Relief

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to our Word of the Week talk and meditation.

And I think we have over 80 people signed up for this.

So we'll be trickling in, I'm sure.

And we have over 300 people in this community.

We just opened up this community recently, and it's one big global Sangha.

One of the things that I found really relieving last night I was procrastinating on another project that I needed to work on and I went through the names of you all and looked at some of your profiles so in circle you can put a little bit about yourself in and I saw people here from Argentina from Indonesia, from France, from a lot of people from Canada, from all over the U.S. And it's just wonderful to have this sangha, which means community, a space that we can gather on Thursday mornings together to have a little word that we're going to be working on this week and and a little practice together.

And when we practice together in this way, we have a collective energy to us, a collective energy of working on this word in our lives, in our families, in our work, in our service, and then a collective energy of offering it to ourselves and to each other.

So last week, our word of the week was

endings.

And I actually experienced from a lot of people sending in messages, something that came with the word ending, which was relief.

And relief is, it's a tricky word.

in psychology because there's a lot of the seeking of relief, like our attempts to get relief actually can make us more entangled in our pain.

And we can think of all the things that we do to get relief that make it worse.

I used to catch butterflies when I was a little girl.

I had a friend named Katie Sorenson and I'd go to her house And she had this beautiful field outside her house of lantana, which is this little orange and red flower that grows here in Southern California.

And lantana is a butterfly magnet.

And we would run around the yard looking for butterflies.

And then we'd find one and we'd put a jar over it and we'd catch it and then we'd bring it in.

And I always noticed that there was something that happened when I tried to catch that butterfly and we put it in the jar, that it lost all of the magic, right? So relief has that quality.

As soon as we're trying to force it or catch it, we end up losing the relief of just it coming to us.

There's three half-truths about relief.

One is that relief comes from eliminating the stressor.

I used to have a colleague that I would always ask her how she was doing and she'd always say, well, at the end of this month or when this deadline is done or when we're through the holidays or when the kids are back in school, then things are going to get better.

She always had this timeline of when it was going to end and then it was going to get better.