So, what does care look like in the presence of difficulty? I think we can safely say that we all care, but are we caring about the right things? These are the words of Hafiz, a poet from antiquity: \u201cMy dear, is it true that your mind is sometimes like a battering ram, running all through the city, shouting so madly inside and out about the 10,000 things that do not matter?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think we all have moments in our lives that wake us up to what matters most. I have one: when my son Valentino was about a month old, I had to rush him to the hospital. It\u2019s there that we learned he needed emergency surgery. It wasn\u2019t even me running into that hospital with him\u2014it was every parent who ever carried their sick child or sick baby. It\u2019s easy to forget in those moments that what we\u2019re actually doing is learning something about this human condition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So…what does it even mean to live with an “undefended heart”? How do we train the heart to relax so we can learn about this phenomenon of being human? And how do we make it less about our individual pain, but connect instead to THE pain, and all the beings who share this condition with me? Because that\u2019s when we\u2019re able to allow the most caring part of ourselves to come forward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s not easy, though. We have to keep an eye out for where we get stuck and bring compassion to that very place, to that VERY experience. Really loving means having to surrender a part of ourselves. The practice of compassion, then, is waking up to all the barriers we put up between ourselves and love. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Seeing where we\u2019re hooked or locked up is important because there\u2019s no chance of freedom if we can\u2019t first recognize where we\u2019re stuck. And if we can\u2019t differentiate between an unskilful response and a skilful one, we\u2019re sure to remain in our unconscious patterns. Tara Brach puts it this way, \u201cEach time you meet an old emotional pattern with presence, you\u2019re awakening to truth can deepen. There\u2019s less identification with the self in the story and more ability to rest in the awareness that\u2019s witnessing what\u2019s happening. You become more able to abide in compassion, to remember and trust your true home rather than cycling repetitively through old conditioning. You are actually spiralling toward freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As we open to what\u2019s difficult, we will also open to understanding. Last week we talked about the ability to stay with the sensations in the body and not the mind\u2019s story about what\u2019s happened or is happening. We can usually bear the sensations. It\u2019s the stories that overwhelm us. It\u2019s the story that we\u2019re always going to feel like this; that we\u2019ve always felt like this; that whatever is happening is the only thing happening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
With this practice we can learn how to direct awareness in a very specific way\u2014particularly with regards to the heart\u2019s relationship to pain. We may not be able to save the world, but we do have to find a way to respond, to hold our experience of the world. Knowing in our hearts that we are not separate from this world is an important first step. Because, as we allow ourselves to be touched, we encounter the courage of the undefended heart. And our willingness to touch, to be moved, to hang out in this realm can bring a kind of beauty to the hard stuff of life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n