Tara Brach - Part 2: Heart of Compassion

Episode Date: February 21, 2014

2014-02-19 - Part 2: Heart of Compassion - Most of us consciously value compassion, but move through much of life without access to the full capacity of our heart. This talk explores the self-compassion that is the very grounds of loving our world.

This class is the second of five classes on the universal faces of love. And last class we covered loving kindness, which is the response to the goodness and beauty of this world. And tonight we'll be on compassion with an emphasis on self-compassion. We'll also cover forgiveness and joy and equanimity. So I mentioned to the group that was gathered here on location. I know a lot of you are listening from podcasts. I wanted to share that teaching a series of classes on loving presence

comes at a very poignant time in my life. And that my mom, who's 87, and many of the folks here in D.C. know her, and she's been a regular at our week-long retreats for quite a while, has just entered hospice care. And so this is the final season of her life. And as many of you know, because so many of us have been through it, right hand in hand with the very deep sadness

is right there is the poignancy of loving. It's like mortality is the gift of it is it lets us absolutely know without any, out what really matters. It lets us know that love and embodying love, living it, expressing it, receiving it, giving it is really what we're here for. Many of you know the Dalai Lama puts it in a very simple way. He says, my religion is kindness. You know, we don't need much more. And then of course there's now going viral or trying to semi-viral online. There's a picture of this really adorable little girl and she's got a mask, she's using her hands as a mask,

and she says, my superpower is kindness. What's yours? So I think our inquiry is, you know, sometimes we're at one of those times in our lives like I am where it's like right there in front of us, this is what matters. And other times we get caught in habit, you know, every one of us, just the way it is. and perhaps the most important inquiry that we can have is really what will reconnect me in this moment. What in this moment will help me remember this heart that's here. And then as we'll explore, there's different expressions of the heart. So tonight we're exploring in this class the expression of compassion, which is in the simplest way it's a kind of resonance that we have when we encounter suffering.

It's a tenderness that naturally arises. I'm reading a book by Henri Nguyen, the return of the prodigal son, but I found this quote from him that I wanted to share on compassion. When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, We often find it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen, rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. A friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion. Who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement?

who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face us with the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. What I like about that is you can sense the courage of it, that it's so much easier to try to fix something or in some way have a role other than just being that space of tenderness that just sits in that reality

that we can manage certain parts, parts of our life, but the big events, birth, sickness, death and what other people do, we can't. So can we have the courage to let go enough to be with ourselves and each other, just being with? So in a spiritual sense, compassion is the flavor of an awake and wise heart. It's the heart that recognizes we are of the same essence. These different appearances of form, these bodies, are really made of the same spiritual essence of awakeness, the kind of a dynamic energy of awareness. That we're one.

It's a heart that realizes that and responds from that sense. It's a tenderness that is right there when we get, we're connected. And then of course in an evolutionary sense, for the last 120 million years, mammalian brain and neocortex have been evolving so that we have this capacity for what are called affiliative emotions and what really mean we can resonate with each other. We can pick up what's going on in each other and care. empathy, compassion. So for the purposes of evolution, it lets us collaborate and it furthers our species, it makes our species pretty in charge of the earth for better and usually

for worse these days. But in an immediate sense, this capacity to resonate is what helps us shift from a sense of being isolated and scared to a sense of being isolated. to a sense of belonging that's really profoundly healing and peace-giving. There's a story that I read from Fran Peavy, who describes being at the Stanford University when there was a crowd of people with cameras. And when she walked over, what she found, video equipment on this little health side, she found they were clustered around a pair of chimpanzees. And the male was running loose, and the female was on a chain.

This was a setup. It was about 25 feet long, and it turned out they were from Marine World, and the female was being studied at Stanford for some reason. And the spectators were scientists and publicity people that were trying to get them to mate. So the male's grunting and pursuing and grabbing at the female's chain and tugging, and she's whimpering and backing, away. He's pulling again, she pulls back. And Fran describes she's a woman and she's watching

the chimp's face and she can tell the chimp is really struggling. She's feeling the sympathy for the female chimp. And then suddenly the chimp yanks her chain out of the male's grasp. And to her amazement, the chimp walks across the crowd through the crowd straight to her and takes her hand. And then she leads Fran over around the circle to where the only other two women are there, and she joins hands with one of them. So she's standing there holding hands.

And then she says, then they all made a little circle, and she says this, I remember the feeling of that rough palm against mine. The little chimp had recognized us and reached out across all the years of evolution to form her own support group. So it's an interesting question in that particular situation

what prevented the male onlookers for feeling compassion because certainly males and females have the equipment. In this case there's something about skiing excitement and there's kind of the engagement and affiliate of bonding with the other spectators. It became kind of a sport and we know what happens in sports. We get carried away and in some way it becomes us them.

You know, we forget our belonging. In other words, it overrides our capacity for compassion in those moments. And in the last class, I described how when we are pursuing and trying to meet our most basic needs, unless we're mindful, it can override our capacities for love and in this case for compassion. And we know it if we look at our day, how we move through the day.

The most primitive need that we move through the day trying to satisfy is the need to not feel endangered. So how many moments of the day we know we're worrying and planning? Well, originally, this is, and each of the basic needs corresponds with a part of our brain. This is the brain stem being afraid. It's the reptilian brain. It's a lizard that's either slithering and hiding under a rock or else, you know, like a snake attacking a predator, but it's that kind of defense and attack.

Well, you know, you can imagine, you know, if you're in a jungle and you're chased by a tiger, or if there's spears coming at you, that the blood flows to the extremities and your heart's pounding and your entire focuses, your focus gets very narrow and fixated on escape. These are not moments when you're resuscities, resonating with the possible emotions of the predator that's after you or any.

I mean, it's like that is not the biochemistry and set up for compassion. Well, most of us don't have tigers chasing us, although there's a resurgence of tigers in India right now. But that's not my point here. But we have a stress that feels like harm is around the corner. I mean, we know that sense that, that in some way we sense that at any moment something bad could happen and we're tensing against it. So there's a sense of anxiously preparing for something, that we're going

to fail in some way, some performance, or getting to an appointment on time, or trying to make a plane. You know, it feels like you're almost going to die if you don't make that plane, doesn't it? At least for me. You know, or the fear that our children or partner or somebody's not going to get taken care of. And the deep fear is that we don't have enough time. That there's only so much time, we don't have enough of it and something bad is going to happen because of that. Does that not enough time experience resonate for you? Yeah. That we're not going to be prepared for what's around the corner. So the research study I share almost one of the most frequent ones I share because every time I remember it, it

helps me, was a study at Princeton called the Good Samaritan Study, one of the most famous ones ever done, where the seminarians were given a practice sermon. Half of them were assigned to do the Good Samaritan, the other half another random Bible story. And the seminarians were then supposed to go to another building and give the sermon and be evaluated. Okay, so that's a setup of the study. on the way to that other building, they passed by a person in a doorway that was in distress. So here they are.

They're about to give a sermon on the Good Samaritan, and they pass this distressed person. And so the study is, you know, what happened was determined by how much time they thought they had before they needed to give their sermon. If they believed that they were going to be late, they didn't stop to help.

This is even the ones that were about to preach on the Good Samaritan. Now think about that. Seminarians are about to preach on the Good Samaritan not stopping to help because they thought they'd be late. I think that for me, that has a particular significance because a lot of the things that I'm doing, I'm on my way in some way,

I'm preparing to give a talk about compassion or love, and how annoyed I get when I'm interrupted because I need to finish my talk and the very essence of the talk falls by the wayside. So it's a good one for me to remember. But we might wonder why it's so difficult to pause. Have you noticed how you get into your day

and it's really hard to just stop and say, okay, just breathe, reconnect, come back? Why is that? Well, we're on this role and our belief is there's not enough time and our body's telling us there's not enough time, we're caught in stress. So that's not the setup that lets us then be tender

when we encounter the person in distress. Now, the more that we feel threatened, the more that we feel stressed, the more others become what I call unreal others, where they're kind of like two-dimensional characters that are either in our way or might have something to offer, but we're mostly in fight-flight, defending, aggressing,

and our mirror neurons, the ones that activate us to being attuned to others aren't really operating at that time. And it's exactly the same with self-compassion. When we're in stress and we think something's around the corner going to go wrong, we stop paying attention or being able to listen to or respond kindly to what's going on inside us. So that's the first need that we try to meet, you know, try to make ourselves safe, but we lose touch with our hearts.

The second need, this is the mammalian brain, is that we are spending a lot of our time trying to seek satisfaction, gratification, pleasure. The example I gave is like a squirrel that's collecting all its acorns and so on. And you know when it's busy collecting its acorns, it's not commiserating with its squirrel made about what a hard day it was. You know, it's focused. So that's us too, that, you know, if we know how it is that if we're kind of watching something really, one of those series on TV that gets so addictive and a friend wants to talk about a hard day at work or our child wants attention, that's not where we're at. We're kind of pursuing our gratification. Older

woman in Miami sitting on a park bench. This is the third area that I'm about to tell you. This is attachment bonding. So I'll tell you the story in a moment. If you have an agenda with somebody else, this is the part of our brain that the basic need is we want to feel secure with each other. This is the monkey grooming and so on. If we have an agenda to secure a mate, to avoid rejection, to impress somebody, to get approval, to draw someone in, whatever it is to control our relationship, any agenda ends up kind of subduing and disconnecting us from our heart, from that compassion and capacity. We can't see another's needs or vulnerability. They're not real. So the older woman, Miami, sitting on a park bench. A very disheveled man

and tattered clothing sits down next to her and says she asked him, so, how are you? And he says, well, I'm just out of prison. It's been 25 years. What were you in for? And he says, well, I murdered my wife. And she goes, oh, you're single. It's a silly one, but it's fun. So the truth is, when we look at our day, and it gets really interesting, you can find that through the day in some way were being driven by one of those three needs, that we're either trying to avoid something bad happening, or we're trying to get more pleasure, or we're trying to secure our bonds with others. And that during those moments, we're in a stress reaction, our attention is narrowed and fixated, and we're not open, and we're not so much able to resonate. So this

is the reason we can move for our day and hear stories. We can hear news stories. We can hear news stories. see flash across our screen, stories of all sorts of suffering. We might say, oh, that's terrible, or did you hear about da-da-da-da? But there's not a visceral quality of care that we're in touch with. It's interesting to track it through the day. Excessing an authentic state of compassion is not easy. Most of us, it's conceptual most of the time. This is a Does that resonate for you? I'm just looking for nods or you can go either way. Okay.

Here's the Dalai Lama. He says, I don't know why people like me so much. It must be because I value Bodhita, which is the awakened, compassionate heart. He says, I can't claim to practice it. I mean, I'm not always living it, but I value it. Now that's reassuring, right?

It's like what he's saying is that we can't always, our heart's not always open and caring, but we can care about caring. And this is the first step. If as we sit here, there's a place in us deep down this, that knows, yes, I get caught in all those habits of, you know, that keep me from being really open-hearted during the day. And I think most of us, when we're honest,

know for ourselves how that is. but we know also at the very same time we care about caring, that opens the door. Your sincere intention to cultivate open-heartedness will energize the path. We just need to be more consciously intentional. So you might just reflect for a moment. And I feel like it's an important reflection just to check in

and sense where this lives in you, the urge or the longing to be the kind of friend that Henry Nguyen talks about, the kind of person that can truly accompany another or our own inner life with a tenderness, not trying to fix, a very pure quality of compassionate presence. Sensing how this lives in your heart is how much this matters, if it does, that in you which wants to pay deeper attention and wake up this heart, that in you that really would like your religion to be kindness in a more active embodied way. So we together, we just feel, okay, that's our intention. Sometimes it's more conscious in some than in others, but that's our intention. And then there's the honesty that can recognize the time we spend cut off. And you

might notice that for yourself right now, that honesty that can scan your life, maybe scan today or yesterday and ask, was I there? Was I here? When I was with others, were they real to me? Was I in some way present enough to sense what was important to that person or what that person might have been feeling? Was I gentle with myself, forgiving, attentive? Notice if as you reflect on this, whether there's a sense of self-criticism. where you say, yeah, I value compassion, but boy, if I'm really honest, there's a lot of self-centeredness because if you notice that criticism and bring it into the light of awareness, it won't control things.

It's really not our fault that we get cut off. We have deeply grooved habits of trying to meet our needs that pull us away. It doesn't have to always be like this, but to blame ourselves only deepens the grooves. So we sense our intention towards compassion, our honesty to where we get cut off, and then the understanding is that the very heart of this path, and it said that the heart of Buddhism is compassion, and the heart of compassion is compassion for ourselves. In other words, if you want to widen in the circles,

If you really want to hold others in this life with kindness, really has to begin with the life that's right here. I'd like to open your eyes, please do. One of the most potent new developments in the world of psychotherapy is called Compassion-focused Therapy. And it's really the next major wave of therapy. and many, it's very synergistic with different types of cognitive therapies and mindfulness-based therapies and somatic therapies.

And the common denominator is this recognition that authentic healing requires self-compassion, that emotional healing requires that there be a forgiving, kind attitude and presence with ourselves. And what we realize is that the more we're suffering and struggling, often the harder it is to be compassionate for ourselves. So we're going to spend some time with that right now because I think that the critical question is when we've turned on ourselves, how do we deepen our attention

to begin to soften and open and embrace the life that's here? And the good news is turning on ourselves, in other words, shutting down our hearts to ourselves is a habit. Now, as we didn't get born down on ourselves. So this is good news, because even what feels like core shame,

which is really a big deal, the sense of omn-effective, it's a well-trod habit pattern of bots and bodily feelings that have been playing out for a long time. So there's these grooves, these neuropathways, that have been pretty well established, but because we now know more about neuroplasticity, those habits can change. And there's not one of us,

no matter how locked in we feel to being judgmental of ourselves, judgmental of others, angry, whatever the pattern is, it's still a habit, which means it can be changed. I say that all real mastery takes 10,000 hours, so we have to practice. You know, it really's true.

But we get regular opportunities. What I've found basically, if I had to say it in a broad way, most of us are really aversive to our particular ego. You know, the way the ego tries to meet its needs, we don't like the way our ego is trying to meet its needs. We don't like feeling needy. We don't like it when we feel aggressive. We don't like it when we feel defensive.

And yet every animal body feels aggressive and defensive. But we take it personally and think it's bad about us. Does that make sense? Okay, we don't like our egos. You know, we don't like the ways that we get addictive and grasping, yet most of us have some form of addictive grasping. We don't like the way we seek approval, yet most of us seek approval.

Most of us, when we're with others, want a certain kind of response. But we don't like ourselves for it. And when we don't fixate on self-aversion, then we put it outward, and we don't like other people for making it. making us feel bad about ourselves or we don't like the way life is. We blame outward.

Yogi Berra, who I grew up, the town I lived most of my life in, where he was, so I have a lot of Yogi Berra quotes. My mom went to a hairdresser and his wife went to the same hairdresser, so I kind of feel like he's part of the family. He says, 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 isn't my fault,

I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself? That attitude. So here's the inquiry. We've turned on ourselves, how can we use these practices? How can we use this 10,000 hours to begin to truly embrace what we've turned on? And I think we actually have to embrace our egos. I think we have to find a way to love and feel tender towards the defensiveness that comes up and the aggressiveness that comes up and the neediness that comes up we have to, there's like nothing's exempt. Whatever we can't embrace with love controls us.

Whatever we can't embrace about ourselves with love controls us. That's where our identity gets stuck. So the message is embrace it all. But it's really hard because when it shows up and when we're not the person we want to be, we contract.

So I wanted to share a very recent story from my life where I was at retreat, as many of you know, for about 10 days in January. And for quite a number of days, I was getting very, very quiet and very collected. And there were a lot of waves of rapture and peace. And I remember at one particular point feeling a tremendous sense of openness. and presence and just feeling alive and peaceful. And then I had the thought of telling Jonathan about it. Jonathan's my husband.

And everything collapsed. And all of a sudden it was like, oh my God, the ego's here. Like I can't just meditate. I have to track my progress and report it to others and impress the world with what a great yogi I am. And then all the different ways I've been critical of myself for spiritual ego, for taking pride and spiritual accomplishments. So I switch from this open thing to, you know, wanting to get approval

and tell about an accomplishment to being completely down on myself, like in seconds. It was very quick. And there is awareness of it because, you know, this is like the 10,000th time that I got at this is a suffering, this turning, okay? This once again being critical of some thing that happened. It wasn't like I asked my ego to. to pop up and want to get proud. You know, it just happened.

So I realized, okay, here's an opportunity. In some way I have to befriend the ego. And so here's this grasping. I'm watching this egoic grasping about having spiritual experiences, looking good, and remembering, and I think it was Eckartoli that might have said this, that if whatever's happening, we can regard it as if we're choosing

that experience. So I said, okay, choosing a proud ego. You know, what would happen if I'm choosing this? And then the next thing that's come up is the aversion towards the ego. Okay, choosing aversion. What happens if I say, okay, I'm choosing to experience this aversiveness? And that allowed me to deepen my attention. And the basic practice now, This is the basic core of presence, is just to notice what's going on. If you want to love this life, notice what's going on, and in some way you're saying yes to it. In some way you're going this too. You're noticing it and allowing it.

That is awareness, recognizing and allowing. And if you're fully allowing, it gets tender. But at first, it's a little bit of an easing into allowing. It's like, okay, usually it's like I'm saying to myself, okay, I'll be with the subversion if it goes away. You know, it's a bargaining mind, right? Okay? But then, because my intention is pretty pure,

like I really do want to be free, the allowing goes deeper and I say to myself, can I really say yes to this squeeze of shame? Can I say yes to this feeling of pressure and weightiness and tightness in my heart, this bad person feeling? So what I practice often, as many of you know, is just simply putting my hand in my heart and seeing, how deep can this yes go? Can it go so deep? And I'll give you the background to this. There's the mother of all Buddhas, the name is Prajna Paramita. And the mother of all

Buddhas is just the pure loving awareness that's the source of it all. And so I say, can I say yes so deeply that I can become Prajana Parameda, that I can become as if the mother of all Buddhists that's just sensing the different play of egos and thoughts and life and just holding it all with tremendous compassion and love. That was my image. Can I just say this too to everything that arises? So I felt that that kind of clutching and the yes went so deep when I had that image of being kind of the mother of all Buddhists being this vast loving presence that just the world was just appearing and dissolving within my being. The yes went so deep that it was the aversion was floating in a sea of tenderness. In other words, I was no longer the judge or the

judged. There was just pure compassion for the life that was here. Even self-compassions a little more limiting over word because I wasn't feeling compassion towards itself. It was just compassion for the currents of life that were flowing through, that were part of me. And then I planned to tell Jonathan about that. I really did. And then I realized, oh my God, this is going to become a story I tell other people. So I forgave myself and went ahead and decided to tell you the story. I'm just trying to be honest here. So how we get waylaid. is we make things wrong. We make it wrong that we feel shame,

we make it wrong that we feel fear, we make it wrong that we judge. There's only one way that frees us and that's to truly love it all. But we can't start with loving it all. That's too much to ask. But we can start with saying, okay, I'm choosing this.

This is an opportunity to wake up. can I bring presence? Can I recognize and allow it? Can I say yes? And then you kind of are opening the door. Can I deepen that yes? Can I really say yes? Can I really feel it? Can I really open to it until the eye that's saying that becomes Prajna Paramita, the mother of all Buddhas. Okay, so if we watch our patterning, what we find out is that every one of us has these egoic experience. is everyone turns on ourselves and thinks in some way in those moments it's me, my experience, everybody else is just where they are, but I'm bad. And we all judge that ego. So for that reason, about 10 years ago, I heard a little essay that has become one of my favorites and many of you've heard it, but it's so fun, I'm going to share it anyway, goes like this. If you can start the day without caffeine or pet pills,

if you can be cheerful ignoring aches and pains, if you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, if you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you time, if you can overlook when people take things out on you when through no fault of yours something goes wrong, if you can take criticism and blame without resentment, if you can face the world without white lies and deceit, if you can conquer tension without medical help,

if you can relax without liquor, if you can sleep without the aid of drugs, then you are probably a dog. It's cute. So one of our challenges is when the stuff comes up that we turn on ourselves for, we're usually alone and we're usually very in that kind of bubble of badness

and feel unique. So one of the experiences I wanted to share with you just again in recent retreat. One woman, we do groups at retreats where we have a chance to, you know, in a small group kind of name what's going on in our meditation and where we're getting stuck. And one woman was really getting, really recognizing the judge as an all-pervasive feature in her landscape, you know, just everywhere she turned in some way she heard the voice putting herself down.

And I said, what do you put yourself down for? lots of things to say. So she named some very, she was actually very real and very vulnerable and names some things that were, that she really found unforgivable. And I could sense that what we needed was for other people to name what they were down on their cells for too, because otherwise she would have been all alone in it. So we all just put out, you know, we all just kind of put into the circle, kind of popcorn-style

things that we really had a hard time accepting about ourselves. Until you just heard these things and it was almost like you'd put in yours, another person put in theirs and it stopped being like my shame or my judgment. It just became the shame and the judgment, just stuff. And then we started, we went around and we kind of shared what our prayer was about this, the way we hoped we could hold the difficult experiences. you know, the prayer for more tolerance and more compassion and a forgiving heart. And by the end, it was so beautiful.

People reported that, you know, the stuff that had such a charge and felt so bad, it just was not so charged. It was like that current I described. It's like space and currents moving through it, but we're not at war anymore. We need to stop the war. I like to just take a little moment to practice. practice ourselves with that. Just to sense a little bit the possibility of this compassion towards ourselves, just a taste and invite you to practice more when you're on your own.

You might take a pause as you let your eyes close. Just feel your breath and feel your heart, feel yourself here, and then just opening your attention in a way that invites something some part of yourself, some experience about yourself that's very hard to accept, hard to relate to with compassion. It might be an addictive behavior. It might be the way you find yourself judgmental or controlling. It might be that you get defensive. It might be a kind of aggressiveness that you feel's hurtful and that may be hurtful. And to know that the prayer to hold ourselves with compassion is not to say that we're giving ourselves permission to cause

harm. It comes from a wisdom that knows that if we can't be present with ourselves with compassion, we really can't access the inner resources that will help us to transform. So you might sense what it is that's hard to relate to and just feel that it's your intention to soften towards yourself, even if it's hard, from that wisdom place in you. that, as the Dalai Lama says, even if you can't care about yourself, you can care about caring. And then just to allow yourself to take a moment to really contact what's so difficult, if it's that you get controlling just to feel how the tightness is, if you get angry to sense how the outbursts are,

if it's grasping, maybe it's a compulsive eating or some other kind of behavior, You might sense that, that's sometimes called the first arrow, the craving, the fear, the anger. And notice how quickly the second arrow is also there, which is the self-blame for what's going on. How much aversion there is towards yourself. And this is where it takes courage just to let yourself feel the realness of that suffering, of self-aversion. what it's like to be at war with yourself, to not like yourself. You might notice how long you've been living with this, how familiar this is, and how the feeling of not okay person, bad person,

has affected your life or your relationships in different ways. So in some way, you're honestly connecting with the fact that this hurts, that the ways you've been pursuing your needs have ended up landing you in self-aversion and you might just put your hand on your heart and just in some way acknowledge, okay, this hurts. There is a stuckness that's painful here and also to sense that you're right now with several hundred people

and more if you're listening, other parts of the world, that you're not alone. that it's part of our human conditioning to act in ways we don't like and to not like ourselves. Just feel the wish for compassion again. May I be kind to myself? Even the words, may I be kind to myself? You might experiment a little and say, okay, I'm choosing this right now. I'm choosing to feel this. This is a gateway. I'm choosing to feel the shame. I'm choosing to feel the shame. or this blame or this hurt. And see how deep your yes can go right now,

just offering a very gentle presence to exactly what you're feeling in your body. And no, you're not saying yes to the behavior, you're not saying, oh, go ahead and do that, you're saying yes to the pain that's circling around it in your body. It's like you're the mother of all Buddhas holding that. You're holding this part of life too,

this too. No matter what comes up, this too, can we hold with tenderness anything that arises, anything unconditionally? You might sense if there's a message to offer to the hurting place inside, just any message that feels resonant right now of caring. The Sufi say, like the mother of the world who carries the pain of the world in her heart, each one of us is part of her heart and therefore endowed with a certain measure of cosmic pain. And each has also got that awareness and love that can hold it.

So just taking a few breaths and knowing that this is a brief connecting with your inner life that is a to-be-continued, that that 10,000 hours means over and over again when you notice you're at war pausing and being willing to remember. Well, others feel this too. My intention is kindness. Can I say yes? Can I love this life no matter what? I'm taking a few full breaths.

When you're ready, opening your eyes, the more fully we say yes to the life within, the more space, the more heart space and tenderness there is for our world. Naturally, we widen the circles. And it gets contagious. You know, just the way violence breeds violence, if your response to pain is kindness,

that actually creates more kindness and it ripples out. Others can feel it. a story I want to end with that I told you about the Good Samaritan story. This is a story is entitled A Real Good Samaritan. And I wanted to share it as part of closing because it really touches me right now at this point of my life. It's written by Bernard Hare, who's a British writer. He describes that they, he was living as a student impoverished in the north of London and the police called him at his student hovel

in the early evening. He didn't answer the phone, but then he got to thinking his mom had been sick, so he goes and rings home to Leeds where his family lives and finds out his mother's in the hospital not expected to survive the night. Get home, son, my dad said. I got to a railway station to find I'd missed the last train.

A train was going as far as Peterborough, but I would miss the connecting Leeds train by 20 minutes. I bought a ticket home and got on anyway. I was a struggling student and didn't have the money for a taxi the whole way, but I had a screwdriver in my pocket and a bunch of skillet and keys. I was so desperate to get home. I planned to nick a car in Peterborough, hitchhike, steal some money, anything. I knew from my dad's tone of voice that my mother was going to die that night and I intended to get home if it killed me. Tickets, please, I heard. I fumbled for my ticket and I gave to the guard when he approached. He stamped it, but then just stood there

looking at me. I've been crying, had red eyes, must have looked a fright. You okay, he asked? Of course I'm okay. Why wouldn't I be? And what's it got to do with you in any case? Well, you look awful, he said. Is there anything I can do? You could get lost to mind your own business, I said. That'd be a big help. I was not in the mood for talking. Look, if there's a problem, I'm here to help. That's what I'm paid for. I was a big bloke in my prime, so I thought for a second by physically sending him on his way, but somehow it didn't seem appropriate. The only other thing I could think of to get rid of him was telling my story. Look, my mom's in the hospital dying, she won't survive the night.

I'm going to miss the connection to leads at Peterborough, and I'm not sure how I'm going to get home. It's tonight or never. I won't get another chance. I'm a bit upset. I don't feel like talking. I'd be grateful if you'd leave me alone, okay? Okay, he said finally getting up.

Sorry to hear that, son. I'll leave you alone then. Hope you make it home in time. Then he wandered off down the carriage, back the way he came. I continued to look out the window at the dark. Ten minutes later, he was back at the side of my table. Oh, no, here we go again.

I thought, this time I'm really going to rag him down the train. He touched my arm. Listen, when we get to Petersburg, shoot straight over to Platform 1 as quick as you can. The leads train will be there. I looked at him dumbfounded. It wasn't registering. Come again, I said stupidly.

What do you mean? Is it late or something? No, he said, it isn't late defensively, as if he really cared whether trains were late or not. No, I just radioed Peterborough. They're going to hold the train up for you. As soon as you get on, it goes. Everyone will be complaining about how late it is,

but let's not worry about that on this occasion. You'll get home, and that's the main thing. Good luck and God bless. Then he was off down the train again. Tickets, please. Any more tickets now? I suddenly realized what a top class full-fledged dolom I was and chased him down the train. I wanted to give him all the money from my wallet, my driver's license, my keys, but I knew he'd be offended.

I caught him up and grabbed his arm. Oh, I just wanted to, or suddenly speechless. It's okay, he said, not a problem. He had a warm smile on his face and true compassion in his eyes. He was a good man for its own sake and required nothing in return. I wish I had some way to thank you, I said. I appreciate what you've done. Not a problem, he said again.

If you feel the need to thank me, the next time you see someone in trouble, you help them out. That'll pay me amply. Tell them to pay you back the same way, and soon the world will be a better place. Bless you. I was at my mother's side when she died

in the early hours of the morning. My meeting with the good conductor changed me from a selfish, potentially violent hedonist into a decent human being, but it took time. I paid them back a thousand times since then. I tell the young people I work with and I'll keep doing so until the day I die, you don't owe me nothing, nothing at all. And if you think you do, I give you the same advice the good conductor gave me. Pass it down the line.

I think I love the story because it has to do with the kind of world we want to live in and that's ours to create. That there's a kind of understanding that to be kind we have to, as someone says, it swerve regularly from our path. Do you know what I mean by that? We're on a track, on our way somewhere else, into the future. And the place where our heart gets tenders right here, right now, when we can see. say, oh, this hurts, ouch, and hold their own being, or look at another and really look

and sense that like ourselves, this person too is struggling, that everyone we meet in some way has lost or will lose beings that they love, that every one of us is living in uncertainty, that we get insecure about people caring about us. If we can slow down just enough like that conductor to really register, oh, person in trouble, our heart will naturally get tender and we'll start passing it on. Dalai Lama calls this shift in our being from an ego self that just focused on ourselves to really taking in who's here with kindness as the hope of the world. I really think it is. So let's just take a moment again to pause together.

We can widen the circles if we keep touching in right here to our own being, to the life that's right here, with a kind presence. So just sense what that means for you in this moment. And sensing that heart space that can include the life that's here and the lives around you. You might bring to mind one person that you'll be seeing in the next day or so.

And just sense that person is living in this heart space, that you can deepen attention to him or her, that you can seek to understand what's really happening for this person, that you can pass on the grace, the love that flows through you. It says, Nikki Giovanni put it, she says, and if ever I touched a life, I hope that life knows, that I know that touching was and still is and always will be the true revolution. I must stay 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.