Tara Brach - Trusting Ourselves, Trusting Life (2015-10-07)

Episode Date: October 9, 2015

Trusting Ourselves, Trusting Life (2015-10-07) - How can we trust in basic goodness when we encounter so much greed and violence within and around us? This talk explores three pathways of practice that enable us to bring a healing attention to our primitive survival conditioning, and cultivate the heart and awareness that express our full potential and deepest essence."Who would you be if you trusted the basic goodness and beauty that lives through you?" Free download of Tara’s new 10 min meditation: “Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease” when you join her email list.

Greetings. I'm Tara Brock and I'd like to welcome you to these podcasts. While the talks and meditations are offered freely, we'd very much appreciate your support. To make a donation or learn more about my schedule, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org. Thank you. Welcome and namaste. One of the reflections that comes to me quite often is very, well-known and very compelling and provocative statement by Einstein. And he wrote that I think the most important question facing humanity is,

is the universe a friendly place? This is the first and most basic question all people must answer for themselves. Is the universe a friendly place? So I'd like to start this time together, just inviting you to sense, what comes up for you when that question is posed. And to keep in mind, you might let the word friendly sit there and sense into it. Is the universe inherently,

is there some inherent quality of love, of unity? Is there some potential in all beings that really express, this basic quality of benevolence. Is there a basic goodness? And there's an alternative way to consider it, which is if you really check yourself, do you feel within your own being

that there's an intrinsic quality of love, of goodness there? That if you're not caught in reactivity or fear, that that's what's there. because if it's inside of you or if it's inside of me given that we're all from the same stardust it's likely that it would permeate and suffuse the universe it's an interesting inquiry and we'll explore it tonight

and I want to just start by saying because this is really an inquiry about basic goodness and about what it means to trust basic goodness and it's a challenging one because it brings up a seeming paradox quickly when we start looking at it. It takes a certain amount of tolerance of paradox and flexibility because, of course, our minds can go very quickly to the horror at having doctors without borders hospital bombed and the horror of the shooting of unarmed African Americans in the streets, and the horror of the ongoing cycles of war that we know leave children without parents and families without homes

and the horror of the refugees. I can go on and we can see that and say, goodness in the universe, is it friendly? And how dangerous would it be if we thought the universe was a friendly place if we're in a war zone? So it takes a capacity to open to that paradox and say there's, yeah, there's tremendous suffering, there's conditioning towards all sorts of harm, causing harm, and under all of that, is there's some potential, some basic intrinsic loving presence that can unfold itself. So Einstein says that it's really important that we ask this question and I'd like to read to a little more of what he says on why it's so important.

He says, for if we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we'll use our technology, our scientific discoveries, our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy that which is unfriendly. He says, if we decide the universe is neither friendly nor unfriendly, that God is essentially playing dice with the universe, then we're simply victims to the random toss of the dice and our lives have no real meaning or purpose.

But if we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we'll use our technologies, our scientific discoveries, are natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe, because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives. God does not play dice with the universe. To add a few words to that, he, in his later writings, a number of times said that the word God doesn't really resonate for him, but he had a sense of God being creative, intelligence and love that flows through

the whole universe through each of us. So it's an interesting thing if you just sense it in a kind of spiritually pragmatic way that if we have a sense that there's an intrinsic unfriendliness,

then we end up living from our more limbic brain from the parts of us that are on survival mode and we're kind of continually having to protect against things, continually having to try to seek personal advantage. I mean, that's where that worldview leads to. Fight, flight, freeze, a lot of war. If we believe it's neutral to toss of the dice, it kind of does

take away a sense of empowerment and meeting and purpose, where we are, in a sense, victims, disempowered. and if we start trying on and sensing into an intrinsic goodness that the beings we encounter, that this being right here, this universe is evolving in a way that allows for more and more love and creativity and wisdom, then we start giving ourselves more and more to being part of that process, to learning about that process, to facilitating it. we help to evolve the world in that way. Now, Buddhism and most spiritual traditions I've encountered

do describe the path as one of realizing the love and awareness that's our essence, cultivating it, trusting it, living from it. This is a Chovium Trunpa, Tibetan teacher. He says, according to the wisdom of the Buddha, we're basically good. We possess what is known as basic goodness. Then we develop an overlay of tricks to shield ourselves from being embarrassed or from feeling too painful or naked.

Those are habitual tendencies, but they're not fundamental. So there's a view here. And again, they're all views. And in a way, I feel like we have to sense into what way of perceiving most brings us happiness and freedom and seems to serve the well-being of others. And there's a view here that there is some sacred, loving awareness

that shines through the creation and that we have each of us the potential to perceive that, to discover it within our own beings and live from it. One of my favorite stories I actually heard first when my son was in Waldorf School here in Washington, you know, I think he was in third grade. And it was a story about children in an art class that were four at a table,

and they were all drawing pictures. And the teacher was rotating around, looking at what they were doing. And one little girl was particularly industrious and excited about what she was drawing. And so the teacher watched her for a while, and then asked her, so, hon, what's that you're drawing? And this little girl said, I'm drawing God.

And the teacher kind of chuckled and said, you know, no one knows what God looks like. And without skipping a beat, without even looking up, she said, they will in a moment. So it's interesting to me that even from a secular perspective when we take this kind of inquiry into essence, into goodness, from a secular perspective, evolutionary psychologists are more and more

offering the perspective of evolution moving in a direction that's very benign where we see, and I've been mostly recently thumbing through Stephen Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature? How many of you have been reading that at all? Yeah, a handful. It's a thick, dense, and wonderful. It's really worthy to look at. And basically, and Stephen Pinker, in case you don't know, is an experimental psychologist and

writer, thinker. And basically his thesis is that as we've evolved over the hundreds and thousands of years, we've become less and less violent. And many people say, how could that be? Look at the world wars and so on.

But actually when you start looking at the facts, over time, we've become less violent. And I'm not going to go into that too much more, but he talks about on the level of families on the level of neighborhoods, factions, nations, less violent. And that there's an increasing capacity over these years, and you can see it over the last

hundreds of years, to act in a collective way, to empathize, to collaborate. There's been an increasing capacity to work together. So it's an interesting frame of reference to start. looking at how this has happened and we can think of really our brains development and sense that, well yeah, that makes sense. I mean, we spent eons of time and, you know, we've first had this brain stem and this limbic system that was mostly in fight-flight freeze and over time we've developed this frontal cortex and the capacities of the frontal cortex to reason, to empathize, you know, to be able to

see a bigger picture, self-control. So when we begin to explore this, the starting place really is to acknowledge, as I said before, the competing forces that make it really hard to just perceive, and they kind of create a veil over basic goodness. And the beginning of that is to get that for all of us, If we look at evolution again, the emergence of form goes hand in hand with a sense of separation. That all organisms are designed, the brains are designed to sort for difference and to feel separate and to feel like within this membrane of stuff that in here is self and out there is world.

And with that sense of separation comes a need to defend and the tendency to attack. So, on that level, we're wired to be aggressive and dominant and vengeful and jealous and violent and to seek advantage and be greedy and selfish. And when we look at that, when our attention fixates on that, that brings up mistrust. It's hard to trust our goodness. And it's easy to fixate on that when you read newspapers. So that's one level. And then we see in human development, as I mentioned, the more recently evolved brain and these

capacities for reconciliation, harmony, and helping, and with that more and more of a sense of interdependence, and as we see evidence of that, that remind us, oh, there's something we can trust. My sense is that we wouldn't be drawn to meditation unless we had had some glimpses of something that feels, intuits, that there's something unitive and something positive and something good that we're opening to, that that's part of what draws us. And each of us in our lives have had those moments

where maybe we've been in conflict and there's been some sense of forgiveness or reconciliation and the feeling of, oh, it's so much nicer to be in this togetherness than to be caught up in our own. our egos fighting each other. And so many of us have had that experience of gratitude where we've sensed somebody else's kindness and it's just given us faith, you know, okay, that can be there. We love random acts of kindness stories and there's a reason.

Jonathan, my husband and I've been often in our talks we come, we're kind of focusing on some of the same materials and we both were having some conversations about the 1914 Christmas truce in World War I. Many of you have heard of it, and if you haven't, it wasn't just at Christmas, even for like a six-month period leading up, there was truces, small truces along the border, the British and the German troops had a long stretch where they were in quite close proximity,

and they could hear each other talking, and they ended up having this kind of consensual breaks in violence where they'd give each other break when they were exercising or doing certain things are to get bodies. Whatever it was, they started cooperating in these ways and it led up to that Christmas. It's very, very touching if you watch any of the videos and I recommend it because there's something about it that to get these humans at war and the amazing possibility of having them on Christmas, having singing carols back and forth.

I mean, it broke me up when they were singing silent night, exchanging gifts and buttons and taking pictures. And I was looking at myself and saying, well, what is it about this that makes me cry? And it's just, I love goodness. It's that simple, that when I just love goodness. And I think we all do. all do. I think we love it because we know it's the deepest truth of what we are and it's

what our prayer is that it keeps unfolding, that our lives are part of that unfolding. So we have different tendencies towards how much we look towards goodness and trust in it. And it has a lot to do with the first 18 months of our upbringing, our caretakers, to the extent there was caregiving, really from caregivers, we develop a basic trust. This is, you know, read about it in Ericksonian psychology and so on, the developmental stages. But you can feel it intuitively that if a young being is taken care of, if there's an attumment from parents to needs,

a mirroring of goodness, a sense of understanding, there's a natural feeling of belonging. It's like the world is a safe place, and I belong to this world. And in contrast, if parents are unattuned, are to go to the extreme in some way abusive and rejecting, the message is, you're separate, you don't belong, and this world's not a safe place.

So that's our deepest first imprint. But really, our parents are messengers of the culture. So we're also being imprinted, our sense of safety and belonging. and is this universe a friendly place, it very much comes from the messages of our culture. So even though we can understand that our societies have gotten increasingly less violent,

there's still a huge amount of limbic fear playing through the culture. I want to name some of it, because it's part of what creates in us a sense of it's not a friendly place. And, you know, the messages come through parents through our schools or peers, our political system, our justice system

that, you know, you can't trust. You don't fit. There's all sorts of standards we're supposed to kind of meet and the message is you need to meet these standards. You need to be like others in a certain way. Some of you might remember this story. I was walking across a bridge one day

and I saw a man standing on the edge about to jump off so I ran over and said, stop, don't do it. Why shouldn't I? He said, well, there's so much to live for. He said like what? Well, are you religious or atheist? He said religious. I said, me too.

Are you Christian or Buddhist? He said Christian. I said, me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant? He said Protestant. I said, hey, me too. Wow. Are you Baptist Church of God

or Baptist Church of the Lord. He said, Baptist Church of God. I said, me too. He said, are you reformed Baptist Church of God? I said, yeah, me too. It goes on and on. Are you reformed Church of God reformed of 1915 or reformed of 1879? He said, reformed of 1915. I said, die, herodic scum. And pushed them off. Isn't that terrible? I mean, really. But you get the idea. It's like we get really comfortable with people that look like us, that believe, like us, right? And to the extent there's difference, that person becomes less and less real, less and less somebody we can feel empathy towards. And we're in a culture that has all sorts of standards about how we should be. And it leaves many, many, many of us in the culture

feeling like we're not okay. That's especially true because the dominant culture says, you know, You have to be white, you have to have certain kinds of successes. You have to have a certain kind of body. You have to have certain kind of intelligence. I mean, it goes down the line in order to really fit. I think a lot about, you know, gender and the messages of how we're supposed to be in our particular gender, our body, what a male body is supposed to be like, our female body.

and of course Dave Barry shines a good light on it. Here's what he says. He describes being puny all his life. He says it was very painful for a male. He said, I totally missed the boat to Puberty Island. I was this hairless dweeb with a voice in the Pinocchio range. One day my mom bless her heart had a talk with me. She told me that girls were not interested only in looks

and that qualities that really mattered were brains and a sense of humor. That little talk was long ago, but it taught me an invaluable life lesson I've never forgotten. Mom's lie when they have to. I mention intelligence, and it's one of the areas that actually is, we have such a narrow band of intelligence. We respect in this culture. I mean, this culture worships left-brain intelligence, and I often think of all the children that go to school that don't particularly fit that band, okay, of intelligence, and go through the school system and come out feeling like they're stupid,

that they're not good enough, and how deeply painful that is in this culture. It comes through at work, the standards that we have to achieve and excel in a certain way. Many of us have been reading about the teen suicide, especially in the real competitive schools. And I just read the other day in this randomized study in San Francisco that 30% of teens were underwent.

suicide risk. That's unbelievable to me. But we get it that there's huge, huge pressure to succeed and in a certain way. And then on a personality level we're supposed to have a certain kind of personality that is fun and funny and interesting and appealing and goes with the flow and so on. And here we are in a society that creates a lot of insecurity and then we have all our reactions to feeling insecure, and then that's condemned too, our reactions for being insecure. And so we end up very often not trusting our own goodness and not trusting our belonging and that the world is a friendly place. And that's really where I'm going with this. Many of us live with that distrust. So the inquiry where I'd like to take us is given that

there is a mistrust in our system, that we know we get caught up in our limbic reactivity. Each of us knows how we get caught in grasping and greed and self-centeredness and we know our anger and we know how we put others down in our mind and then we don't like ourselves for it. We don't trust ourselves. We know that. How do we move from that to a sense of feeling where that basic goodness is? and ourselves and others and nourishing it and cultivating and calling on it and calling it out of others. How do we evolve ourselves? So I'm going to go over three kind of domains of spiritual

practice that evolve us in this way. And one is what we do often is the practice of mindfulness of being able to bring a mindful and kind attention to where we get stuck in limbic reactivity. So we get that that's not who we are. Okay? That's the first one. The second one are the heart practices that directly reveal to us

the tenderness and openness of our being. And then the third is really ways that we then act from that loving presence that deepen our trust. I'm going to use as my main, example of the distrust, a trusting movement of myself because it was so pronounced for me. As many of you know, I lived in an ashram, a spiritual community for 10 years or really more like 12. And very early on, I went in right after college, I was in my early 20s.

Very early on, some of the women started having regular kind of women's group meetings, sensitivity-type group meetings. And I had been, in those early days, found myself getting really down on myself. In the yoga ashrums, the philosophy had a lot to do with kind of climbing a ladder to perfection, getting more and more and more pure and more and more pure and pushing away and leaving behind the shadow, the dark parts of ourselves. And I was just terrifically aware of how much that shadow was not far behind at all. It was like all over the place.

And getting more and more down to myself, and I remember at one of these groups, I was so aware in that particular week of how much I was kind of numero uno. I was not thinking of the whole world, how much I was self-absorbed, how much pride I had in terms of I was very competitive as a yogi, you know, trying to be the best yogi around. And then also how judgmental I was in so many ways. So when I was in this group, I remember at one point making a confession.

And I basically said, I don't trust myself. I said that at the core, I don't think I'm a really good person. And it was really, really jarring. I mean, because I named the main thing, I didn't trust myself. It wasn't like I said, I don't trust, you know, it's like, yeah, I'll sometimes get anger, this or that, I don't trust that I'll always be nice. It was at the core, I don't trust myself. So I don't remember anybody's response because when we're in a very big emotional state,

usually the world kind of fades into the distance and all we're feeling sad. So I remember going back to my room and I was just in touch with core shame. And I just stayed with it. I just opened to it and felt the waves of it and then the grief that I was living with so much shame. And there was some quality of presencing of being present with it because the waves just came through and through hours of sobbing it. like I'd hit bottom as an unworthy person I couldn't trust. But in staying with it, there started to being acquieting, the ways of grief kind of passed. And in that space of silence, as happens, there was a quality of just tenderness that arose.

And during that time, I kind of started viewing through different eyes, this had this sense that I'm not alone. I mean, we all have these egos, these tendencies. And everybody gets self-absorbed. Everybody wants to try to be the best or not look bad. It just came much clearer I wasn't alone, but more than that, in the quietness and in that space, I sensed just a simple loving presence that felt more true, more essence, more intrinsic than any of the changing mind states that I was so judgmental of. So this brought up probably the strongest aspiration I could have called on, which was to look towards that goodness, to unfold it, to trust it, to live from it, to open to the waves that I

judge and open to them with as much presence and kindness as I could, but to trust them. goodness and that's, I mean that really gave rise to the book writing radical acceptance that we not believe the trance of unworthiness, not believe our thoughts, trust what's really behind the veils. So over the years what I've kind of witnessed is a shift in identity and when I was in that torment my identity was organized around being selfish or self-centered or competitive or judgmental. And then over the years, those qualities stayed.

They stayed. I mean, I can see all the stuff arising all the time, and that's just not what defines me. And I've seen the same for all those that are practicing mindfulness and presence. It's that there's a shift in identity. It's like these waves that seemed like, me are still there but there's more of a sense of that vastness and tenderness of the ocean that I know is the deepest truth.

So I mentioned three paths and one of them is just what I've been describing, bringing presence to the waves that are going on until you start sensing in that presence a quality of tenderness and awareness and love that you know is more the truth of yourself than any story. one of the pathways. The second key pathway is to purposefully awaken the heart so that you can experience that goodness directly. And seeing our own goodness is a really, really essential practice on the path. And it's essential because we have such strong conditioning. Each one of us has this condition, to, it's the negativity bias, to really fixate, as I had in my 20s, really on what's wrong. So it takes a real practice, it takes a real training. And I'd like to do a

little bit of that second genre of path right now, if you will, just to put down notes and the like. So this is really, how do we wake up to our goodness? And take a moment. And take a moment. as you come into a pause to notice how your body and mind are right now, offer mindfulness, presence to whatever's going on, if there's any strong sensations, strong feelings. Just regard that with gentleness, with clarity. The power of mindfulness is that when the waves arise, if you notice them, you notice them, and regard them with tenderness, you shift from being identified with the waves to being that compassionate presence, that witness, still engaged but not hitched, beginning to bring a purposeful

attention to goodness, another way that we sometimes describe it as positive neuroplasticity, that we have patterns already in our brain of how we regard ourselves. And yet those patterns are changeable. And so you're practicing in a way that can alter these pathways for this particular practice beginning by bringing to mind someone that you love and that's easy to love. And it could be a sister, friend,

a father, child. Could be an animal, your dog or your cat. Could be a deity, spiritual figure. Maybe somebody that's been kind to you, loving to you. And whatever being you bring to mind, sense that being regarding you with kindness, with love. And let yourself attune to the goodness in that being. What is it that brings up love for this being? Is it the way this being shows love,

aliveness, gentleness, patience, wisdom, humor? Just attuned to that goodness. You feel your loving, feel your appreciation, feel it in a visceral way in your heart. You might even mentally whisper thank you and whisper the being's name. And just feel at the heart space. that loves goodness,

sense how this heart space includes appreciation of beauty, sense the goodness that you love, the mystery around us, the love of truthfulness, of being truthful. See your own goodness, who you are when you're sincere, your intention towards being honest, your capacity to be awed and inspired,

see your goodness and know that it takes courage, to honor your own goodness. We have a lot of conditioning to fixate on the negative. This moment, see if it's possible to choose to look towards the goodness. That innocence in you that loves to love, that purity that does care about others, that part of you that has a sense of wonder.

Feel the goodness. and sense what it would be like if you really trusted in this as essence, trusted in this that lives through you, this awareness, this loving awareness, and trusted that it lives through all beings. It's the spirit that animates all beings, that the conditioning towards fear and grasping are the waves on the surface. But you can sense this depth and stillness and vastness of loving presence. What would your life be like if you really trusted this goodness in you?

Who would you be? Who would you be if you trusted the basic goodness and beauty that lives through you? How would your life transform? Taking a few full breaths as you're ready, opening your eyes. There's an understanding in neuroscience that where attention goes, energy flows. And if you took time each day to bring your attention to your own sincerity, to your own love of goodness, if you took time each day to pay attention to how light shines through other beings, that's the energy that would start flowing more and more and really change the neuropathways

in your brain and the experience of your heart. the mindfulness we practice of the waves that are difficult and the kind of ways that we're just doing right now of really directly waking up the heart these practices are an evolutionary strategy to evolve us to bring out our potential it's like evolution built in to us these capacities and these capacities to find strategies

to activate the capacities. In fact, for really the first time in our history, we're actually able to affect the pace of our own evolution by choosing to meditate. And when I say meditate, I don't mean narrowly on a cushion necessarily. I mean being with each other and paying attention on purpose in ways that we see who's there. Being with each other and on purpose speaking in ways,

that help another to trust themselves. Being together in ways that really honor that pass the masks, there's this one being looking out through these eyes and listening with these hearts. Story for you. And this is moving us to the third pathway. So again, the first pathway is if you take the waves in ocean analogy,

we have waves of conditioning that makes us distrust. If we bring mindfulness to them, we remember the ocean. The second pathway, waking up the goodness, is really sensing directly the ocean of the heart. The third pathway is living from it. And for the third pathway, a story that's one of my favorites that's by Naomi Shai of Nyeh. And she says, wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been detained four hours, I heard announcement. If anyone in the vicinity of Gate 4A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well, one pauses these days. Gate 4A was my own gate. I was there. An older woman

in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help the flight service person said, talk to her, what's her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this. I stooped, put my arm around the woman and spoke to her haltingly. Shou Da'a, Shubidu, Abidi, Stanis,

Shui, Min Fadlik, Shubitui. The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly

used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been canceled entirely. She needed

to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said you're fine,

you'll get there. Who's picking you up? Let's call him. We called her son and I

spoke with him in English. I told him I'd stay with his mother till we got on the plane

and would ride next to her, southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for fun. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out that of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up to about two hours. She was laughing a lot by then, telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade Mamal cookies, little powdered sugar, combrie mounds, stuffed with dates and nuts out of her bag,

and was offering them to all those at the gate. To my amazement, not a single person declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, mom from California, the lovely ones from Laredo, we were all covered in the same powdered sugar and smiling. There's no better cookie. And then the airline broke out free beverages from huge coolers and two little children from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar too and I noticed my new best friend by now we were holding hands had a potted plant poking out of her bag some medicinal thing with green furry leaves such an old country traveling tradition always carry a plant always stay rooted to somewhere and I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought

this is the world I want to live in the shared world Not a single person in this gate once the crying of confusion stops seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those others too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost. We love goodness and we love it because it's really the essence of what we are.

It's a kind of homecoming. We want to trust. And it's really our potential to keep waking up in ways that let us know we do belong. That doesn't mean that in a day-to-day way we don't have to watch out for where people and societies are playing out their fear-based conditioning. Of course we do. And we need to be active in our standing up and speaking our truths and working to wake up out of the systemic injustices and violence.

of course we do. And if we wanted to come from the wisest, deepest, most compassionate place, we need to trust our shared belonging. You know, Chogium Trunk by, I read from him earlier, has a simple phrase, he says, never give up on anyone. I love that phrase. It's like, can we hold up the possibility in ourselves and each other are really manifesting our potential? to love, to be awake, to serve. So the deepest action, because we're in kind of part three, to, you know, again,

it's be mindful of what's happening, purposely wake up our hearts, and then live from that. The deepest action we can take in living from that goodness is to be a mirror for others to really see who's there behind the waves, the conditioning. because in the moments that we remind each other of our goodness, we actually draw it out. It becomes stronger. It's like we've watered a plant that just absolutely unfolds itself in the light of awareness. To remind each other, to say, I love you out loud,

because people forget, you know, we forget. So, again, this is not a practice for just on the... cushion. We're past the point in our evolution where we can afford to be going off to the caves all the time and just training our minds by ourselves. We absolutely have to bring it into every interaction and we have to bring it into politics and we have to bring it to our world because the belonging is true and also the ignorance and the violence is really intense. We have to bring it alive in our day. So we'll do our final reflection on living from our hearts.

And as we did before in this pause, just take a moment to relax whatever might have contracted and tightened in your body, see what wants to soften. You might bring that smile to the mouth, a slight smile. It actually helps the nervous system to relax from the feeling. flight freeze into that attending and befriending. The smile evolves us. The eyes smile. You might smile into your heart.

Feel the breath and the heart. Sense the space, the heart space that's there. And as we did earlier, you might bring someone to mind that you love, that you appreciate. Try someone different. Try a person. Try a person who you are in regular, in some way in regular touch with. someone you care about and bring them right here, right close in. You can see the light in their eyes.

See what this person looks like when he or she or they are happy, lit up, feeling love. And imagine in some way that you're a mirror of goodness that you can let them know their goodness. Let them know something you see, something you appreciate. And notice what happens when you appreciate another's goodness, what happens to that person. Try it with another. Just bring one more person to mind. Someone you care about.

It takes some moments to see that person's goodness, what you appreciate, and imagine letting them know. Sense what happens when you let them know. Can you imagine dedicating to seeing the light, the spirit, in yourself and others. You imagine today or tomorrow in action letting somebody know what you appreciate

giving that gift. This is the poet of face, he says, admit something. Everyone you see, you say to them, love me. Of course, you don't do this out loud, otherwise some will call the cops. Still, though, think about this.

this great pull in us to connect. Why not become the one who lives with the full moon in each eye that is always saying with that sweet moon language what every other eye in this world is dying to hear? May we trust the love, the loving awareness that lives through us. May all beings everywhere trust this loving presence as essence. May we live from that loving presence

so that there can be increasing peace, happiness, and freedom for all beings everywhere. Namaste and thank you. We hope you've enjoyed these teachings. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule and special online offerings,

please join my email list by visiting tarabrock.com.