Tara Brach - Letting Go of Judgment (retreat talk) (2015-09-05)

Episode Date: September 18, 2015

Letting Go of Judgment (retreat talk) (2015-09-05) - The scales of judgment confine us in a limited sense of self, they restrict the depth and fullness of our loving. This talk explores the genesis of projecting badness on to parts of ourselves and others, and how we can use mindfulness and self-compassion practices to evolve our consciousness and free our hearts.

Greetings. I'm Tara Brock, and I'd like to welcome you to these podcasts. While the talks and meditations are offered freely, we'd very much appreciate your support. To make a donation or learn more about my schedule, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org. Thank you. Now this day. Welcome. Good afternoon. It's a different feeling giving a talk when it's all light outside, so it's kind of bright and nice. And what we'll be doing for this period, which is our heart practice, the title I'm using is loving without holding back. And if we ask ourselves at any moment, like what right now is between me and loving, we'll run into all the ways that perhaps we've been distracted and not here. But deep down what we'll find

is that there's vulnerability we're not wanting to feel and that it's not until we open to the vulnerability that we get to open to the whole vastness of love and really occupy it. Because before then we were kind of pulling back from the vulnerabilities, so we were pulling back from really inhabiting our being. There's a bunch of... of responses that children gave to the question, what does love mean? I'll just read you one. When you tell someone something bad about yourself and you're scared they won't love you anymore, but then you get surprised because not only do they still love you, they love you even more. You know, I sometimes get that feeling when we're in small groups together and we're naming

just these human challenges of the heart. We haven't yet grieve, but we know we need to, or the fears and doubts we encounter about if we're enough, or whatever it is. And something happens as we name things together, that this shared space of tenderness is holding it, and we feel more in love with each other. And we also practice that with ourselves.

That's how we really wake up, is that one wise sage said, just to find out, ask yourself, well, what am I unwilling to feel? And so gradually, there's something in us that knows because we want to be awake, that it's worth it to befriend and open to what we've been pulling away from.

Because otherwise we get hardened. There's a really very wonderful Scandinavian story that I've shared before. Some of you might remember, but I thought I'd share it this afternoon so you can sit back and listen to this tale. The princess's parents said, I run into financial difficulties.

It was dicey times, and so they were looking for some financial help, and they decided to raise some money from the dragon's hoard. You might have heard these stories before. They went to the princess and said, well, dear, you know, the dragons agreed to give us some money in return from being between,

cross to you and so we're giving you to the dragon. But she was a resourceful princess. And so though she was frightened and tearful, she went out to the edge of the village where a very wise woman lived with her dozen or two children and grandchildren. She poured out her story. The wise woman said, well, do you want to marry the dragon? And she said, absolutely not. And she said, well, let's see if we can figure out a way for you to do it so it can work out okay. and she whispered into her ear for a while, and then the princess went away. And the first thing that she was supposed to do

is get ten wedding gowns. So wedding day came, and all the people came to the cord, and it was a big celebration, and it was a little tough, but it got finished, and finally the dragon turned to the princess and said, well, dear,

isn't it time for us to consummate our wedding? And the princess responded, well, yes, my dear, husband and so there they are in their bridal chambers and she said but for me to do so I must remove one of my wedding gowns is it not so and he said absolutely my dear joyfully and so she said then I'd ask a small favor from you in return would you not remove a layer of your own so you could be more pleasing to me so he agreed and he took off a few decorative things on his dragon body you know a couple of medals or whatever but to a surprise he didn't have to

noticed she had another wedding gown underneath the first one. And so she took off that one, and dragons are used to taking off their scales. Because, you know, reptiles shed now and then. So she took off a dress, and he'd take off some dragon scales. But as it kept going, because remember, she had ten, it started to get so that he was kind of, his dragon claws were digging deeper and deeper into his own flesh and skin. And he was taking off, eventually parts of himself were sick.

that were stuck. And his form began to change. And on the ninth, it changed more remarkably. And when she took off the tenth gown, by this time the dragon had pulled off enough of his dragonness that what was left, and this is what's often true in these stories, was a handsome prince.

Yes, thank you. And then she took the advice of the old woman from the marketplace and enjoyed an evening of marital. bliss. So here we are in this process that we're all in really of deepening our attention. And we're paying attention as we deepen to these different layers that we've gotten identified with. It's not that the skills are bad. They're just natural. It's just that we have the illusion that that's what we are. We begin to think, oh, I am this scared person or I am this deficient person or I am this lonely person. And we forget the light that's shining through. We get

identified with the scales. So a way of understanding our practices, we're just recognizing these scales or ways of conditioning. We're not trying to get rid of them. But if we can recognize and hold them with a quality of tenderness, we re-inhabit that vastness, that formless presence is what we are. We're in wise relationship and we're free. Not only are we free in some abstract way, but then love is free to flow through. Because as long as we're avoiding the vulnerability and keeping our scales, that very avoidance and contraction kind of clogs up the system. We can't just feel that free flow of loving. So the first part of our exploration is that it's not personal.

It's not personal that we grow scales and get identified with them. And yet it feels personal, right? And when we're in the midst of reactivity, it very much feels like it's my fear or my shame or my grief. And it takes being sometimes with each other and deepening our attention to realize it's just truly not personal. What I'd like to do this afternoon is just deepen our attention to one layer of scales that we get very identified with and that very, very directly blocks us

from opening to the tenderness and flow between us. And that's the scaling of averse of judgment. So we're going to just spend our time on averse of judgment. And I've never found for myself that when I deepen attention to that layer of scales it's done anything but free me. Because it's so pervasive. You know, in the Buddhist tradition, they describe the stages of insight.

The last layering to fall away is comparing mind. Better, worse, good, bad, right, wrong. It's part of our conditioning in a very deep way to create other and inflate ourselves or deflate ourselves. And often it comes out as a kind of mental aggression. that we call a verse of judgment. So, one of the first important understandings as we examine this, because I'll be inviting each of you to take a place where you feel like you've locked

and in some way with judging someone, making them other, where there might be some freedom from doing, forgiving, releasing. And one of the attitudes are ways that we can hold it that make it actually possible to heal, to forgive, is recognizing that it's not our fault that we're judging, not to blame ourselves for it. It's really deep in our evolutionary history to sense that something's wrong. It's part of our survival fear, and it's very much part of our reptilian and limbic brain. And I always find it interesting that for hundreds and of thousands of years, really up until 10,000 years ago, humans roamed around in these small bands

and there were hunter-gatherers and it was life or death to be able to recognize other of these bands as the other and defend against them if you didn't have that capacity to go other and even think bad other

then you wouldn't survive so it was just part at an evolutionary stage to be able to view there's an in-group, this band of hunter-gatherers, and then the out-group. And not only that, there were epitaphs that had names that said less than human to them. So that you weren't attacking or hurting another human. You were hurting something less than.

Averse of judgment served to control behavior within a group and ensure cohesion and survival. and this conditioning is continued. What went from adaptive conditioning at one stage of our evolution is now maladaptive conditioning. It's causing trouble. It's like, I think of it kind of like

a moth needs the cocoon for certain stages of its development, but then it has to break out of it to keep growing. And as long as our cocoon, we're still using the scaling of averse of judgment, we can't keep evolving. Does that resonate for you? So we start examining it.

I saw one cartoon of the dogs on a psychiatrist's couch and he's saying, you know, I bark at everything. You just can't go wrong that way. And we get in this habit of like, you know, it's like I've been violated or threatened. And it's like in some way we're shooting out our judgments at everything. So we can see on a societal level it's what keeps on mobilizing us

and remobilizing us for war. You have to create a... a bad other to motivate people to go to war. You have to have that energy there, that there's a terrorist out there. Not a human, a terrorist. Just the language is really something to look at. On one side of those that are fighting and armed, they're not terrorists, but the other side are terrorists.

So it's like that kind of thing. And it overrides our sense of hurting a fellow human being. And then you think of civil wars, Rwanda, or think of the civil war in this country. It's like, how do you get people that have lived together as neighbors and peaceful neighbors for generations to kill each other? Okay, you have to call on that old, old evolutionary conditioning to go bad other. And then we see in its most maladaptive form how this bad, That other perpetuates the power and the privilege of the dominant culture, making others,

whether it's race or lesser class, those wanting to immigrate appear in some way bad. They're getting in the way, they're causing harm. They're the problem. I mean, how else could one out of three African American males be part of the criminal justice and be put in jail if it weren't for the dominant culture holding averse of judgment? How else is it possible? Just not. So not only does it carry through on a societal level,

the individual ego, which emerged about 5,000 years ago, and I find this really interesting, it carried on the same conditioning of bad other, but it played it out more in a group of one-on-one. I'm the group of one, and others are potentially the bad other. And it leads us to this deep conditioning to mistrust. We project the shape.

shadow. I remember after retreat, a story of a woman who left retreat. This is after a retreat. We're usually in good shape after a retreat. There she goes to an airport and buys a cup of coffee and a small package of cookies and she's got all her baggage and this man goes to a small table that's got one other person sitting at it and she's eating her cookies. And this young man that's sitting at the table, she hears a rustling because she's reading her newspaper and he's taken one of her cookies and eating it. And so she doesn't want to make a scene, so she leans across and takes another cookie herself. And a minute or so pass and more rustling, he's helping himself to another cookie. So by the time they're down to the last cookie in the packet, she's really

angry. She can't believe the rudeness, the lack of consideration that he'd do that. She can't say anything. And then he breaks the last cookie in two gives her. Anyway, she goes, then the public address system goes off. She's about to present her cookie. She goes into her, present her ticket, she goes into her bag, and there's her package of cookies. She had been eating his. It's like, you know, sometimes it's not like, or what do we have in our minds is untrue,

but it's so amazing how we're imagining something that's wrong with another and how quickly it happens. And it particularly happens when others aren't agreeing with us. Have you noticed how uncomfortable it is when people don't agree? A little girl was talking to her teacher about whales and the teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human. And that's because the whales have very small throats. And the little girl stated that Jonah was swallowed by a whale and irritated the teacher reiterated that a whale couldn't swallow a human. It was physically

impossible. The little girl said, well, when I get to heaven, I'll ask Jonah. And the teacher asked, well, what if Jonah went to hell? And the little girl said, you ask them. So it's fun, but We get the notion that it's like on the individual ego level, there's a saying that the world is divided into those who think they're right. That's the whole saying. That we really, really, just like the unreal others, the small bands of hunter-gatherers and attack them, we really hold tightly to being right,

and we definitely put down others. but that's not where it ends. A verse of judgment also turns on ourselves. So we are fragmented and we put down parts of ourselves. And we all know how that goes. We know the enormous suffering of making part of our being a bad self. And that's the part that we're usually most identified with is the part that we've judged as bad self.

I remember the Washington Post a long time ago had a T-shirt award, and the title that won was, I have occasional delusions of adequacy, you know, and you can get it. So I think of averse of judgment when we're caught in it as a kind of developmental arrest, where, and it's happening individually, it's happening culturally,

that we can spend months, where we're driven by that trance of your wrong, my inner being is wrong, and live in a very suffering, kind of crunched, contorted identity. And the reason I think of it as a developmental arrest is because, again, if we look at evolution, while the judgment's coming from the reptilian and mammalian brain, the more primitive parts of our brain, we have this prefrontal cortex that has this neuronet that's really designed and it correlates to compassion and mindfulness. So we are engineered or designed to wake up beyond averse of judgment. We have that capacity to recognize it, not believe it, and

rest in something larger. And I think of meditation as evolution's tool, our strategy to help us manifest, it activate and manifest this potential. So we're going to look at how that can happen. And maybe just to start with a reflection, if you will, just to close your eyes for a moment, You just sense this unfolding evolution of being back in the few cell level to beings emerging that are naturally fight-flight-free, to fending, sensing a sense of separation, fending for themselves, to grouping into small groups and then fending against back.

other, to feeling a little more identify with a separate self and making others wrong or parts of ourself wrong, to having this potential emerge, to see all that and to sense an identity that's beyond any words, but rather a quality of presence and kindness and awakeness that's no longer trapped. So we can begin to see how that waking up plays out right in our lives. And you might bring to mind someone in your life who is a person you care about, a person that's a close person that you're not in major conflict with, but that you know judging goes on. So you know you get into little snags of averse of judgment, and it's part of part of what's going on.

And when you bring someone to mind where this is the case where it's just a normal mixed relationship, you judge, you don't judge, take a recent time or a situation where you were very much in the judging. Something got stirred up,

you got triggered, and in some way they became other that was wrong or bad or less than or causing trouble. And take some moment, moments to let that situation be right here so that you can feel it from the inside out. You might notice the kind of thoughts that are going through your mind, what you're believing

in those moments. And what is your body feeling like in those moments when you're in judgment? Get familiar. The more familiar you are, the less you get caught in it, the more aware you are. What's your body like when you're judging? That is your heart. feel? Can you feel your heart? And what's your self-sense like? Your sense of your own identity? Who are you when you're judging? Now, the same relationship. Shifting gears, take a nice full breath because you're going to shift states here, and bring to mind a moment when you're really appreciating, when you're appreciating this person. And you know what that means? You're thinking of that person's goodness, what you really like, what they mean to you. And in the same way,

just notice what's your body feel like when you're in a state of appreciation? What's your sense of who you are when you're appreciating another? And you might ask yourself, who would I be if I really dropped a verse of judgment? Just check that out for right now. Who would you be? Because that question, points to our evolutionary potential. Okay, so open your eyes. It's really dangerous to ask people to close their eyes during siesta time.

I can feel the energy in the room. Okay, I'm going to keep your eyes open for a while. Here's the encouraging news. The encouraging news is that, contrary to what scientists used to think, evolution can change in one generation. They used to think it was really, really slow. It's not so slow anymore.

And it can happen. Meditation actually changes the structure and function of our brain. So we actually evolve our brain. We actually change the traits of our personality, our being, our perceptions, our sense of identity by paying attention on purpose. So let's look at how that can happen now. The pathway, and this is very, very straightforward here, The pathway is there's scales of judging

the pathway is to bring our attention to what's underneath them the vulnerability and be willing to feel it, open to it, be with it. Okay, that's the pathway. And I read you a poem that I think I first heard through La this is African-American poet Valerie Burton. It's called Strong. If Strong means taking care of everyone else, to the detriment of yourself,

if strong means pretending everything is okay when clearly you're hurting, as strong means keeping it moving after you've suffered disappointment, then strong becomes weak. Strong is good. Resilience is better, but resilience can sometimes look messy.

It may look as if you're down for the count, but as long as you eventually get up, you're resilient. You have permission then to be human, to grieve, rest, cry, and feel what you feel. Feel what you feel. Learning to face your fears by being vulnerable is the first step. So we need to be motivated to do that because we spent a lifetime mastering ways not to go there. Again, that sage said, what are you unwilling to feel?

It's before we're even aware that we're doing it at all. We have ways to of leaving our body, using our minds to get us away from discomfort, using food, using our behaviors. So it takes some motivation to say, okay, I'm willing to feel my feelings. And the way that we get motivated is you would not be here listening or if you're not here right now listening to this audio from wherever you're not here. you live, you wouldn't be listening if there wasn't some wisdom place in you that already knew that in order to be whole and free, you need to feel and be with what's here. We know that.

We have that, that wisdom. So the beginning of doing that is one of the most powerful portals is when you have the arising of judgment. if every one of us took the arising of judgment as okay this is what I'm going to practice with every time a verse of judgment comes up I'm going to instead of believing the judgment where it's aimed out there I'm going to go under the scale right here we would be part of the healing of this world it would be the most radical and direct way we could support the evolving of consciousness. About a decade ago, I began this practice of basically saying,

whenever blame comes up, my mantra, and please don't believe your thoughts. Don't believe them. Don't believe the content of them. Now, by the way, there's a difference between averse of blame and wise discrimination. Wise discrimination looks and sees, oh, this causes harm. This serves freedom. When you behave like this, it causes harm. That's wise discrimination. We need that. When I behave like this, it causes harm. That we need.

To add the layer of I'm bad or you're bad, that's a verse of judgment. And that locks us into separation. It locks us into a consciousness of self and other. So about a decade ago, I was watching, I mean, I think the more we wake up, the more we become aware of the pervasiveness

of judging. And it's just part of waking up. It's so deep in our psyche. I was aware of it and I was aware on more and more subtle levels of how it made me feel separate. And so I became really motivated not to believe my judgments. And so I started doing what I'm saying to you. That became my practice. Every time I noticed it that I could and that I had time that I was on the ball, I would say, pause and let's check it out. So I'll tell you one of those times. And we had And we've had many rounds of board members for IMCW, our meditation community over the last 20 years. We're having our 20th year anniversary next year.

And one of the early boards, there's a person that was on it with very different views and style and approach to me and we kept colliding and disagreeing and I locked into averse of judgment. And it wasn't just like, oh, okay, here's a different perspective to learn from. he was wrong and I could see his ego need to have his way and my ego really didn't want him to anyway so I had enough awareness to be appalled at my

how trapped I was in mentally putting them down how intolerant I was being and that of course I added to it with that because I started judging myself but anyway I had begun this sodna sodna as a spiritual practice of okay if I'm blaming and judging check it out

So, I remember one night I gave a talk on self-compassion. I mean, one of the things of my job, my line of business, is that I keep talking about things that forced me to have to double take on myself every day. So, anyway, I came home and I read an email from him. It tripped off my reactivity, and then I got down on myself, and then I remembered something I had just said earlier, which is that the heart of Buddhism is compassion. And the heart of compassion is compassion for the life right here. And it doesn't work

to bypass or skip over the life that's here thinking we should be compassionate to somebody else first. So there I was, and I was judging both of us, and this stopped me in my tracks, because I was making my scaliness wrong. I was being a bad person for making him a bad person. Okay, it's the second arrow. So I decided to pause and be with it and began kind of what we describe as the rain process of just recognizing, okay, judging going on and letting it be there, and then, okay, what is it really like?

And I could feel the squeeze, and just as I invited you just now, what's it like when you're judging? Very small-minded. I felt just very kind of small and shallow and squeezed and not so dimensional, just tight and sour. And I just kept naming it, but I named it gently. You know, okay, squeeze, small, clenched.

And the more I named it, the more space there was, and I could start sensing what it was covering over because I usually ask, you know, what's really here? What's underneath this judging? And it was fear. And the fear was that I'd be powerless to help grow, our community in a good way as long as this obstacle was there. It was just a fear belief, you know, obstacle to growth and to what I want and so on. And also some anger and hurt that

he wasn't respecting me in my opinions. Okay. So, you know, I went under that and I could feel again that kind of insecurity of it's not going to go well. And as I saw that, I do what I often do. I put my hand on my heart. And it's a helpful gesture because when we're at war with ourselves, we are the opposite of a hand on our heart. We're either, you know, directly in violent relationship or we're really neglecting. So this in a very physicalized way reconnects us, brings us back into relationship. So I had my hand in my heart, as I often do. And I often will ask the question, so what is this vulnerable place, this fear, place, this insecurity,

most want or need. And I invite you to use that inquiry because just by asking that, we're again deepening that kind presence and we'll find out that there's some version of love, some version of acceptance or forgiveness or love that the vulnerability needs. And when we listen to that, it's our natural inclination to respond. with care. As soon as we are listening enough to sense the need within us, this is the alchemy of compassion. When we can feel the suffering and the need, a tenderness arises to meet it. And so then it's really just to offer what's needed within. And for me, it's often simple words like, I'm here with you. I care about this. It's okay. It's okay, sweetheart. Whatever the

languages. This is self-compassion. And so there started to be a softening and an opening, and it was from that place of more soft and open that I was able to look at him and regard him with more space and see past his dragon scales to the light that was there. And it allowed me more flexibility in my behavior. Whereas in the past, when I would say something appreciative of a report he gave. The tone behind it conveyed that, you know, I was being perfunctory, I was doing the right thing. But having viscerally opened, I started being able to appreciate him in a way that he could receive. And his scale started softening. And we never got a long will in our roles, but the human connection grew. And that was enough. I know for myself that the

sooner I remember self-kindness, even the intention toward love, the sooner that even comes to mind, the more quickly I'm resting again in more of the truth of who I am. This is Rilke, one that I suspect everyone has heard. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage. perhaps everything that frightens us is in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. So this is the process of coming into relationship with our vulnerability, with the soft spot. Under the scales of judgment, there's vulnerability.

And the only way to not be identified with our scaly, judgey self is to keep on, instead of believing the trajectory of the thought, it's a problem out there, to turn it around and come inside to feel the vulnerability. Another woman in our community described, she had come to many of our retreats and described doing this. She had many decades of feeling very angry at her husband, and the narrative was that he just wasn't being who she wanted him to be, so she felt a lot of disappointment and a lot of loneliness and a lot of pain. And so she'd feel her pain and that would cause the judgment and she kept aiming at him. And at retreat she started doing this. She started coming back in and just saying, this is loneliness. This is disappointment.

This is just feeling longing and being with that with a tremendous kind of compassion, a tremendous kind of tenderness, until she had a kind of confidence. Until she had a kind of of shock in her realization that she wanted him to be her fantasy of a husband. I mean, she had always been trying to turn him into this fantasy husband. And she'd press him and he'd try, he'd try, but then he'd always revert to being himself again. Surprising thing. So after being with herself that fully, that vulnerability and having that space, she found she had the space to let him be who he was.

And not only that, she actually asked his forgiveness for having spent decades asking him to be somebody different. And the power of her yearning to be true to that, to let him be and to be with what was there inside her, so sincere and so visceral that she described an actual softening and transformation in him where he actually part of him that hadn't been there that started expressing things came out

it was kind of amazing and it doesn't always happen like that you can wake up out of averse of judgment and deeply forgive and feel healing around another person and have them stay pretty stuck and not change into the person you wish they were so it's not like it always works that way But when you start melting, one friend described in an ice cube melting in the ocean, when you start melting, that meltedness is an invitation that does affect the life around us. Does that make sense when you're with other melting beings?

Which is why these retreats, I feel like, are just on an energetic level, just a bunch of melting ice cubes. So we're talking really about forgiveness. to me, the real meaning of forgiveness is the letting go of the aversive judgment, letting go of the scales that have been armoring us. And it's a very brave process because you can do premature forgiveness where you say, oh yeah, I've forgiven that person, or I'm not judging that person, but it's not real and authentic because you haven't really gone into where the herd is

and been with where the experience is that needs attention. So one of the challenges with forgiveness or letting go is that there's this worry that, well, if I stop judging them, they'll go on hurting me. And again, letting go of a verse of judgment doesn't mean you let go of wise discrimination, which might lead to creating whatever boundary you need to create, saying what you need to say, making the request you need to make. But it means letting go of the ice-cubness that prevents us from loving fully. Another challenge is that, and this is I found a lot, when there's a

real stuck-in pattern of aversive judgment towards one person, is I'll go through a very deep process of feeling the vulnerability and bringing self-compassion and opening my heart and seeing them for who they are. And then two days later, I'm back, you know, and I'm looking at that person, I'm saying, I just, I'm tired of this. That person's just, you know, and I put them down again. I'm back in that trance. So it's not like, one deep round of opening to vulnerability dismantles the scales forever. In fact, it's really an ongoing life process. But if that sounds discouraging, it's really not because what happens is that every round makes a difference. One of the metaphors I love the most is that the way

you turn a cloth, you take a white cloth and have it become an indigo-colored cloth. There's a vat of indigo dye. You take the white cloth and you dip it in and you pull it out and the white turns into indigo but then it fades back to just a tiny bit of off-white. So you rinse it and then you dip it in again and you pull it out and it again it's that brilliant indigo and then it fades and it's a little more blue but still faded.

And each time you repeatedly dip it in, a little bit more of the dye actually is held until over time the cloth is that brilliant royal indigo color. And so it is with us that each time we dip into presence and vulnerability and reawaken to that space beyond that old judging identity, each time we do it, we become more familiar that this is more the truth of who we are, this tender, open, undefended presence than any narrative or story of being right and pushing another away. And that's the blessing. That each time we're letting go a little bit of the scales and remembering who we are. There are many rounds that when we're letting go of a verse of judgment, we're

the wounds we have to contact are incredibly raw and incredibly difficult. And so often we need support. We need help. We need somebody else to uphold the space so we can touch into that. Or sometimes we can, through our meditation, call on some greater sense of love and belonging. Like one man who went to the Dalai Lama and said, you know, what's a meditation to be with this fear?

And the Dalai Lama said, just imagine you're being held in the heart of the Buddha. There are times that we have to actually imagine a love that's holding us. Just like a young child when they're very upset, when they're caught and off and really in some way distressed, it's really the hug that actually sends messages into the body mind and nervous system that brings back to self-regulation. We need energetically, our feelings,

physically that hug. So part of forgiving, again, others, is to first bring self-compassion or imagine and feel ourselves being held. I've been talking on this on an individual level, but I just want to bring it to a larger level, which is this evolution of our consciousness is something that's evolving on the planet and it's the hope for healing and peace in the world. And we can see it beginning to happen in peace and reconciliation hearings, restorative justice, rather than punishing. It's a process of opening to vulnerability,

speaking deep truth, letting go of armor, asking, offering forgiveness, making amends. It's the way humans wake up the parts of their being that are inherently compassionate and wise instead of continuing in those cycles of acting and reacting. So I want to close my reflections with a sharing of something I read in the New York Times

last week. And then we're going to do a practice around a verse of judgment. And so the New York Times magazine had portraits of reconciliation for Mawanda It's a 20-year-after kind of thing, and a photographer took pictures, and I've left some of the pictures on the piano. I'd like to invite you to look at them whenever you are in the mood. But what basically went on was for a number of years, the hoodoos and the Tutsis have been counsel.

A bunch of months in a row for each kind of small group, and it would culminate in perpetrators asking for forgiveness. from those that they had caused injury to. So if it was granted, then the perpetrator and the family and friends would bring baskets of offerings of food and banana beer, and the accord would be sealed with song and dance. And so I'd like to read to you some of the, a few of the reports from the pairs, okay, of the perpetrator and the victim.

And I'm reading it to you because it gives you a sense of the possibility where our evolution can go. Perpetrator, Karenzi, says, My conscience was not quiet, and when I could see her, I was very ashamed. After being trained about unity and reconciliation, I went to her house and asked forgiveness, and I shook her hand. So far, we're on good terms. Yermana, he killed my father and three brothers. He did these killings with other people,

but he came alone to me and asked for pardon. He and a group of other offenders who have been in prison helped me build a house with a covered roof. I was afraid of him. Now I have granted him pardon. Things have become normal, and in my mind, I feel clear. Perpetrator, Muturana. I burned her house, I attacked her in order to kill her and her children.

But God protected them, and they escaped. When I was released from jail, if I saw her, I would run and hide. Then AMI started to provide us with trainings. I decide to ask her for forgiveness, to have good relationships with the person to whom you did evil deeds. We thank God. Mukayanui. I used to hate him.

When he came to my house and knelt down before me and asked for forgiveness, I was moved by his sincerity. Now, if I cry for help, he comes to rescue me. When I face any issue, I call him. Nizamwita, this is a perpetrator. I damaged and looted her property I spent nine and a half years in jail. I've been educated to know good

from evil before being released. And when I came home, I thought it would be good to approach the person to whom I did evil deeds and asked for forgiveness. I told her that I'd stand by her with all the means at my disposal. My own father was involved in killing her children. When I learned that my parent had behaved wickedly for that I profoundly begged her pardon too.

Kampudnu. My husband was hiding and men hunted him down and killed him on a Tuesday. The following Tuesday, they came back and killed my two sons. I was hoping that my daughters would be saved, but they took them to my husband's village and killed them. I knelt down and prayed for them along with my younger brother. The reason I granted pardon is because I realized that I would never get back the beloved ones I had lost. I could not live a lonely life. I wondered if I was ill, who was going to be.

stay by my bedside, and if I was in trouble and cried for help, who is going to rescue me? I preferred to grant pardon. And one more. The day I thought of asking pardon, I felt unburdened and relieved. I had lost my humanity because of the crime I committed, but now I'm like any human being. And Ugan Yitka, this is the victim. After I was chased from my village, and Dominic and others looted it, I became homeless and insane. Later, when he asked my pardon, I said, I have nothing to feed my children. Are you going to help raise my children? Are you going to build a house for them? The next week, Dominic came with some survivors and former prisoners who perpetrated genocide. There were more than 50 of them. They

built my family a house. Ever since then, I have started to feel better. I was like a dry stick. Now I feel peaceful in my heart, and I share this peace with my neighbors. It is truly a mystery and astonishing what the human heart is capable of. It's amazing that we can get cut off and forget our belonging and act with violence. And it's amazing that we can wake up when we've been in that small and cut off a place and rediscover our hearts and our humanity. So I'd like to invite you just for a few minutes to just stand and stretch and move around, but please stay with your body, stay with your hearts.

Just take some moments because you've been sitting for a while, and then we're going to meditate together. We hope you've enjoyed these teachings. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule and special online offerings, please join my email list by visiting tarabrock.com.