Tara Brach - Three Blessings in Spiritual Life – Part 1: Forgiveness

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

This 3-part series explores three capacities we all have, that when cultivated, bring spiritual awakening and serve the healing of our world. Drawing on an ancient teaching story from India, we explore together the power of a forgiving heart, the inner fire that expresses as courage and dedication, and the inquiry of "who am I" that reveals our deepest nature.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Greetings, friends. These weeks, I'm taking off some time to be with family, including two young granddaughters. So I'm really excited about that. Lots of fun, real blessings in that. And so during this time, I've chosen a three-week series that I like a lot. It's from the archives. And it's called Three Blessings in Spiritual Life. And it explores the basic facets of our awareness, of our awakening awareness that really help us find freedom and happiness in life. And so the first of these three is on cultivating a forgiving heart.

and I base these talks on a really wonderful teaching story that always uplifts me and I hope it does the same for you. Okay, enjoy. Namaste and welcome. In this class and then two classes to follow, we're going to be exploring what you might consider as the intrinsic capacities we have that really allow for spiritual awakening. and also for the healing of our earth. And I have organized these three talks around one of my favorite tales from the Upanishads, and I periodically revisit it, and I find that each time I do,

I get new layers of appreciation for it. So we'll be exploring an ancient teaching story from India, and I'll read you a bit of the story, and then we'll look at these three capacities together. The lead character is Natchikata. And Natchikata is the son of a rich merchant who also happens to be quite miserly. And his father was making donations to receive a gift from the gods. And his son noticed that the cows he was donating were the lame ones.

And so that his father was really being sneaky. And he kind of challenged him publicly. And the father, in his sense of shame, basically said, I give you to Lord Yama and Yama is death. So it's like basically he said go to hell. Which Nachi Kata took rather concretely because what he did was he went off into the dense forest searching for death. And he sat and waited for death to appear when he found his spot.

And he sat through pain and exhaustion and hunger and so on. And in that presence, he arrived in what's called the domain of Lord Yama. And he was greeted by death's three assistants who were pestilence, famine, and war. And they told him that death was out. He was collecting rent. So he waited patiently for three days. And when Yama arrived and he realized the boy's dedication, his sincerity, he offered him any three wishes that he wanted. He offered to give him three boons for his spiritual journey.

So, Nachie Keita's first wish was peace with his father, that all was forgiven and really the capacity of a forgiving heart because he knew that he couldn't be free if he was pushing his father himself or anyone out of his heart. So that was the first wish. He was granted that wish in his heart opened. He did that releasing and he had an experience of freedom there. The second wish was called Inner Fire, what he wished for. Inner Fire is that energy within us that's very pure and very sincere that is completely in touch with what most matters. It's that energy that knows what we long for and then carries us towards it. And it gives us that courage to go for it. And that was granted also.

He said for his third wish that he wanted to realize the truth of what is beyond death, the mystery of that which is timeless, which is immortal. Now when he said that, Lord Yama was surprised, he said, you know, you can have anything, beautiful maidens and chariots with the fastest horses and palaces and all fathomable riches. Why would you want this? But Natchikato wasn't easily derailed. You know, he basically responded, won't these all these? eventually returned to your kingdom. Lord of death agreed, and he gave him a final gift,

and it was a mirror. He said that he couldn't give him directly the wisdom, but it would arise as he looked into his own heart and mind and asked the most fundamental question, which is, who am I? So as the story goes, Nachicata gazed into the mirror and entered into this inquiry, and in time all delusion fell away, and he discovered the radiance and the purity, really the loving awareness that's at the source of all beings, his own and all beings. He discovered that unitive loving presence that is our source and he was free. So that's the general outlines. We're going to go more into the story at different times, but that's the outline of the Natchikata story. And it's an interesting question for all of us, in the face of reality that this life comes

and goes, that it's fleeting, what would you ask for? What are the capacities or strengths that you would ask for? What would we ask for as a collective? What would we wish were the qualities we had as a collective in the face of a society or a world that has deep challenges. What will we wish for our culture? So these are the questions we're looking at. So Nachi Kata asks for these three gifts of forgiving,

letting go of the armoring of his heart, of tapping into that inner fire, of knowing what really mattered, and of the realization of timeless awareness, of really who we are. And what we're going to do is look at each of those gifts and we're going to take them one by one. This first class we're going to really look at forgiveness. And how do we let go of that armoring that ends up stopping us from loving freely?

So that'll be the first one. And what we'll explore really, and this is for each of the gift, whatever we practice regularly grows stronger. So if we're practicing blame and judgment, it just keeps on deepening the grooves. So each of these is a training. How do we pay attention in a way that really shifts our habits and shifts our experience day to day? The kind of shift we're really looking at is the one of the one that Natchikato experience is the shift from a preoccupation as a separate egoic self,

where we go around in this kind of bubble most of the time, and most of our thoughts are about, you know, how can I be more comfortable, how can I get through this next challenge, how can I get more done, you know, I, I, I won't ask for hand-raised of how many of you find that's what goes on for you. But self-centered, it's a shift from that egoic state, which actually isn't very pleasant, to a quality of presence that feels a sense of belonging, of interconnectedness with this natural world and with all beings,

and that can then act on behalf of all of life. So, the beginning of Nachi Kejah's journey is one of disillusion, and this is really how life goes, that we are navigating through, and things fall apart, things don't cooperate. Most basically, it's the nature of life that what we want to hold on to we can't. And we get disillusioned. We start realizing that these bodies are going on us and these memories are going on us. And the people around us die or leave or don't behave or whatever they do, but things don't work.

So there's disillusionment and very often it's deep, deep suffering of betrayal of feeling deserted or rejected, real deep loss. And that's what happened with Nachikata, a real severing of belonging with his father. And in the Nachi Keta's story, some of the parts I didn't tell you is he had also lost some friends that had died when they were young, so he was really facing mortality. So here we are and we're moving through our lives and we get disillusioned. Something happens. A relationship falls apart or we lose somebody that's dear. Or we lose the job that we had really been, that we loved or something happens.

We generally respond in one of two different ways. And one way we respond is part of our kind of fight-flight-free strategy. from kind of the more primitive part of our brain and that's the part that gets reactive and blames others or blames ourselves, completely withdraws, goes into battle mode, whatever it is, but we get hooked in that way, we get compulsive, we get obsessive. And what that does, especially because a primary way that we react is to blame, is to judge. It reinforces the identity of victim, which is when we talk about ego identity is one of the prime ones that we get caught in.

That's one way that we can go. The other way that we can respond is to evolve. It's like when we hit stress we either start spinning an old reactivity or we evolve, we adapt, we expand, we call on a deeper kind of resourcefulness that has to do with love and mindfulness and compassion. In some ways, if you think of evolutionary psychology, which I think is really useful, it's really the shift from fight-flight freeze,

which keeps reaffirming the ego to attend and befriend, which is really what training and meditation does, which enlarges our sense of who we are. So for any of us, and I think it's so interesting to periodically scan through our lives, and noticed the seasons of our life when we really had those growth spurts where

there were, we ended up with a lot of insights or something cracked open our heart and we really sensed another dimension of our being. For a lot of us, that happens exactly following or during those periods of disillusionment and loss. How many of you have noticed that? hard times. Can I see by hands? I'm just curious. Yeah, okay. So stuff comes our way. If we adapt, and I'll speak to that in a moment, there's change. Now, Mother Teresa writes this. She says, I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me

so much. So we get stuff and it feels like too much. And that's our big fear, by the way, that around the corner something's going to be too much and that's what we're all tensing against. It comes and usually when things don't go our way, whether it's small things or big things, the very first reaction is from the primitive brain, the limbic system, fight, flight, freeze. It's just, it's faster than the more recently evolved part of the brain, the frontal cortex. It just happens, it kicks in and there's some lag time. And then gradually we start getting that our reaction is causing suffering. It's causing suffering that we're blaming. It's causing suffering that we're

contracting and being defensive. And when we start noticing that, there's a kind of wisdom that guides us to begin to adapt and get larger. It's possible that that lag time can be days or hours or decades. You know, for some of us we go through the past patterns for quite a long time before we say, wait a minute, something's not working. It's possible through this training we're doing together of mindfulness and compassion not to lose decades. The training speeds it up in the sense of the lag time gets shorter. Does that make sense that we start noticing quicker?

So, forgiving, the training and forgiven is really training in letting go of our stories of blame. Forgive me and so let go of the armoring that we're collecting around our hearts, that's stories of blame and resentment. And it's towards ourselves and others. Now a lot of people I know have trouble with the word forgive. So as we reflect together, I invite you to replace it with compassion. If you don't want to think of it like I'm forgiving myself, I'm holding myself with compassion.

Okay. Basically it's engaging with an undefended heart. So we ask and there's a question that is an integral part of the training in forgiveness which is how am I creating separation? to periodically ask that, how am I creating separation from my own self? How am I creating separation from others? Because if we ask ourselves, if we say, well, right this moment, you know, how am I creating separation from myself, we'll start noticing that a lot of moments, there's a background judgment. It's a judgment of how our bodies are, it's a judgment of the kind of mood we're

having that we think we shouldn't be having or the kind of thoughts we're having that we don't think are really good thoughts or it's a judgment of how we're behaving or how we behaved yesterday. But they're very sticky. It's like Jules Fifer put it. He said, I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's way of walking, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father. So we have this undercurrent of something's wrong with me. So it's very powerful to ask that question, how am I creating separation from myself?

What is the background thinking that's going on that in some way is creating tension in my body, in my heart? And in a similar way with each other, if we begin to look at our relationships and just ask, how am I creating separation here? It's a powerful question. You know, are we doing it directly through critique or through our behaviors? Are we trying to control others?

Many of you know that how often we're in some way doing something to have another behave the way we want. I've always liked the story of a little girl who watches her mother as she's cleaning and so on, and she notices that her mother has a white hair in the midst of her all-groom hair. and so she asked increasingly how come some of your hairs are white and her mother said well every time you do something wrong and make me cry or unhappy one of my hairs turns white so little girl's thinking about this revelation for a while and she said how come all grandma's hairs are white

control work sometimes so often when we are talking about forgiveness and how how we're behaving with others. We're talking about, you know, kind of the large betrayals. But I think it's really important when we ask the question of how are we creating separation. It's not always the major aversions. It's the kind of chronic judgments and resentments that we can carry. Somebody's the way a partner is driving or not doing the dishes or the way our child's relating to chores. or it's more of the little things that keep us from that wholeheartedness. And sometimes they build up till we lock into an idea about the other person

and we're not even aware that we've locked into something that's really stopped the flow of appreciation. Woman's husband has been slipping out of, in and out of a coma for several months she's staying by his bedside every day. One day he comes to and emotions for her to come near, and he's whispering to her eyes full of tears. You know what? You've been with me through all the bad times.

When I got fired, you were there to support me. When my business failed, you were there. When I had that terrible car wreck, you were there. When we lost the house, you stayed right here. When my health started failing, you were still by my side. Do you know what? She says, what, dear? And she's asking gently, her heart's beginning to fill with warm.

He says, I think you're bad luck. I'm sorry, that's just a fun one, I just threw it in. But the teaching here is whatever we're practicing daily is what grows stronger. So daily in some way there's a judgment and a resentment. That's the groove and it strengthens the neuropathways that if it's towards ourselves, lock us into the identity of a bad self are a victim. a victim or it can lock someone into bad other. So let's pause.

Let's just do a brief scan if you will. I sometimes call this a forgiveness scan and you can do this in a daily way and a very, and not take long. So you pause and take a moment to close your eyes and feel yourself right here, feel your breath and feel your body. You might begin by saying, well, how am I creating separation from myself? Is there some way that I'm down on myself or at war with myself? There's something in some way that you can bring into awareness or you've been holding

against yourself. And sense the possibility with whatever you notice of having the intention to forgive it. Just let that intention be there. I just say the words, forgiven, forgiven. It's okay. It's if you're just a loving grandma that's putting your hand on your own cheek and saying, it's okay.

Really, in the bigger picture, you don't need to be at war with yourself. It's okay. Forgiven, forgiven. What are you blaming yourself for? Just the intention to stop the war opens the door. Forgiven, forgiven. You can widen the inquiry to look at your relationships with others, just to bring the scan to the field of those that you interact with regularly.

You might sense, is there anyone that you're aware of that you're creating some separation from? That your thoughts and behaviors are creating distance. And again, simply the intention to not be pushing another. out of your heart. Simply the intention can help to clear the field some. And if the armoring feels strong, then the awareness that it's there will serve you. The awareness that it's there, you don't have to change anything. So we use this inquiry, how am I creating separation to bring into consciousness the armoring and sometimes soften it? But even if we don't soften just bringing it into awareness begins to position us towards looking towards freedom.

Now you can open your eyes if you'd like. Many people will ask the question but really isn't it natural to blame and isn't it natural if somebody has violated me not to forgive them? And so I just want to slow down here and say that aggression and anger is absolutely a part of our survival equipment and every emotion has its intelligence, every emotion. Anger lets us know that we've been violated and we need to do something. So if somebody's injured us, anger and not forgiving, feeling armoured, that armoring is like having a scab over a very raw wound.

We need that for a time. But what would happen if your scabs never fell off? And if your habit became to always have scabs, that's the idea here. That anger has its time and place, as does not forgiving. But then as we gain our resilience, we start waking up out of that. We have the strength to let go and be back in the mix again. The problem is if we don't forgive we can't move on. It's a developmental arrest.

We're in a trance. And if you're aware of the habit of blame and you're listening to this, don't blame the blaming because we all get caught in it. We can see in relationships how quickly it comes up that as soon as we feel insulted, overlooked, misunderstood, criticized, how quickly our injury morphs right into blame. It happens to all of us. I have one of my favorite readings are some letters that. that Dear Abby admitted she was at a lost to answer.

I just want to read you a couple of them. Dear Abby, I suspected my husband's in fooling around, and when confronted with the evidence, he denied everything and said it would never happen again. Dear Abby, I have a man I can't trust. He cheats so much. I'm not even sure the baby I'm carrying is his. It goes on, but you get the idea.

It's a habit of blame. It's a primitive reaction. It's faster than the parts of us that might say, hey, wait a minute, this isn't healthy, but we get caught in it. The biggest thing is though, when we've been hurt we're afraid to forgive. I don't want to speak to that because we have a fear that if we forgive it'll happen again or things will get worse, that we won't be able to control it. Maybe if we forgive then it's like saying okay then I was wrong.

So, I want to just take a moment to clarify what forgiving is and what it isn't. Forgiving is not approving. It's not like saying it's okay that you insulted or abused me. In fact, we need wise discrimination because we need to be able to recognize when something's unhealthy but we don't need to hate the person for it. We can disapprove of the behavior but not hate the person. So, forgiving doesn't mean that we get rid of boundaries. In fact, we need boundaries.

Forgiving is a way of releasing our heart so it's not caught in blame. So we have the intelligence to know which boundaries are going to serve and which aren't. We have a fear that if we forgive we're going to be passive. You know, if we let go of blame or hatred, we're just going to sit and just people will steam all over us. It's not so. The actual reality is that when we let go of the blaming, it opens us to a place where we get in touch with our care and our intelligence.

We actually can act with more clarity. So you can say I forgive and vowed and not let something happen again. You can really commit yourself. The point is that you're not building the scab. the cover up your heart. When we are stuck in resentment and in blame, we are in a trance and by that I mean the world is being filtered through a primitive part of our brain and we're no longer able to see really who the other is.

We're just seeing the dimension of them that we think is the cause of wrong and we're in a trance because we're caught in a very small sense of our own being as a victimized self. Check this out for a moment. Again, let me invite you to close your eyes and reflect. Consider someone in your close circle, someone's family or friend, somebody you have regular contact with, somebody that matters to you, but someone who you tend to you tend to feel judgmental about, where you lock into feelings of blame.

And when you come up with a person, it could be work, family, friend, when you come up with someone, go ahead and exaggerate a bit, but sense what it's like when you're really struck by something you're not liking about them and you're disapproving or feeling blame, notice what your view of that person's like. what you're seeing, how they're appearing in the movie of the mind. And notice when you're fixating on their wrongness or badness, what's your experience of yourself? Are you the oppressed self, the victimized self, the righteous self, the outraged self, the wrong self? Do you like the self you are when you're judging?

You might take a moment to think of this person and something that you appreciate about this person. Notice what it's like to let equality you appreciate and equality that you don't appreciate, both be there. Our path is one of widening our attention, waking up from the trance that keeps us small and keeps others as unreal others. And what motivates us? What motivates us, like Natchikata to let go of blame?

What motivates us to let go of resentment? For most people we're really not motivated because it's work to do it. It's like we have to come right to our vulnerability but what motivates us is really straightforward. We start getting that it's keeping us from love. You can open your eyes now. and the habit of blame, judgment and the habit of judgment keeps us from experiencing our evolutionary potential to love without holding back. Charlotte Jocke-Obeck put it, she says our failure to know joy is a direct reflection of our inability to forgive. There's some

wisdom in us that knows that and that's what makes it worth it. to us to widen the lens and challenge ourselves if we're fixated on blaming someone. So let's take a look at the process of releasing the armor because as you know in these gatherings we're going to do a little practice here at the end and I'll give you an example of one man who, this was a bunch of years ago, two children, he found out his wife had an affair and it wasn't her first affair so he was in a huge rage and he came to me and said, I know it's a spiritual thing to forgive but how do I do it? And so the first thing that I suggested is that he not try to forgive, that he'd be true to what was going on inside him. He was feeling

horrendous anger and to think we should forgive is betraying the intelligence of the emotion that's there so I said okay feel what's here so we let him

he got in touch with the anger and he felt the sense of violation and he knew he had to have distance from her it informed him of what he needed the kind of boundaries he needed in order to do some inner work so we even knew what he wanted to do about the marriage he had kids, the whole thing.

So during the therapy process and during that time of distance, he let the anger, he practiced letting the anger, that energy be as big as it needed to be. And he started practicing and this is such a powerful practice with anger. First of all, a lot of us have some ethic in us that says it's bad to be angry. So for me, when anger comes up often I'll say, forgiven, forgiven to the anger. And it's not like, oh, I've sinned by having anger but it's forgiven.

It's not that at all. It's like saying, oh, this is an energy that has as much right, belongs here as much as anything else. Anger belongs. So he let it belong, he let it be as big as it was, but he didn't get caught up in the stories of anger. It was more the energy of the anger. And when he let it be as big as it was, he started finding underneath that anger a really

deep sense of shame. Like really what was going on was a feeling that he had been rejected because he wasn't able to be intimate. He had been busy, he had been preoccupied, he had been avoidant and he was not really the partner she wanted and he felt ashamed of that. He also got in touch underneath the anger with feeling unloved, unlovable. He had been rejected. She really cared, she would have stuck it out with him. So that's what he got in contact with. If I just said, yeah, you need to forgive, he would

have never gone under the anger and found that shame and that hurt that he needed to be with. And that's when he could begin really bringing some self-compassion and his friends and his support group. That's where the healing happened. He could bring kindness to that very young place in them that felt ashamed and unlovable. And it was only when he had brought that compassion inward, really felt that care holding his inner vulnerability that he could then look at her and step out of the trance of bad person enemy and see, oh, so what's really going on for her? And he could see, you know, for her as you deepen the attention, her own fears about aging,

about loneliness, the disappointments in her life. He could see how she had her leg in a trap, as we sometimes say, that she was caught in hurt in her own way, in suffering in her own way. Because whenever someone is behaving in a way you don't like, you can assume underneath that they're suffering. So he was able to see that. So they worked it out. They got divorced, co-parenting but it's without the kind of bitterness that comes when we live in that trance of blame. So I give that example because it's a real practice. We don't just forgive like decide, oh I'm going to forgive.

It really requires getting in touch with the vulnerability we're avoiding because not forgiving is the armoring that's covering it over. If you let go of the armoring you have to touch with you. it's there. It takes courage. But the gift is that when we do it we've let go of armor that's also gotten the way of loving others and loving ourselves. Now, we talk often about this training and what happens with Natchikata as a kind of liberating, a spiritual liberation that frees us but it really frees others as well. Because the very very same process that we go through inwardly to let go of armor is the same process we need

to go to through as societies, as groups of people. We need to be able to touch into the vulnerability and be in contact with each other so that we can really move towards peace. I want to share a story that touched me that really was an expression of this where where we start to learn how to see what Longfellow calls the secret suffering of our enemies and in that way start to come together. It's the only hope for peace on earth is that those they're at war come into enough dialogue so they can see how their legs are in a trap, how each is suffering.

Basam Aram, Palestinian. He in 2005 co-founded the Combatants for Peace. which is an organization of former Israeli and Palestinian combatants and non-violent struggle against occupancy. He says, as a child, I fought the occupation by raising the Palestinian flag in our playground. We never felt safe. We were always running from jeeps to avoid the soldiers beating us.

Our homes were invaded and children were killed. At the age of 12, I joined a demonstration where a boy was shot by a soldier. I watched him die in front of me. I became part of the Palestinian struggle. We called ourselves freedom fighters, but the outside world called us terrorists. I got arrested in 1985 at the age of 17 and received a seven-year prison sentence. We had been hurling rocks and grenades at Jeeps, at Israeli Jeeps. Two of them exploded.

No one was injured, but we were caught. Our jailers taught us how to continue hating and resisting. On October, 1987, 120 of us all teenage boys were waiting to go into the dining room when the alarms suddenly went off. Over 100 armed soldiers and suddenly appeared and ordered us to strip naked. They beat us until we could hardly stand. I was held the longest and beaten the hardest. What struck me was that all the soldiers were smiling.

They wore smiles on their faces. I remembered a movie I had seen the year before about the Holocaust. At the time I'd been happy that Hitler had killed six million Jews. I remember wishing that he'd killed them all because I would then never have been sent to prison. But some minutes into the movie I found myself crying and feeling angry that the Jews were being hurted into gas chambers without fighting back. If they knew they were going to die, why didn't they scream out? I tried to hide my tears from the other prisoners.

They wouldn't have understood why I was crying about the pain of my oppressors. was the first time I felt empathy. I slowly realized that the Israeli occupation was because of the Holocaust and I decided to try to understand who the Jews were. This led to a conversation with a prison guard. It was a start of a dialogue and a friendship. We discovered many similarities and some months later the guards that he understood now that we were not settlers. He even became a supporter of Palestinian struggled. Seeing how this transformation happened through dialogue and without force made me realize that the only way to peace was through nonviolence. Our dialogue enabled us both to see each other's purity of heart and good intent.

In 2005, some of us who believed in nonviolence started meeting in secret with former Israeli soldiers. We were meeting as true enemies who wanted to speak. The Israelis were refusing to fight not for the sake of Palestinian people, but for the sake of the morals of their society. We too were not acting to save Israeli lives but to prevent our society from suffering more. It was only later that we both came to feel a responsibility for each other's people. I want to pause here because that's an important step.

We start coming together, it's not because we're coming together feeling like, oh, we're long-lost souls, we're going to commune. We come together because something, some wisdom in us knows It's the only way to move towards healing, but we don't know exactly how it's going to happen. It's only in the togetherness that we start discovering who we really are. I'll keep going. 2007, my 10-year-old daughter, Abir, was shot and killed in cold blood by a member of the Israeli border police while standing outside her school with some classmates. There were no demonstrations, no violence.

I've been appalled by the details of what happened, not least that she had just bought a candy at the store and hadn't had time to eat it. I believe in justice, and many hundreds of my Israeli brothers and Jewish brothers around the world support me. I want to bring this man to justice because he killed my 10-year-old daughter,

not because he's an Israeli and I'm in Palestinian, but because my child was not a fighter, nor was Shifatah or Hamas member. Abir's murder, my daughter's murder, could have led me down the easy path of hatred and vengeance, but for me there was no return from dialogue and nonviolence. After all, it was one Israeli soldier who shot my daughter,

but 100 former Israeli soldiers who built a garden in her name at the school where she was murdered. This is awakening from the trance. The trance is that there's just a bad guy over there, and they're two-dimensional. The awakening is they're humans, and there are humans all over, and there are many humans that want to build the garden. It takes a process of letting go of the armor

to begin to find out who we all are. It's a process, and that is what Natchikata knew. He knew that he couldn't continue, continue on the spiritual path unless he let go of his armor. And this is something I feel that the wisest place in each of us knows and it's a training. Forgiveness is a life path really and we have to do it over and over again because it keeps the reactivity keeps coming up. It's a process that sometimes we need a therapist for because it can touch into real trauma.

There are stages of it. Even if we don't feel we have the capacity, it's okay, we can't will forgiveness, but we can be willing. And this is where the hope is, that each one of us, if just our time right now together listening makes us a few degrees more willing to pay attention, how am I creating separation? few degrees more willing, having that intention to open the door, that's the energy that begins to bring more peace to this world. So let's just close together, take a few moments as you let yourself arrive right here as we did earlier, just asking that simple question, is there any way I'm creating separation

from my own being right now. Is there any layer of judgment? Some way I'm not being forgiving to my own being. And with whatever you notice, sense the intention to include your own being and your heart, just the intention towards kindness, compassion, forgiveness. The training begins with our intention to let go of the armoring. And then we ask the question, scanning the people in our life, picking one person that matters to you, where there's a habit of blame or judgment, how am I creating separation?

Without in any way compounding the blame with blame, with self-blame, just again to feel the intention to soften, the intention to hold with kindness where you yourself, you yourself, and or feeling vulnerable and the intention to wake up out of the trance that keeps that other person appearing in a limited way to remember how they too are in some way caught with unmet knees, with suffering, to remember their goodness, to have the intention to include this being in your heart. He writes, be ground, be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are. You've been stony for too many years.

Try something different. Surrender. Be ground. Be crumbled so wildflowers will come up where you are. You've been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender. Thank you for your kind attention.