Tara Brach - Disarming Our Hearts: Letting Go of Blame (retreat talk)

Episode Date: June 8, 2018

Disarming Our Hearts: Letting Go of Blame (retreat talk) - Anger, judgment and blame create separation—from our inner life and our world. Only by releasing chronic blame can we free our hearts to truly give and receive love. This talk looks at the difference between healthy anger and the trance of blame, and through a set of reflections, teachings and stories, guides us in healing and freeing our hearts. (from the Spring 2018 IMCW 7-Day Silent Retreat - previously unpublished) Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and blessings. I love starting with namaste. That sense that we're just honoring and remembering that sacredness that lives in all of us. And I often imagine, you know, because namaste is. done in some countries in the East, and it can be very mechanical. It's not like everybody in the east is going into some deep space of sacred awareness and presence, but it's there. And I sometimes

imagine what it would be like in contemporary society. If we really did have an ongoing gesture with heart in the ways that we encountered each other, whether it's this, so many people are beginning to, you know, are this. It creates such a sense. a beautiful feeling. And as many of you know, in much of contemporary society, actually, it's the handshake that's saying, look, no gun here, you're safe with me. And as we really reflect, that too is really important. That gesture, if we really could live to it, if we could really let others know you're safe with me. That is the precursor to Namaste. If you think of it in an evolutionary way, if you can let people feel safe, then they can

relax and open to really their true spirit and see in each other that spirit. So in Buddhism, forgiveness, our letting go of animosity, blame, is. described as the forerunner of Meta, that we have to shed that layering around our hearts of anger and blame to really love freely. And it's intrinsic on the Bodhisattva path, the path of an awakening being, to have that intention to free the heart in this way. And we've here, there have been a number of the guided practices that you've noticed to have kind of circled around that. And I know from the meetings, a lot of us are looking very honestly and deeply at how we blame inwardly and how we blame others. So tonight's

talk is on disarming the heart. And I want to look at it through the lens of how we disarm the heart with each other and also on a societal level. There's a reading that struck me from Ram Dass I thought I'd kind of open with. He says, when you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent and some of them are straight and some of them are evergreens and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it's the way it is. You sort of understand it didn't get enough light or whatever, so it turned that way. You don't get all emotional about it. You don't blame them. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near

humans, you lose all of that. And you're constantly saying you're to this or I'm to this, and that judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees, which means I appreciate them just as they are. So that's our meditation for tonight, tree meditation. I'm going to move around, sing each other that way. And we know that, you know, all we have to do is read a newspaper and we see the blame flying around this world. It's pretty intense. We live in an angry world. And if I write now just named a list of leaders that everybody knows, you'd immediately, like in a flash, be sorting friend foe, friend, foe, don't like, like, had good, you know, maybe not too many goods, but maybe there would be.

So we know that, and we know if we name even some countries, there are countries we think of as better, and some we blame in some ways. And then certainly when you get to the layers of some of these identities we've been naming through the we, of whether it's race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender orientation. There's all sorts of filters that make inferior, superior, blame, judgment. And then when we take it in even closer to our one-on-ones where we're, we just like think of the people in our life. You just run through a few of the people in your life and honestly sense how much blame comes up here, how much judgment?

For many of us it can be pretty wall to wall. We have a lot of problem when people disagree with us. Have you noticed that? Isn't it amazing? Somebody doesn't agree with us, and it's something in us gets so offended and threatened, and we're so identified with being right. You know, the Buddha, this is a rough translation,

said that people who hold onto strong opinions just go around bothering each other. And isn't it the case? And it happens, you know, we have different opinions amongst ourselves. It happens inside different religious groups and so on. One of my favorite stories from way back is of a Taoist master who would sit naked in his cabinet and he'd meditate that way. So this group of Confucianists decides they're going to hike up the mountain and to teach him the rules of proper conduct.

And they get there, and there's a sage, you know, doing his thing. And they are shocked, appalled. He's sitting there naked. And so, you know, they say, what are you doing, sitting in your hut without any pants on? Here's his response. This whole universe is my hut. This little hut is my pants.

What are you fellows doing inside my pants? So people that disagree with us, they go around, we bother each other. And then there's this whole category of how when anybody doesn't meet our expectations, I mean, how many times do we have an expectation of somebody and they're not quite helpful in the way we wanted them to be or supportive or considerate or listening or don't have enough time for us?

And of course this expands out to anyone who does not cooperate with what we want. blame. There was one story I heard of a new business that was opening and the owners, one of the owners' best friends decides he wants to send flowers for the occasion. And so they arrive at the party opening the business and the flowers have a card and the card says, rest in peace. And so the guy's really angry, he calls the floors and says, you sent us the wrong card. And the floor said, look, I'm really sorry for the mistake. But think of it. it this way. Imagine that somewhere there's a funeral going on and just think of how they feel

having flowers saying, congratulations on your new location. So how do we shift our view and we lock into something's wrong? But the place that we might want to look closer at, and this is where blame is most insidious often is our closest circles. And it's in our closest circles. It might be the teen who's not, you know, doing their part or the partner who's in some way working too much or who's always late, the sibling who's rigid or controlling or whatever it is, but the people that were with a lot. And just to notice how we get habituated and resent, we barely know that we're carrying that armoring because it's so familiar and how it really blocks love. So I was very struck some years ago.

One of the women in our community was volunteering at hospice, and she described one of the patients she had befriended. It was a woman who was increasingly mute because of this very, very large tumor in her throat. And she encountered the woman one morning really distraught. She had had this nightmare, and she had, in her nightmare, the people at the hospice center told her that she had three days to live. So she woke up from that and she said, I can't die now, I'm not ready. I have to, I have something important to say to my husband first.

And so much of this woman's astonishment, when she got there three days later to visit this woman again, she was getting ready to leave. Her tumor had shrunk. And so she was packed to go home. Then the next time she visited, the woman had returned, and she was very much at peace, and she told her what had happened at home. She said, first the background was she said, all my life, what I saw, and my husband was a guy who was letting me down, who was not on my side, who never cared about me enough, didn't

make me special. I forgot his basic decency and care that was really there. And it wasn't until that dream that I realized I needed to tell him I loved him and that I regretted nothing more in my whole life than how my judgments drove us apart. So I told him and he listened and then he shared some of his regrets. And when we hug we both had tears streaming down our cheeks. It was the first closeness we had had in years. Now I'm ready to go.

And the message from that for me was, you know, we really don't have to wait. that there really is a way that we're in a trance when we're judging, and we forget how much separation it creates. We really, when we're wanting someone to be different, we're not there with them in a real tender connection. Let's maybe pause here, a brief reflection, if you will. So through this talk, I'll be asking you to explore places you feel armored and really what the letting go might be like, the releasing of blame.

In this reflection, you might imagine you're at the end of your life looking back, and you might consider one or two close relationships that you're going to kind of look back at from the vantage at the end of my life. And in those one or two relationships really, I'm honest and try not to add judgment, notice the degree of judgment in them. How much judgment or resentment or blame was in those relationships? How did it limit what you know is your potential for full loving? And if you were with one of these people right now, how might that end-of-life perspective guide you? It's as Stephen Levine says, if you had three days to live, who would you call, what would

you say? And why aren't you doing that now? You open your eyes if you'd like, and it's fine to sit and listen with your eyes closed. For me, working with judgment and blame is something I talk about a lot because it's so at the center of my practice. I've felt the suffering of judgment and blame a lot. I remember when my father had a major valve replacement and I really could feel that his mortality close in

and I realized, oh, my son, it's going to be the flash, you know, he's going to have two more years at home. And that was the time in my life that I made it a formal sadna. A sodna is where you really kind of, a dedicated spiritual practice. I've come to call it rain on blame, you know, as why not, they rhyme. The commitment was that when I became aware of judging to pause and to come back and sense what's under the judging and be with that.

I did it for the sake of knowing because I kept finding that when I was judging and I'd asked myself, is this really who I am, this judging self? And I just realized I was just living in this much smaller space. And it's not a happy space. There's an expression, an anonymous expression. You know, who is it that's unhappy? One who finds fault. And of course, there's a store, a Palm Beach story of two women who are having lunch at their very favorite, you know, watering spot. And the waiter comes over. He's very, very dressed. up and so on. He said, hello ladies, is there anything right? Anything okay. There's a sense that we can lock in, people around us feel it, and it takes away real flow. Joko back, a Zen teacher said it best.

She said, our incapacity to forgive is directly related to our inability to feel joy in our life. you'll notice, as I speak, I'm interchanging forgive with blame. Sometimes the work that's needed is the deepest layers of anger and rage and unforgiveness. And sometimes it's that chronic daily blame, and they both need attention. So we'll take a moment to look briefly at the genesis of blame. You know, where does it come from? How come we're so hooked? And according to one person, it started in the Garden of Eden.

Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, and the serpent, alas for him, didn't have a leg to stand on. And it's silly, but it points to something, which is that right from the get-go, in an existential way, there's a sense that something's wrong, that something's wrong, and that we need to do something about it. And there is in our nervous system what's called an orienting response, which is as soon as we feel that something's wrong right now or something's going to go wrong, we immediately go looking for the source of it. And typically the source of it is either you or me. You know, when something's wrong, either I'm wrong, I'm causing all the trouble or the person, somebody else. And because we have this negativity bias, you know, that we're really, to more emphasize, you know, the things could go wrong that things are good and there's

no problem to solve and who are we now? We don't go that way that much. It's more there's a problem. Because of that, we end up fixating and blame. We fixate. So I want to take a moment to distinguish between healthy anger and healthy blame and unhealthy, where we go below the line. because there really is a difference.

Every emotion that we're rigged to feel has an intelligence. It's part of survival. We're meant to feel angry when in some way there's something opposing our well-being. Every one of us has been wounded. Every one of us has felt threatened at times. Without anger, we wouldn't have the energy

to mobilize and respond. It's part of our nervous system's way of dealing with life. Especially, I think of it more in a societal way for marginalized groups that have had generations of violations and oppression. Its anger with its bodily feelings and its mental recognition of wrongdoing alerts us that we need to bring ourselves together and deal with something that's a real obstacle. It's necessary. And with mindful attention, we can listen to the message of anger.

Okay? Something's going on. We need to deal with it and respond in a wise way. But it usually and quickly becomes a trance of anger and blame. And how does that happen? There's two ways. One way that anger becomes a trance is if we suppress it. And that happens a whole lot because anger is really taboo.

I know for myself. when I start feeling angry or real blaming and so on, you know, there's some part of me that immediately feels like I'm a bad person for feeling this. Like, I feel righteous, but I also feel bad. Like, this isn't spiritual, this isn't good. So what I actually do now is when it flares up, I immediately in some way say,

forgiven, forgiven. Not forgiven like this is evil, but I forgive it. forgiven like it's the weather that's here, that kind of forgiven, okay? So what I've noticed so often is that because of the taboo we push under anger, which means we don't fully attend to the very wounds and parts of our being that need attention. And not only that, when you push under anger, you turn it against yourself and becomes of hatred, or it becomes depression, or becomes shame. Does that make sense as I say that? This is a suffering of suppressing. We're in trance because whenever we're resisting anything,

we get more identified with it. We're under the line. We're no longer remembering who we really are. So that's one way. We suppress it. The second way we go into trance with anger is we get possessed. We completely believe the angry thoughts and the blaming thoughts, and we're taken over and we act out of it. And that too is, it's like the on button gets jammed. And when the on button gets jammed, blame and anger become like a trait. We become anger waiting to happen. Do you know that phrase? You know, it's like almost anything can trigger off that sense of irritation and you're wrong or you're bad. Blaming and judgment becomes a part of our character.

We're going to spend a little more time on that side because when we have the on-button jammed and we're chronically blaming and judging, it hardens into an armoring around our heart. It hardens. It's like kind of think of it like a scab that doesn't fall off. Like initially we needed that energy and that protection, but then it just doesn't fall off. And so the light and love of the universe can't flow so well through us. Undoing it, undoing is sometimes called forgiving, undoing that armoring of blame. And the first thing to do is to respect that it's really hard to do.

You know, it's somebody brought in a few days ago, Annie Lamott's beautiful line that forgiving is giving up all hope for a better past. You know? We hold really tightly to blame and anger because there's something we don't want to feel. James Baldwin put it this way. He said, I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hate. and prejudice so stubbornly is because they sense that once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.

Let's do a reflection on this together, okay? And what we're reflecting on is really this armoring of blame and how can we hold on. Okay? So let yourself arrive again right here. Feel your body sitting here, breathing. And from this presence, scan your life and bring to mind someone that you habitually feel some resentment or judgment towards, not traumatic rage or hatred, like a five out of a ten. But it's chronic and it, you know, it's not easy to drop.

might remind yourself of what really ends up bringing this up, what keeps the charge. And then ask yourself this, if I let go of considering this person as bad or wrong, now there's let go of the story of blame, what unpleasant feeling would I have to feel? What would you be forced to deal with, as Baldwin put it? What's unpleasant under there if you let go of the story of blame, you're bad, you're wrong, What would you have to feel? That's difficult. You can consider this, but you might open your eyes,

and I'd like to invite you to name out loud, just so we hear in the room, just one word, we'll just go around popcorn, and just hear what words are in the room. What's under the anger or blame? What do you notice? You raise your hand, I'll just point, and let's just hear and speak loudly.

Yeah. Guilt, fear. Unsafe. Shame. Not mattering, right. Unloved. Hurt. Helpless. Abandoned. Okay, so disappointment. Thank you. There's a really good reason we hold on to blame. That everything you described is that layer of real vulnerability that's so hard to drop into. which is why it's why forgiving is hard. Just take a moment to pause again and close your eyes and sense what we just heard that under the blame what's there

and see if you can sense this not as my blame or judgment but as the blame and judgment that operates through these human body minds and the vulnerability that's underneath. This is not personal to just you. To sense for these few moments, just collectively that we can hold the collective with some kindness. We all judge, we all blame,

and we all have underneath some woundedness, some pain that we try to move away from. Powerless, out of control, unlovable, unsafe. painful. Opening your eyes as you'd like. So the process we're exploring then is how to continue to disarm and this is a bodhisattva path, a path of an waking heart, because it takes courage. It takes a real strong willingness. Most of the time we do the default of staying in the blame. It's like I saw this really this mediator journal that had a cartoon of Henry the 8th and Anne Boleyn and a mediator and they're having a session. And the mediator saying,

well, when you're saying off with her head, what I'm hearing is I feel neglected. I often share about a movie I saw years ago, the interpreter, and it described this tribe that had a very wise understanding that was wrapped up in these words that vengeance is a lazy form of grief or lazy form of fear or whatever you want to call it, but vengeance, blame, judgment is a default because there's something underneath that's hard to feel. And we hear that and we understand. And I suspect every one of you is feeling, yeah, I get that. And there's a lot of reasons we still don't. One of them that I find why it's hard to disarm is because there's a sense, well, then I'm condoning or then I'm setting it up so I will get hurt again. How many of you kind of

noticed that if I, yeah. So just to, in way of definition even, forgiving in no way condones. In no way it says what you did was okay, do it again, step all over me, it's okay, I'm a dorm, you know, it doesn't do that. It's, you can forgive and create really good boundaries. You can forgive a friend for betraying a confidence and create boundaries by never sharing anything that's private again with that person or forgive an ex-partner for emotional abuse and choose never to be around them alone. There's a, there's an internet kind of advice giving column that and the person giving advice is four years old and his mom helps but I want to read you one of the questions. It's called ravishingly. I don't know where they got the name from, but here's

the question. Do you think it's okay to tell someone I'm afraid to forgive you because then you might hurt me again? Or should I wait until I'm no longer afraid to try to be their friend again? Dawn from Union City. Response. It's nice to forgive someone because then you're not angry anymore. My friend David really wanted to play Ninja Turtles, and he just hit me in the nose, and my nose started bleeding. He said sorry, and the teacher said it was an accident. But I couldn't forgive him because my nose was bleeding. When your nose starts bleeding, you can't forgive someone. But when my nose stopped bleeding, I could forgive him.

One of the biggest questions I get, and this, right after radical acceptance came out, I got this question so much, which is radical acceptance, it sounds really good, but then what are we going to do? environmental devastation. We just, you know, give it up. Are we resigning? You know, the war, we were about to go to war in Iraq. What do we do? Just, you know, saying go ahead, hawks, have your way, destroy the world. And so one of the stories that I shared then, I'll just share it briefly, was, which was pretty revelatory for me. I would read the newspaper all the days leading up to our invasion of Iraq and go crazy. Like the level of venom I felt towards the white male hawk leaders in our country who were

driving us towards an attack that I saw as just continuing the cycles of violence and so on. Enraged me, and I felt very blaming, and it was very much directed at this person and this person. And so I began this meditation I'd do when I was reading the newspaper where I'd read and I'd sense myself, whipped up, and I do this to this day when I see the news, I would pause and I would recognize and allow, okay, anger, anger, blame, blame, and then I would sense, okay, so what else is going on? And underneath that, I could feel the sense of fear of what's going to happen to so many people, like real fear. And when I opened to that, and you've discovered this, the layers of the onion. Underneath the fear, there was real grief. It just, it was like,

as long as I was angry, it wasn't grieving, but then there was this grief. And if I could open to the grieving, then I could feel this place of just pure caring. Now, I can't always stay there. I'm very conditioned to go back into the blaming. But the more times I've done that pathway, the less I believe it's personal towards any individual. The more I see it as, it's just conditions playing out, and I can come back to caring. I often get locked into the sadness place about things, but deep down under grief is caring. So this is what I sometimes call the U-turn, and many of you are familiar with it, where instead of the blame going outward, there's this, okay, what's going on in here, and can we

unlayer it. There's another piece that comes in this process of letting go of blame and forgiving, which is that it can't be done alone sometimes. I said to do a five, you know, out of 10 when I asked you to pick people. If it's like a 9 or a 10 and the person that you're trying to forgive has, you know, violated you physically or emotionally, often it needs the safe space of a therapy container or a really good friend or partner or somebody that can help create a larger container to begin to unfold the process with. Similarly, some of our blame is collective blame. When there's been great injury to a group of people, I think of, I mean, there's so many, like the morning when the Amish children were killed in the schoolhouse, our Charleston's shooting

by the white supremac. Then the place. of support in the process needs to be a collective place where there can sometimes be ritual and touching into the fear and the grief together as part of it. Franco Sussesky, who's known for Zen Hospice and he's got a fantastic book out right now. I really recommend, and I'm not right now. The name is, who remembers Frank's book's name? Five invitations. a great book. He tells a story of teaching in Berlin on grief and forgiveness.

And a woman in the back of the room stands up to talk and she says, I've been listening to you talk about forgiveness, but my father was a prisoner in the concentration camps and I can't forgive as killers. My heart is like ice. So the whole room's silent because the only appropriate response

is really bearing witness. Then a woman on the other side, of the room raises her hand. And, you know, he's preparing for more sharing of stories of the camps and the grief of the losses. And she said, my heart is like ice too. It feels like a stone. My father was a Nazi officer who was a guard in the camps. I know that he killed people. I can't forgive him. And there was silence. And then these two women made their way through 200 people in the conference and just embraced. There were no words. They just held each other. Often the very beginning of forgiving is the deep contacting of the pain that's there. And if we can

do that with each other, our grief about what's happening to our earth, our grief about humans that are marginalized and violated in horrific ways. If we can feel that together, then we can begin to find our way to wake up out of the trance of personal blame to a place that can begin to bring a healing energy into our world. So how do we do that? This is the last part of this exploration are what are the steps of releasing blame, whether again you might be thinking right now, for me it's about that chronic judging and others might have a place of really deep wounds that you're working with. Either way, I think of it as three important steps. And the first step is we can't will forgiveness and we can be willing

to want to forgive, to have the intention to forgive, which comes out of wisdom, that there's, there is an intuitive place in all of us that gets that when we're blaming, our heart's not able to really be in the flow of loving. So there's something in us that wants to forgive, even though it's hard. So that's the first step is to intend and have it be conscious. The second step is to take that you turn and begin to bring rain to blame, really. And when I say rain, rain isn't some other technique. Rain is really the two wings of awareness. It's applying mindfulness and compassion in a stepwise way to the woundedness in there.

So making the U-turn. And then the third step, and this is the U-turn enables us to do this, is to then widen the circles and begin to include others in our heart. The Bodhisattva path is to not push anyone out of our hearts. It's truly a free, awake, loving heart. So that third piece is that including who we've excluded. Now, one of the things that I found in, you know, the process, kind of one of the log jams often, is that there's a sense of, there's blame and anger, But right alongside it, another part in there is self-hatred for being so angry.

And that's a really, I'm thinking of one man in particular that I worked with, because anger can feel so ugly, so bad. He had a temper that was terrible and harmful. He hurt people. He was harmful to his wife. He would demean her when he got angry. he would intimidate and scare his teenage daughter. He alienated everybody at work.

The on button was jammed. And when we worked together, and it was at a retreat, and we talked about, well, the first step is to bring the U-turn and work with your own hurts and bring compassion, he wasn't having any of it. He said, I'm causing harm. I feel like I am a monster. This is ugliness here.

there's no way, you know, this kind of trying to bring tenderness inside to the wounded place type of thing. So first of all, I asked, well, has telling yourself that you're a monster helped you to be less angry? And as you can imagine, not at all. And so then I, you know, we were quiet for a bit and then I said his name and I said, it's not your, fault that you're so angry. It's not your fault. And he broke down in tears at that moment. Some people might hear those words, it's not your fault, as, hey, wait a minute, where's accountability and so on? It wasn't that level. We are such conditioned beings. As it turned out, he had a father who shamed him on and on. It wasn't his fault. And interestingly, far

from that leading to being irresponsible, that was the first step for him taking responsibility. He started to be able to do the U-turn because when he wasn't so ashamed like I'm bad for this anger, and it helped to have someone else say that. It's not your fault. He was then able to begin to listen into the wounded places inside him. You might even just try on if there's some place you're really, really feel terrible about yourself for. Try on, it's not your fault, and see what happens. For him, when he made the U-turn, he was able to get in touch under his angry self, this core wound of unworthiness, of feeling shame.

And the more he was able to bring self-compassion, the more the circles widened, so he could begin to have the choice to pause before he lashed out. And that's all the difference in the world. If you can pause, if you can interrupt the anger, then there's a little bit of time for choosing. So this is the U-turn. And for him, where it brought him was this sense of that he got that his angry self wasn't the truth of who he was. So we're going to explore this more, but I want to talk about widening him. the circle now. How does that happen? And once we've brought self-compassion, then we're

able to see others more clearly. And many of you are familiar with metaphor I like the best on seeing others clearly, which is you're walking in the woods, you see a little dog in the woods, you go over to pet it, and the dog lurches at you. It's fangs are bared. It's ferocious and you move from feeling, oh, you cute little thing to, really angry, bad dog, bad dog, blame, blame, judge, judge. And then you see its leg is in a trap. And in the moment you see its leg is in a trap instantly, you still take care of yourself, you don't go in there and get bit, but your heart totally shifts. Well, when people are acting in ways that violate our sensibilities, in some way, their leg is in a trap. When we act in ways that we hate ourselves

for, our leg's in a trap. And it's not until we can see that that the heart becomes more tender. I was seeing a video of a show with Oprah Winfrey talking about responding to those who act in violent ways. I thought it was really, what she said was so powerful. She said, rather than blame the most important question to ask is, what happened? You know, what pain from the past drove this behavior? Can you sense the heart space and wisdom of that? There's in here times interview with rapper Jay-Z, some of you might have read it. He put it this way. He said, you know, most bullies bully. It just happens. Oh, you got bullied as a kid, so you're trying to bully me. I understand. And once I understand that instead of reacting to that with anger, I can provide a

softer landing and maybe say, oh man, is you okay? When we're the ones blaming, you turn, widen. And when there's a relational conflict, it's really for both parties, if both parties can do it, there's really hope for deepening connection. I'll share with you how this blaming process unfolded for me, and this was not so long ago. This was just a few couple of years ago. Over the last number of years, I've been in a handful of multiracial groups. One of them went for, I think, like, two or two and a half, three years. But this is a different one, and we were doing some scheduling arrangements, and I had, you know, I was in one of my spells, and I go through them now and then where I was pretty chronically fatigued and feeling sick and so on. So I was trying to

ease back a little bit from the thickness of my schedule. So at one point, I asked if we might space out, not have our meetings quite so close to each other because I just needed more space. And one of the teachers, African-American teacher, got really upset with me and kind of my commitment to the process. I left that meeting feeling really angry. Like I felt like I'd been kind of shared my,

I don't usually when I'm teaching say, oh, right now I'm feeling pretty sick. And I, you know, but these were friends. And I, you know, so I was sharing. And I felt like I had been vulnerable and real. And then I got kind of nailed. And, you know, so I was angry. It was unjust. And I was the victim.

And then I didn't like feeling like a victim. So I said, okay, intend to forgive, reign on blame, you know. And then I did it. And how did it go? Well, recognize and allow blaming anger. let it be, allow, pause, investigating and finding underneath that defended place I felt hurt because I felt mistrusted. And feeling mistrusted felt terrible because I didn't trust myself because I have white guilt, I'm never doing enough. Something's wrong with me. It went right

to a deep place of self-doubt of being a bad person. This matters so much. It's such a priority. I'm not doing more. Why don't I draw back on something else and stick with this schedule? It's really me. So that was the experience of investigating and then the nurturing to trust that I care. Even if I'm imperfect, I really do care about this, just to keep trusting that. That softened and opened. So then I could widen the circles and look at her more clearly. you know, I saw how my leg was in a trap, okay, look at her, and see how, for her, she felt deserted by an ally. And I actually have a mentor in this domain, and I checked with her on this, and she said, for you attending a meeting like this is a choice, and for her, it's life and death.

And it's true. I mean, her a grandson in prison and the fear that so many have that their husband, her brother or friend is going to get attacked, get violated by police, whatever it is, life is really dangerous. Deserted. She felt deserted. So because my blame was gone, then when we talked, I was able to acknowledge, I can imagine how that felt. And of course, she, very good doing her own work, was able to completely get how she was caught in that sense of desertion, and when she had taken inner care, she could see about me that she knew I was struggling with illness and that judgment hurt. Now, I share the story because it was kind of, I was so

grateful. I was so grateful for rain on blame. It would have been so easy to stay cycling, to have the on button jammed. And I was very lucky that I was partnered in conflict with someone who could do the same work. But even if you're not, maybe you're thinking of people that, well, I can take responsibility and do this work, but they're still da-da-da-da. It's still for the freedom of your own heart.

Does that make sense? We forgive for the freedom of our own hearts, and it always ripples and affects people. we just don't know how. So this is still talking a bit on the individual level. I want to talk more on a kind of societal level about the blame that comes, people that are unreal others that we don't know.

And in it's very hard to imagine not thinking of them and blaming them and hating them. And you might have people in mind for yourself where you just know as much as you intend to be, be the bodhisattra with not pushing anyone out of your heart, that person still just triggers off aversion. And if you don't have somebody like that, you've graduated. So unreal others.

And so I want to share, I felt like I was very inspired and I have been by a woman, some of you might have heard of Valerie Carr, who I think the group is Love Revolution. is the group she has. And the principles of this group are really fabulous. And I felt like she was a wonderful illustration of how to work with anger and blame. So Valerie Carr is a Sikh woman, and she is a social activist. And the first killing, in other words, the first hate crime after 9-11 was of a Sikh man. And it was someone she knew that she called Uncle, you know, close. And he was killed by a man who considered himself a patriot. He basically had said, I'm going to go out and shoot some towelheads.

That was his line. He said, we should kill children too. Now, Valerie had a young son at that time, and she felt like he was growing up in a, I mean, imagine a young son, wearing turban, the whole thing, growing up in a country dangerous for him. And she said she feared the moments that she couldn't protect him, that he'd be seen as a terrorist, just as black people are seen as criminals and women are seen as property. That's what she felt. So she asked herself, how can I respond to this? This is a very spiritual woman, very passionate. How do I respond to this?

And her wisdom place basically said, love more inclusively, see no one as the enemy. In some place, no, you are a part of me that I don't yet know. You are a part of me, I don't yet know. and then to choose to wonder about the person. Now, keep in mind that she still hadn't done the inner work, and that's what she did for a number of years. I mean, she knew how she wanted to be, just the way we might have our aspiration to have a really a heart that's free of blame.

And we first have to make the U-turn to deal with the woundedness, and that's what she did. And for her, it meant being with her own fears and hurts, and, as she put it, refused to let it hardened into anger, going right under the armor and right to the fears and the hurt. And she did that for a number of years, and then here's what happened. She decided to go back to the place that uncle had been killed, and she and the brother of this man decided they would call the guy who had killed him,

who's in jail, and talked to him. and the only way when somebody's an unreal other is to in some way look more deeply connect, attune, talk that's the only way we bridge it so they talk to him and he said

I'm sorry for what happened and he said also for all who were killed in 9-11 and of course that immediately gave out something and took back something right so she felt defensive but they kept going And the Sikh man's brother said, this is the first time you said you're sorry. And Frank, the killer, then he said this, yes, I really am sorry for what I did to your brother.

And one day when I go to heaven to be judged by God, I'll ask him to see him, and I will hug him, and I'll ask for his forgiveness. And then the man's brother said, we've already forgiven you. So there's a teaching here that for me is it's where the possibility is as we continue in this world to seek ways of bridging separation. The possibility of having the intention, as Valerie described it, she's that deep intention to love and include, just the intention. She wasn't ready right away, to be willing to do the inner work, to really, to read, really bring compassion to where our suffering and the woundedness is, and then to widen out and wonder about other people. How is their leg in a trap? Wonder about them.

Here's what she says at the end of this talk I was listening to. This is the movement towards an undivided world. She said, one day you will see my son as your own and protect him when I'm not there. So this is the three steps that in these moments and as we complete this retreat, we sense as part of this path of awakening that we want to free our hearts, that we want to love without holding back. And that means being willing to pay attention to when we're judging. It's not my judgment, it's the judgment.

Not my vulnerability. It's the judgment. the vulnerability under it. This is the process of restorative justice, of all the circles that really can make a difference, truth and reconciliation that's happening in like 18 countries now. It's this process of knowing that's what we want and then being willing to get close in and get to know, wonder about how another person is. So we begin by disarming our own psyches. We can't expect peace in the world unless we do it. And we know that when we forgive someone, it's an amazing gift because everybody wants to feel forgiven. And we all know what it's like to feel

self-doubt and like something's wrong with me. So when another removes their blame and opens their heart, it's a gift. And then forgiving opens our heart. This is the way it was described by Scott McCollahan. This is in Crapoletia, a biography of place. One time a man left home. He had argued with his mother and father the day before they left. Terrible words were spoken. He left without saying goodbye. He had been gone many years and spent some time in jail. When he finally got out, he wondered if his parents were alive and if they were ashamed, what had been said and where he wound up. He wrote to them and told them he'd be coming home on a specific day the following week.

If they wanted to see them and they were not ashamed, they should put a blanket on the clothesline, and he would know to come inside. If the blanket was missing, he would know that he was not welcome. He would turn back. He told them he hoped they were in good health.

He arrived by rail the next week. He was nervous when he stepped off the train. There was no one there to meet him. He walked up the worn path towards home place and thought about his past, thought about his time in jail, I thought about the horrible words between him and his parents, how shame they must be about him.

He was about to turn around and go back to where he came from when he saw a blanket in a tree. He kept walking and he saw another blanket. He kept walking and he saw another. And then he turned towards home and the house was covered in blankets. The yard was covered in blankets. The clothesline was covered in blankets. The path to the door.

door was covered in blankets, and his parents were standing there and they were welcoming him inside. We began with just the sense of that handshake, you're safe with me, that releasing of the blame. It makes way for Namaste. If we can let go of the blame, we start seeing that light of goodness that's in other beings. So let's take a few moments, do a final little reflection together. In this stillness, just beginning to listen to and feel what's going on inside you, inside your heart right now. Sensing your sincere intention to wake up from that trance of self-blame, to not make yourself wrong or bad. Sensing in the stillness, that intention to wake up from the trance of judging others,

to not push anyone, others, or yourself out of your heart. You might sense for a moment, if this heart is free of blame, free of judgment, who am I, sensing your inner life, the beings in your life? If this heart is free of judgment and blame, who am I? If nothing's wrong with me, who am I?

If it's nobody's fault, there's nothing wrong or bad about anybody. This heart includes us all. Who am I? Just relax back into whatever you notice. The purity of Namaste arises from a heart space that includes us all. When we look through the eyes of this awakened heart space, we can see that we can see that see the light, spirit, the goodness. Close with these words from Thomas Merton.

Then it was if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts, where neither sin or knowledge could reach, the core of reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the divine. If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more need for war, for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.