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

In the Buddhist teachings, the prerequisite to really fully waking up our hearts is the

practice of forgiving, which means really to release any of our resistances to loving.

The given being that each of us, when we get hurt or wounded, tightens our tenses around

our heart. We kind of armor ourselves and push away at what we sense is the cause of

harm. So this kind of averse of pushing away comes in the form of hatred, anger, judgment,

and most of us have some. And some of us have it really if we've been wounded badly,

have very deep sense of unforgiving, of hardened, armoring. So the practice of forgiveness isn't

like a willful okam and a let go of the armoring, but it's a willingness that comes out of a

deep understanding that we're not free if our hearts are armored because not only are we in a

kind of constant protective stance, but we really can't let in and out love in a flowing way.

So we intend towards forgiving. That's really what it comes down to out of out of some wisdom,

some deep longing to be free. It's the intention to let down that armoring, knowing that whatever we

resist persists if we're resisting and pushing away at some perceived bad other, that sense of

dividedness and conflict is just perpetuated. And we also have that intuition that what we accept

we go beyond. In any moment that we open to and say, yeah, the wounds are here and just let that be

real without pushing away and covering it over with a versiveness. In those moments we enlarge.

In the moments of accepting we come larger. One of the stories I've always loved about that comes

from a actually comes from a movie that describes a ritual that happens in a part of and when

tribe in Africa when someone's murdered in a family. The killers brought down to a river and

the family goes down there and the killers hands are tied and the family has to decide whether the

killer is thrown into the river to drown are saved. And if they decide that the killer should be

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