Cultivating Loving Kindness, with Tara Brach

namaste and welcome friends it's good to be with you so our reflection today is on purposely cultivating loving-kindness and in composing i was remembering i was probably my first introduction and i happened to be in a yoga class i was 19 years old and the yoga teacher said put your right arm over your left and hug yourself and we did that and then she said and put your left arm over your right and hug your evil twin well so we all thought that was pretty comical and also as it turns out it was quite valuable to embrace ourselves in those ways um many of you are familiar with the poly word meta and meta is very central in buddhist teachings it means loving kindness it means friendliness benevolence one with mehta has unconditional good will towards all and so so meta is this heart energy of warmth and openness and brightness that really awakens as we realize our belonging to each other and to all of life so i really love the origin story really of when the when the buddha first taught meta to the monks that were with them and they had been out in the forest meditating and they had encountered these tree spirits and these tree spirits had been offended uh by the presence of the monks they felt kind of invaded and so they tried to scare them off and were successful they had the they scared them off with these frightening sights and shrieks and terrible smells and so on so the monks went back to the buddha you know very very frightened and said you know please send us to some other forest we don't want to go back there and he refused he said no this it's really important that you go back but here's your protection and that's when he taught them the love and kindness practice the the meta practice and so they went back um with this with their instructions to really um bring a spirit of friendliness to see the goodness of all the life forms around them and to offer love and care and as the story goes uh the acting out of these uh tree spirits you know is seized and in that field of friendliness and all this reverence and care is being generated by the monks and the tree spirits were so moved that it actually brought to them this sense of wanting to protect the monks create a safe space for the monks for their peace of mind and well-being so that was when the first loving kindness practice was taught and what it really does is it it shows the power when we're caught and feeling separate when we're frightened the power of intentionally looking towards and affirming our loving connection with our world doing that on purpose i was uh corresponding with the poet daniel leninsky he's he's the one who translated a lot of the huffies that many of us read the poe the poetry from hafiz and he sent me a uh he not pafis he's been long gone but daniel sent me a a verse that he had spontaneously come up with and it reads this way he says did buddha really say that barriers dissolve the more you can kiss them probably not but that he could have so the buddha did teach about he gave a list of benefits that come from cultivating loving-kindness and i'll just read a few you'll sleep easily actually that should seal the deal on its own he said you'll wake easily you'll have pleasant dreams people will love you the devas which are the gods or the angels and the animals will love you the davis will protect you external dangers such as poisons weapons and fire will not harm you your face will be radiant so so western science adds a lot more uh to what some of the classical texts described as the um as the benefits more from a kind of here's what study show kind of point of view because it's love and kindness has been the subject of a real growing number of studies so what western science says is it increases positive emotions and decreases negative increases feelings of social connection decreases migraines chronic pain ptsd activates empathy increases compassion increases gray matter volume slows biological aging makes you a more helpful person decreases your bias toward others curbs self-criticism and it's effective even in small doses so this is a sales pitched a well-intentioned sales pitch for us to intentionally cultivate loving kindness and we'll just pause for a moment maybe to get a taste if you want to take a moment to let your attention go inward if it helps to close your eyes please do take some full breaths and bring to mind a being you love ideally where there's a kind of uncomplicated love child dog member of your family friend and whoever you choose bring them close in so you can visualize see them imagine looking into their eyes and in your mind's eye just hear the words i love you you might add the being's name i love you and sense your love being received that they're actually touched by your love and that that being in their own way communicates the same back to you imagine that and just allow yourself in this simple way just to feel the purity of loving how it brings you home to really the essence of who you are the basic goodness of who you are and if your eyes are closed trying to open them so while we all have the capacity for loving as we know it's easily blocked we just look at daily life we can sense that and the good news is that scientists and contemplatives agree that we can actually activate and nourish love we can really bring it into its fullness if we practice if there's a purposeful practice and most people think of the loving-kindness practice they hear about and they they think of it as reciting repeating sets of well-wishing to ourselves and others and widening circles and that's certainly a traditional form but it's helpful to know that meta practice is any way of directing attention that opens your heart and it could be through imagery through touch through asking questions inquiry to your own heart through journaling what i'd like to focus on in this reflection that we'll be doing together this talk is what's really the ground of the practice and it has to do with learning to see intrinsic goodness in all beings that that's like the ground level dedication you know that kind of prayer may i see the goodness in all beings and that perception of goodness undoes the blocks to loving it you know it's what we're really doing is undoing the the negativity bias that keeps us locked in judgment and it just armors our heart so seeing the goodness that's what thomas martin described seeing the secret beauty in all beings and it opens us up to that that field of appreciation and friendliness and love so as mentioned it takes intentionality it has to matter to you because it requires some focus and some practice because otherwise if we don't that conditioning of our mind and our survival brain and our fears keeps us armored so we'll pause again we'll pause again friends and let's just feel in our own ways our intention and and and uh approach to that is this if you let your attention go inward again [Music] and feel yourself right here feel your breathing body and this is a review of the current state of loving in your life very short review with the intention of not judging just noticing and start with how well loving emerges as you relate to your own being you know sense how you're regarding yourself now recently what's been your attitude or the quality of openness tolerance forgiveness compassion to your own being and you might sense if there's something between you and relating with care to your own being just notice and then bringing to mind an important person in your immediate circle so somebody that really matters to you that you are in contact with fairly regularly and let yourself bring that person to mind and just sense a degree of closeness or of distance how much openheartedness there is and and what might be between you and feeling openhearted so again without judgment you might bring to mind another person in your life someone who matters where there's some distance where you're aware there's distance there may be some judgment or blame or misunderstanding but take some moments to notice what's between you and relating with real openheartedness with tenderness and care towards that person and then that powerful inquiry if you're at the end of your life looking back at your relationship with each with your own being with these others what most matters maybe reminding yourself of what it's like the moments when there is that flow of loving kindness of care or friendliness i'm letting this help you connect with your aspiration what is that deep heart intention heart's longing sensing that intention to to see that secret beauty to remember the goodness to come into a loving connectedness the sensing what matters to you and sense of goodness in you that that aspiration comes from that's an expression of your goodness okay so we'll keep going here so as we know in in daily life it's often not our habit to attune to goodness in ourselves and others um perhaps most with ourselves we just that's not where our attention goes i was reading a story recently shared by uh annie lamotte wonderful writer and she described a little girl who was asked what her father who's a minister did and so this is the little girl's response that every sunday he stands in front of everyone and tells them that they are beautiful and god loves them exactly the way they are and they really don't have to worry because they all have each other but then by tuesday they forget this so on sunday he goes back to their church and tells them that they're beautiful and god loves them just the way they are and they don't have to worry because they all have each other so just to sense what is it that stops us from seeing that basic goodness trusting that basic goodness in ourselves holding ourselves with kindness and why so many moments that we're at odds and judging ourselves and others or we're feeling in some way like we're falling short where the negativity bias takes over so for many of you that are with me a lot you know i find real valuable the image of the golden buddha and understanding how we get trapped in feeling deficient and turn on ourselves just as a reminder this huge statue from southeast asia it had been covered for centuries in in plaster and clay and then in the 1950s when cracks appeared the monks discovered that it was actually a solid gold interior and the historians realized that it had been covered over to help it survive difficult times to protect it from being stolen and desecrated and that is so powerful because when you think of it that's what our survival brains do they cover us over we have coverings to protect us as we move through difficult families difficult societies and so we have these coverings these ways of defending ourselves and addressing our attachments or addictions to help us get through their ego control strategies to navigate difficulty that's our coverings and our suffering arises because we think we're the coverings and we forget the gold you know we identify with the ego coverings feeling separate and deficient and we forget we're the gold and then when we look at others we see their coverings we forget the gold in them so one of the ways to i find this just you know it's got an alchemy to it just to sense it to imagine the spiritual path is to more and more realize the coverings or coverings be forgiving be compassionate and realize the who we are is that light and warmth and purity of the gold the fact basic goodness so the starting place we start with right where we are where we start sensing oh so i'm feeling stuck and there's some block between me and sensing my own trusting my own goodness or looking at others and feeling that sense of appreciation and love there's something between me and that and just a sense that we get caught in our egoic coverings so a personal sharing a few months ago i was in a conversation with a very dear friend i've known her over 30 years and we scheduled it during a demanding stretch and after the call i realized that throughout i had in some way been looking for ways to make it shorter or ended and i had been sidestepping her over chores for us to have a visit you know i'd been pretty defended and not really attuned to her what i love about her instead i she became clumped with a demanding world out there um someone who wanted more for me a kind of a threat to my my protected space of time and i deepened attention when i realized that and since okay so these are the coverings that get in the way you know part of the coverings are my ego's worthwhileness project where i'm trying to get things done and when i'm busy trying to get things done others become some sort of a threat to that or part of my ego's fear that's part of the coverings that i'm going to let someone down and then that actually prevents me from relaxing and just seeing who's there and then of course part of the ego's covering is the self-judgment that you know i'm i'm letting people down and i need to be better and that self-judgment makes it worse so the point is that these were the layerings that were blocking me from just simply taking in her goodness which i so love you know her her bright heart and creativity for humor so it was a habit of self-protection the coverings so first of all to say if we want to shift if we want to start waking ourselves up from the coverings and and become part of that field of loving the gold the first step is to just forgive the coverings you know to to be really compassionate and and to realize that under them was just this attempt of our being to find a way through difficulty it's it's not badly intended so i was kind to myself about it and uh the next call was last week that i had with her and i was far more intentional i was actually practicing loving-kindness practice i was still aware of the ego coverings you know where i was protective where she had some wanting but they didn't have power it was almost like the coverings were more transparent and what was shining through was i was really able to enjoy her goodness and feel our are loving and laugh together if we're on to ourselves if we see our patterns they'll still play out they do so we have to forgive them and hold them with compassion but if we're on to them and we hold them with compassion and we forgive them then that awareness makes it so that they don't have so much hold over us we can attend more to the goodness inside ourselves and each other so to help us reflect on this because what i really am hoping is that you'll in your own life kind of look at your different relationships and go oh okay so where are the habits and you know my coverings my defenses my fears and so on how are they blocking a flow of loving that is so precious so keeping that in mind we'll we'll look at three primary ways that our coverings end up blocking us and the three ways have to do with judging fearing and a kind of grasping type of wanting so starting with the first the most pervasive signal that we're living from our coverings we have gotten identified there we're not opening to the gold is judgment most of you have heard of the great humorist jules pfeiffer he says i grew up to have my father's looks my father's speech patterns my father's posture my father's opinions and my mother's contempt for my father yeah so in those moments that we're judging ourselves we contract we're looking through a narrow aperture to others and while we might see them as better you know better than us in some way we're not seeing basic goodness the kind of goodness that awakens loving moments of self-judgment are contractions there's armoring we can't really let in basic goodness so self-judging blocks our capacity for deep attention and of course a lot of our judging is the the way we focus on others faults and here i might invite you to consider not people that you have huge aversion to not that kind of judging but the people that you care about and you continue judging because in a way and this is so sad we can go through days and and decades with judgments like kind of low-key annoyances low-key resentments towards people who are dear to us who matter to us and not realize how much it prevents the real blooming of love the love that's possible the love that comes from really the gold so those are the ones to look at because they're a major sign it's the judging is a major sign that we're in our coverings and we're not seeing the gold and you might pause here and reflect for a moment bring to mind someone you care about where there is a kind of chronic low-key judgment and and hone in you know like pick a person and hone in on maybe a moment when you're really caught and judging them remind yourself of what goes through your mind how they're falling short how they're not meeting an expectation let yourself go into that what it's like when you're judging that person and you might even feel your face from the inside out when you're judging feel the body your heart just notice what happens get a sense of your experience of yourself when you're living inside that kind of judgmental ego covering notice if you like yourself notice what you're forgetting about who you are and about what matters when we're in the coverings we're forgetting the larger truth of who we are our love we're forgetting our love you might turn your attention to the person and when you're judging just notice what is it you're not seeing about them what are you forgetting or missing are you remembering that they long to feel loving and be loved to live fully are you forgetting their aspiration what matters to their heart so this is the first area of how the ego coverings contract us and prevent us from seeing a larger truth and prevent us from feeling the fullness of loving in the second area is fear and it's interesting to sense when you're with someone just ask yourself is there something you're afraid of you know i led a number of workshops just on focusing on fear and one of the exercises we do is we get into small groups and we have people either share with each other directly or write down on pieces of paper you know what am i most afraid of and what always emerges as a major fear for most people is the fear of other people's judgments i'm afraid i'll be judged by that person we're a social species you know so we're dependent on nurturing relationships so it's a deep fear that we won't be liked we won't be respected we'll be judged we're also afraid that people will actively hurt us that they'll speak badly about us they'll abuse us they'll injure us again uh from jules pfeiffer there's a cartoon and a woman and a man the woman saying but i love you and the man's saying don't you threaten me you can see it fear so whatever the level egoic fear the fear in our coverings narrows the aperture we can't see the gold within ourselves or another and you might again explore by just reflecting for a moment maybe bring to mind someone you respect and like but you fear their judgment you fear that they are in some way judging you so imagine that imagine a person imagine being with them and since the experience of what it's like to be afraid of their judgment and again sensing when you're afraid of their judgment just feel it feel your face from the inside what it's like when you're afraid of another's judgment your body and your heart so get the experience of the the ego fear that has taken over to some degree but they're being in that covering and sense how limiting it is how you're cut off from the fullness of your own being but also since what is it that you're perceiving about that person are you able to see their basic goodness when you're afraid of their judgment just notice how much it limits the view so we're exploring how judgment and now fear really blocks our capacity to see goodness and the third is when we want something when we have an agenda with someone we want their attention their approval their money their time it's impossible to see the goal to see the wholeness of a being when we're fixated on wanting something from them including wanting to be closer or grasping around i want to be closer to you i want you to share more with me story i've always loved of a man called john who invites his mother over to dinner and during the meal john's mother notices how beautiful john's roommate is and she's long suspected a relationship between john and his roommate and this makes her even more curious and so watching the two interact over the evening she's wondering if they've held back from her something and reading his mother's thoughts john says you know i know what you might be thinking but i assure you that carrie and i are just roommates well about a week later carrie comes to john and says you know ever since your mother came here for dinner i've been unable to find that beautiful silver soup ladle you don't think she did something with it do you and he says i doubt it but i'll email her so he writes this email he says dear mother i'm not saying you did or did not do anything with the soup ladle but it's odd that it disappeared after dinner do you know anything about this later he received an email back from his mother and it read dearest 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 the soup ladle by now this has been titled don't lie to your mother so this is really about agendas when we have an agenda with each other and it's most clear with those who are closest when we want close people to cooperate with our agenda behave in a way that helps us feel more loved or more important or that assuages our fears including our fears for them our agenda interrupts seeing goodness opening our hearts so again a personal story here where it was really important for me to see my agenda with my son when he was in his early teens i became painfully aware of how many of our conversations and our interactions in some way i had this background agenda something i was wanting him to do more of or wanting him to do less of some way i wanted him to be really the person i thought he should be like so i had this agenda you know i wanted him to be responsible responsive hard working be different so i can relax that your life is working out okay i think that's kind of what it came to and when i realized how in all those moments when i had that agenda of be a certain way be different i wasn't taking him in just directly appreciating his aliveness and his goodness his heart so i was living in my coverings in that contracted state and as mentioned parents and children this is really common and to see it gives us some choices about deepening our intention to be a mirror of goodness so there are many expressions of wanting of having an agenda and even when the agenda's not fixated on the other person let's say it's the energy of of a driven wanting an addiction or an agenda of achieving in our lives in a certain way it can still blind us it puts us in that contracted state that blinds us to who's right here i could feel this poignantly in one woman's description of this time she spent with her father when he was dying he had been a kind of larger than life figure in her world he was well known it was a highly respected architect and he had designed many famous buildings and centers and so on so he was praised and known and they had had a kind of distant relationship during her life because he was very work focused and she felt like a distraction and that was that was the experience she had and it cost her a lot of pain she had to do a lot of inner work with that but now at the end of their life he wasn't so ambitious and focused outward like that they were spending a lot of time together so she describes at one point in their talking asking him what of his accomplishments he felt most proud of and there was a long pause and then with tears in his eyes he looked at her and he said you of course he loved her you know that was the gold in him but he had been caught for decades in in a kind of grasping that kept him from taking her in or mirroring her goodness back and opening that that flow of loving that would have been so healing at the time so let's we'll pause again maybe a bit of a reflection for you of someone you care about and you have an agenda with someone you care about and you have an agenda you want them to give you attention or approval a reassurance give you time give you money in some way you want them to cooperate so take a moment to bring someone to mind and sense what it's like when that agenda is activated and as you sense yourself in in wanting mode as we've done to feel your face from the inside and your body in your heart sense the impact on your sense of your own being your own wholeness and sense how when you're wanting something from somebody else how it impacts your capacity to really see who they are in those moments to see their aspiration to love to live fully as you're ready take a few full breaths so we've done is we've reviewed the the key ways that we contract and are unable to see the larger truth the goodness within ourselves and within others and and sadly it can go on for decades i remember ramdas sharing how for most of his adult life he and his father were always at each other we're always judging each other trying to change each other and then he said towards the end of his life they both dropped that and then he said we became friends so we don't have to wait decades or to the end of life to start training to see the goodness to remember the goodness our own others and really live from that we can be intentional there's a story a doctor described an early morning appointment with an elderly gentleman and he was in a real rush he'd come in i think at 8 30 and he was in rush because he had an appointment at nine and so she was taking care of him and asked if he was going to another doctor's and he said no he needed to go to the nursing home and eat breakfast with his wife so she inquired after his wife's health and he told her that she had been there for a while and she was a victim of alzheimer's disease and then as they continued talking the doctor asked will will she be upset if you're a little bit late and he replied that she no longer knew who he was that she had not recognized him for five years now and so again yes doctor was surprised you still go there every morning even though she doesn't know who you are and he smiled and patted her hand and said she doesn't know me but i still know who she is and that's the that's the preciousness of it the secret beauty so we're going to practice together seeing goodness um but before we do i want to take a moment to say that the value of seeing goodness extends beyond personal relationships and that's been what i've been focusing on it extends to our wider society really shifting how do we perceive groups of people that we don't know groups of people we might stereotype you know how do we get off of the covering and and really open to something more true because it becomes a crucial part of evolving consciousness so that we can heal the decisions in our world this capacity to see basic goodness i was um listening very recently to a wonderful interview on being with krista tippett and she was interviewing trabian shorters and he's a visionary a brilliant thinker and he coined a term asset framing and its opposite to understand it is really deficit framing the negativity bias which is the way most of the world perceives so he describes um you know how often we consider a group of people of difference whether it's socioeconomic race or religion we focus on what's wrong we we do this deficit framing and here's what's so compelling about it he says that even when we think we're being helpful when we're focusing on the struggles that vulnerable people have and use as an example the terms we might use of at-risk children are the school-to-prison pipeline he said we might be well-meaning but this is deficit framing because it fixate it's right away on the problematic societal coverings it locks the other and that group of others in our mind in a kind of less than position so it reaffirms separation and it blocks that real respect and cherishing of basic goodness so he says instead and this is asset framing what about leading with let's say students who have dreams of something more of graduating of doing well what about starting by recognizing the goal the goodness and then examining the conditioning the coverings that get in the way and that's radical so he calls it a love doctrine um because it's so transformational when you start seeing with these eyes when you start training first to go right directly to seeing the gold starting with spirits starting with the goodness of others their human aspirations and then looking at the different ways conditioning blocks firsting the gold and then the coverings and when you start filtering this way it really changes the world and the heart knows it your heart feels more aligned with truth you know travian uh illustrates this realization by a workshop that he does or he at least did once but i think he probably does it regularly um where he asked people to turn to their neighbor and just think about just look at their neighbor possibly a stranger or someone they know and just think about as much as they could what is wrong with this person so that's the assignment you're sitting there looking at somebody you're looking at each other and you're both reflecting on what is wrong with this person and you can sense the power in that because as he describes it lets people know at a gut level it's wrong to do that it feels bad when you have to do that and when someone can see you doing it in your spirit you know fixating on what's wrong that's not the way to do it so this is the training in our personal lives and in our larger society whether we call it asset framing or seeing the goodness the loving kindness practice meta we're leading by relating to and looking towards the goodness what beings aspire to who they really are and as we do that we're actually serving the evolution of consciousness a shift from living from the coverings to living from the gold living from love so if you want to train in this you can explore it in informal practice which means as you move through the day set your intention right at the beginning of the day to see goodness and then if you want to really turn it from a state into a trait the way you do it is in the moment that you are seeing goodness let's say you're with somebody and you're just picking up their essential kindness or brightness or aliveness take 15 seconds that's maybe three long deep breaths and soak it in like just get familiar with the experience of appreciating neuroscience has shown this is what allows that experience to stick to be installed in the unconscious mind and it helps undo the negativity bias this conditioning to what is wrong so it becomes more readily available to just say oh what do i love here what's good what's beautiful so that's informal practice and then as a formal practice and we'll explore this start where it's easiest in other words start with a being who's easy to love and then widen the circles it's not going to work if you try to see the basic goodness and someone who's you know just cheated on you in some way or injured a loved one or who you feel is responsible for great global suffering start start where it's easiest and comes naturally okay friends let's practice together this isn't a long practice and you can extend it on your own but take these few moments to arrive again [Music] and in this pause feel the breath and feel your body and you might visualize and sense a smile spreading through your heart so you can feel the breath as you breathe in and out of the heart and since your intention whatever your words are in some way that intention to cultivate loving kindness to learn to see the goodness and you might begin by bringing to mind a benefactor that's someone who's shown you great kindness who's helped you in some way inspired you it could be someone you know really well or someone you don't know so well but where there really already is some appreciation and take some moments to see their goodness to see the spirit the heart the loving that lives through them you just sense their aspiration for awakening and as you do you might using the person's name say thank you or bow and feel feel directly the sense of appreciation that arises the loving the warmth the openness breathe and feel that filling you then you might bring to mind someone who's dear to you someone who you do get caught up with judgments but this time have the intention to see the goal see the goodness you might remind yourself of what they're like when they're loving happy vibrant when they're feeling loved when they're feeling well-being and just sense what you love about them and again as you do you might say their name and say thank you or bow namaste and let in the experience that kind of purity of just appreciation and love you might bring to mind now a group of people that are different from you perhaps vulnerable those you feel concerned for but some distance from and as we talked about with asset framing seeing the goodness you might imagine an individual from this group and sense what their aspiration might be how like you they really want to live fully to have a meaningful life to feel connected to feel loving and loved seeing their goodness again that kind of bow namaste letting in your appreciation feeling it value then you might open your attention wide for whatever life form appears in your awareness human non-human sensing in each that same aliveness that's living through you that same basic awareness that same love of living young or old beings of different races different places on the planet trees bears birds the same aliveness that's living through you animating each same basic sentience love of being alive and the preciousness of belonging that field of loving sri nur sargadatta says when you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life you will love all naturally and spontaneously sensing the gold the goodness within all beings everywhere your heart is wide as the world including all from the metasuta even as a mother protects with her life her child her only child so with a boundless heart may we cherish all living beings radiating kindness over the entire world thank you friends for your attention and presence love and blessings to each [Music] you

Channel: Tara Brach

Views: 29,032

Keywords: Tara Brach, dharmarain108108108108, dharma, meditation, mindfulness, loving-kindness, love, belonging, metta

Id: mmxieERAGVE

Length: 57min 45sec (3465 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2022