Tara Brach - Radical Love: Part 1 - Reflections that Awaken our Heart (2020-08-05)

Episode Date: August 7, 2020

Radical Love: Part 1 - Reflections that Awaken our Heart (2020-08-05) - Radical love arises from the purity of our awake awareness, and cuts through the delusion of being separate and not OK. It comes from and brings out our intrinsic goodness. These talks explore the barriers to this embodied, inclusive and active loving, and include reflections that can help us to free our own hearts and bring true healing to our world.

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 was talking with a friend this week, actually a number of people, about schools, you know, opening, not opening. And one friend was telling me how she was dealing with it. And it reminded me of a favorite old story that I'll share with you. which is a woman describes how a tired old dog wandered into her yard, and she could tell there was no tags but from the collar and well-fed belly that the dog had a home. But he followed her

into her house, and he followed her down the hall and fell asleep on her couch. And her dogs didn't line. She felt like, okay, seems like a nice dog. So she was okay with that and let him nap. After an hour, the dog went to the door, she let him out, and the next day he was back again, and he resumed the exact same position on the couch and slept for exactly an hour. So this continued for several weeks, and the woman got curious. So she pinned a note to the dog's collar, and she wrote on the note that every afternoon, your dog comes to my house for a nap, and I don't mind, but I want to make sure it's okay with you. Well, the next day she got a note on the collar. It was returned to her. It was said this. It said,

he lives in a home with three children. He's trying to catch up on his sleep. May I come with him tomorrow? So this is the era of corona. We have everybody's in different situations. But I'd say the one common denominator are our dogs are celebrating endless pack time. You know, they're loving the ones they're with. And for humans, it's not always that simple. So, that's kind of a little bit of a warm-up. The title of this talk, and perhaps the next few, I'm not sure how long, is reflections on radical love. And radical is, radical love's a term that's out there now. And radical connotes essence are root, actually root. And like radical acceptance or radical compassion, radical love arises from the purity of our awake awareness and it cuts through all delusion

of being separate and not okay. And it, it really comes from and it brings out our basic goodness. Radical love includes all flavors of love. So think of compassion. Compassion is the feeling of love that arises when we encounter suffering. It's that tenderness of love. And radical love also includes the warm, open feelings of connectedness or oneness that come with intimacy with our friends and partners.

and animals. It also is the feeling of wonder and awe at the sacredness of life. So there are many flavors of radical love. In a way, what my understanding really is of spiritual life is that love is the essence of spiritual life in our human domain. And I'll begin in a personal way with this talk. that during my senior year of college, I became increasingly aware that what was central to me, what mattered was this yearning to live my life from love, that that became really important.

And there were several experiences that actually dramatically affected my life course that happened that year. And one was that I had become very politically active. I was really idealistic in a sense, I guess, about, and I thought it was maybe more around the corner than it was, about having an equitable, just peaceful world, a compassionate society. And so I had plans for law school, and I'd go to organizing meetings with fellow leftist-oriented political people. And I started noticing how much the vibe was angry, you know,

that there was a lot of bad othering is what I call it now. And then I'd go on to my yoga class where I'd touch this inner peace and this open-heartedness. And I started seeing really clearly that our capacity to create this world that I believed in required coming from a very different state of mind than I was sitting around me. And one that I felt like I needed to cultivate myself, of course. So that was one piece. And at the same time, a very dear friend who I dated for a while, I met through actually through Tenants' Rights work organizing. Well, he volunteered regularly at a Catholic worker house. Now, a Catholic worker house has taken all of those that anyone in need, really, those in

difficulty and I would stop by there to visit him and wow it was just such a loving respectful atmosphere it was really a model of active caring engage caring so that really inspired me and that's what's possible and then there's a final influence which was during this time I was becoming incredibly aware of how harsh I was towards myself and I had this yearning to stop the war against myself. So I wanted to stop how judgmental I was and all the self-aversion. So instead of law school, I made a real switch and I joined a spiritual community, much to my own surprise and my parents and my family and friends. It was in a short amount of time, but I ended up staying for 10 years, so it wasn't like I didn't flip-flop on that.

I totally threw myself into a path of inner awakening. I didn't use the term, but I was nourishing the roots of radical love, you know, learning to quiet my mind and devotional chanting and prayer and mindfulness and compassion and self-acceptance, you know, that all the practices that can awaken this heart. and then over the years those practices became more relationally oriented and more and more integrated

into how I was with other people and then social activism. So fast forward, here we are, we're closing on a half century later and it only seems more clear to me that radical love and I think of that as a very embodied love a love that's inclusive of everyone, and a love that's active, that engages in the world,

that radical love is what's needed for our inner freedom and for healing our world. So this is what I want to talk about, and we'll be starting much more inner and going outer, but I want to say maybe a little more about the outer, because my inspiration for this talk came from an article I was reading about, how the mayor of Istanbul won his election, and it was a very large mandate, and the campaign was based on radical love. And that was the name of it. And his name, Ammoglu, and I apologize for not pronouncing correctly, he never said anything negative about his opponent. And he took the high road. And his messages were all ones of inclusiveness, a real, an attitude of respect,

towards the opponent's supporters. He spent time listening to them and making clear they weren't the enemy and a real focus on compassion-based bread and butter issues that could unite voters. Now, I bring this up with the knowledge, and this is where we'll go, is that rooting social change in love is not in any way new.

I mean, it's the basis of nonviolent movements. and I was reading more of civil rights activists and theologian Ruby Sales. And she talks about the spiritual depths of people who have been enslaved. And then this became really the black folk theology, the grounds for the civil rights movement. This is how she described it, that these enslaved people brought forth radical love out of the toxic virus of hate. And the song that she describes

that's kind of epitomizes this, the words are, I love everybody, I love everybody in my heart, and you can't make me hate you, you can't make me hate you in my heart. So beautiful. I was listening also this last week or so,

to an interview that Krista Tippett did with Congressman John Lewis about six years ago. Beautiful interview. I highly recommend it. And it has the same energy of radical love. He says in it, when we were sitting in, it was love and action. When we were on the freedom ride, it was love and action. The march from Selma to Montgomery was love and action. We do it not simply because it's the right thing to do, it's love in action. This is radical love. But this is interesting. He points out in this that this love in action,

this experience of radical love doesn't come naturally. It's in us, but it takes training to bring it out of us. And we're going to come back to this again and again because we can't cultivate radical love. unless we're intentional. And he describes it. Back in the 60s, he describes the outward training of radical love, you know, how to be at the protest. This is those that were going to engage in nonviolence, how to stay respectful and friendly towards everyone, including those violating them. And they actually would role play, getting violated, getting kicked and beat up and spit on,

and the training to keep looking someone in the eye and saying, I'm human. you're human. It's pretty powerful. And where we'll take go further is the inner training. And as he described it, how do you see the person that's kicking you as a younger person as an innocent before they were taught to hate? How to learn to see the spark of the divine in every human heart. How not to give up on anyone. This is the hub of it. How do we, through all the conditioning, everything's going on inside us and the ways others treat us and the way our own mind is acting, how to remember the spark of the divine, that goodness. In the Buddhist scriptures, in the poly canon, this unconditional, all-inclusive

love, it's described as meta, that's the poly word, and it's talked about in a very simple, direct way. I love this. Here's the words. Just as a mother would protect her only child at the risk of her life, so let us create a boundless heart towards all beings. A boundless heart towards all beings. So what helps us to nurture this loving? How do we live from loving? And this is the inquiry that really, I think, in a deep way, most of our us are asking ourselves. And if we're honest and we look at our day, and if you just look at today, because that's the easiest way to get the transfer in, we move through our days often on autopilot. And a lot of it, our hearts kind of either numb or disconnected, we're preoccupied.

And sometimes we're actively defended, reactive, aggressive. And in those moments, these great swaths through our day, we've forgotten that love matters. You know, it's often not until we have a great loss to our lives. They're shicken up in some way, sickness, breakups, death, that we remember. I often think of, this is one of my kind of loop back to and wake myself up memories, is one woman diagnosed with cancer and given a year to live and she had a, I think it was a one-year-old daughter. And her mantra became, I have no time to rush. I have no time to rush. Because if we watch our days, we rush away from presence. And it's only with presence that we can be intimate with ourselves and with each other and have the eyes to see that

spark of the divine. In Buddhism, and this is described as the Bodhisattva path, the path of an awakening being, the beginning of a path of radical love is really a practice in remembering that love matters. It's sometimes described as establishing your aspiration, you know, remembering what really matters. In a simple way, for me, the word is prayer, that we're feeling what matters to our heart and acknowledging it. We're actually acknowledging it by putting it out there. For me, what has become part of my life ritual, I think of as bookending the day with prayer, where I sit and meditate at the beginning of the day and I end the day with meditation, and a part of that is a very a moment of just on purpose remembering in some way that love matters

and praying to be to wake up to be as loving as possible and so the way I do it is before setting the prayer out I quiet and I feel whatever's here and I feel sincere and then from there it may be that I say, please, may I be loving and present today, or may this heart awaken. Often I'll say, please teach me about kindness. Because there's something about when I ask in that way, please teach me, I'm more receptive and attuned to what's going on through the day. May I live this day from love? And then I also have to, have that prayer in the end of the day to be awake and loving. And at that time, there's a sense of kind of reviewing the day and seeing, well, how was it? And I may see that moments or the spots

where there was real connection, but also, because I'm being more intentional, I can see way more clearly all the chunks of time where I was not here, where I was in a trance, where I was covering over loving. And you might have noticed this in your own life that the more you're conscious of the importance of relating with an open heart, not being judging, being kind, not racing through the day, the more you'll start noticing all the different ways that were defended or numb. So the first step on the path of radical loving is praying for it on some level. If you don't like the word prayer, that's totally fine. Setting your intention is really a simple way also, thinking of it.

And then the second is to discover what gets in the way. And of course, for me, if you've been with me before, you know, my favorite expression of this comes from Rumi, who says that our path is not to seek for love, but to seek and find the barriers we've erected against it and to embrace them. And I've shared that that final piece, and to embrace them as something I didn't know that was part of the quote, and yet it's absolutely essential. Because if we want to wake up from the habitual ways we create separation, the very way we wake up has to be kind or will create even more separation.

If in our daily life we have habitual armoring against loving, whether it's against loving ourselves or those we're close to, if those are there, we can't authentically open with boundless love to our world. This is why a lot of times in the training in Buddhism with the Buddhist meditations, we start right where we are before reflecting on loving all beings, everywhere, which can get quite abstract, we ask that much more powerful and immediate question of, well, what's between me and loving right now with this person, or what's between me and regarding myself with kindness? So we're going to practice that question and just a little bit together. Because if there's nothing else you take away but an inquiry that helps to shine a

light more on where your heart wants to open, where it's right now defended, that's a gift. Let me first just name a few of the most basic barriers we create. And then we'll look and see how that may be so in our lives. I would say the biggest one. is what I call the trance of thinking. And that doesn't mean thoughts are bad. We need thoughts to live. It means being lost in thought. A lot of the time keeps us from our heart.

And one meditation master was asked to describe the world, and that was his description, lost in thought. So if we scan through today or yesterday, how many moments are we with others and in some way preoccupied? We can't be intimate with our inner life. If there's a veil of thoughts, we just can't listen to the wisdom of our body or heart. And it's the same thing with others. And often the veil of thoughts is in the form of when we're talking,

we're planning our response or we're caught up in our ideas about things or we're not really listening deeply to what's going on for them. And of course, we even create more distance when our virtual realities are very different, when our beliefs and assumptions are very different from one another. I remember one writer from the New Yorker describing how when his son turned 12, they lost their closeness. They were really living at different worlds, and they couldn't have a conversation. And then he stumbled on texting, which he had hated,

but then he found that can be the way to have connection with the way. my son and the son taught him some abbreviations. And he writes this. He says, one, he didn't have to teach me because it was so self-evident was L-O-L. I knew right away that it meant lots of love because he put it at the end of every message he sent me. Such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation for the 20th century. It's like a little arrow of love you can sound out to anyone you know. So then he describes the next. six months of his infatuation with instant messaging and its power of emotional transmission. And he's sending LOL to everyone he knows.

His sister was getting a divorce and he wrote to her, we're all behind you and beside you. L.O.L. Your brother. He says, my father got L.O.L. in Canada. Everyone I knew at work, at home. Everyone. I sent them L.O.L. no matter what was happening to them. Well, I happen to be I am texting my son from the airport,

and he says that he's hating being away. Oh, and the guy who's writing this says, you know, I hate being away, but I have to travel to make money because right now we're needing it as a family, and then he signs it off LOL. And his son responds, dad, what exactly do you think LOL means? And he responds lots of love, obviously. No dad, it means laughing out loud.

And he said his world crumbled. And of course he had to go through every message he had sent for the last many months. All the LOLs he had sent to people in the midst of their suffering. Well, it's a silly story. But I like it because it reminds us of how we really can be living in different virtual realities. We're fed different news. We come from different emotional conditioning, social conditioning, many of us, and we're not able to relate empathetically or with love to each other unless we know how to quiet our minds, step outside of our

habitual conditioning, and listen to each other in a different way with our intuition and our bodies and our hearts. that's the blessing of a daily practice of mindfulness that even if it's not a training in the heart directly, it's a training in the heart because we learn to wake up out of thoughts and come back into the one place, the presence, the embodied presence that radical love arises from.

So the biggest recommendation from this talk is that daily practice and learning how to step out of thoughts and remember I'm not my thoughts. You know, I don't have to believe these beliefs. There's something you might practice right away if you haven't done it before in an informal way is when you're talking to someone and you want to deepen the possibility of loving connection. Find some anchor in your body. It might be your breath, your hands, and have your intention be as you're talking to keep coming back to that anchor and then listen from your body and your heart to what is being said.

So that first block to feeling connection and love is just this incessant inner dialogue. Let me name a few more. The second I want to mention which you can anticipate is judgment, which is a subset of thinking. And first, just to differentiate judgment from discerning wisdom. Discerning wisdom might say, if you're looking at a friend or partner or whatever, and say, well, when you take that third drink of alcohol, you start acting in ways that hurt yourself and others around you.

That could be discerning wisdom. Judgment would say you're bad for drinking. and you can tell the difference in how your body and heart feel, because when there's judgment, there's aversion, there's a pushing away with a sense of that badness. And of course, as we've been discussing now for many moons, the crucial layer of judgment that most everyone needs to uncover is that undercurrent of superior, inferior,

that societal conditioning that tells us that some people, perhaps a different race, a different religion, a different class, is worse or better. So, unless we uncover the hidden biases and judgments, we can't experience radical love because any judgment that's in our system, whether it's towards us or towards another, armors our heart. And you might just for a moment pause here. And reflect and sense, is there someone that you bring to mind that you know in your heart of hearts that you do have a feeling of being superior to? Somebody that you feel superior to. And is it possible if you're feeling superior to someone to also feel real love?

With judgment, the heart's armored. and your neurons are probably deactivated, which means we're not able to fuel with another. They become more of an object, a bad other, out there. Okay, so the blocks to loving, finding the barriers to loving, the thinking trance, judgment, another block is that we create distance whenever we have an agenda, wanting something from the other, whether it's attention, time, help, approval, love.

Now, here's the thing. We're wanting all the time. It's universal and it's natural. So that's a block that comes up all the time to full, open-hearted, loving. But we can become aware of it. The reality is that to the degree that the other person is an object of wanting, that we really have a strong want for them to give us something, give us their approval, give us their attention. We really can't relate to their wholeness. We can't see their whole being and we're not relating from our whole being. We're relating from a part of our system that's grasping. As they say in India, when a pickpocket sees a saint, they see the saint's pocket. So that's another block just to keep our eyes on, is that what we want from others.

And the last one I'll mention is fear, which is when fear comes out, when we're afraid of being judged by the other person. I remember doing workshops on fear and we get into small groups and talk about what do we fear most. Most people fear other people's judgment. It's a really big deal for us. pack animals, so who really care about how we're seeing. So we fear people, we fear each other, we fear being rejected, being hurt, being exposed. And when we're fearful, fight, flight,

freeze. We have these habits of pulling away, pushing away, defending. Fear shuts down our capacity to learn, to be fully mindful, and to be fully open-hearted. So let me let me, pause here for a reflection. I've spoken a lot. Let's take some moments for you to investigate your most common barriers to radical love. And I invite you to close your eyes for a moment. And you might begin even before this reflection to feel your intention, your prayer. It may be please teach me about love. Please may this serve waking up my heart. You can approach this reflection with curiosity and with care, not with judgment. And you can bring to mind now a recent encounter with someone in your family or close person

may have been in person or on the phone or online or online where you suspect maybe you weren't all there, not fully present. So bring someone to mind and reviewing. the interaction, just tuning into it, you might ask yourself, was I preoccupied? Was I in some way in a trance of thinking that might have distanced me from being fully present? Was there any judgment there? Any resentment or blame? It might have been that you were judging yourself in some way. Maybe you were judging the other person. Was there any wanting there, an agenda, to get something from the other person, to have them cooperate with you in some way, agree with you, give you something.

Or maybe was there wanting for something different, like to get back to work or to get food or a drink? Was there an agenda that created distance? And you might scan and sense was there fear? Was there something you were defending against? Maybe being judged, falling short, being hurt, being taken advantage, of, defending against the loss of your time and energy, and with whatever you're noticing, witness with the wise accepting heart of a grandparent, you know, that you're watching a

habituated or reactive young being. And it's not that something's wrong, these barriers to love are universal conditioning, to protect and enhance ourselves. And if we can become aware, of these ways of blocking love. We can then choose to meet them with a healing presence and wake up from being imprisoned. So you might take some deep breaths, open your eyes as you're ready. So my friends, if we were alive together right now,

I'd be asking some sharing of what you noticed, what were the barriers that came up. And when we actually pay attention to the barriers, we can sense that the things, that there's a lot of vulnerability around them, sometimes judgment. And the reason I love to ask people to share that, and I share mine out loud when I can, is that we realize we're not alone. And that's really important.

And I invite you to kind of reflect on that right now, that there are many, many others practicing like this, and seeing these same human barriers. Just know that judging them just creates more barriers and that it's, every one of us is wired to have wants and fears into armor, and that you are also given the awareness that can awaken you to an undefended heart. So whatever you found blocking you from radical love, it's something in your inner life that's asking for attention. to look at that way helps, that there's some part of us underneath the addiction to thinking

and underneath the fears and underneath the judging and underneath the agendas, the wanting, there's some unmet need, there's some vulnerability that wants attention. And if we can relate to it, bring our attention there, we can free ourselves. But we need to keep bringing our attention right back to what's inside us, because we think about loving others and paying attention to others, but what we really need to pay attention to is the vulnerability in ourselves that when unseen leads us to armoring our hearts. I'll share an example.

I was composing notes for this talk and had a call with a white friend who was an activist, spiritual caring, and she was talking about, we were talking together about the violence of racism, how it's in us, how we're part of it, and how for all of our sake we need to make repairs. And then she started sharing her shame, how she came into this so late. She said, how did it take me so much time to see this? How could I spend so long avoiding the hugeness of this? And of course, she's noticed in the last month or so much more tension and self-consciousness

and trying to please her black friends because, when we have blocks to our inner what's going on ourselves and we're judging ourselves, then relationally we get really tense. If we feel like we're a bad, unworthy self, we cannot bring that into having a mature loving relationship. So we have to keep circling back to being in loving relationship with whatever we're finding here. We need to include ourselves in heart space.

it's so easy when we start looking to see the ways we create separation. If we start looking, we'll see how preoccupied we are, how our needs for attention really we end up grabbing and our anger and how we push people away with our judgment and our gilting. And it's very easy then to hate ourselves for that. And you may be listening and be ashamed of how you're engaging with that. the wider society, you might feel like you never do enough. You might be aware of white fragility or your self-centeredness that you're just occupied with me and aren't giving out. Well,

if we want to be part of the healing, the first step, and we're going to be concluding really with this, the first step is to feel that it matters, that radical love matters. The second step is to have the courage to see where the blocks are. And the third step is to be incredibly forgiving towards that. It's just part of our humanness. Keep paying attention, pay attention to the vulnerability under the blocks, but don't judge them. It's like one of my favorite teachers, Sri Narasarga Data. He says, all I ask of you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. and discover you're beyond. And what he means is

make love of the life that's right here perfect. If you want to hold this world with radical love, start right with the life that's right here because you can't skip over it. Make that love perfect. And by perfect it means unconditional, unconditionally tender. And if you do, you discover you're beyond,

any sense of a self, because in the moments of radical love, the self-sense dissolves. Remember where we started? Radical love cuts through that illusion of separateness. It frees us into belonging. Far from indulging ourselves, it's this kind of unconditional, tender presence with our inner life that actually is the groundwork for bringing a non-vile violent, loving presence, and engaged presence to our world. And I've watched this over and over again. I've watched it in my own life. I've watched it in friends, clients, students. And I think the last little anecdote I'll share is really my mom, who made such a deep imprint on me. She was a practicing alcoholic when I was growing up, very active drinking, and I'm the oldest.

So I had the least impact from, because she drank less when I was young, very young. But my siblings, to different degrees, have symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome. And my mother felt a lot of guilt and got very, very depressed. when she started becoming aware of the effect of her drinking. And through her drinking years, and she stopped when I was a senior in high school, very loving relationships with all of us, and also very challenging, too.

A lot of edges, she had a lot of anxiety and depression. So she went into recovery. She was deeply immersed in Alcoholics Anonymous in both the recent. receiving support and also became very, very active sponsor. And it was her place of spiritual awakening of she realized she wasn't alone. And through that, those decades, really grew to accept herself. Know herself as a caring person.

Forgive herself. And I think she continued right to the end of her life to be pained whenever she registered the ways that her drinking caused her offspring injury. But she wasn't at war with herself. And here's the thing. The more she came to peace with herself, the more she really brought care to her own being, the more selfless she became.

The more she knew her own goodness, the more she radiated. And people were really drawn to her. She had the knack of seeing the goodness and others and having others feel very loved and very accepted in her presence. And I remember in the final few years when she was living with us, she'd come with me to the Wednesday night class. And at the end of class, she'd go around looking for, she'd go around the room and look for whoever looked most lonely and strike up a conversation with them. And I'm sharing this because

I got to witness over the decades with her what I see as so many, in so many, which is coming to truly forgive ourselves, actually dissolves the selfness and frees us to love without holding back in our world. So we started with radical love as a grounds for transforming the world. And we'll continue this whole understanding, and John Lewis said it's so beautifully, this training to see the spark of the divine. And we'll look at how we can do that with those we've habitually pushed out of our hearts. Because this is what can evolve us as a community of humans. Really, whoever we've pushed out of our hearts, can we find a way to include them.

Thomas Merton writes, life is this simple. We're living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story, our fable. It is true. So this is our path to see this goodness and to bring it forward in each other.

And in that spirit, will close with a practice of radical love, of bringing presence and care into relationship. So take a few moments to set yourself in a way that you're sitting relaxed, at ease, alert. Take a few full breaths. And again, as we did before, feel your intention, that prayer to awaken your heart. Take a moment to sense what might want to let go a little in your body, perhaps to bring a slight smile to the mouth.

And scanning your life, choose a person in your life with whom you'd like to deepen that experience of radical loving, person you care about but maybe feel some distance from. And for this practice, not a person where there's great animosity, there might be some judgment or defensiveness, disconnection, but someone you know you care about. Imagine being with them. It could either be a recent time you're with them or a time that you might be with them in the future, but imagine

close in what it's like and aware of your habits of being with them. You might have that very powerful question what is between me and radical loving is there preoccupation judgment are you wanting something from them are you fearing something and as we do with the acronym rain simply recognize and allow what's there just let it be there pause with it with the eye of rain we begin to investigate steepening the attention when you're with that person and there's judging, or there's an agenda, or there's fear, what's that like in your body?

Try to sense what it feels like in your throat, your chest, your belly when you're there with that person. Whatever the barrier is, there's always some sense of it in the body if we can listen deeply enough. And sometimes it can help to ask yourself, well, what am I believing at those moments? Maybe you're believing the other person doesn't respect or like you, that you're not special. Maybe you're believing that you don't have time to be with them. Or maybe you're believing that there's something you need from them. But whatever you're believing, what's it like in your body in those moments?

maybe you might notice there's something you're unwilling to feel. There's some fear in there, some vulnerability. Just let there be that courage to touch what's there. Usually when there's distance, there's some vulnerable place inside us that wants attention. And you might put your hand on your heart because the beginning of offering nurturing, which is the end of rain, it's just that attitude of caring, that you're listening and you're caring about what's inside you. And you might sense what that part of you most needs right now, what kind of reassurance,

what kind of message, what kind of reminder. It might be that love is here. Trust it. It might be trust your belonging. It might be a message to the fear place. Thank you for trying to protect me, but I'm okay. Sending kindness, sending forgiveness inwardly, sending comfort. And if it's hard to send it yourself, you might imagine some larger being,

someone you love and trust helping you by sending love and care through your hand into your heart. Or it might be a spiritual being or a formless, loving, intelligent, light-filled universe that streams through your hand. but sense love coming in, and sense that you can let go into that loving, belong to that loving, the moments that I call after the rain, or just realizing that loving presence, as right here, but that's what you are. More than any story about yourself, you are this presence that's right here. And it's from this presence that you can now begin to pay attention to the other person. you can deepen your attention to them notice the kind of behaviors or what you're picking up from them

recognizing and allowing whatever you're perceiving is coming from them and then investigating by more deeply attending what might they be feeling or experiencing what might they be protecting or wanting feeling into their vulnerability Sometimes the question, where does it hurt? What's it like being you? You might sense them as a child, the innocence, before they were conditioned in any way. You might remember and remind yourself of moments when they were really happy, when they were regarding you with much love and tenderness.

Take these final moments to sense their basic goodness. the spark of the divine, the consciousness, the light, the intelligence, the love that lives through this being. And as you do, in some way, sense your care for them, your appreciation. And you might even imagine the next time you're with them what would it be like if you actively express that loving. because the fruition of radical love is its expression. Imagine letting them know your love, your appreciation. And you might ask yourself, who am I when I'm loving without holding back? We close together, sensing others also practicing,

opening their hearts, seeing goodness, expressing love, sensing this shared heart space, this shared heart space that holds this whole world with radical loving, that longing that says, I want to love everybody in my heart. May we live with our hearts wide open. May we hold our inner life,

each other, and all beings with reverence and love. 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.