Tara Brach - Unfolding of the Sacred Feminine (retreat) (2015-06-26)

Episode Date: July 17, 2015

Unfolding of the Sacred Feminine (retreat) (2015-06-26) - The sacred feminine expresses the qualities of heart that emerge as we open beyond identifying with the egoic, separate self. In this talk, Tara tracks a series of challenging experiences in her own life that catalyzed an awakening of heart, and explores how for each of us, the places of difficulty can help us realize our belonging to life and the loving awareness that is our true essence. (given at the 2015 IMCW Women's Retreat) Your support will enable us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time. Visit: www.tarabrach.com.

The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist, and author. I'm a stay and good evening. I'd like to invite you to begin our time together right now, if you will, by closing your eyes and taking a moment to sense what your aspiration is just for this evening, just for this time together as we reflect Darmatalk and so on, what's your aspiration? Open your eyes if you'd like, but just sense how your heart is when you even check in with aspiration. And I'll share for me that before I begin speaking, always with a Darmatalk and often other times, there's some

quality of prayerfulness. And what I mean by that is there's some intentional connecting with what matters to me. So I begin tonight and there's this prayer that our time together will in some way serve our shared awakening of heart. And I feel a part of that. I might be in a role in some way, but it's really we're waking up together. And when I'm a part of that, I'm I pause and reflect on that, something shifts and I am inhabiting more of a sincere presence just by remembering that, that's what matters to me. There's a shift from to any extent that there's been some egoic conditioning like, okay, I'm here and I need to do a good job and I hope that it, you know, that world to,

may we wake up together. and I get more real. And I share that because I feel like this whole path is one of this shift from our sense of an egoic self with our narrative and our beliefs and that familiar sense of separate small self to the what we are that's more a field of loving, of awareness. that that's the whole path. And what I'd like to do tonight,

it's something different. I actually have never done this in a talk. And that's a more personal reflection of some of the key points in my life when my practice and what was going on kind of unfolded something and woke me up out of a kind of egoic place. And that the shift was distinctly from

a tight selfness into more of that loving awareness. So, I'm going to use the language of the sacred feminine. I like the language. I think there's something beautiful. And you might think of it as the two wings of the bird that we often describe as the nature of awareness and that one wing, which in its full bloom is the sacred masculine, is to see clearly what's true.

And then the other wing in its full unfolding is to absolutely unconditionally love what's seen. So I'll be, as with all talks, the filter, the emphasis will be on the, on this tenderness and heart that liberates us. That in any moment that your heart gets softer and more tender, there's a dissolution of that separate self-feelior. and you become more who you really are. And those moments can't happen unless there's a quality of clear seeing and presence. You cannot really separate out the wings.

So this is just a slant on the sacred feminine. So it's been an, I'm aware in the world, it's been, you know, it always feels like, oh my God, these are really intense times. And oh my God, these are really intense times, you know. So I want to share that today, there's kind of an intensity that's in the hope-giving evolutionary sense, that is that the Supreme Court, five to four, voted to affirm the right for same-sex marriages. Happy-making, yes? Yeah, yeah.

So there's this sense of, at least some people believe this, I feel this, that we feel this, that we are evolving and that the evolving by nature, what we call the shadow side is the unconsciousness and the more primitive ways we try to make it through. All organisms

have ways of feeling separate and afraid and trying to grasp on and trying to push away aggressing. So each of us in our personal lives and as societies and through the evolution of the species,

there's just been this evolving from living in a more narrow, primitive identity, to waking up and waking up to more of a wholeness, a sense of a shared belonging where we're really living and expressing from loving presence. But that, to me, is the direction. And each of us, as a... I feel has suffering that emerges that's kind of a calling from awareness itself saying, okay, you're living in two squeeze and identity. You're going to have to relax and open more.

And it comes in the shape of fear and anger and grief. But it's a sign that in some way we're believing in a self that's less than the truth of who we are. Sufferings awake up. And as part of our path, the other wake up is that we have an intuition of the who we are as the more unfolded being. It's that somehow each of us has a sense of what it might be to love without holding back. We have a kind of a sense, we have a longing for it. Our longing is a sign that we already know about it.

Does that make sense? have a sense of belonging and oneness. There are times can be in nature with another person where something drops away and we just feel the sense of belonging. So for me in my own life, it was a lot in nature when I was very young that something would drop away and I'd get those glimmers of the what's possible. And I had this image of being in a kind of orb and I was going around on my separate self-orb. I didn't have that language, but it was a kind of a sense of an orb. And now and then, I'd sense this mystery

that was so much bigger than what I was paying attention to. And often it came through beauty. I mean, I remember being 11 or 12 and camping in the Shenandoah off of Skyline Drive in Virginia. And I was with my family and going out before anybody woke up and watching a sunrise. And I just remember the sense of,

oh, there's something more than I'm usually living in. So to jump forward in time, I entered college with the plan to become a lawyer. I was going to follow in my father's foot tracks, footsteps, and I go to law school. And I left college and moved into an ashram. So something shifted. It was a little bit of a head-to-heart thing

that I was going along a prescribed path that, you know, fit in with my family and my egoic understanding of myself and something cracked open during college that had very little to do with the coursework I was doing. And it had a lot more to do with suffering that, you know, I ran into that squeeze of a self that wasn't okay.

And I had to start really investigating that. And it had to do with yoga. I started doing yoga and started getting in my body and getting in touch with feelings and so on. It had to do with drugs that just, you know, went past the normal way the neuroreceptors keep the mind small and displayed a bigger, more vast, mysterious universe. So I moved into an ashram,

but the precipitating move was I went to a summer solstice gathering. I was 21 years old and we were out in New Mexico doing hours and hours of yoga and meditation. And I remember at one point sitting there and feeling the aliveness of my body, but it was no longer it had any boundary around it. It was just pure aliveness and light and it was connected with every other bit of light

in the liveliness in the universe, and I was just in love. And when I started having thoughts again for a while, I didn't have thoughts, the first thought was, I need to keep exploring the practices that keep on letting me have access to this. And within a few weeks, I was living in an ashram. I remember telling my parents, and the biggest surprise in the world, I told them, and they just kind of went, yeah, okay. You know, I think inside they must have thought I was, you know, jumped off the deep end.

But they were really, really good. In fact, within a couple of months, they came and visited at the ashram, and we wore turbans and whites and so on, and they put on turbans and wore whites and got up at 3.30 in the morning and did the yoga with us. So pretty cool. So the sacred feminine begins initially to express itself as a call, as a yearning, as a longing,

that every path, every spiritual path is energized and launched from some place of yearning. There's something in us that detects the who we are beyond our daily ideas and yearns to in some way surrender into love, into presence. So it's intuitive and suffering kind of nudges us along. And so for me it was moving into an ashram, but for others that, you know, yearning brings us to intimate relationship with someone and that becomes really, really the living center. For someone else, it's having children and devoting ourselves in that way. And for another, it's creating music or serving. I know many people that went to the Peace Corps

and it was that yearning to belong and express love. You wouldn't be here. You would not be here if there was not that energy of the sacred feminine living through you that was calling you home to the deepest, highest awareness and heart that is what you are. You would not be here. Now, just to say that that yearning is very marbled with other stuff usually for us in a day-to-day way, so we may have this longing to be all that we can be, but we also have all sorts of ideas and shoulds and frames that we place around it, including doubts about what's possible.

And so for me, when I was in college, I was very perfectionistic, and I was a hard-driving person, and I brought all my type A stuff into the ashram. So I was really a type A yogi. I mean, really. And I've shared often that for the first bunch of years, I mean, we got up at 3.30 in the morning, but I would get up at 2.30, so I had an extra hour to do yoga and meditate because I thought, I had this idea that in six years, if I tried really, really hard, I'd be enlightened.

And I have no idea where that came from. But that was my idea. And I'd go around and I'd ask teachers what else I could do to, to, you know, polish the diamond, so to speak, or whatever it was. And they would look at me and say, just relax. you know, and then I'd say, okay, just relax, and that would become my next project, you know. But some of you might know this is a classic story of a new Zen student wants to join the monastery, so he talks to the Abbot, and he said, you know, how long will take me to be enlightened?

And the abbot says 10 years, and the student says, well, what if I try really hard? And the abbot says 20 years. And he goes, hey, wait a minute, you said 10 years, for you 30 years, you know. So I had to learn about that. I had a mixed, marbled kind of sense of calling. But it was really suffering, different encounters with suffering, that drove me into a deeper presence that really revealed the love and awareness

that I was trying to get to, but that was already here. And the first big round of suffering was around a sense of personal deficiency. It was really the seeds of radical acceptance, which was this feeling, the trance of unworthiness. That was the first major layer of suffering that I had a face in order to go deeper. And that really is the gift. It's like when they're suffering, we either lock into our false refuges more intensely are something in us says, okay, stop. That didn't work. Try something different. Surrender, you know, be here. So self-aversion. I mean, I remember when in college even a very close

friend I was camping with said, you know, I'm learning to be my own best friend. And I was just like knocked over by a ton of bricks. It was like best friend. It's like I was just the harsh meanest, cruelest self-critic had that going. So many rounds of harshness, I felt a feeling of real despising myself around a food addiction, feeling like a chronic overeater, body image around the ways I showed up, you know, in my friendships. I always felt like I was being too judgmental or controlling, around my pride, my need to like be the yogi of the year. and, you know, just this sense of like, God, it's all about me, me, me. I just, and I hated myself for being so self-centered. So one of the times that it really, this is one of the memorable junctures for me,

was when my, the teacher of our community in front of a very large group of people, and this is in radical acceptance, kind of blame me and accused me for this, size of my ego. I had had a miscarriage and he said, well, your ego did it. And so that was one of those situations where, yes, it was true. I had an ego and that was emotional abuse and not a good thing to say to a woman who had just miscarried. And I get that it, for many people, that kind of abuse would have been fully traumatizing. For me, because I was fortunate not to have had abuse like that, it was suffering, but it was a wake up. because it put me in that place that either I was going to believe that I was really bad,

or I was really going to get behind myself and say, no matter what, I really want to trust this life, this being, this heart. And that was the prayer. I remember leaving that event when he was so condemning and weeping and weeping, and then the prayer came. you know, please may I accept myself as I am, may I trust my goodness? And with that was that sense of just the pain of feeling not okay. And that was when I first started learning about putting my hand on my heart

and sending a message to myself. Now I often use the phrases, you know, it's okay, sweetheart. But then I don't even remember what I said. I just in some way said, you know, you're, good. You're okay. You're okay as you are. It's, I mean, this is really to me one of the critical places in all spiritual healing is this shift from being at war with ourselves to getting the landscape of our life, getting how many moments that has kept us from enjoying being with another person or from seeing the sunset.

from being happy. And when we get that, there's a natural sense of tenderness that comes out. Srinor Sargadatta says, the mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. He says, all I ask of you is this, make love of yourself perfect. And it's not like a perfectionism, it's like dedicate yourself. Because if you can love the life that's right here, that heart will open and open. So maybe just to pause here for a moment, since we're going to be talking about a few different ways we access the sacred feminine,

and maybe to invite you, if you will, just to close your eyes. Just practice this for a moment. Just a real simple tasting or you might, in this pause, just scan and sense, is there any way right now or today that you've noticed being down on yourself, being judgmental, in some way pushing yourself out of your own heart. Maybe in an extreme way of really feeling like a failure in practice

or maybe you're opening to something going on at home and feeling really bad about yourself for it, or it might be much more subtle where there's just this inner pressure like I could be doing better, I could be making more of this, I could be trying harder, I could have more of a breakthrough experience, that sense of not enough. And if there is somewhere that you're sensing where you've divided it or you're down on yourself in some way, to let yourself honestly feel inside to what it's like to feel that that putting down, that sense of being not okay, not enough.

And to the degree that's familiar, let yourself recognize how familiar it is. And you might, as you're reflecting, just gently place your hand on your heart, so you're keeping company with whatever you're experiencing. You might adjust the pressure so it's tender. It's a communicating presence. just to notice the vulnerability, the contraction that comes when we feel not okay, when we can't trust who we are when we're not at home. Just sense in this moment what does it really mean to you to make love of yourself more

perfect? Is there some message, some energetic way of... communicating and being with your vulnerability. Notice what happens when there's a little more kindness are even the intention for a little kindness. If you'd like to relax your hand down, you can. If you'd like to open your eyes, that's fine. In the Buddhist teachings,

when we bring more loving presence, attention, attention to what's here, there's a shift in identity and that's what happens. This is the blessing of awareness. That there's a shift from that self that feels I'm bad or the judging self to being the presence that's aware and tender. That's where the freedom comes. So this is one pathway of accessing sacred presence of the feminine, is that the to begin to feel where the suffering is and offer compassion. The hand on the heart is just a gesture you can experiment. Now, that has continued.

It's not like I got that, nailed that one 25 years ago and now it's moved on to the next, but it's my identities less and less identified or organized around that one. There's less lag time. When I find myself down on myself, much more quick that the masculine archetype of recognition, juf, got it. Oh, okay, that. Oh, okay, honey. And very, very quickly, even the remembrance that, ooh, it would be a good idea to be kinder, and there's a softening and an opening. That's the power of the sacred feminine.

Another version of suffering that came along was, oh, I was probably in my early 30s, and I had a major infatuation that, and I went on to a six-week retreat, bringing that in with me. So, you know, I remember praying as I went in, God, may this thing fall away so I can really do my practice. Well, you probably know what that means. That was my practice. a lot. It kept coming back and back. I thought, okay, this could be it, this could be it. This could be the one, you know. And so finally, one wise teacher, and oh, and added on to the desire and the fixation and so on was a sense of I am really, really bad for doing this. I'm just

a terrible meditator. The Buddha taught about freeing ourselves from desire and I am hooked. So I was bad. So one wise teacher. said, don't be at war with desire. It's, you know, and that was really, really important to know. But what really freed me was what came after that when I found that, okay, the desire was always fixated outward. It was like there was always a story of a somebody out there that could make my life happy and whole. So I started, instead of paying attention to the story of that person, I started paying attention to the actual feeling of wanting. So not, not only was I not making an enemy of desire, I said, okay, desire, be all that you want

to be. But I went from that to turning the attention back to the very experience of desiring and longing. I said, okay, what is it you're wanting? And I said, well, I want to feel accompanied, I want to feel partnered, I want to feel somebody loving me. Well, what would that do? Well, then I could just relax and feel a sense of real belonging. Or what would that to, then I could just, oh, I'd just be, I'd just be open and spacious and light filled. Yeah, and then absolutely free. There'd just be a boundless radiance of beingness, tenderness, being. And this is really kind of, and so I say, okay, let that be all it is. And I would just sit there in this blazing flames of just loving presence. That's it. And I realized, wow,

It's right here. And that's about the deepest truth I know. And when I say right here it's not owned by an ego self. It's living through and the source of an innate to every being. And we miss it. The word desire comes, the root of is it away from a star? You feel away from your star like you're disconnected. We think our stars out there, but the star, the experience of connection, is found in presence.

It's not found anywhere else. So I call this tracing back the desire and it's not my languageing. I first heard it from a Korean Zen teacher who wrote a book called Tracing Back the Radiance. And the Radiance takes shape as desire or as aversion or as hate. It takes place as energy and if you trace it back, you come to the very source of that energy, which is this living, loving, presence.

This is Cassia Berman. She says, The mother of the universe refuses to let me worship her outside myself anymore. She's withdrawn inside me and tells me if I want to know her, I have to come inside too, which is the last place I want to be.

Although she's been telling me this for years, she's never gone to this extreme before of actually hiding inside me. If I want to love her, I can only do so by loving myself now. So again, we're talking about pathways to the sacred feminine, to that realization and experience of love and belonging. And we do it through self-compassion and through tracing back the feelings that are here. Give you another example for my life, which is that

not so long ago, about 10 years ago, is when I first started feeling a real, experiencing a very dramatic and real downhill tumble in terms of my health. And as many of you know, this is what ended up being the root of writing true refuge. And the suffering of that was the suffering of loss. And there's probably not one person here who doesn't have a version, or many versions, of what it means to lose something that we really, really don't want to lose. And it could be our health, and it could be our mind, and it could be somebody else's existence or their love. But we all know it because it's part of the human experience. And it's really, really difficult because the last thing we want to do, we want to do.

do is grieve. We fight a lot. And we make our, I can speak for myself when I got sick. And I've shared publicly I have a genetic disease and it means my connective tissues loose, which means my joints don't hold together that well, which means I can injure myself fairly easily. But for some reason it got much more acute and I have stabilized and in stabilizing been able to rebuild my strength some, so I'm actually doing pretty well right now. As it was a downhill tumble, I had no idea how far down or if it would ever stop. And at a few different junctures, I, and it turns out Jonathan also thought that I didn't have long to live. So it was pretty severe. So I had to be letting go of everything. Letting go

of my addiction and great love was outside and moving. And I had to really, um, pretty much stop most of the activities I love doing. And, you know, I imagine that, you know, my son or I would have children, might have grandchildren, but not be able to pick them up or play with them, and have to be very, very careful because I'd get injured if they wanted to jump on me or something. A lot of grief. So I remember a number of times doing the fighting, you know, what's wrong with me, how did this happen, how can I fix it, and then finally having to do.

having to feel the overwhelming grief of just saying, it's like this right now. And then the prayer was just in some way, you know, this feeling of please, may I feel held in loving presence? May I feel held by something larger because my ego has felt so crushed? And it was when I would really be grieving and praying,

and I'd imagine what I wanted to be held by, of some sense of the beloved just surrounding me, that that actually could happen. But it had to be like breaking down, breaking apart to let that come in. More recently, I was at a retreat, kind of a similar approach to the Sacred Feminine where I hit this really core sense of that unlovable feeling,

that the what's wrong that is so unlovable. And I did all my ways of putting my hand on my heart and telling myself I was okay. And everything that I knew how to do I did until finally I realized, okay, there's nothing but prayer. You know, to pray, I felt the depth of longing to feel love coming into me, to be held in love. And this time I imagined loving presence around me,

but the way it unfolded was sensing the beloved kissing my brow. And there was a sense of just being washed through with love. And it dissolved all the resistance until I became that loving presence. There was no difference between the what, the presence that was offering the kiss and that which was receiving. But it didn't start out that way. It started out from a profound sense of being separate and reaching out for love.

And so this is the practice of prayer. I want to spend a little more time on because it is a practice. Every time that we open ourselves in prayer, and for me, there's just the very physicality, of it, if I put my hands together and I bow my head, in some way the egoic sense becomes softer and more porous. And it's not like if I bow my head, which I often do, it's not like I'm saying, oh, this ego is bad. It's like in some way I am honoring, acknowledging, and inviting that

which is larger and it makes me receptive to it. There's a real power to prayer. When people are most stuck, are having the hardest time, and I have people come with as hard situations as I could imagine. The two pieces are, one is always, see how much you can be aware of. In other words, the awake mask, and notice, notice, notice,

and the other is pray. Pray from the deepest longing you can get in touch with. There's an image that I love of a tree with its roots going deep, deep, deep, we go into our earthiness, into our earthy longing, and the deeper we go into our longing, the more we can extend out into our belonging and realize it. John O'Donohue puts it that prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging.

So a lot of times people say, well, what really are we praying to? Because, you know, there's all sorts of forms of prayer. And it's whatever's beyond our egoic self. But I love the way the Unitarians put it. You know, they describe prayer as, to whom it may concern. The Unitarians also say that Moses received the ten suggestions. They're very non-directive in their way. I also heard of one three-year-old praying who said,

Our father, who does art in heaven, Harold is his name. That was great. So the truth is, we get caught, separation. And what's the pathway from that sense of I am separate, I am threatened, I am endangered, I'm in sorry shape, to a sense of being that, you know, those are the ways, being that ocean that can hold the waves, what's the pathway? So one pathway is just offering self-compassion. Another pathway is feeling the sense of the wants or the fears of the fears and tracing back, tracing back, tracing back,

until you get to the very space of tender presence that's home. And another is feeling the deep longing and reaching out and imagining what you're reaching out towards. It doesn't have to be any classic notion of a God or a bodhisattva or the Buddha. Just whatever it is you can imagine would be a source of loving awareness in this universe.

whatever it is. And if you can begin to imagine what you want, it will be here. If you can imagine what you want to feel, what you want to experience, it will unfold itself. There's good science on this. There's a lot of MRIs that show that when you imagine something, your brain and body activate in the same way. as if it was actually happening. Imagine a hug and it will, if you really imagine it, you've got to work on training yourself

to really imagine it, and you will have an oxytocin secretion just as if you were being hugged. But this is the power of prayer. You really, you feel the longing and out of that longing, you pray for exactly what you want to feel. And the more you pray for it from longing,

the more it actually spreads through you and becomes your experience. Rumi says, cry out, don't be stolid and silent with your pain, lament, and let the milk of loving flow into you. With any of these pathways of making love of ourselves perfect, that's what it is, we're calling on love or offering love, every time you do it, or every time you do it, even if there's just the intention and you don't even feel anything, just the intention. You're beginning to awaken the sense of the who you are as the sacred divine feminine every time you do it.

It's like the best metaphor I know is to imagine this vat of indigo dye. And the way it works when you're dyeing cloth is you dip it into the vat. You pull it out. And instead of indigo, you get this very pale off white blue, really pale. it's almost disappointing. But you rinse it, actually. Squeeze it, rinse, and then you dip it in again. And every time it gets a little bit darker,

every time you dip into this current of loving presence, even if it's just an idea, your identity begins to soften. It's not so separate. You begin to realize the who you are. And in time, you start trusting that that, loving presence is more the truth of who you are than any story you are living in. The more you trust that, the more you look at another and that's what you see. You see through all the

conditioning that that loving presence is looking out at you. So this last part of what we'll explore is how we then live from that realization of the sacred feminine in our lives. And to know that the old shadow side plays out in many ways and that again that's the wake-up. I know for me if I to say you know the shadow it's covering over my vulnerability presenting a really good front would be you know part of it and acting out of guilt or duty and then feeling like oh okay you know kind of crusty like I'm not really authentic and I was I lived in an ashram wearing garb for all those years. In a way, kind of the garb itself would be like a cover-up, like, you know, being a spiritual person and then feeling like who's really there. I heard a story recently about two priests

who went on, decided to shed their garb because they went on a vacation to the Caribbean. And so they kind of went incognito and bought some tourist stuff, sandals, sunglasses, the whole get-up, went out on the beach, set up shop, so to speak. beautiful woman walks by and she slows down right in front of them and she says, oh, good morning, father, good morning father, passes on. So what's going on? They're both really trying to, they don't understand what's going on, but they go out and buy even more outrageous garb. Figure that'll do it, you know. Next day, the same woman passes by them, which is really, really lovely and radiant and she stops in front of them again and says,

a good morning father, good morning father. And this time they say, wait a minute, wait a minute, we just have to ask you, we're priests, and we're proud of it. But we have to know how in the world did you know we were priests? And she looks at the one that was asking her, and she says, Father, it's me, Sister Angela. So the shadow side plays itself out,

and what happens is, and what happened to me and everyone I know is they're suffering because as long as I'm in a role, if I'm here speaking and I really think in some way I'm different or superior or apart, I suffer. If I am doing everything out of guilt or duty, I suffer. You know, if I'm judgmental, I was talking about this as one group, because that's another one that I've used to judging myself and others, I suffer. So the more suffer, I'm, I'm, I I long for intimacy. It's my longing for intimacy and the suffering of how those patterns created separation that has made relationship a practice for me. And we get a lot of training in the West on how to be on the cushion and practice,

being intimate with our inner life, and really little on how to be with each other. And how do we be with each other and stay real and stay open? How do we be with each other and feel threatened and scared and in some way stay with ourselves? Stay embodied. How do we be with each other and another person's acting in a way that's harmful and still behind that harmfulness? And I use that image of the guy who runs into a dog and the dog lurches at him all angry and he's a vicious kind of dog. And then he sees the dog's got a leg and a trap. And then he realized, oh, that dog's been caught in a trap, and that's why he's acting that way. How do we realize when someone we're with is behaving in a certain way they're suffering?

How do we really get that? So this, too, is a training. And the training starts, as we did with the first whole part of this reflection on the sacred feminine, the more we make love of the life right here perfect, the more we're going to be awake with each other and be able to stay embodied when it's difficult because we've learned how to stay embodied when it's difficult with this life

and the more we're going to be able to see when another's suffering because we've seen our own suffering and the more we're going to be able to see the goodness that's there because we've really started trusting that's who we are I told you the story about feeling that kiss come in and film me. Well, the rest of the story is I was at the Forest Refuge.

And I kept doing it, because when you catch on to a practice that makes you feel good, you keep doing it. But it actually didn't get rote because it came from more and more of a sense of loving love. And so just really receptivity. But then I'd feel that I was, you know,

the field of loving. And so I started taking the different people at the Forest Refuge. You're only like 23 of them that. that year. And I would imagine giving them a kiss on their forehead and in some way looking in their eyes and saying, I love you. And these are people I didn't know, some, you know, elderly guy who I'd never seen before. I didn't really look at his face because we weren't looking at each other, but I had a feeling of him and I imagined kissing his brow. And the young woman who, you know,

had been there I heard for already six months. And, you know, just, and it became this whole field of connectedness for me. I fell in love with everyone. Let's pause again. I've been speaking a lot. Just take a moment, if you will, to just close your eyes and check in. Just feel yourself here and awake and present, your body, your heart. And again, with that inquiry of making love of ourselves perfect. A deep part of it is being willing to receive. You might bring to mind someone who you feel loves you, cares about you, understands you. And if there's nobody in earthly form, just sense the consciousness or awareness that's here in the universe. much as I did it was more of a formless love

the love that brings alive the trees the leaves in the spring and has the shine come through the child's eyes the wonder that happens when we see the night sky that there's something some grace some beauty some goodness and just see if you can imagine

receiving letting in that loving presence You might imagine the kiss on the brow or hand on your cheek, but just sense some loving energy in this universe. And it may be through someone that you know cares about you, just seeing what they look like when they're offering their care. And see if you can let it in.

And if you can't be interested and open to just exploring that. because a lot of our patterning is to armor against receiving love. Can you soften a little? Just let the love that's here in this world pour into you. Let yourself be bathed in it a bit. Even imagine just dissolving into that loving, being that loving. You might bring to mind some of the mind some someone who's dear to you, sensing what it is you really care about in that person.

It might be their brightness or the way they show love, honesty, humor. Sense that you might kiss that person on the brow, that energetically, in the most tender way that you're offering that kiss of love, let that sacred feminine, let that loving live through you. imagine looking into their eyes and saying, I love you with your whole being and opening your eyes when you're ready. The world needs the flowering of the sacred feminine. The shadow, what you might call the shadow masculine, is a violence and a dividedness and

an oppression. if ever, you can sense what the planet needs. I mean, we have been destroying the earth as other, destroying each other, the events of this last year, violence against African Americans, which is really a daily violence that it's just being brought to people's awareness. We need the sacred feminine. We need the hearts that realize that we belong to, together and they can express that. The Wednesday of the shootings and the killings in Charleston, at the same time that was going on, our Wednesday night class was doing a reflection on the sacred feminine, on having an inclusive heart. And I had just given a talk on racial bias.

And many people were happy about it, but I got some real criticism too saying, you know, how could we came here, we come here for spiritual practice, how could you be bringing in, you know, politics and racism into, you know. But then I got this, I wanted to share, I got a, I got a email from one woman who says that she's, she has that happening to her, that this is a woman whose wife of an African-American man, 40 years, a mother of three black daughters and grandmother to 11 black teenagers. and she describes how her spiritual friends say her activism is misguided

and that she's buying into the illusion of separation through it. Then she says, I cannot apologize for a desire to keep my darlings and the darlings of other women safe in this world. I'm weeping for lost sons. As long as I have a body, I cannot imagine to not seek to make this world a better place to live. we can't separate it. When there's violence against one community, there's violence against us. This is the other side.

When we begin to make love of ourselves, of these lives right here more perfect, we find this heart widens and widens in an amazing and inclusive way to see the beauty in others. This is Mary Oliver. She says, so every day, so every day, I was surrounded by the beautiful crying, forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you. Okay, so let's set. Maybe we'll just close our eyes and do a final meditation. One of the best teachings for the sacred

feminine is to not put anyone out of your heart, including yourself. This all-inclusive heart. So you might just sweep through right now, sweep through your body and your heart and just sense if there's any part of you that wants or is asking for inclusion. It might be an area of physical pain or discomfort, some emotional weather system that's been challenging. And again, if it's at all helpful to put your hand on your heart as you practice with the sacred feminine, please do. That mantra, this too, this too belongs.

This expression of life belongs in the whole. This wave is part of the ocean. too, with tenderness and kindness, this pain, this shame, this anger, this hurt. More we include the more this inclusive, tender heart can hold our world. You might open to include another who's suffering right now. Just taking a moment to bring that tenderness, to sense that person floating in this ocean of heart. And to feel this shared field, this heart space here, widening out, truly inclusive,

to sense those that are suffering right now, the horrific losses of the last week in Charleston and the losses daily are so many people that live in fear and fear for their lives and fear for their bodies. For all of us who are living in fear. all beings everywhere that are struggling and feeling separate and lonely, endangered, holding all, close with a simple prayer that I love and share whenever I have a good opportunity by Diane Ackerman. In the name of daybreak and the eyelids of morning and the wayfaring moon and the night

when it departs. I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace. In the name of the sun and its mirrors

and the uttermost night and the crowning seasons of the firefly and the apple, I will honor all life wherever and in whatever form it may dwell, on earth, my home, and in the mansions of the stars. Blessings. Thank you for your presence. The teaching you have received has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit tarabrock.com and our IMCW.org.