Tara Brach - Part 2 - "Play a Greater Part" - Bodhisattva for our Times

Episode Date: November 25, 2016

"Play a Greater Part" - Bodhisattva for our Times - Part 2 (2016-11-23) - During scary and uncertain times, the habitual reflex is to try to find ground by creating stories about what's happening and hardening into us-them blame. This only perpetuates the aggression and violence that is so prevalent in our societies. These two talks are a reflection on how we as awakening bodhisattvas can evolve our consciousness in a way that serves authentic societal healing and transformation. "Though I do not expect a plant to spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." ~ Thoreau NOTE: Part 2 includes a Tonglen meditation near the end of the talk. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks 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. Tonight is the second of a two-part series called We Rise to Play a Greater Part. So it's really the bodhisattva of our times. And a few days ago did an interview with the Washington Post that was ostensibly about how to work with the extra stress of this holiday season. And then I got curious and I thought I'd ask you, how many of you feel like it's extra stressful this particular holiday season?

Can I see by hands? Okay, so let me see how many feel like it's very normal for you right now. This is a normal level. Yeah. Okay, good. I would say that was about two-thirds extra stressful, one-third stressful for those that are listening on podcasts. I ask that because for many people that I've talked to, the combination of the holidays with recent upheaval around the elections,

that combo the sense of potentially the kind of conversations and interactions with family members who might not agree, it just seems to all combine in a way that's intense. And even without the elections, many people know the first. 48-hour limit that if we're too long with family, stuff happens, you know. Somebody recently sent me a little cartoon where there's a psychiatrist and lying on the couch is this long, tall cactus with a cowboy hat, and he says, you know, we weren't what I would call a touchy-feely family, you know, which I thought was cute. And then somebody else sent me one, and it was this annual convention and it's this huge auditorium.

and the convention was adult children of normal parents, only two seats were filled. So it speaks to a lot of us. So we explore then at these times, holiday or not, just at times that are stressful for us, which could be for personal reasons or more societal reasons, because it's often an interaction. how do we live our moments from the best that we are? The Bodhisattva path in the Buddhist tradition really means it's an archetype for all of us of our evolutionary potential. It's living from an awake heart.

Every one of us is on this unfolding of realizing the wisdom that comes from being present and the tenderness that comes when our heart wakes up. And the more we realize it, the more very naturally we serve and we savor life. And there's a reason that all this research keeps showing how people that are generous are less depressed, people that feel a lot of gratitude are happier. And there's a correlation because the more we are inhabiting

our fullness who we can be, the more we're at home. And by contrast, when we're feeling very self-centered and reactive and judgmental, we don't like ourselves. So how do we awaken our full potential at times of intense stress? And what we find is that for many, it's when it gets intense, that actually we feel more inclined towards helping. You see it in natural disasters.

It's like the best of people come out. People become incredibly aware of, oh, we're in this together, and they care. And I'm very aware that wartime, everybody gets together. When we see videos of racial violence, it breaks our hearts. Now there's a problem though that we forget. If we're not in the war zone or in the middle of the natural disaster are constantly taking in the real world because so many of us are in enclaves that are buffered some and I'm speaking those of us of privilege and dominant culture that we forget.

So one of the inquiries tonight is how do we keep remembering truth that they're suffering? so that our hearts can stay tender so we don't go back to sleep. Does that make sense? Okay. I have been hearing from a lot of people, especially in the last few weeks, that something has broken open and it's harder to forget because if you read the newspaper you can't forget.

And one letter I got, one email today, he writes signing petitions, giving money to campaigns, It doesn't feel like enough right now. I want to lend my voice, back, and heart to healing the wounds that keep us apart. I wonder how many of you have felt extra called to give more in these last few weeks? Can I see again? And that's a lot of us. Me too.

There's a word Hanani, and I probably pronouncing it wrong and I apologize. So it's a Jewish word. It means here I am in a spiritual sense. It's like, okay, something's woken me up, I'm here. And Leonard Cohen, who I quoted last week and I'm quoting this week just because I honor him and he's just passed. Here's how he describes it. He says, Heneni, Heneni.

It's that declaration of readiness no matter what the outcome that's a part of everyone's soul. We're all motivated by deep impulses to serve. even though we might not be able to locate that which we're hoping to serve, he says, I think everybody else's nature is to offer oneself at the critical moment, that when it breaks open, when it's critical, it's just our nature. And I think of it often in evolutionary terms is that as we wake up, as we become more present and wake up, we realize this belonging, it's not even a choice of, yes, I think I'll

go help there. It's like, that is the response. we're all in it together. Each person's a part of our heart, each being, each animal. So the inquiry is, when it's confusing and fast and scary and a lot of different emotions are set off in us,

how do we have that bodhisattva presence that's big enough to include all the contradictory pulls that go on in us? And in the last class, I described this and it wasn't my language, it was Charles Eisenstein. I thought it was such a powerful way to frame it. He says that we're in a time between stories. And this happens through history when one kind of way things are, get shaken up enough that the normal way we explain things to ourselves doesn't work.

So we don't have an easy story to frame things with and we're kind of the tendencies to very quickly try to grab on the new story okay here's what's happening and here's what we have to do. There's a real wisdom in pausing and being willing to be uncertain and to not know because that's when you can really take in more information and listen more deeply and actually respond from a deeper place.

So he talks about the space between the story, which can be incredibly fertile to be able to more deeply access what it means to live as a bodhisattva, to live these moments right now, to contact that. So part of what I started describing last class I'd like to go into more is what happens out of our insecurity when things get stirred up and we're in the space between the stories, the ways we try to seek ground again to comfort our nervous system and feel better about things. And one of the ways that we do it, there's kind of two extremes and one is we lock in and reinforce our sense of who's good and who's bad and we blame and fuel the anger and our solidarity

comes out of having shared enemies, which of course replants the seeds of the very stuff that we're upset about. That's one extreme. And then the other extreme is it feels so big that we in some way restrict our information flow or what we really pay attention to so we go back into that forgetting mode and get back into daily life

or even more a kind of a numbing or even more than that, a kind of paralysis that just feels like way, way too much. And again, something that came. through my screen very, very recently. And this has to do with this major pharmaceutical world. Depressed, overworked, job suck, upset about the elections, money worries. Well, here's a pill for you.

It's called Fuck It All. It's 1,000 MGs, two times daily, and va-voom. So that's the edgiest I've been on language in a while, but I thought it fit. So, it's essential for ourselves and our world that we attend deeply enough to realize our belonging, our connection, that we engage from that. Not that just we sit in a cave, but we engage from that belonging connection. But in order to do it, it takes more time than most of us have the tendency to give, to stay connected with what's going on inside us.

I gave the example of Mahatma Gandhi who spent a day each week where he committed to prayer and reflection and he said it was so he would then act from his soul, from the deepest part of his being. And I'm watching now, even in these just few weeks, how many of us there was this raw, grieving place, this real distress and how we quickly try to get into action and how important it is that we act but that we stay in touch because there's layers there that if we don't

keep on being with we won't be living from the deepest, most sincere, most awake part of our hearts. That's what it comes down to. I think we need to grieve and we need to feel the caring that's under the grief. But I want to say that, and I've been talking to a lot of friends about this paradox, that we also have a fear that we're like lopsers in a pot. This is a big one. And that we so easily adjust ourselves, we get used to something. It's like what seemed unbelievable to us.

How long ago was it, like, you know, a week in a day or whatever it was, two weeks in a day? we've gotten used to. And then we lose that edge. We don't heed the urgency. And so there's a fear when someone hears a Buddhist or spiritual practitioners say, yes, we have to keep paying attention to what's inside us that we're going to be gazing at our navel when we really need to act.

So in honor of that, I thought I'd share with you a little bit of a question-answer to do with Buddhists, it's in a very, very classic form. How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a light bulb? None, they are the light bulb. How many does it take to change a light bulb? Three, one to change it, one to not change it, and one to both change it and not change it. How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a light bulb?

Tree falling in the forest. One more. How many Buddhists does it? take to find a missing light bulb? Four noble sleuths. Aw. So I'm reading this because it's very easy to translate meditation into inaction. And I'd like to propose, and it's the same thing with the language of acceptance, that if we open to and accept what's going to. on, then we'll be passive. And I'd like to propose that it's actually not that way at all. It's that if we open to and really courageously open to what's inside us, we will get to the

caring that makes acting the most natural thing in the world. And yet our actions will be planting seeds for true transformation versus the seeds that continue the old pattern because we have to change consciousness. We just have to change consciousness. The same stuff keeps happening if we don't live from more presence and more heart. So what I'll be doing for the remainder of this class is organized a bit around a bodhisattva training that's formal name is Tonglin, but we'll be doing a version of it.

We'll end the class with a full Tonglin meditation. Tonglin basically means the willingness to take into yourself and feel and contact the truth of what's going on. The truth of what's going on inside us and each other. So it's very courageous. It's just saying, okay, I'm willing to feel it. That's the breathing in part of Tonglin. It's based on the breath, but you don't actually have to use the breath.

You can either have the breath be a metaphor or have the breath be an actual breath. The idea is you take in and let yourself be touched by the reality of what's going on. And you start with the reality that's inside you and then you widen the circle to include other people. The breathing out is you offer your care. And these are the two wings of awareness to let ourselves contact reality, really understand and be in touch with. That's wisdom.

the other wing, caring, loving what we touch. So that's what we'll be exploring. And the first part is that we start, as I've been really kind of building into, with an honest contact with what's going on within us right now. For some may be fear. For some, it may be celebration. For some, it may be anger. I'm going to stay with the anger

blame because that's the most common covering. And this is an honest question, how many of you feel like it's something you've been working with and you've been watching the anger blame layering? Can I see by hands? Yeah. Okay, thank you. Again, for those listening, that was a large number of us. And I put myself right in there that I'm on a very limited news intake.

I had taken as much as feels helpful but not what feels like it's going to unnecessarily whip me out. But it's very, very difficult to read the news and not have a very habitual filter of bad guys that are very, very, that's very pointed. It's not just, oh, this is a shadow stream that runs through all human psyches. It's no, this person. This is bad, you know. So, I'm watching it in myself all the time. And yet we know, and one healer put it really beautifully, that hate, and that also includes

the more subtle versions of blame and anger, is just the bodyguard for grief. When people lose the hate, they're forced to deal with the pain underneath. I often use the phrase vengeance is a lazy form of grief. It's hard to let go of the anger and feel what's underneath it. And just to say anger is intelligent. We need anger to survive, we need anger to alert us, we need anger to say, hey, I can accept the feelings going on inside me but I'm not going to accept that that's going on, that hurtful behavior is going on out there.

Acceptance doesn't mean we accept the status quo out there. It means we absolutely accept the actuality of what we're experiencing in the moment, so it allows us to act. So anger's intelligent, but it has a limited intelligence in the sense that if we lock in as a life habit, then we don't get to what's underneath it that most will guide us in our action. So it energizes but then we need to find underneath what we're really caring about. Okay?

So let me ask you to just do a brief reflection with me. Well, I'll do it together. You take a moment, let this be an opportunity to check in, to feel your breath, the sense again as we did earlier, these last days for you. And notice where you feel the strongest judgment and blame, where the most to anger or hatred or blame is directed. And if it's not in a societal or political way, it may be in your personal life. Because I'm not assuming that everyone has the same views or opinions. Sense what ends up stirring up the anger or blame, what it is that you hear about or imagine or sense. What's

the worst part of things that really stirs it up. Now if you had to let go, let go, you of the story of somebody or something being bad, you had to let go of outside person being bad, what then would you have to feel that's difficult? What would you have to feel? Can you sense the vulnerability, the groundlessness, the fear, the sorrow, the confusion? It's different for different people,

but can you sense that vulnerability that lies underneath that certainty of blame? And just to honor and sense that it's possible to bring a deeper presence to what's underneath, to have more choice, more freedom, to plant seeds that can create a different future. And just to keep that in mind as we continue to reflect. So blame creates a kind of certainty. It turns the world into black-white. It gives us a, okay, here's the story I'm operating in. And yet the problem is that if we really got to know things close up, including the person

that we're blaming, really, really close up, it's not so easy. Let me share with you one of the things that we're blaming. first times I experienced this in a jarring way was when I was in college and I was a community organizer and the main challenge then that we were working with were tenants rights and dealing with slumlords, landlords that were really violating the law and their tenants. We had tenants unions and rent control campaigns and the like. So what would happen is we'd build a union and And the landlord would often go to a family that was in the union and co-opped them by offering a slightly lower rent or just some minor things but it would destabilize the union and that's

the way that they could keep everybody off balance and then the rest of us would get very bitter towards the family or the person that was bought off and because they had in some way joined the ranks of the enemy. So it was very black-white, bad landlords and then bad people who went over to their sides. Okay, just give you a feeling for it. So I remember very, very well, one campaign that I was teamed up with a wonderfully charismatic woman, a tenant leader who lived very dilapidated apartment in Worcester where I was going to college. You know, in the winter the heat would go off.

It was awful. And so Don and I really bonded. This woman and I. She's bright, humor, great heart. Got to know her family, had dinners with them, got to know the kids. knew that one of her sons was in prison, I knew that she was dealing with uterine cancer, that her husband was in debt. She was just the center of activity. She was quite a force. Well, she started missing meetings and it turned out that I heard through others that the landlord

had given her husband a less than part-time job and she hadn't even told me. So I felt betrayed and I felt angry at her. And then I started hearing everybody talk about her and things like they'd see her and then cross the other side of the street and I started getting at how ashamed she was that she was trying to make ends meet for her family and this was the best she could do and yet how shaming it was and how rejected she felt.

And when I started, it's like I wouldn't have been able to do that if I didn't know her. She would have so easily been just another enemy. I remember one day I went to, after about a week of this, I went to her apartment and she wasn't opening the door or responding to anybody but finally she did and the pained look she gave me and then just hugging and weeping. And it really opened my eyes. Since then I've gotten to know a lot of people that in the past, in my leftist fervor, I would have called the enemy. And every single time there's just a human being like me with a mix of wants and needs and hurts and vulnerabilities,

just doing the best they can. It doesn't mean they're not ignorant and causing harm. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that when you really get to know close in, Longfellis said when you could see the secret suffering of another, You can't hate them. You just know that there's just a human here. Part of this process of waking up out of the small-mindedness of blame and judgment is a willingness

to get to know. I want to read you what I read in the last class from Charles Eisenstein. He says, he talks about it when we're blaming. He says, something hurts in there. Can you feel it? We are all in this together. One earth, one tribe, one people. We've entertained teachings like these long enough in our spiritual retreats, meditations and prayers. Can we take them now into the political world and create an eye of compassion inside the political hate vortex? It is time to do it, time to up our game. It is time to stop feeding hate. Next time you post online, check your words to see if they smuggle in some form of hate.

Dehumanization, snark, belittling, derision, some invitation to us versus them. Notice how it feels kind of good to do that, like getting a fix. And notice what hurts underneath and how it doesn't feel good, not really. Maybe it's time to stop. So with this Bodhisattva training, we start right where we are and not to judge ourselves for judging and that just adds arrow, second arrow, third hour, fourth arrow, but just to say oh so this is the place where I can wake up. We make what I call the U-turn where our aim of blame is going outward and we make a U-turn

around and just start being with, breathing with, feeling what's going on in our hearts. And we might feel anger and I know for myself I'll feel anger and I'll let it really be big and I'll try to stay out of the storyline. Just let myself feel it and I can find layered under it much like I asked you to check into that underneath the angers of feeling of powerlessness and fear and underneath the powerlessness and fear is a sense of a kind of grieving, the loss, how many people are feeling vulnerable and at risk and in fact being hurt, that grieving and then underneath that is caring.

So if I can make the U-turn and get down to the caring, I can act, use the energy of anger, but not recreate the same world of us against them. So that's a big challenge that we face is to step out of the us against them. And there's another big challenge I want to name as we practice Tonglin. The fear of letting it all in, it'll be overwhelming. Some people tell me I'm already oversensitive, I'm already thin-skinned enough. This will be crushing if I let myself feel all of those people now that are feeling extra-vulnerable. and hurting, it's too much.

I want to say a couple of things about that because sometimes it is and we need to do what's called titrating and just do a piece when we can. But there's a bigger approach to this which is to really know we're in it together that when you breathe in, you're breathing into our collective presence and we can feel it when we're with each other that we can handle more.

I shared last class that I was on a retreat when the election happened and that being in small groups and having people share both their own feelings of vulnerability or if it was one degree of separation, somebody they loved dearly, and how being able to hear each other created a space that we could handle it. I remember one group, one woman Jewish, parents in the Holocaust and what it was triggering off in her, that she felt as much in the non-dominant and being attacked as anybody else and another woman Muslim, another woman gay, another man in that group also gay, another man who felt like he was being marginal.

because he might not have voted like everyone else. And there was a space that could hold all of that. We need to be together in this one. We can't do it unless we feel that we're in it with other people. It will definitely feel overwhelming. Most of you have probably heard this, but it's so powerful. Martin Niemöller writes, first they came for the socialists and I did not speak out

because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me. We're in it together. We really are. Whether we're in it as those in the dominant culture who have the privilege and yet feel that sense of how can I live without being a better ally for those that I care about?

Are those in the non-dominate so many of us were in it together? That same vulnerability. There's a Sufi prayer that I love and it shows us how our pain is not personal. It's an intrinsic part of being alive and it also is felt in this personal body mind. Overcome any bitterness that may have come because you are not up to the magnitude of the pain that was entrusted to. 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. So if it feels like too much and you're not able to talk in small groups at a

retreat or you don't have others to collect with right away, the meditation is to imagine and sense us together and say, other people feel this too. Tell yourself that. Imagine it because it's the truth. So the bodhisatt training starts with this inner experience where we breathe in and let ourselves be touched and then it goes to breathing out and on purpose we offer out to ourselves or to others, our care. There's a real block often. We feel what's going on inside us, but if you really are honest, how often do you pay close attention to what life is like for another person? Like really close attention, like not just, oh yeah, they're having a hard time, but feeling into, well, what's it really like? And yet that's exactly what's being

asked of us on this Bodhisattva path is to deepen the question what's it like for you? Bring to mind your friends who are really, really upset and really imagine what is it like for you? I think of one friend who's a dean on a large campus dean of students and she was describing the students gathering last, week and how one Muslim woman stood up and said, can you assure my safety? And they couldn't. They could say here's what we'll do, but they couldn't assure her safety. What was it like to be her? Another friend tonight was telling me about being in a multicultural conference and how many

people that attended that conference were afraid to go out onto the streets last week. Or another woman that asked about, can you assure my safety, two days later, a pickup truck drove by and urine was sprayed at a woman with a Hajid. Two days later. A friend of mine visited Tom Andrews, visited a detention center, described interviewing different people that had been at the detention center. He interviewed one woman with her six-year-old daughter. She said, this is her second birthday that she's been here in the center and we still don't

know what's going to happen to us. What would it be like? What would it be like to be an immigrant undocumented who could be sent back to a village where all of their extended family had been killed by gangs? What would it be like? I know right now the Times is putting out stories of undocumented immigrants. And I think it's really powerful because if we read the stories, you can't read these stories and not care about those people.

But are we willing to extend our field so we don't forget? Because that's the Bodhisattva path to be willing to keep on being touched not just by our own predicament but by what's going on for others. Ben Franklin put it this way. will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. Now the reality is we're all affected but we don't always get it. So the breathing in part of Tonglin is for what is going on inside us but also to breathe in and get to know what's going on for others.

Okay, now the breathing out. We've been holding our breath for a long time here. Got to get to this. The Bodhisatt prayer is may whatever's arising serve the awakening. of compassion and love. So can we respond creatively and bravely and lovingly and wisely once we breathe in and feel the caring? And we're going to practice how we can breathe out in a meditation because part of it is just sending our love and prayers. But I want to just speak a bit to action and words because they matter as part of the breathing out. And some of

you probably saw this article about a Facebook group called Dear President Trump, Letters from Kids About Kindness. How many of you saw this? Not too many. So this is a new Facebook group and it's all kids writing letters to President Trump. I just want to read you a couple. This is one five-year-old. Dear President-elect Trump, please be a good president, be kind to all people. Some people in my family are a special religion and they are not bad guys. Dear Mr. Trump, please be kind from a little boy Tommy and underneath it's a drawing of a rainbow. Dear Mr. President, be nice to things. Do not say mean things. This helps me calm down. Meditation, reading and resting. It's a six-year-old. And she says, good luck with your new job and let me know if I

and help. That's great. She's an offering as an advisor. Dear Mr. Trump, kids in my class are very scared. Please don't kick them out. In my school we get sent to the wall when we're in trouble. My friends did not do anything wrong. Don't send them to the wall. Love Abby, age six. Dear Mr. Trump, I won an award at school for kindness and respect. I think you should be kind and do not exclamation mark build a wall between Mexico and America. Because we have friends there, Please be kind, sincerely, Henry. There are many, many different ways of speaking and acting from an awake heart and we each have our ways of serving, to continue to do your way of serving with more care, with more presence,

and stretch a bit. There's this inquiry really that's within so many of us is how can we be allies for those who are most vulnerable. ask yourself that question. There are many, many ways. There are ways with our children helping them wake up. There are ways each of us can in our moments be more kind. The attitude's what matters. This is Thomas Merton who describes not depending on the hope of the results. He says, start more and more to concentrate on the value, rightness and truth of the work itself. We don't know what's going to happen.

four years or eight years or 40 years. One great leader in Sri Lanka has a 500-year plan. We just don't know. So it's not the immediate outcome. I know with my, I have a diversity Sanga that I'm part of, that I've been part of over the last four and a half years and and our conclusion over and over again is generations and generations. There's been trauma for generations. It takes time to unwind it. We're waking up. up together. So a story of an act of kindness that I thought I'd share because I just love this story is written by a British writer, Bernard Hare. He was a student when this happened, this event, and he describes living north of London and he was in a student hovel. And a

police kept calling but didn't answer because they thought they were coming to a victim. But then he realized his mom was sick and he better find out if something was going on with her. So he rings home, leads and right away his dad says, get home son. They're not expecting her to survive the night. So he goes to a railway station and finds he missed the last train. So here's what happens. To this day, I won't hear a bad word said about British Rail. I brought a ticket and got on anyway. I was struggling student and didn't have the money for a taxi. The last train was going as far as Petersburg and he knew he was going to miss the connecting train by 20 minutes but he just thought he'd get that far anyway.

He said, I had a screwdriver in my pocket and a bunch of skeleton keys. I was so desperate to get home, I planted a knicker car in Peterborough, hitchhike, steal some money, anything. I just knew from my dad's voice that my mom was going to die that night and I intended to get home if it killed me.

Tickets, please, I heard as I stared blankly out of the window. I fumbled in my pocket, gave it to the guard when he approached. He stamped it but then stood there looking at me. I've been crying, had red eyes, and must have looked a fright. You okay? he asked. Of course I'm okay. I said, why wouldn't I be? And what's that got to do with you in any case?

You look awfully, he said, is there anything I can do? You get lost and mind your own business, I said. That'd be a big help. I wasn't in the mood for talking. He was only a little bloke and he must have read danger signals in my language and tone of voice, but he sat down opposite me anyway and continued to engage me. If there's a problem, I'm here to help. That's what I'm paid for.

Now, I was a big bloke in my prime, and so I thought for a second about physically sending him on his way, but somehow it didn't seem appropriate. He wasn't really doing much wrong. I was going through all the stages of grief all at once, denial, anger, guilt, withdrawal, everything but acceptance. I was a bubbling caldron of emotion. He had placed himself in my line of fire.

The only other thing I could think of to get rid of him was to tell him my story. Look, my mom's in the hospital dying, she won't survive the night. I'm going to miss the connection to Leeds at Peterborough. 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 really 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. He wandered away.

I continued to look out my window at the dark. Ten minutes later, he was back the side of my table. Oh no, I thought, here we go again. This time, I'm really going to rag him down the train. He touched my arm. Listen, when we get to Peterborough, shoot straight over to Platform 1 as quick as you can. Leeds train will be there. I looked him dumbfounded.

It wasn't registering. Come again? I said stupidly. What do you mean? Is it late or something? No, it isn't late, he said defensively, as if he really cared whether trains were late or not. No, I've 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. and 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? I suddenly realized what a top class, full-fledged oil in my was and I 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 just be offended. I caught him up and grabbed his arm. Oh, or I just wanted to, I was suddenly speechless. It's okay, he said. 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 will pay me back a plenty. Tell them to pay you back the same way and soon the world will be a better place. I was at my mother's side when she died in the early hours of the morning. Even now I can't think of her without remembering the conductor on the late-night train to Peterborough, and to this day I won't hear a bad word said about British Rail. Meeting the good conductor changed me from a selfish, potentially violent hedonist into a decent human being, but it took time. I've paid him

back a thousand times since then. I tell the young people I work with and I'll keep on doing so till the day I die, you don't owe me nothing, nothing at all, and if you think you do, I'll give you the same advice as the good conductor gave me, pass it down the line. So tonight we're really talking about this path of awakening our heart so that rather than continuing the same patterns that exist in our personal life and our society that we plant different seeds of consciousness and love. Therosa, as though I do not expect a plant to spring up where no seed has been,

I have great faith in a seed. Convince me you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect wonders. So let's practice a little together, this Tonglin. Give you a taste of it and if you feel it's helpful, there are many guided Tonglin meditations that you can practice more,

or as you settle in, just close your eyes and feel your body, your heart. You can sense this as a life practice. The essence is simple, this willingness to directly contact reality right here and offer care. You might start by just feeling the movement of the breath and sensing as you breathe in, that you're contacting and aware of the life inside you. And as you breathe out, that you're flowing outward into the space around you, letting go, letting go.

And in the same way we've been reflecting this evening to let yourself sense this particular juncture of your life and whatever is arising within you, whatever reaction, whatever place of emotional difficulty, is strongest. It might be anger, might be fear, sorrow, confusion. Feel where it lives in your body. If it helps a sense what really evokes it, the worst part of things going on and what really brings it up, this could be in your personal life or more societally. Just to help you get in touch and feel that as you breathe in you could directly contact.

where that vulnerability is. Breathing in is like saying you're willing to touch it, feel it, be with it. Let the breath come right to the place in your body where you feel most vulnerable, maybe the throat or the chest or the belly. For some it helps to put your hand where you feel it most strongly. You're breathing in and let the touch help to contact and feel what's there. And with the out breath, sense that you're offering that pain, that anger, that hurt into a field of loving presence.

You're breathing it out and letting it be held in the heart of the world. Imagine light and warmth, holding, surrounding, embracing. So you're breathing in and touching what's here and you're breathing out and really offering it into love, offering it love. It's difficult to feel the experience and pay more attention to the in-breath, letting yourself really contact where the experience is most in the body, the felt sense of it. And if it feels overwhelming, then emphasize the out breath a little more, that you could breathe it out and let it be held by the heart of the world, sensing all the others

that feel this too and that we're collectively holding this pain, this suffering, in a heart space of love. You continue to breathe and sense that you're now breathing in for all those beings that feel like you do. All those beings struggling with anger, hurt, fear, vulnerability, sorrow. Whatever it is, you're breathing in for all of us, letting the collective pain touch your heart. Let the heart be a transformer of sorrow so that you breathe it out and sense it

held in a vast field of caring. So you're breathing in for all of us and breathing out love for all of us. We continue by bringing to mind one person that we can imagine that is particularly vulnerable and threatened right now. It could be a person in a non-dominic culture that you know that's really feeling threatened. A person in your personal life, you know, that for whatever reason is struggling, but bring that person to mind and bring that person close in. So you can see the look on their face when things are difficult and actually imagine and sense from the inside out what it's like for this person, what it is this person's anticipating, the fear of failure, the feel of physical threat, the fear of loss, deep loss.

so that you breathe in and breathe in for this person, the vulnerability this person's experiencing, letting your heart be touched and breathing out your wish for healing, for safety, that this person be held in love. Again, if you feel like it's overwhelming to emphasize the out breath, if it's hard to connect, emphasize the in-breath, and really feel in your body, what would this be like? What would it be like if it was you? Widening it to breathe now for all the beings that might be struggling just the way this person is

with the same vulnerability. So you imagine all beings that you're breathing in for all of them, letting your heart be as wide as the world and deep and breathing it out with your prayer. for healing, for relief, for freedom. Letting go of all ideas of self and other now and just feeling the heart space that's here. Kwan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion, is characterized by listening to and responding to the cries of the world. A bodhisattva of our times.

I'd like to close by just reading a bit from Clarissa Estas. who describes it that us like seaworthy vessels that are capable of navigating the stormy waters of these times. She says we're made for these times. For years we've been in training for this exact plane of engagement. When a ship is in harbor and moored, it's safe. There can be no doubt. But that's not what great ships are built for. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once,

but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul to assist some portion of this poor suffering world will help immensely. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of such acts. We know that it does not take everyone on earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second or hundredth gale. One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do

to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold and dark times. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these, to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both are acts of immense bravery and the greatest necessity. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these, to be fierce and to show mercy towards others, both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.

Namaste and thank you for your presence. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.