Lovingkindness - Part 1 of Present Heart: The Universal Expressions of Love

Welcome friends to the Tara Brock 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 we can live from the love and presence that's our deepest essence. Namaste. Namaste. Welcome friends. Each week I pause and I try to listen in to our collective heart and psyche and also inward to this stream I call me and sense what to reflect on together on what talk, what's really going to serve. And so as I was contemplating this I ran across a message from Thich Nhat Hanh goes like this. He says, This my dear is the greatest challenge to being alive, to witness injustice in the world and not allow it to consume our light. Not allow it to consume our light. There's so much truth in that that when injustice and in particular when cruelty is spiking as it is in these days it can bring out our own shadow, our own reactivity and what our world really needs is our light. So we protect our light in a daily way by nurturing our hearts and in this human realm really light shines through an open and present heart. So it's in that spirit that I decided over these next weeks to explore the different flavors of love and Buddhism they're described as loving kindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. And to do this I'll be drawing on a series from the archives that I love and we'll take these weeks together to nurture our hearts. Before beginning I want to name something that some might be wondering about which is if I'm feeling angry or distressed, afraid, can't heart practices in some way be a kind of spiritual bypass ignoring or covering up the the intelligence of emotions and they absolutely can be. When we have a lot arising and ask a lot of strong emotions it's really important first and foremost to be with what's arising. Many of you know the rain practice bringing presence to what's here and we also need to give ourselves the blessings of heart practices. This is a both end. We need an honest and present heart and we need an open heart. There's a there's a joke that about Adam and Eve as they're leaving the garden it's that Adam says to Eve, well my dear these are times of transition and life always feels that way. And these times do have a particular rawness and intensity. So I'll be accompanying you these weeks as we deepen heart presence and a brightening of our spiritual heart. May this serve. One of my regular reflections when I do my daily meditation is if I was at the end of my life or if I just had a very small amount of time left what would really matter? What would matter about today or what would matter about these next few moments? And always in some way what comes up is that this heart be awake and be loving. There's a bumper sticker that I've always liked that says life is fragile, love is the glue. And in that spirit what I'd like to do the next four or five classes and I say that because I always miscalculate how much I can get done in any in any talk but what we'll explore is what are sometimes described as the four universal expressions of love and they're known in the Buddhist tradition as the Brahma Viharas which means the divine abode. And in a way you can sense them as these are the expressions of our evolutionary potential of the heart. And in the Chinese script the word mindfulness the character for it is present heart. And what I love about that and my problem with the word mindfulness sometimes in the west is that it doesn't always include the quality of the way heart but you really can't separate the realizations that the mind has that everything is interconnected and the heart's experience of warmth and openness and tenderness that correlates with that realization. You can't separate them. And it's often described metaphorically as this bird with two wings and it's the wing of mindfulness and the wing of heartfulness and to fly we have to have both. So the Brahma Viharas these expressions of love start with love and kindness and that's what we'll explore in this class. And love and kindness is that friendliness or that open-heartedness that comes when we are in touch with the goodness of life when we're appreciating the beauty and the mystery and the dearness of life. And the second of the Brahma Viharas is compassion. And compassion is that heart quality arises when we're honestly willing to contact the suffering that's here. It's a real tenderness and resonance with suffering. The third is joy sometimes called sympathetic joy and that's that openness of heart that can is so open that all the joys and sorrows can flow through us and there's a profound celebration of just the nature of aliveness itself. And then the fourth is equanimity which actually has to be there for all of them because if there's not a very deep sense of wisdom and balance in the midst our love is actually attachment you know and our compassion can go to pity and it gets off balance. So we'll explore these these innate capacities and with each of them we'll explore the practices that allow us to cultivate them because they're intrinsic and part of what's happening in our evolution is that we are now at the point that we can intentionally cultivate and facilitate our evolution. Does that make sense? I'm seeing enough nods that I feel like I'm not alone up here. Okay so in human development the most recently evolved part of our brain where there's that whole neural net that allows for the mirror neurons to sense oh I can kind of pick up what's going on for you and your intention and we can attune to each other and have empathy and compassion. That's what enabled humans to collaborate and become so successful for better and for worse, that collaboration. And so when we explore this innate capacity of the present heart we're going to explore how to cultivate it and I like the language that Rick Hansen uses. He calls positive neuroplasticity and the reason I like it is because as soon as we really get neuroplasticity that this brain we whatever we practice grows stronger. We practice having judgmental thoughts and worry thoughts. We get more judgmental and worried but if we start practicing appreciating and we start practicing that interest in what's going on for you then we start actually activating the pathways in the brain that have to do with empathy and love. So whatever we practice grows stronger and we can no matter how deep the grooves are we can develop new pathways in the body, heart, mind and we can develop positive ones. So a guiding image that I'd like to use through these classes comes from a true story that took place in Northern Thailand, the ancient capital Sukhathai. And some of you might remember this, that there is in this great hall an enormous clay Buddha and plaster and clay and it had survived through the centuries all sorts of wars and disputes and so on, invading armies, storms, changes of government and so on. And people really revered it. It wasn't beautiful but it was just familiar and an intimate kind of a statue for them. But in recent years and this took place some decades ago now there was a dry season and so there started to be these cracks that came in the Buddha. And one evening the abbot of the monastery got interested in understanding what might be inside, looking at the infrastructure of the statue. So he beamed a little pen flashlight through one of the cracks and what shined back was the gleam of gold. So looked into another crack and the same thing. So he started undoing, they started breaking the clay and the plaster and what they discovered was that it was a solid gold statue of the Buddha. And really the largest solid gold statue of the Buddha in Southeast Asia. And the monks believe that this work of art had been covered over so it could survive these difficult years of invasions and so on much in the same way that we cover our own innate goodness and purity to survive difficult times, difficult society, difficult parenting, just the difficulties of human culture. And the suffering in this is very specific. It's not that we have covering. I mean having an ego is just part of being human. It's that we forget who we are and get identified with the covering. So we become the striving self or the ambitious self or the defended self or the addicted self or whatever it is and we forget who is looking through the mask. We forget who is really listening right now, that consciousness, that heart. So the way I think about it is that these practices remind us of the gold. They remind us of the consciousness that's here so that there's space for the conditioning to play itself out but not really run our lives. So the first step on this path of cultivating an awakening and as we'll explore tonight, love and kindness, is to begin to recognize the habit patterns that obscure the gold. And so that will be what I'll be asking you all to reflect on is, all right, well what are the habits in my life? Because we all have them. And everyone I know wants to love more fully, learn to love without holding back, have that freedom. And we have habits that still play. And as long as they're playing it means that we haven't shined the light of awareness on them sufficiently for them to dissolve. I often go to the line from Rumi that says your task is not to seek for love but really to seek and find all the barriers within yourself you've built against it. Okay, so that's what we're going to look at. And in a simplistic way we can sense the heart, the open heart and the closed heart. I think of it that when we're not contracted by stress and reactivity, when we're in stress and reactivity, we're all identified with the covering and the heart is very, very tight. And when the heart is open in a very natural way, it's unblocked. There's an unimpeded flow of blood and electrical currents and the more subtle energies of chi and prana as you might describe it. When the heart is open, you can describe it less as a thing and more as a conduit, a space for energy to flow through. There's a space of aliveness and a felt sense of love. So I use the word heart space as much as I use the word heart. Does that make sense for an open heart? It's more like a heart space. But then when we're stressed, it becomes a very solidified sense of heart. And in those stressful moments, and these are the sketch to the habits we're looking for that obscure, we are trying to control things. And that's the basic thing that goes on when a creature is stressed, it's scrambling around how to protect against what might invade it or to grasp after what will enhance it. But we're trying to control our environment and our blood flows through the arms and the legs and we're ready to run. And there's this biochemistry that basically says do something. So we get into the doing self. That's part of the covering, this identity with the doing self. Bottom line is when we're in that doing self, we forget the gold. We have left that heart space and we're contracted. So the first inquiry is in our lives and with the people that we care about, because that's a useful way to begin to examine it with our close relationships, friends, family, partner. What are the control strategies that get in the way? And when does our heart closed? When are we on automatic but not really with that porousness? So we're missing out really on living from the gold. So I'll review a few of the basic domains of controlling and just listen with the ears out for what resonates for you and then we'll just do a brief reflection, a sense, scanning in our own life. What are the barriers? So one of the ways I think it's most useful to look at it is that whenever our needs are unmet, we contract and try to control. And the big three areas of needs, safety. And that's the concern of the reptilian brain really, safety, gratification. And that's the mammalian brain. These are really looking at the evolution of the brain. And then the primate brain is really attachment, getting it attached to other creatures. So what happens when we feel unsafe? And that's the first way we get identified with our covering. We try to protect ourselves from harm, from being rejected or hurt or shamed or taken advantage of. And then we cover over vulnerability and the signs of it. We're just not being real with others. It's like we're pretending in some way that we're fine. We're speeding around, we're staying busy, keeping people at a distance. I remember hearing Postmaster General Edwin Day, he described that whenever he was talking to somebody who was really long-winded, he would hang up the phone while he was talking. Because who would hang up on themselves, you know, if that was his way of extricating. So we have these control strategies and we all have. I thought that was a great strategy. But now I can't ever do it because I've announced it formally. So we have our ways of distancing from others. And then of course we have our ways of judging ourselves. That's a major control strategy when we feel threatened, where we judge ourselves and blame ourselves to try to get ourselves to change. Jules Pfeiffer put it this way. He said, I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, my mother's contempt for my father. So we blame ourselves. And again, we're talking about ways that we create barriers. In a moment that you're judging yourself, adversively, you are creating a barrier. You are disconnecting from the gold. And then of course we blame others. And that's another major habit pattern that creates distance. Sometimes we do it just mentally and other times it's a very acting out kind of blaming. Rita Rudner says, my grandmother buried three husbands. Two were only napping. So we have our ways of trying to control. So that's the first area is unsafe and getting reactive, making distances, judging, blaming ourselves. The second area is when we get dissatisfied, when we're not feeling our needs are met. And then there's this perpetual chasing after pleasures in a way that preoccupies us, that really preoccupies our attention. And you can look at just today and sense, well how much were you in some way seeking after, wanting the next moment to contain what this moment is not. In some way leaning forward, in some way more of a narrow focus to get something. It's like they say in India that when a pickpocket sees a saint, they see the saint's pocket. Narrowed vision. So we get fixated on whether it's food or getting fixated online, sex, drugs, decorating shop and whatever it is. The unmet need for gratification narrows us and it stops us from being available to really connect. The poet Riyo Khan says, if you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things. This is just one level inquiry. How much are you chasing after things? Now the third area, and I'm doing this really quickly because I want to actually get into practicing with you, is when we don't feel, well there's been not good attachment with others, when there's a feeling of disconnection. And then our energies that keep us from the gold all have to do with trying to get attachment to work out fine. And the near enemy of loving kindness is attachment because it masquerades as love but it's not. So what are they? How do we do it? We do it seeking approval is the big one. It's very interesting if you consider any interaction you had today and just ask yourself how much was in some way the way you were being with that person driven by wanting to get a certain reaction or response that was favorable in a certain way? How much is spontaneous? How much are we shaped by in some way wanting to get something a certain way? So there's some agenda, performing, flattering, presenting, meeting expectations. There's a saying that dying begins at birth and it accelerates at dinner parties, which I really like. Anyway, so we go around anxiously trying to have good relationships and attaching again, scan the closest relationships because those are where there's a lot at stake and often what's going on is we want those closest to us to cooperate so we can feel good about ourselves and have things under control. And so what happens? There can be demands, expectations, guilt-tripping. So we start scanning in that way. One story describes, this is a kind of mother-son story, we'll call the man John, he invites his mother for dinner and during the meal she can't help but notice that his roommate is very beautiful. So she's been suspicious of a relationship. So this got her more curious and she watches them through the evening and she's wondering and John reads her thoughts and says, you know, I want you to know what you're thinking, I know you know, I know what you're thinking but we're just roommates. So okay, week later, Carrie says, you know, ever since your mom came for dinner, I haven't been able to find that beautiful silver soup ladle. You don't think she did something with it? I doubt it but I'll email her. So he emails his mother and he says, dear mother, I'm not saying you did or did not do anything with that soup ladle but it's odd that it disappeared after dinner. Do you know anything about this? Okay, later he receives an email back, dear son, I'm not saying that you do sleep with Carrie and I'm not saying that you don't but the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her own bed, she would have found a soup ladle by now. Love from your mother. So we're talking about control strategies and so I thought I'd share that with you but then I'd also share, you know, I was, of course, since I'm asking you to do it reviewing my life a bit and thinking with my son and because, you know, parenting is like right in your face all the different strategies and we just love these beings and yet the love gets kind of blocked up sometimes with the ways that we get habituated as parents. So I know that for myself, when my son was, you know, on the younger end, I was writing a book and I was really, really busy and I, so my whole thing was, you know, on some level I was trying to accomplish and I had some drivenness around it and then always feeling guilty for not being, you know, engaged enough and doing special things enough with him and so on and then as he got a little bit older, then it shifted more to trying to control because he was doing too many video games and partying too much and, you know, I was, I had fears about, you know, I was attached and I was afraid that things weren't going to work out and feeling like I'd be a failure and he'd be a failure. I think many of you know that story. So I got controlling and it was like we could rarely have a conversation where I had, didn't have some agenda of trying to get him to do something differently. Well, as I became more and more aware of it, I realized, especially as I started thinking, wow, he's going to graduate in a year and a half and be gone. This is the way I'm spending my life with him. These were the barriers, as Rumi said, that I needed to shine a light on, this control in. Some friends of mine are spending time right now with Ram Das, a teacher from, one of the great teachers from this generation. And Ram Das described this. He said, One of the greatest things that happened in my relationship with my father was when he was approaching death. I finally allowed him to be who he was instead of trying to make him into who I thought he should be. And he stopped trying to make me into who he thought I should be and we became friends. So we can spend decades in trance using whatever the control strategies are and blocking the gold. One woman was describing time with her father when he was dying and he had been a kind of larger-than-life figure. And he had been one of these guys that his way of seeking gratification was to achieve and get a lot of recognition and it had blocked being close with his family. So they've had a not only distant relationship, he had to do a lot of therapy around it. But then here he was at the end of his life, no longer in the limelight. And as happens they spend a lot of time together and things started shifting. It was very gratifying. So at one point she asked him to recount what of his accomplishments he felt most proud of. And she was thinking he had one particular building that he had designed or whatever it was. And there was a long pause and he had tears in his eyes when he looked at her. He said, Why you of course. And it's probably true through his whole life that he loved her but there was a block in him being able to remember and express and live true to that. So that's the inquiry. What are our control strategies? Either out of fear or because we need some more gratification in some way or the attachment issues that actually stop us from really letting our love be full and expressed. So here's why I invite you to close your eyes and I'm just going to ask you to check in a little bit. You might begin by just feeling your own sincerity, that kind of interest and care just to see you what does block my full capacity for loving. And you might imagine that you're at the end of your life looking back and just choose one important relationship. One relationship where you'd like to keep waking up your heart. And then with some curiosity just sense, well what are the habits that might be getting in the way of full open loving and just begin to witness with a very non-judging attention because the judgments will actually make it harder to really look. What are the habitual ways of thinking that might get in the way? Are there judgments of yourself or this person? Do you get distracted because you're being pulled to something else that's some drivenness around accomplishing more? Are you held back because you're afraid in some way that person will reject or judge you? This is some defensiveness, hard to be real because you don't feel that your realness will be accepted. Do in some way try to prove yourself or present yourself? Pretend you're okay when you're not? Do you try to control the person in some way or do you have an agenda that in some way they be different than they are? Again without judgment just to shine the light of awareness on the different ways we habitually create distance. And from that witnessing, feeling your heart and sensing your aspiration to in the days and weeks to come deepen your attention so you can free your heart, so you can reconnect with the gold of your present heart. And what we'll do for the rest of our time in this class is explore what nurtures that natural loving. You can just see the barriers. Well what wakes up the loving? And you can continue with your eyes closed or if you'd like to open you can. We're going to look at three domains of cultivating our heart, waking up our heart. One is the practice of coming into full presence. The second is seeing goodness and the third is expressing love because our habit is not to express very often. So presence, I think I don't remember who said it but attention is the purest form of love. When you are truly paying attention without the thinking that blocks attention like a true listening presence, interested presence, that is a very pure expression of love. And so that presence has to start with where we are. In other words, you can't listen to another person. If you've got all sorts of agitation going on in your body, if you're afraid, if you're ashamed, the presence has to start by acknowledging and opening to what's inside you. We always start where we are. And the key is the quality of attention we bring, wherever we start. And one of my favorite templates for the kind of attention is, and this is very much in a lot of classic meditation literature, is like a grandparent. And if you didn't have a good grandparent, trash that one and come up with something else. But if you happen to have had one, great. But it's that kind of the grandparent that is engaged, attuned, yet there's more equanimity. We're having this conversation last night, you know, that parenting, we love our kids, but we're yanked all the hill around. Grandparents, there's a lot more space to just love and include all the different things going on. Not so torqued by a kind of personal advantage. So there's a kind of benign quality and also can be observant and just an unselfish loving. And to get us just in the mood of grandparent, somebody sent me this that I really like, a couple of observations and sharing from grandparents. My young grandson called the other day to wish me happy birthday. He asked me how old I was and I told him 62. He was quiet for a moment and then he asked, did you start at one? Let's see, just a couple more. A grandmother was telling her little granddaughter what her own childhood was like. We used to skate outside in a pond. I had a swing made from a tire. It hung from a tree in our front yard. We rode our pony. We picked wild raspberries in the woods. The little girl was wide eyed, taking this all in. At last she said, I sure wish I'd gone to know you sooner. Yeah, I didn't know if my granddaughter had learned her colors yet so I decided to test her. I'd point out something, ask what color it was. She would tell me and she always was correct. But it was fun for me so I continued. At last she headed for the door and said, Sage Lee, Grandma, I think you should try to figure out some of these yourself. There's one more. When my grandson asked me how old I was, I teasingly replied, I'm not sure. Look in your underwear, Grandma, he advised. Mine says I'm four to six. So paying attention with that kind of grandmotherly attention. So remember what we practice gets stronger. So every time you're engaged in some way and you say, okay, come back, be fully here. And you notice something's going on inside you and you bring some kindness and presence here. And then you just really offer your attention. And then notice when you're getting distracted and offer again, that muscle gets stronger and it is a gift. So presence is the first and the second, seeing goodness. And I love the whole training and seeing goodness because it makes so much sense to me. We talk often about the negativity bias where our survival brain just has us looking for what's wrong. And the more we've been wounded or had trauma or whatever, the more deeply habitual we are to protecting ourselves by anticipating trouble. So we are scanning our environment and scanning each other for what is going to go wrong. And we scan ourselves too. Intentionally looking for the goodness helps to undo our rebalance that negativity bias so it doesn't dominate so much. And it takes practice, it takes real intentionality that you could be in a conversation with somebody and then when you're done just take a moment and sense, okay, what's the goodness in that person? What am I picking up right now? There was a story I heard about a doctor described being with an elderly patient and the patient was in a rush to get done with his appointment. And so the doctor said, well, what are you in such a rush for? And the guy said, well, I have to go to the nursing home where my wife is and have breakfast with my wife. And so the doctor's asked a few more questions. It turns out that his wife had Alzheimer's and that she'd get upset if he was late. And so, no, the doctor said, would she get upset if he was late? And his response was no, because she no longer knew who he was and that she hadn't recognized him for five years. And so this brought a lot of curiosity, like, oh, but you still go there every morning even though you don't know who she is, even though she doesn't know who you are. And he smiled and he padded this doctor's hands, he said, she doesn't know me but I still know who she is. People forget, some people completely lose track of who they are but we all forget our goodness, every one of us or everyone I've met. We all get caught in the thinking we're the covering in some way to a degree. And so if you have the habit of being with somebody and seeing the glow in their eyes or appreciating their humor or their aliveness in some way, their kindness, that helps to draw the goodness out, that reminds them. And it's really the greatest gift we can offer to seeing the goodness. She no longer knew who he was but he knew who she was. There's a part of the practice that I want to emphasize and we're going to practice together, we're getting close to closing and just doing a meditation together. And the key, if you want to train to reverse the negativity bias is scan for goodness in people but also in everything. Just any moment where there's something to appreciate that's goodness. It could be the beauty of the silhouette of the tree branches against the sky or the sound of the wind or you could be watching the glow in a child's eyes, just appreciate it. But here's the thing, feel the appreciation in your body and then for 10, 15, 20, 25 seconds pause. Because if you just appreciate something but you don't really pause and take it in and in a very kind of visceral way marinate in it, it comes and it goes but it doesn't register in a deep way in your system. Painful experiences go right into our implicit memory. They take root because our survival brain holds on to them. Pleasant ones don't. And this is neuroscience, you have to marinate in them for 15 to 30 seconds for them to go into your implicit memory and be available for recall in any real way. Does that make sense? So it's a real practice. It's a real training. And yet if you get the knack of when things spontaneously happen and you sense some appreciation going, oh okay I'm feeling it. Pause, let it in, like savor it. You start turning a state into a trait, a state of appreciation into the trait of being a grateful person. And that is a blessing. That is the basic groundwork of love and kindness, appreciating. Okay, so we've talked about presence coming right back here with the grandmotherly observing and kindness. We've talked about seeing the goodness. The last piece I want to name is expressing love. And we're shy and we're scared and we're preoccupied and we forget, we just don't say it out loud so often. Mary Oliver writes this, she says, So every day, so every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you. One of which was you. To let people know. Tick-naught Han writes that when you say something like I love you with your whole being, not with just your mouth or your intellect, it can transform the world. Because what happens is we can feel love but when we actually express it our whole body becomes full with it. It actually activates it, energizes it. It becomes more full. So the practice is to reflect in your life where you might want to express more and go ahead and do it. Wes Angelosi says go and love someone exactly as they are and then watch how quickly they transform into the greatest, truest version of themselves. When one feels seen or appreciated in their own essence, one is instantly empowered. So not just see the goodness but let people know. So we started with the Golden Buddha and how really this cultivation of living kindness is a movement from being identified with the covering to really remembering the gold. And we remember the gold by being present, by seeing the goodness, by expressing it. I want to share this is really a part of what is sometimes described as the bodhisattva path, the path of an awakening being. And it is a training that is really a life training of awakening the heart and living from the gold. And it is considered a kind of path of homecoming because we are not trying to become something other than we are. There is really more of a calling. It is as if the most awake, beautiful heart space that has always been here is calling us, inviting us to inhabit it. You might think of it as your future self is calling you to wake up your love, your evolved self. So a short bodhisattva story is this was shared by a hospice nurse that I really love this. She described she worked in a county hospital and she was caring for a patient that had come from, been transported from the prison back when he came he had handcuffs on stuff. He was 44 years old. He was serving this long sentence for robbery and he was dying from complications of AIDS. And he didn't want to call his mother because he was so ashamed of his life. But she kind of saw this hospice worker saw behind his shame and convinced him to go ahead and make contact. So he did. And several days later his mother's woman, frail woman over 80, she arrives and she has got real grief in her face. And she sees her son who she hasn't spoken to for years when she comes into the room and he is handcuffed to the bed. This hospice nurse is afraid that this kind of dignified older woman is going to in some way be harsh or some way judge him but that is not what happens. They have their initial greetings and they just kind of look at each other in their eyes lock kind of taking in all the circumstances and the suffering and the roles just fell away. There is said that Bill's mother gazed at her son like a newborn child, like a saint witnessing a miracle with the vast heart of all mothers. That he and his mother saw behind the mask. They saw each other's goodness and it was these moments of pure forgiveness and it was very kind of internal kind of loving and they just sat together for an hour and a half and held hands. And there wasn't that much that needed to be said. And when she left he turned to this nurse and said now I can die at peace. We need to be seen and we need to bow to that goodness and gold within ourselves and each other. And then there is the space for living and dying. That is the power of meta of loving kindness and I didn't say the poly word at the beginning but this practice we are exploring is loving kindness, is meta. So we will do now is just take a few minutes with it and then we will close and feel free to shift your position around so you are comfortable. Let's be a very short meditation. You can find on my website a lot of versions of the loving kindness practice, the basic sequences that you start where it is easiest to feel love and then you widen the circles because when our heart is really open and free it is that heart space that is very inclusive. So we begin by just bringing a little bit of loving kindness to our bodies and you might let your mind scan through your body and just sense if there is anywhere that wants to let go a little, wants to soften. Just feel like you are bringing a gentle presence that can allow that kind of releasing and opening. You might bring a slight smile to the mouth because it sends a message to your whole nervous system to let go of fight-flight-freeze. It kind of frees you to relax more into wholeness, benevolence and ease. You might take a few long deep breaths, filling the lungs with the in-breath and with the out-breath as you release, letting go, softening down the length of your body, relaxing. So we begin the loving kindness practice by bringing to mind someone who is very easy to love where there is an uncomplicated love. It could be a person that could also be a dog or cat or a pet of some sort. And whoever you choose, see if you can visualize and sense that person very or that being very close in so you can see their eyes, see what those eyes look like and the face looks like when that being is expressing love for you. And sense what you appreciate. You might sense what this being looks like when they are happy, when they are entertained and humored, when they are in a creative mode, playful and when they feel close to you. And as you feel the appreciation, just feel it in your body, viscerally, the heart, the warmth. And you might mentally whisper the being's name and say thank you. And then again, just opening to the feelings in your heart. Bringing the attention in order to sense what you appreciate about your own being. To sense the goal that is here, that which wants to love and be loved. That in you that really wants to know truth. To wake up, to really be all you can be. That cares about others and wants to hold hands and be part of waking up with others. And your humor and your curiosity and whatever else you appreciate. And if it is hard to appreciate yourself, look through the eyes of that benevolent grandmother or somebody who cares and appreciates you. Just sense whatever wish you have for yourself right in this moment that most resonates. And bring to mind the person you might have been considering earlier who you would like to be more awake and loving with. You are reflecting on how you might have some blocks. Let that person be right here in your presence. Full presence to sense those eyes looking at you. Aware of what you appreciate about them. How does the gold in that being shine through? Sense what it is like when this person is expressing their love, their brightness, their aliveness. Imagine letting this person know your appreciation. Letting them know the goodness that you are experiencing. Imagine that and imagine how that would be for them. I love you and here is what I love. Can you sense how that brings the gold alive? Brings your connection alive. And just feeling this heart space that is right here right now as boundless, edgeless including all that are here, all our friends and colleagues, beings that we know and don't know. All species, the earth, our mother, in our lap and all beings everywhere in our heart. Thomas Merton says, Then it was if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depth of their hearts where neither sin nor knowledge could reach, the core of reality, the person that each one is in the eyes of the divine. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time there would be no more need for war, for hatred, for greed, for cruelty. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other. And these last few moments are sensing the heart space that includes this world and your wish or prayer for beings everywhere. May all beings everywhere realize this heart space as their home, the very source of life. May all beings awaken and be free. Namaste and blessings.