The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

Many of you know and love this teaching from Zen Master Tic-Nat Han.

He writes that when the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone

panicked, all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered,

it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive.

What I'd like to reflect on tonight is what it means to face a pandemic, a time of really

widespread fear with a compassionate heart. And what comes up in me, just to name it as

this very real mix of fear, I feel grief with my kind of my heart's anticipating real

loss. There's a rawness, there's a tenderness. And with all that is also a sense of possibility.

The possibility that this suffering, it's so deep and so wide, will wake up our hearts

in a collective way. And I'd like to name that these are times when there is real danger

around us that we actually go on hyper drive with worry. And the challenge, as we know,

is that fear when it takes over causes a tremendous amount of suffering. And in a pandemic, it's

contagious. So it can become widespread and it becomes one of the greatest dangers of a

pandemic. So again, that question, can we be that person in the boat who feels the intelligence

of the fear, but knows how to hold it with mindfulness and with compassion? Because this

is where the training and mindfulness comes in. And we're going to explore it, bringing

rain to fear. For those of you that aren't familiar, rain is a weaving of mindfulness

and compassion. And the letters of the acronym give us an easy to remember sequence that

can help us to recognize what's going on are a allow it to be there. I investigated

and and nurtured it. And then there's after the rain where we actually rest in presence.

Because weave of mindfulness and compassion in a kind of evolutionary sense shifts us from

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