Tara Brach - Darkness of the Womb – Four Key Steps in Transforming Suffering

Episode Date: August 25, 2017

Darkness of the Womb – Four Key Steps in Transforming Suffering (from 2017-01-25) - We can either repeat old fear based patterns, or our suffering can awaken us to a deeper wisdom and greater love. This talk explores four principles in relating to difficulty that move us towards healing and freedom—both personally and as a society. NOTE: Tara was traveling and teaching this week and asked for this timely talk from the archives be posted. Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks 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. I heard a story recently of a priest who was giving a sermon to, it was a children's sermon and he was also giving it to the whole congregation. And he asked the children if any of them knew what the resurrection was. and one very young little boy raised his hand and he said,

I know that if you have a resurrection that lasts more than four hours, you're supposed to call the doctor. And I took the congregation ten minutes to settle down so they can continue. So I don't have a great segue for this particular, but a sort of segue, which brings us really to our times right here. I hear a lot from people about just the ups and downs

of what their heart is experiencing during recent weeks and months. And for many there was a sense of kind of a resurrection of energy and hope really over the weekend with the Women's March and hopefully that hope and energy will last more than four hours. But in seeing people from around the world,

There was a sense of the global community of care, of belonging, that really was quite inspiring. And then, of course, the down again of just feeling the enormity of the suffering that is happening and can happen even more intensively with, especially in this country and some of the policies that are moving forward. One of the shorts that I heard from the march, I was here but I couldn't hear anything, but I heard it afterwards, was Van Jones who's created what's called the Love Army, and the Love Army is to combat post-election hatred. And what he said was, and I thought this was really powerful,

he said that before the March he had felt like something really beautiful was dying. And then he said, with this movement, I feel like something beautiful is being reborn. And that really resonated very closely to another talk I heard that was given by a Sikh woman, a lawyer and an activist, her name's Valerie Carr. And she said, you know, we need to stand up for all of our brothers and sisters who are deprived of rights in whatever way who are oppressed. and then she asked, what if these times are not the darkness of the tomb, but they're the darkness of the womb?

And there was something in that, very similar to what Van Jones is saying, that we can kind of sense in a very deep intuitive way that whenever there is strong suffering, there's a dialectic, it's the potential is a kind of wake-up, a kind of wake-up that really is a reberthing, that times of darkness can be, and we can see it in our own lives, at times we've maybe hit the worst, most difficult pain, whether it was through a divorce or a biopsy that turned out malignant, whatever it was, the loss of somebody, it also in some way opened us to another level of what we really cherished.

And it opened us to another level of resilience or another level of resilience or another level of really sensing the mystery. So there's a power and a potential to a time of darkness. But we've also seen, and we know that great stress, we can see it through evolution, that great stress requires adaptation and so on. So we see it that it can evolve us. And I sometimes think the best metaphor is of a cocoon and if we're in a cocoon and we don't keep evolving and developing the very pressure of the size of the cocoon, because we're meant to keep evolving, is suffering. When we're suffering, it's a sign that we're believing in limiting beliefs and we're acting from a way that

doesn't, isn't aligned with the truth of our connectedness. But we've seen that suffering doesn't always bring a new day. We've seen how we in our lives can get caught in a suffering of addiction or suffering of depression and stay in that prison. And we can see in the larger society how there can be suffering and then have the cycles of violence go and go and go. So I think that there's a really deep inquiry here which has to do with what are the conditions,

what are the ways that we can pay attention? So what's going on right now, whether it's in our personal lives or our broader society can truly be the suffering of the womb. How can each of us be part of letting that be what unfolds, the kind of awakening from suffering in that way? So that'll be the kind of grounds of our reflection in this class. and what I'd like to do is take four key ways of paying attention, the kind of inner to the outer, that if we cultivate, actually allows suffering to be transformative.

And I've never given this particular talk before, so I'm a little concerned it might be too big of a talk, but we'll see what we get through, and I appreciate you for giving me if it's a little bit. a little unwieldy. The four key areas and the first one is to train ourselves not to believe thoughts that create hatred and separation. Whatever beliefs or thoughts we're having, it doesn't mean that there may not be some wise discrimination in them but if we're believing the thought and belief and it's creating separation hatred it will not serve us. That's the first one. The

The second one is to feel our feelings. We end up avoiding vulnerability to feel our feelings. The third one is to train ourselves to turn towards love because we have a conditioning and negativity bias that has us contract. And the fourth is to act from the awakening heart. So let's see how far we can go in these. The first one really is challenging because, we have such a deep conditioning to live in this cocoon of thoughts, a very habitual thoughts

and the negativity bias that really comes from our fear, from our more primitive fear, ends up creating fear thoughts and fear beliefs that usually take the shape of something's wrong with me or something's wrong with you. That then leads to, that judgment then leads to distance and to hatred. It keeps our personal lives such that we have a hard time having intimacy, real intimacy, and societally it keeps us at war. So, one of the real effects of going around in these thoughts, one master was asked to describe the world and his description was lost in thought, you know, that we spend most of, of our time and if you look back through today and just say what was today like, you'll

notice that you're living a lot in a kind of inner dialogue and a kind of virtual reality. So we spend a lot of time in it and when we're in it and especially when it's highlighted by a lot of judgment and angry or hateful thoughts then that's the whole biochemical mix we're living in. one of the things it does is it blocks reality. In other words, if you're entering your day or a situation or interaction with judgment or bias, it torques it, you can't see what's really there. There's, many of you might have seen the film Gorillas in the Mitz.

What I liked about it, this is a film that Diane Fosse is a field biologist and she's following in the footsteps of George Shaler, who was the most famous primate biologists in the world. And he returned from the wilds with more intimate and compelling information about guerrillas and anybody in past generations had done. He found out about their tribal structure and their family life and their mating behaviors

and all of this. And he attributed to one simple thing. He didn't carry a gun. He engaged with a kind of respect that for these remarkable creatures and they must have detected it because they let them close enough. But he didn't carry a gun. In contrast, most of us habitually carry a gun, whether or not we need it, we have a kind of preset in our minds ideas about who and how people are

and often have a slant that stops us from seeing who's really there. Sometime last year, I shared a story that from Maria Popova, who some of you might have heard of, she does the, she puts out brain pickings and it's, they're brilliant, insightful. I highly recommend them if you haven't heard, if you haven't subscribed, just Google brain pickings. But anyway, Maria talks about an experience she had. It was a spring day and she's biking and somebody's behind her biking she can tell and then that person

overtakes her and some of you might have had this experience of on some level can be a perfect stranger but all of a sudden there's competition. It happens when you're swimming, it happens when you're running it happens when you're biking. Anyway she felt that and when he overtook her she felt strangely defeated

and here's what she writes but as he cruised past me I realized the guy was on an electric bike I felt both sort of a redemption and a great sense of injustice, unfair motorized advantage, very demoralizing to the honest muscle-powered peddler. But just as I was getting all self-righteously existential,

I noticed something else. He had a restaurant's name on his back. He was a food delivery guy. He was rushing past me not because he was trying to slight me or because he had some unfair competitive advantage in life, but because this was his daily strife. This was how this immigrant made his living. My first response was to shame myself into gratitude for how fortunate I've been

because I, too, I'm an immigrant from a pretty poor country and it's some miraculous confluence of choice and chance that has kept me from becoming a food delivery person on an electric bike in order to survive in New York City. And perhaps the guy had a more satisfying life than I do. Perhaps he had a good mother and goes home to the love of his life and plays violin at night. I don't know, and I never will. But the point is that the second I begin comparing my pace to his, my life to his,

I'm vacating my own experience of that spring day and ejecting myself into a sort of limbo of life that is neither mine nor his. Beautiful. So don't believe the thoughts that create separation. They lock us into a dividedness and a separateness. and in a deep way they feel more violence. They keep us in that cocoon. And this applies to thoughts about ourselves

as well as thoughts about others that we know as well as thoughts about others that we don't know. The expression I love is real but not true. And what that means is the thoughts are really happening, the real representations in our mind, we have real feelings, but they aren't the truth

any more than your idea of an apple tree is the living breathing tree. Example of real but not true. You could have the thought, when I'm angry and critical, my partner gets defensive and can't hear my message. Now, that's a real thought. It's not the living truth, but it's a useful thought. That's why it's discrimination. But what if you have this thought?

When I'm angry and critical, it proves that I'm a bad person, that I'll never change, and I'll always drive people away. Real but not true. It's not useful. It creates separation. So the criteria, all thoughts are real but not true, but some are worth using as a roadmap. If they create separation, anger and more hatred, if they create division, don't believe them.

Gandhi describes it this way. He says, our beliefs create our thoughts. Our thoughts create our emotions. Our emotions create our behaviors. Our behaviors create our character and our character creates our destiny. So if you keep believing your thoughts that create separation, you are basically solidifying the prison walls, staying in the cocoon. So how we let go?

How do we not believe our thoughts? The first step is to set your intention, to let it matter, to know that especially at this time in history, we can't afford going around in our personal life and our societal life making enemies of ourselves and each other. We can't afford it. Too much is at stake. My prayer to God every day writes Elizabeth.

lesser is remove the veil so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears. Remove the veil so I might see what is really happening here and not be intoxicated by my stories and my fears. That's Elizabeth Lesser. So when thoughts come up and we sense, oh, okay, I'm getting tight. we can ask ourselves, what am I believing? If you're suffering, you're believing something that's not true.

If you have an argument against reality, you'll always lose. Your belief is just a belief. If you're believing it, there's going to be suffering. So what am I believing? What's it like to live in this belief? Is it possible that it's real but not true? Who might I be if I wasn't living inside this belief? We're going to practice this a little bit, but we're going to go to part two.

So the first, don't believe beliefs that create hatred. The second, feel your feelings. Now that's a nice thing to say. You know, what we resist, persist, go ahead and feel your vulnerability. And it's really, really hard. And the reason it's hard is that we have a huge amount of conditioning when our feelings are difficult to do anything but feel them. One friend tonight was saying how powerful the question was from a therapist,

what are you running away from? One sage put it this way, what are you unwilling to feel? So we run away and we have different ways of trying to run away. For many of us, the big way that we try to run away from vulnerability is to in some way ignore it or pretend it's not that. there and we get very habituated to that. And I heard a story, kind of an illustrative story, a woman top executive in a New York financial firm. So usually she takes a limo to work or whatever, but this day because of the weather she had to take a bus. And so she figures she'll take

a bus and catch up on the news. But turns out she ends up listening to music instead on the bus. She has a problem. And this is really a vulnerable one. and she has a lot of gas and she's not sure what to do about it. She's embarrassed to release it to fart because, you know, but anyway, here's what happens. The music's really loud.

So she decides she's going to fart to the beat of the music. You know, this is to prevent anybody. Anyway. So she gets to her stop and she's leaving the bus and everyone is looking at her. And it was only after she got out and stepped off that she realized she had her headphones on. We have our ways of trying to protect ourselves. But one of the big ways, I'm going to let that

one go. Let it pass, okay? So one of the big ways that we try to avoid vulnerability is aggression and judgment. When we feel bad, we try to blame something. And by the way, this is wired into us. To survive, we're trying to seek the cause of what's making us feel bad. And so the cause is either you're doing something wrong or I'm doing something wrong, so we blame. We also try to dominate. We try to control things so we won't feel vulnerable. This is a quote from Desmond Tutu, 1984 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Cape Down South Africa. He tells us the following.

He says, there's a story fairly well known about the missionaries when they came to Africa. They had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. They said, let us pray and we dutifully shut our eyes and when we open them, why? No, they had the land and we had the Bible. So I smile and it's also tragic. There's a tragedy that happens when we aren't able to stay with our vulnerability. We need to dominate and conquer and prove and we create more separation and more violence. So, the second piece is stay with your feelings.

We need to do it individually and I'm going to speak in a moment about culturally but stay with our feelings and why? A lot of people say if I'm feeling bad why stay with it? Well one thing is that our emotions are intelligent and every one of them if you listen has a message to tell us. So we, our anger, we need our anger. Our anger tells us there's some obstacle to something that really matters to us. Our fear tells us that there's something really threatening.

Our grief tells us that there's a loss that we need to be able to touch into. They inform us of our unmet needs. I mean just, I think of it sometimes the child in the womb and the pressure against the child, you know, the feelings that that child has and they feel the pressure of contractions during labor. Well, that's a message to work with those contractions and get out of there. We need it. We need our emotions. They move us. Okay? So that's one piece. And also, by learning to stay present with our emotions to feel them, we discover the presence, the awareness and space that's large enough to be with them and have some balance and freedom. There's no way

you'll learn to ride and be with the weather systems, the inner weather systems, unless you practice presence with them. But there is a real profound gift. In the moments of mindfully being with, there is a space that's larger than the emotions that you can rest in. And this is why I sometimes use the language of the fearless heart. It doesn't mean there's no fear. It just means we've discovered that heart space that's big enough for the fear so we don't suffer from the fear. It's a current in a larger sea of our beingness. So we learn to practice with and discover that presence and then from that presence we can respond intelligently to what's happening. So a lot of our training, a lot of our practice in these mindfulness

and self-compassion classes has to do with being with the emotions we run from, being with the pain we contract against. One man described, Eduardo Okubaro described reading about this in my book Radical Acceptance, and he said, your book helped me a lot to cope with pain some days ago when I had a terrible, when I had terrible renal colics due to a kidney stone. Once I expel it, I will name the stone after you. It was the greatest tribute I've ever received. So this is, we're going to be practicing each of these, but this is number two, to feel our feelings, to learn to stay,

to have the intention to lean in and to be with not to run away, to keep practicing coming back into our bodies and breathing with and bringing kindness to what's here. the third turn towards love. Again, our primitive conditioning is to perceive ourselves as separate, to as a separate organism try to grab onto love or to push others away or to control. But we don't turn towards with open hands because we feel too threatened.

So it always feels, or it can't. can feel quite vulnerable and risky to take the chance to turn towards love, in a real open, undefended way to let the light and warmth really wash through us. And yet it's the experience of connectedness that undoes our conditioning. It's those moments when we're with another person and the stuff falls away and we just feel our, good-heartedness and that we're there were there for each other. It's the moments when we just delight in a child's sense of wonder and just feel, wow, this is really what life is worth living for. It's the moments when somebody helps us when we're in trouble or we

help them and we feel, wow, we're in it together. Or for those that went to the march and felt, you know, saw that we see the signs of build love, not walls and there's a sense of, wow, there's an intelligence and a humanity in a heart around this globe that we are a part of. We need to feel connection. Anthony DeMello describes it this way. He describes how he had spent decades hating himself. He was a Catholic theologian, teacher, writer, wonderful, inspiring guy. So years with self-aversion, and all his colleagues and friends kept,

telling him ways he should change himself. Finally one friend said, it's okay, you don't have to change. I love you just the way you are. And then he started changing because he needed that radical acceptance, that radical unconditional loving, that sense of connection, that mirroring to say you're basically okay. And then he was free to kind of shift. He didn't have to keep playing out the old patterns. So in our personal lives, we need to turn towards love. And we turn towards love by bringing ourselves compassion, by remembering those who love us. So it's in a meditative way we turn towards love. And we activate with others. Whether it's through a 12-step group or in the Buddhist community we have spiritual friends groups that meet, just small groups that meet

every few weeks to share about practice and so on with our friends, with healers. We need to feel connection. So this is in a personal way and a societal way. That's the movement towards healing. Van Jones put it this way. He said, real love is the strongest stuff in the universe. This movement is referring to this kind of growing global movement of caring community. This movement is built on that mama bear love.

Love those cubs, not going to let you mess with those cubs, whether those cubs or Muslims or women or the earth or Black Lives Matter. This movement is based on that kind of love. We need belonging. I read that since the 1980s the percentage of Americans that reported that they were lonely doubled from 20 to 40 percent and we know that huge numbers of people live alone. It affects health on every level and affects our body and our heart and our spirit. So back to our inquiry, how does this experience of suffering instead of being the darkness of the tomb, something like that being imprisoned in the cocoon, really, be the darkness of the womb, something we really can birth out of. And we need to turn,

we need to reverse the negativity bias that has us contract and judge and on purpose choose to reflect on where love is. It needs to be part of our spiritual practice. These are the grounds. You know, I've had a lot of conversations in these last weeks with different communities of care and you know it's an interesting thing that's going on really in the kind of transformational movements right now where those who have been activists for decades are more and more saying I need a way to ground this activism in spirit, in heart, in consciousness. And those that are sitting on the cushion not so active are saying, I need to bring this heart and the spirit into action.

And I think that this is where it becomes a suffering of the womb, of this coming together of really grounding in spirit, in not believing our beliefs, in feeling our feelings, in turning towards love, that we then act out of love. And those that are already acting, reconnecting to the love. So this takes us to our fourth part of the fourth kind of strategy in terms of having suffering really bear fruit, which is to act from love, to be able to feel our care and go ahead and in some way act. And it may be, I mean, there's many, many ways to act.

And a lot of people feel resistance because they think that means that they're supposed to either go to a march or write a letter or whatever it is. that they have in their mind is this equals social activism. That's not what we're talking about, but we are talking about caring and engaging from that caring in some way that helps to bring healing. It deconditions the tendencies to act in ways that are more regressive, which are kind of being obsessed with making ourselves more comfortable,

are obsessed with proving ourselves, or obsessed with getting approval. And I've seen some of the biggest changes in people who were really depressed because of that kind of self-centeredness, not self-care. That's not self-care. That is a self-centeredness that comes from a feeling

of something's wrong with me. And moving from that to service was the freedom where the healing came. The Dalai Lama puts it this way. He says, this is not an age where mere self-growth and development or faith or meditation is sufficient. Those must inevitably be balanced by active social engagement, compassionate actions. No one can do it alone.

We need each other to become enlightened. We need each other for spiritual realization. So as we remember connectedness, it's natural to act from our hearts. I share with you a story that I read in a book called Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle. Gregory Boyle is a Jesuit priest, and he writes about the human tragedies that play out in the worst gang-violence neighborhoods in L.A. So he described in one of the stories a woman named Saldad, and she's a mother of four. And she was very proud when her oldest son got a diploma and went to the Marines. He comes back for a visit, goes out to pick up some fast food.

She hears shots on the streets near their home, and her son Ronnie dies in her arms right outside the door. Soon after, her oldest son Angel pulls off something few in the hood do. He graduates from high school. He helps pull soul death through the hell she's living in. And six months after Ronnie's death, he pleads with her to put on some clothes with color, do her hair, and be a mom to her three remaining children. That afternoon, while sitting eating a sandwich on their front porch, Angel is shot up by kids from a rival gang.

So this is what Gregory Boyle writes. He says he found Sol Dad later that day, sobbing into a huge bath towel. The few of us there found our arms too short to wrap around this kind of pain. So, Soul Dad's locked in this anguish of separation. And he spends a lot of time with her over the next couple of years. She's there with that anguish. At one meeting, he asks how she's doing and she says, You know, I love the two kids I have.

I hurt for the two that are gone. And then crying, she admits, the hurt wins. The hurt wins. Then when she's in the emergency room for some chest pain, several months later, a kid with multiple gunshot wounds is rushed in on a gurney to the spot next to her. No curtain is drawn and she has witnessed him fighting for his life. She recognizes him. He's from the rival gang that killed her boys. Now, she knew that her friends might say, pray that he dies, but that's not what happened. As she hears the doctors yelling,

we're losing him, something in her cracks open. I began to cry as I'd never cried before, she said, and started to pray the hardest I've ever prayed, please, please don't let him die. I don't want his mom to go through what I have. And he survived as she did and has did her capacity for loving. It got ripped open by the grief and in time became unimaginably vast. I love this story because ultimately I have this. faith that anything that happens to us can be part of what wakes us up. And it doesn't mean

we want things to happen that are painful for ourselves or anybody else, not at all. It just means that we can have this trust that if we know how to be in relationship with our life, suffering can be a darkness of the womb. And in Buddhism this is pretty encapsules in the prayer of the Bodhisattva, which is an awakening being, which is, may whatever arises, may this serve the awakening of heart and awareness. So what I'd like to do right now is just walk through these four steps with you and give you a chance to explore bringing them to some place in your life where you'd like to see whatever's going on be that kind of darkness of the womb, let it bear fruit and

some way. So I invite you to just take a moment to find a way to sit that's comfortable, to come into stillness and we'll just practice together. We've been moving back and forth between the personal and the societal. These are practices that we need to train in, each of us in our lives to really have it ripple out into our larger world and there are practices that can be explored in groups. For now, I invite you to take a scan of your personal life and sense where you feel like you're caught in some way in aversion, hatred, or conflict,

where there's some distance with another person, something painful going on, some suffering. If you're scanning your personal life and you're not finding someone you know well, it can be someone that's in the more societal field, wherever you feel a sense of conflict, of adversary, of enemy, then that's the place to attend to. You'll notice that if you've picked a place of conflict, that with that there's going to be perhaps the emotions of anger or fear,

adversiveness. In the beginning of any of these practices is just to have the intention that this may be the darkness of a womb. And you might even try on the bodhisattva prayer, please, may these circumstances, may these feelings that I'm having, may this experience serve to awaken my heart, serve to awaken compassion and wisdom. That prayer makes you available. And you sense, well, what am I believing? What's the belief going on about this other person or myself or the world that's creating or generating the hatred, the anger? And just sense how it feels to believe it. It may be a belief in badness or evil of another, the wrongness of another. Maybe a belief that you're being rejected, that you're being disrespected.

that you're misunderstood, doesn't mean there aren't some accurate perceptions that are useful. It just means that if there's aversiveness that you're creating the other into an enemy, how does it feel to believe? Is it possible to sense this as real but not true and just sense whether it's useful? Check under whatever you're believing or thinking

and sense the real vulnerability or feelings that are there. Whenever there's conflict or aversion, what is it under there? What's the unmet need? Is the unmet need for safety or a concern for other's safety? Is there fear? Is the unmet need one of wanting connection and feeling hurt? Breathe with whatever you're feeling.

whatever's under there, whatever the expression in your body is of aversion or anger or fear, grief, just to breathe with it. This is the step of feeling feelings, this kind of willingness, if it helps you to put your hand on your heart or your cheek to keep company with what's here, this is the beginning of the next step of offering care and it can be very, very powerful. I often put two hands on my heart and just really feel that the most loving place in me is holding and bearing witness to the feelings that need attention. So actively turning towards love, contacting feelings and turning towards love.

And if it's hard to offer yourself love, you might imagine whatever loving beings in your life are helpful to you and you trust. Imagine they're surrounding you, offering love and care to the place in you it feels most vulnerable. It might be the love is in the form of acceptance or forgiveness. I love you just as you are. I sometimes say to myself, it's okay, sweetheart. Sense the larger community of care that you belong to, known and unknown, that there are hearts throughout this world that are a world,

awakening, that are generous, that are concerned, that love and forgive and are willing to act. Sensing your own most awake heart, the place in you that is holding the woundedness or vulnerability, what I sometimes call our future self, that which you are emerging into, becoming, wise self so that you can now witness from your wisest, most loving self, the situation that you've brought up and sense what the possibilities are for creative action. How might you respond to this situation and have some new choices? Again, just coming back to the starting place of feeling your sincerity,

may this situation, may whatever situations arise, may they serve the awakening of this heart. And then widening your view, sensing this heart spaces including our whole world. So you can sense our country and all countries on the globe. The earth are mother in your lap, all beings. Sense the challenges, the beauty, the mystery and the message. and the hurt and the pain, sensing it all in your heart. And feel your prayer for all beings. May whatever darkness there is, the regressive tendencies,

the mean-spiritedness, the hurt, the suffering, may it serve awakening. May this be the darkness of the womb. May there be a rebirthing, into a world that's filled with compassion. We close with a very simple prayer from Diane Ackerman. It's a school prayer actually that she wrote. In the name of daybreak and the eyelids of morning

and the way-fearing moon and the night when it departs, I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace. In the name of the sun and its mirrors and the day that embraces it and the uttermost night,

and the male and the female and the plants bursting with seed and the crowning seasons of the firefly and the apple, I will honor all life wherever and in whatever form it may dwell on earth, my home, and in the mansions of the stars. 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.