Tara Brach - Survival of the Nurtured – Our Path to Belonging

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Survival of the Nurtured – Our Path to Belonging - We flourish when nurtured with love and understanding. Yet for so many, the violence of our society and lack of attuned caretakers has severed trust and belonging. This talk explores how meditation and conscious relating with each other can restore the connections so vital to healing and spiritual freedom. "We are not the survival of the fittest. We are the survival of the nurtured." Louis Cozolino

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Greetings, friends. I wanted to let you know about the talk that we're live streaming tonight because it's one of the best of from the archives. And it's based on a wonderful quote from the psychologist Luis Cozalino. He writes, that we're not survival of the fittest, we're survival of the nurtured. And some deep wisdom in us knows this, that we live in an interdependent dance with others, and our capacity to flourish really depends on knowing and trusting that belonging. And this talk is going to look at how so many of us experience severed belonging,

feeling cut off, separate. it. And we'll look at how our path, how the practices can help restore a true sense of connectedness. Just to cue you in, if you listen to last week's talk, you'll notice an appearance of a very special donkey. Okay, friends, may this reflection serve you well. Many blessings. Namaste and welcome. And a special welcome as always. always to our friends who are live streaming at the moment, really increasingly the sense of a global community. It's very lovely.

I'd like to begin with one of my favorite little pieces from a writer from the New Yorker and he describes how when his son turned 12 they seemed to lose their closeness and he didn't, he couldn't find a way to establish connection to have conversations. but then he stumbled on texting and although he aborted his son was doing it all the time so he figured aha this is the way in and his son taught him some abbreviations but as he writes

the one he didn't have to teach me because it was so self-evident was L-O-L and I knew right away that it meant lots of love because he put it at the end of every message he sent me So he said it's such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation of the 20th century. It's like a little arrow of love you can send out to anyone you know. So he describes the next six months of his kind of infatuation with instant messaging and its power of emotional transmission and he sent LOL to everyone he knew.

He says his sister was getting divorced and they wrote to her, we're all behind you and beside you. L-O-L. your brother. He said, my father got ill and I sent him, you know, healing wishes, L-O-L in Canada. Everyone I knew at work, everyone, you know, the guy that lost his job, L-O-L. So he describes how he happened to be texting with his son one time from the airport and he was saying how he really hated being away so much,

but under some financial pressure and just really needed to travel to make him. money they needed as a family and he signed it L-O-L. And his son responds, Dad, what exactly do you think L-O-L means? Lots of love, obviously. He says, no, Dad, it means laughing out loud, you know. And his world kind of crumpled because, you know, he had to go through every message he had sent to everybody, all the L-O-Ls while they were suffering. So I love that piece and I also love the undercurrent of the message that we hear a lot about the internet and its way of actually reducing intimacy and decreasing empathy, that along with the speed of our culture and the stress.

And so we're to consider that alongside with a study, many of you probably are familiar with, a Harvard study that describes, it's a longitudinal study, they followed people over 80 years and they discovered the question is what really accounts for people being happy, having health and happiness and well-being. And as probably everybody that's listening intuitive it had nothing to do with making a lot of money and success and all that kind of thing. It had everything to do with social network and I don't mean Facebook friends, I mean, real connections with real humans and

close way and that's what made the difference. That was more predictive than social class. It was more predictive than genes in terms of health and happiness. As I said, it's intuitive that when we have real connection, a real feeling of connection, it feeds our souls and it's a basic need. One of my favorite stories about Mother Teresa is when a reporter asked her which was the poorest country she had ever been to. And she said, well yeah, I've traveled to a lot of them and everywhere I go. There's lots of poverty and suffering and people tell me about their hardships and their struggles. She said, but the poorest one I've been to is America. What she was really writing and this is the quote, she said, there are many in the

world who are dying for a piece of bread but there are many more dying for a little love. The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty. It's not only a poverty of loneliness, it's a poverty of spirituality. That here we are and we don't feel that intrinsic connectedness with our own beings and with each other and really with the sacred. So what I'd like to explore together and we'll reflect together on this is this poverty that Mother Teresa points to which is really a lack of a sense of a sense of, of belonging, and I'm going to use the word belonging a lot, the sense of a severed belonging,

and how these practices of presence and heart wake up that sense of belonging in a deep way. The poet John O'Donohue says, our life's journey is the task of refining our belonging so that it may become more true, loving, good, and free. So we can look at it as a life journey that we're here and we're in some way trying to become more connected and listening to our inner life and to each other in our world. And we can also sense it as this is also the evolutionary journey of our species that in a sense our most primitive expression of our brain and species would be what we might call the limbic or reptilian cluster, fight-flight freeze.

That that's what we're operating off of and that does not foster a deep sense of intimacy. That's the primitive expression and that as we evolve and as our brains evolve, we have the capacity to shift from that fight-flight freeze to what sometimes described as attend and befriend. And that's what fosters the sense of belonging. So again, the primitive brain perceives separation, experiences mistrust, and then tries to control and defend and aggress.

And then as we evolved in the, we have this prefrontal cortex that can see past that separateness and see connection. and experience empathy and experience our shared situation and care and collaborate, and that more integrated brain can attend and be friend. So I want to read a bit from Albert Einstein because his way of framing this question of belonging is with the following. He says, I think the most important question facing humanity is, is the universe a friendly place?

This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves. And so even if this is a familiar reading, you might just ask yourself fresh. Do you have a sense of the universe as a friendly place, some intrinsic benevolence? And I'll go on with what he writes. For if we decide the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly. Some prescience there.

If we decide that the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly and that God is essentially playing dice with the universe, our lives have no real purpose or meaning. But if we decide that our universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology and our resources to create tools and models for understanding that world, that universe. We'll seek understanding, seek connection, meaning. So is this world a friendly place? understanding of that language, that friendly doesn't mean that we don't suffer and die, it doesn't mean that humans don't act in incredibly insane and cruel ways. It doesn't mean that. It points to an essence of awareness, a capacity for love that is pervasive, that isn't

all of us, a potential there that's really intrinsic to existence. that sometimes doesn't get cultivated, but it's there. The reptilian brain does not perceive the world as a friendly place. The reptilian brain does not perceive belonging. Now, what about the rational mind? Typically, the rational mind would say, well, it's not friendly and it's not unfriendly, logically speaking. There's no proof, right?

which reminds me of when I last gave this talk on is the universe a friendly place, my mother was here and we would drive home and often we'd talk about the subject and she said, okay, I'm putting on my Barnard philosophy major hat because she went to Barnard and she was a philosophy major and she said, well how do we know that the universe is friendly and that love and awareness is essential? I mean, why can't greed and hatred be essential? You know, She did that kind of a move on me after I had taught all evening, you know. But she said, aren't we believing what we want to believe in what we want and manufacturing experience we want?

You know, she was asking good questions and it's true. If we think about it rationally we can't say, oh yes, the universe is friendly or that love and awareness is essential if we think about it rationally. if we begin to come into presence and a presence that goes beyond our thoughts, then we can begin to experience in that presence a wakefulness and a tenderness and a tenderness and a mystery that does have an intrinsic sense of benevolence, of love. And one way to think of meditation as it evolves the brain to that integrated state. so that we can experience that friendliness and that belonging.

And how does that work? How does meditation do it? Well, the Olympic system plays out in us. We all experience the fears and the wants and, you know, the greed and so on. But we have this capacity for witnessing, a witnessing awareness. They can notice that's happening and respond with compassion. And in the moments that we become deeply present, We're not caught up in the limbic brain.

We're not getting rid of it, but we're not identified with it. We are occupying a larger space that feels in communion with others. We're going to circle back, but I would like to take a little bit of time and look at what are the forces in our society and in our individual lives that keep on reinforcing we're separate, we can't trust, and the universe is unfriendly. Because it's important to see them. And if we look on a societal level, what gets us caught in the reptilian brain is the feeling of being threatened.

When we get threatened, when something feels dangerous to us, we regress, we get caught in that reactivity. So, to the degree that our society is oppressive and violent towards non-dominant populations, there's going to be a feeling of threat of not belonging, the universe isn't friendly. To the extent that we're in a war zone we're going to feel that. I mean, imagine for a moment you are seeking refuge in the United States from war, from violence, from warlords, drug lords, and you encounter a wall or you get in and you get put in one of those prison camp type places and separated from your children, your experience

is going to be this is not a friendly universe. Or let's say you're being fed news every day that those who are seeking refuge in this country are going to take your jobs, rape you, rape your children, and you, and you children murder you, the universe is not going to feel like a friendly place. So these are the kind of forces in our current society that keep us in the survival brain versus the more integrated brain that senses belonging. What about our individual life? What are the forces each of us experienced growing up that made us feel that the world wasn't

friendly? If we look closely and we ask, what does a very young child most need? You know, if you ask that question like, what does an infant most need to feel belonging? They need on one hand to be understood and seen and they need to be loved. They need their basic needs to be met. They need attunement. So that to the degree your needs for being understood and loved were met. You had attuned caretakers.

You felt belonging. They say that the first two years of life is when we really develop either a sense of trust that this world is friendly, is trustworthy, are a sense of mistrust. And it depends a lot on how much that early... Attumment was there. We're our basic needs met. And if they weren't, there's what's called severed belonging. We can't trust so well.

There was a neuroscientist that did a study with young rat pups. He'd watched them at play in their cages. And they, like all mammals, a lot of rough and tumble and enjoyable play with each other. And he watched them do that for a number of days, I think four days straight. And then on the fifth day, he introduced a minimally threatening stimulus into their environment, a hair from a cat. Okay? And he left it only in there for 24 hours.

And what happened to the rat pups was that once that hair was there, they're playing completely stopped and it never fully resumed even after the hair was taken away. So the question is, what happens for us? What's the cat's hair in our life? What is it that feels threatening and stops us from being spontaneous, being at home with ourselves with each other, feeling that the world's a friendly place? What happens? So there's tons of research that poor attachment, in other words, not getting well to parents

caretakers, the poor attachment leads to addiction, it leads to antisocial behavior, aggression, mistrust and so on. Scientists have studied how with good mirroring, with good attunement, it actually activates neural development in the regions of the brain that have to do with empathy, that have to do with compassion and that our capacities for relating intimately with others come out of that. So, nurturing is necessary. This kind of attunement in nurturing is necessary for all humans, all mammals in order for there to be some level of trust and being at okay in our world.

It's the heart of healing too. When we later on in our life say, okay, I'm really suffering, we have to find out how do we start nurturing the parts of us that feel severed belonging. a whole part of Pinterest that has therapy humor. And one, there's a parrot on a therapist couch. He says, I want more than a cracker, but I don't know how to ask for it. And then there's the elephant on the couch that says, sometimes even if I stand in the middle of the room no one acknowledges me. Save idea, our basic needs. And then there's this understanding that we really need to feel belonging. It changes everything for us. And in this, there's a story of a man

who was lost and was driving in the country and his car kind of went into a ditch and got stuck in the mud and finally he walked to a nearby farm, asked for help. And the farmer there said, oh, Warwick can help you get out of the ditch and this is a little skinny old mule. And the guy looked at the mule and looked at his car. But he said, all right, we'll see. And the farmer's real confident, yep, Warwick can do the job so that they bring Warwick over to the ditch and the farmer hitches him to the car and with a snap of the reins he shouts, pull Fred, pull Jack, pull Ted, pull Warwick and the little mule pulls the car from the ditch with very little effort. The guy's amazed. He thanks the farmer and he patched the mule and before he left. He said,

how come you called out all those other names before you called. out Warwick's name and the farmer grin and he said, old Warwick, he's just about blind. As long as he believes he's part of a team, he doesn't mind pulling. I love that. You know, it's like if we trust, we belong, it gives us access. I mean, that's a fun story, but it gives us access when we feel like we belong really to something very universal, a kind of universal wisdom and love and a feeling of being held up by our universe. So I thought we'd take a moment here just to pause and reflect and you might close your eyes. You might bring to mind a moment of belonging and see what comes to you, where in some way

you felt connected and it might be in nature recently. We're just, you're aware of connection. You're aware of being a part of things. There might have been a moment of belonging maybe with a young child where the self-consciousness wasn't there and there's just that sense of communion or with a friend filled with the warmth, cuddling with a partner perhaps,

communing, talking openly. Maybe it was a sense of belonging with a spiritual teacher, might have been with whatever your sense of the divine is, some moment of belonging. I forgot to mention your dog because that's often the one. And take some moments to remind yourself of what it was like. Kind of bring it close in and see if you could fill yourself with what's that really like? What's the feeling in the body?

Let it fill you. and really with interest, what's it like? What's meaningful about it to you? You might even ask, when you're feeling belonging or connection, who are you? What's the sense of your own being when you're feeling belonging? Taking a few deep breaths, opening your eyes as you'd like. When belonging is cut off, the pathway back is some way of being nurtured, some way of either nurturing ourselves, being nurtured by someone else.

When belonging is severed early on, we don't have access to our wholeness, but the severing is not irreversible. We're incredibly resilient beings and neuroplasticity is the word that describes how when we then at any point in our life, through our relationships, and as we'll explore through meditation, begin that self-nurturing and nurturing with others, we can reawaken that intrinsic potential for belonging. There's a attachment psychologist whose name is Kozolino, and here's a line that has very much impacted me.

He says, we're not the survival of the fittest. We're the survival of the nurtured. We're not the survival of the fittest, it's the survival of the nurtured. The fittest is the survival brain, fight, flight, freeze, you know, do it, control it. But it's the nurtured that actually experience that integrated brain and that sense of belonging and the love and freedom that come with that. So the remainder of our exploration together will be, well, when there's been severed belonging, how do we nurture and heal?

Unless we're free, unless we're feeling that oneness and communion with the universe or the divine, there's some severed belonging. We're not fully connected. So we all need nurturing. Every day we need it. A story for you, and this is from Rachel Naomi Remen, one of my favorites, who's a physician and a very wise woman. and she describes a colleague who's the head of the Department of Family Medicine at a great East Coast school

and describes how this doctor had a patient, a homeless woman, and her possessions all fit in a shopping cart, or two shopping carts, and once a month she'd climb this hill and lash her carts to the different meters to get up to his clinic and he'd see her once a month. And her speech was a little rambling and her clothes were dirty and eccentric. But he's just very kind, respectful man. He wasn't troubled by any of the appearances that presented. Instead, he was really incredibly courteous and present with her.

And he'd listened to the details of her difficult life and did what he could to ease her burden. So this would happen once a month. and after he had been seeing her for some time, he became aware that she sometimes came to the hospital on the days that he wasn't there. His staff told him that. And the clinic nurses were puzzled by this because she seemed in a mysterious way to know it wasn't her day to see the doctor.

So after they talked to her, they determined that she simply wanted to go to his consulting room. And once she was there, she didn't go in, but she would stand on the threshold and slowly and deliberately place her right foot inside the empty room, then withdraw it again and again. And after a while she'd be satisfied and she'd go home or go away. And Rachel writes, in the places where we are seen and heard are holy places. I think that's so beautiful. The places we are seen and heard are holy places.

We each need those holy places. We need them with each other and we need to create that kind of space of presence for our inner life. And this is what to me is so empowering about meditation. I sometimes think of it as a spiritual reparenting that we all have some severed belonging but we can heal that if we learn how to offer mindfulness and kindness in where we to the parts of ourselves that feel rejected in different ways. This is what we call the two wings of the bird to free us, that we see what's going on inside us and we offer kindness.

We let it be there and we offer kindness. For myself, right now I'm in a season where there's a lot of activity, a lot of things stirring and several things that are really challenging and that actually brings us. bring up a lot of reaction in me. One is a dear person who is physically sick and can bring up a real sense of powerlessness. I can't help them, you know, and upset. And then I'm part of several organizations, nonprofits, where there's different conflicts and misunderstandings and so on and mistrust. And this stuff happens in spiritual groups too, you know, and that can stir up things. So, what I find is so powerful. This is everything to do with this self-nurturing

with these two wings is that when something comes up, whether it's that powerlessness or a sense of impatience or anger or hurt or whatever it is, I start by just noticing it and saying this belongs. And what I mean by that is this is part of what's going on. It's like a wave in the ocean, it belongs to, not to make some inner experience wrong. Because we can't feel belonging to our world if we don't let the parts of ourselves belong. Does that make sense? We have to really open tenderly to the parts inside us and let them be there, no matter what they are, no matter if their hate or shame, just to say, okay, they're, they're

this belongs, this is a wave in the ocean because the suffering comes when we're identified with them. And in the moment that we say, oh, this wave belongs to, we become more ocean-like. We're not caught inside it. It can come and go. So over and over again the message for me to my inner life is, oh okay, this too. Sometimes you need have to say the word this belongs, This too. It's a great mantra if you want a very pithy little one. This too. And then in some way to offer a kindness. And in that there's some enlargement of being so that it's still there maybe. There's still the impatience or the sorrow or whatever but there's more space for it. It's like the difference between having die released into a sink.

and having that same amount of dye released into a lake. In the moments that you say, oh, this too, and offer kindness, that nurturing, you become more lake-like. So I'll give you an example of how one woman I was working with made this shift from being caught in the sense of severed belonging and the fight-flight freeze to this space of attend and befriend. Her parents had been divorced when she was very young and her mother was a very anxious person, was very consumed with her own needs. So this woman was not nurtured by her mother and in some way she grew up feeling like she had driven her father away,

that she was unlovable and he didn't want to be around her. That was the cat's hair because as she began to have different relationships over and over again the same thing would have and she'd start getting insecure, I'm going to be rejected, I'm unlovable, and then she would do the behaviors that would make sure that it didn't work. The grasping, the jealousy, the possessiveness, whatever it was. That was her fight-flight freeze. So she had come to some meditation classes and we worked together, you know, she was just beginning a new relationship and she just said, I just don't want to repeat this.

So we decide to explore how could these two wings of presence, this meditation, this self-nurturing help her so she could come from a more whole place. So the practice was that as her anxiety and insecurity would arise and she'd get very, very regressed and she'd feel like, okay, he's going to leave me too. Okay, naming it. She'd start naming what was happening, okay, fear, insecurity. shame, and in some way, this too, letting it be here, it belongs, and then she would offer it kindness. For her, the way of offering kindness is just saying it's okay, it's okay.

And she would do this over and over again. Every time she'd feel anxious or insecure or whatever, she'd name it, she'd say this too, it's okay, it's okay. until she started sensing that she was really sending a message to that young part of her that felt that her father left because of her, she was offering nurturing to that place, the nurturing she never, never had. Many, many rounds. But she was beginning to offer herself that holy place where she was being seen and heard

and cared for. And she described that, you know, she was being seen and heard, and cared for. that she was still very, very anxious that this guy would leave, but enough was belonging to her own body and heart that when she spoke she was coming from more of a place of her own wholeness. She was able to share her vulnerability but not leave herself, not abandon herself, not betray herself because she had offered that self-nurturing. This is the potential of the two wings of mindfulness and compassion, to heal that place of severed belonging. And the more we practice that and we begin to trust our belonging, the more we start looking

at the world and feel a trust for other beings, that there's friendliness in the world. I have a friend who's a Sikh, he wears a turban, he's got a big gray beard. I've known him for like 40 years, a long time. And since 9-11 it's been really scary for Sikhs because they get merged with Muslims and then all them have this sense of I am now considered the enemy a terrorist, a bad guy. So for this friend of mine he had typically moved to the world is a Sikh somewhat self-conscious and somewhat feeling like an outsider because he looks very different from others, whereas just wearing the turban itself, lives in southern Virginia, there's not many people like him that look like him around. But after 9-11, he realized he

how to get more, really how to take care of himself in a different way. And he really started drawing on the practice of meditation to bring much more presence with what's going in inside them and then began to just assume, okay, there's going to be some people that are seeing through their lens of bigotry, but most people are friendly, they can see my humanity. That became what he led with, that he felt his inner belonging, he did the self-nurturing, people can see my humanity. He describes about five years ago, and again, Southern Virginia, he stopped at a lion's shopping center. He had never been to one before and his old habit of mine kicked in that he was in

a part of this world that was going to be hostile towards him and he said no no no no no friendly friendly. And so there he is and he's in the checkout line and the clerk says to him and smiles and says you know you have a lion's card don't you? And he said a lion's card? Oh she said oh it saves all sorts of money. Then she looked at the guy behind him he said hey hon can you loan this guy card, you know, the guy behind him says, oh yeah, sure, and digs into his pocket, and hands, my friend a card and uses the card. He left and he got outside of the shopping center and he had tears in his eyes because there really is a potential for friendliness and goodness and understanding and it's so easy to overlook it and when we assume it and allow it to be there,

it actually draws it to us. And there's an understanding that the moment we change our perception, our biochemistry changes. When we start feeling more belonging inside us and we start feeling the world, we belong to our world, that change in perception changes our energetic frequency. Now, some of you might be wondering, yeah, but the dangers and the biases are real. There is danger and it's true.

There is danger. I'll read you a story. A crow was sitting on a tree doing nothing all day. A small rabbit saw the crow and asked him, can I also sit like you and do nothing all day? And the crow answered, Sure, why not? So the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow and rested. All of a sudden a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

What's the teaching here? And the teaching is to be sitting all day and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high. So the reason I'm bringing this in is to not make this like all loosey-goosey. There is danger in this world. Our limbic system is here for a reason. If we didn't have it, if we didn't have fear we'd be brain dead. We need to be able to protect ourselves. So this isn't about saying, oh the world's a friendly place and like the rabbit sitting

on the ground. And the more that we begin to nurture ourselves and nurture each other, the more it actually brings a sense of peace and love and harmony to the world. We can evolve this world. So it's a both-end. Yes, we need our limbic system and yes, we need to light up and awaken our frontal cortex and this integrated brain and this open heart. We need both.

And as we get mature we find that we can live with both. So the last little piece I want to go over with you is we need to nurture ourselves, we We also need to dedicate to more consciously nurturing each other because every one of us forgets. It's as if as the writer Arn Garbaugh wrote, he says, to love someone is to learn the song in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten. We need to nurture each other. one story I've always loved of an African tribe that has this ritual that when someone violates the rules or customs, behaves in a way that creates separation, acts out of mistrust, they

call together a gathering of all the members of the tribe, they form a big circle, that person's in the middle and everyone in the tribe tells that person what's good about them. Stories about the good kind and generous things that they did in their life. And this ritual recitation can last for days. And when it's over, everyone celebrates as the person feels their belonging again in the tribe. The belonging was never not there but they had forgotten it. We remind each other that we belong. That's the possibility.

We can do it in informal ways with each other. We can meditate on remembering the goodness of each other and letting them know. And we can send our heart prayers and we can in action, give the hugs and the smiles and the mirroring that makes a difference. And we can do it in more structured ways. We can belong as many do in this community in Washington. into a spiritual friends group where they meet every other week and meditate and then share together and offer that kind of presence and support.

And it happens in 12-step groups and it happens in therapy groups and in this community again it happens in our affinity sanghas, the LGBTIQ and the People of Color songas that nurturing. We need it. We all need it. A more recent story that I heard about, this is Zimbabwe, they've had many generations of psychological trauma and it turns out a tremendous amount of depression and it's in this country of 16 million people there are 12 psychiatrists. Just think of those numbers for a moment and so what happened was they're looking for

what do we do with this growing amount of mental illness and severe depression? And one of the psychiatrists came up with an idea called the friendship bench. And what he did was he trained and they trained grandmothers in what they called evidence-based talk therapy but was also mixed with all local culture so that it had the formal training they received worked together to incorporate shona concepts of opening up the mind, uplifting and strengthen the spirit. And these 400 trained grandmothers in all these, there's, let's see how many different, 70 communities. They say in 2017 alone 30,000 people were helped. They'd have these friendship benches and they would sit down with people on these benches

and mostly just listen and hold a space, create that holy place where another is listened to and felt and seen and cared about. They nurtured them. And there's been a tremendous kind of healing that's gone on. And what I love is they described how the grandmothers themselves don't get burned out because that sense of belonging to something larger and making a difference keeps them resilient. I share that, these friendship benches, because in a deep way,

this is the kind of wisdom that can change our world. It's the opposite of the kind of policies and decisions and leadership that comes from the survival brain. that's all about building walls and attacking. This is coming from the awake heart mind that says, let's create friendship benches. Informally, informally, let's create spaces for each other that nurture. We're not survival of the fittest, we're survival of the nurtured. And the more we nurture, the more this world actually becomes a friendly place, we know our belonging.

We're going to close with a little practice on self-nurturing. Take a moment to adjust how you're sitting, make yourself comfortable. You may take a few breaths and invite yourself right here, right now. And then choose as you scan your life an area where you might be having some difficulty where some emotional reactivity comes up that's painful. something where you'd like to create that kind of holy place where you can have that parts of you that are in reaction, find some healing. And as you come land on something that's going on maybe with another person that's

conflictual or maybe something where you're down on yourself, something that's scaring you, something that's bringing up sadness. Take a moment to let the situation that most brings this out come close into your awareness and if others are involved to see the expressions on the other's face and hear the words that are involved, sensing what's the worst part of this for you, what you're most afraid of or upset by. And as you can sense what's coming up inside you, you begin with that first wing of recognizing that it's there, just naming what you're aware of, okay, so fear or anger or hurt.

And you might in some way just say, well this belongs, this is part of me right now. It's a wave in the ocean. So you're being respectful that this is here, this too. And just notice what happens when in some way you're going to be. give it some space, you let it be here. And then to have the courage to let yourself feel it fully. So just really contacting the waves where the vulnerability is, might breathe with it. I find the part of keeping company with a part of myself that helps a lot when I put

my hand on my heart because it's like some larger, more awake, more evolved consciousness in me is like keeping company with the part of myself that needs nurturing and listen inwardly in sense what is this place most need right now? Does it need understanding or does it need to be forgiven or just to be allowed to be there? Does it need a kind of loving nurturing? It needs a message, some sort of words that might be soothing or kind. It's really from your own most high self, your most awake heart mind, to offer what's needed inwardly.

We sometimes call it our future self, that which is really evolving, just to offer what's needed and sense if it's possible to let it be really tender. You can even vary the touch on your heart and let it be very tender. Let the mother of the universe come through you into your hand, into your heart. See if you can let it in, let that warmth bathe the vulnerable place, sending the message of kindness, it's okay. Just taking some moments to sense the presence that's here when there's nurturing, sense who you are when offering and receiving nurturing.

Sense what shifts. When there's really a compassionate presence, who are you? What's the quality of belonging? How much is included in your heart right now? You might let another person in your life come to your mind, someone that you can include in this heart space right now as we close tonight, sense like the friendship bench that you're bringing presence to this other person, kind of with them. Presence to where their life might be difficult, where they're hurting, and presence to their goodness,

that essential goodness. You sense how you're creating on that friendship bench, this holy space for that person, to feel nurtured. and just letting some expression of your loving flow into that person through words, through a look, through touch, and sense them receiving it and notice the quality of belonging that emerges. And the poet Hafez says, admit something, everyone you see, you say to them, love me. Of course you don't do 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? Namaste and thank you for your beautiful presence. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.