Tara Brach - Feeling Gratitude, Giving Love (2015-11-25)

Episode Date: November 28, 2015

Feeling Gratitude, Giving Love - Thanksgiving 2015 (2015-11-25) - Like breathing in and breathing out, gratitude and generosity allow us to live fully. This talks explores what blocks these natural capacities, and three pathways of nourishing a grateful and giving heart.   Tara's website: www.tarabrach.com Join Tara’s email list: http://eepurl.com/6YfI - get a free download of Tara’s new 10 min meditation: “Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease”. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With thanks and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrak.com. Namaste and welcome. A Bengali meditation teacher, a Munindraji, was asked how come he meditated and his response was so that I can see the tiny purple flowers on the edge of the road as I go into the village square. And Menendurgy's basic teaching really is quite simple. Live the life fully. And that's the gift. Live the life fully.

And there really are two qualities of heart and awareness that express that, that fullness of living, that connect directly to breathing. and the breathing in, that receiving of the breath connects with gratitude, that when we have the capacity to really take in, when there's that quality of porousness and availability and receptivity, there's a profound appreciation for this living world in all its messiness and mystery.

So that's the breathing in, its gratitude. and then the breathing out, when we can breathe that freely, really let go, that's generosity, that we're able to offer our love and our creativity into this wider world. So we'll be exploring these qualities. I sometimes think of them, if you think of a flowing river, and then you imagine it's moving beautifully, it's fed by mountain streams, it empties itself into the sea, see that's those two qualities and when we're not flowing, when instead there's this kind

of little pool that collects by the side of the river and it's got all those barriers of rocks and whatever, it gets a bit stagnant, that's when we're not receiving and feeling that gratitude and giving and feeling that generosity. So we'll explore both what stops us, you know, take a little bit of time of what closes down these natural capacities of giving and receiving and what can cultivate them. And just to say, if you Google for the benefits of generosity and gratitude, you'll find that there's a huge and ever-growing body of research on it. So I won't even say much because there's nothing at all fresh really and what I know about

except that the key features are that when people are put under MRIs and they're in some way investigating the quality of generosity or gratitude, the left prefrontal cortex lights up is activated and the limbic system is deactivated. There's really a sense of well-being. Happiness is correlated with both gratitude and generosity. And if you think of the happiest person you know, I mean, just take a moment and think of somebody you know that's really happy and let that person come to mind and ask yourself, is this person a being who experiences a lot of gratitude?

Does this person have a natural kind of generosity? I think what we find is what we intuitively know that that's just, it's intrinsic to happiness. Now, in addition to the fact that it's Thanksgiving evening and I tend to like to talk about these subjects on Thanksgiving evening as do most people around, it's on our mind, it also feels like in a really important time to be exploring what blocks the heart and what awakens the heart, given the events of the world right now.

I think we're all somewhat kind of plugged in or alerted to what's going on, the sense of, especially in this last week, the full spectrum of responses to the violence in Paris and before that, Beirut, the whole spectrum of seeing, I read about in the New York Times one or somewhere one couple from Canada who like so many of us when they saw that photo of Ilan Kurdi the young refugee boy who was killed and found dead on the beach

in Turkey when they heard about that they cancelled their wedding and they just collected take all the money that would have gone to that wedding and sponsored a Syrian refugee family, this in Canada. And Canada, as many of you know, is keeping its pledge to take in 25,000 refugees by the end of the year. So we see that, and we see how many have been moved.

You know, we hear stories all around of just the beautiful kindnesses that have been extended. And then we also see how, in this country, the United States, how many out of fear are wanting to close the doors to those that are most vulnerable, close the doors that are running from the same violence that took the lives in Paris. There's a quote from one editorial that the Statue of Liberty must be crying in shame. So we ask, you know, what happens that our hearts close, what happens when our hearts open? and there is some powerful common denominator that when we tighten up,

whether it's personally or as a society, it's because of the alarm set off by fear. And we know that, that when we're stressed and fearful, the primitive survival brain overrides, the more recently evolved part of our brain that is capable of empathy and capable of caring and mind-rength, and capable of making good decisions.

We don't make good decisions when we're reacting from our limbic system. It just doesn't happen. We kind of know that. So, it's important to say that fear is intelligent. That our nervous systems would not be wired with fear if it wasn't basic to survival. So fear is a messenger and we need to pay attention. But there's a real difference between fear being a messenger

and fear taking over and running the show. So there's fear. And the signs of fear, when we lock into unreal other, when we get afraid, instead of being able empathically, our mirror neurons are no longer activated. We can't really sense the other as a subjective being.

Other becomes more unreal, a threat out there. And it's only when someone is unreal that we can kill them or hurt, them. As soon as they become real to us, we can't violate them. So they become unreal. Personally in our lives we know that when we get resentful or blaming, even people very, very close to us all of a sudden become unreal and we forget all the things about them that are dimensional and they just in some way for that time being become the enemy and it can

be really harsh or it can be very much more low-key where there's kind of that inner-crime critic that is externalized that that person becomes a critic and we know in some level we create a distance and there becomes a sense of bad. I was thinking about criticism because that's so much the key for so many of us that as soon as there's judgment, as soon as we feel judged, others become unreal to us. So my background is Jewish. who I grew up Unitarian, but somebody sent me this Jubu, Jewish Buddhism sheet. I thought I'd read you from a few of these little Jubu comments.

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated? There's a few of these. I'm going to try to pick out just a couple. Oh, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Forget this, an attaining enlightenment will be the least of your problems. Let your mind be a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with a posture like that.

Here's one of my favorites. To find the Buddha look within. Deep inside you are 10,000 flowers. Each flower blossoms 10,000 times. Each blossom has 10,000 petals. You might want to see a specialist. Do I do that right? Do I have it?

So there's the judgment peace that can turn into a very deep, deep aggression and aversion, we move around with fears of mistake or failure or rejection and then that of course not only are we judging others, we end up locking into attacking ourselves. And again, this is, what are the fears that have us close our hearts? Okay? The fear, one is that leads us to make others wrong, but we also spend a lot of time with our hearts closed because we're attacking ourselves. And I can, if I asked you to look through today or yesterday and you sensed the periods where you were down on yourself

and you look close, you sense where those were times or moments when there was not a particular degree of tenderness towards your world. We turn on ourselves. We should be doing more, producing more, looking better, parenting better. One of my favorite prayers is, dear God, so far today I've done all right. I haven't gossip, been greedy, mean grumpy, nasty, selfish or overindulgent, and I'm very thankful for that. But in a few minutes, God, I'm going to get out of bed. From then on, I'm going to need a lot of help.

So the deepest truths are the ones we forget regularly. And one of them is, if we are in secure and turned on ourselves, like, uh-oh, I'm going to fail, something's wrong. We can't hold the world in a loving way. Love gets cut off when we're caught in judgment. It creates separation. So, okay, so what else blocks our heart? The other side of it, okay, we get blocked from fear. We also get blocked from grasping, that sense that I need more, something's missing. I need more money, I need more approval, I need more attention, I need better clothes, when there's that I have to have feeling, in those moments we're not feeling that tenderness. Again, the limbic systems hijacked us and we can't really be relating in a kindly way. It's like that

story of the, when a pickpocket sees a saint, he or she only sees the saint's pocket. understand? So when we're grasping, even when it's like you know you want to go and get that next bowl of ice cream but somebody's trying to talk to you, it's like our attention gets narrowed, our mind gets smaller. So you can see it on a societal level, what happens with the society's grasping for ever-increasing consumption, what it does to the earth. We lose our attunement and care about the earth.

We exploit the Earth's resources. Our carbon footprint is basically covering the whole Earth. And when you think of what's really happening out of overconsumption, overdoing, overproducing, we're killing our coral reefs. They're getting completely bleached out. The Amazon, half the trees in the Amazon are considered to be endangered. Half the species of trees there.

It blinds us to the needs of our planet. And then if we look on the personal level, to the degree that we grew up with unmet needs to be attached and feel really good bonding with another, to feel safe, connected, and nourished, we end up fixating on substitutes to try to prove ourselves. So when we're moving through life and we're trying to get the approval or the recognition, again, there's not that open-heartedness. So I bring this up because if we're honest with ourselves, when we talk about gratitude, often when we say, oh, I'm so glad da-da-da-da, it's not a visceral tender feeling of deep receptivity.

It's a little more mental. And when we give, it's often a giving that comes out of a kind of complex computation, but not that flowing. and one of the descriptions, this bit of research that I read that I thought was really pertinent, had to do with a man who was observing rat pups playing and he described how he watched them for several days playing and the kind of frolicing and the abandon and the fun of it. And then after four days he introduced what he called the minimally threatening strategy stimulus, which was a hair from a cat, a hair.

And he only left it in the cage for 24 hours one hair from a cat. And what happened? Well, when the cat hair was there, they completely stopped playing. And even after it was removed, the play never returned to the level that it was at before. And so the researcher says, so where is that cat hair in your life right now? Like what's going on in our psyche in any moment that's keeping us in some way anxious about how we're going to do in the future or anxious about how people are going to be relating to us, or feeling we have to get something more to be okay?

Because if we don't recognize the fear or the grasping, we have no way to wake up out of its grip and open up. open our hearts. So I'd like to take the rest of our time and explore the practices that directly help us wake up out of that clenching, that grip, so that we actually can breathe in and recognize the beauty that's around us and the dearness of somebody that we care about. so we can really breathe in and appreciate. And so we can really breathe out and feel a sense of a natural, spontaneous wanting to share and give of ourselves.

And the three are going to be simply learning to be with or love what is, just open ourselves to what's right here, loving what is, remembering what we love, and the third is expressing our love. Those are the three pathways. and we're going to do a practice with each of them so you'll just keep on being experiential. So the first one, loving what is starts really with being with what is. When we say loving what is, you can't love what is unless you actually just stay for a bit. And in the staying in that presence there becomes a natural tenderness, a natural engagement.

So this is the grounds of mindfulness. when I say loving what is, really that's the training that we do as our core practice here in this class and that's usually described as mindfulness training. And it has two wings or two questions. And one is, what's happening right now? So we begin to befriend what's here if you close your eyes and just ask that question. What is happening right this moment inside me? and you start paying attention with that question.

You start contacting what's here, whether it's a feeling of sleepiness or restlessness or excitement or peace or light or clenching. We start getting honest with the moment. That's the first question. And the second question is, can I be with this? Can I let this be? And that's a heart question

where we're offering some space to what's here. what is happening and can I be with this? And the gift of the training of this mindful presence is really simple that when we stop pushing away the moment and we stop grabbing on trying to make it a certain thing when we let the moment be just as it is, all of a sudden space unfolds. It's almost like we relax open into the space of awareness

and the moment can play itself however it is, but the what we are is larger. There's some space. There's the real freedom in not trying to make the moment different. This is a story that Kurt Vonnegut told. He was at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, and he was talking to Joseph Heller,

who many of you know as a writer, And a famous novelist, Catch 22. So anyway, this is what Kurt said. He said, I said, Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel Catch22's earned in its entire history? And Joe said, I've got something he can never have. And I said, what on earth could that be, Joe? And Joe said, the knowledge that I've got enough.

Kurt Vonnegut in saying, not bad, rest in peace. That is freedom that this moment's enough. You know, most moments, if we're honest with ourselves, we're trying to get somewhere else or make something different or avoid something. Really, pay attention. In the moments that there's no grasping or not trying to make something happen and there's no resisting a space opened up that lets the light of awareness and love shine through

enough so that is one inquiry and practice just simply this presence and we'll just take a moment to dip in if you will just to close your eyes and we're going to apply this this presence to a particular situation in your life

So start right where you are with those two questions, what's happening right this moment inside me and can I be with this or let this be? You can let the breath support you in presence breathing in and allowing yourself to totally feel and receive the moment. Just this, just this

and breathing out and sensing that you can just let go look over whatever's right here, let it be held in the space of presence, the vastness that's around you. Now, bringing up to mind a relationship with someone in your life that includes love and also judgment and reminding yourself of what it's like when you're feeling judgmental about this person. What you're judging, how it feels to judge, and keep breathing in and out with that. Just notice the experience how your body feels, your heart, your mind when judgment's here. And just let it be.

Bring to mind what you appreciate about this person, something you really appreciate. And still, keep breathing. Noticing as you breathe in and as you breathe out how your body and your heart your mind feel when you're appreciating. As you continue to breathe in and out, let both be here. Let both the sense of the judgment and the appreciation be included. And just sense the presence that's aware of these different mind states, the presence that can notice them, the presence that can allow them, the presence that can include all of this person,

that which you judge and that which you appreciate in awareness. Notice what it's like. right this moment to not want anything different, to not resist, to not control. Just notice, who are you when there's no grasping, no resisting? What does it really mean to say enough? Yes to what's right here. So this is pathway number one, discovering the heart space

that can open to whatever's here, not pushing away, not grasping, discovering that equanimity and freedom and space of enough. Take a few full breaths, you're welcome to open the eyes if you'd like. Or you can sit with your eyes closed. Okay, so part two, remembering what we love. Now the challenge of daily life as many of us know is what we call the negativity bias, which is that we have a habit of fixating on what's wrong. And it's survival apparatus from way, way back, that we've carried in

so that we scan the day and we were preparing for things that can, ways we could fail or what to worry about. Some of you will remember one of the first jokes in my family was of a mother sending a telegram to her son saying, start worrying details to follow, you know. So, but we know how it is, that every day the niggling ways that life doesn't cooperate and we fixate on them and they tighten us and these really dumb little things keep us from appreciation. Have you ever noticed the effect of just waiting in line at a post office?

How hard is it to feel that sense of enough and that openheartedness? Or breaking a nail or realizing you've run out of a favorite cereal or drink just when you were ready to have it? It's like we know one friend says we're Velcro for what can go wrong and Teflon for what goes right. We just hold on. There's a linguistics professor who was lecturing his class one day, and he said in English, two negatives make a positive. And he continued, but in some languages, for instance, Russian, two negatives still remain a negative.

However, he said there's no language wherein two positives can make a negative. and then there's a voice in the back of the room that goes, yeah, right. So we can, this is our conditioning, this negativity bias, and so it becomes a really important practice to decondition that by remembering what we love. It's really an important practice. There's a lot of emphasis on suffering,

especially if you're studying with the Buddhists, which is important because we're getting real with what's there, and it's not enough to suffer as Ticknodhan says, you also have to touch peace. You really do. So we need to remember what we love. The Buddha said, whatever you frequently dwell on, to that, the mind will be inclined.

So it's the neuropathways that are strengthened, whatever highways your thought travels, there's more and more inclination for your thoughts to travel that way. So we can choose what we pay attention to. You can choose. In the loving-kindness practice we actively start paying attention to the others in our life and sensing the goodness, sensing what we appreciate. What a beautiful thing.

That was the only practice you ever did to train yourself to look at others and see the goodness, see the light. One friend I was talking to today said, just find one thing you appreciate. just really notice that. It's really beautiful. It's what Thomas Merton says, see the secret beauty that shines through. And more broadly, gratitude is that expanded capacity to be able to take in and appreciate the beautiful, mysterious creativity of this life around us. I have a favorite meditation that I do whenever I have a chance and if you've come to any of my day long as you've done it with me.

And it has, it's where we ask each other, please tell me, what do you love? And we ask it and we ask it and we ask it the same question. And we're going to be practicing that in just a moment. But it's amazing. You know, it's what we come up with. It's not complex. It's actually very simple things.

Like right now the full moon. You know, I love seeing the full moon. seeing the night sky, seeing the skeleton of the trees the way they reach up to the heavens when the leaves fall. So, part of cultivating gratitude is to be on the alert, to intend to notice, to go for a walk and intend to notice, or to be with someone you haven't been with that regularly and intend to notice. There's tricks, like when something strikes you and you.

you appreciate it, to stay and breathe 10 breaths, what they say 10 breaths of taking in the good, just breathe in and just sense yourself taking it. It entrains the brain. It actually teaches the brain how to appreciate. So, Kurt Vonnegut again, when things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause for a moment and then say out loud, if this isn't nice, what is? one of my favorite stories.

This is about Kabir, not the poet Kabir, but a shoemaker and named Kabir. And as he worked, he'd always repeat the mantra, Ram, Ram, Ram, which is a word for the sacred or God or the divine. But day in, day out, for 20 years, he'd just work and say Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram. And finally one day Ram appeared and Kabir said, who are you? And Ram said, I'm Ram. And Kabir said, well, why are you here?

And Rahm said, well, you've been calling on me all these years. I figured about time to appear. And what do you want? And then Kabir said, well, I really don't want anything. And so Ram said, well, why have you been repeating my name then? So Kabir said, I just love repeating your name. So for the years to come, wherever Kabir would go, he'd be followed by the by Rahm and the sound Kabir, Kabir.

gratitude. So let's practice a little bit together, okay? Again, when you pause, take a moment to come into stillness and connect with being here. Start with that first one of loving what is, just opening yourself to the moment. Feel your breath,

feel this body breathing. I'm going to be asking you the question. Please tell me what you love. And every time I ask you the question, just let whatever comes to mind come to mind and whisper it. And don't worry, everybody else will be whispering too so you won't be bothering them. And then we'll just pause and let that settle for a bed and I'll ask you the exact same question again. So this is, you give yourself the gift of just letting whatever comes to mind come to mind.

It might be, if I was doing it I might say, you know, I love feeling the ocean waves, I love being in the ocean and feeling the ocean waves. Then I might say, I love silence, I love real silence. Then I might say, I love chocolate, velvet ice cream. And then I might say, I love my son Narayan. And it might be whatever comes to mind. It could be from sushi to God consciousness, it doesn't matter, okay? Whatever comes to mind.

Okay, so again, quiet for a moment. Please tell me what do you love? Don't be shy, whisper it. Thank you. Please tell me what do you love, thank you. Please tell me what do you love? Thank you. Please tell me what do you love thank you.

Please tell me what do you love, thank you. And whispering a little louder now, please tell me, what do you love? Feel your heart whispering, thank you. Thank you. Please tell me what do you love? Thank you. Please tell me what do you love?

Thank you. And now bringing to mind one thing that you whispered that really resonates deeply, which is one thing, one person or experience, and take some moments to feel very directly what it is that brings up that feeling of loving, what makes it you really appreciate that person or experience. What is it about that? Letting the loving be as big and full as it really is, the gratitude, the appreciation, that you can feel it through your whole body, your whole energy body. And just sense how inclusive and vast that sense of appreciation and love really is, how much it includes of this

life. And sensing who you are when completely open to and fill. filled with loving appreciation, sensing the light and space and awareness and tenderness. That's really essence. Taking a few full breaths, coming back by opening your eyes. There are many, many ways to practice gratitude. Some people like to do a gratitude, have a journal and just do a gratitude list. Some people have gratitude buddies where they'll just eat. at the end of the day and you don't have to even be conversational, just naming three things

from the day that you appreciate. And as I mentioned earlier, there's so much research on the power of remembering what we appreciate to change our moods, moods that have been really locked in, to really uplift a sense of well-being. So there's loving what is, there's remembering what we love, and then there's expressing what we love, our expressing, our appreciation. There was one nun from hundreds of years ago in Japan. Her name was Ono and her mantra was, thank you for everything, I have no complaints whatsoever. And people supposedly got enlightened with that one. And so I remember when my son was young, Narayan was young, his nickname was King Kavetch because he just, you know. So I remember teaching him that story

about this nun whose mantra was, thank you for everything, I have no complaints whatsoever. And soon after I told him that little story, we were on our way to the dentist and on the beltway in traffic, and I was really tense and saying some things I shouldn't be saying. And he nudged me, said, Mom, thank you for everything. I have no complaints whatsoever.

So I remember that one over and over again as a great mantra. expressing our gratitude, expressing our love. It actually activates the motor cortex so it makes the love that's here more full-flowering when we actually say the words, I love you, or say thank you, or express it. Now, there's three... This is generosity.

This is giving out to the world, what's there inside us, the breathing out. And there are three classic levels of generosity. in the Buddhist tradition. One is where you're giving something but it's really nothing to you. It's leftovers, it's spare change. The second is when you're giving something you'd actually enjoy to have for yourself, but you're giving it.

There may be some computations that go with it, but you're giving it. And the third is called kingly giving, which is that spontaneity where it's just a flow-through. It's just out of care. It's like, I'm not giving to you. It's just the love that's flowing through, and we're really an us, okay? That's kingly giving.

And there's a wonderful story, I think it's from Japan. Let me see if I have it with me. Yeah, Tetsugan, a devoted Zen practitioner, lived in the 1600s. He decided to publish the sutras, the discourses of the Buddha, and they were only available in Chinese, so he wanted to print them in Japanese. It would take the construction of 60,000 wood blocks to accomplish this. So he began collecting donations and took years, but he finally got a significant sum of money of gold

because he was only getting little coins. He thanked everybody with equal gratitude, whatever level they gave. Ten years, he had enough to begin his task, but at that time the Uji River overflowed, and crops were ruined and famine followed. So he took all the funds he collected from the books, and he spent them. to save people from starvation.

And then he began collecting money again. So he goes several years after the epidemic spread through the country. He collected it all. He got enough, but then an epidemic spread through the country. And once again, he gave away everything he collected. So this was two rounds. The third time he started his work, and after 20 years his wish was fulfilled,

and the printing blocks that were produced, created the first edition of sutures that can now be seen in the, Obaku monastery in Kyoto. The Japanese tell their children that Tsatsugan made three sets of sutras and that the first two invisible sets surpass even the last. He celebrated the January 1st of each year. It's really the human spirit that comes through in our giving, that there's a sense of knowing

our belonging to others and to the world around us. us and it naturally flows through us to give in that way, in this kingly way. It's wired into us. It's natural to give, children give, children share. And yet because of, as we've talked about, the habits of fear and grasping, it takes practice. And it's okay to practice. It's okay to have it be outside in, just to get the habit of it, because it kind of wakes up a place in us that's absolutely sincere and naturally loving.

Last summer, a woman shared a story that I wanted to share with you tonight about her brother and her father. Now, her father was never able to communicate his love for his children. She found out later that he did love them, but he never could communicate it. When her brother was dying of brain cancer, his wife told her that the only thing missing for for her brother in his whole life was that her father, their father, had never said, I love you. It was the only thing missing for him.

Other than that, he was at peace with his life. So this woman called up her father and really encouraged him and he made a visit and when he got home she said, did you say it? And he said, well, you know, the subject never really came up. Then a month later she got the call and it seemed that this was it. This was probably, her brother would probably die and it would probably die and it would an hour. So again she called her father and said, you know, Daddy, you have one chance. And Jay will probably die today. Please pick up the phone. Just tell him that you love him.

And here's what she wrote. She said, Daddy did just that. He called Jay and told him that he loved him. And Jay, who hadn't spoken for a week, started talking and talked to Daddy for a half hour. And Jay didn't even die that day. He rallied and lived. for another month during which time they had many conversations that were tender and caring. Generosity heals. Simone Weill says that attention is the rarest, purest form of generosity, our attention alone, because that's what the love flows through. So there are many different ways of giving.

We give our pure attention just saying, I'm here. I'm just with you. We can give our sight that we can remind another person of their goodness. That's a beautiful way of giving. We can give our thanks and we can name out loud our loving. On thanks, I love this from Meister Eckart, he says, if the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is thank you that would suffice. a beauty to expressing. So I'd like to have our final meditation now and just to say that

when we give from our heart, whether it's saying thank you or I love you, are you have so much light and beauty and I can feel it or I care, I'm keeping you company, I know you're suffering, whatever our giving is, it's a blessing. And the meaning of the word blessing It's an offering that helps another come back home to their wholeness. It creates something that's holy in that moment in our giving. So this is a very simple meditation on generosity, on giving our blessings to others. So take a moment if you've been sitting still, find a way of adjusting and sitting in a position that's comfortable. and we begin as we've been practicing this evening with the simplicity of the breath.

Just breathing in and feeling with the in-breath that you are receiving this life. You're letting yourself be nourished by the prana, the life in the breath, and with the out-breath that letting go, releasing, dissolving outward into the space around you. And letting the breath be felt at the heart. just feeling heart space, breathing in like those mountain streams that pour into the river and breathing out, emptying out into the space around you, sensing the heart space, that tenderness that this life is flowing through. And from that heart space bringing to mind someone, a loved one,

that's very easy for you to feel a loving connection with. A person could be alive or not alive, close by, not close by, but just to feel that presence of that being close in right now, sensing what it is that arouses that sense of loving. What are the qualities? It might be the way that person shows or gives love to you. It might be a sense of the aliveness or brightness in that person's eyes, that person's way of feeling wonder, mischievousness, kindness,

just sensing yourself receiving and feeling the goodness of that person and giving out your care by simply mentally whispering thank you. And you might say the person's name and say thank you a few times, feel how that lights up the heart space. to just give that blessing of thank you to another, a heartfelt thank you. And then bringing to mind a person you care about who's in difficulty. And as you breathe in, letting yourself be touched by the person's vulnerability, what that person is dealing with,

and let it move through your heart and out, just feeling care, pouring out care. Ticknod Hahn says when we feel compassion, it's like we can say to a person, darling, I care about that. the suffering. You might mentally whisper something to this dear one, offering your attention, your care, I'm with you right now. Whatever words resonate as an offering of a blessing of presence and feel how that lights up the heart to be able to offer your care and your presence. And then finally, one of the great blessings we offer is to be a mirror of goodness, to bring to mind someone in your life that you see regularly.

that you know would be nourished by feeling your appreciation of their good qualities, somebody you care about, that could use that feeling of being appreciated. And just imagine letting that person know what you see in him or her or them, sense what it would be like for that person to receive your appreciation. Be aware of how that lights the heart space up. to offer a blessing and that in the next 24 hours, in the days and weeks to come, you can practice offering blessings as much as this comes to mind and find that this heart space is boundless.

We close in a simple way, just feeling the breath again, breathing in and sensing yourself receiving light, love, aliveness, breathing out, offering your heart, your being into this world. And we'll close with a poem from Mary Oliver who writes, My work is loving the world. My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird, equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast, there the blue plums.

Here are the clam deep in the speckled sand. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished, which is gratitude,

to be given a mind and a heart and these body clothes and a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all over and over how it is that we live forever. My work is loving the world. My work is loving the world.

Namaste and thank you for your attention. We hope you've enjoyed these teachings for more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule and special online offerings, please join my email list by visiting tarabrock.com.