Tara Brach - Awakening through Difficult Emotions

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

Awakening through Difficult Emotions: "The Poison is the Medicine" - Most of us know the pain of getting stuck in fear, anxiety, anger or shame. This exploration looks at how the emotion that takes over, when we attend with mindfulness and care, can become a place of deep transformation and freedom. Included in the talk is a guided RAIN meditation.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome, friends. Glad to be with you. It's been a while. I just spent two weeks of my family, including a two-year-old and a four-year-old granddaughters. It was wonderful. It was exhausting. amazed my body can do this non-stop playing without major injury. You know, a friend was telling me about touring a hotel to book for an event and he was with the representative and he commented

to this representative that, you know, the hotel was kind of aging. It would seem pretty old and the representative said to him, you know, we don't use the word old. We use the word seasoned. So, I'm trying to think of myself as having this seasoned body that can go with it with grandchildren. You know, I was talking to a friend about the intensity of being with young children, and she reminded me of this study that was done, this is decades ago, of Harvard football players who spent a day in a nearby nursery taking care of the children, and then they were interviewed and 100% of them said it was way more stressful, intense, and demanding than a day of practice, a day of training. It's hard. And what it made me think of really was how many,

mostly women spent a lot of time with young children, how challenging and important that work is and how impossible it is, and I think of this for mother so often, not to get stressed and sometimes reactive or angry and then feel bad about themselves for it. Because, you know, when life doesn't cooperate and children don't cooperate, our nervous system is designed to react. And of course, and we're going to be talking about averse of emotions, they arise in all sorts of situations, not just child care. It's whenever life doesn't cooperate. Romdas, many of you might remember, a spiritual teacher, one of the great ones from our generation, said that if you think you're enlightened, spend a week with your family. So, we don't really need others even to

stir up difficult emotions. Our minds can do it. Another friend shared about a greeting card she received and it's this serene drawing of the Buddha sitting in low disposition with his legs crossed and his eyes are closed and then there's this thought bubble above his head and it says I hate my thighs we know what our minds do on whether we're meditating or moving through the day they get us into trouble so I bring this up because now more than ever, our world is changing so fast that our bodies and our nervous systems can't keep up. And it creates a deep sense of insecurity and ungroundedness. And, you know, there are spiking levels of anxiety, depression.

So, this brings us to our theme for this talk, what we'll explore together, which is something I explore regularly because it's so core to the spiritual path is how do we navigate the unpleasant emotions? How do we navigate when we get triggered by the repeating visitors of whether it's anxiety or anger or fear or shame? How do we navigate in a way that really serves awakening, serves spiritual transformation. So as I move through this, you might consider what you'd like to attend to because we'll do a meditation together. What challenging emotional weather system do you regularly experience? And I'll begin this exploration with a teaching story that many of you are familiar with. This is an elder that's teaching his grandson about life and he says

a fight's going on inside me and he says it's a terrible fight. It's between two wolves and one is evil and he's filled with anger and greed and guilt and fear and a lot of ego and then he said the other wolf is good and that wolf is filled with joy and peace and love and truth and compassion and the same fight is going on side of you and really every human being. And so the grandson thinks about this and he then asks his grandfather, well, which wolf's going to win? And the elder replies, whichever one you feed. So, I'd like to offer a bit of a revision. I have a dear friend Stephen Joseph's who puts it this way. He says there's no bad wolf. And it's true. What happened? is that we sometimes have a dominance of primitive emotions, we get stuck in them.

And sometimes we have access to our more evolved emotions, and we need to feed both, really. You might remember Rumi's guest house where he says, welcome the guests, all of them. So, there are two basic ways that our meditation training helps us with difficult emotions. And the first one is, it's like feeding the wolf with the evolved emotions, it's to intentionally cultivate wholesome emotions. In other words, to do practices that help us develop loving kindness and generosity and gratitude. That's the first domain of training. And the other is to bring mindfulness and compassion to the difficult, more primitive emotions. And this will be our focus for today. So a key understanding, and this is one that can really radically shift

how we relate to emotions, is that they're all from the same source. There are life energy that is wanting to protect and promote life. That's the purpose of emotions. They're to move us in ways that protect us and nourish us. Fear and anger, protect against danger and threats. Shame, protect us from being, rejected. Guilt, trying to improve us, greed, trying to promote meeting our needs. And here's the deal, that the more we have unmet needs for safety or for nourishment or love, the more intense

the emotions. So they're entirely natural and they're universal. I think of this cartoon I have and you have to kind of imagine it that there's a cat that's sitting outside a mouse hole and he's leaning against the wall dejected. And in the mouse holes, the mouse who's a psychiatrist, and the mouse is saying to his patient, don't worry, fantasies about devouring the doctor are perfectly normal. And so it is. These emotions are in service of meeting our eyes.

needs and they're necessary to survive and thrive and in a really deep way. And this is what for me is so powerful, they're all expressions of life-loving life, life, life. And they may get twisted and cause pain, but their essence is life-loving life. And that really helps me. I'll be meditating or moving through the day and if I feel a, let's say, a clutch of fear or anxiety about what's around the corner and I can pause and really sense to myself, okay, so this is just that powerful life energy, loving life, wanting to protect life. And if I can just remember that and in some way appreciate that that's what this is, the sense of my own being becomes enlarged and there's no longer any suffering with it. There's a sense of this is a

current that's moving through me. It's okay. You might imagine it for a moment. Maybe you can even sense right now in your body some energy of anxiety or fear or remember a recent time with it. and just sense that this energy is life-protecting life that's trying to help you. And just sense that you could even say thank you, just to honor it as a basic life energy. And notice that that really shifts your relationship with fear. You might listen to these words from Heldegaard von Bingham. she says, this is a mystic saint. I, the fiery life of divine essence,

am a flame beyond the beauty of the meadows. I gleam in the waters. I burn in the sun, moon, and stars. I awaken everything to life. The air lives by turning green and being in bloom. The waters flow as if they were alive. The sun lives in its light. And thus I remain hidden.

and every kind of reality as a fiery power. Our emotions arise from this fiery power, life, loving, protecting, promoting life. So, if these energies are natural and universal, this is life, protecting life, loving life, why do they feel so wrong? Why do we feel that we shouldn't feel fear, anger, hatred, you know, why does something feel wrong when they come up? And the reason is this, that when these

energies arise, they can take over. The on button gets stuck. And when that happens, the whole sense of who we are gets kind of possessed or identified with the emotion. And we get small. And I find it really helpful to think of it like a hose with water flowing through it. And when the hose gets twisted or torqued, which is what happens with our emotions, when we start having fear thoughts that feed the fear feelings, that create more fear thoughts, and they start circling. And rather than the emotion being kind of healthy and telling us what we need to do and what is going to serve us, it just becomes a circling energy that's kind of caught in our body.

And our whole sense of who we are becomes a scared cell. That feels bad. So I'm just giving you an example of how the primitive energy can actually end up creating suffering. Imagine that same hose gets untorked, untwisted, and the water can flow through naturally. then it becomes like a current in our larger system. We still are inhabiting the fullness of our being and it can inform us in an intelligent way and actually serve our aliveness.

One of the ways that language shows us the best is the difference between the word demon, which we kind of know as being a malevolent, difficult spirit, and that represents the Torque-Stuck primitive energies. And its original meaning, which was Dimone, D-A-I-M-O-N, which is really the spirit or the spiritual being that influences our character. It's a very pure, flowing energy. That's the original Greek word for demon, was Dimone.

So, our inquiry friends, is this. How do we relate to the demon, the torqued energies, the primitive energies that we all know, that we all get possessed by of anger, fear, hatred, shame? How do we relate to the demon so it untwists and becomes dimone, that flowing life energy, that really uplifts our life? How do we make that kind of transformation? And Rumi says it so clearly. The cure for the pain is in the pain.

It's in the pain. And the Tibetan teachings describe it this way. They say that we transform when we learn to nourish the demon with wise attention, with mindfulness and compassion. When we bring mindfulness and compassion to the torqued energies to the demon, the poison becomes the medicine. The demon becomes the daimone. Okay, so this is our frame for how we're exploring difficult emotions, having this transformation

from a torque, twisted energy to a flowing energy. Demon to daimone. On our pathway of mindfulness and compassion, as many are familiar, we'll use the practice of rain, which is the four steps that weave mindfulness and compassion. And for those that are not familiar, the steps are recognized, allow, investigate, and nurture. So we're going to explore this movement from demon to daimone. And I want to name the main challenge in advance, which is that the demon doesn't necessarily

arise individually. They often come together, like clusters. And the most common pair of demons is, let's say anger arises, it often gets paired with shame, we have a reaction to the demon that arises with aversion. We feel ashamed of or hating our anger. So they arise together. We often call this the second arrow that first fear or anger or hatred will arise and then shame about the fear or anger or hatred. Okay? So I want to just alert you to that. here's a very mild example of the double demon. And it's a story of a woman and her family when they're vacationing in a small New England town. It's the same town where the actor,

now deceased, many of you probably weren't alive when he was so famous, Paul Newman, he and his family often visited. So she decides one Sunday to, after she does this brisk walk to stop at a and get a double-dip chocolate ice cream cone at this bakery coffee shop. And there's only one of their patron in the store. And that's Paul Newman. So her first response is feeling a kind of burst of kind of anxiety or fear or self-consciousness. That's the first demon that arises. But then the second one is ashamed of herself for even having those feelings. So she's telling herself, you know, pull yourself together, what's wrong with you? You're a happily married woman with three children. Get it together. And she doesn't even look in his direction. She just goes to the counter and orders her cone and

clerk fills the order. And she takes her cone and then goes out the door and just kind of gliding out, just not even glancing in his direction. So she gets to the car and realizes she doesn't have her cone. Back into the car. shop she goes, expecting to see it on the counter and the clerk's hand or whatever, and no ice cream cone in sight. So finally she looks over at Paul Newman and his face breaks into this familiar, warm, friendly grin and he says to her, you put it in your purse. So, paired demons, you know, and often they lead us to actions that we regret. You know, we have the insecurity and then we feel bad

about ourselves and then we do just the thing that creates more insecurity, creates the trance of unworthiness. And what I'm really wanting to get across is that there's no pathway to healing whatever demon is there, whatever unprocessed torqued energy is there, if we're hating ourselves for it. And often that's the first place we have to pay attention, is how we're relating to the difficult energy. So, I'd like to share a story of a woman who was working with difficult energies and how that kind of transformation, how the poison became the medicine for her. And this was last year, I had several sessions with a woman. Actually, she worked at a nonprofit. I'm involved with and she leads meditation at that nonprofit so she practices.

Single mom, under a lot of financial stress, two children. She has been regularly sending money to her family in Guatemala. Very strong young woman. So she shared with me her challenges with her younger son, 16 years old, low self-esteem, really playing a lot of video games and drugs, doing a lot of vaping and edibles. And she would set these boundaries, you know, about helping in the house and schoolwork and drugs. And his compliance was erratic. So she'd naturally get angry, have a lot of judgments, let him know how she was feeling and he was increasingly withdrawing. So there was a standoff, a lot of distance. So we explored Raine together and she began with the demon of anger, this kind of just pretty chronic sense of blame and judgment towards him

and recognized it, named it, allowed it to be there, just said, yes, okay, this is what's here right now and then she began to investigate. And she found that under the anger when she opened to it was fear. And the fear was that, you know, he's going to have trouble in his life. He's going to have a bad life. And that went right to self-blame. In other words, her anger turned on herself. Shame. The belief, I'm a bad parent, you know, it's my fault. I'm not present enough. I don't, I'm not firm enough on boundaries, I'm too judgmental. This was the double demon. She was angry and also ashamed of herself.

And she went more deeply into the shame, feeling it in her body, felt that kind of sinking, aching, powerless feeling in her chest, in her belly. She could feel this kind of crying place in her heart. and it was just saying over and over again, I can't do it right, I can't do it right. So this is the pain, the pain of the shame demon, and she could feel it as something that had been there her whole life and began weeping really deeply, very painful. So part of investigating is to say, well, what is that place most need? And when she asked herself that, it was really to trust him okay, that I love him, that I'm lovable. And so I invited her as I often do to put her hand on her heart and to offer self-compassion.

But she didn't feel like she had any access to self-compassion. She felt too small. She felt too bad. And so, as many of you know, the nurturing of rain doesn't have to come from. from yourself. You can bring it from any source you can imagine. So I asked her, well, who do you trust? And she said, I trust my mother and my grandmother. Her mother's not alive anymore. Her mother died actually when she was quite young. Her grandmother brought her up, her abuela and raised her very strong, loving, wise matriarch. And so she invoked her. She felt her

grandmother's presence and, you know, I said, what would your grandmother say to you? And just let let in your grandmother's words. And her grandmother said to her, carida, carita, it's dear, dear, you have a beautiful loving heart and just kept repeating those words and she started feeling her mother and her grandmother and her great-grandmother and the whole, you know, lineage of female ancestors kind of surrounding her. And their love, and their love, and her, and her mother, and her mother, and strength flowing into her and really relaxing into that. And then we went into what's called after the rain. After the rain is when you're not doing anything,

rather resting in and getting familiar with the presence that's opened up. And she could just feel what she said is a wide open heart. and sense that open-hearted presence as more who she was than any story of a failing parent, any anger towards a son. She could hold her imperfect parenting and include all parts of herself and include her son. So just to say, the demon energy that was all torqued, that anger and that shame, when it untwisted became a really vast field of compassion, became daimon, that energy of loving connection. Now, some comments for you.

First is, rain is not a one-shot. When we've had, you know, over and over again the experience of being caught in the demon, the primitive energies, it takes repeated rounds of untwisting, and it was true. for her. She had a do, she kept getting triggered by anger and she'd keep having to, you know, get in touch with feeling angry and then bad about herself and feel that being held and nurtured by ancestors and that repeatedly freed her up her heart to be more open and loving with her son. And a few days of after we practiced together, she was reflecting on her son and had this insight that she could see how his escaping drugs and online and so on came from his feeling of being flawed,

his trance of unworthiness, his shame, demon. And it just brought up this really deep tenderness in her heart. And so she started this loving kindness practice where she would just hold them in her heart, in her mind's eye and sense his goodness. and she brought it into her daily life. She made a kind of commitment. Every day, I'm going to in some way let him know I see his goodness in words or in actions or by touch.

And that softened things. She tried to be as firm as she could and clear about boundaries, but it was communicated from a place of respect and care. And something came through because they began, over weeks to talk more, to have more real conversations. You could sense the daemon, that energy flowing in her. So a few more comments. For this woman, especially during that first ream practice,

she really plunged deeply into the raw pain of shame. and this is part of the healing. They say that your issues are in your tissues, that in order to untwist the emotional energy, you actually have to contact it, that we have to directly experience in our bodies what's going on for there to be a loosening, untwisting, and untwarking so it can flow more.

We have to feel our feelings. feelings. The cure for the pain is in the pain. And sometimes the pain is really intense. And so if there's been a lot of trauma, it's really important to go slow, to have support, to resource yourself, to really hold yourself in love. Really be gentle. And when we touch it, it's strong. I remember once, I received a note, this was a couple of years ago, from someone along with a very generous donation and he said, thanks a lot. Your rain meditation was so intense it made me throw up. Afterwards I repeated it and it helped me a lot. Thanks a lot. So, I share this because it was maybe one of the most original notes I've heard, you know,

thanking me for having a meditation that made this person throw up. And I share it with you because it takes the willingness and the courage to open to what's in our bodies, to the uncomfortableness, the unpleasantness, and the motivation. there's some wisdom in us that knows that we have to be intimate with the wounded place. It's as Rumi says, it's a little different angle, that that's where the light comes through. It's when we get in touch with the demon, when we get in touch bringing mindfulness and kindness to that twisted energy that it untwist and it flows and it serves our awakening. The final comment is the deepest way it serves our awakening is we start realizing that

this energy is not personal. We really get it. It's just the life energy flowing through us and that who we are is the awareness, the space it's happening in, the tender, awake space that these energies are flowing through. Okay, friends, enough words. What I'd like to do is have you explore a little bit, this bringing rain to something difficult, this movement from demon to daemon.

And I'd like to invite you to consider for yourself what universal energy, whether it's fear or anxiety or anger or shame or hatred, what's a regular visitor these days? And you might even consider a recent situation when you were triggered. Again, recalling Rumi's words, the wound is where the light enters you. We become available for awakening when we turn towards the pain,

when we really get it that this can turn to medicine. So you might sense your intention. and this is sometimes described as the bodhisattva aspiration may this suffering serve to awaken just feel that sincere intention may this suffering serve to awaken and we begin the rain practice by recognizing whatever emotions are strongest

so you might bring the situation closer into mind and sense when you're triggered, you know, what is the emotion that's strongest? Is it fear? Is it feeling ashamed or shame or self-judgment or is it blaming or feeling anger towards another? It's mentally whispering whatever the strong emotion is, the demon of the moment, and then allowing it, just agreeing that this is the reality that's right here, letting it be not judging it or resisting or numbing, just allowing. And then you might investigate some and sense, well, when this is happening, when this situation's happening. What am I believing? What's this fear place believing or this angry place believing? What's its view? Are you believing that somebody isn't respecting or loving you?

Are you believing that you're failing? Are you believing that something bad's about to happen? So what are you believing? And the most important part of investigating is with whatever you're believing, where do you feel it in your body and what does it feel like? And just check your throat, your chest, your belly. You might put your hand on your heart to just bring the attention into the body and help you steady your attention there. You might even let your facial expression be that of the emotion. It'll help you get in touch with the emotion and you can let your body posture, even express what you're feeling. These are ways to get more in touch with what you're feeling, to contact, to have an intimate contact with the emotion that's there, letting yourself

feel it in a direct way, and then asking, you know, what is this place most need? What's needed? How does it want me to be with it? Just to ask. and listen, when the most vulnerable part of you, what is that, what's needed? What is that vulnerable or wounded place need? And sometimes it needs just to be seen. Sometimes it needs to be understood, cared about, forgiven, to feel safe. Sometimes it needs for you to trust. What's the message it needs? You might take a few breaths and feel that you can, really inhabit your whole being as you offer some nurturing. Let that hand be on the heart, let the touch be tender, and to offer what's needed, to offer the message it might be simply

trust your goodness or it's okay. I'm here and I'm not leaving. And if it's difficult to offer a message to yourself, you might call on a larger sense of love. You might call on someone that you love, that you trust. Could be a person that's alive or not alive. It could be your dog or spiritual figure. Could be formless, loving presence in the universe. But just to call on that, invoke it and let the message and let the care come from that.

What's most important is let it. Let it in. Allow the care to move through your hand into your heart into where the vulnerability is, washing through you. Light, love, care. And if it's hard to let in, pray to let it in. Sensing what shifts as there's a real tender presence, an intimate presence with the life that's here. taking some moments to rest in that presence, to rest in perhaps a little bit more of a sense of spaciousness, of tenderness, of compassion, just noticing the difference between the sense of who you were when there was that stuckness of emotion and the quality of awareness awareness, kindness, awakeness that's here.

That's the shift that some describe is from the demon, the more torqued energy, to when there's flow, the dimone. There's a sense that it's nourishing your spirit, that energy now. The practice is to open deeply into what's right here and discover the loving awareness. It's really the source. The poet and my good friend Dana Faults writes this. She says, go in and in. Be the space between two cells, the vast resounding silence in which spirit dwells.

Go in and in and turn away from nothing that you find. Go in and in. be the space between two cells, the vast resounding silence in which spirit dwells. So as you're ready, if your eyes are closed, you might open them. We're exploring really how we awaken, relating to the more torqued energies, the demon, becoming daimon, serving love, understanding, aliveness. The final part that I'd like to look at is that just as these energies are not personal, our healing isn't done necessarily alone.

We need each other, we awaken together. There's a story I've always loved. This man who's driving, he's lost in the country and he's trying to reach for his map, but as he does, his car drives off the road and gets stuck in a ditch. not injured, but his car's deep in the mud. And so he walks to a nearby farm to ask for help. And the farmer says, well, Warwick can get you out of that ditch and points this old mule standing in the field. And the man looks at this haggardly mule meant the farmer. And the farmer's just there repeating, yep, old Warwick can do the job. So the man figures he has nothing to

lose. And the two men and Warwick make their way back to the ditch. And the farmer hitches the mule to the car, and with a snap of the reins, he shouts this. He says, pull Fred, pull Jack, pull Ted, pull Warwick, and the mule pulls the car from the ditch with very little effort. The man's amazed. He thanks the farmer, pats the mule, and asks, well, why did you call out all those other names before you called out Warwick? And the farmer grins and says, well, Warwick is just about blind, but as long as he believes he's part of a team, he doesn't mind pulling. So it's fun and the truth is we are in it together. If when you're practicing with a difficult energy you can remember that this is, we're all working with these energies

and we support each other in it. It really makes a difference to feel that we're dedicated to discovering this potential to live from love, to live in awareness. And I, as many of you know, I lead what's called sapson, which is gatherings, it's once a month or most months. And we share what's going on in our lives in these gatherings. And I remember a few months ago, somebody's sharing about not feeling seen or understood by their family of origin, really feeling invisible and how that played out in so many relationships, that hypersensitivity to not being seen or understood, and how the old hurts would get triggered. And someone else shared something very, very similar. And they felt so accompanied by each other and being witnessed by the group.

and the truth is the wounds that we have, so many share similar wounds, we all feel insecure. We all feel insecure and it's not personal and we find that out. We find that out when we start communicating with each other and we need to actively remind each other of what we forget. I mean, each one of us, when we get caught by the demons, when we get possessed by insecurity or fear, we forget the vastness of our being, the mystery, the love. We forget. We lose perspective. So we need each other to remind us in very simple always, that were loved, that were accepted, that were good, that we're not alone. So, I want to share an article that I read, and this is written by Tom Juneaud, Esquire 2014.

He interviews this young man who prosecutors set out to commit a mass shooting. but this young man was caught and before he could get started and he pleaded guilty to carjacking and would serve some time so the interview happened after he got out of prison and as it turns out when he got out of prison he looked at his old high school yearbook and he was shocked because fellow students assigned it and said let's get together over the summer people had reached out but he had been so caught in himself. He hadn't seen that. And on the day that he set out, armed with guns and ammo,

he said he didn't want to do it. It was like some painful duty that he wanted attention. And he said if someone would have come up to him and said, you don't have to do this, you don't have to have this strange strength, we accept you. We accept you. said I would have broken down and given up. And that really touched me to read that.

Because how many of us, if someone at the right moment just put a hand on our shoulder and said, I'm here with you, looked at us with care, how many of us had just had that reminder that our hearts are good hearts could have shifted something? thing. We're all nourished by these reminders. And so you might take a moment right now and scan and sense those in your life who maybe you'll be in touch with over the next day or two.

And maybe there's someone with some vulnerability who's having a hard time that you might say something to. Perhaps you could write an email. But something that will nurture, something that helps the demons become the dimones, that will free them up. It's a beautiful thing to offer. And inwardly, as a way of closing, I'd like to take a moment and have you sense what happens with even a slight gesture of kindness. You might just sense again as you scan within if there's any vulnerability. ability, anything you're afraid of that's coming up, any way you're feeling hurt or alone,

any part of you that has some distress, maybe physical discomfort. And again, just to simply put your hand on your heart and in some way offer some care. Just a simple message of care. feel the energy come inward to touch you. There's such power to even remembering the word kindness, such power to offering it inward and to bringing it to our world. Closing words, this is Jeff Foster, quote I love. The most potent medicine is this ancient commitment to never abandon yourself.

to discover wholeness in the whole mess, to be a loving mother to your insides, to hold the broken bits in open awareness, to illuminate the sore places with the light of love. Thank you, friends, for your attention, your presence. I'm sending you all blessings in love.