The following meditation is led by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

In many of the wisdom traditions, a key understanding is that love is intrinsic and the key pathway

is really to recognize, to bring into the light of awareness, the ways that we resist or block that love.

And as many of us know, that often comes in the shape of being turned on ourselves or other people in some way.

So in the Buddhist tradition, as many of you know, the forerunner to met our loving kindness is the forgiveness practice.

And today, once again, we'll go a little further, continue on in this process of letting go of the armoring around the heart.

Really, one way to consider this, unless we're completely free, we all have some ways that we resist or tighten against life and defend our hearts.

So it's really a natural and ongoing process, not something that's kind of, oh, we're pathological, need to do this practice.

It really is like taking a bath every day. It's a regular way of washing and cleansing and opening ourselves.

And the natural beginning is just to gently sweep through your body as you have many times now.

And just sense how your body might be in some habitual way, tensing itself.

Just gently run the awareness through the body and just notice where there might be tightening.

Wherever the body is tight, that's in some way a part of the habit of resisting life.

As part of sweeping through the body with awareness, you might also notice parts of the body where there's a discomfort that on some level you might be aversive to.

Just see if you can bring a bit of forgiveness to that presentation of unpleasantness.

Forgive this meaning to let go of the barrier or aversion towards it to let be.

In one of the classic versions of the forgiveness practice, we begin with the reflection of where we might have caused harm to other people.

And for all of us, we each in some way have caused harm to others knowingly or unknowingly.

There are actions, our words, our thoughts.

You might sense where this is true for you.

You might be able to bring to mind a particular person.

Where you've caused injury, they're in the past or currently you feel you are causing injury.

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