Tara Brach - The RAIN of Self-Compassion (2015-12-16)

Episode Date: December 17, 2015

This talk explores three key features of the trance of unworthiness and introduces a guided meditation based on a new version of the acronym RAIN that awakens self-compassion and de-conditions the suffering of being at war with ourselves.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. Anthony DeMello, many of you might know as a well-known Jesuit priest and writer, wise man. And in one of his books he describes a key moment of waking up for him, a moment I call radical acceptance. He says he had spent decades and decades really depressed and anxious and selfish and the worst part of it and he felt despairing about how to change and the worst part of it was that even his friends kept telling him that he really needed to become less self-absorbed.

And so finally one day his world was kind of stopped when one of his friends said, don't change, don't change. I love you just the way you are. Don't change. I love you just as you are." And he said that the words were like pure grace, they just flooded through them. And he said, paradoxically, it was only when he got permission not to change to be just as he was, that he actually transformed in a profound way. And to me that describes one of the deep principles of healing and transformation, which is it's only when we stop the

war, stop the accusation towards ourself that we're bad and wrong as we are, that we actually are free to flower, free to become all that we can be. So for him it was fortunate that he had a friend to help him and many of us have friends that are mirrors in positive way, but ultimately for us to really move forward on our path, we need to be able to give ourselves the message of care, of deep love and acceptance in the moment to open the door, to change. So tonight's talk is titled The Rain of Self-Compassion. And many of you are familiar with the acronym Rain, and I'll be going into it some. The way I'll be sharing it tonight is slightly different.

then many people are familiar with it from the last decades. And it's a practice in a way of deepening in self-compassion that I've gotten a lot of feedback has been really helpful to people. So I wanted to share this practice, the reign of self-compassion and some of the context for it. And if it's something you find helpful, I've written out a document on it that you can find on my website if it helps you to have something written out.

Just go to tarabrock.com slash self-compassion, all one word. So, I've probably talked more about the suffering of self-aversion and the need for self-compassion than any other single theme that I come back to regularly. And the reason is that it's so pervasive, a suffering. And also it's, I'm so familiar with it. It's like as much as I talk about it, I keep having to recognize, oh, back at war with myself again.

And oh, I need to be kind over and over again. So I feel like it's worth coming back to. And I've noticed that even when it's other emotions that are prevalent, even though for you it might feel like, no, it's anger, or it's fear or its you know jealousy our judgment deep down there's a sense of something's wrong with me if you look closely whatever difficult emotion is going on it's not just that emotion it's just it's not just the fear or the jealousy there's also another feeling which is i'm bad for having this feeling This feeling reflects badly on me.

I feel bad, I am bad. They seem to go together. And in the Buddhist tradition, this is described as second arrowing, that the first arrow is the feeling of fear, and the second arrow is the feeling of, I'm bad for feeling this fear. So rather than the first arrow is fear, rather than bringing healing energy to the fear,

instead we lock in trance by saying this is bad or this is wrong. So I got an email last week. A woman said, Dear Tara, my 12-year-old niece is quick to worry and often gets wound up with anxiety. After one such experience, she and I left to run some errands. She started apologizing in the car

and expressed how badly she feels as she has panic attacks, the second arrow. I explained the concept and then offered what seemed like a year's worth of Dharma talks into 15 minutes. So focus on the breath, bring yourself to the present, the feelings are real but the story you're believing is not. Bring compassion and kindness to yourself.

She mentioned again how feeling bad, about feeling bad for having gotten so worked up and I said something like, yeah, the second arrow can be really difficult. And she said, yeah, and then there's the third arrow when you realize that what you're worried about isn't even true. So these stories. The stories we have of personal deficiency, of badness are the most sticky of all the beliefs. They're the ones that are really hard to wake up out of. And by the way, many people will say, yeah, but I actually go around feeling kind of like

I'm special and better than other people and superior. And what I've noticed is that that swelling of inflation is totally true. We tend to be bulimic. We either feel like we're the worst or we feel special and important. We kind of go back and forth. But underneath that specialness is a real hollow feeling and a separateness. A feeling of separateness. It's a very fragile kind of superiority.

And deep down there's a lot of vulnerability. Feeling unlovable and feeling unworthy is a trance. It's one of the common pervasion. forms of trance that we go into. And when I talk about trance, I'm talking about a narrow, distorted reality that we are living in for just a time. And for instance, we know how much we judge ourselves. I've done many hand raises and said how many of you think you dread yourself too much,

and mostly it's 99%, you know. But what we're not aware of is that, aware of is how many life moments are squeezed by an undercurrent of not enough, should be doing more, something's wrong. There's some sense of a problem and the problem is me that's an undercurrent and I often think of it like a fish in water that it's so familiar that we don't even realize that we're breathing in that kind of toxicity of not okay. So many many people wonder, why is this kind of insecurity about self so pervasive? How come so many of us deep down feel like we're not okay?

And we can see it as a kind of mirror to the larger culture, that there's so much striving and so much competition and so much bias and fear. And for most of us, rather than the assumption of belonging, the assumption that we are acceptable and lovable, we have to meet certain standards. And they're in the culture and they're in our family life growing up, that it's that we have to be a certain way, we have to look a certain way and act a certain way and succeed to a certain degree in order to have some confidence, at least for the moment that we're okay. The standards, of course, are in a society, are set by the dominant culture.

So if we don't belong to the dominant culture, there's even more hurdles. You know, if we're of a different race than white, you know, more hurdles. If we don't fit into the dominant culture in terms of religion, right now being Muslim, more hurdles, deepens the trance. And then underneath all those standards, that we need to make. There's a basic negativity bias in just existing that we tend to remember the things we did wrong. And it's part of surviving that, you know, in the old days when there might be a lion around the corner, it was really worthwhile being vigilant

and thinking something was going to go wrong in any moment. You know, it helped to have a nervous system, right? But now for us to always be fixating on any mistake we have a mistake we made so we don't make it again just makes us more nervous and anxious about making mistakes. It kind of locks us in. So there's a lot of research that shows how our minds are designed to remember what's wrong and to get then anxious and then make more mistakes. I have a really early memory of it where I was maybe six or seven years old and my parents had taken me to a restaurant and

the waiter was chattering me up and he said something like, well, you look like a smart young lady and of course then I needed to prove I was smart. So he says, I have a question for you. What color was George Washington's white horse? So I just, you know, my brow got furled and I really started thinking about it. And I went through everything I remembered from, you know, any stories I had ever heard about George Washington's horse and so on. I tried to remember if I'd seen pictures of the first president.

And I finally made my best guess, which was black. True story. So, anyway, failure and shame get entrained. You know, there's this mess. It's like the brain knows, let's remember this, so we don't do it again. So we can look back in our memory banks and that's what will jump out to us. One physician described it happening to him. He says that a new young MD

and doing his residency in obstetrics, I was quite embarrassed when performing a female pelvic exam. To my embarrassment, I had unconsciously formed a habit of whistling softly. The middle-aged lady upon whom I was performing this exam suddenly burst out laughing and further embarrassing me. I looked up from my work and she busily said, oh, I'm sorry, was I tickling you? And she replied,

and she had tears running down her cheeks from laughing so hard. No doctor, but the song you were whistling was, I wish I was an Oscar Meyer weiner. He wouldn't submit his name. So we remember the trance of Unworthy, as I mentioned, in the moments we're in trance, when we're thinking something's wrong, our attention's narrowed,

and we're focused specifically on the beliefs and feelings of what's wrong. so we're forgetting a larger reality. Now, you might consider for yourself what's really happening, like if you really start investigating trance, because the only way to wake up out of the trance is to literally shine the light of awareness on it. So I want to do that just for the next few minutes, just look at, well, what is really going on

when you, for instance, when you're defensive with a colleague, or when you're too harsh in parenting, or when you find you're drinking too much, and are you insensitive to your partner's needs, and then you turn on yourself. And you feel really like I'm a bad person. What's really going on? I want to name three key elements that are going on in the moments that were really caught at war with ourselves. Okay?

Three things when we're really turned on ourselves. on ourselves. And one is that we're taking it personally, what's going on is my fault, I'm bad, and forgetting all the past causes and conditions so we absolutely had no control over. Okay? Now when I say that, what am I talking about? One thing that is becoming clearer, clearer in recent research is generational trauma. So what that means is more and more evidence that genes pass down memories of violence. So what about the violence done to First Nation people? What happens is it's passed out generation to generation and then all the symptoms, all the PTSD symptoms we're familiar with, occur in future generations. Holocaust survivors,

Americans, refugees. So whatever the PTSD symptoms are that we know about, intentional deficit, anxiety, disordered eating, depression, anger, over-drinking, addictions, they play out. And then the people of this generation feel like, I'm bad, I'm weak-willed, something's wrong with me. You see what I'm saying, though, it's genetically passed down. Then there's the causes and conditions that happen right this lifetime, both because of the cultures' influence and also in our families, that we can't do anything about, that then installed in us the programming to behave in the very ways that we think are bad. And I'm thinking right now of a friend of mine who has an eating disorder that's gone through

decades of overeating. It used to be binging, really bad binging, and now it's just regular overeating. And the degree of shame she has lived with, and for that eating behavior, well, the situation was she, her mother was drinking when she was pregnant. So it was fetal alcohol syndrome. She got addicted to sugar in the womb. And her mother neglected her in her early years. That's a setup for binge eating and overeating. I'm thinking of another person, a very high-achieving African-American friend of mine, his attorney, now a judge. He grew up in a really violent neighborhood, very profound poverty, and there's trauma in a system. And then he has shame about that and he feels like an imposter. And it's like nobody in

the world would, he's so respected. Yet he thinks he feels like an apostor because there's this kind of cut-off part of him that he doesn't want to be identified with, but it feels very vulnerable and very traumatized, a lot of shame. So what I'm saying is that the things we often think are the worst, it's not our fault. It doesn't mean we can't be responsible. And mind you, that's a really important distinction. And I'm saying that because I've run into it so much that there's a fear that, well, if I don't blame myself, I won't be responsible.

We are not able to respond with wisdom and compassion if we add that second arrow of self-blame. So the causes and conditions don't just come when there's the dramatic traumas that I've mentioned because I'm naming some really big ones, like for this African-American man, and there is now research that if you grow up in a situation, with a lot of violence, literally it changes your biochemistry around so that your stress

reaction gets locked in and there's a feeling of ongoing danger and a reaction of violence, potential violence. But it's not just with trauma. There's different degrees of severed belonging that we all experienced. Every one of us, just by being in this society, but for many of us, if we really look at our early years, And we ask, did our parents really listen and understand and get who we were? Were we given that kind of mirroring that helped us to trust ourselves and trust our essential goodness? Did we feel a sense of trust that we belong, that we were acceptable, lovable, worthwhile? And to the degree we look back and say we get it that it was conditional,

and not our parents' fault. They were scared, they were self-absorbed, they were depressed or anxious or addicted or whatever, but it was conditional. Well, to that degree, our nervous system picks that up and then does behaviors to try to make up for it. And then we don't like ourselves for those behaviors. Okay, so thus far,

I'm talking a little bit about the dynamics of this trance, first one is we take it personally, like what we're blaming ourselves for is really our fault. We forget the causes and conditions. The second thing that happens when we're in trance is that because our attention is narrowed and tightened, we lose touch with the actual vulnerability that's current in us, with our feelings of hurt or woundedness or sorrow or fear. Now there's a moment we're really turned on ourselves. We don't register the simple truth of,

oh, I'm suffering. This is hard. This hurts. Which means that we're cut off from compassion. If you can't touch the vulnerability, you can't feel compassion. So in the moments of trance, we're not touching our own vulnerability.

There's a woman who is practicing Buddhist, meditation in prison. One of my friends was teaching a class in this maximum security prison. And so she took a course, and I share this story in True Refuge. And this is a

tall, large woman who became very intimidating. She was known her ward as a bully. And she would protect some women, but she'd relentlessly insult and intimidate others. And during the meditation classes, while other people, participants,

share in discussion, she would sit with her arms crossed kind of silent and scowling. But she never missed a session during the eight-week course. And at the final class, they did a go-around saying, well, what did you like or what touched you or what did you learn? And she spoke last and she said, well, I really liked that poem about the pirate. So this is the poem she was referring to. I'm going to just to read you a piece. This is by Tikna Han and it's called, call me by my true names. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond, and I'm also the grass snake who approaching and silence feeds itself on the frog.

I'm the 12-year-old girl refugee on a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate, and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. Please call me by my true names, so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once so I can see that my joy and pain are one please call me by my true name so I can wake up

and so the door of my heart can be left open the door of compassion so after she said I like that poem she said well that poem got me thinking it made me know something and then she spoke so softly that everyone had a strain to hear she said all my life

I was the bad one the problem one. Now I know I'm suffering too. She kind of looked down, she had tears in her eyes and everybody else looked down too, but they were respecting her words. And in the months to come, I heard from word of mouth that she really changed in a deep way. She became a much more quiet person coming to terms with her own suffering. So we disconnect. when we're at war with ourselves, we can't be tender towards our own suffering.

And that's part of the trance. We also can't be tender and aware of our goodness. Again, our attention is narrowed and we have that negativity bias. So we forget how much we long to be honest and see what's true. And we forget how much we really want to love and not hold back. back our love. We forget the goodness of our being. We are fixated in a narrow way. Okay, so that's the second part, the forgetting, the truth of who we are. The third piece when we're in trance, okay, it's my fault and we're forgetting what's true.

The third piece is then we're propelled into a reactive behavior to in some way try to feel better. We're trying to get more comfortable. We're trying to feel better about ourselves. but that very reactive behavior actually sustains the trance. So, trance begets behaviors that thicken trance. And the examples that you might sense, when you're feeling insecure or bad about yourself, what do you do? What are the behaviors? Well, we usually have a self-dialogue going on to self-justify,

you know, tell ourselves that we're okay, or else we start blaming other people, or else we start working harder or else we try to get other people reliant on us in some way trying to prove that we're worthwhile. This is from Saturday Night Live. Here's a good thing to do if you go to a party and you don't know anybody. First, take out the garbage.

Then go around and collect any extra garbage that people might have like a crumpled up napkin and take that out too. Pretty soon people will want to meet the busy garbage garbage guy. It's pretty silly, I know. Okay. So what happens is whatever our ways of trying to feel better about ourselves, that consolidates the identity of the not okay self trying to feel better.

And we usually add on I'm bad for the ways I'm trying to feel better. In other words, we feel ashamed of our trans behaviors. So those are the three. that second arrow of taking it personally it's my fault, okay, not seeing our vulnerability and our goodness, and then reacting out of it and consolidating our persona of the not okay person. The healing begins in the moments when we sense that that's going on, that we're living in the trance of unworthiness, and we make a kind of you-turn so that instead of blaming ourselves or blaming another or acting out, we turn the light and tenderness of attention

right to where the rawness is. And that's what we're going to explore next, is how do we really bring a quality of presence that can heal us to the moment? And we'll use, as we have in the past, the acronym reign and as I've mentioned, a slightly change. version to explore this. And the way the acronym goes is this, that you recognize and allow that you're in a trance. You go, okay, I'm judging, and that the signs are this. You might notice you're judging yourself. So that's the big one. Usually there's that voice of the inner critic going on. But you also might notice that you're justifying yourself, you're rehearsing what you're going to say to somebody else. Or

Or you might know that you're overeating or over-drinking. Or you might notice that you're speeding up and worrying. There may be a lot of different reasons but you stop and go, okay, in some way I'm not feeling good about myself. Recognize it and just allow it. We just let it be there because you can't begin to deepen presence, make that U-turn. If you keep behaving, you need to pause. The eye, which is investigate, and we investigate with curiosity, with gentleness.

We investigate by asking, you know, what's really going on inside me right now? Again, this is the same rain you're familiar with. We investigate with the eye by sensing, well, where do I feel it? And what does it feel like? Maybe what am I believing? What is this place most need? place that's feeling so inferior, so bad, that's the I. And the end is to then nourish with compassion. Nourish with compassion. There's a little poem someone sent after they did the self-compassion

practice. Terms of endearment help. They pad the burden even when we cannot breathe through, our most menacing demons, something simple as, it's okay sweetheart, just may save. We nourish with the end of rain. After rain, after recognizing, allowing, investigating, and nourish, we just simply rest and notice, okay, what's it like right now? And what we'll discover is, at the beginning of rain, we were in the trance of unworthiness. a small self that felt deficient, after the rain, after we've nourished, we'll discover the sense of who we are is enlarged. Rest as that. Notice what you are and rest in it. That largeness, more spaciousness, more tenderness. Let me give you an example of how the reign

of self-compassion works and we'll practice together. So in this example I was working with a minister who had reached an impasse in his marriage and his wife was really dissatisfied. She wanted him to be more intimate, more vulnerable, more real with his feelings, not so spiritually detached. He wanted her to look her in her eyes and say, I love you, and let her know when he was scared. You know, really feel more connected. And the more he asked it, she asked that, the more he felt blocked, stuck, and offended. So we worked together and he got in touch with under that block whenever he felt blocked and defended and cut off

he felt a real sense of deficiency and there was a real harsh inner critic who basically said you're a hypocrite. In other words, his critic was saying, you're preaching love but you don't embody it, that kind of thing. His inner critic would say you can comfort and guide as a spiritual advisor you're fine with people as long as you're in the role of the minister

but as soon as you're peers you can't be close his critic would say you know you've all your life you've never been close to anybody so there's a lot of shame so his practice

with Rain was to recognize and allow when that trance state would come where he'd feel like he's being asked to be intimate but he couldn't because he felt fundamentally like something was wrong with him. He just couldn't show up. Then when we worked together, we started investigating

and when I'd say, well, what does that shame place feel like? He said it's a sinking hollow ache and I can feel it in my heart and in my belly. And I'd say, you know, what's the belief going on? I'm an imposter and I'm defective. And people will find out. Mostly it was his wife. he felt like he couldn't be real

because she'd find out that he was defective. And then when I'd ask, well, what is that hollow shame place most need? He said it needs forgiveness, it needs love, it needs somebody, a presence that sees my goodness. So that was the investigate. And then nourish. Okay, and when we nourish, in some way we want to bring love, compassion to that place. And so, and I often put my hands on my heart because I have

found and so many have found that touch really makes a difference and research is showing it too. There's a whole nexus, a neural nexus in this area if we touch our heart, it helps, it brings a kind of warmth and a contact, it actually arouses the parasympathetic and decreases the sympathetic which is calming and soothing. But nourish can happen through words, through a message, through imagining energy. For him it was, he was in sense calling on God's love and his own love and trying to send it in. He said he just tried to let it pour into his chest and into his belly. And I had a sense of saying, it's okay, you can just surrender into love.

It's okay, surrender. So that was rain. He recognized and he allowed. He investigated. He found out where it was living. He nourished. post-rain, and this is really important in the moments after nourishing to sense, oh, so what's this like?

He felt a kind of spaciousness. He felt a vibrating, loving awareness that felt spacious. And that's where there's a shift in identity. And by the way, the shift in identity is really the signature of freedom. when we're in the trance of unworthiness our identity is small and deficient. After rain, when we check, when we've really nourished, there's a sense of spaciousness and tenderness and no solid self-centered self.

There's just an open presence. And this is what he discovered. He had to do it many, many rounds because, of course, all the old feelings and beliefs would keep coming back. So many rounds of bringing his, you know, kind of hands to his heart and calling on God's love and his own love and pouring it inward and then sensing a larger sense of being. Months later, shared that for the first time in 26 years, he said he and his wife were feeling each other's hearts. Came from repeated self-compassion. This is a poem, a poem from Rumi that he liked.

So I thought I'd share it. Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled. So wildflowers will come up where you are. You've been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.

So for this minister, the trance was actually this kind of, there was an inner stoniness where he played his role, but he was just armored. against that fear and by rain dissolved that stoniness. And the wildflowers were that he could really love from a much more free and open place. I think the most challenging experiences for most of us are when self-doubt is right down to the core of

it's not only a belief of personal badness but it's like I feel bad. It's very visceral. And so often when we try to offer compassion towards ourselves, there's a sense that there's really no one home to offer it. It's almost like we're just too regressed, too tight, too small, to offer self-compassion. So I want to reiterate that in the reign of self-compassion, recognizing, allowing, investigating, and then nourishing,

it can be very important to call on wherever we sense a source of that loving to be because it's not going to feel like it's posited in the small self. Ultimately, that love is our very nature, but because we're tight and contracted and separate, we don't feel it here. So then wherever we can turn towards and call on for this man, it was sensing God's love and then sensing, his own love. We do that. I'll read you a poem that I found really points to this. And it's called She Dreamed of Cows by Nora Pollard.

I knew a woman who washed her hair and bathed her body and put on the nightgown she had worn as a bride and lay down with a 38 in her right hand. Before she did the thing she went over her life. started at the beginning, recalled everything, all the shame, sorrow, regret, and loss. This took a long time into the night, a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief until sleep captured her and bore her down. She dreamed of a green pasture and a green oak tree. She dreamed of cows. She dreamed she stood under the tree and the brown and white cows came slowly up from the pond and stood near her. Some butted her gently and they licked her bare arms with their great coarse, drooling tongues.

Their eyes wet as shining water regarded her. They came closer and began to press their warm flanks against her. And as they pressed, an almost unendurable joy came over her and lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly. She flew over the tree and she flew over the field and she flew with the cows. When the woman woke, she rose and went to the mirror She looked a long time at her living cell Then she went down to the kitchen

Which the sun had made all yellow and she made tea She drank it at the table slowly All the while touching her arms where the cows had licked So the reign of self-compassion means that we make that U-turn from that trance where we're at war with our self. The self is always an object. We make that U-turn where we stop the behaviors

that come out of trance and we bring attention right here to where the rawness and the pain is. And we recognize it and we allow it and we investigate it and we bring a nourishing attention. For me, one of the most powerful experiences of the reign of self-compassion was some years back,

I was at a retreat up at the Forest Refuge where I go and do retreats. I'm going to be going in a few weeks, actually, in January. And right before going, I'd had a real busy period, so it was very stress. I was kind of in a stress tighter place. And when I landed at the Forest Refuge and I started reviewing those weeks, I became kind of horrified at how I had been playing my life out from such an impatient and self-centered kind of place, especially if I thought of with Jonathan, how I had been just really not very attuned or sensitive and just very self-absorbed. And it triggered off some judging that then went more and more into a very, very old place of,

this is just plain unacceptably bad, bad selfness, you know, very, very deep. So I said, okay, you know, recognize and allow it, and I said, okay, this is the trance, and I began to investigate and felt that pain of not okay. And as much as I tried, every time I kept trying, I said, you know, it's okay, sweetheart, and I said some of the things I normally say to myself, there's some very, very deep, stubborn place that, go ahead and do that, but it's just plain not okay. you know, bottom line core not okay.

All right. So the N, the nourish, it was almost like a desperate sense of that a very, very young, helpless place in me that just, you know, I can't love myself, please love me. And those words, just saying those words, and I said them over and over, I said, please love me. From that, just helpless,

I can't love myself. I cannot do the nourishing by myself. And so it came from this real depth of yearning. And from that yearning, out of that yearning, I sensed a presence very, very close in that was simply warmth and tenderness that kissed me on the brow. And that kiss on the brow

was absolutely like a loving blessing that vibrated and through my whole body in a cellular way as just pure loving, just flowing through me, pure care. And the more I let it in, the more the eye dissolved, and that nourishing was just loving presence, loving what is. It wasn't a presence out there, it wasn't even me nourishing myself.

It was just loving presence, loving. I started this practice then at the Forest Reference with whoever I'd see, I would imagine in some way energetically that I was kissing them on the brow. And I know this sounds like a little invasive or whatever, but it was very respectful. But just energetically, with that same just pure, tender caring. And each time I would feel this exquisite sense of relatedness, not this grand me kissing them, but just this absolute tender field that we were part of together.

And it became my kind of custom-designed loving-kindness practice where if I was feeling at war with myself, I would just imagine, you know, I'd recognize and allow the trance and just investigate and feel where it was, and just imagine that end of rain, that nourishing, that kiss coming in. And then I would offer it out. And it became, and it still is, one of the, practices that cuts through the trance. And this is one of the gifts of the reign of self-compassion,

which is that if you practice it, and it's like any other practice, you have to do it over and over because the conditioning is strong to regard ourselves as a self that's deficient and doesn't deserve it. So it takes over and over again, even if you're just going through the motions, the language is neurons that fire together, wire together. And to decondition that over and over recognizing, allowing, investigating, nourishing. But each time you do it, pause after the rain practice because the true flourishing of the, or flowering of the practice, remember? remember Rumi's poem, you know, the wildflowers are right after the rain. After the rain, just rest and discover who you are when there's no longer a war going on. That's the question.

Who am I when I'm absolutely allowing and caring for the life that's right here? So we're going to practice together this reign of self-compassion. And again, if you find that this practice support you, you'll find the steps of it written out. You can get hold of this. Not only will you find the steps written out, but there'll be a link to this meditation we're about to do on my website, on tarabrock.com slash self-compassion. There's no hyphens or spaces.

So let's take some moments to set ourselves for a guided meditation as you come into stillness, take a few full breaths, a nice deep in-breath and a slow-out breath. And again, a nice deep, full-in-breath, filling the chest, filling the lungs, and then a slow-out breath, feeling the sensations of the breath as you exhale.

And then letting the breath resume in its natural rhythm just feel this body breathing and take some moments to scan in your life. And you might notice where your relationships with others or in your own behaviors you feel like you've turned on yourself in some way. It might be in a situation where you're in conflict with another person but feeling bad about yourself. It might be that you've turned on yourself,

you're at war with yourself for a way that you're behaving as a parent, a partner, a friend. You might be judging yourself or down on yourself for something to do with work. Or maybe it's for an addictive behavior. Where do you get into the trance of unworthiness, the trance of not okay? And let your attention go to that place where you know you get into the trance. And for now, just let yourself kind of get close. into it so you can feel the sense of how it is to be living inside that mind state of the

belief that in some way you're falling short, you should be different. Perhaps there's a sense of not lovable, not okay, not respectable, something's wrong. We begin the reign of self-compassion by recognizing, oh this is trance at war with myself. recognizing the thoughts and feelings of the trance, just allowing that all to be here right now. We're making room for what's here. The A of rain is just to allow, this is how it is right now.

We begin to investigate with curiosity, with gentleness. So what's it like when I'm in this trance? And you might sense what you're believing about your yourself and other people, if that comes quickly, just, you know, what's the belief right there? I should be different. I'm bad because I'm hurting others.

No one could love me. I'll always fail. Just sense what might be built in there, what kind of core belief. And most important, feel your body and sense when you're in the trance of unworthiness, What is it like in your body? What's your throat feel like, your chest, your belly, when you're really feeling bad about yourself. The most important part of investigating

is connecting with the embodied experience. Sense the most vulnerable part of you, where you feel the worst. Sense what that part most needs. The part that feels deficient, not okay, what does it need? Does it need to be seen in a different way and loved, understood, held? Just sense that.

And as you're listening into that, as you're feeling into that place in you that is feeling not okay, you might experiment with putting your hand on your heart. Just lightly, a very tender touch. and this is the beginning of turning towards loving, towards the end of rain, the nourishing, and sense the possibility of offering what's most needed inwardly. Perhaps there's words that you might offer. Sometimes it's okay sweetheart. I'm sorry and I love you.

Ticknod Han says, Darling, I care about this suffering is a powerful phrase. Or it might be as the minister that you sense the love of the God or the divine flowing through you or for me that kiss on the brow of pure care. Sense the possibility of calling on love and offering it inward. Nourish with self-compassion. Each time you nourish with self-compassion, let it be a fresh, creative exploration of what really allows you to feel love flowing into your own being. You might imagine light, warmth pouring in.

Just the intention to offer care inwardly begins to decondition that tendency to be at war. The meditation becomes full when after the steps of rain. We simply notice, who am I? if I'm not any longer believing anything's wrong, sensing that tenderness, the openness, the spaciousness of being when we're not at war. From the teachings of Bapuji, an Indian master, he says, my beloved child, break your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself, you break your own heart.

You stop feeding on the love which is the wellspring of your vitality. The time has come your time to live, to celebrate and see the goodness that you are. Let no one, no thing, no idea or ideal obstruct you. If one comes even the name of truth, forgive it for its unknowing. Do not fight, let go and breathe into the goodness that you are. So we close tonight in a simple way. just to feel again your breath, feel the presence that's here, and offer whatever blessing, whatever wish,

most resonates in these moments to your own being. And then sensing our shared wish, sensing the shared heart space of those here live and those listening, that heart space that really includes all beings everywhere, feeling our shared prayer that all beings may realize the loving presence, it's their very essence, that all beings might trust and live from loving presence, that all beings everywhere might experience deep and natural peace. May there be peace on earth.

May there be peace everywhere. all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Namaste and thank you for your presence. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.