Tara Brach - Releasing Self-Blame - Pathways to a Forgiving Heart (2016-04-13)

Episode Date: April 14, 2016

Releasing Self-Blame - Pathways to a Forgiving Heart When we are stuck in blaming, disliking or hating ourselves, we are unable to love our world. This talk explores what underlies our addiction to self-blame and the teachings and practices that loosen aversive self-judgment and help us cultivate a forgiving heart.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. I'd like to begin with a story that I've loved from writer Andreas Shah. I think I've got the name pronounced right. He describes a certain Bektashi Dervish who is really respected for his wisdom and piety and would share his teachings at a coffee house in a regular basis, and people would always ask him, well, how did you become so holy?

And he always had a kind of mysterious look, and he'd say, well, I know what is in the Quran. So one time he'd just given that response to an inquire, and a new person there visiting the area said, well, okay, what's in the Quran? And the response, as the Bhaktashi said, well, in the Quran, there are two pressed flowers and a letter from my friend Abdullah. You know, in this human realm, the expression of spirit is a loving heart.

That's the way it plays out in our humanness. And from an evolutionary perspective, really, it's the fully the manifestation of an awake awareness at the heart that really lets us live in a way that expresses our full potential. So, one of the inquiries that I think is so valuable in a moment is, well, what right now is between me and an awake heart? You know, in some way, how am I developmentally arrested in this moment, not really manifesting? and we start sensing our patterning of how we live somewhat removed from what is our capacity. And one of the key experiences many of us have when we ask that question, you know, what's between me and really feeling open-hearted awareness,

is that there's some level of judgment or blame going on, and sometimes it's towards another, and often it's a kind of judgment or blame towards ourselves that in some way we feel like we're falling short. And that, averse of blame, that is a way of being stuck that stops us from accessing who we can be. So the starting place, really,

in terms of evolving our heart, is often, in any given moment, having some way to release that blame, which will be the theme of this talk. Really, how do we release the armoring we have against our own being? So there's a prayer that I like a lot that I share now and then that goes, dear God, so far today I've been all right, you know, I haven't been greedy and grumpy or self-indulgent, nasty or mean-spirited.

I'm thankful for that. But in a few minutes, God, I'm going to be getting out of bed. And from then on I'm probably going to need a lot of help. So the Buddha described two arrows that, and I think this is a really good description of how we get stuck. And the first arrow is the natural experience that we humans have of aggression or greed or craving, just the stuff that arises in this human animal that we are. and the second arrow is self-aversion for the fact of the first arrow. Okay?

So that we experience that the appearance of whether we're nasty, selfish, greedy, whatever it is, and we don't like ourselves for that. And that's a second arrow. He basically says, you know, the first arrow hurts. Why do we shoot the second arrow into us, ourselves? and yet we do. And I often think of this, oh, let me just say one more thing. This is a quote.

He says, in life we cannot always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. This second arrow is optional. Okay, so this is our place where we can actually intervene and evolve ourselves. We can't stop the sense of aggression from arising, but we can, if we slow things down, not necessarily hate ourselves for it. So I often think of these two arrows in terms of our developing brain and the first arrow comes out of this very primitive brain,

the reptilian and the limbic system that perceives separation and reacts by trying to protect and defend and aggress and hold on to whatever will advance our cause. And that's the first arrow. And then as part of the brain's development, we develop a kind of narrative brain, a thinking brain, that not only has these emotions, but also tells a story about them

and poses a self that's owning them and is responsible for them. And that's what solidifies the ego, the sense that not only are these feelings, coming up, but there is this story of a self that's owning them. And the more that we're living inside that story of a self, the more solid that egoic self becomes that not only says, okay, there's craving or aggression, but this is bad and I'm bad, therefore I'm bad.

So I invite you to watch out for that, that along with difficult energies, energies that are painful. There's a sense of the energies that we feel we didn't want, there's a sense that I own them and therefore I'm bad. Because this is a key recognition as we begin to try to undo it. This ego-based interpretation is the second arrow. So a cartoon of a guy at a bookstore and he's in the Bible section of the bookstore saying to the clerk, What I need is a translation that won't leave me feeling guilty, ashamed, or need of changing myself. And we get how the second arrow is straight from Eden, right?

It's, you know, instead of just being the human animal that's feeling the aggression and the craving, we leave the garden when the ego develops and says, it's mine, I'm self-aware now, it's my fault, something's wrong. So I like the way Annie Dillard, Annie Dillard wrote about, she described a conversation between an Eskimo and a priest and the Eskimo saying, you know, if I didn't know about sin and evil, would it then be, you know, would I be really bad? And, you know, if I didn't realize it and the priest saying, no, not if you don't realize that it's going on.

And then that evil's there. And then the Eskimo looked quizzically and said, well, why? why did you tell me then? You know? When we're in the grip of the first and second arrow, okay, feeling the aggression or the craving and then feeling I'm bad for it, that's when we're suffering in a very solid sense of separate self, a deficient separate self. And that's when we actually lose access to the most recently evolved part of our brain and

in particular the left prefrontal cortex which has all those neural nets that allow us to be empathetic and compassion and have a larger perspective and really be able to see things more clearly as they are. We get cut off and I sometimes talk about this as a kind of a limbic hijacking and that's exactly what the second arrow is. It locks us in to a sense of deficient bad self. You know I sometimes think that the most basic truths are the ones that we most regularly forget. And one of them is, if we're turned on ourselves, we can't love this life. The turning on ourselves contracts us. There's a kind of unpleasant, contracted feeling. It means that in those moments, we're not open to let the life live through us and to feel that

tenderness. So I speak about this a lot because it's the thing that I think we forget the most. We move through the day and there's an undercurrent of not okay and we don't realize how much it's affecting us. I saw a cartoon with a heading his self-esteem and a guy's journaling in his diary and he's written, Dear diary, I'm sorry to bother you again. So we get it in the culture. Okay, self-esteem is low.

I shared that at one workshop and somebody described a one-liner from a therapist to his client which was, these feelings of deficiency are common amongst the deficient. So it's really, it's very, it's something we recognize and yet we don't see it in the moments often. So you may be deeply unforgiving and filled with self-aversion because of binge eating

or ways that you're misusing alcohol or ways you feel like you've created harm to another. And that we're aware that, you know, I hate myself, I can't forgive myself when when we're focused on that kind of thing. But what we don't see are the hundreds or thousands of little moments during the day where there's been an unpleasant experience and we've latched onto it, this feels bad, I'm bad.

And there's some, it creates a kind of atmosphere or mood of not okay. It's not like I'm a flawed, you know, waste of a person. It's just that, it's a mood. of not who I should be, not enough, and it has a kind of oppressive quality to it. So I do a mindfulness scan, a kind of forgiveness scan sometimes at the end of the day where I actually am checking not for the big ones, the big ones I'm aware of when I've turned on myself, but for the little ways that through the day I got caught up in the kind of thoughts and feelings and behaviors years were on some level I was adding on the interpretation of not good, this is wrong, I'm not

okay. And for fun last night right before going to sleep I said to Jonathan let's do a second arrow scan. Jonathan's my husband. So we did a little second arrow scan and he said well you know for a bunch of hours today I got kind of hooked on the computer and I really was not being present and I got hooked in a posture and now I have kind of a headache and you know I'm down of myself for it. I can feel that I am blaming myself for not having taken care of myself. And I did my scan and I'm doing some recordings for the next two days in a studio and so I had a lot of pressure to get these things, these scripts written out for it and so on. And mine was pretty typical that I, when I look through the day and I see the kind of

busy, kind of anxious-stressed self and the ways that that self would, thinking and feeling and acting, there's some part of me that just doesn't like her. And yet I don't quite notice it in the moment. I'm just kind of a little busy and tight and goal-oriented, but it's a mood. And I bring this up with you because I'd like to invite you to do a second-arrow scan. Of course, we're going to, through our reflection, I'm going to ask you to do the same. And just sense for yourself. And you'd like to just begin by closing your eyes and taking a few full breath.

and just knowing this is a pretty pervasive egoic activity to interpret what's going on moment to moment, to have an inner monitor that on some level very quickly can add on not okay. And scan to see where that might be so for you. Just today, the activities of the day, the kind of thoughts that were moving moving through your mind, what you were focused on, the emotions or mind states, the ways that you interacted, just with some interest right now, just notice was there an additional layering of not good or not enough or should be different, should have been better, a a background atmosphere of not okay self.

The first step of being able to evolve ourself to open-hearted awareness is just to recognize it's going on this second arrowing. Feel free to open your eyes if you'd like. And I'm curious to know how many of you found it rather easy to detect the second arrowing. Can I see my hands?

For those listening on podcasts, that's probably about 98%. I saw a couple of hands that didn't go up, which means that maybe you're living in open-hearted awareness today or generally, and that's great. You know, I may it be so, you know. But for most of us, when this layering is there, to the degree that it's there,

it blocks the potential flow of deep appreciation, of feeling joy, of feeling present. And so in Buddhism, before there are the teachings of the different practices for waking up loving kindness and joy, the first practice really is forgiveness, which means, forgiving means in a way to undo that layering of blame and resentment, whether it's directed at another person or ourselves. Forgiving is a releasing of the armoring that encases the heart.

the armoring of blame. Now what happens is that while it's absolutely essential for our healing and our freedom, it's often the thing we least feel able to do. You know, forgiving's a great idea until we actually have someone to forgive or we've actually betrayed our own standards. And then it feels really, really hard.

And I like to say, say the expression that we really can't will it, we can only be willing. You can't push it. It's almost biological. It's like saying, I'm feeling like this. You can't push an opening, but you can deepen your attention. That's where the willingness comes in. You can deepen your attention.

And if your intention sincerely is to free your heart, it'll happen. That's what opens the door. but what happens when we are really stuck thinking and not just feeling that forgiveness is hard but I often have people saying to me you know what if I really hurt somebody what if I've really injured someone and continue to do so isn't that bad I mean why should I forgive myself and let myself get away with it so I want to just invite you again to reflect for a moment on on your own sense of willingness and how you hold this process of releasing self-blame,

just taking a look. And you might bring to mind some way that you consider your behavior could be in the past or current as harmful to yourself or to another person. Some way that you feel you've caused harm to another or to yourself. It could be current, ongoing. And for most of us being embodied and in this culture we feel like we have caused harm at some point. And just investigate with the question, what is wrong with forgiving myself?

What might be bad about forgiving myself, letting go of this aversive self-blame? What might be wrong or bad about it? that you're shining a light on the ways that your psyche might be thinking forgiveness, self-forgiveness, letting go of blame might be not a good idea. Is there something in you that thinks, well, I don't deserve it? I'll get away with it. Is there something that feels like it's right to be punishing? Is there some part of you that if I forgive myself, it's like condoning something harmful and then I'll do it again. There's some part of you that believes that if you forgive yourself or let go of blame, you'll never improve. There's no hope for controlling some part of you you don't

like. Just to examine and see what beliefs are there that might be preventing you from letting go of self-blame. Just to recognize the belief is important. For some it's the feeling that you know, blaming myself is my only chance of change. We think if we aim the arrows of contempt and disgust at the parts of ourselves that feel inadequate, maybe they'll change. As you continue reflecting, you might ask yourself, what would I have to feel or experience that's difficult if I let go of self-blame? If I stop blaming myself, what might I have to open to that's difficult? We would let go of our self-blame if it was easy, but it's not. Please feel free to open your eyes.

For many people when they start investigating, they find that if they let go of self-blame, they would end up feeling completely powerless and out of control, that there would be no way of controlling things. And what that reveals is that our self-flame is a mechanism to try to control ourselves. We hold on it tightly, we're actually addicted to the second arrow of blame because it's painful but it gives us an illusory sense that at least there's some control. And this is what makes it such an entrenched kind of developmental arrest in terms of the evolving of consciousness.

It's kind of the last grasp of okay, this feels terrible but I'm going to control it by blaming myself and hating myself for it. Does that make sense to, does that resonate? I'm just going to look around. I see some shakes of heads and I see mostly nods. It's something to keep investigating. But let's just take a look now. There is a stuck place for many of us where our primitive brain's activity and our primitive

body's activity, fear, aggression, craving becomes my fear, my aggression, my craving. It reflects on me. So rather than this being universal wiring in our nervous system, we get this feeling like we're really the only one that's bad in having this thing. I mean we know there's some others that have it but it feels really personal. Okay? And when it's kind of like the ego it's attacking the id. Part of ourselves is attacking ourselves or something that feels very, very personal.

And we get very stuck in it and as I said I think that if you really invest it you'll find that it's the last ditch way of trying to control things is to blame ourselves. So then we take what Einstein suggested and consider that you can't solve a problem from the state of mind that creates it. So the ego can't forgive itself. The way the ego operates, the ego feels separate and insufficient and is trying to navigate, it can't forgive itself. You have to go to a source that's larger.

than the ego. You have to go to the awareness, the loving presence that's larger than the ego to be able to begin to release that second arrow. So that's what we're going to look at for the rest of our time, is how do we bring the light of awareness, how do we bring care and interest to this stuck place, this second arrowing, that is so pervasive? And as we've been doing, I'll be inviting you to experiment with some place that you know you get hooked in self-blame. So you might have something in mind that you'd like to, you have the intention to loosen that blame, even though you know there's some part of you that's hooked on it. So I'd like to offer a metaphor as a way of setting a context that when I say bring the light of awareness to the stuckness of blame,

You might think of the stuckness of self-aversion as ice cubes, like it's the edgy hardness around the water around our heart, and that it's floating there and it's separate and tight, and that you're bringing the light and the warmth of sun to melt the ice-cubness. Of course, that just frees what's really who we are to be in a flow. It frees us to melt and return to a kind of fluid unity. So that's what we're doing. We're bringing the light of awareness to kind of soften that armoring around the heart. And I'd like to offer a kind of a story of someone I worked with that I think really shows the steps of this in a powerful way.

And if this story resonates for you, you can find it perhaps in more detail in true refuge. So, this was a man Sam who's a successful corporate executive and he, but with his staff, his project managers, his family, he was very demanding, impatient and perfectionistic. And he would blow up regularly when things weren't done as he wanted and it was most painful with his family. And this is what got him to bring some therapeutic and mindfulness tools to the situation. And he told me about insulting his wife in front of a delivery crew when they were doing some catering and the horror he felt afterwards. And then his daughter had come home late, maybe 15-year-old, come home later than she had promised to with a friend and he blew up and embarrassed her in front of her friend.

And later he'd ashamed and apologize for these things. In the moment that they were happening, he felt like people were in some way deliver. deliberately undermining him, disrespecting him, but then afterwards he'd realized he was hurting people he loved and he felt really horrible. So when we talked, when I framed it as, okay, so this is a process of forgiving yourself. Like for many, it was a very alien idea. He said, you know, if I forgive it, it'll get worse. He said, forgiving's impossible for me.

There's an ugly, violent beast in me. I hate it. it makes me hate myself. Okay? So I asked him, I did an inquiry with him, I said, does hating and condemning the beast mute or lessen its anger? Does it spare those who are harmed? And this was important for him because he shook his head in a really sad way because he

got it that hating himself for his anger didn't improve things. And you might check for yourself and if it helps you to close your eyes right now, to do so, please do. If you have some harmful behavior that it's difficult to forgive, perhaps for you it's like Sam lashing out or maybe it's clinging on to somebody being really dependent, or maybe it's an addictive behavior, maybe it's judgment. Does hating yourself for it, just contemming yourself for it help at all, does the second arrow serve for many when they begin to really investigate, they actually, and shine the light of awareness on this, they start finding that the self-hate actually creates the very grounds for the next binge, or for

more lashing out, or for more clinging. So for Sam, his task was, as we're doing, is to shine a light on the process that was going on, on how he'd get angry, and then how it would then be followed with this second arrow of profound self-hatred and self-blame. And his job was simply to pause enough to begin to say, okay, what's happening? What's this like? And he took it on. And he described, told me about, kind of during a meditation on this, he relived an experience with his wife that really shook him.

He had returned home at the end of the day and he had asked her to mail a package for and he saw it on the table when he walked in unmailed, and he let loose on her. And then he remembered that this was the day she was supposed to get the results from a biopsy after. So, it turned out she was okay, but he was completely filled with shame and self-hatred. And in his reflection, when he was running that through, and he had, of course, apologized, but when he was running it through again, he was again gripped. and in his mind's eye

and he heard himself saying, kind of breaking down, saying to her, it's not my fault, I can't help it over and over again. He said it was as if I was trying to get her to understand and forgive me. It's not my fault, I can't help it. And then he said as he was, that was going on

in his mind, like a kind of a movie, he said he remembered being 11 and listening to his father pleading with his mother in exactly that way after his father had lost his temper and shattered a whole lot of wine glasses. And he realized that his father couldn't control his eruptions.

And he said, and neither can I. I think I should be different, but it just happens. And that was, so he's basically saying that the first arrow happens. I can't control it, just like the Buddha described it. And so I just mirrored him back and I said, it's true. You know, it's not your fault. And then I said it again. I said, Sam, it's really not your fault.

And that's when, for the first time, he burst into tears because he so deeply wanted to in some way feel like he was an okay person. It was the beginning of his healing, that phrase, that mantra. It's not my fault. And I want to comment on that because so quickly, for so many of us, what that brings up is, wait a minute, How are we ever going to be accountable or responsible? You maybe have thought that.

So let me speak a little to this, to what I consider the wisdom of it's not my fault. The things that we most hate about ourselves are conditioned by innumerable forces that are way beyond us, way beyond this lifetime. In other words, they're conditioned by the universal forces we already talked about, the first arrow, primitive brain forces of aggression and craving

and greed and so on, the grasping from the primitive mind. They're amplified by genetic tendencies we did not sign on the dotted line. I want these kind of genes. They just came in with them towards anxiety or towards aggression or towards depression. They're finding out more and more as they, as researchers look at genes, how much genes affect everything from whether we're an early riser or a late riser. Okay, so it's that. They of course come from our life experience of whether we've been traumatized, abused,

and then the less quantifiable kind of deficits in attention, in understanding and care and attunement that we receive with our caregivers. It's just very, very interesting to look at how our parents, our caregivers treated us really gets internalized and it's how we end up treating ourselves. If we were blamed or criticized, that's internalized. One story, young man, very, very low self-esteem, he's working on it, had a very judgmental mother. So he's with his therapist and he said, you know, I saw, I had a drive-a, very low self-esteem, he's working on it, had a very judgmental mother. I had a dream last night.

He said, I saw my mother's, I saw my mother in the dream, but then when she turned around to look at me, I noticed she had your face. And as you can imagine, I found this really disturbing. And then he went on to say, I woke up immediately, couldn't get back to sleep, just late there waiting for morning to come. Finally morning came, got up, drank a Coke, came right over here for my appointment. And so I thought you could help me understand this strange dream. So the therapist is silent for a full minute before responding.

a Coke, that's breakfast? How do you expect to live very long doing such things? I thought it was cute. So we internalize the messages. So again, if we're saying, is it my fault? Well, how we're treating ourselves we've learned. Also, we're brought up in a cultural milieu, cultural environments that are plagued by addiction and violence,

by deception, by greed. If we're of the non-dominant culture, we grow up in a culture that we have generational trauma. It's so amazing to me, the more I recognize that, that if I say, think of the legacy of people that have been kidnapped, I'm thinking of African Americans kidnapped from Africa, and then enslaved, and to not get it, that there's generational trauma,

and that that's going to be affecting the nervous system of somebody born now just seems so delusional. Of course there's generational trauma. I just got a letter from somebody who's been studying some of the First Nation people in Canada and describing the generational trauma there. So there's all these forces that affect the level of anxiety, fear, aggression, everything's going on here that we didn't sign on for.

Then we have our environment, our physical environment, what we're breathing, what we're eating, you know, that affect our nervous system. So, the interplay of these forces, we affect the first arrow and they affect the second arrow, and we take it personally like it's our fault. Now I'm going to explain how when we can say that it's not my fault, it actually enables us to be more responsible, more able to respond to the arrows, and how it's the self-blame that actually locks us into keeping on repeating the patterning. But it's a very pervasive thing that we take it personally.

Illustrations for that, a cartoon, a mouse is the psychoanalyst, and he's in the mouse hole, okay? and outside the mouse holes this big dejected-looking feline slumped against the outside wall. So the feline's having therapy, right? And the mouse is saying, don't worry, fantasies about devouring the doctor are perfectly normal. I just thinking of a woman I was doing a mentoring session with last month who is still working with an eating disorder that just carried through decades and also a sense of not accomplishing what she wants to accomplish in her career.

And she was saying how shame she is of being resentful of other people who have a better figure or who are more accomplished and many other things, but those are the two she named. And how ugly and mean-spirited and small-minded she feels when she just ends up feeling that kind of resentment. And again, if I just said, if I started saying, if I started saying, saying to her, you know, you did not sign on to have these feelings. It's not like you want to have them. They're there. It's not your fault. And again, I just, just a sense of space that that opens up. And one of the ways I find that it's really helpful to think of it, you can see this

Buddha here. And if you just take a look at it for a few moments, there's a story behind this Buddha, which is that one of our teachers here at IMCW, Luisa Montero Diaz and I, went shopping for it. It's probably about 15, 16 years ago we wanted to have a Buddha for our meditation community, and we fell for it. It has a kind of an endurogenous look. You can see the feminine and the masculine archetypes. We thought it was a lovely Buddha.

We were excited about it. Had it here first Wednesday night. And I introduced everybody to it. And afterwards, I noticed that people. people were standing and looking at it and they were kind of leaning to the left as they were looking at it. And one person came over to me and she said, Tara, it's beautiful, but the cast is to the left, it's leaning. And so it was. That this is a really imperfect Buddha here. You know, it's a leaning Buddha. And I thought it was one of the most cool, helpful teachings for our meditation community

about how it can be a lovely Buddha, but it's subject to conditions that are beyond its control. It's just somebody made a leaning cast. So if we can even get a glimmer of when these experiences arise in us, when the anxiety or fear or jealousy or resentment or anger or aggression, that it's part of the human condition. It's not my fear, it's the fear. that shift can create a kind of willingness and a flexibility and a gentleness that allows us

to do some very deep healing. Realizing that the first arrow is out of our control is really the beginning and releasing the self-blame is the beginning of actually bringing more awareness that can start melting the ice cubes that can start freeing us. We can't heal the suffering until we release the self-blame. So for Sam, you know, when he described that experience with his wife, I invited him to rerun it and we were talking and I just said, okay, I want you to feel the anger and see if you can stay with just the anger and not make it wrong. And I had him do it with several different situations where he was triggered.

and I said, and see if you can, instead of making it wrong, just see what's going on. And what he found was when he stayed with the anger and I said, well, so what's really under it? What are the feelings underneath the anger? That's when he felt most strongly, wow, I really feel like I don't matter. Like I'm not, I don't matter to the person who's acting in that way. Like they don't respect me. And when he looked at all these different situations, he felt underneath the anger some sense of being demeaned and put him in touch with his own deficiency.

So his anger was coming out of a sense of deficiency. So I invited him to do a forgiveness practice where he looked at himself through the eyes of a caring friend, a friend that could see that underneath his anger was his pain, was his sense of deficiency. And from that view could communicate some forgiveness. and care to him. And as I often do, I asked him to put his hand on his heart. So he would feel the anger and he'd feel the tendency to this is bad, but then he would bring to mind this a loving being, a friend who could see that underneath the anger, the kind of hurt that was there,

and just offer forgiven, forgiven. And so he practiced this for several minutes. When he opened his eyes, they were very, very moist, very receptive. And here's what he said. He said, something uncleanched and space opened up. It was as if my heart was holding my young self who felt he didn't matter, my dad who couldn't help himself, and also the groan me who gets so lost in the angry storms. So here's what had happened. First, he began to release some of the, it's my fault so he could then be with the anger itself. You can't be. with the first arrow until you've released the second arrow. And then when he was with the anger itself, he began to hold it in compassion. And this is the evolutionary shift that I started

talking about at the beginning, that we can shift from this developmental arrest where we react to our survival brain with, this is bad, I'm bad. We can remove or release, the self-blame, And then we actually come into relationship with those survival energies and change our experience of them. We can actually bring some healing. There's more space. And for him, what that meant was when the anger started coming up in the days and weeks to come, he had more space to choose a different response.

He could slow it down. So the essential dynamic really here in self-forgiveness is you have to be able to contact the suffering. have to get it's not your fault. You have to get that there's some pain in there or else that warmth of compassion will not spread through your body. Now, I want to offer one more piece on this reflection on the second arrow and then we're going to reflect together, which is, once we've removed the second arrow of self-blame and open to what's there, there can come a very pure and healing remorse, a sorrow for causing injury. It's an energy that wants to extend itself in prayer or in action.

And I think of it a lot like in the Christian and Jewish traditions the process of atonement, that once we stop the hatred towards ourselves we actually very naturally and authentically care and want to reduce harm. For Sam, this was absolutely the case that he He made amends and he worked really hard in his relationships with his wife and his daughter and very much acknowledged and owned the pain that had been caused but not from a I'm bad place, just getting it, how much suffering became a much more sensitive guy. But I want to share a kind of closing story and then we're going to practice of how this shift from self-blame to

reaching out in a healing way to others can take place. Because I read about a very beautiful illustration. First of all, there's a book called Offerings at the Wall and includes a selection of 90,000-some letters and mementos that Vietnam veterans had left at the wall, the Vietnam Wall. And so that the book kind of pulls it all together and shows all of them here in Washington.

So in 1989, this is one of the letters in the book that was put at the wall, a worn photograph of a young Vietnamese man and a little girl were placed at the wall along with the following letter. Dear sir, for 22 years I've carried your picture in my wallet. I was only 18 years old that day. We faced one another on the trail in Chulai, Vietnam. Why you didn't take my life I'll never know. no, forgive me for taking yours. I was reacting just the way I was trained. So many times over the years I've stared at your picture and your daughter. I suspect

each time my heart and guts would burn with the pain of guilt. I have two daughters of my own now. I perceive you as a brave soldier defending his homeland. Above all else I can now respect the importance life held for you. I suppose that is why I'm able to be here today. It's time for me to continue the life process and release the pain and guilt, forgive me, sir. So this man, his name is Richard Latrell, had placed this on the wall and somehow rather it got brought back to him. He got the book and he saw that his letter was in the book. And this was in 2009, he decided that his journey to, for example, he decided that his journey to forgiveness wasn't ended with the poignant note. So he decided he was going to go to Vietnam

and find the daughter in the picture. So he made a trip and he wanted to return the photo to her. So he traveled to Vietnam and he found her and her brother and through an interpreter he introduced himself and he said, tell her this is the photo I took from her father's wallet the day I shot and killed him and I'm returning it. And he said with his voice breaking, he said, please ask her forgiveness. And the young woman burst into tears and fell into his arm sobbing and later her brother explained that he and his sister believed that their father's spirit lived on in Richard and that on that day their father's spirit had come back home to them. So he needed to let go of the second arrow to heal and he needed to reach out.

we become more responsible, more able to respond. I'd like to close by giving you a chance and opportunity to explore this within yourself, let you do a bit of that forgiveness sweep, that looking for where you see the second arrow where you're pushing yourself out of your own heart. And as a way of beginning this very short meditation, just to feel your intention towards open-hearted awareness that this is for the sake of awakening, healing, and freeing your heart

so that you can really love without holding back. So you feel that willingness to explore right now. And you might bring to mind, scan and bring to mind some situation that brings up self-blame that's hard to forgive yourself for or to accept and for the purposes of this practice right now it's probably not useful to bring up something that has a traumatic undertone but someplace where you feel you're caught and disliking yourself

to begin to shine the light of awareness on that the edginess, the tightness around the heart, that ice-cubness by really sensing is it really my fault? See if you can sense that leaning Buddha that there's conditions that you didn't sign on for. Parents and culture, certain biology, generations behind. Just to open to the possibility that the first arrow, what you're disliking, the thoughts, the feelings, the behaviors that are driven by aggression, by grasping, fear.

But you didn't choose for it to be that way. It's just part of this human inheritance. And to even open to the possibility of, it's not my fault, can open a door to freedom. Part of shining the light is to begin to sense the suffering that comes from the second arrow. It hurts to not like ourselves. It hurts to push our own. hurts to push ourselves out of our own heart. If you gently put your hand on your heart

and just sense that it hurts to turn on myself, it hurts. There can be a little tenderness and space right there. And if you continue to shine that light of presence and awareness, a gentle attention, and sense whatever it is that you're blaming yourself for, whatever that energy is, how that energy itself is suffering, the fear that might have driven you to a behavior you don't like, the anger, the hurt. So like Sam, you can see past the behaviors to the pain underneath, how your legs in a trap in some way, you're caught. And just begin to look through the eyes of your most loving, awake self.

your open-hearted awareness and sense that you can offer yourself some message of kindness right now it might be the phrase I'm sorry and I love you or it might be simply forgiven forgiven

just sense what might help to loosen that second arrow and release the armoring of blame and you can trust that even the willingness to begin to shine the light on the second arrow on self-blame is absolutely a profound step in evolving and awakening this heart. We close with the words of poet Danafeld. She says, forgive yourself.

Forgive yourself. Now is the only time you have to be whole. Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the light of your true nature. is not a prerequisite for anything but pain. Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your stories of separation and failure. This is the day of your awakening. Namaste and blessings 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.