The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

Good evening.

I'd like to invite you to begin our time together right now, if you will, by closing your eyes and taking a moment to sense what your aspiration is.

Just for this this evening, just for this time together as we reflect Dharma talk, so on. What's your aspiration?

Open your eyes if you'd like, but just sense how your heart is when you even check in with aspiration.

And I'll share for me that before I begin speaking always with a Dharma talk and often other times there's some quality of prayerfulness.

And what I mean by that is there's some intentional connecting with what matters to me.

So I begin tonight and there's this prayer that our time together will in some way serve our shared awakening of heart.

And I feel a part of that. I might be in a role in the some way, but it's really we're waking up together.

And when I pause and reflect on that, something shifts and I am inhabiting more of a sincere presence just by remembering that, that that's what matters to me.

There's a shift from to any extent that there's been some egoic conditioning like, okay, I'm here and I need to do a good job and I hope that it will you know that world to me we wake up together.

And I get more real.

And I share that because I feel like this whole path is one of this shift from our sense of an egoic self with our narrative and our beliefs and that familiar sense of separate small self to the what we are that's more a field of loving of awareness.

But that's the whole path. And what I'd like to do tonight, it's something different. I actually have never done this in a talk.

And that's a more personal reflection of some of the key points in my life when my practice and what was going on kind of unfolded something and woke me up out of a kind of egoic place.

And that the shift was distinctly from a tight self-ness into more of that loving awareness.

So I'm going to use the language of the sacred feminine. I like the language. I think I think there's something beautiful and it's you might think of it as the two wings of the bird that we often describe as the nature of awareness and that one wing, which when it's in its full bloom is the sacred masculine.

And the masculine is to see clearly what's true. And then the other wing and it's full unfolding is to absolutely unconditionally love what's seen.

So I'll be as with all talks, the filter, the emphasis will be on this tenderness and heart that liberates us.

That in any moment that your heart gets softer and more tender, there's a dissolution of that separate self feeling and you become more who you really are.

And those moments can't happen unless there's a quality of clear seeing and presence. You cannot really separate out the wings. So this is just a slant on the sacred feminine.

So it's been aware in the world. It always feels like, oh my God, these are really intense times. And oh my God, these are really intense times.

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