The following meditation is led by Tara Brock.

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

So welcome to our afternoon heart meditation. It's nice to be together with you.

I'd like to begin by asking a question that is how many of you have some regular practice,

loving kindness practice that's part of what you do? Can I just see by hand?

And how many of you like and enjoy the loving kindness practice?

Okay, now here's an honest one. How many of you don't like doing the loving kindness practice?

Thank you. I wanted to ask that because there's a lot of people, you know, when you just start asking

and asking and questioning, that either have a lot of difficulty with or just don't like,

at least the way it's classically taught, the loving kindness practice. So I wanted to begin by saying

that loving kindness practice is any way that you pay attention that in some way awakened,

softens, opens your heart, any way that unperpish your paying attention that does that.

And as happens in any culture, you get a certain thing described as this is the practice and then

it becomes, oh, so what we do is we say four phrases and we widen it out like this and low

and behold, we have our meditation. And that's one option of countless because we all have different

kind of words and images and ways and perhaps of touch or ways of feeling in our bodies that

end up translating in some way to allowing our hearts to soften. And so it's really so much needs to

be customized to your own experience. So first off to say that I think of cultivating the heart

as going absolutely hand in hand with a mindfulness practice. We often describe it as two wings

that were bird and that mindfulness sees clearly what's happening and heartfulness opens our

heart to it. And in Asia, the word present heart is another description of mindfulness. So

we, they're totally interwoven and one of the most important parts of our practice for many people

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