The following meditation is led by Tara Brock.

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

Welcome here my friends for the afternoon heart meditation and it's a pleasure to be with you.

We're going to be exploring really how to release the armoring around the heart, sometimes

called forgiveness, sometimes called compassion, found that for some people the word forgiveness

just has not great connotations so you really can go in any direction you want, but the underlying

understanding is that for our hearts to be free to love fully there's a letting go of what

we've been carrying, what we've been hardening against, that's just a natural organic part

of the process. And for each of us it has its own pace so one of the most important principles as we

approach letting go of armoring is being incredibly forgiving, understanding, accepting on how we might

not be able to, you know, I mean it's we just can't will it, you can be willing, but you can't

will it. I'll be inviting each of you to share not to share out loud but to scan really and

sense so where right now in my life and my relationships is there a place I feel ready to explore

more fully a kind of letting go where my carrying resentment or blame and I'd like to not necessarily

let it go all the way but begin to move in that direction, have the intention.

Speak a little bit about the process and then we'll step into it. James Baldwin one of

most well-known quotes is I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hate and

prejudice so stubbornly is because they sense that once hate is gone they will be forced to deal

with their own pain. And this in a way points to the whole dynamic of forgiving or letting go of

blame of anger is that it requires what I always describe is this you turn where we go from

blaming and directing our energy outward of your bad, your wrong pushing away to opening

into the pain that caused that pushing away. We can't release armoring without really

...