Tara Brach - Divine Abodes: Compassion

Episode Date: October 19, 2011

2011-10-19 - Divine Abodes: Compassion - We cultivate compassion by letting ourselves be touched by the suffering within and around us. Because our conditioning is to avoid vulnerability, the path of compassion requires courage and purposefulness. As we awaken to the truth of our connectedness, our hearts become increasingly tender and our actions serve the healing of our world. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

Tonight is the second of a four-week series that I'm doing on what are called the divine abodes and the Polly word are the Brahma Vaharas. And these are considered the dwelling places of Brahma, of God, of the divine. And they really are expressions of our own awakened heart and mind. This is what we experience. what we take refuge in as we wake up. And these four divine abodes are loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. So tonight is compassion.

Tonight we'll be exploring compassion. And all of these states of heart, mind, arise from a wise understanding, which is we are inextricably connected. to each other. We are inextricably connected. And when we recognize that not as a mental idea, but there's a feeling sense of the truth that we belong.

Our love comes out in those flavors. Our wisdom comes out in that flavor of equanimity. So I'd like to begin the compassion talk. Some of you might remember, this is one of my favorite little story little stories and it starts out a while back a dog a tired looking dog wandered into my yard and he came in through the door followed me went down the hall and he lay down on the couch and he slept there for an hour so my dogs didn't seem to mind and he seemed like a good dog and I was okay with it so I let him nap an hour later he went to the door I let him out the next day he was back he resumed his position on the

couch and slept for another hour. This continued for several weeks. Finally, curious, I pinned a note to his collar, and on that note, I wrote, every afternoon your dog comes to my house for a nap. I don't mind, but I want to make sure it's okay with you. So the next day he arrived with a different note pinned to his collar. He lives in a home with three children in it. He's trying to catch up on his sleep. May I come with him tomorrow? So this is the mood of compassion that we, in a way, compassion can be described as attuning to the vulnerability, the shared vulnerability in all of us, and not just attuning to it, responding to it. So there is a wonderful expression, which is, be kind, every one you know is struggling hard.

that it doesn't matter what age we are. If we're in these bodies and on planet Earth, it's not easy. That doesn't mean that we're always slaving away or that life is bad. It just means life can be really challenging. And so when we feel compassion, it's been described as the quivering of the heart in response to just this human reality that it's not so easy. the quivering and then the reaching out. So this is a poem by Mary Oliver.

On cold evenings, my grandmother, with ownership of half her mind, the other half having flown back to Bohemia, spread newspapers over the porch floor, so she said the garden ants could crawl beneath as under a blanket and keep warm. And what shall I wish for for myself? but being so struck by the lightning of years

to be like her with what is left, that loving. You know, it's comforting to think that we might be of help to each other that somehow our smile or our words are just the way we look at each other in some way may bring reassurance or comfort or reminder of who we are.

And it's comforting, comforting in a way that we could help others trust who they are, feel good about themselves. So then the inquiry is, well, what makes us really like to help? And of course, there's always the, you know, it's marble, there's the motivation of ego. Of course. It's part of our good personhood project, you know, where we are trying to be good according to some shoulds. And that's okay. That's just part of the program that was installed.

installed, right? But it goes deeper than that. It goes deeper than trying to feel worthy, trying to feel like we're okay. There's something in us that wants to help because when we extend ourselves, when we attune and care about one another, we're living from the deepest place in us. We're more at home in who we really are. and we love to be who we really are and we love to live from the truth of who we are, from that fullness and I always find it interesting that even when our hearts don't feel open we still care about caring isn't that true that it matters to us something in us knows

so there's a story Swami Satchananda, a Hindu guru, was asked really if he could describe what true health was. And what was the difference between illness and wellness. And he drew the words up on a blackboard, and he circled the eye of illness and the we of wellness. And in a way that sounds simplistic. but when we feel a sense of belonging to the we, whether it's a belonging to nature when we just feel like we're part of this,

our belonging to our family, our friends, or we can sit and meditate and just feel a shared appreciation that we're part of this field of waking up beings. That is health. That is a coming towards whole. illness. So there is, in the Buddhist tradition, what's called the Bodhisattva path. And the word bodhisattva, Bodhi means awakening and satfa means being. And we are all on the bodhisattva path.

We are all awakening beings. And the more conscious we are of this waking up that's happening, the more we end up offering ourselves to facilitate it. The more we do the practices and the behaviors and align ourselves, try to be with people that can support us. And the more we wake up, the more we naturally feel that we quality and then want to serve, want to help. So the Bodhisattva path is a path of not only awakening but serving awakening, very consciously. very intentionally. And it's really an experience of this gradual but felt shift in identity. And identity is key.

And when we talk about waking up, there is a shift in our felt identity from this quality of selfness where we're preoccupied. Most of our moments have to do with what I need, what I want, what I'm afraid of, to a sense of concern for us. for we. The Dalai Lama put it this way. He said compassion certainly is in our daily life, I think, the foundation of human hope, the source and assurance of our human future. So this compassion, the sense of belonging, this shift in identity really is an evolutionary development. And it is the hope.

If our humanity and life on the planet goes as we wish it would, I mean, who knows what the grand plan is, but the hope for healing our planet is in this evolution of consciousness where we sense we, and we reach out out of that sense of belonging. So the challenge to awakening compassion. and it's the same thing as the challenge to loving kindness is that there's very strong conditioning, what I often call a trance, to feel separate. And if you think of evolution,

the early, more primitive parts of the brain, the limbic system's absolutely designed to feel separate and fight, flight, freeze, move from that kind of a sensibility, whereas the more recently evolved part, to the brain, the social brain, the frontal cortex, more can then perceive, oh, empathy and compassion and belonging. I'm just hitching it to the brain because it's so interesting to see with evolution how the brain has evolved to reflect what we're experiencing in a spiritual way. So this trance of

separation comes from the limbic system and often the limbic system is in control. The limbic system is in charge. And there's in a sense a kind of break with the frontal cortex. We really lose sight of belonging. So that happens in daily life. And the more stressed we are, the more you can notice I, me, I need, I want. And what happens to the rest of the world? It's like if we're on a stage, we are the protagonist and everybody else is somewhat of a two-dimensional figure that's either going to help us, going to hurt us, are irrelevant. It fits in those categories. In other words, others are unreal.

This is a theme I want to really explore tonight, that when we're not in our more evolved or awakened consciousness, we're living in a sense of separateness and others are unreal. And the more stressed we are, the more unreal. they are. And the more we then get into the behaviors of you, they're lashing out, or grasping. Some of you might remember the story of a helicopter and these people are dangling from a rope. There's 11 of them. Ten of them are men and there's one woman. And they agree that somebody has to drop off or else the rope's going to break. And so after a lot of back and forth, the woman said,

okay, I'll do it. I'll be the one. She says, you know, that's what women do. They sacrifice themselves for the sake of others. You know, they do what they can to make sure everybody else is taken care of first. And as she finished saying all this, you know, all the men started clapping. Now, I think of that

as still the limbic systems in charge, but it's making use of the cerebral cortex for its purposes. Unreal others. So the trance of separation can be very thick. The armoring can be very thick. And we know

it we know when we're with close others and how easily we get set off so somebody can say something that's judgmental are in some way not show us that they love us in exactly the way we want to be shown or not cooperate with us and how quickly we get triggered to be judgmental and tight to hold on to resentments it's humbling and you know the closer people are the more we get tripped off and we kind of regress into those parts of our brain that are reactive.

So of course it happens with people close in that they quickly become unreal. We lose the capacity to sense what life is like for them in those moments that we're reacting. And then of course it happens big time when we're hearing about the suffering of people that are far away or we think of as different.

then compassion becomes abstract because they're not real to us. So we hear about the recent flooding in Bangkok. Well, we had flooding here, and if you happen to be a person that dealt with the flooding here, it was a big deal. Well, there, I mean, it's huge. I mean, they've got many, many people, 300 some people killed and people displaced. What happens when we hear about drones killing civilians?

you know, in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Somalia, we think, oh, that's terrible. But unless we see a face and have a story and bring it close in, unless we really pay attention, we don't have that quivering of the heart. We hear numbers of people starving, four million people in Somalia in crisis right now. Four million.

Can we grog that, you know, what that really means? So unreal other, it makes a really big difference if we can't understand the subjective reality. And the truth is we're conditioned to not pay close attention. We're conditioned to not want to go close to where the pain is. And we can see that with people that we know close up, that we can think of a friend who's in trouble. And our habit is to think of the story, but not really imagine, what would that be like?

What would that be like? Compassion is mental. I mean, how often have you heard of somebody enduring the loss and known that in some way your condolences were sincere, but not from that really tender place? And then, of course, with ourselves. How many times have we been going through a hard time? but rather than having compassion for ourselves,

we soldier on. We numb ourselves to the rawness. Or we blame ourselves for bringing it on to ourselves. Are we tell ourselves that others have it worse? And not let ourselves go close in to where the pain is. What happens when we avoid vulnerability, our own or others? You know, what happens when we move through the world? world and we don't let ourselves feel it. No intimacy. It's like love matters to us more than

anything. I mean, sure, we're afraid of it more than anything, but it matters to us. And if we don't wake up out of that conditioning to keep at arm's length from the rawness, no intimacy, no connection really. Now, if we're fortunate, something about that lack of connection. that lack of intimacy, that lack of realness. We don't feel real. It's like we're kind of going through life and skimming the surface. We're not arriving with each other. And something about that starts to really eat at us, hurt us.

Comes up as loneliness or separateness, anxiety, depression. Okay, a little parable for you. This is called the parable of the prickly porcupines. It was the coldest winter ever, so cold that many animals froze to death. In an effort to save themselves from this icy fate, the porcupines decided to gather together to fend off the chill. They huddled close to each other, covered and protected from the elements, and warmed by their collective body heat.

But their prickly quills would prove to be a bit of a problem in close proximity. They poked and stabbed each other, wounding their closest companions. The warmth was wonderful, but the mutual needling became increasingly uncomfortable. Eventually, they began to distance themselves one from another, scattering in the forest, only to end up alone and frozen. Many died. It soon became clear that they would have to choose between solitary deaths in the frigid wilderness and the discomfort of being needleed by their companion's quills when they banded together. wisely they decided to return to the huddle.

They learned to live with the little wounds caused by the close relationship with their fellows in order to benefit from the collective heat they generated as a group. In this way, they were able to survive. Moral of the story? I think you know. It takes a certain amount of sensitivity, a willingness to undress, to take off the armor, to be close, to feel the wrongness in order to also feel the truth of our belonging.

It takes a willingness. And it actually takes an intentionality since we have to counter the conditioning to push away discomfort. Does that make sense that we need to be intentional? So the path of compassion, in a nutshell, is letting ourselves be touch. by suffering, our own suffering and the suffering of the world. And sometimes when I say that, people think, well, it's just going to be too much. And I want to say that there are ways that we train ourselves to open

that allow the suffering to come in, but not for the self to hold it or the self to feel possessed, but rather to find a space of heart that is great enough. So it's not, and the idea is not to, taken suffering and get squashed by it. It's to discover that we have room, which we do. So the training begins with the first circle. It's widening circles, and Rolka puts it this way.

He says, I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may never get to the furthest one, but I give myself to it. So we begin with the circle of the suffering, the vulnerability, the rawness that's right. right here, right in our own being, because we find that the more we open to the life

in our own body and heart, the more the social part of the brain is able to empathically attune to the actual experience of others. This training of mindful presence right here actually brings us connection with each other. I like to, when I do this, use the breath as a template. We're gonna practice a little bit

with the first circle right now, and we'll just keep practicing. together tonight. So I mentioned that question, what if it's too much? And often we are afraid to touch into our own pain and suffering because it feels like we'll get overwhelmed and we'll never stop crying or we'll get scared to death. And if there's trauma, then this is not the route. The route is not to say, okay, let me feel it all right now because we need more resources and more support. So when I do a guided practice of let's open to the life that's right here that might be difficult, I invite you to choose something that's difficult but not overwhelming or traumatic.

I like using the breath as a template because we can practice and train by breathing in and saying, okay, let me feel this. Let me agree to it's like letting the rawness in ourselves needle us, you know, with the porcupine. We're getting intimate with our own being. Breathing in, okay, I want to stay close. But then we breathe out, and the out-breath is really important. Because it's with the out-breath that we connect with the space that's here of heart and awareness that has room. Okay?

So with that, just to close your eyes and take a few moments to feel the breath, let the breath help to collect your attention so that you feel right here, feeling the life inside you letting this pause be one of arriving in the moment and just inviting whatever situation in life might want your attention to be in your awareness

whatever difficulty that's here that you might not have let yourself be intimate with with what's going on inside you something that might want attention it could be a difficulty with another person

where you feel some conflict or distance. It could be something at work, someplace where you're feeling like you're falling short, something you're afraid that's going to happen, something that's really stressful, that's making your life feel very small. And when you come up with something, some situation,

just take a moment to sense, how have I been relating to this thus far? And what's my habitual way of relating to it? Have I tried to move away from the rawness by trying to fix the situation? Or have I ignored my heart, my loneliness, my fear? Or have I judged myself in some way? Often our ways of judging ourselves keep us one step removed from feeling the needle, the suffering itself.

Have I just kept busy? That's a very good strategy for staying away from our own hearts. lost and blaming outward, because I didn't want to feel something. As you're reviewing, see if you can not add an added judgment, if you've been avoiding the rawness. And instead, just take a moment to sense the difficulty and just say to yourself, okay, this is a form of suffering. Others feel this too.

May I be kind? May I be intimate with the life that's here? feel your intention to be kind and intimate. So you begin the breathing by breathing in and saying, okay, let me touch what's here. Let me touch the fear, the hurt. Let me touch the feeling of shame or failure. Whatever it is. We begin by emphasizing the in-breath just to contact intimately. This is where you huddle together. You're huddling, getting close to your own heart. But with the out breath, sense the space of warmth, of heart, of awareness that has room. It helps, just sense the space that's in this room, that we're all breathing in and touching difficulty.

And there's a field of compassion that can hold this. As you breathe in, sense what this part of you most needs. And as you breathe out, you might offer it. Just offer kindness, offer words of reassurance. You might offer touch. I often like to put my hand on my heart and just say, I'm here, I'm here with you. Often the places in us that are hurting just want our company and our acceptance. They just want to know we're here.

It's very powerful to simply put your hand on your heart and say, I care about this, just that, to relate with kindness. This is the first circle. And you might notice as you sit and be with whatever's painful, painful the who you are when you're being compassionate. That rather than being the victim of a difficult circumstance, our identity shifts. It opens. We become that space of kindness, that field of compassion.

Rather than reacting to our life, we can relate to it from a larger place. There is no way to widen the circles of compassion. unless we are able to touch the life that's here. Because if we don't have the willingness to touch the fear or the loneliness here, how are we going to open to it and really be with another person and be touched by another person that's having those experiences? Right? Now, we train, we start with what's right here,

and then we begin to widen the circle and what we do is we explore with people that are much like us. Opening our hearts, it's most easy when somebody is a trusted other. When someone has similar appearance of suffering, that's when it's easiest to go, okay, I can include yours too because I know what it's like. And we find this in 12-step groups, that we kind of, yeah, I know what that's like,

and our hearts go out to each other. Are we find it in affinity groups in our community? We have affinity groups for people of color and for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning. There's a shared understanding. Oh, I know that suffering. I know that one. We do that word safest and it's easiest, and that enables us to continue to widen so we can then begin to stretch. And this is where it takes even more courage and attention.

intentionality. What's it like for that person? That person's different from me. That's essential on the Bodhisattva path. Story. Am I gorgeous, my child ass? throwing the word out like pull taffy? Yes, I say you are. The pink and teal dress is probably made of highly flammable material, some chemist's approximation of tulle and satin. Pudgy fingers decorated with pink polish, trace the sequins. on the bodice. I love this. A giant pair of bubblegum pink wings flap slowly. Little feet dance and sparkly red slippers. I'm just like a real princess. Yes, I say, you are. Thick blonde hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, flawless skin. This child is the American epitome of beauty. This child, my son. he's four years old and prefers to wear dresses

maybe it's a phase maybe not even as I wonder how I produce such an angelic looking creature I wish you would put on some pants and go back to playing with toy tractors not because it matters to me it doesn't but because I'm already hearing in my head the name calling he will face in kindergarten many adults already seem a bit disturbed by the dresses

strangers utter awkward apologies when they realize he's not feeling This culture wants little boys to dream only of baseball trucks and trains. This culture has no room for little boys who want to be gorgeous. He picks up parasol, a neighbor gave him, and opens it jauntily over his shoulder. Am I beautiful? he asks. I sweep him into my arms and plant a kiss on his cheek. Always.

This culture, all cultures, create divisions. they create divisions that then make others unreal they create divisions that say this is good and this is bad and the path of awakening and compassion is to see beyond the mask to see beyond the veil of the kind of cultural implants and to see who's there to be able to say always and unconditionally

to whatever expression of life we see before us. I remember reading of a group called Building Bridges for Peace who hold these camps that bring together people from different cultures, especially cultures that are having violence. And one particular of these camps brought together teenage girls, some Palestinian and some Israeli, to live together and get to know each other over a period of a few weeks.

I read some of the different stories about what happened over those two weeks. And one, towards the end, an Israeli girl said, if I don't know you, it's easy to hate you. If I look into your eyes,

I can't. We have to see beyond the mask of difference. We have to actually look into others' eyes. We have to get to know others. I meet with just started a group last year, a few of us that meet that are fairly diverse in terms of sexual orientation, gender orientation, color, and the purpose to stretch. Because, you know, I find for white people it's very easy to feel offended if the word racist comes at us, and yet it's so subtle.

and that's just one example how many ideas and stories flicker through us of who another is without even knowing it categorizing making less there will not be peace

on earth until as the Dalai Lama said we begin to shift this identity from I to this collective sense of we that cherishes and celebrates the diversity but sees the inherent

beauty and goodness within beings. This is the training. So we just do this next circle. Okay, we'll just check in again as we widen our circles together. And in this time, just pause again. And as you did before, take a moment because you cannot awaken compassion

if you're not in your body. It's not mental. Let your attention scan through your body again, feel your breath. and feel your heart and bring to mind something that can bring up fear for you, something in your life that brings up fear. Know that in these little guided practices, sometimes you can't access or contact experience on demand and that's quite fine, but just to have this exploration.

Something that brings up fear and let it be close in, just sense what it's like when you're in that situation. Make it as real as you can. Just know what it's like in your heart, your throat, your belly. And then bring to mind someone you know that seems very, very different from you. Someone that perhaps is culturally different, a different age, different race perhaps, real different temperament. Really different. Can you imagine that this person experience. experiences fear, the same contracting ache or grip or clutch, the same feeling of vulnerability,

of separateness, of endangerment. Naomi Shaib Nye writes, before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of a road. you must see how this could be you how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive

your eyes when you'd like so we widen the circles by coming back again and again to the realness of what's right here to the rawness to the vulnerability we widened the circles by intentionally sharing with others, that others were it safe to share, where we begin to get the sense that it's not

my pain, it's our pain. This recent meditation retreat that we led last week, in the middle of the retreat, we got word that our dog, Hakuna, was very, very sick. And so Hakuna is 14 years old. We knew he was on his way out. But we were away at retreat. So, Jonathan had to drive back to back home and as it turned out he was so sick that Jonathan had to put him down. And so I shared it with everybody at the retreat, what had happened. And we all did a meditation kind of compassion holding Hakuna and Jonathan because Kona was Jonathan's dog before he was our dog. And then when Jonathan came back, you know, there was this whole warm, tender feeling.

how come so many people know that loss, this dear friend that we lose when we lose a dog. So many people know loss, period. It was in that field where it was already people waking up, there was this very palpable compassion. Not hard to feel when you're in a kind of field where people have similar experience and express it in a similar way. But we widen the circle beyond that.

We sense how this fear, others feel the same fear. This hurt, others feel the same hurt. And we start sensing how the same humaneness has lived through people that seem very different from us. We widen the circle. Pema Children says we don't set out to save the world. We set out to wonder how other people are doing and reflect on how our actions affect other.

people's hearts. So there's that wondering. We get interested. We stretch. It's like our skin. We just stretch out to be more inclusive of other people. So this again is what I'm describing as an evolution of consciousness. There's a wonderful line that the miracle, this is Henry David Thoreau. The miracle he says is to see through another's eyes even for a moment. This is our capacity. the evolution of consciousness where we more and more live in that place of it's our suffering, our shared suffering, and we reach out on behalf of each other.

So another story for you tonight. And this was told by a man who worked with juvenile offenders right here in D.C. And both youths were gang members who had committed homicide. One, a 14-year-old had shot and killed an innocent teen to prove himself to the gang And during the trial, the mother of the murdered youth sat silently through the whole trial.

And when it was over, the youth was convicted of the killing. And after the verdict was announced, she stood up, she stared directly at him, and she said, I'm going to kill you. And then the youth was taken away to serve several years in a juvenile facility. six months after that the young man went to jail, the mother went to visit him, the mother of the child. Now he'd been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor he'd had.

And for a time they talked, and when she left, she left him money for snacks, and she started to visit more regularly, bringing food, small gifts. She'd asked him how he was doing, what was on his mind. and she just listened. Near the end of the three-year sentence, she asked him what he'd be doing when he got out, and he was confused and uncertain, so she offered to set him up with a job at a friend's company.

Then she inquired about where he'd live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home. For eight months, he lived there, ate her food, worked at the job. Then one evening she called him into the living room to talk. She sat down opposite him, long pause, and then she started, Do you remember that day in the courtroom when I said that I was going to kill you? This response, I sure do.

And she said, well, I did. She said, I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. And that's why I started to visit you and bring you things, to listen, to talk, get you a job, let you live here. That's how I said about changing you. That old boy, he's gone. So now I want to ask, since my son is gone and that killer is gone, if you'll stay here. I've got room and I'd like to adopt you if you'll let me.

And she became the mother of her son's killer, the mother he had never had. I share that story not because such kind of heroic forms of forgiveness that that we should, be able to do something that's out of our capacity, but that there's a possibility in this, in the worst of situations to see past the mask, the conditioning, and to see who's there and serve who's really there. That that's our possibility.

That's what this evolution of consciousness makes possible. There's a saying that, you know, to be kind, we must swerve often from our path. That whatever we think we're doing, that this waking up happens because we keep stopping and looking. Can you imagine if tonight or tomorrow when you're with others,

you slowed it down internally, just stepped off automatic, and something in you looked at the eyes that were looking at you and just knew, okay, this being struggles also. If something in you had that curiosity, what do you need? What does this person need? What we find when we start asking is that most everybody needs what we need,

which is to in some way feel seen and cared about. Everybody needs that. Of course, people need it delivered in different ways, so we attune. We get close enough in so we can get pricked so we can feel what's difficult and also we can see who's there beyond that difficulty we swerve from our path so let's reflect again

we'll keep opening these circles again the invitation is to come home right now come home into your heart just into whatever you're experiencing right in these moments just feel your breath Feel contact with that first circle, with just the truth of what's right here. And then bring to mind someone in your life that you care about, that you know is going through a difficult time.

Let that person's circumstances be in your awareness, whatever the disappointment is or the sense of frustration or failure or loss or hurt, fears that person might be facing. As you reflect, begin to feel that you feel that you can, could enter right into that person's consciousness. You're looking through that person's eyes. This is really slowing down. You're swerving from your path. You're arriving here to look through this person's eyes. Feel with this person's heart. What is this like? What are the kind of limiting beliefs you might be telling yourself about what's wrong? What does it feel like to be in

this situation. And as you're inside this person, you can begin the breath again, just as if you're breathing in and letting yourself feel the realness and rawness of this person. And you're breathing out and letting it be held in the largeness of compassion. You want to put your hand on your heart. You can imagine that that hand is touching their heart, breathing in. I'm here with you. I'm feeling this and breathing out and I care about the suffering. Just offering your care with the out breath, letting it out. Dick Nod Hahn says the most beautiful thing we can say is, darling, I care about this suffering in some way offering this person what's most needed with the outbreath, that you're with them, that you care, you're healing blessings. This is getting intimate,

it, letting the prick of the needle be there and the warmth of the kindness. Nikki Giovanni says, and if ever I touched a life, I hope that life knows that I know the touching was and still is, and always will be the true revolution. Taking a few full breaths. Letting go, letting go, just coming back into the wholeness of who you are, but sensing that this person that you care about this being, that their suffering is in your heart. So we've been talking tonight about this training, this absolutely precious training that helps this evolution of consciousness keep evolving, talking about letting ourselves be touched by the suffering, but not hold

it, breathe out, feel the space that it's happening in. And this bodhisatt for training and vows go really in its wholeness, the formal vow is this, through timeless existence, through timeless existence, may this life serve the awakening and freedom of all beings. That's the full vow. And we might think to ourselves, wow, that's pretty grand, you know, may my awakening serve everybody. But actually, if we trust the truth that we belong to this web, that anything that wakes up through us is naturally going to ripple out in a healing and beautiful way, then that vow makes deep sense. So we sense, well, how does that happen? How in our lives? Because it's not just the feeling of compassion. You know, on the brain, compassion, the parts of the brain,

primarily insula, is the part of the brain that seems to get activated, is actually very much connected with the motor cortex, it has to do with action. So when we feel touched, it's meant to blossom. Compassion blossoms by our action. And the Dalai Lama, I remember reading, he went to a Seattle conference some years ago. He says, what do you do with your compassion? This was the question he asked 50,817 people there.

He says, will you keep it buried in yourself, or will you release that power through your actions? So we have the courage to be touched. And then we sense, how do we release it through our actions? And we do it every day through the ways that we smile at another and we touch another person and our words have such power, have such power. And we can do it in more active ways politically. We can speak our truths.

You know, last weekend, there was several Buddhist monks and nuns that were part of occupy DC. If that feels like the real expression for us, we can give our time and energy to other social justice kind of strategies and programs. We can give our lives to working for peace. Whatever fits our temperament, we let what we feel be expressed in large and small ways, in spontaneous acts. A priest was walking down the street when he saw a little boy jumping up and down trying to ring a doorbell. Poor kid was so small, the bill was too high. So the priest went up and rang the bill for the little fellow, then turning to the kid with a smile, he asked, what do we do now? Little fellow said, run like hell. So who knows the benefits to come from our

spontaneity. But it's a real journey of spirit, and it makes life very interesting when we're moving through our day and there's something in us that knows that we want to wake up the sense of belonging we want to attune to each other we want to swerve from our path and sense the realness of another being because we become real and that other being becomes real and it serves healing of all beings so the message I always get when I you know read the different writings about the bodhisattvas is not to wait to not to wait just to sense even this week if there's just one person you want to because it's sometimes hard to say okay I'm gonna go and be a bodhisattva for everybody I meet you know that's

pick one person pick one person and sense what does this person need and a little bit more sense if you can can offer from your heart what's needed. So take a moment for the last time now. We'll just close our eyes. In the simplest way, this path of compassion, like breathing in and breathing out,

is a willingness to be touched by life and the tenderness that wants to offer out our love. Being touched, offering our love. Feel it in the breath right now. Let your heart feel touched and breathing out. Let go into this field of compassion, widening circles. Mark Nippo writes,

We cannot eliminate hunger, but we can feed each other. We cannot eliminate loneliness, but we can hold each other. We cannot eliminate pain, but we can live a life of compassion. Namaste. and blessings to each. Thank you. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington,

please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.