Tara Brach - Judgment, Acceptance and Freedom (Retreat Talk) (2019-11-03)

Episode Date: November 8, 2019

Judgment, Acceptance and Freedom (Retreat Talk) - The boundary to what we accept is the boundary to our freedom. This talk explores the often unconscious ways we create separation by judging ourselves and others, and the key pathways of meditation practice that release the habit of blame and free our hearts. (This talk was given on Sunday evening, November 3, at the 2019 IMCW Fall Retreat in Reisterstown, MD.)

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and good evening, my friends. One of the great gifts that many of you have been kind of noticing is that as you deepen attention you do start catching on to the different patterns that go on, whether it's worry or planning, or wanting things different, there's more of a noticing of what's going on

and what's keeping us imprisoned in a sense, stuck or whatever. I was thinking this cartoon I wanted to share with you of a dog with a psychiatrist. There's a lot of dog and psychiatrist cartoons out there now. I don't know why. The dog's lying on the couch, and the psychiatrist is saying,

when did you start seeing the invisible fence? So this talk is really about an invisible fence, and it's a particular invisible fence of the pervasiveness of judging. So we're going to reflect together about judging mind and just noticing what a trance puts us into. As it said, we have 80,000 thoughts a day, and about 95% of them we had yesterday, and a lot of them are thoughts that have something to do with, how something's missing or wrong that's going on. So here we are having all these thoughts, and a lot of them are about what's missing or wrong, and most of those thoughts are about what might be missing or wrong in me.

And so Charlie Brown puts it this way. He says, sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask myself, where have I gone wrong? And then a voice says to me, this is going to take more than one night. And we know it. We know those kind of thoughts. Joseph Campbell describes the circle of awareness.

How many of you are familiar with that metaphor? Can I see you by hands? Yeah, a good number. Again, this is going to be part of our invisible fence in the sense of in the circle of awareness there's a line, and everything that's below the line is like the invisible fence. It's outside of our consciousness,

which means if you're not, If we're not really conscious of it, including when we're pushing it away in some way, we're hitched to it. Our identity gets confined. And if it's above the line, still might hurt, might be unpleasant and so on, but if it's above the line, our whole sense of being does not get shaped by it. So the inquiry is how can we bring judging above the line, like all the different levels, because there's all sorts of kinds of judging.

Like Buddhist psychology describes, you know, when we're going through all the levels of awakening, levels of insight, that the last obscuration, our defilement to go, and that's just a word for saying covering our true nature, the last one to go is comparing mind. Where we're comparing ourselves, often it's to some internalized idea of how we should be,

or we compare ourselves to each other. It's pretty chronic how it goes on. So it can go from the subtleties of this, just the way the architecture of the brain is designed to compare this to that and make something better and something worse, because there's usually this hierarchy of better, worse, good, bad.

Very subtle to the real blatant ones where we're condemning ourselves or condemning others for being bad and wrong. So those are the different levels, and the reality is that when we bring it above the line and we really become aware of and not hitched to it, we're no longer hitched to the judging self or the judged, that's freedom. That's freedom. When you're not feeling judged, you're judging.

In, I think it was 1988, I'm not exactly sure of years. That was my first meditation retreat. And somewhere, like in the first few days, the realization was that the boundary to what I can accept is the boundary to my freedom. The boundary to what I can accept is the boundary to my freedom. And just to define terms a little by accept,

meaning really open to... in this moment what's happening without judging it, making it wrong, pushing it away. Accepting doesn't mean some passive, indifference to harm. It's like the difference between discerning wisdom and judgment. Discerning wisdom says, oh, this anger is pushing people away and causing harm. And judgment says, I'm bad for being angry. Okay, so the boundary to what I can accept means that there's an openness without judging to how it is

because when we're really open to how it is, then we can respond with intelligence. So that was the realization, and right on its heels, right on its heels, was like I felt slammed by how incredibly wall-to-wall judgment was in my mind. And some of you may have noticed that as you start paying attention, you start seeing how much the mind always has a commentary.

I like this, I don't like that. You know, oh, I'm doing well at the, oh, I'm doing bad at this. Oh, that person's looking good. That's bad. I mean, ongoing. Let me ask you, how many have you been noticing it, judging mind? Yeah. And then, of course, the judgments go towards ourselves and towards the world.

And usually, it's very rare that somebody's just judging the world, but not themselves or vice versa. But sometimes we have really profound and visible fences and we don't see any of it. But you can see how it comes up with the news. It's impossible for most people to take in the news and not really go right into us-them, even very awake people I know.

I don't go near to being able to be free from them. I just go right into the us-theming. I watch myself all the time. You know that phrase, the world is divided into those who think they're right. And that's the whole phrase, right? So we get into our viewpoints. And in several of the groups I was doing,

people were talking about seeing how confining the trances of being right or being completely caught in our view. And often our view is something's wrong with me, which is part of where we're going here. And Seb described this such a powerful talk I felt last night, how especially that framing of how when anything comes up, how quickly the mind goes to thinking this shouldn't be here. This is wrong.

This is bad. This is what the Buddha described, the second arrow, that we go from, this feels bad, to I am bad. That when we have negative or, let's not even use the word negative, difficult emotions, they immediately reflect on our okayness. Have you noticed that? So the second arrow, if you haven't heard the expression, because it's a great metaphor, is the first arrow is I'm feeling fear, let's say. And the second arrow is, I'm an insecure, bad person, I shouldn't be feeling this. The first arrow is jealousy.

are hurt, or having some unmet need and the second is you're needy and bad for it. So we get caught and it really puts us at war with reality. We're at war with reality when we second arrow ourselves. So judging is tenacious because it's really homo sapien-saping survival system for controlling ourselves in each other. It's a basic control strategy. If you ask, what's that wanting, trying to do? It's trying in some way to protect you.

I was on some sort of a radio interview. I think it was for mindful leadership or something. And talking about how confining it was when we're constantly evaluating ourselves and sensing that we're falling short, how much it keeps us from our spontaneity and our, you know, creative expression. And the interviewer kind of took me on and said, you know, but I'm concerned. I'm sure some listeners would be concerned that if we don't,

if we put aside our shoulds and our concerns about how we're performing and even our doubts, we won't be spurred on to improve. We'll regress. We'll get laissez-faire. Doesn't it seem to be useful to be anxious about your flaws? And that concern, by the way, extends to others. If I stop judging others, then they won't end up behaving the way I want them to behave. They won't cooperate. So we use it to control. And this is a really

important reflection that so many of us hold tight to blaming ourselves for our addictive behaviors or for our judging or for the way our anger is or how we fall short as a parent, you know, for how our body is. You know, we keep at ourselves because we're afraid we won't change if we let go. And you might reflect for yourself. Do you feel like you,

if you didn't have some shoulds around meditating, would you keep meditating? Would you keep deepening your attention and practicing? And you may sense inside, as you hear that question, you know, your wise self would say, of course I could, I will, because I love to wake up. But there's another part, usually, in most of us, that says, I can't trust that I'm going to keep doing things,

and yes, I'm going to keep strong-arming myself into doing stuff. Does that make sense? Okay. So there's a classic story that's like kind of the reason that our limbic system sticks with criticism. And in this one, a CEO of a large company he's admired for his energy and drive, but he has one slight weakness,

which is every month when he goes in to give his report to the president, he pees in his pants. And that's just his slight little pesky problem, but it's a huge one, obviously. And so the kindly president advises him to go see a urologist. And then when he comes back the next month, his pants are wet again. So he says, didn't you see the urologist?

And the response was, I took a mindfulness course instead, and I'm cured. I'm no longer embarrassed. So that's the deep fear, is that, yeah, it sounds good, okay, I'll stop judging myself and criticizing myself and so on,

but then I'll just get worse in some way. So from a developmental perspective, when we feel threatened we look for the source of the threat and we either point somebody else to attribute blame to them and often it's a sense of something's wrong here

and whenever we're anxious we get fixated on what might be wrong inside of me and so fixated that we don't even really respond to our world in an intelligent way because we're so wrapped up in how I might be wrong There was one example from a job interview. The question was, and where would you see yourself in five years' time, Mr. Jeffries?

And his response, well, personally, I believe my biggest weakness is in listening. See, I thought that was really good. Anyway, fixating on what's wrong with us. So another example of where we turn on ourselves is in the closest relationships are where there's the most attachment and there's the most fear of falling short and we end up judging ourselves are each other the most.

And again, these are my examples, they're not the best. A woman goes to see a psychic because there's not enough intimacy in her relationship and she starts blaming her husband to the psychic because he won't talk about his vulnerability. And she says, okay, I'll, you know, she looks or Crystal Ball and she says, okay, at the beginning of 2020, men will start talking about their feelings, and within moments, women everywhere will be sorry.

So we blame ourselves or we blame each other, and we have a lot of fear around being blamed. So the source of it. The big source, as I mentioned, is the way our brain is designed. It's really the default system that either we're threatened and we look for the source and we blame ourselves or another, or if we're not life and death threatened, then what we do, and this is so interesting, is we look at where we stand in the pecking order and evaluate ourselves. And as we compare ourselves to others, our internal pecking order of how we should be. So it's really deep in the limbic system, how we do it.

And then it gets exacerbated by how it was in our families. So if you were brought up in a family where you were criticized a lot, there's going to be a lot more chance that you've internalized that as a way of doing things and you're on your own case a lot. We just internalize. It's really deepened by our society. Our society has a set of standards on how we should be. And every one of us, we're packed creatures, we want to belong.

And so we have that hierarchy in our mind of what's good according to our society, right? Our society says we should look a certain way and have a certain kind of body and a certain kind of intelligence and be successful in certain ways and so on. So that deepens the judging. And you can watch yourself move through the world and it's very hard not to have a part of you kind of watching yourself to see how, kind of monitoring, to see how you're doing. in terms of those set of standards from society and the family. And then, of course, the most insidious is that because our societies are hierarchical

is the messages that are given to the non-dominant populations in our society. And this is the not so invisible to some but invisible to other judgments of inferior versus superior. I was doing an interview with Sandra O. some of you might know her from Gray's Anatomy or from Killing Eve. She's an Asian actress. She's gotten the Globe Award twice and also hosted, it was first Asian woman to do that,

and so on. And she was describing to me how when her agent called her and said, said, you know, would you like to be in this movie, Killing Eve? I'm curious, how many of you have seen any of Killing Eve? Okay, a few. Very popular series. Her agent asked her that, and she said, I don't know, which part.

And she said, Eve. And she had, say, three times that she was being offered the lead. Now, this is an enormously successful woman. And she said she was, first she was stunned that it was the lead, and then she was stunned that she was stunned. And yet, Hollywood's been so white for so long that for her many times she was told not even to bother going for a role because she wouldn't be considered.

South Korean woman. So part of what she and I were talking about is how her heart goes out to so many young Asians because she said even though they're outwardly successful, they're living that kind of container, that invisible fence of still not really belonging and still not feeling okay about themselves. A couple of years ago, I was with my niece, who's Chinese,

and she was telling me about being at the mall and how fearful she was getting any time she was around groups of white males because there have been such an increase of go back to where you belong, that message and how it made her feel inwardly like something was wrong, dirty, demeaned, not okay about her.

So the cultures imprint on terms of how we relate to ourselves. And again, it's the same limbic system that gets afraid and thinks I'm bad. The limbic system on a societal level is a hierarchy where the messages are sent through the hierarchy and the message of inferior or superior is judgment. And then as we evolve,

and this is where we're going now for the rest of this talk, we move from the lens of good, bad, superior, inferior. As we evolve, it's attend and be friend. We are friends. It's moving towards mutual belonging and interdependence. That's the way our brain is evolving. When it's limbic dominance, it's hierarchical, it takes over, and it dominates. When the brain is integrated, when the brain is integrated, parts communicate with each other.

There's a mutual belonging. So we're now going to look at how we, in our own lives, in a personal way, make that movement. But we do need to see how it goes on all the influence. is on us, because wherever we are societally in the hierarchy, whether the identity is superior or inferior, there's still an invisible fence that's keeping us from wholeness. We're still less than whole, and something in us knows that, and something in us feels bad. And this includes, we often talk about hierarchy in terms of human hierarchy. It also speaks to species bias.

It's so deep in us to have animals lower in some way. And again, when there's lower, then we violate. Does that make sense? If we consider animals as less than us, we don't connect the dots in terms of our eating and the cruelty and suffering that comes from it. these hierarchies really do affect how we treat each other. So the big challenge is that judgment is universal, pervasive, persistent.

It's part of our evolutionary inheritance, which means we can keep on waking up and go beyond it. We can go beyond hierarchy, but it takes attention. The good news is that as we pay attention the way each of us is here, we start sensing the pain of judgment. It hurts. We can feel how it hurts our own hearts when we judge ourselves. We can feel it hurts our hearts when we judge others,

and it hurts others too. I want to share a little story if I can find it. My daughter and I just had a number, knock down, drag-out, bedtime hour. Finally, about 10 minutes ago I put her to bed and through clenched teeth, I said, I love you, Holland, but not another word tonight. You're going to sleep now. I'm done fussing over stuffed animals. Mommy? I paused on the way out the door, literally biting my tongue. I was so frustrated. What is it, Holland? I do have one more thing to say. Of course she did. She was standing on her bed with her hands on her hips too, and her hair was wild,

and she was using her arm to wipe her tears and snot away from her face. Mommy, said my three-year-old, staring me down with the venom in her tiny voice, I forgive you. Then she laid down and cried, and honest to goodness, for a hot man and I didn't know what to do. The way she said, I forgive you, made it sound like cuss words. I walked over to the bedside and leaned over. Baby girl, do you know what forgiveness means? She was still sniffling.

Her face shoved deep in her little mermaid pillow. Yes, she muttered. I really had to hear this. It means you were wrong and I'm tired of being mad and now I'm going to sleep and my heart won't have a tummy ache. How's that for wisdom? My heart won't have a tummy ache. I like that line.

When we live with judgment, it hurts. And the more we wake up, the more we feel. that hurt. So you're going to look at the two pathways of really evolving ourselves and we'll focus it on the way we turn blame towards ourselves. How we move from the something's wrong with me, that limbic grip. It doesn't want to let go because it's afraid if it lets go then we'll get even worse and worseer, right? How we move from the something's wrong with me to being beyond the boundary, really accepting and befriending this life, all parts. We're going to look at the two main pathways, and one of the pathways is offering the

kind of presence we've been practicing, and we'll use the model of rain, and offering presence to ourselves when we get caught in self-blame. We'll do a very brief meditation. And the second pathway is an ongoing practice of nurturing some form of loving kindness. So for the first, brief biographical for me is that, as many of you know, if you've read radical acceptance, I right in the middle of college, I just became very, very clear how was the last thing from my own best friend. I was really, had a pretty vicious inner judge, and I got the pain of it. I was really lucky that I was really pretty young

and getting this hurts and felt a real commitment to, can I accept myself just as I am? That's that. And so I wanted to stop the war. And there was a kind of a sense of a commitment and exploring a lot of practices that helped to loosen up the trance of unworthiness.

And the commitment kept going through, the years because as we know, the judgment's pretty persistent. And so I remember one of my first meditation retreats at IMS, practicing with the yes meditation where anything that came up, I would just recognize it and allow it, say yes to it. And how gradually I'd say yes and the yes became tender and tender. So I started finding that even if I didn't mean it, you know, because I was just saying that I was saying yes to the moment but I didn't really mean it, just the intention to allow started opening up some space, which is an important thing to know.

Then about 15 years ago I started much more actively doing the full rain process where it wasn't just recognizing and allowing but deepening with an investigation and actively nurturing. And that is probably in the most profound way. unearthed those old identities, the invisible fence identities of being the judgeer and the judge. I just don't believe it. I don't know how else to say it, but when the judging still happens,

the thoughts and even the feelings of, yuck, I don't feel good about myself. But there's an awareness that just does not believe the story. There's just a larger truth from many, many rounds of, bringing presence and kindness to it. Each time I get stuck though, especially if it's a real sticky time, there is a process of having to unhook and each time I go through the process with rain it actually deepens

the realization of the bad self is not the truth of who I am. So I'd like to give you an example of an unhooking with blame, with the self-blame. And this occurred, and I was for about three or four years participating with a local group of, a spiritual friends group of sorts, a very diverse mix in terms of racial, and sexual orientation, gender identity. Several of my friends from that group are actually here in this space right now, which is very cool. And the intention was to deepen our understanding really, who are you? What's life like for you? So the sharing was quite open and vulnerable. And the first few months, or first few gatherings, I just was filled with a sense of self-consciousness

and anxiety about saying the right thing and I didn't feel real. I was just afraid I wasn't going to, I was going to in some way betray my ignorance. or do something wrong or offensive. You know, I just wanted to be right. And so I felt a sense of not belonging, and mostly I felt down on myself. I just didn't like the way I was navigating, especially because some of the stories I heard,

especially from Friends of Color, were just gripped me, and I felt like, oh, I'm not doing enough in my life to be relieving the suffering. So one of the mornings before, I was hosting it at my house that time, before everyone came, I felt this grip of really being down on myself. So I decided to do rain, rain on blame, which is what I call it, just because it's got a nifty sound to it. So I sat with myself and I recognized, okay, anxiety and feeling of falling short judging,

and I allowed that to be there. Then the investigating was very somatic for feeling the kind of a sense of shame and sensing this belief, basically, that went right with it, that I could never do enough and that I was falling short. And then some of the context for the belief

is, here I am a leader in a diverse multicultural community, and I really need to step forward more and there's so much pain and I'm not doing enough. And it had both the group identity as a white person, white guilt, clearly was what was happening. It also had, from my personal background,

coming from parents that were real, kind of do-gooder types, that were always out there, champion causes and doing great things. And I took a path that was more of kind of intercontemplative, So there's the unmanifest social activist part of me thinking, I just need to be out there more.

So it was pretty, it was a big collection. But the somatic experience was like this deep aching hole, and I kind of wanted to shrink and disappear into it rather than be part of a group. I just felt it was that kind of badness. And with that sensing, how deep and how bad I felt about myself, came some grief. And also a sense of grief, a kind of a soul sadness of, gosh, look how long in my life this keeps coming up and keeps grabbing my heart, that sense. I don't know if you

know what I mean by a soul sadness, but seeing the whole landscape of my life and like, wow, isn't that amazing that the bad self-feilings would have such a, such pull? But with the grieving, I started getting more tender so I could ask the investigating question that's so that's so important, which is, so what does this place need? What is this part of me that feels bad about self need? What does this place need to trust, need to remember? So I asked that and then with Rain, once there's a kind of a tenderizing, there's a capacity to kind of listen from a larger space and I could sense though what that place needed was

to trust the purity of my care. You know, I may not meet any particular standard of my parents or my idea as a white person of what I should be doing, but the care, just to trust the purity of my heart, that the care is there and that I could do. So I sat there like this saying I care, you know, I trust, I care, there's a purity, there's a caring and even as I say it now, it's, you know, good feel. feel it. And that just loosened up a lot. There was, you know, tears and opening. And I remember that day I was able to name the layering of guilt and the feelings of not enough, not so that others would reassure me that I was okay, because that's something that can happen in these

groups that it doesn't serve. But just simply just to be real in the group and found that that was the beginning of actually participating from a deeper place of care and spontaneity and realness. But I had to go through Rain on Blame to get to that layer of feeling bad to be able to open. There's many different ways that we get stuck in feeling like something's wrong with us. And sometimes it's, you know, the kind that's fueled, as I described, different layers of us, it just feels like we're falling short. Sometimes, and it's the most difficult

when we feel like we have directly caused harm in a very immediate way to somebody. I was feeling a sense of being part of the harm as a white person, and that was painful, and I had to get in touch with that. There's another type of self-blame when somebody's caused direct injuries, thinking right now of a student in my,

and one retreat, one of these retreats some years back, who had a temper that was very damaging to his teen and was ruining his marriage, and he could see it over and over again how it was causing damage. And in being with him and feeling his self-hatred and his aversion, at one point I just said to him, look, this anger does cause harm and it's not your fault.

And he broke down weeping. And that was the beginning of him being able to become responsible and accountable. He first had to be able to get that it wasn't his fault, that he actually started having memories of his father breaking dishes in the kitchen And his father was alcoholic, and he had a vicious temper. And he started seeing the different past conditionings to realize that he didn't, like, get worn and sign on, yep, I want to have a bad temper and hurt people around me.

You know, this was, it was out of control. But for him to get that he didn't have to feel that shame, to unlock the shame was the beginning of being able to then start paying attention when the temper came up, and being able to have enough of a pause that he could make some other choices. His wife some months later says, the first time I feel like I am safe around you, because he could start choosing differently but he had to first undo the layer of shame. It's not your fault.

So this is one domain of working with self-blame, is bringing mindfulness and self-compassion to it. The second domain is the domain of ongoingly learning how to offer care, nurturing, regardless of what's going on, just having that as a practice. And we all have different relationships with the loving-kindness practice. So I want to just name two elements that I find really useful to remember if you want to strengthen that. The first has to do with the understanding that whatever you practice gets stronger.

we have a negativity bias. When we have a voice going in our brain that's saying something's wrong with you or you're falling short and it happens a lot, there's these deepening grooves or neural pathways. So to decondition it, we need to have some form of remembering what we're forgetting, remembering the goodness. So one of the reminders that I find helpful is that we can't always go from zes, we can't always from zero to 100. We can't go from hating ourselves to embracing and befriending. It can be more gradual than that. I know for myself, sometimes I feel kind of that tightness and if I even

make a gesture, like just put my hand in my heart and even if I'm not feeling tender, or I even say, oh, I wish I could be kind, that begins to open the door. There's a friend of mine, some of you might know of her, Shana Shapiro. She's a wonderful meditation teacher. And she describes in her pathway to loving kindness, she's going through a divorce, and each morning she would wake up with this pit of shame of kind of failure or not liking herself. And her meditation teacher suggested that each morning she get up and meditate and say, I love you, Shauna. every morning, get up and say, I love you, Shauna. And she said, no way.

No way I can do that. So she did a second. Instead, she said, okay, how about this? How about just putting her hand in your heart and say, good morning, Shauna? And she said, I could do that. So that was her practice for a month. She'd get up in the morning, and she'd go like this and go, okay, good morning, Shauna.

And that wasn't a problem. She could do that. So her teacher, after a while, said, okay, you're ready for the hard-corporated. stuff. Let's try the Good Morning, I Love You, Shauna. She did it the next morning. She didn't feel anything. She certainly didn't feel love, but she didn't feel like it was bad either. So she kept it up. Again, what you practice gets stronger. She kept it up. And one morning she put her hand on her heart, and she said it, and she felt her grandmother's love, and her mother's love, and her own love, and just this whole field of loving that wasn't even

inside or outsider, it's just the loving that was there. You can establish a pathway that opens you up to love because love is what you are and it's a remembering, a reconnecting, a homecoming. So you start with the gesture or the words or the image wherever it's easiest and then keep practicing. So that's one. just find a tendril wherever there's some sense of softening to yourself that might help. It might be when you just feel a sense of the presence of your dog.

For some people it's like leaning against a tree and that can kind of do it and build on that. The second is that we have some idea that if we really want to develop a strong relationship with ourself we're going to love ourselves and it's not okay. to depend on other people's love. But ultimately, nurturing, it doesn't matter where it comes from. It doesn't matter if you think it's coming from your dead grandmother, from the Dalai Lama, or from your own self. Those are all ideas. The point is, use an idea skillfully. That's all that matters. Use what works. So if you're feeling like, I can't love myself, because the self is

too small to love the self, you know what I mean? You're already feeling regressed. Then call on someone in your mind that feels that you can trust them, that you know loves you, or call on a spiritual figure. Call on some outside source. In some ways, enough, gives enough space from the tight, consolidated, separate self so that you can kind of open and let it in because what happens is it's a bridge. It'll reconnect you to the loving that was already here. A story of this of coming from an outside source and the potential of healing. Some of you might remember this from Frank Osseskeskesh.

His book, The Five Invitations. And then he describes a young man, Matthew, who's dying of age. He's gay, long-time Buddhist practitioner. And he's got high fevers and pneumonia, and he's got this very deep fear and self-hatred that has come up in this last part of his life when sickness kind of broke him open. And the self-hatred is because he was born

in a fundamentalist Christian family. His father was the kind of just taught about a punishing God, basically. So fire and brimstone preacher, man of a father, and now he believed he was used close to death that God would condemn him to eternity for his sexual orientation. So he was in the grip of the limbic, okay? Totally in the grip. Frank tried to support him, drew on all the Buddhist stuff,

the compassion, the mindfulness, created an altar by his bedside with the Buddhist statue. None of it worked. massaged his feet, played his favorite, chanting music, no change. He was really in the grip of self-hatred, self-doubt, fear. So as Frank describes it by 2 in the morning, he was exhausted, he felt ineffective and powerless, so he decided to go home. But for some unknown reason, he says,

on the drive there, I thought of my first Holy Communion, the Catholic ritual that usheres young innocence into the loving lap of God. When I got home, I searched through my storage closet to find my memory box, a small collection of amentoes I hold dear. Here I located a five-inch plastic figurine of Jesus, surrounded by lambs and little children. Instead of going to bed, I drove straight back to the hospital. As Matthew continued to moan and shout and tossed in agony,

I took down the thunkah and replaced the Buddha statue with a small plastic Jesus. Just as I was smoothing the altar cloth, cleaning woman named Dina came into the room and spotted the figurine. Setting the mop to one side, she said with great enthusiasm, Merciful Jesus, when his kindness is with us, everything is all right. At once Matthew's eyes locked onto Dina, an angelic smile spread across his face as he pivoted towards the altar to gaze at the plastic Jesus statue in them back in Dina's direction.

His entire body relaxed in that moment. The punishing God of Matthew's childhood, the one whose wrath he had been taught to fear and whose judgment made him feel like a terrible person, was transformed into the merciful God he also knew and loved, the one who adored all his children, no matter their so-called faults and flaws, the kind of forgiving, all-accepting, and benevolent God.

Dina's faith in God's love was so secure that it lent Matthew exactly, the strength he needed to defeat his inner critic. I left them there together. They didn't need me. So tonight we're kind of exploring this realm of judgment, the boundary to what we accept as the boundary of our freedom and beginning to see, well, where is that boundary? And what are the pathways to waking up beyond it. The pathway of bringing presence and self-compassion as with rain, the rain on blame, are directly the nurturing, whether it's our own nurturing, reminding ourselves, you know, this heart is pure, I do care, or whether it's the nurturing

that we imagine and sense coming from others or from real others because we need each other to remind us that we're okay. So I'd like to close with a brief guided practice on this and it's one of those things that it's brief enough that if you find it's helpful you can practice it on your own at greater length. The boundary to what we accept is the boundary to our freedom and the inquiry is, is there anything going on right now inside you where you sense you're holding against yourself? You're in some way judging down on yourself, some way feeling small,

less than who you know you are because of some judgment. It might be judging yourself for judging. It might be some underlying sense that you're not doing the retreat the way you should be. It might be some way that you feel you're doing your life, you're not really showing up. It might be even particularly to do with one.

one relationship might be to do with self-care, to scan and sense if there's anywhere that you're holding against yourself. I wouldn't pick something that feels like it's rude in trauma, like a deep self-hatred for some way you've destroyed somebody else's life or something like that because that will not serve you for right this moment. And if you know, if you feel like your judgment or blame is more directed outward, it's It's fun to work on that too. You can pick that if you'd like.

The beginning is to recognize and allow that the judgment or the anxiety or the self-aversion or whatever it is is there and just recognize what's most predominant that you're noticing about it. And the allowing is just agreeing to let it be here right now. You don't have to like it. agreeing not to move away from it, not to try to fix, not to add anything extra. So it's yes to the actuality that it's here, which actually creates the space so you can investigate a little more and sense how the judgment is living in your body.

And sometimes it helps to sense, well what is the view from the judging place? what's the judging place believing about me? What's the worst thing it's believing? What's it most afraid of? And then sense how that is in your body. When you're believing, the judging part, how it feels in your body. And notice if it feels familiar, if this feels old, maybe some memories that come with it.

And sometimes we can sense how much that judging place has stopped us from living in certain ways or enjoying or connecting. Notice what happens as you let yourself really feel the feelings that come when the judging is going on. Where is it in your body? You throw chest, your belly. You might put your hand where you feel it. It helps to contact your body and even with that as you put your hand on your throat or

chest, your cheek, you're beginning the nurturing actually. You might listen more deeply and sense what does the place that feels judging and judged most need to trust, what does it need to remember? What does it need to know right now? And since the presence of your most awake, tender heart, so you can respond from that place offering that truth. a deep truth that needs to be trusted, offering the kindness. And if it helps to sense that coming from some source beyond you, then imagine and sense

that. Offering care to the most vulnerable place in you right now. And sensing the possibility of letting it in, letting it in. I might sense how deep the yes can go to your own being. This is really the evolutionary shift of from the judge to truly embracing, befriending, from your own wisest, highest self, saying yes to the life that's inside. You might experiment now and sense how deep can that yes go,

really honoring this life, cherishing this life, sensing who you are, if there's nothing wrong, truly nothing wrong. In closing by sensing your prayer for yourself right now, what do you most wish? letting go of any ideas or thoughts, taking these last few moments, to sense the heart space that's here. Allow yourself to sense the shared heart space that the collective,

who we are together, waking up together. I must stay and thank you for your presence. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.