Tara Brach - Saying "Yes" - Meeting Your Edge and Softening (2018-07-25)

Episode Date: July 27, 2018

Saying "Yes" - Meeting Your Edge and Softening (2018-07-25) - Our habitual ways of avoiding unpleasant experience keep us from intimacy with our inner life and with each other. This talk helps us recognize these often unconscious patterns that keep us identified with a separate, threatened self, and offers guidance in saying "yes" to the life we encounter. As we release resistance, we discover the creativity, wisdom and love that express our unbound, true, nature. Listen to accompanying meditation: Saying "Yes" to Life Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. There's a well-known Tibetan master from the 11th century, Nalaripa, and he was known for composing all these wonderful stories and songs, and I'd like to share with you the most famous of them, the one that I've heard the most. In this, he describes himself as leaving his cave to gather firewood. And when he comes back, he finds that the cave is filled with demons. I mean, they've totally taken over the joint.

And so they're everywhere. And his first thought is, okay, I've got to get rid of these guys. So he plunges at them and he tries to push them away and fight them and so on, tries to force them. They're totally unfazed. In fact, the more he tries to get rid of them, the more they kind of settle back and, you know, really get comfortable. So he realizes he's failed miserably at fighting the demons. So his next approach is he's going to teach them the Dharma. Now, by that means he's going to

kind of try to be rational and explain to them why they can go bye-bye, you know, basically. So that's what he does. And he talks about existence and non-existence and impermanence and compassion and kindness. And they just stared at him with these big bulging eyes kind of glazed over. That didn't work. So he takes a deep breath of surrender and he gets that they're not going to be manipulated into leaving. And so he kind of comes to some wisdom. He says, okay, I'm going to find out what they have to teach me, you know, let them be and just be open to their teachings. And when he does that, most of them bow and dissolve, except one. And so it is with our life.

There's always that one really core thing that does not go away very easily. And so that's the especially fierce demon that stays. And so he goes even further. And he walks over to the demon and he says, okay, take me, eat me. And he just kind of sticks his head in the demon's mouth. and that one dissolves also. So, I like the story mostly because they don't go away easily and it just is kind of archetypal that, you know, we try everything we can.

We really do when we are facing the shadow of our own unwanted experience, whether it's fear or shame or jealousy or anger or whatever it is, when we're in our cave and this stuff is coming up, we first go through all the try to get rid of them, we try to fight them, we try to push them away, and then our resistance gets subtler and subtler. And eventually there's some wisdom in us that knows to stop fighting, to truly authentically say yes.

basically say yes to the life that's right here. I remember, and this was in the early 1990s, I was at a retreat, and I kind of went through the stages that described in the story, I was there and I just was getting separated, I was in this whole thing over custody, my mind was in turmoil, I mean the demons were going wild, they had taken over. And so I started this practice I came to call a yes meditation, which we just practiced here together, where whatever came up, I would just mentally whisper yes. I would say, okay, yes, I wasn't feeling well. I had a kind of sinus infection. So yes to this kind of achy, yucky feeling. And then, you know, yes to the anxiety about what you're,

what's going on at home. At that time, it was cold at, and there was like a windows war. Should we have windows open or closed in the hall we were at? So yes to the windows war and all that agitation in the room, or yes to my impatience with a long-winded teacher or whatever. Everything, I'd go, yes. And at first it was very mechanical. It was kind of like I was going, okay, I'm doing this accepting thing,

and maybe everything will change if I keep throwing acceptance. acceptance at it, you know. But then it became kind of entertaining, it kind of engaged my attention. And then I noticed I'd say yes and there'd be kind of a pause and there'd just be some tenderness surrounding whatever I was saying yes to. And then it got even deeper that I'd say yes and there was such a spaciousness that I realized that there was no real resistance in my body or mind to the life that was happening. There really was a sense of flow, a freedom. And that was the retreat that the phrase, the boundary to what we accept is the boundary to our freedom. That phrase, the boundary to what we accept is the boundary to our freedom, kind of became

at the center of my path. And it was after that that I started teaching. about saying yes to life. And that was the seed for me of writing radical acceptance, that sense that it was only when truly say yes, that there was that quality of open-heartedness and inner freedom. And the other side of it is, what we might call our evolutionary conditioning, is that when we're in a very small sense of self,

basically when the limbic system is dominant, we're saying no an awful lot. I mean, everything in us is contracting and at war and judging and anticipating danger, you know, the negativity bias. So my most simple understanding of how come we meditate is to wake us up out of that limbic dominance, that no to life, and activate the more recently evolved parts of our brain that know how to pay attention in a way that we're not so identified and know how to pay attention in a way that we can feel tenderness towards the life that's here rather than be oppositional.

So that's going to be our exploration tonight saying yes and looking at the stages of of how we resist and how it gets subtler and what can support us in a very radical way of opening our hearts to this life. And in particular, to look at how our sense of identity shifts. Because when we're saying no, it's a very familiar sense of a defended, oppressed, victimized self. Does that make sense? And we say yes, we really kind of don't know who we are anymore.

It gets very mysterious. The strategy of saying yes. One way of understanding it is we meet our edge and soften. And that's not my phrase. It's a Tibetan teacher and I just think it's so good. We just, whatever's coming up, because we feel the edge, you know, the edge of judgment. or fear, whatever it is, anger, just meet it and present, softening. So let me say a little bit more about what I mean by yes.

I'm really talking about in a moment of saying yes, we're directly contacting the experience that's right here and letting it be. There's not really a doing or undoing resistance. if anything, it's an undoing. It's essential quality of mindfulness, noticing and letting be. Now, there are a handful of misunderstandings, just similarly that ways people misunderstand acceptance, as we were talking about.

There's misunderstandings. And one of them is that when we say yes, it means we like something. It's like, yeah, I like this rancid odor, or yeah, I love it. I love being anxious and gripped or whatever it is. I love the feeling I get now that I've been fired for my job and I can't find one. So just to say that yes does not mean we like something. Yes is this honest acknowledgment of, oh, this is how it is right now and letting it be as it is,

not fighting reality. We're not saying yes to some outside person or situation. We're not saying, oh, you're abusing me? Yeah, go ahead. It's not like that. It doesn't mean we're being passive. You can say yes, and I think of this a lot because I remember when I first wrote radical acceptance, we had just invaded Iraq and people would say, well, does that mean it's okay that we invaded Iraq?

And back then there were threats to the environment coming from the government in terms of policy, even way back then. And does it mean we accept this, you know, that we're destroying our ecosystem? Yes doesn't mean that. What we're saying is yes to the despair I feel about that or the fear I feel about that or the anger. We're saying yes, acknowledging this is how I feel. is actually, when you say yes to this moment, you can act in the next moment for much more

intelligence and clarity and kindness. So it's not passive in any way. Yes also does not mean you're confirming a limiting belief. Let's say you have a belief that you're totally inadequate. Saying yes doesn't mean you're going, yep, that's true, I am really, I'm screwed up. up, you know, in my life, you know, it's not that. What we're saying yes to is, yeah, there's a thought going on about this and it gives me a squeezing feeling, you know, yeah, to that, yes to the feeling of shame, it's here. Okay, so you're in your own cave and you're feeling

the demons of hurt or fear, anxiety, or lust or whatever it is. And let's look at what happens. and we'll use Milarepa's stages of more subtle resistance to take a look. Because you can't really wake up yes unless you see how you say no. And no is often unconscious. The limbic system acts in a very quick way. It's very reflexive. We're not so aware of it. Many of you have heard me talk about how Joseph Campbell describes that big circle of awareness

and the line that goes through it and whatever is above the lines in our conscious awareness and below the line is unconscious. No happens often in our unconscious mind and it's so familiar that we're not really paying attention. So here we are and we're in the cave and the first know is that, more belated kind of resistance where basically I want to get rid of this feeling. It's really a sense that something's wrong. And what are the ways we say no? You might be thinking for yourself, how do you say no? What if hurt comes up? What if you feel hurt by another person? Well, no often comes in the form of lashing out. We very quickly start blaming that.

person rather than yes to the feeling of hurt, like, ooh, this hurts. We flip right into the know of your bad, you're wrong, why this is unfair. Okay, so in this cartoon you've got a therapist and on the couch is a praying mantis. And this praying mantis is not looking at all repentant. And he's saying, honestly, doctor, I try to keep the channels of communication open and listen. But it was just so much easier to eat them. So, okay, so we're aggravated and we attack. So that's one of the ways that we say no.

What happens when we feel lust or desire? So quickly our no is a feeling of shame. I shouldn't be feeling this. Something's wrong with me for feeling this. There's a Zen story of an old woman. woman who's been supporting a monk for 20 years, you know, lets him live in a hut on her property and so on. And she sends a beautiful young girl to deliver his meal in her place. And she instructs the girl to embrace the monk and see his response.

So he stands stuck still and when asked afterwards what it's like, here's what he says, like a withering tree on a rock in winter, utterly without warmth. furious the woman throws him out and burns down his hut exclaiming how could I have wasted all these years on such a fraud we deny what we're feeling we make it wrong we make it bad what happens when fear comes up what do we do most of us there's different directions we go a lot of us speed up and get busy and try to do something there's a sense that at least if we're doing something we're in some way in control. So we just start getting activated. Sometimes when fear comes we get depressed. We go to sleep a lot. We medicate a lot. There's a saying that when

women are depressed they eat or shop. When men are depressed, they attack another country. So again, we're really just talking about different responses to the demons. Rather than feeling what we're feeling. And it's fine if you're listening to translate this to our culture because of course it translates. A culture that can't deal

with its fear, that can't open to it, what does it do? It makes others bad and wrong. It builds walls. It attacks. It says, me first and me only and everybody else and especially the most vulnerable

get attacked. So we can translate. A big one is that we, the demon that we work with is feeling like we're not enough, a sense of inadequacy, a sense of imperfection. And how do we deal with it? Rather than just feel it and feel uncomfortable, we pretend, we put on our, you know, some sort of an act, we cover it over, we pretend we're okay. One, a story that was told by a newly graduated MD, he was doing his, you know, a newly graduated,

his residency and obstetrics. And he described how he really did become embarrassed when he was performing pelvic exams. And he had formed this unconscious habit, his way of getting away from his embarrassment. He would whistle as he was performing the exam. Okay, so here he is and he's one such exam he's doing and he's whistling and there's this middle-aged woman that she suddenly burst out laughing. And that makes him even more embarrassing. Oh my gosh, was I tickling you? What's going on? And she has tears running down her face. She's laughing so hard. She has no doctor, but the song you were whistling was, I wish I were an Oscar Meyer Weiner. So pick which song you whistle well. Now here's the thing. With each demon and each time that we're running away,

we add on another demon and the basic demon we add on when there's fear, when there's hurt, when there's anger is the demon that says something's really wrong with me, I'm bad for feeling this. And that's what in Buddhism is described as the second arrow. So all these other emotions are happening but the second arrow is

we've already been shot by the arrow of one difficulty emotion, the second arrow is and I'm bad for feeling this. Okay? And so that's the, often that core demon, the last one to go, is that core sense of I'm bad, something's wrong with me. Does that resonate for you? That's the last one often? It's very core. So for Milarepa, what he found was all the different ways of trying to manipulate the demons or control. told them to go away didn't work. That's the beginning of insight. We see that resisting, grasping, manipulating doesn't relieve the suffering. So we've all seen it. I mean, I can say for myself that all the self-judgment, I think that part of what turned me towards radical

acceptance was it just became so clear that at all of the self-judgment, I think that part of what turned me towards radical acceptance was it just became so clear that adding that second arrow over and over again and it becomes a third, fourth, fifth arrow because then you start blaming yourself for blaming yourself and then goes on and on, you know. It wasn't helping. All the self-improvement projects, which is a more subtle kind of controlling, it never brought me closer to enough. In fact, all it did was confirm that I needed to keep working really hard to be better. So our strategies don't work. They just confirm this sense of a limited, embattled self. Before we go on to level two, we're going to just pause here and look at how are you saying no? When you're in the cave, how are you doing what Melaripa initially

did. And so for this you might want to close your eyes and come into a way to sit where you can really reflect, invite yourself right here and bring to mind a situation that you might have experienced in the not too distant past where there were some demons present. But don't pick something that was traumatizing or super extreme or you won't get any benefits from this. It'll just be overwhelming. So some situation, either in a relating to another person or work, some habit you have where a sense of fear or hurt, embarrassment, something came up, let yourself see the situation close up, visually, maybe where you were, what room you were in, who you were with, remind yourself of the different thoughts and feelings.

And first look for the ways you are saying no, that you were battling the demons and it could be this basic undercurrent of this shouldn't be happening. There is something wrong going on here. Could be through judging another person. Could be through judging yourself. be through ignoring it and getting really busy, pretending. Saying no is any way that you dealt with the demons other than truly allowing and letting be. So notice how you were saying no. This is an opportunity to bring above the line the different limbic reactions and see if you can do it

without adding judgment. Because then it'll be valuable to you if you don't at judgment. And you might increase the no by just mentally whispering no, like sending no, this is bad, this shouldn't be happening, just to really sense what is it like when you're fighting the demons, saying no to life? How does it feel in your body and in your mind? What's your sense of yourself when you're fighting the demons, when you're saying no? And do you like yourself? You might take a few full breaths and notice whatever's going on here. Notice the nose.

Notice the demons that have been brought up. And for the next few moments, explore meeting your edge and softening. Just mentally whisper yes and see what happens. Yes is just letting be. It's like, okay, it's like this. Letting be this fear. fear, letting be this sadness or this shame or this hurt.

Yes. Notice what happens in your body and in your heart when you say yes. What's the sense of yourself of who you are when you're saying yes? And can you imagine in the days and weeks to come when this comes up, this situation? Noticing the conditioning, the natural human conditioning of the limbic system to say no, to avoid pain, to fight, and gently letting be, saying yes, sensing the possibilities of that. As you're ready, you can open your eyes or if you'd prefer to listen and meditate with

your eyes closed, that's fine. A couple of comments, the teaching here is not that yes is good and no is bad. No is natural and yes is possible. And there are times that if we're feeling really strong feelings, it's not going to be helpful to say yes, we can get overwhelmed. We can get flooded with emotions that are too much to handle. And at those times we have to say yes to our no. We have to say not right now and that's okay too.

So often though we're in the habit of thinking we can't handle it and we can. And what we find is that no is very contracted and it correlates with a very tight sense of self. And yes, introduces us to who we can be when we're courageous enough or willing or able to begin to be with the life that's here without resisting. Okay. That's demons exercise number one. We're going to do one more as we go on. But let's look at Melorapas' other levels

because there are more subtle levels of not letting things be as they are. And the second one, remember, he's going to teach the demons the Dharma. And that's when we use kind of egoic mental controls. Like we'll try to think our way to another state of mind. tell ourselves, you know, if another person's hurt us, well, they didn't mean it or they're having a hard day or something like that or I'm being too sensitive, I'm taking things personally, it's impersonal, everything's impersonal, don't take it personally, or everything's going to change, or we'll give ourselves some platitudes or some broad statements. In some way, we're still

trying to control things. We're still trying to get rid of the feeling, but we're trying to kind of talk ourselves out of it. In spiritual teachings, this is called spiritual bypass, where we might be feeling anger at somebody and we'll throw a whole lot of the meta-meditation at it. You know, we'll just keep wishing them all these good things, but we're just feeling a lot of anger and we're covering it over, you know, and it's very inauthentic. Or we'll think equanimity, that's the way to be and we'll try to just act really unruffled and even and just deny that we're really upset. So again, the equation is pain times resistance equals suffering.

And even when the resistance is more subtle, we're not like bashing the demons over the head, we're trying to talk sense into them, it's still resistance. And there's still a self there trying to control things and deep down feel that feeling oppressed and victimized. So our insight grows. We go, oh, there's not really freedom with this either. And that's when an insight, when it's real, when it's very immediate, helps us to let go a bit and say, okay, these demons are here, for these moments, they belong.

And to me, those are magic words. Right? just this moment, whatever waves are in the ocean, there are the waves are in the ocean. They belong. They don't have to always be there but right now they're here. And this is where when we start moving towards being with and letting the situation grow us, teach us. Remember, Melorap? He said, teach me. We start waking up through the situation. It's like Carl Rogers says, it's not until I accept it. and myself, just as I was, that I was free to change.

We start getting that, that the transformation comes out of the acceptance, out of the yes. And that's a liberating realization. I'll give you an example of one man who kind of had to go through some of these stages until they got to, okay, just be with it. and what makes it possible to really be with it. And this was a minister who his marriage had reached an impasse, and his wife basically said, unless we can have more intimacy, I can't stay.

And she basically said, you're always great, you know, counseling everybody else, but really you're very detached. And, you know, she wanted him to look her in the eye and to say I love you and to be able to be vulnerable. And the more she asked for his intimate presence, the more defended he was, but he knew that her feedback was accurate. And he was really down in himself. He had a very harsh inner critic. And he felt like an apostor.

I mean, he knew that he preached about love and about connecting and intimacy and so on. and he was fine when he was people's spiritual advisor, but he couldn't be close. So we started exploring bringing mindfulness and heartfulness, bringing this quality of yes to whatever he was encountering in his body and his heart and his mind. And basically what he was encountering was fear, I'm going to lose my mind. my wife. He was encountering shame, there's something wrong with me, and a profound loneliness that had always been there but now he was kind of dropped into it. So he was saying yes, yes to the fear, yes to the shame and the loneliness and he felt like he was faking it because it was

horribly unpleasant and he wanted it to go away. So he realized he needed to be to forgive the suffering for being there. And that was very profound. It was like, I don't have to like it. But I have to forgive. In other words, let it be true. This is suffering. It's like, yes, in its core for him was this honesty of saying,

okay, I'm suffering. Engaging that directly. And when, as soon as he had that realization, Okay, I have to forgive that they're suffering here. There started to be some tenderness and his way of understanding it was the love of God was coming through him. He was beginning to feel God's love. And the more he could sense that, this love that was holding him, the more he began to really say yes to the core pain.

Like really in a cellular way let it be there. not resisted at all. And there's this spiral that happens. And some of you've experienced it and you will experience it, that the more deeply you say yes, the more tenderness and love wakes up. And that lets you say yes even more deeply. Because tenderness and love is a sense of belonging

and if you can feel it, you can start surrendering into it. And the surrendering is what we're, really frees us in his relationship. And this was over a number of months. He was clearly very, very raw and vulnerable and that allowed his wife to be more real and allowing with him. She wasn't so, I have to have you be a certain way. She tenderized.

And he said for the first time, and I think it was 26 years, we can feel each other's hearts. I share this story because when we say yes, there's something we need to really say yes deeply and that is some quality of gentleness or tenderness. Otherwise, yes can be like this hammer. We're going, yes, yes, yes, and it's another doing and it's another controlling. But if it's tender, it has a receptivity to it and a presence that actually. actually helps us to quiet the limbic system and define more openness and freedom. I like the language of surrender and this is Melarapas' final stage.

He put his head in the demon's mouth, okay? And to me, what that says is it's no longer a sense of a self saying yes. A self really can't say yes, our ego is actually organized around no. trying to control things. It's trying to keep us safe. It's trying to get certain things, but it's always trying to control. Yes, is like this radical discontinuing of egoic control. Now, just in case you're wondering, well, that could be problematic. We have to navigate. And we have to take care of ourselves. And the people I know who have most profoundly surrendered It still know how to cross the street when it's a green light and not cross when it's

a red light and take care of their kids and not put their hand on burning stoves and all that stuff. We still know how to navigate. But deep down our identities not organized around the defensiveness of no. And that comes, that experience of the who we are beyond the defended ego comes when we've known real surrender. One of the times that I most had that experience, I had been in a very long stretch of feeling ill and I had a lot of thoughts identifying as sick person and I was at a retreat and I was exploring Qigang which is sending chi and energy to, you know, the pain and the

few years and I found that I was trying to control, I was using Qigang as just another method to try to control my body. And I remember at one point saying, I can't do this, I can't control my thoughts, I can't control my body, I give up. And then there was this sense of, wow, I really can't. There's no, a self can't do that. and something just let be what got allowed was the worst projections and thoughts

the huge clench in my gut in some way it was just like okay that insight of I can't control allowed all of that pain and clutch and tension to be there but in that allowing a space opened a real spaciousness open that absolutely was filled with tenderness. The more deeply I surrendered, the more spaciousness there was.

And again, I can't say I surrendered. Surrendering happened out of the realization that there's no way to control. Now, that might sound like words right now, and the starting point is just this intention to say yes, because of the way to control. there's a wisdom place in each of us that gets that fighting reality will never bring us freedom. And if the reality is that we're lonely, or we're angry, or we're hurting, there's some intelligence in each of us that knows that if we can open to that, there'll be some openness, some space, some presence that actually is healing.

Our deepest resistance is to loss. Everything in us wants to avoid loss and yet what I have found for myself is that in saying yes, if I say yes deeply enough, I'll come to a grief. Basically I'm saying yes to loss. I'm no longer fighting it or pretending it's not happening. And if I can really say yes to grief, I open to the love. that's absolutely the essence of the grief. We're grieving the loss of something we love.

And it's only through grieving we can come back to that loving. So what we're talking about tonight, and I'm going to begin to wrap this up, is really the gifts of saying yes. And how yes, or if you want to consider mindfulness, or radical acceptance, evolves us from being a self-default defined by our limbic and egoic processes. It evolves us. So we get access to awareness and love.

It evolves us. And I want to mention three particular gifts. And one is happiness. And that is that the more you undo, the more you say yes, you start undoing the negativity bias. It's like the whole pathway that keeps looking for what's wrong and what's around the corner that we can't handle. that shifts and instead there's more availability to celebrate. I think of it in children before they're like deeply imprinted with the negativity bias. This is the openness to the wonder and I often think of this wonderful story that Maurice Sendak,

the illustrator tells about a little boy who sends him this charming card with a little drawing on it. Sendak says he loved it. He answers all the letters, children write, but sometimes he lingers over them. So he said, I sent him a card, and I drew a picture of a wild thing on it. And he says, I wrote, Dear Jim, I loved your card.

Then I got a letter back from Ms. Mother, and she said, Jim loved your card so much, he ate it. That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care it was an original Morys Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it. So happiness, there is a patterning in our nervous system that keeps us from happiness, that keeps us fixating on what's wrong.

And it's been described by neuroscientists that the positive emotions like happiness are very available to us because of neuroplasticity, we can retrain our brains. Saying yes, retrains our brain. That's one of them. Creativity. We get locked with no into very rigid patternings. One of the keys to wellness is flexibility. And we get very rigid with no.

So as we begin to say yes, we actually opened all these different opportunities. And I love the metaphor of the Gulf Stream, you know, going through the Atlantic, and they say if you put a straw in the Gulf Stream, like if you're a naysayer, you put it at odds with the Gulf Stream and it just kind of flips around. But if you put it aligned with the Gulf Stream, if you say yes, the Gulf Stream flows through it. You get all the intelligence of the universe flowing through you. So, I found it interesting to think of improv actors and one of the key ways that they operate. And I got a kind of a letter describing one man's experience

with an improv troupe, and they were revealing some of their secrets. And one of the big secrets was, was to accept whatever was happening or whatever one of the other actors said or did. And what they said is it's easier to be creative and think of a response and keep the scene going if you don't reject or oppose the other actors. And the trick is they say, say yes and to everything. Yes, okay, here's how you're feeling or here's how I'm feeling, and. because then it takes it from this reality and opens to possibility, that creativity.

Then there's wisdom. The big teaching from the Milarepa story is, when the resistance is gone, the demons are gone. When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone. It doesn't mean the fear is gone. It means the identification that the fear is gone. And that's a big difference. Because we're not talking about a path that's trying to clear us of difficult emotions.

We're talking about a path that's freeing us from being identified with our more primitive limbic and egoic emotions. So they happen, but we remember who we are and we can respond with wisdom. When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone. And then finally, love. Every one of us can think of when we're in resistance, when we're fighting, and sense what our hearts like. We know it.

We're not available. We can't take in other people's loves. We just don't trust it because we're in that defended mode and we can't trust that, and we don't like ourselves, we can't trust they will love us. And there's not an outflow. We have this longing to love without holding back. We really do. But when we're in that fighting the demons mode, manipulating, there is a contractedness, a protectiveness

at the heart. So let's do our second demons meditation together. We're going back to the cave again. And as you settle in, you might take a few full breaths and take a moment to scan through your body because yes is not truly yes unless we're embodied. It's mental. So you might take a moment to relax and soften your shoulders,

soften your hands. You might sense an openness at the chest, loosening and softening the belly, letting the breath be felt deep in the torso. Feeling this breathing body sitting here. And I invite you again to bring to mind the situation that brings up the demons, whether it's the fear, the hurt, anger, shame.

and bring up the same situation if you want to keep exploring that one, are something different. But again, nothing that's extreme that feels like it has trauma or terror to it because I won't serve you right now. So this could be a situation that's some conflict with another person, something that brings up a lot of anxiety or feelings of inadequacy to do with the other person, to do with work, perhaps to some addictive behavior. And as you bring up the situation, go right to the most challenging place in it, where you feel that the demons are really most activated. You might sense what's the worst part of this situation.

What are you most afraid of? Notice where in your body you're feeling the emotions that come up, maybe the throat or chest or belly. And the invitation is to explore what it means with whatever you're encountering to say yes, to allow it to be there. If it helps to name it, you might name it like fear, okay, yes to the fear. Anger, yes. Loneliness, sadness, yes.

So you're mentally whispering yes, sir, if you don't, I don't want to use the word yes, just the energy of agreeing or allowing to let what's here be here just this moment inside you. Keeping in mind you're not saying yes to another person or their behavior, you're not saying yes to a belief you have, you're just saying yes to what's exactly emotionally experienced right here in your body. You might find, as the minister did, that you're saying yes to the existence of the suffering. You might not like it but you're acknowledging it's here.

You might say yes and add a sense of real kindness. For some you might explore putting your hand on your heart and saying yes and letting the touch itself communicate a real care. For some you may be saying yes to your no. You might sense, no, this is too much. Say yes to that. The beauty of this practice is everything can be included. If you feel distracted right now, just acknowledge and say yes to that.

Your only job is to notice reality in the moment and allow it to be as it is. You might experiment and see just how deeply kind your yes can be, then you might sense when yes is very full, very unconditional, very loving, who are you? What's your experience of your own being? When yes is really awake and full. I invite you to continue exploring this on your own. We'll close together with a poem called the healing time by Pesha Joyce Kurtler. Finally, on my way to yes, I bump into all the places where I said no to my life, all the untended wounds, those coded messages that sent me down the wrong street again and again. And I lift them one by one close to my heart and I say,

holy holy and I lift them one by one close to my heart and I say holy holy closing by sending to your own being whatever wish or blessing you'd like to offer in these final moments and we close together just sensing our wish for the world may all beings discover the blessings of yes of embracing this life just as it is. May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.