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Foreign. Welcome friends, to the Tara Brak Podcast. I'm so glad you're here. Each week I share teachings and guided meditations to help us awaken our hearts and bring healing to our world. You can learn more or support this offering by visiting tarabrock.com where you can also join our email list. Now let's explore together the many ways

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we can live from the love and

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presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Foreign.

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Welcome and thank you for being here. Story that years ago, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. And the student expected Margaret Mead to talk about clay pots or tools for hunting. But that wasn't what she did. She said the first evidence of civilization was a fractured yet healed femur. That's what links the hip to the knee. The particular bone had been broken and healed, which means other people had cared for this person, got them to safety, tended to them. So she's basically saying helping each other, collaborative efforts, caring is what allows us to flourish in all ways. So whether or not she actually said this, the message is profound that civilization, that evolved human society, begins with compassion. And there are countless examples of humans extending to each other in the midst of hardships and simply out of friendliness. I'm just thinking in these last few weeks for me here, a lot of the east coast, the blizzards, just witnessing how spontaneously people did what they could for others, for the elderly, for the infirm, it's just in our wiring to care. So I'd like to share with you a talk from the archives. And it explores this evolutionary conditioning in each of us that calls us to love. And it also explores the very strong fear based energies that block that love, block our caring. And then in the deepest way, we look at how can our practices of mindful awareness, of waking up the heart, how can they literally evolve us as a species? How can they increase our capacity to live from love?

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Okay, friends, may this serve our reflection. Tonight is your awake, Heart is calling you. That's the title. And I thought I'd start with a story that I was reminded of recently. It happened some years back at when I was teaching at Kripalu, a weekend on awakening loving presence. And one evening we were exploring getting into a real deep place of inner listening. And I had arranged to have my husband Jonathan play the flute. So we were going to get into a real quiet place and then listen to the flute music. And so we did a meditation and the room became very, very still. And then all of a sudden, a woman's cell phone went off. And as has happened, and it was the yellow rose of Texas, you know it. And so all of a sudden this thing's blaring, she panics. So she tries to grab her phone out of her bag, but by mistake she hit the speakerphone. So you hear this voice going, mom. She's trying to grab her phone, mom, is that you? So she's trying to get out of the room because she was up front. And you hear this voice going, mom, speak to me, mom, are you ok? Mom? She was so embarrassed she left the room. And what really struck me about it, and when she came back, you know, this was a person who was kind of new to the practice and so on. She told me what happened, how many people came to her afterward and said that kind of thing. When that happens to me, it's terrible. And kind of gave her a hug. And she got brought back into the community by people saying, hey, I know what it's like. You know, it's such deep conditioning to feel separate and that something's wrong with us to feel separate and then to forget how other people are feeling when things go on for them. We kind of forget the subjective realness of people and what they're experiencing. And there's this, to me, magical question, which is, what's it like for you right now? You know, what is life like for you and what is it like? We have this capacity, these mirror neurons and a lot more in our brain, to extend our perceptiveness and really feel with. And yet we, depending on our degree of stress, forget that question. So we forget, if somebody has a disability, what is it like for you? Or somebody's Partner Just after 20 years, just suddenly said, hey, this is over. We're ending a relationship. What's it like in those moments for that person or for the person right now in the beginning of 2017, who's an immigrant and is unsure of their status? Are the African American applying for a job in this white dominant business? What's it like for you? What is this like for you? So we forget, and as I mentioned, we have this capacity for actually training and remembering more and more to really sense subjective realness. So there's a story that I heard a long, long time ago that to me captures a sum with a Sikh master who gives his two most devoted disciples each a chicken. And he says, go where no one can see and kill the chicken. So one goes behind a shed and picks up an axe and chops off the Chicken's head. And the other wanders around for hours. And he returns back with the chicken alive. And the master said, what happened? And his response was, I can't find a place to kill the chicken where no one can see me. Everywhere I go, the chicken sees. So for to him, the chicken was real and conscious and felt pain. And as we deepen our awareness of our own vulnerable being, as we have that courage to contact the realness of our own vulnerability, what happens is more and more other humans become real. That is the process. Others care about their lives. They want to stay alive, they want to be happy. So I've always been taken by this story, and particularly I'm taken by it right now, when so many feel this dismay. Like the message of the story is all life matters, all life is precious. And it's so in our atmosphere, this dismay that in a way, society wise, we're regressing and that there's a sense that we're reverting more in the direct mentality of some are the real humans and matter, but others don't matter. Not to mention other humans, other species and the earth. So in this reflection, I'd like to explore the two major poles on our psyche and one from our evolutionary past. You know, that kind of regression into a fight, flight, freeze mentality, that's fear based and blocks off others caring for others. And then this calling of loving awareness to increasingly manifest. And we're here, right? We just have celebrated Martin Luther King. And that to me, the quote that just this year just rung out so loud was, I've decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. We just have to keep re choosing love. So we've got these two poles on us. And to speak to the first pole, the pole, the kind of regressive pull, and it's in everybody's psyche, everybody's nervous system. And the more we're stressed, the more our particular conditions are such that life feels unsafe, the more we get pulled in that direction, it's not because there's a bad person, it's just life feels very unsafe. So the emergence of early humans, this is through human history, early emergence survival depended on this tight affiliation with small groups. That affiliation really mattered. So in order to include, you know, coherence and being together and tight and safe and so on, just the one thing that really stands out, groups would name themselves something like humans, we're the humans. And then there'd be epitaphs for other groups that had something to do with being less than human. Because that way you can kill a being that doesn't feel like you, sentient and sensitive. If you think of somebody as less than, then it's easier to injure them, to hurt them. So that improves human coherence, small group coherence. So fast forward to today. And by the way, that mode of small groups living in small groups went on thousands of times as long as our current society. So we still have all the, you know, wiring like that. So we still are pulled from the survival strategies of the past to, you know, create hierarchies and to make others bad and less than and wrong and to dominate that kind of mean spiritedness that comes from that deep core sense of threat to pump up ourselves. Or it can take the form of being numb, automatic, cut off. So this is what Einstein was talking about, about the optical delusion of separateness, that that's the psyche we can live in. And we also intuit a larger truth and are pulled towards something else. What are sometimes called the widening circles of compassion. Some months ago I gave a talk on the Bodhisattva path. This training ourselves to turn towards our awakening heart. How to be with the poles of regression, how to be with the fears and the unsafety, but really open and opening our hearts and opening our hearts to widening circles of beings. And so I talked to a friend from our community here in D.C. and she said, you know, I know I love my family and friends and I know I care about the larger community on some level, but it also feels like pretense because my heart doesn't feel like it cares, it's more like an idea. And she felt this was a confession. And this is a person that actually most people think of as having a very big heart. And she's an activist and here she's saying, I know on some level abstractly that I love people, but I don't feel like I care. In fact, I'm more aware of comparing myself. I'm more aware of feeling jealous, I'm more aware of judging. I'm more aware of feeling undeserving and I'm more aware of self hate than I am of actually, in a visceral way, caring about anybody. So that felt important. I wanted to bring that in here because I think a lot of people feel like that, that the word love gets tossed around. But it's hard to admit how many moments we're caught in some mental prison. That's really those pulls from our evolutionary past that are keeping us feeling separate, not okay comparing to others, not Enough and not really in that place where we sense the sentience in other beings and how other people are real and that connection is going on. That happens a lot. Love has sometimes been described as giving our full, unconditional attention. When it's really full and unconditional, the love is already there. It's almost like what cuts us off is these pulls from the past that get us very self focused and other becomes bad other or the other we want but out there, so we're not really paying attention because we have an agenda. So there's. So I was with this woman and we're kind of discussing how cut off she feels. And I asked her a question, you know, I said, well, what makes this most upsetting? And then I said, then we talked about that. And I said, well, what would it be like if you never really opened into that, those widening circles of caring? I mean, you still do your activist thing and people, you know, people like you and respect you. What would be the worst part of that? And that then she started weeping. The idea of never caring got her weeping. And she said, you know, but that's the whole thing that makes life worth living. I want to care. And so I said, so you care about caring? Caring. And that is what stopped her. And what I mean by stopped her, that kind of broke something open. You care about caring. What I want to say to you is that it really is natural that we cut off and we get disconnected and we get preoccupied, but we care about caring. And for her, when she could, I said, pay attention to the part of you that cares about caring. Just kind of rest in that. And it was like something in her just widened out and lightened up because she knew that was more the truth of who she was than any of the stories of the self that wasn't okay. I remember hearing the Dalai Lama say, you know, I keep hearing how everybody likes me and it must be because I care about Bodhicitta. He said, I can't always embody it, but I care about caring. So I heard it from him first and it really hit me that it's intrinsic to us. Love is intrinsic. It's basic. And we have conditioning that contracts us and gets us preoccupied. And when we've been traumatized a lot, we get very, very contracted and focused on protectiveness. But we can wake up back into really being at home in that caring. So I want to look at that and I want to begin by saying that there are two primary ways that this awake heart of ours, that which already cares, sometimes cut Off. It's like the sun's already shining, sometimes covered by clouds, but it's there. Your awake heart is there. And there's two ways that your awake card calls you and one way. And I sometimes describe this as our future self. And by future self, I mean your fully manifested beingness when you're really. When your heart's awake and your mind's open. And there's two ways that your future, more evolved self is calling you. And one is that it's calling you as you become aware of suffering and become aware of it in a way that you're willing to actually contact what's going on. So for this woman, the beginning of waking up was feeling the suffering of not really being connected with others. The pain of separation was the beginning of her waking up. So it's like being in a cocoon. And as you start to evolve, the cocoon is too small. And it's the pain of that contracted place you're living. The limiting beliefs, the beliefs that you're falling short. The sense that others out there, the fear of other. That contraction starts waking us up. The other way that our future self, our evolved heart, is calling us is by a quality of longing, of a sense of resonance with beauty, a sense of. Of awe, of wonder. It's the what we love calls us. And we all experience that. It happens sometimes when we're laughing with each other and playful, and all of a sudden there's a sense of, oh, it can be like this. You know what I mean? It's like all of a sudden you realize, oh, we can lighten up and just be in the field together. We are together, you know, and it happens at times when we're crying together, when we're grieving. I've noticed how when people are really grieving together, there's nothing to push away anymore because we've kind of opened to the real loss. And in that openness, there's a tender connection. And we feel that longing to feel that vulnerable togetherness more. And that's the calling of our awakened heart. It happens when someone's really kind to us, and it happens when we're in some way just feeling that caring and then feeling, oh, this is home. This is what I want to live from. A few years ago, a friend of mine told me that his prayer now is, please teach me about kindness. He said that his heart, he felt most true to his heart, most sincere when he was making that prayer. And since then I've adopted it because it's so beautiful. It has both a sense with it of humility, but of really inhabiting what I care about. So that feels like the awake heart calling, please teach me about kindness or any prayer in any words that have to do with really inhabiting our hearts. I recently taught with Anam Tabtan, who's a Tibetan teacher and friend and he has a book that is now out and I read one. In one chapter he says that if we really want to awaken our hearts, he says the trick is to love humanity. He says it's very easy to love nature. Nature is beautiful and you can love nature, but humans, it's really, you know, it's hard and it's really true that. And he doesn't mean love humanity abstractly, you know, he means really open to the imperfect, vulnerable shapes and forms of this life force as they come in the human and just love ourselves and each other into healing, really love each other. So how do we listen to the call? We sense it. There's not one of you listening that hasn't sensed that pain of separation, that doesn't know about loneliness or grief or fear and feeling separate. And there's not one of us that hasn't felt that longing to love without holding back. It always happens when I tell this story to myself. Even so how do we listen to the call? Because it's not about acting in a particular way, you know, it's not about in some way being good and cooperating and outwardly acting generous and so on. We get very caught in the expectation of how we, we should be to be open hearted. And it's taught through the religions, different religions of how to behave. Somebody sent me this teaching children in church School and one 3 year old boy was urged to do his prayer. And here's his prayer. He said, our Father who does art in heaven, Harold is his name. Amen. Another one was overheard praying, lord, if you can't make me a better boy, don't worry about it. I'm having a real good time as I am. After the christening of his baby brother in church, Jason sobbed all the way home in the backseat of the car. His father asked him three times what was wrong. Finally the boy replied, well, the preacher said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home, but I said I wanted to stay with you guys. A mother was preparing pancakes for her son Kevin, 5, and Ryan, 3. The boys began arguing over who would get the first pancake. Their mother saw an opportunity for a moral lesson. If Jesus were sitting here, he would say, let my brother have the first pancake. I can Wait. Kevin turned to his younger brother and said, okay, you can have the first time playing Jesus. So the pathway to inhabiting our awake heart, to turning towards our awake heart, starts with what I sometimes call the U turn, which is when we're in pain, we tend to be blaming ourselves or blaming others, are caught in a story of what's going on or a story of how to fix it. It's like being at a movie and we're kind of looking at all that. It's a reactivity to the pain we're trying to get away. And the U turn is a willingness to instead of look out at the screen, in other words, be lost in those stories and the reactivity to come back and be willing with gentleness and kindness and clarity, to touch the vulnerability that we're feeling directly in our body. That's the beginning of listening to the call is coming home to touch what's right here. So it means that in some way, if you've been set off and you're afraid of something that's coming up around the corner where you have to perform or you have to do well, or you're afraid of someone's criticism, instead of staying in the story on the movie screen, you come around and say and breathe. Just feel the rawness that's there and in that presence with you begin to open and sense that you are the presence. You are that awareness, you are that gentleness. And it shifts your sense of who you are. It also lets you be more present with, more compassionate towards anyone else that's having a challenge. This is what wakes up our mirror neurons. The second part of training is to pay deeper attention to others. What's it like to be you? What's it like to be you know, it's so easy in our current culture with the billions of words that come at us on a screen to not really pause enough to feel into the suffering that we're hearing about. In fact, I'd say it's really rare to get close in and really let our hearts be tenderized. And unless we care, we won't respond. So what helps us to care? I was just with a few friends right before class and remembering. Many of you will remember this. The most dramatic example I can think of, the entire world pausing and being touched was a year and a half ago when Alan Kurdi, that little boy who was drowned, the Syrian boy, his family was trying to get from Syria to Greece, and that picture went viral. And I almost don't know anyone that in some way didn't actually Feel that so that it made them really care. How come that doesn't happen more? And how can it happen more? His father said, now I don't want anything. Even if you give me all the countries in the world to move into, I don't want them. My kids were the most beautiful children in the world. They are all gone now. We want the whole world to see this. Let this be the last. But it won't be the last unless we pay attention. So again we're talking about how do we listen to the call, how do we intentionally pay attention? It's like we have to decide to pay attention. There are some bodhisattvas, some poets, some teachers that keep on reminding us in certain ways. And one of them is Warson Shire, who is a Kenyan born poet. I'll give you an example because her interest is writing about the people that are generally not heard otherwise. Immigrants, refugees. She knows that we need to pay more attention. So here's just some of a poem that she wrote. She says no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well, your neighbors running faster than you, breath bloody in their throats. The boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factories, holding a gun bigger than his body. You only leave home when home won't let you stay. She says no one leaves home unless home chases you. Fire under feet, hot blood under belly. No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land. No one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages. No one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the the miles traveled means something more than the journey. No one crawls under fences, no one wants to be beaten, pitied. She says no one wants to go home. She says the words are go home. Blacks, refugees, dirty immigrants, asylum seekers, sucking our country dry messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up. How do the words, the dirty looks roll off your. Maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off, or the words are more tender, or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone, than your child body in pieces. I want to go home. But home is the mouth of a shark, home is the barrel of a gun. So I wanted to take time with that poem because I read it and put it down and couldn't do much for a while, that it's hard to take time and choose to bring our sights closer on purpose, to feel the hurt. And yet Taking the time, having the courage to say what's it like to be you? Is really where evolution is taking our heart and our mind and our spirit. It's the hope of the world that we can widen these circles. It's just as critical. In fact, you can't really do it unless you do it in your personal life with the person you're going to see later tonight at home or at work tomorrow. So this isn't just a training for those that feel a little bit more farther in the distance. Like my friend that I mentioned earlier. Many find it hard to attune and care about really the people right close to them. There's some men that can only cry at movies, and there's some friends. I have a friend who can only really cry at the plight of animals. And it's not like these people are bad. It's the way that our society is. It's the way our bodies have been traumatized. It's the way we've been cut off. But we can reconnect. So the training starts with what you can relate to or what you can connect to most easily. I have one friend who started a nonprofit called Nature Connection. And what they do is they bring animals and parts of nature to people that can't get there, to kids that are in institutions, to people that are in old age homes where they can't get out. And they actually bring rocks and plants and different kinds of animals. One story just to share with you, she described one afternoon, there's a young boy who had been in a program for three years and he'd refused to speak with therapists, teachers, classmates. And some of them, some of the boys were herding animals. Before they got into these institutions, they bragged about killing dogs, cats, frogs. So in this particular place, they brought. They brought. First they had to teach the kids how to treat the animals to make it safe for the boys and safe for the animals. They taught them how to touch gently, how to groom the language of their body gestures, how to use subtle tones of voice. Initially it was chaotic with these young boys. But whenever they bring the animals in, there was this magic that happened. The kids would start getting quiet and they got really. They really took seriously their roles and they started, took two years, they started taking care of the animals. And one boy described his change. He says, now I don't hurt animals now I try and I help them. And the animals come to me as if they know I'm not going to hurt them. I think they sense the way my attitude is, we can Train ourselves and each other to deepen our attention. So I'd like to just take a moment. We're going to pause here. And the practice that I love the most, it's a Tibetan practice called Tonglen. We can adapt it in a very simple way if we want to practice by listening to the call of our awake heart, by training with the people right around us. So this is just a taste of Tonglen. You might close your eyes and take a few moments to sit still and relax and breathe. Bringing to mind one person in your life that you care about that's having difficulty right now. And sense what you are aware of, that is going on, what they are dealing with, what your habitual way of regarding this is. Do you spend a lot of time tuning in or do you have some ideas about what is going on? Does your mind kind of flash to a certain way that that person is when they are having difficulty. Now sense that your awake card is calling you to tune in more deeply and let yourself bring that sense of the person closer in. Imagine when this person is distressed, fear, shame, feelings of failure, disappointment, and sense that you can feel this person inside you as if you are looking through his or her or their eyes, feeling with their heart. And so you can sense what it's like really inside out what this person is going through. You might sense what the most difficult part of this is for this person. What's the worst part? What is it they are believing that is limiting about themselves or the world? What do they need? What do they really need? And in the formal practice, the breath can be a support. You can breathe in and feel that with the in breath, you are just really gently but fully contacting the experience of this person. You are letting yourself touch it, but with the out breath, you are letting it be held in the heart of the universe. You are not holding on to it and you are offering really whatever is most needed to this person. You might sense that you are breathing in and just feeling the person's loneliness or feelings of hurt or feelings of failure. With the out breath, you are really sensing this heart space that is utterly tender and feeling that person embraced and held and bathed in that love. It's called taking in and giving out. Make sure when you breathe out, you sense the vastness that can hold this suffering. It's really the heart space of the soul of the world. You're not holding on to it, but you're letting yourself be touched by it. Breathing in and being touched, breathing out and offering care. And as you're doing this you might now enlarge the sense of what's going on to include all those that might feel like this person. So you're really breathing in for all of us to that might suffer in this way, letting in the reality of the suffering, but breathing out and sensing the heart space that is boundless, that can hold. You can take a few full breaths now and we'll move forward. And if you like being with your eyes closed, that's fine, or opening your eyes. This inquiry, what's it like for you? Is really the inquiry from our awake heart, this willingness to touch what's going on. But it's also our awake heart that has the space. If you think you're an individual, separate self taking in the suffering of the world, it's going to feel overwhelming. You'll feel flooded. And so many people when they learn about Tonglen, ask me, but you know, Tara, I'm thin skinned already. I'm affected by everything. Why would I want to breathe in the suffering of the world? And, and again, if you feel like you're this container of a separate self that's kind of breathing in the universe's wounds, it's just not going to work. But if you imagine yourself as a flow through that you're breathing in to be touched and you're breathing out and you're sensing the whole space, heart space of the world holding, then you become, then you belong to that heart space. It's through Tongan that you actually inhabit your awake heart. And science has shown that those that. And they hooked up these monks to brain scanners and have found that the practice of compassion actually makes us happy. It's a profound happiness. It's the happiness of realizing who we really are. That beingness that has a heart that includes all beings. So we widen the circles. This is again, how do we respond to the call of our awake heart? Well, we are willing to touch the pain, the suffering, and we remember what we love, we offer care. And this happens in truly intimate friendships and partnerships. And it can happen in our wider society, I think for me, perhaps the best. And there's dialogues going on, there's reconciliation going on, different formats really, all over the globe. And that's the hope that is our evolving consciousness at work, where people that have conflict or difficulty, where harm has been caused, come together and begin this getting to know process that can seek to reconcile, make amends, restore justice and balance. I'll share one story that struck me that I'm imagining some of you might have read because this was in the Washington Post, this was last week, describing two young men. They were arguing and they left a bar. And one man, Timothy, killed the other, Joshua. Joshua was unarmed. Timothy went to jail. And five years later, through Restorative justice program the Department of Corrections was running, a meeting was arranged between Ms. Berquist, who was Joshua's mother, and Timothy, her son's killer. Okay, so you've got the mother of the man who was murdered and the killer meeting. So what I wanted to do was read to you a little bit of their conversation, because to me, this is what happens when we're willing to step in closer and pay deeper attention, when we are responding to the call of the awake heart. So a little bit of their conversation. Mrs. Berquist says, My purpose in going there was to share Josh with him, because if he had known my son, he never would have done it. Timothy says these are kind of different things. They both reported she started crying. She was hurt. To come face to face with your son's killer, you know, nothing can really prepare you for that. It was uncomfortable. Ms. Berquist says, I had him watch my son's funeral. I brought pictures, caps and diploma from high school, the bells off his baby shoes, and pictures of his tattoos. He had gorgeous tattoos, Timothy. He says it humanized him to me and made me see how he was loved by her and her family. I took a part of them that I can never give back. Then he said, I was already crying and everything when I saw the funeral tape. She introduced me to her reality. I didn't try to justify anything. I shouldn't have killed him. When I saw him lying in the casket, I took that joy away from them. As Berquist says, he started really apologizing. It was definitely genuine. When I left the meeting, I felt like I'd been power washed. I felt so at peace. I couldn't help my son that night. But I have someone here that I can help turn his life around, do better. Timothy says she said she forgave me. It was a relief because I really hoped she would. Ms. Berquist. I told him I forgive him for what he's done, and I do forgive him. I can't forget what he did. I live with it. But I do forgive him. And in April, last April, the two met again. This time it was at a victim's awareness event at the prison in front of inmates. She called me her friend, Timothy said, she called me her friend. A woman forgiving her son's killer and calling him her friend. And at the end, she got up and gave me a hug. You just don't see that too often. So this is the healing. This is really responding to the call. When we move, the way we move from the horror about our world to being part of the healing, it's really listening to that call that please teach me about kindness, that lets us deepen our attention and ask, well, what's it like for you? And then to extend kindness through our actions, to widen the circles it says. Child developer and researcher said this is LR Nast. Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break and all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but with intention. So go love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you. I sometimes frame it as a trance that we're all evolving or awakening out of and there's going to keep on being poles of forgetting for every one of us. It's not our fault. Poles where we move around the world feeling like my friend did that. We're acting like we're caring, but we're not. That there's a lot of self centeredness or judgment and there's going to be that part of us that has that kind of a prayer like please teach me about kindness, that cares about caring. They are both there. So I would like to end with a very brief meditation where really we are again turning towards the most awake part of our being. We begin this meditation with the words of Stephen Levine. He says 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. So we begin this closing meditation by sensing what the words are in your heart right now, the most awake part of your heart that are calling you to love. It may be, please teach me about kindness or please may I awaken to loving presence. Please may I love without holding back. What's the longing that feels sincere in you right now. And from that place of sincerity and longing, bringing to mind someone who you care about that you'd like to be more awake with, that you'd like your loving to be more awake with you'd like to remember more. Bring that being close in and take some moments to sense their vulnerability. What's life like for you? What is hard that is going on right now for this person? What do they need? What flavor of loving? Is it acceptance or forgiveness or a listening presence, affirmation? Sense yourself embracing, offering. And seeing past the mask of all conditioning. Seeing the goodness, what you cherish about this being. As Thomas Merton says, the secret beauty, how it shines through this particular person in their humor, their brightness, the way they show love. You might mentally whisper the words thank you, just that honoring of the sacredness that lives through that being. And then bringing to mind someone else that you don't know as well, that may seem different to you, someone that's in your circle in your life that you don't know so well. And in some ways it's different enough that you're not that familiar. And in the same way, imagine and bring that person in closer. Just sense what this person might be struggling with, what the challenge or vulnerability this person is living with. What's it like for you? What this person might need? What kind of loving expression, smile or touch, kind word might help this person feel more belonging, more at ease? Sense your heart holding, embracing this being. And also beholding, sensing how goodness, sacredness lives through this being. Sensing the uniqueness and sentience and aliveness and goodness flowing there. And again. A thank you. Or it could be a namaste or some honoring of the secret beauty. And widening that heart space so you're including the person that is close to you and you don't know so well. Sensing you are including your own self and all beings now. Very, very open heart space that senses the vulnerability of all living beings and the sacredness, the goodness that shines. We walk through half our life as if it were a fever dream 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. May all beings realize this loving presence as source. May we live from loving presence. May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste and thank you.