Tara Brach - Guided Heart Meditation: Releasing Blame (retreat) (2019-12-30)

Episode Date: January 30, 2020

Guided Heart Meditation: Releasing Blame (retreat) (2019-12-30) - Our self-protective habits of resentment and blame block intimacy and connection with ourself and others. This short talk and meditation are an invitation to deepen our understanding of the suffering of blame, and to release the armoring to loving freely. (recorded at the IMCW 2019 New Year's 5-day Silent Retreat)

The following meditation is led by Tara Brock. To access more of my meditations or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com. Let yourself settle in, just feel your body sitting here, the body breathing, the quality of presence that's right here. And I'll be speaking a little bit as a way of setting a context for this afternoon's heart meditation and you might choose to keep your eyes closed and listen or open your eyes however you'd like. I begin with one of my favorite lines from Rumi, which is that your path is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself you've built against it and embrace them.

In other words, identify the barriers but with a real kind attention. So, today's heart practice is one of bringing presence to perhaps the most universal barrier to loving, which is blame, the way we blame ourselves and each other. And it's one that we really do need to approach with a lot of gentleness because it's a universal pattern, a universal way of protecting ourselves really. And one friend here shared about letting go of self-blame really, you know, having some a deep kind of progress in that, really releasing self-blame in all the space that opened up when the self-blame wasn't there for love.

And in a way that's what happens that the blaming process occupies a lot of our physical and psychic space when there's not so much identification with that. There's a lot of room for this heart to be in its fullness, express its fullness. And I know that many, many people, when we kind of get into exploring what's the deep longing, have a longing to be more caring so that love's not an abstraction, that it's actually a felt experience. I know I have that. I have a real longing to care more. In fact, I think of You know, if there's anything our world needs, it's for all of us to just have some pathway to caring more.

And in the Buddhist tradition, the training for Meta often begins with finding the barrier of blame. It's described as forgiveness, a forgiving process, letting go of the averse of blame that pushes, we push ourselves out of our own hearts, pushing others out of our own. our hearts. A number of years ago I was on the island of Hawaii and visited the Temple of Refuge. This is Pohuan. I'm not pronouncing it right though. Up until the early 19th century, this temple of refuge existed so that anybody on the island who would break the ancient laws could flee to the temple to avoid certain death. They'd be absolved

by the priests and they could be free to leave. And the problem was that to get there you have to cross this bay which is called the Bay of Sharks. And when I saw that I realized, wow, you know, we all, we, in a deep way we want to let go of our aversions and open our hearts, but there's these sharks, these kind of limiting and aggressive beliefs and feelings we have that just are very, very persistent. So, when we have broken one of our 10,000 rules that we have or ideas of how we should be or when someone else has, then what happens is the first reflex is to condemn and the

sharks are really tenacious. It just loops into some very old belief patterns and it's very sticky. And it's interesting to look at why is it so difficult to let go of blaming ourselves in each other. I mean, you might bring to mind right now something that you just find you regularly blame yourself for. It might be something that's come up in the last day or so or something in your life where you turn on yourself where it's very hard to accept that that's the way you've acted

in the past or you act now. Do you have something in mind? See what comes up. that you really is sticky for you. It's hard to let go of. And then just ask yourself if I let go of making myself wrong, what bad could happen? What am I afraid of? How come I'm holding on so much?

And I'm curious how many of you came to the sense that, well, if I don't blame myself, I'll never change and get to be the person I want to be? How many of you found that one? Yeah. If I don't change, then I'll cause more harm. Yeah. Maybe you have somebody else you're blaming right now. We're going to do a reflection, rein on blame, not telling ourselves we should drop it,

but more just really investigating it, bringing it more into the light of awareness. So if you have someone else you're blaming right now, what would go wrong? What would be bad about letting go of blame? What would you have to experience? And sometimes we find, well, if I let go of blame, then they'll keep on hurting me. They'll never change. And sometimes we find, well, if I let go of blaming them, then I'll have to blame myself. But what we find basically is that we're using blame to try to control things and to try to

avoid just sitting in the vulnerability, facing the vulnerability. And I think of it in a societal way too. I reflect a lot on prisons. For many, many decades, I've had a profound disturbance about prisons, that those that in some way go against our societal norms get punished versus taken care of. And it's not that we don't, of course we have to restrain some people and they're, they can be hurtful. But what a perverse way.

I mean, does punishing really help? And does it help to punish ourselves? And what we find, and I love this phrase from, it was actually from a TV drama that was a movie in the turn to a TV drama, vengeance is a lazy form of grief. That when we're blaming, taking vengeance out in ourselves or others, it's instead of actually attending to where the wound is. going through the process that actually heals us. We can't heal as long as we're blaming.

Now that doesn't mean that we don't need to go through a phase of blaming, of pushing away. And sometimes that phase if we've been traumatically wounded has to be extended until we feel safe and protected enough. But eventually for the freedom of our hearts, for the freedom of our hearts so that we can have that space where the heart can love. love without holding back, we need to let go. With one man that I was working with, he had a very heavy temper and it was really injurious to his loved ones and people at work and so on.

And he felt like he was a monster, hated himself. And I asked him, just hating yourself, just judging your anger help? And he knew it didn't because we know punishing doesn't help. And then after a while I said to him, it's not your fault. And he broke down weeping. It helped him to see how he had been as a child powerless in a violent family and how his anger came out of that. And when he could really grieve, when he could really bring compassion to himself, it

actually helped him work with his anger but punishment didn't help. And I share this with you because in my own process, in terms of working with blame, I mean, that's, I wrote radical acceptance because I was so down on myself, blamed myself a lot. And one of my deepest realizations was that no matter how much I believe that I should have been a better person in the past or I should be different, the only possibility for healing and for transformation is how I pay attention in this moment. And if this moment is filled with self-blame, I am just fueling the pattern. This moment is dynamic, creative,

it's the grounds of the future. And if we want our future to be different, if we want to emerge in a way that's more loving, more kind, more thoughtful, more whatever, blaming ourselves only plants more seeds of being a very contracted reactive self. So the healing begins actually by holding ourselves with compassion. And it's the same thing with others. No matter how much we believe somebody else should be different or better, they are how they are. And when we are blaming, we're just practicing and strengthening neural pathways of aversion,

which only creates more distance and conflict. It's not your fault doesn't give us permission to act out. It's the beginning actually, seeing the conditioning, the truth of our conditioning, responding with care and actually creating a more wholesome future. So this is just to keep this in mind as we practice that you might be a more wholesome future. sense in your life how much blame, how much, you know, how many bytes of the, you know, megabytes of the computer it occupies, how much of your heart it walls off for some more, for some less.

For most of us it's both to others and to ourselves. And just know that to the degree you have an intention to deepen your attention to blame. you're entering an amazing portal for freedom. It's easy to add more blame if we approach forgiveness like we should forgive or will ourselves to forgive. We can only be willing. So just to know that forgiveness practice needs to be held with a lot of forgiveness with a really light heart, tender heart.

And that most important, almost always, if we're trying to forgive others, the first step is to bring a huge amount of compassion to our own wounds. I see more people try to attempt forgiving others when they're still not, they haven't processed or healed their own wounds and it's premature. It's incomplete and usually deep down they feel ashamed because they're not... it's not working. So it may be that as we do this practice, most of your attention is really just bringing some kind presence to where you have feelings of vulnerability yourself. If you need to shift your way of sitting in any way for the practice, please feel free. So we'll

do this in two parts. The first part of the practice will be surveying where we're holding against ourselves right now where we might be holding some level of blame, but be for something in the past or something ongoing. And then we'll explore that and then we'll invite you to choose some place where you feel like you're blaming another person, you feel ready to explore it some, to bring it more into the light of awareness. See what's possible with that. So we begin with ourselves and with each, just to feel your intention right now.

Feel a sense of your own heart's dedication that for the sake of love in this life begin to dissolve some of the walls of blame, can circle the heart. So just to feel your intention towards that, your sincerity. And as I mentioned a little earlier, you may have something in mind already, something that you are holding against yourself, some way of being that you feel aversive towards, some way that you feel you've hurt someone else, maybe some addictive behavior, some way that you've gotten the way of your own unfolding. I'm going to telescope in a little bit so you can maybe bring to mind a situation that brings it home a bit. what was happening or who you're with, something that brings up the feelings of self-judgment

down on yourself. Raise your hand if you need a little more time to arrive at that. The beginning of rain is to recognize what's coming up. Just to recognize it, okay? Self-aversion, self-judgment, be shame or anger, certain thoughts, just to recognize that. And allowing means to let this be here right now. You don't have to do anything about it, don't make it wrong, don't try to fix it. Allowing is a kind of a pausing with what's happening.

It's letting reality be as it is in this moment. These two are waves in the ocean. Beginning to investigate and sense you might begin with what you're believing about yourself in the world. It could be that I'm a harmful, hurtful person, I'm a bad person, I'll never be who I want to be, I'm failing in some way, others could never love me if I'm like this, whatever beliefs you sense circling around this, and as you continue to investigate, sense how it feels when you're judging and when you're the judged, sense the feeling in the body, the feeling in the mind, just the sense of who you are when you're

down on yourself, notice how familiar it is, perhaps how many moments of your life, that's the prison you've been in. You might sense how it's impacted your life to be caught in self-blame, what it's deprived you of, what moments have been missed, just investigating how it, how it lives, how it's lived in your life, this blaming, self-judging, feeling in some way wrong or bad. Since the worst part about being caught in self-blame, kind of the core belief of the something's wrong, how much it separates you. And as you let yourself tap into that vulnerability, feel where it is in your body and

You might bring your hand to your heart or in some way help to keep your attention in your body right now. You might sense really what does that part of you that feels wrong or bad or ashamed or not okay? Just sense what it needs. You might imagine if what the source of comfort would be if that part of you that feels most imprisoned and small and not okay. could be in some way comforted, reminded what would be the source of that wisdom, that love?

Since if you can call in right now, either your own future self, who you're becoming, the wisdom and love of your own being or some spiritual being to help bear witness right now and help comfort. Who do you want to call in? form of the beloved. And you might even imagine looking through the eyes of one who loves you and cares about you. See if you can do that.

Looking through the wisdom of your own high self and just see the small self that's stuck. See even the small self that's doing the things that they wish they wouldn't. It's like a wise and loving grandmother that can see that and see, still remember the goodness, perhaps recognize the pain or suffering that's caused you to behave the way you've been behaving, that sees the big picture. Look through the eyes of wisdom that see the big picture, the eyes of wisdom that know that it's not your fault. Truly it is not your fault.

And imagine the comfort and the words and the love that could come towards you now, right to that place of vulnerability and bathe you and embrace you. Hearing the message this part most needs to hear right now, you're okay. It's not your fault from the wise one that can see the fears and the hurts that might have been driving you. Let in the comfort. Let it in. You might sense your own wise and awake heart holding the part of you that's most vulnerable.

It's okay. It's not your fault. Just sense what happens. You might explore who are you when you're not living inside that prison of blame? Who are you? And what does that mean for your life? When the poet Dana falls, why wait for your awakening? Would you hold back when the beloved beckons?

No, I can't step across the threshold. You say, I'm not worthy, I'm afraid. My motives aren't pure. Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining through the open door? Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. Now is the only time you have to be whole. Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the radiance of your true nature.

Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain. Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your stories of separation and failure. This is the day of your awakening. The part of again forgiving ourselves is to forgive ourselves if we feel we just did rain on blame and it didn't saturate the way we wish, that it's a life process. We're going to extend now the practice to bring our heart and awareness to where we're blaming another person. Romakrishna says the freedom is in not pushing ourselves or anyone

out of our hearts. This again is a process. Sometimes we protect ourselves for a while and that's intelligent. So bring to mind where you feel your kind of readiness to let go of flame, a readiness to explore and open some. You might bring a person to mind and go right to some situation where you get triggered. Remember the words that are exchanged, the looks on the other's face and... what was going on, really what made you react.

And letting go of blame towards another begins with a tending inward. We make that U-turn. So first recognize and allow what you're feeling. Heard, put down, distanced, dislike, you might name it, and then allow it, let it belong. This belongs. It's a natural human reaction. human reaction, this belongs, let it be there. And deepening the investigation sense where you feel most vulnerable, what's going on in your body.

You might begin by sensing what you're believing. Maybe you're believing that if this person really respected you or liked you, they wouldn't treat you this way. Just sense if there's a belief there. You might sense that you're in danger, that you're going to be... Something's going to be taken away from you and go right into the body and feel when you're blaming another, what's it like? How does your body feel?

You might even exaggerate it. You know, feel your face, maybe you clench the jaw a little, make fists sense your body posture. But when you're in blame mode, what's it like? The more you experiment with this, the more you find out and it helps to use the body to kind of assume the posture of blame. your facial features show blame and then feel in your body where you feel it the most, the throat, the chest, the belly, then really start inquiring the place that's blaming,

what's it unwilling to feel? What's in there? What might be the roots of the blame? Is there hurt? Fear? With real curiosity now and gentleness, what's under the blame? really needs your attention. Remember that line, vengeance is a lazy form of grief. You're not blaming them. What might you find out inside you? And with whatever's there and again,

this is where if it helps you to bring a hand to your heart, just to feel kind of that quality of self-compassion, bring some kindness to the part of you that's vulnerable. There's no way to let go of blaming another until we've truly brought some kind of. to the part of us that's agitated. Sense what it needs, if there's words that might be comforting or enlarging, real kindness. Notice what happens when you bring kindness to that place inside you. And if you feel some sense of a larger kind of heart space or presence, you might look through the eyes of your wises self at the other person. You might sense what was behind their behaviors? What's the hurts or fears that might be driving them?

Usually when people cause suffering or act out, there's some suffering there. Can your wise, high self see past the behavior to what might be there, to their vulnerability? if you're in some way including the hurting child or the fearful child, the one that's in some way feels not okay about themselves, just to sense the possibility of including that person with their vulnerability in your heart. And you might sense, who am I when I'm not living inside the barriers of blame, the walls of blame? If there's no blame, who am I? Who's here? For most of us, rain on blame is many, many

rounds. Patterns are deep so it takes many rounds to heal the roots. But each time you can begin to taste who you are beyond the blaming self and get familiar with that. Who's here when you're not blaming yourself or others? There's a real liberal. a movement from I to we to the field, when we wake up from the kind of limbic habit of blame and yet unless we're patient and forgiving with the process we just add another layer of blame. So just sense your intention over and over again. May we wake up caring.

This is from the Radiant Sutras. There's a place in the heart where everything meets. Go there if you want to find me. Mind, senses, soul, eternity, all are there. Are you there? Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon. Quiet ecstasy is there and a steady regal sense of resting in a perfect spot.

Once you know the way, the nature of attention will call you to return again and again and be saturated with knowing, I belong here, I am at home here, these last few minutes, just resting in that heart space. You might sense thoughts or feelings, judgments come and go and sense the heart space. that has room, that's more the truth of who you are than any story. Thank you for your courageous practice. Blessings.