Tara Brach - Stories That Imprison Our Heart - Part 1

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

Our suffering arises from fear-based stories that are often outside our awareness. These include stories of our deficiency or importance, of being a victim, of being unseen or unloved, of facing failure or rejection.  This is true collectively too.  We have shared stories of bad "others" that fuel wars, shared stories of the value of continued growth in consumption and production that destroy our earth, shared stories of our human right to enslave and violate other animals. We have the capacity to bring the stories that separate and imprison us into the light of awareness, and with great compassion, loosen their grip. These two talks look at the ways fear-based stories create suffering, and how awakening from them reveals the freedom of our true, and universal, belonging. Includes a story from Frank Ostaseki's new book, The Five Invitations - https://fiveinvitations.com/

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. Thank you for being here. So, a question. Have you ever had the sense that you're preparing to live but you're not actually living your life? And I ask because there are certain basic truths I have to keep reawakening to and when they're clear, it's like, how could I ever forget? And one is that when I'm thinking, when I'm in my story about what needs to get done, when I'm worrying and planning, I'm not fully inhabiting my life.

It's like real life is down the road. And related, when I'm in some way struggling emotionally, I'm caught in believing something that's smaller than the truth. something is wrong with me, something's wrong with others. In those moments, what I most need is to step out of the stories and the thoughts and come back to presence. If I want to understand reality, if I want to love fully, I need to step out of stories and thoughts.

I need to experience life directly. If I want to inhabit the truth of who I am, I need to step beyond thoughts and stories. So you're getting the theme. that most moments of life experiences filter through the idea of what's happening through good and bad and right and wrong and expectations and judgments and we're a slave to thoughts. There was a story of a man who wrote to the IRS and said, I haven't been able to sleep because two years ago I cheated and failed to pay quite a bit on my taxes, so I've enclosed an anonymous cashier's check for $3,000.

If I still can't sleep, I'll send the rest. On the spiritual path, the movement is from head to this heart and body and awareness, and that is the essential shift for freedom. So several weeks ago, one of the classes in an intro series I did was mindful of thoughts. And because this is so central to the path, I wanted to deepen on that theme. So that's what we're doing this week and next, with two talks that I really like from the archives. I'm so aware that in our world we are divided by polarizing stories and the capacity to see stories as stories and to seek to understand and connect to our shared humanity beyond the stories, it's essential.

It's where the hope is. So that capacity is rooted in us, in each of us realizing how we get entrapped in stories and learning practices for opening up out of our mental world into this realm of presence that really gives us wisdom and insight, compassion, and freedom. So I hope this serves. Thank you, friends, for being here and exploring this with me. We begin tonight with a story about the beloved Rabbi Schechter who was on his deathbed surrounded by people that loved him and wanted to hear his final words of wisdom.

And in a faltering voice, he uttered, Life is like a fountain. And those circling around him passed the word out through the crowds and word went down the long hall of people and it was passed down the stairwells to the people thronging outside and finally got to the outer edge of the crowd and a little boy was told the rabbi's words. And he said, well, what does that mean? People didn't know. So they passed the boy's question back up through the crowds, up the stairs, through the hallway, to those circling around to the closest assistant. So he whispers the question to the rabbi's ear and the rabbi

responds, so maybe it's not like a fountain. We humans are very attached to having stories to creating some orientation in life that gives us meaning to what's going on. Stories about who we are, who others are, what we have to do to be okay, what others should do to be okay, you know, right, wrong, good, bad, and what's going to happen down the road. It's all a part of our securing ourselves. And we sometimes refer to this as the storytelling mind because we create the world with the storytelling mind. And it's an intrinsic part of what's let us survive as a species. I just finished a book that I suspect many of you have read called Sapiens by Yuval Harari. Let me just out of curiosity,

How many of you have read Sapiens? Handful. Highly recommended. And he talks, as many have, of the kind of time period. He starts way back when, 70,000 to 30,000 years ago, when our neural circuitry started lighting up and there was what's called the cognitive revolution, there was, in the frontal cortex,

it catapulted us to being really dominant species on Earth. and the main features of that cognitive revolution is this capacity for abstract thinking, that we can think about things that aren't right here. We can imagine image in mental symbols of the world that we hold in our minds. And we have a language that's supple enough for us to be able to communicate immense amounts of information to each other. And this is a essential because in order for humans to collaborate the way we do and the collaboration is what's allowed us to really dominate the earth, we have to be able to envision things and communicate about them. And so we have collective stories that we just assume as realities,

as truths that we've all agreed to that enables us to cooperate. We have collective stories about how things work and what our role is and what rules are that we go along with. And so the greater the number of beings that are collaborating, the more power. I mean, consider the internet. You know, it's like you can see that the more beings that are going along with the same rules and regs and collaborate, the more they can be creative and productive and generative. So, again, our collective stories aren't the real thing. They're myths.

Harari calls them fictions. And religion, it's not a real thing. It's a set of ideas that different groups of people have a different set of ideas, but they adhere to them. And you can have millions of people that adhere to one set of ideas and values. And even if they don't know each other, they'll group together to serve the hunger are to fight a crusade or whatever it is, but they'll collaborate, which gives them power. Does that make sense?

All because they're agreeing on the same set of symbols. And similarly, we have some shared myths about science, which is, again, it's an abstraction, principles of how things work that allows amazing inventions and creations in the scientific world, breakthroughs in medicine and physics. Most societies participate now in the capitalist economy, which means you have to agree that there's going to be future growth, continued consumption, continued, you know, taking resources from the earth, continued generating new products and so on to invest in a future. That's the assumption that that is healthy and good. That's part of the, that's one of the stories we agree on. And laws, nation states, we agree that nations exist and go along with that.

Again, I'm not adding a right, wrong, good, bad. I'm just saying we have some shared stories. So, we also do that in our personal life. We have stories in our personal life that we don't challenge, we just assume it's the way it is, that that govern our experience. And those stories have who we are in relationship to others, whether we're inferior or superior, our expectations, expectations for ourselves, you know, what's good, what's bad, what behaviors we need to do to get what we want. The bottom line is, both collectively and individually, some of the stories can be very helpful. You know, science with its medical breakthroughs or the shared values that have us work together for those in need. And in our personal life, some of our stories can energize us towards self-discovery and towards savoring life and waking up.

And some of our stories are simply developmental. They're part of our growth and we believe in them and then let them go. Example, one woman describes her daughter saying, are you the tooth fairy? She's seven years old. So there's a story. because one of her teeth had fell out. And this woman says,

I wasn't sure whether or not to end this magical part of her childhood. But since she asked, I thought, yes, she must be ready. It's time. So I let her know, yes, dear, I am the tooth fairy. And she seemed to absorb the information very thoughtfully. And several hours later, the little girl came up to her mother and took her hands and hers and looked in her eyes and said, So what I want to know is, how do you get into the other kids?

houses. Okay, so the storytelling mind can be a benefit and it can also be a potential prison of suffering for individuals and societies. And if the stories are rooted in grasping or fear, if that's their driver, then they generate wars and they generate activities that destroy the earth, wars against ourselves. So this week, this class and next class, what I'd like to do is explore how we can relate wisely to the storytelling mind. And in a way that really allows us to spiritually evolve. The basic premise is that it's natural that we generate stories and that we believe them. and that our continued evolution in consciousness requires that we go meta to the stories.

In other words, we view the stories from a greater vantage point of awareness so we can discern which are serving. So we can discern which ones that have been unconscious are actually keeping us in prison and by shining the light of awareness find some freedom. So, meta, going meta, is a capacity we have. I mean, part of the, and it's correlated to the parts of the brain that are related to mindfulness. It's called metacognition. It's a part of us that gets it that we're lost in thought and the thoughts aren't helping.

Best example that I know is again a parent-child thing where little boy says to his mom, Imagine you're surrounded by 10 hungry, ferocious tigers. What would you do? And the mother says, thinks about it and says, I don't know, what would I do? And he said, stop imagining. So, just as our capacity for storytelling and communicating our stories catapulted us to the top of the food chain, our capacity to become mindful of the whole process of storytelling

is what will allow us to evolve in the direction of true wisdom and compassion. So the stories that imprison us, they have two qualities. One of them is that, as I mentioned, they're fear-based, fear-grasping, and the other is that they're largely unconscious. And a huge amount of our stories are fear-based and it's natural. You know, we spent a lot of time in the middle of the food chain. In fact, let me see, we were in the middle of the food chain for millions of years and it was only in the last hundred thousand that we jumped up to the top.

Okay, so just think of that. For millions of years, our whole nervous system was designed around anticipating you know, major threats from other creatures bigger than us. So it was definitely life or death. Here's something that I found really interesting from Harari's book. He said he was talking about the consequences of our very, very rapid jump to the top of the chain. I hadn't quite thought of it this way. He says that other animals that are at the top, that have been at the top, like lions and like sharks, had millions of years to get there. And what that meant is, other parts of the ecosystem had millions of years to adapt to their dominance and find other strategies.

Gazelles could run faster, other creatures could camouflage better. So there was a balance that prevented too much of a reeking of havoc from those on top. Now take humans. We jumped up on top. Not only that, he describes how lions and sharks had time to adjust themselves, so they have a certain kind of a dignity or grace or an ease in their role. And he says, here's what he describes about us. He says, most top predators are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion gives them a certain kind of confidence. But for humans, we're like banana republic dictators. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities from deadly wars to ecological

catastrophes have resulted from this over-hasty jump. So that really resonated for me, because we go around with the kind of fears as if we're really around the corner going to be, you know, jumped by a lion. yet most of the things for many of us are really psychological fears of where we're going to be rejected or in some way severed belonging, although many people walking the earth are dealing with very physical fears as we will describe. But the survival brain is still very much in action from being in the middle of the food chain and Joseph Campbell describes it this way. Because our stories come out of that. He says most religions

begin with the word help. Their response to this existential fear of being decimated. And so it is with our personal cosmologies, how we make sense of the world, that there's a lot of fear in our system. So we have a feeling of danger around the corner, how others will hurt us or how we'll fail in some way. And so we're using our stories to keep us alert to protect us from harm and danger. Now, a percentage of our fear stories, of course, and this is what makes it dicey, are useful alerts. So then the question is, well, how do I know what's useful fear and what's, you know, just habitual fear? But you can actually begin to become metacognition, to begin to bring awareness to the fears and sense where it's a biological habit versus,

is, hey, this is what's going on in my life. Most of the time it's an overactive survival brain and it keeps us distant from other people and it limits our continued evolution really. One story of a woman who's returning from retreat and she is at the airport and has had a switch planes and she stops and she buys a cup of coffee in a small package of cookies and she sits down at an unoccupied table. She's reading the morning newspaper when she comes aware of somebody else sat down at her table, and she's flabbergasted to see this nicely dressed young man helping himself to a cookie.

So she didn't want to make a scene, so she leans across and takes another cookie yourself, and a minute or so passes more rustling, he's helping himself to another cookie. Okay, so by the time they're down to the last cookie in the packet, she's really angry but she can't bring herself to say anything and then the young man breaks the last cookie in two pushes half to her ate the other half and leaves sometime later when she's you know up at boarding and pulling out her ticket imagine how she feels when she's confronted with her own unopened package of cookies right she had been eating his we go around with an idea of how other people are going to treat us, and whether it's being the victim or our stories of how we're going to

fall short, we live in that. When we're doing that, it keeps us locked in. And similarly, when a culture shaped by stories of bad other, when a culture is shaped by valuing acquisition and consumption that destroys the earth body, we're locked in. We're kind of in developmental arrest, really. Okay, so the second part of what makes a story a prison is we're usually not aware of it. I've often described, you know, this is again Joseph Campbell describes a circle of awareness and a line going through it and that everything below the line is outside of our awareness and above the line is what we're aware of and that mindfulness or metacognition or witnessing, whatever we want to call it, helps to move the line so more becomes in awareness.

Well, when we're not aware of the story, it totally drives us and we are, you know, we're imprisoned. And so it's easier to see, let's say on a collective level the stories that we once bought into and no longer do than it is when you look currently because so many are out of our awareness. So think of it historically that in the 1800s, most of the dominant culture, in the United States thought that Africans were inferior and that it was part of the natural order

for us to kidnap and enslave these people have dominion over. Currently, there's a huge amount of unseen bias that continues violence and oppression. But this particular dimension, slavery, the right of the dominant cultures no longer holds. for most, I would imagine. Now, in contrast, let's take a current story.

And the current collective stories are relationship with other animals. Okay? Most people believe that human animals are special, superior of another kind altogether and more important to the world, and that we're entitled to enslave and violate other animals cruelly for our purposes, whether it's through research, with agra of industrial farming. That's a story that most people believe. It allows us to participate by eating animals, many of which have spent their whole of their very shortened life

in a stall only barely larger than their body and shot through with hormones to speed their growth. And I often think, and I'm not the only one that's thought about this, that if it was another planet, you know, and we saw some super beings enslaving and treating humans that way, how horrified we be. It's kind of like the planet of the apes and there's a bunch of little novels like that. But here we are. And that's a story that most people just assume is how it is. It's the natural order. Humans have a right to do that to other creatures. So our evolutionary direction,

is towards waking up out of the stories that creates separation and moving towards less violence and more empathy. That's my belief. I've seen many evolutionary psychologists and others that feel that way, but I'm just putting that out as that's my hopeful belief and that it's a widening sense of who we are. And I think many of you are here because you've sensed in your own life that by deepening your attention with mindfulness, with self-compassion, with compassion towards others, that you actually feel a more inclusive quality of heart. So my sense is that's what's possible and that's what can keep going and what we're exploring right now is how to facilitate that by really shining a light on the stories that

keep us small in our individual life and us small as a society because we have a responsibility to do both. So the compelling personal stories that really create suffering are driven by survival fears. They're shaped by the standards of our culture and the values of our culture and delivered through our parents. Then they interact with our personal biography and experience to get hardened. That's kind of the way it goes. And they tell us, you know, what's wrong or what's going to go wrong, what to expect, how to behave, how to find safety, how to make things work out with other people. I heard a story about a woman who kept a shoebox, her husband had never dared to open it.

And 60 years later, she asked him to open the box, and the husband couldn't cope with his emotions. Okay, so they've been married 60 years, and to stay together that long, you have to be really honest with your partner. So the husband and wife were very open, and they shared everything. They didn't have any secrets except for the shoebox.

And she said, don't open it or don't ask about it. Okay, so he didn't think about it for 60 years until the day his wife got very sick, and the doctor said she wouldn't make it. And so while trying to sort out their affairs, the husband took the shoebox to his wife's bedside, and she agreed it was time to see what was inside. The man's eyes widened as he discovered $95,000

in two crocheted dolls, crocheted dolls in the box. When we were married, the old lady explained, my grandmother told me the secret of a happy marriage was to never argue. Okay, this is the culture coming in. She told me that if I ever got angry with you, I should just keep quiet and crochet a doll. The husband was deeply touched two dolls, meant she was only angry with them twice in 60 years.

Honey, he said, overcome with emotions. That explains the doll, but what about all the money? Where did that come from? Oh, that, the wife said, that's the money I made from selling the dolls. So our behaviors are very much shaped by the messages of our culture, and I realize that was a silly example, but I could I couldn't resist. It was fun. So we shine the light on stories to bring them above the line and how do we do that? One way is to begin to look at our caregivers. It gives us a little bit of distance and you can find out a whole lot about your stories if you look at your caregiver's stories.

What were their fear-based stories? What was their relationship with the world? they feel like victim? How did they look at hierarchy? Like who did they feel better than, who did they feel worse than? What kind of people do they think were good people or bad people? You know? Most interestingly, how do they regard you? Because how our parents see us, we internalize to a good degree. One of the stories that most touched me, I think I wrote it about about it in radical acceptance. I had a family that was at a, going out for dinner, parents and young daughter and parents ordered their food when the waitress came over and then the

little girl said, I want a hot dog and french fries and a Coke. And the father said, oh no, no, no, no. She's having meatloaf and mashed potatoes and milk or whatever he said. And the waitress looked at the little girl and said, so what is that you want? on your hot dog, hum. Parents were kind of frozen and they laughed and she, the little girl looked at her parents and said, you know, she thinks I'm real. So one of the ways that we begin to sense, you know, our stories about ourselves is, you know, how much did our parents really listen? Did they value what we said? Do we feel like we were seeing? Because one story might be, people don't understand me. I'm invisible to other people. It's just an example.

Rather than me giving you examples, let's reflect together a little, just try this one out. And this, of course, takes more time, so do it on your own if you get interested. Take a moment to feel yourself sitting here and breathing. Allow your attention to go back in time to when you're a young child. maybe five, six, seven, eight. Go to a place that you might have spent a lot of time with caregivers, parents, significant people in your life. It might be the dining room, porch, or TV room, a living room.

Imagine as well as you can visually the details of the place. and where you might have been standing and sitting and where your parents, if you had two parents, or if you had one parent, your parent, or if not a parent, then a caregiver of some sort might have been. And imagine that you're in some way engaged, and you can see that their eyes looking at you. And sense what the message is coming through those eyes. How are they seeing you?

What are they like? What don't they like? What are their expectations? Who do they want you to be? What are their fears for you? And without analyzing, just let this kind of inquiry just open to whatever you're perceiving and sense that as you continue on your own,

you can begin to shine more and more awareness on perhaps some of the messages and stories that just became an assessment. soon part of yourself story. Now when there's a lot of trauma in a family, there's trauma in a society, the stories of course get deeply infused with fear. In fact there's a lot of research now that shows whether it's generational abuse or addiction or something like the Holocaust, racial oppression, the genocide of indigenous peoples, that it's three generations down that you can detect in a genetic way the effects of trauma.

So that means the stories and the energy behind the stories can be passed down and passed down. And I say this because the point is that they're really not our stories. There are stories that come out of the culture that we're embedded in, that are transmitted through whoever were our caregivers, that solidifies, through life experience, but there are stories that profoundly impact the way we experience our life. So, it's our, the invitations to bring them above the line. Now, if you'd like to open your eyes, I see some of you still have your eyes closed, you're fine to do that. So how do we bring it above the line? One way is again, you know,

just sensing where we got messages from caregivers. Another is, you know, to begin to name what we're aware of in terms of our stories with each other. I know for myself that when I became really aware in my 20s of how many stories I had about who I should be and how I has fallen short, one of the ways that I found was most important to work with it was to name it out loud to talk with others and of course I named it quite publicly by writing about it. And then much later on in my 40s or 50s when I realized the stories about special person feeling inflated. You know it's not just deflation we feel. We also can go around feeling quite important like we're the center of the universe and in some way no more than

others. I watched inflation deflation and it was one of the hardest things to name out loud. It was way harder to name inflation than deflation, because underneath inflation is a sense of really being bad. Do you know what I mean? It's really embarrassing to seem vain or whatever. And yet, it's by naming our stories in a field where you feel, you know, you can do that, that actually starts to diminish their power. You know, the Shaman say if you can name a fear, it starts losing its power. If you can name your fear stories with trusted others, you actually begin to sense that it's not my story, it's just our stories. And you can hold it more as a kind witness with that metacognition than

as the victim of a story. So we begin to sense the stories in our life and where they're really snagging us. Now, some of you might, I'll just read to you some of the stories that are most core that many people get hooked on and see if any of them, how they sit with you. One is, I need to work hard for approval or love. I won't be loved just as I am. Now, I'm not worthy of being loved. I don't deserve to be happy. Anyone I get close to will hurt me. I will hurt anyone I love. I need to protect myself or I will get hurt. I need to be different, more attractive or intelligent or confident if I am to be loved or happy or at peace. Other people don't understand or appreciate me. I'm special, smarter,

better than others. It's dangerous to appear weak or needy and the list goes on. It's a powerful inquiry. There's an article I saw in the New York Times just recently describes how the Prozac Nations now the United States of Xanax. Some of you might have seen that. And it's interesting how it's really just how much our core survival fears are right on the surface now. There's so much anxiety and uncertainty in the world.

world. And one of the quotes, I'll read a little bit, only a few beats from ambition, anxiety is in part what made Mr. Trump a businessman. In Trump's book, The Art of the Deal, Ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, might have written this too. He says, in his real estate career, enough was never enough. He called it controlled neurosis and considered the characteristic of the most highly successful entrepreneurs. Trump writes, I don't say that this trait leads to a happier life or a better life, but it's great when it comes to getting what you want. The United States of Xanax is really pointing to how many of our fears are really creating the stories we're buying into. If we wonder how come things are the way they are, a lot of people are believing in stories that are based on fear.

and that's very oversimplistic. So forgive that portion of it. But the point is that when we have fear stories, when you have a fear thought, what happens is it stimulates in the body a biochemistry of fear that then generates more anxious thoughts and we get caught in a looping and it just holds us in that place. I always think of how Gandhi describes it, he says,

our thoughts and beliefs, you know, end up generating our actions and our actions generate our character. And he says, our character creates our destiny. So, our theme in this class really is how we can get imprisoned in our stories. They can create our destiny unless we take a look, unless we really investigate them. Now, we've looked at a little bit of the genesis and the power of fear stories. The last piece I want to explore with you is to begin to look at what frees us, and then we'll continue that next week. Some of you might have been here when Frank Osseseskeskes was visiting a few about a month ago or two months ago. I'd like to share a story that's in his book that I think really shines a light on our theme for right now. Frank works with

the dying. And he works with, he's done this for many, many years, and he describes a accompanying young man named Matthew who's dying of age, Matthew's gay, and he's been a long-time brutus practitioner. So he's suffering from high fevers and pneumonia and also from deep fear. He was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family and the commandments of a punishing God had literally been beaten into him by fire and brimstone preacher, man of a father. So that's the story he's living with. He believes, as he's closing into his death, that God will condemn him for eternity to hell due to his sexual orientation.

Okay, that's the story that's tormenting him. It's not surprising for long-buried cultural mores in early religious training to suddenly resurfaced at the time of death, even if the person has deliberately tried to leave those beliefs far behind. So the story is you're intrinsically bad, you're going to be punished. So Frank tried to support him. He tried to orient him towards mindfulness and compassion practices that Matthew had been studying and loved. And he created an altar by his bedside with a Buddhist statue and a healing tonka, which is a traditional Tibetan painting. And when that didn't calm, he held his hands and massaged his feet and played his favorite chanting music.

No change at all. Matthew was deeply, deeply disturbed. So finally, the doctor orders a sedative and even that didn't work. Matthews spinning in a world to confusion, shame, and dread. Frank writes, By two in the morning I was exhausted and feeling ineffective and powerless. Chose to go home and get some sleep. On the drive there for some unknown reason, I thought of my own first Holy Communion,

the Catholic ritual that ushers young innocence into the loving lap of God. When I got home, I searched through my storage closet to find my memory box, a small collection of mementos I hold dear. Here I located a five-inch plastic figurine of Jesus surrounded by lambs and little children. Instead of going to bed, I drove straight back to the hospital. as Matthew continued to moan, shout, toss, and turned in agony, I took down the thanka

and replaced the Buddha statue with the small plastic Jesus. Just as I was smoothing the altar cloth, a cleaning woman named Dina came into the room and spotted the figurine, setting her mop to one side. She said with great enthusiasm, merciful Jesus,

when His kindness is with us, everything is all right. At once, Matthew's eyes locked into Dina's. An angelic smile spread across his face as he pivoted toward the altar to gaze at the plastic Jesus statue and then back in Dina's direction. His entire body relaxed. In that moment, the punishing God of Matthew's childhood, the one whose wrath he had been taught to fear and whose judgment had made him feel like a terrible person was transformed into the merciful God he also knew and loved, the one who adored all his children, no matter their so-called

faults and flaws, a kind and forgiving, all-accepting, and benevolent God. Dina's faith in God's love was so secure that it lent Matthew exactly the strength he needed to defeat those stories that were tormenting him. I left them together there. They didn't need me. So Matthew was imprisoned by a story that was passed down from the culture through his parents, or a portion of the culture. And he was able to release it and what made it possible. It's the healing power of love. He was reminded of and invited into love.

And so it is that when we can connect in some way to that the living field of loving, the stories that we're holding lose their power. Now, often we talk about the two wings of awareness that free us. And one is the wing of mindfulness, clear seeing, that metacognition or witnessing that sees, oh, that's a story. And the other is the wing of love. And the final story I'd like to give you is how they come together because in our lives, We don't want to wait till the end to have that the story that's actually been holding us back

all of a sudden break loose. We want to be able to day by day be shining the light of awareness, that loving witness onto those stories so they can begin to dissolve. So the final story I'll share. Seems like both of my stories have some religious overtones. this is a minister, and he's at an impasse in his marriage, and his wife is very, very dissatisfied. She wants them to be more intimate and vulnerable and not so spiritually detached. She wants him to say, I love you, and to look into her eyes.

And he's very blocked and stuck and very defended, very insulted when she makes what he considers demands. But it was creating a lot of suffering in their marriage. so we explored it together and under the block and under his being defensive was a real sense of deficiency. He had a very harsh critic

and his harsh critic was basically saying you're a hypocrite, you're an imposter, you preach about love, you invite everybody into the kingdom of God and a loving kingdom but you don't embody it and the part of him is calling an apostors is you're ambitious, your ego's in control, and you're not really walking your talk, basically. So, and in reality he could comfort and guide other people to some degree,

but he didn't have close friends and he wasn't able to let people in. In fact, all his life he never felt closer, close to anyone, really. Yet he would preach about community and opening our hearts to each other. Okay, you get the idea. So, when we started investigating with these two wings and looking into it, he could feel that underneath the storyline of you're a hypocrite, you're not walking your talk, was a real deep sense of self-aversion and shame. And as he began, so he's named the story and then he's getting in touch with the feelings underneath it, which was really a sinking, hollow, empty kind of sense in this heart.

And he could feel the suffering that he had been walking around with that deeply isolating feeling for many, many years. I asked the key question I asked which awakens the wing of love, which is, what does that hurting part in you most need? Just as if, you know, if you saw Matthew and he's there and he's tormented, what does Matthew need? he needs to be reminded that a loving God is here, that there's salvation, that he can be

embraced by, in God's heart. Well, what is that painful place need? And for this, for this minister, it needs, the place needed forgiveness and needed to feel loved. He's kept saying, I'm scared, I'm trying, I can't help it, and he needed to feel forgiven and love. So that was, that final part, was, and we call this the kind of self-compassion, where he'd asked for forgiveness and he also offered it to himself. And for him, he just called on God's love, felt it pouring into him, just really surrendered into it and felt forgiven. After we do these kind of processes, I often get people just to sit and sense, so what's it like now? You know, you're, who are you if you're no longer living in that story?

who are you? And for him it was this spacious vibrating presence and he felt really at home. And I say this because I don't want this to sound like a fairy story. He had many rounds where he would be trying to get more real with his wife and feel blocked and tight and feel down on himself and each time he had to do sign the light again, bring those two wings and say, okay, what's happening? Okay, the story. What's underneath it? Oh, shame. Okay, forgiven, forgiven. Calling on forgiveness, offering it to himself. But here's how our body, minds work. It's the phrase is, neurons that fire together, wire together. And the more we practice something, the more that becomes the neuropathways that actually change our experience.

So he was practicing in a way that undid the story. He was practicing loving presence that undermines that story of you're a hypocrite, you're bad, you're not walking your talk. Months later, he wrote to me, he said, for the first time in 26 years, we're feeling at home with each other, we're feeling each other's hearts.

So when there's suffering, and this is basically the pathway in your life, and we're going to broaden it, to the society as we move on, but when they're suffering, there's an inquiry. What story are we believing in? As individuals and as a culture, what stories are we believing? And then to look through the eyes of the loving witness to begin to unravel it. So we'll do a very brief version of that now as the close to this talk and then we'll continue next round. You might scan your life and choose some situation where you find your

repeatedly getting stuck and reactive in a way, caught in a difficult emotion, anger, hurt, fear. Could be a situation with your family or partner at work, could be something to do with an addictive behavior. So you can go right to the situation that exemplifies where you get stuck. And you might ask yourself, you know, when I'm caught in this, what's story am I living in? Am I believing I'm a victim, or that I'm unworthy, that I'm unlovable, that I'm failing, that others, that another person doesn't care about me or love me, or respect me? What am I believing? And when I'm believing this, how does it feel? How does it feel my body? See, if you can sense the real vulnerability underneath these stories.

It's where we feel most separate, where we're most caught in a small self. Underneath the stories, the identity is locked in a very small and separate self. See if you can feel the vulnerability of that self. And sense from that vulnerability, what way of offering care might most be healing and comforting? Is there some message that the wise, awake part of you can offer to that vulnerable place right now? And if it helps you just to gently touch your heart, I often do this to set up a relationship so you're actually connecting with the vulnerability, going underneath the story and bringing some healing energy right to where the vulnerability is.

Sometimes you can just say, I'm listening and I care. I'm here. I'm sorry and I love you. Or just simply it's okay, it's okay. But just the energy of care. Feel yourself as that caring witness to what's living under the story and see if you can imagine what would your life be like without this story if you didn't buy in?

Who would you be if you weren't living in this story? The stories keep us bound in a small self. Beyond the stories is a field of belonging that we can begin to taste and feel and intuit with our whole being. This is the blessing of the path. This is the hope for Homo sapiens and the earth. touching this field of belonging that's beyond any story.

This is how Rumi puts it. I am water. I am the thorn that catches someone's clothing. There's nothing to believe. Only when I quit believing in myself that I come into this beauty. Day and night I guarded the pearl of my soul. Now, in this ocean of pearling, occurrence, I've lost track of which was mine. So as we close this meditation, this class,

you might sense the invitations to continue to shine the light of love and awareness on any story that might be keeping you from this larger field of belonging. And let our shared prayer be that all beings are blessed to awaken. in this way, to realize the truth of their connectedness, to wake up out of the stories that keep us separate and small and afraid, and to live from that field of loving presence that is our true nature. Namaste and thank you.