Tara Brach - The Joy of Conscious Relationships

Episode Date: July 13, 2011

2011-07-06 - The Joy of Conscious Relationships (from 2007-09-19) - We live in a relational field, and as we develop the capacity for presence with others, we discover the truth of our connectedness. This discovery is experienced as love, and gives rise to genuine happiness and inner freedom. This talk explores the teachings and practices that nourish conscious relationships. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

Two weeks ago, when I was here, I wasn't here last week, as many of you know. The talk was really on the possibility of true happiness. That on this path there's a potential for a freedom and a happiness. And the deepest kind of happiness, the polyword is sukkha. And it's an unconditioned happiness. And what that means is that it's not dependent on things going our way. it's a happiness that's not dependent on certain sense pleasures or relationships going a certain way

or us behaving the way we think we should it's a happiness that arises out of a very profound quality of presence just that that there's complete presence a kind of noticing and allowing just what's here now so what does that mean to say there's a happy there. And one way to consider it is that the happiness comes from being at home in the truth of what we are. That when we're present, we come home into reality, into awareness, into love, into heerness. And when we're at home, we're happy. Now there's many times that we get

happy on more superficial levels, and it's not because we're deep, at home with our true nature. It's because, as I mentioned before, there's certain good feelings about things and it's temporary and it's fleeting and it's fine. You know, unless we're clutching on the lot, it's fine. But this deep happiness is truly a homecoming. It's when we're inhabiting loving presence. And as it's been described, this essence, happiness is an innate expression of who we are when our minds are not caught up in greed, hatred,

or delusion. In other words, when we're not reacting, when we're not reacting, there is this incredible peace and happiness that's here. There's a wonderful cartoon. Somebody showed me a couple of years ago. I came up here

and I was about to give a talking, somebody just handed it to me and it had these two robots and one's dancing around completely joyously flinging her arms she was a she and she's saying I'm free, free, free at last I found my manual override buttons

I thought that was great because you know that it's in a way we're unhappy we're not at home when we're on that kind of automatic and in some way we've been tripped off

and we're just in that trance the same essential happiness that comes when we get quiet and we arrive really arrive right here, arises when we're in full presence with each other. And tonight I'm going to be spending some time talking about the gift, the happiness that's possible when we really learn

how to be here with each other, here with each other. Now, in the Buddhist time, there was one of the kingdoms, the ruler King Kossala commented that he described the monks and nuns that surrounded the Buddha and he described them in this way. He said, they're wonderfully cheerful, wonderfully happy.

And in a way, this is the essence of Sangha, our spiritual community, when there is conscious relationship, there is this quality of good cheer. There's another cartoon I saw with the Buddha in Jetta Park. That's where he first

addressed his followers, his new followers after Enlightenment, and that's where he delivered many sermons. And so he's addressing them, and he's saying, oh, monks, how do you feel about starting a men's group? And in a way, what I liked about that is that it was a men's and women's group. There were monks and nuns. But the gem of community was on an equal part

to the gem of Buddha Nature and the gem of Dharma of really understanding the truth. In other words, friendship, connection is essential to realization. We can't just do it in a cave. There is another cartoon.

One more. And I found this in tricycle, this Buddhist rag, and it had a picture of a guy meditating, and it said, tall, dark, handsome Buddhist looking for himself, Buddhist personals, you know. So last week I was away, I was at a retreat that I was taking, and it was the basic, well, it was given by Hamid Ali, who teaches a system called Diamond Heart,

very complementary to the Buddhist practices. And it was on the teachings and practices for awakening in relationship. And the idea being that most spiritual paths have ethical guidelines, lines on how to be kind and be good to each other and pay attention and so on. But they don't have the emphasis. The emphasis is usually when we're sitting on a cushion how to pay attention inwardly. And there's nowhere near the comprehensive training and emphasis on how do we do it when we're hanging out with each other. And you know how when we're hanging out with each other everything gets tripped off, how do we find that homecoming, that deep happiness when we're with

each other? So the challenge is, as many of you know, if you sit regularly, it's just a part of life that you'll be on the cushion. And there are days that there will be this quietness and stillness and a feeling kind of at one. You might even have them met to wish, may all beings be happy. and then you leave your room and then there's carpool and making sure your kid's dressed right and all this tension sets in and you get bossy and you get a little disrespectful or you're at work

and somebody rubs you wrong and next thing you know you've said some sideways comment that you can't believe you said and it goes on and on I could give you 10,000 examples but the point is that spirituality gets compartmentalized

and we have our spiritual self when we're in some way, you know, kind of really quieting and in the kind of right environment. And then we have the kind of neurotic reactive, absorbed, self-absorbed, trancy self that's doing his or her thing out in the world. So how do we come home? And as you might imagine, the principles for homecoming in meditation on the cushion

are exactly the same. as the principles for being with each other awake. The essence of mindfulness is it gives us this capacity for attunement. Mindfulness, noticing what's happening in the moment and allowing it, reveals the truth of what's here. It attunes us. And when we pay attention in an inner way,

it attunes us to the different moods that are going on, to the different ways that one thing leads to the next inside us. In a deeper way, it attunes us to how everything's changing in a dynamic way, nothing holds still. It attunes us if we really look deeply to how whatever's going on is not owned by anything. There's no self in there we can find. There's just this dance or play, a phenomena. It creates an intimacy with life within us. And as Dogen says, and Master Dogen, really the freedom or enlightenment that we seek is really to be intimate with all things. So these teachings of mindfulness then naturally widen out, that we can have that same attunement

and pay attention to each other. That it doesn't have to be only an inner attunement we can actually intend and train to pay attention in a way to see, see the truth of who's here. I'll tell you a little story about this retreat. We're doing a process called Dialectic Inquiry, and it's basically what I'm talking about, getting together with one person, and a kind of presencing with each other

where you pay attention to what's going on inside here, what is going on inside you, and what is happening in the field between us, this third creative actuality that arises when we're really present. That was the practice. It goes very deep. So we were in the room hearing the teachings on this. And in the front of the room on the altar, there was a Buddha and a Kuanian, you know, wisdom, compassion.

And these statues were sitting and we were kind of looking at them and the beautiful statues. And we left and we did this deep process off in diads. And we walked back into the hall and sat down. And one by one, we were looking up and we all started laughing because we realized somebody had turned the statues and they were facing each other. They were doing their dialectic inquiry together. It was wonderful. The happiness that comes out of this kind of presencing

is that we discover what it means to be at home with each other, which means a oneness that we belong to, a belonging that really allows us to feel this alive, that's unencumbered by self-centered, by what's wrong with me, by what, you know, how we need to kind of censor ourselves. There's this real aliveness that's got a very joyful celebrating experience, this oneness. And as I speak it, it sounds idealistic because so many of us know how many rounds we've gone getting stuck in our patterns of wanting to feel closer, intimate and having all sorts of old tendencies continue to present themselves, tendencies of feeling insecure, or needing to control, our needing to defend, or whatever it is. Our trance, and we each

have our own version of it, but what we sometimes call this selfing trance, where we feel separate and something's wrong and something needs to be different, keeps on resurrecting itself, So the challenge is like this robot who kind of was able to override that how do we notice the trance it's we all are subject to this conditioning

rather than feeling our connection to be a little afraid of each other right? So how do we face that and find that presence in the midst of it that can help us to transform So a little story for you.

Some of you might remember, this is one of the legends from the Holy Grail of Parciful, who's this young knight goes off on a quest, and he wanders into a parched and devastated area where nothing grows.

And when he arrives at the capital of this waste land, he finds the townspeople behaving as if everything were normal. They look depressed. They look on mechanical, but they're not wondering, well, what's horrors befallen us, or what can we do, or what's going on, rather, they're kind of dull mechanical, as if under a spell, which they were.

So Parciful's invited into the castle where, to a surprise, he discovers the king lying in bed, pale and dying, like the land around him as life is waning. Parciful is full of questions, but because he's been told by an elder that asking questions is improper for a night, he keeps quiet, assumes it's none of his business. The next morning, when he leaves the castle to continue on his journey, he meets the sorceress Kundri on the road. When she hears that he hasn't asked the king about himself, about what's going on, she goes into a rage. How could he be so callous, so disengaged, and not asked what was happening? He could have saved the king and the kingdom and himself by doing so. Taking her words to heart, Parsifleful

returns to the waste land and goes straight to the castle. Without even breaking his stride, he walks right up to the king who's lying on his couch. He kneels and ever so gently asks, Oh my lord, what aileth thee? At that moment the color came back into the king's cheeks and he stood up fully healed. And as all stories go, the town came back to life and the kingdom came alive.

So what do we make of this? And maybe in the simplest way is that the trance is universal. It's a part of what happens, is that we get incarnated and sense our self as separate. And we can be in cultures that aggravated or have personal histories that aggravate it, but we all go to sleep. And there's a kind of deadness then.

And when we're asleep with each other and on mechanical, it's dry. It's static, it's lifeless. Nothing grows. It draws up our spirit. So this was what Parcifal entered. And he was also in a trance, a bit disengaged and in his own selfing trance. What heals is remembering what matters.

That's what the sorceress job was. She was with all the aliveness and the kind of healing rage of, wait a minute, what matters here? You know, love, presence. caring, asking. So remembering what matters and then offering our presence, which includes that inquiry as to what is happening. Presence has the quality of what is going on here and an allowing, a complete allowing, because you can't see what's going on unless there's a profound radical acceptance that's here. Seeing and allowing. So let's just for a moment check in. I want to give you a chance to kind of sense in your life, your relationship.

because we'll have an opportunity to do a little meditation on where you might find yourself a little entranced and how can you bring the life and spirit alive a bit more. So sit in whatever way allows you to just check in and let yourself bring to mind a friendship or maybe it's your partner or someone in your family, a relationship that matters. and just observing with the filter of so is there a bit of a spell that I'm living under, a trance? I'd have the earmarks that there's an agenda most of the time or judgment or blame.

Preoccupations is another big one. Not really asking or finding out who's there. Not asking or finding out what's going on inside you, your relationship, not asking or finding out who you are in your togetherness, that unique space of your togetherness. It's the not looking that sustains the trance. Or maybe as you reflect you sense where the attunement is, where you do pause and arrive together. So this is just a chance to reflect on the quality of trance versus a...

presence or attunement in one or more relationships. And you might ask yourself, what stops me from pausing and dropping in more to real presence with this person? Just honestly, what stops you? What gets in the way? And you can continue to reflect on this as we move forward and open your eyes if you like. but I'll just name that a big challenge that we run into is a kind of habitual anxiety

where we think always that we're supposed to be somewhere else doing something else. That in some way something around the corner is going to be too much and we need to defend against it or get more done. So in some way there's this restlessness that stops us from arriving. Sometimes it's a deep fear of if I really hang out, I'll get hurt. So I want to just to mention that

it's very, very hard to arrive in this awake presence and conscious relationship. It's harder when there's a vulnerability that lies beneath the wound. And it doesn't matter if that person was the beginning of the wound, but if we're carrying a sense of an internalized message of people aren't going to like me

or I'm not going to live up to expectations or in some way I'm going to be rejected or smothered or whatever it is. That's like a button waiting to be pushed. What happens is that we don't want to go into the place of the vulnerability. So rather than presencing, rather than that attumement of,

okay, what's happening inside me, what's happening inside you, what's happening in the field, we go into our strategies of avoiding intimacy. which is usually blame. Usually we blame ourselves, blame another. Another cartoon, I seem to have a lot of them tonight, is deep in the African jungle.

You have this woman's in a hut, and she's got all these dolls with pins in them, which are really all the other people in the tribe, and her husband's saying, can't you get along with anybody? So our response, when there's buttons that are just waiting to be pushed, in other words, for most of us,

we've been in some way wounded or not listened to or not heard or understood and that's a hurt and when that's in us we have our strategies and some of us our strategies are aggressive to judge others and push them away and others we have a kind of a withdrawing a holding back our life force there's just a we're very careful careful about what we do or say but there's just a kind of depression or repression or suppression. My best example of that, or maybe not my best, maybe it's one of my worst, but is the story of these two guys that have worked out in the gym and then they're talking and one confesses to the other

that he feels incredibly embarrassed like he created the most major faux pa, really embarrassed. And he tells his friend that, you know, he's a very attractive co-worker and he went in, one day she came in from outside and he said, the house and she asked him something about well this is some weather isn't it and he said yeah it's certainly niply out and he went oh my god what have i done it was really he was just so embarrassed and his friend said oh don't no don't feel bad it's called the Freudian slip it happens all the time why just the other day at breakfast with my wife i meant to say please pass the sugar instead

i said you damn bitch you've ruined my life you know i think you get the idea that we have our strategies. Some people are throwing out the insult, blame attack, other people hold it in, and then it comes out sideways. But the point is this. The given is we enter relationships with vulnerability and how, given the fact that there's vulnerability in each of us

and there's ways that we dance around it, how do we arrive? How do we really arrive? And in a way, the question is when we're aware of wounding, how do we bring a really caring presence into the moment? Whether it's our own wounding or another's or the earth's, instead of reacting, how do we first get present? Our tendencies to react, not to pause and become present.

The basic principle, this is the bottom line teaching, is that any time we react out of that sense of feeling victimized, out of being angry, afraid, whatever, any time we react in that way from a sense of a righteous self or wrong self, it never serves healing, our own or anyone else's. the energy that drives whatever we do, our words and our action, the energy that drives that creates the outcome, and that this universe is an intelligent conscious field. It doesn't matter whether it looks like it's the right thing, or we think we're being right. This universe is aware and conscious and perceives the energy, the intention behind.

So when our action arises from fear or anger, it creates more dividedness, more of an experience of self against world, more delusion, more violence. Now, this doesn't mean we try to get rid of the anger or the fear. What it means is that on this path of conscious relationship, whether it's with our partner or with politicians, are with a friend or a colleague,

the pathway is to use whatever arises, whatever stirred up as the gateway into presence. It's the fire that really creates the diamond. And it takes courage, like this willingness to, instead of react, to pause and sense what's happening. In the moments that we do that, we arrive back in a presence that has a wisdom and a compassion on how to act.

Now, two weeks ago, when I was describing this homecoming, I shared a verse that I share very often that really says that there's countless ways we can react, but there's only one choice that will bring happiness, and that's to love what is. And loving what is starts by allowing what is, being present with what is. And when we're present with what is, we become that presence.

we become that presence. Now a question came up after class and that question is one that I get a lot and that is if we love what is okay, we're in relationship, something gets stirred up or we're in relationship with our world politically something gets stirred up. If we love what is what's going to motivate us to respond to suffering

to take care of things. You know, aren't we going to just be passive? Aren't we just going to lie down and have people step on us or aren't we going to be just detached and not care about our world, you know, if there's something going on? So let me just say that loving what is does not mean that we love, let's say, the way this administration's ratcheting up the violence in the world. Loving what is doesn't mean we love the way somebody treats us when they're being insensitive. it means that we love, which starts with allowing,

the immediate experience we're having. In other words, if the experience that arises is fear or anger, we bring an allowing, caring presence to that, to that. We start right there. And if we can bring that presence to what we're feeling, what happens is we become more present, more open, and then we respond from care, not from fear. When we react in an unaligned way, our body knows it.

Our heart knows it, and if it doesn't know it consciously, it gets sick. It gets tight. I'll tell you a story. The woman I was working with a few years ago, and she had been married for 28 years, grown children, and while she was married she fell in love with another man and she still loved her husband and she felt a tremendous passion and aliveness with this other man

and she didn't sleep with him but it was a very intimate connection a very intimate very emotionally intimate connection she knew she was going to stay with her husband some loyalty some sense of her karma whatever she wanted to say she just knew it and she got to be couldn't let go of this loving. It was just, it was what was happening. And she didn't want to tell her husband because why hurt him? She wasn't going to leave him. She wasn't going to sleep with this guy. Why hurt him? Why shake things up? Why risk losing him? She didn't tell him for a while. And so she's

in therapy. So what we did was just what I'm talking about here. Okay, so come home. What's your intention and not telling him. And then as she went into that, and again, it was protecting the relationship, the fear of loss, the fear of his anger, the fear of his hurt. And then we deepen the inquiry to this inner truthfulness. This is attunement, inner attunement. What's really happening? And there was guilt and there was longing.

But the bottom line, as she went deeper and deeper, was that she felt this tug, where she felt this incredible grief and pain at hurting her husband and this incredible longing for aliveness at the same time. And it's like either way she went, there was loss. So what we did was explore what it meant to just keep saying yes to both of them, not to say, okay, you have to go one way or this way. Okay, yes, there's grief and yes, there's longing. until the more she attuned and kept on noticing and allowing

and letting those currents be there, she find more and more that she was the space, the tender space that was just aware of those currents in this human body mind. Aware of that, she just became that space. And then she could start attuning to him. So I said, okay, so what's going on? And she could sense how the secret she was keeping

was in some way he was picking up and how he was getting smaller and tighter and more and more defended against her and she could feel how his love for her but his more and more inability to be able to express it because something was between them. And her message from her own high self

became very clear which was share what's true, share from your heart. and then let the future unfold from truth. Let it unfold from truth. And that's what she did. And they went into therapy together. And her truth opened up parts of him

that were incredibly vulnerable, but then the relationship was real. In other words, the breaking the spell. It got real. And in that realness, and there was an aliveness there that meant she not only could stay with him, but she had a much more alive marriage.

and she kept her friend but it was more in proportion that worked for them. The point here is not when that kind of situation comes up one should do such and such the point is that there's no way back to intimacy

if we don't pause and really inquire into what's true what is ailing thee gently what is true what's the intention and it has to be with a profound quality of acceptance. If she judged herself for,

I shouldn't want that aliveness, she wouldn't have been able to come home to that quality of presence. So the beginning of this conscious relationship, this coming home to the joy of being together, is accepting no matter what's coming up, accepting it. Anthony DeMello is a Jesuit priest, and he talks in one of his books about

an experience of this kind of radical acceptance that changed his life. He says, he writes that he had been neurotic for years, anxious and depressed and selfish. Like so many of us, he adopted one self-improvement project after another, and when nothing seemed to work, he was on the verge of despair. Part of what was so painful was that even his friends agreed he needed to change and regularly urge him to become less self-absorbed.

His world stopped one day when a friend told him, don't change. I love you just as you are. Letting those words streamed through his heart and mind felt like pure grace. Don't change, don't change, don't change, don't change. I love you as you are. Paradoxically, it was only when he received permission not to that he actually felt free to change.

Father de Mello says he relaxed and open to a feeling of aliveness that have been blocked off for years. that we are judging what we're experiencing or what another is experiencing blocks off aliveness and in the moments that we give permission we say okay be as it is it's okay really really it's okay

and we give that message either to ourselves or to another it's almost like it creates the very space that's needed for whatever's been tangled to begin to unfold itself. Now, you can't, it's not bargaining mind like, okay, I'll accept you so that you'll change. It's not that. You know, this is like authentically and it's courageous. It's saying, okay, it's like it is. Every one of us has had the experience at some time of what it's like when we're with someone that really, really has that space of a genuine accepting and knowing how to

delicious it is. We get a taste of that. That's the happiness of conscious relationship where there's a space that lets us be as we are. And what it does is it lets the tangles begin to loosen so that the light and aliveness and beauty and goodness can shine through. So one element, we're talking about really capacities of presence, is to remember what matters. matters. Remember that it matters to us. If we're at the end of our life looking back, what would matter we wouldn't want to race through in trance. We really want to arrive and love without holding back. Remembering what matters, pausing and arriving in our bodies and our hearts, finding out what's going on, finding out. And there's a quality of truth telling

we can't be intimate unless we tell the truth. I want to read to you, Adrienne Rich, who says it so beautifully. She says, an honorable human relationship that is one in which two people have the right to use the word love is a process of the deepening truths they can tell each other. An honorable human relationship. That is one in which two people have the right to use the word love. is a process of the deepening truths they can tell each other. It's important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.

The night before their marriage, writes Robert Johnson, they held a ritual where they made their shadow vows. The groom said, I will give you an identity and make the world see you as an extension of myself. The bride replied, I will be compliant and sweet. But underneath, I'll have the real control. If anything goes wrong, I'll take your money in your house.

They then drank champagne and laughed heartily at their foibles, knowing that in the course of their marriage, these shadow figures would inevitably come out. They were ahead of the game because they had recognized the shadow and unmasked it. So really what we're talking about tonight is that without judging it, the given is, as described in the waste plan and the Parcival Miss, that we have a tendency to go to sleep. We all do. If not a lot, some. And yet we have a capacity, just as we have when we're kind of on the cushion getting attuned and pausing and really

noticing what's happening inside us and coming back home to presence, we can discover that presence with each other. And when we do, we find some new field that's different than either of us in our alone individual consciousness, that has a tremendous aliveness and the capacity to reveal non-separation. It's not hard to sit and have altered states of consciousness, but on some level have this notion of a self-sitting, a meditator trying to get to enlightenment. When we do this interpersonal meditation, There is a radical waking up from that sense of separateness, a discovery of a field that's bigger than either of us, a field that's really what you might call our true nature of awareness

and love, and it lives through our body minds in unique, interesting ways, and yet that field is our source. It's what we belong to. The Dalai Lama said, my religion is kindness. And there's a commitment in, and he said, don't bother being a Buddhist, just, you know, just live in this awareness of the possibility of really being kind, waking up together, knowing we belong together. I heard a story of one doctor, East Coast, big medical center in the East Coast, and once a month one of his patients would come, and she was a homeless woman, somewhat mentally disturbed.

And this doctor was known for this capacity, kind of what I'm describing tonight, of this kind of presence that really appreciates and allows who's here, attunement. So she'd come in and talk about all the stuff going on and kind of babble and this and that. And he'd help her a little with problems, but mostly he just listened

and respected her beingness. and as it turned out the nurses in the unit noticed that this woman would come on days that this doctor wasn't there and seemed to know when that was the case and she'd go to the edge of his room and she'd put her left foot into the room

and then put it back out and then she'd put it into the room and put it back out she'd do that several rounds and then seemingly satisfied she'd leave the places where we are seen and heard our sacred places. When we offer that seeing and presence and care to our inner

life, that we're offering a space of transformation for our inner life. When we offer it to each other, there's a dynamic, a kind of a spiraling of aliveness that makes it possible to together realize who we are. We'll do a closing meditation where you'll have a chance to kind of explore a little of this again for what goes on in your own life. So take a moment, let this be a sacred pause right now where you feel your breath, relax a little. If you can let the shoulders drop a bit, soften the hands, feel the breath and just invite whatever relationship wants your attention, wherever you might feel that there's a little distance, a little trance, kind of habit or reactivity that you'd like to be more awake around, where you get stuck maybe

in some conflict, some sense of distance. And as you bring this person and situation to mind, just feel your sincerity that you're really letting this meditation be to serve, waking up some to serve more love, more presence, more truth. And let yourself go right to the situation where it might be, if you were watching a movie, the frame of the movie where really kind of most expresses where there might be some stockness or distance. And then in this kind of inner attunement, just sense what's happening for you when this part of the trance or the reactivity comes up. What's going on inside?

I feel your body as you ask that question. What are you afraid of? What are you wanting? What's difficult? And see if you can inquire with a real open quality, just noticing what's true and letting it be there real gently. Maybe you'll find a sense of being,

dissed or disrespected or feeling that way, pushed away, maybe a fear of being overwhelmed or suffocated, maybe feeling misunderstood, just to feel what comes up and give it a full attention, breathe with it. For some it helps to say yes or this too. In some way just bowing to, okay, this is the truth, this is what the feelings are. You can even put your hand on your heart if it helps you to kind of feel a sense of keeping company with what's going on inside. That can really help. Because that's what this is about.

Just as that doctor offered, you're offering a kind of sacred presence to any vulnerability that might be here. And as you be with what's here, just sense the presence. It says the one that's aware. You can take your attention to the person that is in this situation with you. And sense what might be going on for that person, their fears or hurts or disappointments or what they're caught in. I might sense that you could invite the Buddha or some awakened spirit,

Kuan Yin, the Bodhisap of Compassion, to really be living inside you. So you can kind of look through the eyes and the heart of the Buddha right now, at yourself, at the other, at what's going on. You might consider just really calling on your highest, wisest self and sense presence with the situation. and you might even sense if there's a message or some sense of what you want, how you want to relate with this person.

You might even roll the movie forward and sense a way that you might live out this situation with more presence, only if it comes naturally, what you might want to say, do. And it's the possibility of who, you both can be when there's really truth and openness, when you're both living from real presence. Just imagine and sense into the field that is created with that.

If you could pause together and like those statues, really face each other in presence. Really remember what matters. Ticknut Han talks about. about the power of impermanence to really bring us home to what matters and the reflection that I'm going to die and you're going to die and we have these moments, want to show up in these moments. And just to now just letting go of a sense of the story of what's going on

and just in a very gentle way, bring the loving, kindness and presence to whatever's going on inside your own heart, right, this moment. and sense if there's any prayer you'd like to offer to yourself right here, right now, anything you'd like to remember, anything you'd like to feel or experience, just offer that prayer to yourself from the heart of loving kindness, sense the person you were considering and sense whatever prayer you'd like to offer for that person. And then widening the field, sent somebody in this room that you've seen maybe someone you know or don't know that well.

and notice what happens when you very sincerely make a wish or a prayer for that person. It might be the person you said hello to before we started this talk. This is called stealth meta, where you just really just quietly send a prayer and notice the connection that arises when our heart wishes another well. Now sense that you're sitting here as you are with hundreds of others, each with a sincerity to wake up our hearts and feel the field that's here,

the sincerity and the kind of the innocence and goodness of the field that's here. Sense into that, an edgeless field of loving presence that can include this world in our hearts. We close with a prayer for our world that our time together this evening, our meditation and reflections,

awaken these hearts and minds in a way that ripples out to touch all beings. May all beings be filled with loving presence, be held in loving presence. May all beings discover the natural joy of being alive. May all beings realize their connection and belonging to the web of life. May all beings awaken and be free.

Namaste. 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.