Tara Brach - Unconditional Love for the Life Within

Episode Date: October 8, 2011

2011-10-08 - Unconditional Love for the Life Within - (Retreat Talk) The tyranny of "should" prevents us from living and loving fully. This talk explores how we get trapped in the identity of a flawed self and the ways a wise attention can free us. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

So I begin with a namaste, a bow, and a real honoring. I am very aware that these first 24 hours of a retreat are quite interesting. I mean, we've just plucked ourselves out of whatever our daily routines are, and we get dropped into this situation where all our, all our, our habitual doings are typical ways of making decisions and moving through the day are kind of it's all stripped away it's interesting all our habitual roles you know whether it says boss or employee or parent or whatever it is it's just add it's on the sidelines and our common escapes are removed I mean the ways that we soothe ourselves you know even food

food. It's like we just you know even when we're eating it's like we can't it's not the same when we're on silence sitting with a circle of people we can't use our typical escapes and then you know we're in these group norms where we can't comfort ourselves with the ways we're used to connecting so as much as there's this cherishing of silence and many of us have it some of the reassurances that come from looking in someone's eyes or getting a friendly smile, it's not there. So we can get this sense of not friendly, even when that's not actually the intention at first. I feel like our identity gets messed with when we get dropped into this situation. And ultimately in a great way,

I mean, things have to kind of break apart for something more truthful to emerge, right? But it's not easy. It's not easy. So just at the same time that things are taken away or habitual props in some ways, we're shining this light on what's going on. So that makes for even more interest. We start seeing the ways that our psyche operates.

And one of the main things that we see is how much we move through time evaluating what's going on. Ooh, I like this feeling of the sunshine. Oh, I don't like the feeling of my lower back. Ah, chance to take a nap. Oh, this food doesn't taste the way. You know, it just goes on and on and on, this evaluation. And I bring this up because underneath that, we're evaluating how am I doing?

I mean, that's really a very big part of our psyches, this monitoring of how I'm doing. And often, and I call this the trance that we're in, some part of us is possessed by a sense of, I'm not getting what I wanted or I'm not doing it the way I need to be doing it. I'm not meditating well enough. I'm not moving through this the way I, according to my standard.

Now, I don't bring this up because I sense that everybody's always doing that, but I know it's one of the root forms of suffering, this sense of wanting it different. Now is not okay. And underneath now is not okay. Embedded in it is, the self that's experiencing now is not okay. So what I'd like to explore tonight, I kind of think of it as radical acceptance revisited. It's been about 10 years plus, and so I'd like to draw on some of the themes that have felt really compelling to me, and then add on some of the dimensions that in recent years have really emerged. and maybe to ask you to begin by just reflecting for a second,

just to close your eyes for a few moments, to voluntarily occupy the place in you that you might call the judge, and to just to these words say, here at retreat, I should be what? How should you be according to your judge? What does your judge tell you you should be? How should you be behaving, experiencing, looking, meditating.

Maybe you're saying things like I should be present or I should be kind or filled with gratitude. You might add this, I should not be. How should you not be here at retreat? What are some of the shoulds? I should not be judgmental. I should not be lazy. I should not be sleepy.

I just ask yourself, well, how am I actually? How much of a gap is there? a more in a kind of a deeper way. This is an inquiry of how are you with yourself? How are you feeling about yourself in this process? Has there consciously or unconsciously been an evaluation that has caused pain and how you're doing? And I would guess that for some, yes, and some that's not what you're struggling with.

But you can open your eyes when you'd like. Whenever there is a strong should and then a gap with reality, there's trouble. Does that make sense? When there's a strong should and then there's a gap, that's trouble. So one of the ways I like to think of is whenever we're arguing with reality in any way, doesn't matter how right we are. That's suffering. So my own story, my judge says in terms of my shoulds that I should show up the situations

and I should keep my promises and I should not let people down. And in situations where I've given myself to be helpful, I should show up and be helpful. Now there's about 10 of you in this group that probably know where I'm going with this, right? I can see the looks on some of your faces. For the rest of you to know, at 4.30 today, I had a group and I didn't show up for it. And it's the first time I've ever done that, but that shoulds pretty strong in me. You know, retreats really matter to me, and I should do what I plan to do on a retreat. That's a big one for me.

So it was quite interesting to sense the gap between the should and the actuality. if you haven't seen the sign we are having a group to make up tomorrow but I'm not trying to wiggle out here so so what happens when that when we encounter that sense of that gap it's a really important question now just to mention that for many of us the should how things should be and when we have suffering it may not consciously land on ourselves as much as others. Somebody else should be different. Just as much suffering with that. But that's just where it happens to land.

Our life should be different. Whenever that's the case, whenever there's a should in any of those fronts, there's still underneath that a sense of a self that's not okay. Whenever you're experiencing that life should be different, if you check in, you'll find out you're not feeling great about yourself. There might be a swell of self-righteousness, but you don't feel really good about yourself.

Now I'm going to keep coming back to the word should because I feel like it's really important that there's a lot of suffering around it. And there's a lot of neurosis, just plain everyday neurosis. There's a Florida Scott Maxwell says, no matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

So, Radical Acceptance Revisited. This is Sri Narasarga Data. And I love this reading, and I share it a lot, and just invite your reflection, and we'll come back to it in a few different ways

for the remainder of this time. He basically says, he basically says, all that you need is already within you. It's already here. says only you must approach yourself with reverence and love self-condemnation and self-distrust or grievous errors 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 make love of yourself perfect deny yourself nothing give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them. You are beyond. I want to pay a little attention

to some of the language in here because the language can stop you at times. I like this. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of the love you bear for yourself. That all existence wants to be alive. And so our most primitive ways of trying to be alive and stay alive,

and this is the limbic brain, is to grasp and to push away. So that's a part of our way of operating to try to have this organism flourish. It might not be the most enlightened way as we evolve, but it's the first kind of primitive sign of our love for aliveness, right? And yet we have so quickly condemn ourselves for it. It's part of this animal organism. So he starts with that, but then he keeps going in this way. I really like.

He says, make love of yourself perfect. Now, the word perfect is not to set up another should. You should love yourself perfectly. It has to do with profound dedication. Like really dedicate yourself to this loving. Really dedicate yourself. We're going to go on to why. Are we loving ourself? Isn't that, you know, non-Buddhist?

Well, love of ourselves is really talking about love of this life that's right here. It's really loving life, and yet being willing to love the life that's most immediate in our realm of attention. We start with what's right here. And if we can't love the aliveness that's right here, it's very difficult in a visceral, wholehearted way to embrace anything else. So it's this invitation to bring this loving attention to the whole display of phenomena we call self, all these different facets of self. And then he concludes, and this is where it ends, it's like, what happens if we're truly loving this life right here without holding back? What happens?

There's a complete dissolution of any sense of a self that's being loved. There's just love. we're beyond. In the moments that there's unconditional love of the life that's right here, the whole sense of identity completely dissolves and opens. So this is the description of the pathway that he's giving. And why is it so central? I mean, why is it so critical that we dedicate ourselves?

Because this core twist in us that keep, keeps us looping in feeling limited, that keeps us looping in not being able to be intimate with others, that keeps us looping and addictive behavior comes from this sense of something's wrong with me. And until we can untwist that, until we can love ourselves into realizing really who's here, we're going to stay caught in that kind of looping or patterning. I don't know any way of this unfolding awakening to happen without a really deep commitment to loving the life that's right here. Now, you might have a different language for it.

Love might feel too like, oh, love, love, love, you know, like kind of ooey-gooey, and it might be a sense of revere, respect, or honor, cherish. Might have a different language. But it's the same spirit. So in leading up to writing radical acceptance, what motivated me was watching how not only were people turned on themselves and I was turned on myself,

how much the war against ourselves was really there, but how much it affected everything, like any relationship, any activity, if we're on some way thinking something's wrong with me, there's not a way that we can be wholehearted. there's a fear of mistakes there's a fear that others will find out who we are we are unable to be spontaneous

how profound and pervasive the effect of something's wrong with me was so that really impacted me and then I started really exploring the second arrow which is that whatever's going on that's difficult we have this habit of then of adding and I'm bad for this so there's depression and I'm bad for this depression

there's fear and we get judgmental about how we get uptight and reactive we're hurting and then there's disdain for how we're coping so there's suffering and then insult to injury the second arrow what happened after writing the book was that I have rediscovered over and over again how tricky it is how tricky it is how trick that layer of not okay can be. Because ostensibly I don't, you know, I don't trash myself. And yet I started finding that no matter what mood I was in, if there was a feeling of being

caught, hand in hand with it was a sense that I was doing something wrong, that I was personally failing. One of the kind of shockers for me was, as many of you know, over a decade or so, I started getting sicker and sicker. And I remember one summer going up to Cape Cod, and at that point I could no longer run. And so I was trying to kind of speedwalk on the beach just to get some, you know, endorphins going. And I came back home, and I had so badly injured my knees

from that attempt that I couldn't even go up and down my stairs, you know. And I got really sick. It just a cascade of sickness happened. And so for several weeks, I was a terrible patient. You know, people had to help me, Jonathan, Alex, people around me. And I was irritable. But the worst thing was I was entirely self-preoccupied, like, what's going wrong? And how am I going to get better?

And I remember at one point, I asked a question I often ask, which is, you know, in this moment, what is between me and really? feeling free. And a kind of voice inside me at that point said, you know, I just can't stand how I feel. Just can't stand it. And, you know, when we're uncomfortable,

we want to push it away. And then the voice went, I can't stand my life. And then it went, I hate myself. And then it paused. Okay, so what's here? And I realized that I could not stand the self, that was so selfish, that was so self-centered, that was so preoccupied, that had no room in her

psyche for anything outside. It was like my world had gotten so small. And then that, seeing that brought up such a sorrow because I couldn't help it. You know, it was just happening. There was a sense like I was supposed to be able to be different. So this is the should, okay? I should be a better sick person. And I'll say to you that throughout being sick I've had that that's an undercurrent that if I don't catch it, my identity gets wrapped around it, that I'm sick and I should be doing this better. Do you understand how that's a second arrowing? And so that brought up a kind of sorrow that had me deepen my commitment to just what Srinargaratis talking about, to really, really be dedicated to caring about this life,

to be alert to being at war. And I remember I began doing this kind of scan where I would just pause in any moment and say, okay, how am I relating to myself now? And if I could see it, I wouldn't be as caught in it. And that's really the deal. And I started this practice where I would see it. And sometimes it was difficult,

I would just say something to myself like, sweetheart, it's okay. Some kind of term of affection. And it was amazing. Even if I wasn't feeling the sentiment, just saying sweetheart or hon or, you know, it was because my intention was to offer kindness. And by the way, that's a trick with the meta meditation or loving kindness practice.

You can go through the motions. If your intention is to love yourself, even if your heart's not there, going through the motions actually helps to bring you back home. Any suffering is a call for loving attention. Any suffering. Any suffering is a severed belonging and something in us wants love. So the challenge is that when we're turned on ourselves, and this is we're going to drop at another level. deeper here. When we're turned on ourselves, it's in our body. It's not just, I think I'm not doing things well, but there's a feeling in the body that's a big clutch, and it's very hard to unwind

that. So we begin to look and say, well, how did that get so deep in us, the sense that I should be different, that I'm not interesting as I am, that I'm not, I don't make enough of a difference, I don't deserve love. Something's basically flawed. How does that get so... We're not born with it. We're not born with the feeling of something's wrong with me.

We're born with a sense of separateness that is very real, a very real sense of separateness that makes us feel vulnerable. All organisms have that. In our separateness, we're scanning for danger and our greatest need is for safety and love.

And when that's not met, we get afraid and angry. So that's the kind of hub. Now, depending on our parents and their resonance, how much they could help us feel a sense of belonging, of being loved and seen, that soothes some. In other words, if our attachment needs are met, with our parents or with another significant,

caretaker or with someone in our environment, if we get the message of belonging, then our identity does not emerge built around the fear and anger so much. Because there's a fundamental sense of attachment and belonging, a positive attachment. The Buddhist words have a different connotation, right? But for most of us, it was pretty uneven at best. Not because our parents weren't loving beings, but they were imprinted by the culture, which is a fear-based culture that has standards to meet and anxiety about meeting them. So we were insecure about attachment. And when we're insecure about attachment, our identity then starts revolving around the ways that we are trying to get safety and avoid threats. It's a false identity. So we all

have these strategies to the degree that we didn't feel an innate sense of belonging. We all have these ways of trying to be who we want to be and who we think we should be and avoid who we shouldn't be. We all have them. You know, for some of them, it's just working real hard and just proving ourselves by achieving one thing after the next, after the next. And for someone else, it might be if we can be really charming and funny. And for someone else, it's aggressive because we have to push away the threats. And for many people, there's a sense that we have to look good. It's like in being here, there's the layer of internally how I should be,

but also the way we want to look. Unless we're really, really free, part of us is monitoring how others are looking at us. We want to be right. And it comes very early in school where there's a lot of praise and blame around being good and being right. So one child's asked, name six animals which live specifically in the Arctic. The response, two polar bears, and then three, and he crosses out three, four seals.

What was Sir Walter Raleigh famous for? He's a noted figure in history because he invented cigarettes and started a craze for bicycles. What happens during puberty to a boy? He says goodbye to his childhood and enters adultery. What are what is a vibration? These are real answers. What is a vibration? Well, there are good vibrations and bad vibrations.

Good vibrations were discovered in the 1960s. And so we as a child get these messages. And then as we get older, we get messages. Our body shouldn't look like this and our mind shouldn't behave like this, right? So we get older and there's still these messages of how we should be, how we should be. Working people, frequently asked retired people, what they do to make, day's interesting. Well, for example, the other day, Mary, my wife and I, I went into town and visited a shop. When we came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket. We went up to him,

and I said, come on, man, how about giving a senior citizen a break? He ignored us and continued writing the ticket. I called him a creep. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn out tires. So Mary called him a nut face. He finished the second ticket and put it on the rinshield with the first. Then he said, started writing more tickets. This went on for about 20 minutes. The more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote. Just then our bus arrived and we got on it and went home. We tried to have a little fun each day now that we're retired. It's important for our age. So there are some exceptions to the shoulds. So there's the shoulds and then the right-hand man of should-is guilt, which is, you know,

the feeling in our body that then has us doing things to feel better. The is again one of the strategies we do things to look better or seem better to relieve the the pain of the should but the should's still there okay a man wrote a letter to the IRS saying I've been unable to sleep knowing that I cheated on my income tax I have understated my taxable income that have enclosed a check for 150 dollars if I still can't sleep I'll send the rest but the main point I'm trying to make is that the judge has a very central role in the psyche that on some level we're always evaluating on some level to the extent we're not free there's a experience that we want life to be different than it is

and a lot of the time we want this being right here to be different and as long as there's a strong should and a gap they're suffering we suffer in large and small ways we suffer in large and small ways. And I'll just give an example for myself that, you know, because we take on these ideas of how we should be and it can carry through our life without us being that aware of it. When I joined a spiritual community in ashram, my job in the ashram, I was teaching yoga and running the yoga center. And I was devastated when our spiritual teacher came to town and I was not one of the three women that were chosen to serve him, to bring tea and to massage his feet and to be there as part of the group that were serving him.

They chose the women that were real nurturers, that were real earth mothers, that were the cooks, that had a real good way with decorating and doing things. And I was not a nurturing. I ran the yoga center. I taught the yoga, but I wasn't the one chosen to be up close, serving, I was really, really upset about that. And I remember when I had my son, and as he grew up as a mother, a lot of my self-doubts would come up like he'd get sick and I wasn't great,

had taken care of him when he was sick. And the idea of, you know, Halloween costumes, I was not the mother that made them, you know, never. I mean, sewing and ironing, I don't know if I had an iron, you know, it was like, so that was, but it wasn't something that was, I could say, well, I'm good at other things. There's something in me that felt like something was missing in me as a woman that I wasn't, I wasn't the one that made the meals for him that were, I mean, I made the simple meals. His dad made the really good meals. And then as, as many of you know, I met Jonathan about eight years ago. And, you know, when I met him, he weighed 300 pounds. And, you know, look what I've done

so our deepest insecurities are when we run against the shoulds and they're internalized standards they're ones that are given to us by our parents and then some of the most painful ones are when we run against the cultures

and I want to read you am I gorgeous my child as drawing the word out like Poldaffy, gorgeous? Yes, I said you are. The pink and teal dress is probably made of highly flammable material, some chemist's approximation of tulle and satin.

Pudgy fingers decorated with pink polish trace the sequins on the bodice. I love this. A giant pair of bubble gum pink wings flap slowly, little feet dance in sparkly red slippers. I'm just like a real princess.

Yes, I say you are. thick blonde hair, blue eyes, rosy cheeks, flawless skin. This child is the American epitome of beauty. This child, my son. He is four years old and prefers to wear dresses. Maybe it's a phase, maybe not. Even as I wonder how I produce such an angelic-looking creature, I wish you would put on some pants and go back to playing with toy tractors.

not because it matters to me, it doesn't, but because I'm already hearing in my head the name-calling he will face in kindergarten. Many adults already seem a bit disturbed by the dresses. Strangers utter awkward apologies when they realize he's not female. This culture wants little boys to dream only of baseball trucks and trains.

This culture has no room for little boys who want to be gorgeous. He picks up parasol, a neighbor gave him, and opens it jauntily over his shoulder. Am I beautiful, he asks? I sweep him into my arms and plant a kiss on his cheek. Always, I respond. It's painful that we grow up with messages that we should be other than we are. For some, it happens in more subtle ways,

but we're in a culture that elevates the white race, race, that elevates heterosexuality, that elevates certain kinds of intelligences over other kinds of intelligences, certain body shapes. If I keep going down the list, we'll realize each one of us that we just don't fit in some of these ways. And if we happen to latch onto them, it's painful. So there was a hospice nurse who spent many, many years working with people, and she said that the most common regret that she encountered, the most common regret, was that I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I'd say part of that is not the life my judge expected of me, too. I'd add that on. the sense that how many moments and how many days of our life do we live according to something that we've internalized or laid on ourselves or thought others were laying on ourselves

as some sort of a sense of duty that doesn't come out of what we really love or some sense of hyper responsibility that's not authentic being good you know but according to what So the inquiry, I think that's really important is, you know, what, if you were living true to your deepest self, you know, who would you be? What are the shoulds that keep you boxed in? And how do we wake up out of them? Sweet nurse Argodot is basically saying, I plead with you, you know, plead with you, make this love perfect, really embrace this life just as it is. And yet we have this. fear that if I embrace this life, that I'll never be the way I should be. That's the should speaking. So how do we undo? So the last part of this talk is exploring about how to wake up out of the trance of should, whether it's the culture's imposing or whatever level. And there's always these two wings that we come back to that you're familiar with many of you, that one of the

pieces of waking up is to see it, to really, really contact and see and experience this and the suffering of this and to hold it with kindness, to really hold what we see with kindness. I remember working with one man at, oh, years ago at Spirit Rock, I was teaching a month-long retreat, and he decided that he was committing his retreat to judging mind. The whole retreat, he said that whatever happens he was going to just keep noticing judging and and he said that at first he was so overwhelming that he felt devastated like when he started catching the the hugeness of how much whether it was laid on himself or others it was just devastating and then he said he began to just name me just would say judging and pause and try to be kind and he said

it was a bit of a routine at first it was kind of like mechanical okay judging pause was okay. But in time he said he developed this tenderness, that he would pause and he'd feel the same kind of squeezing. It was kind of like, oh, okay. And that tenderness turned into a space. And space is a sign that the identity is loosening up. Do you know what I mean? As soon as there's some space around it, we're not so much the judge or the judgeee, we're kind of inhabiting something larger. By the end of the month, he was not free. of judgment, but there was more familiarity with that tender open space than a sense of, oh, this judge or judgey is who I am. And that is the movement towards freedom. Now, sometimes

it's very, very hard, especially if there's been trauma, because the sense of the pain and suffering and that there's something wrong with it is so deep in the body that, it requires some help. I want to read you a I was working with a woman some years ago who was sexually abused and she ended up writing a story about her experience and I just want to read a piece of it to you. Some of you might remember this from radical acceptance and I want to take this and move it forward in the theme we have tonight. She's seven years old. She's hiding in a closet and terrified

after an unexpected attack by her drunk and enraged father and she's praying I can't take it anymore help she opens her eyes to see a fairy and a haze of blue with a glittering wand and she lets fairy know how her father's been beating her and her mother doesn't help and how she feels they both wish she was dead

and the good fairy listens with tears in her eyes and tells her that while she can't make all the pain disappear she can help her get through this time she can help her forget and then remember later when she's able to handle it. With a wave of the wand, the good fairy says, I'm going to send things into different parts of your body and they're going to hold them for you

until you feel strong enough to let them move freely again. And she explains that she's going to tighten, dull the pelvis and the belly and constrict her heart and throat and just protect her from the raw intensity of the hurt and the fear and the brokenheartedness. She says, you'll have trouble feeling and being close to people, but it will be your way of surviving. At those times that the pain erupts, you will find your own ways to control it.

Ways that may not look good to the world, they might not look good to you, but they'll be of temporary comfort. And you, my darling, will be fairly functional human in spite of all this because you have a strong mind and you can hold all this in, and I'll be helping you. The child looked directly into the fairy's eyes and asked, how will you help? Will you come back to see me? You will not forget everything. I will leave a voice inside you that will urge you to reconnect with your whole self.

It may be a very long process, but in time, you will feel an urgent calling to step out of the beliefs, to unwind your body, to release what it's been holding. You'll learn presence. You'll learn to reach out for compassion and support from others. But you will be the same person you'll be just whole again, spiritually awake, This is because your soul has already been there, just hidden by the scars of this lifetime. So here's how the story ends. The good fairy put her arm around the child's shoulders and gently led her to bed. Little girl finally relaxed into a deep sleep.

The good fairy gazed tenderly at the small innocent face and then whispered her goodbye. When you wake up, you will forget I was here. You will forget you asked for help. You will forget the sharpness of your daily pain. This is the only way I know to get you through this. You are a beautiful child. I love you and in fact your parents love you although they're incapable of showing it to you. You will have to love yourself enough to heal so that when you're older your life will be powerful, full, and free.

One day you will know who you really are. You will trust your goodness and know your belonging. Until then and for always, I love you. With her permission, Rosalie's permission, I shared this on a Wednesday night, and many people were in tears. And I think more people I talked to after that class than I've ever talked to. And there were two things about it that really mattered to people and mattered to Rosalie. And one was that she realized that that place in her needed help and that it reached out. that that was really just an integral part of healing

is that when we feel small and caught, that we can reach out. And then the second part was that the things she had done as she grew up to cope were not her fault. That it was too much to handle when she was young and she had to have strategies to hold back the pain, to cover it over, to defend herself, to whatever it was.

it wasn't her fault. And for the people at that class, I think that was one of the biggest pieces. They would say, well, I have all these things I do that I've been judging myself for, and I can see their ways of just trying to cope. And there is no way to heal the core suffering if we're blaming ourselves for the ways we're coping with it.

Does that make sense? If it's very deep suffering, And, you know, for most of us, the stuff that really is difficult happened when we're very, very young. Whatever the role modeling was from our parents, whatever the ways of being judged or not seen very early. If we then develop strategies to try to get approval or safety or love and then hate ourselves for our strategies, that's a second arrow. And there's no way home. So for Rosalie, the first step was that she began to, you know, I often say, forgiven, forgiven. You know, she would do things that, and she was, you know, she was bulimic, and she smoked way too much pot,

and she had an edge to her, and things, she'd play out things, and she'd go, forgive and forgiven, just knowing it was part of the strategies in her to try to feel better. And she reached out at first to the good fairy and then as an adult that emerged into the divine mother. She kept on doing that. When she'd feel really stuck, she'd call on that sense of a loving presence. She had her own sense of kind of a shimmer and light and surrounding her and kind of pouring into her. She'd call on that. So those are the two pieces, de-shaming.

in other words, not blaming the strategies and reaching out that were key. And when she, those were there, she began to bring the two wings that I've described. Okay, notice what's going on in this moment and hold it with kindness. She started to be able to really be with herself in a way that was quite powerful

to really regain a sense of her own spontaneity and power and freedom. So that's Rosalie's story. I just want to say that for many people, they say, well, is that Buddhist, you know, this reaching out for something? If everything I need is within me, why would I be reaching out? I just want to say that it's a very powerful, skillful and compassionate pathway back home. When we can't hold ourselves with love and with compassion to bring to mind some way, one, whether it's a person that's alive or no longer alive, or a spiritual figure, or it might be our dog, and for many people it's a pet, but to bring to mind some being, the Buddha, Jesus, Kuan Yin, and to sense that through that being's eyes and with that being's heart that were being held. I remember one woman some years ago in our community that I got very close to was dying of cancer and she had isolated herself a lot.

And when we talked about, you know, what is it that you really need to, you know, be able to be with dying? it was that she said, I just need to feel loved. And so I said, who do you want to feel loved by? And her response was her mother, who was no longer alive. And I said, well, what would that be like? And so she said the words, please love me, and she imagined and felt her mother's love. And then I said to say it again.

So she just did this thing where she would just go, please love me. and she'd bring to mind whoever she wanted to love her and then she just feel it and then she'd say it again please love me until she was like imagining a tree and saying please love me and feeling the earth energy of the tree coming into her it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever witnessed

I mean she ended by saying you know Tarwin if you know you're dying and you accept it it's not hard to feel God loving you but she had to go through that process for her what she really came to find was that love that's beyond that is beyond any spiritual figure

that's not my love or you're a love or God's love unless your sense of God is this whole universe emanating love and that's what it was for her. Please love me. So reaching out is really key when we're really caught and also what's really key is then being able to forgive the manifestations.

For one woman, friends of mine were teaching classes in a maximum security prison, and one woman was known as a bully, and she was in the class. They were teaching these meditation classes a number of years ago. So she took the class, and just to describe her a little, She's over six feet tall, large woman bright dyed red hair, tattoos all over her body. She would protect some women and relentlessly insult and intimidate others. She was a scary figure. And during the meditation classes, my friend would teach it.

She would sit there and other people would join in in discussions, but she would sit there silently and scowling. Intimidating. But she never missed a session in this eight-week course. So at the final class, each person shared. and when it was her turn, the name was Vanessa. She said, well, what I really like was that poem about the pirate. Some of you might know the poem that I'm going to mention.

This is Call Me by My True Names, Ticknott-Hans poem. This is the poem that Vanessa liked. I only read a couple of phrases from it. She says, I'm the mayfly, metamorphosing on the surface of the river. And I'm the bird which when spring comes arrives in time to eat the mayfly. I'm the child in Uganda all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks, and I'm the arms merchant selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the 12-year-old girl refugee in a small boat who throws herself into the ocean after

being raped by a sea pirate, and I'm the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. Please call me by my true names so I can hear all my cries and last. at once so I can see that my joy and pain are one please call me by my true names so I can wake up and so the door of my heart can be left open the door of compassion so Vanessa said well that poem got me to thinking it made me know something she said all my life I was the bad one the problem one now I know that I am suffering too and that for her was the change point. She, from what people heard, word of mouth, was a sad and much

quieter person. She was coming to terms with the realness of her own suffering. But what I found is that when we're having a hard time, we tend to make ourselves wrong in some way so we don't get directly. This is suffering. if you get it directly, if you really pause and get out, this hurts. This hurts. This judging is, as I explored with one of my groups today, now I only had one group.

Okay. Explored with that group. That the judge hurts our soul. It squeezes us. So we are not free to be who we are. It blinds us to who we are. if we get it to soul suffering this judgment you know if we commit that deeply to to not believing it and to pausing and to bringing seeing this moment what's happening and kindness forgiveness forgiveness

we're freeing our souls we're freeing ourselves to be who we are but we have to see that it's suffering and it's very easy to say well you know my suffering's not as bad as other people's or I deserve it or whatever. So we have to kind of be able to peel that away. Whenever they're suffering, the only healing response is loving attention. And when we offer it, and it could be on any level,

when they're suffering and we offer attention, it might be on the level, maybe all we can do is just name it, like the man at Spirit Rock at the beginning, just name it and pause. That's moving us in the direction. of discovering a much deeper sense of who we are. Just to even name it, just because, and why does that work?

It's because there's a commitment or an intention to be kind. The intention opens the door. There are sometimes described on the spiritual path three phases. And the first one's actually realization that there's some deep intuition that who we are is more, than the story we're living in. It's more than who the judge says we are. It's more than who the judge says other people are. So there's this realization or deep intuition of what's what. And then a big stretch of the path is what we might call getting familiar, where we start getting

more and more familiar with a larger sense of who we are and who others are. That becomes more and more real that I might be living in this storyline with a filter of something's wrong with me and something's wrong with you. But that doesn't feel as true as when I sense the being that's

looking through those eyes and who's really here looking out. It's the same spirit. It's the same presence. That feels more real. That's familiarized. And then the last phase is embodying it.

that you start moving through your day, where, you know, it might float through the judgments and the clenching, but there's such a trust in who you are beyond what any story is, that your way of moving through life embodies it. Your body itself has a flow because judgment stops us. It tightens us. there is actual blockages in the body that go with judging. There's a flowing in the body. There's openness. There's a sense of space inside us and around us. And embodiment means we're free to serve.

We're free to savor. Because there's this trust in who we are. So I started with this flag of should. I want to close by saying, you know, many of you might be familiar. familiar with that description of freedom from the Third Send Patriarch, which is being without anxiety about imperfection. Can you imagine just for a moment what that would be like? Because we're all sitting here in these bodies and with these minds and the neurosis and the thoughts and

this and that. What if we were really without anxiety about this whole constellation? What if there was a trust in essential goodness that was deep enough? Can you imagine for a moment? Because that's a glimmer of freedom. One of the men, IMCW's doing a prison program called Insight on the Inside. And one of the men who was recently, I think, released, wrote this poem, but he was part of the program. He said, this is just the end of it. He said, first and last, though, is this.

Fall in love with yourself. Whatever your flaws, whatever your faults, no person is more deserving of your love and forgiveness. We get hooked on the judge because it's a way of trying to control things. We're just trying to make things different and better, so not to judge the judge. But if we begin to sense the pain of it and the suffering of it, we get committed.

And that's, you know, my hope is for all of us, and I'm saying this for me, for all of us as we wake up together, that that dedication just gets deeper and deeper to loving life. And that means loving the life that's right here, truly loving this life. So we'll just close, if you will, taking a few moments just to meditate. brief reflection as we close and invite yourself into the silence that's here we hear the words

make love of this life perfect this self-perfect just sense who's here sense the stance of sensation and the different moods or emotions that might play through the heart perhaps sensing if if you're in touch with it what my angela described is that ache of the heart that wants to come home that really wants to realize and inhabit the truth of who we are can you imagine making love of yourself perfect of this life, this moment perfect

what would that be like? What does it mean this moment to make love of yourself perfect? Just this moment and now just this moment who are you when love of this life This being right here is perfect.

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.