Awakening through Difficult Emotions: "The Poison is the Medicine", with Tara Brach

[Music] Namaste and Welcome Friends glad to be with you it's been a while I just spent two weeks with my family including a two-year-old and a four-year-old granddaughters it was wonderful it was exhausting I'm amazed my body can do this non-stop playing without major injury you know a friend was telling me about uh touring a hotel to book for an event and he was with the representative and he commented to this representative that you know the hotel was kind of aging it seemed pretty old and the representatives said to him you know we don't use the word old we use the word seasoned so I'm trying to think of myself as having this seasoned body that can that can go with it with grandchildren um you know I was talking to a friend about the intensity of being with young children and she reminded me of this study that was done this is decades ago of Harvard football players who spent a day in a nearby nursery taking care of the children and then they were interviewed and 100 of them said it was way more stressful intense and demanding than a day of practice a day of training it's hard and what it made me think of really was how many mostly women spend a lot of time with young children how challenging and important that work is and how impossible it is and I think of this for mother so often not to get stressed and sometimes reactive or angry and then feel bad about themselves for it because you know when life doesn't cooperate and children don't cooperate our nervous system is designed to react and of course and we're going to be talking about aversive emotions they arise in all sorts of situations not just child care it's whenever life doesn't go operating ramdas many of you might remember a spiritual teacher from one of the great ones from our generation said that if you think you're enlightened spend a week with your family you know so we don't really need others even to stir up difficult emotions our minds can do it another friend shared about a a greeting card she received and it's a Serene drawing of the Buddha sitting you know in Lotus position with his legs crossed his eyes are closed and then there's this thought bubble above his head and it says I hate my thighs we know what our minds do on whether we're meditating or moving through the day they get us into trouble so I bring this up because uh now more than ever our world is changing so fast that our bodies and our nervous systems can't keep up and it creates a a deep sense of insecurity and ungroundedness and you know there are spiking levels of anxiety depression so this brings us to our our theme for this talk what we'll explore together which is something I explore regularly because it's so core to the spiritual path is how do we navigate the unpleasant emotions how do we navigate when we get triggered by the repeating visitors of whether it's anxiety or anger or fear our shame how do we navigate in a way that really serves Awakening serves spiritual transformation so as I move through this you might consider what you'd like to attend to because we'll do a meditation together what challenging emotional weather system do you regularly experience and I'll begin this you know Exploration with a teaching story that many of you are familiar with this is an elder that's teaching his grandson about life and he says a fight's going on inside me and he says it's a terrible fight it's between two wolves and one is evil and he's filled with anger and greed and guilt and fear and a lot of ego and then he said the other wolf is good and that wolf is filled with joy and peace and love and truth and compassion and the same fight is going on inside of you and really every human being and so the grandson thinks about this and he then asks his grandfather well which Wolf's going to win and the Elder replies whichever one you feed so I'd like to offer a bit of a revision I have a dear friend Stephen Josephs who puts it this way he says there's no bad wolf and it's true what happens is that we sometimes have a dominance of primitive emotions we get stuck in them and sometimes we have access to our more evolved emotions and we need to feed both really you you might remember Rumi's guest house where he says welcome the guests all of them so there are two basic ways that our meditation training helps us with difficult emotions and the first one is it's like feeding the wolf with the evolved motions it's to intentionally cultivate wholesome emotions in other words to do practices that help us develop loving kindness and generosity and gratitude that's the first domain of training and the other is to bring mindfulness and compassion to the difficult more primitive emotions and this will be our Focus for today so a key understanding and this is one that can really radically shift how we relate to emotions is that they're all from the same source there are life energy that is wanting to protect and promote life that's the purpose of emotions they're to move us in ways that protect us and nourish us fear and anger protect against danger and threats shame you know protect us from being rejected guilt trying to improve us greed trying to promote meeting our needs and here's the deal that the more we have unmet needs for safety or for nourishment or love the more intense the emotions so they're entirely natural and they're Universal I think of this cartoon uh I have and it you have to kind of imagine it that there's a cat that's sitting outside a mouse hole and he's leaning against the wall dejected and in the mouse holes the mouse who's a psychiatrist and the mouse is saying to his patient don't worry fantasies about devouring the doctor are perfectly normal and so it is these emotions are in service of meeting our needs and they're necessary to survive and thrive and in a really deep way and and this is what for me is so powerful they're all expressions of life loving life -loving life and they make it twisted and cause pain but their Essence is life-loving life and that really helps me I'll be meditating or moving through the day and if I feel let's say a clutch of fear or anxiety about what's around the corner and I can pause and really sense to myself okay so this is just that powerful Life Energy loving life wanting to protect life and if I can just remember that and in some way appreciate that that's what this is the sense of my own being becomes enlarged and it's no longer um there's no longer any suffering with it there's a sense of this is a current that's moving through me it's okay you might imagine it for a moment maybe you can even sense right now in your body some energy of anxiety our fear or remember a recent time with it yeah and just sense that this energy is life protecting life that's trying to help you and just sense that you could even say thank you just to honor it is the basic Life Energy and notice that that really shifts your relationship with fear you might listen to these words from Hildegard upon Bingham she says this is a Mystic saint I the fiery life of Divine Essence am a flame beyond the beauty of The Meadows I gleam in the waters I burn in the sun moon and stars I awaken everything to life the air lives by turning green and being In Bloom the waters flow as if they were alive the sun lives in its light and thus I remain hidden in every kind of reality as a fiery power our emotions arise from this fiery power life loving protecting promoting life Okay so if these energies are natural and Universal this is life protecting life loving life why do they feel so wrong and why do we feel that we shouldn't feel fear anger hatred you know why does something feel wrong when they come up and the reason is this that when these energies arise they can take over the on button gets stuck and when that happens the whole sense of Who We Are gets kind of possessed or identified with the emotion and we get small and I find it really helpful to think of it like a hose with water flowing through it and when the hose gets twisted or torqued which is what happens with our emotions when we start having fewer thoughts that feed the fear feelings that create more fear thoughts and they start circling and rather than the emotion being kind of healthy and telling us what we need to do and what is going to serve us it just becomes a circling energy that's kind of caught in our body and our whole sense of who we are becomes a scared self feels bad so I'm just giving you an example of how the Primitive energy can actually end up creating suffering imagine that same hose gets untorked untwisted and the water can flow through naturally then it becomes like a current in our larger system we still are inhabiting the fullness of our being and it can inform Us in an intelligent way and actually serve our aliveness one of the ways that language shows us the best is the difference between the word demon which we kind of know as being a malevolent difficult spirit and that represents the torque stuck primitive Energies and its original meaning which was Diamond d-a-i-m-o-n which is really the spirit or the spiritual being that influences our character it's a very pure flowing energy that's the original Greek word for demon was diamond so our inquiry friends is this how do we relate to the demon the torqued energies the Primitive energies that we all know that we all get possessed by of anger fear hatred shame how do we relate to the demon so it untwists and becomes Diamond that flowing Life Energy that really uplifts our life how do we make that kind of transformation and Rumi says it so clearly the cure for the pain is in the pain it's in the pain and the Tibetan teachings describe it this way they say that we transform when we learn to nourish the demon with wise attention with mindfulness and compassion when we bring mindfulness and compassion to the torqued energies to the demon the poison becomes the medicine the demon becomes the diamond okay so this is our our frame for how we're exploring difficult emotions having this transformation from a torque Twisted energy to a flowing energy demon to Diamond and our pathway of mindfulness and compassion as many are familiar will use the the practice of rain which is the four steps that weave mindfulness and compassion and for those that are not familiar the steps are recognized allow investigate and nurture so we're going to explore this this movement from demon to Diamond and I want to name the main challenge in advance which is that the demon doesn't necessarily arise individually that they often come together like clusters and the most common pair of demons is let's say uh anger arises it often gets paired with shame because we have a reaction to the demon that arises with aversion we feel ashamed of or hating our anger so they arise together we often call this the second Arrow that first fear or anger or hatred will arise and then shame about the fear or anger or hatred okay so I want to just alert you to that here's a very um mild example of the double demon and it's a story of a woman and her family when they're vacationing in a small New England town it's the same town where the actor now deceased many of you probably weren't alive when he was so famous Paul Newman he and his family often visited so she decides one Sunday to after she does this brisk walk to stop at a and get a double dip chocolate ice cream cone at this Bakery coffee shop and there's only one other Patron in the store and that's Paul Newman so her first response is feeling a kind of burst of kind of anxiety or fear or self-consciousness that's the first demon that arises but then the second one is ashamed of herself for even having those feelings so she's telling herself you know pull yourself together what's wrong with you you're a happily married woman with three children get it together and she doesn't even look in his Direction and she just goes to the counter and orders her cone and clerk fills the order and she takes her cone and then goes out the door and just kind of gliding out just not even glancing in his Direction so she gets to the car and realizes she doesn't have her cone back into the shop she goes expecting to see it and on the counter in the clerk's hand or whatever and no ice cream cone in sight so finally she looks over at Paul Newman and his face breaks into this familiar warm friendly grin and he says to her you put it in your purse so paired demons you know and often they lead us to actions that we regret you know we have the insecurity and then we feel bad about ourselves and then we do just the thing that creates more insecurity creates the trance of unworthiness and what I'm really wanting to get across is that there's no Pathway to Healing whatever demon is there whatever unprocessed torqued energies there if we're hating ourselves for it and often that's the first place we have to pay attention is how we're relating to the difficult energy so I'd like to share a story of a woman who was working with difficult energies and how that kind of transformation how the poison became the medicine for her and this was last year I had several sessions with a woman actually she worked at a non-profit I'm involved with and she leads meditation at that non-profit so she practices single mom under a lot of financial stress two children she has been regularly sending money to her family in Guatemala very strong young woman so she shared with me her challenges with her younger son 16 years old low self-esteem really playing a lot of video games and drugs doing a lot of vaping and Edibles and she would set these boundaries uh you know about helping in the house and school work and drugs and his compliance was erratic so she'd naturally get angry have a lot of judgments let him know how she was feeling and he was increasingly withdrawing so that it was a standoff a lot of distance so we explored rain together and she began with the demon of anger this kind of just pretty chronic sense of blame and judgment towards him and recognized it named it allowed it to be there just said yes okay this is what's here right now and then she began to investigate and she found that under the anger when she opened to It Was Fear And The Fear was that you know he's going to have trouble in his life he's going to have a bad life and that went right to self-blame in other words her anger turned on herself shame the belief I'm a bad parent you know it's my fault I'm not present enough I don't I'm not firm enough on boundaries I'm too judgmental you know this is the double demon she was angry and also ashamed of herself and she went more deeply into the shame feeling it in her body felt that kind of sinking aching powerless feeling in her chest and her belly she could feel this kind of crying place in her heart and it was just saying over and over again I can't do it right I can't do it right so this is the pain the the pain of the shame demon and she could feel it as something that had been there her whole life and began weeping really deeply very painful so part of investigating is to say well what is that place most need and when she asked herself that it was really to trust them okay that I love him that I'm lovable and so I invited her as I often did do to put her hand in her heart and to offer self-compassion but she didn't feel like she had any access to self-compassion she felt too small she felt too bad and so as many of you know the nurturing of rain doesn't have to come from yourself you can bring it from any Source you can imagine so I asked her well who do you trust and she said I trust my mother and my grandmother my mother's not alive anymore mother died actually when she was quite young her grandmother brought her up her abuela and raised her very strong loving wise matriarch and so she invoked her she felt her grandmother's presence and you know I said what would your grandmother say to you and just let let in your grandmother's words and her grandmother said to her carida karita it's dear dear you have a beautiful loving heart and and just kept repeating those words and she started feeling her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother and the whole you know lineage of female ancestors kind of surrounding her and their love and strength flowing into her and uh really uh relaxing into that and then we went into what's called after the rain after the rain is when you're not doing anything rather resting in and getting familiar with the presence that's opened up and she could just feel what she said is a wide open heart and sense that open-hearted presence as more who she was than any story of a failing parent any anger towards a son so she could hold her imperfect parenting and include all parts of her herself and include her son so just to say the demon energy that was all torqued that anger and that shame when it untwisted became a really fast field of compassion became Diamond that energy of loving connection now some comments for you first is rain is not a one shot when we've had you know over and over again the experience of being caught in the demon the Primitive energies it takes repeated rounds of untwisting and it was true for her she had to do she kept getting triggered by anger and she'd keep having to you know get in touch with feeling angry and then bad about herself and feel that being held and nurtured by ancestors and that repeatedly freed her up her heart to be more open and loving with her son and a few days of after we practice together she was reflecting on her son and had this insight that you could see how his escaping drugs and online and so on came from his feeling of being flawed his trance of unworthiness his shame demon and it just brought up this really deep tenderness in her heart and so she'd be started this loving kindness practice where she would just hold him in her heart in her Mind's Eye and and sense his goodness and she brought it into her daily life she made a kind of commitment every day I'm going to in some way let him know I see his goodness in words or in actions or by touch and that softened things she's tried to be as firm as she could and clear about boundaries but it was communicated from a place of respect and care and something came through because they began over weeks to to talk more to have more real conversations you could sense the diamond the that energy flowing in her so a few more comments for this woman during the especially during that first rain practice she really plunged deeply into the raw pain of Shame and this is part of the healing they say that your issues are in your tissues that in order to untwist the emotional energy you actually have to contact it that we have to directly experience in our bodies what's going on for there to be a loosening and untwisting and untorking so it can flow more we have to feel our feelings the cure for the pain is in the pain and sometimes the pain is really intense and so if there's been a lot of trauma it's really important to go slow to have support to Resource yourself to you know really hold yourself in love really be gentle and when we touch it it's strong I remember once I received a note uh this was a couple of years ago from someone along with a very generous donation and he said thanks a lot your rain meditation was so intense it made me throw up afterwards I repeated it and it helped me a lot thanks a lot so I share this with because it was maybe one of the most original notes I've heard you know thanking me for having a meditation that made this person throw up and I share it with you because it takes the willingness and the courage to open to what's in our bodies to the uncomfortableness the unpleasantness and the motivation there's some wisdom in us that knows that we have to be intimate with the wounded place it says Rumi says it's a little different angle that that's where the light comes through it's when we get in touch with the demon when we get in touch bringing mindfulness and kindness to that Twisted energy that it untwists and it flows and it serves our Awakening the final comment is the deepest way it serves our Awakening is we start realizing that this energy is not personal we really get it that it's just the life energy flowing through us and that Who We Are is the awareness the space that's happening in the tender awake space that these energies are flowing through okay friends enough words what I'd like to do is have you explore a little bit this bringing rain to something difficult this movement from demon to Diamond and I'd like to invite you to consider for yourself what Universal energy whether it's fear or anxiety or anger or shame or hatred what's a regular visitor these days and you might even consider a recent situation when you were triggered again recalling roomie's words the wound is where the light enters you we become available for awakening when we turn towards the pain when we really get it that this can turn to Medicine it's you might sense your intention and this is sometimes described as the bodhisattva aspiration may this suffering serve to awaken just feel that sincere intention May the suffering serve to awaken and we begin the rain practice by recognizing whatever emotions are strongest so you might bring the situation closer into mind and sense when you're triggered you know what is the emotion that's strongest is it fear is that feeling ashamed or shame or self-judgment or is it blaming or feeling anger towards another mentally Whispering whatever the strong emotion is the demon of the moment and then allowing it just figuring that this is the reality that's right here letting it be not judging it or resisting or numbing just allowing and then you might investigate some and sense well when this is happening when the Situation's happening oh what am I believing what's this Fear Place believing or this angry Place believing what's its view are you believing that somebody isn't respecting or loving you are you believing that you're failing are you believing that something bad's about to happen just what do you believe in the most important part of investigating is with whatever you're believing where do you feel it in your body and what does it feel like and just check your throat your chest your belly you might put your hand on your heart to just bring the attention into the body and help you steady your attention there you might even let your facial expression be that of the emotion it'll help you get in touch with the emotion and you can let your body posture even express what you're feeling these are ways to get more in touch with what you're feeling to contact to have an intimate contact with the emotion that's there letting yourself feel it in a direct way and then asking you know what is this place most need what's needed how does it want me to be with it just to ask and listen from the most vulnerable part of you what is that what is what's needed what is that vulnerable or wounded Place need and sometimes it needs just to be seen sometimes it needs to be understood cared about forgiven [Music] to feel safe sometimes it needs for you to trust foreign what's the message it needs you might take a few breaths and feel that you can really inhabit your whole being as you offer some nurturing let that hand be on the heart let the touch be tender and to offer what's needed to offer the message it might be simply trust your goodness or it's okay I'm here and I'm not living and if it's difficult to offer a message to yourself you might call on a larger sense of loving you might call on someone that you love that you trust could be a person that's alive or not alive it could be your dog or spiritual figure could be formless loving presence in the universe but just to call on that invoke it and let the message and let the care come from that what's most important is let it in allow the care Dove through your hand into your heart into where the vulnerability is washing through you light love care and if it's hard to let in pray to let it in sensing what shifts as there's a real tender presence and into my presence with the life that's here I'm taking some moments to to rest in that presence to rest in perhaps a little bit more of a sense of spaciousness of tenderness of compassion just noticing the difference between the sense of who you were when there was that stuckness of emotion and the quality of awareness kindness awakeness that's here that's the shift that some describe is from the demon the more torqued energy to when there's flow of the diamond there's a sense that it's nourishing your spirit that energy now to the practice is to open deeply into what's right here and discover the loving awareness it's really the source the poet and my good friend Dana Falls writes this she says go in and in be the space between two cells the vas resounding silence in which Spirit dwells go in and in and turn away from nothing that you find go in and in be the space between two cells the vast resounding silence in which Spirit dwells foreign if your eyes are closed you might open them we're exploring really how we awaken relating to the more torqued energies the demon becoming diamond serving love understanding aliveness the final part that I'd like to look at is that just as these energies are not personal our healing isn't done necessarily alone we we need each other we awaken together there's a story I've always loved this man who's driving he's lost in the country and he's trying to reach for his map but as he does his uh card drives off the road and gets stuck in a ditch and so he's not injured but his car's deep in the mud and so he walks to a nearby Farm task for help and the farmer says well Warwick can get you out of that ditch and points this old mule who's standing in the field and the man looks at this haggardly mule and that the farmer and the farmer's just there repeating yep old Warwick can do the job so the man figures he has nothing to lose and the two men in Warwick make their way back to the ditch and the farmer hitches the mule to the car and with a snap of the reins he shouts this he says pull Fred pull Jack pulled head pull Warwick and the mule pulls the car from the ditch with very little effort the man's amazed he thanks the farmer patch the mule and why did you call out all those other names before you called out Warwick and the farmer Grins and says well Warwick is just about blind but as long as he believes he's part of a team he doesn't mind pulling so it's fun and the truth is we are in it together if when you're practicing with a difficult energy you can remember that this is we're all working with these energies and we support each other in it it really makes a difference to feel that we're dedicated to discovering this potential to live from love to live in awareness and I as many of you know I lead what's called satyan which is Gatherings it's once a month or most months and we share what's going on in our lives in these gatherings and I remember a few months ago somebody sharing about not feeling seen or understood by their family of origin really feeling invisible and how that played out in so many relationships that hypersensitivity to not being seen or understood and how the old Hertz would get triggered and someone else shared something very very similar um and they felt so accompanied by each other and being witnessed by the group and the truth is the wounds that we have so many share similar wounds we all feel insecure you know we all feel insecure and it's not personal and we find that out we find that out when we start communicating with each other and we need to actively remind each other of what we forget I mean each one of us when we get caught in these uh caught by the demons we get possessed by insecurity or fear we forget the vastness of our being the mystery the love we forget we lose perspective so we need each other to remind us in very simple ways that were loved that were accepted that were good um that we're not alone so I want to share a an article that I read and this is written by uh Tom junode Esquire 2014 he interviews this young man who prosecutors said set out to commit a mass shooting but this young man was caught and before he could get started and he pleaded guilty to carjacking and served some time so the interview happened after he got out of prison and as it turns out when he got out of prison he looked at his old high school yearbook and he was shocked because fellow students assigned it and said let's get together over the summer people had reached out but he had been so caught in himself he hadn't seen that and on the day that he set out armed with guns and ammo he said he didn't want to do it it was like some painful Duty that he wanted attention and he said if someone would have come up to him and said you don't have to do this you don't have to have this strange strength we accept you we accept you he said I would have broken down and given up and and that really touched me to read that because how many of us if if someone at the right moment just put a hand on our shoulders and said I'm here with you looked at us with care how many of us we just had that reminder that our hearts are good hearts um could have shifted something we're all nourished by by these reminders and and so you might take a moment right now and scan and sense those in your life who maybe you'll be in touch with over the next day or two and maybe there's someone with some vulnerability who's having a hard time and that you might say something to perhaps you could write an email but something that will nurture something that helps the demons become the diamonds that will free them up it's a beautiful thing to offer and inwardly as a way of closing like to take a moment and have you sense what happens with even uh slight gesture of kindness you might just sense again as you scan Within if there's any vulnerability anything your afraid of that's coming up anyway you're feeling hurt or alone any part of you that has some distress maybe physical discomfort and again just to Simply put your hand on your heart and in some way offer some care just a simple message of care feel the energy come inward to touch you there's such power to even remembering the word kindness such power to offering it inward and to bring you to our world closing words this is Jeff Foster quote I love the most potent medicine is this ancient commitment to never abandon yourself to discover wholeness in the whole mess to be a loving mother to your insides to hold the broken bits and open awareness to illuminate the sore places with the light of love thank you friends for your attention your presence I'm sending you all blessings and love [Music]

Channel: Tara Brach

Views: 195,150

Keywords: Tara Brach, dharmarain108108108108, dharma, meditation, mindfulness, awakening, medicine, fear, anxiety, shame, anger, emotion, RAIN, freedom

Id: 8lgWA4DpbBA

Length: 49min 13sec (2953 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 24 2022