saying is that pain and loss are inevitable, but suffering is optional. And if we add to unpleasant experience that this is bad, it shouldn't be happening, I am bad, you're bad, then we get locked in to suffering. one friend describes that we're arguing with reality and that we'll always lose. So I think of this kind of contraction against reality as a way that our being in a very organismic way is saying no and that all selfing, the whole sense of self, organizes around this basic sense of no, right now is not okay.

And again I invite you to check it out and this time maybe we'll do it together a brief reflection if you will. So in some way to let the attention turn inward and you might scan your life for something that's challenging that's going on right now. Most of us has something that can bring up a sense of unpleasantness. So I'm actually inviting you to get in touch not with something that's traumatic. If it's traumatic, not now. But something that's difficult in your life that brings up unpleasant feelings. It could be a relational conflict, an addictive behavior, something going on at work, something with family that's really disturbing to you. And take a moment to remind yourself of really what brings up the unpleasantness. And scan now for how you might

be saying no to this unpleasantness. In other words, sense how you're really relating to the unpleasantness? Is there an undercurrent that this shouldn't be here? This is bad. That you want it gone. That it has implications about how you are, who you are, that you're not okay. Are you adding on a judgment? Are you blaming someone else? And wherever you sense no, not liking this, not liking myself or having this happen, whatever it is, no, no, Notice how your body experiences no. You might even send the word no through, just sensing the contraction, sensing what happens in your body with no, I don't like this, I don't want this, this needs to go away, this

fear, this hurt, this shame, it's not okay. And sense how your mind experiences no. What goes on in your mind when there's some resisting of what's happening? And what about your heart when in some way you're resisting or contracting against something going on? And when there's no, what's your experience of yourself? Do you like yourself? Now take a few full breaths and let the unpleasantness be here, still aware of what feels unpleasant, what's disturbing, what's scary, what's embarrassing, what's irritating. but this time send the message of yes, which is pure allowing and what you're allowing

and saying yes to is nothing external to you. You're saying yes to the feelings that come up in your body, heart, mind, around it. When there's unpleasant feelings, what happens when you say yes to the unpleasantness? Yes doesn't mean I like this, I want it to keep going. Yes means the reality that's here, letting the waves that are in the ocean be here. What's it like to say yes? And explore deepening the yes energetically. So you're truly allowing life to be as it is. What happens in your body, your heart, your mind? Just sense who you are when yes is there. And you can continue to pay attention and sense the difference between resisting reality and allowing reality.

If you'd like, if your eyes are closed and you want to open them again, it's fine. Many people when I asked them to report in on what they noticed will say, well, when no was tight and contracted and I didn't like myself and yes, there was more space and movement and inner freedom. I also want to note that for many people saying yes doesn't mean the unpleasantness goes away. You can think of it like a sign curve, you know, that goes up and down and that sometimes you'll catch, let's say, sadness or fear on its way up and you say yes and it actually gives it permission to continue its movement up and then down. It lets it move through. I know for myself if I say yes to sadness often I'll move into tears.

Now, there's an important piece here around trauma, which is that it's not always wise if you feel trauma lurking to say yes because you can trigger overwhelm. Sometimes saying no, no, not now, no, we're going to wait till we're more resource, this isn't the time, what you're actually doing is saying yes to your no, yes to the boundaries that for the moment are important in moving towards freedom. But ultimately our freedom is a pathway of saying yes to the moment, of not adding layers of judgment, stories of wrongness. Our theme here again is waking up from the way we say no to our own being, our self-aversion,

something's wrong with me. And some of you know I've been writing and teaching for decades on this, this habit of believing in a bad self or an unworthy self. and I've called it the trance of unworthiness, feeling inadequate, like we're failures, not lovable, and how it can take over. And I, as many people, I ended up writing and teaching about what I was a master of, which was this is my own complete realm of knowing Dukkah or suffering, of being such a harsh critic of, and this is my early 20s primarily that it came to its full blossom.

I was never doing enough for others. I was selfish. I was addictive and out of control and couldn't stand my behaviors and my eating behaviors and my body and the list went on and on. And so my first decade really of doing yoga and meditation was really discovering the different pathways of presence and compassion that could help me to embrace and befriend the moments, my own being. I remember when I wrote radical acceptance, I was touring and I gave a talk in Boulder. And when I walked into the building where they were promoting the talk, there was a big poster of me, big picture of my face.

And the caption was, something is wrong with me. What a welcome to a new place to teach. I mean, at that time, that's when John Bradshaw was really bringing into the, you know, cultural consciousness, the enormity of suffering from shame. Many of you know of him. And one of my favorite cartoons is there are two bears that are talking and they've got this skinny bearded guy who's trapped and one of them saying to the other, his name is Bradshaw. He says he understands I came from a single parent den with inadequate role models. He senses that my dysfunctional behavior is shame-based and he urges me to let my inner cub heal. I say we eat them. So we know some of the

reasoning that's going on but we don't want to face, we really don't want to face the feelings of personal badness. And the reason is that it's not just a belief that I'm not okay. It's deep in the body as a felt sense. It's deep in the body. And so that's why it's so it's become much more recognized around the culture. Most therapists would say it's the greatest form of emotional suffering. Another cartoon for you is one therapist saying, these feelings of unworthiness are common among the unworthy. That's the double bind and George Carlin acknowledged it when he said, I always knew I wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific. Okay, so this is the trance of unworthiness. And I call it a trance because a trance means

that we're in a confined, distorted perception. And unworthiness, feeling down on ourselves is so familiar that we're often not aware that under the line, as Jonathan would say, that we're telling ourselves a limiting story about ourselves. And nowadays for me, whenever I feel grim or I'm in a bad mood, I very quickly will ask myself, okay, what am I believing? You know, what story am I telling myself? Because as soon as I can catch it, this is the thing about trance, as soon as you can really see it, you're not as in it. That's the blessing of mindfulness. We wake up to the awareness that can include what's going on but isn't identified. It's a trance.

We're not aware of how much the story of bad self affects every part of our life, how to feeds relational insecurities. So many of we've talked about in groups how when we're down on ourselves it's very hard to let in love. and I invite you to explore that, very, very difficult to trust that people can love us. Feeling like we're falling short and unworthy fuels addictive behaviors and it puts a real ceiling on our creativity and our empowerment because we just don't trust ourselves. And in the deepest way, in any moment that you're judging yourself, you're cut off from

seeing the truth of who you are, your beingness, your love. So again, why is it called a trance? Well, we're unaware that we're telling stories to ourselves. We're usually unaware of the clutch inside us about it. We're unaware of how many parts of our life it's affecting. And one of the things we're unaware of is how so many others are caught in the same trance. Instead, we feel quite separate and alone. If any of you right now are really feeling a kind of a coming into consciousness about feeling unlovable or in some way like you're falling short, it feels very personal and we forget how many others are caught in the same constellation of feelings. And just to bring that more alive, I'd like to ask you

if you will right now to go to Gallery View and I'm doing it right now too. So here we are and we're talking about the trance of unworthiness and we're doing this in community. And I'm wondering, and this is of course an invitation, there's no obligation, how many of you could say that you really have observed your own being going into the trance of unworthiness? Here are a lot in your life just to raise your hand so others can see. And if you'd like take a moment to scroll and see how many hands are up, just see. And of course it's not going to be everyone. but just notice the Trance of Unworthiness Club, here we go. So if you want to you can put your hands down but take a moment to kind of let your mind register

and your heart register how many hands are up and how it's not my suffering of the trance of unworthiness, it's our suffering. It's a collective suffering. And to perhaps next time you're feeling really, really serious, stuck in it, just remember looking on that screen. It can really help. We're so caught sometimes in thinking we're personally pathological and it's really, really bigger than that. So a regular question I get because I talk so much about this is how come we're so quick to turn on ourselves? How come it goes so deep? How come self-compassion can be so difficult?

And to name that we are relational beings, we learn about who we are, we really learn about who we are and our worth and how we fit in or don't fit in through others. It's others mirroring that tells us about ourselves. And as I think many of us know, it's very rare to have unconditional acceptance and love for being just who we are. Rather, our direct messengers, the caretakers who ever brought us up were very much imprinted by our larger society, which is so full of fear and aggression and competition that the messages that we got were not that unconditional acceptance but rather came through the filters of fear. You know, we're in a very comprehensive.

competitive society most of us. And there's very few ways of natural belonging. I mean, think of it. Our families often feel very conditional, whether we really feel loved and accepted. And then we look at school or work with a larger society and there's all these standards about how we should be to really belong, to really be good. You know, a certain kind of body and a certain kind of looks and personality and behaviors and then it goes on to all the levels of the hierarchy that we know about with class, you know, wealth, skin color, religion, sexual orientation, gender ID. There's very few real unconditional ways of belonging in our culture. Even in spiritual communities, if you look close, there's standards and react

And what happens when there's not an unconditional way that we just belong is our survival brain gets activated and we go around chronically evaluating like, how am I doing now? Maybe you've noticed that how often you're assessing, how am I doing, how am I doing, to try to meet those standards in some way. Now, what I'm describing is hugely exacerbated, this sense of the feeling of unworthiness, that there's no way of natural belonging and all the activation around that is hugely exacerbated if we're in a non-dominant population, if we belong to a non-dominate population. The most clear example in the United States is being a black person in our racial caste system.

You know, how many messages daily from the culture, from schools, from workplace, from our what we might say as our injustice system, how many messages that go out saying you're inferior, you're not mattering, you're not fully human. And centuries of violation creates this ongoing sense not just of being relationally unsafe but being physically endangered. Now, to broaden it out and say, and I speak as a white woman in a PTSD society, most everyone I know feels some degree of relationally not being safe, fearing rejection, and many people I know feel physically unsafe, deeply severed belonging.

So the question is for us is what are the grounds of the of really feeling belonging, feeling at home with ourselves. What allows us to feel at home with ourselves? And I often think, well, what does an infant most need to feel belonging, the infant and a young child growing up? And there's two qualities. One quality is to be seen, to really be mirrored, the goodness, the consciousness, the aliveness, how they are mirrored, seen.

the other is to be loved for what's seen, to be seen and to be loved. So again, just a brief reflection so you can kind of check in and ground this in your life. And by the way, this reflection and all reflections, please know that if anything feels like this is triggering me in some way that's not healthy, please put it aside and turn your attention elsewhere. I really trust you to honor your own sensibilities about this. So consider for a moment your caregivers, whoever you grew up with in the earliest years. And you might, for a moment, just sense how they were imprinted by society, their degree of

privilege, belonging, our sense of violation and exclusion. And that take a moment to go back in time and be young, be six years old, seven years old, eight years old, something in that time frame. And you're with caregivers, one or two, and you're in a room that in some ways familiar. Take a moment to take in the room, remind yourself of something that connects you back, and then see your caregiver or caregivers a bit of a distance away, but see what their faces look like, their facial expressions, and sense their eyes and they're looking at you, they're seeing what kind of person you are and this is what they're, you just ask yourself, what would their message be if they're saying, well, here's what

we love or appreciate about you. What do they like or appreciate about you? And if their eyes are sending the message, here's what we're critical of, here's what we want different. to be loved, to be approved, be this way. You're telling you how to be. And just sense how you feel about yourself in their presence. And notice if there's anything as you sense that that's blocking, feeling accepted and loved. And you might ask yourself how and where is this familiar in my current life. And just let that inquiry be there.

And you're always free to journal. at any moment on these kind of things. Feel free if your eyes are closed and you want to open them to do that or stay with your eyes closed. So the antidote to the trance of unworthiness is really what a child most needs to feel belonging. It's being seen and being loved. And this is really our inner work. Now let me just say that it's also relational work that we need to feel that from others. It's not an either or, it's both end.

But it is inner work to learn to see ourselves clearly and love what has seen. I often refer to this as spiritual reparenting, this bringing the mindfulness and compassion to the place of wounding. So let's look now and we'll spend a lot of the rest of this reflection at how this works, how we begin to deepen our commitment to loving ourselves into healing. And the first piece of this is that when we register that we're stuck in some way, when we register that we're telling ourselves that story of you're failing, you're bad, something's wrong with you, or when we notice that we're stuck in that familiar, anxious feeling,

or grim or ashamed feeling, or when we're seeing the addictive behavior that we know numbs us, we pause. This is the beginning of breaking out of trance. I often call it the sacred art of pausing because if you pause then you can deepen attention in a way that dismantles the habits that lock you in suffering. Now most of you or many of you probably know the famous quote by Victor Frankel that in between the stimulus and the response there is a space and in that space is your power and your freedom. And what's so cool now is that neuroscience is really showing how that happens, that if you're triggered and you pause, even for a very short time, you can interrupt the pattern of reactivity

that locks you in suffering. You can just in very small ways start calming the limbic system and move towards more integration. just even a short pause. And I often think of rain as a longer pause, that you come into a stuck place, you find yourself in a stuck place and you pause and then you take the steps of rain, recognizing, allowing, investigating, nurturing, and then that after the rain moment where you really sense the presence it's here. That's a very deliberate, skillful way of pausing and unpacking and processing and freeing up the old patterns. So again, for those of you new terrain, recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture.

And what we do then is we begin to recognize the signals and we pause. And the first two steps recognize and allow, I think of as a way of saying, okay, here's what's going on and yes, yes, instead of contracting, allowing it to be here. I very good number of years ago was at a retreat with a man who had Alzheimer's and he was a psychologist and a long-term meditator and he described early onset how he was giving a talk and he went completely blank during the talk and this huge unpleasant feelings, feelings we normally would go know to and contract and turn on ourselves for. But here's what he did. When he went blank, he paused and instead of that chain of reactivity, he just started naming what he was aware of, you know, heart

pounding and he put his palms together and bowed. And then he named the next thing he was aware of, squeeze in the chest, bowed. And then he named the next thing, embarrassed, bow. And this kept going until he started to calm down and then he named that, calming down. And I remember him telling me how at the end one student said, you know, nobody has ever taught us the Dharma this way. And what had he done? he paused and he did the first two steps of rain.

He recognized what was going on and he allowed. I love the image of the bow because it's such a way of honoring reality that this is the wave in the ocean in this moment. But what that does and here's why I'm taking some time with it is right from the get-go, if you can name what's happening and allow it, then rather than solidifying the identification, that happens when you argue with reality, you actually keep things fluid and you deepen the presence that's there. So you can then, if it's a sticky, painful place, you can begin to investigate. Now, when you're caught in the trance of unworthiness, generally you need to do all of rain.

Recognizing and allowing is not enough. We usually need to deepen our attention further. And there's a lot of misunderstandings about investigation. So I'm just going to to name a few, a little more about investigating because it's not cognitive. Most people think it has some figuring out to do and it's not that. The purpose of investigating is to feel what we've been resisting. It's to really connect with reality. And so the inquiry, you know, what am I unwilling to feel? And I recommend at any time that you feel like you're kind of stuck, just to toss that one in, what am I unwilling to feel? And of course it takes courage, being with vulnerability. But investigating helps to bring you to a more full somatic contact

with the wound that's there. And here's the deal, that compassion arises out of full somatic contact. The more you're in touch with the rawness, the more tender your heart gets. So the challenge is if we're very good at dissociating, we also dissociate from our heart. We can't feel that compassion. Now again, a reminder that if there's trauma and there is more dissociation with trauma, then the process of investigating and reconnecting needs to be really gradual and really respecting the fear that's there and respecting that it can become overwhelming. And one of the ways I think about it, if you're dealing with trauma, think of nurturing the end of rain as the entire atmosphere of the process. And as you are doing the process, nurture

over and over, finding your pathway to safety or to feeling regulated or to feeling loved. and then continue after that. So keep on nurturing. A few more things about investigating. The art of investigating is to move from thoughts to the felt sense. That's the trajectory. And that means you need to kind of be aware of, well, what's the background belief going on? What am I believing? And then rather than riding that train, in some way say, I don't have to believe my beliefs and then come into your body. And I'll share with you that there are many people when they leave a week-long residential retreat, the biggest single takeaway is that they come out of the retreat in some way more aware,

I am not my thoughts. I don't have to believe my thoughts. And that is an opening to freedom. I often use that phrase from Sokney Rimposheh, Tibetan teacher, thoughts are real, but they're not the truth, they're not true. In other words, they're real, they're appearing in the mind and they bring up feelings in the body, but they're not reality itself, they're a representation. So I invite you to explore that to say I don't have to believe my thoughts and come into

the body to the throat, the chest, the belly, put your hand there. That's the beginning of nurturing just by accompanying what's going on. Breathe with it. And again, for you to know that the more you willingly open to the rawness that's there, the more you'll experience that tenderness of compassion. I'd like to give you an example of rain and what I'd like to emphasize here is that the big challenge people talk about is, well, I got to the end but I really couldn't nurture myself. I couldn't feel any compassion. And so what I want to remind you of is that

nurturing doesn't have to be that you are nurturing yourself. You can nurture from whatever source of love comes to your awareness. It may be your high self, your own Buddha nature, your awakened heart mine, but it might also be someone else and it might be a spiritual figure. Okay, a story. So one woman that I worked with on a month-long Vapasana retreat, and this was out west some years ago, a woman named Shahara, she's of course given me permission to share the story and Shahara just passed away last month. So in a way I'm sharing her story because I so honored her.

and it touched me to recall this. She was at this retreat and she was encountering fears and insecurities and sorrow and the most painful was this personal sense of failure that so many of us have. And so we'd recognize and allow and investigate and feel in the body some, but it was hard because the thoughts of something's wrong with me were pretty strong. So it was hard to self-nurture. Well, one day, Shahara came in, to an interview with a really cheerful smile and she said to me, I went to church this morning.

And I was really surprised. I said, you did. And she said, oh yes, I went to church and we sang the gospel and it was rich and beautiful. And so my mind was trying to imagine it how she was leaving our secluded campus and getting in a car and driving on the highway and gathering with others who were singing. It wasn't exactly part of our retreat format, part of our protocol, but you know, I'm a pragmatist, so I figure whatever works. So she went on and she said, oh, I was feeling that same fear and failure while I was at

church. I could feel it really intentionally right here, you know, the clutch in the heart. So I started praying for love and I found myself wrapping Jesus like a shawl around me and the peace just filled my heart and I haven't taken the shawl off, that loves warming me up and it's reminding me I am love, I am love. Okay, so with an inner jolt for me, I realized Shahara had gone to church in a very energetic metaphorical way and had been blessed. So she continued and said, well, and I'm wearing the shawl while I'm walking those hills

and while I'm sipping my tea and standing in line at lunch and she gave me a kind of mischievous look And so, yeah, even in the shower tar, you know, I'm wearing that jol. So we laughed, you know. She knew I had to track her a bit and we had that kind of fun together. So as I mentioned, Shahar is not with us in form but her spirit is and the message of this story is that there are many ways that we can find nurturing. And each of us, everyone I know has to kind of find and customize and refine our own pathways. And sometimes, again, it's from ourselves.

We put our hand on our heart and offered inward and sometimes it's a feeling of it flowing in from some larger sense of belonging. But ultimately, it's the same field of loving. You know, we see the reaching out to a larger belonging, a larger source in the story of the Buddha in the morning of his enlightenment that he had woken up through all the challenges and the final challenge that came at him as he kind of woke up that morning under the Bodhi tree is just what we're exploring in this talk is self-doubt. So what he did was he called on the earth goddess, which is this larger belonging,

the web of life and love, to bear witness. And there are many versions of the myth, but after calling on the earth goddess, this web of loving life, the goddess became visible through thunder and lightning and the god of the shadow side, Mara, who was really creating all the doubts withdrew. And that's when the Buddha realized true freedom. And I'm sharing this myth because it's so, deep in us this doubt about ourselves, about our intrinsic goodness. And just like the Buddha, we need to call in love. We just need to call in love, whether it's from the earth goddess

or from our ancestors or friends. One friend here described how when she was stuck she'd stroke her cat and that would reconnect her and give her the energy and the space to open up to what's here. So we each find our pathways. And then the key is to practice the pathway a lot because whatever you practice gets stronger. I know for myself, you know, what works for me is envisioning a field of love and light, very intimate kind of presence and just to sense that presence blessing me, you know, kissing me on the brow, holding me dear. And I, I invoke it so regularly, thousands and thousands of times, that it's very immediate that that loving presence can be here.

So practice, it gets stronger. The mindfulness and compassion of rain helps undo the trance. But often people do rain and they miss what I think is probably the most critical moment, which is after the four steps, which each have some doing to them. I call it after the rain where the key moments are to just stay and notice the quality of presence that's emerged. And then notice the shift from where you started, which is usually a very solid, separate, deficient sense of self, to this presence that doesn't really have a boundary and that's

often very tender. you begin to trust that this presence is more the truth of who you are than any story you've ever been telling yourself. Getting familiar with this presence, trusting this presence, that's the pathway of freedom. So during after the rain, it's like for Shihara, the reminder, I am love. We realize who we are. So our inquiry, in this talk really is how to repair our heart when we're stuck in self-rejection or self-doubt. And we need this kind of inner pathway of spiritually repairing ourselves, this inner rain. But I also want to name that the same wounding and need for repairs happening on a societal level

when there's a rejection, a violation of parts of the whole. And I mentioned early on we're a traumatized society. There's no unconditional belonging. All of us feel a degree of severed belonging. And one of the most immediate compelling places of severed belonging is race, centuries of violation. We need collective pathways of responding to societal. suffering because as long as it's there it will keep imprinting each of our lives.

So I want to, in this closing part of this talk, name a very beautiful example of this kind of collective repair work because the longer I practice and teach the more I see it that we can't separate our inner work from societal work. And the example that has been very much inspiring me over the last couple of years is Brian Stevenson, who's a lawyer for those on death row, is a social justice activist, deeply wise being. And he helped create the Legacy Museum, which is built on a site in Montgomery, Alabama, where enslaved people were once warehoused. And there's exhibits that really bring to life the enslavement and the racial terror lynchings and the continued rampant incarceration and all the violations of black people's bodies and minds.

He created this museum with the understanding, we need places where we can have rituals of facing truth and holding with an awake heart. Just the way we need to do an inner practice where we face truth and hold with tenderness. We need to do it collectively for the collective of wounds. He shares one particular story that I'll share with you that they've been doing a initiative where they'd have people go to lynching sites and collect soil from the lynching site and put in a jar. And he describes how in the museum they have hundreds of jars of soil collected from these sites with the name of the lynching victim, the date. Very powerful. And it gives people an opportunity to do something tangible to go and

do something restorative, redemptive. So people go to these places, these lynching sites, and collect that soil. And he describes one middle-aged black woman who was really nervous about going to a lynching site by herself. But she did it. They gave her the jar and I'll read you. We gave her the memo. She went out to this lynching site, which was in a remote area. She got really nervous, but she decided to do it. She went to the place where the lynching took place. She was about to start digging when a truck drove by. There was this white man in the truck who slowed down and stared at her. And then she said, the truck stopped and turned around and drove back by.

The man stared at her some more. And then she said the truck stopped. And this big white guy got out and started walking toward her. She was very nervous. And we tell people that you don't have to explain what you're doing if you want to to say you're just getting dirt for your garden, feel free to say that. And that's what she intended to do. But when this white man walked up to her and you said, what are you doing? She said, something got hold of me. And I turned to that man, I said, I'm digging soil because this is where a black

man was lynched in 1931 and I'm going to honor his life. And she said she was so scared that she started digging really fast. And then the man stood there and he said, does that paper talk about the lynching? And she said, yes, it does. And then he said, can I read it? And she gave the man the paper. And he stood there reading while she was digging. And then he put the paper down and stunned her by asking, would it be okay if I helped you? And then she told me that this white man got in his knees and she offered him the little plow to dig the soil and he said, no, no, no, use that. And he started throwing his hands into the soil with such force. And it's hands were getting coated with this black soil and they were turning black and he was putting

them in the jar but he kept throwing his hands and it moved her and she said the next thing she knew she had tears running down her face and he stopped and he said oh I'm so sorry I'm upsetting you and she said no no no no you're blessing me and they kept putting the soil in the jar and they got the jar almost full and she noticed toward the end that the man was slowing down and that his shoulders were shaking. And she turned and she looked and she saw the man had tears running down his face. And she stopped and she put her hand on his shoulder. She said, are you all right? And that's when the man said to her, he said, no, no. I'm just so worried it might have been my grandparents that were involved in lynching this man. And she said they both

sat there with tears running down their face. Now, beautiful things like that don't always happen, Brian writes, when you tell the truth about history. But he goes on, he says, but until we commit to some acts like that, until we tell the truth, we deny ourselves the beauty of redemption, the beauty of restoration. It's still hard for me to read that story. It just brings up this longing that together we face the truth of history. and what continues today, that we hold this pain in a way that moves us to repair, that we care enough to repair, to realize true belonging.

And so today we're exploring caring about repairing our own hearts, that it takes commitment. If you are turned on yourself and through this retreat you deepen your dedication and say, I'm not going to believe my thoughts. I'm going to feel what's here. I'm going to really feel what's here and hold it with kindness. Your heart will wake up. And if we together do that, if we see where the collective wounds are, where the horrors of our history are still unfolding,

and together we let ourselves feel, let ourselves feel, our hearts will bring us to respond in a caring way. So I want to close, if we can, together just in a simple way, invite you to, in whatever way helps you turn your attention inward. Feel your breath, feel your body breathing. Let yourself come back right here, right now, listening to your heart, feeling your heart, sensing what might be asking for attention in this moment. any way you may have turned on yourself in the last days and the last moments.

And if you'd like to put your hand on your heart, please do. Just sense that in this moment you can offer some message and some energetic care, some tenderness inward. And if that's hard to feel it coming from some larger source, just let it come in. And sense who you are when you're offering love. of inward when you're letting yourself receive a bit, since who you'd be if you didn't believe anything was wrong. Who would you be? A favorite verse from Rumi, I must have been incredibly simple or drunk or insane to sneak into my own house and steal money to climb over the fence

and take my own vegetables. But no more. I've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. The universe and the light of the stars come through me. I am the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival into that open heart space now, sensing the boundless field of heart space that includes all beings, no superior, no inferior, just sensing the sweetness, truth, and grace that comes when we sense our belonging to this field of loving awareness. Taking a few full breaths, bring yourself right here with your eyes open if they've been closed. So I want to thank you for your attention and your beautiful hearts, offering you all blessings.

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