The following meditation is led by me, Tara Brock.

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

As a preface to the heart practice, I'd like to begin with a short reading.

This is from a book written by friend and teaching colleague Gil Fonsdale.

He describes an engineer who visits a monastery regularly for many years,

and the practices make sense to him.

He's a pragmatic type and gives him hope that he can overcome the kind of chronic unhappiness.

He tries all the practices that the Abbas gave him, and with each he keeps encountering this wall of suffering that he can't pass.

And he contracts because he's trying to think his way out.

So after many rounds, the Abbas decides to a different approach is really what's needed,

and gives him a special practice that he's to practice outside the monastery for two years.

And then when he's completed, he can return for deeper teachings.

So his activity is to volunteer for 10 hours a week at a maternity ward at a hospital,

hold babies that are born prematurely, because without enough physical contact,

they can't grow in a healthy way.

So he plunges in and he's holding these small, fragile beings ever so carefully,

watching their every breath, seemed in danger of them stopping breathing.

And he found it the most effective way to care for them was to hold them against his chest.

After about six months, he felt something new, a little spot of warmth and softness in the very center of his being.

It was kind of foreign.

It didn't fit his ideas of himself, but ignored it, not thinking it out.

And that was good, because it would have interfered with the warmth.

...