Tara Brach - Part 2: The Sure Heart's Release

Episode Date: January 3, 2014

2011-02-16 - Part 2 - The Sure Heart's Release - Our longing is to realize and embody loving presence, yet we each have deeply conditioned habits that bind our hearts. This talk reflects on these habits, and explores how we can free ourselves by bringing a mindful, compassionate attention to places where we are most trapped in feeling separate, fearful and unworthy.

Tonight's talk will be a continuation of last week's talk, but you didn't have to be here, so don't worry if you weren't. I reflected a bit on one of the Buddhist scriptures, the Majima Nakaya, has a verse, and I'd like to read it again, and this will be the focus for the evening. The purpose of holy life does not consist in acquiring merit, honor or fame, gnar in gaining morality, concentration, or the eye of knowledge. It's that unshakable deliverance, the sure hearts release, that indeed is the object of the holy life.

That is its essence, that is its goal. That unshakable deliverance, the sure hearts release. That indeed is the object of the holy life. That is its essence. That is its goal. So we'll be again exploring, I think I just love the language, the sure hearts release, really exploring the freedom that's possible when we are no longer caught in any of the binds

that have us believing we're small or separate or deficient. So the release is from any story that prevents us from realizing our belonging to each other and to life. And tonight what I'll be emphasizing in this kind of a deepening of reflection is one of the key binds for all of us, which is averse of judgment, how our judgments of ourselves and others create separation. And I'll right from the start want to distinguish that judgment from wise discrimination. So wise discrimination is when we recognize accurately, oh, when this happens, it causes this. When I do this, something that causes hurt to somebody else or to me.

Or when you do that, it hurts me. So we're recognizing in an accurate way. It becomes a verse of judgment if we then go, you're bad, you're wrong, or else I'm bad, I'm wrong. In other words, if we add a hatred or anger, a kind of a pushing away of another and a closing of the heart. Dorothy Hunt, the poet, has a few lines that I try to weave in as often as I can that I love in one of her poems. She says,

Peace is this moment without judgment, that is all. Peace is this moment without judgment, that is all. This moment in the heart space where everything that is welcome. So just to sense for a moment, if you can, what it would be like, this heart space where everything that is is welcome, that there is room, that there's not resistance, that there's a wakeful openness. I often like to start and anchor any of these reflections in science or in evolution, so it's not so personal that we get that in one way it's, really quite true. We are all, we have the hardwiring to care. It's part of our psychobiology, our chemistry, to feel caring towards others and to receive care and to be empathetic and compassionate. And we have enormous conditioning towards aggression. We've, you know, more than,

more time than not is our human history, we were prey. And then we weren't, when we were, weren't totally prey, we've been for most of the time fighting over somewhat limited resources. So wherever we were on the food chain, we were kind of at war in some way. It was incredibly important to be faster and stronger and smarter and better. And some of you might have read in the New York Times Science, in the Science Times this week, they did research on thousands of eighth graders and were looking at bullying and found that more bullying didn't take place

mostly against marginalized people more where the bullying was taking place and the aggression was against those that were fairly popular and they were joccing for position and for popularity and using aggression, judgment, verbal, emotional aggression against those that they presented, perceived as their rivals. It's very deep in our biology that when we feel threatened we have to find the source

and eliminate it, the source of the threat. And so then the ego dresses that up with concepts of wrongness. We make others wrong or bad. That's the ego's way of eliminating. Now often the source is me. know that, that when stuff goes wrong, we're very quick to go, I'm screwing up, I'm messing up my own life, I'm messing up other people's lives, we're very quick to that. And we use our judgment of ourselves to try to take control. In some way, if I judge me and punish

me, then that preempts and you won't do it to me. And if I judge me, maybe I can whip myself into shape and be better. So we preempt. for all the imperfections, sleeping late, eating an extra serving, getting lost, misunderstanding directions, forgetting things. So, cartoon that someone sent me yesterday has this, the captions, a senior moment. And it's this pair of elderly dinosaurs, and they're on these rocks, and they're surrounded by this rising swirl of water, and you can see Noah's Ark at a distance pulling away, you know, and all the animals are on it, but these two are left,

to ban and strand it and there's two of them. And one of them saying to the other, oh, so this was the day, you know? This was the day. They missed it. So what I'll emphasize tonight is blaming outward, not blaming me for forgetting, you know, for doing it wrong as much as blaming you that you are supposed to remember and keep track of the day, or it's your fault that our life is crumbling. And some of you might remember, if you've been here, one story of this very devoted wife, she had spent her life type taking care of her husband. Now he'd been slipping in and out of a coma for several months and she stayed by his bedside every day, you know. When he came to a sense of emotion for her to come near him, she sat by him. He said, you know what? You know, you've

been with me through all the bad times. When I got fired, you were there to support me. When my business failed, you were there. When I got shot, you were by my side. When we lost the house, you gave me support. When my health started failing, you were by my side. You know what? What dear, she said gently. I think you bring me bad luck. A little late to toss out blame, but, you know.

So it's our most, one of our most fundamental ways to kind of take control and make sense of the world is have the heart tightened and blame. As soon as, at least we're doing something rather than feeling helpless. So there are levels of it, but I would want to ask you to do, if you will, as a reflection that will start now and then I'm going to have you revisit at the end of this talk. And that is, if you will, just to let your attention go inward, you might close your eyes. As I was beginning to say, there are different levels of blame.

But most of us have somewhere that we have a story of blame of another person being wrong, and not just wise discrimination but aversion with it, a sense of putting down, that they're less than, that they're bad. And so I invite you to sense somewhere in your life where you might be holding a story of blame, and I wouldn't choose somewhere that it's like blame for something that's very traumatic to you, because I'm going to ask you to revisit it and it's not that useful to work on trauma in this kind of a setting. But somewhere where you're carrying a story of resentment or blame, you'd like a little more freedom in your heart.

And as you reflect, you might, in a sense what's going on, might sense a storyline, how come it's a bothersome thing, what makes you angry or hurt or upset. And then ask yourself, what would happen what would you have to experience if you let go of the story of your bad you're wrong

if you let go of the aversive story of blame what would be underneath that you'd have to experience that might be somewhat difficult to experience if you let go of you're wrong that story what would you have to feel you can keep on reflecting on that

but if you'd like to open your eyes and what I'm going to ask is just to, if a few people will be willing to share, just to, and speak loudly, and I'll repeat if I can, if I, as long as I can hear you, just raise your hand. Anybody, what did you notice? What's underneath it? Yeah. Just a few words. Ah, so we let go of blame outward and then it goes inward. Thank you. That's, there's no right or wrong answer, but that's a real one that I see. Yeah. Disappointment. I let go of the story of your wrong and then I'm living with disappointment. Yeah. You didn't love me, the hurt and feeling of you didn't love me. Yeah. Not belonging, okay? Yeah. Compassion.

Now, what would stop you from letting go of the story of blame if you go to compassion? Have you already dropped it now that you just did that reflection? Great. Sometimes just asking the question and it kind of drops away. But often there's some layers between that we have to first feel, which is what I'm wondering about. What else did you notice? Anyone?

Under the story of blame, yeah. Responsibility. Then we become... For your part, that's right. Yeah, I see a hand by... I'm not good enough? So, again, it goes inward. Anyone else? What do you notice? If you drop the story of your wrong, anyone else?

Vulnerability. How many of you noticed there was vulnerability? if you drop the story. Can I see? Yeah. Anything else? Yeah. Bad luck. Yeah. Fear. Fear. Okay, so here's what I have found when I work with people on this releasing the heart of the bind of blame. is that when we first start putting down blame, like, okay, I'm going to see what's underneath it, there's a layer of stuff we don't want to feel, and it usually has to do with,

oh, then maybe there's something wrong with me, responsibility, fear, vulnerability, sometimes helplessness. Yeah, lack of identity, perfect. That's one of the most profound levels that when we let go of blame, when we're no longer making someone wrong, our whole sense of who we are becomes unraveled.

Because so much of our sense of self gets organized around me being against this person, this person. Okay? So the levels of blame can be sometimes really gross and sometimes really subtle. Now the gross level is, you know, you hurt me, you're bad, I'm going to then physically get back at you. Like I remember with my son when he was very, very young,

if I was playing with him and I, you know, in some way he felt hurt by me, he would have to punch me back twice as hard. No matter what, it had to be twice as hard, you know. And then Rita Rudner writes this. She says, my grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping. So that's more than twice as hard, right?

So there's the gross level of blame your bad lash out. And I can say that for myself, and I'm going to share a few of my stories tonight, I spent my early years in a rough neighborhood, East Orange, New Jersey, right near Newark, New Jersey. And at junior high school, there were junior high gangs. And in those gangs, a slight insult, and it led to big fights. Of course, as you know, it's deadly now. So I wasn't part of one of the gangs and it was hard for me to understand

I was kind of on the outside of that and I had my boyfriend, his name was Tyrone he was an African American Chinese peacnik and it was early days for peacnicks and then I had a few friends and I was outside of it and I don't know what happened but at some point one of the girls in the neighborhood Rosemary

decided that I had dissed her Okay. And she confronted me outside, around a block away from the apartment building I lived in, she brought a gang of other girls, and she confronted me for dissing her, and I said, didn't mean it, didn't do it, but she really wanted to fight. And she punched me in the cheek, and it was a heart, she punched me hard, and I was immediately enraged. Like I was immediately enraged, I hated her. wander her and I

immediately slammed her in the face really, really hard. This isn't a turn in the other cheek story as you're

gathering. Okay. So I slammed her in the face and then I realized the numbers were totally

against me. So I ran as fast as I could and I ducked into my apartment building.

So this isn't a bravery story either, okay? So this is neither of those. It was a fight and

flight story. And I think of Rosemary I think of what happened, a lot of times when I hear about the violence and gangs, like, it was so in me. It's like there was not a moment pause between feeling the outrage of somebody slamming me and slamming back.

I mean, not a moment. I think of that a lot, and I'm going to be coming back to that. But it's sometimes blatant that in some way we feel offended, hurt, threatened and we lash back. And then it's often subtle. The many ways we conclude that others should be different, that they should be different than they are. We do it, you know, that others should handle their lives differently, they should treat us differently, they should be acting differently. So now I fast forward in my own life to living in an ashram, a spiritual community, and the mother community was called a HEMSA. You know, that means nonviolence. Okay, so here I am.

And we do yoga and meditation every morning, get up at 3.30 and gather together. And my husband in the ashram, who's, that was my first marriage, father of my son, continues as a dear and close friend. My husband in the ashram did not attend the morning meditations. And it kept becoming more of and more of an issue for me. And I pleaded with him to come, and he would never. come. He just didn't like doing yoga and meditation with groups. He didn't even like to do formal practice. You know, it was just not his thing. Well, to me, this was like the most major violation

anybody could do. I mean, this was abuse. I mean, it was a big deal to me. It was like he was violating the very terms of our relationship, which is we were in a spiritual relationship and we were going to meditate together and he wouldn't meditate with me. You know, so I would do as I would go in the mornings and I'd be doing my yoga and meditation. But in my mind, the whole time I was thinking he's not here, I can't believe he's not here, he is never going to spiritually evolve. This, you know, so I was just going through. He was less. So I share that because I so many people I know, my partner should be different, whether it should clean up more, should be raising our child differently. My child should behave different. My boss should be more appreciative.

any time there's a should, our antennas might be good for them to go up. Because when there's a should, our heart is binded. When there should, we're arguing with reality. We're saying reality is wrong. How it is wrong. It's a verse of judgment. Now in Buddhist teachings it gets very, very subtle. And it said that the final bind to freedom, the final, final fetter to freedom is comparing mind, that it is that deep in our conditioning to say

this is different than that, I'm comparing this to that, I'm comparing me to you in a flash. And I want to say that it's not necessarily a problem that comparing mind goes on. It's not a problem. We need to be able to distinguish between things. we need to be able to, as I mentioned earlier, make discriminating wisdom. This one guy writes, this is kind of some version of comparing mine. He says, my dad was the town drunk. Usually that's not so bad, but New York City, you know.

So you get the idea. It's like perspective. So it gives us perspective. But I also want to say that we often think of anger as bad. It's in our culture as bad. But anger too is not an intrinsic problem. Anger can come up and it can be actually totally intelligent, give us the energy to act. This is Rachel Remen.

She describes some cancer studies that suggest that many people recover become angry first. She says, and very the way, Rachel Remen is a wonderful, she's a physician, a healer, a wonderful writer. She says anger is just a demand for change, a passionate wish for things to be different. It can be a way to reestablish important boundaries and assert personal integrity in the face of a body and life-altering disease. And as it was for me, it may be the first expression of the will to live. Anger, she writes, becomes a problem for people only when they become wedded to it as a way of life. So here we begin to sense where the judgment and anger becomes a bind to the heart.

It's when we get identified with it. It's when our sense of who we are is shaped by the judgment. I'm the better one, you're the worst one. I'm angry, I'm going to hurt you. You did this, I'm going to get back. What happens is we get identified as a victim and as, the judge. There's a wonderful line that says, who is it that's unhappy? He or she that finds fault. We get identified. Our life gets small. So then we begin to explore, okay, let's say

for each of us to some extent, because it's in our conditioning and our culture, we have gotten identified as a victim or as the judge, and we're in the mode. of in some way putting down another person in our life, carrying a resentment. Let's say for most of us, there's somewhere that our heart is small in that way. How do we begin to loosen that bind? How do we begin to step out of the habit of judging? And I'm going to describe the most basic elements are what we call the two wings of presence. the most basic elements to wake up out of judgment

is the wing of recognizing our mindfulness. Okay, notice it's happening. Pause and notice it's happening. And then there's the wing of kindness. But I'd like to emphasize certain qualities of these wings. And the first quality I'm going to emphasize is when you are finding you're stuck in judgment, the first thing to do is pause

and start exactly where you are by bringing attention to the place in you that's hurting. If there's judgment underneath the blame, there's something going on. So the first step, start where you are and go right into where it's hurt inside your heart with a compassionate presence. That is the first piece. We don't begin by saying I shouldn't judge. We don't begin by saying, oh, that person's really a good person.

They really meant well. we start with recognizing, okay, I wouldn't be judging unless something was going on right here. Does that make sense? Start here. So we're going to go back to my situation in the ashram with my first husband with Alex, who wasn't called Alex then. He had an ashram name, which was Sat Singh, which means truth. So there I was.

You know, morning after morning I'd go to the Sodna, the spiritual practice and stew. and then one morning I was in Cobra Pose some of you know Cobra Pose and there I was, you know, in my mind my mantra was something's wrong with him, something's wrong with him, you know. And then the absurdity hit. Okay, I got to pause

because it became a totally absurd thing that I was sitting there doing a yoga posture and mentally going, he's crazy, he's wrong, he's bad. So during the meditation, I started paying attention and this is the start where you are peace, where I just felt my heart, and it was tight and it was hot. Okay, that's what I felt inside.

And so I said, okay, so what's the worst part of this? You know, okay, so what? What would happen if I didn't, if I stopped blaming him? Well, what I found out was if I stopped blaming him, he'll stay the way he is, which means he doesn't care about me. I'll just have to accept he doesn't care about me and accept will never be close.

Okay, if I stop blaming, if I don't try to control it, because I was trying to control him with my blame, I'll have to accept that he doesn't care because if he cared, he'd come and do this with me. I'm not saying that's true. It's called a complex equivalent. Care means you'll treat me this way. We do it all the time, these complex equivalents. My complex equivalence, if he cared about me, he'd be doing yoga and meditation with me. And then the other complex equivalence was, if he doesn't do it, he'd be doing yoga and meditation with me. this with me will never have a way to be close. Okay, those are my...

So I stayed with that, that feeling of the pain of that, because there was pain in that, pain that he doesn't care, pain that we won't be close, and that's when I just offered compassion to myself. I just breathed with it. In those days I didn't, I wasn't in the Buddhist practice, I didn't know about putting my hand on my heart and sending certain messages, but I breathed with it. I breathed within and I felt a sense of kindness towards myself. And that was the beginning of a real shift with Alex where something in me just, you know, I took

care of myself and something in me just said he's the way he is and it was the biggest freedom I ever gave to him and me for me to say he's the way he is because then I started noticing he was about the most generous, serviceful person I'd ever encountered. I was busy doing a lot of yoga meditation but I was not as generous. as he was. Very interesting. Pama Chodron. She says, when you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space. The beginning of letting our heart be

touched when there's judgment is to just touch your own hearts to feel a sense of okay there's some vulnerability or hurt in here or threat. If you're a high school kid and you're doing the bullying you're being aggressive it's because you don't feel secure. You wouldn't be judging if you were feeling happy and secure. Does that resonate for you? We don't blame, we don't aggress if we're at peace with our. ourselves. So have some compassion to the unhappy or insecure place. It's the beginning of being able to relate to others without judgment. Now one of the biggest challenges when we want to let go of blame is when somebody disagrees with us. I know it sounds

like it's not a big violation but it can feel like death because we're very, very attached to our views. People kill because other people don't have the same idea of God, right? It's happened through history. People have a vicious sense towards each other when they don't hold the same view about how change works or if you don't see my motives the way I see my motives. I'm not seeing.

It's incredibly painful. The Buddha said that people with strong appeas, opinions go around bothering one another. I think that's a great one. And some of you, if you've been here before, you know how I've shared this before with you within religions, how much just, you know, you can be in the same religion but a little bit of a different school. And this one, a Taoist master sitting naked in his mountain cabin meditating, and a group

of Confucianists enter the door of his hut, having hiked up the mountain intending to lecture him on the rules of proper conduct. When they saw the sage sitting naked before them, they were shocked and asked, what are you doing sitting in your hut without any pants on? And the sage replied, this entire universe is my hut. This little hut is my pants. What are you fellows doing inside my pants? So we know with differences and what happens, how much the heart gets tight and how much somebody becomes an unreal other, and it's hard to sense the humanness. And one friend in the community here shared her conflict and pain. This is a woman who's gay and is very left-leaning in our community,

whose brother is a fundamentalist Christian minister. Okay, so this is the setup. And they got into an email conflict over views that differed, and then there were months and months and months of no communication whatsoever. And then she saw something on his Facebook. He was weighing in on Keith Oberman. You can imagine which direction he weighed in on. And so she weighed in. And then was watching a movie soon after on TV that had a story about a very estranged family

and a lot of pain. and was struck in the middle of the story with her own pain, that she was not living with her heart in the way she was relating to her brother, relating to what was happening. And she said, and I'm just going to read, because she wrote it out a little, I asked her to write out some of this.

She says it was clear to me how out of line I was with my own heart and the way I want to be with my brother, how I want to be with anyone. So what she did was she called him and left a message. She didn't pick up, but they spoke soon after. And basically she communicated how her heart was hurting so much, being estranged for the person that meant so much to me. And she shared her vulnerability. And she describes in this that when she was sharing her vulnerability,

she was saying, you know, I should never have done that on Facebook. because it was coming from a hostile place. She admitted it. But she wasn't down on herself. And I think this is an important piece. That it wasn't like bad me. It was like, I just want to love well. And I don't want to be misaligned with my heart.

It wasn't a bad me thing. So she shared her vulnerability, and that allowed him to share from a place that he had never shared from. And the coming back together was at a level that they hadn't communicated from. How did this happen? I want to come back to these basic keys to, you know, what allows us to release this bind

of the heart. We start where we are. We start and get in touch with, okay, vulnerable, hurt. It hurts. There's a kindness towards ourselves. There's not like we're blaming ourselves for the judging. If you blame yourself for judging, all you've done is added another bind to your heart. Okay?

So we start where we are. with compassion. But then there's a next piece which is we realize what matters to us. This is this next piece. If you want to wake up out of judging and judging is the biggest trance we go into. It's the biggest one. Remember what matters. So for this woman, my heart doesn't want to be this way with my brother. It's the choice I don't want, I'd rather rather than being right, I'd rather to love. Choosing love. This is the next piece.

First we start where we are and be with what's here, and then we remember what matters. We choose love. Do I want to be right or to be loving? Thus far I'm giving you examples of how to begin to loosen the binds of judgment when we felt hurt by others or in conflict. but I haven't really included the very deepest kind of violations if somebody's raped you or attacked you or are killed somebody you love

and there's a regular question I get which is you know how do we start softening and opening the heart and you know when somebody has created those kind of violations and I first want to say that this awakening compassionate heart doesn't mean being a doormat. It doesn't mean when somebody condone violence, bad behavior. It's not what some call idiot compassion. You know, idiot compassion,

where we just, it's like throw down all the boundaries and love everybody and it's got an intelligence. It's not passivity. In fact, when we're inactive, we're acting. Okay? So this forgiving heart is not inactive. It's important to set boundaries. So let's say you've been abused, okay?

Do everything we can to leave the abusive situation. Do everything we can to have self-compassion. In fact, when you've been abused, don't try to forgive too quickly. It becomes a spiritual bypass. You know, it's like a spiritual transnational. you're trying to get something over with you quickly. It's a slow process. And if you've been abused, to have the intention to let go of the anger and hatred is the intention to free your own heart. Because it's your heart that doesn't get

released if you carry the blame. Do you sense that, the wisdom of that, that we do all the boundaries we need, we take all the action that's appropriate to move towards justice and less harm for ourselves and others, but to have the intention not to live with judgment, hatred, and blame? If a dictator is violating people's rights, if our country or another country is violating rights, we take action. I have such a strong process that goes on inside me to share with you that,

and I remember it very, very, it was very clear as we led up to the war in Iraq, where I'd be reading the newspaper and having this building sense of like it was going to happen any time now, and the feeling of anger and hatred towards the administration in me for moving us inexorably towards war. And I'd sit and read the paper, and I would pause, put the paper down, say, okay, what's going on inside me?

Anger, anger, hatred. it was very riveted on certain individuals. I mean, I was really, really upset. And this is not a historical thing. I continue in certain situations to sense what's going on in the world and have a real lot of anger towards those that appear to be the ones

driving the action. So anger, anger, and then I pause. Okay? So what if I had to let go of the story of blame? Fear, fear, it's all out of control. fear, and then what's under that grief, grief, you know, that this cycles of war, you know, we think that we're going to go and depose of this person and the very ways that we do it and the violence towards civilians just creates more anger and just puts in another kind of angry

lead, you know, it's just cycles of violence. So grief, grief, and underneath the grief, caring, caring. Do you understand what happens when we stay with what's this? there rather than plunge forward in the story of blame. We come down to grieving. There's a beautiful line that I read that vengeance is a lazy form of grief. So the teachings really for this sure heart's release start with pausing. They go to saying, okay, so what's going on inside me? and I bring compassion here.

And then they go to what really matters. As this woman in our Sanga found it, matters to live aligned with my heart. I want to love. I'd rather love than prove I'm right. In the most basic way, this commitment to freeing our hearts is a commitment to trusting in the power of our hearts and awareness. We're trusting in it. We're trusting in goodness, our own and others.

taking a chance to let that be our stand, that I'd rather stand for that. So I started tonight, and I'm going to be closing soon, started tonight with my own story about these junior high school gangs. I'd like to end with a different story, which is one where a man who spent many years working in a rehab program for juvenile offenders here in D.C. described this where most of his, the youth, were gang members committed homicide. One 14-year-old boy in his program had shot and killed an innocent teenager to prove himself to his gang. At the trial the victim's mother sat impassively silent until the end when the youth was convicted of the

killing. After the verdict was announced, he stood up slowly and stared directly at him and said, I am going to kill you. Then the youth was taken away to serve several years in a juvenile facility. After the first half year, the mother of the slain child went to visit his killer. He had been living on the streets before the killing, and she was the only visitor he'd had. For a time they talked, and when she left, she gave him some money for cigarettes. Then she started step-by-step to visit him more regularly, bringing food and small gifts. Near the end of the three-year sentence, she asked him what he'd be doing when he got out,

and he was confused and very uncertain, so she offered to set him up with a job at a friend's company. Then she inquired about where he would live, and since he had no family to return to, she offered him temporary use of the spare room in her home. For eight months he lived there. He ate her food and worked at the job. Then one evening she called him and delivered him to talk, and she sat down opposite him and waited. Then she started. Do you remember in the courtroom when I said, that I was going to kill you? I sure do, he replied. Well, I did, she went on. I did not want

the boy who could kill my son for no reason to remain alive on this earth. I wanted him to die. That's why I started to visit you and bring you things. That's why I got you the job and let you live here in my house. That's how I said about changing you, and that old boy he's gone. So now I want to ask you since my son's gone and that killer's gone if you'll stay here. I've got room and I'd like to adopt you if you'll let me. And she became the mother of her son's killer, the mother he had never had. So this is a story of embodying the sure heart's release, the freedom of the heart, of not giving up on anyone. In other words, we learn not to give up on our own heart and we learn not to give up on the potential in others.

And I don't share the story to say, oh, if this kind of thing happened to my son that I could be forgiving in that way. It's not to say that or that we should be. It's more to say that this is the possibility of living for what really just, living our loving, letting our life stand for love. And that's the kind of choice that we can make of remembering what really matters when we're caught in judgment. Does it matter to really be right? Doesn't it matter more in this world if just in our own lives, if we care about peace on earth that we in our own lives at least have the intention to wake up out of the story of blame? Doesn't

that matter more? I mean, if each of us left and had some place that we knew we were living in kind of some resentment or blame and just had a sense, well, it matters to me to loosen this sum. I don't want to live with this bind. I want to live more from my heart. If each of us did that, the power of that in this universe is hard to even describe. That's the kind of thing that makes a difference. There is a teaching in the Shambala tradition.

Tibetan Buddhism from Choghuryam Trunkba. He describes it the vision of the Great Eastern Sun. He says that in this vision no human being is ever a lost cause. We are always willing to give things a chance to flower, including ourselves. So this is really the practice. If we want to free ourselves from the judgments, is to pause, to bring that kindness to our, our own wounds, but not to give up. You know, if we're judging ourselves, not to give up on

our own goodness, not to give up on the light, the love that lives through other beings, not to give up, to let your life stand for love, choosing love. So do a closing meditation on this theme. If you'd like to take this pause and let yourself arrive a little more fully, feeling your breath, just inviting yourself right here. The more you're here, the more you're feeling your body, your heart, the more power to the reflection. You might begin by feeling your sincerity, your intention for the sure heart's release, to free this heart, of whatever might separate, free this heart to really love for fully without holding back. And from that place of sincerity to again choose wherever in your

life you might sense you're holding resentment or blame, maybe the place you chose earlier. For some, for many it'll be a person perhaps that you work with or family member or somebody you know. But it could also be someone you don't know if you feel a lot of hatred towards a political figure or somebody that's well known in some way, that too is a place to practice. So we begin bringing these wings of presence to what's right here in our heart. So you might sense what's really charging or energizing the hatred or anger or judgment or resentment you feel. You know, what's happened? What's the worst thing about this? Is there a feeling of being unloved or uncared about, not seen, threatened that somebody's going to take something away

from you, threatened that somebody's going to injure or take something away from people you care about, they already have. So as you begin to inquire and sense what's underneath, just to hold with kindness your own feelings of insecurity or hurt or upset, just to hold whatever's in this human heart with kindness. And just sensing your intention to not give up on your own capacity to love in an open-hearted way, not give up on another. And that doesn't mean you think the other can change but rather that you just want to be able to hold the vision of the possibility and to remember another's goodness,

even if it's covered over, even if it's masked in mind. many ways. You're serving the world by remembering with compassion and care and others' decency and others' heart. So you begin by opening the attention to bring the other into your awareness and sense the vulnerability there. Just to imagine sense how that person is insecure, how whatever you're judging comes from insecurity. And that under that insufficiency, and that under that insecurity, this person too wants to love, wants to be happy. Just to feel your breath right now and sense that in you which is simply aware of this whole process, holding with kindness your own heart, holding with kindness this other being.

Again the words of Pema Chodran, when you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it's bottomless, that it doesn't have to be touched. doesn't have any resolution that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there as well as how much space. May the binds that keep our hearts small and separate, be freed, be dissolved and released. may these hearts open to the fullness of loving presence. May all beings be free of the binds that keep them small. May all beings realize loving presence as their deepest nature.

Namaste. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, are 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.