BEFRIENDING YOURSELF with Jeff Foster & Matt Licata

October 2019 Week 1 Teaching Session with Matt Licata- Transcript

This transcript is only for members of Befriending Yourself. Please do not share
it. We’ve done our best to get this transcript to you as soon as possible after the
teaching session. The transcript will contain a few minor errors. We thank you for
your understanding. Enjoy!

Matt Licata:
So, hi, everyone and welcome to this teaching video for Befriending Yourself. I'm really honored and
happy and grateful that we could take the time together to connect in this way. So thank you so much
for taking the time out of your busy lives to join me as we deepen in our journey together of
befriending. I thought I'd start off in the beginning here. In preparation for this session, I went back and
read through all of the questions as I wanted to get a sense as to where everyone was coming from,
what was coming up for you all, what sort of questions you had.

And so I'm going to make an attempt anyway to weave together a talk here that I think will I hope
anyway will address some of the common questions and the themes that have come up in your
feedback, in your questions, and just my own sense of what might be helpful for us at this stage of our
journey together. So I've made some notes here that I'm going to refer to and I really hope that I can
and that you find this talk interesting, that you find it helpful, that you find it supportive. And I think
we've done 10 or 12 videos so far and I hope you've had the opportunity to watch them all.

I know it's a lot of content but just to remind you then in addition to the videos, everything's also
available as an audio download and also as a written transcript. And I've heard from some of you that
you've been downloading the audios and taking them with you in your cars or when you go on a walk or
to the gym or when you have some time on the train. And then also printing out the transcripts and
really sitting and going for a walk, finding a nice place in nature or in your meditation room or any place
or a library where you can sit and really read the content as well.

And I think it's important to try the different modalities. The video, the audio, the written transcripts,
they all affect us and land in different ways and to really experiment with that. You could listen to one of
the meditations and then listen to one of the talks or read the transcript and just really experiment in
your own unique way how to really bring these teachings into your life in a way that works for you. So I
wish you well with that and would really encourage you to experiment as much as you can.

Along those lines also, I wanted to let you know that we're starting to index the content a bit. And so
each of the videos that we've done so far will have a list of topics that were covered on those videos. I
know a number of you have asked about this as a way to go back and listen or watch a particular part of
the teaching that you wanted to focus on. And so over the next weeks or so, we should have that
indexing up in a way that I think will help you to really get at the content that's most meaningful for you
right now.
So during today's session, we're going to... I don't want to just have this be just an ordinary lecturer, but
I really want you to sit back and relax as deeply as you can and be as attentive as you can and let us
connect with one another, really heart to heart, nervous system to nervous system, brain to brain in this
shared resonance in this field together. I'll probably slow down or even pause every 15 or 20 minutes
and we can just really rest together.

And in many ways, as Jeff and I have been reflecting the teachings of Befriending Yourself, there's
something that we want to really sink in as deeply as possible into your own bodies, into your own
psyches, into your own souls. But yes, there's a lot of information that's conveyed here. But ultimately,
Befriending Yourself really is an experiential immersion. It's really a new relationship with yourself, with
your own heart, with your own being, with your own inner world. And of course, taking in new
information, new insights, new clarity. These can all be very helpful on this path.

But ultimately, it's something that we want to be a lived experience for you. And so that's how we
structure our dialogues together and how we'll be doing these sessions as well. So I have been asked a
couple of times if I would just speak a little bit about my own personal background, a little bit about
where I come from, how I came to this work. It's something I don't talk about very much as a bit of a
private, introverted person. But I do think there's a couple of things I could say anyway that would be
relevant to what we're doing.

So as a young man in my teenage years, I became incredibly interested in philosophy and religion and
began meditating and really became a pretty active, maybe aggressive, naive, young spiritual seeker I
think like many of us. And I ended up going to India and spending a lot of time there and really spending
a lot of time in meditation and I learned so much about myself and to be able to access this freedom
that I always sensed was possible.

But in my early family, which was a relatively solid, stable situation. But not without my own of trauma
and anxiety and difficult experience that I had to work through issues with attachment and so forth,
which I think will be unfolding as the weeks and months go on here. But I think really the most
important part of this and to give a little bit of context is that what I began to discover after years of
dedicating my life to spirituality and meditation was that while yes, I could wiggle myself into a state of
contemplation, a state of meditation, even a lot of peaceful Samadhi type states of consciousness, which
were very beautiful and in their own way.

There was a part of my spiritual practice, my relationship with my life that wasn't being touched by
meditation. It wasn't being touched by my relationship with spiritual teachings and practices. Things like
my interpersonal relationships, my relationship with my own body, my relationship with my own
emotional world. And look, I'm not saying this as a fault of the meditative traditions. It was certainly a
reflection of my own relationship with this material.

And so what became really important for me anyway was to begin to look at some other ways I might
integrate some other types of teachings, resources, wisdom really into my own life that would help me
to integrate these great teachings from the contemplative traditions and the meditative experience I
had had. And that's when I really became interested in psychology - particularly somatic psychology, and
also, the depth psychologies working with content from the unconscious shadow material, projection,
transference, things like that that I felt were really missing from my relationship with spirituality.
So long story short. What became really important for me and over the last almost three decades now,
25 years or so, I've really been interested in weaving together the best of the deepest wisdoms of the
meditative traditions as I've come to experience them. And also, the deepest wisdom of the
psychological traditions, especially those depth traditions that are interested in working with material
from the unconscious as it manifests as symptoms, as emotional experience, as sensations in the body,
in our dream world. And of course, becomes very activated in our intimate relationships.

I think as we've spoken about, whenever we allow someone to matter to us, we open those floodgates
to that material to come into our experience and often in not so conscious ways as many of us have
discovered. So I'm sure we'll be speaking some more about that. It's really important I think to honor
that this work is going to be unique for each of us. It's going to change over time. It's going to some
kinds of work will be relevant at some parts of our life. Some kinds may not be so relevant at other times
in our life.

So I just thought I'd say a couple things about the larger types of work that are part of the work that I do
that are relevant I think in some ways to the work we're doing here with Befriending Yourself. And I
thought I'd speak about four different kinds of work that we do together. And I try to unfold these really
in the meditations that I do. I try to touch on each of these four layers of our experience of our work
together. But I thought I'd just go ahead and explain them here a little bit more so you have a little bit
more background as to where I'm coming from and the types of ways that I work with people and what I
find really relevant.

So the first type of work is really what we might call ego strengthening or resource building or
foundational building that's really important to do, especially if we're struggling with traumatic
organization. We've had a lot of trauma in our life. It's really a building the sense of resource in our
immediate embodied experience. We have to do this very slowly one step at a time rather than just
diving in, which can be very unkind and aggressive. So we do this resourcing, the slow turning back
home really into our immediate embodied experience. We do that in relationship. We do that in things
like therapy. But the real important point here is that we go very slowly.

And I think we're going to be we build a new set point. Because many of us have sort of if we've had a
lot of unbearable experience if we've had early environments that were affected deeply by trauma. I'm
going to speak some more about trauma. It's a common question that comes up in a course like this. But
we have to build new resource and we have to train our nervous systems slowly one moment at a time
that we can actually begin to turn back home into the body that the body is actually a safe place that we
don't need to spin off into the mind and to all of our habitual behaviors. We can actually come back
home.

There's a home, a new resource, a foundation that we can find in our immediate embodied experience.
And so this resourcing work is incredibly important. Having our feet on the ground, really embodied
work, really grounded work when we're not necessarily working actively with unconscious material.
We're not actually even leaning to more of the awareness-based open awareness meditation, which
really isn't necessarily always going to be the most resonant work for us at certain parts in our life.

So this resourcing as a foundation is something that during the meditations and during even these talks,
it's an invitation to find that part of ourselves that was never unhealed to return to that, to create a new
neural set point in the body that we can come back to that we can touch in times of difficulty. So we'll
be talking more about that, but I just wanted to lay that out, that foundation that we have to build a
certain strength in the nervous system where we can actually train ourselves very slowly to tolerate
these more challenging states of experience.

And we have to go very slow and it has to be oriented in a new kind of kindness towards ourselves. And
this is where the befriending is so important. Because so often those of us that are drawn to deep inner
work, we want to get in there, we want to do it really fast, we want to heal, we want to get awakened.
We really just want to get in there and root all of this out as quickly as possible. And what happens when
we do that is, is that we just reinforce this circuitry that there's something wrong with us. There's
something wrong with our immediate embodied experience.

So we have to really slow down. And so whenever you hear myself and Jeff in the meditations and
otherwise, really bringing us slowly back into the unfolding of one breath of really feeling that contact
point, where your feet are touching the ground, where there's roots growing out from under your feet
and pulling down into the earth. Whenever we talk about this grounding, this rooting, this resourcing,
we're emphasizing this part of the teaching, which is very important.

So the second phase of the work as I see it is what's often called uncovering work. This is where we're
really going into a material that we've had to disown at earlier times in our lives. All of us have had to
dissociate, split off, repress, deny certain parts of ourselves that really didn't fit into our families of
origin, certain feelings, certain emotional states, certain ways of being, certain experiences, certain ways
of seeing the world. We had to split off from this material. It was actually quite intelligent for us to do so
in order to fit in, in order to keep that attachment bond alive.

Because it was just too unsafe, too dangerous to do otherwise. It was actually an active intelligence to
be able to dissociate or to split off from early experience. These words; dissociation, splitting, denying,
disowning have a pretty bad reputation. But I think it's really important to realize that they served an
incredibly adaptive function, an intelligent function earlier in our lives. That they actually these
strategies, this capacity to get out of uncomfortable, unworkable, unsafe experience actually saved our
lives. Maybe not physically so much for some of us perhaps, but certainly, psychically.

So this uncovering work, which is more sort of analytical work, it's where we invite these parts of
ourselves, these feelings and emotions that we've become frozen to come back out into conscious
awareness where we can develop a new relationship with them, where we can begin to meet them, and
infuse them with these deeper qualities of befriending such as love and compassion and acceptance. But
the important thing here is that we can't skip stages. We can't skip that basic resourcing. We have to
actually retrain our nervous systems to understand that we can actually stay with this experience
without completely falling apart, without losing it, without falling to the ground metaphorically and
literally.

So this uncovering work is the second larger family of work that we'll be doing together that's important
for me, especially as a therapist. And the third phase of the work is what we might call existential work.
This is once we have some basic resourcing and the nervous system and some understanding of those
feelings that we've dissociated from that those capacities to experience fear directly to experience
anxiety directly, to experience joy directly where we can actually begin to hold this experience.

Often what happens next is we move into this more existential realm of experience, some of us anyway,
which is where we become more concerned with issues of freedom. These larger issues of responsibility
and freedom and death and meaning. We all sense on some deep level that our time is limited here. And
where am I going to find meaning in this life? Not just working with difficult experience and processing
emotions, but a more of a humanistic or an existential side of the work where we've had a lot of life
experience. Maybe we've gone through a lot of heartbreak or disappointment or loneliness.

I'm sure you've noticed that Jeff and I speak about these more existential states as very holy. Actually,
we have a very different sort of understanding of these states I think that our culture has provided us.
And this is just through our own experience in working with so many people that there's meaning and
there's gold and there's a wisdom found in these more deflated existential type states of
meaninglessness working with anxiety around death. Our bodies falling apart, the loss of a dream.

We all have to face this in our lives where our lives don't always turn out the way we thought they
would. And rather than have that take us down, rather than see that as some evidence of mistake of
some cosmic error, the invitation is to begin to see those as expressions of holiness, of the beloved, of
God. And look, this isn't something that some new belief to take on. But this is actually an experiential
realization that many people have as they continue to deepen in this work.

So that's the third phase of the work is this existential component to it. And the fourth stage is more of
the spiritual or the transpersonal side. And I think if we look at a model like Ken Wilber's model of the
transpersonal band of the spectrum. He talks about these four sub-stages of psychic, causal, subtle and
non-dual work. And so we're going to be obviously touching a lot of the meditation work, a lot of the
mindfulness-based, meditative work we do, the non-dual work we do is going to be part of that.

And also this other psychological work where we begin to have a dialogue with inner figures. We begin
to realize that this sense of ego, this sense of self is incredibly important. This work isn't about getting
rid of or even transcending the ego. It's about relativizing the ego and seeing the ego as an incredibly
important, but it's only one figure. It's only one part of the psyche. Only one part of soul. There's these
other voices and other figures and other energies that are a part of this overall ecology of consciousness.

Many of us know these interfaith years such as inner children or wisdom figures, but this idea that
there's these images and figures that are part of the psyche that we can begin to work with, which bring
tremendous wisdom into our overall being. So I just wanted to layout that landscape for all of us. We
have this resourcing that's grounding and so when we do our meditations together, we're going to start
there. We're going to, and Jeff and I will continue to invite you back into that place of resource, that set
point that you can continue to discover and familiarize yourself with a place of safety in the nervous
system. That's very slow.

That's one moment at a time where we begin to build that new resourcing that many of us lost touch
with earlier in our lives, especially with a lot of pain and trauma. So the resourcing and then this
uncovering work, this more shadow work, working with projection, working with all of that material
we've had to set aside as young children in our families of origin, even the capacity to feel joy, for
example. And then the existential material, the deflation, the disappointment, the working with death,
the body falling apart, these things that we are going to breathe life back into.

Where am I going to find meaning in my life, especially in the second half of my life, which most of us
that are participating in this work are in fact in the second half, the “third third” of our lives even? And
then finally, the more spiritual aspect of the work, the transpersonal aspect of work, that's when things
begin to open up. And we're not so much as a riveted to me in my personal experience as we are to
opening to the expression of God or the beloved really as he or she or it manifest into the world of time
and space.

So there's just a little bit of overall architecture I wanted to present you with. And this, of course, leads
us into this realm of trauma and we've gotten a lot of questions about trauma and so I wanted to just
spend a little bit of time to speak about that and particularly in the context of what we just discussed.
Now I know that for many of us we didn't really have this sense of a holding environment when we were
young children. We haven't really had it at any time in our lives. This scaffolding wasn't really built for us
where we were received and this little young magical being was received in this field of empathic
holding and mirroring and attunement.

Many if not most of us didn't have that experience. And that's very unfortunate and I think it's a lot to
take. A lot for us to really realize that we weren't given that early contact and space for this young
miracle of a being to unfold and develop. And so the good news, however, that I think we will continue
to present to you is that you can create this holding environment for yourself. And so much of the work
that we're going to be doing here is really about what that means. There's obviously we're wired in so
many ways as mammals, as relational mammals to rest and explore within a relational matrix.

And so there's the relational piece of this work with our intimate others, with our friends, with our
therapists, with our children that's so very important in re-wiring these pathways. But there's also quite
a lot that we can do on our own that the meditative traditions have helped to really build the scaffolding
to build this holding environment. And in this sense, I think we could say that awareness itself, this
warm, open spacious awareness that we're continuing to point to and talk about is really the ultimate
holding environment. And so we have these two different kinds of holding environments that we're
going to be talking about.

But the good news is that this work of befriending, this work that we're starting to do together where
we're returning home and to our immediate embodied experience and training ourselves moment by
moment really to infuse what's arising with these new pathways, with these slower pathways that arise
out of the prefrontal cortex of empathy, of curiosity, which is really you might notice how much Jeff and
I speak about curiosity, which is really the foundation in many ways of this work. It's from this curious
interest in my unfolding experience that we begin to sort of foster these neuroplasticity, which is the
capacity of the brain to rewire.

So each moment a difficult feeling or a thought or a sensation or some old ideas, some shame, some
unworthiness comes up in our experience and we pause, we slow down, we name it while I'm aware in
this moment, I'm aware in this moment that those thoughts are coming. There's something wrong with
me. I know there's something wrong with me. And we start to feel that fluttering in the belly, that
constriction in the throat, that closing down in the heart to just before we fall under the waterfall,
before we just get caught in that cascading in that looping of thought, feeling and sensation.

We have a moment of recognition where we just slow down like I see what's happening and in this
moment, not the next moment, not five minutes from now, not tomorrow, but in this moment, I'm
actually going to slow down. I'm not going to follow those habitual pathways. I'm going to slow down
and I'm going to connect with what's alive here right now. What is it that's longing to be met within me?
What is it that's knocking at the door? What is it that wants to be touched? Finally, to turn toward
ourselves in those moments of activation really when we need ourselves more than ever, we begin to
build a holding environment for ourselves and yes, it takes practice.
I know many of us want the spiritual path to be effortless. We hear about how this path of awakening is
effortless and I think in a poetic way, it's very beautiful. There is a certain effortlessness that's wired into
this path. However, in my experience, just speaking in my own experience and in working with many,
many others now it does require practice. It does require effort. If you think about for so many
moments, maybe millions of moments, weeks, months, years, decades, and if you believe in things like
past lives, lifetimes of this archaic practice of self-abandonment of turning away from ourselves in a
moment that we need ourselves more than ever.

You can start to sense that what's going to be required to set a new set point in our neural network to
find a new resource point in our nervous systems where we slow down, we see what's happening. It all
starts with that one moment of awareness. And this is a practice that we do. It's not some goal that we
set up that we shame ourselves for when we don't do perfectly. It's a practice. It's an invitation of
self-love of kindness to start to become curious, to catch that. Start to catch those moments when we
fall into those habitual pathways of self-aggression.

And we talk a lot about self-abandonment, this idea of self-abandonment as the root cause really as the
root essence of all of our struggle and suffering. Before we familiarize ourselves with this territory and
with this work, it's so easy to believe that, oh, I'm suffering and struggling because sadness has come.
Because fear has come. Because confusion has become. Because shame has come. And I think what we
start to discover on this path is that there's no suffering inherent and that wave-like experience of fear
in the nervous system and that wave-like experience of shame in the nervous system and that wave
passing experience of anger or rage.

But it's in the abandonment of ourselves when those experiences arise, which is just something, a
conditioned pathway that we've learned that we had to learn as young children in our families of origin.
Because back then when our little brains and sensitive nervous systems and little hearts were
developing, we didn't have the capacity. We just did not have the developmental capacity to turn
toward that material to offer a home for it. Really to create a temple around it, to surround it with our
presence, with our warmth, with our curiosity, and see what it is. We just didn't have that ability
developmentally and also in our families, most of us were never taught this sort of thing. This is new
territory.

Even if we've been doing this work for a long time, even if we consider ourselves no longer beginners on
this path, which is always a bit risky that it's still going to require because it's wired into our culture, it's
wired into our societies, into our families, it's turning from ourselves and difficult times. So the two
strategies, the two camps that we can fall into when a difficult feeling or emotion or thought or
experience comes to deny. On the one hand, we can either deny it, stuff it, repress it. We all know what
that's like to deny, to stuff, to repress.

And it can seem like in a moment, we're getting rid of it. We're healing it. We're transforming it. We're
transcending it. But if all we're doing is denying that experience, if that's really what's happening, then
we're just stuffing it deeper into the unconscious, deeper into the body where it will come out usually in
less than ideal ways, usually in our intimate relationships through all kinds of addictive behaviors and
ways of lashing out at ourself and others. So this camp of denial on the one hand and this other camp on
the other hand of needing to spin out in some urgent way to discharge that energy from our bodies.
This is when we have the whole realm of habitual addictive behavior for some of us running to the
refrigerator when we're not hungry, acting out, sort of shaming, blaming, yelling at others, blaming
others for what's happening to us emotionally or acting in, attacking ourselves, shaming ourselves all to
get out of this underlying vulnerability that's just arising to be met. It's arising to be integrated, to be
allowed back home into this larger ecology of what we are.

And so this takes practice. It takes training. It happens slowly, moment by moment. And so our invitation
here is really many, many times a day a practice that you can do is several times a day just slow down,
set an alarm on your iPhone, put sticky notes up on your computer or your refrigerator or your laptop. I
wonder what I'm experiencing right now in my body, in my immediate embodied experience without
any interpretation. We can start to see how we've lost this basic, simple, native, natural ability to be in
touch with our experience.

And you have to see this. It can be incredibly revealing to see how we've lost the capacity to feel, to be.
We've confused that with thinking about our experience and having a full embodied experience. In the
live sessions, we've talked about this as participating in our experience. This is what we mean. This
starting to discern in yourself the difference between participating in your experience, having your
experience. And actually thinking about your experience.

Now, this doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with reflection and thinking about your experience.
It's part of what we are as humans. It's very beautiful. But there are other moments when it can be
helpful to discern between this and to really to go into our immediate experience and see what's
happening. Because from this place of just recognition, oh, I recognize right now, I'm aware right now
that there's a thought coming up in my mind that's saying, something's wrong with me. I've messed up.
I've failed. I've fallen short. No one's ever going to love me.

And so in that moment that you, for example, and these are just examples, of course. And in that
moment when we catch ourselves then we have an opportunity to take a new action. We have an
opportunity. We have to catch it first. We have to see it. And this is where all of this work does begin
with awareness. It begins with clarity. It begins with seeing into our experience and that's when it starts.
And that's the invitation to try something new, to choose something different.

And this is really what we mean by neuro-plasticity. This capacity to rewire these pathways to rewire the
brain, to allow a new synopsis to occur, to use that language, to use more spiritual language. It's in that
moment when we have the opportunity to infuse our experience with awareness, to allow this warmth
and curiosity to flood through us and to allow God to appear to allow the beloved to appear to show us
what it is that wants to be met, what's longing to be met with the slower circuitry of empathic
attunement?

And so remember that any good effective holding environment. And so this term holding environment,
as some of you may know, comes from a British psychoanalyst that's no longer with us D.W. Winnicott.
He's one of my favorite writers. He spoke a lot about holding this idea of holding and also a lot about
play and unstructured play and how important that was in the psyche of a young child. And I would also
say the psyche of a middle-aged to older adult. This capacity to play. This capacity to play with our rising
experience.
So it's not so much. The goal here is to create some limited spectrum where only certain feelings and
thoughts come. Only certain sensations come, i.e., the ones that we like that we want, but it's this
capacity and willingness to begin to have a new relationship with our lives, with our experience that's
oriented in play. Not the play of a child. That's sort of silly and sort of... I mean that's fine too, but play
I'm talking about like the play of God, the play of the love, the play of the beloved as he or she, it infuses
this realm of time and space.

And so the journey at that point becomes not so much about how to get from “here” to “there,” how to
get from some unhealed unawakened state to some healed or awakened state. But what is it like for me
to be a vessel through which to there God, the mystery, the beloved can come through this vessel, this
broken and whole human vessel, this cracked open, imperfect, messy, glorious vessel of this human
form. When the “there” comes through this form and seeds this world, comes into the world of time
and space.

And so from this resourcing and uncovering and this existential material that we spoke about, and then
we land in this more transpersonal or spiritual, which is God is here, the kingdom has come. It's here,
actually. It's here in this arising moment, God is here. Now what that God is or what that love is, or what
this awareness is, or the source or this mystery and we have to find the right image, the right metaphor,
and the right language for us.

Not everyone relates to these words; God, Beloved. These are just words that I use that have had
meaning to me over the years. We have to find our own language. And that's an act of kindness and of
compassion to ourselves to find the metaphors that are right for us to find the language that's right for
us. So this journey from here to there, which is an important part of the journey. But this ascending, this
sort of transcending, this upward movement within the body, within soul, within psyche, very important.

But there's this other movement as well that's often left out and that's more of that descendant current.
That movement where God or the beloved where she comes into this world of time and space through
us. And so when we speak to another person, when we touch another person, when we look into the
eyes of another person, when we go out into the natural world, we craft ourselves really as vessels for
her, for he, for she, for it, for they, for them. Again, whatever language is most relevant for you.

So again, this holding environment has these two essential qualities, contact and space. And so as we
train ourselves to begin to create a holding environment for ourselves, we begin to cultivate these
qualities in our experience. And so a lot of what we're doing at Befriending Yourself, the dialogues that
Jeff and I are having and what's actually happening with us in those dialogues, the meditations that
we're doing are all designed in some ways to help us to cultivate and manifest and bring forward these
qualities that deepen these qualities of making contact with our lives. True contact.

And so as young children, if there wasn't contact, if no one was making contact with our lived embodied
experience if no one was actually tending to us, mirroring back to us when we had a feeling or an
emotion or a thought, I see you. Mommy feels anger or sometimes too, daddy feels that too, that
hopelessness. It's okay, I see you, I feel you. You're okay as you are. It's intelligent to have an emotion.
It's intelligent to be scared at times. It's wisdom. There's a wisdom in your heartbreak.

If that wasn't mirrored back to us, of course, of course, and we're lacking in that empathic attunement,
which is all of us really in a certain way. Then this is what this contact is what we need to start is the
invitation to repair it ourselves is to bring that contact back to begin to make contact, embodied,
attuned contact with what arises in our immediate experience. And so the meditations, the inquiries
everything we're doing here is meant as an invitation to come into a closer more embodied contact with
what's here.

Because the freedom that we're longing for, this freedom, this aliveness, that we yearn for, this
participation in what we sense is a miracle here. This freedom is not going to be found in this grand
project of replacing one feeling for another, but it's going to be found and embodied and attunement to
what's here, to what's always already here. So this contact, so making contact, participating in our
experience. Not thinking about it, not denying, repressing, acting out, acting in. These are all strategies
that really served an incredibly important purpose and function for us at one time in our lives. They
served a protective function to protect this fragile developing little brain and nervous system.

So the question we have to ask ourselves now is, am I still in need of that kind of protection? To what
degree do I still need to be protected from this embodied vulnerability, from this life that's surging to
come through me? And we have to be really honest with ourselves. I think we've spoken about in the
many thousands of people at this point that we've met over the years in private sessions, on retreats,
and workshops, and so forth. I think what's so similar, everyone's story is a little bit different. Different
kinds of pain, different details, different narratives, different biographical experiences, different ways of
organizing our experience.

But what is the same actually and what never ceases to surprise and amaze me is this deep longing that
we all have to be alive even beyond these fantasies and ideas about healing and awakening and which
are all beautiful images. They're beautiful metaphors. But it's at a more basic human core level. It's this
longing to want to be alive, to fully participate in some kingdom miracle, whatever language we want to
use. Something that we sense at the deepest level I believe that it's already here.

And we want to participate. We want to feel connected. We want to feel intimate with ourselves, with
others, with the natural world. We just want to participate fully. We want to get off of the sidelines. We
don't want to stand back apart from life anymore. We want to give ourselves to it, to God, to the
miracle, to whatever, to the stars, to the moon, to the oceans or whatever that is for you. And so that's
such a common experience that we all have.

And so through beginning to create a holding environment for ourselves to provide this contact with life,
with our experience. That's one of the important qualities. The other essential quality of any good
holding environment is space. So we have these two qualities of contact and space. So a young child,
let's just go back to the metaphor, the image of the young child who needs that empathic contact, who
needs that mirroring, who needs that reflection back. Oh, I see you for we need that parent that other
to see us not just as an object in our parent's awareness, but actually as a subject in our own right with
our own interiority.

And this is really where we get into the realms of narcissism. Narcissism is that inability to see the other
as other, to see the other as having their own soul, their own interiority. Rather we see them as an
object in our own awareness. And so in addition to having to have that good contact as a young child
because that's what helps the brain and the nervous system to grow and their little heart to unfold, we
need space. We need that spaciousness around our experience where we can touch unstructured states
of being. Meaning there's not mom and dad and the society always there saying, do this, do that. Make
sure you don't do this. Don't do that. Don't get into trouble. Don't you know.
It's actually this capacity to train ourselves, to learn, to be able to rest in something unstructured. And
this is where we get into those realms of play and imagination. And so the spaciousness that's around
our experience to begin to familiarize ourselves with this. And again, in Jeff and I's teachings and in our
meditations, we really want to invite this direct experience of spaciousness that even as you notice
these difficult thoughts appearing, these repetitive thoughts, there's something wrong with me. I've
done it wrong again. I'm a horrible person. No one will ever love me. I failed. I've fallen short. Oh my
God, I can't believe I said that. I'm a horrible person, et cetera.

Even as those thoughts are arising, they're arising in this context of an incredible amount of space. So as
we continue to deepen in this work, our psychic center of gravity begins to drop. It begins to where
we're not only in touch with the thoughts, we're not fused with them, we're not identified with them,
but we're also in touch with that massive, majestic, warm, open, warm. It's warm. It has qualities of
warm spaciousness in which all of our experience arises.

And then the experience of fear or jealousy or anger or shame is a very different experience where it's
not so much, oh my God, how do I get out of this? How do I transcend it? How do I replace it with
something else? But it becomes yet another invitation into the spaciousness of awareness. And so this
capacity to play with these energies as they arise, these feelings, these thoughts, or to use more
psychological language. If we focus or we concentrate on a feeling or a thought or a sensation in the
body, we watch the image. There's an image that arises. There's a figure that arises, and an invitation
into relationship.

We often speak about this intimacy without fusion and this is what we're talking about, this middle
territory really between these extremes of denying what's there on the one hand or having to act it out
or in on the other, like in between, in this sort of we talk about it as an all chemical place in between
these two extremes is that invitation into play, that invitation into the realm of the beloved, which is
oriented in contact. Contact, space, and play and this capacity to rest in that display that's always
coming and going.

And so I thought, why don't we just take a few minutes just to rest and just to allow this material
together just to sink in and to begin to open into what it would be like to offer a holding environment for
ourselves and our deepest experience. To truly what it would be like as an intention, not as a goal to
shame ourselves for when we inevitably fail at. But just an intention to make contact with ourselves, to
slow down enough, to get curious enough, to touch what's come in a moment to unwind this tendency,
to see our immediate embodied experience as some sort of mistake, some error that needs to be
corrected, and to open the mystery of what's being sent to us, to make contact.

And also to open to the spaciousness of awareness that these thoughts, these feelings, these sensations,
these memories, they can seem so solid, so heavy, so fused. But begin to open to the possibility that
these thoughts, these feelings, these sensations are arising in space arising in a vast meadow of
spaciousness. Not only are they arising within this space, but they actually are made of the space. The
fears made of space, disappointment made of space, rage made of space to just slow down for a
moment and make contact with what's here. For just a moment to lay our hands and our hearts
together and if there's any specific intention we'd like to make for our lives to voice that silently or out
loud depending on where we are.
And to just offer this intention into the field that we're participating in now as we continue our journey
together to just rest for a moment. So no matter what our past experience has been like, no matter the
trauma, the pain, the confusion of what might be happening presently in our lives or what might happen
in the future, over time through doing this work, what inevitably happens is a growing sense of
confidence emerges. Not the mind's version of confidence, which is I can create everything I want. I can
just set my life up exactly the way I want. I can have only the thoughts and feelings that I want. Not that
kind of confidence, but the confidence that's much more mysterious. That's much faster than that.

Really the confidence that I have the capacity. I have the curiosity to meet what arises. That my
immediate embodied experience is workable, my life is workable. This confidence that's rooted deep,
deep, deep in the human soul that there's something happening here. There's something happening
here that's trustworthy. It may not conform. It's unlikely to conform to the way I thought my life was
going to turn out, who I thought I would become, who I thought I would be with, what I thought I would
be doing, my even my deepest realizations and discoveries at times that rug is pulled out from under us
and we're left bare and naked.

Just the confidence in that, that this is the gift of the beloved is to offer, is to pull that rug out from time
to time deeper and her call, which is always it's the endlessness of the heart. These evocative images
about being healed, becoming awakened, becoming enlightened that they're beautiful images and
metaphors for us to play and dance with. But this journey is endless. There is no landing place. There is
no final place where we're no longer at risk for the beloved to step in. She's always there. He's always
there because he or she loves us not as an obstacle to our path, not as an obscuration but as the activity
of love and all of its wildness.

And so thank you all so much for spending this time with me and for listening deeply and participating in
this hour or so together. It means a lot to me and thank you for participating in Befriending Yourself.
And so just a reminder an invitation to engage in this material that's being offered here. Listen to it on
audio, download the transcript, read it, watch the videos, participate in the Facebook Group if you feel
called to. It's not for everyone, but it's there if you feel drawn to it.

And as over the next weeks and months, we'll just continue to meet like this and to continue to share in
this relational field together and continue to talk about these topics that I know are so meaningful and
important to you. We'll talk more about trauma. We'll talk more about intimate relationship. We'll talk
more about working with the shadow and what that means, what it means to be aware of our
projections and to withdraw them.

You'll have sessions with Jeff that will go into this non-dual discovery and awareness and connection
with the holiness really of this moment as it is. And so we're going to offer as many different pathways,
metaphors, images, medicines as we possibly can to invite us into this meadow really of presence of love
that's always already here that actually isn't waiting for us to heal first. This trance of postponement.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to heal, to transform, to get awakened. Nothing. It's very human.
This is not saying anything against that.

But it's that and it's an invitation to participate in something that's already here that doesn't require you
to first heal your past, to clean up all of your trauma, to get enlightened or get awakened first, or to find
your soul mate to find your meaningful work. It's here now, and this is what we'll continue to invite you
into over the weeks and months. So, again, thank you so much. And please continue to send your
questions in and post on Facebook and we'll see you in the weeks and months to come. Okay. Take good
care. Love you all. Bye-bye.