Episode 8: Host Julia Sagebien interviews Tara Brach

In this eigth episoide of New Horizons for Engaged Buddhism, Host Julia Sagebien interviews Tara Brach. Tara is a spiritual teacher, psychologist and author of the internationally bestselling books Radical Acceptance, Radical Compassion and Trusting the Gold. She blends Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practices, mindful attention to our inner life, and a dedication to creating a more just, equitable and loving world. Tara is the founder of the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and, together with Jack Kornfield, has co-founded Banyan and the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program, which serves participants from 74 countries around the world.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of New Horizons in Engage Buddhism. Before I present our illustrious guest, I am going to do a little bit of housekeeping. And we are going to have uh in May 14th, uh Kara Jewel Lingo. And I think we're going to be dealing mostly with environmental issues. And then in June, we're going to have Joshua Burns from the Bretloaf Mountains and community. If you'd like to tune in to some of the previous uh recordings, just go to the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy. You can go to their YouTube um page or just the website, you know, Buddhist Coalition for Democracy. And under videos, you should be able to access the recordings of all of the previous um tapings. And today we have with us also someone who has been doing some very interesting conversations through the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy. And his name is Shaoksh Prengal, and he runs something called 10% more engaged. And you can connect to that again through the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy. And they're very interesting, it's like time for all of us to actually converse, not just about what we might be doing, not doing, but how everything is affecting and give each other support because uh I think the darkness just kind of started and it's gonna get a little darker. Um, so let me just uh take the opportunity now to introduce Tara. I am truly honored to have an opportunity to have her in this um show. Tara is a longtime practitioner of Apassana. She's a psychologist, a teacher, uh, an author of internationally recognized books like Radical Acceptance, Radical Compassion, and Trusting the Gold. And she blends Western psychology with Buddha Dharma and meditation and eastern spiritual practices. And she has really dedicated her life to the discovery of what Dharma means to her and helping others do that also. Um, she has been extremely active lately. Um, she's one of the people who definitely hears the call to move out of our comfort zone because we will need to reach many that we never thought we would have to. And some of these situations are even in our own communities. So without any uh further ado, um Tara, welcome.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Thank you. Thank you, uh Julia. Thank you all who are here in time and who are here beyond time. Um, and an honoring of the work of New Horizons. I mean, we need this. Uh, we need these conversations, we need this intentional engagement. So yeah, so I'm glad to be here. And I guess our inquiry, if we wanted to name it, would be how we wake up caring and compassion in action in our current world. And I thought I'd start personal. Um, I was a social activist actually before I got involved with spiritual path. And my parents were uh kind of leftist politically engaged people, and during college I got very involved with uh community organizing and leftist activities. And then so in my junior year, I was um doing on the weekends these rallies and meetings, and it was kind of a strident us them, you know, us against the hawks and the police and so on. And then on Tuesday nights, I started taking yoga classes and meditating, and it was uh quite a contrast because on Tuesday nights it was very I got very quiet and centered and balanced. I remember one spring evening after class, I stopped. I was standing under a fruit tree outside after leaving class and realized that my body and my mind were in the same place at the same time. And there was this openness and this sense of a field of loving and peace, and everything in me knew in that moment, this is what the world needs, you know, not this antagonism. And so I decided to immerse, and instead of going to law school, I was heading for law school, did this 180, and I joined a spiritual community in ashram and uh stayed there for 10 years and started teaching while I was in the ashram and then afterwards uh attended Buddhist retreats and got very involved with um practicing and teaching in the Buddhist tradition. So I gradually, once I was practicing and teaching, re-engaged, and several dimensions over these decades have become increasingly clear, and I suspect most of you are very aware of and resonate with this. And what became clear is that the spiritual path can't be separated from how we live, you know, how we relate to each other, how right in this moment we're relating to each other, how we relate to our larger world. It's part of our hearts. Um, to know this in a cellular way means to care. So not to compartmentalize uh activism in any way. And yet, as we know when Buddhism kind of sprung up here in the West, very individualistic, you know, practices to serve my freedom and my clarity and my this and my that. Um in Tricycle magazine there was a personals cartoon, and it said, tall, dark, handsome Buddhist looking for himself, you know. So things are changing. And I think in a radical way, I think there are growing numbers that are very much widening, sense a widened sense of the path, uh, that we have this collective belonging and acting from that. And the other thing that got has gotten very, very clear is that if we want to serve true transformation in the world, our actions have to arise from love, from care. You know, if we it's not going to come from the same consciousness that's creating today's aggression, divides, or just perpetuates. And so many are familiar with and love that that sutra, you know, or the teaching of hatred never ceases by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. So we know this. And in times of fear, and we are in a time where the whole atmosphere around us and it affects us, is fear spiking, existential threats. It can get difficult to access a very pure quality of care because we are prone, just like everyone else, we have a nervous system that's prone towards blame, towards you know what I call bad othering. And I'll just say for myself, taking in the news most days, the default is to very quickly go into bad othering, to very quickly have the good guys and the bad guys and the uses and the thems. So it takes attention to come back to caring. So again, this is our inquiry, really. How do we arouse Bodhicitta, that real dedication to love, dedication to awakening in times of fear, especially when our own primitive conditioning is acting out, you know, is is um either angry and blaming, or else for so many, just getting things get normalized. The pain gets normalized, the intensity gets normalized, we get numb, we get cut off. You know, I often think of Tik Nathan, he had this beautiful kind of teaching. He said, This, my dear, it's the greatest challenge to being alive, to witness injustice in the world and not allow it to consume our light, our love. So here we are, we're exploring this, and part of why I really love uh the these gatherings and what you're doing, is because I think that part of waking up on the path is that we have to do it together. It's not meant, uh, we don't do the bodhisattva path solo in a cave for any long stretches. Um, I I think of uh just this last Monday, um, there's Memorial Day for uh many people. There's an organization, uh several organizations actually, that co-hosts an annual Memorial Day ceremony and bring together Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost loved ones, bereaved ones, families. And so it was held this last Monday, and I've attended for several years, but this uh time I had the privilege with uh Valerie Korr of guiding a part of the virtual event that followed. It was so powerful. I mean, during the memorial, people gathered to speak the names, to tell the stories, and to grieve side by side. And in the communing, you know, of Palestinians and Israelis grieving, something happens, and it's so clear that their pain hasn't hardened into hatred. It's actually become a source of courage. It's like um, it's like their togetherness gives a felt sense of hope for what's possible. Um they're not turning their gaze away, they're saying, yes, there is suffering, and we can hold this together. And for many of the participants in these organizations, because I have been involved and I know uh founder of one and so on, uh much action, action for justice, for peace, for different future. So I'm sharing this with you because to me it's a beautiful example of the bodhisattva path of not losing light, both by uh the inner work, because I think choosing to love on in this world means first that we bring love to our fears and to the realness of loss. We start inner, we have to choose to love what's right here, and that tenderizes our hearts so we see more clearly, we go beyond blame, and then we can bring that love more actively into the world. Does that resonate? Does that make sense? Yeah. So it takes courage. Um, there's a phrase I love. I've been playing with it a lot, I've been tasting it and feeling it. It's uh called spiritual audacity from Rabbi Abraham Eschel. So he he introduced the the term during a um a letter to John F. Kennedy, and I'll read you. He said, This historical moment, and he was referring to the violence of racism, calls us to respond with moral grandeur and spiritual audacity. And in Buddhism, the comparable is the lion's roar. You know, that that confidence and courage comes when we are tapped into totally deeply being connected with what matters. It gives like this incredible empowerment when we're in touch with our love for love, our love for truth. It gives us power, this willingness to risk, uh, this courage uh to go ahead and act, to speak out, to stand up for what we care about, to act for the greater well-being. So there's been some models recently. You know, there's there's a huge shadow that we're all aware of, a collective regression that's so painful to experience. And there's also, as happens when there's a lot of darkness, uh we respond to suffering by waking up some, and there's some really beautiful waking up going on. And one of the models for me is recently was uh, and for many is uh Minneapolis. Um suspect for many of you are aware. The term I love that came through was neighborliness. I really love that. Um said, I'm not here because I love protests, I'm here because I love people. And I think of uh thousands of people in Minneapolis at one point went and kind of practiced in a church and then came and sang these beautiful songs, thousands of them you might have listened on YouTube, but so beautiful. Um some of you might be there. Um, songs they were singing to ICE agents in the hotel, saying, You're part of us, you know, to witness injustice and not allow it to consume our light, our love. I think of friends I have, um activists uh in the Middle East that are uh going into the West Bank and supporting uh farmers who are being attacked by settlers. And one friend got really badly beaten about two weeks ago, and many of us wrote to him and sent our appreciation and hugs, and his response was, My spirit is good. There have been more hugs than fists, spiritual audacity. Rabbi Heschel put it this way: he said, I pray with my feet. You know, he was out there doing this thing. I pray with my feet. So spiritual audacity requires imagination. And when I talk about imagination, it's really imagining what might not be seen but is possible. Um I want to dig into imagination a little because I feel like it's a superpower on the spiritual path that's not always recognized. Um there's a quote I love from Bill Hook. She says, imagination creates the future. It's not a passive mirror, it's a tool of transformation. And of course, it's not like any old imagination. Um, you know, it we're in a lot of trouble when our imagination comes from fear and delusion. I remember one story of a boy saying to his mother, you know, pretend you're surrounded by eight hungry tigers. What would you do? And she said, I don't know. And he said, Stop pretending, you know. So it's the imagination that arises from presence that's integral to our evolution. And it's part of many of our practices, whether it's we're thinking of loving kindness or forgiveness or compassion or big mind, big sky meditations, they all take imagination. Um, on a broad more broad note, imagination, it's an essential ingredient in humans evolving. I mean, it shaped every leap in our development from fire and language to civil rights to quantum physics. Recently, I encountered a myth that impacted me. It's about the power of presence and imagination during a time of unraveling. So it felt very relevant. I want to share it with you. I heard it from Michael Mead. Many of you might be familiar with him. It's an old native story, and it begins not with uh once upon a time, but it begins with this time. And it says that every human is searching for true wisdom, love, awakening, and it lies in a cave nearby, always nearby, but we don't find it when we're distracted by the rush of modern life, by that trance of anxiety and reactivity and speed. Okay, so inside the cave an old woman is weaving the most beautiful garment ever imagined. But now and then she has to pause to stir a pot over the fire at the back of the cave, a pot that holds all the seeds of the earth, because if it's left unstirred, the seeds would burn and life itself would vanish. While she's away, a black dog slips in and unravels her weaving thread by thread until only chaos remains. So when she returns, she pauses not in anger, but she comes into stillness, into deep inner listening, bringing her heart to all that is to the pain, to the sorrows, to the losses, to the beauty. But then she picks up a thread, and in that thread she envisions an even more beautiful garment, one that didn't exist before the unraveling. The elders say don't curse the dog. If nothing fell apart, nothing new could be imagined. The old woman is our collective awakening heart, dreaming, imagining, and reweaving what is possible. That's all of us. That's what's happening. So if I unpack just a bit, because I I I trust that for the most part, this is kind of it it's pretty clear. In our evolutionary development, our primitive nervous system has the aggression, the fear and the aggression of the dog. Don't blame the dog. It's just part of our nervous system. We either get aggressive and blame or we grasp or we go numb and get indifferent. I always think of Joanna Macy saying indifference is the greatest danger. But okay, so there's an unraveling. Our n our primitive nervous system, we've been hijacked. And when there's an unraveling, if like the woman in the cave, and I think of it as a collective, when we all collectively come together to pause and to feel deeply into what's happening, to let ourselves love the fear, to let ourselves love the losses, to let ourselves love and listen to what needs attention. Then we can return to the weaving with an imagination that can see what else is possible. We can reweave the world more beautiful than before. You know, I lead a gathering once every few months for a Palestinian meditation community. Uh some live in Israel, some in other Arab countries. There's huge trauma, as you can imagine. Uh many family, friends are lit have, you know, have been been killed, uh, devastated, Gaza struggling for food basics, also in the West Bank, where as I mentioned, you know, people are f facing military settlers taking their lands, their lives. So I'm bringing this up because more than most groups I've engaged with, they are proximate to violence. Okay. It's a grim future, hard to imagine for many of us. So I shared this story, this myth of the woman in the cave. And the group was really quiet. And then one woman spoke softly and she said, That's what we're doing here in this meditation community. Finding the presence that's uh big enough to hold both grief and grace. The imagining of a more loving, caring world. That's what we're doing here. So in our practice, and this is what I want to kind of get particular here, um, the the practices on the bodhisattva path, two major ways call on imagination. Uh in one way it's to help us remember the goodness, the beauty, the sacredness that lives through all of us. And the other, it's to remember the human vulnerability that comes from conditioning. As Tiknat Han said, humans are not the enemy. There's just this conditioning. So I'm gonna take a little bit a few moments with each and then uh practice a little together. Uh last year I was talking with Father Gregory Boyle on this theme. Many are familiar. He's the author of Tattoos on the Heart, and he's known for his work with LA Gangs. He created Homeboy Industries, which is an amazing community, you know, loving, trusting, healing community with young people who have a history of huge violence, rivals, they've killed each other's friends and family, proximate to violence so that it's affected their whole nervous system. And my inquiry is what made it possible to have such a beautiful community? So he described this. He said there's two unwavering principles. At Homeboy Industries and the community. He said, first, everyone is unshakably good, no exceptions. The second, we belong to each other, no exceptions. Then he said, now do I think all our vexing and complex social dilemmas would disappear if we, you know, embraced these two notions? Yes, I do. I do. And I love that. But just take a moment and sense both the truth and the challenge of remembering the preciousness of all beings, that all beings belong in this world where most of us find ourselves taking sides, thinking there's an enemy out there. It's deep, it's powerful. I'll share a story of one of my greatest inspirations and models of spiritual audacity, this John Lewis, who you all know as a lifetime civil rights leader and congressman, African-American, lived through decades of racial violence. So he told this story. He says, over 65 years ago, he describes how he and a colleague were beaten with the baseball bats by a group of white men, and they didn't fight back or press charges. They treated their wounds and continued their work, nonviolent resistance. About 15 years ago, one of those attackers walked into Lewis's Capitol Hill office with his son, and he said, I'm one of the men who beat you, and I want to atone. Will you forgive me? And Lewis said, I forgave him. We embraced. He, his son, and I, we all wept, and then we talked. And then as he ends the story, he says this quietly, almost to himself. He says, People can change. People can change. So I share this because here he is through these decades, despite the brutality of racism, the cruelty, the hatred, he maintained his imagination, his capacity to see potential in humans. It's very, very powerful to me, not losing his light, his love. And it feels like this is our work. And mainly around bad othering, around blame. We need to use our imagination when humans cause harm to see their vulnerability. I often think of that little anecdote where whereby someone's on a path in the woods and they see a little dog by a tree and they go to pet it, and the dog lurches fangs bared, and the person goes from being friendly to being really angry at this dog and scared, and then it sees that the dog's leg is in a trap. And then everything shifts. I mean, they might not get close to the dog, but they see what's happening. They see a larger truth. And when we see a larger truth, how our leg's in a trap when we behave in strange, neurotic, unkind, whatever ways are how others behave and cause harm. If we can see that, we'll still protect ourselves. We'll still have what uh Joan Halifax calls a strong back. We still will create boundaries and so on, but we'll have a soft front. Our heart stays soft, which is uh freedom. So one of the questions I get a lot that I want to name here is people I'll talk about compassion, I'll talk about forgiveness, about not blaming. And people say, Well, I'm too traumatized to do that. And I want to name that, especially in these in our circles of engaged Buddhism, it's much easier if there's some privilege, if we're not so proximate to the violence that's around us. We're all touched, but if we're not so proximate, it's easier to have equanimity, it's easier to talk about emptiness, it's easier to sense a compassion. Um and when there's more proximity, when our nervous system's more in the grip of fear, it's not so easy. And there's something uh really compassionate about realizing that we all have there's different ways that we come back to who we are. And if there's a lot of triggering, um so many of my friends, uh, I've so many friends whose neighbors have been deported or threatened by ICE. I have so many friends who are waiting to hear from their families in Iran, and I could go on and on for these folks. The first step, how do we calm our nervous system? How do we find safe space? How do we find basic ways of connection that can help us come back into a more stable, uh, open, relaxed space? And then most important, self-compassion. Can we hold ourselves and feel held? Can we love the fear, the hurt? Can we open? So it's a life practice for us and for all who want to be part of the radical dharma of these times, um, to open ourselves as we can to widen the circles of compassion. And I'd like to pause here and just walk through what I think of as a beautiful example of bringing imagination to widening the circles of compassion and walk us through it. I think I got it. And um what I like to do is explore how we can uh have spiritual audacity, choose to love with the circles close in. Because I think often we do meditations to open our heart to the world, and we continue with uh blame or resentment. One moment, I need to put dogs out. I think one of our um challenges for spiritual audacity is choosing to love with those close in, uh, choosing to wake up out of blame and out of resentments to the people that we've just habitually had some distance with, but who we care about. So that's going to be our domain. Uh, the invitation is to in some way bring to mind uh someone in your life that's close to that you care about, but that in some way you've had a conflict with, that you've been feeling some resentment towards. And I'm gonna take a moment to let you get in touch with somebody that you'd like to work with in this way. Where you can explore bringing your imagination to serve you in a way of waking up from that place of blame. Recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture because it's so useful in these things. So take a moment to sense a situation where uh whoever you have in mind and you are, you know, where something's triggered, where you are in some way feeling judged or judging, where you're feeling separation, where you feel conflict and needs, where they're in some way obstructing something that you want to pursue, asking something from you you don't want to give, whatever it happens to be that creates distance, get in touch with the situation and go right to where you feel um most triggered. So you're remembering the visuals of what the person's face might look like or the words exchanged and sense the worst part of it, like what really is bothering you. And then you may take what I call the U-turn and turn your attention from the situation to your inner life. And the R of rain recognize is just notice what's most predominant, what feelings are most predominant. It might be anger, blame, judgment, fear. You might mentally whisper. This is basic mindfulness practice to recognize what's here, and the A of rain is allow, which means let it be there. Um, not adding more judgment, not thinking it shouldn't be happening, not ignoring. I sometimes say to myself, this belongs like a wave in the ocean. It's part of things, it's reality. Let it belong. And then deepen attention. Investigate means to deepen primarily in a somatic way, but you might first ask, you know, what are you believing about yourself and the other when this is going on? Are you believing that the other isn't being respectful or caring, or they're not seeing you or understanding you? What were you hoping for or wanting that didn't happen? And sense where you feel feelings most fully in the body. And if you want to experiment to get more fully in touch, uh intimate with feelings, let your face take the expression of the feelings. Experiment with that. Let your body, so if you're angry, let that be expressed. If you're hurt, if you're fearful. See if you can sense where you feel the most vulnerability in your body. And you might experiment by putting your hand on your heart very gently, because that contact helps to anchor into the body, and it also is a kind of communication of care. And ask the part of you that's upset, what do you most need? Is it to feel cared about, respected, valued, important, understood, appreciated, safe? What does this part need? The last part of rain, of the active part of rain is nurture, which means that you can take a breath and invoke and invite in your most awake heart, your high self, your future self, who you are evolving into. And if that's difficult, you might imagine a spiritual figure or a person you feel you really trust and love. Just invoke them. And from the high self, the spiritual self, the spiritual heart, this person, whatever that source is, offer inwardly what's needed. You might offer a message of care. What will most bring healing? Just whisper those words, and you might have the hand on the heart and sense that the warmth and the care is going through your hand right into the most vulnerable place inside you. Let your intention be to let in care. To let care wash through the place of vulnerability so you feel like you're the holder and the held. And then take a moment for what's called after the rain, which is just sensing the quality of presence and heart that's here. The larger sense of who you are. And it's from this place that you can more intimately and clearly witness the other and a look and sense how might this person's leg be in a trap? How might they be hurting or vulnerable? What were they hoping for? Were they wanting to feel more respected, loved, important, understood, appreciated, safe? You can nurture by sensing your care. Like imagine the person feeling their needs met. How they might behave differently, be different when not caught in fear or hurt and deficiency. And sense who you are when you're free of blame. Where there's a heart space that can include yourself and the other. And you might then ask yourself, what is love asking here? So that you can imagine ways you might respond in your next encounter with more choices. So you can weave a better relationship. So yeah, so if you have anything, just put on the hand raise and or raise your hand, and we're a small enough group and we can hear from you.

SPEAKER_00 40:07

Thank you. Um I can't start though until I just uh thank you generally for your teachings. Um you've really helped me a lot in my life. So thank you. Thank you for all of that. Um I I think something that I've really been working on. Um I don't know quite the way to best express it, but maybe it's like a a practical co-on um or Dharma gate of thinking of compassionate resistance. And I've been thinking about like how to show compassion for a murderer, and often we think of like, well, the murder has happened, and so it's about do we forgive that person? But this person is actively murdering, um, and murdering at scale, and so like to love that person, to show love to that person, I feel called to stop them with some urgency. And so I've been thinking about that um and struggling with the the notion of you know non-blaming, because it's clear they're murdering, there's no doubt about it. Murdering quite a bit, um, and by extension, we all are too. Um so I I'm not I don't think there's an easy answer, but that's like that's the place where I find myself um not um comfortably, but not also in a bad way struggling uh to see my way through.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

Wow, so thank you. I think though what you're contemplating feels crucial actually for us all to kind of look close in on. Um there's a real difference between wise discernment and aversive judgment. I mean, wise discernment says, you know, like the strongman leader is causing uh unprecedented suffering for countless, you know, so wise discernment gets that. Aversive judgment says I hate this person, uh they are bad, they are, you know. Okay. So I kind of mentioned in passing something that's helped me a lot, which is uh teachings of Joan Halifax on the strong back and soft front. And so where that fits in, I'll just share how it works for me on this one and tell me what how that lands for you is that the strong back comes first. We've been trying, we're being traumatized. I mean, it's like all of it's a PTSD society. It's it's huge. We all need to find a way to calm our nervous systems and protect ourselves, and so we do whatever we can possibly do to prevent harm. Strong back. We make rules, we don't elect people, we fight the good fight however we possibly can to end uh the horror. So that love and compassion are yin-yang, they have an activist side of strong back, fight the good fight, resist, etc., just the way you were naming it. And if we tighten our heart into hatred for the individual, we lose our capacity to create a different world because it's not the fault or the blame toward. An individual. These are energies that are living through all of us. And for some, the conditioning just has it play out in certain ways. So I keep hearing ringing through my mind, Tiknat Han's words, that man is not the enemy. And that doesn't mean we don't fight with everything we've got for stopping the harm, but that we do what we can to keep our hearts soft and caring towards all. So that's what I do with it. I don't know how that lands for you. Please share.

SPEAKER_00 44:37

It lands very well. And I think you're like it's it's what I've been feeling in this notion of compassionate resistance, that it's not resistance um out of hate. Um it but because it's also for the benefit of the murderer that he needs murder.

SPEAKER_01 44:56

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Big yes. Yeah, absolutely. It's out of care. It's out of care. Thank you so much. That's very, really valuable inquiry. Yeah. Anyone else want to share what's coming up for you?

SPEAKER_03 45:20

Please. So for me it was a personal issue of somebody who has a very, very blaming view of me. Very critical, and um connecting to, you know, beyond the I'm innocent, you know, I have nothing to do with this, the sense that I can see that I don't want to give him what he wants, which is the kind of recognition, appreciation, and maybe at some level what he might think of as respect. Um and and so that sense of feeling, um, yeah, I'm I can't or I won't give you what you want, and at the same time, I'm really sorry for your pain, and I can identify with that, and I'm not able or willing to give you what you want.

SPEAKER_01 46:35

So, how did that sit for you?

SPEAKER_03 46:39

So there's a tender part there because it sits at the limit of what I'm capable of as the moment.

SPEAKER_01 46:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 46:49

So neither a sense of um um, you know, being in the place of I should be a certain person, nor of glorifying what I do.

SPEAKER_01 47:06

I want to go slow here because I'm really respecting what you're saying. We so often have this idea of how we should be, and that torques things. So what I'm hearing you say is that there's this honest recognition of this is what's possible or not possible right now. Yeah. Right now, having a tenderness towards that and also a tenderness towards that that it causes hurt and just letting them both be there, having the space for them both, which is really all we can do is to name what's true and have a space that holds that.

SPEAKER_03 47:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:54

I guess I'll just add one other thing is that the more we do that, like the more times you just name those different elements, that there's a part that can't, for whatever reason, of the conditioning, do differently, and there's a place in you that cares, and you let there be a space for both, the more your identity is resting in that larger space and actually starts to have more flexibility. So that's where the um possibility comes in. Does that resonate for you?

SPEAKER_03 48:28

Very much so.

SPEAKER_01 48:29

Yeah. Thank you, my friend.

SPEAKER_03 48:32

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 48:34

Yeah. So we're coming down the home stretch. Thank you so much for your uh for your wisdom, your inquiries in your wisdom. I'm I'm feeling it in this space here, and and it's beautiful. Um, maybe as a way to close, um, just to speak a bit about uh we talk a lot about love-based activism, you know, love in action. And for many of you, you may have ways you know to engage. Um, but sometimes when some people come feeling very isolated or stressed or anxious and they don't have a way to start. And if you know people like that, or if anyone, yeah, if this is true for anyone in your life, uh, I was this week in a webinar with a woman who's very close into trauma and suffering from the war in Ukraine, and she said that what helped her was she started this habit of just reaching out and touching the world, you know, a text or a smile or a hug or an errand for someone who was sick. But she said reaching out in little ways saved my life, because I started trusting that any reaching out, anything I did could make a difference. I often think about that uh that phrase, action absorbs anxiety, and how important it is um to engage that an action action absorbs anxiety, and action with others deepens our belonging, it serves the world. Uh John Rodell put it this way: he said, Whenever I feel helpless in this overwhelming world, I become a helper. Oh, oh my love, on the days when it feels like I have no power, I serve others. You see, whenever I wash the world's feet, my hands immediately stop shaking. So here we are on this path, bodhisattva path, and it becomes more and more clear that when we're you know washing the world's feet, uh we basically open to become the world. We kind of wake up out of that separateness, which comes with so much fear and so much grasping. Um so just to close together, maybe in that spirit, uh, if if you'd like just to close your eyes or let your attention go inward. And just to sense in your own life what is love asking when it comes to serving? What is love asking? What breaks your heart? What is love asking and to feel collectively our heart space and the love that seeks to bring a healing and a freedom to all beings. May all beings everywhere know their essence as loving awareness. May all beings touch great and natural peace. May all beings serve this world from love. May there be a growing justice, compassion, and freedom in our world. May all beings everywhere awaken and be free. Thank you, friends, for your presence and your good hearts. Thank you, Tara.

SPEAKER_02 52:57

Um do you want to put both of us, uh, Kandya? Can we have the two of us on the screen? Thank you. Um I started this series for one simple reason. I don't know anything about engaged Buddhism. And the best, it's a habit in my life, I was a professor, that every time I don't know something, I create a conference. Invite the best people. And by the end of the conference, I learned. So my intention was to um open an invitation to people such as yourself who for years have been cooking this soup to feed people, where the dharma becomes accessible and accessible through acts of kindness and simplicity. And I would like to invite you to consider one possibility that some friends of mine and I have been thinking about in the Chicago Shambhala Center. What if on November 3rd, the day of the midterms, every Dharma Center in America stays open and we practice, and we invite people just to come in for silence, for cookies, for what we do well. Silence, kindness, welcoming. We don't have to say anything and do anything. And for lazy people like me, it means I can sit and not march. Um, but it's it's this notion of the spiritual audacity that I think that more than talking about it, I feel um I feel the strength of your conviction that it is possible, and that has been very inspiring. And I hope to have an opportunity to listen to you again and to work with you and to get a lot of spiritual auditors to join us. And thank you, thank you. Um, I always know that something is real when coincidences happen. I love the fact that your dog came in and listened to the story about the dog and then left. And I went, aha, this is good.

SPEAKER_01 55:11

And they're out there creating chaos, and I'm gonna love them up as soon as I'm done.

SPEAKER_02 55:17

Thank you all, and thank you everybody for coming. And remember that this is all will be available in both the BCD's YouTube and on the BCD website on their videos. Send it to your friends. I actually sincerely think that this is one of those talks that is very useful in many, many ways. Has a grand vision, it has practicality, and it makes sure that people don't forget about their heart.