Tara Brach | Shame, Healing and Transformation

welcome my friend to our class you'll find this available on my Facebook and YouTube pages and I am cw's as well so I'd like to again welcome you here and thank you for being part of this I just feel like it's such a beautiful way for us to connect hearts and minds and really on all continents I'm going to start all over again welcome my friends to our class and you'll find this available on my Facebook and YouTube pages I am cw's as well so I'd like to begin just by thanking you for being here it really gladdens me to have us connect in this way those of you coming from all parts around the world and we will begin with our meditation and this meditation is the title is calling on our inner bodhisattva and as many of you know bodhisattva is an awakened being and we're really calling on the most evolved wise loving parts of ourselves some call it their future self because it's really who's manifesting what's unfolding in us so feel free to use any term that works for you as we explore this in the meditation please find a comfortable way to sit and as you settle close your eyes and feel your sitting posture so that you're alert and at ease we begin together breathing together you might take a nice long deep in-breath and that slow out-breath that allows you to feel a releasing a letting go inhaling again full deep in-breath and a slow out-breath letting go letting go and again inhaling deeply and since the out-breath that you can let go of any thoughts that are unnecessary letting go nice full deep in-breath letting go of body tensions the most obvious whatever is accumulated and breathing in and with the out-breath letting go of tightness armoring around the heart letting the breath resume in a natural way natural rhythm I'm still sense with the in-breath that you're taking in you're letting in healing energy receptive with the in-breath it's like a balloon that's swelling a bit now with the out-breath got deflating letting go releasing I'm continuing to breathe in this way and gently scanning through your body noticing the more subtle areas of tightness or tension it's helpful to check the area of the brow letting the brow be smooth let the eyes be soft it helps to have a very slight but real smile at the lips and relax the tongue let it fill the lower palate and relax down to the base of the tongue so you can feel the whole mouth lips tongue gums teeth awake with sensation let those micro muscles in the face all be relaxed allowing the shoulders to relax back and down I'm feeling the awareness inside the shoulders allowing whatever knots or tension might be there to float an awareness to naturally untangle soften dissolve and it can help you to accompany this with the breath it says you breathe in you're receiving the breath in that area and with the out-breath relaxing from the inside out whatever is in the area of the shoulders softening the hands and then soften again perhaps feeling the breath and the hands feeling the aliveness and the hands let there be an openness to the chest breathing in and out of the heart as you breathe in letting the heart be touched with awareness receptive as you breathe out releasing letting go of any tightness or tension that might be keeping the heart closed in the same way feeling the breath of the belly as the breath comes in softening opening receiving and as the breath goes out letting go of any blocks to a full flow of energy breathing into your back upper back letting go with the out-breath and the mid back and the lower back letting the pelvic region be filled with awareness breathing opening letting go I wear the land the volume of the legs the sensations that fill the feet so that as you know wide and the attention you can feel this whole body breathing with the in-breath filling this whole energy body with awareness and with the out-breath letting go of anything the blocks the full flow of energy flow of aliveness breathing and resting in this awake presence where the changing flow of life sounds sensations feelings than in the background this witnessing awake presence it's natural that the attention will wander find yourself drifting and thoughts of the future or past or it's kind of a dreamlike reverie and when there's that noticing the possibility is to choose to gently arrive back again in presence to listen to the sounds that are actually right here to again feel that movement of the breath breathing into the body perhaps re letting go through the shoulders and the hands the belly and the heart again feeling that quality of hereness the wakefulness the presence that can include changing experience witnessing feeling with kindness what's here this is the the source of what we might call the inner Bodhisattva this wakeful kind presence now as a way of more intentionally calling forward our inner Bodhisattva you might sense ahead in time 10 years 1520 and that you're going to encounter a kind of the manifestation of this inner Bodhisattva or what you might call your future self and older wiser awake version of yourself who you are when the self preoccupation is gone who you are when there is the possibility of loving without holding back when wisdom can shine through so visualize yourself you might visualize your future selfs home picture where your future self is in this home and how this older more involved awake self looks perhaps clothing hair facial expression I'm sensing that your current self is about to encounter is there in that presence notice the look in their eyes as you meet the welcome the unconditional friendliness notice what their presence is like how it feels to be with them that this is the inner Bodhisattva in its evolved manifested state and feeling into your current life and since where you might get stuck in a smaller place since what wants a healing attention right now in your life and it might be something that brings up self judgment that disconnects you from that inner Bodhisattva or maybe when you get caught in fear our anger [Music] shame it might be something coming up around the uncertainties in our world the danger the racial violence it might be something coming up in a personal relationship at work with your finances your health addictive behavior whatever it is just notice a place in your life that that wants your healing attention the healing attention of your inner Bodhisattva and take some moments to connect with that experience it happens in a certain place see the setting when you get triggered where you are the room you're in or if you're outside what's happening and if there's someone else involves you their face and hear what they might be saying [Music] and notice when you get triggered when you start feeling stuck what you're believing what are you believing about yourself or about the world just it that you're in some way bad or unworthy or unlovable or that you can't trust others you're not save notice the feelings that come up with that belief so getting a sense of Feld sense of when you get stuck asking your inner Bodhisattva your future self for help and you might whisper whatever words feel attuned to where you are resonate for you it might be please love me please guide me please protect me but in some way communicate the help you want to your inner Bodhisattva since how that feels to ask and you might now explore placing your hand on your heart and imagine that your inner Bodhisattva can communicate by surrounding you and filling you with their awareness with their light with their warmth and by directly sending care through your hand into the most vulnerable part of your being visualizing that light sensing the warmth feeling bathed by the presence of this awake being letting your touch be tender and listening deeply what is the message the wisdom that your inner Bodhisattva is offering what are they reminding you of what are you being invited to trust and as you take in whatever the message is and it may be silenced it may be words it may be an image let yourself be fully in this moment feel your breath be right where you are listening sensing taking in the care of your own awakened heart taking in the wisdom of whatever that awake heart that wise hearts offering and sensing how the love and wisdom of your most evolved being lives in you now right here and always trusting that with practice you'll increasingly and naturally be able to access and live from this goodness this goal this awakened heart with more and more ease okay so my friends it's a good time to open your eyes feel free to stretch if that serves you just listening to your body moving as you do and during this transition period I like to make a few announcements let you know what's up and coming and one thing is a reminder I make each time to check my website Tara brach comm for all the virtual offerings and a note that there's the Saturday satsang the question answer on Saturday is on my home page under events so please save yourself a spot and we will be having satsang on July 4th and the focus we've decided will be on how to awaken true freedom please also check IM CW org for live stream offerings made available by our local DC teachers and this week's affinity online gatherings are for veterans and women i also like to remind you that each week before this class we have a really beautiful movement class get you in your body and then afterwards discussion groups and the discussion groups begin directly after the talk and the information is in the descriptions on face book and we have two groups ones two options ones a mixed group for mixed race the other is that we now are offering is a people of color only group finally as many of you know these teachings these classes meditations talks the podcasts all offered freely and your donations really make a big difference so please offer only what you're able and for those that can we appreciate $10 but whatever you offer truly i'm grateful so thank you okay we'll take a short pause here and then begin the talk [Music] you namaste and welcome in times of stress in our life whatever the level there is a tendency to turn against ourselves we we do it we would draw we also lash out at others but in some way we get smaller we contract I have a favourite little essay some of you might remember this is an abbreviated version that if you could sit quietly after difficult news if you can during financial downturns remain perfectly calm if you can see your neighbors travel and have fantastic adventures without a twinge of jealousy if you can happily eat whatever's put on your plate and fall asleep after day of running around without a drink or a pill if you can always find contentment just where you are you are probably a dog so someone you can sense why I like that so much it's so true we are so reactive when we get stressful we have our repertoire of how we react and this is where we'll be going more with this talk stress adversity loss they also can lead us to tapping our deepest resources to not only adapting but really transforming in a in a profound way and this week what I'd like to do is focus on a key domain that shuts down that capacity transform that shuts down that capacity to awaken and how by addressing it we really free ourselves and that domain is shame self judgment self aversion being at war with ourselves so that's what we'll look at and I find that the deepest truths are the ones that we most regularly forget and one of those is if we're at war with ourselves we can't truly open our hearts to the rest of life our hearts are tight and I circle back to this regularly from way way back because it's a pervasive suffering turning on ourselves and the story that to me is one of the most powerful guides or powerful metaphors which I want to re bring to our attention because I I try to bringing in a ton a lot because it's so helpful is the story of the statue that was in Thailand's ancient capital sukhothai and it was not a particularly handsome a refined statue it was a plaster clay but huge and people loved it just for staying power it had been through many changes of government and through all sorts of weather systems and invasions and so on but in the 1950s during a hot dry season some cracks started appearing in this beloved statue and when the abbot of the monastery took a flashlight one night kind of pure in and just kind of looking at the infrastructure inside the cracks what came back was a flash of gold was the glimmer of gold and so they kind of chipped it away and they found underneath this plaster clay covering the largest solid gold statue in Southeast Asia what's interesting is the monks believed that it was covered over with plaster and clay to protect it from invading armies much in the same way that we cover over our innate purity to protect us as we navigate through the stressors of life that we all put on coverings and that's not a problem per se it's just very natural we have our ego of Defense's and protections and ways that we can try to enhance ourselves where the suffering comes is when we take ourselves to be the coverings you know these different defenses parts of our personality our emotional reactions or beliefs we take the coverings to be who we are and we forget the gold that's the core suffering and this is the suffering you'll see pointed out in some way in every contemplative wisdom tradition that we forget who we are we forget the awareness and the love that's really our essence and we take ourselves to be what I sometimes think of as a kind of cluster of waves of different personality features that stand out to us we identify with our our fears and our anger and our ways of controlling when were identified with the coverings we'll kind of live in this bit of a rollercoaster of inflation deflation and for many it feels more like one or the other but deep down and this is what's key we dislike ourselves we dislike the self that's identified with the coverings because we Intuit that there's more but we're just feeling small and this is often called the second arrow that we sense the coverings of fear selfishness or controlling and then we hate ourselves for it I think the this simple mem for me is feels bad becomes I'm bad so most therapy most processes of healing including meditation have to address this root belief and feeling of of core badness because of course by extension we end up at odds with others to many many different expressions of how that deep sense of I'm not okay shows itself I love this this line up from it was on Pinterest actually about therapy and first you see a pair on a therapist couch saying I want more than a cracker but I don't have to ask for it you know undeserving and then you see the elephant on the couch and the elephant's just the moaning you know sometimes I even stand in the middle of the room and no one acknowledges me with a chicken why did the chicken cross the road will the chicken response my therapist says I should do more things that scare me I'll just do one more they're silly but fun there's a donut on the therapists couch and the donut saying well it appears like I'm a very well-rounded individual yet people still say I'm bad for them so forgive me but these are just different expressions of this basic deep sense of not okay and I often call it a trance of unworthiness and I think the word trance is important because like a dream were identified and caught in a fragment of experience the coverings the coverings in particular that we don't like we're condemning that that fragment and we're not remembering the goals we're not remembering the awareness that's here we're not remembering who's looking through these eyes and listening right now so our inquiry for this for this talk is how do we wake up from that small shame based identity that's on the coverings how do we trust the goal how do we live from the gold aligned with it the first step and this is going to seem pretty yea intuitive is we have to recognize we're caught in trance and that's the only way will deepen attention and I know that for people that have read radical acceptance that one of the main takeaways that they mention is it's just seeing how much trance has taken over my life how much of my life experience is in that trance and then saying that's actually they begin of healing so that's certainly how it happened for me it really wasn't until I kind of got clobbered over the head with how wall-to-wall trapped I was by some inner judge some harsh inner judge as I've shared with many times it was when a good friend talked about how she was learning to be her own best friend and that just seemed like that was from another galaxy I was so so harsh on myself and of course some things brought up that harshness more than others for me it circled a lot around eating around feeling that I was overweight it also circled around feeling like I was a selfish person I let people down I heard people even as it lasted through the early years of parenting the falling short as a parent so clever Dover the head with the trance of unworthiness but the pain actually motivated me and here's the this feels like what I've noticed in many many people is that the pain of that transference we get it motivates us to really dedicate ourselves to loving ourselves into healing loving ourselves into healing and so for me that took the form of rain many of you are familiar with it which is really simply bringing mindfulness and compassion to what's going on recognizing and allowing that it's there these bad feelings investigating them so we can really honestly contact them and then nurturing and the shift and this is the important piece with rain what starts to really deep and integrate the healing is in what I call after the rain because that's when I could be feeling really down on myself and I go through the steps of rain and I'm nurturing but it's during after the rain that I realize oh this is the goal this this compassionate awareness this is more who I really am then the coverings I was judging that shift from feeling identified with the coverings to remembering the gold the more that becomes familiar the more we actually are free so after all these years it's been decades now the habit of feeling deficient still arises it still arises this imperfect conditioning and coverings that I have and then feeling bad about it but there's not a sense that I am bad there's just feeling bad about it and then responding to what's going on now you might be listening and wondering so what about if we're really doing bad things causing harm in other words if I was feeling shame about inadequate parenting well maybe isn't shame appropriate to help me improve our shouldn't someone who's abused another feel shame you know these are these are really important questions as isn't it a signal to change or what about on the societal level shouldn't Nazis feel shame when they realize what they've been caught in or what about such a current question white people feeling shame for centuries of participating in the violence of racism doesn't shame serve doesn't it help us change our behaviors and I think this is a really important question so she evolved like all emotions it has a function it's a really yucky unpleasant feeling that lets us know you need to adapt your behavior in order to be in harmony with your community and with your own values so it has a it has a positive function I think it's really important to distinguish between healthy shame and toxic shame because toxic shame is so pervasive that it actually makes healthy shame impossible for us to we can't take the message so let's say we regularly lash out at our child and make them feel diminished and bad about themselves toxic shame would be a feeling of badness I'm a bad person you know I'm I'm basically this being caught up in the coverings but forgetting the gold I'm a bad person healthy shame would be there's a feeling of badness this behavior is harmful I need to change so that I can live from the goal from the truth of Who I am this seeing the difference is really really critical in Buddhist psychology healthy shame is called here eh IRI and it was described by the Buddha as a bright guardian of the world and that it kept people from betraying the trust of others you know also betraying ourselves it helps us stay aligned with our our values and live from the gold so healthy shame here is uncomfortable but it's there to serve our ultimate happiness and belonging and alignment but what I've realized over the years because I've known about the differences for a long time I've realized that if we don't attend to toxic shame in other words if we don't find our way to trusting our basic goodness we might behave incorrectly we might you know act right but we'll regularly be swamped in reactivity arising from that underlying sense of personal badness it won't matter how will we behave the the imperfect the natural imperfections of our conditioning will keeps whomping us in basic badness in other words for us making a mistake are getting constructive feedback easily trips off and sinks us into toxic shame so the presence of toxic shame undermines our capacity to take in correct a feedback and you can see looking at a societal level and right now I'm bringing in racism it's so in the forefront but it's all the isms the ways we feel superior inferior this is so important because if we don't trust the gold if we don't trust our basic goodness we'll have larger blind spots and more projections because the toxic shame makes it difficult to honestly examine our psyches it makes us fragile that toxic shame and defensive this is very powerfully put forth in the book white fragility which I'm rereading right now and I really recommend to everyone because it shines a light on this so here's the thing we are all very loyal to our narratives about ourselves we hold on tightly to our self story and by that I mean we hold on to the deep sense of being bad if we have toxic shame it feels true to our body it feels familiar it's painful and dangerous to dismantle it gives us at least some sense of stability of how to deal with things and we hold very tightly to our ideas about the ways we're a good person we really need that so we have a cognitive bias and how we navigate that keep sorting for information that confirms our narrative that keeps us it keeps us in trance it obscures the gold so it takes an intentional practice to wake up and trust the gold and live from the gold to be able to bypass this habit we have of sorting for information and avoiding what's painful takes a dedicated practice and the practice comes down to the two wings of awareness we need to practice seen clearly with mindfulness the ways that we get hooked on feeling personally bad and we need to bring love and compassion to that these are the the two wings of awareness mindfulness compassion in the moment that we're seeing clearly it takes courage because we have to actually contact the feelings the felt sense of shame and it takes compassion because if we can't hold that with kindness will collapse into it so let me share a story that I think at least for me when I first heard it really Illustrated how these two wings can wake us up from toxic shame so this is a woman and her adult daughter mm-hmm when did therapy on the request of the adult daughter who let her mother know in therapy that she had been repeatedly sexually abused by this woman's ex-husband her step and the daughter stepfather and when she heard that when this woman heard that she had been drinking through a lot of her daughter's younger life she had been clueless about the sexual abuse and it brought up such deep rage and really shame of personal badness that she felt suicidal and she sought out a Jesuit priest who had actually been a teacher at her college when she was younger and shared her despair and her deep sense of worthlessness of badness and what he did was he took her hand in his and he drew a circle on her palm and he said this is where you are right now and this is what you're feeling horror and rage and shame and you have to feel this you have to be with this but remember this too and you put his big priestly handovers and this is the this is the infinite compassion of God just remember that too and if you if you do this if you keep feeling what's so terrible to feel but remembering this you will discover a healing and a freedom that you've never experienced before so this became her practice that she'd had the feelings would come up of of rage and of you know fear for her daughter and of deep deep shame and she'd feel them but she kept imagining that that hand over hers the the field of compassion divine compassion and gradually she was able more and more to tolerate the feelings of shame and then even more than that start sensing that that hand that divine compassion really was her own awakened heart she was beginning to hold herself with compassion and since that that's my goodness that I have this this goodness to my heart many many rounds of sensing okay I have a tenderness a care and awareness that's more essence than any of these emotions that are playing through she started trusting the gold and what happened in therapy and this is so interesting to me is that it became you know part of what they were working on is how through the daughter's life and now as an adult her mother still was not very good at listening and paying attention to her and she started being able to take this in not like I am a failure you know I'm a bad person but just feeling bad feeling bad but remembering her goodness and that enabled her to actually take in that that feedback and begin to change and listen more deeply in other words that was healthy shame she felt bad and she let herself feel it but she was able to tolerate it because she had ordered on the work with the toxic shame and was beginning to trust deeply in the gold you know in our lives to the degree that we can see the coverings you know the fear and the anger and are controlling mindfully if we can actually observe them witness them feel them and hold them with compassion what starts happening is we recognize them as conditioned experience they're not our essence they're conditioned experience and the more we sense them as coverings that have been conditioned by infinite forces but conditioned the more we actually deepen our trust in the gold so I want to take some time to to look at this because it's so important that if we want to open up our sense of identification from the coverings we have to see them as conditioned by forces that are beyond who we are and that's what I mean by conditioning that when you're feeling caught in jealousy our fear that's been conditioned in and for different people in different ways one man was experiencing a whole lot of through his whole life he was very had a lot of anger moving through him but it was hit a crisis point in his marriage his wife was threatening divorce his teens were completely alienated from him and so he wanted to learn how to bring these two wings of mindfulness and compassion and be able to to you know change his habits so he began to mindfully investigate his anger and what happened as we brought that lens of mindful attention was that he could see that every time he was anger got triggered underneath the anger he was in some way feeling put down and he was feeling afraid and then he started bringing mindfulness to how young that felt how old and how familiar that that fearful humiliated self and that spontaneously brought to mind his father's anger and I was father Sanger humiliated him it scared him and also how his father was entirely out of control when he was angry and he said I am the same way this mindful investigation was showing him that it wasn't so personal that there were forces from his past that had actually molded or shaped the anger and when I said it's not your fault he began weeping because that was the the insight or freedom he needed to realize it's not my fault that it's this way it's incredibly painful but it's not my fault and that allowed him knowing that it wasn't his fault to actually hold with compassion that vulnerable humiliated fearful young self and begin a healing process that then when the anger would get triggered he had a little more space he could pause he could choose his behaviors more and it actually changed the coverings the behavior I think the the deep recognition I sometimes used the metaphor of an ocean with waves is that you know these waves are conditioned by all sorts of weather systems and everything else these waves of who we are and they don't define us we are the ocean we include the waves but there's a much more vast much more deep truth about who we are and when we know that then we can deal with the waves as they say you know if you remember the ocean you're not afraid of the waves and then the other saying is if you forget you're the ocean you're seasick all the time so remembering the gold part of it is remembering all the forces and conditions and causes that create the coverings that we get so identified with and what are they I mean we've talked to about the family conditioning the modeling of whoever our caregivers were and the treatment from our caregivers but there's way more I mean each of us our DNA means that we have a primitive reptilian brain in us and we share it with reptiles that means we get threatened your most immediate reflex the fast movement of the of the mind and body when you're threatened is either to lash back or in some way be silenced and withdraw freeze so you have this reptilian brain and you also have a mammalian brain which means and you share this with Fox and lions and so on which means that when you're not facing life death issues your program to be concerned about your standing with the pack we're programmed to feel that we're programmed to compare against each other we're invested in belonging we're programmed to try to get advantages and perks or a program to compete - sometimes dominate or sometimes subordinate so we can get favors where we're programmed to lie or exaggerate our accomplishments to look good or a program to minimize our flaws and we're programmed to make others look bad so we look better this is all part of our mammalian brain so you know thank you ma'am alien brain and then of course we also have our new mammalian brain that's the more recently evolved frontal cortex when our cognition which is quite developed compared to many other creatures when it's fear-based in other words when the reptilian brain is affecting our neocortex that leads to obsessing and anxiety over consuming and a huge capacity for violence to ourselves and each other and our earth so what it does is it makes us most dangerous species on earth this is conditioning our neocortex also values cooperation has a sense of morality ethics compassion and mindful in other words when were living from a more integrated whole we have access to that but very often when we're stressed the lower brains take over so we're shaped by that conditioning and we're shaped hugely by cultural conditioning you know we have this delusion of our individuality whereas as they say you're not thinking your thoughts you're thinking society's thoughts we are absolutely embedded in the thoughts and values and perspectives of our society I sometimes think about this and you can you know consider if you lived a few hundred years ago you and most others would have accepted slavery as normal you weren't a bad person but that's the perspective if you lived in the United States 175 years ago you'd unquestionably be accepting women as husbands property and not equal beings you'd be ok with burning witches and many back in the past as a kind of a holiday or recreation maybe Saturday morning would go out to a public hanging or an execution again not bad people the society's conditioning and we think oh my god how could they have done that but it's conditioning if you lived in India 75 years ago and many even currently you wouldn't question caste system and the hard treatment of the delete' was just the The Untouchables and I'm not even mentioning so many vile and exclusionary attitudes and behaviors through through history against gay against transgendered against all the isms you know but the point is not bad people it's the coverings that get conditioned by our society that have us participate in harm you know I suspect and some decades we're going to look back on right now the cruel the berrak ways that we treat non-human animals to eat their flesh and most people don't considered immoral and just noting that this is part of our cultural conditioning - it's not we're bad humans and yet it's hard to examine our current conditioning it's hard to examine it honestly because we're very invested and not feeling bad about ourselves so our views our behaviors our ways of being are largely conditioned by the society by our caregivers by our genetics by our shared DNA it's not personal it's not our fault and realizing this and this is the power of it if you realize that the coverings don't define you that there's basic goodness it heals toxic shame and it gives you the capacity to actually sense very spontaneously the coverings transform so that they can express the gold the more we trust the gold and we don't take the covers personally the more we transform so this is where healthy shame comes in because if we're trusting the goal then healthy shame a feeling of badness when we're being imperfect actually serves us it helps us to align with what matters to us it can be a valuable reminder of what we really care about and actually move us towards alignment I'll speak personally that I would say over time more and more I get very quick feedback in my body very unpleasant very uncomfortable when I perceive that I'm being hurtful towards others or defensive or controlling or in some way misleading any way that I'm creating separation my body you know I can feel it in my body in the old days that would feed into toxic shame there would be a sinking basic feeling of I'm not I'm bad you know feels bad I'm bad but now it's just unpleasant it's tolerable it's healthy shame but in order to stay and honestly listen to the message I have to consciously be agreeing to be uncomfortable and that's because my first reflex is to in some way want to reduce it by defending myself by justifying myself I want to feel like a good person you know that's still in there so just as with toxic shame the first step with healthy shame is self compassion is being kind to myself and you you might not be able to see us I'm putting my hand on my heart but you're just reminding myself trust that you care trust the gold you know trust the gold and then then I can look more honestly at the coverings but I first have to soften with self compassion so I don't defend myself and then I can come around and examine what's going on and if needed make amends and so I see that over and over with close relationships if if with my husband Jonathan I'm tight or demanding or insensitive that bad feeling comes up it's hurry you know healthy shame and if I can be gentle and kind with myself then I can acknowledge how I'm off and and adjust and it's very very powerful this this healthy shame when I when I find it in my group identity as a white person and this is where my learning curve is deepest and it's actually very exhilarating you know as a leader in my meditation community as a teacher I've continually made mistakes and had to face my imperfections you know around racism just to socialize is every any creature in our society and how to ask the questions like you know why so many years having a mostly white board of directors mostly white teachers why were the people of color came to our classes reporting they didn't feel safe or welcomed and had a face how often I used teaching examples that came from white cultural experience or why did it take so long you know to to have the affinity song as that we needed for people of color and white people in our different teaching communities so with each mistake it really was the same process and again mistake meaning the imperfection of the coverings reflects a fragility of wanting to look good or uphold my good personhood so an initial like tensing against feeling bad that's the white fragility but if I remind myself trust the goal you know trust that this really matters to you that you care you know if I'm compassionate with myself that gives me a space to stay with the discomfort get the message and respond to try to make things right so the key in healing toxic shame and to be guided by healthy shame is self compassion and inevitably this is true for all of us as we're going to be practicing together in a moment we will continue to feel bad Ness when we encounter the imperfections of our coverings the the habits of in different ways getting caught in anxiety or lashing out or judgment or whatever it is if we can remember our basic goodness and I often my mantras often just trust the goal trust the goal you know instead of reacting instead of defending instead of sinking in a shame if we can remember that we can then respond to what comes up in a way that further aligns our heart we all need pathways of self compassion in response to imperfection we all need ways and we all need to help each other realize that these difficult waves we experience they're not our fault and if we trust the goodness we can actually become the being that we want to be so with that a lot of words let's let's practice a little this meditation is on healing toxic shame and trusting the gold take a moment if you will to pause let yourself settle might close your eyes might feel this body breathing you might scan notice where in your life you might be reacting to imperfection you might be feeling down on yourself judging yourself feeling shame or aversion and if there's a situation that triggers it let that be in the foreground so you might be thinking of a situation where you turn on yourself that has to do with your relationships personal relationships or your work or maybe it's an addictive behavior or you might be turning on yourself in relationship to your group identity feeling shame about that judging others could be related to race or sexual orientation gender identity religion ethnicity some situation where you turn on yourself you might sense the worst part of this when you're turning on yourself what really feels the worst and being guided by the rain acronym we start by just recognizing whatever's predominant when you're turning on yourself what are you most noticing is it shame is it a version is it fear mentally whisper whatever you notice and that begins to call in the mindful witness and then allow and that creates some space allow it's like saying okay these coverings are here this belongs it's a wave in the ocean let it be there and then as you approach investigating let there be a quality of gentleness and interest real curiosity about how reality is playing out through your body mind you might sense what you're believing what are you believing when you're turning on yourself is that you basically unworthy that you're there's a sense of basic badness I said that you'll never be close with others because of this you're not lovable what belief comes and as you sense whatever belief is there let yourself feel the unpleasantness the pain of shame of that feeling of badness and if it helps to put your hand on your heart just to feel connected with what's going on inside please do so you might imagine you could look right now through the eyes of a bodhisattva well wise compassionate being at your own they turn on the self that feels ashamed not okay the eyes of a wise grandmother the eyes of a Buddha maybe your eyes of a wise and loving friend and see the suffering that's there the suffering of self aversion and also see the streams of conditioning that shaped the very behaviors or feelings that you're judging how did you learn to be the way you are this is modeled from caregivers shaped by messages from others whatever you're judging how did it get there you weren't born as a bad person what's the conditioning here was there past trauma in your personal lifetime or past generations through the eyes of the Bodhisattva seeing the conditioning that created the very thing that you're aversive to how did the society shape it our competitive over consuming aggressive divided society how did that shape your inner experience I'm sensing the presence of this Bodhisattva this wise and loving being your own awake heart you might send the message inward it's not your fault I just offer a real compassionate presence send care right the place that's hurting the place that feels bad let it be bathed with a compassionate presence since this possibility of letting in that loving that healing letting go into it becoming one with it and with after the rain just to rest in that open-hearted presence that which sees clearly the suffering and holds with love you might sense who are you when you're not believing something's wrong with you since the possibility of trusting the awareness and compassion that's here is really your essence and from that place of trusting the gold trusting the goodness of your essence you might look at the patterning that you were judging aversive to whatever it is about the coverings that you're not liking perhaps ways you hurt others hurt yourself you might sense what's my deepest intention from the goals what's my deepest intention and what will help me align with that deep intention well will help me live from loving awareness the poet Rumi describes the gold is loving awareness as the secret self he writes 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'm the crescent moon put up over the gate to the festival you might take a few full breaths and as you're ready open your eyes so I want to thank you for your attention or exploring this together invite all of those that are interested in the discussion groups to return to a Facebook link right now for them and to wish you all loving blessings as you move through these next days namaste [Music] you

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

Views: 22,514

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

Id: a2ay6kLwGzs

Length: 75min 53sec (4553 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 02 2020