Tara Brach

And I can also scent under it a grieving and a deep caring.

One of the kind of teachings that I keep hearing in my mind, it's from Thich Nhat Hanh, he wrote this, he said, this, my dear, is the greatest challenge to being alive.

He says, to witness injustice in the world, cruelty, violence, and not allow it to consume our light, our love, our capacity to respond.

So I think of that a lot, about that we all naturally have this reactivity.

And I also think about how, and this is true in our individual lives, and it's also through history what we see, is that times of darkness call out a kind of deepened and more engaged caring and a fresh intelligence.

And I'm sensing this happening now, a kind of emergent movement

that really embodies that.

We can talk more about that.

But the deal is that it needs nurturing.

I mean, so when you say, you know, how am I locating myself?

I'm really aware that these times are calling for us to evolve our consciousness, to intentionally wake up our hearts in a way that we're, what I call, widening the circles of belonging, sensing more and more

that we're part of the world, we belong to the world and to each other.

And I'm finding when I teach, more than ever before, so many people are directly impacted, like very few degrees of separation, directly impacted by what's unfolding.

Whether we're talking about ICE and immigrants or health insurance or

the continued atrocities in the Middle East.

And so when people share, when I'm teaching, let's say, a webinar online, I'll ask how many people are dealing with this, are struggling with this,

And there's something so powerful about being in a collective where people can sense they're not alone and what they're dealing with, and we talk about how they're working with it.

It creates a space that's larger than that sense of an individual self and this really scary world.

And I saw this most powerfully recently.

I attended and was part of actually a memorial service