Tara Brach - Remembering Love (Retreat Talk)

Episode Date: May 1, 2011

2011-05-01 - Remembering Love (from IMCW Spring Retreat) - The habit of self-judgment not only causes emotional pain, it creates a trance that obscures the purity and vastness of our Being. This talk explores how a wakeful and forgiving heart can heal and free us. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

Good evening. One of the great signs of meditation in our culture, it's all the paraphernalia. One is this necklace, this bone-shaped necklace, and on it it it's written, sit, stay, heal. So here we are. And I wanted to start in tonight a bit where we left our hero, the Buddha, under the Bodhi tree last night.

I was reflecting on the myth, you know, of the Buddha and, you know, battling Mara. And at the end, you know, the Mara is kind of, the forces are demolished and scattered. And the elephant, this monster elephant that Mara is riding is down on his knees. And, you know, he's been vanquished, basically. The Buddha vanquished him. And Mara is this bad guy. So I was reflecting on this arctypal casting. of this battle, okay, and how this was not a myth that came out of the minds of Buddhist nuns

and wise women through the ages. This is a male myth, you know, battling Mara, a bad guy. Then the inquiry really of, what happens, you know, when we start sensing, okay, so the forces of Mara are these energies inside us and we're battling them. And what really happens when we frame it that way? When there's this bad energy, when it's good against evil, when it's been casted that way, what really happens? So it's an interesting thing because, you know, if we're at war with Mara, if we're battling Mara, if that's all we're doing, we'll always be at war. If that's the frame we have, Now that wasn't the, that's not the wisdom of the myth, you know, its intention. And in the deepest way, it's really an encounter with energies that's done with tremendous presence and care. But I think the language is important because we actually do perceive it like we're struggling against something that's bad. That is one of the ways that we contract. Like we're kind of at war with something bad. ourselves. One of the greatest truths that we always forget, and I think we do forget the

greatest truth, one of the greatest truths we always forget, is that if we don't regard this life right here with love, the self with love, we can't be happy and we can't really love our world. That the path of heart classically begins with forgiveness and forgiveness begins with forgiving whatever we're holding against

this being right here. It's the place we're most regularly blindsided. I talk about trance a lot because we don't realize how we're turned against ourselves. We move through the day

and there might be a slight sense of of, you know, uneasiness or unpleasantness, and we don't realize it's because in some way we're not liking how we are. And so what I've found is that really the key moment, and I watch, I mean, one of the big questions a lot of us have is what really causes change, what allows us really to heal or to wake up? The key moment in any mini-healing process, our big healing process, is when there's a softening of the heart to ourselves, when something remembers, oh, wait a minute, be kind. It's a key moment.

And it's amazing that we keep forgetting, like I find for myself that I'll be moving along and when I remember, wait a minute, just gentler, gentler, it's like, how could I have forgotten that I do? So this is the Buddha, this is from, the Samyatta Nakaya, one of the British scriptures, the moment you see how important it is to love yourself, you'll stop making others suffer.

So how do we understand that? In the moment that we really embrace this life right here, all sense of separation dissolves. If we really are loving the life that's here, our identity shifts, we open up. So, since I'm invoking the Buddha, I'd like to bring your attention to this lovely Buddha we have right here.

I don't know how many of you've tuned into this Buddha here. But a little bit of a story behind it that I particularly want to share because Luis is here. Luis and I had a job, and our job was to find a really beautiful Buddha for our sangha here. It was a really great job. So we actually did it while we were up in Provincetown.

Louisa was visiting with my family up there. And we first, we went out to a restaurant and had dinner and so on. And then we went and looked for our Buddha, and that's the Buddha we found. And we brought it back and put it in the Wednesday night class on an altar there. And I noticed people would come to it and they'd look at it. And I saw a group of people looking at it, and they're kind of leaning like this as they were looking.

And they brought me over, they wave me over, and they said, and Tara, this is a leaning Buddha. And can you see it? Yeah? It's a very imperfectly casted Buddha. And it became like beloved, because it's almost like, how cool can that be that we have this like imperfect Buddha here? And it really makes it easier because, you know, here it is.

every one of us were all casted by forces beyond our control. It's just casting. And when we believe that the leaning facet, the imperfect cover to our being is what we are, we're in trouble. Every one of us, every one of us has these conditioning, the same conditionings, the same conditionings, to want to grasp and to be afraid and to push away and to pretend. We all, you know, protect.

We all have those forces in us. So in Buddhist psychology, as many of you know, the description that the Buddha gave to how we get ourselves in trouble, he said, the first arrow, you know, this casting, these conditions that we all have, is absolutely inevitable. every one of you you know we're all our nervous system we're all rigged

with this limbic system that is just geared for fight and flight and it doesn't always look so good so that's given the first arrow is a given that's what he said but he said the second arrow

is optional we don't have to react and take personally this conditioning I've kind of translated it to leaning is a given knocking ourselves over is optional does that make sense

that work so at the center of our psyche is often these two personas of the judgeer and the judged you know the one that's shooting the second arrow and the one that feels hit by it and if you

examine your psyche for most of us will find that holds together a sense of self like we've spent a lot of time where there's some way that we're evaluating evaluating with not such a positive slant how we're doing and there's some place in us

that's feeling that vulnerability of being evaluated judgeer and the judge it's the linchpin of the self-identity and sometimes it's very subtle You know, we're all designed to feel a sense of separateness and sense of selfness. And with any sense of self, there's some feeling of vulnerable and not okay. And the more solid that gets, the more suffering there is.

It's an amazingly powerful place to pay attention if we want to be free. And the more that we can notice and wake up from this sense of something's wrong with me, evaluating it, the more this self-sense becomes more fluid, less solid, less centralized, the more freedom there is. So how we wake up, just explore that a bit. everything that we've been exploring over this weekend and that we'll continue to explore generally comes under the rubric of a mindful awareness with these two wings that we notice

when it's happening the contracting, the judging, or whatever it is and then there's a quality of kindness that we're allowing but with this real kind attention recognizing and allowing. And so when it comes to our focus tonight, which is how this self-identity and suffering happens when we shoot the second arrow, when it comes to that, there's kind of a chain reaction

and it's interesting to see where we catch ourselves on the chain. For instance, for many of us, we've got the less sticky second arrows. In other words, we know there's certain things that we know. know we don't like when we do. And if we can be alert, when we do them, we can go, okay, okay, you know, drop it. It's okay. It's not such a big deal. But we get more, we get more clear about that. For instance, for myself, when I make certain kinds of mistakes, it's forgivable. As long as I catch it. If I don't catch that I'm kind of on my own case, it can build up like layers of gunk, you know, it just kind of gets stickier and stickier. So today, just to come

right into the present day, first mistake of the day that got me was I took four supplements of the wrong kind. So rather than taking four calciums, I took four magnesiums. Now, I don't know if any of you know what magnesium does to you, but you're not supposed to take four times that amount. I won't even talk about what it does to you, but it has to do with your gut. So anyway, I took four of those. So they're down already, and I'm sitting there going, you know how you go, I just can't believe I didda-da-da-da. Well, I just kept on cycling through.

I can't believe. But it's already down, you know, so finally I won't, wait a minute, okay, forgiven, forgive. So I moved through the day, and then this afternoon when we were, I'm doing the closing with the other group, we had groups of four, and each person was, us to have a chance to share and after the third person I had thought we were all done so I did a lovely closing little meditation and they were going wait a minute wait a minute and so again it was

one of those pangs of oh god you know here I am teaching mindfulness and now that is not mindful you know okay let it go let it go so we have these areas where we we catch ourselves I have a friend that just visited and his thing is that he brats and then he really, then he feels kind of slimy from it. So one of his practices now is to notice when he's bragging and, you know, either cut it out, but just, but to forgive himself. So he caught himself with me and it was great. He paused and goes, I just did it, didn't I, you know, and just to pause.

So you might know for yourself, like you might have your list of not so sticky second arrows where you, you know, you kind of get on your case but you can drop at places where you're, you see that you're trying to impress somebody and you kind of leave the conversation and go, oh, I was kind of trying to, I was trying to make a real impression, or places where you got a little defensive or where you got controlling. I love the story of Postmaster General J. Edward Day. He reveals in his book an ingenious way to stop long-winded telephone callers. They suggest you hang up while you are talking.

The other party will think you're accidentally cut off because who would hang up on their own voice, you know? So we all have our little manipulations, don't we? It's a good strategy. I've never tried of it. I think it's kind of cool. So we have our things. You know how Yogi Berra puts it? He says, I never blame myself when I'm not hitting.

I just blame the bat. And if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it's not my fault that I'm not hitting, how can I get mad at myself? So it's like, how easygoing are we with ourselves? But there's many, many areas where the second arrow has to do with the basic sense of our identity, which is, because I'm this way means I'm bad.

So we have these places where, we think we fall short. And it could be as a parent, or it could be, you know, as an intimate partner, or it could be as a friend, or it could be at work. It's usually work and love. But for many of us, we have something that feels unforgivable about how we are, and sometimes it's in ways we relate to ourselves. And it might be that it's not the kind of unforgivable that we spend a lot of time thinking about. But for many, there's something left to forgive that until we've forgiven, there really is a way in which we're not able to be at ease in our world. So the inquiry then is in these larger areas, you know, how we feel that we're falling short and how to begin to

look at them. Mahatma Gandhi says, I have only three enemies. My favorite enemy, the one most easily influenced for the better as the British Empire. My second enemy, the Indian people, far more difficult. But my most formidable opponent is a man named Mohandas G. Gandhi. No, Mahondas K Gandhi. With him, I seem to have very little influence. So when we get stuck, it's because we're living with a should, that I should be different. And it gets very, It's very deep, the sense of the way I am is not the way I should be, and I want to bring your attention to the word should, because we have it. Other people should be different, we should be different. Lely Tomlin says, I always knew I wanted to be somebody, but I guess I should

have been more specific. I remember one of the times I went to the Insight Meditation Society, I went into the front hall and there was a little sign up that said self-knowledge is not necessarily good news. And it's like that, that we aren't at home with how it is. There's this leaning Buddha and we can't help the casting, but we really think we should be different. One of my biggest wake-ups to the depth of that was not that long ago, about three or four years ago. I had been up at Cape Cod, and I had been having increasing trouble with my knees,

and I couldn't run any longer, so I got the brilliant idea that I'd go speedwalking instead. And so I went out for three mornings in a row, speedwalking on a slanted beach, which I found out was, like, incredibly bad for one's knees. and I was pretty much crippled. I went home and I couldn't walk. I couldn't go up and down my stairs.

I had a kind of crawl. It was pathetic. And so I spent about a week pretty sick because it triggered off a whole inflammation through my body and it was pretty miserable. And I remember at one point meditating and saying, you know, that inquiry of, you know, really what's between me and being present?

And of course there was the real unpleasantness in my body. body. But it got, but it, you know, I said, okay, unpleasant, unpleasant. But then I went, you know, then all of a sudden I heard a voice saying, I hate my life. And then I heard a voice saying, I hate myself. Now, in recent years, I haven't encountered that so much. And so I kept paying attention. And it was this hate was towards this self, this sick self that was self-pitying, and was impatient and irritable with Jonathan and others, but mostly it was this self-pity and humorlessness and grimness that somehow rather this self had locked into.

And then it hit me that I was miserable and I was hating myself for how I was handling it. That I had this idea I should be handling it differently. Here I've done decades of spiritual people. practice and I'm still this self-pitying person that gets so grim, how I should be different. And it was when I recognized that core level of I should be different and how much it was creating suffering that something in me really, you know, I started weeping. It's like this prayer of please may I be kind. What keeps us hooked is this idea that it should be different.

And in some way we then punish ourselves. Now it's very difficult to begin to unravel that when we've injured other people. It seems like, yes, I should be different. It's not just an idea, I should be different. It's like we really believe our belief. So I want to explore with you because I find that so much of our self-forgiveness has to do with when we've caused injury to others, how that can be possible. and I'd like to do it with an example of one man I worked with

who had a session with and he hated his anger because his anger lashed out at people in ways that were injurious at his people he worked with and at home it was the way he had really hurt his family so his first challenge was to me he said I have like a violent beast in me how can I forgive that it's like Mara is is bad and how and why should I forgive that okay and so we started exploring because his

belief was that if he forgave it it would indulge that beast in fact that beast would be wildly out of control and so at one point I asked him does hating the beast improve your behavior and that got him because he knew it didn't but I think that it's an important thing because when we think about forgiving, it's ourselves. I think that's what comes to mind, that in some way we'll never get better, you know, that we won't change anything, that we'll indulge, that will kind of go to sleep, that we won't see where we've heard other people. So he came to retreat because he knew that his anger and his hatred of himself was keeping him in a really in a bind. And his assignment

really at retreat was to notice when he turned on himself. And he was in, this is several years ago, he was sitting in a meditation hall, and his mind went right to the worst violation he felt he had done. And what it was was a few weeks earlier, his wife had had a mammogram, and there was something suspicious, so there was the needle biopsy. And the results were supposed to be in by the end of the day. So he comes home at the end of the day. He walks home. in the front hall, he sees a package that he had asked her to mail that had not been mailed. She walks into the room. The first thing he does is say, so it wasn't important enough to you to mail the package when it mattered to me? That's the first thing he said. She, of course,

broke down weeping. And then he went, you know, he's, so he's sitting in the hall remembering this, and it was so overwhelming to him that he left the hall, and he went back to his room. And and he was just sobbing. This is what he told me about. And he said when he was sobbing, he was saying to her, I can't help it, I can't help it. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.

Then he had a memory of his father, after his father had had a tantrum and thrown wine glasses and saying to his mother the same exact things, I can't help it, I can't help it. Of course she was threatening to leave in some way, but he had overheard that. and he realized that his father was at the mercy of the same demons he was at the mercy of

and that neither of them could help it. So I said to him, you know, we sat with it and I said, you know, it really isn't your fault. I say that a lot. I say it to myself. I say it to other people. You know, I see people that are children of drug addicts or parents were violent in some way or parents were shut down or whatever the causes and conditions.

The casting is the casting. We're leaning. It's not our fault. But what I talked to him about was that you can learn to respond differently. Not your fault doesn't mean not responsible, not able to respond. It just means it's not your fault.

You're not a bad person. You didn't want it to be this way. We don't want it to be that way. I mean, none of us wants to. to shut down our hearts with our intimate partners and not be able to respond or wants to just unleash our criticism on a child. None of us wants to do the things that we blame ourselves for.

So for him, the first step of healing was, it's not my fault. The second step, that kind of cleared the way. That removed that second arrow enough that he could start investigating his anger and find under it the feeling of being a very ashamed person that didn't feel important and didn't feel significant and that just created a rage when other people didn't pay attention in certain ways. He was able to start this process of forgiven, forgiven. So those are the steps.

It's not my fault. And then to really pay attention to the very behavior that we feel is so reprehensible. There's a metaphor that I find kind of helpful on this, which is to imagine that you're walking in the woods and you come upon a dog, this little dog that's sitting by a tree, and you reach down to pet the dog, and it all of a sudden, you know, lurches at you, bears its teeth, you know, and barks. And at first you might feel frightened and angry, right? But then if you notice that one of its legs buried under these leaves isn't a trap. And immediately your mood shifts, right? You go from anger to all.

From concern, you see that the dog's aggression was coming from vulnerability. It was coming from hurt. So this applies to all of us, that when we act in hurtful ways or unconscious ways, It's because our leg is in a trap. The more that we can look through the eyes of wisdom at ourselves and others and see that, the more that we begin the process of healing.

Some friends of mine were teaching at a security prison and teaching a meditation course. And one of the women in the course, a woman named Vanessa, over six feet tall, bright, dyed red hair and more tattoos than you can possibly count. And known in her ward as a bully. And she protected some women and relentlessly kind of intimidated and insulted others. And during the meditation course, while others joined in for discussion,

she would just kind of sit with her arms crossed and kind of scowl. Okay. And the final class, eight weeks, there was kind of a go-round of, you know, what people noticed or discovered or experienced. She went last, and she said, well, what I really liked was the poem about the pirate. Now, what she was referring to, some of you might know them, I'm going to read it because I love this film. This is Ticknathan.

It's called Call Me by My True Names. I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river, and I'm the bird which when spring comes arrives in time to eat the mayfly. I'm the frog swimming happily in the clear pond, and I'm also the grass snake who approaching in silence feeds itself on the frog. I'm the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks, and I'm the arms merchant selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I'm the 12-year-old girl refugee on a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate

and I'm the pirate my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving please call me by my true name so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once so I can see that my joy and pain are one please call me by my true names so I can wake up And so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion. So this woman said after, she said that poem about the pirate, she says, well, that got me thinking. It made me know something. And then she spoke so softly, people could barely hear her. She said, all my life, I was the bad one, the problem one.

Now I know that I am suffering too. I mentioned that in the process of transformation, the key point is the softening. And what allows us to soften is the recognition of, ouch, that this hurts. I mean, in a moment we can actually, without deluding it and saying, oh, other people hurt more than me or, oh, I deserve to hurt, it's the pure recognition of, oh, this hurts. This hurting. and it's not self-pity it's like there's something

naturally that gets tender right and that is compassion compassion is this recognition of out you know and then then this kind of a tenderness

that just cares there's a there's a black spiritual that has a line that says see beyond the fault to the need see beyond the fault

to the need And I feel like that is really a critical part of wisdom. It's the same idea as the trapdog. That if you can see beyond the presentation, the leaning to what's causing it, then you don't take it personally and you just have that, oh, okay, tender. Maybe just a short reflection for a moment on that. if you would like just to take a moment to close your eyes. You might send something that you're aware of.

If you scan, I sometimes do these forgiveness scans to myself, somewhere that you might be holding against yourself for something, something you're judging yourself for. And if you're not finding anything, then yay, you can celebrate. That's your meditation. but if you notice that there's something, some way that you're doing things here or something you might feel like you did to somebody

that was wrong or hurtful, might be some ongoing judgment that you hold of yourself. And when you, if you find something, sense the what you're judging, the behavior or the state of mind, maybe you're judging yourself or being insecure, or angry or anxious or whatever. But to see what you're judging

and then see if you can sense behind the fault the unmet need that's there, the way in some way you're in a trap, the vulnerability, the feeling of maybe that your life is not fulfilling you, or the feeling of fear and needing to defend, feeling that if you give some, you'll be just sucked into something and lose your life or whatever the need or fear or vulnerability

is, can you see behind the fault to that? And if you can to just in some way offer kindness. Dana Fault 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 being. Perfection 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. Opening your eyes if you'd like. So one of the pathways to self-forgiveness and self-compassion

passion is to pause and sense, okay, it's not my fault. Can I look into what's really going on? Can I see behind the thing I'm blaming to the need, to the hurt, to the vulnerability? Sometimes it's really hard to do that. And when I work with people, I find if I then just, we just look at, okay, what's it like to be blaming yourself? What if you invest in, you, investigate the experience of being on your own case, being at war. And often, I'll ask the question, how many moments is your body and mind living in this state of dividedness of not liking yourself? How many moments? How long has it been? Often what happens if we can really honestly recognize how many of our life moments, the proportion of our life moments in some way that

we're at war with ourselves, not at home with ourselves. If we start getting that, that can give rise to compassion. It brings up what I sometimes call a soul sadness, where we see the kind of shape of our incarnation and get it. These are moments that I could have been loving more freely. I could have creative, I could have been relaxing, I could have served. But no, I was caught being on my own case. How much it binds our life energy. It's actually a useful thing to have that soul sadness when we start getting it. There was one woman that was in a group today that has been to a few retreats and she said, this retreat, I got stopped in my tracks. She said, What I couldn't believe I had never seen before is how many moments my mind was judging,

wall-to-wall judging. We don't see it. It's so much a part of our identity. The Buddha says, your days pass like rainbows, like a flash of lightning, like a star at dawn. Your life is short. How can you quarrel? And it goes for quarreling with ourselves, too. How can you quarrel?

So it takes a commitment. What I've seen is that once people get a sense of the suffering of being at war, there can be a real intention. You can leave this retreat with more of an awake and intentional kind of stance of, please, may I be kind. It's like Huxley, all this Huxley, one of my heroes that he died of throat cancer and I remember the story of at the end of his life he was asked you know what have you learned and his message he whispered it he couldn't even speak

he said be kinder so one of the questions that comes up is well if we've heard another okay so what does self-compassion do and and I want to go back to the way where I started where the Buddha said, if you could love yourself, you would stop hurting other people. Said in a more positive way, self-compassion unleashes our capacity to love others. It unleashes it.

When we start softening that armor, there is just an amazing, total, full expression of this heart. I've never seen self-compassion. lead to anything but widening ripples. Now compassion, the very word compassion has to do with action. It's like we're not just, there's not just a kind of a softening, there's action, there's like an extending. There's a story that I started sharing at retreats many years ago because I was so moved by it that I like to share with you tonight about this, that when we've

caused injury, how the first step is really letting go of our own guilt. It's not my fault, not blaming ourselves. It's in other words, we can't make amends to other people out of guilt. That does not, we can go ahead and do the outside in, and it's not like it won't be helpful. It's skillful in its own way. But the deepest transformation and healing is if we've truly brought self-compassion to our own hearts, then there's this very pure, caring, that we then make amends. And by the way, making amends is incredibly appropriate and powerful. And there are many faiths.

I think of the Jewish faith. There's the instructions of, you know, when you see you've caused harm, reach out, make a difference. There's a, let's see if I have it still. Yeah, let me share this with you. Highly esteemed Hasidic rabbi of the most renowned Jewish community in Poland. 1800s needed to travel by train to a distant town. Being a modest man and not wanting to call attention to himself, he dressed in the attire of most peasants. A man of some means, slightly

drunk and arrogant, sat down beside the rabbi and not knowing who he was, was rude, insulting, and abusive to him most of the trip. When they arrived at their destination, there was a huge following to welcome the rabbi, and the man immediately realized what he'd done and he was mortified. So he falls to his knees and he pleads the rambis. rabbi's forgiveness and the rabbi gently offered his hand and invited him to rise but he said it's not for me that you need to seek forgiveness it was not the chief rabbi to whom you were rude you need to go find some peasant who seems to be poor and uncultured and ignorant it is from him that you need to beg forgiveness so there's a beauty to asking for forgiveness but when we first have

come to that place in our own being and it comes out of that. So it's from that understanding I share this as a reading from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection. Their offerings at the wall is the name of the book. And in this reading, the man writes, this is a letter, Dear Sir, for 22 years I've carried your picture in my wallet. I was only 18 years old that day we faced each other on the trail in Chulai, Vietnam. Why you didn't take my life, I'll never know. You stared at me so long, armed with your AK-47, and yet you didn't fire. Forgive me for taking your life.

I was reacting just the way I was trained, to kill VC. So many times, Betsbya Khan, so many times over the years I 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 is time for me to continue the life process and release the pain and guilt.

Forgive me, sir. So I shared that for many years when I was teaching, and then a couple of years ago somebody said, that's not the end of the story. And then I found out the rest of the story. So this man, his name's Richard Latrell, had written this letter and he left it at the Vietnam Memorial, which people did along with the photograph.

But somehow or other, it got into the book, and the book and letter got back to him. It's like he'd wanted to get rid of it, and he couldn't. It just came back to him. So he ended up deciding he wanted to go to Vietnam to meet the daughter in the picture. And he did. He found his way to Vietnam.

and found his way to her. And they had a meeting. And so there's an interpreter that was at the meeting, and I'll just read you a little bit of it. He introduced himself, and he said to her, and he said, tell her, this is the photo I took from her father's wallet the day I shot and killed him, and then I'm returning it. So he said that, and then he kind of, his voice broke up,

and then he asked for her forgiveness. And then the woman, her name's Lon, burst into tears, and fill into his arms and they just held each other sobbing. When she settled down, the interpreter again said both she and her brother

believe their father's spirit lives on in you. They expect that you'll think it's just superstition and perhaps they say it is but for them today is the day their father's spirit

has come back to them. So there's a way of understanding that when we finally get it to let go of the guilt, to hold our own being with compassion, there is a natural expression to reach out and touch others. And if it turns out and if there's been harm to another, it's, we care. We care. The sila, the virtuous action will come out of that self-compassion. It's about remembering

love. That pivotal moment in all healing is the moment that's the moment that's something in us rewakens up to who we are, to the loving presence, it is who we are, and we remember to offer to the places in ourselves and each other where it's needed. And even remembering our intention, if we leave this retreat with just more conscious intention to soften towards ourselves, our life will unfold with more freedom, just more intention and to help each other in it. It's one of the most beautiful parts of Sangha or community is that when someone else is caught up in their identity as a leaning Buddha and they're caught up in the leaning part and we remind them of the Buddha part,

it's like that is the freedom that happens that we have a shift in identity. Rumi, come, come, whoever you are, wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn't matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come even if you have broken your vow a hundred times, come, come, come again, come. It's okay that we're imperfect. It's really okay. It's kind of like Sri Narasar Gadata. He says it's so wonderfully that upon realization, it says you can't really describe it. You can't put it. You can't put it in many words except for there's a profound realization, nothing is really wrong with me. What if that truly was where we were living?

Nothing is really wrong with me. The third Zen Patriarch, you know, that we're without anxiety about imperfection. Every one of us is here leaning. You know, we might not be leaning so obviously, but we're leaning. You know, we've got these imperfections, so what? So there's a deep habit to add the second arrow, to have our identity solidify around the sense that something is wrong. It's very, very deep in us, which is why I speak about it a lot and dedicated.

Tonight's talk is dedicated to the leaning Buddha. It's dedicated to all the parts of us that the inner expressions of Mara that in the Tibetan tradition are described differently. contrast to the enemy as the deities. They're just different deities, wrathful deity and jealous deity and possessive deity, and that our entry into sacred space is by encountering the deities. It's like that is how we wake up. We just encounter the leaning qualities in us. And if we can remember love, then the radiance, the luminosity of what we are is free to shine. So we'll just close with a brief reflection on this.

And in this pause, just feel the sincerity of your own heart towards freedom, towards being really truly who you are, realizing that, and your own intention to untangle the armoring, freedom from the second arrow. in whatever way it expresses, subtle or overt. Srinarsarga Data says to make love of yourself perfect. He says, all I plead with you is make love of yourself perfect. He's not talking about loving this separate self.

He's talking about loving the life that's here, which leads us into loving all life. What would it mean right now to make love of this life, this aliveness, with all of its expression, is perfect, unconditional. We begin by just sensing where there's not, where there's not-okay feelings. And I sometimes just use the word forgiven, forgiven. Not as if something's wrong and it's being forgiven, but just this gentle offering of letting go of any blame, releasing it. Forgiven, forgiven. Nothing's wrong. It's taking a few moments.

and the quietness to sense if there's any places asking for forgiveness or acceptance. I'm just offering the light of your own heart and kindness. Who would you be if there was no reversive judge, no judged, if truly there was the experience of nothing is wrong. Moments that you hold the imperfections with kindness, you discover the vastness and want, of your Buddha heart. 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.