Tara Brach - Shame, Healing and Transformation (2020-07-01)

Episode Date: July 3, 2020

Shame, Healing and Transformation (2020-07-01) - Being at war with ourselves blocks us from evolving our consciousness and living from our hearts. This talk distinguishes between toxic and healthy shame, as well as shame about our individual self and our group identity. We explore how, with self-compassion and courageous honesty, we can respond to negative, painful feelings about ourselves in a way that serves awakening and alignment with our deepest values.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. In times of stress in our life, whatever the level, there is a tendency to turn against ourselves. We withdraw. We also lash out at others but in some way we get smaller. We contract. I have a favorite little essay some of you might remember. This is an abbreviated version, that if you can sit quietly after difficult news, if you can during financial downturns remain perfectly calm, if you can see your neighbors, travel

and have fantastic adventures without a twinge of jealousy. If you can happily eat whatever's put on your plate and fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill. If you can always find contentment just where you are, you are probably a dog. So if some of you can sense why I like that so much, it's so true. We are so reactive when we get stressful and we have our repertoire of how we react. And this is where we'll be going more with this talk. Stress, adversity, loss, they also can lead us to tapping our deepest resources to not only adapting but really transforming in a profound way.

And this week what I'd like to do is focus on a key domain that shuts down that capacity to transform, that shuts down that capacity to awaken and how by addressing it we really free ourselves and that domain is shame, self-judgment, self-aversion, being at war with ourself. So that's what we'll look at and I find that the deepest truths are the ones that we most regularly forget. And one of those is if we're at war with ourselves, we can't truly open our hearts to the rest of life. Our hearts are tight. And I circle back. to this regularly from way, way back, because it's a pervasive suffering, turning on ourselves. And the story that to me is one of the most powerful guides or powerful metaphors, which I want

to re-bring to our attention because I try to bringing it in a lot because it's so helpful is a story of the statue that was in Thailand's ancient capital of Sukhataai. and it was not a particularly handsome or refined statue. It was a plaster clay, but huge. And people loved it just for its staying power. It had been through many changes of government and through all sorts of weather systems and invasions and so on. But in the 1950s, during a hot, dry season, some cracks started appearing in this beloved statue. And when the abbot of the monastery took a flashlight one night to kind of peer in and just kind of looking at the infrastructure inside the cracks. What came back was a flash of gold, was the glimmer of gold.

And so they kind of chipped it away and they found underneath this plaster clay covering, the largest solid gold statue in Southeast Asia. What's interesting is the monks believe that it was covered over with plaster and clay to protect it from invading armies, much in the same way that we cover over our innate purity to protect us as we navigate through the stressors of life, that we all put on coverings. And that's not a problem per se. It's just very natural. We have our egoic defenses and protections in ways that we can try to enhance ourselves. Where the suffering comes is when we take ourselves to be the coverings, you know, these different defenses, parts of our personality or emotional reactions or beliefs,

we take the coverings to be who we are and we forget the gold. That's the core suffering. And this is the suffering you'll see pointed out in some way in every contemplative wisdom tradition that we forget who we are. We forget the awareness and the love that's really our essence. And we take ourselves to be what I sometimes think of as a kind of cluster of waves of different personality features that stand out to us. We identify with our fears and our anger and our ways of controlling.

When we're identified with the coverings, we're kind of live in this bit of a roller coaster of inflation, deflation, and for many it feels more like one or the other. But deep down, and this is what's key, we dislike ourselves. We dislike the self that's identified with the coverings because we intuit that there's more but we're just feeling small. And this is often called the second arrow that we sense the coverings of fear or selfishness or controlling and then we hate ourselves for it.

I think this simple mem for me is feels bad becomes I'm bad. So most therapy, most processes of healing, including meditation, have to address this root belief and feeling of core badness because of course by extension we end up at odds with others too. Many, many different expressions of how that deep sense of I'm not okay shows itself. I love this lineup from, it was on Pinterest actually, about therapy. And first you see a parrot on a therapist couch saying, I want more than a cracker, but I don't know how to ask for it, you know, undeserving. And then you see the elephant on the couch and the elephant's just the moaning, you know, sometimes I even stand in the middle of the room and no one acknowledges me.

With a chicken, why do the chicken cross the road? Well, the chicken responds. My therapist says, I should do more things that scare me. I'll just do one more. They're silly but fun. There's a donut on the therapist's couch and the donut saying, well, it appears like I'm a very well-rounded individual, yet people still say I'm bad for them. So forgive me. But these are just different expressions of this basic deep sense of not okay. And I often call it a trance of unworthiness. And I think the word trance is important because like a dream, we're identified and caught in a fragment of experience, the coverings, the coverings in particular that we don't like. We're condemning that fragment and we're not remembering the gold. We're not remembering the

awareness that's here. We're not remembering who's looking through, these eyes and listening right now. So our inquiry for this talk is how do we wake up from that small shame-based identity that's on the coverings? How do we trust the gold? How do we live from the gold, aligned with it? The first step, and this is going to seem pretty, yeah, intuitive, is we have to be to recognize we're caught in trance and that's the only way we will deepen attention. And I know that for people that have read radical acceptance, one of the main takeaways that they mention is just seeing how much trance has taken over my life, how much of my life experience is in that trance, and then saying that's actually the beginning of healing.

So that's certainly how it happened for me. really wasn't until I kind of got clobbered over the head with how wall-to-wall trapped I was by some inner judge, some harsh inner judge. As I've shared with many times, it was when a good friend talked about how she was learning to be her own best friend and that just seemed like that was from another galaxy. I was so, so harsh on myself and of course some things brought up that harshness more than others. For me, it circled a lot around. eating, around feeling that I was overweight. It also circled around feeling like I was a selfish person, I let people down, I hurt people. Even as it lasted through the early years of parenting,

falling short as a parent. So, clovered over the head with the trance of unworthiness, but the pain actually motivated me. And here's the, this feels like what I've noticed in many many people is that the pain of that transplants we get it motivates us to really dedicate ourselves to loving ourselves into healing, loving ourselves into healing. And so for me that took the form of rain, many of you are familiar with it, which is really simply bringing mindfulness and compassion to what's going on, recognizing and allowing that it's there, these bad feelings. investigating them so we can really honestly contact them and then nurturing.

And the shift, and this is the important piece with rain, what starts to really deepen and integrate the healing is in what I call after the rain because that's when I could be feeling really down to myself and I go through the steps of rain and I'm nurturing, but it's during after the rain that I realize, oh, this is the gold, this compassionate awareness, this is more who I really am than the coverings I was judging. That shift from feeling identified with the coverings to remembering the gold, the more that becomes familiar, the more we actually are free. So after all these years, and it's been decades now, the habit of feeling deficient still arises. It still arises this imperfect

conditioning and coverings that I have and then feeling bad about it. But there's not a sense that I am bad. There's just feeling bad about it and then responding to what's going on. Now you might be listening and wondering, so what about if we're really doing bad things, causing harm. In other words, if I was feeling shame about inadequate parenting, well, maybe isn't shame appropriate to help me improve? Or shouldn't someone who's abused another feel shame? These are really important questions. Isn't it a signal to change? Or what about on the societal level? Shouldn't Nazis feel shame when they realize what they've been caught in? or what about such a current question, white people feeling shame for centuries of participating

in the violence of racism? Doesn't shame serve? Doesn't it help us change our behaviors? And I think this is a really important question. So shame evolved like all emotions. It has a function. It's a really yucky, unpleasant feeling that lets us know you need to adapt your behavior in order to be in harmony with your community and with your own values. So it has a positive function. I think it's really important to distinguish between healthy shame and toxic shame. because toxic shame is so pervasive that it actually makes healthy shame impossible for us to we can't take the message. So let's say we regularly lash out at our child and make them feel diminished and bad about themselves.

Toxic shame would be a feeling of badness. I'm a bad person. I'm basically this being caught up in the coverings but forgetting the gold. I'm a bad person. healthy shame would be there's a feeling of badness. This behavior is harmful. I need to change so that I can live from the goal, from the truth of who I am. This seeing the difference is really, really critical.

In Buddhist psychology, healthy shame is called H-I-R-I. And it was described by the Buddha as a bright guardian of the world and that it kept people from betraying the trust of others, also betraying ourselves. It helps us stay aligned with our values and live from the gold. So healthy shame here is uncomfortable, but it's there to serve our ultimate happiness and belonging and alignment.

But what I've realized over the years, because I've known about the differences for a long time, I've realized that if we don't attend to toxic shame, In other words, if we don't find our way to trusting our basic goodness, we might behave correctly. We might act right, but will regularly be swamped in reactivity arising from that underlying sense of personal badness. It won't matter how will we behave. The natural imperfections of our conditioning will keep swamping us in basic badness.

In other words, for us making a mistake, or getting constructive feedback easily trips off and sinks us into toxic shame. So the presence of toxic shame undermines our capacity to take in corrective feedback. And you can see looking at a societal level and right now I'm bringing in racism, it's so in the forefront but it's all the isms, the ways we feel superior or inferior, this is so important because if we don't trust the gold, if we don't trust our basic goodness, we'll have larger blind spots and more projections because the toxic shame makes it difficult to honestly examine our psyches.

It makes us fragile, that toxic shame and defensive. This is very powerfully put forth in the book White Fragility, which I'm rereading right now and I really recommend to everyone because it shines a light on this. So here's the thing. We are all very loyal to our narratives about ourselves. We hold on tightly to our self-story. And by that I mean we hold on to the deep sense of being bad if we have toxic shame.

It feels true to our body. It feels familiar. It's painful and dangerous to dismantle. It gives us at least some sense of stability of how to have. how to deal with things. And we hold very tightly to our ideas about the ways we're a good person. We really need that. So we have a cognitive bias in how we navigate that keeps sorting for information that confirms our narrative. It keeps us in trance. It obscures the gold. So it takes an intentional practice to wake up and trust the gold.

and live from the gold. To be able to bypass this habit we have of sorting for information and avoiding what's painful. It takes a dedicated practice. And the practice comes down to the two wings of awareness. We need to practice seen clearly with mindfulness the ways that we get hooked on feeling personally bad. And we need to bring love and compassion. to that. These are the two wings of awareness, mindfulness, compassion. In the moment that we're seeing clearly, it takes courage because we have to actually contact the feelings, the felt sense of shame. And it takes compassion because if we can't hold that with kindness, we'll collapse into it. So let me share a story that I think, at least for me, when I first heard it, really illustrated

how these two wings can wake us up from toxic shame. So this is a woman and her adult daughter. I went to therapy on the request of the adult daughter who let her mother know in therapy that she had been repeatedly sexually abused by this woman's ex-husband. husband and the daughter's stepfather. And when she heard that, when this woman heard that, she had been drinking through a lot of her daughter's younger life, she had been clueless about the sexual abuse. And it brought up such deep rage and really shame of personal badness that she felt suicidal. And she sought out a Jesuit priest who had actually

actually been a teacher at her college when she was younger and shared her despair and her deep sense of worthlessness, of badness. And what he did was he took her hand and his and he drew a circle in her palm and he said, this is where you are right now and this is what you're feeling, horror and rage and shame. And you have to feel this. have to be with this. But remember this too. And you put his big priestly hand over hers. And this is the infinite compassion of God. Just remember that too. If you do this, if you keep feeling what's so terrible to feel but remembering this, you will discover a healing and a freedom that you've

never experienced before. So this became her practice, that she'd had the feelings would come up of rage and of fear for her daughter and of deep, deep shame. And she'd feel them, but she kept imagining that hand over hers, the field of compassion, divine compassion. And gradually, she was able more and more to tolerate the feelings of shame, and then even more than that, start sensing that that hand, that divine compassion really was her own awakened heart. She was beginning to hold herself with compassion and sense that that's my goodness, that I have this goodness to my heart. Many, many rounds of sensing, okay, I have a tenderness, a care and awareness that's more essence than any of these emotions that are playing through. She started

trusting the gold. And what happened in therapy, and this is so interesting to me, is that part of what they were working on is how through the daughter's life and now as an adult her mother still was not very good at listening and paying attention to her. And she started being able to take this in, not like I'm a failure, you know, I'm a bad person, but just feeling bad. Feeling bad but remembering her goodness. and that enabled her to actually take in that feedback and begin to change and listen more deeply. In other words, that was healthy shame. She felt bad and she let herself feel it, but she was able to tolerate it

because she had already done the work with the toxic shame and was beginning to trust deeply in the gold. You know, in our lives, to the degree that we can see the coverings, you know, the fear and the anger and our controlling mindfully, if we can actually observe them, witness them, feel them, and hold them with compassion, what starts happening is we recognize them as conditioned experience. They're not our essence. They're conditioned experience. And the more we sense them as coverings that have been conditioned by infinite forces by condition, the more we actually deepen our trust in the gold. So I want to take some time to look at this because it's so important that if we want to open up our sense of identification from the coverings, we have to

see them as conditioned by forces that are beyond who we are. And that's what I mean by conditioning, that when you're feeling caught in jealousy or fear, that's been conditioned in. And for different people in different ways, one man was experiencing a whole lot of, through his whole life, he had a lot of anger moving through him. But it was hit a crisis point in his marriage. His wife was threatening divorce. his teens were completely alienated from him. And so he wanted to learn how to bring these two wings of mindfulness and compassion and be able to change his habits. So he began to mindfully investigate

his anger. And what happened as we brought that lens of mindful attention was that he could see that every time he was anger got triggered underneath the anger, he was in some way. feeling put down and he was feeling afraid. And then he started bringing mindfulness to how young that felt, how old and how familiar, that fearful humiliated self. And that spontaneously brought to mind his father's anger. And how his father's anger humiliated him, it scared him, and also how his father was entirely out of control when he was angry. And he said, I'm the same way. This mindful investigation was showing him that it wasn't so personal, that there were forces from his past that it actually molded or shaped the anger.

And when I said, it's not your fault, he began weeping because that was the insight or freedom he needed to realize it's not my fault that it's this way. It's incredibly painful, but it's not my fault. And that allowed him, knowing that it wasn't his fault, to actually hold with compassion that vulnerable, humiliated, fearful, young self and begin a healing process that then when the anger would get triggered, he had a little more space. He could pause. He could choose his behaviors more and it actually changed the coverings, the behavior.

I think the deep recognition I sometimes use the metaphor of an ocean with waves is that these waves are conditioned by all sorts of weather systems and everything else, these waves of who we are. And they don't define us. We are the ocean, we include the waves, but there's a much more vast, much more deep truth about who we are. And when we know that, then we can deal with the waves. as they say, you know, if you remember the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves.

And then the other saying is, if you forget you're the ocean, you're seasick all the time. So, remembering the gold, part of it is remembering all the forces and conditions and causes that create the coverings that we get so identified with. And what are they? I mean, we've talked a bit about the family conditioning, the modeling of, of whoever our caregivers were and the treatment from our caregivers, but there's way more. I mean, each of us, our DNA, means that we have a primitive reptilian brain in us. And we share it with reptiles that means we get threatened.

Your most immediate reflex, the fast movement of the mind and body, when you're threatened, is either to lash back or in some way be silenced and withdraw, freeze, So you have this reptilian brain and you also have a mammalian brain which means, and you share this with fox and lions and so on, which means that when you're not facing life-death issues, you're programmed to be concerned about your standing with the pack. We're programmed to feel that. We're programmed to compare against each other. We're invested in belonging.

We're programmed to try to get advantages and perks. We're programmed to compete, to sometimes dominate or sometimes subordinate so we can get favors. We're programmed to lie or exaggerate our accomplishments to look good. We're a program to minimize our flaws and we're programmed to make others look bad so we look better. This is all part of our mammalian brain. So, thank you mammalian brain. And then, of course, we also have our neo-mammalian brain. and that's the more recently evolved frontal cortex,

when our cognition, which is quite developed compared to many other creatures, when it's fear-based, in other words, when the reptilian brain is affecting our neocortex, that leads to obsessing and anxiety over-consuming and a huge capacity for violence to ourselves and each other and our earth. So what it does is it makes us most dangerous species on Earth. This is conditioning. Our neocortex also values cooperation, has a sense of morality, ethics, compassion, and mindfulness. In other words, when we're living from a more integrated whole,

we have access to that. But very often, when we're stressed, the lower brains take over. So we're shaped by that conditioning. And we're shaped hugely by cultural conditioning. You know, we have this delusion of our individuality. Whereas, as they say, you're not thinking your thoughts, you're thinking society's thoughts. We are absolutely embedded in the thoughts and values and perspectives of our society. I sometimes think about this and you can, you know,

consider if you lived a few hundred years ago you and most others would have accepted slavery as normal. You weren't a bad person, but that's the perspective. If you lived in the United States 175 years ago you'd unquestionably be accepting women as husband's property and not equal beings. You'd be okay with burning witches. And many, back in the past, As a kind of a holiday or recreation, maybe Saturday morning would go out to a public hanging or an execution. Again, not bad people. This is society's conditioning.

We think, oh my God, how could they have done that? But it's conditioning. If you lived in India 75 years ago and many, even currently, you wouldn't question caste system and the hard treatment of the delete. It's just the untouchables. And I'm not even mentioning so many violent, exclusionary attitudes and behaviors through history against gay, against transgender, against all the isms, you know. But the point is, not bad people, it's the coverings that get conditioned by our society

that have us participate in harm. You know, I suspect in some decades we're going to look back on right now the cruel, the barbaric ways that we treat non-human animals to eat their flesh. Most people don't consider it immoral. And just noting that this is part of our cultural conditioning too. It's not. We're bad humans. And yet it's hard to examine our current conditioning. It's hard to examine it honestly

because we're very invested in not feeling bad about ourselves. our views, our behaviors, our ways of being are largely conditioned by the society, by our caregivers, by our genetics, by our shared DNA. It's not personal. It's not our fault. And realizing this, and this is the power of it, if you realize that the coverings don't define you, that there's basic goodness, it heals talk. toxic shame and it gives you the capacity to actually sense very spontaneously the coverings

transform so that they can express the gold. The more we trust the gold and we don't take the covers personally, the more we transform. So this is where healthy shame comes in because if we're trusting the gold and healthy shame, a feeling of badness when we're being imperfect, actually serves. us. It helps us to align with what matters to us. It can be a valuable reminder of what we really care about and actually move us towards alignment. I'll speak personally that I would say over time more and more I get very quick feedback in my body, very unpleasant, very uncomfortable when I perceive that I'm being hurtful towards others or defensive or controlling.

are in some way misleading, any way that I'm creating separation. My body, you know, I can feel it in my body. In the old days, that would feed into toxic shame. There would be a sinking, basic feeling of, I'm not okay, I'm bad, feels bad, I'm bad. But now it's just unpleasant, it's tolerable, it's healthy shame. But in order to stay and honestly listen to the message, I have to consciously be agreeing to be uncomfortable. And that's because my first reflex is to in some way want to reduce it by defending myself, by justifying myself. I want to feel like a good person.

You know, that's still in there. So, justice with toxic shame, the first step with healthy shame is self-compassion, is being kind to myself. And you might not feel able to see this in putting my hand in my heart, but you know, just reminding myself, trust that you care, trust the gold. You know, trust the gold. And then I can look more honestly at the coverings. But I first have to soften with self-compassion so I don't defend myself.

And then I can come around and examine what's going on and if needed make amends. And so I see that over and over with close relationships. If with my husband Jonathan I'm tight or demanding or insensitive, that bad feeling comes up, huri, you know, healthy shame. And if I can be gentle and kind with myself, then I can acknowledge how I'm off and adjust. And it's very, very powerful,

this healthy shame when I find it in my group identity as a white person. And this is where my learning curve is steepest, and it's actually very exhilarating. You know, as a leader in my meditation, community. As a teacher, I've continually made mistakes and had to face my imperfections, you know, around racism, just to socialize as any creature in our society and had to ask the questions like, you know, why so many years having a mostly white board of directors, mostly white teachers, why were the people of color who came to our classes reporting they didn't feel safe or welcomed?

and how to face how often I'd use teaching examples that came from white cultural experience or why did it take so long, you know, to have the affinity sangas that we needed for people of color and white people in our different teaching communities. So, with each mistake, it really was the same process. And again, mistake, meaning the imperfection of the coverings, reflex of fragility, of one wanting to look good or uphold my good personhood. So an initial tensing against feeling bad, that's the white fragility. But if I remind myself, trust the goal, you know, trust that this really matters to you,

that you care. You know, if I'm compassionate with myself, that gives me the space to stay with the discomfort, get the message and respond to try to make things right. So the key in healing toxic shame and to be guided by healthy shame is self-compassion. And inevitably, this is true for all of us as we're going to be practicing together in a moment. We will continue to feel badness when we encounter the imperfections of our coverings, the habits of in different ways getting caught in anxiety or lashings.

or lashing out or judgment or whatever it is, if we can remember our basic goodness, and I often, my mantra is often just trust the gold, trust the gold, you know, instead of reacting, instead of defending, instead of sinking in a shame, if we can remember that, we can then respond to what comes up in a way that further aligns our heart. We all need pathways of self-compassion in response to imperfection. We all need ways and we all need to help each other. Realize that these difficult waves we experience, they're not our fault. And if we trust the goodness, we can actually become the being that we want to be.

So with that, a lot of words, let's practice a little. This meditation is on healing, toxic shame and trusting the gold. Take a moment, if you will, to pause, let yourself settle. you might close your eyes you might feel this body breathing and you might scan and notice where in your life you might be reacting to imperfection

you might be feeling down on yourself judging yourself feeling shame or aversion and if there's a situation that triggers it let that be in the foreground so you might be thinking of a situation where you turn on yourself that has to do with your relationships, personal relationships, or your work, or maybe it's an addictive behavior.

Or you might be turning on yourself in relationship to your group identity, feeling shame about that, judging others. It could be related to race or sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, ethnicity, some situation where you turn on yourself. You might sense the worst part of this when you're turning on yourself what really feels the worst. And being guided by the rain acronym, we start by just recognizing whatever's predominant when you're turning on yourself. What are you most noticing? Is it shame? Is it aversion? Is it fear?

You might mentally whisper whatever you notice. That begins to call in the mindful witness. And then allow. And that creates some space. is like saying, okay, these coverings are here, this belongs. It's a wave in the ocean. Let it be there. And then as you approach investigating, let there be a quality of gentleness and interest. Real curiosity about how reality is playing out through your body mind. You might sense what you're believing. What do you believing when you're turning on yourself? Is it that you're basically unworthy, that you're, there's a sense of basic badness, is it that you'll never

be close with others because of this, you're not lovable? What belief comes? And as you sense whatever belief is there, let yourself feel the unpleasantness, the pain of shame, of that feeling of badness. And if it helps to put your hand on your heart, just to feel connect with what's going on inside, please do so. You might imagine you could look right now through the eyes of a bodhisattva, a wise, compassionate being, the self that feels ashamed, not okay. The eyes of a wise grandmother, the eyes of a Buddha, maybe eyes of a wise and loving friend,

and see the suffering that's there, the suffering of self-aversion, and also see the streams of conditioning that shaped the very behaviors or feelings that you're judging. How did you learn to be the way you are? This is modeled from caregivers, shaped by messages from others. Whatever you're judging, how did it get there? You weren't born as a bad person. What's the conditioning here? Was there past trauma? in your personal lifetime or past generations through the eyes of the Bodhisattva seeing the conditioning

that created the very thing that you're aversive to. How did the society shape it? Our competitive, over-consuming, aggressive, divided society, how did that shape your inner experience? And sensing the presence of, this bodhisattva, this wise and loving being your own awake heart. You might send the message inward, it's not your fault. Just offer a real compassionate presence.

Send care right to the place that's hurting, the place that feels bad. Let it be bathed with a compassionate presence. This possibility of letting in that loving, that healing, that healing. healing, letting go into it, becoming one with it, and with after the rain just to rest in that open-hearted presence, that which sees clearly the suffering and holds with love. You might sense who are you when you're not believing something's wrong with you? Since the possibility of trusting the awareness and compassion that's here is really your essence. And from that place of trusting the gold, trusting the goodness of your essence, you might look

at the patterning that you were judging, averse of two, whatever it is about the coverings that you're not liking, perhaps ways you hurt others, hurt yourself. You might sense what's my deepest intention from the gold, what's my deepest intention, and what will help me align with that deep intention, what will help me live from loving awareness. The poet Rumi describes the gold, this loving awareness, as the secret self. He writes, 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. You might take a few full breaths and as you're ready open your eyes. So I want to thank you for your attention, for exploring this together. Invite all of those that are interested in the discussion groups to return to Facebook link right now for them and to wish you all loving blessings as you move through these next days. Namaste. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.