Tara Brach - The Courage to Love - Part 1 (2019-06-12)

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

The Courage to Love - Part 1 (2019-06-12) - The gateway to full intimacy and love is our capacity to open to vulnerability. These two talks look at our ways of avoiding vulnerability, and offer guidance in learning to contact and transform our fears into awake and loving presence. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Welcome and namaste. There's a story I heard of three construction workers who are standing in a row next to the traffic and they're all carrying signs. And the first one has a big stop sign and the second one has a sign that says, smell the flowers. is carrying a bunch of flowers in her hand. And the third has a sign that says,

okay, resume tearing through your life like a maniac. Imagine coming to a traffic stop and seeing that. I think that many of us have a sense of racing through our lives. And sometimes, on a more sobering note, I'll be meeting with someone, and I'll be saying, actually, one of the real feelings of despair is skimming the surface and racing to the end line, which is, we're gone, but not really dropping in.

And certainly we all know days or weeks or months when we're doing that, when we're kind of continually on our way to something else, but we really don't settle and there's not a sense ever of, oh, this moment, okay, this is it, you know. And I often think of the teaching from one pay lead of caregiver who describes thousands of people being with them at their deathbed and them talking about their greatest regrets. And one of the greatest regrets was I didn't live true to myself. I lived according to the expectations of others or according to my own judgments and shoulds and expectations, but not true to my heart.

and by extension the regret has to do with not taking the time to really connect deeply with others, in some way for whatever reason, fears of intimacy or preoccupation, busyness, whatever it is, not really being there for that kind of heart connection. And yet when dust is dust and if we were at the end of our life looking back, for many of us, the moments that we would most be cherishing are the moments when we felt that kind of open-hearted belonging with each other. And you might just take a moment right here at the beginning of our reflection together to close your eyes and consider today and scan through today maybe bringing to mind one person

that you are with a person that you care about that matters. Notice the degree of open-heartedness and presence. Without any judgment, just take a look and if it felt like it was missing some with some interest sense, okay, so what got in the way? Was it a habit of being in a rush, being busy? Was it a habit of being just distracted? Was there some judgment going on of yourself or another? Were you adhering too tightly to a role?

We're in some way trying to control something? This is a really larger inquiry than just one person which is what in our lives prevents us from having as much intimacy or connection or open-heartedness as we'd like to. to, with our inner life, with each other, with our world. And one of the questions as we look at this is, well, what is it that I'm unwilling to feel? Like if I paused with that person and took some more time and really had the intention of being more open-hearted and present, what would be difficult about that maybe? What would I have to feel on my way to intimacy that would be difficult, awkward, uncomfortable?

You might find that if you paused and dropped in more with that person, that you would feel self-conscious or embarrassed in some way or insecure, fear of being judged. There's some form of vulnerability and you can open your eyes now because this is, we're going to be exploring this together. But what I'd like to offer as a frame is that our willingness to hang in and feel vulnerable is really the entry to true intimacy, to full loving. It requires a willingness to be vulnerable. And we are deeply, deeply conditioned to do whatever we can to stay away from vulnerability.

deeply part of our wiring. And yet what's required really in any very full relationship and even ones that aren't like close in people but where we really want to have contact is that we put down the habits that we have of defending or protecting or presenting or whatever it is and be kind of more there, more undefended and there. So this is going to be what we're going to explore. class and also the next. And if we, if this is all we did for quite a while, which is look at intimacy and vulnerability and how we avoid it and how we can open to it, it would

be quite worthy. And as many of you know, I pick, I choose themes that are very alive in my life. I mean I feel like most everybody I know in some way is on a trajectory of becoming more and more able to be with themselves in a courageous way and that's what we're going to explore. How do we develop our willingness and capacity to be with vulnerability, that courage? So this one will look a little bit more at how the inner work of being with vulnerability and we'll extend it to how we can support each other in that process. I like being with that word courageous or courage.

I've been bringing it in more and more. It feels very relevant to our whole evolutionary trajectory that if we think of millions of years of evolution that for quite a long time, for the first millions of years, our species was really living from fight-flight-fright freeze. We were basically in a kind of reflexive reaction that we were scanning for danger and our response to it was to any perception of danger was either fight, flight, freeze and there wasn't what we have now which is sometimes described as a self-reflective awareness where there was an awareness of what was going on and any real choosing about that.

As the brain has evolved with this whole neuronet that allows us to be mindful and allows us to have compassion and so on, we can actually see the ways we have a flinch reaction to some sense of danger, some threat to our egos, we can see it and there can be a capacity to choose to pause. And instead of reacting to stay with our feelings, to be there, to be there, and then maybe to respond for more intelligence, for more creativity, for more compassion. So we can actually train ourselves to stay. And we decide to do so when we choose to, even though it's uncomfortable, because each of you

has a deep place of wisdom that intuit that the more you can stay and be honest with your feelings, the more you can open to your vulnerability, the more you'll be able to open to love. That's why we choose to stay because it actually frees us to be more loving, more awake, more present. So the gift, if one to say it, of what we're exploring together, the gift of deciding to be with our vulnerability is that when we open to the vulnerability we open to a loving presence, it's more the truth of who we are than any of the reactive small self-states. We open to our true nature that way. Now here's where I want to make a caveat which is

when I talk about opening to vulnerability, that doesn't mean everybody should, you know, jump off the cliff right away into their deepest fears. And, you know, like say, okay, have at me, you know, it's not like that. Especially if there's trauma, you know, if there's really deep intense vulnerability that feels like it could bring up panic or whatever, then the wisdom is really to do this kind of gradual and wise way and do all sorts of ways of resourcing and strengthening and stabilizing ourselves so we're able to stay with the vulnerability in a way that's transformational, not re-traumatizing. Does that make sense when I say that? That the trajectory is opening

to vulnerability but it's not all at once in some, you know, full-hearted way. That there's a science and an art to it that has a lot of lot of sensitivity and compassion. So we're going to start exploring this and begin by looking at, this is the question, what do you feel your habits are of avoiding vulnerability? And this isn't one of those hand raises where I'm going to ask you to say that out loud, but I am going to ask you to kind of look within and I'm going to give some examples. The bottom line is that all humans live with a sense of apprehension.

of what's going to go wrong, of our demise. We all have a sense of around the corner this body's going to break down and my mind is not going to work and we're not sure which is going to happen first and hope they don't both happen at the same time and soon, you know, but we have that sense of that's what's going to happen, and it's going to happen to others we love and we're going to have losses. We all live. Our nervous system has that apprehension in it.

So one teacher said, we live, it's like having a bunch of tense muscles that's resisting or tensing against existence, that we live like that and the tense muscles are in our body but they're also our emotions and our thoughts. So one of the ways that we try to avoid feeling vulnerability is we control other people. We try to control them. We use our behaviors to try to get them to do what we want them to do, to cooperate with us so we'll feel more secure in our lives or get what we want. We try to control them so they'll treat us the way we want them to.

We use judgment and we use threats and we use withholding and we use guilt and we use things to come hither approaches to attract. But there's a way in which unconsciously, and you can watch yourself in any interaction that in some way the way you're behaving is to get a certain response versus pure spontaneity. So in one story a young girl noticed that her mother's hair had several strands of gray or white sticking out and the rest of her hair was brunette and so she asked her mother mother, you know, so how come your hair, some of your hair is turning white mom? And the response was this.

Well, every time that you do something wrong or make me cry or unhappy, one of my hairs turns white. So the little girl is kind of mulling over this revelation for a while and then she said, mama, how come all grandma's hairs are white? So one level for us to kind of look at is, you know, how do we in some way are we trying to maneuver other people and sometimes it's withdrawing. It's like you don't act right, I pull back my affections. Sometimes it's we're presenting a false self, a self that in some ways meant to look good

to others, to get their approval. Another way that we try to control and not feel our vulnerability is that we distract ourselves and we distract ourselves, you know, on the screen, you know, in some way, whether it's what we're listening to or what we're watching. I saw one cartoon of a little boy in his bedroom and his mom's talking to him and he's responding, he's on a tablet of course, and he's saying, go out and play. What is this? 1962? Which of course is really sad and true. We know the statistics of each generation less and less outdoor time because we're hooked on our tablets. And again, I won't ask for hand-raised,

but how many of us know that a lot of the time when we're checking our emails or texts, we don't have to be doing that? You know, it's just kind of a restless thing, right? I mean, I'm not alone in that, right? Okay, thank you. Thank you. So the primary control of the primary control strategy to keep us from our vulnerability is that we spend a huge amount of time in our thoughts, in a virtual reality of thoughts. So rather than feel from the neck down because that's where vulnerability is experienced, we are spinning stories. There's an incessant inner dialogue that we live in.

And I sometimes think if somebody else was ever whispering in my ear all the stuff I'm talking to myself about, I go insane, you know, but it just goes on and on and on. And so we're in this control tower of thinking and when we first start meditating it might feel like, oh it's nice but after a while there can be this sense of when we're really not inside thoughts like wow this is a wild and mysterious and raw place in here in this body. So we begin to start noticing how much we are off. It says one meditation master was asked to describe the world and his response was lost in thought. Planning, obsessing, strategizing. One of my favorite

little stories between a mother and son, you know, mother sends her son an email and says, start worrying, details to follow. But you get the idea that we're busy up here and it keeps us from actually inhabiting our body. And any time we are in a control strategy, whether we're trying to control another person's behavior by guilt or withdrawing or whatever it is or when we're distracting ourselves or lost in thought are moments that we can't feel the vulnerability and realness of the moment and we can't be present to really connect. I would you close your eyes again just for a moment?

You might again scan your life and just bring to mind a person. who you care about a person you want to be open-hearted, perhaps more open-hearted, more present with and just consider in any moments that you have an agenda with them where you're wanting them different in some way can you be really present and open-hearted any moment that when you're presenting yourself in a certain way, as the one who knows the knowledgeable one, presenting yourself in some way you think that they'll like or be approving of, can there be intimacy? When you're wanting yourself to be different, when you're judging yourself, that's another

control strategy, can there be connection? If you're off in thought, planning, worrying is to begin. to attune and have this lens of the ways that we maintain disconnection. And then we can begin to ask ourselves how do we wean ourselves of the controlling strategies of trying to control others or getting being distracted or being lost in thought, how do we wean ourselves and open to the vulnerability of real presence? with others. And you can keep your eyes closed or if you'd like to open them as you listen to this very beautiful poem and invitation by the poet Mark Nippo. We waste so much energy trying

to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed, and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time. When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world. And often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which if not put down diminishes our chances for joy. It's like wearing gloves every time we touch something and then forgetting we chose to put them on. We complain that nothing feels quite real. In this way, our challenge

each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to un-glove ourselves, to un-glove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being soft and unrepeatable. So let's explore this ungloving, putting down our strategies. And as often in these talks I'll be inviting you to maybe focus on one person you'd like to explore opening more to the vulnerability and also to the loving that's possible. She might keep that in mind, so you have somebody in mind when we do our final little practice. Mark Nippo, the poet I just read from, has a way of describing this journey to intimacy.

He calls it the exquisite risk. I think that's a fantastic term. And really he's describing the exquisite risk as the whole spiritual path because it's not just intimacy with other people, it's intimacy with ourself and our world. It always involves letting go of coverings of defenses of habits that we've been holding on to. And the word exquisite connotes beauty and it connotes sensitivity. and excellence and responsiveness.

So it's an exquisite process. And risk, the felt sense is that there's something dangerous because we are so used to protecting ourselves against that what's next feeling, that something around the corner is dangerous. So we armor ourselves. So there's a sense of danger there, exposure to feeling some threat exposure to loss, exposure to embarrassment, the exquisite risk. And the reality is we will get hurt. You know, they sometimes describe dating as a contact sport, you know, well, it's

inevitable in being with each other. One of the other metaphors was the prickly porcupines that inevitably prick each other but still find a way to huddle for warmth. Well, We will hurt each other and we will have losses and yet the ungloving, the undefended heart discovers, we discover a heart space that has room for all of that. That's where the freedom is. So we are talking about how to wean ourselves with the control strategies and be willing to be vulnerable. And I remember years ago seeing a picture of cartoon with two sheep are talking and a third one is across the field and they're saying to each other, you know, every time he comes

home from being shorn we have to spend hours talking about how vulnerable he feels. So I sometimes think of those sheep when I'm talking about this and yet again we have that intuition that it's worth it. We have that intuition that the exquisite risk truly is worth it to us. I read recently something written by Madeline Langel, I'm not pronouncing her name right but the author of Rinkle in Time. And she wrote that over the years I've worked out a philosophy of failure which I find extraordinarily liberating. If I'm not free to fail, If I'm not free to risk, take risks and everything in life that's worth doing involves a willingness to risk, I can never really flourish.

And she describes how for wrinkle in time she received nearly 30 rejections before she found a publisher for it, which I think is really amazing. That was my like all-time favorite childhood book. She writes this, she says, the same thing's true in all human relationships, unless I'm willing to open myself up to risk and to being hurt, then I'm closing myself off to love and friendship. So we begin this, really this pathway of opening to vulnerability by having that as our intention, that it's conscious. That the next time you're with somebody that matters to you, there's something in you that goes,

oh yeah, this might, to be real, this might involve a little bit of rawness, a little bit of discomfort, embarrassment, whatever, vulnerability. And one of the ways of thinking of the pathway is many of you might remember the story of the Buddha after his enlightenment he went through the next 50 years teaching about the path of compassion and wisdom and still the shadow side would keep appearing. All the feelings of vulnerability, of fear, of hurt, of anger, of all the intense passions would come up. And so when Mara, that was the god of all the shadow's side, would appear,

often the Buddha would be teaching. There would be a big field of people and Mara would be lurking around the edges. And as the story goes, Ananda, who was the Buddha's loyal attendant and beloved friend too, follower, would see Mara and go, oh no, this is bad news, bad bad, bad, bad, Mara is here. And he'd tell the Buddha and the Buddha would say, oh no, no, no, it's okay. And he'd go over to Mara and say, I see you Mara, let's have tea. I see you Mara, let's have tea.

And so it is when we start encountering vulnerability if instead of that reflex to control, to go off into our thoughts, to plan, to strategize, there's some part of us who goes, okay, I see this, this is the vulnerability. Can I have tea with it? Can I be with it? We will be opening the door in a radical way to deepening our capacity for love and for presence. I'd like to give you an example of tea with Mara from my own life that has to do with choosing vulnerability. I'm going to give you a few examples and then we're going to practice

it together. So this was a story, this actually came from early in my marriage. When I first met my husband, when I first met Jonathan, I was really, really physically active. I had been running five days a week, I go for runs and so on. I was pretty athletic and so on. I was pretty athletic and so on. Within two years of being together, I started getting sicker and sicker and two years in, I was so sick that I was unable to do most physical activities. A lot of our bonding came around of, you know, boogie boarding in the ocean and biking and hiking and so on. And I could barely, I mean, I couldn't even walk up an incline. I was getting very immobilized. I have a connective tissue disorder and I'm actually a lot better.

now but I hit a really bad downward spiral that actually lasted about six years. So there was a couple of years into this new relationship and I wasn't the woman who married so to speak. You know, it was very evident to me that I wasn't going to pull out quickly and I remember after one particular time where we had been away really, really dropping into depression feeling so much of what I loved in life was, I was deprived of. and so on. And so I kind of withdrew into myself and pulled away from him and kind of distanced from him and we'd have conversations about what was going on and he would try

to offer really good advice and that of course the fixing made me insanely judgmental and so I'd get down on him and then down on myself. So it was a really difficult period. So I remember at one point being on a, we have a hammock and I was a was swinging on it and I was recognizing how cut off I felt and depressed and the self-judgment and that you'll notice rain which is really tea with Mara. It's like recognizing what's happening. I see you Mara letting it be there and then having tea really investigating and nurturing. Those of you that are unfamiliar, Rain's an acronym that really helps us have tea with

Mara, you know, rain, the recognizing is you just get it, I got it for myself with recognizing, okay, depression, self-judgment, distancing, and then the A of Raines allow, okay, just let it be there. And I realized I needed to stay. I felt bad enough that it wasn't working to do my control strategy of withdraw or judge or anything, I needed to stay. So then I began to investigate. That's the eye of rain.

That's when we're really having tea. It's like if you're getting to know a friend you start saying, okay, what's really going on? So I started asking myself that. And what I found out in investigating is that I was really ashamed of being sick that in some way it made me feel like I was less than that something was. really wrong with me as a human that I was sick. I wasn't doing sickness well. And I also felt this vulnerability that I was no longer an attractive appealing mate. I was no fun. I was the opposite of fun. I was really a drag, you know. So in the investigating I got in touch with

really the essence of mara for me at those moments was a feeling of vulnerability and fear that I'd be rejected, this man I loved, but I was going to be rejected. So that was a, that had that quality of ouch, it was real suffering. And then I asked a question I often asked to get to the end of rain, which is nurturing, which is how does this place want me to be with it? And clearly what this part of me that was feeling ashamed and vulnerable needed was me to offer care inside, so I've got my hand on my heart and I do what I often do, which is it's okay, sweetheart, you know, just a real kindness and just sensing loving energy from inside and around me, just washing through me.

The more, and this is a comment, the more you get in touch with the suffering, the more powerful the nurturing. In other words, if you really contact the vulnerability, you'll find that you can then be very nurturing. And I was feeling a lot of vulnerability. So the more that I offered care, the more there was a sense of space and tenderness and rather than being caught in that vulnerable, um, rejectable self, I had kind of reopened to a spacious presence that was kind-hearted towards myself. And I knew I needed to then share with Jonathan what was going on. But that brought up a wave of real vulnerability.

And it took probably in my whole life it was one of the most courageous things for me to be willing to stay with that vulnerability and share with him, this is what's happening. And of course what it did is when one person is vulnerable the other person is free to be able to express from their vulnerability so he could then share how powerless he felt and how scared he felt, you know, and how hard it was to love me but not be able to help me. And it was probably one of the deepest bonding experiences we've had, which wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been willing to have tea with Mara be with that vulnerability.

So for me it was one of the most powerful teachings about the pathway to love is be willing to stay with the vulnerability. And we got married soon after and we built into our wedding ceremony vows that had to do with being real in that way and I'll read you one was a quote from Rilke and it says, I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed for where I am closed I am false. I want to stay clear in your sight. Now sometimes when we contact fear or vulnerability that's really deep and we need to have

to you with it, we first need to sense some safety or some larger belonging or some love in the universe that can help us hang in there. So part of the training that we're talking about to be willing to be willing to be willing to to open to vulnerability is really a training when we're feeling vulnerable to find some pathway to something that feels loving in our life. And I want to share with you a story about Mahatma Gandhi that really struck me that as a young man he was really shy, he was tongue-tied, he was plagued by fears and doubts. In other words, he went around with enormous sense of vulnerability.

And it particularly would come out in courtroom when he was terrified to present an argument and in challenging situations with other people. And even as a child very, very young he was a very obsessive and fearful child. So there's a story that of one of the family servants who was touched by this young boy, because he'd daily he'd run into her arms and tears after being bullied at school. And what she said to him is whenever you're threatened, instead of running away, stand firm, stay in touch, but repeat the mantra Rama, Rama, and this will turn your fear into courage.

So it took some years from to immerse into that practice but I tell this because growing up he was a very vulnerable, not a powerful man and his practice, of feeling vulnerability but calling on love because Rama is another word for God for him. Turning onto that connection with a larger loving field of energy gave him courage. Courage is when we're willing to stay. One more example of a story, there's first to quote, Veronica Tugaleva writes, emotional pain cannot kill you but running away from it can. Allow, embrace, let yourself feel, let yourself heal.

So emotional pain cannot kill but running away from it can not only shut us down but it also can be hurtful to others because then we act in ways that can cause suffering. And one woman that I worked with years ago, her story was that her daughter, her daughter had been addicted to heroin and in and out of treatment centers for a handful of years, I think since she was like 17 or something like that. And each round she would get out and her mother would help her get cleaned up and give her money and housing and then she'd relapse. I mean she'd promise she was going to do it right this time and she'd relapse.

And so it was a complete enmeshment and what was going on inside her was her, her Her thoughts were, if I don't save her, she will die. She'll die from an overdose or be killed on the streets. So she was really caught in it. So for her to have to you with Mara, this is, I'm giving you an example that was just wrenching. Her controlling, the way she stayed away from dropping fully into the vulnerability was to keep on trying to save her daughter. For her, when she realized and a friend of hers told her that she was traumatized.

herself and contributing to the suffering, for her to be able to say, okay, I'm not going to try to save her and then say, how do I have the courage to be with what's in there? Because what's in there is the terror of her dying. It was one of the most challenging things this woman could ever face. And so for her, her pathway was to call on the divine mother. I mean, she had a sense that there was something larger and loving, in the universe. It was part of her and larger than her. And so she practiced just sensing a field of light and love. And it was like she took her fear that I'm afraid my daughter's

going to die and it was too big for her to hold so she said, please hold this. She surrendered it into something larger over and over again, felt something larger holding her and holding that fear. And what happened gradually was like unplugging a bottle. She got in touch with the grief that for weeks and weeks all she could do was weep but she was staying. That was the vulnerability. She was grieving a loss, you know, she could no longer control what was happening.

Gradually by surrendering into the beloved and staying with the, she's staying and feeling the vulnerability and holding and just being with it and surrendering. surrendering it, she started finding in that grieving of very vast tenderness that had space. She had self-compassion, compassion for her daughter and finally she was able from her heart wisdom to create the boundaries that she needed to. And the next time her daughter relapsed and came back after her month on the streets, she didn't do it. She didn't, she wasn't available to her.

Her daughter made it, I want to tell you that, I mean, because it does, not all stories have a happy ending. Her daughter made it, her daughter held her boundaries, her daughter not only made it, ended up becoming a counselor working with young women and so on. But it was the hardest thing she had ever done and the only way she could do it, because what she did was she opened to a more mature way of loving her daughter. Does that make sense? She loved her daughter all along but she was loving and trying to control and the only

way to a more mature loving was by opening to the terror and opening to the grief. I share that story because as we practice together and sometimes you can practice with somebody in your mind and your life that you want to be open-hearted with and there's not like a traumatizing vulnerability, it's vulnerable and it's not easy but it's not trauma. And it's easier to bring compassion to yourself and breathe with it and then sense what's creatively possible with that person. At other times the vulnerability is so deep that it takes a lot of preparing by calling on love first before you can really open fully to the vulnerability.

So as you practice now, you might just bring yourself into a position to practice, Choose a relationship where you'd like to be more intentional, more present, more undefended. But don't choose a relationship that brings up a lot of trauma for you because it won't serve you in this setting. Start with a relationship where it's more doable, where you can actually practice a little. still an exquisite risk. Any choice to stay present and be vulnerable is an exquisite risk. So bringing up a relationship where you'd like to be more there, more courageously present, as if you're at the end of your life looking back that you'd really want to be more true

to yourself. And as you have this person come to mind, sense your intentionality that there's a willingness to explore that exquisite risk of uncovering, of opening a bit to the vulnerability that is in all of us at your own pace. And you might scan and look for a situation with that person that illustrates where you get blocked, where in some way you move into more of your control strategies, you get caught up in getting distracted or judgmental or presenting yourself in some way or withholding, whatever it is where it's hard for you to really land and arrive. Just to bring the lens a little closer you might ask yourself in that situation, what

is it I'm unwilling to feel? What might happen if I really paused and opened more and became more present. That's beginning to have tea with Mara. That's where you can start recognizing, oh, okay. If I allow myself to pause and open, there's a fear that I'll be judged or I'd have to put down a judgment, there's a fear that that person will never change in a way I want them to, I'll never get what I want, or there's just an awkwardness. that if I stop thinking or controlling or acting the way I normally do,

I won't know how to be. I'll be embarrassed. So we begin to have tea with Mara by recognizing, this is rain. Oh, so that's what's going on. And the A of Raines to allow it, just let it be there. That's the beginning of this willingness to stay. Just let it be there. It says if you've paused the frame with this person, they're still there but you're letting yourself really go inside.

You begin to investigate and just feel in your body, where are you uncomfortable? What's going on inside you? You can include investigating and saying, well what am I believing? Because maybe there's some belief that, wow, if I really open up some, the other person will judge me and not like me. They'll be uncomfortable, they'll want distance or believing if I put down my judgment or put down my agenda with that person, they'll never change and I'll never really have the person I want to be close to.

What am I believing? But with whatever you find, come back to your body, feel your throat, your chest, your belly and sense where is the most vulnerability? Where do you feel most uncomfortable, scared? hurt, embarrassed, breathe with it and you might even if it feels strong put your hand on your heart and keep company because that's the beginning of nurturing. Keep yourself company. Nurturing deepens when you just really bring love to that place, the part of you that's

uncomfortable. You might send a message, it's okay or it's okay sweetheart. this belongs, this is natural. You might have a mantra like Rama like Gandhi did. You might imagine the Divine Mother, some spiritual field of loving or light washing through you. Bring kindness to the place that feels vulnerable. How much you can wash through your heart with a gentleness, a kindness. And since the presence that wakes up, the heart space that opens when you've had the courage to feel the vulnerability and bring kindness to it. You might, from the heart space that's here now bring the other person into your, onto

your screen again and sense more choice in how you might relate with that person. What might be possible? Just sense, what might be possible? Might you listen more? them more questions that are real questions, share something more truthful about yourself, maybe you'll decide to in some way let them know your caring about them, that you want to have them feel your care, or something you appreciate about them. Sense the choices that open up you might imagine in the days and weeks to come that whenever

you're with this person, that there can be a bit more presence with the real feelings inside you, a pausing, and more creativity and choice in the quality of presence you bring, more freedom to respond from loving presence. Again, Mark Nippo, our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world, to un-glove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being soft and unrepeatable. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please

visit tarabrock.com.