The Courage to Love (Part 1)

[music] Welcome and Namaste. There's a story I‘ve heard of three construction workers who are standing in a row next to the traffic and they are all carrying signs. The first one has a big stop sign. The second one has a sign that says “Smell the flowers,” and she is carrying a bunch of flowers in her hand. And the third has a sign that says “Okay, resume tearing through your life like a maniac.” Imagine coming to a traffic stop and seeing that. I think that many of us have a sense of racing through our lives and sometimes, on a more sobering note, I’ll be meeting with someone and they’ll say--actually, this is one of the real feelings of despair, skimming the surface and racing to the end line, which is we are gone - but not really dropping in. And certainly we all know days and weeks and months when we are doing that, when we are continually on our way to something else but we really don’t settle and there is not a sense ever of “Oh, this moment, okay, this is it.” And I often think of the teaching from one palliative caregiver who describes thousands of people, being with them at their deathbed and them talking about their greatest regrets. One of the greatest regrets was “I didn’t live true to myself. I lived according to the expectations of others or according to my own judgments and shoulds and expectations but not true to my heart.” And by extension the regret has to do with not taking the time to really connect deeply with others: that in some way, for whatever reason – fears of intimacy, preoccupation, busyness, whatever it is-- not really being there for that heart-connection. And yet when dust is dust, when we are at the end of our life looking back, for many of us the moments that we would most be cherishing are the moments when we felt that open-hearted belonging with each other. You might just take a moment right here at the beginning of our reflection together to close your eyes and consider today. Scan through today, maybe bringing to mind one person that you were with, a person that you care about, that matters, and notice the degree of open-heartedness and presence. Without any judgment, just take a look. And if it felt like it was missing, with some interest, ask: “Okay, what got in the way?” Was it a habit of being in a rush? Being busy? Was it a habit of being just distracted? Was there some judgment going on of yourself or another? Were you adhering too tightly to a role, in some way trying to control something? This is a larger enquiry than just one person, which is; What in our lives prevents us from having as much intimacy or connection or open-heartedness as we’d like to, with our inner life, with each other, with our world? One of the questions as we look at this is: “What is it that I am unwilling to feel? If I paused with that person and took some more time and really had the intention of being more open-hearted and present, what would be difficult about that, maybe? What would I have to feel on my way to intimacy that would be difficult, awkward, uncomfortable?” You might find that if you paused and dropped in more with that person that you would feel self-conscious or embarrassed in some way or insecure, fearful of being judged. There is some form of vulnerability. You can open your eyes now because this is something we are going to be exploring this together. But I’d like to offer as a frame that our willingness to hang in and feel vulnerable is really the entry to true intimacy, to full loving. It requires a willingness to be vulnerable. And we are deeply, deeply, conditioned to do whatever we can to stay away from vulnerability. It’s deeply part of our wiring. And yet what’s required really in any very full relationship – and even ones that aren’t close in people but where we really want to have contact – is that we put down the habits that we have of defending or protecting or presenting or whatever it is and be more there, more undefended and there. So this is what we are going to explore this class and the next. And if this was all we did for quite a while - which is look at intimacy and vulnerability and how we avoid it and how we can open to it - it would be quite worthy. And as many of you know I choose themes that are very alive in my life. I feel like most everybody I know in some way is on a trajectory of becoming more and more able to be with themselves in a courageous way. And that’s what we’re going to explore: How do we develop our willingness and capacity to be with vulnerability, that courage? So in this talk we’ll look a little bit more at the inner work of being with vulnerability and we’ll extend it to how we can support each other in that process. I like being with that word “courageous” or “courage”. I have been bringing it in more and more. It feels very relevant to our whole evolutionary trajectory. If we think of millions of years of evolution, for quite a long time - for the first millions of years – our species was really living from fight-flight-freeze. We were basically in a kind of reflexive reaction scanning for danger. Our response to any perception of danger was either fight or flight or freeze and there wasn’t what we have now which is sometimes described as a self-reflective awareness where there is an awareness of what was going on and a real choosing about that. As the brain has evolved with this whole neuro net that allows us to be mindful and allows us to have compassion and so on, we can actually see the ways we have a flinch reaction to some sense of danger, some threat to our egos. We can see it and there can be a capacity to choose to pause and instead of reacting, to stay with our feelings, to be there, be there and then maybe to respond from more intelligence, from more creativity, from more compassion. So we can actually train ourselves to stay. And we decide to do so and we choose to even though it’s uncomfortable because each of you has a deep place of wisdom that intuits that, the more you can stay and be honest with your feelings, the more you can open to your vulnerability, the more you’ll be able to open to love. That’s why we choose to stay--because it actually frees us to be more loving, more awake, more present. So the gift of what we are exploring together, the gift of deciding to be with our vulnerability, is that when we open to the vulnerability we open to a loving presence that’s more the truth of who we are than any of the reactive small-self states. We open to our true nature that way. Now here is where I want to make a caveat, which is; when I talk about opening to vulnerability, that doesn’t mean everybody should jump off the cliff right away into their deepest fears and say, “Okay, have at me!” It’s not like that. Especially if there is trauma, if there is really deep intense vulnerability that feels like it could bring up panic or whatever, then the wisdom is really to to do this in a gradual and wise way and do all sorts of ways of resourcing and strengthening and stabilizing ourselves so we are able to stay with the vulnerability in a way that’s transformational, not retraumatizing. Does that make sense when I say that? – that the trajectory is opening up to vulnerability but it’s not all at once in some full-hearted way. There is a science and an art to it that has a lot of sensitivity and compassion. So we’re going to start exploring this and begin by looking at – and this is the question – what do you feel your habits are of avoiding vulnerability? And this isn’t one of those hand raises where I’m going to ask you to say that out loud but I am going to ask you to look within and I’m going to give some examples. The bottom line is that all humans live with a sense of apprehension of what’s going to go wrong, of our demise. We all have a sense that around the corner this body is going to break down and my mind is not going to work - and we are not sure which is going to happen first and we hope they both don’t happen at the same time and soon. But we have that sense that that’s what’s going to happen and it’s going to happen to others we love and we’re going to have losses. Our nervous system has that apprehension. So one teacher said it’s like having a bunch of tense muscles that are resisting, tensing against existence, that we live like that, and the tense muscles are in our body but they are also our emotions and our thoughts. So one of the ways that we try to avoid feeling vulnerability is we control other people. We try to control them. We use our behaviors to try to get them to do what we want them to do, to cooperate with us so that we feel more secure in our lives or get what we want. We try to control them so they’ll treat us the way we want them to. We use judgment and we use threats and we use withholding and we use guilt and we use come-hither approaches to attract. But there is a way in which unconsciously – and you can watch yourself in any interaction – in some way, the way you’re behaving is to get a certain response versus pure spontaneity. So in one story a young girl noticed that her mother’s hair had several strands of grey or white sticking out and the rest of her hair was brunette. And so she asked her mother, “So how come some of your hair is turning white, mom?” And the response was this, “Well, every time that you do something wrong or make me cry or unhappy one of my hairs turns white.” So the little girl is kind of mulling over this revelation for a while and then she said, “Mama, how come all grandma’s hair are white?” So one level for us to look at is how we in some way maneuver other people. Sometimes it’s withdrawing; If you don’t act right, I pull back my affections. Sometimes it’s representing a false self, a self that in some way is meant to look good to others to get their approval. Another way that we try to control and not feel our vulnerability is that we distract ourselves; we distract ourselves on the screen in some way, whether it’s what we are listening to or what we are watching. I saw one cartoon of a little boy in his bedroom and his mom is talking to him and he is responding. He is on a tablet, of course, and he is saying, “Go out and play? What is this, 1962?” Which of course is really sad and true: we know the statistics of each generation having less and less outdoor time because we are hooked on our tablets. And, again, I won’t ask for a hand raise but how many of us know that a lot of the time when we are checking our emails or texts, we don’t have to be doing that? It’s just a kind of a restless thing, right? I am not alone in that, right? Okay, thank you. So the primary control strategy to keep us from our vulnerability is that we spend a huge amount of time in our thoughts, in our virtual reality of thoughts. So, rather than to feel from the neck down – because that’s where vulnerability is experienced – we are spinning stories. There is an incessant inner dialogue that we live in. I sometimes think if somebody else was ever whispering in my ear all the stuff I am talking to myself about, I’d go insane. But it just goes on and on and on. We are in this control tower of thinking and when we first start meditating, you might feel ”Oh, it’s nice!” But after a while there can be the sense, when we are really not inside the thoughts, “ Wow! This is a wild and mysterious and raw place in here, in this body.” So we begin to start noticing how much we are off. One meditation master was asked to describe the world and his response was, “Lost in thought.” Planning obsessing strategizing… One of my favorite little stories between mother and son is; mother sends her son an email that says, “Start worrying. Details to follow.” But you get the idea-- that we are busy up here and it keeps us from actually inhabiting our body. And any time we are in a control strategy, whether we are trying to control another person’s behavior by guilt or withdrawing or whatever it is, or when we are distracting ourselves or are lost in thought, these are moments that we can’t feel the vulnerability and realness of the moment and we can’t be present to really connect. Why don’t you close your eyes again just for a moment. And you might again scan your life and just bring to mind a person who you care about, a person you want to be perhaps more open-hearted, more present, with. And just consider: in any moments that you have an agenda with them, where you’re wanting them different in some way, can you be really present and open-hearted? In any moment when you are presenting yourself in a certain way; as the one who knows, the knowledgeable one, presenting yourself in some way you think that they’ll like or will be approving of, can there be intimacy? When you are wanting yourself to be different, when you are judging yourself – that’s another control strategy -- can there be connection? If you are off in thought, planning, worrying? Just to begin to attune and have this lens of the ways that we maintain disconnection. And then we can begin to ask ourselves: how do we wean ourselves off the control strategies – of trying to control others or being distracted or being lost in thought – how do we wean ourselves and open to the vulnerability of real presence with others? And you can keep your eyes closed or if you’d like to open them – as you listen to this very beautiful poem and invitation by the poet Mark Nepo, “We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time. “”When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy. “It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.” “We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are.” So let’s explore this ungloving, okay? Putting down our strategies. And as often in these talks, I’ll be inviting you to maybe focus on one person you’d like to explore, opening more to the vulnerability and also to the loving that’s possible. So you might keep that in mind so you have somebody in mind when we do our final little practice. Mark Nepo, the poet I just read from, has a way of describing this journey to intimacy. He calls it “the exquisite risk” – and I think that’s a fantastic term. Really he is describing the exquisite risk as the whole spiritual path because it’s not just intimacy with other people, it’s intimacy with ourselves and our world. It always involves letting go of coverings, of defenses, of habits that we’ve been holding on to. And the word “exquisite” connotes beauty and it connotes sensitivity and excellence and responsiveness. So it’s an exquisite process. And “risk?” The felt sense is that there is something dangerous because we are so used to protecting ourselves against that “What’s next?” feeling that something around the corner is dangerous so we armor ourselves. So there is a sense of danger there, exposure to feeling some threat, exposure to loss, exposure to embarrassment. The “exquisite risk.” And the reality is: We will get hurt, you know. They sometimes describe dating as a contact sport. It’s inevitable in being with each other… One of the other metaphors was the prickly porcupines that inevitably prick each other but still find a way to huddle for warmth. Well, we will hurt each other and we will have losses. And yet the ungloving, the undefended heart, discovers… we discover a heart-space that has room for all of that. That’s where the freedom is. So we are talking about how to wean ourselves from the control strategies and be willing to be vulnerable. And I remember years ago seeing a picture, a cartoon, with two sheep are talking and a third one is across the field and they are saying to each other, “You know, every time he comes home from being shorn we have to spend hours talking about how vulnerable he feels!” So I sometimes think of those sheep when I am talking about this. And yet, again, we have that intuition that it’s worth it, we have that intuition that the exquisite risk is worth it to us. I read recently something written by Madelaine L’Engle – I am not pronouncing her name right –the author of Wrinkle In Time. She wrote, “Over the years I have worked out a philosophy of failure which I find extraordinarily liberating. If I am not free to fail, if I am not free to take risks - and everything in life that’s worth doing involves a willingness to risk - I can never really flourish.” And she describes how for Wrinkle In Time she received nearly thirty rejections before she found a publisher for it--which I think is amazing. That was my all-time favorite childhood book. She writes, “The same thing is true in all human relationships. Unless I am willing to open myself up to risk and to being hurt then I am closing myself off from love and friendship.” So we begin this pathway of opening to vulnerability by having that as our intention, that it is conscious, that the next time you are with somebody that matters to you there is something in you that goes, “Oh yes, to be real this might involve a little bit of rawness, discomfort, vulnerability.” And one of the ways of thinking of the pathway is-- many of you might remember-- the story of the Buddha after his enlightenment. He went through the next fifty years teaching about the path of compassion and wisdom and, still, the shadow-side would keep appearing. All the feelings of vulnerability, of fear, of hurt, of anger, all the intense passions would come up. And so when Mara – that was the God of all the shadow-side– would appear, often the Buddha would be teaching. There’d be a big field of people and Mara would be lurking around the edges, and, as the story goes, Ananda, who was the Buddha’s loyal attendant and beloved friend too, would see Mara and go, “Oh no! this is bad news! Bad bad bad! Mara is here!” And he would tell the Buddha and the Buddha would say, “Oh no, no, no, it’s okay.” He would go over to Mara and say, “I see you, Mara. Let’s have tea.” “I see you, Mara. Let’s have tea.” And so it is when we start encountering vulnerability. If, instead of that reflex to control, to go off into our thoughts, to plan, to strategize, there is some part of us that goes, “Okay, I see this, this is the vulnerability. Can I have tea with it? Can I be with it?” we will be opening the door in a radical way to deepening our capacity for love and for presence. I would like to give you an example of “Tea with Mara” from my own life that has to do with choosing vulnerability. I’m going to give you a few examples and then we’re going to practice it together. So this was a story… this actually came from early in my marriage. When I first met my husband, when I first met Jonathan, I was really, really physically active. I had been running five days a week. I would go for runs and so on, I was pretty athletic. Within two years of being together I started getting sicker and sicker and two years in I was so sick that I was unable to do most physical activities. A lot of our bonding came around boogie boarding in the ocean and biking and hiking. And I could barely… I mean, I couldn’t even walk up an incline, I was getting very immobilized. I have a connective tissue disorder. I am actually a lot better now but I hit a really bad downward spiral that actually lasted about six years. So there I was, a couple of years into this new relationship, and I wasn’t the woman he had married so to speak. It was very evident to me that I wasn’t going to pull out quickly. And I remember after one particular time when we had been away, really dropping into depression, feeling so much of what I loved in life I was deprived of and so on. And so I withdrew into myself and pulled away from him and distanced from him. We’d have conversations about what was going on and he would try to offer good advice and that of course, the fixing, made me insanely judgmental. And so I got down on him and then down on myself. So it was a really difficult period. I remember at one point being on a hammock and I was swinging on it and I was recognizing how cut off I felt and depressed and the self-judgment. (You’ll notice RAIN which is really “tea with Mara:” it’s recognizing what’s happening. “I see you, Mara,” letting it be there and then having tea; really investigating and nurturing) For those of you that are unfamiliar: RAIN is an acronym that really helps us have tea with Mara. R-A-I-N… The Recognizing is: you just get it. I got it for myself with recognizing, “Okay, depression, self-judgment, distancing.” And then the A is Allow; “Okay, just let it be there” and I realized I needed to stay. I felt bad enough that it wasn’t working to do my control strategies of withdraw or judge or anything. I needed to stay. So then I began to investigate – that’s the I of RAIN – that’s when we are really having tea. It’s like if you are getting to know a friend you start saying, “Okay, what’s really going on?” So I started asking myself that. And what I found out in Investigating is that I was really ashamed of being sick, that in some way it was… it made me feel that I was less than, that something was really wrong with me as a human that I was sick, I wasn’t doing sickness well, and I also felt this vulnerability that I was no longer an attractive, appealing mate. I was no fun. I was the opposite of fun, I was really a drag. So in the Investigating I got in touch with the essence of Mara for me at these moments was a feeling of vulnerability and fear that I’d be rejected by this man I loved, that I was going to be rejected. So that had that quality of “Ouch.” It was real suffering. Then I asked a question I often ask to get to the N of RAIN – which is Nurturing – which is, “How does this place want me to be with it?” And clearly what this part of me that was feeling ashamed and vulnerable needed was me to offer care. So I put my hand on my heart and I did what I often do which is, “It’s okay sweetheart” Just a real kindness and just sensing loving energy from inside and around me just washing through me. The more – and this is a comment – the more you get in touch with the suffering, the more powerful the nurturing. In other words: if you really contact the vulnerability you’ll find that you can then be very nurturing. And I was feeling a lot of vulnerability. So the more that I offered care, the more there was the sense of space and tenderness and, rather than being caught in that vulnerable, rejectable self, I had reopened to a spacious presence that was kind-hearted towards myself. I knew I needed to then share with Jonathan what was going on. But that brought up a wave of new vulnerability. And it took probably… In my whole life it was one of the most courageous things for me to be willing to stay with that vulnerability and share with him that this is what’s happening. And of course when one person is vulnerable, the other person is free to be able to express from their vulnerability. So he could then share how powerless he felt and how scared he felt, and how hard it was to love me but not be able to help me. And it was probably one of the deepest bonding experiences we have had – which wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been willing to have tea with Mara, be with that vulnerability. So for me one of the most powerful teachings about the pathway to love is to be willing to stay with the vulnerability. We got married soon after. And we built into our wedding ceremony vows that had to do with being real in that way. And one was a quote from Rilke and it says, “I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed. For where I am closed I am false. I want to stay clear in your sight.” Now sometimes when we contact fear or vulnerability that’s really deep and we need to have tea with it, we first need to sense some safety, some larger belonging, or some love in the universe that can help us hang in there. So part of the training that we are talking about - to be willing to open to vulnerability – is really a training when we are feeling vulnerable to find some pathway to something that feels loving in our life. I want to share with you a story about Mahatma Gandhi that really struck me. As a young man he was really shy, he was tongue-tied, he was plagued by fears and doubts. In other words, he went around with an enormous sense of vulnerability. And it particularly would come out in the courtroom when he was terrified to present an argument and in challenging situations with other people. And even as a child, very, very young, he was a very obsessive and fearful child. So there is a story of one of the family servants who was touched by this young boy – because daily he’d run into her arms and tears after being bullied at school – and what she said to him was, “Whenever you are threatened, instead of running away, stand firm, stay in touch, but repeat the mantra ‘Rama, Rama, Rama’ and this will turn your fear into courage.” So it took some years for him to immerse into that practice. But I tell this because growing up he was a very vulnerable, not a powerful man. And his practice of feeling vulnerability – calling on love, because “Rama” is another word for God for him-- turning to the connection with a larger, loving field of energy gave him courage Courage is when we are willing to stay. One more example. A story. There is first a quote. Veronica Tugaleva writes, “Emotional pain cannot kill you but running away from it can. Allow, embrace, let yourself feel, let yourself heal.” Emotional pain cannot kill but running away from it can not only shut us down but it also can be hurtful to others because then we act in ways that can cause suffering. One woman that I worked with years ago, her story was that her daughter had been addicted to heroin and in and out of treatments for a handful of years – since she was seventeen or something like that – and each round she’d get out and her mother would help her get cleaned up and give her money and housing and then she’d relapse. She promised she’d do it right this time and she’d relapse. And so it was a complete enmeshment. And what was going on inside her, her thoughts were, “If I don’t save her she’ll die. She’ll die from an overdose or be killed on the streets.” So she was really caught in it. For her to have Tea with Mara –I am giving you an example that was just wrenching – her controlling, the way she stayed away from dropping fully into the vulnerability was to try to keep on trying to save her daughter. For her, when she realized – and a friend of hers told her that she was traumatized herself and contributing to the suffering – for her to be able to say, “Okay, I am not going to try to save her” and then say, “How do I have the courage to be with what’s in there? Because what’s in there is the terror of her dying,” was one of the most challenging things this woman could ever face. And so her pathway was to call on the Divine Mother. I mean, she had a sense that there was something larger and loving in the universe that was part of her and larger than her. And so she practiced just sensing a field of light and love and it was like she took her fear – “I am afraid my daughter is going to die” – and it was too big for her to hold it so she said, “Please, hold this.” She surrendered it into something larger over and over again, something larger holding her and holding that fear. And what happened gradually was it was like unplugging a bottle. She got in touch with the grief. For weeks and weeks all she could do was weep. But she was staying. That was the vulnerability. She was grieving a loss, you know, she could no longer control what was happening. Gradually, by surrendering into the Beloved and staying with feeling, the vulnerability, holding it and just being with it and surrendering to it, she started finding in that grieving a very vast tenderness that had space And she had self-compassion, compassion for her daughter, and finally she was able from her heart-wisdom to create the boundaries that she needed to. And the next time her daughter relapsed and then came back after a month on the streets she didn’t do it. She wasn’t available to her. Her daughter made it. I want to tell you this. Not all stories have a happy ending but her daughter made it, her daughter held her boundaries, her daughter not only made it, she ended up becoming a counselor working with young women and so on. But it was the hardest thing she had ever done. And the only way she could do it was because she opened to a more mature way of loving her daughter. Does that make sense? She loved her daughter all along but she was loving and trying to control and the only way to a more mature loving was by opening to the terror and opening to the grief. I share that story because as we practice together and sometimes you can practice with somebody in your mind and in your life that you want to be open-hearted with and there is not like a traumatizing vulnerability, it’s vulnerable and it’s not easy but it’s not trauma, and it’s easier to bring compassion to yourself and breathe with it and then sense what is creatively possible with that person. But other times the vulnerability is so deep that it takes a lot of preparing by calling on love first before you can open really fully to the vulnerability. So as you practice now – and we are going to end… you might just bring yourself into a position to practice – choose a relationship where you’d like to be more intentional, more present and more undefended. But don’t choose a relationship that brings up a lot of trauma for you because it won’t serve you in this setting. Start with a relationship where it is more doable, where you can actually practice a little. It’s still an exquisite risk. Any choice to stay present and to be vulnerable is an exquisite risk. So: bringing up a relationship where you’d like to be more there, more courageously present, as if you are at the end of your life looking back and you’d really be more true to yourself. And as you have this person come to mind, sense your intentionality; that there is a willingness to explore that exquisite risk of uncovering, of opening a bit to the vulnerability that is in all of us--at your own pace. And you might scan and look for a situation with that person that illustrates where you get blocked, where in some way you move into your control strategies, you get caught up in getting distracted or judgmental or presenting yourself in some way or withholding, whatever it is. Where it’s hard for you to really land and arrive. And just to bring the lens a little closer, you might ask yourself, “In that situation, what is it I am unwilling to feel? What might happen if I really paused and opened more and became more present?” And that’s beginning to have tea with Mara, that’s where you can start recognizing, “Oh, okay, if I allow myself to pause and open, hmm, there is a fear that I’ll be judged or I’d have to put down a judgment, and there is a fear that that person will never change in the way I’ll want them to or I’ll never get what I want. Or there is just an awkwardness that if I stopped thinking or controlling or acting the way I normally do I won’t know how to be, I will be embarrassed.” So we begin to have tea with Mara by recognizing – this is RAIN – “Oh that’s what’s going on!” and the A of RAIN, “Allow, it, just let it be there,” that’s the beginning of this willingness to stay, just let it be there, as if as you pause at the frame with this person They are still there but you are letting yourself really go inside. You begin to investigate and just feel in your body where you are uncomfortable. What’s going on inside you? You can include in investigating, “Well, what am I believing?” Because maybe there is some belief like, “Well, if I really open up some, the other person will judge me and not like me. They’ll be uncomfortable, they’ll want distance”. Or believing “If I put down my judgment or my agenda with that person, they’ll never change and I’ll never really have the person I want to be close to.” What am I believing? But with whatever you find, come back to your body. Feel your throat, your chest, your belly, and sense where is the most vulnerability. Where do you feel most uncomfortable, scared, hurt, embarrassed? Breathe with that. And you might even, if it feels strong, put your hand on your heart and keep company. Because that’s the beginning of Nurturing. Keep yourself company. Nurturing deepens when you just really bring love to that place, the part of you that’s uncomfortable. You might send a message. “It’s okay” or “It’s okay sweetheart” or just “This belongs, this is natural.” You might have a mantra like “Rama” like Gandhi did. You might imagine the Divine Mother or some spiritual field of loving or light washing through you. Bring kindness to the place that feels vulnerable. See how much you can wash through your heart with a gentleness, a kindness. And sense the presence that wakes up, the heart-space that opens when you’ve had the courage to feel the vulnerability and bring kindness to it. And you might from the heart-space that’s here now bring the other onto your screen again and sense more choice in how you might relate with that person, what might be possible. Just sense: What might be possible? Might you listen more? Ask them more questions that are real questions? Share something more truthful about yourself? Maybe you’ll decide to in some way let them know you are caring about them, that you want to have them feel the care. Or something you appreciate about them. Sense the choices that open up. You might imagine in the days and weeks to come that whenever you are with that person there can be a bit more presence with the real feelings inside you, a pausing. And more creativity and choice in the quality of presence you bring. More freedom to respond from Loving Presence. Again Mark Nepo: “Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves. So that the door knob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.” Namaste and thank you for your attention. [flute music]