Tara Brach - A Generous Heart

Episode Date: November 23, 2023

A Generous Heart - Our deep potential is to live from an awake, loving heart. This talk looks at how, with a kind and mindful attention, we can decondition habitual tendencies toward grasping and self-centeredness, and nourish the sense of connectedness and care that gives rise to generosity. As we bring these heart practices alive in our most immediate relationships, they have the power to evolve consciousness in widening circles across the world.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. There's a classic tale that I wanted to begin with, and it's about two brothers who worked on a family farm together, and one was single, and the other had a family wife and children. And at the end of the day, they would share the proceeds of whatever they earned. They shared everything equally. And one day, the brother that was married and with family said, you know, it's not fair that we're sharing everything equally. I have a family to take care of me and my old age. My brother has nothing. So he, at the end, you know, the day, at nighttime, he took a sack of grain and he snuck across the field and dumped it in his brother's bin. Meanwhile, his younger brother,

who the single one was thinking, you know, it's not fair that we're sharing everything equally. My brother has a whole family to take care of, and my needs are simple. I'm just living on my own. So he got this idea, and he, at the end of the day, after it was dark, took a bag of his sack of grain, and he brought it over through the field and dumped in his brother's bin. And this went on for years, and both were very, very puzzled why their level of grain never dwindled. until one night in the very darkness of the night, they ran into each other, dropped their grain, their bags of grain, and realized what was going on and embraced.

So, generosity. It's really a quality, a very natural quality of our hearts when our hearts are awake. And it arises out of a very simple sense of belonging together. We're connected. So, of course, we're going to want to take care of each other. And in Buddhism, the story of the Buddha's awakening was very distinctive that the very first of the spiritual perfections that the Buddha taught about,

in spiritual perfections, the expressions of the awakened heart-mind. The very first one was generosity. It basically considered it's the active expression of loving kindness. And so the Buddha talked about it, and then also we have from the poet Hafei, so I thought I'd read you a very short little essay. It says, has a man talking to O'Face the Sufi poet about a profoundly enlightening experience, and he had a vision of God and an experience emerging with light and love, and his question was, was it real?

Did I experience reality, the ultimate reality? And so, Hafez asked him some questions. He said, well, do you have any goats? Yeah. Do you have a wife? Children, siblings, parents, friends. So he asked him these questions. And with each one he nodded his head.

And he said, the realness of your experience shows itself through the kindness you express with each being of your life. The mark of a free and awake being is really the expression of heart, the quality of kindness and generosity that is expressed and shared. So many of you might be aware that there's a growing body of research now that points to something we intuitively know, which is that generosity, when we're generous, it goes hand in hand with happiness. When we're being generous, when we're giving, there's a part of our brain that's correlated with positive emotion that lights up.

And it's not only true for humans, it seems to be true for other creatures too. There's some studies last year on rats, I remember where in this research they were sharing their treats with captivated companions. And so it's evolutionary reward for pro-social behavior. You know, when we're nice and we share and we play well, you know, we get the flowing of chemicals that make us feel good. And you can certainly see it with children that even though young children are quite naturally dominated by the me, me, me, I want, it's mine, that kind of thing. There's also a real good feeling children get when they're sharing. It always reminds me when I'm thinking of this of my son, Orion,

and he was, I think, four or five years old, and for Easter I gave him a chocolate bunny, and I remember a few days afterwards, he had his friends over, and, you know, it seemed very proper given, you know, he'd only gotten through one or two ears that he shared some with his friends, and he was quite agitated.

He goes, no, it's mine. my bunny rabbit. And I, you know, I was about to, you know, I was of sex, I wanted him to be a more generous kind of kid, but I paused and I said, you know, you're right. It is your rabbit. And that's why you get to share it with others. So he thought of it, because he knows that I could be tricky, but he lit up, you know, and he had this great smile and this with this real dignity, He broke off pieces and he gave it to his companions. It was great to watch. So it was kind of just thinking of that story reminded me of this bus driver

who tells a story about he was driving a school bus on a trip or something, a bunch of young children on it. And a little girl came up and handed him a bunch of peanuts. And he said, how nice. So he ate the peanuts. He thanked her. He thought that's very cool. They're being generous.

She went back and played with, was back talking with her friends, and she came up with another handful, and he said, wow, you know, ate the peanuts. And then the third time he said, hon, you keep the peanuts, you and your friends, you eat them. At which point she goes, oh, no, we just like sucking the chocolate off of them. Anyway. So we're going to explore the whole experience of generosity at night And really, just the bottom line is that research shows it that the more generously are, the happier we get.

And of course, it's the reverse. It's true, too. The happier we are, the more naturally we become generous. And you might just reflect in your own life of people you know. And you might consider who do you know that you consider a happy person? and is it true that they're also generous? I mean a truly happy person. Are they also generous?

And consider in reverse also, people you know that are generous, are they happy? Just to consider that. I think if we look at the real flip side of it and ask ourselves if somebody we know is really selfish or self-centered, are they happy? And we know it for ourselves,

and we're really focused on ourselves, even when we're getting what we want, we're not feeling that great. So we'll look a little bit through a developmental and an evolutionary lens, which I like to do. And in a way we can sense that the grasping or wanting for me,

moa, ma-wa, you know, navigating with, you know, the whole filter of what's it going to do for me is completely appropriate at certain stages of development. And we have to individuate, we have to be concerned about taking care of ourselves, and at some points in our lives, even when we're much older, more mature, we really have to make sure we're taking care of ourselves. It's easy not to.

So it's completely appropriate. But if we look more closely, well, what's behind grasping our self-centeredness, it arises out of a perception of separation, that I am separate and the world is out there, and there's not much sense of we, it's mostly me. You know, it's very much focused on what's in here and what's out there as a part. And so with that, there's a fixation on, you know, am I meeting my needs? and you can see it with the parts of the brain that the reptilian and the limbic system are designed

to focus on self and self's needs. And then if we think of the more recently evolved parts of our brain and there's a whole neural net in the frontal cortex that has to do with relationship that has mirror neurons and can sense what others are intending and feeling and so on our more recently evolved brain is designed to sense we, sense relationship. And as I mentioned before, when we collaborate, when we're generous,

when we act on behalf of the common good, there's a reward that we get biochemically that then encourages us to do it more. So what happens is sometimes these two different dimensions of a separate self and a more mutual belonging self, sometimes we end up having a jarring experience of we're not fully landing in either. And we have a sense that we want to develop more of that sense of we, but we keep getting hooked or regressing into separate selfhood.

When there's a real evolution and stability in that sense of connectedness, we're no longer driven by grasping an aversion. That doesn't mean we don't take care of ourselves, but it no longer possesses us. And so there's some beings that we can say seem pretty evolved. And the Dalai Lama, there's a classic story that I've always loved about the Dalai Lama,

and it's called the Dalai Lama's birthday present, and some of you might remember it. It's really cute. You see on this card that he's opening up this big gift and it's got ribbons and all the other monks are surrounding. I'm excited. And he opens it up and he looks inside and he goes, oh, nothing.

It's empty. Just what I've always wanted. And that's the deal. There's just no grasping. So it feels like in exploring this tonight that here we are on, for those that are from this country on Thanksgiving Eve, And we're also at a time, you know, in terms of our social events that are really striking,

dramatic and painful. And it feels like this interplay of the more primitive self, the fear-based self that's grasping and pushing away, and the more evolved self that senses our mutual belonging is particularly important to look at. And if you think of, well, maybe I'll first read you something last. year that John Stewart said as he was approaching Thanksgiving, right afterwards actually, he said, I celebrated Thanksgiving in an old-fashioned way. He said, I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house.

We had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land. It's awful, I know. I know it's awful. And so I read it because if we think of Thanksgiving and where it comes from, there's that interplay of the different parts of the brain are the different evolutionary stages. On one level, you can say, well, Thanksgiving. I mean, the Europeans came over

and their greed and violence towards indigenous peoples is just horrific and horrible. And that was the reptilian and the limbic system playing out. That's an earlier stage of development. And you might also say that there were developing currents amongst those who came of amazing sacrifice and collaboration and dedication to the common good. That was there too. And gratitude.

That was part of it too. So what do we see today if we take that same lens of kind of the less evolved and where it's possible to move into? You see today that here we are overconsuming and violating the earth at a pace that's really destroying our expanded body. That's grasping. It's coming from a less developed part of our brain. And we see just this week, again, separateness, that sense of unreal other that I talk about,

out there, with the ruling on the tragic killing of Michael Brown. I mean, we see, how can we not see it highlighting the continued presence in our society of racial injustice and violence? That's the fear, we're a fear-based limbic society when this kind of stuff happens, it's coming from that part of the brain. And that's not all. There's also the incredible heart response to that. There's a sense of incredible compassion.

There's increasing efforts around the globe towards more processes of reconciliation, more circles of healing. There's processes of, you know, in different communities of diversity work, of white privilege work, and of waking up from unreal other. I mean, so many times when we gather here, we're exploring how do we see past the mask? How do we really commit? And we're not talking about unreal other only as others from different races or different sexual orientations or gender orientations. We're also talking about other as the people we live

with and work with. And still there's a sense in us of competing and mistrusting and judging and feeling judged. So when we explore together as we move into a holiday season, really, what does it mean to wake up our hearts? And with our own family and friends in widening circles, see past the mask and sense our mutual belonging and live with generosity. It's a really personal experimental process. We each playing our edge to wake ourselves up, to evolve our consciousness. And we can trust that it ripples out. Story that for me captures a bit about unreal other, was told by Gregory Boyle, who's a pastor of a church in an area

with most concentrated murderous gang activity in Los Angeles. And his book, Tattoos on the Hearts, one of my favorites anywhere. So this church declared itself a sanctuary church in 1987. And so it began to house 100 homeless men each night. And the challenge was the next day, people will come to church, and they would grumble about the smell.

You know, they'd talk about churching, going somewhere else. And the people that were, you know, running the church did everything they can to sprinkle, you know, carpet stuff on the rugs and to, you know, air whisk around and so on. But 100 guys is a lot of guys. Okay. So that was the challenge. So he had this thing where, well, how on Sunday morning can I really address what's going on? The discontent in the church. So this is how he started in. It goes real directly, what does the church smell like right now? People were mortified.

There was nobody answering. Finally, somebody boomed out. It smells like feet. Then he asked them, why does it smell like feet? And the response will, because a lot of homeless guys slept here last night. Then he said, well, why do we let that happen? It's what we're committed to doing, was the response. Well, why would anyone commit to do that?

And then the response was, because is what Jesus would do? Well, then, what's the church smell like now? Somebody bellows out, it smells like commitment. The place cheers, and then a woman waves her arms wildly. Owele a rosas. It smells like roses. The packed church roars with laughter

and a newfound kinship that embraced someone else's odor as their own. The stink in the church hadn't changed, only how the folks saw it. Nothing had changed, but they saw it differently because these beings were part of their hearts. It smells like roses. He quotes Wendell Berry, says, you have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours. So I want to keep that line right in front of us. You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours. because how do we wake up out of the more primitive kind of evolutionary stage of me and others out there,

which of course leads to grasping and violating, how do we wake up from that into generosity? We begin to stretch and feel into lives that we don't consider ours, but of course it's the same consciousness and beingness. We stretch. So what lets us do this, it lets us stretch, what lets us change the patterning of our mind and beliefs and feelings is neuroplasticity. There are these patternings, these pathways, these neuronal pathways in our brain that correlate with the habits of grasping. And we can actually change them to patterning the correlates with the habits of generosity. We really,

That can happen. So let's look at how that goes. And I'd like us to think about both grasping and generosity as habit patterns. In other words, there's a cue, and then there's an action, and then there's a reward, which then sets off the cue again and keeps us circling. So let's look at it more closely. take the habit pattern of grasping. And I'm going to ask you each at some point to look at a place where you feel there's grasping in a relationship so we can work with this tonight.

So the cue, I mean, the whole sense in a relationship when we are grasping is something's missing here. Okay? In some way, it's not okay. There's not enough. I need more. So the cue might be, I need this person to treat me differently. I want more attention. I want more money, more time, more help, more cooperation. So grasping starts in a relationship where we have a sense that something's missing and we want something more. It's either a thought or a feeling.

Okay, that's the cue. And then we act. We either do a favor to try to get them to do something for us or we judge them into trying to try to get them to do something different for us or we in other ways try to control things. So we do some actions, some way of we might withdraw, but there's something we do to try to get what we want.

That's the grasping. And then there's a reward which either they cooperate or we get something or we have a feeling of being in control. There's some temporary reward which then has us do more, more of the judging or manipulating or whatever it is. Now, the deal is that when we're grasping for another to give us more in some way, it never really works.

We just get a temporary hit. and it's really temporary because they usually be grudgeted and there's a closed heart. So it never really works. And yet we get enough so we kind of get hooked on our strategy. Story of an older woman in Miami and a park bench. And a very disheveled, tattered guy comes and sits next door. And so she says, so how are you? What are you doing?

He goes, well, I'm just out of prison. How long are you in prison for? Twenty-five years. Oh. So what were you in for? And he said, well, I murdered my wife. Oh, so you're single. You get it, right?

So we have agendas, you know? And it's a crazy, crazy story to illustrate that point, I know. The point here really is that when we have an agenda and are wanting somebody to be different and are wanting more, we don't end up getting what we really want, which is connection. It doesn't work. And over the long term, we get in these habits with our family and friends of wanting

and having our subtle or not so subtle ways of trying to control our grasp, and it creates a pretty deep sense of separation. And sadly, that separation creates more of a want, and we keep circling. A story I heard I wanted to share with you of a... This is a woman who was volunteering at a hospice. And she was with a woman who had cancer and who didn't have very long to live. She had a large tumor on her tongue,

and she loved to talk, but of course she could barely talk. But she spoke a little. And so they would talk now and then, but one day she got there, and the woman was sitting on the edge of her bed, and she had only had a little time to live, but she was dressed and about to go home. And here's what had happened.

She said a few nights past she had had the worst nightmare of her life. She dreamed, the staff of the hospice told her she was next to die, and she woke up at 4 a.m., paralyzed with fear. And, you know, God, no, no, why? You know, I can't die. And she was flooded with a sense of separation, but not only from God, but from her husband. And then she started getting in touch with how she had lived for so many years

resenting her husband because he wasn't giving her everything she wanted. She wanted him to give her more of a sense of financial security, and she wanted him to do things more her way and bring up the children the way she went. And she was always feeling let down and judging and resentful, that he wasn't doing enough. And so she had this flash of realization that it was not her time to go. She needed to be able to speak and let him know that she loved him and she loved him just for who he was.

So in the next two days, the tumor shrank had shrunk. It shrunk down. And she could leave and she had enough time to speak from her true self and to speak that deep place that knows what enough means, that knows that I love this being just as they are. So then she could come back and, as she did, she returned to the hospice and was able to, to die peacefully, to want others to be different.

In those moments, we're contracted in a way that we're holding back our love. And that's the greatest suffering. To not let that loving flow, to have it caught in that tangle of things should be different. We don't like ourselves when we're in it. We're hooked, but we don't like ourselves. and the deep suffering is we're not free to really experience our connection and our loving. So we're going to explore how we kind of start waking up out of the habit of grasping and wanting others to be different.

The first step for this woman in hospice is to start recognizing as we look at any relationship where the ways we're controlling, grasping, judging, are creating a distance. and to let ourselves feel the pain of that. That's the first step. We have to be alert to it. But I want to add one more piece, and that is, it's very easy the way I'm framing it to say, okay, grasping reptilian brain, limbic, lower, bad,

and generosity, higher brain, evolve, brain, good. And then to have a real sense of judgment towards the parts of us, and we all have those parts where we get hooked on wanting things a certain way. To judge the grasping parts of ourselves actually only deepens the grooves. It only keeps us more identified, more hooked. Really, the response that is freeing

when we see ourselves caught in grasping is first if there's a belief in there that I have to have things a certain way and I won't be happy. And you can add that really wise mantra from Sokne-rimpeche, which is real but not true. It's a real belief that somebody should be different. That's a real belief, but it's not truth. That loosens things up a bit.

And then to go to where the feelings are, that person should be different because we feel it should be different, and then regard that with compassion. Let's just try it out. I think you'll feel it better from the inside out. To take a moment to pause and to sit in a way that you can close your eyes and check in. I'd like to invite you to bring to mind a relationship in your life, somebody close in, where there's some grasping, some should, or expectation or demand, that you know creates some distance

where you're wanting someone else to be different and let yourself sense how the wanting that person to be different in some way tightens your heart creates either a withholding or a judgment or an anger or disappointment that creates distance and take a moment to sense your deeper intention

that what most matters to you in this relationship just let yourself get in touch with that if you're at the end of your life what would you want both of you to feel with each other just taking some moments now just to hone in a little more investigating what's currently going on what's a situation that might bring up

your habit of having a demand or an expectation or grasping some way the other person's behaving or letting you down, not treating you the way you want to be treated, or not treating themselves or other people the way you want them to act, whatever it is. You might notice when the situation comes up what you're believing. What are you believing should be different? What are you believing is wrong or bad. So you just get the beliefs into your conscious mind. You might surround the belief with a real but not true mantra. You know, it's okay, so this is really what the belief is. That doesn't mean it's truth, but give it a little space and come into the body and just feel underneath the belief what's upsetting or what's missing, the sense of something's

missing or wrong in your body that keeps the grasping going, that keeps you. wanting things different. Maybe a sense of vulnerability, a sense of not feeling cared about or respected or important. It might be a sense that there's something you're not going to get in your life that really matters, that you don't feel understood perhaps. And for now, just let yourself feel what's underneath there that just wants your own attention and and see if you can bring as much tenderness towards it as possible. For some it might be helpful to put your hand on your heart. Just forgive that vulnerability for being there, accepted, offer it.

Whatever message of presence or love or kindness is most comforting and feels most healing right now. Sometimes simply, I'm here with you right now. Or I'm sorry and I love you. That mantra from the Hawaiian healer, Hewlen, bringing kindness to your own vulnerability so that you can look at the other person through the eyes of wisdom,

with compassion. You might remember that phrase, imagine lives that are not our own. Just sense this person's life in a more dimensional way right now, what he or she might be fearing or needing or wanting or concerned with, so that there's more space in your heart

to let that person be as they are, to love them just as they are. The want can still be there for something different, but you're more living from that place of loving and letting be, that it matters more to love than to get your way. And you can trust that if you continue to be mindful of should or demands or expectations, gradually you'll rest more and more in that space of connectedness

where you're sensing the other's life, the realness of the other. And there's a more natural flow of acceptance and generosity and presence. Please take a few full breaths and come back. Okay. This is the kind of reflection that over the long haul can decondition habits of grasping. But for many of us, especially when they're deeply grooved, you could take hundreds of rounds. So if you felt like you did that and you kept on rehooking into what needed to be different in order for things to be okay or whatever you experience, please be patient with yourself.

because it takes a lot of rounds of enacting the grasping behavior to create these neuropathways. It takes a lot of rounds of stepping back and sensing the beliefs and not quite believing them and being kind towards the feelings and looking at the other through new eyes to have a different patterning emerge. But it's possible. This is the part of tonight's reflection on how we decondition grasping. I want to spend the last bit and how we can nourish the pathways of generosity. And just to begin with a very brief story,

there's an American author and journalist James Agi who recounts experiences during the Great Depression. And one of the things he did was he went through Appalachia, and he found one impoverished elderly woman in the hollows Appalachian. She was living in a hut that had no... He's had dirt floors, no heat, no plumbing. So he asked her, well, what would you do if someone came along and gave you a whole lot of money to help you out?

And so she sat there and she's rocking in her chair and finally she shook her head and said, you know, I don't know, I think I'd give it to the poor. It's really a matter of our perspective. In any given moment, is our habit to sense enough, you know, that there's really enough? there's a magic to, you know, sometimes I use the phrase, you know, this is it, to sense I could die now, you know, to really feel that fullness that what we have is full, is, it's

really enough. Let me see, there's a cartoon I thought I might have brought. Oh, yeah. Okay, so this is a Sylvia cartoon, and Sylvia's listing, she's typing a list of responses you'd hope to have the occasion to say, and one of the responses is, yes, it is unusual to have won an Olympic medal in the Nobel Peace Prize the same day. And can you bring me those leather pants in size too? But she said, here's the best of all the responses.

No thanks. I have everything I need. Great cartoon. So we're going to look now at the feedback loop of generosity. An example I wanted to share was from this book, inspiring generosity. And this is a story of Cammy Walker. And in her early 30s and newly

married, Cammy Walker was working as an advertising executive when she was struck down by severe and debilitating multiple sclerosis. And the disease quickly took away the use of her hands and vision in one eye and left her with numbness

throughout her body. Among the many healers she called upon in this crisis was an African medicine woman named Bali Kraso. And the prescription that Kami received from Bali in what she called a divination from an African ritual was simple. This was her prescription.

Give away 29 gifts in 29 days. Okay? And Bali's reason was equally straightforward. Healing doesn't happen in a vacuum, but through our interactions, with other people. By giving, you are focusing on what you have to offer others, inviting more abundance into your life. Giving of any kind is taking a positive action that begins the process of change. It will shift your energy for life. Further, the gifts that Kamie was to give had to be

both authentic and mindful, and one needed to be something that she felt was scarce in her life. Okay, so at first skeptical of such a non-traditional healing agenda but committed to doing all she could to regain her health, Cammy quickly became amazed at the transformation giving made in her life. Her daily gifts were simple, a clean acts, a kind word, a phone call, a seashell. By the end of the month, her health had dramatically improved and she attributes this to a profound shift in her mindset that provided her with freedom and joy as she said about healing.

As with other people that are in this book that I'm quoting from, Kami realized early in her giving project that the gifts were only the vehicle through which her generous spirit could manifest. We're not here to live in a vacuum, she reflects. We're here to be of service to each other and have a common experience. When Bali looks back on her own first experience with this giving ritual, she remarks on its relevance to our lives in the Western world today. Though most of us have no experience of the depth of scarcity that exists in African countries,

we often believe we are not successful enough, not rich enough, beautiful, or thin enough. We simply don't have enough or not good enough. We become so lost in our sense of lack, low self-esteem, and non-existent self-love that we forget that our life is an essential part of a greater whole and that we have many gifts to offer to the world at large. Throughout her journey back to health, Kami kept a journal, which eventually became her inspirational book, 29 gifts, how a month of giving can change her life.

It's a day-by-day account of her month of giving, the people she met, the insights that she experienced and the renewal of her health. She has continued her own monthly giving ever since her encounter with her transformational healer and her experience of healing through giving inspired her to earn a graduate degree in integrative medicine. She went on to transform to establish a transformative education curriculum at a noted hospital and now works in the Integrative Bodywork Program there.

So I wanted to read you the whole story because there's a real power in what's behind it that each one of us has a naturally generous heart. We're not in the habit of manifesting it, sometimes out of fear, out of self-like, out of the sense that something's missing in my life and I need to get it. But when we, this is such a perfect example of let's just say commit and just do it. It's an outside in thing. Just start doing it. And we start finding that in the giving and in the responses we enter this

a flow of loving that powerfully changes our body, our hearts, and our minds. Powerful. So interesting to me that the cue for Cammy was that I have something to offer. She had to keep remember, I have something to offer. And that shifted her from a sense of lack and disease to a sense of fullness. So the habit of generosity begats more generosity, and we kind of know it, that people respond really well, and that encourages us to give more. We also know what it's like when we're with somebody who's generous. You know, when somebody gives something to you, you know that feeling of you really want to give something back? And it's not just so, well, I want you to like me

too. It's like, it's such a natural thing to want to be part of that flow of loving. So the Buddha, as I mentioned earlier, name this activity, this expression of loving kindness as the first of the expressions of the awakened heart. And in Buddhism, the Polly word is Donna forgiving. And it's very much integrated in Asia into daily life, the sense of the happiness that comes with sharing and with giving. And it's definitely a part of the spiritual process. You go to a monastery in Asia,

and you'll be fed and clothed and offered the teachings for free. And it's because the culture so values spirituality that people make it possible to build the monasteries and to have the monks fed and clothe. And so in this country, we're really trying to do the same thing. And as those that come here know

that we hope for donations, which is Donna giving, to help us be able to afford to, but there's no charge. Doors are wide open. And those listening to my talks know that they're given freely. And what makes it work is it's not like, I do this so you'll do that. It's this flow, this back forth,

of sharing what we love and of giving to each other that creates such a rich environment. This is the poet George Eliot. If you sit down at the set of sun and count the acts you have done and counting find one word that ease the heart of him who heard one glance most kind that fell like sunshine where it went,

then you may count that day well spent. It's a lot like breathing in and breathing out that we learn to create a daily habit of generosity, breathing in and feeling touched and filled, that we're in some way loving this life and we're nourished by this life and then the breathing out is the giving out. And so to be very specific about it,

if you leave here tonight or leave listening to talk and you want to actually deepen those neural pathways of generosity, there's a few simple steps. And one is, have the intention for acts of kindness. I know for myself, when I meditate each day, often will set my intention. And very often it's the simple words, please teach me about kindness. That there be some openness to be taught about it, to learn about it. So that prayer to be generous and kind.

And then the second part is very actively commit yourself, maybe three times a day, that in some way you know you're going to have three acts of generosity. It could be in an email, just saying something you know will make another feel better, or it could be a smile or opening up a door. There's so many ways that we can touch each other. One of the five pillars of Islam is charity, and each year at the end of the month of Ramadan, each household is asked, to give two and a half percent of their earnings to the needy.

A group of poor people went to the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and asked him how they could help others if they had nothing to give. And he told them, if they did not have something to give, then ask them to smile at others and do their best to make sure that everyone whom they encountered felt cared for. What a cool thing if we went through the world. And in some way there's this intention that anyone we encounter can we in some way convey that we care about them?

That alone. What a beautiful way to move through the world. So we'll close with a brief meditation and a poem. In this spirit, feel yourself arriving in the life that's right here by relaxing a little in the body so you can feel your body, feeling the life inside the body, aware of the sounds around you,

and become aware of your breathing, so that as you breathe in, you can feel that you're letting in, taking in the nourishment of the universe. There's air, there's prana, there's life energy. It's a sense that as you breathe in, you're taking it in a most cellular level, even the spaces between the cells, nourished by the light, the love, the energy that's here. And with the breath, you're letting go, you're releasing into the universe, your own heart, your own care, your love, as if when you breathe out the light and love of your being could spread out and spread across the world. The poet Hafeus writes, it happens all the time in heaven

and someday it will begin to happen again on earth that men and women, that beings who give each other light will often get down on their knees and with tears in their eyes will sincerely speak saying, my dear, how can I be more loving to you? How can I be more kind? My dear, how can I be more loving to you? How can I be more kind? As we enter this season of awakening hearts, you might sense in your own life, Just for this moment, one person, imagine that you're asking that question. How can I be more loving to you? How can I be more kind? And just stretching and letting yourself feel that person's life, that person's heart,

his or her needs and wants, and just sense what you might say or do, that would be a very natural act of generosity. that would touch that person. It could be as simple as a hug in the words I love you. Could be some other words that let them know how much you appreciate and see goodness.

What would it be? You might imagine offering whatever the words or touch or action is. Just to feel your intention towards loving connection to sense what's possible. We close by just feeling this heart space that's here, and sensing the possibility of this

heart space truly being edgeless, inclusive, caring about all beings. May all beings everywhere be filled with loving presence, be held in loving presence, realize their very essence as loving presence. May there be peace on earth and may there be peace everywhere. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Namaste.