Clearing Space for Spirit: A Conversation with Tara Brach & Patty Morrissey

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 my friends. Some of you have heard of Marie Kondo. She became known for teaching about decluttering and choosing really what sparks joy. So she has created a community along with Patty Morrissey and it's dedicated to living with intention and cultivating joy. And Patty asked me for an interview and I agreed. And so what follows is a wonderful conversation we had about the meaning of spirituality, about what makes for a spiritually awake person, basic habits that sustain a vibrant life, the role of humor on the path, how tidiness, which is basic to Conmarie method, can either control us trying to be too tidy or actually become a liberating act of presence and care. One question that was pitched to me that I somehow didn't answer was my personal experience around tidiness. So I feel compelled to confess partly because Jonathan, my husband, threatened to out me that beyond the Zoom view that you see my office is not yet tidy. I honor tidiness and I'm on a very steep learning curve. So I wanted to share that with you along with this interview and the wish that you find this to be enjoyable and valuable. Okay, thank you. So when we begin our monthly, our month, related to different themes, some of our themes are body, time, money, creativity, and then here we are in spirituality month. It's one of those words that often mean something different to different people. So how do you define it? Can you give us a shared definition to move forward with? And beyond that, what are some qualities that you see in people that have a healthy or robust spiritual life? And maybe I'm taking the language of personal development and applying it incorrectly to spirituality, but what is an A-plus look like? What does it look like to achieve or to be in right relationship with our spiritual life? Yeah, it's a beautiful question. So maybe just to share a story that I often draw on as a kind of metaphor, which in this true story of there was this statue in Southeast Asia that was not a particularly attractive statue, it was huge plaster clay, but people loved it, visited it every year, tons and tons of people. And one year, and this was in the 50s, 1950s, a big crack appeared, it had been really dry weather. And one of the monks looked through the crack to see the infrastructure, and what shone back was the gleam of gold. And they took it apart, they took off the coverings, what turned out to be coverings, it's the largest solid gold statue of the Buddha in Southeast Asia. But here's the thing that's interesting to me, which is that, and the monks believe this, and historians have their own version of it, is that just as we go through difficult times and we cover over our innate purity, that's what happened with the statue, that was just difficult years invading armies and different changes of government and so on, so they covered it over to protect it. And we do that too. And what's the tragedy of it is that we come to think where the coverings, the personality, the defenses, we get identified with the ego coverings and forget the gold. And so really what spiritual paths are about are to wake up our sense of who we are beyond the ego, so we can remember really the innate purity that's here, that in us which really loves to love, that in us which really wants to see truths, that really wants to know truth, to live in truth. And so the whole process is can we remember the gold, can we remember who we really are, and it's not like pretending the coverings aren't there, we all have our egos and our defenses and our ways of protecting. Can we hold that with mindfulness, with kindness, with humor? And so when you ask what does a person look like when they're really embodying that, if, and you can think of it in your own lives, like the moments when you're really trusting a deeper sense of who you are, a deeper belonging with others, there's a natural way of feeling caring, caring about the life inside you, caring about other people, caring about animals, caring about our larger community. So I'd say for me, it's like the Dalai Lama said, my religion is kindness, it's that caring and kindness that goes beyond the letter A plus that I think is the most powerful expression of anyone who's really remembering the gold. And there are others. I think of the kind of honesty, the willingness to be vulnerable, like the coverings are there, can we name what's there, can we be real with it rather than pretending? And that feels like a really big one. There's a quality of courage willing to risk and really turn towards what's scary. I think that's another one of them. And with each other, there's what I call mirroring the gold or mirroring the goodness. And I really see this a lot in people that I feel like are most awake is they help other people trust their goodness. Do you know what I mean by that? When you're with somebody and they really help you remember, one of the authors, she's also a physician, Rachel Naomi Rehman, tells a story about her grandfather who was a realized, very awake person spiritually, he was a rabbi. And he used to call her Nishimala, which means little beloved soul. And he told her then she came to sense that's what she was. And when he died, she was a little afraid she'd forget, but she'd discovered that once blessed, forever blessed. And she told her mother about her grandfather's blessings. And her mother said, Rachel, I have prayed for you every day of my life. I just never had the wisdom to do it out loud. And that's what I've, that's part of Patty, when you asked me about really how this shows up, spirituality shows up, is that with each other, we mirror the goodness. It's the greatest gift we can give each other is to remind each other that we're lovable and that we're good. Yeah. Thank you for that question. Beautiful. I was looking for inspiration for my protest sign this weekend. And I was reading Mr. Rogers book on how to have a live a good life. And he said something like that to the practice of remembering the people. He'd use different language who loved you all out. So it reminded me of that. I just wanted to highlight that as something for us to take away as a reflection point of who was that person in your life who loved you out loud. And when I'm teaching folks here, especially our new members on this contemplation exercise and sitting in a presence of unconditional love, sometimes a loving person in our lives, they can take on their voice if our own inner voice isn't so kind and loving, right? Or inner thoughts aren't so kind and loving where is a voice that we've experienced that is. And I also want to highlight for us the practice of mirroring. That's something that our small groups are designed to do as well and be that place where we can be our most honest selves, where the meetings aren't recorded. And we end every meeting Tara with a practice of elevation of sharing when you felt elevated by someone else's share because of the kindness or the bravery or how in liveny it was when they told that story. And that's something that we're trying to train ourselves to do here in this space with the hope that it can ripple out and translate out to how we're interacting with people broadly. So thank you for that. Thank you for that. So one of the things I've noticed is that when many folks who are coming to this community or have experienced that myself, it seems easier or more automatic to tap into spiritual practices when we need help. And William James says, all religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry help. And I also love Anne Lamont's book, Help Thanks Wow. Why do you think that is that when kind of life is too much where we can't handle it or there's big burdens upon us? That's the time we seek out guidance and help. Yeah, it's a great question. And William James described it that the reason religions start with the cry help is because even if we dilute ourselves into thinking, oh, everybody else is going to die but not me, we feel our mortality, we have a fundamental insecurity. And so that call on something larger to help us comes out of that, that we know that if we're in a separate human ego, that it's going to end and that we can't control that. And so what I've noticed is that we all have our management strategies to try to control. And I'm sure you've explored this together just to look at what are my ways of trying to control life. I always think of John O'Donohue who said, we manage our lives so fully so as to cover over the mystery that we're on behalf of. And we know it. I can say for myself, I know all the ways I'm trying to manage to make sure that others cooperate with me or I get what I want or I don't make mistakes or whatever it is. So what happens is we go through life with our management strategies and inevitably we hit something where life is too big and too powerful and doesn't cooperate. This was the story of the Buddha. The Buddha was just going along being a rich young prince until he encountered aging, sickness and death. And we encounter all of that. We encounter changes. We're living in a time right now. That is the essence of the time that our world is really tumbling into a shadow. And we can feel that. And so a lot of us are on some level saying, how can I help and what will help? Because it's so much bigger than our normal strategies of trying to make things work out. So I can say for myself, I had a very deep experience of that where things went along fairly well until in my early 50s I started spiraling into sickness. And it was for about six years that I was getting sicker and sicker. Turns out it was part of a genetic disorder I have and I'm way better now. I'm way healthier than I was then. But we didn't know what it was and I had no reason to think I was going to get better. And so it hit a point where on some deep level, my cells were crying out help. It's like, how can I live through this feeling like everything that matters to me in life is being taken away? I was very athletic, I couldn't do sports and the other things in nature I used to love to do. I knew I was going to have grandchildren. I wouldn't be able to play with my grandchildren. It went in every which direction. And I remember pretty much a very distinctive moment where one of my favorite things to do is play in the ocean and I couldn't walk on sand anymore. And we're all up on Cape Cod in the United States off of Massachusetts and friends, family all went together to the beach and I got left behind. And this feeling of this crushing sense that the life I loved was taken from me and there was this prayer but it was different than help. It was really, may I live and love this life no matter what? May I trust in something deeper than just this body being healthy? And I've come to consider that as turning towards a larger refuge, a true refuge, not a false refuge but something where I was actually feeling myself belonging to a sacredness, a vastness, an awareness, a love that was larger than the living, dying world, than this changing body. And that was really a deepening of spirituality for me and even as I got better I felt like my practice and my focus and my attention was knowing that everything gets taken away and as everything gets taken away, what is it that holds this life? And for me it was this loving awareness that was larger than my body or ego cell. That's a bit of a kind of more full-blown personal story but I think we all get shaken at different times and then it's very natural to look towards something larger and more trustworthy than whatever we were depending on, whether it was our looks or our intelligence or whatever it was. We need to take refuge in something larger. Yeah, this might sound weird, not that we wish for pain but there's something about going through painful times that has an aliveness to it, a rawness to it that I kind of love. There's an Asian prayer, I don't remember what country, that says, grant me difficult times that has that same notion of please shake it up so that I can not get into a trance, so that I can stay real. Stay real? Yeah, trance. I'm reading Francis Weller's The Wild Edge of Sorrow right now. Beautiful book. Beautiful book. Yeah, this is just the reality of acknowledging that we're going to lose everything that we love and I'm bouncing around in my mind a little bit but I want to go back to ways that are around control strategies. I do think that the community that's built around very precise methods of folding and sorting and putting things away, we have a tendency a little bit to lean on control and perfectionism. As some of our strategies and I want to, I would like to hear as a follow up to what you shared of how do we, the practices of the Konmari method, taking care for our environment and having reverence for the things in our life and gratitude for the things in our life. It's very much the spiritual practice or an applied meditative practice but it can also be taken too far where it becomes this fixed tight control strategy. How do we tell the difference when we're using something for our opening or its closing us? Yeah, it's actually a super important question to do with any meditation because we can take any meditation and if we grab onto it and we're trying to achieve something with it, we're striving, it actually reifies a sense of an insufficient self trying to get somewhere. So that's the story of the guy that goes to the Zen monastery and said, how long will it take me to get enlightened? And the master said, ten years. And that guy said, what if I try really hard? Twenty years. He said, wait a minute, you just said ten years. For you, thirty. And it's that idea, it depends on the spirit that we're bringing to the practice. And so whether it's to do with tidying or whether it's to do with concentrating the mind on the breath, it really needs, we need to remember our deepest intention for the practice. And if the reason that we're tidying is to create a clearing in the dense forest of our life, to create space so we can remember what really matters to our heart, so we can listen more, so we can clear the clutter in our mind, the emotional, unnecessary, vibratory distractions so we can pay attention more deeply, beautiful. And if it gets OCD, then to hold that with a lot of kindness and with humor, because humor helps a whole lot. And by the way, we always bring our ego tendencies to spiritual practice. So this isn't like just in case this happens to happen. Yeah, of course we do. And one teacher called it spiritual materialism, we do it. So that's why it's like we are trying to remember the gold and our neurotic stuff from the coverings has its play in it. Does that make sense? So we just keep our eyes open and that's where helping each other. So if you see me getting into striving too much or else resigning and giving up or whatever it is that my particular personality is doing, with love you can say, wow, you have all this potential to walk in love and in freedom and to relax and here's, have you noticed this? We have to remind each other. Yeah, one of the most loving things someone ever said to me was they basically invited me to just be, and I said, your job right now is to just be, you don't try to fix anything or accomplish anything or make money with anything and just be in the truth of the situation and the truth of the situation, that are being the love of the situation. So you bring up humor and you use humor quite a bit in your teachings and two parts to this. What is it about humor? Anne Lamont calls it, what did she, carbonated holy water. That's great. That's great. And what is it about humor that helps us access something? And I think some of our kind of spiritual models, they just have this big grin, they're happy people. And the second question is how do you actually organize all of your clippings? Organize all my what? All your clippings. That was one of the areas when I'm helping people tidy their homes. They have a box of scraps of paper of things that inspire them and you always have the right story or not the right one, but the great story or great cartoon for the right moment. Do you have a way that you actually organize your paperwork around that? So what's the rule of humor and spirituality and then how do you, Tara Brock, organize all of your inspo for your talks? Okay. Part one, you know that quote, real famous, I think Chester Dunn or somebody who said angels fly because they take themselves lightly. This spiritual path can get very heavy handed if we are buying into some idea of a separate self that's climbing up a mountain and trying to get to the mountain top to have some transcendent experience gets very heavy and exhausting and like oppressive. And it's a lot more instead of the idea of climbing up a mountain to get to the mountain top, it's more like we're turning around and seeing the world and embracing it and all its messiness and confusion and beauty and mystery. And so it's just not such an individual, effortful thing. I love what you said, Patty, about the shift from doing to being. Because if there's any true meditation, there's a lot of practices that help us become more skillful, that cultivate some good qualities, but the deepest freedom are the meditations where we stop doing anything, we stop trying to control anything, and we just let life be as it is. And in those moments, we start inhabiting the awareness and openness and tenderness that really is the truth of who we are, is the goal. So humor, it helps us to lighten it up and not take that ego self and all its busy doings so seriously. And it also, it feels good and helps to feel good. We get so grim with the negativity bias that we all have, and I know you all know about that. We get so grim, or so quickly going towards what's going to go wrong, that humor is like a great interruption of that. And the biggest grimness is that, I call it the trance of unworthiness, that we move through this life and this path on some deep level thinking we're trying to fix a deficient cell. And it's very deep because it's in the culture. This isn't a personal problem, this trance of unworthiness. We're in a very hierarchical culture that sends all sorts of messages that to be beautiful, you have to look this way and be this color and have this kind of symmetry and have this kind of a body that's not healthy even, and you know what I'm talking about. And to be intelligent, oh my gosh, our children are going in school systems to tell them that intelligence is a certain sliver of left brain intelligence that is just one of many. And then they go up and they feel like they're stupid, which I say that and I always feel like a real sorrow because what a way to crimp a life. So I'm saying all this, the trance of unworthiness is really big. And even if we don't think we're damaged goods, it's like on some level there's a sense of not being enough, which keeps us striving and keeps us heavy. It's like that cartoon of the dog who's saying, it's always good dog this and good dog that, but is it ever a great dog? It's like we have this perfectionism that is so such a setup for suffering. So long-winded way to say, yeah, we need to lighten it up. We need to feel the suffering but also to absolutely intentionally on purpose turn towards the light is and have our bodies and our hearts feel lifted up. Beautiful. It's one of the practices that we do. So each month when we're coming up with our cultivation plans, we base our work here on identity based habit building. So we use mantras for that. I am someone who and it's not grandiose mantras. It's that we have to believe it. It has to feel true when we say it right now today as we are. And the mantras I like people to start with are things like I am human. I am deserving of love or I am enough. And I sometimes wonder when people sign up for a program with the intent of improving their life and that's going to be adequate to satisfy them. It's like the dynamic you were saying around visiting the monk and he's going to be it's going to take just as much but it's that whole curl Rogers idea of I need to love myself and accept myself for who I am before I can make any change happen. So I do see this tension between wanting always wanting to and maybe that's the yoga thing that I lean on a lot of always striving and always letting go at the same time like just staying right at that edge. That can be really hard to do because I'm not hearing you say it's not worth growing and yeah there's a really big difference between striving and wise effort. I think that's where you're going. And I love that you're bringing it up because even the most experienced students I know get stuck on striving. It's very deep in the architecture of our brain to have an idea of a map of where we're going in time, we're going into the future and the who we are and trying to get better. We really like to feel like we're progressing. It makes us feel better about ourselves. So it's one of the deep hooks because ultimately to realize the gold we have to realize we're not going anywhere and it's not a self who's realizing the gold. The gold doesn't really have anything to do with the self. It's when that sense of identity with the self drops away that the gold shines through. It's in those moments and you've all had them where you might be with somebody who's dying and just that ego self just falls away and you're just in a field of loving and tenderness. Or with birth and you're sensing this miracle, this awesomeness and it's just no longer confined by that ego self or in nature. I don't know how many of you do this but I go out and I touch trees and I feel communion with trees and I can feel that dropping away of a familiar ego self. And then it's in silence when we get really quiet. When there's really space, the stories that keep perpetuating that familiar sense of self quiet and there's a vastness that is delicious. It's also scary. It's disorienting if we're not used to it. So much of the path is just starting to get familiar with those moments of not being so confined in that story because we spend a lot of the spiritual path is wrapped in concepts, in ideas about a self getting somewhere. I often think about this is another one of those Zen stories where a novice asks the abbot what happens after we die and the abbot says, I don't know. And the novice says, I thought you were a Zen master and he said, I am but not a dead one. And we can't think our way to freedom and yet we're very habituated to relying on our thoughts to tell us about reality. So it takes a real surrendering and this is a lot of the training of meditation practices of just letting go of the virtual reality, the thoughts, and then opening up into the this-ness. And because we're so unfamiliar with very quickly our default is to hold on again to some idea of what we're doing and what's happening and how we should do it better or whatever it is. And then we let go again, letting go and then letting go of the letting go. It's just a continuous relaxing of the grip until we're resting in a spacious-ness and a wakefulness and a tenderness that's not so confined. Thank you. I have two more questions and then we'll have a moment to answer questions from everyone here in the room too. So in our monthly practice we grab an idea, something that we're curious about that we think might aid our growth in this area of our life. So for someone who's wanting to cultivate more of a deeper authentic spiritual connection or spiritual practice, what are some of the foundational practices growing up Catholic? For me, I was told I had to go to church every Sunday. That was the thing. So what is the thing or the things from your perspective that someone should think about starting with to enter into this? Yeah. When I think of the church on Sunday, the poet Rumi says, do you make regular visits to yourself? And yeah, beyond church on Sunday, we need to pause a lot because we leave ourselves, we go off in that virtual reality. So one of the foundational practices, whether we call it formal meditation or the sacred art of pausing, which I know you're all aware of, is to create some space and just ask those two questions. It's so simple and powerful with what's happening inside me right now. You just notice what happens when you just, what's happening inside me right now. Immediately there's more listening, more presence. And can I be with this or can I let this be? And that gives a little space and tenderness. So that's one piece, is to pause and deepen attention, but not just when you're in a formal meditation practice. Pause, you can pause even while there's activity because it's a consciousness expression. So do it informally too. You can pause just for a moment before eating or before getting out of a car or before going online. Just pause and come back home. And then very related to that, and this is really, I think, at least a regular daily reflection, hopefully many times a day, is keep asking yourself what most matters. The Zen teachers put it, they say, the most important thing is remembering the most important thing. And in the moments that you're really remembering, at times you're going to ask that question, what most matters, and the mind will be spinning because you're disconnected, you're not intimate with the moment, and you'll come up with old things you've thought of in the past. That's okay, quiet a little, but then ask again. If it was at the end of your life looking back, what would most matter? The palliative caregivers, one friend of mine, thousands of people she's been with, said that the greatest regret of the dying is not living true to our heart, not living true to what most matters to us. So to keep asking that I would consider that as another foundational practice for a spiritual life, another thing they'll say, and this is for a spiritual life, especially in this day and age, is self-compassion. Have the intention for self-compassion. The trance of unworthiness is so pervasive, it's not our personal problem, but it's a pervasive sense of not-okayness. And if we can really sense the suffering of it, like how many moments has that sense of being deficient stopped you from being intimate with others, or from enjoying a sunset, or being more risk-taking or creative, we know how much it stops us from living. So to respond to what's going on inside with compassion, really important, and to respond to others with compassion, it just makes a huge difference. And then maybe the – I'm just going to name a few other things that come to mind. A big one which I know you all really value is the power of community, that the truth is we're not on a path doing something alone, we're waking up together. And it breaks through the delusion of a separate self to experience that with each other. So to be with each other in this waking up process, serving is part of the spiritual path. Serving and engaging in our world, I think that one of the delusions of the spiritual path is that it's a lot of inner work, but we can't separate the inner work from how we're walking on this earth. Are we taking – do we know we're belonging to this earth, to all the animals, not just the human ones? And do we engage in our world in a way that helps to relieve suffering? That is part of the spiritual path. In a daily way, it can be in whatever works for our particular body-mind, but that's part of the spiritual path. So I'm naming a lot of things, but it's because I have a very dimensional sense of what it means to be waking up. I don't think of it as put your hands in Gyan Mudra, go into some sort of an altered state with crystal rainbows of light. I really think of it as are we on this earth with each other, cherishing this life and living from that love? Beautiful. And I see how all of these things that you've listed can be applied. Is that clear for everyone around how you could take that? We call them self-care experiments and have that be something that you practice with. I've thinking about my partner who likes his job. It's a job that he's done for a very long time. And one of his spiritual practices is to be really present with all of these many people that he has to interact with every day and just get to know them and open his heart to them. And I think it's beautiful. It's a great example of making it an everyday thing. And part of that is the more dicey inquiries of how am I creating separation? And what are the biases I haven't seen yet that we actually are willing to examine what's uncomfortable because every one of us has control strategies that create separation. And every one of us, because we are conditioned by a hierarchical society that oppresses and diminishes the value of some people, we end up getting inculcated into that. So it's an actual deliberate inquiry to wake up from those trances. Putting that land. Putting that land. So my final question is one of the things that I've brought into my Konmari consulting practice as a direct result of having you and your teachings in my life was realizing when I... So one of the things that we do in the Konmari method is help people face difficult truths and the difficult truth of the logistical situation that they're in when they have a lot of clutter, but often the truth is lurking in the closet. When people go to a therapy room, they bring what they want into that room. When I'm helping someone sort through their belongings, there's stuff lurking that they might have forgotten about that we're going to stumble upon and we're going to face it together there. And so part of this decluttering process is a process of confronting the truth. And that's where we start from is we can confront the truth and the intelligence of what to do with that truth will emerge. It's how we approach it. And so I've brought your mindfulness and compassion into that space so that people meet the truth with kindness and not judgment. So could you elaborate on that for us of some techniques to help people confront the difficult truths that they find themselves in, situations that they find themselves in? Sure. So, Patti, would you like me to talk about it or would you rather... We're going to talk about doing brain meditation that would be wonderful. Yeah, okay. Some of you are familiar, some of you maybe not, that bringing mindfulness and compassion to a difficulty ends up unwinding our identity and it opens us back to the gold. That's basically what it does. It shifts us from the coverings to more of a wholeness. And the acronym I use for mindfulness and compassion is RAIN. It's recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. And I use it in my own life and have done tens of thousands, maybe more times, either briefly or as a longer meditation and we'll just do it briefly now. But the value of it is when we're stuck, when we're in reactivity, we forget how to come back home. So having four steps that are pretty simple can help us to reconnect. So in that spirit, we'll just do a brief practice, keep this five minutes or so just to give you a taste. And if you haven't done it before, there are many recordings and so on that you can access. I'm sure Patty has offered practices that are this or like this. Make yourself comfortable. Make yourself comfortable. And in whatever position works, you're awake enough and relaxed. And just take a few full breaths. And in the way that works for you the best, gently let yourself arrive right here, right now. The invitation is to choose somewhere that you've been encountering difficulty where you know there's something that could use some attention inside. Some situation it could be in a relationship or a work, a habit, maybe addictive habit, where you can sense that there's some healing possible. Not something that brings up trauma or really overwhelming emotions, but something that brings up difficult feelings. And when you have it in mind, bring it in close so as if you're watching a movie you can sense right into the scene where you feel you get hooked, you get reactor, where there's a sense something's wrong, something's wrong with you or with another person or the way life's going. So freeze that frame and go right into it and sense what's the worst part about this. And this is happening. What's it like? The R of rain recognize means just to name, mentally whisper whatever you're most aware of here. It might be fear or anger, anxiety, judgment, embarrassment, whatever it is. Just mentally whisper it. And if there's a few things you can whisper a few things and then just sense into which is most calling your attention. So naming, some strong feeling. And then A is allow. And allow means letting it be there, that you're not fighting reality, you're allowing reality. This is just a part of, it's like a wave in the sea, it belongs. And if you can say this belongs too, this is another wave in the sea of what's going on in my life, in my experience. So on some deep level, making room for what's here, not pushing it away. The I's investigate and that means primarily somatically to let yourself feel where the feelings are strongest. It can help to ask yourself first though, what am I believing? When this is triggered, what am I believing? Am I believing that I failed in some way, that I'm falling short? Or that someone else doesn't care about me or respect me or I'm not important to them? What am I believing? Mostly sense with whatever you're believing, what's it like when you're really hooked, when you're really believing it? And just feel right into your throat, your chest, your belly, probably a familiar feeling. And if you can let your face express it, this will actually bring it deeper. Let your body, your posture, so if it's fear, you can feel the tightness of it. The shame, the kind of sinking or hollow or anger, the clenching, the heat. And with care and interest, go right to where you feel it most strong in your body. Like you're going right to that part of you that's most vulnerable. And if it helps, put your hand on your heart and that's the gesture of your keeping company right now. Keeping company with what's going on. And ask the part that's most reactive, most triggered, most vulnerable, how does it want you to be with it? What does this part most need? Right in this moment, what does it need? Does it need to feel companionship, understanding, forgiveness, compassion, love? What does it need to feel? And as you investigate that, you might take a few full breaths. And even maybe shift your posture a bit so you feel like you're sitting in a more bull awake place. Just invite in your most awake heart, your high self, your bodhisattva self as some call it or your true nature. Just invite in the wisdom and love that lives through you. And send the possibility of offering to this part of you what it needs. Take your time. Take your time. You might sense that you're offering from your own awake heart, love, warmth, light. Feel it go through your hand if your hand is on your heart. Or you might, if it's hard to offer love from your own high self, imagine someone you love. Patty mentioned it earlier. Imagine someone you trust and love. Their energy, their spirit surrounding you, offering in care. See if you can let it bathe you, wash through you. A deep, tender presence so it's as if your spiritual heart is holding your human heart. The holder and the held. And these final moments just sense the presence that's here. Notice the shift from when you started, maybe as the sense of an angry self or hurting self, frightened self to this space of tenderness that's holding. As if you're the ocean holding the waves. Know this is more true than any story you tell yourself about yourself. The sense of the gold, the heart space is more true than the small self. This is your home. You might sense, before you open your eyes, what it is you'd like to remember, what feels important to you right now. Thank you. I want to be mindful of your time. Or do you have a moment to answer a question from your community? Yeah, I can actually stay on for a few more minutes. If you have a question, please raise your hand. And then we're going to wish you all the best. Thank you and goodbye. We're going to stay on as a community and talk amongst ourselves to process and be brave together. Anyone like to ask a question? What is your favorite meditation? Your own. My favorite? Thank you. Your cell. Yeah, it really depends on what's going on. If I'm stirred up, like if I'm triggered, I'll do something like what we just did. I'll do some way of getting in touch with it in my body and holding with compassion and then sensing really who I am that's larger. But if I'm not stirred up, then I'll take some time to quiet my mind with my breath or listening to sound. And then mostly I'm paying attention, I'm resting in awareness and just noticing if a sense of self emerges, just noticing that and relaxing it so I can relax back into a more open, tender awareness. Thank you, Hester. I actually love that question. It's a live one for me. Tara, thank you so much for your time and your care and your tune and to me today and so much. And thank you for all that you do to bring love and harmony and aliveness to the world. Let's, if we can, take a screenshot group picture and look at the camera and it will count us down to three. Ready? One, two, three. Thanks for being part of our scrapbook. This is a collective experience for us. We're going to continue revisiting all that you've shared here and through your other trainings and books and podcasts. One of our members here, Draia, has gone through your meditation training program and so we'll be sure to communicate with our community as well, different ways to plug in beyond. Patty, let me thank you because I can feel from all the things you shared how much alignment and what a rich kind of community and offerings that are going on here. So it just makes me grateful and happy to know. And blessings to each of you. I could just love the quality of presence that's here. Enjoy. Thank you. Be well. Take care. Bye.