Tara Brach - Guided Heart Meditation: Loving Presence - from Retreat

Episode Date: April 13, 2017

Guided Heart Meditation: Loving Presence - This meditation introduces the loving-kindness (metta) heart practice. After brief instruction, it begins with scanning the body, filling it gradually with the image of a smile. The meditation continues with a loving-kindness practice - sensing loving presence of someone easy to love, our own being, then offering care to others. (from 2015 fall IMCW weeklong silent retreat)

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. As a preface to the heart practice, I'd like to begin with a short reading. This is from a book written by friend and teaching colleague, Gil Franzdale. It describes an engineer who visits a moment. monastery regularly for many years, and the practices make sense to him. He's a pragmatic type,

and gives him hope that he can overcome a kind of chronic unhappiness. He tries all the practices that the abbess gave him, and with each he keeps encountering this wall of suffering that he can't pass, and he contracts because he's trying to think his way out. So after many rounds, the abbess decides to a different approach is really what's needed and gives him a special practice that he's to practice outside the monastery for two years. And then when he's completed, he can return for deeper teachings. So his activity is to volunteer for 10 hours a week at a maternity ward at a hospital, hold babies that are born prematurely,

because without enough physical contact, they can't grow. in a healthy way. So he plunges in and he's holding these small, fragile beings ever so carefully. Watching their every breath seemed in danger

of them stopping breathing. And he found the most effective way to care for them was to hold them against his chest. After about six months he felt something new. A little spot of warmth and softness in the very center of his being It was kind of foreign.

It didn't fit his ideas of himself, but he ignored it, not thinking it out. That was good because it would have interfered with the warmth. Then over the months, that warmth expanded to fill his whole body and gradually dissolve the dark, hardened wall around his heart. After the completed time, he returned, and the abbess saw that he was transformed. He was no longer desperate. he wasn't trying to fit everything into his conceptual framework of how things should be around him within him.

So he had new instructions. When you meditate, don't think about what's happening. Rather, let your awareness be seated in the tender warmth you feel in your body. If you do this, any meditation practice you do will be fruitful. And the man found this to be true. He continually knew the simplicity of his. his practice was to move from his head to his heart, to keep his heart and his body as the center of awareness, to keep coming home. So it's in this way that an understanding of met or loving

kindness practice is that there's a classical well-known version that has its steps, It's typical sequence reciting the phrases, a mantra of sorts, can lead to deep concentration, can also lead to really awakening, a sense of warmth and tenderness and love. And there are really infinite other versions or pathways that as we pay attention to ourselves with our own historical background, our bodies, our minds, our tendencies can find, really have the effect, which is, the question is, does this serve an opening, a softening, an awakening of my heart? So we'll explore a bit more today, a version of the loving kindness practice. And the first part of it will be really waking up the quality of warmth or love in the body

using traditional, both in the, it's found both in the Tibetan, and actually Taoist traditions of the image of a smile. So take a moment, if there's any other very subtle adjusting so that you're sitting in a way that supports you. Often the guidance with the posture with Meta is to really prioritize feeling a sense of ease. Letting yourself bring to mind the image of a smile, the curve upward at the sides, each edges of a smile, and let it spread through the sky. So you imagine the sky blue and endless and vast and a smile spreading through it. And since the brightness, the receptivity, the openness, the openness, the inclusivity, and then sense that smile filling the mind, brightening, opening the mind.

Sense a smile spreading through the eyes so that the outside corners of the eyes are lifted up some. Find a natural tendency to soften the eyes and let the brow be smooth. We'll come back to the eyes because it's so quick that as we begin thinking those micro-muscles around the eyes, tighten. It's a softening, smiling, and that slight smile at the mouth. It's the half-smile of the Buddha. Ticknodhan describes us as smile yoga. See if you can sense the inside of the mouth smiling. The eyes are soft and smiling in the mouth, feeling the breath at the throat area and visualizing and sensing a smile in the throat. Another place we unconsciously tighten regularly.

Let that smile spread through the throat. Eyes, mouth, the throat and smiling into the heart, inviting a smile to spread through the heart area so that you're visualizing and having the felt sense of a smile not to cover over what's there, but really to sense the space that's already there. Softening the belly and sensing a smile spread through the belly. Visualizing, feeling that, eyes are smiling, the mouth, the heart, and the belly. You can imagine a smile spreading through the pelvic region. Relaxing, opening, feeling the life, the space that's there.

feeling a smile filling the pelvic region, spreading through the belly, filling the heart area, sensing the energy of a smile, filling the whole body, radiating outward. You can almost imagine in a cellular way that receptivity and openness and aliveness. And gently settling the breath, the attention at the heart, sensing the heart is really heart-spers space, vibrant, open, radiant. We begin by bringing to mind someone, some being in our life who's very easy to feel love with, that you might feel loved by, a very simple love towards. It's uncomplicated.

This could be someone you know very well, somebody that's living, someone. someone that's not living. It can also be a dog, a cat, or someone you feel a sense of closeness and love with that perhaps you don't know so well and it could be a deity or a figure, a spiritual figure. What's important is that it's a being with whom you felt loving connection. Bring that being very close in right now. You can see and feel and sense his or her presence their presence, and sense what brings alive the loving for you. What's the goodness in this being that you perceive? Might be the aliveness that you see in this being,

their kindness, brightness, brightness, humor, care for the world. It might be in a very simple way, the way you experience this being loving you. Take some moments to really attend to where the goodness is. what you most appreciate. So you feel that appreciation in a visceral way, that warmth at the heart. You might mentally say this being's name,

whisper it, and say thank you. Whisper thank you. And perhaps again, if it helps you to mentally whisper the name and thank you, until the sound of your voice is a pure, expression of your sincerity, feeling the experience of love and appreciation in a visceral way, expanding in the heart, letting it be as full as it is, and bringing the attention to your appreciation for your own being, to appreciate your own capacity for appreciating and loving

another, we're appreciating whatever quality most touches you, your own honesty, your commitment to truth, to knowing truth, to waking up, your love of loving, your yearning to love more fully, to love without holding back. And if you find as many do that it's really difficult to appreciate your own being, take some moments to look through the eyes of the one who loves you well, who sees you truly and loves you well, perhaps the being you first brought to mind. Just experiment with that. What is it that that person or being sees? To sense what you appreciate about yourself, through your own eyes, through the eyes of another, to feel that goodness.

of life right here, right within you, that consciousness that's waking up and sense what prayer you most want to offer to yourself right now. And if it helps to offer it as you're touching your own heart to deepen the sense of connection and communication, please feel free. And if there's a set of phrases that's a part of your practice, that resonates deeply to offer the phrases with whatever you're offering. See if you can visualize the prayer, the gift, the blessing that you're offering, if you're offering or wishing for your own happiness to visualize that with light, color, form, and to kinesthetically feel the possibility.

of the prayer manifesting. As you continue to reflect, just sense the pure essence of your own care flowing into your heart and see how much you can receive, how much you can let in. Now bringing to mind someone that you care about

that's dear to you, that you'd like to offer your love and blessings to, and let this being, again be close in. So you can see the look in his or her or their eyes, expression on that being's face, and sense what makes them so dear to you. What do you appreciate? What's the goodness that you perceive that lights you up? And as you feel that visceral warmth that comes with appreciation from that place of care, offering your prayer for this person and if the prayer is in the form of a set of phrases offering it that

way, visualizing, imagining and sensing and receiving that prayer, bringing someone else to mind. This time someone that you care about but that's more complicated where there may be some difficulty, some challenge between you and bringing someone. bringing this person close in, and first allow yourself to feel if it's there what arises that might be difficult. So you begin first by just bringing a compassionate presence to whatever reactivity might be in you, not to bypass that. Just breathe with it and let that place of reactivity, whether it's irritation or hurt or whatever

it is, be a place that you really give your kindness, your presence to, breathe with, feel. It's from that place of self-kindness. You can then widen the circle and look through the eyes of the heart at this other being and sense vulnerability, perhaps what other fears or hurts might have this person act in ways that cause harm to themselves or others, and also to see the innate goodness. This being's longing to love and be loved, to be happy, to be peaceful, as you allow yourself to sense the whole beingness there,

to feel your appreciation, and care deepening and offering whatever prayer resonates in this moment are alternatively your phrases that you find are natural for you in the meta practice. As before, visualizing and feeling the possibility of these prayers, these wishes manifesting for this being. from that space of well-wishing and open-heartedness now, just coming back and feeling your own heart, feeling warmth, space, aliveness,

and sensing that heart space as edgeless and inclusive, including the first being you brought to mind, including all the beings you brought to mind, your own self, all those that are here, wide and open, including the land or on, the beings, all species, creatures, here, throughout this planet, and beyond, so that you can hold the earth or mother in your lap and feel all life everywhere, feeling your prayer, your wish for life everywhere, that all beings everywhere might be filled, with loving presence, held in loving presence.

Realize the very essence as loving presence. That all beings might touch a great natural peace. That all beings might know the joy of being alive. That all beings everywhere might awaken and be free. Namaste. Thank you.