Tara Brach - From Egoic to Unconditioned Loving

Episode Date: September 8, 2013

2013-09-04 - From Egoic to Unconditioned Loving - When we are caught in the sense of separation and unmet needs, our love is marbled with fear and attachment.  This talk describes the chain of conditioning that perpetuates the constrictions of egoic love and explores several courageous activities--sharing our vulnerability, expressing love, extending and receiving love-- that awaken us to the vastness and freedom of pure loving awareness. 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!

So these last few weeks I've been exploring how to relate with what I call the shadow deities of fear and of all the emotions that are related to fear, jealousy, anger, shame, that come out of feeling separate, feeling like something's wrong, feeling like something's missing. And in the last class we really explored how in the moments of that we can remember belonging. We can remember some sense of connectedness with another person, with the earth, with something larger. We begin to dissolve the power of that emotion.

And the more alive that loving feeling is, that sense of true belonging, the more fully we heal. So fear as the end, antidote, really. As consciousness evolves, the way we experience loving changes. So you can, love is a really messy word, and for now I'm just going to use it and say that there's a range of experience of feeling that connection, belonging, or oneness. And it can range from what I'll call a more constricted kind of ego loving, where there's a sense of this self here who's loving, who's

loving something else. And with that, because there's still some sense of separateness to the self, it's marbled with fear and it's marbled with attachment because that self has some insecurity and that's quite natural. And we all have, we all know what that's like, ego fear. But as we wake up, there's the potential to wake up a sense of loving that's quite unconditional and quite boundless, quite free. And last week after the class, I led a few exercises in the talk, I got an email from someone who had touched into that. And I wanted to share a little, I wanted to share pieces of that email with you. She said, I had such a

powerful experience, I wanted to share it. And she says, my breakthrough came when you discussed the strategy of finding a way to allow myself to feel the fear. You asked the question, where do you feel a heart connection? I thought of my best friend. As I sat with my eyes closed, I found my refuge in her friendship and love for me. I actually felt her love for me

soothe and surround me and lift me out of my fear state. The emotion was so strong I started to cry. And I finally began to understand one of the teachings I've heard you give many times, that when we reach out for a sense of love and belonging, we can discover that it is already here within us. And that a sense of love and belonging is more who we are than the small ego sense of self we tend to identify as our self on a day-to-day basis.

That the love is already inside us. So reaching out is a skillful thing because it reminds us of something that was already there but was outside of our consciousness that the loving's already here and not only is it already here it's more true as essence of who we are

than any narrative, any story about a self who's deficient or a self who needs this or a self who's failing in some other way. Each one of us here, each one of us that's in some way listening right this moment, is on a path of what you might call the awakening heart of this evolving from a more constricted egoic kind of loving where there's conditions

and we hold back to a more free heart where we sense the loving, not as this egoic self-loving something out there, but really as a field of beingness, as really what we are. This is the kind of movement of the awakening. And what nourishes it, and this is to me what's so amazing in terms of the juncture of evolution that we're at is that we're now able to pay attention on purpose in ways that actually nourish our capacity for loving. We can actually be intentional and evolve that level. loving to wake up out of the egoic kind of state.

So there's this potential. Our existential predicament, and this is like we're all in the same boat, is every being that comes into form emerges with a sense of separateness. So that's not like a mistake, it's not bad, it's not like unspiritual, just how it is. We all have that sense of there's this membrane

and in here is moire. and out there's the world. And with that comes our conditioning for fighting, flighting, freezing, and then it comes to attaching, you know, chasing after rewards. So that's, you know, we are wired to struggle, wired to grasp. It's all a part of it. And it's just not the end of the story

because we also have as part of our evolutionary, evolutionary equipment, this capacity to feel a sense of affiliation, and it's really built into our nervous system to recognize, ah, sameness. We have this capacity to feel tender and empathetic. We have a capacity to really reach out and take care. So I call that, you know, the shift from fight, flight, freeze to attend and be friend. This is our capacity. What happens, and I'm going to spend a little more time because what I'd like to explore tonight is this movement from egoic loving to more unconditional loving without holding back, how we can nurture that.

We begin by just understanding that when, for different reasons, and it might be genetic and it might be our more cultural-based, but it mostly, lands up with our caregivers, when our basic bonding is not secure, it's much more difficult. There's a kind of arrest that goes on where we get caught in a kind of constricted version of egoic love and it's harder to wake up out of it. There is just more charge to the fear and more charge for the wanting because there's just more unmet needs. Again, it's not something wrong, it's more just a recognition that to the degree we have unmet needs for secure bonding, we're going to have to be even more intentional on how to find our pathways

to belonging so that we can wake up, so we can keep waking up. So what we're going to do is going to take a look at how do we get caught in the patterning that comes out of these unmet needs, how do we get stuck in them in a kind of trance where our love keeps being confined to just a few people and even their tense and feeling like in some way we're not really free, our hearts aren't free. And most of us are pretty aware of the generational chain reaction whereby if our parents had their needs that weren't met for love, for safety, for work, then they're going to develop patterning in their lives that make it very difficult for them to then give us that kind of resonance field where they're attentive and

nourishing and able to see us because they're going to be preoccupied with meeting their own needs. There's going to be a lot more projection, a lot less capacity to be empathic. So I think we get that it gets handed down where I think it's sometimes valuable to take a closer look is our own internal chain of reactivity that really solidifies and keeps us in a kind of egoic prison where we don't have access to our hearts. And then we go through the day feeling in some way, I'm not really a loving person. Or others don't love me. Or we don't even pay attention to the domain of loving because we're just feeling so unsafe and anxious. So if we kind of break it down, when parents are unable to provide the two qualities of attention

that are most needed, which is to see clearly who are we? We all need to be seen and to offer care to what is seen, you know, love what they see. When that doesn't happen, the feeling is something's wrong with me. And the belief is unlovable. One writer describes just the wound of unlove. And that sense of not being, not mattering, and not being lovable, shapes the entire way we move through the world

and the entire way that we perceive others are relating to us. We get anxious and tense and depressed about how it all is. Pablo Neruda, calls this a certain weariness. He says, I'm tired of the harsh sea

and the mysterious earth. I'm tired of chickens. We never know what they think. And they look at us with dry eyes as though we were unimportant. I really like that. I think that's just like, okay, chickens also, even they don't get it.

They don't get us. There's a wonderful cartoon many, many years ago that my sister sent me from the New Yorker and it shows a man sitting in his family room and he's really angry and upset and here's what everybody else is thinking you see it in thought bubbles

his wife is thinking was it something I said the dog is thinking was it something I buried the cat is thinking was it something I dragged in and the parrot's thinking was it something I repeated

but you know how it is we all take it personally It's very hard to be with somebody who's in a bad mood and not feel bad. We somehow rather think it's our fault. And if we do, can we imagine what a young child does when their parents are unhappy, afraid, depressed, angry? We're very self-referenced, right? So what happens then?

We grow up to have this mix of the feelings and the beliefs of something's wrong with me. And that drives us to finding something to help us feel better about ourselves. And some substitute forms of love because we don't feel able to get it directly that makes us feel we're okay. And I've called these false refuges, again, not because they're bad, but because they don't work. We find substitutes and they don't work.

We're trying to soothe this rawness in us, fear that comes with not belonging. And I want to just slow down and say, we are social beings. So when we don't feel belonging, that's really dangerous. So even if we're not sensing, oh, I'm not feeling connected to others, I'm afraid, even if it doesn't present like that, deep down, there's a deep angst and restlessness and unease when we don't feel a sense of belonging. So we do a lot. And if you notice, watch yourself through the day, a lot of what we do, the ways we're thinking

and the ways we're behaving, is in some way to soothe some anxiety, some clench, some rawness in our body that is uncomfortable. The more of the unmet need, the more addicted we get to the ways we try to soothe ourselves. The example I want to share with you, I read in the Sun magazine, which is a really beautiful, beautiful publication. My mother always assured me that unspeakable punishments were bound to befall any child as naughty as I was. If I were you, she'd say, I'd be afraid to go to sleep at night for fear God would strike me dead. She would speak these words softly, regretfully, as though saddened by her errant daughter's fate.

I thought myself unloved and unlovable, not only by my own mother, but by God himself. In addition to threatening me with thoughts of eternal damnation, mother also gave me a fear of strangers, germs, disease, food poisoning. A precocious and imaginative child, I added to the list some bizarre fears of my own. Rare ailments learned from medical dictionary falling into the wrong dimension, spontaneous human combustion. When I was suspended from my private, girl school at age 15 for a harmless prank, the headmistress referred to my behavior as

damnable. This was no big news to my mother or me. What was news was that I had the highest IQ and the lowest grades in the entire student body. I took pride in the fact that although I was a dysfunctional underachiever, at least I wasn't stupid. The most devastating words my mother ever spoke to me came when I asked her if she loved me. I had just been escorted home by the police after one of my many attempts to run away, so it was bad timing on my part. She answered, how could anyone ever love you?

It took me almost 50 years to heal the damage from all her ugly remarks. Recently discussing eating disorders with my therapist, I related to childhood ritual of mine, intending it to be an amusing anecdote to illustrate how far back my eating problems went. I even laughed as I spoke,

poking gentle fun at myself. It was only when I know noticed that my therapist was watching me with sympathy rather than amusement that I became aware of the tears on my own cheeks. This is what I told her. From the age of five or six until I was well into my teens, whenever I had trouble sleeping, I would slip out from under my covers and steal into the kitchen for a bit of bread or cheese, which I would carry back to the bed with me. There I pretend my hands belonged to someone else, a comforting, being reassuring being without a name, an angel perhaps.

The right hand would feed me little bits of cheese or bread as my left hand stroked my cheeks and hair. My eyes closed. I would whisper softly to myself, They're there, go to sleep. You're safe now. Everything will be all right. I love you.

So when there's unmet needs, some intelligence in us, some love in us, moves us to try to meet them. We don't have necessarily good or healthy ways to do it, but we're trying. And then many of us get locked into those strategies and they end up turning out to be harmful to us. But they didn't come out of an intention for harm. Meanwhile, because their substitutes,

the wounded place is not met and not healed. So there's many kind of strategies. And I can mention some to you. Some are to numb, some are to just keep on finding pleasure after pleasure. Some are to grasp and try to hold on to other people so that we can have them in some way approve of us or give us what we want. Some of us, judgment, aggression, you know, pushing others away so they don't have a chance to talk.

A lot of them are trying to control in some way, how others are perceiving us. And the more we feel threatened that others will reject us, the more we're in some way maneuvering. I was sharing with my mother the theme of tonight's talk, and she emailed me what I'm about to read you. After a tiring day, a commuter settled down in his seat and closed his eyes. As the train rolled out of the station, a young woman sitting next to him,

pulled out her cell phone and started talking in a loud voice. Hi sweetheart, it's Sue. I'm on the train. Yes, I know it's 6.30 and not 430. I had a long meeting. No, honey. Not with that Kevin from the accounting office. It was with the boss. No, sweetheart. You're the only one in my life. Yes, I'm sure. Cross my heart. Fifteen minutes later, she was still talking loudly. When the man sitting next to her had enough, he leaned over and said into the phone, Sue, hang up the phone and come back to bed.

Sue doesn't use her cell phone in public any longer. So we all have, to the degree that we feel insecure, to the degree we don't feel a sense of belonging, we all have our strategies. And if we're not aware of them, then they actually keep us from expressing and receiving real love. So I'm trying to describe this chain of reactivity that unmet needs, we have these beliefs, we have these feelings,

we develop these strategies, and they really confirm to us this self that's not okay. Carl Jung put it this way, and I share this often because I think it really sums it up. He says, nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children

than the unlived life of the parents. Now, unlived doesn't mean, oh, I wanted to breed iguanas or this and I never got around to it, or I wanted to be in the circus, or whatever it is, or I wanted to swim across the Atlantic doing side stroke. It's not that kind of unlived life. What we're talking about is the unlived life that we haven't, when we haven't seen or felt really, the lonely life.

loneliness, the passion, the different yearnings, the different fears, when we haven't been with that rawness that we run away from. That's the unlived life. And when there's unlived life, all the ways we use to avoid it are also ways that we avoid the one place where we can experience love, the present moment. So we're not able to be there for our children are ourselves. So a way that is sometimes helpful to think of this is that when you think of spores in the plant kingdom, when times are harsh and what's needed to bloom can't be found when we don't have the sunshine and the warmth and the light and so on, certain plants become spores, right? And what that means, they're found in mummy,

you know, spores that can be thousands of years old. And what's amazing is these thousands of year old spores that couldn't bloom once they're given the proper nourishment and environment can bloom. Unlived life is like that. When children are judged or not listen to or understood or not met with some resonance, some mirroring of goodness,

that unlived life is like a spore. It's, they kind of wall off that part of themselves because it's too painful. And then all the strategies they use to the substitute strategies keep building the wall and keep them away from feeling what's there. So it's frozen life energy. But like plant spores, because they're opportunists, plant spores actually are waiting for what can allow them to blossom. The unlived life in us is the same.

And I often think of our meditation practices as kind of a spiritual reparenting where we're beginning to offer inwardly the attention and the love that can begin to dissolve the walls around that unlive life and allow it to rejoin the flow of our being. In other words, kind of soften the arming so love can come in and out. And I like even the notion of spiritual reparenting because it's taking something that we needed to blossom and giving it to ourselves. And on every spiritual path and in every religion, the activity with each other, conscious-relating, conscious loving relationships with each other also is in the same way, allows us to begin

to dissolve those walls around the unlived life. It begins to wake up the heart. So what I'd like to do is use the remainder of my time tonight with you to explore how in our relationships with each other can we intentionally, actively wake up the heart. How can we begin to heal the unmet needs and heal into that wholeness so that rather than the constricted egoic loving that's organized around unmet needs, our hearts are free to love without holding back. I'm going to talk about two different ways that given where we are in an evolutionary manner, we actually can choose to wake ourselves up more, two different ways. And I want to say that they both involve risk, the ego thinks of them as risky,

because the ego is afraid of moving, you know, putting down the walls, the ego is afraid of reaching out because there's a risk of rejection of it not working. So each of these conscious ways of relating that help free our heart take a lot of courage. So we just ease into them. The first one of them is a willingness where we haven't been willing before to acknowledge our vulnerability. It doesn't mean that we acknowledge it with everybody at the supermarket. It doesn't, you know, it's just like, it's like we pick and choose, but we acknowledge it. And there is a wonderful quote from Adrian Rich and she says, and I don't have it in front of me so I'm going to paraphrase

it, she says in a relationship for us to call it love for it to truly be love is a matter of the deepening truths that we tell each other. And it's important because it helps to reduce self-delusion and isolation. Now here's the flip side of it is, when we're covering over our vulnerability, what we're ashamed of, what we're afraid of, when we're covering it over, it actually increases our sense of something's wrong. Secrets keep us trapped. When we can include it in a field that's larger than the separate self, our sense of boundary begins to dissolve and it actually no longer carries the same meaning. to us. It loses its power if we can name it. Share with you in my own life where that

became very, very clear in my relationship with Jonathan, who I met about 10 years ago. And I remember, you know, not too long after he moved in, I had one of those weeks where I was really stressed and really ornery, and this is a new relationship in the sense of here we were living together, and I was really bad to be around. I mean, just tight. I knew it. And then I remember on a Saturday morning, I had a board meeting, and we hadn't discussed what we do for the rest of the day when I got back. But I remember driving back home after the board meeting, and I had a kind of projection or fantasy that Jonathan had gone down to the river and gone kayaking without me. And the more I thought that he might have gone done that, my body went into rage.

I mean, I was feeling exclusive. I started rehearsing what I was going to say to him and how even if he came back and said, I had a great time in the river, how I was not going to have any, it's called Mudita, joy and his joy, I was just going to be pissed. I mean, I really had it all revved up. And so it was a huge head of steam all on this idea that he had gone. And so I got home. He had made some bread, homemade bread,

and then he was wondering if I was in the mood to go to the river and go kayaking with him. So we went kayaking in and we kind of parked. We sometimes park on one of those little islands and just watch the currents. And I kept thinking, okay, I got to tell him. I just got to tell him what happened. And I had so much fear of telling me, it was so embarrassing to say out loud that I had imagined that he had gone without me and how angry I was. It was just really...

But I got myself to say it. And he was, as he is, kind and attentive and actually honored me for taking the risk and so on. But what it got me in touch with as I shared it was that I... I didn't want to be with me, so I couldn't imagine how he'd want to be with me. And the feeling of being such an unwanted person was so painful that I just attacked. It was an amazing experience because it deepened my sense of how when I'm real and vulnerable, I actually land up more connected. It's the opposite of what I'm fearing. And again, this is the beginning of our relationship.

It actually allowed him to be able to start telling me about some of his insecurities that he had been embarrassed about and hadn't wanted to share. There's a beautiful poem that says to reteach a thing, its loveliness. And I just, if I have it here, I wanted to share it with you, because this is, in a way, what happens is that when we can go through, expressing our vulnerability, we get to come home, I don't have it here so I can't say, but we get to remember our goodness. We get to reconnect with our goodness. So that's the first one that takes nerve to sense, and you might sense in your life right now as you're just listening,

where do you tell the truth the most about what's really real for you? And how does it feel afterwards? And if you don't, where might you? Just stretch a little to begin to share what's real. There's so much power to it. Number two, has to do with expressing love. And I think for many of us, we have all sorts of good or warm or tender feelings for others and we don't let them know. We don't let them

know as much as we might. So again a reflection is you know you might sense how recently or often you've really paused and when I say pause you've really been present with someone else as you've let them know that they really matter to you. Not the habitual love you hun, which we all do a lot, but but really pausing to acknowledge the realness and the tenderness and poignancy of caring. Again, it doesn't happen so much. And in the moments when we do do that, and this was kind of a revelation to me when I realized the power of it,

when you really stop and you're very inhabiting your body as you say it, and you say, I love you, the love actually is drawn up and wakes up in you. The saying of it actually brings it alive. There's a power to that. This is what Tikna Han writes. He says, when you say something like, I love you with your whole being, not just with your mouth or your intellect, it can transform the world. We are interconnected.

when we awaken love in ourselves and express that our love changes the world around us. Children on love, there's a set of quotes by children. You really shouldn't say I love you unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget and it's good for them to get reminded. There's a story that Rachel Naomi Remen tells about her grandfather. she spent her first six years or so, her grandfather was a main influence in her life, and he called her Nesimala, which means little beloved soul.

And it really gave her a feeling of mattering in the eyes of God. And when he died, she had a period where she started feeling afraid that if her grandfather wasn't there to call her little beloved soul, that God would forget her. but she realized that once blessed, forever blessed, that she had that blessing. Somebody had mirrored her, and she really had some basic connection

or belonging in that way. And when later in her life, she shared this with her mother. Her mother had started lighting candles and saying prayers, since her mother was a very old woman at that time, and she shared with her mother that gift of her grandfather's,

her mother said this. She said, Rachel, I have blessed you every day of your life. I just never had the wisdom to say it out loud. So this taking the risk, and you might sense where it might be possible in your life, has to do with expressing love. And we might be very embodied and feel it and say it, and then it's really going to wake it up in us, or we might not be as embodied, but the more we express the more it actually helps us contact the loving. Similarly, this is the extension of that, not just saying I love you, but having our activity express our love, reaching

out. And I thought I'd share with you a story about my mother and reaching out that really touched me because we think, you know, reaching out what it does is it actually puts us in touch with our loving. So when you go ahead and do something for another person in some way take care, offer your care, it brings up your caring. And here's what happened for my mom. My father's second cousin was born with brain damage and so throughout my child growing up, he would always be included at holidays. He didn't have living family. And my mother was always polite and generous and, you know, she'd always make sure there was a gift for him at Christmas and so on. But behind the lines, he was what I call an unreal other to her. He, he didn't feel

like a part of things. And I could tell that she felt uncomfortable and a bit resentful that he was there and he was a little difficult to have around the way he ate and so on was awkward and not pretty and my mother just had a hard time with it but she kind of contained it well after my father died and other people and the family kind of died off she was the only one around when we called them cousin Victor landed up in a hospital and then in a care facility she was the only one left to visit him or take care of him. So he became her job. And so she'd go over there and she'd bring him things and she'd spend a little time with him and he really became very attached to her visits and the more she realized how much it mattered to him, the more it started

mattering to her until she'd go over and she'd bring him gifts and when he was upset about things she'd listened to the things he was upset about and what he had stories to tell, until she told me one day that he's a part of me now. And it came from taking care of. Whatever we pay attention to or take care of, it brings out our caring. We discover the belonging that was there but hidden. And it's there with every living part of this universe if we slowed down and if we reached out. Not only does it wake up our hearts, it inevitably ripples out.

A story for you. One day when I was a freshman in high school, I saw a kid from my class was walking home from school. His name was Kyle. He looked like he was carrying all of his books. I thought to myself, why would anyone bring home all his books on a Friday? He must really be a nerd.

I had quite a weekend planned, parties, and football game with my friends tomorrow afternoon, I shrug my shoulders and went on. As I was walking, I saw a bunch of kids running towards him. They ran at him, knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt. His glasses went flying, and I saw them land in the grass about ten feet from him. He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness in his eyes. My heart went out to him. So I jogged over to him, and as he crawled around looking for his glasses, I saw a tear in his eye. As I handed him his glasses, I said, those guys are jerks. They really should get lives.

He looked at me and said, Hey, thanks. There was a really big smile on his face. It was one of those smiles that showed gratitude. I helped him pick up his books and asked him where he lived. As it turned out, he lived near me, so I asked him why I'd never seen him before. He said he had gone to private school before now.

I would have never hung out with a private school kid before. We talked all the way home and I carried some of his books. He turned out to be a pretty cool kid. I asked him if he wanted to play a little football with my friends. He said yes. We hung out all weekend, and the more I got to know Kyle, the more I liked him, and my friends thought the same of him. Monday morning came, and there was Kyle with a huge stack of books again. I stopped him and said, boy, you're really going to build some serious muscles with this pile of books every day.

He just laughed and handed me half of them. Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends. When we were seniors, we began to think about college. Kyle decided on Georgetown, and I was going to Duke. I knew that we would always be friends that the Miles would never be a problem. He was going to be a doctor and I was going for business

on a football scholarship. Kyle was the valedictorian of our class. I teased him all the time about being a nerd. He had to prepare a speech for graduation. I was so glad it wasn't me having to get up there and speak. Graduation day I saw Kyle. He looked great. He was one of those guys that really found himself during high school. He felled out

and actually looked good in glasses. He had more dates than I had and all the girls loved him. Why, sometimes I was jealous. Today it was one of those days. I could see he was nervous about his speech, so I smacked him on the back and said, hey, big guy, you'll be great. He looked at me with one of those looks, the really grateful one, and smiled.

Thanks, he said. As he started his speech, he cleared his throat and began. Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through those tough years. Your parents, your teacher, your siblings, maybe a coach, but

mostly your friends. I'm here to tell all of you that being a friend to someone is the best gift you can give them. I'm going to tell you a story. I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the story of the first day we met. He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his mom wouldn't have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. Thankfully, I I was saved, he said. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable. I heard the gas go through the crowd as this handsome popular boy told us all about his weakest moment. I saw his mom and dad looking at me and smiling that same grateful smile. Not until that moment did I realize

its depth. Never underestimate the power of your actions. With one small gesture, you can change a person's life. I think if we realize the effect we have on each other and we really do, how much the simple stuff of just a touch or a hug or a smile

or a kind word really, really nourishes this place in and inside each of us that often needs reminding if we remembered that it would change the way we

We've lived. We're estimate the yearning we all have to feel loved. Even the smallest expression of care it really lands somewhere. So there's this courage in reaching out because we're afraid to express ourselves. It's hard to say I love you and really be present because the other person might not be in the mood to receive it or might not be feeling so good about us. You know, it's hard to extend ourselves in a caring way because sometimes we feel you it won't be well received. And it's really, really hard to let in. As much as it's difficult

to extend, we're so afraid that it's true that we're unlovable that we don't even explore that little edge of, well, let in that somebody really is acting in an appreciative way. Let it in some. I'm thinking of the woman who wrote me that email last week that she was able to think her friend and actually let it in, well, this person cares about me. It's a really important practice as much as breathing out and giving out love wakes up love, breathing in and letting it in wakes up love. It starts to dissolve that hard wall around the spore. It lets life flow. What happens as we practice, I've been talking about this kind of evolution, evolutionary process that if we're deliberate in practicing, if you decide in these next

weeks to find somewhere that you're going to play your edge and be a little more vulnerable, if you find one person that you're going to be present with and really speak your love from that presence or notice their goodness and in some way feed it back. If you reach out in a way of kindness, if you just in some way reflect, okay, okay, this person, I sense this person cares, and actually pause and see what it feels like to let yourself feel cared about. That is radical.

That begins to decondition the egoic patterning that keeps us from loving fully. You can choose to wake up your heart. You can choose to take a risk at your own pace but be deliberate and regular in these practices and find that there's actually more aliveness viscerally that you feel. As you do, the more that you kind of wake it up, the more you trust, as the woman in the email at the beginning said

that that's actually who you are. Although you were using giving love out to that person and that was something you were doing and that wakes up love, you discover it was always there. You just forgot. And as you trust that more, and here's the real gift of the shift from egoic loving to spiritual loving is that you start discovering that there's nothing excluded from your heart,

that everywhere you pay attention in some way that too is part of your heart, there's tenderness there too. There's a lovely story about Kafka when he was an older man, that he spent time sitting in a park, and one day a little girl came up to him. She had tears rolling down her face, and he asked her what was wrong and she said that she was missing her doll,

that her doll was lost. And he agreed to look around. He tried to find the doll. And he said, listen, you come back and I'll keep looking and see if I can find her. So a few days later, the little girl returned to the park, and Kafka is there. And he doesn't have a doll, but he has a note,

and he reads it. It says, I've gone off to travel some around the world. Please, don't worry about me. I'm fine. The girl was somewhat relieved. She returned to the park every week or so, and Kafka would be there with a note from the doll. And the girl was too young to read, so he would read a telling of the doll's adventures.

Kafka, much sicker, went to the park one last time. This time he had brought a doll. He handed it to the girl and said, the travels had really changed her. Some years later, when the girl was a young woman, she found and read a note that had been rolled up and placed in the doll's hand. Here's what it said. You will lose everyone you love, but the love will always return in new forms. So this is really the gift of awakening these hearts intentionally through loving relationships,

that we discover a timeless love that's inclusive, that's boundless, that feels like home, that feels more true about who we are than any of our stories, any of the egoic stories. And we discover that there's a natural overflowing when that love is there. So we'll do a little practice in a moment. I just want to read you a poem by Hafiz. He says, admit something.

Everyone you see, you say to them, love me. Of course, you do not do this out loud. Otherwise, someone would call the cops. Still, think about this, this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying with that sweet moon language what every other eye in this world is dying to hear? Okay, let's take some moments to explore this a bit with practice. So as you become still, just let your attention go inward.

You might feel the breath for a few moments as a way of collecting and relaxing your attention. And you might scan your body. And just notice if there's any places of discomfort, unease, just to send a message of kindness there. It could be just energetic or some words, as if you could directly reach in, and in some way touch, place of discomfort with a totally tender quality of kindness. You might sense kindness like a warm, the warm light of the sun, just the capacity to melt

and soften and dissolve wherever there's tightness, pain. And if there's something you're carrying around, some emotion that feels difficult about a relationship or about work or about your life. Just a simple gesture of kindness inward. You might just take a moment to touch your heart with your hand and just in some way send a wish for your own well-being, send the energy of caring, even the intention to offer kindness to your own body and heart

is part of this. Bringing to mind someone who you care about, someone that you feel some sense of closeness, connection that's not too complicated. It's helpful right now not to pick a super complicated relationship which might be impossible but that's okay.

We can do the best you can. Sense what you love about this person what brings up your sense of caring. And if part of what you What brings up your caring and love is what you feel from them. If you can feel their appreciation or love of you, take a moment to notice that and see if you can let it in. Perhaps you could imagine their eyes looking at you and that the look in their eyes is

truly expressing like a face's sweet moon eyes, a sense of loving. And just experiment. Can your body energetically let that in a little? And continue to notice then whatever it is that you appreciate about this person, their goodness of heart, humor, aliveness, brightness, and just imagine that you can really bring that person right here, feel their presence. And just as you put your hand on your own heart in some way that you'd be able to touch them with your words. First, just to say thank you. Mentally whisper, thank you.

The appreciation of them being in your life. Thank you. Just sense what happens in your body as you say thank you and really mean it. In some form, I love you, letting that person know, feeling your body and your heart as you express your love, and sensing as you express loving who you are, your own sense of your own being,

when loving is alive, and sensing the possibility of living from this loving presence. We close with the words of the poet Hafeus. This sky where we live is no place to lose your wings. so love, love, love, love. 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.