Tara Brach - Radical-Compassion - Part 2 (2017-05-10)

Episode Date: May 19, 2017

Radical-Compassion - Part 2 (2017-05-10) - 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 welcome. I'd like to start tonight's talk with a story that I heard. It was told by a social activist whose name is Fran Peavy and she describes walking through the Stanford campus and seeing a group of people and some video equipment and they were all crowding around a chimp. Actually, there was two chimp. There was a male chimp who was loose and a female who was on a chain and the crowd was trying to get the two chumps to mate.

The male was really into the idea. In fact, he was grunting and tugging at the female's chain. The female was really scared. She was whimpering and pulling away and trying to avoid his advances. So for this woman, Fran Peevy, she said, wave of empathy swept through her for the female chimp on the chain and then she had an experience she said she'd never forget and I want to read to you what she wrote. She said suddenly the female chimp yanked her chain out of the male's grasp. To my amaze

when she walked through the crowd straight over to me and took my hand. Then she led me across the circle to 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. And I think many of us look at the suffering around the globe and really sense that the healing will only come with a shift in consciousness that's really expressed by increased compassion. I mean, what else will make it possible

for humans to stop oppressing non-dominant beings, human beings and other species that are beings? And what else will make it possible to really end violent, the cycling of violent conflicts? And what else but opening our hearts will make us feel a tenderness to this living earth, so we want to protect this earth. And the Dalai Lama basically described compassion as a necessity, as the hope of the world. So this is the second of a two-part series on compassion,

and really exploring, well, what is true compassion, a living compassion? How do we cultivate that? Now, the word compassion literally means to feel together in that suffering, to suffer together. And it's the feeling that arises when we encounter suffering and feel that motivation in some way to alleviate it. Now, I felt like Gary Larson captured it really well in one of his cartoons. In this one, you've got two women, typical far-side character. and they're looking out a window at a grotesque creature, and one of them is terrified,

and the other one's saying, calm down, Edna, yes, it is a giant hideous insect, but it may be a giant hideous insect in need of help, which is the nature of compassion that we see past the mask to that fellow feeling that comes, oh, this being too is hurting. What will explore is the essence of living compassion

and what I call it is radical compassion. And the reason why is that it's really characterized in three ways, what really makes it radical or cutting to the roots. And one of the signature characteristics of radical compassion is that it's embodied, it's a felt sense. It's not abstract. It's not like we read a story in the news and go, oh, those poor people over there, way over there.

it's like there is a resonance in our body that we feel, we care. That's part one, one characteristic embodied. The second characteristic of radical compassion is that it's not exclusive. It's not just for this person or just these people. It's a heart quality that embraces all beings. It's all embrasive. and the third is that when we feel that rising up of tenderness and that inclusivity we are motivated to do something

in fact the center where it correlates to compassion in the brain and the frontal cortex where there's a kind of neural net for social behaviors is right next to the motor cortex like right aligned it wants to move us into action So radical compassion expresses really the flowering of our potential. It's sometimes described as the, in terms of the bodhisattva, you know, ideal with the bodhisattva being an awakening being, that when we're really all of who we can be, it's a natural expression to our world. It's really the shift from moving around in a bubble where we feel separate and we're doing things for this self right here.

to moving through the world and sensing the wisdom and truth that we're in an entirely interdependent field of being. And that there's a natural sense of, of course, we want for the well-being of all. Einstein put it this way. He said, a human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He said, we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires

and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our tasks must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. So this is really a description of the flowering of our potential in the Bodhisattva tradition and Buddhism and in terms of evolutionary psychology, the real full awakening of our capacity for empathy, sympathy, and compassion. The capacity has been evolving now for the last 120 million years. It's during this time that the mammalian brain and the neocortex has developed this whole

capacity for affiliative emotions and love, compassion, empathy. One of the experiments I thought was, there's several of them that are really brilliant on compassion. The one I really liked was done with rats in the University of Chicago, and they were seeking to find out whether a rat would help to release. a fellow rat from an unpleasantly restrictive cage if it had the opportunity. And the answer was yes. It did that. But not only that, if the rat was given this little pile of chocolate chips, it would save at least one of the treats for the captive if it was still in the cage, which is a lot for a rat, you know? I know people that would have a hard time sharing, so

So they would share that chocolate treat. It didn't matter whether it was milk chocolate or dark chocolate. They just went and shared it, you know. Anyway, I like that experiment. And what evolutionary psychologists say, well, starting right with Darwin, he argued that this fellow feeling serves survival, that he writes a group or community that has many members willing to contribute or sacrifice for the common good would be victorious over other groups.

That it's our capacity to cooperate and care for our young and for each other and for our group that allows us to really develop these advanced social lives. E.O. Wilson, social biologist, very, very well known for taking this track forward, basically says Those species that have developed advanced social lives, EU sociality, bees, ants, termites, ourselves to a degree, have been staggeringly successful and extremely rare. This is the development, this is the evolutionary development. But we humans are complex because we continue to have all the forces alive in us of individual selection, i.e., me, how do I take care of me?

especially when we're stressed. Individual selection goes, va-voom, and all of a sudden everything's... I was thinking of one friend of mine who describes what it's like when we're in traffic, how everybody else is traffic. We're not the traffic. It's everybody else. That was great. But we know it. We know how when we're stressed, it comes right back down to promoting and defending ourselves. And while we're hardwired to be pro-social and cooperate with our group, within our group, we consider other groups and tribes and societies and nations, we consider ourselves as superior to them. So being pro-social and being really cooperative within your group doesn't mean that you're pro-social with everybody.

It's limited in that way. And you can see that how often, you know, everybody gets together and they can get together and fight the war, you know, but how quickly one group considers itself on the basis of race or socioeconomic factors or whatever it is, there's a hierarchy. It's not the end of the evolutionary story, though. And this is where the hope is, that just as in our individual, lives, if we look over time, most of us feel that there's a movement towards being more kind, that we're moving in that direction. It's happening. Consciousness is evolving as a species.

And one of the great articulate proponents of that, Stephen Pinker, in his book Better Angels of our Nature, how many of you read that? Can I see by hands? Better Angels of Our Nature? He basically says no matter how horrified we are at violence in contemporary society, if you compare it to earlier periods of history, we're way less tolerant of torture and cruelty. There's way more recognition of human rights, of other non-human creature's rights, more than there was before. There's more inclusivity, more responsiveness towards those that are not in our immediate, it group. It's just happening. And the other piece of good news is research is showing that

not only is it happening, we can participate in it happening by cultivating it, that we actually can cultivate this capacity for compassion. So keep in mind that when we talk about cultivating compassion or radical compassion, what is needed, is being able to be in touch with our inner life, with the feelings in our body and heart, with what's called proprioceptive awareness, the capacity to feel ourselves as we're moving through space as a physical entity. It's correlated with compassion. We cannot feel that tenderness if we're not in our bodies. So let's look at what impedes the unfolding of compassion and what facilitates. That's going to be the rest of our talk here.

The main block is when our basic needs for feeling safe, are feeling gratification or feeling attached to others when they're not met, we go into a stress reaction that overrides our capacity to feel those affiliative feelings. What happens is that when those needs are met, we go and pursue substitutes to try to make. make ourselves feel better. So we don't feel love, so we stuff ourselves with food. We don't feel appreciate our scenes so we keep completely fixated on how much more we can achieve. We go after substitutes. You know, we don't feel a real sense of belonging with others so we try to ramp

up on the entertainment with others so we feel that we're in it together in some way. We dissociate. When we're seeking substitutes, when we're trying to make ourselves feel better, we leave ourselves and we leave our capacity to be tender towards what other people are feeling.

So let's get back to the chimp that was on the chain and most of the spectators and bystanders happened to be males that were cheering on the mating. and it was kind of like watching a sports event and there was like everybody was kind of together in it and there was a lot of energy and like hey this is this

fun interesting thing happening and so they kind of got overrided with this engagement and affiliate of sports arena kind of bonding and it overrided the perception of the suffering of a fellow being does that make sense just how that kind of wave took over just in those moments. So when we're pursuing any substitute,

and it could be overeating, drugs, impressing someone, proving we're right, we dissociate from the vulnerability, the place we're trying to really heal, and we leave ourselves, and we leave our capacity to feel kindness. It's really easy to see it when we're feeling unsafe. I mean, if you go back to the traditional example of you, you're being chased by a tiger in the jungle and the spears are flying and the blood flows

to your extremities and your heart's pounding and you're able to race as fast as possible. Every bit of your focus is on escaping and you're not sitting there going, oh boy, I'm really feeling at risk, you know. And you're certainly not trying to tune into the unmet needs of the predator. He's hungry, he's got children to feed, whatever. The brainstem's taken over. this primal survival drive and the frontal cortex is quieted down, right? We're in survival mode.

Well, the deal is that we're under stress and on some level in a kind of survival mentality a lot of the time. We have a lot of... It might not be, for many people, it's bodily stress. It's the fear of bodily injury, especially for non-dominant cultures. it's a much more risky world in a physical way. But for many, many people, it's not bodily injury, it's the anxiety about failing, failing at work,

or failing in love and being rejected, preparing for something that's coming where we might in some way run into trouble, fear of losing our capacities in the future, the deep fear that there's not going to be enough time. How many of you have noticed how much in the background there's a sense there's not going to be enough time? Can I see by hands? Yeah, that one's a big one, that squeeze. When we're in that, that feeling of not enough time, we're not really available in a way

to care and respond to our deep inner needs are those of others. And the classic study that comes to mind all the time for me because it feels just very personally relevant. Many of you've heard of, which was the Good Samaritan study that was done at Princeton. And here the seminarians were given a practice sermon. And half of them were given the story of the Good Samaritan. And the other half, another random story from the Bible. And so the idea is that they were supposed to go to, they were supposed to walk to another building.

to give the sermon, the seminarians, and then they were going to be evaluated on it. But on the way to the other building where they had to give the sermon on the Good Samaritan or whichever when they were assigned, there was a person in a doorway who was moaning with distress. So the whole point of the study is, would these folks that were going to become seminarians that were going to be giving a talk on either the Good Samarians? or something else, stop and help. So here's what happened. It depended on how much time they had before they had to give their sermon. If they thought they'd be late, they didn't stop to help, even if the sermon they were about to preach was about being a good Samaritan.

And I think that's like really, really a classic teaching. That as much as we are good people who believe in doing good things to help other good people in trouble. If we're caught in stress, if our limbic system is activated, it shuts down our normal morality, our normal perceptiveness, our normal capacity to attune. It shuts down. We get cut off. You might take a moment to just check in here and bring to mind whether it was today, or yesterday or whenever, when you felt caught in some form of stress, where either you were

the stress was you were craving something, really wanting something. Food, drugs, somebody's attention, you're anxious about something under a time deadline, whatever, remind yourself of the kind of body and mind state you were in. And just check and sense how attuned were you to the other people around you? Attuned being able to sense what that person was living with, they're going through, their mood, their vulnerability, their fears are wants. How attuned were you to your own inner life, when you're anxious. Are you aware of what's under it, of the vulnerability, what Pema Chodin calls a soft spot? When we're stressed, it's not our fault. We leave ourselves. We leave that integrated wholeness that has the capacity for attunement. We disconnect.

And that's a lot of moments, that we're in some way chasing after something. We're on our somewhere else, we're running away from what is uncomfortable right here, and what's necessary for an authentic state of compassion to develop radical compassion is intention. Because if we're not mindful that primitive fight-flight-free stress conditioning will override the more recently evolved circuitry of compassion. We're going to move to now how to become more intentional. Because this is what evolves us. As we get more intentional about being here and being attuned, we actually wake up that capacity. Now here's the quote from the Dalai Lama and I think this is a terrific one. He says, I don't know why people like me so much.

It must be because I value Bodhi Chita. That's the awakened compassionate heart. He says, I can't claim to practice it, but I value it. So I think that's great because what he's saying is that he too sometimes disconnects. He's not always living in the full bloom of compassion, although he's in it. I think a lot, but that's all relative. But he cares about caring. And isn't that true for you too? That even though we all disconnect, we forget that we care about caring,

to the degree that that caring starts getting more and more conscious, that we're moving through our life and there's a very awake sense in us that caring matters, I want to care. Like I have a part of my morning practice is a prayer saying, please teach me about kindness. that when we start caring, it actually makes us available. I think of it as if our evolutionary potential calls us more and more as compassion becomes something that matters to us consciously. How many of you would say, yes, I do care about caring? I'm more and more conscious about that.

Can I say? Okay. So it's waking up in us. So we'll do the first attentional practice that facilitates compassion is perhaps the most well-known in the Buddhist bodhisattva tradition and very simple one you might again close your eyes arrive let yourself be right here you might take a few full conscious breath

this is a reflection on aspiration a conscious connecting with what we care about and we begin by just sensing into a place in our life that is really challenging, a place where we struggle, something that's difficult. It may be something to do with your health, it may be something to do with the relationship that is conflictual, it may be something to do with a person that you deeply care about who's having a lot of trouble, It might be a place where you're really encountering a lot of fear and insecurity. It might be something that's been around for a long time that's a pattern you're just aware of

that's really a challenging one for you. Maybe an addiction. The Bodhisattva's aspiration is, may whatever arise serve to awaken this heart of compassion. So if you attend to what's arising in your life, life that's difficult. Explore what happens when you offer that prayer. May this suffering serve to awaken my heart. May this suffering awaken compassion. You can also frame it as an inquiry, how might this challenge, this difficulty awaken my heart? And sense what happens to your way of relating to

suffering, your way of relating to the landscape of your life. And what it would be like if whenever this struggle came into the forefront, there was a part of you that was remembering that what really matters to you is awakening your heart. May this awaken my heart. It said that the heart of Buddhism is compassion and the heart of compassion is compassion for ourselves for the life that's right here. You know, we cannot authentically experience radical compassion for another if we're not in our body, in our heart, feeling care for the life that's right here. You can open your eyes if you'd like. Now for many of us, when we are struggling, it's not only hard to feel compassion for ourselves, we actually are in a state

of self-aversion. Most of us when we're struggling really, not only are we struggling and feeling fear or feeling the shame of an addiction or whatever it is, but then there's an added layer of not liking ourselves for what we're going through. I'm weak, I'm undeserving, I'm not okay. So it becomes absolutely essential on this path of awakening compassion to be able to begin to soften towards ourselves. There's a story that really touched me about one woman softening, a woman named Vanessa, and I wrote about this in True Refuge. She was in a maximum security prison.

And some of my friends are teaching six-week mindfulness course at the prison. Now, Vanessa was over six feet tall, a really large woman with dyed red hair and tattoos all over her body. and she was known in the ward as a bully. And she protected some women and kind of relentlessly tormented others. And during the meditation classes, while other participants would join in for the discussion, she would sit there and kind of scowl.

So anyway, she never missed a session. And at the end of the eight-week course, the question was, well, what did you get out of this? How did this affect you? And so Vanessa went last. And she started by saying, well, I really liked that poem about the pirate. Here's the poem. I'll just read you a part of it.

This is from Ticknod Han. It's called Call Me by My True Names. I'm the frog swimming happily in the clear pond, and I'm also the grass snake who approaching in silence feeds itself on the frog. I'm the 12-year-old girl refugee on a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate and I'm the pirate my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving please call me by my true name so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once

so I can see that my joy and pain are one please call me by my true names so I can wake up and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. So Vanessa had referred to that poem and she said, well, that got me thinking, that got me to know something. And then she spoke really softly so people had a strain to hear. And she said, all my life I was the bad one, I was the problem one. And now I realize I'm suffering too. So the room got very quiet and still and she had.

tears in her eyes but everybody was looking at the floor just respecting her words. And just so you know after that group graduated and my friend kept teaching the course heard word that Vanessa had changed in a pretty deep way that she wasn't a bully. She was a much sadder and quieter person. She was slowly coming to terms with the realness of her own suffering. I am suffering too. if you want to wake up self-compassion, the gateway is a recognition of this hurts in here. And we do a lot to not recognize that reality.

We treat ourselves a lot the way our caregivers treated us. So often when we're suffering, instead of going, oh, this really hurts, what we do is say, I deserve to feel this way. Are we say, others have it worse? I'm sure some of you have experienced that one. Are we ignore it? Or we try to fix something? But to simply, and this takes tremendous courage and presence and honesty,

to simply say, wow, I'm really hurting. That's rare. And yet, it's in that moment that the tenderness of compassion for the life that's here begins to wake up. Because it means we're in our bodies, we're feeling the hurt, and we're acknowledging it. We're not running away from it. I can say personally, I've had to learn that over and over again,

especially when I'm in that vulnerability of feeling my body in a slump kind of sick and yet having to show up and meet demands and feeling really vulnerable about it. And usually I go through everything first, how to fix it, how to deal with myself, before I'll just simply say, wow, this is hard. And as soon as I do it, and as soon as there's that tenderness that washes through, it's not a self-centered thing. It's like tender space opens up and it's like then there's room for the life that's here. It actually moves us beyond egocentricity where we can just acknowledge a suffering. That's the power of this prayer. May this awaken compassion. The challenge is that

we don't stay with ourselves but when we start acknowledging our own suffering and holding our own being with compassion, it naturally starts widening out. We can naturally then encounter someone else because we know how to inhabit that tenderness. It includes them. We're just there for more people. And the challenge then is that, as I explained earlier, because of our conditioning, we widen out just so far. But then others are others. They're not really a part of us. That's that's our deep, deep conditioning. We perceive others as different, and then they become what I call unreal others,

where they don't have the same subjective reality as we do, and therefore we don't feel compassion towards them. One of my favorite examples is a guy who hears a knock on the door, and he opens the door, and on his porch is a little snail. So he takes the snail, and he throws it like as far as he can. Three years later, another knock on the door. He opens the door and snails there again. The snail says, what the heck was that all about?

We basically create other and our hearts are not open. And while it's a silly example, we armor against difference and it harkens back. You know, humans spend thousand times as long roving in small communities that had to watch out for others that were different. had to consider them the bad guys to rally and defend against them. It was necessary for survival, thousand times as long as in our current kind of contemporary communities. And yet that conditioning is still alive and well and we still scan for difference, the more different someone seems, the less our heart feels attuned and tender. So we're much more responsive to the suffering of somebody that has that sameness and we create hierarchy.

and any time we feel like we're better than another, then they're in some way less than human, they're not like us, and we don't have that activation of the parts of our being that can feel care. A lot of the time this is below the line, and by that I mean, we are unaware of our bias.

We're unaware that we've created an unreal other and that we've cut off our hearts. I'd like to share a story with you that was seminal for me. I heard it many years ago when I was, my family was Unitarian and we had a church we attend in Montclair, New Jersey. On Christmas Eve we'd always go to church.

And this story was shared one Christmas Eve, and it was written by Unitarian Minister. it has stayed with me over the years and I share it now and then because it has such power for me. So this minister describes it was Christmas Day and she's with her family or two children and her husband and they're traveling and they stop at a restaurant that's nearly empty on Christmas day and she sits her son Eric who's a one-year-old in a high chair and then suddenly she hears from him this squeal. He's squealing with glee and he's going, hi there, hi there.

And he thought those two words were one. So his face is alive with excitement and she could see. And then she looked at the source of his merriment and she says she had a hard time taking it in all at once. She describes a tattered rag of a coat and baggy pants and they in the half zipper at half mast over a spindly body, gums as bare as erics, hair uncombed, unwashed and his hands were waving in the air, flapping about on loose wrists. And he's saying, hi there, baby, hi there, big boy, I see you buster. This woman says, my husband and I exchanged a look that was a cross

between what do we do and poor devil. Eric continued to laugh and answer, hi there, every call was echoed. This old geezer was creating a nuisance with my beautiful baby. I shoved an cracker at Eric and he pulverized it on the tray. I whispered, why me under my breath? Our meal came and the nuisance continued. Now the old bum was shouting from across the room. Do you know Patty Cake? Adaboy, do you know peek-a-boo?

Hey, he knows peek-a-boo. So we ate in silence except Eric, who was running through his repertoire for the admiring applause of a skid row bum. Finally, we had enough. Dennis went to pay the check imploring me to get Eric and meet me in the parking lot. I trundled Eric out of the high chair and looked toward the exit. The old man sat poison waiting his chair directly between me and the door. Lord just let me out of here before he speaks to me or Eric, I headed towards the door.

It soon became apparent that both the Lord and Eric had other plants. As I drew closer to the man, I turned my back walking to sidestep him and any air he might be breathing. As I did so, Eric all the while with his eyes riveted to his best friend, leaned far over my arm reaching with both arms in a baby pick-me-up position. In a split second of balancing my baby and turning to counter his weight, I came eye-to-eye with the old man. Eric was lunging for him, arms spread wide. The bum's eyes both asked and implored, would you let me hold your baby?

There's no need for me to answer since Eric prepared. propelled himself from my arms to the man's. Suddenly a very old man and a very young baby were involved in a love relationship. Eric laid his tiny head upon the man's ragged shoulder. The man's eyes closed and I saw tears hover beneath his lashes. His aged hands full of grime and pain and hard labor gently, so gently, cradled my baby's bottom and stroked his back. I stood awestruck. The old man rocked and cradled Eric in his arms for a moment. and then his eyes open and set squarely on mine. He said in a firm, commanding voice,

you take care of this baby, and somehow I've managed, I will, from a throat that contained a stone. He pried Eric from his chest, unwillingly, longingly, as though he were in pain. I held my arms open to receive my baby and again the gentleman addressed me. God bless you, ma'am, you've given me my Christmas gift.

I said nothing more than a muttered thanks. With Eric back in my arms I ran for the car. Dennis wondered why I was crying and holding Eric so tightly and why I was saying, my God, my God, forgive me. One teacher that I studied with said, just don't push anyone out of your heart, including yourself. I just remember when I heard this story, I just started reviewing all the people that in some way I had not just included as real.

And I remember reading the book Stones from the River and getting another jar. Some of you might have read that. It's about dwarfism, the narrator's a dwarf. And again, it was one of these things like I had had in my mind, unreal other. and just to sense the realness and the heart and the awareness that lives through all of us and can we remember because that remembering is what's going to bring healing to our world. So again, radical compassion, it's embodied, it's inclusive, that we can look past the mask and see the vulnerability, the, the,

the being in there that is struggling like we're struggling, that wants to feel love, that's afraid of failure, to see that, to see that in all beings. And one of the things that's helping us over time, and this was in Better Angels of our nature, through the publishing of books, through reading stories, we start to enter into more lives and we start to register what's beyond our normal daily reality. But the starting place, and we're going to come back to us again and again in all the teachings are that we have to be able to feel it for the life that's here. That's the only way we'll be available to feel it elsewhere.

The widening circles start with our own reaction to people when they feel different, to be with that in a completely forgiving way, and then once we're at home and ourselves to move through the world and ask that question what's it like to be this person? What's it like? Now, last piece, the last few minutes here is that radical compassion is not just embodied and inclusive

we then respond and there's this urge to relieve and relieve suffering and often what happens is we start feeling compassion but then we get distracted or we feel shy about offering care. We hold back our loving. So there's many, many different responses in our world that we can act on. I mean, it can be anything from writing letters and protesting

and engaging in social action that's very outward to offering a prayer and sending our love through energetic means and everything in between. But part of the awakening, compassion is in its fullest flower when we act, when we express. In our close-in circles, many times it's to be able to know the difference

between fixing and accompanying others like staying open when they're having a hard time. Ticknut-Han says one of the most beautiful things we can do is just that kind of expression of, darling, I care about your suffering. This is Henri Nguyen, Catholic writer,

and truly a mystic, a real leader. He says, when we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find it is 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 could stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.

So I want to close with a brief meditation on that note of really this cultivation of radical compassion, being in our bodies, opening our hearts in an inclusive way, and extending ourselves, extending kindness. And you might just as you close your eyes and take a few full breaths, really invite yourself right here into the moment and bring to mind someone who you care about who's having a hard time. And once you've brought this person to mind, you might take a moment to sense,

how do you typically relate to them in their hard time? Is it kind of a story that you abstractly think, oh, I'm sorry about this. How much does it really awaken you tenderness? Not to judge yourself, but just to notice because that noticing is the beginning of deepening your caring about caring. And sensing that aspiration, may this awaken compassion in my heart, may this suffering awaken compassion. And let that move you to look closer, to look behind what whatever personality mask might be there and sense, well, what's it like to be this person? What might this person be believing about the world that's creating disappointment or fear

or hurt? If you could feel from the inside out what this person is living with, the fear or the loneliness, disappointment, what's it like? Can you include that in a visceral way? I sense that person's vulnerability held in the, it's like waves holding the waves in your ocean. This room. Just to breathe and sense what's it like for this person. Feeling your tender care and sensing your wish for this person some way that you might

communicate you're keeping them company, that you care. That's simple. Imagine letting them know your presence and your care and how they might respond. You might widen your attention to sense all those that are suffering in the same way. You might even bring to mind another particular person that you know as well as those you don't know. And since this tender-heartedness includes us all. So you're breathing and feeling your heart, include all of us, including your own being. You might widen your attention and sense all those that are here and all those listening

to this podcast and joining in this reflection and many others around the world, caring about caring, caring, caring about caring and awakening this boundless tender heart. Sense us, this is the hope of the world to be with ourselves or loved ones in widening circles to we close in a very simple way with a prayer for our world that all beings everywhere might awaken this heart of compassion that we all might dedicate ourselves

to taking care of the life within and around us that there may be peace on earth that all beings everywhere, awaken and be free. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.