Tara Brach - Devotion: Grounds of a Path with Heart, Part 1

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

In this two-part series, we reflect on the power of devotion as a gateway to awakening that reconnects us with what we love most deeply. Together, we'll look at how prayer and heartfelt longing can open us to  the intrinsic experience of belonging we yearn for. Especially in these times of fear and division, cultivating our natural devotion helps us soften, remember our true nature, and realign with love.   In this talk, Tara explores:   The essence of devotional practice as a gateway to belonging and spiritual awakening. How longing and sincere intention can guide us back to our true nature. Prayer as the bridge between longing and belonging The difference between substitutes for love and true aspirations that arise from presence. Tracing desire inward as a practice to reconnect with the source of love and aliveness.  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. Thank you for being here. So I'll start by sharing a story I heard from my friend who, her mother, for years and years, you know, everybody kind of considered her this refuge of the heart. anybody who's having difficulty in their extended family and circles. My friend discovered in her mother's later years that through most of her life, she had been an hour a day doing prayers for her circle, all those that she was considered and thought of as part of the extended family,

I think about 100 people. She'd include them with blessings. and my friend described her dying as so peaceful that she really sensed this belonging to all beings and as we can imagine there's when you really trust your belonging there's no loneliness or fear so the words that jump out for me when I listen to the story of this woman the main word was devotion that she was just living true to what most mattered in her heart and we know what devotion looks like. You know, whether it's the devotion that's expressed when someone's creating a work of art, a work of beauty, nurturing a garden, healing others, those fighting for justice,

for freedom, are someone communing with the divine? Devotion expresses our sincere, pure, love for life. And the sign of devotion is there's a sense of belonging to something larger. An inquiry I'd like to invite you to explore really is what is your life devoted to? What is your life devoted to? And just take a moment to sense what comes up, what matters, what's the deep intention, the sacred intention that guides your life. And as you reflect, you might consider moments that you've actually felt a very alive sense of devotion, maybe to your work, to a relationship, helping others, serving to the spiritual path, and what it's like when you feel that your energy, your words, your thoughts, your being is really good.

divided by devotion. And you can spend time with this on your own, but I ask, because it feels to me that these are times in the history of our humanity that are calling us to be more conscious of what matters to us, more awake and remembering our larger belonging. I mean, here we are. Our world is just unraveling with conflict and mistrust and animosity. It's just so chaotic and unstable. And we go into survival mode. It's quite natural to lose sight of what matters to us. So, this kind of reflection, what is my life devoted to? What is love asking? Can be a real lifeline that awakens us from our personal trance and also a collective trance. So with this in mind, I look through the archives and I found two talks that I want to share with you that

help us connect with natural devotion, the ways our life becomes aligned with our heart. So, I'm sharing them with you now and I hope you find them meaningful and relevant in your life, in your day-to-day life. Okay, friends, blessings. I'd like to begin just a bit of a personal biographical, which is that when I first entered college, I was planning to go to law school. That was my trajectory. And when I left, I moved into an ashram. So, something happened. And what happened was I, in my senior year, started doing yoga and meditation. And it was a radical, dramatic shift and I moved, decide the most important thing in life was to spiritually wake up. And so I moved into an ashram which is a spiritual community and lived in a spiritual community

for 10, 11 years and the reason and what kept me as part of that community so long, besides the fact that I loved my fellow community members was, we have. We had a practice, it's called a sadna, spiritual practice, where we'd get up at 3.30 in the morning and we'd start with a cold shower and then we'd spend two and a half hours doing yoga and meditating and praying and chanting. And by the end of those two and half hours it didn't matter what mood I was in when I began. My heart was open.

Just didn't matter what was going on. And a key element for me that opened my heart was the chanting. Because the chanting, there was no way that my highly active mental processes could compete. They just kind of quiet down and I literally there was going from the head to the heart. And it didn't mean that I didn't have access to my brains anymore but I was just living more guided by my heart. I love the chanting. And chanting is part of a broader domain of what we might call devotional practices or practices

that are sometimes described as awakening the sacred feminine, which is really that sense of communion, belonging, connecting. Every spiritual path I've ever run into and every religion has a strong current in it a strong pathway towards belonging because it's a universal longing. I mean every one of us deep, deep down, wants, I was going to say, to fall in love, we want to be love. We just want to belong. We want to be one with it all. That doesn't mean we want to lose our uniqueness or individuality, but we want to trust our belonging to the web of life. We want to be at home in that. So there's a lot of different practices and we're

focusing more in the inner practices that the way I'm going to, the language I'll use is that really awaken that sacred feminine, awaken that heart experience of belonging. And there are many that do it. I've mentioned the chanting and the praying. There's, in the Buddhist tradition, the loving-kindness. practices and the compassion practices. And there's the outward practices of Bhakti, which is the service, like offering service. And there's all sorts of relational practices. So there's many. But what I can say is in the years since living in the ashram, whenever I hit a wall, whenever I hit one of those life crises where the rug gets pulled or when I'm working

with others, when they've, when the big, really dramatic, hard stuff happens, there's always two kind of ways that we pay attention. And one is to deepen presence and notice what's happening with clarity, like really honestly contact what's here. And that would be considered as the awakened masculine, that clarity and that recognition. And inextricably linked, this is the second wing of awareness, is whatever helps us to soften our heart and remember, reconnect with that sense of belonging. So Srinar Sargadata, one of the Indian teachers I really like, said that the mind creates

the abyss and the heart crosses it. The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. That we need to recognize what's going on in the moment but if we don't get some taste of love, of belonging, we don't soften enough to really be fully here. There's no real healing. So for each of you that's here right now and those that are listening, there's some quality of devotion, of this sacred feminine, of this longing to belong that's active. You wouldn't be here right now.

You wouldn't be in a field that involves deepening presence unless you were longing for something, unless there was something that really mattered to you. I remember being at a meditation retreat and Rumpashe. He was kind of a guest teacher. And this was a Tibetan retreat and we were really exploring this deep practice of freedom, of it's called Rigpa, of really recognizing the nature of reality. And he started speaking and he said, you know, my meditation, eh, it's so-so, my Rigpa so-so, but I have a lot of devotion.

I think in the West we don't talk about it so much. It's kind of an odd phrase and we sometimes associate devotion with some of a lot of, some really rigid structures of religion. And yet if you end up painting a lot or writing poetry or taking care of certain people that you love, or finding yourself in nature a lot, or in some way being drawn to getting still, that's devotion. You are devoted. You are seeking that belonging.

So, as we know, there are many moments of our life that rather than devotion were being guided by something else. It said that on the spiritual path that's described as the devotion or the sacred feminin is the juice of the path. It's what's juicy. It's what energizes us. People don't stay on a spiritual path unless there's some devotion or something that really is drawing them, that's carrying them, that's really calling them. We don't stay.

The Buddha said that our entire life arises from the tip of intention. Our entire life arises from the tip of intention. And yet as we know, we move through life and we're not always guided by the awakened heart. We are guided by all sorts of other more twisted and sometimes shadowy. energies. So, what we're going to be inquiring about for the rest of the time that I'll be speaking is how do we take what sometimes the kind of intentions that are murky or shadowy and how does it purify? So more and more moments of your life are lived out of that authentic quality of devotion, of heart-carrying. How do we align the compass of our heart?

I think it's probably the most critical question for all of us because I run into so many people that there's an undercurrent of disappointment in their lives, that in some way my life's not what I wanted it to be and that there's a gap between my idea of who I could be or how I could serve or my creativity or intimacy, there's a gap between that and what's actually happening. And that gap happens because we get hijacked by intentions that are narrow and fixated and not really issuing in their full, mature way from that devotion. Does that make sense?

That hijacking? So, all organisms, all living organisms are motored by intention from the most primitive to the most complex. There's intention. It's a neutral enemy, energy. In other words, a surgeon can be, a person can be cutting another body with a knife and it could be a surgeon trying to heal or murder or trying to kill. So it's intention, it's neutral.

It can go either direction. So all life, the most primitive, has intention and it also often gets contracted by fear. So we think we're separate and our intention gets caught in fear and then all of a sudden our days about getting things done so we don't get punished for doing things wrong. Or it's contracted by fear and we all of a sudden are trying to cover ourselves and show ourselves differently to people. Or we get hijacked by fear and all of a sudden there's a sense that in some way we're really a bad person and we have to make up for it.

So mature devotion evolves but in order to take that raw energy of intention and have that become really a heart energy that guides us. It takes consciousness, it takes presence and practice. So we're going to look at the practices right now that unfold our devotion. And the first practice is to get where the blocks are. And when I say blocks, to the degree that any one of us has unmet needs, i.e., we grew up in a close, culture or a family where we weren't seen, understood, loved, accepted. To the degree that we didn't have, that we had unmet needs, what happens is we try to meet our needs by fixating on substitutes.

And most everyone I know has, is organized around some substitutes where we're moving through the day and we have a deep need but we're trying to meet it through something other than directly finding love. We are soothing and comforting ourselves in other ways. Now, religion can be a substitute. You know, Campbell described as the opiate of the masses that it covers over the mystery sometimes rather than plunging us in. So sometimes we can use our religion or our faith that way. Sometimes the substitute is to have power over others. other than going for that feminine, sacred feminine of connecting, we get hooked on trying to have power over, having control.

Sometimes it's a real aggressiveness, a real domination. How many of you were here last week with us? Can I see? Well then you probably know that those that weren't, that as we closed last week we were doing what I consider one of the most beautiful. wonderful meditations of the sacred feminine, which is an inclusive heart. What does it mean to take another person that you have distanced and called an other and even put down in your heart? What does it mean to open the heart in an inclusive way? And we were doing that meditation exactly at the same time that in Charleston, nine people in a Bible

circle were massacred, exactly at the same time. time, this heart practice and it was hard not to, when I, the next day, as many people, you know, ripped me wide open, just a sense that in this world what we most need is the awakening of the sacred feminine. We need that sense of connectedness, we need that that remembrance that what matters is including and belonging, not having power over, not dominating, not aggressing. So the practices we do together to wake up this quality of heart, we're really doing for the healing of our own hearts but also in a rippling way as it's part of where our world most

needs. So other substitutes, you probably know yours. I sometimes call them false refuges. But other substitutes are accumulating wealth or fame, looking good. And then of course there's the level of substitutes where we're addictions to chemicals, food. I read this little story, a rabbi, a minister and a priest were playing poker. They played regularly when the police raided the game.

Turning to the priest, the lead police officer said, Father Murphy, were you gambling? Turning his eyes to heaven, the priest whispered, Lord, forgive me for what I'm about to do. To the police officer, he then said, no officer, I was not gambling. The officer then asked the minister, Pastor Johnson, were you gambling? And again, an appeal to heaven, and the minister replied, no officer, I was not gambling.

Turning to the rabbi, the officer again asked Rabbi Goldstein, were you gambling? shrugging his shoulders, the rabbi replied, With whom could I be gambling? So we all have ours. We have our ways of escaping the present moment. We have our ways of soothing ourselves and comforting ourselves. And sadly, what happens is not only do we use substitutes,

but then we add judgment to those substitutes. So we don't like ourselves for the ways that we try to meet our needs. I think often when I talk about this, our search for kind of, we're seeking belonging, we're seeking that peace and that sense of union and we have all these ways of doing that aren't so healthy. I often think of a story that I read years ago in a magazine called The Sun. And it was a woman, she had an eating disorder and she was describing to her therapist this pivotal moment. She had run away from home, she ran away regularly and she'd been returned by

the police and she asked her mother, right after she, the police dropped her off, she said, do you love me? And her mother said, how could anyone ever love you? And then she described how this wasn't new, how her child had been filled with these kind of critiques, these messages about her badness that hardened into beliefs and took decades. to heal. So she was writing about her youth and this woman described the following bedtime ritual. This is what I want to tell you about. She said this. She said, from the age of five or six until I was well into my teens, whenever I had trouble sleeping, I'd slip from under my covers and steal into the kitchen for some bread or cheese which I would carry back

to bed with me. There I'd pretend my hands belonged to someone else. a comforting, reassuring being without a name, an angel perhaps. The right hand would feed me little bites of cheese or bread as the left hand stroked my cheek and hair. My eyes would close. I would whisper softly to myself, "'There, there, go to sleep. You're safe now. Everything will be all right. I love you.' So I share this with you because whatever your substitutes are, and we all have them. Our deepest longing is to love and be loved. We want to connect. That's our deepest longing. And it's the same energy, like these primitive organisms, all organisms want to live

and thrive and flourish. But then we get contorted because of our conditioning, our society, our families, we get feared, afraid, and then we fixate on something. smaller. This is D.H. Lawrence, he says, men are not free doing just what they like. Men are only free when they are doing what the deepest self likes and there's getting down to that deepest self. It takes some diving. So, we might each ask ourselves, how do we dive? How do we get down to what our deepest aspiration is? How do we live more connected to that? And then name two pathways and we'll practice each of them a little bit and they're completely related. And one pathway is that whatever is coming up, whatever wave of experience is coming up,

we start right there. So if right now you're feeling numb or tired or restless or sad or anxious, you start right with that wave of experience and you go in and in and in to get right deeply present with the essence of that wave. And the other pathway is to turn towards the and open to the ocean of experience to wherever love is. Because love is always here, we're just not seeing it. So it's an intentional opening right, okay, where is it in my life? So reaching in and in and in through the wave or opening to the things.

the ocean. And here's John O'Donohue, a poet and a Christian teacher no longer alive, but this is one of my favorites of his quotes. He says, prayer is the voice of longing. It reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging. It reaches outwards and inwards to unearth our ancient belonging. So we're going to start with the inward. And as I mentioned, the inward is you start right where you are. And I sometimes call it tracing back desire to the pure source. I'll give you an example and then I'm going to have you try it out. An example is a friend of mine that I met with recently and he described his pushpole

with intimacy. He, both craving it and avoiding it, which most of us have. to some degree. We really want to be close to others and we have all sorts of fears that make us push others away. So, what would happen is he's very, it gets very addicted and fixated on the idea of the perfect relationship, okay? And then when he gets involved with somebody at first, because it has the possibilities, projected all this possibility on it, he fixates on the person and a lot of attention there and very soon starts fixating on what's wrong with her. And then more and more becomes looking at what's missing and judgmental

and shutting down and realizes he's rigid and perfectionistic in it. So we started exploring and what are the waves that are coming up? Okay, the waves are fear. I do that because I'm afraid I'll get involved with somebody and she won't be right and it won't be good and we will not have the thing I most really want. And I said, and what's that? goes, what I'm wanting is, and this is where this is tracing back the wanting. Very, very powerful process. He said, well, what I'm wanting is, I want a companion. I said, well, what would the companion do? Well, if I had a companion, I'd feel like I belonged, like I was in a togetherness. And then I said, okay, so what would that really be like if you get under the words?

He said, I'd feel like I belonged, well, it would feel like communion. I'd feel one with God, I'd feel one. And I said, what does it really feel like? And they went in and in it, well, it would feel warm and edgeless and fluid. And there'd be a lot, it'd be light-filled. It's like the sense of we are the universe. It's like we are the field, that warm, light-filled field. And so I said, now just inhabit that right now.

Just feel it, just be it, be that. And of course he blissed out in those moments. And I also said, this is what you always and already are. That oneness you're seeking. It's not out there. When he traced back the desire, he found the source of it. When he was saying, I want to feel oneness. And I said, well, what did it feel like?

And he started naming it and feeling it was already there in it. Does that make sense? You cannot imagine something and imagine it fully if it's outside you. You have to have some link to the actual experience. It was already there in him. But as long as we fixate our wants on an object out there, we never discover that the source of our longing is the love and the presence that's already what we are. Now, this is a practice that needs to be done over and over because we are so fixated

on thinking the what I want is solved down the road or with that person or when that happens out there. So if there's any takeaway right now the path to awakening the sacred feminine, one key element is when the waves come up of wanting or fearing or needs to be different, wants something out there, trace back in and in and in because the source of our longing is right here. Now, just to say for this guy, he, he, this, when I first talked to him about this, when we first explored this, it was several years ago. Subsequently, he had an intimate relationship that didn't last, but it was way different

than anything beforehand. And he described what would happen is that every time he'd hit moments of judging and he did, he would find, he would look for what's wrong, he would say, okay, this is the conditioning, it's not that essence, it's not that source and then he'd go in and in and in and in, he'd feel his fears, defensiveness as wanting, his wanting for perfection, you'd go in and in and in to that longing for love and then right into the love itself. And that gave him the space and the trust that he could could let the waves of judgment come and go and not believe them. So this, staying with the waves and tracing back, it not only gives you a taste of the who you always and already are, you

can start changing your life patterns because you start trusting that and you don't have to obey the conditioning. A lot of people will ask me what's the difference between kind of immature substitute wanting when I'm fixating? and true aspiration, deep aspiration. Isn't that another form of wanting? And there are three flags that will help you to really trust when your aspiration is pure. And you just heard them in a way because one element when you start reflecting on what do I really, really want is that when it's a true aspiration, what you're longing for is already a part of you, it's your potential. You're not longing to be somebody else or for something

else to complete you. It's here. What you're longing for is here and you can intuit that. The second piece is that what you're longing for isn't down the road. If it's a true aspiration, it's for something that can be found right now. And I mean right now, like right now, we postpone. We have it in the future. It's right now. The only way are our our aspiration will unfold as if it gets very, very present. The third flag of a true aspiration is you'll feel sincere. Rather than a kind of grasping and a smallness you'll feel tender and open. Because again, a true aspiration is a relaxing back into what's here.

Let's try this out. Let's just practice a little. You might adjust how you're sitting and close your eyes. You might bring to mind somewhere in your life that you know you're a little hooked on wanting something, wanting somebody to return your affections or wanting a partner or wanting financial security or wanting to change how you look, some charged wanting some approval that you want to get, some accomplishment you want. So, scan and sense where something has got a fixation to it. It's something you want that fits into the category of wanting. In other words, it's for things to be different, it's in the future, it's dependent on something

changing, it's dependent on someone outside. What do you attach to? Let yourself make it as big as it is, in other words, even if it helps to exaggerate, just sense yourself, what makes this so important, why do I want it so much? And you might even feel in your body what it's like when you're wanting, because when there's wanting, there's tension. There's a fear of not getting. It's in a way if you could embody it. It's like a leaning forward.

Sometimes you can imagine your hands a little bit clutched. I feel the wanting and sense what is it, if you could be able to be. If you got what you're wanting, if it came through, what would you really be getting that you're wanting? What are you really wanting? What's the inner experience you're wanting? If you got that financial security or the person in your life that you're wanting to return your affections or the right partner or success in some way in your profession, would that give you that is what you're really wanting? What's the inner experience you're really wanting? And you can ask that question again, keep diving. What is it that I'm

really wanting under that? What is it you're wanting to feel or experience or know or trust? Tracing back the wanting, the desire? You might really investigate even more. What is it that you most want to be experiencing? Like if you got the thing you wanted, would it be that you could relax and enjoy moments? Would it be a feeling of belonging, of being more alive, more at home? Feel what you're really wanting, feel the wanting and what you're wanting to experience. Is it a feeling of inner peace, warm, openness, non-separation? full aliveness, just inhabit the experience that you're most wanting. Inhabit it, just be it.

Be the longing, the essence of the longing, be longing. What we are wanting is what we are. When we take our wanting from its outside fixation and trace back the desire, It's always and already here. These are the words of Sri Ramakrishna. O longing mind, dwell within the depth of your own pure nature. Do not seek your home elsewhere. Your naked awareness alone, O heart, oh mine, is the inexhaustible abundance for which

you long so desperately, O longing mind, dwell within the depth of your own pure nature. So what you've just done is explored a practice that's a very powerful devotional practice of taking the energy of wanting, of desire and tracing back the longing to the source, that sense of it's really love calling us home. When you feel longing, instead of turning outward, turn inward to the source that's right here. So as I describe, there's this two elements as that's turning inward and the second element is to look towards what we really long for by reaching out. And don't have enough time in this talk to get to part two.

So that means that this is a two-part series and you'll have to come back next week or listen in on the podcast for part two. So I'd like to close in a very simple way to invite you just to close your eyes for one last moment. We're really exploring that sacred feminine, that sense of belonging to life, belonging to love. It begins with belonging to the moment. So just sense the possibility of relaxing.

and letting go into the aliveness of this moment right here. You might mentally whisper the word yes and relax even more. See how much you can really let go into the changing ways, belonging to your heart, since whatever's here right now, just opening to and letting go into the experience of your heart. And from that heart space, again, just sensing what is your deepest aspiration that you're aware of right now? What is it you are aware of most longing for? What feels most sincere in this moment?

Just feel that prayer, that wish that it may manifest and that it can manifest right here in this life, this body. this heart, this mind. Namaste and thank you for your attention.