Tara Brach - Love is Always Here

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

One expression of suffering is forgetting that we are intrinsically lovable and worthy. This talk looks at the pathway to trusting our belonging, and focuses on the healing that comes from letting in love and mirroring others goodness. Talk includes quotes from Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. There's a cartoon I like where you have a patient on the couch and the dog is, of course, a psychologist. And the dog saying, my therapy is quite simple. I wag my tail and look your face until you feel good about yourself again. And I share it, many of you know I have a new puppy, and I'm amazed at how much the affection from this furry little creature can lift my spirits. She really likes me. So the cartoon also shines a light, really, that all of us, we have a lifelong need

to feel loved to have the world mirror back to us that we're valuable, that we're lovable. and we also have a deep conditioning, and this is what's important not to let in love. And perhaps you've noticed that, that you might not always feel, you might sense, well, they're acting this way, but they don't really mean it. Something in our bodies kind of defends against receiving love. and, you know, for me, it's much easier with my puppy than with humans. So I'm imagining others feel the same. Letting in love's not so easy.

I think it's interesting and really important to examine how often we're living in a sense of self that doesn't feel worthy, valued, or lovable. If we don't examine it, we can't wake up from that trance. I started investigating and teaching and writing about this 50 years ago. And still, in mentoring, supporting people, it's the root suffering, not feeling lovable, feeling separate. And my sense is that as our world spirals more into the shadows, much of suffering is in humans not feeling valued, not feeling belonging, and then in reaction, dehumanizing others. So, both personally and collectively, we need a pathway that leads to loving and feeling loved.

And with that in my mind, I chose a talk from the archives. It's one of my all-time favorite themes. And it's based on the story of the prodigal son. It examines the pathway that we're talking about of letting in love, trusting the loving, that really is in this world and that loving is intrinsic to what we are. So, my friends,

my prayers are that this will serve your heart and spirit and ripple out to touch many others. So I'd like to begin this talk with one of my favorite personals that I've run across over the last decade. SBF, single black

female seeks male companionship. I love long walks in the woods, riding in your pickup truck, hunting, camping and fishing trips. Cozy winter nights spent lying by the fire. Candlelight dinners will have me eating out of your hand. Rub me the right way and I'll respond with tender caresses. I'll be at the front door when you get home from work. Kiss me and I'm yours.

I'm a swell, good-looking girl who loves to play. Call 712-5-5-1-2 and ask for Daisy. Turns out that 15,000 calls for men all over the country came to the Atlanta Humane Society. This is an adoption offer for a black lab retriever, eight weeks old. Now the reason I like it so much is we live in such projections about not, I mean, you can see it totally with the personals, like who we imagine somebody is going to be, but we do it through our lives, what's going on with another person and how they're relating to us and if we feel that we're being accepted in love, we go up and if we feel we're

being pushed away, criticized, we go down. I was teaching a weekend or so ago at Omega and had a chance to connect with different people and the most intense emotions always circle around the level of connectedness and relationship and when there's strong bonding or connection there's a sense of the sense of the level of connectedness and relationship. there's a sense of this open-heartedness, whether it's with a romantic partner or with a friend or with the group that gathered, which was very beautiful. And when there's a divorce, when there's a real distancing from a child or from a parent, just the grip of the pain, we go up and down and it's so biochemical.

Our DNA wants to belong. We are deeply, deeply oriented around feeling connectedness, feeling lovable and feeling worthy. It really matters. And we can see it with the circuitry of the brain how when we have a sense of that, you know, all the reward circuitry lights up. You know, dopamine and other chemicals, you know, surge through our system. And when there's a breakup or something that disconnect. next, we plummet, the word heartbreak.

You know, we, it's like been likened to what's exactly happening in the brain when a drug addict is going through withdrawal. So you can sense our evolutionary setup which is to really do whatever we can, to find belonging or to protect ourselves from being pushed away. And here we are, as we know, living in a world. where there's pervasive suffering around feeling separate and unlovable and unworthy. So the classic motif of healing, and this is really the hero's journey and you can look at it in an existential way, is that we incarnate and on some level there's some separation.

We are leaving the garden. A kind of ego develops in the whole world of grasping and wanting and agenda. and feeling that we're in some way needing to be a certain kind of person emerges. So this is for all of us. This is kind of the existential grounds that we all go through. That with the development of a sense of an ego or separate self, there are fears around and insecurities around our value, around how lovable we are.

And then as the hero's journey continues, we become aware of the pain of separation, we become aware of the pain of feeling unworthy. We become aware of our fears and our insecurities. And as that awareness becomes more awake and more sensitive and more tender, we begin to touch into the loving that helps us to return to the garden with an awake awareness. Now, truth is, we've never left the garden. And it's just a metaphor. And think of it, like a wave, like we emerge, we incarnate, it's like a wave in the ocean.

The wave isn't leaving the ocean, but it thinks it's separate. And what we're doing is we're the wave waking up to our ocean-ness. We're realizing we never left but when we return to the garden it's with another level of awareness. Now the hero's journey that we're all on, we're all on this journey of waking, up and discovering really our belonging is entirely shaped by our conditioning of our culture and our families, our caregivers. And so what I'd like to do in this class is reflect some on this journey, you know, look at it both in terms of individually in a little bit, you know, in terms of our culture.

And the essential piece I want to look at is how our loving with others our capacity to let in love and to offer is an intrinsic part of returning more awake to the garden. I want to look at that with you. And it's not always focused on, especially if you're familiar with some of the classic Buddhist teachings, you sometimes hear the message of don't look for other people's love. Everything's right in here, right? It makes me often think of this cartoon I once saw of two women are having coffee and one

of them has a son and he's up on a ladder and he's wearing goggles and he has a blow torch and he's burning into the wall the words, I need attention. No, no, wait a minute, wait a minute, I got it wrong. I need love and his mother's saying, oh, he's just doing that to get attention. We need love. In fact, one of the basic refuges for coming home to who we are is in the relational web in feeling that connectedness with each other. Now of course we can get addicted and codependent and have all sorts of shadow stuff happen

around that. But our basic capacity to let in the loving and to offer it out is a precious part of the flow that really wakes us up to our non-separation, to the truth of our belonging. So another personals that just comes to mind is in a Buddhist rag and it says, tall, dark, handsome Buddhist looking for himself. Okay. So as we explore this refuge of letting in love and offering it out, it's another way of saying really letting in blessings and offering blessings, that we can be that and offer that with

each other. I'd like to draw on one of my favorite parables and I've done this in a few talks, this same parable because I love it so much, which is the prodigal son, very well known probably to most of you and I'll be in particular, Henri Neuwen, who's a Christian mystic and author wrote a book called The Return of the Prodical Son, which I have here, and as you can tell, I've marked pretty much every page. But I'd like to explore it as he, kind of with the lens that he offers, because I found it so valuable. Now, just to remind you in all of us, the basic outline of this parable, is that a father has two sons and he's divided their inheritance, has

between them. But the younger son decides he doesn't want to wait till his father dies. He wants his portion now. And not only that, he takes his portion and he leaves home. He's just got things to do, places to go, things he wants to experience and he squanders it. And he ends up almost starving and finally realizes the error of his ways, you know, that he just had been off in some crazed trance in some way. And he decides to return and put himself really at his father's mercy. And so I'm going to read you just the last part of the parable directly. While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with pity.

He ran to the boy, clasped in his arms and kissed him. And his son said, Father, I've sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son. But the father said to his servants, quick, bring out the best robe and put it on him, put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet, bring the calf we have been fattening and kill it, we will celebrate by having a feast

because this son of mine was dead and has come back to life. He was lost and is found. And they began to celebrate. Now the older son was out in the fields and on his way back as he drew near the house he could hear the music and dancing. Calling one of the servants, he asked what it was all about. And the servant told him, Your brother has come and your father has killed the calf we've been fattening

because he has got him back safe and sound. He was angry then and refused to go in and his father came out and began to urge him to come in, but he retorted to his father. All these years, I have slave for you and never once disobeyed any orders of yours. yet you never offered me so much as a kid for me to celebrate with my friends. But for this son of yours, when he comes back after swallowing up your property, he and his loose women, you kill the calf we've been fattening. The father said, my son, you are with me always and all I have is yours.

But it's only right we should celebrate and rejoice. Because your brother here was dead and has come to life. He was lost and has found. So that's the parable. Now, in 1983, Henri Neuyn encountered Rembrandt's very famous rendering of this. And he was struck in that picture by the positioning of the figures and the expression of compassion. The father's offering his loving blessing to his son.

And it was actually considered as one of Rembrandt's greatest works, a real spiritual kind of transmission in it. And so, Henri Nuen describes his own longing to be received in just that way, to have some loving presence receive him and offer blessings. And when I look at the image on the book and I'll leave it out for those of you that want to look at it, it's incredibly moving. It touches something, some, again, it's kind of arctypal place, I think, in all of us that just yearns to be received by some larger all-loving presence, just to really feel that loving us, to let in that love. So as the story goes in this book, in The Return of Prodigal Son, the way No one describes his own journey, over ten years

he kept going back and looking at the picture over and over and finding more and more meaning in it and it really revealed for him a lot about his own life. And he found himself in the younger son. He could see how he had left home, how his grasping after approval, after getting other people to in some way give him their thumbs up, his grasping after success after being somebody. You know, had actually, he left who he was. And he could also over time see he was also the older brother, the one who separated himself by holding judgment on other people, who had a kind of aversion and a sense of how others were falling short

and also judged himself. He was the older brother in the way he felt like a victim so often. So he saw himself in both brothers. and as we listen and reflect, the two brothers are the two basic ways we leave the garden that we leave home. You know, we leave the present moment by sensing something's missing, I need something more, so we're leaning forward, we're on our way to the next thing. We're wanting for the next moment to contain what this moment does not.

We're wanting more something. in our life. It's kind of if only mind. If only I had that partner or that job or wait 10 pounds less or had more money or whatever, then I'd be okay. So that's the younger brother and we have in us the older brother that then judges that. I'm a bad person for being that way and judges others and locks into a sense of separation. So the healing journey that's described in the book is one of recognizing the suffering of leaving home. So we pause and say, well, what's between me and happiness right now?

And we start sensing how we've congealed into this separate egoic self that is dissatisfied and wants more or is blaming or is reality. reactive in some way. We recognize that suffering and then as the book goes on to describe, we open to it, we be with it, we actually let ourselves feel it rather than continuing to run away. And then we open to love. We actually let that suffering place be touched by love. We let it in. We let in forgiveness or acceptance or whatever flavor of love, compassion. So the core message in the parable and in most spiritual traditions is that the love that heals is already here.

It's already here. The father celebrates the return of his son. He's pre-forgiven. Love is already here. And you can see it in the picture when you look close. One of the things I found most interesting is that in the picture you'll see the left hand, has his hands on his son's shoulders. And the left hand, it's a masculine hand. You can see by the fingers, it's affirming and it's blessing and it's like saying, I see you. So it's an

affirmation. And the right hand is very feminine and it's very caressing and comforting. It's just pure loving. So you can see love is already here and in the way the father's blessing his younger son and in his words to the elder son. His words so simple, you are always with me, you are with me always. All that I have is yours. So again, we never leave the garden and the love is here but we have to wake up through that sense of separateness to rediscover that the awareness and love is here. There's an Indian teacher, his name is Punji no longer alive. And the way he put it has always touched me. He says, love is always loving you. Love is always loving you. That the more we wake up, the more we sense

that as the case. It's like the ocean is always loving the waves that are part of it. So even when we're deluded, even when we're completely in a sense of isolatedness, the ocean's still loving us and the more that we begin to let in love, the more our sense of identity shifts and we become that ocean that's loving the waves. And so it is in this parable that the, as Henri Nguyen describes it, the more he opened to the younger son and the older son with presence and with letting in love, letting in forgiveness, the more he became the father. father, he realized that he was that loving presence that was holding the different elements

in his own being. Does that resonate for you that shift, that journey? Let me then focus on this. How come the emphasis on letting in love? Most of the time we don't talk about it so much. Most of the time we talk about offering our love to others, to ourselves, we don't talk about letting in. And yet when I explore with people places of suffering, we start getting to that recognition of how difficult it is. You know, about 10 years ago, Harville Hendrix, who many of you know of as one of the most well-known couples therapists in the world, and his wife also well-known couples therapist, Helen Hunt, you know, they write books together on self-help and they train couples and so on.

Their own relationship was crumbling about 10 years ago. And as it turned out, Harville realized he couldn't really trust or believe that Helen loved him. So the very core of the trouble was that he really didn't trust he was loved or lovable. So let me ask you to reflect for a moment for yourself so we're going to start to ground this in your experience. So please bring to mind someone that you know, at least your mind knows, really cares about you, holds you with love. Someone that loves you.

And it's fine if the person's not alive, because we can feel love regardless. We can feel it if a person's not in the same room and if they're not any longer in their bodies. Someone that you know loves you. A sense if you can really let that loving in, if there's a felt sense in your body, in your heart, and embodied knowing of that loving. And if you can let it in, just notice what it's like and train to that sense of letting in love.

Let it fill you, just be that loving. And if it's difficult, just to be honest with yourself, okay, that's difficult and sense, so what is it that makes it so hard? Bring your attention to it. What makes it hard to let it in? What do you notice? It's fine if you'd like to keep your eyes closed or if you'd like to open your eyes. What I've noticed in my own life and working with others is we accept the love we think

we deserve. In other words, to open to love, we first have to confront the places in us that feel unworthy or ashamed. And we're armored because we don't trust that we're really lovable. So we feel like if we open, what we're going to really be exposing is an unlovable self and we're going to have to re-experience that again. So we armor, we're protecting ourselves against the bad news in a way. We armor with a physical tightness, some of you might have noticed with letting in, there's

just a block or sometimes it's a numbness. or sometimes it's just all we can do is stay mental because we're not at home in our bodies, it just does not feel safe enough. We don't trust we're lovable, we accept the love we think we deserve. So a key dimension in homecoming and coming back to the garden for each of us really is to begin to recognize the protective layering and pause and be with that and sense, you know, what does that place need and bring our attention there. But I want to pause here and say, if you found you couldn't let in love, it's not like

you're being resistant or stubborn. It's like it's not your fault. It's really a product of our conditioning. If we come from a, if we're brought up from caregivers that were completely unattuned or let's say even abusive, we're going to be armored. because there's going to be a deep message in our nervous system saying good stuff is not coming my way or something's really wrong with me and I don't deserve good stuff and we're going to be protecting ourselves. If we're brought up in a culture that sends us the message that

something's wrong with us, we're going to be armored. We're not going to have that porousness and receptivity when love does show up. Love can be always loving us but if our caregiving and our culture are sending other types of messages, we're going to have a block that needs attention. Does that make sense? Okay. So we're going to look at two questions now for the second half of this exploration. And one is, you know, when we've left home and we all leave home some due to our different levels of conditioning, what helps us discover that love is always loving us?

what helps us to become more porous. And then the second question is how do we help each other? Because again, we're not waking up alone. We're waking up together. Somebody's on their way somewhere. The younger son. Okay. All right, so the pathway to discovering love is always loving us.

We often talk in the Buddhist tradition of the two-wing of awareness that first see what's happening and the second is soften and open our hearts to it. So we're talking about really seeing what's happening and how to soften our hearts in a way that really allows us to relax back. And I'd like to share with you an example of how that happens. A note that one person wrote to me from the Omega Workshop and she described how some months back she landed in a place of really deep darkness, a really kind of a struggle she couldn't see her way out of and it was pretty much tormenting her. And she was listening to podcasts daily, you know, these mindfulness podcasts and, you know,

trying to practice but she felt really, really stuck. But then she described one particular time where she started sobbing in one afternoon, she just didn't know how she was She could go on suffering much longer, but instead of trying to stop the suffering, something in her just said, be with it. So she said, I stayed with it and after a while I realized that I was afraid that underneath the fear was the belief that I was unlovable. Ah, my biggest story. So I asked that part of myself, the part that felt unlovable, what do you need?

And I put my hand on my heart and breathed in, may I just be. feel safe and I breathed out, may I feel loved? And as I did this I remembered the people who were with me in the darkness. You, a few friends encouraging me, my daughter kept me company, I could envision and feel you all surrounding me. And then I widen the circle to include a few more trusted people and then a few more until the circle widened all the way out to my spiritual teachers including the Dalai Lama and Tignat Han, Rumi and the Buddha, all encircling me, holding me. And then something truly magical happened. I realized that I had been with me in this darkness doing things all along to care for myself, going for

walks, listening to the podcast, reaching out for help. And that's when I connected with the loving presence inside me that's always been loving me. That's when I connected with the loving presence inside me that's always been loving me. At that moment the light came I felt immediate relief and I noticed that the words to my breathing had spontaneously shifted to, you are safe, you are loved. This is the first time I've taken the exquisite risk of facing one of my demons head on and offering a tea and I can feel a definite shift, some space, a refuge. So just a couple of comments because there's a few pieces to this that are really the practice that we're exploring together. And the first piece is we start recognizing the suffering of leaving

the garden, the suffering of feeling separate, of turning on ourselves, of turning on other people, of resentment, of jealousy, whatever it is. And instead of trying to get rid of it, Instead of moving away or numbing or whatever habits we have and we all have ways of getting away, we just, some part of us takes the exquisite risk to stay. Again I want to credit Mark Nepo, thank you Mark for that beautiful phrase, the exquisite risk because it's life changing. We stay and then we stay and touch what's there and begin to in some way, make a gesture of kindness and it's okay if it's mechanical. It's okay if we, you know,

sense the part in us that needs love and we say, may you feel love, may you feel love, may I feel safe. It doesn't matter what we do. Just the gesture deep down, the intention is coming from the part of us that's always loving us, even if in our small-mindedness it feels mechanical. And as you noticed, this person's included others in our heart and mind, to sense that it's not a separate self trying to re-enter the garden. We belong to this web, so we bring to mind others, we sense them holding us, that we sense them with us. And then it's in that in large sense of belonging that we begin to say, oh, the love has always been here, I just wasn't seeing it. So it's like remembering

others bridges us back to a vast love that's within us and all beings that's always here. But we need that bridge. A couple of things I've found that I want to add to this, that sometimes we bring to mind other people where we still don't feel really held by them. It's still that armoring. It helps to be intentional about letting love in. and by that I mean, pray for it, pray to feel loved. Sometimes what I'll do, and I've done this when I felt really, really stuck, really caught,

is just simply feel that longing and just say, please love me. You can try that, you can close your eyes and mentally whisper, please love me. And there's something in that universal call that softens our heart. hearts. And when we have tears, when we really have a longing to feel love, the tears will really melt the armor. Just to know about that, to kind of be tracking for that, hey, this matters to me, I want to feel loved. Until then nourish that longing. It's not a grasping, it's a longing and your body will know the difference. Because people often ask me, well, isn't the longing for love and other attachment, it can be if it fixates on a certain person in a certain way.

But if you trace it back, the longing is a yearning to belong and it's very tender and very open-handed and very porous. And when you get in touch with that longing, it actually makes it possible to receive. Rumi writes, I've been knocking on a door, it opens. I've been knocking from the inside. Okay? So we're longing and where's the longing come from? It comes from a universal and timeless love

that's always and already here. It was just forgotten. So love is always loving us. I want to just mention again that it's very, it's very in the culture to say, well, we shouldn't be, looking outside ourselves and examine for yourself in a real honest way whether it's a grasping outside yourself or whether it's that yearning. The other thing to say about that is that

all of us forget our worth, forget that we're lovable and need reminding. And it's a beautiful thing we do for each other to mirror back the gold. It's a beautiful thing. I mean, would you say to a child, like in that cartoon who's saying, you know, I need love, they shouldn't reach out outside themselves? Would you say to an adult who as a child never got love or affirmation, you shouldn't reach outside yourself? Or to someone who's regularly told by the wider culture that they're inferior, you shouldn't reach outside yourself? We humans belong to each other and we need to mirror each other. It's a beautiful part of our practice which leads to question number two, how do we provide

that bridge for each other? How do we become the one who can offer blessings when another person's forgotten? Because that's what a blessing is. A blessing is in some way a reminder that helps a person come home to their true nature to their awake heart, to their awake mind. How do we help others relax their armor? There's a story I heard, it came from Spain, a young man, Paco and his father had a major altercation and Paco ran away and his father was searching for months to no avail.

He was really desperate to reunite with his son. So he decided his strategy was put an ad in a local newspaper and he put this ad. saying, Paco, meet me in the town square by the fountain at noon on Tuesday. So he went to the town square at noon on Tuesday and there were 800 young men named Paco waiting for their fathers and for the forgiveness they never thought was possible. We all want to feel forgiven, seen, accepted, and loved. So how do we begin to offer that? And I'm going to speak first, I'm going to speak mostly individually how we can

and it will end with a practice and how we can offer our blessings to others but I want to first speak on the societal level because so much of the suffering of severed belonging happens there and

here's the example I'm using there's much evidence that we perform according to what's expected of us So, if others see the goal and they see our potential, it draws it out. If others assume that we're not going to perform well and that we have no potential to go to college or succeed or be creative, then that keeps us very narrow. And so, an example of this that's familiar and widely known that if African American students

in elementary school have an African American teacher, better test scores and more favorable teacher perceptions, right? But a really powerful study came out this last March from Johns Hopkins that looked at the long-run impact of teachers and students being matched. Findings, low-income black students who have at least one black teacher in elementary school are significantly more likely to graduate high school and consider attending college. one black teacher reduced the black students' probability dropping out of school by 29 percent and for very low-income black boys, the results are a reduction of the chance of dropping

out by 39 percent having one black teacher in elementary school. Just one teacher, 39 percent. for some reason, that very much upsets me. And I'm going to say why. I mean, it's very common sense that if you have a role model, if you have someone that gets you and pays attention and believes in you, it's going to draw out the goodness. We get that. But then we look at what's actually happened in this country

with Brown v. the Board of Education, 1954. It looked like this incredible boon to racial justice, right? Integration of schools. Well, what happened actually was African-American kids were integrated into white schools, and within 10 years, half of all African-American teachers lost their jobs. Why? Because those who are hiring, the dominant culture, believe that white teachers were superior to black teachers,

and white parents wanted white teachers to be teaching their kids. Thousands of black educators' jobs are terminated. And then here we have it. It just takes one teacher. Imagine you have one or two or three. So we need positive mirroring. And if this is interesting to you, by the way, I learned from, I got this from Malcolm Gladwell's podcast on Revisionist History,

this particular episode. And if you want to learn more about it, I thought it was really powerful. I bring this in because we're talking about coming home to the garden and the power of our relationships with each other and we're also in a relationship with the structures and institutions of our culture and it's as much a part of our path to try to create a compassionate society as it is to wake up the compassion in our own hearts. So how do we do it in our own hearts?

How do we deepen our attention so that we're with someone and there's a place in us that's scanning and saying, what do you need? How are you feeling vulnerable? How can I respond in a way that reminds you that you belong? What would it be like if we scanned and did that? Rachel Remen says, one moment of unconditional love may call into question a life time of feeling unworthy and invalidated. One teacher, one moment. There's a power we have in really showing up for each other to remind each other. This is the essence of blessing and

I, um, last month, came across a short essay that I thought really expressed it as beautiful beautifully as I've heard, this power of blessing. And it was written by Alicia Vesel about his father, Elie Wiesel. Visell. Vicer. It's an essay on his father's love and I just want to read parts of it to you because this is again a beautiful portrait of blessing. He says, as the cancer progressed with episodic violence, my father came closer to his end,

I would often ask him what I could do for him. And smiling, he would hold my hand and look into my eyes and say, just be. Nothing more than that. There were no requests, no message he needed me to deliver, no instruction he needed me to absorb. Now the only thing he wanted to convey was his love for me and his faith in the direction I would take my life. He wanted me to understand what my existence meant to him, not the concept of a son, but the

actual me, the good and the bad and the imperfect and the flawed, the whole package, just be. He describes how his father hadn't been always so open-ended in his affirmation in the sense that in his early years his message offered with love and confidence was be a good student, be a good son and be a good Jew. That was the message. He says, as a young adult, I did the opposite. I raged against my school, against my parents, and against my tradition.

My father was ill-equipped to explain the rules of modern adolescence and I raged against myself. His love seemed too heavy to bear, the confidence he had in me grievously misplaced. It tells a story of a rabbi who was once approached by devotee, how far his son had strayed. The rabbi's surprising answer, love your son more. How could my father love me the way he did when my disrespect was so severe? My father must have heard this story because he lived it. He believed in me even when I did not believe in myself.

He believed in me as I set out on a journey that would take me very far from Judaism and from him. And he believed in me even as I shouted at him I had wanted nothing to do with his religion, that I wanted to be an X factor in every equation he and my mother had used to project my life, that I would be an atheist or a Buddhist, anything, but what he told me I had to be. My father kept telling me to be a good student, a good son, a good Jew, but he said it more quietly. His love for me was an impossible love. His belief in me was an impossible belief, but he had a way of holding impossible beliefs, and now I too have impossible beliefs,

beliefs that do not square with rational thought. I believe he's still with me, still believing in me. In the moment when he died, he went from being somewhere to being nowhere, and then he was everywhere. It was as though I could feel the universe resonating with his love for me, saying, I am still loving you, I will always love you, I am with you and everything you do. Do you remember when Bed and Canobey was struck down in Star Wars?

for and becomes more powerful than ever. It was like that, except that I alone could feel it. I can feel in loving me even today if I just opened myself to it, just be. This is the power of blessing, of really seeing who's there behind the mass, behind all the ego qualities, of cherishing the beingness of another, letting them know. He goes on to then offer some suggestions to the rest of us. He says, do you say everything you have to say the way my father did until there's nothing left?

Did someone, anyone, have a better day to day because of something you said or did? If you were a parent whose children still live with you, do you come home early from work every so often to play a game with your kids? Are you figuring out how to teach your children? and when to stop teaching them and start trusting in them and acknowledging that this may be the greatest lesson of all. To stop teaching them and start trusting in them and acknowledging this may be the greatest lesson of all.

So we're really just reflecting together on the way back to the garden and the practices of presence of recognizing what takes us. away of bringing as much kindness as we can and sensing the possibility of letting in the love, the love that's always loving us in a very active yet receptive way. I'd like to close with a meditation that explores us together. As you close your eyes, take a moment to sweep through your body with your awareness and Relax any parts of your body that feel tight or tense. Take a few full breaths and scanning people in your life you might bring to mind someone who

you know struggling right now with self-dlaim, self-judgment and sense that you can pause and just bring a full attention to this person, imagining and feeling and sensing what's going on for them. as you really let this person fill your attention, your awareness, both the challenge that they're facing and also sense the inherent goodness, the beingness of this person, the place in them that is really awareness, tenderness, sensitivity, love and sense your own potential to in some way offer the blessing of forgiveness or acceptance, not in the spirit of, oh, you've done something wrong but I forgive you,

but in that spirit of you are inherently a valuable, beautiful being. Trust that. Trust in the love that's here. And sense that you can hold this person in your heart and send that message to them. You might even imagine putting your hand on their shoulder and their cheek. Imagine since you're just bathing them with your, what your understanding and heart sees the goodness that's there, send whatever message and words and touch might help to heal the part of them that is at war with themselves. You might imagine in daily life encountering this person and finding some way to communicate the same sentiment of your love and your acceptance in a way they might be able to receive it.

Just to imagine that, imagine them in some way being touched by your caring heart. And taking a few moments to scan and sense if there's any place in you right now that's feeling unacceptable or unforgivable, any place where you've turned on yourself, If you find some part of you that's contracted, that you're, where you're divided against yourself, you might explore inviting in the presence of someone that you know, sees you well, cares about you, understands you. Just imagine and sense their forgiveness, acceptance, care, washing through you. And it feels hard, you might just sense your sincere intention to let you.

in the loving, what would it be like to let in the care, let it wash through you, to let it be something that can bathe and relax the armoring? You might notice and sense if you can't feel your own forgiving heart space, that which is really part of this universal heart space, start to wake up as you let in love. is always loving you. We close with a poem called To My Mother by Wendell Berry. I was your rebellious son. Do you remember? Sometimes I wonder if you do remember, so complete has your forgiveness been. So complete has your forgiveness been, I wonder sometimes if it did not precede my wrong and I erred safe found within your love. Prepared ahead of me the way home are my bed at

night so that almost I should forgive you who perhaps foresaw the worst that I might do and forgave before I could act, causing me to smile now looking back to see how paltry was my worst compared to your forgiveness of it already given. And this then is the vision of that heaven of which we have heard where those who love each other have forgiven each other. where for that the leaves are green, the light of music in the air, and all is unentangled, and all is undismayed. And this then is the vision of that heaven of which we have heard, where those who love each other have forgiven each other.

Where for that the leaves are green, the light a music in the air, and all is unentangeloved. tangled and all is undismayed. Namaste and thank you for your attention.