Tara Brach - The World in Our Heart

Episode Date: April 25, 2012

2012-04-25 - The World in Our Heart - Some contemporary evolutionary theories track our development from survival of the fittest to group selection whereby we have the capacity for cooperation and empathy. This talk explores how our meditation practice of attending and befriending consciously facilitates the unfolding of our full evolutionary potential. The talk includes a guided meditation that helps us widen the circles of belonging to include all beings. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations make a difference!

Some of you might remember that right after the tsunami 2005, there was, you know, this kind of worldwide. It was very contagious, a sense of the grief and the loss. And then millions followed a very particular story about a hippo and a tortoise. And I'm wondering how many of you followed that story, just out of interest here. The millions didn't come from this room. Okay, here's the story. So there was a baby hippo that survived the tsunami and got washed into this coast in Kenya, but lost its mom.

And hippos are very social. And so it became very interesting to the naturalist that it formed this bond with a centuries-old tortoise. And it followed the tortoise everywhere just the way it would its own mother. And there was a really deep bond. And this was a real story. I mean, this really happened. and they would eat together and sleep together and swim together. And originally, you know, early on, the tortoise was bigger than the hippo.

That changed. But they stayed really strong bond there. And I was very captured by it. And I get captured by all of these stories of cross-species bonding. And so there's this inquiry of, so what really is that? What is it that really speaks to us? And my sense is that we love to see love. It's what we most cherish about humans.

And when we see it between species, this almost gives us this sense of how integral it is to life and this possibility of this goodness being more and more a central part of development of the evolution of our species. I mean, if different species can feel that together, it must be something very entree. about this capacity to love. So we have that yearning to feel that there is this basic goodness in us and in the world,

and then we run up against all the conditioning we know about, where we sense the pain of separation and how humans act out of that with greed, with cruelty, with aggression. And so that it kind of gives us that sense of, you know, are we going to make it or not in this universe? And one of the people I follow, it's an evolutionary biologist, Edward O. Wilson has come out with a new book

that he challenges a lot of the contemporary feeling of theory of evolution. And there's some that agree with him, some that don't. He's basically backing Darwin. And what Darwin says that when tribes have a lot of members who are willing to cooperate and sacrifice for the common good, that tribe will be victorious over another tribe. And that individual selection, just the survival of the fittest, does not account for kinship. And it doesn't account for so many species that have that capacity to cooperate in a way that goes beyond their own. personal needs. So what he proposes basically is this and I'll read a little. He says that

species that have developed advanced social lives. It's called euse sociality and includes some bees, some ants, ants was his major area of exploration that brought him fame, includes termites, ourselves, have been staggeringly successful and extremely rare. This is group members across two plus generations that stay together, cooperate, care for the young, divide labor in ways that favor reproduction of some individuals over that and others. So he basically says we're complex because we have this capacity to go beyond our individual selfishness or aggression to contribute to cooperate. And we still have those basic tendencies to get caught in fight, flight in a way that causes enormous destruction.

We have two competing forces in us. And he describes the kind of dilemma between good and evil. Evil or sin means missing the mark, actually, in its original definition. But he describes that as kind of our multi-level selection that we have operating in us this primitive brain that's going for fight-flight, and then what's developed, the frontal cortex in the social brain that has this capacity for empathy and compassion for attunement to care. So they're finding more and more about this wiring for empathy. It's one of the big areas of research and it's very hope-giving and one of the discoveries is it's not just

primates. I've talked a few months ago about a research experiment with rats where they found that one rat would free another rat that was in a very confined cage if it could and save it treats which is you know that says something so rats have this capacity so what it means to me is that there's a a path of evolutionary development that's hope-giving that we have this capacity not just to be caught in fight-flight but also in what is sometimes been described as attend and be friend. Attend and be friend. And yet we're not done with the evolutionary unfolding because we still get regularly dragged into not only competition but painful aggression. So one of the descriptions of this

enlarged belonging is that it's tribal, that we have the capacity to be in a tribe and serve our tribe. But then the old tendency of fight-flight has a lot of influence because the tribes become narrow affiliations. So we've widened to be not just an individual. We're tribe, but it's my tribe is better than your tribe, right? So one of the you know one of the very dramatic

ways that have drawn attention is through certain movies that are out and one of them is called bully and I'm wondering how many of you have seen bully can I see by hands? Just a few so bully is

it's having a big impact on a lot of people it shows a lot of of very specific cases of bullying in a way that's personal and dramatic and heartbreaking. You know, it shows one young man, Rafael, gay boy from Idaho, 14 years old, hung himself because of incessant bullying, and it goes on and on. So there's a lot of parents and educators and all across the spectrum that are saying, okay, this is huge and it's pervasive.

I mean there's a huge number of people and there's probably many in this room that know what it's like from being younger and some who might continue to know it in different ways so children and what's happening with bullying is just a mirror for adults in our society I mean what we find in our societies that just as adults war politically

and against other countries and against different races so children do the same and in our culture there's so much conditioning I mean we know it personally to feel like an outsider to feel like well there's the in-group but I'm kind of standing on the on the outer edges or there's so much condition to feel inferior or superior there's so much conditioning to feel judged and to have others be unreal to us different from me so this brings us back to this question about this the evolution of consciousness.

So here's what we've evolved to so far. We are no longer just individual selection. We're tribal, but we still are at war with other tribes, and we still think of others as different from ourselves. Not my type. We still attack and try to dominate and oppress minorities. So what happens is we say, well, how can this evolve for us? And what's the ideal?

And I think if we felt into our hearts, there's something that's not that far from our consciousness that we all are hoping for, which has to do with truly feeling belonging to all of life. Like, imagine the peace and ease in your nervous system if you truly felt a sense of our togetherness, that this web of life belonging to it the sense if you look in your life

of well what were your happiest moments when are they what's going on when you're really feeling happy or free and if you investigate those are the moments that there's not a narrow belonging there's a very inclusive sense of heart a heart that includes others

that's what real happening is. So it's not abstract. We know we've had moments where there's that the potential of our evolution, where there's that belonging. And yet we get caught. Somi Satchananda was asked, this is a Hindu yogi, what's the difference between illness and wellness? And he wrote down the words on a blackboard and he circled the eye in illness and the we in wellness. And he said, that's the difference. So this is what we're going to continue to look at tonight. It really has to do with the evolution of consciousness

and how our conditioning and traps us to feel separate, you know, either as an individual or as a tribe. And how we can enlarge that and experience our relatedness, how we can actually contribute to the evolution of consciousness with our practices to feel that those widening circles of belonging. So let's take a look first. We know that when we're caught in fight-flight, that's when all our primitive limbic system apparatus

is highly activated. And when it's dominating, there's no integration between the limbic system and the higher centers of our brain. The image I really like, this is Dan Siegel, offers this, is to think of your brain as a hand. And this is the brain stem, the wrist, down. This thumb is the limbic system and then it's enfolded inside the frontal cortex. So this is, we're going around with a brain like this, but what happens when the limbic system is activated and we don't have an integrated mind when we're really reactive and stress, we flip our lid, okay?

Right? So we have no access to this and we're basically being run by our limbic system and those are the times that we do. do things we regret. You know, one friend here said, you know, today I was just caught up, you know, very self-centered day. Well, self-centered comes out of, so there's some limbic system activity, some flight, fight, flight, some insecurity, and kind of losing contact with this mindfulness and with this perspective, humor, kind of understanding of bigger context. We lose context.

We flip our lid. So when does that happen? And how come it happens more for some than others? Well, we know that there's genetic propensities where stress is much more intolerable, much more quickly go like that, much more depression and anxiety, early childhood wounding, traumas in our life, a culture that's really amped with a lot of aggression, a lot of greed. Those are when the activation's high.

So how do we sue that? people go around soothing this because this is very uncomfortable, it's very agitating. Well, unfortunately, when we're stressed and we're in a kind of high reactive limbic system playing it out, our ways of soothing ourselves are temporary fixes that actually deepen our wiring to stay disconnected from the frontal cortex.

So you might think of it, how do you act when you're stressed? What do you do? How are you thinking? What are you feeling? Now, for most of us, I can speak for myself. When I'm stressed, I speed up. I make a lot more mistakes. And I even talk to myself about it.

I tell myself, if you're speeding up like this, you're going to make more mistakes. And I go ahead and make the mistakes, and I'm so angry and annoyed, I speed up even more, and it gets more grim and determined. And is that? Okay, you got that one. All right.

So we speed up, and we disconnect from our body. I mean, when I am stressed, It's not like I'm sitting here opening and feeling the openness deep into the torso and, you know, feeling the softening and the tingling in my hands. That's just another universe, right? Okay. So we know that. We disconnect from our body.

With others, when I'm stressed, I am not attuned. I am not wondering, well, what's life like for this person? That's not what's going on. I'm very, very self-centered when I'm stressed. I just want to figure things out and take care of the problem and get out of the uncomfortability. For most of us, when we're stressed, that fight-flight comes on and we get more blaming. Sometimes we attack ourselves, sometimes we attack others. But that happens.

We get more defensive. We're just not out there spreading love and light, you know? It's not happening. So there's more illness than wellness. Now, on a societal level, what happens when there's stress, when societies flip their lids and just live in that dissociated place, the reactivity is expressed in narrow affiliations of us against them, and it gets very mean-spirited and often turns into violence. That's how societies deal with stress. They can't handle it. They can't tolerate it.

There's not healthy ways of soothing. they flip their lid, they attack. Other way they deal with addiction. So with the narrow affiliation, it's something really important to look at because clearly some affiliations are important developmentally, give us some safety and security and sense of place, but if we don't have a way of growing beyond them, we have an arrested development.

So you start, looking and sense, how are we relating to our political views, our social group, or our friends, or our race, or, you know, any of our affiliations? And what we find is that to the degree that there's fear, it can be very narrow and we're the chosen ones and something's wrong with others. Fear makes us need to inflate and be superior. So you see what fundamentalism comes from. It doesn't matter whether it's religious or political. There's a fear that fear drives a narrowed affiliation that needs to inflate itself and make others wrong, very black and white. Does this all make sense? You with me? Okay. Now, some religions, the way it's, it was interesting

to me, Wilson puts it, he says religions are a mechanism for strengthening affiliation with tribe. And again, developmentally, that can have some positive features. You can have a coherent system of belief and behavior that is very healthy in some ways. And often, if there's fear, there's intolerance, and it's not so healthy. But either way, it becomes important just to watch ourselves and see, you know, what kind of affiliation do I have and what am I looking for in it? and how does it give me my sense of identity and does it serve or does it not?

One story, hallelujah, a preacher said anyone with special needs who wants to be prayed over please come forward to the front by the altar. With that, Leroy got in line and when it was his turn the preacher asked Leroy, what do you want me to pray about for you? Leroy replied, preacher, I need you to pray for help with my hearing.

preacher put one finger of one hand in Leroy's ear, placed the other in top of Leroy's head, and then prayed and prayed and prayed. He prayed a blue streak for Leroy, and the whole congregation joined him with great enthusiasm. After a few minutes, the preacher removed his hand, stood back and asked, Leroy, how is your hearing now? Leroy answered, I don't know. It's not until next week. So we're talking about tribalism, and, you know,

I think that praying for each other is incredible. To me, it's one of the beautiful, beautiful products of feeling an affiliation. Of course, we want to not have signs that say, you know, praying for our country, we want to pray for all beings everywhere. But still, it's powerful. But it's important to know that this affiliation, this growth, this, our evolutionary capacity to affiliate, really does have a, a very subtle covert seductiveness where we begin to, we sense that in some way we're trying to find our security like,

oh, I've got my Buddhist Sanga. You know, I'm a Buddhist. Oh, I'm part of a yoga community. I mean, these are things, you know, I think Buddhism is great. I think yoga's great. But I am a such and such. We're more than any such and such. So we look and sense, you know, oh, I'm a faithful. faculty member at the school or I'm a 12-steper and sense what's the healthy ways our affiliation serves and how does it in some way imbue us with a bit of sense of a specialness right a little importance or something like that so the point in here is that we need practices that help us to affiliate in healthy ways and grow out of any narrowness so that our hearts are truly inclusive

That's how we serve evolution. So I'd like to do is take a closer look at how in our daily life we have certain habit patterns that keep us caught in what we might call the more primitive brain in fight-flight that feed narrow affiliations. And I'm going to name three of them that I mentioned a bit before and just look a little more at them because my sense is different. if we all just paid attention to these three, we'd get a lot of mileage out of it.

And the first is speed. Speed serves dissociation, and speed serves kind of energizing and activating fight-flight. And our culture has sped up. You know, in agricultural societies, the rhythm of the years was really, according to nature and is where the world. they exist. But in contemporary life, it's sped up to an unprecedented rate. And it's spurred

on by an economic system that has basic assumption, which is the necessity of growth, which means you have to accomplish more in a year, this year than you did last year for the economy to keep growing. So there's this pressure to always produce and accomplish more when the assumption is, and this is a lot of, you know, this is not just a conservative position. This is what most politicians are saying they are going to get for us is economic growth. Do we really want to keep on being hooked to having to grow economically? Because it keeps us speeding up. It keeps a real pressure on us.

There is a managing partner of one of the world's leading private equity firms. And he said this. He says a lot of public companies, we speak to, we spend too much time on regulation issues, on social responsibility, corporate governance. and they forget their prime purpose, which is to grow the company as rapidly as possible. So what's the core experience when that's the assumption underlying our entire economy? What happens?

There's a sense we live with that there's not enough time. Have you noticed that how much of our stress comes from? There's not enough time. And in that is, I won't get enough done and I will fail and I'll be kicked out. I won't be loved and respected. We live with that, a lot of us, in our nervous system. So that core experience reconfirms this trance of separation. I'm in danger, I need to do something, fight, flight,

and it blocks us from fulfilling our evolutionary capacity, as long as we're hooked on speed. Okay, does that one make sense? I want to make sure we're all together here. Okay. Now the second one that I want to mention is the trance of thinking

being lost in thought but maybe before I do there was one example of this speed one that I thought I'd mentioned many of you know about the Good Samaritan story, this study that happened at Princeton I just want to remind us of it that seminarians were given this practice sermon

and half were assigned the story of the Good Samaritan and the other half a random Bible story and then the Samarians were supposed to go to another building to give a sermon and be evaluated on it, right? So that's the setup of the study. Now, on their way to the building, they pass a person in a doorway who's moaning in distress. So what happens? Okay? It's really interesting.

I mean, here's seminarians, and they're about to give a talk. It's like me, I'm about to give a talk on loving kindness, and I kick somebody on the way. You know, it's like what, so here's what they did. They didn't kick anybody. but the question was would they stop to help? And that was determined by how much time they thought they had before they had to give their sermon. If they believed they would be late,

they didn't stop to help, even though they were about to preach about being a good Samaritan. Isn't that amazing? The power of not enough time. Anyway, I wanted to reshare that because that one was kind of, that's a stunner when I really think about it because it feels so true to me. I'm so much less available

when I'm living in that idea of not enough time. Okay, so the second one now, I promised I'd go on to it. Trance of thinking. We spend most of our moments in a trance of thinking, and that's not to say

that there's not absolute necessity to think. Most of us have work that requires thinking, and thinking is natural and thinking is necessary for surviving and thriving and we are lost in thought way more than is helpful or necessary for surviving and thriving.

In fact, it keeps us from living at times. Last week, Sokney Rimposhay was here and he uses the word lung, which is this kind of energy that is moving through our body and our subtle body. And he describes how lung gets kind of caught in our head. And really what we need to do

is keep bringing our energy down so we're more in the Don Tian, which is the navel, it's known in the Qigong world, this energy down here. Well, what happens when we're caught in the trance of thinking is our energy is up in our head and we have dissociated from our body, from our subtle body, from that which gives us sensitivity to the world. We're dissociated. The more we're lost in obsessive thinking or addicted to thought, the more dissociated we are. The outcome of that is that when we separate from our inner life, we lose the capacity for presence and for empathy. So if you're

caught in thinking and you hear something, a disaster that's happened in the world, you'll go, oh, that is awful. You know, you'll hear even maybe a particular story about that disaster, somebody that really, you know, that lost everybody or whatever. But your heart, you will not be enough awake in your heart. Your body will not be there for there to be this, this kind of visceral sense of caring. It's abstract. That's what happens when we're dissociated. The other thing is when we're living in a virtual reality,

we have thoughts, we don't really pay attention to other people. We live in our projections of who they are. Does that make sense? We're thinking about it, so we're not actually in the moment picking up what's going on. We're not really listening. my favorite example of this some of you might remember but I'll share it because it's good is about a century or two ago the pope decided that all the Jews had to leave Rome naturally there was a big uproar from the Jewish community so the Pope made a deal

he would have a religious debate with a member of the Jewish community and if the Jew won the Jews could stay if the Pope won the Jews would leave because this tribalism and dominance The Jews realized they had no choice. So they picked a middle-aged man named Moisha to represent them, and Moisha asked for one addition to the debate. To make it more interesting, neither side would be allowed to talk. The Pope agreed. The day of the great debate came.

Moisha and the Pope sat opposite each other for a full minute before the Pope raised his hand and showed three fingers. Moisha looked back at him and raised one finger. The Pope waved his fingers in a circle around his head, and Moisha pointed to the ground. where he sat. The Pope pulled out a glass of water and a wafer. Moisha pulled out an apple. The Pope stood up. He said, I give up. This man is too good. The Jews can stay. An hour later, the Cardinals were around the Pope asking him what had happened. He said,

well, first I held up three fingers to represent the Trinity, and he responded by holding up one finger to remind me there was still one God, took common to both our religions. Then I waved my finger around to show him that God was all around us and he responded by pointing to the ground to say God was right here with us. I pulled out the wine and wafer to show that God absolves us from our sins. He pulled out an apple to remind me of original sin. He had an answer for everything. What could I do? Okay, meanwhile, the Jewish community, the same thing is going on. People were crowded around Moisha saying, you know, what happened? And Moishe said, well, first he said to me that the Jews had three days to get out of here. I told him that not one of us was leaving. Then he told me that this whole

city would be cleared of Jews and I let him know we were staying right here. Yes, you assess the crowd. Well, I don't know, said Morsha. He took out his lunch and I took out mine. So this is, again, it's fun, but the point is if we live in our thoughts and our ideas, we're disconnected from the actuality of what's here. We're not paying attention. I'll go a long way to prove a point, won't I? So again, dissociation, living in the trance of thinking, what it does is it reconfirms our separateness.

This is all about, you know, are we locked in that limbic system, that reptilian brain that feels separate and caught and fight and flight? It blocks us from fulfilling our evolutionary potential, which is to pay attention in a way, that we really sense our belonging. That's part two.

The third thing to mention, okay, so we speed around, we live in our thoughts, disconnect from our body. The third is judgment. This is the third way we block our evolutionary potential. Now, it's important to have

discrimination. Judgment and discrimination are different. We have to discriminate and say, this person is a threat, dangerous, be careful. Or, you know, we have to discriminate to say, you know, this technique will make me money or feed me. You know, we have to have ways of knowing what's going to do what, discriminating wisdom. But if we're very caught in fear, the discriminating mind turns into averse of judgment.

And what we do is we lock into, I'm bad and you're bad. it's usually one or the other at a time so when this aversive judge becomes rooted in the psyche it's used to secure our narrow affiliation so judgment means we are the best group

they're bad they'll never get into heaven you know that's what happens judgment so again it affirms the trance of separation it opposes our evolutionary potential so these are the three things

things I just wanted to mention this is if we watch our day what keeps us small okay so what is it that will counter this stress reaction of speeding up and dissociating and judging what is it what what helps us to connect with our body and with an accepting heart what helps us meditation Thank you. My plant here. Yeah. Meditative strategies that bring us to presence that open our heart.

So let's look at how it works. This is something we, I hope, most every time we're together we explore, which is the first step. If we want to break the chain reaction that keeps us locked in kind of the limbic system, we have to pause. And that's the beginning. There has to be enough mindfulness to know, oh, I'm caught.

Stop. Okay? The pause gives us enough space that we can then bring in a different kind of attentiveness if we can pause. So once we pause, you know, we stop,

we come back into our senses, then we bring what are called the two wings of attention. And one wing is we attend. we noticed, okay, so what's actually happening here? When a person is saying this to me, what is it that they're really trying to communicate? Or when I'm feeling angry, what's really going on behind the anger?

Is it hurt? What's there? So that's a 10. We're investigating this curiosity. We're paying attention to what is actually true. The other wing of attention is a quality of kindness, relating with kindness to whatever's there. A simple way to think of it is attend and befriend. The antidote to fight-flight is attend and be friend.

I think it's really kind of a beautiful way to think of it, that we can sense our evolutionary shift, that fight-flight is necessary. There's discriminating wisdom. We sometimes fight-flight sometimes is what we have to do. But if we're awake, it's very, contained and we can more and more develop this capacity to attend and befriend and truly resolve what seemed to be the differences.

Okay, so we're going to look at attend and befriend and just to say a bit that there's been a lot of research recently. It started in UCLA about a decade ago that they discovered that I think it was a female group of researchers that all the stress research had been done on males. So everything they were finding was, oh, when you get stressed, you go into fight-flate. But what they found was actually women have a strategy of Tandin the friend, which does a lot to soothe the, you know, surge of cortisol and all the other facets of the stress reaction. And then just, it's like three days ago, there was an article in the New York Times on the power of women friends. and not just humans in other species too,

that the friendship and the grooming and the caring and tending and befriending between two women reduces the stress level. Now, what seems to have happened through evolution is that tandem befriended response builds on the brain's attachment caring system. And so at first emerged in women, who are the initial caregivers with their offspring,

but then it generalized to men. In other words, empathy started with women, but men have it now too. And what that says is that even though fight-flight is the predominant reaction around the globe when we're caught in stress, that same evolution as possible, that just the way women are more and more using tend and befriend,

that can generalize in the brain too. And I want to stop at this point in case there's any men that are sitting here thinking, so I'm playing catch-up and the less evolved sex and so on. But it might be true. But no,

what happens is that what's generally in the globe, there are definitely people that are waking up and practicing in ways to evolve their own brains and it's happening all over. And tendem of friend doesn't mean, you know, goodbye, football and beer and hello garden parties in herbal tea. I mean, it doesn't necessarily translate to that. We see it all the time that it's beautifully modeled in both genders.

And then what we look at is, and I'm going to describe, how do we start practicing and paying attention to have it become even more generalized and even more the prominent way of beings on this planet. And the practices, I think, are very familiar to you. They begin with mindfulness, and they begin with mindfulness of what's happening within us, because if we can be aware and sensitive to our own body that wakes up the parts of the brain,

the social brain that actually allows us to perceive what's going on in other bodies. So these practices start with pain, attention to our own life. They start with pausing and asking, and you can just do it right now, just to say, so what is happening inside me right now? And can I be with this? And in the moment that you say, can I be with this, if there's a quality of gentleness and kindness, then the tend and befriend practice, this mindfulness practice inwardly, will begin to weigh wake up the very part of the brain that's absolutely essential for having compassion and empathy for others.

Then we very intentionally begin to extend it. And there's a lot of studies now in the power of deliberate practice, that any mastery takes deliberate practice, that we commit ourselves to paying attention to each other. So attend and be friend. We bring up a loved one. You can do it either in meditation or in person. Now in person, if you're just starting, we get so thrilled. into our normal trance of personality it's a little hard to pay attention so you practice it with meditation first but attend and befriend with a loved one is

imagining you know bringing that person to mind sensing them right here and really paying attention something what's life like for this person if you were looking through those eyes what would life appear like what feelings are going on what's difficult what's joyful and befriend is that quality natural responsiveness of heart that wishes the best for another person. Attend and befriend when it's full naturally leads to action. It's the ground for action of serving. For us to serve in a way that actually brings healing,

it comes from the biology of tend and befriend. So that's how it works with loved ones. What about difficult people? What about when we're bringing to mind a person that really brings up a sense of being dissed or being insulted or in some way not understood? Well, we begin by bringing them to mind and bringing Tand and Befriend to the place within us that's hurting. And once we've taken the time to do that, we've activated the parts of the brain, the biochemistry, the consciousness that then includes. then we look to say, oh, how might this person be suffering? What about a person that we are in the habit of ignoring?

They're called neutral people in the Buddhist teachings of the meta meditation or loving kindness. What about somebody who's you ignore because they're not, they don't either, there's nothing that you want from them, there's nothing that you fear from them. They're kind of seem irrelevant because that's what we do when we're caught up in stress. We completely discount the people that are not in some way going to, give us something are in some way going to threaten us. What about the neutral people? One of the practices I found really helpful, I did this for quite a while, was to bring to mind people that I knew in passing, but I really had very little activity with, and I would

mentally recite, you are my friend. Just those words, you are my friend. And then I deepened my attention and so what what is life like for this person now this could be somebody in the post office or you know somebody that was the you know a cousin of somebody that was helping with the carpool and my son was young or you know it could be just anybody that I happened to run into a lot but I didn't know and this bond would create just because I deepened my attention paying attention is the most pure form of love. This is about paying attention, not being lost in the trance of thought,

not being too busy, not getting caught in judgments, but paying attention. Sometimes because we are so speedy, what we need to do when we're with each other, and it's a beautiful kind of, if you just say to yourself, I have all the time in the world to listen to my friend.

You might on some level say, yeah, but that's not true, but if you set that frame, you arrive in a very boundless sense of the present. I have all the time in the world to listen to my friend. Something enlarges. Your friend is part of your heart. So we're going to practice this in a little bit, but I want to bring up the digital world

because a lot of our relationships are very affected by how we are online. And I've been really interested in that. Like, you know, you know what it's like when you're a little mift and you shoot off an email and then you know it has repercussions in the field, you know what that's like. So one practice is to pause and to come into your body and be intimate with your own experience before you send off that email and wait until you can see through the other person's eyes. Or if you're writing an email and it's sensitive in some

way, write it and then read it as if you're the one receiving it. Now these sound like, you know, they could be written in a self-help book, but you know, our communication online has an effect. And the other person is a real being and it's a place to deepen attention because we do it so much. If they're unreal during our email communication, that habit continues. That's the way we're holding our world. So roll reverse. It's Pema Chodin writes this. She says, we don't set out to save the world. We set out to wonder how other people are doing and to reflect on how our actions affect other people's hearts. So the gift of attend and befriend is that it enlarges us. So we really become more inclusive. And the more inclusive you are, the more beings that you include in your heart, the more you're living from the truth of who you are. We are at home in our wholeness when we include others. To the degree that we can't accept, that we can't forgive, that we have judgments that we blame,

we're just not occupying the fullness of who we are and they're suffering. Many of you have heard of, I've mentioned this a few times, this book, Tattoos on the Heart. And I think of it as a beautiful example of what it means to widen the circles, this commitment to evolving our humanity. And this is Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest to work with Latino gang members and most violent part of L.A. And he had a way of reaching out and connecting. He is alive now, has a very inclusive heart and helps others to feel that belonging. So his way of making those connections was whenever somebody would get shot or beden up, he'd visit them in the hospital.

and he had a real good ear for the neighborhood slang. He really knew how to listen, kind of. I was able to talk and got to know them. They called him G for Gregory. Everybody would call him G. He'd say they'll be running from the police and they'll still cross themselves when they pass a church.

He was Latino guys. He has a great way to describe everybody. And he described one time when he came upon a brawl the largest he'd ever seen, like 50 or 60 men with baseball bats blocking four lanes of traffic in L.A. He ran into the middle of the mob bellowing, put down the motherfucking bats.

The men stood down, shocked. It was like the parting of the Red Sea. And Boyle, he recalled this chuckling. He said, they said, gee, you cursed. So here's this Jesuit priest in the middle of 50 or 60 violent men. He's telling him to put down the motherfucking bats and they all stop because this priest cursed. I thought that was so great.

So he, his, his mission, really, was inclusiveness and is inclusiveness. It's like, how do you take people that have been excluded and marginalized who exclude themselves, who put themselves down, and have them become more whole and more part of our world community? And his way of widening the circles has been to find work for these Latino boys that they could feel a sense of their worth. And so he describes trying to help one kid get some work, and he goes to, he's in a conversation,

and the kid says, I want to be a mechanic. I don't know nothing about cars, really, but I'd like to learn. So this is what Gregory writes. He says, my mechanic, Dennis on Brooklyn Avenue, was something of a legend in the barrio. Dennis could fix any car. A tall, polth and Japanese-American is near 60s. Dennis was a chain smoker.

He was not a man He was not a man of few words He was a man of no damn words at all He just smoked You'd bring your car in He'd have dangling cigarette From his lips Give him the keys

When they return the next day He'd give you his car purring as it should No words were exchanged So I'd go up to Dennis to plead my case Because he wants him to take on this boy Right Look Dennis I say Sitting in his cramped office

Truly a smoked fell room hire this kid Anthony. True enough, he doesn't know anything about cars. He's sure he's eager, and I think he could learn stuff. Dennis just stares at me, nodding slightly. I redouble my efforts. I tell Dennis that this won't just be one job for one homie, but will create a ripple effect of peace in the entire neighborhood.

Long drags of silence in a stony stare. I get out my shovel on my top hat and cane. Noble peace prize will alter the course of history. We'll change the world as we know it. Nothing. Dennis just fills his lungs with smoke as I fill the air with earnest please. Once every trace of smoke is let out, he looks at me, and this is the only thing he says that day. I will teach him everything I know.

And so Anthony becomes a mechanic. He would give me periodic updates. I learned how to do a lube job today. I fixed a carburetor all by myself. He hands me a photograph one day. There is Anthony with a broad smile, face smudged with axle grease, workshirt with Anthony embroidered proudly on his chest. No question. To look at this face is to know that its owner is a transformed man. But standing next to him in the picture with an arm around Anthony and a cigarette

hanging out of his mouth is Dennis, an equally changed human being. And all because Dennis, one day, he pulled down the walls and let the world in, stepped out of a cramp world, his separateness. there was kinship. So this tend and befriend widens into actively reaching out. So tonight really what we've been exploring is that we're part of an evolutionary

unfolding. We're part of it. And as we awaken and notice that, it's possible to consciously facilitate it. We can practice. We can practice waking up the parts of our brain

that bring more peace and love to the planet. So I want to end with a meditation and just say that you know I've mentioned great disaster, the tsunami you know there's a nuclear disaster and these bring people together we have to get hit over the head sometimes

but it wakes up our social brain in a certain way we get it you know the nuclear disaster that brought the Japanese together and there was so much in that country so many reports of how they supported each other and the more recent And then Haiti, and we sensed how the world, you know, really just for a short time, we forget so quickly we care together, right? So in order for it to take root, it has to be in our daily life.

We have these surges where we really see possibility, a really beautiful shining human hearts reaching out beyond their tribe. But if it's not part of our daily practice, and it's up to us, I mean, I'm talking about those. those of us that are sitting here or watching or listening, it's up to us to evolve our consciousness in a way that serves the consciousness everywhere. So we'll just practice a little, and you might close your eyes and let yourself arrive so that you're bringing the attending

and befriending to the life that's right here. Just take a few breaths and feel yourself here. Just feel what your body feels like and your heart. Notice what happens if you just have the intention to regard your life right this moment with tenderness, with kindness. Just notice what happens. We'll practice in a simple way just to bring to mind one person that you love and see him or her close up so that you can feel the presence of this person right here. These are the moments of attending and befriending, a deepening your attention in a way that you sense.

Well, what's it like for this person? this life. What's difficult? Where is this person finding happiness? Just sense even a little bit of attention. You can feel the visceral connection. Sense what you wish for this person. You might pick one person who we call the neutral person, somebody that you encounter somewhat regularly but haven't paid much attention to. What's life like for this person? when you create a space and you deepen your attention. You don't have to have words, just a felt sense of this person. Imagine this person happy.

I bring to mind a difficult person and not somebody that's really difficult, just a little irritating for now. Let that person be right here. And since whatever's going on in your body and your heart, do you first attend and befriend that? And sense that this person, there's room in your heart. but in some way you can then notice the vulnerability, the challenge that this person's living with,

feel your wish for this person, for their well-being. Then just sense the quality of your heart itself, that kind of openness and tenderness, that you feel the aliveness that's here. Feel the aliveness that's really part of the whole web of life. Sense what it means to realize your heart, includes all life. Just try that out. All those that are here in this room, all those in other continents, the creatures that are struggling for survival, the beings, the humans, the men, the women, the children in Afghanistan,

in Sudan, the continuing crisis in Haiti. So just a sense that it's all in your heart. This world's in your heart. This is the widening of a being that lets us inhabit our wholeness. We are the world. We are the children. We are the ones who make a brighter day. So let's start giving. Namaste. 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 Insleeves. meditation community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.