Tara Brach - Realizing Your Deepest Desires (2017-03-15)

Episode Date: March 17, 2017

Realizing Your Deepest Desires (2017-03-15) - This talk differentiates between egoic intentions (driven by wants and fears), and our true aspiration (deepest desires) to manifest our full potential for awake awareness and love. We explore ways to realize and open to our deepest desires when we are stuck in self-promotion, grasping and conflict, so that our aspiration becomes a compass of the heart that can guide us in living with wisdom and compassion. 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 begin this talk with an ancient and contemporary tale and it's about a king and his wife that were entering into old age and they didn't have a child so they were trying to trying to attune to who's going to really take over the kingdom, who's going to rule, and that a very wise counselor they were consulting with and the wise counselor who's also very egalitarian-minded person said, let's just open it to all, we'll just do interviews

and see really who's the best person and it's kind of like a contemporary nonprofit, you know, they're going to just invite everybody to the kingdom and do interviews. So what they did was going to have interviews in the royal chambers, but in order for it to be really fair, they wanted first for each person to be able to present themselves without an unfair advantage. So they opened up the chambers and the royal closets and people had a choice of whatever they wanted to wear. And they had a banquet available. So those that were waiting for their interview would be able to eat well. And they had music and entertainment. fancy soaps and it was a very, very gracious kind of an invitation for all.

So the king and the queen and their counselor waited in the royal chambers for people to start lining up for their interviews. And hours and hours went by and finally they went downstairs and found that everybody had left. They had eaten all the food and they had kind of left with some of the clothing, they'd even taken the fancy soaps. And they forgot to meet with the royal couple. In fact, they really forgot why they came. And so it is with many of us much of the time that we enter this life and we get kind of lost and waylaid and we forget what really brings us here and what really most matters to us. So, this is our theme or a place of inquiry tonight which is really what are our deepest desires and I'll kind of use the word aspiration also, what are the deepest desires and how do we

really live according to the compass of our heart and not forget? And in a way you can think of the whole evolution of consciousness that a key element is remembering what matters. And so it is that in most meditations that I lead and most gatherings and workshops and retreats, right at the beginning we have a reflection, you know, what is it that brings you here? What do you want? What is the deepest part of your heart want?

And it's interesting that often people will come up afterwards and say, you know, I reflect on my aspiration, but I really, I just don't know. It's like nothing really comes to me. And then some people find that it's kind of prepackaged, like they say, you know, okay, what I want is to be happy or I want to touch peace or I want to be more loving, you know, but it's like kind of a mantra, they tell themselves it's not coming from a very deep and alive place. And then some people find when they get really quiet and they reflect really deeply, they touch something quite alive and juicy and beautiful that really inspires them,

but actually carries them into what's next with a very available heart. So what makes the difference? And one of the basic principles on the path is that the more we wake up and touch the touch presence, really have that direct experience of feeling really here and awake and tender and open-hearted, the more our intention is to touch presence. And then the more we have that intention, the more it energizes the way we pay attention. So it's considered a virtuous spiral. And it's one that many people can relate to when you touch something you cherish, then that

becomes more in your consciousness. The Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi put it, I think, in the most elegant way. He said, the most important thing is to remember the most important thing. And that's it. So we begin by really perhaps maybe the key inquiry, which is how come we forget? I mean, what happens when we're forgetting. And mostly we're not aware of how much we forget. You know, the more we're in a reaction to stress.

In other words, when we're in traffic, when we have a deadline, when in some way we're late to an appointment or we're afraid of failure that we're going to miss out in something, we're in that biochemistry of fight-flight freeze. And the very nature of it is we're cut off. from those parts of our mind and our heart and our being that are in touch with our deep intention. We're just not living from that depth, we're living from really that drivenness of fear and wanting that come with fight-flight-freeze.

And last week in my last talk we were talking about trauma which is the kind of the full-blown fight-flight-freeze, we're really caught in fear. And in those moments, it's a trance. We're in a trance most of the time but it's such a trance that there is absolutely no remembrance of may I awaken my heart, may I be free, may I touch the truth if I am, it's like a complete small compartment of trance and we act out of that. One of my favorite, totally ridiculous illustrations of this is of two hunters

that are out in the woods and one of them collapses and he doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed and the other one panics and he whips out his phone and he calls emergency he calls 911

and he's gasping my friend's dead my friend's dead what am I going to do and the operator says calm down I can help and she said first make sure he's dead

and so there's a silence and then a gunshot is heard the guy gets back on the phone is, okay, now what? And I apologize, I'm sorry. But you get the idea. When we get caught, we forget what really matters. We're really in fight, flight, freeze.

And I'll speak more personally that I know for myself, and it's a big swaths of time, that I'm really in busy mode and I'm speeding along. And my main intention is to check things off the list, to soothe my anxiety. And in those moments, I'm not thinking, well, what will serve deeper presence or more open heart? I'm just really wanting to check things off the list. You know, my mind has gotten narrow and my intention is coming from that place. And the truth is that when we're stressed, we're fueled by discomfort. Even though it seems like we're living in a lot of thoughts,

what's actually driving us as feelings. And I've always found it really interesting. This is Chief Justice Douglas who described the decision-making at the Supreme Court level, and he said 90% of the decision is made by feelings and the other 10% by thoughts to rationalize the feelings that we've just decided on. And so it is with our lives.

If we really look at the decision-making and how we move through a day, it's based on feelings. Then the question is, what domain of feelings? Are we operating off the fight, flight, freeze, fear, and grasping? Or is it from what is considered the purity that's underneath, which is really our deepest aspiration? for love, for freedom to wake up. There's many ways of describing it. So I would like to just invite a pause here and say,

just to check out today. You know, just what was today like for you? And you might just close your eyes for a moment. And before you scan, you might say, well, just imagine that today was the last day. of your life. And from that vantage point, did you move through it in a way that felt aligned? It's okay that you were doing small tasks but did you navigate whatever the conversations or activity was with a quality of wholeheartedness of authenticity of presence and if you're finding

no, it wasn't aligned, what was going on? Was there a sense of being on automatic and that maybe behind the automatic the kind of familiar fuel of anxiety like me trying to get things done? Or was there judging? Was there worrying, planning? Were you craving or wanting something and chasing after it. So as you scan and sense what was really going on, what were you really, what level of wants and needs was driving you, not to judge because noticing is the beginning of shifting. I might think of it in a developmental way as were you being driven by egoic intention, which is very familiar, very habitual. Or was there some sense from the depth of a kind of true heart intention or aspiration.

You can keep this reflection in mind if you'd like to open your eyes you're free to, just to maybe further define when I talk about egoic intention. It comes down to really the intention to defend against threats or problems, to promote our self-interest, you know, to secure our attachments to make ourselves feel better and not to feel worse. That's kind of the egoic level. And I often describe it in terms of a spacesuit that we get born into a planet that's inherently challenging.

And we develop this egoic spacesuit to help us navigate, and we need it. And it helps us say, oh, danger there, go that way, and hey, something you need and want that way, go after. And we navigate with it. But if we're living constantly, if our life is wall-to-wall being driven by egoic intent, then we get identified with the space suit and we forget the consciousness that's here. We forget the heart that's here. We forget a much more deep and vast and mysterious belonging that really can carry us home,

just remembering it, wanting it, longing for it, which takes us to true aspiration. and true aspiration has a lot of expressions. So when I say, what is your true aspiration or true desires, it can take different shapes and different moments. Sometimes it can be, I aspire to feel love. I want to love without holding back, you know. And sometimes it's for truth. I really want to know truth.

Just reality. What is reality? And sometimes our deepest aspiration might be a sense of, you know, that peace that surpass all understanding. You know, profound peace. It has all these different expressions. Sometimes it's for creativity to live in a really authentic, creative way. Each of these has a common denominator.

And this is I'm going to kind of give a kind of definition for true aspiration or true desire, which is our true aspiration is always in some way to manifest fully who we are. It's what's already and always here that we want to manifest, unfold it, live it. It's not for something outside ourselves or down the road. In fact, the only place that you can actually experience a true desire is in the moment.

It can only be felt right here. So some of the criteria, the signs, of true desire, when you've arrived at your true desire or true aspiration, it's about really manifesting your potential in some way, it's about a quality of presence that can experience it in a living way and you'll feel a kind of sincerity. I can say for myself that when I am prayerful and really in touch with what matters, it feels totally sincere. Like there's just, there's no been there done that, there's no edge, there's nothing but just that purity of yeah this really matters. It has a kind of an innocence to it and for me when I'm really kind of

in that and there's a sense that something's calling me home that I just want to relax back and rest in the awareness and love that's here because I'm that's home. I want to come home. So I'm just giving you some of the flavors. Now, the Buddha taught that our entire life arises from the tip of intention. So that whatever your intention is right now, whether it's the surface waves of wanting, craving, fear, are it's that deep, tender place of longing. Whatever your intention is, that then creates what happens out of it. It's kind of like your karma unfolds from your intention.

And so that means in a conversation if your intention is in some way to prove yourself or to dominate or to get approval or whatever, the conversation will unfold in a certain way based on that, the kind of egoic level. And if you're in a conversation and your intention is to take the risk to really not prepare in any way, but be totally available to connect and to understand, you're going to have a whole different experience. The poet Mark Nippo calls that exquisite risk when our intention is to absolutely come unarmored into the moment so that we're available, to be available to be change, available to have real connection. What's our intention?

So there's two different pathways we'll explore as we continue in this reflection to shift from the egoic level, which we all have some of and we need some of. We just want it not to be dominating our attention all the time, but to shift from the egoic to that level of that purity of our true desires. and one of the approaches for shifting it is by deeply reflecting, okay, what's my spiritual aspiration right now? And that's when we're a little quiet or you'll find if you're busy and stressed out and you try to do it, you're just going to have a lot of thoughts.

So put that aside. The second way is when you are stressed out and you're stuck and you're really caught in reactivity to be able to pause and say okay so what's my intention? What's driving right now? Because if you are in the middle of a conflict and you have a way to take a time out

and you say, okay, what's my intention right now? My intention is to get back at somebody, okay? Or prove I'm right. That's a big one we have. If you get that and then you pause some more and you just are with that with kindness, not judging it.

And a deeper level of who you are and your intentionality will start unfolding itself. What do I really want? What do I really want under that until you get back home in what we might call true aspiration?

So those are the two pathways and I'm going to give you a few different examples of the latter because I feel like it's so powerful to begin to pause and bring mindfulness to intention when we're caught in egoic patterns. So we're going to look at two places where we get hooked in those patternings where we can use intention to come back home.

And one of them will be when we're promoting ourselves in some way, the other will be conflict because they happen all the time every day, okay? And for promoting ourselves, we know that one of the, you know, it comes on all levels, self-promotion. It could be from the level, the material level, that we're trying to acquire more money and more possessions or more approval or more power, just status in the world. You know, it's our narrative, our story that we want others to know about ourselves. We're trying to in some way get that across. That's self-promotion.

My husband Jonathan Faust has a bio that he has out there, and I thought I'd share a little bit about his bio. One thing on it is certified pesticide applicator expired. And the way his bio ends is Jonathan Faust, M.A. And for years it was like that. And then a few years ago, somebody said, okay, I know what MA is. Well, what CSA stand for? It stands for Cops of America.

So that was his self-promotion. A big way that we try to promote is to win to be the best in some way. One-upmanship. There's a story about some stores on a main street in a very small town that were like side-by-side-by-side, no space between them. And they all sold the same kind of murder. merchandise, so it was very, very competitive. One day, one end, the owner put up a sign saying rock bottom prices. And that prompted the competitive guy on the other end to say lowest prices

in town. So the guy in the middle is going, okay, how am I going to deal with these aggressive maneuvers? Then he gets a really bright idea. And he put his sign up and it said, main entrance, enter here. So we get very slick in the ways we try to pull it up. One of the biggest domains for self-promotion is promoting our own comfort, our sense of pleasure, you know, kind of grasping after more satisfaction and more pleasure. And instead of the deeper, longer-term gratification that comes from our deeper desires. Again, a story to illustrate is of a woman who goes to her priest one day and says, you know, father, I have a problem, I have two female parrots, but they only know how to say one thing.

And so the priest inquires, well, what is that? And she says, well, and she's embarrassed, but she said, well, they say, hi, we're prostitutes, do you want to have some fun? And so the priest is really upset. He goes, that's obscene. And then he gets a brilliant idea. He goes, you know, I might have a solution. I have two parrots myself.

And I've taught them to pray and read the Bible. And my sense is that my parents can teach your parrots to praise and words, in worship and stop saying that phrase in no time. So the woman's really enthusiastic. She goes, great, I'll bring them over. So the next day she goes to the priest's house with their parrots and the estersers her in and she sees as two male parrots and sure enough they're holding the rosary beads and they're praying. So she's impressed and she placed her parrots with them and after a few minutes the female parrots cry out in unison, hi, we're prostitutes, you want to have some fun.

and there's a stunned silence and finally one male parrot looks over at the other and says put the beads away Francis our prayers have been answered so I want to again say that

we need the egoic space suit self or we wouldn't reproduce and wouldn't do all sorts of things in this life and so it's not like bad and good and yet But when we get identified with that, when our life is, we're constantly pursuing pleasures

and constantly trying to get another's approval and constantly trying to prove or right, we forget who we are. And so we're not in touch with the deepest longing, which is really to manifest this hard and this awareness that expresses our true nature. So, there's an understanding that the more stress we're in or the more we're driven, the more forgetting there is. This is Oprah Winfrey says, before you agree to do anything that might add even a smallest amount of stress to your life, ask yourself, what is my truest intention?

Give yourself time to let a yes or sound within you. When it's right, I guarantee that your entire body will feel it. And when we get stuck, when we're grasping and chasing after, it adds stress. What is it really long for? Now a hundred years earlier about, approximately, Dage Lawrence put it this way. He said, men are not free doing just what they want. Men are only free when they're doing what the deepest self wants and there's getting down to the deepest self.

It takes some digging. So when we're stuck, how do we get down to that deepest self, our deepest longing? I'd like to give you an example of one woman. I worked with some years back. She both came to classes and also we did some sessions together. She had left government work and was a CEO of a for-profit business that was involved with sustainable development. and she was a sought-after consultant.

This is a woman that cared deeply about the world, about the environment and about economic justice, and she was a super-achiever. She graduated from Yale. She was very politically networked, very leveraged when I met her, and a competitive person. And she came to therapy,

and this was interesting, she came because she was getting in touch with just how driven she was to be a player, to be visible and influential and powerful and how it was creating in her a sense of shame and isolation, the degree of her drivenness. How many moments her focus was on numeral uno, how is this going to leverage me personally?

She felt like she was leaving home, and I think meditation got her more in touch with that. So we met. And we took a recent instance that she had, in her mind where she had had a news interview about the field she was in and she had focused a lot on her own accomplishments and kind of deflected attention from others that had made some major contributions. So I asked her, so what was your intention in doing that? Said I wanted to look good. And then I said, well what will that do for you? Because

this is the process, you keep saying, well, what will that do for you? Well, what that, what Will that do for you? And I said, well, so if you look good, then what? Well, I get more admiration, more attention. Okay, so what does it do for you to have more admiration, more attention? Well, then I know I'm worthy. Ah, so what does that do for you if you know you're worthy? Well, then I trust that I'm lovable.

Then I trust I belong. Bingo, that's your aspiration. you want to really trust that loving and lovability, trust belonging. And then I asked her, so if you trusted it, like if you're really feeling loving and loved and belonging, what's that like? And it took her and she said, okay, she kind of had to go into that and she said, well, it's like, I'm going to read what she wrote, on this field of light, I'm alive, I'm tender, there's no boundary and everything in the world's

part of me. I said, okay, so just get familiar with that, just feel it, feel it right now in your body, your heart. And then her practice was, when you leave home, in other words, when you find yourself caught in that more ego-level intention, you know, of kind of promoting herself. forgive it because it's absolutely conditioned. This is not like we choose to be self-aggrandizing, it's just conditioned, forgive it, and then say, well, what am I wanting? Oh, what am I really wanting? Well, what will that do for me? What will that do for me? I call this tracing back

desire because if you trace it back and back, it goes from those surface ego-level waves that drive us most of the time to a deep, vast place in us that's very tender that's just yearning to come home to the truth of who we are. Now, she did it many, many rounds and just to an update, she's still totally engaged, totally influential, you know, she's really, she goes at it, she's a driven person, way more confident, just some basically more confident and more collaborative, which is really the way the world needs to go. And her description was, she says, I'm feeling a lot more joy, which is the truth because it's never joyful to promote ourselves. It gives a temporary zing and it's very biochemical and it's a real zing and we get

very attached to it. But it's not joy. Joy is in homecoming. So that's just one example of tracing back, you know, and there's a beautiful kind of understanding that to be kind or to be really who we are, we need to swerve frequently from our path, that we might be on a track, an egoic track, but to really be a line, we're just going to have to keep on being flexible to really be who we are. A brief example that I loved, again from, I got this from the poet Mark. Nipo, who I highly recommend his poems and his writings. He has a story in one of his books about a cyclist who worked and prepared for months for a cycling race that was going to take place

out in the country. And he got into great shape and there the race begins and within very little time he's way, way ahead of everybody. He's in the lead quite a bit. And then all of a sudden a great blue heron sweeps down, wing spread. who's right over his handlebars. And he's stunned. And he stops his bike and he's just straddling. Because in some way this heron opened him up to something he had been chasing his whole life. There was a moment that he opened to.

And everybody else is catching up and he has stopped and he's confused. And we'll go to the end of the story years later. people would say to him, well, now and then, well, what cost you that race? And his response would be, I didn't lose the race, I left it. In that moment, that deep intention to be available, that sense of exquisite risk, oh, whatever the goal I thought it was, do we have this flexibility to have something deeper? Carry us, open us, stop us, make us avail. He was available to be changed.

That's being aligned with deep intention. Thus far I've been talking really on an individual level, but we can also look at parallel the intentions that drive a society and a society that's based on egoic level intentions is going to be, in terms of we're talking about self-promotion and feeding ourselves, is going to be an ever-inclusive. there'll be ever-increasing consumption, addiction. Many of you might have seen on the front pages of the,

the front page of the Times today, that large sections of the Great Barrier Reef are dead, before schedule even, before they thought they're dead. This is horrific. This is a major horrific piece of news that reflects, you know, the devastation of global warming, which has to do with greenhouse gases that are because we're overconsuming fuel. The intention that runs a society has great effect. And when that

intention shifts, you know, if we shift from gross national product to gross national happiness, to really living from that intention that humans be there to help each other, enjoy each other, that we live more simply and nourish this life web, that's the shift to true aspiration. So we've talked so far about how do we drop down when it's self-promotion? I want to, the second domain, which is, again, one that's pervasive is how do we shift our intention when we're in conflict with another person? And again, this is a huge one because we spend a lot of our time trying to control each other. in some way. And when another doesn't cooperate, we get offensive, we get aggressive, we try to

dominate, we try to manipulate. Illustration, an old man in Phoenix calls his son in New York and says, I hate to ruin your day, but I have to tell you that your mother and I are divorcing. 45 years of misery is enough. And he screamed, the son screams out, Pop, what are you talking about? And he said, and the father interrupts, we can't stand the sight of each other anymore. We're sick and tired of other and I'm sick of talking about this and he says, go call your sister in Chicago and tell her, hangs up. Okay, so brother calls a sister and she's, you know, she's freaked out too. So she calls her father and says, you are not getting divorced, don't do a single thing until

I get there. I'm calling my brother back. We'll both be there tomorrow until then, don't do anything to hear me and she hangs up. Okay. Old man hangs up his phone and he turns to his wife. Okay, he says, they're coming for Thanksgiving and they're They're paying their own way. Every one of us knows, and this is the particular area we get most caught in, is blame,

averse of judgment and blame. And we know what it's like. So that's the egoic level that we're most familiar with, the criticizing. And we do it, the intention behind it, we're trying to control things. We're trying to find some ground. We're trying to be right. We make others wrong and we try to be right. So it's a powerful opportunity if we really want to wake up our consciousness.

It's a powerful opportunity to explore, okay, what's the intention here and can we in that presence come to a deeper, wiser, more liberating intent? An example of how this works in this domain, one of the of the men that actually attended this class some years ago talked to me about how he and his partner were locked into this kind of growing kind of tension. And background briefly, he left a very secure job, well paying, decided he wanted to build this business as an executive coach. He was really excited about it and he's doing all these extra trainings, he's taking trainings

and communications and diversity and focusing and so on. His wife has meanwhile become super anxious about income and security. And so she starts getting more and more critical about how he's prioritizing his time, how he's running things, how small his client base is, etc. Almost every conversation ends up descending into that same argument with her being critical and him defending and getting very distant. And in general, she basically was punishing. She was angry and upset and punishing towards him.

And he described one day coming back from a day-long training and she's questioning him on how that training was really going to bring him clients and getting angry and he gets very angry and he cuts her off. And he says, you know, why do I have to justify every step of the way? Then he told her, I feel like I'm the enemy and you're just at me all the time. And I told you're sick of it. So that was the one we talked about. That's the one we explored together.

And I said, okay, so you're angry and what's the intention? It's to push her away, to defend myself from her attacks. And then I said, so what's, you know, if you had a really sense, what are you defending yourself from? and he said it's from the hurt. He said, you know, if I don't push her away, then I have to feel hurt that she doesn't trust me. So, defending against that hurt. And I'm defending against the sense that she doesn't care

that I'm pursuing something I'm excited about. So we paused there and that was a place for self-compassion, that feeling of hurt. If you want to get down to deeper intentions, you have to take care of the place that's feeling, upset. So he brought some real care there. And after he had some time, I said, so what is the deepest intention? If you're back with her, what is it you're really wanting to happen with her? He said, well, I want us to be close again like we used to be. I want us to care about what the other person cares about and to understand each other. And he said, I want to be allies, not enemies. So I had him go through an inner process, you know, of imagining speaking with her,

And I said, I want you to get in touch with the part of you that has that deep intention. It's more evolved self. I sometimes refer to as his future self in the sense that that's the, his being, once he's really awake and mature, he'd have that intention. And I said, and through the eyes of your more evolved self, what's going on for her? What's her intention? Well, she's afraid. You know, we're drawing on our savings now and there's very very,

little buffer. And she's hurt that I don't care about her fears. So then I said, well, from the perspective of future self, what does she really need? And she said, she needs me to show her that I care about her fears, that I'm willing to listen. So this was the practice he had, which was every time they'd lock into conflict, he would try to call on, you know, when He felt hurt by her reaction. He'd, internally he'd breathe and offer himself care. But then he'd call on his future self, that intention, that they be allies, that they connect, that they have understanding.

And little by little, it gave him more choice on how to respond when she lashed out. He was able to say things like, okay, what's behind that? I feel like you're afraid right now. Is that what it is? Like check out things and start listening when she said she was, that, you know, how much their financial situation was shaking them up. And so they started being allies and looking at how could they create a way of doing it together so that she would feel more secure.

And he then was able to express his vulnerability that he needed her to trust him some and to care about what he cared about. So it opened up communications. And I found this that often in conflict, usually it's one person that has to lead the way a little bit in making it safe enough for the other person. But if one person can ask themselves what really matters here, what do I really care about? They're going to be then coming from their more evolved self and have more choice in how to meet the needs that felt like they weren't meetable, how to work with both people's needs. There's new choices. I think of this often as when we're in conflict, our mind makes the other person the enemy. And as long as we're, you know, the intention is

to in some way deal with the enemy as an enemy, I want to push them away or beat them or prove I'm right, we're going to stay in the same ago a gloop. But if we can instead sense our intention to be allies that we want to connect, there's all sorts of creativity that's possible. And I love, you know, there's a very, very well-known quote from Lincoln, I do not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends. Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends? Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends. That is the shift from egoic to true aspiration. When we can hold it in that big a way,

the poet Edwin Markham put it this way, he drew a circle that shut me out, heretic, rebel, a thing to flout, but love and I had the wit to win. We drew a circle that took him in. talking again on the individual level but the exact parallel with our larger society. If the intention is to others are the enemy and the intention is to defend against the enemy, the walls against the enemy, attack an enemy,

then it's going to keep us in the same cycles of violence. If the intention is to be allies, to collaborate, to be friends, then we get to move towards peace. So let's pause here. Let's take a moment and I invite you to check into where there might be a relationship that could use your deepened attention and presence. Just do a little bit of practice right here on the spot. So see if you can bring to mind some situation where you get it conflictual, you know, reactive with somebody, family, friend, colleague.

This isn't not a major, major hostility, but where you get into a pattern where you know that you're reacting from your ego and they're reacting from theirs. I'd imagine one situation that is representative. Imagine a situation where you're kind of stuck in your... in the defenses or the aggression or whatever it is. You might ask yourself, what's my intent right here? Am I trying to protect myself from hurt? Am I trying to be right to improve my position?

To get something I want. By trying to get back. And whatever you notice on the egoic want level, just to regard it with compassion. I think of it like you're the ocean. It's just waves. It's a pattern of waves that's developed. It's compassionate towards it.

In fact, the more you're kind towards that ego level, the more you'll be able to drop into something deeper. So you might sense what happens if you really are kind towards whatever's going on inside you. Then investigate more deeply, what's my deepest intention? What really matters? If you and this person were at the end of your lives, what we're at the end of your lives, what would you wish? See if you can let your deepest aspiration fill you. So you look through

the eyes of your more awake self, that the other person may be sensing a bit where they're vulnerable, what they need. You might notice if there's more of a sense of possibilities, choices that open up when you're remembering your deepest intention. Knowing that this takes repeating many rounds, where attention goes, energy flows. You might imagine over and over that you could be pausing with this person or with children, parents, partner, friends, noticing what the intention is in the moment with kindness, but then saying, well, what really matters here? We know we don't want to go through the decades, sleepwalking, chasing after comforts

and pleasures, cotton, judging and blame, we don't want to miss the fullness of love and aliveness and mystery that's who we are. Mary Oliver in one of her poems describes kneeling in prayer in a field contemplating with wonder, a grasshopper who's gazing around with enormous complicated eyes. And she writes, tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon, tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? As a final closing reflection, just continuing with your eyes closed, you might imagine if you really knew you had a year to live and what's your sense of how you'd live that year? How would the compass of your heart guide you?

What would matter? You might imagine if you had a month in the same way. What's the sense of your true aspiration, your desire? How would that guide you? You might imagine if you had a day. What matters? What really matters? What do you want to remember?

How do you want to live your moments in the last few minutes? What is it that you want to really remember, open to, touch, live from, die into, what matters? All beings open to the purest longing of their hearts. May the compass of the heart guide us to ever increasing kindness. and creativity, aliveness. May we be carried into boundless belonging, into vast love and awareness. Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list,

please visit tarabrock.com.