Tara Brach - How Hope Can Heal and Free Us - Part 1 (2016-08-10)

Episode Date: August 12, 2016

How Hope Can Heal and Free Us - Part 1 (2016-08-10) - The mature expression of hope includes three elements: the aspiration for manifesting our full potential, a trust that this is possible, and an energy that engages to serve this unfolding. In this talk we explore the importance of hope on the spiritual path, its shadow side, and how we can nourish hope - through these three elements - in a way that serves inner freedom and the healing of our world. "We close with a simple prayer this evening, that all beings might remember the depth of their longing – that deep aspiration for love, for aliveness. That all beings may trust the heart and consciousness that's always and already here. And that we may live from the depth and fullness of who we are." ~ Tara Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara ui29b7ne  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely, and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. We're going to be reflecting tonight on the role of hope, the role of hope on the spiritual path. And by that I mean really the trust in our unfolding lives, the trust in this living world. And I'd like to begin that with a classic story of a big, tough samurai who once went to see a very little monk. And he said in a voice that was accustomed to being obeyed, he said, teach me about heaven and hell. And the little monk looked up at the mighty warrior, and he looked at him with utter disdain. and he said, teach you about heaven and hell?

I couldn't teach you about anything. You're dirty. You smell. Your blade's rusty. Your disgrace and embarrassment to the samurai class. Get out of my sight. I can't stand you, you know. So the samurai is completely furious,

and he gets all red in the face, and he pulls out his sword. He's speechless with rage, and he's about to slay the little monk. And the monk says, that's hell. So the samurai is now overwhelmed with the compassion and the surrender of this little monk who really was willing to sacrifice his life

to convey this teaching and show him hell and he puts down his sword and you can sense he's filled with gratitude he's suddenly deeply peaceful and the little monk said and that's heaven what I like about this story is that the wake up

of the samurai comes so clearly from that flash of, oh, there's goodness in this life. There's connection, there's heart, there's something really basic here that I can trust. And so heaven is that experience of that connectedness, of touching into that basic goodness and trusting that basic goodness. And what it does is it allows us to move through the world open and available. That's the gift. Hell is believing in separateness. It's that sense that something's intrinsically wrong with me, with you, that there's a threat because there's just nothing really okay in this universe. In some basic way, it's, hell's a dangerous, miserable place. There's nothing okay. There's nothing okay. And one of the allushered of stories is of a man dying and going to hell and

Satan greets him and shows him three doors. You know, there's a lot of these types of stories, but this is one of them. He says, you have to spend the rest of eternity in one of these three rooms and look in each one and just decide which one, you know, you're going to do it in. And the guy opens the first door and he sees a bunch of people sitting on their heads on a wooden floor looking very uncomfortable. And he opens a second door and he sees a bunch of people standing on their heads on a concrete floor looking even more uncomfortable.

Finally, he opens a third door and he sees a bunch of people sitting around chatting and drinking coffee. They're up to their knees in shit, but they're seeming to have a nice time. And he goes, hmm, that doesn't look great, but it's better than the other two. I'll take the third door.

So Satan smiles and shows him in. 10 minutes later, Satan walks back into the room and says, all right, coffee breaks over, everybody back on your heads. That's a pretty bad one, isn't it? But the idea is this, that the worst part of hell is that sense of eternity, that things are bad and they're never going to get better. It's the lack of hope.

And that's what causes depression. Our life energy sinks because there's a sense, and this is the hellishness of, depression that there's nothing ahead that we can count on. There's no intrinsic goodness or hopefulness in this universe. And so when there's no hope, we then end up moving through life in this closed, defended way, anticipating trouble, are depressed and cut off from life, are aggressive and needlessly attacking little monks, something like that. So hope is a sense of potential.

Very simple way. Hope is a sense in our body and mind that there's potential. There's potential to evolve. There's a potential to realize a sense of belonging, of connection. So what I'd like to do in these two talks is explore the value and importance of hope, the shadow side of hope, because there's hope that can be, very egoic and grasping, and then look at what it is that cultivates a liberating kind of hope. Hamid Ali, who's one of the teachers that's really, I found very powerful,

describes as holy hope. So maybe to start, let's take a moment to reflect. I'll take stock a little, just sense where you are in this domain that we're exploring. You might close your eyes and take a few full breaths and let your intention be as you check in to bring some interest and honesty to what your experience is without any judgment. Just to sense if you really watch yourself and your moods and your emotions,

if you sense really, are you a hopeful person? if you take in all the different ups and downs of politics and societal shifts and ups and downs in your personal life, and just sense your basic view of the universe, do you consider yourself to be a hopeful person? And if we looked at in terms of very hopeful, moderately hopeful, or not hopeful at all, and keep your eyes closed, I'd like to do a hand raise.

And who considers yourself here very, very, very much sense of the potential of everything. Raise your hands high so I can just check. Okay. And how many of you consider yourself in the medium level? Okay, that's more. How many low level? Low level hope? Good number also. Okay. So I can't quite give you the percentages right now. You can open your eyes, but I would say it was kind of, um, um, 60, 30, 10. So the 30 was high, the 60 was medium, the 10 was low. That's my best take.

I'll ask for someone else to check that out at some time. Hope matters. It makes a difference in how we experience our life, our physical being, our emotional being, our spiritual being. And there's a book on Hope that was written by Shane Lopez. It's called Making Hope Happen. He did a lot of studies on the effect of hopefulness, and there's a lot from positive psychology on it also.

So just to give you a taste of some of those studies, on an emotional level, it's found that hope actually gives a certain kind of resilience in the face of stress, so that it's like a buffer when things are really the negative effects of stress. stress, anxiety, and so, and it buffers that a little. And studies of workers show that hopeful employees experience more well-being. This is all intuitively makes sense. And of course,

the opposite is, when there's hopelessness, it's a predictor of suicide. Can't live without hope. There's that question. Have you ever seen a hopeless, happy person? No. A story I loved that James Whistler, the painter, this took place in the early 1850s. He spent a very short, and it was academically unsuccessful period at West Point. You might not know that at the U.S. Military Academy. And the story goes that when he was assigned to draw a bridge,

he drew a romantic stone one complete with the grassy banks and two small children fishing from it. And so his instructor says, get those children off that bridge. This is an engineering exercise. exercise, you know. So Whistler got the kids off the bridge and drew them fishing from the bank of the river, resubmitted the drawing, the angry instructor yells, I told you to remove those children, get them completely out of the picture. So here's the final version, because

the creative urge was too strong in him. His last version had the children buried under two small tombstones on the river bank. Probably got kicked out soon after. But what just intrigues me is that the sense of aliveness we have has to sense hopefulness, has to sense generativness, creativity. So when there is no hope, you know, on a physical basis, you know, our health goes down. Many of you follow the placebo studies that show that if you're hopeful, you know, those with hope heal better.

Like all mindsets. affects your neurochemistry and releases brain endorphins that release pain, reduce pain. It strengthens the immune system when there's hope, as well as respiration and circulation, motor function. So no hope, and we lose our well to live. On a behavioral level, when there's hope, it promotes healthy behaviors. In other words, if we have hope about what's possible, possible we end up going for it. According to Shane Lopez, he says, hope promotes healthy behaviors including fruit and vegetable consumption, regular exercise, safe sex practices, and quitting smoking. It's this all around good thing. But we can sense that. If we sense the

possibility of really learning something, we'll study. And if we sense the possibility of intimacy, will take more of a chance to be open or vulnerable or listen more deeply. And if we sense the possibility of spiritual awakening, we'll give more of our energy to really quieting and collecting, training our heart and mind. Hope sets us on the course. So it matters and we're also wisely warned against certain kinds of hope. I want to go there next.

When our hopefulness becomes a kind of shadow, you might think of it as an egoic hope that's really a kind of grasping type of hope. T.S. Eliot said, I told my heart to be still in wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Do you understand that? That we end up narrowing our sights

and hoping for something real particular to go a certain way. That's not the evolved kind of hope we're talking about. Pema Chodrin puts it this way. She says, hope, and she's talking about this kind of grasping hope and fear, which is the other side of it, come from feeling that we lack something. They come from a sense of poverty. We can't simply relax with ourselves.

We hold on to hope, and hope robs us of the, present moment. So there's a certain kind of hope that the shadow side of hope that we're grasping after things to be a certain way. And we get cheerfully optimistic when the stock markets go up or when we

get a promotion or at the success of one of our children and we lose hope when we've gotten criticized on the job or in some way we're unable to, you know, the rent goes up, we can't get pregnant when we want to get pregnant, car breaks down. So there's this role

roller coaster that we're on. And that's a sign of the shadow side of hope, a kind of more of an egoic hope. I think it's captured best by that real famous Taoist story where a Chinese farmer gets a horse and it runs away. And a neighbor says, that's bad news. The farmer replies, good news, bad news, who can say? Of course, the horse comes back and brings another horse with them. Good news, you might say. The farmer gives a second horse to his son who rides it but is thrown and badly breaks his leg. Okay, so sorry for your bad news, says the concerned neighbor. Good news, bad news, who can say? The farmer replies, because in a week or so, after that, the emperor's men come and take every able-bodied young man to fight in a war, and of course

the farmer's son is spared. Good news, bad news, good news. bad news. And I suspect many of you have had that experience I certainly have where something happens and right in the moment it feels like it's one of those bad things but something in us and gets it that life is bigger than that and that we just don't know what leads to what. And when we can put down the bad news, good news, there's a different kind of hope that awakens and it's a soulful kind of hope. But we first have to put down that sense of being hitched to things being a certain way, including being hitched to our health, our bodies.

There's a story about final wishes where a Catholic priest, a Protestant minister, and a rabbi are discussing what they most hope people would say after they die when their bodies are open on display in a casket. So the priest says, I would like someone to say he was a righteous man, an honest man, and very generous. And the minister says, I would like someone to say he was very kind and fair and he was good to his parishioners. And the rabbi says, I would hope someone will say, oh, look, he's moving.

One more, I want to give you one more kind of example of the shadow side of hope, and that is magical thinking. And it's not that uncommon, that kind of delusional thinking where there's a lot of a lot of daydreaming and fantasizing. It's kind of an avoid-in- or escapist thing, always coming up with new ideas of how to make a fortune or a million new strategies and kind of denying limitations. And so it gets passive and conceptual and without a lack of, it's a lack of follow-up. It's just kind of dreamy hope. I saw a cartoon with a dog who a fairy and a fairy is offering the dog any wish. And the dog says, any way.

wish it all, I wish we could play fetch with your wand non-stop for a hundred years. That's the fantasizing mind. So let's reflect for a moment. Just check in. When you get hopeful, what's the context? What's it like? What are you hopeful about? Is it a kind of egoic hope where you're looking ahead and you're hopeful that something particular is going to go your way, get that job or the raise or someone's approval, one of the signs of that is that it always comes bound with fear of it not happening, that you would not be okay with it not happening. What do you notice about your own quality?

of hopefulness. And as you reflect, it's helpful to know that if what you found is, yeah, my hopes are kind of hitched to things being a certain way, there is within that still a pure strain of openness to possibility that can unfold itself into a more powerful and liberating and mature hope. That's in there. just helps to notice where your hope has gotten tight or small. So you can keep your eyes closed if you'd like or open them. What I'd like to do is propose a way of understanding hope

that has three basic characteristics and that as we evolve these three characteristics, our hope becomes more of that holy hope, that soulful hope. And the three characteristics, are, the first is that there's an aspiration towards our highest potential, that hope is grounded in that, an aspiration towards really manifesting our highest potential, and that there's a trust, this is characteristic too, that it's possible. The possibility is there. And the third is that there's an energy to engage to support that manifesting. There's a dynamic quality to hope. Vaklav Havel describes this evolved hope that I'm talking about as an attribute that we carry in us always.

It's a state of being, I can get covered over, but it's there. It's a dimension of soul. So let's look at each of those characteristics one by one. The first one is that quality of aspiration. If you're scanning to sense, well, is there hopefulness right? right here in me. It's one of the big sign points is, well, is there a sense of being connected with a true aspiration, with a sense of what really matters to you? Sometimes this might express as the aspiration to love or to serve or to create. Like a flower hopes to

blossom. Acorn hopes to become an oak. It's like that aspiration to really become all we be. And sometimes it expresses as vision. The Hebrew prophets warn that without vision, people perish. So this is a core element of hope. We need to have vision or aspiration. And to give you an example of the power of this, I read an article in the New Yorker a few years ago. And it was about Japan. And in Japan, there is twice as much suicide as there is in the United States, which would say there's a lot of hopelessness, okay? And I think it's one person every 15 minutes. So there's a young monk, his name is Namoto, who's been working with the suicidal people in Japan, and he does a workshop. And a key part of the workshop is an exercise

where he says, okay, imagine this. You've got three months to live. You've been died. diagnosed with cancer. What do you want to do? And then he says, now you have, he starts with three months and he says, now you have one month and now you have one week and then you have 10 minutes. And so people have a blank piece of paper and they're writing in. So what do you want to do with these last, you know, months or weeks or minutes? And you might decide, oh, I want to be more loving or help more or be creative with my poetry that I've never manifested. So one man was participating in this and his paper was blank. He couldn't write anything and he was weeping because all he had done was fixate on wanting to die, not what he'd do

if he lived. And then he realized, well, if he hadn't really lived, how could he want to die? And there's something about that insight that was freeing because he returned to his job and he began to be able to speak more. He had been really adverse to talking, and his life was free to unfold. So we might not be suicidal, but it's often that happens that we're really not remembering

a deeper compelling aspiration in an embodied way, what we really care about. And there's a depression that comes with that. When we get disconnected from a real, that kind of stream of passion that lives through us, that really wants to manifest all we can be. You can sense for yourself that if you knew that this was the last, let's say, month of your life, how much of the activity and the way of paying attention that happened today would

be aligned with what you really think matters? Are we living our days as if they really count in our life? and to the degree that it's really removed, there's going to be a disconnection from heart and from hope. So the reconnecting, the reconnecting, is to get in touch with our aspiration, and it's a practice. I had one friend who we were talking

and she was very, very anxious and kind of shut down a certain way. And so I said, well, what's something you're really hoping for right now? And she said, well, I have research I'm doing, I really want it published in a top journal. Now that might be called, you know, like if she's hoping for something, that's kind of a narrow hope. Get it published.

So I deepen the inquiry. I said, well, what would be so important about that? That's how you deepen your inquiry. Well, why does that matter? What would that give you? And she said, well, if it got published in a top journal that would help validate the protocol for trauma that I'm working on. I said, okay, and what would be so important about that?

What would that serve? And she said, well, it would really help people heal. And I said, ah, so that's what really matters to you. Feel that aspiration that you can help people heal and feel it in your body. And as soon as she started feeling that truth that that's what she really wanted, she started softening and opening. She really started coming home into herself. So it's not grasping to the particular.

She was connected with the deep longing. Sri Narasar Gadda said, it's one of my favorite teachers, he says, your wants are too small. Make them larger. Make them deeper. Make them more encompassing. Okay, so that's the first one.

If we want to wake up a deeper level of hoping, It's to connect with a deep aspiration. What is it we really long for? That's what evolves hope. The second is a trust that it's possible. Okay? Do you trust that it's possible for you to manifest your heart's potential to love? Your mind's potential to be fully awake, to see clearly?

Can you manifest your potential to really be intimate with others? with others? Do you have some trust that that's possible? That's the second part. And there's a phrase that Shane uses. He says, you can only get there from here, that the trust is that by being fully here, that's what allows us to manifest. And again, the metaphor of an acorn and an oak, that an acorn has an urge toward becoming an oak. The oakenness is in bed. It's already here. It's guiding the unfolding. That your true nature is already here, guiding the unfolding. Henry David Thoreau says, though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been. I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there

and I am prepared to expect wonders. One way to consider this, and I find this really powerful is to sense that your future self, the oak tree, is calling you to manifest, that your future self is here, energetically, calling you to become all that you can be. It's drawing you into your fullness. And I can share for myself a story that kind of tuned me into this in a very profound way during, I've shared often that I had about eight years of a pretty chronic and sometimes acute illness and I found that I did that ego roller coaster of hope where on days that I could walk a little bit further and I wasn't so fatigued I'd go, oh, I'm getting better and my hopefulness

would start blossoming out there and then I'd have a few days in a row where I was just exhausted and I couldn't even move up even an incline and any of the stretching I did seem to injure me and then I just deflated, defeated. So that was going on for a while because I had a very difficult stretch where I wasn't moving well and I could watch how I was becoming, you know, without hope. And I sat there and I just sensed to myself I really want to be devil to trust in love, in presence, in the goodness of life, regardless of whether things are temporarily up or down. And so I called on the wisest part of my being. You know, I said, okay, please, may the wisest, most loving part of my being just remind me. May I trust

this? And I kind of imagined my future self. I imagine the self that was more mature and more evolved, more awake than this person doing the roller coaster. I said, teach me about how to be at peace however it is, the person that was maybe down the road 10 years. And it wasn't like I was imagining a physical self as much as kind of an energetic, wise space of awareness that had manifested more. And so I actually sensed it lurking and I just said, okay, Okay, fill me. Let me sense what it's like to be my most evolved self. And it was like my awake awareness was calling me, so I just filled myself with it. And when I was in my room at that point, because I wasn't even able to go down to the river

where I usually walked on this very flat path, I had to stay home. And when I opened my eyes, the light was kind of, the sun was really kind of reflecting off the leaves of a fir- that was hanging in my room and the leaves, I could see the precision and the magic and the mystery of just the simple ordinary fern leaf that to me was like divine. And I realized that when I called on my future self, my evolved self, right now was entirely not just okay, it was filled with the sacred. So that became more and more of a practice of what I now is calling on my fearless heart or Bodhi Chita, the awakened heart mind.

But I find it helpful sometimes to think of it as our future self, what we're evolving into, just to call on that and it's there. And that was the power of the realization was that what I was calling on was already here. And that's where trust comes in, that you can trust you're evolving because the seeds of your Buddha nature are already here and you can contact them. Okay, so there's aspiration, there's trusting that who you're becoming, the seeds are already and always right here. You can only get there from here. The third area that I mentioned is that we engage that we get active towards that manifestation, that we dedicate energy.

And if you trust that's already here, it actually enables action. So if you long for freedom, you'll dedicate more to the practices of waking up from mental stories. And if you long for love, you'll dedicate yourself more to relationships. And if you long for serving in the world, you'll act to heal our earth, or to reduce social injustice. And the trick is, and this is interesting, and you know this if you know much about depression, is that if you get active, it starts lifting the depression. It's an outside-in effect. So I've named the three pieces. I'm going to tell you a story now, again, from the monk Namoto. But I want to remind you of the three pieces so you can listen

as remembering them. The first is aspiration that you remember, oh, I care about that. The second is there's some sense of trust that something's possible. And the third is that you engage energetically. Okay? So for the monk Nemoto, he at one point got very sick. After spending a number of years working with suicidal people, he'd respond to every message anybody sent to him. He was absolutely 24-7 on the job.

and when he got sick, people didn't really reach out to him. And people, you know, he got these kind of responses like, well, I need help. I don't need to be waiting for you to get better. He was really surprised. It was very isolating. But he decided he hadn't been doing something right and that he really needed to change the way he worked with people. And so he decided that he was going to insist that anybody,

that want to work with him come to his temple, which wasn't an easy thing to do. It was like it was hours away from, it wasn't easy to public transportation, you had a walk to get there. But he set it up that way, and far fewer people came to work with him, but those that did had a much more deep kind of transformation.

So he describes this. He says, once a man walked for five hours to get to the temple. Now, the walk was a kind of heroic journey for this man because he had been living as a shut-in. And shut-in means never leaving the house. Now, suddenly he was outside in the sun, he was sweating, feeling his body move. And as he walked, he thought about what he was going to say. It had been so long since he had really spoken to anyone,

and now he was going to be expected to explain his most intimate feelings to a stranger. He sweated and thought as he walked, and when at last, after five hours, he arrived at the temple. He announced that he had achieved understanding and no longer needed Nomodo's help, and he turned around and he walked home. So what happened? Well, first, he recognized that he wanted healing. He had aspiration, and he had some trust, some sense of possibility. and it was through the monk's energy.

The monk gave him that hope that something was possible. And by the way, trust is contagious. You sometimes might run into somebody that has touched into a certain kind of healing or has a certain kind of devotion or certain kind of faith themselves, and it's contagious in a good way. It lets you sense, oh, this really is possible.

so that just being in that kind of a field with Nomoto, that faith was there. And then he dedicated energy. That hope activated him in a way that he sensed his body come alive. He had to reconnected with a flow. And in that process, he had found what he already needed. And a very biophysical level, hope was there. This is Barbara Kingsolver. Here's what I've decided.

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope, not admire it from a distance, but live right under it, under its roof. What I want is so simple, I almost can't say it. Elementary kindness. I've been teaching now for 40 years. And so I've watched a lot of people, you know, start and stop or kind of plateau, get habituated on the path.

But the ones that have really kept unfolding in a really creative way that have kept really waking up their hearts and minds these are the three qualities are characteristics that I've seen in them, staying really in touch with aspiration. So today doesn't feel that far removed from how you'd want to live your life if you knew you didn't have long. There's being in touch with what really matters. And then a trust in what's possible, a trust that the love that we long for and the wisdom,

it's already here, that our future self is calling us and it's seated in our being and our consciousness already. There's a trust in what we're evolving into. And then the third, there's energy that's engaged in that waking up process. So I'd like to walk through that in a short way right now. I think you'll find it helpful to take it from words to really applying it, right, as we're here together. So take some moments, if you will, to adjust how you're sitting, so you're sitting comfortably and take a few nice full breaths and let yourself collect your attention,

your energy with the breath, breathing in fully, exhaling slowly, letting go, a few full breaths. And then as the breath resumes in its natural rhythm, you might feel it in the area of the heart, listening to and feeling your heart and sensing that inquiry that if you were at the end of your life looking back, what would most matter? What would matter about how you live today? If you're at the end of your life looking back, what would matter about the quality of your attention or presence or heart right in this moment? What matters?

You might sense your future self further along towards the end of your life the self or being that's manifested more fully, the love that's here and the wisdom, that that future self is calling you. And you might sense how that future self is experiencing this moment. You might sense what the future self, this awakeness in you really want. wants you to remember and trust. Just listening to the message or wisdom of your future self on what you can trust and sensing the ways that your future self, this awakened heart mind, are already here.

And then the third characteristic which is engaging, what step this moment or this next moment our tomorrow will most serve as you continue to evolve, to manifest who you are. What's important? What might be one distinct way that you could engage energetically that would support this path manifesting, becoming all of who you are? The very least you can do in your life. is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope, not admire it from a distance, but live

right in it under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it. Elementary kindness. So we close with a simple prayer this evening that all beings might remember. the depth of their longing, that deep aspiration for awareness, for love, for aliveness, that all beings might trust the heart and consciousness that's always and already here and that we may live from the fullness and depth of who we are. Namaste and thank you for your attention.

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