Tara Brach - Flowering, From Within, of Self-Blessing

Episode Date: March 14, 2012

2012-03-14 - Flowering, From Within, of Self-Blessing - This line from poet Galway Kinnell reminds us of the possibility of meeting our inner life with a loving, healing presence. When we do, we loosen the trance of unworthiness and reconnect with our intrinsic goodness. In turn, we can offer our blessings to others--serving as reminders of the awareness and love that can blossom in all beings. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Imagine if even 10% of listeners gave $10 a month? The audio could be self-supporting!

Ten years ago or so, I was completing the book Radical Acceptance. And this was around the time that yoga and meditation, I think of yoga as a form of meditation, were beginning to really gain some acceptance. There was more and more around in the culture that was saying, oh, this has benefits. So even though, and against the currents in some ways, there was more of an embrace. And I remember somebody's sending to me this little cartoon, and it had a group of bats, and they're all hanging from the top of a cave. And they discover a single bat is standing below them on the floor of the cave. So they're surprised, of course, by this unusual behavior.

And they ask, well, what's wrong with you? You know, what are you doing down there? And the standing bat answers, yoga. And, of course, in the meditation community, there was always that phrase, don't just. do something, sit there. You know, just it goes against this culture that is so active, so busy. And it's gotten a lot more, again, over this last 10, 15 years, very much a part of the culture. So that now the message that we explore so often, you find in the psychotherapy world,

in education, and other domains, which is simply, if we want to be happy, if we want to have some real clarity, if we want to have some real peace, we need to learn how to come into the present moment. That's simple. And that is really huge and radical. And it's actually something that no longer sounds so wild, so exotic. It's like, yeah, okay. There's a message that this begins with our inner life. We have to come into the present moment and be able to be with what's here. People go, yeah, that sounds right. And then there's that message of being with what here means being with what's here with some sense of presence and kindness. And people go, yeah, that sounds good. And it is so difficult for so, for many of us to actually come into the

moment and regard our inner life with a quality of compassion. It's so difficult. So that, of course, spurred me on to that was the reason I wrote radical acceptance was this recognition of the pervasive suffering in this culture and in others of being at war with ourselves of really not being able to be at home with our inner life so instead of presence what we find when we begin to really check is that either we're ignoring, you know, our loneliness or our sorrow. We're ignoring the fact that we're feeling really insecure or alienated. So there's a neglect or ignoring or else there's a judgment. There's an undercurrent of this means that I'm flawed in some way. Sometimes it's an actual aggression towards ourselves, a violence towards ourselves. But the

basic core sense is often that I'm not okay as I am. So at the beginning of radical acceptance for those of you that didn't read it, I shared a story that touched me deeply. A woman was sitting with her mother when she was in a coma dying and at one point her mother opened her eyes and was completely lucent. It was the first time in weeks and said, you know, all my life I thought that something was wrong with me. And then she closed her eyes and went back into a coma and died shortly after. So for this woman, it was actually a dying gift.

It was a wake-up for her to recognize how by always feeling something was wrong with her, her mother had not lived fully. She hadn't really blossomed into the fullness of who she was. She was kept kind of dampened down. caged in some way by her beliefs. So seeing that actually gave this woman a resolve. And it has become, you know,

it seems very compelling to me that how we pay attention to ourselves determines in a very deep way the quality of our well-being. And it's springtime right now. And we're seeing all around us, especially those of us in this, part or this climate, we're seeing how sun and warmth, how light and warmth brings out the blossoms. And it's the same way when the light and warmth of our awareness is directed to our own being or to each other, it brings out the beauty, the goodness, the wholeness.

So this is what I'd like to explore tonight, is this quality of attentiveness that allows us to blossom. And there's a wonderful poem that many of you might be familiar with by Galway Canal. It's called St. Francis and the sow. And one line

he says, for everything flowers from within of self-blessing. For everything flowers from within of self-blessing. That this spirit wakes up as we offer the blessing of our attention.

And that's a possibility for every one of us. This was the Buddha's essential teaching and promise. That enlightenment wasn't something that some guy did 25 plus 100 years ago. That it's the natural quality of mind. The essence of mind is this radiance and this expression of loving. And that when we offer the blessing of our attention, attention. It's not like right away we just, you know, explode into this luminosity, but in time, we decondition these beliefs and feelings that something's wrong. We kind of start letting go.

And that frees us to blossom. So we'll look at that a bit tonight. I found very useful in teaching radical acceptance the term the trance of unworthiness because it draws attention to how much we're at war with ourselves. And what I often like to do, and we can just do it for fun tonight, is to say how many of you do feel that you judge yourselves too much. And we just, don't be shy.

Just I like to look around. It's somewhat, somewhat reassuring, just like, okay, so we're all on the same boat. And yet what we don't recognize is how much it's happening and the impact on our bodies of kind of keeping us tight because when we're judging ourselves, if we think something's wrong,

then there's a bit more of the fight-flight going on. We have to protect and defend. And we find out that when we look around, we're not aware that we're doing it, but if we start looking at any moment in our life when we're stressed, often the undercurrent is, I'm falling short. You can just even reflect right now.

just for a moment, any situation in your life right now that's bringing up emotional difficulty. If in some way you're facing something that you're really afraid of that's going to happen, or you're in a conflict with somebody, are you dealing with a great loss, you're angry about something. If you check into that situation and ask yourself, well, how am I relating to myself? It's the kind of attention I'm paying to my inner life in this situation. And often we find it's not a kindly accepting presence. We've added on to the situation, I'm in some way not doing a good job with this.

I'm falling short. This shouldn't be happening. Now often we've riveted our blame on someone else too. I'm not saying we don't blame outward, but there's usually some undercurrent of something's not okay with me. And if you bring your attention to any situation where you're just feeling uncomfortable with another person. Let's say there's somebody in your life you're aware of feeling really uncomfortable with. And if you have someone in mind, and by the way, when I ask you to do these reflections, it's quite natural that for some of you, things won't jump into your consciousness right away.

But if you have someone in mind that makes you uncomfortable or you feel uncomfortable with, and then you check underneath you'll sense often underneath that discomfort is the sense that I'm falling short something's wrong with me I'm not worthy I'm going to be judged

when we're stressed at work what's the worry I'm going to fall short I'm not going to perform so what I've found for myself I'm asking you to kind of check out your experience is that the times that I feel

most stressed, most in a bad mood. When I dig under a little bit under the surface, what I find is that on some level I've latched onto the notion of feeling like I'm not enough that I'm falling short. And then we say, well, what's the genesis of this? How does this happen? That it's so pervasive, this kind of insecurity.

And in an existential way, all organisms are worried about survival. So all organisms are wired to anticipate that something's going to go wrong so that they can defend and protect and aggress. So there's a perception of separation and some sense that something's going to go wrong. Now, that can either be modulated, let's say for humans, if we have in our family, in our tribe, in our culture, a very deeply ingrained sense of belonging. That feeling of something's wrong gets modulated.

We still know how to call on fight-flight, but it does not override some basic sense of okayness or belonging. But that's usually not the case. For most of us, we would say, at least in this culture and in our families as messenger of the culture, the sense of not belonging actually gets exacerbated. And so there's something's wrong with me feeling, gets very locked in.

And sometimes it happens in real horrific ways through trauma and abuse, but often it's quieter ways, so we can't even always put our finger on it. Where in some way there was an expectation that we'd be successful in a certain way, or we got compared to our siblings, or, you know, father's disappointment that the son's not an athlete or the son's told you're being too needy.

If we got the word needy, that's the swamp of shame right there. Okay. So the consequence is there's some message that comes through family that be different. And if you're different and you meet certain standards of being attractive or smart or behave well, you're not too loud or not too shy, whatever, then you'll be accepted. So we have hoops to jump through. And then of course in our culture, it's very competitive and we have to meet standards there, whether it's to feel like we're okay at school. And that rules out a lot of people that have different learning styles. To belong to sports team or to belong to a social group or a spiritual group, we still have these

ideas of standards that we're supposed to meet. Our culture idolizes those that have power and status and wealth and certain kinds of intelligence or beauty or whatever. And a huge majority don't make that mark. So there's this undercurrent of not really so great, not really belonging. And then our culture perpetuates it by serving those that have the power and the privilege and maintaining the separation between the haves and the have-nots. And it does it in all sorts of ways, but the way I'll mention right now, is that it directly alienates and oppresses the underclasses. And brands people's psyche with something's wrong.

Something's wrong if you're poor. It's your fault. You're not working hard enough. I was reading in the New York Times on Monday on the opinion page, an article that said, Are Black men born suspects? And it was written by, this is by Neil Franklin,

who's had a 34-year-old career with the Maryland State Police and the Baltimore Police Department. He writes this. He says, 53% of black boys never finish high school. Among those who drop out, 60% end up spending time behind bars. And this, by the way, matches the national statistics.

I just take that 60% 60% behind bars. A teen being arrested is a right of passage. That one brought tears. The being arrested is a right of passage. Your belonging is to a gang that behaves in a certain way and you just land up getting arrested. He writes this.

He says many schools treat kids as suspect from the moment they walk in the door making them pass through metal detectors or administering urine tests as a condition of joining after school clubs. Cops move about the school like prison guards. It's like we're conditioning them for a life of incarceration. Now let's just bring this to what we're talking about tonight. We have a pervasive sense of not good enough. Well look how the branding happens for elements of this society that are in some way through the institutions of society being kept down. not good enough.

So how we solidify the trance of not good enough. It's important that we see it in our own behavior and psyche, that underneath that feeling is a sense of shame and a sense of fear. And so we try to control our life so we don't have to live in that. And we do it in two ways. And one of the ways we do it is we're trying to always fix ourselves. And you'll notice it in yourselves, this kind of perpetual self-improvement project.

There's this idea I'm on this kind of track and I'm trying to get better and better, you know, to not be worse and worse, to not be unworthy. So we try to fix the problem, and we try to do it by winning over others. It makes us not just competitive in a healthy gaming way, it becomes really important to be better than others, to help soothe our sense of not enough.

and that can lead to kind of blaming or putting others down and it becomes really good to keep accomplishing so we're accomplishing just to have a growing staff stack of accomplishments not out of a generative, creative, serviceful productivity and then in some ways we present ourselves and again this to me is something

that often gets me really sad when I sense how we leave our spontaneity in our naturalness and feel like we have to present a certain kind of person. And if you look, it's very interesting to see how many moments when you're with somebody, how what you're doing and saying is in some way being shaped to get the others' approval, have the other's affection. So this trance of unworthiness leads us to a kind of fear-based manipulating. example, a man walks into the produce section of his local supermarket and asks to buy a half

a head of lettuce. The young man working at that department said, well, we only sell whole heads of lettuce. But the man was really insistent. So the young guy goes into the back to ask his manager about the matter. He walks up to his manager and says, you know, some jerk wants to buy half a head of lettuce. And as he finished his sentence, he turned to find the man standing right behind him. So he quickly added, and this gentleman kindly offered to buy the other half. So the manager approves the deal and the man goes on his way. And later the manager, he just goes to the employee. He said, you know, I was impressed with the way you got yourself out of that situation earlier. We like people who think on their feet here. Where are you from, son? Canada, sir, the young man replies. Well, why did you leave Canada? The manager asked, sir, there's nothing but horrors and hockey players up there. Really, sir. Really. said the manager. My wife is from Canada.

Really? Who did she play for, the young man for? Have you ever noted yourself adjusting what you're saying on the way? So one way that we try to control things so we don't, so we're not stuck in that sense of not okay, is we manipulate some. The second way is we directly remove ourselves. We dissociate from that feeling of not.

not okay. And the way we do that, and again I think this is pervasive, and I call these, as many of you know, false refuges, is we overconsume or oversleep, we get lost online or lost in mental obsessing. Okay, so we go through these routes of just pulling away from the unpleasantness itself. Now whether we're in some way manipulating and proving ourselves or just dulling and dissociating, these false refuges don't work. As you know, I like my favorite metaphors. It's like drinking salt water. It's like you're trying to relieve yourself and feel better about yourself or whatever.

And you get more hooked because as long as you're doing the false refuge, some part of you knows that it's coming from. from insecurity and it never relieves the insecurity. You don't in some way come to finally trust who you really are. You're always on that hamster wheel of trying to get away from something. George C. Scott, who was describing his, when he finally gets, he got success

at getting the attention he wanted, and then he writes this, he says, there's no question, you get pumped by the recognition. Then a self-loathing sets in when you realize you're enjoying, it, you know? Okay. So as long as there's this trance of unworthiness, we can't relax, because all our ways of soothing it don't really take care of that deep sense of not okay. Not only that, usually our false refuges are something we disapprove of inside. So we've added on to, it's not only are we, you know, doing the oversleeping or we're,

we've gone and bragged about ourselves, right? Something in us doesn't like ourselves. So there's a, I shouldn't do this or I should do that. There's a lot of shoulds and shouldn'ts when we're doing false refuges. Somebody sent me this cartoon of this bear at a fancy restaurant. He's saying, I shouldn't, but I'm going to have the garbage. It's a cute one if you want to see it. It's up here.

So we add on judgment and then there's this spiral of shame and you can see the pain of it, let's say with overeating, that there's a feeling of not good about yourself and then you kind of overeat to dull the not good feelings and then you feel bad about yourself for that and that deepens a sense of not okay and there's this called a spiral of shame. It's very painful. So just to sum up this portion, our cycles that we go through of the belief of what's wrong with me and the feelings that go with it and then the activities we do to try to in some way feel better about ourselves lock us in a very limited sense of self, a narrow sense of self. It's an identity that we really, when we're in it, do not trust.

remember what I often describe as that that radiance or that love that awareness that's really our essence we forget so this is this sense of we forget and what happens is you know it started very early on this forgetting is that when the unpleasantness would arise because it felt untolerable to feel I'm unlovable that was an intolerable feeling early on or intolerable I'm not worthy. The raw feeling of it. We in some way walled it off and we built a self, kind of a false self that was built on those walls to try to be somebody and not really have to feel the difficulty.

One of the understandings I found really useful when I think of this walling off of the deep, difficult parts of our early experience is thinking of a spore and what happens with a spore and you can see it in the plant kingdom that when times are harsh and what's needed to bloom, it can't be found in other words, the heat, the moisture, the light, certain plants become spores. And these plants dampen down and they wall off their life force

in order to survive. I keep just sensing the parallel to survive. we wall off the raw pain just to survive. And it's an effective strategy. And spores have been found in mummies. It's kind of interesting. They've been thousands of years old. And then they've been able to unfold into plants

when given the opportunity to nurture. Or they've been given nourishment. Okay, so this is, you know, when children are not listened to or when they're judged or when they're told, you know, you're really my person, you're supposed to be what I want you to be, and they lose touch with their own realness, you know. They're forced to shape themselves to get approval, and then they form spores, and they wall off the unlovable parts of themselves, and survival. It's frozen life energy. And yet, like the plant spores, we're opportunists, you know, and it's a life

force in waiting. There's this potential aliveness that's scanning the environment for the first opportunity to bloom. And so for those of us that are beginning to be aware of, oh, I've pushed away parts of myself, I've been judging myself, I've been ignoring myself, the opportunity to blossom comes when we begin to deepen attention in a kind way in any moment that we pause and we sense, okay so what's happening here and we begin to touch our experience with kindness we are sending in that light and warmth they can allow those walls to start dissolving they can allow resumed flow of aliveness and a more wholeness of presence that is the process the flags that let us know we have those walled off

places in us the flags are the ones that most of us have the ones that most of us have For many of us it's kind of speed and busyness. I often describe it as we're bicycling away from the present moment and we're bicycling fast. There's just something we're trying to get to and away from. That's one of the signs that there's some unlived life in there that's wanting attention. Other signs is the sense of incomplete, need to do something else for things to be okay, need to prepare more for something.

restless and then of course in a deep way something's wrong something's wrong so the practices of presence that we explore together are really the medicine that can allow us to blossom again it's this this is what i think that galway canal meant by self-blessing that we offer ourselves We offer a real gift to our soul when we learn to pause and deepen our attention with real kindness. And we start exactly where we are.

The whole teaching is start right where you are. If you know that there's a very compelling false refuge, okay, if you know that every day you get caught in a certain kind of obsessing, if you know you get caught in a certain kind of judging, are overconsuming,

are bragging, are procrastinating, or whatever. You know, we usually have a nice cluster of them. It's not just one, right? But whatever it is, that's a place to start. Start with where you sense you're running away. Start with where you notice there's a lot of controlling in some way or pretending.

I think the key to begin to offer self-blessings is our attitude. I mean, our tendency, as I mentioned, when we sense our false refuges, when we sense that we're doing it again, we've over-eatened again, or we've gotten critical or controlling, is that it kind of adds on to that weightiness

of not okay person. So we begin by sensing, okay, what's the attitude that's liberating? What's the attitude? I like very much the metaphor I've shared here a number of times. If you imagine you're going for a walk and you see a little dog standing under a tree,

and you go to pat the dog, and the little dog lunges at you, teeth-beared, you know, growling. And your first instinct is to pull back and be really angry. Like, you know, what? You know, here I was being friendly. And then you see that one of the dog's paws is in a trap. And in that moment, there's this real shift, because you've seen something.

You've seen a truth you weren't seeing. and that's what causes a shift. You've seen a truth that they're suffering and that that behavior was coming from suffering. It's the same with us. You know, whenever we're doing something that we're judging ourselves for, we are being compelled in some way

by some unmet need, by some fear, by something that is really painful. And if we can pause, the beginning, of self-blessing is that attitude that says, well, wait a second, there's something underneath. Let me get a larger truth on this. Can I see how in some way I've got one of my legs in a trap? Okay. You know, I think of these false refuges as decisions we made early on that, you know, okay, this is too much here. This is going to at least make it better for now. You know,

It's like the best decision that we could have in the moment, but then we get habituated. These neuropathways have kind of grooves that we just keep running the same decision over and over again to judge in the same way or obsess or blame or eat or sleep, whatever it is. So how can we look differently at these decisions? It's like some of you might remember this reporter Asset Bank president who's known in the business world, sir what's the secret to your success two words okay what are they right decisions and how do you make the right decisions one word and sir what is that experience and how do you get experience two words okay sir what are they wrong decisions so our experience is that we see these

patterns of ways that we seem to be caught in creating separation in our life, distance from others, distance from ourselves. And we go, okay, this is the false refuge, it's caused by some suffering. This is the place to deepen attention. This is the entry place. This is the gateway to freedom, to healing. So I do this with myself a lot. One of my, um, one of my false refuges is being over busy and kind of getting lost in that. And I'm sharing with you a current ongoing process I'm in where I watch myself over committing and being busy and underneath that if I investigate, there's this fear of letting people down. And it's, you know, I'm not living free from this thing of how do people relate to me.

I'm very much in this. I get caught in this psyche that wants everybody to be happy and everybody to feel taken care of and feel like I'm right there and I can't be and I'm not. And so, of course, I fixate on the places where I feel like I'm falling short. And then I overextend to try to, you know, make up for it. And, of course, that makes it worse. So more and more, both when requests come in and when I'm in the thick of my process, I'll just pause.

And just as I describe with that dog, when I'm in that kind of speediness or I'm defensive or I'm aggressive about something or irritated, I'll say, okay, what's going on? And underneath, there's that sense of falling short. I'm letting people down or in some way not meeting my own standards for being patient and generous and open and peaceful or whatever they are, you know. And if I can really see, and it's not just an idea, if I can really get the pain of falling short of that feeling, not just say, oh, trans of unworthiness, I got it, yeah, I'm there, but really feel like, gosh, how many moments of this life do I want to give to this feeling of not okayness? How much am I going to subscribe to this and how many life moments are not lived? are not loved because there's some sense of a not okay self, at times that will become poignant enough that I'll begin to then offer myself those blessings.

Oh, okay, I'm sorry. I love you. Let me be here with, you know, this inner part, the spore that's, you know, walled off. And then there'll be, then there's this energizing that comes and what happens is not like I feel like, oh, I'm not letting anyone down. I'm a great person.

It's not like a new identity. What happens is I see it as just an identity. And there's a resting in something larger that just trusts belonging and essential goodness. Awareness is here. Care is here. This is a pathway from being stuck in a trance of not okay

to coming home again into that openness and tenderness. and presence, it's really the source of what we are. Then we play out our roles, but it's with a much lighter touch, with a lot more humor, more spontaneity, a lot less of an obligation to try to be who others think we should be. Freedom, freedom. So let's reflect together. I'm going to invite you to explore a little, your own entry into this.

And as you set yourself for this reflection, As you begin pausing, I'd like to make a comment about the guided reflections we do together. And that is that we're all in a different body and mind and state of mind. And you'll sometimes be hearing me guide you and it won't relate to where you are. You might not have an example you can draw on. I might say get in touch with your feelings about this and you might feel completely cut off from your body. or I might ask you what you're believing and nothing comes to mind. Please know that these are just templates that you can explore on your own, at your own pace, and adapt.

Trust yourself to adapt these inquiries so that you can find out more about who you are. So letting your attention settle, you might feel the breath and let the breath help to collect and relax you. You might scan and sense when you're stressed and things don't feel like they're going the way you want them to. What's a false refuge that you find yourself moving towards regularly? In other words, what's some way of either grasping or resisting, some way of judging or obsessing or consuming or whatever it is, what's a habit that you find in your life

that maybe you have a judgment about? Are you doing the false refuge? Maybe your false refuge is judging, but you're also judging the judging. So there's some shouldn't, I shouldn't be really doing this. Is it blaming others? Is it blaming yourself? Is it getting lost in busyness?

Or some addictive behavior that you know isn't good for you? whatever the behavior, whether it's a mental one or a physical one, see if you can have that attitude that like the most kind grandmother, gentle being in the world, just sees truly, oh, okay, so how is my leg in a trap? What is that I'm attempting to soothe? What's this unmet need or fear or belief? What are you trying to get away from?

Just you begin to investigate. I mean, if you weren't doing that false refuge, if you weren't lashing out or obsessing or whatever it is, what would you have to kind of sink down and feel? Is it a sense of being flawed, not lovable, endangered, not worthy? Just take your time and feel into your body and your heart. In a very simple way as you touch whatever's there underneath.

you might just noted as suffering. This is suffering. May I be kind? That simple. This is suffering. May I be kind? Just even the idea of being kind is the beginning of self-blessing, the beginning of offering that light and warmth to that spore that's been walled off by your behaviors. If you like, you can choose right now just offering some, message of kindness. If you'd like to put your hand on your heart as we often do to really activate that way of relating to yourself, very gentle touch, just really sensing, may I be kind? Letting that place in you that feels afraid or unworthy or unlovable, unsafe, just let it know you're there. This is self-blessing. Notice what your experience is as you offer kindness inwardly.

Everything flowers from within of self-blessing. To even have the intention to be kind to yourself opens the door. Begins to soften and free up. That spore begins to let the blossoming happen. To deepen in the inquiry, you might just ask, who am I when there's this offering of kindness, this offering of presence? Who am I?

What's the sense of your own being? Can you sense that you're resting in more of a wholeness of being enlarged? Srinor Sargadatta says that when we're resting in the truth of what we are, and that wholeness, he says, there's nothing, you can't really say what's changed. All you can say is nothing is wrong with me anymore. Nothing is wrong with me anymore. What would it be like? And just check it out right this moment, just to trust this even for a little bit.

nothing is wrong with me anymore. What would that be like? What is it like? How might it change your life if that was the realization that guided you? Taking a few full breaths and then opening your eyes as you're ready. So I began tonight saying that, you know, we kind of have a general growing wisdom in our culture

that to be happy, to heal, to be free, requires bringing this kind and wakeful presence to the life that's here. And of course, it naturally extends to all life. We're not just paying attention inwardly. We're paying attention inwardly and outwardly to each other and to all beings. As you begin to trust this kind of essence of basic goodness, of awareness and love, it doesn't mean your rose-colored lenses and not seeing the conditioning that can often be really harmful, but you're trusting this essence. You begin to look around and you begin to see that.

You begin to truly see that. You actually see in the eyes looking out at you and others that same spirit, that same beauty. You see the defenses, the walls that around that person's spores and you also see what's shining through. And in your seeing, you actually are nourished, another person's blossoming. When you can see your partner or your child or your parent and see pass the offenses

to that shining awareness, that loving presence, you call it forth. Now, the inquiry I think is really interesting. I spoke earlier about a culture that locks down

on minorities that brands the psyche with this something's wrong with me and you know really dramatically well what would happen if the culture and the messengers of this culture instead were offering warmth and light of attention that they could see with anybody who was struggling economically or otherwise anybody that committed a crime that person has their leg in a trap how can we help so i was sharing with you from reading about the how many the prisons and 60% of black young men in prison. I wanted to read you something else that this writer wrote if I can find it in my notes.

Ah, here we go. So this is Neil Franklin. He said, perhaps if we spend less money in a futile attempt to eliminate drug use through suspicion, arrest, prosecution, and punishment, we could invest resources in improving our schools to ensure that more of our young people get the preparation they need to succeed. So now let's look at how this shift can be possible.

Instead of mass incarceration, we pour money into schools where there can be a nurturing for success. Now, this is a story it's called How Mrs. Grady Transform named Ali Neal. Ali Neal in the late 1950s, poor black kid with an attitude. He was one of 13 brothers and sisters in a house with no electricity,

and his father was a farmer with a second grade education. Neil attended a small school for black children. This was in the segregated South and was always mouthing off. He remembers reducing his English teacher, Mildred Grady, to tears. I wasn't a nice kid, he said. I had a reputation. I was the only one who made her cry. A regular shoplifter back then, Neil was caught stealing from the store where he worked

part-time. He seemed headed for a life in trouble. One of his teachers, Carolyn Blakely, described him as he disrupted her class by addressing her as Carolyn and she had to kick him out. He was a at-risk kid prone to challenge authority. To deal with kids like him, Blakely told me, I'd go home and stand in front of the mirror and practice being mean. Now one day in 1957 in the fall of his senior year, Neil cut Blakely's class and wandered into the library. And it was set up by Grady. That was his English teacher that he had made cry. Okay.

So his English teacher is now the librarian. It says here, set up by Grady, the English teacher whom he had tormented. And Neil wasn't a reader, but he spotted a book with a risque cover of a sexy woman called the Treasure of Pleasant Valley. It was by Frank Yarby, a black author, and it looked appealing. Neil says he thought of checking it out, but he didn't want word to get out to any of his classmates that he was reading. That would have been humiliating. So I stole it.

Neil tucked the book under his jacket and took it home and loved it. After reading the book, he sneaked it back into the library, and there on the shelf he noticed another novel by Yerby. He stole that one as well. This book was also terrific. And to Neil's surprise, when he returned it to the shelf after finishing it, he found yet another by Yerby. Four times this happened and he caught the book bug.

Reading got to be a thing I liked, he says. His trajectory changed and he later graduated to harder novels, including those by Albert Camus, and he turned to newspapers and magazines as well. He went to college and later to law school. In 1991, Neil was appointed the first black district prosecuting attorney in Arkansas. A few years later, he became a judge

and then an appellate court judge. But there's more. At a high school reunion, Grady, that was that teacher and then the librarian, stunned Neil by confiding to him that she spotted him stealing that first book. Her impulse was to confront him, but then in a flash of understanding,

she realized his embarrassment at being seen checking out a book. So Grady kept quiet. The next Saturday, she told him she drove 70 miles to Memphis to search the bookshops for another novel by Irby. Finally, she found one, bought it, and put it on the library bookshelf.

Twice more, Grady told Neil she spent her Saturdays trekking to Memphis to buy books by Yerby all in hopes of turning around a rude adolescent who had made her cry she paid for the books out of her own pocket how to measure Grady's impact not only in the but in the lives around him the big-hearted Grady is now dead a reminder that teachers may have most important jobs in America by all accounts Grady they transform many other children as well through more mundane methods. When I read this, it just hit me so much that here is a woman, and it happens all the time.

And in stories that, you know, we sometimes hear acts of kindness, where somebody that's in a position to help, sees past the facade and calls out who's there, a teacher, a mentor, a coach, a counselor. someone. It is the greatest of blessings. You know, we offer ourselves self- blessings in the moment that we can go, wait a minute, this is suffering, may I be kind. And the more we offer those self- blessings, the more we start living from this awareness of there's nothing wrong any longer. There's conditioning, there's things to pay attention to, but there's nothing essentially wrong. We see each other that way. We We don't scan for badness, for ways that people let us down, for the flaws.

We recognize the goodness and we call it out. So I'd like to close with a brief meditation, if you will, just to come into quietness. We begin to sense as we deepen on the spiritual path and we see it again and again. As we bring loving presence to our inner life, that same presence will be able to reach out to embrace and heal our world. We practice for the freedom of all beings. So as you sit in this final pause of the evening, take a moment to give yourself that gift of relaxing. Just do a brief scan through your body and notice where perhaps just habitually the tension has accumulated and let go again. As you scan you might sense the house.

smile of the Buddha, that smile that really expresses our tenderness, our care. You might feel this life breath that sustains us, relaxing through the body and relaxing the heart. You might sense within whatever vulnerability you've contacted this evening, perhaps that image of a spore that the life that gets frozen out of fear or hurt, the unlived life. And just sense the possibility of deepening your commitment to self-blessing, deepening your commitment to offering that kindness that will allow whatever unlived life is here to unfold itself and blossom. In the loving kindness practice, we just offer a simple phrase of blessing. You might offer to your own being, may I live fully, may I love fully, may I

inhabit the awakened presence that is home. May I live fully. May I love fully inhabit the awakened presence that is home. And then bringing someone to mind in your life, you'd like to offer your healing energy to right now. Perhaps someone that's caught also in self-doubt who's at war with themselves. Just the way you put your hand on your own heart, you know, might imagine putting your hand on that person's heart or cheek, just sending that message of kindness into where are there, that frozen, unlived life is, where the fear is, sense of unworthiness. And may you live fully. May you love fully. May you inhabit the awakened presence that is home, trusting the goodness living from who we are.

And then just sense that you can open this heart in all directions. You can sense this field of loving presence of all that are here, that are listening, that are part of our Sangha that has no particular geography, just this shared field of loving presence, that we offer our prayers to all beings. May all beings live fully, may all beings lovefully, may all beings inhabit that awakened presence that is home. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered.

If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW. Thank you very much.