Tara Brach - Forgiving Our Way to Freedom

Episode Date: December 12, 2012

2012-12-12 - A Forgiving Heart - Living with chronic blame or resentment is a trance that confines us to a limited fragment of what we are. This talk looks at the ways this trance is fueled and the process by which we release the armoring around our hearts. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

The last three talks of this year are under the umbrella of what I call the gateway of love. And this is the middle section in True Refuge, which is my book that's coming out next month. And so the last talk we did was on self-forgiveness. And tonight we'll be exploring letting go of blame, opening our heart in forgiveness and acceptance of others. and it's a topic that I try to visit as regularly as I can because I've found that in our relationships with each other, whether it's overt, hostility, or very subtle levels of resentment and blame,

it's what creates distance. So that's where we'll be going tonight. I got an email from one person that listens to the podcast. And he was describing watching an improv group many years ago. And afterwards, the people in the group were sharing some of their secrets, their trade secrets. And they described how one principle they operated by was no matter what anybody threw your way, no matter how much it seemed to derail or be kind of offbeat or even irritating, that there, Their basic principle was to go with it, to accept it and to respond from that.

And they described that when they didn't oppose or kind of get jolted by what another person threw their way, they actually had this resourcefulness that was much more creative and spontaneous and fun. They kept the flow of the evening going. And so I was really struck by that how in a moment of judgment, when we're caught in that sense of you're doing something wrong, you're bad, we lose access to that creativity and spontaneity.

It's like the aperture of what we are has narrowed. We have less access. So I love that, that in a way we're doing improv in life, Because life doesn't cooperate. Have you noticed? I mean, people don't act the way we want them to or expect them to. And of course, we don't either. But always, through our day, through our weeks,

things don't go our way. And so there's this inquiry of what's our stance and how do we respond? Can we do a little more of what these improv actors are suggesting? And it can seem very idealistic to say, you know, when somebody treats us in a way that really is hurtful to accept it and go with it. And that's not really the point. The point is to not lock down in resentful blame, resentment and blame, non-forgiving, because then we have no flexibility to respond from our intelligence. So there's an anonymous quote that goes,

who is it that's unhappy, the one who finds fault? Most of us, if we start tracking our day, if we really look closely, we'll notice that there are a certain number of moments that we're either in the mode of feeling like a victim in some way are in some way superior. And if we're honest, we'll notice that others can appear as either an obstacle or an irritant. And sometimes as a disappointment, sometimes it's more subtle.

So today, and this often happens to me, I feel like I'm kind of a magnet for whatever I'm going to talk about. It's pretty, it's very predictable. So today I had my, you know, some pages open that I was, kind of looking at sensing what I might want to, you know, explore and reflect on together with you. And I got a call. I was, I've been kind of hounding this group that had, this company that had given us, installed it in a generator. I live in an area where trees come down, you know, they just keep on falling down. So we lose power a lot. And since I work at home and my husband, Jonathan does, this became really important.

Well, the generator's been out since Hurricane Sandy, and they've been very non-responsive. So finally, I'm talking to this woman and realizing this, I'm looking at these pages saying, well, when you're blaming, there's heat and there's anger, and you're tight, and I'm sitting there feeling completely in that trance. So, you know, and so I'm going to share a little bit as I go through the night, just that experience.

of feeling righteously wronged and how seductive it is to lock into it and how much more pleasant it is to be angry and push your point across and make the other person feel small than it is to in some way process it within your own body. It's a very uncomfortable energy. it's much much easier to lash out than it is to metabolize anger okay so we'll come back to that but I'd like to invite you because I feel like just to ground it let's just see where we are together to take a moment to reflect and and this is just a very simple reflection on where you might be carrying some sense of resentment or blame in your life. So just to close your eyes if you like,

and you might begin by sensing your closest circle, whether you have children, parents, siblings, close friends, just sensing if there's any subtle or not so subtle level of, feeling wronged or let down, intolerant. If there's a verse of judgment and see if you can do this very simple scanning without adding more judgment, just notice. You might sense if you work and work with other people, if there's any subtle or not so subtle blame, resentment, judgment, in that domain. You might sense in the world of politics,

whether you move around with having a strong, aversive judgment towards people that disagree with you. If there are certain types of people that you're aware of, whether you have a bias against people with certain sexual orientations, certain races, ethnicities.

The beginning of this past, of awakening the heart is to realize where we're at war and sometimes it's really over it sometimes it's a quiet kind of putting down and just as we did last week to look at ourselves just to become aware of our habit of pushing others out of our heart is the beginning of opening our hearts now you can open your eyes if you'd like so we're exploring a little bit of this site, I did a day long this weekend and sharing how, you know, between within political groups, there's a lot of fractions that are, you know, at war with each other.

Within religious communities, it's the same way. It's wherever people disagree. And one of my favorite stories on this line I shared this weekend, some of you might remember, was kind of a conflict with a Taoist master. These Confuciists were very upset with him because he would sit in this mountain hut and meditate naked. And they felt like that was really an appalling thing to do. So a group of them climbed the mountain

to lecture him on proper behavior. And they saw him sitting naked as usual and they were shocked. And so they asked him, what are you doing sitting in your hut without any pants on? And the sage replied, This entire universe is my hut.

This little hut is my pants. What are you fellows doing inside my pants? So again, I want to spend time on this theme because I feel like for each of us on our spiritual path, it takes a real commitment. And it takes time and energy to begin, to track our own judgments and rather than play out and live inside the beliefs that others are wrong, be willing to check inside and sense what's going on inside us. So it's a daily practice.

And maybe I'll begin by saying, well, what is the process of forgiving? And if forgiving is a word that doesn't resonate for you accepting when you have, rejected? What's the process of reopening and accepting? And it begins, the most key place, is recognizing what is the storyline that you're telling yourself, that this person's wrong or bad or less than? What's the storyline? And can you step out of that storyline of blame and just open to the feelings inside you that are living underneath the story? That's the nutshell summary of the entire process. Can you say, okay, here's my storyline, like today when I was on the phone,

and between the phone calls, I knew my storyline that this was really important to our household, that when the energy, when power goes off, what happens is that, and it's happened four times in the last few weeks, is that my computer goes down, and then sometimes I lose information. And if I'm writing something, that leads me to being extraordinarily upset. I get very freaked out. And then I, okay, let go, let go. But it's upsetting.

So here I am between these phone calls thinking about how important it is to me and then say, okay, so my storyline is that this particular person, the secretary that's responding to these calls, is responsible for causing a lot of trouble to me. That's my storyline. can I sense what's underneath it? So between the store underneath it, I was finding, oh, powerless. It's about power outages, but I was feeling powerless. And in that powerlessness was fear because I lose what's on my screen

and then I don't get things done and then I'm not prepared and then I'm embarrassed and then I fail. You know, so it kind of unfolded into that. So I was with that sum. that's the process of forgiving. It's to be with what's vulnerable inside us rather than fueling this repeating of the storyline. Now I want to step back and say

that anger has an intelligence to it. This is not a kind of an invitation to get rid of anger and just sit and process your own stuff. We have to pay attention to anger because it's part of our survival equipment. I needed to feel stirred up so I could be proactive and take care of this. But that's not all that we do.

We don't get stirred up and get proactive and take care of. We tend to lock into ongoing inner narrative about what's wrong with this person or this situation. So it builds up in us. So the bodily reaction is way, overblown, way overblown, which of course what's the effect on another person when we are overreactive? We don't get what we want because that person becomes defensive. Basically, by not stepping out of our averse of thoughts and really taking the time with what's

going on in us, we're perpetuating the cycle of war. We overreact. Somebody overreacts. It just keeps distance. So one of the ways that we do it is that we cause trouble to others when we overreact. Rita Rutner puts it this way. She says, my grandmother buried three husbands. Two were only napping. So we overreact. We also get in this habit of experiencing difficulty and lashing out and it's not always so reasonable. My examples are from Dear Abby, letters that she admitted she was at a loss to respond to. One woman writes,

Dear Abby, I have a man I can't trust. He cheats so much. I'm not even sure the baby I'm carrying is his. Do you get it? It's a sleeper a little, right? Dear Abby, I suspected my husband's been fooling around and when confronted with the evidence, he denied everything and said it would never happen again.

Well, I won't go on with these, but you get the idea. So sometimes when I'm talking about this, I think of our dog. We had a large, large standard poodle, a super-sized poodle, Hakuna. And when I lived in Bethesia, we go on these walks, and Hakuna hated the neighborhood Akita. There were a couple of Akitas that lived nearby. and whenever I'd go for a walk and I'd see them at a distance, what I'd have to do was wrap the leash around the tree and hold on

because Hakuna was 85 pounds of pure muscle. And I'm not that bigger person. So I'd have to like wrap around this tree and then he'd lunge and I'd, you know, hold on for dear life. But after they were gone, he'd go back to sniffing around and trotting cheerfully. He wasn't like mulling in his brain all those. damn Akita's. They think they own the hood, those fancy curly tails. You know, the next time I'm going to show them. You know, it's like he didn't. But I think about that because, you know,

they just go back to it. But when we feel injured, we just fixate. And that's what our minds do. They fixate. And sadly, not only do they fixate, we're hooked on getting back. We have that vengefulness. So the inquiry is how do we stop the proliferation, stop the fixation, stop the overreaction. I remember right after September 11th, a lot of people had that fear of exactly what happened, which was a vicious kind of spiraling that would only lead to more violence. There was a wonderful Cherokee legend that spread through the web, and in it an old grandfather was speaking to his grandson about what causes violence and cruelty in the world. And he said in each human heart, there are two wolves battling one another.

One is fearful and angry and the other is understanding and kind. The young boy looked intently into his grandfather's eyes and asked, which one will win? And the grandfather smiled and quietly said, whichever one we choose to feed. In more recent years, I've kind of reflected on that, and really the different parts of our brain that this talks about. And we need them all.

We need to have the anger and feel the energy, and we need to listen and respond intelligently. But if we feed it by believing our thoughts of, you're bad, you're wrong, then we are fueling the cycles of violence. So how do we listen intelligently to the anger, but then call on, in this case, the wolf that's wise and understanding? Okay?

So what this really brings us to is, well, what would motivate us? Because as I mentioned, it's actually addictive. Anger's addictive because there's a pleasantness to the rush. I mean, letting out anger actually has a pleasant feeling. Of course, what it stokes is more letting out of anger. But in the moment it feels pleasant. And so what would encourage us to really commit to forgiving, to letting go of blame and resentment.

And my sense is that in each of us, there is a place of wisdom that knows that to be free and to have our hearts free to love without holding back, to have that experience, that direct realization of really belonging, that it requires feeding that part of our being that's more wise and more understanding. In other words, it requires a commitment to not stay in that trance of blame. There's a part of us that knows that.

There's a part of us that intuets that a forgiving heart is intrinsic to the path of freedom. We know that. And it's a very hot subject now in conferences and professional conferences and research at major universities. I'm thinking of Stanford as one with the passionate care center they have there in Berkeley, University of Oregon. So there's this whole science developing on forgiveness. and the research has shown that it's linked to decreasing blood pressure and stress hormone levels, that there's less pain, less depression, fewer relapses in substance abuse. So it's got, you know, it's got real good play in that way.

But I think, to me, the deepest, most compelling reason to actively commit ourselves to to reducing blame is the experience of who we are. That when we're in a place of blaming, we're living in a very tight, constricted, egoic experience of self. And when our heart is forgiving, we relax open into, we can't put words onto,

but into a quality of beingness and connectedness that's something we cherish. Okay, so next reflection. Let's, let me have you check this out. And take a pause and in the pause, see if you can arrive as much as we do with the guided practices, just feel yourself right here, aware of the sensations of sitting here, and aware of your breath. So you come home and the invitations to bring to mind a situation where you are resentful of somebody where you feel blame. It could be low-level blame or feel real irritation or anger. And on these little reflections, if you can go right to a situation and sense, you know, what's triggering you, you'll get more in touch with the experience, which is helpful. And just

explore what is it like in your body when you're feeling resentful? What does your heart feel like? when you have blame, when you're carrying blame, when there's stories of blame. What's your sense of yourself? What's the felt sense of, okay, this is me? When you're full with averse of judgment, do you like yourself? If you'd like to just acknowledge, just sense, okay, so this is being mindful of the constellation of what it's like to be in an angry or blaming place. And for most of us, you know,

when we really pay attention to it, we can sense this constriction that we're not inhabiting the fullness of who we are. And our identity is confined to what I call a kind of reactive fragment of our being. So in a way you can consider this being in a trance, that whenever we're living in a small or narrowed part of our being, we've lost sight of the big picture. We've lost sight of the fullness of who we are,

and we're forgetting our tenderness, and we're forgetting our creativity, and we're forgetting our natural intelligence, we're not even really feeling the flow of our whole body. We're just tight. Our senses are not open. and we've lost sight of the real the awakeness and awareness that's here and we lose sight of the other person when we're in blame we're only seeing what's wrong with that person we are sorting for what's wrong there's a filter in our brain that's a trance so i think it's helpful to just sense well whenever we're in blame mode we're in a trance it doesn't mean that the anger doesn't have an intelligent message but we've locked into something that makes us smaller than we are and the other smaller than they are.

Does that make sense? Okay. All right. So what Joko Beck says, this is a Zen teacher on the West Coast, is this, she says, our failure to know joy is directly linked to our inability to forgive. Our failure to know joy is directly linked to our inability to forgive. ability to forgive. So it may be just mild blame, our huge rage. But in the moments when we're in judgment, averse of judgment, the biochemistry and spirit and openness of joy

is something that we're just cut off from it. Cut off from it. Now, the challenge is that forgiving, many of us could be sitting here going, yeah, well, forgiving is a good thing. Most people think it's a really good idea until they actually have something to forgive, right? So let's check that out now because what I'm going to ask you to do as I often do towards the end of this talk is to choose somebody that you'd like to explore opening some, letting go some around, letting back into your heart a bit and exploring that. But let's start with just a leading up reflection. Again, I ask you to maybe close your eyes and let the attention go inward. And again, to let this be a pause so you come into your body, you'll find that in any of these reflections, if you re-enter your body,

we cut off pretty quickly. Feel your breath, feel your hands, feel your feet. And see if you can from the inside out just feel the chest, belly, know that you're here. And then bringing to mind again a situation where there's distance with another person, where there's judgment or blame, where you feel you've kind of locked into that, into feeling some aversion, some sense of this person's wrong, maybe victimized by the person or really superior to them, in some way you've pushed them away.

And take some time to sense the situation and remind yourself of how come. And if you find there's nobody in your personal life that you feel this is going on with, you might find that there's somebody in the political realm. Usually there's somebody that we have aversion to and we think is in some way bad or wrong. And the question that I'd like to ask you

is what would you have to feel? if you put aside the blaming thoughts if you just noted okay these are blaming thoughts I'm going to put them aside for now what would be the difficult experience underneath them that you'd have to connect with what would you have to feel in your body and your heart

and you can keep on exploring that inside you but when you're ready to open your eyes and let's just hear a little bit of what's in the room just raise your hand and speak loudly I'll just point and what's the feeling under there that you'd have to connect with if you put aside the blaming thoughts it's difficult to feel yeah sadness so you'd have to come face to face with sadness right impotence right so a lot like i was feeling that kind of powerless feeling and there's some fear with

that for me so yeah impotence thank you yeah way back there rejection feeling pushed away ourselves yeah grief yeah by the way there's no right answer it's just There's different kinds of feelings. Yeah, I see a hand there. I'm sorry? Failure. Right. Yeah.

Dormat. So the sense of being stepped on and dormat. Yeah. Yeah. Fear. Exactly. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Back there? Yeah, I see you. Compassion. Okay, so compassion now. Let me just ask you to think. if compassion was what you'd feel, what would stop you from just dropping the blaming thoughts if you could land right in compassion? Or do you find that you can? So Bernie Madoff was in the room.

That's a very good one. And so somebody that's caused a lot of pain to others. And the inquiry is, you know, trying to understand anybody that causes suffering is suffering. And I'm trying to understand that. And if our minds can go down that track, we can find out a lot. But if we've been personally wounded, if we're one of the people that is our entire life has changed, the ground has been pulled from underneath us because of what he did, we might first have to feel our sense of the fear, the hurt, the pain, the, you know, just our life being pulled apart. So sometimes there's a step before compassion, and yet compassion is what's possible. So, thank you to each of you because when you start sensing what's underneath blame, you also

start sensing why it's so hard to let go of the narrative that we hang out in. It's much easier to keep making someone else wrong than to touch the impotence or to touch the fear or the grief or the sadness or the feeling of being a doormat. Much easier. So what we discover is that not forgiving someone is protecting us from a deeper rawness. It's an armor. Okay? And it's an armor because it's easier to blame than feel the woundedness. I remember seeing a cartoon with a dog on a therapist couch,

and the dog's saying, he's got a dog psychiatrist, and he's saying, you know, I bark at everything. You can't go wrong that way. And in a way, that's the kind of how we are. It's like, you know, whatever's coming at us. It's that reaction because, you know, it's too dangerous not to. So, and we also sense that there's some fear around putting down the blame that then we're going to actually adopt another belief,

which is, oh, if you're not wrong, then I'm wrong. Okay? that will and the worst part when I explore with people the whole process of forgiving is the fear that if I forgive if I stop blaming this person's going to keep on hurting me and so there's a sense that forgiving means that we're letting go of all our boundaries which isn't the case I remember a you know I'll know John Bradshaw's you know the shame guy. He wrote a book about shame. And there was a cartoon, and John Bradshaw was dressed up in a safari kind of outfit, and he

had been strung up to a tree, so he's dangling from these branches. And he's got a whole mess of lions circling around him. They're assessing the situation. And the lead lion, leader of the PAC says, he says his name is Bradshaw, that he understands that as cubs, we were brought up in single-parent prides, that were acting from deprivation and shame. I say we eat them. And it's like, so we can be compassionate, but we're afraid, that we have this fear that if we're compassionate, what's going to happen? You know, we'll get creamed. So I want to just say at this point that this commitment to forgiving, to letting

go of the story of blame is not like saying we're going to let go of our discrimination, our intelligence that lets us know how to protect ourselves and others. You can have wise discrimination and say, if I do this, this person's going to do that, or I can't trust this person to treat me well, but not feel hate or aversion in your heart. There's a difference between averse of blame and discrimination. And we can forgive someone and decide to never see. them again. We can forgive someone and decide to divorce them. We can forgive someone and, you know, and completely say our truth the way we most mean it, but we're no longer pushing that person out of our hearts. That's the difference. So I'll give you a kind of an idea

of a bit of how it works for some people. For one woman, her husband and I gave you the Anne Landers but this was another situation with a woman who found out her husband and had multiple affairs and had lied a lot about the whole thing

and so her first reaction was rage feeling a betrayal lying bastard contempt you know hate how could he do this to me and the kids she had two one in middle school one in high school

and she came to me, he said, how am I supposed to forgive him? And my response was, don't even try. That's not, that's not where you are right now. Instead, what I had her do, because she had the story going, how could I, how could he, lying bastard, terrible person, I said, don't try to forgive him. Just let's see if you can take that story, put a picture frame around it, put it aside, and let's sense what's underneath it. So we did a little, you know, in a much more full fashion what I asked you to do. And what she found that underneath the story, what she was experiencing was this kind of rage. And I said, let it be as big as it is. And I sometimes, I'll just say, kind of, you know,

completely let it, let it explode, let it, let it rip, you know, let it be as much as it is. And it, you know, I was in Bethesda at that time. It filled my office in Bethesda. And filled the East Coast and it just filled the planets and the solar system. It just got bigger and bigger through the galaxies, outwards. Then on the edge of all that rage, she sent something else. I said, what's there? And she says, oh, well, underneath it is this fear that something is really wrong with me. And then, of course, I invited her let that, this is being mindful and present with what's there. Okay, let's be with that fear. And it was this, there's the story line up. I'll never be loved. I'm not desirable and then in the heart of that fear was the shame of you know basic defect basic defect and then

with that came some loneliness and so our practice our process therapeutically and this is something that sometimes we need to do in therapy and sometimes we can do it as part of our meditation was to keep being with the rawness that was underneath the blaming stories that is the process that is the process. And for her, it came to a place of deep self-compassion, that she could sense how how much suffering there was in feeling, I'm just not lovable, something's really wrong, until she could begin to bring a real kindness to that raw place. And that was maybe eight months where her whole practice was being with that rawness and bringing compassion until she started feeling this shift.

And the simplest way I can say it is that she went from being the victim of some lying bastard and a victim who's basically unworthy to a sense of a space of tenderness and awareness that could hold the wounded place. Her identity opened up. She could have never experienced that if she stayed in the blame. if she hadn't gone through that process of being with the rawness. So from that place, she could begin to look through the eyes of compassion at him. And just as our friend over here described, seek to understand, so what's going on?

And for him, he was in one of those crises of being at a certain age and feeling like his life wasn't working out and disappointed and not so desirable himself. And he was playing that out. not this is not her excusing him just okay what was going on she was able to forgive him and divorce him because she couldn't trust him so this is an example of he he was she was able to have him in her heart but divorce him and they could raise continue to raise their children and be co-parents without that bitterness that creates another generation of wounding do you know what i mean it always us. Forgiving is not a one-shot. It's not like something happens and we process the pain and that

person's forgiven, especially if we're in an ongoing relationship. The patterns keep playing. We keep getting triggered. It's an ongoing thing. And the question is, do we want to lock into the narrative of your wrong and then get fixed in a kind of distance between us and the other? are we willing to keep being with and then from the place of having processed speak with as much intelligence and compassion as we can? Can we choose that?

The only way we have wisdom in navigating is if we're willing to go to where the rawness is otherwise the dance keeps on replaying. And again I want to say if it's a repeating process in a relationship it doesn't mean we don't insist on something being different. It's just that we first work with our own rawness so that when we speak and call for boundaries and make requests,

it's coming from presence, not from a reactivity that we've been fueling with our storyline. It's a life process for most of us. We keep on encountering things that trigger old wounded places, so we keep on having to pay attention and let go. Each time we forgive, we become more familiar with an enlarged sense of our own being. Each time we forgive, we're on that path of true refuge, we've done the gateway of love, we discover more a sense of our own totality, the potential of our hearts to really love freely.

Each time that expanded sense of identity becomes more the truth and we're less identity. with the angry victim. That's freedom. We can't always do it on our own because sometimes the rawness is so much that we need support therapeutically. But we can do a certain amount and we can certainly intend to forgive. If all you do is leave this particular session after we do a little bit of a meditation on this with a few degrees more commitment to this intention to forgive, to put more attention, letting blame be kind of a flag saying, okay, I'm not going to just play out the story, I'm going to pay attention. Then what happens is that you've opened the gateway, just intending to forgive. Sometimes people say, well,

I can see, you know, when sometimes if there's been an affair, somebody's disappointed, or let you down, but what about the real horrendous crimes? You know, what about mass murders and when children are the ones that get injured and violated? What then? And just to say that no matter how awful the act, it still is a trance if we keep our heart in a fist of anger. We're still cut off from our wholeness and not seeing the wholeness of another person. No matter what the crime is or the violation, nobody is violent unless they're suffering inside them. It comes from suffering. I want to share with you. I've mentioned in the past a book I read called Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle. And it's,

he's a Catholic priest who writes about gang violence in the L.A. area. It's one of the areas's most intense violence. And he set up a handful of businesses to help bring the kids that were so caught in that culture and give them a chance of a new life. Well, he describes the tragedies that happen in these neighborhoods. And one of these stories I want to share with you is about, a woman her name Soldod. She's a mother of four. And she was incredibly proud when her second oldest son got his diploma and went to the Marines. He was serving. She found it later in Afghanistan.

Comes back home for a visit, he goes out to pick up some fast food. She hears the shots on the street near the home and her son Ronnie dies in her arms right outside the door. So you just come back from a visit after going off to serve. soon after her oldest son, his name's Angel, pulls off something few in the hood do. He graduates from high school. Helps pull his mother through the hell she's living in. And six months after Ronnie's death,

he pleads with her to put on some clothes to color, do her hair, and to be a mom for three remaining children. He convinces her. Well, that afternoon, while eating a sandwich on their front porch, Angel shot up by kids from her. rival gang. So she's lost two of her sons to this gang violence. And Boyle, this priest, Gregory Boyle writes that he found her later that day sobbing into a huge bath towel. The few of us there found our arms too short to wrap around this kind of pain. So sold out's locked in the anguish

of separation and, you know, he spends a lot of time with her over the next few years. And at one meeting when he asks her how she's doing with the losses, she tells them, you know, I love the two kids I have. I hurt for the two that are gone. And then crying, she says, the hurt wins. The hurt wins. Okay. So then, a short time after, she's in the emergency room for chest pain, several months later. And a kid with multiple gunshot wounds is rushed in on a gurney to the spot next to her. And there's no curtain, so she's witnessed him fighting for his life. And she recognizes him as one of the kids from the rival gang that had killed her boys. And she knew that her friends might say, pray that he dies. That's not what happened. As she hears

the doctor's yelling, we're losing him, something in her cracks open. And she says, I began to cry I've never cried before and started to pray the hardest I've ever prayed. Please don't let them die. Please don't let him die. I don't want his mom to go through what I have. So the boy survived, as did this woman's capacity for loving. It got ripped open by grief. And in time it became an unimaginable vastness. Some wisdom. Some wisdom. Some awake place in her knew that the only way to find some freedom was to completely forgive. So we release blame for our own freedom. We really do. It's like that image of holding a hot call. Angers like holding a hot call. We release for our own freedom. And because we are

entirely interdependent with the rest of this creation, every time we let go, every time we let go, Every time we include others in our heart, there is some rippling out of consciousness. It's a waking up. It might not be the way we wish it would be. But I come back again at this point to those two wolves that we are in an evolutionary process, all of us. And we've got this primitive brain that we need and that responds to danger. And we have a more recently evolved brain that

has the empathy networks in them, the circuitry, has the capacity for mindfulness. And if we choose to cultivate it, and that's part of our evolutionary potential, we can actually choose to serve our own evolution. Our consciousness can choose to wake itself up. If you, in your daily life, start noticing where the blame is and not, ride the narrative so much. You are doing more for the evolution of consciousness than almost anything else I can think of you doing because it stops the war. It's like this is peacework. We want to do peace work. It's not that we shouldn't also do the activist work that's more external, but this is the inner peacework that changes consciousness. Every time we have a

blaming thought that somebody's wrong or bad, and instead of going down that track, we say wait, and we have the courage to feel what's in our own bodies and hearts. There'll be a transformation of a sense of our own being so that we'll be able to include the other in our heart and not perpetuate the cycles. So let's practice a little. Let's just close tonight with a few minutes of practice. And as you have the last few times in this pause, see if you can bring your awareness right into your body, feeling the movement of the breath. You might feel into your heart. You can imagine smiling into your heart. Again, that's not to paper over anything, but to create some space, some flow, choosing a

relationship where you're carrying blame. And I would encourage you not to choose something where there's traumatic wounding, but just something where you're just living with some resentment, some judgment that you know is creating a distance, and let yourself feel what gives rise, to your judgment. There's a reason we armor our hearts. And if you let the feeling underneath the judgment be as big as it is, the anger, the fear, the hurt, just notice what happens. What is it that really wants attention inside you? What's the vulnerability that's there? Is it that you feel rejected and hurt? Powerless, afraid? Is it that you're being? being asked to accept in some way a loss,

and that there's disappointment and sadness, that the other is not the way you want them to be? Is it having to face a sense of your own self-mistrust? That sense of I'm bad? That's what's under there, under the judgment. And see if you can give yourself that gift of offering whatever vulnerabilities there are very deep presence right now. And it's very helpful to put the hand on the heart because it's so rare that we offer a real tender presence, and that's what heals.

So you might feel as you put your hand on your heart the vary the pressure. So it just feels like you're offering a witness, company, kindness inwardly. So if there's hurt there, if there's a sense of shame, personal failure, sadness, fear, offer it kindness. And just notice what happens. This step you take as long as you need when you're on your own of just bringing that compassion to whatever feels difficult in you.

And when you feel that you've arrived in a place that is tender towards your own being, then you can begin to look through the eyes of compassion at the other. And it's not to excuse, but rather just to see into that person suffering. Can you see how that person in some ways being driven by fear, by confusion, by their own unmet needs? This is allowing you to put aside the veil of trance and see a more whole being. What's going on for that person? And if it feels, difficult as you're looking to see a larger picture, if the mind keeps fixating on what's wrong,

to be very forgiving towards that. And just know that it's your intention over time to let go of the aversion and to include this person and all beings in your heart. To have that intention opens the gateway to freedom. You might sense as you connect with compassion, you might sense as you connect with compassion towards yourself and the other, what might be the wisest way to proceed in this relationship, if there's something to say, if there's a boundary to call, if you need to actually create distance in terms of your active relating, all that's possible still keeping the heart tender and open. It's out of presence that we make the wisest decisions. It's out of presence that our actions are such that they stop the war and move us towards peace.

Sensing the heart space that can hold your own vulnerability that includes others and widening it out now so you sense that really for these last few moments that your heart can include all beings everywhere. And we close with a simple prayer that all beings everywhere will wake up. to the tenderness and fullness of a forgiving heart that all beings everywhere

will choose to stop the war that all beings everywhere will realize their innate belonging may there be peace on earth may there be peace on earth may there be peace everywhere may all beings

awaken and be free namaste and blessings 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.