Tara Brach - Part 3 - Freedom from Othering: Undoing the Myths that Imprison Us (2018-01-31)

Episode Date: February 3, 2018

Part 3 - Freedom from Othering: Undoing the Myths that Imprison Us (2018-01-31) - A primary source of our suffering is the conditioning to create "bad other," or "inferior other." This same conditioning leads us to creating a bad self and turn on ourselves. These three talks explore how we subscribe to societal myths and beliefs that perpetuate this "bad othering," and "bad selfing." They then guide us in bring a healing attention that can reveal the goodness that lives through all beings, and our innate connectedness. A core teaching is, "the boundary to who we include in our hearts is the boundary to our freedom." 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. We just had, right before starting, somebody fainted and I just am so struck by the immediate response of holding and care and kind of connection that arises. when we humans are vulnerable or in trouble. And it fits very much with the theme of tonight. This is the third of a three-part series,

and if you haven't been, this is your first time ever, it's okay, it'll stand alone, I hope, on othering, on how we have this habit of creating separation out of fear. They all go together because they're from the same root of fear, The first one we focused on how we do it societally and how we make others inferior or superior and how in doing that really we go into a trance and we can't be whole. And the second one is how we do in our personal life, how we so quickly judge and make others bad. And this class will look at how we turn on ourselves.

and we know we have this capacity in us as we saw just so quickly to immediately sense our commonality and extending care and that's part of our evolutionary capacity and it's beautiful and we also have a very primitive part of us that in a moment's notice can contract and pull back and feel the other's enemy are contract and go to war with ourselves. So we're going to look at that. The common denominator in any time we get into othering

is that we are in a trance where our perceptions get narrowed and get torched. And so we're coming from like a sliver of our consciousness. It's from our primitive brain. And when we're in it, we get... cut off from the more recently evolved parts of our brain, from the parts of our brain that are able to witness and have a sense of perspective, have humor, have empathy, have compassion. We get cut off.

So often I am asked, you know, over the decades that I have practiced, what's changed? And I realize that the biggest shifts I can point to are that there's less lag time in realizing my thoughts are going and they're in some way creating distance or separation. I don't believe my thoughts. I more quickly go, oh, okay, that's going on. So if the thoughts are judging myself, it's quicker that I recognize. oh, nothing's really wrong, those are just thoughts. And just thoughts helps, just saying, oh, just that.

And it's quicker that my heart then softens, whether it's making myself wrong or someone else wrong, it's quicker that I see that and soften. And when that happens, it's not like I've gone from a bad self to a good self. it's more just relaxed back into a beingness quality. I'd like to read you one of my favorite quotes from Srinar Sargata. And he says this, he says,

All you need is already within you. Only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. Self-condemnation, self-destrust are grievous errors. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. Make love of yourself perfect. Give yourself infinity and eternity and discover you do not need them. You are beyond. Make love of yourself perfect. So when he says this, he doesn't mean that you're loving the self character and your story of self.

It's not loving the narrative self. on what he's talking about. When you make love of yourself perfect, you're really making perfect this love, this full unconditional embrace of the life that's arising right here. Just this arising life. And perfect doesn't mean it's not another hurdle to get over, to do it right.

It means fully without any holding back. So it's, what happens is that the more you embrace the life that's here, the more there's dissolving of any sense of separateness. So the invitation is a kind of dedication to embracing the life right here. And it's what wakes us up from trance. And so many people when I start talking about bad selfing say, well actually I don't feel like my problem is that, I feel like actually I'm a bit on the arrogant side or, you know, in a way I feel superior very quickly to other people. Like I know more, I'm more important

and so on. And just to name that that's just the flip side, they both come from fear. Pride comes from fear, shame comes from fear. So they're just flip sides. If you're caught in pride, then in some basic way there's an undercurrent of fear that makes you hold on to the pride. Humans and animals inflate and have to keep their status by inflating. That's the way they fight to keep their role and their turf. So we're going to focus on, and this is what I'm inviting you to do in participating, is to notice places in your life where you get caught in, shame or self-doubt or judging. Because it shows up in all sorts of different ways.

It can be very extreme shame. But often it's that niggling voice inside us that's just always saying you're doing something wrong, you're not enough. One of my favorite all-time stories on this is a woman and her family vacationing in New England and she regularly visits this bakery that's also a coffee shop where Paul Newman and his family are also staying too. So he's there sometimes. And so she goes for this hike on a Sunday morning who starts to stop there for, she gets this like double-decker chocolate ice cream Sunday or something. And he's there.

And she totally freezes. She sees him there. He's the only other patron in the store. And so she, and then her voice starts going in her head, okay, cool it, you're 45 years old, you're not a teenager, what are you doing being so uptight, you should be relaxed about this, don't be so starstruck, and so she's on her own case. So she tries not to even look at him and she just glides through the, you know, through the store and she orders her double-decker whatever and clerk gives it to her, she's coming in one hand,

puts her change, pocking. one, she leaves, but when she gets to the car, she realizes she's not carrying her cone. Oh, okay, so maybe I left it in that rack or whatever. She's not sure what she did. But she goes back in and she looks over, because the cone's not there, and looks over in Paul Newman's direction, and he breaks out into this grin, and he said, you put it in your purse. So as we know, when we're on our own case, we don't operate.

quite as well. It doesn't bring out our best. So of course, and in a deep way, when we're really caught in shame, it cuts us off from others. We can't be intimate. And the more you're feeling at war with yourself, the less you're going to be able to be natural or spontaneous or real or connected with another person. So shame. It's a feeling of personal badness with shame comes that urge to hide we're kind of cut off from the circle of life and it varies between cultures and individuals but it's totally in the wiring of our species

like I think of my dog Katie and sometimes I'll go into my office and the garbage is dumped over and she's got a wrapper or something and if I catch her in the act I mean the tail goes between the legs she kind of skulks out she knows. She knows. And so it is that most social animals have a hierarchy and it's very

rigid and it's dangerous to go out, go off, you know, break the rules because there's all sorts of ways of staying in the pecking order. So there's really bad consequences. Like if a dog, if an alpha dog goes on a non-alpha, the non-alpha will bear its throat or chimp show deference. So it's in our ancestors to have that shame that allowed for cohesion in the tribes and keeping the hierarchy and so on. There is such a thing as healthy shame and it's a message that we need to in some way adapt our behavior, make amends, whatever, if we're causing harm in order to belong again. But most shame is toxic shame. and by that I mean there's a pervasive sense of something's wrong with me

there's a sense that I can't belong as I am so it's a limbic hijack it's like that limbic part of us that could use shame intelligently is taken over and it's become the primary message that shapes how we feel about our life so we're going to look at really what drives it in its varying degrees like to the degree that you are caught in that feeling of badness, what drives it. And two levels, one societal and ones through our caregivers are those who raise us and aren't giving us care the way we needed it.

So if we look at the societal level, I was thinking about one friend of mine who's now almost completing med school, African American and he's in med school in a very white part of the country, very white med school. And he described how people that he encounters would treat him like they couldn't trust him. Like he was always looked at with suspicion and how, you know, whether he's on a bus or whether he's, you know, in a store and even on campus. and how he started feeling like he couldn't trust himself in some way, just how insidious it is. Then women that feel ashamed of being competitive because of the message of the culture or feel when they've become a sex object in some way it's their fault.

One student I've worked with over the years who was gay and she had a memory. who was a really close mentor. And when she came out to him, he told her how unnatural it was and how many years it's taken her to work with that shame. So all of us in some way get messages from the larger society on how we should be. And then we move around constantly evaluating ourselves against the standard that we think we're supposed to meet, whether, you know, how confident we're supposed to be, how wealthy, how successful, how we're supposed to look, how our body's supposed to look. So this is Dave Barry. He describes being puny all his life and how painful it is for a male. He says, I totally missed the boat to Puberty Island.

I was this little hairless a dweeb with a voice in the Pinocchio range. One day my mom, bless her heart, had to talk with me. She told me that girls were not interested only in looks, that the qualities that really mattered were brains and a sense of humor. That little talk was long ago but it taught me an invaluable life lesson I've never forgotten. Moms lie when they have to. So there's a societal level and we're all living with the messages that come from it and some of us depending on whether we're dominant part of the culture or not, the messages can be incredibly shaming. And then there's parent level or caregivers. And even for those

that are brought up in relatively non-critical environments, there's still a sense of what I need to do to be lovable. There's still a picking up of the messages of be like this to be respected and loved. And if you're like this, it's really not okay. And because of our negativity bias, which is to survive, we pay way more attention to negative input than positive, we internalize the critiques. One story, a woman walks by a pet store and there's a parrot out in the cage. And right when she's walking right by him, the parrot goes, oh, I'll call. awk, you're ugly and you're stupid. She's a strange, oh well, he must have heard that.

Well, next day she's walking again, the same place, and again, right in that moment, right in front of the pet store. Ah, gawk, you're ugly, you're stupid. She's annoyed. She goes inside, tells the owner what's gone on, and he's just abjectly apologetic. He said he'll take care of it. He'll do some training with the parrot.

She walks by, and she's a little. nervous to see what's going to happen, but she walks by right in front of the pet store. Awk, ock, you know. That's pretty awful one, I know. So we learn who we are in relationship. Our first relationships are mirrors. And to the extent that our parents were either not paying attention, negligent, abusive, slightly critical, whatever, we're absorbent. So you might pause right here and just let your attention go inward. Let's do a brief reflection. So imagine back to age 10 or 11 or 12 to where you lived and what room you might have spent time with with your parents or with whoever was taking care.

of you, whoever brought you out. See if you can pick over some, for some it's the dining room or might be another place in your house, but you're there with your parents and they're looking at you and sense what they're seeing, that they might be liking or not liking about what they see, and sense inside what is it you most want them to be aware of about you? What do you want them to see? what is it you don't want them to see? What might they be aware of about you that you really don't want them to be paying attention to? And to gently bring yourself right into your life

right now and just scan and sense where do you get really down on yourself? What do you really judge yourself for? What feels unacceptable or very hard to accept? Let your attention go to one particular quality about yourself, something that you really dislike or judge a lot. And for a moment imagine if you put down that judgment, if you let go of it, if you accepted this, what bad might happen? What would be wrong with that? What's the problem with accepting this? Let's notice what comes up, just imagining, okay, what if I accepted this?

What could be wrong with that? You can keep reflecting, you can keep your eyes closed or open your eyes. Many people think, oh, self-judgment, that's, I wish I could get rid of all this judgment, but then we are incredibly loyal to our suffering. We really hold on tight. And you might have noticed that when you kind of looked and said, well what if I let go of it, that there's some real resistance in there to letting go of the judgment. How many of you had the sense that, well, if I let go of the judgment, then I'd never change

and get better? How many of you found that one? Okay. Often judgments are a way of trying to controlling ourselves to getting better. It's like the intention behind the judgment is we want to feel better about ourselves. And we figure if I keep judging myself, I'll nudge myself towards the better zone. It doesn't really work. Now, let's just say that there's a difference between what you call wise discrimination,

which says, oh, when I blow up at other people, they tend to be distant from me and it doesn't help the relationship. That's wise discrimination. And judgment, which is, you know, I'm a jerk for blowing up at people. It means I'm basically a bad person. And if I can't control myself, I'm a bad person. So that's judgment. That's averse of judgment.

The other was wise discrimination. Averse of judgment doesn't work. We're afraid though that we're not going to improve. This is Yogi Berra says I never blame myself when I'm not hitting. I just blame the bad and if it keeps up I change bats. After all, if I know it's not my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself? So we're afraid if we're not blaming ourselves that we're actually not being responsible, we're not going to be able to change anything.

Judgment's a control strategy. And when we're judging ourselves with aversion, as I mentioned, we're in trance. It's a limbic hijack and we're forgetting A, the conditioning that shaped us. We judge ourselves, let's say for our anger, we're forgetting the genetics, the ways that we were treated that made us angry. We were forgetting all the conditioning that created it. And B, when we're blaming and judging ourselves, we're forgetting our basic goodness. So it's a trance.

So the rest of this talk is really how do we wake up from that trance. I often talk about the circle of awareness in that line and when we're in trance we're below the line. That's everything that's unconscious. And when we're not in trance, we're both. the line, what's in awareness. And when we're under the line, when we're in self-judgment, we're not aware of it. And so the beginning of coming above the line is to start getting the knack of noticing certain thoughts that, oh yeah, okay, I'm in the trance of unworthiness

right now, just to catch it, just to catch that it's happening. So you start to watch the stories you're telling yourself when you're down on yourself. Start watching them. Some of you might remember Carlos Costanjada, the author of all the book, the Don Juan books, some of you've read them, he's a sorcerer and he says, we maintain our world with inner dialogue. Man or woman of knowledge is aware the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. So the trance of unworthiness requires us talking to ourselves. It requires a narrative saying in some way you're blowing it. So we become aware of that. And the basic text is, you should be different. That's the basic notion. Carl Rogers, many of you know,

as great psychologist, said it wasn't until I accepted myself as I was that I was free to change, that that acceptance is a precondition to changing. And yet when we're under the line there is a belief that I should be different and I have to be on my own case to change. So we start noticing that. The basic practice to wake us up from the trance of unworthiness, we often describe as the two wings of awareness. be aware, come above the line. And the two wings are, notice what's happening and bring kindness

to it. Mindfulness and heartfulness. For me, and I started with my, you know, talking about myself the lag time and gradually catching on to the trance, I would say there's been thousands and thousands and thousands of rounds of recognizing that I've turned on myself. Often I'll be in a bad mood and if I look under the bad mood, there is some belief that I'm falling short and that's what's causing the mood. That in some way I've let down somebody in my family or I've done something, you know,

some work has fallen through the cracks that I feel really bad about or I haven't attended to something in the community, but in some way I'm falling short. So in all of those 10,000 times there's always a process of in some way pausing and going, okay, in the trance. Sometimes there's some investigating, like feeling how it is in the body, really connecting with it. And almost always there's some softening of the heart, some offering of care. and I found that if I can even have the intention to be kind to myself.

I mean like even just the remembrance of the word kindness, that's really what it comes to. Even remembering the idea of kindness and that shines a whole lot of light on the whole thing. So many, many rounds. If you want to, as Sri Narasar Gadda says, if you really want to make love of yourself perfect, it's doing the 10,000 rounds to rewire the brain. And this is sometimes called resourcing, that we have these neuro pathways that keep on, you know, the same narrative, the same feelings, that in some way keep us as that small self that's falling short. You have the potential.

this is neuroplasticity to change those pathways and actually be at home with yourself. But it takes many, many rounds because the way those pathways change keep in mind that every time you have a negative experience about yourself that fuels those pathways

and it's very well remembered. In fact, you know, the saying is that we're Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones. You remember that? This is again the negativity bias. When you have an experience of being at war with yourself and feeling a lot of self-aversion, let's say you've made a mistake and then you just hate yourself for it, that goes right into your long-term memory. If you do something that's an accomplishment and you feel a sense of mastery or flow or trust, that doesn't go into your long-term memory.

I know for myself I can give a talk and have like 20 people say, you know, I felt like you were talking to me and really feel connected. And one person might say, you know, that you told an off-color joke and I found it, you know, or give me feedback about something.

What do you think I'm going to remember? It's like positive doesn't have stickiness in our long-term memory. And this is the findings of neuropsychology. So to create the neuropathways of trust in yourself, of feeling a sense of confidence, of feeling a sense of goodness, it takes many rounds of repeating over and over again

that kind of process of bringing care, of nurturing. Now, there's many ways when you're in self-doubt to come above the line and to create, to remember, reconnect with self-trust. And the model that I love, this is, I think this is my very favorite mythical story from the life of the Buddha is, and I'm moving this so I can actually demonstrate. So the Buddha's epic experience under the Bodhi tree through the night, he sat there and he basically intended to wake up, to come above the line, to come out of trance, to really live from the fullness of his being, the full evolved potential.

And through the night, the basic battle was his limbic side, his shadow side, in the version of the god Mara kept attacking. And that's how it goes. Our Olympic system keeps saying, yeah, but I'm afraid of this and I can't trust this and so on. So that happened to the Buddha in a more, you know, externalized way. And through the night, the Buddha practiced these two wings of presence. And all the slings and arrows of Mara ended up as a heap of flower petals.

They got transformed because he kept recognizing the trance and bringing presence and kindness to it. But as the morning star began to rise, Mara issued the final great challenge which was doubt. Okay, this is the big one. If you want to say in the battle between our evolving consciousness and our limbic system, the big one is doubt. That's the one that grabs us, that makes us think, I can't do it. Something's wrong with me.

Mara basically said, who do you think you are to seek enlightenment? To want to experience yourself as a Buddha, as an awakened one. And so what the Buddha did at that moment I think is really notable because he didn't try to out meditate Mara in any way. He reached down and he touched the earth and he called on the earth goddess to bear witness. In other words, he called on the whole web of life to be a mirror of his goodness, of his worth. And in a way he was calling on his highest consciousness. He was calling on the most awake expression of his being to remind him of his values. value. And when he did that, when he touched the ground and called on the earth goddess

this whole web of life of living awareness, you know, there was lightning bolts and thunder and the earth shook and that's when Mara finally withdrew and that's the moment that the Buddha was truly free. So this is the epic really unfolding of consciousness. where we naturally keep getting dragged into the trance of self-doubt. And it just happens. And gradually we notice it more and more. We become more aware of it. And there's many, many rounds of touching the earth.

Many rounds on calling on the highest, most awake part of our being to say, okay, I see you, I see this is happening. It's okay. And I put my hands on my heart because that's just the gesture of kindness. We call on this living world, we call on our highest consciousness, and gradually we become more familiar with that wakefulness and that confidence and that trust than any small part of us saying something's wrong. And that's the shift really that the Buddha described as the gift of awakening, that our identity

shifts. Rather than that identity of that small, limited self that is self-conscious and insecure, we're more and more at home in that beingness that can love without holding back and can be creative and can really serve. One of the reasons I like that story of the Buddha touching the ground is we have this idea that when we're caught in a stuck emotional place, we should be able to take care of ourselves. So we should be able to nurture ourselves. We should be able to fix it ourselves. But the Buddha actually reached out to a larger sense of beingness than his small self. And we have to do that. When we're really stuck, we can't always find self-compassion. So what we have to do is find a source

larger than the stuck place. Now it's a little bit of a trick because once we reach out, what we realize we've reached out to is a more whole sense of our own beingness. But initially it feels like we're reaching out to something outside. As an example, I was trying to find a good example for you.

I was remembering one man I worked with years ago. So he grew up in a very dysfunctional family. His father was alcoholic and abusive and he had a very overwhelmed and frightened mother. And he was left a lot when he was young with his grandmother. And he'd be all upset and her way of responding was she'd hug him and she'd hold him until he calmed down and then she'd look in his eyes and then she'd say, oh there it is, that strong,

bright spirit that lights up your eyes. There it is. She'd see it in him. Well, he forgot all about this and went through the decades struggling with his own alcoholism and a divorce and opening to the shame. of his father's patterning. And then with some meditation, when he had to start sensing, well, how am I going to bring kindness? He remembered his grandmother and started looking through her eyes. Remember the voice? Remember what she saw on him? And he kept doing

that over and over again. Like whenever he'd feel small, he'd remember that voice and he'd He'd just remember, oh, look at that bright spirit in your eyes. And what's so cool is he told me that, and he's really a lot better, he told me that that's, he started looking at other people and when he'd be judging them or feel separate, he felt like he was looking through his grandmother's eyes through those, really the eyes of the heart. That's resourcing. And we do it many, many times.

We all need nurturing. We need to learn to nurture ourselves and we also need it from each other. We need to feel accepted and forgiven and loved. There's a story I heard from Spain, a young man, Paco and his father get into this altercation. So he runs away. His father searches for months and can't find him and he's really desperate to reunite with his son. he put an ad in a local paper and it said Paco meet me in the town square by the fountain at noon on Tuesday

so that Tuesday he goes to the town square at noon and there are 800 men named Paco waiting for their fathers and for the forgiveness they never thought was possible we each long for that we long to be seen we long to be forgiven, we long to be accepted, we long to be taken care of. And when it comes, it nourishes that place in us so we can offer it to ourselves. So this class we're focusing really on bringing that love to this life that's right here, to make love of ourselves perfect. But as a way of ending, I want to say that I have never seen authentic self-love or forgiveness lead to anything but widening ripples of love.

We think we're doing it for ourselves, but it's just love. We're just opening our hearts. And, you know, when we've turned against ourselves, the inner life becomes like an unreal other. and we're cut off from that part of the brain that's empathetic to others too. You cannot be hateful towards yourself and wide open towards others. It doesn't happen that way. So as we start to embrace the life inside us, that embracing heart gets more and more inclusive. We'll close with a story that taught me about that some.

I heard it in two parts. The first part of the story I heard years and years and years ago. And it was of a man who was in the Vietnam War, a Vietnam vet. His name's Richard Latrell. And he killed a young Vietnamese man during a battle there. And then he took from the man's pocket a photo. and it was of this young man and a little girl. He says, I remember holding the photo and actually squatting and getting close

and actually looking at his face and looking at the photo and looking in his face. So he had basically taken that photo with him and through the years the horror of what he did really plagued him. So when the Vietnam Memorial was built, he made a pelchamage and he left the picture at the wall there and he actually wrote a letter with it. But what happened was a lot of vets did that and they were all gathered up and put in this book called Offerings from the Wall.

Some of you may have read it or seen it. And then it made its way back to him. So I want to read you the letter that he wrote to this man basically that he had killed. He said, Dear Sir, for 22 years I've carried your picture in my wallet. I was only 18 years old that day we faced each other on the trail in Vietnam. Why you didn't take my life I'll never know. You stared at me so long armed with your AK-47 and yet you didn't fire. Forgive me for taking your life. I was reacting just the way I was

trained to kill VC. So many times over the years I stared at your picture and your daughter. I suspect each time my heart and guts would burn with the pain of guilt. I have two daughters of my own now. I perceive you as a brave soldier defending his homeland. Above all else, I can now respect the importance life held for you. I suppose that's why I'm able to be here today. It's time for me to continue the life process and release the pain and guilt.

Forgive me, sir. Only a few years ago, I heard the next part of the story, which is that after he, his letter, was returned to him, he decided to go to Vietnam and meet the daughter of the man he had killed. And so he went there and as the story goes he spoke through an interpreter and he told the interpreter, tell her, this is the photo I took from her father's wall the day I shot and killed him and I'm returning it. And then with a cracking voice he asked for her forgiveness. Then after a moment this woman, her name's Lan, burst into tears and fell into his arms,

so there they are the two of them holding each other up and sobbing and embracing. And then she communicated that, and her brother was there too, that they both believed that their father's spirit lived on in rich. and they expect that having him come back to see them that it was like bringing their father's spirit back to them. So in this, this man who did something horrible, obviously conditioned from his larger society but still felt the felt sense of horror went through all the pain of that and forgave himself and did that kind of ritual and that freeing up of his shame

allowed him to reach out in a way he never would have if he had felt guilty and ashamed to bring some healing to others. So we explore this together how we can begin in our own lives to really dedicate ourselves, making love of this life perfect, to opening up this heart so we have the heart space to sense when we're with each other, oh, I'm judging, I'm making another

bad or wrong and include them in our hearts. And so that on a societal level we feel we start getting, oh, if I'm not aware of the way I'm taking whole groups of people and in some way assuming a less than and inferior, then I'm cutting out a part of my own heart. We start seeing the connections. The commitment becomes very deep to waking up from this trance. So we're going to close by a meditation that really has to do with freedom from othering. Feel free to shift around, find a way of sitting that will serve you.

As you let your attention go inward, you might ask, is there anything that you're this moment between me and really feeling at home in my own heart, in myself. Is there any way that I'm turned on myself? Judging, shining the light of awareness on whatever way you may be creating separation inside you. Sensing the possibility if there's a place of judgment, if there's a place that you've been in some way rejecting yourself for, condemning yourself for, to see that, to bring that into the light of awareness, to sense the

pain of judging, the pain of putting yourself down. In my sense how many life moments have been lost to this, to making yourself less than, how many moments of being able to enjoy what's here and connect with others have instead been caught in that trance of unworthiness and just to feel the intention to bring love to the life that's here, kindness, to see through that grandmother's eyes, the goodness. You might explore putting her hand on your heart and just sending some message or some energy of care to trust the life that's here. And it feels hard to offer that care to your own being.

You might, as the Buddha did, just call on something larger to bear witness, to mirror your goodness. Again, like that grandmother, or could be a friend or the Buddha, Kuan Yin, your own future self, most evolved self. so that you're really looking through the eyes of your most awake, compassionate self at your own being and forgiving and accepting. You might sense, what does it really mean to make love of yourself perfect? Right in this moment, to sense that heart space that doesn't make anything wrong that really includes all parts of your being. Let the sense feel you of that okayness, of being at home,

Rumi says, I've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. The universe and the light of the stars come through me. I'm the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival, sensing the awake heart space that includes this life, and then bringing another person to mine that you include in that loving presence, sensing that person's vulnerability, that person's basic goodness, bringing to mind perhaps someone that you habitually judge, or you make the other person wrong,

sensing this heart space that can include in widening circles. You might sense in a societal way if there's any group of people that you have a habit of othering due to their religion or race or sexual preference, sexual orientation, gender orientation, culture, ethnicity, class, embracing, including knowing that this movement towards the awake heart space is a movement home to who we are beyond the trance. I've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self. The universe and the light of the stars come through me.

I'm the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival. Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.