Tara Brach - 2024-04-03 - Relating Wisely to our Inner Life: Tara and Lee C Camp

Episode Date: April 4, 2024

In this conversation, recorded for the acclaimed podcast, No Small Endeavor, award winning theologian Lee C. Camp interviews Tara about radically accepting and loving our being, just as we are. The conversation includes an unpacking of the RAIN meditation, and stories of navigating difficulty from Tara's life. No Small Endeavor, produced by Great Feeling Studios and PRX, brings you thoughtful conversations with artists, theologians and philosophers about what it means to live a good life. You can find the No Small Endeavor Podcast on your favorite podcast app or listen to more episodes here: https://link.chtbl.com/LN08h4po?sid=TaraBrach

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, my friends. This week I'd like to share with you an interview I did a few months ago for a podcast called No Small Endeavor. Lee is a wise and amazing person. He does a wide-ranging conversations on the podcast. They're really fantastic. You can check it out wherever you get podcasts. And for our specific episode, we really talked about the deep healing of mindfulness, of making friends with the experience of this moment.

And we looked at how we can shift from the habit of being at war with ourselves, you know, really being divided from ourselves to loving ourselves, loving ourselves into healing into wholeness. And I found our exchange incredibly rich and alive. And I'm hoping you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. Welcome, Tara. Nice to be with you, Lee. It's nice to be with you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a long while, so I'm grateful that we get to spend a bit of time together today. Congratulations on 20-year anniversary of your book, Radical Acceptance. I know. It ages me and it's hard to believe. But yeah, thank you. It seems that it has served and helped many, many millions of people, so I'm grateful for your good work. I love the

introduction or the inscription on chapter one, the trance of unworthiness with this passage from Wendell Berry that says, you'll be walking some night, you'll be clear to you suddenly that you were about to escape and that you were guilty. You misread the complex instructions. You are not a remember you've lost your card or never had one. Classic Wendell Berry getting right to the point there. But unpack kind of some of that feeling for us of this trance of unworthiness. Yeah. Well, first, it's pervasive.

And I call it a trance because, you know, if I was to say to you, okay, Lee, do you think you'd judge yourself too much? You probably go, yeah. And, you know, I do hand raises. as most people know they do. But what we don't realize is how many moments on some level there's this unconscious monitoring, like, how am I doing now? And we have a standard and we're falling short.

I mean, I can sense it even in myself this moment just as we're talking that there's some part of me saying, you know, am I being natural and authentic and am I tuned in? And, you know, so we monitor, we feel we're falling short, and on some level, there's a sense of not okay with ourselves. We get to war. We turn on ourselves. I certainly, I've made a lot of progress with that, but I think it was debilitating to me when I was younger and a sort of deep perfectionism that was certainly fueled for me, at least in part. part, if not a really large part, by kind of religious perfectionism of the community in which I was raised. But as well, I kind of more general perfectionism, I think, that has, was often debilitating. Is this for you as well? That's exactly, that's what got me going. I mean, I realized

that, and this was when I was in college, it really became conscious. I remember being on a hike with a friend and she was saying, you know, I've learned to be my own best friend. And I thought, oh my gosh, you know, I'm the farthest thing. I was the harshest critic, you know, my body weighed too much and I wasn't, you know, my way of doing relationships was off and I wasn't a good daughter and this and that, you know, not contributing enough. So I realized how wall to wall it was. And that, when you say crippling, when we don't see it, that sense of unworthiness really makes it impossible to be intimate with others because we have that sense of if they really knew. And I think of one woman who was sharing being with her mom when her mom was dying and she was in a coma. and when at one point she kind of opened her eyes and looked really lucidly at my friend

and said, all my life I thought something was wrong with me. And then she closed her eyes and she died. And so those were her last words. And for my friend and for me just listening, it just seemed like such a tragedy that we can go through decades and on some level feel like we're not okay. Yeah, that reminds me of an episode when I was probably in my early 30s. And at the time, I was a staff member at a church and I was preaching fairly regularly. And one of the, one of the interesting tasks that we would do is that

as the staff and the church would kind of read through the text that I was supposed to preach that week. And there's this beautiful text in the New Testament out of 1 John, and it has this passage about our hearts, whenever our hearts condemn us, God knows everything and doesn't condemn us, to that effect. And when it got around in the circle to me to kind of give my response to that text, I said something like, I have no idea what it would be like for my heart not to condemn me. and there was a friend of mine who was on the staff, an older, older man, who I love. And he turned in a very non-shaming way, he said, Lee, where do you think that's coming from? He said, I don't think it's coming from us. Where do you think it's coming from? And that actually led to my resignation from that post because I realized I really needed to deal with that.

Wow, that's powerful. just to sense how much it impacts your whole life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you started pointing to it there, but you say further on in the chapter, the more deficient we feel, the more separate and vulnerable we feel. Unpack that for us a bit.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I feel like our deepest longing is to belong. I mean, we, you know, it's in our DNA that we are packed creatures. we're social creatures. And so feeling that we're enough, feeling that we're deserving, then we sense we belong and we can relax. So when there's a sense that there's something wrong with me, that we're flawed, hand in hand with that, because that's shame, is this fear that we're going to be pushed out of the group, out of the belonging. So we get

really gripped by that fear of failing. It really means a lot to fail. It's not okay to make a mistake. It translates into, I'm going to be rejected and flung out into the cold. And it's, I think a lot about how come it's so pervasively, because you mentioned the messaging of perfection that can come through different religions, and it comes through a number of religions. terms of Christians, you know, not just Christianity, how we're supposed to be. And I think that deep down, if I kind of look at the existential roots of this, because it feels so, you know, many, many cultures, is that we come into existence and we're wired to feel separate, that there's, that in some way there's a self in here and a world out there, like every organism has that perception. And

And it's really interesting because all of the defenses, all the ways we protect ourselves, all the ways we try to self-aggrandize come out of that sense of, I'm separate, something's missing, something's wrong, I need something. And what we do as humans is we go from that sense of life is dangerous, something's wrong, to I'm wrong. We take it personally. That is the way the ego is structured. And you can see it, and this is where it's so disturbing.

I know so many people who were sexually abused when they were young, and on some deep level, they feel it was their fault. And it's because that sense of something's wrong so quickly gloms on to our sense of our own core is wrong. Yeah. So the more we're in an environment that is... is not confirming our belonging. In other words, if there are a lot of hurdles

to feel a sense of belonging to our family, to the earth, to the community, then it's gonna in some way be a reflection to us that something's wrong with me. And in our culture, we have such a hierarchical culture. I mean, there are so many different hierarchies that give the message to some you are less than, whether it's racial or by class or by religion, whatever, that many, many people get the message from our society of that sense of

flawedness. So then your book is structured around this fundamental claim that the way out, or let me just read this one passage. The way out, the way out. out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives. So that's a, I'm sure a lot of people are going to receive that as quite objectionable, but unpack that and make the case for it for us. Sure. Well, I think right away, I think of Carl Rogers, famous American psychologists, who said, it wasn't until I accepted myself just as I was,

that I was free to change. And the reason I like that so much, Lee, is that it says basically that on some deep level making friends with or being at peace with how we are in the moment, like how this life is expressing right in this moment is the precondition to transformation. If we're at war with ourselves, we're just seeding in the soil of our cycle of our cycle, more aversion, more shame, more guilt. So if we want to be able to emerge and evolve, in some way we have to make friends with the life that's here.

Another way of saying it is we just have to stop being at war with reality because we are as we are. And we have amazing potential to change some of the habits that cause ourselves or others harm, but we will be able to access that if we're at war with ourselves. Yeah, as I've thought a lot about that particular chapter, the way I think it resonates deeply with me is I think when I would have certain things about myself, and I would say, I will never do that again, and I would kind of be in this war with myself.

I inevitably did it again, and then that just further fueled shame and self-reveillance. hatred that seemed to make it all the more difficult for me to get out of the behavior I wanted to get out of. And I hear you saying it's that very frame that has to be set aside and a new frame given to think about our reality that then makes that freedom possible. That's beautifully, beautifully said. I mean, I think of it, like, we have to love ourselves into healing. We cannot, It doesn't work for children. It doesn't work for anybody to punish people into trying to bring out the best of who they are. And I saw with myself, because when I was in my 20s, I had an eating disorder and I had a huge shame around it. And so I kept being very punishing towards how I was eating and how I was experiencing myself.

And I finally got to this place that I realized that I had to sense where the pain was and really hold it with kindness, you know, that the drivenness, that sense of not being able to tolerate, being with the rawness of my experience without self-soothing with food. I had to hold that with enormous compassion for, and that somehow rather relaxed my knowledge. nervous system so I could start making new choices. So it's very, and that's just one example. I mean, I've held all sorts of things against myself and realized that that wasn't going to bring out a positive change. Yeah, on your definition of radical acceptance, you said it has two parts seeing clearly and holding our experience with compassion. And you kind of started to get at that, but would you tell us a little bit more about both of those two parts of acceptance? Yeah. So it's described, I love the description of the two wings of the bird, and that

anytime we want to wake up our awareness, wake up to who we can be, there are two wings in order to fly and be free. And one wing is the wing of what's sometimes called mindfulness, which is seeing clearly what's happening in the moment. And the question that you can ask yourself to have that wing wake up is, what is happening inside me right now? It's just a really simple, powerful inquiry. What is happening inside me right now? The other wing is the wing of compassion, which says whatever we're seeing, can we hold it with some tenderness, some grace, some space, some kindness? And that's, so that wing, the question is, and can I view with this? Or can I let this be? And I'll share just a story that really helped me attune to the two wings was I was teaching at a

like a two-week silent retreat, and we do interviews with the people who are there. And one of the men that I was doing interviews with was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. And he was a clinical psychologist, and he had been practicing meditation for a decade, just to give a little background. And when I met with him, I asked him how he was doing. And he had kind of a gleam to his eye and he was lighthearted and I kind of asked him, how is it that you're able to have that kind of spirit? And he said, I don't think anything is wrong about what was going on with him.

And then he told me about, you know, some months back he had been giving a talk to about 100 people and he started and then he went completely blank. Like he didn't know why he was there, who they were, I mean, really went blank. So here's what he did. First he actually paused. I call it the sacred art of pausing because we cannot enter the next moment fresh if we don't pause. So he paused.

And then he started naming what he was aware of and he would say, heart pounding. And then he put his palms together and bow. And then he would say, afraid, palms together, bow. Ashamed, palms together, bow. Confused. And it kept going. And then he said, relaxing, bow. He looked at the group and he apologized. And one person said to him, you know, and they had tears in their eyes, no one has ever taught me this, us this way. And what did he done? You know, he had basically, those are the two wings.

He had named what was happening, you know, just naming experience. And then the other wing, letting it be with a sense of honoring. This is reality in this moment. And that created the circumstance for him to calm down, for him to be in relationship with others. The two wings have transformational magic. They bring us into the power of presence. And sometimes it takes time, you know, to, because we have all sorts of distractions in our mind and so on, to simply notice what's happening in the moment and open our hearts to it.

That's a beautiful, beautiful story. Thank you for that. And that sort of yielding to that moment. I think it's someone who's often in front of people and then to struggle with Alzheimer's that way and then simply not to know what I'm doing. I can't imagine the terror in that, potential terror in that and in that capacity for him.

But I would imagine he couldn't have, obviously, he couldn't have done that apart from his decade of practicing being mindful. So I agree. I think that, you know, and again, Alzheimer's has so many different expressions, and he was very, very positively habituated to pausing and noticing what was happening. But what it speaks to is really something that's a capacity in every human brain. is, you know, we, if you think of our evolution, I'm very interested in, you know, how we evolved

and how, you know, yes, we have this primal survival system that goes into fear, fight, flight, freeze, and the more recently evolved part of our brain has in a built-in hardwired capacity for mindfulness, for metacognition, for seeing what's going on, to be able to notice what's going on so we're not as in the grip. of it. And we also have a built-in neural network that's all based on tuning into each other and compassion and empathy. So the way I think of meditations, and this is beyond any particular religion, but meditation meaning training our heart and mind, is that we're actually strengthening the most recently evolved parts of our brain. with these capacities to see what's happening in the moment and relate to them with love,

with care. You mentioned this notion of pausing as kind of a, maybe I would call it a meta-habit that I see you pointing to. And I think even though I've worked at that through the years, I realize how poorly I can fall back into forgetting to pause. And my own work right now, I'm in that season of very intense work, and so I'm seeing my anxiety tick back up. And just this week, having been reminded by your work to pause, it's amazing to begin to

become aware of how much tension I have in my chest, how I crunch my shoulders over, how tight everything is, and just to not even be aware of that kind of. of physical reality until I pause and pay attention to it. And as you say, then the pause allows me to make different choices about setting my shoulders back, breathing into my chest. So it's just, it's fascinating how much good can come from simply pausing. Thank you for that. You just helped me to put my shoulders back and down and I just started breathing more deeply. That was a very good induction. I appreciate that, Lee. It's magic.

I mean, that's why I call it the sacred pause because, you know, our lives are such a kind of tumbling into the future and it's driven by fear. It's the survival brain. So part of the reason we don't pause is because, as you just described, initially what happens is we start getting in touch with that clenching that's going on inside, a mental clenching and physical clenching. And the first expression of it is unpleasant. But if we even pause for a minute, and that's what's so cool.

This is not like an arduous exercise. Right. Just even pause and take five long deep breaths. It entirely changes our physiological state. It's really magic. Yes. It is. It is.

It is fascinating. Now, I want to go to fear, but not quite. yet. Would you discuss, I think the distinction you draw is between pain and suffering, and others I've heard draw a distinction between suffering and misery, but I think they're pointing to the same thing, as I understand it, but then let me share how I understand what you're saying, and then you teach us a bit more about this. If I understand it, the idea there is to make a distinction between our fundamental experience that as mortal physically embodied beings, it's inevitable that we're going to have some sort of pain, some sort of difficulty, some sort of thing that we

experience as troubling. And then there's the sort of mental story we tell ourselves or obsess about that pain. And that that awareness of that distinction can alleviate a lot of the turmoil that we experience about our inevitable pain. Is that accurate? Yeah, I think that's, that is. I mean, the phrase is that, you know, pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. And where it comes from is pain, meaning unpleasant and pleasantness is just part of the human nervous systems, Like, it's just going to keep happening.

And we're storytelling creatures. And the more we wrap what's going on with an interpretation or a narrative, the more we end up locking in. So I think it was Jill Boltey Taylor, the neuroscientists who described, you know, if left to its own devices, there's, you know, very short duration for emotions to come and go. like the weather, but what locks something like fear into mood, what locks disappointment into depression is the ongoing mental narrative. And so if we can learn to have an experience, and instead of going off into all of our

beliefs and thoughts about it, coming directly in contact with the sensations, what's going on in our body, it'll come and go. So that's the idea is that we don't have to lock into suffering. That reminds me of another habit I have seen in myself that I don't like. And that is when I've tried to practice mindfulness and a sort of acceptance of pain or sad, I find myself sliding too often. A lot of judgments here, but so you can help me a breath. I find myself sliding from acknowledging the pain of sadness into self-pity.

And it seems this distinction that you're making ought to help me with that somehow, but help me unpack that. Well, let me ask you, is there something right now that's going on in your life? that you are feeling that about, that it's a difficulty, but then it ends up, you know, kind of collapsing into self-pity. I would say that there's something going on right now, that that could be a temptation to me. I haven't fallen into it yet around what's going on at the moment, but yes, there's definitely something there that I could fall prey to that.

So if you wanted to explore practicing so that, you know, you bring that situation to mind, and let's say we'll talk about the two wings against, since that's a simple way, that you would ask yourself, you know, in that situation, what is it that I'm experiencing right now? Like, what is the, what's the most predominant feeling? Do you have a sense of what feeling comes up with the situation? Fear, mostly. Okay. And then what happens when you ask yourself?

and can I let this be or can I just be with this as it is right now? I think part of it is that it, if things unfold as I would not want them to, then it's going to impact other people negatively as well. Right. So that, and that's the nature of fear, fear is anticipating something going wrong. And so, and you mentioned you wanted to postpone anxiety and fear and now we're actually talking about it. But there's a number of different ways to have that be the case, but stay present with it. And if you can stay present, then you don't, then the whole nervous system has a chance to calm down some. And one of the things I'll often do is, you know, with fear is, you know,

either I'll communicate to the fear and say, thank you for trying to protect me. You know, I'm okay right now, we're okay right now, this moment. But thank you. And just acknowledge that the fear in us is really trying to help us. It's really trying to help us. The only challenge is that it's so habituated in our nervous system that we, we don't have a good off button. In other words, the on button gets jammed and then it's no longer a survival mechanism. It's just a habit. So what you want to do is shift so that it comes back into,

okay, right now we're okay. And that gives you nervous, you know, thank you for trying to protect me, but it's okay right now. If that, if for some reason it's very charged, that won't work. Like, if it's a very charged fear, it's not going to be getting a cognitive reassurance and calm down, in which case there are ways to ground into the present moment that are really, really powerful, to sense, you know, the space around you and sense the sky and sense what's larger they can hold it, to sense that other people experience this too, you know, that this is, you're not alone in this, to ground your body and feel the weight of gravity and feel yourself as part of the earth. I mean, there's a lot of different practices that can help create a larger

context so the fear is not so much of an assault. Yeah, so let's do go ahead and keep unpacking fear and anxiety. And I'll say as well, just out of personal experience here, you know, I was, whether by nature or nurture, I was wired for anxiety. when I was very young, and I got treated for a stomach ulcer when I was a seventh grader that I think was fueled by kind of anxiety. And so I've had lots of experience with anxiety and with some seasons of depression. But your definition of fear, you're talking about the difference between the physiological effect and then the mental part of that.

Would you kind of give that definition for us? I found that so helpful. Yeah, well, we all have a physiology of, you know, when we get afraid of what happens in our bodies and the kind of secretions that go on and so on, that is, you know, the app, that's universal. All human bodies have it. When our minds then start circling in their interpretation of that, oh, this happened before and here's how things went wrong and here's whose fault, that kind of thing, it turns into anxiety that, you know, can get locked into the nervous system that doesn't have to be there.

It's no longer connected to survival. It's being fueled by the activities of our mind. The question then of interrogating fear that you kind of pointed to a moment ago and asking me those questions. Teach us a little bit more about that, about what can it look like for us to continue to interrogate fear? Sure. I'll do it by way of an example here. The practice I often use that really is the most useful practice for the two wings is called the rain meditation. and it's an acronym, recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. And I've had more people tell me that the rain meditation saved their life when they

were caught in fear or shame or anger, whatever it was, conflict with people, than any other practice. And again, this is something, you know, people from all faiths, from all, you know, different traditions and so on. And the reason is because, again, it is activating our evolved brain, really. It activates mindfulness and compassion. So about, my mother died when she was 86. When she was about 82, she moved down here. And I was at a time of high level demand of, you know, finishing chapters in a book and a lot of teaching, traveling. And I adore my mom. And I was glad to have her move down with us. And I was, and I really was struggling because I was so busy and I didn't want

to let her down. And I remember, you know, it was, I was feeling guilty in terms of her, but I was also very, very anxious about dropping the balls, you know, and having things really go south on a lot of levels. So I remember once I was in here, where I am right now, and I was putting together talk I had to give that night on loving kindness. My mother walked into the room. She wanted to show me an article, and I was so fixated on the screen. I didn't even turn my head. She just very graciously could down the article and walked out, but I looked and saw her retreating figure. And I said, oh, my gosh, I don't know how long I'm going to have her. And so I paused. I'm so thankful that I, the sacred pause, and I did rain. And this is going to be my example of

working with anxiety because I recognized that the R's recognized. It begins that wing of mindfulness. Okay, what's happening here? Anxiety, guilt. The A of Rain is a LOW, which says, it's here right now. You know, just not to argue with reality. This is like a wave in the ocean, you know, it belongs. And I often say for the A of Raine, this belongs. The I is investigate. And investigate is primarily somatic, meaning what's going on in this living body.

But I can start with, what am I believing? because we have this narrative always. So what I was believing was, I'm going to fail. You know, I'm going to fail my mother. I'm going to fail my students because I'm not going to be done on time. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to fail myself for not finishing this chapter. It was a real fear of failure and that was, you know, very core anxiety. And underneath that I'm going to fail and be rejected and, you know, life's going to end. It was really, it was deep. So I then continued to investigate because this is the key thing.

It has to be somatic. Because if we don't really feel it in our bodies, we can't really open to a larger space. So I could feel this clenching in my chest and my gut, you know, is this kind of aching, empty feeling in my gut and I put my hand on my heart because that's the beginning of the N of Raine, which is nurturing. And I just asked myself, so what is, ask this place in me, what do you really need? What do you need to trust or feel or, you know, because at the beginning of nurturing is to sense what's needed here. And what was really needed was that I, I just trust my love, trust my goodness, trust that, you know, what was in me, my heart, my spirit was

going to, you know, it would be fine. I'd be imperfect but fine, you know. So the fullness of nurturing is just to send that caring message inward, which is what I did, you know, kind of trust the goodness, trust the goodness. And I could feel my, I could, I'm feeling it right now, I could feel the space open up, but it was like in the moments of just seeing what was happening and offering kindness, there was more of a sense of openness and spaciousness and clarity and tenderness. It was like I was back home in my own soul. I was resting in the truth of who I was, more true than that busy, hurried, anxious, guilty

self, which is, by the way, the gift of rain. It's a homecoming to the truth of who we are. And so I started noticingly. I'd be with my mom and we'd be, you know, I'd take her to a doctor, but I wasn't like rushing to get to the doctor. I was with her and we were having our, you know, we had such a good reforte and our walking by the river together and not trying to race to get home for something

or having our big salads at night and not thinking about what I had to do upstairs in the office. And she probably died about four years later. And, you know, I'm just talking about her. I feel my tenderness towards her. But there was no remorse because I had really, rain had saved my life moments with my mom, where I could have been caught in that anxious, small-minded scurring, it actually allowed for the presence not to race through these moments. And I think that often anxiety does that. It makes us smaller and it has us fixating on what do I need to do, what do I need to get done, what's going to go wrong, and we're racing. It's like racing over the surface of our lives to get to the end and we're not dropping in.

and, you know, being awake and open-hearted with those that are right here. Thank you for that. So rain, recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture? That's it. And then what I call after the rain is, just like after a real rain, that's when everything kind of flowers. after we've done those steps to then just start to notice a larger truth about who we are, that there is more awareness, there's more light, there's more space, there's more tenderness than when we were identified with that smaller cell.

There's an assumption throughout what you shared with us today of the goodness of self-compassion. Why do you think there seems to be so much suspicion in our culture of self-compassion? I think that for many it translates into in some way indulging ourselves and the sense is, if I truly accepted myself or was compassion towards myself, I'd never change. I'd never improve. I'd never become the person I want to be. So the deep belief is I have to in some way badger and attack myself into improving. And we're very deeply attached to improving.

And that's fine, having an aspiration to be all we can be. But there's some misunderstanding that the way that we evolve actually comes out of that heavy-handedness or that, as I mentioned earlier, that punishing, I've never seen at work. I don't see it work in bringing up children. It's not like we bring up our child to be who they can really be by attacking them. There's so much, both research and intuitive understanding that the more that there is a space of unconditional loving, of really having that child know they belong, if you think of the two things a child most needs, it's to be seen. In other words, to be understood, I get you, I see you, you know, their intrinsic value and to be

loved for what's seen, you know, to be cared about. And when that, you know, as attachment theory says, when attachment is strong, the bonds, then the child is free to become the creative, spontaneous, awake being that's possible. So what I'm really teaching is about spiritual re-parenting. That's the way I think of it. It's like most of us did not get that, what I just mentioned. And it's not our caregiver's fault. It's actually, again, endemic to our larger society that, you know, does not make belonging easy.

Our societies, we're in a very, you know, it's capitalistic, competitive. It inclines us towards trying to beat out people or win or inclines us towards towards mistrust, sets all these standards that you're not good enough if you don't have a certain size body or a certain look or that you're not, as I mentioned earlier, of a certain color or religion or whatever it is. And when those messages are in the society, they come through caregivers. Caregivers get anxious. They set all these standards.

Most people I know felt very judged and felt like to be acceptable. and loved, they had to meet certain standards. They weren't just intrinsically lovable. And so when I've, you know, in addition to teaching meditation, I spent many decades as a clinical psychologist and so many people, the core was a sense of I don't feel lovable. I don't feel lovable. I don't feel worthy. And it's because of the messages from care caregivers that are critical and judgmental versus compassionate and accepting. In thinking about our response to fear, you have a quote from Charlotte Beck at the opening of your chapter on fear. It says, we have to face the pain we have been running from.

In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us. And that reminded me of another episode in my own life. Probably a decade ago, I had one particular fear that I was just having a very difficult time facing. And a friend of mine in a group that I'm in one day said something like, he said, you know, if you're at the beach and you're in the ocean and the waves are coming in and they're strong waves, said, if you turn to the side or you turn your back on it, you, you is much more likely to get knocked down,

and it's a little easier to get through it if you'll just dive right into the wave and let it flow over you. And I found that so helpful, and I hear you saying a similar sort of thing of it's actually letting ourselves experience it and then see what it might teach us or what we might learn through allowing ourselves to be in that.

Yeah, thank you for that metaphor. That's a powerful one. You know, with a wave, if you actually try to get away from it, it really crashes on you and you get rolled. But if you dive in, it's fine. And this is, you know, what we resist persists and what we can open to, we become the openness, the space that it can move through. It really is weather.

But it takes training to do that. And the challenge is sometimes fear is too strong. Sometimes it's traumatic fear. And trying to dive into the wave doesn't work because of its traumatic fear, we can get overwhelmed. So it takes some discernment if it's going to be too much. Instead of diving into the wave, we need to resource ourselves. We need to get buoys.

We need to have, you know, safety anchors, something. And that's more what I was talking about earlier. We need to learn to ground ourselves. We need to call in in our mind whatever person or spiritual figure feels protective. There are a lot of different processes. And I can kind of share a little more on those. But if the fear isn't too overwhelming, the healing comes from being with what's here. And I know for myself, one of the times I was most frightened, I was in a hospital.

I went through about six years of a kind of spiraling downhill of illness and really didn't know what was going on. I'm much better now. But I was losing my mobility. I couldn't. I mean, before that, I was very completely fanatic about exercise. and sports and everything. And, you know, I was just losing all these capacities. So I was in a, in a hospital unit for cardiacs. They were wondering about something with my heart. And I remember being alone, you know how it is? It's an endless day in a hospital. The lights

never go out. And I started getting very fearful one night, started thinking, because I had no idea what was wrong and thinking of all the different things coming up that I might have to cancel and that I probably would have to cancel. And so I remembered a teaching that's just what we're talking about, Lee, which is to meet your edge and soften. Do you say that again? Meet your edge and soften. And so I said, okay, with this fear, I'm going to meet my edge. and soften and I kept opening to it and it was you know it was very raw in my body

and very very unpleasant and I kept saying meet your edge and soften soften open soften let it be there let it be there and the fear transformed into grief it's like under the fear was the grief of losing life because you know our fear of what's ahead is that we're going to lose life in some way. Somebody we love, something we value, there's going to be loss. So I was opening right into the grief about that loss. And then again, meet your edge and soften. Like, let it be there.

Open, open, open. And something collapsed. And I just was, it just became this field of poignant tenderness. That the grief itself that embedded in the grief was just a, love for life. And I could just feel this love for life. It was a very timeless kind of love. It wasn't holding on to a particular thing like I want to be able to do this event. It was just loving life. It felt very vast and very timeless. And that space made it possible. I kept over, you know, for the rest of the time I was in the hospital and afterwards, every time I'd do that process of meeting

my edge and softening and really opening to the fear, I could feel behind it that grief and that love. And I really found that there was a very alive, spacious field that had room for the changing weather. So through my life, I've been deepening that process of going right into the wave in that way. It's the same idea. Meet your edge and soften.

Yeah. Another counterintuitive, perhaps to many, approach that you take is in your chapter on desire, and that rather than meeting desire with aversion or suppression, as is often the case, you're suggesting that, again, we interrogate it and or we discover what's underneath the desire, that actually may lead us to a greater freedom. As a matter of fact, another one of the great quotes that I love from your book, from D.H. Lawrence, men are not free when they're doing just what they like. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes.

And there is getting down to the deepest self. It takes some diving. But would you unpack this notion of desire for us? Yeah, you know, there are so many, and this comes from many religions, the sense that there's some, that humans are evil and that our desire is getting us in trouble and we've got to have all our antennas up and our shields up and so on to watch out. And my experience is that every emotion we have is intelligent and that the basic energies of our emotions, including passions, are life-loving life. They come from love. They get distorted

and confused and cause trouble, but they come from love. And desire comes from love. It's a love of life. Now, there's no question that it can turn into addiction and be destructive. So, clearly there has to be mindfulness. But I find what is so powerful is what I call tracing back to the core of the energy. So if I'm having desire for something and I, instead of thinking of the object, whether it's food or another person or success in something or whatever, I make what I call the U-turn and I go right back into the feeling of the desire and I ask the question, what is it I'm really wanting? What am I really longing for? What is it in my heart's really longing for. What I find is that I'm longing for love. I'm longing to be one with love, whether we

call that one with God, one with spirit, one with the universe, I'm longing for that belonging. And then if I keep going in and in, I actually come to the experience of that belonging. It says, John O'Donohue put it so beautifully, he said prayers, the bridge, between longing and belonging. And the more we go in and in and in, the more it's really love calling us home. But it gets mistaken as desire for an object out there. And so what I like to teach in terms of bringing more awareness

is to just sense right into the heart of the desire. What are we really longing for? And it takes some time. It takes some digging, as D.H. Lawrence said, because we're so habituated to thinking that what we want is the recognition or what we want is that person out there, whereas what we're really wants an experience, and it's an experience of communion. Beautifully said. Yeah, I think in the Christian tradition, there's this sort of, on the one hand, a moralistic fear. of desire, fear of pleasure.

And then what I find much more helpful is in the kind of virtue tradition, going back to somebody like Aquinas or going back to Augustine or going back to even Aristotle, is this sort of notion that the, a virtue like temperance, for example, is not about squelching pleasure. It's about enjoying pleasure all the more. and that you can fall prey to one of two vices with regard to pleasure. You can fall prey to eustemiousness and fear of pleasure or this overindulgence that can lead to bondage and addiction.

But there's this sweet spot where it's trying to help us realize how beautiful and wonderful and pleasurable life and love and relationships and the body is and can be. And I see, I hear you saying a very similar thing. It is. And part of what I'm enjoying and talking to you is that this is the wisdom, the common wisdom of different traditions, the perennial philosophy, really. I mean, the Buddhists would call it the middle way that not to,

not to grasp and not to push away. And what that takes is presence. So if we can train our, and in that wise abstinence, you know, where we're not grasping after, but we're creating space. Or William Blake would say, you know, to not try to grasp at the joys it flies by, this open-handedness that enjoys it in the moment and then lets it go. That's, I learned the phrase, I guess, from Pima Chudrin and from her book, I think it was called When Things Fall Apart.

and she talks about in meditation to neither repress nor indulge, I think is her phrase. Yes, it's beautiful. She's wonderful. Yeah. It was so super helpful. And the kind of process of meditating, desire, fear, whatever can come along. And I don't have to jump on the boat,

but I can observe the boat, and I don't have to have aversion towards the boat as it flows down the stream of my consciousness. So, yes. So helpful. And it really, it's such an invitation because so many of us, if we're grasping, we're not really enjoying life. If we're pushing away, we're not enjoying life. And joy is such a capacity that we don't nurture. And the joy comes from that open-handedness. Let me turn to a question of critique of Buddhist traditions that I've heard and see what you might

say about this. Oh, goody. I like that. That's fun. One that I've heard is that to practice this way of life facilitates or engenders a sort of lack of care for historical cultural realities, especially of oppression.

Is that fair at all? I can imagine if, you know, this is true with any tradition, there are some currents within a tradition that are more extreme and shut out certain things. So if, you know, there was a personal's ad in a Buddhist magazine that said, tall, dark, handsome Buddhist looking for himself. And I love that because, you know, it can be, it certainly can be, and I think of it as avoiding life, it can be, you know, you can take from the tradition that we're supposed to go off into a cave and we're supposed to be very inward

focus and the outer world doesn't matter, it's all an illusion. And so there are certainly people that would veer in that direction. There are, just like Christianity, there are so many different expressions of Buddhism. To me, the most awake or evolved is totally based on compassion and caring about the world. It's called the Bodhisattva Path. It's one of the main understandings that, you know, the heart of Buddhism is compassion and we begin with ourselves and widen the circles to include all beings everywhere. and that the idea is not to go into nirvana and leave this existence, it's to open our hearts

to include everybody and know that because this is an interdependent world, everybody's a part of our heart and that the only real freedom is when everybody's free. And that's much more of the tradition that is appealing to me. Yeah. That reminds me another thing I learned from Pima Chudrin, which I think is a widespread Buddhist practice, meditation practices of Tonglin. Would you describe that for us? Yeah. So if our habitual conditioning out of fear is when we encounter pain to push it away and when we feel a moment of pleasure or something good to grasp on, Tonglin deconditions it. Tonglin is a compassion practice that helps us feel our connection with all beings.

So the way we would practice is that in a moment that you bring to mind something that is really difficult and painful, let's say many people right now are feeling kind of the horror of the violence that's going on in the Middle East right now. And so what we would be doing with tonguelin, and it uses the breath as a way to activate our capacities, when you breathe in, you actually make yourself available to that suffering. You let yourself be touched by the suffering. You imagine it and you breathe in and feel like that pain is actually being felt in your body. So it reverses the sense of keeping away and ignoring and avoiding and so on. And then with

the out breath, you feel your deepest wish for freedom, for healing from suffering, for relief, and you send it out. So it's a taking in and ascending out. And the fear that people have is they're going to take in and be overwhelmed. That's the fear. If we think we're an individual separate self, that's a totally understandable fear. But what happens when you start breathing in and letting out is that you start feeling that you are the tender space that the world's happening in. There's plenty of room for it. And it creates a sense of profound connection with all beings.

So it's not their suffering over there. our suffering. It's our shared suffering. And that's a profound waking up because we tend to move through life as in a kind of cocoon. Right. Yeah. I'll give you another example that, you know, the way that these compassion practices actually really connect us with each other because it's so easy to have pity for people at a distance that are struggling and not sense it as our shared pain was, I first saw this in a documentary Van Jones is involved with where he brought together two groups of people and one group were from West Virginia and they were struggling with the opiate epidemic and, you know, all professionals serving, trying to help. And the other group

was from South L.A. and they were struggling with heroin and drug epidemics out there. And he brought together these two groups. And so Lee, these were very culturally different groups. I mean, you have the, you have the group from West Virginia, which were politically white. They're Christian. And there were political. politically very, very different from the primarily Latina Latinx and black population from South LA. So here you got these two groups for a week being together and, you know, exploring the epidemics that they were both dealing with and getting to know each other.

And of course, at first there was a lot of mistrust and there was a lot of sense of separateness. And I'm sharing this because our society is so, you know, completely caught in division. So there they were. They're there for a week and he asked them to each bring a picture of someone they had lost in the epidemics. And at one point during this documentary, you see one man holding a picture of his son and he said, the last thing I told him was, you got yourself in. to this, you get yourself out. And you could feel the whole group. It's like you could see that,

like as with the Tonglin practice, it was no longer my suffering. It's our shared suffering. And how realizing that created this really precious, I think, sacred space, because it becomes sacred space when we see the truth of our communion, of our belonging to each other. And you could see that there. So I share this because there's so many ways that we habitually go into our particular social identity and how we're separate. And we need to actually intentionally lean in to sense the truth of our shared vulnerability, that just like you're, you struggle with anxiety, like, of course I know fear, and it's the fear. And just to look at each other right now and say, yeah, yeah, these human body minds get

caught in that and also be able to look at each other and see behind the mass, so to speak, the deep goodness, the care about the world, the caring that is bigger than any ego identity. And to trust in that, that's what will bring us together and heal in our world. So we need these practices that help us to see more truthfully each other. I've been talking to Tara Brock, author of Radical Acceptance, embracing your life with the heart of a Buddha recently released in a 20th anniversary updated edition. Tar, it's been lovely talking to you today. Thank you so much for the wonderful conversation.

I feel the same. A lot of appreciation for what you do, Lee. Thank you. Thank you.