Tara Brach - Part 2: Evolving Toward Unconditional Love

Episode Date: December 21, 2013

2013-12-18 - Part 2: Evolving Toward Unconditional Love - This two part series explores the evolutionary conditioning of fear and judgment that contracts us away from love and acceptance, and the quality of mindful presence - in relating inwardly and in communicating with others - that awakens and frees our hearts. Included at the end: "Holiday Dharma" - fun and song from La Sarmiento as part of IMCW's 2013 winter solstice celebration.

This class is really part of a two-part series, but it's fine if you weren't here or haven't listened to the first part. The title is evolving into unconditional loving. And the perspective is kind of taking a look in an evolutionary way at something I like the term the big squeeze, that we each have this very primitive conditioning. to react to our world with fight, flight, and freeze, to be defensive or aggressive and perceive ourselves as separate and navigate that way. And we also have a more recent conditioning, which is quite different. And it sets us apart from other creatures in the degree,

which is that we collaborate with each other. What sets us apart in an evolutionary way is we can collaborate and communicate and the indicators are we can empathize, we can have compassion, we can be with each other and feel a sense of togetherness that really allows us to come alive fully. That's our full potential. So I often use the language of fight, flight, freeze as the mode that's more primitive and attend and befriend. as our more recent evolutionary capacity. Last class, I spent some time talking about Nelson Mandela because he is a spiritual hero that really exemplifies kind of being at the leading edge in terms of expressing our evolutionary potential,

expressing this capacity to live with a very inclusive heart versus an us against them kind of mentality. And I mentioned briefly the truth and reconciliation hearings, which again are kind of of evolutionary model far from perfect in the way they've been done, but they're an evolutionary model of this possibility of communicating, of speaking truth and listening that actually leads us from a sense of separation to a sense of connection. And I heard one story, one young man in South Africa described what happened. He had been blinded by policemen when they shot him in the face at close range. And he was

part of the hearings and what he said was, I feel what has brought my eyesight back is to come here and tell the story. I feel what has been making me sick. all the time is the fact that I couldn't tell my story. So it's part of our evolution to create forums where whether it's one-on-one are in small groups between partners or between warring countries, some kind of forum where we can begin to speak and move from the unreal other who's bad and the enemy to, oh, real human, to have that listening quality that can heal us. I heard stories about one camp, I think it's called Building Bridges, that would bring together teams.

And in this case, girls that were some from Palestine, some from Israel, and they'd be together for some time for a handful of weeks, and practice communicating, because it's, again, communicating that evolves us. And I remember hearing one of the stories is at the end of around a very authentic truth-telling and listening, one Israeli girl said, you know, if I don't know you, it's easy to hate you.

If I look in your eyes, I can't. I think of this as the hope for our planet, that we can heal conflict and separation through mindful, heartful communication. Of course, it comes from presence. We need to have a capacity to be here for that. But the expression is mindful, heartfelt communication.

That we can attend and be friend. And it begins a lot with the practice of the inner parts of us that we've made an enemy, the places in our own being that we've judged as bad as other. that we communicate to the rejected parts of our own being and re-embrace and include, and then to widen the circles. So I'm going to be emphasizing the mode of communications as a kind of way of evolving us. And I found it really interesting. An article,

it was in the New York Times Magazine, was describing what we're learning from anesthesia. And it said that what's happened is a little over 1% of people that are put under anesthesia actually don't go unconscious. You have to go unconscious to work for you not to feel pain. So they don't go fully unconscious, but they can't move, they can't speak. And so they're experiencing the horror of this enormous pain. They can hear the surgeons and the nurses talking, but they can't do anything.

And what the medical profession realizes is that there's no way to measure consciousness. They have no way to measure when somebody's unconscious. So a little bit over 1% it doesn't work for. What they're finding as they're beginning to deepen the exploration is that when we're unconscious, there's still parts of the brain that are active, but they're not talking to each other. But consciousness occurs is correlated to when the brain is talking to each other, each parts of itself. You know, communication. So there's communication between different parts of a whole are what create a larger sense of wholeness.

When you and I speak and we start to really pay attention, we become more than me and other. We become a quality, there's a kind of us-ness that happens. Okay, so communication as a form of evolving consciousness and that the essence of communication is, one of the terms I like, is a flow-through of information. That when communication is at its fullest, there's a flow-through, there's a flow-through, there's like breathing in that we're able to receive the information of who another is

and breathing out, we're able to share the truth of who we are. It's a flow-through. And the reason that it's not so easy is because it takes a huge amount of courage to be vulnerable enough and open enough and honest enough to let that flow through happen. And for most of us we have some degree of wounding that's told us it's not safe. It's not safe to show who I am. I'll get hurt. Somebody will see how defective I am and reject me. It's not safe to let in because if I really open and let in,

I'm going to get the bad news that actually I'm not lovable. So there's a description in one cartoon of two sheep, and they're kind of off in the side gossiping, and they're looking at the whole herd or whatever, and they're talking about one particular sheep, and they said, well, you know, every time she comes back from being sheared, she can't stop talk about how vulnerable she feels, you know. So vulnerability is the key. Like how tolerant are we of vulnerability? Because to communicate in a way that evolves our consciousness, we have to be willing to, sometimes people say, sit in the fire. We have to be willing to be in that realness that's scary. For the most part, when we feel vulnerable, we revert to fight, flight, freeze to our early survival.

strategies. We do it through judging. There's a one picture I have here of a man and a woman in a hut deep in the jungle and she's got all these little figures and with pins in them. She's been putting pins in all the figures and he and the man saying to her her husband, can't you get along with anybody? So it's a it's the kind of thing where we we feel threatened and it's like in some way everybody becomes a target of our judgment or a target of our aggression. Rita Rudner says, my grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping. Okay, not great examples here, but anyway. So last class, last week, explored a little the origins of

aversive judgment, how that's one of the main strategies. It's one of the main fight strategies we have. And we humans were in tribes for hundreds of thousands of years. And keep in mind, we've only been more in settlements and cities and countries for 6,000 years. So it's hundreds of thousands of years of conditioning where we were in tribes and there were small tribes and in an order to keep a cohesiveness and to keep safe, you had to know, this is me, my tribe, us, and that's them, and the them is not so good, and we're watching out for them. And a way we keep the us together, the rigidity of a tribal structure is through a verse of judgment. We keep people in line with judgment. And you'll see it. The more fundamentalist a group is, the more judgment

that and criteria that you have to follow and obey. It's interesting that tribes refer to themselves within the word they have for themselves as people usually. Like for instance, they refer to others with epithets that are degrading and themselves as people. One example is the term Inuit translates as people, but they were known by the Ojibwa by the word Eskimo, which translates to eaters of raw meat.

So we think of ourselves as people as human and others as something less than human in a tribal structure, which then gives us ease in killing them. Because you can't, once you get to know, once you look in someone's eyes and say, I can't hate you anymore, you can't, they're no longer other, you can't kill them. So this was part of tribal conditioning, and it was a strategy that worked through hundreds of thousands of years. And here we are in this increasingly interdependent world, where we've got the Internet that's connecting us, and our economies are utterly interwoven, as we know. Everything is connected and our climate is connected.

You know, what happens in one place affects the climate and another. we are connected, and yet aversive judgment still rules. We are, in contrast to having an ego identity with the tribe, we have an ego identity with a separate self and with some groups, but that separate self-identity means that we toss the aversive judgment inward as well as outward. So in a way, I think of it as a developmental arrest, that we have this capacity to keep evolving, to keep widening our circle of belonging.

We have the infrastructure and our brains to do it. We have these compassion networks that let us really feel each other and feel felt. It's all possible. We've touched it ourselves. We wouldn't be here together if we didn't have a sense of the possibility of feeling loving and belonging and feeling a belonging to something larger than an ego self. We wouldn't be here. There's something in us that intuits it and tastes it. And yet for each of us, if we look at our day-to-day life, there's something in us that

longs to love without holding back, that wants to feel a sense of wonder and awe and serve and care. And yet every day we watch how our minds get self-centered. It's not our faults just the way we're rigged but we watch how the primary concern is for moi we watch the judgments roll through the jealousies the aggression the defensiveness so that's the big squeeze how it plays out in our individual lives I read a book over the last few weeks more carefully I'd already read it called evolving toward peace and I recommended Jalalja Bonhim evolving towards peace.

So here we are and we're talking about the key block to communications is that when we feel vulnerable we tighten and go into judgment, go into fight, flight, freeze. And Jalalja describes this as head-thinking. That we disconnect from our heart, our body, our awareness and go into head thinking where we're judging and reaction rationalizing and defending. And she contrasts that to heart thinking. And heart thinking would be where we're really resting in a larger sense of our being, we're aware of our bodies, our

hearts, and we're using our mind to, you know, in some way figure out how can I help, how do we, how do we, you know, solve problems together, how do we collaborate? Heart thinking. So this movement from head thinking to heart thinking is the critical element in our evolution. This movement from our defended self that's judging and creating others into more distant others, that movement from that into the attending and befriending where we're, every time we notice that we're feeling separate, there's that kind of, oh, what's happening, opening, softening? that's the shift. That's the shift.

We can see in our personal lives. You can even look at today, conversations you had today. And you can sense if you really pay attention when it was head-thinking. And that could be meaning that you were feeling in some way like you wanted to prove something,

somewhere you had an agenda, somewhere that in some way you were upset with somebody, feeling judged, that, you can feel the difference between that, even being routine, habitual with somebody's head thinking, between that, and when we're really there and there's an awake intention to connect, to understand, to enjoy, to be together. We can tell the difference between head thinking and heart thinking. So maybe this is a good place to pause and let's do a brief reflection together, okay? That means to sit however as comfortable, close your eyes as a way to pause more.

Take a few breaths, feel yourself here, and you might bring to mind a relationship, person that matters to you, where you know you do get caught in head thinking or what you might call judgment, fight, flight, freeze. Either where you feel judged, are you judging? Somebody that matters to you. And you might just inquire, well, really, what's between me and relaxing open into my heart? What's between me and more unconditional loving?

In other words, what's behind the judging? Is there her, is there fear? What might happen if I let go of the judging, of the blame or resentment? And just as this is an honest inquiry, just sense what's there, what's keeping the judgment in place? What happen if I let go? Would I feel unsafe, threatened? Usually our judgment is to protect a vulnerability in some way. It's that more primitive evolutionary strategy to control ourselves or control ourselves or control another. Usually we need some time with that inquiry when we're considering someone we care

about and saying, really, what's between me and really loving more unconditionally? So just to remember that inquiry, but check out right now another one, which is bring someone to mind where at least in a relative way you feel you spend more time with the heart thinking, where there's more attending and befriending, where there's not so much judgment. So bring to mind a person where, relationship where you actually don't feel a lot of judgment. You don't feel judging or judged. And some of you'll find there aren't any and that's okay just to take note of that. That just means that there's a lot of vulnerability or protection going on.

So you want to find, if you can, a relationship where there's not much judging, you don't feel judged, the person's over the age of four months, it's not your dog, you can't use your dog, and if you found someone, again, it doesn't, not everybody well, just sense what's allowing this more unconditional friendliness or unconditional love? What's making it possible? Feel into the space that exists between you and sense what you notice, what makes it possible? You might notice that as we begin to inquire to when there's more unconditional presence or love, when there's not, that we come down to in some situations we feel safe. We might have vulnerability but we basically feel some trust or safety and in others we don't.

So it takes courage to be on this path of unconditional loving where we become more intentional about taking the risk, being vulnerable for the sake of healing, for the sake of opening more to a larger sense of belonging. Because as long as we're judging, we're creating separation. That's the bottom line. As long as we're judging, we're creating separation from ourselves and others. You can open your eyes. So what we start finding out is that if we look in our own lives and see that where we're growing, our growth edge is the places that we're deepening our attention and attempting to step out of the judgment and more into the finding where we can really be with ourselves or each other. And that this is the same collaborative process that's been going to

on through evolution that where there's success it's because we've been able to communicate many years ago my sister sent me a cartoon of a dog and a squirrel at a negotiation table subtitle at least we can agree on a big yard so here's the encouraging news because we're you know really looking at a time in history where everything's speeding up so the big squeeze is even a bigger squeeze where there's more and more of a sense of the disaster of what can happen to our climate. There's more and more of a sense of when there's an unreal bad other that people will use nuclear or chemical arms to destroy in a much more massive way.

It's a scary time. The more that we're in the grip of fight, flight, freeze, and judgment, the more danger. And we're also at a time where we can see all around us, people taking the time to begin to train their attention to come into presence, to be with what's difficult, to stop running away from their own fears and hearts, taking the time to begin to be with each other. The truth and reconciliation model, well, it's happening in many places on many levels.

So the encouraging news is that scientists are finding that evolution is possible, adaptive strategies are possible more quickly than we've thought. In other words, different species can happen in one generation. Truly, the healing on this earth is up to us. You know, the magic of these times is that we can train our attention in a way that evolves our brains, evolves our consciousness. We can have more communication inside our brain, more communication with each other. So then the next question is,

how do we go about that? How do we start shifting from the head thinking which is so much our habit, rationalizing, justifying, blaming, judging to the heart thinking which really requires that we get embodied and courageous about being with vulnerability? And the first step is to be willing to recognize the flag of judgment. Averse of judgment is a a flag and if each of us in our lives, if everyone that's right here listening or around the world listening, wherever you are, if we deepen our intention to let judgment be a flag, there is going to be a ripple of awakening in consciousness. When we turn on ourselves or each other, if something in us says, wait a minute, this night feel like somebody's wrong,

you're wrong or I'm wrong. But this is a place to pause and deepen attention. Then there's a possibility of healing. So the first step is the flag of either judging or feeling judged to pause. The second step is to deepen attention by attending.

That means kind of listening. What's going on? What's really happening? Like that question I asked, when you're judging, what would happen if you drop that judgment? If you let go of believing that person is wrong or bad, what would happen? Listening, kind of softening and opening and taking in what's really going on. And the third part, it's like breathing in. So we pause with judgment, we breathe and we listen, okay, what's really happening in you or me.

And then the third, breathing out is expressing our care, expressing our truth, expressing what's here. Attend and be friend. So I want to give you an example that really touched me that I read about in DeLaj's book, which is the Dalai Lama when he was visiting San Francisco. Now, the sign of a great leader is a willingness to change their own beliefs. And he was asked in San Francisco his position on homosexuality. And he said very firmly, our religion does not approve of it. In San Francisco, he said this. So not surprisingly, the San Francisco gay community wasn't happy about that,

and they asked if they could meet with him, you know, bring a delegation and meet with him. And he said, yes. And the next day they had a long meeting. And when it was over, the Dalai Lama publicly announced that he had changed his position on homosexuality. This is what he said, I was wrong. I was wrong, he said. I was speaking in accordance with traditional Buddhist teachings, but now I believe they are misguided.

That's evolution. Okay? Whatever the head-thinking is that comes from fear and misunderstanding, he had the heart to pause. Okay, judgment, judgment, pause, to listen, to take in information, to take in the truth of what others were experiencing. and then to breathe out and express care to befriend.

We don't often grasp the power and challenge of true listening of this when we pause really taking in what's happening. We don't grasp it usually. We don't listen much, as you probably know. We have to be able to put down our interpretations, our ideas, our defense, and truly breathe in another's experience. This is, I'd like to read you from Tickna-Han, Zen teacher. Deep listening is a kind of listening that can help relieve the suffering of another person.

You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose to help him or her to empty his heart. Even if he says things that are full of wrong perceptions, full of bitterness, you are still capable of continuing to listen with compassion because you know that listening like that, you give that person a chance to suffer less. So we're accepting with deep listening how a person is, and that doesn't mean we're condoning it,

doesn't mean we like it, but in that moment we're acknowledging another person's experience as real. And I want to share with you a story again from evolving toward piece that touched me profoundly about the power of listening. And it's about an African-American therapist who was in his 60s, and he worked in a rehabilitation program, and a client he had, a guy named Andy, white, early 40s in on some drug offense, comes in to meet with him because they're assigned to each other, and Andy won't talk.

Okay? That's the setup. So Justin, the therapist, says, well, what's going on? And I'm going to read to you from the dialogue here. I'm just uncomfortable with you, was his answer. Do you know me? No, he said. Then what do you have against me?

You're black. Wow, I said, this is Justin talking, and I took a deep breath. As Justin was soon to discover, Andy was not only an ardent racist, but also a Ku Klux Klan member. From the get-go, he hated Justin. Justin's guts and told him so in no uncertain terms. Had we been in Justin's shoes, most of us would have countered Andy's judgments with our own. How dare he?

But amazingly, Justin did none of this. He merely listened quietly to what Andy had to say. Then he gently remarked, well, it certainly happens that people have preferences about whom they want to hang out with. Andy then told Justin he'd been raised to view black people's worthless. Justin grins as he remembers the conversation. So you believe that? I asked him. Well, yeah.

He said, sure, I believe it. So right now you think I'm worthless and have nothing to offer you and that this is a total waste of time. Yes, he said, you're damn right. That's exactly what I think. I'm not going to talk to you. Look, Justin said, whatever the differences are between us, I'm here to help you with the courts.

I promise you, whatever you think of me, I'll do my best for you. So why don't you tell me how you got into this situation? So he says, Andy was really resistant, but very slowly he started talking and I just listened and validated his feelings. He was angry at a lot of people. He believed that black people were the problem and the government was filling to protect white folks like him. I assured him that if he cooperated and did what he needed to do, we could get him through this ordeal without prison.

So in addition to seeing me once a week, he had to participate in a group four times a week. I told him I would definitely support him. You, he asked totally a credulous, you're going to advocate. you're going to advocate for me? Absolutely, I said, that's what I'm here for. If for a moment you can put the issue of color aside, then we can work together. Afterwards, if you like, you can pick it up again.

But somehow, we've got to get you through this thing. He accepted this. He didn't like it, but he saw he had to. And over the next week, very slowly, we started talking about issues of race. We had many dialogues in which I, as a black man, accepted him completely for who he was. I didn't fight him in any way.

Nor did I feel any sense of defensiveness toward him. And increasingly he saw he didn't have to fight me either because I wasn't present as his enemy. That was a completely new experience for him. Now there's a commentary. For decades Justin had been a student of Chinese martial arts. At the heart of this tradition lies the recognition that to be whole, empowered beings, we need to balance the outgoing active energy known as Yang with the receptive yielding force known as Yin. Yang energy is described as fiery and masculine.

and Yin is watery and feminine. Normally we counter Yang with Yang. If someone judges us, we judge them right back. If they attack us, we attack them. Yet according to the Chinese tradition, the only power capable of overcoming aggression is Yin energy. This is the receptive, spacious energy. Justin says, in this society, we don't understand the power of yin. We think of it as passive or weak. If you plunge your fist into water, it won't fight, you, it will just yield, and yet it carved the Grand Canyon, what is the most powerful element of all. So this is precisely what Justin was doing in his work with Andy. Instead of fighting him, Justin kept encouraging Andy to speak his truth and express his feelings.

And as he listened, it was like his clenched fist plunged into the cool, calm water of Justin's acceptance. So Andy could find no enemy. And then he could find no enemy. And a bitter war came to an end. Over the next six months, this is Justin speaking, I repeatedly came to his rescue by talking to the probation officers and acting as a kind of buffer between him and the system. I kept helping and encouraging him as he gave up drugs and gradually sort of forging a close relationship. Eventually he got comfortable enough around me that we could actually laugh together and joke about things that were happening. And in the last months he told me several times he felt really good about the relationship. At the end of the year, people

completed the process and overcome their addiction, have sort of graduation ceremony. Usually they don't say anything. They're not expected to participate in any way. But Andy stood up. He said he had something important to say. He had to say it. This is what he shared. He said, I want you all to know that I would never have made it, were it not for Justin, he began. Then he went on to say a lot of incredibly beautiful and touching things about our relationship that left me in tears. Six months later when I ran into him, he was still in that clear and positive space. So I took time with that to share with you because there is a power, an evolutionary power to being able to step out of our habitual fight,

flight, freeze, averse of judgment and to begin to pause and open to what's happening. and open to another person in a way that can allow it to move from us against them to a sense of true we. And sometimes this is not able, we can't do it individually. It's done in circles in many times which is quite beautiful. I'd like to close with just a brief meditation where we can practice a bit of this, just taking it a little forward in our own lives. thinking to heart thinking in this world's got to start with each of us. And you can explore it with someone you care about, where you do get caught in judgment. We each have people in

our close in circles that we get locked in with. So just choosing someone as you did earlier, letting that person be in your awareness and as if you could pause and just sense, okay, they're there, in your mind's eye, but take a moment to really come into your body right now. You can't move from the head to the heart if you're not in your body. So feel your breath, feel your hands, and feel your heart. And as you allow yourself to consider this other person and where you're stuck, where you're judging, and perhaps some of the energy around the judging, begin, and this is really important by offering yourself acceptance and kindness. Rather than blaming yourself for judging, do the opposite. Begin the attending and befriending to your own heart. And notice the power

of just a gesture of kindness towards yourself right now. And from that heart space that can feel that kindness towards your own being, sense that you're now including the other person and your attention and see if you can listen and what you're listening to and tuning into and breathing in as that other person's insecurity or vulnerability or whatever is behind the ways they're behaving that are difficult for you. So you're seeing behind the mask, you're pausing to sense the vulnerability that that person's living with and you're pausing to to sense the unmet need, what that person needs. Breathing in, letting in the reality of that person's humanness and vulnerability, feeling the heart space that's here, and just sensing

your wish for that person that might help them to meet what's not met in terms of that person's need for understanding or love, feeling your care. And for these last few years, moments, see if you can feel into what it's like to love this person unconditionally exactly as they are. Sense that as what's possible, that there is the heart space here to absolutely accept and love this person. What's it like to just say, okay, I accept you just as you are in your own heart, that space that's edgeless that can hold that person.

let that open-heartedness include others. You might just let a few other people come to mind. And just for this time, imagine, okay, unconditional acceptance in love. What would it be like to let each being be held in this way? It's possible. It's not our habit, but it's possible. From the poet Hafeus, admit something. Everyone you see, you say to the them love me. Of course you don't do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops. Still, though think about this, this great pull in us to connect, why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying with that sweet moon language what every other eye in this world is dying to hear? Why not become the one who loves to love?

lives with a full moon in each eye that is always saying with that sweet moon language, what every other eye in this world is dying to hear. I want to invite Las Sarmiento to come up because you're about to receive a certain transmission that's a different form than what we just did. This is a form of Darmic expression and creativity that we try to have each year with us to add to the life of it. Thank you, Law, for being here. Bless you.

So this is kind of a little bit of a Buddhist variety show. It'll be really short and concise and direct transmission. I think some of you know that I teach mindfulness to teenagers. And so the other day one of my teens texted me with what I saw as like holiday Dharma. And what it said was forget the past, it's over. Forget the future. It hasn't happened. Forget the present.

I can't afford it. and Tara's been talking a lot about cartoons today, and so I saw this cartoon. It was called Christmas Group Therapy. So there's a therapist and a group, and the first client was Santa Claus, and he says, I don't believe in myself. He needs Tara's book, right?

We've got to send Santa Claus Radical Acceptance Stat. And then the second client is Snowman. And he says, I'm bipolar. That grows on you. And then the third client is Rudolph. And he said, all the other reindeer laugh and call me names. Aw. Couldn't join in any reindeer games.

And then the fourth client was a disgruntled elf who says, I'm in a dead-end job. So the other day You probably didn't think it was going to be a comedy routine But I just making this up as I go along The other day I ran upon this old holiday cocktail napkin That I saved and it says Home for the Holidays in therapy by New Year's

So here's a little ditty about that It goes Oh there's no place like home for the holidays Doesn't matter how many retreats you sit. I couldn't finish it. It got too hard. So I want to sing, I think a couple of years ago I sang this song that was written by my friend Maureen Brady from the Snowflower Saga in Madison, Wisconsin. And it goes like this.

How does it go? I just had a blank moment. That's what many years of meditation does. Your mind just totally gets really good. clear, except when you really need it, like right now. So I'm just going to let it go. Now I remembered what it was. Well, the holidays can be frightful, but the Dharma so delightful.

When there's no escaping, ho, ho, ho. Let it go, let it go, let it go. With the family there is no stopping. I'd rather die than keep on. shopping. Don't these people know that I'm poe? Let it go, let it go, let it go. 2 a.m. and still no good nights. Oh, I might throw them out in the storm, but the Buddha says, do not bite. All your lifelong do no harm. In hell we will not be frying. My dears, we're Buddhists, there's no dying. Don't let the holidays get you love.

Let it go, let it go, let it go. So it gets really lonely standing here, singing every year after year. So I thought that it was really hard to write another song, and then I thought, well, I'll write another song, and then we'll pass out 350 little pieces of paper, and now that we're all about staying green, you know, I didn't think that was going to be very good. So what I did was I took a classic,

and I just tweaked it a little bit, And so you'll know all the words, but we're going to change a few of them. So how many people here still believe in Santa Claus? So if you don't, there's actually an alternative. In the Buddhist tradition, it's called Karma Clause. And so because I made this up, I'm going to make Karma Clause gender non-conforming because we're also talking a lot about diversity and inclusivity and all that kind of stuff in our Sanga these days. And so, just like myself, Karma Claus uses the pronouns they, they, they, and them.

So we're going to sing this song. You figure it out. You're smart enough. I trust you. So here's how it goes. I just had another blank moment. You better watch out. You better not cry.

You better not pout. I'm telling you why. Karma Claus is coming to town. They're making us. list and checking it twice gonna find out who's naughty and nice Karma Clause is coming

to town They see you when you're sleeping They know when you're awake They know if you've been bad or good So be good for karma's sake Oh you better watch out You better not cry

You better not pout I'm telling you why Karma Clause is coming to town. Thank you. Thank you, Law. So for those of you who don't know, La, is one of IMCW's guiding teachers and is the teacher for our diversity sangas, as well as for many of our retreats and also manages many of our events.

And blessings, so good to have you with us. And we close with a shared prayer that the light that, the light that, within us and our collective light might help us to feel this infinite heart space, this heart space that can include all beings. And we take some moments to bring to mind those beings that are struggling, those that most need our prayer or care, those that have suffered in the Philippines, those that are suffering in ongoing civil wars, ethnic wars, those that are homeless, those that have been oppressed,

those beings everywhere, young and old, that aren't living in safety, we offer our prayers. May this heart space, this loving presence, wake up through all beings everywhere. May all beings live from loving presence. May all beings touch a great and natural peace. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace everywhere. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free.

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.