Tara Brach - Basic Trust - Part 1

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

One of the expressions of an awakened heart-mind is a basic trust in reality. These talks explore the severed belonging that gives rise to mistrust, and two primary pathways to realizing and trusting the indivisible field of loving awareness that is our source (a favorite from the archives). 

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Greetings, friends. Thank you for being here. There is one quality that determines our capacity for happiness, for intimacy with others, and as a society, our capacity for living collaboratively in a true democracy. And that quality is trust. There needs to be some basic trust. And I'm focusing on this because, as so many are aware, trust is at a real low globally,

certainly societally. And for many, it's difficult to trust others or even to trust ourselves to be who we want to be. Some of you might remember a favorite prayer that goes, dear God, so far today, I've done all right. I haven't been greedy or judgmental or defensive or self-indulgent or controlling. And I'm grateful for that. But in a few minutes, God, I'm going to get out of bed. And from then on, I'm going to need a lot of help. So the reality is we can't trust ourselves or others not to cause harm. I mean, the given is we have to. We have a lot of have the same conditioning as other animals and under certain circumstances will steal,

will kill, will lie, will get addicted. So what can we trust? And maybe by way of definition, this is what I'm calling basic trust. We can trust that there's an intrinsic awareness and love that's waking up through each of us, a basic goodness. And that when it's fully manifest, we realize our belonging. And that naturally leads us to serving the greater good. We belong to wholeness. So trust evolves as we wake up. Trust evolves as we wake up.

Many of you've noticed this, that the more you practice meditation, the more you experience tastes of that Buddha nature, that basic goodness, the more you sense that you're trusting, this is where the power and potential is. Now, you might consider yourself a mistrusting person, and many of us, you know, due to our caregivers and trauma, have challenges trusting. But the good news is that meditation practices can really contribute in a deep way to cultivating trust, to bringing about that happiness

and that intimacy to really helping us collectively in creating a more loving and harmonious world. So this focus on trust feels really relevant to our current times. And I've chosen a two-part talk on trust. And it first looks at how we can see the basic goodness in ourselves and others. And I hope that you find these two talks on trust valuable on your own. your path. Okay, thank you. When the Dalai Lama speaks, he has a refrain that many of you are familiar with, which is that nobody wants to suffer and everybody wants to be happy.

And a core ingredient to that happiness is a sense of belonging. And if that word doesn't work for you, it's a sense of connectedness, of being a part of. The word belonging really implies that what we are is more than this separate egoic self, that we're a part of this aliveness and awareness in this world. And there's a story about belonging that I wanted to share with you that was written by Mark Van Doren. He says a boy named Eddie Shell came one afternoon to play with Frank and me and at the hour for going home did not know how to do so.

This is a malady that afflicts all children, but my mother was not sure how she should handle it in Eddie's case. She consulted us secretly as to whether he should be asked to stay for supper. We thought not, so she hinted to him that his mother might be expecting him. He was so slow in acting upon the hint that we were all in despair and began to feel guilty because we hadn't pressed him to stay. What I remember now is Eddie standing at last on the other side of the screen door and trying to say goodbye as if he meant it.

My mother said warmly, well Eddie, come and see us again. Whereupon he opened the door and walked in. in. We, the moments that matter to us the most are the moments when there's something that falls away and we just feel that sense of being at home. And the reason that we long to belong is because the truth is that we do belong. When we feel that experience of being at one with, we're really living from the truth of our being. Just as the trees belong in the woods, we're part of this living web. it's an at-home kind of quality. I'd like to invite you just even before I go more to do

a brief belonging scan, which means close your eyes for a moment. And just, this is a way of checking and sensing what's your quality of at-homeness. There'll be a new word in our vocabulary here. To maybe explore, feel your body and sense, am I at home right now in my body? Am I inhabiting it apart with this aliveness that's right here. There's a belonging to the body and aliveness. Not to judge what you noticed. Am I at home in my heart? Is there a sense of connection, presence, inhabiting, being part of this heart space right here? Do I feel belonging to those that are here in Sangha or community? Is there a sense of being part of the relational field right here. Again, no judgment. Do I feel belonging to the earth when I sense earth? It's

their sense of being part of. Is there a sense of belonging to awareness to that formless dimension, that wakeful openness that's aware of what's here? And just keep that in mind because you can ask yourself at any moment, do I belong to this moment? Am I belonging to the life and presence that's right here? Am I here? Now, when we investigate, and it's fine if you'd like to open your eyes, when we investigate moments that we feel happy. When I say happy, a real sense of well-being, it's not hitched, oh, things are going my way, but just happy. What we find, there's kind of a few common denominators, is that the self-story has quieted. When we're really happy, there's not a sense

of a fixating on the narrative of self. There's more of an open quality. And that open quality has a sense of a part of, that there's a sense of trusting and belonging to and being engaged with a greater experience than that egoic self. And if we flip it and we investigate moments when we're stuck and when we're suffering, we're going to find the opposite. The self-narrative is definitely charged up. There's a sense of me. The world is out there. There's a sense of real distance from the world. And there's generally a sense of in some way not only a vice separate but something's wrong.

There's a kind of a fear, there's a mistrust of oneself or of the world. It goes in that direction. So not belonging and mistrust go together. Because when we don't belong, then something feels wrong. We feel like something bad can happen to us. We can't trust ourselves for being enough

or something's wrong. with the world. It's often outside our consciousness, this sense of not belonging and mistrust. It's not something we go around going, oh, this moment I'm not feeling belonging and I'm not trusting things. It's not really part of our filter usually consciously. It's unconscious, but it profoundly shapes our reality. And you'll find in different explorations of the spiritual path, there's different filter

we examine, and this is the filter we'll examine tonight, which is the pathway to feeling belonging and trust and the genesis of not feeling belonging, the way that mistrust happens. So Einstein, as many of you have heard, because this is one of the more famous reported things that he said, we don't know exactly the language he said it in, but he said the most important question a person can ask is, is this universe a friendly place? So some of you familiar with that? Is this universe a friendly place? In other words, do we intuit a oneness, an inherent oneness or goodness or benevolence or love, that even though there's insanity and craziness and total ignorance and hatred and cruelty, all that stuff's true, there's some inherent presence

or love, that when everything's uncontorted is there, and if we can really come into presence, we can find it. Do we sense that oneness there, that belonging? So you might ask yourself what happens when you contemplate that? Do you perceive the universe as a friendly place? You might just sense, what's that like for me to explore that? Do I, is there some basic trust that there's benevolence or love to take refuge in, to come back home to, that it's there. I might be out of touch with it, but it's there. Is there a basic trust? And you can continue to let this be a contemplation for you through this talk and beyond,

but I'll just name that for many people there's a desire to have that trust and there's a desire to perceive oneness and belonging. but when it's directly in front of us, we kind of draw a blank or else we say, no, actually, I feel separate. And I don't have a reason to trust myself or the world. And I just want to name that that's part of our evolutionary predicament, that we are conditioned to feel separate and apart from the world and out of that to develop a whole world of defenses and aggression and so on.

So that's natural. And we have within our equipment here, the capacity to pay attention in a way that wakes us up from that perception of separation. They're both true. So the good news is that meditative practice, that this training we're doing in paying attention to what's right here and waking up our heart actually evolves us. It actually, the veils of separation begin to dissolve. And there's a unit of experience, It's something indivisible that we discover. Not even we're resting in, it is what we are.

That's the discovery. That goes hand in hand with trust. If you know you're the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves. The waves are still there, but you're not afraid. There's trust. So if we look at the genesis of mistrust, all incarnation is designed to feel separate. All organisms sense a kind of what's me and what's the world out there and gets organized around that.

That's just what happens in evolution. And there's a negativity bias which scans for what's wrong. That's just part of the way creatures are designed, scan for what's wrong so we can protect ourselves. And there's a vigilance that comes with it. I often describe it as we have a nervous system. You know, we're anxious about what's going to happen. And we can see through history, through the creation story, how this sense of separation and this negativity bias play out.

I think of the creation story, Adam and Eve, is really a story of the emergence of the ego and the ego feeling bad about itself, the ego feeling inherently like something's wrong with it. So there we have the Old Testament in the Garden of Eden, and we don't have Adam and Eve mirroring each other's goodness. right? You know, they're not saying namaste and they're not feeling God's unconditional love washing through them. No, what happens, because this is, again, the egoic self is they're doing something wrong and they're getting kicked out, right? So there's an inherent flawedness.

And I could say in a much bigger way, with any sense of the egoic self, there's also a sense that something's wrong because it's just evolution's bias. There's a sense of separateness and not okay. But we see how this has been a theme through religion and politics. You can see it in religion that most major religions have some warnings about our sinfulness, some warnings to guard against basic impurities that were flawed in the eyes of God. One story I heard two little boys, eight and ten, were always getting in trouble. Guests would come and they couldn't keep their hands, off breakable objects so things would get trashed right before the guests are supposed to walk in the door and their parents were at their wits end and they decided they'd heard about a clergyman

in town who was very good at disciplining young children so the pastor agreed to speak with the boys and he asked to do individually so okay here comes you know they're going to bring in god now and the fear of god so eight-year-old boy goes first and the clergyman sits him down says sternly where is is God? And the boy makes no response, so the pastor says it even more sternly. Where is God? And again, the boy's kind of frozen, he doesn't say anything. So the clergyman raises his voice and shakes his finger in the boy's face. Where is God? You know, really. At that point, the boy bolts from the room, runs home, slams himself into the closet, his older brother follows him in and says, what happened? The younger brother replied, we're in really big trouble

now. God is missing and they think we did it. Do you ever notice how even if you've done nothing wrong, if somebody blames you for it, you still feel guilty? It's like it's so deep in us to assume something's wrong. According to Hobbs, without laws to govern us, we live lives that are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So that's Hobbs. And then you can look at social and political views with this filter of trust and mistrust. And this is a lot of trust. And this is a lot of people. And This is where it gets really interesting, that if there's a deep mistrust, a sense of the egoic self as flawed, then you're going to get a lot of us versus them fundamentalism and the badness will be projected on other, right?

You get a lot of rigidity, you get a lot of violence and suffering. I think of Gaza right now and the almost unmentionable tragedies going on and you can just see behind it there's a sense of bad, evil, being pointed in another direction. You can just feel it. You can see that if there's political views that are based on mistrusting humans, what happens to helping those in need? If they don't deserve it, they should be working harder. What happens to social justice? There's a deep down sense that some people are less deserving and worthy than other people. Deep, deep down.

What happens to the earth? You know, if we're caught in that mistrust and that egoic self, there's going to be a lot of grasping and a lot of consuming and a lot of numbing and really not feeling a belonging to the earth. Einstein again. He said, if our conclusion is,

he said, for if we believe that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly. Can you see how this basic perception of belonging and trust versus separation and mistrust

ends up creating a whole worldview and a way of behaving and experiencing life? Something to consider because we look at our individual lives on this, some time there. And we know that to the degree we feel separate and mistrustful, we build up our defensive walls and we build up our aggression. And it's very much fueled by our early caregiving experiences or lack therein. Many schools of Western psychology believe the very first stage of development infant to two years old is where we develop either basic trust or mistrust.

Of course there's degrees, but that's where the issue. of trust comes in and if parents were able to be resonant and perceive the needs that were there and be responsive and attuned and mirror goodness and so on there's going to be a sense of belonging there's going to be more of a sense of trust and to the degree that our needs were not met there's going to be a sense of I don't belong I can't count on the world mistrust so severed belonging is the core wound It's the core wound that we experience.

And then as we age, our parents' way of delivering the messages of the culture that you need to be a certain way to be approved or loved, deepen that sense of severed belonging. Then, of course, we look at how the culture is playing out and we sense how, in contrast to some cultures, perhaps, where it's easier to feel a sense of belonging to community and to earth. And ours, it's not. And rather, you're supposed to be a certain way to really make it.

So our belonging depends on meeting certain criteria. Are you successful at work? Do you have a certain kind of intelligence? Do you have a certain kind of body? This is Dave Barry. He describes being puny all his life, which is painful for a male. He says, I totally missed the boat to puberty. puberty island. I was this little hairless dweeb with a voice in the Pinocchio range.

One day my mom bless her heart, I had a talk with me. She told me that girls were not interested only in looks, the qualities that really mattered were brains and a sense of humor. That little talk was long ago, but it taught me an invaluable lesson I have never forgotten. Moms lie when they have to. So then he describes the ongoing suffering of not meeting machismo standards for males. He says, men, you know how when your wife can open a pickle jar she gives it to you, and you're supposed to smile in a manly, patronizing way as you effortlessly twisted open? That's not what happens in our house.

What happens is, after a grim struggle lasting several minutes, I wind up lying on the kitchen floor exhausted and whimpering, while the pickle jar, unopened, laughs and flirts boldly with my wife. So we have standards. And, you know, we're talking about a guy who's puny, but think of women. Women are almost universally objectified. So a woman develops feeling like this body is an object, and often, because a standard for what the good object is,

is unreachable for most women, I'm not only an object, I'm a bad object. I'm not meeting the standard. It happens with intelligence in schools in a way that really, really pains me because I'm increasingly aware of how in most schools, Still, a very narrow band of intelligence is rewarded. It's a certain kind of left brain intelligence. And there's all kinds of intelligence.

And we've got so many children that don't fit into that particular band that have the stamp of something's wrong with me. They can't trust themselves. They can't trust their belonging. Do you see how this trust and the belonging go together? If you don't belong, then something else. wrong with you and it's dangerous. So the egoic self lives in a trance and the trance goes like this. It basically says, I'm separate, I'm threatened, you know, I need to do all this stuff to try

to be okay. So then the egoic self does its fight, flight, freeze, all its strategies to feel better about itself, which do a temporary fix but end up making it feel more like an egoic self trying really hard to feel better. So it's this loop. One of the places it plays out the most painfully, this sense of mistrust and not belonging is in relationships. And that's where we see it most clearly often in our lives, especially because most of us have been repeating the same basic patterns,

and we think back it's, oh my God, since I was a teen, since I was whatever. Well, it's true. We have patterns. We have ways of feeling separate and trying to feel. better and we play it out in relationships very consistently. So if we're very insecure, out of that insecurity perhaps we play it out in a jealous, grasping possessive way, which then creates a certain reaction that confirms that we should be in fact insecure, that makes us do it more, right? Or we might play it out feeling insecure and be aggressive and judgmental, and that creates a certain

reaction in the world that then confirms our beliefs about ourselves. But we keep looping. I've been thinking about how parents do it because this mistrust plays out most in the closest relationships that in some way we mistrust and therefore somebody will leave us or they'll hurt us or will hurt them. So with parents there's this chronic worry that my children not going to be okay. That's a chronic, chronic worry. Two women on a park bench, Jewish women. One says, oy ve. The other goes, oi ve. And then the first one says, all right, enough about the children. I get to say that because all my heritage is Jewish. There's a wonderful quote from Florida Scott Maxwell. She says, no matter how old a mother gets,

She still looks to her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. So again, I'm using this as we have a negativity bias. We look for what's wrong. We look for what's wrong with ourselves. How am I not being a good enough parent or friend or partner or whatever? And we look for what's wrong in the other. And that insecurity has us behave in ways that actually causes suffering and create more insecurity.

It works on the spiritual path in exactly the same way. We bring the same mistrust of ourselves and need to prove ourselves worthy onto the spiritual path. We hope that'll kind of relieve us, but we can end up looping in pretty much the same way. So I remember in my early 20s I was living in an ashram. I'd been in for a couple of years in a spiritual community and I'd been going through a hard time and I was feeling kind of alienated mostly because I was really down on myself. had this in the afternoon this ideal of purity like how to really be perfecting oneself and we

actually wore whites and the and there was the ego was talked about in very disparaging terms like you do something and somebody would go you're doing that from your ego and it would be really a put down you didn't want to be in your ego you know and I remember I got really on myself because I started filtering everything for how self-absorbed I was and self-same centered and, you know, I had gone in and I brought all my type A behavior in, so I was like not only, you know, using the yoga to wake up and be pure, but also I liked proving myself athletically with the yoga because I was very flexible back then. I was kind of like a show-off thing. So I could see my ego in it and I could see my ego in so much that I was doing.

I remember we had a women's sensitivity group and one day I went in to one of our meetings and I made a confession, which is I really don't trust myself. I think at the very root I am self-centered and I'm out for myself. And it's really painful. I remember saying that, and I have no idea how anybody else responded, because I don't know if some of you can relate to this, but when it's so big and you've said something, I was kind of frozen in my own fight-flight-freezing.

I just, I wasn't attuning to anybody else's response. But I remember going back to my room and just falling apart, I started just deepening attention. My only mantra myself was just feel what's here, feel what's here, be with this, be with this. And under all the judgments of myself was this very deep core of shame and that having an ego meant I was bad and didn't matter what was going on. On some level I could perceive my ego and therefore I was bad. And then there's a lot of grief about that,

about having to live inside a sense of bad self. And then as those waves washed through, feel it, let it be there, as happens, I started sensing the space that was aware of all of that. It's just there was space and there was waves going through and I started realizing, okay, that's all there, but that doesn't define me. I mean, there's this being quality which we will encounter any time we start being really present with what's going on. We'll start relaxing back into the being.

being quality. And in those moments there was two things, a recognition of I am not that, I'm not the bad ego. There's egoic stuff playing, but that's not what I am. It doesn't define this being. And this prayer to keep remembering this essential goodness of awareness and tenderness that's here so that the waves, whatever the self-centeredness or the, you know, very, very vanity or the competitiveness or whatever it is I was criticizing. It was just waves that could be attended to with kindness, with affection, with humor. But the prayer was to remember my wholeness. Because in those moments of wholeness, there was no question of mistrusting a self,

because I wasn't a self. There was a real sense of belonging to a quality of wholeness. And that was a taste of freedom. noticed in myself and in most others that keep on meditating, the real quality of sincerity, is there is a transformative shift that happens where the identity shifts from, oh, I'm this self with these patterns and this area of suffering and this area of good stuff, to resting in a quality of formless awareness that, like the ocean, that includes all that, but can't in any way be nailed down to any of it? We're just so much more mysterious and bigger.

And that shift in identity is absolutely the portal to freedom. When you trust you're the ocean, when you trust that mystery, that awareness, the waves are still there and they can be painful, but you're really okay. So over the years I found that there are two primary pathways of homecoming to that quality of belonging and trust. And one of the path, and we're going to look more at one of the pathways tonight and then the other pathway will be continuing this exploration of trust and belonging next week. The first pathway is learning to shift our attention in a way that counters the negativity bias. So that, and here's where it's, you might consider it as positive neuroplasticity, that we have patterning, we all do it, we keep repeating the same stuff, and what is the most promising thing that we find in science is that by paying attention you actually can alter your wiring, the neurocircuitry.

So we have a negative bias, we don't have to. It doesn't mean we're not going to still take care of ourselves in wise ways, but we don't have to live with this habit of fixating on something's wrong with me and something's wrong with you. So the first pathway is to begin to reflect on the goodness, on the wholeness, on the beauty, on the love that's here. We're reflecting on true things and we're just shifting the attention because where attention goes, energy flows. Okay? That's the first way. The second way of homecoming is to start

exactly where you are and with a courageous presence, let reality unfold itself from the suffering or the pain or the stuckness of the moment. But we'll wait till next week for that. So shifting our attention purposefully. It's interesting that we keep finding over and over again that others might look at us and see our goodness, our value, our beauty. And it can be so difficult to sense that or trust that. It's such a deep part of us to, it's dangerous not to be vigilant, not to doubt ourselves, not to judge ourselves. It's almost like judging, oh, then at least I have a way to fix myself and become the person I want to be. Robert Johnson, who's a young an analyst says, curiously, people resist the noble aspects of themselves, the unacknowledged

traits, more strenuously than they hide the dark side. It is more disrupting to find that you have profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum. So consider that, that it's easier to live in that familiar flawed limit itself. At least we know that. We've got our defenses regularly available. It's easier to live in that. It's easier to live in that It's easier to live that way in that mistrust than to consider this profound capacity each of us has to love without holding back, to really sense with wisdom the reality that's right here, to live from wholeness. We have this capacity.

So the first of these practices is learn to turn towards the light, turn towards what's possible, just to begin to practice that. I'd like to do a brief guided meditation on this. And the beginning of this guided meditation is the aspiration to realize and trust the spirit that lives through you, the light or the goodness that's here. Just that wish to, that sincere aspiration to trust who you are. It doesn't really matter what happens in the meditation only that you feel your own sincerity about trusting yourself, that that's the longing there, the longing to belong to the truth of who you are. And the more sincere that longing, the more it'll carry you into belonging. The longing comes from a

sense of how many moments we've sacrificed living in a very limited sense of ourselves. And letting that govern how much we can experience and let in and offer love. And let it govern how creative we can be, how much we can enjoy our moments. So we feel that sincerity, that yearning, please may I belong to truth to the spirit that lives through me. And then just to sense, you are an awakening Buddha. And by that the word Buddha, you are spirit, light love, that's awakening through this human incarnation. Awareness awakening through this human incarnation.

And the signs are that longing and sincerity about transforming. That's a sign of the spirit that lives through you. It's calling you home. Another sign is the yearning to love more fully. That's that awakening awareness calling you home. And another sign is this increasing honesty with yourself. And another sign of this awareness awakening through you is appreciation for beauty, the moments of awe and wonder.

That's awareness awakening through you. sign is when you're appreciating goodness, just really loving the goodness in others or that you see in the world. Another sign is loving truth, loving love. Sense that you are spirit awakening through this body, shining through these cells, the spaces between the cells, that the intelligence of the universe, the love of the universe is living through you, waking up through you. And just imagine for a moment, what if you fully trusted that?

The word faith in Polly means to lay your heart on what is true. What if you totally trusted this? That your deepest identity is awareness awakening to itself through this body, love coming to fullness through this human incarnation. What if you trusted that? Who would you be if you trusted that basic goodness and beauty is living through you? How would your life be different if you trusted that spirit, love, awareness is what you are? The purpose of meditation is to reveal who we are, who we all are, because when we start waking up to the sense of

there's this awareness and love that's unfolding through this body mind, we start seeing the exact same thing in each other. to the degree we're living in a sense of I am just this ego, we will just see the mask on others. So we're waking up to all of our true nature. And imagining is powerful. If you imagine that you are spirit or love or awareness waking up right here, that actually allows you to experience more directly what's true. It's interesting in science now with MRIs that can actually show what's going on in the brain

when you're imagining things. And what scientists have found is just when you're imagining something versus the actual, having an actual experience. Let's say you imagine walking versus just walking. The parts of the brain that are stimulator are exactly the same. This is parts of the nervous system that it's responding to what's going on. It's exactly the same. your heart rhythm changes in exactly the same way,

or the hormones and chemicals released are exactly the same. Imagining and doing or experiencing directly exactly the same. So you can imagine enlightenment. Just say, I'm going to imagine I'm enlightened. And because the reality is existent as a potential, it's intrinsic, imagining calls it forth. Where attention goes, energy flows. This is powerful stuff, this training ourself to pay attention.

You can either pay attention to what's wrong or you can start sensing, okay, what I am is this awareness, this love, this tenderness, this wakefulness. And the more moments you do that, there's a shift and the familiar sense of your being becomes more that. It just builds. So the Tibetan teachings, oh nobly born, oh you of glorious origins, remember your radiant, true nature. The essence of mind, trust it, return to it. It is home. This is the first pathway and not only to imagine but to intentionally then go and look to see the goodness in others, like actively look to see it. This is the This is the essence of Namaste. Namaste is, I see the sacred of the divine in you, and

I see it in me and I see it in all beings. So we actually go into the field and look, and look and mirror it and let people know because that's really, really important. And unless we're liberated, we all need reminding. In that first stage of development I talked about in caregiving that really establishes all the brain circuitry and so on for the relating for the rest of our lives, that mirroring of goodness, that a parent can see the who we are, the sentience, the growing beingness that's there helps us to be connected with our wholeness. One of my favorite stories on this theme was told decades ago now by Sister Helen Rosa, and she was a teacher in a small Catholic school, and she talked about her experience.

with a junior high math class that she had. Students were having a hard time with one of the concepts and they were getting frustrated and edgy. So she stopped the class completely. This is small. There are small classes. The kids had gone through school for years together. They knew each other well. She had them each take out a piece of paper and list the name of their classmates on it, two sheets of paper, and in the space between each name, the nicest thing they could say about that classmate. So they did that, handed in their list, went home for the weekend. The next Monday she gave each student their list. Okay? So that's just a list that had all the things that their classmates had said about them. And she heard little sounds around the room, oh, I didn't know others

like me so much, or I never realized that meant anything to anyone. Anyway, the group became a lot more bonded. Several years later, this group of students had graduated and so on. Several years later she got a letter from one of the parents one of the students named mark she had been very fond of she's close to all her students but there's a real connection uh parents message was that he had been killed in vietnam she was asked to go to the funeral and when she got there there was a lot of the classmates there friends of this young man and parents were gathered around and the father said he wanted to show her something and he took a wallet out of his pocket and he took a pocket and he said, they found this on Mark when he was killed and we thought you might

recognize it. And he carefully removed these two worn pieces of notebook paper. They're taped and refolded and folded many times. And they were the lists you'd given to each student the good things that were written on it. And at that point one of the classmates said, I still have my list. It's in the top drawer of my desk. And then another said, well Chuck asked me to put his in our wedding album and then another, it's in my diary, and then even another took out her wall and to show her worn, frazzled list to the group. And it was at that point that they all really cried together. You know, their heart's so full, feeling the goodness and the greatness of loss,

because they go together, really cherishing and feeling the truth of loss. I share this story now and then when I have a chance and I think about it, it a lot because we forget the power of letting another being know what's good about them. We forget that by seeing the beauty and the light and the intelligence and the dearness of another, by seeing and letting another know, it helps to call it out, it helps them to belong to their own goodness, belong to that larger beingness that's not a, and that's not a lot of, and limited and hitched to the ego. Takes deliberate practice. It takes deliberate practice with others and for ourselves even more so to really commit the time to sensing what we can appreciate about

ourselves. And in the classical loving-kindness meditation in the Buddhist practice, it begins with wherever it's easiest to feel love. And sometimes we can begin with another and sense them loving us and then feel our own care for ourselves. Sometimes we can just reflect on the qualities we like about ourselves. But I found that that doesn't always work. You can list your qualities and say, you know, I'm good at this or whatever and it doesn't go deep enough. I think what helps us feel our goodness is when we feel our aspiration, when we feel what matters. If you remember what matters to you is honesty or love, our creativity, or beauty, or beauty, and we feel our In those moments, you realize, oh, that's good.

That's coming from my essential goodness. Let's just take a moment. We're going to do just a brief reflection on goodness as part of our closing. As you set yourself, the word good, GED is the original English for the word good, the root, is related to the word belonging, being a part of. We feel essential goodness when they're a part of something larger because it's the truth. We belong to something larger. So with that in mind, letting yourself close your eyes and we begin in a simple way of bringing

to mind a person that you trust and care about, that you feel a connection to. Person you know is best, but if there's not somebody that comes to mind, a person that's Perhaps you don't know and also, but you feel a trust in is fine too. It could be a deity, a spiritual figure. See if you can bring to mind a trusted other and feel that being right here, like right here, right close in. So that if you see that his or her eyes, by the way, it can be a pet too, a dog or cat's fine, whatever.

see the eyes and sense the love and appreciation, the care that comes through that being's eyes towards you when they're appreciating you. Look in their face and see if you can soften and let in. Just let that warmth bathe you. Let it be real and true and let it in. This is a being that's mirroring your goodness. And you might even mentally whisper the person's name and just say thank you and feel your heart, sensing what this person appreciates about you and sensing what you appreciate about you, taking these moments to take the chance to sense that spirit that lives through you, that which longs for honesty and truth and loves love.

and loves beauty and wants to wake up. You are beyond any story of yourself. Just offer yourself whatever message of care resonates in this moment, what you wish for yourself. And bring to mind now someone who's close to you that you care about that could use your loving energy and let that person be close in. And take some moments of sense,

what it is you appreciate. It's a bow of Namaste and sensing how awareness and love live through this being, how this being wants to be happy, doesn't want to suffer, loves love, wants to come home. Just imagine that you can some way let this person know your appreciation. Imagine Imagine communicating your appreciation in some way. And just sense and imagine this person coming to a more relaxed, trusting, healed place, just sensing their own goodness. And then just in the silence now, whoever else comes to mind, just imagine that you can look, see this being,

and in some way deeply offer your namaste, I see the sacred that lives through you, the divine. The poet Hafeis says, admit something. Everyone you see you say to them, love me. Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops. Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying, with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear, sensing

this heart space that can hold and cherish others, they can hold and cherish the life that's right here. Can you imagine trusting that this heart space, this light that shines through is really the truth of who you are, the deepest expression of who we all are? really the source of our being. We close with a simple prayer that beings everywhere may come to realize and trust the loving awareness that is the source of being,

that this trust and belonging may bring openness, communication, and peace to this world that may ripple out to include all beings everywhere, that all beings everywhere might be filled with loving presence, held in loving presence. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace everywhere. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Namaste.