Tara Brach - Part 1: Three Blessings of Awakening Consciousness

Episode Date: March 13, 2013

2013-03-13 - Part 1: Three Blessings of Awakening Consciousness - In this two part series we explore the evolution of consciousness through the lens of three key capacities: A forgiving heart, inner fire (conscious aspiration toward freedom) and self-inquiry. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

Tonight and the next two classes that I teach will, actually tonight in just one more class, I'll be doing a kind of two-part. And it's really the key elements on the spiritual path, and there's three of them I'll focus on, that really are key to this evolutionary unfolding of consciousness. And what I'd like to do is frame it in terms of a story that I've always, love from the Upanishads. It's an ancient teaching story from India and periodically I pull it out and review it myself and then like to share it with those that are listening. And this is a story about a son of a rich merchant and his father was very, very miserly.

And when his father was making donations in order to receive a gift from the gods, his son noticed that he was donating only the cows that were old or blind or lame. In other words, He was a cheap guy. And so he challenged his father publicly. And in his father's shame and anger, his father said, I give you to Lord Yama. That's death. Go to hell, basically, is what he told his son.

So Nachi Kata took his words in a very concrete way, and he went out searching for Lord Yama. And he went into the dense forest, searching for death, and sat waiting at death's door to appear, and sat through hunger and pain. and exhaustion and so on, arrives in the land of Yama. He's greeted by death's three assistants, which are pestilence, famine, and war. And they told him that death was out, you know, he's collecting rent or something like that.

So he waits patiently for three days and when Yama arrives he realizes the boy's dedication and his sincerity and he offers him three gifts. He says, I'll respond to any three requests you have for your spiritual journey. Okay, so these gifts are going to be the gifts that are really essential in the evolution of consciousness. His first wish? Natchie Keda's first wish was peace with his father, that all be forgiven, because he knew that he couldn't continue on the path if his heart was pushing out his father or anybody or any part of his own being.

In other words, the forgiving heart was his request and in response, Lord Yama agreed and freed his heart from blame, from resentment, from anger. Second wish. He asked for what's called Inner Fire, which is this conscious aspiration in us to be free. It's when that intention that we sometimes talk about at the beginning of class becomes very, very alive in our awareness and it starts guiding our lives, aligning us towards freedom. So this is sacred fire, this quality of devotion. And Lord Yama again blessed him with this, and Natchi Keta received that aliveness, that passion for freedom. The third wish,

okay, so this is, he says, okay, you've got one more. And Natchikato said, I want to realize the truth of that which is beyond death. I want to realize the timeless, that which is beyond death, the mystery of that which is immortal. And Lord Yama was surprised. He said, this is your last boon.

You can have anything beautiful maidens, chariots, you know, fast horses, palace, but Natchikato was not easily derailed. He knew what he wanted. So he said, nope, won't all these things eventually return me right to your

kingdom, smart guy, okay? So Lord Yama agreed and he gave him his final gift. It was a mirror. Okay, the final gift was a mirror and he told Natchikata he couldn't give him wisdom, but what he could do is give him a way to look into his own heart and mind and discover the truth. In other words, he basically invited him into the most fundamental of inquiries, which is, Who am I? To discover the timeless, we look into our own hearts and minds. So as the story goes, Natchikata gazed into the mirror, he entered into this inquiry and in time all delusion fell away and he saw the radiance and the purity of his being.

So he realized his timeless essence, that beingness and he was free. So this is the story of Natchiketa. So we'll follow this story together and this class will explore the first of the gifts because it's such a key one to open the gateway for us to move on, this gift of a forgiving heart. And then in the next class we'll explore the second and third of the gifts. So now the story starts with disillusionment. And so it is with all of our lives that impermanence ends up, if not when we're younger,

somewhere along the line, exposing us to the losses that shake the ground underneath us. So for Nachi Keta, he had lost some dear friends and then he had this sense of betrayal, that his father wasn't who he had thought his father was. because that was his disillusionment and we each have our wake-ups where in some way Lord Yama appears we sense

oh mortality this body's going to go those that I love divorce custody health whatever it is we get that it's very uncertain and that we are living in that insecurity so it happens to all of us

and then the big inquiry is when And for many of the deepest are the betrayals, such as what Natchi Keta experienced, where our trust is really shaken. And then the big inquiry is when we encounter Lord Yama, when these losses appear in our life, how do we respond? And one way we respond, and this is where we get into kind of the evolution of consciousness, is from our most primitive, instinctual reptilian brain.

the limbic system where we go immediately into reactivity and it's fight, flight, freeze. And what that translates to for many of us is that when we're wounded, when we feel hurt, we look for causality. By the way, our nervous system is designed to do this, that when something is painful, we look for the cause and we go into blame. I mean, that is our mode. We in some way react wanting to either fight that thing or get away from it. So that's the first way we can respond in this kind of more primitive fight-flight. And what it does is it solidifies our identity as a separate victimized self in some way. Okay? That's the first possibility.

The second possibility, if it's not fight-flight, is that we engage with the higher center of our being, our heart, our mind, our frontal cortex, whatever we're describing in a physical plane, it's in a spiritual way we engage a kind of presence and compassion that encounters the losses and wakes up through them. So in this second possibility, instead of fight-flight, you might think of it as the tend and befriend, okay? This is the higher evolutionary possibility. There's a kind of courage to meet life as it is. And when we meet life with presence it reveals and opens up the compassion and the deep

beingness that's our most profound level of identity. So now what happens to most of us? If we get real, most of us, when things start happening, we have our first response and it's usually that primitive fight-flight response. I mean, that's just the immediate thing that happens. Not a problem. It just does, you know. And it really, on the path, it just is a matter of lag time,

like how long does it take us until we go, oh, I'm stuck? And we really get that the way we're stuck is only causing more suffering, that we're feeling trapped in a small egoic self. And then we get drawn to some practices and processes is that teach us to pause, that teach us to deepen our attention, to let go some of the clutching, to open our hearts. So typically our path is we go from fight-flight to tend and be friend and the question is whether it happens in, you know, minutes or decades, right? There's an in-between

there's a middle way. So what wakes us up really is we're in reactivity and there's a lot of pain that comes from that and that's what the Buddha described as suffering that we're wanting it different. We're pushing things away or holding on and one of the deepest ways that we react as I mentioned is that we blame. We blame ourselves, we blame another or we blame life for being wrong or bad. So that's the place we're paying attention to tonight. It's when we react by going, this is wrong or bad and it's you or it's me or it's life. But we're mostly going to focus on how it's you. Not you, but you know, you. Okay. So forgiveness means letting go of the

armoring, the fight-flight armoring, which is really stories of badness, stories of blaming. and resentment. And for Natchikata, that wisdom to forgive, it came out of just getting impermanence, that if he wanted to continue on the spiritual journey, he had to be able to free his heart. Now, I want to acknowledge that many people have trouble with the word forgive. And if you're one of those people, feel free to substitute compassion, rather than saying I need to forgive this person or my intentions to forgive. My intention is to hold with compassion. Because sometimes it's got connotations. So an important and ongoing inquiry to launch us on this kind of exploration is really how am I creating separation in my life?

You know, how do I create separation with others? And you might think of particular others. How do I create separation from my own heart or spirit? So we start looking at ourselves, like, how do I create separation from myself? And we start noticing on some level that incessant inner dialogue that's always haranguing ourselves, then in some way has the message of not enough. And if we kind of look, we have this idea that we should be further along. than we are. We have an idea of this map in our mind of how we should be. And because

most of us that are listening or that are here have some appreciation for spiritual unfolding, that too becomes a map that we're trying to get somewhere, that I should be more mindful, I should be less reactive, I should be more quantumist, I should be more loving. I mean how many of us have deep down the sense that we should really be more loving than we are? You don't have to raise hands on that one. But you know what I mean. So, I think of Jules Fifer who has in one of his cartoons that I grew up with my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's walk, my father's opinions,

and my mother's contempt for my father. You know how we internalize stuff. And sometimes it's as deep as we're really at war with ourselves. a sense of this is fundamentally flawed. It's like one person told me therapist saying to his client, well these feelings of inadequacy are common amongst the inadequate.

So we create separation from ourselves and we create it from others, you know, in our critiques and our ways of trying to control ways we threaten, the ways we withhold affection so they fit our... We want people to cooperate with us. And I'm not, when I talk about forgiveness or compassion tonight, I'm not just talking about the big betrayals, although I'll mention some about them.

I'm also referring to the ongoing habits so many of us have, whether it's with a partner or a sibling or a parent or a child, of just being resentful for the little ways that person does not make us feel good about ourselves or cooperate with their ideas of how they should be, the littler ways. You know, how someone drives or the way they just over aid or the way a colleague is doing their job or the way our child's relating to chores. But there's some hardening of the heart that happens without us noticing so we're really not so tender and not so available. Now just to pause and say that hardening, when we feel hurt and and now I'm kind of flipping back to the larger injuries.

The aggression and unforgiving quality of the heart is part of the way we're designed. I mentioned fight, flight. And one of the things we do is when we are blaming and aggressive and so on, we add the second arrow of I'm bad. It's very hard to work on compassion and forgiveness if it's coming from a sense of, I'm bad and I should be different.

So that's the first place to pay attention. That, you know, you can really feel how biological it is, that anger and resentment comes up in a flash. Like, what happens when you're cut off by a car on the beltway? It's not like your personality or ego went, you know, I'm feeling in a bad grouchy mood. I'm going to get angry at this person. It just like flares up, you know.

Or you can notice in a relationship how easily when someone seems to be criticizing or judging and how quickly we go into feeling hurt, insulted, or angry. It's not like we're thinking it through. It's like one cartoon, there's a dog on a therapist's couch, and there's a dog psychiatrist too. And the dog's saying to psychiatrists, you know, I bark at everything. Can't go wrong that way.

I like the animal cartoons because they really remind us that this isn't something we can control. It's like there's a mouse therapist with a cat patient, and the cat patient saying, Transference, schmanceference, I still want to eat you. You get the idea that forgiving, that meeting life with compassion, it's an evolutionary capacity,

and we're pretty designed to first get into the reactive phase of fight-flight. And there's a fear of what we can evolve to. There's a fear of a forgiving heart. There's a fear that if we forgive we're going to be indulging or condoning. You know, so often when I do the longer workshops, like a Krupaulu or Omega, we'll do a kind of real exploration of what is it that has us hold on to blame? That makes it so hard. You know, it's like forgiving's this great idea until you really have something to forgive.

You know, what makes us really hold on? and there's a fear that if we forgive, that we're kind of opening the gateways to get trampled again, they're just going to do it again. We're just making ourselves vulnerable. So I want to just clarify for a moment, maybe a bit of what forgiveness or compassion is and is not. That forgiveness in no way is approval. It's not like saying it's okay that you did that. It's okay that you're hurting me or it's okay that I'm hurting you. In other words, we need to have wise discrimination.

We need to be able to say, yeah, this is injurious. Forgiving isn't putting down boundaries. You can open your heart but keep your boundaries in your life in a way that protects you and loved ones from injury. In fact, I often think of that you can forgive and vow never again. again. You can forgive. In fact, if we're forgiving, we're really going to be present with our experience, take action from that presence that really moves towards healing. You can forgive and divorce. You can forgive and not spend time with. You can forgive and sue. Do you see what

I'm saying? You know, you can do what you want to do or what feels healthy. Here's the deal though, when we don't forgive, in other words, when we're caught in blame. And you can kind of be scanning your life right now because as you know, when I do these particular talks, I'm going to ask you to pick somewhere where you feel like there's a distance and where you're holding on to some resentment or blame. Okay? Since you know that, we're going to do that. When we're not forgiving, when we're in blame, we're in a trance. When we're in fighting, we're in fight, flight, our aperture gets smaller. We're filtering the other in a much more narrowed way and all we can see is what our story is telling us. This is wrongness. We're not seeing

the whole human. Our primitive brain actually tightens and narrows the filtering system when we're in survival mode. It's only a small amount of information is flowing. Similarly, when we're in survival mode and we're blaming, we're not perceived. the fullness of who we are. We're the reactive victim. Let's reflect on this for a moment. You're hearing words and I'd like you to check in and kind of grounded in your experience. So use the pause to, if you in some way left your body, just come back again, feel your breath, feel your body. So you might consider someone in your closer circle of family or friends or people you are with regularly. And I wouldn't pick a person where the relationship is traumatic in

some way because I won't serve you right now, but where there's reactivity, where you've in some way locked into a feeling of blame, you're wrong, you're bad, and take some moments to just examine if you let this situation be really right here for you so you can remember what behind the blaming so that you can then sense how does the other appear to me when I'm in blaming mode? How are you viewing, how is this person in some way become characterized by wrongness, badness, of, you know, how is your aversion shaped this person in your mind? Do you have certain pictures you're seeing of the person with certain expressions on their

face that don't include the pictures of perhaps when this person's being generous or kind or entertained or happy or more at peace with themselves? Now, how is your picture and image and sense of the person narrowed? And just letting yourself feel the blame, let yourself get in touch with it, you know, what's behind it again so that you can feel the sense of it in your body, what seems wrong and as you feel that, just sense your experience of yourself, who you are when you're in blaming mode. Do you like yourself? What's your mind feel like when you're blaming? Your heart? Is there a sense of being an oppressed self or a victimized self? Just noticing what

when you're in blaming mode you're not aware of about yourself perhaps, what you've lost contact with. You can continue to reflect and listen if you'd like you can open your eyes, but there's a trance that goes on, a narrowing that's actually very seductive and can last, as I mentioned, for decades, especially feeling like a victim. It doesn't matter how much hurt has happened to lock into that identity as a trance because we forget who we are. It's the same thing when we subscribe to having an enemy out there, that same narrowing, whether it's a certain group of people or a country, religion, a politician, a political party.

Really, I mean, politics puts us into an incredible trance. Many people I know that are the most mindful, most awake collapse into a reactive delusion and a righteous rage when it comes to politics. And I can watch it in myself. And, you know, it's hard. It's almost like that part's exempt. You know, everything else, you know, I can feel one way, but politics is. I'm right, you know. So it's a trance. And so then the inquiry is, well, what motivates us

to wake up out of that trance? What motivates us like Natchiketa? To say, you know, any blaming, anywhere I'm not forgiving is keeping me from realizing the truth of who others are and who I am. Anytime we're in that victim role, any time we're making another wrong, making ourselves wrong, it's a trance. So what motivates us is really that we start getting the pain of that trance. It makes us lonely, it makes us anxious, it makes us not like ourselves, it makes us distant from others. I often think about in Carlos Costagnata's books, the Shaman Don Juan has a teaching about death. And since we're talking about Lord Yaman and how really the wisdom of impermanence can help us

to realize, hey, might as well forgive, we don't have that long, you know. He describes death on our left shoulder. And he says, when death makes the slightest gesture, all our pettiness falls away. Now, you might be thinking, yeah, but this wound and this, you know, anger, hatred or blame isn't petty. But it's actually the same teaching that if we knew we were going to die in a few minutes or if we knew somebody else was going to die in a few minutes, how would we want to be holding ourselves or that other person?

I don't think we'd want to be doing it in that blaming mode. So then we can start to begin to sense that we each. We each have that deep wisdom that Natchiketa had that knows that our hearts are unfree when we're caught in blame. We each have that wisdom. So how do we reopen the channels? I mean, how do we take that aperture that gets closed down and fight, flight, and start opening and to attend and be friend?

And the basic process from what I've found in myself and others is that it begins by being with the pain that's in our own hearts, that we cannot forgive another until we've brought compassion and presence to the pain inside us. And that to try to forgive someone else first is going to be premature transcendence. You know, it's not going to be real. It's going to be an idea of forgiveness. To forgive, we have to start here. I share a story, a friend of mine who I've been in touch with over the years. He lived. with a long-standing resentment. He, after college, after graduate school, actually, he and a friend went into business together. And the business went south. It just did not go well.

They just weren't well matched. And so there's a lot of conflict. His friend left the business but took a number of major clients with him in what felt like an underhanded way. So this guy felt very, very betrayed. And that bad feeling of betrayed, you know, victim, injury lasted for several decades. Actually, lasted until he began meditation and bringing this knot of pain

to a lot of his practice to it and really got that he was living inside a victim's stance and that this was not the only place because it's never that we're a victim in one. one place. It's one of the, I talk about the spacesuit self when we kind of sense an identity and try to make it through the world and victim is one of those things that we do in a lot of places. And so he realized that and his process began with his own feelings of, well, what happens when I believe he's bad? And he could feel the kind of rage but also a kind of impotence,

like powerlessness, it was easier to blame his ex-business than feel that powerlessness, just feel it. So he started feeling the powerlessness, how he felt foolish that he had been taken advantage of, how he felt in some way it was his own fault, his own weakness, his own lack of awareness. And so for quite a while, every time the story of what's wrong with him would come up,

why is he like that? like that, why did he do that, what's wrong with him, he's bad, he would instead say, okay, let go of that story and he just feel his own powerlessness, his own hurt, his own sense of his own impotency or deficiency until that pain was enough that he could actually begin to sense compassion towards it. It's like when we really get we're suffering, and I call it ouch, you know, when we really just say this hurts, then some place in us expands so we can begin to be kind towards ourselves and that's what happened for him. And after a while, you know, I asked him that question of, you know, who would you be if

you no longer believed he was bad? And that's a really, really important question. Who would you be? If you no longer believe that the person you've been resenting all this time was bad or wrong, he just was what he was. You're not a victim, he's not a victim, he's wrong. Well, what he'd believe was who he could be outside of that victim role. He couldn't put too many words to it, but he said alive, free, and with a future. Possibility. It was kind of exhilarating. So victimhood's a prison, but we cannot command ourselves to forgive the other person. It doesn't go like that. And I want to make a real point of that because so many times we hear, oh, forgiveness is a good thing, but it's, we can't, we

just can't will it. I had, I've shared at different times, my first, the first teacher that I considered a spiritual teacher was emotionally abusive with me and a number of other people. And it was a terribly painful thing. I felt really, really betrayed. And, you know, so for a number of years after I left the spiritual community, I was living in that sense of I had been hurt, I was victimized by him, and sensing, you know, a badness to him.

He had abused his power and he was bad. And part of the challenge was so many other people agreed with me that I got a lot of reinforcement for he's bad and yes, you were treated terribly. what started becoming very real was that was a very small place to live in. So I had this real strong urge to stop making him wrong and just to get on with my life. But every time I'd think of him, I'd feel really angry. And so then I started really being down on myself for not being able to just forgive and be more open and have that kind of empowered whatever. I'm sharing that with you because I could not change the timetable.

I couldn't say, okay, stop being angry at him. So I started discovering that when anger would come up, I would just say, forgiven, forgiven to the anger. I would hold the anger with presence and kindness. Didn't mean I would go into the storyline. I started really catching on that the storyline of what he did and what was wrong and how he shouldn't have, the shouldn't, it just didn't work. but I would stay with the feelings of the anger

and say, forgiven, forgiven. And that let me open to just the pure, this hurt, this felt like a betrayal at hurt, and the kind of self-compassion, that then I could actually look at him and see him through the eyes of a forgiving heart. I couldn't will it, but I could become willing, and that's all we can do with forgiveness.

We can't will to get rid of the blame or hatred, We can become willing to deepen our attention. So we begin to deepen our attention by learning to look more deeply at when we're, when we've turned on ourselves, on what's going on inside ourselves, the pain that's there. And eventually, as I mentioned, that there's more of a quality of looking through the eyes that are forgiving. We begin to look at others and see past that narrow aperture of what's wrong with them. I love this little essay by Alan Wallace and I wanted to share this with you.

I've been moving papers to find it here. He says, imagine walking along a sidewalk with your arms full of groceries and someone roughly bumps into you so that you fall and your groceries are strewn all over the ground. And as you rise up from the puddle of broken eggs and tomato juice, you're ready to shout out, you idiot, what's wrong with you? Are you blind? But just before you can catch your breath to speak, you see that the person who bumped you is actually blind. He too has sprawled in the spilled groceries and your anger vanishes in an instant to be replaced by sympathetic concern. Are you hurt? Can I help you up? Our situation actually is like that. I often use

the metaphor of the dog with its leg in a trap that, you know, if somebody is acting in a way that seems horrible, it's because there's some horrible sufferings going on inside them. When someone is happy and free, they do not behave in ways that cause harm. So when we're caught in blame, as I'm describing, the other becomes an unreal other, kind of a two-dimensional character, the most direct way should we be so fortunate to be able to unfold what's going on, is communicating because then we can start to remember or find out who that person really is and the armor starts to dissolve. You know, Longfellow puts it, he says, if we could see the secret history of our enemies. You know, if we really can see past the veil to who's there,

it starts softening our hearts. So we need a path to reconciliation. And sometimes the path is outward, where we get to communicate and find out who the other is. But often we don't have that opportunity. And that's when we need these practices of forgiveness where we work, bringing compassion to where the hurt is in us, and then look through eyes that see more truly to the vulnerability in others.

I'd like to share with you a story. I bring out now and then that gives us a sense of what's possible in our hearts. This story was told by a man who ran a rehabilitation program for juvenile defenders right here in D.C. And he describes a 14-year-old boy in his program who shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to a gang, which we know happens. And at the trial, the mother of that child that was killed just sat kind of impassively silent until the end. The youth was convicted of the killing and after the verdict was announced she stood up slowly stared directly at him and she said I'm going to kill you. The youth was taken away to serve several years in the juvenile

facility. Now for the first half of the year for the first half year the mother of the slain child went to start to visiting his killer and he'd been living on the streets before killing and she was the only visitor he had and for time they talked and she left some money so he could get some snacks and so on. She started step by step to visit him more regularly and she brought him food and she brought him small gifts and started to get to know him some. Near the end of his three years sentence she asked him what he'd be doing when he got out and he was confused and uncertain so she offered to set him up with a job at a friend's company And then she asked him about where he'd live, and since he had no family to return to,

she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home. So for eight months he lived there, and he ate her food, and he went to work and the job, and then one evening she calls him into the living room to talk, and she sits down opposite of him and starts out. She said, you remember that day in the courtroom when I looked at you and said, I was going to kill you? I sure do. She said, well, I did. I did not want the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. So that's why I started to visit you and bring you things. That's why I got to know you and got you that job and I let you

live in my house. That's how I said about changing you. And that old boy, he's gone. So now I want to ask you since my son is gone and that killer is gone if you'll stay here. I've got room and I'd like to adopt you if you'll let me. So she became the mother of her son's killer, the mother that he had never had. When I share that story it's not with the intent of saying, well, we should be able to do that. Okay? I just want to make that clear because I hear that story and every time it's to imagine, you know, having a son, it doesn't matter if you have a child or not to imagine losing someone like that. Could we do that? We don't have to ask that question. It's more to sense that we have this possibility in our heart of experiencing huge, huge loss,

going to the kingdom of Lord Yama, experiencing the worst, and discovering in the midst of of it, that quality of presence that can remember who we are and remember who another is and respond to that remembrance. That's a possibility. It's what this evolution of consciousness is about. We can move from fight-flight to attend and be friend. And as I mentioned, sometimes it's quick and sometimes it takes a while. And it feels important to say that for many of us with the deep wounds it really is gradual and the forgiving is not a one-shot. It's like we have to go through many, many rounds. Sometimes we're living with somebody who keeps on setting us off to that place where we feel victimized and

hurt and we have to keep on re-going back to being with that and holding with kindness and remembering again who that other person is 10,000 times. And we stay because there's something in the container and in the relationship that's worth it. Often the wounds are so deep that it's not possible to do the process alone. To try to stay with the pain would be it's too much trauma and we need the support of a healer or teacher a therapist. Even then, this shift from fight-flight to attend and be friend is our capacity. This is what the evolution of consciousness is about. And it's not because we can will it, but it's because we can sense out of wisdom that we're not free as long

as we're caught in blame and simply intend to forgive. If you leave tonight's reflection with just a little more awakeness around that intention, the door to the heart is opening. The light can shine through. So let's practice together. Let's do a, and maybe, um, because this is going to be about a 10-minute meditation. If you want to move, or take 30 seconds to move, stretch, whatever will help you, and then sit down and really let yourself enter the practice. Okay, so coming into stillness, sensing if it's possible to relax somewhere in your body

that might be habitually tense, maybe the shoulders, the hands, from the belly, feeling the breath perhaps at the heart, just softening. relaxing. So we begin by extending forgiveness or compassion to ourselves and just to notice if there's somewhere right now in your life that you're very aware of being at war with yourself or in some way creating separation, in some way aiming blame or resentment or judgment,

in some way making yourself wrong and you might take some moments to investigate a little. And sense, just as in the story Alan Wallace describes that, you know, when we are blaming ourselves for stumbling around in some way, it's because some place in us is hurting or blind or unable to do better. So you might just sense whatever you're blaming yourself for, the hurt or fear or confusion that might be causing it that's really just happening. It's not something that you can control. see how your leg is in a trap. It helps to actually loosen the trap just by seeing it

and by feeling some tenderness to your own being, sensing how fear, confusion or hurt is driving the behaviors you might judge. And then just having the intention to regard yourself with compassion and forgiveness. If you'd like to put your hand on your heart that can deepen, And just like that gesture is one of, this is my intention, my willingness to regard this life right here with kindness. You might explore just the words, I allow myself to be imperfect, sensing that this body and nervous system belong to nature and are designed to react the way they react. I allow myself to be imperfect.

I allow myself to make mistakes. I allow myself to be a learner, still learning life's lessons. I forgive myself. And if I cannot forgive myself now, may I forgive myself sometime in the future? See if you can sense in a visceral way that you're just offering compassion and care to the place of pain inside where you feel down on yourself, not okay. And just for a moment since, who would I be if I did not believe that something was wrong with me. Try that out. Who would I be if I didn't believe something was wrong with

me? To really inquire into that is to get a glimmer of freedom, a taste of freedom. And we open the attention to someone who's caused harm to you and take your time and sense, I wouldn't pick somewhere, again, I wouldn't pick something that has a lot of trauma to it. but where you feel that you're not able to forgive, you're feeling angry, hurt, victimized, resentful. And take a moment to honor the place in you that feels hurt or afraid by giving it compassionate attention, knowing that we cannot regard another with compassion if we have not brought that energy to ourselves to let yourself feel what is causing you to push this person away? There must be some wound, some hurt.

And again the hand on the heart is a message of I'm here, I'm willing to touch and feel and bring kindness to this place of hurt. And as you're able to feel that compassion that holds your own hurt, to feel it in a sense you can look through the eyes of compassion at the other. Just as I allow myself to be imperfect, so I allow you to be imperfect. Seeing how that person has their leg in a trap, how that person's operating out of fear, hurt, confusion, just as I allow myself to be imperfect, so I allow you to be imperfect. I allow you also to make mistakes. I allow you to be a learner, still learning life's lessons. I forgive you.

you or if I cannot forgive you now it's my intention to forgive you when I can. And now putting down the idea of another and just take a moment in sense of right now as you do this practice you're feeling any judgment towards yourself for how you're doing the meditation. And if you feel any judgment towards yourself first include that in mindfulness, you might even just mentally whisper, okay, judging, judging, and then let your intent intention be to let go, to hold with kindness your own process, just to honor that it's a natural organic process that happens at its own pace and that your intention is towards a forgiving heart.

Trusting that the intention alone opens the door to freedom. We close with the words of the poet Rumi, out beyond of our own. beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. Namaste and blessings. 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.