Tara Brach - Part 1: Three Blessings on the Journey

Episode Date: January 22, 2016

Part 1: Three Blessings on the Journey - Drawing on a wonderful teaching story from the Upanishads, these two talks explore the role of forgiveness, inner fire and looking at our own minds, in finding freedom. Free download of Tara’s new 10 min meditation: “Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease” when you join her email list.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Tonight and next week we'll be exploring what I sometimes think of as three key facets of spiritual practice that really serve our awakening and our freedom. And there's an ancient teaching story from the Upanishads that I've always loved and every time I revisit it I feel like there's more that that comes out of it as happens with all really good teaching stories. So I'd like to share with you a bit of this story and we'll use the story as a kind of grounding for both weeks and I'm going to read you a little bit of what you can find. It's one of the versions you can find on the web of Nachi Kita and the Lord of Death.

So Natchikata is a young man from India. He's the son of a rich merchant who also happens to be a very miserly guy. And when his father was making donations in order to receive a gift from the gods, Nachi Kata noticed that he was donating only the cows he owned that were old or lame or blind. So publicly, he brought this up. He challenged his father and basically, in his father's shame and anger. His father said, I give you to Yama, which is death.

And now that's kind of like saying go to hell, you know, but he said, I give you to Yama. And Nachi Kida, being a very sincere young man and taking things literally, he thought, okay, so he took him for his word and went off into the dense forest searching for death. And finally he sat and waited for death to appear and he sat through pain and he sat through hunger and he sat through exhaustion. And he arrived in the land of Yama. He was greeted by Yama's three assistants,

who were, as you might imagine, pestilence, famine, and war as three assistants. And they told him death was out. So he said, I'll wait. And he waited. And he waited through three days that were pretty intense, pretty miserable for him. But he waited patiently.

And finally Yama arrived and said, sensing the boy's patience and his determination and his sincerity, he offered him any three boons, any boons of his choosing to continue on his spiritual journey. So Natchie Kha's first wish was for peace with his father, that all be forgiven, that he live his life with an undefended heart, and he knew that he couldn't move on in his spiritual path. if he was pushing his father or anyone out of his heart. So that was his first request and it was granted and his heart was quite open and free from that.

His second request, his second wish, was for inner fire. Now, inner fire is really that, sometimes called the sacred fire, it's the energy that brings the path alive. It's a quality of devotion and courage to really commit ourselves fully to give everything we've got to what we're doing. And when we do that, when we give ourselves fully to the path, of course, there's a profound kind of freedom that's possible. So that was granted. So here he had, his heart was open and his energy was alive and full for really going the whole ten yards. And he was asked what his third wish might be. And he said,

for my third wish, I want to realize the truth of that which is beyond death. I want to know the mystery of that which is timeless, which is immortal. Now, Lord Yama was taken aback. You know, he said, you know, look, this is your third and final wish. You could have anything you want. You could have beautiful women or maidens that could accompany you. You could have the chariots with the fastest steeds in the kingdom to carry you on your way. You could have your own palace. Natchikato was not to be swayed. He's not easily derailed. He knew what he wanted. And he actually asked Lord Yama, well, won't any of these gifts that you give me return eventually to your kingdom? And Yama said, well, you got a good point there, you know. So he agreed. And he gave him the final

gift. And what he gave him was a mirror. He gave him a mirror and basically said that he couldn't give him the wisdom, but Natchi Keta could learn to look into his own mind, look into his own awareness, and discover the truth and freedom that he yearned for. So he was basically given the mirror and advised to ask the most fundamental question that we can ask on the spiritual path. Who am I? Who am I? As the story goes, Nachi Keta gave into the mirror and he entered deeply into this inquiry and in time all delusion fell away and he saw the purity and radiance of his being so this is the the unfolding of the story he realized his timeless essence and he was free and

the final event of the story we will we'll explore a little bit later perhaps next week but to know that the these three blessings, this blessing of forgiveness, of the undefended heart, of the inner fire that lets us devote ourselves, and of a pathway to turn our attentions right into the mystery of who we are, are the three boons or three blessings that we'll be exploring this class and the next. And what we'll do is, particularly for tonight, we'll stay with just. We'll stay with just the first of the three blessings, because there's a lot in that one. Natchi Keta's journey began with disillusionment.

There are other stories, other versions that describe how he had recently lost some friends in an accident and or some misfortune. And of course he had a real severing with his own father. And so it is with all of us that our journey begins with some sort of a disenchant, And it's the given that the great gateway is realizing impermanence, that early on or not so early on, we get that everything goes. Everything changes. These bodies age and get sick and die and everyone that we care for and love, their lives also pass. And so sometimes it happens in big ways in our lives. Sometimes it's very sudden that we

get a positive reading on a biopsy or someone that we love has a serious illness or a relationship 20 years or whatever crashes betrayal so sometimes it's it's those big ways and in these recent years for many it's been the profoundness of financial insecurity of not having the meaningful type of work that can orient our lives. So it's some disillusionment, some shaking of the ground. It's not always so outwardly painful. For many of us, the sense of impermanence and of change happens when we start getting that life just doesn't cooperate,

that our own moods are out of our control, they just happen. And these bodies and the people around us, we can't control them really, even though we try like crazy. So we start getting that there's a lot out of control. There's two possibilities when we start confronting the truth of impermanence, that there's really not a self behind the curtain that can keep on rigging things to make it work out the way we want it.

There's two possibilities. Now one is that we scramble, we try harder to control things. things. And you see many people just getting tighter and smaller in how they run their lives. They get more anxious and controlling with other people, more tight and narrow in their own lifestyle, more pursuing the kind of addictive behaviors that we try to do to control how our body feels or how our mind is feeling. The assumption there is something's wrong. Not only, it's out of control, that we all know, but the added assumption is this is bad, this is wrong and then in some way

I need to grab on and so there's a real tight grip a tightness there are many little Zen stories about grasping one of the ones that has always charm me is a guy who's chased by a tiger

and he falls off this precipice and he's hanging perilously from a limb tiger's you know kind of going back and forth above and there's these jagged rocks below. And so he calls out, he yells out in desperation, help, help, is anyone there? And there's a voice. It goes, yes. He goes, is that God? God, are you there? Yes. God, will you help me? Yes. I will. You know, so the man just says, what can I do? I'll do anything. God says, just let go.

Is anyone else there? You know? So we'll do any. anything but let go. And we have our preferred ways of hanging on. I mean we think it might be easy to let go of this and this, but we have certain ones we're just not willing to let go of and often they're thought patterns. We will not let go of certain thought patterns about how things should be and how certain people are doing things wrong, how we're doing things wrong. That's what we really hold on to. So I said there's two possibilities of what we can do when we realize it's out of control, it's changing, we can either grasp on more tightly, or we can do what I sometimes call take refuge in truth, which means become aware

of what's actually here in the present moment. Let be, relax the grip and let be the life of the present moment. That's the other options. We become more aware. inhabit awareness. Now, I want to mention the primary way that we resist, that we do grasp on because it relates to the first boon, is that one of our deepest patterns of conditioning when life is difficult is to assign blame. And I find myself in my own life reflecting on this a lot. You know, I see how blame isn't always really a kind of outrage condemnation.

It's a much more subtle thing of on some level when things don't feel good, either assuming I'm doing something wrong, are in some way being irritated or impatient with others. So it can be subtle or it can be the kind of blame that has to do with a profound lack of forgiveness, hatred, anger. But it's a deep conditioning when things are that things Things feel scary when things feel out of control to blame. And that's why Natchikata requested the first boon, which is really a heart that's not armoring itself with blame, a forgiving heart. So we'll be exploring that boon, that particular area of freedom for the rest of the evening.

I want to also mention that I've noticed many people have trouble with the word forgive. So I'll just kind of say that you can think of it like this first gift or blessing is a forgiving heart or you might think of it as a compassionate heart, a heart that's willing to rather than blame open in an undefended way to what's here. So maybe we begin with a scan in our own lives just to take a moment to check in and sensing that whenever we blame ourselves or others, we're creating separation. And just to invite you to take a few moments to see where this might be true in your life, where on either the more low-key ways or the more blatant ways,

where are you creating separation? It might be separation with others. There may be somebody in your close-in circle that you just having a resentment towards for not holding up their own in some way in the household or a colleague at work. Or it may be a deeper kind of you felt betrayed, misunderstood, injured deeply. But where is your heart continuing to in some way hold somewhat at a distance? Just take a moment and note that because we'll be coming back to this

in a reflection a bit later so again you might be noticing the small kind of averse of judgments that you that you have as kind of a pattern maybe it with a partner how they drive maybe towards yourself the way you're eating habits

maybe the way your child relates to chores or it might be someone that you don't know but you really have a judgment towards a newscaster or a politician. But just to sense that because it's in most of us and it keeps us from an open-heartedness. Are some of you maybe considering the more huge and obvious places of resentment and blame? So as you can consider this as we keep on exploring this

but I'd like to at this point make a distinction that I find really important between what I sometimes think of as wise discrimination and averse of judgment because you might be wondering well aren't there situations where we need to be just honest about hey look this is a problem and of course there are

and that's the only way it's part of our survival equipment and we use our mind well when it's what we call discriminating wisdom, where we can see, look, when you do this, this causes harm. You know, when I end up raising my voice and losing my temper with my child, it doesn't help my child to understand what I want them to do or what needs to happen.

They just get defensive or scared, you know. So why is discrimination just sees the cause and effect, kind of sees the karmic, what's causing what, and then that understanding helps guide us in our behaviors. That's different from averse of judgment that says, you know, I raise my voice, I lose my temper with my child, and I'm just a rotten person. I'm just bad.

That condemnation that's not talking about a behavior that we really, really would benefit from changing, but just a real, averse of condemning of who we, are. It's an important distinction. You can feel it in your body as you begin to explore it. So it's important to recognize as we say, okay, I'd like to explore this boon, this blessing. What would happen if I really committed myself to waking up out of a verse of judgment? Like, what would happen in my life? How would my life change? It's important to, and this is kind of of our being humble is to recognize that we have this survival equipment, this nervous system

and these emotions that are really rigged into us that are designed when things hurt, when we're afraid, this equipment in a flash brings up blame and resentment. It's not like we have a time to think about it and it's not a rational decision. I mean think about when you're cut off on the beltway by a car and you know you get that sense that could have been a really bad accident. What happens to your body? We get a flash of rage, right? I mean it doesn't matter how nice a person we think we are. It's like that's what goes on in our body. We get outraged. And you can see in relationships when we feel misunderstood, are overlooked, are criticized, you know, how quickly our hearts harden and we feel angry. We get mean-spirited in some ways. So how quickly injury

and insecurity end up morphing into blame. And then we lash out in some way with our mind or with our actions. It's like there's one cartoon of a dog who's on a psychiatrist's couch and he's basically saying, and the psychiatrist is a dog too, he's basically saying, you know, I bark at everything. You just can't go to warm. wrong that way, you know, just bark at everything, you know. So, and that's the way we are and some part of us is geared to do that just to lash out. And to say that to forgive doesn't mean we're going to be passive, it doesn't mean that we're approving of what happens. You know, it's not like we're saying, oh, it's okay that you insult me or abuse me.

and we need wise discrimination. How many of you read Beatrice Potter are familiar with Peter Rabbit's stories? Can I see? Some of you. Okay. This is for you. There was, ran into this cartoon with a rabbit at a desk taking an exam and the question is write a brief reaction to the following statement. Farmer McGregor is essentially a decent man, you know?

Now for those of you didn't read it, Peter Rabbit's father was basically made into a pie by a McGregor's wife. So it's, you know, bad history there and it's dangerous to go into the garden and so on. So the point is that we have a strong conditioning in our body not to forgive, not to open our heart. And the truth is it's not about setting ourselves up to be stamped on or made pie of. We also have strong conditioning not to forgive ourselves. and we have a fear and then you can just check in on this one that if there's something you really

don't like about yourself there's this fear that if we get tender towards our being if we open with compassion in some way if we say you know let me hold this with kindness what's our fear we'll never change right

yeah I tell you're about to say that yeah that we'll stay the same we might get worse. Maybe we're indulging ourselves. It's like some of you might know deep thoughts. Jack Handy, he says, the first thing was I told myself, I learned to forgive and then I said, go ahead and do whatever you want. It's okay by me, you know. It's like this indulging that we're afraid of. So forgiving does not mean we're erasing all boundaries. The undefended heart is still

intelligent. It knows how to guide us in taking good care of ourselves or those that we're responsible for. I sometimes think of it like this that we can be practicing in this deep way of releasing averse of judgments of just letting this wise discrimination guide us. We can release, we can forgive and we can commit ourselves ever more deeply. We can take a vow to never ever ever let that hurtful behavior happen again, to do whatever is within our power to protect ourselves or others. Some of the people that I know that are most forgiving are also the most dedicated social activists. It's spiritual activism. So the truth is, and the reason that this becomes so important on the spiritual path, is that when you are in a place of

blame. When you're holding a real negative judgment towards yourself or another person, you're in trance. You're in a trance. You're not seeing clearly the world. Our story blocks out the larger truth of who we are in that moment and who the other person is. We're in a deluded trance. This is how Mark Twain puts it. He says, when I was 14, my father in particular was such a fool. I was embarrassed to have them around. I marveled at 21 how in seven years the old fellow would learn so much. So you might reflect for a moment in your own life. And again, this is a chance to, if you'd like, close your eyes and just sense how you might be in trance when judgment gets strong. First by considering someone maybe in a close circle of friends or family.

And what's it like when you lock into a feeling of real blame or resentment with that person? This is somebody you care about but bugs you and that you get reactive towards. And when you're feeling blame, that sense of you're doing something wrong, you should be different. How does that other person appear to you? In other words, what is it you're noticing about that person? What happens when your attention narrows and you're fixating on wrongdoing? How does that person look to you? Do you like the way that person looks?

Consider what you might be forgetting in those moments, the vulnerability or unmet need that might have driven that person to act the way they're acting. Maybe you're forgetting that this person is really wanting to be happy, wanting to feel loved, wanting to feel good about themselves. You might know all that at other moments, but in this moment of blaming, consider what you're forgetting, this person's basic goodness. Take some moments as you're considering when you're blaming, when you're resentful, what is your experience of yourself?

How does it feel to be in your own mind, your own body? What's your identity? Is it with an oppressed self or a victimized self or an outraged self or a wronged self? what's the self identity you've taken on when you're in blame mode just to notice that trance is when we step into a smaller self than the being that we are do you like who you are when you're blaming think of the trance that we go into when we have an enemy

in a social way maybe it's a group of people a country a religion politician a political party you can open your eyes if you'd like but what's that like I mean can you sense how much smaller we get when we start targeting and having an enemy

what if our enemy is a sports team that's threatening our favorite team I mean how much is this build up to the Super Bowl effect in my household we have I have a couple of guys who go into very much of a good guy bad guy kind of mentality around the playoffs I mean it's like maybe they don't believe it deep down

but the energy is that, right? I mean, I bring it up on purpose because it is this time of year that both with the Super Bowl and also with the elections, how many of us can read the newspaper and not on some level start having a filter

of who's good and who's bad, who are for, who we're against? It's very physical. There's a kind of violence and aggression and dislike and distaste or, yeah, that's my team, you know, feeling. So it's interesting to investigate how much of this culture fuels the sense of us and them, bad and good, you know, not okay. And you can think of the violent video games that have an enemy you're going after or the themes of most movies and TV shows that are, you know, kind of action shows or, as I mentioned, political warfare.

It leaves it easier to not challenge when our own psyche is resentful of somebody for something smaller. We go very quickly into, you should be different, you're not okay. So we have a deep investment in how the world should be. We want it to be a certain way so we feel good in our lives work out. And when we aren't the way we want to be, there's a feeling of I should be different, and it's very hard to forgive ourselves. when others are not the way we think they should be, you should be different, and it's very difficult to accept

people are as they are. When the world is not doing it the way we want it to be, we get outraged. The Flying Cross was an award to Percy the Pigeon, who flopped down exhausted in a Sheffield loft, having beaten a thousand rivals in a 500-mile race, he was immediately eaten by a cat. So here's this pigeon.

He beat out all the rivals, a thousand rivals. It's a 500-mile race. He's eaten immediately by a cat. The 90-minute delay in finding his remains and handing his ID tag to the judges relegated Percy from first to third place. Now, is that fair? You might be wondering, you know, why am I reading that to you?

It's just so weird that I... But it violates our sense of should. I mean, this little pigeon did this amazing job, gets eaten by a cat, and loses first place for it. Okay. I knew that when I put that in my file, that I wasn't going to figure out how to fit it in, really. So the upshot is, when we live in shoulds,

when our heart is in a should, you should be different, and it closes down. And it doesn't matter how, right, it seems we are. If our heart is pushing someone else away, or if we're rejecting a part of our own being, our heart is defended and closed, and we're not available to really see life as it is. We're in a trance. We're not available to move on this journey of freedom. So that's why Nachikata chose us as the first layer, this defended heart. And the truth is that we don't have a full capacity to love if we are in resentment and blame towards anyone. Not a full

capacity. Now I want to share a story I think last year I brought it up here. I read a book called Tattoos on the Heart and it's by Gregory Boyle and I recommend it highly. It's a beautiful, beautiful book. And Boyle is a priest, a Catholic priest, who works in the worst gang violent violence kind of neighborhoods in L.A. and he has created businesses and all sorts of support for some of the gang members to help them make this transition. Well, he tells a story of a woman named Soldod, who's a mother of four, and she's very, very proud when her son, her second oldest son gets his diploma and he goes to the Marines. She actually, she found it later on, went to Afghanistan.

And he comes back home for a visit and goes out to pick up some fast food and she hears the shots outside. And when she opens up the front door, her son Ronnie dies in her arms in the front door. Soon after, her oldest boy, Angel, pulled off something very few in the hood would do. He graduated from high school. and he just helped Saldad, you know, get through the hell she was living in for six months, you know. And he finally pleaded with her at the end of six months, put on some clothes with some color, get your hair done, you know, be a mom to your three remaining children. And that afternoon, and she did it.

She gussied up and he gave her a lot of support. And she finally was pulling out in that afternoon they were sitting and she was sitting and eating a sandwich on the front porch. And Angel got called down and who shot up by her. rivaled gang of kids. So Boyle writes about her and he says that she was, he describes her. He says later that day she was sobbing into a huge bath towel. The few of us there found our arms too short to wrap around this kind of pain. The next couple of years she was locked into the anguish of separation. So he spent a lot of time with her and described at one meeting how he asked her how she was doing. She said, you know, I love the two kids I have. I hurt for the two that are gone.

And then she's crying. She goes, the hurt wins. The hurt wins. Some months after that, she's in the emergency room for some chest pain, and a kid with multiple gunshot wounds is rushed on a gurney to the spot right next to her, and there's no curtain drawn. So she's kind of witnessing him fighting for his life. And she said that she recognized that she recognized, him from the rival gang that killed her boys. And she knew who he was. And she knew that her friends might say, pray that he dies

for all the violence, all the harm. But that's not what happened. What happened and said is she heard the doctors crying out, we're losing him. We're losing him. And something cracked open. And she said, she began to cry. And she said, I prayed like I had never prayed before.

The hardest I've ever prayed, please don't let him die. I don't want his mom to go through what I had to go through. So the boy survived, as did Soul Dad's capacity for loving. In other words, she got ripped open by grief, but that became this unimaginable openness. And I share this story because at first, when we are injured badly by another, at first the hurt wins.

It's part of our evolutionary design to go into reaction to hurt and to cover our hearts and protect ourselves. So not forgiving is a natural phase. And in fact, you can't will forgiveness. It's like, you know, willing you're a certain, muscle to just relax when it's trying to protect you against somebody attacking you. You cannot will it. So we are designed to not forgive for a while.

It's natural to contract, to hate, to blame. But that's not the end of our evolutionary potential. We also have this capacity to sense human suffering and to care. And to come around to that, even if we have been defending our heart. We have the capacity to wake up to that. Many of you've probably heard of Stephen Pinker who's a leading evolutionary psychologist Harvard-based. Well he wrote a book called Better Angels of Our Nature and his thesis is that there's actually a decrease in violence on the globe and it's been happening steadily. It might not look that way but there's actually less and

less violence and more and more cooperation. That's that our brains are developing and that the higher centers of our brain are activated and, and this is what's so interesting, as we awaken spiritually as humans, we then can choose the practices and ways of paying attention that continue to evolve our brain. This is what's so radical about evolution. We're evolving and we're learning how to then facilitate. are evolving. And that's where compassion practices come in. That's where the intention to forgive comes in. I say it a lot, but you can't will forgiveness, but you can be willing. You can leave

here tonight. You can, with more of your intentionality, mobilized, to recognize averse of blame and to wake up from it. You can have more intention to have an undefended heart. That can be your intention and that's what opens the door. So there are trainings in this and we do the practices often here and there are labs around the world now that are doing research and trainings and compassion, looking at the effect of the brain when you do these practices, finding how it definitely activates the left prefrontal cortex and the parts of the middle brain that are associated with empathy, with compassion, with kindness. And in Stanford, which has a center called SeaCare, the Center for Compassion and Altruism, the Dalai Lama saw

what they were doing. He donated, it's the first time he's donated personally to any facility. He donated to see care because they're doing these eight-week trainings and all this research on the impact of compassion because if we can train ourselves, train these parts of our brain to more quickly let go of blame and open in an undefended way, that's the hope for peace on earth. This evolutionary capacity to facilitate our evolution. This is where the hope is. So in these immediate lives, in our own lives, it's the precursor to freedom, to be able to let go of our armoring, wherever it is around our hearts. And this is the wisdom that Saldad knew deep down. The hurt was winning, but didn't have to be that way. This is the same wisdom that so many

spiritual leaders know, Nelson, the Mandala, when peace and reconciliation process in South Africa. We see it with Martin Luther King who refused to let and respond with hatred to hatred to continue that cycle of violence. Refused it. We see it with the Dalai Lama who talks about the Chinese as my friend, the enemy, his religion is kindness. We see it in awakening beings and it's really the pathway that each of us can choose. So it comes from understanding.

It comes from understanding that we have deeper freedom if we're not living in blame. Maybe since I have enough time I'll share with you a story of one client I work with some years ago. His wife had left him and his first reaction from that hurt, again, his space suit survival reaction was a sense of rage and a sense of blame that she broke her promise, she betrayed his trust. And he began to triangulate with the kids, you know, and in some way to try to pull them to his side. And the amount of confusion and anger and dysfunction that that produced woke him up. He realized he couldn't do it.

He could not keep on playing the story to his wife, if you're bad, you're wrong, you should be different. But what he did was he flipped it. And this is what we often do. As soon as we withdraw our blame of another, where does it go? So then he was blaming himself, I'm unworthy, I didn't meet her in needs, I failed in this relationship. And that was suffering. So I asked a question that I often ask, which is, if you had to put down your story of blame, if you had to just stop believing the story of I'm bad, I'm unworthy, I blew it,

what then would you have to feel? and when he put aside that story he actually plunged very deeply into a place of powerlessness and fear and the fear was I'll never be close to anyone again I'll never have connection and then we explored as we do with rain

the acronym rain and these practices of mindfulness well what is that place in you need that's afraid and what it needed was compassion So he did many, many weeks of, in some deep way, just offering a very kind presence to the place in him. There was afraid he'd be alone for the rest of his life. Loneliness is deep in us.

It's a big fear. So that was his compassion and presence and that was the beginning of his healing. As soon as he stopped blaming her and stopped blaming himself, he was actually able to start healing a place, a deeply rooted place, fear. And this is the real message in forgiveness. There's no healing possible until we put down the story of blame. We can't make any traction. We can't see the unmet needs that are there. We can't respond to them within ourselves. For him, once he was able to regard himself with compassion, he was able to look at her through different eyes. And he was able to really see the place in her that felt unloved and didn't feel like he was showing her the kind of love that let her feel more secure.

They were able to co-parent. They were able to get outside the blame, blame that kept them at odds. So the teaching is forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, opens the way to healing and to freedom. But as we know, and this is going to be the last piece, the most difficult place to, forgive is ourselves. When we have a deep belief that I should be different, it's not just cognitive. There is a squeeze and an emptiness and a hole and an ache that feels very physical. It's a physical something's wrong feeling.

And it's very hard to work with and it's a very deep place. So again, the first step is having the intention. intention to be kind towards ourselves. It's amazing how much if you sense from the wisdom within you that that is the path, even though there's a lot of resistance, your intention to be kind can begin to loosen, can begin to soften the area of your heart. I mean, I've seen with myself time and time again that when I'm in what seems like a bad mood, when I'm feeling unhappy or anxious or down in some way.

And if I ask that place in me, well, what are you believing? What's your view of the world? How to go inside the place of that yucky feeling and look out. Inevitably, I find that from the view of that place, I'm falling short. That in some way I should be different. And it's just in seeing that that the armoring begin. begins to soften. As soon as I see, oh, once again I've turned on myself, something in me goes, oh, okay, let's try. The beginning of all real shifts towards healing is when we have

that intention to be more gentle. So tonight we've been talking about forgiveness and there's the big situations, but I think it's just as important as you scan and kind of deepen your attention to look for the small ways, the less obvious ways, the kind of incessant small judgments towards ourselves, towards others. It's kind of often a jadedness or a mistrust or a cynicism towards the ego self. But it creates a hardness, a kind of crustiness at the heart. Charlotte Joko Beck writes, this is a Zen teacher, our failure to know joy is directly related to our inability to forgive. Our failure to no joy

is directly related to our inability to forgive. As we deepen our commitment to our journey, it's natural to commit to this forgiving because everything that we long for begins to blossom when the heart's less defended. Then we can open to who's here. So we'll end the evening with a reflection, as we often do,

give you a chance to just explore what this means right here and now in your own body and heart and as a way of contexting this I think it's really helpful to think of it as this is a practice of remembering to choose love to decide on love to decide on on forgiveness it means that you're intending and take away the expectation that all of a sudden your heart will break open and free and the person that you've forever had a grudge towards you'll be embracing because that's not fair to yourself, you know? Just let it be an intention and see what happens when your intention is to open the heart, to be undefended. So closing your eyes, if that's helpful, take a few moments to let yourself arrive right here, be present, sometimes call this a forgiveness sweep,

something you can do daily in a very brief way or you can do it and take more time. But it's a sweep because it really helps to aerate and open up and loosen the layering around the heart. And we sweep by beginning to sense if there's anything right this moment, any unpleasantness in the body, any difficult emotion, right this moment, that once you notice is there, something in you wishes it wasn't, there, things that shouldn't be there. So is there anything that's wanting acceptance or attention right here in this moment in your body, in your heart?

If you notice anything, something you're wanting different, that should be different, how you're feeling, emotion or sensation, then just have the intention to forgive it for being as it is. Forgiving means to let go of the judgment or the armoring. the intention to let be, just to meet with kindness, and see what happens. So you're sensing what it means to have an undefended heart, when there's something in the body, when there's something in your moods that's not matching how you want it. And continuing the sweep to be a comprehensive kind of mindfulness of today, any attitude

towards yourself about the day, how did the day go, anything you might be caring. that has some judgment, some blame on how you conducted yourself today. So you might just scan the day. Is there anything that you're carrying some idea of how you should have been different? Often it's so habitual that we think we should be doing things differently, we don't even notice we're carrying it and yet that is a layer of armoring that separates us from ourselves. So if you notice something, some judgment about today, again have that intention to soften

in the heart. You might just mentally say the words, forgiven, forgiven. Just to touch that blame with kindness. Forgiven, forgiven. And see what happens when you have the intention to let go. So we widen this scan now to sense if there's something. somewhere that you're carrying more of a deep or ongoing anger or sense of self condemnation. And these are some of the larger, more life currents of how we are turned on ourselves.

Just to include that right now. It might be for ways you feel you've hurt others or that you continue to hurt others or yourself. And if you find something just to slow down and, and deepen your attention and see if you can sense the unmet need that drives the very thing you judge, the fear or hurt, the restlessness, the confusion, the unmet longing that might make you act or behave in ways that you don't like. Just include a larger truth here. And as you do, see what happens if you intend to meet this with compassion

versus blame. Again, you might use the words forgiven, forgiven. Just the intention to let go and see what happens. Finally, we widen the scan now to where you might have a sense of dividedness or separation with another person, where you've pushed someone else out of your heart. And just as Natchikata asked with his father, may we have peace, just allow the intention to arise

in your own heart for this capacity to forgive, this capacity to include others in your heart in a wise way. With that intention, you might be able to see the other's vulnerability more. With that intention, you can explore forgiven, forgiven, and just see what's possible, knowing this has its own timing, not being willful, but just a willingness, willingness to explore cultivating an undefended heart I share with you the words of Rumi he says very little grows on jagged rock

be ground be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are you've been stony for too many years try something different surrender we close with a simple reflection of sensing this heart, this capacity for an undefended heart, a surrendering presence that leaves

this heart free to love without holding back. I just invite you to sense how your life might unfold and blossom the wildflowers that will come up where you are as this heart becomes increasingly less defended and increasingly free. and there's a way to bring your intention very much more immediate. You might sense in the next day or two one place where you'd like to experiment where you'd like your intentionality to be very conscious

in putting down blame and opening yourself in this undefended presence, perhaps with one person or with yourself. Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You've been stony for too many years. Try something different.

Surrender. Namaste and blessings. Thank you. 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.