"Make Love of Your Self Perfect”, with Tara Brach

[Music] welcome back friends it's a pleasure to be with you and i wanted to start by honoring you just really the quality of effort and earnestness and and dedication to practice i feel like we're all kind of helping each other along and the atmosphere is just it's sweet and beautiful so so i wanted to start with a quote this is uh thomas merton who once said of what a veil is it if we can travel to the moon if we cannot cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves this is the most important of all journeys and without it all the rest are useless i'm starting with this because it feels like that's what we're doing um that we gather here and in a sense we're crossing the abyss there's so much conditioning to cut us off from ourselves and cut us off from each other and we're in this practice that is really bringing an intimacy with the life that's here and you could feel that as jonathan spoke yesterday this is such a powerful talk on meeting difficulty all those challenging weather systems befriending you know with the wings of mindfulness and kindness and then the beautiful meta meditations yesterday with devin and then just now with with law that really keep inviting us into this heart space into really embracing ourselves and naturally finding how it extends outward so i had a yoga teacher long long long time ago and she taught this in slightly a different way than we're doing here she and these are the instructions she'd give she'd say put your left arm over your right and hug yourself and then she said put your right arm over your left and hug your evil twin i had no idea what was coming i was following the instructions but then i realized why not you know just embrace all parts of ourselves whatever we consider themselves whatever we consider them to be and yet we know that when the difficult weather comes along and you can kind of track how it's been these last days it's not our first response it just isn't you know our first response is to either ignore it or think it's in the way of our of the real meditation i try to get rid of it and the most painful is really judging ourselves for it this shouldn't be happening this is a sign of something bad about me it's my fault i was thinking of just today my last group of the morning we had all of us had trouble getting in the room because the link didn't work but each of us were just sharing on how quickly our minds defaulted into this is about me it's my failure you know it's just what happens and many of you are probably familiar with the buddha talking about this in terms of getting shot by two arrows and i find it so useful to remember this because the first arrow is the painful emotion let's say anxiety comes up you know something's going wrong i'm gonna miss something and then we shoot a second arrow because we're disliking our insecure anxious failing self so we're blaming ourselves for the experience and here's the thing when we're doing a lot of second arrowing in other words when it's a habit of judging ourselves we're creating an abyss that really locks us in suffering it solidifies our identity as a bad self that that undercurrent that nags away something's wrong with me and the reality is that any degree of self aversion any self aversion in the moment is creating an abyss that distances us from others and it actually obscures reality it obscures reality so the focus of this talk is as you might be detecting i think of it as loving ourself into healing and it's a really continuation of what you've been exploring with the different teachers thus far loving ourselves into healing into freedom and i often think you know if if this is the last talk i was ever going to give you know what would i talk about and i would talk about love i talk about love because in the deepest way it's what we are and it's what we're coming home to you might consider it loving awareness there's all these different words so i find it helpful to consider if i just think kind of more in terms of the lifespan that what you as an infant or young child most needed and what i needed and what we all need it really came down to it is to feel understood like others were getting us they understood us and that what was seen was loved that were loved and there's a evolutionary psychologist kozalino who says it's not the survival of the fittest it's the survival of the nurtured and so this is what we're practicing really um learning to offer to our inner experience this nurturing and when i wrote radical acceptance i termed it as spiritual re-parenting because it's really when you think of what is meditation doing we're recognizing what's arising we're coming to understand here's what the experience is and we're holding it with kindness so this is what actually undoes the identity of bad self this over and over again seeing what's here and relating with kindness it's what reconnects us with our basic goodness so the starting place is really becoming aware of the thoughts and feelings of bad self sometimes they're subtle sometimes they're really overt and um well maybe for a moment if you're not already on gallery view switch to gallery view if you don't mind okay here so the the question i have really is how many of you feel like you're aware of judging yourself too much and really the pain it causes in your life and and you can do it by hand raise your arm or else just putting it up and take a moment just to look at the kind of screen through and it may not be everybody but we're getting it that there's just a lot of us that know how deep a habit this is for us so thank you um whenever i do stuff like this please know it's really optional and i'm sorry i didn't say that decades ago again this is rad when i when i um wrote radical acceptance i i describe this as a trance of unworthiness because most of us are aware that we are judging a lot and it causes pain but as we move through the day we're not conscious of how many moments there's this undercurrent of something's wrong that i'm falling short in some way and how it impacts everything so that when we're with other people on some level we're monitoring to see how they're responding to us because we're afraid of being judged and rejected i remember doing a course on fear and i had people get into small groups and write on a piece of paper their greatest fears and then we shuffled them around and read them out most of the fears had to do with the fear of others judgment this trance of unworthiness affects how we approach work because we're so anxious about mistakes that we can't be as creative as we want to be it it affects meditation we so often feel like we're falling short it's really important to notice how much the trance of unworthiness totally bleeds into the spiritual path this idea of how we should be speaking acting feeling i mean on some level we're always monitoring ourselves and seeing if we're meeting a standard that's our perfectionistic standard and there can often be a background sinking feeling of falling short i saw a cartoon with a a woman she was having kind of an entry meeting with god in the afterlife and he's shaking his head and saying nope that's not a sin not that one either no no that's not a sin because my goodness you must have worried yourself to death and i liked it because i'm so i'm interested in the word worry the old english for worry is strangle and when we're judging ourself when we have that anxiety about imperfection it's just this strangling and so many people report like i want to inhabit my full vibrancy and yet as long as there's that patterning of judging it's very hard to feel fully alive so people often ask me you know why do so many of us struggle with this when i was doing book tour for radical acceptance that was the biggest question how come so many of us are they didn't put it this way but going around strangling ourselves you know and our sense of value and our sense of belonging and they go together they go together um is shaped by our caregivers and our society you know how well do others see us like really see who we are mirror who we are and how unconditionally do they love us you know and it's it's the caregivers and society one man wrote about it the kind of messaging growing up in his particular religious community he said they taught me two things one is that god loves you and you're going to burn in hell and the other is that sex is the most awful filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love no so so maybe we didn't receive this much of a mixed message but each of us were given messages about how others viewed us including how we should be different where we're falling short maybe to pause right here and invite you to reflect for a moment you can just explore this for yourself if let your attention go inward if it helps to have your eyes down cast or closed go ahead and imagine yourself at around 8 years old and you're in a room that you might have commonly been in with whoever were your primary caregivers so just imagine that might be a dining room might be in a tv room kitchen and they're looking at you just notice face eyes expression i'm sensing how they're viewing you what they're focused on about you and you might just wonder what brings approval or love from them what about me what about me brings disapproval and our distance or rejection what's the degree of belonging that you feel of truly being understood and loved you can continue to reflect if you want to journal at any point to just write something down because we're going to do a few reflections that really have to do with waking up out of the prison really of a small self that in some way might be falling short so many of us had parents or caregivers who do to their own fears their own beliefs wounds their self-focus their trauma their generational trauma they weren't able to see and understand us to love us unconditionally and some neglected and abused us it's all to varying degrees but the upshot is many of us got the message that there's something wrong with us that we need to change to be okay and here's what's important the caregivers are shaped by society so even when they're more awake than the society our society has great power to turn us against ourselves i'd like to read you something this is written by a mom it was in the sun magazine am i gorgeous my child asks drawing the word out like pulled taffy yes i say you are pink and teal dress is probably made of highly flammable materials some chemists approximation of satin pudgy fingers decorated with pink polish trace the sequins on the bodice i love this a giant pair of bubblegum pink wings flaps slowly little feet dance and sparkly red slippers i'm just like a real princess yes i say you are thick blonde hair blue eyes rosy cheeks flawless skin this child is the american epitome of beauty this child my son he's four years old and prefers to wear dresses maybe it is a phase maybe not even as i wonder how i produce such an angelic looking creature i wish he would put on some pants and go back to playing with toy tractors not because it matters to me it doesn't but because i'm already hearing in my head the name calling he will face in kindergarten many adults already seem a bit disturbed by the dresses strangers utter awkward apologies when they realize she's not female this culture wants little boys to dream only of baseball trucks and trains this culture has no room for little boys who want to be gorgeous he picks up a parasol a neighbor gave him and opens it jauntly over his shoulder am i beautiful he asks i sweep him into my arms and plan to kiss on his cheek always so what happens in this society when it doesn't have room for us you know our societies are caste systems the most notably racial caste systems also demean and violate us because of gender identity sexual orientation religion and on and on what happens when the daily message is you're inferior you don't belong something's wrong with you and well society actively targets and violates some it divides all of us from each other in other words it prevents all of us from true belonging so i'm speaking this way because the need for belonging is in our human dna it's a fundamental survival need it's essential for our continued evolving and when belonging is severed and that's what we're talking about it brings up huge fear huge insecurity and then with that all these behaviors because when we feel so insecure severed belonging leads us to behaviors to self-soothe to find some ease to protect and and so that's over consuming medicating you know using anger defensiveness one woman with a lifelong eating disorder had been terribly emotionally abused by her mother really continuously demeaned shamed and she describes about her eating disorder the kind of beginning she describes a bedtime ritual and i want to read this to you she says from the age of five or six until i was well into my teens whenever i had trouble sleeping i would slip out from under my covers and steal into the kitchen for a bit of bread or cheese which i would carry back to bed with me there i'd pretend my hands belonged to someone else a comforting reassuring being without a name an angel perhaps the right hand would feed me little bits of cheese or bread as the left hand stroked my cheeks and hair my eyes closed i could whisper softly to myself they're there go to sleep you're safe now everything will be all right i love you the self-soothing was a primitive way of her loving herself and yet it became the enemy it fed into self-hatred and i i bring up this example to you all because it's the first uh first way we can start controlling things is with food so so many hate themselves for food and for bodies that they feel are the wrong size and it was like our it's our primitive nervous system trying to feel better and this happens in many many ways so many of the ways that we try to feel better we hate ourselves for and so part of waking up from the trance of unworthiness this is what's important is to recognize that what we're hating is our best effort at loving ourselves it happened in an early time and we locked in but we need to be able to see that what seems most destructive on some level is an effort to cope so what happens is instead of seeing that we have a lot of self-distrust a lot of self-aversion and it shows up daily you know continuously anxious about what others think and having these standards i've been talking about and feeling like we're making mistakes or falling short you know i can see it in myself that that kind of chronic monitoring i can if i paused and slowed down right now as i'm speaking there is some part of me that's saying well how am i doing now you know am i authentic am i here am i embodied are we in a resonance field you know it's like there is that monitoring and so often there's a sense of oh not fully here um a sinking feeling it helps to name that out loud i'm just saying right now on the spot when i can name out loud that the monitoring is going on then i'm not so identified with it you know what i mean so this is part of trance that we get divided against ourselves and um it can come up as fear as doubt version sometimes subtle sometimes dramatic either way what happens is it's like clouds that obscure the sun we can't see who we are so again pause to reflect take a moment let your attention turn inward and i'd like to invite you to just scan and sense how you've been relating to yourself during this retreat scan and notice anywhere you might have been holding on to the judgment of i should be different doing it differently feeling different having different kinds of thoughts less thoughts maybe there's a judgment about how you've been in relationship with those in your where you're living if there's others around maybe you had a teacher's meeting and you didn't feel like you really expressed who you were is there judgment for sleepiness for ways you've been eating or for maybe something you carried into retreat with you something that's hard to forgive you carried in with you real gentle real gentle it can bring up a lot of sadness a lot of pain sometimes despair just a sense how thick it is we're in it together sense yourself witnessing yeah breathe breathe and witness just naming it okay judging self-aversion this is the trance and with that you might just sense your deep intention towards spiritual reparenting really it's towards trusting your basic goodness you know the most basic truths are the ones we regularly forget and one of those truths is if our hearts are closed against ourselves that closed heart is not going to be able to really love life we need to cross the abyss there's a a teaching from one of my teachers srinar sargadatta he's a non-dual indian master no longer alive and i want to read it to you and then unpack it a little here's what he says all you need is already within you only you must approach yourself with reverence and love self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself all i plead with you is this make love of yourself perfect deny yourself nothing give yourself infinity in eternity and discover you do not need them you are beyond all i plead with you is this make love of yourself perfect so the words your flight from pain and search for pleasure is love you bear for yourself and this is what we're looking at before it says that the grasping the aversion like that woman's eating disorder are coming from love that this organism is trying to live fully it's misguided love it's coming from an illusion of separation it's what i sometimes call a false refuge that causes suffering but it's coming from love so here we are the the plea is this make love of yourself perfect so what is your many people ask this they say well you know here we are and buddhism says there's no self why are we trying to love this self so let's say you're angry you're not loving the narrative self in other words the story of a person who's righteous or who just lashed out what you're doing is you're loving the life in this moment that's expressing through you whether it's the heat of anger or the tightness of the heart so you're loving the aliveness that's expressing in the moment not the story of a self i hope that's helpful to you what does it mean to say make love perfect and that is really talking about dedication that when we realize what the trance of unworthiness does that it keeps us in a prison of bad self then it becomes the center of our path a deep deep commitment to love ourself into healing then he says give yourself infinity in eternity and discover you do not need them you are beyond that if you love yourself without holding back true unconditional love letting it in it dissolves that sense of a limited separate self it reveals the reality which is really a boundless field of tenderness of wakefulness it reveals our wholeness so it takes intentionality this is one of the main things i really want to convey that the trance is sticky it's persistent and so what i'd like to do is is look at um look at really the the challenges that we run into when we're trying to make love of ourself perfect the challenges people run into with the meta practice or self-compassion or the end of rain the nurturing of rain and often i'll ask people what stops you and i'm asking you can census for yourself right now what stops you from accepting yourself just as you are you know what stops you from bringing kindness to the places you've been reacting to what stops you for many and i'll share what i hear often is it's the fear that if i don't judge myself i'll never be the person i want to be in fact i'll get worse you know let me just check with you how many can relate to that if i stop judging i'll never improve can i just see by hands yeah i mean i see that in myself it's what dry it keeps driving the effort yeah so the truth is i have never seen someone judge themselves into spiritual transformation into who they want to be and i've never found someone who dedicated to true self-kindness not find increasing freedom never seen that so let's let's let's look more closely because you have to the only way you'll discover it is if you do it at the challenges and the most regular challenge uh you know we we offer meta we we invite you to really experiment and meta is not just i mean there's one classical form where you're repeating several phrases over and over but as you've been sensing with uh devon and with law there's many different facets you can experiment with and one is touch you can touch your hands on your heart or a hug images using imagery you can uh practice any words you want you can imagine offering yourself love or you can invoke a love or trusted being it could be a non-human being it could be your ancestors it could be anybody any other source but many people when they start experimenting still feel blocked and they feel in some way hypocritical or fake or they're going through the motions are even worse that just the practice of loving kindness they actually bring up more of a sense of unworthiness and i won't do a hand raise on this but i know how how common that is that the very idea of offering love to ourselves we feel incredibly undeserving of it one friend of mine a fellow dharma teacher and and buddy shawna shapiro describes her pathway to meta she was going through a difficult divorce and she would wake up each morning in this kind of pit of shame and failure and her meditation teacher said well how about saying to yourself each morning i love you shauna just you know i love you shauna and shauna said no way you know that it's too far from what i'm feeling and then the meditation teacher said well how about instead just put your hand in your heart and say good morning shauna she said i could probably do that so she practiced really regularly and a few months later teacher said okay you're ready to graduate to the advanced practice now it's you know good morning i love you shauna she did it the next morning she didn't it wasn't terrible she didn't feel any love but she just did it and she kept it up and one morning she put her hand on her heart and did it and she felt her grandmother and her grandmother's grandmother and the whole lineage of of women her own mother just surrounding her and infusing her with loving and i share this because you don't have to feel it all very strongly but what you do need to do is just plain practice go through the motions and do it regularly because our neuro you know our neural pathways actually gradually wake up the more we run the same experience through and what you practice grows stronger that's what it comes down to and you can be gradual you can feel a vulnerable part of you and just send the message i'm here i'm listening you don't have to start with love you can just or you can go i care about the suffering or you can just put your hand on your heart and breathe experiment at what minimally is the entry but here's why it works because if your intention is to bring love to the life that's here if that's your intention that intention is coming from love and it helps open the door that's why going through the motions help all you need is somewhere deep down to want to bring more love to your own being okay so that's the first piece is practice makes whatever you practice gets stronger and as long as there's a sincere intent it's okay to go through the motions and keep experimenting how you do it now i want to name a second challenge and that is that whether we're offering care to ourself or we're receiving it from a source we have in mind the inner place of vulnerability can have trouble letting in love letting in love and i remember about 12 years ago harval hendrix and helen hunt some of you know harvard hendricks marriage therapist best selling author and so on on relationship well they were going you know they trained couples and so on their relationship was crumbling and it turned out that harvell could not believe that helen loved him he couldn't let in love you know often i i do a reflection i'll just say you know bring to mind someone who loves you and what's it like to feel their love and i'll ask a person so what are you noticing and often they can't answer because it's it's conceptual it's in their mind but it's not embodied and many of us especially if there's an abyss if we feel cut off very hard to let in let's let's explore for a moment together it's always best to anchor these things in uh lived experience okay so again let your attention go inward and bring to mind someone you know who loves you who cares about you and if it's not a living person that's fine and if it's a spiritual figure and you have some trust in that that's fine but take a moment to let the being be close in you might see in their eyes the appreciation that's there the love what's it like to let in love check your body check your heart what does it feel like are you aware of some warmth and some openness of expansion or spaciousness or if you're finding that no you don't feel anything to let this be a valuable moment of just inquiry what stops me and you might ask the whatever the armoring is whatever it feels like is being blocked what what stops you from letting it in just as if you're addressing this to some some bit of armoring what's stopping you from letting it in is it that you don't believe it's possible that they really don't know who you are whether you just don't deserve it again you can keep reflecting feel free to journal if if it's helpful to you the more severed belonging in other words the more insecure early attachments the more trauma from caregivers or society the more difficult it is to let in the more armoring you know i i a couple of weeks ago was exploring this during my uh saturday satsang and uh one of the men that i was working with he was he's a gay young man bullied in elementary school and you know deep sense of something's wrong with me and perhaps it was intensified he had intersecting identities he was gay and latino no self-compassion and when sometimes when there's not a capacity for self-compassion for offering it to ourselves they'll say well who else do you trust loves you and he said my younger sister absolutely my mother and then when we explored that he couldn't let in their love and you know the the block was you know i don't deserve there's something really wrong and when i asked him what does it feel like to be blocked that you can't let in love he had a real wave of sorrow and i said you know okay so what what's there he goes there's this longing and i said well go ahead give let the longing speak and his prayer was please may i let in love and so i just had him reflect on it please may i let in love over and over and when he opened his eyes his eyes were moist but i could feel the softening and that's what he named he was he said he felt serenity that he that there was he's on this pathway of opening so i'm i'm sharing this with you because we all get stuck in sometimes giving out love sometimes letting it in you know our hearts have been wounded there's armoring but what we can do is feel our prayer feel our prayer to let in and again just as i mentioned before the source of our prayer is our awake heart it's really love calling us home when we're praying so when we inhabit that prayer when i s if i in this moment say please please may i let in love i've become more porous there's a certain kind of dissolving of the armoring john o'donoghue said it so well he said prayer is the bridge between longing and belonging starts allowing us to dissolve so this letting in love practice is really really a powerful necessary part of loving ourselves into healing and in the moments that you feel you are letting in some get familiar with it remember jonathan's word familiar get to know it what's it like when you're really letting in love and you start strategically where your least offended your dog a child for me the natural world i i know often i'll when i go to retreats let's say at the forest refuge or the insight meditation society in barrie massachusetts there's fantastic mature woods there and when i'm feeling vulnerable and stirred up i'll often go out into those woods and sometimes lean against a tree and i'll feel this sense of like the great mothers living through that tree and feel really loved and held and protected and i can kind of cry and feel held by that tree one friend here brought into our group the the power of the word the hug of gravity you can kind of sense this natural force of gravity shows us our belonging to this larger body of ours this earth so maybe you can let in love by feeling that hug of gravity start where it's easiest and then you can graduate to people as you go there's a a line from another teacher punjaji it's that love is always loving you and the more you practice letting in love and it doesn't matter the source you'll start being able to let in the love of this world this the universal loving awareness just will be you'll have it washed through more and more and sense that when you're feeling separate and small that you can have some more access to that sense that love is always loving you okay the last approach i want to look at with you we've talked about ways to just go ahead and practice because it'll get stronger experiment really experiment use your hand use different words see what works letting in love the last approach i want to mention to really waking up our hearts is opening directly to the suffering of not belonging to the fear and grief and shame and pain of not belonging and this is where we often will weave together the mindfulness and compassion of rain and and rain is not some special technique it's really the very core techniques of this path it's mindfulness and compassion in a in a weave that makes it easy to follow now in opening directly to the suffering of not belonging the big remembrance is that especially if there's trauma because not belonging feeling separate is what trauma is if it feels like too much we spend more time directly nurturing we don't go right into where it's most painful first we need to create the kind of warmth and space that comes from the heart practices and then when we're ready we can open to the vulnerability and that vulnerability can become a portal to true belonging so i just want to say that again that if you get any signal of this is too much i'm going to be overwhelmed go back to what we call resourcing which means grounding yourself feeling the hug of gravity doing the the slow breathing imagining love pouring into you something that helps you feel safe and safe is the key word and more connected i want to give you an example of this that came from a one woman who gave me permission to share this a woman of color on the retreat who was describing last year the horror the trauma of the murder of george floyd and how when the video came out couldn't go near i mean just the horror of it and yet now this year she's been listening to every part of the chauvin trial he's the one that lynched george floyd every testimony something inside her told her to go through this process of listening every day watching every day she said she owed it to she feels she owes it to george floyd to bear witness and here's what is really i'm just so striking that as the days passed those first days of the trial last week she started realizing wow i can witness and discern this is anger this is rage this is fear this is sorrow this is empathy really hold it in a witnessing presence that had space and and she found this really deep healing in having the capacity to be with in fact she described as gave her a kind of courage and a confidence that was really empowering that she can handle what life brings we don't get that courage and confidence until we actually open to the vulnerability but we can't open to the vulnerability unless there's some level of feeling safe enough so she had intuitively known she was re knew she was ready to be able to do that and so i asked her the question what allowed you to do it what allowed you to be with this intensity and she shared the thing that came to mind which is for the last year or so she's been participating weekly in a woman's meditation group that was completely rooted in kindness in meta and senses that accessing that field of tenderness made it possible that she could bring that field to such pain it gave her the space so i'm bringing this in because um we need great care and opening to the vulnerable places and as we do that's what reveals the openness and the power of loving presence that's really our nature so i want to close and we'll be we're going to be doing a bit of a rain meditation addressing the trance of unworthiness i'm going to name a little bit about rain that i found is really helpful for me over the years because i've been and i still am working with the ways that that trance appears um through my life and so we know that recognize means that when we get some sign that it's here you might notice it as a thought a judgmental thought it may be a sinking feeling maybe anger but then we check in and sense okay the abyss i'm cut off for myself that's recognizing it allowing means that we're really able and willing to let it be here we're not leaving we're not trying to get rid of it we're not adding judgment we're not adding resistance it may be simply the most we can do is say okay i can let this be here for now yes to this for the moment and that that yes can deepen and if you can get to the point of saying to what's coming up this belongs it's it's waves in the sea these are part of the waves of my being that actually deepens the process of freeing up each step of rain reduces the identification of a self the moment you see it as jonathan said if you can name it you're less identified the moment you let it be there without resistance you're even less identified now i want to make a comment on allowing i was working with someone last week who was judging themselves and they thought allowing meant saying yes to the judgment like this uh part of her that was saying you're failing that she was saying yes it's true allowing doesn't mean we're saying that the content of the judgment's true we're just allowing the experience of judging to be there i hope that's clear because it's a really big difference and then we investigate and i find it very useful with the trance of unworthiness to first say oh what am i believing and often a person will say well you know i've been rejected before it's going to happen again or i believe i'm failing and to let that story be a portal we don't want to stay with the story but first sense the story of what you're believing about yourself and then come into the body and since when i'm believing this what's going on with the felt sense what am i feeling is it sinking or squeeze of shame fear i think of it like we're treating the felt sense like a shy animal that's lurks in the darkness of the woods and we're inviting it out into the light and so that's the attitude a kind of curiosity and a gentleness inviting the felt sense inviting what's here it's like you're saying i'm here it's okay as much as you want i'm listening the key of investigating is to get to what i call ouch a pure place of this hurts i know for myself once i really get okay i'm strangling my own spirit with these judgments i'm hurting myself it's so unnecessary there's a kind of soul sadness like i'm grieving the lost moments so we're investigating to get to that place of ouch we're not saying oh i deserve it or oh others have it worse but just this hurts so just explore that and that will lead to nurturing because we get tenderized and we've been talking this whole talk about how to nurture experiment experiment with your own wise awake heart offering nurturing experiment with calling on others i know for me when i'm really regressed and feeling separate i'll often just say please love me i'll just feel that prayer please love me and that that brings that porousness so in some way i'm i'm reaching out and often what i'll feel is almost like i'm i'm reaching out please love me i'm kind of bowing i'm offering my being into something larger and that just invites a washing through of light and love and tenderness and then what happens is there's a shift in those moments and this is what we call after the rain where once we let in love we discover we are the love that's holding our life that small self dissolves and we become the love so we move from that sense of i'm a small self and love is always loving me to the loving that's holding our being that's the shift says you can say it simply nothing is wrong with me anymore that's a shift to freedom so let's uh take a moment to practice this i'm going to lead you through a very brief taste which is something many of you are familiar with just a brief kind of review with rain you exploring with yourself and i invite you to carry it on on your own when you have more time and you might as your attention goes inward feel your body breathing bring yourself right here and you've already been reflecting on this some allowing yourself to bring a situation to mind that brings up self-doubt self-aversion where you feel you create an abyss in some way you get separate from your inner life and you might let the lens get a little closer and sense what is it that's really bothers you about the way you are [Music] what is it that really brings up the judgment what's the worst part about what you perceive about yourself that really makes you judge or feel aversion or dislike and the recognizing is just to name mental whisper what you're noticing it may be aversion or dislike or anger fear whatever is most predominant and with whatever you notice that allowing that willingness to let it be here let the experience be here just for now and if at any point it feels like too much to really put aside anything i'm saying and go back to the meta that most helps you feel connected but if you're able to allow if there is that sense of you can tolerate it then begin to investigate what are you believing about yourself what's the story you're believing that turns you on yourself do you feel are you believing that you're unlovable that you'll never be close to anyone that you're failing in your life in some way that you let others down you cause harm what is it you're believing and whatever you notice sense how it affects your life to be turned on yourself just let yourself feel in your body what it's like when you're believing something's wrong with you what's it like check your throat your chest your belly and if it helps to put your hand on your heart as a way of accompanying the experience it can be very powerful to help steady the attention it's like you're already beginning to self-nurture you're saying okay i'm here what does this really feel like and invite the vulnerability forward what's the worst part of this you might sense how long have i been living with this and most important how has it affected my life what has it taken away from me and since this is the deepest question really what do i most need to remember what do i need to trust right in this moment what would bring some healing to know to trust to remember and what might be the source of that message who do you want to receive it from know that just intuitively you know that you know is it your high self your own awake heart do you want to hear it from the buddha or bodhisattva or is there an ancestor a group of ancestors is there a person in your life a teacher a friend it doesn't matter what the sources of who's who is delivering the message beginning the nurturing by really sensing and you can breathe a little more fully bring yourself right here that you are receiving exactly the medicine the heart medicine that can serve you right now the reminder that can serve you might be from your own awake heart it might be a formless presence as i described a grandparent an ancestor and let your intention be to let in let that be your prayer please may i let in love and if it's a prayer you can whisper it a few times and notice each time that you can get more sincere more receptive either please love me or please may i let in love perhaps there can be some surrendering open and with some witnessing right now just notice the presence that's here notice the quality of presence that's emerged it may be just a little more space a little more tenderness maybe it's vast maybe you're still really feeling the vulnerability it doesn't really it's not you can't do it wrong just notice what's here and you might ask yourself who would you be if you didn't believe something was wrong as you feel ready to open your eyes and know that this isn't like a a process with a clear beginning and end but what you can trust is each time each time you bring your sincerity to making love of yourself more perfect each time there'll be a little bit of an awakening or a shift from that sense of a small self the abyss in some way turned against yourself to remembering that you are the loving awareness that's holding this life there'll be some level of shift pay attention to that get to familiar with it because it'll really be more and more your home okay friends i really really feels really good to be with you all i thank you for going on the journey in a big way in your life and this retreat and this little session here blessings [Music] you

Channel: Tara Brach

Views: 127,612

Keywords: Tara Brach, dharmarain108108108, dharma, meditation, mindfulness, radical compassion, compassion, livestream, live, love, retreat, self-judgment, blame, shame, heart, practice

Id: p70x2ztQ4m4

Length: 64min 54sec (3894 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021