Tara Brach - Part 1 - The Jewel in the Lotus: Cultivating Compassion (2018-10-24)

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Part 1 - The Jewel in the Lotus: Cultivating Compassion (2018-10-24) - The compassion that arises from mindful awareness can heal our inner wounds, interpersonal conflict and the suffering in our world. These two talks focus on cultivating self-compassion and compassion for others. They look at the blocks to compassion and accessible powerful practices that awaken the full wisdom and tenderness of our hearts.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. Over the last 35 years in addition to my mindfulness practice, there's been one mantra that in particular when I've been caught in stress and reactivity that I'll turn to, And it's probably the most well-known mantra in Asia, in Buddhist Asia. It's Omani Padmehom. And this mantra is really one of the Bodhisattva path,

the path of awakening hearts. And it's got a lot of different translations, but the one that I find speaks to me the most is that Omani Padmi Homme Homme as the lotus of wisdom unfold we discover the jewel of compassion. That this whole awakening, we wake up and wake up and wake up and discover the radiance of the heart. That's the expression of awakening, kindness and compassion.

Says the Dalai Lama put it, my religion is kindness. And Omani Padmehum is a heart mantra. So it helps me to collect and come back to that presence where I can feel my heart. When I think of evolution, you know, it's very clear that we are wired to experience compassion. That's really the key feature of our species in terms of what's allowed us to continue to evolve as we have. and we have in competition our survival nervous system that says,

I'm all for fight, flight, freeze, things are dangerous, I'm not messing around with that. You know, it's a dangerous world when we get into compassion. So we have these competing systems. And for most of us, Pema Chodin described it beautifully. She called it the big squeeze. We can probably look at every day of our life and sense how some part of us has that sense or intuition of what's possible,

the open-heartedness and the kindness and the presence and the sense of wonder of beauty. We know that's in the background as possible. And every day we go into a kind of stress trance, at least some parts of the day, where there's forgetting, you know, and we're caught in a much more small-minded, grim, cut-off place. So one mother describes her experience. This is a woman who describes herself

as very much into organic foods and a veggie and healthy lifestyle. And she's got a couple of children and comes back at the end of the day, hasn't gone to the grocery store, is completely exhausted. She's trying to figure out what possibly they can eat. She looks in the freezer and there's frozen pizza.

So, okay, guys, we're having frozen pizza for dinner tonight. She says she tries to keep the guilt out of her voice because instead of this organic meal made with compassion and love, she's serving them pizza. And her son instantly resists, but I don't want frozen pizza, you know, and she says she remains calm and she keeps saying where this is what we're having and he keeps saying, I don't want frozen pizza, I don't like frozen pizza. So he's on the verge of a tantrum and she's feeling like she is a failing person, that she has really failed them.

And also what's going through her mind is I'm a bad mom and of course they don't like frozen peace and I don't like it either but I'm doing the best I can and I've created a monster that they can't just this meal, you know, this is what's going on inside her. Deep breath, she says, okay, this is what we have to have for dinner tonight, sweetie, I'm tired and this is what it is and it'll be okay. And surprisingly, her son kind of, she looks at his tear-streaked face and he says kind of calmly, he's three years old, he says, okay, mama, but could we at least heat it up? And I love that story. This woman emailed it to me because we get so caught in our stress trance

that, you know, we lose sight of our own, that we're okay, that they're okay. when our limbic system, that's what we're talking about, dominates, we are in a trance. I've described often that circle and the line and whatever we're aware of is above the line, what we're not aware of is below the line. We go below the line a lot, you know, in a lot of ways. And when we do, our emotions can get really painful. They can get locked in because we're in a kind of looping of, fear-thinking and shame and fear and anger.

And then our behaviors are not who we want to be at those times. And so then we add on another layer of shame. Well, you can see the same thing, this below the line on the societal level, that this is what we read in the newspaper. Usually we're reading about the reactivity of trance. the actions that are cut off from a more integrated, awake mind. And so then we see things like a zero-tolerance policy that separates families.

Or we see bombs being delivered to targeted people. Are we see really obvious racism or sexism? We see it play out in all the addiction in our society. I know for myself reading the papers and so on, there's a very activist part of me and I truly believe that we can't change this world unless we vote and act and get engaged. And I truly believe that if we are not underneath our activism, awakening our own consciousness and helping to awaken each other, it won't hold. There's no true transformation without awakening consciousness.

We need a compassionate world. Otherwise, all the policies in the world won't stay. Instead, it'll kind of unravel because of unseen bias and the tendency towards hierarchy and those in power trying to hold their power and being afraid of losing it. This class and the next, I'd like to explore, kind of do another dive into compassion. I'd say it's probably the subject I talk about the most

because it feels to me like it's the medicine for our world. And so we'll do it in two pieces. And the first class will be that's tonight or right now on bringing compassion to ourselves. And then the next class will be on bringing it to others. And we have to start with ourselves. Because if we are at war with ourselves, we won't trust others.

We will be defended or we will be aggressive. So we have to begin by bringing compassion actively to the life that's right here, in order to widen the circles. So we start with a little bit of terms or setting our definitions. And compassion really means that is that resonance of heart when we can sense the suffering in another or in our own being. It's grounded in mindfulness.

If we're not mindful, then we'll sense. suffering, but we'll react to it and we'll either push it away or we'll get in some way overwhelmed by it. And many times when I've talked about compassion, I'll have people saying to me that I don't need to be more compassion. I'm already thin-skinned as it is. And if I was more compassionate, I'd be completely overwhelmed all the time. Well, this is to me a really really important place of misunderstanding because empathy, empathy means being able to sense what other people are feeling. If we're empathetic, we can get overwhelmed by negative emotions. But compassion, because it's grounded in mindfulness, means that we experience the negative

emotions, but there's enough space and balance and perspective not to be overwhelmed. So there's not burnout there. In fact, the basic components, mindfulness, the caring when we experience suffering, and the urge to relieve suffering. So what blocks it is what we're talking about. This limbic hijack really where hatred or fear. our anger takes over and it really comes from a sense of severed belonging

and then what gets triggered is all the biochemistry and all the activity of fight-flight freeze. So it leads to you're unsafe and bad, I'm bad, and we get cut off. By the way, there's a little equation I found that almost is always there, which is when we have a sense of I'm feeling bad It goes hand in hand with I am bad and I invite you to check that out

so we get cut off for stretches of time when we get hijacked so you can look at your day to day and say well how much was I above the line and if you were in that forgetting trance which could just be this busyness I'm on my way somewhere else I don't have time you know that kind of thing

you'll notice that there wasn't a real tenderness in your heart towards yourself or your world. The biochemistry of rushing and stress doesn't go with compassion. So we can go under the line for, you know, busy moments of a day or for whole stretches of our life when we're preoccupied, caught in an addiction, caught in conflict, and so on. And when that happens, we end up turning on ourselves. Deep down we don't like ourselves. One of the stories that most struck me, I included in radical acceptance and it was a woman describing her mother dying and her mother kind of woke up from a coma and looked her in the eye and

was lucid for a moment and said, you know, all my life I thought something was wrong with me. And then she closed her eyes and soon after she died. So those were her last words. And all my life I thought something was wrong with me. And I really got struck by that, as did this woman, because there's something so tragic about having a deep belief that there's something wrong with us and how much life we lose to that belief. When I say that, how many of you resonate with that? That we lose our life to that belief?

So what are the conditions, you know, if we want to really start sensing, well, how do I go below the line? What is pushing us under the line so that we're believing something's wrong with us, that we're deficient, that in some way we're not enough? Because it's pervasive. You know, over the last, I've been either as a psychotherapist or a teacher working with people now for 35, 40 years. It is the single most core and common suffering I run into is this inability to hold ourselves

kindly and this deep belief that something's wrong, that I'm flawed. And even people that aren't in the grip of it in an explicit way and a real overt way, it's still a background that contracts. So what's the conditioning that pulls us under? There's a statement that we're not thinking our own thoughts, we're thinking society's thoughts. We are all conditioned by a society that has all sorts of standards and we're sent the messages of the society. And they tell us how we're supposed to be, and what's wrong with us and what's right with us. So in one Annie Dillard story, she describes an Eskimo who asks the local missionary priest,

if I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell? No, said the priest, not if you did not know. Then why asked the Eskimo earnestly, did you tell me? It's a deep message of what's wrong with us. You know, how are we supposed to look? We're told how we should be looking. We're told how we should be acting. We're told the kind of mind that's most admired and valued in this society, a certain left-brain

intelligence. We're told in many, many ways what it means to be successful and what it means to fail. men are told what they should be like, women are told what they should be like, and men and women are told they should be identified as one or the other, and it's not okay not to be. So Dave Barry, he describes being puny all of his life, which is really difficult for a male. He says, I totally missed the boat to Puberty Island. I was this hairless little dweeb with a voice in the Pinocchio range. One day my mom blessed her heart

How to talk with me She told me that girls were not interested only in looks That the qualities that really mattered were brains and a sense of humor That little talk was long ago But it taught me an invaluable life lesson I've never forgotten Moms lie when they have to

So we're given these messages And we're given them Through our parents usually as the voice but also through our schools and through employment settings and through the justice system and through the housing system and through every other industry

and institution in our country are given messages about who we are. And the most toxic messages go to non-dominant population. We know that. The most toxic messages, when I say toxic, you're less, you're not worthy, something's wrong with you, that then get incorporated to indigenous people, people of color, to women, to those with different sexual orientations or gender identities. I'm thinking of last week, you know, now the threat is reopened to transgendered peoples.

The message is you're less than. I was talking with a very good friend a few weeks ago who is a teacher of color and she was describing how when she was sick and getting treated for cancer and she was in a whole lot of pain at many junctures, she was denied pain killers when she really did need them. And she's also very active in doing diversity work and has done a lot of research. The research shows clearly that people of color are more regularly denied painkillers than whites because there's a bias that says in some way you're going to be more, you're going

to get addicted. And there's another bias that says, well, you don't really feel pain because you're not like me. And this is researched out. horrific and what's the message to my friend and to all those that have that treatment, whether it's through the medical system, are through again education, what white teachers expect. We know the research on that.

They expect children of color not to do as well and then what happens. So I'm spending a little time with this because there are very powerful messages from our society that affect that sense of something is wrong with me. Now, the ground level that we get those messages are in our relationship with significant others early, early on. And every one of us in some way was told how to be. Sometimes it was with a lighter touch and sometimes a heavier touch.

Like if you're not this way, this way and this way, I'm not going to love you. but to the degree that you grew up and didn't feel understood or loved that you felt you had to meet certain standards to be okay to that degree that installs the fear of I'm not okay

and it's very deep sometimes it happens in really overt ways sometimes in not as clear ways so this is an essay that, again, to me, is very powerful. It's called ordinary heartbreak. She climbs easily onto the box. It seats her above the swivel chair at adult height,

crosses her legs, left, ankle over right, and smooths the plastic apron over her lap, while the beautician lifts her ponytail and mocks, coarse as a horse's tail. Then, as if that's all there is to say, the woman at once wax off and tosses it's foot and a half into the trash. And the little girl who didn't want her haircut,

but long ago learned successfully how not to say what it is she wants, who even at this minute can't quite grasp her shock and grief, is getting her hair cut. For convenience, her mother put it, the long waves gone that had been evidence at night when loosened from their class, she might secretly be a princess. Rather than cry out, she grips her own wrist and looks to her mother in the mirror,

but her mother's too polite or reserved or indifferent to defend the girl. So the girl herself takes up indifference while pain follows a hidden channel to a place almost unknown to her, convinced as she is, that her own emotions are not the ones her life depends on. She shifts her gaze from the mother's face back to the haircut now so steadily as if this short-haired child she sees were someone else. So this is severed belonging. This is when we get cut off from ourselves and others because of a lack of attunement and we all had it to some degree. there's a really important statement that an evolutionary psychologist talked about,

which is, I think his name was Cordoza, but I'm not sure. He says it's not the survival of the fittest. It's the survival of the nurtured. This is all about the evolution of our consciousness and evolving compassion and when it's not there, when that attunement is not there, there's a sense of severed belonging and we suffer. So what happens for this little girl who got her hair cut and wasn't, her wants weren't respected, or for the more kind of horrific kind of trauma, traumatic abuse that happens to

so many, that severed belonging, well, we learn and internalize the same. sense of something's wrong with me. And there's beliefs and feelings that go with that. And we get trapped through our life in a looping of those beliefs. We'll have the belief that no one will ever love me or will have the belief that I'll always fail. Whatever it is, that I'm falling short. And with that comes a sinking feeling that stirs up more beliefs. Veronica Tugaleva writes Perhaps the most liberating moment in my life was when I realized that my self-loathing was not a product of my inadequacy

but rather a product of my thoughts. Now this is really important. Gandhi put it this way. He said our beliefs and our thoughts create our feelings, our feelings create our actions, our actions create our character and our character creates our destiny. It comes out of our beliefs. And if we believe our beliefs, if you behind the line, under the line, are saying,

I'm bad, I'm falling short, something's wrong with me, I don't deserve love, whatever, that's going to keep you in that looping of self-loathing that then actually, creates behaviors that bring about the very things that you judge. Okay, so how come it's so hard to undo our beliefs about ourselves? How come it's so hard to be kind to ourselves? And I'm going to invite you to reflect right now, just to check something out, if you will. So just close your eyes and invite yourself right here, take a few full breaths. and since the domain we're exploring, you know, how do we shift from that underlying trance

where we're kind of cut off from our hearts and often when we're judging ourselves to really regarding ourselves with kindness? How do we move towards that? And you might ask yourself or check in and sense, well, where do you get stuck? Where do you get stuck? Where do you you get caught in a negative belief about yourself? You might think about something going on in your life where you judge yourself regularly, where it's very hard to be compassionate or be accepting. Most of us have something in that domain. And you might sense, well, what would happen if I let go of that belief? If I regarded myself with compassion, what's wrong with letting go of of that belief. What would be wrong with regarding myself with compassion?

Just be curious and sense what comes up. What really stops me from regarding myself with compassion? If you'd like, you can open your eyes but continue to let that be an inquiry. Now, if we were in a workshop or I might have people get into small groups and share what they know to stop them or do it in the group. But let me ask you this. How many of you are afraid to forgive or accept or hold yourself with compassion because you're afraid then you'll never change? In fact, maybe you'd get worse. How many of you, that's what came up? Can I see by hands and don't be shy? How many of you were afraid that if you accepted yourself and embraced yourself, then maybe others might reject you. Okay. For many people, the challenge with regarding

ourselves with compassion is not just that we have this mental belief, but the body believes, no, it's true. I'm wrong, I'm bad. How can I be compassionate? I'm really, really bad. How many have you found that one in there? Yeah. Okay. So, for many of us, what we start sensing is it's not that easy to go from a place of self-judgment to, oh, it's okay, I accept myself. It's not safe to let go of the judgment because in some way we're letting go of our control. Like if I stop judging myself, how am I going to control myself? There's a story of a chief executive of a large company. He's greatly admired for his energy and drive. And he suffers from one embarrassing weakness, and that is each time he goes to the president's office to make a report, he wets

his pants. So, the kindly present advises him to see a therapist at the company's expense. The next week, when he appears before the president again, he wets his pants again. So the president says, didn't you see the therapist? And he said, nope, well, yes, I did. But when we met, actually I'm cured. I'm not embarrassed anymore. And I like that because, you know, in a way it's silly, but there's this fear of letting go of our judgment that because we don't like the way we are and we're using our judgment to try to change ourselves. But the deep question is, does our self-blame ever really work? And we're going to ask that same question in the next time when we talk about compassion for others. Does it ever really help to blame another person?

Do we get them to change? Okay, so we're talking about going below the line and how do we start cultivating compassion when we're below the line? Now, I'm right now talking a lot about cultivating compassion when we're at war with ourselves, but also cultivating compassion when we're scared, cultivating compassion when we feel hurt by others. So it's a broader terrain, but we're doing the hardest piece, which is when we've been turned on ourselves. On the Bodhisattva path, you'll remember I started with that mantra, Omane Padmehum. On the of awakening beings, there is a Bodhisattva vow. And the Bodhisattva vow has a different languaging, but the essence of it is, may whatever arise awaken compassion. May whatever

arises in my life awaken compassion. And that includes compassion towards ourselves. for right this moment to say that the reason that the bodhisattvas take this vow is because in awakening consciousness compassion is right at the center it's the gem and the lotus and if you again just reflect it and you might close your eyes for a moment again and bring up that situation where you end up judging yourself, where you feel bad about yourself, and you might explore that bodicevavavavavut, which is really a prayer, and apply it to this. May this situation serve to awaken compassion. And just notice what that's like to have that, just to hold that intention, to feel your own prayer, to awaken compassion.

The intention opens the door. If you have a real commitment to evolving your consciousness, awakening compassion for yourself and others, bring it right to this situation, see what happens. Now the next question is, okay, so I would like to awaken self-compassion, but how how do I go about it? And this is where we bring the tools that we practice together of mindfulness and compassion. We apply them to a situation. So I'm going to share with you a situation.

One person went through how she worked with it and then I'm actually going to invite you to practice a little with self-compassion because it's so central on the path. And when we talk about awakening compassion, probably the most of the most of the most of the most of the most useful strategy is using the acronym Rain, which many of you are familiar with, and so we'll use that as a model. Rain is a systematic way of waking up mindfulness and compassion. It's R is recognized, A is allow, I is investigate, and N is nurture. And then after the rain, we rest and sense who we now are. So in the situation I wanted to share you, I thought I'd keep on the mother theme since I started out earlier.

And this is a different mom, though. She has two children, a four-year-old and a six-year-old, and gets locked into a dance with the older one. And then she gets really angry at her older daughter, the six-year-old, won't cooperate. And the six-year-old has tantrums when she's not getting her way and gets bossy. and domineering with her sister, her younger sister. So the mom gets critical, she goes below the line, she's threatening, she's threatening timeouts, but the worst part is in that reactivity she doesn't like her daughter. And that's very painful because of course she feels then ashamed that she doesn't like her daughter

and hates herself for that. She says things she regrets, she loses her temper. And so in her mind for this mother, a mad mother is a bad mother. So that's where when we started working together, I don't deserve self-acceptance, I don't deserve self-compassion, I'm a mad mother and I'm a bad mother. So you get the idea. That was her situation. So you've thought of yours and I want to show you how she applied mindfulness and compassion

to hers. But first I asked her, what I mentioned to you is, does blaming yourself, believing you're a bad mother, make you any more calm or resourceful or loving toward your daughter? And she said, no, the more I hate myself, the more I end up being, you know, reactive with her. Again, it's just what Gandhi said. It's his beliefs just kind of generate that whole syndrome. So we started rain. And rain started with, recognizing and allowing that she was caught in this anger at her daughter and at herself. That's recognized. That's the beginning of mindfulness.

Allow the A of Rain is making space for it, just letting it be there. Mindfulness is a non-judging quality of attention. Mindfulness means you have to recognize it and just let it be there, okay? And when I say let it be there, I mostly mean pause. You're pausing so you can actually go deeper into the process of presence. Now the eye. For her, investigating meant that she said, well, what am I believing? And she believed she was failing.

What does that feel like when I feel like I'm failing? Investigating is getting into your body. It was a sense of a kind of very squeeze, pressure, sinking feeling. and very, very vulnerable, and I asked her, well, what does that remind you of, that vulnerable experience? And she could hear her mother's voice saying, what's wrong with you over and over? So she was being criticized. And I said, well, how long have you live with that sense of failing? And she said, as long as I can remember. And that was the moment, I sound this called an ouch moment because that was the moment for her when she realized

how long she'd been living with that sense of failing, not only feeling as a bad mother, but failing as a friend or a student or anything, that's when she felt the pain of, you might remember when I asked you earlier how those beliefs take away our life moments when we believe something's wrong with us, that's what she was getting in touch with. And it's a soul sadness because we can sense the landscape of our life and all the missed moments when we were at war with ourselves. Then she asked that part of her that was vulnerable, what do you need? And what that part needed to know was to trust that she was okay and that she loved her children and she was a loving being. Then the end, nurture. You know, I asked her if you could be given

that message from anybody in the whole world. Who would it be? And she said it was really from kind of the ideal mother. We sometimes, for her it was kind of, she thought of her future self, who she could be when she was really open-hearted and loving. So she kind of called on her future more evolved, compassionate self to nurture her. And that's when she sat, and as I often show here with hands on the heart, that's when she'd nurtured, she imagined that loving energy coming in and basically giving her that message,

you're okay. You're a loving being, you've got a loving heart, it's okay. And as she let that in, she could feel a shift from being that bad mother, the angry mother, the person who is always failing, to being that compassionate presence that really was her essence. This This is the shift, this shift from the small self who's down on itself to the compassionate awareness is the very essence of waking up. In any moment when you're turned on yourself and a part of you softens and you go, oh, it's okay. And then you realize that you're more that being and that awareness that's compassionate

than you are any story of a bad self, that's a moment of freedom. Well, for this woman, repeating this regularly, you know, and going through those steps of, you know, being caught in the anger and investigating and then nurturing and then what I call after the rain where you just sense who you really are, oh, and that compassionate presence, she started finding more ease with her daughter and she was able to see that this little six-year-old was, you know, she was anxious and wanting attention and maybe there was a sibling rivalry and just out of control, she couldn't help it. And she started finding that if she could get her laughing, or when she made requests, ask her to draw for her first the request, that she

could shift her mood. She started being more creative, basically. That's the possibility. Once we become more self-compassionate, it starts widening out. We see each other. more clearly because we're above the line. There's a Tibetan teacher who said, when we open our hearts fully to ourselves, we open to the world. So this is the pathway and we're exploring it tonight, how to bring it to ourselves when we're at war with ourselves.

There are many ways to nurture yourself and it's really an experiment. For some people, the nurturing is just what she did. Put your hand on your heart. and send a message, send a message that is exactly what that vulnerable place needs to know. For some, imagine it coming from some outside being that's loving, could be a person you know, it could be a spiritual figure. I often sense a very luminous, warm, loving presence,

kind of blessing me on the brow, like a kiss on the brow. and that helps to allow me to hold my inner life. And then it feels like that loving presence can hold everybody. So we make that shift in that way to the world. I was at a conference a few days ago, and one of the other presenters was Dan Harris, and we were both presenting on compassion and afterwards we were talking,

and he was describing how, you know, when it was first suggested, that he touches hard, it was like, are you kidding me? You know, this is just not a guy's thing or it just wasn't for him. It was a little bit cynical edge on it. But what he found is that these practices of compassion soften him in a way that then actually makes more room for the life that he wants to get in touch with.

We need compassion to be able to honestly, and fully live our moments. There's a wisdom that comes up that as we embrace what's here, we start sensing that, you know, as we widen and look at each other, that the other isn't really other. There's a sense of belonging that we start discovering.

William James said, our lives are like islands in the sea, are like trees in the forest, which co-mingled, their roots in the darkness underneath. You know, when we've brought compassion to our own being and when we belong to our own being, there's a sense of real belonging with others. We really sense our roots are all intermingled and you really can't tell who's who.

And in a very deep way, and this to me is so powerful, is Fris Nargadatta, one of the teachers that's most influenced me, described true awakening as realizing nothing is wrong with me anymore. Yes, there's conditioning. It's like waves on the ocean, but this ocean-ness is pure and vast and deep and mysterious. Here's a poem from Robert Hall. You might close your eyes and listen for a few moments. As we consider this evening really, how do we open our hearts?

to the life inside us. Here's what Robert Hall says. Within the body you are wearing, now inside the bones and the beating in the heart, lives the one you have been searching for so long. But you must stop moving and shake hands. The meeting doesn't happen without your presence, your participation. The same one waiting for you there is moving in the tree,

glistening on the water, growing in the grasses and lurking in the shadows you create. You have nowhere to go. The marriage happened long ago. Within the body you are wearing now, inside the bones and the beating in the heart, lives the one you have been searching for so long. So keeping your eyes closed. you might again sense that Bodhisattva vow that prayer may this awaken compassion

and just sense in your own words the prayer to be able to embrace the life inside you with care Omani Padme whom the jewel is in the lotus as we awaken consciousness we discover this jewel of compassion. You might again allow yourself to sense a place in your life where you typically turn against yourself

and while we'll just be practicing for a few moments right now, sense your intention to revisit and explore how you can bring that reign of self-compassion to this place, how you can recognize and allow, okay, down on myself, judging, blaming, how you might investigate and you can do it right now and just sense under the blaming the places in you that might be believing that something's really wrong, that you're flawed, that you're bad in some way, and just to feel in your body what it's like to be living with that belief.

perhaps how sad it is to have that belief take over, keep you in a trance that separates you from yourself and from others. And you might sense, well, what is it that I need to trust or feel? What is it that most vulnerable part of me needs to trust or feel? And you might for a moment just taking your hand and gently touching your heart, sense a message that might be healing to the part of you that's been caught in a belief, in the pain of a belief for so long, offering that compassion to yourself, or you might imagine a being you trust and let their energy and

love and wisdom flow into you. You don't have to believe your beliefs. You can trust that basic goodness of heart. You might sense, if nothing's really wrong, who am I? Omane, Padme whom the jewel is in the lotus, closing in a simple way, sensing that intention, that prayer, to hold this inner life and all life with the wise heart of compassion, sensing the freedom, the radiance, the love, the tear when we're not caught in that trance of something's wrong. This is our potential to free these hearts and to let the circles of loving and compassion ripple outward and outward to include all beings everywhere.

Namaste and thank you for your beautiful presence. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.