Tara Brach - My Religion is Kindness - Part 1 (2017-12-13)

Episode Date: December 16, 2017

My Religion is Kindness - Part 1 (2017-12-13) - Authentic kindness must include the life within us. These two talks examine the movement from an armored to a free and loving heart. The first looks at how we can awaken from the trance of unworthiness and establish a genuinely caring relationship with our inner life. In the second we explore how self-kindness awakens us to the heartspace that naturally includes all of life. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. My very favorite teaching and one of the most well-known teachings from the Dalai Lama is the simplest and it's the words, my religion is kindness. And if you just take a moment and sense, well, what would it mean and how would your life be if that was the center guiding principle that you came back to and remembered over and over. We can kind of feel into it and sense how if our religious kindness, that means the kindness needs to be utterly inclusive, needs to include all parts of our own being and all beings.

Some of you may have followed with rapper Jay-Z. There was some interviews in the press and it described the... effective therapy on him. And I found a lot of wisdom and thought I'd read you just a couple little pieces from the interview. He talks about the emotions that drive us to in some ways cause harm to other people and how we're not born with them. They're conditioned. I mean, we're born with emotions, but they're conditioned to be in their full-blown fury. And he says, every emotion is connected and it comes from somewhere and just being aware of it, being aware of it in everyday life puts you at such a, he says, you're at such an advantage. He says, you know,

bullies, bully. It just happens. Oh, you got bullied as a kid, so you're trying to bully me. I understand. You got bullied as a kid? Okay, you're bullying me. I understand. He says, once I understand that, instead of reacting to that with anger, I can provide a softer landing and say maybe, oh man, is you okay? Can you sense in that? that the depth of understanding and in the Buddhism it's called codependent arising that this happens because this happened. If we're acting in ways that are causing others to suffer, it's because in some way we're suffering. Something was done to us. It's kind of a chain. It didn't start with us. There's not some intrinsic badness. I often give the metaphor

or, and I can't do it too often because it helps me so much of, you know, seeing a dog under a tree, a person's walking and they go to pet the dog and the dog lurches at them with its fangs, bared and, you know, really aggressive and a person gets, you know, angry, a bad dog and then sees the dog has its leg in a trap. And it switches in an instant to, oh, you poor thing. But not like I'm going to go and get bitten by you, but you know, still have your boundaries, but your heart changes. Do you know what I mean? When you see that, and this is what Jay-Z is saying, he says, when you get it that whether

it's us causing harm, us having the thoughts and the actions that we hate ourselves for, whether it's our addictive behaviors or our ways of being aggressive or withholding or judging, comes from somewhere. My religion is kindness comes from a wisdom that sees how things are. So if we don't see how this is relevant for our own being, if we can't get it that when we're turned on ourselves, what we're judging and being unkind about comes from somewhere. If we can't see that, then we really can't regard our world with kindness and compassion. I think often of just this basic teaching that in Buddhism, the heart of Buddhism is compassion and the heart of compassion is compassion to the life right here.

It just starts with just what's going on inside us. Otherwise we're skipping something and it's a kind of abstraction of compassion. It's not embodied. So in this class what I'd like to explore is just this. really how do we stop the inner war, all the subtle and sometimes not subtle ways that we hold back our kindness? And to do it with the understanding that it's the greatest gift we can offer to our world and I know we're so aware we have this shared awareness of how fraught our world is with antagonism, nastiness, deception.

injustice, that our greatest gift is if we can start in these moments deepening our commitment to kindness right here, that's what ripples out. That's what ripples out. So the beginning of deepening our commitment is to get sharper and clearer on, oh, okay, I'm caught. Start to notice it because often it's a kind of habitual mindset of where we're kind of jaded about ourselves. There's a kind of self-synicism where we're just not liking how we are. And underneath that there's a sense that there's a flaw. The story that I started my book Radical Acceptance with that keeps coming back to me is a woman in a coma, her daughter was with her.

and she woke up right before she died and had a real lucidity, as some people do, looked her daughter in her eyes and said, you know, all my life I thought something was wrong with me. And then she closed her eyes, fell back into a coma, and she died, and that was the last thing she said. So for this woman, and as I consider this story even now, and I've shared it a lot,

it's very poignant the sense that what I call the trance of unworthiness, how swaths of time we can spend and instead of loving each other and instead of being playful or enjoying, you know, like today, the intensity is so invigoratingly cold and clear and beautiful and instead of being here for it, there's this veil and we're turned on ourselves. I'm curious, how many of you here would say, yeah, I do judge myself too much? Can I just see by hands? Okay, so I like it because I'm not alone. You know, okay.

So we know that, but the reason I call it a trance is because even though we know about that, we don't realize how many moments of our existence are contracted and torqued because of it. how often when we're interacting that sense of I'm not okay is flavoring things. So we're not able to be spontaneous, we can't be playful, we can't be real because in some way we're afraid of how others are going to take us. I call it a trance because we're not aware in our work life of how much the fear of failure stops us from being creative or taking risks.

and just in the moment how hard it is when we're down on ourselves to be able to just pause and open and live the moment. It's a trance. Often I describe how it's not always the kind of trance of, oh, I'm fatally flawed. It's usually the not enough thing. It's like the cartoon that has the dog talking to his therapist and he's saying, oh, it's always good dog this and good dog that, but is it ever great dog?

You know, it's that kind of thing. You know, it's just not really not enough. And I remember after I wrote radical acceptance, I was teaching in different places, and I taught at one Buddhist college, and they had a big poster of me coming to teach, and they had the subtitle at the bottom was, something is wrong with me, in quotes.

It's just so strange to see this picture of me with this caption. So I've been struck, you know, some of you might remember this palative caregiver that described being with tens of thousands of people and that the greatest regret they expressed was I really wasn't living true to myself, that I lived according to others' expectations. I'm imagining according to my internalized shoulds, you know, but I wasn't aligned and what stops us from being aligned is that we get caught in this trance that something's wrong.

That stops us from being all we can be. So in Buddhism it's taught that the deepest suffering is really forgetting who we are, subscribing to a story of self, a narrative that is smaller that is limiting ideas and beliefs of who we are and who we should be and what's falling short. And forgetting, it's like I sometimes describe that we're wearing a space suit to navigate difficult territory, but we get identified with our ego, with our spacesuit. We get identified with the defenses and the grasping and the cover-ups and the ways we present. And we forget who's looking through. And that's what's sad, that we get identified with something smaller

than the truth. So we forget that right now this awareness that's listening, if your eyes are open, that's looking, the awareness of tenderness in the heart, we forget. There's a story that was circulating years ago around this Waldorf. school where my son was of children in an art class and there were tables of four. And one little girl was really into her drawing and really fully immersed into the teacher stood behind her for a while and then she said, So hon, what are you drawing? And the little girl said, I'm drawing God. And the teacher kind of chuckled and said, you know, nobody really knows what God looks

like. And without looking up, without even skipping a beat, she said, they will in a moment. And you can sense in it that kind of not yet messed with, you know, psyche that just feels a sense of the aliveness of the mystery. And I remember reading John O'Donohue who said, you know, when do we start covering over that aliveness and that mystery in us and get so civilized. So then the inquiry is, well, how did we, how do we so pervasively get entranced? Because I've been in the field for decades and decades, the field, you know, in some way with meditation and psychology and so on. And I still, over and over in myself and others, come back to this strong conditioning to think something's wrong. And it's partly, you know,

it's got its existential basis, which is that the primal mood of the separate self, of perceiving separation, is fear. So if we're going around and most of us are most of the time, sensing a bit of a bubble within here is me and out there is the world and in our whole story of us and them, fear is at play. We're going to be afraid of something bad, it's going to happen to the me in here and we're going to have grasping onto what gives me advantage and so on. So right there, with separation, there's that negativity bias, the survival bias, that's kind of looking for what's going to go wrong. And then as our ego emerges, the ego takes things personally. So the what's wrong first gloms on to moi. Does that make sense? There's a sense something's

going to go wrong and then, oh, I'm going wrong, I'm not doing things right. Now, we know that it also latches on to you, you know, like I think you're to blame, but it's always both. If we're feeling at home in our own being, we don't have a reason to put others down. So we've got the existential, we've got this egoic level that in some way says I'm bad, I'm doing something wrong, and then of course, depending on our culture, it gets amplified. And in the West, you know, in contrast to tribal cultures, where there's a lot of real family, functional families and community and so on, we've got a lot of dysfunction.

And so there's not a natural way to belong. And it's much easier to have a lot of self-doubt. And there's all these standards that get set on what lets you feel like you've got belonging. And in the culture, it's very competitive. You know, you look a certain way and be successful. academically and be successful and financially and so on and get it right, be right, win. We have a lot of fear of being wrong. And even when it looks very much like we're wrong, we'll make up something that makes

it look like we're not wrong. There's a story of a priest presenting a children's sermon, and he asked the children if they knew what the resurrection was. You see a picture of him surrounded by all these little children. And in response to the question, a little boy raised his hand, he said, if you have a resurrection that lasts more than four hours, you're supposed to call the doctor. Picture of him, he doesn't seem to mind being wrong, but anyway.

Or maybe that is a resurrection. Maybe that's the true meaning of resurrection. Who knows? So I think of it often about how our school system worships one kind of intelligence, a kind of left-brain intelligence and there's all these different kinds of intelligences and I think about how many kids go through our school system and come out thinking they're stupid in some way

because not everybody's going to have the same kind of intelligence and that it's just, it's very sad. So in our culture it's amplified and it's particularly amplified for non-dominant and marginalized parts of the world. the culture, the message that you're inferior, you're falling short. I came upon this, a little piece from Desmond Tutu, Archivishop Desmond Tutu that I thought was really interesting.

He described going on a flight. First he talks about not underestimating the damage that apartheid inflicts. So he's talking about the culture and what it does to the psyche. And then he describes going on a flight from Lagos airport and he gets onto the plane and he says the two pilots in the cockpit are both black and we, I grew just inches. You know it was fantastic because we had been told the blacks can't do this and we have a smooth take off and then we hit the mother and father of turbulence. I mean it was quite awful, scary and you know I can't believe it.

but the first thought that came to my mind was, hey, there's no white men in that cockpit. Are those blacks going to be able to make it? And of course they obviously made it, and here I am. But the thing is, I had not known that I was damaged to the extent of thinking that somehow actually with those white people who kept drumming into us in South Africa about our being inferior, about our being capable,

it had lodged somewhere in me. Desmond Tutu. How can we not get it that the messages of a culture can be so imprisoning? So then we look at the family level and we know, I mean every one of us, we grew up with parents that were in their own ways, had their insecurities and then wanted us to be a certain way. So we get these messages that if you really want to be loved and accepted you'll be like this.

at those messages that we can't possibly meet. So we then try to shape ourselves into being who we're supposed to be. They're not always overt. One story that again has stayed with me over the years has a family at a restaurant and parents and their daughter and parents make their order, the waitress asks daughter and she She says, I'll have a hot dog, French fries, and a Coke. And father says, oh, no, she won't. She's having mashed potatoes, and she's having meatloaf and carrots and milk.

And the waitress looked at the little girl and said, So hon, what do you want on that hot dog? So she leaves, and the parents are kind of frozen, and the little girl said, you know, she thinks unreal. We lose connection with our realness when others have standards on how, we should be. So to the degree that we feel not okay and many of us have that, we then have to take on coping strategies to try to make ourselves feel better and to make ourselves look better. And I think it's really important if we want to bring more kindness to ourselves

to see the coping strategies because those are basically ways we're trying to accommodate accommodate the not okay feeling and some of the signs of it, you know, you can see it when we're trying to impress or prove ourselves or be clever or in some way be addicted to accomplishment. It means underneath there's the I'm not okay. And as long as we keep doing those things we can't bring the kindness we need to to the not okay place. We get into obsessive thinking, we get into overconsuming, speech.

eating around, distracting ourselves, underneath it, not okay. One story of a couple are in the living room and he's saying to her, you know, honey, if I ever turn into a vegetable please pull the plug. At which point she goes to the TV set and she yanks the plug, you know. So this is, we're talking about the space suit self and forgetting the awareness, the heart, the beauty, the goodness that's here and getting caught and trying to navigate. navigate and trying to deal with that underlying thing of not okay. And the more we do it, the more we have the belief of I'm not okay, the more we get caught

in the trap. Gandhi put it really well, I said, our beliefs create our thoughts, our thoughts create our actions, our actions create our character and our character creates our destiny. So we need to go to that trance of unworthiness and bring kindness. to undo it. I watch myself and my coping strategies and, you know, through my life it's been some sense of not enough, got to do more. And I've had two realizations around this that really helped me over and over again. And one is that no matter how much I get done or how much I accomplish, the fix of feeling better about myself only lasts like a few minutes usually.

I mean, it's just very, very temporary. Very quickly I have to do more. So it doesn't work. The wheel of trying to accomplish and prove ourselves never works. And the second thing I've noticed is that in the moments when I'm really trusting who's there underneath the space suit, really at home in my heart and feeling loving and really not in that trance, really at home, they have no. nothing to do with accomplishment, nothing at all. They just arise from presence. So we move on

to the second part of this exploration is how do we, when we're caught, come back to that presence that really can bring kindness to the life that's here. One of the teachings I love the most from Srinar Sargadata, his great non-dual teacher, he says this, he says, all All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. Make love of yourself perfect. Then he says, and discover you're beyond. Because as soon as you really, really completely bathe this life with love, you realize you're

beyond a self. You're not, there's not a self there. You just become that loving presence. Make love of yourself perfect. It's not like another hoop that we're jumping over. perfect in the sense of give yourself completely to loving the life that's here. Really commit. So you might just take a moment and reflect and it helps to close your eyes and just sense

in your own life, sense how the trance might show up in your life of not enough or not okay, what the thoughts are and the feelings, the cover-up behaviors. And just take a moment just to acknowledge it with, and scan with interest. Don't add another layer of judgment because that just hammers the nail in the coffin just to look, okay, so how do I get caught in the trance of unworthiness? And as you sense the currents of it in your life, you might say, well what does it mean to make love of myself perfect right in this moment? this sense of, okay, here's the conditioning, here's how I get caught and trance.

What is it like to make love of yourself perfect right in this moment? Come right here, noticing what's happening, whatever's going on in your body or your heart. Just anchor it right to this moment. What does it mean to make love of yourself perfect in this moment? Is there some gesture of kindness? Sometimes love is this full radiant bathing and light and sometimes it can start in a much more slight way with just this intention to be kind. Maybe you start there, just that there's some wisdom and care in you that wants to be kinder.

So feel the intention. Maybe there's some small gesture of kindness that you can offer to yourself. right in this moment. To have your religion be kindness means cultivating the two wings of awareness, being able to see what's going on because you have to be awake and then holding it with tenderness. The two wings of awareness, mindfulness and heartfulness. If you want to open your eyes, please feel free. To have our religion be kindness, we might go back right to one of the most well-known stories in the Buddha's life of the kind of shadow god Mara. Maro is really the god of great greed and hatred and delusions.

It's really our shadow side. When the Buddha was sitting beneath the Bodhi tree through the night of his awakening, the whole story was basically the shadow side, all this conditioning to of self-distance doubt and of anger and of desire and all the stuff was arising. And the awakening was awakening through it, not because it wasn't there but just being with it with these wings of seeing what was happening and regarding with compassion. And even after the Buddha awakened, and this is my favorite twist in the story, Mara kept showing up for the next decade, for decade after decade, which I think of as really

news for us because if you feel like, oh, I've been practicing meditation but I'm still feeling anxious. Well, the Buddha, you know, Mara kept showing up. And as the story goes, Mara would appear when the Buddha was holding forth, he'd be in a field with hundreds of folks from the village or whatever and Mara would start lurking around the, you know, perimeter and the Buddha's loyal cousin really and helper Ananda. would see Mara and really freak, like, oh my God, Mara's back, you know, and kind of like this, you know, and he'd go and tell the Buddha and the Buddha would say, no, don't, no worries. And he'd go right over to Mara, looking Mara in the eyes, and he'd say, I see you Mara.

Come, let's have tea. He would see Mara, that's the wing of mindfulness and then heartfulness, come on, let's have tea. Kind of bring, include him in his heart. and to me that's the most elegant teaching of what we're learning how to do as we relate to our inner life and each other this is really the dynamic of making kindness our religion seeing what's going on inside us inside others And like Jay-Z said, seeing, oh, it's connected to this, connected to this, oh, you're hurting. Kindness.

So I'll give you an example of how one woman worked with this. She was in a real kind of at it with her daughter, a teen who was, I think she had just gotten at the beginning of senior year, and that's like a time when a lot of kids say, okay, I'm done, you know, kind of party time, so on. And that's what she was doing and her grades were pummelting and she was smoking a lot of pot and her, you know, her mother was really, really, it was just chronically angry at her daughter and so the gap got wider, the daughter was constantly defensive and when we met, the mother basically said, you know, I'm really, really angry at her and I don't know how to deal with it because I'm also angry at myself because in some way I feel

like I was a negligent mother and so we started practicing together and she said so the beginning of I see you Mara was to see the anger and to see the fear you know I'm afraid my daughter's gonna like ruin her life and underneath that to see the shame that she felt really ashamed like she was failing And when she could see that and she could sense, oh, I've actually felt that throughout my life. It's not just with my daughter, I kind of always feel like I'm failing. And she could start sensing, like remember again, Jay-Z, that, you know, it's like it didn't just start with her. Like there's a reason she was feeling she was failing.

And how so much had come out of that, she started opening her heart to herself. I sometimes think of it like a soul sadness when we can see the landscape of our life and see how many moments have you been turned on yourself? Have you sacrificed those moments that could have been lived and been at war? And when we get how often we're spending these precious moments of our life down on ourselves, something in us gets sad and that's what happened to her. And so that's the wing of seeing, seeing what's going on. And then with the sadness, she could start feeling compassion.

And often when I'm teaching self-kindness, I'll say, okay, if you imagine that the kindest way to respond to that part within you, what would it be? And she'd say, oh, well, I'd be holding it and I'd be saying such and such to it. So that's what we do with self-kindness. I often will invite people to put their hands on their heart or sometimes hold themselves like this or sometimes their hand on their cheek because that's an expression of kindness. And it establishes a relationship with our inner life when we physicalize it that's very powerful. Now some people are uncomfortable with it and it's fine.

We can also mentally whisper words like I sometimes will say it's okay sweetheart. But we can also say, one Hawaiian healer says, I'm sorry, and I love you. And some people just say, it's okay, it's okay, just real simple, but in some way, some kindness, some gesture. So this is what she did. She would feel the anger at her daughter and she'd unlare it by being with Mara and seeing what was going on and being kind and she'd say, okay, you know, I'm sorry and I love you to her own being, making her religion kindness within.

And she started sensing what we call the basic shift in consciousness that happens when we let our religion be kindness, which is we shift from being the judgeer and the judged, because we're both really, that small self, to that field of compassionate presence. And we start realizing that's more the truth of who we are than any idea we ever had of ourselves. We start getting familiar with the awareness and love that's shining through the mask rather than the space suit. So this is what happened with her and something shifted and softened with her daughter and loosened up a lot because as she described it she would bring her daughter to mind and

And she could see how her daughter's leg was in a trap, how she was feeling really insecure about leaving home and she was trying to bond more with the people around her and she could just see what was going on behind the behaviors and hold it with more care and it didn't mean she wasn't setting boundaries because she had to set boundaries but she could speak to her daughter from a much more from a place of kindness and understanding. Now we're going to be practicing. one more round of self-kindness before we close. But I want to share one more story with you.

I know I'm telling you a lot of stories tonight. But I think the biggest challenge for us is when it's so deeply grooved that message of badness, whether it's from trauma or abuse, whatever, when it's so deeply grooved that self-kindness does not feel possible. And so we need a way to bridge to self-kindness. We need to somehow rather feel the kindness

like the sun shining on us in order to hold ourselves with kindness. And I've seen this over and over again that we can bridge to kindness if we bring to mind someone who's loving and caring and sense their kindness, and that helps to wake up the sense of kindness inside us. Sometimes it happens in our relationships with real others in time,

and sometimes we use our meditation to connect with that, and sometimes both. So in this story, this is a both story, real story, of a woman I met on retreat about 15, 18 years of. ago, a long time ago. And when she came to retreat, she had had a lot of trauma in her life and she was, it was scary to feel the breath because she felt like a, like she was being choked. And when we did the meta-meditation, which is a loving-kindness practice, she went nuts. To say the meta-phrases, like, you know, may I be happy, may I be peaceful, kicked off pure self-hatred. It's like, I don't deserve it. It was unbelievable. It was, it was, It was unbelievable.

And when we would meet she could barely look at me. She had such a sense of being, you know, I'm going to be rejected, something's awful about me. I offered to meet with her every day, which she both wanted and hated because it was really hard to be with another person and these meetings at retreats are pretty intimate. But we did it and she, midway through, said, why are you doing this for me? And just to say she was very perceptive person, she would come out with things that were very, very funny now and then, but she couldn't look at me, but she was just, she was there, you know. And so she said, why are you doing this?

And I said, because I care about you. And I did. I just cared about her. And she couldn't believe it. But she kept meeting with me. And, you know, she, she, her practice was mostly walking, meditation. the most she could do to kind of stabilize and quiet herself was just stepping, stepping, stepping mostly outside, not even with the group around.

The day before we closed the retreat, she was able to look at me a little more, and that was about it, but it was good. There was more contact, which means just a little more trust that something might be okay. By the way, she lived far away. She lives down south. She had to come to retreat, she had to drive around eight hours or something. So she asked me to write something to help her remember what we had been exploring and so on. So I wrote her a note.

I don't remember exactly the words, but it was just I wish that you could see yourself the way I see you. I wish you could see your caring heart and your bright mind. and your funniness and your generosity. I wish you could trust your goodness. It was kind of a prayer. And I also prayed that she could trust that I really did care about her. My heart was keeping her company. So over the years, every couple of years, she'd drive north

and come to class and do a little meditation and we'd meet and then she'd leave. And over the years, something started melting. and she was just increasingly gentle with herself and she had been harsh like deep hatred something started softening and last year when she came she was fully able to have eye contact she'd really really shifted and she pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded and refolded 10,000 times torn where the creases were and it was the prayer I had written and she said the day you gave me this was the first day I had hope I could heal. Somehow letting in another person's kindness and then remembering it, remembering it, remembering it,

was the bridge to her being able to do this to put her hands on our heart and offer care inside. And many of us, even when we're in good shape generally and able to do it, hit times where we really disconnect from any sense of open-heartedness and we need to remember by reaching out all of us. So what happens is that if we do enough rounds of self-kindness, as I described earlier, there's a shift in consciousness. And this is the shift in consciousness. We're talking on an individual level right now that's also possible.

in a societal and global way, where we become, we see the patterns of anger and fear and greed and so on, but we become more and more a sense of belonging to something larger and more loving. We're able to witness from that place more and more. I'm going to read to you again from Jay-Z because we are talking a lot tonight about self-kindness. But having our religion be kindness if it starts with self will naturally extend so that if we can see how our leg is in a trap we really can see it in others. Here's what he writes. He says, or not rights, this was in the interview.

He says, there was a lot of fights in our neighborhood. that started with, what are you looking at? Why are you looking at me? You looking at me? And then you realize, oh, you think I see you. You're in this space where you're hurting and you think I see you so you don't want me to look at you and you don't want me to see your pain. So you put this shell on, this tough person that's really willing to fight me

and possibly kill me because I looked at you. Knowing that and understanding that changes life completely, he says. just realizing that, oh my goodness, and he's talking about the younger men. These young men coming from these places, they're just in pain. So this is the consciousness that wakes up in us, that we see people do all sorts of horrific things, and we see them maybe in our personal life, but we also see it looking around at our society right now.

And can we see past the mask to see, oh, you're in pain? then we're really living that religion of kindness. So we keep coming back over and over again because there's a idealistic thing that we should be thinking about others all the time but if we don't, if we're not dedicated to coming back to the heart right here and saying, okay, am I holding against myself right now, there's a kind of a hardening that happens

and we don't realize it but we're no longer porous and available for each other. So we come back over and over again to let go of what we're holding against ourselves. Here's a poem written by Elizabeth Carlson called Imperfection. You might just sit back and close your eyes if you want and take in her words. She says, I am falling in love with my imperfections, the way I never get the sink really clean. forget to check my oil, lose my car in parking lots, misappointments I've ridden down, I'm just a little late,

I'm learning to love the small bumps on my face, the big bump of my nose, my hairless scalp, chip nail polish, toes that overlap, learning to love the open-ended mystery of not knowing why. I'm learning to fail, to make lists, to use my time wisely to read the books I should. Instead, I practice inconsistency, irrationality, forgetfulness. Probably I should hang my clothes neatly in the closet all the shirts together than the pants, send Christmas cards, or better yet, a letter telling of my perfect family. But I'd rather waste time listening to the rain or lying underneath my cat learning to purr.

I used to fill every moment with something I could cross off later. I used to fill every moment with something I could cross off later. Perfect was the laundry done and folded, all my papers graded, the whole truth and nothing but now the empty mind is what I seek, the formless shape, the strange, off-centered, sometimes fictional me and perfection. So let's practice together a little. and as we do knowing that sometimes it's the lightweight imperfections we hold against ourselves of not folding the laundry and sometimes it feels really deep and really true

and either way it's the same if our religious kindness we at least intend to soften our hearts So with that allowing yourself to sit in a way that's comfortable, to close your eyes, and to take a moment to scan and see if there's a way your body wants to let go of tension, to let go. You might scan and sense in your life right now where you've been unkind towards yourself recently, where there's something between you and...

being gentle or kind or loving, or at home with yourself. What's been unacceptable? What have you been pushing away? Maybe a way of thinking or a way of feeling or a way of acting. Maybe you don't like the way you've behaved with your child or your parent or a friend or a partner. Can you sense how your leg has been in a trap? how some basic sense of fear, of confusion, of stress, of hurt, of shame has been in some way twerking you, squeezing you.

And if you listen, really listen. Can you sense what the place inside you that feels most vulnerable right now most needs? the flavor of kindness right now. As you listen, experiment. Let it be an experiment of being in relationship with your inner life in a more gentle or kind way than perhaps ever before. Just in this moment, why not? Sense what it means to really in this moment be kind. and I invite you to experiment with touch and let the touch be very, very gentle, very tender so the touch itself communicates kindness

just as you'd be in a relationship with a child or a loved one kind touch and sense if there are words to mentally whisper to yourself you might use your name, you might say I'm here I'm not leaving I care. It's okay. Whatever it is, to not hold back your loving, to not hold back your kindness.

And if it helps to sense the bridging of help from beyond, imagine someone loving and kind, let that energy that's really the energy of love in the universe flow through your hand into your heart. flow to the place that most needs love. Have the intention to let it in. Why not? Why wait? From the teachings of Babuji, a loving Indian master,

says, break your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself, you break your heart. You pull away from the love that's the willspring of your vitality. Now the time has come your time to live to celebrate and to trust the goodness that you are. There is no badness, no wrong in you. Your true essence is pure awareness, aliveness, love. Your true essence is pure awareness, aliveness, love. Let no one, no thing, no idea or ideal obscure this truth.

and if one comes, forgive it for its unknowing. Do not fight it. Just let go and breathe into the goodness that you are. You might sense the heart space that's here, who you are when there's even the intention to be kind. There's more light. There's more space. Sensing in this heart space,

others in your life, just let whoever comes to mine come to mine. My religious kindness, this heart space that really tenderly lovingly includes the beings in our life, sensing the awareness, the light and love that shines through their eyes and widening and widening to include all beings. becoming the heart space that includes all beings, feeling your prayer for all beings. As we enter these holy days, may our religion be kindness. And as we go beyond these days for all days, may our religion be kindness and may that kindness include all beings everywhere, may all beings everywhere realize the love and the love and

awareness that's their very essence. May all beings everywhere live from that love and awareness. May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.