The following meditation is led by Tara Brock.

To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.

So welcome to our heart meditation. It's nice to be together with you. Feel free to find

a way of sitting that's comfortable and allows you to be alert enough so you're here.

With the loving kindness practice, we might use ideas and thoughts of others. But for it

to really become manifest, it's an experience in the body, tenderness and warmth in the body.

So I like to begin by establishing that embodied presence, bringing meta into the body with the

imagery of a smile. Tick-n-t-hon calls this smile yoga because it, and again it's got a real

science to it that the image and the felt sense of a smile actually relaxes the fight-flight

freeze mechanism, the stress reaction. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which really

allows us to feel a sense of ease and benevolence. You might imagine the great sky that's around us

right now, this blue open sky and imagine it filled with the curve and the image of a smile.

Receptive, vast, open, letting your mind merge with that vast open sky and setting the,

sensing the smile spreading through your whole mind.

You might allow the eyes to smile, the outer corners of the eyes lifted up some,

so there's a sense of spaciousness and ease and softening of the eyes,

brow is smooth,

still sensing that open sky-like mind letting it all float in that,

smiling into the eyes,

slight smile, the lips, and sensing inside of the mouth smiling.

And visualized and sense and feel a smile spreading through the heart.

This isn't to cover over what really creating this space for the life that's here.

...