Radical Acceptance: Gateway to Love, Wisdom and Peace, with Tara Brach

welcome namaste it's a pleasure to be with you in our last class last week the theme was cultivating a loving heart and this week what i'd like to do is explore what i really consider to be the roots of love and wisdom which is acceptance and true acceptance is radical i mean it means no resistance to the present moment experience no controlling it's a full allowing of life to be as it is it's what um the poet dorothy hunt calls a heart space where everything that is is welcome and i really love that a heart space where everything that is is welcome so when we're having a hard time you know when we're fearful when we're angry we might not directly be able to open to compassion to relating with loving presence but what is possible and this is the first step is to undo our resistance to what's going on in other words to allow to let what's going on just be and that's why and many of you are familiar with rain recognize allow investigate and nurture the practice that leads us to loving presence to nurturing and loving presence is recognizing and allowing it's radical acceptance so radical acceptance takes training it takes training to simply recognize and allow and let be what's here because it goes against our conditioning and when we're stressed you know when we encounter unpleasant experiences like let's say you make a mistake or you're late for something or there's a conflict with someone there's really strong conditioning for our survival reflexes to take over fight flight freeze grasping and it happens really quickly and it's often unconscious because the intent of the survival brain is just to protect you it's to control things as quickly as you can it's not to accept so in those moments when we're in that survival brain hijack we're in a trance we're contracted we're we're cut off from you know reason and empathy and compassion and really from our whole brain from our whole being so the practice of radical acceptance is undoing that reflex to clench to contract to resist and opening back into our full heart and awareness okay a favorite story of mine and this is uh an insurance claim that was put in by a bricklayer and it writes this he says dear sir i am writing in response to your request for additional information in block three of the accident reporting form i put poor planning as the cause of my accident you asked for a fuller explanation i'm a bricklayer by trade on the day of the accident i was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building when i completed my work i found that i had some bricks left over which when weighed later were found to be 240 pounds rather than carry the bricks down by hand i decided to lower them in a barrel creating a pulley that was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor so securing the rope at the ground level i went up to the roof swung the barrel out and loaded the bricks onto it then i went down and untied the rope holding it tightly to ensure a slow descent of the 240 pounds of bricks you will note on the accident reporting form that my weight is 135 pounds due to my surprise of being jerked off the ground so suddenly i lost my presence of mine and forgot to let go of the rope needless to say i proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building in the vicinity of the third floor i met the barrel which was now proceeding downward at an equally impressive speed this explains the fractured skull minor aberrations and the broken collar bone as listed in section 3 of the accident form slowly only slightly i continued my rapid ascent not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulley which i mentioned in paragraph two of this correspondence fortunately by this time i regained my presence of mine was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of the excruciating pain i was now beginning to experience at approximately the same time however the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel now devoid of the weight of the bricks the barrel weighed approximately 50 pounds i refer you again to my weight as you might imagine i began a rapid descent down the side of the building in the vicinity of the third floor i met the barrel coming up this accounts for the two fractured ankles broken tooth and severe lacerations of my legs and lower body here my luck began to change slightly the encounter with the barrel seemed to slow me enough to lessen my injuries when i fell into the pile of bricks and fortunately only three vertebrae were cracked i'm sorry to report however as i lay there on the pile of bricks and pain unable to move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me i again lost my composure and presence of mine and let go of the rope the empty 50-pound barrel weighing more than the rope i had let go fell rapidly to the earth resulting in the two broken forearms and wrists which when i raised my arms to protect myself it crashed into i hope this information satisfactorily fulfills your request for further information this is entitled knowing when to let go and it's fun because it's such a graphic example of the reactive trance getting us in trouble and you might think well yeah but you know where's the opportunity to release resistance and come into presence with this and you're right you know if you're getting dragged up and down the side of a building um you probably won't pause and breathe and reconnect although it might have really helped this poor guy so as we know we're often relying on our survival reflexes and it's appropriate you know they help us survive if you're on the highway and someone cuts you off you know we swerve and our child's playing on rocks about to fall we act really quickly and for me last week i was uh walking on a path on the river and a fox came trotting toward me and it didn't stop it kept coming at me and all of a sudden i realized oh my gosh this is this fox is rabid and i yank my dog off of the path you know was no thoughts no breathing it was instantaneous and it was confirmed later by a park ranger that in fact there was a rabid fox around the park area but the point is we need that quick twitch of reflex of the primitive survival brain and those moments are we're in a trance we're hijacked by the amygdala it's essential for survival the challenge is when that hijacking is ongoing where we're regularly in some sort of a reactive trance and if you track your own suffering it comes down to that habitual reactivity of resisting present moment and instead the reflex to control to judge to grasp and you can see it let's say in life patterns and relationships how stuck we can get in being defended that flinch response to tighten against criticism or how we won't risk intimacy or being controlling trying to make others do what we want we can see it how quickly we come down on ourselves or see it with addictive patterns you know rather than befriending our inner life and where the wounds are exiting with substances or dependent relationships or overworking anxious mental obsessing so learning to undo that resistance to the present moment learning to undo those habits of controlling it's essential for evolving it's what allows us to really live from our full potential from our wisdom from our love so as you know i've been talking about radical acceptance for decades or at least some of you know and um what i'm finding is that every time i revisit it it's a deepening understanding of just how powerful and key it is to waking up i still remember my first radical acceptance workshop that i taught at omega and i taught at the same time that another workshop was given i think was tony horton who's the creator of a exercise well-known exercise regime and so at lunch a woman had a conversation with it from a woman from my class had a conversation with a young man who had been attending that other workshop and he was a competitive athlete with a very you know chiseled body and his eyes kept darting around the room he was you know kind of in a hyper mode and um they each were telling each other about the workshops they were attending so he was telling her what he was hoping to achieve from his and she was talking about how the power of meditation to bring us into presence in a way that can change our lives and so the conversation then went like this he said i don't have time for something like meditation she was silent he says well how long do you meditate every day and she says well it ranges between 15 minutes and 45 or so then there's a long pause and he says so what's the world record for meditation and you can feel you feel the energy of it and that the gifts of radical acceptance of of meditating is not achieving anything it's really becoming fully who we are living from an awakened heart mind and the buddha is a kind of our typical example of our evolutionary capacity to meet life with radical acceptance to shift from that trance of reactivity to living from our wholeness and i often reflect on a wonderful story that was told by tiknot han of the buddha's encounter with the shadow god mara and mara is the god of greed and hatred and delusion and all the parts of ourselves we don't like and as many know that you know mara appeared regularly through the buddha's life and tiknot han describes one encounter where mara appears as the buddhist teaching a large gathering out in a field and mara goes skirting around the outside edges of the group and the buddha's loyal attendant ananda saw him and he he was kind of freaked out and he went up to the buddha and said oh no maura's here but the buddha basically said no worries and he went right over tomorrow and he said i see you mara come let's have tea i see you mara let's have tea so let me share what strikes me about this which is he didn't go tomorrow and say i love you or embrace mara you know the end of rain he wasn't it wasn't nurturing he wasn't celebrating nor did he hear about mara being there and then say well who or what is aware of mara being here and just see mara is a kind of empty and permanent phenomena you know there's no buddha there's no mara no he didn't do any of that he just this very first step i see you mara come let's have tea we begin with radical acceptance with not resisting the reality that's right here there's a there's a transformational power in the moments if something difficult arises in your life let's say a wave of fear or anger and if you can pause and if in that pause you can with mindful awareness just say i see you anger or i see you fear let's have tea let me just be with this in those moments you're no longer a victim of those emotions you're no longer possessed by them you're not in a reactive trance anymore because here's what happens and this is the kind of magical alchemy of a moment of radical acceptance of that mindful presence is that when you see the wave you become the ocean you can then relate to the wave and let it be there you're no longer caught inside the wave and that's where the freedom is i see you mara in that moment you're no longer at war with mara you're a larger awareness when i was new to teaching retreats i think it was one of my first few retreats i encountered one of the most powerful illustrations of this shift from being kind of caught in something to that presence that that freedom that can respond and it was uh it happened when i was doing an interview meeting with one man who had alzheimer's and he was there with his wife and his wife is helping him move through the retreat but i asked him how he was doing because he seemed to be in pretty good shape and he described something that happened right at the beginning the early onset when symptoms were first showing up he was a psychologist also a meditator of about 15 years he was giving a talk somewhere and he had about a hundred people there he arrived to give the talk and he froze he went blank he he didn't even know why he was there or what what people were waiting for there you know why they were why they had come and so here's what he did first he didn't do anything he just kind of paused and then he started naming what was going on inside him he would say you know anxious and then he bowed and he would say confused and bow embarrassed you know wow he kept doing that and finally you know heart pounding bow breathing and relaxing now things calm down and one of the students they had tears in their eyes and they said you know no one has ever taught us like this and what had he done you know first when the intensity started happening he paused he didn't try to resist it he didn't try to pretend nothing he just paused and he began naming what was going on i see you mara bowing just letting it be you know radical acceptance interrupts the habitual reaction it gives space for what's here to unfold in a healing way and for this man he shifted from you know the victim of a disease from somebody who was possessed by reactivity to a larger awareness and presence so i have found it helpful when caught to consider radical acceptance as two questions and the first question is what is happening inside me right now what is happening inside me right now and that leads to being able to say i see you mara to seeing what's here and the second question is and can i be with this or let it be whichever you'd prefer and that's the the a of reign the allowing if there's anything you remember from this talk these two questions can really be the key to the kingdom and you might just try them now just pause for a moment close your eyes or let your gaze be downcast and bring the attention inward and ask yourself what's happening inside me right now and can i be with this can i let this be just notice even in a few moments some enlarging of presence that you're not as much caught inside something as you're the ocean you're the awareness that's aware okay so come on back i often get the question doesn't this make radical acceptance a real passive or lead us to inactivity and you know what if we're an abusive relationship or what about all the suffering in our society so i just want to say here that activity is an essential expression of our of our aliveness you know we speak we move around we engage with our world the question is when we get disturbing news or when someone mistreats us or as we face our world as we face the racism the spiking of anti-semitism the undermining of democracy all the sufferings of our world climate change do we react or do we respond in other words do we react from the amygdala from our conditioned fears with anger with blame with more violence or do we have the capacity to pause to open to the moment without resistance to fuel what's here and then respond from a larger space of awareness from our natural intelligence and our heart react or respond the reality is for most of us because our habits of reactivity are so deeply grooved that when things happen like the kind of things i just named when we get stressed we find ourselves initially launching into our old patterns and i found it really helpful to reassure myself that no matter how much i've been on a reactive streak no matter how long it's been going on in the moments of remembering oh yeah what's happening inside me right now can i be with this that's a moment where the doors to freedom start opening and the more we interrupt the old habits the more we're nourishing new wholesome kind of patterning so a recent example of the power of radical acceptance in my life one of my most intentional interrupting patterns is when i find myself judging others i you know have a kind of a dedication to okay let's interrupt this when i catch on that it's going on well a few weeks ago i had some email exchanges with a colleague i worked quite closely with and we were just agreeing about the timing and the content and shaping of an event and i felt the growing tension and the emails you know the messages were getting a little bit more and more terse well right before going to bed i shot off an email arguing my position and then i went offline which in retrospect is you know kind of like hanging up on somebody right anyway i was in a reactive streak and and then there i am in bed and i'm tossing and turning and it's clear that my tone was pushy and not collaborative and not friendly and i realized i'd you know broken two cardinal rules and one is to wade and never send an email when i'm inwardly reacting and judging and the others never ever ever do it in the evening when i'm tired and on empty so so there i am in bed and there's no distraction so there's nothing to do but feel that inward churning you know how it is so so okay let's be with the reality that was the beginning of okay let's pause and and stop resisting by being off in my thoughts and and sense what's here so i deepened attention and what's happening inside me right now and i could feel the sense of rightness and annoyance and the judging the tightness of my body okay can i be with this so feeling it allowing it again this is the recognizing and allowing of rain but then i continued doing it okay what's inside me in this moment recognizing again oh so self-aversion it's not liking that um righteous judging self can i be with that with that self-aversion so just feeling it opening to that and then again what what's happening now inside me oh really wanting to feel connection to feel open-heartedness okay be with that that longing being with it being with it and gradually the longing became just that more open-heartedness and realizing okay now i'm back home in more of that ocean-ness more of who i really am so that process of recognizing and allowing over and over again undid the resistance and the reactivity so the next day we later in the afternoon we jumped on the phone and you know i apologize for my tone and being overbearing and own my up tightness and it was it was warm it was collaborative we found our way and and actually left with a deepened sense of of connection and appreciation because the bumps are never the problem it's not the bumps it's when we keep on resisting the underlying unpleasantness keep needing to be right keep being defended keep being aggressive and and not really touch into what's going on underneath that we end up getting caught in the suffering so radical acceptance it undoes that conditioning to resist the waves to resist reality and by releasing resistance and this is the gift we open to a fullness and oceaness of who we are and it's a superpower and it really frees our spirit let me just pause again here and invite you to check in if it helps to close your eyes or lower your gaze again to have that intention towards radical acceptance to simply notice what's happening right here inside you and let it be keep coming into your body what's happening now and can i be with this can you say yes to this moment and then yes to this moment notice what happens if the yes gets very unconditional and full okay you can continue in presence if you want to keep the eyes closed that's fine or open them some of you might have noticed for some moments when you really are saying yes that there's that taste of freedom that tenderness the openness the mystery and some of you might have noticed that it's unfamiliar because we're so used to tensing and controlling and actually resisting opening to the moment and then if there were strong wants or fears going on inside you unpleasantness that's very challenging to really open so that's where i want to go now we're going to take a look at how you know how does radical acceptance help us loosen the grip when we're really caught in that trance of reacting to very unpleasant emotions how do we move towards the compassion and freedom then and it always helps me to understand that emotions get stuck when there's a looping of negative thoughts and feelings for instance one of the big stuck places something's wrong with me that sense of deficiency and when we have thoughts of what's wrong with us that brings up fear or shame and then the fear or shame in our body drives more thinking where we're looking for evidence of what's wrong with us and it keeps looping or let's say we're feeling like something's wrong with you with some other person with you know somebody we know or don't know that those thoughts of what's wrong with them bring up anger and blame which then deepen the feelings in the body which bring up more anger and blame and we can be in that looping for a long time to turn towards radical acceptance it's really important to understand that as long as that there's that looping as long as there's a focus on the mental images and sound bites the the thoughts about the world we can't shift our reactivity it'll keep stirring up the difficult emotions because thoughts are a way of resisting reality of trying to control things so radical acceptance begins when you shift your attention from the story line from the thoughts to the felt experience in the body i just want to say that again that radical acceptance starts coming alive when you move your attention from the thoughts from the storyline to what's actually going on inside your body to somatic experience again it's an undoing of resistance to reality and our thoughts when we're in a in those loopings are resisting reality and it's not easy to make that shift to our body because we're so addicted to our thinking i mean they give us a sense of being in control and of course they're an essential road map but when it comes to when we're really stuck and suffering and when it comes to life's deepest challenges you know conflict with our self conflict with others facing aging sickness loss death when we're really dealing with the true uncertainty of life if we can't arrive in a full presence will have no access to true wisdom to a real refuge i i'll share with you i i saw this little cartoon of a woman who goes to see a fortune teller and wants to find a way to contact her husband who passed away recently and after some incantations the the fortune teller says i'm getting your dear departed husband he says he can't believe you paid 45 dollars for this so our answer is not out there in another person or through our thoughts it's coming right back here it's making that u-turn right back into what is going on inside us and i'll share another personal story that that has to do really the importance for me of the shift from stories to immediate experience as i started writing this talk and i often start talks a few weeks before i actually give them you know just kind of gathering and deepening into the domain so i was just starting to write this talk and i'd put tofu in the oven and i was aiming to have lunch ready before my next zoom meeting so i went so i when i went downstairs i flipped and i seasoned the tofu and then i had to do some more stuff so upstairs so i went back up and then when i went down to take it out finally what i found was it was still on the counter i'd never put it back in the oven again i'd flipped it seasoned it and not put it back in so there the oven was blasting away at 4 20 and my tofu was still sort of raw and i had this instant wave of frustration i said something like god damn tar you're so stupid and then of course that's not common self-talk so i kind of smiled you know and shook my head okay no big deal most of us have done mindless stuff and then reflexively we blast ourselves and that kind of thing can pass not go into a looping or a deep grudge but here's the thing through that day and the next there was a handful of these other small things that went down like not being able to remember the name of something in this case i was trying to remember the words kitchen island and all i could come up with was kitchen counter jonathan had to move this large bag of birdseed because i could not get it to move you know he had to help me with a computer tech thing ditzy little things you know walking into the room and forgetting why being outside walking in my knees starting to hurt the point is by the end of that next day i wasn't feeling so good about myself there was a sense okay the operating systems are declining and um and then with that the judgment this self-feeling diminished less than so of course this is not the first time i've faced up to this aging thing you know the body mind deteriorating but it's a continued reminder that it requires attention because if i and i'll say we because it's all of us if we are identified with our body and how it functions or our mind and how it functions there's trouble you know it's it's so easy to believe and get oppressed by the story that who i am is this deficient person who's losing it that's a very compelling story that being imprisoned in that kind of trance of feeling deficient and what's so clear is that this is a perfect example of where radical acceptance that courageous unresisting presence can actually become the gateway to real freedom and fearlessness and peace so on this or any challenge we start right where we are if we want to cut through with radical acceptance right where we are what is happening inside me right now and for me in this instance you know i recognize okay self-judgment aversion okay allow it be with it just let it be there okay self-aversion it's there and then well what's happening now vulnerability a fear of the future okay allow it let it be there and just really opening to okay there's this kind of survival level vulnerability going on and the more deeply i let that be you know really opening to that this natural tenderness arose there was just compassion towards you know my own vulnerability and the plight of all of us that we all have that and so it would kind of like there was an enlarging becoming that field of compassion that's holding this body mind and all body minds um like a field that really is timeless it's formless it's really loving presence beyond the body and the mind and with that there's a lot of peace and i really find over and over again that this is the gift of radical acceptance that when there's that unresisting presence with reality our awareness awakens so we're inhabiting a larger truth and reality we're inhabiting the ocean-ness of our being that timeless loving presence and we can be with whatever waves all the waves of this living dying world we can be with it so in this talk my primary focus is really being on accepting ourselves our own life but the same exact process extends to accepting others recently working with a woman who was judging her father for his political beliefs and as we know there's just a lot of dividedness families friends and so on so i asked her okay when you encounter this when it comes to mind or when you're with your father what goes on inside you that's the first question what is happening inside you and and her response was the way i think of all the harm that his beliefs cause so okay let that be there and if you get under your thoughts then what's happening in your body you have the thought that there's a lot of harm what happens in your body then because you have to get under the story line so she got in touch with anger i said okay can you be with that and she opened to the anger and opened to the anger and i said now what what's happening inside you now and there was fear you know there's fear for how our world is going open to that open open again this is i see you tomorrow let's have tea being with what's here and under the fear i care about this world i care because we'll find that under our reactivity there's something we're caring about and she did that so i said let that care fill you let it be all it is just be with that and that was her becoming at home with a larger sense of her own being that's where she realized oh this is my nature this is the ocean this is who i am when i had her bring her father to mind there was sadness and there was more room for him to be as he is she was the ocean being with the waves and she could also remember what she loved about him and of course it required repeating because any time there's deep grooves of habits we have to keep interrupting keep repeating but she was on a trajectory towards freedom so the point is if you're judging someone and you want to move towards that larger sense of being acceptance the pathway is to open up to what is coming up in your body under the thoughts and the stories and keep bringing that radical acceptance to that what is happening can i be with this bringing as much presence and gentleness and kindness as you can and you'll find you'll naturally undo the resistance that not only was pushing away the negative feelings but also pushing away the vastness and beauty and wisdom that's inside you now i mentioned earlier and i want to say again it doesn't make us passive of course you'll act you know possibly you'll communicate with the person if it has to do with judging someone or you'll engage in the world but the process of presencing and acceptance will allow you to act from from your true intelligence and heart i mean that's why the great leaders current and past leaders like nelson mandela gandhi they dedicated time to practices like this that connect us to our heart and our spirit so this is the invitation for each of us that if we want to cultivate this superpower of radical acceptance to start where you are keep paying attention to what's arising inside you without adding further judgment or resistance and this is the secret pathway to inner peace and wholeness you might want to just take a moment to listen to the poet dorothy hunt her poems called peace is this moment without judgment do you think peace will come some other place than here some other time than now in some other heart than yours peace is this moment without judgment that is all this moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome peace is this moment without thinking that it should be some other way that you should feel some other thing that your life should unfold according to your plans peace is this moment without judgment this moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome okay friends let's uh let's do a closing meditation in this meditation we'll explore bringing radical acceptance to some place where we're judging ourselves and i invite you to take a moment to resettle in other words feel your posture let your eyes close your gaze be down cast and settle right here take a few full breaths and you might bring to mind uh where you're finding yourself getting snagged in self-judgment these days and maybe bring to mind a situation that reminds you of when you turn on yourself let the situation be close in so you can remind yourself of what happened and then let yourself feel the presence of the judge that there's judging going on what you're believing about yourself and then come into your body as fully as possible and sense that when that judge is there when there's the judging what's happening inside you right now maybe there's a voice saying it's true then ask again so if that's what the voice is saying what's the experience in your body of that is there shame embarrassment fear the first question always is what is happening inside me right now and then can you be with that can you just open to letting that shame or fear or embarrassment whatever it is be there you might breathe with it just offer that gentle presence that allows this is having tea you're just letting it be there staying in your body you might ask okay so what's happening now is there's something more that's going on that wants my attention maybe something layered under that just noticing what's there again you're saying i see you mara then have tea with that just open to it breathe be gentle a non-resisting presence with what's here it sounds if there's something else going on what is happening inside me right now can i be with that let that be as much as it is maybe you're beginning to feel a sense of tenderness or kindness or care sensing sadness for being stuck you might sense underneath it all what it is you're really caring about what's mattering to you what you're longing for what is happening inside me in that deepest way can i let that be sensing in the presence that's here who you really are that awareness that compassion that's holding and relating to the waves just noticing the shift from being caught in the ways of judgment or reactivity to a larger presence that's more truly your home and sense the peace the freedom when you can respond to the waves but not be in reaction peace is this moment without judgment this moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome taking these final few moments to sense the blessing of that that heart space where everything that is is welcome i'm taking a few full breaths if your eyes are closed you might open them i want to thank you i want to thank you for participating for being together with me on this path and send you all blessings all love may this power of radical acceptance really serve to heal and free your heart namaste [Music] you

Channel: Tara Brach

Views: 56,519

Keywords: Tara Brach, dharmarain108108108108, dharma, RAIN, meditation, mindfulness, radical acceptance, compassion

Id: mT8p8q2mH_k

Length: 49min 48sec (2988 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 24 2022