Tara Brach - Freeing Ourselves by Loving Ourselves (retreat talk) (2015-10-11)

Episode Date: October 18, 2015

(Retreat talk) Freeing Ourselves by Loving Ourselves (2015-10-11) - In this human realm, healing and spiritual realization are rooted in awakening a love for the life that is here. This talk looks at our habit of feeling we should be different than we are, and the ways that mindfulness and self-compassion help enable us to not only embrace our inner life, but bring genuine healing to others.

Greetings. I'm Tara Brock, and I'd like to welcome you to these podcasts. While the talks and meditations are offered freely, we'd very much appreciate your support. To make a donation or learn more about my schedule, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org. Thank you. So I was just noticing the altar here in our, we have a second basket. We had such an overflowing metabol. What a lovely kind of sense of the spirit of the gathering here. So from the groups today, one of the things that become so apparent, it's really one of the gifts of retreat is that less distractions and more intention about presence, and it really shines a light for so many of us on how we're leaving ourselves. I know you've noticed that. I've heard so many reports.

that we just start watching and recognizing how many moments we're off trying to in some way solve a problem or rerunning something in the past that didn't work out right, you know, kind of a fixating on difficulty or how many moments we're judging or in some way finding a way to distract ourselves. One of my favorite lines from as the Indian teacher, Sri Narasar Gadata, is that the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. The mind creates the abyss. The activity of the mind creates that sense of separateness. It separates us. And then the heart crosses it. The heart reminds us of this innate belonging. And it feels so true that our mind, and by mind I mean the habitual fear thinking that goes on,

disconnects us from our bodies, and it disconnects us from that felt sense of relatedness with each other and from our earth. So really, so much of the healing, you know, in our own body minds and in our relationships, and really the healing of our planet really comes back to, I think, I think of it as the feminine archetype, as these heart qualities that perceive unity, belonging,

and are most expressed through compassion, through love. But that's what, that's what we reweaves us. So tonight, in a sense, this talk is dedicated to the feminine archetype, the bodhisatt of compassion, that's really the awakening heart in each of us. It's dedicated to that. And what we'll be looking at in particular, the particular expression of the bodhisattva, is self-compassion.

That's what I'd like to explore tonight with you. And in a sense, there's no way to untangle the deep tangles unless we have that atmosphere of self-compassion. It just doesn't work. So a story that I've always liked is a woman describes some time back, and an old tired-looking dog wandered into her yard. And the dog, she could tell it had an owner. It had a collar and was well fed and so on.

But it followed her into the house, and it hopped onto her couch, and it took a nap for an hour. And she didn't mind, and her dog didn't seem to mind. So after an hour, the dog gets up, leaves the house. But the next day the same thing happened. It came in, came to the couch, slept for an hour and left, and this went on for a few weeks. So this woman became a little concerned,

and she pinned a note onto his collar, and it said, your dog comes every day and takes a nap. I don't mind. I just want to make sure it's okay with you. Next day, dog comes back with a different note on its collar, and it says, he lives in a home with three children. He's trying to catch up on his sleep. can I come with him tomorrow

so there's a sense of in a way that in this human realm to be with this life whether it's the normal stressors or the really big ones of facing mortality we need to sense our larger belonging

and what I mean by that is we need to have a felt experience of what we're a part of in order to be able to hold really this living, dying world. We need to feel our belonging. The way I think of it is the wounds that we face and work with each of us are built on this basic sense of separateness. It's very primal.

It's primal, it's in us all, and that in the being with, we can notice it, there has to be a quality of allowing and kindness and tenderness in order to actually open to it and actually heal. So the big challenge is this. And this is really we're going to be doing a continuation of Jonathan's exploration last night where you're just so clearly and just name these energies that we all encounter. And the challenge is that when they arise,

and this is like when we're here, when in some way we get triggered, rather than responding with that clearly seeing what's happening and that feminine archetype of tenderly embracing rather than that our first reflex is to make it wrong that's the first reflex

is this shouldn't be happening something's wrong it's like there's a mistake the force is off in this universe something is wrong and usually it's something's wrong with me. So rather than a gift from beyond, we in some way are making ourselves wrong. And this has often been referred to as part of the second arrow. The first arrow is there's something painful or difficult happening. And then the Buddha said, you know, would it be wise to then shoot another arrow right where that arrow is? But that's what we do. Not only are we feeling

terrible in some way, but then we make ourselves bad for it. Can I just ask you? Can I just ask you, how many here tracked that today when stuff was off that you also felt bad about yourself for it? Can I see? Okay, so you're on to that layer. Because if we don't see it, it actually locks in the suffering and the selfing. So it makes me happy that you're recognizing it. And we're going to unlayer it some more. Because I think that a central inquiry on our path is when we're caught in that reactivity of something's wrong, what helps us shift? What serves a shift from that something's wrong tightness to those qualities of clear recognizing and tender presence with? What serves that shift? Because that's the key spot where we get caught. One of the ways that

that process, that shift and that opening is described in Eastern art, that we see it illustrated in Eastern art is in the mandalay's and also in the entrance to the temples where there are these animal-headed goddesses. Some of you've probably seen it on the mandolas and so on, that represent, you know, rage and passion and anger and fear. They're fearsome deities, the kind of raw energies of our human life. And the understanding is that to get to sacred space, the center of the mandala or to enter the temple, because they're at the gateways of the temple, that you need to move through those deities.

And there's no way to sacred space if you're a human, incarnate as a human, other than to encounter with presence and great heart these deities. So what that says is it is an intrinsic alchemical process that we're all in, every one of us. And I can say for myself that in that process of encountering the deities, the two major, when people say, well, what's changed in my life? How have I changed? Well, the deities still appear very regularly. You know, they come up in all the different ways. They always have.

But the difference is the lag time in recognizing, oh, okay, these are the energies are appearing. You know, there's less lag time and going, oh, that's what this is, and less lag time and more access to that kindness in relating to them. So there's just less identification as a victim of them or the one that's going to try to work through it's just more of more presencing, less lag time. And one of the things that has helped the most because this is like when there's that abyss,

when the deities appear and there's a real feeling of caught in separation, I want to read you again Srinor Sargadatta, who's this particular line, and you'll hear it in this reading, has impacted me a lot. He says, all you need is already within you. Only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust or grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and Search for pleasure is a sign of the love you bear for yourself. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect.

Make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing. Give yourself infinity and eternity and discover you do not need them. You are beyond. So just to untase that a bit. The words make love of yourself perfect. the self isn't the character in the storyline that we have. It's not the narrative self. This is saying, make love of the life that's right here, this immediate life, these waves of

experience, perfect. And what is to love them? Full, tender presence. Not resisting. Not manipulating. And what does the word perfect mean? Is that another like hurdle we have to get a over, like, am I doing it well enough? Am I loving myself enough? You know, because it's not. And to me, it really has to do with aspiration. That if you leave this retreat and you are a few degrees more dedicated to truly loving the life that's arising right here, you will have unfolded and be inhabiting another level of freedom. It's that central. Make love of yourself perfect. There's a fear sometimes when we talk about loving ourselves that it actually is reifying a self. And yet if you actually hands-on experiment, and this is the sign of is a

skillful means serving, in the moments that there's a full tenderness towards the life that's right here, there's actually a dissolving of the self-sense. Loving ourselves dissolves the self-sense. So just to name for me one of the most useful understandings of self-compassion is when I look at through the perspective of our evolutionary development. Like, why is for me, why is self-compassion so essential. And from an evolutionary perspective, when we encounter stress, when there's some challenge to our needs for safety, for our needs for satisfaction, the survival brain is designed to judge and react with aggression, with fear, with clinging. And what happens is when the survival brain reacts, it disconnects some,

from the more recently evolved parts of our brain. So when you're stressed and when you're encountering the deities, that's the first response, is actually to disconnect some, to go into a reactivity. And one of the best illustrations of this, some of you might be familiar with, but I really like this. This is from Dan Siegel, who is a psychiatrist, author.

So he has a model of the brain. And if you want to do it yourself right now, just take your thumb right here and put it in the middle of your palm and put your four fingers over the top. Okay, that's your brain. Take a look at your brain. See how much you like your brain, okay?

And so let's just look through it. The wrist into this area right here, this is the spine going into the brain stem, okay? And then this is the limbic system. And the brain stem and the limbic system work together to regulate fight, flight, freeze, and emotional arousal and the like. Now, these four fingers over the top, that's the cortex.

And the thinking part of the brain and the frontal cortex, this is where it gets to me really interesting, is a site that correlates with mindfulness, it correlates with compassion, it correlates with all the executive decision-making, also with moral decision-making. and it regulates the limbic brainstem area. So what happens when we're triggered is it looks kind of like this.

We flip our lid. Okay? So you can imagine it like when you encounter the deities and you get triggered by them, your initial reflex is to go kind of like this. And the abyss is that there's no longer that integrated brain, there's no longer the communication, you no longer have, access to mindfulness and compassion in those moments. And in reality, what happens often is

when we flipped our lid, we actually act in ways that aren't aligned with our ethics, because we no longer have access to our whole mature being. Okay? Now, one of the stressors the deities that most triggers us is a sense of I'm not okay. So if there's a lot of patterning of shame, fears of deficiency, self-criticism going on, much quicker to flip our lid because it's such a vulnerable thing to feel not okay. It means that we can be vanquished, that we can no longer belong to our tribe. It's annihilation. Is this making sense?

Okay. So we don't always flip our lead completely. That's with trauma. It's a total flip. We're totally disconnected from any communication in the brain and on another level in a more spiritual way, any access to our more evolved consciousness. But we flip some.

So the question is how do we notice that and come back into a more unitive place with our brain and our being. The reason I find science and evolution so useful is because I find it makes it less personal. And just a quick example is last week. I had a really busy season, and I had the same thing in the spring where I was traveling a lot

and right towards the end of the spring. I got a back spasm, and I couldn't teach a major workshop, and it was kind of an imposed pause. And the same thing happened this fall. I had a real busy stretch, got a back spasm, had to cancel something. And as I started re-entering, because I was on my way to this retreat and had a really busy week, I remember on, I think it was Monday morning, walking in the woods and feeling incredibly fragile, anxious, self-protective. And in my mind, reviewing a conversation I'd had with a friend whose son is having some real difficulty.

and realizing how totally removed and on automatic I had been. In other words, the abyss. I had not had access to my heart. And so I added on to vulnerable, anxious, et cetera, not okay self. And then the light went on, of course, and I said, okay, we're doing some subcortical looping here. And so I started coaching myself and just naming it, because that's what it is.

When there's a little bit of a flip, you're basically operating from this area, right? So I just said, okay, this is subcortical looping. And right away, just by saying it like that, of course, it became a little bit humorous. And so I coached myself a little more and said, you know, don't believe your fear-based thoughts. And, you know, we all get caught in this kind of looping

and it's not your fault and be kind and this will pass. You know, I could start, it was almost like the moment I named it. and some of you might know the shaman describe it that when you can name a fear it starts losing its power over you well in the moment that I could say oh sub-cortical looping there was less identification with the victim the fear fear-based separate self that was being you know engaged with that and more of a reopening back into more witnessing and presence so the value of seeing, just even having the image of the flip lid, it makes it easier to sense the wisdom

of anata, that it's not a self that's doing something wrong. This is just a process unfolding. We each are designed to get stressed, to react some, to have that abyss, to feel separated, and we each are designed to recognize that and to find a pathway back. We have the capacities for homecoming. That's where we're going to be turning our attention now. And the beginning of it is just to recognize our patterns of leaving. Just to notice, you know, when you get triggered,

what are your ways of kind of consolidating and exiting from the kind of exit from your body. We each have our particular favorite styles of leaving because the last thing we want to do is feel the rawness of fear. So the survival brain basically gets us to go do things to try to control it. And in the moment you're controlling, you're unable to be present. So what are our favorite ways? And I'll just name some and you can just sense Like when we're at retreat, we can start seeing that we leave that we have different ways of obsessing because we'd rather be obsessing gives us a little sense that maybe we can figure something out rather than that uncertainty of just being with what's here.

So we obsess some. Or we might find that we have other ways of distracting ourselves with unnecessary doings. at home, of course, we have all sorts of ways of getting lost online. How many of you feel that that's one of your ways of leaving yourself beyond the usefulness of online, emails and so on? Can I see by hands? How many? Okay, I'm going to raise my hand too. Anybody else raising that? Okay. Anybody who want to raise two hands? We, it's a really big deal in this culture. It takes a lot of discipline to begin to sense, okay, I'm, I'm choosing to leave right now.

Some ways that seem less obvious that cause suffering, but we're still exiting. One of my favorite little stories is a guy who had just gone through a major life transition and was no longer working, which gives a lot of meaning to our lives and don't quite realize it until maybe retiring. And he says that here's what we do to make our day interesting.

Mary, my wife and I went to town the other day. We visited a shop. When we came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket. I went up to him and said, hey, man, why not give an elder citizen a break? And he ignored us, so he kept writing the ticket. So then the guy says, well, so I called him a jerk. He glared at me and started writing another ticket.

So Mary called him a creep. He finished the second ticket, put it on the windshield, and then he started writing more tickets, and it went on for 20 minutes. The guy's just writing ticket after ticket. He says, the more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote. Just then our bus arrived. And we had to get on it and go home.

But we try to have a little fun now that we're retired. It's important at our age. Okay, so we have our ways of exiting. But here are the more major ways we do it. There's flight, which means we numb ourselves, we leave our body, we oversleep, we overeat, but we leave that way. And then the other way we leave that we try to control is fighting,

where we get aggressive, we get angry at ourselves for the feelings we're having, we get angry at others, and the big one mentally is judgment. In a moment of judging, in that moment, that's a way of leaving the rawness, leaving the one place that you can actually encounter the deities and wake up, and projecting something's wrong on the world. The major zone of judging is the last piece that I already touched. on and you raise your hand about is that part the thing that really locks us into that abyss is that we then make ourselves wrong. In fact we make ourselves wrong for all

the ways that we leave for the overeating or the oversleeping or the over-ealing or the judging we add that second arrow. So step number one is that we start noticing how that's happening. And and And I think a bottom line kind of flag that's really useful is the sense, I should be different. And I invite you to not take my word for it, but just to track it and notice what's happening when there's an I should be different. And if you have the tendency to say I should be different, you'll also have a tendency to say others should be different.

And as some people describe it, it's an argument with reality. And when we're arguing with reality, that creates the abyss. That creates separation. You can see it. You can see any time you're making someone else wrong or think somebody should be different, what happens. Other stories of a young man who invites his mother to dinner and she notices how beautiful his roommate is

and keeps being suspicious and thinking that he should be more explicit and say what's what. And so her son kind of reads her thoughts, and he says, you know, I know what you might be thinking, but I assure you, Carrie and I are just roommates. So anyway, a week later, Carrie the girl, the roommate, says to John, you know, ever since your mother came here for dinner, I've been unable to find that beautiful silver soup ladle. You don't think she did something with it, do you? He says, I doubt it, but I'll email her just in case.

So he writes, Dear Mother, I'm not saying you did or did not do anything with the soup ladle, but it's odd that it disappeared after the dinner. Do you know anything about this? Here's what he hears back. Dear son, I'm not saying that you do sleep with Carrie, and I'm not saying that you don't. But the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, you would have found the soup ladle by now. Love your mother. So what happens when we're saying should be different?

You know, with another person, we know it creates distance. I love the way Ram Dass put it. At one point not so long ago, his most recent books, he said one of the greatest things that happened in his relationship with his father was that he said, I finally allowed him to be who he was instead of trying to make him into who I thought he should be. and he accepted me for who I was, and then we became friends. And this was very close to his father's death.

We don't have to wait that long. And we know with ourselves, we've already kind of sensed it when we're trying, when we're insisting that we be different than we are, it doesn't feel good. Let's just take a moment. Let me invite you to check in on this one. and taking a pause, we're just going to check in on our attitude, the way we're regarding

ourselves and do it a few times as part of this reflection on self-compassion. And just to say that we might have the aspiration to live from our full potential, but that's different than a should. that's a sense of what's possible and it's held with a quality of openness whereas a should has aversion to it that there's some badness some wrongness some flaw so i'd like to invite you to reflect on a key relationship in your life and you might choose one that you really want to it to be growing, awakening, a real heart relationship, a relationship that matters to you. And just notice in that relationship if and where there is some attitude of should, that this person should

change or be different in any way, some demand or expectation on how this person should change or be different in any way, some demand or expectation on how this other expresses him or herself should be different. And without evaluating whether you think that's right or not, just notice how it feels in your body and your heart when that's the view and the belief. What's the sense of self? What's the quality of heart? What's the sense of connection when there's a should? Bring that same inquiry to yourself.

How in this relationship are you in some way believing that you should be different? You should be feeling, thinking, acting differently. Let it be as full-blown as it might be that shoulding and just sense again what happens when that layer or attitude is imposed on how it actually is. what's the sense of your own body and heart, mind? It's a sense of your own being, sense of self, sense of connection with yourself with other. So we'll continue to explore this because this is the starting place.

We start noticing how we're leaving and one of the main ways we leave is in judgment. We leave what's here by projecting badness on our self. or on others. So again, this inquiry is how do we awaken from that reactive place. That's really an expression of the survival brain

when we've been kind of cut off. How do we bridge the abyss? There's a story of a sage who was well known for his wisdom and people would travel days on feet through the wilderness to get to him and as it went, when anybody would say, okay, here's what's going on, here's where I'm stuck, here's where the pain is, he would swear them to secrecy, and then he'd say, there's one question

to ask yourself, and that is, what am I unwilling to feel? When the abyss is there, when we've kind of exited away from the deities and we're kind of caught in our reactivity, there's something we're unwilling to feel. there's something we're unwilling to feel. And so really the shift, the waking up, comes when we start to begin to call on these qualities of the two wings we've been exploring since we've been together to feel what we've been unwilling to feel. That's really the process.

It's like whatever we have been unwilling to shine the light of awareness on, we start including an awareness. Okay? So these two wings, just to save them again, Jonathan spoke to them beautifully last night. One, and we need them both and they're utterly interdependent. They can't exist without each other. We cannot, the wings of the bird can't fly to freedom without each other. And one wing is the wing of recognizing. It's the, what's happening right here, this moment, what's true? And it unfurls into deep wisdom. And the other wing is the wing of,

this allowing quality that makes room and it unfurls into pure loving compassion. It's got profound tenderness in that allowing. So we awaken these two wings. It's through awakening the two wings and being with what we haven't wanted to feel that we cross the abyss. The more awake we get, the more we find the subtle ways we're pulling away from discomfort. And some of you are already naming how you're naming how you're noticing that. It gets subtler and subtler, what we sometimes call selfing, which is just the

habitual resisting of what's unpleasant and the holding to what we think's going to bring pleasure. And that gets subtler and subtler, and we start to watch and witness that at these different levels, and they're all just a way of trying to control. It's a survival brain, trying to control things, creates that self-thing. So we keep bringing these two wings. waking up these two wings. Now, what I'd like to do is give you an example of how that happens, but I'm just going to describe the process again that we get caught, we get disconnected, we get in a kind of flip-lid place,

and the steps are in some way seemingly simple, and yet each one we have to customize. So the first step is just to recognize, oh, this is going on, name it. it, just name what we're aware of. Because right away that starts activating the prefrontal cortex and there's science on it, that if you name something and UCLA did a great study on it, in the moment of naming it, you're activating the part of the brain that is correlating with more mindfulness, less activity of the limbic system. So name it. That's the recognize in rain. And then allowing it, even if you can't allow it just to you just to, you know, just

that some wisdom place in you knows it's a good idea to allow it is the beginning of allowing. I'm going to say that again because it's important. When we're resisting, a lot of us is all organized around resisting. And so when we say, oh, allow, it's like usually it's a very bargaining mind kind of allowing. All right, I'll be with it if it'll go away. You know that one? It's not a full allow like, okay, have at me. It's like, you know, it's a little manipulative.

That's okay. It's really okay. Just the intention to allow is opening the door. Does that resonate for you? So just tell you, okay, yes, even though you're not wholeheartedly behind the yes. This is a poem called See Paris First. Suppose what you fear could be trapped and held in Paris. Then you would have the courage to go,

Everywhere in the world, all the directions of the compass open to you, except the degrees east or west of true north that lead to Paris. Still, you wouldn't dare to put your toes smack dab on the city limit line. And you're not really willing to stand on a mountainside miles away and watch the Paris lights come up at night. And just to be on the safe side, you decide to stay completely out of France. But then danger seems too close even to those boundaries, and you feel the timid part of you covering the whole.

globe again. You need the kind of friend who learns your secret and says, see Paris first. So the two wings, we recognize what's happening and we allow. We say, okay, let's stay. Let's be with the deities. Let's get on this path of presencing into sacred space. Then what happens? Well, we agree to see Paris. We agree to be with the deities, but there's still a whole lot of reactivity. still pretty flipped, right? And that's when it's a wise, intuitively wise, process to say, okay, Liz is deep in the two wings. And this is, if in rain we go recognize and allow, and the deepening of the two wings comes in the eye of rain. And I always call it investigate with kindness. Because if you try to do the investigating and there's not that

atmosphere of tenderness, it'll become a removed investigation that will not engage in an energetic way that heals. We need the heart. So we begin to investigate. And the investigation, as James described, and I thought it was really important, is very embodied. If you have an idea that investigate means you're analyzing your childhood patterns to see. the relationship with how it's all happening now and my mother said this and now I have this every time somebody, that's not it. It's noticing what's happening, where it's happening, how it feels in your body. Now sometimes adding in some inquiry deepens that presencing. The value of inquiry of that interest that's really, so how is this, is to deepen the

presencing. So Jonathan gave us some wonderful examples of inquiry that can do that. You can ask the question, what am I believing? Because the given is that if you're suffering, you're believing something untrue, but don't go searching and thinking about it too much because it'll just spiral out. And if you find what you're believing, which might be, I'm failing, I've always failed, I'm unlovable, I'll never get what I want. As soon as you sense it, come right into your body and sense where it lives in your body. Because otherwise, again, it's mental

and it will not lead to healing. So we deepen the two wings. We investigate. We feel more into our body. We inquire. And this is central. In order to awaken that wing of the heart, really need to sense

what the wounded place needs. How does it need us to be with it? What is the quality of care that's needed? This is really key. There's no way to undo the resistance if there's not a quality of care that's offered. So the Nnerveen, I just want to mention again, is that if you're truly bringing the two wings alive, noticing what's happening, allowing it, deepening the n-of-rein, noticing, bringing tenderness, then in that presencing, there's an awakening to inhabit presence. You become that presence. You become that tender space it's happening in. And there's no doing with the N of Rain. There's simply being that, inhabiting it. Get familiar with it. Let me give you an example here. This is really an example of how, you

it's possible to move from this, and when I'm doing this with my hand, I'm meaning creating the abyss by being in reactivity to coming back again. And this is an example that, a woman that really inspired me, I wrote about her a little bit in true refuge. She, her mother had terminal breast cancer and she was the only local offspring, so she was in a caretaking role. And growing up, her mother had been incredibly narcissistic and neglectful. And one of the stories she most remembered was she was three years old, and her mother had called her to take a bath, and it was telling her the bath was ready,

and when she got up, there were three inches of water, and it was cold. And she had this realization at three years old that this is all I'm going to ever get, and nobody's really going to take care of me. I can't trust. Okay. So, as an adult taking care of her mother, the anger is still there towards her mother.

And then the second arrow of, I'm supposed to be taken care of her, I shouldn't be angry, and she's at the end of her life was there too. So that was the flipped lid, okay, the anger. So practicing bringing the two wings to it was beginning with the anger. And she had some fear the anger would get out of control if she allowed it. So she had to make room for the fear of that too. But when she did, the fear gave her permission to feel her anger. So she began to investigate.

She allowed it, began to investigate. And the way she investigated anger, and I often encourage people to do it, get out of the stories, feel it in the body as an energy, and then let it rip. Like totally allow it as an energy in the body. And when she did that, she felt this like hot cauldron in her chest, and when she

kept saying yes to it, it wanted to explode, so she said yes to that. And so it became like these bursting flames and this windstorm that was spreading, and it crashed through the windows, and it spread through the east coast, and across the continent and across all the continents and out

into outer space and started destroying galaxies. And, you know, so it was really big anger. Okay, this is rage, and she's really letting it go. and she kept recognizing the bigness of it, letting it be, until finally she started recognizing that it was losing steam. Okay, yes to that, getting quieter, yes to that. So there's an emptiness and a silence, yes to that.

There's no one left in the world, I'm utterly alone, saying yes to that. no one who loves me, no one who I can love, and then grief. So this anger, by recognizing and allowing, morphed into what was under it, this grief, this deep grief. And she inquired a bit, what is this grief most need? And it was just to know that she cared about it, to know that she cared. So she did what many people are doing more and more. Put her hand on her heart.

And just the simple words, I'm sorry, and I love you over and over. And as she did it, she had an image of that little girl in the bath that she was sending the message there. And the more she sent that message, the more she said there's going to this shift in her sense of her own identity that she was becoming, like that warm, loving pool of what, her holding her own being and really became like an ocean holding all the waves of her being. That's the end of rain. The shift in identity, not identified as the angry, rageful young one,

not identified as the all-alone grieving one, resting in her natural openness and tenderness. Okay, so that's what happened. And she had a practice over and over again because thinking about her mother, or being with her mother, re-triggered this, the abyss. So many rounds of practice to activate the frontal cortex so that she could stay whole in the midst. The learning for her was, and she found she could start being with her mother in a way that was, she could sense her mother's vulnerability and loneliness, so she was less and less activated. But the learning for her was that it wasn't a one-shot. She couldn't just have this great experience of becoming the ocean, the great bath that she never had, and holding herself.

She just had to keep repeating it and keep repeating it. And one of the metaphors that I think is beautiful for this, and I heard this through Jonathan, who heard it through someone else, is to sense how a piece of cloth gets dyed to the color indigo and that you take this white cloth and you dip it into a vat of dye and you pull it out and the white cloth first it's got a strong color but it quickly fades to just a little bit off white so you rinse it and then you dip it in again pull it out and it's a little stronger but it still fades back some

and you have to keep repeating and repeating dipping into the vat of awareness, let's say, until more and more it holds that you can actually sense more than any story you've ever told yourself is the truth of this loving presence. That is the gift of this practice.

And it takes repeating, bringing these two wings to whatever the deities are. Now, the last piece of this to say is that there are, when we get stuck and we're noticing it, and as for this woman, she offered that message of care, each one of us needs to find our pathways of nourishing this second wing, the wing of loving presence. And it's different for each of each of us. And so it's a true experiment. It's an experiment that everyone I know that has really awakened to more freedom from that old sense of limit identity that's really resting in something larger. Everyone has had to find their own way of how to regard the inner life with

kindness. And for some it might be a gesture, hand on the heart or hand on your cheek or both. And when you do that, it's to vary the touch, you know, so that you really sense that there's a communication of kindness. For others, I mean, for me, sometimes I'll imagine the Bodhisattva of compassion as just this great field of warmth and light, and I'll just imagine it pouring into me and then discover there was nothing out there pouring into me that that is what I am. But at first that image and that sense of that love pouring in. And for most of us it's very hard to receive love. So it's been a real practice to just keep on surrendering and opening to let that pour in.

That's a pathway to awakening the wing of love. sometimes instead I find for myself, and I know others that do the same, is to sense this vastness of love. And when I'm caught in a small sense of my own being, it's almost like I'm offering it into something larger, not like I'm trying to get rid of it, but more like it's just in a very humble, loving way, just saying, please, may this be held in a larger truth. It's a deep kind of bowing and devotion, just giving myself to something. something larger. There are many different pathways and it's an experiment. So the last

piece to name is, because this is all about how do we make love of our self-perfect when we've flipped, when we've disconnected, is that I've never seen anyone that's open to more authentic self-compassion, not have it ripple out so that this heart space is inclusive of all other beings. There's no difference. In the moments that you start having an authentically tender, real kindness offered inward, that kindness absolutely expands to include others. And we know it also in terms of neuroscience, that self-compassion activates a certain neural net in the frontal cortex

where the mirror neurons are. As we open in kindness towards ourselves, we're able to have a resonance field with others. An example of that that I love, but first I'll go back to this woman I told you about with her mother, I thought I'd share with you what happened in their last meeting. In our last meeting, she told me about right before her mom died, a few days before she died,

her mother woke up really hot and sweaty, and she put a cold cloth on her mother's head, and her mother said, you know, and then she started washing her mom where she felt uncomfortable. Her mom said, you know, no one's ever washed me. And she thought of that little girl who had no one had prepared the bath for, and how she and her mom both had felt that same neglect. and she said she touched an uncomplicated love,

the love that's just that humanist feeling the pure vulnerability of another human. And she said that she knew that would be what stayed with her long after her mom had died. And it came from that capacity to go right to the wounded place and bring those two wings, recognizing and tenderness. So we practice really for the sake of healing that's just unconditional to our world. And I wanted to share a last story that's affected me over the years.

That is an illustration of this. Because when we're turned on ourselves, we create an unreal self. We're divided. We're in conflict. And it's the exact same thing when we're creating shoulds or an enemy outside ourselves. So this practice of compassion is the bridge that can help us see past unreal other, whether it's the other racially different person or a person with different political views or religious views. This is the potential to really heal the dividedness and war and conflict and violence on Earth.

And one of the examples that's lived with me for so long, there's a book called Offerings at the Wall. And it's made up of letters that Vietnam Vets wrote that they actually left at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. It's collected into a book, The Letters, and published. And this is one person's letter. Dear sir, for 22 years I've carried your picture in my wallet. I was only 18 years old that day that we faced one another on the trail in Chulai, Vietnam. Why you didn't take my life, I'll never know. You stared at me for so long, armed with your AK-47, and yet you didn't fire.

Forgive me for taking your life. I was reacting just the way I was trained to kill VC. see, so many times over the years I've stared at your picture and your daughter, I suspect. Each time my heart and guts would burn with pain of guilt, I have two daughters myself now. I've received you as a brave soldier defending his homeland. Above all else, I respect the importance I've held for you. I suppose that's why I'm able to be here today. It's time for me to continue the life process and release my family.

pain and guilt, forgive me, sir. So he wrote this letter, and this is his process, that alchemy I described, if he'd faced the deities, the pain with a real presence, I was ready to let go of whatever was between him and living and loving. But it's not the end of the story because it got into the book and then it got brought to him and he realized he was published. And so he made a big life decision, which was he was going to go to Vietnam and find the little girl in the picture. So he and his wife traveled to Vietnam to see if they could find her, and they found her. And they had a translator there, and I'll read you how the rest of it goes. Through the interpreter Richard introduced himself.

He said, tell her, this is the photo I took from her father's wallet the day I shot and killed him, and I'm returning it. And so then he broke up and he asked for her forgiveness. And then she burst into tears, fell into his arms, and they just held each other sobbing and embracing. Then after a while, her brother explained, because she had a younger brother, that they both believed that their father's spirit lived on in this man, in rich. He said, they expect, well, think it's just superstition, and perhaps it is, but for them, that's the day their father's spirit returned to them.

It's our deepest potential to open to what we've been turning away from with the quality of compassion that then reveals who we are and naturally ripples out. This is our evolutionary potential to, watch how the mind creates the abyss and with less and less lag time, have our hearts cross it. So I'd like to do a final, or short meditation on this with you and to take some moments to scan and sense what's right here for you.

And as you do, you might sense if there's anything here in the moment between you and loving presence. with that phrase, make love of yourself perfect. Is there anything between you and just love and presence with the life that's here? And if you notice anything, you might explore just in these moments that kind of gesture of kindness. Whatever gesture of kindness might bring more of a sense of tenderness. most simple might be to just gently place your hand on your heart. But as you do, vary the pressure

so that you feel that quality of purposely offering to yourself care. And sense what it really means to make love of yourself, love of this life right here perfect. And if there's a disconnect, let there just simply be the intention. and notice what that's like. A sincere intention. Just this moment. The poet Rumi writes, I must have been incredibly simple or drunk or insane to sneak into my own house and steal money, to climb over the fence and take my own vegetables, but no more. I've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. The universe and the light of the stars come through me. I am the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival. Namaste,

blessings, and thank you. 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.