Tara Brach - How to Stop the War Against Yourself - A conversation with Tara Brach & Dan Harris

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

How to Stop the War Against Yourself - A conversation with Tara Brach & Dan Harris - It's possible to actually be addicted to self-criticism, especially as a way to keep yourself safe. But evidence shows that rather than safety, this pervasive habit in our society creates deep suffering. This conversation between Tara and Dan Harris dives into strategies to deal with your own self-hatred and cultivate a forgiving heart. (Note: This was initially created as an episode for 10% Happier Podcast)  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. Our talk today is an interview I did with Dan Harris for the 10% Happier Podcast. And the theme is self-forgiveness. And I have found that some of the deepest pain many people live with is a sense. of not being able to forgive themselves for some past hurtful action or maybe for some ongoing way that we're living our lives. And that's why I was so eager to focus on this with Dan

because it feels so clear that the healing of our deepest wounds often begins with being able to hold our own being with a forgiving heart. So my prayer, friends, is that this may serve you well. Tara Brock, welcome back to the show. My pleasure to be with you and with everyone, Dan. Really appreciate it. All right, let's start with your story of the Tilted Buddha. What's that all about? Okay, so a few decades ago, a friend of mine and I decided we wanted to buy a statue,

a Buddha statue for our D.C. community. And we went hunting around in Provincetown and found a really beautiful androgynous, really lovely looking Buddha statue. But the night that, you know, I put it up on the pedestal, and after I taught that night, I saw people looking at it and they were all, their heads were all kind of tilted to one side. And they called me over and it turns out the casting had been tilted. It was a leaning Buddha. And so we had fun with that. We kind of named ourselves the Sangha, the leaning Buddhas, just to sense that we could have imperfect castings and still be waking up Buddhas. And that became a really valuable reminder in a lot of ways that

what we most get down on ourselves for, hate ourselves for, are really conditionings, castings that we really didn't have any control over and everybody's got them to make it through the day, they're coping strategies. And if we can remember that, it all becomes a lot less personal and we have more capacity to be forgiving, be kind towards ourselves. To see whatever quote-unquote flaws you may have as nature instead of something you designed, it's bespoke and irreparably yours and your fault. Exactly. Nature and really universal. I mean, the most basic conditioning is this illusion that I am a self. And right hand in hand, very close to that illusion, is a sense that something's wrong, because when we feel separate, there's a sense that

we're threatened or that we have to build ourselves in some way. So all the grasping and a version of the universe comes out of that universal illusion. That's the basic casting we've got. And then it gets amplified depending on our, you know, our DNA and our personal upbringings and the society we're in. But it's not like there's a little self in there that made some terrible mistake and chose to be wearing this armoring that we end up not liking. What you just said raises a million questions that I'll circle back to some of them. But I do want to ask you about something I've heard you say, which is that self-hatred or lack of self-forgiveness, and this is the quote, divides us from ourselves. What does that mean?

That means that when there's a part of us, the judge, that hates some other part of us, some part of life that we view as flawed or bad, we're fragmented. We're living in parts. We're not remembering a larger wholeness. We're not remembering the awareness. that's there. We're not remembering the basic love that connects us to the world. It's a very fragmented small reality we're living in. So we're really apart from our wholeness is another way to say it. And wholeness, your contention is, is our natural resting spot? We're just conditioned by the world into which we're born for inner division. Yeah, I often think of the metaphor, Dan, of ocean and waves that we get identified with a certain set of waves that we

think as me, this kind of personality or intelligence, are these markings of success or failure, attractiveness or unattractiveness, and forget that it's all made of ocean. And so the wholeness is really not my wholeness. It's the infinite field of beingness that is inherently I think of it as a kind of luminous openness that's got a natural tenderness in response to the world. We forget that larger belonging and get identified in, whether you think of it as the waves or the covering or the casting, we get identified in a very small way.

Anybody who's new, anybody listening who's maybe not anybody, but some people who are new to this whole meditation world, contemplative spiritual world might hear luminous wholeness and say, well, what exactly does that mean? That means that in this moment, as you're listening, you might have an idea of yourself as, oh, this is where I am on my path, and this is what's going wrong, and this is my family, and this is my personality. But at the same time, there's a sense of the awareness

that's maybe looking through your eyes right now, the awareness that's listening to these sounds. There's a kind of natural wakefulness that just knows that life is happening. And it's that knowing quality that really can't be located in a solid, steady way. It's just kind of like a field of knowing. So that's more what I'm referring to.

And there's also a quality of care or kindness that when we get quiet and we sense others in our life and we sense the natural world, we sense a kind of belonging to it. And so there's a natural tenderness. So those are the qualities I would describe as more innate. And like that's the ocean-ness or the sea of being. and then the waves are when we get caught in the kind of narrative idea of what the self is. I heard the kind of sentences you just uttered for quite a while when I was first getting interested in meditation, and I really didn't grok it.

And it was only just through doing it enough that I started to see, oh yeah, so awareness, which can sound like this big concept, it really is if you're not stuck on, just to stick with your metaphor, the waves, If you're not stuck in every little neurotic impulse that flits through your mind, if you're not stuck in whatever emotion is washing over you right now, you can see that on some deeper level, there's this kind of nameless, you can't put your finger on it, awareness, this raw knowing of whatever's happening. And that, even as I say those words, I realize it might be hard for somebody to grok, but it's there, it's non-negotiable and it's not yours. And it's seable through not that many sessions of meditation. And simultaneously, the less you're owned by all of the waves and in touch with the ocean, the less, as I often say, that when you sort of pull your head out of your ass in that way,

it gives you more bandwidth to be open to other people's needs, which you will quickly see feels better than rumination. So anyway, is that as a kind of a street version of what you said, Is that an okay version of a restatement? It's more than an okay version. It's eloquent. And sometimes with some people, I'll just say, well, take a few moments and try not to be aware. Just try not to be aware, just for a few moments.

And that's long enough. It's like saying don't picture a polar bear. And yet the awareness really is always there. And the only reason it's obscured by our thinking, constantly living inside the thoughts. And as soon as, it's like if you're flying in a plane and you're always inside the clouds of thought, and then when you get, you know, it is when you're outside of the clouds, you see the clouds, but you also are aware of the vastness of the sky. It's like as soon as our mind gets quiet, there is a quality of awakeness, of knowing, of presence, of what we call awareness.

But I think what's interesting, because we're really talking about how do we work with the divide against ourselves, is that's part of what blocks it, is that when we're down on ourselves, we get very contracted. We get into a very small place, and it's kind of like we're in this cocoon. And one of the gifts of beginning to accept ourselves, make peace with ourselves, love ourselves, forgive ourselves, is that, that all of that spinning of the thoughts of something's wrong with me and the feelings of contraction quiet down. And then we have access to what's always been there but was hidden, which is a real sense of spaciousness and a real sense of kind of a very open-hearted quality. In the excellent Dharma talk you gave on this subject recently, you talked about some of the cultural, societal, genetic forces that lead us to this contracted state quite often.

You cited things like generational trauma or DNA, the limits of our parents, aspects of the global culture. I'd love to hear you say some more about that here. Yeah. Well, we are conditioning on every level. And I mentioned kind of the existential to think that we're separate from others and to react to that. by grasping and fearing. But then on the level of our caregivers,

if our parents weren't attuned to some degree to us, if there was in some sense of understanding and care, then there's a feeling of more severed belonging, that we're more separate, that there's more fully that there's something wrong. So the messages that our parents give us, And most of us had parents that in some way, because of their own pain and fears, projected on us who we were and had some message be different, be more, be better. And so we internalize that. So that happens on the biographical level in our families. And then the society, we think society's thoughts, we take on the ideas of the standards that our society gives us and measure ourselves against those.

the gap can get even bigger, that I'm supposed to look a certain way, and I'm supposed to have this kind of success and this body type. And so all of those are forces that really impact that sense of, am I okay or am I not okay? And probably the most insidious on a societal level is that we have a built-in hierarchy. Most societies do. And so, especially if we're in one of the non-dominant groups, especially if we're black, indigenous, person of color, that's the most blaring in the United States.

There's a messaging through every institution, through the justice system, through the schools, every level of less than, that your life isn't as valuable. So there's all these different dimensions of where we get the messaging, but we end up having the belief deep down that, something's wrong and it doesn't help usually when especially when it's really deep and I'd say the deepest is when there's trauma early trauma because when young children are traumatized the trauma feels bad and they make the association this feels bad I'm bad and it's very it can be very preverbal in a way it's just very very deep it doesn't help to say oh no it's not your fault you didn't cause

anything, you're fine, you're good. It's that, it can't, you can't be talked out of it. It really requires a, what I call a kind of a felt sense processing where there's a reopening to the deep place of woundedness with a new and different way of holding with kindness. We're going to unpack some of those words the further we get into this interview. We're phrases like holding something with kindness. We're definitely going to get to that. But let me ask. you first. I suspect this is something you hear all the time from people. Well, if I forgive myself, I'll never change. I'll be totally resigned and I'll be eating ice cream for the rest of my life and I'll never get off the couch. And there are so many things about myself that I need to change that are

objectively unacceptable. So what are you telling me to Ara Brake? That you're in good company thinking that. That's probably the main reason people have for not accepting themselves or forgiving themselves is because there's a belief that by being on our own case, we'll nudge ourselves to change. And that inner judge deep down does have a good intention. I mean, the intention of the harsh inner critic is to improve ourselves so we'll get to belong again, so that we'll be lovable. And so it helps just to know that, that, okay, I'm judging myself because I think it's going to help. But then what are you? usually invite people to do is just check out, is it working? I mean, does judging yourself

or not forgiving yourself really help? And if you were better, how much would be enough? How much better do you have to be to really feel like you're enough? And so most people when they take a close look at the suffering of hating themselves will find honestly that hating themselves, or judging themselves does not promote good personhood. It doesn't really help. Some major contributions have been made here by our mutual friend, the great Kristen Neff, the researcher at the University of Texas, who really has pioneered the, and she's been on the show many times, many people will be familiar with her work, but just to restate one of

the top line findings in support of what you just said, Tara, that people who are self-compassionate, In other words, have an inner coach rather than an inner drill sergeant who have their own back are more likely not less to reach their goals. And I just, I needed to hear that over and over again. I need present tense to hear it over and over again because I revert to my cultural, familial, personal conditioning quite frequently. Anyway, so if anybody's listening to this and thinks Tara's serving up meaningless goo, you are wrong.

Tara is correct. Research shows not just in terms of being our own inner coach and being kind towards ourselves, it actually improves our relationships with other people. I know for myself in terms of being down on myself as a mother that the more that I was, I went through a phase where I just felt like I was just driven, working really hard and didn't feel like I was giving my son enough attention and really aversive. to myself for it, really down to myself. And I realized the more down on myself I was, the more impatient and controlling and judging I was of him. And that as I started working that one

and seeing that well behind my drivenness, this was my fear, I had fears of failure and I was trying to soothe that fear and trying to feel better about myself. And when I just committed to, okay, forgiven, forgiven. It's, I'm imperfect and I love him. The more I did that, the more when I was with him, I actually became like way more spontaneous and playful and available on all levels. And so that's just a personal example, but most people find there's a direct correlation with our capacity to let down our own armor against ourselves and it actually allows us to be more open to each other. I completely buy that story that you just told.

And I would just add, and I'm sure you already know this, but I say it for any hardworking moms out in the audience as the son of a hardworking mom, it was incredibly important for me to grow up with a driven, hard charging boss, and meaning that she was a boss in her workplace. And so that was, I suspect, and I don't know your son. that both your hard work in the world and your hard work on yourself paid off for him. That's just my gut. Well, you probably helped the healing process along by speaking for my son a little bit. Thank you.

I'll have to let him know. That'll help. Good. Well, I'm speaking from pure projection, but again, as the son of a hardworking mom, I loved it. And it's been really good for me to have her in my life in many ways. much more of my conversation with Tara Brock after this. Back to lack of self-forgiveness. You refer to it as an addiction, which really caught my eye slash ear.

What do you mean by that? Yeah. So let's, if we define terms, I think of forgiving as a kind of disarming our hostility against ourselves. It's not like we're doing something as much as undoing something. We're disarming our hearts. We're seizing to attack ourselves. We're seizing to diminish ourselves. And that the addiction is to hold on to this belief of I'm bad and then to keep attacking,

to keep pushing, to keep shoving, to keep trying to get the self to be better. And it's not our personal addiction. It's like in, if you look at our species that when we sense something's wrong, our flinch responses to blame because we're trying to fix it. We're trying to reduce what's wrong. And often we blame others, so we could just as well be having a conversation about how our reflex is something's off, you're bad. But we often turn it inward. And both of them are addictions. And there are addictions that if you look at our world situation are the cause for all war and suffering. That as soon as we get afraid, we blame, we create another, and we attack.

And often that other is a part of ourselves. And it can be hard to kick that habit because we have this story, as we've already established, that if we drop it, we're going to die to put it in the most extreme terms. We won't survive. Exactly. It's our main sense of agency. It's control. And I find this most strong when I work with people who've had a lot of trauma in early years, that holding very tight to that sense of damaged goods, it's very deep in the psyche that in a way it's almost like I'd rather know where I stand than not know. The not knowing is way too dangerous. Then I'm risking annihilation. At least if I know I can defend myself properly. against myself. Yes, this like defensive pessimism. And just as you said, if I've got the full picture of my dysfunction, then nobody can pull one over on me. I got it. That's exactly right. We can at least do what we can to protect ourselves. And the other piece is the fear of uncertainty

and not knowing itself that who would I be? It's like for many people, and I often ask this question because it's such a powerful one of, who would you be if you didn't think something was wrong with you? And what I found is that when there's been no work at that disarming of hostility, people are very blank or it's a shaky kind of thing. It seems impossible. It's like everything I know about who I am has been kind of colored by the sense of I am somebody who's not okay. I have badness. but once there's been some disarming of that hostility, once there's a little more light and space and just a little more spaciousness, then that question is a really powerful inquiry for

deeper transformation. So we can look back to that one, but it's a powerful question. Well, I think it's so interesting because we think of the word conceited as being somebody who's super arrogant, constantly reupping the story about how great. great they are. And to threaten that is very threatening for the individual. But the same can be true in a kind of bizarre world way on the other, on the flip side of the coin. Many of us are walking around with this conceit that we're a monster. And to threaten that is also threatening because, as you just very eloquently stated, it raises the question, well, who the hell am I then? Right. What you're pointing to in a way, and this is part of

Buddhist teachings is that conceit doesn't have to do with positive or negative. It's the way we're holding a self. And any threat to our beliefs is a threat to our stable sense of self. And we just really want to hold steady to what we think we are. In this same vein, you ask people to contemplate some, I think, very pleasingly jarring questions, deep questions. And I want to restate one of them to you and get you to kind of hold forth if you're up for it. Here's one. How come I want to change so much? How come it matters so much to be different? I love that question. Could you say a few more words about it? Yeah. There's a whole process of tracing back what matters, what's really generating both our wants and our fears. that's very revealing. So if we're really hooked on wanting to be different, we're afraid to be bad and we want to be good,

and to just trace it back and say, well, what would that give you? If you were different, what would you get from that? And then somebody might come up with, well, if I was different, then I could relax or then I could trust that other people would love or respect me. and if you keep going deeper and deeper, you get to what you might call our core longings, which have something to do with the domain of belonging, of knowing our belonging, of feeling connected, a feeling at one. The deepest pain is separation. So that yearning's there. And it's very healing to be able to identify that, to be able to identify, well, what is it?

I'm really wanting because then you start seeing, oh, so what I was going after, that's what I really wanted was love, but what I was going after was to in some way manhandle my personality and try to look better. So you start getting that. A wise crack, but a genuinely wise crack from a meditation teacher, a friend of mine is coming to mind. The teacher in question is Jeff Warren, who is just fantastic and a friend. And I once heard him say that some people get into meditation because they want a little bit of stress relief. Others get in because they want deep, ecstatic, enlightenment experiences. But the further you get in his experience, you see that really all you want are the cliches, peace and love.

I'd go ditto, ditto. And there's a little bit of a frame on that I'd add, which is because that's what you are. You want to be what you are. And that shifts it a little bit because you're really not trying to get something. You're trying more to disarm or relax back into what's already here but been obscured. What do you say to people who are like listening to the two of us talk about what we are on some fundamental level? And it just don't feel like they have any access to it. Don't believe us.

What can we say to convince people that you do have access? to reservoirs of, it won't be bulletproof and permanent, but you do have access to reservoirs of peace and love that you might dismiss as New Age Hocom. Well, sometimes it's just simply to reflect on what you really want and keep going deeper into what really makes that important and even under that, like what really matters, and then to sense that you wouldn't even be able to have that longing. unless some sense of that experience, some tendril, already lived inside you. You wouldn't be able to long for love unless you knew love on some level.

You couldn't long for truth unless there was something inside that really was awake like that. So I think anything we long for is already here and the longing is just a way of calling us back to it. That's just one practical exercise that really helps us go, oh yeah, of course, how could I I want that unless I have to know something about it. The other way, and this is another practical training, is that when we have glimmers of being more who we really know we want to be, when there's glimmers of silence or quietness or awe or beauty or gratitude, our love, or whatever it is, to on-purpose pause, and it could be five full breast, or counting to 30, but really let ourselves feel saturated by the feeling of that experience.

So we actually get familiar with the felt sense of the qualities that really are our best or our deepest or whatever we want to call them. And there's a whole lot of neuroscience behind that, that our habit, our default, is to fixate on negative stuff and identify with it. And the more we have experiences that are, what I sometimes think of as our innate goodness, or I sometimes call the gold or who we really are, but the more we have wafts of that or tastes of that, and we pause and very consciously let the feeling fill our body and breathe with it, it actually moves from the explicit to the implicit mind.

It gets remembered more regularly. And what usually happens is that only negative stuff drops into our implicit memory and comes back. But this makes it more sticky when the positive stuff more sticky. And that becomes, they say this is what shifts from a passing state to a more enduring trait, more of a sense of, oh. So even when the waves are angry and are jealous or whatever, underneath these qualities are here. That was such a well-answered question, in my opinion. Just to restate it in reverse order, one move is we all have, on these even mundane levels, these mini transcendent experiences throughout the day.

You might notice the beauty of your environment. You might savor some affection from a little kid or a pet or your partner. You may have breakthrough either on your own or with your team. And just learning to be a little tech douchy about this, just learning to kind of double click on those experiences so that they get into your viscera, into your cells, is a way to touch on the depth that Tara and I keep talking about. And the other I also like, because for a newbie,

this is an intellectual exercise that doesn't involve us having to have some deep contemplative experience. We can just look at, okay, what do I want? I would say the me of 15 years ago, I might have said, well, I want success. Why do you want success? And then the further you trace that down,

it's going to get pretty embarrassingly quickly to love and safety and peace. And there you are, again, that evidence for what a skeptic would question us about, which is the capacity and the deep desire for these more profound states that kind of live beneath the surface of our superficial lives. Yeah, I love hearing it back again because it feels so important that we think, truth is what it is because of our habits. And if we break our habits of just paying attention to what's difficult and instead cultivate what we're calling taking in the good,

it actually shifts our whole perception of who we are. And just to add one other piece to it, which I find really interesting, is you can start stormy weather too. So let's say you're feeling fear. And you say, well, inside the fear, what's this fear trying to do? What does this fear want? And if you go deep enough, it's going to always get to this is trying to protect me. It's life that is loving life. And there's something so powerful

about sensing that any emotion, when you trace it back, is some dimension of our being, our organism, our life, wanting to live. And it takes away any of any of the human, the judgment that flies around the particular expressions when we can remember that all forms are trying to live, to thrive, to flourish. And so I just find that tracing back really helpful. And just even the language of this is life, loving life, has helped many people I know. Yeah, your old friend and collaborator Jack Cornfield has referred to it as it's the organism trying to protect itself, which I think is a very, for me, powerful phraseology. And I wonder, does that in any way connect back to something you said a few minutes ago that I wanted to

make sure we spend some time with this notion of innate goodness or what you call the gold? And just to say for listeners, Tara's been on the show holding forth on this very subject, the gold, our basic goodness, or Buddha nature, as it's sometimes called, and we'll put a link to her previous appearances on the show. But just to get back to the show, that subject, the fact that at root our attacking of ourselves is, and frankly, all of our greed, too, is really the organism trying to protect itself. Is that an evidentiary point in favor of the gold? Absolutely. And it's protecting our promoting in some way. Being able to appreciate it, and often the language could be simply with fear, well, thank you for trying to protect me.

I'm okay right now or with greed. Thank you for trying to promote. And it's enough. I have enough. It's okay. Just that wakes us up to a larger space than the emotion itself. And that's the whole deal with meditation. Is that if we can, instead of being caught inside the wave and thinking, oh, that's me.

I'm the greedy one. We can be the awareness that's aware of the greed. then if we're not taking it personally, there's no suffering. There still may be discomfort, but by seeing it and knowing this is just another expression of life trying to promote itself or protect itself, it really gives us a certain kind of freedom. So let's talk about, we've been putting it off a little bit, let's talk about some meditation practices we can do to really touch in on these deeper qualities that you keep pointing to, there's one that's a little that's kind of, and these are taken directly from you,

there's one practice that's a little bit sort of more beginner level, but let's do that first, and then we'll go to some of the deeper stuff. You recommend sort of a review of the previous day or the day that's just passed as a way to work with forgiving yourself or not judging yourself. Can you describe the practice? Yeah, sure. If we watch our minds, we're going to find, that there are, it doesn't have to do with deep things that were, I'll never forgive myself for doing that in the past and that we're holding on to, but ongoing small ways through the day that we have this idea in our mind of how we should be and we didn't meet it. And so it could be some way that, oh, it could be, let's say you and I are talking and I had some idea of being

more fluid and spontaneous and I felt a little more linear and tight. Or it could be that I was then later with my husband and I wasn't as generous as I had meant to be or wanted to be or whatever it is. At the end of the day, if we look back, we'll see that there were a lot of times that in some way our persona or way of moving through didn't match your idea of being good. And it's really helpful to kind of forgive, to clear away whatever armoring or judgment we've been accumulating through the day. And the reason it's good to do is because if we do it at the end of the day, we'll start doing it more spontaneously throughout the day. We'll just start noticing, oh, I'm feeling a little tight. Oh, there's a little bit of a down on myself feeling. And in the

seeing, there's some freeing. It's just like that. It gets like that. Unless it's deeply rooted, That's a whole, we'll go into the deeper practices. So the end of the day practice is simply to review and notice where in some way you're holding a little bit of judgment, like not enough, fell short. And I just whisper the words, forgiven, forgiven, because those words work for me, but in some way send the message of disarmament. It's okay, accepted, accepted. Whatever we want to do, It doesn't have to be words, although words can be useful in kind of undoing parts of ourselves because we are thinking creatures, the communication can help soften and with an attitude of kindness, just knowing the whole deal with forgiveness is that we can't will it, we can be willing,

we can have the intention. And the intention goes a long way. And it really opens the the door. And I know for myself that, you know, when I was in my 20s and I really hit hard times that I just was so turned on myself, that it took a kind of a dedication, like knowing, okay, this is right at the center of my spiritual life. Like anything else I want to experience is going to come out of in some way befriending myself. So there was an intention. And sometimes I couldn't, sometimes I couldn't. So it's the same thing at the end of the day. You just have the intention to let go of armoring around the heart. I just want to emphasize that point because it strikes me as very important. When you are doing this practice, you're lying in bed or you're

getting ready to go to bed or it's first thing in the morning and you're reviewing the previous day or the day that's just finished and forgiving yourself for all of the allegedly stupid things you did, you don't have to force yourself into a forgiveness that isn't there. There's something about the bicep curl of intending to forgive just the way we do a bicep curl toward friendliness or compassion if we're doing Brahma v. Hara practices where we're imagining people and hurling phrases at them like, may you be happy or may you be safe? We don't have to feel the thing. It's the intention to feel it that will build the muscle over time. That's exactly right because I have worked with people who have really hated themselves.

And I'm thinking right now of a woman I worked with over the years who was just binging a lot, a lot on sugar and so on. She just could not forgive herself for that and for ways that she just, she kind of had that a learned helplessness. She'd just give up on things and she just couldn't forgive herself for how she was doing her life. And so we didn't try for forgiveness. She knew she wished she could forgive. And that is the beginning of self-kindness just to even wish you could forgive. And so that's the place to

start, because there's something in us, some wisdom, some love in us that doesn't want to hurt, that wants to be happier. So we start where we can. It's not something you necessarily can do, but the intention actually creates an atmosphere that's incredibly conducive to having it unfold. Somewhere along the way, in the course of the hundreds of interviews I've done with researchers and meditation gurus, as somebody, and I think it was this guy, Sean Acour, who was on the show several years ago, somebody recommended to me that I do sort of an evidence-based gratitude practice at the end of the day where I just think back at all the good things that happened during the day. and try to take it in. And I'm just wondering whether this end of the day, forgiveness practice might pair well with that. Well, I like you're bringing it up

because if all you do is look at, oh, what did I do? How am I holding against myself? That can be, you feel lightening up after doing it. But my husband and I have a practice at the very, very end, before we say good night of just asking each other what we're grateful. for during the day. And there's something about gratitude that is so sweet. And again, as we were talking about before, it reconnects us more with who we're most at home with being. So I love that as a kind of a way, a very sweet way to end the day or to start the day or in the middle of the day too.

Healthy cocktail. Yep. Much more of my conversation with Tara Brock after this. Okay, so let's go deep now. What are the practices you recommend for dealing with the kind of deep, either self-hatred or lack of self-forgiveness that many, if not most of us, harbor? Yeah, so before I described the practice of itself, I was reading, I got a while back, Carl Menninger, he's famed psychiatrist. He once said that if he could convince patients in psychiatric hospitals that their sins were forgiven, and 75% of them would walk out the next day. And I think about that a lot, that how core it is, this being turned against ourselves, the self against the self,

that like fundamental core split, and how much suffering builds around that, how much then we go around seeking evidence for more of it. And so I bring this up because whatever practice it is, it's not a one-shot. It's more again out of some deep sense of caring about ourselves that we say, okay, it really matters to include myself and all beings in my heart. And I really do think of it as a disarming, the armoring around our hearts. And so I often will teach forgiveness in the frame of rain, which I can walk through with us. Rain is, as many of you know, it's a weave of mindfulness

and self-compassion. And it's a weave in four steps. And the value of four steps, because it's not necessarily so cut and dry, but it can be generally done that way, is that when we're stuck, when we're emotionally stuck, when the limbic system's taken over,

we lose our access to executive functioning, we forget our way back. Those are the times we most need help. And so it just helps to have four steps. And so the acronym rain is recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. And there's another piece that follows it that I'm going to get to, which makes it profound and transformational. But I'll wait on that.

We'll do those. And so I'll just walk through those four steps on how it relates to forgiveness. And maybe hitch it to a story. I'll just give kind of the story was in the talk, I think. of a woman who it was a deep one because she was married, had a daughter who was a teen, I think. She had affairs. She wasn't, she was not just the hardworking mother who didn't have that much time. She was pretty neglectful, ended up leaving the marriage.

Her daughter called her a narcissist and really allied with the husband. And she agreed with her. She felt like she was a basket case herself. And so she did a lot of work. And some of the work she did was with Rain. And she also did 12-step groups and a lot more. And what she had to do is come face-to-face with a deep sense of, I am flawed and I am bad.

I am pure badness. So Rain, I'll just give you how a sample session would go, the recognized means, okay, let's take a kind of global sense of what's going on and what's the most strong emotion that's here right now? And for her, the emotion was guilt and aversion, maybe shame. And then the A of Rain allow is just let it be there. It means don't try to fix it, don't try to change it, don't ignore it, just let be, even for a few moments.

And it's really powerful because it's like in that pause, there's actually a possibility of beginning to then deepen attention. And that's the I, the investigate. Now, with Investigate, many people think it's going to be cognitive. It's 95% somatic. It's mostly in the body because our issues are in our tissues. We have to go through the felt sense to really have a shift. There's a little cognitive, but not too much.

So investigate for her. I asked her what she was. was believing and her belief was I've been failing all my life in everything that's important. And I invited her to feel that feeling of failure in her body and it was a kind of a hollowness and an ache and a squeeze and something I often will do in helping to somatatize to get into the body and the felt sense is I'll say, well, express it through your face and your posture. and for anybody it's practicing on your own, it's really helpful because we're so mental and we need ways to come into our body. So when you make the expression on your face and you

actually, for her, the kind of hunching of her shoulders and the caving of her chest, it helped her to actually access the deep sense of pain, of shame, of hollowness, of wanting to disappear. And then the investigating went right to that vulnerability and how long is, I just asked her how long that had been there as long as I can remember. What came to mind for her was the feeling of wanting to disappear very early because she was so bad when her parents split up. And she just felt like it was her fault in some ways very young. And we kept investigating, well, what, how has it affected your life, to be moving through life feeling like so flawed and like a failure. And that's when she started weeping. The sense of how many moments of potential connection of being able to

enjoy a sunset or really feel creative or had been shut down by this basic badness feeling. There's something about seeing the landscape of your life. You get a kind of soul sadness sometimes when you realized how much self-hatred has gotten in the way of really living moments. It's a real deep one. So she started weeping and that's when we could move to nurture, which was, you know, I said, so what is that place that feels so vulnerable and so bad and so hurting? What does it need? And it needed to feel forgiven and in some way to be reminded that she had goodness in her. And she, so for nurture, often people will offer to themselves, they'll sense their most wise self, their most loving self, and offer a

message to that vulnerable place. And that's really, really beautiful. And that's a practice to do over and over again that nurturing. For her, she was so regressed or caught in that actually traumatized young place that she felt like she needed that forgiveness to come from something larger. And so in a way, she was saying, please forgive me to the universe, to the love in the universe. And so that's what she did. She felt that young place going, please forgive me. It's like, please love me. And then the nurturing was, I invited her just to feel nurturing, love, care, kindness, forgiveness coming from the universe, like kind of a sunlit sky, kind of shining down on her. bathing her, and that was nurturing.

That's the end of rain. And we stayed there for a while. And as you and I talked about before, Dan, with nurturing, if staying with the feelings of being forgiven, of being held, of being loved, actually allows it to get more familiar, you know, in your nervous system. And then after that, and this is the way that rain concludes, if you really want it to be transformative, there's what I call after the rain. And after the rain, just like after a real rain, when, you know, it's after the rain that things

start perking up and flourishing and growing, the invitation to her is just to notice the quality of presence that was there. And the experience after that much attention and kindness was for her, a real sense of lightness, openness, just tender. And I sometimes will invite people just to notice what shifted from when she started as a kind of bad self to this presence that's here, because that presence, that tenderness, more the truth of who we are than any of the passing narratives or feelings or our beliefs. And so that's what she did.

She sensed that. And then I asked you the question I brought up earlier, which was, who would you be if you really trusted there was nothing wrong with you? And she said, I can't even barely put it in words, but there'd be a freedom that feels like the most precious thing in the world. If I didn't think anything was wrong with me, there'd be freedom. So this is just an example of rain, and it was a very powerful one. And I want to really highlight this, she had to do a number of rounds because that conditioning is very deep, those beliefs and those feelings, to continue to disarm the heart so that that became more the experience that she could live in than the old one of being a small and bad self.

Yeah, I could imagine it would require years of rounds. We're not talking about quick fixes here. This is deep work. My meditation career is nothing compared to yours, but I I've been doing it for 13 years, and I'm still a mess in a million ways. But you know you're a mess, and that's really, and you're kind of benevolent about it. And I actually said that lightly because I'm not affirming your messiness. Let me affirm it for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, you're good with your mess, and you use your mess to help people trust they can wake up out of a smaller identity into something more happy.

more free, more loving. So that, to me, is the whole point of this. And for her, yeah, years, I think it's a lifetime for all of us. And not to underestimate the power of glimmers and the hope that gives and how that itself in a very fundamental way shifts us. Because once you see what's possible, even if it's not permanent and, as I said before, bulletproof, it really gives you a North Star. It gives you a North Star. It builds, to me, the basic expression of freedom is trust, that there's trust in reality, in what is, and that every time we do reality practices like mindfulness and like self-compassion, which undoes and allows us to reopen to what's here, we start trusting reality more than we

believe the beliefs about ourselves. And that is, that's where the transformation comes from. So her trust really woke up. Let me see if I can formulate a question. I'm hoping that this will resonate with you and with listeners and it won't just be just irretrievably selfish. But let's see if I can get there. When you were talking about who would you be if you didn't believe there was something wrong with you, I was wondering in your patient or client was saying, I don't know exactly.

but it sounds like a freeing place. I was just, of course, thinking about that for myself and also adding on a question that I think would also be equally compelling and maybe freeing, which is who would I be if I really believed I was safe or didn't have to be anxious in order to keep myself safe?

And I wonder if self-hatred and anxiety or comorbid in some meaningful percentage of the population. So is the question that if you really believed you were safe, who would you be? Yeah, yes, because I think so much of my life is really in a defensive crouch because I am anxious, thanks to, and we're both Jewish here. So we both have plenty of cultural feeding in on this one. Yes. So, and I just think that when you invoke the word freedom or when you're patient or client did that I was thinking, yeah, not walking around with the story that I'm always in forever a shitbag, that would help.

but it would also help to have on some level a belief that, yeah, I'm going to be fine, probably, and I don't need to be anxious all the time. Yeah, so I think it's a great question, and I think that they're part of the same cluster, the feelings of safety and the feelings of goodness and innate goodness, and the reason why is because we're social creatures. We want to trust that we belong and that we belong, and that will be welcomed and we won't be banished. And if there's something wrong with us,

shame goes hand in hand with a feeling of not belonging, the fear of not belonging. And so if you are really trusting you're safe, that means you trust that you belong. You trust that you're a part of the larger whole. And so you can go from either angle, really. And that's why a practice like loving kindness practice is so powerful. And when I say loving kindness practice, I don't mean necessarily specifically repeating the classic phrases,

but any practice that is an intentional practice that softens and opens our hearts that lets us come back home to a more open-hearted kind of experience is freeing because in that open-heartedness, there is a knowing and a trusting of belonging. And if belonging isn't the word that resonates, it could be oneness or connectedness or interdependence. But that's the reality that when we know it and trust it, we can relax. Just as, maybe we'll cut this, but just to stay with the me of it all to be just completely hogging the mic here. My specific, most prominent version of anxiety is not belonging. And maybe at root, that's what it is.

But it's often like career base that everything's going to fall apart. and I can feel how that fear constricts me creatively and interpersonally as I move through the day. And so that it doesn't always, I mean, I think I've done a lot of work on it, but it's still there. And I think that's what I was thinking of when I talked about anxiety being comorbid with self-criticism. And I can't quite articulate how, but in my mind, there may be some linkage between constantly telling myself I'm bad and constantly telling myself everything could fall apart. So let me ask you a question then. What do you imagine if everything fell apart would be the worst thing?

Like what would be so horrible for you if it fell apart? I imagine that all the time. I try to actually work with this in a quite deliberate way. Not just the one of my favorite Buddhist terms is propansha, these sort of horror movies we make in our mind in an end. instant often. And then there's a related practice that I'm intrigued by from the Stoics, which is to therapeutically imagine the worst case scenario because then you realize it's not that bad. And so I actually quite frequently do that. Okay, Dan, if X, Y, and Z happens,

what's going to happen? Like, oh, you lose your house or whatever. I'll be fine. My wife and I, she constantly tells me if she catches me in a state of concern. We'll figure it out. And I know that. And yet the anxiety does come back. So I wonder whether there may be more to go on that, that it's not just, oh, you'll lose the house. I just, I wonder if you keep going and saying, really, what's so bad about it? And I'm asking you that because I feel like I'm somewhat similarly.

A lot of my emotions circle around not failing at what I'm doing versus other things. And so I just wonder for you what it would mean to what does not having it not work out mean? And it may not be that you have something right this moment to say more than you have. I think there would be the answer to the feeling that surfacing is something like humiliation, maybe. Right. So humiliation, and if you keep tracking that, humiliated in the eyes of... Exactly, right, right. My friends and my family, I guess. Yeah, so same for me. And so there's this kind of basic worth thing that everybody will like me and include me and I'll be all fine and respected as long as I do well.

But as soon as I don't do well, all that comes into question. So it's just building an identity and a safety and an okay. about performance. Yes. But it does come down to severed belonging, I think. Interesting. Let's keep in touch on it. No, I think you're right. I do.

I think you're right. Taking it a step further as you recommend gets me right to that, which goes back to the thing we were talking about before, which is all of us, all we really want is peace and love. There you go. And what is belonging, if not love? Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's true. Speaking of love, I want to finish on, and you touched on this a little bit, but let's just put a fine point on it. Some of the benefits of learning to kick the habit of kicking our own ass. And one of them, you list at least two, but one of them is that it, and these are your words, frees us to love without holding back. Can you say more about that? Yeah. Yeah. So in the moments that we're down on ourselves, our beliefs and our feelings and our body is constricted.

And as we begin to see the constriction and just because we care, we want to be happier and so that we kind of let go of some of that judging and really hold ourselves with more compassion, offer that nurturing, there's a sense of enlarging, of occupying a larger space than that self that was spinning around down on itself. And in that larger space, there's a lot more possibility for love to flow with other people and with the world. There's just more in love with life that's possible. So it's really the movement from a constricted, turned-in kind of attention on fixated on what's wrong with me to an opening an undefended opening for we're able to be in communion and connection with our world. So those are big words, but it's actually the felt experience. And people notice in a moment that you really can sense,

wait a minute, it's not my fault. It's not my fault from this way. You really kind of get that this is the conditioning, that there's no self in there that wanted to be bad. In the moments that we get, it's not my fault. and the moments we get that we were trying the best we could. That was life-loving life in its own contorted way. Some tenderness opens up.

And one of the metaphors that I share in this talk that I think is so useful for people in opening up that loving is the story I tell of a person who's walking in the woods and they see a dog under a tree and they go to pet the dog and then the dog lurches at them really aggressive and its fangs-beared and so on. And so the person goes from being friendly to being really blaming and angry, but then they see that the dog has its leg in a trap. And then they shift again from that anger and blaming to, oh, poor thing. I mean, they may not get close because they realize that the dog's dangerous, but their heart shifted. And when we start seeing ourselves that way, that when we're acting in ways we don't like, when we're acting arrogant, our

defensive, our critical, our deceiving people, or whatever it is, our legs in a trap. There's something hurting behind that. There's some vulnerability in there. And when we can start sensing that, we get more tender. And then we start looking at other people. And it's much quicker that we can see ourselves reacting to things we don't like, but then looking more deeply and sensing, oh, okay, so how's this person's leg in a trap? So we get more loving and we also get more compassionate because we start seeing more clearly everybody's living with their own hurts. It's like be kind, everyone you see is struggling hard.

We start getting that more. I completely agree. You said it was big words, but I think it's actually common-sensical, too, that if you're less stuck in cycles of rumination around how bad you are, that's just more airtime you can give to other people. And the more you have a sense of okayness vis-a-vis your own dysfunction or ugliness or whatever, the more you see that everybody's got their stuff and it can make you less judgmental. So I completely agree. Let me just run by you before I let you go.

The other benefit, and you may have already covered this, but you mentioned this in your talk, and so I just want to give you a chance to say more if you feel like it. The other benefit of self-forgiveness you say is that it, and these are your words, it allows us to open beyond a limiting identity, to taste the mystery of who we are, that timeless, formless, loving awareness.

Those are big words. Yeah, those are. and this is what I was talking about in After the Rain, that when we've disarmed the heart, let's say you've been blaming yourself for years for in some way hurting somebody in your past or continuing to be hurtful. And somehow rather you get big enough, you open up enough to see that it's coming from a wounded place, you care, you're kind of hurt yourself for the wounding, there's more space, when you then sense, well, who am I, the more forgiving and kind you are, the more you don't

feel solid, you don't feel constricted, rather there's more of a kind of a field, a kind of tender field of being. And this is something not to necessarily take my word for, but importantly, sense in the moments when you're feeling kind towards yourself or others, in the moment when you're feeling forgiving towards yourself or others, just investigate a little and sense the quality of self that you experience. And I think you'll notice that it's much more diffuse. It's much more open. It's much more filled with light and tenderness. Last question before I let you go. I say this from a place of totally, agreeing with you about self-forgiveness and self-compassion. And yet, what role in all of this

is there for accountability, given that we, many of us, all of us, have genuinely made mistakes and hurt other people? Yeah, it's actually a really important question. I mean, I'm glad I want us to have this as part of it, because one of the misunderstandings about forgiveness is that in some way we're condoning what we've done and that we're just able to say, oh, okay, now I can forget about that one. And it's actually quite different. I found that what forgiving does is when we respond to ourselves with that kindness is it makes us more responsible. That when we're not forgiving ourselves, we're caught in a kind of constriction that actually has us repeat the behaviors that we don't like over and over again.

But when we start forgiving ourselves, we have access to more of the resources that we really need to behave the ways we want to. So we actually naturally become more accountable and responsible. And the reason is that there's premature forgiveness and there's spiritual bypassing. What that means is that we're saying, oh, I've forgiven myself,

and we're not really going through the steps. and that's a lot of delusion. But to really forgive ourselves requires that we open to a really deep sense of often unpleasantness and vulnerability and touch into a kind of self-compassion that's very awake, that's very aware, and then it extends to our world, and we want to be responsible and accountable. Is there anything I should have asked but failed to ask? No, more that we're speaking this interview, is on November 9th, and it's the day in the United States after our midterms. And there is just

such a parallel to the suffering, the inner suffering of being divided and the suffering in our world of living in kind of hostile cocoons with different realities and with really living in a way that breeds such distrust, that expression the center won't hold, that there can't be real communication and a healthy society because of it. And it's the same way we can't communicate with their own being and be healthy if we haven't forgiven ourselves. And so it feels like the same principles are really important that we lead as we look at our world and look at others that we don't agree with, we lead with the intention to see past the behaviors to the hurt that's underneath and that we lead with the intention to bridge the divides because there really is

no happiness or freedom unless we bridge the divides. In this way, the personal is political. Absolutely. And forgiveness, self-forgiveness truly is a political act. At the very least it can, as we've discussed, make you more pleasant to be around. And as it reduces your judgmentalism toward the people in your orbit, you can extend that infinitely beyond to people with whom you disagree. That doesn't mean you condone their views or their actions, but you can have some empathy for it in a way that makes it much more workable rather than shouting across an unbridgeable divide. That's exactly right. So you're not feeling. the violence that keeps spinning in our society. You're actually part of the healing at whatever

level. This is genuinely my last question. If I can get you to shamelessly plug pre-forgiven shameless self-promotion of anything you're putting out into the world resource-wise that you would want to direct people towards. Yeah. Boy, I was coming in so selfless, Dan. I don't know. I wasn't thinking of self-promotion here. Yeah. Let me help you. Cloud Sanga. I know you're involved in that. Am I right about that? Yeah. So, yeah, that's a beautiful one. So Cloud Sanga is a online community for people that really want to bring mindfulness into their relationships and have a group of people to deepen intimacy with, a spiritual community, a mindfulness community. And they're mentored by really fantastic, experienced teachers, small groups of age. So that cloud Sanga really is a way to have

online community that is quite powerful. And then, of course, the other is as you're deepening attention to the extent that you feel like, wow, these practices are waking up my heart and mind and I want to share it with others at some point to consider the mindfulness meditation teacher certification program, which is TCP, as a way to both deepen you on your own path and also to assist others in waking up. I heartily recommend both of those. And also just to say Hattara's written a bunch of books, I will have mentioned these in the introduction, but they include and are not limited to radical acceptance, true refuge, and trusting the gold. She also has a podcast that you should go check out where you can hear her Dharma talks. So she's done a lot in this world, and you

should go check out all of it. Tara, thank you very much. Really appreciate your time. I love being able to do this. Thank you, Dan.