I'm happy to be here this morning. I'm kind of curious, as you might be, I'm kind of wondering what the speaker is going to say. And I'm very curious about this, and I'm looking forward to receiving the teaching. The other day, somebody sent me an email about how she was confused and lost and various things. And I wrote back and I said, me too. And then she said, here, let me share with you this email that I got from this Ed Brown person a while back. Maybe it'll help you. So I got this email back that I had sent to her about six months ago, and it was pretty nice.

[01:05]

So I'm kind of curious about any of the undiscovered, you know, on Earth, see what comes up today, and maybe it'll be helpful for me. Sometimes, you know, we need to listen a little more carefully to ourselves. called meditation. So now that I've gotten that part, well, anyway, I actually have this idea. I know what I want to talk about, so I'm going to tell you what that is here at the start, and then we'll see what happens with the talk and whether that's actually what the talk is about and you might think it's about something else and so forth so we don't quite know. I'm going to tell you one more thing before I tell you what I'm going to talk about.

[02:17]

I'm going to tell you one more thing which is when I give a talk I try to just give you the talk and then I like you can do with the talk what you want. It's like when you cook oatmeal, some people like it and some people don't. Where's the pancakes? And other people are like, this is great, I love oatmeal. So my talk, we don't know. And I'm not aiming with my talk, in other words, to control your experience or make you have any particular experience. kind of have a slight preference that you might enjoy yourself and you know appreciate the talk but if you don't okay you know happens you know my aim or intention is to speak to you and to speak my my interest you know and I decided this a number of years ago I got tired of listening to people talk to my head and I notice sometimes when people talk they're talking to my body and

[03:26]

So I decided I want to talk from my body to your body. I don't want to just talk from my head to your head and give you some kind of intellectual information. I want to be talking from inside of you. I want to be that close to you and like I'm a voice inside of you. That's my interest. So you may or may not appreciate having a voice inside of you. That doesn't seem to be yours. Or you might like, oh, nice person to have around. Thank you for talking to me. So we'll see. And in that sense, also, part of why I feel like I can do this or part of my understanding of doing this is, you know, I'm not trying to tell you anything. I'm not trying to change you or fix you or, you know, we're just visiting.

[04:30]

And we're kind of hanging out together. And my interest in that sense is I want to awaken the teacher in you or help you meet what is the teacher in your life. What gives you some, in your life, what gives you some guidance? You know, what gives you some support? Where does your companionship come from, your true companionship? So, you know, my interest is to give you, you know, just a little help there. Maybe, maybe help, maybe not. You know, so anyway, I get up and talk and something happens and mostly I have no idea what it is and maybe you do. For you, what... something about what happened, maybe you don't. And then maybe we see each other again, or maybe we don't.

[05:34]

And of course, partly then, this has to do then, how do you listen? Is it someone outside of you? How do you understand another person or another voice? And which voice is your friend or companion and which voice is criticizing you or attacking you or belittling you or shaming you? Whose voice is that? And if you feel, you know, because I'm not intending to embarrass you or shame you or criticize you with anything I say. But it might happen, you know, because I don't know, you know, we're each who we are, right? So my wish is to, you know, be a good friend. And you can tell, you know, sometimes I stop and I'm not saying anything.

[07:08]

And then sometimes people say, what are you doing? And you know, I'm listening. I'm listening to the room and I'm listening, you know, as much as I can to what? You know, to receive the room and everyone in the room and the spirit and heart and to have that touch me and to do my best to respond and speak to that. So this means it takes me a little while to feel that and I have to stop every so often and sense it freshly so I can stay on track and be speaking to you, to this room. and not just giving you some information that you might find useful. Okay?

[08:15]

So what I want to, one idea of the subject I have to talk with you about is the difference between love and approval. And most of us, for a lot of our lives, have a confusion between what is love and what would that look like and what is approval and what would that look like. And mostly, if I may say so and suggest that it's very tempting and very easy to spend most of your life looking for approval, trying to avoid behaving, trying to behave in a way that you avoid and will not encounter disapproval rather than living in love. Does this sound like a good choice? I mean, is there any real choice here?

[09:20]

You say, well, damn, I want to live in love, of course. Oh. So what about approval? You don't want people to criticize you, do you? So how much of your energy and attention and mind and focus and implicitly is, I want approval. I don't want people to criticize me. And how much of your attention, your focus, your commitment is, I want to live in love. I want to receive love and share love and let love flow through me and from others and to others and from the world and out to the world. And I'm suggesting there's a big difference between these two. And by the way, again, if I may suggest, and without spending the whole lecture talking about it, we make this choice.

[10:27]

for approval on the most part when we're very little. And we didn't understand the choice we were making, but since we all make it, it's kind of part of the plan. And it's what we do as very small people to, because approval is something you can actually do with your behavior. You can behave in a way that will get you approval. And you can behave in ways that get you disapproval, depending on who you're hanging out with. But when we start out, we're hanging out usually in a particular family, and we're studying how to get approval in that situation. That's very healthy. That's what we all do, pretty much. The people who don't do that, we call them psychopaths. Who cares whether you approve of me? If you make that decision very young, this is very problematic, very difficult.

[11:33]

It's almost impossible to shift. So for most of us to make this decision to work for and make effort to have recognition, approval, is very powerful, very strong, and very appropriate, very healthy. The question then at some point becomes, is this still a good decision? Do you still want to stick to that early unconscious decision you made? Or would you like to make a new conscious choice to live in love? And what would that be like? So I'm going to tell you a story first. before I talk more about this, okay? Because it will give us a little bits and pieces of context and some specifics to talk about instead of just speaking abstractly.

[12:39]

So when I was in my, you know, as a teenager, about 15 years old, I started smoking. In a certain crowd, you get approval for that. I wanted approval in that crowd. I was one of the smartest kids in my high school. I didn't want approval from the smart kids. I wanted to walk a block off campus and get approval from those kids where they were smoking. So if you want approval block off campus, you smoke. You know, I went to high school. I graduated in 63. So it turns out 1964, my friends at Tam High were smoking dope. So I just missed it. Or, you know, probably I would have been a doper, but smoking, you know, I got around to. So then little by little, you know, I found that I didn't always like smoking.

[13:48]

And sometimes I have a cough or my lungs would hurt. And enjoyable as it is, it seemed like, you know what? This doesn't really seem to be healthy, and how do I stop? And so the first way that I decided to stop is, what do you do? Willpower. I have decided I will not smoke. You, that part of myself who is smoking, you will no longer do this. Because I said so. And I am the boss here. So how, you know, we've all tried this. How well does it work? Once in a while. Okay, but then pretty soon the boss gets tired or the boss gets a little kind of...

[14:54]

a little worn out, a little stressed, a little anxious, and is not able anymore to boss, to keep up that bossing thing. So then the part of you that wants to smoke says, at last, my chance, great. Then when the boss shows up again, the boss says, You are so bad. If I'm not here to tell you what to do, you just go ahead and smoke. I mean, what kind of person are you? What an idiot. It's not good for your health. You're getting sick. You've got a cough. You're smoking anyway. How can you do this? And then the other part of you says, excuse me, but I need a cigarette because there's somebody talking to me. I'm kind of a bossy. know-it-all kind of fashion, and he thinks they're some sort of spiritually advanced or something, excuse me, I need a break.

[15:55]

I'm going to go have a cigarette. And of course, then when the boss comes back, damn, you know, you really don't know. And then, you know, you can humiliate yourself and attack yourself and shame yourself and belittle yourself. And all the more reason you need a break to go smoke. So this is the way some of our addictions work, you know. So I would manage to, sometimes I managed to, and then I did another one, by the way. I would stop smoking for a day and reward myself by smoking. If you can quit for a day, then you can have a cigarette. And then I would do, if you can quit for two days, you can have a cigarette. And I did one day, two days, four days, a week, a month. It was amazing. I would keep track, you know, when the next cigarette could be, you know.

[16:58]

And one time at Tassajara, I had stopped smoking for about four months. And I was getting, I was kind of depressed. So I went to visit Coben Chino, who was the resident teacher there at Tassajara, you know, Japanese monk, priest. And Coben lived in, you know, what is now the abbot's cabin. And I knocked on the door, and he answers the door, and I said, you know, Cobancino, I am just so depressed. I feel so terrible. And Cobancino held out his box of Balkan Sobrani gold-tipped, you know, cigarettes and said, have a cigarette. So you never know who's going to be your, you know, helper here. Who are your friends? Is that a friend or is it?

[18:03]

And then at one point I stopped smoking and I decided, if I have the wish to smoke, why don't I just do something else instead? Apparently, you know, I'm not exactly comfortable or liking what I'm doing, but so why don't I, if the wish to smoke comes up, I will devote my, I will give my attention to something else, devote my energy to something else, do something else, you know, some different behavior. So I tried that for a while and one day I noticed, you know what, I'm feeling really anxious. Oh, this means I want a cigarette. I hadn't noticed that before. that you don't really notice what's happening until you stop. Because before, I'm going along, and then there's the thought, I want a cigarette. And there's not even noticing that there's anxiety. Without even noticing that there's anxiety, I want a cigarette.

[19:09]

So a lot of the times, we're in behaviors that actually are covering up the emotion that that is moving us to do something. So the anxiety, we don't want to have anxiety and we don't want to have it enough that we go right to the behavior that will stop it without even noticing it. Okay? Are you getting this? You got this? So how helpful is it going to be to say, You are not going to smoke. And then what about this anxiety? I would guess, if you're anything like me, when I feel that kind of anxiety, I feel like, I don't like that anxiety.

[20:12]

I don't like that feeling. I don't like me. I couldn't like somebody who's that anxious, and I don't think anybody else could either. I better have a cigarette so that people will like me, so that I won't have this objectionable anxiety that nobody could possibly like or approve of or respect me for having this feeling that I find so afflictive. Better not have it. Better not even notice it in myself. Better just do something to get rid of it. Sometimes the way that you think to get rid of this is, you know, if somebody says something to you and you feel hurt and you get defensive, you'd attack them back. But you didn't notice that you felt hurt. You just know that you're angry. But you want to let them know not to ever say that to you again.

[21:14]

Because, you know, and actually what happened was you felt hurt. But what happens is, without even noticing you feel hurt, attack. And then they'll know not to hurt you again. But you didn't notice you felt hurt. If you noticed you felt hurt, then you might, oh, I feel so hurt. This is sad. I didn't... I didn't ask for this, and this just happened, and now I feel hurt. Oh, gosh. How can I be with somebody who feels hurt? And you start to notice pretty quickly that if I attack the other person who consciously or unconsciously or knowingly or unknowingly hurt me, if I attack them, is that going to alleviate my feeling hurt? No, now I'm just going to be remorse and regret about being angry at someone and, you know, ruining their day and mine because, you know, the proverbial Buddhist thing is in order to put mud on somebody else, you have to have it in your own hand first.

[22:21]

Anyway, you know, anger is not so pleasant. Except, you know, I did go through a whole period in my life where I thought it's the thing to do. Don't let those people get away with anything. Okay. So you'll notice now I'm also bringing up that one of the things then about approval and looking for approval is probably going to involve manipulating and controlling your emotions in such a way that the ones that are painful to you don't show up because you couldn't approve of that and nobody else could either. So you better actually focus in your behavior and how you manifest yourself and not having any of those things, and then you could get some approval. Oh, thank God. How well has it worked? I don't know about you, but getting approval is a very unsatisfying way of life from my point of view.

[23:28]

I mean, I spent enough years aiming to do it, you know. I mean, one of the ways you can do that, come to a sin center. and see how much approval you can get. And when your behavior is finally good enough that everybody says, oh, thank you, your behavior is so wonderful, I really appreciate your... We just aren't going there. Your behavior is never good enough. We're sort of like the schizophrenic mom. Schizophrenic mother who says, you need to behave better. Oh, that's not good enough yet. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm just trying to be funny. Only little bits of shreds of truth in there. Okay, so I'm feeling anxious.

[24:34]

Oh, this means I want a cigarette. So what am I feeling anxious about? Again, if you're anything like me, my anxiety is not usually about anything particular. Something bad is about to happen. They are about to turn on me. They are about to criticize me if I'm not behaving well enough. And if anything, you know, emotionally afflictive is going on, they're going to spot it and they're going to want to tell me about it and what I need to do about it and how to fix myself. And they're going to want to explain all this to me. And I am not going to like that. And, you know, I kind of need to... See, what do I need to do so that I don't get attacked and criticized and judged for my behavior, for my emotion?

[25:46]

Sometimes we sort of like, you know, you can get anxious, certainly. I mean, a lot of us are anxious about the election. They're going to be canceled. for national security reasons. The Republicans control the ballot boxes and all of the computers in America. This is scary. So I had some of that. And at some point, those kind of things, at some point you can say, let's just wait and see what happens, okay? Let's just not keep on that. You tell yourself, give it a rest. Let's see what happens. Nobody can know the future. Let's just wait and see. So most of my anxiety, though, is just kind of general.

[26:53]

Why are you anxious? And, you know, I can feel this kind of anxiety just by myself. I don't need all of you here to remind me that you're out there. These are not real people. They, they, those people, they are going to turn on me. They are going to attack me if I'm not good enough, if I'm not careful enough in my behavior. And if I have the wrong feeling, if I start to feel sad, Oh, don't feel sad. I love you. Oh, don't be anxious. I love you. Oh, we all love you, Ed. So don't feel like that. Now, is that love or is that just a kind of coercion to change your behavior and so that you get some approval? Love does not alter where alteration finds.

[27:56]

William Shakespeare. Okay, so I'm feeling anxious. What is this about? It's about whether or not I'm good enough. Whether or not I will get approval. Okay? So what are you going to do about this anxiety? So one of the things I was doing at the time, I was the cook at Tassara. So I was working really hard. And it was very important to me that everybody likes the food. This is already challenging because a third of the people there are Zen macrobiotic, they call themselves, and you should be eating brown rice and chewing it 50 to 100 times and no raw foods, no salads. This is a whole different era, you know, to raw foods, vegan, you know, this is macrobiotic, no brown rice, cooked vegetables, probably no fruit, you know. There was a small contingent, though, of, you know, people who wanted to be on the mucous-less diet, you know, basically all fruit.

[29:03]

And so forth, you know, and they believed in the, there was a little book by Arnold Erhart or something who said that V vitality, your vitality equals prana, P prana, the power of the universe, minus O obstruction. So that has to do with, you know, your bowels and, you know, the obstruction is in your intestine and if you had more fruit, you know, that would relieve you. of the obstruction and you would have more of the power of the universe flowing through you and coming into your vitality. So anyway, this is a challenge to have, to be cooking and then how is, you know, but I want to, you know, cook and I want people to like my cooking and I am going to work really hard to get you to like my cooking. Isn't that important? So, you know, after a number of months, and sometimes in those days we were so understaffed, sometimes, you know, I was working, going to most of the periods of meditation and then working 10, 12 hours a day or more.

[30:16]

And then sometimes there weren't days off because there was nobody else to do it. And, you know, somebody asked me recently, Ed, were you ever a guest cook at Tassajara? This is somebody who was born after I was the head cook, and I said, as a matter of fact, I was the guest cook. And when I was one of the two guest cooks, I was also the head cook, the Tenzo. I was also the assistant Tenzo and the baker. And I know we had fewer guests in those days, but nonetheless, I had a number of positions. So I worked very hard and then every so often I would collapse. And I just couldn't move for a couple of days. And so one of the times I was in my cabin not moving for a couple of days, I started thinking about all this.

[31:19]

Here I am anxious and I want people to like my cooking. Why do I want them to like my cooking? Who cares? Well, if they liked my cooking, that would mean they liked me. Is that true? What I noticed, if I thought about that, I think, no, they just like the cooking. They don't even know me. They don't care about me. They just want that food. How many of them ever come in to say, thank you for your effort, appreciate your work? No, mostly people are coming to the kitchen to say, you served raisins in the oatmeal. How could you be poisoning people like this? Or whatever it is, you know, you've got too much cheese, you know, we can't eat all this cheese and dairy, we're getting clogged up in our sinuses. So I started thinking that, you know, they don't care about me.

[32:30]

They just want, you know, the food that they want. I mean, that's what's important. And I thought, well, but, you know, if I could have gotten the people to like me by liking my cooking and by making all this effort to get people to like the food so they would like me, and if they did like me, who cares? What difference would that make? Well, if enough people liked me, maybe it would convince me that it would be all right for me to like me. Is that true? And I thought, well, you know, and then, you know, all of a sudden it's like, uh-oh, I guess I don't like myself. And then if you don't like yourself, you know, you could easily be anxious about how other people are going to see you. And you might want to be careful how you behave to see if you can get some approval from them.

[33:35]

But whatever amount of approval you get, is that going to be enough so you like yourself? Some people are pretty good at getting approval. You may or may not have been somebody pretty good at that. But as far as I can tell, it doesn't translate into loving yourself or liking yourself. All the approval in the world you can get. And I thought at that time, I thought, you know what? This is a little roundabout, don't you think? I mean, if I'm going to start liking myself, I'm going to have to start loving myself. If I'm going to love myself, I'm going to have to start doing it. And all this business of trying to cook and get these people to like the food, to like me, so that I could like me, it's a little roundabout. And it doesn't actually seem to have worked. Okay? So I decided at that time, you know what? I think I need to work on loving myself. So how are you going to do that?

[34:41]

And if I could love myself a little bit better, I wouldn't be so anxious. I wouldn't be making this crazy kind of effort where I'm so tired all the time. And by the way, who could like somebody who's so tired all the time? And who could like anybody and love anybody who's so, you know, needy for approval? I mean, you see somebody who's needy, it's kind of like, ew. And because you know, you can't give them enough. So I embarked on this new project. So this is a big shift in any of our lives when we say, okay, aiming for approval has not worked. I'm going to live in love.

[35:47]

What does that look like? How do you do that? And when you first decide to do this, there's no way to do it. In other words, love is not something you can do or not do. So you've got to change your whole mode because you can make an effort. You can do something, but you can't do love. So I want to explain this a bit to you, if I may, from my point of view. You can see if it relates at all to your point of view. So, by the way, when people ask me, Well, how do you love yourself? I say, probably pretty awkwardly at first. Because we really don't know so much about how to do it. And it's something that we need to, in a sense, study. But again, it's not about doing.

[36:52]

Because love is something that's just in the air. And love is something in our heart. and it's in other hearts, and it flows, and it's our bodies, and it's everywhere. But it's not quite enough to say that, is it, for you to feel it? How are you going to feel it? It's everywhere, and it's free, and it doesn't depend on your performance. whether you're anxious or you're not anxious or you're greedy or you're not greedy or you're angry or you're not angry it doesn't depend on anything as Suzuki Roshi one time in You know, Suzuki Rishi one time said, you know, we practice meditation to purify our love.

[38:03]

That's to separate love from approval, from performance, that you could have love without any particular performance or any particular characteristics. There could be love. And another word for this, you know, what we usually call it in Buddhism or in Zen, you know, is presence of mind, good-hearted presence of mind, and it's not abandoning yourself. It's showing up, showing up and being there with yourself no matter what happens. So we used to call it something like this. But another time, Suzuki Roshi said, don't move. During meditation, he said, don't move. Just die. Nothing will help you now.

[39:08]

This is your last moment. Not even enlightenment will help you now because you have no more moments. And you sit there and suddenly, you can feel it then. This is the last moment, and you'd feel the sweetness that was there all the time. And then he said, so be true to yourself, express yourself fully. If you're going to be true to yourself and express yourself fully, this is beyond approval. This is something you do to express your heart, to express your love, to express who you are, which is love, and you do it.

[40:20]

And some people will like it, and some people won't. Some people are busy giving out approval and disapproval. Okay, so that's... What they're up to right now in their lives, all right, so. Doesn't work for them, they're busy with their approval and disapproval stuff, okay. And other people will be touched when you share yourself, when you're true to yourself. The poet Arumi says in one of his poems, don't move. Read these things and think, damn, I've heard this before. But his next line is, there is a sublime generosity coming towards you.

[41:29]

Don't move. Let it wash away. You know, let it resonate inside your body. If you're looking for approval and while you're busy doing approval-seeking behaviors, you will not be able to experience this. This is a shift in the focus of your mind, of your attention. I am going to let the sublime generosity coming towards me wash through me. I am not going to be busy right now with, does everybody in the room like me? Are they about to turn on me? What do I need to do to get them to lay off of me? And if you're busy doing all of that, you will not be.

[42:34]

letting the sublime generosity flow through you. It's coming towards you, and you let it into you. And sometimes you do this, to start with, rather awkwardly, and you don't know how to do it. But the good news is, even if you don't do it very well, it's happening. There's a lot of Buddhist traditions and included in Zen. Zen Master Hakuin was one of them. He, at one point, was very ill with what's called the Zen sickness. We're not going to talk about all that. I'm running out of time here. But he was taught to visualize a duck egg of butter. some soft butter the size of a duck egg on his forehead that was filled with love and compassion and faith and generosity and kindness and let it wash down, melt and dissolve down through his body.

[43:48]

And there are many Buddhist traditions like this and other traditions like this. And if you imagine, excuse me if this isn't Zen, sometimes when I mention this to Zen people, they say, but Ed, it's not Zen. We don't care if Haguin did that. That was his Zen. That's not our Zen. That's not the way we do Zen. Zen is just what is. And you don't get to go just making it up. You just are with what is. Excuse me, if I experience what is as being full of sublime generosity. But you're not going to get the sublime generosity if you're busy limiting your idea of just what is to stuff and things and phenomena that are at a gross level.

[44:50]

You're going to have to allow your consciousness to become a little more subtle and notice a little more subtle levels of reality and just what is. So get a little more subtle, would you? Well, I'm sorry if I'm speaking to anybody in this room, but this happened to me up at a Zen group in another town. That I was talking about this and they told me that it's not Zen. Again, you know, are we gonna get it right? Are we gonna get it right, do it right? and get some approval for doing it right, I'm doing Zen. I'm doing Zen, I'm getting it right. You got it? You approve? Oh, good for you, yeah, I see.

[45:51]

And, you know, if you need to, if you're that worried about it and concerned about it, you know, people will notice that you're that worried and concerned about it, and like, yeah, doing Zen, I get it, okay. Busy getting it right, getting approval, you know, getting recognition. You know what you're doing. Cool. Okay. Spiritual person, I got it. But, you know, you could also be noticing, you know, at a more subtle level, the sublime generosity. Now, I do need to finish up, you know. So I'm going to try to... Finish this up. And then we have a question and answer time. You can come back and we can talk more about stuff. The mysterious thing again here is that you can't just do love. You can't just do sublime generosity.

[46:52]

It's something that you perceive and allow to move through you and be in you. And you can't make it up. You can make up all kinds of things and behavior patterns and you can do something differently and you can... So there are some things that you can do, okay? And I want to remind you about what some of these things are that may at some point turn into the sublime generosity. One of them is don't move. You know, just be with things. Don't keep trying to go here and get that and avoid this and, you know, try sitting. And when you're sitting, don't worry about, you know, whether, you know, it's the good kind of meditation or the bad kind. Whether you're getting it right or you're not getting it right or you're doing a good job or you're not doing a good job.

[47:57]

Whatever your experience is, let it come through you. That's called love. But you will experience it as, I'm so sad, I'm so scared, I'm so angry. And it's just stuff washing through you. And basically what happens is, you need to have that happen because your body, for the spiritual energy, I'll call it now switch, like love, spiritual energy, something, right? Okay, so when you sit still and you shut up, You're not moving, you're not talking, the energy starts to build up inside and then it starts to move through your body. And otherwise that energy is going like, you, calm down, straighten up, relax, be nice to me. You know, you want to give some directives out to the world and you want to tell it how to behave to make you happy. And somehow most of the world isn't interested in making you happy, I don't know. And then some people, they want to make you happy and they're going out of their way to make you happy and it's...

[49:00]

Such a burden. I don't know. You probably have some of those people in your life, too. They want to help you. Sometimes that can be quite a burden. Sometimes it works. Some people are able to help, and we find ways to help one another without helping or without the person having to say to you, excuse me, but is this helpful enough? Am I being helpful? Because they're wanting recognition for being helpful. And then you have to sort of help them or something. And it's sort of like, how does that help me? And how do I make sure that you feel like a good helper? Excuse me. We need to finish up. I keep saying it. But the energy is moving through you. And what happens? It gets to places where it can't move. We all have all these residual feelings. Where do you think they are? The ones that you've been... you know, not expressing or not allowing because you wouldn't get approval if they showed up and you wouldn't approve of yourself and you couldn't like yourself because they might show up.

[50:09]

So where, you know, they're here, you know, and you have to know where they are or you might accidentally go there. So you have to know the parts of your body and the places inside not to go with your consciousness. You have to. So when you start to sit there, you start to breathe and Follow your breath and pretty soon you're starting with your awareness to inhabit places in your body where there's stuff stored. And when you encounter the places where there's stuff stored, it comes to the surface and it becomes conscious and you have sad, angry, depressed, fearful, scared. And there's something to be said at some point for, yeah, you weather it. And but most of us, we go like, oh, God, this is going to go on forever. I must be such a terrible person. I still haven't gotten over this. I still don't know how to control this. I still don't know how to manage it. And what's wrong with me?

[51:10]

And we're going back into our approval. But if you want to just live in love, you're going to have to accept it and allow it to surface. And pretty soon the energy in your body moves. You know, it's surfaced. You let go of it. And so you're practicing what we call, you know, in Buddhism, mindfulness. You're aware of it without judging good, bad, right, wrong, and you allow it to surface, and it's gone, and pretty soon the energy in that place is running clear. The energy is just flowing. It's called love. This energy, you have fuller energy. And you have a greater capacity to show up and say, good morning, how are you? Nice to meet you. and to dig in the garden and to wash the dishes, and you have energy for that, and your energy can go into doing that, and you don't worry so much about, are they looking at me? Do they like me? Am I doing this right? Am I doing a good job? Is this Zen? And you're just sharing your vitality and the lovely vitality of human being with the world.

[52:17]

So this is not easy, but anyway, Thank you for awakening this wish to live in love and to express yourself fully, to share your good-heartedness, your tenderness with the world and your devotion, and not worry so much about, am I getting it right? Am I being the kind of person that would get approval? None of that doesn't work. I wrote the Tessire Bread book. Does that help? It's a best-selling book. And people say, oh, thank you, thank you. It's been my friend and companion for 25 years. I mean, is that going to give me all the love and approval that I missed out on when I was growing? All the attention and, you know, four years in the orphanage and all the attention and approval and acceptance and affection that I missed out on as a child?

[53:25]

I don't think so. You're going to have to, I'm going to have to, I decided, I'm going to have to be the mother and father that I never had, that I always wanted, and I'm going to have to be that person. Study up. Start practicing. It's never too late. Start being that person. And probably when you start being that person, you won't be very good at it. But you can get started. And then once you've started, you continue. Seeing that you could be the person you always, the mother and the father you always wanted to be. And as you get older, it becomes more and more important, right? You're not going to be 20 and 30 forever. All right. Thank you. Blessings.

[54:09]

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