Tara Brach - Radical Compassion - Part 1 (retreat talk) (2017-04-30)

Episode Date: May 12, 2017

Radical Compassion - Part 1 (retreat talk) (2017-04-30) - Compassion is the medicine we most need as individuals and a species to heal suffering and free our spirits. The essence of compassion for ourselves and others - what I call Radical Compassion - has three key elements: it is an embodied experience (a felt sense of tenderness), it is inclusive all beings, and it naturally moves us to act from a caring heart. This two-part talk explores the alchemy of Radical Compassion and guides us in awakening this intrinsic expression of our evolutionary potential. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks 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 good evening. I'm really feeling that sense of honoring the quality of your presence and engagement and just really giving yourself to what we're doing here. I just have felt the earnestness in general and, of course, in the groups. And I think many people, as could see this today, are really getting that core teaching of, it's not what's happening, it's how we're relating.

You know, if you scan, just these two days, and let's say there's some spots that you know you were stuck, that were suffering. And I'm kind of inviting you to do that right now. Just remind yourself. If you begin to investigate those spots of suffering, there was a way of relating to what was going on in some way that was opposed to reality.

There was some opposition to what was happening. So it might have been sleepiness and some background notion that sleepiness isn't as good as wakefulness and you maybe weren't getting the most out of your retreat in those moments. How many had a little bit of that one? Can I see by hands? I know how that one comes up for me. It might have been physical pain

and just wanting it to go away so you could really do your retreat, not wanting it to interfere. Okay? Let's do hand raises, yeah. Okay. I know that one too. And for some anxiety or fear that was coming up

and in some way sensing that it shouldn't be happening. Like there's some sense that it's a mistake, or shouldn't be happening, or that I'm bad, or falling short for what's going on. And I bring all this up because there's a kind of cute equation that has been put out there, it's in the Dharma fields, that says pain times resistance equal suffering. And I think it's so useful that to the degree we're resisting and thinking it shouldn't be happening or I'm bad for it happening, that's when we're identified and stuck. Pain times

no resistance. A story. One CEO of an organization was very admired by everybody for his drive and his integrity and so on. He had one embarrassing weakness, which would be when he came in to do his weekly report to the president, he'd wet his pants. And so that was difficult. And And the kindly president, he said, hey, listen, go to a therapist. It's on the company expense, you know. So following week, he comes to the meeting, and again, he wets his pants. And the president said, didn't you go to see the therapist? And he said, well, he wasn't available. He actually had to leave town. But I went and saw a mindfulness teacher instead, and I'm cured because I no longer feel embarrassed. I like that because it's like it has to be about the most discouraging, like, why would we want to do mindfulness?

Kind of an example and it's silly. But if we really get it that it's what we're adding on to the situation that causes the suffering, there's some crack that opens up, some door that opens up that's really freeing. One person today in a group was describing, going and looking at the schedule and seeing that it just kept saying sitting, walking, sitting, walking, and feeling angry that that was the schedule. And then he'd go back a little bit later and look at it, it would still say sitting, and he got angrier. And each time he'd go back, the schedule stayed the same, and he was getting really angry. And he was noticing that he was angry. and the day passed and today was here and he described the humor that he had around it.

It's not what's happening, even the anger, whatever the reactivity is. It's how we're relating to it. One Zen master, many of you probably familiar with this phrase describes freedom as being without anxiety about imperfection, without that added judgment about how things are. So pain or whatever's going on with no resistance is the beginning of healing. And what I'd like to explore tonight is to continue Jonathan's talk, which I think is so powerful on let's have tea with what's here.

What happens when what's here is really difficult? and rather than resistance, there's an allowing, and the real blossoming of allowing is truly a compassionate presence. That's the blossoming of allowing. When allowing is in its fullness, it's suffused with tenderness. So how do we move from when we're in reactivity and really down on ourselves to that compassionate presence? the title of this talk is radical compassion. And the reason I feel drawn to, just as I did with acceptance, the word radical, is because compassion has lost some of its umph, the way it's bandied around.

Most of the time, when we talk about feeling compassion about something or we read a story in the newspaper, let's say, and we go, oh, that's awful. awful. What kind of compassion is that in those moments? It's mental. It's like we know it's a bad thing. But because we are so regularly dissociated from our bodies, compassion is mental and radical compassion means embodied compassion. It means a living dynamic compassion where we feel in a visceral a tenderness. You can feel it. And it means you have to come into your body. So radical compassion requires that we touch into vulnerability. It's the only way that we can genuinely forgive anybody or forgive ourselves is if it's embodied. Otherwise, again, it's like a little

bit of a spiritual bypass. We say, oh yeah, I'm over that or I've forgiven that. that has to be embodied. Aldous Huxley, many of you know, a great writer, philosopher, one of the really the most brilliant thinkers I think of this generation. So when he was dying, and he was dying of throat cancer, and he was surrounded by friends and kind of disciples, he was pretty worshipped. And one person asked him, you know, if he had a capsule, I was like, what was his deepest learning this lifetime?

and he whispered because he couldn't speak and his response was be a little kinder. Be a little kinder. And he had offered that some months earlier or years earlier, but close to the end of his life as kind of a synopsis of his learnings. And then he added on that he felt a little bit funny about that because he produced tons and tons of volumes of profound, brilliant thinking and so on, and it all came down to kindness for him. And yet it resonates.

And the Dalai Lama, my religion is kindness. So our exploration, radical compassion, has been described in the Tibetan tradition as the jewel and the lotus, that as we unfold and awaken, the jewel, this luminosity is the expression of that awakening and its compassion. And because compassion has to start right in the moment, right where we are, the commitment as we train to awaken up these hearts and minds is to embrace the life that's right here that we call self. That's the commitment.

So if we step back, just to give a kind of context, and I often turn to evolution because it brings home for me how impersonal it is, which is very freeing. And if we look through an evolutionary lens, there's these two forces that are interacting and shaping everything. And one of the forces is from our earliest most primitive brain that census separation is afraid is fighting and fleeing and freezing and grasping after whatever will promote and gratify the self.

And this basic limbic energy is absolutely essential to survive. In fact, as we keep on evolving, it's not like we want to get rid of it. But if we're identified with it, if it dominates, if we're moving through the life always sensing a separate self in here that's trying to protect its well-being and protect against others and gab onto things, it's going to be a very limited life. So then there's this second force at play, which is really the call of our potential, our evolutionary potential. I mean, just the way the oak is in the acorn. It's calling us into unfolding.

When we're feeling longing, that's really this awakened heart-mind, just calling us to be all that we are. You wouldn't be here without that calling. It's a very deep part of all of us. And it's really, I often think of it as our future self. it's in a relative plane and what I mean by a future self and I know some of you have

listened to podcasts on future self and so on are familiar is that it's the expression of who we are when we're really manifesting our wakefulness and our love and that can be in any moment but we have that sense

each of us or most of us let me say have a sense that we're emerging more and more in time to manifest who we are. And I'm curious here how many that resonates for, that that emergence is happening, that you're on that path. Okay.

So much of our practice is noticing that we're stuck in a limbic identity and bringing that evolving capacity for compassion to that. and it's not to get rid of the limbic experience, but it's to include it in something larger. And when I go like this, I'm almost modeling the brain, okay? That we're not getting rid of, we're not getting rid of the brain stem, we're not getting rid of, you know, the limbic in here, but we're including it in something larger.

So there's a process of integration. creation going on. That's what it really is, including in something larger. So the poet Rumi, I often quote this, teaches that our path is to seek and find all the barriers we've created against love and then to love them. So I'd like to continue this talk with that being the the way we're going to be exploring how to cultivate radical compassion that we're looking at the barriers where we've gotten kind of caught and identified in that limbic activity. And we're bringing this embodied compassion, this tenderness to include it in something larger so we can keep on evolving.

So maybe just to pause here and just to invite you to check in since we're going to be exploring the barriers to our fullness. I'm going to close your eyes for a moment. You might bring to mind a relationship that really matters to you. And you might ask, what is between me and fully manifesting loving? What's between me and loving without holding back? What's between me and really the full evolved expression?

What you sense is your potential to love? You might just sense a word that comes to mind. What gets in the way? Keep on reflecting if you'd like. But I'd be interested in hearing maybe just a little popcorn style just to put out words. Like, what's between us and love? Just raise your hand and all point. And just let's get words in the room.

Judgment. Fear. Fear. Fear again. Fear again. Oh, my gosh. Defensiveness. There's no wrong answer. Yeah.

Greed. Comparing. Yes. Way back. Fear. Fear. Business. Moving away from... Discombing. Exactly. Avoiding the discomfort. Way in the back. And you have to speak loud. Resentment. That's a big one. Yeah. Self-consciousness.

Conditioning. Okay. So, again, let's just pause and just sense in the fear. So these are some of the barriers, the habits where we get identified. And just even right now, just a sense in the collective field that we're just holding that, we're witnessing and including with some gentleness. But these are the emotional reactions that create barriers. It comes from feeling separate. It comes from feeling that something's wrong. with me, something's wrong with you, something's wrong with life. And what we notice,

are many people notice, is that the more it feels like it's my problem, my barrier, the more solid the sense of self. I'm curious, have you noticed in the last couple of days that when you really felt like I have got a problem, how solid the self-sense is? Yeah. This morning, a friend in the community here shared the trauma of witnessing dog, kill a chicken. And then others expressed, yeah, us too. And the shift that happened in that, not that the pain or fear or hurt for a lost life went away, but that there was a bigger container, there was more possibility for warmth, and there was a belonging to something larger.

And this is the pathway of radical compassion, that we're including in something larger the painful parts of our being and of others' beings. But the inquiry that can be helpful is to know what exacerbates what makes it harder to embrace the barriers. And a simple way I think of it is that to the degree we feel severed belonging to that degree we suffer. Okay? Separation.

And to the degree that in our family environments, our caregivers, we didn't get the attumement we needed. Further severed belonging. I mean, every one of us, all human, human, we're. We're herd animals. You know, we're pack animals, we're social animals, and so others' treatment of us is actually part of our brain development and our social capacity for intimacy.

If you watch a mother rat grooming her babies, those babies are going to have more neural networking going on. It nurtures neural development than the non-groomed baby. One evolutionary psychologist called it the survival of the nurtured. Okay. So how we're treated very young

affects either a sense of more belonging and trust or less belonging and more mistrust, less capacity to embrace the barriers. Not only do when there's non-attunement, do we end up having more limbic reactivity, get caught in that? And again, studies from animals. The chimps that aren't mothered well.

Aggression, depression, anxiety, and binge eating. Okay? So, not only is there more limbic reactivity when we don't get nurtured, but then there's the limbic-inspired narrative that says, I hate myself for the way I'm acting. That's the second arrow. and this is the insult to injury that most of us suffer from. That not only do we feel the limbic reactivity of fear and anxiety and depression

and the whole range, but we don't like ourselves for it. So then there's two basic responses that go. We either get possessed by that sense of badness and not okay and fear. are we numb it. And when we cut off and numb it, we also get cut off from other people. Woman and her husband had to interrupt their vacation to go to a dentist. And so basically she says, I want a tooth pulled. I don't want any painkillers. I'm in a big hurry. This is the woman. She's just extract the tooth as quickly as possible and will be on her way. So the dentist is really impressed. He basically says, you're certainly a courageous woman.

and which tooth is it? And she turned to her husband and said, show him your tooth, dear. So there's a severed belonging that comes in our family and we end up going in the direction of either getting possessed or numbing out. And then it's very much exacerbated in our cultural setting, many reasons. It's exacerbated because we're so busy and so speedy that we don't drop in to connect.

And it's exacerbated, very individualistic culture, and we're caught up in kind of competing and lost in our cyber worlds. And, you know, I was thinking driving up here as we drove through a few towns where there were high school students kind of walking from school or whatever together. And they all had their headphones on

and they're walking in pairs but with their headphones kind of going like this, and there's no contact. We don't have so much contact that, and there's been all sorts of research now on college campuses, that with texting and so on, less empathy, less intimacy. One man describes about on the holidays going to visit his family and decides to stop at one of those rest areas on the side of the road,

And here's what he says. I go into the bathroom. The first stall is taken, so I go into a second stall. I just sat down 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, but I didn't want to be rude. So I didn't know what to say, so finally I say, not bad.

Then the voice says, so what are you doing? And I'm beginning to find this a bit weird by say, well, I'm going, you know, back to, I'm going to Boston to visit my family. Then I hear the person all flustered say, look, I'll call you back. Every time I ask you a question, this idiot in the next stall keeps answering. So culture, now, one of the things about culture I've been reflecting on a lot more is how deeply embedded in our brain and our culture is hierarchy. Everywhere you go, there's hierarchy, you know, and it's in spiritual communities and it's in schools. And it's in it's in businesses, it's everywhere.

And we are programmed to have a pecking order. And even when we're not in a formal hierarchy, we're looking for who has more of what's valued, who has more power, who has more influence, who has more money, who has more whatever. And it's our limbic system's way of trying to secure itself

and feel safe and okay to try to reaffirm our status and to put others down. I've often seen myself put somebody else down in my mind and saying, why? Why bother? What's the good of that? And there's something in inflating oneself and pushing down that's very deep in our animal limbic brain. The effect is most insidious on the non-dominical. cultures in our society.

And think about it, and I think particularly for people of color, the pervasive message in the institutions that we live in throughout our culture that are daily encountered and internalized that has that dominant, you're less or more. It feeds that deep insecurity that we all have that something's wrong with me. fuels the survival brains need to protect and then it blocks access to that which gives us a sense of well-being. Last year I read between the world and me, how many of you have read that by Ta-Nehisi Coates? Yeah, thank you. I just want to read one quote. He says, All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to be twice as good,

which is to say except half as much. These words were spoken with a veneer of religious nobility as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. It talks about throughout his writings how people of color live with fear for their bodily selves.

This is a limbic in full activation. And it's the severed belonging that makes it so hard to feel embracing are embraced. So we're, again, we're exploring the barriers kind of right now, where they come from, but the barriers to are really manifesting our evolution, potential and it's really severed belonging. It confines a sense of who we are. And as with everything we described in the Dharma, the wake-up, and this is the good news, is it's like being

in a cocoon when we're in a limited sense of ourselves, when we're living in a sense of a bad self, a small self, a limited self, a fearful self, that cocoon is, you know, we're comfortable and familiar with that identity, but the cocoon in some way suffocates. And the more that urge in us, that pull to grow is there, the more there is the pressure of the cocoon that's the suffering that wakes us up. That is the suffering that wakes us up. So it's our path to keep on growing. And when we get that we're caught, there's a sadness that can come up that's very deep. So I want to share a story of what I think is beginning the alchemy of compassion, of radical compassion, that I heard a man named Chris Emanuel. And he grew up in

the West Indies. He's now a counselor in Toronto, his family immigrated. And he describes his history. And he describes how the severed belonging in his family, the kind of abuse from his father the beatings and when he'd scream out that would just urge his father to keep going. Shaming in front of his peers. He describes moving to Toronto and he's one of two African Americans. He describes being abused and called the nigger word daily. Then as a teen and a young man he's so disgusted with his shame self that he goes into bodybuilding. It gets very macho strong, you know, kind of body armor, kind of numbs out. So remember I said that either we numb out or we get possessed. And that lasted for a while. Then his mid-20s, that fell apart.

And then he became possessed and really became possessed with a rage towards his father. So now I'm just going to read a story. Stormed over to his father's house to confront him. He brought a boulder and threw it through the back door, let himself in. And his mother is yelling to his father, your son is mad and he wants to talk to you. There's what he writes. She says, the back door opened and my father appeared naked, approaching me slowly. What do you want me to do, son? He said, his voice wavering. Kneel down in front of me now and see what it feels like I commanded. My father knelt before me, bent in submission. I pushed his head to the ground. How could you do this to me? I said,

shouted. My anger broke and tears filled my eyes as I cried the tears I'd never been able to shed as a child, staring down at my father. Great sadness poured through me. For what I had just done, I realized in that I'd become like him. Horrified, I turned and ran from the house. As I stepped out into the snow-filled street, the armor of anger that I built up over the years melted. This was the day that he opened to forgiving his father. He goes on to talk about the visits and how he learned about his father's difficult childhood and how compassion grew. And you can sense through the process that he cultivated a transforming compassion, a radical compassion towards his own heart. So we look at it and say, okay, so how did he get out of the cocoon? The pressure was

really intense. He's feeling the rage, he's feeling that kind of drivenness. And then there's a psychodrama in a way, because that's the best way word I can get for it, where when his father's in that helpless place, that violated self, he's able to see his own unloved violated self. He's finally able to see it and care. And that's what radical compassion requires. that we see and feel the suffering, the vulnerability inside ourselves and each other. Otherwise, it's just conceptual. This is a key archetypal journey that he went through to contact that pain, that unloved cell, to feel the grief for it.

And as his heart breaks open, he then got room for his father. So I want to look at that further, how that arctypictop. people unfolding in a way and Jonathan described it as the hero's journey where we actually have to face what we're running from, how that opens us to radical compassion. I mentioned opening night the poet Mark Nippo. This phrase that's really stuck with me that we're on this path of awakening we're taking the exquisite risk. And that's really to discover the jewel and the lotus, it's that way.

There's a way that we have to take off our armoring and touch what's there. Nietzsche writes, The snake that cannot shed its skin perishes. There's a shedding of a skin, a protective layer that we hold on to that allows us to wake up this radical compassion. There's a story from the Polynesian culture that struck me, where the mother of the tribe goes regularly to the river to shed her skin. But one time she goes and she sheds her skin and the old skin gets caught on a bit of

driftwood. And so she goes back to the village and her teenage daughter sees her and she's totally freaked out and frightened because her mother does not look the way her mother used to look. She's without her skin. So the mother tries to reassure her, but the daughter is so repulsed by this raw-skinned new person that she can't handle it. So the mother wants to soothe her fear so she goes back to the river. She finds the old skin, puts it back on.

And from that time on, humans are mere mortals because the understanding was to be immortal, keep opening to your timeless nature, you need to be able to keep shedding your skin. And in a way that's what we're doing in every meditation. That's what we're doing in any moment that we've sensed that we're caught in thoughts and we say, okay, what's really happening here? Does that make sense that that is a way we're shedding our skin? We're practicing it all the time. And tonight we're just exploring when there's a real intense vulnerability How do we have that courage and how do we be with what's here? The skin that's most challenging to shed is that layering that's blaming ourselves,

that's saying I'm wrong or I'm bad. This is Dana Fultz poet. She says, why wait for your awakening? Would you hold back when the beloved beckons? No, I can't step across the threshold you say, eyes downcast. worthy. I'm afraid and my motives aren't pure. Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining through the open door? Forgive yourself. Now is the only time you have to be whole. Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the radiance of your true

nature. Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain. Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your stories of separation and failure. This is the day of your awakening. So let's, we're going to explore a little more how we can shed that skin and how radical compassion can allow us to really manifest fullness of who we are. And I'd like to use an example with rain because rain, Rain is our practice. Basically, rain is the two wings of seeing what's happening and opening to it with kindness. Rain starts, it's in pairs if you think of it. The recognizing and the

allowing, recognize see what's happening and allow it to be there. And then there's a deepening and a more energizing of the two wings as you investigate, you recognize even more what's happening. and as you nurture compassion flowers. So it's the two wings kind of spiraling and becoming stronger and stronger. And what I thought I do is share with you, because many of you have heard about rain. Who is not familiar with rain here? Can I just see by hands? Because there's some, I know.

So for many of you, because you're familiar, I thought I would just take the elements that have to me. me have been the deepest learnings in the last while in working with rain with myself. And my example is we all have our kind of repeating stuck places. For me, all my limbic survival patterns arise when I start feeling sick and tired and have a lot of demands on me. And then I go into this certain, a survival mode that's very much. very self-protective and it's got a lot of anxious and worry and can I make it through this?

And if I feel this sick now, am I going to be able to go to that retreat and actually, you know, you get the idea. Well, I've had a recent cycle very, very recently. I feel like I'm just emerging. So everything is quite fresh. The skins that I'm shedding, the raw kind of new fresh feeling my environment. And what I have found every time I recycle and really need to purposely wake up the two wings and rain is that as soon as I notice a stuckness, if I can remember in some way to say,

may this serve awakening, if I can remember this is a portal, this isn't like something wrong going on in my life, there's an opportunity to do. deepen awakening. If I can remember that at the beginning of rain, it becomes a kind of atmosphere that allows the whole process to flourish. I wonder, we'll just pause for a moment and just to invite you to check that out. You might sense for yourself anywhere that you've noticed is sticky. And it might be sticky as in you get caught in obsessing. and don't like the way you're feeling about yourself, to stick you as in big self-aversion, reactivity, fear.

But to pick something, some area where you know you get stuck and see if you can hold it with that understanding and prayer that this is your portal, that the more intense the stuckness, the more of the potential for awakening. And just to sense, if you feel sincerely, may this serve awakening, may this serve the awakening of compassion, sense what happens. The recognized begins by getting, this is a stuck place, kind of limbic dominance. There's an identification here as a self.

There's severed belonging. May this serve awakening. So that's the recognizing. And then the allowing is some wisdom in you that gets that as much as the conditioning is to leave that you want to get out of the cocoon so you're willing to stay. That's the allowing. And for me it helps to in some way say whatever's going on and often it's fear. when I'm caught in this kind of vulnerable place, this belongs.

That this is as much a wave in this ocean of being as anything else. So there's a this belongs. You might experiment with that too if something's going on right now, that you wish away, you wish wasn't there. sense what happens when you send a message inwardly. This belongs. This is part of the beingness that's here. So just to keep in mind that when we're holding onto that skin we're basically not wanting

to pay attention to what's here and not wanting to stay with it. So this is the beginning of the shedding of the skin. Then we investigate. And I found that, you know, the key, and this is something I suspect each of you is familiar with in investigating, is to really dedicate to, I sometimes call it a U-turn, moving from that aiming at the thoughts, like thinking, thinking, to the U-turn right back into this body wherever I'm feeling the vulnerability the most over and over to make that U-turn from thoughts right back here, you might feel the throat, the chest, the belly. And investigating is a way,

a kind of inquiring or asking questions that help us to contact more what's really here, the energy, the felt sense, the emotion in the body. It can be helpful sometimes to ask questions like, well, what am I believing right now? For me, often what I find if I say, well, what am I believing it's that in some way I'm failing the test, okay, that I'm falling short. But then I come right back to doing the U-turn right back into where that's in my body, okay? So this has been what's helpful on investigating. The key thing that I discovered in the most recent rounds is how much when I come back to the body there's some part of me, some veil of belief that, well, others have at work,

This isn't so bad. And right now in my life I have many friends that one whose partner's dying, another friend who's been, you know, is paraplegic is in a wheelchair and we don't know if she'll ever walk and other friend that's, it just goes on and on, I'm not going to keep going. But then it's very hard to give real attention to the place in me that's having a hard time. So others have it harder and when I can register that belief and how in some way it's a pushing away and a dismissing, like this doesn't matter, this being doesn't matter, is when there's a sense of, I sometimes call the ouch moment where there's real sadness

springs out. Like how many moments have I not been just acknowledging, hey, this hurts, this is hard. This is hard. It's essential to be able to recognize it's hard. Because that's what lets us feel tender towards ourselves. And as long as we either are, and by the way, we treat ourselves the way our caretakers treat us often. And if they neglected ourselves, we neglect. If they judged, we judge. So in some way saying, hey, yeah, this is a challenge, but hey, others have it worse. Very, very familiar understanding, but have to feel it. And then for me, it brings up a kind of soul sadness. Like how many moments have I just pushed away the feelings that are here in some way diminished myself? How many moments of life have I missed by some way

blaming and not being kind? So that's where the grieving comes up and then it turns into the nurturing. And for me, nurturing takes that, hey, this belongs here and it deepens into this very sincere, you really belong, I care, I'm listening. And even if you're just going through the motions of that, if you put your hand on your heart and say, I really care, I'm here, I'm listening, just going through the motions will reconnect you with an authentic caring. The gesture of kindness is very, very powerful. After that nurturing, For me, the deepest part of the nurturing, after I've kind of offered that, is when I feel the intensity is in some way I take the feelings of powerlessness and grief and everything, and in some

way I offer it into the larger space of loving presence. It's like an ego can't nurture itself. It has to be held by something larger. So I kind of offer it to that something larger, which to me is kind of a field of it's formless and tender and I feel that washing through, just really bathing me with loving presence. That's the fullness of nurture for me. And then it moves past any doing of rain. And I just want to emphasize this as you practice yourselves. The key moment in the rain process that so many people forget is that after recognizing, allowing, investigating, and nurturing to just rest in the being that's there. Get to know that being state. You know, it's just like after a real rain. That's when the fruits, you know,

spring forth. After we do the doing of rain, just to rest in that being is a homecoming to who we are. And the more familiar we get with it, the more we realize that's more the truth than any self that we thought was struggling with fear or grief or anything. I'm going to add a few more comments and then we're going to close. I've accompanied a lot of people with finding their pathways to belonging, the nurturing. And it really is an experiment. It's like every one of us needs to find our pathways. pathways to reconnecting. And to me, it's an experiment that's fresh every time. Like, even though I can say, well, here's what I do, how I feel my way into what happens just

feels like it's the first time every time. So it's not automatic or rigid. For some people, the offering to themselves comes really naturally, putting their hands in their heart or their cheek, finding the message. For some people, it's really just to sense it from something beyond them, some larger belonging, and then they realized that they are that larger belonging. John O'Donoghue says, prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging. So if you're feeling in the grip of that powerlessness or fear or grief, and out of feeling that grip, you reach out to what you long for, and just reach, you know, really a yearning. There's a real deep, deep, powerful wanting to be held. That wanting will

carry you and open you and make you porous to being held. This is the poet Hafeis. Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients. can. Don't surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients can. Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender, my need of God absolutely clear. The longing for belonging is in each human soul, there's some yearning, whether we call it God or the infinite or wholeness or great spirit doesn't matter.

And so this is really about letting whatever arises be a portal so we can get in touch with that the sadness, the loneliness, the vulnerability and find that the other side of that, the other side of that really is a profound, vast tenderness. There's a story I just wanted to share as part of closing about Jarvis Masters who's been living on death row, San Quentin Prison, for many, many years, decades. And he has taken the Buddhist refuges and the Bodhisattva vows, vows of compassion, very, very deep part of his way.

And Jarvis tells a story about being in the prison yard one day. And so a seagull lands in this little puddle of water. And a big young inmate next to him picks up a rock to throw at the seagull. And so following his vow of compassion, Jarvis just immediately instinctively responds and he raises his arm basically to stop the guy from throwing the rock and in the inmates' code of how you do things

you don't do that, you don't stop somebody from doing something so everybody gets alert and quiet to see what's going to come down here and as they're just looking at him you know, how come he's messing with this guy? And so Jarvis looks back and then he says, that bird's got my wings. That bird got my wings. So it sounded a little crazy to people. Maybe that's a good thing if you're in trouble sound crazy. But the young inmate just peered at him kind of quizzically, put down his stone and just dropped it. And Jarvis describes how afterwards

different inmates would come up to him and say, what do you mean by that, Jarvis? That bird got my wings. It kind of became like a Zen Cohen, you know. But we understand that. And this is the gift of radical compassion. That when we are taking that exquisite risk and letting go of our skin, our armoring, all the blame, you're wrong, I'm wrong. And we just open directly to the vulnerability. We open to a tenderness that embraces this life and it embraces all lives. It's the portal to that freedom. So we started with Aldous Huxley say be a little kinder and just starts in this moment and I thought we'd end on that note, just take a moment to close our eyes together. Notice what's right here, whatever's predominant, whatever's

asking for attention, and sense that whatever's right here belongs and sense the possibility of being a little kinder, just in this moment, softening to include with tenderness, whatever's going on right now. You might imagine days and weeks to come if whatever arises there's that remembrance, this too, this belongs. There's that remembrance, this really, right, this moment, what's arising, maybe. this serve awakening. This is it. This is the portal. Can I be a little kinder? Can I open into what's here with a tender heart? These are the words of David White. He says, those who will not

slip beneath the still surface on the well of grief turning downward through its black water to the place we cannot breathe will never know the source from which we drink. the secret water cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering the small round coins thrown by those who wished for something else. Namaste and thank you for your kind attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

please visit tarabrock.com.