Tara Brach - How Do We Bridge the Divides?

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

How Do We Bridge the Divides? - The divides in our world can only exist if we humans are divided from our own full being and habituated to divides with others. In this reflection we explore bridging inner and relational divides as the grounds for evolving consciousness in our species and awakening to more connectedness and love in our 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. The title of today's reflection is How Do We Bridge Divides? And I know given the state of the world, this is quite the central inquiry for many of us. So starting with a story, a man had been slipping in and out of a coma for several months, and his wife had stayed by his bedside every single day. And one day when he came to, he motioned for her to come closer.

And she sat by and he whispered, you know, eyes full of tears, you know what, you've been with me all through the bad times. When I got fired, you were there to support me. When I had that terrible car wreck, you were there with me. when we lost the house, you stayed right here. When my health started to fail, you were still by my side. You know what? She says, what dear?

She's smiling and her heart's beginning to fell with warmth. He says, I think you bring me bad luck. So, classic, silly example of when life does not cooperate, you know, when we're experiencing pain, difficulty, we blame. And we either blame ourselves or others. or something. But it's actually a built-in survival-orienting reflex that in the moments we feel threatened, you know, fear arises and our attention shifts and scans define a perceived source of threat. And this fear and this assigning blame is the beginning of divides. So as a temporary

reflex to immediate threats, it's absolutely necessary for survival. But here's the challenge. For us humans, due to our thinking mind that tends to fixate and scan for the negative, we keep recycling, blaming thoughts. We habituate to anger, to dislike, to hatred. You know, we create a narrative, a reinforcing narrative that solidifies the divides. It separates us from, you know, whether it's certain people in our lives, are who could be things, family, work, social circles, and of course as we know it happens in collective ways, are those solidified collective narratives against certain political groups or racial or religious or ethnic groups. So this is what creates divides.

We have the sense of bad other, of enemy. Now, here's the thing. That dividedness with others, whether it's in our personal relationship, or against some other societal group, it can only exist if we are divided from our own being, if there's a sense of disconnect from our own wholeness. And I'm going to go slow here because this feels important if you consider for a moment what is going on inside us when we're turned against another person, our group, you know, when we're focused on badness. And of course, it depends on degree. But when there's

blame, anger, aversion, the body tightens, and we're cut off from full executive functioning. And what I mean by that is our learning centers in the brain become deactivated when we're blaming and angry. We're not taking in new information. We're unable to get a larger perspective. The mind gets narrow and we're cut off from mindfulness, from compassion, from empathy. We're not living in our wholeness. We're not being guided by the inner resources we most value. And we know this. I mean, I know this. You know, in moments when I'm angry, I'm living from this agitated, narrowly focused dimension of my being. I'm not all there. Now, to be clear, the arising of blame and anger, that's not the problem.

We need that energy to alert us to threat to the fact that something's off and we need to attend to it. It's when it locks in. It's when it habituates as our attitude. When we're regularly living in a narrative of blame that creates division, a feeling of anger and aversion, that's when we're cut off from the fullness, from our true nature, from who we are. And that's what I always call a trance, because we're living in an hour sliver of our being, a distorted sliver, and we're not experiencing our fullness.

So if we widen the lens here, our world's problems are fundamentally spiritual. cut off from a wholeness of being, cut off from spirit, from heart. We suffer because we have forgotten our belonging to each other, to our own wholeness. And then, of course, when there's this forgetting, violence is fueled. So, friends, we are exploring this together because the remembering and the healing of dividedness in our world starts with each of us in our own lives, deepening our dedication to bridging the divides we have with others and with our inner life underneath that. I mean, think of it.

I mean, how can there be real evolving towards healing in our world unless we're doing it? we're deepening our sense of, oh, okay, here are some divides that are asking for my attention. Maybe we'll pause here and you might reflect for a moment, let your attention go inward, and you might scan and sense in your personal life. Where do you feel divides? Where do you feel a sense of separation from others? You know, maybe there's one that stands out, where you just haven't dealt with the conflict or the distance or the resentment or the blame.

And you might remind yourself, you know, when you're really in that, when you're sensing what you're believing that's causing the separation, what is it you're believing that keeps you separate? What are you feeling? And just sense yourself when you're caught, when you're actually feeling distance, separation, dividedness from another person. What's it like? And maybe as you sense into that, you can feel that in those moments you're smaller than

who you really are. You're divided from your own wholeness. Maybe as you're reflecting, you might just imagine for a moment the freedom and the happiness when no one is really excluded from your heart, when you're not leaving anyone out of your heart. You know, that kind of ease and happiness when there really is a sense of connectedness, care with others.

I mean, if we're at the end of our life, looking back, isn't that what we really want? So, just remembering that we care about this, that we want to move towards more connectedness is the beginning of bridging divides. It is the beginning of opening to more of a sense of belonging with others. Just a sense that we want to be more loving,

that we want a more loving world. So this is a deep inquiry, how to bridge divides in our world, knowing that we start with ourselves. And I want to say it's so timely, so crucial. I mean, we know it. We know that we humans are facing a multi-global crisis, existential crisis, threats of growing ecological catastrophe, nuclear disaster, increasing pandemics, more violence across the globe. We know this, okay. And in our evolutionary history, species survive because they adapt. They have the flexibility to adapt,

and our adaptation as a species needs to be evolving our capacity to connect and care, evolving our capacity to collaborate, to hold hands if we're going to be able to navigate these threats. So I want to share a story about bridging divides that I think illustrates some of what I'd like to explore together in a really concrete way. So I've been listening to Christiana Bigueras, a recent episode on OnBe with Krista Tippett. And she's an ecological activist from Costa Rica, internationally renowned. she spent a number of years as the executive secretary of the UN's convention on climate change. And during the time that was leading up to the Paris Agreement of 2015, her husband left her, totally unexpected and devastating.

And she went into a deep depression, despair. So this is personally, you know, experiencing the divides. And she was also in these years encountering huge difficulty working. on these accords, all the divides between countries and peoples. She took off some time, and this was not her typical M.O., but she took off some time and went to Plum Village, which is the Buddhist community that Ticknat Han founded in France. And she did a really deep dive into meditation. Lots of inner listening and presence to all that was inside her. And in that willingness to be open, she opened directly into the pain of loss and the deep grief

she felt and fear. And it was both on a personal level and a collective level that she was feeling it. But the point is that she bridged the inner divides by bringing presence and care to that depth of grief. She needed to bridge the inner divides. And that opened her to a new, felt sense of connectedness with the world and a sense of resilience and wisdom and hope. She was responsible for bringing the Paris Agreement to fruition. It was a huge accomplishment, building support and collaboration, which is what we so need, between countries and non-governmental organizations and businesses and banks and faith groups and technology. providers, amazing accomplishment of collaboration, the most notable yet, really, in this field. And as she describes it in her working, her energy in bringing these groups together, it came out

of love. It wasn't out of an unprocessed grief, anger, fear. It was out of love, out of a cherishing for our world. And it brought this really deep understanding that we're not apart or divided from nature, that we don't go into nature to enjoy it. We are nature, knowing that belonging, and that naturally arouses love. The reason I share this is because if we want to bridge divides with others and in our world, it starts with whatever is separated. us from our own heart, the hurt, the fear, the grief. We need to meet what's there with a kind presence. It's what Christiana calls grounding an emotion and then we can engage in the world from our wholeness. There's a line from Sri Narasar Gadata that comes back to me over and over

again. The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. The greatest challenge to bridging divides is that our mind keeps generating beliefs and narratives that perpetuate the feelings of anger and reactivity. It's summed up really well by Gandhi. He says, your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions and your actions become your destiny. Huge power to the beliefs, the messages we keep telling ourselves. So if we're suffering, if we're hurting, if we're lonely, if we're

angry, if we're caught in fear, we're believing something that's creating feelings of separation from ourselves and others. And because so many of our beliefs are rooted in fear, they often divide us. Think about it. Think of the beliefs that many of us hold and the impact of them. One shaman said that, and this is about our incessant fear thoughts and beliefs, he says, you talk to yourself too much. You're not unique in that. Every one of us does. We maintain our world with our inner dialogue. A person of not is aware that the world will change completely as soon as they stop talking to themselves. The world will change completely when we stop believing our fear-based beliefs.

You know, the Buddha put it very succinctly, he said, take the world of beliefs and opinions in two hands and drop them. You know, we need to step out of the cocoon of beliefs that dominate our mind. I remember in my early 20s after I'd been kind of catching on to the trance of unworthiness, this harsh inner critic at war with myself that's core dividedness, I started investigating beliefs. And every time I'd be in a bad mood, I'd ask myself, well, what am I believing right now? And very often it was that I was falling short and should be different.

No. That's the belief that was creating that inner dividedness, the judge and the judged. I remember, you know, when I went on Book Door for Radical Acceptance, there was a poster in one place announcing the workshop I was offering, and the picture, there was a picture of me, and the caption underneath was, something is wrong with me. It was a strange way to be welcomed into a new place to teach. But anyway, I remember a cartoon I ran across, there's a therapist, and he's speaking to a very forlorn client, and he's saying to him, you know, these feelings of unworthiness are common amongst the unworthy.

And the deal is we believe in the messages of something's wrong and they really feel true. We get imprisoned in a looping where there's this mental message of, you're bad, you should be different. Then the body fuels that as shame, which then stimulates more messages of what's wrong with us, more shame, and on it goes. It feels true. Something's wrong. And there's no way out if we're believing the belief. The emotions and thoughts are stuck in that looping. Over time for me, what happened was that the message, you should be different, you know, badness became a sign or a flag to pause and to go deeper and to feel under that should, under that message, the shame and fear that we're there, to feel the raw feelings directly with mindfulness, with compassion.

So many, many rounds of getting a message saying, come into your body, feel. what's here with kindness. That broke the looping. That created a larger space of presence and a natural waking up from that trance of unworthiness. The mind creates the abyss, the heart crosses it. And this applies to any message of badness, of should be different, that is going towards ourselves or towards others, it argues with reality. It locks in a negative feeling and it divides us. It puts us in prison. Okay, so to bridge the inner divide, we have to move from the mind, from the shoulds, the belief and badness, to the feelings. Again, grounding in the feelings. And it takes a real dedication to truth, to love.

because it's hard to step out of the familiar and self-reinforcing narrative into the discomfort and rawness of feelings. I mean, I remember my first yoga teacher, and she started off saying, you know, put your right arm over your left and hug yourself. And then she said, and then put your left arm over your right and hug your evil twin. It's like, we need to be to bring presence to the jealousy, to the hurt, to the fear, to the loss, and ultimately to the grief that's there, because this is what breaks the looping and evolves our heart. Radical acceptance of the emotions that we've been unwilling to feel, an intimate presence with our inner life, breaks the looping. You know, since the publishing of radical acceptance,

which was 20 years ago, one of the most common questions I get, people ask me about radical acceptance as well, does that mean we're just supposed to accept what's really wrong? You know, pollution, social injustice, war, are we supposed to be passive? And I shared, I often, through those years, shared my own experience. Some might remember me doing this before, that in 2003, 2004, I was very distressed about our attack on Iraq. And it felt really clear that the aggression, it was being driven by the hatred and blame from 9-11, but that it would only create more violence and suffering for all, that more people would be radicalized in their hatred of the United States.

more dividedness. Then, as is true now, I was very resonant with the teachings by Martin Luther King and many spiritual traditions. The Buddhists put it this way that hatred never seizes by hatred, but by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law. So every time I would read a newspaper, back then those big paper things that we'd read, I'd feel this huge. I'd feel this huge grip of anger towards then it was President Bush and the administration for revving up the thread and spreading rumors about weapons of mass destruction and pushing for war. I feel a lot of blame and bad othering and that they should be different. This was my version of hatred. So I was adding hatred onto expressions of hatred. So I started doing a radical acceptance meditation to break the looping.

And what I'd do is I'd start with what was up, the raw feelings of anger in my body, underneath the story just feeling that heat and pressure. And I'd bring a kindness and a presence to that, accepting it, accepting it. And then it would unlayer and I'd find under that fear. You know, I was afraid of the suffering that was going to happen. Okay, open to that, intimate, accept, be with. And then that fear would unlayer and under it was grief. Just this real deep sorrow really about the suffering in our world.

And I'd often weep when I do this practice, you're just really opening to that. And again, accepting compassionate presence with that. What was left under that grief was caring. Just plain caring about our world. So there was this shift. Rather than the looping that led to bad othering, a group of bad people out there, in this case politicians, I was inhabiting a much larger space of presence and care. In other words, I had bridged the inner divide because I had touched into the grief.

I'd crossed the abyss. And this allowed me to act, but from care, not from anger. And I remember joining protests when one was a very large interfaith protests. There were noble peace laureates and ministers and clergy of all different denominations. Many of us were arrested. I remember the police as they were arresting us, putting us in paddy wagons, joking about white color crime because of the priests who were there. But the main tenor of these protests, it wasn't hateful.

angry slogans, you know, pumping fists in anger. It was pleased to remember the real humans, Iraqi, American, the children, the lives, pleased to care about the pleas were to care about life. We need to act. We need to act in this world. And yet when there's outer divides, you know, are when there's, you know, like it can be in the form of anger, blame, in our personal life, or against others in the world. First, we need to pause and attend to the inner divides. If we're to respond from our deepest intelligence and compassion, if we're to see beyond our narratives to the humanity of others. I want to honor here that the more trauma there is, the more challenging it is to bridge the inner and outer divides. And it's important to know that, that we each have

our own timing in healing divides. I mean, it's so natural with trauma that it takes more time to ground and send some degree of safety and takes a lot of care and a lot of patience. The shamans say that when we're traumatized, the soul goes into hiding. And in a similar way, Western psychology describes trauma in terms of disconnection. You know, we're unable to, when we're in a state of trauma, integrate the strong emotions moving through, so they either possess us or we get, are we dissociated from them? And when we're in a state of trauma, we're just cut off

from any larger perspective or sense of compassion or full presence. Soul retrieval, coming back into whole, is possible when there's some sense of a larger refuge that holds us. I've spoken to so many struggling in recent days and the need is refuge, some sense of belonging to something larger. Often in the soul retrieval practices that are led by shaman, it's the presence of the larger community, a sense of the loving presence of the larger community. It can also be that we find some path to an inner refuge, our own, awake, caring, awareness. Here's the thing. Whether we're very fully cut off and divided through trauma,

arts that more partial where we've just locked into a narrative and locked into anger and blame, we have the practices, we have the pathways that can help us cross the abyss. We have ways of reconnecting with our own wise heart that allows us to bridge the divides with others. We have that. This sacred medicine, these practices that so many of us practice of mindful presence and of bringing kindness and care to what's here, they are our superpowers, they truly transform. So if you're seeking to bridge divides, inner divides and with others, I want to just invite you to be very forgiving about the timing of it, however long it takes.

I can say speaking personally in my life where I sense divides, where I sense the narratives kicking in, I keep having this sense, I should be more compassionate, I should stop othering, I shouldn't be reactive. And that actually is just more of the mind creating the abyss that should. So forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for the timing. And that'll allow you just to say, once again, this is what matters. You know, this is what matters.

May I dedicate to bridging divides? What we practice gets stronger. So let's practice a bit together right now. We'll start with bridging divides in our person. life, you know, crossing the abyss. And I invite you as you consider who you might work with not to pick the most intense divide. Let's practice together and with somebody you care about, but where there's a sense of separation and you'd like to feel more connection.

Where there's some blame, some irritation, some anger, some resentment. So take a moment, if you will, and as we often do, let the attention go inward, become still, take a few full breaths and let the breathing help to collect your attention. So take a moment to sense the person where you feel some separation, where you'd like to feel more connection, and let yourself feel your intention. what's your heart's aspiration here? In your own words. What are you hoping for?

And then bring to mind a situation that illustrates what might be part of the separating where you feel a sense of blame or resentment or anger. Maybe something going on in a conversation or email exchange or some memory of something that this person did. And as if you're watching a movie, go right to the place where you feel most activated, most of a sense of that dividedness, that separation. And pause to hear, to notice what feelings are strongest, as we do with the rain practice, recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture, just recognize.

You might name what's coming up. It might be irritation, anxiety, judgment, blame, and whatever it is, have the intention to make space just to allow it to be as it is, that you're allowing what's here to be here. This is part of reality. And then deepen attention and ask yourself, what am I believing? You know, what's, what are you believing when you're feeling the dividedness? Is it that you're falling short?

they should be different, that they are not loving you in some way, that they're not respecting you, that they're rejecting you, that they're hurting you and they're going to hurt you more, what are you believing? And with whatever you notice, sent under the believing, sent under the belief, what fulums are there? When you're believing this, what are you feeling? just sense into your throat, your chest, your belly. It can help many of you find this is true, just put your hand on your heart to keep you kind of connected and anchored with feelings in your

body. You might let your face express what you're feeling, let your body posture express it so that you can really get in touch with, okay, this is what's underneath. And we're grounding in the emotions that are there, feeling them, breathe with it. And you might sort of sense what this part of you that's feeling this needs? How does it want you to be with it? What does this place need to remember or feel? And sense that as you're connecting with this feeling, you can also invite your highest, most awake presence and heart. So you can witness and listen to what's needed. And you can offer inwardly to that. part of you, the feelings that are hurting, that are afraid, you can offer in some care in whatever

form is most comforting, most healing. You might let that hand on the heart become very tender in its touch. Imagine in sense that your spiritual heart space is holding your human heart and see if you can let in the care. It's as if you're bathing, that part with warmth, with light, with care, let it feel held. You're the holder and the held. And notice the quality of presence and beingness that opens up. Notice that shift from the divided self to more of a sense of wholeness, whatever degree it is, that shift.

And it's from that greater wholeness, from that spiritual heart space, that you might bring the other person to mind, and see their behavior and ask from your most intuitive place, ask, what might they be believing? What might they have been hoping for? What might they feel is wrong with them or wrong with what's going on, wrong with you that's causing them pain? What are they believing?

And you might sense more deeply what they're feeling. the vulnerability underneath their hurt, their fear, their sense of loss. We each deep down have that vulnerability, and you might sense what they need, what would bring them to more of a place of wholeness, of openness, of ease. So you can start to begin to feel that that spiritual heart space is also holding them. and from that more whole space you might imagine new possibilities of what might move you toward more understanding and connection, more belonging. One creates the abyss, the heart crosses.

Okay, take a few breaths. Your eyes are closed. You might open them. So we're talking about bridging divides. requires this inner work near each of us planting the seeds of peace of connectedness in our personal life. And they need to be germinated and cultivated in the collective. We know that too. And many spiritual paths are very individualistic. They just focus on individual humans. Our world is asking for us to wake up to collective belonging.

And, you know, I often think of that personals that I saw years ago in a Buddhist magazine. It's a tall, dark, handsome Buddhist looking for himself. So, in addition to this inner bridging, we need conscious processes of relational bridging in society. And these exist. I mean, there are a lot of different forms of societal repair work going on, whether it's the truth and reconciliation processes or group processes that center nonviolent communications, you know, the basics of being in a group and learning to listen and to mirror what we've heard and to awaken a collective sense of compassion. And if you examine any of these

processes, each of them directly strengthens relational networks in the brain that are responsible for attuning and feeling and acting from connectedness. Again, the mind creates the abyss, believe in those beliefs. The heart crosses. And we need intentional practices of awakening that heart presence. You know, I often think of a documentary I saw that Van Jones put together. They brought together groups from West Virginia. These were white professions. dealing with the opiate epidemic. And they brought that group together with a group from South Central LA, Black, Latina dealing with the crack epidemic. Entirely different cultures, races, politics. And they came, all that came up, of course. There were natural tensions.

And they were together for a week. So here we have divides and what happens. And he asked them to each bring pictures of someone they lost in the epidemic. And a few days in, they were sharing and one father from West Virginia showed a picture of his son. And he said, the last thing I said to him was, you got yourself into this, you get yourself out. And you could see in the group the tears because they were touching into their share. humanity. We transform suffering. We bridge divides when we deepen our attention to those who seem different. If we look, we find so many of us want to feel safe, want to feel loved, want to feel connected. I think of civil rights icon Ruby Sales and her

leading inquiry when she'd meet someone, especially someone of difference, where to does it hurt? What's it like being you? So, you know, whether we're talking about ecological demise or the losses of war, what bonds us is getting under our narrative of othering, challenging it, getting under it, touching the grief, the fear in our own being, and coming into that place its senses our shared humanity. There's a story that's now been widely publicized, first read about it in a novel, A Paragon. It's a true story though, and it takes its inspiration from the real-life friendship between a Palestinian, Basam Aroman, and an Israeli Rami al-Hanam. And Basam, while in an Israeli jail, studied the Holocaust.

And Rami, the more he learned, the more he was against the occupation. And they both lost their young daughters in violence. Rami's daughter, 13, by a suicide bomber, Basams by a member of the Israeli army. So they became friends. And their effort to serve resolution of all the violence was to travel around together and tell their story of what happened to the war. their girls. How people touch into that collective space that knows grief. There's a picture of the two of them, asleep together in a train in Germany, traveling from one speaking engagement to the

next, and they're leaning against one another. Rami, he's the older man, is supporting the smaller basaum as he sleeps. It's quite lovely. I want to say, sharing that is that I am really humble about steps toward peace in our world because there's such complexity of trauma, such entrenchment of bias and narrative. But the deeper work, the grounds of peacemaking is clear that we need to tend to the divides in our personal life, which means the courage to tend to the inner divides, being with what is under our beliefs, opening to what we've been unwilling to feel.

And in our world, it's natural that those most traumatized may get locked into hate and reactivity. It's what happens. It's up to those of us that are not as directly impacted to keep caring about all who are suffering and to hold a space that leads to actions that serves of justice, compassion, and peace. We're the ones to keep opening. And this means again and again to see how our minds are creating the abyss to find out how the heart can cross. Here are words, this is an indigenous prayer that was sung at a vigil I recently attended. There will be a day and the children of all gender, colors, and faith will follow the path

of the heart. They will speak the language of the earth and understand the language of heaven. They will live as part of the great circle of life, and then peace will come. There will be a day, and the children of all genders and colors and face will follow the path of heart. The hearts will walk and trust. They will sanctify all form of living beings and plants. Together, they will pray to God, connected to the source of life, and then peace will come. So, friends, a closing prayer is, may we all see how the mind creates the abyss. May our hearts cross. Thank you for your caring. Thank you for your presence, for your dedication to awakening. Blessings.