Tara Brach - The Revolution of Tenderness - Part 1

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

This two-talk series explores our capacity to be tender – sensitive and responsive to ourselves and others. This capacity marks a radical evolutionary shift from a self-centered existence shaped by fear, to a life lived from the realization of our collective belonging and the preciousness of all life. The talks examine the conditioning that inclines us toward dissociation and emotional reactivity, and the practices of presence that evolve our heart and awareness. ~ from the talk: Pope Francis invites us to "live the revolution of tenderness," which is expressed through closeness, compassion and service… Part 2 - coming soon!

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome friends. I was talking with a dear friend, a poet Jane Hirschfield, recently and we're talking about the qualities of hardened awareness that are really most needed in these times and one that we both felt was right at the center was tenderness. And you can find her really beautiful reflections on substack. And as we were talking, I was reminded of the phrase, the revolution of tenderness. It was spoken by Pope Francis. And I used that as the title for two talks from my archives.

And those are what I want to share with you for this week and next week. So, Pope Francis delivered a TED Talk. He was the first Catholic Pope to do so. It was in 2017, and it was during a conference on technology and innovation. It was attended by founders of all the world's biggest tech companies and venture capitalists and leaders of major cultural institutions and foundations. So it was quite a gathering. He started by saying, how wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion. And then he went on to ask the powerful for a revolution of tenderness. He said this, tenderness is not weakness, it is fortitude. It is the path of solidarity, the path of humility.

Please allow me to say it loud and clear. The more powerful you are, the more your actions will have an impact on people, the more responsible you are to act humbly. If you don't, your power will ruin you and you will ruin the other. May there be a revolution of tenderness. As with many themes, these talks feel only more relevant in our contemporary culture. So, this week we'll be looking at the ways we leave presence, leave our heart, we block our capacity to tenderness and some of the most powerful pathways of homecoming that I know. So, friends, I hope you find that this is helpful on your path. Some of my very favorite stories are dog-related stories and one of the top of my list

is of a woman who described how she must have left a door open because, this dog walked into her house and she hadn't seen that dog before and it didn't have any tags but looked like it had a home, well-fed belly and clean and so on. So she let the dog come in and walked through her hallway and it walked right into her living room, jumped on the couch and settled down and took a nap for an hour and then it left and she thought okay, her dogs didn't seem to mind, seemed like it was an okay visit. The same thing happened the next day. The dog came, walked in her door, plopped down on the couch, slept for an hour and left.

And this went on for about a week. So she started getting curious. She wrote a little note and pinned it to the collar that was there. And the note said, every afternoon your dog comes to my house for a nap and I don't mind but I want to make sure it's okay with you. Next day the dog arrives back with a different note pinned to it. collar and the note says, he lives in a home with three children and he's trying to catch up on his sleep.

May I come with him tomorrow? I really like this story because it has that fellow feeling kind of to it, a sense of intimacy of just inviting into our lives and our beings, others. And I like it a lot because it's also something that's precious and not so common. As we know, when we're uptight, we're just not welcoming. I saw afterwards, just recently after I hadn't seen this for a while, a little cartoon that a dog is on the psychiatrist's couch and he's saying, actually I'm really fine, I just like to have a place where I'm allowed on the couch, you know, which I thought was kind

of cute. So, when we're caught in stress, we don't offer a space to each other. We're not inclusive, we don't assume connectedness and when it's prolonged stress we get into this kind of bubble where we're moving through life and we're kind of, others are in the way or they have something we need but they're not really a part of our heart. So what I'd like to explore in this class is what I'm going to explore in this class is what I'm Pope Francis described as the revolution of tenderness, the revolution of tenderness. And that's really a caring responsiveness, a sensitivity that is our capacity to cultivate,

but it does not unfold when we're stressed and not mindful. And I like the languaging, a revolution of tenderness because it's a radical pervasive transformation for us when we move from that sense of being a separate egoic self that's trying to get through the day to a sense of belonging where we actually feel a sense of this web of life that we're a part of and there's an inclusion and we're really responsive to all of life because it's part of us. So this is a shift really in an evolutionary way of moving from one level of identity, separate ego, to a level of belonging that we're exploring.

And you might even just in this moment take a pause and close your eyes and just ask yourself to scan through the day today and just choose one situation, one encounter to look more closely at something where you were in some conversation, some way of relating with another, and just simply ask yourself, what would it have been like to be a bit more tender? What would that have meant in this situation? And sense for yourself, what does tender mean to you? As you examine, you might notice that being more tender involves more presence, that if you have an agenda, if you're trying to get something or protect something,

there's not tenderness. You might also notice that tenderness has a felt sense to it, that it's embodied, that you're actually here in a body when there's tenderness. And you might notice there's a quality of open-heartedness with it. That you're not in your head, you're not thinking through things. things, planning, figuring out, worrying, you're in your heart. So this is what we'll explore, you can open your eyes when you'd like. It feels like a critical time to explore it.

That the more there is stress and the more there is fear and the more we toughen up and we tend towards not letting in others and we tend towards a great-reve-and-we tend towards aggression, so it feels like an important time in our society and also for many of us in our personal lives just under the stress of the season to explore what does it mean to arrive in more presence, to open our hearts, to have more tenderness. And I share something that I have always been struck by and this is an observation by Carl Jung. In 1924, he visited the Pueblo Indians in Taoist, New Mexico. And he describes a conversation with the chief that he met with about the difference between Westerners

and the native people, the indigenous populations. Speaking of the white men, Chief Ochoice, told Dr. Young, their eyes have a staring experience. They're always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They're always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want. We do not understand them. We think that they are mad. I asked him, Dr. Young writes, why he thought the whites were all mad. They say they think with their heads, Chief Achweis, replied, Well, of course, said Dr. Young's surprise. What do you think with? We think here, the chief said, and he put his hand over his heart.

He says Dr. Young was profoundly struck by this encounter. Chief had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we were blind. So let's just take a moment, a sense. So what is the meaning of that? We think with our heads. We think with our hearts. When we are in what might be called a developmental arrest, when our limbic system takes over, we are not embodied in a healthy integrated way.

What happens is we try to use our brain to figure out things but it's all driven by fear. So living in their heads, restless, wanting something, is that, that fear-based thinking that every one of us is familiar with. We know what it's like to be in that trance. In fact, it takes over a lot of our days and it's aggressive, it's like blaming and it's defensive. What does it mean to think from our hearts? There's still thoughts but they're sourced in a sense of connection, of care, of sensitivity,

of tenderness. So, in a way we're going to be looking at this shift from head to heart and thinking and feeling. And it's a critical one because when we're caught in our heads and when we're stressful, we start finding that our lives don't have much meaning. We feel like we're racing to the finish line but we're not really dropping in. That's the experience You know what it's like. There's where you can be, have these prolonged stretches of anxiety and trying to get a lot done and worrying and blaming and conflict and then you have a moment of real contact. Let's say something you're in nature and there's a sense of, oh yeah, this, or you're with another person and there's a feeling of being touched and then something

in you goes, where have I been? Have you experienced that? Being lost and then all of a sudden go, oh yeah, this is what matters. We lose touch with what matters. John O'Donohue says, our bodies know that they belong to life, to spirit. It's our minds that make our lives so homeless. So in this reflection on tenderness, we're looking really at the shift

from fear-based head-thinking to the heart. And we're looking at a homecoming, back into a kind of integration right here. The Chinese calligraphy character for mindfulness is present heart. And I really love that. You know, there's a lot of different ways of describing mindfulness. I've always had a problem with the word mindfulness to confess here to you, which is because it doesn't usually talk about the heart and I feel like our training is really awakening

our heart mind. In Asia the script for heart mind is this, you know, it's the same word. I like this Chinese calligraphy that acknowledges that, it's a present heart. So if we think of meaningful moments, if you review the last few days and just say, yourself, okay, so when did I have a moment where there was that meaning, that sense of meaningfulness, a sense of coming home, that oh yeah, this is what matters? Why don't you bring to mind when that might have happened? Again, close your eyes if that helps.

When did you have a moment of meet some meaning of homecoming? And as you investigate that a bit more, can you sense how the quality of present heart of some tenderness was part of it? I know for myself when I invited myself into that in, inquiry I thought of this morning, I got up really early and the full moon was right outside my window and it's just so compelling to meditate and then open my eyes and have it be there and close my eyes and open again and there it was this big orb in the sky and just to feel very touched that closeness with the world around me.

Then I had another meaningful moment. was playing tug-of-war with my dog and then, you know, and when we were done, she was just so happy. It was like, okay, she had her moment. It was really fun. She was just all exhilarated and I just got happy for her happiness, you know. Then I had another meaningful moment that really stood out to me. A couple of days ago I got an email from a woman who used to be a journalist and then at 28 got a very, very very... serious disease and has been for the last eight years unable to do anything. And the courage and spirit she's bringing to this life situation move me to tears.

And each one of those, they're real different, had that same, some sense of, okay, I'm right here, I'm home, there's a present heart, there's tenderness, one was very happy, one was very sad, one was kind of awed, tenderness. It's being in relationship with our inner life in the world. So, meditation is this evolutionary strategy that wakes us up from that ego-separate self that's fear-based, fear-thinking, kind of caught. Meditation wakes us up into that sense of realizing connectedness, having access to that tenderness, to empathy, to joy, to self-awareness.

So, every one of us has the intrinsic potential, this capacity for tenderness, every one of us. And the pathway is to meet this moment, it always comes down to this moment, it's nowhere else, with an embodied presence. It's like one Zen nun put it, she said, I meet life with my whole body. Just a sense that meeting life with our whole body. So what blocks tenderness? And we're going to take a look at that. One main way we block tenderness, that present heart, is we dissociate.

And what that means is that instead of meeting life with our whole body, we pull away. They were constantly controlling experience rather than living it. So we dissociate. And how come? It's because early on we got born into a family or a culture where there wasn't enough sense of belonging, of connection, of resonance to feel safe to be here. So we had to control things. There wasn't the tolerance for life.

So instead of opening to it and processing it and in the direction, and digesting it, there was a pulling away from it and that becomes a habit. It feels like too much. So we depress or suppress or repress and instead get mental. And that's that again the white man predicament that this chief talked about. Fear-based thinking. So that's one way that we shut down our tenderness. The second way is when we can't successfully dissociate, So we move through the world with excessive sensitivity and there's a whole psychological category if we're over-sensitive and we're constantly in reactivity because our system can't deal with that much feeling.

So dissociate or oversensitive. But either way we're not able to process and digest. So there are signs of being in that ego trance and cut off from tendering. And I'll just name them and they're very familiar signs and you'll know them. One sign when we're not in that tenderness and that heart presence is when we're turned on ourselves in judgment. There is a translation we make that when we feel bad, you know, when there's anger, there's hurt, there's fear, there's shame, we immediately make a translation to I feel bad, I am bad.

In other words, our identity owns it. So, we turn on ourselves. And when that happens, when you are judging yourself, you're blocking tenderness. And we do it in a million ways. You know, we do it by taking how other people treat us and we have deep down these kind of neuropathways of interpretation where people look at us a certain way or say certain things and it immediately translates to the same message I got to the same message I got for. from my mother when I was whatever age, something's wrong with me.

One of the kings of this self-negation Rodney Dangerfield, he says, I went to the psychiatrist and he says you're crazy. I tell him I want a second opinion. He says, okay, you're ugly too. So it's that kind of thing. You know them. I mean they're all silly but there's a reason there's so many shame jokes is because so many of us are stuck, there's a developmental arrest at the ego level and what keeps us stuck

there is the ego is hating itself. It's not until we unwind that, what I call the trance of unworthiness, that we can begin to come home to that tender place. Another sign of the trance we were caught in that ego state, caught in the head thinking and are not able to contact us when we're trying to control. control our inner state and this is where we're trying to use food or drugs or alcohol or caffeine or overwork, anything we can to distract us and you can feel underneath it the restlessness that again that chief was talking about.

When we're distracting ourselves, when we're avoiding ourselves, we can't feel the tenderness. Another sign of blocking it is when we're trying to control others and how many times do we engage in a conversation and it's not overt control, we're not powering over someone but we're trying to present ourselves or some way manipulate things to create a certain impression of ourselves, to be thought of in a certain way. And sometimes it is manipulative outwardly. This story describes 11 people that are hanging tight to a rope that's dangling from a helicopter, okay? And there's 10 men and one one. woman. And they agree that somebody has to let go of the rope or else they'll all die

because the rope will break. So after a whole lot of backforth, the woman finally says, okay, I'm going to be the one to do it. This is what women do. We sacrifice ourselves for others, for the well-being of others. We do what we can to make sure everybody else is taking care of first rather than ourselves. And when she was done, all the men started clapping. So we control others and in a moment when you have any agenda at all to change another person, to affect how they're viewing you, any agenda cuts off tenderness, this present heart. Okay. One of the biggest signs of being caught is depression which is huge.

Most of us know what it's like. where we're basically are shutting down feelings because they're too much. And when pain is strong and ongoing and there's a whole lot of research on this now, when there's a lot of pain, there's depression. Pain and depression go together whether it's physical or emotional. When it's prolonged, we get depressed. So just kind of the way the body tries to push things under, it's a very distinct biochemistry. Life's meaning?

Down. Because we're talking about how meaning comes along with that present heart and that tenderness and the more we're cut off from it, the less we're going to feel meaning. So if I asked you to bring up a meaningful moment in the last few weeks and it was difficult, it just means that your system's been caught and not able to touch that tenderness. It's not a fault, it's just that we get caught. So the inquiry then becomes, how do we wake up out of that egoic trance so we can come back to these qualities of tenderness?

This is Thomas Merton. He says, of what a veil is it if we can travel to the moon, if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all journeys and without it all of the rest. are useless. We can get so waylaid in our lives thinking, well first let me just get this done, let me just get this project done or wait till the kids leave the house and then I'm going to start learning to get in touch with myself or when I get over this illness or when or when or when. So we postpone bridging the abyss and then we get we stay stuck

in that trance. So, bridging it is really the movement that's not very big distance from head thinking to really being guided by our hearts, to by that tenderness. I thought I'd share with you something I read years and years ago. Tibetan teacher Choggyam Trunpa writes this about this awakening process. He says, if you search for the awakened heart, if you put your mind, you're a child. If you put your hand through your rib cage and feel for it, there's nothing there except for tenderness.

You feel sore and soft and if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness. This kind of sadness doesn't come from being mistreated. You don't feel sad because someone has insulted you or because you feel impoverished. Rather this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed. There's no skin or tissue covering it. It's pure raw meat. Even if a tiny mosquito lands on it, you feel so touched.

Your experience is raw and tender. So there's happiness for no reason and sadness for no reason. There's this unconditioned heart that is completely tender and receptive and can move in those directions as I describe with my dog of just this joy or just this joy or just, you know, or reading that email of the woman struggling, the sorrow, the sadness. And if we can be with it with the present heart, then there's a quality of realness and authenticity and freedom and meaning. But if we can't hold it, if we cover it over, if we depress it, we lose touch with our lives.

So let's look a bit now on the pathway of really making this move from head to heart and then as we often do, we'll end with a bit of a practice where you can explore it for yourself. The first step is when you get one of the signs, one of the signals, oh okay, I'm on my own case or okay I'm judging another person. I can tell I'm distracting myself. The first step, pause. This is what we call the sacred art of pausing and if you're in a pattern, if your neuro-pathways

are really grooved in a pattern, the only way to change those patterns is to pause. So you have some choice to do it a little differently. So we pause and in that pause there's two basic questions and if you come back to these questions again and again whether you've been meditating for, you know, three weeks or 30 years, these are the questions that will begin to evolve your awareness. And the questions are, okay, so what is actually happening inside me right now? And can I let this be? Can I not do something, not fix it, not get away from it, just let be?

So you might find when you ask that question that underneath the sign, let's say you're on somebody else's case or on your own case, let's say you just find numbness or maybe you find you're anxious or maybe you find you're depressed. Just to let that be there. We so quickly remember if I feel bad I am bad and then we quickly want to get away. But if you ask the question, okay what's going on in here and it feels bad? You say, okay, just let it be there. Don't move away so quickly. You're beginning to radically shift your neuro-pathways and your evolutionary path. That's the move towards the heart.

One of many, many of us find a great source of spiritual wisdom in Winnie the Pooh, so I wanted to read you a little bit here. One awesome thing about Eeyore is that even though he's basically clinically depressed, he still gets invited to participate in adventures and synonygants with all his friends and they never expect him to pretend to feel happy. They just love them anyway and they never leave them behind or ask them to change. Don't you love that? I mean, how many of us either in ourselves or we have friends, there's some undercurrent of a message of you should be different if you're depressed. And how damn that you are different? devastating as that. When we're caught in this biochemical cocktail we didn't choose,

but it's just there and some, and either we're telling ourselves or others are telling us, you should be different. So the first shift here, this revolution of tenderness, the first movement towards that, what is happening inside me? Okay, there's depression. Just let it be. Let it be. Now, I just want to say with depression in particular, depression often requires that to continue to really keep healing that we get active. So letting a bee doesn't mean that we don't then respond in a way that's wholesome. But in order to even be guided to respond, first we need to have the courage just let it be there without any judgment.

Okay? Just want to name that. Okay, so anxiety, depression, shame, anger, what's happening inside me and let it be. The next piece after we've let be is to go deeper and fully contact. Now keep in mind that the block to tenderness is that we leave our body or overreact to what's there. So the pathway to tenderness is to learn to wisely re-inhabit our body and our heart. When I say wisely re-inhabit, we left for a good reason, okay?

We left because things were tough. So again when people say, well, just come into your body and feel it, that's not quite fair. Because we wouldn't have left unless there was something really, really difficult. We've been spending our whole lives avoiding, feeling certain things. So there's an attitude in arriving again that is critical and that is super patient, super gentle and knowing how to find support for the process that allows us to actually do it. Now what I mean by that is often before we can actually actually start bringing our awareness really into our body, we need to find some link to what feels

safe, what gives us a feeling of enough safety to make that traveling from our head to our heart. Okay, so a poem for you that I think kind of describes this well. This is called She Dreamed of Cows by Nora Pollard. I knew a woman who washed your head. and bathed her body and put on a 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. She started at the beginning and recalled everything, all the shame, sorrow, regret, and loss. This took her a long time into the night and a long time crying out in rage and grief and disbelief until sleep captured her and bore her down. She dreamed of a green passion.

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 looked 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. her and lifted her like a warm wind and she could fly. She flew over the trees 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 what happened? Here's this being who could no longer endure and she found a way to endure by sensing belonging. And so it is with us, the very truth is we do belong. But we've forgotten. So part of this movement from head to heart where we begin to open to the heart, we begin to open to and process what we've been running from for a lifetime.

Part of this is remembering or reconnecting to where there is some sense of belonging somewhere. We all have it. Even if it's the most fragile thread, we have time. We can strengthen that thread. So what helps? What are the pathways? The one that I find that we can practice most regularly is even making a gesture of kindness towards ourselves even if we're not really meaning it.

That doesn't matter. If your intention is to bring kindness to yourself, just that intention opens the door. And when I put my hand on my heart as most of you have been with me before, no, there is a new relationship we're creating with ourselves that is actually that is actually that is actually actually part of opening us to the tenderness, where we're beginning to learn to have that part of us that's our more awake heart, the part that can witness and care and sense the small parts, the young parts of ourselves that are hurting, that begins to just offer kind messages. That's one way. Perhaps even before you can enter your body that creates a kind of softness

and availability and safety that makes it possible. So, offering kindness to our itself. And then another way is we reach out for connection both in real time with other people and also in our meditation. You know, I walked with one vet who came back from Afghanistan, had a lot of trauma. And if I had said, go to where the trauma is caught in your body, because eventually you have to, you have to feel it in your body to be able to process and open to tenderness. But if I had said that to go directly it would have been re-traumatizing. So I asked him, well what gave him a sense of comfort or safety? And he said he just imagined the God, the whole field of love in the world was enveloping him.

And so that became his prayer. He said, may I be held in God's embrace? And he said it over and over and over again, probably thousands of times. But each time he was taking that thread where there was belonging and having it become more and more of a pathway to safety and love so that he could then begin to have the container where he could start getting back into his body and working through the trauma. He could start opening to his feelings because you can't. be tender towards your life if you can't open into your body.

That's another way. And then another approach is to sense what really matters to us, to remember our deepest aspiration. Like if you remember, oh, what do I really care about? Something in you knows that there's this yearning to be helpful or yearning to be close with others, are yearning to feel your belonging to the earth. That yearning actually helps to create the connection. There's a woman who founded Healing Journeys, which her name is Jan Adrian and it's an organization

that supports women through the process of cancer. And so she describes her own story with cancer where she had a chest x-ray to see if her cancer had metastasized to her lungs. And the doctor calls and says, well, there are, there's a nodule on the lung so we need a CT scan. So she got it on a Wednesday and she was told that the results would come in the next day. Okay, so you can all put yourself in that situation.

It's kind of waiting anxiously what she was doing and her anxiety just kind of went over the top, she couldn't concentrate, she felt like crying all day. on that Thursday, what if it's metastasized? And then she's thinking, oh, my healthy diet and exercise, nothing had made a difference and there was part of her that's angry because she didn't think she'd have the energy to fight the cancer again. She calls the doctor's office twice, promises he'd call back and he didn't. So that Thursday night she read and she meditated And she was so agitated, she was saying, okay, so what's really going to help? And she remembered her aspiration, which was a prayer most of us know, make me an instrument,

use me. May this life serve awakening. And she said, who knows? Maybe having the cancer again is the way I'm going to be most useful serving and supporting others and something intertapped into that trust that whatever unfolds, it's part of this loving and serving and this larger belonging. In other words, her aspiration connected her to her world that she loved. And that gave her some peace. And finally, the end of the next day she got the results, which was there wasn't anything

to worry about. And she celebrated, but I thought it was interesting what she said. She said even though she's accepting whatever happened, she preferred health. She said she was glad she didn't get the results immediately. It had put her in touch with what most mattered, that love for her larger belonging, that sense of connectedness. She also wrote, there was this inner knowing that I will be okay no matter what, I'm not just a body. Someday I know this body won't go on and I will still be okay.

I like being reminded of that periodically. This is another pathway to that safety and love and belonging that helps us to come back into our heart and our tenderness. For many of us going into nature and there's more and more research that nature does it makes the difference. Rachel Carson writes, those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. So the tenderness revolution starts with our capacity to meet this life with our whole body,

which means that we find some of these pathways to make it safe enough to come home into our bodies and then the tenderness revolution starts extending to others. Because if we can be present, heart, tender to this life in here, we naturally have that space, that receptivity and the capacity to respond to others. It might take a moment just to check in on something, if you will. Just close your eyes. This is a bit of a scan or relationships with others to choose one person that you know is having a difficult time right now, one person you know.

And see if without any judgment, just if you honestly investigate, how you have to How have you been in relationship with this? Have you been relating to this person and it's kind of been a mental idea of their suffering? Have you let yourself be touched by it? So has it been a head response or a heart response? What's the tenderness quotient? No judgment we're going to practice some because it takes practice. our habit is to be in our heads, our habit is to protect ourselves from suffering because

it'll feel like too much. Emily Bennington tells a story that I think is really powerful about this. It's another story about someone with breast cancer. She says my mother told me she has breast cancer. If you've ever been in a situation, she'll recognize the flood of emotions, they hit you all at once. Sadness, guilt, anger, regret. at. 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? You get the idea. Thank God for this work, practicing presence, heart presence. Despite complete head spiral, I still had the presence enough to ask myself that important

question, what am I noticing right now? What is happening inside me? And it is happening inside me? And In that moment I was able to see something I would have missed otherwise. My mother didn't want to talk about any of those things. As I was weighing her options, she sat in a high top chair in my kitchen staring blankly into a cup of coffee. I was trying to be strong for her sake and mine, but it suddenly became clear 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 very holding it together and scurring around, making dinner, pouring over doctor's paperwork and staying busy was my way of avoiding a 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 happened. Slowly she started rocking side to side like a mother of her.

rocks a child except the child was now the caretaker. It was a sweet, tiny moment I'll never forget, one that I surely would have missed if it were not with the power of mindfulness. So again, this is the revolution of tenderness that shifted for Emily what would have been a mental reaction without real contact to a intimacy. It takes practice because we have a very quick reflex to cut off from that tenderness and get mental for most of us. And especially when somebody is in a lot of pain, we're afraid of it, we want to fix it,

we want it to go away. But what if we can't? Do we know how to stay there and be with someone? What is happening? Can we be with this? we stay in our bodies and our hearts. So this brings me back to that letter I mentioned from, this is Lucy Mayhew, the British journalists who at 28 got this horrific illness and she's very, very sick still.

And she describes savoring small gifts of compassion when others are able to stand in that presence and in that tenderness. I'm going to read you a little of what she wrote in an article. She says, loss of physical function is hell, but acute pain takes you to hell's basement where you doubt life, goodness, and yourself. Alone one employs legion strategies to keep buoyant. Nothing, however, is as effective as the faith drawn from another's warmth. It wards off desolation and revives one's resolve to keep fighting.

He just talks about the power of another's presence. describes a, this is a note she wrote to her friend who had come through with this presence. She says, You came into my room, I wrote. As I cried, you hugged me and said you knew what a huge amount I had done and how endlessly hard I had been trying to find a path back to health. That explicit recognition of the breath and depth of my delving and the connected salute to how vile the situation was did more good. than anything else could have possibly done. It didn't stop the pain or banished the fear,

but it helped a lot. It's what people mean when they talk about bearing testimony to a person's suffering. It transcends pity. It's love as understanding, which is priceless. Sometimes there are no viable suggestions but you can repeatedly let a person in distress know you are holding the space for brighter times for them. It never gets old. or tired. It never becomes unnecessary. It can be spoken and unspoken. Both is best. So this is the final part of our exploration in this class of the revolution of tenderness, which is how do we be there for others when they're having a hard time and stay tender? And I want to draw on some suggestions Lucy makes from being in that position on how we can

be with others and make a difference. And the first one she says is, be patient and constant like regular meals, a person in distress needs repeated comfort and as time passes that need intensifies. It's human nature to hold on to hope even when the outlet looks pretty futile and to feel that someone else cares and is holding on too is a great tonic. The second thing she says, share your life. Don't worry up a pedestrian or dull you think your news is because it's the inclusion, the human connection that's cherished. The next thing she says that I want to share is what we mentioned earlier with Eeyore. Don't make any belittling commentary like, I wish you try to overcome this depression, get fresh

air, ignore the pain, you certainly look well. Implying this is a chosen circumstance that stems from weakness. lack of willpower or moral fiber hurts. And she says, a short, simple acknowledgment of how hard it must be to be denied the joys of an ordinary life show sensitivity. And finally, she says, simply naming the presence of suffering brings enormous relief. The confidence arising from your acknowledgement also provides space for lightness and laughter. So we're going to just end with a short practice of moving from head to heart. We'll do the simplest version of this by first inviting you to arrive right here because what is called for is present heart. Just be

right here present. You might breathe and feel the breath gently at the heart, bringing to mind somewhere in the last couple of days where you felt stuck in some way. Perhaps caught in one of those places of dissociation where you're turned on yourself, conflict with another, restless, avoiding things, in the sense that you could take that small self that was stuck, just feel that as part of you inside you right now, that part of you that was restless, judgmental, angry, anxious, feel where that part lives in your body. If it feels like too much to contact that place, to sense that you're being accompanied, just call on a friend, as if you could step outside yourself and just bear witness to

this part of you and have a companion helping. It could be a person that's in a body or it could be a spiritual figure. But bear witness with your support, bear witness to the part of you that's feeling cut off, the part of you that feels reactive. Just bear witness as if you're above your body and looking in, as if you're the awareness that surrounds your body, gentle, observing, caring. and see if you can sense that same tender awareness as coming from the inside out, just filling, surrounding, holding, and permeating the place that has felt cut off, that embrace like that

vet that I described and of that divine embrace of your own present tender heart. This is the revolution of tenderness. and we bring that heart presence to the cut-off places. And from that tender heart space, just bring to mind that person you were thinking of that's having difficulty. Sense what's possible if you encounter this person from that pure and tender heart space. Sense that you can bear witness to this person's struggle. and you might imagine being with this person, having that courage in your tenderness to reach

out, to respond, to acknowledge the suffering, to keep company, to be in pure care, and sense who you are, your sense of your own being when there's that tenderness, that heart space that's fully present for another, that empty, radiant, tender heart. And sensing that heart space is edgeless and vast and including all beings, this human we call self, other humans, other species, all beings everywhere held in this tender heart space. May all beings everywhere awaken to realize and inhabit this tender heart space and know it his home. May we hold each other in care. May we hold this whole living earth and all

beings everywhere with love, with compassion. May we all live in peace. Namaste and blessings.