Tara Brach - 2014-08-02 - (retreat talk) Embodying Loving Presence

Episode Date: December 26, 2014

2014-08-02 - (retreat talk) Embodying Loving Presence - This talk looks at the evolutionary fear-patterning that creates separation in our relationships, and at the practices that open us to giving and receiving love.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Good evening. We've had now 48 hours together, and I suspect one of the things you've noticed is that there's been a lot of changing weather inside, and we just go through worlds of experience in not too long a time. I've been really very touched and much. moved by the quality of your presence in the hall, these groups, just the naming of what's real, the authenticity and presence with what's there. And what I'm sensing and is this recognition

that all these different systems can move through and it's really the freedom is in how we're relating to what's going on. And we've been exploring here, Jonathan referred to the two wings of the bird. And this is one of the, I think, one of the best classic metaphors, really for the whole practice, that there's this wing of understanding or recognition, okay, this is what's going on right this moment, this sadness, this excitement or this fear. And then this wing of love, which is the heart space that makes room for what's here. and that we need both to be able to be free in any moment.

And so last night's talk and a lot of the practice has been, how do we get into that no matter what place where no matter what it is, there's this, okay, this is what's going on. Can I offer this some kindness and presence? And so what I'd like to explore tonight is how we bring these same two wings into the relational field. How do we bring it alive with other people? And as perhaps just to kind of set the mood,

one of my favorite little stories, a woman describes this tired-looking dog that wanders into her yard and walks in her door, walks down the hall, gets onto her couch and falls asleep. And so she lets it be there because, you know, it doesn't have tags but has a collar and looks well-fed and well-behaved and so on. Her dogs didn't seem to mind.

And so here's what she says. She says, an hour later he went to the door, I let him out. The next day he was back, he resumed his position on the couch and slept for an hour. This continued for several weeks. Curious, I pinned a note to his collar and I wrote, Every afternoon your dog comes to my house for a nap. I don't mind, but I want to make sure it's okay with you. Next day he arrives back with a different note

into his collar. He lives in a home with three children. He's trying to catch up on his sleep. Can I come with him tomorrow? So there's a quality of space and kindness that really makes room for our lives. And, you know, if we do this reflection and say, well, at the very end,

end of my life. Here I am at the very end of my life and I'm looking back and what really mattered. If we just slow it down, it's okay, what really mattered? And for most people when we kind of explore that together, what really mattered were the moments of real connection, where we in some way felt seen or understood and felt love for another, the moments of tenderness and intimacy. That's kind of what we end up remembering and having mattered. And we know when we think of,

if you think of the biggest challenges you've encountered, and for some of us it's divorce, and for some of us it's, you know, around the custody or some of us it's health, our own health. Some of us, it's a big, sudden loss of somebody that we love. Others, it might be like, you know, a real failure at work. We know that a key element in being able to find any peace or freedom in the midst is a sense of our relatedness, of being in some way held or feeling connected. And it's not just the

challenging stuff. It's the joys, to feel meaning. You know, the, word meaning has to do with feeling connected to something larger. It's the contexting of something larger that gives meaning. So we start exploring, well, how is this field of relationship alive in my life? I love this from Andrea Shah describes a Bechtashi dervish, and he's respected for his piety and appearance of virtue. And when anyone asks him, how he became so whole? holy, he would always say the same thing. He'd say, I know what is in the Quran. So he holds forth in a coffee house. And one time a newcomer finally called him on and he said, okay, what's in the Quran? And here's his response. He says, in the Quran there are two pressed flowers and a letter

from my friend Abdullah. The Dalai Lama says, you, my religion is kindness. And I often think if we just put aside all the, you know, all the complexity of scripture and this and that, and that was the place, you know, just to be awake and be kind. I don't know if we'd need much more to really discover freedom. So our challenge, as we know, is in daily life we go into a trance, most of us, because of the culture, because of our own makeup. up. In some way we get chronically either numb or anxious or busy or restless or defended or on our way to something else. But in some way that sense of this is what I cherish

kind of goes on to the back burner. Do you know what I mean by that trance? And we can leave here and really say it's about loving presence. We can know it. and still, you know, get so small-minded. So what's happening in some level is we're getting, you know, hijacked by our limbic system. You know, we're going into some form of fight-flight freeze, and we've disconnected from what's described as the resonance circuitry. It's the part of our brain that feels empathy

and feels a sense of compassion or kindness. We just are no longer connected up. So the big thing is, you know, how do we reconnect? And there is hope, no matter how we're wired. And it comes in a single word that many of you know, which is neuroplasticity. You remember the graduate, right? One word? Just have one word for you?

How many of you remember that? Okay. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't alone here. For those that don't, you know, forget the scene, but the one word is plastics, but here we're neuroplasticity. We're about 30 years later. But the deal is, it's this amazing juncture in human evolution that we can intentionally evolve our own consciousness by how we pay attention. That's amazing. And our brain can get rewired.

So if there's something in us that knows that we love, love, and knows that we forget, we can go deeper on the path, and it takes two things, and one is much more consciously activating our intention, and then the other is spending our 10,000 hours. Okay? And I'm going to just say them one at a time for a moment, that if you go into daily life and you start watching your intention, It's a really powerful thing to do to track your intention. Any moment with other people by yourself, what's really my intention? You'll find it's marbled.

It's always marbled. One friend was describing in a group wanting for her husband to have the experience of a retreat and knowing that it was marbled because part of it's a controlling thing and a part of it is a true wish for someone's happiness. It's always marbled. So to start tracking our intentions so that we sense how easy it is for the intention to, let's say, check things off the list can get in the way of our intention to really listen to our child. Or we might start noticing how our intention to prove ourselves or be right or impress gets in the way of our intention to listen to listen

and be in real dialogue. So we start tracking intention and get that we often get pulled off by the more surface but intense, immediate wants and fears. Rumi says this. He says, gamble everything for love if you're a true human being. Half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty.

You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for love. long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. Isn't that a great one? So we get waylaid. One woman described her father, a high-powered, very well-known architect, and how during her life he'd been really absent. But she was with him for the last few months when he needed her and when he was dying. And at one point, she said to him, so what was your, what was the greatest accomplishment, you know, of your life. And he looked at her and he said, why, you, of course, and she hadn't ever known, and he hadn't remembered his intention enough to embody it, we wait.

We wait a long time sometimes. Okay, so there's the conscious intention that loving matters, and then the 10,000 hours, so that like anything that matters, that we want to master, whether it's piano or sport or art, anything. It takes actively engaging so that we're not just sitting on the cushion with our eyes closed learning to relate to experience. We're learning how to be with each other and when things come up relate and to celebrate the tenderness and to work with where it's edgy and practice. That's how we retrain. That's how neuroplasticity becomes positive neuroplasticity.

There's a piece of research that I quote a lot, and I do it a lot for myself because it so addresses where I get caught. And this was a study at Princeton. It was the Good Samaritan study, and I imagine many of you are familiar with it. And the way it was set up is that seminarians were supposed to practice their sermon, and half were given the story of the Good Samaritan, the other half some other Bible story. And then, after practicing, the seminarians were supposed to go to another building to give

the sermon and be evaluated. And on the way to the other building, there was a person in a doorway who was moaning in distress. So the question was, are the seminarians going to stop to help? and that was determined by how much time they thought they had before delivering a sermon. And if they believed they were going to be late, they didn't stop to help. This is even true of those who were about to deliver a sermon on the Good Samaritan. Now, isn't that interesting? I mean, really, that we really believe in this stuff. And yet our nervous system gets hijacked.

and a lot of time, there's a notion of there's not enough time. How many of you are aware of that, that squeezes your nervous system? Can I see by hands? Okay, so you've watched that one. Okay, so the given is we have this conditioning to get dragged off course. So it takes intention and it takes practice. So let's look a little more now how we can practice and rewire for love. in the interpersonal field.

And we'll use perhaps as our template, a holding space, one of the most well-known Rumi quotes. It's this one. Your path is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself you have built against it. Okay? It's not like we have to go seeking after, grasping after love,

is find love's here. But how do we separate ourselves? How do we block it off? That's the inquiry. The signal that there's a barrier are all the emotional states we're really familiar with, you know, of separation, that when we're feeling not so alive,

when we're feeling mistrust, our shame, you know, when we're feeling marginalized, when we're feeling lonely. Okay? There's a sign there's barriers. Now, before we can really start looking at those barriers, one of the big challenges is we take them very personally. It's like what am I doing to separate myself from love?

And so there's an understanding that helps to make this all very accessible, which is this is universal. Every one of us incarnates. We are awareness that incarnates into form and then assumes we're form and forgets the awareness, the ocean part. We assume we're the wave of the moment.

We forget. And this is true with all beings that incarnate. There's a forgetting of the wholeness and a taking oneself as separate and sensing that there's some sort of a membrane that says all the material in here is me and everything out there is the world. And along with that,

whole universe of wanting and fearing arises. That's the forgetting, and we're all designed to forget. So then the question is, what then happens to either help us remember and come home to a larger sense of being are what accentuates the forgetting. We happen to be in a culture that really goes on the forgetting side of things. It really creates a sense of a separation. It's, you know, very consumer, I need, I want, I have to be more, prove, compete, you know, speedy, speedy, speedy, produce more, and then violent. I'm like this, you're like that, you're an other, you're an unreal other, you're less than, or you're more than, but you're other, okay? Then our caregivers who are very much shaped by this culture,

as we know, they come from this culture, how we experience caregiving, whether there was a resonance field, whether our needs were attended to, whether there was mirroring so that the one taken care of us saw the light in our eyes and saw the consciousness that was there and saw that vastness, that mystery,

whether there was a responsiveness and a tenderness, that helps remembering. When there wasn't because our parents were stressed out, like the Goods Merritt and they didn't have enough time, when our parents were feeling like there was something wrong with them, when they were afraid. When they were afraid something was wrong with us and we weren't going to be happy, you know, all those things, then there's not such a good resonance field. So the core wounding is severed belonging. It's when we don't get mirrored, we don't get the responsiveness we need.

and that severed belonging leads to more forgetting. We really lock into I'm a separate self and usually I'm a deficient separate self. That's the narrative. So there's a deep fear. Now, let's explore how that plays out relationally. When we're afraid, it sets off a reactive trance and has three major characteristics that we're going to look at tonight. When we're afraid and we feel like we don't belong,

the first thing that happens is we cut off from our body because the raw feelings in our body feel like too much to be with. It's really scary. We try to get away. So the first thing in our reactive trance that solidifies separation is we cut off from our bodies. We go grasping after what will make us feel better and attach to substitute gratifications, but we leave our body. The second thing that happens is that we lock into some form of judgment of something being

wrong and bad. So there's the something wrong sense. Okay, we leave our body, something's wrong. And the third is our own particular strategies for then armoring our hearts. Sometimes we armor an aggressiveness where it gets even more judgmental and pushing others away. Sometimes we armor our hearts by pretending and lying, and sometimes we don't let other people see anything about what's true for us. Some of us withdraw and avoid situations. There's all sorts of ways we armor our hearts. The point of all this is that when we armor, we consolidate

that severed belonging. We feel very, very separate. and so that forgetting gets very deep. When it's really acute, we're completely disconnected from the parts of our brain and our being that allow us to feel love. It becomes really an abstraction. Now, some of you are familiar with, Dan Siegel has a really good show and tell

for how this happens. And just to remind us all so we can refer to it, He describes the brain this way. So this is the brain stem here, and this is, you know, this controls appetite and basic instinctual level. This is the limbic system, the thumb like that. Okay, that's all the emotional body. And then these fingers over here are the frontal cortex, okay, which has to do with reasoning and also perspective and also mindfulness and also compassion and empathy. When we're like this, when everything's all integrated, information flows up like this, including what might be scary or dangerous, and then information flows down here saying, it's cool, it's okay, you've already done that one, you've been there,

other people feel it too, you're not alone, all the information we need to be integrated and whole and then respond and have access to our intelligence and our compassion. But what happens when we get a strong charge of, fear and we're not in the habit of being so integrated is we flip our lid. Okay? And what happens then, this is when our kind of limbic systems hijacked, is we no longer have access to the very remembrances, to the tenderness, to the understanding that can help us respond to a situation well. So the challenge is how, when we have the habit of going like this, and by the way,

it's degrees. Not everybody goes a total flip. You can kind of get hijacked somewhat. And so you have some access to stuff, but it's limited. But when we're offline, when we're hijacked and we don't have access, there's no sense of being at home in our body and our spirit. One of of my clients some years ago, a lot of sexual abuse and then it played out in relationships that would trigger so much fear and neediness and she felt so regressed but it was so constant, she just said, I've lost my soul. And I was mentioning this to a friend here within the hour that another understanding of another way to describe the work we do is soul retrieval in the sense that we're not becoming something different, we're reconnecting with the love

and the consciousness that's already here. So let's look in our own lives, because I'm going to have you check your own lives out, and then we're going to end with a meditation on this, of how you, what you're aware of in terms of your own going into trance. Okay? And this is just a moment to perhaps close your eyes and to pause by sensing your body because you can view trance most clearly if you're not in trance. So come here right now.

Feel your breath. Feel yourself awake. And you might bring to mind someone that you're close to, but you know you create separation with. someone you're close to that you'd like to feel more intimate with. You'd be a child, a friend, a partner, someone at work that matters to you. And just for now, this is an inquiry about how you go into some form of a trance with that person of creating barriers.

And you might sense, do you leave your body? if you get pulled out in some way into a performance, into thinking, into rehearsing, do you leave yourself? You might sense if you're aware of judging, of making something wrong, either yourself or the other, you might sense how you armor. What are your ways of trying to control things? Are you trying to control how the other person sees you? trying to control their behavior.

Often one of the basic parts of control is a more full judgment of what's wrong with me and what's wrong with you. It's usually one or the other, but it's often both, really. Often there's a blame or resentment that's in the background. So then a question for you is if you in some way stopped armoring, if you stopped avoiding or preoccupying or judging or controlling,

what might you have to feel that's difficult? What would getting closer put you in touch with that's not easy to feel? We would get more intimate if it was easy. There's layers of our being that we've been running from. What would you have to feel if you put down the judgment or stopped avoiding or stop preoccupying, stop pretending. You can continue to reflect on this if you'd like to open your eyes.

And maybe if you're willing, just to hear some words in the room, just put out one word of what you might have to touch into if you were to put down some of the armor. What you're aware of. Just raise your hand and let's just hear in the room a little bit of what's here. So who first? Yeah. The fear of not getting married. so that you wouldn't be seen. Yeah. Yeah. What else? Yeah. Mistrust? Yeah. It's a big one. It's real basic. Thank you.

Yeah. What else? What are the feelings under there you'd have to get in touch with? Yeah. Unknowing. That you wouldn't ah. So it'd be very unfamiliar on new territory. That's a big one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Lack of control and what does that bring up? Terror. How many of you notice some version of fear? Yeah. So, and each of these, you names them really actually subtle and very real, that it's, we wouldn't barely know who we were if we put down the armor that's most familiar.

We wouldn't know who we were. The way we keep knowing who we are is by our armoring, by our resistance, by these patternings. Okay, so the healing, the bringing these practices into daily life involve deconditioning the three elements I named. In other words, if the trance is made of leaving our body, then we have to come back to our body. If the trance is made of judging, then we have to step beyond the judgment. And if the trance is made by an armoring, we have to be able to soften the armoring.

So we're going to look a little bit. And maybe I'll begin with one woman that her process really struck me, Julia, and I wrote about this in true refuge, and her patterning was deep mistrust, and her armoring was to withdraw. She was self-sufficient. wouldn't ask for anything from other people. And it was an okay strategy until she got breast cancer. And then she ran into a very deep place of fear and loneliness. She appeared to be brave.

She was brave, but she was also afraid and lonely. So we did some rain with this, and you're familiar with rain, where she felt that sense of loneliness and fear. and, you know, and I asked her, well, what would you have to feel if you asked for more support? And she began to investigate, and it was really the fear that nobody would really want to be with her. They'd do it out of duty and obligation, but the painfulness of feeling that people would be with her, that she wasn't lovable was really it. And so her practice, this is she's investigating and feeling unlovable, unlovable.

and then we started exploring, well, what is that place most need? And of course it wants to feel unconditionally like it can trust that, you know, I'm loved by the world, by, you know, I'm lovable. And I asked her if there was going to be the perfect source for feeling loved, who would that be or what would that be? And for her it was her mother who had died, oh, you know, 15, 20 years early, And I had her imagine her mother's energy and presence and imagine herself being bathed in that. And then her prayer was, please love me.

And she'd say, please love me and then feel her mother, and then say, please love me some more. And it would just keep coming and coming. But she had to speak from that longing, because deep embedded in the feeling of unlovable was the longing, please love me. So recognize and allow was this loneliness, the investigating and finding the unlovable, and then the intimacy of being washed by that love. Very, very powerful for her, she felt like it was just bathing her until she dissolved into loving. And the shift for her, the N of Rain. She was no longer identified

as a separate, unlovable self. She was the field of loving itself. Do you understand that, that kind of shift of going from, please love me, and feeling something come towards you to just dissolving and being the loving? That was the N of Rain. That was the shift.

And it's really the essence of our whole practice that when we open deeply enough into presence and love, we become that loving presence? It's the essence. So for her, a major turning point was she was in bed at one night alone and feeling really, really sick. And a friend came over, and she didn't know her friend was still there.

She was just kind of weeping and alone. And her friend climbed into bed and she just kind of held her and it really let her fully weep. and that was with another person actually experiencing letting in love. So there was the imagining and then with another person. And she said her last few months were amazing. And she said that if you trust you belong to God, you're not afraid of what happens with this life.

That was her languaging of it. It's no different than saying if you trust you're the ocean, you know, you can really be with these waves. I wanted to share her story because it had both the element of her and her meditation imagining and letting in love in the rain process, that kind of letting in love and feeling the intimacy as she investigated and that shift. And it was really essential for her to be held by her friend. In this world held and feeling that she could let it in.

We need to explore this field of waking up love in a relational field with others. There's Robert Johnson, he describes this called shadow vows. The night before their marriage, they held a ritual where they made their shadow vows. The groom said, I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself. The bride replied,

compliant and sweet, but underneath I will have the real control. If anything goes wrong, I'll take your money in your house. Then they drank champagne and laughed heartily at their foibles, knowing that in the course of the marriage, these shadow figures would inevitably come out. They were ahead of the game because they had recognized the shadow and unmatched it. We need to practice with each other, and that doesn't mean we need to have an intimate partner in the classic sense. We need to be in relationships that are conscious where we can begin to take the risk to be more who we are, be more real, let it be out there, take in others. We need to be in the field together.

So let's just take these areas of our conditioning one by one and explore how we can do it with each other. And the first one is that dissociating from our... our body. There's a story of a hermit that lived way out in the wilderness and you had a trek through miles of woods and challenging elements to get to him. He'd sit you down and before he would give any wisdom, he'd say, do you promise to keep this a secret? And you'd have to go, okay. And then he would just ask a question. He'd say, what is it that you're not willing to pay attention to. So with dissociating, there is a deep, deep pattern of not wanting to be with what's

raw. And really the inquiry is, what wants attention? What really wants me to be with it? There's a friend that tells a story of an engineer who was very, very mental. And he went to a monastery to heal his suffering. And he wasn't able to make any progress because he'd start going towards and he tried to get into his body a little, but then he'd just go tripping off into his rational mind and try to explain things and try to figure things out, which you might have noticed this weekend doesn't work.

If you came here thinking you're going to figure something out, we can't think our way into freedom. It just doesn't work. So the abbess sent him to volunteer. She said, okay, enough of the monastery. She sent him out to a maternity ward to hold babies that were prematurely born, okay? And he did it 10 hours a week for two years.

That was his assignment. So there he was. He'd be, you know, holding these fragile little beings to his chest. And he, as he described it, six months, he's holding him just carefully attending to their breathing. And he started feeling a bit of softness and warmth kind of in the center of his being. That's after six months of holding a baby to his chest.

Over the months, that warm little spot began to grow to fill his whole body. And then, as you can imagine, he returned in two years a transformed being. And her assignment was to him after that, his practice was just to keep seating his attention in the tender warmth of his body. It didn't mean it was always pleasant, but keep coming into the body. So I love that story. And I love it because we have such a habit of avoiding or removing that to be able to go the opposite direction. And it really has to do with sensing vulnerability and letting ourselves be touched by it. And yet we have to go out of our way for that to happen.

So there are many ways if you feel like you're relating to this, that you know you've left your body a lot. There are many ways to come back in and we're doing a lot of them here. Do a lot of body scanning. And every time you come back from a thought, it can't hurt to re-relax and scan through your body and really establish your presence in your body so that right now you can feel your hands and you can feel the energy inside your chest. And you can feel the breath and you can let it be receive deeper in the torso and you can feel your feet from the inside out. And you begin to get the knack of coming back right here in your body. If you have a hard time being in the body, put your hand on your belly and feel the breath in the belly. Keep coming deep into the

belly because we tend to create a lot of armoring around the belly when we're blocking raw feelings. So to soften the belly and begin to feel like a two-year-old, that undefended belly, just really feel yourself deep in the torso like that will begin to open you up into your body, to give massage and receive massage, to belong to the world, to dance with others and touch. The inner practice you can do that really, much like this engineer did, that I think is most powerful in waking up the heart in an embodied way is Tunglin, where when you're breathing and you're breathing in the vulnerability of yourself and others. And when you're breathing out, you breathe out care. So these are just examples of

how we can work with that disassociation. Now the second of the areas is this habit and it's kind of the negativity bias of the mind to go, something is wrong and to fixate on badness, to judge. And this takes a really deep kind of intentionality to move the other way. I heard a wonderful story some years ago, a woman told about being with her friend in a grocery store in California. And she said that as they were moving, she was moving through the aisles and they became aware of a mother with a small boy moving the opposite direction. They kept meeting them head on head. And the mother, the woman didn't notice them because she was so furious with her little boy

who seemed intent on pulling items off the lower shelves. And as the mother became more and more frustrated, she started to yell at the child, and several hours later they'd regressed to shaking them by the arm. Okay, now, many of you've been in that experience. You've seen parents treating kids in ways that freak you out. This was kind of like that. Now, at this point, she says her friend spoke up,

and this is how she described her. She said, a wonderful mother of three and founder of a progressive school, she had probably never once in her life treated any child so harshly. I expected my friend would give this woman a solid mother-to-mother talk about controlling herself and about the effect this behavior has on a child. Braced for a confrontation,

I felt a spike in my already elevated adrenaline. Instead, my friend said, What a beautiful little boy, how old is he? The woman answered cautiously. He's three. My friend went on to comment about how curious he seemed and how her own three children were just like him in the grocery store, pulling things off shell so interested in all the wonderful colors and packages. He seemed so bright and intelligent, my friend said. The woman had the boy in her arms by now and a shy smile came upon her face, gently brushing his hair out of his eyes. She said, yes, he's very smart and curious, but sometimes he wears me out. My friend responded sympathetically, yes, they can do that. They're so full of energy.

As we walked away, I heard the mother speaking more kindly to the boy about getting home and cooking his dinner. We'll have your favorite, she said. Macaroni and cheese. So part of this training to wake up out of trance

is to come back into our body and then notice our reactions. And for this woman, her first reaction might have been, know, this is bad mothering, something's wrong. But something interposed and open to a wiser place of seeing the vulnerability and seeing the goodness that was embedded in there and calling that out instead of, you know, shaking a finger.

We forget. We forget what's really going to move another person. The poet He face. He says, I could not lie anymore, so I started to call my dog God. First he looked confused. Then he started smiling. Then he even danced. I kept at it. Now he doesn't even bite. I'm wondering if this might work on people. So this is the practice that you've been doing in the afternoons. This is really the practice of the heart where we pause enough to really look and see who's there. And if there's anyone practice that you bring on to the street, to slow down and to look and sense, okay, so how is this person suffering? What does this person need?

And to look and see the goodness that's there totally alters how we move through. So there's cutting off from our body, there's turning around that tendency to look for what's wrong. And then the third is this armoring that's so habitual that doesn't let in love and doesn't give out. We are trying to love without holding back much of the time, but we keep it in. We withhold. And most of the time, you know, the armoring is some form of control. We're trying to control

things. So we don't speak our truths and we get manipulative in a certain way. It's interesting if you're honest with yourself, watching yourself with another person, how many moments on some level were trying to have that other person think well of us in a certain way rather than just the spontaneity of being. Another story. John invited his mother over for dinner. During the meal, John's mother couldn't help noticing

how beautiful John's roommate was. She had long been suspicious of a relationship between John and his roommate and this only made her more curious. And watching the two interact over the evening, she really wondered if there was more to that relationship than met the eye. Reading his mother's thoughts, John volunteered, I know what you might be thinking, but I assure you, Carrie and I are just roommates.

About a week later, Carrie came to John and said, you know, ever since your mother came here for dinner, I've been unable to find that beautiful silver soup ladle. Do you think she did something with it? He says to her, I doubt it, but I'll email her just in case. so he writes down, Dear Mother, I'm not saying you did or did not do anything with a soup ladle, but it's odd that it disappeared after the dinner. Do you know anything about this? Later, he received an email from his mother that read,

Dear Son, I'm not saying that you do sleep with Carrie, and I'm not saying that you don't. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, she would have found the soup ladle by now. Love from your mother. So we develop our strategies for how we operate with each other, and they're not always that straightforward. So the practice of removing armor is, as we've been exploring, risky. It feels risky. The armor wouldn't be there if we didn't have a wound of severed belonging.

Okay? So any move you make, if you leave here and say you're going to play your edge a little more in terms of removing armor, you're going to be a little bit more real, or let yourself be a little more touched by others or letting in love more, whatever it is, that playing your edge is going to feel risky because there's some raw feelings underneath to experience. And yet if we don't play our edge and begin to soften that armoring, we don't get to feel our hearts wake up. We were talking about this a few weeks ago at a course I was giving, and a woman shared a story that I want to share with you now, and that basically her father was very, very shut down.

His armoring was miles thick, and even though she said he loved his children, he was unable to express it. So after her mother died, she kind of was a little more courageous and she said, I want a relationship with you. And they actually had 20 good years. None of her siblings did this, but they were able to communicate some. She was able to get through. But this is what she told us about. She said her brother died at age 48 of a brain tumor, brain cancer. And in his last months, his wife had called her and said that the main thing missing from her brother's life, the one thing missing, was contact with his father, it was meaningful, that his father had never said, I love you. So this was kind of like a dying wish of her brother Jay. And so this woman

describes getting on the phone, calling her father and saying, you know, you're about to visit, this is what means the most to him. Please say it, Dad. So, as it turns out, he went to visit, but the subject never came up. So, on Jay's last day, his wife, Kathy, call he was dying. He was supposed to die in about an hour. At that point, he was blind and paralyzed and hadn't spoken in a week. And so she said she had, Kathy hold the phone to Jay's ear, and she said that, I love you to her brother.

But then she'd called her father and she said, okay, you've got one last chance. She said, Jay's probably going to die today. Please, pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. And he did it. He called her brother. He told him that he loved him.

And her brother, who hadn't spoken for a week, started talking. They spoke for half an hour. And the brother didn't die that day. He rallied and lived another month. And during that month, he and his father had a month where they were in touch with each other with their hearts open. True story. There's a whole world of loving that's available that we even forget as possible because we're in such a trance of what's familiar in the way that we express to each other and what we take in. We're so familiar, we're so patterned.

The risks to even say the words I love you and say them slow enough and embodied enough so you're meaning it, you're not just throwing them out there, is risky for many people. And yet there's such a power. There's a power for you in saying it because if you say it and you mean it, it actually brings forth the feelings even more. If you say it and you mean it, it actually calls forth and brings alive the feelings. And for another person to hear you when you mean it melts their armor. It's a real powerful, powerful process.

To speak anything that's really true and take a chance is really powerful. This is Adrienne Wright, she says, an honorable human relationship that is one in which two people have the right to use the word love, is a process of deepening truths they can tell each other. It's important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. So in this exploration tonight, trying to keep it very simple to the three primary ways that we leave and don't really engage with our hearts, we leave our bodies, we have an undercurrent of judgment, and then we armor our hearts and our different ways. And the good news is that these can all be deconditioned. And what we come back

to then, there's a natural loving that is what some describe is our original nature. It's essence. It's not something we have to go chase after. I sometimes read over, there's a whole collection of quotes from children, and when I think of it being natural, this loving, I, I, I, I, I, I, I enjoy these. Just read you a few of them. The question was, children, please tell us what you mean by love. When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too.

That's love. Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your french fries without making them give you any of theirs. Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen. When you tell someone something bad about yourself and you're scared, they won't love you anymore, but then you get surprised because not only do they still love you, they love you even more. That's love. I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones. When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.

You really shouldn't say, I love you unless you mean it, but if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget, and it's good for them to get reminded. It's an innate capacity. And the more we get familiar, one person mentioned, you know, this unfamiliarity, the more we get familiar with that place of having the windows and doors open and letting it out and speaking it and letting in, the more spontaneous it becomes. comes. This will be my last story for you. And this is written by a surgeon. And he says, I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face post-operative, her mouth twisted and palsy, clownish.

A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh, I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remember. remove the tumor in her cheek I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private.

The young woman speaks, will my mouth always be like this, she asks? Yes, I say it well. It's because the nerve was cut. She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. I like it, he says. It's kind of cute.

All of once I know who he is. as I understand and lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a God. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works. I remember the gods appeared in ancient Greece as mortals,

and I hold my breath and let the wonder in. So I'd like to close with a guided message, meditation will take a few minutes. And it's an opportunity for you just to practice a little playing your edge or waking up at a trance or however you want to consider it with someone in your life. And so before you come into stillness, if it helps you to move your body a little bit, if you've been sitting still, if you want to stretch a little bit however, please do so so that you can be here awake in your body.

and then coming into stillness, having your attention, come inside you, and just feeling the moment through your senses, the sounds, the sensations, and feeling your heart, choosing a relationship with somebody that you care about, where you want to experience more conscious loving. When you have someone in mind, you might choose a situation where you might choose a situation where you're typically with that person, where there might be some real communication or care possible, quiet time with a child or a partner or a friend, where you might have the opportunity to be getting real,

see the place or space you're in, you might visualize and sense the other person close in. And just to begin to invest, investigate what might stop you from letting in love? What are the beliefs, the feelings that would stop you from letting in this person's love, letting your body and heart feel it? As an extension of that, what bad might happen if you played your edge and softened and let in a bit more?

What might you first have to feel to even know? move in that direction. Continuing to investigate what stops you from expressing love from a very deep and real and authentic place? There's some beliefs you have about what would happen. What uncomfortableness, what rawness, what pain might you feel if you softened and let out more.

Sensing what most wants attention right now from just those reflections, if you felt where did you feel most vulnerable? For some, it's contemplating letting in love, some expressing, some both, feeling into where the vulnerability lives. The place sometimes describes the place of severed belonging, the wounded heart, just for now, just breathing into whatever you feel, throat, heart, belly, and if you want to put your hand there where you feel, vulnerability that can help connect you. It can help bring you into your body even more.

If you feel it, if you put your little bit of pressure there, so you're accompanying and connecting with that place, breathing with it, sensing what that vulnerable place, just this moment, what might most bring healing to that place. If there's any message, any image, any energy that might really be what this place needs right this moment, feeling the possibility of offering and letting in some flow of love or understanding or acceptance, recognition. So that place can feel bathed in awareness, in love. And see before you the person,

that you've been reflecting on, and sense your deepest intention. What's your deepest intention for this relationship? Let yourself see in that person's eyes and face when he or she's most expressing love or appreciation, care, and sense what it means right, this moment, to truly have the intention to let in, that any judgment, just noticing what happens with the intention to soften, to soften, and let in, still sensing the presence of this person right here, and you might mentally whisper his or her name and just whisper the words thank you, just express your appreciation, feeling his or her goodness, what you really love about this person. And you might imagine and sense

communicating your love with whatever words most resonate for you. And imagine that person, person receiving your love. Mary Oliver writes, so every day, so every day, I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you, sensing this field of caring, of letting in, of offering. You can even let go of any notion of giving and receiving and just rest in the field of loving presence. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule,

or programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.