Tara Brach - True Resilience - Pt1 - Awakening through All Circumstances (2017-08-16)

Episode Date: August 19, 2017

True Resilience - Pt1 - Awakening through All Circumstances (2017-08-16) - Spiritual resilience enables us to deepen compassion and wisdom as we navigate life's difficulties. In this two part series, we will look at the conditions that incline us towards or away from True Resilience, and explore practical and powerful practices that nourish this precious capacity.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I often speak about my morning walks by the river through these woods and hills and so on. It's really a very regular part of my meditation. And the way I often begin is I'll do some metta or some loving-kindness practice so that I feel my heart wide open and that everything I'm hearing and seeing and smelling really is part of my heart.

You know, the geese and the currents in the river and the sounds of other birds and trees. So this morning I was doing that. It was a beautiful, it was a really misty and mysterious morning, actually, and kind of wet lingering, and you could just see rocks on the river and just the water and the rocks and a few birds. So I was just including it all,

and all of a sudden I got completely enwrapped in a spider's web. And I went from this openness to, yeah, gross, oh, disgusting. And it was like pulling it off of my face and my hair. And, you know, I was slimed, you know, Ghostbusters. I was completely slimed. And so I started grumbling about how I was going to have to wash my hair and in a few moments the contrast really got me of you know going from this you know the beloved holding the universe in her heart kind of moment to you know like disgusted you know this

kind of entitled princess it was disgusted by this little spiders with really what hit me you know I saw that contrast was how quickly I collapsed into that It was really, really quickly. And then with seeing it and then just opening, I was like I laughed out loud really, how I went on and I still felt that stickiness and I still wondered about my, and I kept going like this trying to see if the spider was crawling around inside my scalp somewhere, you know. But I was, it was, there was so much more reality and dimension and presence there. And life didn't go the way I wanted it, but I was more there.

So, the reason I share this is that I recently did an interview with the Washington Post on the theme of resilience. There'll be an article at some point on it. And the inquiry was really about how does meditation practice strengthen our resilience? And it's interesting because resilience is like this buzzword now. I mean, everybody's talking about whether it has to do with trauma survivors or children. but really with all of us is this in the old days resilience had to do with you know you fill off the horse and you got back up in the saddle that kind of thing you know or you know you got knocked down like the punching bag you got knocked down and you came back up again it kind of

reminds me a special kind of grit was this little reading a great Spanish sea captain was walking on his ship when a soldier rushed him and exclaimed, an enemy ship is approaching us. And the captain replies calmly, get me my red shirt. The soldier gets him the shirt, and the enemy ship comes in, there's the heavy rounds of fire.

Finally, the Spaniards win. The soldier says, congratulations, sir. Why the red shirt? And the captain replies, if I got injured, my blood shouldn't be seen as they didn't want my men to lose hope. Just then another soldier runs up and says,

Sir, we just spotted another 20 enemy ships. The captain calmly replies, Go bring my yellow pants. So the old style of resilience. Currently, it is no longer considered an extraordinary quality. Actually, it's viewed as a capacity that we all need and we all can develop in dealing with the stresses of life. and it has to do with being flexible and adaptive and confident

and being able to regulate our emotions and have access to our reason and so on. From an evolutionary perspective, stress is the given, and the question for different species are, are you adaptive enough to be able to keep on making it? So the understanding is that resilience is what allows a species to flourish.

And from one perspective, humans are really resilient. We went from the middle of the food chain. We'd been there millions of years. In a very short time, we hopped right to the top. So we're on the top of the food chain. And very innovative and creative. We've got a lot more leisure time,

a lot more material goods, a lot more creativity, well-being for some people would say, and what allowed it, what was really the essence of our resilience, was this capacity to communicate, this development in our brain that allows us to be more empathetic, more compassionate, capacity for mindfulness to be able to reflect on life. So we humans have those qualities. And yet we also know that when we get hijacked by fear and by grasping, we lose access to what makes us resilient.

And then all of our strengths can get used in a way that is profoundly destructive. All that intelligence gets used in service of violence. And we become a threat to the entire ecosystem to each of us. other. And I bring this up because we're going to be exploring resilience. We're going to be exploring tonight what I call spiritual resilience. Really, how do we respond to our lives in a way that allows us to keep on growing and waking up? But it's really important to recognize that resilience gets hijacked very easily and really for all of us. I mean, even though my little opening story about a spider web is lightweight,

I mean, it just didn't take anything for me to go from being very open to being really filled with complaints about the world. So we get caught very, very quickly. And of course, I'm right this moment sharing this and speaking with the awareness of how many of us are heartbroken by recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, how we watch that hijack, how fear becomes hatred and anger,

and how the violence that comes out of that is something that, you know, it's just so painful to behold the sign of what undercuts resilience when we get cut off from our capacity for empathy. our capacity to communicate. So it's humbling because that primitive conditioning that cuts us off from resilience is in all of us. We know that.

Some people get more cut off than others. We're going to talk about what cuts us off, what gives us access. And I'd like to do is also talk about really how do we nourish it? How do we nourish that resilience? Because it's so easy for all of us, whether we, when our needs for safety aren't met, if we feel unsafe, it's so easy to go into a place that's either aggressive or defensive. When we feel unsafe, it's so easy to start grasping, getting caught in craving, addictions to soothe ourselves. When we feel unsafe, it's so easy to turn on ourselves

and be at war with ourselves. And in those moments we are cut off from the resilience that allows us to keep on growing and awakening. So I want to explore that and really with the inquiry of what does it mean to have a resilient spirit? What does that mean? And I'll share from the Dalai Lama that this took place about 20 years ago. that he was meeting with Western teachers and the question he was asked is, what is it that would be most useful for the students in the West to remember?

That was the question. And his response was to trust the power of your heart and awareness to wake up through any circumstances that whatever is going on in your life and whatever is going on collectively we can wake up through that. And trusting that makes it so.

We're going to get into that. But trusting it is really important. Now this is really been summed up as a part of the Bodhisattva path. The Bodhisattva path is the path of an awakening being, which is all of you, all of us, anyone that's listening. We wouldn't be listening unless there was some place in our heart that really wanted to unfold and be all we can be. That really wants to love without holding back,

that really wants to express our creativity, that wants to see reality. So the Bodhisattva aspiration, much like the Dalai Lama said, it's a very simple kind of prayerfulness that may whatever arises in my life, whatever it is, May this serve the awakening of my heart.

May this serve the awakening of compassion and wisdom. So if what's happening is a health condition where the biopsy came out positive, or deep, deep worry about someone you love, or a major conflict with someone else that matters, whatever it is, please, may this serve awaken. Very, very powerful. This, to me, points to the essence of what true resilience is.

True resilience isn't just bouncing back. That's kind of the classic definition that you get kind of knocked down. In some way, stress comes and you get kind of thrown around, but then you come back and you're in action again. True resilience, you don't just bounce back. the stressors grow you. It means that when you're knocked around, you have the capacity to actually wake up into more wisdom

and more love through that process. Now, what's interesting to me is that Western research actually has a kind of comparable expression of this in a little more of a cognitive or psychological way, this capacity to wake up. And the way I've seen it, so if you take it from the spiritual perspective, what we're saying is there's two elements to resilience. One is the sense of this being is awakening, that you have some sense that your heart and mind are awakening.

And the second is that whatever is going on in your life can be a portal. Okay? Those are the two ingredients of true resilience. You trust that there's awakening, and you also trust that anything going on can be a portal. Okay? So the research, and what I'm going to draw from, I read this in the New Yorker recently.

This is Norman Garmese. He was a psychologist at the University of Minnesota. And what he did was he studied children who came from, disturbed backgrounds, low socioeconomic status and challenging home situations, trauma, neglect, parents who were emotionally unstable and so on. I'm going to read you a description of one boy who really stood out for him. He says he was nine years old with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich,

two slices of bread with nothing in between. At home there was no other food available and no one to make any. Even so, Garmese would later recall, the boy wanted to make sure that no one would feel pity for him and no one would know the ineptitude of his mother. So each day without fail, he would walk in with a smile on his face and a bread sandwich tucked into his bag.

So this boy was part of a cohort that was studied with the basic question of what were the factors in those who were very deprived in many ways that enabled them to be resilient compared to the others that weren't? That was the inquiry. And what they found was several things.

Of course, if there was any place of human connection, that's the biggest predictor of resilience for all of us. survival of the nurtured. It's the bottom line. We're going to be spending more time on that in the next class. We're doing this as a two-part series. Survival of the nurtured.

So that across the board, the more nurturing, the more resilience. But what other factors? So one of them they found for the children that were able to be resilient regardless is called locus of control. And what that means is

that rather than perceiving themselves as a victim, perceiving themselves as I am bad or blaming outward, they had a sense in their own potential to grow, to learn, to transform. They figured, you know, whatever was going on, then in some way they could make it. It really makes me think of, when I was reading this as Locus of Control, of Swami Satchananda,

He's a Hindu yogi. I saw this poster years ago in a health food store, and he's got this long flowing beard, and you see him in treposed, which is standing on one leg, in this yoga posture, little orange loin cloth and so on. And he's on a surfboard.

And the caption underneath is, you can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. Come meditate with Swami Sachin, you know. But that's the locus of, control. It's like, okay, stuff's happening, but I'm not blaming the waves and I can learn to work with it. The second thing that they found was that, and it has to do with the interpretation of what's going on, that they didn't interpret difficulty as bad or as a problem. Okay? And events,

It's said that events are not traumatic unless we perceive them as such. So stuff could be hard, but they weren't perceived as bad. Rather, they could be, again, a chance to learn, a chance to grow. It's what a lot of healing groups now called, and they usually people say, I wish I didn't have to have another FGO-effing growth opportunity. But the idea is this. that it's how we're construing or interpreting what's happening that's making the difference. And more recent research is really bearing that out.

Kelly McGonical, who's wonderful and has done amazing work in this field, describes an experiment or research that she did. And they studied 30,000 people over a period of eight years. And they asked two questions. and one was how much stress did you have last year? The second question was, do you believe stress is harmful for your health? Those are the two questions, and they tracked who died.

So here's what they found. Those who experienced lots of stress last year had 43% more chance of dying, but that was only true for those who believed stress was bad for their health. The lowest risk of anyone in the study were those with high stress but they didn't believe it was bad. Isn't that interesting? I mean really, it shows the power of how we are understanding what's happening. How are we relating to the waves in our life? Again, you know, are we relating to it, you know, that

this is bad and I'm a victim? Or this is bad and it's your fault? Or is there a sense like that bodhisattva aspiration of, okay, so this is the portal for awakening, please, may this serve awakening? Or alternately you can say, how may this serve awakening? The inquiry can be really, really revealing. We're going to practice with this a bit, but just to again bring in a very realistic way how it works. For me, when I encounter a stressor, whether it's a little spider web or something bigger, my first response isn't, ah, may this serve. My first response is the normal neurotic wishing it wasn't happening and, you know, just, you know, wanting it to go away. and then gradually there'll be that dawning recognition of oh this is the reality that's here

paying attention to it and then through paying attention kindly there'll be some sort of a waking up into actually a more awake place than before the difference in my life now and 30, 40 years ago, when, you know, I hadn't had as much practice, is lag time, really? And people ask me what's changed, and I would say I'm kinder quicker, you know, and as we're describing here in terms of resilience, there just isn't as much lag time between the initial fight-flight freeze, where my more survival brain's going, don't like, like this, something's bad, I'm being, you know, oppressed, to that kind of lighting up of the frontal cortex that goes, wait a minute, this is just what is. You know, if you resist, then you feel worse

and it persists. You know, why not just open and be present? Less lag time. So, we're going to, as I mentioned, we're going to practice this, but I want to give you a few examples that I find useful. One, we're talking really about how to remember this aspiration more quickly when we hit hard stuff. Okay, this too, can this serve to awaken? One man who's a newly married and their second, it was a second marriage for both of them. And so his wife had a son, his stepson who was 14, who was really oppositional, clearly in pain himself, but the way it came out, really rude, inconsiderate, angry, difficult hostile, really. And he could see it was taking a toll on his wife, how she was really exhausted and distressed.

And of course for him, he was feeling this growing and tolerance and dislike and then he was feeling guilty about his dislike. Like you're not supposed to dislike your stepson. And then that would make him actually more angry at his stepson. And now and then he would flare out in a kind of harsh reprimand and at other times he would distance and really just try not to be around. But it was really creating separation with his wife because he felt like he had to hide it from her.

She had her own challenges, but it was a wedge in their relationship. So he was a practitioner. He was doing mindfulness and heard about the bodhisattva aspiration, this prayer. And so he tried it on with this situation. May this situation serve to awaken compassion. So then he shifted it to the question. how might this serve to awaken?

And he got that the starting place was he needed to pay more attention to what was actually going on inside him, which is always the first step, if you want to say, how is this going to wake me up? You have to pay more attention. So he started paying attention, and he sensed, okay, there's anger, there's aversion here, dislike. And then as he deepened his attention,

he could sense underneath his dislike of the steps on was a fear. And the fear was that he would never have a happy home life, that there would never be peace, there'd never be harmony. And he really got it that, you know, whether it was rational or not, he was afraid that his life was going to be ruined in a way. And he was afraid that his marriage would be destroyed. And that fear was underneath the anger. So when he could sense that fear, rather than feeling guilty for feeling that he was disliking his stepson, he actually started feeling compassion towards himself, which was really a critical piece. When he could just bring a kind of gentle, okay, fear, I'm with you, I'm listening, I care, just the simplicity of a kind presence.

he found more space. You know, all the energy of dislike, it's all there, but he just wasn't as hooked. He wasn't as identified as the stepfather that was disliking his stepson. There was more just space and compassion. And it was easier for him to see in this teenage boy the pain he was in, much easier. That space made it possible to talk to his wife.

which was an enormous relief for her because she could say out loud, I don't like them either. I love them, but I don't like them. Right now I don't like them. And it's really hard to not like my own son. And so she could weep and feel the pain of that. And they could be in it together in a way that was truly resilient. or they could say, okay, how can we wake up more wisdom and compassion in this situation as a team?

I have seen so many people in this particular situation reacting to their offspring in ways that they don't like themselves for and not being resilient at all. To be a parent and not feel resilient are reacting with their partner. are reacting at work. And the resilience begins to trickle up in the moments that we say, oh, in this situation, please let this teach me, let this serve awakening. Sometimes my prayer is, please teach me about kindness.

Because the presupposition in this kind of a prayer is that it's possible to wake up through this. situation. We can be resilient. Sometimes classically, this is described as, you know, these animal-headed goddesses in these mandalayas and the Thankas, the pictures of, you know, the entering sacred space in Asia. The art often shows these images of fearsome and angry and hostile and jealous goddesses that you have to move through to get to sacred space. And it's not like the path is to get rid of them.

It's not like there is a path without them. They are integral to the path. It's in the engagement with the goddesses that we wake up, not because they're not there. In the moments that they're there though, we forget. Initially we forget most of us. That's why this practice getting used to this prayer, please, may this serve awakening. Helps us remember quicker. Ticknat Han has a wonderful phrase, no mud, no lotus.

It's great. And you get it, right? It's part of the flowering is to be able to engage with what's difficult. Now, I want to take this last piece that we're going to be exploring. I mentioned the survival of the nurtured. And on one level, the nurtured really has to do with our attachment bonding. Did we get enough safety, enough mirroring, enough care? So we felt safe enough, connected enough.

that's really, it's actually in this first months, the quality of connecting that actually wakes up the neural net in our brain. The rats that lick and groom their baby pups, the most, those pups are the ones that are actually most well-adjusted, most resilient, most wholesome. So it makes a difference, this way of, you know, just really understanding that early on it matters, but the good news is we have neuroplasticity that even if we didn't get well nurtured, it is possible in our relationships with each other and in relating to our own heart and mind to activate that same tender quality

and all that cocktail of oxytocin and dopamine and so on that helps to wake up the frontal cortex the empathy and the mindfulness. So when we look at meditation, the power of mindfulness and of compassion, I sometimes think of it as spiritual reparenting, that we're learning to relate to ourselves and bring to ourselves we might not have gotten so well early on.

What all of us need, most, every one of us needs it, but some of us might have really had a deficit. And there's two things that if you say, well, what would a young child most need to have that resilience? It's to be seen, that being seen, mirrored, I get you, I see you, I understand you, and that what seen is loved, whatever I'm seeing, I'm embracing. And that's what we're doing when we're practicing meditation.

We're learning to look into our own psyche and whatever we encounter there, whether it's jealousy, our hatred, whether it's fear, whether it's loneliness, we're able to say, okay, I see you and I care. And that helps us, that is a way that we begin to address the survival of the nurtured. It's self-nurturing and it makes a huge difference. I want to share with you a story of true resilience that really called on these qualities of self-nurturing and one that really involved facing the most challenging of stressors. And this is a story of a very, very close friend of mine and Dharma teacher who just died last month,

and her name's Sherry Maples. She died at 64 years old and really was one of the most resilient and inspirational people that I know. It's still raw for me, so I kind of held off even talking about her the first few weeks after her death because I really love Sherry.

But it fits so well what we're exploring together right now, the possibility for being a resilient spirit So Sherry grew up in a poor white family in the Rush Belt and she lived in a trailer park her father was alcoholic her mother had real deep psychological disorders difficulties she didn't have a lot of nurturing at that early caretaking level

she was very blessed to be smart and super athletic and had that locus of control thing where she was really courageous enough to do things her own way. She figured she could make her way through. And so she appeared very externally resilient. And by that, I mean, she played competitive baseball, traveled around the country with a woman's team. Lesbian police officer became captain of police force in Madison, Wisconsin, became a lawyer, social activist, assistant attorney general, I think, in the state of Westonians.

cons and I'm not sure of that. That's, you know, resilient and bouts of depression, bouts of depression and alcohol abuse. Until this is where the resilience, because she appeared resilient turned into spiritual resilience or true resilience, she met Ticknatam and learned to meditate. And there's developed sort of supportive community. in that area and she learned what meditation teaches which is don't believe your limiting thoughts

the thoughts that can drive you into sustaining an addiction and being at war with yourself and learn how to bring a wise and kind attention to your inner life don't believe your thoughts feel your feelings kindly really basic okay so So she still went through bouts of depression where she felt like she couldn't trust herself on her connection with others. And this of course, you know, again, she had a really tough early years. And I want to tell you about the worst of those bouts and how resilience kicked in, how she grew through it because she really grew through it.

And the worst of the bouts was a few years ago when Sherry and her partner of nine years, through a really wrenching breakup. And Sherry spiraled into a depression that was entirely out of control. And this was just a few years ago. We were scheduled to teach a women's retreat. She had to cancel it. She had to cancel all of her teaching.

She was in the middle of writing a book, came to a standstill, tons and tons. As I mentioned, she was a social activist. She would go different places and do trainings with the criminal justice system on how to have a more compassionate system. She actually had brought Ticknat Han to train the police force in Madison, Wisconsin.

So she had to cancel all of that, her socializing, her biking, her sailing. Everything came to a standstill and she just went inward and this was for months. And what had withered was her hope that she could ever feel close with her world. This is about survival of the nurture, remember. connection was really shaky. So Sherry and I kept a regular contact. We talked a lot through this and she would say I know that it's possible to wake up through this. My mind knows that it's just my body is sinking, my heart is sinking. So she knew but she just couldn't. But gradually her informal practice kicked in. By that I mean mindfulness. She started noticing

more and more that she could see the thoughts that were the hopeless thoughts and kind of put a frame around them and just go, okay, hopeless thoughts and not be quite as much believing them. You are not your thoughts. The cardinal teaching, okay? Started kicking in. She also began to investigate what was under the thoughts. This is part two. Feel your feelings.

And she could sense this pit of isolation in her belly and this school. squeeze of anxiety in her chest and she just started learning to stay so that instead of the hopeless thoughts there was more the sense of okay this is the portal let go of the thoughts be with the feelings and gradually she started offering gestures of care her intention was to be kind but she actually offered increasing kindness to her inner life not believe leaving thoughts, feeling her feelings, offering care. What happened from that was that she started experiencing the reality of her loss in such a raw way that the grieving was possible, that she could really, really grieve.

And she grieved deeply. And with the deep grieving, the depression loosened. With the deep grieving, what she most feared it happened, that's what grieving is, it's when you have to open to what you most don't want to happen as happen. You're no longer resisting it, space opens up. With the grieving she had came into this place of tenderness and presence that really allowed her to reconnect with her wholeness. I've seen, I'm going to speak to this a little more, so often on.

the road to resilience, grieving is the peace that's essential. So for Sherry, that was the beginning of opening back into her life again. Grieving, feeling that tenderness, and she stepped back in. And she came in with more of an enlarged, vibrance, more heart, more compassion. She got back into doing things she was doing, very involved with reconciliation, with dialogue, social justice, just this whole level of creativity and presence. And only a half year after that, Sherry was on a bike and she collided with a big van and had an accident that did her in, basically.

She was in the hospital for many, many months. She had just gotten out of the hospital when she really went down. but I visited her and here's what's amazing. There she was and she was basically at best going to be crippled for life and her mood and her heart, she had a brightness in her eyes, she was filled with affection, she was her humorous self. And when I talked to her and I asked her the question that you might want to ask anybody in this situation, like, what is allowing you to face your life this way?

Her response was, I've already faced the worst death I can face. And I came through and I know I can awaken through any situation. I can awaken through this too. And that's what she did. I mean, she trusted she had a refuge. She knew how to pay attention and bring compassion to what was there. She knew about a kind of place of timeless love and awareness that could hold her life. And I talked to her just, and this again, this just happened a few weeks ago, the week before she died.

It was of an infection related to the injury. And she named that loud, she said that she might be passing soon. She knew that was the case. And that she wasn't framing it as this is wrong or this is bad. Mostly she talked about how amazing it was to belong to so much love. When we know how to take refuge in presence and love, we find the resilience that can carry us through this living, dying world. When we know how to take refuge and presence and love,

we've got what can carry us. So we're talking tonight about really the nature of true resilience. and it has everything to do with sensing whatever happens we can wake up through it. Often it has to do with a grieving because to wake up through something we have to contact the reality which often is loss and if we're not willing to grieve we can't find that tenderness and space that's bigger than the grief. This is David White, poet that I like a lot. those who will not slip beneath the still water on the will of grief,

turning downward through its black water to the place we cannot breathe, we'll never know the source from which we drink, the secret water cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else. So how do we cultivate a resilient spirit? And we're talking about the inner process of nurturing. I can say for Sherry that she was unbelievably blessed

to have a network of friends who were bodhisattvas, unbelievable. So she was held in love. And what so stood out to me was this willingness to be with. with what's here over and over again and trust that we can wake up through it. She could wake up through it. When we explore the next step of this, how do we in our lives cultivate this capacity, we're going to also look at how we can intentionally nourish positive mind states.

Because one dimension of resilience is this radical presence with what is. I can wake up through this portal. The other is knowing how to bring forth our strengths, how to bring forth our gratitude, how to bring forth our love, how to bring forth all these qualities of heart that really help us to make it through. So that's what we're going to be exploring in the next class. But the bottom line, what energizes this is trusting that you really trust your potential to wake up through exactly what's happening in your life right now. So I'd like to do a meditation on that, if you're willing. So take a moment to, as you're sitting, feel your body from the inside out,

sense if there's any places you'd like to relax a little more. This is a brief reflection on how we can really awaken our spiritual, resilience and we begin by sensing where in our life right now we might need it. In other words, where are you being challenged, where are what's happening right now that's bringing up anger, hurt, fear? What are those shadow goddesses that are arising right now for you? It might be somewhere that you're reacting to. reacting to a relational conflict, maybe some financial work pressure, health challenge.

Or it may be in your response to the suffering that's going on in the world around us. How do you feel you might need some more resilience, some more access to your strengths? You may take a moment to sense what you feel or know about your own capacity for resilience. How resilient are you in your life? How adaptive? How well do you flex and grow with change without adding any judgment just to observe, bear witness? And do you trust that you can grow through this? Do you have a sense that this could be a portal?

a place to deepen wisdom, to grow your compassion, letting your attention go right to where whatever's going on feels most challenging. Your sense of what you're afraid might happen, what you're upset or distressed about. Notice what happens when you hold this with that bodhisattva prayer or aspiration. Please, may this awaken compassion. May this awaken wisdom. May these circumstances awaken my heart

and know that you can offer the prayer again and deepen your sincerity because the more it comes from a real longing please may I awaken through this. May this teach me, may this grow me. The more sincere you are, the more available you are to grow.

You might bring some curiosity. and sense, how might this awaken me? And close with a poem from Roshani Ray. There's a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken, a shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable. There is a sorrow beyond all grief, which leads to joy, and a fragility out of whose depths emerge is strength.

There's a hollow space too vast for words through which we pass with each loss, out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being. There's a cry deeper than all sound whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open to the place inside that is unbreakable and whole. May the challenges in our life serve to awaken our hearts. and may the collective suffering that we're facing awaken within the collective the wisdom and love that can free us and heal us. Namaste and thank you.

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