Tara Brach - Widening the Circles of Care

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

What helps us widen our circles of care and awaken a more inclusive, compassionate heart?  As we navigate political division, collective uncertainty, and personal challenges, mindful awareness and spiritual imagination can help us stay connected to love without being overwhelmed by the suffering we witness.  Drawing from mindfulness, compassion practices, personal stories, and timeless wisdom teachings, Tara explores how we can move beyond fear, reactivity, and "othering" toward a deeper experience of our shared humanity.  This talk is an invitation to reconnect with the truth of our belonging—to ourselves, to one another, and to the living world. When we deepen our attention and allow our hearts to be touched, we become part of weaving a more loving future.  In this talk, you'll learn: -How fear and stress fuel division, blame, and "othering" -Why opening to suffering can deepen wisdom and compassion -The role of mindfulness in staying present without becoming overwhelmed -How spiritual imagination helps us envision and create a more loving world -Practices for recognizing the vulnerability and goodness in others   Our introduction music is from "Opening" by Adrienne Torf, © 2025 ABT Music

Welcome friends to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Namaste. Welcome.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City. They're celebrating their 10th year of a very robust, wonderful mindfulness community. So I'd like to share the talk that I gave there with you. It's focused on what to me is kind of a core inquiry, our times, which is what allows us to widen our circles of caring, our capacity to care in a more inclusive way. So I hope you find some value and inspiration in listening. Thank you, thank you for being part of this.

Maybe in the spirit of this gathering, just take a moment for us to pause together consciously There's a beautiful line from a poem, Take, you know, just sense the forest of your life, the dense forest of your life, and take a pause to arrive right here and now. The dense forest of our lives, may we pause, and just find the space that's right here now. Maybe you're finding your breath, taking a few full breaths. maybe listening to your heart. We don't often listen inwardly.

Just listen and notice the state of your heart in this moment. So you're inviting yourself into presence. And if your eyes are closed, as you're ready, opening your eyes. So I actually have a title for this kind of gathering or event, which is widening the circles, awakening our capacity to care in widening circles. And I'll start with a tiny little brief anecdote, which is a little girl asked her mother, how did the human race appear? And the mother said, well, God made Adam and Eve, and they had children,

and all mankind was made. And then she asked her father the same question. He said, well, many years ago there were monkeys and humans, human race evolved out of monkeys. She's very confused. She goes back to her mother and says, you know, how is it possible you told me the human race came from God? and dad said that we developed for monkeys. And she said, very simple, my dear. He told you about his side of the family. And I told you about mine. So I'm starting here because the truth is most of us take sides, right?

You know what I mean? That we're taking sides and we're doing it all the time. And I'm not just talking about the Nicks versus this, you know, we're not talking about that level, although we take sides there too, I know. here I am, New York, right? But it's hypercharged, how whether it's political, religious, et cetera, it's hypercharged now

how much we oppose others and on some level consider the other side as less than, as in some way diminished in our mind. It's what I call bad othering. And I think we do it in an instant and often are not aware of just the way we push away our kin. And you may not be riding the political roller coasters, I say that, although I think of it

not as much a rollercoasters entering this tunnel of doom, but enough on that, demons popping up from all directions. But even if it's not political, when we're... stressed and we're in a stressed world, we tend to other, we tend to blame and resent and create separations. It's really the grounds of all war that when we get fearful, we do that. And right now, because there's so many existential crises that are nervous, even if we're not even paying attention to the news, our nervous systems pick it up, right? I mean, that this Earth is struggling, that so many people on the planet are having to migrate. And then it's really close in the amount

of pain and struggle. So the algorithms that inform us are driven by fear. They're meant to bring up fear and outrage. So fear is spiking. And one of the most glaring examples is that anytime there's unprocessed fear, it turns into aggression on some level. Does that make sense? I'm just kind of sitting there. Okay. So I've been teaching for, I figure, over 50 years now, and something has changed when

I teach, when I do webinars and people bring up stuff. And in the last five years, up until then, it was usually very personal. bring up personal issues and problems. The last five years, huge percentage of people are bringing up some inquiry about how do I deal with my reactions to our world right now, or to a family member who's on the other side or something in that genre. And the degrees of separation are much smaller now so that whether we're talking about about the cruelty of ice, you know, we feel it in our bodies, or if we sense what's happening with health insurance for so many, or what the decimation of Gaza, or whatever it is that

it's like, for me, when we pulled away from foreign aid and just sensing how many millions of people were dependent on it, it's like my body felt it. So I think what I'm getting at is that for most, I think it's the scale of cruelty that's getting to us, that we didn't quite expect this much of a human regression into cruelty. Again, does that connect? We just didn't expect it. Tickmuthan has a beautiful kind of offering. He says this.

He says, this, my dear, is the greatest challenge to being alive, to witness injustice in the world, and not allow it to consume our light, our love, to witness injustice in the world, the scale of cruelty, and not have it consume our light, our love. So our inquiry together, and we're going to do some practice together, is really what increases our caring for the world? And I don't mean caring where we're so raw that we're in constant reactivity. I mean a wise caring, right? What helps us widen the circles of compassion where we are unconsciously, are consciously taking sides?

So that's kind of the inquiry. And for me, a really helpful frame that we find in Buddhism and many contemplative traditions is that when we face the reality of suffering, when we have the courage to actually let ourselves be touched, it does awaken compassion. I mean, this is like almost like a, it's like a science that if we let ourselves be touched, we care, right? And so a lot of the training is to let ourselves be touched, but touched in a way that we have enough space so we don't get supercontracted. So this is where we're going to explore a bit. But again, the teaching is that whether it's individual or societal, when we start opening to suffering, that very suffering

can give rise to a deeper and more fresh intelligence, you know, more inclusive caring. And I know we can see it in our personal life. I've worked with so many who, whether it was the devastating divorce or the cancer diagnosis or the incredible angst of having a child, struggling in some way, that going through the intensity of that just tenderizes us. We're more awake. There's more soul, there's more spirit. And so, and I see it in the world right now, and I suspect you do too, that people are stepping forward in a fresh way because of the scale of cruelty, right? And I think of, I'm very involved with some activi who were working with Israelis and Palestinians,

and one of them who was helping some Palestinian farmers on the West Bank got really badly beaten up. And a lot of us sent messages and, you know, sending you hugs and love. And he wrote to us, he said, my spirit is good. I got more hugs and fish, you know, which is, I think of those in Minneapolis. And I've taken to, I love the phrase neighborliness. Like, if we're going to be making anything great again, we need to have more neighborliness.

I really love that phrase. I love one person who was interviewed in Minneapolis who said, I'm not here because I love protests. I'm here because I love people. I'm seeing that more. I know that privilege can blind us to our individual. dependence. I'm privileged. I have to actually intentionally pay attention to stay tender to what's happening. I do. And I think that's part of it. But when we feel the belonging, it's undefinably sweet. story. A while back, an old, tired-looking dog wandered into this woman's yard. And she said she couldn't

tell from the color, although there are no tags, who the dog was, but well-fed, Billy, etc., kind of sensed he had a home. So she says he followed her into her house down the hall, and he plopped down to the couch, and took a nap for an hour, then got up, walked out, and left. and he kept doing it, and he did it for about a week, coming in, sleeping for an hour, leaving. And then she said, I pinned a note to his collar, and I wrote, every afternoon, your dog comes here for a nap. I just want to make sure it's okay with you. So the next day, he comes back with a different note pinned to his collar, and it says, he lives in a home with three children. He's trying to catch up on his sleep. May I come with him tomorrow?

I just love the sense of shared humanity, which of course needs to include our non-human kin. So what we're speaking to here is the bodhisattva path, which I know many of you are familiar with, is it's the path of awakening beings, all of us, and how to realize belonging in a visceral way, not in our minds, because it's very common to have abstract compassion. Like, to hear something horrible and go, oh, that's terrible. But not to feel that resonance or that quivering, as they say, of the heart, right? So how do we get it embodied? And it feels like it does take an active practice, an intentional practice that nurtures it.

And when I think of all the great spiritual leaders who we all of all the great spiritual leaders who we all know of, whether it was Gandhi who said he prayed, he took a day a week off for prayer, right? And he said he did it so he would stay connected with the wisdom of his heart. A day a week, he wouldn't let anybody interrupt him, or at least that's a story. Who knows? Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, you know, deep contemplation. So there's a myth I came upon that I want to share with you that I loved. I thought it was really cool. I heard it through Michael Mead. It's this old native story and it begins, it doesn't begin with once upon a time. It begins with this time. And it says, this time, every, we know

that every human is searching for true wisdom, true love, and it lies in a cave that's nearby. It's always right here nearby, but we don't find it because we're distracted by the rush of modern life, by trance, by anxiety, by reactivity, by the speed of these times. Inside the cave, an old woman is weaving the most beautiful garment to ever imagined. But now and then she must pause and stir a pot over the fire at the back of the cave, a pot that holds all the seeds of the earth, and have left unstirred, the seeds would burn and life itself would vanish. While she is away, a black dog slips in and unravels her weaving thread by thread until only chaos remains. When she returns, she pauses, not in anger, but she comes into stillness, to presence, to deep inner

listening, bringing her heart to all that is to the suffering and the preciousness of life. Then she picks up a thread and in that thread she envisions an even more beautiful garment. An even more beautiful garment, one that did not exist before the unraveling. And the elders say, don't curse the dog. If nothing fell apart, nothing new would be imagined. The old woman is the world dreaming force itself. Creativity, imagination that arises in each of us when we're living in presence. the imagination that expresses the loving awareness that's our source.

So when there's an unraveling, and here we are, we're in an unraveling, a time of unraveling, much shadow, much violence, our conditioning, our reflux is to blame the dog, right? Take sides, bad other. That's just our reflex. Or else, sometimes we just get overwhelmed and go numb and get distracted and block it all out. But either way, we're usually either aggressive or kind of shut down. And instead, our task is to pause and deepen attention, intentionally bring our awareness

to the suffering, to what's going on in the world and the preciousness. It's never just the suffering that, you know, Ticknot Han always used to say it's not enough to suffer. You have to touch peace too, right? So we bring our attention that way and let ourselves be touched, let ourselves care, and then imagine together what's the world we want to create. So I'm sharing that because I think it's, as a myths go, it's one of the most kind of elegant and timely and deep and just seems to sit well.

And we're going to explore this, we're going to practice with it, but I want to say that it is most powerful if we face the unraveling together. We're in a really individualistic culture that in some way has spirituality as when we go and sit by ourselves, you know, or go inward. And the relational field is what really viscerally teaches us the truth of our belonging. I know many people that have gone to retreats, that three-month retreats, done deep, deep practice, and still are very caught in a separate self. I'm sure you understand.

So I've been in many teaching situations in these last five years that I've been telling you about, and one of the things I love doing when somebody brings something like the crushing heartache or the feeling of powerlessness or giving up despair, I'll pause and I'll say, how many others? And when we take it in, in that togetherness, we get bigger than the whatever belief is limiting us,

whatever sense of separation, we see, oh, yeah. It's not your fear or my fear, it's the fear. That's really powerful. I saw this recently. Every spring in the last many years, like eight years, I think it is, there are these non-violent, several non-violent organizations that host a memorial, and it's a memorial where Palestinian and Israeli families come together

who have lost loved ones. And this year they did a, they have it online. And I was really honored to be able to lead a piece of it after the formal memorial to help people connect with each other. And one of the things that really impacted me was seeing people naming the names together, naming the names and feeling the grief, feeling the togetherness in it. And what you could feel is that by opening to the heartbreak together, by doing that together,

their hearts were not heartening into taking sides. That's what our world needs. We need to be able to grieve together. So like the old woman in the cave, the idea is to be able to pause and open together or within ourselves so that we can creatively imagine and help create a better world. And I want to deepen a little bit of time on the word imagination, because it's an amazingly potent capacity in spiritual awakening. And it's not always understood as that. And of course, I'm not talking about any old imagination. Like, you know, in one story a son says to his mom, hey, mama, imagine and pretend that you're

surrounded by eight hungry tigers. What would you do? And she said, I don't know. And he said, stop imagining. So the truth is that a lot of our imagination is in service of fear. We're fixating a lot on what can go wrong and what's wrong with us and we're tensing against the future. It's like my father's favorite joke, and this will show you the age is a woman sends her son a telegram, and it says, start worrying.

Details to follow. So the imagination that arises from presence is a superpower. It's a superpower. It's shaped every leap in human development, from fire to language to civil rights to quantum physics. This is Bill Hooks. She says, imagination creates the future. It is not a passive mirror. It is a tool of transformation. So in Buddhist practice and in many other practices and spiritual traditions, imagination is a key ingredient. We just don't recognize that that's what we're doing, I think. Because when I talk about it, first people go imagination, but then they see it. oh, what about the compassion practice? Well, yeah, I'm having to imagine. Well, what about loving

kindness? Well, what about a big mind? You know, it all requires imagining what is not explicit and then bringing it into manifestation. I'll give you a personal example that many of you are familiar with the loving kindness practice. Let me just see by nodding heads. I do a non-traditional a loving practice, loving kindness practice every day. I've been doing this for quite a while where I'll bring to mind somebody and I'll imagine looking into their eyes and seeing them and seeing what I love and imagine kissing them on the brow. And then I'll imagine them in some way kissing me on the brow or loving me back. And all the separation does a house. There's just a field of who we are. And I'll do that with everybody in my family and widen the circles and I did it with you

all today in a kind of more generic way, but it got me really relaxed, you know, and excited to see you. It's very, very powerful. And for me, it's just a way of literally in an embodied way opening to loving, using that imagining. So we can do it in a lot of ways to evolve consciousness. And we're going to practice using imagination. And there's two different ways that are key if we want to widen the circles of compassion. And one of them is seeing vulnerability.

If we can see the vulnerability in others, our heart gets tender. And the other is seeing goodness. some of, I often think of Father Greg Boyle, he puts it this way, he says, everyone has goodness, no exception. Everyone belongs, no exception. And then after he shares these principles, he says, now do I think all the world's most vexing problems would disappear if I practice this? I do. So you may, some of you that have tracked with me a bit know of the story of the Golden Buddha, you know, that statue in Asia, that

massive statue that was covered by plaster clay for centuries, and then the monks finally dug under the plaster clay and found this amazing Golden Buddha. And historians believe it was covered with plaster and clay to protect it through dangerous times, much in the way we cover over our own purity, just incarnating in a very confused, confused, confused world. And so so much of our practice, as Pamela was describing it, is to remember the goal, the goodness in ourselves and each other. And sometimes the inroad is to first see the tenderness, the vulnerability. I often think of this little anecdote. where if you're walking in the woods and you see a little dog by a tree,

and you go to pet it, and it lurches at you with its fangs-beared and, you know, fierce and instead of, and then you feel like angry and upset at it, but then you see that it's pause and a trap. In an instant, in an instant, you go from bad othering to caring. Now you might not go and get near the dog because, you know, could be dangerous, but your heart's open. And so it is when we see that somebody's leg is in a trap, when we see some vulnerability, our heart just gets very open. I sometimes think of this story about this Army lieutenant. There was a time, I don't know if it's still happening, when mindfulness was being taught,

in a lot of programs in the Army. And he was forced to take an anger management program because of his anger and big piece of it was mindfulness. So there he is learning mindfulness, learning how to see what's going on and be present. He goes to a supermarket one evening and he fills up his cart, he has to get home to work, he's in a rush, gets into line.

The woman in front of him only has one item, she has a little girl, she hands the girl to the clerk, and they're ooing and eyeing over the little girl, and he just works up ahead of steam. It's like, she's not in the express lane, she's in this lane, and what are they doing, and I've got to get home, you know, that kind of thing. And he goes, oh, yeah, mindfulness. And he starts paying attention, he senses under the anger that he's anxious. You know, it's that thing of, you know, if I don't get everything done, I'll die kind of thing, which many of us have, and calms down. And then he looks at the little girl and he notices that she's cute.

So when it's his turn, he says, oh, that little girl is really cute. And the clerk beams and says, oh, well, that's my little girl. My, yeah, we have to have my mom bring her over a couple of times a day because my husband was killed in Afghanistan earlier in the year. and this is my only chance to see her. So not everyone we meet is struggling in the deepest ways, but everybody's struggling hard, right? I mean, life, you know.

And what if we could slow down enough to just ask that amazing question? It's Ruby Sales, is who I heard it from, Civil Rights icon. She says, where does it hurt? And it's not like she asks it out loud, that would be kind of, she does, she has, that's part of her story, but internally just to imagine, oh, how might this person, you know, have fear like I have fear, or have losses like I have loss, have gone through some sicknesses that really were scary, still feels very, very on the edge. Where does it hurt? Because if we can sense the shared vulnerability, Then we look past the mask, right? Past the plaster clay and we can sense what's really there.

For me it takes real practice to look. Like I've had to train myself to slow down and look. Van Jones commentator, CNN commentator, and he's also one of these people who has really been working to not have people take sides so much, you know, in their heart to kind of dehumanize. He did this beautiful thing. He brought together these families from West Virginia, families and professionals who were struggling with the opiate crisis in West Virginia. And he brought them together with the group from South Central L.A., struggling with crack epidemic. See what they could learn from each other. Really different cultures and races and politics. This was right

when the first round of Trump, hugely different cultures. And so what could they find out and learn from each other? And at first, there was a huge edginess and tension in the group. They were together for a week. It's really a red, blue, whatever. He asked them each to bring pictures of loved ones that they had lost in the epidemic. And so at one point, they all brought out their first,

photos and they milled around and they shared with each other and talked about the person and what the person meant to them. One man said, this is my son and the last thing I said to him was, you got yourself into this, you get yourself out. And so there were just a lot of tears and a lot of grief and a lot of that realization. It's like going into that cave where the old woman was of the realness of our shared humanity, that tenderness. We can always learn to be with those who are different if we deepen our attention. The most difficult time is when we're bad othering because we feel others are really threatening us and people we love. And that takes, that's not easy. I don't want to pretend that's easy. That's a life practice, I think. That's a life practice. That's a

life practice. John Paul Lederach, who's an international peace builder, conflict resolution, he's just a powerful, brilliant scholar. He teaches, his basic teaching is to be in relationship with the one that you consider the enemy, to find a way to be in relationship. And for many of us, that doesn't mean that we can literally establish a living relationship, but to bring our hearts and minds into relationship, like, who is that really, underneath all that conditioning? So it's really asking those questions, like, you know, what is the conditioning that made you this way? Like, what is it you fear? What is it you long for? Imagine them with their children. Imagine them serving. Imagine that you're with them serving in some way or seeing something

beautiful together. Imagine sharing pictures of loved ones. There's ways we can connect. So that's one element of seeing the vulnerability and that's a training and then the other is seeing the goodness like seeing the gold. Thomas Merritton says, life is this simple. We're living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through all the time. This is not just a nice story or fable. This is true. So what if our practice gave us the eyes to see that, not to pretend there wasn't this enormous conditioning to be cruel, but to also be able to see the essence, the light, the love that shines through. Now, I want to name that we can't go around seeing the sacred and the divine shining through everybody if we don't actually

trust, that's what's living through this very heart, mind, body right here. And we have a lot of programming to get down on ourselves, right? I mean, I talk about this, probably more than I talk about anything else, like the trance of unworthiness. One woman sent me a note, she said, my young son and I were listening to one of your podcasts while making dinner, and suddenly he looked at me and said, I don't have any badness in me, just goodness. And that goodness keeps getting gooder and gooder every day. Okay, so there's, since I'm talking a lot about humans, Here's about, here's a dog and a cat. A dog says, human life form,

you keep me warm and give me food, you cater to my every mood, you give me hugs, you give me love, all of this you do for free, there's nothing you wouldn't do for me, whatever the odds. Therefore, I conclude, you must be God.

Here's the cat. Human life form, you keep me warm and give me food, you cater to my every mood, you give me hugs, you give me love, all of this you do for free. There's nothing you wouldn't do for me, whatever the odds. Therefore, I conclude, I must be God. Isn't that it, really?

So there's a story I heard that I come back to over and over, and this is John Lewis, who most of you know of longtime civil rights leader and congressmen. He describes being, describes 1961, being at a bus station, and being attacked. And beaten with He was colleague, were beaten with baseball bats by a group of white men. And they didn't fight back, and they didn't press charges. They treated their wounds and continued their work.

So nearly five decades later, this is 2009, one of those attackers, Elwyn Wilson walked into Lewis's Capitol Hill office with his son. He said, I'm one of the men who beat you. and I want to atone, will you forgive me? And Lewis said, I forgave him. We embraced. He, his son and I, we all wept.

And then we talked. And so he tells the story. And then he speaks, and this is almost like quietly to himself and says, people can change. People can change. And that brings up a kind of in me, kind of tears and hope that, I mean, it feels like so profound if we move through the world and not that everybody can change this lifetime in the way we wish we could, but the transformation

is the nature of things and that there is something in consciousness that wants to wake up to itself, that wants to know more truth, that wants to live more love, there's something in there, even with the fear. We can change. This is the meaning of Bodhita, which is really our potential for the awakened heart. And for Lewis,

he maintained his spiritual imagination through all these decades of incredible injustice and cruelty. There's a Tibetan teacher who says, never give up on anybody. I just love that. I think of that a lot when I'm really down on the human race. Never give up on anyone. So that's part of the

training, is to actively look towards the goodness. There's one man from our Mindhouse community in Washington described being on the subways and his practice for that was he would just say that, he would look at someone and say thou, you know, boobers thou, you know. And And he would pick people that were the most unlikely that seemed most different from him, and just say thou, and look at them in the eyes, even though they weren't looking at him, but just pick up on who they were. And it just brought up reverence for what maybe we don't see right away. So I started with taking sides, and I want to move us now to a practice on taking sides in our personal life.

But maybe the last thing I'll speak to is that it really helps that every human feels their imperfection on some level, no matter how much bravado and grandiosity, there's a deep vulnerability in everyone. Everyone wants to feel belonging on some level. It's wired into our DNA. Everyone. There's a story that Scott McClanahan tells of a man who left home after an ugly fight with his parents, and he stayed away for many years, some of which he spent in jail.

When he was released, he wrote to his parents saying he'd be coming home and he gave the dates, and he asked if they wanted to see him, and if they weren't ashamed and angry about what happened, to put a blanket on the clothes line, just to give him a signal. that they were willing to see him. So on the appointed day he gets off the train, he becomes anxious and starts having doubts that they want to see him. And the doubts grow, and he's about to turn around

because he's thinking of the horrible words that were exchanged and so on. But then he sees a blanket in a tree. And then he sees another. And as the house comes into sight, he sees a clothesliner covered with blankets. The yard was covered in blankets. The house was covered in blankets and his parents were standing there welcoming him inside. We need to have forgiving hearts.

We need to put out blankets for ourselves and each other. So let's practice, friends. And maybe as a way to begin practicing, first, let's rise to our collective feet. And I invite you to take a moment to pay attention to your body and just move your body in whatever ways will help you. fully be in your body, relaxed and awake. So just take a moment to move. So this is a practice on using the superpower of imagination to help bridge divides in our personal life. And the first part of bridging divides is any divide between you and your own body mind. So take a moment to arrive and feel yourself right here. We can breathe together, taking a nice long, deep,

in-breadth and a slow-out breath, slow enough so you can feel the sensations of the breath as they leave the nostrils. And another nice long deep in-breath. Slow-out breath, releasing, relaxing outward, letting go. Inhale again. Hold for a moment. Slow out breath, relaxing down the length of your body. Letting go. Letting go. And then And as your breath resumes in its natural rhythm, the sense yourself observing and feeling the breath, noticing the quality of presence that's here. Let your senses be awake,

listening to the sounds around you, not just with your body, but with your whole awareness, listening to and feeling the aliveness that's here, listening to and feeling the whole moment. and now scanning your life and just notice if there's someone who matters to you where there's conflict, distance, resentment, not trauma, that won't serve you right now.

But where somebody comes to mind where there's some aversion, some anger, a feeling of separation, it might be around some ongoing recurrent pattern or behavior, if you don't have somebody in mind yet, raise your hands so I know how much time to give you. Okay. And since your intention, it's really good to start with intention, that your intention is to wake up, to wake up your heart, mind, have more freedom in whatever words serve you. And then scan for a particular wrongdoing or a particular incident that exemplifies what creates,

the separation. And when you bring it to mind, actually remember the place you're in. So you get the visuals of the place and bring the person, the image of the person close in, the sound of their voice, sense what's going on, and make what I call the U-turn, really pay attention now inwardly and sense, what does it bring up in you? Like what is the strongest feelings that it brings up? So as you make this U-turn and pay attention inwardly, just begin by naming whatever has come up. It might be anger, blame, judgment, fear.

It's fine to name more than one experience. And then you might sense what most wants attention. In the rain practice, that's called recognizing the next part of rains allow. Let it be there. Just let whatever has come up be there. So in some way you're saying, okay, this belongs. This is like a wave in the ocean. It's part of what's happening. So you're not adding judgment. You're not trying to fix it. You're not trying to ignore it.

Letting be. So it's anger, just letting it be. Blame, let it be. And that allows you to investigate, to bring a deeper presence. And you might ask yourself, what am I believing about the person, about what's going on? Maybe you're a bit of your body. believing that in some way you're not being respected, you're not being seen, you're not being cared about, that they're demanding too much. But since what's the worst part? What's the worst part of this for you? What's the most disturbing or hurtful or frightening part of this? This is where it helps to imagine, exaggerate a little so you can really get in touch of what is bothering you, What is making you feel armored or separate?

And where do you feel the feelings in your body most fully? So start paying attention, your throat, your chest, your belly, if you can. What's the strongest feeling right now? Is it fear? Distress? If you want to explore imagination, let your face take the expression of what you're feeling. Let your face take the expression of what you're feeling and even your body posture and sense what the upset or vulnerable place really feels like. What's under it? In other words,

if you let the fear be there, what's under it? And whatever you find, keep saying this belongs. Because under anger, there's always something we're caring about. We're wanting to feel safe or loved, understood, respected. Just sense what's mattering, what you're caring about. And you might put your hand on your heart and just explore this, that you're beginning to nurture, which is to offer care inwardly. You can put your hand on your cheek, on your belly, it doesn't matter, but just in some way contact your own being.

And just honor what's here. Hold with compassion. You might imagine your spiritual hearts nurturing your human heart. And sense what message will most be healing. What is most needed? The part in you that's upset and distress, what does it need to remember? Maybe it needs to remember, trust your goodness.

You're held in love. I'm sorry and I love you. To sense you're awake heart offering a message inwardly. Maybe it's I'm here and I'm not leaving. You're not alone. In addition to offering a message, imagine and sense, warmth, light, goodness, bathing you, bathing that place in you. So you're held by the universe, held by the awakened heart of the universe. Just imagine it. Warmth, light, bathing the most vulnerable place inside you.

Some sense this is held in the arms of the beloved, others simply as opening to a larger field. Now simply sense the quality of presence that's here. Maybe you can sense that you're the holder and the held, that you are that field of love and light, that you're in touch and belong to more than that small self that was reactive. And from that larger presence, begin to bring to mind more closely the other person. And just notice the actions of the other person. And here's again where imagination comes in. Sense, as you deepen attention to them, what do you imagine they're feeling?

How is their leg in a trap? You might ask, where does it hurt? It can help to imagine what unmet needs they might have for security and safety, our respect, our love, feeling belonging. Maybe with you, you can imagine what were they hoping for that didn't happen. And just sense what your heart wishes for them. You can use your imagination like the woman in the cave to sense who they are when their needs are met, when they're released from the trap, when they feel truly loved. How might they behave? be different, sensing behind the mask, the goal, the awareness, the sentience, the heart,

the basic goodness that's free to shine through when they're not feeling scared or hurt. And as we close this meditation, imagine and inhabit who you are when undefended, undivided, when the quality of presence and heart is full. You might sense, what is love asking here? what creative choices might open as you move forward with this person and to sense how what you're doing right now is picking up a thread. It's part of weaving a more loving world. We're going to do a little closing together. So you might just find a place, a meditative kind of posture. A lot of the spirit of today has been, how do we wake up out of taking?

sides, how do we instead feel our belonging to this precious world and serve into that? John Rodill says, whenever I feel helpless in this overwhelming world, I become a helper. Oh, oh, my love on the days when it feels like I have no power, I serve others. You see, whenever I wash the world's feet, my hands immediately stopped. stop shaking. Whenever I wash the world's feet, my hands immediately stop shaking. The biggest illusion we have is that we're facing a crazy, cruel, precious, mysterious world by ourselves. One of the greatest healings in the world is to know that there are huge numbers of people that want to weave a better world, people that care.

And so in that spirit as we close this particular part of the day, I invite you to bring to mind all those that have come before us, ancestors and other beings in all directions that have come before us that have walked this earth and cared. I've loved the beauty of this earth,

have stewarded it, have loved their neighbors, and felt a neighborliness, have sought to bring goodness more alive in the world. All those before us on all different parts of the earth. All of those in the future, our descendants, our grandchildren's grandchildren, who may be able to hold hands better than some of us with others, all those in the future who will seek

like the woman in the cave to keep weaving, goodness, waking up goodness, letting it manifest in this precious world. And all those now, all those sitting here, all those who've joined us online, all those in whitening circles everywhere who are caring, whose hearts get broken by the suffering and hearts laid up by the sense of our belonging, all those through all times, past, present, and future, this field we belong to of loving presence that we always belong to, that's always, always here now, forever. Thomas Meriden says, then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor desire could reach the core of their reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of God.

If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I guess the real problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. So we close in prayer that these hearts and minds may awaken in widening circles to include all beings everywhere. that all beings may awaken, that there may be a growing peace, justice, love and freedom,

may all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Blessings, Namaste, thank you.