Tara Brach - Compass of the Heart

Episode Date: June 29, 2011

2011-06-29 - Compass of the Heart - Are you aware of the intentions that are shaping your thoughts, moods and life experience? This talk explores how mindfulness of intention allows us to open to our deepest heart's aspiration, and have that guide the unfolding of our lives. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

Okay, so I'd like to begin tonight with a story, as I sometimes do. And this one is about a king and a queen, a very kind couple who had no offspring, so no one to inherit the throne. And a wise counselor suggested that they be very egalitarian and invite anyone in the kingdom. who is interested in the job to come for an interview. And so the date was set and they opened it wide. And it was quite an interesting setup for them because what they did to ensure that it really was equal was that when guests would come, they'd invite them into the royal wardrobes and let them choose whatever they wanted to wear.

and so they all, you know, had access to wonderful clothing and jewelry or whatever. And they had a great banquet so that while people were waiting for their interview, they would be fed well and entertained. And so there was music and the like. Well, the king and the queen and their wise counselor stayed up in their chambers waiting for the people to come up for their interviews and hours and hours went by. They heard the sounds of laughter and shouting and jokes and so on, but they were just waiting. So finally, into the wee hours, the counselor went down to see what was going on. And what he found was everybody had left. They had

taken the little soaps. They had completely eaten all the food. They left with their clothing on. They had all gone. And they had forgotten. why they came. And so it is with us that we move through our day and often our decades with a kind of forgetfulness about what really matters, about what's really important. And I've noticed when I look at people that I know now that have been practicing meditation for decades and decades. a growing number of us. And many, many people can say, yes, I'm more centered.

I know when I'm stressed how to kind of work with it, there's more balance. But often there's a kind of plateau where there hasn't been a deep kind of liberating realization or freedom of the heart. And in a way, a kind of a, well, that's just how it is. Whereas those I know that have continued in a really creative, deep way to feel awakening, the difference is a kind of remembering of what matters. The difference is this intentionality that in some way says, okay, what I care about is really living this life from presence.

What I care about is loving without holding back. I want to wake up. And that remembrance keeps them on this very kind of creative, in this creative domain, very alive. So that in a way, the way I'd like to think of it is that their lives are aligned with the compass of their heart. Their moments. I remember a long time ago

I heard a story about a man and his wife she was pregnant she's entering her ninth month and they had a four-year-old son and their four-year-old asked her if after the baby was born

if he could have just a few minutes alone with the child and they were a little kind of bewildered as what's he asking for that for but they agree

you know what do you say no you know so and so she delivered the baby at the hospital came home and a few weeks in the the little boy said said mommy I want to have my time now and so he went into the room and the door was open a crack so they overheard this and he he was kind of leaned into the cradle and he said please tell me about God I'm beginning to forget. The Buddha taught that our entire life experience arises from the tip of intention, that what we're intending when we're remembering what matters actually creates the felt sense of the moment. And that the more moments that we're remembering what matters,

the more our life is aligned with the compass of our heart. Our words, our actions are actions, how we are with each other. So I'd like to look more closely at what makes conscious intention so important. And I'll use the word karma, which is really the law of cause and effect, and say, you know, what we sow is what we reap. And that our past actions create our current lived experience. And the most significant energy we sow is our intention. So you pick up a knife and you plunge it into another causing death.

And if you're a skilled surgeon and it's a risky procedure, that's one thing. And if you're doing it out of a violent anger, it's another. So when our intention is to not cause harm, when our intention is to help, to in some way serve, to be loving, that gives rise to a positive future. That's what it gives rise to. And when our intention is to be right, to consolidate our rightness,

or to cause harm or to punish, that causes suffering. So I want to kind of break this down a bit of how it actually happens that we have these intentions form and how they unroll in our life. And we begin with Buddhist psychology which says, you know, that what our intention is

is going to determine what we're paying attention to. What your intention is is going to determine what you're paying attention to. You remember in other talks I've described the reducing valve of the brain, how there's this massive amount of, there's the totality of the universe of information and to survive our brain kind of has to reduce all that down

so that we're kind of operating off a trickle and what do we choose to operate off of? Well, for survival purposes, we have to pay attention to certain things and what we think about shapes, things. Where our attention goes, energy flows. So when a pickpocket sees a saint, they say in India, that pickpocket sees the saint's pocket, right?

I mean, that's one of the most simplistic ones. When our intention is to protect ourselves, to enhance ourselves, there's a certain narrowing of the field. The reducing valve has narrowed us. When the intention is healing, there's a more open valve, more intimacy. Let me invite you just to reflect for a moment. Just close your eyes and pause. Just feel how it is for you right, this moment, your body, your heart, reflect on the word trouble. Just let the word trouble come to the mind. Notice what happens. Okay, now erase the blackboard in the mind. And now the word kindness. Two thoughts just kind of plucked out of thin air and sense how your

body's affected. You sense the power of thoughts to affect your whole system. If you'd like, you can open your eyes. But just to consider what is the theme or the tone of the thoughts that you regularly have in your mind? What's your cocoon of familiar thoughts like? What do you think about regularly? Many of you now are familiar with the term that neurons that fire together, wire together. the more we think certain thoughts, more it creates a kind of a neural pattern

that then in turn keeps us in a certain kind of biochemistry that then in turn generates more thoughts. So in Buddhist psychology, before every thought, there's an intention. We have an intention, some energy in us that wants to go towards something and then our thoughts help us go in that direction. And the Chinese Buddhist text, say, from intention springs the deed, From the deeds springs the habits, from the habits grow the character,

and from the character develops destiny. So the intention that you're living with in any moment, the intention to do harm, the intention to help, will create the thoughts and the actions, and ultimately what's called destiny, the patterns that actually define your life experience. intention matters now

we move around through the day and our intentions are largely unconscious we might get hits of oh I'm wanting this or I'm wanting that but we're not so aware when we're speaking with someone

of oh my intention right now is really because I want your approval or my intention is to prove such and such we're not usually consciously aware so I like taking just a few moments to name some of the domains, the typical domains that our intentions arise from. So really, in that sincerity that I know we have to wake up, that wholeheartedness, we can begin to actually in our day, slow it down, say, okay, so what's the intention

that actually is creating my body state, my thoughts, my action? my life. So some of the ones that are primary, if we really think about it, survival and the basic primal fears and craving are always going to be layered in there. Our intentions are marbled. So that's a layer and we begin to become aware of them. Of course when they're unconscious they really will possess us. Our whole sense of identity gets captured but we start noticing, okay, there's some craving for this or some fear of that. But we start looking more closely at these domains and we find that each of them, when we're not aware of our intention, they reinforce the sense of an insecure and defended self. Okay, so one example

of a domain is that one of the intentions we often have is to in some way inflate ourselves. to feel more superior. And it comes from feeling not so superior. It comes from feeling like something's wrong. And we have all sorts of ways of doing it. Sometimes we get quietly uncomfortable with another person's success. When speaking, there's just very subtle ways

that we might speak about a third party that are a little bit lowering their status and upping ours in the person we're talking with. We get a little bit better. And then it can be very much more dramatic, the kind of experience of putting ourselves up or bragging in some way. I many years ago plucked this. It's an article that reads, Monk gloats over yoga championship.

Employing the brash style that brought him to prominence, Tridana Johnny Bickram won the fifth annual world yoga championship yesterday with the world. record point total of 8773.6. I am the serenis, Bickram shouted to the estimated crowd of 20,000 yoga fans while vigorously pumping his fists. No one is serener than three. Donna Johnny Bickram. I am the greatest monk of all time. Bickram got off to a fast start at the Lassa meet, which is a six-event affair. In the first competition, he attained total consciousness T.C. in just two minutes, 34 seconds. and set the tone for the meat by repeatedly shouting, I'm blissful, you blissful, I'm blissful,

to the other yogis. Before the Bhutan meet, Bikram had never placed better than fourth in any competition. Many say he had forsaken rigorous training for the celebrity status accorded by his Bhutan win, endorsing Nike's new line of prayer mats and reportedly dating the Hindu goddess Shakti. But his performance last weekend will regain for him the number one computer ranking and will earn him new respect. Monk gloats.

So a silly example, as you know, it's cute. But when we look at our day, and I find this is really interesting, there is an investment in being right. There's a reason competition is huge in this culture. There's an addiction to being better than. And there's a continual assessment of where we stand in regards to other people, whether we've got a better figure or better looks, or whether we feel we're more intelligent or more successful, or more important, or whatever it is, graduated from a better school,

the whole ten yards. So that's one area, just to watch the intention to be better than. Another one we do as we go through the day, in some ways trying to win over other people, other people to win love and approval and affection. And I say this because if we're trying to be better than, if that's the intention, the very activity and intention reaffirms an underlying sense of not enough. Does that make sense? Similarly, if we're trying to seek approval, there's an undercurrent of, I'm not okay as I am.

Anything we do to seek approval reaffirms that whole neurone net that's saying to us not enough. And the more intensely we pursue, the more that's there. An honest seven-year-old admitted calmly to her parents that Billy Brown had kissed her after class. How did that happen, gastromeda. It wasn't easy, admitted the young lady, but three girls helped me catch him. So we have that intention And you might even We explored this at the relationships day long

You might sense for yourself When that's your intent If you might think of in the last week To week somebody that you're with That you wanted their approval For most of us there's someone And you might consider What it's like in your body

And in your heart in the moments that in some way you're acting in order to get approval. It might be that you acted on, it was on the phone and speaking or in writing an email or in person, it doesn't matter. What was it like inside when you were trying to get another person's approval? What we find is that rather than that openness, because when there's an open valve of the mind, the body is more open, there's a contraction when we're narrowly fixated on getting approval, when that's our intention,

it's coming from the place in us that's not enough. And again, it reconfirms it. Now, what are some other areas? Some are very, very basic, like this intention to soothe or comfort, to relieve. We do it with food, we do it with sleep, we do it with sometimes reading, sometimes email, sometimes alcohol. Heard last year's one of these few liners where a man goes to a bar and orders a drink. Bartender gives it to him. He takes the drink. He puts it aside.

He orders another one. The bartender gives him that drink, and he immediately drinks it, and the bartender says, what gives? And the guy's response is, well, I go to A meetings, and what I hear regularly is stay away from that first drink. That's the one that causes trouble, you know. So again, we have this intention to soothe and the suffering of it is that

every time we play it out, and this isn't a thing about ethics right or wrong, but when we play out, we become locked in this notion that we have to have something to be okay. We lose our freedom. So again, when we're not conscious of that intention to soothe and we keep on going for comfort with certain ways of consuming certain addictive behaviors, we lose our freedom. We get solidified in the identity of a self that has to have in order to be okay. Okay. So our practice here with mindfulness is to become aware of the intentions that are really kind of affecting our thoughts, affecting our behaviors, and discovering how those intentions direct our attention,

where the attention goes, energy flows. Our whole life gets caught in certain very narrow currents. Now, every one of us knows about painful karma on some level. I mean, I don't know anyone that in some way, hasn't felt the pain in the aftermath of unwise actions, whether it's of what happens when we deceive another person, or what happens when we act out of anger, or what happens when we get really preoccupied,

and then don't bring our attention to the ones we most love, or when we get caught in the activities of a painful addiction. We know the aftermath. We know the pain. And what's important when we think about karma, when we think about it, is we can't undo the past. We can't go back and change the way those things played out. But we can start fresh in this moment. And this is the blessing of a spiritual practice.

You can't undo the past, but you can create new patterns, new karmic tendencies. a new unfolding future by exactly how you pay attention this moment. And that begins by noticing the intention that is driving your experience. I want to just say that the point is not to get rid of the intentions that have to do with craving and fear.

I mentioned earlier, every one of us, we have a survival brain. That's going to be layered in there. So the point is to become aware so that they're not in the unconscious zone and thereby directing our behavior and actually monopolizing our sense of identity. If we're aware of them, they lose some of their power.

And if you're aware of one of those layers of intention, that awareness can help you to discover a deeper, a deeper and actually more true heart intention. So I read you, D.H. Lawrence. Men are not free doing just what they want. Men are only free doing what the deepest self likes. And there's getting down to the deepest self. It takes some diving.

So really this is what we're exploring tonight, how to become aware of the layers of self-ing. the different intentions that keep us locked in a smaller sense of self and how that awareness can actually invite forward the heart's aspiration. To begin with, it takes pausing. If we just are tumbling through our day, we will not catch our intentions. Some years back, I heard a story that this came from St. Louis. The jails were overfilled.

This is about eight years ago. I heard this, the judge began to give sentences to offenders that require taking meditation courses. And this is one of the first times this had happened. One man convicted for a number of felonies for stealing commented that he said this. He said, I've discovered that there can be a space between the urge to steal and my actions. This is giving me freedom. I can choose not to. This is changing my life.

Okay, so these are layers of intention. There's the intention to steal. It comes some part of them had this grasping, the part of them that felt insecure, incomplete, something's missing. And then a deeper intention to live from freedom to not grasp, to respect other people's rights to property.

Pausing made the difference. So it takes practice to see what's happening and to then come home to our intention. The Navajo believe that each day a new sun is born. And to honor the sun, we must start again and make our day sacred. Each day, a new sun is born. And to honor the sun, we must start again and make our day sacred. Now, I love the imagery of that, that our life is in cycles.

I mean, day cycles, months, cycles, cycles of all sorts of nature, and that to come home to our deepest intention requires a regular practice of remembrance. What is it that to us we hold sacred? How can we reflect on that? Imagine if each day you took enough time at the beginning of the day to really remember what for you made the day sacred. Imagine how much more of your thoughts and your actions would be aligned with this compass of the heart. So the key to changing these karmic patterns that keep us small, that keep us in a more of a defended and insecure self, is to pause and each day remember a

deeper kind of intent. Now this is the Dalai Lama. Each morning when the Dalai Lama wakes up, he begins his morning practices with a prayer from Shanti-Dava. May I be a guard for those who need protection, a guide for those on the path, a boat, a raft, a bridge for those to cross the flood. may I be a lamp in the darkness a resting place for the weary and a healing medicine for all who are sick as long as the earth and sky endure may I assist until all living beings are awakened

so this is the ritual quite a beautiful one that the Dalai Lama reaffirms the compass of the heart that he says this is what matters to me Now each of us is going to have our own language. Each of us is going to have something that is our way of saying, here's what I really care about.

The more moments that you remember what you care about, the more that will create the patterning of your life. So I'm going to explore this with you in three parts, how we can bring alive our true intention or our true aspiration, how we can cultivate informal practice, and then how do we access it when we're in the streets, when things are going wild for us, okay? And to say that in formal practice, there's two elements,

and one is, much as we do here at the beginning of our meditations, we pause and we listen to our hearts. for those of you that don't have that as a regular practice, if you decided each day to take some few moments and the beginning of the day is a good time, to just pause and you have to get somewhat quiet because if at first you say, okay, what's my intention, you're going to hear a lot of static.

And then if you start getting quiet, then what will come through is some very familiar intention, something that's a little bit canned. Do you know what I mean? You've already told yourself. that for a while. If you keep listening and keep present, in that presence, the heart gets more sincere. There's a kind of softening, a loosening, an opening, kind of moisturizing of moisturizing of the heart, so that it gets quieter and you're starting to listen. And then

there's, then there is a kind of innocence where what you care about is coming through in a more pure way. Okay? So that's the practice of establishing a formal intention or aspiration. Take some moments. Get quiet enough so that you're really listening and ask yourself what most matters. I often use that line from, I think it's Suzuki Roshi, I'm not sure, where he said that the most important thing is remembering the most important. thing, right? And it's so true. When we're remembering what's most important, we're actually coming home to who we are. What's most important to you is who you are, is the awareness and love that is who you are. So that's the beginning of using formal practices that we actually set

aside time to intentionally contact our intention, to meditate on it, to listen to our heart, to perhaps whisper it as a prayer, experiment. Find out what way of meditating on aspiration actually has it resonating as this is alive and real for me. The second part is practicing, as we do here, this regular, how do we pay attention mindfully moment to moment? What happens is informal meditation practice. You're learning the...

art of waking up from trance. The same thing that happens through the day, we go into a trance and hopefully we come out of it and go, oh yeah, smell the roses. Well, in a meditation, in a micro handful of moments, we're practicing falling asleep and waking up over and over again. And there's no problem that your mind drifts. In fact, the fact that your mind goes off is just a chance to practice noticing, oh, often averture. reality, come back, come here. And what are we coming back to? Initially we come back and because our attention is used to it, we come back and land on, oh, this breath or this sound or this feeling, but we can deepen our attention. We can come back and notice

that's in the foreground but also become aware of the presence itself that's here. We can come back and really come home to this vastness and awakeness that's here, awareness itself. We can take refuge in awareness. So meditation practice is training in homecoming, in noticing we've left and going, oh, come back, come back to what matters to this moment, to this heart, and to this awake, open stillness that's our very deepest nature. Come back. How does that help us? When you get lost during the day, if you have a regular meditation practice, and if you've sat for 20 minutes in the morning and maybe a hundred times noticed, oh, lost in thought, come back, there's a lot more likelihood during

the day, you're going to be lost in trance and something in you will go, wake up, you know, and you'll go, oh, and then you'll sense, oh, and you'll notice the intention that has kind of captured your attention. You'll notice, oh, I've been often craving, I've been pursuing a fantasy, or, oh, I've been resisting, I've been angry, I've been attacking, you'll notice it. And you'll have, like that felon, you'll have a part, you'll have a part, you'll have a cause that has the opportunity of a different choice. So I'll give you an example. So as I like to do, this is an example of one woman who had been meditating for probably

eight, nine years. So she was a longtime meditator, relatively speaking. And she had had a decade standoff with an older sibling. She was the kind of non-traditional, impulsive. of, she was the bad girl of the family, got into trouble in her years younger, said the wrong thing and so on. Her older sister was in her eyes, goody two shoes, but she was more traditional, and so they had not really gotten along. And she wasn't invited to one of her niece's weddings after a particularly bitter argument. Their dad died, their mom got sick, and they

started to be forced together more for the holidays. So there it was a Thanksgiving gathering, and this woman was kind of ready for the difficulty that would come up and she went into it really wanting to be awake. So sure enough, she fell into a habit. They got into a disagreement about their mother's diet. And so she is suggesting gluten-free. She's holistically minded. And her older sister goes,

oh, everything has to fit into your, you know, vegetarian philosophy. and this woman was hurt and she got angry and left the room and in her mind she's going it's the same as always she just likes me she doesn't respect me there's nothing I can do to help make her understand me

and her mind was spinning and then she paused okay so here's where the potential for freedom was she paused and realized that she was hurting and did as I often have people do put her hand on her heart and just was with her a little bit. And then she asked her the question that's key. Okay, well when I got into

that kind of little dispute, what was my intention? And she very quickly realized that she wanted to be recognized. I know something about diet. I know how to heal people. She wanted to be seen as the kind of the knowledgeable one. She wanted recognition. And it was a very young place in her that was going for it. And so she, that's when she started to dive deeper. and ask herself, what is it that really matters while I'm here with the family, with my sister, with my mother, what really matters? And what she got was what mattered was loving connection, that she wanted to have love more than being right or being smart or proving herself. She wanted that loving connection. And she wanted to be helpful. And so she had a little kind of

reflection that was helpful to her on this, which was really not my will, but my heart's well. Not my will to be smart and show off and be the right one and, you know, be the holistic one, but my heart's will that we connect. She went back into the room and for the rest of the evening, there was more engagement. She didn't have the need to defend or assert her opinions, or whatever. A couple months later, they're together for Hanukkah. There's more ease. They kind of laughed together over an old family story. And later that night her sister told her that she was having a tough time with her teenage son. And for the first time something shifted. She actually thanked her for being such a good listening shoulder for her.

What had shifted? What happened? This is the possibility of changing karmic patterns. We redo over and over again because we stay with the intentions that are the shallower but more familiar ones. Prove myself, defend myself, be better then. And for her, this capacity to feel the pain in that, the capacity to pause and say, okay, so what is my intention? And then what's the intention that most matters? Shifted the entire dynamic of a relationship. So for each of us, and this is, we're going to practice in a few minutes, but for each of us to the degree that we're in relationships that we can ask ourselves, well, what's between me and really feeling loving and open and present,

we're going to find that we're caught in some habitual intentions that narrow us, that narrow our attention, that keep us from that freedom. And it's a powerful inquiry to begin to say, can I pause? Can I move from my will, from the ego's intentions to the heart's intentions? Can I do that? And that's what's possible for each of us. Now, one of the reflections that most catalyzes that shift is the reflection on impermanence. to the degree that you remember impermanence,

that this is fleeting. We don't have that much time. You're going to go much more quickly to, I'd rather have love here than be right. You just well. Nobody, when, if you're with somebody that's dying, nobody cares in the past who won what argument, right? It just doesn't matter.

We remember what matters in the face of impermanence. I remember when my son, Orion was, I think, in third grade, he went to this Washington Waldorf school here, and one of his classmates was in a car accident with her father and was killed. And I remember over the next weeks watching parents with their children and the cherishing, the remembrance of, oh my God, you're alive and I love you. That's all that mattered. It doesn't mean that we don't have to create the boundaries.

and do our thing, but we do not get waylaid by the shallower intentions when we're remembering impermanence. Got a woman, Alison Valenine, a pediatrician, educator, gave a commencement talk a couple months ago, I guess. And she shared about this tendency we have to move through life, sensing not enough time, I'm on my way somewhere else, and forget. And I wanted to read you because she sent it to me. She is part of this, our larger community that is part of listens to the podcast, as part of these, you know, practicing these practices and teachings. And so here's what she shared in her commencement talk. She said we become so accustomed to life on the hamster wheel of achievement and approval that we just forget. We scamper on and on

chasing the ephemeral promises of someday all are if only. This is the way we've been conditioned. College looks forward to medical school, medical school to residency, residency to whatever lies beyond, what comes next becomes more important than what is here. Growing up, I learned a hard lesson about how the hamster wheel can cheat us. My father was a pediatric surgeon with a tremendous enthusiasm and drive to succeed that encompassed his work, his family, and his friendships. He was a huge influence in my life. He taught me the value of hard work and the satisfaction of a job done right. But on a winter day when he was driving home from the hospital where he worked, he was a his car slid on a patch of black ice hitting a telephone pole on the driver's side, killing him instantly.

He was 48 and I was 18. That was obviously many years ago and the alchemy that occurs as we age has been good to me. Through that alchemy, this loss has come to mean something more, something good. It serves as a reminder that I cannot live my life on the hamster wheel waiting for some day are if only I. So you might ask yourself if there's something you're waiting for. If your habit of intention has you going for something in the future that's outside of yourself or beyond, you're waiting for something to happen, if there's an if only, that really keeps you from the deeper intention of presence and aliveness and love.

I remember hearing about Aldous Huxley as he was dying. Aldous Huxley is one of my heroes. And as he was dying, he had people kind of sitting around him. And he died of throat cancer, so he couldn't speak very loudly. But one of the people there, I guess that he had mentored, asked him if he, anything he wanted to really share about what really most matters about this life. and his words, his response, be kinder. Just that.

So we get this teaching that impermanence can wake us up and keep us more with that compass of the heart. In the Carlos Casignata books, it's death as an advisor. So the same teaching is really the spiritual transmission of every wise path. the same teaching, to not wait. You don't have to wait until you get the diagnosis or you're with someone else that you thought had much longer or your children have all of a sudden leaving home.

Just don't wait. That one of the key practices on the spiritual path is this mindfulness of intention. That it's a given that we're going to go into trance and get hijacked some. That's, for most of us, it's a given. Most of us get caught. That's okay. The practice is to, in a formal way every day, if you can at the beginning of the day or at some point, just remind yourself of what matters. Take some time to practice regular meditation because it'll just give you the knack of waking up out of trance more. And then through

the day, when you remember, pause. What's my intention right now? What's my deepest intention? So let's practice a little. Let's just take the last few minutes to explore this together. So as you close your eyes and let your body be in stillness, just feel the life inside you. come into contact with the life of the moment. You might be aware of the in-flow and outflow of your breath. You might be aware of areas of tightness or tension and just give yourself that gift of letting go a little. And as you're arriving in this presence,

the reflection is if these were the last few moments of your life, If you're at the end of your life looking back, what is it that would most matter in your relationships with others, with your most close circle of others, with others that matter to you? What are the qualities of presence, of attention, of heart that would matter? You might bring to mind one person in your life that is important to you and where you might have some friction or conflict where you know you get reactive. And just take some moments to bring yourself to a past encounter

where something got triggered off. Let yourself go to the point in that encounter when things in some way were heated up where you felt caught in reactivity. And just pause in your mind's eye. Just let yourself freeze the frame and investigate a little. Investigate what's going on.

You might ask yourself really, you know, what in this reactivity, what's really the intention, maybe fear-driven or craving-driven. What's the intention there? What are you trying to have happen? Are you trying to prove something? You're trying to regain power?

You're trying to protect yourself in some way. trying to be seen, to get approval, to get back. What's the intention? And as you investigate that, let go of any judgment around that intention. That's just your natural human ego. We all have these intentions. So to regard that and regard the need behind that intent is with a real kindness. It's very hard to find your deepest intention

if you're in some way judging these ego needs. Be very kind, very forgiving. This is my will, the ego's will. And as you feel able, just sense deeper, what is your deepest intention? What's your heart's will? What do you really wish? Going on that vantage point of at your end of your life,

looking back, you really, really wish, what's your deepest intention here? And can you imagine letting this be the compass of your heart? Can you imagine how your words and your actions might unfold if you're able to pause and remember what's possible? Close this reflection with a metar loving-kindness reflection which begins by offering your own being whatever prayer you'd like to right now, whatever wish, if it helps you as you offer a prayer just to gently put your hand on your heart, just to really connect, to be intimate with your own being right now, just to offer yourself that prayer. It may be that may I remember

what most matters. May I live from that intention to love, to be awake. Then we end together as community, a far-flung community with our prayer for all beings, that all beings everywhere might come into the presence that allows them to remember their heart, that allows them to remember their deepest aspiration, that all beings everywhere might live their lives from loving presence, that all beings everywhere might awaken. and be free. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation,

learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.