Tara Brach - Instructions on Working with Trauma - Q and A from Retreat (2015-04-20)

Episode Date: November 20, 2015

Instructions on Working with Trauma - Q and A from Retreat (2015-04-20) - a short segment that includes a message on working with trauma as part of a morning question-response session at the IMCW 2015 Spring Retreat.

Good morning. Yeah, so a couple of comments and then open it to questions. One of the great questions that I like to ask myself and is out there in the field is, you know, what is it that I'm unwilling to feel? And I find if I ask that, it kind of shines a light on what I've been unconsciously pulling away from. It's much like, you know, what's really happening. and then the follow-up inquiry is, then, can I be with this? And I use the word yes a lot just because it said that willingness

to let what's here be here, to acknowledge reality and open to it. So that's a lot of the theme that you'll hear here, is that we notice what's happening in the attitude, and can the attitude be one of willingness? So I want to offer a caveat to that, which is that it's not always the wisest and most compassionate thing to say yes to what's here. And just to put that out there, because I've had a number of questions about, well, what about if there's a lot of trauma going on in my system?

If there's trauma, do we say, okay, what am I unwilling to feel? Well, I don't want to feel that trauma. All right, can I say yes to it? that might not be such a wise idea because it's possible if we really try to dive into something that we could get flooded and overwhelmed and really not have the resourcefulness or balance or perspective to actually allow it to be an experience that helps to wake us up. Rather, we can just get re-traumatized, rerunning the same groove of helplessness and overwhelm. Does that make sense that it's not.

not always wise? So then the question is, well, what then? And just want to put out just a few pointers, and this is something to, again, it's an experiment that we each have to be playing with. For some of us, rather than that direct contact in the body with, where the fear is living, it can be much more helpful to have the main emphasis of our practice be something like the loving kindness practice where we're using the phrases of loving kindness to quiet the mind and also to help the bodies, defenses, and armoring

begin to soften and relax. It actually shifts the nervous system. It activates a power of sympathetic nervous system. It creates more sense of safety. And so after a certain amount of meta, it then becomes possible to begin to dip into where we feel a lot of fear and still have enough of that background resource of safety so that there's a possibility of being with but not being overwhelmed.

It's like the metaphor if you put some dye in a sink, you know what happens, but if you put that same die in a lake, there's plenty of space for it. Well, loving kindness practice helps to create more space for what's here. In a similar way, there's other anchors you can use, like listening that helps to remind us of space. Or if there's trauma, instead of going to where it is in the body, you can open your eyes, see what's around you, and just name other experiences to help anchor you in the world around you. Or you can spend time grounding, which is really, really helpful, which is just in a very simple

way and you can feel it right now, just feel yourself sitting on Earth. Feel gravity, feel the weight. So you can feel the pressure and contact where your bottom is on the chair or cushion, where your feet or legs are contacting the floor and the ground, and just feel the stability that the Earth is supporting you. Most basically what I'm pointing to is that sometimes we need to spend some time contacting our resources before we directly dive in to where a strong emotion lives that we might not feel we have the resilience for.

So take your time and feel free to resource yourself, to bring to mind the people that perhaps bring up feelings of safety and love or the places that do that. Whatever helps you to feel more at ease so that you can dip in a little to what's difficult and then come back out and look around again and feel your breath or whatever else helps you.

Go back in a little. Come back until you develop more and more capacity to tolerate what's there. So that's a totally oversimplified synopsis. And there's a lot out there on working with trauma. But I just wanted to put something out there because it's not just a few of us. many of us have trauma in our nervous systems or else if not trauma intense fear that we're not always ready to just say yes to.

So I hope that's helpful and any questions on anything to do with your practice. So yesterday and yesterday evening's Dharma talk Jonathan gave the example of the dangers of multitasking and I see it all the time in New York City where I'm from with people texting and walking around and trying to do two things at once. And then I enjoy today's instruction where we sort of opened up the idea to be able to address thoughts that come forward while we're still focused on our anchors. So I wonder, is it an effort to multitask?

Are we as people capable of multitasking? Or is it reprioritizing and sequencing? Or what is it we're trying to do? Thank you. Yeah, thanks for your question. So I'll bring it right to the instructions. Actually, the Zen teaching is just do one thing at a time and really bring your whole heart to it. And similarly, with the instructions, really they're an invitation to bring your full attention to whatever's predominant.

So you're really not multitasking. If what's predominant is, let's say, you have a feeling in the back, a squeeze or an ache or soreness, and rather than staying with the breath, it's kind of pulling your attention. Allow it to be there, bring your full attention there. Now, if it helps to breathe with it, you're bringing together the breath and that experience to help stabilize the attention. You might call that multitasking,

but you're really primarily paying attention to the sensations. Similarly, if an emotion arises, you let the breath kind of recede into the background, and then those are in the foreground. You might think of it like waves in the ocean, that different waves are calling your attention and you're bringing your attention to them and then you're resting back in that current of your anchor,

the underlying current. Yeah, thank you. I wonder if you can speak to spontaneous movement and spontaneous emotion, specifically laughter, which I'm guessing in or I perceive in this culture of silence could be problematic and yet don't want to let go of it when it comes. Yeah, and the same thing with us. with deep weeping.

You know, there's a lot these human bodies experience and want to express. And so there's a kind of a balancing act between what can the container easily include and what is better if you're outside to

and you feel a need to move around or laugh what you might do outside. So it's a balancing. I found then I'll just speak to crying. And I was saying this in a group that for myself, if I go to a long retreat, usually by the third or fourth day, I've deeply sobbed. You know, that's just one expression of it.

And often, you know, if it's deep sobbing, I'll go somewhere else. If it's light crying, I'll be in the hall. There's something quite beautiful about knowing in this hall we have some people feeling mirth and some people feeling tears and some people, you know, working really with a pain. and that we really have the space for it all. With spontaneous movement, if it's spontaneous and it's already happened, it's whatever. If you have actually a choice,

like you can feel the urge, there's something very powerful about resting in the stillness and just feeling the passing wave of the urge come and go that's very, very revealing. So you can go either way with it. I hope that's helpful.

Yeah, thank you. I'd like to hear more about causes and conditions. Probably you couldn't answer it in the time remaining, but could you elaborate at some point on that? On causes and conditions? Right, it's pretty central to teachings. As Jonathan mentioned it several times in his talk yesterday.

and I haven't come across anything that defines it or elaborates on it and how is it sort of the core of teaching. It's in a way the simplest and can be the most complex of all the teachings. It's the word karma is one word for it, which is that whatever that the past sets the conditions for the future, you plant a seed and it grows, you don't water it enough and it doesn't grow in a certain way. So you can look at every tree in the future.

the woods and it's in its different angles and how much it's the leaves are leafing out and it's a result of causes and conditions and so are we so that when we cause harm it's because usually in some way we've been harmed or you can think of it another way of you know we get born into certain cultures and then we have it shapes our experience it filters our experience So the deep understanding is there's infinite streams of causation and we can't really track them all. But what they teach us is that it's not our fault, that what comes or rises out of that,

and yet in any given moment there is the choice to pause and come into presence. And that's where our power is. It's the, and I'm going to end with this because I have to make an nonsense, but there's a beautiful phrase from Victor Frankel,

which is between the stimulus and the response, there is a space, and in that space is our power and our freedom. And when we're in trance, we're continually living in stimulus and response,

cause and reaction. But the power of this practice is that we can actually break the chain, break the old habits that keep us in a limited sense of self, we can pause and wake up out of that habitual cause and effect to make the choice for presence and for love. And that's what actually gives us the potential of discovering truly who we are.

So that's a real nutshell. And I'm sorry if I didn't do justice to it, but thank you for bringing in the hall. I appreciate that. Yeah. So a final word is that you're entering into the thick and this is the time when there can be a real continuity of attention. You can start bringing all the things where we used to think you were on your way

right into this is it, whether it's turning a doork, or lifting a fork, or washing your face. So include it all and have many, many moments of presence. Thank you. For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.