Tara Brach - The Power of Spiritual Hope

Episode Date: July 23, 2021

The Power of Spiritual Hope (2021-07-21) - The openness to possibility is essential on a path of awakening and freedom. In this talk we explore what makes up mature or spiritual hope, and how two meditation practices of presence can nourish our hope.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Greetings, namaste. Welcome friends. I'm so glad you're with us for this gathering. We'll be exploring in this talk the power of hope on the spiritual path, the power of really trusting and possibility. And to begin, with a little story of a modern day Buddha who fell off the top of a high sky scraper. And as he's falling past the 10th floor window, somebody pokes their head out and says, are you okay? His response is so far so good. And so I start there so that we can just from the get-go, our common ground is that

the awakened hope we're exploring isn't a kind of delusional. optimism. And just to say, this topic really drew me to, I've been reflecting on it a lot and to share, reflect together. It feels important because for many that have been in touch with me, there's a sense of flagging hope. You know, our pandemic continues here in the United States and very, very horrifically around the planet. And wildfire. fires, heat waves, the dangers that are right here now of climate change, and so much societal suffering and dividedness. And also, many individuals are continuing to feel the isolation from the pandemic and a real sense of uncertainty and anxiety, just feeling stuck emotionally or

spiritually. So, in addressing this, we'll begin with the Buddhist scriptures. This is the Buddha saying, if it were not possible to free the heart from entanglement, I would not teach you to do so. Just because it is possible to free the heart, there arises the teachings of the Dharma of Liberation offered open-handedly for the welfare of all beings. It's such a powerful statement. If it were not possible to free the heart, I would not teach you to do so. So, an essential part of the spiritual path really is this trust in possibility, this trust

in our potential to awaken and be free. And this is what I consider the heart of mature hope, of spiritual hope. And that sense that there's potential will bring you to being right here listening, it'll bring you to meditation practice, it'll energetically call forth the best of you in your relationships with others and with the larger society. That sense of hope and trust is actually what allows you to manifest the fullness of who you are, of your intelligence, of your heart. So if you think on the societal level, trust in possibility is what moves us to serve the greater good. There's a Hebrew saying that I love, which is that without vision,

the people perish. So hope is that sensibility, that sense of possibility, that sense of possibility that gives us resilience and it gives us the energy to manifest our best. So we'll slow down here and pause and just invite you to reflect for a few moments on your own hope-conscious, how hopeful you are. You might let the attention go inward and feel your body and feel the breath. Invite yourself right here and just listening to your own heart, your own wise heart. Do you sense your consciousness is evolving? Do you sense this possibility of increasing understanding, kindness, love? So this is the inquiry of how hopeful are you that your own life is unfolding in the ways

that most deeply matter to you? And just sense what arises with that. More broadly, the inquiry is, do you believe consciousness is evolving in our species, towards more wisdom, more compassion? In other words, how hopeful are you for our world? So as we continue on, of course, there's different lenses. There's an anonymous saying that the difference between an optimist and a pessimist, the optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds,

and the pessimist fears the optimist is right. And there's no question that we need to honestly face just how much fear and greed runs our behavior. I mean, here we have these huge human brains and we can cause profound problems and we do cause them for life on earth. There's another anonymous quote I thought I'd share with you that I liked. It says two million years from now, scientists can generate charge conflict with claims that their species descended from us. So that's a mortal insult, you know. So for all our shadow, our species is amazingly adaptive. We've got this capacity for collaboration, for compassion, for altruism, for wonder.

And there's many signs of continued evolving. I often think of it the way Desmond Tutu put it. And he leads from hope. He says two steps forward, one step back. So, as I mentioned, spiritual hope isn't optimism. It's not this optimism that things are going to work out a certain way in our world, that will meet our 2030 target for reducing greenhouse gases, or that the COVID pandemic will go away,

or in our personal life that we'll find our soulmate or get pregnant. And these wants are totally natural. and we need to allow them to arise, hold them with mindfulness and compassion. But when these very particularly targeted wants tighten into expectation or grasping that we have to have it happen to be happy or okay, or when these kind of wants are actually delusion and they prevent us from facing a truth that we need to face, they cause suffering. They actually obscure mature hope.

Okay, so what defines mature hope? When you are living with spiritual hope for yourself or for the world, you have an aspiration to fulfill potential. So the aspiration is based on seeds that are already here. Let's say the seeds of creativity and love that are inside you, your aspiration is to manifest. to fulfill. And of course, with that comes a sense that that's possible. As the Buddha taught, it's possible to free our heart and mind. So that's the first element of spiritual hope, this sense of aspiration of what's possible. And the second is that there's a willingness to put energy toward that goal. Say, to draw or write more or meditate more, or our

if there's hope for the world to offer your voice, to offer your money or energy or whatever it is that will serve the causes that call you. I saw an article in the New Yorker some years ago. It was about a Japanese monk named Namoto. And he was giving his life to responding to people who were suicidal. And Japan, as many of you know, probably know, this very high rate of suicidal ideation and suicide amongst industrial nations. So he was dedicated to helping suicidal people find hope. He had a website, countless emails would come in, phone calls. He said that some people, he'd have conversations for years, they would just go in circles, no progress. And meanwhile, he's absorbing some terrible emotions into his body. So he realized that something was wrong with his approach.

and he decided that he wouldn't communicate with people until he had met them. So if they wanted his counsel, they first had to come to his temple. And this wasn't such an easy thing. You know, his temple was in a kind of remote place, far from the nearest city, even from a train station. And he had been talking to people from all over Japan. And also it would cost them. But this was the point. if they didn't want help enough to get to his temple, it's unlikely he could help them.

So this new strategy reduced the number of people who came to him for help, but it also changed something for those who did, which was there was a marked shift towards healing. I'll give you one example that struck me. And this is one man walked five hours to get to Nemoto's temple. And the walk was a heroic journey for him because he had been living as a shut-in. Many of you've heard that expression. You're just completely insular, isolated, never going out. And now suddenly he's outside in the sun. He's sweating and feeling his body move. And as he walks, he's thinking about what he's going to say because it had been really a long time since he had spoken to anyone. So now he's going to be expected to share his most intimate feelings with a stranger.

So he's sweating and thinking and walking. And at last, after five hours, he arrives at the temple. And he announced that he had achieved the understanding and no longer needed Nomodos help. So he turned around and walked back home. So what happened? He had the elements of spiritual hope. Nomoda's teachings had already kind of nurtured an aspiration that healing's possible. And he energetically got behind that aspiration he actually put out and that reconnected

him with an embodied sense of his potential in a very immediate and powerful way. So spiritual hope, it has both aspiration, that sense of possibility and dedicated energy. And really underneath it is a trust in life, a trust in the goodness of this unfolding life, this unfolding reality, trust that you belong to reality and that it's basically okay. This spiritual trust, the teacher Hamid Ali, calls holy hope. I just like the sound of that holy hope. It's an attitude of the soul that's open and receptive to how reality is unfolding through our unique human forms. And it makes us fully available to this life. I've been reading just a bit of quantum physics. Carla Rovelli has kind of inspired me and I barely understand

anything, but I realize that hope lines up very well with a key principle in quantum physics, and that is that reality can only be understood with the lens of possibility. In other words, Researchers have found it's impossible to predict with certainty the outcome of a single experiment on the quantum level. That's atoms and subatonic particles. That's what everything's made of. It's impossible to protect with certainty what's going to happen. Instead, everything's predicted as probability of the possibilities. And even if you're not scientifically minded, the implications can be really clear and inspiring that this universe exists in the exists in a state of creative possibility. You exist in a state of creative possibility.

And aligning with that truth that there's unbelievable possibility makes you available. And when you nurture your hope and trust, it actually influences what manifests in a positive way. There's a lot of research that talks about certain mind states like hope, like hope, like trust actually increasing the probability that something will happen that's positive. If you feel hopeful about the possibility of being close with others when you meet them, it's more likely and on and on it goes. I have found that I'm pragmatic about hope. And what I mean by that is that no matter what's going on, whether it's a personal challenge or feeling

despairing about what's happening in our society or the suffering of our earth, no matter what's going on, it's useful to find my way to feeling hopeful, to being open to possibility, because I've become more resilient, I get more engaged, I feel more alive, there's more well-being. So it's kind of a pragmatism that hopefulness works. Okay, so we're going to look at what cultivates mature hope, holy hope. And the good news, of course, is that it can be developed. There's hope for hope. And we begin by just looking at what the basic challenges to hope. What undermines it? And what undermines it is that the more that you feel separate, the more you feel cut off and not belonging, the more you'll be filled with fear and mistrust

and cut off from a sense of possibility. And the hope research, and there's this growing body of hope research, it shows that the hope and trust levels are diminished. They're disabled sometimes if our holding environment as an infant or young child isn't sensitive, it isn't responsive, it isn't attuned. And then of course especially if there's trauma. Trauma means we get cut off. That's the experience of trauma. Cut off. Our system's overwhelmed, there's powerlessness, there's no efficacy or power to control anything. So it ends up in learned helplessness and hopelessness. Now, to different degrees, when there's wounds, when there's severed belonging, what happens is the survival brain takes over and the body gets tight and defended and the heart

armored and the mind closes. So instead of possibility, being open to possibility, there's really a tracking for what's going to go wrong. It's that negativity bias. And the wounding and severed belonging happens both growing up with caregivers but also, of course, it happens on the societal level whenever there's a sustained violence against our children. particular population and the most notable for in many parts of the world against black, indigenous people of color, many other populations as well, I think of how many young trans people have committed suicide, hopelessness because of the way society demeans, disregards, threatens, shames. So whether it's family or societal, when

there's a sense of severed belonging, disconnection, it undermines hope. What it does is it cuts us off from our full beingness. It cuts us off from that field of possibility that quantum physics points to. So reconnecting with presence is really a process that gives us hope. And this is what we're going to look at, how we can really really really use two different meditation trainings of presence to reconnect with our whole beingness and with that field of possibility. And one of the types of training I'd like to look at together is the presence with what's

difficult. It's the presence with our experiences of addiction and our experiences of failure and loss and violence and greed. being directly in contact with that. And the second pathway of presence that actually opens us to possibility is presence with goodness, with whatever we witness in ourselves and others in the natural world that brings up a sense of beauty, awe, appreciation. Now, you might be thinking that I get how that second pathway would make us hopeful. but how come presence with suffering can land us up hopeful?

So we'll start there. I'll do it by example that I was doing a kind of Zoom call with a middle-aged woman from the West Coast a few weeks ago. And she was very trapped in personal feelings of failure. Her consulting business was flat. And she wasn't going to the gym because of the resurgence of COVID fears. and not exercising and feeling overweight and feeling lonely. And the looping her body mind was doing was that the future is going to be more of the same and a sense of hopelessness.

So we did rain together, recognize, allow, investigate, nurture, which is a way we can bring presence to the painful entanglements. And the recognizing was, okay, anxious and alone. alone, the allowing, let it be there. And when she started investigating, she could feel in her body this fear and this belief that she was isolated and that no one would ever really be there with her. She would just always be alone. And it was a very young place.

And so then she began to investigate, you know, in some way inquiring of that young place, know, what do you really need? And she felt that young part of her just endlessly crying. It's just this crying place. And the message was, I need to feel someone's there, someone's caring. So I asked her and I often do this, I said, you know, what does the most wise, loving part of you wish for her? So this is getting towards aspiration now. and she said to let her know I'm here, you're here, caring is here. And so for the nurturing, she began a kind of meta or loving kindness practice. We were just repeating phrases of love, you know, saying may you feel held in loving

kindness, filled with love and kindness, may you be safe, may you be happy. And just singing them over and over again for a few moments. we just sat there and she was whispering to herself really because whispering it out loud sometimes this is a trick but with met her loving kindness when you whisper the phrases it can actually go in deeper sometimes and I asked her how she was doing after a few minutes and she said caring feels good caring feels good and I had her open to that sense and it really was a sense of a caring presence that she belonged to and I belong to and that she was reconnecting with. And along with feeling connected to caring presence, opened up a sense of possibility.

And here's why. Presence links us to possibility. Maybe not right away because our presence is in degrees. Sometimes we're present with something but there's judgment or we're present but we're not full in our body. But when there's full presence, we're reconnected with that field of possibility. Life is unfolding and there's a creativity to it. And so she felt more alive. And as it turned out, she kind of committed to some pieces of self-care that were important to replace for her, replacing the gym with biking and actually doing an online workshop or training that would

that she was really fascinated by and would connect her with others. So again, mature hope, reconnecting with our aspiration for her, may I be held in loving kindness, and an energy towards that for her act of self-care. So the presence with pain is a gateway to hope or being with what's real. I'll give you a different kind of example. In this one, and this story is in True Refuge, my book True Refuge, it really stayed with me. Woman was caring for her dying husband, and she was really filled with fear, and her fear was that she would not be the person he needed at this crucial transition.

And she focused her intention on doing a good job. She wanted to do it right and not make mistakes. And she stayed busy and she had a lot of self-judgments going on and she tried to present herself in a kind of optimistic way to him. She described how one morning when he woke up and she was making tea from and gave it to him. She said, you know, they were chatting and she said, well, today's, today's going to be a good day. And she could immediately feel him shutting down. There was this immediate distance and it was really jarring and what it told her was she needed

to be real. So something shifted and she began bringing presence to what was there and what she felt was first that fear of letting him down and as she opened to that underneath that she felt her grieving about losing him and as she opened to that underneath that right in the heart of that she felt her deep love for him. And that loving gave her a sense of what she belonged to. It opened up presence into loving presence. And her aspiration shifted.

Instead of the intention to do a good job, her aspiration was just love him well. And it was quite beautiful as she described it. She wrote to me afterwards. She said that she kind of was intuitive about it, that she kind of knew when to sing softly and when to be silent and when to massage him and when to just be with him. And she said he's gone, but that field of loving presence is always with me. So hope isn't hope that things will go a certain way, a certain narrow way, like someone won't die. Hope is hope for what is really

our potential, which is timeless love, an away car. Okay, so that's the first pathway to hope, which is being with what's difficult. The second pathway is direct presence with goodness. And by that I mean with any experience we have of beauty or kindness or compassion, awe, of deep aspiration, to intentionally turn attention to these dimensions of reality because we tend not to attend to them. You know, our survival brain is busy worrying and looking for problems to solve. So how do we do that?

Well, one way that many of you are aware of now is if you do a gratitude practice daily, you'll become more hopeful. So many studies now, less depression, more hope. It really opens up a sense of possibility and there are two different ways. I mean, there are many ways of doing gratitude practice but you can lump them into two ways. One is formal where you have a particular time that you're on purpose paying attention to what you're grateful for and you might write it down or you might email it to somebody if you have a gratitude partner and share it. Reflect on that. The other, and I want

to just emphasize this little, is an informal gratitude practice where when anything positive arises spontaneously, a feeling of love or gratitude or aliveness, that you pause in those moments and consciously savor it. Get familiar with it. The reason for positive states like hope and love and gratitude to really become states that are turning into traits that they really stay with us, become part of us, we need to spend time with them. We need to get familiar with them. I'll give you an example from just this morning. I mentioned I was on Cape Cod, which is we're by the sea, and I was going for a walk with Jonathan, my husband, and our elderly pup, Katie. And Katie is getting increasingly arthritic. So there's a deep stairs that we have to go

down to get down to the beach and he picked her up and he did it so gently, you know, with such care and such tenderness and he carried her down the stairs because he knew it would be difficult and I just felt the goodness of his heart. And so as we continued walking, I was quiet for a few moments and just let that appreciation be felt in a very kind of somatic way as warmth and openness. And we kept walking a bit and we have a ritual now where we walk to a certain distance and because she's not that able to walk far, he turns around and brings her back and I continue on because a longer walk is part of my sod and my practice. And so I was walking on and it was really quiet around me with just the wash of the waves

and the sound was just so beautiful to me. But again, it was like, okay, beauty, listening, you know, just sensing the wash of the waves and with that a spaciousness and open-heartedness, we tend to race by things and to install them. Again, this is the techno-language in our implicit memory, we need to pause and savor. It said that if you just pause for 15 seconds or maybe take three deep breaths, take in the goodness. that nourishes hope. So presence with goodness includes savoring stories of hope, stories of inspiration. We need to trade them around. Most are familiar with Jane Goodall, the 87 years old primatologist, anthropologist, social activist, one of my great heroes. She had an interview in the New York Times

magazine last week and I recently read her soon-to-be-published book. It's called The Book of Hope. and I'm participating in a summit on hope that's organized around her inspiration. Through the decades of her life, she's been witnessed to the horrors of World War II and countless incidents of cruelty to non-humans and humans. You know, she's seen icebergs melting in Greenland. She's traveled all over. The water pouring out of places where Inuit elders told her it never used to melt. She's met with people who've had to leave their island homes because the water levels have risen so far,

now unprecedented heat waves, fires. She's adamant. She says, we need to face reality. If we don't take action, it'll be too late. And she says, we need to give equal time to stories of hope. Equal time to stories of hope. And this is really what I'm hoping will take away. from this right now is that we need that. She shares beautiful ones in her book. I highly recommend

it when it's available. You know, people giving their hearts and lives to save endangered animals and habitats. This includes children, young people, people who are really oppressed working against all odds to, you know, serve life on our herding planet. We know that the news most of us get is catering to our survival brain which gets fixated on what's wrong. And there's often very little to remind us of the nobility of the human spirit. And yet that nobility is expressed daily in small ways and in huge ways around the planet. My hope level increases when I, when the stories of hope that come to me are around bridging the divide, when there's some movement from people who are making others the bad other, thinking others are less than inferior, bad,

movement from that to that sense of shared humanity. In other words, watching human hearts wake up. And I'd like to share inspiration that I got from two different documentaries. Both of them featured CNN commentator Van Jones, who's a social justice activist and more. And the first one is called The Redemption Project, done a few years ago with CNN. It's a series of meetings that take place in prisons between the offenders and the victims who come and visit at the prison. And in one of those stories, okay, so Donald Lacey is the father of a 16-year-old who is

killed and the 16-year-old is killed by a man named Chris Smith. And Chris had done it to be accepted into a gang. He had been in Foster Holmes all his life and this was the family that he wanted to belong to. So he shot into a van where Lacey's daughter was. He thought it was a rival gang so it was a mistake and he killed her. Some years after Donald Lacey, the dad, knew he needed to meet Chris because he had been to therapy, he had done all sorts of work on himself, but he was still really stuck and his heart was really closed. So each in their own places prepared for this dialogue for I think about a year.

And then they met and they and following the mediator's lead, they each shared what they hoped to accomplish through the meeting, through the conversation. And as they both choked back tears, Donald Lacey said three words that really transform both of their lives. I forgive you. Chris was in shock. He said this. He said, it was almost like I didn't hear it. It's like he had to say it a couple of times for it to really register. And just to give you a little follow-up, six months after that meeting, Chris was paroled. And Lacey had actually told the California courts that he was in favor of Smith's release. and now Chris is working towards a degree in psychology and his goal is to become a marriage

and family therapist with a focus on single parent mothers and their children. So that gives me hope, you know, that we humans can evolve through the most deep, painful conditioning, painful wounds, we can feel remorse, we can want to make amends, and we can forgive. We have this capacity to connect with presence, to open to possibility. I want to share one other story and this is a powerful documentary that just came out and it's called the first step so keep your eye out for it, the first step. And it chronicles the passage of the First Step Act during the Trump administration. It's the passage

of a bipartisan criminal justice bill. And it's really amazing and fascinating because it shows the bridge building that happened behind the scenes. And some of it very controversial. Van Jones was being reviled by the left for working with the Trump administrations through Jared Kushner and mistrusted by the right for his progressive views. But let me tell you what most riveted me in this.

And it was kind of an ongoing theme for much of it was this bringing together of two dramatically different groups of community activists. Van brought together a group of black people from South L.A. who were fighting heroin addiction and a group of white people from West Virginia fighting opiate addiction. And in the film, you can just see the cultural differences of blue versus red, you know, urban versus rural and more and more. So at first, they're all gathered around in West Virginia for a couple of days, all sequestered. And gradually, you get to see this very honest, real dialogue happening, you know, talking about racism, talking about why they voted as they did, getting to know each other, not always easy.

And in time you see, and this is what got me, you see them showing each other pictures of their dead children, the ones who overdosed. So there they are sharing their pictures. It's a parent's most terrible loss. One man from West Virginia told the group, you know, he said, you know, that he had told his son, you got yourself into this, you get yourself out. And now his son is dead. So he's living with that remorse, with that grief. and you could see the tears of understanding in others, a shared heartbreak. So in this divided world of ours, it's possible for people of great difference to come together, to get to know each other, to honor the differences, and to realize their belonging.

It's possible. And there's something more. you know, it's impossible to be in this violent, divided world and to be oppressed and still choose love. You know, one of the things that I've been reflecting on lot, when I think of the nonviolent movement, when I think of the courage of people of color who live with centuries of traumatic injury and have dedicated themselves to nonviolent activism, that inspires hope. you know, to know

hatred never seizes by hatred but by love alone is healed to really know that. One of the things that had me thinking about this was it's a year after Congressman John Lewis's death and as many know he was active in the civil rights protests in the 60s

and trained in nonviolence and was beaten so badly while he's peacefully protesting that one point he thought he was going to die So the brutality against nonviolent protesters actually helped make the way for Voters Rights Act in 1965 to be passed. And then John Lewis and many others watched this hard one act get gutted in 2013. He saw the resurfacing of undisguised and vicious white supremacy in these last years and still he turned to love and hope. I'm going to read a little bit of John Lewis because I find him so inspiring.

He says, you are a light, you are the light. Never let anyone, any person, any force dampen, dim, or diminish your light. Release the need to hate, the harbor division, and the enticement of revenge. Hold only love, only peace in your heart. Do not get lost in a sea of despair. be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year. It is the struggle of a lifetime. Never ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. So, yes, to two steps forward, one step back, and we need the long view. We need to know its generations. And in looking at our own lives, we need to be patient and present with the persistence of our fears and self-doubts,

and also to know our path to freedom is presence and to know that our hope will be nourished every time we truly connect with what we care about. Remember, without vision, the people perish. It doesn't matter whether we know the outcome. Our only obligation if we love life, we love life, is to hold a vision and take a step. We need a vision of what's possible in our world. We need a vision of people sharing their pain as those in West Virginia did and finding their heart connection. We need to know that kind of compassion between people's possible, that kind of collaborating,

working together is possible. In our personal lives we need vision. We need to remember the qualities of heart and awareness that we want to manifest. Barbara King-Solver writes this. Here's what I've decided. The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope, not admire it from a distance, but live right inside it, under its roof.

What I want is so simple. I almost can't say it. Elementary kindness. I'd like to close by saying that this path of presence of awakening hope is not a solo endeavor. I can't do it by myself. I need to be with others, both share what I'm in pain about, also share where I'm hopeful. And I need to hear that from others.

we're not alone. You can trust that as you're listening right now, there are many, many other beings, countless beings who care, who weep for our world, who deeply want to bridge the separations, who want to end racism, want to end all forms of violence and oppression, and who want to care, desperately want to bring

to our larger body of this earth are our care. those who like you love life. We need to trust there's a basic flow of love and intelligence that flows through all of us. It's easily blocked by fear and doubt, yet as we cultivate presence and cultivate hope, we increasingly get aligned with an away cart. So this is possible for us, for our species. Again, the Buddha, if it were not possible to free the heart from entanglement, I would not teach you to do so. Okay, let's practice a bit. This practice is called cultivating spiritual hope. Take a moment if you'd like to adjust how you're sitting, be comfortable, be alert, let yourself come home into the moment. Just notice what this moment is like.

feelings and sensations in your body, in your heart, and begin listening to your heart, really calling on the most sincere heart space, wondering in this moment, what is my aspiration? What's my aspiration for my own heart and consciousness? And for some, it's helpful to sense if you're at the end of your life looking back, what most matters? what do I want to manifest in this life? Who do I want to be in relating to others? How do I want to be?

And maybe some words come to mind like kindness, being real, being authentic, presence. You might sense how the seeds of whatever comes to mind is already here. So invite it forward right now just to sense, well what would it mean to be living under the roof of what I hope for, to really inhabit it, to be all that I can be. Just in this moment, invoke your awake heart, your high self and let that wisdom and love fill you. Let yourself fully inhabit who you aspire to be. Your awareness already knows this. Just sense how your body and heart and mind feel it. The most you can do is live inside that hope, not admire it from a distance but live right in it under its roof. What I want is so simple, I almost can't say it.

Elementary kindness. It's already here. Live inside it. And as you feel the potential of who you are, just notice what it's like to open to the attitude of hopefulness that this can manifest more and more. That holy hope that in some deep way all shall be well. And you might sense what would be a natural way to dedicate energy towards what you hope for in your own unfolding. What would nourish your evolution? Maybe something you're already involved with, something fresh,

but just sense the energy towards nourishing. This is tapping into the field of possibility, the awake heart. and you can widen the field now in what you're attending to and sense, well, what is your wish for our world? What's your vision? And it might have to do with harmony, peace, love, compassion, justice, and bring to mind wherever you sense the seeds of what you wish for, the witnessing of goodness in different people and groups of people, the acts of kindness, the dedication.

the stories of hope. You might bring to mind the most caring and hopeful person you know, hopeful in a wise, deep way. And just co-mingle with that person. Co-mingle with all of us who hold open the possibility of healing, of freedom. And if there's some way of dedicating your energy that resonates to helping to manifest this vision, of what's possible for our world. Again, something you're already doing that you can feel refreshed in or something new. Bring that to mind. Feeling the heart space that's here. May all beings remember the depth of our longing for full awareness, for love, for aliveness. May we trust the

heart and consciousness that is always already here. May we live from the fullness and depth of who we are from that love, from that awareness. And may our awakening of hope, of inner freedom, serve creating a more just, compassionate world. Namaste, friends. Namaste friends. I bow to your good hearts and I wish you all blessings. Thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.