Tara Brach | Repairing our Hearts

greetings and welcome my friends i'm glad you could be with us for this meditation and talk you'll find it available on my facebook and youtube pages and also imcws so it's wonderful to be together for this last class of 2020. it's really a perfect time to come into presents and open our hearts and turn towards this new year with uh with all the the hope and inspiration we can call on and we'll start our time together in this class with a guided meditation called the reign of self-compassion may it serve your heart so if you will take a moment to find your way of sitting that'll support you for the next 10-15 minutes adjusting your posture so you're feeling comfortable so you're relaxed at ease and also alert awake as you're ready you might close your eyes and let the attention go inward we begin by just breathing together extending our breath so that the in-breath now breathing in long and deep filling the chest and the lungs and a slow out breath feel the sensations of the breath leaving the nostrils inhaling again a deep full in-breath and a slow even out breath sense of letting go letting go letting go and once again inhaling deeply and that's slow out breath relaxing outward letting go and then allowing the breath to come back into a natural rhythm being aware of the presence that's right here the sense is awake and you might take a moment to scan through your body and sense what might want to let go just a little bit more right now it's very helpful to feel your face and let the eyes soften maybe bring a slight smile to the mouth to let go a bit in the shoulders see if you can soften let there be an openness to the chest and softening the belly letting this next breath be received in a softening belly this breath and now this one and again [Music] widening the tension so you can feel your whole body breathing opening to receive the breath relaxing settling with the out breath and again sensing the quality of presence it's right here and it's from presence that i invite you to scan your life and notice if there's a repeating situation going on that brings up emotional reactivity self-judgment or in some way you turn on yourself feeling whether it's self-aversion or just in some way that critical voice takes over some so scanning and looking for that where you might be turning on yourself not landing on something that is linked in with trauma because it won't serve you so well during this shorter meditation maybe something to do with a relationship with others maybe something to do with your habits your health something to do with work and when you've landed on something bring to mind the situation that most illustrates it something recent that might have happened where those feelings of self-judgment came up and visualize where you are when it's happening see the room you're in or if it's outside where you are and if there's somebody else involved see them their face what they might be saying so you reconnect with the actual experience some and sense what's the worst part of this for you the r of rain is to really pause and recognize okay what's happening and notice whatever is most predominant it may be as i mentioned that inner critical voice or maybe a feeling of fear anxiety shame agitation distress maybe there's criticism but also numbness to recognize it really helps to whisper what you're aware of you might just name it self-judgment self-aversion anger a mental whisper and allowing is just what it sounds like that you're letting whatever's coming up be there these are the waves of the moment and it's like saying okay this belongs right in this moment so you're acknowledging the reality without pushing it away and you can even mentally whisper something like yes or this belongs or let be just to allow space for what's here and now you can begin a investigation and that's a somatic primarily somatic in your body with curiosity and gentleness so bring your interest to okay so how is this living inside me and as a way in you might ask yourself what am i believing what am i believing right now am i believing that i failed am i believing that i'm a bad person am i believing i'll never change am i believing that others will reject me that others couldn't possibly respect me a belief might come up easily and if it doesn't no worries whatever comes up see if you can go to where the feelings are strongest now in the body so if you're believing that you're a failure that you're deficient flawed how does that feel in your body what's it like do you feel it in your throat your chest or your belly and to help yourself get in your body wherever you feel anything a little more strongly put your hand there it's as if you're inviting whatever's there just to come forward in your body breathe with it when you're feeling the self-judgment or when you're feeling aversive you might let your face take the expression that represents it experiment with this it can be helpful especially if you're dissociated from your body and let your posture express what you're feeling so you're finding your way into your body into that place in your body where you feel most vulnerable you might ask yourself what am i unwilling to feel what's the worst part of this and then feel into your body breathe with what's there and the last part of investigating is to sense what is this part of me that feels terrible that feels vulnerable what does it most need how does it want me to be with it if it could have anything from the world right now from your higher self or the world what would it want would it want to be seen to be understood to be loved to be cherished to be forgiven accepted what flavor of love would most comfort and nourish and as you feel into that because this is the transition into the end of rain which is nurture let yourself be witnessing and listening from your most awake wise heart just sense what does that part of you most need to remember or trust and see if you can offer some message of care you might put your hand on your heart if it's not always there and you might even vary the touch so it's tender so you're communicating presence and tenderness even if you don't feel it just go through the motions and send a message that you think will most be comforting it could be simply you're okay you're enough trust yourself trust your goodness or it might be i'm i'm here and i'm not leaving i'm with you you're held in love offering self-compassion knowing that even if you're going through the motions there's some deep part of you that wants to be able to hold yourself with love and if it's very difficult to offer to yourself you might explore calling on some larger source of loving perhaps the love or wisdom that flows through someone you trust like a friend a grandparent a teacher a healer maybe a spiritual figure maybe your dog it may be that you're calling on a formless presence to something you into it as the love of the universe just imagine that loving from the universe or through a certain being flowing into you through your hand into the vulnerable place for some it helps to imagine light flowing in or warmth and it helps to have the intention to receive to let in love let it into your cells and the spaces between your cells let it wash through your entire being the final part of the practice is called after the rain and this is when you just sense the quality of the presence that's emerged perhaps you'll notice there's a bit more space more tenderness a little more openness and freedom and maybe just a small degree it may be very profound but whatever it is notice the shift from when you started as the self-judging self and the quality of presence that's here who are you beyond the judging cell for the self that feels judged and what would your experience be like if you really trusted nothing is wrong with you take some moments to simply rest in a more spacious and kind awareness knowing this awareness as the innermost truth of what you are [Music] you might open your eyes and sense that you can take in whatever you see with this present heart let your senses be awake so you're seeing and hearing and feeling the world with an open-hearted awareness and if you'd like you can move around just listen to your body and sense whatever will serve and these are the moments i will be making a few announcements i begin by saying please check my website tarabrock.com for all my virtual offerings and also to let you know that my book radical compassion that came out last year is now available starting today in paperback so if you don't have it i hope you'll consider getting it for yourself or gifting a dear one who's entering the new year as a way of supporting them i also want to let you know that january 6th will be the first class of the new year and in that class we'll be exploring the arctic refuges of awareness truth and love and we'll be doing it through some stories and illustrations and reflections and we'll end the class with what's called a refuge ceremony and it can be done by anyone who feels drawn and it's a beautiful way to start the new year now to participate please bring a candle and a 24 inch red string okay final announcements for now the just to remind you that before each of our classes there's a movement class and afterwards there's a discussion group and you can find the information the call-in information tarbrock.com backslash class i also want to remind you to check imcw.org for live stream offerings from our local teachers and the affinity groups this coming week are women veterans teens and the teens of color mindfulness group finally each week i remind you that we don't charge for these classes for the meditations or talks and whatever you offer it's called donna which is generosity in pali whatever you offer if you can offer ten dollars great and if you can offer more to help cover for those who can't pay that would be really wonderful and if you don't have money to pay just know you're fully welcome regardless okay with that we'll take a short pause and then the talk will begin thank you [Music] greetings friends and welcome back right here now so our second almost full day together and i just want to start really by bowing to you to honor your practice i have felt so much a sense of the sincerity and that presence and space that we're creating together so it's delicious and you know especially in the midst of such a reactive spinning hurting world right now it really matters that we're coming together like this in this relative quietness i know it's not quiet for everyone um more stillness more connecting with hearts you know we miss so much when we're preoccupied when we're speeding along on automatic and you know just reacting to daily stressors i received an email a woman wrote to me about her four-year-old and she was buckling her daughter in after you know typically harried morning two working parents baby young children two different schools you get the picture and this is what she wrote she said i noticed my daughter's nails were getting long and i told her we'd have to cut them tonight and started talking about the other things that would need to happen in the evening like taking a bath and detangling her curls and she said okay mom but let's care about now so i just love that because it's such a beautiful description of our practice caring about what's here now so this talk uh we'll be exploring really our primary challenge to this open-hearted presence this caring about now and it happens when now is unpleasant and we have this very deep conditioning when it's unpleasant as we know to react by pulling away by contracting and also to react by turning on ourselves especially when emotional pain physical pain is strong and ongoing it often comes with self-aversion and i invite you to check that out so the title of the talk is repairing our hearts and if we want to understand how we perpetuate disrepair suffering we need to begin to recognize in the background of what's going on the stories that we're telling ourselves in other words we need to see how we move from a feeling that's unpleasant to judging it as bad something bad's happening and then moving on even further to saying something's wrong with me and it happens very quickly you know something's wrong something's wrong with me and we call it the second arrow from the buddha's teaching that the first arrow is some painful experience and the second arrow and this is what's critical is this slapping on of a story about what's happening there's a poly word i love it's papancha and it's that chain of reactivity the proliferation that happens so rather than just feeling something's unpleasant we immediately start trying to figure it out push it away and blame usually and usually we blame ourselves and we end up solidifying our identity as a flawed separate self in that chain reaction now i just want to name that of course the story about badness extends to others you know we often blame others and say you're bad and we blame life life's bad but deep down if there's any rejecting of the present moment we're not liking ourself we're mistrusting ourself and in buddhist psychology any moment of resisting what's right here of wanting life different is suffering it could be very subtle suffering because we're in some habitual way of distracting our could be very profound but either way when we want life different we cannot inhabit and live from the love and the awareness that's our true nature so i want to tell you about a friend of mine some of you might have heard of him dan gottlieb he's a psychologist he's an author radio host from philadelphia and i interviewed him for my podcast when he was 33 he had a very successful career family then he had an accident that landed him quadriplegic um chronic pain this so this is almost 40 years ago and at first after the accident he wrapped what was going on in many many stories i'll have a terrible life i can't live with this then his wife died soon after more pain and it landed as a sense of personal badness i'm in pain and and there's something really wrong with me and life is bad and he started realizing that his stories were what was creating the suffering that it was just pain but he was adding on all these layers of stories to the unpleasantness and he realized that without the stories he trusted that he could deal with his life he could have a good life so the reason i share this is because over the years he's really trained himself to release the story of badness especially personal badness and dan's emerged to be i would say one of the most happy grateful open-hearted beings i've ever met the classic saying is that pain and loss are inevitable but suffering is optional and if we add to unpleasant experience that this is bad it shouldn't be happening i'm bad you're bad then we get locked in to suffering and one friend describes that we're arguing with reality and that we'll always lose so i think of this kind of contraction against reality as a way that our being in a very organismic way is saying no and that all selfing the whole sense of self organizes around this basic sense of no right now is not okay and again i invite you to check it out and this time maybe we'll do it together a brief reflection if you will so in some way to let the attention turn inward and you might scan your life for something that's challenging that's going on right now most of us have something that can bring up a sense of unpleasantness so i'm actually inviting you to get in touch not with something that's traumatic if it's traumatic not now but something that's difficult in your life that brings up unpleasant feelings it could be a relational conflict an addictive behavior something going on at work something with family that's really disturbing to you and take a moment to remind yourself of really what brings up the unpleasantness and scan now for how you might be saying no to this unpleasantness in other words sense how you're relating to the unpleasantness is there an undercurrent that this shouldn't be here this is bad that you want it gone that it has implications about how you are who you are that you're not okay are you adding on a judgment are you blaming someone else and wherever you sense no not liking this not liking myself or having this happen whatever it is notice how your body experiences no you might even send the word no through just sensing the contraction sensing what happens in your body with no i don't like this i don't want this this needs to go away this fear this hurt this shame it's not okay and sense how your mind experiences no what goes on in your mind when there's some resisting of what's happening and what about your heart when in some way you're resisting or contracting against something going on and when there's no what's your experience of yourself do you like yourself now take a few full breaths and let the unpleasantness be here still aware of what feels unpleasant what's disturbing what's scary what's embarrassing what's irritating but this time send the message of yes which is pure allowing what you're allowing and saying yes to is nothing external to you you're saying yes to the feelings that come up in your body heart mind around it when there's unpleasant feelings what happens when you say yes to the unpleasantness yes doesn't mean i like this i want it to keep going yes means acknowledging the reality that's here letting the waves that are in the ocean be here it like to say yes and explore deepening the yes energetically so you're truly allowing life to be as it is what happens in your body your heart your mind to sense who you are when yes is there and you can continue to pay attention and sense the difference between resisting reality and allowing reality if you'd like if your eyes are closed and you want to open them again it's fine many people when i ask them to report in on what they noticed will say well when no was tight and contracted and i didn't like myself and yes there was more space and movement and inner freedom i also want to note that for many people saying yes doesn't mean the unpleasantness goes away you can think of it like a sign curve you know that goes up and down and that that sometimes you'll catch let's say sadness or fear on its way up and you say yes and it actually gives it permission to continue its movement up and then down it lets it move through i know for myself if i say yes to sadness often i'll move into tears now there's an important piece here around trauma which is that it's not always wise if you feel trauma lurking to say yes because you can trigger overwhelm sometimes saying no no not now no we're going to wait till we're more resourced this isn't the time what you're actually doing is saying yes to your no yes to the boundaries that for the moment are important in moving towards freedom but ultimately our freedom is a pathway of saying yes to the moment of not adding layers of judgment stories of wrongness so our theme here again is waking up from the way we say no to our own being our self-aversion something's wrong with me and some of you know i've been writing and teaching for decades on this this habit of believing in a bad self or an unworthy self and i've called it the trance of unworthiness feeling inadequate like we're failures not lovable and how it can take over and i as many people i ended up writing and teaching about what i was a master of which was this is my own you know complete realm of knowing dukkha or suffering of being such a harsh critic of you know this is my early 20s primarily that it came to its full blossom you know i was never doing enough for others i was selfish i was my addictive and out of control and couldn't stand my behaviors and my eating behaviors and my body and the list went on and on and so my first decade really of doing yoga and meditation was really discovering the different pathways of presence and compassion that could help me to embrace and befriend the moments my own being i remember when i wrote radical acceptance i was touring and i gave a talk in boulder and when i walked into the building where they were promoting the talk there was a big poster of me big picture of my face and the caption was something is wrong with me what a welcome to a new place to teach i mean at that time that's when john bradshaw was really bringing into the cultural consciousness the enormity of suffering from shame many of you know of him and one of my favorite cartoons is there are two bears that are talking and they've got this skinny bearded guy who's trapped and one of them sang to the other his name is bradshaw he says he understands i came from a single parent den with inadequate role models he senses that my dysfunctional behavior is shame-based and he urges me to let my inner cub heal i say we eat them so we know some of the reasoning that's going on but we don't want to face we really don't want to face the feelings of personal badness and the reason is that it's not just a belief that i'm not okay it's deep in the body as a felt sense it's deep in the body and so that's why it's so it's become much more recognized around the culture most therapists would say it's the greatest form of emotional suffering another cartoon for you is one therapist saying these feelings of unworthiness are common among the unworthy that's the double bind and george carlin acknowledged it when he said i always knew i wanted to be somebody but i should have been more specific okay so this is the trance of unworthiness and i call it a trance because a trance means that we're in a confined distorted perception and unworthiness feeling down on ourselves is so familiar that we're often not aware that under the line as jonathan would say that we're telling ourselves a limiting story about ourselves and nowadays for me when whenever i feel grim or i'm in a bad mood i very quickly will ask myself okay what am i believing you know what story am i telling myself because as soon as i can catch it this is the thing about trance as soon as you can really see it you're not as in it that's the blessing of mindfulness we wake up to the awareness that can include what's going on but isn't identified it's a trance we're not aware of how much the story of bad self affects every part of our life how to feeds relational insecurities um so many of we've talked about in groups how when we're down on ourselves it's very hard to let in love again i invite you to explore that very very difficult to trust that people can love us feeling like we're falling short and unworthy fuels addictive behaviors and it puts a real ceiling on our creativity and our empowerment because we just don't trust ourselves and in the deepest way in any moment that you're judging yourself you're cut off from seeing the truth of who you are your your beingness your love so again why is it called a trance well we're unaware that we're telling stories to ourselves we're usually unaware of the clutch inside us about it we're unaware of how many parts of our life it's affecting and one of the things we're unaware of is how so many others are caught in the same trance you know instead we feel quite separate and alone if any of you right now are really feeling uh coming into consciousness about feeling unlovable or in some way like you're falling short it feels very personal and we forget how many others are caught in the same constellation of feelings and just to bring that more alive i'd like to ask you if you will right now to go to gallery view and i'm doing it right now too so here we are and we're talking about the trance of unworthiness and we're doing this in community and i'm wondering this is of course an invitation there's no obligation how many of you could say that you really have observed your own being going into the trance of unworthiness here are a lot in your life just to raise your hand so others can see and if you'd like take a moment to scroll and see how many hands are up to see and of course it's not going to be everyone but just notice the trance of unworthiness club here we go so if you want to you can put your hands down but take a moment to kind of let your mind register and your heart register how many hands are up and how it's not my suffering of the trance of unworthiness it's our suffering it's a collective suffering and to perhaps next time you're feeling really really stuck in it just remember looking on that screen it can really help we're so caught sometimes in thinking we're personally pathological and it's really really bigger than that so a regular question i get because i talk so much about this is how come we're so quick to turn on ourselves how come it goes so deep how come self-compassion can be so difficult and to name that we are relational beings we learn about who we are we really learn about who we are and our worth and how we fit in or don't fit in through others it's others mirroring that tells us about ourselves and as i think many of us know it's very rare to have unconditional acceptance and love for being just who we are rather our direct messengers the caretakers whoever brought us up were very much imprinted by our larger society which is so full of fear and aggression and competition that the messages that we got were not that unconditional acceptance but rather came through the filters of fear and we're you know we're in a very competitive society most of us and there's very few ways of natural belonging i mean think of it our families often feel very conditional whether we really feel loved and accepted and then we look at school or work or the larger society and there's all these standards about how we should be to really belong to really be good you know a certain kind of body and a certain kind of looks and personality and behaviors and you know then it goes on to all the the levels of the hierarchy that we know about with class you know wealth skin color religion sexual orientation gender id there's very few real unconditional ways of belonging in our culture even in spiritual communities if you look close there's standards and reactivity and what happens when there's not a unconditional way that we just belong is our survival brain gets activated and we go around chronically evaluating like how am i doing now maybe you've noticed that how often you're assessing how am i doing how am i doing to try to meet those standards in some way now what i'm describing is hugely exacerbated this sense of the feeling of unworthiness that there's no way of natural belonging and all the activation around that is hugely exacerbated if we're in a non-dominant population if we belong to a non-dominant population the most clear example in the united states is being a black person in our racial caste system you know how many messages daily from the culture from schools from workplace from our what we might say as our injustice system how many messages that go out saying you're inferior you're not mattering you're not fully human and centuries of violation creates this ongoing sense not just of being relationally unsafe but being physically endangered now to broaden it out and say i speak as a white woman in a ptsd society most everyone i know feels some degree of relationally not being safe fearing rejection and many people i know feel physically unsafe deeply severed belonging so the what the question is for us is what are the grounds of really feeling belonging feeling at home with ourselves what allows us to feel at home with ourselves and i often think well what does an infant most need to feel belonging and there's two qualities one is the infant and a young child growing up one quality is to be seen to really be mirrored the goodness the consciousness the aliveness how they are mirrored seen and the other is to be loved for what scene to be seen and to be loved so again a just a brief reflection so you can kind of check in and ground this in your life and by the way this reflection and all reflections please know that if anything feels like this is triggering me in some way that's not healthy please put it aside and turn your attention elsewhere i really trust you to honor your own sensibilities about this consider for a moment your caregivers whoever you grew up with in the earliest years and you might for a moment just sense how they were imprinted by society their degree of privilege belonging our sense of violation and exclusion and now take a moment to go back in time and be young be six years old seven years old eight years old something in that time frame and you're with caregivers one or two and you're in a room that in some ways familiar take a moment to take in the room remind yourself of something that connects you back and then see your caregiver or caregivers a bit of a distance away but see what their faces look like their facial expressions and sense their eyes and they're looking at you and they're seeing what kind of person you are and this is what they're you just ask yourself um what would their message be if they were saying well here's what we love or appreciate about you what do they like or appreciate about you and if their eyes are sending the message here's what we're critical of here's what we want different to be loved to be approved be this way they're telling you how to be and just sense how you feel about yourself and their presence and notice if there's anything [Music] as you sense that that's blocking feeling accepted and loved and you might ask yourself how and where is this familiar in my current life just let that inquiry be there and you're always free to journal at any moment on these kind of things feel free if your eyes are closed and you want to open them to do that or stay with your eyes closed so the antidote to the trance of unworthiness is really what a child most needs to feel belonging it's being seen and being loved and this is really our inner work now let me just say that it's also relational art that we need to feel that from others and it's not an either arts both end but it is inner work to learn to see ourselves clearly and love what is seen i often refer to this as spiritual re-parenting this bringing the mindfulness and compassion to the place of wounding so let's look now and we'll spend a lot of the rest of this reflection at how this works how we begin to deepen our commitment to loving ourselves into healing and the first piece of this is that when we register that we're stuck in some way when we register that we're telling ourselves that story of you're failing you're bad something's wrong with you or when we notice that we're stuck in that familiar anxious feeling or grim or ashamed feeling or when we're seeing the addictive behavior that we know numbs us that we pause this is the beginning of breaking out of trance i often call it the sacred art of pausing because if you pause then you can deepen attention in a way that dismantles the habits that lock you in suffering now most of you or many of you probably know the famous quote by viktor frankl that in between the stimulus and the response there is a space and in that space is your power and your freedom and what's so cool now is that neuroscience is really showing how that happens that if you're triggered and you pause even for a very short time you can interrupt the pattern of reactivity that locks us locks you in suffering you can just in very small ways start calming the limbic system and move towards more integration just even a short pause and i often think of rain as a longer pause that you come into a stuck place you find yourself in a stuck place and you pause and then you take the steps of rain recognizing allowing investigating nurturing and then that after the rain moment where you really sense the presence that's here that's a very deliberate uh skillful way of pausing and unpacking and processing and freeing up the old patterns so again for those of you new to rain recognize allow investigate and nurture and what we do then is we begin to recognize the signals and we pause and the first two steps recognize and allow i think of as a way of saying okay here's what's going on and yes yes instead of contracting allowing it to be here a very good number of years ago i was at a retreat with a man who had alzheimer's and he was a psychologist and a long-term meditator and he described early onset how he was giving a talk and he went completely blank during the talk and this huge unpleasant feelings feelings we normally would go no to and contract and turn on ourselves for but here's what he did when he went blank he paused and instead of that chain of reactivity he just started naming what he was aware of you know heart pounding and he put his palms together and bowed and then he named the next thing he was aware of squeeze in the chest bowed and then he named the next thing embarrassed bowed and this kept going until he started to calm down and then he named that calming down bow and i remember him telling me how at the end one student said you know nobody has ever taught us the dharma this way and what had he done well he paused and he did the first two steps of reign he recognized what was going on and he allowed i love the the image of the bow because it's such a way of honoring reality that this is the wave in the ocean in this moment but what that does and here's why i'm taking some time with it is right from the get-go if you can name what's happening and allow it then rather than solidifying the identification that happens when you argue with reality you actually keep things fluid and you deepen the presence that's there so you can then if it's a sticky painful place you can begin to investigate now when you're caught in the trance of unworthiness generally you need to do all of rain recognizing and allowing's not enough we usually need to deepen our attention further and there's a lot of misunderstandings about investigation and jonathan really covered a number of them so i'm just going to name a few a little more about investigating because it's not cognitive most people think it has some figuring out to do and it's not that the purpose of investigating is to feel what we've been resisting it's to really connect with reality and so the inquiry you know what am i unwilling to feel and i recommend at any time that you feel like you're kind of stuck just to toss that one in what am i unwilling to feel and of course it takes courage being with vulnerability but investigating helps to bring you to a more full somatic contact with the wound that's there and here's the deal that compassion arises out of full somatic contact the more you're in touch with the rawness the more tender your heart gets so the challenge is if we're very good at dissociating we also dissociate from our heart we can't feel that compassion now again a reminder that if there's trauma and there is more dissociation with trauma then the process of investigating and reconnecting needs to be really gradual and really respecting the fear that's there and respecting that it can become overwhelming and one of the ways i think about it if you're dealing with trauma think of nurturing the end of rain as the entire atmosphere of the process and as you are doing the process nurture over and over finding your pathway to safety or to feeling regulated or to feeling loved and then continue after that so keep on nurturing okay a few more things about investigating the art of investigating is to move from thoughts to the felt sense that's the trajectory and that means you need to kind of be aware of well what what's the background belief going on what am i believing and then rather than riding that train in some way say i don't have to believe my beliefs and then come into your body and i'll share with you that there are many people when they leave a week-long residential retreat the biggest single takeaway is that they come out of the retreat in some way more aware i am not my thoughts i don't have to believe my thoughts and that is an opening to freedom i often use that phrase from a sokni rinpoche tibetan teacher thoughts are real but they're not the truth they're not true in other words they're real they're appearing in the mind and they bring up feelings in the body but they're not reality itself they're a representation so i invite you to explore that to say i don't have to believe my thoughts and come into the body to the throat the chest the belly put your hand there that's the beginning of nurturing just by accompanying what's going on breathe with it and again for you to know that the more you willingly open to the rawness that's there the more you'll experience that tenderness of compassion i'd like to give you an example of reign and what i'd like to emphasize here is that the big challenge people talk about is well i got to the end but i really couldn't nurture myself i couldn't feel any compassion and so what i want to remind you of is that nurturing doesn't have to be that you are nurturing yourself you can nurture from whatever source of love comes to your awareness it may be your high self your own buddha nature your awakened heart mind but it might also be someone else and it might be a spiritual figure okay a story so one woman that i worked with on a month-long vipassana retreat and this was out west some years ago a woman named shahara she's of course given me permission to share the story and shahara just passed away last month so in a way i'm sharing her story because i so honored her and it touched me to recall this she was at this retreat and she was encountering fears and insecurities and sorrow and the most painful was this personal sense of failure that so many of us have and so we'd recognize and allow and investigate and feel in the body some but it was hard because the thoughts of something's wrong with me were pretty strong so it was hard to self-nurture well one day shahara came into an interview with a really cheerful smile and she said to me i went to church this morning and i was really surprised you know i said you did and she said oh yes i went to church and we we sang the gospel and it was rich and beautiful and so my mind was trying to imagine it how she was leaving our secluded campus and getting in a car and driving on the highway and gathering with others who are singing it wasn't exactly part of our retreat format part of our protocol but you know i'm a pragmatist so i figure whatever works so um she went on and she said oh i was feeling that same fear and failure while i was at church i could feel it really intensely right here you know the clutch in the heart so i started praying for love and i found myself wrapping jesus like a shawl around me and the peace just filled my heart and i haven't taken the shawl off that loves warming me up and it's reminding me i am love i am love okay so with an inner jolt for me i realized shahara had gone to church in a very energetic metaphorical way and had been blessed so she continued and said well and i'm wearing this shawl while i'm walking those hills and while i'm sipping my tea and standing in line at lunch and she gave me a kind of mischievous look and said yeah even in the shower tar you know i'm wearing that jaw so we laughed you know she knew i had to track her a bit and we had we had that kind of fun together um so as i mentioned um shahar is not with us and form but her spirit is and the message of this story is that there are many ways that we can find nurturing and each of us everyone i know has to kind of find and customize and refine our own pathways and sometimes again it's from ourselves we put our hand on our heart and offer it inward and sometimes it's a feeling of it flowing in from some larger sense of belonging but ultimately it's the same field of loving you know we see the the reaching out to a larger belonging a larger source in the story of the buddha in the morning of his enlightenment that he you know he had woken up through all the challenges and the final challenge that came at him as he kind of woke up that morning under the bodhi tree is just what we're exploring in this talk is self-doubt so what he did was he called on the earth goddess which is this larger belonging the web of life and love to bear witness and there are many versions of the myth but after calling on the earth goddess this this web of loving life uh the the goddess became visible through thunder and lightning and and the god of the shadow side mara who was really you know creating all the doubts withdrew and that's when the buddha realized true freedom and i'm sharing this myth because it's so deep in us this doubt about ourselves about our intrinsic goodness and just like the buddha we need to call in love we just need to call in love whether it's from the earth goddess or from our ancestors or friends one friend here described how when she was stuck she'd stroke her cat and that would reconnect her and give her the the energy and the space to open up to what's here so we each find our our pathways and then the key is to practice the pathway a lot because whatever you practice gets stronger i know for myself you know what works for me is envisioning a field of love and light very intimate kind of presence and just a sense that presence blessing me you know kissing me on the brow holding me dear and i invoke it so regularly thousands and thousands of times that it's very immediate that that loving presence can be here so practice it it gets stronger the mindfulness and compassion of rain helps undo the trance but often people do rain and they miss what i think is probably the most critical moment which is after the four steps which each have some doing to them i call it after the rain where the key moments are to just stay and notice the quality of presence that's a that's emerged and notice the shift from where you started which is usually a very solid separate deficient sense of self to this presence that doesn't really have a boundary and that's often very tender and you begin to trust that this presence is more the truth of who you are than any story you've ever been telling yourself getting familiar with this presence trusting this presence that's the pathway of freedom so during after the rain it's like for sahara the reminder i am love we realize who we are so our inquiry in this talk really is how to repair our heart when we're stuck in in self-rejection or self-doubt and we need this kind of inner pathway of of spiritually repairing ourselves this inner rain but i also want to name that the same wounding and need for repairs happening on a societal level when there's a rejection a violation of parts of the whole and i mentioned early on we're a traumatized society there's no unconditional belonging all of us feel a degree of severed belonging and one of the most immediate compelling places of severed belonging is race centuries of violation we need collective pathways of responding to societal suffering because as long as it's there it will keep imprinting each of our lives so i want to be in this closing part of this talk name a very beautiful example of this kind of collective repair work because the longer i practice and teach the more i see it that we can't separate our inner work from societal work and the example that has been very much inspiring me over the last couple of years is brian stevenson who's a lawyer for those on death row as a social justice activist deeply wise being and he helped create the legacy museum which is built on a site in montgomery alabama where enslaved people were once warehoused and there's exhibits that really bring to life the enslavement and the racial terror lynchings and the continued rampant incarceration all the violations of black people's bodies and minds he created this museum with the understanding we need places where we can have rituals of facing truth and holding with an awake heart just the way we need to do an inner practice where we face truth and hold with tenderness we need to do it collectively for the collective wounds he shares one particular story that i'll share with you um that they'd been doing a initiative where they'd have people go to lynching sites and collect soil from the lynching site and put it in a jar and he describes how in the museum they have hundreds of jars of soil collected from these sites with the name of the lynching victim the date very powerful and it gives people an opportunity to do something tangible to go and do something restorative redemptive so people go to these places these lynching sites and collect that soil and he describes one middle-aged black woman who was really nervous about going to a lynching site by herself but she did it they gave her the jar and i'll read you we gave her the memo she went out to this lynching site which was in a remote area she got really nervous but she decided to do it she went to the place where the lynching took place she was about to start digging when a truck drove by there was this white man in the truck who slowed down and stared at her and then she said the truck stopped and turned around and drove back by the man stared at her some more and then she said the truck stopped and this big white guy got out and started walking toward her she was very nervous and we tell people that you don't have to explain what you're doing if you want to say you're just getting dirt for your garden feel free to say that and that's what she intended to do but when this white man walked up to her and he said what are you doing she said something got hold of me and i turned to that man i said i'm digging soil because this is where a black man was lynched in 1931 and i'm going to honor his life and she said she was so scared that she started digging really fast and then the man stood there and he said does that paper talk about the lynching and she said yes it does then he said can i read it and she gave the man the paper and he stood there reading while she was digging and then he put the paper down and stunned her by asking would it be okay if i helped you and then she told me that this white man got into his knees and she offered him the little plow to dig the soil and he said no no no use that and he started throwing his hands into the soil with such force and his hands were getting coated with this black soil and they were turning black and he was putting them in the jar but he kept throwing his hands and it moved her and she said the next thing she knew she had tears running down her face and he stopped and he said oh i'm so sorry i'm upsetting you and she said no no no no you're blessing me and they kept putting the soil in the jar and they got the jar almost full and she noticed toward the end that the man was slowing down and that her shoulders were shaking and she turned and she looked and she saw the man had tears running down his face and she stopped and she put her hand on his shoulder she said are you all right and that's when the man said to her he said no no i'm just so worried it might have been my grandparents that were involved in lynching this man and she said they both sat there with tears running down their face no beautiful things like that don't always happen brian writes when you tell the truth about history but he goes on he says but until we commit to some acts like that until we tell the truth we deny ourselves the beauty of redemption the beauty of restoration it's still hard for me to read that story it just brings up this longing that together we face the truth of history and what continues today that we hold this uh pain in a way that moves us to repair that we care enough to repair to realize true belonging and so today we're exploring caring about repairing our own hearts that it takes commitment if you are turned on yourself and through this retreat you deepen your dedication and say i'm not going to believe my thoughts i'm going to feel what's here i'm going to really feel what's here and hold it with kindness your heart will wake up and if we together do that if we see where the collective wounds are where the horrors of our history are still unfolding and together we let ourselves feel let ourselves feel our hearts will bring us to respond in a caring way so i want to close if we can together just in a simple way invite you to in whatever way helps you turn your attention inward feel your breath feel your body breathing let yourself come back right here right now listening to your heart feeling your heart sensing what might be asking for attention in this moment sensing any way you may have turned on yourself in the last days and the last moments and if you'd like to put your hand on your heart please do you just sense that in this moment you can offer some message and some energetic care some tenderness inward and if that's hard to feel it coming from some larger source just let it come in and since who you are when you're offering love inward when you're letting yourself receive a bit sense who you'd be if you didn't believe anything was wrong who would you be a favorite verse from roomie i must have been incredibly simple or drunk or insane to sneak into my own house and steal money to climb over the fence and take my own vegetables but no more i've gotten free of that ignorant fist that was pinching and twisting my secret self the universe and the light of the stars come through me i am the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival into that open heart space now sensing the the boundless field of heart space that includes all beings no superior no inferior just sensing the sweetness truth and grace that comes when we sense our belonging to this field of loving awareness taking a few full breaths bring yourself right here with your eyes open if they've been closed so i want to thank you for your attention and your beautiful hearts offering you all blessings you

Channel: Insight Meditation Community of Washington, D.C.

Views: 11,818

Keywords: IMCW, Tara Brach, Jonathan Foust, Hugh Byrne, Insight, Meditation, Dharma Talk, Washington DC, Live Stream

Id: ec_wqmOSt6Q

Length: 80min 9sec (4809 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020