Tara Brach - Love is Always Loving Us (2016-04-20)

Episode Date: April 22, 2016

Love is Always Loving Us (2016-04-20) - This talk draws on Christian mystic Henri Nouwen’s book Return of the Prodigal Son. We explore the primary ways we leave home - leave presence, connection, beingness - and the pathways of deep attention and love that enable our return. The emphasis is on “letting in love” as a key and often missing element in practices that heal and free our hearts. Through the talk there are several reflections that lead to receiving the blessings of love and discovering that we are the source of that loving.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. In almost every spiritual and religious tradition, the word home has a kind of special place, has a quality of really where we experience in a kind of sacred way, the experience of connection or belonging. John O'Donoghue puts it this way. He says, our life's journey is the task of refining our belonging

so that it may become more true, loving, good, and free. In this reflection that we'll be doing together this evening, I'll be using the languaging of homecoming, of discovering that belonging and having that belonging come alive for us. and I'll be drawing on probably the most famous parable in the world, which is the Christian parable of the Return of the Prodical Son. And I've done a few different talks on it over the years, and recently I had caused to come back to this book by Henry Nguyen called The Return of the Prodical Son.

And I'm going to leave it up front for those of you would like to look at the picture on the front, the front. It's a fantastic book. It's been an amazing inspiration to me. And so it's the interpretation of this parable that we'll be exploring. Just to remind some of you that might not be that attuned to it, in the story, the youngest son asks his father if his inheritance could be given out early. In other words, split everything that's owed.

to him between his brother and himself. And he took his portion and he left home and then he went to foreign lands and squandered it. He ended up destitute and hungry and realized the error of his ways and decided he was going to return home and just call him the mercy of his father. I'll read you just a little bit of it. While he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was moved with pity, he ran to the boy, clasped him in his arms and kissed him. Then his son's, said, Father, I have 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 finger on his, put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the calf we've been

fattening, kill it. We'll 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. Meanwhile, out in the field the older brother had been watching and he got very very upset and he basically said you know it's not fair i've been true to you i've stayed home i've done everything and yet you're celebrating the return of my brother he said all these years i've 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. And the father said,

My son, you are with me always, and all I have is yours. But it's only right that we should celebrate and rejoice because your brother here was dead and has come back to life. He was lost and is found. So, Henri Nguyen, and I probably really slaughtering the pronunciation of his name, in 1983, he encountered Rembrandt's very, very famous painting of the return of the prodigal son. And he was profoundly struck by its beauty and how it was a transmission of compassion, the look of the father as he was offering blessings to the youngest son

and as his son was receiving those blessings, it just totally brought to him in his own experience his longing to be received in that way. his longing to bring his humanness to some very compassionate being and be utterly seen and loved and received. And I have to say that when I let myself reflect on the painting, even a terrible copy of it on the cover of this book, it can bring tears. Because I think it's an archetypal longing. It's this longing for belonging.

It's this longing that for whatever this human conditioning and our imperfections, that something, some being that's large in the way of open, deep-hearted compassion and wisdom can embrace us, receive us, bless us. So as the story continues through this book, Henri Nuan writes about how he just kept visiting the where it was in museums and how his own journey kept evolving through what he saw in the pictures. And at first, for the first while, he identified with the younger son. He felt like he was the prodigal son who was always searching for something outside himself. He kept leaving home because that's what his son, the son, he left home both physically and metaphorically

to go and find his fame and fortune and whatever else he was seeking elsewhere. And so it is with Henri Nguyen that he felt like he would fix on things outside himself, approval, success, renown, whatever, and was leaving home that way. And this is the way of grasping an attachment in the Buddhist tradition

as the way we leave our beingness and leave the moment. But after some time he discovered that he also completely identify with the older son because he left home in his judgment in judging himself for leaving home and in judging others. And as it goes, most of us have both the grasping after. We want things more. We want things different. We want what's missing.

We want to be more. And then the aversion towards ourselves and towards the world for the world for that happening. So for him, this led to a very radical kind of spiritual transformation that as he could recognize the suffering of these two elements in him, the older and the younger son, the ways he left home. And then as the picture conveys, as he began to let in the sense of forgiveness and love, that's so much the heart of this story, he had a shift in identity. And instead of being identified

as the younger son who was grasping after things in the world or the older son who was judging all of that, the shift was as he led in love, he became the father, that compassionate presence that it could include both dimensions of himself. So this is basically what we're going to keep on exploring how is that a path of transformation that each of us in our own ways are involved with?

And to begin with, how come this emphasis on letting in love? Because that's what the picture shows. The picture shows the father blessing his younger son, but the younger son is letting it in. And that's where the transformation happens. Now, when we often explore spiritual awakening, we talk about the two wings of awareness that we're waking up this wing of recognition,

oh, seeing the grasping, seeing the aversion, seeing how we're leaving home, and then we wake up the wing of love, which holds what's happening with an unconditional kind of tenderness. But we don't often talk about that love in terms of, are we letting it in? And I'm wondering how many of you have begun to reckon with how difficult it is in a very real way, not abstractly, but in a real way to actually let in caring and love if you're willing to raise your hands. How many of you have noticed that?

For those I like to report in because so many of our friends are listening by podcasts, that was probably 80% or so. In a way, we can think of absolute love as non-directional. It's everything. And it's the essence of what we are. And I like the metaphor best of absolute love is this ocean of being that is just loving the changing waves that are part of it. Okay. But when we're caught in grasping our aversion,

when we're in that place of something's missing or something's wrong, there is an illusion and a sense of being a wave that's really cut off or a set of waves that really doesn't belong to the ocean there's a sense of being separate and in those moments I sometimes think of it like if you imagine a sea an enemy contracted no it's no longer possible for the ocean to wash through it when we're scared and contracted or contracting and grasping the love and the energy of this universe no longer flows through us in a natural way. And that's our regressed wounded state, where we're tensed and we're not able to let in. We're afraid of letting in because we're afraid we'll be rejected or further wounded.

And that's actually not just for those of us that have been traumatized and abused, but it's actually a very pervasive condition state that we don't so often feel ourselves washed through with the love of this universe. So the key dimension in homecoming for each of us is relaxing that protective layering. It feels at first like a risk. I mean spiritual growth always feels like a risk like we're in some way taking a chance because there's still the fear there but taking the chance to let in to relax the that armoring that's keeping away the threats and also keeping away the love, because that's

what it does. So it takes some trust, that there's some love here, that it's worth the risk. And then once we let some love wash through, we begin to trust even more. There's more and more of that belonging. So this is the message in the parable. The message is basically that love is here, that the father has pre-forgiven, as one poet writes it. It's not even a forgiving.

everything was already forgiven. From the father's perspective, his son always belonged. But in the parable, and you see it so much in the picture, the posture and the hands of the father are just confirming belonging. And just to give you one piece that I thought was really cool, the left hand of the father is different than the right hand. The left hand is more masculine, and it's got a more firm, strong kind of grip.

He's kind of holding the sun as if saying, I see you and you belong, I see who you are. And the right hand's feminine. And you can see that Rembrandt did this very much on purpose. And it's more caressing and consoling and nourishing. And what you get in the picture is that the father's not a male patriarch. There's really an androgy where you see both the masculine and feminine archetypes. in receiving the wayward sun back home.

Quite beautiful in that. The Indian master Punjaji puts it this way. He says, love is always loving you. You're always a part of the ocean. Love is always loving you. And yet, because of our beliefs and our contraction, we don't experience that. So in a way, the path is to relax back into recognizing

that love is always loving us. that phrase for me is quite a beautiful one that love is always loving us and the basic question that Henri Nguyen Nguyen asks is okay so when we've left home what helps us discover and trust this and just to say it's part of our evolutionary journey

to leave home it's part of it's not a mistake we evolve in a way where we have the perception of not belonging of being separate. And that's not the end of the evolutionary story. We keep on evolving to realize, oh, okay, so that was happening, and it causes suffering if I keep on believing that. But what is that next unfolding

that allows us to rediscover a larger sense of belonging, that love is always loving us, that we really were never a separate wave? So the first step is to recognize leaving. On every spiritual path I've encountered, it's suffering to wake up. When we sense, oh, something's hurting, I'm not fulfilled, something's not working, we start looking more deeply. So the first step is to notice, how are we leaving?

And I'm going to ask you each to kind of check into your own lives and sense, okay, so are you identifying more as the younger son and feeling like you're leaving because you're chasing after things or is it more because of the aversive judgment? So the younger son leaves because of wanting and Buddhism calls it clinging, searching for love where it can't be found, fixating on substitutes,

as it's described in some of the parts of the parable, that there's a sense of the loudest, most demanding inner voices in us saying, I want this now, which lead us to quest in foreign countries. In other words, we leave this home right here for approval. We quest for wealth, for power, for accomplishment, for prestige. And that questing takes over. Illustration, a man walking along California beach was deep in prayer, and he says out loud, Lord, please grant me one wish. And suddenly the sky clouds over and a booming voice says, because you've tried to be faithful to me in all ways,

I'll grant you just one wish. So the man says, please, Lord, build a bridge to Hawaii so I can drive over any time I need to see the beautiful sights and alleviate the stress in my life. The Lord said, your request is really materialistic. I mean, think of the logistics of that kind of undertaking. The support's required to reach the bottom of the Pacific. The concrete and steel would take us on and on.

He says, you know, take it a little time, think of another wish, a wish you think would truly evoke my almighty power of blessing. The man thought about it for a long time. Finally, he said, Lord, I wish I could understand women. I want to know how they really feel, what they're thinking when they give me the silent treatment, why they cry, what they mean when they say, oh, it's nothing. And most important, how I can make a woman truly happy. After a few moments, God said, you want two lanes or four on that bridge? So our most obvious way of leaving ourselves, for most of us that I know, is seeking approval. Seeking our own approval and seeking others.

But what's important to really start investigating about that is that any moment that we're in some way in the grip of wanting others to think of us a certain way, even a little bit, we've left home. We're no longer inhabiting a kind of spontaneity and naturalness. We've conformed ourselves to be okay for that other person. There's a little bit of that contraction. In which case we're reaffirming that we can't trust our naturalness and in which case in that mistrust there's a contraction that can't let the washing through of loving. We can't trust that love is always loving us. any bit of seeking approval, which is something we all do.

So just watching how that happens. Watching how that happens. Let's take a pause here to reflect. So this is the first reflection on how the younger son might be living out the wanting mind in your life. And as you pause, you might just ask yourself, where do you most see the evidence of wanting mind, where there's some kind of addictiveness in the extreme or kind of obsessing or seeking in some way

to get something, to get approval, to win something, to win someone, to accomplish something. often when we're caught in wanting mind, when we're leaving ourselves in this way, there's a sense of if only. Like if only this, then I'd have what I wanted, then I could be happy. What's the if only?

It could be very, very material, like if only I got that raise, or it could be very spiritual. Like if only I was able to meditate a couple of hours a day, then, it's still if only mind. What is it that you're wanting, that you feel like you need in order to be okay? For some it's a kind of relationship, for some it's that our bodies feel a certain way. Choose one that feels strong where there's some energy, where you can sense that your decisions,

your actions, get organized around that wanting to accomplish more. to be more, to be different, whatever it is. And just take a moment to investigate how this is leaving home for you. What the feeling is when you're really in the grip of it, when you're really wanting that person's approval, are you really wanting a certain relationship to be a certain way, or whatever it is? You might even, from the inside out, let your posture take

the posture of wanting mind. Just be a little playful with this. For some people there's a kind of leaning forward or a kind of a little bit more of a clenching to the fists or a tightening to the face just to feel your intentness of what you're wanting. What happens in the body when there's wanting mind? And how does the mind get small or tight? Notice the contraction like the sea an enemy that when you're wanting you're more separate. and sense for yourself, what's your sense of yourself when you're really wanting something? And do you like yourself? You can keep your eyes closed or open them, but the wanting mind of the younger brother often brings up the older brother, which says, I shouldn't be this way. This is bad. This is a sign of my lack of

spiritual development. You know, I'm just a grasping, clinging person, and the worst, I'm needy. I'm needy, I'm needy, I'm needy. That's really a bad one. That brings up all the shaming of the older brother. So the older brother, externally, he's being dutiful. He stayed home. He's doing things right, but internally he left in judgment, judging others for seeking pleasure, for all the hindrances. So the older brother is what we call the second arrow, okay, the condemnation of how things are. There's usually a righteousness with the older brother in us. There's a kind of condemning others for wrongdoings. There's an anger at injustice, a feeling of being victimized, just giving some of the characteristics of this aversive older brother. There can be envy. Often though it's the form of judgment and aggression.

The older brother's the part of us that's trying to control to get people to do things our way, to agree with us, to be like us, to cooperate. Rita Rudner writes, my grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping. You get the idea. And of course the older brother, the judging part, aims a lot towards ourselves.

But I'm less than, never enough, I've failed. So you can continue your reflection now. If you've opened your eyes, you might close them again. And just sense how the archetype of the older brother, the judging, averse of one, plays out, how your life gets organized around that. And you might bring to mind someplace where you've locked in to judgment,

to anger, to aversion or fear. And just notice when you're in the thick, when you're leaving home in this particular modality, what it's like. So if you're in the midst of judging someone or judging yourself, you might sense really full-blown what you're believing in those moments

because there's always a belief. We're always believing something that's limiting and most important, what's it like in your body when aversion takes over when judgment, anger, fear takes over? Again, sensing like that synonym of the contraction. And if you want to kind of model the posture a little, feel your face maybe tightening, what's it like when you're in that mode and what's your sense of yourself?

Do you like yourself? Notice how there can be almost infinite second arrows. The real suffering of leaving home is that we've left the truth of who we are. We don't feel that belonging that's really what we long for. So Henri Nguyen and in his own process and talking about the return of the prodigal son

describes at first there's this recognizing that we're leaving home. Then it moves, it starts moving towards well, so how do we go from there to beginning to, from that suffering place, letting in love? And that's the place I want to, this is where I want to take the rest of our time, is this key shift from playing out the wanting or playing out the aversion to, how do we move from that to letting in love?

And the pathway is one always of deepening our attention, right where it's difficult, deepening our attention, which means we pause, we step out of all our ideas about what's going on because that's the only way we can deepen attention and we come into the lived experience of what's going on. I sometimes like to call this taking a U-turn. And what I mean by that is If you're the younger brother and you're fixating on what you want and what you want's approval from so-and-so, the U-turn is letting go of that outward directed fixation and coming and bringing the attention back to the wanting itself, to the energy in the body right here. Or, if you're fixated on judging that person because they've betrayed you,

the U-turn is you let go of fixating on bad person out there and you come right back to the aversive feelings in your body right here. And it doesn't matter what's going on. If you're suffering, you have fixated on something that is leaving home outside yourself. You're believing something about yourself in the world and you're living in those thoughts and feelings. And the U-turn is the only way to begin

to undo that identification that keeps you small. The reason? Because it's only when you contact the vulnerability that's underneath that's right here, does there start to be a porousness that makes possible letting in love? You see, the outward fixation keeps that armoring and separateness in place.

It's when you make the you turn, you start feeling vulnerability, and there's a kind of softening that lets the ocean wash through. Let me give you a couple of examples that I think can be helpful, in really sensing how that can happen, that kind of touching in with the U-turn. The first example I'd like to give you, I gave this a talk on the return of the prodigal son a few years ago,

and a lot of people read the book. One man read it, and he described his process that had occurred after it. he's very involved with commercial real estate and his prodigal son, his way of leaving home very good guy, honest guy, caring guy and yet he found himself and this is his own description, he was very hooked on being a wheeler dealer type of guy and going after the prize

and being very competitive and wanting others to know his successes he really wanted to impress these are all the ways he saw the prodigal son in himself competitive on all fronts, including his tennis game and having his kids go to the best schools and accomplish and so on. So when he started meditating on the journey described in the return of the prodigal son, he really got in touch with his self-centeredness and how leaving home with all his competitiveness

and grasping after things left him deep down feeling really lonely. and he also felt really ashamed of the grasping and a sense he was never enough. It's like no matter how much he accomplished or how much he won, there was still a sense of I'm not there yet and he was intelligent enough to know that it didn't matter how much he accomplished he'd never be there according to that track that he was on.

So he started to do what I call this U-turn of tracing back all the grasping that was going on, chasing it back to what was really underneath, the vulnerability underneath. So he started with I want to win, I have ambition so that I'll get. And he said, what is it I really want to get from winning, from getting the biggest contracts from impressing people? What would I really get? Well, then if I won and impressed everybody, well, that would, I'd be able to finally relax and know that I was enough. And if I knew that was enough, what would that give me? Then I'd feel appreciated. Then I'd feel belonging. It's like if only he could get enough, he'd end up feeling belonging. That's what he was longing

for, being appreciated and feeling loved and belonging. So when he got to that, there was a feeling of a place in him that he feels like has been crying, he felt he called it as crying point. place, that when he really got that underneath all that chasing after, there was this place that just wanted to be seen and appreciated and be part of, belong. It was a crying place. And here's what he wrote me. He said, Tara, I was the one kneeling before the compassionate father with just the pure longing to belong.

I could feel his hands on my shoulders that he was seeing me, receiving me, blessing me. my head was bowed and I let it in I let that love wash through me he said and we talked since many many rounds of that it wasn't a one shot and voila you know I am free it was tastes of that freedom

taste of that shift in identity where once it washed that loving washed through him he just felt that sense of openness he just felt that sense of love is loving me But as he described it this way, he said it was many rounds that I would find ambition, you know, be charging forward, feel the suffering, feel the deep place of shame of never enough, and then imagine again my head bowed, bathing in that forgiving, loving energy, many rounds.

Okay, so the end of the story is he's still in real estate, he's still going for it, he still plays competitive tennis and there's much more space and humor and spontaneity and warmth and he feels he can hold a space for others and let them know they're enough and that's the gift I loved that story because he took a kind of arctuptu picture of just bowing one's head and being blessed and he actually let himself energetically inhabit it and it shifted the sense of who he was from being the prodigal son who was always grasping or the judgmental older brother to that space to that ocean to the love that's always doing the loving so that's that's one example now to me it's very interesting that when we're caught when we're when we're caught in one

of the grasping or the aversion, there's always a story going on in our mind about how it all is that we're believing. In other words, there's certain voices we're listening to. And it's really important to start getting what voice you're listening to. Are you listening to the voice of if only such and such, then I'll be good enough? Are you listening to the voice that you can never trust such and such? You can never trust people that'll always hurt you. What voice are you listening to? And I bring this up because until we step out of the beliefs and the stories in our mind, we cannot make that full you turn to the vulnerability as long as we're believing the voices in our mind. I wanted to share, at least part of a poem, a Mary Oliver poem, that

I think many of you are familiar with because this is going to set us up for we're going to be doing a final meditation on this kind of homecoming, making this U-turn. And it's called The Journey, so you might sit back and listen. One day you finally knew what you had to do. You began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice. Men my life, each voice cried, but you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do. It was already late enough in a wild night in the road full of fallen branches and stones.

but little by little as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own that kept you company, as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do, determined to save the only life you could save. So we stop listening to the thoughts and the beliefs,

and we strive deeper and deeper into the world. That's the inner world. That's the U-turn. So we're tracing back and back into that place of pure presence and receptivity and tenderness as we stop believing those voices. Let me tell you another example of the return home.

And this one, this was some years back, a woman that I was working with that come to retreats and done different practices She was very stuck in the older brother syndrome. She was very angry and judgmental towards her husband for not prioritizing her, for coming home late, for everything else was first,

work, friends, everything. And she said he'd make periodic gestures that would only make her angrier because she felt like he was being dutiful and he really didn't care. And underneath she was feeling, I'm just not as desirable as I used to be. He just doesn't want to be

with me and he's not admitting it. So in a way she felt he was being false. And then he'd get upset and he'd say, but I love you and I'm trying and you don't believe me so you're judging me and it's no, and it gets to be no fun. It's hard to be around and always be judged and never get it right. So they were pretty stuck. So her U-turn, the voices that she would have believing is he's bad, he's not, he's not doing our relationship right, he's not loving me, And underneath that, I'm bad, I'm undesirable. Those are the voices that she was listening to. And so she went under them and she went under that voice of I'm bad or I'm undesirable

to a place of where the real vulnerability was is just the felt sense of unlovable. Just that felt sense of unlovable. And with that the grieving and even underneath that, this deep longing, much like John O'Donogh who described with this longing to belong, this longing to feel and trust love. And the voice of that longing was that very simple, pure cry of please love me. Please love me. So she traced back and then she let herself inhabit that longing.

And for her the experience was the more she let herself feel the rawness and the vulnerability of this yearning to belong, the more she could call on an imagine and sense, for her the term was the beloved, a sense of warmth or light in this universe that was bathing her, that was around her, that was in some deep way with her in a loving presence. And for her, that phrase,

Love is always loving me became what she called her true voice. In other words, remember in Mary Oliver's poem, the voices, you're stepping out of the voices and going deeper and deeper until there's a voice that feels like your true nature speaking. Love is always loving me was the truth that became the voice that she said,

this is the one I'm dedicated to listening to. When I get lost, love is always loving me is the voice that can bring me home. So with that, I'd like to invite you to practice a little bit with me. And we'll practice in a simple way. And as you're setting yourself in a posture that's comfortable, a general comment about the reflections we do in the middle of a talk is that these are short.

and the practice of letting in love is a life practice. We've spent so much time in that kind of more armored sea an enemy where we really don't let the ocean wash through us that it's familiar. In fact, we don't even notice sometimes that we're not letting in love. So we'll explore a bit and the invitation is to, take it home and as this woman described it let that that sense of love is always loving me be what you turn towards. Rumi puts it this way. Whenever some kindness comes to you,

turn that way toward the source of kindness. This is a choice to turn towards the loving. We did some early reflections of where you felt hooked. You might bring one place up now. whether it's a form of chasing after something that consumes you or whether it's a form of pushing away, aversion, blame, some situation where you feel stuck and you know that's one of the situations where you leave home. When you have that in mind, you might bring up the particulars of where that gets activated. just one particular setting where maybe with a certain person

that you're acting in a certain way that you know you've left home maybe at work, maybe with family, let it be close in enough and real enough that you can actually feel the sense of the judgment or aversion that arises, the anger, the fear, the wanting. You could even let your face, your body,

your posture, everything kind of, let yourself feel it. become that more contracted see an enemy where you're really caught in that. Begin the U-turn, letting go of the outside fixation of who's wrong, the storyline, the voices, and come right back here to this body, to what's right inside the distressed part of you. So you begin to trace back and sense. You know, what is it I'm really fearing or what is it I'm really wanting? What's the deepest need inside this?

This angry or upset or judging place? What am I really, really wanting or needing to feel? And you might find, like the man I described, that you're really needing to feel a sense of a nut, that you're enough, that you belong, that you're seeing, appreciated, you belong. or you might feel like the woman that you just to really trust you're lovable. Let yourself feel the longing to be seen, to be held, that part of you that knows what it's

like on the inside to say please love me. And it may be that there's a certain source towards which you turn that you really want the love from, that you want a source you want to be seen by. It might be a living person or a deity. it might be a kind of formless energy it might be as the man I described that you really want to sense a kind of wise compassionate being

put their hands on your shoulders or the beloved kissing you on the brow or embracing you whatever it is that you sense that that would be an experience of turning towards and experiencing love just imagine it. Let yourself imagine it. Let yourself be on your knees with those hands on your shoulders.

Let yourself be bathed in warmth or light. You might hear the words, please love me and sense the possibility, the courage of just letting in a bit, letting it wash in some. It might be subtle, some warmth, the gentle embrace, like floating in warm water, relaxed, or it might be a real washing through. What if you could trust that love is always loving you? And what if you could really let go and be the love that's loving you? Become that loving, that ocean that's cherishing the waves. You can continue with your eyes closed if you'd like. for this final portion of the journey that Henri Nu-Nes describes, he says that to let in love, to know that you're loved,

means that you know you are love. And this is the blessing of the journey. In his languaging, that by letting love in, we become that loving presence. Our identity shifts. We let in love and then discover we are the first. father and the mother and that which is loving the ways. And he describes it this way at the very end of this book, Return of the Prodigal Son, and I'll read to you.

He says, to claim for myself spiritual fatherhood and the authority of compassion that belongs to it, I have to let the rebellious younger son and the resentful elder son step up on the platform to receive the unconditional forgiving love that the father offers me and discover there the call to be home as my father is home. Then both sons and me can gradually be transformed into the compassionate father. This transformation leads me to the fulfillment of the deepest desire of my restless heart because what greater joy can there be for me than to stretch out my tired arms and let my hands rest in a blessing on the shoulders of my ever,

on the shoulders of my homecoming children. What greater joy can there be for me than to stretch out my tired arms and let my hands rest in blessing on the shoulders of my homecoming children? And so it is with us that we can relax back and rest in that loving presence that includes all the different streams of our being

and in that resting, realize a sense of oneness and joy. So we close this inquiry and reflection tonight with the sense of curiosity. What would it mean to trust that love is always loving me? What would it mean to trust that I am that loving awareness embracing this changing life. Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

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