Tara Brach - Your Future Self: Turning Towards Your Awakened HeartMind

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

Your Future Self: Turning Towards Your Awakened HeartMind - Our lives are shaped by our evolutionary past – the fears and wants that arise from a separate self sense – and the pull of our evolutionary potential – our awakened heart and mind. This talk explores the power of these pulls, and the teachings and reflections that make us most available and responsive to the calling of our future self (enjoy from the archives). 

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really matters. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. I'll begin with a cartoon I just saw where there's a praying mantis who's lying on a psychiatrist's couch and he's saying, honestly, doctor, I tried to keep the lines of communication open, but it was easier just to eat him. praying mantis, praying mantis, you know. So it captures the predicament that really in a way we all regularly face, which is instant gratification in some way the relief that comes

when we shoot off that defensive email or go to get that other second helping of ice cream, you know, continuing to obsess and plan versus if we actually can pause and deepen attention. And I think of this as really being at the cross-currents of two are two evolutionary forces. And one is really the evolutionary force, if you think of the perspective of time that's from the past, which is that the path of least resistance, it gives us the most immediate gratification, satisfaction, relief is what we go for. And this is the conditioning from the early parts of our brain, the primitive brain, the survival brain.

The second current of our pull really of evolution is what, if you think of it in terms of time, it's towards our future being, our future self, it's towards the fullness of our potential, we're being pulled towards that. And that's the pathway of increasing integration and wholeness and of inhabiting loving awareness. So in this talk, what I'd like to do is investigate how our future self, which is really our evolutionary potential is calling us, how it's drawing us towards it and how we can be more available and responsive to that call. We explore this really, this evolution of our hearts and minds for the sake of what feels

like our personal freedom, but it's really the evolution of the species. and it's really the hope of our world, this capacity to keep on waking up. So tonight's talk, the future self. And we see these pulls not just in our individual life. We could track through a day and see how we ended up being caught up in something when we could have paused. We see it society-wide all the time. If you open up the newspaper, you'll see more of the emphasis on the survival brain.

It's really limbic news, right? That's what we mostly see. But there's other news too. So what we might see on the headlines, you know, the devastation of the planet, climate warming, what's happening, racial injustice and violence will also know that there is a growing number of small groups doing what we call sometimes white awareness work looking at racial bias, trying to wake ourselves up. Or we'll see how I'm thinking of in Washington.

Washington right now, a group I'm involved with called Mines, has reached over 7,000 children in the school systems teaching them mindfulness. This is the evolutionary pull of the future, this is us waking up. So I also want to say it's very easy to sense these evolutionary pulls of the past is bad, the limbic system is bad and the future which is correlated with the frontal cortex and awakening consciousness is good. But it's not that way. I mean, if you actually think of the brain, the primitive brain is embedded in the evolving, more recently evolved frontal cortex. We need our fear, we need our anger, we need our aggression. So it's not to get rid of. It's that instead of

being identified and reacting out of the limbic brain, we sense a larger sense of our being and that part of our brain alerts us. It's a servant, it doesn't dominate us, it doesn't identify us. So that's where evolution is going and that's where meditation and spiritual life comes in. Because not only are we designed to keep on evolving, we're designed to facilitate our own evolution by training ourselves to pay attention. And that is how evolution designed us to wake up, that we can learn to pay attention to how we're caught in reactive patterns and judging and jealousy and defendedness and learned to pay attention.

So a story that I like to share now and then that to me is a great illustration of this evolving is from a mythological story from Scandinavia. And it takes place in a little kingdom where the king and queen realize that they have run into very dicey financial times. They're having a really hard time keeping up and maintaining the castle and so on. And they'd love to have a little help from the dragons hoard. He has got a lot. But they have to make a deal and And it's a kind of difficult deal, but they have to trade a lot of the dragon's gold for their daughter, her hand in marriage. And she doesn't like this at all, but she's a resourceful princess.

So she goes out to a very wise woman who has, you know, 20 grandchildren and so on ourselves and says, look, what am I going to do? I'm betrothed to the dragon. How do I deal with this? And this wise old woman has a really good idea and she whispered. into your ear and tells her what to do. The wedding day comes, and it's a little difficult, everybody in the court and big celebration,

and here she is with her new beloved, the dragon. And then they retire to the bridal chambers, and the dragon turns to her and says, well, dear, isn't it time to consummate our wedding? And she says, oh, yes, dear husband, but first I have to do something, I have to remove one of my wedding gowns. Isn't that so?

And he goes, oh, absolutely, please. And so she does that, but it turns out... And she says to him, as I do that, I'd like one favor from you. As I remove my wedding gown, I'd like you to remove some of your scales. This is a sure, fair deal, we could do that. So she takes off a wedding gown. He takes off scales, but she's got another gown under it. It turns out she's done this layered fashion thing.

and so she says, well, if I take off this one you'll take off some more scales, won't you? And he goes, but of course, my dear, and he does that. Well, this goes on and on. He notices that it was the second of ten wedding gowns that she has on. Each one she takes off each time he's taking off his scales. And four, five, six, his dragon claws had to dig deeper and deeper into his own flesh and skin. peeling off other layers, the eighth, the dragon's down to taking off parts of himself that were stuck. Then his form begins to change.

Ninth gown comes off, it changes even more remarkably. And then when she takes off the tenth gown, by that time the dragon has pulled off so much of his dragoness that is true in many of these tales, what's left is, as you can imagine. A handsome prince, right. Okay. And so she took the advice of the old woman from far beyond the marketplace and had a very blissful wedding night. Now, so this in a way describes the practice of paying attention, that we're learning to pay attention to the scales or the coverings and as we pay attention in a wise way they dissolve or become increasingly transparent until the life.

that's within us really shines through and we get that we weren't those scales were that light, that essence. If we look a little more closely at what happened in the story, his motivation to start taking off scales was love. You know, it was for the love of the princess. The princess in a way you might think of as the word in Buddhism Bodhi Chita, the awakened heart, she was the awakened heart that was calling him, saying, come dear, just take off your.

yet another set of scales and yet another, come on dear, just so she was inviting him to de-dragonize himself and come home to his true light. A way that I like to think of this sometimes, you might imagine our awareness as this big circle and there's a line that goes through and what's below the line is what we're not aware of and what's above the lines, what we're aware of. And awareness by nature wants to include everything in awareness. Awareness wants to wake up. So, awareness and love are guiding the dragon to keep on taking off as dragon

just so less and less is unconscious. More and more is an awareness. And so it is that as we look more closely, our process too is waking up to where the scales of confusion and delusion and grasping and hatred and so on are blocking us. Now there's a quote from Rumi that I share often and I shared it recently out on the West Coast and a man is very involved with the Sufis

and with Rumi poetry said, ah, but there's one more piece to the quote. So I'm going to read it too. Your path is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers, scales, within yourself you've built against it and to love them. So we're not just identifying, oh, there's my addiction to such and such and that's getting in the way, there's my tendency to judge, our dragoness, we're not just identifying it,

we're actually bringing our hearts to it and that makes all the difference. We're going to come back around to that. But what we are getting from this kind of evolutionary take is that the scales are just a natural part of our evolutionary heritage to protect ourselves, fight, flight, freeze, try to seek rewards, and we get caught in them and if we don't keep on waking up, that's a developmental arrest and then we are in suffering. And there's our potential calling us saying, pay attention with love to what's here. Now, as you know, there are challenges we all encounter.

I mean, every one of us is on this path of recognizing the scales and letting go and discovering the light that's there. We're all on that. But the challenges are very real and one of the challenges is those scales come from underneath the lines so they're usually unconscious. We don't even notice half the time that we're actually playing out our person personas, you know, the word personas from the Greek theater. It's a mask that we wear. We're not even aware of it a lot of the time, how we make little exaggerations or lies to impress people

in a certain way. Sometimes we tell people, oh, how hard things are, how hard we're working, or how much we've accomplished, or things that make us look good. So many moments, what we are expressing to another is contrived to have a certain response. It's not spontaneous, but it's such a unconscious habit we don't even notice that we're presenting a certain persona. So we start noticing that a lot of the times things are happening and we're not really being truthful or honest. And even when we do, they're defending our interests in a way that it's just a reflex almost to be defensive. It's a reflex to grasp.

Story of two guys with dogs and they're talking and one says, hey, let's go across the street and get some, get a cup of coffee at that cafe. And the guy says, you know, we can't, we've got dogs. They had one chihuahua and they had a Doberman. The guy with the Doberman says, oh, that won't be a problem. Don't worry about that. Just do what I do. So he puts on a pair of really dark glasses and he goes across the street to the cafe and the waiter says, sir, we don't allow dogs. And he says, it's a seeing-eye dog. You know, it's a Doberman. It's a Doberman. Wait a minute, doormans aren't usually seeing-eye-dice.

This is an experiment. It's working, you know, so shows him a seat. The others across the street. And he's very nervous but he decides, okay, I'm going to pull it off, I'm going to do it. So, he wanted what he wanted, he wanted a cup of coffee, so puts on his sunglasses and he walks in, sir, no dogs are allowed here. Ah, but this is a seeing-eye dog. But sir, that's a chihuahua. What? They gave me a chihuahua?

I want to say on the record that that one came from my husband Jonathan Faust. We accuse each other of taking each other's material so I thought I'd honor. Okay, so the influences that make a challenging, unconscious, this reflexive behavior, the limbic responds way, way more quickly to situations than the frontal cortex. So before we even know it, we've lashed out in blame or before we even know it, we've begun defending ourselves in some way. The other piece that makes it really challenging is that we've been, that it's just these scales are such deep habits in our nervous system.

If you think of neuropathways, we've run these pathways over and over and over again and we've used our anger over and over again. By the way, even though in an evolutionary sense our scales don't serve us until we wake up to them, in the short term they feel better. We feel protected. we feel gratified in the short term and that's why they stay being habits. So we're attached to using our anger to get our way or to overconsume to soothe or to appear a certain way.

We want to appear a certain way in order to impress or to attract others. So we're very caught in these habits and again by illustration there are two priests that as you know, normally do wear habits, but they were on this vacation in Hawaii and decided, you know, let's have some fun, let's take off our habits and just be like everybody else. So they land, they buy some, actually some outrageous kind of shorts and sandals and sunglasses and so on. The next day they're on the beach and their tourist garb, kind of excited about it, presenting another who they are to the world. These two very lovely looking women go passing by with bikinis and they're staring but then right

as the blonde passes them, she smiles and nods and says, good morning, father, good morning father. How in the world did they know we were priests? So the next day they go back to the store and they buy even more outrageous garb. I mean, they look up to the T-toris hats, the whole deal. So they're sitting there and once again these same two come by and as soon as they walk by and they go, oh, good morning, father, good morning father. So they couldn't stand it. They said, so we're priests, you're right, and we're proud of it actually, but I have to know, how did you know that we were priests?

The young woman replied, Father, it's me, Sister Angela. Father, it's me, Sister Angela. I don't know why I love that one. Different kind of habit, right? But anyway, we get very hitched to them. The last thing I want to mention on the challenges of letting go of our covering and really opening to the evolved expression of what we are is that we hate our covering.

In other words, not only do we have all these habits of pretending and trying to seek approval and over-consuming and defending and aggressing, we hate the scales. We don't like our dragonness. That's what we refer to as second arrowing, adding the second arrow. And that's what actually solidifies the scales. It's like adding a scale to a scale so it gets really pasted on very, very thick. So then the question is, what really serves us in evolving?

How do we, on purpose, turn towards the awakened heart mind? How do we love ourself into healing? Because remember, you cannot rip off the scales, you can't hate the scales and judge the scales into falling off. So the good news is that our future self or our evolved beingness, that Bodhi-chita perceives where there's blocks, perceives the blocks, there's something in us that knows, oh, by not forgiving, I'm staying small, or by spending my time grasping after this addiction, our defending, or lashing out at somebody I care about, there's something in us that knows

beyond the fact that we don't like it, just knows in our hearts that it keeps us from being who we can be. That is our awakened heart mind. That's our future self calling us. This is really where the practice of rain comes in because rain are any, and by the way, when I say rain, it's the weaving of mindfulness and compassion. Bringing together mindfulness and compassion is what ends up calling us back to really inhabiting the fullness of who we are. I'll give you an example of how it really is kind of our future self-calling us home and I thought I'd share a story from my own life. I might have shared it a few years ago but it was a very, for me it was a very powerful learning. The background

is that when I first met my husband Jonathan, let's see I think, I think, that I was a very powerful learning. I was about 13 years ago. I was running five days a week and very, very active and very into being outside and physical. And within two years of living together, I could barely walk up inclines, I couldn't swim, I was in this downward spiral, so all the things that when we first got together we celebrated and loved doing, you know, the boogie boarding in the ocean and whether it was biking, hiking, we couldn't do it. And I remember, and I remember that we I remember coming back from a particular time where we had taken some time off on Cape Cod and I hadn't been able to participate.

We had friends visiting us and they all would go off and do things and I couldn't participate. And when I got back here to Washington, I was feeling very depressed. I was feeling distanced from him, not connected, I was feeling irritable. I was judging both of us. And I remember one afternoon kind of lying on our hammock and I was just feeling this wave of sadness and underneath the sadness was this, I missed our connection. And that was like, that was the voice of Bodhisita, the more awake heart-mind saying, oh there's something sweet that's here but you're missing.

And so that was an invitation to deepen attention. So that's when I started attending to the scales. The scales were my judgment and my distancing and my blaming and so on. And so the recognizing and allowing of rain, many of you are familiar if you're not, it's an acronym that's pretty simple, recognize and allow, was really recognizing how cut off and depressed I was and just letting those feelings be there as the allowing. And then when I was investigating, what is I'm really not wanting to feel? I felt this kind of sinking, ache and fear and this vulnerability that really had to do with shame.

And the shame was and the belief was that I'm not the woman he married. It's like I'm pulling his life down. I'm getting old and infirm and not lovable and that was really hard to feel. That was the investigating. It's this shame about who I was becoming as a sick person. And when I sensed that deep inquiry of how does this want me to be with it, it was really a very full and tender and caring presence. So, as many of you know, this is my practice of self-metter, self-love,

as to put my hands in my heart and really offer in a tremendous amount of, of presence and care. So this is really where the sense of my evolved future self, my awake-loving heart was really bathing the place of shame and insecurity. And the more that I sat there and held that place, the more I became that place of caring presence. In other words, by inviting it in and intending to bring kindness, I relaxed open and I became that awakened heart space. I called on that future, evolved Bodhita and then became that. It wasn't in the future anymore. Now a few comments on this.

Well first I'll share that back, just so you get, you don't leave you hanging on the relational piece, that when I did go back, I felt like once I was resting in a larger space of heart-mind, I could name the vulnerability and be real with Jonathan and that let him name his own feelings of powerlessness and fear of what was happening and how could he do more and he wasn't doing enough and in that sharing of vulnerability it actually brought us so much closer than we had been by me being in my scaled place and him being in his scaled place of feeling powerless and kind of covering it over with worry. But I want to make a comment on really how I was responding in an evolutionary way to, whether you call it my future self or you call it Bodhi-chi to the awakened heart mind,

that what even alerted me to deepen my attention to the scales was some tender, sad, loving place that wanted to reconnect. And we all have that longing in us. If we listen, in each of us there's a longing to love well, to not hold back our love. And that is the call of our future self. And then by paying attention to the scales, they started getting more transparent

and I could reopen to inhabiting that loving presence. So where I want to go to now is how we can facilitate that process, each of us, and when we run into suffering, more quickly turn to our evolved self, not get so waylaid in being dominated by the limbic system, dominated by our fear, by our anger, by our jealousy. How can we more quickly remember the most awake, wise, loving place in us? And there's a really interesting question that I feel like we could start paying attention to which is, you know, what evolutionary pull are we listening to at any moment? Are we listening to the voice of the past that's telling us what's wrong with us and others?

Are we listening to that sense of longing and possibility and care? There's a friend that wrote a story and I want to tell you, read to you parts of it, His name's Logan Thomas and he's right now up at IMS, the Insight Meditation Society working. And so he wrote this as part of an article for a magazine. But he describes how he attending the, I think it was a six-week retreat. No, it was a three-month retreat. Now that's a big deal. He went into a three-month retreat and he just says,

my first three weeks of the retreat were quite unpleasant to say the least. My mind constantly wandered, usually with the self-deprecating fantasies. it then berated me for not doing it right. And this was the theme for him that he was living with a kind of relentlessly critical mind. This is the force of his evolutionary past. So he says, I was meditating today, I got discouraged from the unrelenting thoughts.

A voice then shouted in my head, it's okay, you're doing great. It takes a lot of courage to do what you're doing. You're not alone. The unexpected wise voice spawned a river of tears and the wondering if the kindness and goodness and the voice could really be coming from inside me. I began letting go into the meditation. I felt the observer, the watcher dissipated as I became immersed into bodily sensations.

This letting go usually causes fear that I'll lose control and that something or someone will harm me. But I heard the wise voice saying so reassuringly, it's okay, it's okay. Let go. It's okay. I reluctantly trusted it, letting my guard down. The voice met my vulnerability with a molyphalus, There, you're not alone anymore. I lost it. I cried my eyes out.

I fearfully wondered if this wise voice would ever leave me. I promptly heard, I'm not going anywhere. I lost it again. The sheer kindness, wisdom, and support of the wise voice tap the depths of my reservoir of tears, then it hit me. Is this voice me as part of his practice? It's really to listen to and trust. In a growing way, that voice.

And it's such a clear expression of evolution that the pull from the past, the force of the critical voice it still takes over and is incredibly convincing. and this pull from his evolutionary potential, the future self, which is the wise voice. And so for each of us, there are different ways that we can begin to listen for and cultivate a relationship with and respond to the most awake part of our being. Each one of you who's listening right now has that awakeness and can deepen your relationship with it. So I'd like to lead you in a short guided practice that's called calling on your future self

and as you adjust how you're sitting, I'd just like to name that if the metaphor of your future self doesn't sit well for you, you can just say calling on your most awake, loving heart, calling on Bodiceita, taking refuge in Bodiceita in your awake, heart mind. However you like to language it, so when you hear me use the words future self, please feel free to translate if that's helpful. But for many you'll find that it's actually a skillful and useful terms you might experiment. So finding a comfortable position and take some moments to on purpose, relax. You might take a nice long, deep in-breath

and then a slow-out breath, long, slow-out breath and feel the sensations of letting go, letting go of any tension or tightness in your body. And then a nice full deep in-breath again. And again with the out-breath, see if you can soften and loosen through the shoulders, the hands, the chest, the belly,

inhaling nice long deep in-breath again and with the out-breaths just letting go whatever might not be necessary to hold on to letting go letting go and letting your breath resume in its natural rhythm you might imagine that you could journey forward in time that you're going to encounter your future self

maybe 10 years just an older awake evolved version of yourself. If you're young, you might imagine it as 20 years. You might sense where this future self is living, kind of the space that they're in, what they look like and what the feeling of their presence is like. Let yourself take that in.

What's the feeling of your future self's presence like? You might let them know about something going on in your current life where you're aware of scales or barriers, some difficulty perhaps at work or relationships, something to do with your own behavior that's challenging. Just kind of put that forward and let that be included in the awareness of your future self. Sense their guidance. Sense how they perceive it and whatever. whatever wisdom they might have to offer,

whatever heart message. Just be receptive. Listen with an open heart. Before leaving, find out if there's a message your future self wants you to leave with. Something that will serve you in the moments of your current life. And take a moment to imagine the feeling and the wisdom and the heart of your future self filling you. I sense that energy and awakeness, the kindness, just filling you and the possibility of

remembering what this is like, connecting with it during your daily life, returning to this moment and sensing what you're carrying with you, sense the presence and the liveliness of your awake, heart mind right here and now. The poet Rumi says, Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you as a fish out of water hears the serfs come back. This turn toward what you deeply love saves you. This turn toward what you deeply love saves you. So this is the, this is really the energy and vector of our evolutionary unfolding that the

the more we feel a sense of longing, a sense that we really yearn to be all that we can be, to live from loving presence, the more we learn to turn towards that, to call on that, to listen to the messages from that, to respond to it. So it's like any other practice, the more you call on Bodhita, your future self, the more you turn again and again towards it, listen, the more you're actually creating neuropathways in the brain that correlate with compassion and wisdom. You're going to be more awake. So in my own life over the last many months and so on I've kind of been experimenting with

ways of doing this and so I regular, it's a regular practice that I'll be in some way sense some squeeze of identifying as a separate self, some squeeze of small-mindedness where I'm you know, circling in worry or I'm judging or whatever way caught and I'll just say, okay, what's it like from the perspective of my more evolved being? And I actually imagine awareness like up in the corner of a room kind of looking down or in front of me looking down and at me and just sensing, well, what's that perspective? And I'll sense the perspective that's perceiving this particular consolation of thoughts and feelings and not judging it, but just very aware, oh, these are the scales I'm identified with.

And so as I sense that perspective, as I'm calling on that, you know, in a way I'll be listening for a message. And the message is almost always relax, surprise, surprise, be kind, be here, pretty much those three things. Relax, be kind, be here. You know, when dust is dust, none of this circling in the brain matters. Just be here, be kind, relax. And then as I sense the message and as I sense that bigger presence, there is a natural releasing of the scales.

We're really releasing the identification with the scales. and a very spontaneous inhabiting that more evolved dimension of my being. But I do it over and over. And here's a couple of interesting pieces from cognitive science to encourage you, which is when you coach yourself or hear in a guided meditation, the invitation to imagine something that you know about, to imagine your future self, to imagine the awakened heart mind, to imagine a pink elephant, for instance, okay?

If I say imagine a pink elephant, it's harder not to perceive it than to perceive it. Once something's presented, imagine your future self. It's harder to move your attention away from that and forget it and try not to experience it because it exists. There's in reality an awakened part of your being. So, cognitive science has shown that it's more work for the brain to not think of a pink elephant. That's one thing to know about that I think is really interesting. And the other thing that cognitive science knows is that you can imagine something and practice it in your mind and it will not only change neural pathways, it'll change your physiology

and your psychology like if you want to practice your tennis serve. How many of you have tried this out with sports? Is anybody, where you imagine a move? Well, if you visualize the perfect tennis serve over and over again, you are actually training your nervous system to do it. If over and over again you take refuge in Bodhiita in the awakened heart mind, you actually are training yourself to come home to your full potential being. A couple more words to say about that.

One is that it's really natural, that we will keep being tugged by the primitive wants and fears and all the ways they express themselves. So it's part of evolution's kind of design that we can begin to imagine and repeatedly reach towards what's possible. The poet RELCO puts it this way. God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear.

You sent out beyond your recall. Go to the limits of your longing. Emboddy me. Flair up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don't let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. So we begin to hold hands more and more

with the awakened heart mind, to listen to its wisdom, to be guided by its wisdom, to actually feel that heart space holding us. Now I want to, as part of the closing here, say something about the language of my future self. And the first is there's a deep understanding in terms of the future self that future is already here. You wouldn't be able to experience that tenderness and that wisdom if it wasn't already here and accessible. So future's just a concept. But it's a useful one when you're feeling stuck and caught by the limbic system.

Then it feels like future, but it's already here. So you can kind of dissolve the idea of future on some deep level. The next part of that phrase, my future self, self. If you're really getting in touch with the heart space and wisdom that you're calling on and you investigate, there's no self in it, it's just a field of awake awareness, tender awake awareness. My future self is really not in the future and it's not a self. Finally, my, does it really belong to us?

Again, when we investigate, there's nothing to own it. It's just here. In fact, what we perceive as my future self is a field of awake, tender awareness that's your future self and your future self and yours. It's just a field that's available and living through and the source of all of us. So, I'm offering a phrase and a guided meditation that's called by the Buddhist a skillful means. It's really useful when you're stuck in kind of everyday mind and feeling somewhat limited and in your story, then my future self, wow, okay, there is something more.

And then as you deepen in your sense of it, you discover it's always already here. Finally, to say that it's here in all of us, no matter how stuck we are, no matter how lost we feel. I remember some years ago a story Rachel Raymond told about, she's a a, a, a, a, a physician, a wise woman. And she described how a man named Tim's, his father had Alzheimer's, and it had been for ten years of his life. And despite the devoted care of his mother, he deteriorated and wasn't able to speak or do much.

And so one Sunday, Tim's mother was out doing shopping and his brother, he and his brother, they were 15 and 17 and were watching footbook. and his father was nearby in a chair and she writes this. Suddenly he slump forward and fell to the floor. Both sons realized immediately that something was terribly wrong. His color was gray and his breath uneven and rasping. Frighted Tim's older brother told him to call 911. Before he could respond a voice he had not heard in 10 years,

his father hadn't spoken for 10 years. A voice he could merely remember, interrupted, don't call 911 son. Just tell your mother that I love her. that I love her, tell her I'm all right. And Tim's father died. So Tim's a cardiologist and they did an autopsy and so on. His entire brain had been destroyed by a disease and yet Bodichita was there. Consciousness, awareness was there and this is the mystery that we can be in any state of mind, we can be reactive, we can be angry, we can feel small, we can feel

Bodecita is the life that lives through us, the consciousness and heart is always there and always available. And you can begin this practice in any moment of just saying, okay, right now, and I invite you to check it out right this moment even as you're listening, just to close your eyes and say right now, this moment and from your sincerity, please may I sense. that awakened heart mind, my future self, the evolved, wisest, most loving part of me, may I sense that presence right here? And to the degree that you feel that sincerity and you bring your full attention,

you find it there. And you also find that you can open your eyes if you'd like, This shines through spontaneously regardless of calling on it. I think of children and I think of the light that shines through children and I'll read you just a few responses children gave to the question, what does love mean? And these are four to eight year olds, okay? One little girl said, when my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore.

So my grandfather does it for her all the time even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love. Another one. When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different, you know that your name is safe in their mouth. Another one, love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening the presents and just listen. When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you. When you tell someone something bad about yourself and you're scared they won't. love you anymore but then you get surprised because not only do they still love you,

they love you even more. You really shouldn't say I love you unless you mean it but if you mean it you should say it a lot. People forget. So we'll close now with just taking a few moments again to reconnect. As you come into stillness again feel this body breathing sense in these moments that you're again calling on your future self, most awake expression of your heart and mind, your heart when it's full and not holding back love, just really open, tender. Bring to mind a dear one, someone you care a lot about. As you look through these eyes of wisdom and with this open heart, just sense this person how the light

of Bodichita, how their most awake heart mind lives through them, the sense the aliveness and humor, intelligence, sensitivity, kindness, the expressions of their most evolved consciousness, how that lives through them. And as you sense this you might imagine in some way letting that person know, being a mirror, your experience of their awakened heart mind, what you love, sensing how when we see the goodness and we acknowledge it, it makes it burn even brighter in both of us. And from that same awake heart mind, just experiencing the life that's right here that you call self, sensing how this loving, this awakeness lives to you in this moment and sensing

how this heart of Bodhita is vast and inclusive. She can sense all those who are listening right now to this here and around the world, all those that feel that longing to really manifest their fullness, all those who that long is still unconscious but in their death. want to wake up, be whole, sensing all of us, all beings everywhere in this awakened heart, all species, sensing that you can hold the earth, our mother in your lap, and all beings everywhere in this heart. And we close with the simple prayer that all beings awakened to the loving presence that is

our shared source, that all beings might live from that loving presence. May there be peace on earth and peace everywhere. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Namaste and thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.