Tara Brach - Releasing the Barriers to Unconditional Loving

Episode Date: May 17, 2013

2013-05-15 - Releasing the Barriors to Unconditional Loving - We long for love and habitually armor our hearts. This talk explores the aggression and clinging that protect our wound of feeling unlovable, and the ways that mindfulness can dissolve our defenses and reveal our inner refuge of pure loving presence.

So I begin with a quote from Zen Master Dogen, which is that enlightenment is just intimacy with all things. I've known this quote for a long time. I never knew the word just was in there. All you have to do is be intimate with everything. Then you're free. But I'd like to just start tonight by inviting you to imagine what that means, to just slow us down right from the start, and just have you just check in for a moment. moment and imagine intimacy with all things. Intimacy right this moment with the life inside you. What does that mean? Intimacy with someone at work, your boss, an employee, somebody that you work with a cousin or a sister. Intimacy with the person sitting next to you even

if you don't know that person. What does it mean? What's the quality of heart? Intimacy with the squirrels that eat the bird seed at the feeder. Intimacy with the weeds. Intimacy with the wind. Intimacy with the sounds that are right here. Can you begin to sense the quality of openness, of awakeness, of tenderness, that unconditionally makes room?

It's at the heart space where everything that is is welcome. So whenever you'd like to open your eyes. So realizing, whether we call it intimacy, our loving presence, is our potential, both in evolutionary terms and in spiritual terms, it's our potential to realize and trust and live from loving presence. And it's an expression of full awakening. And it's also a need. We need love to evolve in a healthy way, developmentally. I mean, now research shows that we need a certain amount of loving attention in order for our neuronal synapses to be formed.

And they've studied rat pups and they see that the rat pups, they get enough licking and grooming, there's more synapses. It's just, it's part of what we need. So we have a longing for love and we flourish when love is there and it expresses who we are. When there's a sense of belonging, we are at ease and we're able to flower. It's the primary subject of most poetry and most literature and therapy. So the poet Hafeis says, The subject tonight is love and for tomorrow night as well.

As a matter of fact, I know of no better topic for us to discuss until we all die. And we know it that if we're at the end of our life looking back and we do that reflection, okay, so what really matters about just how we live today or what matters about, you know, when we're on vacation or when we're with our family or our friends or what really matters? And we come back to the moments where there's authentic, caring contact. When it's dust to dust, that's what's timeless for us. So then we have RELCA who writes, For one human being to love another, this is the most difficult of all our tasks.

So what I'd like to explore tonight is what makes it so difficult. It makes it so difficult and then some of the inner pathways to unconditional loving, to that feeling of intimacy with all things. Now there'll be another talk that explores how we bring it in an engaged way with each other. This is more of the inner work that helps us to sense what's difficult, move through it and wake up. And it's clear. This is, we know that the human realm is filled with misunderstanding and conflict and hurt and anger

and insecurity. And we've explored here a lot how we have a basic perception of separation. As we keep on waking up, we start sensing the connectedness that holds us all. But that's very core in our conditioning is to feel separate and to have all the fight-flight activity that surrounds that separation. The primal mood of the separate self is fear. So we start off with that and then due to that we don't trust belonging very easily. To the degree we don't feel a sense of belonging and we don't trust anyone really loves us

and we don't trust that we're loving. It brings a real deep mistrust. So one way to understand a kind of core or wounding, that appears, and it appears what depending on our parenting and our culture, is a basic sense that I'm not lovable for who I am. I don't belong, I can't trust belonging, I'm not lovable, I'm not loving in a real way. There's that core mistrust. And so the biggest way that gets exacerbated or gets really solidified is the imprint of the imprint of of parenting, the caretakers. That's the big one.

I've kept around for a long time this little cartoon and it has a little boy with a goggle and with a, he's got, he's spraying and painting onto the wall. It says, I need love. He's on a ladder. And then his mother and his mother's friend are sitting there talking and she's just saying, he's just doing that to get attention. I need love. So what happens when the love doesn't come through, when there is some sort of neglect, or if there is major amount of criticism or abusive behavior, even if there's just a lack of attunement, well then a child has to protect from the pain of that.

So a lot of our personality is how we protect ourselves from that raw pain of, I'm not lovable as I am. And the way we do it is we dissociate in some way. And there's a reason we all live in our heads and don't inhabit our bodies so fully. It's not such an easy place to be. There's a lot of raw, unprocessed feelings. And there's two major areas that we dissociate from,

that I want to name tonight. And one of the places we just say we cut off and tighten in the belly. There's a lot of nerves and a lot of experiences of the mind-body experience of emotion. The billy is a key place for that nexus of nerves. We tighten, we tighten, we cut off, and when we tighten and cut off from the belly, we cut off from our sense of empowerment, we cut off from our sense of a kind of instinctual knowing, you know, or being connected to the earth, we cut off from desire. So that's one area we cut off from and then the other area, the major areas, the heart.

And that cuts us off from the rawness of feeling. So those are the major dissociative places. Of course, many people know what it's like when we tighten and dissociate through the neck and throat area. We don't have our voice, right? So this is the response to what you might call the kind of fundamental wound of unlove, where we don't feel belonging is this kind of dissociative process that goes on and then when there's not kind of a health it's called healthy attachment healthy loving there's a few different

styles we take in our relationships it's been grouped you know in the field of psychology is you know that we have we have a certain kind of attachment disorder that's more the insecure avoidant disorders and then we have the insecure anxious and the avoidant if a simplification Some attachment disorders are stay away from me and others are I need you, I want you. And hence we have played out and some people are more often the pursuer and some people are more often the avoider. Gross generalization, but I think you probably know what I mean. Looking around to see, I've got some nods there.

Okay. Jules Fifer does it well. He has a man and a woman, you know, in a major confrontation and she's saying, but I love you and he's saying, don't you threaten me. me. You know. So you kind of get the feeling of it. The pursuer and the distancer.

They're both control strategies. You know, the pursuer, when they're clinging, are not allowing themselves to be receptive and open to what's here. It's a way of holding on and grasping but not really opening to the life that's here. And of course the avoider is pushing away the life that's here in that way. If we look at romance, we see the patterning of love as being the thing we most want and the thing we're most afraid of. And we see in the dance of romance it in most clear way, because it models, you know,

the longing for the primal experience of connection with the mother, whereas really this pure sense of belonging. safety and communion. So seeking it in a more mature, evolved, multidimensional way, and there's this with infatuation or the beginning of romance, there's a sense of, aha, I've got it finally. This is it and my future is really going to work out now because now we have this container of safety and love and so on. And so falling in love, there's kind of a falling into this thing where it's a chemical cocktail, a very distinct chemical cocktail. And this is known now. There's this euphoria of dopamine's nerepinephrine.

And then I'm not good at pronouncing this one, fenni-lethalolamines, P-E-A's. Anyway, those things all just are going wild in our bodies and they don't last that long. You know, they last for it. They get absorbed into the system and then metabolize and so they don't last that long. maybe a year, two years. Although one person writes, you know, when I fell in love, it was the two and a half happiest days of my life. So in that period,

when those chemicals are just roaring through our system, and this person's going to provide us everything we've always longed for, the sense of belonging and connection, the deepest longings, they're idealized, we're projecting everything we've ever wanted on that person.

There's a lot of distorting. a lot of enchantment, things seem like incredibly enchanting eccentricities and charming things that in a few years are not going to seem that way. So this is, some of you might have read Irvin Yalom, this is the first paragraph. He says, I do not like to work with patients who are in love. He says, perhaps it's because of envy. I too crave enchantment. Perhaps it's because love and psychotherapy are fundamentalized.

fundamentally incompatible. The good therapist fights darkness and seeks illumination while romantic love is sustained by mystery and crumbles upon inspection. I hate to be love's executioner. So of course we're not talking about true and awake love. We're talking about a version of love that's got a lot of stuff mixed in that makes it kind of distorted. But then it starts to find its way because as I mentioned the

chemicals calm down and underneath everyone brings in their own shadow of whatever ways that they have tried to work with their own fears of not belonging and insecurities and so on so there's a shadow of mistrust and it gets very easily triggered once we kind of get into a regular relationship we know how it is that that somebody just starts feeling criticized or somebody feels the others pulling back in certain ways are not supportive and all the old stuff of I'm not okay I'm not worthwhile whatever it is can get triggered and so it's just waiting to be stoked in some way and

then the ride begins where we have to start working with all that conditioning so I'm making it sound dire but in a way then we have the opportunity because we each bring our dance our particular attachment dance into the relationship, we have our opportunity to see what's going on and find the purity of love that's there but is in some way filtered by the dance. There's so many ways that it comes out that we think we know someone and then have to take a double take. In the personals, a woman writes, free to a good home.

And on one side of this personal, she says, beautiful six-month-old male kitten, orange and Carmel Tabby, playful, friendly, very affectionate, ideal for family with kids. Or, other side, handsome 32-year-old husband, personable, funny, good job,

but doesn't like cat, says he goes or the cat goes. Call Jennifer, come and see both and decide what you'd like. So, romance gets neutralized after these couple of years of being metabolized. It doesn't, just the higher, romance and there's all these other dimensions of familiarity that are beautiful that can stream in but still there's this working through process and basically it's a working through of having to come from our projections or ideas of who's there to the

realness of what's here some of you might remember this diary entry a woman made she says tonight I thought my husband husband was acting weird. We'd made plans to meet at a nice restaurant for dinner. I was shopping with my friends all day, so I thought he was upset at the fact I was a bit late, but he made no comment on it. Conversation wasn't flowing, so I suggested we go some are quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but didn't say much. I asked him what was wrong. He said nothing. I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he wasn't upset and had nothing to do with me and not to worry about it. On the way home, I told him that I loved him.

He smiled slightly and kept driving. I can't explain his behavior. I don't know why he didn't say I love you too. When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly and watched TV. He continued to see him distant and absent. Finally, with silence all around us, I decided to go to bed.

About 15 minutes later, he came to bed, but I still felt that he was distracted. His thoughts were somewhere else. He fell asleep. I cried. I don't know what to do. I'm almost sure his thoughts are with someone else. My life's a disaster. His diary. Motorcycle won't start. Can't figure out why. So whether the ride is romance or friendship or partners or family, I just give you examples

with romance because they're so blown out of the water, but whatever it is, if there is enough closeness in a relationship, then the dance of attachment, including pushing away or grasping on, will play out. If there's enough closeness, it'll play out in some form. Robert Johnson wrote this. He said, The night before their marriage, they held a ritual where they made their shadow vows. The groom said, I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself. The bride said, I will be compliant and sweet, but underneath I will have the real control. If anything goes wrong, I'll take your money in your house.

They then drank champagne and laughed heartily at their foibles, knowing that in the course of their marriage, these shadow figures would inevitably come out. They were ahead of the game because they had recognized the shadow and unmasked it. So this is the beginning of the inquiry now, which is given what we know, how do we bring our practices of awareness and heart so that we can wake up through the conditioning? And I'll just name the basic principles that you might consider at the root of any inquiry

into waking up through relationships. and one of them is that love is intrinsic to what we are. And when I say that, what I mean is, in the most real way possible, we belong to this living world. I mean, we're made of stardust. We all are composed of the same stuff. We're breathing in this world. We're breathing out into it.

Everything affects everything else. We belong. That's the basics. and when the heart experiences that truth, in a visceral, vivid way, the experience is love. In other words, awareness when it's awake, when our awareness is aware of our own presence, we belong to the world and the world as part of our heart. It's intrinsic. The yearning to realize love is universal.

It's like a flower wants to bloom. each of us wants to unfold into our wholeness, realize who we really are and live in that. So that's universal. The fear of love, the fear of intimacy is also a universal conditioning, as I mentioned. We have this perception and our nervous system is wired with it of separateness. So we're kind of stuck both longing for love, longing to realize who we are and biologically have a whole fight-flight freeze reaction around love. It's a bit of a dilemma, right?

But there's hope. And here's the hope. So the conditioning is universal, this conditioning and we build our different attachment structures around it, that's universal. Everybody, when we get together it's person to person not being to being. We're bringing our personalities into a dance. So that's a given. But another given is what's called neuroplasticity.

which means whatever our patterns of avoidance or grasping are, because there's neuroplasticity, because change is possible, we can use meditation, we can actively cultivate mindfulness, love, compassion in a way that changes are patterning. In other words, the filters that prevent us from experiencing that kind of universal love in our relatedness with each other, those filters can be altered. So one way to think of it metaphorically is that the sun is always shining, but there are clouds sometimes that prevent us from experiencing that light and that warmth.

And those clouds are the filters of our conditioning. The idea that we're separate, that we need something, that something's missing, that we're unlovable and meditation is a way of helping us to discover the sun that's always there have more access to it. So how does this work? Maybe as a way to start and how we bring our attention to what's going on I'll bring back a line from Rumi that I shared some weeks ago that has been a real, it's a real, it's a It's been a really beautiful kind of reminder for me. So Rumi writes this, he says your path is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and

find all the barriers within yourself you have built against it. Okay? So we're not going after love, but we're beginning to wake up to the ways that we armor ourselves, the ways that we protect ourselves. We've all had enough wounding that we have some defensive or aggressive armoring that stops us from fully letting in love, fully giving love. We know we hold back. So Rumi advises find out about that.

D.H. Lawrence says this. He says, those who go on a search for love will only find their own lovelessness. Now that's an interesting one. If we're on a search for it, where can I find love? We're going to look outside ourselves and leave ourselves. And in the leaving of ourselves, it'll reconfirm it's not okay here. Who I am is not okay. We can't find love by separating from ourselves and fixating outward.

That doesn't mean that our engagement with others can't help us wake up to loving. It means if we're fixated on finding it out there, we leave ourselves. Does that resonate for you? Okay. So again, as I mentioned, we're going to explore the inner pathways. How do we recognize the barriers and how do we open underneath the barriers, you know, how do we sense the clouds and then discover the pure light that shines through? How do we trust that intrinsic love that's right here?

And this of course is the invitation to true refuge. How do we really find that inner refuge that the love we long for is always and already here? How do we trust that? So let's look at the two most basic versions of armoring. And one of the major versions of armoring is, some form of aggression and that could be you know it always arises out of that feeling of not lovable for who we are that's the basic wound and then and then then we blame because we have to you know if we feel not lovable and we think

something's wrong with us part of the blame's inward but we have to protect ourselves from the rawness by also blaming outward so that happens we blame and we also feel anger we also can feel hatred And so we're trying to protect ourselves from more injury. And that's why we hold on to blame. We hold on to blame because we're holding onto the armoring that protects us, we think, from being hurt more. So while fundamentally that blame is inward, we get addicted to blaming outward too.

And sometimes the expression is low key. just this sense of the person we're with or child or whatever really should change or be different. It's like Barbara Streisand saying, you know, how come women spend 10 years trying to change their husbands and then say, he's not the man I married, you know, that kind of thing. So there's that level. That level is still got a kind of tragic element because just this habit of thinking someone should be different. different. In those moments, we're not able to inhabit a wholehearted presence.

And in those moments we're not able to see the sacred that shines through, we're not able to see what delights us and we're not able to see the vulnerability. We can't respond. That's one level. But then there's the level that many of us know about that can be carried through decades where there's somebody in our lives that there's somebody that. that has hurt us enough that we've just locked down in blame. We've just shut down and blame.

And our heart is pretty blocked. And I want to share with you a story of one man in our extended community who, in the last handful of years, began meditating and encountered the enormity of his armoring, how much he had turned on himself at war, and how much he, anywhere he was, he was judging others and often feeling resentful and blaming. And he set about looking at those barriers and bringing mindfulness and compassion. And for the first few years, you know, I often teach about putting your hand on your heart.

He just on some level was constantly saying it's okay, it's okay to his own heart for being so hardened. He was kind of forgiving his hardened heart for being like it was. and that loosened up enough so he could begin to uncover the layers of of hurt and woundedness and did a lot of beautiful healing work where he just started sensing more and more that he wasn't the judging nasty critical you know prided himself on kind of he had a superior inflated kind of ego stance and also underneath that a real sense of emptiness and worthlessness he was none of that he just started sensing sensing the presence it was here.

At the core of that story behind the defendant heart was his father, who had been very narcissistic, very neglectful, very judgmental, and he had completely cut out his father and his father had cut him out. They just barely had any contact while this father was alive. So I want to read you about what he writes. about his relationship with father and when he died. He said, his father died, I guess, in 2008. And the funeral director, who was a friend from child,

had asked him if he wanted to see his father before the cremation. And he said, no, there's no point. But his wife pressured him to do it. So he went into the background and he was left alone with his father who's kind of lying on the gurney and covered with a sheet, except his head and shoulders. He writes, I stood there for two to three minutes looking at him

as he looked so peaceful and at peace something I was not used to seeing. I went over to him, kissed him on the forehead and told him I loved him. When I stepped away, I had what I can only describe as a moment of grace. It hit me as clear as a bell that I'd sent my whole life clinging to the desire

that it be someone other than he was or was capable of being. I had never before had that thought about him, and I realized how much I had suffered terribly for almost 60 years because of that clinging. I felt as though 50 pounds of weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. Two days later, at his memorial service, I wept like I never remembered weeping. I was free of the struggle and suffering that was the result of my clinging and grasping for a father that was never to be. Five years later, I feel the same and the burden has never returned nor has the anger, the hurt, or the frustration. I have empathy and compassion for his life, his suffering, his struggles.

I've been able to recall some positive interactions with him and feel proud of the work he did for social justice. The Dharma gave me a gift that nothing else ever could give me. It's a very powerful realization when we get what the effect is of feeling that others should be different than they are. And I suspect if every one of us just took a moment to reflect inward and kind of scan the people of our close circle, you will see in different degrees ways that we've kind of held on to wanting someone to be different.

If you think of someone you love and you just sense the wanting them to be different in the moments you're wanting them to be more for their society. more in a certain way or for you to feel better more in a different way. You can feel in your body that the heart is occupied and tight, very different from just a pure place of appreciation. It's a powerful realization. Ram Dass describes how all his life, and many of you know of Babram Das, and he talks about father in all his life, he thought his father should be different and his father thought

he should change and at the end of their life they had just a few months together as his father is dying. They really, he says, we accepted each other as we were and finally became friends. So we don't have to wait. This is one of the barriers we have of whether it's a real aggressive blame or just this kind of nagging, I want you to change such and such, it gets in the way. Now there's another level of armoring that I feel like it's important to mention that I don't always talk about, which is rage or hatred, real extreme aggression.

I think it was Rita Rudner, she writes, my grandmother was a very tough woman. She buried three husbands. Two of them were just napping. I like that one. So I've shared with you that phrase is from a more. movie that vengeance is a lazy form of grief. When we get carried and lost in aggression, in rage and in hatred and getting back, we're protecting. It's a protection. It's not to look at it like there's something evil about us, but the effect of it is that it entirely

cuts us off from the feeling in our heart and the real empowerment of it. in our belly. Anger is addictive because it temporarily gives us a feeling of power. That it's a very false kind of power. It's a kind of power that, you know, I'm a victim and you wronged me and I'm getting back kind of power, reaffirms the victimhood and it blocks off the real source of power which is when the belly is open and flowing and you can feel the life energy is moving through you. So it's really important process in the body of the as we look at, you know, the barriers to love to actually face the presence of rage, of anger, hatred.

One woman I was working with, her rage was at her ex-husband for leaving her, for rejecting her, for going with a younger woman. And it was, you know, a whole body rage that went on for months and months and months. and when I worked with her, of course it was my first extent thing is to absolutely forgive that it's there, to not make it wrong. And that's really important. I do that with myself when I'm angry. There's some sense in me that, you know, oh, this is not spiritual, this has got a violent energy, you know. But no, it's another weather system.

We don't have to act on it, but it's a weather system to respect. I mean, every energy, every emotion has an intelligence. And we cannot discover its intelligence and its basic, pure expression if we don't really allow it to be there. So the first step for her, forgive the rage, just let it be there. But then the second step is let go of the storyline and open to the energy. This is key. If you're working with that...

block, that armoring of rage and anger, to be with it as an energy, let it rip, as one of my friends says. He said, let it rip, let it be as big as it is. But, you know, but dropped the story. So she did that and she felt she opened to it and opened to it. And underneath the anger she found some grieving, which often happens that we go from grievance to grief if we open. And she felt more tender, but there was still a blocked up feeling.

So, you know, I asked her to stay with that blocked up feeling and she said there's something in me is feeling hatred. You know, there's hatred there. And it was really important for to name it and I said, name it again. She goes, okay, hatred. And what does it feel like? And she could feel again the burn and the squeeze and the twist of it. So again, she let the portal be a story and the portal really was her mother initially. who was either putting her down or didn't seem to want to be with her or spend time with her. She always felt pushed away. So it was either pushed down or pushed away. And it was really hard for her to say, yes, I'm feeling hatred towards my mother.

But that was the moment when she could name it and actually let that feeling be there that there started to be some movement and some space opening up. And so she just kept, so she dropped the sense of her mother, dropped the sense of her ex, was another version of her mother in that way and just let that energy move. And she described how she started feeling before she had felt like she was all over the place and wobbly and shaking and then she started feeling when she let it move this kind of strength and power from her core. When we feel strong anger, when we feel hatred, we feel cut off from ourselves. We're angry and hating because there's a cut-off experience.

We might blame someone else, but we're really angry and hating about is that we're disconnected and we want to feel connected. So if we stay in the story of blame, we don't get to pay attention to the one place where we can find connection and healing. So she let the energies be there, not the story, the energies, and started feeling the movement in her own body connected to that. sense of aliveness in her own body. So I'm sharing this because to me this was a really powerful example of how when we're with the armoring and we open to the energies under

it, for her she started sensing this purity of aliveness and she started feeling her own tenderness and warm, she started tapping into that intrinsic loving energy that's not dependent on anything else. We go through the the armoring into where the energy is. So let's practice a tiny bit on that and then I'm going to bring in one more piece tonight, see if we have time for that too. So let your attention go inward and just take a moment to on purpose, relax, wherever you can relax. Feel your body, let the shoulders soften a little, the hands, loosening in the belly and taking a full breath or two. And then this is the opportunity to bring your attention to where you might be defending,

have a defended heart and where it takes the shape of blame, where it takes the shape of ongoing judgment or where it takes the shape of outright anger or hatred. And to begin just to sense where that is in your life. So we start to start with a way. with a storyline. We start where we are blaming outward, angry towards someone out there, resentful, have a grievance. And if you let the story be there, you can just investigate what it is that really is triggering you, what it is that has happened, just enough so you can feel in your body that sense of blaming of a great. of reactivity. And know that in this guided meditation you might or might not get in touch

with what you want to, but this gives you a kind of template for practicing on your own. What Rumi says is finding the barriers, the feeling where the blame is or the judgment, and then sensing under it and sensing, you know, what's the emotion under this? If I couldn't keep blaming this person, what would I have to feel? Just ask that. If you couldn't hold on to the averse of blame, what's the uncomfortable emotion that would be there? Is it a feeling of being hurt? Is it a feeling of being endangered, vulnerable? Is a feeling of grief, of loss? What's there? Whatever you encounter, agree to it. Just sense that you can let it be as full as it wants to be right now. If you couldn't keep blaming this person, allowing

yourself to feel the hurt or the powerlessness, the grief, fear, or maybe you sense that you're blaming yourself then, the shame or guilt that's there, whatever it is. Your only job is to allow it to be there so you can continue being present. But notice what happens as you allow it to be there if you just offer some kindness, some gesture of kindness to whatever is under there. For some of you, just putting the hand on the heart could be a very direct and powerful way to offer your presence and kindness to whatever is underneath the blame and see what happens. Just keep paying attention. Since even with just a little attention, attention, that there's some reconnecting with what's really you in there, the aliveness,

the energy, that you're coming home in an honest way. You're not fixating outwardly. It's a courageous presence with your own vulnerability, adding a little more kindness right now. It's like I sometimes say to myself, it's okay, sweetheart. whatever your version of just some gentle gesture towards yourself. So the presence comes even more full towards whatever vulnerabilities there. And see if you can sense in the midst of this presence what I've been describing is

that intrinsic love, that intimacy where there's some purity of tenderness, of warmth, of light, that's already here, that start shining when you bring presence to your own experience. And know that you can, whenever you feel drawn, practice this, just noticing when the heart armoring is there and just having the intention to pause and to become intimate with your inner experience as a way of tapping into that intrinsic loving presence. So opening your eyes and we'll just for now. know that that's one version of the armoring. Now another way that we armor ourselves, as I described it, is that clinging or that pursuit where we're

grabbing on to another person, we're grabbing on and trying to hold on so that we can get what we want from outside us. And infatuation, fixation, feelings of jealousy, feelings of, if I don't have this person approval or attention or love, something will go very, very wrong. So it's the pursuit. One man came to a retreat and he was feeling an enormous amount of pain because he really loved his wife and his wife didn't love him back. And it just was a real imbalance and he kept trying and longing for intimacy and she really just did not, didn't want to divorce because they had children but she just did not want intimacy with him. And, you know, what

You know, when I'd ask him, well, who do you know that really does love you? He would say, oh, well, my children love me and my parents love me and so on. And when I'd ask him, well, what happens when you try to just feel yourself letting in the love of those beings, those people, he wasn't able to? And I'm sharing that because when we're in the pursuit, when we're trying to get love, get approval, get attention, we cannot receive love. In fact, for most of us, to some degree, if we're really honest, we'll say, yeah, I feel these people love me or whatever, but our capacity in a very visceral, immediate way, to feel the washing in of love, to feel

held, to feel embraced in some way, it's very limited. We're not good at receiving love. I'd just be curious how many of you sense that yourself and others. Is that? Yeah. Okay. So it's part of, you know, this cultural idea that it's more important to give love than to receive and yet like breathing, we really need to be able to do both. And often we need to pay attention to having a more of a porous, receptive quality so we can let it come in. I'd like to recommend John Willwood's book, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships. He talks a lot about this and a lot of the themes of Tonight are in that book. And he quotes Rilke. Rilke says, To love is to cast light, while to be love, means to be love, means to

means to be a blaze. And then John says, who is to say that being a blaze is any less holy than casting light? And how can we cast pure light if we're not ablaze? Right? I think that's really good. So again, this armoring that we have, it makes us hold back the giving of love and it prevents it from coming in. When we're either blaming or we're pursuing it's hard to let in love. So what we'll be doing as our final meditation is an exploration of letting in love. And you know before we before we do that I just want to kind of in a more whole way to set a context that tonight we've been exploring how we have this profound

soulful longing for belonging and love and we have this incredibly strong conditioning to protect ourselves and armor ourselves because of the natural wounding that happens in this lifetime and our path is to begin to investigate and release the armoring so that that very pure love that's within us can shine through in our engagement with each other and our Practice involves both internally being with these different areas of woundedness and learning to receive through as we meditate and learning how to do it in an engaged way. It's both.

But just to honor that this loving experience is something that has been cherished through all of time. Dante was standing near Pontavecchio. bridge that crosses the Arno River in Florence. It was just before 1300. Dante saw Beatrice standing on the bridge. He was a young man, she even younger, and that vision contained the whole of eternity for him. Dante did not speak to her and saw her very little. And when Beatrice died, she carried off by the plague, Dante was stricken with the loss of his vision. She was the connection between his soul and heaven itself.

650 years later during World War II the Americans were chasing the German army up the Italian peninsula. The Germans were blowing up everything of aid to the progression of the American army, including the bridges across the Arno River. But no one wanted to blow up Pontavecchio because Beatrice had stood on it and Dante had written about her. So the German army made radio contact with the Americans and in plain language, and in plain language language said they would leave the Pontavecchio intact if the Americans would promise not to use it.

The promise was held. The bridge was not blown up and not one American soldier or piece of equipment went across it. We're such hard-bitten people that we need hard-bitten proof of things and this is the most hard-bitten fact I know to present to you. The bridge was spared in a modern, ruthless war because, be it had stood upon it. It's universal. We long to belong. We sometimes fixated outward, but ultimately if we check deep inside ourselves, the very source of that longing is the loving itself. It's love calling us home. That's what longing is. So let's do a final meditation. We'll be going over about two or three minutes tonight, but give you a taste of this.

So again, just feel your senses awake and allow yourself honestly to just to scan your life and sense to the degree it's true how or where you feel cut off or separate from love. It may be in a very general way or it may be in a specific relationship. And so this takes a bit of courage and honesty just to sense where that's so for you, where you feel cut off or separate from love. So you can sense it as an actual feeling in your body where the absence of love, where there's actually a feeling in the body of this is something that's missing, just to let the longing be activated.

So letting yourself feel that kind of separateness, but also sensing that you actually do long to be more intimate, more connected, perhaps that intimacy. with all things, you really long to feel that belonging. You know, you might have a certain story of a person you want to feel it with or whatever, that's fine, but stay right with the longing, right in your body, in your heart, just the feeling of wanting to be seen, appreciate it, held. So this is a real reflection on how much you want to be seen and loved. And really in the most basic way, love for who you are,

you are, free to be who you are in love. And see if you can feel that as a longing, a real longing in the heart area. If it helps you to breathe and feel your heart, if it helps you to use words like, please love me or I want to feel love, I want to feel held, just experiment, don't limit yourself, just to see if you can tap into that longing. Set sense of please love me, let the love wash in, let it enter me. And as you feel that sincerity of just longing to belong, look and see if you can intuit some love that's actually right here, just as you trace back right into the source of the longing. And the more full the longing is in your body, the more you might sense that there's also some warmth

and light and love that comes right through it. Is love available to sense right now so that as you say please love me? Sense if there is love right here, warmth, light, love and let it enter you, let it bathe you. Feel it all around you permeating you. Don't worry because if you don't feel love, just practice reconnecting you. reconnecting with the real aliveness of longing. Please love me, please love me.

It can be subtle sometimes what we feel, just kind of some warmth or a gentle embrace, might be a sense of kind of floating in warm water. For some it's just deep relaxation, some maybe even a stillness. Whatever you're experiencing, just relax into it. This is a life practice. the extent you feel some loving presence, just melt into it, be held by it, let it suffuse yourselves and be one with it. Sensing that heart space where everything that is is welcome and sensing our shared prayer

that all beings everywhere might awaken to the loving presence that is their essence, that all beings everywhere might trust that loving presence. their belonging and live from love. May there be peace on earth. May there be peace everywhere. May all beings awaken and be free. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.