The following meditation is led by Tara Brock.

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

This afternoon, the guided heart practice will be on forgiveness.

I'd like to begin by speaking for a few minutes and then we'll actually practice.

When we've in some way been wounded or offended, we developed some hardening of skin around it, our scabbing.

And just as with any limbic survival response, we need to do that.

We need to protect ourselves.

And like most of our limbic reactivity, if we keep on protecting beyond when it's necessary needed, it then becomes suffering.

Then we kind of go around with scabs that protect us from actually letting in light and love and giving out light and love.

So the practice of forgiveness is to cultivate that capacity to let go when it's healthy to let go of the blames and the resentments and the armoring.

When we're holding on to blame and resentment, hatred and anger, we're in a trance of sorts.

We're inside the narrative of a small, separate, wounded self.

And so that's the lens that we're experiencing our self through, the victim.

And we're in a trance because we have a narrowed lens that we're experiencing others through.

We're seeing other as the oppressor or the enemy, that other.

The whole understanding of trance is it's a contraction, so we're not really experiencing reality directly.

So in the Buddhist tradition, forgiveness is really the precursor to all the other heart practices because it's not until we've done some letting go of that armoring that we can actually cultivate the other qualities of metha, loving kinas, kuru no compassion, the full joy of other people's joy.

We want to add that forgiveness is in a sense a subset of compassion.

It's when we are able to open our hearts to the vulnerability or woundedness underneath the scabbling or armor that we can let it go.

And then we're able to see others and open ourselves to their wounding, their woundedness.

There's a story that often in, you know, it's probably once a year I share, I haven't shared it that recently, that for me highlights really the possibility of forgiveness in a very dramatic way.

Part of the reason I get drawn to is because it occurred in Washington, D.C., and it's something that is in the news a lot in Washington where a 14-year-old, for no reason at all, killed another young, a teen, to prove himself, to gang.

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