Tara Brach - The Heartspace That is Our True Home (retreat talk)

Episode Date: October 26, 2013

2013-10-19 - The Heartspace That is Our True Home - (retreat talk) - By dedicating ourselves to loving the life that is right here--ourselves--we discover the heartspace that holds this world.  This talk explores the pathways of forgiveness, offering and letting in love, and gratitude that reveal the vastness of loving presence.

So good evening. Some of you who are new might not know when we're doing this and saying namaste and all this, what we're meaning by it. So I thought maybe I'd just start by saying that the word namaste, you know, in contrast to in the West where we kind of greet each other and say, hey, how are you doing? Hi, how are you? Namaste means I see the divine in you. I see the sacred in you.

It's a little different feeling. for cultures, you know. Namaste. And so when we bow, it's just that deep acknowledging of who is here. You know, we go around and we tend to feel ourselves as an ego self and we're interacting with ego selves. And it takes a little pausing and deepening to really sense that. But this kind of sweet living ritual of namestay is helps us to tune in more. Now, we've been here 24 hours together, and I always feel like the first 24 is more than 24, and it's quite a ride. And it's particularly interesting because for most of us, it's a dramatic shift in life circumstance.

We've been stripped of all our normal roles of person at work or parent or dog walker. You know, it's like, I don't have a dog to walk. What am I going to do? We get all our normal escape routes are kind of most of them, not all of them, are taken away. So we, you know, we don't have email or for most of us we don't. And we can't keep busy in certain ways and we're not consuming in the same way. And even our personality, the way we interact is taken away. Part of the guidelines are really to give each other space by not even having the

the request that comes when we're having eye contact, which in some ways asking for a certain response. So in a lot of ways, the persona we're familiar with is sidelined. The doer is sidelined. You know? And simultaneously, we have this practice of paying more attention, noticing what's going on. So certain things start revealing themselves right away. And one of them I think of as one of the deepest truths of them all is that it doesn't matter so much what exactly is happening. It's how we're relating to it. So at one moment you might be sleepy and thinking, you know, I'm ruining my weekend. This is the weekend. I said, I've been waiting eight months for this weekend and now I'm sleeping through it, and that's one attitude towards sleepiness, and at another time,

you know, I'm going to take a nap, take a nap, and it just, it's the same sensations, but you've added on a whole different experience, right? We start to notice when it gets a little quieter that this voice in our head is constantly commenting. Have you noticed that? Like, has an attitude about everything. like this, don't like that, this walk is nice. Oh my God, when is the bell going to ring? You know, and it goes on and on. It's just nonstop liking and not liking.

And what we find out if we start looking closely is the times we're suffering, when it's really, really suffering, is when there's some assumption that this is wrong, this is bad, this shouldn't be happening. It just shouldn't be like it. this. And if you haven't noticed that, that's the invitations to really look at that. There's a sense of now is not okay. Something's missing with it. Something's wrong. And then by extension, because our life is, we sense a self that's experiencing and owning now, I'm not okay.

In the moments when there's an assumption that something's wrong or I'm wrong, that's suffering. So then what we do, is, you know, in some way, we've evaluated, we want life different. We're, as they say, we're odds with reality. So then we go on some form of fixing it mode. We try to figure out what part of practice we can pull out to try to make it different. And as many of you know with mindfulness,

the instructions are to notice what's happening and allow it to be there. And even when we do that, in the backgrounds, this idea that I'll let you be here fear if you'll go away, right? You know, it's bargaining mine. So we're trying to figure out what's going to do it. How can we arrange things to make it different?

And it reminded me of, I've shared this with some of you last year, this little essay goes like this. It says, the Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans. The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart. heart attacks than the British of the Americans. Now the Japanese drink very little red wine and they suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits of the Yanks. The Italians drink huge amounts of red wine and they suffer fewer heart attacks than the above. Now the Germans drink a lot of beers

and they say, this thing goes on and on and on. The message, eat or drink what you like, it's speaking English that kills you. So it's like we can manipulate all we want, we can try this, try that, but it's the wanting it to be different. different. It's this assumption that something needs to be different to be okay. Does that make sense? And that's where the suffering is? I've always been kind of grabbed by the story of Lester Levinson. He's the founder of the Sedona Method. Some of you might know of it. It's a powerful psycho-spiritual process. But the story of Lester, he was in his mid-40s when he got very, very sick. He had at once, heart failure, colon cancer, and a bunch of other stuff.

But anyway, this doctor basically sent him home and said, there's nothing we can do for you, just don't move around much. And it was basically a death sentence. So he got to reflecting. And now this guy was incredibly well educated. He knew all the world philosophies, and he very attuned to sciences. And, you know, he had gone through, filling his mind with a lot of knowledge.

So what he did is he tried to drop everything he knew and he just started really addressing inquiry to his body and said, colon, or he spoke to the cancer, what's your belief? And the belief that he got back was a demand that the world be different. And demand that he be different. It was like, it's not okay as it is. That was the kind of dug-in position.

And so you can just imagine and sense for yourself when you're thinking it has to be different, what's it like in your body? And the more deeply you're holding that, life has to be different. This is not okay. What goes on in your body or in your heart, in your mind? So for him, that inquiry led to realizing

this is not serving my needs. And he was able to drop it. That's how deep he got it, that that belief was completely constricting his life. In this path, it becomes really essential to recognize what's between us and freedom. One of the best and most powerful questions is like this moment, what's between me and presence?

what's between me and loving, what's between me and freedom. And when we really inquire deeply, there's some way that we've gotten organized against the moment. Now is not okay. And if you look at it in an evolutionary way, if you just track or unfolding, you know, existence arises and forms are created, and when we're informed, there's an inherent,

stress, there's an inherent sense of, I'm in here, the world's out there, there's something dangerous, I need this to be okay. It's said that the primal mood of the separate self is fear. So the very nature of being embodied is that we have fight, flight, freeze as part of our repertoire. You know, there's a sense of something's not okay. Something around the corner is not okay, because we're going to die, and we know that. And that as we evolve as humans with our self-awareness and then all the incessant thinking, it becomes all the more accentuated, the sense of a separate endangered self. So fight-flight freeze is big, and then what happens is because we take things personally, we don't like the self that's fighting and fighting

and freezing. We get the double whammy. And the way that I, one of the ways, one of the ways I find it really helpful to imagine and sense spiritual awakening is that so we're evolving and out of separateness we have to fight, flight, freeze and our identities organized around it, but as we begin to perceive belonging, which is very much what the more recent part of our brain helps us do, frontal cortex, as we begin to sense a larger belonging of tribe and community and part of the earth and part of awareness, then we have the capacity for attend and befriend. So there's a shift in how we pay attention. We're not so hooked on fight, flight, flight freeze. We have some choices that we can pause and pay attention differently,

which is what we're training in right here. One of my favorite descriptions in poetry of how we're evolving is from Dorothy Hunt when she describes the heart space where everything that is is welcome. There's a sense that rather than reacting to life, there really is this space of awareness and tenderness that can hold it. And so we start looking at what helps us to cultivate that. And one thing that helps us is when we've had others in our life, And this is the most precious gift for any of us, others in our life that have offered that heart space, that have actually attended and befriended us. And the more we got that early on, the more we can offer it to ourselves.

Rachel Naomi Remen, she wrote Kitchen Table Wisdom. She's a physician and a writer and a wise woman, really, really wise. And she describes the power of attention. and befriending and a beautiful story about a homeless woman who would go regularly to see a doctor who was a colleague, actually, of hers, the head of a family medicine department on the East Coast. And she describes this woman as, you know, having a bit of having different disorders in terms of cognitive disorders and has gone through addiction and this and this and that. but really finding her way to this doctor and every single week she would go and visit him and then they'd find out that even on the days that the doctor wasn't in

she'd sometimes come to the offices and the clinic nurses were puzzled because she seemed to know it wasn't her day to see the doctor but she'd go to the empty room where they normally spent time because when they were together he was a very attentive and gentle person and he treated her with a profound respect. He didn't

have her stereotyped as some person down the economic socioeconomic ladder that he was pitting. There was a real sense of respect. So she'd go to the offices and she'd stand outside his room and this is how Rachel writes it.

She said, once there she did not go in but she'd stand on the threshold and slowly and deliberately place her right foot inside the empty room and withdraw it again and again. After a while she'd be satisfied and go away. The places in which we are seen and cared for are holy places. So where it's offered to us, it's healing and freeing. And there's an understanding that it's part of our evolutionary capacity to offer to each other and to receive. And it's not just us human.

This is Mary Oliver on a poem called Percy Wakes Me. She says, Percy wakes me and I'm not ready. He's slept all night under the covers. Now he's eager for action, a walk, then breakfast. So I hasten up. He's sitting on the kitchen counter where he's not supposed to be. How wonderful you are, I say. How clever if you needed me to wake me.

He thought he would hear a lecture, and deeply his eyes began to shine. He tumbles onto the couch for more. compliments. He squirms and squeals. He has done something that he needed, and now he hears that it's okay. I scratch his ears. I turn him over and touch him everywhere. He's wild with the okayness of it. Then we walk. Then he has his breakfast, and he is happy. This is a poem about Percy. This is a poem about more than Percy. Think about it. Mary Oliver has a new book out. some of you might have seen it. It's a book called Dog Songs.

Every poem is about dogs, and they're as beautiful and brilliant and wise as any of her poetry. Definitely recommend it. So tonight, what I'd like to explore is how we can take this capacity for attending and befriending and offer it more deeply inward.

How do we wake up that heart space for ourself where everything that is is welcome. And what I'd like to do is to read you a very short piece from Sri Narargarata because I'd like to use this as a kind of organizing piece for the rest of our exploration together. He says, all you need is already within you, only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. self-condemnation and self-distrust or 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. You do not need them, you are beyond. So if I, just to unpack that a little bit, making love of ourselves perfect, the love that he's describing is the ultimate flowering of attending and befriending. It's where we're truly, truly seeing what's real and cherishing it. So perfect loving is not just the warmth of the heart. It's also that lucidity that sees what's true.

you think as a young child what you'd need, you need to be seen really clearly that that understanding piece has to be there, not just, oh, we love you. We need to be seen. So make love of yourself perfect to truly attend and be friend. And what is yourself? So in this, he's not talking about a self that's like the narrative self, the story self. He's talking about yourself, meaning this aliveness that you're experiencing right here. this moment with its mixed currents of emotions, sensations, perceptions, that it's very much to do with this moment and this aliveness right here. And the word perfect itself is misleading because it's not another hoop so that you can say to yourself, oh my God, I'm really blowing it. I'm

not loving myself perfectly enough, you know, it's not that kind of perfect. It means that you're absolutely completely dedicated to this loving. And here's the thing. The most important truths are the ones that we most regularly forget. And one of those is that if we don't truly love the life that's right here, we can't love our world. It's just loving. It needs to include what's right here just to widen and widen.

It doesn't mean we always meditate by starting with ourselves, but it needs to include ourselves. So we begin by sensing, okay, so how do we wake up this really profound attending and befriending? Where we really, what does it really mean in this moment to make love of yourself perfect? And you might ask yourself that, just to check in right now, and just sense, okay, So I've been practicing today and now I'm turning the attention inward, did some meta today. What does it mean? I mean, what would it be if I really, this moment made love of myself perfect? You can also ask it a different way.

If you're finding it difficult, you might say, what's between me and really loving the life that's here? maybe you'll find you just don't feel present enough or you're feeling mental and not embodied or maybe you'll find that there's some sense of something wrong there's pain or emotional pain and it's very hard to embrace there are what i find three um very interrelated and powerful pathways to awakening this full loving. And they correspond to, I did a talk of them called the three gestures of love. And the first gesture of love is really a forgiving. It's the gesture that says, let go of any armoring that I'm holding against myself. It's forgiving. And I sometimes use this physical gesture of my hand on my cheek. You know, it's the way we'd put

your hand on somebody's cheek and say, it's okay, hon. You're okay. So it's this gesture of letting go of anything we're holding against ourselves. And that's the precursor to loving. In Buddhist practice, the forgiveness practice often clears the way. There's a Hawaiian healer, Hugh Lenn, who describes it this way. He describes some words that he says either to himself or just somebody else that's suffering. And the first is I'm sorry. And it's that same idea of compassion or forgiveness towards what's happening.

So that's the first gesture of love that we wake up. The second gesture of love, and I usually put my hands on my own heart when I'm doing this with myself, is really simply sensing the goodness that's right here and I love you. I care about this. I love this beingness right here.

And then the third gesture of love is that grows out of that. Once we say, I love you and there's really a sense of loving, it's a deep sense, it's a kind of bowing, which is a thank you, or a kind of a devotional bow that we belong to the whole. I'm going to come back to each one so you don't have to try to see how it all fits the other yet. Because the beginning place, I think, for most of us, and this came to you. came out a lot in the interviews today is that what's between us and full presence is in some way we're at war with ourselves and we need to stop the war. So the first piece really is in some way forgiving how it is. Forgiving ourselves, forgiving an emotion, forgiving the sleepiness, whatever it is, forgiving. Srinor Sargadatta in his, in this, what I just

read to you, writes that your constant flight from pain and your search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself. And what he's saying is it's not your fault that you get caught in grasping and aversion. I think a lot of what happens is that we have an idea of how we should be and it's free of grasping and free of aversion and economists and so on. And yet our whole nervous system is primed for fight, flight, freeze and all the emotions that come out of that. And then we blame ourselves for it. So what we start getting is it's not our fault. It's just part of the way we're rigged. And depending on the culture we're from, and depending on our families, it can be quite powerful conditioning that we have, that we need to defend ourselves

and protect ourselves and prove ourselves. I mean, think of our culture. culture, really. Let's take a moment. I hate to take advantage of what just happened on Capitol Hill, but, you know, I mean, look at the contentiousness, how fractionalized, how rude and crude our public relating is. And then when we look even, you know, more fully at the degree of racial divide, racism, and socioeconomic divide, the continuing larger schism between the wealthy, the hugely, almost grotesquely wealthy and so many who don't have money. And then we sense, you know, on another level, technology and how, because we're talking about what feeds, fight, flight, freeze. We have such a virtual world. What happens to a sense of connection if we're spending most of our day in front of a screen? What happens? There's a writer from the New Yorker and he described how when his son turned 12 they lost their closeness and they were unable to have a conversation. Some would come to the door and he'd say he'd make

the mistake of saying, how was your day? Big mistake at 12. The son would grunt, go in. This happened over and over again. And one day he was doing email on his cell phone. He saw his son had texted him saying, how's it going? And that was, that opened up a whole new world because The son wouldn't talk to him, but they could text. So he caught on some. That was the way to have a conversation. He was on for it. So his son taught him the abbreviations.

And here's what he writes. He said, one, he didn't have to teach me because it was so self-evident what it meant. It was L-O-L. And I knew right away that meant lots of love. Because he put at the end of every message that he sent me. And he writes, such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation for the 20th century. It's like a little

arrow of love you can send out to anyone you know, L.O.L. So he describes for the next six month he has this infatuation with texting because, you know, he's like he's connecting to everybody with texting. He's doing instant messaging and its power of emotional transmission. So he sends LOL to everyone he knows. He says his sister was getting divorced and he wrote her, we're all behind you and beside you. L.O.L. Your brother. He says, my father got ill and I sent him LOL in Canada. Everyone I knew at work at home, I sent them LOL, those that were in financial difficulty, the guy that had the car accident, the one that lost the job, the teen with the mother with a teen who was doing drugs, LOL.

So the coming to truth happened. One day he's at the airport and he's texting his son and he's telling, because he's away. and he's been away a while, and he's telling his son how sorry he is that they have to spend, you know, this time away, but that, you know, given the economy and given, you know, what the needs are as a family, that there's no way he can get around it,

and then he signs off LOL. Son responds, dad, what exactly do you think LOL means? Lots of love, obviously. No, dad, it means laughing out loud. he said his world crumbled. He said he had to go through every message. He'd written for the last six months. All the LOLs he has sent to people in the midst of their suffering.

So there's the digital world and, you know, what happens when we're, you know, and there's definitely some connecting aspects, but there's also many that aren't. And then there's within our own families what happens. And this is no pointing of fingers because it's passed down. generationally that it's not so much attend and befriend it's very often that a parent's wrapped in their own concerns and fears and needs and that the child's in some way an instrument that they want to make sure things work out so there's a lot of fear added on and they're feeling overwhelmed and unable to pay attention

Deborah Nystrom writes a story and I've known a number of people who have had this kind of experience that I wanted to read to you. And this is called ordinary heartbreak. She climbs easily onto the box that sits her above the swivel chair at adult height, crosses her legs, left over right

and smooths the plastic apron over her lap while the beautician lifts her ponytail and mocks, coarse as a horse's tail. Then, as if that's all there is to say, the woman at once wax off and tosses its foot and a half into the trash, and the little girl who didn't want her haircut, but long ago learned successfully how not to say what it is she wants, who even at this minute cannot quite grasp her shock and grief is getting her haircut.

For convenience, her mother put it, the long waves gone that have been evidence at night when loosened from their class, she might secretly be a princess. Rather than cry out, she grips her own wrist and looks to her mother in the mirror, but her mother's too polite or too reserved or too indifferent to defend the girl. So the girl herself takes up indifference, while pain follows a hidden channel to a place almost unknown to her, convinced as she is that her own emotions are not the ones her life depends on. She shifts her gaze from the mother's face back to the haircut now, so steadily as if

this short-haired child she sees were someone else. When we're not mirrored, when others don't see the goodness that's here, are the vulnerability, when we're not mirrored, we don't have a way of knowing who we are. We have to kind of create a self that will get acceptance or attention or love, and we disconnect from that beingness, that basic sense of our own being. And so not only do we get caught up in the fight, flight, freeze, and all the emotions, we develop all these strategies to be okay. And that's part of what we end up not liking ourselves for. And each of us, if we kind of pay attention, knows some of our strategies. You know, for many it's striving and achieving. You know, for others, it's playing it safe

and accommodating in some way. For many, it's using consuming in some way to soothe or numb the angst. We know our strategies. So what happens is that with any sense of separation, there's a sense of something's wrong or not okay. And the more separate we feel, the more we do what we can to protect and defend, and the more we feel not okay. Egos don't like themselves deep down. Egos know that they're doing their strategies and don't like themselves. They might not be paying attention to that. So Sri Norsarga Data saying, you know, you're doing it out of love for yourself, all these strategies. And then he's basically saying, but it's just not a mature, awakened love. And that our path is really to forgive

our strategies. And that's the beginning of waking up our loving. To truly forgive. And you can ask yourself, what does it mean to really, really forgive the things you're blaming yourself for? Because there's no way to embrace this beingness and this life unless we forgive. So when suffering arises we're here different emotion that we don't like jealousy anger with all the thoughts whatever it is we begin by sensing okay where's the vulnerability here i often give the metaphor of uh you're walking in the woods and you see a a dog sitting under a tree you go to pet the dog the dog lurches up its fangs are bared and it's in an aggressive mode and all of a sudden it's bad dog and you know you're angry but then you realize the dog's leg is in a trap and then you shift and you go oh you poor thing

so the first step this first gesture of love which is really like saying it's not your fault I'm sorry it's okay you know is really getting there's a leg in a trap we have to see it That's the inquiry. When you're turned on yourself, whatever you're blaming yourself for, how is your leg in a trap? There's a woman that I heard about who was serving time in a maximum security prison

and she took one of the, of course, in Buddhist meditation that's happening around the country now and something Pat's very involved with down in Charlottesville. So this woman, Vanessa, is over six feet tall. She's got bright dyed red hair, tattoos all over her body and she's known in her ward as a bully. She protects some women and relentlessly insults and intimidates others. And during the meditation classes, well, everyone else would be part of a discussion.

She'd kind of sit there with her arms crossed, scowling. But she never missed a session of the eight weeks. In the final class, each person was sharing, you know, what they learned, what was challenging. And her comment, she spoke last, she said, well, what I really like was that poem about the pirate. And she was referring to a poem by Ticknott Han. Many of you know call me by my true names, and I'll just read a few verses. I'm the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,

and I'm also the grass snake who approaching and silence feeds itself on the frog. 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 names 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 Vanessa says that, you know, I like this poem about the pirate, she goes on, she says, well, that got me thinking. It made me know something. And then she spoke so softly, people had a strain to hear. And what she said was, all my life, I thought I was the bad one, the problem one. And now I know I'm suffering, too. So the group was totally quiet and still, and she had tears in her eyes, but everybody was kind of looking at the floor just respecting her words. And after that class graduated, my friend continued to teach courses and heard word of mouth that she had really changed in a deep way. She wasn't a bully.

She was a sad, much quieter person who was really coming to terms with the realness of her own suffering. There's a black spiritual that says, see beyond the fault to the need. And this is really the training when we talk about heart space. To see beyond whatever we're blaming in ourself or another to the need that there's. always an unmet need. There's always, you know, that ankle in a trap. And unless we can, in some way, get to the place of, I'm sorry, I'm sorry about the suffering, we cannot open fully to loving. So I'd like to give you, share an example from my own life. And this taught me a lot. And this took place about, I think, three years ago.

And I was going to do a conference, or I was doing a day-long presentation outside of San Diego. And so I arrived on the West Coast at nighttime. And the driver that picked me up could barely speak English. He was a young Latino guy. And I kept saying the hotel, and he sounded like he hadn't heard of it, but he kept assuring me he knew about it and that he knew where it was. It's about a half an hour, 25 minutes out of Los Angeles. An hour later, he was completely lost,

and he was distressed, and I was distressed, and he kept asking me, because I had been there once before, you know, if I knew, if anything looked familiar. And at one point, he took a turn, and he was driving really fast down this four-lane highway. and coming towards us was traffic. It was like he was going the wrong way on a four-lane highway. And he went over the medium.

He like went swerved. I screamed, and he swerved and went over the medium and then got to the other side and went the other direction. So that was about five minutes before we found where the hotel was. And I was, you know, in a surreal state. I was completely, it's almost dissociated. It was very scary, and then I kind of dissociated. And all I knew was that it was not appropriate to pay.

You know, I was an hour and ten minutes drive, and I had almost been killed, and we had almost been killed. And so I looked him in the eye, and I wasn't mean. I just shook my head and said, I can't pay for this. You have to understand. You know, it was kind of sad almost. So I got into the hotel room, I was kind of beginning to unwind from it.

And then I just, all of a sudden, my body seized up and something was terribly wrong. So I started sitting and breathing. I was really agitated and I asked myself, what's between me and presence now. And when I, and I kind of dropped out of story and it was pure shame. It was the most massive shame I had felt in a very, very long time. I felt really bad, like a bad person, a mean person. small-minded person. It didn't matter what on earth I thought was right or wrong. Not paying him. It just set off huge, huge shame. I tried to investigate, well, okay, so what was going on for me?

You know, I had felt like everything was out of control. I was being mistreated. And then I started sensing this, like, on some level, I had locked into this offended important person that just wasn't being taken care of. And I had locked into some very ugly story of some punitive superior person. And then the shame gut was really crushing because in some way I had bought into this, you know, I hadn't seen him. I was this dominant culture. I had no idea, you know, family, he's new to the country.

Nothing in me had any sensitivity to any of that. I had just been, you didn't do your job. I was supposed to get there and a half. Anyway, so I said, this is suffering. And I just started saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And when I was saying, I'm sorry, I was saying it to him, to the universe, to me. It was just, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And then I started letting it go right into the suffering, into the pain of my own ignorance,

my own fear, my own inflation, my own deflation, just kept sending it inward. So I really was ending up just, I was crying and saying, it's okay, sweetheart, there's no basic badness, you know, that kind of thing. And putting my hand on my heart. And then finally, things softened and there was enough tenderness that I could sense deep down the goodness that was still there. And I love you. And I realized when I was saying I love you that I was loving him. And what really struck me was that if I hadn't gone through first forgiving, I couldn't, I would have loved him conceptually. I would have felt bad for him abstractly. But he and I were just, you know, my ignorance, his situation, it was just all the humanity was in my heart.

And there was just a sense of loving presence. And that's when I felt gratitude. That's when the thank you came. I'm sorry. I love you and thank you. It's a very hard story for me to tell. I just need to name that with you as friends. Even as I tell it, it brings back. I had a redo, meaning revisit and revisit and revisit

that sense of shame at having been so caught many times. And I found it really valuable. I found it really valuable to really commit to those three gestures and find that pathway that hopefully will just let me be more awake. That's the hope. But finding that there was no other way than first on some level deeply forgiving was really important for me. So that's the first one, is to in some way say I'm sorry.

The second part of the, you know, waking up this heart space is where we can actually have an appreciation for the life that's here. And in the meta practice, the training is to see goodness. The training is to actually sense, whether it's someone else or ourselves, sense the goodness is that's here. And I've taught this meta for, you know, 25, 30 years. And probably the most regular response is it's very hard to authentically feel goodness and appreciate the life that's right inside me. And I don't know how many of you have found that, but to really feel a sense of warmth and tenderness towards the life right here,

many people find very, very difficult. They don't feel embodied in it. So then the advice is, as you got from Mary this afternoon, is start where you feel love. but cultivate that so it's visceral. Cultivate it so it's in your body. We love a lot of people, but we don't pause enough

to actually feel the loving in a very alive, embodied way. Give you a taste for right now, and that is, if you will, just to close your eyes. Much as you did earlier, take a moment to choose someone that's very easy for you to love, someone whom it's very easy to see that person's goodness. It could be a human being, it could be a dog being, it could be any

being. But take your time so that you let yourself see that person, that being's eyes, when they're communicating love, communicating happiness. And you might whisper, thank you. Just thank you for being in my life. And I love you. And imagine that being, receiving it, feeling warmed and opened by your love. So that you can begin to feel your heart.

What's it like when you're offering love? when you're really caring about somebody. What's the felt sense, perhaps in the heart area? What if you just let it be as big as it is? And just sense that this is the heart space. And sense that heart space including you, this heart that's right here, these emotions, this intelligence,

and the same way you can keep your eyes closed that we have a challenge sometimes, finding our way to offering that I love you to ourselves. We have a hard time taking it in. So that in us which needs to feel loved has a hard time experiencing that. And you might ask yourself, is there anywhere that you really let in love

with any person, where you can feel that person's love and in again in a felt-sense way actually feel held in that person's love. And you might experiment a little with that part of you that wants to feel loved and sense what would be the most valued source of loving. Where would it be most easy to receive from if you really deepened your attention? Would it be from a dog? mother, friend, from a spiritual figure like Buddha or Kuan Yin, Jesus. If you are going to deepen your

capacity to receive love, where might it be easiest to receive from? You might imagine, and imagining is powerful, asking that being, please love me. And just see what happens. as you ask that and just imagine exactly what you want feeling bathed, feeling held, feeling seen imagine having what you want

happen from that being and if you're able to feel that sense of being bathed in love that's lovely and if not to let that be a place that you have some interest and care about

deepening your attention to because like everything else. It's a training. You can open your eyes if you'd like. Imagining is powerful. The exercises can really wake up parts of you. There's a video going viral right now that has, some of you might have seen it where this photographer is taking strangers together on the streets and putting them together and posing them in these postures that look like they're totally in love with each other. How many of you have seen this? Can I just see by hand? Yes. So he'll just take two people and they'll have to hold each other in a certain way, have their arms touching, look into each other's eyes, and he'll be taking pictures of them.

Total absolute strangers. And then they'll interview them afterwards. And it's amazing because in the interview, the people report that at first they felt totally awkward and weird, but that as a result of it, they felt a sense of loving connection with the person they were posing with. If you imagine love coming towards you and you have an intention to receive it because our habit is to harden, your body and heart can start being trained to be more porous. Okay, so we've talked about I'm sorry, the forgiving, we've talked about I love you and letting in love. Final again is when we start feeling that loving, in the moment of feeling loving there's enormous gratitude that rises because we're coming home

when we feel that heart space we feel more this is more the truth of who I am than any self-story any emotion I was living inside of there's a sense that we belong to something whole and beautiful and so this belonging this heart space is thanking you, then our life starts becoming an expression of loving. Our life starts being an expression of it. And it becomes an expression of it in several different ways. The forgiving clears the way so that it makes it possible for us to reach people that we could have never reached. That self-compassion creates a field of compassion. And there's a story that over the years has been, been for me the biggest wake-up on this one, which came out of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

collection of the power of this kind of forgiving to really open up connections with other people, because when we're down on ourselves, we create a blockade with other people. So this was found on the Vietnam Memorial wall. They had these people put in these little prayers and messages and letters and so on. And this was a letter-ridden, the guy says, Dear sir, for 22 years, I've carried your picture in my wallet.

I was only 18 years old that day. We faced one another on the trail and chew live Vietnam. Why you did not take my life, I'll never know. Forgive me for taking your life. I was reacting just the way I was trained. I need to go on with my life. life now he writes so many times though I stared at your picture and your daughter I

suspect it was your daughter and each time I suspect my heart and guts would burn with the pain of guilt I have two daughters of my own now I perceive you as a brave soldier defending his homeland above all else I can now respect the importance life held for you I suppose that is why I'm able to be here today it's time for me to continue the life process and release the pain and guilt, forgive me, sir. Okay, so this is the letter where he's asking for forgiveness and clearly ready to forgive himself and getting the conditioning that he was from a culture that was at war and so on.

Well, he left it there, but then for whatever reason, the letter seemed to make its way back to him. Somebody found it and found him and gave it back to him. So he decided he was going to go to Vietnam himself and see if he could find the little girl in the picture, whose father he killed. So his name is Richard LaTrell. And so he traveled there and was able to find the girl in the snapshot. And he wanted to give the photo back to her. So she was 40 years old and she had no picture of her father. And through an interpreter, he introduced himself.

He says, tell her, this is the photo I took from her father's wallet the day I shot and killed him. And I'm returning it. And then with a cracking voice, he asked her forgiveness. She burst into tears and fell into his arms, and the two held each other up, sobbing and embracing. Her brother could speak English, he says that both of them believe that their father's spirit lives on and rich. They expect, and we'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 the reason that I'm sharing this story is that it sounds like the invitation, make love of yourself perfect, has to do with this deep inner process. But in any moment that you open up your heart to loving yourself and forgiving yourself, that openness directly impacts widening circles of others. Our capacity to have a heart space where everything that is, is welcome, means that everyone is part of our heart.

We can welcome each in a way that actually is a transmission, that actually helps to heal others. I'll share one last story that I found, that in a way expresses this. And it's written by a surgeon, his name's Richard Seltzer. He says, I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face post-operative, her mouth, twisted in palsy, clownish. The tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth had been

severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon, he was talking about himself, had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh. I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek had to cut the little nerve. Her husband is in the room. They stand on the opposite the side of the bed, and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me private. Who are they, I asked myself, he in this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously. The young woman speaks,

Will my mouth always be like this, she says? Yes, I tell her, yes it will. It is because the nerve was cut. She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. I like it, he says. It's kind of cute. all at once I know who he is

I understand and I lower my gaze one is not bold in an encounter with a god unmindful he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate hers to show her that their kiss still works so tonight really what we're looking at is how we bring these two wings of attending

and befriending to see within ourselves to see the vulnerability and be forgiving, to see the goodness hold with love, and in that loving sense our belonging, and just really feel that namaste, it's just part of this sacred wholeness, and that as we do that naturally, it ripples out. And this path is really energized by our aspiration,

that we remember it matters, that if you leave retreat with just a little, more remembrance that it really matters to pause and offer that kindness to the life that's right here. That's radical. That makes a difference. Again, Sri Nursorga Data, all I plead with you is this, make love of yourself perfect. And then you discover your beyond. So let's Let's close if we can just to take a few moments. Again, we'll just practice together. So pausing and letting the pause be a chance to really arrive,

to feel right where you are right now, the aliveness of the body, the sounds, whatever feeling tone in the heart. And just to ask yourself, is there anything this moment between me and really loving the life that's right here? and to simply have that intention to let whatever's here be part of this heart space, be part of this tenderness, awakeness space that really cherishes life. If there's vulnerability, I'm sorry, I care about the suffering. In some way offering that message of forgiveness.

as you see the goodness that's here, I love you. And as you feel that belonging to sacred whole, that spirit, that oneness, there's that bow, that thank you. We close with the radiant sutras. There's a place in the heart where everything meets. Go there if you want to find me. Mind, senses, soul, eternity. All are there. Are you there?

Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon. Quiet ecstasy is there and a steady, regal sense of resting in a perfect spot. Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again and be saturated with knowing, I belong here. I am at home here. Namaste and thank you.

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.