Tara Brach - Bodhichitta - The Awakened Heart - Part 1 (2016-02-24)

Episode Date: February 27, 2016

Bodhichitta - The Awakened Heart - Part 1 (2016-02-24) - While the brightness and warmth of our hearts is always here, like the sun when blocked by clouds, our intrinsic love can be obscured. These two talks explore how we become arrested in a confining story of separate self, and how remembering love releases us from this trance. The first talk emphasizes inner pathways of freeing our heart and the second talk explores awakening bodhichitta actively in relating with each other. "Exploring what allows the heart to wake up..." "...being loved into being more who we are is a moment of blessing. What is a blessing? A blessing is a reminder or homecoming into more realness - more love. We're blessed when we remember." Free download of Tara’s new 10 min meditation: “Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease” when you join her email list. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With thanks and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. For those of you who are listening that aren't here in Washington, D.C., tonight's pretty wild storm, torrential rains, winds, and so on. And I knew I was coming in to give a talk on Bodhita, which is the awakening heart. And yet there I was at home and my dog Katie was just shivering with terror at the thunder and I thought how can I go in and talk about and awake hard and leave this poor puppy? So Katie is for the very first time on a Wednesday night here to listen to the Dharma talk or else to be out back somewhere tugging someone around and I thought in her honor I'd

start with a story some of you might remember it's one of my favorite dog stories a woman describes that a tired elderly dog came into her yard and then she could tell it from its collar it was owned by somebody. It was well fed but didn't have a tag on it. Followed her into the house and it walked down the hall and just lay down on her couch and it fell asleep for about an hour, got up and then it left. Well it happened the next day too. The dog came back, came in, slept on her couch for an hour and left and when it had gone on for a couple of weeks, she finally got curious and she pinned a note to the dog's collar. And on the note she wrote, every afternoon your dog comes here for a nap.

I don't mind, but I want to make sure it's okay with you. Well, the next day the dog arrived and it had another note pinned to its collar. This is what it read. He lives in a home with three children in it. He's trying to catch up on his sleep. May I come with him tomorrow? I think the appeal for me is this sense of community. It's like, okay, we understand and we care about each other and we're in it together,

that kind of feeling. So we begin our Bodhita talk with the image that I think is one of the best of the spiritual path, which is of a bird with two wings. And it's as if the body of the bird is awakened awareness. And each wing is needed to fly and one wing is to understand. what's going on and the other is to embrace it. This is the wing of understanding and love. And in the last two talks that I gave,

we were exploring how do you cultivate the wing of understanding? How do we use inquiry, questions, and our interests to really unlayer truth, to really open us to what's true? That's the wing of understanding. And these next two weeks we'll be exploring, How do we cultivate this heart space, what the Buddhists called Bodhi Chita, the awakening heart? And in most traditions, spiritual traditions, and it's part of the perennial philosophy, it's not as if we're trying to have our heart become something.

It's more really a sense that the heart is always here, there's like a sun that's always shining, and yet clouds can obscure it so we can forget or disconnect from the tenderness of our heart. And the clouds that obscure it are that sense of when we're caught inside a small self, like a kind of egoic, more narrow-minded, more contracted sense of who we are. And we all get caught. I mean, every one of us goes into I sometimes call it a trance. We all go through times of our day and sometimes it's pretty ongoing

where we're inside the story of a self who's on their way somewhere and trying to make things work and avoid things that don't work and most of it's about moi, you know, what's going to help me or hurt me. And in those moments our heart's not open. We're not aware of that radiant sun of the heart that really shines through us. So this isn't abstract. I mean, if you think for yourself of in the last day or the last few days or the last week, a moment when you felt connected or loving, where it was alive in you, wasn't an idea.

And if you bring something like that to mind and I'm inviting you to check that out right now, it could be with a child or a friend or a partner or your dog, when you're feeling those moments of playfulness and affection or tenderness, if you consider those moments and then say, well, what was my self-sense in those moments? You'll notice that it wasn't particularly centralized or solid or strong. The boundaries are more amorphous. You're not inside that cloud of self.

More clouds might be there. Things are going on. But there's resting in something larger, a more connected kind of field. And the opposite holds true too. If you think of moments that you felt completely cut off or closed down, you know, not caring at all, those moments, there's a lot of self-absorption.

It's tight. So we realize love. We realize that radiant warmth, that light of the sun, as we wake up from that exclusive identity with a sense of egoic self. And that really is the pathway. It's described as the Bodhisattva path, the path of an awakening being in Buddhism, because in a very simple way,

it's natural developmentally to get very occupied with the self, and it's also our potential to wake up, and sense the what we are beyond that. So what I'd like to do in these two classes is we'll look at the trance of selfing, like how we get caught, how we close down our hearts, and then we'll explore really how we can love ourselves into freedom, how we can love ourselves into freedom. And when I say love ourselves, I'm not talking about loving the narrative self,

the character that we think. of us ourselves. It's really how do we love the aliveness that's here in whatever form it comes, unconditionally, tenderly, in a present way. So I often, when I'm describing, well, how do we get stuck? How do we get caught in this identity of, with limiting beliefs and the storyline of what's wrong? I often use the description of a spacesuit self because it feels so useful that every one of us emerges and comes into this world and has to have strategies to navigate. Every one of us develops an ego. That's a given. To the degree that our basic needs aren't met, when I talk about basic needs, to the degree that there wasn't

some real mirroring back of the who we really are, that goodness is. and that mystery and that creativity and aliveness, we weren't understood. So that need for understanding to be seen wasn't met. And to the degree that there was in some quality of presence around us that embraced us anyway, no matter what, you know, that had some quality of that unconditional loving. It doesn't have to be perfect

because there's no, everybody's got egos in bringing up children, but good enough parenting. as it's described, the need for loving gets met. But to the degree that those two needs for feeling embraced and seen aren't met, not only do we have a spacesuit self that's navigating, but our identity gets hooked inside it. We get identified with our rather urgent strategies to get approval and to protect ourselves,

to not show others what feels toxic. We get identified. We're in that cloud. We're cut off from that bodiceita. So we look and say, well, really, what's it like when it's that unseen, unloved? And sometimes there's a kind of violence to it. Sometimes there's a sense of, you know, it comes because of abuse. And other times it's a lot more subtle. It's kind of the messages of, you know, if you do it differently, you'll be happier.

But underneath that's a message that as you are right now is not acceptable. Sometimes it's a deep not seeing. This story is one of my favorite by Deborah Nystrom and it's called Ordinary Heartbreak. She climbs easily under the box that seats her above the swivel chair at adult height, crosses her legs, left ankle over right, and smooths the plastic apron over her lap, while the beautician lifts her ponytail and mocks coarse as a horse's tail. Then as if that's all there is to say, the woman at once wax off and tosses its foot and a half into the trash. And the little girl who didn't want her haircut, but long ago learned successfully how not to say what it is she wants,

who even at this minute cannot quite grasp her shock and grief is getting her hair cut. For convenience her mother put it, the long waves gone that have been evidence at night when loosened from their class, she might secretly be a princess. So, rather than cry out, she grips her own wrist and looks to her mother in the mirror, but her mother's too polite or reserved or too indifferent to defend the girl.

So the girl herself takes up indifference, while pain follows a hidden channel to a place almost unknown to her, convinced as she is that her own emotions are not the ones her life depends on. She shifts her gaze from the mother's face back to the haircut now, so steadily as if this short-haired child she sees were someone else. I like this story. I mean, it's beautifully written, and I also think it's powerful because it really gives a sense, of how it doesn't take something profoundly violent or seemingly abusive to have us get the message

that it's not okay to feel what we feel and be who we are and then we become something else and then we start believing that's what we are. Does that make sense? How we leave ourselves? Okay. So the primary mechanism that the primary dynamic of the space itself is thinking, and you might notice that you go through the day and thoughts are survival-based, even though they seem to have to do with what we're going to go shop for and get for dinner or what we have to respond to an email or whatever. But deep down, it's wanting and fearing that's driving them. And the more we're in our thoughts, thoughts, the more they trigger off the wanting and fearing. And the more we feel wants and fears,

the more it triggers thoughts. So we're in a looping. And if the looping is charged, it locks in. So if you're on your way to a doctor's appointment, let's say, and you're in Washington and the beltway's kind of slowed down to a near stop, and then all of a sudden you start thinking, I'm going to be late. Then you realize not only you're going to be late, that because you're late, somebody else will go ahead of you. so you'll be late for the rest of your day, and then you start realizing the consequences of that, and you start being angry,

and that triggers off more thoughts of what's going to go wrong, and you're caught in one of those fight-flight-free loops. You're in a stress looping. So when the looping is coming out of unmet needs, when it's coming out of that sense of how people are going to experience me or how I'm being rejected, how I'm not going to get love, how I'm going to fail, what's wrong with me. It very deeply, deeply amplifies the sense of that space suit self. The Buddha had a really wonderful pithy line and that was whatever you frequently think and

ponder upon, that will become the inclination of your mind. So what that means is if we just scan today and just take a moment to sense so where was your mind today? What kind of things were you thinking about? One description of it is that we have 80,000 thoughts a day and 98% of them we had yesterday, right? Because we're pretty habitual.

So whatever we're frequently thinking about, that is the inclination of our mind. Are we thinking thoughts about that are creative or generous or kind or grateful? Are we thinking thoughts that are, you know, what I did wrong or what somebody else is going to do wrong or has done wrong? From neuroscience, it's neurons that fire together, wire together. How we think creates a neuronet in our brain.

And that triggers off the emotions that then triggers off more thinking. So most of us live in kind of predictable looping, and if our looping is charged with fear, with anger, with hurt, we're in a trance that cuts us off from this bodichita. We're identified with the spacesuit. Now, it's interesting that in the moments we're in trance, we're generally cut off from some feelings and possessed by others. For instance, one friend I was talking to recently grew up in a really violent neighborhood and it was very dangerous as a male to show vulnerability.

And so he grew up acting very tough and arrogant. He's been spending years trying to undo the tough arrogant guy persona, spacesuit self. But emotionally, very easy for him to be possessed by anger, very, very difficult for him to feel the hurt underneath. Other kind of example, a client I worked with some years back, was a sensitive one in the family and always told she was too sensitive. You know, everything's such a big deal for you. And she became ashamed of her sensitivity and ashamed of being, your mother, say, you're needy.

You know, and that was, you know, that is so painful. We're all needy. But when we get identified and we think we're needy, that's about the most embarrassing, shameful place, which is so sad. But for her, you know, she wasn't able to feel anger, but she could easily feel hurt, victimized, something's wrong with me, ashamed. so we get cut off from some emotions and possessed by others. When we look at relationships and how that works, our fears can lock us into either avoiding closeness, so we're the space suit self that's navigating and not letting anybody get too close,

because if they get too close, they'll see what's so bad about us and reject us. And then of course there's the other side of it of our spacesuit self is so afraid of not having what we need in terms of contact there's a grasping on and trying to control to get people closer and fearing abandonment and wanting people to treat us a certain way and getting jealous of others and so in that situation life is the space suit self has got a lot to do with how other people are doing things, completely focused on other people. I love the story of two women are sitting on a bench and one says, oh, ve. And then the other one says, oh, ve. And then the first one says, all right, enough about the children.

I can get away with the Jewish-Buddhist stuff, just giving my background as Semitic. And somebody re-sent this to me recently. which really kind of has that feeling. You can get love mixed with attachment in some of these sayings of the Jewish Buddha. There's no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited.

And whose fault was that? The Tao does not speak, the Tao does not blame, the Tao does not take sides, the Tao has no expectations, the Tao demands nothing of others, the Tao is not Jewish. Just a couple more, they're fun. Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.

Forget this, and attaining enlightenment will be the least of your problems. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders. Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions. Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of terminal illness.

One more. Deep inside you are 10,000 flowers. Each flower blossoms 10,000 times. Each blossom has 10,000 petals. You might want to see a specialist. Okay, enough of the Jewish Buddha. So where this all came from is our spacesuit self in relationships, usually either avoids intimacy or gets very, very attached.

And when there's an addiction, there's a sense of dependency on others. to be okay. And that is real suffering. I mean, many of us can feel some of the roller coaster, really notice how much in any given day our sense of okayness or not okayness has to do with how people are treating us. Most of us know that one. I want to read you, one woman sent me this some months ago, called Love Addiction. I am not a someone until you make me so. Who am I? Only you know. If you turn away now, you'll leave nothing there. I'll be stripped, unmasked, uncovered, I'll be bare. You didn't notice, but I'm wrapped up in a chain. It's my own creation, but it bears

your name. Don't leave me with no prisoner to blame except the one who answers to my name, the one that I abandon yet again. The one that I abandoned yet again. So we're exploring really what allows the heart to wake up and we begin by looking at, well, what stops us from recognizing and living from open-heartedness? And it's when our identity gets really small. And this is one of the ways that it happens. It gets very small when we are so afraid of each other that we distance. It gets very small when we grasp on and abandon ourselves.

So I'd like to do is look more deeply now at how meditation, how these different practices of mindfulness and compassion can begin to undo that entraped identity, that being in the cloud, and free us, allow us to rest in something larger. And just to start with to say that there are a lot of misunderstandings about meditation and there are a lot of ways that meditation is actually used by the ego as another space suit strategy. So there are people that, you know, pride themselves on meditating but are actually, you know, going off into the cave because they're too afraid to engage with other people. There are people that use meditation to pump up a sense of kind of being superior.

Sometimes I like that expression, gazing at your navel. It's kind of a weird one. I mean, just imagine people really gazing at their navels, their head turned inward. But it can be that. It can be a lot of self-fixation. And there's a book now that has a lot of examples in a really fun way of spiritual materialism. That's what this is. when you're actually using practice

to really actually amp up your spacesuit self. Here's one. Wendell achieves a state of mindfulness by imagining he is floating in a beautiful lake until his mind empties of everyday worries. Soon he's aware of himself, but no longer worried about money, work, family, or whatever,

whether he even left the taps on. Many home insurance policies now cover acts of mindfulness. Clive likes to practice loving-kindness meditation. This is when someone thinks of a friend and sends them love. Clive finds this easier than bothering to meet his friends or lending them money. And one more. Todd likes extreme mindfulness. Today he's emptying his mind on a tight rope,

high above the streets of Manhattan. The people in the convertibles below hope that Todd doesn't empty any other part of his body. So in contrast to fostering, self-centeredness, real meditation, true meditation includes everything that's been pushed away. So whatever our space suit self-habits are in terms of pushing away some emotions and getting lost in others, meditation that's authentic, meaning that's waking us up, embraces whatever's been pushed away. And there's a challenge in that, of course, and that is that it's embracing, I mean, we push away things because they're sticky, they're painful, they're scary,

so embracing is not easy. And my favorite, one of my favorite descriptions of the beauty and messiness of embracing is from the vileteen rabbit. And if I hadn't brought my dog tonight, I had a beautiful velveteen rabbit kind of stuffed one to show you, but I have a live dog instead. Here you go. Real isn't how you're made, said the skin horse. It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.

Does it hurt, asked the rabbit? Sometimes, said the skin horse, for he was always truthful. When you're real, you don't mind being hurt. Well, does it happen all at once, like being wound up, he asked, or bit by bit? It doesn't happen all at once, said the skin horse. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily or have sharp edges

or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you're real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all because once you're real, you can't be ugly except to people who don't understand. So another way of thinking about waking up out of this spacesuit identity and really coming and sensing the fullness of who we are and this alive loving heart is becoming real. that we're no longer caught inside a limited, rigid, narrowed sense of being. And the pathway to becoming real is to be loved into it. We have to be loved into occupying our wholeness and our realness.

It's probably the kind of central theme of the path, that we have to be loved into it. And when I say we have to be loved into it, it doesn't mean necessarily from the outside. It really means inside and outside, that we have to remember, reconnect with the love that can help us to become real, become awake. I sometimes think of any moment of experiencing that, of being loved into being more who we are is a moment of blessing. That if we wonder, well, what is a blessing? A blessing is really a reminder. It's a reminder our homecoming into more realness, more love. We're blessed when we remember. So, the practice is that when the arising patterns of feelings are experienced, the hurt, the fear, the anger, and when instead of pushing away some and getting lost in others,

we open in a tender way to what's here. When there's really that loving presence, there's a disidentification with the spacesuit self. The space suit self only keeps going through its controlling, it's resisting and it's grasping. In a moment of love, the identity starts dissolving. Now, if you're wondering, yeah, but we need to have an ego, it doesn't mean the space to itself's gone.

You have access to it. It's just, it's not who you are. Does that make sense? Okay. So, we're going to walk through the process of this disidentification, this opening into realness, into Bodhita. And there are three steps, and one is moving from our thoughts into our body, feeling the feelings that are there. And then the next step is really opening consciously to that vulnerability.

And then the last one is to let in love, express love. Now the first step coming out of thoughts and into our body is really what we're training in in our meditation practice. It's really the kind of the crux of it, that that begins to wake us up out of the trance. Once we're feeling the feelings, if we have a lot of trauma in us, it has to go really slow. You know, often we'll have retreats and you'll get the message at a retreat, well, just open to whatever arises. And this particularly happened in the early days a couple of decades ago.

And people would be sitting in these retreats with a lot of... terror and deep, deep, intense emotions, and it was not the right instructions. Because if there's trauma, you have to love yourself into freedom and you have to do it in a very tender way, but not by just jumping off a cliff and opening to all the feelings all at once. There needs to be some resourcing, some safety, maybe working with somebody else and doing it more gradually. But the basic pathway is whether gradual or not gradual, thoughts to body and feelings, feeling the feelings, and then opening to love. And one of my favorite descriptions of this through a folk tale I wanted to share with you tonight, Maladoma Somme is a wonderful healer and shaman and teacher.

and he tells an Irish folk tale about one of the god heroes. And this god hero had vanquished so many enemies that Mars, which is the energy of aggression, took over. So when this god hero was returning back to his own village, he was filled with this destructive energy. And there was a wise person in town that advised the town on how to handle it. Okay, so again, from thoughts into body, but he was possessed. How do you work with that possession? So their approach, this is what

the wise person advised them to do, is first as he came down the road to the town, they had the women, the mothers lying the streets, and they actually had their breasts shown bare and it was like erotic but it's also mother's milk to like invoke, oh yeah, the feminine. This isn't all war, this isn't all aggression. Then they put them in ice water, do what you got to do. And then they finally surrounded him and they told stories of returning from war, of planting crops for abundant times. They sat around the fire, they shared their lives, their children's lives, there was dancing, there was quiet in the woods and above all they reminded him of the warmth of belonging. So in this way,

there was a transition as we've been talking from that space suit self that's possessed by anger to relaxing open to something more and in this way it was creative way of reminding him of love through the village and their encounter reconnecting with the heart

there are so many ways each of us really is in a process of discovering what is it for me when I'm stuck, when I'm cut off, that helps me to remember love? What is it? And it's about the most important inquiry we can ask ourselves, what helps me remember love or connection or belonging when I'm feeling cut off? There's a meditation of remembrance that we're going to practice together tonight.

It's one of the ones that, for me, has been most profound. And I came upon it at a retreat a couple of years ago. And I arrived at retreat. I'd kind of do an annual retreat up in New England. And I had been in a really busy period. So when I arrived at retreat, there was a lot of unwinding. of, you know, I just had so much pressure that when I was at home, I had felt very particularly impatient and tight and selfish and self-centered.

And especially with those that I was closest to, I just felt like, you know, I could come and be gracious and give a talk, but then I was not very attentive with my family and so on. So, of course, as it happens, as soon as I got to retreat and things quieted, I had a face my sense of bad personhood, which is how it goes often. And I've done so many rounds, you know, over the decades of getting in touch with that very tenacious place that sees the spacesuit self and doesn't like her for it, you know, that I tend to say, okay, let's let's let it rip, let's see what the judgments that are going on are. And the judging self was, it was very harsh. It was really saying, you know, like, after all these years, you can't be a nicer person.

what's the deal? And it was that very familiar feeling of this self is not lovable. The self here is not lovable. And so I really let myself open to the sensations as I'm describing to you the feeling of being very young and very vulnerable and really not trusting the lovability. And you know, I try to try. to offer myself compassion and that didn't work. I tried the things I know how to do.

You know, it's okay sweetheart, that kind of thing. And there was just a very young place in me and when I really let myself go inside that feeling of that young place, the expression, the words were, please love me. It was reaching out. It was like it needed something from the outside. And I actually whispered it, please love me, you know, and I whispered it from deep, deep yearning. And then what happened was I just sensed, well, what would it be, you know, if I really wanted to feel loved, it would feel like an enveloping warm presence that was right here shining and just absolutely attending to and seeing and caring about me, offering me blessings. and I actually felt the sense of this warm, loving presence, offering a kiss, a kiss of blessing on my brow.

And with that, it was just, you know, kind of like bathed in love. And in that bathing in love, something in me really surrendered, and that sunshine, light, heart that is always there was able to be free to then merge with the light that I perceived as around me. So it started though with imagining and sensing myself kissed on the brow and then a dissolving and opening into that field of loving presence. And it was delicious and I was resting in it just feeling, you know, like that all those currents of unloveability were being held.

And then I, over these next few days, but starting in those moments, would bring to mind people that I loved. and with each person I would bring to mine I would sense that field of loving presence and imagine offering them a blessing, kissing them on the brow or putting my hand on their cheek or hugging them different people, different ways.

But every time I do it, then the field of loving got bigger. So when I was feeling small, I'd imagine being kissed on the brow, being blessed, and when I was feeling expansive, no longer identify with the space suit self, but Bodhita was really radiant, I would offer blessings.

And each, it's like, you know, the negative looping. Each was a kind of looping to greater and greater field of Bodhita. So I turned it into a loving-kindness practice that I do regularly now, where I'll sit and I'll even, it doesn't matter if I'm feeling small or not small, I'll sit and I'll imagine and sense being blessed with loving presence. And that just naturally saw, just talking about it, you know, it helps me to open and soften. And then I bring to mind others and I'll offer them that blessing. The expressing is really basic and since I'm on a dog theme tonight, this is Mary Oliver

who has a whole book on dogs and loving her dog. It's called Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night. He puts his cheek against mine and makes small expressive sounds. And when I'm awake or awake enough, he turns upside down, his four paws in the air, and his eyes dark and fervent. Tell me, you love me, he says. Tell me again. Could there be a sweeter arrangement?

Over and over, he gets to ask. I get to tell. little reflecting on the velveteen rabbit and how we become more real when we're in that field of loving. And by nature, we need to feel it coming in. We need to feel we're being loved. And by nature, it grows as we offer it out. And this really is the experience of Bodhita. Gradually, what happens is we realize it's not like something outside is loving this

or this is loving that, it's a field of loving. And we recognize that that field of loving presence is more the truth of who we are than any story we've ever lived in about a separate self. This realization doesn't always sit with us when we're feeling triggered. And one of the stories I'll share as we close tonight, Araya Mountain Dreamer

is a wonderful teacher and writer and she writes about an experience she had after giving a day-long workshop and a woman comes up to her, Jess, she's about to leave. A woman introduced herself as Isabel and she says, can I do this meditation on my own?

Yes, I said. I'm sure you can, although many people find it easier to establish a meditation practice with the help of a group. It's just hard to keep. up the discipline on your own. But what will it give me? What will I get if I do this every day? Her tone took on a whining quality. I felt my irritation rise as she continued, how fast will it work? Will I feel a difference after a week? How will I know it's working? This is

exactly the kind of thing I detested, the quest for a quick fix, the desire for guaranteed outcomes, a simple answer, do this, you'll get that. My sons were waiting for me and I wanted to go home. I took a deep breath. looked directly at Isabel and set my knapsack down on the floor. I tried to slow down my words thinking that maybe if I spoke slower, I'd feel more patient. Well, I said meditation is more a process than a goal-oriented activity. It can help you become more aware of what's going on within and around you, and this can help reduce stress.

My best advice is to try it and just be patient with yourself. I picked up my bag and started to budd in my coat. I really did have to leave and I wanted to get out while I was feeling virtuous for not snapping her head. off. But as I started to move away, Isabel suddenly reached out and grabbed my arm with surprising strength. But what I want to know, she said, her voice rising in a crescendo that bordered on real panic, is will it help me find God? If I meditate, will I have an experience of something or someone out there listening? Something really with me? A wave of desperation swept out from her through me and I was surprised to find my eyes filling with tears.

This woman was not looking for an easy answer or guaranteed formula because she was lazy. She didn't want a simple plan because she was unable or unwilling to think critically about what would work. She wanted something she knew would work and work quickly because she was hanging on by her fingernails. She wanted something that would work in a week because she was afraid she simply wasn't going to make it through months or years. I put my hand gently over Isabelle's work, grip my arm. It's okay, Isabel. We all. all feel desperate at times, I said. Nobody does it by themselves. We all need help.

Her hand relaxed a little beneath mine and she started to cry. We talked for a while longer. There is no them. There's only us. When I left, I did not leave one of them. I said goodbye to one of us, a human being doing the best she can, searching for the home for which all our hearts long. You can feel in that that there's this longing in Isabel saying, please love me, be with me, connect with me. This is this longing to remember love, asking for a blessing. And that in the asking and in the offering, much like the Velveteen rabbit, there was a getting real and it wasn't that one person was getting real.

There was a waking up together because there is no bad. in the moment that we can get that, that there's no one outside, it's us. And we're in this process of getting more real and it's nourished in the moments that we offer and receive blessings. It's nourished. So I'd like to pause here and have you explore a bit of this loving-kindness practice of receiving receiving and offering blessings, sitting in a way that's comfortable, taking a moment to scan through your body and so the sense of kindness see if anything wants to relax or let go. Let your attention come to the area of the heart. You might feel your breath right at your heart. With some

interests, with a gentle attention, just notice whatever the state of your heart is right now. Notice what might want attention in the region of your heart. If there's some mood or emotion or something going on in your life that's living inside you right now, it just wants a bit of acknowledgement. You might wonder and notice if there's something inside, some place of vulnerability that you haven't been wanting to feel. Part of what keeps us from realness, what keeps us in that small self-identity is the avoiding of what's here. You might let yourself breathe directly into whatever feels most vulnerable, keeping the attention in the body, throat, chest, belly. For some it helps to put your hand on your heart,

just to keep the sense of being in relationship with your inner life, breathing and feeling, what's asking for attention. If you're aware of something you're afraid of that's going on in your life, something that feels like a loss, just letting that the raw feelings or vulnerability be felt, breathing, feeling the touch of your own hand, letting whatever's here be here. Sometimes when we get quiet and pay attention,

part of what's here is a sense of really not feeling at home in ourselves. feeling uncomfortable, feeling some judgment we're holding onto, turned on ourselves. Sometimes we get in touch with feeling far from others. Whatever's here just to breathe into it, open to it, and as if you could put your being inside the place in you that feels most vulnerable, you might experiment with the words, please love me and just see what happened. Saying them once, saying them again, just from that sincerity in you that naturally yearns to be held and cared about and loved.

Letting the yearning be sincere and imagining and sensing the energy of love of presence in some way blessing you. And it might be someone you know, it might be through a spiritual figure or as I described in my own story of formless loving presence, but imagining the loving presence that's in this universe close in, intimate, right with you, right here, perhaps kissing your brow, a hand on the cheek, flowing through your own hand on your heart. But letting love come in, being willing to feel your own being washed through with love. Can it help again to mentally whisper the words, please love me from a sincere place as you

can and then open to receive and sensing the great radiant sun and warmth of love that's within you shining through you merging with that love and presence? an illuminated heart space right now that you can inhabit that, bringing to mind someone in your life that you'd like to offer your blessings to. You might imagine that person close in right here with all of his or her or their challenges and goodness. I might see the person's eyes and imagine those eyes closing gently and that you could just kiss the person on the brow.

touch their brow or touch their cheek and mentally whisper the person's name and say, I love you and notice what happens. Bringing somebody else to mind, somebody that you care about. Again, seeing very clearly that person close in, see the person's eyes and let the eyes close gently, you can lean forward and kiss that person's brow or put a hand on that person's cheek, mentally whispering the person's name and saying, I love you, and notice what happens. One more person bringing someone else to mine, child, a friend, a partner, a colleague, feeling that person close in, seeing their face, seeing the look in their eyes, letting those

eyes close gently in your mind's eye, offering your blessing, kissing the person. person's brow or in what other way or touch you feel inclined, mentally whispering the person's name and saying, I love you, and letting go of any sense of another person or yourself and just feeling the felt experience of loving, how vast and inclusive it is, sensing who you are when you're offering or receiving blessings. Sensing this great heart of bodiceita. the radiance and warmth of the awakened heart. Knowing this is your true home. Namaste and thank you for your attention.

For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.