Tara Brach - Heart Training on the Bodhisatva Path

Episode Date: May 23, 2014

2014-05-21 - Heart Training on the Bodhisatva Path - Bodhisattva means “Awakened Being.” This path of awakening has three key domains for practice: remembering intention; training our attention; and compassionate activity. This talk reviews these domains and includes guided reflections that can help bring spirituality alive in daily life.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. So last week I went to Minnesota and participated in a collaborative law conference. And you might hear the words collaborative law and think oxymoron or something, right? You know, because we think of law as adversaries that are fighting it out and there's a right and a right and a wrong and a good and a bad. and this is in contrast to that a sense of belonging to a whole and in some way you're collaborating to address the needs of parts of the whole to find a kind of viable common ground. And it was a very powerful experience just to sense how much this

and they're really the basic grounds of this is how do you awaken mindfulness and forgiveness in the process of dealing with dispute it's another example of this paradigm shift that's going on in consciousness. It's a shift from kind of the egoic mentality of warring entities. It's kind of dominated by the limbic system to a very integrative consciousness

that it's where there's a kind of perception of interdependence and a capacity to call on that awareness, that recognizes what's going on without so much reactivity and can forgive. Very powerful. And we're seeing it in all the different domains now, in education and in medicine and business leadership and so on. And of course it's gradual because we have 10,000 plus years of wiring to react from a more egoate consciousness.

But it's happening. It's happening. see it just in collaborative law working with a family, you see the difference between what happens with divorce often which has got a violence and a trauma that ripples into family and children and children's children. You can, it just ripples out and really having the potential for reconciliation, forgiveness. So, in an individual way, this shift from fight-flight freeze to attend and befriend has been personified by the archetype of the Bodhisattva in the Buddhist tradition

and Bodhisattva is awakening being Bodhisattva. And each one of you are on the bodhisattva path in some way, some more consciously than others perhaps, but we're all waking up. These hearts are waking up. And the more we get conscious of the waking up, the more we actually facilitate it. It matters to us. So we're on this bodhisattva path and one of the big challenges, I sometimes think of it as the great gap, is that in our daily life, we, in our depth we know, that love and presence is really the source of our being, it's what matters. We want to love without holding back.

And it's very deep in us. And then we notice, and this is where the great gap comes, our daily life. And we notice how regularly we go into a trance where great swaths of moments get caught up in our worrying and our planning and our figuring out and our defensiveness and our judgment and just that smallness of a kind of fixation on self, what I need, what I'm afraid of. We know that. We know how much that trance catches us.

And we know that we're kind of caught in an egoic self and that what we're seeing around us rather than seeing deeply into who's there, we're seeing kind of the personality covering and reacting. to that. One of my favorite stories is a woman who comes into a business meeting and she had just been outside on the streets and she said she just saw a clown outside. And one man in the group asked, well, was it a real clown or just a person dressed up as a clown? It creeps up on you, right? When we're in trance, and this is the moments that we're really, our perception is, I'm separate, I'm in here, you're out there, I'm on my way somewhere else.

We're not really occupying our body in the moment. When we're in trance, love still matters. It's a part of our narrative, but it's abstract. Compassion matters. We read the newspaper and we'll see something and go, oh no, that's terrible. But there's not that visceral tenderness of response because we're in a transfer, one step removed from really occupying our beingness. So what happens is that we still act pretty well most of us a lot of the time. We're dutiful. We have the shoulds well ingrained and so we behave well and we say often the right thing. You know, we give what we're supposed to give and we interact well. And you can see it's very, it's in us from an early age, one of the other stories of

always liked is of a group of kindergartners on a bus, on a trip. And a little girl brings up to the bus driver a handful of peanuts. And he's surprised and grateful and wow, generosity at this young age and says thanks and eats them. A few minutes later, she comes up with another handful. And he takes them and says, thank you. But then when it happened the third time, he said, hon, you guys eat the peanuts yourself. You know, you don't have to give them all to me. And she said, oh, no, no, we don't mind. We just suck the chocolate off of them. So we have mixed motives in what we do. And, you know, if you look at any kind of giving or generosity

or any of the ways that we do our good person project, it's nothing wrong with that there are layers of different motives. I mean, there usually is underneath a self-sense that wants to feel good about itself. And then there's the kind of, when we're caught in the ego itself, we don't always see clearly and we're not always helpful when we mean to be. I know I remember one story of a little boy was reaching, little little boy reaching high to try to press a doorbell, and a kindly priest was on the street, and he saw him. So he came right up behind him, and he helped him by pushing the doorbell, and he says,

now what? And he goes, and little kid says, we run like hell, you know. It doesn't always work out. Okay, so we're talking about the gap and then we all, we wouldn't be here if we didn't have times of remembering regularly enough that, you know, something happens and we get it that we're not living from who we want to live from, we're not being who we can be. And sometimes they come because of something really beautiful, you know, we get some quietness and we see the night sky or with somebody we love and we slow down and go, oh, this

is what really counts. Sometimes it's at deaths or periods of great transition. I see it a lot when I teach week-long retreats, at the end of a week-long retreat, or sometimes the weekends on True Refuge people. At the very end, it's like, I've touched something that I cherish, and I'm afraid.

And that's the word that she was afraid that when I go home and get into my daily routine, I'm going to forget. I'm going to lose contact. I think this is one of the really deep inquiries for all of us, is how do we be in a culture where we're kind of going against the stream? It's very speedy and it's all about achieving and proving and looking a certain way. And how do we be in that and maintain a quality of open-heartedness and presence and valuing?

You know, how do we keep waking up on this bodhisattva path in this culture and this society at this time? So what I'd like to do is look at the mythology or story of the Buddha and look at the basic elements of this bodhisattva archetype that really can give us guidance in daily life. And I think of three domains of training, and these are trainings. It's like as awareness wakes up, it finds way to facilitate its own awakening. So these are trainings, they're intentional. And the first training has to do with intention.

It's our intention to realize and live from loving presence. To live from that, it's called Bodicita, the awakened heart mind. So there's intention. And the second training is attention. How do we pay attention to undo the conditioning that keeps us contract? It's not pay attention to become. We're paying attention to see the old habitual ways we keep recreating a sense of separateness and deficiency often.

How we keep creating distance from each other. It's learning to pay attention and see that. It's that beautiful Rumi quote, is not to seek for love, but to recognize the beautiful, barriers that we've put up against it. So we pay attention. That's part two. And the third part is action. And it's a really important part because we often forget it in spiritual circles, the actions that actually express and embody loving presence, that we purposefully act. In the Buddhist religion, Sila, which has to do with virtue, that we live it. Okay, so we're going to

do those three. We could do this for the next few years, but we're going to do it all in one night, all in see where we go, but it'll base it on certain key pieces of the Buddha's awakening. And we start with intention and how did intention get aroused in the Buddha, who was at that point, Siddhartha, Gotama, and he lived in northern India, and he lived in what sometimes described as pleasure palaces. His father kind of created a domain where he was surrounded by every possible conceivable pleasure and protected from anything that looked ugly or dangerous

or anything that had the shadow side. And then as the myth goes, the Buddha encountered the three heavenly messengers of aging and sickness and death. In other words, in some way he got a... a glimmer of reality and realized, oh, okay, I'm living in this protected world, what's going to allow me to find peace and freedom in the midst of reality? So this was the deep inquiry of the Buddhas, this deep intention to find refuge in the midst of this living,

dying world. So in his pursuit, he had this intention, how do you find freedom in the midst? but in his pursuit he swung towards what you might call aversion where he got very into self-deprivation into the kind of extreme renunciation where he starved himself and lived in a way where he didn't get the sleep or any of the nourishment he needed and then in that state again he got that strong intention of wait a minute this isn't it either

there's something I'm longing for and he had a remembrance of being nine years old and it was spring plowing season and he was the whole village or kingdom I guess would celebrate the season and they'd be off in the hills in this beautiful area doing plowing and he was kind of with a nurse on the side on a blanket just playing around she left and he had some moments

of what might be called natural awareness, where he became just collected, still, open, present. And this is as a nine-year-old, and he had this, he remembered that, right, when he'd kind of hit bottom on this self-deprivation kind of approach. And he remembered, hey, it's possible,

it's natural, it's part of our nature. this awakened heart mind. I don't have to strive, I don't have to injure myself. It's not about hanging out with grasping onto pleasure and it's not about avoiding pain. There's another quality of presence as possible. That was the intention he brought to the Bodhi tree. The Bodhi tree is the tree of awakening. He vowed to sit under the Bodied Tree until he just was absolutely realizing and embodying that loving presence, that he had touched so naturally when he was younger. So the alchemy of intention is that we perceive separation in some way. We perceive, okay, there's something that feels off and we perceive the

possibility of homecoming. And that's where our pure intention comes from. It's not to get somewhere else. It's really sensing the possibility of homecoming. And that's where, that's where our pure intention comes from. It's not to get somewhere else. It's really sensing the possibility of arriving in our own full potential. And that was what the Buddha took under the Bodhi tree. It happens for us, you know, when we often, when something, sometimes it's something extreme where we realize, oh, I'm really off, and this is not who I am in some deep way. For Andres Gregory, he writes about this in my dinner with Andre, a man asked him about his writing and had to really be a good writer. And this is what he said.

He told a story about his wife going into surgery and he realized he hadn't said what he wanted to say to her before she went under anesthesia. And you never know. And at that moment he resolved that if she woke up that he would speak his heart as if for the last time. And he said to the man, write like that. intention, where we get that this world is fleeting and we resolve not to hold back our love, not to act like we've got a whole life ahead of us and maybe in the future we'll calm down

and really arrive in that presence that lets us be with each other. That we don't postpone our life. So we have it. You know, we have it at different times in our lives. I know for me, I practice intention every day, but I have certain junctures. I remember where my intention got deeper. And one time was when I was at a retreat and I was just in the process of separating from my husband, I guess this is now about 21 years ago or so.

And I brought in to retreat all that tangle of disappointment and guilt and anger. And we were really conflicted at that time over how we were going to, do finances and work out different things to do with housing. And I remember in the silence I could feel how contracted I was and how, you know, on some level I knew I loved this person. We both loved our son. I didn't want it to be war. And there I was in this tight oppositional place.

And I remember the words of Ramanah Maharshi who says, Do not push anyone, including yourself, out of your heart. Just that simple. Just don't push anyone no matter what. Doesn't mean you don't create boundaries. It doesn't mean you don't take care of yourself. It doesn't mean you might decide to help get somebody in jail. Who knows what you do?

But your heart, don't create those walls. and that was an incredible reminder of intention for me that love matter to choose love and Narayan's dad, my son's dad is still he's a brother, he's part of my family it makes a huge difference and it's a practice this practice of intention and for each of us

it's really that question of what most matters that we're asking ourselves in any moment and in any moment that you slow down and you get a glimmer of what you really care about, you're more abiding in your bodhisattva being, you're more home. So there's different strategies with intention, like anything else, to find, is there a gesture that helps?

I mean, for some people, the classical gesture of prayer, and to whisper the intention as a prayer. For others, it's coming into real stillness, bodily stillness. for myself, you know, I sit in front of an altar each morning, and I, you know, and I use the gesture and I whisper. I whispered as a prayer, not to some other being out there, but it's the expression of my heart to the heart of the universe. It's just a way of more deeply feeling the reality of what matters.

One of my regular prayers is something a friend told. me a few years ago that he did and I tried it and it really felt good which is please teach me about kindness. Please teach me about kindness. Because there's something in that please teach me that has such a humility and an availability. It kind of makes me more receptive to that it's that inquiry. What really does it mean to live this path, this Bodhisattva path? Let's reflect together. We're going to do a few reflections. This will be the first.

As you settle, be aware of whatever experience is going on in your body. Let your awareness really come into your body, down into your body, so that you can feel your breath, perhaps breathing in and feeling the breath everywhere in your body. And as you breathe in, it's an opening to receive. So there's a receptivity. And then as you breathe out, a letting go, receiving inward, then offering outward. And in this presence, just scan your life and sense one relationship that matters where you might feel some sense of separation and yet you're very aware of the possibility there,

possibility of awakening more sense of connection. Just imagine that you right now are sitting under the Bodie tree. which is the truth because we're always in some way coming into stillness for the sake of awakening. That's always a possibility in any moment. And here you are under the Bodhi tree and you can sense into what most matters to you about this relationship. Like when dust is dust, if you're at the end of your life looking back, what will have mattered?

the quality of heart or presence that matters to you, how do you want to be with this other person? Sense in your own way how you choose love, how you choose loving presence. And you might experiment because intention as a practice is always experimental. What brings this alive most? Is it a prayer that's whispered? Is it a mental whisper? Does it help to bring the palms together at the heart? In some way, just feel yourself connecting with the sincerity that's here,

that in you that's choosing love, that intends love. Just sense within yourself whatever words in this moment might express your intention. You know that each time you remember to reflect on intention you've opened the gateway to a kind of homecoming on the bodhisattva path so you can continue eyes open or eyes closed we move to attention now we'll go back to the buddhist story here

because here he was under the bodhi tree and he had this profound vow to really wake up to who he was and he sat through the night and as it happens whenever we vow for presents all the things that tug us away from presence happen. We all know that one.

And that was called Mara. This is the God of greed, hatred, and delusion, all the stuff in us, all the conditioning that has us forget who we are and get caught in grasping, get caught and resisting. And in the mythology came as weapons that were hurled at the Buddha,

and he practiced attention, the same practice we do here of recognizing what's going on to seeing it and meeting it with a quality of tender, open-heartedness. The two wings, okay? Seeing what's happening, seeing what's true, and this allowing that is profoundly tender, compassionate.

And as the mythology goes, as he got this onslaught of the conditioning and met it with this quality of presence, the different Bose and Arabic, and slings and rocks and so on turned into flower petals and fell to his feet. So by the time the morning star arose, there was a heap of petals at his feet. It's a beautiful story. And so this was the process of his awakening through these two wings of paying attention.

And as I've shared with you before, Mara kept coming back. So the Buddha was an awakened, enlightened, enlightened being. Mara kept coming, and that, again, I share as a kind of encouragement, because this is just conditioning that keeps arising. It doesn't have to tug us. It doesn't have to have us collapse into a sense of small, endangered self, but it's just stuff that arises. So Mara would come, and each time Mara would come, as a story has it, the Buddha's loyal

attendant and devoted follower, Ananda, would be freaked out some, and he'd go, oh, my God, Mara's here, watch out, you know, because Mara would be lurking around the field, the side of the field where the Buddha would hold forth, but the Buddha would say, no, no, no, it's okay. And he'd go to Mara and this is the very essence of the teaching. He'd say, I see you, Mara, come, let's have tea, just that. And then in having tea, you know, that dissolves any attachments and any resistance, just having tea, being with, with kindness. I see you, Mara. Let's have tea.

So this is the practice. This is our basic way of training our attention is just to keep on noticing what's happening, to name it, to put a name on it as a useful, skillful thing. Not if it turns cluts, you don't have to name every little thing, but now and then if you name something, the shaman say if you name a fear, you're not so identified with it. It doesn't control you.

I see you, Mara. Come to tea. So for us in our daily practice, what this means is having some curiosity or inquiry of what is between us and presence in any moment. Usually there's the conditioning, there's Mara, it's there. And I can say for myself when I pause, and I slow down because usually I'm kind of speeding into the next moment trying to get things done. I start feeling into my body and there's an energy that wants to get more done. And it's anxious and it wants the soothing of checking things off the list.

So that's the Mara that's there. So I'll just name it. Okay, anxiety. I see you Mara. And then if I am willing, I'll stay and hang out and breathe with that and regard it with kind of. It's not at a second hour saying, oh, I'm a bad person, what a spiritual hypocrite that I'm again speeding around busily. I'll just, okay, I see you, Mara. Let's have tea.

And in those moments of recognizing and allowing the sense of who I am shifts from the busy person that's kind of oppressed by how much there is to do and anxious to that space. that empty, tender, kind space, just wakefulness. And it collapses again and recoagulates back into selfhood, but every time we touch into that space of awareness, we get more and more familiar with who we really are and less identified with the egoic self. Okay, so naming.

This is Robert Johnson. This is called Shadow Vows. The night before their marriage, they held a ritual where they made their shadow vows. The groom said, I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself. The bride replied, I will be compliant and sweet, but underneath I will have the real control. If anything goes wrong, I will take your money in your house. Then they drank champagne and laughed heartily at their foibles, knowing that in the course of the marriage, these shadow figures would inevitably come out.

They were ahead of the game because they had recognized a shadow. and unmasked it. Being honest like that's really hard. Most of us have a narrative and an identity that we're protecting, and we actually protect it with presenting ourselves in ways that actually are not the realness of what we are. In fact, there was a really interesting study at University of Massachusetts

where a psychologist would have two strangers talk for 10 minutes and record the talks. And then before looking at the footage, the subjects would tell the researchers that everything they said was absolutely true. But then they were amazed to discover when they listened to the recording that it was punctuated with all sorts of little white lies. Just to a stranger. When there's no real reason to have to do it. This isn't a kid that's being accused of something that's about to get punished. This is a stranger.

It's a deep habit. Here's the statistics. It says 60% of the subjects lied at least once during that 10 minutes, and they told an average of 2.92 false things. It's just 10 minutes with a stranger. It's pretty amazing. So it takes a resolve. Honesty takes a resolve. Really, really being honest with ourselves.

This is what I'm feeling. I'm ashamed. I feel jealous. Naming things we don't want to feel. But when we name them it helps, and then bringing that to T, kindness. The process of doing this, of opening to our own vulnerability, paying attention, enables us to open to each other's vulnerability. If we can open to ours, then we can recognize and allow what's going on for others. It's really in our brain that the mirror neurons, the networking for compassion gets activated

when we are embodied and in touch with ourselves. So this starts widening out. We pay attention on the Bodhi Satva path and open to our inner experience and we start embracing others. And I wanted to share something I read a few years ago. about this white supremist, a former chief propagandist for the racist group Aryan Nations. And it's a story about his recovery. And this really struck me that...

So in his early years, his mother abandoned him and his stepmother abused him, and he was alienated, and he read about Hitler. And, you know, the black sheep arose to world power, and he found himself into Aryan nations. And he wrote, when I walked past the white's only sign on the gate, I knew I was home. Anti-Black, anti-Semitic, anti-U.S. Government, etc. Well, here was the turning point for him.

He was a family guy and he'd really opened himself to his love and protectiveness of his children. And a high officer let him know that when they came to power, his then-four-year-old son would be euthanized because he had a cleft palate. So that woke him up. that they would kill his son for a genetic defect. You know, how could he advocate killing anyone for anything about them?

And he went 180 degrees, and now lectures passionately against bigotry around the country. I've heard many stories of people that are, you know, pro-tobacco on the tobacco lobby or this or that, and as soon as they get lung cancer or viciously militantly anti-gay, but then their child comes out. We know it when it's close in

And when we open to vulnerability, our heart widens and gets more inclusive. Anonymous poem inspired by the Dalai Lama, Walk gently on this earth with purposeful steps. You share this space with seven billion human beings and countless other precious life forms just like you. Just like you they all want to be happy. Just like you, they all need love. We're not going to survive unless we walk gently on this earth. together unless we touch something in others that feels just like the shards of our own pain,

the fluttering warmth of our own joy, until we sow their wounds into our hearts and seal it with our own skin. Just like you. We'll just practice for a moment together the simplicity of paying attention. And as you close your eyes, come into stillness, just allow yourself again to collect with the breath, sense the possibility when the breath comes in of really opening to receive, letting the breath touch and contact all parts of your body and being very conscious in breath and as the breath goes out, a sense of letting go and letting the breath be released into the vast space around you. So breathing in, letting yourself be touched, contacting the life within you and breathing out and sensing the space that's around you, even interior space,

sensing space and letting everything be held in that. You might sense if as you scan a bit your body and current life, if there's anything, any place where you're feeling stuck some, where there's difficulty with another person, might be the same person you reflected on before, somebody different, where you feel distance, conflict, reaction. For now, just sense what it brings up in you that feels vulnerable or difficult. Anger or fear or hurt. This is Mara appearing. And in the same way that the Buddha would say, I see you Mara and let's have tea,

just sense yourself recognizing honestly, okay, so this is coming up. It's okay and just breathe in and let yourself touch, place in your body where you feel the anger or hurt or fear and breathing out, just sense the space that can hold it. There's attending, contacting and then befriending, offering that space and kindness, the larger space of compassion, letting go into that. So it's an honest and kind presence with whatever's there. whatever's between you and feeling close to this person. Just to get a taste of this for now, you can practice more fully on your own, but just breathing

in and letting yourself contact the vulnerability, breathing out and sensing that you're letting the vulnerability be held in a larger space of care and kindness. You can almost imagine you're offering it into that, letting it float in that. You might bring to mind others that you know feel the same kind of vulnerability, the same kind of anger or hurt or fear, insecurity, frustration. So that now as you breathe in, you're breathing in for all of us, all of us that have the same expression of Mara. You're letting yourself contact our shared pain.

And you're breathing out and letting it all be held in the vast heart of the world. put it this way, overcome any bitterness that may have come because you were not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to. Like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each one of us is a part of her heart and therefore endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. So the second training is the training of attention, attention that can touch and hold with kindness our own vulnerability and the vulnerability of all beings. We move on to the third of the trainings on the Bodhisattva path, which is action. And again, feel free to open your eyes if you'd like, we'll come to the story

and mythology of the Buddha and now we're going to be just to know that when he first woke up and got enlightened, the Buddha was not inclined to be teaching the Dharma. In fact, there's a phrase, too much of dust in their eyes. The Buddha thought that, well, those that aren't awake have so much of dust in their eyes, it's just, it's not going to work.

It's like, I try to help be like the priest pushing the doorbell. It's just, they're not taking it seriously, you know. But the gods that were in communication with him convinced him that humans had that potential to wake up. And the Buddha's heart opened

to really the fullness of the Bodhisattva path, which is sharing, serving for the benefit of all. And for the next three, four decades, he spent his time traveling, teaching. And even when he was dying, his final person he was talking to or met with was a very poor man from a rural area seeking spiritual guidance. So the power of the myth of the Buddha is he embodied a Bodhisattva. He lived it in action. And this is something that when we go ahead and experience it, in the moments when we're really living from our heart, we know we're home. One man, Matt, that I worked with, had spent his adult life, mostly keeping a distance from his mother who was very suffocating and needy and demanding. He loved her, but just couldn't get too close because he got suffocated

by it. She kept wanting his reassurances in more time. But as she approached dying, he didn't want to live with that sense of separateness, with that hardness in his heart, so he visited her more and more frequently. He describes a final visit when she was sleeping and he was just looking at her sleeping and thought to himself, you know, she's been a widow for 15 years. And who has hugged her. And what does it mean to be not hugged for such a long time? And then he got his sensed under that neediness, just this longing to love and be loved that she had.

And so he pulled the bedrails down and he held her fragile, bony body. He just held her. And then he remembered how when he had been a child, how she would hold him and comfort him when he was sick. and then he sensed even under her longing the essence of who she was, which is purely loving presence. He could sense her essence. And soon after that, after he left, she died,

and he called me and he was weeping as you can imagine, but he said, now I know what my life work is about. I want to go around letting everyone know how lovable they are. What if that was really in our consciousness as an intention? You know, we all forget. That's the suffering. We forget. We need each other to remind us.

So this bodhisattva path is really about inaction, reminding each other, inaction, reminding each other that we're lovable. Ticknathan says, when you say something like, I love you with your whole being, not just with your mouth, your intellect, it can transform the world. So embodying, it awakens us. A story for you as part of closing. Several years ago, there was a 52-year-old to Ben Refugee, Tenzin who I was diagnosed with lymphoma, and he was admitted to a hospital, and he received his first dose of chemotherapy, but during the treatment, this usually gentle man became extremely angry and upset. He pulled the

ivy out of his arm and refused to cooperate. He shouted, became argumented. Doctors and nurses were baffled. Then Tenzin's wife spoke to the staff. She told him that Tenzin had been held as a political prisoner by the Chinese for 17 years. They killed his first wife and repeatedly tortured and brutalized him. And he told him that the hospital rules, coupled with chemo treatments,

gave Tanzan horrible flashbacks. I know you mean to help him, she said, but he feels tortured by your treatments. They're causing him. to feel hatred inside. Just like he felt towards the Chinese, he would rather die than have to live with the hatred he's now feeling. According to his, our belief, it's very bad to have hatred in your heart at the time of death.

So he needs to be able to pray and cleanse his heart. So they discharged him. They gave him a hospice team. And the person that's writing this, the hospice nurse, is describing, seeking help from Amnesty International for advice in working with him. And she was told that the only way to heal damage from tortures to talk it through.

But when I encouraged Tenzin to talk about his experiences, he held up his hand and stopped me. He said, I must learn to love again if I am to heal my heart. Your job is not to ask me questions. Your job is to teach me to love again. Took a deep breath. So I said, well, how can I help you love again? And he said, sit down, drink my tea and eat my cookies. You know that the tea is made with yak butter and salt.

It's not easy to drink anyway. She did this several weeks. She sat with Tenzin and his wife and did that. We also worked with his doctors to find ways to treat his physical pain, but his spiritual pain seemed to be lessening. Each time I arrived, Tenzin was sitting cross-legged on his bag, reciting prayers from his books. As time went on, he and his wife hung more and more colorful Tanca,

as are Tibetan Buddhist banners on the walls. The room was fast becoming a beautiful religious shrine. When spring came asked, tensen what Tibetans do when they're ill in spring. He smiled brightly. He says, we sit downwind from flowers. I thought he must be speaking poetically, but Tenzin's words were quite literal. He told me that Tibetans sit downwind so they can be dusted with new blossoms pollen that floats on the spring breeze. They feel this new pollen as strong medicine. That might be a reframe for some of you are allergic. At first, finding enough blossoms seemed a bit daunting. Then one of my friends

suggested that Tenzin visit some of the local flower nurseries. I called the manager of one of the nurseries and explained the situation. The manager's initial response was, you want to do what? But when I explained the request, the manager agreed. So the next weekend, I picked up Tenzin's wife with their provisions for the afternoon, black tea, butter, salt, cups, cookies, prayer beads, and prayer books. I dropped them off at the nursery and assured them I'd return at five. The following weekend, Tenzin's wife visited another nursery.

The third weekend, they went to yet another nursery. The fourth week, I began to get calls from the nurseries inviting Tenzin and his wife to come again. One of the managers said, We've got a new shipment of Nicosia coming in and some wonderful fuchsians. Oh, yes, some great Daphne. I know the love of the scent of that, Daphne.

I almost forgot we have some new lawn furniture that Tenzin and his wife might enjoy. Later that day, I got a call from a second nursery saying that they had colorful wind socks, and that would help Tenzin predict where the wind was blowing. Pretty soon the nurseries were competing for Tenzin's visits. People began to know and care about the Tibetan couple. The nursery employees started setting out the lawn furniture in the direction of the wind.

Others would bring out fresh hot water for the tea. Some of the regular customers would leave their wagons of flowers near the two of them. It seemed that a community was growing around Tenzin and his wife. At the end of the summer, Tenzin returned to his doctor for another CT scan to determine the extent of the spread of the cancer. But the doctor could find no evidence of cancer at all. He was dumbfounded. He told Tenzin he couldn't explain it. Tenzin lifted his finger and said, I know why the cancer's gone away.

It could no longer live in a body so filled with love. When I began to feel all the compassion from the hospice people from the nursery employees, and all those people who wanted to know about me, I started to change inside. Now I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to heal this way. Please, doctor, remember that your medicine is not the only cure. Love heals as well. So the message is not that love heals

as in necessarily having us keep living. I just was with my mom who passed and was in a sense. such a field of loving and so filled with loving and she died and that was fine. It's not about whether we live or die. It's about the quality of consciousness and heart that's timeless and that's available and the bodhisattva path is the training to have that intention to live from that, to pay attention in a way that wakes it up and to have our actions embody it. I started with talking about collaborative law, this response to conflict, this shift in paradigms from kind of egoic to really having this capacity to forgive

and open in compassion and really have a reverence for life. So I want to end with a very short little story about Dante, who was standing near Pontebekio, a bridge that crosses. the Arno River in Florence, and it was just before 1300, and Dante saw Beatrice standing on the bridge. Many of you are familiar. He was a young man, she even younger, and the vision contained the whole of eternity for him. Dante didn't speak to her, and he saw her very little. And then Beatrice died, carried off by the plague.

Dante was stricken with the loss of his vision. She was the connection between his soul and heaven itself. Six hundred and fifty years later during World War II, the Americans were chasing the German army up the Italian Peninsula. Germans were blowing up everything of age, the progression of the American army, including the bridges across the Arna River. But no one wanted to blow up the Ponte Vecchio because Beatrice had stood on it and Dante had written about her. So the German army made radio contact with Americans and in plain language they said they would leave Pontavecchio intact if the Americans would promise not to use it. The promise was

held. The bridge was not blown up and not one American soldier or piece of equipment went across it. The writer says, we're such hard-bitten people that we need hard-bitten proof of things and this is the most hard-bitten fact I know to present to you. The bridge was spared in a modern, ruthless war because Beatrice had stood upon it. In every one, one of our hearts, we want to choose love. We forget, we get entranced, and the possibility is we can on purpose remember, and in that remembering,

be part of that rippling out that really has the potential to awaken and heal our world. Okay, so let's just take a few moments of quietness. We'll close in a simple way, just to feel your own heart right now. the state of your heart, just notice how it is with absolutely zero judgment, just naming, recognizing just the quality of heart right now, and offering your heart whatever prayer, whatever blessing most resonates in this moment, and widening the lens now to sense all

beings. Let your heart space include all beings. Just our prayer together that all beings might awaken to choose loving presence, feeling that aspiration to live from loving presence, to realize this loving awareness as the very source of being. May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste and thank you. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.