Tara Brach - Beyond the Controlling Self - Part 2 (2019-04-10)

Episode Date: April 12, 2019

Beyond the Controlling Self - Part 2 (2019-04-10) - It's natural that we do what we can to ward off danger and further ourselves. While our control strategies - such as aggression, judging, planning, seeking approval, pretending - have a developmental role, they are not a recipe for happiness, intimacy and freedom. An essential part of our evolution is to recognize when we are over-managing our lives, and learn to let go of the controls. These talks explore how we can release the grip of the over-controller, and the profound awakening of our hearts and minds that is possible in the shift from doing to being.  Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. This class is the second part of a two-part series called Beyond the Controlling Self. And after I gave the first part, talking about the over-controller, I had a number of people either directly after class. talk to me or email saying, I know you are talking about me. And it's one of those talks that's really all of us.

Because unless we're completely free, there's some identification with an ego that's trying to control things. I mean, that's just the way it is. So the deal is to get curious and interested and relate kindly to it because when we start noticing it, we can start stepping out of the old habits that actually keep us really small and grim and kind of stuck. Because the whole idea of the over-controller is this habit of chronic doing. Not just doing the needful but just chronic doing and sometimes it's busying ourselves physically

and often the doing is a mental, ongoing mental, narrative of what's going wrong and what I need to worry about and what's wrong with somebody else and just it usually has a kind of problem around the corner frame to it. Does that make sense? This is the over-controller. So what happens is we move through our day and we kind of rush and we lean forward and we're skimming the surface. And then the despair for the over-controller is that I haven't really arrived in my life.

I've been kind of racing to the finish line but not really living the moments. I often think of John O'Donohue who says it so beautifully he says that we're so busy managing our life that we forget this great mystery we're a part of. It's just really, that one rings true. So the challenge is, and the way we're talking about it is that we have the ongoing pattern of just overdoing. And then we have the kind of reactive controlling that arises where we're set off by something and then we can actually cause more harm in our life.

But the bottom line is under it all. is we're just making the effort to survive. We're trying to survive and we're trying to further ourselves. And this is the machinery behind the controller. The story I sometimes share is of 11 people that are hanging from a rope underneath the helicopter and a ten are men, one's a woman. They all decide one person should get off because the rope's going to break otherwise and the negotiation begins.

But the woman basically says, you know, I'll be the one to do it. I'll be the one to drop off because she gives this touching speech. She says, women give up their lives to save others. And they're used to doing that for their husbands and children, giving into men, not receiving anything in return. But this is what we do is women. And then all the men began clapping. So forgive me if this lands wrong for anybody.

but you get the idea that there's... The controllers manipulating for their own benefit. And we know there's... Sometimes we're into more chronic manipulation when we're feeling threatened and squeeze and sometimes it's just now and then. I posed in the last talk the myth of Sisyphus. I kind of offered that forward as an example of when we get really trapped.

when our over-controlling behaviors are ways of trying to push or make things happen really define our lives. And they're addictive because it doesn't matter how much we're doing them, whether the controlling is to try to impress or try to manage other people, make them do things our way or whatever it is. No matter how much we do it, it never really satisfies. It never really works out. so we have to keep doing it like Sisyphus did.

It's on and on and on. I ran into this cartoon, there's a bunch of cavemen and they're bowling and they're bowling with a massive boulder and they're pushing it uphill and it's Sisyphus's turn. So the caption says, oh great, it's his turn again. I'll bet he takes forever. with Sisyphus. So I like to check in and since this is the theme we're going to be exploring for you to reflect a little on today, just to maybe close your eyes for a moment, just scan through the day.

And we each have a sense of our controlling self. I mean how much were you living inside of or from your controlling self? where you are trying to busily manage things or get things done or in some way rush through, manage others. How much were you on your way somewhere else? And that's in contrast to where there are times of pausing, of savoring, of not doing. This is a reading from a Tibetan teacher who says, Give yourself a break.

Give yourself a break. That doesn't mean to say you should drive to the closest bar and have lots of drinks or go to a movie. Just enjoy the day. Your normal existence. Allow yourself to sit in your home or take a drive into the mountains. Park your car somewhere. Just sit, just be. It sounds very simplistic but has a lot of magic.

You begin to pick up on clouds. sunshine and weather, the mountains, your past, you begin to pick up on a lot of things. Just let them pass like the chatter of a brook as it hits the rocks. We have to give ourselves some time to be. Open your eyes if you'd like. Now you might be thinking, well that's really nice for somebody, it's got a lot of free time and lives by the mountains and thinks driving cars are good but for me, you know, so there's all sorts of yeah buts.

Give ourselves a break and taking a pause can be in many, many versions. It can be very creative. It really has to do with stopping the busyness even for a minute or two here and there and feeling our breath. Are taking in the blossom of Atrika spring is everywhere around this area. Are in some way listening one another speaking and really just stopping and listening. It's the simple things and yet when our limbic system is agitated or activated there's a tendency not to listen, not to pause, to keep steaming along. And the habit is,

and this is the basic thing, our habits to perceive there's a problem that in some way whatever's going on in our life, we're trying to solve a problem. And that's the thing I'd like to invite you to kind of watch out for. That you're in the day and you're trying to solve a problem and then all of a sudden you become the problem-solving self and there's really no way to pause and sense presence and sense love and see into really the mystery that's here, be with it some. So the last class we explored how do we begin to interrupt the habitual controlling and when we're in a kind of reactive state.

We talked about how if let's say we're really busy trying to control by criticizing or by proving ourselves that we might learn to pause some and sense, well what's the real need here? And is there a way that I can be with myself and respond to that? need so I don't have to keep playing out that behavior. So that was the way we explored it, this kind of interrupting so we're going more from controller to being with. It's not so easy. The pattern is really deeply grooved on how we do it.

Here's what Andy Lamont writes. She goes, I know I need to let go or I'm going to be dragged. Letting go is definitely not my strong suit. Neither is forgiveness. In fact, they're the two things. I'm the worst at. Why couldn't God's answer be, why don't you obsess endlessly about this? Then try to control the situation to a fare they well and be sure not to breathe out at all and try to manipulate everyone into doing everything your way and then stamp away and brood for a while

and then eat a bag of Hershey's kisses. So it's not easy. There's a lot of other, they call default, like least resistance pathways that are much easier than stop and control. controlling and just getting in touch with what's going on. We don't do that so much. Now since I mentioned that everybody was taking very personally these talks, I'll say that I talk about things that are what I need to keep waking up on and so I'm watching the controller in my life all the time and I usually tell stories about my controller that date back three decades or so.

But it's not that it's not here. But I do want to share one of the key areas for me that I've found is so important to track on the controllers where it creates distance in our relationships. And I'm going to invite you to kind of check that out. Where is my controlling in some way creating a distance? And for me, one of the places that I felt the most angst was being a mom of a high school son, high school age son. And our drama was that he went through high school and he didn't try at all. He was here, I was just talking about this locally at Whitman and Bethesda. And he would

agree with this. There's nothing I'm going to say that he wouldn't agree with, I'd hear from. But he wasn't trying and he had no real interest in anything that I would have considered wholesome. Now he only would partly agree with that because he thinks of video games and his social life of course, you know, I think of as good. He was very into magic, The Gathering, which is a card game that he's, that's very, very engaging. So that's where he put his time, social life and video and card games. So we would have these repeating battles where I was just judging on him and there

was all these, I found that I had this chronic edge where on some level I was feeling like he was blowing it and I was trying to change him. So I was chronically annoyed and yet senior year came around and I realized oh my gosh you know he's going to leave home this is a flash of time with my boy and here I am chronically judging him being the controlling mom. So that's when I started deepening my attention and I started doing what this practice we explored last week of interrupting like a I would be about to attack and I'd go off to my room and I'd be with my agitation and anger and since I'd start investigating it and make that U-turn and say, okay, well what's under

the anger? Well it was fear. I was afraid that if he didn't try harder he'd never be fulfilled and happy. That's where the controlling energy was coming from was fear. And there's also grief that if he didn't try we'd never be close because I just couldn't relate to his interests and he'd be going down this path and it's like we wouldn't have the kind of relationship that I wanted so it was loss of love. So I was controlling him to make him be the person that would be a happy person and a close

person for me. Anyway that's what the controller thought it was doing. So then I just felt that and called on my most awake part of me and basically said, look, the love is already here and he's the love. okay, you know, it's really an idea that he's going to, you know, not try and be unhappy. He's okay. So just to trust his good-hearted, bright being. And that reconnected me.

I just kept comforting myself in that way and then I had more choice in whether to pounce on him. And what I found was that I had, I still had the urge to criticize him but I only did it like one out of five times. And I said nice things on the other, you know, I gave him more appreciation for his emotional intelligence and how skilled he was at playing magic cards, you know, it was good. So we had in that senior year more connecting and understanding and fun and he didn't change by the way in this thing about not trying until junior year of college and entirely without

the controlling mother's energy. He just, that's when he changed. He's 32 years old now. He's still playing Magic the Gathering. And he's doing fine. He really is. And I share this story because I interrupted a very deep pattern. It was very deep in me to critically try to control my son.

And to interrupt it and do it one out of five times actually it was major. It was a really big deal. So that's the invitation to explore is to choose one place. place because I don't think, I think if we say, all right, everywhere I'm controlling I'm going to stop doing it, then it's a setup for failure, right? But if you pick one place, one relationship where you see that you have a hard time holding back either defending yourself or attacking or in some way managing things and start making that you turn and sensing, okay what needs attention inside me, then you'll have more choice.

So I want to name a few other pathways of working with the controller. One of them is just what I named. You see the pattern of controller, controlling and bring the attention inward. There's another way that is really, really powerful and I think of it as handing over control. That we see where we're really caught in controlling, either just mentally or actively, And there's a kind of surrendering that comes. Now, there are times this happens in our life where we hit a wall because we've been doing financial maneuvering but we hit a wall and we become bankrupt or a criminal activity of controlling and we hit a wall and get caught or we're a workaholic and we have a heart attack.

So there are times that we end up surrendering but that's not the kind of surrendering I'm talking about. That's not the kind, it's not, it's when we're, those are kind of forced and the way you know it as the pattern comes back as soon as it has an opportunity, okay? There was a magician working on a cruise ship. He had a parrot that was always ruining his axe saying in the middle of the trick, the cards up his sleeve or he has a dove in his pocket or he slipped it through the hole in his hat. Well one day the ship sank. The parrot and the magician found themselves together on a life raft. For several days the parrot sat silently and stared at the magician. On the fourth day the parrot said, okay, I give up. What'd you do with

the ship? And that does not exactly illustrate my point, but it's a cute story, I know. The surrender I'm talking about really comes out of a deep inner wakefulness and an embodied presence. It's kind of a river releasing into the ocean. And I can give you a few examples. And as I do, you might scan your life to see where it might be relevant. One woman was the CEO of a large organization involving legal defense for indigenous. people and low-income people and there were all these horror stories and she was very much micromanaging and she took everything home with her and it was really causing a schism

in her family with her husband and so on because there's no break from problem mentality. She was living in the world's a problem and so we did some work together and her practice became that when she found she was getting obsessed, when she was over-controlling, to hand over the problems, the difficulties to the compassion and the universe, which included co-workers and others, you know, to hand over more to them too, but just to hand it over, it's like I can't do more than I'm doing. And she would get, have this image in her mind of people in the past. and the present and the future, the care, that there's not just problems in the world,

there's people that care. And so in some way she'd imagine that when she was getting caught in it and taking on too much that she's saying, okay, this larger field of caring energy, you're going to have to hold some of this. That's an example of handing it over. That we just can't manage it all. The ego self can't do it. So there's some wisdom that's coming through that says, just hand it over a bit.

Of course this isn't a 12-step program a lot. It's handing it over. A.R. Amun says, writes, the wind said, you know, I'm the result of forces beyond my control. This world is bigger than what we can control. So there's a real deep intelligence that knows it's not so wise to carry all. all of it. There's, we need to hand it over. Now sometimes our longing wakes us up to that larger belonging for one man I worked with

who was addicted to cocaine and he was very much, he was pretty high-powered guy and he felt mistrustful of everybody and was very, very manipulative and he had bought him and he was close to losing his marriage and his job and that's when his heart kind of broke. because he realized how his mistrustful controlling self was really ruining his life. And of course he had to join a 12-step program and his practice was, and this is what I was so inspired by, his prayer became not my will but my heart's well. Not my will but my heart's well. That's an example of handing it over.

Does that make sense? It's a shift from the ego controller to something larger, the heart's will, or to all the compassion in the world and we're letting go of the doing self and sensing something larger. Very, very powerful. Most often it requires many, many rounds because we are so addicted to thinking that the ego has to manage things. To begin to let this gesture in some energetic form really take hold is liberating but it takes many, many rounds. Now I'll give you one more example of one woman who, her daughter, this is another addiction story actually I hadn't realized I told two of them

but all of this is really about addiction. Her daughter was in her late teens was addicted to heroin and was on the streets a lot. And she would hit a kind of bottom go back to her mother and her mother was totally an enabler and would get her into the right recovery program and have all sorts of high hopes and at some point sooner or later she'd go off the program and end up back using again. And the mother was traumatized. She was really living in fear for her daughter. life and it was impossible for her to say no to her daughter when her daughter would

finally come and swear this was the time that she was going to make it. So finally after one more round where she had been kind of just actually broken open and her daughter disappeared again for a really long time, a friend of her basically said you're traumatized, you're enabling, you're keeping the pattern going, you need to change. And so that's when she went, changing meant that instead of enabling she was going to basically say, okay I'm no longer going to pull you out. And in order for her to do that she had to hand it over. She had to in the deepest way say, I can't save my daughter and really hand it over to in

her sense it was really the divine sensing, she sensed a kind of a feminine divine energy that she was surrendering it into and she did it over and over and over again and her daughter did come back begging and she said no, you know, she did not. And it cracked her heart open. I mean it was like it was an awful, awful experience but she began to sense, began to face the depth of her grief. because that's what was under, she didn't want to face, the grief of really feeling what it would be like to lose her daughter, and sensing some tender presence holding her, as it turned out, her daughter did find her way back on her own.

And actually her daughter, who's now in her 30s with two children, works with addicted teens. and it brings up a lot of emotion to me because I know them but this woman had to break the pattern of controlling in this case enabling by handing it over and it's the hardest when it's our children I think I know for myself that handing it over this even this gesture has become one of the most powerful pathways for me

in some way I do it especially when I find myself caught in a sense of personal badness. Like when I'm on my own case and I feel like the conditioning I call self has acted out in a way I don't like and I feel that badness. In some way I'm saying, okay, beloved, this belongs to something larger. I'm not going to let it be owned by a self. Let it just belong to the universe. So I hand it over and I immediately feel a sense, a wash of compassion and attention.

tenderness that lets me, it's the sense of basic goodness that can include the conditioning. So I hand over the badness into the universe. Now when I'm in a good doer, I hang on to it, I don't hand that over. I'm kidding. Let's practice a little with handing it over. It's such a, is this such a powerful process? One way you might imagine it if you think of things. more in terms of the development of the brain is that kind of limbic-driven ego self is really

handing it over to our own wholeness or handing it over to a larger truth of who we are. So find a comfortable position, close your eyes, feel your body breathing, let yourself relax back and be right here. taking some moments to scan through your life and sense if there's anything, some major place where you hold on to controlling, where there's a lot of worrying and planning, there's a fear about the future, a sense of having the burden of problems, where are you the controlling self trying to handle the problems? And it might be problems of what's going on in your own body.

Maybe there's some disease or sickness or illness that you're struggling with that keeps you worried and trying to control things or maybe somebody else's behavior in the way they're living their life. Maybe something at work. Maybe it's a relationship that's really difficult and inflictingual and you keep trying to fix it. You identify with the controlling self trying to deal with problems. Are you carrying burdens that are oppressive?

It may be as I describe that the problem is what you feel like is that you're the problem. There's something about you that feels like a burden to be dealing with. Now take some moments to bring to mind some benevolent entity or formless being could be God, spirit, the intelligence of the universe, the compassion of the universe, Jesus, Buddha, divine mother, nature, whatever you sense as wise and compassionate and larger, it might be your future self, what we sometimes call your own awakened heart mind, but bring to mind some larger sense of being and visualize and sense that presence so that you can imagine taking the full mass of what you've been carrying and handing it over,

offering it into this larger field, this vaster being. For some, if you want to experiment, you can actually feel the physical gesture of kind of bowing your head and palms open, just offering it up and out. It's no longer your small self's job to worry. Let it be held in the hands of something larger. Sometimes there's words that go with it. Please take this, please hold this, let this be held in something larger. You can find that as you begin to sense of something larger and hand it over it's really there.

You can relax back and you might explore what's here when there's no problem to solve. Right this moment, if there's no problem here, what's the experience? Maybe it feels mysterious or different, alive, disorienting, peaceful. Just notice and sense the possibility that in the days and weeks to come when you start feeling that burden that you're carrying that there's a problem either inside you or another and you've been feeling oppressed, the controlling self, that you can pause, that you You can call on and remember a larger sense of beingness and hand it over and sense more space, more freedom.

So when you're ready you can open your eyes unless you'd prefer sitting with your eyes closed. The last piece is we're going to widen it to the societal level and you might sense what comes to mind when you think of the energy of the over-controller in our world. What comes to mind? Just consider that. What is it when a limbic society is when there's a dominant energy of that fearful controlling? What goes on? It makes very hard for different groups of people to listen to each other, to take in each other's views.

The over-controller is typically punitive, so there's more punishing, right? More walls barring people and protecting, there's an energy of contempt when there's over-controlling. There's greed, there's amassing wealth with little concern for others. When we're over-controlling we're relating to animals in the earth without concern. It's more that animals are there to satisfy our appetite, oil to satisfy our appetite. So that's just the feeling for it. The over-controller is fear-based and on a societal level causes huge harm. So what we can then begin to explore is what would happen if on a societal level there

were the kind of trainings and explorations that could begin to interrupt the controlling energy and bring us to some much deeper sense of compassionate presence. How would that change things? And one description of that, I remembered from a novel, a Kurt Vonnegut novel. And in the novel, a man sitting and watching television, he's watching a movie from World War II. And I'm going to read this piece. All those endless black and white movies from World War II, you remember them, right? Okay.

So someone has somehow rather put the reel on backwards. This is in the novel. And so there he is he sitting and this is how it looks to the man watching. watching TV. He's seeing American planes full of holes and wounded men and corpses take off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards and sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for the wrecked American bombers on the ground and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. You tracking this?

formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bombay doors, exerted miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers and lifted the containers by magic into the billies of the plains. The containers were stored neatly in racks, but there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again and made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from their racks and shipped back to the United States where factories were operating day and night dismantling

the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground and hide them collect. leverally so they would never hurt anybody ever again. May it be so. There's a choice to stop violence. The over-controlling energy of the limbic in our society is addictive to.

It's addictive to keep on consuming oil and it's addictive to keep generating contempt that keeps sides divided and keeps people at war. And this too needs to be interrupted. So we begin the practices, we're doing them in our own lives, we begin to bring them into the world and that's what's happening. I mean you can find now trainings and mindfulness and non-violent communications and dialogue and so on in all sorts of different settings, schools and so on and you can see with restorative justice to me is one of the great examples of where really the practice.

practice of this really bringing a mindful presence versus playing out the patterns of reactivity. And in a deep way what we're learning to do in some of our institutions is pause, stop the doing so that we can get more in touch with the being states that inform us, that help us to feel the compassion and the care. And I'll share an example of that with you. I and a couple of other teachers have done several rounds of mindfulness classes at the Senate on Capitol Hill. And on one day that I was offering teachings was right in the middle of the Kavanaugh hearings. And as you might remember, this was a time in the country of enormous

tension, animosity, and contempt and everything flying around. Because I was very in touch with the staff that were coming to the mindfulness classes, the staff people were inundated with the horror. They were getting calls from people that had been sexually abused from around the country. So it was a really, really intense time. They had been getting barrages of calls with these graphic stories of abuse and letters. So the trauma was just thick. So there on that day of class, of the class, to get to the class, the staff people had to walk through the marble atrium of the heart building in Washington.

And right there in that hallway in the heart building, there were a group of women lining the bridge and they're all dressed in black with black veils and duct tape over their mouth demonstrating. There were 80 protesters around. There's a cacophony of sound and it really bangs against the walls and so there was rage that you could feel the atmosphere of rage. And these staffers and others attending the class had to walk through this, regardless of their positions, this is what they were walking through and going to this space that was really, really quiet and spending an hour feeling their breath and feeling their hearts and bringing kindness to themselves and feeling their wishes for the rippling out and to hear how they described

afterwards what it was like to have a refuge and take a pause in the middle of that was so powerful because really what it made me kind of focus on is that any wise culture needs to take collective pauses. We get so into the cycles of reactivity and no matter what our positions are, whether we're on the right or on the left, contempt flies both ways. And we build up the momentum so we lose track of the real presence that allows us to reach out and connect. and be wise. We need spaces to pause and stop the doing. So I want to close a little bit of a summary and then we'll do a very brief rechecking in together, okay? And to say that every one of us is designed, our nervous systems are designed to try to get what we want. We're designed to try to not only survive but thrive and the idea is not to tense against,

that conditioning and not to take it personally. I saw, there's a book I have of children's prayers to God and one of the prayers is, Dear God, please forgive me for hiding my sister's favorite doll and please don't tell her where it is. Another one, Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I asked for was a puppy. I never asked for anything before, you can look it up. Dear God, please make my parents understand that if I don't eat salad I do better at school. And they go on. We have in us, we're wired to try to get what we want and to manipulate and maneuver and so on.

It's okay. Kindness, friendliness, good humor, and to know that some of our patterns of controlling our life make distances between us and others. and they all make distances between us and our own wise hearts. So there's a real power to having a daily practice where you set aside time whether it's five minutes or 25 minutes to pause and it's a gift to the soul. It really is to just know that every day, because nature loves a rhythm, you're going to stop and you're just going to be with your own experience.

You know, one of my friends says, you put your tush on the kush and you take what you get, you know? And it doesn't matter what happens, there's just a pausing to be with. And there's something in that daily habit that will then wake you up through the day so that you don't race to the end of your life and mess out. The second is when you see particular areas where you know controlling is sabotaging you, getting in the way to get interested.

And with real kindness, see how much you can do some pausing and interrupting. And then through your life, more being activity versus doing, doing, doing. It said in many shamanistic societies that if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, disheartened or dispirited or depressed, they'd ask you one of four questions. When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? And when did you stop finding comfort in the sweet territory of silence?

Why don't you close your eyes and we'll just take a few moments together? We sometimes even on the spiritual path, think of it like, well I'm a human on a spiritual path, I'm trying to get somewhere. And you might think of it instead that you are spirit experiencing a human existence. Your awareness waking up through these bodies and minds and that this light and love of awareness which is what you are is always and already here. There's no doing to get there. There's no there.

It's more to sense how doing takes us away and choose to relax back, stepping out of the story of a doing self who has to solve problems. I'm coming home right here, more and more. Coming home here because you remember, oh, maybe I'll dance. or sing, or find comfort in the sweet territory of silence. We take these last few moments. Sense this as a pause, as important a pause as any pause in your whole life. Just to arrive, really be right here.

Notice how it is. There may be pleasantness and it may be unpleasant. You may feel restless, you may feel bored. But you can also sense there's a preciousness when we stop. You might sense between the thoughts that there's some space and that space is filled with the light of awareness. You might sense that in the pause there's a possibility of relaxing into tenderness, feeling, that beingness that natural.

naturally cares. And we close with the words of black elk. The first piece which is the most important is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe. And when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the great spirit and that the center is really everywhere, is within each of us. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.