Tara Brach - Part 2 - 1000 Serious Moves

Episode Date: August 22, 2012

2012-08-22 - Part 2 - 1000 Serious Moves - We easily habituate to feeling stressed, leaning forward, trying to figure things out and get things done. The undercurrent is we are living reactively--resisting unpleasant experience, seeking out more comfort and ease-- perpetually wanting life to be different than it is. In response to this confined way of living, the Buddha invites us to discover our innate capacity for happiness, the wellbeing that arises in full presence. These two talks explore the ways we get caught in the trance of reactivity and grimness, and the pathways to unconditioned happiness. 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!

A few days ago, one of the people that helps me with my Facebook site, posted something I had sent to her that in 24 hours had over a thousand likes. And so I thought I'd share it with you. Some of you probably may follow it. But this was a story about two twins, a pair of twins. And one, there were in different incubators. One was dying, expected to die, and the other was. fine and a nurse fought against the hospital regulations and had them put in the

same incubator and once they got into the same incubator the healthier one put her arm around the less healthy one in an embrace and the one that was supposedly dying her temperature came up her heartbeat stabilized and she made it so the picture comes with it and it was really something to reflect on for me. I was mostly interested on the level of the response to the story. You know, what is it in us that responds pretty universally to that as a sense of goodness?

And my experience as I reflect on it is that it really takes us out of our, the small mind of our doings and reminds us of what matters. That the real healing and the real joy in life is it comes from connectedness. It comes from embracing each other, embracing ourselves, embracing life. And we can't embrace life if we're on our way somewhere else. Right? There's that wonderful teaching that to be kind, we have to stray regularly.

from our path. That path that we're rolling forward into the future to get the next thing done, right? So tonight's class is really part two and a two-part series on arousing happiness

and I'm basing it on a line from the poet Hafeus who says, whereas you, my dear, still think you have a thousand serious moves. He describes his chest game then saints they're playing with God and they just surrender joyfully whereas we think we have a thousand serious moves yet left ahead and how that map that we live in and you just ask yourself

this is true do I have most moments of the day do I have a map in my mind of I'm here now and I'm on my way to such and such and these are the things I have to do does that resonate for many of you? Yeah. For those that aren't here and are listening, there are nodding heads. So we're not so much in the happiness business in a sense of expressing happiness. I came in tonight and one friend here I asked her how you're doing. She goes, oh, I'm happy. And everything in me went, yay, you know, you said it. You said it out loud, but it doesn't happen that much. there's a cartoon of two monks who are meditating side by side and one looks really annoyed and he's saying to the other well you stop yelling out ka-ching every time you reach oneness with the universe well i actually was thinking

well what if here we were meditating and we agreed whenever you feel really connected or happier life just yell out ka-ching you know it would be kind of funny it would be popping around the room you know but we don't notice the moments of happiness so much and we don't express them we don't savor them and in a way we're wired to experience love and wonder and happiness we're wired for it and as we've talked about and we talked about this last week we have a bias towards the negative. It's part of our survival brain. So we tend to fixate on the bad news, most of us. We do. So to name it that we need all of our emotions, we need the ones that are called negative emotions.

They're part of what allows us to sense when there's a threat and they move us to respond in ways that help us to make it. And on the spiritual path, Remember that phrase, you know, no mud, no lotus, right? They're part of transformation. They open up our hearts, so we need them. And because we have such conditioning to fixate on what's wrong, we also need very intentionally to pay attention in a way that wakes up our hearts to happiness. So in a way, there are two domains of spiritual practice, and one is be with what is,

like fully bring your presence to what is, and the other is to make sure that you also include what your mind's not fixated on, but what might serve your freedom. Does that make sense? Okay, I'm glad to. Thank you. The point of the talks on a thousand serious moves is that, we're biased towards fixating on painful emotions, on depression, on happiness, on judgment, on anger. And so the training is to learn to be with those experiences, wake up out of the stories and be with them,

but also to cultivate what's there, but often we don't pay attention to, which is our capacity for happiness, for loving kindness, for joy, for wonder. So it's both. It's both be with what is and cultivate the positive. We're good? Okay. A linguistics professor was lecturing his class one day, and he said in English, two negatives make a positive.

He said, but in some languages, for instance, Russian, two negatives still remain a negative. However, he said, there's no language wherein two positives make a negative, at which point a voice in the back of the room went, Yeah, right. Okay, so the underlying principle of tonight's exploration, and we'll be reflecting together, practicing the strategies that wake up these positive emotions, the underlying principle is this, that where attention goes, energy flows. What you pay attention to, that's where the energy goes. So what that means, the Buddha said it this way. He said, whatever the practitioner regularly thinks and ponderes upon,

that will be the inclination of the mind. Neuroscientists say neurons that fire together, wire together. Now, this is a really key understanding in our lives because if we really got it, if we really got that how we're paying attention, What we're paying attention to is affecting our mood and affecting our inclinations for the future, wouldn't we maybe make some more choices

of how we're paying attention? Like if we could remember that? I'm lucky because if I'm giving a talk on something, I have to kind of use that as a filter for things that are going on. So I've had a really kind of a pretty fun week. I came in tonight and I left a little late and then the rains came. And I watched my mind do what it does because I have anxiety about being late for class.

So I watched starting to worry and starting to predict ahead of time where the traffic would, you know, really clog up and so on. And I said, okay, where the attention goes, energy flows, attention goes, energy. I started, you know, reminding myself of that. And I said, okay, so I don't want to deny that there's anxiety. So I felt what was there. But also the rain was coming down. to have a convertible so I could really hear it playing on the roof and I love the sound of rain. So I said, okay, I'll pay attention to the anxiety, but I'll also let that wash through.

And it was really something that having, just enlarging my attention so that it wasn't fixed on worry thoughts, which of course create a certain biochemistry, which create more worry thoughts. It's not a fun looping to be in. the rain, just listening to those sounds, shifting my attention, not away from, but opening it, allowed energy to flow in a much more alive and freeing way. So it becomes interesting to start noticing what do we spend our time thinking about. And that's not an invitation to get down on yourself. because we know that, you know, when we're honest,

we're pretty self-centered. A lot of our thoughts are about how am I doing, what do I need to do more of, what's going to make me feel better about life, what am I going to do to have others feel better about me? Me, me, you know. So, okay, so we see that. And it creates more eyeing and mying.

It's a self-ing. If we can see that and know that it actually doesn't create happiness, we can begin to make other choices. The challenge is the patterning to get fixated on the negatives very strong, and I think it's something to respect. It starts in infancy, and again, it's the culture, it's our families, it's our genetics, but we in some way experience very early on what I call severed belonging, where who we are and what we are is not.

not met in a resonant way, that there's not the attunement that we're really longing for. So something happens. Either a parent loses their temper and yells or pushes us away or ignores or doesn't respond to our cries or maybe goes away unexpectedly. But there's some kinds of severing and their survival brain then fixates on it and looks through life at experiences that similar when somebody looks or acts or speaks in a similar way that might mean I'm endangered or I'm going to be rejected I'm going to be shamed we filter for it the painful experience are the ones that the brain codes it leaves traces on the brain more readily than the positive so we move through life and we have you know I describe the space suit

self that we develop to in some way protect ourselves from the pain the raw pain of those imprints. And this negative bias is pretty strong. And those are the neuropathways that are, that the mind runs through again and again. The thoughts of somebody's going to reject me. I need to do this, I'm falling short, the feelings that go with it.

So what happens is that we develop strategies to not feel bad. We try to numb and not feel that. feel that and then when we start meditating so you just you hear that meditation reduces stress you hear that meditation brings a more happy centered life so you come to class and you start getting quiet and what comes up that's stuff you've been running away from right so initially it can be really difficult you start realizing oh I'm obsessively thinking about stuff that's

really causing my biochemistry to have a version you start realizing that oh that's where my tension's going. That's where my energy's flowing. You know, we start recognize it. And then we start sensing underneath that obsessing, wow, there's some real deep sense of being flawed. I'm saying this because initially, meditation actually gets us in touch

with the patterning and underneath that, the raw pain that we've been running from. So then a teacher will say, well, the way through is through, right? Just be with it. And so we started being with it and funny thing but we realized that we're not meditating as much and we realized oh we stopped coming to class and it's two years and we went wow I really got away from that. Well what happened? What happened was that it was really unpleasant to meditate. It was unpleasant

because there were layers of unlived life we were getting in touch with and I and we didn't want to do that. So we had all these reasons for not meditating. So then we start hearing these teachings about a thousand serious moves. Maybe we're going at it too grimly, which is the whole reason I'm going into this riff right now. You will not keep meditating if it's really unpleasant. There needs, it says, Ticknott Han said,

it's not enough to suffer. You have to touch peace too. that's why we have this balancing yes we have to have the courage and bravery to be with what's here and we need to touch into the bigger picture into the streams of happiness and love and peace in order to have a space that can hold and be resilient with what's here

it's as if the mind is this garden and we're learning to be with it and we be with the wildness that's there and we be with all the thorns in the garden, but we also do some wading, and we also plant some seeds of beautiful flowers. So that's all background for me to move further into how do we plant those seeds

that allow us more fully to be with the whole of life, not just what's so difficult. But before I go into it, when I start teaching about cultivating, positive states of mind of really being happy, there's a fear that comes up from some people. And the fear is, you know, if I got happy, I might get complacent. I might stop working on myself, I might stop caring about the world and trying to serve the world. I just get complacent. What about the suffering in the world? I mean, should I really be

spending time meditating and arousing happiness, you know, when other people are having a hard time and I hear this a lot so in a way just to say that there's really a difference between the kind of self-centeredness that's out grasping after pleasure wants to possess more wants to experience more me me me I want I want and the quality of heart and presence that arise when we cultivate these positive states. What I've seen is those beings that are really serving

true transformation, radical transformation on the planet. I think of the Dalai Lama and his infectious giggle. Like he loves to giggle. He's got like this bubble of happiness in him. And yet he cares deeply about the world. I think of Ticknod Han

who teaches about eating a peach a friend of mine, left some peaches at my house the other day, they're outrageously good. So I think of Tick Nhat Han. He slows down and he's each bite and he really savors it. And Tick Nathan has spent, what is it now, six decades, completely dedicated to peace movement and to working against overconsuming and trying to be a steward for this earth. I think of Joanna Macy, who's the most dedicated person I know in terms of really working to heal our planet and her capacity for joy and her humor

we do not have to be grim and we do not have to suffer in order to keep motivated to be good it's our natural goodness that'll shine through so there's a wise balancing that we're exploring here and it's very easy to get grim. I mean, a thousand serious moves, we bring into spiritual life very, very easily. I've been on retreats,

and I've watched people take it on as the next project of, you know, I'm going to experience the genres, which are the collected states of, you know, of concentration, or I'm going to, you know, having these projects, spiritual projects and getting really intense about them. And if it's grim, it just doesn't work, really. I have one person, I'm thinking of, I was teaching a month-long retreat at Spirit Rock.

And one of the persons taking the retreat got very focused and quiet, yet he realized that he had gotten too grim. So he brought his penetrating attention to haiku. Okay. And I want to read you something he wrote. Great Hall, Meditation All, the Great Hall is silent. Pinto beans for lunch. punch and now some lean left some right do you get it we're being polite I think he

subsequently called himself haiku master Yon Tin Faust which if you know is very close suspiciously close to my husband's name Yon Tin Faust so the first step when we recognize yes I'm doing the thousand series moves and you can use it as a filter you can just stop at any point of the day and say am I on my way somewhere and is it tight you know if we're doing the thousand serious moves

the first step is intention it's just having that desire to be able to be here and embrace this life like that little infant you had to be here you have to be here if you're going to embrace this life to have that intention to plant seeds of gratitude of happiness

And there's going to be three related ways that I'm going to explore now about planting seeds. The first one is gratitude. Gratitude is incredibly powerful practice. It's a natural experience when we're present to feel grateful. And you can actually practice bringing the attention to gratitude and neuroplasticity kicks in. You actually shift from complaints. mind to grateful mind. It is freedom. So research. I mentioned Marty Seligman last week, who's the father of positive psychology, which developed out of this same understanding. It's not

enough to suffer. We have wiring for experiencing joy. Why get fixated on the negative? So what he did was he worked with some severely depressed people and he had them write three good things that happened to them for 15 days. So each day they'd write the three good things. At the end, 94% had a decrease in depression. 92% said happiness increased. He says in his trainings,

the most effective thing is to pick someone you feel grateful toward, write a one-page letter read to that person and listen attentively to their response now what you'll find in each of these ways of planting seeds there's the contemplation or reflection but there's also this action you can do

and if you bring it into action more parts of the brain get involved than it actually lets the positive emotion flower so you can feel gratitude I can feel the sense of I'm really grateful that you all want to come and get together and explore these teachings that are so precious to me. So I can feel that, but saying that out loud just now and meaning it because I do, it softens.

It wakes us up. You might decide to have a gratitude buddy. That can be really beautiful, which is where you just have one person and you send an email each day. You don't have to say hi. You don't have to have a sign off. All you do is list a few things you're grateful for. It's a training and it's a training that can profoundly change your mood.

It's a trick also when life is really difficult. How do you frame things in a way that allows you? It's not to be Pollyanna-ish but just to see a bigger picture, to shift things around some. You might remember the story about Saul and Mort. They're walking from religious services, and Saul's wondering if it's okay to smoke while praying. So Mort says, why don't you ask the rabbi?

So he goes up to the rabbi and says, Rabbi, may I smoke while I pray? And the rabbi says, no, my son, you may not. That's disrespect to our religion. Goes back, tells his friend what the rabbi said, and Mort says, I'm not surprised. You asked the wrong question. Let me try.

So he goes to the rabbi and says, rabbi, is it all right if I pray while I smoke? By all means, my son, by all means. So it's a practice. There's many people that, and you might sense, as I know and myself, how much complaining goes on in my mind. So it gets really interesting, and I'll share one favorite story. This is James Beres, and I think we still have his book here. We sell it regularly. It's called Awakening Joy, and it's really good.

He's got a lot of good practices in it. And James tells a story. James is a really good buddy, and I've been hearing stories about his mom for years and years, but this most recent one is great. He spent some time with her when she was 89. He went down to L.A. to visit her. She is a self-proclaimed half-full type, okay?

Okay, okay. Real feisty woman, wonderful woman. So he's sharing with her about the benefits of gratitude, and she's kind of skeptical. Like, you know, I'm an old dog, you know. It's like I've been half full for a lot of decades. So he turned it into a game, and the game was every time she made a complaint,

then she was going to be adding, and my life is very blessed. You know, so the TV's broken, and my life is very blessed, you know. Okay, they forgot to deliver it, over the newspaper today, and my life is very blessed and so on and so on. He was there for a week and he was able to support her and it actually turned fun. I mean, they had a good time with it.

And then he'd call her, you know, over the next few weeks and he said miraculously it stopped. And he said there was a real revolutionary change in her mood and her attitude. This is his 89-year-old mother. Now, during this time, these last few months that he was kind of supporting her in it, she was losing her eyesight, which is a really big deal. So I want to read you what she sent him on her 90th birthday. They have a family kind of tradition of sending poems. She says, I'm happier than I've ever been and truly mean each word.

the thoughts that cause the worries now all seem so absurd though my eyesight has been dimmed I see clearer than before the glass is not half empty it's overflowing to be sure so I wanted to share that

because this is a practice that if you take on you can do it at any time during the day I sometimes when I first start sitting if I'm feeling I'm in a certain mood will just take some moments to just reflect on everything that's good in my life everything I feel

blessed for let's just take a moment together now we'll just get a taste and then we'll move on to the next type of seed we're planting but during this pause you might begin by just noticing if any part of your body's habitually been tensing itself and see if you can just soften a little to relax your shoulders might soften the hands. Take a few full breaths. Sense the possibility of smiling into your eyes. So the brow is smooth.

Slight smile at the mouth. And see if you can smile into the heart. Just sense that, that openness that has room for whatever's there, that receptivity. And let your mind now go to whatever you feel grateful for in your life. I'd like to invite you to whisper. what you feel grateful for. Don't worry because nobody's listening.

Everybody else is just reflecting and whispering themselves. So just begin to whisper, I feel grateful for, and then just fill in the blank. It could be a person, it could be a part of nature that you love, any experience that you relish. Just let the mind be open and receptive, whatever comes.

You might choose one thing that really stands out to you right now, and whisper that again and actually let it be felt in the body let gratitude just fill you up get to know gratitude you might just if

there's a person that it involves just imagine just saying thank you and if it's not just say thank you to the universe just whisper thank you and see what happens and then maybe again until it comes from the most sincere place

that you know. The glass is not half empty. It's overflowing to be sure. Okay, so that's the first area of practice of planting seeds in the garden. The second is the actual practice of savoring. We move through the day and there are many spots of unpleasantness and pleasantness, but we tend to just kind of roll right over them. And so one of the practices the Buddha described as gladdening the mind is to pause and to linger and to immerse in what is bringing delight. This is part of gladdening the mind. He B. White writes, I wake up each morning torn between the desire to serve and the desire to savor. On the day that I ate my peach, I got this from a friend on the west coast. Our peach tree bore the most magnificent

in fruit this year and last night Alice and I picked all the remaining ones before our trip to the southeast. We had a peach orgy with whipped cream and lots of swooning. Wish you could have been there with us. Good email. That's savoring. A lot of swooning. Isn't that great? So it takes a commitment to savor. In other words, just as I mentioned earlier to be kind, we have to swerve regularly from our path. To savor, you have to be. willing to stop that engine that keeps thinking it's on its way somewhere else. Right? We have to kind of get off that track and just stop.

And so when something delightful arises, like for me it was the sound of the rain. It might be the beauty of the night sky or maybe you're somebody that you love is laughing and you just love to watch them laugh. I mean, it's great to watch people you love laughing to see them happy. You know, it's really fun. you witness some kindness, just stop, take it in and sense, what does it really feel like to take that in? Find out.

It's an investigation. It's been described by psychologists as memorizing the experience. We have many templates for unpleasant experiences. They're very familiar. And we have a sense of a self that's having an unpleasant experience. So what happens when we start really attention? intending to and memorizing and being familiar with pleasant experiences. New neuro pathways, right?

So it's a felt sense in the body that we're paying attention to. I mean, I have a way that I explore this on my morning walks, which is that I do random pauses. Whenever I can think of it, I'll just stop wherever I am. And it doesn't have to be the most scenic spot. In fact, I try to stop. I try to remember and pause in odd places so I can catch myself in that tumbling forward

and say, oh, what's it like right this moment? And so that I can come back to that sensibility that this is it, that there's not another time on planet Earth or in this life that we're waiting for. That this moment right here with us all together, us exploring this moment right, this moment. This is as much it as anything in the universe. If we don't have that capacity

to really stop and open to the kind of timeless sense of this, we'll never really be doing it. It'll be an idea and we'll always be tumbling forward. So we pause. And we pause when there's some pleasantness and start really, oh, what's it like? For me, I'll pause and I'll open my sense because that's the way I do it. I just listen, let the sounds wash through. I'll relax my body and sense that the whole dance of sensations is washing through. And then I start sensing that what I am is that space it's all washing through. There's this vastness and this tenderness and this aliveness, and this aliveness,

and that's all there is. Savoring. Just getting to know that. So there's an interesting finding when there's research on, on aging and that is that elderly people are actually not grumpier but they're happier than younger people and again these they might sound too much of a generalization but here's what the idea is that when we're younger we fixate on the future more more about worries and accomplishment and where am I going

and what needs to be different and what's going to go wrong as we get older mortality becomes more real and with that there's motivation to enjoy the moments and I am aware of that with my mom the mom who's now 86 much more than when she was younger we'll go for a walk and she'll oh look at that and it's just it's a leaf and it's a leaf I've seen 10,000 times oh look at that or the fires this is a beautiful fire tonight because we have a wood-burning stove and we watch the fire sometimes when we have dinner or the dinner or the taste of the food she really gets into it she knows she doesn't have that long. She's savoring.

Alicia here told me about her father who's just told me this tonight, I think 94. His memory's going and all, you know, the aging's happening. He gets frustrated because he used to be really clear and be able to remember everything. He says,

I'm not going to focus on frustration. He invites her outside. He says, look at that son. That son's my friend. He says, this son is so generous. It's so warm. It's so beautiful. This is a real, this is real. This is real. This is what he does. He has the sense of really savoring this life.

94. So Einstein puts it quite simply. He says there's two ways to live this life. He says you can live as if nothing's a miracle. And the other way is as if everything's a miracle. Our attention goes, energy flows. If we are in that jaded place, skeptical, cynical, judgmental, that's the experience we live in

and it's got a very strong sense of self that goes with it when we start cultivating gratitude when they're savoring the self-sense becomes more transparent and there's a light that's always been there that starts becoming more luminous more obvious more visible we're letting something shine this is um the poet kabir says

that when we're really waking up, every leaf teaches us about the Dharma. And there's a story about another Kabir who's a shoemaker, who as he works, he's really savoring and enjoying. And he's repeating the mantra, Ram, Ram, Ram, because Ram's the name of God. And he's just feeling the divine or the sacred in everything. So day and day out, he's going, Ram, Ram, Ram, Ram. 20 years and one day, Ram appears. And Kabir goes, who are you?

And he goes, I'm Ram. Well, why are you here? Well, I'm here because you've been calling me for years. Now I've come. What do you want? I don't want anything. What? You've been repeating my name over and over?

And then Kabir says, I just love repeating your name. And then for the years to come, wherever Kabir would go, he'd hear, be followed by Rahm and the sound Kabir, Kabir, Kabir. So we've talked about two weeks. ways of gladdening the mind, of some people looking towards the good. And one way is that gratitude and one way savoring. The third way is the one that many of you have done with me and in other places called met our loving kindness where we pay attention to the goodness in ourselves and each other. And as we pay attention to that, to that light in each other, there's a natural

loving that comes. And again, just like with gratitude, you can reflect on it and feel it, or you can look at someone and say, I love you, and find out how that loving presence actually flowers. Action. Okay? So how do we cultivate loving kindness?

Whatever you pay attention to that softens and opens your heart is a practice of loving kindness. Whatever you pay attention to. This week, one of my loving kindness practices was I have a book by Jennifer Holland, who is actually a local author, called Unlakely Friendships. And it's a beautifully illustrated book about different species that have, for different reasons, come together and pair it up and become, you know, have a real loving bond.

And it usually happens because as very young, one, you know, baby gets abandoned, and then it gets linked up with another creature who takes it in. So there's a lot of these different examples. And some of them have gone viral and you've probably heard about them. The tortoise and the hippo, many of you probably heard about that. An elephant and a dog. There's a great story about that. One of the ones that touched me was that well-known 230-pound gorilla Coco.

And the pictures were so great. I just wanted to share it with you. You can find, if you look up gorilla and kitten, you'll see it. Just Google that. But what happened was Coco could sign and communicate amazingly. And her teacher was reading her books. And her two favorites were Puss and Boots and Three Little Kittens. Now, Coco got really lonely and restless,

and she kept signing that she wanted a kitten. And they were worried because, you know, this was a big gorilla. And how is she going to do with the tiny little kitten? But they gave her the pick of a litter. And she picked a little kitten. And then she named it. Let's see what she named it. I wrote it down.

All ball. All ball. You know, it's like just a little ball. And she was smitten, and she treated it like a baby. And she was incredibly gentle. And she tried to nurse it. And she played with it. Well, there's a sad part to this story, because that kid and got hit by a car.

Got escaped and got hit by a car. And Coco went into deep, deep grief. And this was a real bond. And after a certain amount of time, she was willing to. to, you know, she was with two, she got two more kittens. And so you see pictures of her then with two more kittens and they're climbing all over her and she's again holding them gently.

There's something about this bond between species that we sense the sentience and the light that shines through all beings and how we're constructed differently in some ways, but what's in common is so deep and so pure and so beautiful. Again, it reminds us of the goodness. It reminds us of the goodness.

That's why all those people liked the Facebook entry with the twins because there's some innate light that shines through and we see one little infant embracing another. It's beyond our rational mind. It's just part of being. So on a research level, we know that as we cultivate loving connection with other beings, we get happier. The parts of the brain that have to do it.

happiness light up. It just, it's there. Older people with pets are happier. People with social networks that are meaningful or happier. What happens is rather than self-centered thoughts all the time, our attention shifts. Where energy goes, and where attention goes, energy flows. We shift and we become larger. We become enlarged when we're in love. We're not so caught in that story of a separate self. Parts of our brain light up that are parts that are parts that that perceive unitive kind of being, the boundaries are dissolved some. And if we need it, we can get back into that survival self and take care of ourselves. It's not like all of a sudden it's just all, you know, la-la land,

but we have access to a part of our being that makes us more whole. Maybe the last story I'll share with you because this practice of loving kindness enlarges, us, opens us beyond the small self and enlarges those that we pay attention to. And this story I heard through Rachel Naomi Remen about a physician, head of Department of Medicine and the East Coast, one of East Coast institutions. And he saw, he would see homeless women and men and he'd work with them and one woman in this story would come to visit him. once a month. And, you know, it was hard for her to get there. And her speech was sometimes

rambling. Her clothing was eccentric. And she had a hard life. But this doctor was not, he was really respectful. He didn't, he, what he was seen was not homeless woman, socioeconomic status. He didn't make her into an other. He just saw her humanity, her goodness. And they would talk and she would leave and you know it was good. Well what was interesting and at first the clinic nurses were really puzzled is that she would come to the clinic on days when he wasn't there and she knew he wasn't there and she simply wanted to go to his consulting room and she but she didn't go in she would stand on the threshold of the room and deliberately place her right foot inside the empty room and then withdraw it and then she'd put it in and then she'd withdraw it so she was

drawn to this place where there was loving presence. The places where we are seen and heard are holy places. And when we can offer that space, when we sense another's goodness and let them know it, when we sense another's goodness and express our love, we wake it up and bring out that light. When someone really listens to you, accepts you, sees your sincerity, sees your dedication to waking up, sees who you are, it allows that light to shine, it opens you up, it brings it forth. So we'll close tonight in a way that I hope you enjoy. We'll do a meta meditation and then we'll be listening a little to something that expresses a bit of

of the flavor of what we've been exploring. So find yourself a way of sitting that is comfortable that allows you to be alert. And my sense is that as we explore this garden of the mind, the very first step, coming back to basics, is right in this moment to sense your intention.

This intention to move towards wholeness. to connect with the fullness of who you are to wake up these potentials for happiness and love and gratitude is part of this unfolding to wholeness. When we're suffering, it's because our sense of self is organized around something's wrong.

Part of waking up is remembering the goodness. So we glad in the mind, we remember what we're grateful for. We commit to savoring and we practice seeing. the goodness in ourselves and each other. You might begin with your own being right now. Just take a moment to appreciate whatever you can appreciate about the life that's right here.

And if it helps you to look through the eyes of someone who sees you in an awake and wise and understanding way, that's fine too. To sense your honesty, to see, sense your longing to be awake and present and happy, to sense this growing wisdom and compassion. You might experiment with putting your hand on your own heart. Because part of loving kindness practice is action and the action of offering kindness through your hand. As you now sense, what is the wish you'd like to offer to yourself right now? blessing and you might vary the touch of your hand so it's tender and just offer to yourself

whatever blessing you might wish for yourself in this moment and then bring to mind someone who you care about that you'd like to reflect on for a few moments somebody who you're close to and sense what it is that makes you love this person what do you appreciate about this person you You might sense their humor. You might imagine this person laughing and sense their aliveness. You might sense this person's way of showing you love, the look in their eyes when they're loving. And take a moment to imagine letting that person know their goodness.

Just imagine that you're expressing what you see, just even a piece of it. Imagine saying to them, I love you. And just see and feel their response. And let your attention come now to the actual feelings in your heart. So you can sense, what is this loving presence like? Is it light? Is it warmth? How big does it want to be? What happens when you let that light really be as luminous as it is,

or that warmth or that energy. Is there any edge to it? You imagine that one loving presence that's here, all of us converging, spreading out in all directions, as a field of caring, so that we can bring to mind now, including in this light and love,

all beings, sensing these hearts, these shared heart space, holding all beings, wishing all beings the blessings of happiness. May all beings be happy. May all beings touch great and natural peace. May all beings know the wonder of being alive.

May all beings everywhere. Realize their essence, the light of their essential being and let it shine infinitely in all directions. and now just listen and feel the sense of the sound, the light in your heart.

Just listen. You may be listening to silence. You may be listening to the sounds in the room. You may be listening to the sounds outside. And just closing to listen to the music of your own heart. These last few moments

it's so rare that we just listen to our hearts not having your heart be in any certain way, really accepting however it is in this moment, but feeling that commitment to listen increasingly to the longing, to the light, to the goodness of this heart. Namaste and blessings to each. 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.