Tara Brach - Intimacy with Life - Awakening Love

Episode Date: May 30, 2012

2012-05-30 - Intimacy with Life - Awakening Love - The Buddha taught about four Divine Abodes--dwelling places of the awakened heart mind: lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. In this four-part series, we will explore the ways our conditioning blocks us from these expressions of inner freedom, and the understandings and practices that enable us to inhabit our full potential. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations make a difference!

It was really on the theme of intimacy. And Zen Master Dogen's very well-known teaching that to be enlightened, to be free, is to be intimate with all things. And I've always loved that word, intimacy, that sense of, that to be intimate, we really have to sense a belonging with whatever we're intimate with,

a kind of a oneness, a deep familiarity, a tenderness. And so the inquiry from the last class was really what awakens that kind of intimate connectedness. And we spoke about the single factor that makes it possible, which is our capacity to pay attention. If we can pay attention well, if we can pay attention fully, there is a quality of connectedness that emerges. And in the Buddhist tradition, there are four key domains where we train that attention. And these are domains. They're called the Brahma Viharas.

Brahma is the king of all gods. And Bihara is the dwelling place or abode, the home. And so it really is like the home of God, or the home of our own awakened heart-mind, these four places. and they are love, compassion, joy, and equanimity. So what I'd like to do for these next four weeks, probably four weeks, sometimes I'll do one and I'll realize I need to do another week on it, but we'll see, is explore how these places of training our heart-mind

can really arouse that intimate connectedness, how they allow us to be intimate with all of life. And we'll start with the first one. We'll start with loving kindness. But just to say that each of these qualities is an innate expression of who we are. It's already our nature. When we're relaxed, when we're open,

when we're not in reactivity, there's a natural expression of love, of compassion, of joy, of equanimity. I sometimes think of Aldous Huxley because there's so many of his, what he wrote that became real teachings for me, but one of the greatest wasn't a writing. It's what happened as he was dying.

And he was dying of throat cancer, and he was surrounded by his family and some students, you know, people that were younger that really admired him. And one of them asked him what he had learned, you know, what he had learned through his life. And he couldn't speak very loud, so he's kind of whispered the answer. But his response was, be a little kinder. I sometimes think if that was it, if that was our whole spiritual path, if just moment by moment something in us said, oh, just saw,

often, just be a little kinder that our true nature would unfurl itself. So it's who we already are and there are practices. There's ways we can train our attention with each of these abodes, each of these qualities that cultivate it, that wake up these experiences. So how do we do that? How do we train ourselves in loving? I mean, if we took a poll, how many people, would say, nah, I'm not really interested in being a more loving person, you know.

I mean, really. Most of us, there's some yearning in us that doesn't want to hold back our love, that wants that freedom to be who we are. So how do we train that? And one of the stories I always liked was from Krishna-Murti. And he advised this. He said, get a rock. Place in your living room somewhere or something like that.

He said every day, at one point during the day, just go by that rock and just pay attention to it a little. He said, in two months, that rock will become a sacred rock. Now, how does that happen? Something in this intuitively gets, yeah, when we really give our wholehearted attention to anyone, to any part of this natural world, our attention connects us, our awareness. awareness merges with what we're attending to, and we see beyond the veil, we see what it is, we see its beingness, we get its isness. I sometimes think of it that, you know, I watch us with our dogs, and I'm thinking of this because we just, my mom and I just adopted a new dog, we're

probably going to get another one, and how when you have a dog, you like dogs in general, but your dog becomes special. You know, it's got that special something. And how come? You know, it's, we've paid attention to that, that being, and we sense that soul and sentience in a very immediate, intimate way. But that's possible everywhere.

I mean, I think of it as a mom with a child, and you know if you're a mom, when you're, especially when your child's an infant, you just, your attention gets absorbed into that being. It's oneness. You just sense that. beingness is what you are. And of course our children feel special. It's because we pay attention to the degree we do. So you might be thinking, well, there's a lot of people I pay attention to

and I don't have all sorts of warm, fuzzy feelings, right? I mean, it could be that you say, well, you know, I pay attention every time my partner doesn't clean up after himself in the kitchen and, you know, that doesn't do it for me. Or, you know, I pay attention, you know, to my boss when she tells me I've missed something in the latest document I submitted. So it's like, yeah, we fixate our attention, but that's not the kind of full, mindful attention that we're talking about. How we pay attention has to do often with our wants and our fears. We pay attention to each other through a filter of what we're wanting or fearing

in relationship to that other person. So that's not this unconditional presence that we're talking about. I'll share with you one of my favorite. This is a New Yorker cartoon from a long, long, long time ago. And it has this family in their sitting room. And the guy is, the father or the man is sitting there, and he's really, really angry and upset. Like he is steaming.

He's red. He's brewing on something. And here's what everybody in the room is thinking, okay? The woman's thinking, was it something I said? And the dog is thinking, was it something I buried? The cat's thinking, was it something I dragged in?

And the parrot is thinking, was it something I repeated? And what I liked about this is it's just so clear for us that what's going on, this insistent, incessant inner dialogue, when we are paying attention, we're paying attention through this thought process

that has to do with me, what I'm afraid of or what I want. So the question is, how do we offer a full attention to each other that's not contracted by judgment, that's not contracted by our guilt or our fears? Because our quality of attention with each other will determine the kind of relationship we have. It's that simple. And so then we asked the question, really,

so what blocks us from offering that attention? You know, what blocks us from offering a loving presence? You know, with our children, our partners, our colleagues, or our friends? And if we really watch how we pay attention, we get some absolutely essential information in being able to wake up. Because what we find is that in any way, moment that we're wanting something different, or we're defending in some way, or we're preoccupied, our heart is closed. Now, I'm using this word heart closed, heart opened, and I wanted to say

that sometimes it's taken as this real metaphorical thing, but it's actually very physiological. You know, you can think of it that when we're not in reactivity or stress, there is an openness that allows a flow of blood and of electrical currents and of more subtle energies sometimes described as cheap. But there's an openness that allows a flow. And our heart can be thought of more as a space than a thing. There is a space or a region or an openness that allows these energies to move through us. and it's actually more energy moving through the heart

than there is through any other part of our body in that way. So when we're not stressed, there's a lot of flow. It's a conduit for energy. And when that happens to the felt sense is love. There's a warmth, a kind of brightness, kind of liveliness. So that's our capacity. That's when we're unstressed and at ease. Now what happens when we get stressed?

Stress closes our heart. As often as I can when I'm doing, when I'm presenting to different groups, I will remind the group or those that don't know about it of the word busy and the Chinese syllable, which is heart killing, very close to busy. And how when we're stressed, the heart tightens. And you can sense it that, you know, when we're in fight, flight, what happens physically? well the blood flow goes to the arms and the legs so we can run and fight right what happens in the brain

during fight flight well the limbic system's activated and there's less activity and the parts of the brain that have to do with peace and love and happiness the frontal cortex there's not activation we're cut off from the parts of our brain really that have that bring into our life empathy so hearts rather shut down in a lot of ways. And then we say, well, how many moments of my day am I feeling stressed? Well, if we're honest, a lot. There's a lot of moments that we're not in that open-hearted,

tenderness and feeling the flow and receptive to our world and engaged with others. When we're stressed, rather, we get very self-centered because the fight-flight activity means that were organized around me here, world out there, world is either very, very dangerous, or it has something I need and something's missing. That's the kind of energetic atmosphere. So our actions come out of that. Some of you might remember the story of there's a kind of a helicopter with a rope dangling down. There's 11 people hanging on to that rope. And somebody needs

to just let go and die because otherwise the rope will break. So finally, there's one woman, the rest of them are men. Finally, this woman says, I'll do it, I'll do it. I'll be the one to sacrifice because women always sacrifice. We do it for our children and we do it for our partners and we're the ones that are just giving, giving, giving to make sure everyone else is taken care of,

at which point all the men started clapping. So we can see it. When we're stressed, it gets self-centered. We can see it with the really big stressors. You know, how many of you have been on your way to catch a flight when you got caught in traffic? Like, what happens? We're cut off from our hearts. We get really very, very squeezed. And we can see it, you know, in a very daily way with the littler things, not quite so big that we're late to a movie. Or we don't have an ingredient we need for a recipe. What happens? It's just amazing how quick. that openness can kind of close down. So a closed heart, there's some perception of threat. We don't close our heart because it feels good. It doesn't feel good. There's usually when our hearts closed, there's either a sense of agitation

and kind of a raw, tight, fisted feeling or else there's numbness. It doesn't feel good. So we don't do it because it feels good. It's a reaction. It's a contraction to protect ourselves. The sad thing is in that reaction to protect and control, it becomes habitual.

So we can move through a lot of our life, many swaths of moment, without a real quality of openness and tenderness. A friend volunteered for quite a while at hospice, and one story she shared was about a woman who had cancer and a very, very short time to live. She had a large tumor on her tongue, and she loved to talk and she couldn't talk much. So it was a very difficult situation,

but when this woman would come in, my friend, she really wanted to talk. And so they did some and talked a little. And then this friend of mine came back about three, four days later, and the patient she was visiting was sitting on the edge of her bed, all dressed up and ready to go home. And so this was what happened.

This is her story. A few nights right after, the last time they had met, she had the worst nightmare of her life. And in that nightmare, she woke up, she dreamed that the staff at the hospice center told her that she was about to die. And in her mind, she went,

no, no, God, it's not time, I can't. And she was flooded with this sense of separation, but it wasn't only from God. She also felt separated from her husband. And she said, this flash of realization, she realized that she had been carrying resentment for decades towards her husband. And ever since they were bringing up their children, and her constant mantra was, you know, he's not doing enough, he's not doing enough.

She had built up this wall of armoring and resentment, and she realized it's not my time. I have to go and speak to him. I have to let him know, I love him. well what happened was in the next two days the tumor shrunk and that's why she was now able to have enough time to go home and to speak from her true self which is what she did she went home and she spoke her truth

including you know the pain of knowing how she had held back love had armored herself and there was a tenderness and a healing that occurred. And then she returned to the hospice and died soon after. To hold back love is perhaps the deepest suffering. Something in us knows it.

Something in us knows that it's where the freedom and the beauty and the joy is and to hold it back to have our fortress that we're protecting ourselves with become a prison. And sometimes not to even know it. To have a lot of time passed and not even

realize with the people in our lives, our sisters and friends and sons and parents, that we've been only partly there. That brings up a tremendous sense of sorrow when we really face that. So again, the inquiry is how when it's become a habit to defend our heart, to blame, to hide, to pretend, to try to get approval, to try it in some way maneuver, manipulate others to get our way. How, when these are deeply grooved habits, do we begin to wake up and to let that fortress kind of become a little more porous, a little looser? Let some of that love shine through. And I would say that one of the very first steps is the

courage to be willing, without adding on more aversion, to just look in the face of how we are creating separation in our lives right now. If we could just leave tonight with a little more sense of, oh, well, with this person, here's how the habit's playing out. If we're mindful of that, there's a little more space and a little more choice to let go some of our defenses, to be real, to be there. So our first reflection tonight, we'll just do a couple, is that, just to kind of do a little bit of a scan of our own lives. And yeah, so sit however is comfortable for you to take a look.

Sensing this as a pause and inviting yourself to be right here. What I like with any meditation, any heart meditation, just to touch into your own sincerity that this matters to you, that there's something about loving freely. about not holding back our love that really is important that you care about if you can sense your own sincerity that's actually

as much of the practice as anything else and it's from that sincerity that as you reflect you can not add on a second arrow of judging yourself just to look with interest with curiosity with friendliness

so the inquiry really is, you know, is there a person in your life right now that you'd like to have a more open, flowing experience of loving with where you know that there's some blocking? Because it helps to do a reflection when you have an example, somebody in your life. Someone that you'd like to experience more of an intimate connection with. It could be your child, partner, colleague, boss. loss, employee, grandparent. And then just to begin to sense what within you is in the way.

In other words, what are some of the habitual thoughts that move through about this person that might be contracting your heart? What are maybe the judgments you might have about that person or about yourself that are contracting your heart? What might you be believing about this person, about you, about your relationship? It actually is getting in the way just to see it. It helps to give a little bit of mindfulness and space to not believe it so much. What are some of your ways of being distracted or preoccupied that might keep a distance with that person?

Or maybe for you, what is it that you're wanting? from that person that actually creates separation. Just to be the observer, a friendly observer of what the patterns are. What are the ways of acting? Your ways of acting that might create distance. Perhaps criticism are just being busy, maybe ignoring, maybe being defensive, having to prove your right,

presenting yourself in a certain way. certain way. These thoughts and behaviors are all part of a kind of a stress, grasping, aversion. And just by being aware of them, you can start to relax that fist in the heart, just open a bit. Now, just to even sense your aspiration, to be a bit more awake and aware when these thoughts and behaviors arise is a real gift, is a real offering. and creates the grounds for more intimacy. Just that aspiration. Can I be aware of this?

So we'll continue. You can open your eyes when you'd like. Okay, good. So let's look a bit more on how we can cultivate that intimacy and love with others. And so what I'm beginning with is just the quality of attention that we start bringing this mindful awareness. It's kind of an unconditional presence right. to the ways that we create separation.

And of course the training is can we, when we're with each other, and keep this particular person in mind, because I'm going to bring you back to this person at the end, how can we begin to have more of an unconditional presence when we're with that person, a sense of benevolence, a sense of just listening of having a space for that person?

Can we remember that that attention, that that attention is the purest form of love. Just paying attention. Sometimes the metaphor is of a disinterested grandmother who just has that space for the grandchildren to play and be however they are, whether they're naughty and wicked or angelic and cute, whatever it is.

There's just space. And I like the grandparent metaphor because I'm now most of my generations, like having those experiences of first and second and third grandchildren. I'm still waiting in the wings on that one, but everybody is so completely blissed out. They say it's so much better than being a parent, you know. You completely adore them, but you don't have to deal with all the attachments and the reactivity. So there's this thing.

And disinterested, by the way, does not mean not interested. Disinterested means you're not hooked in. There's a care, but it's very. allowing. So somebody sent me these stories about grandparents and grandmothers and this she writes, my young grandson called the other day to wish me happy birthday. He asked me how old I was and I told him 62. He was quiet for a moment and then he asked, did you start at one? I'm just going to share a few more. After putting her grandchild to bed, a grandmother changed into old slacks and droopy

blouse and perceived to wash her hair. As she heard the children getting more and more rambunctious, her patience grew thin. At last she threw a towel around her head and stormed to the room, putting them back to bed with stern warnings. As she left the room, she heard the three-year-old say with a trembling voice, who was that? Another, I didn't know if my granddaughter had learned her color yet, so I decided to test her. I would point out something and ask what color it was. She would tell me, and always she was correct, but it was fun for me. So I continued. At last she headed for the door saying sagely,

Grandma, I think you should try to figure out some of these things yourself. Last one. When my grandson asked me how old I was, I teasingly replied, I'm not sure. Look in your underwear, Grandma, he advised. Mine says I'm four to six. So I like that grandmother metaphor. So he's just interested and yet loving and attentive. So the first piece of this cultivation of open-heartedness

is just this intention to offer our presence. And it's amazing if you go into an encounter and something in you says, okay, this time, just let me see how much I can just be there, you know, really attentive. You'll find you get lost really quickly, but there's a little more remembering than there was before and a little counts a lot. Okay, that's the first piece.

The second is to be one of the most beautiful heart trainings in the universe, and that is to intentionally look for the goodness. This isn't a Pollyanna thing. This is a recognition that we have deep survival conditioning to look for what's wrong. It's really part of our biology to attend to where there might be a problem. It's part of survival. So to begin to counter that conditioning and enlarge our sense of what's true, to intentionally look to see the goodness is powerful and beautiful.

Powerful and beautiful. There's a quote from Thomas Merton I wanted to share with you tonight. The saints are what they are, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift. of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everybody else. You just don't imagine a very realized being going around with a lot of judgment. There's a kind of fundamental resonance, a fundamental capacity to see behind personalities to what's

shining through. That receptivity then leads to a kind of active expression of love, which the third quality. So unconditional presence, looking for the good, and then expressing out of what we see our care, expressing it, saying it, vibrating it, praying it,

in some way living it. So, story for you, I've mentioned in past months very dear friend in our community, Jesse, who last year was rushed to

hospital with heart trouble and lung trouble and at one point it got so dire that that his parents were called in by the doctors and they were told it's time to prepare to let him go he was on all sorts of life supports and it wasn't working and it turned out they found a heart donor and he got a heart transplant and he spent six months in hospitals and he is in recovery recovery. And he was back at our last retreat. And he was interviewed as part of our finding true refuge project. So he's on, we have a video interview of really how he called on his practice and on meditation and on loving presence to help get him through. And so first off,

I want to invite you to go to check out the Finding True Refuge video because I think you'll love it. but I just want to share a piece with you, which is about the worst point for him. Jesse describes realizing his life would never be the same. He was never going to be the person he thought he was. I mean, he was very, very hard-driving, successful, incredibly creative, productive, always on the go. His life would never be the same, but not only that, he might not have a life. He really got it. Very, very fragile.

and he was with his girlfriend. They were together for the night, and she had been by his side, continuously taking care of him. Well, on this night, he was feeling the loss of everything, and he was trying to rub her shoulders or in some way give back

because she had been giving so much. But at one point she said, no need, that's enough, you don't have to. And then she looked at him, and she said, you're enough for me. you're enough. And as he says, and to me this is the teaching, like, what greater gift could there be to let someone else know you're enough? Well, for him, that totally connected him with that kind of

belonging. He says, it's not just in there and here. True refuge is not just in here. It's in this belonging, this field of loving. It connected them. And as it turns out the next morning, he asked her to marry him and they are getting married soon and he's doing a lot better. When we are facing death, if you ask yourself, if you knew you only had a few moments, what would matter? For many of us, what we'd realize is to feel the truth of loving presence, to feel our belonging to love. So this pathway of awake and our heart gives us a refuge in the face of everything. So we begin our practice of loving kindness and it's called the meta practice. Meta means loving kindness. It also means friendliness with these simple

trainings in looking to see the goodness and then offering care. So just the way Jesse's partner had looked at him and saw the goodness, you're enough and she'd offered those words. I mean, that's a beautiful blessing. She gave him such a gift. That's the metta practice. We see the goodness, we offer our blessings. And when we're doing it in a silent meditation, it's in the form of some sort of a prayer. You think of somebody you deeply care about

and in some way you sense their goodness. And you say, oh, may you be happy, may you truly be happy. May you be filled with loving presence. And may you touch natural great peace. May you accept yourself just as you are, whatever the prayer is. So we're both seeing the goodness and out of our feelings of care expressing it because it's in the expression that it fully flowers.

Does that make sense? It's not just recognizing there's an activity of expressing love. Now, in the formal practice, it's described as widening circles where we start with either a benefactor or we start with ourselves. and then we expand it to somebody that's easy to love and then to a person we don't know so well or we don't have strong, pleasant, or unpleasant feelings. And then to somebody who's difficult

and then to all beings. And that's the classic practice. But it's an absolutely creative personal experiment for you. Whatever way of paying attention softens your heart, opens your heart, brings that moisture, that tenderness, that's a loving kindness practice. We're going to end the time together with a brief one,

but just want to share a little bit of some of the blessings of loving kindness, whether you're offering are receiving, because they're both blessings. And one of the real gifts is that when there is a field or atmosphere of loving kindness where there's this open-hearted attention, healing happens. It just does. When we sense belonging to our body or to another, we relax.

And that flow I described of blood and of lymph and of electrical currents and of chi, it happens. Illness is blockage. Healing is flow. In the early 1900s, many infants were known to work. waste away in institutions and die. And it was often unknown how come.

In fact, on their admission cards, what it would say for these seriously sick infants, the words would be there just described as hopeless. So one of the interns that was following around a very famous physician, and the physician's name was Dr. Talbot, just trailed him because he was having unusual success in diagnosing what was going on with these infants. So he trailed him for a while and then he rode up one that was one very curious and regular occurrence. And that's what I want to share with you. After examining one of these infants, Dr. Talbot would write on the child's chart in illegible scrawl.

But within days, the child would miraculously begin to gain color to eat more food or move around with more ease and vitality. Curious, this guy asked this station nurse, what was the diagnosis and what was the prescription? okay and oh she said and then she just pointed to the corner of the nursery where a matronly woman sat rocking a child she said oh it's old anna when nothing works he has a child spend time with old Anna and just does it you know within a few days now think of it this is you know you can find this somewhere I don't know where I got this story but you can find it probably if you Google but it's not we don't need to prove it to ourselves we know it when there is that grandmotherly loving, rocking, nourishing, loving presence, we thrive.

It's the grounds of healing. Life is fragile. This is a bumper sticker. Life is fragile. Love is the glue. Okay, so that's one of the gifts of this awakening. The other gift that is as fundamental as it goes is that in the moments that we completely feel bathed by love or that it's moving through us to another, the sense of self and other disappears. There's sometimes this question that comes up in Buddhist circles with, you know, two Buddhists, which is, well, isn't this practice of meditating on other people and offering them prayers?

Doesn't that kind of reinforced duality? But here's the, here's what really, happens. It is a skillful means. It's a tool. But what you find is the more you get sincere and you have in mind another person and you're seeing their goodness and your sincerity of saying, may you trust yourself just as you are, may you feel filled with loving presence, the more that's sincere, your own armoring starts dissolving. And then you discover the truth of non-separation. There's not a self over there so much. You realize that that one beingness, that life, that tenderness, that's really who we are. You realize that there's only one of us here.

All different expressions. One awareness. I read you, the poet have faced. I have learned so much from God that I can no longer call myself a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Jew. The truth has shared so much of itself with me that I can no longer call myself a man, a woman, an angel, or even a pure soul. Love has befriended her face so completely at its turn to ash and freed me. Love is befriended so have faced so completely, it has turned to ash and freed me of every concept and image my mind has ever known. Love is befriended have faced so completely

it has turned to ash and freed me of every concept and image my mind has ever known. So these practices of cultivating and awakening our heart actually go beyond any ideas. We start there maybe with an idea of an other that we want to send love to. But then we get catapulted into this sense of belonging and oneness. No separation. That there's just one of us here and our hearts freed. And then there's still the conventional reality playing out that there's just love that flows through the who we are. And we know that

as more deeply what we are than any of the defenses that we're familiar with or any of the aggression. That can still play out, but there's this quality of forgiveness and tenderness that recognizes it and it doesn't get fueled. So that too dies out some. Freedom. So part of closing, just to say that every one of us, and we wouldn't be here, we wouldn't be listening, or wouldn't be watching if there wasn't some intuition of this oneness, of this belonging as possible. It's possible to realize something as intuit possibility of loving

without holding back and we long for it. And what we find is that it's contagious that when we're around someone who's inhabiting that reality more fully, it helps us melt. It's like ice cubes melting. It's like the warmth and energy. energy, we don't have to protect ourselves from them. So we dissolve a little, and then we sense, oh, it really is just water washing around. Yeah, I have a little ice cubiness, but, you know,

I'm made of water. It's contagious. We do help each other melt. In fact, one person described it as this, he said, my spiritual teacher is whoever around me in this moment whose heart is more relaxed and open than my own. My spiritual teacher is whoever's around me in this moment whose heart is more relaxed and open than my own, which usually makes it our dog, right? Okay. All right, let's close a little bit of practice. Bring this back to what can touch our lives immediately right here. And as you come into stillness and bring the attention inside, again, feel your own sincerity of intention, that even in these very few minutes that aspiration,

may this way of paying attention awaken my heart. May this heart soften and open. And to the extent that you feel any blockage or distraction, reactivity right here in this moment, see if it's possible to forgive it. And that doesn't mean forgive it as if it's bad and you're forgiving. It means that you're really acknowledging, okay, this too. It's okay.

You're practicing loving kindness with what's difficult in the moment. My heart's feeling numb or angry or judgmental. Sometimes I'll just whisper the words, forgiven, forgiven. And just the intention to forgive begins to open the door and soften. Melt the ice-cubness a little. And so bringing to mind the person you were considering before that you'd like to have more intimacy with, less separation. And just for a moment, appreciate your own intention,

that it's coming from a place of caring about love and its source is love, even if it's love that is caught up a bit in fear or hurt, it's still coming from love. So to take a moment to appreciate the goodness of your own intention, It's really important. It's like you're saying thank you to this sincerity that's here. Own goodness. It's got an innocence to it.

That in us that longs to connect. Taking the other person into your awareness, just bringing your attention to the other and just imagine that person right here so you could see or see the eyes, his or her eyes. Take a moment to sense what this person's like when here she's really loving or happy. When here she's more free.

The look in that person's eyes, their smile, their whole continents. When here she's just more relaxed or at ease. So you can sense the goodness that expresses when that person's not afraid or not in some way needing something to be different. sense what you appreciate about this person. Maybe the way he or she expresses love or curiosity or creativity, patience, helpfulness. And as you sense that goodness, let it touch your heart

that that person like all beings wants to be happy and doesn't want to suffer. That person wants to live from their goodness. The Buddha said there is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the highest half, this is the light that shines in our hearts. It's that light in that other being.

So you can see past the veil and just sense that light, that goodness. In some way, imagine that you could let that person know about his or her goodness. In some way. And notice how that person responds when you do. When you in some way let them know your appreciation of their goodness. goodness. You might even mentally wish for the words thank you for your beingness. And you might whisper whatever prayer you have for that person, whatever you wish for that person. And as you do, let it be as sincere as possible. Imagine them experiencing what you're wishing

for them. And sense the belonging, the connection that happens when you're appreciating and reaching out in this way. The freedom it brings to your own heart. And then just letting that heart be as open as it is. So you can visually sense your own heart as this vast space where there's just a flow of aliveness that the whole world's aliveness can flow through your heart. That vast. A heart as wide as the world, sensing that heart,

including the sounds above us and around us and way, way beyond, letting it all live through. through your heart. Sensing all the beings that are in your heart. You just might have images of friends or family, images of those that you don't know so well, but sense how all beings live. Anybody you can imagine as part of this heart, all beings, all creatures, the birds, the deer, the fox, the flowers. All live in this heart. In this vastness and this flow, there's a luminosity. The Buddha says, there is that light. It shines beyond all things on earth.

Beyond us all, beyond the highest heavens. This is the light that shines in our hearts. All beings everywhere realize their essence as loving presence. And may all beings live their lives as an expression of loving presence. May this bring a healing and peace to earth, a peace everywhere. May all beings awaken and be free. 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.