Tara Brach - Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness - The Power of Self-Nurturing

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness - The Power of Self-Nurturing - While we all need to customize meditation, this is particularly important for those living with PTSD or strong, potentially overwhelming emotions. This talk explores how trauma cuts us off from wholeness, and is accompanied by a deep and painful experience of shame. We look at the ways meditation can be adapted to cultivate sufficient safety for the full transformational healing of mindfulness to unfold. The gift of processing trauma is that the place of woundedness becomes a gateway into profound love, healing, and freedom.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Greetings. Namaste friends. I am glad to be with you. There was a cartoon that came out right after Christmas. It was captions, Tree Trauma. And you see this very disturbed Christmas lying on the psychiatrist's couch and the tree is saying, well, it turns out that all those gifts weren't for me. And I loved it. And I thought I'd share it with you as a bit of a lead-in for our theme. We're going to be exploring what's called trauma-sensitive mindfulness. And I'd like to begin by saying that in my early days of meditation practice, the uniform mindfulness guidance was, if something strong comes up, be with it. You know, as you hear,

lean into the fear, you know, bring a gentle, clear, mindful attention to whatever arises. And that worked pretty well for me. But I found out later that for people that had a lot of fear, had trauma, it could amplify the fear in ways that sometimes felt overwhelming. And some people experience panic, some stop meditating. What we didn't understand what we're calling trauma-sensitive mindfulness is that mindfulness needs to be adapted with flexibility, with sensitivity, with care to best serve those that are living with PTSD, as well as anyone that's feeling in the moment potentially overwhelming emotions. So if after this talk you want to deepen your understanding in this territory,

I'd like to encourage you to read David Treleven's book Trauma Sensitive Therapy and it's in my resources on my website. So as we'll discuss, for those with PTSD, TSD, when strong fear arises, there may be times that it really isn't wise to lean in. And by way of illustration, Peter Levine, who's a leader in responding to trauma, uses the Medusa myth to illustrate how, you know, Medusa's this monster with venomous snakes for hair and anyone who looks in her face will be immobilized, you know, freeze, turn to stone. So Perseus, who is the Greek heroes advised by Athena, goddess of wisdom, she tells him not to look directly at Medusa, to use his shield as a way to reflect her gaze,

and this will allow him to enter her cave and slay the demon. So the point being that sometimes we can directly face and contact suffering, but at other times we need to actually shift our attention. And in the case of meditation, we need to find some ways of soothing our sympathetic nervous system, you know, self-soothing when it's activated. In other words, we need to learn to nurture ourselves. So we're going to return to this, but I want to name that this talks really for all of us because so many have experienced trauma and most have the experience at times of being

emotionally overwhelmed where it just feels like what's going on is too much. We need some way to calm ourselves to come back to balance. So whether we're healing PTSD or less severe suffering, we are wounded in relationship. We need relationship for healing. And a crucial part of relationship is how we relate to our inner life. This is the domain of meditation. Meditation is really essential for all deep, authentic healing. And one of the last times I taught at a weekend retreat, a live retreat, I remember a woman

standing up in front of, I think there were about 300 people, and she said, I've had decades of PTSD and therapy. And it wasn't until I was introduced to meditation. And that was eight years ago, she said that I finally found an inner refuge. I've heard this from so many people. And the key thing that they share, this is the common theme, is that the very place of trauma transforms into the gateway for spiritual healing. Where the wound is becomes the entry. And some of you might remember Leonard Cohen saying, in the broken places, the light shines through. So trauma, as painful as it is, also is the place where we can reconnect with a sense of the sacred, soul, spirit, a sense of a fearless heart.

So I'm starting here on purpose with what's possible, that as much as the painful of the painful emotions and when it's extreme, full trauma is something that we don't wish for in our lives, that intensity really does become a domain for spiritual awakening when we learn how to pay attention. So what I've seen is, and this is for all of us, that the practice of mindfulness needs to be customized. I mean, we each have different bodies and minds, so we need to, and not just that, different on different days. So we need to have a flexibility with how we work with the instructions we're given. This is especially true for those with trauma. And the emphasis needs to be with trauma on first creating enough of a sense of safety so that it's possible

to really have a full presence. So what we'll cover, is we'll look at some of the background on the suffering of trauma. We'll look at particular strategies that will help you customize mindfulness and self-resourcing and really the healing that comes when we can then open to our wholeness. So by way of background on trauma, if we were live, you know, if I could ask you and do a hand raise, how many of you either no trauma personally in your own body mind or know someone close that is dealing with trauma, most everyone would raise their hand. Because trauma is so widespread.

And similarly, PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder, it's so prevalent in our collective psyche, especially amid the global polycrisis that we're living through. The writer Carol Patterson describes us as a PTSD society. And the signs of a traumatized society, disconnection from the earth, from our own bodies, violation of the earth, cruelty aggression towards fellow beings, the addiction that is so spread through our whole globe,

polarization and fragmentation, the breakdown of communication between parts. These are all signs of trauma, and you can think of it collectively and also in an individual body. And it feels really important to recognize that people in non-dominant groups face ongoing threats and conditions that make them more vulnerable to experiencing trauma. including generational trauma, just experiencing that. And these identities, non-dominant identities include race, religion, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, indigenous heritage, national origin, gender disability, so many.

And if you're in the dominant groups, it's very hard to remember and recognize, with those with different backgrounds and identities are actually experiencing. And I feel like Rezma Menacom has been such an important voice for me on this. And he uses the language, black bodies feel endangered and potentially traumatized by whites. And he describes how through the centuries and currently white bodies are countless times more violent to black bodies than the reverse, killing, lynching, raping. And so, as he is sharing, white people often forget how much trauma is there. Faulkner says it so clearly. He says, the past is not dead. It is not even past. And what this means is situations that white people don't

register as triggers for trauma actually are. And I think of in my own life, the meditation class I used to teach weekly live, largely white attendees, and it was located in a fairly wealthy suburb. And my friends of color would come and report they felt intensely uncomfortable, many of them, anxious, you know, and at first I couldn't get it. It's like, well, everybody's being really friendly. That's not the deal. I mean, there's the microaggressions that happen and there's that history of feeling threatened by white people, trauma in the body.

There, of course, more obvious situation would be being stopped by a police car for speeding. It might be unpleasant for a white person, but for a person of color, it can mean life or death. Another whole domain, those with financial security, forget the trauma of poverty, that we're living through these pandemics and how a family, when COVID hits a family and you're unable to work and you have several children and that goes on for a bit, can put you under the line, not sure about feeding your family, paying rent. I think about those in the global north, and we have some climate events that are really disturbing

and still don't quite recognize that the devastation of climate change really is here now for many countries. Pakistan, one third underwater last year. Philippines, Bangladesh, and then I think of the droughts and famine in Africa, Chad, Kenya, Somalia. This is not just livelihood, it's life. So I took a little time with that because there's such huge trauma in non-dominant populations and just to realize how much that is around the globe can be staggering to the mind. And then of course, in addition to the collective

causes of trauma, many, if not all of us, go through traumatic events in our personal life. In the womb, upbringing, accidents, sickness, surgeries, abuse, sudden losses. You know, more than two-thirds of children reported at least one traumatic event. by the age of 16. So the difference between trauma and PTSD, and this is simplified, but trauma arises in situations where the nervous system is overwhelmed, where normal coping strategies don't work. PTSD arises when there's an inability to process and integrate that trauma into the larger body mind. So some people will have trauma and process it and not have PTSD and others won't. And here's an example.

Let's say someone is sexually abused as a young child and it happens repeatedly and unpredictably. And so there's that severed belonging. There's no safety, no larger container, no trustworthy available adult who could in some way make possible the healing, the processing. So trauma's living in the body and the issues are in the tissues as they say and it's easily triggered. Any sign of danger, a violation of abandonment activates acute stress. And what happens? This means that the parts of our brain that have evolved to monitor for danger are overactivated chronically. The on-buttoned button is jammed. And so there's this regular secretion of cortisol which is toxic for neurons.

It damages connections needed for parts of the brain to communicate. So it's easy for executive function to get cut off, for the limbic fear to take over. I find a useful way to illustrate this is some of you may remember from Dan Siegel where he says, you know, this is your brain and you might look at your fist right now and this is your brain and if you look at it close in, this is your limbic system, the spine goes up into the brainstem. This area, the thumb and this area here represent the limbic system and the brain stem, which is responsible for the arousal a fight-flight freeze. And these four fingers, this is the frontal cortex, this is executive functioning. It actually has the capacity to send messages down to the limbic system saying,

it's okay. You know, when there's this threat that comes up, the frontal cortex says, oh, we've experienced this before, we're going to be okay. But what happens when we're chronically stressed and we don't have that kind of integration is we get a message of danger and we flip our lid. And when we flip our lid, there's a disconnection from empathy, compassion, perspective. We're no longer functioning with the parts of our brain that give us resourcefulness. We lose access to flexibility, to creativity. So this is the hijack by the survival brain. We're essentially unsafe.

And it's interesting to consider to play, to mate, to create, to nurture our young, to nurture others, to receive nurturing. We have to feel safe enough to temporarily turn off our vigilance, shut down our defensive systems. We can't have a flipped lid. And yet how often are we partially or fully having that flipped lid reaction and cut off from those capacities, caught in a sense of being small, separate, confused, disconnected, Even when we're not caught in a full flipped lid, we know what a partial hijack is like when our mind becomes preoccupied and small and we've lost our sense of perspective.

We don't have access to our full intelligence. We make more mistakes. One of my favorite examples is of a mom who is generally into feeding her children organic food, and, you know, good vegetables, but she wasn't able to get to the grocery store. She was stressed. She was tired. And she's looking for what to feed her children. And thank goodness, she finds a frozen pizza in the freezer.

And she feels really guilty, but she announces, okay, we're having pizza tonight. And her son resists. She says, I don't want frozen pizza. And she says, very calmly tries to be calm. That's what we're having. Inside, she's increasingly feeling upset because she's. She feels like she's failing them and she feels like a bad mother and her son's getting upset. I don't want it.

I don't want a frozen pizza. Again, she tries to sound calm. It's all we have in the house. You've had it before. You know, and inside she's thinking he's spoiled. I failed him. I'm not only a bad mother in terms of good dinners, but I spoiled him. He's an entitled brat.

I'm a bad mom, you know, just really spinning off. takes a deep breath, says that's what we're having tonight, sweetie. I'm tired and it's what we're having. And he looks with this tear-streaked voice and he says quite calmly, but okay, mama, but could we at least heat it up? We go into a trance, partial hijack, whether it's just a partial flip-lid or a full flip-lid. We go into a trance. And as I mentioned, when we're threatened, when we're having that reactivity, whether it's partial or full flip lid, and those times we're cut off. We're not able to play, learn, bond, take in or give love. And this, friends, is a suffering of trauma, that cut-off experience, the fear and mistrust. Because it's really a cut-off

of belonging to our own being and to others, and in a deep way, we're cut off from wholeness, from spirit. So bringing this to meditation, you might consider that when we're triggered in an intense way, when we're in reactive fight, flight, freeze, we're cut off and outside of our window of tolerance. We're not able to tolerate what's arising in us. And that term, window of tolerance. Again, it's from Dan Siegel, psychologist, an author who's been on this podcast. And, you know, as he describes it, when we're in the window of tolerance, our brain is integrated. But when we get triggered and we flip our lid, we leave a window of tolerance. We're either caught in fight-flight, which is strong, unpleasant.

pleasant emotions and when the instructions for mindfulness, if we're in fight-flight are to feel what's going on, that's when we can have that sense of overwhelm. Or we're in freeze, a kind of rigidity, a dissociation that's still outside the window of tolerance, numbing, can't feel things. And often the instructions for mindfulness are feel what's going to be. going on inside your body and yet there's a sense of being cut off. So here's the thing. The classical instructions for meditation tell us to feel our feelings and when we're in fight-flight freeze or either feeling them too much it feels overwhelming or unable to feel

them. And either way, there's a sense of in some way not being able to do the meditation, failing the meditation. And when we're outside the window, we're really cut off or unable to. So I'd like to take some moments now to look at the primary suffering that happens when we're triggered, either into dissociation, are triggered into that hypersensitivity and strong emotion. And the primary suffering is shame, shame about what's going on. And I'd like to share with you a story some of you might remember that I felt really illustrated the power of traumatic experience and the shame that can surround it and how we can work with that. So many years ago, I was working with this woman who was sexually and physically abused by her father.

And as an adult, she had an eating disorder. She wasn't capable of intimate relationships. And she would swing, as I've described, between being dissociated from her feelings to being flooded. And she hated herself. She hated herself when she was shut down. She hated herself when she was filled with fear. she hated herself for her body and for her eating disorder. She considered herself damaged goods and hated herself for who she was.

This is shame. And she did a good deal of therapy and also was working with meditation and we were customizing it. And out of one intense and deep therapy session, she wrote a story about her own healing. And in it she was seven years old hiding in a closet terrified after an unexpected attack by her drunk and a rage father. And the little girl in the story is praying. She's saying, help, I can't take it anymore. And she opens her eyes and sees a fairy in a haze of blue with a glittering wand. And she lets the fairy know how her father had been beating her and her mother doesn't help.

and how she feels like they both wish she was dead. And the fairy listens with tears in her eyes and then tells her that while she can't make all this pain and fear disappear, she can help her get through this time. She can help her forget and then remember later when she's able to handle it. And with a wave of the wand, the good fairy says, I'm going to send things into different parts of your body and they're going to hold them for you until you feel strong enough to let them move freely again. And she explains that she's going to help the little girl tighten and dull her pelvis and her belly and she's going to constrict her heart and throat and protect her from feeling the raw intensity of the hurt and the fear and the brokenheartedness. And I'll read you

the last part of the story. This is the fairy speaking. You will have trouble feeling and being close to people, but it will be your way of surviving. At those times that the pain erupts, you will find your own ways to control it, ways that may not look good to the world but will be of temporary comfort. And you, my darling, will be a fairly functional human being in spite of all this because you have a strong mind and you can hold this all in. And I'll be helping you. The child looked directly into the fairy's eyes asked, how will you help? Will you come back to see me? You will not forget everything. I will leave a voice inside you that will urge you to reconnect with your whole self. It may be a very long process, but in

time you'll feel an urgent calling to step out of imprisoning beliefs, to unwind your body and release what it's been holding all these years. You will learn the art of sacred presence. There will be physical and emotional pain as you open, but you'll have what you need, the compassion and wisdom, the support of loving others, to be a whole person, spiritually awake, but still the same.

This is because your soul has always been there, just hidden by the scars of this lifetime. The good fairy put her arm around the child's shoulders and gently led her into her bed. She waved her wand and stood by as the little girl finally relaxed into a deep sleep. She gazed tenderly at the small, innocent face and then whispered her goodbye. When you wake up, you'll forget that I was here. You will forget you ask for help. You will forget the sharpness of your daily pain.

This is the only way I know to get you through this. You're a beautiful child. I love you, and in fact your parents love you, although they are incapable of showing it to you. You'll have to love yourself enough to heal so that when you're older, your life will be powerful, full, and free. One day you will know who you really are. You will trust your goodness and know your belonging. Until then, and for always, I love you. So I shared her story in a talk I gave. Of course, she gave me permission. After that talk, so many lined up to talk to me and their sharings were very similar. One person put it so clearly, she said, I've always been so ashamed of the addiction, of the conflictual relationships, the rage,

shutting down. And listening to this, I realized it wasn't my fault, that I was trying to control the trauma. I didn't have a better way. And she said it again, I didn't have a better way. And it was that sense of relief, this glimmering of self-forgiveness. And so many had something similar that if they could just get, that it was the best they could do at the time, there was some sense of hope and possibility, but they needed to forgive themselves first. I remember in a similar way, a man I worked with a few years ago, company downsized, and he got laid off, and he tried for a few years, just tried everything to get a job, and he couldn't. And he descended into this panic, depression, sleeplessness, you know, was taking anxiety,

medication and he more and more withdrew from other people, really avoided other people. And his marriage was falling apart. He was really filled with shame. And I remember working with him and finally at some point saying, this is trauma. And it's not your fault. And something cracked open. He started weeping. It was the beginning of some self-compassion, the beginning of healing.

and he gradually reached out to friends, he joined a men's group, he started re-engaging. He was on a path of healing. Trauma is a universal response to endangerment when we're powerless, as are the symptoms of PTSD when trauma hasn't been processed. It's universal. And what starts to release the shame is a kind of salient. realizing, it's not my fault. It's not our fault that we get traumatized. It's not our fault when we're unable to process the trauma. It's not our fault that our nervous system reacts with

anxiety, with depression. It's not our fault that then there are the behaviors aimed at controlling the pain, the coping strategies. This was the realization of the woman who wrote that story about the fairy, that it was intelligent to shut down feelings when there were too much to handle. And the coping strategies that followed were her way of eating, her way of controlling her body experience, avoiding intimacy. It was the best she could do. So I'm spending some time with this because where there is trauma, there is shame that's asking our attention and healing. And I can extend this and say, with any deep emotional wounding, neglect, criticism, betrayal, rejection, somewhere deep down we feel it's our fault and we're ashamed of the way that wounding affects our personality and behaviors.

We think we should be different. If you can recognize the shame and dedicate to releasing it, It's not my fault. It's possible to then bring healing directly to the place of trauma, of woundedness, and begin to open. Let's pause here and reflect for a moment. You might consider where you might be living with generational trauma or with early trauma, wounds from a lack of good nurturing.

In other words, poor attachment, bonding. You know, where might you have some experience of trauma? Where have you been outside the window of tolerance? And then how to develop coping strategies to work with what's going on inside you? Maybe dissociating from the body, maybe anger, addictive behaviors. of real intimacy, neediness, codependency. Suggest check and see where that might be in your life, how it's presented, trauma, and then the reaction to trauma. And as you do, honestly check and sense, have you felt shame about woundedness?

Have you felt shame about the ways you've tried to protect yourself from you? feeling too much. And as you explore this, you might put your hand on your heart and just be aware of what's going on inside, the places of self-judgment or shame, and let some of the places of judgment come right to the foreground. And as they do with each, you might explore what happens when you say with kindness, it's not my fault. And if it helps, you might imagine someone you trust or love being the one to say it. It's not your fault. I invite you to hear it, to let it in. And if it's hard to let it in, this message, pray to let it in. Again from the fairy story, you will have to love yourself enough to heal so that when you're older, your life

will be powerful, full, and free. One day you will know who you really are. you will trust your goodness and know your belonging. Until then, and for always, I love you. Your eyes are closed, you might open them. In many shamanistic cultures, the process of reconnecting, of releasing the shame and processing and healing the trauma, it's called soul retrieval. And it's believed that when a person is traumatized,

the soul leaves the body as a way of protecting it, from intolerable pain. And in the process of soul retrieval, the traumatized person is held in the love and safety of community as the soul is invited to return. I like this description because I've heard many who heal from trauma describe recovering a sense of soul, of spirit, recovering a sense of the dimensions of sacred

that lived through them and had been cut up. off. And likewise in other healing contexts, the care, just as in this one, it's the community, the care of therapist, friend, a teacher might initially provide the safety to reconnect with some degree of authentic presence and well-being inside. We need it. I always think of that that little story of it's a stormy night and a child calls out for his parents because he's scared of the thunder and the father goes in and he says, it's okay, you can trust that God is with you and he's with the child a little and then he leaves the room and then the child starts wailing again and the father comes back and again reassures him. You know, God is with you, leaves the room

And finally, a child's crying and he comes back in a child says, you know, I know God's with me, but I want someone with skin on. So I love that because we need the interpersonal. We need the relational support in healing from trauma, from that cut-off feeling. And as we've been talking, we also have a relationship with our inner life. and that's what we're cultivating. I so often think of psychologist Luis Cozalino who says, it's not survival of the fittest, it's survival of the nurtured.

So this last part of what we're exploring is how the self-nurturing that comes with some facets of meditation is exactly what we need, exactly what we need in this process of healing trauma. And we need enough access to safety and care to be able to open mindfully. And partly we build that in a daily meditation that we adapt in a way that allows us to really feel safe enough. There are many instructions that get offered and we think, oh, well, meditating means I have to close my eyes. You can customize any part of the instructions. Find out for yourself in your daily practice. Does it work better to have your eyes open or closed?

The posture is always assume we're sitting but you could be lying down or standing. For some with PTSD, movement really helps because sitting still is difficult, is scary. You can spend some time and sense what is the anchor that really serves you? It might not be the breath because breath is sometimes difficult for people who have PTSD. find an anchor, maybe it's sound, certain parts of the body that either are neutral or positive and sensation. Begin by grounding yourself, feeling the earth beneath you. I have a PDF that is available on how to customize your daily meditation if you have PTSD

and it's on the home page of my website and that can give you more guidance in this. So let's look at what happens when distressing or strong emotions start taking over. What then? And just to remind you that while you might have enough tolerance to face or lean in, it's very wise and compassionate to recognize when you don't, that this might be a time like Perseus to not face directly and instead to emphasize self-nurturing. Once you're back in the window of tolerance, you can then return to a more direct contact-filled mindfulness.

Okay, so how do we self-nurture? The training is to pre-identify a way of self-resourcing that you can then call on when you're distressed. And there are many types. You could be sending a message to yourself that comforts ensues you, all types of messages. You could visualize someone you love, imagine they're either hugging you or giving you a message of comfort. You can visualize a safe space, a place you've been to or a place in your imagination.

You can gently touch your heart as I often teach. All of these, if they're familiar to you, you might represent. recognize them as part of the N of Rang, nurture. And so the training is to practice this self-nurturing with these resources when you're not activated, when you're feeling okay, as part of your daily meditation perhaps, so that the pathway to the window of tolerance is more available when you do get triggered so that you're more able to remember the pathway back to your inner resourcefulness. I was working with a woman in D.C., a Latina woman who's very active in immigration and serving the local community,

doing social justice work and so on. And she had a lot of childhood trauma and is also regularly around people who are traumatized, including her extended family and those who she works with. And she found that when she was activated, she couldn't calm herself with self-compassion. She couldn't put her hand on her heart and give herself a message. She felt too regressed, too damaged, too flawed. So her pathway, what she discovered would work was she brought to mind her grandmother, who was very strong and empowered, kind of a spiritual matriarch in the family, and brought

also to mind other women in the family. But her grandmother was the key one and she imagined her grandmother saying to her, I'm here with you, you can trust your heart, it's okay, and just kind of touching her cheek. Once she identified this, just bringing to mind an image of her, of her grandmother and that touch and that message, that became a central part of her daily practice. every day she would invoke that sense and feel the experience of that comforting presence. And if you're doing this, it really helps to start your daily meditation with self-nurturing, to end it, to use it as often as it's possible, because repetition makes a difference.

in neuroscience, I'm described as in training and installing. What's happening is there's old pathways in the brain that you've been repeating over and over again that are anxious pathways, worry pathways, fear pathways, and you're creating new pathways. And the more you repeat them, the pathways to self-nurturing, the more access you'll have. Once that is there, once that resource is strong, you can do what's called pendulating. And that means you can go from feeling that resourceful place to dipping in a bit to where the fear lives.

And each time the fear feels a little too strong, you come back to the place of feeling resourced. And gradually what happens is by bringing some of the qualities of feeling resourced to that wounded place, it begins to get processed. This is what it means to process or digest or heal trauma. It's to be able to bring an increased sense of presence and care to a place inside you in your body, feeling it, where you've been so. storing the trauma. Just to kind of loop back to the fairy story, this was the process this woman did. She would call on that sense of the good fairy and feel her presence and feel herself held and really

nurtured and safe in that presence. And then she began to go to the parts of the body that had really stored the trauma. And there were stories with them and very strong feelings bit by bit, over many months. And she found that as she did that, she started experiencing this growing freedom, this capacity to, you know, actually be with other people in a more intimate way, her eating disorder lightened. Similarly, with this other woman that I just brought up, bringing her grandmother, feeling her grandmother's presence, she was, able to very quickly come back into that window of tolerance. The fears would still come up, but she knew how to pause, how to breathe, how to bring that image to her mind and how

to find her way back to that more integrated place. So I want to step back here, friends, and say this is an arctypal process that like Perseus we first need to redirect our attention and find, in this case I'm describing the kind of self-nurturing that increases our sense of safety. And then once we're back inside the window of tolerance, we're not overwhelmed, then we can begin to open to old wounds. So what I'd like to do is close with a practice. This is a guided meditation that offers a pathway to our own inner resources in the face of intense emotion. I'd like to invite you to find a comfortable posture. Whatever position allows you to feel most safe and present, if it helps begin to collect your attention with a few full breaths,

feel the earth beneath you, the weight of your body, sense of contact right here, Your eyes could be open or close, and then scan and see who in your life brings you comfort, brings you a sense of love and safety. It might be a grandparent, child, friend, healer, pet. Could be living or not. Could be an ancestor or perhaps a spiritual figure you haven't personally met. Deity. divine mother, Buddha, Allah, Jesus.

In other words, sense who helps you to feel the type of love or safety that you want to access when things are difficult? To take some moments to imagine and visualize that person or being. You might imagine their eyes looking at you with an expression of care and sense the love, the energy, surrounding you when you bring that being to mind. and you might attune to what words of wisdom from this being, from this presence, what reminder might most comfort the fearful part inside you? What does that part most need to remember, to trust? Sense this message being offered and what is it like in your body and in your heart when you let

the love and wisdom of a caring being in. If it's hard to let it in, just let that be your, sincere prayer, may I let in this care, may I let in the messages of truth? And you can even visualize the loving bathing you, bathing the cells inside you. So it's surrounding you and permeating you and see if you can sense that felt experience of being safe and loved, of belonging to something larger, a larger source, resting in that. Okay, now shifting your attention, please bring to mind a situation that you know can evoke fear in you, not trauma, but some level of fear. It might be something that arises in a relationship with somebody.

It could be a situation, maybe a social kind of setting that scares you, something related to work, financial security, your own. own or another's health. Let the situation be close in so you can actually sense it like you're watching a movie. Play it out to get a taste of the fear that it evokes. So you're noticing where you are, the look on other people's faces, whatever's going on, the words that are exchanged, your own fearful thoughts or beliefs, and just sense where the fear lives in you, what it's like. how you experience it. And then in a very intentional way, you might take a full breath and intend to resource yourself, intend self-nurturing. You might begin by grounding.

Just feel yourself sitting right here. Feel the weight of your bottom on your seat, the warmth of your feet on the floor, the gravity that holds you to this beloved planet, our larger body right here. And again, Imagine that comforting being. Look at the image and the felt sense of that being and sense close in eyes that are caring. Hear the words that are comforting. Feel yourself held by, cared by belonging to a larger source. And you can now bring these resources with you, the sense of this loving being as you touch into the fear just a bit.

knowing that you can touch and then return to a safe space. You can touch in, sense the fear, and feel the support of that space of care, of nurturing. And if at any point the fear feels like too much, go back and again, reimagine and strengthen and vitalize this connection with this being and with the sense of being held and loved. So over the next few moments, just sense that back and forth, the loving resource space and then touching in, feeling where the fear lives in a very visceral way in your body, and then back to the fullness of self-nurturing of the resource. And as you're doing this, it might help to slow your breathing down a bit, long, slow in-breath,

long, slow out breath. Be aware of your relationship with fear in these moments. Increasingly, perhaps, the possibility of inhabiting a sea of loving presence and including the currents of fear, resting in that vast sea of loving in the heart space that has room for fear. This is the true meaning of a fearless heart. for the last few moments, be the sea of loving and include the currents that are here with tenderness and clarity and presence.

Gently bringing yourself back, if your eyes are closed, opening them, a few full breaths. So Rumi points to the same truth that we've been exploring really through these two segments on awakening and healing through trauma. And his words are this, that the wound is the place where the light enters you. What if you really trusted that? What if where there's woundedness you sense a real interest or a curiosity? How can I deepen the self-nurturing? how can I bring a presence that's truly healing to this place of woundedness? Unprocess wounds can either fester and shame are we can dedicate ourselves to loving ourselves into healing, letting the wounds become a portal for true awakening, for freedom.

So we'll close in a simple way, friends, with some meta. you might just let the attention again go inward. May we all love ourselves into healing. Just sense what that means. Sense your dedication to it. May we live from that field of loving presence, including all beings everywhere in our heart. May all beings everywhere heal, awaken, and be free.

blessings friends sending you much love