Tara Brach - Seeing Basic Goodness - Part 1 (2018-05-16)

Episode Date: May 18, 2018

Seeing Basic Goodness - Part 1 (2018-05-16) - Most of us long to trust our goodness, but get caught in stories of deficiency and striving to affirm we're ok. These talks look at the block to realizing the loving awareness that is our essence, and the practices that help us see this essential goodness - in ourselves, dear ones and in those we might habitually consider different or "other." Both talks include reflections that can help us appreciate the basic goodness that lives through these precious, changing forms. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and blessings. Welcome. So I'd like to start tonight's talk with a favorite story, and this I heard from a friend who's also a teacher, many of you know, of Sylvia Borstein. And she describes a man in New York who had been practicing meditation and loving kindness practice a lot. And he was accosted in Soho by a mugger, this

scraggly hair, blonde young guy who asked him for money. And this man, the meditator, Phil, gave over $600 that he carried in his wallet. And so the mugger's shaking his gun and demanding more. And he looks dazed and high and he's basically saying, I'm going to kill you, give me more. And so Phil gave him his watch and the guy's still, you know, very disoriented and waving his gun and he says, I'm going to shoot you. And so Phil said, he looked at him with loving kindness. Here's what he said. He said, you don't have to shoot me. You did really good. Look, you got nearly $700. You got credit cards and an expensive watch. You don't have to shoot me. You did good. The mugger's confused, he lowers his gun in slowly, he says, I did good.

He said, you did really good. Go and tell your friends you did good. And so days the mugger kind of wandered away, softly saying to himself, I did good. I did good. So I've always been touched by this story because what it brings out to me is that no matter how deeply in a trance we are. We all want to feel good about ourselves. We want to feel goodness. Deep down, we want to feel that intrinsic goodness that Thomas Merton calls our secret beauty. And yet, as we know, so many moments of our life, we're living in a kind of a trance where the storyline is that, we're either a small good self or a small bad self, but we're not really rooted to that deep sense of inner goodness.

And so what I'd like to explore with you in this class is really waking up from these temporary things of, oh, now I'm doing good and now I'm doing bad, to that depth that place in us that can trust intrinsic goodness and that can trust it in ourselves and see how it lives through each other. because one of the most beautiful gifts we have to offer is to remind each other. Really?

There's a wonderful line, this is Thomas Merton again. He says, saints are what they are, not because their sanctity makes them admirable to others, but because the gift of sainthood makes it possible for them to admire everyone else. You understand? it's that capacity to see the secret beauty. So maybe to start with by way of definition, I often use the term basic goodness, and that's used by a lot of different teachers

and different traditions. It's not a belief like we're not basically bad, we're basically good. It's more of an experience that many sages and meditation masters and many of you have intuited, which is when you get quiet and you're not in reactivity, and there's that kind of just quiet presence and it's under the ripples of the thoughts and personality,

you can sense an inner quality of stillness, of presence, a kind of awakefulness, a tenderness, that's more, it's a priori, It's before, it's underneath all the activity. One of a very dear friend was describing being with her grandchild and taking a picture and then having it at home. They live across the country.

It was when her grandchild was like one and a half or something. And the eyes are huge, soulful eyes and you can't miss it. You can't miss just this glow of spirit shining through. So for my friend, it's whenever she's like having her doubts about human nature, she just goes to that picture and that's her fix. And she was reminding me of this beautiful line from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. He says, there lives the dearest freshness deep down things. The dearest freshness deep down things. Under all the busyness and the activity, there is this beautiful presence, this fresh, beautiful presence.

So, interestingly to me, there's all these different definitions of words, but the word good, one of the roots of it is the Indo-European root of it is from GED, G-E-H-D, and it has to do with the sense of being together, gathering together. belonging to a togetherness, that we feel good when there's that sense of being part of a whole. And I think we intuit that. Those are the times people report, oh, it's when I'm in nature and it's, I'm not all self-preoccupied and I feel one with the elements or I'm feeling that sense of connection with that person that that selfness dissolves.

It's just us. Good. That's goodness. So in the Buddhist tradition, basic goodness is our true nature. It's Buddha nature. Other traditions might call it, you know, the indwelling spirit, and there's just many, many different names. But it's that universal presence that expresses as wisdom, as love.

And because we each have different bodies and minds, it expresses in very unique ways through each of us. So one of the great joys in getting to know someone is to sense, well, how does this universal goodness express? through this person. That's the inquiry. So we begin with, we'll do a little reflection right now as we listen to the sound of the cell phone

and it gathers our attention. You may close your eyes for a second. Let this be a pause to arrive a little and feel your breath and feel your body and putting aside the habitual ways of stories about ourselves just for these moments since okay, there's goodness here, there's a basic goodness here. Even the longing to feel goodness comes from that deep goodness.

There's an intrinsic longing to love and be loved here, right here, living through this body mind. There's a longing to know truth, to really know what is this all about, to connect. And just imagine what it would be like if through your day and through the week and the months there was a more and more of remembrance of there's goodness here. Who would you be? What would your life be like? Basic goodness is not some inflated ego idea. It's remembering our source and honoring the ways that it moves through us.

It's true homecoming. You can open your eyes when you'd like and we'll. explore together, you know, what helps us to really connect with and trust us? And we begin by, as we often do, and this is very much the model of how the Buddha taught was, you know, this is all possible. We start by looking, how do we get blocked? You know, how can we go off into this trance where we're so far from sensing goodness? It's like we're really down on ourselves and thinking we're flawed. Like how do we do? that. And, you know, in the biblical terms, like, how come we feel we got kicked out of the

garden? Because most of us in some way often go around feeling like there's something wrong and some flaw and so on, that we have to then cover up. I've always liked the little story of a little boy who opens up this big old family Bible that's been around for a long time and he's fascinated, he's turning all the pages. And then something falls out. of the Bible. So he picks it up and looks at it closely and it's an old leaf. He'd been from a tree had been pressed and kind of dry it out. So he calls out to his mom, mama, mama, look what I found? Look what I found? And she goes, what do you have there, dear? And he says, he's astonished. He says, I think it's Adam's suit. It's so deep in our

psyche. You cover up the realness of who you are because something is wrong. So we'll look a little more closely on how we get blocked from basic goodness and how we learn to see. And many of you might remember the story of the Golden Buddha and the story is massive plaster Buddha from Southeast Asia and when it cracked they found that and people loved it but it wasn't an attractive Buddha statue which is massive and it had lasted for years but when they it cracked because of a change in the weather, they found out that under all the plaster and clay was the biggest gold statue in Southeast Asia, so now it's in its gold glory. But they believe that it was covered up with plaster and clay because it needed to get through

really difficult times without being stolen or whatever and, you know, like invading armies and so on. but much in the same way that we cover over our innate purity to make it through a challenging environment, upbringing and culture, that we all have coverings, we all have ego coverings. I sometimes think of it as a spacesuit we take, we don our spacesuit to be able to navigate what's difficult, which is totally natural, totally fine.

There's nothing bad or wrong. the suffering is we get identified with the covering, the space suit, and we forget the gold. We forget that innate purity of awareness and love that's really our home. So, the more we're triggered and the more our limbic systems activated, the more we're stressed, the more we're going to be relating to the coverings. and we're either going to think, my coverings really flawed, it's really got ugly colors to it, and everybody's seeing it and it's bad, or we're going to think, oh, and we'll polish up our covering.

Wow, am I looking good, you know. But it's our coverings. And the more we're concerned with our coverings, the less we can actually remember. So one of the basic understandings is the more that you're focusing on improving yourself and being good, are focused on how bad you are, in those moments, the more you're going to be blocked from the one place of presence that can actually find the freedom of basic goodness.

One of the things that we start, when we start kind of getting to know ourselves, we start finding that if there's been a lot of deep wounding and we haven't processed it or we're not paying attention to it, that wounding will trigger us and we won't be able to trust. We also start noticing how the society we live in keeps us from our basic goodness because the society, what does it do? It sends out all these messages of this is what a good self is like. A good self has this kind of success and looks like this and acts like that. And then it gets passed down to our parents so that whenever we deviate from those standards,

we get a message we're not okay. The punishment goes from criticism to abuse, but we get a message of not okay. So every one of us has been subjected to trying to match who we are according to the standards out there. Six-year-old Angie and her four-year-old brother Joel

are sitting together in church, and Joel giggles and he's singing and he's talking out loud and finally his big sister out of enough. had enough. She says, you're not supposed to talk out loud in church. Why? Who's going to stop me, Joel asked. Angie pointed to the back of the church and says, see those two men standing by the door? They're the hushers. So that one's not a good one. But it fit the theme. We are trained to behave a certain way. And there are threats to keep us in line. And so this

is part of the focus and we all go through it. Like, when we're here, we have certain behaviors that we agree on and there are messages if you act wrong, if your cell phone was the one to go off. Raise your hand now and, you know. So we internalize the standards. We don't need anyone to tell us anymore. We already know. There's a Zen Roshi says to a child, when you feel the urge to act badly, my son, ask yourself this, what is the sound of one hand spanking? It's that idea. We already know. It's internalized.

Then what do we do to keep ourselves from basic goodness? We then constantly tell ourselves stories about how it is. We tell ourselves stories about what's wrong with us and how we need to do things to be a little. okay to get out of the red. And the stories usually have to do with falling short at work, mistakes we're making, not contributing or in relationships, letting people down in some way that we're never enough or we're demanding too much and getting pushed away. But we have bad self stories that are sometimes very conscious and sometimes not so conscious, but they keep deepening

that fixation on the surface. And they keep deepening that fixation on the surface. And they keep us from that inner goodness. There's a lot of different psycho-spiritual exercises that starts to help us shine a light on the stories. I mean you might know some of your stories like what you basically kind of are repeating to yourself during the day that keeps you feeling small. Well in one workshop one of my friends was telling me about this exercise where, you know, they were asked to describe a major current conflict and some of the background to it and, you know, that kind of thing. So you tell your story to your partner. So she told her partner all about, you know, like what had gone on with her ex-husband

to get it to the point that it was now and told her story. And then after it was done, the instructions were, it takes about four minutes. You know, you tell, you, you tell, you. It's just going blah, blah, blah. The instructions were now, tell your story again. Okay, I'm going to tell my story again. She had some energy around it. Well, by the fifth time, you can imagine she started getting, oh, this is just my story. You start getting it when you do it out loud.

Most of us are running it in our mind, so that's why meditation helps to bring it out. Now the key element that's going on here is in the stories we run, and we run, and we're run, there's a judgment and the judgment is sometimes of ourselves or sometimes of others. And the judgment is often that something's wrong with me or you. But it's also very often inflation. Because when we're paying attention to the cover, remember we don't just look at the flaws, we also notice where we're all polished up. And again, it's this outer fixation that keeps us from really trusting.

So we inflate. we in some way feel special or superior where we're a way good self, you know. And yet if you check it out, when you've accomplished something or when people are patting you on the back, when you're feeling important in some way, whatever the inflation is, it feels there's a swelling and it has some good feelings. They're very temporary but if you look close underneath it there's a little shame because you're feeling good about yourself, right? And there's that. And then it never has a real good sense. I mean, it's never deep that you feel good. Like you don't feel goodness, you just feel the

I did good as a temporary passing. I remember almost the exact setting where I was and I was in my 30s when I realized that how deep the programming was in me, to chronically try to achieve and to feel better than. It was not just achieve, it was better than, which is embarrassing to say, but that was it, in order to be lovable. So it's like, in order to be okay, I had to be better than. Realizing that and realizing that no matter what the achievement was, it never undid the sense of not okay self.

It didn't matter what went right. That not okay self was always there. I was so caught off. And then I realized that the moments of really trusting basic goodness had nothing to do with any of the achievements, any of my strategies I had been using, it had nothing to do with any of them. And yet, as we know, the strategies are addictive. Whatever our strategies are to make us feel good about ourselves, we're really addictive. it's like that, you know, the story of the, you see the cartoon with the dog saying, it's always good dog this and good dog that, but is it ever a great dog? You know, it's like,

it's never enough. So this is the polishing the surface and holding tight to these better-than stories. And we can go for decades and decades. The reason I'm spending time on this is that But if you really long to trust your basic goodness, notice how hooked you are on feeling better about yourself through the inflation staff. In one story of a student in a Zen master, they lived across the river from each other and they would discuss Buddhism. And one day the student, Su Dungpo, felt inspired by his awakening and he wrote the following poem. I bow my head to the heaven within heaven, hairline rays illuminating the universe.

The eight winds cannot move me sitting still upon the purple golden lotus. You know, like that, that awakening that you're just unmovable, you're so radiant. So he wrote that and then he was basically saying that he'd achieved this really super high level of spirituality where the normal forces that move everybody else's ego, weren't affecting him anymore. Okay? So he's impressed with himself and he sends a servant to hand deliver the poem to his master across the river and he's sure that his master and friend will be very impressed. And when the master read the poem, he immediately saw that it was a declaration of spiritual refinement. So smiling, he wrote the word fart on the manuscript and then he had it

returned. Okay? Well, this guy, Su Dongpo, was, in a way I'm thinking of his name, it sounds like Su Dung-Poo, which is not. Anyway, it was expecting compliments in the seal of approval. When he saw the word fart written on the manuscript, he was shocked and he burst into anger. He said, how dare he insult me like this, why that lousy old monkey's got a lot of explaining to do. So his indignity rushes out of the house and he orders the boat to ferry. to the other side of the river, he goes to find the master in demand an apology. However, the master's doors closed. On the doors a piece of paper, here's what it says.

The eight winds cannot move me. One fart blows me across the river. Needless to say that, freedom, woke him up and freedom. It's amazing, though. We really live in these stories of bad self and good self. Okay, so what we've basically explored so far is that when we're living in either a good self, trying to be better, trying to use our strategies to feel good, or a bad self and running those stories, we are living in a trance that keeps us from the presence that allows us to taste

and trust to know something beneath the surface. We're in those surface ripples. So we'll do a reflection again, if you will. I invite you to close your eyes. We're talking about how we stay identified with the cover over the Golden Buddha. And I invite you to reflect just today maybe. Just remind yourself of today where you were, what you did. Do you have a sense of what yourself's story was?

Whether you were focused some on falling short, needing to do things differently, not okayness, so a failing self in some way, or whether you were trying hard to do well and felt some sense of accomplishment, you were doing the polishing. Whether you have a sense of today whether there was an identification with a good self or a not good self. Sometimes when you reflect back you can sense, well I wasn't aware of it at the time, but underneath my busyness there was a kind of sinking feeling that I was falling short. Or underneath my way of presenting myself I was feeling kind of proud of myself or pumped up. Just to notice not to add any further judgment.

You might even just sense, well, how many moments was there some resting in basic goodness? some sense of really at home, loving connection, presence. If you have a taste of basic initial notice, it has no judgment to it. It's not like good as in better. It's just basic presence. It's a kind of self as dissolves some and just the light of the universe is shining through, belonging. So the first step in training to trust and see, see basic goodness is to notice the trance and see if we can notice it with gentleness and interest because then we have some choice to wake up.

So how do we learn to see basic goodness? There's basically two pathways. You can open your eyes if you'd like. One of the pathways is really the practice that we're exploring all the time through these classes in meditation, which is learning to wake up from the stories and the busyness and be here because the more that we're present, the more that we can actually just sense in that presence goodness. So it's revealed in presence, okay? But in addition, because we're so conditioned to fixate on inflation or deflation, we can actually intentionally look for it.

And that's where I want to emphasize for the remainder of this talk. So we can intend to see goodness. You can intend to see your own goodness. You can intend to see it in others. And it's interesting. There is research with mice that if you shine a light in their brains, you can activate neural pathways that are related to love. Well, if we purposely shine a light on our inner life, we can activate that appreciation. We can activate it. So this, what we're exploring now, this intentionality to see goodness, to look and see, is a really practical way to move through our days.

And it's the essence of the loving kindness meditation. There's two pieces. Look for the goodness and then express what you see. So the loving-kindness practice, it has to include everybody ultimately or we're not, it's arts-conditioned love, but it has to include our inner life. In other words, you can look for goodness and see it in others, but if you can't do it inwardly, if you can't see your own goodness, then what you see in others is going to be thin and it won't be embodied. You'll see it in a kind of objective distance way, but you won't feel the warmth of appreciation because you're cut off from yourself. So it has to include ourselves. Does that make

sense? Okay. So we start with our own goodness. And the challenge in looking for our own goodness is the very nature of our trance is we're often turned on ourselves. So even if I said, okay, I want you to pay attention and what do you notice that's really good inside, if we're caught in that trance, we're going to just, it's almost going to intensify the sense of aversion. So just to know that and know that it takes a lot of patience and compassion and that sometimes we warm up to basic goodness by first looking for it where it's easiest, which could be our dog or our sister or a dead grandparent or whatever, okay? We start there and then we pay attention inwardly.

We're going to practice in a moment, but I'm just going to give you some tricks when it's hard to see in our goodness, because that's one of them is that we start where it's easier. Also, it's helpful to remember times in our lives that we know we were generous or kind. it's helpful to remember our aspiration that no matter how it's playing out there's some deep part in us that really wants to love more fully. So remembering aspiration can help. It helps to see yourself as a child sometimes. It helps to look through other people's eyes and it can help to sense your future self

and look through your future self's eyes. So these are just different practices you can explore. But we'll get a little taste. I'm going to give you a sampler right now. This is short, but my hope is that you'll practice it and actually turn it into an ongoing practice because if every day you took a little time to sense, okay, what is the goodness in here? Can I sense how Buddha Nature is living through this body, mind?

If you did that every day, totally changes and frees your heart. So let's do a taster. Come on back inside again, just come into stillness. Let yourself feel your breath. And for starters, let the breath be long and slow and deep, a nice, full, deep in-breath and a slow, full-out breath. And one more time, a nice full in-breath and a slow-out breath. the breath come into its natural rhythm now. You might bring to mind whoever you can imagine

that's easiest for you to feel appreciation for. Some being alive are not still alive, where it's easy to detect goodness, easy to appreciate. And as I mentioned, it could be your dog, could be a child, could be a healer you know, or could be somebody that's no longer around. Just take a moment to sense how goodness lives through that being. Acceptance, love, wisdom, patience, how goodness lives through that being. It's like my friend looking at the eyes of her grandchild. Can't miss it. and to feel your appreciation for that goodness.

It's like you might whisper, thank you. Just try that and you'll feel it. Thank you. You're just thanking the universe for shining through this being. And as you feel that appreciation, then turn the attention to your own being and just feel your own basic goodness, just the goodness of being able to appreciate another.

You might sense the qualities you really do appreciate about, yourself. It might be your humor or your sense of wonder at nature, sense of beauty, things you like about yourself that are really very deep in you, your own loving, your honesty. And if it helps you, you might see yourself as a child, the aliveness and curiosity, sincerity of that child, or it helps you, you might bring to mind someone you trust and love, and imagine looking at yourself through their eyes. What do they see? Maybe they see your most awake heart, what we sometimes call your future self. You might sense that, what's unfolding through you, manifesting through you, the growing wisdom, the growing open-heartedness.

So we begin to practice seeing the goodness. The teacher Bapuji really urges us. He says, break your heart no longer. Each time you judge yourself, you break your heart. You pull away from the love that is the willspring of your vitality. That basic goodness. He says, now the time has come, your time to live to celebrate, to trust the goodness that you are.

Your true essence is pure awareness, aliveness, love. Let no one, no thing, no idea or ideal obscure this truth. If one comes, forgive it for its unknowing. Do not fight it. Just let go and breathe into the goodness that you are. So part of our training really right at the heart of our training is this practice of appreciating our own basic goodness. And then we widen the circles and we find even those that we most deeply care about, we have the tendency to fixate on what's wrong with them. This is our negativity bias in its full regalia. And I can think of my son and bringing my son up and I still, it's so amazing to me how it was that every single stage I was fixated on something but it shifted on

what was wrong. Like, I remember when he was in, you know, kindergarten first, second grade, my big concern then was that he really didn't know how to play well with other children, so he didn't have many friends. And I was just, you know, he was bossy and egotistical and selfish. And so that's what I was worried about. And then as he got into middle school and high school, then my worry was he's partying too much. He's with his friends too much because he was just a totally social creature. Like he swung the other way. Too much part of him. too much video games. And then as he got, it kept going,

you know, he's not academically focused. He doesn't have a passion that'll turn into a life career, you know, every step of the way. And now he's about to be a father himself very, very soon, and we'll see how he does it. But I, you know, I have to say, there's a wonderful quote by Florida, Scott Maxwell, no matter how old a mother gets,

she still looks to her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. You know, so he's about to be a dad, but what I can say honestly, looking back is it was really the moments of when I was relaxed with him and just seeing how good he was and, you know, I mean good in the deepest way, I know that's what gave him whatever resilience or trust or confidence he has. So it's kind of I just shake my head. It's like we all go through it. Parents in particular, we're so afraid our kids, there's going to be trouble for them. That's what we fixate on. There's a story that taught me a lot and just by watching it. And this is actually parents that were here on a Wednesday night, they came up afterwards,

they were very worried about their son who was, I think, 22 or 23. And he had gone to liberal arts college, but I think he had only gone through a couple of years, and he had some learning disabilities. So who's living at home, he hadn't found his niche, and they were fretting that he would never find his way. You know, his father was trying to get him to do career counseling and courses at Montgomery College and his mother was, you know, she's saying, should I surround him with white light? What should I do? You know, so it was like that. So I asked them, what is that you really love and respect most about him. And they said, oh, mom says, oh, you know, he's the kindest guy that ever lived.

I mean, you know, he's totally sensitive to every bills his needs. And, you know, when he's not, he's kind of been moping, but when he's in a good mood, he has a wacky sense of humor and he's fun to be with, you know, the father saying, well, you know, he's a pretty creative guy. And, you know, so they got into it. So I said, okay, so here's your practice. stop trying to fix them right now, get them on a track. And just in your meditation add this piece.

Even if it's just for a couple of minutes, meditate on what you love about them and let me know what happens. So about a month later, you know, met up with them and they're smiling and saying, well, you know, it's a little bit more, it's more relaxed at home because, you know, I'm just feeling more relaxed and just more confident that when I pay attention to his strengths, I just trust he's going to be okay. The father said, yeah, I think he'll find his own way. So there were a month after that, he had started volunteering to do some video editing somewhere

and he was going to go back to school in doing digital video something. And he ended up, that's where he is now. But the key point here is that we are mirrors for each other. We all are mirrors for each other. The deep mirroring happens very early on, but we continue to be mirrors. And when we're anxious about each other and thinks something's wrong, that's picked up. When we believe in each other, that's picked up. mirroring the goodness is one of the most beautiful gifts that we can offer.

So with those close to us, we often are fixated for whatever reason on what's wrong. And then of course those who are different from us, class or race or religion, all the different categories where we tend to sense someone's different and then have very small, narrow, stereotyped ideas about who they are. we're seeing the covering. And if we want to bring healing to our world, we have to on purpose look deeper. How is loving awareness creatively moving through this person and this person?

There's a friend of mine told me about... So here's the word, this is a story about a juvenile delinquent. So they just think of what comes to mind when I say juvenile delinquent. So this is from Madison, Wisconsin. She was part of a whole restorative justice model and what they would do with when kids acted in ways that violated others and this kid had, they would have a youth court

and they would assign sentences and some of the sentences were really creative what they'd assigned the kids to do. And so one teen that she described, my friend described, he had some musical talent. So part of his sentence was to be a gopher for a rap artist in town and compose a rap song to sing at an event. He had to do other things too in this restorative justice process.

This is one thing. So they went to the event, there's 100 people, and the kid brought down the house with his talent. And he went from being juvenile-dial, delinquent to a kid that has struggles and suffering and has to work on behavior and has tremendous aliveness and talent. And the truth is that everyone has Buddha nature and everyone is creative and intelligent and loving if that Buddha nature can shine and if we can take the time to look, we

help to call it out. This helped to call out this boy's Buddha nature. I'd like to invite you just to, well, first I'll share something that we did this week. I knew I was going to be giving this talk and I'm also writing a book right now and this is the time I'm writing on seeing goodness so I'm, you know, whenever I'm writing and teaching about it, it's like, wow, this is really, I really love playing in that field. So one of the things we did this week is we, on social media, I say we and my team, we asked the question of people, and some of you might have seen this on Facebook, to describe some of the ways that, you know, very particular examples of seeing goodness in someone.

And I thought I'd share with you some of the responses because I have to tell you that reading it, put me in a good mood. It's like every time I'd look on Facebook and see what people were responding, it would like my heart would just light up. So I'm just going to read you some of them because they're sweet. So you might just close your eyes and just listen. I see goodness in my 15-year-old son when he dedicated the poem, Phenomenalna by Maya Angelou to me

when I was going through chemo for breast cancer. I see goodness in my youngest son during the time so you can hear fatigue in my voice and bring me a cup of water. This morning, each one of these is different. This morning when I stepped out of a train, a few seconds later someone kicked me by accident on my heel. I didn't see who did it but a few minutes later a man came up to me and said, it was me and I'm so sorry.

I see goodness in my husband when I can watch him playing with our son. I see goodness in my dog when she walks up and drops a frisbee on my lap in the middle of me crying from loneliness. I see goodness in my partner when he's tender and willing to be ample with apologies, not as a statement of right and wrong but as a skill of staying in relation. I saw the goodness in my dad when after a massive stroke he could not walk or use one of his arms and he asked, sweetheart, can I get you anything while we were sitting together? I see the goodness of my best friend when he hugs his dog with deep affection.

I see goodness in my wife when she greets the parking attendant or cashier or waitresses with such kindness, attention, and respect. I see goodness in my five-year-old daughter who says to the sun at sunset, Goodbye, I love you, in the purest voice filled with gratitude. So you might want to reflect a bit right now. Keep your eyes closed and this will be our closing reflection. I invite you to bring to mind someone who's dear to you. Look to see their goodness.

What is it about them that really wakes up your loving? What do you see? Is it the way they look at you when they're loving? Is it their humor? Are they just their liveliness or brightness? A certain look in their face? Sense? What brings up your loving?

and imagine that over the next few days you can tell them, you can express what you're loving, what you see. In other words, let them know about their goodness. Imagine telling them, sense what their experience would be, how they might look and act, having you tell them, and sense what it's like for you to be sharing. Arn Garbork says to love someone is to learn the song in their heart and sing it to them when they have forgotten. You might pick

another person, another person who you care about. And again, take some moments to reflect on what you love about them. You might remember their expression when they're happy or how they look at you when they're feeling affection, tenderness towards you. Their particular way of being bright or creative or alive, what's it like? What do you love? And again, imagine telling them. Imagine in some way being a mirror of goodness. And then let your attention go simply into your own heart, just feeling the presence that's right here, sensing the innate goodness that lives in this human heart, and sense again,

who would you be if you move through your day remembering, remembering this gold that shined through, what would your life be like? And sense in your own heart right now what your prayer is or your wishes, right in this moment, what is the prayer or wish that you hope will guide you? Namaste and thank you for your presence. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. Thank you.