Tara Brach - River of Change - Part 2 - Bringing a Wise Heart to this Impermanent Life (2017-10-11)

Episode Date: October 13, 2017

River of Change - Part 2 - Bringing a Wise Heart to this Impermanent Life (2017-10-11) - These two talks look at how we relate to change - especially the notable changes involving loss of relationships and our own body and mind. We examine our strategies for avoiding uncertainty and fear; the consequences of resisting reality; our refuges of presence and compassion in the face of grief; and the gifts of opening fully to the river of change. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Welcome and namaste. Our last class was on the really opening to this river of change, talk on impermanence. And we're going to continue with the teaching that really as we open to change, we discover an open-heartedness. that the more we are able to open to the challenges and beauty and unfolding of our life, the more we sense the who we are beyond the changes. We kind of come into a sense of really what we might call the timeless.

And so, as you know, opening to the river of change includes opening to the deepest losses. And that's really we're going to focus in tonight, really, how to open to grief and to the pain of separation. And you might hear that and be thinking, okay, here we go. And it's a heavy ride and all that. And one friend I was just talking to said, well, the bad news is with loss and grieving is you have to go through it. And the good news is you can go through it. and there is buried in grief a love that is totally sacred. So there is a gift to this very natural process of opening to loss that we'll be exploring.

And I'd like to start with a story that I love. And in this story, a troubled widower makes his way to talk to a wise old woman about his troubles. and she receives him and they go for a walk along a stream and she can see the pain in his face and he begins to tremble as he asks really what's the point and what's the meaning really to life because he's just gone through a crushing loss so she invites him to sit down on a stone

and near the stream and she takes this long branch and she's kind of dipping into the stream and swirling in in the water and she says, it all depends on what it means to you to be alive. And in this sorrow, the man dropped his shoulders and the old woman gave him the branch. Go on, she said. Touch the branch to the water. As he poked the branch in the running stream,

there was something comforting about feeling the water in his hand through the branch. She touched his hand and said, You see that you can feel the water without putting your hand in the water. This is what meaning feels like. The troubled man seemed puzzled. She said, close your eyes and feel your wife now gone. That you can feel her in your heart without being able to touch her. This is how meaning saves us.

The widower began to cry. The old woman put her arm around him. No one knows how to live or die. We only know how to love and how to lose and how to pick up branches and meaning along the way. You can feel the water without putting your hand in the water. The moments of meaning in our life are the moments when we connect and intuit something larger, not something we can see or even put into words, but something we can experience in a being kind of way.

That's what meaning is. It's intuiting and connecting to something larger. This is the refuge in moving through grief that we begin to sense how we can touch the branch to the water and still be in contact with what we love. Does that make sense right now this much? Because this is what we're going to be building on. So grief is this natural emotion. It happens to humans and to other social species and it happens when we've lost something

that we love. And so this is very universal. Where it becomes a portal to spirituality to a timeless kind of loving is when there's that breaking open that happens as we accept loss. It's in that kind of tearing apart that we actually become more open, we can metabolize the loss and live actually in a more open and alive and loving way. Young wrote, Embrace your grief for there the soul will grow. So we start to understand grief as soul work that if we bring our presence to it, and I don't

mean a willfulness, I just mean a willingness to pay. attention. It is soul work. That's where the soul can grow. And I love the way Naomi Nye puts it. She said, before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow, you must speak it till your voice catches the threat of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. So we explore this together They're sensing, grieving not as this bad thing when something awfuls happen, but as this natural way that this human body mind processes and can wake up.

And we explore it with that kind of understanding both to look at how do we avoid that? of us to some degree are going to avoid the very portal that can free us because we're conditioned that way. So how do we avoid it? Like what are our ways of avoiding grief or bearing it? And how do we turn towards it and what are the gifts? So that's kind of our exploration for the time. Now in the last class when we were talking about the River of Change, you know I talked about the controller and how every one of us has within us, I sometimes have describe it as the spacesuit self, which is trying to navigate a difficult environment. Well, the core difficulty is things keep changing.

And these bodies and minds, at least on this planet, seem to deteriorate and then dissolve and go off into the infinite. And everybody we know and love does the same. And the controller, the spacesuit self, it doesn't want that. So it's kind of geared up to try to do the best it can to avoid that. experience of loss. And we all have to some degree a controller that's trying to deal with things. And the controller gets us to behave in good ways so bad things don't happen. You know, the controller tries to have us, you know, in every possible way try to avoid

stuff. And the controller in our culture has us in some way not really face death and dying in a cultural way. I mean we don't really teach our children. in a natural way. It's like death is this bad shadowy thing. So one father was on the beach with his son, his four-year-old son, is very excited. He grabs his hand and leads him to the shore where are seagulls lying dead in the sand. Daddy, Daddy, what happened to him? The son asked.

Well, he died and went to heaven, Dad replied. And the boy thought about it for a while and goes, did God throw him down again? It's like we really don't we think something's wrong with it and there's a story of a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister and a rabbi. They're discussing what they most hope people would say after they die in their bodies or in display and casket.

And the priest says, well, I'd like someone to say he was a righteous man, an honest man, very generous. And then the minister says, well, I'd like someone to say he was very kind and fair, he was good to his practitioners. And the rabbi says, I would hope someone would say, oh, look, he's moving. So you get the idea that we have both in a cultural way and individually, there's something wrong with the story, the way it goes for every one of us and every creature on the planet. It shouldn't be happening.

And then we're trying to navigate and do things just right to avoid. avoid bad things from happening. And we spend a lot of moments in our day figuring out, you know, like you probably notice the figuring out because there's some deep down anticipation that around the corner something is going to occur that'll be too much to handle. So we watch out on every level we're watching out, you know, we're rehearsing what we're going to say to each other and we're planning ahead the sequence of whether we're going to the bank first or Safeway first or the gas station first just because we don't want to lose

time because somehow or other losing time is losing life. So we're always sensing there's not enough time, you know that one. And then we're constantly obsessing about how our bodies are doing. There's one little essay that I share now and then that I love that talks about how the Japanese eat very little fat, suffer fewer heart attacks than the British are the Americans. The French eat a lot of fat and they also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British and Americans. Now the Japanese drink very little red wine and they suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans. And the Italians drink huge amounts of red wine

and they suffer fewer heart attacks. You know, you're getting the idea. The Germans drink a whole lot of beer. They suffer. This is the message. Eat and drink what you like. It's speaking English that kills you. So the controller, it's trying to get it right all the time. Now, my, you know, I've been tracking the ego controller for a bunch of years, but I think I'd never seen the controller so activated as I did. Now, it's probably about eight years ago, where I was in, many of you probably know about this,

I went kind of in a downward spiral of health and got very, very sick and I didn't know really what was wrong and I didn't know if I'd ever get better because, I mean, I was sick enough that I couldn't walk up inclines. I lost a lot of physical mobility and so on. And I was in a cardiac unit for a week and again we didn't know what was going on. But I had to last minute cancel out of a week-long retreat I was supposed to teach. So in that cardiac unit, I watched this nutty neurotic controller mind go crazy. Like I would find myself just obsessing about like what could it be and how much more will I have to give up and what did I do wrong and how did I not take care of myself and what else?

You know, it was just it was non-stop. Anything but opening right to the fear and to the good. grief about what was happening. So I got this firsthand direct experience of rather than sensing, okay, there's grief, this body right now is failing, we don't know but there's grief right here. And then the real grief, I'm missing life, that was the feeling. That deep sorrow, I just kept going and going. Now I'm going to come back to that story because this isn't the end of it, but there's many ways that we avoid facing fear and grief. One of them is the obsessing, staying preoccupied, really staying busy.

You know, there's some people that find on weekends are when they have some free time, it's actually scary because there's this like chasm that opens up of unscheduled time and they kind of fill it in real quickly because there's a sense of a sense of, you know, of real disorientation when we don't have our routines. So there's the busyness. We go on autopilot, get habitual. Sometimes we avoid grieving by blaming, you know, somebody else made a mistake in some way. I've seen families blame doctors a lot and I've seen people blame each other for not really

showing up in different ways and people blaming themselves. are not showing up. So blame is a way that we don't open up to our grieving sometimes and then anger at God. There's just anger. Like this is not just or right in some way shouldn't have happened, okay? So that's a way we, rather than just being with it that we avoid grief. We avoid grief by numbing ourselves by the addictive patterns that help us quiet down the feelings in our body and that's something that a lot of us do.

Anything but taking the time to really open into what David White described as the will of grief, just dropping in. So then the inquiry really for us and I'm going to of course invite you to check this out is so how available are we to the losses in our life? You know, we've all had losses and have we showed up for the grieving? And it's a very, I find that a very intimate and personal question. Like when I ask myself that I say, well, okay, I lost my mom and I lost my dad and have I really gone in?

And have I grieved the moments I've lost, that I, the sense of, you know, because I still go through a lot of rounds of illness. grieved that I don't have a body I can count on. You know, that kind of thing. So we asked ourselves, have we really grieved and not just the obvious things? Many of us were traumatized or had really a lot of wounding in our childhood. You know, have we grieved that? Have we grieved the loss of a childhood due to sexual abuse?

Have we grieved parents' mental illness and neglect that we didn't have the parent that we wanted or needed? Have we grieved the loss of our dreams when we had a dream about being creative in a certain way? The loss of years to addictions, the loss of our own capacity. So it's just a really important inquiry not to in any way get down in ourselves but just to, oh, how can we open our own capacity? ourselves. Have we grieve collectively? We know we haven't as a culture. We know that we numb

ourselves from grieving what's going on to our earth. It's so right there happening right now and you have to numb your body not to feel it in your nervous system. Do you know what I mean by that? It's so painful to see what's happening to this earth. Do we grieve what happens to non-human non-human creatures every day, every day, because in some way we humans think we're separate and above and it's okay to be cruel to satisfy our appetites or whatever. Do we grieve that? And then do we grieve every day the injustice reeked upon the non-dominant parts of our culture, the pushing down, you're not as good as, the real denial of human dignity.

Do we let ourselves grieve these things? So I ask these questions because that's the beginning, that looking is the beginning of deepening attention because we have to grieve to reconnect and find the love. I give you an example. Because when we don't grieve consciously, grief goes into the shadows and it appears as depression, It appears as anxiety, it appears as anger, and it appears as despair. And in families, I've seen so many rounds when something's buried that needed grieving, you know, real abuse in a family, or a loss of a child, or divorce,

it can create separations that aren't bridgeable. Because when we're not grieving, we're pushing it under and then we don't have access in a way to bring our being into connection. So, story to describe this one man some years ago, had worked really hard to hold together marriage and found out his wife had an affair, actually kind of a repeating affairs. And he was absolutely devastated,

and he knew they had a split. And his mind just fixated on, this is so wrong. what you did is so wrong this is so bad you have destroyed our family and he was so angry and bitter it was so he was so filled with and then

what he had and when he saw his own way that he had his responsibility he was angry at himself too his mind was filled with this should be different you're bad I'm bad and he

was doing what I call arguing with reality because it just was what was happening and it was creating a lot of distress and he knew it and he said to me I know this anger is causing more suffering but it's what my mind's doing so I encouraged him not to judge his mind but to keep noticing

underneath that this should be different what he was feeling so every time that narrative it should be different this is bad you're bad okay what's going on underneath what are you really running away from, you know.

So he discovered under that, under the shoulds, both fear and under that grief. He had lost his dream of an intact family of a belonging that was precious to him. He had lost the love of somebody he had trusted. So by saying yes to the grieving, by going through that process and that was a whole process unto itself, rather than being arrested, because it's a developmental arrest by the blame, he got to find that continued aliveness,

that openness, I was talking about, that he could move on in his life, and he could move on in a way that invited his children, and eventually actually his wife too, to be able to move on. When it's not grieved, it's separation. and the appearance of ungrieved grief is a life that feels habitual. There's a kind of routineness to it because we're cut off. Okay, I mentioned David White.

So this is his poem, The Will of Grief. Those who will not slip beneath the still surface on the will of grief, turning downward to its black water to the place we cannot breathe, will never know the source from which we drink, the secret water cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else.

So sometimes there's this misunderstanding that we're conditioned to avoid pain. We're conditioned to wish for something else. Of course we do. Okay, that's... And there can be some wisdom and compassion really when there's a crushing grief to take our time and how we gentle into it, okay? You know, it can be wise to keep ourselves occupied for certain periods of time,

to keep engaged, to actually find a kind of balance, time with other people that buffers from some of the aloneness that we haven't faced, or when we're seeking solitude a lot going ahead and doing that, or reading the books or watching the videos. It's not about jumping off a cliff into grief. It's about staying awake so we can gentle in towards it. Because if we don't, if it becomes our habit to numb and cut off, then we narrow our lives.

We get arrested. There's a wonderful woman, Sobun Fu Somei, and she teaches interesting. internationally, African spirituality, amazing, from the Dagara tribe. And she talks about the inability to grieve on what happens, how it smothers our creativity and our joy and our ability to connect with others. And she says, it may even kill us. And I want to just read you a little bit from her.

She says, for my people, the Dagara tribe of West Africa, we see that in life, in life, it is necessary to grieve those things that no longer. serve us and let them go. When I grieve, I'm surrounded by family, reassuring me that the grieving is worthwhile and I can grieve as much as I want. Then she describes moving to the United States and how different it was being here in the United States and how we relate to grief. She said, in today's world, most of us carry grief and do not even know it. We've been trained at a very young age how not to feel. In the West we're often taught that to be good girls and boys we have to suck it up.

The consequences are that even with your most intimate and trustworthy friends you might feel like I'm burdening them. Crying in front of others is too often a forbidden fruit. We learn to compartmentalize our grief because expressing it in an unwelcoming place will only lead to more grief. We're taught that the people who are closest to us have no way of holding us when we fall apart. Yet we are born fully knowing how to grieve. We cry naturally to feel better, to unburden ourselves and take a few pounds off our shoulders and our souls. So how do we approach grief?

Spend the rest of our time looking at how we really can practice with it. And I got a lot of inspiration from Francis Willer, who's a book on Sarvary. is really quite beautiful. Again, Francis Willer, W-E-L-L-E-R. And he describes as, it's not really training ourselves to, with a particular specific grief, but really how to become an apprentice to sorrow. And he says sorrow is just a part of our life landscape. It's, there are losses and how to really trust and follow and be with the movement of sorrow. He describes, and this is John O'Donohue who language did, that the approach is an approach

of reverence, that sadness and sorrow are really coming from a sense of what we cherish. And if we follow them, if we trace them back, we come to that cherishing. But it requires a kind of reverence to this domain to invite the shadow and the darkness forward, what wants to be included in loving awareness. So it's a practice in the sense that when we agree that our most awake adult self is holding a space for the places in us that are feeling the rupture and the loss to be felt. The most awake part of our heart mind is holding us space for that. And it's attuning, it's listening to the pain.

It's holding it, it's caring for the depth of it. So what it requires is a willingness to stay because the tendency is a lot of us get this kind of an up-willing of feeling something but we're so habituated to have our mind fleet and thicker and go somewhere else. And so it's like, okay, just be here. And then of course we get this resistance like, oh, this is too much or I can't hold this. There's just such deep conditioning not to let go into the one place that most is asking our attention, which is the pain of loss.

There's a classic, a zen-like story of a man being chased like by a tiger, I think it is, and he falls from a precipice because he's running away from the tiger and he finds him himself hanging perilously from this limb. The tiger's kind of going back and forth above and he's on this limb holding on for dear life and there's these jagged rocks, you know, way, way below. So he calls out, you know, is anybody there? Help, help, help. And he hears the booming voice from the heavens, yes. So he goes, God? God, yes. God, can you help me? Yes, you only need to do one thing. And the man said, I'll do anything. And God says, just let go. Is anybody else there?

But you understand. It's the last thing that we want to do is to let go into that pain. So back to the cardiac unit, that was what was going on. It was like my mind wanted to go anywhere but to let go into that. And in fact, the first moment of letting go wasn't when I was alone. but this elderly nurse came in the middle of the night and it's never the middle of the night in the hospital. It's always that awful in-between place. And she looked at me and she said, oh dear, you're feeling poorly, aren't you? And she was like, oh, the grandmother you dream of.

And all of a sudden I was, from my like spinning mind, all of a sudden it was like, you know, I was tearing just because there was another being. She was that wise. adult space that was the container, you know. So I got a glimmer in me, something in me said, okay, I really need to open. But there was a kind of fierceness to the controller that was still trying to figure things out, trying to figure things out. And it wasn't until I think the second of the last day that I was there that finding myself obsessing about canceling this class and what specialist to see and so on.

I was struck by the desperation. And so I said, okay, lying down, let's go lie down and be present. And I thought of, there's a Tibetan teacher I always love Chogium Trunkpa. And he has a phrase that our practice is to meet our edge and soften. Just to meet our edge and soften. So I just kept trying that I'd meet this edge of kind of fear and and I just try to soften and then I could feel the grief coming up and it could soften. And it felt like this gaping hole that I would, if I let go into I would just die.

That's the way it felt. And so everything in me, as many of you know I practice often when I'm really stuck, put my hand on my heart and from that more wise heart place they just, it's okay sweetheart, just soften, relax. So kind of letting go. And it was a crushing sense of fear and loss like I was losing my life. But the more I let go into it, the more I was really touching this sense of tender space that had room.

That's the only words I have for it. That I kept letting go and letting go until there was an openness and a tenderness that was very loving, that was holding all the grieving. And that was the moment there was a shift in identity. And by the way, that's the key in waking up, is a shift in identity where we go from the small self that's doing anything but grieving or else the grieving self that feels absolutely crushed to a tender loving awareness that's including those waves but is not caught inside them. It's more of a sense of that timeless presence. It's the branch that's touching the water.

There's a moment of meaning of sensing, oh, this is it. This is the wholeness of being that has room for the grief, for the loss of this life, for the loss of other lives. So I can say in retrospect I've had many, many rounds of meeting the edge and softening, but but more and what more that pathway is the soul work that is reliably, reintroduces me to a sense of timeless loving presence. Every time I go through the portal of grieving, I discover that open-heartedness that has room. Many of you I know and love Mary Oliver, the poet,

and her partner 40 years died some years ago. And she wrote a poem called The Uses of Sorrow and she said, in my sleep I dream this poem, Someone I loved once gave me a box of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too was a gift. So my understanding is her partner's death for all the anguish was a gift and that she spent a lot of her poetry

opening up this box of darkness and I want to read one of her poems that is in that spirit that we're talking about but really how do we bring our human hearts to grieving? And this poem is called Heavy. That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying. I went closer and I did not die. Surely God had his hand in this as well as friends. Still, I was bent and my laughter as the poet said was nowhere to be

found. Then said my friends Daniel, brave even among lions, it's not the weight you carry but how you carry it. Books, Brex's grief, all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it, when you cannot and would not put it down. So I went practicing. Have you noticed? Have you heard the laughter that comes now and then, now and again out of my startled mouth? How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind and maybe also troubled

roses in the wind, the sea geese on the steep waves, a love to which there is no reply. A love to which there is no reply. This is the present heart. This is the branch touching the water that we sense that love and it's timeless and it's here and it never went away but we don't have access the way we used to. Do you understand? But the meaning, the real connection is still there. In many ways we're talking about how we process grief inwardly, how we learn to stay, how

we open to it, how we soften into it. But it really is meant to be with each other too. Many African cultures believe that for the deceased to be carried to the afterlife, to the ancestors, they have to sail on a river of tears. the river of tears is the shared grieving that comes, it's often amidst a really elaborate celebration of dancing and drumming and singing. We need each other and we need to grieve together. It's the beauty of sitting Shiva if you're Jewish. It's the beauty of any gathering where we have the courage to hold a space and be an apprentice to sorrow together. I wanted to share with you one story

of this that really touched me, a friend. We have in the Buddhist tradition Kalianamita are, they're called spiritual friends groups. And there's a lot of intimacy in them. People gather and every other week and meditate together and sit together and really open their hearts to each other. So in one of these groups that was going on just a minute, I was a minute, I want to see if I can find my sheet on it because I had a quote that I was going to read you from that. There we go. So one of these groups had been going on for five years and they had really been with each other losses of jobs, a struggle to have a child, divorces and so on.

So one woman was struggling a lot with anger and her pattern was always feeling let down by other people and feeling very much of a victim and not getting the social. support her attention, she wanted or needed. And she was single and often felt let down by her married friends. Her background was her mother was very neglectful and narcissistic and sometimes she could be really engaging and charming and then she could get close in and all of a sudden pounce and be vicious. So as an adult this woman was mistrustful and she would periodically connect but often feel disappointed by people. Okay, so her mother had a stroke. and then a second stroke and was suddenly gone

and when this woman was sharing in this spiritual friends group she said I feel utterly dissociated, really cold and I realize I'm still angry at her and I feel terrible to say that but she was never there for me even towards the end when I was taking care of her she never showed real interest so here I am and I'm embarrassed

that here I just lost my mother and I'm actually at best angry at her still. She was kind of looking down when she said all that and she looked up and looked around and the others were sitting there with such attentiveness and kindness and presence that all of a sudden she just started sobbing and she got in touch with the deep grief which is, I'll never have the mother I really longed for. She had to let go of this dream. Somehow her other while her mother was alive, even though rationally she would have known her mother

would never convert into this perfect mother. Somehow her other was until she died that she really got, that she had to grieve the loss of that dream. Does that make sense? Yeah. So two weeks later, she had done some job, journaling. I just wanted to let you know. She wrote one letter to her mother and she expressed her hurt and it wasn't blaming. It was just naming the wounds, just naming the woundedness.

And then she wrote a letter to the mother of her dreams. And there she said what she'd always wanted and what she still wanted and it was to let you know anything and everything and have you look at me with infinite understanding and love. I want to feel held by you, felt by you, known by you. And it went on. And many times as she was reading, her voice broke and in the end everyone had tears. But this was their shared ritual of grieving, of holding that space with her. And this was where she was dipping the branch into the water because she started connecting

in those moments with actually the experience she longed for. of feeling in some sense of presence that was bearing witness. And it actually led her to changing her way of perceiving her biological mother. She started feeling more empathy. She could sense her mother's prison of suffering, you know, what her mother was living with, and also remember other things about her afterwards. So this is really a story of when there's ungrieved grief,

not having a mother. When it's held in that anger, we're arrested, we're kept small. But often we need a container or a ritual for the grieving. We sometimes can't do it alone. It's precious when we have others that can bear witness. It makes a really huge difference. So we've talked a bit about how it can be this portal, how we run away from grieving, the consequences, the possibilities. In the Lakota-Soo tradition, a person whose grieving is considered most Wakan, W-A-K-A-N, and that means most holy. There's a sense that when struck by the loss, by the sudden lightning of loss, that person stands on the

threshold of the spirit world and that their prayers are really powerful. It's proper to ask them for health. And so it is that when we really open to grieving, we feel like we're opening into a mystery. It's like when you're with somebody that's dying, you can feel that. We're opening right into that place where if we stay, we start sensing a formless, timeless presence. Ticknod Han expressed that in a way that I found so compelling. He experienced his mother's death as one of the great misfortunes of his life and describes grieving for her for more than a year and then she appeared in a dream. And in it there having this wonderful talk and she was young and beautiful and he woke up in

the middle of the night and had the distinct impression he had never lost his mother that she was alive in him. And then when he stepped outside his monastery hut and he began walking among the tea plants, he still felt her presence by his side. And this is how he put it, he said so beautiful. He says, she was the moonlight caressing me as she had done so often, very tender, very sweet. And then 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 and I think of that and my understanding is that his year of grieving of directly experiencing this human loss opened him to that that refuge of timeless loving awareness.

He said this is how he put he said 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 it's a practice being apprenticed to our sorrow in a way that we can actually have that branch that's touching the water and sense in any moment, yes, we've lost our childhood, or we've lost our mobility, or we might be on the verge of losing our life or a loved one, and that we always can have access to what's within that but formless and timeless, that dimension of awareness and love. So we started there with the widow and having that branch in the

water and whether you're grieving right now loss of someone else or loss of something within your own life immediately and directly. We have this capacity to see beyond the veils of separation. So let's take just a few moments together to close. And as you invite yourself into presence and into stillness, you might feel the breath at the heart. Just noticing the state of your heart right now, just very honest, listening and connecting to just what's here. You might deepen that listening by whispering yes to however your experience is, whether you feel numb or distracted or tired or tender.

are open, it's really all included. It's meeting whatever edge might be here and softening with yes. Notice what happens. You might scan and sense where there might be an ungrieved loss in your life, whether it's your body right now, the feel of losing life in your body right now, the loss of a dear one that you're experiencing, it's current or past,

or maybe a loss of a part of your own life from the past and just sense into that wise heart that has the intention to offer presence, knowing that it takes patience. But just to feel your intention to be an apprentice to sorrow, to bring a quality of reverence and gentleness and patience,

to ungrieve loss. We're going to close with the words of John O'Donohue. And when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hear in your heart in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. and when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hear where your loved one has awaited your return all the time.

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