4.8 • 10.6K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2017
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Ask the Friend for Love - Prayer, when cultivated consciously, energizes and guides us on the spiritual path. This talk investigates the difference between wanting, with its narrow fixation, and the prayer that arises out of our deep heart’s longing. We explore how living prayer, the prayer that arises from consciously inhabiting longing, can carry us home to loving presence. As John O’Donahue writes, prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging.
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With gratitude and love, Tara
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0:00.0 | Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. |
0:07.8 | To make a donation, please visit tarbrock.com. |
0:18.8 | I'll begin by sharing a brief story of my own, which was three weeks before 9-11. I was |
0:34.7 | a speaker at a conference and it took place in the Twin Towers. So it's kind of a point, |
0:41.9 | it's still pointing in as a memory. It was a Buddhist conference there. And the theme of the conference |
0:47.0 | was really how we heal and awaken, what really helps us to heal and awaken and find freedom. |
0:54.4 | And there were five of us that were opening the conference and we were asked each ask to give |
0:59.4 | a 10-minute talk on really what we felt was the essence of the path that helps us be free. |
1:06.6 | And the other four people that were invited to speak were elders in the Buddhist tradition. |
1:11.6 | I was a real newbie, but I was a female and I think they needed a woman. I'm not sure, but anyway, |
1:16.0 | there I was. And I was second in the lineup, which felt really just right because when you're second, |
1:22.4 | you have the first 10 minutes just to kind of arrive, you know, and you're there. But then you |
1:26.7 | don't have to wait. You don't have to like, you know, any of you that have spoken in front of groups |
1:31.6 | know. So I was a second. I was kind of, so the first speaker, Richard Baker, Roshi, very well known, |
1:39.6 | disciple of Suzuki Roshi got up to do his sharing and he looked around and he said transformation |
1:49.3 | and awakening comes down to two things, intention and attention. And then he bowed and he sat down. |
2:01.2 | And I was on. So I got up there and I was a little bit frozen. I kind of, everything in me wanted to |
2:09.8 | go what he said, you know, one of those. And to be honest, that's the end of the story. I have no |
2:16.0 | idea what I said. But what he said is stuck with me because I think it's one of the most |
2:24.3 | pithy and profound summations. If you think of it, everything we're doing is a training and how to |
2:32.7 | pay attention. How do we pay attention in a way that frees our heart? And what guides how we pay |
2:42.3 | attention is our intention. Like what's mattering to us? You know, and if we know what matters to us is |
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