Tara Brach

In fact, they canceled school to find goat three.

So we get it when we lose, we go into a little trance and we actually, the busier and more anxious and more reactive we get, the more we complicate our life.

So you might just take a moment to reflect on today and notice, you know, to what degree were you reacting to what came your way?

In other words, in that place of either anxiety or wanting things to be a certain way with tension and impatient or restless and reactive?

And to what degree was there a presence of mind that allowed you to respond versus react?

And as you sense into your day you might be able to also sense into how in our relationships

if we want to be experiencing the awakened heart, if we want real love and real compassion to arise, we need to have that mindful presence as the ground.

And I find it really interesting when you think of when it's not there, love actually contracts into attachment.

And when equanimity is not there, compassion contracts into pity.

And when equanimity is not there, joy contracts into kind of a selfish exuberance.

In other words, the energies are still there but they have a contracted form when we are not resting in that space of balance and presence.

And these are sometimes in the Buddhist tradition called the near enemies.

They are not the pure expression of the heart.

There is a wisdom in equanimity.

Equanimity has that space that really can see what's true that allows for a very mature kind of loving.

There's a story that I heard years ago about Kafka when he was an older man and as it goes he spent time in a park

sitting in a park and one day a little girl went by him and she had tears in her face and he asked her to stop and tell him what was wrong and she told him that she had lost her doll.

And so he said he'd look around.

They looked around together but it seemed actually that the doll was lost.

He said, Why don't you come back?