Tara Brach - Compassion for All Living Beings

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Compassion for All Living Beings - We often talk of widening the circles of compassion. This talk explores the qualities of mature compassion, what blocks us from this embodied and inclusive caring, and how each of us can awaken a heart that responds to our world's suffering.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Amasday, welcome, welcome, friends. It's my pleasure to be with you. So here we are and it's live on this Wednesday, East Coast night. This gathering is entitled, widening the circles of compassion. And we're really looking at what it means to hold all beings without exception in our hearts. So we're being webcasted on Facebook and YouTube and many of you as I'm seeing here and it's a pleasure to look at you or live on Zoom.

And after I'm done with the talk and with some of our meditations, there'll be a time for questions. So if you have questions, you can put them on the chat at any time during the talk, okay? We'll put you on the list. So as you might have seen on the screen, this is being co-sponsored by Friends at Act for Climate Today, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fairfax, Virginia, that's right near where I live, as well as a friend from the Faith Alliance for Climate Solutions and the Nova chapter of the Climate Reality Project.

So I want to welcome anyone here for the first time and also specifically those caring and activist friends from some of these groups. and a special thanks to Bob Roe and Loretta Rowe for, oh my gosh, putting so much hard into organizing this event, really. As always, if you want to find out about upcoming events that I'm offering, tarabrock.com and visit IMCW.org for events, offerings from our local D.C. area teachers. And I mention every week donations, and as many of you are aware, these talks and meditations

are offered freely, and your support makes a huge difference in letting us continue to do that. The donation information is on my website. You can just go to tarabrock.com slash donate, and also, Christy will put it on the chat for you right now if you'd like it. Usually, each week we start with a meditation, but this evening what I decide to do is weave several meditations into the talk. So we'll be doing that and even though let's take a pause, one of those sacred pauses, just to arrive together in presence.

So wherever you are on whatever continent, whatever time of day and whatever room you're in, invite yourself right here, just right into this moment. And if it helps, close your eyes or lower your gaze, maybe adjust your position for a little bit just to make sure you're sitting in a way that's comfortable, that you're alert and you're relaxed, taking a few full breaths together. Such a beautiful ritual to breathe together. Perhaps breathing in and filling our chest and lungs and maybe a slow out breath and just sense of letting go. Letting go, letting go. Breathing in together again, filling the chest and the lungs. And with the out breath, sense that you can kind of soften a little, the shoulders,

the hands, the belly, letting go. Again, breathing in fully, aware with the out breath of releasing, relaxing outward, so that as your breath resumes in its natural rhythm, you can sense the quality of presence here, perhaps enhanced a bit. Let your senses be awake. wear of sounds, sensations in the body. Perhaps you can scan and sense if anything wants to let go a little bit more. So that if your eyes are closed when you open your eyes or when you let your gaze raise, you can feel a fresh sense of being right here, right now, awake. Hmm.

Thank you. Thank you for pausing together. It helps me. So I thought I'd maybe start our talk with Mullah Nasrudin, who's a Sufi wise man. He's also kind of a jokester. And as the story goes, he was resting in the shade of a tall, luscious walnut tree. And he's daydreaming away. And he notices a huge pumpkin that's growing up on a delicate vine, snaking across the ground.

And then he looks up and he's squinting to see tiny walnuts growing high up on the magnificent tree. And he says how strange Mother Nature is, you know, to make plump pumpkins grow on spindly little vines while walnuts have their own impressive tree. And just then a walnut fell from above and landed with a tuck on his forehead. And he rubs it or it's a little sore and he picks up the fallen walnut. He looks high up towards the branches of the tree. And then he looks over thankfully at those swollen pumpkins growing safely on the ground. it goes, oh, Mother Nature, you are wise. And I think about this often because there is such a beautiful wisdom in our natural world.

It's this deep intelligence that lives through all of us when we're open and connected and awake. It continually reveals our belonging to the web of life. And perhaps you've felt it in moments of all. you know, the beauty of a night sky just recently we saw the planets, a few of them out, just the mystery and beauty of it, or the intricacy of a flower petal. Here in D.C., we have cherry blossoms just coming out and or maybe it's many of you learning about how trees communicate, just that mystery, are watching animals with their babes

and knowing how the same we are. Or I sometimes think of when we let in the sentience of our dog and really sense this being is conscious, real, loves being alive, you know, that interspecies connectedness, how it enlarges us. I remember doing a meditation retreat and I was sitting outside for hours just sitting still watching a spider weaving this web. It was amazing. And as you can imagine, with that kind of intimacy, there's no way in the world I would have just stood up and broken right through it.

Because when we really pay attention to other life forms, when we deeply pay attention, those lives matter to us. They're a part of our heart, which is very much the theme of our talk tonight. How do we wake up to that belonging? Some of you might know of Jarvis Masters. He's still living on death row at St. Quentin. He's been there for years, and many feel sure he's innocent of what he was convicted of. But he's still on death row, and he's deep into Buddhist practice. And he tells a story of being in the prison yard one day, and a seagull landed in a puddle of water.

and there's a big young inmate next to him picks up a rock to throw it at the gull. And Jarvis instinctively raises his arm to stop the stone thrower. And the young inmate shouted at him, what are you doing, you know, kind of getting in my way. And everybody in the yard quieted because, you know, they wanted to see what was going to come down. Because you don't usually mess with another person. It's a private space in prison. Do so at your peril. So Jarvis describes looking back and then spontaneously responding,

That bird got my wings. And with that, the young man kind of looked at Jarvis quizzically and he lowered the stone and everyone relaxed. And for days afterwards, people would come up to Jarvis and say, what did you mean by that? That bird got my wings. It was kind of like a Zen Cohen, right? I love that story. This kind of knowing of our shared belonging that that bird got my wings.

It's really the source of true compassion that we don't care about each other, we don't care about other beings because of some abstract ethic. This isn't a moral lesson or something. It's not out of pity for an unfortunate other. We care because we're all part of each other. Ticknod Han calls it interbeing. And of course, like Jarvis, when that caring is alive, we act. that's the nature of it.

So we're looking at what wakes up that caring and compassion. When Zen Master Ticknatham was asked about this, he said that what we needed to do was here within us the sounds of the earth crying. I just love that. Here within us, the sounds of the earth crying. He says, you carry Mother Earth within you. She's not outside you.

It's so poetic and it's so true. so that what's needed for us to be part of the healing is that we be present enough with our world that we listen. And of course this means the cries that are coming from within our own hearts when we're lonely and the cries of those we know well, our family, our friends, and the cries of humans who are different from us, who live perhaps far away or different in other ways. We're going to get into this. And the cries of not. non-human animals, of our living earth that's in such disease, we have to be here and listen to the cries. So our inquiry together is how do we awaken that genuine compassion? And by that

I mean where it's really inclusive. We're not leaving any part of life out and it's embodied. It's not abstract. It's a kind of caring that moves us in a healing way. How do we listen to our earth? How do we realize when we encounter a being that's different from us? That bird has my wings. So we start as we often do by looking at the blocks to compassion because there's no way to really wake up our hearts unless we see what's getting in the way. And as many of you know, this is a training, it's an intentional training. It's part of what the Buddhist called the Bodhisattva path because it's just Bodhisatt

a means an awakening being. It's part of waking up. And from an evolutionary perspective, I think of Margaret Mead years ago anthropologist. She was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. And the student expected me to talk about, you know, clay pots and tools for hunting. But she didn't. Instead, she said the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 thousand-year-old fractured femur, that's the bone linking the hip to the knee, and that that particular bone had been broken and then healed. And she said, what that meant was that other people had to care for that person, had to get them to safety and tend to them. Compassion is wired into us as homo sapiens. It's an evolutionary capacity that correlates with the development of our prefrontal

cortex and the relational circuitry in the brain, it's a part of us. And evolutionary scientists say it's really the key to our success in flourishing, this capacity to collaborate with each other, to care for each other, beyond kin. So as Mead says, it's the first most meaningful sign of civilization. And I also think of Gandhi. You know, he was asked what he thought about Western civilization. His response was, it would be a good idea. You know, we have this capacity for compassion, and as we know well, it's often not activated. In fact, when primal energies get strong, they take over pretty quickly and we lose touch. And that's why it takes cultivation.

You know, in one story, a mom was preparing pancakes for her son. You know, Kevin was five and Ryan was three, and the boys began arguing over who would get the first pancake. So the mom felt this is an opportunity for a lesson in care and in generosity. So she said, if Jesus were sitting here, he'd say, let my brother have the first pancake. I can wait. And so Kevin turns to his brother, Ryan, and says, Ryan, you can have the first chance at being Jesus. So it's entirely natural that individually we're self-centered, that our compassion, takes time to mature, it's also natural that when we have unmet needs, when the forces of

wanting or fearing are strong, that it deactivates caring. And consider what happens when you're really wanting something, when you're craving something, whether it's somebody's attention and approval or sugar or caffeine or whatever it is, how narrow and fixated the mind gets. We know it. It's not like we're operating from that integrated brain, heart, mind that is open to compassion. It's saying in India is that when a pickpocket sees a saint, the pickpocket sees the saint's pocket. You know, we get very narrow. Similarly, when we're fearful of someone, we're not seeing their whole being and where they're vulnerable. We're fixated on how they can harm us and how we can protect ourselves.

So this is really natural. You might remember that posting from Glacier National Park. This is National Park Rangers put it up saying, be alert for bears, take extra precautions to avoid an encounter. They say park visitors are supposed to wear little bells on their clothes to make noises when hiking. The bell noise will allow the bears to hear them coming from a distance and so on. Visitors should also carry pepper spray just in case a bear is encountered. the pepper into the air will irritate the bear's sensitive nose. It's a good idea to keep your eye out for fresh bear scat so you have an idea of bears are in the area and you should be

able to recognize the difference between black bear and grizzly bear scat. Black bear droppings are smaller and often contain berries, leaves, and possible bits of fur. Grizzly bear droppings contain small bells and the smell of pepper. The point is, we're afraid we're going to defend. We're not going to be opening in compassion. It's part of our natural evolutionary survival conditioning. In other words, imagine our furry ancestors, little rodent-like creatures, sitting on a rock doing loving kindness practice for a hungry snake slithering in their direction.

I mean, not going to happen or else no progeny. They become kibble. Or if it was the reverse, the snakes having a lot of, last-minute compassion attack and it decides to refrain from going after its prey. So it's not part of our conditioning but here's why this is important. And that is our wants and fears to a large extent are no longer connected to survival and flourishing. They're societally generated and the more we get hooked by them, the more others become unreal. They become an object. to get something from, to exploit, or to violate. We lose any capacity to sense,

that bird has my wings. Consider the history of white Europeans. This is where human wanting emerges into this voracious global pursuit of land and riches and indigenous others become objects to dominate and enslave and violate. And I think of the United States and its exploits more than probably any other country on the planet abroad, dominating aggressively for the pursuit of what? Not democracy. It's the pursuit of power and resources. So when it gets out of control, when it's no longer linked to survival, others become unreal others to dominate and exploit. We lose any capacity for compassion. You can also think of ongoingly how our societally driven attachment to eating food that comes

from animals continues to make animals unreal, objects that are violated through factory farming. So we're conditioned to perceive non-human animals as less valuable life forms. We forget the sentience, the intelligence, the realness of their pain and suffering. We forget that bird has my wings. When we think of societally driven attachment to consuming and accumulation and profit, you know, for so long we haven't faced the reality of how fossil fuels and waste and toxic chemicals impact this living earth, the atmosphere, the air, the water, the soils. Joanna Macy is a great leader in visionary and spiritual, wise being describes it this way.

She says, our earth becomes a supply house and a sewer. It's no longer experienced as our larger body. And then we disconnect from the care that would lead to a more concerted effort to reduce use of fossil fuels and the like. and we live with societally generated and sustained fears of others who are different from us. Countries and smaller entities, they play on fears within their own group to create an outside enemy which fuels hatred and aggression, cuts off compassion. And most every society on the planet has a caste system that's organized around a number of differences, as we know,

race, ethnicity, religion, and so many others. And those that are ranked lower are devalued. It reduces care. So I'm naming just a list of different ways that we get cut off through our lives from true caring for others nearby and more distant. And I also want to name that the anxiety and speed and stress in our daily lives that's generated in this society cuts us off. I can speak personally to that in the sense that when I'm feeling myself stressed, when I feel there's not enough time, that kind of thing. And then I hear about somebody else who's having difficulty, my care is mental. It's not a heartfelt care. Emotionally, I'm worried about me, you know, and we know that. We know how stressful our world is. I saw one cartoon in a man's in a

bar and he's confessing, I know I'm nothing, but I'm all I can think about. So, my friends, there's a lot that cuts off caring. There's a lot of forces that create unreal others out there. And it's important to scan in our own lives and think of people we meet, things we read, things we see, and how often the figures out there are like two-dimensional characters in a playbook, but they're not feeling real to us. We don't feel a sense of the vulnerability and the sentience and the realness and the sign of blocked caring. I've seen myself and I see in so many of us is that, as I described, we might hear of something terrible happening. We might hear of a particular climate disaster

because so many happen so much of the time, you know, flooding or drought and we'll compute and go, oh, that's awful. But it's mental. It's like the description of compassion, the heart quivering, being touched by others' pain, it's not visceral. We can see it when we hear news about a war. If we have one side, we can stir the enemy, and then we hear that they've sustained some real injury. We're cut off from the sorrow at the very real human suffering. I'm spending time on this because it's only when we become awake to the othering

that we can deepen our attention and remove the barriers. and that's where we're going now. Because you may be listening and thinking to yourself, well, I don't feel real caring that often. Maybe it is more mental and abstract. I'm like the guy in the bar mostly thinking about myself. It's so common. So please remember as we continue to reflect that the tendencies to override caring are deep in our society and they're universal, they're conditioned by evolution and it's part of our human predicament. And, and here's where the hope and the good news is, we have the capacity to cultivate caring. If each of us are intentional, we can move the dial on caring and contribute to collective waking up.

You know, I often think of the Dalai Lama. He said this, and this was in an informal gathering, I was part of, he said, I don't know why people like me so much. And then he went on to say, it must be because I value compassion. And he said, I can't claim to always practice it, but I value it. I love that. You know, so reassuring, you know, that we can't mandate an open heart. We can't always be aligned. But even when we're not aligned, even when we don't feel caring, we still care about caring.

Do you know what I mean? Isn't that so? I mean, it matters to us and why? We feel more at home in the truth of who we are when we're caring. We just feel more at home. It's intrinsic. It's our basic goodness. I mean, it's just like the sun is still there when there are clouds.

Even when our caring is cut off, that light and warmth of caring is still in the background. We care about caring. That's the sign of it. I know recent time I was talking with someone who's a close person having a hard time and I could tell that I was saying all the right things and I just was not embodied. It wasn't there. I mean, I wasn't angry or aversive, just somehow hardened.

And, you know, I got off the call. It was Zoom. And I started reflecting and I tried to feel that person's, pain, but it was still really mental. I was blocked. But then when I started reflecting, well, I care about caring, I want to care, and then I deepen that reflection. I said, you know, if I died and never opened my heart to this person, or if I imagine being with this person when they're at the end of their life, oh my gosh, you know, I would so miss really having lived out that loving. And just that reflection on caring about caring, soft.

be back into caring. You know what I mean? You know, in those next days I was much more available to be touched. I felt more embodied. So I'm sharing this because the first step in moving the dial is to feel our aspiration. This matters to me. I want to have a compassionate heart. I want to have a heart that feels that bird has my wings, that's tender, to have that feeling. Okay, so this our first meditation together, okay? Let's take a pause here and invite you if you want to shift a little bit, your position. This is very, very short. Each of these reflections is short, and you can practice them at more length on your own. So find the position you want to be in, be comfortable. In fact, take a moment and just ask yourself, is there any part of my body,

heart, mind that wants to just let go a little bit right now. Feel your breath, feel yourself right here. I invite you to scan people you know and bring to mind someone who matters to you and who might be having a hard time where you know that you're aware of it but you're just not feeling particularly attuned or open or touched. And as you bring this person to mind, bring them a little closer in. Without any judgment, just notice how the quality of your caring, you know, if it's mental, if it feels disembodied, or even if there's a bit of othering, some sense of some judgment in there towards them, maybe how they're handling their situations in their life, or just some way that you feel a little judgmental or reversive, just notice

what might be blocking. Or maybe you've been preoccupy. occupied, just haven't been that touchable, able to be touched. Whatever it is, noticing, then take a moment to widen the field and sense at the end of your life looking back how you want to be relating to this person, how you wish you would in your moments be in relationship with them. If you're at the end of your life looking back, what will matter? or perhaps if you're with them at the end of their life, just to let yourself get in touch with what matters to you, that sense of caring about caring.

And all for now is just to know that's your intention. It's a sincere intention. You might even bring them to mine and whisper their name and just say it's my intention to open my heart, to care. See what happens when you do that, mentally whispering their name, it's my intention to open my heart and care. What do you notice?

Okay, at your own pace, your eyes are closed, open them, come back. So our motivation in training and compassion is this caring about caring. This is the motivation on the bodhisattva path. So now we get closer in and look at, So how do we cultivate a full embodied caring if this is what matters to us? How do we make that shift from focusing on what I want, what I need, what I'm afraid of,

to that sense of we? And I often quote Ruby Sales, who's a civil rights leader and elder, and she said her activism changed entirely when she began to ask the question, where does it hurt? So this is going to be a centerpiece for us for the remainder here. And she says that sometimes it was an inner contemplation and sometimes it was a direct inquiry with others. And she used that lens. She's looking at the opiate crisis in the rust belt, the growing visibility of white supremacy.

And it helped her in particular see the deaths of despair, the profound levels of insecurity and loss and meaninglessness felt by those who felt. that they lost their voice, their centrality, their value in our wider society. So instead of creating a bad other, an enemy, her activism came more deeply from compassion, from care. Where does it hurt? It's an amazing, powerful inquiry, and it's really the heart of bodhisattva training, of compassion training. It's to be able to see vulnerability. It's that question, what's it like being you? because if we're touched by the suffering, we'll care.

And it doesn't matter if someone close in or some we don't know well. And as Ruby realized, importantly, the suffering of those most different from ourselves, the more we can sense the vulnerability, whether it's race, class, body size, ethnicity, religion, whatever it is. politics, as one great bodhisattva master said, never leave anyone out of your heart. So it's wise to begin training and compassion by practicing with whoever's easiest, those that are easiest to care for. And I want to name that for all of us, for our compassion to be full and mature, the grounds are we have to feel a tenderness towards

our inner life. We have to feel the earth crying within our own body and heart. I've done many, many talks on self-kindness. And so this talk I'm going to be more focusing on including others in our heart. But if at any time as we're practicing you get stuck and you feel reactive, numb, hurting in some way, the training is to come right back to what you feel inside you and befriend it, bring compassion there. Okay, let's look at including others and we start with someone who's easy. And I want to also say that even with those who are most close in in our lives, this practice can be really difficult.

Because often when someone's having a hard time, it can present in ways that can be really off-putting. So I know for myself, when I am feeling fatigued, when I'm feeling sick, Jonathan will first notice, oh, she's being impatient, she's being judgmental, she's being irritable. because that's the front that I put on when I'm getting vulnerable. For one friend, one friend described her teen was always snapping at her and angry. It was a whole long season of this. And then she discovered through another one of her offspring that her daughter had been really feeling hurt and excluded and ostracized by her peer group. But her expression was anger.

The one man described his partner as defensive and withdrawn, but after some more open talks he'd be him clear that he just wasn't feeling appreciated at his work or secure in his job. He was fearful. So the question is this, if we're waking up our compassion to each other, are we focusing on the mask or on the underlying vulnerability? And the illustration I share whenever I have a chance, because it helps me all the time, is if you imagine you're walking in the woods and you're going to pet a dog you see sitting under a tree and a dog lunges and bangs bared, you know, like seems really vicious and angry,

you get yourself like bad dog, you know, angry yourself. But then you notice the dog has a leg in a trap. And that changes everything because you see past the aggression to the vulnerability. So this is the question, where does it hurt? Under the ego presentation, is the person feeling vulnerable? Are they experiencing long COVID? The horror of that, or the loss of a beloved pet, or feeling out of control with sugar,

are deep down feeling lonely and isolated, where does it hurt? So this next reflection we're doing, we're going to explore waking up our compassion for someone who's easy to care about, but we might not be feeling fully embodied in our compassion. So again, we're going to reflect and I invite you to just take a moment to move your body a little bit so that you're here in your body. You might shake your hands. You might move if you're in a chair, just kind of circle around your shoulders a little bit. Because, you know, you can't wake up compassion if you're not awake in your body. It's felt in the body. Okay, as you're ready, come into stillness. Take a few full breaths.

Gather yourself with your breath so you know you're here. Do a brief scan through the body. Just check if your shoulders are tight, soften. Soften the hands, the belly. Let the breath be received deep in the belly and a softening belly. So you're really breathing and hear. and as we did before scanning and sensing someone you know is having difficulty who you care about. And it couldn't be the same person as last time or it could be somebody different. And when you bring them to mind, right from the start sends your intention, your care about caring. You may have your own words for it.

May I open my heart. May I awaken compassion. May I hold my friend, my son. my sister, whoever it is, with great kindness, whatever the words are. Feel your intention. And you might bear witness and notice what that person presents. What's being presented, is there a mask that's in any way off-putting that keeps you more reacting to the mask than feeling into who they really are and what's going on? Because if you see the mask, then you can look deeper and ask that question, where does it hurt?

What's it like being you? And you might visualize them looking vulnerable. Just imagine when they are vulnerable, when they're hurting in some way. And you might even try to let a part of you step inside and imagine life from their perspective, experiencing it with their body, what's going on, living with their state of health, with their beliefs of their limiting, social situation, the challenges. What's it like being you?

Sense the most difficult challenge where that person might be afraid or lonely, hurting. So you're looking through their eyes and with their heart. And you might put your hand on your heart right now. And just sense it's like as if you're putting your hand on your heart in that very tender, is touching how they're living inside you. You're just touching tenderly a sense of their being. And as you breathe in, you might just sense you're really letting in the realness of their vulnerability.

And as you breathe out, a sense that you're offering what you can to them. And you might sense, what do they most need? What did they need that I might offer? Is it understanding, companionship? acceptance, love, being seen, heard. Do they need to be reminded of their goodness? And continue breathing and feeling your breathing with them, feeling the vulnerability with the in-breath,

maybe sending out your prayer, your care with the out-breath. As you do, sense this being belongs is part of your heart. And you might even again mentally whisper their name and in some way let them know, I'm with you. I care. Please feel me with you. Real simple. And as we complete this, just sense what you want to remember, how you might engage with this person moving forward and express your care.

So we begin this training and compassion, opening our hearts, Bodhisattva training, practicing with aspiration, practicing with those who are easier to bring our care to, I'd like to look now at how we widen the circles to those who are different and perhaps who we experience as less than. And in a bit, I'm going to be,

we're going to be doing this as a meditation, and I'll invite you to reflect on someone from a group of beings that are different. So you might consider how you want to widen the circles. But again, the alchemy of compassion of that bird has my wings is that we need to contact the vulnerability to awaken. In other words, we need proximity. And I love that word proximity.

I got it from Brian Stevenson, who's activist, writer, and somebody who's, I think, is just a real model of a bodhisattva. And proximity means that if we can, we get close in and get to know another. But if we can't do it close in physically, we bring our attention close in. Proximity is what lets us be touched by another suffering. And naturally, we can't always talk with those of difference, but we can deepen attention. So I've watched in my own life what happens when I get proximate. And I just want to share a couple of examples.

Last month, there was that horrible spell of toxic chemicals when that train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. And my response was mental. It was, this is awful. I felt anger at the train company for not caring to abide by safety regulations for reducing staff. I felt a kind of mental sympathy for those affected, for the toxifying of this living earth. But then I started reading and listening more deeply. And I listened to an interview of few people living there. And one described how much they loved going into the woods and finding mushrooms and that they

wouldn't be able to do that anymore. And another was describing how in past springs and summer the children were out. and then they were swimming and how they couldn't do that. And then I was reading about the children's rashes and the sicknesses and how children have smaller lungs so they could be much more damage to their lungs and how they don't know and what it was like for the parents to have that uncertainty. As a mother, as a grandmother, that fear for their children just, it was just contagious that these are our children.

It was that bird has my wings feeling. But I had to get closer in. So I'm sharing this because I see in myself, I only feel care when I get touched and I have to pay more attention. Of course, I can't pay attention everywhere, but I have to keep on offering my attention to different places to keep my heart open. And this explains why our global response to the suffering of climate change has been so slow. I mean, the suffering seemed abstract, especially for those with privilege and in wealthier nations. I mean, it's changing.

And now most believe that the catastrophic challenges, that human-generated climate change is coming and that we need to act. but in wealthy white dominating countries what's not recognized is how truly it's already here and it's horrific Somalia they're facing their sixth failed rainy season and you might even notice when I say Somalia because the majority listening are probably from the global north so it might seem distant and far away, a distant world. Well, by the middle of this year, over 8 million people, almost a half the population will be in the kind of crisis of food security, facing famine, many children's starvation without needed drinking water. And I want to admit that I've been aware of this over the years and read about it. And it was mental caring.

until I saw one picture. And I don't want to tell you about that picture because it stopped my world. It was a picture of a young Somalian boy with a paper cup squatting. And he was trying to get water from a small muddy hole in this drought. And he was probably my granddaughter's age. Of course, you might have been much older. I just want to pause here, friends, because if we can imagine, if we can really imagine, the people we love, our children, our grandchildren, those close to us malnourished, susceptible

to diseases that affect the growth, brain development, and just to imagine how devastating for their parents to watch that, of course they themselves starving, if we can slow down and attend and know these are our children, our friends, our fellow beings, our fellow beings, that our earth is crying, then there's that proximity. And you might wonder, well, why feel so much pain? Is it good to feel that much pain? And all that comes out of that. And I think so often of the words of Joanna Macy, who says, don't ever apologize for the sorrow, the grief, the rage you feel. It's a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It's a measure of your humanity. It's a measure of your open heart as your heart breaks open, there will be room for the world to heal.

It's healthy to get proximate to feel the earth crying. Gary Snyder says that we can't save our world out of guilt, but we save our world because we love it. Okay, so I've been talking about the bodhisattva path and widening the circle. So more and more of the life forms on this planet are part of our care and the mark of genuine compassion, full compassion, for it to be truly transformation, it has to be all-inclusive. And what that means for many of us is really true reverence for life and not just focusing on the well-being of humans. And yet we humans often remove ourselves from the web of life and we put ourselves above non-human animals. And that's exactly the same mentality that generates human-on-human forms of othering and

domination and violation. It's part of living in a caste system that devalues part of life. I remember one of my first wake-ups to the suffering of animals where it got proximate. that I want to share with you. I was teaching a retreat. And it was during the morning meditation. I started hearing the mother cows. They were lowing on a nearby farm. And I found out the calves had just been removed. And you might know this, that mothers and baby calves are separated soon after birth. The mothers get hooked up to the milk machines and so on. And then they're impregnated. She's impregnated yearly for milk. And the natural lifespan of a cow is 20 years, but they're

killed it about five years because they're no longer producing enough milk to be profitable. Okay, so back to the retreat. So here I was. I was a young mother. My son was just a few years old, maybe five years old, six years old. And there we were meditating, listening to these forlorn cries of mother cows from their babies being taken. And it just became real in my body and in my meditation. I wasn't alone. Many others were moved by this, including my own. mother who was at the retreat. So we all started including the cows and the calves in our daily loving kindness meditation. So that was an early wake up. And I was already a vegetarian, but I was really motivated to learn more about get proximate with the realities, the cruelties of factory farming.

Because in the United States, 10 billion animals are slaughtered a year, 10 billion living beings, and I hadn't realized that no matter what it appears in the labels that 99% of all dairy and eggs and meat are sourced in factory farms. So anyway, for me, plant-based eating was a way to feel aligned to stay approximate with the realness of suffering. And what it's given me is more of a real sense of belonging to the world. And I'm seeing that spirit of that bird of inclusive caring, growing in a number of meditation groups, other faith and spiritual and activist communities that are now actually serving only plant-based foods at retreats and at gatherings and events. I'll share a personal practice that keeps on deepening my realization of this

belonging because it's so freeing. Some years ago I was walking by the Potomac River early morning and I was watching the geese because I watched them a lot, especially in the spring, their babes and so on. And I heard these rifle shots upriver and I realized they were hunters that were shooting geese. So I spent a lot of time doing this watching as I mentioned, the geese, the mallards, the Morgansers, you know, all the birds by the river. So there's a kind of intimacy. I'm already proximate. So I just started crying.

It was like they were violating my friends. That was the feeling. And I said it out loud. I said, we're friends. And I knew when I said it that it was the deepest level of what friends means, that they're a part of me. And so there was this compassion. It wasn't from a superior place.

They're just a part of my heart. So then I started thinking of other vulnerable creatures, you know, the farm animals I mentioned, the pigs and the chickens and the cows and I'd bring to mind one and I'd say we're friends. And it was truth. And then I'd reflect on different groups of people who are extremely vulnerable. We're friends. It became so clear to me that if all life forms are our friends, we can never be alone. We can never be alone.

It's the sweetest feeling in the world. So that became an ongoing practice. I'll hear a story about those suffering or see a picture on some level. We are friends and it might be the words or the energy of it, that it's not your suffering, it's our shared suffering. So this is interbeing, realizing that our own life is indivisible from other lives. One of my teachers, Sri Norsar Gadata, puts it this way. He says, when you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is,

and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. You will know that every living being in the entire universe are included in your affection. So, my friends, we're exploring the meaning of compassion on the Bodhisattva path, embodied and inclusive so that we can be touched and respond. Gary Lawless puts it this way. He says, when the animals come to us asking for our help, will we know what they are saying? When the plants speak to us in their delicate, beautiful language, will we be able to answer them? when the planet herself sings to us in our dreams will we be able to wake ourselves and act

we'll do our final reflection but I want to say that however you feel that yearning to deepen to wake up your heart to respond to the world it really makes a difference to not do it alone and I'm speaking personally now from my own experience that talking to others, joining with others, activism reduces anxiety. It really does and it increases belonging. It's important not to feel alone in it and to know how many others care. I mean, you wouldn't be here if you didn't care, if you didn't care about caring. So it helps energize and inspire us to be together in it. Okay, let's do our final reflection on widening the circles.

On that bird has my wings. And as we did before, I want to first ask you just to move a tiny bit in some way that may just remind you that your body's right here and you can move down. It's usually a downward thing from your head into your body. So you might actually feel your breath more consciously, letting go through the body if there's tightness, anywhere you find it. Now scanning your life,

bring to mind a group of beings that are very different from you, a group that you know is suffering, that you care about and want to listen more, deeply, want to open your heart more fully, want to go from perhaps that mental or abstract caring to an embodied compassion. And it could be a group of humans that are vulnerable or non-human animals. And what you might do is bring to mind one member of that group. Just visualize,

imagine, bring that being close in, sense the eyes. of that being. So you're really imagining and sensing into the realness and you're bringing that lens of where does it hurt. What's it like being you? And you might imagine stepping inside this being, experiencing from this being's awareness and just sensing the sentience that this being wants to live fully. And from a wholeness of your own awareness, just sense we are friends, we are friends. You're a part of my heart to this being. You might feel yourself breathing,

letting in the suffering, the vulnerability of this being. Just feeling from a very open, embodied presence, that you can breathe in and let in the suffering. and you can breathe out and sense your care, you're offering care, letting this all be held in a space of compassion. You might sense as you breathe with the suffering of this being that it extends to all who are suffering this way,

that you're breathing for all the being suffering in this way. And from that awake and tender heart you might just sense, how can I help? Whatever the extension of your being is in prayer, talking to friends, writing something, donating time, money. How can I help? Learning more. Deepening your engagement.

From the poet Rebecca Baguette, I want to say like Neruda that I am waiting for a great and common tenderness, that I still believe we are capable of attention that anyone who notices the world must, want to save it. Anyone who notices the world must want to save it. These last few moments of this reflection sense, what's important to this, about this to you?

What you want to remember. Hmm. Okay. Opening your eyes coming back. Thank you. So we are going to move into the last part of our time together. and we have some questions and Loretta as I mentioned is going to be moderating so we'll get to hear from some of you and she will explain the way that to ask questions you can do it.

So Loretta, if you'll come on and step in at this point. It's great to see everybody and looking forward to hearing your questions. If you'd like to submit a question, please do so via the check. box to everyone rather than privately to the moderators. Please submit your questions only once. Also, please keep the same Zoom name throughout a call. If your question is selected, we will read your name and ask you to unmute your mic to talk with Tara. If your camera is off at the time, please turn it on. Once your dialogue has finished, a moderator will renew your mic. And the first question is from Ellen. And Tara, it's a question about how to cultivate

compassion for those who seem to promote suffering. Hi, Ellen. Hi, Tara. It's Eileen. Oh, good. Yeah. So, we've been doing this work of trying to heal the earth for many years. And I feel I have great compassion towards animals. But my problem is with the people who are supporting pain to our earth, the people with power, I get very angry. And I'm very much challenged how to deal with the people in power who promote hate and who are poisoning our earth and our people. What do I do with my compassion and those people? Yeah. Okay. So, Eileen, first of all, thank you for that question because it's a really important question. And if I did a hand raise right now, I would imagine most people would, many, many of us would be raising our hand. Like, this is a hard one. It's a hard one. So are you open to just exploring a little if I asked you to go inside and just maybe helps you to close your eyes? and I may ask you some things, and you can even respond without opening your eyes, because I want you to stay in touch with yourself. And this is for anyone that's here that might have a whole lot of

caring about the vulnerable and feel like it's very hard to include in your heart those that because of their power and position are causing harm, or we think are causing harm. So this is for most of us. Okay. Eileen, what I'd like to invite you to do is to bring to mind a situation and people who you sense are causing harm and the ones that trigger that kind of anger that you described. And tell me when you have that in mind. Do you mean a specific person? Are some sort of an image or something that helps you target. Okay.

It's easy. There's a lot of them. Yeah. Anything that triggers helps you to sense that it's getting triggered. And sense the worst part about this. So you're actually in a very real way getting in touch with what's upsetting to you. And this is again for all of us. You wouldn't feel angry unless you felt something was really upsetting and off and wrong. Yeah. So you're in touch with what's so distressed. and if you sense behind your anger what's the strongest feeling under your anger pain and fear pain and fear yeah and you might even name the fear if the fear was speaking i'm afraid i'm afraid of all the life that's going to be lost on our planet yeah yeah all that the suffering of all the life that's

going to be lost. So if you let yourself actually be real with what's going on right now, that that's a very living fear in your heart and your body. And let it be as much as it is and sense if there's something else that comes with that fear when you let it really be there. Hopelessness. Yeah. Yeah, there's a hopelessness. Yeah. So just to acknowledge, this is truth-telling. So there's fear and there's layers of there's a hopelessness there. And when you sense the fear of all that pain and the hopelessness to do something perhaps, what else is there? Anger? Anger? Yeah. But we've already gotten underneath. That's the fear and hopelessness. And what else? Great love for people and nature. Yeah.

So let that be as big as it is that you wouldn't be feeling all this unless you loved life. You have a really intrinsic and deep love for life. You wouldn't be feeling all those other feelings if you didn't love life. And just for a moment just honor that, that this is coming from a love for life. yourself the gift of letting yourself touch that truth. It's all coming from a love for life. And take some moments to just honor that. This is our shared goodness, this love for life. This is what makes you care. And tell me what's going on right now as you...

This doesn't work. I mean, it doesn't help. It doesn't change. It doesn't help. That's not trying to help anything. I just want you to stay in touch with the different layers here. So you circled back from the love to feeling angry or hopeless. Is that the cycle that goes on for you? Yes. Yeah. So just to watch that, be the witness right now. You're watching a cycle of what goes on inside you. And tell me what else you notice. I'm not coming up with anything, Tara, anything else. So naming just what's here right now then. I feel anxious right now.

Is that because of a wider sense of, oh my gosh, I'm taking time and this isn't going anywhere kind of feeling? Part of it, yeah. Yeah. That's part. Sweetie, take your time. Take your time. This is all of us. And if I ask somebody else what's going on, there would be layers in the same way. And I'm not trying to get you to feel compassion. I'm just trying to get you to witness what's going on inside you. So take your time. I do feel like I have to be more kind to myself,

knowing that I'm being true to myself and my strong desire to make the world a better place. So if you start with that right in this moment, what does that mean? What's it like to be more kind to yourself in this moment? Compassion towards myself. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to keep going slow because

the purpose of us working together is not to get to a certain place. What feels important right now for you to remember, for you to move forward with? It sounds kind of crazy, but to take it easy. Okay, come on. Yeah? Well, that's just what's coming out. So, Eileen? Yeah.

Thank you for your realness. Thank you. It doesn't seem crazy to me. If we step back a moment, what I'm picking up is that you care really, really deeply. This really matters to you. And it's almost like there's a part of you that says, no, I'm not going to go so quickly into loving. There's something really wrong here and I care. There's something in you that's really dedicated to making it different.

And I really honor that. The purpose here is not to get all big open. and tender-hearted, it's more to get more real. And for you to get real means to see the cycle that goes on inside you of anger, fear, powerless, and to just ease up a little. So you give that a little more space, a little more gentleness, because you're going to keep on giving your life to helping. You might as well do it from a more spacious place. That's all. Does that resonate for you? Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I really bow to your dedication. Yeah. Blessings dear. Yeah. Our next question is from Mimi, who asks about how we hold compassion

to those who have heard us. Hi, Mimi. Hi. Hi. Hey. Yeah. Yeah. So, say a little more. I guess maybe coming from experiences, traumatic experiences that I've had, people who have caused some significant damage or violated me in ways, trying to hold compassion maybe for traumas that they experienced. And so then the pattern is repeated. But what comes up for just this kind of, I can't even hold them barely in my head because there's just such an inversion. So I think there's a real intelligence inside you saying, not the right time, don't try to bring compassion to them. You know, compassion, it's not like we're supposed to be trying to be compassionate to everybody. There's a compassionate,

sequence to it. And for you, trying to open your heart to people who have been abusive or cause trauma can just cause more trauma. You know, there's an intelligence to you saying that's not the place to go. The first place for you and the most important is to continue the work of bringing a huge amount of kindness and compassion to the places that have been hurt. Does that, does that resonate? Yeah, it does, absolutely. It feels like that's what I'm supposed to do. Yeah, that feels very true to what I'm supposed to do. I think one of the things that comes up that's hard is being in relationship with at least one of the people who have hurt me, an aging parent and trying to hold compassion for myself and for them at the same time, you know, because I've made the decision. the very conscious decision to keep that relationship and care for them, that it's just, it's a tough space. It's a really, really hard space. I honor that, I mean, it's courageous to make that decision. You just need to keep your priorities because it's kind of that, you know, when you're

flying, you first put the gas, you know, the mask on you. Try an example. But the reality is you're in survival mode here. It's a really big deal. When we get traumatized, it feels like we can die and that we're powerless and it's horrible. So you're going to need to make sure your nervous system is taken care of. And that means the priority is setting the boundaries that you can deal with and doing everything you can to resource yourself and nourish yourself and strengthen yourself and have all the allies you can and do it physically, mentally, spiritually, and then offer what you can out of that space. But no judgment to how much you can offer.

It's not just your task. It's wise and compassionate to take care of yourself first. Okay? Okay. Yeah, thank you for bringing that in because, again, it's one of those, it's in a lot of us here, you know. The point is not to just wide open. the heart to everybody. It's got its own process. Yeah. Okay, dear, blessings.

Our next question is from Rosemary, who asks about maintaining our own values and still finding compassion with those we don't agree with. I recently moved to Montana from, you know, I'm a lifelong San Francisco Bay Area, and I probably fit every one of those boxed categories you could imagine from politics to social activism and career and all the other things. And, you know, I knew coming to Montana would expose me to a lot of different, of people that, that in my safe environment of California, I didn't have to ever come up and rub closely against them. And that's just not the case anymore. You know, I'm a, I'm a minority. I look like everyone else. It's an extremely homogenous environment, sadly. But my viewpoint,

is very different. And sometimes it's scary, but I'm really committed to the process of listening. When our former president was elected and everyone, you know, went crazy politically on both sides everywhere. I thought, oh, no, like this is the time to listen. Something has gone wrong. When this many people vote this way, something has gone wrong. So I'm committed to the listening, But it's really hard to hold empathy for people whose value system is so directly in conflict with my own. And I think specifically about issues around guns and around abortion rights. And I'm just, I'm just skin on skin. It's everywhere here.

And so I wonder what your own experience is with that and how you might guide the process. Yeah. Well, first, I just want to. honor that you are on the front lines of proximity. You're actually doing the very thing that's hard to do. And usually we titrate it a little bit and kind of get nourished by a feeling of holding hands and working with people and so on. And then as much as we can, you know, our nervous system can take it, really put ourselves in situations where we can listen more deeply. And it's listening deeply and also sincerely trying to understand what deeply matters to you. Like, that's what I try to find

out. I try to find, because it's not going to work to go through the typical arguments about any types of, I mean, you can't argue and it doesn't serve anything. But if you sense behind the position, what is the deepest thing that's really mattering to you? What do you value? What do you care about. Common humanity. You know, I mean, when I think, you know, I have a 23-year-old son. And when I think about him, I think, you know, I just wanted him to play Little League. And so does this woman next to me, who's marching for, you know, for abortion banning or for all, you know, praying for those of us who who don't follow her belief system. And I think really, we all just want our kids to have access to Little League, you know, or to play an instrument in school.

or like I think our common humanity is so close to the surface. It's not far away. So when you listen, you can find that. It's easy. You can talk to something. You can find it. So maybe that's enough is to keep building your relationship on the common humanity, not pay attention so much to the fact that somebody's marching pro-life

or whatever it is they believe in. In other words, deepen your heart connections as well as you can. because the more of us that have real relationships with people that are different, the more we are setting the grounds for a future where we can at least collaborate enough. We don't have to agree, but we don't need to have contempt towards each other. And you're picking it up, you're lifting it up the consciousness so that we're not going to be living in contempt. We need a whole lot of us doing that. and it's really hard because it's getting more and more divided and bitter and harsh. Yeah, it is getting all those things.

And we don't have a common agreement about what truth equals right now. And so without that common truth thread, like, you know, A is A is A is A, right? And that A looks like A to me and you, it's very difficult to get there. It is. And, you know, because we're closing, this is going to be kind of the last, you're the last person, I just want to name that because it's so tough right now, like Eileen, we care a whole lot, and it's very, very easy to feel hopeless. And I don't have like a read on, oh, we should feel hope or we should not, you know,

it's not more of that as much as we need to have a way to keep knowing what's going on inside us, holding it with kindness and connecting with those that can help nourish us. We need, we need that because if there's any hope, it's because you sense there's a lot of us that care. Yeah. I mean, you can, you can listen to other people here. That's what gives me hope that we care. There's a lot of caring out there. Yes. And then beyond that, who knows what's going to play out. You know, they care too. That's totally. Totally, totally. Yeah, and there's also a caring that gets torqued by fear. And that's a different kind of caring. There's a common humanity, but some humanity is more torqued by fear than other humanity. So can we be part of moving towards more connection and less fear? Anyway, those are big, big phrases and it takes a lot of dedication. So thank you, dear. Thank you. Thanks for everything. I saw a lot of the questions. I saw questions on chat and oh my gosh, so many good ones we could do, you know, a year of this. So yeah, thank you. Okay, some closing words. And then I'm going to ask Loretta, I'm going to thank you. I'm going to ask you at the very end to come on again, if you will. But for now, I would like to ask everybody that's on Zoom to go on gallery view and just a sense that there's a lot of

beings here that are dedicated and caring. You know, we started with that bird has my wings and there is a training that helps us to go beyond the fears and more towards true belonging. So, that's the path. That's the best we can do is to keep on feeling our belonging and out of care to act, to respond. And so what I'd like to do right now, because I find it helps me so much and I'm going to be joining you, is to look at each other. And the nice thing about looking at each other is that, and by the way, if you're listening to this and you're not on Zoom, bring to mind beings you love and just imagine looking into their eyes. The nice thing here on Zoom is that you don't have to be self-conscious because no one knows that you're looking at them,

but you are. If you're on a big screen to open it wide enough and, you know, just kind of scan and let yourself pause with the first of several people we're going to pause with. And just look at them and as you look, just sense the truth that just like you, this being cares, this being cares about life, and they care about caring. Just like you, this person also probably has fears and doubts and places where they get despairing. And it's going to jump around a little, but you'll find your person again. But just since you holding hands with that person and that we care and we can move forward together, that caring is what'll give us energy. and then take one more person

and I see a look into your eyes I see you care too and that we're holding hands we are friends and then another here we are caring together and we are friends and since the possibility that opens up

we are friends caring together and if you want just to take a moment to close your eyes and feel kind of energetically all those who are with us who we can't see on screen, the many who care from a deep, deep, awake place and those that care from the more fear-based places but sensing these human hearts and our prayer for all beings, may we hear the cries of the earth and respond in a healing way. May all beings everywhere be

free from suffering. May there be a growing justice and peace, compassion and love in our world. May all beings be free.