Tara Brach - Bodhichitta - The Awakened Heart - Part 2 (2016-03-02)

Episode Date: March 5, 2016

Bodhichitta - The Awakened Heart - Part 2 (2016-03-02) 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. "To love someone is to learn the song in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten." Arne Garborg 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/donate/. 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. So this talk and reflection is part two of a series on Bodhi Chita. And Bodhi Chita literally means awakening being heart-mind, Chita heart mind in the Asian script, they're really considered the same. And it's about love and really refers to the many flavors of love. It could be the love that we experience when we're holding a newborn infant

or when we're accompanying a beloved who's dying or it could be the love, the affection that just surges up when we're with a pet or when we're seeing. some sort of beauty or when a friend is experiencing loss, there's all these flavors of the heart responding with tenderness that the common denominator is the falling away of a sense of a separateness and a feeling of belonging to this field of aliveness. And a bodhisattva, that's an awakening being, is a being who lives out of Bodhisattva. of Bodhi Chita, whatever the flavor of love, the Bodhisattva's life is being informed

by that, the behaviors, the expressions. And the Bodhisattva is an archetypal figure. And for me, my favorite understanding is the Bodhisattva is an archetypal figure that really represents our evolutionary capacity. This is the fully awake heart, what's possible for us. And I like the evolutionary perspective because you can really see it in terms of the brains unfolding that in the most recently evolved part of our brain,

there's a neural net, there's circuitry that's completely dedicated to social relating. And it's basically in humans and also, of course, other creatures, but survival and flourishing depends on the activation of this part of our brain. And you can see that the more the strength of our togetherness, our capacity cooperates, what's made possible the greatest medical advances in the great, you know, in terms of all scientific research, it's also what makes a sports team successful. And it's what allows students to learn the best when they learn cooperatively.

And when we face natural disasters, it's what helps us pull out. And when we want to move towards peace, that capacity to reconcile and, cooperate, moves us towards peace. So this part of our brain, and that's the physiology of it, but really in a bigger way, this bodiceita, this awakening heart mind, is what we're evolving towards, living from fully. And as I mentioned, it's not just humans. You can see it's what allows other creatures to be successful, the pro-social species like the ants and the bees and so on. One of my favorite illustrations

is this guy's driving in the country and he's looking at his map and he, by mistake, kind of drives off the road and gets stuck in a ditch. He's not hurt, but his car's stuck. So he has to go get some help. So he goes to a nearby farm. And very friendly farmer says, oh, Warwick can help you.

So it turns out that Warwick goes, yep, Warwick can do the job. So Warwick's a very... old, haggardly-looking mule. So here's how the story goes. Farmer hitches the mule to the car, and with a snap of the reins, he shouts, pull Fred, pull Jack, pull Ted, pull Warwick, and the mule pulled the car from the ditch with very little effort. So the man's amazed. He thanks to the farmer, patch the mule, and says, you know, why'd you call out all those other names before you called out Warwick? Farmer grinned. He said, oh, Warwick is just about blind.

as long as he believes he's part of a team, he doesn't mind pulling. This togetherness, not only does it serve the group, it serves each of us because we call on our greatest resources when we feel a sense of belonging to something larger. It's really one of the main characteristics of happiness, feeling a sense of belonging to something greater. So the first many tens of thousands of years of our human history, as this brain is developing, as it turns out, we for sure were bonding but more exclusively in small groups and everybody that wasn't part of that small group was not part of our bonding

domain. So they became the unreal other and the enemy and it was really part, group cohesion was necessary for survival, but it was kind of a limited pro-social behavior. And what is reassuring is that you can sense it the circles are widening in terms of what we, who we consider part of us, widening and widening. So this networking region our brain actually allows us to perceive not just our family or our close ones, but all species and all of life. And that for many people, when they get that experience, of wow, I'm connected to this dog or this plant or this other creature. That feeling is so enlarging.

Many of us know that one. I was sharing this the other day at a workshop and somebody sent me a card. It has two dolphins talking. And one's saying, one of these days I want to swim with a fat, hairy investment banker. And the other saying, yes, I've heard it's quite magical. That was my favorite of the month, you know. So in a very direct way, this region of the brain and really the whole spirit of Bodhita, when it's activated, when we're connected, when it's enliven, it brings healing.

And when it's disconnected, when it's shut down, you can see how it's really responsible for the trouble we have on this planet. When we're disconnected from Bodhita, it enables us to be cruel to animals. It enables us to violate the earth without sensing we are earth. The earth is our body. Naturally, when it's not activated, we violate other humans. We see other humans as different in other, and it leads to all forms of injustice and oppression. So it's for the healing of our planet that we cultivate Bodhita

because what it allows is a heart space that's truly inclusive. We begin to act on behalf of all of life. It's that line from Dorothy Hunt I love so much that where she talks about the heart space where everything that is is welcome. So one of the easy are more elegant in a way descriptions of the spiritual path

is that movement from being identified as a separate solid self where we're operating off of attachment and fight-flight freeze to a sense of identity that's really inclusive, that experiences belonging to life, to awareness.

And when that shift happens, what enables that shift and what happens when we've shifted in that way is rather than fight-flight freeze, it's attend and befriend. So we're going to continue in this class exploring that shift in identity that really allows this full emergence of Bodhita that allows us to really be the Bodhisattva, live from Bodichita. One of the lines from RELCA that describes that aspiration and that path has just a simple line. He says, I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may never be able to complete this last one, but I give myself to it. So there's this sense of dedication to

not pushing anything out of our hearts, keeping widening and widening until our beingness and our heart really includes life without exception. We'll particularly focus on... So how do these widening circles work? Because the first circle is the life that's right here

and we can't skip over it. Okay? The idea, this kind of idealism where I'm here to serve the world to have that and not listen to and be tender towards and open to the vulnerability that's right here is a bit of delusion. It's an ideal. So widening circles means we have to keep on coming back and saying, okay, what's right here?

So explore that, how we bring a tend and befriend here and then widen it out. And the challenge that we'll be looking at, as many of you know, is it even when we get that taste of really get touched and really sense, yes, this is really my life, I really want to open and include and feel this open-heartedness, we get re-hooked every day, most people I know. I mean, every day we get caught in that trance, that self-trance of kind of the conditioning of the survival brain that's saying, well, how do I make myself more comfortable and what do I have to avoid and what's going to go wrong, and then that reactivity when we're uncomfortable, the way we get

triggered so easily. Every one of us gets hooked. So just to begin to notice how that trance happens for us in a daily way is the beginning of honestly awakening bodiceita. There's a parable that some of you might remember that I think is a real useful one. So it was the coldest winter ever, so cold that many animals froze to death. In an effort to save themselves from this icy fate, the porcupines decided to gather together to fend off the chill.

They huddled close to each other, covered and protected from the elements and warmed by their collective body heat. But their prickly quills proved to be a bit of a problem in close proximity. They poked and stabbed each other, wounding their closest companions. The warmth was wonderful, but the mutual needling became increasingly uncomfortable. Eventually, they began to distance themselves from one another, scattering in the forest only to end up alone and frozen. Many died.

It soon became clear they would have to choose between solitary deaths in the frigid wilderness and the discomfort of being needleed by their companion's quills when they banded together. Wisely, they decided to return to the huddle. They learned to live with the little wounds caused by the close relationships with their fellows in order to benefit from the collective heat they generated as a group. In this way, they were able to survive, to take it one step further, not just to survive, but on the Bodhisattva path, there's no way to really wake up unless we're willing to hang in with each other.

because the real freedom comes in realizing that we're not the self, the story that we take ourselves to be and we cannot discover that until we go ahead and hang in where the vulnerabilities come up with each other and in that hanging in discover the love and the awareness that shines through all of us. We need to wake up that way. So the first step is to recognize how like the porcupines we start getting needled and we say, hey, I'm out of here. On some level. Sometimes we say we're out of here by fighting and blaming and sometimes it's by withdrawing, but how we need to be able to see how that happens. And in the process of looking, as we start examining our lives more closely and more honestly and say, okay, how do I create

separation. The key attitude is one of being interested and truly not judging ourselves for going into a reactive trance. It's like everything else I'll say about the trance is not useful if the process is built around judgment. Because that's just another part of the trance is judging. And every one of us is rigged to perceive separation and at least for a season, when I say a season, some years of our life, be really identified in a separate egoic self. That's just part of, that's the design. I think of this, you know, the self-centeredness of children, I think of this, I always love this one, woman describes driving the carpool and she's picking up little Chris for preschool and she notices

an older woman who's hugging him as he leaves the house and he, and so she asked him, well, is that your grandmother? And he said, yes. She comes to visit us for Christmas. And I said, how nice. Where does she live? Oh, at the airport, Chris replied, whenever we want her, we just go out there and get her. So we're supposed to be like in our little worlds,

in our bubbles for a certain amount of time. And to the degree that we've had trauma, to the degree we've had parenting or in a culture where there's not really healthy mirroring of who we are, where we're not seen or understood or loved, to the degree that's the case, that rigidity, that holding on to separateness actually becomes more extreme

and all the behaviors that circle around it become more extreme because we have unmet needs. Again, that's trans-reactivity. That's not our fault. So, just to begin to do this examining of, okay, how do I get triggered, whether some of us it'll be in a traumatic way where I go into trance and push others away or fight or whatever it is. And for some of us it's more subtle, but for all of us, it's not our fault.

And if we can see that, we can begin to notice when it's happening and have more choice. Okay? So we'll look the different ways we get hooked where we get caught in trance in a daily way and disconnect from bodiceita. In a way, in a very specific way in the brain, the mirror neurons are not activated when we're in that reactive trance. Does that make sense? That when we're in fight-flight-freeze, that circuitry is not energized.

We've got less Bodhita going on. All right, so what are the ways? One of the ways in the Buddhist way of languaging it is that we get attached and we start grasping after things. As we're kind of leaning forward and we're trying to get something and make something better in our lives, there's a sense of something's missing and we're trying to get somebody's approval or affection. Or we're trying to get more money or we're trying to get more power or advantage, kind of

position ourselves in some way, or maybe something beautiful that you want to possess, or something you want to consume. So, in the moments, when any of those are strong drivers, when there's a kind of ambition to be more successful that has a grasping to it, or chasing after our person's affections, whatever it is, our aperture narrows. We're not able to see others. in a way that really has empathy, compassion, understanding, because the self-centeredness is stronger. We're in grasping mode. So we're living in a world that's torqued by our wants

and our perceptions are no longer open. We're not that part of our brain that's designed to attune is not really operative. So then we goes into all sorts of self-justification, and just our own little reality. In the end game, this is a cartoon, you have in one room two dogs who are looking at a birthday cake

that's ready for a party, and in the other room the kids are opening the presents, one dog saying to the other, sure, they'll be mad today, but how else will they remember this birthday 30 years from now? Okay, so grasping. My examples are not always completely on target, but we all have this stuff going on, so I figure why not have some fun with it, you know.

The other side of the coin is aversion, which is when we're afraid of failure or afraid of loss, afraid of, there's a squeeze of something's wrong. And when we're living in that anxiety, the aperture narrows. when you're stressed and anxious, when you're with and another person's around, again, that part of the brain that's designed to attune is not activated. The heart is not open. It's particularly clear in those moments when we're speeding and have a sense of not enough time. And my favorite example of this comes from a very famous study.

Many of you are familiar with the Good Samaritan study at Princeton. And in this, the seminarians were given a practice sermon, and half were assigned the story of the Good Samaritan, and the other half were given a random Bible story. And the seminarians were supposed to go to another building and give the sermon and be evaluated on it. And the way the design was set up on the way to that building, they passed a person in a doorway who was in very evident distress.

So the question was, will the seminarians who had just studied the Good Samaritan story, will they stop and help the person in distress? And the real question, so what was determined, it was determined by how much they thought they had, how much time they had before they had to give their sermon. If they thought they only had a little time, they would race to give their sermon on the Good Samaritan but not help this person. They thought they had a lot of time they would stop. And to me, it feels very personally relevant.

I am so aware of feeling I can in the morning meditate and feel real open, hard, and spacious and feel the blessings of wanting to offer blessings to everybody. but if I hit a point in the day where I'm feeling squeezed by time and then somebody asked something from me, I might act nicely, but inside I am my, it's not like my heart is open and tender. That sense of there's not enough time shuts down our heart. How many of you have noticed that? Can I see?

Yeah, okay. So these domains of stress, whether it's the grasping after or, you know, or the aversion and one of the biggest ones within aversion when we're stressed is judgment. It stops, it's closing the aperture, we're not there and it's fear-based. You know, when we are hooked by fear, when we're in the trance of fear, we're living in that separate self that forgets our belonging. We forget what we most cherish, that sense of connectedness. I've shared with some of you that I'm about to do a course called the Awakening, the Fearless

Heart that really looks at this, at how we cut off from our own full potential when we get hooked by the trance of fear. It's an online course and if it's something you're interested in, it's starting next month then you can check my homepage for more information. Brock.com. Because the conditioning is so strong to go into trance and to cut off from who we can be, it takes a lot of intention to wake up during the day. It takes a lot of intention to takes a lot of intention to recognize that we're caught in fight-flight freeze or caught in grasping and then shift to simply attending and befriending. And in the Bodhisattva tradition,

it's the Bodhisattva vow. It's that vow may whatever's arising awaken this heart and mind that actually cultivates a sense of that awakeness that can notice, oh, I'm in trance right now. Now, most of us, we have vows or strong intentions, but they're not necessarily dedicated to our full awakening. They land on something lesser than our full awakening. Jonathan, my husband, gave an example for himself a couple days ago at his class that he's, you know, has been one of the characteristics of our relationship for a long time, that before we met, he had a few vows. Okay, he vowed never to live in the suburbs.

He vowed never to move anywhere where he didn't have a job. He vowed never to get married and he vowed never to renovate. So, after he moved to live with me in Bethesda where he didn't have a job, we got married and then we decided to renovate a fixer-upper, which is our current home. Interestingly, that our marriage ceremony was based around a deeper vow than any of the vows that he pushed aside, which I'm glad he did. And as part of our wedding ceremony, we took that Bodhisatt vavow, which again I want to repeat. And it goes, it's very simple and very, very powerful. And it's one of the reflections that guides me in my whole life. It says, regardless of what arises, whatever circumstances arise, in this case it was between you and me.

It could be whether it's anger, whether it's judgment, whether I'm feeling judged, whether I'm feeling hurt no matter what it is that comes up between us and more broadly in life, may that serve the awakening of compassion and wisdom. So that means we get in a fight and there's some part of us that's computing it like, okay, how might this serve our hearts waking up? or one of us feels, you know, really judgmental, okay, how can my judgment now actually serve? If that vow is the background for our life, then it'll keep on waking us up from the trance so that we can move towards attend and befriend.

Let's do a little reflection here so you can check this out, okay? Just take a moment to close your eyes. You might bring to mind a relationship that's important to you, that also has the natural prickliness, the triggers. So a relationship where you want to keep on getting closer and there's the natural arising of hurt or guilt or anger or insecurity, or judgment or resentment. Could be with children, the parents, friends, partner, family, and let your attention focus on a particular area where you get triggered. What's the area of triggering that feels most strong, most compelling,

that catapults you into trance most easily, and let yourself connect with what's difficult about it. You wouldn't be triggered if it didn't go to some place in you that felt vulnerable. And now let yourself reflect on the bodhisattva aspiration or vow. May these very circumstances, these feelings that are arising, may they serve the awakening. of heart and mind, of compassion, of wisdom. May this serve Bodichita.

Let it be a sincere wish from your heart that what's going on might help to wake you out and mentally whisper it one more time, please may this serve. May this in some way teach me, awake in my heart. So you really feel the sincerity of your own wish or it becomes more important to heal and connect and wake up than be right. You might put it into the form of an inquiry,

how might this serve the awakening of Bodhita of my heart? And then taking a few breaths, nice full breaths and opening your eyes when you're ready. So thus far what we've been reflecting on is that we have this capacity for the awakened heart. it naturally gets shut down when we go into trance. It's not our fault, it just happens, and that this aspiration, should we practice it,

will help us to be more aware of going into trance and more energized to be able to wake up from trance, that we care about it, that the trance itself is like a flag, oh, okay, judging. How might this serve, the awakening of my heart? How can I deepen attention? So once we recognize the suffering of trance, that helps us to become more alert.

In other words, when we feel, oh, there's distance, I feel lonely. This keeps happening again and again in relationships. Something's going on. That motivates us to deepen our attention. There's one friend of mine who, for a number of of years was volunteering and working at a hospice. And she described one woman that she got close to. This is a woman who had cancer and didn't have long to live. She had a large tumor

on her tongue so she could barely talk, but she loved to talk, which was difficult. This woman would come and they'd just be with each other. The company was very comforting. One day she returned, the woman was sitting on the edge of her bed dressed and about to go home, and here's what had happened. This is a woman that's about to die. A few nights past, she'd had the worst nightmare of her life. And she dreamed that the staff at the hospice had told her she was next to die. She woke up at 4 a.m. in the morning, paralyzed with fears.

I'm talking to God, no, no, why. I can't, this is not my time. and she was flooded with a sense of separation, not just from God, but from everybody in her life, and particularly from her husband. And then she got flooded with all the resentment she'd been carrying, that ever since bringing up their children, that he wasn't doing enough, that in some way she always was trying to control him to be a different person. She always, always felt like he wasn't who he should be.

So this is what came up to her in her dream, the sense of separation. So this is the suffering of the trance that she's realizing at the end of her life. And it was motivation to deepen her attention and feel this yearning to connect. So she said, it's not my time. I need to speak and I need to let them know I love them. So in the next two days the tumor shrank. And she could leave. She had enough time to leave.

and she went home and she could speak from her heart and name a lot of what was going on, her own fears and vulnerabilities and the pain that she now is experiencing by creating that kind of a distance and asking for forgiveness. And then she returned to the hospice and was able to die peacefully. To hold back our love is the deepest suffering. And that's what happens when we're in trance.

So when we start feeling that suffering, suffering. We get motivated. And that vow flees, may these patterns, whatever I'm in, may that awaken me, actually saves us time. We can instead of being in that transfer decades, start really catching on and deepening our attention much more quickly. We don't have to wait till we're at the end of our life. So it begins with this aspiration, awakening Bodhiita. May whatever's happening serve. And then, in the remainder of this talk, we're going to explore three main training elements, three domains that we can cultivate if we really want to wake up our hearts. And the first domain is the simplicity of keep starting right where you are. I mentioned

earlier the widening circles. You have to keep coming back to this circle and say what's really going on right here and can I open to it. It's, we are not able to bring empathy to another person if we have not attended to what's right here and we have to attend in an embodied way. The whole circuitry for compassion gets activated when we are kinesthetically inhabiting our body. If we're dissociated, then the compassion is mental. It's not wholehearted. Does that make sense? So the first step, start right where you are,

and by that I mean come right into the body, come in to touch the body fully, and then the circles can start widening. Then if we are real and in touch with our realness, others become real. The second part is to then purposefully look for what's true, what is going on in this other person. We don't look. We tend to, part of the trance we're in is that we're so caught up in what I'm feeling and

I'm doing that there's a projection but we don't really look at another with that interest of what's it like for you? What do you need? What are you feeling? What are you wanting? You know, we don't check it out that way. So there's this training, a Bodhisattva training, where in some way we're saying, just like me, I'm imagining that you feel vulnerable.

Just like me, you too feel fear, a failure. Just like me, you have a longing to connect and a fear about connecting. Just like me, you fear the loss of loved ones. There's that sense of just like me that's possible as we widen the circles when we really start looking at others. One friend described the West Coast, a kindergarten teacher, was talking about her class. And this was at the time when the United States attacked Iraq. And the children heard about the Iraq war and that we were sending bombers over there. And they asked her, do they have children over there?

And she said, yes. And they got very agitated. They said, oh, well, then they must not know those, you know, the people and the bombers. They must not know that. We have to let them know. And so they went to the playground and they used these different materials to write, materials to write out the word Iraq and then, you know, and they have a child's picture so that the bombers that were flying overhead to see what they had.

made and understand, oh no, you can't go bombing because there's children there, just like me. So the training is really two-part. The training is to see the vulnerability in others that just like our subjective experience, everybody is going around in this body that is out of our control and it gets sick and it dies and this heart that loses other beings, every one of us. So to be able to see that just like me and see who's there and also to see the innate goodness, to see the potential, the wisdom and the tenderness and that that longs for love in another being. I think of Choghya and Trunkba, a Tibetan teacher who's one of his messages around compassion

is never give up on anybody to be able to. to see that goodness, just to see the potential, no matter how buried it is. I read a story a couple, maybe a year and a half ago. It was really an editorial that Nicholas Christoph wrote that was based on an NPR story about Ali Neal, he's the Arkansas Court of Appeals Judge. And I was really struck by it as a Bodhisattva story. I wondered. share it. So Christoph writes, in the late 1950s, Ali Neal was a poor black kid with an attitude. And he remembers, Ali Neal reduced his English teacher, Meldred Grady, to tears. He was a regular shoplifter back then. He was kind of right on the edge, really, of

kind of the fringe of being a delinquent. And so in the fall of his senior year, Neil cut class one day and he wanders into the library where now his old English teacher, Brady, the one that he had kind of tormented when he was younger, was now working in the library. And Neil wasn't a reader but he spotted a book by a little known black author, an adult novel. And he didn't want to check it out so he, because he didn't want word to get out that, you know, he was reading. So he stole it. He took it under his jacket and stole it. And he really loved it. So he finished it and he went back into the library and there on the shelf he noticed another novel by the same author. He stole that one also. The book was

terrific. So then he returned to get yet another and found yet another was there. And it happened four times and he caught the book bug as he said. He said, reading got to be three. thing I liked. His trajectory changed. He graduated to harder novels, Albert Camus, turned to newspapers, magazines. He went to college and later law school. In 1991, he was appointed the first black district prosecuting attorney in Arkansas, and a few years later he became a judge and then an appellate court judge. But there's more. At a high school reunion, Grady, the woman from the library, stunned him by confiding that she had spotted him stealing that first book. Her impulse was to confront him,

but then in a flash of understanding, she realized he'd be embarrassed to be seen checking out a book. So she kept quiet. Not only did she keep quiet, she drove 70 miles to Memphis to search the bookshops for another title by that author. She found one, she brought it back, put it on the library bookshelf,

and then twice more she spent him. her Saturdays trekking to Memphis to buy books by this author all in the hopes of turning around this rude adolescent who had made her cry. She paid for the books herself. That's Bodhita. That's the heart that is attuned and doesn't want to understand embarrassment. It's the heart that sees potential goodness. It's that forgiving heart and that generous heart that really wants.

to bring out that goodness, which is really the word blessing. When we're offered a blessing, a blessing means in some way we're touched to become more who we are, to wake up our hearts, wake up our minds. She gave them a blessing. So the training to see the vulnerability and to see the goodness because then we can respond. Then as Trunkhah teaches we don't give up on somebody. And who knows? It's not like everybody before they die blossoms and becomes who we wish they'd be, but that's

okay. You can't measure the impact of seeing goodness and seeing vulnerability and responding from that. It still ripples out in ways we don't know. So we're looking at the different trainings. The first training is to consciously have that vow, may this wake up my heart, whatever us happening and then starting right where we are, being right with what's there, and then learning to look to widen the circles by seeing the goodness and the vulnerability, and then to express ourselves from that place of seeing, to see what we see, to see the truth in another

being, and to express our love in whatever way is going to be most helpful. Because each of us forget. Every one of us forgets our goodness and forgets that tenderness that's in there and needs reminding. One of my friends got reminded of this, a Buddhist teacher from Vancouver. It's named Brian Dean Williams, wonderful guy. He was at one of his first retreats some years back, and one guy in the retreat made him really, really uncomfortable. And this guy was wearing Nazi skinhead tattoos. He didn't like his energy. He couldn't figure out what he was doing there. So at the end of the retreat, he's sitting down in the dining hall for the last meal,

and this guy, of course, sits down right next to him as these things happen. Turns out his name's George Birdie. He's the founder of a well-known neo-Nazi record label. And they started talking about punk, you know, because my friend had been involved with punk rock, but not neo-Nazi punk rock, different kind. So my friend's still wondering, what on earth is he doing here? Because this guy's well known in certain circles.

And so it turns out the guy told him that he had renounced Nazism. He now sits three retreats a year and so on. And the story, what happened was he went to jail. And while he was in jail, he talked to his mother, and she was in so much pain about his imprisonment and his life and where his life was going, that she just started weeping for him. And her crying and her love,

her sensing his vulnerability and his goodness and loving him through it all, he said, that's what got me, my mother's love. So his mom melted the armor around his heart just by crying and expressing her love. He described he's still getting death threats from people that considered him a traitor. And my friend Brian just found his heart.

It's like he got to bear witness under the exterior to who this guy was emerging to become, flowering into being. Like this guy and what happened in jail, every one of us at different times are in the prison of trance. Every one of us needs to be reminded. Arn Garborg writes this. is a Norwegian writer. To love someone is to learn the song in their heart

and sing it back to them when they have forgotten. To love someone is to learn the song in their heart and sing it back to them when they have forgotten. So in this class we're really exploring how do we widen the circles, how do we come to that place within our own being where we're attending and befriending and how do we widen it?

How do we notice when we're in trance, like the Good Samaritan either racing around because we don't have enough time or judging or whatever it is? And remember that aspiration. May this too, may it wake up my heart. How do we start right where we are with what's going on inside us in an embodied way? How do we begin to look at each other?

and really wonder how the other is doing. And most, how do we express our love? You know, we're very shy about that. Many, many people I know as they get old or something terrible will happen to shake their lives and there'll be a tremendous amount of regret and remorse for not having really expressed. You know, it says Stephen Levine said, died recently.

If you had just three days to live, who would you call and what would you say? And why haven't you already done that? We need to offer each other that mirroring to sing that soul song when the other's forgotten. And we need to hear it. We need to let it in too. We'll close with a meditation that to me is the most of the most of the most of the most of the most of most powerful training in Bodhita in a very immediate way, learning to offer that loving and receive it. Let's take a moment to sit however you're most comfortable, to close your eyes, to take a nice

full, deep breath, inhale and exhale. Let the breathing be felt at the heart. And you might imagine a smile spreading through your heart, a smile that allows you to sense the space that's there, not to cover over but just to have room for whatever you're feeling right now. And sense if there's any part of your being right now that is needing attention, needing kindness, needing care. Just scan and notice most of us we move through the day and we don't recognize that there are places in us that are feeling anxious or lonely, sad, upset, off balance. Just notice what might want attention.

And you might gently put your hand on your heart and feel that you're beginning to offer just from your own highest, wisest, kindest being, attention, presence, kindness. You might vary the touch so it feels tender, light, real. and see if you can invite the energy of this universe that is intrinsically kind and loving right here. Just ask for and invite that love to be flowing and bathing through your hand into your body,

bathing the place that most needs it. You might even sense the close-in presence of love, loving awareness, the beloved, And imagine that blessing, that you're being blessed with love, for some to feel it as a kiss on the brow, a touch on the brow. So it's very intimate and immediate, the sense of taking in love and letting it wash through. And it's a space, the heart space that is always in a ready here opening and merging with that loving presence around you. So it's really one big field of loving.

And then bring to mind somebody in your life that you care about and you feel a connection with. And imagine that you could bring them close in so you can see them right here in front of you. You can see that person's eyes and the soul that looks through those eyes. And you can see that person's vulnerability and where that person has experienced fear or disappointment, hurt, insecurity. You can also sense the innate goodness, the sincerity and love, aliveness, aliveness,

awakeness that's there. You might imagine that person's eyes closing and that you just kiss that person on the brow, kiss that person on the brow and mentally whisper their name and just say I love you or offer whatever blessing you'd like. The more you kinesthetically imagine kissing the brow, mentally whispering the person's name, the more fully you can sense that offering of a blessing. And then imagine that you're closing your eyes and that person is offering you the same loving blessing by kissing you on your brow, whispering your name and saying, I love you to you

and see if you can let yourself receive that blessing, and sensing the field of loving that exists between you that's beyond any sense of separate self, this field of bodichita. We'll bring to mind one more person, somebody else that you feel care for, some connection with. Again, seeing the person's vulnerability right in front of you, seeing those eyes and realness of that person, natural fears, losses that this person lives with, and also their goodness, what brings up your loving, your care, imagining, offering them a blessing as they close their eyes in some way kissing them on the brow, touching them, mentally whispering their name and saying, I love you,

and exploring, receiving the blessing of love. Your eyes closed, sensing that person kissing your brow, saying, I love you, whispering your name, relaxing open to feel that field of loving. To love someone is to learn the song in their heart and to sing it to them when they have forgotten, to offer these blessings of love, to receive them, wakes up the radiance of our heart, Bodichita.

And we close in a simple way by feeling that field of loving presence, that heart space that we all belong to, that's really the source of our beings. May all beings everywhere realize their very nature as loving presence. May all beings live from loving presence. May all beings touch a great and natural peace. May all beings awaken bodichita and be free. Namaste. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

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