Tara Brach - From Ego to Eco-Identity - Homecoming to Sacred Relationship

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

Our human loneliness and suffering arise from getting identified in a mental ego, and separating ourselves from the living web of our natural world. This talk explores the pathway back to sacred relationship, and offers reflections and practices that awaken intimacy with the non-human world. 

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. About 25 years ago, I was teaching with a friend at a rural retreat center in the woods, I think, north of Toronto. And during the lunch break, we had a kind of lunch and then a walking meditation period. I took a walk in the woods with my co-teacher and friend. And we got immersed in a wonderful conversation. And then somewhere along the line, we realized that, oh my gosh, we're going to be late. We're due back to lead the next meditation.

And then we realized, oh, no, we've gotten off the trail. We're lost. And so started getting anxious and walking faster, trying to find her away, and took a number of turns. It was impossible to retrace our steps. And at some point there was a kind of a thinning in the woods and we walked out of the woods and found a highway and were able to flag down a police car. And the police drove us back to the retreat center. And I'll never forget going up that direction. driveway and seeing all of our students in front of the meditation center standing there silently

as the police car drove up and then their two teachers got out of the police car, you know, namaste. And I just would love to know what they were thinking in those moments. There's a poem I wish that I had had with me to share at that evening talk. and I want to share it with you now. It's by David Wagoner and it's called Lost. Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here and you must treat it as a powerful stranger. Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers.

I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying, here. No two trees are the same to raven. No two branches are the same to wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.

So being lost, losing our way is another way of saying that we're no longer at home in this moment, in our own body and heart with others, with our larger body of the earth. Trees, bushes beside us are not lost. They are nature at home. But we feel separate. There's that lost belonging. So when we get disconnected, we kind of know the flags and we get anxious, restless, there's a kind of dissatisfaction, mental obsessing. We speed up, we consume in a more addictive way, and behaviorally we're just more self-centered, you know, we get more judgmental, we're more isolated, and there's a sense that something's wrong. So that's being lost. And we also, as we know, get collectively lost

as our world really is right now, spiraling into increasing dividedness, violence. I read somewhere a long time ago, it said that when Adam and Eve left Eden, he commented to her, he said, my dear, we're living in a time of great transition. And I love that because really our great signature transition, in all of human history is humans developing this sense of separateness superior to the rest of the

natural world. At some point, gradually, we left our bodies and began living in a mental world where we were seeking to dominate and control our bodies, the earth bodies, the feminine. So this is really our fundamental divide. It's leaving the garden. It's leaving our bodies and our heart and our natural belonging and getting identified with the mind and with the controlling ego and in so doing really wreaking havoc, the health and well-being of ourselves and all beings, you know, of the earth. There is a pathway back into sacred relationship with the living world. So again, from the poem, The Forest Breeze. Listen, it answers, I have made this place

around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying, here. The portal, is presence. It's pausing, becoming still, and again, finding our way to intimacy with the trees, with the birds, with humans, and life. It's realizing we never really left the garden, though we've been living and acting from the delusion of separation and causing great harm. So you're getting a sense of what I'd like us to reflect together about today, which is how deepening attention to the non-human world can be a radical way of awakening from that delusion of separation and really for discovering our capacity for all-inclusive love. When we have that loving, when we feel that belonging, we naturally participate in the

healing of our world. So the title of this talk is from ego-executive, identity to echo identity, homecoming to sacred relationship. I've always liked the phrase our sickness is homesickness because when we're caught in our identity as a mental egoic self, we're actually homesick. We feel apart from the whole. You might not be conscious of it, but it's there. So I'll speak a little bit about ego, that it's a natural part of our navigating equipment to have that executive functioning mental control tower that goes after what we want and avoids what we fear and, you know, focuses a lot on how do I want to be seen, how do I want to be treated? There's a lot of self-focus. So it's part of our

survival. It really is part of our evolutionary unfolding. But when the That mental ego is our exclusive identity. When it really defines our sense of who we are, then there is a deep suffering of separation. We are no longer experiencing any sense of embeddedness in that larger relational field. It's actually a developmental arrest when we're caught in strictly ego identification and we've forgotten our belonging. And as I mentioned, with it, there's a sense of something's wrong. So I spent most of the decades of my teaching life exploring on how the ego tends to fixate on the what's wrong with me, our own imperfections. It attacks itself. And that actually

intensifies ego. And it also attacks others. for what's wrong with others. There's that story of a man driving home from work. It's at the end of a really tough day and it's been wall-to-wall conflicts, feeling misunderstood and fairly blamed, angry at others. So there he is. His wife calls him on a cell phone because she's just struck because here he is driving home and she's heard on the radio that someone's driving the wrong way on the highway. And his response is, heck Emma, there's hundreds of them doing that today. When we're identified with our ego, the other is out there and often wrong. And when we're identified with our ego, our wants supersede the needs of others. I mean,

there really is that sign of, to the degree we're identified with the ego, we have to have things our own way. And some of you might remember that story. It's a wonderful story of mom preparing pancakes for her two sons, one's age five, the other's age three. Boys are arguing over who's going to get the first one. So the mom sees her opportunity for a kind of moral lesson and says, well, if Jesus was sitting here, he would say, let my brother have the first pancake, I can wait. And so the older one turns to the younger one and says,

Ryan, you can have the first chance at playing Jesus. So, you know, we temporarily like getting what we want. But when we're caught in it, in the ego fixation of I want, I need, me, me, me, it comes with a sense of fear and separateness and often shame. I know in my marriage I've discovered that every time I let go of my need to have it my own way, there's real freedom. And when I get my way, underneath there's a real sense of not liking myself. So now I kind of practice like letting go every other time, kind of playing a little.

So as I mentioned, ego is not a mistake. It's part of our evolutionary unfolding and it's not the end of the story. I mean, evolution has given us the necessary equipment to evolve beyond ego, to find our way home to the garden that's always been here, to find our way to echo identity. And so what I'd like to do is explore the ways that we can consciously cultivate this capacity to feel relatedness, that larger belonging. because it's actually, it's a practice. By our habits and our conditioning, we feel separate. So it needs to be conscious and intentional. Again, from the poem Lost,

The forest knows where you are. You must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known. I love that language, that the forest, which is really our larger belonging, the forest knows where you are, our larger being, our larger the presence and truth of who we are, that sentience knows where we are.

And it's with respect and humility and care. Ask permission to know and be known that we can become intimate with that mysterious wholeness of what we are. You know, we have much to learn from indigenous peoples who have maintained the wisdom of belonging, have not gotten caught in that delusion of leaving the garden, being superior or separate from the natural world. And last week I shared a story about an encounter Carl Jung had with an indigenous elder, and the elder was describing his view of white Europeans. as always being dissatisfied, wanting something uneasy, restless, crazy.

So Carl Jung said, well, why do you think they're crazy? And the elders said, well, they think with their heads. And Carl Jung said, well, how do you think? And the response was, well, we think with our hearts. Meaning, the thoughts are guided by a sense of relatedness, not by the disembodied, anxious mental ego that really drives greed and violence. So this really points us to the grounds of reconnecting with our larger belonging of sacred relationship, which is an intentional shift from head-thinking to embodying and inhabiting our body and heart,

so our thoughts are guided by a sense of connectedness, inspire intuition, by heart wisdom, by love. Melodoma Somme was an indigenous teacher and author who was born to the Dagara people of Burkina Faso in West Africa. And Maladoma was kidnapped from his village at the age of four by a Jesuit missionary who had befriended his father. And he was placed in a boarding school, So he was on a path to becoming a priest to be used really as a tool to convert the African people to the white man's god. When he was 20, he managed to run away and he walked the entire distance back to his village where he found himself home once more, yet he was kind of a stranger there because he'd been gone for 15 years.

So one of his first lessons in returning was really profound because in this village, they didn't have electricity, but they had natural. ways of creating light at night if they wanted to. But they'd often choose not to. They'd say, let's turn off the lights so we can see. Let's turn off the light so we can see. And Maladoma was told that if they lit their lamps at night, they wouldn't be able to see. The village elders explained it this way. They said, you can't see anything real in daylight. You can only see what you want to see. When you turn the lights off in the night, you see what wants to be seen, which is a whole different reality. Truth, reality wants to be seen. But our habitual patterns of thought and interpretation that seeing in the daylight obscure the view, I think that's really

profound, that we need to be able to turn off the light of our habitual thoughts. the filters that have kept our attention kind of fixated in narrow conditioned ways, in order to open into reality. We do it through the dark, uncontrolled realm of our body. We discover the world that exists unto itself beyond any ideas, beyond what we think or want or expect. And what happens when we become embodied, we discover that the body is this living energy And it becomes this portal for deep intelligence and wisdom.

The thoughts that arise from embodied presence in our heart guide us well. So we need to turn off the light of our habitual thinking, come into our bodies and let our perceptions come from embodied presence. That's what they mean by seeing at night without lights. And actually, this is the essential training in the practices we do together, that we're coming, we're bringing mindfulness to the first foundation, which is the living body. And it's by this embodied presence, we actually become intimate. We go from head thoughts to heart and become intimate.

If you investigate any experience of intimacy, you've had recently moments of warmth or feeling connectedness, you'll find it comes from that embodied presence. That's what brings it alive. I read somewhere that Krishna Merti, the Indian spiritual teacher, taught that if you choose a rock and you place it somewhere in your home and visit it daily, in a few weeks it will have become a sacred rock, it will have meaning, you'll be in conscious relationship. Some wisdom in us knows this, that when we're present, when we pay deep attention to any part of this living world, we bond with what we're paying attention to. I mean, think of a mother and an infant gazing at each other. Think of how much attention we pay to our dog or our cat. That's what brings

alive the relationship. Embodied presence, paying attention, this shift from head-thinking, to perceiving from this presence is what really awakens our heart. So that leads us to our first reflection. We're going to do two together, which is really moving from head thinking to embodied presence. So I'd like to invite you to take a moment. Just as the poem says, you know, stand still. Become still. Wherever you are is called here.

So become still and just maybe mentally whisper the word here. Become still, whisper here. And if your eyes are open, you might let the gaze be downcast, or close the eyes. The forest breeze. Feel yourself breathing. Just feel the inflow and the outflow. And maybe as you release the breath with the outflow,

can let go of tension wherever you feel it. So breathing in and then breathing out and relaxing the shoulders. Soffening, letting go. Breathing in and breathing out, softening the hands, letting the arms and hands rest in an easy, effortless way. Breathing in and breathing out, the chest be open and the belly soft. Softening the belly. And you might begin to sense your whole, body breathing, that as the breath comes in, it's like a balloon inflating a bit, even in a cellular way. And as you breathe out, there's the releasing, settling, letting go. Your whole body breathing. Just as a cup is filled with water, this whole body is filled with awareness and aliveness. You can feel it in the hands if you soften the hands. You can feel it in the

feet feel it throughout this whole body filled with aliveness notice the tingling the vibrating not stopping anything tightness or loose flowing heat cool sensing the body is a field of sensation intrinsically alive you might sense this earth the vastness of this earth flowing through you. He's coming up through the feet, coming up through the base of the spine, filling the body. It's feeling this living, breathing body filled with aliveness and awareness, awake, knowing, and that you can sense if you bring the attention to other people, other animals, those bodies are living bodies, awake, filled with awareness too. You might be able. You might be able to. You might, pay attention in your mind to one human,

just off of your presence, and sense that being as aliveness, awareness, just like you, life, loving life, and bring your attention to one non-human being, animal, tree,

filled with aliveness, sentience, life, loving life, extending it and sensing bad truth in all living beings, life, loving life, alive and aware. Svidnar Surgadata says, when you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is, and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spontaneously. You will know that every living being in the entire universe are included in your life.

heart. So you might take a few breaths, bring yourself back. Yeah. So this first ground level of awakening to our echo identity to sacred relationship is embodied presence, which helps us wake up from that rigid ego identity and really inhabit the fullness of who we are and sense it everywhere around us. And I invite you to explore, explore with a rock or plant, every day simply offering your embodied presence just for a few moments and creating that receptivity to the sacredness that wants to be experienced. So now I want to name and look at the challenge in cultivating intimacy with the non-human world. And it's the habit of objectifying, being blind to the sentience in all life forms. In the poem,

It says, the forest knows where you are. There is sentience, intelligence in this living web, and it lives through all beings. But the habit of ego is to sense its own sentience, but not realize it's everywhere. Over the last few years, I've been reading on and off from Robin Kimmerer's amazing book Braiding with Sweetgrass. And she was saying in one point, part of it, that the English language is 75% nouns and 25% verbs, which lends our language to classifying, dividing, and objectifying. It separates. It doesn't open the lens to perceive this world as living and communing. I mean, think of it,

the difference between what you are. This is the noun side of it, your name, okay? You're a human, your gender identity, your location, versus the verb side, which is this unfolding process of physical movement, of breathing, of hearing, seeing, feeling, knowing that's going on moment to moment, which attuned you to sentience, aliveness, and spirit? In contrast to the English language, indigenous languages are 25% nouns and 75% verbs, it's really a language of animacy, as Kimmerer says, and it impacts our perception. It widens the lens to realize this indivisible, animate, communicating living world, the world where spirit lives through and connects all beings.

So she writes at one point about a woman who's a field botanist and this way describes it, she kneels along the trail to inspect a set of moose tracks saying, someone's already been this way this morning. She says, someone is in my hat shaking out a deer fly. Someone, not something. A being, not an it. So this has majorly impacted me in terms of my movement through the world. I'll go walking outside and I'll hear a bird and I'll in some way reflect to myself.

Someone's singing. Or I might get curious and say, who is this? Attuning to a someone, not a something. I'll see a tree and say, someone's rooted. here, I'll see a squirrel in a branch, someone's on a branch. And you get the idea that the more perceiving, sentient beings, the more belonging, the more we're never alone. But again, it's not our habit. This is what Kimmerer writes. She says, imagine seeing your grandmother standing at the stove in her apron and then saying of her, look, it is making soup. It has gray hair.

We might snicker at such a mistake, but we also recoil from it. In English, we never refer to a member of our family or indeed any person as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of self-hood and kinship. It reduces a person to a mere thing. So it is that in most indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family, because they all. are our family. The trees, the squirrels, the flies, the fish, they are our family. Echo theologist

Thomas Berry puts it this way. He says, we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. So if we deepen our attention to the natural world in this way, we can witness this communion and feel awe. The subject, the sentient life forms of our global family, ourselves included, are in continual communication, taking in and expressing information. Example, researchers at Tel Aviv University, Israel, collected nectar from evening primrose flowers before and after they expose them to this range of sound, recordings of bees and synthetic noises. And it was only in response to the bee sounds did they quickly make their nectar sweeter

because they hear and respond. Prum roses and bees exchanging information, extending, receiving, relatedness. We don't have to look far with our pets. Behind those eyes, they're sentience. Good friend, a musician in Arizona, had a cockatiel. It was kind of parrot, and at the time of the story was five years old, bright, clever, mischievous, free to fly around her house. And she communicated with Mimi, that's the name of the cockatiel, regularly.

So on one day, there was a birthday party, and she had many friends over, and Mimi got a lot of attention. It was very stimulated and very spoiled. The next day, Mimi got a good. ignored because my friend was totally immersed in work, composing, and Mimi was demanding attention and not getting it. So that afternoon my friend left the house to go next door, she left the door open, she didn't take keys, the neighbors were away and she was picking up their mail.

She goes back and the front door dead bolt was locked, shut from the inside. It had to be Mimi, so she patiently says, Mimi, I know you did it and let me in. It's the only key to her house and the others with her friend who lives an hour away. So they're all quiet inside. She goes again, Mimi, if you don't let me in, I'll be gone two hours getting a key. I'll be really mad. Please open, silence. So she turns away and starts walking down the path, click, and then there's all sorts of squawking

and flapping. was not an it. Mimu was a someone, a living sentient being. The bees are sentient, the primrose sentient. All of us, our global family sentient. So I am going down this track

because our language and our attention can either reflect and honor this living communicating interdependent world and that nourishes love or instead present a fractal static world of mostly separate objects, which of course cuts off and armors our heart. I shared some about Melodoma, that indigenous elder. In his life story, he had a relearn from his people when he got back from that boarding school. And he describes another

breakthrough I want to share with you. So his elders had asked him to sit and watch a tree. And he's aware of his own head processing and wondering what the purpose is and what's the correct thing to do. There has to be more to it than just staring at a tree, right? He becomes angry and feels like he's being made to go through a public humiliation because he's sitting right in the center of the village looking at this tree. Then past that anger and at some point he broke open and began to speak to the tree. And it became a sort of confessional where he poured out his feelings of friends.

frustration and he apologized to the tree. And what he experienced next was a transformation of the tree into what he calls the green lady, a green human-formed spirit who felt like love and home. And he ran sobbing to the spirit and she held him in her arms. And when he came out of the moment and was hugging the tree, he immediately tried to blame the vision on the heat and the lack of food, which is of course a Western way of thought, except that the elders of the tribe who were watching it seeing the same Green Lady in the moment he did. How could he explain that? So this is what he writes.

He says, my experience with the Green Lady raises an important issue, namely the true identity of the elements of nature. What if they are not inanimate objects as people in the West have been taught to believe, but rather living presences? How would we need to change if we granted to a tree the kind of life we usually reserve for so-called intelligent beings. If you peek long enough into the natural world, the trees, the hills, the rivers, and all natural things,

you start to realize that their spirit is much bigger than what can be seen, that the visible part of nature is only a small portion of what nature is. I am imagining that you have touched this, being with part of the natural world and realizing a sense of sentience, the one spirit that's living through. Seeing this, remembering this is really the grounds of sacred relationship. A powerful pathway of bringing this recognition alive and its one we'll be reflecting on together is by communicating. Consciously joining in the communicating that's a way. already going on. In other words, coming into active relationship, intimacy with non-human forms.

So let me just share some ways of doing that that you can explore, and there are many. And it might be as Maladoma-Somé did with Green Lady, simply expressing to some part of this natural world what's on your heart, acting as if the other is sensitive. positive and receiving. I think of Carlo Rovelli, who's a quantum physicist, and he describes at times when he'd be anxious before doing a public presentation, he'd go out and find a tree and come into some stillness and he'd touch it. And he'd just receive what he'd receive, something would happen because he'd feel different

and then he could go in and present. It might be that as you move through the natural world, you mental mental to Lee whisper, thank you. Or the flowers fragrant or the streams flowing sounds or the tree's shade or the worms that are working underground.

Thank you for the beauty. Thank you for the wonder. Just saying thank you makes us tender, receptive, and intimate. You might do as I found, for me, this is a really powerful one, that I will pause with a tree or a plant.

some sort of an animal that's nearby a bird, and I'll mentally reflect, we are friends. And in communicating it, it brings the truth into full fruition. I actually feel it and I trust it. And what happens is that the more I do it, the more I sense that I'm in communion with everything, I can never be alone. Other ways, you can practice as I described earlier. earlier reflecting on how whatever you're seeing is a someone, it's so powerful. All of a sudden, an object turns into a subject that's precious, that has spirit living

through it. The bird, the squirrel, the tree. For some, it's really powerful to ask permission before taking flowers or plants or other parts of the natural world for our consumption and enjoyment. are something I've done is sometimes just stand before a part of the earth and say, please teach me because every part of this natural world teaches the Dharma. Every part of this natural world can teach us about truth. The point is this, friends, that in communicating we are relating as if sentience is here

in all life forms. And it actually brings into our full awareness the truth that that is what is actually here. We discover ourselves opening into the field of belonging. So we'll do a final practice in a few moments. Many are familiar with the wonderful phrase from Zen Master Dogen that enlightenment is intimacy with all things. And it's a life practice. attuning, communicating, nurturing intimacy with this living world. And it brings joys and sorrows. The joys are so clear as we sense our belonging that the life spirit living through us is the same as through all beings.

And when we really know that, there's so much love and wonder, beauty wherever we look. And as I said, we never feel alone. We're in communion with everything. We have the whole world in our heart. that's grace and their sorrows you know when someone asked tignot on how to save the world his response is that what we most need to do is hear within us the sounds of the earth crying as echo identity deepens so does our sensitivity to the wounds to our earth to all life forms and it's natural

and necessary and appropriate to grieve what's happening now what our nervous systems really do apprehend. I'll share with you that I was meditating this morning and I'm very much anticipating a pulling back of climate initiatives in the United States, increased support for basal fuels, and what first kind of was coming up in me was anger, but then it became tears,

a real grieving for our larger body, this earth, and for all of us. I can feel it right now. It's just deeply sad to experience the decline. And part of this eco-identity is realizing that there are countless beings awakening to their belonging and feeling the same grief and caring that I'm feeling. For me, different people came to mind, friends, people I don't know. really all of you.

And it makes a difference that this field of caring is immeasurably deep and wide. And that's what leads to hope because we don't know the particulars but as more and more of us realize the larger belonging, the earth is in us, we are the earth. The possibilities for

unimaginable creativity and resilience and healing, they grow. I think of Ticknat Han saying that change will happen on a fundamental level as we fall back in love with the planet. It's our love for life, the love that comes from knowing our belonging, that's our hope and our prayer. Okay, friends, let's do our final practice, and I love this. This practice is communicating to commune.

And again, I invite you wherever you are to come into stillness. You might close your eyes or lower your gaze and whisper here, right here. And as you do, feel the movement of the breath, perhaps let go a little or relax where there's tightness. See if you can feel your whole body breathing, the awareness and aliveness that fills you. and it's from this presence, you might bring to mind a non-human animal that's in some way in your life or an animal that appeals to you if you don't have a close-in animal. But imagine and feel it close in.

See the eyes, see the light behind the eyes, taking in the aliveness and sentience and presence of this being, and you might mentally reflect someone is here. You might mentally reflect we are friends and sense the tenderness that knows that truth. And then bringing to mind a non-human part of this world that's a plant, plant or tree, and bringing close in some image of a plant or tree that you're familiar with. It's insensitive life-loving life, taking in sunlight, letting out gases, communicating with the rest of the world, sense the aliveness, the intelligence. Someone is here. Your friends. That's your intention and that's the possibility to realize.

And widening, widening the scope of what you're experiencing to sense this entire living world as sentient. Anything you can imagine. tree, grass, rock, river, atoms in the dust and the water, earth, air, this living world, and let emerge in that just one life form, a tree, an animal, a bush. Just let one come forward and through that one you're saying to them all, thank you. Thank you for this precious living web of life, this living world, a communion of subjects filled with spirit. Just relax back. Knowing you can never be alone when you realize that true belonging and taking for a few

moments to sense how many around the globe are awakening to the same belonging, the same communion, awakening and caring, how that brings our hearts together. And in any moment when you feel lost, you can trust that the antidote is to pause. Arrive back in presence right here. Reconnect with the life that's right here. And that will be the portal to belonging to this living, tender, precious world. Stand still. The trees ahead. and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger.

Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, saying, here. No two trees are the same. to raven. No two branches are the same to wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are, you must let it find you.

Blessings, my friends. Thank you for your presence, and thank you for your shared care and prayer for our beloved larger body this earth.