Tara Brach - Becoming Bodhisattvas in a Troubled World

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Thich Nhat Hanh said "no mud, no lotus."  How might anger, hatred and delusion—the mud of these times-- give rise to a growing compassion and wisdom in our world?  In this talk we look directly at the angst surrounding the US elections, and explore several powerful teachings and practices that can serve as the catalyst for profound transformation, an evolving of wisdom and love, in our collective consciousness.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste, welcome, friends, and thank you for being here. For many months now, people have been sharing their anxiety about what this U.S. election pertains, and there's been enormous stress. We all know it. It's part of a larger atmosphere of and distress about violence, wars, climate-related catastrophes that are really creating suffering globally. So here we are the day after the U.S. election. And for many, there's a whole range of inner experiences. You know, some on the intense end is full-blown distress, alarm, devastation, agitation,

And as often when the grounds are shaken, there's a real spinning of the mind. Our brains are predicting machines. So it's like what's going to happen? What can we do? And yet what I really want to invite is a pause, that we all take a true pause. The outer tumult will unfold as it does. and we can only respond wisely to our world if we take the necessary pauses to arrive inwardly and with each other. We really need to steady our hearts and resource ourselves.

I often think about trees, how the stress of wind causes trees to develop heartwood, the inner fiber that gives them strength and allows them also to be flexible and move with the winds, not break. So stress creates this heartwood in trees and it also impacts the growth of roots. Their deep interconnecting roots with other trees around. And for me, this is just such a crucial remembrance that if we pause, we can find, out how the stress of our current times can grow our heart space, our strength, our flexibility, our connectedness, our capacity to love. You may well have experienced this in your own lives with times of real upheaval, pain, loss. It might have been losing a job or in a relationship,

someone dear that dies, a cancer that really threatens your life. And what we find sometimes is these great unwanted changes actually leave us more deeply awake. We emerge spiritually stronger, more tender-hearted, more present. So friends, today feels like an important time for us to pause and reflect together on how to grow our wisdom and our love and our spirit through these times. And it begins with resourcing ourselves. It's so important when we're collectively stirred up when there's so much agitation. What happens is we leave presence, we leave our hearts, and we need ways of reconnecting.

So let's take a short time to explore this is a simple guided reflection that I find really powerful and helpful. And again, it draws on our friends the trees. So take these moments now and either let the gaze be downward or let your eyes close gently, and settle yourself. Allow your body to feel its place on the earth. So you can feel the pressure and warmth where your feet contact, the floor, your buttocks on the chair. And as you take your seat fully, feel yourself right here.

Let yourself now remember or envision a great tree you've seen, an old, great, tree rooted in the earth, connected to the surrounding trees, branches reaching to the sky. So in your mind's eye, imagine this. Imagine yourself standing by this tree, perhaps under it, right next to it, looking at its strength, sensing its powerful trunk, sensing how this tree has survived, storms, survive the seasons and sense that you can be like a tree. See and imagine its roots going deep into the earth, interconnecting with other tree's roots. You too can be rooted in the earth like this tree, sensing that down through your feet, through your body, go tendrils and roots into the soil,

into the rocks, interconnecting and interweaving with other roots. Feel yourself being steady, strong, rooted, learning from this tree. And as you feel yourself rooted, let your attention sweep through your body. You can allow anxiety, worry, tension to gradually drain down through your body into the roots and back to Mother Earth, who can hold it all. Through your head, shoulders, arms, torso, you might sense with the out breath releasing the fears and the worries. Letting them return to this earth, you are timeless, steady energy of this tree. ancient, alive, calm, belonging with all other trees. Feel your branches extending out to vast sky and the renewal that comes with every season.

How buds re-arise, leaves, bloom, flowers come. And you have within yourself a life energy, a creative, loving energy that can withstand storms and renew. And you have this because you're part of a collective of trees and roots and aliveness that has that creativity, that steadiness, rooted in the earth. Calm through storms, trusting of life force, the loving spirit that moves through you and through all trees, through all life forms, the birds flying through the sky, the wolves and bears, the humans, fish swimming in waters, sense how all of this is part of your vast, tender heart space, all of the sacred living earth belonging, each expression of life, inseparable and precious.

So, dear ones, we really need to pause to find our way to reconnecting, to heart to each other, to earth, to spirit. We need to be trees together and we'll need to respond to our world, yet it has to come from a resource place. I often think of the story of two women who are talking about their adult sons who went to high school together, now both have graduated college. One's asking the other, well, what's your son doing now that he's graduated? And the response is, well, he doesn't have a job, but he's taken up meditation. So the other woman asks, well, what's that? Response, well, not sure, but at least he's not sitting around doing nothing.

So we know it. Pausing includes sitting around and not having a project. And it also goes beyond formal meditation. There are many ways to stop hanging out in our spinning mind and our tense body. A few weeks back, I invited through Facebook sharing what has been helpful amidst the intensity of these times, many wonderful responses that remain really valuable as we move forward. Some people mentioned the different activities they found that calm them, that enriched them, whether it was listening to music or dancing or yoga or being in nature or being with others.

And of course some mentioned the kind of activities and doing out of caring what we can to help because anxiety absorbed stress. Many mentioned less news. I saw that cartoon of a woman telling her partner, my desire to be well informed is currently at odds with my desire to stay sane. Less news is really important for me. I take one full day a week where there's zero news, and then every morning I won't look at any news until I've already exercised and meditated, and then the evening, anywhere close to bedtime also. And that's not enough. I mean, I need to do more. I'm really hooked on the news. One person mentioned a coin term electoral stress anxiety disorder, new one for the DSM, continuous anxiety surrounding elections

that doesn't let up. So that reminded me of the story. Some of you might know of a priest who's doing children's time during a service. And he asks the kids, does anyone know what the resurrection is? And one little girl raises her hand and says, well, father, I know that if it doesn't go away in four hours, you have to call your doctor. Okay, also on Facebook, a few mentioned a bit of fun. So here we are. Some who shared when I asked that question to Facebook were from other countries and how much these elections, of course, because the whole planet is interwoven, how much it impacted them too. one person from Denmark acknowledged that Denmark was a small country but said if things don't go well for you, you're all invited to come live here. So, and of course you can imagine many, the value of coming into presence, the being with our breath, meditation, prayer, widening the lens.

One person wrote, I take a long walk in the desert and look at mountains that have been here millions of years and will continue to be there after our lifetime. There were some that wrote that it helped just to hear from each other. There was a felt sense of nourishment from this shared wisdom and that we're together in this. And I want to slow down here, friends, and say, We really are. We're together in this. And it matters more than ever to realize that.

And right this moment as I'm speaking, I'm feeling you in the field and it helps. Whatever you're feeling, fear, alarm, distress, it's natural, it's intelligent. It's alerting us to a major threat to our personal and collective well-being and survival. We need to respond. Yet when these emotions take over, they don't serve, then we react, not respond. We're in a more regressed place where we're caught in our primitive brain and we don't have full access to our intelligence, our heart, and the truth of our larger belonging. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it. Very famous quote now.

And it's true personally and it's true collectively. So if we say, well, what's the mind that is created our current suffering? It's really the mind or mentality of separateness, of us, them, of abys, of a bit of, bad other, and under that sense of separateness is fear. It's unprocessed fear. And most people I know right now are caught in the mentality of, it's not only my side and the other side in terms of our voting. If we're honest, it's in the sense of the rightness of my side and the other is wrong. And there's a sense with other that in some way the other is incomprehensible. And there's a sense of less moral perhaps, less human. But even if it's, well, others are

misinformed, that comes with some sense of diminishing and with a closed heart. I mean, just being honest, this is what is going on in our collective psyche, forgetting the true humanity in others. And it's humbling to see. I mean, we flip into othering, what I'm calling othering, very quickly. And it can be subtle. You might have noticed when somebody disagrees with you, I mean, I'm thinking of me last week, I was talking politics with somebody and where the Democratic had gone wrong over the last decades. And it wasn't a big deal, but the person I was talking to said, well, no, I don't think it's this. I think something like that. But anyway, I'm sharing

this because I felt my heart tightening. There's something so deep in either the fear of being wrong or the fear of being seen as wrong that the other, at least for those moments, really becomes other. Story of a little girl's talking to her teacher about whales. The teacher said it was physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because even though it's a large mammal, its throats very small. The little girl stated that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Irritated. The teacher reiterated that a whale couldn't swallow a human.

It was physically impossible. little girl said, when I get to heaven, I will ask Jonah. And the teacher asked, well, what if Jonah went to hell? And little girl immediately replied, well, then you ask them. So othering, you know, this habit of judging and creating separation, it's universal. And we do it with parts of our own self. It becomes the inner shadow. We do it with other people in our lives.

We do it with groups. And here's the thing. The more we feel threatened by the other, the more what comes up in us is hostility and aggression. And so on this heating, hurting planet of ours, as the pressures of climate disasters, inequality, immigration grow, so will this mentality of dividedness

will be ever more prone to fear and mistrust. trust because the threat is there. And that's the grounds for authoritarian rule for violent oppression here in the United States and in other countries. So this brings us back to Einstein, that it matters who wins an election. It impacts all sorts of levels of suffering, really. And the only real hope is a radical shift in consciousness. It's not a candidate winning. It's a shift in consciousness. Where a growing number of people evolve from us, them, to really being aware of our shared

belonging. We're a growing number of people realize this shared love of life, of this living earth. a growing number of people really wake up to care and respect for all life forms. There's a group I'm involved with. It's called Mind Our Democracy. And the name is, when we love, we win. And it's a winning for all of us, not just for some of us. When we love, we win. So it's natural to wonder, you may be thinking this, how does evolving consciousness, awakening hearts happen in such a fearful, hostile environment? And it's interesting to sense into, well, how did it happen for Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or other spiritual leaders and the spiritual movements that

emerged in the face of such societal stress? And we're talking about the violence of colonization We're talking about apartheid, racial hatred, oppression. There's a reason that movements of love, this is what we're talking about, radical love, movements of nonviolence can emerge in hugely stressful times. And that to me is really hope-giving. And it's that if we look back through human history, evolutionary scientists believe that Stressors, survival dangers are what increased the sophistication of our language and communication, our capacity to reason, and the growth of pro-social capacities like compassion, like empathy, like collaboration.

It was huge stressors, survival dangers that did it. And the trajectory of our human evolution is towards wider and wider domains of belonging, beyond kin and tribe, beyond particular community, to realizing a belonging to life. Stress can grow us, like the winds, causing trees to grow heartwood, interweaving roots. We can grow. Ticknacht captures it so beautifully with that simple phrase, no mud, no lotus. And you see this in Buddhism that mud or the stress of our existence, fear, suffering, actually gives rise to the lotus of compassion. One of the meditation communities, it's a retreat center in North Carolina, got decimated by the hurricane, Helene, huge damage.

And they jumped in fully with all the other communities in the area to help the population there. and I read one person's interview, they were interviewed from the area and they talked about, they kind of compared what it was like before the storm and how all of his interactions were so politically charged to after the storm because the tragedy put everyone on common ground. And he describes having unexpectedly poignant moments with people on the other end. under the political spectrum, including one person who parked a car. It was covered with MAGA bumper stickers on the same bridge, and he was on that bridge surveying the damage. And so together they stood there and they looked over the destruction, no words, and they

hugged. A moment of empathy, it just would have been unimaginable just the week earlier. He said this, he said it was a pretty powerful moment. I'll remember. remember it for the rest of my life. It made me think of Dorothy Day, the leader of the Catholic Worker Movement, incredibly wise, awake, loving being. When she was eight years old, this was 1906. That was when the San Francisco earthquake was. And she was out on the streets and watching how her parents and people were helping each other, pitching tents, making food, and she had this question, why can't we live this way all the time? There are times that our shared human predicament, our shared suffering, become so apparent. It wakens us up from that

mentality of dividedness, where there's that sense of everyone on common ground, like in the streets of San Francisco or on that bridge in North Carolina. Stress and suffering can awaken us to that sense of that common ground, where there's just this care for the collective, there's a sense of our larger belonging. So perhaps like me, you're feeling both the pain of these times and that this is this societal earthquake right now, that there's potential. There's potential when the grounds of our society are shaking. And it might bring us together. together in a deeper way, awaken us to our caring for the greater good. And naturally it's not going to happen to everyone or certainly everyone all at once.

I mean, what's needed for a true transformation of consciousness is enough of us. I often think of the Dalai Lama's words when he was meeting with a group of Western teachers who are asking the question, what should we bring back to? our students. And he said, to trust the power of heart and awareness to awaken through all circumstances. And that means the circumstances in our own personal lives that feel most difficult and these current times to awaken. So in Buddhism, many are familiar with this, this intentional evolving of the heart, mind, and the face of suffering. is called the Bodhisattva path.

It's a path of individual and collective awakening. And there are many inspiring examples of beings on this path that have awakened through stress. I named a few earlier. I also think of, I was in a retreat about 35 years ago with Ticknaud Han when he described what it was like during the war in Vietnam, where he and other monks, and at that time they were all very young. They were in their late teens, early 20s. They were really dedicated to mindfulness and compassion, and they were bodhisattvas. They were doing what they could to help the suffering there with food and medicine, but they

refused to take sides. So the United States suspected them of being Viet Cong, and the Viet Cong considered them the enemy. One night, their encampment was bombed, and all but a few monks and nuns were killed. And the survivors were asked to make a statement. And the statement was basically the perpetrators were forgiven, that the violence was done out of ignorance. Through his life, Ticknod Han taught over and over about not taking sides in our heart. Humans are not the enemy. He said over and over that it's the forces of fear and delusion that has us forget that we belong to each other, forget our interbeing.

And when we realize there's tenderness, there's love. I think of one of my students who visited a memorial in Rwanda and she sent me one inscription that she read. went like this, if you knew me and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me. Felicia Natagwa. We don't violate when we know the truth of our belonging. The sense of enemy drops away and it becomes so clear that hatred never seizes by hatred, but by love alone is healed. So this is the Bodhisattva path. And in the face of the winds of stress, there's this dedication to growing heartwood.

So what I'd like to do, and this is for the remainder of this talk, is look at a couple of the practices on the bodhisattapath that I have found are most powerful in these times for facing the realness and the harshness and the difficulty of what's going on. and coming back to a sense of heart and spirit that allows us to respond. And the grounds of the bodhisattva path is aspiration. It's remembering what matters to you. Some of you might remember the phrase, the most important thing is remembering the most important thing.

So on this bodhisattva path, we're invited to pause again and again and sense where the suffering is and what we most care about. What is it that most matters to us in the face of this? And it's practiced regularly this remembrance of, okay, what's my prayer, what really matters, so that aspiration becomes the compass of your heart. really guide you through your day. The formal Bodhisattva aspiration is the prayer that whatever the circumstances may this serve the awakening of compassion and wisdom.

Whatever the circumstances, may this serve the awakening of compassion and wisdom, and may this awakening be of benefit to all beings everywhere. That's the formal vow and wish and prayer of the Bodhisattva. And when it says whatever the circumstances, it could be that our finances have crashed or failure at work, it could be relationship breakup, health, whatever the circumstances, may this help me become more loving, more wise. That's the prayer. And I could say personally that I've shared a number of times that I went through in my 50s,

about five years where I was getting sicker and sicker, and I had no real understanding of what was going on. And it was getting so bad that I couldn't exercise. I couldn't really walk up a steep incline. I was pretty sick. and I'm better now because I sometimes forget to share that, but I am. But at that time, it felt like I was losing my life. And so I practiced this bodhisatt for prayer that may this illness, may this sickness serve to awaken my heart, my spirit.

And I found through it that I touched a level of compassion for myself and for others I'd never known. It opened me to who I was beyond a sick body in a deep, deep way, gave rise to writing my book True Refuge. So this is the prayer. And it's one that we bring to our personal lives and also to our society. We take in what's happening in our current world and we can have that prayer that what's going to, on might collectively awaken our hearts, awaken our wisdom to a larger belonging. Let's just pause here. I want to give you a chance just to explore it for a moment, a chance to try on the bodhisattva prayer. And again, as we often do, let yourself arrive. You might take a few full breaths, feel the breath at your

heart. So you're connecting with the feelings in your heart right now. If you like, you can put your hand on your heart, you can put your palms together. It just helps to collect the heart and spirit. It helps to really bring yourself fully into a sense of sincerity right here. And now to bring to mind, if you will, some personal challenge, some difficulty in your life that you might often wish wasn't there. It could be in a relationship, your own health, something at work. And then sense the aspiration. May this difficulty serve to awaken my heart. Serve to awaken wisdom. May this waking up be of benefit to others. Just sense what happens. You might say it again, just feel your sincerity.

May this challenge, this difficulty serve to awaken compassion, awaken wisdom. May this awakening be of benefit to others. And then widen your attention to our society, sensing the challenges we face, the stress and suffering as a society. again, feel your heart and your sincerity. May this suffering serve to awaken our collective compassion, love, and wisdom. May this suffering serve to awaken our collective love and compassion and wisdom. May this awakening be a benefit to all beings.

And just notice what happens. Take a few moments. Feel your breath. Feel your presence. Feel your heart. When you're ready, if your eyes are closed, to open your eyes. So last month, I was talking with one woman who cares deeply about the world and was feeling a sense of real despair, just the horrific continuing suffering in Gaza,

the tumble towards autocracy here, climate change. So she's engaged in, you know, active yet felt really overwhelmed. And so when I asked her, as I often do, what most helps you right now when you feel that overwhelmed? She said really clearly, it's when I remember I'm not alone, when I remember so many others are caring and are working hard or trying to help, which reminded me of, you know, that Fred Rogers story, he says that when I was a boy, I would see scary things in the news, and my mother would say, look for the helpers. You'll always find people who are helping.

And so we talk some more about this because there's so much power in it, how there are just countless humans on this planet that are caring about the Earth and about social justice about so much. And through history, people on all different continents, caring about each other and caring about, you know, the well-being of others. People in the future, we know it, our great-great-grandchildren. How many will be caring will want to be part of the healing. So it helped us to talk about this to, again, sense the interconnected roots. because when we forget, when we get activated and overwhelmed,

it's because we're forgetting really all the others that we belong to that are caring. So I want to invite you just for a moment again to pause. Give yourself the gift of a pause and take a few more full breaths, grown caring about all that's unfolding and sense how right now There are so many in the United States and around the world that are caring about democracy, about oppression, about war, about suffering, so many that are trying to help. And think about the past, our ancestors, indigenous people, people from all different societies, tending their families and their communities, caring and expressing countless acts of kindness.

those in the future caring, trying to help our world, caring beings through all time. And in a timeless way, right here, you can feel your heart belonging to that boundless field of caring. Let it be a refuge. It's true. So again, if you'd like to open your eyes, you can, or you can be with your eyes closed, back to what was going on talking to this woman, we reflected on the caring in the world. And then I guided her in a practice of heart presence that I love, that immediately directs the pain and suffering that's here. It's a version of Tonglin, which is a Tibetan compassion practice, very beautiful, very

powerful, especially during really challenging times. And I think of Tonglin as a reality meditation. It often uses the breath so that you're breathing in, you're totally contacting the rawness and realness of what's happening. And with the out breath, you're contacting the reality of a larger space, of a larger field, space and field that we often forget. So for her, we began with the reality of what was just right here for her, which is naming and honoring the despair and there was also fear and anger. So she would breathe in and just let herself feel it in her body. Just all that clenching and weight and ache in her body, she'd breathe in and she'd breathe out and just sense that it was being held in a larger space in and out

in feeling the pain that she was feeling, letting it out and gradually really sent and she was letting it out into that space, that boundless space of caring, of loving. And the next part of Tonglin, after you feel exactly what you're feeling, is you imagine all the others that are feeling the same thing. So she breathed in for all of us that might be feeling fear and despair and breathed out for all of us into that field of loving. and found over time that she was inhabiting that larger field of loving, that she was relating from that field to the currents of fear and despair that were inside her but no longer

taking over, that she enlarged in her consciousness. It's a beautiful practice. We're going to close with this practice, but I'll just speak a little bit more. just a few more moments and then we'll experiment. And I do have this practice a larger version that accompanies this talk. So if you want to explore it more deeply, you can. So today, we're really looking at this bodhisattva path of awakening and troubled times. And it doesn't matter the circumstance. If we can feel that aspirational, generation, may this, whatever exactly right now we're experiencing, may this serve awakening, may this serve the awakening of compassion and wisdom, we actually are aligning ourselves

in a way that that becomes possible. I hope that that makes sense because it feels so important if we really open to the sincerity of our hearts and say, may this serve the awakening of wisdom and compassion, that becomes like a magnetic field that draws us home to a larger heart space. So if we can feel that prayer and then meet it with presence, such as in the practice of Tonglin, the blessing is there's a kind of homecoming to a larger truth of who we are, so we're able to respond to our world in a way that's really transformational. What I think of as radical love, love in action, love that is unconditional and inclusive, and our words and our actions carry that loving in a way that helps

create the world we long for. You know, we can be like those two people on the bridge that might have differences on some levels but realize that common ground and can hug. and are actually the beginning of creating a new world. This is L.R. Nost. Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break and all things can be mended, not with time as they say but with intention. So go, love intentionally, unconditionally. The broken world waits in darkness for the light.

that is you. The world needs our collective light, our caring response more than ever. So let's take a short time for this final practice. Wherever you are, it helps to move or stretch, please do, and then come sitting down so that you can settle a bit so that you can lower your gaze or close your eyes. So you can feel the gentle movement of the breath and let the breath help collect you. bring you right here. You might take a moment as we've been exploring just to remember your aspiration. Whatever's most troubling right now, personally or in our society to you, may these circumstances awaken a growing love and a growing wisdom, and may this awakening be of benefit to all beings. And you might again remember all those in the world who are

caring, this whole field of caring. And now allow yourself to invite forward the emotions carried by your human heart. And if it helps, put your hand gently on your heart, so that you allow yourself to know the immediacy of what these feelings are like. You might sense what feels worse, what's most difficult, what you're most afraid of. And as you do, With the help of the breath, begin to let yourself touch directly where the fear, the pain lives in your body. Might be the throat, the chest, the belly. As you breathe in, feel fully what's here.

Allow yourself to be touched fully by the discomfort, the difficulty. You might name it. Fear, fear, aversion, anger. distress, despair, with each in breath allowing yourself to be touched by the realness of what's here. And as you breathe out, sense there's space for it. Sense their space. You can imagine a great sky of awareness. There's space. Breathing in, touching, feeling in your body, the realness of what you're experiencing and breathing them out, breathing the feelings out, letting them be held in a larger space.

And you might begin to sense with the out breath that you're breathing them out into the heart of the world. So you're breathing in and feeling the pain of what's here and breathing out and letting that current of pain like a river come into the sea of loving. the boundless field of cairn that holds our life. Breathing in and feeling your human heart, breathing out spiritual heart space, let the earth skies, the field of shared care hold it all.

Few more breaths, breathing in and feeling what's here, breathing it out into the heart of the world, that field of caring. And now bring to mind all that. the others that also feel the same human pain, the fears, the aversion, the despair, the confusion, the overwhelm. So you're breathing in for all of us, letting yourself be touched, and then breathing out, offering it outward into the heart of the world. There's space. There's space for you to breathe for all of us. Breathing in and feeling the difficulty. the hurt, the fear, breathing out into the shared heart space that holds our lives, sensing

as you continue to breathe that you are that shared heart space, that spiritual heart space. Your true being is this vastness, this luminosity, this tenderness, and it's holding this hurting precious life that this spiritual heart space is more the truth of who we are. than any story of separateness, knowing that the more we trust our shared belonging, the more our lives become love in action. Do not be dismayed by their brokenness of the world, all things break, and all things can be mended not with time as they say, but with intention. So go, love intentionally, unconditionally. The broken world waits, in darkness for the light that is you.

Thank you, dear ones. It's a beautiful refuge to feel us walking together, wanting to bring our collective light forward. Namaste and prayers for growing justice, love, peace, and freedom in our world.