Tara Brach - Trusting Who We Are (retreat talk)

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

When we are suffering, we are believing something untrue - usually a limiting story about who we are. This talk explores the roots of our self-doubts, and the teachings and practices that remind us of our basic goodness - the loving awareness that is our source (given at the Fall 2019 IMCW 7-Day Silent Retreat - 2019-11-06). 

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit Tarabrock.com. Namaste and good evening. When I was in my 20s for much of that decade I was living in an ashram or spiritual community and I've shared that I was a bit of a type A type yogi. You know, I was kind of pretty driven trying to, trying to, reach enlightenment, I had an idea it would take about seven years so I was trying real hard. That was not a true idea that didn't match with reality. But there was a story that I remember

hearing early on that has stayed with me and I share it now and then because it helps me. And it's of this musk deer who got a whiff of this heavenly fragrance and felt this to find the source of it and it became this compelling life journey that this musk deer was always on its way trying to find the source of this incredible fragrance and it went over the tallest rocky peaks and across wide raging rivers and through dense jungle chasing after this sacred scent and finally at the end of its life it was exhausted and And as it was dying, its horn pierced its belly and the scent absolutely filled the air. And so it is that what we are longing for is here.

It's already here. It's really what we are. And yet we get caught in this idea that it's around the band or it's down the road or it's after the three-month retreat where we've gone into the Himalayas or it's back 2,500 years ago with only special beings at another era and in some ongoing way we feel like we have this problem we have to figure out and solve before we're really there. There's always something else. How many of you can relate to this being on your way? Okay, so here we are on our way together.

And what the Buddha taught, I find it's through most spiritual traditions I've encountered, it's this radical reminder and it really kind of cuts through that what we seek is what we are. It's the way Kabir says, the guest I love is inside. Even when we're most neurotic, when we're feeling most confused, when we're most caught in doubt, whatever it is, when we're most stuck, we're never actually separated from the awakened heart mind any more than waves are separate from the ocean.

It truly is already always here. So I'm going to be referring to this as our basic goodness and what I mean by that is the awareness, love that's waking up through all of us. our essence, it expresses as waves and the waves are conditioned and they distract us because we think we're a particular wave, we forget what we are. And that the path really is increasingly to trust our ocean-ness, to include the waves and trust our ocean-ness. Tonight's reflection really is what helps us to trust this?

What helps us to really trust ourselves in the deepest way? last night, Ruth's going to this elegant inquiry into the depth of, you know, the nature of reality. And this is kind of continuing on that, that who are we really? And I think that in terms of last night's talk, future Dharma students will consider it the discourse, the salad dressing discourse. You'll never think of Dukha the same, you'll see this. So when we're in Dukha, and the big it, we're, we...

We are caught in doubt and we're caught in mistrust and I know from the groups that that's some of the deepest pain is when we feel that we really can't trust ourselves. And I think the big question comes when we hear this potential of can we trust our true nature is how could I possibly trust myself if I know that I hurt people, I have hurt people, I will continue to hurt people, how can I trust myself? You know, the extension is how can I trust someone else if, you know, I know they're going to hurt me. So in terms of defining things, trusting goodness does not mean that we're trusting any of us not

to hurt each other. It doesn't have to do with that. We're not trusting, they won't have mean-spirited thoughts or act aggressively or in unkind ways. of you might remember one of my favorite prayers is, Dear God, so far today I've done all right. I haven't been greedy, selfish or self-indulgent, but I'm going to get up in a few moments, God. From then on I'm going to need a lot of help, you know. So the given is that we have the same conditioning, the same reptilian brain and limbic system as other animals and creatures, and that under certain circumstances, all of us most likely will kill or steal or lie,

given the circumstances. When we're threatened, most of us get defensive. A woman in a job interviewer says, tell me, what do you think your biggest character defect would be? Her reply, honesty. The interviewer says, honesty? I wouldn't consider honesty a defect. her reply, I don't care what the hell you think.

I have to tell you, I was trying to find a way to fit that in, and I couldn't figure out why. I just think it's so cute. So, back to where we're really looking, we can't trust that others won't be defensive or aggressive or any of those things, but here's what we can trust, that there is an intrinsic awareness that's waking up through all these body minds, really is, through each of us. And it's manifesting in a way to serve our greater good because that awareness realizes our belonging. So it's expressed in love and in compassion.

So how trust comes about is that we have more and more tastes of that, of that awareness and that love. and the more tastes we have, the more we start recognizing, oh, this is more home, this is more true than any of the passing condition states. And I'm going to keep looping back to that again and again. So I remember one of my very first Buddhist retreats was probably at IMS because that's where I always went.

One of the teachers was giving a talk about the nature of awareness and he said so, and he asked for hand-rays. how many of you trust your Buddha nature? And I kind of was going like this because a part of me was thinking, well, yeah, sure. And then, well, no, I don't know, you know, because I was back and forth in that sense of, well, I can't trust that I'm really a good person in this way or in this way. And it's an interesting inquiry for you just to sense when you've had moments of feeling that kind of trust. I think of it like we touch facets of that gem of awareness whether it's maybe you had

some moments of quietness and you really felt the basic stillness of awareness or moments of that as Ruth described that that real wakefulness that knowing, just knowing, receiving in the moment what was happening or maybe you've had moments of feeling a sense of tenderness, compassion, love. Did you sense in the moments when there was that kind of awareness or maybe a purity of heart that you really could trust that there was a kind of profound okayness? So this isn't a hand raised kind of thing but there's just a sense how much has trust been woven in and then for many and this is equally valuable the waking up is shined a light

on a kind of chronic mistrust where you have doubts. And it's not until we really get conscious and see them that we can begin to wake up out of them. So as we look at it, there's an inquiry which is what is between, like right in this moment between me and trusting goodness. And you might ask yourself that. Is there anything between me and trusting my basic goodness, the awakening awareness? the awakening love that's here. When we ask that we might sense that we're trusting or we might sense, well, instead there's

a feeling of fear, our shame, our numbness or I'm just too distracted to contact anything. And usually whatever it is that's between us and trusting, it comes with some background story of a not okay self. So our lens for looking at trust is really that it's about identity, that when we're mistrusting, we're identified as a separate self. Even when it's not a bad separate self, if there's a feeling of a separate self we're not going to trust ourselves because we're living in something smaller than the truth. We're living separate.

One of the metaphors I use a lot is sensing that we come into this world and because the world is challenging and difficult we construct our ego kind of space suit. We all, every organism does it in its own way. We toughen our skin in different ways and the different tools for navigating and trying to figure out what people want from us and getting acceptance and getting approval and shining up our presentation. So we develop the spacesuit. all do it. I've sometimes described as the coverings around the golden Buddha, you know.

We develop the space suit and the delusion comes because we get identified with the space suit and we forget who's looking through. And then we see another being and we forget that the coverings aren't what they are, we forget the consciousness, the knowing, the awareness, the love that's there. So we all, to some degree, if we're suffering, we're identified with a space suit, we're identifying with some notion of a separate self. Is this all making, is this make sense so far? Okay.

Rumi put it this way, he said, whatever comes into being gets lost in being, drunkenly forgetting its way home. So all forms, all organisms, all waves, however you want to think of it, arise and in some some way have this misperception that their being is identified with that wave, there's, that they forget the larger ocean that they are emerging out of temporarily. That's getting lost. And so then drunkenly finding our way home. Here we are, drunkenly finding our way home.

So it's natural and universal to get identified as a separate self. It's not like our personal mistake, our personal problem. It all happens to everyone. We get identified as a set of waves with certain defining characteristics and our path is really remembering our ocean-ness and cherishing the waves. The way we get stuck, what makes it hard to let go of the identity is that we have this incessant inner narrative that keeps telling us you're this set of waves and it's not a very good set of waves, you know, and we just keep telling ourselves it over and over again.

And Carlos Castagnata, the Don Juan books, puts this. He says, you talk to yourself too much. You're not unique in that. Every one of us does. We maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A man or woman of knowledge is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. So here we are practicing and starting to shine a light on how much we're...

how much is going on in terms of thinking. And it's not about fighting the thoughts. You know, if we're at war with our thoughts, we'll be at war for the rest of our lives. So it's not that. It's just knowing that we can wake up out of the thoughts and see them and not always be caught inside them. It's the space between the thoughts and around the thoughts that the, that awareness shines through that we remember the awareness that's here.

So the challenge with thoughts and with thinking is that they're super persistent, that they're usually fear-based and that we take them as reality. Those are the three challenges. There's a cartoon with a man at a bar he's saying, I know I'm nothing but I'm all I can think about. You know? It's like we are the star of the show and we, and you know how it is. where it's a little embarrassing to say but we spend a lot of time moving through the day

and you know it's just circling around a sense of you know moa and so it builds that sense of separate cell and so here we start noticing those patterns and we start noticing the quality of the thoughts like how many of them that you have during the day arouse a sense of kindness of belonging of gratitude you know and more and more we we we get more skillful as time goes on. And then we're honest when we sense, well, how many are kind of fueling the worries and the plans and the judging that kind of reconfirms a limited threat in self? And as the Buddha said, whatever a person frequently thinks and reflects on, that will

become the inclination of their mind. Norons that fire together, wire together. So part of our practice is we start shining a light on the thoughts that are going on on the kind of thoughts and just the fact of thinking and this is the most important piece that we take them to be reality. We have a little film going on in our mind and our body is believing it, having biochemistry going on because we think it's true. So these are the challenges of the thoughts and they perpetuate a sense of a kind of self-

that we are. Now, to look at the construction of identity is this huge complex thing and I'm going to be really simplifying but just to say that certain kinds of thoughts create a certain sense of who we are so that if you're moving through a lot and blaming others there's going to be a sense of the victim's self, right? And if you're going around and there's a sense of I've got this problem, I've got that problem, you're the designated patient or the problemed person or if it's always about your health. It's all of a sudden I'm the sick one and I know that one. I've done the on the sick one over a number of years.

My world got so small that became the story, right? I just kept telling myself. Cartoon, a man's in heaven on an iPhone. He says, hello doc. This is the hypochondriac. Guess where I'm calling from. Some of our stories have some roots in whatever's going on, but often not. Sometimes our story is about being the special spiritual person, the meditator.

And that story separates us too. Then we're all of a sudden the moral or the ethical one or the cool one or the better one in certain ways. my dad when I got really interested in spiritual life, came home from college, I think he was a junior or senior year, and here's a story he told me because he knew of my interest. He said two friends were very fascinated by the metaphysical and they were focusing on what spiritual realms, the higher spiritual realms that they would visit after their death. They agreed whoever died first would contact the other and let them know what it was like.

So one died and the other did seances for months. night at dusk, a friend's voice comes through and he's eager. He says, well, what's it like? Tell me, tell me. And the friend says, well, we eat and we drink and we have sex and we sleep and then we eat and we drink and we have sex and we sleep and I could talk over and over. His friend says, wow, heaven sounds really wonderful. It goes, oh no, no, no, I'm not in heaven. I'm a moose in Wyoming. So we have these stories about how it is and about ourselves. And one of the big stories for many of us is that life is hard and it's oppressive and we're carrying a burden and we're grim.

It's that grim, oppressed person story. I don't know if any of you know that one, but I'll tell you about my version of it. I mean, I can easily get into my to-do list and start sinking. And right before retreat, someone from our organization sent me a letter that need to be edited and rewritten. It was substantial like three days before she sent it to me. So I just got into a snit because I was trying to get talks together and notes and stuff and this and that. And I just felt my body and I got grim and I started feeling resentful and too much stuff was being poured on me. and then I saw, oh, okay, there's the oppressed person.

And I ask myself, and I do this a lot, is this really who I am? Am I this one? Am I the sick person? Am I the oppressed person? It's really helpful when we start catching our identity. Okay, so now I'm in the victim. And it's not like it instantly dissolves, but there's a little mindfulness that makes it so we're not quite as identified.

So these are just examples of how our thoughts create our identity and of course as we know it's deeply, deeply imprinted on us from our society. We have all the different ideas and standards and ways of thinking of our society that tells us who we are. I'm going to speak just a bit about this because it's a world unto itself but I've always been struck by the story of a meeting between Carl Jung and an indigenous chief, Ochoie, and I'm not pronouncing it right, but it happened in 1924, New Mexico and it was in his personal memoirs, memories, dreams, and reflections. So he describes this conversation and speaking of

white men, the chief Ochoai told Dr. Young, their eyes have a staring expression. They're always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something. They're always uneasy and restless. We don't know what they want. We don't understand them. We think they're mad.

Then Carl Jung asked him why he thought whites were all mad and the response was they say they think with their heads. Why of course said Dr. Young surprised what do you think with? We think here and he put his hand. over his heart. And Jung describes it that he had struck our vulnerable spot, unveiled the truth to which we are blind. So I want to slow down here because just this different description of how we think, whether

it's head thinking, which is in this context means it's really driven by an in service of fear and greed, fear and wanting, head thinking. It's not connected up with heart, it's not integrated, it's not whole, it doesn't recognize belonging. Our heart thinking, which arises from the sense of our mutual interdependence and has a much deeper kind of intelligence. And again I'm going to come back to these kinds of thinking because head thinking, driven from fear, creates hierarchies by nature.

thinking creates hierarchies and it doesn't matter where we are in the hierarchy, it creates separation and fear. And so many of us here as we sense as we kind of are waking up more to both our personally held identity and our group identities we have intersecting group identities. Some might be considered on the higher on the hierarchy the dominant in terms of let's say race but not in terms, this would be me, not in terms of gender or not in terms of gender or our religion being Jewish. There's all these different levels

and someone else might be, you know, in terms of sexual orientation or gender identity. So we have intersecting identities and they all have messages and they all put us up or down in different ways and they all contribute to a sense of whether we feel superior or inferior at different times but basically separation.

And just to sense that for a moment, just to experiment, you might reflect in your mind and someone here that is in some ways different from you. Just bring someone to mind that's in some way different from you. And then imagine if you could truly experience no better, no worse, that you are no better, no worse, that there's truly belonging and then to bring another person to mind, no better, no worse, truly belonging. And what if you could move through the world and really disband some notion and they're very, sometimes it's very subtle and sometimes it's very overt of in some way being better

or worse? It's not saying the same, it's saying belonging. I know for myself I wrote this in True Refuge that about special person like because I'm teaching a lot and I'm put in the position of knowing more or something, the subtle thing of being above and realizing that if I in any way right this moment feel like I'm better, that's suffering because it makes me separate. and it's actually a smaller identity and creates distrust. If I feel like I'm worse, that's no fun either.

So anyway, that's been a powerful reflection for me, no better, no worse. It's something that people that do plant medicine, psychedelics, that kind of thing. The chemistry seems to deactivate the part of the brain that makes these different separations and hierarchies. I remember in college doing psilocybin and being with plants and totally knowing in a cellular way the belonging in that there was no better, no worse. Now I have to often re-disidentify from a hierarchy and rediscover, but it's a powerful and liberating approach to our identity, no better, no worse. So we're talking about we get these identities, we believe and then of course the most

direct way that we develop them is in our families, parents, caretakers who in some way send the messages, you know, the deepest need we have, being seen and being loved. And then to the degree that our parents could mirror back, our value, show us love, see our goodness, that allows us to relax and belong. That's basic trust. But most of us had it very conditional and to some degree had severed belonging. And you might just reflect for a moment, just as a very simple reflection, just to sense some of what fed the identity that might be most sticky for you.

You might allow an image to arise of you being young and with your... whoever were your significant others, parents, caretakers, in some room where you spent time, maybe you're six, seven, eight and see if you can dial it in a little so you can actually see where you were, see the surroundings, see your parents or caretakers there, see their faces, maybe look in their eyes so that they're looking at you. Now, sense, what is it that you want them to see? What do you want them to see about you? What don't you want them to see about you?

How do you want them to feel about you? What do you want them to be feeling emotionally in their heart about you? What are you afraid that they might feel about you? Just to know that the core features of identity organize around wants and fears, So to the degree that there's mistrust or severed belonging, it's the unmet needs for feeling seen and valued. So the inquiry here, open your eyes if you'd like or keep them closed, the inquiry is how we move from to whatever degree there is mistrust because there's an identity and a sense

of something wrong which creates mistrust to remembering and... feeling our belonging to awareness and love, trusting that. This is a quote from Sri Nisar Gadata. He said, My guru told me I was the divine, the source, pure awareness itself. The guru told me I was the divine, the source, the pure awareness itself. I pondered that for several years until I knew that it was true until I became it. Then he adds, I was lucky because I trusted what I was told. So I'm wondering if I just said that, would that work?

I could be guru for the moment. But it's not just the message of a particular guru. That's the point. It's really the message, as I mentioned earlier, of the Buddha and mystics and saints through the ages. That's what we are. And it's also, you wouldn't be here if you didn't have some deep intuitive wisdom that that's what you are in a longing to manifest it. It's in us. So the pathway of trusting and remembering is really having more and more tastes or direct experiences of our natural awareness. Just what we're doing here, the practices that allow us to relax back and deepen our attention

and really taste presence and love, awakening. In the Tibetan tradition, this is my favorite, to me what makes most sense, description of our natural awareness is it's got three primary characteristics or qualities and one of the qualities is that it's absolutely open and another way of saying it is that it's empty, that there's no center, there's no limit, that awareness. is utterly open, open and empty. And hence, because it's open and empty, you look at the altar for the Buddha over here

and maybe some people were feeling sorry for the Buddha, feeling like, how come Kuan Yin gets all the beautiful little meta, all the stuff going on over here, and the Buddha is just sitting there all alone. But that's just, it's emptiness. I was trying to, I keep thinking we should have, candles or vase or something but I realized that's just going to be the way it is. So that's one of the qualities, is this open emptiness.

The second quality is wakefulness. That awareness is inherently wakeful as Ruth was describing so beautiful there's that knowing quality. The third quality is the act of expression which is a tenderness that can respond so that when awareness encounters form there's a response that's tender. And again, back to ocean of waves, when the awareness, which is source, encounters the waves that arise out of the source, it's tender because the waves belong to awareness. It's not like there's something separate, it's not dualistic.

We fall in love because we realize oneness, the waves belong to us. Everything that we experience is part of our awareness. There's nothing outside awareness. So the open, empty, wakeful and inherently tender. Now there's many, many dimensions that get expressed from that that we encounter all the time. Gratitude. Gratitude is a pure expression of awake awareness. Compassion.

Aw. Wonder. Creativity. So whenever we touch any of the facets of the gem, it's like coming home. There's something that feels completely pure and true. Now here's the key that you have been moving through these days and each of you at moments has touched in some way has had a taste of natural awareness, probably many, many, many, many glimpses.

And yet what happens is that we are so in the habit like the must-ear of trying to get somewhere else that we don't arrive enough to really get familiar as Jonathan was saying with the experience so it feels like oh yeah I know this, this is home, this is what I am more than any of that conditioning. So the remainder of our time for this talk I want to explore how to you. how you can move from having taste of your true nature to having a real sense of a trust that this really is who I am. And there's a lot more science on this now which is really interesting that the science of

going from states to traits, that you might have a state of feeling compassion. But how does it become a really regularly accessible part of your being? being. And what a lot of neuroscientists showing is that if you have an experience of compassion and you actually stay in it and feel it and it fills you completely and you're actually aware of the experience for 15 to 30 seconds, there's more chance that it kind of, it comes and it gets sticky and stays in your implicit memory as, oh yeah, this is part of my life experience. But if you don't really sink into it, it comes and goes.

and it stays like a passing state. So to turn states into traits, we need to deepen our attention to the awareness that has emerged. This is why I emphasize what we call after the rain, because during the practice of rain, you're recognizing, you're allowing, you're investigating, you're offering compassion, but it's in the moments afterward where there's that beingness, that presence, and just to rest in and get familiar is really, really like getting to know what it's like to be home. And the more you get to know what it's like to be home, the more you trust who you are.

So I'm going to give you a couple of examples of this and then we'll just practice a little. And the first example is from my own life, this was the end of my ashram days. My biggest experience about trusting goodness was one of the most painful experiences I've ever had. I have had the good fortune of not having experienced abuse except for once and this was it. And I've ridden it up and I'm going to give you a little bit more of the, a little more layers of this. I was 28. I was at a gathering of our spiritual community and I had just had a miscarriage. It was two days after a miscarriage. And I had been worried that maybe the heat of the desert had, because it was very, very hot and I was outside and doing a lot of exercise it caused

it and I, and that was mentioned to the spiritual teacher, well we were all gathered and in that gathering of a couple hundred people he had me stand up in front of everybody and basically blame me for losing the child. He said that you know you're willing to have sex but it was really your own ego that wanted to just work and you're selfish and you didn't really care about having a child and that killed the child. And so as you can hear, that's abuse and over the next few days I was devastated because this is my community and this is my teacher and I spent hours in this little Goudoir.

A Gaudwara is a Sikh temple but this is kind of like a one-person Sikh temple meditating and praying and it came down to do I believe. believe his condemnation of my badness, you know, my badness, personal badness. And remember in the hierarchy he had a lot of power. He was a male and he was the top of the hierarchy, a lot of authority and what he had said tapped into my own already existing identity of bad self, my own shame around being a driven person and being self-centered and being, you know, egocentric and ambitious and all the things that I didn't like myself for.

So it was like, well, wait a minute, is it true I'm bad? You know? And so I just meditated a lot and the process that really turned me towards healing was, and this is why I brought up the fear thinking as I went from all the swirl of I'm bad or am I bad or how could this happen, he wouldn't have done it if there wasn't something wrong with me to I made a kind of U-turn. I said, okay, stop the thinking and I went to my heart and I knew that all I could do was be with the waves.

Like I had to go under the thoughts to the waves of hurt, of grief around betrayal, the anger, the shame. So the process was drop the fear of thinking and just go directly into the rawness of the waves and it was in that presence that a quality of self-class, that a quality of self-conclusive, and it was self-compassion and tenderness emerge that became so filled with light, so full, it was so tender and so big that I realized that this was, this was who I was. That was more true than any of the stories, either of us, him or me were telling me about me, you know?

And so then the after the rain was I just stayed a long time in that presence. I kept saying this is it, just rest in this, just rest in this. And just to follow up in the story, the forgiveness became possible because it was just as limiting to stay in the abused victim story as it was anything else. It wasn't because, oh, he deserves to be forgiven, it was just for the freedom of my own heart. And now I can look at him and see a really being that's very mixed, that he's not alive anymore but him being driven by his own demons and whatever.

And I left the community and I warned other people because I didn't want other people treated that way. So it was ultimately empowering and at the time devastating and I share it because it had everything to do with the seeds of real trust. Not that I won't cause harm and haven't caused harm but that that compassionate presence that openness, wakefulness, tenderness is more the truth of who I am than any of the waves. Let me invite you to reflect for a moment, if you will. One of the pathways to trusting Buddha in nature is to open unconditionally to the waves.

This is what we've been practicing here, that all the waves belong. So just explore that. for a moment together, utterly awake, senses wide open, just open your senses, listening, the sounds are known, sensations are felt, feelings experienced, sensing the possibility of really letting life be just as it is, coming out of any idea or story, this is a kind of yes to the moment that can go infinitely deep. just allowing this life right now. You might sense who are you

when there's truly a yes to the life of the moment to these waves right now. Who's here? And if you sense a solidity, a clutch, another wave, just opening to that, opening and becoming the openness in the foreground, sound, sensations, feelings, and sensing in the background that alert, inner, stillness, the openness that includes it all, everything belongs.

As Mark Nippo says, everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief. The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I've lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center under it all we have that no one can take away and all that we've lost face each other.

It is there that I'm adrift feeling punctured by a holiness that exists. exists inside everything. I am so sad and everything is beautiful. So one of the pathways to discovering the awareness, openness and tenderness that's what we are is through the waves. The other pathway is the two wings, mindfulness and love. The other pathways directing our attention to remember love. To remember love. And this is what we do with our heart practices. We're shifting on purpose from fear of thinking, the head thinking, to the kind of heart thinking that helps us reconnect with that belonging that's always here, to reconnect and dissolve that small

self-identity. So we can sense it some in the groups when we get together and there's that shared vulnerability. And then we start sensing that when we're all. all holding a space for that, we become that tender space and that deepens trust. And then in our daily life this is where we can really find the trust gets very, very much kind of integrated into our being, all the moments of giving and receiving when we can in those moments in our consciousness sense, oh we, it's we. larger space. It could be the gestures, the smiles, the little bit of the melting of the

heart and sometimes it's dramatic but it's the connections with each other that truly help us to trust who we really are. So a story and then we'll be closing for you that shows that to me was such a, it's such a beautiful example of how in relating we can go be beyond the small self-identity. And this is a story told by Terry Dobson, who's an American, a white American in Japan studying Aikido. This is decades ago.

And Aikido is the art of reconciliation and really the idea is that whoever has the mind to fight has broken their connection with the universe. But Terry was studying Aikido and while he saw the wisdom of this, he really wanted to prove himself physically. So he's still got the identity of this young tough guy. And so one afternoon he's on a train and a large, dirty, drunk man in laborers, clothing boards and starts yelling and he's violent and he's cursing and he's swinging his fists around and he knocks a young woman with a baby into the laps of an elderly couple. So he's this violent guy and Terry figures, okay, this is my chance. I'm going to show this guy. He felt tough and holy basically.

So he's going to put an end to this guy's violence. And so he stood up and he's going to step in and the drunk guy saw him and so now he focuses all his yelling at Terry. He says, you're going to get a lesson. Terry gave him a look of disgust to egg him on and the guy's about to rush at him when enter someone else. An old man in a kimono calls out, hey, and he beckons the drunk man to come over to him. And at first the drunk's belligerent, you know,

Why the hell should I talk to you?" But the old man just beams. No fear, resentment, his eyes are sparkling with interest. He asks him what he was drinking and just starts talking to him. The old man tells the laborer about how every evening sitting in the garden with his wife drinking sake and how he looks at their persimintry and goes on and on and the drunk's bewildered. He goes, well, I like sake too. And the old man says, I'm sure you have a wonderful wife too.

No replies the laborer to this so strangely friendly man in a soft, sullen voice, my wife, she died last year and suddenly changed, drunk, hung his head in heavy sorrow and gently swaying with the motion of the train, this big burly man who was so threatening just moments ago began to sob. I don't got no wife, I don't got no home anymore, I lost my job, I don't got no money, I don't got nowhere to go. I'm so ashamed of myself. Big tears are rolling down his cheeks.

A spasm of pure despair ripples through his body. My, my, the elderly man says, the heart-filled care yet undiminished delight. That's very difficult predicament indeed. Sit down here and tell me about it. So Terry turned his head for one last time before because he's leaving the train now and the laborer was sprawled like a sack on the seat, his head in the old man's lap. The old man was looking down at him with a smiling compassion, his hand stroking the filthy, matted head of his confused soul.

So Terry describes leaving the train dazed, what he had wanted to do with muscle and meanness have been accomplished with a few kind words. Whatever we practice gets stronger. And if our identity is such that we practice controlling or pushing around or judging, that gets stronger. But if our muscles that we're building, which is what we're doing here together, is to remember care, remember that each person is struggling a hard struggle, that it's hard to be alive, our shared vulnerability, remembering the goodness, then our way of reaching out to each

other will keep deepening our sense of connection and trust. There's a way in which we all have to find our meta-practice, our way of remembering love, whatever really opens our heart, whatever helps us to trust. I remember last time I was at the Forest Refuge. For me I was sitting at a table and there was an elderly gentleman at the table and he looked really grim and beleaguered in his own way and I remember in my mind's eye giving him a kiss on the brow like just offering him a blessing, giving him a kiss on the brow and feeling this sense of immediate open-heartedness and connection.

And then I started in my mind's eye going around this silent retreat. And you don't look at people directly in the eye, but I kept imagining I was kissing everyone on the brow and they became more than, I mean they became dear friends, you know, in the silence. And then in my meditation I started bringing people up in my life and I'd imagine kissing them on the brow or touching them on the brow, whatever, and having them offer the same blessing to me and the sense of tenderness and belonging was so profound that it was another one of those deepening in trusting the purity of heart. And so I really invite you to experiment and find the way of remembering love that warms

your heart because it'll help you trust your heart. And we each deep down really want to trust the good of our hearts. So our final reflection, if you will, is to close your eyes and bringing to mind someone you love where it's kind of uncomplicated, it's easy to love them. Sense them right here so you can really feel and sense and remember all the goodness that you're loving, how they are when they're expressing love to you, their aliveness, their mischievousness, their intelligence, their basic goodness and in some way communicate your care. Just imagine yourself doing it, it might be through words like thank you or I love you.

It might be a kiss on the brow, it might be some energetic expression, letting it be tender and sense them receiving it, really receiving it. Perhaps you could take a moment to imagine reciprocally their expression of love to you and letting yourself receive it and feeling the heart space that opens up. You just might ask yourself who am I when this heart is open? Therrida says love tells me I'm everything. Wisdom tells me I'm nothing. Between the two my life flows.

These final moments you might sense this ocean-ness, this field of awareness, cherishing the waves so that whatever comes up regarding holding as part of your being that it belongs, there's nothing wrong, that there's a natural tenderness and presence with this changing life. Love tells me I'm everything. Wisdom tells me I'm nothing. Between the two, my life flows. May we trust who we are, many blessings. Thank you.