Tara Brach - Part 2 - Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame (2019-05-01)

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame – Part 2 (2019-05-01) - Rumi invites us to find the barriers we've erected against love, and a universal one is blame. These three talks are an invitation to relax those barriers, and to open our hearts to our inner life and to all beings. Part I focuses on chronic self-judgment; Part II on the places of deep self-condemnation, and Part III on where we have locked into anger, blame or hatred of others. Each includes guided reflections that can support us in directly awakening beyond the confining thoughts and feelings of blame. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. I'd like to begin this talk with a brief story, a teaching story that's really Western wisdom. And this is of a reporter who is interviewing a very well-known, successful bank president And his opening question was what is the really secret of your success? And the response is, two words. And what, sir, are they?

Right decisions. But how do you make right decisions? One word. And what is that, sir? Experience. And how do you get experience? Two words. And what is that, sir?

Wrong decisions. I was reflecting on this and I remembered one of the lines from Zen Master Dogen which is that we must make one mistake after another in this life and I was thinking, okay, so what does that really mean and really getting the word mistake, not taking accurately and that the very nature of our existence is that we come into this universe and we kind of perceive a separateness, and we start developing all our behaviors

around this separate self that feels threatened and that needs more. And it's inevitable that our lens of separation has us make mistakes. We all do it, including mistakes that we deeply regret. And as the bank president says, and this is, I remember this in my earliest training,

as a psychotherapist, the great reframe is it's not failure, it's feedback. That if our mistakes, our ways of misunderstanding or confusion or reactivity, can become a domain for learning, we keep growing and waking up. And if they become a domain for self-condemnation, then we actually block our evolution. Okay. So this is the preface to the... preface to the second of a three-part series I'm doing that's not three weeks in a row.

It's far from that. It's going to be spotted over really a month and a half. But when I thought about it that really makes sense because for those of you that really want to practice with this, if you want to make this a real, what we call a sadna or spiritual practice, forgiving ourselves and forgiving others, it takes to be a real, we call a sadna, or spiritual practice, It takes weeks and weeks just to set the foundations of some new habits. The quote from Rumi that I find I return to over and over again when I talk about this is that your task is not to seek for love but to seek and find the barriers you've created

against it. And the single greatest barrier that blocks are loving is the way we go to war with ourselves. you know, consider ourselves bad, wrong and blame ourselves, and the way we go to war with each other. So we'll be exploring now in this second class how to be able to release those barriers. And the first class was when we get into this chronic self-blame. And tonight we're going to be dropping it deeper

and looking at how do we forgive ourselves or let go of that self-condemnation, when we're holding very deep sense of unforgiveness, our self-condemnation, when we feel like we really violated something. Okay? And it's a really... So this is hard.

This is a difficult one. And yet, so many people I work with when we start kind of honing in on where the deepest core place of stuckness is, it's that I haven't forgiven myself for the way I do-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-de-de- fill in the blanks. And so to the extent that you might have that going on,

to some degree, it'll be an opportunity for you to sense where am I still holding against myself? Where have I not forgiven? And begin to loosen and soften that. And I can promise that even the intention to do that can really profoundly open up more space, more wisdom, more perspective, and more kindness. So that's the challenge and the invitation. Some of you might have noticed this Buddha here, because it's here all the time.

I want to tell you a little bit of the story behind this Buddha. One of my best friends who's another senior Dharma teacher in this Washington, D.C. area, Luis Samatero Diaz and I were together and decided we were going to go buy a Buddha for our community. And we looked at many, many, many Buddhas. And voila, this is the Buddha we found. And we were really happy to present it to the community, and we put it up here, and people came up and looked. And I started noticing when people were looking at it that they were kind of going like that.

and then I realized as I was looking at it that I was leaning like that and it's because if you take a close look this is a leaning Buddha the cast is leaning it's imperfect it's a mistake on a

level of the cast and our community here finds that this is one of the greatest good fortunes that we've ever had is to have a leaning Buddha as our Buddha here and I think you can probably

put the pieces together on on how come, that we are all leaning Buddhas. I mean, every one of us, we have this awareness, this capacity for awareness and love that's very, it's very integral to what we are. And we, all of us, have casts or conditioning that we absolutely have no choice about. Every one of us. I mean, you can trace the influences if you start naming them, whatever's handed over generationally and genetically and in our individual upbringings and our cultures.

It's like we did not, as we were incarning, sign on the dotted line checking off how we wanted to be. We came in with really strong conditioning. And it's conditioning to perceive things a certain way that aren't accurate. it's biased in so many ways against ourselves and others. And I could go on and on but the bottom line is that we're leaning and it leads to off-balanced behaviors, all of us. And then what we do, us leaning Buddhas, is look at ourselves and go, geez, I'm leaning, that sucks, you know, and then we push our, we shove ourselves with self-judgment until

we lean more. Does that make sense? That's kind of like a summary of what happens. You know, we're conditioned to be a certain way and then we blame ourselves. And in the Buddhist teachings, that goes with the story of the second arrow, that the first arrows the conditioning to be fearful or angry or hurt or confused or whatever it is. And the second arrow is saying, I am bad for that. The second arrow is more of the first arrow.

It's like if the first arrow is feeling a lot of aversion, then aversion to the aversion. It just doubles it. So this is how we get really caught in trance and the understanding that we're going to be exploring is that our non-perfection, our caste and conditioning is not our fault. And to truly get that is really, really freeing. It's also really controversial because as soon as we say, okay, the way I am is not my fault, we think, oh, then I'm not going to be responsible or accountable and then I'm just going to, here I'll give you an example.

This is from Saturday Night Live, you remember how handy put it, he said, the first thing was I learned to forgive myself. I told myself, go ahead, do whatever you want, it's okay by me. And then Yogi Berra, I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up I change bats. After all, if I know it's not my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself? No? So you get the idea that there's this fear if we say it's not my fault that I lose my temper

or that I'm prone towards addiction, or that I'm so insecure that I don't get out and do the things I need to do, or that in some way I'm harsh on my child, it's not my fault, then it's like we're saying green light, we're condoning it. We'll look at how that's not the case. But mostly the bottom line principle is that the tend to, tendency to condemn ourselves for leaning creates more leaning, okay?

That it's more suffering. In other words, if out of feeling flawed we end up overeating to soothe our anxiety or drugging or whatever it is and then we hate ourselves for it, that's called a secondary force that keeps on the looping, keeps us looping in the same behavior. So I'm talking about deep self-condemnation but the reality is that even when we judge ourselves a little for leaning, we're still cutting ourselves off from our possibilities of growing. Even when there's just a little bit of judgment in some way we're inclined to more mistakes because of the aversive twist of the judging.

By way of example, our mom sent me an email describing a conundrum she got into, very into organic foods and bringing up her children vegetarian, healthy lifestyle, so on. And she described how when she gets really busy, sometimes she can't get to the grocery store and then she feels like she's really letting them down. She's not doing it right. And so she describes one evening where she hadn't been able to shop, she landed up looking in the freezer, and all she could find was a frozen pizza.

And she said, okay, guys, we're going to have frozen pizza for dinner. And she tried to keep the guilt out of her voice that this was not a homemade, organic meal. And her son immediately picked up something because he resisted. He said, I don't want frozen pizza. And she said, I remained calm. And I said, this is we're having tonight, even though I was beating myself. But he got more and more resistant on the verge of a tantrum.

You know, I don't want frozen pizza. I don't want frozen pizza. So she's almost saying this mantra, you know, that's what we're having for dinner. It's all we have in the house. It'll be okay. And have you ever even had a frozen pizza? So she's going crazy in her mind. She goes, I'm such a bad mom.

I can't believe I'm doing this. Of course they don't like frozen pizza. I don't like it either, but I'm doing the best thing. Basically, she's creating herself into kind of a monster. And then her child is even more of a monster for only being willing to eat organic foods. Okay, so this is the conundrum and she's raising entitled brats, I'm a bad mom, blah, blah, blah, and then she takes a deep breath. That's what we're having tonight for dinner, sweetie, and I'm tired, and that's what we have,

and it'll be okay. And she looks at her son's tear-streaked voice and he looks at her and says, she says actually quite calmly for a three-year-old, okay mom, but could we at least heat it up? I thought she was giving her frozen pizza. We can't control that the conditioning is there. We can't control that we sometimes act out of it. In other words, we can't control what's happened in the past. that there's, if you just take a moment and sense, it's done.

You know, there's one writer said that, you know, forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past, you know. We can't change it. But what we can do if we're feeling like we're leaning Buddhas and we've been kind of locking ourselves in is we can plant seeds for the future in how we really relate right now to these imperfect casts and these imperfect cells. That's what you can do. You can plant seeds for the future and as long as we condemn ourselves we're planting the seeds

of more leaning. So now we're going to look at how we can begin to remove the second arrow that blame. But first it's really important to inquire and then we're going to do an inquiry together is how come we hold on so tight to blaming ourselves? And the question I'd like to ask you, and you might close your eyes so you can just reflect on this right now. Take a moment to bring to mind some place that is as of yet not forgiven that you still find you're really holding against yourself.

So take a moment to bring that to mind. And the question for you is this, what is what is wrong with forgiving yourself? What is wrong with it? Notice what you might be afraid of or what can go wrong. And you can continue to reflect on this. You might, and for those of you that want to, it's fine to open your eyes. I'd like to hear from a few people just like a few words, like under a sentence, what is wrong with forgiving yourself? And if you speak, just speak really loud. I am not being responsible if I forgive myself. I'll do it again.

Yep. If I forgive myself, I'll just go do it again, yeah? Say it again? People will dislike me if I forgive myself. Again, how many of you felt that? If I forgive myself, I'll just go on being bad. And I saw somebody else's hand over there. Yes, I'm condoning what I did.

Yes, if I forgive myself, it's like I'm condoning what I did. Ah, if I forgive myself and if I let go of the story of a bad person that transgressed, who will I be? So it really drops the bottom out of our whole identity. That's good, good. Anyone else that has one right here? So, yeah, sure, one more. Then I'd have to admit I was wrong in the first place, okay. So that's when I work with people and do forgiveness workshops and so on,

many people have that sense if I forgive myself, I'll just go on being bad. Some say that punishing is my way of paying back. It's a kind of way of redeeming myself. I'm wondering if any of you noticed that one. Few people are not in their head. Letting myself get away with it makes me more bad. At least I'm a little less bad if I don't let myself get away with it. Or if I forgive some people feel like then I'll really have to be.

to face and accept the pain of what happened. So if you honestly now witness yourself in your unself-forgiving stance, has it helped? Again I'm not going to do a hand raise here for some reason it feels a little bit intimate, but whenever I ask that a lot when I'm working with students, how is this helping you? is a self-condemnation, self-hate, self-criticism helping. And most people have the understanding or intelligence. It's not helping, but there is some part of them that believes it's still serving them even though it's not helping.

It's kind of, they're both there. And if we look as a society, if we look at bringing up children, does punishing children help them? Well, it might control their behavior temporarily, but does it really help? Does it help in our justice system to punish? I mean really. It locks in bad personhood. It locks in a sense of bad personhood,

which actually leads to more mistakes, more acting out of the cast. I often share a story of a teaching from an African tribe in a movie I saw which was that vengeance is a lazy form of grief. Vengeance is a lazy form of grief. And when we take vengeance on others, it's because we're in some way avoiding the whole process of grieving what really happened. And when we take vengeance on ourselves, it's the exact same thing.

We're punishing ourselves so we don't have to face something that's difficult and painful. and it only actually locks us in even more. So what I'd like to do is explore with you when we are caught in that kind of self-punishing or non-forgiving stance, how we can begin to loosen it, how we can begin to release those barriers and free our heart. And I'll do it through sharing a story, this is from some years back, these stories are never quick fixes. We're going to do the reign of self-forgiveness. It's not a one-shot. We've taken years to groove in those neuropathways that go, I'm bad for this. So it takes rerunning the stream of

forgiving heart energy through a lot of rounds and yet each time it can soften and loosen and free up a certain amount in a very beautiful way. So keeping that in mind and keeping that it's very layered and complex, each of us has our own layering of how we're holding against ourselves. I'll share this woman's story. So this is a woman who had a pretty difficult marriage and she had one daughter and while her daughter was growing up she had several affairs, she was very immersed in her work, she was in some TV news production studio locally.

she also struggled with being addicted to prescription drugs. And she and her husband divorced when her daughter was 15 and her daughter felt like she was a narcissist, that's what she called her mother, and there was enough hostility that her daughter decided to live, had the choice, and decided to live with her father. So over the years their relationship softened some. There was more civility but it was clearly a real distance. And when I met this woman, her daughter was 30 years old, her daughter had her own struggles

with anxiety, depression, bulimia, and she was three months pregnant. And this woman had been going and doing 12-step programs and had been meditating and really wanted to make amends and wanted to establish a much more real relationship with her daughter and then with grandchild. So the challenge was that every time she would visit, or be in touch, she froze and some part of her felt so ashamed of herself and so undeserving of the relationship that she was really stiff and it just perpetuated it. She just, she couldn't, she felt kind of paralyzed and unnatural with her daughter. And so when we met,

she just basically said, I can't forgive myself for being so self-absorbed as a parent that I injured her and she's now a suffering young adult. That was the basic thing. And so when I asked her the question I asked you, what would be wrong with forgiving yourself? Her first response was, then I'd be getting away with something and it's wrong. I was bad. And then I asked her the follow-up question that we explored, well, how does not letting yourself get away with it help? And she knew.

She said that all her life she had hated herself as long as she had she had, as long as she she could remember. Her mother was an alcoholic. Her father had left when she was young and she always felt like this nuisance and a burden and then became a wild teen and looking for love in all the wrong places and hating herself all the time for it. And hating herself never helped but she was just, that was her habit of life was hating herself. And then she just went ahead and hated herself and was a bad mom and hated herself more. So that's the background. So there we are doing Rain of Self-Forgiveness with that cluster, that gives you a sense. And the recognizing and allowing was, okay, I'm unworthy and bad and

unlovable and just recognizing that and allowing was not like a big yes to that, it was more, okay, let's just create some space and let that be here right now. And then the investigating, and I'm speaking as if you know Rain, but the acronym is in a a very straightforward way you recognize and allow what's going on, then you investigate it primarily in the body and then the N is nurturing and that's where the forgiveness comes in. So in the investigating, the belief she had was I hurt everybody I love and then underneath that was a mix of fear and self-hate. What I sometimes do with investigating in rain is I invite people to let their face take the expression

that they're feeling inside their body and let their even their posture do it. And I had her do that when she's feeling failure and self-hate and unlovable and, you know, you could see her starting to go into the kind of fetal position and then to sense, so that is the state that she was living a lot of her life in. And when she registered that, that this incredibly unpleasant pulled into futile position, self-hating stance was the state she was in most of the time and how it shut out any possibility of connecting with others. totally isolated her. That was when she started tearing up and she could feel a sense

of grieving that was coming up around being so caught in that trance of self-hatred. Investigating ends with often asking, well what is that place in you that's most vulnerable in grieving need? And it's usually some form of love, of acceptance, of forgiveness, of nurturing. The N is nurture. And for her it was, it needed to feel forgiven, that there's some basic goodness there, that you have a heart that can love. It just needed some basic forgiving. And I often always say, and where do you want to feel that from? Because for her, she was too regressed to be able to do self-nurturing. Sometimes we can do that. In fact, most of us at certain times can put her hand on our heart and in some way offer some kindness and really do some

healing. But for her she needed to feel it from her sense of God, of the divine, that she had a sense of divine, the divine and loving energy in the universe that's formless and there that she felt very disconnected from but she needed to feel like that formless presence was forgiving her. So for the nurturing I guided her in that and I first had her look through the eyes of the kind of the intelligence of that spirit, that wisdom and just to see the stuckness, the place she was caught.

I sometimes describe this as seeing how when, let's say you're feeling when you get very aggressive how the aggression is coming from a place of fear. for her, how her narcissism and her self-centeredness was coming because she was trying to meet her needs. So I was inviting her to look through the kind of the eyes of the divine to see her own vulnerability in a really caring way. And so I had her put her hand on her heart and imagine that, sensing herself being seen and understood her own vulnerability being seen and to feel a sense of forgiveness washing in from the divine. And that was her practice over and over and over again to feel herself stuck in self-hatred,

recognize and allow self-hatred, to feel how it is in the body, to feel the grieving for being so stuck, and then to imagine and sense their self being bathed and washed by forgiveness from a benevolent sense of the divine or spirit. So I want to say honestly it took months and months of her repeating that to begin to sense that she could be with herself and not feel the grip of self-aversion, many, many rounds. Her daughter was getting more and more pregnant as she was doing this process. So there she is, she's getting washed by the divine, her daughter's billy's growing in a very real way.

And they found out that her daughter was going to have twins, just to add to it. But she found she was more and more after she would feel washed through with forgiveness, she found she could start holding her daughter and the babies that were inside her daughter in that same kind of loving presence. So, daughter gave birth. she was, I mean, the daughter needed her so much that some of that distance just fell

away because she was really quite there to be helpful. But what she told me was, and this was the big thing, that it was by letting in forgiveness that she felt that she actually was free to love without holding back those babies and her daughter. First time in her life she felt that she was a little bit of her. able to be loving, but it came from letting in love. Rather than condemning the Leaning Buddha, she had to embrace. She had to let that Leaning Buddha be embraced so that that goal, that love, could flow

outward. So a couple of comments. Our vengeance against ourselves for what we've done wrong is a lazy form of grief. When we've done stuff that's been hurtful, we know. need to grieve it. It's sad, it's painful, but to grieve it and to allow ourselves to feel forgiven to know that it's not our fault. And what I have seen over and over is that when we really get that it's not our fault, we become more responsible. We become able to respond from a much more whole and wise and intelligent place. It's not like we're responsible.

responsible when we're blaming ourselves. We feel small, we hide. I want to extend this now and say that you can see it on a cultural level just the way we get locked into the trance of self-condemnation and self-punishment, that limbic strategy is what keeps a culture, what I call limbic culture, in a place of real contraction where those that are suffering end up suffering even more. The more we use punishment, whether it's for prison, imprisoning people instead of rehab, capital punishment, whether it's a kind of a fundamentalist, punitive way of bringing

up children, the more we kind of lock people into living in a fear-based way. And you can really see it in our culture how it particularly ends up injuring non-dominant populations having a fundamentalist kind of punishing culture. I think so often of the punishment that comes with being caught with cocaine versus crack, or I think of now with the opiate crisis, it's considered to be a human mental health crisis versus the badness if somebody is accused of and found with crack, that one is a human problem and challenge and the other is criminal. And guess who are those that are having the human problem versus those that are being considered criminal?

It happens over and over again that in a limbic culture that's basing itself on punishment, the punishment ends up landing on those of the non-dominant culture. Punish those trying to enter and be part of our country. Punish those that are already down. So I'm naming that because there's always parallels between the work we're doing and ourselves to wake up our hearts to ourselves and having this ripple out and being part of a culture, that actually lives for more compassion and has the potential of healing. Does that make sense to you?

To bring it to both levels. In contrast to a limbic culture, a wise culture has a very different response to a leaning Buddha. One of my favorite stories, I found this from Alice Walker, was a forgiveness ritual in an African tribe, when someone violates the rules and the customs. Okay, this is going against rules and customs, they call together a gathering of all members and they form one great circle and that person's in the middle of the circle and that everyone

in the tribe tells that person what is good about them, stories about good, kind, generous things they've done in their life. And this ritual recitation can last for several days and when it's over the circle's broken and everyone celebrates as a person feels their belonging and again. in the tribe. And the tribe never rejected them. It just they themselves felt isolated and out of that mistaken perception of separation, they acted in ways that weren't healthy for the tribe. So they were rehabilitated by being reminded of their goodness. Can you imagine if instead of imprisoning people we could have some different ways of... and I'm not

saying that everybody will respond to this. I think some people, I think there's such a thing as people that are unreachable in those ways, perhaps, psychopaths, but so many people are injured and could be healed if we went at it with compassion versus punishment. Okay, last piece. So we're talking about the necessity of self-forgiveness as a prerequisite to continued evolution, that we need to do that for ourselves. I want to give the final part of the self-forgiveness process which is atonement. And it's a word from England in 1510 and what it means is what really brings us fully at one with ourselves, with each other and with the sacred.

And the process of moving from that separateness where we've in some way created violation then we've gone down on ourselves back into on oneness involves offering reparation. It involves in some way, it could be actively through an apology or making amends to, if that's not possible, the person's dead, it's not a way we can do it, to our heart offering care and prayer.

It can be any of those levels. But that's an integral part of moving from that, that separateness and making a mistake and blaming ourselves to really feeling our belonging from the inside out with each other. And I thought I would share one of the stories of atonement that I, has always just touched me so deeply. And this is a story about a Vietnam vet who killed a young, a Vietnam vet who killed a young, American man during the war and he had a photo in his pocket and of this young man he

had killed in a little girl and he, through the years after the war he had this real horror and it plagued him of having killed this man. And so when the Vietnam Memorial was built he took the pilgrimage and he took that little picture and left it on the wall. It wasn't labeled or anything. And it was part of this book that some of you may have seen called Offerings at the Wall. How many of you have seen that? Yes, some of you.

Somehow, through a fellow vet, it made it back to him, the picture. And I wanted to say what he wrote along with the picture. This is what he left on the wall. He said, Dear Sir, and it's a letter that he wrote to this man that he had killed, for 22 years I've carried your picture in my wallet. I was only 18 years old that day. we faced each other on the trail in Chulai, Vietnam. Why you didn't take my life, I'll never know.

You stared at me so long, armed with your AK-47, and yet you didn't fire. Forgive me for taking your life. I was reacting just the way I was trained to kill VC. So many times over the years I've stared at your picture and your daughter. I suspect each time my heart and guts would burn with the pain of guilt. I have two daughters of my own now. I perceive you as a brave soldier defending his homeland.

Above all else, I can now respect the importance life held for you. I suppose that is why I'm able to be here today. It's time for me to continue the life process and release the pain and guilt. Forgive me, sir. I found out a couple of years ago that there's actually more to the story that when the photo was returned to him,

that letter, because it was now in the book, he decided to go, he went with his wife, I think, to Vietnam to meet the daughter of the man that he had met on the trail in July. So he traveled to Vietnam to return the photo. Okay? And so through an interpreter, this guy, Richard LaTrell, introduced himself,

to the daughter and her brother and said, tell her this is the photo I took from her father's wallet the day I shot and killed him and I'm returning it. And this is with a cracking voice he asked then for her forgiveness. And after an awkward moment, the woman burst into tears and fell into his arms and so there they are sobbing and embracing. Then they explained through the interpreter

that for them in terms of their beliefs this is their father himself finally coming home from the war and that they both believed that his spirit lived on through rich this guy and whether or not we think it's superstition for them that was the day their father's spirit came home to him and for me there's has to be some truth in it because there's something about the heart space that is that connects us all that was woken up and rich in his willingness to feel the grieving and to do the self-forgiving and then out of that to be able to share his heart with them. So this is atonement that we need to forgive ourselves for our leaning and then where others have been hurt in any way we can extend our hearts and that's what completes

it. We're going to be practicing as a way to close our time together, the reign of self-forgiveness. So I'll be inviting you, if you will, to scan your own life and sense what you might want to work with. First take a moment to pause and adjust how you're sitting. This is the practice of letting go of the barriers to love. And in this case, someplace that you're unforgiving towards yourself where you can't forgive the leaning Buddha where it feels very personal like it's really your fault. And to keep in mind that if you're suffering you're believing something that's untrue. It may be true that others have been hurt or that you've hurt yourself but it's not true

that it's your fault. We often talk about that metaphor of the dog with a leg in its trap that it wouldn't behave aggressively if it didn't have a leg, its leg caught. a trap and when we behave in ways like the Leaning Buddha, it's because in some way our conditioning is creating pain, there's unmet needs, there's our own hurts and fears playing out. And that doesn't mean we can't learn new ways to operate but it doesn't help to add that second arrow to shove the leaning Buddha so it leans more. So we begin with our intention,

which is to open our hearts some to ourselves. And we bring to mind and locate some situation, something that we've done in the past or that we're still finding ourselves doing that we blame ourselves for. It can be current. That feels something that feels unforgiven or unforgivable or unacceptable. It may be some behaviors or feelings that arise around a relationship, family, or other, maybe addictive behavior, some way we approach our work, and reflect as if you're watching a movie and allow yourself to go to the situation or the frame that most will arouse this reaction of blame that really most turns you on yourself and freeze the frames so you can see the setting and if there's another person, see them and their face and what's being said

or it might be a memory of way back but of whatever your behaviors were that you continue to in some way condemn. Rain begins by recognizing whatever is predominantly going on inside you, the aversion or the blame or the anger towards yourself, the distaste, the judgment. And the allow is the willingness to pause right now and just let all that be there. Give it some space so that you can deepen your attention and perhaps move towards some healing. The eye of rain with mindfulness we begin to just explore a little more deeply and primarily we'll explore in the body but there's a few places that will ask questions that are

are not just the body. You might sense what most wants attention right now. What is the most difficult feeling? It may be the place of feeling failure or shame, badness, judgment, hatred, fear. And be aware of what you're believing about yourself. That this is bad, this is wrong, this reflects on me that I'm a bad person in some way,

that bad things will happen in the future because of it. whatever belief might be there, just to notice that, to notice how that belief lives in your body. So if you're feeling personal badness, what does that feel like in your body? You might feel your throat, your heart, your belly. Even let your body posture take the position that expresses how you feel about yourself and the feelings that are going on. And you can let your face take that expression too. It might be grim, it might be fearful, it might be, have some disgust, but it'll help you contact very directly the experience inside you

when you're at war with yourself, when you're turned on yourself. And if you could go right to the center of the vulnerability, the place that feels real badness, real wrongness, real not okayness, And since how long has this been here? How long have you been living with the sense, deep sense of something wrong? How has that affected your heart and your relationships? This is called comprehensive mindfulness, the sense just the impact, how things have played in your life.

And just to notice what it's like to bear witness to how much this feeling of being at war with yourself as impacted your life. And you might even put your hand on where you feel the most vulnerability and begin to really contact it with some gentleness. I often put my hand on my heart. Could be your belly, your cheek. Because you're going to begin to communicate with this place in you that feels so caught in self-aversion or unforgiveness.

And you might ask, what is this place most need? What would bring healing to this place? What does it need to trust or feel? Does it need to feel forgiveness from the outside or your own forgiveness? Does it need to feel loved and held? And you might call on whatever source you feel could best offer care inwardly. It might be your own most evolved and wise and compassionate heart mind. It might be calling on the Buddha or God or Jesus, or Divine Mother, or some well-known person

you deeply trust, or a personal healer, teacher, friend. It might be for many people, it's their pet, just feeling the love and forgiveness and acceptance and pets don't even need to forgive us, they just love us. So sense that loving presence here. own evolved self or your or some spiritual presence. And imagine and sense and feel the loving that this part of you needs flowing in, the forgiveness, the care, sense that this more awakened being sees you through eyes of compassion, sees how your leg was caught in a trap.

in some way you were hurting, you had needs that were unmet, that were causing you to lean, to behave the way you did. Sense loving, forgiving energy flowing in to the place in you that most needs it and sense what message would most matter to receive right now. What's the message that will most help you? What's the reminder for these last few moments you might deepen your intention to take the risk and let in forgiveness like a bath of warm light, saturating right to the core of the place in you that has felt most tight, most diversive, most not okay.

The words of one of the spiritual masters, the teachings of Babuji, it's, my beloved child, your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself, you break your own heart. You stop feeding on the love which is the wellspring of your vitality. The time has come your time to see, to celebrate, to live, to trust the goodness that you are. Let no one, no thing, no idea or ideal obstruct you. And if one comes even the name of truth, forgive it for its unknowing.

Do not fight, stop the war and let go and breathe into the goodness that you are. As you complete the meditation to scan and sense if there's any judgment for how you did the meditation because we tend to be really good at judging everything and to have that mindfulness that can let go of that judgment and to sense your intention to revisit again and again with a loving and forgiving, caring energy, the parts of your being that most seek healing. Namaste and blessings. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.