Tara Brach - 2015-03-25 - Three Liberating Gifts: Part 1 - Forgiveness

Episode Date: March 27, 2015

2015-03-25 - Three Liberating Gifts: Part 1 - Forgiveness - This 3 part series is based on a teaching story from the Upanishads that shows our potential to awaken from an ego-based trance and discover the full luminosity and freedom of our natural awareness.  In each class we'll explore one of the three gifts considered as essential on the spiritual path.  The first is the capacity to forgive, to let go of the blame and resentment that prevents our hearts from being open and free.  The second gift is "inner fire," the capacity to devote ourselves wholeheartedly to what we most cherish.  The third gift is a "mirror" or the capacity to look deeply into our own hearts and minds and realize the truth of who we are. Each class includes guided meditations that explore how these gifts can be nourished right here and now in our lives.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Namaste and welcome. In this class and in the next two classes, we're going to be exploring three key capacities. They're building capacities that when we nourish them, they really become a pathway to freeing our hearts. and I'll be organizing these three classes around an ancient story from the Upanishads that I've told on and off over the years and every time I revisit it I find nuances that inspire me so I get motivated to re-enter it with you. And I'm going to read a bit from this story.

The main character is a young man named Natchiketa. and he's a son of a rich merchant who happens to be a very miserly guy and so his father was making these donations in order to receive a gift from the gods and his son noticed that he was donating only cows that were old, lame, or blind. So he challenged him publicly.

He pointed it out and in his shame and his anger, his father said you know, basically I give you to Yama which is death, God of death, which is the same thing as saying go to hell, you know. But Natchikata took him very, this is a very kind of concrete thing, and so he went off into the dense forest searching for death,

and he sat waiting for death to appear, and he sat through hunger and pain and exhaustion until he arrived in the land of Yama. And he was greeted by death's three assistants, pestilence, and war. And they told him that death was out. He was out collecting rent or something like that. So he waited patiently for three days. And when Yom arrived realizing the boy's dedication and sincerity, he offered him any three boons or blessings or gifts that he might want for his spiritual

journey. So Natchie Keta's first wish was that he might find peace with his father, that all be forgiven because he knew he couldn't continue the journey of his heart was armored if he had pushed his father out of his heart. And so that gift was granted and his heart was quite open and free. And his second wish that he asked for was inner fire. An inner fire, it's the sacred fire that brings the path alive. It's really the energy and juice and aspiration that carries us forward in a kind of wholehearted or devoted way. And so Lord Yama granted that gift, and this meant that Natchi Keta really had the energy to move forward.

The third wish was he said, I want to realize the truth of what is beyond death, the mystery of that, which is timeless and immortal. So Lord Yom was a surprise with this last boon. He said, you know, you can have anything. You can have beautiful maidens. and the fastest steeds around, palaces, you know, whatever. But Natchikata was easily derailed.

And he said, won't all of these things return eventually to your kingdom, Lord Yama? And Lord of Death agreed, and he gave him his final gift, and it was a mirror. And he said he couldn't give him the wisdom itself, but it would arise as he looked directly into his own heart and mind, asked that most core question on the spiritual path, which is, who am I? So as the story goes, Machia Keda gazed into the mirror and entered into this inquiry, and in time all delusion fell away, and he saw the radiance and the purity of his own being. So he realized his timeless essence, and he was free.

So this is the kind of landscape of this story. And really it's the question for all of us in the face of reality. Lord Yama's reality that everything comes and everything goes. These lives were mortal and given the truth of this fleeting life, what is it that most matters? What is it that we really want to nourish? And so for Natchikata, the three factors of awakening were forgiveness, this aspiration to give himself wholeheartedly to the path,

and then this willingness to really look within. These are the three faculty. So each of the classes we're going to look at one of them, and tonight we're going to be looking more deeply into how do we release the armoring, that most of us have some. If we've been hurt at all, we have some ways that we're protecting ourselves from more hurt, and it takes the shape of blame and resentment and not forgiving. So we'll look at that first of the gifts, first capacity.

And just to say that in the story, which is so it's kind of powerfully drawn, it begins with disillusionment, with disenchantment. And this is something that every one of us, if we live long enough, we get disillusioned. Things change. People don't behave the way we want them to. We end up feeling hurt. We feel betrayed by our own bodies as they can age and get sick, and we feel betrayed by other people because they behave in ways out of fear or their own grasping that hurt us.

So then the big inquiry is, you know, how are we going to relate to that? And one possibility when we face Lord Yama, when we face the betrayals, so to speak, the losses, one possibility is that we get tight and reactive. And if you think of it in terms of evolution, that we then react from our more primitive conditioning. And we harden ourselves and we get aggressive or defensive and play that out. We react with anger. And then, of course, as we do that, that reinforces. the separate self and ego.

And then the other possibility is that as the betrayals come that we instead of the more primitive reaction we move into tend and befriend which means we pay attention to where

the wounding is and we bring a compassionate presence to ourselves and that and gradually that widens to include others. And if instead of reacting and blaming, we do this more evolved route, that's the pathway that reveals a liberated heart. So we're going to explore how that's possible, how we can move from what we most often do.

And just to say, most of us, when we first encounter betrayal, when somebody treats us in a way that makes us feel diminished, that makes us feel pushed away, that in some way is an obstacle. For most of us, there's a flinch reaction, and it's the more primitive system that kicks in, and we go into blame, and that can last for minutes, hours, or decades, right? Most of we do that. And then what happens, that at some point, that reactivity creates a kind of contraction in us that it becomes so painful that we realize, I don't want to live my life this way.

There's a kind of rigidity that comes when we're going around feeling resentful or angry or hateful. That ends up being very painful. So we recognize that, and then we start unwinding and releasing the armor. That's usually the pattern.

And as I mentioned, if we've practiced a whole lot, it can be within a few hours. that we might have a reaction and then learn to let go. And if we are not so conscious of the process, we can move for decades, pretty armored, carrying resentments with us. I think that the reason this teaching, the Natchikata story is powerful, is that it's possible for all of us,

no matter how many layers we've accumulated, to get very intentional and not carry it for decades. It's possible to free ourselves. So the very word forgive means to let go of the armoring of our stories of blame. That most of us, if we scan the people in our life and we scan our relationships, we'll notice that we have some narratives where in some way we've developed this idea that that person has let us down or they're wrong or they're bad or in some way we're adding to the situation, you're not okay. But I want to also say that many people have trouble with the word forgive.

So as you're reflecting tonight, and as most of you know, if we've practiced together, I'm going to invite you to pick somewhere where you've created some separation with another person. If forgive doesn't resonate as a word, then you might shift it to bringing more compassion to the situation, whatever works for you. So we begin by looking at how it is we create separation so we can actually notice where it's happening. And we, first of all, create a lot of separation from ourselves. We move through the day with an idea of how we should be, and we move through our

our life with these standards of how we should behave. And then we don't match those standards, and then we turn on ourselves. And we have an idea that we should be different. I usually think of Jules Pfeiffer's cartoon because it's so good where he has this man saying, you know, I grew up with my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's walk, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father, you know. So for many people, this is the core suffering, is a sense of in some way I'm fundamentally flawed. I'm really not okay.

So that's the lack of forgiving ourselves for how we are. And then we also have standards on how other people need to treat us so that we feel okay. And then we often have a reaction. They're not doing a right. So then we try to control them with our judgments and our criticism, are threats to withhold affection so that they meet our expectations. My illustration tonight is a young man who invited his mother over for dinner,

and his name is John, and during the dinner his mother couldn't help noticing how beautiful John's roommate was, and she'd long been suspicious of a relationship between the two, and given their roommate, she got even more suspicious and curious, and a little judgy. So she's watching them interact over the evening and wondering, maybe they're not being honest with me. And 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 the beautiful silver soup ladle. You don't think she did something with it, do you? He said, I doubt it, but I'll email her. So he wrote this.

He says, Dear Mother, I'm not saying you did or did not do anything with the 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, and it 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. The title of the story is, Don't Lie to Your Mother.

mother. So, you know, when we talk about forgiveness, we might be thinking of the lifelong resentments and hatred. But I think what I'm also wanting to emphasize in this class is that it's our ongoing habit of judging. There's the very small kind of aversive judgments, which are really insidious, the kind of judgments like, you know, how our partner's driving that we hold on to, or the way colleagues doing their job or our child's relating to our chores or whatever it is that tightens us so that without knowing it, it bleeds into other things and we're just distancing. We're just distancing. How are siblings controlling things at the holiday, whatever it is.

There's this undercurrent of you should be different. You're not okay. There's a story of a devoted wife who's spent her lifetime taking care of her husband. and now he's been slipping in and out of a coma for several months, but she stays at his bedside every day. And when he comes to his senses, he motions her to come close, and he says this. He says, you know what, you've been with me through all the bad times.

When I got fired, you were there to support me. When my business failed, you were there. When I got shot, you were by my side. When we lost the house, you gave me support. When my health started failing, you were still by my side. You know what? And she goes, what, dear, very gently. He says, I think you bring me bad luck.

So part of what happens is when things don't go our way, we are really looking for somewhere to blame. And very often we'll blame ourselves. You know, I'm failing in some way. But we also blame outward. It's a very deeply rooted against part of our primitive wiring. When something is painful, we look for a cause so we can control it. That's the basic mechanism of blame.

So you might ask yourself, you know, where am I practicing blame? And I use the word practice on purpose. It's really a habit. It's a habit of thinking. And most of us have it a lot. And there's a understanding neuroscientists put it this way, that neurons that fire together wire together. Which means that whatever you think about regularly,

that becomes really what creates the atmosphere and mood in your body and mind. So where are we judging? Where are we strengthening those neuropathways that lock us into this experience of separation? And sometimes the judging is done in a more abstract way where we have some types of people that we just have this assumption that they're not like us and in some way they're less than. which is toxic. We do it to people that are, we've been told our enemy

and other places in the world. We have all sorts of assumptions and stereotypes we do around race. We do it around people that are different in terms of gender orientation, sexual orientation. And then we do it close in in our personal life with people that don't cooperate

with how we want them to act. So it's a very important inquiry if we're wanting to begin to shine the light of awareness on the patterning that closes our heart. I want to name that, again, that judgment is kind of the mental part of aggression, which is part of our survival equipment.

So not to blame, blame, not to judge ourselves for judgment. judging. That's not the point. That's adding another level of aggression to aggression. It's just to have the courage and the care to really look, to look at it. And in many ways, we're afraid to let go of our judgment and our blame. We're afraid to forgive. I often do day-long workshops and sometimes weekend workshops around awakening the heart. And when I ask the question, you know, really what's between you and forgiving? What's so bad?

What would happen? There's this fear that if I forgive, then I'll be taken advantage of. If I forgive, everything will be out of control. I'll get hurt again. If I forgive, then maybe it was my fault, not the other person's fault. If I forgive, isn't that like condoning? Isn't it like that saying it's okay to something that is really causing harm? So it's important just to get more clear in a way that when we're forgiving, in other words,

when we're letting go of the story of your bad, we're not condoning or approving behavior. We're not saying it's okay, you can keep on hurting me or insulting me or abusing me. In fact, it takes really wise discrimination to sense if somebody's causing harm exactly what what boundaries you want to do and how we want to take care of it. But it doesn't mean our hearts have to tighten up into a knot of anger and aversion. Because that is really harming our body, our nervous system, and our capacity to keep waking up. So we can forgive and vow never again.

We can forgive and we may still divorce, we may still decide not to spend time with someone ever again, we can sue people, we can write letters, we can protest, we can do anything we need to do that's a wise action, but release the armoring around our hearts. Maybe another way to put it is when we're stuck in blame, there's a natural movement and anger comes up that's very healthy to let us know, hey, pay attention, take care of things. But when we lock in, when we're locked in for weeks and months and years and decades to making others wrong. We're in a trance. We're in a trance, an egoic trance, and the world's being filtered through a very primitive part of our brain. We can't see all of who's there, and we are living

in a very small sense of who we are. Let's reflect for a moment. Let me invite you to kind of close your eyes and check in and see what you notice about this in your own life. So as you take a temporary pause here, you might bring someone to mind in your closer circle, who you know, you know, that you care about and you know you can easily flip into judgment. And if there's no one close in than someone in a wider circle, and if you have to stretch, you can go into politicians you don't know. And when you have somebody in mind, go ahead and remind yourself of what triggers off blame. And it won't help if you pick somebody where there's a real traumatic reaction.

But just where you get caught in blame, resentment, judgment, and just remind yourself of what trips it off and when you're in it, when you're in that state, and this takes a little bit of, you know, just prompting yourself. So you're experimenting to get yourself inside the judging state. Notice when you're judging that person how he or she appears to you. What is it that you're noticing about that person? In other words, how has your attention fixated or narrowed?

What is it looking at? And when you're in blaming mode, what's your experience of yourself? What does your body feel like, your mind feel like? Do you like yourself? Are you in a role that's familiar of being oppressed or victimized or wronged or outraged, offended? Is there a familiar narrative here? if you can just witness right now. So, okay, so this is what it's like. This is the egoic

trance of blame. You might sense what it is when you're blaming that person, you're not remembering about them in the moment. You might remind yourself of what you really care about, what the dimensions of that person are that really matter to you, nourish you, enliven you. Because as you begin to include you, those qualities, you are beginning to dissolve the trance. You're beginning to see more truly who's there and you'll start sensing yourself more resting in a wholeness of your own being. When you'd like, feel free to open your eyes. It's very powerful to begin to witness ourselves going in and out of judgment and to really get that when we're in judgment, we're an egoic trance, that

smaller than who we are. It feels very compelling, it's very addictive, it's not easy to wake up out of because we hold onto it, we'd rather be right and feel the temporary surge of power of that righteousness than be in that less control, less able to control things state where we're not holding onto the story. Very compelling and yet it's smaller than who we are. So the beginning of the beginning of this path that Natchikato was on was getting that it's not easy, but in the face of reality, which I'm going to die, we're all going to die, if you knew you're on your deathbed, would you hold on to that resentment? Really? We know from our wisest place that

it's not who we are. So this is the beginning of the path for Natchikata and for us, which is to get more conscious in our commitment to wake up out of the trance of judgment. It's a really powerful commitment. If all you take away from this class is more of a sense that, wow, this really, I want to commit myself to this. I might not be ready to commit myself, but at least it's my intention at some point. That will transform your life. And that's what Nachicata did. There's a, from Carlos Kostaneda, if anyone read these books about the Shaman Don Juan, he writes that when death makes the slightest gesture, pettiness falls away. Okay, so what motivates us to go ahead and be in that uncomfortable zone

of beginning to challenge our own judgments is some wisdom in us knows that we're bigger than that. that in this changing life it doesn't pay to hold on to the resentments. I know for myself, I was in a spiritual community for 10, 11 years, and towards the end of that time, I felt very directly betrayed by my teacher. He misused his position of authority. He was abusive emotionally. If you want the blow-by-blow, it's in my book Radical Acceptance. But for the purposes of this talk to say that I left the community

and many people were leaving for the similar reason, I wasn't the only one by a long shot. But I carried with me a sense of empowerment that I got up and left, and I took good care of myself. But I also had a mix of kind of putting them down, contempt, you know, talking with other people that had left and feeling like not good personhood. putting that on him. And after a year or two years, I started recognizing just what we're

talking about, that that was just, that that locked me into the trance of having been victimized, which I'm sure you understand. And so gradually what happened is I just noticed that, and I felt this commitment not to buy into my ideas about him. And when I let go of the idea of your bad, he just became this mixed bad. of a person, you know, some perfect being who had some brilliance and some strengths and some light and some shadow sides and it was just okay. And in that, I became larger in some way. It's like the story of two ex-political prisoners and one saying, and they meet up after like 20 years and one says to the other, have you forgiven our captors yet? And the guy, his response is

grimly, no, never. And then his friend said, ah, so you're still in prison then, aren't you? You understand? So we forgive for the freedom of our heart and also so that we can really enjoy our lives. It's a Charlotte Chouke-Bak, Zen teacher said in really, I love this way, she puts it. She says, our failure to know joy is a direct reflection of our inability to forgive. Our failure to know joy is a direct reflection of our inability to forgive. Okay, so then the inquiry is this. It's how do we go about it? Like what's really the practice?

You know, just the way we practice blame, we can actually practice letting go. And we practice in small ways. We can practice every day in small ways. You can feel yourself tightening up against somebody. You can feel the email comes in and in some way it's written in a way that you take a or somebody in the family says something with a critical edge. We can tell. We react really quickly. So we can start with where it's easy,

where we just notice that and notice ourselves getting smaller. And then they're the big ones, the big ones where we've been really, really wounded. And I'm going to share one story that touched me, this friend of mine, had been living with very long-standing anger, He and his college friend, after graduating, set up a consulting business. And they really put in with each other. And there was much conflict between them. They just didn't work well together.

And so finally his friend left, and he left with some, and he took with him some major clients, and this guy that I knew felt that he did it in an underhanded way. Who knows? But it was very bad blood. He felt betrayed. 15 years, he just was locked in the storyline of this guy, deceitful, bad, I'm hurt, I'm victim. Then, you know, began, then started doing meditation and therapy and realized that that was keeping him small. So, here's how we had to work with it, and this is the process.

It begins with sensing what we're believing, okay, I'm believing this person's bad, but then feeling under it. to the wounded place. There's no way to forgive unless you go under the story of blame to where you're hurting. That's the process and it's hard. And for him that meant he had a feel underneath the blame, the rage and underneath that, the impotence and a sense of being a fool and taken advantage of and not respected, that what his friend did meant that he was in some way incompetent and unlovable. he had a lot of what are called complex equivalents

to what it all meant. But he had to get in touch with that very impudent place in himself. They felt powerless and hurt. And so for weeks and weeks, his practice was simply every time he'd sense the blame, he'd have to go under the blame to that very raw place and offer kindness. And as many of you know, I often teach this practice

of putting your hand on your heart and offering messages of kindness. And he had a similar one. He just put his two hands like this. And in some way he would just say forgiven, forgiven to himself. And gradually, it included his friend. He could start seeing his friend through fresh eyes.

He could start seeing him back when he was 26 as insecure, as afraid of failing himself, as hurt by their conflict on his own. And as he started to get his friend's vulnerability, that's when the forgiveness became more full. So he gave a gift to his own heart, and it also opened up future possibilities with others because when we're blaming and resentful towards one person,

it's never one person. It's a habit. Now, in this story, there's a basic quality of attention that's essential for forgiving. And the metaphor I use that I'll share again here, because I go back to it so often, is if you imagine you're walking in the woods and you see a little dog under a tree

and you go to pet that dog, and it lurches at you and its fangs are bared and it's looking vicious, and you go from being friendly to being really angry at that dog, and then you notice the dog's paw is caught in a touch. trap. And then you shift again. You go from feeling angry to, oh, you poor thing. Now, you might not get real close to that dog because you might get bits. You're calling your boundaries, right? In other words, forgiving and caring doesn't mean you go get hurt, but you care. Because you

seen that anyone that causes suffering is suffering. When we or other creatures are happy, fulfilled, At home with ourselves, we don't harm others. One of my friend's mother, as she was growing up, she and her brothers and sisters, whenever they would make a disparage and remark, her mother would call a pause and have that one of them come up with three possible reasons that the person they were putting down might be acting or behaving in that way, or three reasons that were sympathetic, you know. What a great exercise.

So just to say, just coming back, that this first capacity is inbuilt. In other words, we have a very primitive nervous system that is absolutely designed when we get hurt to lash out. And we have a part of our frontal cortex, a whole neural net up there that's designed to be able to see how the leg is in a trap and have empathy and forgive. We have both. and we can commit ourselves to cultivating the more evolved neuropathways to free our heart. And that was the commitment that Natchikata made, and that's what we can do in our lives. A story for you that shared a few years ago, and I found again in my files, and it touched me a lot. This is told by a man who worked here in Washington, D.C.

in doing rehabilitation, the juvenile offenders. And these were offenders that had committed homicide. This guy was right on the front line. And he described one 14-year-old boy in his program who had to prove himself to a gang. He had shot and killed another teenager. So he was put on trial. and the victim's mother was in the courtroom when his verdict was announced and she stood up slowly and she stared at this young boy

and in the eyes as he was being taken out and she said, I'm going to kill you. So he's put in, he's put in, taken away for several years in this juvenile facility. Well, during that time, after the first half year, the victim's mother went and visited this young man. And she had been living on the streets before the killing. He didn't have family. She was the only visitor. So they talked, and then she gave him some money

for some refreshments or whatever they could get in there. And she started step by step to visit him more regularly, bringing him food and gifts and so on. And near the end of his three years, sentence, when it was almost up, she asked him what he was going to do when he got out. And, you know, he was kind of confused

and uncertain. So she offered to set him up with a job, with a friend's company. And she inquired where he was going to live. And again, because he didn't have family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home. So for eight months, he lived there and he ate her food, and he stayed in her home, and he worked at the friend's company. And then finally she said, at one point, she said, let's talk. And she said, she said, So do you remember in the courtroom when I said I was going to kill you? And he said, I sure do. She says, well, I did.

I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. And that's why I started to visit you and bring you things. And that's why I got you a job. And that's why I let you live in this house. So that's how I said about changing you. And that old boy, he's gone. and so now what I want to ask you, since my son is gone,

and that killer is gone, if you'll stay there, I've got room and I'd like to adopt you if you'll let me. And so she became the mother of her son's killer, the mother he had never had. So when I share that with you, it's not like that, I don't know if I could ever do anything like that, you know, if my son was killed. And that's not really the point so much,

but there is this capacity in our human hearts to see past the veil and see the human that's there. That is a capacity. And it's something we can, if we commit ourselves to, we can start moving through our day. And can you imagine if we could slow down

and we are with others in some way we can sense into what is really life like for this person. And when we have our armoring go up, we could slowly recognize, wow, this is making me small, and I'm not seeing who this person is, and I'm not living from my heart. And just even recognizing that, even if we can't, the armor doesn't go down really quickly.

You know, it's like everybody thinks, forgiveness is a good idea until you really have something to forgive. You know, the body gets into its aggression and its reaction, and it's not fair to ask ourselves to so we could drop it. You can't will forgiveness. You can be willing. And that's what not Chiquita asked for, that, that willingness to release the armoring and the blame. And it really comes from a very deep wisdom when we have willingness. It comes from a wisdom that gets that the armoring causes suffering. We really get that. There's an African tribe in a movie I saw years ago that have this very wise understanding of forgiveness. And they put it this way.

they say vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. So we start getting that, that our aggression is covering something, and it's hard to be with what's under it, but it's worth it. That's what we get. That becomes the intention. So we'll close tonight with a forgiveness practice that I find very beautiful.

and it's the first step to moving through these three boons. If we can begin to let go of the armor, then we open up more to that inner fire that's there. So you might, if you need to adjust how you're sitting, make yourself comfortable, alert, and relaxed. And this particular forgiveness practice is adapted from a friend of mine. offers Eric Colvick some of the language from it that I find really beautiful. You might start by just bringing your attention to your heart

and as if you could breathe in and out of your heart. Just notice right now the state of your heart. You might scan and sense if there's any way that you're holding against yourself right now. Some way, whether it's very explicit or maybe just quietly, some part of you that just feels like you haven't done something right, you're not being, behaving the way you should, maybe you let someone down, maybe it's something to do with parenting, something at work, maybe it's an addictive behavior, that somewhere that you're holding against yourself or not meeting your own standard.

And you might find it easier for now as you practice this because it really is a practice We're undoing blame. To start with something not too huge, some minor way you might have caused yourself for someone else trouble. And as you sense that, sense where you're holding against yourself and sense what you've done to trigger off your own blame, and sense behind that action, maybe whatever fear or confusion or wanting might have driven you. whenever we behave in a way that causes harm, our legs in a trap in some way.

We're driven by something that's difficult. Can you see how your leg was in a trap? And it might be helpful to put your hand on your heart, your hand on your cheek, in some ways you offer yourself attention because blame is an aggression towards ourself and to undo and decondition blame, it really helps to offer kindness. And if you're not comfortable doing that, just sense that you're energy is regarding and witnessing your inner life with a kindness. As far as you're able to, you might extend forgiveness to yourself and I'm going to offer

some phrases you might try on. I allow myself to be imperfect, allow myself to make mistakes, allow myself to be a learner still learning life's lessons. I forgive myself. And if I can't forgive myself now, may I forgive myself some time in the future. And just take a moment energetically to sense what that would mean to really let go of the blame and hold that place in you that's vulnerable, that wants or fears that might have been driven to act in a way you didn't like, just to hold it with kindness.

Be the kind witness right now. And we'll widen this now to where you might be blaming someone else. Maybe considering somebody in your close circle where you have been feeling resentful or judgment And again, to encourage you not to pick a situation where somebody's caused enormous or traumatic wounding, you might begin with minor harms. And as you reflect on someone who's caused you some minor harm, again, you might sense how their leg is in a trap, but in some way that person was acting out of their own confusion or fear or unmet needs, as well as you can to see that.

That's part of waking up from the trance. And holding this person in your awareness, you might explore extending these words of forgiveness. Just as I allow myself to be imperfect, so I allow you to be imperfect. Allow you also to make mistakes. I allow you to be a learner, still learning life's lessons.

I forgive you. And if I cannot forgive you now, may I forgive you sometime in the future? and taking a moment to just scan and sense if there's any judgment you have right now towards yourself or how you're doing a forgiveness meditation. So often we judge ourselves for not being able to do it. And see if you can very gently just let go there too. So we'll close with the words of Rumi.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing, there is a field I'll meet you there when the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about ideas language even the phrase each other

doesn't make any sense thank you for your attention 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.