Tara Brach - Winds of Homecoming: How Intention Frees our Heart (2018-01-10)

Episode Date: January 13, 2018

Winds of Homecoming: How Intention Frees our Heart (2018-01-10) - The Buddha taught that we live our lives on the tip of intention, it is the seed of our future. This talk explores the difference between "limbic" intentions driven by grasping or fear, and intentions that are the call of our awakening heart. You will learn how to identify and shift from a "limbic" to wise intention, and several different ways you can more readily and regularly access your deepest aspiration.  Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. So as we enter into now this new year, many people have this tendency to step back and sense the landscape of their life and make some intentions or resolutions to really increase or deepen well-being. And it could be a very, you know, re-commitments to health, sleep, exercise, whatever it is, caring for ourselves, caring for others. I'm curious how many of you had some sort of more intentionality as we began the year that you came up with something. How many came up with something that had to do with

self-kindness? Can I see? We're going to be exploring intention tonight, but just to say that For a number of years, when I was younger, my intention each year, one of them was always to less black tea because I was very, you know, thought I was overdoing it. This year someone sent me a cartoon. It's got two bears in a cave and they're hibernating. At least one of them is asleep. And the other one is like wide awake and he's saying, darn it, I know better than to have a cup of coffee after October. So if your intention happens to be, you know, developing a regular meditation practice, and I mentioned this earlier, I'd like to encourage you to go to my website, Tarabrock.com, because we have a program that's perfect. It's 40 days, 15

minutes a day, that can get you going. And I do it with Jack Cornfield. It's inexpensive, and it's a great way to start the year. So that's my promo for the evening. The reason I want to do some investigating of intentions because intentions are what set basically the seeds of our future. Whatever your intention is is going to create your experience. And I know for myself that I've watched people over the years, I've been teaching over 40 years now and I watch people come to class and some disappear and some people stay for a number of years but kind of plateau. And then there's some that just in different ways keep unfolding. Just becoming more at home in themselves, more wise, more loving. And so I'm always interested

what's the difference, what makes the difference. And for me it's come down to one thing and it has nothing to do with what path they're on. They could be, you know, Sufi or doing Qigang or Native American practices or Buddhist practices and there's nothing to do with the particular kind of practice. It always comes down to a very sincere conscious intention to wake up. It's just very love of truth. It's like I'm not going to stop because I really want to know what's true. this love of love. It's like knowing what matters. That seems to be what makes the difference.

Which is why I love and I try to each year spend at least one of our talks on intention because it's so central to the path and it's very central to Buddhist psychology in terms of its impact on karma on what happens in our lives. So I often will frame deep intention in a way as it's the calling of our most awake, enlightened being. It's our wisdom calling us. When you're feeling a deep intention, that's your wisdom calling you, that's your

heart calling you. And my understanding is that our deepest intention is to manifest what we really are. We intend, our intention is for what we really are. We're intending for love, which is what we are. We're intending for truth. We're intending for awareness. Rilke describes it as the winds of homecoming in these aspirations. And I love that phrase, the winds of homecoming. So I thought I'd kind of open a little with a Jodica tale, and Jodika tales are the mythical teachings about the many lives of the Buddha, and in each incarnation he, or she appeared, or they appeared as animal, as human, and in some way expressed a virtue that's really important to us.

In this tale, the Buddha is a good merchant. It's living in a small village in northern India. One afternoon he happens to see walking across the town square a very luminous person who's just radiating compassion. And instantly he knows he wants to serve this person but really he wants to serve what this person is serving which is awakening the heart. And so he prepares a tray to nourish this being of fruit

and tea to offer, and he walks out to meet him and seems like the luminous one is waiting for him. So suddenly he's only halfway across the courtyard in this town square and daylight turns to darkness and the grounds quake violently and the sky seems to rip open and lightning bolts are appearing all over the place and he sees the glaring eyes and the bloody mouths of horrifying demons. And basically, Mara, this is the shadow god, is appearing. That's the deal. And he's surrounded by the voices of Mara and they're telling him, go back, it's too dangerous, who do you think you are to be going on this kind of a path, those kind of challenges? So thunder's shaking the air and everything's crashing around him. He's terrified and he's about to turn around

when again he just gets the image of that luminous being and the sense of the sense of of that awake heart that he longs for. And in that remembrance he feels his intention so strongly that he just takes a step. And then he takes another step. And as he's stepping, things quiet around him, the demons disappear, the brilliant daylight appears again, and the earth comes together healed and whole. Now read you the rest,

The merchant trembling with aliveness overflowing with love and gratitude, with love and gratitude finds him standing right in front of the luminous figure, the great being embraced of saying, well done Bodhisattva. Walk on through all the fears and pain in this life. Walk on following your heart and trusting in the power of awareness. Walk on one step at a time and you will know of freedom and peace beyond all imagining. As he heard these words, the good merchant felt his entire being filled with light, looking around around he saw the same divine presence shining through the ground and the trees and the singing birds and every blade of grass. He and the great being and every part of this living world belong to

boundless radiant presence. So this is a kind of beautiful expression of the power of aspiration that if we remember what we care about, even though we get challenged and tugged, something in us will say take the next step, which really means stepping into presence, stepping into open presence and open presence. And part of what I like about this story is that it's totally inevitable, no matter how beautiful and pure our intentions are, that Mara, which is the shadow God of all the more egoic intentions, all the fear-driven intentions and the grasping will appear. It's in our nervous system to get tugged around. We just don't move through life remembering 24-7 what really matters.

We forget. So that's kind of why I like the tale that it happens daily and you might let this be a moment of pausing and sense, well what was today like for you? You know, if you sense what intentions were moving you through the day? You may close your eyes for a moment because we know that a lot of the time our choices and actions can be driven by fear of failure or rejection or grasping after approval or the gratification of checking things off a list, proving we're right. What was today like?

How much of today did you feel some background, some connection with a deep intention? with what really matter to you. And as you review, put aside judgment if you can and just be interested because the first step of really awakening to our deepest intention is to start noticing the other layers of intention that typically move us through the day. So for many of us, if we're honest and it's fine to either open your eyes or if you'd like to listen with your eyes closed, that's fine too.

If we're honest, we start noticing that most of the circling dialogue in our mind through the day has to do with me and what's I need or what's wrong with me or what I've got to do. And while sometimes it's very wholesome like filling our responsibilities, there's often an undercurrent of that sense of something's wrong. and that we're operating from that sense of something's wrong. And it's often self-focused how our decisions are versus taking into consideration other people. And one story that I like to share now and then

there's 11 people hanging tight to a rope that's dangling from a helicopter. And this one, and this is 10 men, one woman. They agreed that someone needed to drop off or the rope would break and everyone would be killed. So after a lot of back and forth, the woman finally said, okay, I'll be the one to do it. Women are known to do this.

We sacrifice ourselves for the well-being of others, and we do what we can to ensure everybody else is taking care of first. And when she was done, all the men started clapping. So the Buddha had a, there's a beautiful phrase, who knows whether he said it, but it's really a beautiful teaching, which is that our life is lived out of the tip of intention. It's lived out of it.

The true intention is the heart's compass. But very often we're not living from true intention. And I like to say that it's often marbled and that's really natural. That you think of as you're a parent and that you can sometimes get controlling with a child and where's that coming from? Well, it's coming from fear and it's coming from attachment and it's coming from love. And it's a big mix. And so really the deal with the deal with,

is to become aware of that. If you can notice where your intentions are coming from, then they're not ruling you. But what happens is we move through most of the day in a trance because we're being compelled or moved by energies we're not aware of. Stephen Levine refers to this in a poem called Half-Life and you might just sit back and and take in these words. I think it's a powerful poem. We walk through half our life as if it were a fever dream, barely touching the ground. Our eyes half open, our heart half closed. Not half knowing who we are, we watch the ghost of us drift from room to room through friends and lovers, never quite as real as

advertised. Not saying half we mean, or meaning half. we say, we dream ourselves from birth to birth, seeking the true self, until the fever breaks and the heart cannot abide a moment longer as the rest of us awakens, summoned from the dream not half caring for anything but love. Not half caring for anything but love. It's a great last line. So it takes that kind of wholeheartedness to really feel that compass, the heart is a compass. And the first step is to begin to investigate what intention is operating right now. What's the intention that's operating? And I often bring in this image I find so helpful of a big circle of awareness. And there's a line.

going through it and whatever we're not aware of is under the line and what we're aware of is over the line. And when we're moving through the day and we're on automatic or when we're we have those reflexes to judge or to blame or to worry or whatever it is, we're under the line. There's energies of fear or grasping that are really in controlling the game. And it's quite natural developmentally to have some of those energies more predominant. You know, as we're very young, it's very natural that there's more of a self-centeredness and it's a I want, I want. Some of you might remember this is one of my more favorite stories of a mom preparing pancakes for her two boys.

and one of them's Kevin age five and the other's Ryan age three. And so they begin to argue who's going to get the first pancake. And so the mother thinks, hmm, teaching moment. You know, she's saying if Jesus was sitting here, he would say, let my brother have the first pancake. I can wait. So Kevin turns to his younger brother and says, Ryan, you can have the first chance at being Jesus.

So as we mature though, and, you know, we have the potential to evolve out of that me first, me, me, me, me, me, the sign of limbic intent is suffering. If you're suffering, it means you're below the line and the limbic energies are dominating and driving you. And by limbic energies, I mean the fear and the grasping that the survival brain really is run by. So, the flags, when we're in conflict,

addictive behavior, you know, when we're down on ourselves, when we're really hating ourselves. It can also be low-key. Sometimes the most insidious is that we're just regularly in a kind of low-key trance where we're just anxious or planning or worrying or just not so connected with each other. We're below the line, limbic trance. So, how do we approach it? like the rest of this talk is really, how do we wake up from a limbic intention into really the intention of our more mature evolved being? And Rumi says this. He describes that we get snagged, what we got to recognize when we get snagged.

He says, gamble everything for love. If you're a true human being, half-heartedness doesn't reach into matter. You set out to find God, but then you keep stopping for long periods at mean-spirited roadhouses. This is the inquiry. Oh, am I at one of those road houses right now? Have I gotten way late? And if we can remember to ask that.

So I'm going to give you an example of the process by which when we go, oh, okay, they're suffering. I must be below the line. I must be driven by limbic intent. The first step is to recognize that and allow, okay, that's what's going on. But then we begin to investigate, well, what are the unmet needs right now? You're below the line because there's some unmet needs. So we begin to see, oh, I'm feeling invisible, feeling not seen, I'm feeling not protected, I'm feeling put down, you know,

a need to be respected, need to be seen. So the first steps of sensing what snags are. and the next step is to bring kindness to that. You can't come above the line without kindness. Let's say if there's anything I've learned in 40 years of teaching. It's that what brings us above the line is recognizing what's happening and bringing kindness to it. So that's what we do.

We recognize what's happening, we bring kindness to it and then we sense, okay, so what's the limbic intent that's been driving? Oh, it's fear. It's going to grab it. and then once we're above the line we can say, so what is my deepest intent? You can ask that question once you come above the line. What really matters to me about this? Let me give you an example of how this works because then I'm going to have you actually

practice this coming from limbic intent to a more enlightened intent. And the story I'd like to share is of one woman who's a long-time meditator and And she had had decades of distance from her older sister. Growing up, she had always been the kind of bad girl, got into a lot of trouble and so on. Her sister ended up being much more conventional. She was more alternative, the woman I'm telling you about, and she'd always say things that the rest of the family thought were wacky and so on. So she was a little marginalized.

But now, and this is, you know, as adults, the dad had died. their mom was unwell and the sisters plus their youngest and all their families were gathering for the holidays. The challenge is, as you know, when families gather, that all the old stuff would be triggered up. She'd feel again unappreciated, marginalized and so on. So there they are Thanksgiving. Mom's asleep because as I mentioned she's unwell and they start talking about a few of the family members of mom's health. And so this woman, um, started weighing in on diet because something she was always very interested in, a holistic type. And she said, well, maybe we might help her get onto a gluten-free diet with less meat

and more omegas and, you know, did her thing. Well, her older sister and this is, again, they're playing out their role, said, look, I know you're into this stuff, but you're no doctor. So you can imagine how that would land and of course she lashed out back and you don't have to be a doctor to know about good nutrition. And in the end of that episode, she ended up leaving the room feeling very hurt and with the old sense of I'm not respected, I'm not seen, always putting me down. So she found a quiet spot and decided to practice with it. And how did she practice? Well, she started feeling what was going on inside her and it was anger and it was hurt and she could sense the old beliefs

of in some way I'm less than and angry that somebody was making her feel that and the need to be seen and to be loved. And when she could see that, she could and I often, as you know, put my hand on my heart because that's the gesture and it really helps to make a gesture of self-kindness. And she breathed and she just held a space for it and that gave her more of a presence and more of a kind of compassion. and she wasn't stuck in the regressed self as much. And so she could see, well, the intention when I was in the room was to prove myself.

She was once again trying to prove herself. That was her limbic intent. But she said, what's my real intention with my sister? What's my real intention? And her real intention is, I want to be closer. I want to connect. So she really held that in her mind. Her prayer really was that she could kind of release.

least the demand that her sister appreciate her or understand her and just find a way towards connection. So the rest of the evening she had more space. She didn't need to insert opinions or defend and no major tensions. Then one month later they're together again, Hanukkah, there's even more ease and they're laughing together over some family story and it turned later in the night her sister told her about a difficult time with her teenage son and at the end of the evening said oh thanks for listening you've been such a good shoulder you know that kind of thing and this woman described it to me she said I feel like I went from my will to my heart's will and this is a shift that other people have used similar language for it moving from

what the ego in the limbic system says this is what I want this is what I want this is what I need, this is what I fear, to the heart which has a much deeper wisdom, my will to my heart's well. So this is the movement that's possible and that the more we practice it the more we have access to a more enlightened intention and that's what creates our future. So I want to pause here and invite you to take a moment to maybe adjust if you'd like how you're sitting but to let your attention go inward and you try this out. Give yourself a moment to arrive, know that you're here, feel this body breathing and then let

come into awareness some situation in your life with another person that has some tension or conflict where you in some repeating way get reactive. You'll have more power to this reflection if you bring to mind a real example of something from the recent past or something that's very easy to recall. And as if you're watching a movie, just go through it to the point where you're getting triggered. Notice what's really, what's the worst part of this? what's triggering you.

You might sense the person's expression, the words, what you're saying. I'm sensing what really is the hardest part of this. And pause, recognize it, okay, so there's, this is where we easily go under the line and begin to investigate a little. To sense what's it like, what are the feelings going on inside you? Feel where they are in your body, breathe with them. You might notice what you're believing in these moments about the other person or what they must be, how they must be relating to you. You might be able to sense the part of you that feels the worst about this.

What are the unmet needs? Is it to be loved or seen, understood, accepted? And as you pay attention, see if you can include a quality of kindness that you're offering inwardly. So you're bringing compassion to whatever you're noticing and it might help to just gently touch your heart just to connect because we don't connect with ourselves so easily. So you can actually sense you're offering kindness to wherever the vulnerability is to the sense of unmet need and that helps you to come above the line into that compassionate witness that you're holding a space for your inner life.

You might be able to see that when you were caught, that there was some limbic intent. You wanted to get back or prove yourself or to fend yourself. There's nothing wrong with those, but just to see it. This is coming from the survival brain. And from the place above the line you might sense, well, what's my deepest heart's intent? What's the heart's well? What do you really long for? or how do you want things to unfold in this relationship?

And as you sense what your aspiration is, just sense the experience of who you are when you're holding that aspiration. And can you sense any shift in that sense of your own being? You're in touch with your heart's will, your heart as a compass. This is Rilke, the winds of homecoming when we start getting in touch, starts carrying us home to who we really are. You might sense that you have more choice in how you can respond to the situation in your mind's eye. And perhaps have the intention next time when you get some flag of this situation calling your attention that you might ask yourself, so what really matters

here? Whenever you'd like, feel free to open your eyes. So this is one approach. to contacting and strengthening what I call liberating intention, the intention that helps us really come back home to ourselves. At other times there's no obvious suffering and yet it can be a really powerful practice to reflect on your intention and really ask yourself, well, what matters? And in the Buddhist tradition it is its own meditation. reflecting on aspiration and it takes time

often I'll ask here when we begin a class to pay attention to your intention and because the day and the busyness of the day is still there it's really hard to get in touch with what's underneath that so it takes time you might remember Martha Postalwaite's poem and her beautiful line make a clearing in the dental

forest of your life. Make a clearing in the dense forest of your life because then we can begin to sense what matters. So we have to get quiet a little to be able to sense that. Another way that helps us to, in addition to just getting quiet to sense into what matters, this beautiful reflection on aspiration, is to sense impermanence. If you can remember it's all changing, if you can take a look at from the end of your life looking back vantage point, it becomes very clear that a lot of the small stuff we think is important isn't so important. I often think of one woman who got

diagnosed with cancer knew she had a year to live and to be with her only child who was like four or something and her mantra was no time to rush. She knew what mattered. She was really guided by her heart's aspiration. Another way to get in touch with liberating intent is you can see through the template of what's called the Bodhisattva aspiration. A Bodhisattva is an awakening being and the core aspiration of the Bodhisattva is, may all circumstances serve to awaken compassion and wisdom. May whatever's arising in my life, no matter what it is, may it help to awaken this heart and mind.

And then the second part of the aspiration is may that ripple out to really bring healing to all beings. And so just to reflect on the bodhisattva aspiration is very powerful because every one of you, you wouldn't be listening if you didn't have that bodhisattva awakening happening through you. You might not be aware of it, but when you practice the aspiration, something starts resonating. So our second pause to explore, we'll just take a moment, if you will, again, to let your attention come inside. And you might bring to mind whatever is going on in your life right now that feels most challenging, most difficult, Maybe something you wish away, like some very difficult challenge with a relationship or with your health, maybe something at work that's really huge stress for you, something financial.

Let's take a moment to sense, so what is it right now that is challenging? And if there's no big ones, then what's minorly challenging? And then as you let yourself feel that situation in your heart and mind, then try on this aspiration. Just feel that your heart is wishing this from its most wise and sincere place. May these circumstances serve to awaken my heart and mind. May they awaken compassion. May they deepen my wisdom. May they be of benefit to others?

Just explore what is the effect of that? What happens when you take something difficult and say, please, may this awaken compassion? How does that shift your relationship with difficulty? Just check that out. So we'll continue on. I've been speaking so far from a kind of individual perspective. If we take our evolutionary perspective, our our... as a species, our motivation or intent has been evolving.

That when we were more dominated by our primitive brain, our survival brain, then obviously all the intentionality came, how to protect me, how to promote me. And with this emergence of the more recently developed part of our brain, the frontal cortex and the prefrontal cortex, we're much more relational. We have a capacity to feel with others. And our sense of who we are is expanded so that when we're in our most awake, mature, integrated self, our senses of belonging to the web of life, we care about all beings. That's our capacity, the well-being of all. So we can begin to sense when we're quiet. that our hearts open in that way and that we really have that belonging.

And that affects how we relate to others. More of our activity and our thoughts are for the well-being of all. So this is something, this evolved intention, that is, can we look through other people's eyes? One of the ways that we become aware of others not being unreal others, but part of our heart is by intentionally looking through their eyes. And when we think of social movements that can actually make a difference, when we think of what's going on, so many of us are together in our concern for all the suffering in our world, for the racism and the effect of climate change and the genocide, the Rohingya and

so on, we're worried, we're concerned, what are the movements that actually change consciousness? What are the movements that change consciousness? And I think that what we find is any movement that is centered on how do we see through other people's eyes, how do we open our hearts to include other people, is moving and involving us. I'm right now reading Van Jones book. beyond the messy truth. And I love the phrase messy truth. Because the more we're operating from our limbic brain, the more rigid we are and having to think I'm right and you're wrong.

And the more we evolve and have that flexibility, the more we want to look through each other's eyes so that we can include each other in our hearts. And I see this as there's a group called Love Army that Van Jones is one of the originators of. There's a group called Love Revolution. I think of the Civil Rights Movement and how much Martin Luther King's basically saying it's really compassion for all of us. I think of the Dalai Lama who refers to the Chinese as my friend, the enemy. I love that. I think of Mahatma Gandhi who was talking about his enemies and he said my greatest enemy is a man named Mohandis Gandhi and he was really talking about a shadow side, the part of him that would make him forget his connection.

So I want to bring in the collective because when we collectively hold the intention to not push others out of our heart but to see through others' eyes, we're part of a movement for transformation that can heal the world. If we belong to something smaller with a separate identity that makes others wrong, we're going back to the primitive survival brain. So we'll end with the three key elements of a living aspiration and then we'll just do a guided meditation that helps you get in touch with it for you. The three key elements, the first one is that true aspiration has to do with manifesting potential. As I mentioned at the beginning, your deepest intention is what you are. If we go very, very deep, our intention is love and that's what we are.

If we go very, very deep, our intention is awareness and that's what we are. Our attention is connectedness and that's what we are. It's very easy to have more surface intentions. You know, I want to hike the Appalachian Trail. You know, I want the Dalai Lama to sign my book. I want, you know, whatever it is, you know. Lily Tomlin says, even if you win rat race, you're still a rat. Which means that a liberating intent is beyond the ego. The second of a true aspiration is that it's embodied, that you experience true aspiration in a very alive, vibrant way

in your whole body and heart. And aspirations that are arrived at through reasoning do not carry power. What carries power is your body. and Oprah Rinfrey said it beautifully. She says, ask yourself, what is my truest intention? Give yourself time to let a yes

resound within you. When it's right, I guarantee that your entire body will feel it. Okay? So embodied that you're passionate about what you love. So your deepest intention is what you are, manifesting potential, embodied.

And the third one is it always related. to this moment. It's not in three years I want to take that trip to Tibet. It's right now in this moment what's possible to feel and to experience. Each of those gets strengthened by in the moments you feel sincere, you feel like you're in touch with something, entrain, immerse your attention to it, get really familiar and intimate with it. The guideline here is that we have all sorts of positive states and they come and go and they don't really change us because we don't know how to really have them last. They don't stick in our brain because they don't go into our implicit memory.

In other words, we don't spend time on them. When something negative happens, it gets coded and remembered. You know, we're Teflon for good experiences and Velcro for bad, they say. Okay? So when the good ones come, like a really sincere, beautiful intent, need to keep your attention with it for 15 to 30 seconds. Feel it completely in your body. It will stick more.

You'll remember it more. We're going to practice this in a moment. But I can share for myself that I remember one of my first, Buddhist retreats almost 30 years ago. A few days in, I was just settling in and I got to this very quiet place, very still, very open heart, and then I burst out crying. And it was like I so loved feeling that quiet, open-hearted, loving feeling and I was so sad that I didn't feel it more.

I could just feel that yearning. And I know as I'm speaking, many of you know what I'm saying, that when we touch into, oh, this is what matters. It's like, why don't we remember this more? So there's that yearning but also that tenderness. Those are the winds of homecoming. I could feel that I was coming closer to who I am. And this has happened now tens of thousands of times since then.

And I deepen it just by saying, I love you, Beloved, because Beloved is that present that I'm really loving and then feeling it in my body as if a sponge just saturating, you know, just letting it in. So it's very, very familiar now and very easy to access. But it's only because tens of thousands of times on purpose I have aroused my intention and gotten very familiar with it. So in train. closed by sharing with you that a very dear friend and a teacher in our larger teacher-teaching community, Amy Connolly, is going to be having major heart surgery tomorrow and it's very complicated surgery and it's, you know, risky. And so she wisely reflected on what she

wanted to say to dear ones. And to me it had that sense of if this was the last last thing I was ever going to say. And because of that, I wanted to share it with you tonight. Here's what she wrote. She says, inquiring within at this time of stillness and reflection, I'm asking myself what is the most important message to share with those I care about. It is simply this. Be kind to yourself, to one another, to all living things, and to our dear Mother Earth, and let that kindness blossom into action. Let that kindness blossom into action. So it feels like these are words that are winds of homecoming.

Let's sit together a bit and just reflect as closing. Again, to take some moments to feel your body breathing, to feel the life that's here. This is a reflection on impermanence, letting the truth of impermanence help us wake up to our deepest aspiration. We begin by saying if you had a year to live, what would you do? What would you want to experience? What would your longing be?

Just sensing what would matter. Letting this be as real as it can be. What would matter? If you had a week to live, what would you do? what would you want to experience and what would really matter to your heart if you had a day to live what would you do what would you want to experience what would really matter to your heart what would you long for what would you care about if you had just a few moments to live what would you want to experience what would your heart long for what would most matter

And can you feel that right now and let it be as big and real as it is, let it fill your mind, your body, your heart? Just that longing for what? For connection, for love, for light, for peace? Let it fill you. As if you were that sponge that could just take in fully exactly what you're longing for. sensing how come it matters to you so much, sensing what you might not have ever noticed

about it before, letting it be as big as it is. The poet He face guides us to feel our yearning to embody and inhabit it. He says to ask again and again, for I have learned that every heart will get what it prays for most. I have learned that every heart will get what it prays for most. a few full breaths, sensing yourself fully right here and just feeling and honoring the aliveness and space and tenderness of your being. Namaste and thank you for your attention.

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