Tara Brach - Namaste - Seeing the Sacred that Lives through All Beings (2015-04-23)

Episode Date: May 9, 2015

(retreat talk) Namaste - Seeing the Sacred that Lives through All Beings (2015-04-23) - The trance of separation is part of our evolutionary heritage, but not the end of the story. This talk explores how several key trainings of the heart can evolve and awaken our capacity to realize connectedness, and the sacredness that shines through this living world.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. Good evening and welcome. So I start with Namaste again and I'm feeling it a lot, a lot of sense of honoring what's unfolding, seeing so much presence and so much waking up going on in all of us. I feel like we're all in it together. And in a sense, tonight's talk is really, if there was a word that captures it for me, it really is a spirit of namaste. It's really how we wake up these hearts to be able to really sense our interconnection

and bow to that beauty and goodness and sacredness that is living through all beings. So it's a talk on the bodhisattva path, Bodhi awakening satfa being, And it doesn't matter what religion we are, we're all on that path. And we are all awakening beings. And so the exploration really is tonight, in a sense, in a practical way, what are the trainings or the ways that we pay attention that really help us to evolve on this path? And in particular, that help us to sense our connectedness and live from that.

Okay. There's a story that I heard a number of years ago about social activist Fran Peavy, and she's on the Stanford campus, and there's some experiment going on with a couple of chimps, a male chimp and a female chimp, and the female chimp's on a chain. The male chimp is loose,

but he's being very aggressive in trying to mate with her, and all sorts of a bunch of scientists, and from Marine World were studying the chimps and they're all kind of circled around and just kind of watching so the male's eager and he's kind of grunting

and grabbing at the female's chain and tugging it and she's whimpering and pulling back and so this is what Fran writes she says watching the chimps' faces I a woman began to feel sympathy for the female and suddenly the female chimp yanked her chain

out of the male's grasp and to my amazement she walked through the crowd straight over to me and took my hand. Then she led me across the circle to the only other two women in the crowd, and she joined hands with one of them, and three of us stood together in a circle, and I remember the feeling of that rough palm against mine. The little chimp had recognized us and reached out across all the years of evolution

to form her own women's support group. You know, it's comforting, think that we might be helping in small ways, whether it's here with a sense of graciousness opening a door and having someone feel that sense of awareness and connection or in our daily lives, our smile or a touch or some words that we know comfort another. And I often reflect on how it's deep in our nature to want to relieve someone. It's deep in our nature and maybe a part of it is a bit of the ego project that makes us feel good about ourselves to be a helpful person.

But it goes much deeper than that. In a way when we're extending and reaching out and helping, we're living more from who we really are. And that could be another way of saying what it is we most long for. for it's to really inhabit the truth or the fullness of who we are, to live from that. And when we're not, that's suffering. We feel it. So it's interesting also to consider that sometimes it's easy to feel that responsiveness and care. You know, if you watch those chicks out there that have been removed, it's just very hard not to feel this like, ooh, ah, or the goats, you know, are you doing meta and just feeling each other in the room?

There's kind of, there can be this opening. And then we also know that at times we're shut down. And yet what's interesting to me is that even when we're feeling cut off, we still care about caring. Do you know what I mean? Like it still matters to us because it's so intrinsic. So one way of understanding this bodhisattva path is that it's this, it's a gradual yet fundamental shift in our identity from feeling this separateness, this going around in a bubble

of me and the world out there to an authentic sense of we that we're really in this together. Some of you might have felt that the other night we're watching the things. thunderstorm and the lightning and there we were and in the face of this mystery it's like here we are together or a few of these sunsets are just sensing in these pods that are going together these groups that are meeting you know you can kind of start feeling this we so the challenge as we know is that we get caught in a trance of separation and and we need to wake up from it I mean coming to feel that sense of the we is really the hope for our world. We can be involved in any political

or social action movement that we want to, but unless there's that shift in consciousness, the same play of violence and greed is just going to keep cycling through. So our challenge is the trance of separation, and we're all caught in it to some degree some of the time or most people I've met. I don't know if everyone is. But we can sense the trance here. I mentioned meta before you can feel that openness. Well, you also probably most of you know what it's like to sit in this room

and have a guided meta practice and feel completely in the prison of your own self and like nothing is landing and there's no way of really connecting. We know what that's like too. We know what it's like to move through a region. treat and feel when the emotions are strong, especially like we're really in it alone, lonely, separate. Trans can be strong. It can be really strong in our daily life. I mean, we get so easily reactive and we can move through our daily life and just a huge amount of judgment

are needing to accommodate or are needing to impress, you know, a lot that goes on, that's really that separate selfing. So I sometimes use the language of unreal other, and it's actually, it's going to be a bit of a theme as we explore tonight. Because my sense is that when we're in reaction, whenever we're in reaction, we're in a kind of trance where others become unreal. And when we're in some reactivity

where we're wanting more or fearing or whatever, others become either an object that can get us what we want or an object that's an obstruction, getting in the way, or it doesn't really matter very much, but they're not real. So in my never-ending search for good illustrations, a guy sitting at home when he hears a knock at the door,

and he opens the door and sees a snail on the porch. He picks up the snail and throws it as far as he can. Three years later, there's a knock on the door. He opens it and sees the same snail. And the snail says, what the hell was that all about? Now, the snail was taking it personally. It wasn't about him at all. So from an evolutionary perspective, and we bring this in a lot,

again, I find it really, really helpful. Partly because it makes it less personal is that we have the primitive parts of our brain that are driven by fears and craving and they emerge out of this perception of separation. And we have a more evolved part of our brain that has got the wiring to perceive connection, to feel empathy,

to be mindful to have a perspective that's large. I remember pretty soon after 9-11, one of the stories that was circulating had a, it was a Cherokee legend, and a grandfather speaking to his grandson about what causes the violence and suffering and cruelty in the world. And he says that in each human heart, there are two wolves and they're battling each other and one's fearful and angry, and the other one is understanding and kind. And then his son looks at a grand. grandson looks really intently at him and says, Grandpa, which one is going to win?

And the old man says, whichever one we choose to feed. So it's really not that simple. As you've been noticing here, if you could just say, oh, what am I going to feed? That would be simpler. In a way, it's really bringing awareness to the whole process that's going on,

to the reality that within us we have grasping and fear. How many times in these groups I've sat and we've gotten in touch with the grasping and the fear and also with the part that really intends towards kindness and can we make room for them both?

So it's really bringing presence to both and if you think of it again in an evolutionary term that primitive survival brain belongs in us and is absolutely essential for our continued life.

We have to have a really very, very quick flash of a response to certain situations or we won't make it. So there's fast-acting primal system's there. But it's enfolded in this more evolved part of our brain that has the capacity to give it information and to soothe it and to, you know, offer perspective. And that's what we're aiming for. But instead of that optimal arrangement where we get these reactive triggers

and we feel this stuff and then having the more mature part of our brain say it's okay, that was then and now was now or you're projecting but it's okay, you meant well because you have to honor the intention that really helps. Really, I'm not saying that facetiously.

But rather than that relationship between the more evolved parts of our being and the primitive survival system, when we get stressed, it gets compartmentalized. So you might have the den with the loving wolf, and that's when you've sat in the morning and you're feeling like this.

But it's like about eight minutes later, and then the other wolf kind of takes over for the day, you know. And we have, you know, a lot of reactivity going on. and during that time, when we're hijacked by the fearful wolf, what happens is that we find that our affection and loyalty and connectedness is with those most close in or who are most like us, but that we are at odds or removed from those that feel more different in any way. And as we're going to explore, that's very much a part of tribalism. But what happens is that there's a lot of stereotyping and projecting,

and we're not living from that, that wiser part of our being that senses our human connection and our connection with all beings. One of the stories I really like, some might remember, it occurred centuries ago, and there had been many rounds of conflict between the Christians and the Jews, and in this particular round, the Pope wanted the Jews to leave Rome, those that were oppositional.

And they decided that, you know, there was an uproar, so they decided they'd have a debate. And if the Pope won, the Jews that were oppositional, would leave town. And if the man they selected to represent the Jews won the debate, the Jews could stay. So they had one extra rule to the debate, which was to make a more interesting,

neither side could talk. talk. Okay? So here's what happens. Great day arrives. And Moishi, who's the, with the Jews and the Pope, they set opposite each other. And they do it for a full minute before the Pope raises his hand and shows three fingers. And then Moisa looks back at him and raises one finger. The Pope waves his fingers around a circle around his head, and Moisha points to the ground, right where he's sitting. The Pope pulls out a wafer and a glass of wine. Moisha pulls out an apple. The Pope stands up and he says, I give up. The man's too good. The Jews can stay. An hour later, the Cardinals are all around the Pope saying, hey, what happened? What happened? And the Pope said, well, I put up three fingers to represent the Trinity. He put up one finger to

remind me that it's all one God. I waved three fingers around my head to show that God was all around me, but he responded by saying, God's right here now. I pulled out the wine and wafer to show that God absolves us from our sins, well, he pulled out an apple to remind me of original sin. What could I do? Guys too good. Meanwhile, the Jewish community has kind of circled around Moishe's saying, what happened? You know, and he said, well, first he said to me the Jews had three days to leave, and I said, we're not one of us is leaving. And then he told me the whole city would be cleared out, and I said, we're staying right here. Yeah, and then. And then, and then, and then, and then, I don't know, he pulled out his lunch and I pulled out mine.

So when we get cut off, we're not able to really communicate. So I mentioned tribalism, and I just want to say that there's, tribalism is alive and well now. And we were in tribes way long, you know, thousand times as long as we've not lived in tribes in terms of human history. And there's kind of two psychobiological systems with tribalism, the evolved and the, the primitive. And in the primitive, that's, you know, self and other, the others that are not part of tribe are bad, dangerous, not really human. And that those within the tribe, that's where the pro-social evolutionary brain's working, that's where we cooperate and feel empathy and compassion. That still exists. Those that we can relate to that are close in, that's where

of this, you know, more developed brain is, you know, very empathetic and so on, but we still have others that don't fit in, that aren't included. And when there are others, they get dehumanized. There I was reading about tribalism and in one description, it says, many tribes refer to themselves with their language as word for people. That's the name of the tribe. It has their language for people. And they refer to other neighboring tribes with epithets. For example, the term Inuit translates as people. But they were known to the objibwe by the name Eskimo, which roughly translate as eaters of raw meat. So it's a put-down. And again, if we're not considering the other as human, we can kill them. Because we are the wiring to feel

empathy isn't there. So the evolving ego is more mental and it's still got that tribalism to it and it's more dangerous. So there's a story about an encounter between Coral Jung and one of the Pueblo Indian chiefs that really struck me about these two domains of the brain and what it means for us. And the chief was speaking to Carl Jung and this is what he said about white men. Their eyes have a staring expression. They're always seeking something. What are they seeking?

The whites always want something. They're always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We don't understand them. We think that they're mad. And then Carl Jung asked, well, why do you think they're mad? And he says, well, they say they think with their heads. That's what the chief said.

And Carl Jung was surprised. Well, what do you think with? And he says, well, and then the chief's response is, we think here. So he put his hand over his heart, and Carl Jung was like profoundly struck by it. He said that this Indian had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled a truth to which we are blind. So this is sometimes what's called fear-thinking when our brains and our being has been, you know, hijacked to heart thinking or living from that heart intelligence that sense our connection with each other. We can actually scan our day and scan our culture

and sense where actions are coming from. I mean, how else can we understand our society's madness other than being hijacked by that fear-thinking? I mean, how can we understand the decimation of indigenous people? What happened? That chief had a right to worry

about white men being mad, didn't he? I mean, what wolf had taken over. I mean, how else can we explain enslaving a race? something has to be cut off. We have to be cut off from our heart wisdom to enslave a race. How do we explain a white policeman killing an unarmed African man

who's running away, Walter Scott? How can we explain it? And then it's not human to human. We cut off, it's like we don't get that other beings and creatures are sentient. How can we explain that most Americans have a diet based on factory farming. If any of us that eat fish or meat were to really get close in and pay attention

to the cruelty inflicted on these sentient beings, we wouldn't be able to do it. We're living with that. And how else to understand in our personal life how are the tenacity of making others wrong? I mean, so many of us here are waking up to how much judgment goes on. Where's that coming from? There's a scared, primitive survival system that's just triggering and triggering. And it doesn't have the benefit of that connection with that part that sees, okay, yes, this is fear and judging and there's something a bigger truth.

How else do we understand how we attack ourselves? Okay. And then I think of it, you know, like the dominance and of this, of the fearful wolf and what we're doing to our planet. Is the words of Wendell Berry. He says, it is the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane and more than half. To destroy that which we were given in trust,

how will we bear it? Our nervous systems get it. We know. We know the traumatic injury to Mother Earth that's going on. It's to our own bodies. You know, we are the planet waking up to that injury and able to speak and act, and we're all wondering, you know, how fast, how much, what's needed. It's the destruction of the world in our own lives that drives us half insane and more than half.

To destroy that which we were given and trust, how will we bear it? So, this Bodhisattva path has a deep question to it, that each one of us is asking ourselves, and we are, this is a question we ask ourselves, what will serve evolving this heart-mind to wake up out of that trance of separateness so that we can really live from the truth of our connection with each other and that the truth of that awareness and love that's really our sort. what will help us wake up? And I'm sure that each one of you has noticed in the background that that's a very beautiful inquiry.

What serves? So the most basic kind of principle or one of the most basic principles that we come across here is that the heart awakens when we're willing to touch what's real, which means willing to touch the pain of separation willing to touch the vulnerability that's here. The core wounds that so many of you've been naming

of feeling unlovable, unworthy, something's going to go wrong, going to fail, letting ourselves be touched. There's a story of a wise sage who is a total recluse, lived a few days walk through pretty tangley woods and so on. And so you had to want to really, you had to have a burning question, and you had to really want to heal spiritually to go see him.

And people would make the journey, and they'd come into his hut, and he'd say basically, okay, but you have to swear to secrecy. And they'd swear, and they'd say, there is a question to ask yourself, and here it is, what are you unwilling to feel? What are you unwilling to feel? So it's a powerful inquiry and what we've been really practicing

this week is this recognition of what's happening and the willingness to feel. The poet Rolka says, I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may never complete the last one, but I give myself to it.

So our willingness to feel begins with the life that's here and then widens out. It has to begin right here with the vulnerability and pain that's here until we have that training and tolerance and openness and tenderness as to what's here, we will not be able to include those widening circles.

In one group today, one person was describing practicing meta for her ex-boyfriend. And she described how she was would sit there and say, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you feel well-being, may you have a horrible untimely death. It's like she could get through a certain amount, but you know, what does that say? There's something yet that there's more attention to pay in here, right? There's something that hasn't yet been paid attention to. I was reading, there's an internet

site, I think it's called ravishing or ravishingly. Anyway, on it, there's a a son and his mother who are a team that give advice. He's four years old. He's very cool. Okay, so a question comes in. Do you think it's okay to tell someone, I'm afraid to forgive you because then you might hurt me again? Or should I wait until I'm no longer afraid to try to be their friend again? Here's this little boy's response. It's nice to forgive someone because then you're not angry anymore. My friend David really, really wanted to play Ninja Turtles, and he just hit me in the nose and then my nose started bleeding.

He said sorry, and the teacher said it was an accident, but I couldn't forgive him because my nose was bleeding. When your nose starts bleeding, you can't forgive someone. But when my nose stopped bleeding, I could forgive him. You understand. I think that's as good advice as I've heard in a really long time. Okay, so the path. that we're practicing, this is the courage of the bodhisattva, is a willingness to open to vulnerability within and then widen it.

And as you know, it's our universal wiring to pull back, to resist. And yet there is a wisdom in each one of us here that knows that touching reality is our way home. Touching reality is our way home. So we have this aspiration to come home and we're going to do a few short practices and the remainder of this reflection tonight together are kind of framing and then doing just some practices

and the ground-level practice on the bodhisattva path the ground-level training is a remembering of aspiration that we care about waking up And in the Bodhisatt tradition, one of the ways that it's described is this. It's this sense that may all circumstances, no matter what they are, may all circumstances serve to awaken this heart and mind. It's a really, really, to me, one of the most powerful ways of framing aspiration. May whatever happen, whatever happens to this body to other people, whatever is going

on in my life. May this serve to awaken wisdom and compassion. And I'd like just to have you try it on for a moment, if you will, just to pause and come into quietness and stillness within yourself for a moment. It's taking a little bit of time, just feel yourself here. And you might scan your life and just notice what you consider a really difficult situation, something that brings out perhaps the real reactive, more primitive parts of you, the fear, the anger, the hurt, the judging. Might be a conflict with another person, something that just feels really hard to handle with yourself, your body, your mind.

Where do you feel stuck? You might just take a moment with whatever is coming to mind to sense what makes it so challenging, what you're worried or frightened about that might happen. What's the worst thing about it? What does it keep you from getting in your life or keep you stuck in? And you might sense the sincerity of your longing

to wake up, to be all that you are. And try on the bodhisattva aspiration. May this situation, may these circumstances, serve to awaken my heart and mind. And just notice what that's like for you to pray that these circumstances be in service of awakening. May it awaken your compassion, your wisdom.

You can also frame the aspiration as how, as an inquiry, you know, how might these circumstances or situation awaken me. And it serves the same purpose, which is to deepen your attention to what's actually happening. Life serves to awaken us when we're willing to deepen our attention.

We'll continue, eyes closed, your eyes open, that in the Bodhisattva training, there are several practices that actually help us to deepen our attention, to break through the trance of self-other, and see past the mask, see past the conditioning to who's here.

And one of those trainings and areas is called Karuna Compassion, which is the training to be able to, instead of seeing the surface or the persona, to see really to the suffering, to the vulnerability, to our shared humanness, because as soon as you really get, oh, this person's suffering. or I'm suffering. There's a tenderness. Compassion wakes up. That's the alchemy of compassion.

And then metta, our loving kindness, the training is to see the goodness. Because when we see the goodness, when there's that namaste and really seeing the consciousness, the light, the heart, there's a natural sense of care. So with Karuna,

we're going to do a bit with each of them. with Karuna and widening the circles, we're including the vulnerability here, the vulnerability in the people that we see right around us, the vulnerability in those we don't know. And it's critical that we do that, that we keep widened the circles because we'll keep making war on anybody

that seems like an unreal other if we think it's to our advantage. That's how tribalism works. We have to widen the circles. after Ferguson, after Michael Brown was killed, soon after there was a vigil in Washington, D.C. of grieving moms. And so a few of us went to it. And it felt to me like, you know,

I could feel the waves of sorrow and horror. And something in me knew I just wanted it to be as direct and immediate as possible. And so I was really drawn to being, with the mothers and was really lucky to be able to be right close in so I could see clearly whoever was speaking and I could hear well and so on. And to hear each mother talk, as you can imagine, was completely heartbreaking and was good. To hear one mother describe how her son was killed the day before her birthday

and he had been planning her birthday party. Just like a little thing like that. Another was killed a few days before his wedding day. So real human, walking the planet about to make a big life change link up with his sweetheart. Another was killed in the Bronx

as police prevented him from receiving medical treatment that was one block, block away and to hear the mother talk about what that was like for her. There's no anguish like not being able to save your child. We need to lean in. We need to let our hearts get broken. It's a good thing. The rose says, could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

So we decondition the trance, which is our reason. We want to not look through another's eyes, but we decondition it by leaning in. There's a kind of inquiry where we just start sensing close in, you know, if somebody's having trouble and we can go inside and look through their eyes and feel with their hearts, what do they need? What do they need? And it has to be visceral. You have to really feel it to sense what a person needs so you can respond.

There's a story about a family with a young son during a powerful storm. The son cries out many times. He's scared of lightning and thunder. And each time his father gets up and calms him and tries to calm him, he leaves the room by saying, don't be scared. God's with you. So this happened several times. And finally the boy said, I know God's with me, but right now I need someone with skin on. What do they need? Okay, so this is the basic compassion training. And just to say one other thing, which is a question that came up, I just taught a relationships course and this came up for a number of people which is it feels like if I open to the suffering of others I will be flooded overwhelmed and unable to handle it and that is

truly how it can seem that we can't handle it and that's why part of the the tonguelin and the compassion practice is to begin to discover that while we let it in, it's not we're letting it in and holding onto it with an egoic self. It's not like this separate self is trying to hold it. We're letting what's here be touched and we're letting it be held by all of life. We breathe it out. You have to be able to breathe it out. It's not like you're breathing it out to get rid of it. You're breathing it out so it's held by the largeness of what we are. In the Tibetan tradition, there's a phrase called the lion's roar. And it points to this quality of confidence that comes when we realize we really can handle this life. It's like who we really are is large

and enough to handle it. Let's just do a brief reflection on this. This is the compassion practice. Let's just be real simple and just invite someone to mind that you care about that's having a hard time right now. And notice how you've been relating to it. You know what you've been noticing, how you've been responding. Just kind of an honest take on how close in you've been to it. And for some moments, see if you can step inside a little more. Looking through this person's eyes at the world, feeling with this person's heart, sensing perhaps with this person's is believing, what the worst part of it all is, of this either feeling of fear or disappointment or loss, failure.

You might sense, what is this person needing? If you're inside and inhabiting and breathing in and feeling what's going on for this person some, what's the unmet need? Is it to feel accompanied, seen, understood, loved, health. We inhabit your own fullness, but just sense the tenderness, the natural tenderness in you offering what's needed in an energetic way. You can visualize hugging the person or putting your hand on their heart or cheek, maybe saying some words, whatever resonates as an offering of your care.

And you might ask yourself, who are you when you're regarding, this being with compassion. What's your sense of your own being in these moments? This is Kateruna, this willingness to feel the reality of suffering and respond with tenderness. Meta, this other flavor of love, this other part of the Bodhisattva training,

is the capacity to see goodness. So move into that one and say that even when it's completely covered over, when we're very identified with our bad self, our angry self, our judgmental self, we want to come home to feeling and trusting our goodness, every one of us. And goodness might not be a word that resonates. It might be that our honesty, our capacity for loving. So meta is a practice that enlarges that sense within ourselves and with others and it takes intentionality.

The reason we have to practice seeing the goodness is, back to evolution, we have this negativity bias whereby we go around and, out of fear, track what's wrong in another person and in ourselves. If you've got, if you've had a hundred encounters with dogs and you've been bitten once, you're going to remember the one time, not the other 99 friendly encounters and you're going to have a bad association. So we have associations that build up. Because of the culture that we're in and because some others, some unreal others are considered really bad in some ways or less than, we have associations that we scan and we don't even realize in our mind these flash judgments of what a person's like. It comes before we know it and we have it

in our personal life. So it takes training to wake up past the trance of those very reflexively really swift closing down and making an unreal other. Story for you. you. And this is a story that took place on Christmas Day. It's written by a Unitarian minister who describes being with her family and they're doing a drive down through California. And they have to stop for a meal. She and her two children, her husband and two children, in this pretty vacant place, this diner that there's only just a few people there. And it's Christmas day. It's kind of a weird situation for them. She says, as I sat Eric, our one-year-old, in the high chair. I looked around the room and wondered, what am I doing in this place?

The rest of it was nearly empty and it was pretty depressing. My reverie was interrupted when I heard Eric squeal with glee. Hi there. Two words he thought were one. Hi there. He pounded his fat baby hands whack, whack on the metal high chair tray. His face was alive with excitement. Eyes wide, gums bared and a toothless grin. He wriggled and chirped and giggled. And then I saw the source of his merriment and my eyes could not take it in all at once. A tattered rag of a coat, obviously bought by someone eons agoed, dirty, greasy, worn, baggy pants, zipper at half-mast over a spindly body, shirt with a ring around the collar and gums as bare as erics, hair uncombed, unwashed, whiskers too short to be called a beer but way, way beyond a shadow,

and a nose so varicose, it looked like a map of New York. I was too far away to smell him, but I knew he smelled. His hands were waving in the air, flapping about on loose wrists. Hi there, baby, hi there, big boy, I see you buster. My husband and I exchanged a look that was a cross between, What do we do, and poor devil. Eric continued to laugh and answer, Hi there, every call was echoed.

I noticed waitresses' eyebrows shoot up, and several people near us went out loud. This old geezer was creating a nuisance with my beautiful baby, I shoved a cracker at Eric. He pulverized it on the tray. I whispered, why me under my breath? Our meal came and the nuisance continued. Now the old bum was shouting from across the room, do you know patty cake? Adda boy, you know peekaboo. Hey look, he knows peekaboo. Nobody thought it was cute. The guy was probably drunk in a definite disturbance. I was embarrassed. My husband, Dennis, was humiliated. Even our six-year-old said, why is that old man talking so loud? We ate in silence,

except Eric, who was running through his repertoire for the admiring applause of a skid row bum. Finally, I had enough. I turned the high chair. Eric screamed and clambered around to face his old buddy. Now I was really mad. Dennis went to pay the check and implored me to get Eric and meet me in the parking lot. I trundled Eric out of the high chair and looked toward the exit. The old man sat poised and waiting his chair directly between me and the door. Lord, just help me get out of here before he speaks to me or Eric, I headed towards the door. It soon became a parent that both the Lord and Eric had other plans. As I drew closer to the man, I turned my back, walking to sidestep him in any air he might be breathing. As I did so, Eric all the while with his eyes riveted to his best friend,

leaned far over my arms, reaching with both arms in a baby's pick-me-up position. In a split second of balancing my baby and turning to counter his weight, I came eye to eye, with the old man. Eric was lunging for him, arms spread wide. The bum's eyes both asked and implored, would you let me hold your baby? There was no need for me to respond because Eric propelled himself from my arms to the man's. Suddenly, a very old man and a very young baby were involved in a love relationship. Eric laid his tiny head upon the man's ragged shoulder. The man's eyes closed and I saw tears hover beneath his lashes. His aged hands full of grime and pain and hard labor

gently, so gently, cradled my baby's bottom and stroked his back. I stood awestruck. The old man rocked and cradled Eric in his arms for a moment and then his eyes opened and he sat squarely on mine. He said in a firm commanding voice, You take care of this baby. Somehow I managed, I will, from a throat that contained a stone.

He pried Eric from his chest unwillingly, longingly, as though he was in pain. I held my arms open to receive my baby and again the gentleman addressed me. God bless you, ma'am, you've given me my Christmas gift. I said nothing more than a muttered thanks. With Eric back in my arms I ran for the car. Dennis wondered why I was crying and holding Eric so tightly and why I was saying, my God, my God, forgive me. I remember I heard this on a Christmas Eve at church, at the Unitarian Church,

and we were all crying. I was with my family, but I remember the thought, I just started going through my mind of how many people I had in some way just put into a little box and not let them be real. You know, there's that saying to be kind, you must swerve often from our path. I mean, what would it be like if we really slowed down and looked? I mean, you might think just for a moment, just reflect and sense, you know, in the week

before you came here. Was there somebody, was there more than one somebody who you just automatically put in this other category and didn't really look to see who was there? It happens a lot. So it's out of wanting to wake up that we train, that we slow down, that we look, that we make it our business. There's some areas of blindness of those stereotyping that is so deep in our psyche that unless we're very conscious and systematic,

we're not going to wake up from it. I think of racism as one of them. It's so pervasive and so deep we need to make a deliberate effort. There are many others, and in our personal life, it's the only way we'll ever be intimate and widen the circles. So we begin to train, to see past the mask, and to, you know, in Karuna,

we're seeing what Longfellow called the secret suffering. He said that if we could see the secret suffering in our enemies, that would bridge all distance, all separation, and we attend to the goodness. Namo or namaste, I see the divine anew. When we see it in another, it helps to bring it out. That's the gift. You've probably noticed that. That's this gift we give each other.

If we have the eyes to see, because we all forget, it helps to bring it out. From Tukharami says, I could not lie anymore, so I started to call my dog God. First he looked confused, then he started smiling, then he even danced. I kept at it. Now he doesn't even bite. I'm wondering if this might work on people. So whether we're practicing loving kindness or compassion, one piece is to see the reality that's here,

but there's another piece which is then to respond. The Dalai Lama says it's not enough to care. We have to act. And you can see in the brain that the location that's correlated to compassion is right near the motor cortex. It involves action. And so that brings us to the question this morning that really wonderful question about engagement. Now, we're all always acting and a lot of times it's reacting. Okay? We're always in action. So this isn't a question of are we acting. But it's really where does the acting come from? So the purpose of the bodhisattva training

is to get us to have that waking up of the heart so that our actions come out of the caring, come out of the wisdom of our interconnectedness. And then when we care, it may be that we act in ways that are very obviously political, social justice issues, that we speak our truths in a very active overt way, It may be the small kindnesses that we offer to one another and to the people around us.

The point is that we act. And in so doing, we become more fully who we are, that blossoming that we long for to be who we are. And in that acting, we begin to create, I love the language of Martin Luther King, beloved community. Last story for you. This is Naomi Nye who is just fantastic Palestinian poet and writer and she's in the Albuquerque Airport Terminal. She learns her flight's been delayed. And then she hears an announcement.

If anyone in the vicinity of Gate Foray understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. She says, oh, Gate Foray is my own gate. I went there, an older woman in full Palestinian embroidered, dressed, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. Help, said the flight attendant, flight service person, talked to her, what's her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late, and she did this. I stooped down and put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. Shu Dao Ah, Shubiduk, Abikti, Staneshingwa, Min Batik. The minute she heard

any word, she knew however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for me. major medical treatment the next day. I said, you're fine. You'll get there. Who's picking you up? Let's call them. We called her son and I spoke to him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane and would ride next to her, southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out that of course they had 10 shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took about two hours. She was laughing

a lot by then, telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She'd pulled out a sack of homemade mamuole cookies, little powdered sugar crumbly mounds, stuffed with dates and nuts. I was offering them to all of us at the gate. To my amazement, no one declined. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the one from Laredo. We were all covered with the same powdered sugar and smiling, there's no better cookie. And then the airline broke out free beverages from huge coolers and two little children from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend, by now we were holding hands, had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green furry leaves,

such an old country traveling tradition, always carry a plant, always stay rooted somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate, once the crying of confusion stops, seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies.

I wanted to hug all those others too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. So we started with the chimps and the sense of the goodness of reaching out and holding hands that we are all in this waking up process of learning to see past our own conditioning to the being that's inside the human, the vulnerable and the beauty, the goodness, and seeing that in others. And it's out of that connectedness that we act.

And it's really, it's a journey of spirit and it makes day-to-day life a really interesting adventure. When we know that whoever we're going to engage with, this is another opportunity to see in those eyes, the one who's looking out of these eyes. It gets really interesting. It gets very, very alive, friends, strangers, whoever's here. So we'll practice our final meditation now. This is a practice that I consider the most powerful bodhisattva training I know. I hope that picture ears up.

This is the most powerful. Now, you know what that means? It's also the most challenging. It can bring up a feeling of, oh, all sorts of things. But the good news is that whatever it brings up, then the practice is also just to bring interest-friendliness presence to that. So we can learn and grow from whatever happens. Now, what I'd like to invite you to do as a way to begin this

is just to remember that in any heart practice, the starting place is just to sense your attitude, just to sense your own sincerity, because that really is what brings us here, the interest, and this willingness to not judge yourself, to be self-compassionate. Now, with that kind of prep, and I see you all kind of getting yourself all set to meditate, I'm going to ask you actually to stand up. Okay?

And then I'm going to ask you, if you will, to just turn to somebody that's nearby, and take your right hand into right hand and just hold right hands. What you're going to be doing is just eyes into eyes and notice what it's like to look somebody in the eyes after a week of, on purpose not. And the first part of this practice is to look into those eyes and just sense, just like me, this human has these human vulnerabilities that same wiring. in that same heart that gets scared, that gets self-conscious. Like me, this being has fears of failing, of not being okay.

So you're looking into these other person's eyes and seeing that, seeing that behind these eyes there's sorrow and there's loss. And just feeling what comes up in you as you let yourself recognize that this is true for this being. It's really true. and also as you look into these eyes to sense the goodness that's looking through the sentience

that this being wants to love and be loved this being wants to be all that he or she can be letting yourself take that in that this is real sensing your wish your care just sending it sending a message of care and knowing that you're also

having one sent to you. And then in whatever way you'd like to namaste or just honor or thank your partner without words, please do so. And then still standing, find another partner. Now, right hand into right hand. And this is another chance to practice on the spot, Karuna and Meta, to first just look into these eyes

and let yourself open to the vulnerability, the humanness that this person like you lives with and you can know that this person has experienced losses has experienced challenges with his or her own body

and heart and mind feelings of deficiency of being not okay feelings of loneliness of not belonging and also looking into these eyes sensing the good goodness that shines through, that glow of intelligence, the humor, the creativity, the kindness.

And as you sense, just let yourself take that in. Feeling the natural response that you feel, offering whatever wish most resonates for this person, just sending it silently as a wish or a blessing. and know you're receiving the same and then offering your namaste or thank you however you'd like without words we'll quietly come back to just close for a few moments in our seats as you arrive in stillness just to bring a very simple and gentle presence

to however you are right now just letting the life be just as it is and I'd sense in the spirit of Namaste that you can take a moment to honor or bow to the life within you. Just to appreciate the essential wakefulness, tenderness, aliveness that's right here, the light that lives through you. And to sense in this heart space those that you are just with and that this heart space can include all beings, that that wisdom in you can bow to the light that shines through all beings.

Close with the words of Thomas Merton. Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor knowledge could reach the core of reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the divine, If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more need for war, for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. Namaste and thank you.

The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.