Tara Brach - Stories That Imprison Our Heart - Part 2

Episode Date: June 26, 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.

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 this is part two of Imprisoned by Our Stories, a two-part series that I have chosen from the archives. and I wanted to share that some years back I was talking with a young man at the end of a mindfulness retreat and through the week he had gotten in touch with intense fear with buried grief with anger also had moments of deep peace as he was sipping a cup of tea, sense of wonder while walking outside. He had touched into this open-heartedness and tenderness to life. When he left he said he was

leaving with a very important understanding. And the way he put it, the joy isn't getting real. The joy isn't getting real. We can't discover that joy if life is perpetually filtered by thoughts, judgments, plans, and stories. And that's the power of doing a meditation retreat. That's the center of meditation practice is waking. up from the trance of thinking. And the Buddha talked about it sometimes as living in a waking dream and he advised us to take the world of concepts in two hands and drop it. He also said that people with strong opinions just go around bothering one another, which I think is a great quote. And when I looked it up, it's really there. It's the gist in the Buddhist scriptures,

is slightly paraphrase, but when we cling to our stories, we're at odds with others and we're at odds with truth. So this is from a much more contemporary source. It is true. As we go through life-thinking heavy thoughts, thought particles tend to get caught between the ears, causing a condition called tooth decay. Some meditations like mental floss, right? Really, the sense, The centerpiece of meditation training is to become aware of thinking not to believe our thoughts. These thoughts aren't who I am to arrive back in the present moment. And the thinking that causes the most suffering are fear-based stories. I mean, this is what leads us to be at war with others and also ourselves.

Some of you might remember the phrase from Kabir. He says, into the looking glass cavern, the dog goes running, seeing his own reflection, he dies barking. So this week will deepen our exploration into how stories imprison, how they cause truth decay, and the profound freedom of waking up from stories. So I hope this serves you on your path. Many blessings. There's a story of a reporter interviewing a bank president and the interview went like this.

The question was, sir, what's the secret of your success? And he says, two words. And sir, what are they? Right decisions. But how do you make right decisions? One word. And sir, what's that? Experience.

And how do you get experience? two words. And sir, what is, what's that? Wrong decisions. That's the, you know, said briefly, that's the message of its feedback, not failure when stuff doesn't go our way. And the reason I bring it in is because how we frame what's going on, the story we create around what's going on or the meaning we assign totally shapes our experience. There's been some very interesting research that Kelly McGonigal reported about about four years ago on stress and she described tracking 30,000 people over a period of eight years and the question she asked was, how much stress did you have last year?

Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health? And then she basically noted who does? died over that period of time. And here's what they found. Those who experienced a lot of stress had 43% more risk of dying, but it was only true for those that felt the stress was bad for them. Those that felt that stress was not bad for them had the lowest risk of dying, 30,000 people. It's a really interesting study. that how we frame things really determines our experience. It's, as I say, it's not what's happening.

It's how you're relating to it. And this goes whether you're considering it, you know, having a divorce or getting a really bad diagnosis or having the stocks go up or the stocks go down, it's how you're relating will determine your experience. So this is part two that we're doing in this class of the theme of how our stories can imprison us. And the core understanding I kind of want to start right in the beginning with is that our stories, our beliefs are a map of reality. they're not reality itself. As one teacher says, they're real but not true.

They're real thoughts, they're real soundbites in our mind, but they're not the truth, the lay of the land itself. They're a map, not the territory. And some, like a roadmap, are useful. They get us going in a certain way that can be helpful in our life. And others are not. And they actually cause enormous suffering. That's the bottom line.

One way to think about it is that our stories are really good servants, they have the potential to be and really terrible masters. When they're the masters, they define us. And this is the key to the whole exploration is that our stories can keep us trapped in a very small sense of self. are they can remind us of important ways to pay attention and to be that actually wake us up out of a confining sense of self. So that's what we'll be exploring and one way that I think about it is that if you're

suffering, you're believing a story that's not serving you, any kind of suffering. You're believing a story that's not serving you. dominating you, it's defining you. So the question is, you know, how do we know whether the stories in our mind are serving us? Can we actually have that filter where we have enough mindfulness to step back and say, hey, this is a story, what's it doing to me? And if we're hooked, how do we get unhooked?

That's kind of what we'll be looking at. So in the last class I described how whether we're looking at our collective stories are individual stories because we have huge amount of collective stories that inform our individual stories. When we're looking at them, the ones that cause suffering are fear-based. They're driven by fear. They're coming from our more primitive survival brain and that survival brain is over, is kind of overdoing it.

out of control and it's creating a story that's not serving us. And because we're, the biggest domain that matters to us is relationships. You know, we are relational creatures and we live and die because of relationships. That's the arena that our stories are most poignant about. who are we in relationship to other people? And the core of a story that is causing suffering is usually either I'm bad, I'm wrong, or you're bad, you're wrong. That's kind of what it comes down to.

I know I'm being very simplistic, but it's the reason I'm being simplistic is that to begin to investigate your stories, you need some flags. So the flag of should be different, I should be different or you should be different. I am wrong, I need to change, you're wrong. That's a sign that there's a story that's confining you. So fear-based stories are often really proliferate in societies where there's a lot of fear. And if you look at our contemporary society, well, what does fear come from? It's when we feel separate.

We feel like we don't belong. And we're in a society that does not nurture togetherness, you know. It does not nurture a sense of cooperation and collaboration. There's more of an emphasis on competition and being the best and beating out other people. a lot of hierarchy that we buy into that really makes it hard to trust a true belonging. The effect is anxiety is rampant. I mentioned in the last class, New York Times article that shows the shift from being the Society of Prozac to the Society of Xanax.

that, you know, we're really hooked on anxiety and the statistics are 38% of girls age 13 to 17 and 26% of boys are diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. And that's not just talking about normal anxiety and anxiety disorder. That's really high. So in our families, our caregivers have their anxieties about themselves, about the children doing well. So, it often interferes with the kind of bonding and attunement that makes for secure belonging. So we all develop what I sometimes describe as these spacesuit selves, these egos that underneath

its insecurity and the space suit self is navigating to try to feel better. And we, you know, it needs to be there to get through a difficult environment where there's not an innate sense of belonging and to cope with those unmet needs for feeling connected. And the single greatest space suit activity that we engage in are the stories that we generate. Our fear-based stories are the major way this ego self is trying to cope. So just to give you a sense of it, in this New York Times article, one woman writes about texting a friend in Oregon about an impending visit and when there was no response right away, she posted on Twitter to her 16,000 plus followers the following. She said, I don't hear

from my friend for a day. My thought, they don't want to be my friend anymore. And then she's developed this hashtag called, this is what anxiety feels like and it just caught fire and people started sending in all their experiences of anxiety and their stories for what was anxiety like for them. One said, finding even the littlest changes in people's behavior around you and thinking they hate you. How quickly our story is, if you're acting grumpy or critical, it's about me. Always feeling you're a bad friend, although you did nothing.

wrong. How many of us have a story that we're always letting other people down? You don't even have to raise your hand on that, you know? So, when fear-based stories dominate the map, it basically means, I mean when we're living in them, it means we're identified with the space suit, we're identified with our ego and we're forgetting the love that's here and the awareness that shines through. We're forgetting who we are. We're forgetting who we are. And when we're inside fear-based stories, we're perceiving other people as spacesuit cells. We're forgetting their subjectivity and that the eyes that are looking at you have the same deep longing to connect the same sentience. We forget when we're in those stories.

They contract our being. So I've worked with a lot of people, including myself, who are aware of those stories. were aware of the stories that we're telling ourselves to some degree and yet they're really hard to let go of. They have a deep groove in the psyche. So I'd like to look at how come they're so tenacious. How come these stories just persist and persist? And the way they keep going is that we are continually looping thoughts and feelings. So we have a fear thought and it creates a biochemistry of fear that then generates more thoughts. So we can spend a lot of time lost in thoughts that in some way are keeping an atmosphere going of anxiety.

We're just very repetitious. One cartoon I've always loved is that this guy who's about to drive into a desert and says you and your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles, you know. This is Carlos Castagnata who wrote, he's describing the teachings of a shaman who says, you talk to yourself too much. You talk to yourself too much. You're not unique in that. Every one of us does. We maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A man or woman of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to them. themselves. Okay.

So this is one reason there's so tenacious is that we're just so habituated to thinking mind and believing our thoughts. And so the beginning of training ourselves to be able to let go of the stories that hold us is to just even be able to step out of the thinking and know the difference between thoughts and this living reality right now. The difference between any idea we have and this moment that is just vibrant, sensations, sounds, awareness to know the difference. But instead we stay inside the thought forms and if you think about fake news, which many

of us are thinking about, the more it's repeated, the more believable it becomes. and that's, you know, that's more and more common information. Just keep repeating it. It doesn't matter how bizarre it might seem to some people. If you keep repeating it, there's something about hearing it that the mind assumes it's true. And it's interesting that mental corrections alone don't work. What that means is if somebody puts out fake news and you correct it, it actually amplifies the belief in it. interesting to me. And it's kind of, as Einstein put it, you can't solve a problem on the same

level it's created. You can't respond to an untrue story with another story that's trying to correct it, which is why affirmations generally don't work that well, because the stories in our body by that point, our body is feeling and believing it in a visceral way. So one reason the stories that limit us are so tenacious, we keep repeating them, deep grooves in the brain. The second is that we avoid opening to the vulnerability underneath them. Consider this. If our story is something like, I believe anyone I meet if they get to know me will reject me. And then we're saying, well, stop staying in the idea and come into your body. Well, what he thinks in your body at that moment? Fear, shame. It's the last place you want to go is into the

body and feel what's there. Even though if we learn to do it, we'd actually discover a presence that gave us a lot more wisdom and space and reality. But you have to go through the energy in the body. So we avoid the vulnerability there. Another reason the stories survive so well, is that the stories that really keep us hitched, the ones that have a lot of vulnerability around them, we don't share with others. We don't bring into a wider container to let them ventilate and have the benefit of more awareness. We keep them to ourselves, which means we get more identified with them. You know, I've seen when, especially when I was working a lot as a clinical psychologist, that when a person was able to name something they felt really,

really ashamed about, something where they had a story of just how deeply bad they were, that actually was a sign to me. They were beginning to not be so identified with the story. Does that make sense to you? Okay, so naming out loud and we're not inclined to do that for the stories that really have us hooked. And the last piece I'll say on why they're so tenacious, We hold on to them because they give us a sense of control. We'd rather feel like we have a map than no map. We'd rather feel like we know the bad news and are ready for something and maybe can do something than not being sure.

We don't want uncertainty. So it gives a false illusion of control to keep running these stories. So what motivates us, you know, why would we be spending time right now on this? What motivates us is that as we begin to deepen our attention, we start sensing just how much suffering there is, being identified as a deficient, unlovable cell. You know, we see the condition to perpetuate, but we get, we start getting, as it said, that we're loyal to our suffering, that we keep rerunning the same. stories that were being really loyal to our suffering, but there's some sense of another possibility.

So I'm naming this because it takes a lot of motivation to begin to really shine a light on our stories and to be able to start opening to what's underneath them. It takes courage. Kind of, I like the language of Mark Nippo, the poet who's described it as an exquisite risk. To become more intimate with truth means we take the exquisite risk of going underneath the stories. Okay, so the first step, to become aware that we're telling ourselves a fear-based story, that we've framed life as a problem, we've framed ourselves as a problem, the effect it's happening.

And if you, if this is mode-invading you, if you're feeling like, yeah, I'd actually like to catch on to the stories that really have me hooked. Start with ones that aren't so charged just to get the knack of going, okay, here's a story that I'm believing that's making me feel more contracted. As you can imagine, those of you that have been with me before, I will be asking you to do something like that soon. Okay, so we become aware. So I'll give you an example for myself because I'm actually really fascinated.

by watching my mind and watching how often there is some background of a story that I wasn't conscious of that's affecting my sense of things. So Monday morning, as I've described often in my talks, I have a ritual of going right down and walking, hiking by the river, the Potomac River. And then I often will do a standing meditation by the river, sit on some rocks. And I got still and I encountered this huge wave of fatigue and it had been, it's been really chronic. I've had, you know, for several weeks now, I've just been aware of consistent fatigue at a

more intense and oppressive level than usual. So my mind started circling around with the typical, you know, what's causing this, how come it's happening and what do I need to do about it and so on. And then I watched that and because I was officially meditating, I was standing there turning a minute, I went, okay, I'm talking to myself here. And what's the story? And what's the real assumption here in the story? And the assumption was that I'm caught in something bad right now.

Something bad is happening. And it shouldn't be happening. It's like a bad thing to be happening. And I'm in some way complicit, like I caused it in some way. So, just a comment that again these fear-based thinking has a undercurrent of no, this shouldn't be happening. No, this is wrong, no, I'm wrong. This is bad, it shouldn't be.

Okay, so there I am and underneath, so I say okay, a story and there's a lot of noes around it, it shouldn't be happening, what's actually going on? into my body and it was feeling that weighty, achy, you know, I feel when I'm really fatigued, kind of like a pain or pressure in my heart, it's just real weighty. My mind's fuzzy, it's unpleasant. So I just say, okay, I'm pleasant. And there's a little more quiet and a little more kind of opening into a witnessing versus the oppressed, beleaguered, fatigue self. That's the beginning of a shift. But then thinking again and the thinking went, yeah, but if I don't pay attention to this, I won't take the steps to fix it.

So I'm really up to pay attention in order to fix it. And then there's another part of me that goes, you can spend time thinking about it and fixing it, but you're way, way over doing that, you know, because we go way beyond the need. So, okay, then quieting again. And just sensing, okay, feels oppressive, it feels unpleasant, and more and more the who I was,

the awareness witnessing and just sensing, oh, this is hard. This being, this organism's struggling right now. So with that witnessing, there was kindness, just a bit of compassion. The question comes up, if nothing's wrong, if there's no story of something being wrong, then what's here? And you can ask yourself that. You can ask yourself that right now because it's really right at the part of what we're looking at. If we step out of any story that something's wrong with how things are, they should be different, then what's here? What we find is it might be unpleasant, it might be intense, but the identification with it dissolves and there's a sense that we're resting in an awareness that can include what's here in this moment.

That's the freedom. The clear revelation for me on Monday morning was that as long as there was any undercurrent of a story that I shouldn't be feeling this, there was no way to have compassion. If you're making something wrong, there's no space for that tenderness to arise. Okay. So in Western psychology, one form of one practice comes out of narrative psychology. And it describes just the power of the narratives we have about our life, where I came from, where I'm going, what's happening now.

And again, these narratives we have, they can be useful, they can be an interesting map, they can be a map that inspires us. But so often the narrative is something we're either grasping onto because underneath we're sensing something's wrong, it's a narrative that takes away our sense of possibility and openness. My husband Jonathan has a resume and it's on his website and elsewhere and up until a couple of years ago it just was there. It says his name, M.A. C.S.A. And then a couple of years ago, somebody finally asked him, okay, well, what's CSA? I get the MA. And with great dignity, he explained it was the Cupscouts of America. I have to tell you, under his past employment hit a long list. The final one

was certified pesticide applicator for the state of Illinois. Expired. So we latch on to our our narratives and again they can either be to cover up or they can be in some way so narrow they keep us down. The most toxic stories are the ones that have a real negative narrative about our whole trajectory. It's the conclusions we've made of what's possible and it's when we've seen our patterns repeat and we lose hope and think this is it. to always be like this, et cetera. One woman I worked with some time ago

had gone through a lot of changes in a very short time over a couple of years really brought a lot of this practice of mindfulness and compassion to trauma, so a lot of dramatic changes. But periodically she'd get this wave of depression and with that depression we'd come flooding the old stories

that were really negative. and a lot of self-destructive thoughts, even some suicidal thoughts, a lot of darkness. And then the story she'd wrap around all of that would be, this shouldn't be happening if I was really getting better, this wouldn't be happening. This means something's basically broken, I'll never heal, I'll never be happy, and then defeated. Okay? It was kind of a despair. So that was the pattern. It's back.

You know, the demons are back and this is a down. downward spiral. If I thought I was doing better, I was deluding myself, that kind of thing. So I'm giving this example because I want to give to you an example of how the narrative can absolutely entrap us when we have that stretch. So we work together and as I described, you know, I'm working with myself, the first step is, okay, this is a story. Just notice there's a story and it's having a major effect on you. And then you have to start investigating, well, what's under that story right now? This is the courageous part, okay? Because when there's a fear story, there's fear. And for her, when she started investigating it was a dark, hollow

place of ache and fear and shame and kind of being with that. And when she sensed, what did that that very young, desperate place need, it really needed the message that the fact that this is re-arizing, what happens is not your fault. You know, it's that kind of sense, just like the outer weather is not our fault. The fact that we go through cycles, it's not your fault. It's not your fault. And needed that. So as soon as she even recognized, that's what she needed, there was some sense.

of some compassionate place offering that inward and she touched into the grief that she had been covering over, just the enormous sense of the losses of her life and a real deep tenderness and she had to start sensing that that young part of her could then begin to relax into something larger, bigger than the storyline, okay? But then this happens, we get a hitch. She started to relax a little into a larger sense of being and then some place in her went fear, contract. And another story came up, if I relax, something bad will happen.

If I let myself trust, something bad will happen. Very old place that had been abused. And often with abuse it comes unexpectedly just as you start relaxing, you get in some way some violation and that was the case for her. So, again, she was being loyal to her suffering. Stay vigilant. It's not okay to relax and to notice that story. The reason to bring this up is it's not a one-shot. It's like our minds will keep unwrapping meaning around things, okay? Okay, so there's that story of if I relax and trust something terrible will happen. just notice that it's a story and feel underneath that and underneath that was a place

in her that was really afraid and trying to protect her and just to bear witness. What she needed was just acknowledgment, okay, you're trying to protect me. And that again, in the moments of seeing the story and feeling what's going on, there's an enlargement of identity. And again for her there was a sense of opening and being. that compassionate witness. And when she wrote me an email the next morning, she said, I'm resting in a larger space with the compassionate witness. And it's more the truth of who I am than the small self in the story. And she used the language, I don't need to be so loyal to my suffering. I don't need to be so loyal to my suffering. So the stories perpetuate the suffering

and the pathways opening to the body. And I want to say also that often, in this process with myself and others, that opening includes a movement from feeling the fear to the grieving place that we've been blocking. And the grieving is actually, the sadness and grief is actually a sign of dissolving and opening. It's a sign that we're no longer resisting and saying no. Now, often there's this invitation to sense that we've got these stories and we're clinging to a story of wrongness and badness, but then there's the question,

don't we need a story of something's wrong to protect against a violent world? And I want to address that because some of you might be wondering that there's a lot that happens that endangers our being. Don't we need a story that something's wrong so we'll stay alert to it? And many of you, I know are familiar with Tahamhisi Coates who wrote between the world and me and he brings a powerful attention to the fear that lives in the body of an African-American because of the very real ongoing threat of physical violence. And I'll just read you a quote. He said, it is not necessary that you believe the officer who choked Eric Garner

set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with them the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy. and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black. So if you're in a black body, way, way more endangered. Now, I share this on the same day that yet another police, maybe it was yesterday, another police officer was acquitted

in shooting and killing a person of color. It's a big series of acquittals. And the reality is we need to have the stories that remind us that we have to take care as individuals and take care collectively to change a system that destroys life that's oppressive and violent. Yet those are stories that serve. But as Taanehisi Coates says, if the story becomes a master, in other words, if a person of color goes around and the story of I'm endangered takes over, it disconnects from life.

It takes over life in a way that's incredibly painful. And I want to share with you his example of that because I found it so compelling. He writes in the book about an experience in Paris he had and he shared, by the way, the whole book is him sharing with his son. the way people of color lived with fear for bodily cell. But this is the first time out of the country for him, and he described how hard it was for him to shake that fear and mistrust. He says a few weeks into the trip he made a friend who wanted to improve English,

and he wanted to improve French. So he describes at one point meeting up with this man and going to an outdoor cafe and the friend orders some wine and heaping platter of meats and bread and cheese and then pays. and all the time he's thinking, hey, this is some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me. His friend wanted to show him the architecture of a building so he guides him down the street. They take a walk together. Meanwhile, he's waiting for the guy to slip into an alley where some dudes would be waiting to attack. This is what he brought with him.

He said, but my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonsoire and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear. What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible. So I share this story on purpose because, yes, stories that let us know of very real danger, absolutely we need to have them. When they take over, they separate us from our hearts and our awareness and each other. So we're exploring this process of how do we identify the stories that

are not serving our hearts and awareness. How do we bring them into our, come into the lived experience so we can bear witness? And we can recognize who we are is that witnessing, compassionate presence and not be so identified, not be imprisoned. How do we loosen the grip of the story? As I mentioned, when we're living in the spacesuit self and we're in our stories, all we can see is other people's spacesuits and we're not able to recognize their goodness. We're not able to recognize their vulnerability and we can't sense what's meaningful to them. You know, one of my favorite reflections when I'm leading groups often is, please tell me

what you love. Please tell me what brings you happiness. Please tell me what you feel devoted to. You know, that kind of inquiry. Well, when we're in a space suit self when we're living in our stories, we are unable to connect with what is really important to others. So we don't have an authentic respect and care for what matters for other people. We're just not in touch.

Again, by example, during the early weeks of the Iraq War, there was a, this happened then, the Army and the Marines were closing in on Baghdad, and one soldier describes what happened that a small unit of American soldiers was walking along a street. in the job, and I'm not pronouncing it right, but when hundreds of Iraqis poured out of the building on either side, so there they are, the small unit of Americans, and the Iraqis were really, really enraged, the fists waving, throats taught, and they pressed in on the Americans who glanced around each other, and they're in terror. And so this guy says he turned on the sound on the remote, and they were shrieking franed with rage. And it, uh, it's,

And the lens was lurching. The cameraman seemed as frightened as the soldiers when he looked at the images. And this guy was sure that there would be a shot that fired from somewhere, that the Americans would then open fire and the world did witness a massacre. Okay? That was the fear. So here's what happened. At that moment, an American officer stepped through the crowd holding a rifle, his rifle,

High over his head with the barrel pointed to the ground against the backdrop of the seething crowd. It was a striking gesture. It was almost biblical. Then he said, take a knee. Okay? That means that go down on your knees. The soldiers looked at him like he was completely crazy. And then one after another, this is with their bulky armor, body armor and so on in gear.

They melt before this boiling, crowd and pointed their guns at the ground. The Iraqis fell silent and their anger subsided. The officer ordered his men to withdraw. If we're going to have peace on this earth, we need to get to know others and what matters to them and respect it. And that means getting outside of our own fear-based story which might lead us to say, that person's threatening and the way to go at it is to shoot, which is the mentality often of those top of the hierarchy. When we start to live outside the confines of our story, we're open to new information and we can grow and we can experience a deeper reality.

Not just with ourselves, we can end up connecting. We can't really connect with others if we're living inside our story of what's wrong. It doesn't matter if we're not officially blaming them. If it's what's wrong with me, we're still afraid to be vulnerable and real because somebody else will end up rejecting us. So my final story for you tonight is an illustration again of the possibility of, and what happens when we're starting to step out of our stories. And this is, I found this in Crapalachio, which is by Scott McClanahan.

He says one time, a man, I'm paraphrasing part of it, left home. He had argued with his mother and father the day before he left. They spoke horrible words to one another and he left without saying goodbye. He had been gone many years, even spent time in jail. Years later, when he finally got out of jail, he wondered if his mother and father were even alive and how they were holding would have been shed and how they were relating to where he had wound up. Were they ashamed? Were they enraged? He rode to them and told them he'd be coming home on a specific day following week. He said, if they wanted to see him and were not angry,

not blaming him anymore, not ashamed. They should put a blanket on the clothes line, and he would know to come inside. If the blank was missing, he would know that he was not welcome. He would know to turn back. And he told them he hoped they were in good health. The man arrived by rail the next week. He was nervous when he stepped off the train.

There was no one there to meet him. He walked up the worn path towards the home place and thought about the past. He thought about his time in jail. He thought about how angry or ashamed his parents must have been. He thought about the horrible words they spoke. He was just about to turn around and go back to where he came from when he saw a blanket in a tree.

He kept walking. He saw another blanket. He kept walking and he saw another blanket. Then he turned towards home and the house was covered with blankets. The yard was covered in blankets. The clothes line was covered. in blankets. The path to the door was covered in blankets. His parents were standing there and they were welcoming inside. I think what, part of what touches me about that so much is we're

so inclined to believe our stories of separation. When deep down we all want to connect, deep down, we may be too afraid to make the gesture and put out the blanket, but that's what we long for. It takes a dedicated practice to challenge the stories. Mostly we're in such a trance, we don't notice they're there, and then when we start to notice, it takes a real willingness to say, oh, look, this in some way is me making myself wrong or somebody else wrong. This is the shouldn't be happening story. It takes dedicated practice to get the knack of really,

being in our bodies and breathing with what's there until we start sensing the space of that that witness, that larger presence. But it's possible because that space does open up. This is Henry Nguyen, who says the real work of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me. To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I. I will hear the voice of blessing, to gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing, that demands real effort. So we make that effort.

Really, may we do this as individuals? May we quiet the stories of fear? And just hear that the voice of blessing, which is beyond all stories, that just is the realization of our goodness and our belonging. And may we do it collectively, that we open beyond the stories that separate us to that loving awareness that's really our source. So let's practice together for a few minutes and explore this. Just do it in a simple way.

You might bring to mind some recurrent situation in your life where you end up feeling difficult emotions, feeling afraid, angry, hurt, some situation that triggers you, and ask yourself, what's the story I'm telling around this? See if you can find the no, the basic assumption this shouldn't be happening. This is a bad situation. It's my fault. It's someone else's fault. What's the no?

This is wrong. You might explore for a few moments if you could step out of the story of something's wrong with this and just feel directly in your body what the situation brings up. With the simple intention of being with and breathing with kindly, whatever's there. Very simple right now. If you feel it's bringing up fear underneath or shame or hurt, if it helps you to put your hand on your heart to keep company with what's here, breathe with it and feel it.

And sense that you're contacting what's under the story and regarding it with a very kind witnessing. Okay, so this is what's here. It might be very, very unpleasant, but the witness, the kindness can include it. Okay, this is what's happening. So this is the movement from the story, believing the story, to witnessing and holding the feelings underneath them with kindness.

It doesn't give you an answer on how to move through your life. But what it does is give you a larger sense of who you are in the moment, which leads you to embody. body more compassion and intelligence. A simple presence with what's here. Notice who you are when you're witnessing kindly, the experience inside you. Sense the goodness that's inherent in witnessing kindly.

You might ask yourself, if nothing's wrong, if I'm not believing in a story that something's wrong, then what is here? And just let go and trust yourself to that heerness. And as you move through the days and weeks to come and you find yourself stuck, you can ask that question, well, what am I telling myself? What story? How am I making myself or life or others wrong?

Can I just bring that kind witnessing to the life that's really here? Come back home to the intrinsic goodness of your more true self. Hafais puts it this way, the poet Hafais, you don't have to act crazy anymore. We all know you were good at that. We all know you were good at that. Now retire, my dear, from all that hard work you do or bringing pain to your sweet eyes and heart. a clear mountain mirror, see the beautiful ancient warrior and the divine elements you always

carry inside. Look in a clear mountain mirror. See the beautiful ancient warrior and the divine elements you always carry inside. Thank you for your attention and namaste.