Tara Brach - Present Heart: The Universal Expressions of Love, Part 2: Compassion

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Compassion – the tender resonance of heart – awakens as we allow ourselves to be touched by our shared vulnerability.   This series reflects on four primary expressions of an awake, wise heart: lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. In each talk we explore the habitual patterning that blocks our full realization of these innate capacities, and the understandings and practices that nurture their unfolding.    In this talk, Tara explores  ✨the all-inclusive nature of compassion in awakening our hearts and embracing all beings with care and presence. ✨ how evolutionary conditioning limits compassion, yet reveals our brain's natural wiring for empathy and connection. ✨ the common blocks to compassion, like fear, stress, and busyness, which pull us into a trance of disconnection. ✨ the essential role of self-compassion and kindness toward ourselves in deepening our ability to care for others. ✨ how to make compassion a lasting trait, by fully feeling and savoring moments of care so they shape who we are.   Our introduction music is from "Opening" by Adrienne Torf, © 2025 ABT Music

Welcome friends to the Tara Brock podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Namaste and welcome. So I'd like to wish you a happy Valentine's Day

and begin with a brief quiz. The first one is, what do squirrels give each other on Valentine's Day? Any guesses? Forget me nuts. Okay, one more. Only one more. What does an octopus sing to his beloved?

on Valentine's Day. I want to hold your hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand, hand. Okay, I gave it a good shot, right? So appropriately, we're in the midst of a four-part series on awakening the present heart. And this is the first one. The first one that we did was on awakening loving-kindness, which is the seeing the goodness and responding to the goodness in life.

The second is compassion, which is what we'll be doing this class, and then we move on to joy and equanimity. And in the Buddhist tradition, these four are called the Brahma Vajaras or the divine abodes because they really express the capacity and potential of our awakening heart. So, in thinking about each one of them we look at, you know, really what's blocking this innate capacity we have and what cultivates it. So as we think of compassion tonight, I'd like to invite you to bring to mind someone you know, or if you don't know anyone, someone you know of, who you really consider

as authentically compassionate. And just take a moment to sense that person and what are the qualities that come to mind. What is it that you feel in them? What lets you know that quality of heart is there? See if this description from Henri Nguyen resonates. He says, when we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, often find it's those who instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, not fixing, and face us with the reality of our powerlessness is a friend who cares. So, we begin to sense, so what does it really mean to be compassionate? I'd like to name three qualities and the first one is that compassion isn't something where I can feel compassionate and when I talk about compassion right now, I'm talking about the full bloom of it where I can feel compassionate towards you but it shuts down here. Compassion isn't all-pervading, why?

open state of heart that's really inclusive. And one of the examples that struck me on this was a story of a Sikh master who gives his two main disciples, each one of them a chicken. And he says, go where no one can see and kill the chicken. So the first one goes behind this hut, chops off the chicken's head. The second one's wandering around for hours and hours and he comes back and the master says, what? You didn't kill the chicken? And he said, no, it's because I can't find a place to kill the chicken where no one can see me everywhere I go the chicken sees. Right?

So this is the heart that is so open and attuned that it senses the sentience in all beings. It doesn't exclude. And the truth is as we deepen our attention, to our own consciousness and vulnerability, we're more and more alert to how all beings are sentient. They hurt and they want to stay alive just like us. So that's one quality which is this wisdom of interdependence that the whole world is part of us and that our compassion is all inclusive. The second quality is that then when we see vulnerability or tenderness, there's a natural horizon. in our heart of care.

When we see that others are hurting, there's that responsiveness of care. And the third is really that there's an impulse to help. It's not a removed kind of empathy where I get it, I can feel that, but there's this urge to help. And one story about Zen Master Rehacon, a thief visits his hut at the base of a mountain where he lives. and when he comes back, the thief finds that there's nothing to steal, and so Ria Khan returns and catches him there.

Here's what he says. You've come a long way to visit me, he told the prowler and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift. The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away. Ria Khan sat naked watching the moon. Poor fellow, he mused. I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon.

So, you can feel a bit the freedom of a compassionate heart. So, like loving kindness, compassion often gets blocked and we're going to look at how so, because I think deep down many of us judge ourselves as not really a compassionate person. We might feel like, you know, we hear headlines and there's a part of us that's appalled or horrified. But our heart isn't really tenderized by it. We don't really feel it deep down. So it helps to see kind of in a bigger picture the kind of universal conditioning that we're

subject to that's been impacting humans for millions of years that might cause us to be less than fully compassionate. we don't take it so personally. So a very brief romp through evolutionary history is just to say that four millions of years, humans lived in small groups and the way they survived was that other groups were considered other and less than and they actually had names for themselves that usually had something to do with human and their names for the others, other groups were epithets that really had to do with less than human. And so it was really part of social cohesion and to feel that

we're the ones and others are not and that a let, and if others are unreal and less than, then you can attack them and you can be against them. So, while they had the capacity for pro-social affiliative emotions like compassion, it was very, very restricted. It was a very immature form of compassion. And then we see that about 70,000 years ago, so this is millions of years, and about 70,000 years ago, there was this cognitive revolution that happened where all our brains started spurting all these different pathways and we began to communicate to each other and be able to collaborate in ways that have now led to our current capacity to really collaborate globally, you know, on economics and on law. And there's actually less

violence now than there has, if you look at the broad span over time. But to know that for thousand times as long as this last recent period in history, humans were living in small little bands and having others be bad. So there wasn't that inclusive heart. So we're catching up. So we have these evolutionary poles. We have all that old conditioning to make others bad and not be attuned. as that man was to the chicken, to the sentience.

And then we have this more recently evolved part of our brain that has the mirror neurons and the equipment to look at any being and sense that that which is looking back at us is the same awareness, the same beingness, that you are part of my heart. How could I hurt you? Those are the pulse we've got going. Our evolution is moving in the direction of this, the empathy, the compassion, the care. In fact, one attachment scientist, Lewis Cozolina, says that it's not the survival of the fittest, it's the survival of the nurtured.

And you can kind of sense it in our individual lives that the more nurturing and the the more we know how to self-nurture, actually the more integrated and mature we can become. So evolution favors that direction and yet as we know in a moment's notice we can have that override of our limbic system that has us become really into othering and not seeing who's here. I always have been drawn to a story talking to a story talking about. told by Fram Peavy, who's a social activist, describes being on the Stanford campus when they were doing some sort of an experiment. And there was all this crowd of men that was gathered around a male chimp.

And the male chimp was running loose and there was a female chimp on a chain. And they were trying to get them to mate. And the male, of course, didn't need much encouragement. He was going at it. this female on the chain was whimpering and scared and so on and trying to avoid his advances. So, this, Fran Peavy describes this wave of caring that went through her and then something happened she'd never forget. She said, suddenly the female chimp yanked her chain out of the male's grasp and to my

amazement she walked through the crowd straight over to me and took my hand. And she led me across the circle. It's the only other two women in the crowd and she joined hands with one of them. The three of us stood together in a circle. I remember the feeling of that rough palm against mine. The little chimp had recognized us and reached out across all the years of evolution to form her own women's support group. It's the beginning of me too. So, but the question that I think is really interesting is what prevented the male onlookers to feel the compassion at that moment? I mean, here's this female on a chain and upset.

In those moments there was an override, a limbic override, there was a forgetting that came from the less evolved part of the psyche because they were seeking excitement, seeking engagement. It was a male bonding kind of thing, affiliation, dominance. And that masked the suffering and affiliation. being, it reinforced the much older conditioning of us versus them. Does that make sense? Just for those moments. It's a trance and it's a trance that happens to all of us when we're stressed, every one of us. So this isn't about women being empathetic, women tend to be because they're more biologically relational, but this is not a male versus female. We all go

into trance, every one of us when we're stressed and it closes off our hearts. This is the way Einstein puts it. He says, we have an optical delusion of separation when this happens. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. So, this optical delusion of separation when we're being run by our more primitive parts of our brain. So what I'd like to do is look more closely so we can in our lives catch on to, oh, okay, this is trance. I'm not fully here.

here so we can wake up to it and just see where we get blocked and we get blocked when we have unmet needs and in some way they get tripped off. And the first major area we close down our compassion is when we feel in some way endangered, right? There's so many ways that we can, if we feel threatened, we're going to in some way fail or our health is going down or we're going to lose esteem or lose possessions or money or whatever. As soon as that happens, that survival brain kicks in and we become less attuned.

Now the major one for most of us is when we're afraid of failure. I think that a lot that there's a sense of how often we're anxiously preparing for something so we don't fail. How often we're trying to get to an appointment on time or trying to make sure our children or partners taking care, whatever it is, but there's that stress and there's a deep fear. There's not enough time. And I can say for myself, when I am feeling that, when I feel like I'm trying to get to the next thing and check things off the list, I'm not in an open-hearted place. I hear news and it's a very thing. It's not like my heart becomes tender and resonant because when we're busy we tighten.

One of the best examples and research on this that I think about often was the Good Samaritan study that was done at Princeton. How many are familiar with that? Can I see? Some, yeah. I found it so fascinating. So the Seminarians were given a practice sermon and half of them were given the story of the Good Samaritan and the other half were given another random Bible story.

And they're supposed to go to another building to give the sermon and be evaluated on it. But on the way to that other building there's a person in a doorway who's moaning in distress. So the real question was would they stop and whether the... and it was determined, and this is what they found out, how much time they thought they had before they had to give their sermon, determine whether or not they would stop to help this person. And if they believed they'd be late, they didn't stop to help even if the sermon was about the Good Samaritan. Isn't that amazing?

That's how deep in our brain, the fear of failure closes down our heart, the fear of being late even. So that's one area is when we feel endangered in some way. Another area is when we're fixated on seeking out compassion. seeking out satisfaction or pleasure. And there are times that are, you know, the mammalian brain were like a squirrel going after acorns and we just, our view does not include others, doesn't include anything else. We're not really attuned. It's like moments when you're watching an engaging show and your child asks you for something. You're aiming towards ending the evening

with that rewarding bowl of ice cream, but then you get a distress call from her friend. And it's like we're not as available in some way. Or somebody has a request for charity or time when we really wanted to spend money or time on ourselves. In this story, one morning Sam wakes up with a start and she's, her partner asked what's the matter and she says, well I just had a dream that you gave me a pearl necklace for Valentine's Day. What do you think it means? You'll know tonight, Tony said. That evening Tony comes home with a small package and gives it to her. Delighted, Sam Oatman, it only to find a book entitled The Meaning of Dreams.

That didn't totally illustrate my point but I couldn't resist. So we've got the first two areas who've named, we closed down when we're endangered, we close down when we're riveted on seeking gratification and the third way that we close down is when we're trying to attach to another person. And that's when we have this agenda that we're trying to get someone to like us, not to leave us, to think certain things about us, whenever we're with each other and there's some strong agenda of wanting something from each other. We actually aren't present to tune into vulnerability and be tender.

The agenda gets in the way. It's like that story of the older woman in Miami sitting on a park bench and a very disheveled man in tattered clothing sits down next to her and she asked him, well, how are you doing? And he goes, well, I'm just out of prison, 25 years. Oh, what were you in for? Murdering my wife. And then she goes, oh, so you're single. You get the idea. Like our attention. gets narrowed when we're going for something, we have an agenda. Again, not a perfect example, but...

So, these are the areas that when we're fearful of something, wanting something, trying to control relationships, and it happens a lot of the time, we're actually not available. And then even when we do extend to others, it's not wholehearted, it's self, you know, it's It's maybe out of duty or obligation or just to feel good about ourselves. So, I'm coming back to this is the reason we hear stories in the news, we even see things, more comes to us information-wise than ever in history and because of stress in these three areas, our response is more mental than it is visceral and heart. Okay.

So, accessing an authentic quality of compassion isn't easy. It requires a real presence and unless we're mindful, our stress conditioning continuously overrides the circuitry. I find it really interesting what the Dalai Lama said about this. He said, I don't know why people like me so much. It must be because I value Bodichita. Bodiceita is the awakened heart-mind. He says, I can't claim to practice it, but I value it. What he's saying in my understanding, because clearly he practices and he emanates it, but

he means that he's, it's not across the board, he forgets to. But he says, he's saying I care about caring. why people like me. And I heard this quote a long time ago and it was one of those coach that has just stayed with me because I can really relate to that. I clearly, I'm not always sitting with this wide open, tender, inclusive heart, but I care about the awakened heart and that caring keeps drawing us even though we go into trance and get over, you know, the Olympic hijack and all that. We keep on evolving because we're we care about caring.

And you wouldn't be here, each one of you that's listening unless there was something waking up in you and knowing that caring. That's, this is what matters. So it gives us motivation when we sense that's where we're going. We're evolving towards that awakened heart mind and that matters to us. Because then we can begin to notice without... slamming ourselves, oh, okay, I've been entranced, but I care about caring. That was a bit of what happened for one woman who describes an experience with her mother

I want to share with you. She was very dedicated to noticing and witnessing when she went under the line, you know, and she went into trance. And she describes being with her mother when her mom told her about having breast cancer. And she said, you know, immediately she went to sadness, guilt, anger, future tripping regret. In other words, she's overwhelmed by the shock. Okay, so this is stress. She says, as it usually does, my mind immediately went into planning mode.

So, just track the story. So instead of like, oh, you know, the resonance, she's right there planning, that's a stress reaction, what needs to happen, what are your treatment options, how soon we can get the lump removed? So, you get the idea. And she says, thank God for this work because this work meaning training and mindfulness, noticing going into trance because despite of a complete head spiral, I still had the presence enough to ask myself an important question. What am I noticing now?

And in that moment I was able to see something I would have missed otherwise. My mother didn't want to talk about any of those things. As I was weighing her options, she sat in the high top chair in my kitchen, and she sat in the high top chair in my kitchen staring blankly into a cup of coffee. I was trying to be strong for her sake in mind but suddenly became clear that wasn't what she needed. She was scared and needed to be scared. I debated whether to give her a hug, which sounds terrible I know, but I was barely

holding it together and scurring around, making dinner, pouring over doctors' paperwork and staying busy was my way of avoiding total collapse. Being pressed and allowed me to shift to her way. I took a breath, walked across the room, and wrapped my arms around her. It was an awkward sideways hug but it was also a long, necessary one and then something happened. Slowly she started rocking side to side like a mother rocks a child except the child was now the caretaker. It was a sweet tiny moment I'll never forget and one that I surely would have missed if it

we're not for the power of mindfulness. This is Emily Bennington. I'd like to reflect here, invite you to reflect because this is really us beginning to bear witness to these evolutionary poles. She began to see her pull towards getting busy, her pull towards moving away from where the pain was and was able to counter that conditioning. So let's just take a look in our own lifestyle moment. We'll close your eyes if you will, take a moment to reflect. So you might bring to mind someone who's dear to you and who's currently facing difficulty, someone you'd like to relate to with more compassion.

Take a moment to remind you of what lets you know you care, that you want to be the friend or partner or sibling or whatever it is who truly listens, not fixing, who has that kind presence. So just remind yourself that you care about caring. And then without judging, notice how you go into trance with this person. Notice the pull of your stressed brain that might get lost in worrying or obsessing or getting things done. or proving something or distracting, trying to control what's happening. Just notice your version of it, sense what you want to look out for, what you want to be alert

to next time. If you can witness this without judging, in other words, to keep feeling that sincerity that you care about caring, you will be more alert. that that care will carry you to your future self, the more awake heart mind that's possible. So we're going to move now into how we can cultivate compassion. Because most of us, when we come into presence to be with another person for whatever's going on, what we're going to find first is that the first place we need to bring compassion to our own hearts. Very often, in many situations, there is discomfort, pain, suffering

right here and if we try to skip over it, our compassion will be abstract. It will not be authentic. So that's why it's often said in Buddhism that the heart of Buddhism is compassion and the heart of compassion is compassion for ourselves. Okay, so it's not selfish. It's just that if something's going on and you're having a reaction, first take care of yourself or you won't be able to open your heart to others. So there's a basic understanding that authentic healing requires self-compassion. So we have to have that capacity to attend to our own life with kindness. That wakes up those mirror neurons that can attune to others.

I'm right now writing a book about the acronym R-A-I-N which is to recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture and that nurture piece, there's no real freedom if we don't have a tenderness towards what's going on. It's absolutely essential. So the process of compassion and self-compassion is very simple. We have the courage to recognize, oh, suffering is right here. And if we really connect with it, this really is suffering. Ouch.

The heart gets tender. But what happens usually, what happens when you're hurting, when you're having a hard time? How do you usually relate to yourself? It's really interesting to watch. For many of us, we relate to ourselves often how our caretakers related to us, which could have been anything from ignoring or judging your judgment. too sensitive, or trying to fix or get rid of something, which is a big one, or others have it worse. Why are you complaining? Others have it so much worse. Or we might tell ourselves

it's your fault, you got yourself into this. But you see how each of those is something other than directly just going, oh, suffering, ouch. It's not until we stay and just get it that this hurts, that our hearts will start opening to ourselves. Any notion that we don't have it so bad that others have it worse takes us away from that. And again, if there's no self-compassion, those mirror neurons that need to be activated to be empathetic towards others are not there. So I'd like to give you an example of how it can work that we move from, you know, because when there is self-compassion we naturally extend.

And this was a story that really struck me because it was a man and a woman got married and he and their family became those two and her son so who's a stepfather. And what came up, the child was eight years old, had a lot of tantrums, it was difficult, it was rude and this guy is finding himself not liking his steps on, feeling anger, feeling rage. And so whenever there was outbursts and the child acted out and he felt a lot of aversion, he tried to hide it from his wife because he figured she had her own challenges and the last thing he wanted was her to feel like she, you know, I don't like your kid,

that kind of thing. But it was really corroding their relationship. So, we decided to work with Rain. Rain is basically mindfulness and compassion. And the recognizing was recognizing and allowing his reactivity, okay? Angry, feeling judgmental, feeling rageful. And then making that U-turn rather than blaming the child really deepening the eye of rein is to investigate and he found under the anger and under that I don't like you feeling, he found fear.

You're ruining my life and you're going to ruin and you're ruining your mother's life and you're ruining our relationship. And then he also felt shame for that. So that's what he found underneath when he was investigating. And we talked some about how many parents, and this isn't just stepchildren, biological Churchill, at times, don't like our children. It's hard to name it, but when things are really unpleasant, we react and children can get in the way of us meeting our own needs for safety, for gratification.

So through the eyes of his wisest self, his future self, he kind of witnessed the situation and saw the stuckness of here he is in a marriage where he's feeling like his, the way this child is, is really threatening the relationship and so on. And rather than being harsh with himself, he said, okay, this is hard, just this is hard, that's simple. You know, self-compassion and start with words like, Like, you know, it can be as big as I'm sorry and I love you or it can be simply it's okay or it can be this is hard but some kindness directed inwardly.

And when he let himself acknowledge this is hard and softened towards himself, he was able to start talking to his wife and it actually opened things up for her because she felt like she was failing and she was really miserable too. So they were able to be vulnerable together in it, hold each other which then allowed them to be a lot more creative and flexible and less reactive with the child who obviously if he was having tantrums and acting out was having a hard time so they could they had space for it. The reason I tell you this story was it wasn't until he was going ah this is hard, that his heart opened so he could be with his wife and be

be with his stepson in a way that allowed some tenderness and creativity and change. We have to start with what's going on inside him ourselves. If he had instead say, wait a minute, I'm the adult, I shouldn't be feeling this, he would never have gotten to an authentic place of change. Does that make sense? Self-compassion first. If we can embrace our own suffering, then we can begin to widen and act. out. So, the widening out, we're going to look at now, how do we cultivate that compassion

for others? And what I really want to look at in the last 15 minutes that we have is how do we take compassion from a fleeting state that we sometimes experience, just a little tenderness, to being a trait, an enduring expression of our being. And there are three things, three steps really to really installing my friend Rick Hansen, who's a psychologist and many of you probably heard of them, is the one that really has gotten me inspired about this potential to really cultivate from a state to a trait, how we really install compassion. And the first is that when we witness vulnerability to really feel it and let ourselves be touched, and When the tenderness comes, when the real visceral tenderness comes, feel it for 15 seconds,

20 seconds, but let yourself marinate in the feeling of tenderness. We don't pause, let yourself really feel it and then in some way extend, whether it's through prayer or action but extend because the completion of compassion is some extension of our being. The sight that's correlated with compassion in the brain is right near the motor cortex. We're meant to reach out and help. It's very interesting. So let's look at those. The first step is to begin to see that they're suffering or vulnerability. We don't usually see. When we're in our stress trance, we don't look at each other and go, oh, look, you're having a hard time. We typically don't see very deeply. What stops us?

Well, either we're living in stereotyping people, a certain type, in which case we're just seeing the type but we're not seeing behind the mask or else somebody's acting out in a way and we're seeing the way they're defensive or aggressive but we're not seeing what's behind it. We're not seeing how it's covering the way. vulnerability. James Baldwin says, I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hate and prejudice so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone they will be forced to deal with their own pain. Now, when we run in to someone who is acting hateful, do we look deeply enough to sense, oh, there's pain behind that hate? Most of us don't. When

recoil. Do you know what I mean? So it takes a commitment to really look and see what's going on. And then we, if we look, we'll feel tenderness and then we can extend ourselves in some way that is meaningful in that moment. One of the examples I love of this of really the expression of compassion, I heard in a Krista Tippett interview with Ruby Sales and Ruby Sales is an African American social activist, older woman now, very active in civil rights. So here's what she says. She describes getting her locks washed and she says, my locker's daughter came in one morning and she had been hustling all night and she had sores on her body and she was just an estate, drugs, so something said to me, ask her, where does it hurt?

And I said, Shelly, where does it hurt? And just that simple question unleashed territory in her that she had never shared with her mother. And she talked about having been incested. She talked about all the things that had happened to her as a child. And she literally shared the source of her pain. And I realized in that moment listening to her and talking with her that I needed a larger way to do this work. What Ruby Sales is talking about in a larger way is cultivating this capacity to see the vulnerability,

let ourselves be touched and reach out. Where does it hurt? Where does it hurt? Such a beautiful question. As we begin to get more tender and to look and to respond, it's contagious. The people around us, they get touched and then they act that way more. Just the way there's limbic contagion, you know, when people are angry or upset, there's compassion contagion.

I remember experiencing a bit of it. It was 2008 because I remember it during that recession period. and I was going up to New York to give a talk on something and one of my great fears in the world is getting lost and I was driving to Union Station and somehow rather 3.95 got all botched up, got completely lost, late for my train, afraid I would be late for my train. I went to a gas station and parked and was trying to find someone that give me instructions and an elderly gentleman was kind of overheard me and could sense all my angst and he interrupted the guy that was trying to explain to me, said, come on, hon, you just follow me.

And he just drove and I followed him right to you in station. And in those moments I felt the sense of the world being a friendly place. Now it's not always friendly on some levels, but deep down there is love. People have that capacity. I just felt the field of loving. I get on the train and I was really excited, I was reading, I don't even know what I was reading, but I was reading something I was excited about and this young man next to me started talking to me and it turned out he had lost his job because of the recession and so on.

We talked a long time and there was something about just dropping the thing of wanting to read and just being there and I figure he probably went back to his wife and his kids and he was probably more open. It goes on and on and it's so much of a happier way to live. And what's interesting with the science is that although with compassion we're training ourselves to look at where the suffering and vulnerability is, the actual experience of compassion lights up the parts of the brain that are related to positive emotion, it actually feels good because it has to do with belonging and connection.

It's the world we want to live in. We care about caring. There's a little saying that to be kind you must swerve regularly from your path. So whatever this conditioned path of I want to get this done and I want more of this and I want this is my agenda with you to swerve and just pause and look and see who's here. Really look and see. it like for you right now? To let ourselves be touched by vulnerability, to feel that tenderness and feel it, really feel

it. I invite you next time you have a taste of that tender caring to literally 15 to 30 seconds get to know it. As it's described by neuroscience, our negative experiences that we have to have to be, we have have, go deeply into our implicit memory. We can recall them. It's just the negativity bias. It's evolutionary, right? The positive ones like tenderness and caring, you know, like feeling creative, like feeling happy. We get whiffs of them, but they don't have the stickiness, they don't go into our implicit memory, so there are states that come and go. What makes

a state into a trait is when it arises pause and really take it in. Oh, this is the tenorness of compassion. Really feel it, feel it in your body and yourselves. And then it gets stickier. It goes into your implicit memory. And if you keep repeating that, over time the state of compassion becomes a trait. You really sense it as who you are. So that's the invitation and we'll practice a little bit right now with that, if you will. You want to just adjust how you're sitting and close your eyes for the last few minutes. When we talk about a state to a trait, when we talk about cultivating compassion, really

talking about a shift in identity, a shift from a sense of a self that's very self-centered and really operating off a fear, grasping, to a sense of enlarge being. where the world is part of our heart and our actions are on behalf of the world. And the Dalai Lama described this shift in identity as really the hope of the world. And so we practice and you might bring to mind again as you did earlier the person you'd like to feel some more compassion towards, that you'd like to be less entrance more there and feel your intention towards compassion, towards awakening into your future self, your awakened heart-mind, really manifesting that compassion, who you can be.

Bring this person to mind in a close in way so that you can deepen your attention and sense, well, what's it like for this person right now? You might imagine if you could really step inside this person for the next minute or two. You know, looking out from this person's eyes, what's the world like right now? What are they believing about the world? About themselves, about what's disappointing or what feels threatening, what feels hurtful for this person? Where does it hurt for this person?

You have their body, their face, their experience. Just feeling inside the vulnerability that this person might be feeling and really what the most vulnerable place in them needs. What is this person need? What will be most healing? As you sense yourself now, just widen back out and sense this person's a part of your heart but feel your own vastness, feel the presence that's here and really calling on your most awake heart and sense that you could in some way give this person

right this moment what's most needed energetically. So if you could put a hand on their cheek or their heart or hug them and really send the message that would most be healing to hear, it might be simply the message of I'm sorry and I love you, but you might mentally whisper their name and send that message. Or Ticknat Han says, I care about your suffering. Darling, I care about your suffering. Imagine this person really being able to receive and feel that tenderness. Let it fill you. Really let the sense of tenderness for this person fill you. Get familiar with it, what it's like, the caring. This is your deepest, most awake heart. You might sense that

this heart space is wide open, that it's including all the beings that struggle just the way this person that's dear to you struggle. All the beings from different countries, different ages, races, religions, perhaps species that might struggle with the same kind of suffering. So you're feeling that tenderness really includes them all and us all. You might listen to the words of this poem, Just Like You, Walk gently on this earth with purposeful steps. You share the space with seven billion human beings and countless other precious life forms. Just like you, they all want to be happy. Just like you, they all need love.

We're not going to survive unless we walk gently. on this earth together, until we touch something in others that feels just like the shards of our own pain, the fluttering warmth of our own joy, until we sow their wounds into our hearts and seal it with our own skin. Walk gently on this earth. Walk gently on the surf. Walk gently on the earth. Walk gently on the earth. Namaste and thank you for your attention.