Tara Brach - Minting Gold (retreat talk)

Episode Date: January 26, 2011

2010-12-31 - Minting Gold - Embodying the Awakened Heart - Our core conditioning expresses as both a longing for love and the pain of not trusting we are loveable. This talk explores how we create the experience of separation, and the key meditative heart- trainings that lead us to realizing and living from the truth of our connectedness. This talk was given at the IMCW New Year's Retreat. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Thank you!

Namaste. Usually at the beginning of retreat, we talk about the word namaste. I'm aware that we didn't. And even for those of us that have said it a thousand times, it's... I think it's one of the most amazing and beautiful rituals of greeting in the history of the universe. I mean, think of it. We're saying these words that really mean, I see and I bow. to the sacred that is shining through you, living through you, expressing through you. Like, what if we really slowed down enough to just even glimmer that when we, you know, as just a regular way of encountering each other? So I wasn't planning to go into that, but that's what came to mind. So one of the nice things about New Year's Eve and kind of the

turning of the year, it can be a skillful means, like a useful marker where we sense as we try to so often what really matters and what we want to deepen our attention to. I've sensed so much in the groups and just in the hall, this deepening of presence and a kind of courageousness of heart. I mean, it's just, it's no small deal to choose to come here. And whether you were one of those people that choose to came here and found yourself taking so-called breaks and spending more time, you know, walking somewhere else, or whether you've been right with the schedule, still, there's some choosing to pay attention to your heart and your awareness. And there's a waking up that happens. and tonight I want to talk specifically about the waking up of this heart these are the words of hafiz

and for those of you that don't know the name of the book is the subject tonight is love translation of Daniel Ladinsky and it's a wonderful book so he writes the subject tonight is love here we go and for tomorrow night as well as a matter of fact I know of no better topic for us to discuss until we all die. So the subject tonight is love. And my understanding is the most essence expression of spiritual realization is love.

So in that spirit, it's not always the love that seems out there. It's a very earthy kind of love. And I'd like to start with a children's story that someone sent, me just last month. And it's called Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch. Has anybody encountered this? Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch? Wonderful children's story. So Mr. Hatch is this drab, predictable guy who leads a very ordinary, uninteresting life. He goes day after day to the factory. Valentine's Day. One Valentine's Day, he gets a giant candy-filled heart. And there's a note on it that reads, somebody loves you.

Just the thought of someone taking an interest in him completely changes the way he starts interacts with his neighbors and coworkers and he becomes this newly lovable guy that becomes very much a part of other people's lives over the weeks to come. And then it gets disclosed that the heart was delivered by mistake.

He finds out that wasn't to him. And so he just, you know, he crumbles. and then his friends and neighbors gather around and then there's a much more even real expression that allows him to really come home to his belonging. Somebody loves you, Mr. Hatch. So we can't underestimate the power of feeling loved. And sometimes this path is mistakenly understood

is like go off into a cave and learn to offer to yourself and find, you know, it's spiritual reparenting, but we're giving it to ourselves. And we're in a whole relational universe and we need to feel the world, individuals, beings loving us. There is a core conditioning that arises from our perception of separation. We all are designed to have that. And as much as we talk about connection and oneness, we go around most moments of the day with some sort of a filter that says, me and here, world out there. And for some of us, it's a pretty permeable kind of a separation. For others, it's a very, it's one filled with anguish and loneliness and pain. That perception of separation, there's kind of a core conditioning that has two expressions that come out of it.

And one expression is the longing for connection. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone that in some way doesn't have that sense of wanting to feel connection or belonging. Sometimes it gets fixated at different levels of our being, but there's some longing for connection. And then the other expression of that conditioning is a deep mistrust that we're lovable. we long for connection and we mistrust that we're lovable are worthy of love I mean I remember going for a walk with a friend

decades ago and having him make this comment that he said I don't know if I'll ever really feel close to anybody and I don't know why it stood out over decades but it just hit me so much that that there is that very core sense that in some way others don't really embrace who we are or couldn't or wouldn't. So then I'm using the word love and I'm very aware that it's a messy word. It's very overused. So I just want to ask you, if you will, to, we'll do a brief reflection. I'm going to do a few different

reflections that are part of really this bodhisattva path, this path of awakening beings. But the first one, if you will, just to close your eyes. And sense this as a pause so that

you just stop and let yourself arrive into the space and experience of right now. And in this now-ness, just letting arise in your consciousness of being that you love that's easy for you to love. It could be a person, could be your dog or cat, that's easy for you to love. And sense what you're loving about that being.

It might be the way he or she expresses love, our humor, our liveliness. Sense what you're loving. and then bring the attention to the loving itself, just to the feeling of loving, the energetic felt sense of it. And for some that might not be so easy, and that's fine, but just have that intention to let it be as full as it is.

Just kind of letting go into that, let that energetic felt sense of loving be here. Notice what the sense of your own being is when loving is here. It's kind of an inquire. You know, what's the sense of my being when loving is awake? Do you feel larger,

warm, bright, flowing? Is there a sense of boundary? Just to explore a little, just to investigate, opening your eyes. So for many of us, that would be too short because it takes a while to contact experience, but just to bring that into the room a little,

because it's really where we're going tonight, which is whether we are sensing our love for another or sensing being loved, when loving wakes up, there's a shift in our experience of what we are. And in some basic way, when we're loving without holding back and it's an energetic felt sense, not mental, but it felt sense, that sense of separation starts dissolving. and I sometimes think of it like ice cubes

that we go around in our ice cubeness and it's kind of defensive and protective and we've got our edges and sometimes we mesh well with other ice cubes and sometimes it's kind of pokey but you know we're just we just do our ice cube thing and when it's warm out we do there's a little bit of melting you know and we mush around together but there's still that ice cubeness until

until our attention really comes into the present and into the sense of our connection and care for another, our feeling of care. And then that ice-cubness really starts melting until we sense that the what we are really is that whole pool and space of fluid, bright, awake tenderness. That's the point.

possibility. My favorite way of describing it is in one yoga sutha that says, experience your heart as open space forever shining. Open space forever shining. So the description of the path that I find very useful when we talk about awakening in the heart is that we get drawn to the path. The first kind of piece is that we realize or intuit this. We realize that beyond this ice-cubness of a separate self sense, there is a larger belonging. And we have different ways of intuiting it, but we sense that what we are is larger than this story we're telling ourselves. It's larger than the particular habitual cycling of feelings and thoughts, that we are something larger, we belong to something larger. We intuit that. The second phase of the path is getting familiar with that.

We do these practices, these ways of paying attention, this moment-to-moment presence, so that we can keep on waking up out of this small identity and discover what's larger. And then the third phase, so we come in already realizing or intuiting, then we familiarize. The third phase is embodiment. We embody that empty-awake. heart, that our words and our actions are an expression of loving presence. So the inquiry for most of us is, you know, what will help us to get more familiar? What will help us to embody more? Again, Hafiz, he says, why go into the city or fields without first kissing the friend

who always stands at your door? It takes only a second. Habits, are human nature, why not create some that will mint gold? Habits are human nature. Why not create some that will mint gold? So we enter a new year together with some intention to see the habits to keep us feeling separate and cultivate the habits, the ways of paying attention that allow these hearts to soften and open and allow these minds to be awake and free. And the beginning is to recognize how we create separation. And you've been seeing it. I mean, I've been in groups with so many that have described different ways, different ways the mind is going to create a sense of distance. We can see it here

and how we separate from our own being is the first domain. We separate from ourselves. We separate from ourselves in any moment that we're ignoring the loneliness or pain that's here or that we're judging it. We separate from our own being when we distract ourselves, when we get caught up in our obsessive thinking, when we grasp after what's not here, when we leave ourselves. When we bicycle away, we separate from ourselves. And we separate from each other. We have habits. For some, its comparing mind is really big. Whether it's, in the movement class or when we're sitting, how we're sitting and compared to others, or we get self-conscious during the meals.

Meals are hard. I mean, have you noticed that? I mean, we don't talk about it much, but it can be, it's kind of embarrassing. You get a little self-conscious about how you're eating and how you're with others until you get much more quiet. And then we separate oddly in the ways that we either get attracted or we get a sense of kind of a version. Like some people are like us or familiar to us or our types. And then others are in some way obstacles or do little things that annoy. So that creates the distance. We judge. But it happens even bigger in daily life. It's blown out in the way we relate with others. And we've

talked about it some that we, you know, create people into unreal others. The more we're stressed. the more we're stressed others become either one of three things an object to satisfy our needs we want to get something an object that's interfering with what we want are irrelevant in which case we ignore them often what's going on is we want to change people we know that we want to change them so they cooperate with what we want them to be i always love this one of the sylvia cartoons or or a woman comes into, Sylvia is the fortune teller in this particular cartoon, and woman comes in to complain to her, and she says, my husband won't talk about his feelings.

And Sylvia says, well, so what's new? But anyway, she says, okay, I'll answer. And so she goes into her trance, and her guide's about to speak, and she says, by the end of 2010, men are going to begin to talk about their feelings. women all over America will be sorry in minutes. So it's, you know, trying to get what we want and then not getting it exactly the way we want it. So one thing we want people to be different,

and then, of course, there's the way that we go around trying to create others and unreal others and then defend ourselves, that we present a self. This creates separation. We try to cooperate. and in a painful way we try to cooperate so that we don't get punished. Just to say the third, we attack, you know, when we feel threatened. But each one of these ways of creating separation is part of the design of this brain.

And we come onto planet Earth with the brain that's designed to have us defend ourselves and attack. And then, of course, the painful thing is we blame ourselves for that. but underneath those activities is vulnerability. And so this is the key of where we're going to pay attention, which is that everything we do that we don't like is coming from a vulnerable place. Everything we do that we don't like in ourselves and everything we judge in others is coming from a vulnerable place.

And it's vulnerabilities exacerbated in our culture. There's no natural ways of belonging. We have to compete and we have to prove ourselves. And often we seek limited identification so that we can feel better, you know, like I'm a Buddhist or I'm an artist or I'm a liberal just to give us a feeling of okayness or we identify with a sports hero or with a nationality or an ethnicity. I remember watching 60 minutes about a year ago. And Zhang Gudi, who's the son of the big mafia boss in New York, who was imprisoned and died. Anyway, so it's on 60 minutes,

and he's describing life in the family, you know, the crime family, and how it was a given. They all knew that they'd land up probably in either prison or having an early death. I mean, they knew it, and yet he absolutely was devoted to the family and felt like his feeling of okayness was by being approved of and belonging to the family.

And soon after hearing that story, somebody sent me this. It's elderly Italian man lives alone in New Jersey. He wants to plant his annual tomato garden, but it's very difficult work as the grounds hard. His only son Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison. The old man wrote a letter to his son described as predicament. Dear Vinnie, I'm feeling pretty sad because it looks like I won't be able to plant my tomato garden this year. and it's given me so much pleasure.

I'm just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. I know if you were here, my troubles would be over. I know you would be happy to dig the plot for me, like in the old days. Love Papa. A few days later, he receives a letter from his son from prison. Dear Pop, don't dig up that garden. That's where the bodies are buried. Love Vinnie.

At 4 a.m., the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrive and dig up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized the old man and left. The same day the old man received another letter from his son. Dear Pop, go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That's the best I could do under the circumstances. So we find our limited belongings and identification. There are subtler ways that we create, that we sustain this

trance of separation, and I want to name one of them, which is we keep ourselves separate because we live in the story of, I'm a self that's on my way somewhere else, and there's not enough time. In the moments that we in some way feel there's not enough time, we cannot be intimate. We can't be intimate right here with our own being, and we can't be intimate with anyone else. As long as we have a project that we're trying to complete and get somewhere else, we're not here. I've been very touched by a book called Tattoos on the Heart that I want to share, I'm going to share a few different stories from. Tattoos on the Heart is really about LA gangs and

huge amount of violence in this one particular neighborhood that is being written about and the priest that's writing it writing these stories describes he's done an amazing amount of work setting up kind of home

businesses and so on for gang members and he describes with the power and a beauty really the life inside the gangs. So here's one story. He describes how a woman is coming to talk to him. And he says, Carmen's

a heroin addict, a gang member, street person, occasional prostitute. So there she comes to meet with him. And it's seven minutes before he's supposed to do a baptism, but he's going to meet with her. He says, Carmen's a dusty blonde, which couldn't be the color God originally gave her.

She's attractive, but so worn by heroin and street life. So she comes in. I need help. She launches right in. and something of a no-shit sister. Oh, she says, I've been to like 50 rehabs. I'm known all over. Nationwide.

She smiles. Her eyes wander around my office and she studies all the photographs hanging there. She multitasked in her inspection of the place doesn't derail her stream of consciousness rambling.

The family will arrive for the baptism in five minutes. I went to Catholic school all my life. Fact, I graduated from high school even. Fact, right after graduation, when I started to use heroin. Carmen enters some kind of trance at this point, and her speech slows

to deliberate and halting. And I have been trying to stop since the moment I began. Then I watch as Carmen tilts her head back until it meets the wall. She stares at the ceiling,

and in an instant her eyes become these two ponds, water rising to meet their edges, swollen banks spelling over. Then, for the first time, she really looks at me and straightens. I am a disgrace. Suddenly, her shame meets mine. For when Carmen walked through the door,

I had mistaken her for an interruption. So you know that feeling of being with someone, but in some way they're in the way of what's next, that we're not really arriving. It's one of the biggest illusion. not enough time. There's a saying that to be kind, you must swerve regularly from the path.

The path meaning where we think we're supposed to be going. I mentioned in one of the groups how William James describes is ceaseless frenzy, where we always think we're supposed to be doing something else other than what we're doing in the moment. So it's hard to just pause with each other, pause in our life, and just be,

because there's some sense of some restlessness, some anxiousness, some on our way. So it takes courage to undo these habits of creating separation because in order to undo them, we have to touch the vulnerability where our own pain of separation is. And we're not comfortable with ourselves there. We have to touch the kind of the insecure place that we're trying to soothe by staying busy

or by proving ourselves or by judging or by any of those, habits that I described. One of the best descriptions of the path I've heard is Pema Chodran saying it's this big squeeze where we on one level really sense that this heart and this awareness and that that's who we are to really live in connection and express that. And then there's this daily habit of getting lost and reactive. and busy and not having enough time. So to spend the rest of our time right now, what are the habits, the ways of paying attention

that meant gold, that actually help us to undo that trance of separation and really be intimate? And I'd like to begin with Karuna, compassion, which you've been talking about, on and off in different ways through the week. The alchemy of compassion is to pause and to let ourselves be touched by the vulnerability without adding a second arrow.

I'm going to say that again because those are the ingredients. We have to stop, in other words, swerve from our path, be here. Let ourselves be touched by the vulnerability, our own and others, and not add a second arrow that's any additional,

notion of this shouldn't be happening, you shouldn't feel this way or I shouldn't feel this way. If those elements are there, if we stop and we feel what's happening without any additional judgment, naturally these hearts will be tender. Does that make sense? The response to this full presence with is tenderness. Now, the challenge is that we, instead of recognizing, recognizing the vulnerability and just getting it okay, vulnerability, we usually make it wrong. So we don't arrive at compassion. We suffer. We feel the pain, but we feel the pain and then say something's wrong with this. There's a woman that I heard from some friends who teach mindfulness in a prison. This woman, Vanessa, prisoner in a maximum security facility,

attended a meditation course that was taught eight weeks course. Now, Vanessa, it was very striking. This woman was over six feet tall, real large, dyed red hair, tattoos all over her body, and she was known in the ward as a bully. She protected some women, and she relentlessly pursued and intimidated others, insulted them. During the meditation classes, while the other participants, were part of the discussion. So when she would sit with a permanent scowl.

So my friend had no idea what was going on inside her. It was not easy and comfortable, though. Permanent scowl, silent. But she never missed a session. She came to all eight, okay? The final class, everybody's going around sharing, and she spoke last, what it was like. She said, well, what I really liked was that poem about the pirate.

and what she was referring to is the poem that Pat read a few days ago, Call Me by My True Names. This is what she liked, and I'm just going to remind you of a few parts of it. I'm the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird which when spring comes arrives in time to eat the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond, and I am also the grass snake who approaching in silence

feeds itself on the frog. I'm the 12-year-old girl refugee on a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate and I am the pirate my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. Please call me by my true name

so I can hear all my laughs and cries at once so I can see that my joy and pain are one, please call me by my true name so I can wake up and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. Vanessa liked that poem. She says, well, that got me thinking.

It made me know something. And then she spoke so softly that everyone had to lean in and strain to hear her. She said, all my life, I was the bad one, the problem one. now I know I am suffering too the group was

completely quiet and still and she had tears in her eyes but most everybody was just looking at the floor kind of respecting her words and just to let you know the follow-up that that group graduated and

she heard word of mouth that Vanessa really changed in a deep way that she wasn't a bully any longer she was a sad and much quieter person, but she was coming to terms with the realness of her suffering. I wanted to share that with you because what's so important is that if you can contact, I'm suffering without making yourself wrong for the particular flavor of suffering, then the compassion that can heal your spirit arises.

There is, in the Buddhist tradition, a kind of essential aspiration that, you know, that, you know, that I come back to over and over again on my own practice, which the language varies a bit, but it has the spirit of, may whatever arises serve to awaken compassion. May whatever suffering arises, may it awaken this heart. And this is, in a sense,

the inner fire that I was talking about the other night, that if we have this aspiration, that no matter what is going on, life. Maybe you feel like right now you have hit like a complete wall in some way and what's going on is pure frustration like absolutely powerless I don't know what to do. Or maybe you're hitting the depth of sadness or maybe you're re-contacting a trauma that finally you're touching into but is overwhelming. Or maybe you're facing the loss of a beloved. Or maybe you're dealing with your own body's mortality. Whatever the suffering

May this serve to awaken compassion. That's the aspiration. And there's an amazing power when you can take whatever's going on and place that frame around it. For one man, this is an African American who's a photojournalist married a Caucasian woman, a white woman,

and her mother vehemently disapproved of the marriage. She thought they're too different. friend and her daughter was going to ruin her life and so on. And they would go and visit the family on holidays. And it was incredibly painful. The mother would ignore him to the point of rudeness. And after a number of visits, he'd return each time withdrawn and hurt. After one visit, something cracked open and he touched into a place of woundedness from way, way back, of feeling bad and not wanted and that in some way he deserved to be rejected

really deep stuff and that's when he took the Bodhisatt for Aspiration he said okay may this suffering awakened compassion for me for her made awaken compassion and he began to deepen his attention in a way

where he could feel in his body that clenched in his heart that was basically this fist saying, you know, kind of protecting his heart saying, I know you're going to reject me so I'm not going to let anything touch me. It's like this contracting place

and he just kept offering that prayer may this awake and compassion until all he could feel was the raw pain of it. The raw pain of it and he got to the place where he said this is suffering. And I sometimes use the word, ouch? Or it's just this purity of,

this hurts. Nothing added. The story dropped away. Just this hurts. And with that, he said, a tenderness he had never experienced a rose. And he said, he felt like the bodhisattva

of compassion was holding him in her heart. And he, you know, because he knew about this, putting your hand on your heart. He had his hands on his heart, but he felt like it was the bodhisattva's energy, coming through his own hands, just suffusing that pain with compassion. Practice that a lot. Every time anything would come up about this situation with her family,

because he was afraid he'd lose his wife. He was afraid that the mother would in some way wedge and separate. He kept practicing the same thing of just feeling it, saying, Ouch, suffering, and holding himself with compassion. They went to visit at Thanksgiving, and at that time, had more inner ease and he took us camera and started taking pictures and he she didn't know it but he got some really good shots of her the mother goes back on christmas and of course the mother continues being extreme in her distancing in fact she gives him socks the wrong size a box of candy

he's a health nut he gave her some framed pictures and the pictures had captured a moment of affection of her and her husband and the best was a cradling of her new granddaughter the look on her face being one of pure love and adoration. She opens the pictures and sees them and begin sobbing because he had seen her. He had seen her goodness and she was aware of how she had pushed him away. And that was the beginning of a thaw. He had been able to see, as he described it to me, that behind her controlling was a very, her and scared woman and that in some way

to relax that control and she just needed the real depths of her needed to be mirrored back and that's what he did and he described to me that when he was feeling that compassion he was no longer

this victimized bad person that was shut out and didn't belong he said my heart felt like the Bodhisattva's heart this is Karuna the passion behind it

is this dedication that no matter what the suffering, can we pause, can we let ourselves feel it, and not add that second arrow. So let me ask you, if you will, just to take a moment as a reflection on this New Year's Eve to once again be pausing, letting yourself arrive right here. Just invite into your consciousness,

whatever situation in your life right now, might really be calling for compassion, wherever there's real difficulty, where there's pain, struggle, uncertainty, where you feel separate or powerless, where you might feel angry or hurt, whatever is difficult right now in your life, to hold that in a kind of what we call comprehensive mindfulness,

let it all be in your awareness. and from the most sincere place to sense try on that bodhisattva aspiration may these circumstances may this suffering serve to awaken compassion may this be held in the heart of the bodhisattva

and just sense what happens sense if it's possible to contact where the vulnerability is in this difficulty, the fear of loss, the uncertainty, and if it feels like you'd like to, you can put your hand on your heart and just sense the possibility of awakening the deepest expression of compassion, of letting whatever this difficulty in pain is be touched by great compassion. To dedicate whatever the circumstances that are,

difficult in our life to awakening compassion is liberating. We also, in the same way, can bring to mind others with that same prayer. You might sense someone else who's struggling right now, going through a hard time. And when you bring to mind someone just with that same prayer, may these circumstances, may this person's difficulty and hurt awaken this heart of compassion. Most of our compassion is mental and yet as this heart awakens it becomes more and more visceral, felt sense. You might sense this person

and really tune into where their vulnerability is their disappointment, their fear, their hurt. You might step inside that person and sense if you are living in this body and heart looking through this person's eyes, what would it be like? What is this person's eyes? person need? What does this person need? May this awaken compassion. Can you sense the large,

awake heart of the bodhisattva offering the care that's needed to this person, your own awakened heart? You can almost imagine that your hand is on that person's heart. May suffering, awaken compassion. This is, again, Hafiz, admit something, he says. Everyone you see, you say to them, love me. Of course you do not say this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops. Still, though, think about this. This great pull in us to connect, why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying with that sweet moon language what every other eye in this world is dying to hear? So this is the training of Karuna. And if you dedicated your life to it, you'd have a very good life. Really. It's this training to be here for what is.

And thus far we're talking about, you know, this world has got the 10,000 joys and sorrows. We're talking about the sorrows right now to let yourself be touched by the vulnerability, to not add the second arrow to awaken compassion for your own life and others. And now we add the joys. And this is where the metta practice comes in, seeing the good. goodness. And I just want to say that the more awake we get, the harder it is not to see the light and beauty and goodness that shines through other beings. The harder it is to not see past the veil. The harder is to not just get it that those eyes looking at us, the mystery is looking through those. It's hard. The more awake we get. And yet we live a lot of

moments and trance where what we're seeing is not what's shining through, but we're seeing the defenses and we're seeing the reactivity. So we fixate, as Jonathan was describing, on the kind of painful reactivity and we miss that spirit and beauty. The more in our early childhood we were mirrored and had resonance and felt understood and seen, the easier it is to trust belonging and easier it is to see who's who and others you know who's really looking through but for most of us it was imperfect and to that extent that we didn't feel seen or loved there was severed belonging and then out of fear we had to do all this layering so we don't see who we are and we see other people's layers not them the good news science call it

neuroplasticity and the yogis through the ages have known that these habitual patterns, these grooves in our consciousness, we can deconstruct that sense of a defended, wounded, oppressed, victimized self. We can deconstruct that self-sense and discover who's really here. And Meta is an amazingly beautiful practice of training ourselves to see our own being and see other beings. One of the descriptions, I like the word mirroring, because in a way, to the extent that others can see our goodness,

it brings out that goodness. Again, a story, Gregory Boyle, this priest I mentioned that worked with the gangs in L.A., he says, often after mass at camps, kids will line up to talk one-on-one to me. and one guy came up all swagger and pose his head bob side to side to make sure all eyes are riveted he sits down we shake hands but he seems unable to shake the scowl etched across his face what's your name i ask him sniper he sneers okay look i have a feeling you didn't pop out of your mom and she just took one look at your ass and said sniper so come on dog what's your name gonzalez he relents a little okay now son i know the staff here will call you by your last name but i'm not down with that you

that. Tell me, miho, what's your mom call you? Cabrone. There's even a slight flicker of innocence in his answer. Oh, no cabé duda, but son, I'm looking for birth certificate here. The kid softens. I can tell it's happening, but here it's embarrassment and a newfound vulnerability. Napoleon, he manages to sneak out, pronouncing in Spanish. Wow, I say, that's a fine, noble historic name, but I'm almost positive that when your hafita calls you, she doesn't use your whole, the whole nine yards. Come on, mehito, do you have a name? What's your mom call you? Then I watch him go to some far, distant place. A location he is not visiting sometime. His voice, body language, and whole being are taking on a new shape right before my eyes. Sometimes, his voice

so quiet, I lean in. Sometimes when my mom's not mad at me, she calls me Napito. I watch this kid move, transformed from sniper to Gonzales, to Cabron, to Napoleon, to Napito. We all just want to be called by the name our mom uses when she's not pissed off at us. So there's this amazing web we're in where we become mirrors for each other and we can help us remind us when our sense of belonging is severed and you know what it's like when someone pays attention

and you sense they really get who you are in that moment some bit of the ice-cubness melts, doesn't it? Sometimes think of it like a fountain that gets covered over. We've got this fountain deep source of emptiness and love and beauty that can express in this world but it gets covered over by trance.

It gets covered over by all our habitual doubts and fears. But when somebody intuits who we are or sees it, senses that source, it kind of invites that fountain to begin to express to sink spring forth. And it frees us to be, we get more humorous and we get more creative and we get more loving

when someone else creates an atmosphere that invites it forth. You know, Mother Teresa, when she told this room full of lepers, she was speaking to them and she said, it was telling them how loved by God they were. And she says, you're loved by God and you're a gift to the rest of us.

And one of this old leper interrupted her. And he said, she calls them and she says, and he says, could you repeat that again? It did me good. So would you mind just saying it again? So again, we're talking about a shift in identity. We're talking about how when we can see our own goodness or when someone else can see it, something changes. And we start coming home to that larger being that I was talking about,

that we intuit, but we forget because we get caught in trance. There are many ways that as we start waking up to who we are, the loving expresses. And for some, it's generosity that we just become, It becomes pleasurable to give. For some, we give our time or our money or energy. For some, it's a deep listening that we don't need so much to. The ice cube doesn't need to show its ice cubness and say, I'm here. There's more space, and it's kind of like we can pause and swerve from our path and make space for another and really listen.

It's a big deal, really listening. No agenda. For some, it's healing. you know, actively offering healing, some at social action, where we feel our love for the earth or our care about social justice and we really give ourselves to that

for some, it's naming truths. I started with the story of Mr. Hatch, which is one way that, you know, one way that love expresses when we kind of let someone know that their love. I want to, it's a kind of closing story somebody sent me very recently

teacher in New York decides to honor each of her seniors in high school by telling them the difference that each made so she kind of calls them up and presents them each with this gold ribbon nope it's a blue ribbon and printed with gold letters which reads who I am makes a difference

so each one she let them know the ways that they mattered and then she decided to do this project and she gave each of them three more ribbons and ask them to go and give a ribbon to somebody and let them know they mattered and then give them two more to pass to others. You understand what I'm saying? So it would spread out. Okay. So this is kind of a project to see the impact that recognition can have. So one of the boys went to a junior executive in a nearby company and who had helped him with career planning and gave him a blue ribbon, put it on his shirt and really said thank you from his whole.

heart sincerely and the guy was very touched and so he said would you be willing to take these two other ribbons and you find somebody and you pin it on them and then give them the extra so on so on so he gives him so that happens and then the junior executive goes to see his boss who had been a kind of grouchy guy and he goes to him and he sits him down he says you know I really admire your creative genius I mean there's stuff probably edgy but I admire your creative genius and I'm part of this ribbon thing. And I want to... So he says,

would you be willing to let me put a blue ribbon on you? And he places this blue ribbon right on the jacket right above his heart. And he says, well, you take this last ribbon

and give it to somebody else. Okay? So the boss agrees. And that night, he goes home to his 14-year-old son, sits him down. He says, you know,

the most incredible thing happened. I was in my office and one of the junior executives came in and told, me he admired me and gave me a blue ribbon for being a creative genius. Imagine. He thinks I'm a creative genius. And then so then he puts his ribbon on that says who I am makes a difference on my jacket and asked me to give this last ribbon to someone I honor. So I started thinking about who I would honor with this ribbon and I thought about you and I want to honor you.

And my days are really hectic and when I come home I don't pay a lot of attention to you. And Sometimes I scream at you for not getting good enough grades in school and for your bedroom being a mess. But somehow tonight, I just wanted to sit here and, well, just to let you know that you do make a difference to me. Besides your mother, you are the most important person in my life. You're a great kid and I love you. The startled boy started to sob and sob and he couldn't stop crying. His whole body shook. He looked up at his father and said through his tears,

Dad, earlier tonight I sat in my room and rode. a letter to you and mom explaining why I'd killed myself and asking you to forgive me. I was going to commit suicide tonight after you were asleep. I just didn't think that you cared at all. The letters upstairs, I don't think I needed after all. So his father walked upstairs and found a heartfelt letter full of anguish and pain in the envelope was addressed mom and dad. and there's more of it that's the gist of it that you know

they followed this ribbon um acknowledgement project and were astonished not all the ways that a touch life were so dramatic but there is no question

that each of us needs to feel like we matter each of us needs to feel like we belong that we're apart. And the truth is we are and we each belong to this web of life and the source, this sacred light of aliveness shines through us and we need to trust that and we often don't. So one of the ways that this path that we're on in a very intentional manner can wake us up is by beginning to let each other know, letting each other know the goodness that's here. So I said that there's all these different ways. The Bodhisattapath doesn't take some extraordinary sacrifice. It's really the small daily ways that we swerve from our path. For me,

that's a really meaningful phrase swerving from our path. One group of professionals asked children to describe love, and I sometimes like reading this. I'll just share a few of them. They're very short. When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love. When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth. Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen. When you tell someone something bad about yourself, you're scared they won't love you anymore. But then you get surprised because not only do they still love you, they love you even more.

You really shouldn't say I love you unless you mean it, but if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget. One more. When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you. So the ways we swerve from our path, I think the biggest teaching for me that many years ago, somebody just said, don't wait. Just don't wait. The only place will ever discover love is right here. And that Javis poem of Ask the Friend for Love, when we feel like it's not here, just ask for love. I always say that to myself, ask the friend for love, ask him again, for I have learned that every heart will get.

what it longs for most. Ask and ask. When I got that teaching don't wait, it was at a Tick-Nat-Han retreat that I attended. Oh gosh, it was now about 20 years ago. And the retreat ended in a way that was really quite powerful. We were asked to stand in pairs, and I began this talk with Namaste. I kind of want to end it on that note. We're asked to stand in pairs and we faced each other and had our palms together and first bowed to see the sacred, the divine that was shining through the other's eyes. Namaste. And then we hugged each other and there was three breaths and the first breath is, I'm going to die. And the second breath, you're going to die. And the third, we have just these precious moments together.

The power of don't wait is that we don't have that. that much time. It's an illusion that we're on our way somewhere else or that there's forever onward. It's the only place is now. And if we can't will it, you know, there's, I felt despairing at times that, because you know, how we all can feel that we're not very loving, I felt despairing at times and my heart's closed and I just can't get myself to be more tender and open. You can't will it, but there can be this intention. Like we can't love always, but we can have that longing and that intention. So we'll do a final little reflection and then we'll close. And as you set yourself, Mother Teresa diagnoses the world tells this way. She says,

we've just forgotten that we belong to each other. So in this practice right now, we begin as we always do by just feeling the presence that's here. The liberating love arises from this pure presence, inviting into your consciousness one being that you love, that you'd like to feel that awakened love with right this moment, just inviting in someone. And sensing you're bowing to them, namaste, you're just sensing the sacred there, that mystery and light that lives through this being that animates this unique being and yet comes from source. And then, as Ticknod Han teaches, imagine that kind of embrace where you're sensing, I'm going to die. The reality that we don't have that long.

And you're going to die. And we have just these moments right here. Feeling the loving itself, sensing who you are when loving is awake. What's sometimes called Buddha nature. This heart has open space forever shining. and sense the world that's included in your heart, how this open heart truly includes all life everywhere. And then in the silence, letting go of any ideas or notions,

just resting in that space of awakeness. Thre Naras Argedata says, love says I'm everything, wisdom says I'm nothing. between the two my life flows. Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule,

or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.