Tara Brach - Part 1: Evolving Toward Unconditional Love

Episode Date: December 13, 2013

2013-12-11 - Part 1: Evolving Toward Unconditional Love - This two part series explores the evolutionary conditioning of fear and judgment that contracts us away from love and acceptance, and the quality of mindful presence - in relating inwardly and in communicating with others - that awakens and frees our hearts.

With the passing of Nelson Mandela and myself just finding out kind of being in front of a computer and then leaving the screen behind and sitting down and weeping and really saying, so what is this? What is it? What's the depth of this sorrow about? For me, it was this sense of his goodness and that that's what matters on this earth. His goodness really, really matters. And his example of the awakened heart gives hope. It's hope-giving. It says, here is what's possible.

Here's what can live through us human beings. So it's kind of an example of what's possible, which is our collective potential to really wake up these hearts. And so what I'd like to explore this week, this class and next, is really what we might call our evolutionary path to unconditional loving. That we're on this path as individuals and collectively to the awakened heart. And when we explore it, what we start discovering is, well, what are the primary obstacles or what in some way is challenging as we evolve?

and probably the main focus I'll take tonight is that we encounter fear that leads us into a verse of judgment. That as we awaken these hearts, as we engage in our lives, we hit fear, and we, without knowing it sometimes, go right into a verse of judgment.

And so I'm going to kind of spend some time exploring that and how the ways we pay attention can really wake us up from being caught in a smaller sense of who we are than is the truth. So we'll use evolution as a lens and because of that I'll begin with a story about evolution where a little girl asks her mom how did the human race appear? And the mother answered, well, God made Adam and Eve and they had children and so all mankind was made. And two days later, the little girl asked her father the exact same question. He answered, well, many years ago there were monkeys from which the human race evolved.

So this little girl is very confused. He goes back to her mom and says, you know, how come you told me the human race was created by God? And dad said they developed from monkeys. Mother answered, well, dear, it's very simple. I told you about my side of the family, and your father told you about his. challenges when different parts of the family have different ideas on things.

So I think a lot of us share a kind of similar sense that it's a remarkable juncture in terms of the evolution of our species. And it's sometimes described as the big squeeze. Because on one hand, we can see around us, it's just very evident that many, many people are choosing to explore practices like meditation or yoga or chigong or contemplation or prayer that very purposefully wake us up. So there is a way in which you can say right now we are participating in our own evolution. And it's exciting, it's dynamic.

Things are happening once every few days you see articles that, describe what's going on as we purposely wake up our consciousness. And yesterday was no exception in the journal of psycho-neuroendroconology, I can never say at all. It's like it's a very long journal name. Anyway, they had the very, the first time a paper has directly shown the effect of mindfulness meditation on gene expression, that it directly affects the our gene expression in terms of specifically recovering from stress. So here we are at this time. We're actually participating in the evolution of consciousness.

We're doing that, each one of us. And it's an incredibly alarming juncture of time because these incredible human brains are often in the service of greed and fear and are able to accomplish terrifying feats that nuclear and chemical warfare is now so available to so many people very, very frightening.

The devastation that we can do are consuming and our greed in terms of this planet's natural resources and what we're doing to the air and the waters. And then, of course, here we are with all this intelligence and because of greed and fear the gap between those that are wealthy and those that are impoverished, there's whiter than ever.

It's an alarming juncture, too. So this is what's called the big squeeze, and Martin Luther King described it this way. He said, our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. Nelson Mandela described himself as an optimist, and this is in the long walk to freedom. Part of what I loved about,

there's so much of his story that gives inspiration, but one of his basic stances, he says, I don't know why I'm an optimist, but I am. He says, just keep turning towards the light and taking the next step. So we have these different

forces or energies at play in our evolution, and one of the kind of descriptions of how it is in contemporary society that I found really interesting came from a story from Carl Jung. He tells himself a life-changing encounter he had with a Pueblo chief during the 20s. Maybe because this chief was aware of Jung's interest in emotions and healing, he remarked that in his view, the white man was, or white people were a bunch of sad, unhappy, tortured souls.

And he said, what's their problem? So here's how he described the problem. This chief said, he says, 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.

And then when Jung asked why this chief thought that whites were so unhappy and discontent, because he also described us as outright and sane truth, this is what the chief said. He says, they think with their heads. And so Young was startled, and he said, well, what do you think with? And at that point he said, we think here. We think here. And I share this story because I read, I just read a book called Evolving Towards Peace

by Jalalja Bonhim. It's a wonderful book, Evolving Toward Peace. And she describes, she really loves the phrase head thinking and heart thinking. And with head thinking, it's when we're disconnected from the heart. And so there's all of our logic and analysis is really used as rationalizations or justifications or ways of trying to promote our project to get more for ourselves.

Our heads, when we're in head thinking, it's all fear-driven thoughts. But when we think with our hearts, we're really informed by a deeper wisdom that remembers what matters and that remembers our connection. So head thinking and heart thinking. So again, we are at this juncture where we have these different forces of evolution playing out.

And we're also right here, for those of us that are listening here in this room and elsewhere that are joined us on the podcast, it's a season where with the holidays all sorts of different things come up. And for many of us, there's a sense of a remembering of here we all are, whatever our face is. this is some way this is a time that we can care about each other more consciously. There's an emphasis on generosity and compassion. But then you think of it, and you think of Thanksgiving and what it means, and the next day is what? Black Friday, right? Where people are trampling each other to get more goods.

It's kind of interesting, Thanksgiving and then Black Friday. And then here's Dave Barry on the season. It's a deeply religious time that each of us observes in his own way by going to the mall of his choice. After September 11th, when so many of us were frightened by what we knew was going to be a spiral of retaliation and ongoing global violence, one of the legends that went viral, and many of you've heard it, It was a Cherokee legend where a grandfather, old grandfather speaking to his grandson about the violence and cruelty in the world. And he said in each human heart there are two wolves battling one another. One is fearful and angry and the other's understanding and kind.

The young boy looked intently into his grandfather's eyes and asked, which one will win? And the grandfather smiled and quietly said, whichever one we choose to feed. Now, I've been kind of reflecting on that story, and in a way I have a bit of a different spin because I don't think of these forces of evolution that are playing on us as good or bad. And I don't think of them as much as fighting, although they are in quite a dance. So one of the ways that I think of the, you know, this head-thinking and heart-thinking or the wolf that's fear-based, and then that which is more understanding, kind of like the very physicality of our brain, like concentric circles, that we have embedded a very primitive nervous system and brain that is based on fight-flight freeze, that's designed to detect where a threat is and designed to react. It's not bad. It's part of surviving. So it's part of us. And we've evolved other capacities that are actually on top of it. If you think of the brain,

This is Dan Siegel, he does it this way with a fist. He says, here's the brain stem and here's the limbic system, all the primitive parts of the brain, and they're enfolded inside the frontal cortex. So we have the frontal cortex that reminds us of a bigger picture, that's able to be mindful, aware of what's happening without judgment, that has perspective, and actually a compassion network that can really sense belonging.

And it's unfolding. There's communication. When there's real danger, the limbic system knows it and tells us, and we have to act. But when we freak out, when we get into head thinking and we've lost contact with the heart, we flip our lid. Okay? And I think that this is Dan Siegel. He's a psychologist and brilliant.

I think that's such a great expression. So the brain's doing all this wild stuff, but it's not being informed by the heart. It's just the limbic system, the nerve has hijacked the brain. So a way that I think is really useful of considering it is that with these two wolves, what we're really saying is we have a fearful part of us that is absolutely wired to defend us and to notice danger. And it's doing in a ways that no longer serve our evolving being. Does that make sense?

That the limbic system gets activated in ways that no longer solve our evolving being. And the first step in transforming this is to more and more bring awareness to the parts of ourselves that need attention. Now, I love the question, what is between me and unconditional love? and if you close your eyes for a moment because this is the first step in transforming the relationship between these wolves and having the more awake wolf

really be the seat of our consciousness the first step is to begin to bring the fearful wolf into mindfulness the key way of feeding the more evolved wolf, resting in an enlarged sense of our being, is bringing mindfulness and care to this early conditioning that's now outmoded. So I invite you to reflect for a moment and bring to mind someone who's important to you that you care about,

someone with whom you feel some separation and would like more closeness. So this is not a person where you're having, where you have traumatic split up. This is a person who's important to you, but in some way you're stuck in some sense of separateness. You feel a distance. Your heart isn't as available in some way. And ask that question, just ask yourself, what is between me an unconditional love in this relationship? Just ask the question, just shine a light on what's between you and unconditional loving.

What's stopping you? What's stopping you from feeling love or letting in love or expressing love? You might ask yourself, what is most asking for acceptance here? What needs attention? And you might notice if there's some fear in there that's hard to hang out with, maybe some feeling of unworthiness, unloavability, unsafe. For now you're just shining a light on what is between me and unconditional love. Is there some judgment that's woven in there, that something's wrong with you, that's

part of what's getting between you and loving? Is there a sense of flawedness? Or is there a judgment something's wrong with the other person? Is this just an honest reflection right now? You're not going to do anything with it right now. But the first thing, step as we evolve ourself to unconditional love is to look at really what's in the way. Can you sense the fear that's there? The judgment, the sense of something's wrong with me or something's wrong with you. You might consider this basic teaching that the boundary to what you can accept is the boundary to your freedom. It's the boundary to your capacity to love freely. So what's the inner experience that's hard to accept in this?

Is it the fear that comes up? We'll be coming back to this reflection. Later you'll have a chance to work a little more with this. Because again, as I mentioned, the purpose of tonight really is to sense we are all of us in this process of this heart awakening. It's happening. And yet, to some degree,

if we're feeling not free, there's some arrest, some developmental arrest where we're getting stuck. What's going on? And for most of us, if we start investigating, we're going to start sensing that there's some deep judgment of ourselves or others, and even underneath that fear, that there's something we're not able to accept and open to. So whether we're looking at war going on globally, or whether we're looking at a lack of intimacy with other people, or whether we're looking at a sense of our own shame,

the root of it is some unprocessed fear. There's some unprocessed fear that we haven't hung out with. And the path to evolution, if we want to really evolve ourselves, and I think pretty much everybody knows the Gandhi, quote, to be the change we seek. I think the starting place is that we deepen our dedication to exploring that averse of judgment when we really point it towards ourselves or somebody that's ongoing in our lives.

I mean, if we want world peace, how can we talk about it if we don't make peace with ourselves and with the people we live with our work with? how can we do it so we start here we start right right here and there's an attitude that is absolutely essential

if we want to begin to wake up out of a verse of judgment and by the way just to define terms when I talk about judgment I'm not talking about the kind of discriminations that say oh this person is safe to tell

a secret to are the discrimination that says, oh, this person is drinking a lot and is actually hurting themselves and hurting me, something needs to happen. We're not talking about wise discrimination. We're talking about averse of judgment where we make another person bad or wrong. So that's a really important distinction to say because we need discriminating wisdom. And as we'll explore, a verse of judgment never helps. Never helps. But the crucial attitude I was about to say

as we go further in tonight into looking into how do we work with averse of judgment is to not add judgment to it. Do not judge the judging. And if you are judging the judging, don't judge yourself for judging the judging. And on and on it goes. It gets really tricky

because a lot of us have come to the conclusion that we're incredibly judgmental people, and there's a real aversion to it. So that is often the starting place, is to sense that it's not that I'm a judgmental person. Judgment has been conditioned into our psyche for hundreds of thousands of years. You know, we have been living, humans have lived in tribes for hundreds of thousands of years. only the last 6,000 years that we've actually moved into settlements and other ways of being. We carry our conditioning forward.

Another research piece. Okay, the first research piece of tonight was saying that yesterday the first study came out that meditation affects our genetic expression. Well, another study, a neuroscience study that came out on December 1st, showed a mechanism of transfer from our ancestors. It traced how genetic memories could be carried through generations by looking at the DNA of mice. Now think of what that means,

that a mouse that had a traumatic experience passes on to its babies, even if the experience happened before the babies were conceived, through genetic memory passes on evidence of that trauma. That says a huge amount about what each of us is made of the experience of past generations. That's a really big deal. If your past generations went through trauma and many of ours did, it's in our nervous system and we think that we're overly fearful or overly sensitive

or overly rageful or overly this or that, we've inherited it. Well, it's the same thing with judgment. part of the way tribes have worked, I mean tribes, for hundreds of thousands of years, the tribes are kind of isolated and to survive, you were totally dependent on your tribe. And they were kind of homogeneous. So their adaptive strategies, the way they worked, was they had a firm belief in us and them that was firmly wired into the brain. There's us.

You had to know who us was and you had to know who them was to survive. There was good and bad and right and wrong and judgment was used to ensure cohesion of the tribe. It was a survival strategy. Well, what happened when we shifted into more of an egoic mentality, where we became it's us and them, but also self and other, and more and more of our sense of identity was wrapped around an individual self? Well, we carried forward all that judging, all of that us and, them, but into a more egoic structure, which actually has been quite deadly because we now

use judgment. We point it inward. So there's me and my inner life and my inner life's not okay. We judge inner life. So that's a fragmentation. And then itself and other, me, I'm not okay or you're not okay. And then there's me and that other ethnicity or religion or race and they're not okay. We have all these fragmentations that we now apply judgment to.

Consider the power of feeling judged. You know, some of us think, oh, I'm really sensitive to judgment. That's almost a joke when I hear that. Now, sensitive to judgment. Well, again, think of our hundreds of thousands of years in tribes. If you were judged, you could be banished. Not fitting in, according to the rights and wrongs of the tribe, meant that you wouldn't survive.

The word human, Jalajah describes this, has one meaning that belongs to the tribe. Like our humanness, our deserving to survive, means that we're not judged as bad. So we know what it's like. It's easy to see why we have a strong need

to feel right. Have you noticed how important that is to feel right? You know that phrase, do you want to be right or do you want to feel love? You know that phrase? Some of you? Well, I actually think you might hear that and go, hmm, I'm not sure. Because think of it that do I want to feel love or do I want to be right? It's like, do I want to feel love or do I want to feel safe from rejection? Because being right kind of gives us an armor where we're safe from rejection. Maybe that feels more immediate

than feeling loved. So we feel attracted to people who agree with us. There are tribe. People that think like us or politics like us or religion. You know what's like when people don't agree politically, you really all of a sudden go, ooh, you know. It's too bad, but we very quickly have these flash experiences of people that either have a sense of, oh, like me, I like, or not like me. There's a little girl talking to her teacher about whales and the teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human

because even though a very large, it's a large mammal, it's throat small. A little girl stated that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Irritated, the teacher reiterated that a whale could not swallow a human. It was physically impossible. The little girl said, well, when I get to heaven, I will ask Jonah. The teacher asked, well, what if Jonah went to hell? A little girl said, well, then you ask them. So, judgment, and it does not feel good.

Talking about whales, in this recent issue of the New Yorker, you've got a cartoon with this whale reading a book and it's going, oh, come on now, I wasn't that terrible. Did you get it? I thought it was cute. So the more separation and fear that we feel, the more we get into averse of judging and feeling judged, the more fear we have,

the more we're going to go around feeling like people are judged, judging us. We're going to project it, imagine it. And another New Yorker, there was a man sitting in a chair looking really angry and really grim, and everybody else in the room was looking fearful. And here's what they were thinking. The woman was thinking, was it something I said? And the dog was thinking, was it something I buried? And the cat was thinking, was it something I dragged in and the parrot was thinking, was it something I repeated? But you get it, right? That we each take personally when we're fearful judgment. It's a really big deal. The Buddha said that people with strong opinions just go around bothering each other. So judgment is the mental

aggression that separates and it violates the one that it's aimed at. and it contracts the perpetrator. When we're the judgeer, it contracts us from wholeness. And in a societal way, when we lock into, as we do, the stereotyping and the judging of different people who are people we perceive as different, it blocks empathy.

It blocks empathy. I want to read you, Nicholas Christoph, the columnist, article, Where's the Love that came out around Thanksgiving? I was so impacted by it. I want to share a piece of it with you because it has to do about how we relate to others that are different. He said, when I've written recently about food stamp recipients, the uninsured and prison inmates, I've had plenty of pushback from readers. One reader writes, well, if kids are going hungry, it's because the parents aren't upholding their responsibilities. The reader

in Washington bluntly suggested taking children from parents and putting them in orphanages. Jim asked, why should I have to subsidize someone else's child? How about personal responsibility? You procreate, you provide. After a recent column about an uninsured man who delayed seeing a doctor about a condition that turned out to be colon cancer, many readers noted that he's a lifelong smoker and had it coming to him. One said, what kind of lame brain dufus is this guy? and like it's our fault that he couldn't afford to have himself checked out? Such scorn seems widespread based on comments I get on my blog and Facebook page,

as well as on polling on government policy. At root, these attitudes reflect a profound lack of empathy. A Princeton University professor, Susan Fisk, has found that when research subjects hooked up to neuroimaging machines look at photos of the poor and homeless, their brains often react as if they are seeing things, not people. I'm going to read that again. When research subjects are hooked up to neuroimaging machines

and they look at photos of the poor and homeless, their brains often react as if they're seeing things, not people. Her analysis suggests that Americans sometimes react to those living in poverty, not with sympathy, but with revulsion. And I could go on, it's a longer article. So I wanted to share that with you because aversive judgment cuts us off, it turns into head thinking, cuts us off from the heart. And when another person isn't real, if another person is an object, not only might we not

care about them, we can kill them. Judgment is the beginning of war. is an evolutionary holdover that worked in tribal times to ensure cohesion. But when something's there for hundreds of thousands of years, and we've only for 6,000 years been in changed circumstances, it sticks around in our nervous system, in our memory. So it's still there, but it's arresting our development. So the inquiry is how do we be the change? How do we start to really bring a committed attention when we notice judgment arising? I read a story Ram Dass told. Ram Dass many of you will remember as really one of the, another one from this generation, great spiritual teacher. He describes

his relationship with his father that for most of his life, he judged his father, his father, his father judged him, But as his father approached death, there was kind of a shift. And he said, I finally allowed him to be who he was instead of trying to make him into who I thought he should be. And he stopped trying to make me into who he thought I should be. And we became friends. Another man in our community in a similar way, even with more, described more hostility. He hated his father through his life.

He had a real revulsion and a huge amount of, judgment that his father had been a horrible father and real clinging to wanting wanting him different and kind of rage at him and his father was he says was very indifferent and he could be a rageful person so his father died and at the funeral home he looked at him and he in some way saw something not just that he was peaceful because he was a corpse but he saw he could see him in a way that he hadn't been able to see when this father had been active in his human form. He kissed him on the forehead and he said, I love you. And then he said, this could only be grace, pure grace, because he

described that in that moment he saw the enormous weight and burden of having lived a life locked into that aversion, that judgment, that wanting him to be different. And he said he saw the enormity of that suffering and in seeing it, it just dropped. He said he found a lightness, a space and a compassion that he couldn't have imagined. There is a saying, it came actually out of a movie called The Interpreters, that vengeance, and that includes judgmental, averse of thoughts, vengeance is a lazy form of grief. I think what that means really, is that when we lock into this more primitive kind of part of our system, we lock into vengeance or averse of judgment, it's lazy because we're really not feeling an opening

to the vulnerability that we need to open to in order to keep evolving. We're not opening to the grieving or the fear. And it's only when we open to that that we can really flower that our hearts can open. Any Dillard, the writer says, write as if you are dying, or as if you are writing for an audience consisting solely of dying people. That's her advice to writers. I think it's the same thing for speaking and relating and living. You know, if we can remember, everybody we meet is struggling hard. Everyone we need is in a body that often has a lot of pain in it, our will. Everyone we meet is encountering losses and living with uncertainty.

If we could remember that we could be talking to this person for the very last time, if we had that perspective, we would be more dedicated to saying, well, what matters? And we deepen that inquiry. What is between me and love and the question? moment, it would become right in the forefront, what is between me and unconditional love? Right now. And always, when we ask that question, unless we're already inhabiting unconditional love, when we ask that question, it will shine a light on the places of fear or grief that we haven't been accepting. So let's deepen the inquiry together. Let me ask you to, again,

let your attention go inward. And again, to let someone come to mind, a person that you know there's some judging that goes on with, someone close, but where you get stuck with some adversiveness. And go ahead and go into a situation where you find yourself caught up in judging. Let yourself play out the content, what the person is doing wrong, what's so bad about it. Then turn your attention to the judging place in you and just sense what it feels like. Sense who you are, your sense of yourself when you're in the shape of a judgeer. What does yourself feel like? What does your heart feel like?

Your body? Do you like yourself? Just to get familiar with this is the space, this is the shape, this is the felt sense, when living inside the belief that somebody is wrong or bad. This is what it's like. And just take a few nice full breaths and remind yourself of something you appreciate about this person. And you have the flexibility to do that. You can think of this person and think of when this person is happy or is expressing their kindness or love towards you.

And when I say happy, really happy. just more free inside. When this person is entertained, something you appreciate about the person and just feel yourself appreciating, maybe even letting that person know that you're appreciating them. Just imagine that for a moment. And again, turn the attention to the who you are experience. Like, what's your sense of yourself when you're appreciating? What's your heart feel like? And do you like yourself? Now, what happens if you let yourself feel the appreciation, but include in a discriminating way what you're seeing about the person, what might be useful to be noticing, where that person could be doing things in a more healthy way,

but see, it could be discriminating without aversion. You're appreciating the person. It's like you're living in that larger space. You're letting yourself notice where things could be different. you're letting both be there. Just notice what happens. Take a full breath. We're going to come back to this at the very end for our final meditation.

Okay, so here's the challenging piece that when we're caught in feeling averse of judgment towards somebody, especially a close person because there's a lot of charge with close people, those are the moments that's very hard to just flip into appreciation.

That's really hard to do. The question is, in the moments that we're stuck, how can we deepen our attention to what we're calling the fearful wolf, the part of us that's really caught? And in some way, find some more space. And by way of example, I'd like to share with you where I got really caught in a kind of judgmental stuck place early on in my relationship. with Jonathan, my husband. And maybe just to give you a first kind of an image, imagine this couple sitting in a living room, and the guy says, you know, if I ever get into a vegetative state,

please pull the plug. And she reaches over the TV set and yanks the plug, you know. That's just giving you a prelude to my zone of judgment. But Jonathan, for Jonathan, it's not TV, but it's Jonathan's relationship with the cyber world. I very early on discovered that he lived a lot with a screen in front of him many hours. He was kind of plugged into something.

It wasn't always a big screen. He goes, you know, there's iPads and iPhones too. But little plugs in your ears, but he was plugged in a lot. And so, you know, at times he assured me he wasn't looking into the screen. He was really meditating, but screen just happened to be there. Anyway, so my judgment was, oh, my God, he's addicted to being plugged into, you know, a virtual reality. And, you know, we'd be out for a walk in the evening out in a field we go to. And I'd be, you know, we'd be looking up and I'd wonder if something was a planet or a star,

and he'd pull out his new app that had a constellation thing on it. And, you know, we'd be talking and I'd say something like, I wonder whether it's going to be raining tomorrow morning, whether I'll be able to go for my walk, and in a moment he's out there with, you know, he's pulled out, you know, he's talking to Syria again. So I'm thinking, you know, eventually it's going to be me or Siri, right? Okay. So the problem is that we could joke around about it sometimes,

but couldn't really talk, in some way, the aversion, and I'm being light right now, was enough so that on some level I felt like I was always kind of putting them down for it. And that is what averse of judgment is. And as happens for me a lot, it came to a head on a Thursday morning because I had just on that Wednesday night, it's a little embarrassing to say this, given a talk on compassion.

And how, you know, in Buddhism, the heart of Buddhism is compassion and the heart of compassion is compassion for ourselves. So I said, okay, compassion for this other, here's this judging going on, and what's driving it? How is my leg in a trap? You know, what's the worst thing? How come this bothers me so much?

And so I kind of started going under the judging. You know, I said, okay, if I wasn't judging him, what would I have to feel? And underneath it was fear that if he's plugged in, if he's really caught him being plugged in, he's not going to really want to be intimate and available and present with me. But it didn't stop there.

went to then underneath that a sense of hurt like, oh, and maybe I'm not that interesting or worthwhile, or maybe he's not going to really want to be spending time with me, really spending time. He'll always want to have that back door being plugged in. So I was getting to the layer of vulnerability and fear that's when I say the boundary to what you can accept is the boundary to your freedom. And that's the place that felt unacceptable. Like that's the place I was running from. It was easier to judge him for being plugged in

than sit in that place of, oh, maybe I'm not being chosen. Maybe he won't want to be really close with me. He'll choose that. Of course, part of what flashed into my mind was my dad who was very, very busy an attorney. He had many, many social action causes. He adored us. And he was always juggling a lot of things.

So that was part of that insecure place. So I got home and this time I could talk about it. And rather than there being a put-down, I was actually sharing the vulnerability underneath the judgment. And that made all the difference because he could listen and he could say, yeah, I know I'm working on not going online. And, you know, he could share where he was working on it.

And he could also share with me how he would feel disappointed and sometimes deserted when I go into my busyness, which is every bit a trance and a workaholic thing and a type A thing that would, where he'd walk into the room and I wouldn't even look up. So it was worse in a way. But he could share that. And the bottom line is that it took me from being. in that place of the fearful wolf with the averse of judgment, by going into the vulnerability and opening to where I wasn't really accepting a fear, allowed some space. So there was compassion.

There was compassion for the judge. I wasn't a bad person for judging. It was just what was happening. And no longer, I could see him and see where he's working on something. And also it's not such a big deal and it didn't have to do with me. There was more space. So I share this example and how important it is to not judge the judge. That's often the starting place. And also to say that I've had many rounds where it would come up again and again, but each time I get more and more familiar with resting in the place that had more space than being the judge. But then you might ask, well, what if somebody's, you know, that's an example where actually, you know, he wasn't doing it to push you away and it's not such a big addiction.

And what about if you're with somebody who's really emotionally abusive? How do you then work with it? Exactly the same way. And it's probably going to be harder, but exactly the same way. Aversive judgment does not help to control somebody. If you think of a time that somebody judged you aversively, you'll know that your response was probably defense and anger. It wasn't to cooperate and change, right? It doesn't help. You think of people that have, you know, had really, really difficult situations, like how do

you let go of the aversive judgment if somebody's alcoholism is ruining your family or somebody's abusive or like Nelson Mandela, you know, for 27 years was it, 29 years, being, you know, abused, tortured, jailed. And somehow he worked with his inner life in a way that he could come out of it and not only invite his white jailer to his inauguration, but begin peace and reconciliation proceedings that were absolutely a model for our world. It's possible. No matter how bad the situation is, it's possible to evolve in a way that we don't live in our adverse judgment, but rather we bring our care and our mindfulness to

that place with kindness, with care, to free our identity to live somewhere bigger. Rumi says Be ground be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are you've been stony for too many years

try something different surrender so we're going to close with a short practice and the surrender here is to surrender that grip on the averse of judgment and open to what's here so this final practice

find a way to sit so that you can be awake, relaxed, comfortable. Take a moment to arrive. Let this be a gift to yourself. There's something very powerful when we really care about healing our globe, the earth, when we care about peace, and we sense in our own life, okay, if I care,

it's possible to wake up some, to wake up some from the ways that I'm at war with myself or others. That's possible. So just to feel your own intention to be more awake around judgment, the sincerity about awakening your heart. Repeat the steps we've done before to sense another, it could be the same person where there's a person you care about but there's some distance and sub-judgment involved. and to again ask, what is between me an unconditional loving,

where there's no boundary to what I can accept, that vast heart, what's between me and that vast open-heartedness? And sense within you that the fearful wolf, the part that's afraid, that's hurt, that doesn't trust, whatever it is that you've been moving away from, that you don't want to really sit down in, judgment takes us away from that, but just take some moments to sense right into where that vulnerability is,

sense what that place in you most needs. What is the place underneath the judgment most need? What does it need from you right now? For many of us it can be helpful just to put our hands on our hearts, And just sense that just in a way with that image of the fist and the frontal cortex over the limbic system, the thumb, you can sense that this larger heart of yours is holding the place that sends out blame, is holding that vulnerability with care, that you're witnessing, holding, offering kindness to that place that's vulnerable. that over these hundreds of thousands of years that vulnerability needed to make its expression

and blame, but you can hold that vulnerability. You can evolve yourself by holding that vulnerability right now and seeing how deeply you can offer it care. How deeply you can offer a forgiving, loving energy to the place in you that's afraid. sense how much space and tenderness is in this heart that can hold the life that's here so that when you start imagining and sensing the other person that they too are part of this ocean of heart imagining how it is to have no boundary to what the heart accepts

knowing that if that open-heartedness is truly there and awake you can find intelligent ways to navigate to take care of yourself, protect yourself where need be, but your heart doesn't have to be closed. Your heart can be open and tender. As Rumi said, be ground, be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are. You've been stony for too many years. Try something different.

Surrender. 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.