Dr. Tara Brach's NICABM webinar, "A Deeper Love: Discover the Power of Mindfulness," was first broadcast yesterday. Luckily they ran it twice and I got that "limbic resonance" looking into Tara's eyes (no "still face"!) both times.
Next and probably last replay is tomorrow Friday Mar 28, 9 am Pacific (12 noon Eastern) at:
http://www.onlinemeetingnow.com/seminar/?id=433dba8c34
NICABM says: We'll be getting into Tara's personal experiences with mindfulness.Here's a look
What to Do When Your Mindfulness Practice Falls off Track
Techniques for Letting Go of Anger and Resentment
Ways Mindfulness Can Help Us Be Less Judgmental
How Mindfulness Can Play a Role in Parenting
But I got a lot more out of it that just that. Tara's webcast was about how to access vulnerability to heal.
She spoke mostly about how to "feel into" our pain about family, children, and marriage relationships. It's not a question of "turn the cheek and forgive." It's the opposite. It's really getting deeply into "What about Me -- What in the heck do I feel, anyway?" which for people in trauma is often very difficult to access, cos it hurts so bad the brain stem clicks us out into freeze and we don't even know the hurt is there.
Tara says she got into meditation by accident. One day doing yoga, suddenly in front stretch pose, she just felt an enormous space of connectedness open. Afterward they did a brief meditation and she felt just sitting still, a vividness that comes with Presence, which she grew to love -- even when what's here doesn't feel 'good.'
When we have an unpleasant emotion -- we can begin to ID what's going on physically inside our bodies and contact it, the physical tension of anxiety, the tightness of anger, really feel the body sensations.
Feel the physical sensations of swelling, heat, pressure, squeeze in the heart, tightness in the chest, maybe even nausea. Let be, don't recoil from them - "Let the body sensations be as big as it wants" It 's just another weather system. So "MapQuest" down into it, expand it, really get to it, let it be as Big as it is. Then it begins to disperse. Then we can begin relating to our feeling, rather than relating to others from our negative feeling.
Don't over-think; this has little to do with the thinking brain frontal cortex which usually really gets in the way.
Just: Focus on my own need. Create empathy for myself. Be willing to get into communication with a very vulnerable place inside me -- which actually when I get in touch with it, turns out to be very resourceful.
The ancient poet Rumi says "Do you make regular visits to yourself?"
When we feel hurt -- even when we are in fact hurt -- or misunderstood, badly treated, etc, Tara says: I look inside and see: There's Anxiety here, so I name it. I try to feel all the body sensations of that and let them be as big as they want. Then I offer compassion, and ask that place inside me: What do you need? And the place will answer "I need to get away from the unsafe person and then just sit. Sit and feel into what I NEED. OK, feels like I need support from another person, I need to feel understood." Then I go get it from a Safe person. But it starts with feeling into What do I need?
Tara had one section that really got to me: "Sometimes we were unseen or unloved," she says, and describes a woman with a critical abusive mother who felt very violated but needed to let her children see grandma. So she let mom around some, but was totally shut down emotionally which was really painful to her inside her self.
Working with Tara, she did some very deep "What about Me" work. She felt all the way thru all the anger, let it be as big as it was. Then she got down under that to a very deep grief: She will never have the mother that she longs for, who would really understand her and accept her for who she was and deeply care about her. That had me shaking my chair for a long while.
After she did work just being present with that, and let that expand, offering kindness to that and ask that hurting place "What do you need" -- it began to heal. She still had to set boundaries and limits on being with her mother -- but she found that now rather than freeze and shut down, she could pause and even say something playful. Eventually even her mother noticed and said, "You're different. What's going on?" Wow. That's earned forgiveness, instead of fake.
And yes, NICABM is promoting a new $398 six-week webinar series by Tara which starts next week, but no, I'm not trying to advertise here on ACEsConnection, no way, nor is there a cent in any of this for me. But if you are a helping professional, or a hurting person who can afford it, I've already benefited so deeply from my last four years intensive study of Tara's video classes that I can't frankly think of anything to recommend more highly --unless of course you want to go on youtube and start watching Tara's many fabulous 1-hour videos gratis. Those also changed my life, as I wrote about in my summary on Tara's basic philosophy and healing at www.AttachmentDisorderHealing.com/stardust/
If you prefer structure, the new NICABM series is "The Power of Mindfulness to Radically Change Our Relationships and Deepen Our Capacity for Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness" and registration is closing in the next few days at http://www.nicabm.com/mindfulnessandrelationships/info/?del=taralaunchfb1
However you get it, Tara's brand of "Stardust" goes deep for healing.
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