Tara Brach - Part 3 - Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame (2019-05-29)

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

Part 3 - Forgiveness: Releasing Ourselves and Others from Aversive Blame (2019-05-29) - Rumi invites us to find the barriers we've erected against love, and a universal one is blame. These three talks are an invitation to relax those barriers, and to open our hearts to our inner life and to all beings. Part 1 focuses on chronic self-judgment; Part 2 on the places of deep self-condemnation, and Part 3 on where we have locked into anger, blame or hatred of others. Each includes guided reflections that can support us in directly awakening beyond the confining thoughts and feelings of blame. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. Story I heard a while back of a man who had a really tough day at work, very oppositional, a lot of conflict with other people, nothing was going his way. So he was driving home on the Beltway and his husband. car phone rang and when he answered his wife was very, very upset. She has this urgent warning. She said, I just heard on the news there's a car going the wrong way on the beltway and

just please be careful. And he said, damn that it's not just one car, it's hundreds of them. I always love that one because haven't we all had that experience of going around and wanting to shoot arrows at everybody for the way they're misbehaving? Like just piss at everyone, disappointed by everyone and then we realize there's one common denominator, wah. So this is opening to what I'm considering as the third of a three-part series. It's been spread out over time a bit and it's unforgiving, releasing the armoring of blame that we carry where we make either ourselves or others wrong or bad. and really that hardening of the heart.

And I used the first two of these classes and they're all available now on podcast to really explore the ways we turn against ourselves and make ourselves bad and wrong and the suffering of that. So the third is really how to widen the circles and bring forgiveness to others. The verse from Rumi which inspires this and many times I bring it up because I find it so valuable is that our task is not to seek love but to seek and find the barriers that we've created against it. So that's the exploration here and I find that probably more than most other themes, I come

back again and again to the themes of judgment because that's the seems to be the single most painful habit we have of creating distance. And I can certainly say in my own life that I keep going deeper in the discovery that whenever I've locked into blame where I'm really critical of somebody else, I'm in a trance in some way. In other words, no matter how right it seems, and it always seems like I'm really right, there is a shrinking of my world and I'm actually caught in a very tight-hearted place and the other person is no longer a real subjective feeling being. They're more of a two-dimensional character that in some ways fitting my idea of badness.

In other words, I'm not living in a dimensional reality. So I watched that in myself and I also watched in a sense in a broader way how in the whole development of our species and certainly in our individual development, the creation of a bad other has caused so much suffering. much suffering. It seems like the most important place to pay attention if we want to have some peace on this planet. And it's certainly a domain of major research. There's been tons of research on the effect on our own body of holding grudges. There's a big article on, I think last week in the New York Times on this, that when we carry our grudges

over the years, it's associated with higher levels of inflammation and chronic illness. And of course there's tons of research on the effect of blaming and not forgiving on our minds that the process of forgiving is associated with all sorts of positive emotions like happiness and peace and open-heartedness. And this is all kind of intuitive, like it's something we'd say, yeah, I can get that. But when it comes to your own personal life and we actually actually get caught in something where we have felt injured in some way and angry, it's

like forgiveness is a great idea until we really have something to forgive. And then it seems really, really hard. So we'll look at, there's different kinds of blame. For many of us it's just a deeply grooved habit that whenever we feel in some way criticized or insulted, you know, wherever there's been disagreements. In some way we can track back and we kind of push the other way. I find that if we track what it's like to listen to the news, it becomes really obvious what's going on, the way our minds so quickly categorize others into the enemy.

I watch it in myself, I'm not speaking of others out there that do that. So we know when we don't agree what happens. In one story that some of you might remember there's a conversation between a little girl and our teacher and they're talking about whales and the teacher is telling the little girl that's physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because its throat's too small. And the little girl insists that it's possible because why a whale swallowed Jonah, you know? Right? So the teacher starts getting irritated because the little girl's being kind of obstinate

and says that it's not possible, it's not physically possible. So the little girl said, well, when I go to heaven, I'll ask Jonah. And the teacher said, well, what if Jonah went to hell? And she said, then you ask him. It starts early, this thing of needing to be right. It's really deep in our psyches, you know, this thing about being right. So that's one level of blame, but then there's the other deeper level when we have been abused are in some way violated and often early on childhood abuse, when our hearts just close up

and there's a pushing away and when we are unable to process it and move on it very much shapes our personality and our relationships with others and creates a lot of suffering. So I want to start with some defining of what we mean by forgiving. And there may be some of you listening that feel like forgiving is not a useful word for you and that you'd rather talk about cultivating compassion and response to situations and That's a fine substitution. But either way, when we're injured, moving towards forgiveness our compassion is an organic process and it's not something we can well.

We can't say, okay I'm going to forgive. There's just a squeeze and a shutdown in our heart and a woundedness and a hurt that we can't legislate out of existence and nor is it intelligent. to. So that's the first thing is that we can't will it. As we'll discuss, we can be willing. In other words, we can engage in a process that helps to open us, but we can insist on it or judge ourselves or push ourselves on it. Another kind of guideline is that in protecting ourselves or protecting others when there's been woundedness, we very naturally and instinctually shut down empathy.

We do close down and that's not a bad thing. That's just part of the process and I'm going to talk about that a little bit in a moment but even as we start reopening the opening our hearts does not mean that we put aside boundaries. I think one of the biggest misunderstandings of forgiveness is that if we forgive we're just going to open the door and say, come on, just step all over me again, hurt me again. You know, it's not that. In fact, mature forgiveness requires a tremendous and holistic kind of sense of how to take good care of ourselves and others in the process.

I think it's really helpful to consider forgiveness in terms of, you know, a very biological level. And if you think of a C-enemone, and many of you may have, can have the image of you poke a little C-anemone, a very limited number of cells, there's a contraction. Danger, contract. And that is the way we are wired to, that when we're threatened, when we're slandered, when we're blame, when there's an obstacle to our well-being, when we're manipulated, when we're abused, We are meant to contract. We're wired to be angry.

We're wired to respond with fight-flight freeze. It's in every one of our nervous systems to react that way. And it does include shutting down empathy. At the time that we're being wounded, we're not supposed to be trying to figure out how that other person's suffering. Not then. That comes a little later. So, just as when we're endangered and there's fight-flight freeze, all our blood flows

to our limbs and digestion kind of slows down and stops, it's the same thing, empathy just shuts it down for the time being. So it's really important to honor that there is developmentally a phase where we're not supposed to be forgiving. We're supposed to be taking care of ourselves and all the apparatus to forgive. is not there. Does that make sense? I just want to make sure we're all... Okay. I'll give you an example of one woman that I worked with that was, had experienced a whole lot of emotional and sexual abuse from her partner and she felt a lot of shame and a lot of self-aversion and a lot of fear.

But it wasn't until she really got it that this is abuse, that she fully opened it. to her anger. It wasn't until she felt anger that she actually did what she needed to do to take care of herself, which was to get away, to find safety, to get a divorce, to get help. And I'm saying that because it so struck me that, you know, we have these spiritual ideas about anger. Well, we need it. And we need it and I think of social justice movements and we need our anger to get us. us going at times. It's a catalyst for change. I felt, just today I was reading the paper and, you know, I think that when there's a lot

of bad news for years in a row or whatever, that our tolerance in a bad way gets bigger, you know, that we kind of get kind of numb to it. But I got, you know, kind of, I felt clobbered and then felt all this anger when I heard about the administration plans to take away health care protection for transgender people. And it's just like anger. And because it comes right on the heels of HUD has this proposed policy to allow homeless shelters to deny services to transgender people. So it came around the heels of that and just it's like violating friends.

It's like how you feel when your friends are being violated. Well, this is a, these are my friends. And I felt like it was a good anger. I wanted to lead to, let's see, I'm not sure maybe it's leading to me sharing it with you and maybe that's the action, I don't know. But there's a phase when we're supposed, emotion, moving, being able to do something. And yet it's a catalyst for change but it can't be sustained for healthy change and that's the next piece we're going to be going to. But I do want to say that people frequently bypass the

emotions that come up because they think they should be forgiving or not angry and it gets them in trouble. By way of another example, a man I work with some years ago, his wife cheated on him And for the sake of his family and thinking he was being a good spiritual person, he kind of covered it over, he kind of buried it and said let's get on with it, you know, she did her apologies and this and that. Three years later he was bitter, he was distanced, there was kind of a triangulation going that he hadn't expected what happened. And when he went into therapy he started getting a touch.

with the depth of the wound. And he first felt the anger and then he felt the deep sense of being rejected and he brought compassion to that and that was his therapy for eight months, nine months and then he was able to widen it and be able to sense more about his wife and where she was come from and then they went to therapy together. In other words they had to do a lot of things to get to where his heart felt open to her in truly a forgiving way. It's organic. And in a way what this points to is I think of two distinct phases in forgiving. And the first phase is when we have been wounded, we first, before

we try to forgive somebody else, we have to make sure we're safe, we have to make sure we're taken care of our own needs and we have to bring a healing presence, including therapy and friends, to the wound before we can actually bring integrity to the process of forgiving another. We have to do that work with our own wounds. That's step one. you, this is from the view of a four-year-old on Step 1, who gives internet advice with the help of his mother. I think this guy, this is amazing to me.

So a little girl, Don, from Union City writes, do you think it's okay to tell someone I'm afraid to forgive you because then you might hurt me again? Or should I wait until I'm no longer afraid to try to be their friend again? It's nice to forgive someone because then you're not angry anymore. My friend David really wanted to play Ninja Turtles and he just hit me in the nose and then my nose started bleeding. He said sorry and the teacher said it was an accident but I couldn't forgive him because my nose was bleeding.

When your nose starts bleeding you can't forgive someone but when my nose stopped bleeding I could forgive him. Isn't that like as good as anything? Step one in forgiving, so we have to take care of ourselves and not to judge ourselves for the anger or whatever comes up. It's like be present with it. You don't have to fuel it with stories of bad, bad, bad, be present but take care of ourselves and keep the boundaries we need.

Part two, and this is where we'll spend the rest of our time, is widening the circle of compassion to include the other person. And the understanding is that step one and fight-flight freeze is necessary, but if it stays dominant, we can't continue to evolve. Does that make sense? If we stay in that phase, if we stay in that limbic reaction which has its own intelligence, we can't keep evolving. true both individually and as groups when we talk about social action.

I think of it in a group way of activism that anger energizes us, but then if we want to really make the changes that we believe in, we have to be living from a wiser, more whole place. And I think my friend Ruth King, who some of you might remember, she's taught here before, She says it this way, she says, anger is initiatory, not transformative. I'll say it again, anger is initiatory, that's the intelligence of it, but it's not transformative. So we need to be able to move on because otherwise we're locked in the limbic system which isn't where we call on our deepest intelligence and our heart and our wholeness. When we're in the angry limbic system, we're not able to see the whole picture.

We're in a trance. So now we're going to look at how do we forgive others, how do we do that organic process that we can intentionally facilitate of forgiving others when we're locked in blame. If you've been with me before you know that this is going to end with me asking you to come up with a situation where you've been caught in blame and I'm going to have you do a process with it. So you might want to start thinking what you want to work with. And I will ask you to pick something where there's not trauma because you'll develop that muscle of forgiving a lot more if you start in a more gradual way. So the first piece on the how to forgive is

that we begin with the inner and the more deeply we can bring presence and kindness to the wounded, agitated place in us, the more that presence can be extended to see clearly the other person. We can see past the mask and the way I often describe it and if you've heard this metaphor before you'll know why I describe it as of that dog in the woods, a performance, a person person's going through the woods, they see a little dog by a tree, they reach over to pet the dog, the dog lunges, bangs bared, a person shifts from being friendly towards the dog to angry and scared until they see the dog has its paw on a trap and then they shift again, they go, oh you poor thing.

But they don't necessarily go cozy up to it, right? their hearts changed, their hearts no longer feeling anger, angry at it because they see the cause of the action. And so it is with all of us, I'll say for the most part, I can't speak for psychosis in some other states, but for the most part when we cause suffering it's because we're suffering. when we cause suffering, when we harm another person, our harm ourselves, it's because we're in pain in some way.

So that phase of forgiveness we're widening it out is can we see past the mask to what's really going on for this human being? I remember hearing one friend tell me that the way their mother kind of trained them, which is when the kids, or I think three or four brothers and sisters, When one of them would say something really critical about somebody that wasn't there, she'd stop everything and say, okay, let's come up with three possible explanations for how come they're acting that way. Isn't that marvelous?

I mean, what great training to pause and say, well, what possible reasons? It's much harder when we've been the one that's been injured. It takes a while to bring that presence inward so we can actually be looking through the eyes that can see. I'll share one of the earliest conscious processes I had of forgiving and I wrote this story. It was probably one of the hardest stories for me ever to write about or tell in radical acceptance. And it was a story of being betrayed and emotionally abused by my first spiritual teacher. And I had just had a miscarriage and he berated me in front of a lot of people

telling me I'd caused the miscarriage and it was complicated because he thought I was in some way saying his yoga techniques caused it so he was kind of defending his turf and it was a, felt cruel to me. And so phase one, you know, I went inward, I took care of myself as well as I could, I left the spiritual community that I was part of. But then as a couple of years, I kind of locked into, he did a bad thing to me. And I hadn't ever experienced abuse. I've been very fortunate in my life. I've been treated well and hadn't ever experienced anything like that. So, it was pretty clear that he was like, he did a really bad thing to me and he was very abusive to other people too so I knew this was, I wasn't the only victim.

But I was still a victim, okay? So even after I had been with myself and felt my own vulnerability and felt a lot of the hurt and the pain of it and brought self-compassion and started trusting my own goodness that I was okay, I didn't have to believe a message from some guy out there. Even then I still had that storyline of I've been wronged and he's bad and so on. And I realized after a few years that that was keeping me in a trance, that was actually, that was keeping me as a victim. It was disempowering to hold that storyline, that narrative. And so I very actively engaged with trying to see him and I asked my this question, am I willing to see him differently?

And it's a really powerful question to ask yourself. When you're caught in the trance of blame, it's like once you've taken care of yourself, am I willing to see differently? Am I willing to open my perspective and look through the eyes of wisdom? Am I willing to occupy a more whole sense of being and see from that? And I often think of it, am I willing to really connect with my most awake, open-hearted self being in here? So that was the question and I would actually meditate on him and I would see this mixed bag

of a human. I would see his vulnerabilities, how he was living in his own kind of guilt and shame. He had a lot of shame around his shadow side. He knew he was taking advantage of people and lived with him. that and he was kind of isolated in his power. And I also saw what was driving him to defend himself and try to maintain his power. And I could also see the good side of him as vitality and his brilliance and his charisma. But I just started seeing a more whole human and the armoring got released. I no longer was in a small place of victim. He was no longer the back

bad monster of a perpetrator, he's just human, just as human. So there was some freedom in it and I want to reinforce it wasn't a matter of letting down boundaries, I was at a good distance and I also was very public about his behavior to help anybody else that was going to experience it because it, you know, he was a threatening figure to other people. We forgive for the freedom of our own hearts. We really do. We put down blame because blame keeps us armored.

So that is one example of facilitating this organic process of letting go of blame. Now another more unusual and interesting example I thought I'd give you was something that I think Janet sent me an article about even. And she's a known playwright for the vagina monologues. And she has a new book called The Apology. And I want to tell you about this because it's a creative way of doing the same thing, of being able to, from a much bigger place of heart and mind, look at the other person who's heard us and understand from a deeper level what's going on

in a friezes. So here's her process. First of all, I'll tell you a bit of her story and I'll read a bit from this article. When she was five, her father started sexually abusing her, and when she got a little older, he started beating her and it left her suffering from all sorts of physical and emotional challenges, night terrors and the like, she began drinking and so on. And all through his life she kept waiting for him to apologize and he never did. So even after he died, she's kept waiting until she then wrote this book called The Apology.

And so the text is presented, I'm going to read some of this to you, as a letter written by her father from a kind of void beyond the grave. And he can'tly describes the atrocities he's committed, he confesses the weakness that made him so cruel, and he acknowledges the damage he wrought on her tender mind and body. She describes the apology as an act of therapeutic imagination, and for her, she's 65 now, she says, writing out the sentences, writing out the apology brought her freedom. And I'll come back to that but I want to tell you a little bit about the process she went through. She says, it takes so long to get to a place where you can open yourself to feel what your

perpetrator feels and to know what they've been through and to know who they are because it's much easier and less painful to cast them as a kind of monolithic monster. really an important, our default, other is bad. Again, this two-dimensional being that comes out of our trance, much harder to try to feel into who they are and sense a dimensional being. For her, she had to think about his past and about how he was raised and what she calls the rape paradigm. His parents, severe and unaffectionate, any expression of vulnerability or regret were signs of weakness. She goes on to say she's not letting her father or any abuser off the hook.

That it's not, she didn't feel like the apology writing it was justification. It was explanation and says most abused women will never hear an expression of sorrow from their tormentors. But by doing this kind of feeling into another level of reality, she says, we can actually shift the way those predators live inside us. We move them inside us from a monster to an apologist. The effect of her process, the effect of after she did her a certain amount of inner healing, feeling into her father and what was driving him.

And the person that wrote this article said she breaks down briefly she tries to describe just how different the world suddenly feels. I don't even know what this place is. is going to be now," she says, her tears turning to laughter. My heart feels so open in a way it hasn't been able to be open. It's like driving a new car. I don't know how to drive this car. I wanted to share this because, and I'm giving rather more extreme examples, but the

process of forgiving, the reason that it matters to us and that we want to, is that because it leads to a freedom that's unimaginable. When we're caught in the blame, we're living in such a small version of who we are. And as she described, she had been in that for decades. And just to imagine who would you be if you weren't blaming anybody anymore? A lot opens up. This is the second kind of way I want to describe this process is really creatively trying to feel into the other person. The last way I want to describe is something that's not always possible but in some instances is that when there's been harm caused to communicate.

For communication to happen it really needs a very, very good container and very, very good guidelines such as nonviolent communication guidelines. And if you're not familiar with it, NVC is a way of really allowing the speaking to be taking responsibility for what you're saying, not blaming the other, speaking your feelings, making requests and so on. Unreal other begins to dissolve when we have real human contact. That's the way it can most directly resolve. And yet our deepest habit when there's tension is to avoid that contact.

By way of example, Earl and Bubba are sitting quietly in a boat fishing and drinking beer when suddenly Bubba says, I think I'm going to divorce the wife. She hasn't spoken to me in over two months. Earl takes a long, slow sip of beer and says, better think it over. Women like that are hard to find. Many people will really appreciate not having to deal with the other person. I want to give by example the possibility of what happens with communication.

I'd like to share what I've been learning about, a show on CNN called the Redemption Project that Van Jones has created and has done all the, set it up, doing all the interviews. And I'm wondering how many of you, if any, have seen any of the episodes of the Redemption Project? Awesome. Great. Okay. Recommend it. Again, CNN. So it's an original series and it's stories of survivors of really horrific violence meeting with the offenders, those who committed the crime. And I thought I would share one of the stories of those encounters because it impacted me so much. It really speaks to the potential humans have when they meet each other. This is an encounter between Donald Lacey

and Chris Smith, who killed Lacey's daughter when she was 16. And Donald's daughter's name was Lowe Shea, and I may be saying it wrong, but it's two words from Nigerian dialects that in English mean to love and life, which was the way he described her, Loe Shea. And in 1997, year when there were 100 homicides in Oakland, one of her friends was killed, and she had been involved with conflict resolution, being a mediator at her high school.

She was really distressed, and she wanted her father to help her write a play to spread the message of nonviolence. It was the kind of young woman she was, 16. A few months later, she was killed while in a stationary van, and her killer, Chris Smith, was a true. childhood friend who was now in a gang and he didn't realize she was in the van. So that's the setup, okay? Now Chris, friend that killed her, he had spent most of his life in foster

homes, there was a lot of neglect and a lot of abuse and then he joined a gang and he had been seeking revenge for a killing of one of his friends but up until then he had been on the sidelines But this was his opportunity actually to get really more included in the gang. And this is what he said. He said, if I go and kill someone from my gang, then I would be accepted into a whole other family, a family that will love me, a family that will care for me, a family that will never leave me. So he had thought that the van had the targets, the people he was supposed to get in them,

and then he found out the next day he had killed his friend, he confessed, and then he was sentenced to 20 years. He landed up in San Quentin. Now, after the killing of his daughter, Donald said he was wanting something positive to come out of his daughter's murder. So he started an organization called Love Life Foundation, which is an Oakland-based community organization to promote nonviolence. He worked really, really hard in years later, a decade, whatever.

He had a breakdown. because he had never really processed. And during the breakdown he starts thinking about Chris Smith, the killer of his daughter. He said, I realized part of the thing that was blocking me was that I hadn't forgiven him. So he decides he wants to meet with Chris who's in prison and he began working with a group that specialized in restorative justice dialogues. And for those of you that aren't familiar with restorative justice, it's a process that brings together, victims and offenders, and gives them both a voice, tries to create opportunities

to seek healing and rehab and accountability. So that's the process that he wanted to get involved with. So meanwhile, Chris is in jail and in prison and he's facing his own demons and he became active in a victim offender education group and then he received word that somebody wanted to talk to him and it was Donald Lee. father of the young woman he killed. So as it turned out, they both gave permission for their encounter to be filmed as part of the redemption series. And hence that's how we're hearing about it right now. So there they are sitting feet apart from each other in a room at

San Quentin Prison. And Chris says this, I'm just going to read you bits of what they're saying. He says, I don't know what to expect, the fear of the unknown, the uncertainty. We had been prepped for the dialogue for a whole year straight, but nothing can prepare me or anyone else for a situation like that. I was nothing but pure emotions. So they, following the facilitators lead, they both say what their intentions are, what they want to accomplish. And then as they both choked back tears, Donald Lacey said the three words that transformed both of their lives. I forgive you.

Chris was in shock. He said, it was almost like I didn't hear it. It's like he had to say it a couple of times for it to really register. Walking out of that room, he said, I felt a hundred thousand pounds later. Six months later Chris was paroled. And Donald told the California courts who's in favor of his release. And so now Chris is working towards a degree in psychology. to be a marriage and family therapist, focus on single-parent mothers and their children.

I want to tell you, end the story by telling you about Donald. He says, I'm not going to sit there and pretend like it was anywhere near easy for me to do that. But I always felt like there's this ancient African proverb, and I forget exactly how it goes, but it's that children choose their parents before they come into the world. I always felt like my daughter chose me for this. The lesson I learned from my daughter is this life and this world can be so much better if we all just put a little more effort into being compassionate.

That was my daughter's greatest gift, Louis Shea, one who loves life. I chose to share an example from the redemption project which is for many people listening, perhaps more of an intense violation that what we've experienced, but not for all, there are many people that have experienced really awful things, that this is a process of freeing ourselves in each other and it can't be forced, it has to happen naturally but it's possible. and to sense that possibility in ourselves, to know that wherever you feel armored and blame, there's a possibility if you have the intention to free your heart. And like you described it, you might not know how to drive the car being this new body mind

that's so much freer, but that's a nice problem to have. So intention is the big deal here. It's that some wisdom in a sketch that to keep on evolving, that's the invitation to pay attention and to know it's a life process and that we're going to keep on getting pricked and contracting. But every time we contract and something in us says stay and be with it and feel what's here and be compassionate towards our inner life and then widens a circle and asks that amazing question Am I willing to look differently at this? Am I willing to look differently?

And we can trust that every moment that we pay attention in this way, how we pay attention now is shaping our future and we start right where we are. It's part of closing that just we do this practice that I've mentioned of just bringing attention to our own experience. I'd like to invite you to, if you're uncomfortable, shift your position a little, but find a way of sitting where you can bring your attention inwardly and invite yourself as we explore this process of forgiving, of releasing the armoring of blame, invite yourself into presence. Take a few nice full deep breaths. Notice if there's any part of your body that wants to relax or let go a little more right

now. Maybe someplace you've been carrying habitual tightness or tension, letting go in the shoulders, softening the hands, scanning your life and sensing where you might be feeling armored against somebody. Not a place of armoring because there's been major trauma or abuse but where you've been holding blame, a grudge, resentment. It might be somebody in your family or somebody at work, whether there's annoyance or dislike, pushing away. The beginning of this practice is to sense your intention. It's the intention to deepen presence, be on a pathway of letting go, a pathway of opening your heart.

And part of that means not to judge the speed of it or how it happens, because that just bogs down things. It's letting the situation be in the front of your attention right now, how this person has in some way triggered off your blame or your anger, let yourself notice and attend to what happened and sense the possibility of what we call the U-turn where you move your attention from their behavior to how it feels inside you. And sometimes it helps just to put your hand on your heart and just bring the attention inward so you're feeling okay so when this person did this acted that way, here's my inner

experience. And then you might feel like you've been rejected or you've been disrespected, pushed away and you can feel your own hurt and anger and the tightening. And just breathe with that. Breathe with what you feel. You might sense that you can call in your most awake, high self, the wisest part of you just to be with you, the kind of you, the kind of you mind as part of you to help bring comfort to your own heart, breathing with the feelings of hurt or perhaps fear, maybe shame, whatever's come up, breathing with what's underneath the anger. And you might sense and imagine that you can offer a message of kindness to yourself.

It might be I care, I'm here, it might be I'm sorry and I love you, I care about this suffering, Or Ticknod Han puts it, darling, I care about this suffering. Sometimes just the words, it's okay, it's okay when it's sent with a tenderness. So you're bringing kindness to your own being. And if it helps to feel that there's some wise loving being outside of you offering kindness to your heart, that can be useful. that you trust and love that's helping you bring care and healing to your heart. It could be a spiritual figure.

So this first phase of the process, you're bringing kindness and care. You might imagine light and warmth going right to the place in you that feels most vulnerable. And as you practice on your own, this phase could take three minutes or 20 minutes or three months. that even as we move on to the next step, if you're not ready, just come back to self-compassion. Sometimes we go too quickly into bringing our attention to the other person. And so you have to kind of guide yourself, trust yourself. If you're not ready, just stay with the self-compassion. If you want to explore widening the circles of compassion, again from your most awake,

open-hearted self, your high self, your future self, begin to look through the eyes of wisdom at the other person. And you might ask yourself, am I willing to look differently? What else can I see about them? And as you look with the eyes of compassion and you might sense how that person in some way has their leg in a trap, is some way hurting. suffering in their own way, their fear, they have unmet needs, their own confusion, their own insecurity, illusion, misunderstanding.

Just to see more dimensionally a real human with hurts, fears and also a heart that wants to feel safe and loved. You can feel your own heart including both of you beyond the rights and wrongs of the matter. You might even sense if this is a person you're in contact with how when you're next with this person, how releasing the armoring of blame might give you more choices and how you behave, more freedom. But mostly feel right now your own heart. You might close this way, just feeling the presence that's here, noticing if any judgments

have crept in about how you're doing the process and with kindness and wisdom letting go of the judgments, trusting the organic nature of this and taking these last few moments in a quiet way to feel your breathing, to listen to the sounds around you and and to sense perhaps an increased amount of presence and openness and honor that. The lesson I learned is this life and this world can be so much better if we just all put a little more effort into being compassionate. That was my daughter's greatest gift. Namaste and blessings.

For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.