Tara Brach - Three Gestures of Love

Episode Date: July 27, 2013

2013-07-24 - Three Gestures of Love - If we inquire "what is between me and presence" we usually find we've been caught inside a limiting story of self, contracted by wants and fears. This talk explores a simple yet powerful way of arousing loving presence and dissolving the narrow identification that keeps us from inhabiting our awakened heartmind.

One of the most powerful and direct inquiries that can help us wake up right through our daily life is in any given moment just to pause and say, what is between me and presence right now? Or what is between me and really feeling at home in my body, my heart, with my world? just to ask that question as a way of immediately deepening attention. And what we usually find out when we ask that question, what is between me and presence, is that there's these layers of anxiety or layers of distractedness, that there's usually some story about how we're doing or what's expected of us or what we need to do and how we are, how things are going in our life.

And generally it has, there's aspects of who I am in relationship to other people. So there's all these layers. A friend of mine was visiting this last weekend and we were talking about this, this kind of inquiry and how we go into this trance and we don't realize we're not present for long stretches and all of a sudden we'll go, oh wait a minute, where have I been? And so he was described in an experience he had had a few months ago that that I wanted to share with you. And this friend of mine is an American Sikh,

so he wears the turban and he's got a very full, long gray beard. And he's used to people staring and being confused, and especially in the last decade, he's used to hostility. He was in a rural conservative area, and he was going into a food lion, into one of the, it just been, put up so it was kind of a new store and he was in line and he describes being in line and standing there and a person in front of him was taking a long time the person behind him was

a kind of young guy who was bald who's covered with tattoos and so on the clerk was she looked like some a local woman that had probably been there for her whole life seemed to know everybody and he started feeling really uncomfortable like he didn't belong and like others were considering him in a weird way. And he just started feeling really restless and wanting to get out of there. That was his experience. And he could feel the tightness and the constriction. Finally it's his turn.

The clerk asked him if he has a food line card. Because you know everybody who's a member of the club has a food line card, of course. And he does. And so she turns to the guy that's standing behind him and she says, hey, hun, you got a card? Our friend can borrow. And he goes, yeah, sure. He pulls it out.

He goes, glad to help. And a big smile, hands it to my friend. And the clerk's beaming, and everybody's all happy that it worked out that he could save like $2.74. And he left, and he found he had tears in his eyes as he left the food line. And he was saying, thank you, thank you, thank you. because the clerk and that young man had been his teachers. I mean, they were his teachers. And that gratitude for waking up out of a trance.

He was in a story that was creating stuff in his body. It reminded me a lot of a very classic teaching tale. Some of you might know about a decaying monastery. The order was dying. dying. They were kind of down to just a very small handful of monks. And there was a well-known rabbi that lived near to this monastery who would kind of take little sabbaticals in a hut that wasn't that far from them. And the few remaining monks decided they'd send somebody over their abbot who's just, you know, been there a little bit longer, to talk to the rabbi and see,

you know, if he had any advice for them on what to do about, you know, this kind of dying order, And so they sat together, the rabbi and the abbot, and they talked for a while, and nothing about the monastery. It was time to leave. And so the abbot said, is there anything you can say and any light you can shine? And the response was the only thing I can tell you, said the rabbi, is that the Messiah is among you. Okay. So the abbot returns, the monks gather around and said, well, what gives, what do he say? And he shared what he had said, that the Messiah is among us and I don't know the meaning of his words but that's just it. So in the months that followed the monks were

just pondering these words and Messiah is among us, you know, could that possibly, he means he's one of us. And so they started to treat each other a little differently and and as one person writes, do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes, if he meant anyone, he probably meant Father Abbott. Certainly he could not have meant Brother Eldridge. Eldridge gets crotchety at times.

But come to think of it, even so. Eldridge is virtually always right. Maybe he did mean Brother Eldridge. Then he goes, of course, the rabbi didn't mean me. He couldn't possibly event me. I'm just an ordinary person. Well, supposing he did. Maybe.

Maybe. Maybe suppose I'm the Messiah. So you get the idea. they were contemplating in this way, and they began to treat each other with extraordinary respect and kindness on the off chance of one of them might be the Messiah.

And they started treating themselves more respectfully. And people came occasionally to visit this monastery, and they could kind of feel there was this spiritual aura there, so more and more families would come and picnic and young men would start thinking, wow, you know, I'd like to spend some time here and in not that much time within a few years the monastery again became a thriving order and a real center of light and spirituality in the realm. It feels like about the

truest principle I can imagine that if we beheld ourselves and each other sensing the truth, that there is an awareness, a love, a sacred kind of energy that really lives through each of us. And if we had the eyes to see that in ourselves and each other and respond to that and it doesn't mean be polyana-ish and not see the conditioning that makes us absolutely neurotic and crazy also, but also see that what we might call basic goodness, the Messiah that's within each of us in the Buddhist kind of way of describing things that would be called the Bodhisattva, the awakening being that's really waking up through these different forms here. What a world. But the given is that each of us forgets, and that's just, we just

forget who we are, we forget who each other is, and Rumi described it, I think, in one of the best ways, he says whatever comes into being gets lost in being drunkenly forgetting its way home. So we forget. And probably the central teaching and the practices of every spiritual path is recognizing we're not who we think we are, waking up to realize that vastness and tenderness and consciousness that's right here. So tonight I'd like to explore as we often do how we forget, how we get caught in a pretty limited sense of who we are, a cramped sense of who we are, a sense of who we are that actually has us live pretty consistently in a sense of, you know, anxious about what's about to come and self-conscious and so on.

How we get caught in that. And I'd like to explore a very simple but powerful practice of remembering. And I call it the three gestures of love. So that's going to be the title of tonight's talk, the three gestures of love. But we start with the hard part, which I sometimes use the language of spacesuit self. Some of you know that we, you know, as part of getting incarnated, we each are given. this nervous system and this body mind that has equipped to survive. And that means that we're equipped to try to avoid what's threatening,

try to seek out what'll satisfy us, and try to find the kind of connection to pack that'll give us the sense of attachment and security we need. So we're all equipped with the same survival gear. And our reptilian brain, our limbic, tell us to fight, flight, freeze, tell us how to navigate to make things work. And we also have a more recently evolved part of our brain that correlates with a capacity for mindfulness to be aware of all that. That has the capacity for empathy to actually sense what it's like for another. That has a capacity for wonder.

We have all these capacities. And as we can kind of intuit, the fight-flight freeze when it's strong, when we're locked into it, overrides our capacity to really inhabit more of a whole sense of our being. So when fight-flight freeze is strong, our identity takes the shape

of a self that's trying to make it through the day, trying to survive, afraid what's going to go wrong, we forget. And we see each other in those same kind of contracted ego formations. There's many, many ways that we get locked into a small story about who we are. I love the way Ram Dass puts it. He describes it as somebody training, that we're all in training to be somebody. and our parents and our culture are trying to shape us into being the somebody that will most be able to, you know, handle the dangers and pursue the wants and find our connections. So we have all these somebody standards. Like if I can meet this, this and this standard, then I'll be the somebody that's safe enough, that's appreciated, that's making it.

So Ram Dass, he does this in a really beautiful way, describes it, he says, when I was growing up, I used to be somebody. We were all in that somebody training. He said, I became somebody because my parents wanted me to be special, and my educators wanted me to be special, and they trained me how to do that. I really was somebody. My parents were proud of me. I could look in their eyes and see pride and appreciation. That part was very gratifying. But then he goes on to tell a story that made it so why it wasn't working out so well. He said the problem, first he says, the problem was, inside I felt lousy. I felt somehow I should be happy, but I wasn't. And then I thought, well, happiness isn't everything,

is it? As long as I am what everyone wants me to be, isn't that enough? But it wasn't. I felt weird. So here's a story he tells. And it's a story about Zumbach, who's a tailor. And a man wanted to have a suit made, so he brought it to Zumbach, the tailor. And Zumbach takes his measurements and orders the best material. The guy goes in for a final fitting, puts on the suit, one sleeve's two inches longer than the other. He says, Zumbach, I don't want to complain. It's a beautiful suit, but this sleeve is two inches longer than that sleeve.

Zumbach's affronted. There's nothing wrong with the suit. It's the way you're standing. And he pushed one of the man's shoulders down and the other up. He says, see, it fits perfectly. The fellow looks in the mirror again, and there's all this loose material behind the collar. He says, Zumback, what's all this?

material sticking out again. He's irritated. There's nothing wrong with that suit. It's the way you're standing. He pushes the man's chin and he makes him hunch his shoulders. See? It's perfect. Finally the suit was fitting perfectly and the man left and he was walking to the bus in his new beautifully fitting suit and somebody came up to him and said what a beautiful suit. I bet Zumback the tailor made it. Man said wow how'd you know? Because only a tailor of Zumback's skill could make a suit fit so perfectly on somebody as crippled as you are. Then Ramda says that's what I felt like. Everybody kept telling me what a beautiful suit I was wearing, but I felt like I was in Zumbach suit.

Do you understand? It's like we're all given these standards and we pop into this incarnation and there's all sorts of naturalness and spontaneity but it, the wildness it's there and it quickly gets civilized and put into the shape of a culture, and we're culture and put in the shape of a personality or whatever that's trying to make it according to certain standards. So we are wearing our space suit or our Zumbach suit. We'll call it Zumback suit for tonight. And it includes stories that we tell ourselves about how we need to be more a certain

way or less a certain way. And the more we do to keep on fitting that suit, fitting the way we think we can, should be, the more we forget our original nature. We forget who we really are. And we all know that we spend many, many moments trying to be good or strong or capable or successful, trying to get somewhere. So we have strategies. It's part of wearing the shoes we have strategies that can keep controlling us into the person we think we should be, that we can be confident or feel good about. And you probably know your strategies, the strategies that help you try to cover over things or feel better about yourself or try to make it in some way. One of the big ones,

of course, is to achieve more. I mean, most of us, many of us, are programmed to feel like the more we achieve, the more worth there is, the more people will like us, and then it fulfills those basic needs. So we try to prove ourselves. It's like, It's like Zumbaksu, we keep adding metals to it, you know, to try to make this personhood look better. So we have our resume of who we are when people ask us. I was, had an interesting experience with my husband who, he has on his website, he has his resume, he has his name, this is Jonathan Faust, and he has MA after it, and then CSA. And it was only about a year and a half ago, I think, that somebody for the very,

first time said, what is CSA? It's Cubscouts of America. Pretty impressive, right? I want you also to know that under past employment, he has a long list of employment. The last thing on the list of his past employment, certified pesticide applicator for the state of Illinois expired. So we do, though, try to present itself that will impress. That we'll get approval. We also get very wound up around making the right decisions. Again this is part of the space suit self that there's a sense of trying to navigate and not make a mistake. Do it right. Choose the right whether it's the right job or the right sequence in which we go to the bank, the post office and shopping. We're always

trying to figure it out, make it work. Some of you might remember a very good piece on this. It says that the Japanese eat very little fat and they suffer fewer heart attacks and the British or the Americans. The French eat a lot of fat and they also suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits are the Americans. The Japanese drink very little red wine and they suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits of the Yanks. Now the Italians drink huge amounts of red wine and they also suffer fewer.

The Germans drink a lot of beer and it goes on and on and on. The teaching or message is eat or drink what you like. It's speaking English that kills you. We try to control things and we're not just trying to make the right decisions, we try to control our environments. I mean, again, this is part of our being, to be the person we want to be, to feel safe, to feel like things are going to work out. The more we're living from an insecure place, the more controlling we get. And we know it. We've seen ourselves. We know it's not just we're controlling ourselves, our environment. We want things to go according to the way we want things to go.

And we don't have a lot of movement about that. So we often lose sight. We're so busy managing things that we lose sight. And one story, an old man was dying and he smelt apple pie. So he told his grandson to go downstairs and ask his wife and go bring him up a piece. And the child comes back empty hand. He says, sorry, grandpa, she's saving it for the funeral service tomorrow. Pretty bad.

I know. But you get the idea. We really lose sight because we're so busy trying to micromanage things. The last two ways I want to mention that we are caught up in staying in Zumbach suit, where I identify with Zumbach suit, is we keep judging ourselves to make sure we keep that we're fitting the standard and finding the gap between how we should be and how we are and we blame other people. And we blame other people because if things are out of control and we can't make things work, we have to have somewhere to focus our energy. That's the only place we can feel in control is to blame somebody else. It doesn't work, but that's what we do. So the deal is that no matter how hard we try to make this ego self

workable, no matter how hard we try to achieve more, to blame ourselves more so we strong arm ourselves into getting better, or whatever it is we're doing, the cards are stacked against us. There's no way for the ego to try really hard and end up feeling good about itself. So let me say more about that. I mean, think about it. If you feel unworthy and you have to achieve to feel worthy, when is it enough? Is it ever enough? I mean can you at some point achieve enough and then rest in your laurels and say, okay, now I'm at peace with myself? Does it work? Really? I'm looking around to see if anyone thinks it does. If our okayness is wedded to being better than people in certain

areas, to our looks, to our cognitions, to our physical capacities, anything, it's going to go down, it's going to go south, so to speak. But there's even a deeper reason that the ego self inherently feels deficient because it does. Whenever we're identified with the ego self, whenever we're identified with the I am the suit, the space suit self, we're forgetting our wholeness and there's some intuitive wisdom inside us that gets that the who we think we are is smaller than the truth. We get that we're living in a contracted cramped space. Every one of us knows it. We know we go around inside a story that's less than the truth. So there's

some sense of I'm not there yet because we're living in an experience of a of a self that's less than that awareness and that heart and that creativity that's here. The flag, you know, it just to say you might remember Lily Tomlin. She says, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat, you know. It's the same thing, no matter how much we polish up the ego suit, we're still living in something smaller than the truth. flag is, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes it's mild, which means sometimes it's just a kind of self-consciousness where we can't really feel comfortable and spontaneous and

free with others. It can be mild like that. Some judging, some comparing, but it's not like anguish. But often, you know, that word, you know, cripple in the Zumbach story, often the way we try to shape ourselves really internally violates. us so much, it really violates us so much that we live in a chronic sense of anger, we live in a chronic sense of fear, live in a chronic sense of depression like it'll never work out, shame. So the big inquiry is when we start to get the message of, wait a minute, I'm living in something less than who I am, whatever way the message comes, we realize that we're not feeling

really intimate with anybody. Or we realize we're living with this kind of shame that never gives up. Always that nagging voice of not enough. Something's wrong with me. When we get that, how do we begin to remember who we are? How do we start coming home? And this really is the inquiry in every path. And one of my favorite teachings that

kind of points the way is a teaching by Srinar Sargadatta, who's a non-dual teacher I find is very, his truth is very clear and very available. He says, all you need is already within you only you must approach yourself with reverence and love. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing. Give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them. You are beyond. So there's a few, I want to break this down a little bit because there's a few parts to me that really are powerful. And one is the spacesuit self and are navigating and are trying to make things better

and avoid pain and prove ourselves is not a, um, a space suit self and are navigating and are trying to make things better and avoid pain and prove ourselves is not a malevolent thing. It's well intended. It's the best we could do. It comes from our conditioning. It's part of the way we were designed. It's just not the end of the story. Okay?

So it comes from a basic love for being fully alive. It's just torqued. So that's the beginning. That's the first message he gives. Then he says, make love of yourself perfect. And by this, because this is again a language thing, this was translated. This is not a command to do something right. You're not loving yourself well enough, you know, get it together,

do a better job on loving yourself. It's not that kind of imperative. It's an invitation to bring your whole being into engagement with your heart. And this is where we're going to explore these three gestures. It's an invitation to really bring your heart to your healing, to stop depriving yourself of love. And then, of course, the ending is so beautiful that we use these gestures of love.

We start offering more and more love inward, and what do we discover? We're beyond. There's not a self-offering love, there's not a self-receiving it. We become that field of loving presence that no longer needs any gesture. at all. But there's a pathway and it's a beautiful one. So let's look a little more

closely at these flavors of loving that I'm calling the three gestures. And I want to say that what we're doing tonight is not different than other practices. We've explored heart practices many times, the practices of forgiveness, the practices of offering compassion inwardly the practices of gratitude. But there's a very quick kind of in-your-pocket way that you can practice this regularly that I want to share tonight that is inspired by a doctor Hugh Lenn who's a Hawaiian healer and the particular formal exploring tonight is inspired by him and he is a practitioner of Hooponopono which is a Hawaiian healing process. And the background story with Hulen is that he's a psychologist.

He was hired to go into a hospital in Hawaii, I think it's the Hawaii State Hospital for the criminally insane, are really horrifically, the place is violent, you know, the patients there attack visitors, crumbling, deteriorating, structure, really bad place. People cycled through all the staff would come and leave very quickly. His role there, he wasn't hired to go meet with the patients, he actually had an arrangement where he would get their files. He would meditate on their files, and as he learned about them, he would then do this practice that I'm going to share with you on the experience of them in his own body. in heart. Okay? And so he began doing this practice just sitting with the files of these

patients and one by one they started healing. You know one that was shackled was unshackled, another that was really incapacitated, was actually able to leave and one by one it said in this story about it that the staff began to enjoy the work, absenteeism decreased and they ended up closing the unit because everybody was in some way progressed so far in the healing process that they no longer needed the unit. Now, I know it sounds pretty wild, that this guy's off in a room meditating on files and everybody gets healed. That's the story.

Whether, whatever you think of the story, the practice he was doing, that's the interesting thing, okay? The whole thing is interesting, actually. What he would do with each file is he'd get a feeling for the person. He'd sense how that person was living inside him. You know, he had that space where you're just really meditating, reflecting, and feeling that person inside him. And then he'd addressed the divine.

He'd addressed that highest sense of his own being, our beings, and he would say to the being living within him, I'm sorry. That's the first thing I'd say. I love you. And then he'd say, thank you. And then he'd say thank you. These are three key flavors of love.

I'm sorry, and it could be either I'm sorry which has quality of compassion or forgiveness. Forgiven, forgiven, you know. It's the first. The second I love you is offering that cherishing, really calling on the universal loving energy to cherish the life that's here. That's the second. And thank you, appreciating. how the sacred lives through this in every life.

Those three. And what he would do is just directed over and over again. I'm sorry, I love you, thank you. I'm sorry, I love you, thank you. Offering it to that beingness inside them. And whatever our beliefs are about how things work on this planet in terms of the laws of physics and what can happen, it had an effect.

I'd like to give you an example. an example of this. And we're going to practice it a little bit ourselves here because we always do that. But share with you an example of one couple who were familiar with this and practiced mindfulness because you really can't practice this without mindfulness. Unless there's a presence with the words, I'm sorry, it's not alive. Unless you say, I love you and feel and experience what's actually happening, it's not going to transform. Does that make sense? So mindfulness is involved with each of these.

In fact, the Chinese character for mindfulness, the top of the characters now are presence, and the bottom is heart. It's a heart presence. So you might think of this as the three gestures of love that are really expressions of mindfulness. A couple I know co-lead workshops, trainings and executive coaching.

And several years ago, they had a morning session, they had planned it and they knew who was doing what and they had timed out the curriculum. But midway through she was presenting something, she extended the presentation because she felt more context was needed and that stimulated a bunch of questions so that they got involved with a very lively dialogue and the schedule, they had a kind of make-shift change the schedule on the spot. At lunch he was fuming. She had broken the agreement.

They were going to do it a certain way. She kind of spontaneously did something different. And so he confronted her with his anger. They didn't have time to process it. They had to go back and teach together, which is always an interesting thing for a couple that are having stuff. But she acknowledged what she had done and she acknowledged is upset. So they go back in the afternoon and during the afternoon she didn't have time to do some

deep work with her reaction but she could feel her defensiveness. She could feel how our mind kept coming up with justifications, you know how we do that, we keep justifying ourselves. And so what she did was just over and over again say to the parts of her that were reactive, I'm sorry, or she sometimes switched it to, it's okay because she, you know, kind of that reassuring, the compassion, I love you, thank you, just over and over again. And as she describes that she does this a lot, she said that it's like clear, pure water, just washing the debris through, going through a steam,

stream bed and just washing the debris out until there's just this kind of a flow that you're reconnected with. And she did it and then she would bring him into her awareness and start offering the same phrases, you know, I'm sorry, I love you, thank you, to the experience she had of him inside her. And so when they then explored it at dinner and what he reported was what really made a difference was she was allowing him anger. There was room for it. She wasn't identified with her reaction. She had already kind of washed through that. And so they were able to explore together, you know, what made it for him so distressing that they veered off the plan. And they had this

deepened, understanding and connection. And she went, rather than feeling good about herself, like, oh, okay, now I did it right, I made amends. It was like she had, and they together rediscovered basic goodness. When we offer love to ourselves in these ways, it doesn't make us a better person. It's not like we finally can feel the ego doesn't get to feel, oh, now I'm a good person. We become that goodness. Our identity is goodness. So they felt that shared space. And because they're a couple, they have all sorts of stuff that comes up like that. In their marriage, he gets upset when she's late for things. She feels judged when she doesn't do it his way. But they use this over and over again, where they'll just

wash through and wash through. And then when they come together, they have a shared space that allows for connection. I think one of the most powerful parts of this has to do with when we relate to other people. We tend to, and this is part of the teachings of hope, and opono, opono, is that we are responsible for everything. And I'm not going to go into that teaching too much because it brings up so many different ideas about, well, what does that mean? But what we can take from it is anybody that's behaving in a certain way, we are responsible for how our body mind experiences that.

In other words, whatever a person is doing, we're having an experience of them. We can't control them, but we can, when I say be responsible for, we can respond to our own experience. Be responsible for means we can respond to. And when we live in a story of blame, we've given away our power. We've given away the one place where we can bring transformation and healing, which is to our own experience of that person. Does that piece make sense or would you like to hear that again? Okay. When we're living in a, and I'm sure there's many people that would say, but what about da-da-da? So we're not going to go too far into it, but just enough, when somebody

else acts in a way that causes us to feel hurt, that causes us to feel angry, we can't control how they're acting, but we are responsible for our reaction of hurt or anger. Not that it's wrong. But we can, that's the one place that we can have some healing and awakening is by responding to the hurt and anger inside us. And if instead we spend our time and energy blaming them, we don't get to go to that place of inner healing. It's where do you pay attention? Do you target your wrong or do you open to some sense of presence with the reactivity in your own body mind. So with this practice, it might be another person doing something, but you can always open to your own experience and in your own experience say, I'm sorry, to your own experience,

I'm sorry for this suffering. You can say to your own experience, I love you. You know, I cherish the life that's right here. And you can say thank you to that loving presence that we start getting in touch with when we bring our attention inward. Okay. So let's just take, let's slow it down, I want to spend a little time with these three gestures, what each of them is, a little bit more, maybe give you one more example than we'll practice together. So the first one is compassion and sometimes forgiveness. If what's going on, let's say what's going on is you've in some way caused harm to another person, it may be that rather than I'm sorry to that place in you that's agitated, that feels guilty or ashamed,

you might just say, it's okay, honey, or sweetheart, that's my phrase, are, forgiven, forgiven, or in some way offer, you know, understanding and care in a compassionate way. So that's the first one. And it's really a key one. In the Buddhist tradition, unless we forgive, we can't open our hearts in love. And most often when we're caught in trance, when we're in Zumbak suit, There's a sense of deficiency like we're not doing it right. There's a self-consciousness.

There's a sense of, in some way I'm falling short. So if we don't unhook that second arrow, as they call it, the first arrow is whatever. We're feeling the second arrow is, I'm bad for this. If we don't undo the I'm wrong feeling, we can't say, I love you. To ourselves or anybody, and I mean it by anybody. When the heart's at war, tight, closed against ourselves, the love is not there for anyone in the world. So the first step is in some way relaxing that tendency to turn against ourselves.

It's okay. So often if I can just catch that I'm down on myself and just even make the gesture, I put my hand on my heart because that's one of the gestures, but often I'll go like that this with my hand on my cheek as if just as a young child you're saying, it's really okay honey. So I'd like to offer that as gesture number one just to kind of, you just can check it out. It's in some way you're saying it's okay. It's really okay. Whatever I'm criticizing, judging down on myself for on some level, there's some understanding, compassionate space that we can call on and say it's okay. That's number one. The second,

I love you is an active gesture inward that we rarely do where we're saying the life that's right here I cherish. We cherish this life just the way we cherish this tree or our child or our dog or this beautiful sunset. There's a cherishing. So in the moment that in some way we say I love you and sometimes we'll say I love you and what will bring up is how much we're hating ourselves. So it's not like it immediately brings up tenderness, but then we can bring that into mindfulness

and begin to say, oh, I'm sorry, to that. Do you understand? It just begins to open it. It's really important this second piece of actively offering, and this part is the hands on the heart, I love you. So we go from I'm sorry or forgiven to I love you. I read you Cassia Berman, she puts it this way. The mother of the universe refers to let me worship her outside myself anymore.

She's withdrawn inside me and tells me that if I want to know her, I have to come inside too, which is the last place I want to be. Although she's been telling me for years she's never gone to this extreme before of actually hiding inside me, if I want to love her, I can only do it by loving myself now. Gesture too is recognizing if we want to love this world, we have to love this world, We have to love the life that's right here. And truly the world lives inside us. We discover that.

Step two. I think it's really valuable to use the gestures just to kind of get the feeling of it. And step three is that thank you, that gratitude, that whenever we start touching into the love and the goodness, there's a natural, it can feel like devotion or gratitude or reverence or appreciation that springs up, which is the sweetness of the whole path to feel that sense of, ah, this is so precious, so beautiful, so good, that gratitude. It's like my friend when he left the food line and just saying, oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. That appreciation for homecoming. And in that one, that's the devotional quality and the palms together

is the gesture. Now, I want to just say a word about these gestures. You, this is just something to experiment with. Each of these flavors of love are arctuple flavors of love, compassion, the feelings of offering love directly, and the sense of appreciation or gratitude. For you to really explore this practice so that you can in the midst of a day just pull it out of your pocket and start letting that stream of clear water move through you and clear you, You're going to have to find the language, the images, and the gestures that match for you. It's your own experiment. I'm sharing gestures that happen to be very in use by many people.

I mean, to feel gratitude and go like this as fairly archetypal gesture, but see for yourself, it may trigger off some old going into church school or having to do something you didn't want to do. So check it out. Whenever I'm teaching on a certain subject, I kind of track how I'm practicing in that particular way. And the most recent example I thought I'd share with you of how the three gestures really helped me. A couple of weeks ago, I was on the phone with my sister and I'm about to leave and be part of our family's gathering on Cape Cod. And she asked me if midway through the week, if I'd be willing to drive her to Hyannis,

bus so she'd catch a bus so it means about you know to an half hour round trip and I I agreed very haltingly it was not entirely gracious like you know I kind of stumbled around on my agreeing and she of course picked it up right away and said well maybe I could call a friend and have them da-da-da-da-da you know I said no no no no I'll take you but but I kind of was in my mind saying gosh what if that's low tide what if that's exactly what I'm gonna want to be on the beat you know I was not gracious and generous. Hung up the phone and got

waves and waves of guilt because I had just recently visited her out in the Bay Area and she for about a week was taking me everywhere. I mean she was so generous and sweet. So I was just, you know, I was in contortions on this one. And so

that's when I just started saying, okay, it's okay, sweetheart. I didn't go like this, I just mostly just had my hands on my heart, but it's okay, sweetheart. I love you. Thank you. It's okay, sweetheart. It's okay. I love you. Thank you. Just, you know, just the word just rolling through and rolling through until there was a shift and it wasn't the guilty person saying now I can go be good, but a shift to just opening into the feeling

of goodness, of just loving, just loving itself. So I can go do this, this, I can offer her that time and there might be a part of me that's still computing but it doesn't matter. And it's not because I'm being a good person, it's just because there's contact with the goodness of loving that's bigger than the ego cell. And that is the essence of the three gestures is that by intentionally bringing love to the life that's right here, heart presence, in those moments we start dissolving the identification was on back suit. We're no longer that ego self that is, that's our identity is around stories of what's wrong or who I need to be or what I should do, that starts

dissolving. It's like sunshine on an ice cube. You know, it's like we've identified where that block is and as the sun shines, it starts dissolving and we become more fluid and what are we, the who we are is bigger and it's loving and it's awake. So this is the shift in identity from the three gestures. And I started with the story of the Messiah on purpose because it's not just our sense of identity that shifts. That as we melt and dissolve open by offering the gestures as we forgive, as we offer love, as we feel that reverence, that prayerfulness, and as we sense an openness, we start looking

at each other and it's not a gamey thing anymore who's the Messiah. We just start seeing who's looking through the mask. What's looking through those eyes is the same awakeness, the same consciousness is looking through these. That what's listening is the same awareness. That this heart space that we're in really is a heart space, that this love is a love is kind of living through us. There's a beautiful saying

that we're not humans on a spiritual path, but that we're spirit, where that loving awareness waking up to realize ourselves through these forms. And these kind of gestures help remind us of that truth. It's not like they make us different. They help us come home to the truth of who we are.

Okay, so let's try it. Let's practice a little bit. So just take a few full breaths and as we did with the meditation, collect yourself so you can feel yourself here. And then this inquiry of really is there anything right now between me and full presence really at home in my body, my heart, my life. And you can expand that inquiry just to sense your life in these recent days and just sense if there's anything going on that is triggering you in a way that keeps you from really resting in a larger sense of being.

That gets you small, contracted, reactive. It might be something in a relationship with somebody where you get triggered some way that you're down on yourself or some behavior, maybe an addictive behavior, something at work. Of course, when you're on your own practicing, you'd be practicing when something actually comes up so that you can right now just imagine what it's like when you're feeling caught in that one, where you're feeling caught in the reactivity. Just for a moment just to imagine, you know, if somebody, you're talking to somebody and they're provoking you, the look on their face or the tone of voice, so the situation that you're

nervous about, whatever it is, and just sense the way you get contracted and reactive. You might even feel your body and notice what happens when you're in that reaction, whether it's anger or fear, whether you're down on yourself or down on another person. Let yourself just experiment now, you might experiment just putting your hand on your cheek and let the touch be really light or tender. Just for a moment since what happens if you say I'm sorry or it's okay, or forgiven, forgiven. So you're really calling on loving presence and just offering it to the place in you that feels I'm wrong, I'm bad, I'm not okay.

You're sending it right to the place that feels not okay. And you're basically saying I'm sorry or it's okay. Hear that mental whisper and just sense with sincerity that you can send that message. that you can send that message. And continuing to feel the place in you that might be vulnerable or having a hard time, you might sense what happens if you put your hands on your heart and that gesture inward of I love you.

Just hearing the words, I love you. And then thank you if you'd like to put your palms together and just sense your appreciation that there is a path of homecoming. There is a way of coming home to the loving presence it's really your true nature. So with that, the palms are together. And know that you can continue to experiment with these gestures of love in whatever way resonates.

I'm sorry, I love you, thank you. I'm sorry, I love you, thank you. And it may be that you just say one or one or two or three. It doesn't really matter. you're calling on love. You might bring to mind someone that you care about who's having a hard time right now. Just imagine you could bring them into the room you're sensing the person who's disappointed or afraid, down on themselves, grieving something,

and sense how that person lives in you, how when you consider that person you can feel energetically their experience in you. You might imagine just as you put your hand in you on a child's cheek, just imagine you could put your hand on that person's cheek, I'm sorry. Or it's okay, sweetheart, the comfort, the compassion. How you could send a message, I love you. And really sense that part of you that's experiencing that person receiving it, I love you. And then thank you.

Sensing how the sacred lives through that person, thank you, thank you, thank you. May all beings awaken to the loving presence that is our essence. And may we live from that realization. May we behold that in each other. May all beings such great and natural peace. May all beings awaken and be free. 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 Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.