Tara Brach - Meditation and Healing Trauma

Episode Date: March 31, 2010

2010-03-31 - Spiritual awakening often involves offering a healing presence to the suffering of post traumatic stress or deep emotional wounding. This talk explores the three key elements that support this process: self-forgiveness, accessing a source of love and safety, and bringing a kind attention to the unlived life in the body.

This last weekend, I was teaching at the Networker Conference, it's a psychology conference, and I usually teach on bringing together meditation practices with difficult emotions, that genre. And one of the questions that always comes at these times is how do you work with meditation if you've been traumatized? And it's really, really an important, question because most people have had some trauma and meditation can actually get you in touch with

trauma and even if we haven't been traumatized we all hit times in our life where we're absolutely frozen are in complete flight or reactivity it becomes a really important question well what do we do with meditation at those times how does meditation serve us so I want to speak to that and really share with you the three elements that I have found are really key if we're to untangle trauma. Trauma really is a condition of disconnection. When we're traumatized, we disconnect from our bodies and our hearts and our presence. How to reconnect. I'm going to talk about three elements that I think make a big difference.

But I want to say that trauma is more common than most people acknowledge. Some statistics between 75 and 100 million Americans have experienced childhood sexual or physical abuse. That's a very big number. The AMA says that over 30% of all married women have been beaten by their spouses and 30% of pregnant women have been beaten by their spouses. 30%. That's a big number, too. And then there's all the less recognized

sources of trauma such as difficulties in birthing which happen all the time are the sudden loss of a loved one, what happens in surgery for many, then of course natural disasters. And if we just consider how many are living in war zones are places that are like war zones, we might not call them that, but where there's unpredictable violence, trauma,

watching somebody else be violated trauma. It's huge. So part of the reason I'm bringing this in is to respect that our own nervous systems have certain situations that can easily trigger us into a state that we then could get down on ourselves for. But it's just the way the body and mind respond. when overwhelmed by stimuli, when something's too much. And that is the definition of trauma, when our nervous system's overwhelmed, and we don't have access to our normal coping strategies,

and then we dissociate. And for some people, after trauma, there are ways of processing what happens, fighting, responding, fleeing, successfully getting out of a situation, in some way finding some power, some way to control things that actually allows for a digesting of the trauma. But for many people, trauma happens at times in our lives where we don't have that resourcefulness.

And then it just gets lodged in our bodies. And then what happens is either we successfully dissociate from it but then experience all the symptoms of dissociation, which means we're not in touch with our bodies. We're not able to feel the feelings we want to be feeling. We're not able to be spontaneous. A lot of undercurrents of anxiety, depression.

Those are just some of the symptoms, addictive behaviors. Or something gets triggered and tripped off and we get plunged into and flooded by the feelings. So we're either disconnected from the rawness and we have a whole mess of other symptoms, or we're plunged into the rawness. Does this make sense as the basic ground of the condition? Okay.

The description maybe from a Buddhist perspective, I use the word trance a lot, that when our systems are overwhelmed, our way of trying to handle it is to go into a trance. We pull away from the immediacy of what's going on, and we go in. into hyper-thinking, into getting really busy. We go into all the different behaviors that keep us from experiencing what feels like too much. And the Buddha described the suffering of

trances, we're disconnected from who we are, from our wholeness, from our full aliveness, from the tenderness in us that can love and respond. We're disconnected. And, and And just to say again, even if we're not traumatized, those same mechanisms go into place when something feels like it's intense and we don't want to be with it. We go into fighting or fleeing and getting away. I've brought up a number of times and I sometimes do hand raises of saying, you know, how many felt that in some way your basic needs for unconditional love, for feeling really respected or seen,

weren't completely met. And without even going through it, most of us, and it's not our parents' fault, it's the culture, it's beyond our parents. But to the degree our needs were not met, our system contracts, we disconnect from the pain and the rawness, and we go into what I sometimes call the false refuges.

For many, the primary false refuge is just trying to get approval. I mean, we felt so not approvals. of that if we really slow down and watch what we're doing in any interaction, if we're not busy seeking another person's approval, we're trying to approve of ourselves by what we're doing. We're trying to win ourselves over. We are trying to sue the sense of not enough. And then we try to soothe the way we dull ourselves. I mean, it's, we're so addicted to leaving presence through looking on a screen in front of us. Have you noticed. I mean, we are addicted to looking on that screen. I've shared with some of you the story

of the woman and man sitting in a living room and he's saying, you know, if I ever get into a vegetative state, you know, just pull the plug and she goes over the TV set and pulls the plug, you know. And it's so we know it, you know. It's like addicted to email. I talk about this a lot and then we get addicted to other people. And I'm not talking about that free openness of loving. We get addicted to having another person fill what's missing. Some of you remember the story of an older woman in Miami on a park bench and this very disheveled man in tattered clothing sits down next to her.

And she's asked him, so, how are you? And he goes, well, I'm actually just out of prison 25 years. She says, oh, what were you in for? and his response was murdering my wife she paused and then she says oh so you're single you know

and I actually like that it's a silly joke but you know I like it because we have what we're wanting a lot and what we're fearing a lot and it narrows our perceptual field and so we actually go around seeing

you know if you're on a trip and you really have to pee you're looking for gas stations all the time It's like you don't notice the landscape. So, oh, so you're single. You know, it's like we're trying to scope it out. We don't see really who's there. And then if we're, our needs are not met for feeling that we're safe. On some level, there's a kind of chronic anxiety that we're always trying to soothe.

So the healing of trauma, the process of healing trauma, is to stop the false refuges and to come home to presence and reconnect with what we're running from. That's the process. But the challenge is that, and I'm going to use the language, window of tolerance,

that we can't be with the rawness unless we have enough resilience to be with it in a healthy way. So often people will come to a meditation class or a retreat. and they'll hear instruction saying, whatever comes up, just open to it and say yes. Maybe some of you think you've heard that. And when we hear that, if there's trauma in there, if there's fear, and we try to open to it and say yes,

it can be overwhelming and actually re-traumatize us. So in order to be with what's within us in a way that actually heals the trauma, in a way that truly reconnects us, we actually have to have some resourcefulness. And this is now a principle of Western cognitive learning theory, which is, when we learn something to have a new learning, you have to re-contact the old experience, but add a new resource to it. There has to be something additional to change the context.

That creates new neural pathways. That creates a new learning. If you go back to the same raw fear and you bring with it a little more presence, our kindness, our clarity, our space, you actually reframe that experience and you're not stuck in the same identification with it. So the healing of trauma is to go back and experience the rawness, but with an additional resource of presence and love. That's the approach. When we don't, when we try to just be present and it's, overwhelming, we can feel like a failure. And I've seen that many, many times that people have said,

you know, I'm trying to be with my experience, but I just can't. My mind just runs away in terms of, you know, obsessive thinking, or I just get restless, or I move, or I do something. I sometimes, when I hear that share the story of Baba Ram Dass, many of you I know have heard of Ram Dass. He, Originally, Richard Alper, very well known to many as one of the pioneers in bringing Eastern spirituality to the West. And he had explored Hinduism and Buddhism and Advaita and so on. Well, Ram Dass, some years back now, maybe eight years ago, had a stroke. And he, after the stroke for a while, was lying in an utterly helpless state.

and even as they got him on the gurney he was staring up at the pipes on his ceiling and no uplifting thoughts or inspiration came to rescue him and he noticed that or he realized that he was so freaked out that he didn't have a shred of capacity to bring mindfulness to what was going on in fact as he said

in summarizing that crucial moment he said I flunked the test so this is a guy that decades and decades of practice, the test comes, he has a stroke, he's in the aftermath of a stroke, everything's freaked out, he says, okay, mindfulness, he couldn't do it. I think it's really important to know that, that sometimes we can't. That doesn't mean there's not a way home, but trying to be present isn't going to always work, especially when our system's really rattled. It makes it so that we're a lot more tolerant and understanding that it's

really, really hard. Now here's what happened for Ram Dass. He discovered his gateway back home in time by remembering the love of Maharaji, who was his Indian guru, who had passed away years earlier. And he said the way it happened is he was trapped in this anguish and this powerlessness and the despair. And then he began to pray to Maharaji. Maharaji, he sensed him as this emanation of love. And he started praying to him and praying to him. And he said, I talked to my guru's picture.

And then he spoke to me, and all of a sudden I sensed he was all around me. That was the grace, that he prayed. And he called on this loving presence that he had known so intimately. and it was right there. And from then on, he went through all sorts of, you know, got tugged around by all sorts of experiences,

but he said on some basic level, connecting with that sense of being held in love made it possible to bear the trauma of the stroke. In many shamanistic traditions and cultures, it's believed that when a, person's traumatized, the soul leaves the body. And whether we think of it as metaphorical or not, the soul is leaving as a way of protecting it from intolerable pain, at some way being armored or

exiting. And in the process of soul retrieval, which I think is a lovely languaging of it, in the process of soul retrieval, the traumatized person is held in the love and safety and belonging of community. And in that context, the soul's invited to return. And there can be a whole sorts of layers of raw stuff that's felt in that process, but it's safe enough. So that just as for Ram Dass, it was safe enough because he felt Maharaji's love, or for someone else who might call on God or the divine mother, or feeling a good friend. It doesn't matter. It's calling on a larger belonging when we feel

small and regressed that makes it safe enough. So this is the basic alchemy of healing trauma. And what I'd like to do is share with you a story of one person I worked in depth with and

explore in that story the three key elements that can allow us to reconnect, to retrieve our souls, to come home, whether we're caught in the grip of more classic trauma, are what many of us experience a lot, which is really feeling stuck,

really feeling caught in the grip of an emotion that feels out of control. So I'd like to share this story with you. First, by saying this was a woman who was traumatized, She was a client that was using Buddhist meditation in conjunction with her therapy. And as part of her healing, she ended up writing a story that was very much about her own healing and gave me permission to share it. And I first shared it actually in here.

Now it was probably eight years ago that I first shared in here. I've shared it once or twice. So in this story, she's seven years old. She's hiding in a closet terrified after an eye. unexpected attack by her drunk and enraged father. Little girl's praying, help, I can't take it anymore. She opens her eyes to see a fairy in a haze of blue with a glittering wand. And she lets the fairy know how her father's been beating her and her mother doesn't help

and how she feels like they both wish that she was dead. The fairy listens with tears in her eyes and then tells her that while she can't make all this pain disappear, she can help her get through it this time. this time by helping her to forget and then to remember later when she's able to handle it. So with the wave of the wand, the good fairy said, I'm going to send things into different parts of your body and they're going to hold them for you until you feel strong enough to let them move freely again. And she explained that she was going to tighten and dull her pelvis and her belly.

She was going to constrict her heart and throat and protect her from feeling the raw intensity of her hurt and fear and from feeling her brokenheartedness. Sona read you the last part. She said, you will have trouble feeling and being close to people, but it will be your way of surviving. At those times that the pain erupts, you will find your own ways to control it

that may not look good to the world, but will be of temporary comfort. And you, my darling, will be a fairly functional human being in spite of all this because you have a strong mind and you can hold all the sin, and I'll be helping you.

The child looked directly into the fairy's eyes and asked, How will you help? Would you come back to see me? You will not forget everything. I will leave a voice inside you that will urge you to reconnect with your whole self. It may be a very long process, but in time you will feel an urgent calling to step out of imprisoning beliefs, to unwind your body and release what it's been holding all these years.

You will learn the art of presence. There will be physical and emotional pain as you open, but you will have what you need, the compassion and wisdom, the support of loving others to be a whole person, spiritually awake, but still the same. This is because your soul has always been there, just hidden by the scars of a lifetime. The good fairy put her arm around the child's shoulders and gently led her into bed. She waved her wand and stood by as the little girl finally relaxed into a deep sleep. She gazed tenderly at the small innocent face and then whispered her goodbye. When you wake up, you will forget I was here.

You will forget you asked for help. You will forget the sharpness of your daily pain. This is the only way I know to get you through this. You are a beautiful child. I love you and in fact your parents love you, although they're incapable of showing it to you. You will have to love yourself enough to heal so that when you are older, your life,

will be powerful, full, and free. One day you will know who you really are. You will trust your goodness and know your belonging. Until then, and for always, I love you. When I first shared this story here, and subsequently many people have talked to me afterwards. And one of the things that most has an effect is a sense that all the things that we've been blaming ourselves for, like the ways that we distract ourselves or maybe the ways that we overeat,

are the other addictions, are the ways we grasp on to other people, or avoid other people. All the things we think are weak that we don't like ourselves for were actually part of what we needed to survive. And there's a real freedom in getting that they weren't a mistake, that we were doing the best that we could. And I think Larissa says it beautifully. She calls it the not

beautiful, the parts of ourselves that get aggressive because that was the best way we had to protect ourselves, are angry, or that worry all the time. It's like if we're vigilant enough, we'll be able to and if we watch other people carefully enough we can protect ourselves from other from more injury so one of the first pieces this is the first key to healing trauma and deep emotional wounds that I want to say is that there's a realization that it's not my fault that so much of what we have been blaming ourselves for feeling flawed about it's not our fault and that far from having that take us away from being responsible, it's not until we remove the shame that we can be responsible.

We can actually respond to the true core wound that's there once we stop making ourselves wrong for the ways that we've been living with it. And that includes if we've been gone off into alcoholism or been abusive ourselves. Still, it's not my fault, is actually the beginning of being able to be responsible, be able to respond.

So I find so much that in the 12-step programs and in our spiritual friends groups, the KM groups, and wherever there's a real consciousness of healing friends, that that's the beginning message that heals. that this deep respect for who's there and this understanding that the ways that we've ended up acting out were the best that we could do.

It's not my fault. So another way to say it is to forgive yourself, to truly forgive yourself. One friend of mine says, forgive yourself perfections, not a prerequisite for anything but pain. but even more forgive yourself all the imperfections and if you leave here tonight and there's just a little more sense of like as in the good fairy story that there was some part of you that was trying to take care of you and it doesn't look so good the ways that these parts of us try to take care of ourselves over years

but it's not our fault that's the beginning of being able to choose differently forgive yourself okay that's first key. Now in this story, as I began working with this woman over the months and actually several years, the second piece was that in order for her to begin to contact the rawness, she needed to feel the presence of the good fairy who became as she matured really the divine mother. but she needed to have some access to a sense of a very divine and loving energy in the universe

to begin to be safe enough to go inside to all that was there. And part of her anchor for safety was my presence too. When it's severe trauma we really need another that can be there with us. So Annie Lamott says, my mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone. And that's why we meditate together, you know. So for this woman over the time that we worked together, I was one anchor of a resource of, you know, safety and presence.

But she also would started getting more and more knowing the pathway to calling on the divine mother. And that made a very big difference. She would visualize a field of light. warmth kind of enveloping her. And she'd do it when she wasn't struggling, when she wasn't caught in the fear. She would practice that so that when she did get caught in fear, she'd already had, the neural pathways were kind of grease.

She already knew her way. Okay. So this is a key piece that when I'm working with students and clients, especially at retreats, I will ask what helps you in your life feel a sense, of safety and love. When do you feel protected? When do you feel at home?

And I'll ask that question because if we know, and it might be for some in nature, many people find a tree or the ocean, certain spot and natural surrounding is what allows them to feel taken care of. For some, it's their dog. Very, very common that the love of this this adoring, accepting creature does it.

For many, there's a friend or a grandmother that's no longer alive. For some people, it's an arctypal spiritual figure, like for this woman, the divine mother. Or it could be Christ, or it could be Allah, or could be some sense of spirit ally of some sort. This is Rumi. He says, There is a secret medicine given only to those who hurt so hard they can't hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew. Look as long as you can at the friend you love. No matter whether that friend is moving away from you or coming back. Look as long as you can at the friend you love. In another roomy verse, he says, this turn towards what you love saves you. So this is the second part of having the capacity to heal trauma, to heal difficult emotions in a way that truly brings us home. The first, forgive yourself.

It's not your fault. For whatever ways that you've reacted to the trauma and tried to make it better. The second, find some pathway to love or to safety. Now the third, once you have a kind of an anchor, a resource, is to as much as possible, choose presence. Choose to bring that anchor to what's going on right here in this body, in this heart. Now, there are the anchors of love and safety in a big way, but there's also the very immediate anchors that we practice here, where we explore feeling your breath come in and out. That can sometimes be a way of stabilizing attention right here,

or when you're feeling a strong emotion, just breathe and feel the emotion at the same time. But for some people, the breath can actually be part of the trauma. So that doesn't always work. You have to find what anchor works. For some people, just feeling the hands. For one man I worked with who was a vet that had come back and the breath was traumatizing for him

and most any invitation to feel his body set off terror, the only two things that worked were to feel his feet on the ground, his feet on the ground, and to sense that he was calling on the love of God to hold him. He would literally say, may the love of God hold me. So that was all we worked with for months and months. Feel your feet on the ground. May the love of God hold me.

Until he had that enough as that he kind of, was calling on a feeling of, okay, there's a little bit of safety. Then we could gradually begin to scan through the body and open to some of the other layers of what was there. So once there's a resource, we begin to come into the body. And with this woman, what we would do is a gentle body scan, much like I begin our meditations here, where we start and we soften in the eyes

and feel the shoulders and come down through the body. And when she would come to a part of her body that kind of tripped off some feelings of fear or even more, she'd come back to her anchor. She'd sometimes feel her breath. She'd remember that she and I were right there. It's right here now. It's not something back then.

Because in trauma, when trauma gets triggered, the experiences that what you're remembering is not a memory, memory, it's happening right now. So having an anchor that's right here, oh, this person I'm talking with is right here helps to bridge that. It helps to integrate. She'd go back and forth, and she used what many of us have practiced in here. She'd put her hand on her heart, and she'd call on the beloved, she'd call on the divine mother, and when she was having trouble, she'd just put her hand on her heart and imagine that the divine mother's energy was pouring through her hand and comforting her. And that was her practice. Her moment of most realization and freedom happened when she wasn't

with me. She was at home and a frightening memory came up. And as soon as it came up, she put her hand on her heart. She called on the great mother. She called on the divine. But she stayed feeling the feelings in her body. So she was breathing, she was feeling the feelings, she was imagining the divine mother pouring energy into her, but she stayed. And this is the key. She absolutely surrendered and stayed with the fullness of the feeling, the rawness, the shattering, the cracking open, the heat, the intensity. She stayed. And she said that the more she stayed, the intensity of fear became the intensity

of pure loving presence. That her presence with that fear became intensified presence itself. And this is the blessing of presence. This is how

presence heals. That when we fully open to what's actually happening in the moment, there's a shift in identity. any resistance to what's happening in the moment, any dissociation, and we become the self that has to avoid something.

Does that make sense? If you're pushing away, if you're fighting what's happening, if you're running a false refuge and trying to get away, you become the small self that has to avoid something that's too much to handle. And even if you dissociate, there's still anxiety because around the corner it can get you. it's only in the moments of total surrender

absolutely as as RELCA says let everything happen to you the beauty and the terror not controlling but still remembering the love she had to remember the love to be able to do that it's in that moment of full presence that the identity shifts

and you shift from the self that's the traumatized victimized self the wounded self to the loving presence itself. That's the freedom. That's the healing. I love the poem that says, and I take every broken, wounded place

and go, holy, holy, holy, that we touch every part of ourselves that we've been pushing away with that spirit of tender presence. Holy, holy, holy. Now the metaphor here, for these three keys that I've mentioned, forgive yourself. Just forgive yourself.

Put down that arm ring of the heart. Call on love, turn to love, and then fully be with what's here. The metaphor that for me's most helpful is of an ocean and waves, that if we're fighting the waves, if we're avoiding the waves, if we're judging the waves, we're still going to feel contracted and not okay. in the moment that we open to them fully, we reconnect with our oceanness.

We get that what these waves are made of is what we are. Holy, holy, we become whole. And when you trust you're the ocean, you're not afraid of the waves. Okay, just to finish up on the fairy story, for this woman after that one experience, which really was one of, I think of a soul retrieval, that she shifted from fighting the rawness

to actually recognizing that that loving presence is what I am. That that really was the more true identity, more truth of what she was than any small idea of herself. That that realization didn't go away, But she had many, many rounds of feeling great surges of fear and shame and anger and reactivity that continued and still continues. This does not make the waves go away. But her relationship to the waves was irreversibly shifted. Something in her new that it was terribly unpleasant, but if she could call on love and stay,

if she could keep forgiving herself when the old blame came in and if she could really surrender and stay she'd come home again something in her new even when she felt wretched something in her new and that is the gift of this path we're on it's not that we move through life and it's all easy or that we are in a permanent state of happiness and joy but it's that our way of

relating to the wave shifts, and something deep in us realizes that what we are cannot be identified as any set of waves, even when it feels terrible. Something intuit the wholeness that's behind the scenes, the presence, the awakeness is our home. Something in us remembers that there's love even if we don't feel it in the moment. Now, thus far tonight, I, have been mostly emphasizing how do we work with difficult emotion or trauma really within our own psyche. And even though my story had me as a support in there, this is mostly a meditative process she was in of calling on the divine mother and feeling that energy come in and forgiving herself and so on. But I want to say that as much as it's an inner process, it also needs to be in

the relational field that we work with these difficult emotions. There can almost be this other story we build that I'm supposed to handle it alone. And it reinforces a sense of a self that's supposed to muscle our way through kind of a machismo spirituality. The truth is we belong to this living web

and that if we bring what's difficult into the field and let the field help to hold us, field meaning each other, it helps to dissolve that trance of separation. It helps us to see the truth of our belonging. So the Buddha talked about the refuge of Sanga, of spiritual friends, and every one of us needs to take refuge in that as much as we need to take refuge in the inner experience

of presence on our own. every one of us has a part of us that needs to feel safety at certain times that only can be really felt when we're with each other there's a story one summer evening during a violent thunderstorm a mother was tucking her son into bed she was about to turn off the light when he asked with a tremor in his voice mommy will you sleep with me tonight the mother smiled at him and gave him a reassuring hug

I can't dear I have to sleep in daddy's room a long silence was broken at last by a shaky little voice that big scaredy cat so it's all ages I heard another story of kids that were you know had a big fight and then the mother sends them to go to their rooms to bed and then there's a thunderstorm again and then she starts hearing this kind of sound of talking

and she goes upstairs and opens up the closet and they're all in the closet. And she says, and they said to her, well, we're just in the closet forgiving each other, Mama, which is the same notion that, you know, it's like it's very intuitive

that in our togetherness we find that sense of belonging that allows us to feel safe. But in the deepest way, in the company of each other, it allows us to get in touch with the truth that's here. I remember some years ago

hearing a story about this town somewhere in the Midwest where they gave these awards for the random kindness, the most kind act of the year. And what had happened in this town is this young boy and his parents live next door to an elderly couple, and the wife had died.

And the young boy would make these visits over to be with them. this elderly man and spent hours there. So he got awarded the kindness of the year award. And his mother, he went with his mother and they picked it up. And they were driving home and she said, hon, those times you were visiting him, you know, what was that you two were talking about?

And his response, which is what I loved was, oh, we weren't saying anything, Mama. I just helped him to cry. It is absolutely essential. on the path of liberation to pay attention in our relationships and find the love that holds us in our relationships

and it's essential to find within our own consciousness our pathways to loving presence. The three keys that when we get really caught can free us, this first one of getting it, it's not my fault,

unless we can forgive ourselves, we can't go on any further. It's called secondary shame because until we are able to address the ways we've turned on ourselves, we cannot go to the root of the wound. The second, taking the time when we're not feeling reactive

to sense the real source for us of loving, where do we find loving, is absolutely essential. I've been corresponding with it. really lovely woman who recently lost her partner, the love of her life. And the ground gets taken from us with that kind of a loss. And I sent her this reading from John O'Donohue that I wanted to share with you because it really speaks to finding our way to loving. He says this is a poem called For Grief. There are days when you have your heart back, when you're able to function well, until in the

middle of work our encounter, suddenly with no warning, you are ambushed by grief. It becomes hard to trust yourself. All you can depend on now is that sorrow will remain faithful to itself. More than you, it knows its way and will find the right time to pull and pull the rope of grief until that coiled hill of tears has reduced to its last drop. Gradually, you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed. I say that again. Gradually, you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed. And when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your

return all the time. Gradually, you will learn acquaintance with the invisible form of your departed. And when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal, and you will have learned to wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the hearth in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. Now I share that because our way of finding ourselves home in love begins often with a person or a figure, or someone that we love and has died, has gone, has left us. We can start with that love and find that what we're really loving can't be lost. That there is a timeless presence, a timeless love that can never be.

be taken. And that's why I love this language of you will wean your eyes from that gap in the air and be able to enter the heart in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all the time. It's right here. And this is really the perhaps the core teaching of the Buddha that what we long for and what we need, what will heal us is right. here in the moments that we forgive ourselves, in the moments that we turn towards love, and in the moments that we bring our attention to the life of the moment. So in honor of those three keys, we'll just take a few moments to meditate together and then we'll close. So give yourself the gift of pausing no matter where your mind has been, just letting go of the past.

and letting go of the future and just letting go into what's right here we begin by just clearing a little it's a sense if there's anything any holding any armoring in your heart any way that you're turned on yourself right now any slight judgment

any deep resentment any blame and let your intention be to forgive the beginning of self-forgiveness of acceptance is the intention, the intention to include ourselves in our own heart. I just feel that kind of softening that can come

when you have that as your intention to go beyond that sense of fault, to look at yourself through the eyes of a loving and wise friend, perhaps say, forgiven, forgiven, to anything that might feel left out, pushed away, or just yes or accepted. As Sri Nursarga Data says, just to make love of yourself perfect,

love of this life, this moment perfect, to turn towards love, to sense the loving in your life. And whatever brings that to mind is a beautiful entry. So sense whatever, awakens the sense of loving in your life. It might be the beauty of spring. It might be a dog, a child, someone no longer alive, a friend, someone you don't know who in your mind is a loving spiritual being, an arctippal figure like the divine mother. Bring to mind whatever

reminds you of love and sense that loving energy surrounding you if you'd like to put your hand on your heart you can imagine and sense love just pouring in and let yourself receive a bit

Rilka says I yearn to belong to something to be contained in an all-embracing mind that sees me I yearn to be held in the great hands of your heart forgiving ourselves letting ourselves be bathed in love, surrounded by love.

And then feeling that tenderness, that openness. And for the last few moments here, being with whatever wants attention in your body, in your heart, in your life. Sensing who you are when there's a full and loving attention, sensing the wakeful openness and tenderness that's home. Namaste, namaste, namaste, thank you. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you would like to contact the Insight Meditation Community of Washington

to make a donation or to learn more about our programs, please visit our website at www.imcw.org.