Radical Acceptance: Our Gateway to Love and Freedom, with Tara Brach

Namaste friends and welcome I wanted to share with you that next year is the 20th anniversary of my first book radical acceptance and we're offering a new addition that will include a new chapter and also introduce the rain practice so I'm in the thick of working on this and I continue to be moved in in my own practice and by working with others moved by how essential the practice of radical acceptance is how in any moment that we truly aren't resisting that we're truly opening to the life of the moment we have the capacity to love more fully and to realize that this mystery this vastness that's really what we are so in honor of the power of radical acceptance I thought I'd offer a talk revisiting these teachings and I know for many of you this it will feel familiar and I hope for all of you it will be the kind of reminders that bring more of that Vivid wakefulness and openness and kindness to your moments in your life okay I hope you enjoy Namaste greetings friends a good number of years ago now the Dalai Lama was interviewed by Network news and the inquiry was really about happiness because that was the subject of his latest book and they asked him a question which was what was your happiest moment in memory and his response he first gave that kind of now classic mischievous look and his response was I think now I've always loved that story because you know for many listening being present here and now is not a new idea and yet as we know often it's mostly an idea you know we're usually on our way somewhere we're usually checking things off the list so often we're lost in thought and and thinking that the important moment of our life we're on our way to it or it's already in the past but it's rare that we sense well right now this moment really matters the gift of meditation of training in presence is that it really allows our body and mind to be in the same place at the same time it allows us to arrive in the one place where love and happiness and creativity and healing Freedom all is possible so our inquiry really is what takes us from presence and if we begin to look we're in a trance of thinking most of the time and that trance is typically driven by wants and fears by the sense that something's missing right now are something's wrong and even under that it's often and this is usually our core Focus it's something's wrong with me with how I am with what I'm doing that sense of never enough that I'm in some way deficient or flawed and that failures around the corner and the expression of that is a background sense of of fear or anxiety and uncomfortableness and sometimes shame so this will be our our subject for this talk which is how do we wake up out of this trance of feeling like there's something wrong with us how do we disentangle from the self-judgments and and live our lives and one of these stories I'll always remember a woman describe being with her mom when her mom was dying and she was in a coma and at one moment her mother kind of woke up from the coma and was very lucid and looked her in the eyes and said you know all my life I thought something was wrong with me and those were her last words and for this woman in a sense it was a a kind of a gift because it made so clear how we can go through decades how many moments we miss of living of loving of enjoying Beauty when we're all wrapped up in thinking that we need to be different that we're falling short in some way and this is what drew me to write my first book radical acceptance uh that as a response to that sense of being flawed being caught in what I call the trance of unworthiness I remember after writing the book I was on book tour and one stop I was giving a workshop on this and there was a big poster of me and the caption at the bottom was something is wrong with me it was a great welcome to a new community there and yet you know for those of you listening if you start looking at your life most of you know I mean huge amount of self-judgment and what we don't always realize and this is why I call it a trance is how much that underlying sense of not enough effects are moments affects how generative and creative we are at work affects our relationships how intimate we can be because it's very hard to be close to others if we feel something's wrong with us affects everything and the Buddha said that the great suffering we experience is not realizing the truth of who we are our true nature and being caught up in a in an identification with a small limited self and there's a story I've always loved that I think describes this so beautifully true story that there was a enormous clay statue of the Buddha in Thailand and it wasn't beautiful but it was loved and revered by the populations it had survived over centuries of Storms and battles and so on and in the 50s there was a long dry season and during that time there were some cracks appeared so an enterprising monk shined a flashlight into the crack and what came back was The Gleam of gold and shined into another crack and another and they took off what turned out to be just a covering of plaster and clay and found the largest solid gold statue of the Buddha in that part of Asia and what's interesting is the monks say that the statue was covered to protect it during tumultuous times and it's much in the same way that we protect our innate goodness and Purity we covered over when we feel threatened to be able to navigate our world and the suffering is when we cover over with our defenses and our aggressions and so on is that we get identified with the covering we think we're the covering that controlling promoting self and we forget who's looking through we forget the the tender awake heart the awareness that's looking through you know the essence of all sickness is homesickness there's a suffering when we forget the gold when we leave home we forget what we really belong to that aliveness and awareness and loving we forget Who We Are a story from my son's youth in a school he went to in the art classes that children would sit forward to a table a teacher would circulate as they did their artwork and one time teacher saw a little girl being very industrious with her drawing and stood behind her for a while and then she asked her you know hon what are you drawing and the little girl responded I'm drawing God and the teachers kind of chuckled and said well you know no one knows what God looks like and without skipping a beat without even looking up the little girl said they will in a moment so you know it becomes such a profound inquiry you know what leads us to forgetting who we are to judging ourselves so harshly to becoming so identified with the coverings and really we can look first to main culprit the messaging of our culture our culture tells us what it means to be a respectable person a successful person a likable person there's an essay I love a short essay that illustrates this and it goes like this it says if you can start the day without caffeine or pills if you're cheerful ignoring aches and pains if you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles if you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you time if you can Overlook when people take things out on you when through no fault of yours something goes wrong if you can take criticism and blame without resentment if you can face the world without lies or deceit if you can conquer tension without medical help if you can relax without liquor if you can sleep without the aid of drugs then you are probably a dog no we value ourselves according to society's standards of success how we should appear how we should look the size of our body the kind of intelligence I often think of children in school and the message they get that really only left brain intelligence counts and how many come out thinking that they're stupid that in some way they're inferior that really pains me you know our culture's message of not enough and of Badness is particularly toxic for non-dominant populations because the messages from the dominant culture are internalized we think we have our own views but we're not thinking our own thoughts we're thinking society's thoughts and then we think of what are those messages and consider the United States for hundreds of years and continues to this day that people of color are given the message of inferior you're inferior and goes through all the institutions housing education Justice Finance Medical your life's not as valuable as the message it's a deep conditioning this trance of unworthiness and then the children of course anticipate and assume they'll fail Tony Morrison writes that in this country American means being white everyone else has to hyphenate so we're talking about really how do we land up in the trance of unworthiness and the messages of the culture are really strong to women those with disability those different from cultural ideal in terms of their body non-dominant sexual orientation gender identity given the messages primary funnel for our messages that trap us in the trance of unworthiness is through family and caregivers of course this is the domain of most Psychotherapy and it's a primary channel for the culture of insecurity and fear of failure I mean if you could ask what a child most wants what a child a young child most wants and needs it's to be understood and loved yet out of their own insecurities and fears most parents don't know how to see clearly and mirror back who this child is most parents aren't equipped to love unconditionally so for so many there's an experience of severed belonging cut off from the most significant other and really suffered belonging from the not okay parts of ourselves I mean the core wound I'm not lovable I'm not loved I'm not worthy okay this is the trance of unworthiness and then to manage it we take on these strategies of of striving and accomplishing and trying to prove ourselves that endless self-improvement project this is uh Jimmy hooker on nutrition and health right so the Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans the French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits are Americans the Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits of the Yanks the Italians drink huge amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the Brits of the Yanks the Germans drink a lot of beers and goes on and on the conclusion eat and drink what you like it's speaking English that kills you though we strive we constantly are trying to improve and and dial it in to be good get it right we also are another strategy for you know managing the trance of unworthiness is um getting addicted to substances that numb us that take us away from the rawness and the pain but the biggest strategy is that we try to judge ourselves into being a better person we try to fix ourselves through judgment the inner critic is trying to help us become a better person but of course we know the amount of pain that that can cause all of this fuels the coverings on the Golden Buddha I mean no amount of accomplishing no amount of judging actually helps us to contact experience and Trust our goodness I mean check it out ask yourself what would be enough to really be okay what would be enough the healing the path to realizing who we are and living from that freedom in terms of the trainings of meditation is learning to bring radical acceptance and unconditional compassionate presence to the experience of the moment this is what helps to dissolve the coverings to make the coverings transparent so our light our creativity our love our intelligence can shine through radical acceptance really opening to the present moment but I want to note here the objection most people have a fear of accepting how we are in the moment our fears our shame and the fears I'll never change I'll never get better and yet as American psychologist Carl Rogers put it it wasn't until I accepted myself just as I was that I was free to change in other words the prerequisite for True transformation and healing is this radical acceptance this presence and kindness with what's right here okay so the rest of this exploration is how do we do that and what I'd like to do here is introduce a practice a meditation that weaves together mindfulness a mindful presence with self-compassion that can really free our hearts that can wake us up from the coverings and allow us to rest and express the gold of who we are and the meditation is called the rain meditation I know many are familiar with it rains and acronym for recognize allow investigate and nurture recognize meaning see what's here okay fear just name it name it allow allow it to be here not to fight it not to judge it just let be investigate that doesn't mean cognitively investigate that can be a trap it means investigate by deepening the inquiry into the body and feeling what's here contacting it and then nurture the last part of rain is to bring kindness to what we find when we do that we experience what's called after the rain which means we start opening to our natural being to the gold that's here to the awareness and love that was here but covered over the first two steps of rain recognize and allow all on their own are very powerful one man I was meeting with was in the mid stages of Alzheimer's and he was a meditator and he was a psychologist and he knew what was going on and he described to me an experience he had at the onset he had been invited to give a talk 100 people or so and when he or he arrived and he was about to begin and he went completely blank I mean he had no idea why they were here or what he was supposed to say so here's what he did first he did nothing he just paused and then he started naming what he was aware of he named you know fear and then he bowed then he named confused and he'd bow then he'd say heart pounding bow this went on and they started saying breathing bow relaxing bow he looked around and he apologized and I'm sorry and one of the people in the group said you know no one has ever given us the teachings like this they had tears in their eyes what had he done well first he didn't do anything he did what I call the sacred art of pausing he just stopped it says Victor Frankel puts it he says between the stimulus and the response there is a space and in that space is our power and our freedom he just stopped and then he began those first two steps of rain which are really an expression of mindfulness where he just named what was going on and he bowed he allowed it to be there very very powerful very powerful way of coming home again now here's the thing if it's a major tangle major emotional tangle then we need to add the last two steps of rain allows us to change very deep-rooted patterning during the pandemic I had countless emails people saying rain save my life and I really understood uh what they meant it's had such an impact on me I remember when my mother first moved down to live with my husband and me and she was 82 and she had a lot that she needed from me a lot of a doctor's appointments and mostly just needed me to keep her company some and at the same time I had a whole lot going on on the work and teaching front and I started feeling increasingly stressed and I remember one day being at the computer and put I was writing a talk it was on loving kindness she walked into my office to show me an article and I barely looked up from the screen and so she very graciously put it down and and laughed and as I kind of looked up to see her retreating form I had this thought I don't know how long I'll have her so I decided to do a uh the practice of rain and got quiet and the r recognized was a feeling a sense of you know guilt and anxiety you know I'm just not coming through and the a allow I just let that be there rather than adding more judgment to it and the allow has this sense of this is this belongs just like the waves in the ocean this this belongs it's really letting it be and that allowed me to deepen my attention and begin to investigate and I started feeling the feelings in my body the tightness and I asked myself what am I believing and the belief was I'm failing I'm feeling my mother and I'm also going to fall short teaching the feelings in my body were a real squeeze in my heart and this this sense of pressure and tightness and as I opened to it I asked the question that really deepens investigation which is what do I need what is this vulnerable place need this place of of feeling you know squeezed and guilty and fearful and what I got was I just need to trust I need to trust my love I need to trust my goodness my heart you know and so I put my hand on my heart and this is a part of nurturing it often it makes it even more powerful and I just gave myself that message you know trust your heart trust your goodness it's okay and as I did that I just felt more space I felt more space more openness and so I stayed for a few moments and rested in a more spacious more tender awareness that's f after the rain you know there was a shift I I went from this being this you know guilty anxious person to the space of compassion of kindness and what I noticed in the days and weeks to come and I repeated rain I did what I call a light rain just I repeated it and it was shorter and very effective because I noticed when I was with my mom I was able to be really present I was able to really be with her and enjoy our big salads for dinner and our walks by the river and when she died it was a few years later three or four years later um deep grief of course I adored her but no regrets and I realized that rain saved my life moments with my mom when I did the rain practice I put my hand on my heart I gave myself a message and that's often a beautiful way of self-compassion to give ourselves a message that will bring some comfort and healing but sometimes we can't and I want a name here that self-compassion doesn't mean that we're offering ourselves compassion that a self is offering itself compassion you can draw on a larger source um I worked with an a vet who came back after being in Iraq and when we explored what would help him nurture a very very uh traumatized place in him it was the love of Jesus and and a man described being with the Dalai Lama and telling the Dalai Lama about his fears in the Dalai Lama said you know just let yourself be held in the heart of the Buddha and a physicist I was reading talks about touching a tree and feeling the nurturing there or the connection you can call on a friend you can call on a deity you can call on your ancestors I sometimes call on formless loving awareness some larger source what rain does when we offer ourselves attention and when we bring in that nurturing is a kind of spiritual re-parenting we're bringing the presence and kindness we need to heal and if you're more you know science oriented you might think of it that we're actually rewiring the brain with rain because it creates new neuronal Pathways to feeling empowered creative loving lucid okay friends let's do a brief practice we'll do what I call a light rain to give you a taste of it and wherever you are you might adjust how you're sitting so you can just know you're feeling comfortable at ease awake you might take a few full breaths letting your eyes close or your gaze be downcast and you might bring to mind a situation in your life that feels difficult where you turn on yourself in some way it might be in a relationship might be at work might be related to an addiction to a Health Challenge but somewhere some situation where you land up feeling judgmental and down on yourself Let Yourself Go to the most triggering moment of that and we begin a light rain by recognizing what's going on and you might just mentally whisper the word that most captures what's going on it might be judgment shame embarrassment fear anxiety anger and then allow it and that means in some way you're saying this belongs this is part of the experience of the moment letting it be and beginning to investigate it you know what am I believing when this is going on am I believing that I'm failing that I'm flawed that I'm creating pain for myself or for another and with whatever I'm believing watch the strongest feeling in the body going on you might feel your throat your chest your belly and just sense where you feel vulnerability where you feel tightness or activation and you might even let your face and your posture Express what you're feeling it's a powerful way to get more somatically connected and continue to investigate and feel right into the center of the vulnerability and ask yourself what do I need you know how does this part want me to be with it and explore nurturing you might put your hand on your heart especially if you've never done it vary the touch so it expresses kindness and just send some message inward that you think might be healing could be I care about the suffering our trust your heart trust your goodness or I'm here and I'm not leaving or it's okay you're enough whatever you sense will bring some healing and you can have it come from an outside source a friend a grandparent your dog the trees a deity formless loving awareness let that energy of kindness move through your hand right into your heart to wherever you feel vulnerable and then let go of all doings and sense the presence of tear since the shift from a flawed self to the the awakeness the awareness the tenderness noticing the gold noticing this tender presence that's more the truth of who you are than any limiting story or belief the more you trust this the more freedom creativity love aliveness you'll find in your life and take a few full breaths if your eyes are closed opening your eyes and the last part I've been focusing on inner healing and as we hold our own being with radical acceptance as we practice rain and come home into who we are that loving presence naturally extends to others we're able to see their vulnerability and see their gold and I've worked with so many parents been reactive with their children and done a kind of inner rain process and much more able to to see and respond to their children's unmet needs less judgmental you know and if work with so many people who are in conflict with Partners other people in their life and that inner work enables us to put down blame and really communicate in a much more intelligent open-hearted way and it takes practice we go into trance we disconnect from our own loving away cart in gold and then we're really looking through the filters of our culture our society we don't see others we we see their coverings if we're in our ego identify with our ego that's what we see in others so I'll share a final story that's been a real guide for me on the path and the story is told by a minister describing a family holiday trip and stopping at a restaurant that's nearly empty and she says she sat her son Eric her one-year-old in a high chair and suddenly she hears him squeal with Glee hi there two words you think sir one hi there his face is alive with excitement then she says I saw the source of his merriment and my eyes could not take it in all at once a tattered rag of a coat baggy pants gums as barrows Eric's hair uncombed unwashed his hands were flapping in the air around loose wrists hi there baby hi there big boy I see you Buster my husband and I exchanged the look that was a cross between what do we do and poor devil error continued to laugh and answer hi there every call was echoed this old geezer was creating a nuisance with my beautiful baby I shoved a cracker at Eric and he pulverized it in the tray I whispered why me our meal came and the nuisance continued now the old bum was shouting do you know patty cake attaboy you know peek-a-boo hey look he knows peek-a-boo wait in silence except Eric who was running through his repertoire for the admiring Applause of a skid row bum we had enough Dennis went to pay the check imploring me to get Eric and meet me in the parking lot I trundled Eric out of the high chair and looked toward the exit the old man sat poised and waiting his chair directly between me and the door Lord just let me out of here before he speaks to me or Eric I headed toward the door it soon became apparent that both the Lord and Eric had other plans as I drew closer to the man Eric had his eyes riveted to his best friend and leaned far over my arm reaching with both arms and a baby pick me up position in a split second of balancing my baby and turning to counter his weight I came eye to eye with the old man Eric was lunging for him arms spread wide the bum's eyes both asked and implored would you let me hold your baby there is no need for me to answer since Eric propelled himself from my arms to the mans suddenly a very old man and a very young baby were involved in a love relationship Eric laid his tiny head upon the man's ragged shoulder the Man's eyes closed and I saw tears hover beneath his lashes his aged hands full of grime and pain and hard labor gently so gently cradled my baby's bottom and stroked his back I stood awestruck the old man rocked and cradled Erica's arms for a moment and then his eyes opened and sat squarely on mine he said in a firm commanding voice you take care of this baby somehow I managed I will from a throat that contained a stone he pried Eric from his chest unwillingly longingly as though he was in pain I held my arms open to receive my baby and again the gentleman addressed me God bless you man you've given me my Christmas gift I said nothing more than a muttered thanks with Eric back in my arms I ran for the car Dennis wondered why I was crying and holding Eric so tightly and why I was saying my God my God forgive me foreign I've shared this story many times and each time it feels like a wake up you know we think society's thoughts we forget to look past the coverings towards the human heart and then our current world friends where there's so much dividedness and Trauma seeing others as different as bad as inferior create such violence around the world create such violence there's so much trance one of the great gifts we bring to the world is the dedication to see the gold in ourselves and in each other and that's the meaning of Namaste you know I see the sacred in you it allows us to be part of the healing it allows us to bridge divides and and bring forward the goodness the potential you know this capacity to see gold is the blessing of radical acceptance of learning to meet our moments with open-hearted presence it lets us truly live from Love I'd like to close with a short prayer this is written by the poet Diane Ackerman you might sit back and close your eyes and just take it in in the name of Daybreak and the eyelids of mourning and the wayfaring moon and the night when it departs I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature as a Healer of misery as a messenger of wonder as an architect of peace in the name of the son and its mirrors and the crowning seasons of the Firefly and the Apple I will honor all life wherever and in whatever form it may dwell on Earth my home and in the Mansions of the Stars thank you for your attention friends blessings [Music]

Channel: Tara Brach

Views: 173,935

Keywords: Tara Brach, dharmarain108108108, dharma, meditation, mindfulness, radical compassion, compassion, radical acceptance, radical, love, freedom

Id: fMHqL6R475E

Length: 39min 54sec (2394 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2022