Join Loch Kelly the creator of the mindful glimpses app here as he shares a deep dialogue with psychologist, meditation teacher and author, Tara Brach. As friends and colleagues they explore the critical themes of waking up consciousness and fostering an open heart in the midst of today’s stressful world. The dialogue emphasizes the need for radical acceptance and compassionate activity rooted in awake consciousness as the best response to the pain in the world. Both of them offer steps to begin to uncover the already awake consciousness within us.
The conversation gracefully weaves through topics of ways to integrate psychology and meditation, the impact of social identities, and the importance of recognizing our belonging to the larger living planet. Tara and Loch share personal insights and practices that lead to a profound sense of interconnectedness and compassion.
43:52 The episode features Loch offering a guided practice which is designed to explore Emotions as Awareness Energy. These mindful glimpses serve as invaluable tools for experiencing ways to access the awake consciousness that is already here within all of us.
You can now explore all of Loch Kelly’s practices and teachings on the new mindful glimpses app. This innovative meditation and wellness app offers daily micro-meditations, step by step programs, and simple-yet-advanced tools for awakening.
Tara Brach, a prominent figure in Western Buddhism, merges psychology and Eastern spirituality. With a background in psychology and political science, she explored yoga during grassroots organizing, later embracing Insight Meditation. Holding a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, she integrates mindfulness into psychotherapy. Through her podcast and global teachings, she emphasizes emotional healing, spiritual awakening, and compassionate action, addressing societal issues. Additionally, Tara is the author of the book ‘Radical Acceptance,’ now being re-released in its 20th Anniversary Edition.
Connect with Tara Brach:
Loch Kelly is the creator of the Mindful Glimpses app, award winning author, psychotherapist, and meditation teacher known for his unique practical methods that support awakening as the next natural stage of human development. Backed by modern neuroscience and psychology, Loch introduces Effortless Mindfulness, an ancient form of nondual meditation that allows immediate access to our embodied awake nature which arises as calm, clarity, and compassion.
Connect with Loch:
Mobile App: https://lochkelly.org/loch-kelly-mindful-glimpses-app-download
Website: https://lochkelly.org/
Donate: https://lochkelly.org/donate
The Effortless Mindfulness Podcast is brought to you by our 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity. Our mission is to make learning how to tap into your inner resources simple, teachable, and accessible to everyone.
Episode Transcript
Loch: Welcome to the Effortless Mindfulness Podcast. I’m Loch Kelly, and here I share talks and deep dialogues with leading experts in the field of meditation, psychology, and neuroscience. Together we’ll explore how everyday people, like you and me, can live an awakened life of clarity and compassion. You’ll also find micro meditations in every podcast episode.
If you want to try more of these, you can go to mindful glimpses. com to download the new app. To experience immediate benefits because the love and peace we are all seeking is already here. Anywhere. Anytime. Enjoy.
Hi and welcome everyone. It’s my great pleasure today to be here, dialoguing with my friend and colleague, Tara Brach.
Welcome Tara.
Tara: I feel really delighted to be with you, Loch.
Loch: So wonderful to have a chance with all the busy schedules to dive deeply into things that we both love and have a vision to share with others. And now we can share together while others listen.
Tara: Yeah, it’s my idea of a good Dharma party.
Loch: Yes, that’s right. This is what I love. Yeah, I know that just whenever I get a chance to hear you and what you’re doing, I get natural sympathetic joy. So it’s oh, effortless sympathetic joy arising because, yeah, go Tara, go!
Tara: Oh, I’m glad I’m serving in that way. And it’s mutual, of course.
I feel like we’ve been tracking each other for a good number of years.
Loch: Yeah, so I just wanted to start with that, just to say that it’s a delight. And just to begin, by talking a little about, I noticed that your book, which I am rereading, Radical Acceptance, published about 20 years ago.
But as I read it, it was like, oh, it’s almost like it’s your new book. It’s literally the themes are what we’re both still talking about and almost are still cutting edge. So I just thought I wondered as you look at it today. What’s new? What’s the same? What is the core of what you were communicating then that’s fresh now?
Tara: Oh, thank you for that invitation. Yeah, so 20th Anniversary Edition. And it’s got a new chapter and a new forward and introducing the RAIN meditation and so on. And I wanted to do this. I wanted to have the chance to bring it forward again. It feels like this is such a time of dividedness, the hostility, the contempt.
It’s amongst so many of us. I feel myself going into that kind of dividedness and demoting others in my mind because of their views. And it just felt so important. It feels like the only healing for these times is waking up consciousness, awake awareness. And an awake heart. So I wanted to really make it fully relevant to these times including our identities, how we get caught in social identities and don’t see each other, really don’t see who’s there. And including how we forget our belonging to this larger living planet and don’t navigate in a way that’s sensitive and conscious.
Radical acceptance basically means to completely allow without any resistance or opposition the experience that’s unfolding. And in that allowing, we open to a presence that has the kind of intelligence and compassion that can respond. So it’s not passive, it’s actually the grounds for activism, but more spiritually rooted activism.
So thank you for inviting that out because I’m excited to bring consciousness practices into the world that are so linked to what is going on right now.
Loch: Yeah, as you say, it’s as social animals, there is a tendency to want to be part of a group and to bond. But then that connection that keeps us in the more family or smaller sense and creates this otherness that makes us feel that movement to the bigger we, to the global family, is what’s needed not just through politics or actions, but also through transformation of consciousness. Which is really seeing that we are the same and that we’re passionately, no matter what the view is, passionately feeling that we’re protecting something valuable by trying to hold a position about it.
Tara: I love the way you’re framing it because I often think of the whole evolution of consciousness as waking up to that belonging, knowing that. But it’s not intellectual, it has to be a felt sense that the life that’s living through you, the awareness that’s looking through your eyes is completely the same.
And that’s what wakes up caring. And it’s interesting. Right before we connected here, I was reading an article in Scientific American that has to do with insects being sentient and having feelings, feeling pain and joy. I feel like it takes really training our attention to wake up past some idea of a hierarchy where humans are better, more worthwhile, and between humans, where different groups feel better, or more worthwhile.
It’s very much part of our survival brain to actually make those differences, to feel inferior and superior. Yet we have this capacity to wake up out of that. And that takes to me a real dedication to sense this living world as sentient. That’s a radical thing. But when we actually feel it, like we look at a tree and there’s a sense, I have this mantra, I’ll say, we are friends and then feel the realness of that.
Everything changes.
Loch: It does, yeah. And through that movement from like we often do like a research study and then some great understanding or philosophy. And then what’s the practice to actually feel that rather than just think it or understand it or repeat it? Because then it becomes a belief system rather than a lived experience.
So yeah, there was a study, I think at Dartmouth. They took groups of people that were all along the spectrum and flashed pictures of people similar and different. And there would be visceral reactions of positivity and visceral reactions no matter what the – how liberal or radical – of otherness that made people. So it is this survival instinct, as you say. So it takes that acceptance of that. Not negating it or not saying it’s bad to have that, or if we’re spiritual we wouldn’t feel that.
That’s I think something you and I have in common, it’s you know what, we’re human beings. We got feelings, we got emotions, we got all the default, settings. And the first arrow that arises of anger or hatred is just arising. It’s the response that is possible and not only response, but the compassion to that that changes. And the type of compassion I think is, we talk about, I think that’s the key because there’s levels of compassion, or depth of meditative possibility, of discovering.
What both you and I talk about is just being kind, being compassionate, attitude adjustment, positive thinking, expression of that. And then a kind of deep discovery of a natural compassion, a loving awareness or open-hearted presence or that we are the love. And then we can express or see through those eyes.
Tara: That’s a powerful, beautiful way of describing both the capacity to cultivate compassion and also the spontaneous compassion that arises when there’s a wide open presence. And if we bring that to what we were just talking about, that we are wired to see difference, we’re wired.
And so to feel guilty, I’ve spent a lot of moments investigating white guilt, all the guilt for feeling I am responsible. I’m not doing enough to alleviate the horror of racial violence. And my own process, just to make it very personal, was just what you were describing. Which was I had to face, and this is ongoing, this is not a fait accompli, but face the conditioning that, my mind judged as really ugly, and face it.
And feel the suffering of it. Feel how it actually created separation, it imprisoned me, and made me not know my belonging to others. And it was when I felt the realness of that suffering that, I’m putting my hand on my heart because I do that sometimes, that there was a tenderness and an acceptance of, just as you said, this is just this body mind’s conditioning. But in that presence, there was a capacity to see beyond the ways that I had been creating separation.
And like you said, it takes practice. I have one friend who described how he’d be on the subway. He’d notice himself in that classic, making others other, the unreal other who’s less than. And he would then meditate on the word thou. He would just sense them and sense spirit, sacredness, the sentience living through them and just mentally whisper thou.
And it dissolved that, that separateness and it’s like the gift of bringing our attention to how we create separation. Holding it with complete compassion. And then being able to see beyond and start to foster that sense of true belonging. We can’t be alone on this planet if we truly know our belonging to the insects and the trees and those of different races and onward.
And I guess I just keep coming back to there’s motivation to do that. Because there’s some deep part of our being, our already awake heart mind that really longs for that true belonging. Not the belonging to a subgroup and feeling, rah, we’re the best, but that true belonging, because that’s the only way there’s a truly fearless heart. And a loving heart is knowing we’re all, knowing that oneness.
Loch: Beautiful. Yeah, as you shared personally about your experience, I immediately went back to going early on to Asia and being introduced in a kind of a deep way to meditation and starting in Sri Lanka, doing nine months of Vipassana and insight meditation, both at the university and then doing, five-day retreats, 10-day retreats, 21-day retreats, and then going up.
And having the good fortune of meeting Tibetan teacher Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. And getting a full introduction into all the traditions, having done some Zen before that. Feeling they all were connected. But I just remember after having a kind of initial dropping into that meditative insight that’s experiential, feeling like do I want to stay and be a monk? And I was like, no, I want to go back to New York City where people are suffering. And finish, do a social work degree and write in to my family. Because that’s where it feels like that, meditation and action leads to almost a playful joy of we’re all kids in a playground. But everyone’s innocent and suffering and a little bit crazy.
Tara: I love it. It’s the essence of the Bodhisattva path. The path of an awakening being, is if you know your belonging, why leave the field of beings that we’re all a part of? And that doesn’t mean that we don’t take, as you did, take real time in a quiet contemplative retreat. But there’s something so beautiful and powerful about holding hands and helping.
I just think the activity of awareness is love. And of course it gets confused and twisted. And we have all the expressions in the world of cruelty and ignorance. But the original impulse of awareness is love.
Loch: Yes. Yeah. That’s that expression, its freedom and almost absence of negativity, like non-judgmental, almost neutral or free.
But then as that nondual. In the sense of pure awake awareness recognizes not other than aliveness. When we drop deeply, we go, oh, there’s shame. Oh there’s guilt. There’s that memory of I did all that. Oh that person did it to me. We go out, we go in. But willing to go deeper and then include this with a real full on the cushion, off the cushion way of being in the unfolding of this awakening. Which seems like it’s the potential for just human development rather than some esoteric, advanced, Olympic athlete thing.
Tara: I’m with you. It feels like that is the hope. And you also are pointing to where the stuck place is and the suffering, which is the activity of awareness is love, there’s a basic goodness. So many people say I can’t find it. I don’t trust it. If there’s basic goodness, how come I feel hatred and anger?
It feels to me like one of the most powerful ways of deepening attention is to start realizing that every emotion is intelligent. And it gets torqued because we get caught in the sense of a separate self. And we get all identified and twisted and so on. Like a hose that gets twisted and the water’s not flowing through.
We can pay attention in a way that naturally untwists when instead of adding that second arrow that you described of, oh, this is bad or I’m bad, finding out deep down really investigating those emotions, anger, and finding right embedded inside anger is an energy that is trying to in some way protect us, serve us, it anticipates something is an obstacle to our unfolding.
And if we can sense that. I think of it as life loving life. There’s a life loving life energy at the heart of every emotion. And then we can sense the way it got twisted. Our awareness, because we’re not judging, is actually a healing attention that can untwist that hose and allow the waters to flow and actually get integrated in our whole body. So a lot of what I’ve been doing and working with people is when they’re stuck saying what’s that part trying to do for you?
And I know you have similar approaches, because if we actually sense the fears trying to protect us. If we sense that we can say thank you to the fear, I’m okay right now, but thank you. The relationship with that part shifts. So there’s some actual possibility of untwisting the fear and freeing up what’s under it, which is a care about life.
Loch: Yeah, beautiful. And, with the different psychological and contemplative views we have, I think that’s something we certainly have very much in common. You can experience that feeling or emotion on many different levels. Almost like eyeglasses, or a microscope, or electron microscope. Or then a sub personality, or a persona.
So that we don’t just spiritually zap it away with awareness or mindfulness, as if it’s just a story, or just a thought, as one type of way of working with it. But as you say, it’s almost like off the cushion. The way I find that emotions arise is sometimes they’ll arise as a natural emotional reaction response to a loud sound. Just fear, or initial anger, will get triggered.
But then often, they form into thoughts, feelings, sensations, worldview. And they sneak up the back of one’s head and then take over and feel like I’m possessed. Then adrenaline and cortisol goes into the body from there so that it’s this must be true because it’s embodied and happening now. So from here, what do I know and what are the options?
So in some ways, what I call the mindful move, that first ability to step back or to pause, or to take a breath, but the breath leads to an openness. And then this other level of consciousness that is, with, but not possessed, and then not staying in a detached witness.
But finding a way, as you do with RAIN, to then continue back to include and have a felt sense of what exactly is this part that feels angry. Where is it in my body? What is it saying? And what age is it even, sometimes. But sometimes it’s multiple ages, but it’s got a view. And as soon as you realize that there are parts that you don’t have to be egoless.
You don’t have to be… I’m either a self that is fearful or I’m no self. But no, I’m awake consciousness that has these parts. Some are very functional. Some are not so functional, some are. But there’s the where you’re aware from. Which level of mind you’re mindful from starts to be the center. But it doesn’t, as you say, eliminate. … It gives you actually more capacity to be a sensitive human being.
Tara: I love the clarity in that, in the sequence that you described. It’s very intuitive and wise. And one of the things I think a lot of people want to know and want to trust, but have a hard time is that awake awareness is the truth of who I am. That these are parts. They don’t define me. I am not my fear. I am not my anger. And so it feels to me that a lot of spiritual practice is really about cultivating the quality of attention. This accepting, compassionate, clear attention, relaxed attention, that allows us to disentangle our identity from the part.
I’ll never forget one point somebody shared the story about a wise sage. People would bring their problems, where they were most stuck, most small, most feeling like they were unworthy. He would swear them to silence, and he’d say, I have just one question.
That is, what are you unwilling to feel?
And it seems so clear that it’s our resistance to feeling life that keeps us identified with the small self. The small self is a patterning of resistance to what is true right here and now. And you described very beautifully the way of, we have to pause. There are these patterns that keep us identified. So the sacred art of pausing, if we can just remember just to pause for a moment.
Just that. Yeah, that’s exactly right, ah. Because if we’ve paused, there’s a little more space, a little more remembrance of presence. That can allow us then to have the courage to feel what’s here. And the tenderness to feel what’s here in a way that transforms not the thing but the sense of identification. Which is the whole deal as one of the things I’m finding so helpful is that even once there is a sense of resting in a larger presence, there’s often these different thoughts and feelings that re-snag. And it becomes really helpful then to, where is the self that’s experiencing this? What I’ve noticed is actually inviting ourselves to sense, okay, where is it living?
Like finding a place in a felt sense that correlates with that familiar sense of a self that’s owning experience, that’s running experience, whatever. That if we can connect with that, it’s possible then to just invite that sense of a self to relax in and as the awake awareness that’s truly its home.
But we have to see it. We have to catch it. It’s like a ghost self.
Loch: Yeah. Because it’s always trying to go one up on everything else. It’s are you aware of your feeling? Yes, I am. Are you aware of the one that’s aware? Yes. In fact, I’m mindful of that one. Oh, I see. And I call that often a transitional subject, not a transitional object. Like when you’re trying to bond with and self soothe.
But so as you said before, getting used to that home base that is actually everywhere, nowhere, and here, and is more of a awake presence, open-hearted field that is aware, actually, from within your body as much as all around and interconnected. So it’s almost, that’s the home base. It isn’t just this separate battery of a physical animal that is physically separate.
And that’s one of the keys is to recognize, no, I will always feel. In fact, it’s important to feel separate physically from that tree. Or from as I’m driving a car. So there’s a separate dualistic level of experience that is important and that feelings happen within there. But who they’re happening to isn’t a point of view.
And that feeling at first to the current protective system or ego defenses is Oh wow, it’s a little spaced out or that’s a little woo. That’s oh, there’s no ground here. But if you stay there, it’s like, what’s the ground made of? Oh, it’s made of space. But it’s not just space, it’s dancing.
It’s alive and it’s, oh, and it’s not other. That little pointing. That’s been my interest is okay, if this is already here, as is said in, what you write in and reference in Radical Acceptance and your teachings, and I do as well, as a unique premise. There is development and training. But there also is more unlearning and untraining in order to discover something that’s already here, not something that’s. … So giving some trust, and courage, and support to almost directly recognize this. Then abide, and then include. And the key to living from it is to immediately have to include the triggers that will then come up.
And say, wait a minute, what are you doing? You’re going, you’re not gonna be able to function from here. Thank you for sharing. Yeah.
Tara: Yeah. What you’re saying most of the liberating practice is undoing. It’s like having a clenched fist. If you just bring awareness into the clenched fist, there’s no self that has to unclench.
There’s a natural– the muscles know how to do it. Awareness knows how to wake up. We just need to pay attention. And I feel like the message for me behind what I’m listening to is that the more we get familiar with boundless awake awareness, it’s every time there’s that glimpse, there is some place in us that knows that this is more true than any story or narrative ever.
There is a resonance of truth. And the more glimpses, the more sense that not just I’m going to let go into awake awareness but awake awareness is what I am. That keeps calling us. And one of the things I’ve noticed in a lot of teachings is you refer to emptiness dancing. How there’s just this living dynamic. That there’s a kind of dry emptiness where there’s a sense of awake awareness. But it’s very vast and there’s something really wonderful and yet there’s no tenderness.
What feels crucial is, and you talked about this earlier, is that we sense the awareness that is in and through our bodies. And it means really living and feeling from the inside out, that awareness that’s in and through our bodies. And through and around in every direction and that is continuous space that’s filled with the light of awareness.
It’s whole. And then when something comes up, there’s a natural tenderness in the response. It’s like the Tibetans talk about the three qualities of awareness as being that openness and that wakefulness, that knowing, and a natural tender responsiveness. And we don’t get that third quality, unless we’re really embodied, inhabiting it.
So I feel like the more glimpses, and I want a name right here that I’m going to be the one to bring it up. Loch has a new app that is just wonderful. It’s just wonderful. It has all different pathways to glimpsing, to really sensing the larger truth of what we are, whether it’s, a one minute practice or a longer practice.
So I just want to bow to you, Loch, because I know the amount of energy and… what it takes, blood, sweat and tears to create an app. And it’s really wonderful.
Loch: Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah. It just felt like it’s the delivery system or the contact place that people need in the midst of a busy life.
And that because it is already here, they can do a glimpse. And then what I call marinate, for longer periods of time, instead of meditate. You just glimpse, recognize, realize, embody. Feel open-hearted and now turn off, put the phone away. But you have, now you’re given a short pointing.
That’s been my interest, like you, is how to bring this into contemporary forms to translate not only the language from the cultures of contemplatives of all traditions, not just from Western traditions as well as Eastern traditions and psychological traditions and neuroscience traditions of freedom and joy and maturity as well. And give tools that are experiential rather than just written supports.
This is something that I felt would be a way to share with people so they could make it part of their lives wherever they are. And that’s how I set up the intro course. Natural calm is the first one, which is calm abiding, Samatha, but different ways to do that.
And then the second one is types of mindfulness, deliberate and effortless. And then embodiment. Then I introduce a kind of way of doing this called local awake awareness. Which is a way to actually unhook and drop and have awareness know itself both within and outside. Rather than efforting to do it or trying to imagine doing it. And then embodiment, and what I’m calling there awake loving flow.
Which you and I have translated in 12 different ways because we want to try to get at it somehow, open-hearted awareness. Ram Dass called it loving awareness. You’d sometimes call it open-hearted presence. So there’s something there, or heart mind. Those three moves from, being introduced to mindfulness and which it unfolds naturally through Theravada insight, or to point to the pure awake awareness, and then to point to the nondual.
Which in Buddhism, [the] nondual emphasis isn’t just nondual awareness, pure awareness. It’s actually the awareness that is not other than the aliveness. So that’s the embodiment. It’s oh, they’re not two, that there’s what’s called in the Mahamudra, same taste. Or simultaneous mind. And then what Thich Nhat Hanh so beautifully called interbeing.
So that grounding, interbeing, interconnects us to everyone. And then the operating system, we don’t have to go back to create a thinker and a doer in order to be a calmer version of our small selves. But this heart mind or open-hearted awareness has that fullness or wholeness, as you say. So one of the glimpses is literally feeling how we’re identified or attached to thought. And then it’s like a small self riding a horse of our body looking out of our eyes. Then this local awareness, which is identified or attached but is made of this spacious awareness can unhook and drop and know your jaw from within, your throat from within, and then feel completely embodied, and then find this heart mind or heart space that becomes the center.
It also drops to the Dantian and to the legs and to the feet and to the ground as well. But it is connected from, and as, many people who this is a good match for, many, some glimpses don’t work for everybody, but those who find it, it literally just ah, I’m home. This is, I’ve been trying so hard from here to get there by being here.
Tara: It really resonates. In a way, it’s a guide to move from that smaller, more constricted identity to relax the clench. And yet there’s many different pathways that help us to relax the clench. And for many people, the starting place is really feeling stuck in a reactive small self. I often think of Ram Dass who said, I’m learning to treat my personality as a pet. You’re right that when we’re actually resting and knowing it’s home, that heart space, our personality actually, the natural intelligence of the universe and the love of the universe actually moves through our personality. It actually shifts, but there is that learning to trust who we really are. And, as one of the pathways that many people have found valuable, we’ve touched on it a few times, is the RAIN practice.
But I just speak a little bit about it just because so many people, Loch, have told me that RAIN saved my life. And I thought I’d share that what convinced me to write a book about RAIN, Radical Compassion, a guide book to RAIN, and now this new 20th anniversary edition of Radical Acceptance features it, because it wasn’t there 20 years ago.
But people have kept giving me that feedback. And I remember, oh, about 12 years ago my own experience with RAIN. My mom, who is 82, came down to live with us. And I went into this part of the trance of unworthiness where I was falling short on being really there for my mom. But I was also falling short on this book I was writing. I just felt really trapped in that anxiety and guilt.
I remember one day I was right here in my office. She came in with a New Yorker article to show me. I was actually working on a talk on loving kindness, and I didn’t look up. So she just laid the article down nearby and very graciously walked out. I turned to look at her retreating figure and I had this thought: I don’t know how long I’m going to have her. And so I decided to take a pause and go sit down and practice RAIN.
The acronym stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. And so Recognize, okay, there’s just naming it. There’s guilt, there’s fear, and there’s anxiety. And you let in all the parts that want to be there. And then sensing what was most compelling was that feeling of guilt of letting her down.
The A, Allowing, means truly let life be as it is. Not try to fix it, get rid of it, judge it, anything. Just let it be. It’s like it’s a wave in the ocean, it belongs. And I actually say to myself, This belongs. To not just to undo resistance, and then the I, Investigate. There’s beliefs there I’m failing her and causing injury and I’m failing what most matters to me.
And underneath that, this felt sense of a kind of clench in my chest that was squeezing and aching and painful. So I put my hand on my heart. And I often do this as part of investigating because it’s so quick that we exit from our bodies. Just to keep there and really said “what do you need,” to that guilty squeezing part?
I just needed to trust my goodness, needed to trust I loved her. That was the compassion of just from my own awake heart sending that message of, You love her, Trust your goodness. And if I said it enough rounds, which I did, it got very tender and sincere. After those steps there is what I call after the RAIN.
After the RAIN is where we notice the presence that has unfolded. There is a lot of undoing. And when there is an undoing of a clenched unnatural presence, that’s who we are, unfold itself. And I just felt that I was this field of tenderness and wakefulness. The reason I’m sharing is because I started noticing when I was with my mother rather than guilt I actually was showing up.
Like I wasn’t trying to figure out when we’d be done, so I could come upstairs and get more work done. And she died maybe three years later, I could still feel the sorrow of that. But I realized that RAIN saved my life moments. with my mom. And that precious, just the way you described those pathways of being with as much awareness as possible. Not resisting, and then discovering that what unfolds is really who we are is so liberating.
Because then we get to, and I got to, live with her for more of the truth of my heart. So I thought I’d just share a little bit about the power of RAIN because it’s so similar to the work you do with parts and with recognizing the awareness that has emerged and knowing that’s our home. I’m really enjoying this Loch. I feel like we both have developed our languages and our ways of practice and they’re very beautifully synergistic.
So this has been a treat. Thank you.
Glimpse Practice
Loch: When you start this exercise, bring your awareness. within your body and find any emotion that is here now. You can do this exercise with any emotion, pleasant or unpleasant. But when you do this for the first time, please try it with an unpleasant emotion. If you don’t have an unpleasant emotion available, choose the unpleasant emotion that you encounter most often in your life.
If necessary, you can go to a memory or recent situation in your life to bring up an unpleasant emotion. By practicing this, you will learn that you can feel sad without being sad, anger without being angry, and more. So begin by finding a comfortable way of sitting. And find an emotion in your body, fear, anger, or jealousy, for instance, and begin by feeling it fully.
I’ll use sadness as an example in the following steps. You can substitute whatever emotion that you choose.
Silently say to yourself and feel, I am sad.
Fully experience what it’s like to say and feel I am sad. Stay with this experience until you feel it completely.
Now, instead of saying, I am sad, take a breath and say and feel, I feel sadness. Notice the shift from I am to I feel.
Experience the shift and the new way of feeling from being. From here, feel your relationship to the sadness as a feeling.
Now, shift again by saying, I am aware of feeling sadness. Experience awareness of feeling sadness fully.
Shift into an observing awareness. Notice the different emotional quality that comes from this.
And now, shift again, and silently say, sadness is welcome.
Starting from awareness, experience what welcoming the feeling is like.
Feel the awareness energy, embody, and embrace the feeling. Notice the different emotional quality that comes from welcoming.
Sense the support that welcoming brings.
Finally, say, awareness and sadness are not separate.
Pause to feel awake awareness all around and within, permeating the emotion fully, but without identifying with the emotion, or rejecting it.
Feel awareness energy with emotion fully from within.
Feel the awareness, the energetic aliveness, the deep stillness of presence.
Notice the feeling of looking out now at others in the world, from this embodied, connected, open-hearted awareness.
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