The following meditation is led by Tara Brock.

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

As a way of entering the heart practice, you might just take a moment to feel your own intention

or aspiration toward open-hearted awareness.

Whatever language resonates for you.

To feel your own sincerity really sets the grounds.

It draws your heart-mind right to that place of being available.

The body also can be prepared in a way for heart practice with the simple image and felt sense of the smile.

If you'd like to just feel your eyes, let the corners of the eyes, the outside corners lift a bit, soften the eyes.

And slight smile at the mouth, the inside of the mouth smiling, and sensing, inviting a smile to spread through the heart and chest area.

And then just energetically sensing the spirit of the smile, that receptivity and openness spreading through your whole body being.

It's said that the heart of Buddhism is compassion and the heart of compassion is self-compassion.

It's the place it starts.

So we'll do practice this afternoon that can help to awaken our heart of compassion.

The alchemy of compassion, the dynamic the way it arises, is that as we allow ourselves to be touched by suffering, as we have that courage or availability to suffering, there's a natural tenderness that opens up.

That's the tenderness of compassion.

And in this process today, as we explore it, we'll be using the acronym RAIN, which is familiar to many of you, be using a version that's different than has been taught commonly, and teaching it in recent days and finding it very helpful.

And in this version of RAIN, the way it goes is that the R is to recognize the situation, recognize what's going on, and the A of RAIN is to allow to let be just as it is, not to try to fix change, avoid.

The A of RAIN is to investigate with a gentle attention, and primarily the investigation is a inquiry into the felt sense, the body.

The A of RAIN is to then nourish what is experienced with compassion.

And the key part of the process then is what happens after the activity of RAIN, which is to rest in the experience of what unfolds from that nourishing RAIN.

And that aftermath of RAIN, much like when we have a real RAIN that nourishes the Earth, that flowering is really what's described as a shift or enlargement of our sense of our being from a small ego itself that's in some way struggling against something or with something,

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