Tara Brach - Authentic Thanks Giving (2020-11-25)

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Authentic Thanks Giving (redux) - How do we awaken our natural capacities for gratitude and generosity? This talk explores the pathways of honest presence and purposeful cultivation, and offers several reflections that guide us in contacting and expressing our love (a favorite Thanksgiving talk from the archives).

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. There's a Sufi wise man who also plays The Fool, his name is Milanazardine. And in one of the stories about him, he had lost his wife's bracelet and he's frantic and panicking. He says, God, help me find this. I'll do anything. I'll give half of my week's earnings to the poor.

I'll do anything. Just help me. And then he sees it behind a cushion. And he says, never mind God, I've already found it. That's the beginning of my Thanksgiving talk. Yeah, so each year, the night before Thanksgiving, I put together a talk that in some way looks at these, qualities of the heart as we awaken of a natural generosity and a sense of gratitude.

And so when I was approaching this class, I'd actually forgotten that this was Thanksgiving week. And I had a whole different tacos cooking up on self-honesty. Then I somehow looked at the calendar and figured it out. And my first reaction was a real resistance, like, oh no. I got to do a talk on gratitude. I processed it and because I was in, you know, my whole mode was on honesty, I thought I'd share with you my process on it, if you'll bear with me,

which was I had a kind of cynicism come up and a bit of an aversion that there's so much about this contemporary Thanksgiving that's actually quite contrary to the heart qualities that were really celebrating. So I felt this kind of anger come up in me about a bit of the false pretensions that are images of history and really the genocide, the devastation towards indigenous people and how it continues on today and other non-dominant parts of our population. And this whole sense of receiving a harvest when the white Europeans came over here and plundered the earth, destroyed the ecosystems and so on.

And then of course, Thanksgiving goes hand in hand with this idea of turkey and how few connect the dots that what we're eating in our banquet, these turkeys were hatched and lived their six months. They live for six months and then they're slaughtered. In the wild, turkeys live for ten years. But six months and they're in this shed without light. They're drug to gain weight. So much so that a lot of them break their legs.

Anyway, it's a horrific thing. And so the whole, as you get it, my mind was just going through, oh my God, Thanksgiving. And then all of a sudden I said, okay, be with that. And I felt this real sorrow, just sorrow, about the shadow side of it. And so then I was saying, okay, be with the sorrow, be with the sorrow. You know, some tenderness came up. and then I just started feeling the sense of this presence, this tenderness, just holding the sorrow.

And then I went, wow, I'm just so grateful for this practice. Ah, gratitude. Slipped up on me. So gratitude and then, you know, and then I thought of you all. And when I say you all, you know, those, I just love my community here, IMCW community, those that gather here, and really this non-local community. that of just a web of people that care and want to wake up. And then I was feeling that gratitude, wow, what an amazing thing to be part of that.

Because I feel part of it, I am nurtured by it. I know I'm in a role, but boy, I, it's very much just a wonderful, rich exchange. And so I was just feeling that gratitude and I thought, wow, I wonder if I could share this with you. And then my first thought was, oh, this is going to be a downer, I start sharing all my stuff on Thanksgiving, but I realized that we all want to be more real and that that's part of when the gratitude comes up, it's because we're feeling more real and who we are. So I want to thank you for just being with being and being with each other and together in this

path of waking up. And so I felt full of gratitude and I went, okay, I'm really on for putting together a talk and I went back to my desk, and the first thing that showed up in my files that I thought to myself, wow, this resonates. I want to share it with you. This is Mary Oliver. And this poem is called in praise of craziness of a certain kind. On cold evenings, my grandmother, with ownership of half her mind, the other half, having flown back to Bohemia, spread newspapers over the porch floor, So, she said, the garden ants could crawl beneath as under a blanket and keep warm. And what shall I wish for for myself?

But being so struck by the lightning of years, to be like her with what is left, that loving. To be like her with what is left, that loving. And maybe a pause here for all of us as we consider the season and what makes a holiday really a holy day. Just to close your eyes for a moment, maybe sense yourself into the future when a lot has fallen away. Perhaps some of your capabilities, some of your cognitive capacities, your feelings, your physical, what do you wish would be left? What are the qualities of being of who you really

are that you most in this moment want to honor, want to cultivate, want to bring alive? Just sense that over these next few minutes together we'll be reflecting together on what can evolve these heart qualities. You can open your eyes if you'd like. I think of it as two pathways. One pathway of awakening the heart is pure presence with whatever's here in the moment. So if for me whatever was here in the moment was cynicism, anger, aversion, just start where you are. So we start with where we are. And it takes kind of being alert because often where we are feels like we shouldn't be there and it's wrong. And there's lag time for us. We kind of get caught in it. But the sooner we realize, oh, this is the portal right here. Just be with this. And then

we pause. Then a very precious kind of presence starts waking up. But it requires pausing. Typically, if we look at our lives, we are tumbling forward into what's next. And mentally we have a map and our map is really has this trajectory of what we're on our way to. Have you noticed that, how much we're on our way to something? This pathway back to the heart means that we catch on like, oh, I can't be on my way, I need to come right here. So there's that kind of stop, be right here, make a clearing in the dense forest of your life. Remember that line?

So we learn to stop chasing after things, stop racing forward in our mind. Now, some of you might remember FOMO, that's the fear of missing out, you know, the way we're just constantly racing after things. I'd like to read you a very short piece called Jomo, which is the joy of missing out. Oh, the joy of missing out when the world begins to shout and rush towards that shining thing, the latest bit of mental bling, trying to have it, see it, do it, the anxious clamoring in need,

this restless hungry thing to feed. Instead, you feel the loveliness, the pleasure of your emptiness. You spurn the treasure on the shelf in favor of your peaceful self. Without regret, without a doubt, oh, the joy of missing out. So it's a fun way of saying,

We stop that busyness if we want to wake up the heart because all the qualities we most cherish come from presence. Take a moment again if you will, just to close your eyes and listen. When we start being here we can listen to the moment. We can listen inwardly and get intimate with our inner life. We can listen to each other from an anonymous writer, isn't it true that to get to know the beauty and majesty of a tree, you have to be quiet and rest in the shade of the tree? Don't you have to stand under the tree? To understand anyone,

you need to stand under them for a little while. This means you have to listen to them and be quiet and take in who they are as if from under, as if from inside out. And so as we enter this season of holy days, creating that clearing in the dense forest, you might sense who in the next day or two you want to understand, stand under with that listening presence. So you can appreciate and just imagine that in order to stand under, you need to pause to come into that presence right here. Our first pathway to these heart qualities is simply stopping and bringing that listening presence alive.

The second pathway, and it's fine if you'd like to open your eyes, the second pathway is intentionally cultivating these positive traits of gratitude and generosity. Now, these are intrinsic. Every one of us has this natural capacity. It's built in to us. But it often gets kind of covered over or twisted or torched, expresses itself in strange ways. One of my favorite stories when I talk about this is of a bus of kindergartners on a school

trip and one little girl brings a handful of peanuts up to the driver and he's surprised and thinks, oh, she must have thought I was hungry. and just really touched. Thanks her. Well, ten minutes later, she comes up again with this other handful, and he's thinking, oh my gosh, these children, they're just so generous. Happens the third time, he says, honey, you and your friends, you can share and enjoy them. And she says, oh, no, no, no, we just like sucking the chocolate off of them.

So our generosity is not always full-blown or whole-hearted. But it's there. But when our survival brain gets really activated, okay? when our survival brain's really on, in other words, fight, flight, freeze, then it closes down. We lose access to generosity and to gratitude. And it happens in two ways. There's a sense that we're going to miss out on something. That's the grasping part of the survival brain, I need, I want, there's not enough,

and then we aren't able to be in that grateful mode or generous mode. And it happens also in the sense that there's something bad that's going to happen around the corner. And then we're so wrapped up in defending ourselves, protecting ourselves, worrying, planning that we're not there to receive the moment. We're just not able to enjoy. Now, often that something bad has to do with there's something wrong with me or something wrong with you and then we get even tighter and we're unable to enjoy our lives.

I think Garrison Kuehler said it wonderfully when he said, my ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time. So we get tight. One of the biggest ways that our survival brain takes control is that we feel like we have to control other people. And you can think in your life if there's anybody that you want them to behave in a certain

way, you want them to be different, that in the moments that you're wanting them to be different, you can't be appreciating them. That flow of generosity and gratitude can't be there. There's one story that always comes to mind around Thanksgiving where this elderly man in Phoenix calls his son in New York and says, I hate to ruin your day, but your mother and I are divorcing. Forty-five years of misery, enough. We can't handle anymore.

And the son screams and, Pop, what are you talking about? And the father says, nope, we can't stand the sight of each other any longer. He says, we're sick and tired of each other and I'm sick of talking about this. So call your sister in Chicago and just tell her. He hangs up. The son calls his sister in Chicago and she freaks out. So she calls Phoenix and she screams at her father. You're not getting divorced.

Don't do a single thing until I get there. I'm calling my brother back. We'll both be there tomorrow. But until then, do you hear me? Don't do a thing. She hangs up. The old man hangs up his phone and turns to his wife. Okay, they're coming for Thanksgiving and they're paying their own way.

This is just a bit of how the survival brain can interfere with these qualities of the heart. So for the remainder of our time, I'd like to, and we'll do some practice together, talk about active ways that we can cultivate the trait of gratitude, like just be in that habit of, oh, wow, you know, taking it in and appreciating and of generosity. I think of them as utterly inseparable, by the way, that gratitudes when we're breathing and taking in and letting ourselves really receive the mystery and the beauty and the sweetness that's here. And generosity is that flow through where there's just naturally this breathing out, where

we're just naturally giving out of care. So there's a misunderstanding really about generosity, the shadow side, which is people who are always giving, but it's a kind of a giving that others won't love me or won't value me unless I give. It's kind of an addiction to helping. And for those people, it's more breathe in, take it in, take it in, take it in, let it in, you know, not trusting, they're good enough. So we're going to look at how we can intentionally cultivate gratitude because it's a practice. There's lots of gratitude research out there because it's so good for our bodies and our spirit and, you know, it shows over and over again that even doing once a week a kind of gratitude

list can lift depression. My husband, Jonathan, and I have a practice. We get together to meditate and then do a kind of relational meditation twice a week. and we schedule it because if we don't schedule it, stuff happens. So twice a week we actually formally sit down and we sit together silently for 20 minutes, a half an hour and then we have a several-part meditation we do out loud. The first part is to say, well, what are you grateful for? And we say, you know, things we're grateful for to each other.

And I often notice that a lot like doing this Thanksgiving, talk, my first thing is, well, I'm just not in the mood right now. I'm not feeling grateful for why should I invent what I'm great, you know, that kind of feeling. But I find every time is that as I start naming and as Inaj's head, that it's kind of an outside in, I'm faking it and then I start realizing, yeah, I really am grateful for that. I am grateful for this puppy, my little dog who's sitting right here. I am grateful that I get to go and walk by the river so often or that I get to do what I do as life. And then it becomes sincere. And for me, sincerity is one of the most delicious feelings in the world when I really feel

it's a kind of innocence. There's no covering. And then he does the same thing. And then there's a real openness and then we can move on to the next question which is what's challenging right now. And there's a lot more realness and vulnerability on that. Then we move on to the third question which is the most challenging which is is, is there anything between us and feeling really connected? And the reason I'm sharing this is the gratitude question sets the groundwork for a kind of realness and connection on the other questions. It's so powerful. There are many ways you can practice gratitude. You can have a buddy of some sort. Some people just have a gratitude buddy and at the

end of the day they just agree to email three things they're grateful for. There's no back for it that doesn't have to take time but they keep each other accountable. Some people have gratitude journals. Some people just say it out loud. ever works, I want to share with you one of the people in my life that has most taught me about gratitude. And I had the good fortune to, we had a nice Skype call yesterday, his name's Dan Gottlieb. He's a very dear friend. He is a psychologist and a writer and also had a radio over a number of years. And about 40 years ago, Dan got into a really horrific accident and he's been a quadriplegic for 40 years. And he feels his body's winding down and it's

because that's a long time to be not able to move and have all the different things that come along with it. And initially when he was first in the ICU after the accident, he was despairing and he felt suicidal. and he describes how a nurse who was tending to him seemed pretty depressed and came in and started talking to him because she knew who was a psychologist and they talked a long time and she left and the next morning she came and said

you know that talk she was going through some sort of a break or something she said that talk changed me you know I feel I still feel miserable but I also feel hopeful like I can sense there's more life ahead She walked out of the room and he said to himself, you know, if I can be of help to people, I can live. And he chose life. And he chose life in a really deep way, so much so that when you're with Dan, you feel more alive because he's 100% here inhabiting his life. You know, yesterday

He reminded me of one of these, there's a classic Charlie Brown cartoon where Charlie Brown and Snoopy are sitting on this dock and they're looking out at this beautiful lake and Charlie Brown saying, you know, someday we'll all die Snoopy. And Snoopy says true, but on all the other days we won't. Saddam was just reminding me of all these life moments that we can choose to take. in, to breathe in and appreciate. And there's such a beauty to choosing to actively cherish these moments. I'm reminded of one meditation master who was asked why he practices meditation and his response

was so, when I walk to the town square, I'll notice the tiny purple flowers by the side of the road. So this is the gift that instead of being on our way to what's next, we can pause for presence and actually learn consciously, purposely, to let in the beauty and the goodness. And it's not just letting it in. If you want to train in gratitude, it also means feeling it in your body, it's the embodied quality that actually allows it to stick to be not just a passing state but become a trait. As many of you know with the survival brain, we are geared to remember what is bad or wrong and to actually sort in our environment for what's wrong.

So to shift that negativity bias with gratitude, you're not only the to say, oh yeah, that's lovely, I appreciate this, but feel it in your body. And then it shifts from going into your brain and just kind of fluttering away to going really into your implicit memory and developing this habit of noticing what's good. Let's practice it for a few moments. Let's just come into whatever posture helps you. Feel your body sitting here and breathing. your heart and begin to bring to mind what you're grateful for in your life.

And for these next few moments, just whisper softly but whisper, I'm grateful for and fell in the blanks and then just say it again, I'm grateful for and just keep saying it with whatever comes up. I invite you to whisper it because the entrainment, the sense of gratitude, become stronger if you say it out loud. So don't be shy. Just begin whispering, I am grateful for. Maybe people, maybe experiences.

What are you grateful for? And if something really feels alive, repeat it again and then again. Let yourself choose something that really feels sincere right now. something you're really grateful for, and repeat it several more times, slowing it down so you can feel in your body the experience of gratitude, feel how it feels in your throat, your heart, and your belly, let it fill you, and then you might just simply say thank you for what you're grateful for. If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is thank Thank you that would suffice Meister Eckhart.

Opening your eyes as you're ready. So this is just a couple of moments or minutes and the key elements again is to reflect on what you're grateful for. It helps a lot to say it out loud. This morning I was talking to one of my oldest friends I've known her since home rooms. freshman year of high school. And before hanging up, I just paused and I knew I was going to say it. And I said, you know, Susan, I'm really, really grateful to have you in my life that we've

had all these years and you're just so dear. I knew I was going to say it and before I said it, I was feeling it in my mind. I wasn't in my body but as I said it, I started crying because what's already true if you name it and bring yourself to it, it actually brings it forth in a much more whole body and tender way. There's a similar sensibility in this little reading from Zen master Shimano. He says, people often ask me how the Buddhists answer the question, does God exist? The other day I was walking along the river. I was suddenly aware of the sun shining through bare, trees, its warmth, its brightness, and all this completely free, completely gratuitous,

simply there for us to enjoy. And without my knowing it, completely spontaneously, my two hands came together and I realized I was making gashio, that's the gesture of prayer. And it occurred to me that this is all that matters, that we can bow, take a deep bow. Just that. Just that. saying thank you, or bowing, but in some way expressing the gratitude. Okay, so that's breathing in, the taking in, and it can be taking in our appreciation of another person or natural beauty or of a moment of connection or kindness or whatever it is we cherish. Then there's the generosity, there's expressing with our love by giving. And it really can be through words of care, through a prayer, or through actions.

But there are different degrees of generosity. And it's really, this is where self-honesty comes in because we can be generous giving leftovers or things that don't matter too much to us or small amounts of money or then it can kind of be deeper, things we would enjoy for ourselves but we just really want another person to enjoy. And then there's kingly giving, that's the term in Buddhism. And it's this wholehearted, spontaneous movement of the heart that's just out of love, you're just kind of totally giving of yourself to whatever it is, whatever you believe in or to helping

in a full, wholehearted way. And the quality is sometimes described in the negative as non-clinging, there's just no holding on. There's that open hand that just freely lets this love. and this energy just flow through us. And that is an ecstatic feeling, that kind of generosity. Because it's not like a self I'm going to give to you, it's just really letting the universe, the generosity of the universe flow through us.

So an example of this one is a story I love about a devoted Zen practitioner, we're back to Zen again. His name is Tetsugan. And he was a teacher in Japan. He lived in the 1600s. And he decided he was going to publish the sutras, which are the discourses of the Buddha. And that time, they were only available in Chinese. So he was going to print them in Japanese. And this was going to take the construction of 60,000 wood blocks to accomplish it. It takes a lot of donations. So he started traveling and collecting bit by bit the sum of money he needed. It took a while. A few sympathizers would give him a hundred pieces of gold, but most of the times he only received small coins. But he thanked each donor with equal gratitude and after

ten years he had enough money to then begin the task. But it turned out at that time that the Uji River overflowed and all the crops were ruined and famine followed. So Tetsugan took the funds he had collected for the books and spent them of course to save others from starvation. And then he began the work of collecting again. In several years he'd built up again the coffers so he could do the project, but several years an epidemic spread over the country and again he gave away what he collected. He starts for the third time. After 20 years his wish was fulfilled and the printing blocks would produce the first edition

of sutures they can be seen today in the Obaku Monaster in Kyoto. The Japanese tell their children that Tasugan made three sets of sutras and that the first two invisible sets surpass even the last. The first two invisible sets surpass even the last. There's no greater beauty than this flow of love that we call generosity. You know, I think that probably every one of us knows the experience of being around a generous person, that as soon as someone else is generous, our hands seem to open up and it's like we want to give back.

It brings out that loving part of us. I think of it like a fully generous community is a holy community. I mean, that is the evolutionary potential and we can create that. If each of us in our own lives just leans in that direction, I have a kind of good, game I play with myself and it's turned into a game because I sometimes get shocked by it. But whenever I have a generous thought like, oh, I'm going to give this here or let that person know such and such or whenever it comes to my mind, I have to follow through on it. So, you know, you never know what's going to come to your mind.

But it's just something that's really been alive for me. And the reality is, it's wired into all of us. We just get waylaid. I sometimes like to read this inquiry that went to children about love and generosity and marriage and so on because you get a sense of what's already there and this is a kind of follow-up from my earlier story. There was one question is, well, how do you make someone fall in love with you? What kind of way of showing care or generosity will make somebody fall in love with you?

I'll read you a few responses. Tell them you own a whole bunch of candy stores. Still, age six. Two, don't do things like having smilly green sneakers. You might get attention, but attention isn't the same thing as love. Three, one way is to take a girl out to eat. Make sure it's something she likes to eat. French fries usually works for me.

It's Bart, age nine. Just read you a few more of these. This is an expression of love. I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones. And then more on love. There's a question of, okay, so what is it?

Well, a man and a woman promised to go through sickness and illness and diseases together. Marilyn, age 10. And Floyd, age nine, says, love is foolish, but I still might try it sometime. And the last, when my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too. That's love.

When it's blocked, it takes intention. There's one woman who was with us for a training of some years ago and she described her father just, he had that kind of block, he could not communicate love for his children. And when her brother was dying of brain cancer, his wife told her that the only thing missing for her brother was that his father never told him he loved him. So she encouraged her father, but on his next visit, he claimed, well, the subject just didn't come up.

He had been blocked for a really long time, that flow through. Then she gets a call and seems her brother is probably going to die in about an hour, because he's blind and paralyzed, hadn't spoken in a week, so she calls her father. She says, Daddy, you have one chance. Jay will probably die today. Please pick up the phone and tell him that you love him. So here's what she writes. She says, and Daddy did just that.

He called Jay and told him that he loved him. And Jay, who hadn't spoken for a week, started talking and talked to Daddy for half an hour. Jay didn't even die that day. He rallied and lived for another month. Again, you might want to pause and just close your eyes. Just says, is there a place where you felt blocked, where you could just lean a little in the direction? of giving something, some expression of care, to someone where you felt kind of withholding or resentful or just blah.

You might just sense your intention because if the intention is there that can open the door. So we're going to close with the practice but I just want to say a few more words before we end. So in this class I started personally because it's very easy to be. to sense around us the survival brain in action. I sometimes think of the limbic hijack of our society and fixate on where the shadow side is, where the cruelty is. And this isn't about turning our eyes or glazing over or being polyanish.

We need to be really honest with it. And for me, it meant when it came up two days ago, when I was thinking of giving this talk, that I just stayed with it. And I let myself feel the anger and the injustice and the hurting. And then in that presence, I found that tenderness. So there's two pathways to waking up our heart. And one is to be absolutely right there, start where we are. And the other is to sense these qualities of,

of care that we want to cultivate and actively intend to engage. I read that one of the five pillars of Islamist charity and each year at the end of Ramadan, each household is asked to give two and a half percent of earnings to the needy. And so I heard this story, this group of poor people went to the prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and asked him, how could they help others if they had nothing to give? And he told them they did not have, if they did not have something to give, he asked them to smile at others and do the best to make sure that everyone whom they encountered felt cared for.

And I just, when I heard that, I thought, wow, what if we move through the world with that? That just whoever you have contact with, there's some place. in you that intends that they feel cared for. That's generosity. That is a beautiful expression of it. So I'd like to have a closing reflection on this with you, if you will, and take some moments again to close your eyes and arrive right here, let yourself come home into the moment.

you might take a few long deep full breaths. You might listen again to Mary Oliver and the spirit, I think, of this heart space. She says, on cold evenings my grandmother, with ownership of half her mind, the other half having flown back to Bohemia, spread newspapers over the porch floor. So she said the garden ants could crawl beneath. as under a blanket and keep warm. And what shall I wish for for myself, but being so struck by the lightning of years

to be like her with what is left, that loving? So you might sense this intention in your own language, your own heart language, in some way that whoever you're with, in some way they may feel cared for, that there may be these heart qualities awake. You might take some moments to bring to mind the beings in your life, those that you might be with in the next day or so,

and those who are part of your close-in-circle, those you work with, and take a moment just to let different people come to mind and sense the possibility of coming into presence and in some way letting them know that they're cared for with your words, your actions. You take a moment and sense

offering that generosity and care inward to any part of you that needs to be cared for. Just offering a message of care if you like to, putting your hand on your heart and offering energetically that generosity of tenderness, letting it flow inward. And sensing yourself, right, this moment, listening, practicing with others here and around the world, sensing our shared heart space with our shared care and prayers that would bring that caring to all in need.

to bring to mind in this heart space all those in need of company, of healing, all those in needs of home, of refuge, all those in need of safety, all those humans and non-human beings that need protection and love, may they all be held in the loving presence that's here, that's boundless. holding all beings in our heart, holding this earth and all life everywhere in our heart, may all beings everywhere be filled with loving presence, held in loving presence. May all beings be safe from inner and outer harm. May all beings touch the natural joy of being alive.

May all beings everywhere awaken and be able. free. Namaste and thanksgiving blessings to all. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.