Learning to Respond Not React - Tara Brach

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Hi OP , any chance you could give the exact timestamp (or thereabouts) for when she raises the CFS context ? A portion of us can't follow consecutive minutes of video content so that would be awesome if you could :)

👍︎︎ 5 👤︎︎ u/etherspin 📅︎︎ Mar 09 2018 🗫︎ replies

Chronic fatigue is not me/cfs...

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/panckage 📅︎︎ Mar 09 2018 🗫︎ replies

*this talk

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/hoginthesky 📅︎︎ Mar 08 2018 🗫︎ replies

Awesome! Love her. Thanks 💚

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/queen_Pegasus 📅︎︎ Mar 09 2018 🗫︎ replies
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Welcome. I would like to begin with a quote that’s pretty much anonymous, although I have seen versions of it from Christian philosophers and Buddhists and Ghandi. This is it: “The thought becomes the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into the habit. Habit hardens into character. Character gives birth to destiny. So watch your thoughts with care. And let them spring from love, born out of respect for all beings.” So this is an expression of karma which really is saying that causes lead to effects, that when we have certain beliefs and thoughts they create certain feelings that then turn into actions and the actions become habits and those habits end up really creating our sense of identity and, if they are really hardened, become our destiny. And we tend to keep repeating and repeating and repeating, we are creatures of habit. So when they create our destiny and when they are based in fear – these habits – they really become the block in our lives to accessing all that we can be, to accessing happiness and creativity and, in a deep way, a sense of our spirit. So I would say that one of the deepest expressions of despair that comes my way is when someone will report that, “Well, I have been repeating the same pattern of pushing people away or of grasping on or undermining myself or whatever it is all my life, for as long as I can remember.” That’s a feeling of... there is a real feeling of despair because, “How can I ever change? It’s so deeply grooved!” So tonight’s reflection will really be on how we can awaken from these habitual chains of thinking, feeling and then acting, this stimulus reaction-cycle that we get caught into, that really can bind our lifes, and the title of the talk is really “The Freedom Of Responding, Not Reacting.” Okay? And I think of this as a very universal kind of theme in terms of transformation because every one of us, if we are in any way suffering, we are suffering because there is some patterning that has locked in that’s rooted in fear and that we keep playing out over and over again and it’s confining our sense of being. That’s why we are suffering. So what I would like to... The way I would like to structure this is around three key teachings that have really shaped my... my life, my spiritual life in a very deep way. And I think of them as invitations. And the first invi... And these... Each of these three teachings are ways of in a way freeing ourselves, we are waking up out of the chain-reaction, okay? And the first one the way our language is really, “Please don’t believe your thoughts!” Okay, that’s the first one. And the second one is, “Please just pause and come back into presence!” And the third one is, “Please remember love! In some way, whatever way, but remember love!” So that is going to be kind of the architecture if you will of our... of our reflection together, these three invitations. But we will begin by taking a look at what happens in our brain when we are caught in the stimulus reaction-chain, in the ones... And they are very often relational. We get triggered and then we go into this... this chain of reactivity. And my favorite illustration comes from Doctor Dan Segal who is a psychiatrist and he is a friend also and he is one of the leaders in what is called interpersonal neurobiology. And what Dan does is he says, “Think of the brain,” – and he says, and he brings... he picks up his hand like this, he says, “Think of the brain like this: that your wrist leading into the palm of your hand is like a spinal cord going into the skull.” So this is the brain stem, okay? And then he says, “This thumb is your limbic system.” And this is to do with arousal and emotions and relationships. So you have got the brain stem that is really regulating your body and it is fight-flight-freeze, okay? And then you have got the thumb that’s emotions, it’s the limbic system, and he says, “These four fingers” – okay, so like this – “is the cortex, the frontal cortex.” And this is what allows us to perceive the outside world and think and reason. And the prefrontal cortex is just the kind of bottom-part of my knuckles right down here is really the source of mindfulness, attunement, empathy, compassion. And so this is the brain. And what happens when the brain is integrated, kind of holding together, is there is a flow upward of, “Oh oh, danger, got to do this, got to do that, fight-flight-freeze” and then downward there is a, “It’s okay, we have been here before, we know how to deal with this” And so this... There are fibers really that come down from the prefrontal cortex that soothe and de-activate the limbic system. So this is... There is a kind of upward flow and then a downward feedback. But what happens when we get stressed, when there is a real shooting of... of fear or anxiety or what happens very regularly is: We flip our lid, okay? And we... we go around a lot of times kind of like this, or half open, and what this means is if those times when we are stressed and in reactivity we are no longer getting the benefit of that... that insight and that perspective and that empathy that comes from the prefrontal cortex which is the most recently evolved parts of our brain. Instead there is a sub-cortical loping going on that has got a lot of, you know, there is thoughts but there is also a lot of feelings and there is a lot of reactivity. There is a growing body of research that shows that the more we practice mindfulness meditation the more we are strengthening and activating the prefrontal cortex the more integration we are able to sustain. It is very interesting that it becomes a trait, that it becomes really a quality of our awareness that we are in that remembrance, we are still getting the feedback from our mindfulness and empathy, a sense of morality, a sense of the bigger picture. So the question really is, when we have done this flipping, how do we re-integrate. And again, as I mentioned, we will start with it is, “Please just remember this is just a thought, don’t believe it!” Because when we are believing our thoughts, we are really feeling that sub-cortical looping that keeps us in a reactivity, okay? So one Buddhist teacher was asked to describe the world. And his description was, “Lost in thought.” That we spend most of our time in a virtual reality. If you pause and even just think of today – I know this works for me – if I just glance back at the day I realize how much of the day, the swathes of moments that I was living inside that incessant dialogue going on in my brain. And if we look even more closely and say, “Well, what was the atmosphere, what was the kind of flavor of the thinking?” then we kind of get a sense of the experience we are living inside of of... of ourself and the world and whether we are the endangered oppressed victim or whether we we were in some way the hero or rescuer or whatever roles we were playing, but we start getting a sense of the identity we are living in. Very, very interesting. When we start catching on to, “Oh, don’t believe your thoughts!” that means there is a little space around that virtual reality and a little more capacity to choose, “Well, are these thoughts serving healing and serving connecting with others and freedom or are they serving that sense of a separate self, a deficient self and a beleagured self?” We start getting some choice because there is a little more space. You know when I am on my way to teacher retreat and I am very aware that when people come to retreats and spend a few days practicing this, really noticing thoughts and kind of waking up out of them and saying, “Okay, it’s a thought, just a thought!” the take away at the end of the retreat is really, “I am not my thoughts! I don’t have to believe them!” And that... there is profound freedom that comes with that. So if we look at thoughts a little more closely, we start getting that they are images in our mind and sound bites, okay, they are representational, which means that if you are hungry and you think of an apple, and you might have a really good thought of an apple, it is going to be different than the actual feeling – it’s your favorite apple, for mine the Honeycrisp, I love Honeycrisp apples, you know it’s a new discovery in the last four years or whatever – the feeling of the... the hardness and the actual crunch and the spurt of sweet-sour and the smell, there is no way your idea is the same thing as that living reality. Thoughts are never reality. They are at best a kind of... a representation of that is useful, they are at best that, and they are often misguided and they often lead to unwise action. A couple of years ago, I heard a... and this took place in a Midwest High School... where some teens were doing a prank and they took three goats and they painted on the goats “Number One” and then the second “Number Two” and then “Number Four,” and they released the goats into the school and it... and the staff... the administration canceled school for the day because they couldn’t find goat number three. So thinking obviously is totally necessary for... for survival: We need to be able to anticipate trouble and avoid it, and it is also necessary for flourishing – I mean, medicine, architecture and writing a poem or building a piano, negotiating peace – it’s an essential part of spiritual practice. I... I wouldn’t have been able to compose this talk without thinking. So thinking can us towards what’s beyond words. But often, because of our tendency to have fear-thoughts, they are... they are not in that direction. And most of you know we have a what is called the negativity-bias that’s part of survival that’s very much alive and well in us, which means that we tend to remember the things that are painful and pull them together and create our beliefs out of them. In a very simple way: If you have had a hundred encounters with a dog and one time you got bit by a dog, that’s what you remember. And our tendency to lock into what’s wrong with us is so strong that some, you know, child psychologists will say that you have to have five positive mirroring kind of comments really re-enforcing a younger person if you want to have one constructive bit of, you know, feedback because we tend to latch on so much to what is wrong, which is not only for during our life this is also for after this life. This is George Carlin, he says, “You know what a ‘Frisbee-aterian’ is? It’s a belief that when you die your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.” So just to say: Fear-thoughts can be adaptive in terms of real danger, but they become mal-adaptive because they become a habit of our mind, and the more we run them the more they become the inclination of our mind because as... as neuropsychologists say, “Neurons that fire together wire together.” So the habit of fear-thinking fuels difficult emotions and difficult emotions fuel more fear-thinking, it’s a circular, but I always have been struck by Jill Bolty-Taylor who many of you have heard of, again neuropsychologist, she describes that it takes 1.5 minutes for an emotion to come and to go, 1.5 minutes, unless of course you are having thoughts that keep on fueling the emotion, which is of course what we do, that we keep on generating stress-thoughts or fear-thoughts or we keep talking about things that keep us anxious and they keep the mood going. Okay, after a tiring day a commuter settled into his seat and closes his eyes. As the train rolled out of the station a young woman sitting next to him pulled out her cell phone and started talking in a loud voice, “Hi sweetheart, it’s Sue, I am on the train... Yes, I know, it’s the 6:30 and not the 4:30 but I had a long meeting... No, Honey, not with that Kevin from the accounting office, it was with the boss...” She gets... Her voice is getting more and more anxious and defensive, “No sweetheart, you are the only one in my life. Yes, I am sure, cross my heart!” And, 15 minutes later, okay, she is still talking loudly, she is anxious, she is defensive. The man sitting next to her finally had enough. He leaned over and said into the phone, “Sue, hang up the phone and come back to bed!” So it wasn’t a good illustration but I liked it. So the more we have the habit of the thoughts and the talking that has to do what we are afraid is around the corner, what’s going to go wrong, what’s wrong with me, the more that generates the emotions that... that embody those feelings in our body and leads to the very behaviors that, bring about the responses from the world, that re-enforce our beliefs. Do you all know what I mean by that? That when we are insecure and we have insecure thoughts and we act out of them, we create responses that then deepen our sense of insecurity. So we are caught in this stimulus-reaction, kind of a cycle. And this is what I am calling this sub-cortical looping. And it leads to... The actions that come out of our fears – well either we speed up get tense and really get our body sick – We also try to control others, we try to prove ourselves a lot, we try to defend and present a lot and there is a lot of aggression – whether it’s just our minds having judgmental thoughts or, in large ways, bullying, attacking, hurting. So this is what I mean by flipping the lid. It means that we are no longer living from that what... the integrated brain which really, in an energetic way, means we are no longer inhabiting our awareness and our heart, we are not living from a more evolved awakened sense of our being, we are reacting more out of the primitive parts of our brain, they have taken over, they have hijacked, and we need to find our way home. And we can see that in our individual life how... how we act out in ways where we press the send-button on an insensitive email or say hurtful things or let lose our anger, and we see how in a larger society the sub cortical looping that leads to the repeating cycles of war and oppression, we see what happens when the primitive brain hijacks: We are coming from a very small fear-place. I read in just recently in The Post that the first five months of this year police killed more than two people a day, disproportionately African-Americans, and we can see the fear in the fear meeting each other, we can see living with this flipped lid, we are disconnected from the evolving brain and the danger that it creates. Bottom-line: When we are living out stimulus react looping, this unintegrated brain, we are believing something that’s not true, we are living in a very confined reality of a separate and limited self, a reality that has us locked into a very small sense of who we are. Okay, so there is a smoker, an older man, a lifetime smoker who was hospitalized with emphysema and after a series of small strokes his daughter urged him, as she often had, to give up smoking. And he refused and asked her to buy him some more cigarettes, he told her, “I am a smoker this life and that’s how it is!” But several days later he had another small stroke, apparently in one of the memory-areas of the brain. And then without a concern he stopped smoking for good. But it wasn’t because he decided to, he woke up one morning and forgot that he was a smoker. It’s very powerful this looping. We don’t have to keep living in it but in order to wake up from it, in order to re-member or re-connect, we need to begin to activate the prefrontal cortex, we need to begin to call on mindfulness. So the first piece – and it doesn’t have to be the first piece, by the way, this isn’t linear, you don’t have to start with, “Please may I not believe my thoughts!” you could start with, “Please may I remember love!” and, for many people, to catch the thought-patterns is often usually really a powerful way to start de-conditioning the looping, okay? Does that make sense? This isn’t a rigid linear thing but we begin by that... that practice of waking up out of our thoughts. And this is the... pretty much the central practice that we start with when we begin mindfulness training to use the breath as an anchor and notice when we are in thoughts so that rather than living inside them, you are aware that they are happening. And the point isn’t to get rid of thoughts. Just know that they are there so that you don’t mistake them for reality. Does that make sense? You have a choice. If you can say, “Oh, wait! This is a thought! It feels really real, it’s really strong, it’s creating a lot of power, I even can tell I am believing it!” but there is even a little bit of you that says, “Please let me remember I don’t have to believe it!” you are on the right track, you are opening the door of awareness letting the light come through. Rhumi says, “Be empty of worrying, think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?” You don’t have to believe your thoughts. Even remembering that possibility, even remembering that possibility is a radical shift in consciousness, okay? So we begin that, that’s the first step, “Please don’t believe your thoughts! And... And by the way I like the phrase: They are real but they are not true, okay? The thoughts are real but they are not truth. So we do that. And that begins to quiet a little bit of the sub-cortical looping because there is... we are not as identified we are not charging the looping quite as much. Then we take the next step which is this invitation to deepen presence, “Please may I pause, may I contact what’s right here!” And you can sense that for yourself just as you are listening right now that if you even invite yourself, “Please!” – really sincere – “Please may I pause, may I pause and really arrive in presence, connect with my senses!” There is a tremendous amount of mindfulness research that shows that as we begin to step out of thoughts and become more awake and aware in our senses it de-activates the limbic system and activates the prefrontal cortex. I love the... John Gotman did a piece of research I find fascinating. He is a very well-known couple’s therapist and researcher. And he did a... In his experiment he had a couple that was all hooked up to different physiological gauges and he would take a video of them discussing difficult issues, and he would wait till their pulses were over 100 beats per minute, and then he would interrupt their argument and he would say something like, you know, “Our Equipment is having trouble. Could you just... Just need you to wait for a little bit!” And he would send them into different... different spaces, they could just sit down, read a magazine, whatever, 15 minutes later he would have them begin again, and what he found is 15 minutes they were no longer in high arousal – in other words they were no longer doing the sub-cortical looping – and once out of the high arousal – more access, remember, to the prefrontal cortex – they were like entirely different people. They could begin to find their common ground and come to some more resolution. Now what is interesting for meditators is that when we pause we are not just reading a magazine, we are actually on purpose noticing what is going on in the present moment naming it some – just naming and noticing and opening to it – which means we don’t have to wait 15 minutes to have that coming back together of the brain, re-connecting with empathy, and with perspective, because we are on purpose coming into presence. Now the most challenging part, though, of when we say, “Please may I pause and come into presence!” is what we contact is all the arousal, the unpleasant, uncomfortable stuff that’s going on in our body because of that looping, that activation, the very stuff we we have mastered over a lifetime to not hang out with, right? We have been... We spend decades learning how to move away from unpleasantness. So this simple invitation, “Please may I pause and be with what is right here!” is actually like saying, “Please may I pause and get myself ripped up and squeezed and squished and achy and sore” and feeling all this like conundrum going on inside us. . It is not easy. It is not easy to learn to stay. Which leads us to the third invitation, “Please may I remember love!” Because if we regard the situation, the context of the stimulus and the reaction, what’s going on inside us, with a quality of tenderness, all of a sudden we find we can stay. There is just enough space, softness, kindness, so we can hang out with what’s there because we are not so inside it and caught in it as a victim rather when in some way there is a remembrance of love the what we are opens and we become a bigger space of presence. I am going to give some examples in a little bit. But just to say that when I am talking about remembering love there are countless pathways and each of us... This is an experiment for each of us. I hear so many spiritual paths prescribing a particular way to open the heart or whatever. Truly you have to kind of customize and and try out things. But they are kind of genres, different kind of broad pathways. And one pathway of remembering love is to simply have the intention to offer love or care inwardly. And it could be through words or an image or... I often put my hand on my heart. And even having the intention and going through the motions works. Why does it work? Because deep, deep down the who we are is loving-presence. And by going through the motions we begin to call that forth, we begin to reconnect with more of the truth of who we are. Said again in terms of this brain analogy: We begin to activate this whole neural net in the prefrontal cortex that has to do with compassion and empathy. So one pathway to remembering love is to offering love inward. And another pathway is when we say, “Please remember love!” is to call on the love that we know is in the universe and ask to be held by it. Just the way a young child, we know when a young child is really upset and their... their limbic system is hijacked and going wild, and the mother’s hug brings them online again, it actually helps them self-regulate. Well, when we imagine feeling hugged, that imagining – and this has been shown in MRIs – this imagining does the same thing, it begins to bring us back into that integrated state. So just to call on love. I want to mention that one of my inspirations, the Hawaiian healer Dr. Hugh Lynn, is one of... what has been described as his... He describes his practice whether he is responding to somebody else’s stuck place or his own he just sends messages, his most basic phrases are like , “I am sorry, and I love you.” And so I found for many people a lot of time when I am teaching workshops just to practice what phrase works for you. Can you put your hand on your heart? Well, there is a reason that works: And when we put our hand on our heart it actual warmth that neuronal centre right here in the heart-area actually calms down the sympathetic nervous system; plus, in a whole other way, you know, our relationship with ourself is at best it is harsh or distant or neglecting, when we relate to ourselves kind of like others related to us in our early life and, for many, real tenderness, a really understanding presence, an intimate presence, wasn’t part of it. So what we are doing when we put our hand on our heart is we are actually cultivating a new relationship with our inner life. So story for you: one... one example of somebody that has used these three invitations: And this is a woman who was at that sandwich-time of life where, her, she was... she had a son in 8th grade who was, you know, having a hard time in his own ways and her father was in a nursing home and the nursing home was about an hour away so she would go for a visit once a week. And he had dementia and would repeat himself a lot. But clearly the big message that he gave her was, “Please stay. Please hang out. Please come more often.” And it wasn’t resentful, it was just he really liked having her around. But her inner – you know, this is a stimulus – her inner reaction was to feel tight and resentful, feeling a need to justify herself because she felt she was failing. It triggered her sense of “not enough”; that she was failing her son, she wasn’t showing up enough for her son, she was failing her father, failing on all fronts. And then she was also living with the sense that she would be regret... how incredibly regretful she would be if he died and she was... this was their last years together, whatever. So this is what she brought her practice to, okay? The stimulus again was, you know, her father saying, “Oh I wish you would be around more!” her son acting out in ways and her then going into that looping of, “What’s wrong with me?” and also blaming them in different ways and then the feelings of fear and shame and so on. So her practice was first to notice the thoughts, “I am a bad daughter, I am a bad mother” and just whisper, “Please don’t believe this!” Just that, “Please don’t believe this!” And then she would come into her body, she would say: “Please just come in touch what’s right here in this body!” and she would feel what was there, and she would feel the fear and kind of shame and then, “Please may I be kind!” put her hand on her heart and she used those... those phrases I just mentioned, “I am sorry” – I am sorry meaning: I am sorry those painful feelings are here – “and I love you!” So after one visit with her father she sat in a parking lot and she was practicing this and saying, you know, kind of trying... trying not to believe the thoughts and saying “yes” and being kind towards all the tightness and fear and really feeling the waves of tears and grief and realized that underneath it all she just loved her son and she loved her father and she didn’t want to let them down; but more than that she just wanted to trust the loving. Just trust the loving. In a way that was her realization. You know, it’s like: Don’t believe the thoughts, come into a wise relationship with yourself and then trust the loving, trust who we are. And that was the gift of the three invitations was that... and she had, by the way, many rounds with any of these practices of presence... It’s like you have neuronal pathways that are deeply grooved of... of how we are, these habits, takes a lot of rounds to de-condition, and every time some part of us says, “Please don’t believe this thought! Please come into presence! Please be kind!” every round there is a loosening of the old identity, every round there is a little more space, a little more homecoming to the awareness and heart that is really our essence, to that spirit, every round. So for her, after some rounds, she started noticing more and more. She would be with her father and when he would say something like, “Oh I wish you would be coming more!” or whatever, rather than trying to justify herself she would just feel a wave of, “Oh he loves me! I love him!” It was okay. The imperfectness was okay. And he would be repeating what he repeated, he would look at this tree out the window and say, “Isn’t that beautiful tree?” And she could just relax and really go, “Yeah, that’s really a beautiful tree!” because she wasn’t wound up in that looping that we have been talking about, a stimulus reaction, she was responding, not reacting, to the situation. So we have many versions of how we have a stimulus reaction-pattern, partial flip, that keeps getting repeated. And many of the triggers are external like for this woman it was something her father would say or someone would do, could be the criticism of a boss or team that’s left the kitchen messy or the partner that’s driving too fast or a person that’s hurt you in the way they have behaved. But we are also triggered by inner states of physical discomfort that we sometimes don’t realize. I just wanted to name that too because often we are in a reactivity and we don’t realize that it is coming from a very physical state of our body. And I discovered this big time about a decade or so ago. I have talked a lot about sickness. One element of it was chronic fatigue, and that was a very particular element that when I didn’t recognize, “Oh this is the stimulus!” I could be off on a cycle of reactivity for quite a while. And what would happen, a sort of catching on to the looping, as I would be really, really tired and then my thoughts would become very, very grim and there would... then this complaining voice would kick in, and I would have pretty much oppressed beleaguered persona that was complaining about everything and... and the way it would jump into my attention is I started seeing the complaints be really petty stuff with Jonathan, my husband. And that was my signal. And that became my signal. Like, whenever I would start complaining about him in my mind - and I am talking about really petty, you know, so he really wasn’t anything wrong I promise - I would just say, “Please don’t believe this! Don’t believe these thoughts! Please be here! And please be kind!” And I did it so much during that period because I had so much chronic fatigue and because the complainer got so whiny and so persistent, I got a huge amount of practice, and it really got... it really got installed , I mean, so that... that... And I still get... I get phases of like many people of fatigue that... that lasts in a way that all of a sudden I catch, “Oh okay. So it’s this kind of thought. This kind of judgy or oppressed or whatever.” and there is... Mostly I can say that it is installed, there is a lot less lag-time between having the complainer come up and this, “Oh yeah, that! Just don’t believe it” And I don’t even go through the steps so much, there is like a... a much more quick sense of relaxing open into a friendly presence, a kind of witnessing that’s kind, more space, more ease. So now thus far I have been talking about this in terms of a solo-practice. Okay, we are in our stimulus-reaction, looping, and here is how we invite ourselves into not believing and being present and being kind. But I think it is important to say that we are waking up together and we invite each other into it. When we are really really... being in loving relationship with each other we help each other to remember to not believe and to come back and to be kind. And it’s really important because we are forgetting... the spiritual path is all forgetting and remembering. And even the idea that we are supposed to do it on our own is another role in identity that we are hooked to. It is some glorious-hero-spiritual identity-thing. We are meant to wake up together. So it is in that spirit that I want to share a story that I have always loved. And it is written in first person. “When I was a freshman in high school I saw a kid from my class was walking home from school, his name was Kyle, he looked like he was carrying all his books. I thought to myself, ‘Why would anyone bring all his books home on a Friday! He must be a real nerd. I had quite a weekend planned: football, football game, parties etc. ... So I shrugged my shoulders and went on. As I was walking I saw a bunch of kids running towards him. They ran at him knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt. His glasses... glasses went flying and I saw them land in the grass about ten feet from him. He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness in his eyes and my heart went out to him. So I jogged over to him and as he crawled around looking for his glasses I saw a tear. As I handed him the glasses, I said, ‘Those guys are jerks. They really should get lives.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Hey, thanks!’ and there was this big smile on his face which was one of those smiles that showed real gratitude. I helped him pick up his books and asked him where he lived. As it turned out he lived near me. So I asked him why I had never seen him before. He had gone to private school and was now transferred over. I would have never hung out with a private school kid before so we talked all the way home and I carried some of his books. Turned out to be a really cool kid. I asked him if he wanted to play a little football with my friends and he said yes. We hung out all weekend; and the more I got to know Kyle the more I liked him and my friends thought the same. Monday morning came and there was Kyle with that huge stack of books again. I stopped and said, “Boy you are going to build some muscles with this pile of books every day!’ He just laughed and handed me half the books. Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends. When we were seniors, we began to think about college. Kyle decided on George Town, I was going to Duke. I knew that we would always be friends, that the miles would never be a problem. He was going to be a doctor, I was going for business on a football scholarship. Kyle was valedictorian of our class. I teased him all the time about being a nerd. He had to prepare a speech for graduation. I was so glad it wasn’t me having to get up there and speak. Graduation day, I saw Kyle, and he looked great, he was one of those guys who had really found himself during high school. He felt that I would not actually look good in glasses .He had more dates than I had and all the girls loved him. Boy sometimes I was jealous and today was one of those days. I could see he was nervous about his speech, so I smacked him on the back and said, “Hey big guy, you’ll be great!’ He looked at me with one of those looks, the really grateful one, and smiled. As he started his speech he cleared his throat and began: ‘Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through those tough years – your parents, your sisters, your siblings, maybe a coach – but mostly your friends. I am here to tell you that being a friend of someone is the best gift you can give them. And I am going to tell you a story.’ I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the story of the first day we met. He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked about how he had cleaned out his lockers so that his mom wouldn’t have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. ‘Thankfully I was saved. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable.’ I heard the gasp go through the crowd as this well-loved boy told us all about his weakest moment. I saw his mom and dad looking at me and smiling this same grateful smile. Not until that moment did I realize its depth. Never under-estimate the power of your caring. With one small gesture you can change a person’s life.” We are really not in it alone. And sometimes when we are not actively involved with others it is really important just to bring them to mind to remind us of caring and connection. The opening quote, I want to read it again as we begin to close this reflection, we’ll do some reflecting together: “The thought becomes the word. The word manifests as the deed. The deed develops into the habit. The habit hardens into character. Character gives birth to destiny. So watch your thoughts with care and let them spring from love born out of respect for all beings.” To the degree that we suffer we are believing thoughts that are not true and we are caught in some kind of reactive looping that is keeping us identified with something that is smaller than the truth of who we are. So we all need ways to remember. I have been talking about remembering with each other. We all need practices of... of presence. I remember when I first heard Mahatma Ghandi’s story, he said that... “I take off a day each week to meditate so that I’ll be then all my actions will come from the wisest part of my being, my higher self.” We need to train ourselves. We need the time to pause and to learn not to believe our thoughts, to pause and to come into presence, to pause and be kind, so that we can be living, inhabiting, the highest part of our being. And what happens when we train that way, with each other and alone, is that we more and more... it’s again the word trait... rather than it being something like, “Okay, I am in a switch from reactivity, responding– more and more is that we are expressing from our spirit. It’s almost like we have de-conditioned the interference and that flow of light and love comes through in a very natural way, it’s just spontaneous. There is a triggering and then there is a spontaneous remembrance and then a flow through. Short story of a great Argentino golfer who once won a tournament and after receiving a cheque and smiling for the cameras he prepared to leave. And he was relatively new at this so he walked alone into the parking lot. And he was approached by a young woman who congratulated him and then told him that her son was seriously ill and near death. She didn’t know if she could pay for the doctor and hospital expenses. And he who was known as a gentleman was so touched by her story he took the pen and endorsed the day’s winning story and pressed in her hand and said, “Make some good days for the baby.” Couple of weeks later, he sat in another country club one of the officials came over and said: “Some of the boys in the parking lot at that last tournament told us what happened with that young woman you met.” He nodded. “Well,” said the official, “I have news for you. She is a phony. She has no sick baby. She has no children at all. She has fleeced you, my friend.” “You mean there is no baby who is dying?” said Roberto. “That’s right,” said the official. “Why that’s the best news I have heard all week!” It just becomes who we are, becomes who we are, we... it’s really that we have realized who we really are. So we close together in a simple way just taking some moments, as we have been describing, to pause together. And you might bring to mind some situation where you get triggered and I probably encourage you not to bring one where you get triggered in a very huge or traumatic way but somewhat triggered, medium-triggered, where you get irritated or you get judgmental, maybe hurt or defensive... in some way reactive. It could be a situation with another person or if it is something to do with your health or traffic, it doesn’t matter, whatever it is, whatever triggers you. Put yourself into this situation enough so you can get a taste of it right now. This is just to give you a taste, and then you can practice as you go. But when it is going on, what are the thoughts that are going on in your mind? What are you believing? What are you believing about other people or yourself? What are you telling yourself about the world? And you might explore just saying to yourself something like, “Please don’t believe your thoughts! You don’t have to believe these beliefs! They are real but not true.” And then invite yourself into presence, say, you know, “Please just come right here!” and feel what is going on in your body, your heart, maybe your throat or your belly, so just, “Please may I just contact and connect with a kind of an intimate presence of what is right here!” You might breathe with it. And the third invitation, “Please may I relate with kindness! May I remember love” And for now you may want to just put that gesture of lightly touching the heart and sense if there is any message that would most bring healing, wisdom, comfort, more truth to your own being. And in this responding instead of reacting just sense your own experience right now of presence. The quality of heart and awareness that’s right here. Sensing the possibility of homecoming to a more full expression of your being; the light, the spirit, the heart, the truth that’s really your essence. May we each discover this pathway of homecoming in a way that really allows us to trust our natural being. And may we live our days from this presence, from this loving. Namaste and thank you.
Info
Channel: Tara Brach
Views: 1,017,473
Rating: 4.8381515 out of 5
Keywords: Tara Brach, meditation, mindfulness, dharmarain108108108108, respond not react, fear, stress, reactivity, healing, awakening, natural wisdom, empathy, deconditioning
Id: ymPF0q7U5oM
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 53min 33sec (3213 seconds)
Published: Sat Sep 19 2015
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