Tara Brach - The Courage to Love - Part 2 (2019-06-19)

Episode Date: June 21, 2019

The Courage to Love - Part 2 (2019-06-19) - 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. Join Tara's email community at http://eepurl.com/6YfI, to receive exclusive updates, events, and meditations. - Get a free download of Tara's new 10 min meditation: "Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease," - plus a bonus gift: "8 Essential Tips to Nourish Your Meditation Practice."

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. This class is the second of a two-part series called The Courage to Love. And I begin with a story from many years past that I like to share about a therapist who encouraged, encouraged his client who was, had come to some meditation classes to take the dive and do a retreat. I think it was a three or five day retreat. He said it'll help. And the man went to the retreat and when he came in for his next session the therapist asked him

how it went and he said it was really challenging. It was really difficult. I mean I really got I felt a lot of fear and I went into a place of deep grieving. and at one point I really got caught up in lust and then self-condemnation, it was really hard. You said that you thought it would help. And the therapist said, yes, you're learning to feel your fear better and you're learning to feel your lust better and you're learning to fear whatever he had named. The retreat taught him to feel better, but it was to feel the difficult emotions better. And so the question is how come that's important?

And one of the ways we sometimes describe it, we often talk about the circle of awareness and the line that's through it and below the line is where we're unconscious and above the line is where we're conscious. And for most of us we have very deeply grooved patterns of how to pull away from difficult feelings. I mean, that's just the way we're rigged and we're not even aware of how much we're avoiding vulnerability. So we push away our loneliness and we push away our hurts and we push away our fears and the

real suffering comes in our life from our unfaced, unfilled feelings, from what's below the line. That's the stuff that hooks us. We might not be aware of it. we get more identified with the loneliness and the fear and the anger when we push it under. It actually defines us more and it controls us more. Coral Young put it this way, he said, nothing has a greater impact on their life and on the life of their children than the unlived life of the parents. The unlived life of the parents and he doesn't mean by unlived necessarily, I always wanted

to be the first on Mars or, you know, I wanted to climb the Appalachian Trail or be a dance with the greatest. You know it's the unlived, it's those parts of ourselves we just weren't willing to process and feel. You might consider in your life or with your family, your parents, your children, or those you know how this might be the case. How to the degree to which things got walled off they actually created walls. I can say for myself that I have several realizations that keep on repeating themselves

through the decades. And one of the biggest is when I realized to myself, I'm going, oh my gosh, I just need to feel my feelings. And it sounds so psycho-babel 101, but it's like, okay, feel what's here. And yet what I find is that there's a direct relationship between how to be able to be one-o-one, but it's like, okay, feel what's here. And yet what I find is that there's a direct relationship between how to much I'm feeling vulnerability and my feelings and really how intimate I am with anybody around me.

Direct relationship. So what we push away controls us and it disconnects us from our heart and the sign that there's stuff below the lines, the line of awareness that has got you in its grip, is that there's this kind of angsty restlessness and it's very hard to... ever really settle into the moment. And there's kind of anxiety and there's a tendency to be continuously in that narrative, you know, because we're not wanting to be in our bodies and feel things. And there's emotional reactivity. Those are the signs.

You can see it societally. You know, I call this the limbic hijack, that when we're, we've got a lot below the line that we're not facing. you know, we're actually being controlled by our Olympic system. And as a society, when groups of us, you know, society-wide are not facing our fears and our hurts and so on, then we act out on the larger level and we create unreal others and our unfaced fear we projected in all sorts of ways. So all of a sudden immigrants become people that are going to cause us drug addiction and rape our wives or do this or take our jobs. We know how it happens.

We see how it happens racially that when we haven't dealt with our fears and our biases and what are under them all of a sudden there's a way of making an unreal other less than. It happens in every institution in our culture, unfaced. unfaced fears. We do it with religions. Read you something Carl Young wrote many years ago that I think is so amazingly contemporary. So in 1924 he had a visit with a Pueblo chief and he wrote this by the way in his book, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.

And the chief was speaking of a white man and he told Dr. Young this. He said, their eyes have a staring expression. They're always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always wants something. They're always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We don't understand them. We think they're mad. And then Carl Jung writes, I asked him why he thought whites were all mad. And then the chief said, well they say that they think with their heads. Why, of course, said, you said, you're saying, what do you think? think with. And then the response is, we think here and he put his hand over his heart.

And Carl Young was really struck by this encounter. He said, this Indian had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind. We have lost touch with heart wisdom. We get caught in the fear-driven, wanting, greedy thinking and we forget the wisdom of the heart. it's called the eye of the heart, this heart wisdom. It doesn't mean that thoughts aren't useful, it just means that there's a larger context than thought. There's a larger reality of this web of connectedness.

There's a larger world we belong to and if we intuit that and we sense the tenderness and beauty and mystery of that, then our thoughts are we think. can inform us wisely. Then we're not driven by our limbic system. Instead we have that wise heart, the eye of the heart. So what we're exploring in this class is really the pathway, the courage to love, the pathway to loving more fully. And I'd like to in a way offer a simple kind of alchemy that we move from the head to the heart to the place of feelings and from the place of feelings to heart space. So we find heart space, or this awake heart, by moving through vulnerability.

There's no way around that. We have to go through vulnerability. So it's interesting to me that the word sage, originally it was a verb that meant to taste, that wisdom came from tasting or embodying experience, not from a mental knowing. So it's part of our evolutionary capacity. Even though we are rigged to avoid difficult emotions, to go into all sorts of mental looping and reactivity,

even though that's our wiring of our limbic system, we have now the capacity with the more recently evolved brain to actually choose to stay with difficult emotions. We actually can choose that. We can choose to go from, unhook from the thoughts and go into the vulnerability and then find a tender heart space as we really bring presence there. And we do it for the freedom of our hearts and for the healing of our world. This is the pathway. So it takes practice as I keep referring to our main modality of avoiding vulnerability is this

mental control tower that we're in, this familiar kind of worrying and repetitive thought. I remember this years back I saw this cartoon of this guy who's drawing, driving into a desert and the sign says, you and your own tedious thoughts next 200 miles. So I thought it was a great sign. But it's also, you know, James Joyce wrote it, said it really beautifully in one of his books. He said, Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body. And so it is that we go around and if you look back at today you can sense it, how much were you living in the the virtual realm of your thoughts about the future or the past or your commentary versus

just pausing and listening to the actual what's right here, or listening inward and sensing what's going on inside us, or being with somebody and really, really getting quiet enough to take in another. We're gone somewhere else a lot of the time. So there's this habit that we keep reincarnating this self that is trying to defend itself and prove itself and not go into deep vulnerability and I sometimes think of it like those, you know, those birthday candles that trick ones and you blow them out and they just keep on coming back up and so it is. It's like even you meditate and you get quieter and it feels like all that self-centeredness is kind of, you know, and then like,

minutes later, it's like you're in another obsessive neurotic thing, that birthday candle is just back again. At least that's how it is for me. So we know that we spend a lot of our life moments in some way presenting a self to ourselves or to the world. The illustrative story is this guy that's driving around the back woods of Montana and he sees a sign saying talking dog for sale. So he rings the bell, the owner tells him, yep, got a dog, he's in the backyard and go see him yourself. So he goes in the backyard and there's this nice looking laboratory retriever just sitting there. And so the man looks at him and says, you talk? And the dog says, yep. So after he recovers from the shock of hearing a dog talk, he says, so what's your

story? So I'll read you. Well, Lab says, well I discovered I could talk when I was pretty young, I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA, and in no time at all, they had me jetting country to country, sitting in rooms with spies and world leaders because no one figured a dog would eavesdrop. I was one of their most valuable assets for about eight years running, but the jetting around really tired me out. I knew I wasn't getting any younger, so I decided to settle down, signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security, wandering, your suspicious characters, listening in.

I covered some incredible dealings. boarded a batch of medals. Anyway, I got married and had a mess of puppies and now I'm just retired. The guy's amazed. Goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog. Ten dollars, the guy says, ten dollars, this dog's amazing, why are you selling him so cheap? The guy said, because he's a liar and a fake, he never did any of that stuff. Thank you, that was cute but not a great illustration of much of anything I know. So, in the first class on the courage to love, the basic teaching was that vulnerability and insecurity is a given.

I mean every one of us experiences, you know, loss and death of our own body and mind and loss of others and we all have needs that are dependent on others and others are not reliable and things happen that are hurtful. And so we are vulnerable. And it's natural to avoid having to feel that and get caught in our thoughts and fears and behaviors. And the deep evolutionary choice we can make is to start noticing that and saying, okay, I'm staying. I'm going to stay in touch. This is how the poet David White puts it.

He says, the only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability. how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate. As we inhabit our vulnerability, we discover the heart space that allows us to really have room for our life. So just to kind of pause and have you touch in a little bit, why don't you close your eyes and we'll just explore this pathway that we're talking about. So we're exploring the movement of going from head to heart to heart space. And you might bring to mind some challenging but important relationship.

It doesn't have to be traumatizing, in fact that won't be serviceable right now, but some relationship that matters to you but you get reactive and pick a particular situation where you know you get either defensive or you get irritated and more aggressive or you pull away. You might imagine yourself in the midst of that situation and just to freeze the frame in the moment where you're getting reactive. And it helps to see the look on the other person's face or hear the words they're saying. And the first step is to unhook from the thoughts that might be going on in your mind about what's wrong with them or what's wrong with you. And come into your heart and just sense, well, what does it mean to inhabit my feelings,

my vulnerability in this moment? It can be helpful to ask yourself, what am I unwilling to feel or where does it hurt? And ask it kindly, where does it hurt? And you might sense if as you pay attention to what you feel. feel in your heart, the vulnerability, whatever's difficult, if you add some kindness. Just notice what happens when you add some kindness. By bringing a kind presence to vulnerability, you start to discover the alchemy that leads to heart space.

Notice what happens when you bring a little kindness into it towards yourself. You'll get a little bit of the flavor of heart space. Now we're going to return and give you a chance to revisit this again after we've explored some of the ingredients that can strengthen this pathway. But I wanted to give you a pre-taste. It's like the before or after and maybe in the before you actually got a real taste of heart space, we'll see. So let's look at what nourishes our courage.

what helps us to follow this pathway when we're stuck. And the first step in the training of moving from head to heart space is that you need to recognize, oops, this is a situation, I'm below the line, I'm stuck, I'm acting out, right? You have to be able to catch that it's happening. One man that a kindergarten teacher was describing how for a number of years as a younger teacher, when kids would go into one of their storms and they're getting really upset and acting out, his reaction was he would get upset, he would get agitated,

and he would either send them in time out or try to control them in some way. He just, that was his response. And then he described how he found out instead that he could do it differently, that the trigger was, okay, they're freaking out, and that was kind of a flag to him. And what he would do instead was he would sense, okay, pause inside himself and he'd start breathing and telling himself it's okay, just to kind of calm his own nervous system down.

So he'd be regarding himself kindly and he would just stay with them until it became kind of a co-pause because he'd let them undo whatever they needed to undo. and at a certain moment as they came a little bit above the line themselves, because kids do you can kind of see it from the crazy look to a little bit more, I'm here again, what he would say to them was, ah, there you are. He'd let them know he saw them that they were coming back. And in that way he was teaching them about the power of pausing

and just letting the process happen. And I just think that's such a powerful example of how when we can kind of match and pace, like we, okay, so that's what's going on, I'm reacting, let me calm myself down, that that actually creates a contagious field that invites the other person to settle, we're not trying to control them, we're not trying to make anything happen, and then, oh, okay, there you are. It's an amazing, beautiful, beautiful training. It takes courage to interrupt it though because he had a sit with his feelings of it's out

of control which is a really bad feeling. So that's the first step is that you sense that you've left home. You get this flag like okay I'm in reactivity. Remember that that line that all sickness is homesickness. Okay I'm not really here. You recognize that and you can sense with your child, you know, okay I'm here within my body but I've been completely distracted, I'm not really paying attention. I've been going through the motions as my partner's been speaking or my friend's selling

about a challenge and I'm fixing. So you catch yourself in these moments and then you say, oh right, from head that busyness back to feeling, stay, stay, a little bit of close. kindness and then you're back inhabiting more of your wholeness. There's a woman who described her experience with this pathway and I wanted to read you this. This is a Buddhist practitioner named Emily Bennington. Last night she writes, my mother told me she had breast cancer. I've ever been in a situation like this you'll recognize the flood of emotions that

hit you at once. guilt, anger, future tripping, regret, the initial shock is truly overwhelming. And as it usually does, my mind immediately went into planning mode. What needs to happen? What are your treatment options? How soon can we get the lump removed? Do you get the idea? Thank God for this practice because despite a complete head spiral I still had the presence

enough to pause and ask myself an important question. So what am I really noticing right now? Pause, step out of reaction. In that moment I was able to do something I would have missed otherwise. My mother did not want to talk about any of those things. As I'm weighing her options, she sat in the high top chair in my kitchen staring blankly into a cup of coffee. I was trying to be strong for her sake in mind but suddenly it became clear that that wasn't

what she needed. She was scared and needed to be scared. I debated whether to give her a hug which sounds terrible, I know, but I was barely holding it together and scurring around, making dinner, pouring over her doctor's work, my busy way was my way of avoiding total collapse. Being present allowed me to shift to her way. I took a breath, walked across the room and wrapped my arms around her. It was an awkward sideways hug but it was also a long, necessary one and then something

happen. Slowly she started rocking side to side like a mother rocks a child except and a child was now a caretaker. It was a tiny, sweet moment I'll never forget and one that I surely would have missed were it not for the power of mindfulness, the blessing of a pause that shift towards loving presence. So we have to interrupt when we're in that limbic reactivity. That's like Carl Young said, that kind of restless staring white man, you know, like we have to interrupt whatever that is and come back down into our body, into our heart and to that heart space that's really who we are.

Now when the emotions are really, really strong, when a lot is turned up, it's really hard hard to be able to do that. Especially if there's trauma in your body, there's a lot of really, there's panic, really strong experience. It's not necessarily wise to say, okay, I'm coming into the heart we need to sometimes really take some care first because we don't want to go into trauma. So what helps us to open? What helps us to come from here to here and really start opening to our lives in this way. What we'd find is that there's two basic dimensions of what helps us find that courage. There's the inner ways that we train in meditation where we start learning to just pause

and call on something that helps us feel safe. We might call on a sense of a spiritual figure that we love or we might call on our own future self or we might just send ourselves messages. I spoke in the last class about Gandhi who had a lot of fear in his body and he would get bullied and he had one very kind caretaker said, when you have fear, don't run away from it, step forward, but say, Rahma, you know, call on that light, that God, that divine that you know is your protector. So that was his pathway so we find our pathways to something that feels like light and love and protecting and that we can trust and we call on that.

That's an inner way. But we can also practice being in relationship with each other in ways that helps to build our courage. We can help each other feel safe enough to contact vulnerability. And let me give you some examples, but the understanding is this, that a child who has really good attachment with parents, and I mean this in a positive way, a good sense of belonging, is actually able to tolerate more vulnerability. Does that make sense?

If there's good relationships, secure relationships, a sense of belonging to family and the wider culture, there's more tolerance of what feels uncomfortable. And the truth is like trees and rivers and birds and plants, we belong to the web of life and the more trauma there is, the more we forget that and any sort of vulnerability there's much less tolerance of. So we need a taste of belonging to help us tolerate coming into vulnerability. Here's a story from Frank Osseskeskes that describes how one person can help another. And we know it by the way, the research shows if you are experiencing fear and you hold hands

with somebody you trust and love, the centers in the brain that register fear less activated. In other words, feeling connection with a loved one helps us to be able to hold the fear. So Frank is the founder of Hospice, a Zen Hospice. And he was very close to one man who was dying of a stomach cancer and the man was in a lot of pain, very intolerable, and he asked Frank to guide him in a meditation to help hold a space for the pain. So Frank began but the guy said, no, I'm just too painful for me to meditate with this. So Frank offered to put his hands on the man's belly to help hold the

the pain. And this is the same as fear, fear our pain. This is another person helping to hold it. And so the man agreed but said, no, it still hurts too much. And so Frank brought his hands a little bit away from the man's belly, holding a real space around him. And the man said, that's better. And then a little bit further away goes, oh, that really works. That's lovely. And so Frank invited him to rest for a bit as he stood there with his hands above his belly and the man said, ah, just rest in love, rest in love. And that became his mantra right to his death. It was rest in love, that he could feel the fear and the pain and the grief or whatever it was and he could sense a space

that he could let it be held in that was big enough. So that is another pathway, that if we can feel connected with others, we can open more to the vulnerability that wants to be felt. It's a deep sense that the more that we trust our belonging, the more we can open. And there's some wise cultures that know this and that actually have rituals that help people to be with vulnerability together.

And I want to share one of those was told by Michael Mead. He describes a healing ritual in Zambia that's always impacted me. And I wrote this up in our radical acceptance because I thought it was so powerful because it's the kind of thing we need in our culture more. So Michael Mead is a renowned storyteller and a teacher. And this healing ritual, the way it goes is if a member of the tribe comes down with an illness, whether it's emotional or physical, the belief is that an ancestor's tooth has lodged itself inside the person that's responsible for the illness.

You know, it's not you personally that's having a problem. It's an ancestor's tooth and it's lodged itself in you. And because all the members of the tribe are connected with each other, the suffering of one affects the others and all become involved with the healing. So the tribe's healing ritual is based on the understanding that the tooth will come out as the truth comes out. Isn't that cool? The tooth comes out as the truth comes out.

And while the sick person must reveal the rage or hatred or lust year he has been experiencing, For the full truth to be revealed, each person in the tribe must express their own buried hurts and fears, anger and disappointment. As Michael Meade describes it, the release happens only when everything comes out in the midst of dancing and singing and drumming. The whole village gets cleansed by the release of the tooth through the release of these difficult truths. Now this is a really powerful message to us.

And it's not like this doesn't exist in our culture. I mean we have many healing groups, whether 12-step groups or in the Buddhist communities or spiritual friends groups, where people take the risk to bring in whatever is true and it's really in that mutual sharing and naming of truth and bringing that vulnerability into the shared space that there's a profound healing. It becomes clear. It's not my problem, it's just the vulnerability that's part of our shared humanity. So one of the pathways, if we want to really nourish the courage to love, is to take the chance

to be with each other and share vulnerability in a shared space. Again, Franco Szeski tells a story, this time it's in teaching a workshop in Berlin on grief and forgiveness. And he describes the ending of the workshop. A woman in the very back of the room stood up and said, I've been listening to you talking about forgiveness, but my father was a prisoner in the concentration camps and I can't forgive his killers. My heart is like ice."

So the whole room went silent and the only appropriate response was to bear witness. Then another woman on the other side of the room raised her hand to speak. And Frank says he thought to himself, okay, now the stories of the camps and the grief of those losses will come. And she stood and said, My heart is like ice too. It feels like a stone. My father was a Nazi officer who was a guard in the camp. I know that he killed people. I can't forgive him."

Then there was silence. And then Frank says, Then these two women did the bravest thing I've ever seen. They made their way across the large conference hall of 200 people and embraced. They didn't say a word. They didn't have to. They just held each other.

Their actions were a clear recognition that they were no longer alone in their pain. For that moment their suffering was all of our suffering. We're really looking at what allows us to make this evolutionary, powerful movement from head to heart space. And we do it when we start practicing, pausing, and being willing to choosing to be with what's here, bringing it kindness. We do it when we meditate and we really fill ourselves up with metra loving kindness and

then go in because that helps us to have some space. We do it when we are with each other in a way that is honest and real and we hold a space for each other. We make it safe for each other to begin to be more vulnerable. I've been speaking mostly on an individual level yet all really valuable, societal change comes when groups of people start relating to each other from more heart space, when there's a willingness to face what hasn't been faced and live from more heart space. It's the same process.

Instead of the reactivity, pausing, getting in touch and doing something different that up-levels the connection. I heard a story that to me expressed this up-leveling, this kind of evolutionary shift on a societal level, the courage to love that took place during the early weeks of the Iraq War. This was described by a correspondent who was actually watching the action and he said he saw a disaster when the army and the Marines were closing in on Baghdad, a disaster in the making, he said. He said a small group of American soldiers was walking along a street in Najaf when hundreds of Iraqis poured out of buildings on either side.

They said their fists were waving, their throats were taught and they pressed in on the Americans who glanced at one another in terror. This is it, I thought. A shot will come from somewhere. The Americans will open fire and the world will witness the Malaya massacre of the Iraq War. So this is what he expected. But in that moment, an American soldier stepped through the crowd, holding his rifle high over his head with the barrel pointing to the ground.

Against the backdrop of a seething crowd, it was a striking gesture, almost biblical. Take a knee, the officer said, take a knee. The soldiers looked at him as if he was crazy, but then one after another swaying in their bulky body armor and gear they knelt before the boiling crowd and pointed their guns at the ground. The Iraqis fell silent, their anger subsided. The officer ordered his men to withdraw. Can you feel in that the consciousness behind it that instead of the habitual reactivity that comes from the thoughts from a limbic brain, it's being run by fear,

or grasping, there was something in that man that paused, that felt into the situation in a much deeper way and really responded from heart wisdom. It was respect. It's rare but it's what really is the hope of our future. So this is what we mean by the courage to love. It takes breaking the habits that we have and we can see where we have them with the people in our lives where we do things that we, maybe it's not rageful and extreme, but it keeps a distance, it's the blaming, it's the judging, it's the defending, it's the reacting.

And the invitation is that we can begin to notice, oh, okay, I'm below the line. I'm not living from heart space. and we can choose to pause and deepen our attention. We can choose to start naming what's true for us. Adrian Rich says this. She says, an honorable human relationship that is one in which two people have the right to use the word love is a process of refining the truths they tell each other. It's important to do so because this breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

It's important to do so because this breaks down human self-delusion and isolation, refining, deepening the truths we tell each other. We're going to in a little bit be practicing, let's look at the time, this movement from head to heart space. But I thought I'd tell you one more story since I'm kind of into telling stories tonight that touched me that expressed this where you could see the potential for playing out something painful and the shift. And this is a story that was narrated by a hospice nurse or a patient had been in prison.

He was forty-four years old. who was serving a long sentence for something and he was dying from complications of HIV. He didn't want to call his mother because he was so ashamed of his life but the hospice nurse sensed deep down that he did and she talked him into it. So several days later mother arrives and she's over 80 and she's frail and at the sight of him brings up a lot of grief and when she entered the room she sees her son who hadn't spoken to her for some years in prison garb, he was actually handcuffed to his bed and the hospice nurse was afraid in those moments that his mother who looked like this kind of dignified

stern woman would be judgmental towards her son and disappointed. But after the initial greetings they just kind of looked at each other, their eyes locked and it seemed that the rolls and the costumes and everything just fill away. The nurse described at, his mother gazed at her son like a newborn child like a saint witnessing a miracle with the vast heart of all mothers. And he and his mother saw in one another their secret beauty, forgiving, timeless, eternal. They sat together for an hour and just held hands. There's not much that needed to be said. And when his mother left, the man said he could now die in peace. We don't have to be at the end of our life or with somebody at the end of their

life to step out of our old habits and find that courage to love. And we don't have to feel like we have to do some major dramatic thing. Try finding little bits, little pieces, saying out loud what we appreciate about somebody, giving that hug and putting down all our thoughts and really inhabiting our body when we hug or when we are about to say something that we habitually do that's a little bit of distancing or a judgment, just breathe and wait and see if the urge passes and we can kind of get away without saying it. Take a moment if you will to sit in a way that's going to be. comfortable and we'll do a little bit of a meditation together.

It might begin by just feeling your intention, just sensing your heart's intention to live from heart space more, to be able to respond to yourself and others from that wise heart space. And the pathway of the courage to love is this movement from our thoughts and reactivity, to feel our feelings from head to heart to heart space. So again to bring to mind either the person you considered before somebody that's important but where there's some reactivity or if there's somebody else you'd like to explore this with, do so, finding yourself as if you're watching a movie, finding a situation where you know you react and create some distance.

sense the flags for you that you're just so if you encounter the situation in a day or a week you can say okay this is it what are the flags what's going on what are you saying or what are they saying what's the looks in your faces what's the circumstance and you might notice mostly what are you thinking maybe what are you believing about yourself for them or what's happening. What's going on in your mind is some part of you believing that they couldn't care if they'd act this way or that something's unfair, that you're not being respected, or maybe you're believing something's wrong with me.

Just sense what's going on in your mind. And the first step is to unhook from the thoughts and let yourself as if you're following awareness down into your body, right into the area of the throat and the heart, maybe the belly, but feel inside yourself and notice what you're feeling. Where does it hurt? You might even ask yourself that, where does it hurt? Or if it helps you for some people, what am I unwilling to feel? And part of coming into these feelings that are vulnerable are to add some kindness in.

It'll both help you get in touch and it'll help you start opening to heart space. And for many of us it's helpful to put our hands on our heart because that gesture alone can be one that just says, okay, I'm here, there's caring here. You're accompanying yourself and breathing and feeling where the vulnerability is. And if it helps to feel like somebody that loves you is, you kind of bathing you with some love right now just to help you have space for what hurts, that can be good too. You're choosing to be present, choosing to be real with what's here. Sense as you bring some kindness to this vulnerable place, the space that begins to open

up, that there's a kind of tenderness, a field that's inside and around the hurt, that's just It's a pure tenderness, it's a tender, aware place and space like a field and if you let yourself open into it and relax back into it you can sense more and more that who you are is that space, that tender space that's being with the vulnerability. you can relax back and rest in heart space and sense how the heart space can include your vulnerable self and also the other person. That's just conditioning playing out, your human body mind conditioning and that there's a heart space that's large enough to include that.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate. Sensing this heart space, intimacy with this heart space. We close together feeling our shared prayer that in the days and weeks to come we can continue to have that courage to open to what we run from. And really our prayer for all beings that we can discover the heart space that's our true home. May we discover the heart space that's our true home. May we live from that heart space. And may our prayers and our actions from this heart space bring peace and

healing and freedom to our own inner being and to all those we love and to all beings everywhere. Namaste. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.