Tara Brach - Peace Work

Episode Date: September 14, 2013

2013-09-11 - Peace Work - The hope for inner and world peace lies in our evolutionary capacity to shift from Fight-Flight-Freeze reactivity to responding to aggravation with Attend-Befriend. This talk explores the three elements on this path of awakening that support us in this transformation:  Remembering our true aspiration; taking full responsibility (for whatever arises in our experience) and widening the circles of our caring to include all beings. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

Tonight's talk is on peacework and what I consider to be the three facets of inner peacework and then extending peace to the world. And it feels like timing-wise, you know, it's 9-11, we're in the midst of the Jewish high holy days, we're going toward Yom Kippur, the time of atonement, at one minute. So this inquiry that's so powerful for all of us, which recognizes that each of us in our own lives get into patterns that create separation. And to be able to look in our own lives, how do we create separation, what are our patterns, and how do we begin to step out of them?

How do we begin to stop the war, or even the very subtle ways that we distance and really include each other in our hearts? It's also a compelling time because I suspect most everybody's been following the unfolding a news around Syria and the threat of a U.S. strike. And it brings up all the most difficult questions, really, about how in the face of hostility, in the face of aggression, in the face of insanity, how do we respond?

And what happens when we meet violence with violence? This is a question we've been contemplating now through the eons. really, I suspect. And then we ask that question not just as I mentioned in the global theater. We're asking that in our own lives in all the ways that each of us encounters aggression and we do because every human body is wired with aggression. This is not a bad, aggression's not bad. But when aggression becomes locked in and the habit and our identities organized around it, that's suffering. That's what keeps the cycles of war, going. So how in our daily lives? When we encounter betrayal, our judgment, our criticism,

when we encounter emotional abuse, how do we respond when it's directed ourselves or at someone else? So I'm really aware there's not easy answers and but what has been striking me is some incredibly inspiring examples of the what's possible. and especially what's possible when humans are awake and caring. And so I want to bring our attention back to August, a story that most of you followed, I think to some degree, when a 20-year-old man with AK-47 and tons of rounds of ammunition entered in Atlanta elementary schools. Many of you aware of this?

Yeah, good. And he encountered Antoinette Tuft in the office of the school. And here she has this young woman, young book caper. She's faced with this violent, confused gunman, and she managed to spend an hour talking to him and talked them out of shooting. There were 870 kids in this school, talked them out of it. And what she basically said was, I could see this was a herding. young man. Somehow she saw past the mask of violence. So this was a hurting young man. She said, I just started praying for him. So what she did? She shared her stories of vulnerability, how her husband had left her and she had contemplated suicide and she had a disabled son. And he revealed that he hadn't taken his meds, you know. She told him that she loved him. She was calling him sweetie baby. That we all go through hard things, that he was going to be all right. So she was not armed with a gun. She was armed with faith, with emotional intelligence.

She knew how to be with someone and with an enormous heart, an empathic heart. So this is an evolved being. And we sometimes in the Buddhist tradition use the word bodhisattva, awakening being, which we're all on this bodhisattva path. This is a woman who was illuminated. illuminating those qualities of heart and mind. So I share that, I kind of bring us back to that because I often think of, try to sense what's going on in our world and in our hearts and bodies and use the frame of our evolutionary path. I find that

evolutionary psychology really resonates and that I can sense the truth that there's and evolving from this reflex of fight-flight freeze, from the reptilian and mammalian brain to we have this more evolved frontal cortex that actually has other choices, such as attending and befriending like Antoinette did. That's our possibility. And then in a way,

we can see the spiritual path as this shifting in identity from a kind of threatened in separate self that's kind of reflexively reacting to a quality of presence that can choose to respond with compassion. Let me ask you this. I'm curious, I've only done this once before, but I'll try it.

How many of you, in kind of witnessing your own process, would say that you sense that shifting to more choice, more capacity, to respond with attending and befriending. If you don't mind, I just want to thank you. For those of you that are with us, I really feel you with us, but listening through a podcast or whatever,

that was a lot of hands that went up. It looked like about 90% from here. So here's what gives me hope that if we're experiencing it and we're part of this world, it's happening in this world. And I do sense a hundredth monkey that something's caught on, especially in these last decades, we're more conscious of the process of waking up itself and therefore able to choose to facilitate it. It's happening.

You can see it in the culture when you have New Yorker cartoons with two people watching a TV set, and it says, this week on the amazing race to enlightenment, can Jim and Susie achieve right mindfulness? And will Barb and Candy be eliminated for relentless clinging to the self? It's in the culture. And it's contagious. And this is, you know, we know that whoever we're with we're affected by, well, when we're with people who are kind and patient and understanding, that creates an energy field that brings out the best in us

like what happened with Antoinette. She somehow rather touched a place in him that was buried, right? I think of it like ice cubes melting and that when one person's beginning to melt that edginess and become more fluid and expansive and encounters other ice cubes, it helps them dissolve too.

Just a metaphor, but I like it. So we know the effect of that. When we're with, there's a transmission. And we also know the effect of when we're with somebody that's edgy and agitated. if we're not centered, what happens? When somebody's critical or demanding or angry

there's another some of you might have seen this on Facebook, another cartoon with a bunch of monks that were gathered having a protest demonstration and they're saying and the guy with the horns going, what do we want? And they're going mindfulness when do you want it? Now!

It's like going to an anti-war kind of rally and everybody you're like you know, militant, that kind of thing. So peacework. Peacework is really this shift where we very intentionally are dissolving the boundaries that shut other people out, dissolving the boundaries in our heart. We're creating with peacework a healing refuge for whatever's going on inside us because a lot of the peace work has to do with making peace with the places within us we've rejected. Has to happen.

If we don't make peace with those places within us, can we really authentically be the change we seek? Can we be that peacefulness that helps dissolve others? So this is really the path, as I've mentioned, in the Buddhist tradition called the Bodhisattva path. Bodhi is awakening. Satva is being and every one of us

it's happening and some we're getting more conscious of it than others this movement where there's some presence that senses oh I don't have to keep replaying history we talk about if you don't learn from history you're condemned

to repeat it and we see in a heartbreaking way the cycles of violence somebody's got to interrupt the cycles of violence and it begins in our own lives when we interrupt our patterning to react to lash out to grasp

and we pause and we sense there's other possibilities Tick Nhat Han talks about the boat people that he says every time their small boats were caught in storms they knew their lives were in danger these are the refugees

that the war in Vietnam that left and they'd all get into these boats and often a lot of them would die. So he'd say that if one person on the boat could keep calm and not panic, that was a great help for everyone. People would listen to him or her and keep serene, and there was a chance for the boat to survive the danger.

Our earth is like a small boat. Compared to the rest of the cosmos, it's a very small boat, and it is in danger of sinking. We need such a person to inspire us with calm confidence. to tell us what to do. Who is that person? The Mahayana Buddha Sutras tell us that you are that person. If you are yourself, if you are your best, then you are that person. Only with such a person, kind, calm, lucid, aware, will our situation improve. I wish you good luck. Please, be yourself.

Be that person. So the message on this path is that each one of us has those qualities of awareness and love of Buddha nature, and that really if we dedicate to being all that we are, then those patterns that have kept the world in endless wars, those patterns that are actually destroying our earth, there's a chance of interrupting them in a way to bring healing. So we look at the world. You know, I brought this in tonight because I'm so,

aware of it's right in front of us just yesterday you can sense the fear and the reactivity how strong it is after rounds of wake-ups that we've had in schools and other shootings children killed and so on the real traumatizing wake-ups so yesterday two state senators in Colorado were recalled from office for supporting gun control so we watch that and we sense there's a lot of fear. We watch what's happening in Syria and I'm also aware of what's happening in Burma that I'd like to mention which is that there are atrocities being committed ethnic cleansing against the minority Rohingya Muslims committed by the Buddhists. There are groups of Buddhists

that are gangs of Buddhists that are going and real genocide against these minority groups in Burma. There's continued genocide in Sudan, Somalia, Congo. What I'm getting at is there's no religion that's exempt. No religion. There's no country. There's no ethnicity that is exempt from this human conditioning of fight, flight, freeze to be caught in greed, to be caught in hatred and fear.

No one's exempt. No human ego is exempt. Unless we're fully awake, we're in this conditioning, that when it's difficult, when it's painful, we either pull in or we lash out or we freeze. There's a word Bill Moyers reintroduced to a lot of people, and I'm going to pronounce it wrong. I should have looked up pronunciation. It's H-O-C-H-M-A. Anybody else got it better for me?

H-O-C-M-A? Thank you. So ancient Israelites described this as a science of the heart. it's a capacity to see and fully feel what's going on and then to act as if the future depended on you. And Bill Moyers adds, believe me, it does. It's the same message that Ticknaud Hans giving. The future depends on us.

To be all that we are, to really inhabit our fullness, to sense our potential, to move to attend and be friend, and dedicate ourselves in our own lives, in the days of our lives, to having this kind of shift, because that's what will shift us to peace or towards peace in the world. So we begin to understand as we meditate and as we explore this, that this kind of most basic teaching,

that how we live today creates the future, that whatever we think about regularly, whatever we speak about regularly, whatever we do regularly, those create the habits and the neural pathways in the brain that then carry forth into the future. So that resonates, right? So whatever you do regularly today, this is it. This is creating the pathways for tomorrow. And so the more you think about what can go wrong, the more you're setting up the conditions to be anxious and nervous in the future.

the more you blame others and lash out somehow rather you're wrong you're bad the more your body and mind are going to be geared towards aggression the more you think about how you might help others or how others you can see the spark of goodness or sacredness or you see the vulnerability and just care the more in the future your heart's going to be inclined to be generous and helpful

so it's just like weightlifting. We build muscles by practicing our thoughts over and over again and our actions. And you can direct your attention to either strengthen the pathways of aggression and fear or to strengthen the pathways of loving and peace. We cannot change anything that's happened in the past. But this moment you have power. Because this moment, you can be aware of what's going on, and actually choose to pay attention in a way that brings the body, mind, and the heart towards peace and understanding. That's where your power is.

So we begin to look at how we live today. This is the bodhisattva path. We just get real honest because something in us cares about waking up, cares about loving, cares about being free. So that caring gets us to pay more attention. Okay, so how am I creating separation? It's a powerful inquiry. How today did I in some way in my relationships with others

and in relating to my inner life did I create separation? So we look at it and we find for most of us that there's a strong patterning towards judgment. Sometimes it's real overt and sometimes it's just subtle ways that we put others down or diminish. We see it. In some way there's criticism or blame that we watch,

this belief that you're wrong or you're bad. And then we have the more active forms of where we really get irritated or angry that life's not cooperating. And we get really upset that people aren't cooperating with the way things they should be. And so then we act out of that. Heard a story similarly.

This is a kind of summer vacation story. of a guy leaving a beach week with his family and he's driving back to Boston, gets on the, stops at one of those rest areas on the side of the road. And this is what he writes. He says, I go into the bathroom. The first stall is taken, so I go into the second stall. I just sat down there when I hear a voice from the other stall. Hi there.

How's it going? Okay. I'm not the type to strike up conversations with strangers and washrooms on the side of the road. I didn't know what to say. So finally I say, not bad, just don't want to be rude. So the voice says, so what's you doing? Well, I'm finding this a bit weird, but I say, well, I'm going back to Boston just on vacation. Then I hear the person totally pissed off.

Look, I'll call you back. Every time I ask you a question, this idiot in the next stall keeps answering me. So stuff happens and we get angry. That was the point of that story. So there's the act of ways that we get anger, and we all know the ways we've heard others by the things we've said and things we've done. There's also the passive-aggressive stuff that most of us do

where we ignore someone or we withhold or we gossip on the sidelines. So there's in some way an indirect aggression where we're putting them down. I read a little story called The Evolution of Man where a little girl asks her mother, how did the human race appear? The mother answered, God made Adam and Eve, they had children, and so all mankind was made.

Two days later, the girl asked her father the same question. How did the human race appear? The father answered, many years ago there were monkeys from which the human race evolved. The confused girl returned to her mother and said, Mom, how is it possible you told me the human race was created

by God and dad said they would develop from monkeys? The mother answered, well dear it's very simple I told you about my side of the family your father told you that is so we inflate ourselves we put others down so a comment on aggression all forms they arise from a sense of being separate and in some way threatened and there's a reason we're all wired with it there's an intelligence to aggression it's a signal that something is going on that we need to pay attention to and possibly do something about. So if we're not habituated, the anger arises or whatever it is and

we can get more clear, okay, I've got to deal with this, our energy gets collected, we get mobilized, we take care of things, and then it goes away. But for many of us, and this is the way stress works, our fight-flight-flight-freeze mechanism, our fight-flight-free mechanism, whatever our favorite version is, for some it's flight, fighting, for us others it's fighting, locks in. And then what happens is it's just not periodically that we are triggered and say, oh, this is something to be worried about. It's a chronic triggering. Everything seems to irritate us or everything rings up judgment so we become chronic in our reactivity. And what

What happens when we get locked into any form of fight, flight, or freeze reactivity is our sense of who we are gets very tight and very small. And you can sense whenever you've been really afraid or whenever you've been really angry or whenever you've gotten really withdrawn. Who are you in those moments? It's a very small, contracted sense of who we are. The world is very far away from us. So our identity shrinks.

The more we repeat our patterns of reactivity, the more we create our destiny, which is to say, trapped in a, it's kind of like we got arrested in our development in a very small threatened self. And sadly, what that means is what's obscured, what Tiknaan was talking about. talking about the who we can be, we don't have access to. We don't have access to that empathy and we don't have access to that awakeness and mystery that's really who we are. We get trapped. So peace work is the intentional ways of paying attention that break those patterns, that free us to become more of who we really are. It's the stepping out of the fight-flight,

freeze by pausing and it's being as we are as Tickna said coming from a deeper place within us. Now for most of us in this process of peace work we pause and then often we go ahead and do the same thing. Are we pause and we do it part way and that's really okay. It's not one of those all of a sudden you get it and it may be sometimes you pause and you end up not lashing out, you keep it inside, you do a timeout, you process, you're much better, and then another time you just get tripped off and you say exactly the thing you had promised you wouldn't say, you know. It's okay. What matters is that there's some intention there to break the pattern.

When we have that intention, we are contributing to breaking the pattern on planet Earth. So a story that I shared in true refuge that touched me greatly and this was written up in a book written by Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle called Tattoos on the Heart and I've mentioned it before but if you haven't heard about it or you haven't read it it's an absolutely beautiful book tattoos on the heart So Gregory Boyle writes about the tragedies and the potentials in this neighborhood which has got the worst gang violence in Los Angeles. In one particular story, he writes about a woman whose name is Saldad.

She's a mother of four, and she's particularly proud when her second oldest got his diploma and goes to the Marines, and later she finds out he went to Afghanistan. He comes back for a visit. goes out to pick up some fast food and she hears shots on the streets near their home. So her son Ronnie dies in her arms right out there outside the front door. She's grieving and grieving. And soon after her oldest son, Angel pulls off something very few in the hood does. He graduates from high school.

And he helps pull her through the hell she's living in. Six months after Ronnie's death, he pleads with her, to put some clothes on with color to do her hair, to live her life, to be a mom for her remaining three children. And so she kind of goes along with it. That afternoon, while sitting, eating a sandwich on the front porch, Angel shot up by kids in a rival gang. So Gregory Boyle writes this.

He says he found Soul Dad later that day sobbing into a huge bath towel. The few of us there found our arms too short to wrap around this kind of pain. So she's locked in the anguish of separation. And over the next couple of years, Gregory Boyle spends a lot of time with her. And at one meeting, he asked how she's doing, and she tells him this. She says, you know, I love the two kids I have. I hurt for the two that are gone. And then crying, she admits, the hurt wins.

The hurt wins. A few months later, she's in the emergency room for some chest pain. and a kid with multiple gunshot wounds is rushed on a gurney to a spot next to her. And there's no curtain drawn. So she can see who he is and watch him fighting for his life and she recognizes him as one of the boys

from a rival gang that killed her son. And she knew that her friends might say, pray that he dies. Look what he's done on this earth. pray that he dies, but that's not what happened. So she hears the doctors yelling, we're losing him, and something in her cracked open. And she said, I began to cry as I'd never cried before

and started to pray the hardest I've ever prayed. Please don't let him die. I don't want his mom to go through what I have. So the boy survived, as did her capacity for loving. So it got ripped open by grief, and in time it became huge and vast. I share this story because yet again we see this evolution of consciousness, where we can say stuck and hurt or even in vengeance, or we can evolve and in some way choose love.

Some of you might remember that quote, that vengeance is a lazy form of grief. we have to grieve it we have to touch it and to find our way to peace we have to really honestly be with what's there and then we can choose love Martin Luther King he says the ultimate weakness of violence

is that it's a descending spiral begatting the very thing it seeks to destroy through violence you may murder the hater but you do not murder hate Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. So the remainder of this talk I'd like to explore how we do this peacework,

how we in our own lives can in some way nourish that shifting from the old habits of reactivity to attending and befriending when we've been triggered. And there's three key elements I want to emphasize, and one of them has to do with conscious aspiration that we have to really care about making this evolutionary shift. One of them has to do with taking responsibility, which is where we get empowered. And the last I'm calling widening circles. And I'll explain each one. The first is aspiration,

that it's easier to be angry. And by the way, anger has a role. If you don't allow the angry phase, you don't sharpen your attention to what needs attention. So this isn't about getting rid of anger. It's moving on, not getting arrested there. Is that clear? This is not a diatribe saying we should never be angry or aggressive.

It's just saying, that's not the end of the story, the story if we want peace. Okay? So if we really, if we have an aspiration like it really, really matters to us to be who we can be. It matters to live true to ourselves. It matters to develop to our full potential of loving, our full potential of being awake. If that really matters, then we'll have the energy to hang in there with what's difficult. Otherwise, we'll go back to the old patterning. So it really matters that we are in touch with what we care about, because then we start aligning our life with our heart. And we also start aligning our life with other hearts, because deep down we all care about the same thing. We all want to realize who we are. We want to

inhabit awareness and love. Back to Martin Luther King. I heard an interesting story, and it was in the New York Times some weeks back, that he had, and it's to do with the 1963 talk that's so well known. He had considered using the I Have a Dream refrain, but it dropped it for that talk because he didn't think he'd have time and he didn't think it would be as useful as some other themes he wanted to cover. So he wasn't going to do it. Now his talk followed a gospel singer named Mahalia Jackson who sang some spirituals and she created a mood and this is what news reporter Roger Mudd said

he said that all the speeches in the world couldn't evoke okay so they're there and aspirations opened up right through these gospels so the mood's there it's heart space so then he's starting to he does his talk it's kind of a short talk and he's kind of towards the end he goes off his script and starts improvising. And then during a pause, Mahalia shouts,

tell them about the dream, Martin. Tell them about the dream. And he looks out over the crowd and realizes that's exactly what he needs to do. So that's when he said, I say to you today, my friend, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow,

I still have a dream. and he went on to express that dream in ways that touched the aspiration it lived in every heart there and was so moving that it's probably one of the most famous talks ever given in the world. I have a dream. So what is it that's so moving about that? He was carrying the vision of our potential and our potential is what most matters that we step in and live from love and connection, that we really live peace, be peace, have a peaceful

earth. So who's expressing that? And it wasn't just his aspiration. Tell him about the dream, Martin. And that's just so beautiful. It was like it was in the field and he got reminded to share his aspiration. Same feeling of resonance. I think when we say, I have a dream, as, you know, at Obama's first inauguration, so many people felt that he looked on the TV at the faces that had for so many years yearned for and despaired of will it ever happen and that sense of, wow, our aspiration, maybe this is our dreams coming true. And we sometimes can feel it for some of us, old enough or whatever, when we listen to

John Lennon sing, imagine. It touches something. something we yearn for and why do we yearn for it? Because we sense the possibility of loving fully. So this is the first of the bodhisattva path aspiration that we consciously pay attention to what we love because you know we say we yearn for peace and we say we yearn for more of a loving world and more love in our life and yet we have other things we're wanting to and we don't really recognize how much we're paying attention to those wants more, maybe for comfort or maybe to prove ourselves or in some way accomplish something that inflates us. So we don't stay in touch

with the deepest aspiration. So the practice, and it is a practice, consider aspiration as a practice, is to ask yourself, what do I really care about? And then ask like it's the first time you've ever asked. This is how you bring this practice alive. Don't assume you know. I can say words like love and peace, but don't assume you know, because you're going to have your own language, your own felt sense that's going to bring it alive for you. And in the moments that you ask and you really patiently listen, what gets unearthed is a powerful longing that can carry you home. Keep paying attention. do it. So the second piece of this piecework is full responsibility. So we discover

what's between me and peace. Let's say you find out, well, judgment and I'm really blaming and I'm blaming that person. And that person really did something harmful. Okay? That's a good one because that happens. Full responsibility means that you take, that you are fully able to respond. Responsibility means able to respond to what comes up in you. And that that's the first priority, that more than fixating on the badness of other, because what that does, in any moment you fixate on the badness of another,

you disempower yourself. You take away from the possibility of healing what's inside you, any moment of blaming outward. So full responsibility means you're able to respond to what comes up in you. And the more you take full responsibility, the more you'll be empowered and happy and free. We don't want to because it's hard, because it means we have to be with real rawness.

But if you are responsible, then what you're going to be doing is bringing the two wings of awareness, noticing what's going on inside you, mindfulness, and bringing compassion to it, to what's going on right inside you, that gesture of love, responsibility. We're going to practice in a few moments so you'll get a chance to explore this. So the first is aspiration. I care about waking up, I care about love, I care about finding peace and inner peace. The second is full responsibility, whatever comes up, the ability to respond to what's going on inside us with mindfulness and kindness. The next piece is that

we widen the circles. And widening the circles means that we don't exclude anyone from our heart. That that responsibility, that ability respond includes anyone that comes up in our awareness, that we're able to respond and hold that being with care, like Antoinette. who included this violent, crazy young guy in her heart. And like Saldad, who did the same, how do we do that? We become aware of who's there. We pay attention deeply enough

to get that this human's real and vulnerable and hurts and is sentient. So there's a Sikh story I want to share. And in it there's an aged spiritual master who calls his two most dedicated disciples to the garden in front of his hut. And gravely he gives each one a chicken and instructs them. Go to where no one can see and kill the chicken. One of them that immediately goes behind the shed,

picks up an axe, and chops off the chicken's head. The other wanders around for hours and finally returns to his master, the chicken still alive and in hand. Well, what happened? the disciple responds, I can't find a place to kill the chicken where no one can see me. Everywhere I go, the chicken sees. We can only hurt each other if the other's an unreal other. If you deepen your attention enough, they become part of you, part of your awareness.

Longfellow puts it this way. He says, if we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. So you might be wondering, okay, but fine, but what do we do? How do we respond? Because we have to respond. We have to respond to people that cause harm in our personal lives or cause harm to people we love

and we have to respond in the global theater. We have to respond. It's right to respond. It's part of caring to respond. And the guidance on the Bodhisattva path is if we have our aspiration really, really clear, we're really wanting to serve healing and peace, more loving on this planet.

And if we're willing to be present with what comes up inside us, we're responsible, we will be in a place of presence and resourcefulness and intelligence that will allow us to respond as well as possible in our world, that will respond instead of, of react. Do you understand the difference between that? That if it's a flinch reaction, okay, somebody's violated us and our flinch reaction is violate them back, we are still

operating off a fight-flight freeze and we're perpetuating the cycles of violence. If we can pause, if we can remember what matters, if we can be with what's coming up in us so that rather than acting out of fear, we have been with that fear and enlarged ourselves, then we have more choice. And something you can do just to experiment is next time you're with somebody and you're in one of those conversations that triggers, instead of doing something, at the moment you notice you're triggered, just stop.

Just pause. It'll be utterly awkward, really weird, but just pause. pause and just wait and you'll feel like all this turning and it's almost intolerable because you want to do something or you want to say something you want to get away but just stop and then notice

what possibilities might come up as ways to respond when you've just had even a short pause there's more there might not be real satisfying ones but there's more possibilities this is what we're going to explore in a moment Before we do our final meditation, I want to say as clearly as I can that widening the circles and including others in our heart, including others that have caused great harm, does not mean

that we don't set boundaries. It doesn't mean that we don't take all the necessary precautions and actions to prevent more harm. There's something called idiot compassion in the Buddhist tradition. You can probably figure out what it is right from those words. but idiot compassion means that we're avoiding conflict. We're not necessarily supposed to avoid conflict. Sometimes you have to engage completely in the conflict.

It means that we're trying to protect our image when we should be saying no. We talk about saying yes. Sometimes we have to say yes to our no. No more. No you can't do this. Or pull ourselves away from a situation. That's all completely

intelligent. The whole point here is, are we reacting or responding? Are we in a reflexive reaction that's angry and trying to push somebody away or put them down? Are we connected with what matters with a sense of presence? The short reading from Kurt Quater, he says, tell me the weight of a snowflake, a coal mouse asked a wild dove. Nothing. more than nothing was the answer. In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story, the Colmouse said. I sat on a branch of a fur close to its trunk when it began to snow, not heavily, not in a giant blizzard, no, just like in a dream without any violence. Since I didn't have anything better to do, I counted the snowflake settling on the twigs and the needles of my

branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. Then the next snowflake dropped on the branch. Nothing more than nothing, as you say, the branch broke off. Having said that, the Cole Mouse flew away. The dove, since Noah's time and authority on change, thought about the story for a while and finally said to herself, perhaps there's only one person's voice lacking for peace to come about in the world. If we care, the most powerful thing we can do is not wait.

tonight because a lot of our exploration is how do we work with and be responsible for what comes up within us, that's our place of working. Just as important is living from that place, having our voice be out there, having our actions be towards healing and peace. But first, we need the presence, we need the awakeness, we need the heart open. So with that in mind, I'd like to invite you to do a few minutes of a reflection. And if it helps you to move around, take about 20 seconds to stretch or move, please do so. I'd like you to be comfortable for this.

Okay, so coming into stillness, closing the eyes and bringing a soft and gentle attention to the breath. Just let yourself collect and gather right here. And you might sense the breath at the heart, just feeling whatever the experience of your heart is right now. and taking these moments to sense your aspiration, asking that question as if for the first time, what is it that really matters? What matters in your life and what matters with the people of your life,

with the other beings of your life? What do you long for? What's your dream or vision? Then you might sense that you're asking really, about the aspiration of your spiritual life as it is right in this moment. So what is that you long to experience? Like right in this moment, what's the potential or possibility that you long to manifest right now, right here? And just to feel it in a sincere way, what matters to you, here with others, living aligned with your heart,

so that now you can bring to mind some person that you get into a reactive pattern with where there's some judgment or blame, someplace where you sense your repeat history, where you're doing some cycling. Just to begin to examine this, sensing your aspiration, you might bring to mind an instance recently of where you perhaps got caught in something, where a person said something that triggered you

or did a behavior that triggered you. And if you want the meditation to be a little more alive, go right into it, like sense what the worst part of that was for you, like what really got to, perhaps what you're believing when the person says or acts that way and how that makes you feel. To take full responsibility means to let go of any ideas about wrongness and to bring your full attention to what's going on inside you for

now, to respond to what's going on inside your own heart and body. So with real honesty and interest, just notice what it's triggered. Maybe the feeling of not mattering, the feeling of being diminished, feeling the person's being in some way an obstacle to you getting what you want. Often the feeling is that I'm not cared about. Maybe the feeling is fear that that person is going to hurt themselves. So you're judgmental out of fear. But whatever it is, start breathing into your body and just feeling, okay, so this is what's under it. You're being responsible, you're responding to what's under it. And if it helps you to put your hand on your heart or some way you put your hand on your cheek just to keep company with, to bring

these wings of attention to what's going on inside you, please do. An experiment with just feeling what's underneath the aggression or the judgment, breathing with it, some gesture of kindness. You might send a message yourself, it's okay, or just sense some light or warmth going to the place that's vulnerable. And sensing the possibility in this pause that you can begin to look out and widen the circle and sense, you sense, what is going on for this other person. Your eyes might be a little more clear because of the pause. You might see a little more deeply past the mask.

You might sense the other person's pain or fear or confusion or the stress and anxiety that's there. Imagine that there's some other choices and how to respond. Just explore how else you might respond, knowing that no matter what unfolds you can still find that empowerment in being able to be responsible to what arises inside you and then gently sense the possibility of including another knowing that even making the effort having the intention to pause

and interrupt the pattern is a powerful and courageous contribution to bringing peace to this earth to changing the patterning of meeting violence with violence, to opening us to the healing of peace. I'd like to close with the words of Maddie Stepanik, who no longer is alive. He wrote this when he was 13. He had muscular dystrophy,

and he wrote it on September 12, 2001. He said, for our world, we need to stop, just stop. Stop for a moment before anybody says or does anything that may hurt anyone else. We need to be silent, just silent. Silent for a moment before we forever lose the blessing of songs that grow in our hearts. We need to notice, just notice, notice for a moment before the future slips away into ashes and dust of humility.

Stop. Be silent. silent and notice. In so many ways we are the same. And now let us pray, differently yet together, before there is no earth, no life, no chance for peace. I must stay and thank you for your attention. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.