Tara Brach - 2014-02-05 - Part 1: Universal Faces of Love

Episode Date: February 6, 2014

2014-02-05 - Part 1: Universal Faces of Love - Lovingkindness, or metta, is the first of the four divine abodes in buddhist teachings. This talk explores the habitual patterns of fears and wants that obscure this innate quality of heart and key ways that we awaken ourselves to its luminous presence.

In Asia, the word or character in Chinese script, but the word in general in most of the languages for heart and mind are the same. I find this interesting because if you look at the Chinese characters for mindfulness, the word is present heart. And the significance of this is that you cannot cultivate a mindful awareness without simultaneously cultivating heartfulness, that embedded in mindfulness is the embodiment and the aliveness and warmth of the heart. And so what I'd like to do for these next number of classes, it may be four, it may be more, is to explore what are known as the four arctippal or universal

expressions of love. In the Buddhist or Polly script, they're called the Brahma Viharas, which mean the divine abodes. And it's a beautiful term because they're the really the dwelling place of the awakened heart. And they're also the practices and processes that awaken our hearts amidst a really challenging uncertain world. Great bumper sticker. Life is fragile. is the glue. Okay? So we'll do that together. The first of the Brahmavaharas or divine abodes is loving kindness. And loving kindness is our response, our appreciative response to the goodness that we perceive in this world. The second of these universal faces is compassion, and that's the loving response that we experience when we are connected with suffering, with pain.

The third, which is described in different ways, but it's basically joy, is really the heart's awakeness or aliveness when it opens to the full catastrophe, as it said, when it opens to everything. And then the fourth of the divine abodes is equanimity, which is that quality of presence that's profoundly balanced and non-reactive because there's that wisdom that really it's impersonal. So there's a vastness, a spaciousness, and a balance that allows us to be with everything without reacting.

So each of these faces of love is in innate capacity. We all have the neurologic and biophysical rigging for it. They're all a part of us naturally. from an evolutionary perspective, which I think is really valuable, these faces of love are what really allow us to prosper. They're what give rise to being collaborative. They're what allow us to have an extended childhood, extended child rearing. It's what gives rise to empathy and our capacity to co-create together.

So it makes for what's called the success of our species, that word success is a little bit questionable at this point, but that's the way it's described. But in the most basic way, from a spiritual perspective, loving awareness is the source, our essence of what we are, and it's our true home. And I love these words from the Buddha.

There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the highest heavens, and this is the light that shines in our hearts. So maybe as a way to kind of open the portion on loving kindness to remind you, many of you have heard this of a favorite image I have, and it comes from about 12 years ago in Southeast Asia, one of the most gigantic statues of the Buddha was described as having this kind of plaster clay covering,

not a very handsome or refined-looking statue, but it was love for its staying power over many, many centuries. But during a long drought, some cracks appeared in this statue. And some enterprising monks took some little flashlights, started looking in these cracks, and what they discovered was what shined back at them, It was brilliant and beautiful. They looked in crack after crack and the same kind of shining.

They removed the plaster and clay and found it was the largest solid gold statue of the Buddha in all of Southeast Asia. So that was a major discovery. What I love in this is that the monks believe that that statue was covered over to protect it from years of invading armies and difficult weather systems. and so on, much in the way that we cover over our own innate purity, this pure, loving presence to protect ourselves in a difficult life. It just gets covered over.

And what is sad is that we come to believe we're the covering, and we kind of take ourselves as being the ego self that's protecting us rather than remember. remembering this light, this luminous awareness that's here. I think of it as a space suit we take on a kind of ego space suit that we come into a difficult environment or atmosphere and we need protections, we need ways to help navigate. But if we think we're the space suit, if we don't remember who's looking through the mask right now, who's looking out through these eyes? who's listening.

In other words, if we lose touch with that essential presence that's here, we live in a very small and limited world. So one of the big inquiries, I think, on the spiritual path is how do we lose sight? I mean, the basic suffering that the Buddha described that's universal is a kind of forgetting,

a disconnecting from who we are and identifying with something smaller. So what does it? are the habits that we have, each of us, of thinking and behaving in the world, that in some way obscure the gold that have us identified as an egoic cell. I think the way that Rumi frames it's quite beautiful. He says, your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. So that really resonates to me is that if we just rather, it's not a judgmental seeking, it's just if we care

about really living from the goal, from the purity and essence of who we are, to just notice, well, how am I creating this covering and getting identified? How does that happen for me? And there's a kind of simplistic image I like, but it helps, I think, to deepen understanding. it's if we think of a kind of open versus a closed heart. And when we're not locked in reactivity or stress, you know, when we're not caught in fear, if we're not caught in wanting things different, basically in something's missing, something's wrong.

That's the mindset. When we're not in that, the heart's naturally open. When it's unblocked, there's an unimpeded flow of blood. the kind of electrical currents and the more subtle energies, the chi, can flow. So the heart, I think, and what I like about this kind of image is it can be described less as a thing and more as a space or a conduit for life, for what flows through it. And when the space is open, when there's an openness and the full flow of aliveness is free to move through us, when there's no resistance,

When there's just inclusion, that's what we call love. And it feels good. We love love that openness when life is flowing through and there's a sense that this whole universe belongs to our heart. So that's the open heart. And then when we're stressed, what happens? Blood flows out to the arms and legs, you know, to help us, it flows away from the heart, arms and legs to get us ready to protect ourselves.

And then there's that whole biochemistry that agitates and excites us and tells us to do something. The breath gets shallow and the heart can feel squeezed or tight or numb. Now, stress itself is not the enemy. And I want to take a few moments on that, that it's totally natural and healthy and appropriate that our system goes into a stress response. In other words, the heart's meant to open and close some, and we're meant to have times when we have to get activated and take care of things.

So that's not the problem. In fact, there's some really interesting research recently that's come out that says that if we can recognize when we're stressed and when we're reacting that this is our body's healthy response, and it's meant to be happening, we actually lock less into the kind of toxic chronic stress that really can bring down our system. In other words, if we believe

that the stress is part of our body's healthy response, it's healthier. And furthermore, if stress becomes a cue to reach out to others in some way, it becomes actually a vehicle of continued growth and transformation. So stress itself is not the problem. It's okay that there's the tightness

and the faster beating and so on. When stress becomes a problem is when it's so chronic that we get identified with our stress behaviors, with the defending self, the fleeing self, the endangered self and so on. And we forget the gold. We forget the awareness that's here, the tenderness, the sensitivity, the heart. So let's look at how that happens. and the beginning of looking as maybe one again simple but I think useful understanding is that stress is the tension of wants and fears that circle around us meeting three core needs

and one is the need to avoid danger the other is the need to enhance ourselves or have satisfaction pleasure and the other and the third is the need to secure attachment with other fellow humans. So if you look at them, these are all these control strategies, we all do them, but if they get chronic, in other words, if our stress becomes chronic, the stress reaction,

that's when we lose sight and we start finding that our days we're on a kind of automatic, we're speedy, we're judgmental, and we're living inside a society, sense of self that is tight and less than the truth of who we are. And over time there becomes a kind of deep sense of either anxiety or depression that has to do with us not really living true to who we are. So how this kind of disconnecting from the

gold happens? Well the first, you know, is the protecting from harm. What happens when we're always trying to protect from harm, when we always feel like something around the corner is going to hurt us. When we're always in some way covering over our vulnerability, one strategy is just to pretend that we're fine all the time. Another strategy is to distance ourselves from others, just to keep a distance so that we can't get hurt. This is Carol Leifer. She says, whenever I travel, I like to keep the seat next to me empty. I found a great way to do it. When someone walks down the aisle and says to you, is someone sitting here, just say, no, no one except the Lord. We have our distancing strategies. Perhaps one of the ways that we most

control other people is through our blame and our judgment and our anger. There's a great Jules Fifer cartoon. I've always loved this one where she's saying, but I love you. And he's saying, don't you threaten me. So again, protecting from harm. We have our different ways. I mean, these are real exaggerations. Another New Yorker cartoon sketches a man and a woman facing off defiantly

and he's responding to her by saying, yeah, well, the Dalai Lama never had a deal with your whining. You get the idea. So that's one way that we lock into chronic stress is judging, blaming, distancing, and that becomes a habit, and that starts identifying our personality and our character. And as Gandhi says, that becomes our destiny, that that's our identity. The second control strategy I mentioned is pursuing satisfaction. And there's not one of us that doesn't know how it is that when we start fixing on in some way, something's missing, this restlessness,

I need to get satisfied, whether it's food or playing sports or going online or sex or drugs or decorating or shopping or any of things. We don't end up paying good attention to the people we're with, right? You know the saying that when a pickpocket sees the saint, he or she sees the saint's pocket. Well, when we're riveted on pleasure seeking, and I'm saying when it becomes cross, we can't really be here for ourselves or for others because we're fixated on thinking our happiness lies and assuaging that particular need. Okay, then there's the attaching.

And this is sometimes called the near enemy of love because it masquerades as love. When we're attached, it feels like love. And I think of it not as much as the near enemy, but as it's marbled, that we have can be very purely loving towards our child or a parent or whatever. But we have marbled into that how our needs and wants and fears are playing out. And that's completely natural. But what happens when our attachment, our procuring or securing attachment takes over?

And then we're always seeking approval. Or we're always presenting ourselves in a certain way. We're always manipulating other people. are always in some way trying to meet the expectations of others so that things will work out with them. There's a saying that dying begins at birth and it accelerates at dinner parties.

Now sometimes attaching is the ways we try to grab onto relationships but it's also part of our attaching control strategies are often denying our needs for relationships. I remember years ago somebody sent me a cartoon and had a picture of a dejected monk who slumped over a table there's this dim candle in a long scroll of paper and he's writing one phrase over and over and over and it reads,

celibacy is not so bad, syllabacy is not so bad, celibacy is not so bad, so you get the idea. I think that our attaching agendas are most clear with those that that are closest to us. And that's where we can see most actually how the attaching gets in the way of loving. And it's because we try to get those closest to us to cooperate with our agenda so that they meet our ways of feeling loved. We all have what are sometimes called complex equivalents for feeling loved, respected, worthwhile. So we're getting the other

person to respond to us or treat us in a certain way so we're reassured. It can be guilt-tripping, being demanding, withholding. I have a very strong memory when my son, Narayan was in high school, it's actually started in junior high school, of our conversations, having conversations and afterwards becoming painfully aware of my way of having and meaning to be open and flowing but having an agenda with him and how rare it was that I was just plain open. Most of the time there was something going on where I wanted him to be cooperating with my priorities, doing something a certain way, doing less of something or more of something. So I didn't have the spontaneity and I would I remember I'd leave these conversations

and I would swear to myself okay I'm going to find a time later in the day and just be wide open and more fluid. And it was like they always crept in. In some way, I always had this need to in some way control him. And it nodded me how much having an agenda dominated.

And I'm aware that it's faded a lot, but even now I can still sense in the conversation, I'll hang up and sense, okay, I wanted him to be more into doing this in his grad program, or I wanted him to respond to me, this, you know, I can see still the faint shadow of it. It gets in the way.

Now the primary fear that trips off the kind of chronic stress reactivity in us that gets in the way of intimacy is feeling unworthy. When that fears there that both challenges our basic biological sense of safety, because for fifty-three-three-three-three-three-three-three-three. thousand some years we were in tribes and being unworthy meant you could get banished or kicked out. So it's a very visceral fear. And it's also, of course, affects our attachment capacities. And it's a big one. It's one I spent a lot of time reflecting on and working on myself and working with others because to the degree we're caught in the trance of unworthiness, we're not going to be able to have that heart space where life can flow through

where we can really be intimate with ourselves and each other. It's really chronic stress. I read, some of you might get these articles through upworthy.com. It's a really interesting channel. And in one, they had mothers reflect on how they're doing. And they said, describe yourself as a mother. You might imagine what you'd say, by the way, as you're listening to this. What these mothers did that they interviewed described their challenges with anger and patience

and the want to listen better, being perfectionistic, doubts about their ability, the needs to calm before speaking. Pretty much what you heard from me as a parent of a high school student, how I was falling short. Then they interviewed the kids and to see what the kids had to say, about their moms. Totally awesome. Fun to snuggle with. Pretty, fun. Cooks a lot of food for me. She's like my heart, you could say, because she's that close to me. Favorite thing is to jump on a trampoline with me. My mommy's my hero. She will care about me. She'll love me forever. She's the

best. Those are a lot of different responses, but you get the idea. How sad it is that we lock into a storyline of falling short and the amount of stress in our body and our heart and our mind that comes from it that then interferes with our capacity to be fully manifested in love with each other in this life. It's interesting that it's dangerous to believe in the gold in a way. We're afraid if we start believing in some sense of our own purity and and beauty and goodness that will get some bad surprise. We won't have protected against our badness. Robert Johnson is a noted Jungian analyst.

He describes this. He says, we more easily take our worst fears and thoughts to be who we are, the shadow. Curiously, he writes, people resist the noble aspects more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. It's more disrupting to find you of a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum. So our capacity to tolerate these poles of unmet needs, of feeling that we're endangered or feeling that we want more

pleasure or feeling that we want more satisfying attachment relationships is very deeply affected by our primary caregiving relationship. And we're social creatures and our brain developments directly impacted by the quality of attunement that we received. And when we don't have good attunement, our needs aren't met as well. So that means that we go through life and there's more charge around those three areas and we're more inclined to go into chronic stress. So we end up attaching to substitutes to feel better to protect ourselves or to get pleasure, food, drugs, material possessions, achievements is a big one.

If we have that trance of unworthiness, a lot of our sense of okayness, the space suit self is built around achieving. Story that touched me a lot as a woman describing time with her dying father, and through her life he had been a kind of larger-than-life figure, a kind of well-known guy who's a respected architect, design buildings, urban centers. many praised pieces of work. And so they had had a kind of distant relationship through her life.

He was very work-focused. That was the center of his attention. And it had caused her a lot of pain. She had to do a whole lot of inner work because of that. But now at the end of his life, they were actually spending more time together. And for him he was kind of moving from his mental self more into a heart space.

And she recounts asking him, what of his accomplishments he felt most proud of. And there was a really long pause. And then he had tears in his eyes and he looked at her and said, you, of course. And of course those were the words that she had most, that was the message she most wanted all her life. And it's both a beautiful story and a sad story

that we can go decades and decades trying to take care of our needs in ways that actually separate us from each other, decades and decades. We separate from each other and in the most fundamental way, we believe we're in a story of who we are that's not the truth. We're blocked from that goal, from that purity. Stephen Vincent Bonae writes, Life is not lost by dying.

Life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day in all the thousands of small uncaring ways. Uncaring. Not caring, cut off from caring. It's like caring is our nature. When we're not caught in fight-flight-free, when we're not caught in this fixation on meeting a knee, the chronic stress, there's a natural caring. But we can go through day after day without...

And when I talk about caring, I'm talking about a visceral warmth of caring, not an abstract kind of compassion where we say, oh yeah, I care about that person, and I feel terrible for the suffering of the name, that group of people. It's not that. I'm talking about the caring when we're in our bodies,

when there's that heart presence, that we actually... there's a tenderness, a kind of a quivering response, caring. So I started on this what kind of from Rumi's vantage point, we begin, we don't seek out the love, we look, well, what's keeping me in any moment? And in any moment that you ask that question, it's really perhaps one of the most important inquiries we could have, what is between me and loving in this moment? moment, we'll find some sense of something's missing or something's wrong right now, some

fear or craving there. And then if we begin to really pay attention, we'll find some version of the ways that we leave in these chronic stress responses. So let's try this together a little bit. We'll just do a brief reflection right now. And take some moments if you need to readjust how you're sitting, just finding that posture that lets you close your eyes. and deepen your attention. So in the spirit of the story I just shared, you might imagine that you're at the end of your life looking back. And you might choose one relationship for now,

one relationship that's important to you, where you can easily sense from a very sincere place that you'd like to wake up more loving. The love is there, but you'd like to have it be more. manifest. Picking a person that's important to you and sensing that sincerity, that you'd like more of a flow of loving, and then just to begin that without any judgment, with curiosity.

So what's in the way? What are the habitual thoughts that might be barriers, the judgments, the fears, the the insecurities about ourselves, the worries. You might notice the ways of acting or behaving that might get in the way, the criticism or the busyness, or perhaps you're chasing after something regularly to soothe you or to get more done or to prove yourself. Maybe there's some presenting or pretending with this person. What gets in the way?

prevents you from being more real, more present, more open, knowing that this can be a continued inquiry, but it will only serve if it's offered to inwardly or brought inwardly with the kind of quality of interest and care, not judgment. Just to sense your aspiration to meet with awareness what you notice, to relax the fist as you can, the tightness, the craving, the moving away, the protecting. Just to sense your aspiration to free your heart so that you can love without holding back and to know as you do so that aspiration itself arises from the gold. It is the purity and beauty and goodness in your mind. you that cares about caring when you're ready to open your eyes.

In a way we could say that this is the most important element in the process of awakening loving kindness, which is intention. If you connect with a sincere yearning to notice where you're blocked and to bring awareness and presence, it takes courage. But if that's your yearning, that's what opens the door. The intention for heart presence is what opens the door. So that's the beginning of it. We're going to take the remainder of the evening's floor, what helps to nourish or cultivate

or awaken this innate capacity. But the beginning is remembering that it matters to you. You're going to come back to it again and again, remembering it matters. There's a kind of attitude or quality that we can develop as we pay attention to ourselves and each other and it's sometimes described as a kind-hearted grandmother. And here's where you see equanimity coming into loving-kindness that we begin to sense this possibility of moving through life and looking for the gold. So the first step, the intention, the second step, looking for the goal, this kind of friendly,

curious attitude where we were in it for seeing the goodness. And the reason this is so important in terms of waking up the heart is that from an evolutionary perspective we have what's called a negativity bias, which means we're so busy protecting ourselves avoiding harm that we tend to look around for what's wrong in others and in ourself. So to decondition that, we start developing this first capacity of looking for the gold. And I love that. And I love the idea of a grandmother because in a way, you know, grandmothers, more than parents, they can do, parents get all caught up in their stuff, but grandparents can behold their grandchildren and really see the gold. They just do. And so I wanted to share a couple of little,

tiny little, grandparent anecdotes. One's my young grandson called the other day to wish me a happy birthday. He asked me how old I was and I told him 62. He was quiet for a moment and then he asked, did you start at one? Another grandmother's telling her little granddaughter what her own child was like, well, we used to skate outside in a pond, and I made a swing from a tired, hung from a tree in our front yard, we rode our pony, we picked wild raspberries in the woods. The little girl was wide-eyed taking this in. At last she said, I sure wish I'd gotten to know you sooner. Just a couple more, they're so good. I didn't know if my granddaughter had learned her colors yet, so I decided to test her. I would point out something and ask her what color it was.

She would tell me, she always was correct. But it was funny. for me, so I continued. At last she headed for the door, sang sagely, Grandma, I think you should try to figure out some of these yourself. Just one more. When my grandson asked me how old I was, I teasingly replied, I'm not sure. Look in your underwear, Grandma, he advised. Mine says I'm four to six. I love that one. So seeing the goodness. It's, But it wakes us up when we see the goodness, just this lens that's like kind of, it just brings out, brings it out in us. And when we see the goodness, it creates a loving space, a safe space for the person that we're viewing. One of the stories that I've always remembered,

it was from Rachel Naomi Remen, who writes in her book, Kitchen Table, Wisdom, writes about a homeless woman. and she is going, she goes for regular appointments at a medical center who has one of, it's very outstanding medical school and describes the doctor, who's the head of the department, who's seeing the different people coming in. Okay, so this woman would come and she'd actually, she had possessions that would fit into two shopping carts, and once a month she'd go up this steep hill with those shopping carts, and she'd finally get to the clinic. And so he saw her once a month on Wednesdays.

Rachel writes this, she says her speech was sometimes rambling or clothes were eccentric. This deeply kind and respectful man was not troubled by this. With his usual grave courtesy, he welcomed her into his consulting room, listen to the details of her difficult life, and did what he could to ease her burden. So he did this time after time just appreciating her humanness. seeing past the particulars, seems that she would start coming to the hospital in days that he wasn't there.

And the clinic nurses were puzzled by this at first, as she seemed to know in some mysterious way he wasn't there. But after talking with her, they determined she simply wanted to go to his consulting room. And once she was there, she didn't go in, but she'd stand on the threshold and slowly and deliberately place her right foot inside the empty room

and withdraw it again, again. After a while she'd be satisfied and go away. Rachel writes to the places in which we're seen and heard, the places we're cared for are holy places. And it creates that kind of quality of sacred space, of holy space, when we pause and we really see past the mask, past what I've been calling the space suit, to that gold, to that shine, to that light, to that light, to that warmth, to that tenderness that really expresses another's essence. We create sacred space in those moments. I've seen, especially in families, how it's so easy to get caught in patterns of reaction and habit patterns that we often don't pause and really mirror

back who's there. One woman described all her fears about her son who was in his 20s, he had grown up with pretty severe learning disabilities, and he was having a hard time finding his niche. And he had a good bit of shame, anxiety and so on. And so she said, I'm not sure how to respond and should I send him white light to surround that and try to heal him. And my response was, you can do that. And really the deepest gift is to see who he really is.

is just to remember that. I started asking about that, you know, because we can sense who are we really, you know, behind all our layers of protection or grasping, and to see who he is. And I asked her, what, what, really, what do you see? And, you know, she described his humor, this delightful humor he had, and his creativity, he was musical, and he's spontaneously generous and his sensitivity. And she described these things and said, just keep meditating on that. Just be aware of the gold.

And it wasn't like I was saying be a Pollyanna, don't see where he's troubled, but keep that right in the foreground. And she described however the next year that they started having a different time together, rather than her being the worried mother always trying to send white light or fix things, she just became more relaxed and something in that was contagious

because he seemed to gain more confidence. I really think of it as the most profound gift we can give to each other and to ourselves is to remember the gold, that goodness, because it does bring it out. It does help bring it out. So the first piece I'm describing tonight on how to really, wake up, this loving kindness, is to have that intention, just to see what gets in the way and have the intention, have the intention to free our hearts. The second is to, on purpose,

look for the goodness. The third and last piece I'm going to describe tonight is to then express our love, express our appreciation. And I, um, I'm going to describe tonight, is to then express our appreciation. And I'd like to start this piece with a poem from Mary Oliver. Some of you might have seen her latest book, which is every poem is about dogs. You see that one? It's beautiful. I think it's called Dog Songs. This one's called Little Dogs Rhapsody in the night. He puts his cheek against mine and makes small expressive sounds. And when I'm awake or awake enough, he turns upside down, his four paws in the air and his eyes dark and fervent. Tell me you love me, he says, tell me again. Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over, he gets to ask, I get to tell.

So in the awakening of loving kindness, we begin this practice of expressing, and sometimes it's in silence and in our meditation, but it's expressive. Not only we're seeing the goodness, we're in some way offering a blessing or a wish. And I think of it as a continual experiment. If you read the classic loving kindness meditation, you'll see that there are phrases and it can be very collecting and concentrating and very powerful heart medicine to take a set of phrases and repeat them over and over again. And another, another way is to start fresh in any moment seeing the goodness and sensing what is it that your heart really wants to express to that person or what gesture. It could be words, it could

be an image, it could be a feeling that you're in some way expressing. When I was on retreat a few weeks ago and I had the opportunity to go deeper into the loving kindness practice and I'd be bringing different people up in my lives and I take some time and I'd take some time and really sense what was shining through. And I found that it became one of the most creative, juicy, alive parts to sense the offering, the sense of letting them know my love. And I would bring, I always start with the person who's the easiest and perhaps for me other than my dog is my mom, who many of you that come here regularly know because

she sits, somebody's in her spot, but that's okay. here. So I thought of her and for those of you don't know her, she's little now. She used to be my height, but she's little. And I, so I didn't see her and it's very easy for me to see her goodness. She's just a very full with affection and gratitude and goodwill. But I'd see it. I'd also see her fragility and her vulnerability. And I just look at her. I was looking down a little bit, but just because that she's a little lower. And I'd say, and I'd look at her in the eyes, and this was in my meditation, I would be saying, I love you, Mom. And then I'd just bend down and kiss her lightly on the forehead.

And every time I would take the time to do that and just give her that little kiss in the forehead, my body would fill with an almost ecstatic kind of warmth and love. And we already know that a hug can bring up oxytocin, imagining a hug. This is the same thing. We are changing our biochemistry, but that makes it sound thin. We're opening our hearts by intentionally expressing love.

There's so many different ways. Sometimes if somebody's been kind just to say the person's name and say thank you. Ticknat Han says that when you say something like, I love you, with your whole being, not just with your mouth or your intellect, it can transform the world.

So it fully engages our heart and our being when we not only see the goodness but when we embody and say the prayer, the blessing. Again, Rachel Naomi Remen describes when she was seven, her grandfather died, and she says, I had never lived in a world without him in it before, and it was hard for me.

He had looked at me as no one else had and called me by a special name, Nishumala, which means little beloved soul. There's no one left to call me this anymore. At first I was afraid that without him to see me and tell God who I was, I might disappear. But slowly over time I came to understand that in some mysterious way I had learned to see myself through his eyes and that once blessed, we were blessed forever. many years later when in her extreme old age my mother surprisingly began to light candles and talk to God herself I told her about these blessings and what they had meant to me she smiled at me

sadly I have blessed you every day of your life Rachel she told me I just never had the wisdom to do it out loud so in a way of the message is we don't have to wait that this possibility of waking up our hearts is right here now and that it begins with the simple longing to have that happen. And then we can nourish it by having that practice of looking to see the goal and it has to include ourselves because we're part of life. But we start where it's easiest. And sometimes that's ourselves but often with others. So we start where it's easiest. I'd like to try to do lead us in a little loving kindness practice now. It's going to be an abbreviated version, but we'll take the time just to

explore some of these pieces I just named together. So again, if you have been sitting for a really long time, you might just kind of shift around some move, get comfortable, and then come into stillness. So we begin in a simple way. just to close your eyes and pause and allow yourself to feel your breath. You might let the breath be felt at the heart. To create an embodied atmosphere for a loving kindness, you might let a slight smile come to the mouth, feel the inside of the mouth smiling, let the eyes be soft.

And since you can smile into the heart, you can visualize that curve of a smile spreading through the chest, It's not to cover over but to really allow you to sense that openness and receptivity. It's a sensing heart space. And then letting come to mind someone in your life who's very easy for you to feel appreciation towards, care towards, love towards. It might be a benefactor, someone who's been very kind, someone who you can trust loves you.

And as this person comes to mind, sense that here she's right here with you, very close in. You can see his or her eyes, look on the person's face when happy, peaceful. You can sense the love that that person feels for you. And take some moments to reflect on whatever goodness, most of the most of the person feels for you. easy to sense what you love about this person and it might be the way they show love, or it might be the humor or brightness, honesty, that this person really is dedicated to being awake or real or kind. Sense what you love about this person really close up so that your appreciation is visceral, you can feel your appreciation in

your heart, your body. Might let yourself whisper this person's name and in some way some either say thank you or I love you or offer a wish to this person. You might also feel to add a gesture, perhaps as I described, could be a kiss or a hug or a hand on the shoulder. You feel your deepest prayer for this person. What do you really wish? yourself be aware of the heart space that opens up as you appreciate and express love.

And then including someone else in this heart space, someone else that is also a person that's important to you, dear to you. And in the same way, feeling that person right here, seeing the person's eyes, expressions, sensing what goodness really comes forth, what you appreciate, or love about this person. You might sense the way they look when they're expressing love for you, enjoying you, encouraging you. Or you might sense what they look like when they're filled with happiness or wonder or curiosity or humor. You might sense the realness, the authenticity, the authenticity, the honesty, as you feel your appreciation, see, you feel like your whole body can be filled

with that. And again, mentally whispering the person's name, you might say thank you, or I love you. There may be some gesture or expression physically, sensing your wish, your prayer for this person. And including now in this heart space the life that's right here, our own being and just sensing your own deep aspiration to love well, the goodness of that, the sincerity and purity of that, is to feel that well of gold, that shine that's at the very source or essence of being.

Sense your love of truth, love for awakening, love of love. just appreciating the goodness that's right here, and sense whatever message or prayer you'd like to offer to yourself in this moment, your prayer of meta, of loving kindness. And sensing that heart space is vast, as inclusive, that it includes all of life, might sense Tom Smurton's quote,

then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin or knowledge could reach, the core of reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the divine. If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more need for war, for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. Sensing our shared heart space, those that are here in this room, those that are places around the world,

the shared heart space that's edgeless and vast and includes all of life, offering our shared prayer to all beings everywhere. May all beings everywhere be filled with loving presence, held in loving presence. know their deepest essence as loving presence. May all beings everywhere touch a natural and great peace. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Namaste and thank you. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation,

learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.