Tara Brach - Spiritual Reparenting

Episode Date: February 15, 2019

Spiritual Reparenting (a favorite from the archives) - When we are not sufficiently nurtured in childhood, we are inclined toward anxiety, depression, addiction and other forms of suffering. In a deep way, we do not feel at home with others. We are disconnected from our own body, heart and spirit. This talk explores how meditation offers "spiritual reparenting" as we learn to bring interest, understanding and love to our own inner vulnerability. This process of healing extends to our relationships with others and our larger society – by reaching out to widening circles with interest and care, we bring increasing harmony and peace to our world. "That question: Where does it hurt? We need to address it to everyone, if we really want to understand each other." Ruby Sales 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. I'd like to begin with a brief, a little story I heard on the press that a man tried to sneak his pet turtle onto a flight and he tried to pass it off as if it was fast food and the way he did it was he placed it between these two buns and wrapped it in paper for Kentucky fried chicken, but he got caught and when he was discovered he told the airport officials that he just really couldn't leave his beloved pet at home. And I thought it was a kind of an interesting little story because I have had times that I've nearly canceled a teaching trip because

I just didn't want to leave my dog and the feeling is kind of this wrenching feeling and it speaks to how profound the sense of wanting connection and not wanting to be separated is. It's so deep in us. There's so much research now that having pets and that sense of warmth and connection and the oxytocin and tenderness, it increases longevity and happiness, the happiness quality of life and that the other side of the equation is when there's a death. deficit of connection, when there's a lot of loneliness, there is depression and when we don't have adequate bonding early on, death. At least on, it can be physical and on other levels

too. In the theme of tonight, which has very much to do with connection and separation, there is a myth that I love to share now and then and it's one of the legends from the Holy Grail. And it has to do with Percival's, this young knight on a quest. And he wanders into this very parched and devastated kingdom where nothing grows. It's a real wasteland. And when he arrives at the capital, he finds that the townspeople are behaving as if everything's normal. They're in this total trance of they're on automatic and they're just acting and doing their daily duties, but with no affect really. They're completely in another realm.

And so they're not like wondering or what horror has befallen us, whereas nothing's growing, the whole place is devastated. So they're dull and mechanical, and then he goes into the castle where he finds the king who's in his bed and he's pale and he's dying. And like the land around him,

the monarch's life is waning. So Percival's full of, questions but he's kind of been taught by an older night that asking questions is improper for a night of his rank or whatever so he keeps quiet and the next morning he leaves the castle to continue on his journey but the witch kundri encounters him as he's making his way onward and when she hears that he had visited the king but he hadn't even asked the king anything about himself she goes into a complete rage and she says how could he be so callous? You know, he could have saved the king in the kingdom by only extending

himself. So Percival goes, whoa, okay, so he turns around and he goes back, because he takes, he's really taking her words to heart. So he goes back into the wasteland, and he goes right to the castle, and without even breaking his stride, he walks right up to the king, and then comes down onto his knees, and with incredible gentleness, he says, oh my king, what aileth thee? And within moments, color returns to the king's cheeks and he stands up and he's fully healed. And with that throughout the kingdom, everything comes to life. And the people newly awakened talk with animation, they laugh and they sing together and they have a vigorous step. The crops begin to grow, the grass on the hills glows with the new greenest spring and life has been renewed.

They're back. That's the story. And what happened? What happened to make that awakening possible from the trance into this aliveness and vitality and presence? And it was Percival extending himself with care to reach and touch and connect with another being. That's what awakens us from trance, connection.

And sometimes the connection occurs as we learn to come back home into our bodies and start really having the courage and presence to feel the aliveness that's here. And sometimes it comes because we listen to our own hearts in a new way. And sometimes it comes because somebody reaches out to us or we reach out to them, but it's all about relationship, coming into our relatedness, realizing we're not separate. that the truth is this living web that we are absolutely in a belonging and interdependence. So the trauma in our life, the wounds are all having to do with severed belonging. They come in our families and in our culture ways that we in some way get split off from

feeling the okayness of this body and heart that we're okay. We get told that something's wrong. We get split off because we get hurt and it's too painful to live in our bodies and feel that hurt. We get split off because in some way the other has not been able to stay with us. If we begin to reflect and sense, okay, so what Parciful did was he brought his presence in his care. That's really what's needed.

and I'd like to invite you we're going to do a few reflections as we often do the first if you just close your eyes for a moment and we've just heard of Parsifle and just to bring to mind for yourself a time when you might have been in some

form of a trance of suffering some form of a kind of a disconnect feeling alone or hurt or confused. And when you were in need, and somebody, you connected with somebody that had a healing presence.

And it could be in a very subtle way, you felt that connection or it could be really one of those powerful moments in your life, but somebody who had a healing presence that you could tell was making a difference, was able to help you reconnect, come back into this mutual belonging, this web of life.

And as you bring someone to mind, and the Buddhists they call it a benefactor, somebody who showed up, what are the qualities in that person that made a difference for you? What was it that that person embodied or offered? When you'd like, you can open your eyes. I often think if we're in the earliest phase of life or infancy, a very young child, what is most needed from our parents? And there are two things. And you might have in some way had some of the language for these two things and you thought

of that person that extended to you. And one of the qualities that we need from a parent is a sense that they understand or get us. Feeling felt that we're known in some way. This being understands, this being as interested, this being's attuning, okay? That's one quality. And the other quality is in that feeling felt that we're loved, that there's care. These are often described as the two wings of awareness really when they're in full bloom,

the understanding and the caring. And we all need to receive it and then we discover that it's our natural intrinsic nature. It wakes us up. What I'd like to explore for the remainder of our time tonight is what I sometimes think of as spiritual reparenting. that what we're doing on this path of healing and awakening is bringing those two qualities of seeing clearly, oh, what is going on right here? What aileth they, you know? And caring, that gentleness to our inner life and to each other and to our larger world.

And I call it spiritually parenting because there is a corrective quality that the given is that there was some severed belonging. There is some delusion and greed and aggression that ends up getting in the way of us feeling loved. We all have this capacity in us to spiritually reparent ourselves and each other and we all need help both. So we're going to explore that and the inquiry really is how do we awaken that presence. We're going to primarily look at how do we bring it to the wounded and excommunicated and oppressed parts of our own. being. I think the starting place, and this is, it seems incredibly obvious, but it's what we most forget, is that every one of us, every one of us needs to feel loved. We get very occupied with what we think we want, but deep down we want to feel loved. There's a better

language for it. We want to feel that loving presence, which is what we are. But one of the first ways that we touch into it is by feeling loved. We want to feel loved. It's a core need biologically, psychologically, and then spiritually. We want to feel loved. And if you look early on, there is so much research now, in attachment theory and so on, on what happens when there's not a secure attachment with a caretaker, when that that seeing and caring is not there. We know that in the very earliest phases of a young being's life and we look at rats, the rat mama licking her pups, that that's, that licking, that grooming is what allows the synapses

to connect. It's through the nurturing behaviors that we actually wake up our brain, it gets functioning. We know that from studies of monkeys that erratic mothering, the effect of it is binge eating, aggressive behavior, withdrawal, depression, anxiety. Look at all of us, you know, to the extent that I mean, really we have parenting that's kind of not steady, well we get anxious, we get depressed, or we get addictive, it's all there. When attunement and attachment is weak and it is weak, it's societal. It's not just like, oh, my family.

We all have some dysfunction to different degrees. It affects us and we see it in animals, we see it in humans. Somebody sent me a few of these. One of them, one little cartoon has a parrot on a therapist couch and he's saying, I want more than a cracker but I don't have to ask for it. And then there's an elephant on the couch who's saying, sometimes even if I stand in the middle of the room, no one acknowledges me. Why did the chicken cross the road?

The chicken response. My therapist says I should do more things that scare me. The donut on the therapist's couch? I feel like I'm very well-rounded individually. People say I'm bad for them still. Okay, enough of these guys. Let's see. biological, we can see that.

And then there's really some fantastic studies that I've been reading about it on the social level that humans' relational strength is what really has allowed us to be the peak survivors. And it's now hypothesized that it was our need to communicate that actually most accounted for that phenomenal growth of the cortex in human development. this need to communicate. It's through communicating, collaborating, and relating that we've had our evolutionary success. And there's a psychologist Kozolino and he has a line that I think is fantastic. I'm doing some writing. I'm going to use it. Which is we are not the survival of fittest. We are the survival of the nurtured.

the survival of the nurtured. Nurturing in human development is key. We have an elongated stretch of childhood, this capacity to feel related to others is what makes our intelligence grow. It makes us capable of empathy, compassion, collaborating, creating, and fulfilling. So what happens is we need to feel connected

and then of course, as I've described it, it's very, very imperfect, and we all have our places of severed belonging. And what happens then? Well, we go after substitutes. We need to feel loved. If we don't feel love, we're going to go after something else. And the more we don't feel love, the more we're going to grasp onto that something else, hence addiction.

So we have substitutes. Sometimes the substitutes are, I don't feel loved. Well, I want to feel admired then. I want to feel approved. I want to feel envied. I want to feel esteemed. Maybe I want to feel in control or I want to overconsume. One story of going after substitutes took place on an airplane where a woman sneezed and then she takes out a tissue, she wipes her nose and then she shudders quite violently for 10 to 15 seconds. So this guy sitting next door and he notices it but he just goes back to his reading

but then it happens again. She sneezes, she wipes her nose, she shudders, and he's really curious, what is going on here for her? When it happens the third time, he finally talks to her. He says, okay, so you sneeze three times, you wipe your nose, you shudder violently, are you okay? And she said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I have a rare condition. When I sneeze, I have an orgasm. And he said, he's embarrassed, but he says, oh, so what do you take for it? And she says, oh, pepper. Okay, so we're talking about substitutes here. You get the idea. So we pursue whatever we can if we don't feel the love.

We also have another approach when we don't feel loved and safe is then we, because it hurts, we protect ourselves from intimacy. We long for it, but we protect ourselves because we're afraid of getting hurt even more. If there's severed belonging, we try to prevent more severed belonging. belonging. How do we do it? Well, we withdraw, we defend, we blame others, we just play it out,

we make others wrong and bad, basically. Some of you'll remember the story of a little girl who asks her mother how the human race appears. Do you remember this? It's so good. The mother answers, well, God made Adam and Eve, and they had children and all mankind was made. Two days later, she asked her father the exact same question. His response is, well, many years ago there were monkeys and from them the human race evolved. So the girl's confused, she goes back to her mother and says, you know, how come you told me the human race was created by God? And dad said the human race was evolved out of monkeys. And she said, oh dear, it's quite simple. He told you about his side of the family and I told you about mine. So we have these strategies

when we don't feel loved to, or either basically we grasp or we push away. The challenge with both of them is that the more we react out of that wound, the less we're able to actually bring real healing to the wound. So the archetype of healing, of moving from that suffering and that reactivity to healing, is in Buddhism it's the archetype of the bodhisattva, which is an awakening being with an awakening heart. And the way that the Bodhisattva of compassion is described is as listening to the cries of the world. Quan Yin, the Bodhisattva compassion with 10,000 arms.

So the beginning of healing is, oh, there's suffering going on. There's a sense of, oh, there's this, ouch. There's a severed belonging, listening to that. And then, after that, listening, the bodhisattva of compassion responds with care. So this is the model for spiritual reparenting is that like the bodice of compassion, something in us goes, wow, I am hooked on substitutes, or wow, I have a habit of pushing people away. I have a habit of distracting myself on my iPhone and not really being an intimate relationship with others. Or I have a habit of overconsuming rather than being present in a conversation, you know,

being present and showing up in a situation, or have a habit of being so busy that it makes it really hard for people to feel like I'm right there with them. So we go, oh, okay, that's the way I'm avoiding intimacy. That's the way I leave presence. So we're listening like Kuan Yin to the suffering and then we can begin to find a pathway to bring in care and it's really challenging because there's a lot of vulnerability or we wouldn't believing. Okay? So what we're going to look at is how do we begin to bring that loving presence to ourselves? How do we begin to, instead of leaving and grasping and pushing away and losing

ourself and distraction, how do we begin to love ourselves into healing? And the first step like Percival is to begin to ask ourselves the question, what's going on right now? You might just close your eyes for a moment. Wherever you are, whatever's going on as I'm speaking, the beginning of becoming intimate with your inner life right now is just say, what's going on inside me right now? Can you get under your thoughts? What's going on in your body or your heart? Is there a restlessness?

Is there an anxiety? Is there interest? Is there sadness? So we begin by saying what's going on. You can continue with their eyes closed or open. I have recently been inspired by a interview on Being, Krista Tippett, with a woman named Ruby Sales. And she's a civil rights activist, a theologian, an amazing woman. I recommend the interview.

and she talks about this need for unconditional love that we offer to ourselves, each other, in our world, as really the essence of the healing. And she describes this archetype, just the way the bodhisattva is the archetype in Buddhism, it's the same archetype, this loving presence. She describes in black folk religion. In the interview, she has the line from one of the spirituals,

which is, I love everybody, I love everybody, I love everybody. I love everybody in my heart. And that's kind of the centerpiece. And she described in her own life how she grew up in this black folk spirituality, but she left it some and she kind of got into Marxism and into this and into that. And in a way, it seemed like she had left home, left her spiritual grounds, but two experiences that were really profound for her. Let her know that she had never really left, that conscious loving was really the centerpiece of her theology. And the first of the two experiences, and this is bringing us right to how do we bring these two wings to ourselves, I'm going to read you. She says,

the defining moment I was getting my locks washed and my locker's daughter came in one morning and she had been hustling all night and she had sores on her body and she was just in a state, drugs. So something said to me, ask her, where does it hurt? And I said, Shelly, where does it hurt? And just that simple question, unleashed territory in her that she'd never shared with her mother. And she talked about having been incested and she talked about all these things that had happened to her as a child and she literally shared the source of her pain. And I realized in that moment listening to her and talking to her that I needed a larger way to to do this work.

Okay? So that's number one, just like Parciful, she said, ask that question, where does it hurt? That same question, what's going on inside me right now? Where does it hurt? Powerful beginning of intimacy. Second experience she had, she described, she says, I was riding down the road one day in Washington, D.C. after having been at a demonstration against the war in Iraq. And suddenly, out of nowhere, I started crying.

And I realized that God had been with me even when I hadn't been with myself. And those moments made me really begin to seek to go back to thinking deeply about black folk religion and to really wanting to develop in a very intentional way in inner life that had to do with how I lived in the world. Let's return to unconditional love for the life that's within us, life around us. as the centerpiece of her theology. When I heard that story about her asking that question, and I had already known the Parsifal story,

it really landed in quite a beautiful way. Like I could think in my own life of times that people asked me a question and really asked from a place of presence and in those moments feeling that healing that comes when somebody really wants to know, know that actually opened up something in me.

So I wonder if maybe you'll do, this is another little reflection if you will, just to close your eyes. And in this pause, see if you can relax back, come right here, feel that heerness, your body sitting here breathing, the life that's here. You might bring to mind a challenging situation that's going on. your life, anything that feels challenging. And imagine somebody who you consider to be a caring person, to bring somebody to mind that you know as a caring person, that you trust as a caring person.

Just imagine them looking at you with care and asking the question, where does it hurt? Or what's this like for you? What aileth you? What's going on? What's it like to be asked? This is the beginning, this is that first wing of spiritually parenting, just as a parent if they see their child upset, angry, withdrawn. Where does it hurt?

What's going on? So we begin to learn to ask this of ourselves. We begin to pause and say, what is going on inside? What's happening? We're going to practice more fully in a few moments. with our inner life, but just to get a taste. So, you can open your eyes. We're talking about addressing within ourselves or individual personal self,

but this is the same exact question that if we widen the field, that we can begin to ask of any population that is having trouble. If we really want to have a world where we're understanding each other and there for each other and responding to each other, we need to ask that same question, where does it hurt? Where does it hurt for this group or for that group? So this is Ruby, again, this is one of the points that I found so powerful. She said that question, where does it hurt? We need to address it to everyone if we really want to understand each other.

So we ask that question, we do our white awareness trainings, and we say, well, can I imagine, what would it like being a person of color here in Washington, D.C., where if you're out in the streets and with the racial profile and that goes on, you're just very going to be very inclined to running into trouble. Or a mother of a son or a wife of a husband or daughter of a father who could easily get arrested. Or what's it like to be right now a Muslim in this country? or to be an immigrant who might not be fully documented or might have some minor criminal infringement. What's it like to be any of these people right now? Where does it hurt?

Can our hearts really get that? But Ruby goes further than that in her conversation and says that she says that we have a white spiritual crisis going on in this country and that in order to understand what's underneath the aggression and the anger and reactivity, we really need to ask that question, where does it hurt and really get what's it like to be unemployed, to be losing jobs to globalization? Dalai Lama says that there's the suffering of not feeling needed, not feeling relevant anymore. It's like that story I tell so often of, you know, approaching a dog that's under a tree and you're all friendly and wanting to pet it and the dog

lurches at you angry and then you see the dog's got its paw in a trap. And then you go from feeling angry at the dog for being aggressive to, oh, you're aggressive because you're hurting. Where does it hurt? Can we ask that of everybody? Instead of making somebody a bad other, where does it hurt? powerful question. So for Ruby, this is the theology. Unconditional love, finding out where it hurts. So back to spiritual parenting, the parent asks the child where does it hurt?

We ask ourselves that and then once we've started tuning in, okay it hurts, I'm feeling unloved, I'm feeling unworthy, the next step is we need to feel with that, let ourselves feel it so that the caring comes alive. Now here's a challenging place. We can ask ourselves where does it hurt. We might even get in touch with some loneliness, some feelings of shame, some feelings of being unloved by others. But we don't know how to hang out with that.

We very quickly want to leave. Some of you might remember this story of people going to seek wisdom from a wise old sage who lived way out in the wilderness and they had a cross through, you know, dangerous jungles and forests and so on to get there and I'd get there, he'd swear them to silence and then he'd say, okay, I have one question for you. What are you unwilling to feel? What are you unwilling to feel? So that's the question that when we start getting towards it to the hurting place we don't want to feel it. So we exit and we all have our exit strategies. The next step in our training of spiritual reparenting ourselves, we ask the question and then we have to kind of

learn to stay, to stick around. Not so easy. So we look at the different ways we leave and we start just noticing them, not judging them. Okay, I leave a lot, I get lost on the internet or leave a lot and I, as I mentioned before, it's because I overeat or I get overbizzy or whatever. We don't judge it but we start noticing it. And one of the main ways that we leave, rather than staying and feeling where it's difficult, one of the main ways is we just move into judgment mode. I shouldn't be this way. I'm bad for being this way. We blame ourselves. Or we judge others. We do them both. We get angry. Okay, spiritually parenting. If the child's angry, what do we do? Well, we stay with an upset, angry child until they can get in touch with what

it is they're really wanting. And it's the same thing when we're judging ourselves and angry. Back to Ruby Sales, she says, we talk a lot about what we hate. In other words, we're very quick to go into our judgments about ourselves and each other. I hate when it's like, such and such. She says, we need to talk about what we love. For us to be social activists or for us to go and do internal healing work, if we're staying with, I hate myself for such and such, even if we're doing the harmful behavior, we're not going to change. I hate the society for the way it's such and such. We're not going to be able to change it. But if we can move into, I hate it when it's like this because this is what I care about. I want to see such and such

happen. Ah, then we have the energy for change. If you think of it in terms of hating ourselves, judging ourselves, one woman I was working with some years ago hated herself for binge eating. And I say one woman, I have worked with myself and 10,000 women on this, so it's not one woman, but I'm thinking right now of one woman. That was her main position, which is I've ruined my life, life with this. In other words, I've ruined my body, I can't be in a relationship, I can't enjoy being physical with another person, I'm too self-conscious and disgusted in myself. I've ruined my life. So that was her, that was where she was locked in. So where does spiritual reparenting go? Well, you start by saying, okay, so what is it? Where's the hurt?

Well, the hurts right now all I can feel is my anger and my hatred towards myself. We started there with that hatred towards yourself. And I said, let it be as big as it is and it was really, really big. And I said, okay, so if you're really open to it, what's the deepest thing you're aware of? Well, it's deprived me of my life. I said, what has it deprived you of? Then she started saying, I want to feel connected and it keeps me from feeling connected. And I said, say more about that.

What do you really want? I want to be able to feel really close. feel really close. What does that mean? What would that be like? And it got right down to the place of feeling absolutely in communion. She was longing for communion. Most of her moments in life, I hate myself for the way I eat, deep down, I'm longing for communion. So what we did, I said, okay, let's explore what it would happen if you were in touch with that longing more and you kept praying from that place, and you kept remembering that place that long,

and you got familiar with it, and that became her practice. Every day she would meditate and she'd get in touch with the place that really longed to feel connected. From that place, when she would binge, she had more forgiveness. Because the more she remembered that she longed

to feel loving presence, the less she attacked herself. she started to be able to work with the addiction from a place of caring about her life, not hating herself. And so it is with spiritual reparenting that we begin to re-parent ourselves from a place of caring about the parts that are having trouble. And so it is with our wider culture. As Ruby says, we have to know what the hate and the anger, she says,

there's redemptive anger. And I think this is a really cool contrast. Redemptive anger is when you feel the energy of anger because you sense an opposition to what's healthy and healing and good. That's healthy. But she says if you lock into anger and it gets targeted to blaming and making somebody bad, then it gets toxic.

So how do we take the anger and judgment and so on that we feel and have a redemptive? She says, remember what you love. The anger's there because there's something you love that's getting blocked. Then act from that loving. Cornell West, he says, justice is what love looks like in public. We love ourselves into healing and it's not just our inner life.

We have to love our world into healing. We have to ask where it hurts to our world too. Thus far, asking that question, where does it hurt? staying, feeling, being with the loneliness, the fear, the anger, the hurt, being with it, and then learning how to really respond. Now, a really big challenge in spiritually parenting ourselves is that to some degree, sometimes small, sometimes large, there's trauma there, and it's very hard to stay with the place of rawness and hurt and fear and stay with.

it in a way that truly can comfort ourselves. Often we try to be with ourselves and it just makes the trauma get stronger. We get more fear. The last thing we'll talk about in spiritual re-parenting is how do we be with ourselves when there's really raw, deep feelings that are hard to be with? And I thought I'd share with you as a kind of modeling of how we do it. I was thinking about the movie The Horse Whisperer and I'm curious how many of you saw The Horse Whisperer? Good number. You might remember in it, this is Robert Redford and he's playing the role of a man who agrees to tame a traumatized horse and the horse's name is Pilgrim. And at one point in the movie he's created a very nurturing relationship with

the horse. He's done the spiritually parenting. You know, he's created a very nurturing. He's He's in that relationship of kind of stabilizing, calming, soothing, creating a really loving presence. But the horse gets triggered by a cell phone that a woman has, goes off and it triggers pilgrim. And so his trauma comes back and he contorts and he rise and he runs off into open pasture. Okay, and that's like imagine you're trying to be with yourself and you're trying to bring some connecting and healing to your inner life. And a part of you gets traumatized and it completely

contracts and it pulls away and you can feel that you're, you know, you're feeling panicked or enormous amount of anger or whatever it is. So how do you, you're like the trainer or the parent, how do you begin to come into relationship with the traumatized part? So here's what he did. The horse is far in the distance and And this trainer kneels down in a kind of form of submission right where he is. He doesn't chase after the horse. He just stays where he is in this very kind of humble, present way and he's just attending to what the horse is doing and needing from a distance.

So he's staying in connection, not chasing down the horse, staying present and attending. Okay, what do you need? What's going on? He's asking those questions from a distance. And he waits until Pilgrim is able to come into relationship with him. And after some time, Pelgram slowly walks to where the trainer's kneeling. And as he's coming close to the trainer's incredibly present, gentle, still, just a receptive presence. And finally, Pilgrim lowers his head and that's the horse's sign of trust and submission and readiness.

In other words, he's attended and created a field that allows the horse to kind of re-esthetic establish that trusting. And when that happens, the trainer just gently strokes Pilgrim's head. So they're reconnected. And then he's with one finger able to guide Pilgrim back, kind of here's the pathway back to healing and they can go back home to complete their training and their recovery. So what does this tell us? We've felt the parts of ourselves that are, we felt we're suffering, we asked that question, what's needed? We try to be with, we sense trauma, we really stay and stay and create that safe space and patiently, gently wait until there's enough calming so we can do that stroking, that nurturing,

that healing. And this is the way out of the wasteland. When we're in trance, all trance has to do with separation. We're cut off. We're cut off from this larger living, loving, reality and in this kind of static fragment of a story of something's wrong. Trance. How do we wake up out of it? There's some awareness in us that says, hey, what's happening? What aileth they? Where does it hurt? And then we deepen presence in that

gentle way. And this is the archetype of unconditional loving. We love ourselves back to healing. And I've been going back and forth tonight, as you've noticed, between loving ourselves into healing and loving the people around us and really the wider society into healing. So we're going to do a final meditation, but I thought I'd first read to you from just one short piece of Martin Luther King. It's from this talk beyond Vietnam, a time to break the silence. And I think it's very powerful. He says, this call for worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for

all humankind. When I speak of love, I'm not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I'm not speaking of that force, which is just emotional bash. I am speaking of that force, which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme, unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. So let's practice, we'll just do a short practice of this unconditional loving, this spiritually parenting, give you a chance to just taste with your own experience, and then you can practice more on your own. Take a moment to pause and arrive again right here. You might take a few full breaths to collect and gather your attention, inhaling deeply,

and a slow out breath, letting go, letting go. And again, inhaling deeply. And a slow out breath, letting go, letting go. letting the breath be in its natural rhythm and as we did a bit earlier you might bring to mind a part of your life right now that you feel there's some suffering for you some difficulty

and it may be where you feel disconnected and are conflictual in a relationship with another person you might feel suffering around what's going on in our wider society might be a sense of disconnection that's coming because of your own behaviors, ways you're down on yourself, might be fears

around health, money, something at work, somewhere where you're struggling and calling on that dimension of your being that's most awake and most caring. What you might call your awakened heart or your high self or your future self, that what you're evolving into. Just from that place, sense that you can ask yourself the question, where does it hurt? What's really going on inside?

Direct the question to the most vulnerable part within you. What most wants attention? And as you ask that question, see if you can feel into whatever vulnerability is going on, the fears or the hurts, sense what's most calling your attention right now, like that horse whisperer really attending with sensitivity.

You might sense what the unmet need is. Remember that all of our wounds, the deep part is really a sense of separation. What is the need of the vulnerabilities, the need to feel loved, to feel seen, accepted, held, to feel belonging to something larger, to feel safety, understanding, what kind of connecting does this place most need? And from that awakened heart, from the high self or future self, just a sense that you

can listen and feel with that vulnerability and begin to offer inward whatever nurturing, like the horse whisper, that gentle stroke. And if it helps to put your hand on your heart, for so many of us that can begin to create a relationship of reparenting, of healing that is so different from our normal way of relating to ourselves, just to put your hand on your heart, it's this gesture of kindness. You might experiment with that. Survival of the nurtured.

Can you offer that nurturing inwardly through some words, words maybe, some message to your heart, to the wounded place, to the hurting place, that's kind. As part of nurturing you can imagine and sense the love of this universe, the light and warmth of the universe moving through your hands into your heart. Let the nurturing in and from that heart space that can then sense the potential of the healing of the nurturing. You might bring it, bring to mind someone that's dear to you that's having a hard time

so you can extend it outward. One person that's dear, that's having a hard time. Just bring that person to mind and imagine asking the question. Where does it hurt? Or what's happening for you? What aileth thee? What's going on? and sense that you could bring that attention and that care to that person's vulnerability

in whatever way that you can offer nurturing and imagine what it's like for that person to feel you there, just the connection that opens up when you offer your presence to another, the warmth, the tenderness. And just feeling that heart space, the heart space that expresses, and nurturance, and just resting in that, sensing all beings as part of that heart space. I'll close with a simple verse from the poet Hafeus, admit something. Everyone you see, you say to them, love me.

Of course, you do not say this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops. Still, though, think about this. This great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying with that sweet moon language what every other eye in this world is dying to hear? Why not become the one who lives with the full moon in each eye that is always saying with that sweet moon language what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

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