Tara Brach - (retreat talk) Self Compassion

Episode Date: March 20, 2013

2009-10-26 - (retreat talk) Self Compassion - We can only find love and peace in this life if we are able to hold our inner life with compassion. This talk explores the subtle and therefore often unseen ways that we turn on ourselves, and the pathways to a forgiving heart. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

Good evening. I was reflecting on today on the interviews and just on the retreat and realized that for me one of the best descriptions of what goes on is forgetting and remembering and then forgetting and then remembering and just I watch myself, I watch all of us when we forget. The signs are real clear there's a stuckness and kind of a contraction into a small sense of who we are. And when there's a remembering, it has different experiences to it, but the common denominator is there's a quality of presence that has room for what's going on. Rather than reacting, whether it's the image of the mountains and all the weather systems just happening, they're just happening. I often like the

metaphor of ocean, we're back to the ocean-ness and the waves are coming and going and it's workable. And in the Zen tradition they say that the very heart of Zen is being able to respond appropriately. And I like that because when you're in your ocean-ness different waves come and there's a capacity to respond either spontaneously or creatively or with heart or whatever is called for. Some of you might remember, this is one of my more favorite descriptions in this kind of Zen line. It starts a while back, an old tired-looking dog wandered into the yard. I could tell from his collar, though no tags, and well-fed belly, and the fact that he was clean that he had a home. He followed me into the house, down the hall, and fell asleep on the

couch. Now, my dogs didn't seem to mind, and he seemed like a good dog, and I was okay with him, so I let him nap. An hour later, he went to the door, and I let him out. The next day he was back, resumed his position on the couch and slept for an hour. This continued for several weeks. Curious, I pinned a note to his collar that I wrote, every afternoon your dog comes to my house for a nap. Now, I don't mind, but I want to make sure you're okay with it. The next day he arrived with a different note into his collar. He lives in a home with three children. He's trying to catch up on his sleep.

May I come with him tomorrow? So there's a sense of responding, you know, when you're sleepy, just sleep, when you're hungry, just eat. If you're sad, you know, the description of sad Buddha, or Buddha's mind is sad today or angry, if Buddha's mind is angry today. And yet what happens to us instead,

is when waves arise, rather than just being aware that it's happening, we take them personally. And you've been hearing this for the last handful of days. And what I'd like to explore tonight is in a refined way looking at the process by which we get hooked. The polyword is paponcha. It's a proliferation. It's a chain reactivity. and the particular way that I'd like to look at it, the lens is it's a very pervasive kind of suffering

whereby when something difficult comes up we take it personally and then in a very deep way land up feeling I'm wrong, I'm bad, I'm not okay. So this is a talk about the arising of the not okay self. And my motivation is that when I work with myself and I work with others, almost always when there's suffering, there's a layer that if it's not seen, keeps us stuck in the suffering. And that layer is some belief and feeling and they go together of something's wrong with me. Now, sometimes it's very subtle.

It's not a gross thing of I'm a flawed being and I deserve to be thrown in the trash, it's much more subtle, it's more like something's wrong with that person. But underneath that's a sense of not okay self. In fact, I mean, when we really, really investigate with any sense of self, there's an undercurrent of something's wrong. But it can be very subtle. And when we start catching it, when we start catching and James referred to the selfing,

it's only when we start examining and seeing it that we can truly discover the what we are that's not hitched to a small, limited, failing sense of self. So the suffering from this is what motivated me years ago to write radical acceptance, seeing how what I call the trance of unworthiness really hooked people. We're going to explore this at a little bit of a more refined level, but it's the same suffering.

It's, when I taught it in Europa, they had a picture of me showing that I was, you know, the workshop I was going to do and the caption underneath was, something is wrong with me, you know, because I teach a lot about how we believe that, you know, that, they have that, the cartoon on self-esteem and this guy's writing in his diary, Dear diary, I'm sorry to bother you again. It's that. And recently I saw, I shared, I shared, this with the closing group of a man's in heaven and he's kind of having his entry interview with God and God saying, no, no, that's not a sin either. No, no. You must have worried yourself to death, you know? So we get hooked in and it was at one of these retreats at seven oaks about seven or eight years ago. I was kind of talking about how deep a suffering this was when one of the men here said that he reminded himself of this tiger in the D.C. National Zoo,

her name was Mohini, and she would just pace back and forth. And he said that the zoologist, the naturalist, felt really sorry for her. So it was just kind of a 12-foot-by-12 cage. So they created this incredible natural environment for her, with ponds and hills and the whole deal like acres and acres of a reserve. So it was with real enthusiasm that they brought her to her new home and she immediately went to one corner of the compound and just started pacing 12 feet by 12 feet until it was bare of grass

and she did that for the rest of her life. So when this man described that I realized that was one of the most elegant metaphors I'd ever heard about how we live our life, that each of us, at least some of the time, is inside the cage of our idea about self. And if we're honest, we spend a lot of our day with an idea of who we are and who other is. And to some degree, there's a squeeze, there's a confining quality. because we're really not inhabiting the wholeness of our being. A friend of ours who has taught here a few times, Eric Colvick,

and he describes it as roaming freely like a happy dog, you know, that we don't, we're not really, we don't give ourselves permission to just live in the spontaneity of who we are. We don't let ourselves love without holding back. You know, we're in that cage, at least some of the time. the teacher Srinar Sargadata, you've heard a bit from him, you know, some of his words thus far. He's been one of my great inspirations and I want to read you. This, usually I share this at the end of a talk but I thought maybe I'd start kind of with this and then

maybe land up with it too. He writes this, he says, on realization you feel complete, fulfilled free from the pleasure pain complex and yet not always able to explain what happened, why or how. You can put it only in negative terms. Nothing is wrong with me any longer. Nothing is wrong with me any longer. And I wonder if just for a moment, if we pause together, just to sense what that, just to kind of try that on. Okay, just check in.

And behind the words, nothing is wrong with me anymore, any longer. If you can sense what it would mean to let go of any belief that something's wrong, just a sense of glimmer or maybe more of what that would be in your body, nothing's wrong with me. and if it feels really hard to sense what gets in the way

and that's as much a part of the investigation as anything else nothing is wrong with me what happens in the mind and the heart so a glimmer of this is a taste of realization okay so let's take a look at how we get caught in the trance of something wrong so it affects our body the feeling in our body. It affects our heart, it affects how we interact with each other.

And again, it may not be an overt, something's wrong with me. It might be something's wrong with other people or something's wrong with how things are that they should be different. And by the way, that's always a big flag, that there's some sense it should be different. So we begin with really this understanding that suffering is a chain reaction. and it's an ongoing process, it's not a static state, it keeps on generating itself, it's a conditioning that keeps on reconstructing the sense of self. And it's a chain reaction that happens outside of awareness. The medicine for suffering is awareness.

If you see the chain reaction, the identification with it dissolves and you're no longer stuck. Okay, so it's a chain reaction that happens outside of awareness, or you might have some awareness of it but it's not full enough to dissolve the selfing. The first step, and this is the first noble truth, the beginning is that the condition of this relative world is that there is unease, that there is pleasantness and unpleasantness and it keeps changing and so that creates a sense of unease. that let's say if we just talk about the unpleasantness,

it can get triggered internally by a wave of not feeling good or by a thought and it can get triggered externally by somebody punching you in the face or saying something nasty. It can get triggered in many ways. So we have that first step of unpleasantness. And then there's a series of reactions. And again, with each reaction, if it's not, seen, there's a solidifying of a self-sense. The self-sense co- arises with reaction.

The first reaction is evaluating it. There's something that evaluates and says, something's wrong, something's missing, shouldn't be like this, okay? And very quickly from that reaction, if it's something's missing, we're grasping and if there's something wrong, we're pushing away. But it's a contraction to try to control our experience. Now if that's how happening again, as I said, and we don't notice it, there's a self-centeredness, a centralization around self that begins to arise, grasping, resisting. It then unfolds or proliferates with more thoughts into emotions, into shame, into fear, into anger. But again, it's not just anger, it's I am angry. This anger is happening to me.

Where the suffering is, as I was talking with one person here today, it's not just that anger or ill will comes up, it's that it's my anger, my ill will. I am the perpetrator of bad things. So we have a sense that it's happening to me, it's because of me. If we're greedy, it's owned by me, the greed is owned by me. We're not just, let's say, confused or fatigued, or even sick. How many of you've noticed that when you get sick, it's not just unpleasant feelings, it reflects on a self. It says something about a self being weak or vulnerable or not okay. We don't keep it simple. So this has been called the second arrow. There's unpleasantness, there's a reaction going on and then we add onto that, it's mine and I'm

bad for it. So it's not just the fear, it's my fear and what does the fear say about me? I'm not okay. I'm bad for feeling this. I'm weak. I'm out of control. The most basic layer of how this happens is that we have unmet needs, we feel needy, we act out of that and then we feel like I'm a needy self and I'm bad. In fact, the word needy brings up a sense of shame, doesn't it? Like it's a bad thing to have needs. Jonathan and I were walking today and we were kind of talking about what it would be like if we did a hand raise on and the question would be how many of us here felt that our basic

needs for unconditional love and understanding were met by our families of origin. I'm not going to ask for Henry's, but we're just kind of fantasizing about it and how the people that would be most embarrassed, the outliers would be the ones that said, yeah, my family was just, you know, it's not so common. And it's not our parents' fault. I feel like I lucked out, but, you know, the culture is, and the generations and the generations create a situation where our parents didn't get the love and the mirroring and the understanding and they didn't how to give it. so it just gets handed down and handed down. So most of us have unmet needs and they're deep.

And for some more than others there's trauma and neglect and abuse. And so it's very hard to feel love and belonging and safety. And when that's the case, we get identified with the unlovable, unsafe, not okay self. and then it gets further consolidated. There's another step of proliferation in the ways we go about trying to meet those needs. So not only am I, let's say, a needy, unlovable self, but then my ways of feeling defensive against other people or protective or pushing other people away or grasping at them further confirms my badness.

And we all have our strategies that for many of us, we're trying to hide the not okay self. And so we lie or we exaggerate. Dear Abby has these letters. She admitted she was at a loss to answer. Dear Abby, I've suspected that my husband's been fooling around and when confronted with the evidence, he denied everything and said it would never happen again.

Strategies here. Dear Abby, I have a man I can't trust. He cheats so much. I'm not even sure the baby I'm carrying is his. So that one of the strategies is to maneuver, manipulate, control, try to present a certain way, one of our biggest ones is to try to be good. And when I say that, what I mean is try to look good to others and try to convince herself we're good as a way of kind of trying to make up for something.

One man wrote a letter to the IRS saying, I've been unable to sleep knowing that I cheated on my income tax. I've understated my taxable income and have enclosed a check for $150. If I still can't sleep, I'll send the rest. We have strategies that are aggressive. When we feel like a not-okay self, we then feel very unsafe and judge and blame others.

When we feel needy and not-okay, there's a grasping and a selfishness and then we hate ourselves for that. So these are all examples. I'm just giving examples of how it proliferates, that we go from having unpleasant experiences, evaluating them as not okay. Oh, the self is owning it. It's not an okay self.

And then it proliferates into behaving in ways to try to feel better and then like addictive behaviors and then feeling even worse about ourselves. And this is all considered in the domain of, ego. This is the ego, the sense of self trying to navigate to make it in an environment where it feels bad. I think it's interesting that the ego, and this is true in Buddhism too, it's in spiritual culture, the ego is considered the bad guy. For instance, Mara, the name Mara means cosmic devil. So here we have this completely.

compensatory selfing mechanism that's not our fault. It just is a set of conditions, right? But it's the cosmic devil and it puts us at war with our own ways of trying to defend and protect. It's like we're trying to get rid of the self. And the deal is a self can't get rid of the self. What's possible is having the intention and it comes because we care about freedom, we care about remembering, having the intention, attention to see what's going on. So we begin to quiet enough so we can notice this paponcha, this sequence of unfolding, so we can begin to notice when we've added the second

arrow of I'm bad, I shouldn't be doing this, I'm wrong for feeling this. Wutajjania is a Buddhist teacher describes it very simply as, keep watching the attitude in your mind. No matter what's going on, check the attitude in your mind and sense if there's some notion of this is bad, it shouldn't be happening, I want more of this, what is going on? So the forgetting is when we don't notice and we get hooked as the bad self having a problem

having a hard time. Now, I gave a talk on this kind of process of remembering, of seeing and remembering and discovering really that there's nothing wrong with me. And I got an email and I meant to bring the email, but the gist of it was, that's really a lovely idea, but, you know, to say there's nothing wrong with me if you're causing other people a whole lot of injury, or if you're destroying yourself in some way, isn't that rather dangerous? And so I just want to say a word on the meaning of wise discrimination, which is that we can watch this proliferation and realize that the ways we're going about trying to feel better cause suffering.

If we feel bad about ourselves and then feel like we need to put someone else down, it's going to cause suffering. If we feel like somebody else is not meeting our needs and we get angry at them for it, it's not going to help us get the intimacy we're looking for. So wise discrimination sees that X does not, X causes Y and it's causing trouble. But that's very different than the averse of tightening of the heart that says, I am bad or you're bad. That's what locks us in trance.

If we want to say what forgetting is, it's forgetting who we are and believing both the thoughts and the feelings that say, you know, something is wrong with me. One person in one of the groups described in a very powerful way how this sense of seeing the selfing go on and then turning on herself how it really is a violence. It violates our wholeness because Anything that's not true is violent. When we believe something not true about ourselves, it's violent. When we believe something not true about others, it's violent.

I wanted to share with you, I read a book and it started in a way that I found really compelling. It started with a story of an Austrian woman named Clara and she was made pregnant by her married uncle and when his wife died, he married her. So all her children died right after birth. but finally the fourth child, very, very sickly, but he lived. So Clara nurses him for two years, and she's a very miserable woman, and she's very obsessive about trying to make him live, and she's also obsessive about having a spotless house,

and she's living in the fear of her husband's beatings. The son, who was, as you can tell, was suffocated and so on, and also living in an atmosphere of fear, he grew up as a very fearful person. He became a vegetarian because he was afraid of microbes and germs and dirt. He felt the very blood in his veins was dangerous because of the incest in his family and that would bring about defects and feeble-mindedness and he was afraid of the gossip about his incestuous family.

Never had children, afraid of tainted blood. He was terrified of cancer, which took his mother's life, horrified that he had suckled at diseased breasts. Turns out he was also afraid of moonlight and horses, of snow, water, and the dark, of judges, of Americans, of men, and poets. And the question is, how could anyone live with so much fear? With so much aversion towards himself. And what he did was he seized on one all-encompassing explanation

for the existence of sin and disease and of all his failures. It was not a weakness in his parents, or in his blood, or his mind. He was faultless. Others were felfth. He could not change his china blue eyes, but would hang the world that they saw. He would identify the secret source of every evil and rooted out. He would free Europe of pollution and defilement.

Only health and purity would remain. Are such grim and cosmic facts significant or merely interesting? Here's another. The doctor who could not cure Clara Hitler's cancer was Jewish. So the reason I share that, because that's like, of course, that's the extreme. is that, well, let me frame it the way Carl Jung did. Carl Jung, and I try to, whenever I can remember, share this particular quote, said that there's nothing that's a greater cause of suffering to ourselves or to our children

than the unlived life of the parents. Then the unlived life of the parents. When we add the second arrow, the moment of blame of saying, I'm wrong or you're wrong or this shouldn't be, in that moment we become divided from the life that's actually here. Any moment of judging and believing the judgment of badness disconnects us. We aren't able to live the life that's here. We can't process it, we can't be present with it, and we can't come home and remember the presence that's what we are. we are divided.

So it becomes one of the deepest ways we can commit ourselves to freedom is to commit ourselves to scanning for when we have turned against ourselves or turned against another person. Because if we believe our thoughts, if we are identified with those feelings, we're in trance.

And it's violent. It causes suffering. So the inquiry then, comes to when we're in that stuckness, you know, how do we awaken, how do we embrace what's there, how do we let go of the ideas of wrongness or badness and really come home to a quality of wholeness at one of the Meta a couple days ago. I read another Sri Nursar Gadata quote and I want to bring it back into the room again because we're going to use it a bit. as we go. He writes, all you need is already within you. Only you must approach yourself

with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing. Give yourself infinity and eternity, and discover that you do not need them, you are beyond. Just to take a couple of pieces of this. One is your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself. What he's saying is the ego underneath everything that we think is bad about ourselves

is some basic thrust towards trying to find our way, trying to be alive. It doesn't mean it's not twerked and ignorant the way we do it, but it's got that element to it. So he's saying, know that, forgive that, and then find a more pure and wholesome way to love yourself. Then he says that, deny yourself nothing, give yourself infinity and eternity and discover you are beyond. And I think this speaks to a question that came up in the hall which is, does it reinforce

a sense of self? Is it part of duality to say I'm going to love myself, give myself everything? Who's his self we're loving? And yet what I think the wisdom of this teaching is, is that by having that intention to love the life that's here, and that's the difference. sense in a self, but the life that's here. By having that intention, we actually discover the who we are that's beyond any notion of a self. A dualistic practice, a skillful means, can reveal the non-dual, can reveal oneness. Make love of yourself perfect. It's a powerful vow or commitment. Okay, so let's explore some of the pathways of that. I think of self-compassion or love as actually an expression of wisdom.

It comes out of a unconditional presence. So when we're committing to loving this life right here that we call self, we're really committing to a profound presence. the first gateway of this presence and love arises from what I sometimes think of as getting to ouch that we are being present so that we can get to where the real essence of the vulnerability is or maybe what we might say the real unmet need, what the real longing is. And the alchemy of compassion really is

touching directly without wavering where the vulnerability is and when that happens a natural flavor of compassion arises we do not have to manufacture compassion there's a natural tenderness in the moments that we touch vulnerability but it's really hard to get there because we have all these layers and this is part of the proliferation that say I don't deserve to feel this or other people feel worse or it's my fault anyway. So I'll give you an example of working with one man where this came up and how he got in. And it's, when I do this process with people, I sometimes in workshops will have them actually embody the different experiences they're having and I had him do a little of that so I'm going to explain that. It was in a workshop on forgiveness and he was

saying that he was stuck in a kind of self-hatred that he didn't think would ever lift and he was an elderly man and he said that although he had been down on himself for as long as he could remember there was one particular incident that kind of nailed the coffin and it was that he was taking care of the next-door neighbor's cat and the cat was the beloved of the young girl that live next door so he was taking care of this cat and he realized the cat was acting strange but he was kind of annoyed with it then it was acting really strange

and by the time he got it to the vet it was too late and the cat died and the girl was heartbroken so his thing to me was why should I forgive myself it won't help that little girl and it won't bring the cat back you know that's that's a very common thing I hear when people think about forgiving themselves.

And then he went on to describe how the same patterns had gone through his whole life with his own son, he had been unavailable. And he said, and to this day I'm insensitive, I'm caught up in myself and I hurt people that love me and that I love. And if I forgive myself, why should I make it easy on myself? Why should I condone my own selfishness? So we began to investigate, which is when I talk about, about an unconditional presence with to get to ouch it requires a real inquiry and a kind

of courageous inquiry. So I asked him, you know, when he was turned on himself what he was believing and just I'm a bad person, I heard others, I let them down, how is your body feel? And I actually had him get into the position of how his body felt and he was kind of like this and then I asked him to, and I do this often as to feel that feeling of bad selfness in his face and, you know, to feel the facial expression and then when I had him sense how it was in his body he says it's shame, it's hollow, it's aching, I kept to said, okay, now what, now what? Just as much as you might find in the interviews, okay, what's happening, what's happening? And underneath the shame was a fear that his life was wasted,

that he had wasted the opportunity to be really living it fully. And then that's when the ouch, the grief came of lost moments, that he hadn't paid attention and he had lost love. I find often when investigating the bad self-feeling, if you say, well, what do you really feel bad about and you get in touch what you feel really bad about underneath it is a sense of lost connection, the pain of separation and that's where he got to. That was the ouch and when he sensed how many moments he had lived, preoccupied and not contacting,

not really, not having an intimate contact with his world, that's when it really opened him up. And I think of that as a kind of a soul sadness when we see the shape of our incarnation and realize how many moments that paponcha, that proliferation's gone on, that we've been turned against ourselves, turned against others, and missing the thing we most love, which is love, which is being alive, which is presence. So for him, in the moment of really contacting that, you know, the grief there, I asked him what the grief needed, and I often ask that question, much as Jonathan will ask the question, what does it want for me,

I'll sometimes, you know, what is this feeling want for me? I'll sometimes ask the question, what is that feeling need? You know, what is it asking for? What's the real need? And what it needed from him really was simply that he paid attention to it. And that for him was an insight that he was feeling like he hadn't paid attention to others all his life. He hadn't paid attention to his own heart. so he practiced much as we often do here

just holding his hand in his heart saying I'm here I'm here that is the alchemy of self-compassion if you get to the ouch if you get to what's really the unmet need where's really the pain there's a natural caring and for him

there was a shift in his sense of identity because he went from the unforgivable person who had let down the people in his life to that space of tenderness that just cares that wants to be present. This is one pathway. Keep paying attention, what's happening, feel it, what's happening, feel it, and when really, really touch into the vulnerability, there's a natural caring.

Now the question comes up often, which is, I pay attention, I pay attention, and it's so painful that I can't really hold myself. I cannot offer attention or care to myself. And I just want to honor that there are some wounds that when it happened we got so regressed, we got so caught in a sense of a small, young, powerless self that feeling it and offering care and saying I'm here, that's skipping a step.

We have to have some access, to something, some resourcefulness before we can do that. One woman that I met many years ago now, the pain she suffered was that her daughter had been sexually abused by her then-husband over and over again and she had not known about it. And so when she found out as an adult, her daughter told her. And when she found out that for years of her daughter's younger life that she had been She had been drinking and she had been clueless.

The degree of self-hatred and remorse and shame was just explosive. She couldn't hold it. So she went to see a priest, a Jesuit priest, who had been actually a teacher when she was younger. And what happened there really, it really struck me because she told him that she was suicidal, basically, that she could not, she didn't feel like she deserved living. And he took her hand in his and he drew a circle in the middle of her hand

and he said, this is where you're living now. And it's a place of hatred and disgust and remorse and guilt and, you know, he said this and you have to feel this. But you also have to remember this and he put his big priest warm hand over hers and said, this is the kingdom of mercy. this is the mercy of God and if you can feel this and remember this

you'll discover a freedom of your heart that you've never known so for several months her practice was just she'd get into the stuck miserable self-hatred place and she would imagine the priest's hand and she'd imagine some field of mercy that in some way was forgiving her

not saying you're okay it was fine that you did that but the depth of who she was was seen and forgiven. And she would over and over again when she feels stuck kind of call on that. Like call on it. Okay, I need to feel this. Feel the hand, feel that. Until gradually, as she described it to me,

she said, Tara, I realized that that mercy, that merciful God really was my own awakened heart. But here's the thing. she had to have that stepping stone and it's developmental we need that we need to feel that personal forgiveness coming from and care coming from the outside until we can soften and relax and expand and realize that that's what we are do you understand that she needed that stepping stone there are many times for each of us when we're stuck that if we can in some way remember that love is there, it's in this universe and reach out, we can rediscover that sense of it being what we are. For myself, often when I share, you know, where do I get stuck,

the self-contraction often comes when I feel sick and I get enough sickness that I get a lot of good practice with this kind of contracted sense of self and what happens is, and I've talked to a few people here that said they have a similar thing, which is I'll start feeling bad physically, and I'll have a bit of the paponcha of it's happening to me victim, but more what did I do to cause this and has some implication about who I am and my lifestyle, but even that's not the biggest thing. The biggest thing is that from feeling sick, I get more self-centered and protective of my time and then I get defensive of what's going to happen to my time and then I get impatient, anxious, judgmental, you know, just like all these unpleasant parts of the psyche

seem to come out and then I find that I'm suffering because I'm not liking myself. Now, the good good news is that the lag time is pretty short because I'm very alert, I've long ago committed myself to noticing when I've turned on myself. But I have this habit of still, it's a delusion, of still when I'm in the thick of it and I'm feeling really kind of judgy and uptight, thinking that I should be different and that I can control it to be different, that the uptightness and self-centeredness is something if I just aim my mind in a certain way or tell myself certain things that I can, you know, in other words, that I can control it. That's difficult because the idea of I can control is part of what solidifies the self,

that I can control. And so what happens is I'll try, you know, and I'll try to have more benevolent thoughts about others and I'll try all the strategies, tons of them that we've been talking about here. And the blessing is that I fall on my face because they don't work because I'll just get another surge of feeling self-centered and uptight until finally there's a surrendering. And I can't even say there's a self that surrenders. It's like awareness realizes that controlling doesn't work. And there's just a self-referendors. And there's just a dropping. It's kind of like if you're riding a bicycle, you have to keep pedaling, you have to keep on trying and that keeps things going but if you stop, you stop going, stop pedaling.

Well I was like kept pedaling and trying and when I stopped, when I realized, oh, okay, it just doesn't work. I can't control these feelings. I can't control that my mind is foggy and that I'm not so clear. There was a surrendering of well and it's happened many, many times. is that I'll think I can change something and then there's that realization. With that, the I sense starts dissolving. There's not a self that's being bad and there's not a self that can control. Do you understand how thinking you can control it keeps on fueling the self-sense? I guess it's a hard thing to answer in a silent group, isn't it?

For me, what happens is when I let go of trying to control or when that is let go of, and when there's a surrendering, then there's just a sense of this kind of the pain of separation that the self-centeredness causes a pain of separation. I mean that was the motivation to try to control it but then I'm just stuck feeling the pain. And then there's a kind of prayerfulness and it's not real specific, it's just this prayerfulness to feel loving presence. There's a verse from Javis that I say to myself a lot and it goes, like this. It's ask the friend for love. Ask him again. For I have found that every heart

will get what it prays for most. When there's a shift from trying to control how I am to that kind of surrendering and that prayerfulness, just the long, it's very pure, just the longing for loving presence. There's a kind of freedom that happens in that moment and that's when there's a sense that nothing's wrong with me any longer. And it doesn't mean that there's still not some uptightness or defensiveness or judgment. It just means that the sense of who I am has shifted. I'm no longer the self trying to transcend a self. It really helps to feel that longing for love and to reach out. And sometimes you're going to be reaching out to your own awakened heart, just calling on it, just the wisest, most awake part of your own.

own being. And in other times there's going to be perhaps some expression of loving presence that you trust that might seem outside yourself but by calling on it it carries you home. We all need to feel that we belong to loving presence. This is how Rilke puts it. I'm here in all the pieces of my shame that now I find myself again. I yearn to belong to something, to be contained in an all-embracing mind that sees me as a single thing. I yearn to be held in the great hands of your heart. I'll let them take me now. Into them, I placed these fragments my life.

And you, God, spend them however you want. So the first gateway is to pay attention to where the self-thing's happening. pay attention to where there's the bad self-feeling and to really keep attending and attending until you find the unmet need and can begin to offer sometimes the way that Hawaiian healer put it, he just said, I'm sorry and I love you, just offering with sincerity, care.

Sometimes we can't offer to ourselves so we let ourselves feel what's happening and reach for that loving presence in whatever form, whatever figure, whatever way that we perceive it. In the deepest way, what happens is as we become more present, we begin to wake up out of the ignorance, ignoring the truth, which says that these conditions are me, that I am responsible, that I cause them, that they belong to me.

And when we begin to sense that wisdom, there's a forgiveness in our heart that frees us to live again. I mean, this is the pain of something's wrong with me, is it divides us from our own life. So as part of closing, I'd like to read to you, this was from the readings from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection. And this was collected, this is many of the men and women in the war wrote and left at the wall in Washington, D.C., at the monument the different verses and lines, and this is one of them. And it came with a picture of a Vietnamese man with his young daughter. It said, 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 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 here, 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. Every one of us has had thoughts and feelings and actions that, and ways are being

operates that has us turn against ourselves, some in big ways and some in small ways. and when we can begin to realize that we're doing the best we can and that these are conditions playing out, there comes a greatness of heart. We realize that it does not serve, it's more violence, it's more violence to lock into a sense of bad me or bad you. So we begin the process and it takes a real honesty and commitment, it takes a real bravery, just to feel what's there and hold it with kindness. I shared this story I just read to you last week before last in Seattle.

At a conference I was at, then after I did, one of the men in the conference came up to me and said there's another chapter to that story and so I want to share that with you. that after this man had left the picture and the letter at the wall in Washington, D.C., it had been collected, put into this memorial book, and then it was sent back to him, made his way back to him. And so there he had this picture again that he had been living with. So finally he decided he wanted to find the little girl in the picture, the daughter of the man he had killed so many years ago,

because he wanted to give the photo back. So he and his wife flew to Vietnam and found this 40-year-old woman who that was, you know, who it was. And through an interpreter, the man's name is Richard, introduced himself. He said, tell her that this is the photo I took from her father's wallet the day I shot and killed him and I'm returning it. And with a cracking voice, he then asked for her forgiveness. and after an awkward moment she burst into tears and fill into his arms and there the two held each other up sobbing and embracing. And her brother who could speak English told Rich, told him that they both of them believed that

their father's spirit lived on in Rich and that they expect that they thought he'd think this was just superstition but they said that that they said that that day that the photo came back was the day that their father's spirit came back to them. Not only does making ourselves wrong keep us in trance and not only does it divide us from others, the opposite is equally true, that in any moment that we can notice that added layer of, I shouldn't be like this or something's wrong with me,

and begin that process, and I just use this gesture, as an example, of a kind presence, in that moment we begin to be able to bring the ripples into the world of healing and of awakening. It wakes up others too. So that I began tonight, really speaking of forgetting and remembering, that is our way of beginning to remember. So I'd like to close with a reflection, if you will. which means I'm going to invite you to kind of sit up a bit. And just to begin the reflection with some words from Dorothy Hunt, she says,

do you think peace will come some other time than here, some other time than now, in some other heart than yours? Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all. This moment in the heart space, where everything that is is welcome. Peace is this moment without judgment, that is all.

This moment in the heart space, where everything that is is welcome. So in this pause, as you've done many times over these last days, just to sense what's happening, whatever it is, how your body is feeling, your heart, if there's any story or residue of feelings of something being wrong,

any blame towards another or yourself, sensing the possibility of that whatever's here, that there's this space, this heart space, that has room. And if thoughts or feelings come up that create a sense of wrongness, shouldn't be here, not okay, sense. Sense of a possibility of just noticing that and in the awareness that notices are re-arriving in that heart space. You might sense who you are when you're meeting what's right here with unconditional presence, who you are when you're not believing that anything is wrong. Do you think peace will come some other place than here, some other time than now, and some other heart than yours. Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all. This moment in the heart space, where everything

that is, is welcome. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you would like to contact the Insight Meditation Community of Washington to make a donation or to learn more about our programs, please visit our website at www.imcw.org G.