Tara Brach - Part 1 - Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame (2019-04-17)

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Part 1 - Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame (2019-04-17) - Rumi invites us to find the barriers we've erected against love, and a universal one is blame. These three talks are an invitation to relax those barriers, and to open our hearts to our inner life and to all beings. Part I focuses on chronic self-judgment; Part II on the places of deep self-condemnation, and Part III on where we have locked into anger, blame or hatred of others. Each includes guided reflections that can support us in directly awakening beyond the confining thoughts and feelings of blame. 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. Namaste and welcome. I'd like to begin tonight with a story that's written by Zen teacher Ed Brown, who was one of the founders of the Greens restaurant, many of you know of in San Francisco. and when he became a cook in the Zen Center, his whole life story came into focus as he was making this effort to create the perfect biscuits. So here's the story. When I first started cooking at Tasahara, I had a problem.

I couldn't get my biscuits to come out the way they were supposed to. I'd follow the recipe and try variations, but nothing worked. These biscuits just didn't measure up. Growing up, I had made two kinds of biscuits. One was from Bisquick and the other from Pillsbury. For the Viscuit biscuits, you added milk to the mix and then you blob the dough and spoonfuls onto the pan. You didn't even need to roll them out.

The biscuits from Pelsbury came in a kind of cardboard can. You wrapped the can on the corner of the counter and it popped open. Then you twisted the can open more, put those pre-made biscuits on a pan and bake them. I really like those Pillsbury biscuits. Isn't that what biscuits should taste like? Mine just weren't coming out right. It's wonderful and amazing the ideas we get about what biscuits should taste like or what a life should look like. Compared to what? Canned biscuits from Pelsbury? Leave it to beaver?

People who ate my biscuits could extol their virtues eating one after another but to me these perfectly good biscuits just weren't right. Finally one day came a shifting into place and awakening, not right compared to what. Oh my word, I've been trying to make canned Pillsbury biscuits. Then came in an exquisite moment of actually tasting my biscuits without comparing them to some previously hidden standard. They were weedy, flaky, buttery, sunny, earthy, real as Rilkes-Somit proclaims. They were incomparably alive, present, vibrant, in fact much more satisfying than any memory. These occasions can be so stunning, so liberating, these moments when you realize

your life is just fine as it is, thank you. Only the insidious comparison to a beautifully prepared, beautifully packaged product made it seem insufficient. Trying to produce a biscuit, a life, with no dirty bowls, no messy feelings, no depression, no anger was so frustrating. Then savoring, actually tasting the present moment of experience. How much more complex and multifaceted. How unfathomable, a thought, a feeling, ants crawling on the ground and sunlight. As Zen students, we spent years trying to make it look right, trying to cover the faults, conceal the messes. We knew what the Bisquick Zen student looked like. Calm, buoyant, cheerful, energetic, deep, profound. Our motto, as one of my friend said was, looking good. We've all done it, trying to look good as husband, wife, or parent,

trying to attain perfection, trying to make pilsberry biscuits. Well, to heck with it, I say, wake up and smell the coffee. How about some good old home cooking, the biscuits of today? Handle each ingredient with sincerity and wholeheartedness. The results will take care of themselves, savor them. So I've always loved this story. You know, one of the great Zen patriarchs describe liberation as being without anxiety about non-perfection. And there is a tremendous freedom whether we think of it as I'm not okay and you're not okay and that's okay or whether we think of it as these are the biscuits of the moment and why compare? I mean, what if we had even just for a moment that glimmer of what would it be like?

And I really invite you to check it out to be without anxiety about non-perfection. Like this moment and you might just sense it, this moment, whatever your perceived imperfections are, flaws, what if there was really no anxiety about it? It was just, okay, it's like this. There's nothing fundamentally wrong. Even a glimmer is a taste of freedom. Because we have huge conditioning. In the Buddhist psychology they say that comparing mind is the last part of our obscurations,

our confusions to go. we are constantly comparing and we compare towards a standard. We all go around with these standards of how should I look, how should my body look, how should I be feeling, what emotion should I be having, how should I be responding appropriately, how should my life look, what should I accomplish? We have these ideas always, these Pillsbury Biscuits in our mind and we go through so many moments. without even knowing it, but evaluating ourselves and feeling like we aren't matching up. And this has become so clear in my life that it's probably one of the themes I pretty much

touch on every time I sit and meditate in my own experience and when I speak with you. delusion that we should be different and the torment we create for ourselves when we're not meeting a standard. Now I'll pause here and say there's a real difference between our judgments or our verse of judgments and putting ourselves down for not meeting a standard and what you might call wise discrimination which says oh well when I eat that kind of food I end up feeling really sick. Or when I speak to my child like this it just creates defensiveness or whatever, that's wise discrimination. But what I'm talking about right now is the suffering of chronically

judging not okay, should be different. So I often quote Rumi, it's become one of my most central quotes where he really teaches and he says, that our task is not to seek for love, but to seek for the barriers that we've created against love. And one of the biggest barriers that we create against love is this habit of always thinking we should be different and of blaming ourselves for how we are. How many of you does that resonate as a real barrier? Yeah, okay, I should be flailing my hands around too here.

Furthermore, we're addicted to our barrier of blame and I want to look at that but first I'll step back because to awaken and free ourselves we do need to wake up from this ongoing creation of this barrier of blame and we aim the blame inward and we aim the blame outward and it doesn't matter either way averse of blame closes our heart. So, this class in the next two after, I'm going to, I wanted to give a little more time to do kind of a deeper dive into this. We'll look at how to let go of the barriers of blame. Many people call it forgiveness, forgiving meaning to let go of the barrier, to let go of the

blaming. Again, we're not letting go of wise discrimination, we're letting go of that closed, tight-fisted heart. So the way we'll do it is this, tonight we'll be looking at the kind of chronic daily blaming, the chronic sense of not enough. And next week we'll look at where we're holding deep self-aversion and self-contempt where there's something that's really not forgiven, a deeper level. And then on the third week we'll look at how we're holding others in contempt, how we

put others down, blame and judge them in ways that actually keep us from loving in a free way in our lives. So those will be the three weeks and there'll be practices that if you feel like, okay, this is a really good time in my life to do a deeper dive on this, there'll be practices that you can do even if you do just a little bit each day that will allow you If you feel real sincere about it, to bring it more above the line into awareness and find some freedom. A couple of years ago, I did a radio interview and it was on Mindful Leadership.

And I was talking about this incessant evaluation of how am I doing and feeling like we're falling short and how much it really constricts our creativity. You know, it's just like there is a heaviness and a tightness to it that really does not allow us to think outside the box as well, to have as much clarity, to respond compassionately. And the interviewer expressed a concern and the concern was this, that if I put aside my shoulds, if I put aside my anxiety about non-perfection, then I won't improve. I won't be able to improve myself. I'll regress, I'll actually get worse.

You know, I'll get really lazy fare. You know, it's like my biscuits will be full of GMOs and sugar and junk, you know, that idea. So it felt like there's some good reason to be anxious about imperfection. It kind of motivates us to keep trying to get better. So I think this is a really important point to slow down and look at because unless we really get how hooked we are, I'm putting ourselves down, we won't be able to let go of it. So there's a reason that most of us hold tight to blaming ourselves.

And you know we blame ourselves for our addictive habits for the ways we fall short as parents, for the ways we're unable to be intimate with others, we blame ourselves and we're afraid that if we stop we won't change. Does that resonate for you? Seems some not. So the inquiry is, do you feel like if you drop the shoulds and if you drop the I'm not enough and the blame that you'd continue to grow, to serve, to contribute? And so as I asked that, there's probably a wisdom place in you that goes, yeah, I'd keep going, I'd probably be a lot healthier, but there's an emotional body that when it actually comes down to it is really hooked because it's afraid, it doesn't know another way.

It thinks that, you know, and this is the emotional brain, that we will lose control if we, as soon as we start being gentle and kind to ourselves, we'll lose it. And as I was reflecting on this talk, I reminded me of a story that I share now and then about an executive in a large company who he's really admired for his energy and his drive. He has one embarrassing weakness and that is that when he, each time he goes to the presence office for his monthly report, he wets his pants and that is really embarrassing. So the kindly president offered him to go see a urologist at the company's expense and when he appeared again the following month he did it again.

He wet his pants again and the president said, well, didn't you see the urologist? And he goes, nope, nope, I went to a mindfulness class and instead, and I'm cured. He said, I no longer feel embarrassed. You get the idea, right? You know, it's all well and fine to say, oh, come and accept myself just as I am and this is all the teachings that we get. But what might happen? You know, we might get worse.

And from a developmental perspective, self-blame, you know, averse of judgment, should anxiety, anger, it arises from the limbic system and it's our primary tool of the ego to control ourselves, to act in ways to promote ourselves. And what I've seen and probably you all can intuit is that the more we grew up in an atmosphere where there was criticism, the more we internalize it that both creates that sense of something's wrong with me and we adopt that limbic mechanism to control ourselves. We get very self-critical. So there's huge attention around making mistakes, around not looking good, around being pushed away by others, how we look, how we work, sports,

everything. It never enough is really it. I often think of that dog on the psychiatrist's couch who says it's always good dog this and good dog that, but is it ever a great dog? You know, it's like not quite enough, you know, that kind of thing. So the suffering of always making ourselves not enough, we can't really be as authentic as we want with others because there's that undercurrent of sensing they'll find out, you know, they'll see the flawedness. We can't quite take it. take the risks that we would take is the fear of failure so much. Just we don't want to expose our badness.

I remember with my son growing up and he had a fear of not being good at things and he wouldn't take on any sport or hobby that he didn't think he'd be really, really good at. Which made me really sad because I wanted him to go and experiment with things and he was really careful about it. This fear of mistakes. And we know that a lot of the humor in our society actually focuses on people's mistakes because it relieves of sort of when other people make mistakes, which reminded me of, this is from Anne Landers years ago and she says these are real answers given to questions

on Bible knowledge. The first one is Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. The Seventh Commandment is, Thou shalt not admit adultery. Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption. David fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in biblical times. A Christian should have only one wife.

This is called monotony. Jews had trouble throughout their history with unsympathetic genitals, and it goes on and on and on. But, you know, That's pretty good, right? But think about how many slapstick movies or how many jokes and if you look at the essence of the joke, it's somebody messing up on something but it just releases this, we have this deep

fear of mistakes of not doing it right. So in the deep way it's a losing proposition because we cannot judge ourselves in the to improvement. It doesn't work. I remember one student who had worked for years, she had spent years traveling around Asia and working with women who were at the extreme poverty level and she had a chronic feeling that she wasn't doing enough. And I remember hearing her say that and I thought, whoa, you know, because I mean she She was such a model of really giving her life and finally went to therapy and her therapist

asked the question that you probably have on your mind which is, well what is enough? But that changed her. And it's a really important question for us because we have this standard that's impossible. We have standards that are impossible no matter how much we sense well there's just no amount of service or accomplishment or whatever that can make us think we've met our standard. When we're caught in the deficient self, there's a mistrust of others. I just sometimes describe it when we're only seeing our own egoic defenses and wants and so on and seeing ourselves as flawed, we see that's all we see of others.

We don't see past the mass to the being that's there. And so there's this entire atmosphere of something's wrong. And if we think back to the Garden of Eden, which is one of the formative myths and there are many many interpretations, but original sin is a pretty big one in our culture like that there's some basic badness. And one of the ways I think of it is kind of an evolutionary frame is that, like that like all creatures, we're designed to survive. And so we have these limbic systems of fight, flight and freeze.

And the more self-aware we are, the more we end up judging our limbic reactivity. We don't like our anger, we don't like our depression, we don't like our hurt, we don't like our insecurity. We sometimes call that the second arrow. We have the limbic, the first arrow of all these unpleasant feelings coming up. and then the second arrow which kind of locks us in, just jams it in, is there's something wrong with me for this. That's the ego that leaves the garden because we're no longer embedded, we're now self-aware

and not liking ourselves, original sin. And it kind of goes like this, that the limbic system says something's wrong and the ego says something's wrong with me and it also says something's wrong with you. But probably more basically with me because our first attention is in that me sense. The limbic says, ooh, this feels bad and the ego says oh I'm bad. Check it out. It's so interesting. I often find that when I'm in a really bad mood and turn to myself it's because I've

been feeling bad like there's bad feelings and then in some way it's attribute. attributed to a bad self, somebody that's owning the feelings. So the deep suffering here of this chronic judgment that's daily, in some way this trance of unworthiness, we're not necessarily aware of it, but there's some sense of not meeting a standard, is that it's a developmental arrest in terms of our evolution, that we're caught with the limbic system playing out and then a part of the limbic system or version saying, this is bad. We're caught in a kind of limbic looping.

And as long as we're believing the thoughts I'm bad and identified with the feelings, we can't wake up to a larger sense of who we are. That judgment obscures the light that's here. So this is actually evolution. I mean it's just the way humans have evolved to have these reactivity and then condemn ourselves for it and it's not the end of the evolutionary story. We have the capacity and it's built into our nervous system. We have the capacity to become aware of that, to go meta larger than that and see it, witness

it, oh, down on myself and to step out of the looping. We have that capacity and we actually have the capacity for mindfulness and compassion that can wake us up out of that looping trance of something's wrong with me. And it takes a real dedication. So I want to talk about the process of dedicating ourselves to that healing and then practice some with you. And if I go back to my own experience, this is probably one of the landmark awakenings in my life was in college when I caught on to how chronically behind the lines there was

a belief of something's wrong with me. And I remember it really explicitly, just how it happened with a very close friend telling me that she was learning how to be her own best friend and me going, whoa, I am the opposite of my own best friend. I am constantly on my case and it began very very blaring to me how much I was down on myself as a friend and as a daughter and as a partner and I was down on my body and I was down on the amount of my way of being selfish and just all of it. So I developed this inquiry over the years which was really simple, which was, well, okay, how am I relating to myself right now?

Which is really a powerful inquiry like in any given moment how am I relating to what's going on right now? And often the way we're relating is that there is an atmosphere of judging it. So that helped me catch it. And often as you know when I'm teaching I talk about that circle of awareness. and the line and what's above the lines in awareness and below the line outside of awareness. And that question, you know, how am I relating to myself right now? Help to bring above the line all the different ways my beliefs and feelings kept me locked

in the trance of unworthiness. And when it's above the line, then you can begin to bring a mindfulness and a compassion that actually shifts the sense of identity. I'm no longer the bad self, that witnessing and kind presence. So I'm going to slow it down here and say that it's taken like thousands and thousands and thousands of rounds of recognizing the trance to loosen the grip.

So I'm not pretending it's small, It's really one of the big ways we get hooked. I remember early on I returned from a Buddhist retreat and we had practiced as we do at our Buddhist retreats a lot of the loving-kindness meditation. And I was pretty much glowing. I'd had that experience of how, you know, that heart space that's wide open and feeling like everybody was part of it

and feeling just very inclusive and tender and good. And I remember getting home and I'd had this happen before and watching myself go from that bigness to being back into more selfish and petty and mean-spirited and... But this particular time it was really disappointing. Like somehow I thought maybe I got it, you know, that I was really... And to see the contraction in daily life really was disappointing. and seeing my self-preoccupation, just the self-centeredness. And the more I looked at it, the more I felt the judgment kind of sink in of, oh, this

is the way I am, I'm really self-centered. Because it was a feeling of selfishness like preoccupation with myself. And then there was this recognition of I can't help it. It's like this is just the conditioning, the way it's playing out, is to start getting preoccupation preoccupied with me and I can't control that self-centeredness. And of course if we look from the big picture we can't. It's like it is rigged, we are rigged to be very, very much hitched to how is this going to benefit me, how is this going to hurt me.

I mean our survival is based on it so our limbic system is designed to keep bringing our attention back like this. But there was something about seeing that, that it's just there, this self-centeredness, just like anger's there, or depression's there, our feelings of insecurity are there, it's just there. It's not like there's a self that's signed up to have those feelings, you know, that then brought up this sense of sadness at how many moments I then took it personally and judged it. And I remember grieving, like a real grief of I can't help it and yes, here I am judging

it, you know, and this, I often call this a soul set and I could just see the landscape of my life and how many moments different waves of feelings would come up and I'd blame myself for them. And I remember that was one of the times that I deepened my commitment. to seeing the trance and regarding it with kindness. And I think it does take grieving. I think we have to get it that we can't help the way we are, it's just how we are, but we don't have to condemn ourselves, we don't have to chronically judge.

And it's very hard to commit ourselves to waking up from it until we really sense the sadness of it. just how unnecessary and it's a bit of a tragedy that we spend so many moments adding that second arrow of self-judgment. So that motivated me a lot to really, as Rumi said, it's not seeking for love but to see the barrier of self-blame. And interestingly, and I've shared this before, in that Rumi quote, to see the barrier that we've built against love, there's another piece to the quote that I just heard

about from a Sufi scholar a few years ago which is, and embrace them. That once you see the barriers, I self-blame, there's a kindness towards it. It's not like you're taking a pickaxe or whatever and going at them. It's like there's a sense of, oh, I've been down to myself again, I've been blaming. or, oh, I've been blaming other people, okay, soften towards ourselves. We can't stop selfing. That's the kind of the way the Buddhists call it, doing the self-centered stuff and getting caught in the emotions.

But we can wake up and let go of the blame. And that begins all of the change. It's like Carl Rogers, great psychologist, said, it wasn't until I accepted myself just as I was that I was free to change. It's the prerequisite, removing the barrier of self-blame. It's really the prerequisite. You know we often talk about loving kindness and opening our hearts and widening circles and the center of those widening circles is the life that's right here.

Now that doesn't mean in our loving-kindness practice we always start with ourselves. For some people it's very helpful to start with wherever it's the easiest, but we have to include the life that's here. That we have to do. It's one of the kind of wake-ups that we get that we can't really love unconditionally until we've done that. So I have witnessed, you know, this is really the thesis of radical acceptance and I've witnessed countless people catch on that, okay, I'm in that trance of blame, of unworthiness.

And that was like the portal to really start getting it and feel that dedication and it takes commitment. It's like this is the most important thing on my spiritual path to be able to see the self-blame and soften. It takes real dedication. So, I'm going to be sharing a practice of waking up out of self-blame and I'll invite you to explore it this week and then each week there'll be a practice that helps to free our hearts. But to give you a sense of the practice I'll do it by way of a story about one, a psychotherapist

who's very new at it. She had just gotten out of grad school and was doing her post-doctoral internship. And she was like wall-to-wall imposter syndrome. It was really, really difficult. Big one. And she had been practicing meditation and she really wanted to learn how do I deal with this incredible fear of failure, this fixation on my imperfections, like super anxious about imperfection. And they were that I'm not going to be able to help the client and that others in the clinic

are much more skilled, people are going to get that I'm not the one they really want to be seeing in this clinic, a lot of comparing mine. It stopped her from being spontaneous and being intuitive and she didn't feel good at leading experiential pieces because she felt like they weren't really going to trust her and let go into her guidance. So she was pretty stuck. And I asked her, well, what would happen if you just weren't so judgmental about yourself, if you weren't so focused on what's wrong?

And she said, I'd never improve. Then I'd never improve. This is at least helping me to keep my eyes on where I have to, you know, which wasn't the answer I wanted. So, but it wasn't just her profession that, of course, the trance of unworthiness is always leaks into everything, it's not just one thing. So it was also how she was as a partner and her capacity to enjoy. It was also her overeating or lack of discipline. She was a trance of unworthiness, I'm not going to make a good mother because she really, really wanted to be a mom.

When we talked, her wise self knew she didn't have to always be this way but she was stuck. And so I said, are you willing to dedicate a month to being without anxiety about imperfection towards just keeping on being kind every time these things come up? And I promised her that if the imperfections got worse she could go back to judging, which she thought that helped. So I walked her through what I call rain on blame and in this case is rain on self-blame which is what I'm going to be inviting you all to practice. And the way you do rain on self-blame is that if you are meditating, you can kind of scan

and sense like, okay, where have I been caught in self-blame in the last 24 hours? And you can do it as part of a meditation. So that's the way I guided her. You can also do it on the spot during the day, but then it's a very light rain, a very quick rain. And we'll talk about that too. So here's how it went for her when we walked through it. I asked her to scan and pick a situation where she was turned on herself and I said pick something simple, not like your deepest place of self-contempt and she said okay and

so she it was that she had the night before right before bed eaten two big very very big bowls of cereal and she was trying not to eat and trying not to do that. So, we paused and she named that. This is where she was feeling her anxiety and shame about non-perfection. And so she named the beliefs and the bad feeling that was there. And I said, okay, allow that all, allow that whole sense of I'm bad, I'm wrong. So that's recognize and allow. Those of you that are new to rain, it's an acronym that helps you bring mindfulness and compassion

to what's there and the R is recognized, okay, I'm ashamed of what I just did. The A is you allow it, you just let it be there for now. You don't try to make it right, fix it, do anything, just allow. But then they investigate, feel what's underneath it and that's not cognitive. Investigates really to contact and sense where is the fear, the shame in your body, the feeling of being flawed. to breathe with that and to feel it. You know for her it was to really contact and sense how much of her life it was affecting, that sense

of that badness that was kind of, it was a sinking feeling and it brought her both depression and anxiety and how much it separated her from other people. And that was the big piece. She could feel how it separates me from my partner, separates me from my clients, and separate, it's going to separate me from my child. You know, she could feel that. And when she got how much that constant making herself wrong separated her, it was the barrier that Rumi's talking about,

that's when she got that sadness. And she could say, this hurts and say it with kindness. This hurts. And then you get from investigating to nurturing, because that leads to nurturing, where she could call on her wife, his self and say, okay, how do you want to be with that hurting place? And mostly the message was to relax and trust you're okay.

And that was her process. I always put my hand on my heart because I teach it a lot and that's what she was doing. She put her hand in her heart and say it's okay. It's like she was telling a young child you're okay, you're okay, trust yourself. And more than the words, what makes nurturing work is that there's an intention to be kind towards ourselves. There's all sorts of different words that are reassuring that you can send in but when you get to the end of rain it's really that intention to comfort it's that energy itself

is what's healing. Now after you have done those steps of rain and for her after she had recognized and allowed it and investigated okay there's this place inside that is feeling so squeezed and depressed and anxious and how it creates separation and then done the nurturing. She was in a much more open and present place. And I call that after the rain. That's the gift of rain. She wasn't so identified with a bad self.

She was more in that presence that was there. So I asked her a question. I said, what would your life be like if you trusted who you were, if you trusted your essence? Yeah, there's conditioning, but you just trusted your essence. Who would you be? And she opened her eyes and she had a twinkle and she said, I'd be a really good mom, which I really liked because she was being a mom to her inner life and it let her know she could be a mom to others.

And it's the same way when we nurture ourselves we become a nurturing, safe and wise presence for others, which is part of the gift of rain. So she did it for a month and she told me that she thought that was a real trick because in a way she recognized this as a life thing, there's no way it was going to be a month, but she said it's the commitment that's actually letting her sense that she could love her life, which I thought was really beautiful. So this is the practice. doing rain on self-blame, and to know that if you're doing it, that you are completely not alone.

I mean, there's a reason a 7th century Zen master was talking about this. That this is like a universal human condition that we get very anxious about what's wrong with us. And there's also a reason that Carl Rogers would say it wasn't until I accepted myself as I was that I was free to change. We need to wake up from self-blame, from that barrier. So let's practice together a bit and then we'll just talk a little bit more after that. This is a brief reflection on bringing rain, the mindfulness and compassion of rain, to self-blame.

And a way to begin is to scan your life. You scan today, scan... the last few days perhaps, and notice where you have felt caught in some form of blame, where you've been anxious about non-perfection. It might be to do with falling short at work or parenting, the partner, just the way you interacting with people that you feel has created distance. This is that inquiry, how have I been relating to myself? Where have I been harsh?

Where have I been withholding or cynical towards myself, jaded, angry, impatient, demeaning? And as you scan, let your intention be to meet what you encounter with a wise and compassionate presence. So this is the scan, kind of a forgiveness scan, where you see where you've turned on yourself and then we begin with rain, the rain on self-blame by recognizing a place where that's happened. This might recognize some of the more predominant features of it, you know, what it is you're judging. And as you recognize the landscape, for now it's a allow.

Create a sense of, okay, just letting it be here. letting it be here. This is part of bringing what's been a trance above the line so that you can really shine the light of awareness, just to let it be here. And you can begin to investigate. Investigate means just to sense more fully how you experience in your body that self-blame. Maybe there's some beliefs of I'm falling short. never be who I want to be. I'm hurting other people, I'm hurting myself, I'm stuck, whatever

the beliefs are, but feel how the beliefs live in your body. Let yourself feel your throat, your chest, your belly and it even helps to put your hand on your heart and that'll help to keep your attention with you and this is the beginning actually of nurturing as you investigate just to sense, okay, where does this hurt inside? And you might sense the squeeze of self-judgment, the sinking feeling, the aching feeling, the emptiness of it. You might sense how long and how often it's like that. And even in a broader sense how much that affects your life, investigating and sensing if there's

a sadness about that. What that place of that part of you that feels not okay, what it most needs right in this moment. It's really sensing your wisest, kindest self, responding to this part, sending in some message of kindness or comfort and feel your sincere intention to be kind towards this place inside you. And even if you don't feel kind, sense your intention to offer kindness, that there's some part of you that in a very deep and sincere way wants to bring a caring inward, letting yourself sense the space of kindness and presence that can arise, that can hold what's there. And you might ask yourself, who would you be if you trusted your goodness?

Who would you be if you sense there's nothing really wrong with me? How would your life be if you were without anxiety about non-perfection? You basically trusted okayness. The poet Dana Fault says, why wait for your awakening? would you hold back when the beloved beckons? No, I can't step across the threshold you say, I'm not worthy, I'm afraid, and my motives aren't pure. Do you value your reasons for staying small

more than the light shining through the open door? Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. Now is the only time you have to be whole. Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the radiance of your true nature. Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain. Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your stories of separation and failure. This is the day of your awakening.

You may take a few full breaths and relax your hand down. As you're ready, open your eyes. So in a sense this is what you might call a freedom challenge or a meditation challenge or whatever language you have that if you would like to deepen your practice and sense that barrier of self-blame and of blaming others and make it more of a focused process, invite you each day to do that forgiveness scan

sense if there's some place that you're holding against yourself and do that brief rein on self-blame and offer whatever nurture you can and sense who you'd be if you weren't holding against yourself that sense something's wrong. Then you can do it lightly during the day when you notice that in the midst of things you've turned on yourself you can do it lightly, just notice it and allow it and just see it and feel it and just send yourself a little message more quickly. The deal is it takes many, many, many rounds and that's okay because each time, and this is the cool thing, each time you notice self-blame and instead of just riding that train

some place and you says, okay, here it is and you pause and you interrupt the pattern and there's even the slightest gesture of kindness, you're beginning to create new neural pathways in your brain and in a spiritual way you're beginning to sense what we think of as that shift from living in a small self that feels bad about itself to resting in loving awareness that really is that ocean that can include all the waves. So with that I invite you just take the last few moments of closing your eyes and feel your breath and feel your heart. The Buddha said that this entire life arises from the tip of intention.

You might sense your intention right now in the deepest way towards healing, towards freedom, freeing the heart from the barriers that keep us from truly being in love. Namaste and thank you so much for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.