If you feel like you’ve been doing all the work—working on your mindset, taking action, making real progress… and still feel like something’s missing—this episode is for you.

It might not be that you’re doing the wrong work.
It might be that there’s something deeper you were never taught how to do:

Holding your own presence with warmth.

At the end of the day, this podcast is about mindset, identity, and overcoming the barriers that keep us from building and living a life that’s true to us—not one shaped by fear, avoidance, or others’ expectations.

And while many episodes focus on breaking patterns, rewiring beliefs, and taking aligned action…

...some, like this one, are about helping you bring your whole, integrated, free self into that journey.

That means sometimes we’ll turn to the wisdom of thought leaders and pioneers in emotional healing and human development whose teachings offer the kind of scaffolding we didn’t even know we needed.

In today’s episode, we lean into the wise teachings of Tara Brach on the suffering created by a sense of severed belonging—from ourselves, from each other, from other species, and from this world—and how learning to nurture, both ourselves and others, can serve as the pathway back to belonging and wholeness.

From Tara Brach's website:

Tara Brach, Ph.D., is a spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author of several books including the international bestsellers Radical Acceptance, Radical Compassion, and Trusting the Gold. Her teaching blends Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices, mindful attention to our inner life, and a dedication to creating a more just, equitable, and loving world. Tara is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. With Jack Kornfield, co-founded Banyan and the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program...

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If this episode gave language to something you’ve been struggling to name—or softened a part of you that’s been holding it all together—consider exploring more of Tara’s work. Her teachings offer the kind of grounded, heart-centered support that can help you return to yourself with compassion, clarity, and care.

If this episode resonated, please consider sharing this podcast, as well as Tara Brach's work. You never know who you may help by doing so.

Inside this episode:

• A full reading of Tara Brach’s blog post: Where Does It Hurt? Healing the Wounds of Severed Belonging (February 26, 2017)
• Reflections from her 2018 talk: Survival of the Nurtured: Our Path to Belonging (Published November 2018)
• A deeper look into the concept of severed belonging
• Why spiritual reparenting might be the thing beneath the thing
• The shift from “fight, flight, freeze” to “attend and befriend”
• What it means to treat your own presence with warm regard
• A reminder that belonging isn’t gone. It’s just been forgotten. And we can remember.

Cited resources:

Tara Brach's website: https://www.tarabrach.com/

• For blog posts, podcast + talk archives + guided meditations + courses + books

Quotes:

We are not the survival of the fittest. We are the survival of the nurtured.”  - Louis Cozolino

“To love someone is to learn the song in their heart and to sing it to them when they have forgotten.”  - Arne Garborg

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