Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference.

To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Tonight's talk of the theme will be about how the arising of judgment, averse of judgment, can be an incredibly powerful portal to the awakened heart when we have that intention.

And I'd like to begin with a story I heard about Andre Scareg Gregory, who many of you've heard of my dinner with Andre, a man asked him about his writing

and how did it have so much juice? And his response was he told a story about when his wife

had gone to the hospital, was going to go in for surgery, went under anesthesia,

and he realized belatedly that he hadn't said to her what he needed to say before she went under.

And he made a commitment that when she woke, that he was going to speak his heart as

if for the last time. And he said, write like that. This is the last time you're ever

going to write, speak like that, live like that. And there's this really powerful message of what it means to remember what matters, and the more

moments we remember, the more our life is really aligned with our hearts. And this is the

intention behind Bodichita.

I love the sound of the word because it's kind of bright and it's the awakened

heart mind. It's the wisdom that realizes the truth of who we are and it's that heart's

expression of that, the tenderness and warmth and radiance that comes with that.

And I think the teaching is that each of us has this deep longing to live aligned with our hearts

and we suffer when we feel that we're not aligned, when we're not living according to or true to who we can be.

And I often refer to this palliative caregiver who had been with thousands of people

when they were dying, kept them company, and said that the greatest

regret of the dying is that simple sense of I didn't live true to myself. That I lived

according to others' expectations. I lived according to my internalized shoulds, but I didn't live

really true to my heart, true to Bodichita, although that's not the word they use.

But you can get the sense that that's the suffering. And it's not just with people who are

...