Tara Brach - Listening to Our Life

Episode Date: February 10, 2010

2008-08-27 Listening in a full and open way allows us to come home to our natural state--awake, vast awareness. In an immediate way, a listening attention dissolves the tangles of fear and craving that obscure our wholeness. This class includes both a talk and guided meditations on deep listening to our inner experience and with others.

I want to introduce you tonight to a very dear friend who I've known for a very long time who is not only a dear friend but also a fabulous musician and a yoga teacher and a healer and she's going to be playing some flute at our closing meditation. So Akaldev, welcome here and thank you so much for being here. Acaldev Sharon is with us tonight. Thank you. So if you reflect in your life on the moments that were real epiphanies, the moments that were really special or meaningful, that really stand out for you and just sense what inside you made that moment possible.

So moments, and you might even sense in this last week or two, if there was any moment that really was just a compelling moment, One of those, like if you looked back at the end of your life, okay, so this was a meaningful moment. And you ask yourself, really, what made it possible? It might have been a moment of tenderness or awe, liveliness. The common denominator for us in these moments, or we're not just on our way somewhere, or leaving somewhere, but really the moments, moments is a quality of attention. There's a quality of presence where in no way are we

trying to make something different. There's no resistance. There's in some way in those moments we're at home. It's we're just fully here for them. In contrast, have you noticed how many moments we really are on our way to a future? That there's a, a, a, a, sense, an idea that we're living in of where we are now and where we're going and we're on our way to that. I mean, Rumi says there is no future. One that can recognize that is enlightened. He doesn't use the word enlightened. That's Buddhist, but it's the idea of enlightened. How many moments in some way our life is contained by this notion that we're going somewhere. and in any moment like that what's compromised is the fullness of what's right here

often we're trying to do something to check something off a list to make something happen I got an email from my brother this week who's in the habit of leaning forward because this is what it is we're kind of leaning forward most of the time he said Tara he calls me actually Torah just so he's a little different he says I feel like I'm finally learning to set goals that are manageable. I can't try to change every problem in the universe. All I'm trying to do is change the world. And even with this more modest ambition, just a part of the world. This planet is made up of liquid, gas, and solids. I've decided that for now I'd just like to concern myself with the solid part and let others handle the rest. In the spirit of the 12-step

programs, I've decided to take things one world at a time. I don't know how we'd feel if you knew I shared this, but, you know, it's part of our awakening heart to serve this world and to act and to create and to participate. As we know, if it's from a place of striving, if it's from that selfing of I am doing such and such, if it's from guilt, if it's from anger, what happens is in a way we end up creating more ignorance, more confusion, more violence. So the spiritual path is really one of getting the knack of arriving so fully here. And when I say fully here, that there's not a future, that this moment matters as much as any moment in the whole universe.

It's not like this is on its way somewhere. getting the knack of that radical presence so that our words and our actions flow from that. The Buddha said basically that the real suffering is ignorance, which means ignoring this wholeness, this presence. And in some way,

living in a story of something smaller, a small self trying to get somewhere, a small self that is having an argument with how it is because it's not okay as it is. that wants it different. That's it. I mean, that's the essence of this suffering. So the spiritual path is really one of

coming back home over and over again to really trust and inhabit this presence so that we can live engaged from that spirit of presence. So tonight I want to talk about a key element in this arriving that really is what I call a listening presence. And I try to talk about listening,

and I'll talk about it both inner listening and listening to each other. I try to do it regularly because for me, getting more intentional about listening has been profoundly kind of woken me from some trance of the doer, this doing self.

It hasn't let me be less active, but less leaning forward. So a listening presence. And I gave this talk here about eight months ago and people send me things after I give talks often. So I want to read you what somebody sent me. This is in the old days out west, two cowboys, and there was a very admired, locally known scout.

So these two cowboys, come upon this scout who's lying on his stomach with his ear to the ground. And one of the cowboys stopped and says the other, you see that guy? His name is Skeeter McGee. Yeah, says the other cowboy. Look, says the first one, he's listening to the ground. He can hear things for miles in any direction. Just then, Skeeter looks up.

Covered wagon, he says, about two miles away. Have two horses, one brown, one white. Man, woman, child, household effects in the wagon. wagon. Incredible, says the cowwardoist friend. Skeeter knows how far away they are, how many horses, what color they are, who's in the wagon, and what is in the wagon? Amazing. Skeeter looks up and says, ran over me about a half hour ago. So it's a much honored thing, this capacity to listen, to hear. Rumi talks about it too, but in a little bit way of a way, I think you'll probably enjoy more.

basically in the moments of genuine listening when we're really listening when there's that profound receptivity we relax back into what you might say is our natural state when we're really listening that doing self begins to kind of melt

and there's space so have you noticed that when you really listen that you can begin to become more spacious. This is called Be Melting Snow by Rumi, and I'm just going to read you a piece of it. Lo, I am with you always, means when you look for God, God is in the look of your eyes,

in the thought of looking nearer to you than yourself are things that have happened to you. There's no need to go outside. Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself. A white flower grows in the quietness. Let your tongue become that flower. Be melting snow.

Wash yourself of yourself. A white flower grows in the quietness. let your tongue become that flower so in a way Rumi is giving the three main elements of the path that God is in the look of your eyes

that we have this habit of longing for something and thinking it's outside us and that which is longing that love itself it's right here what we're looking for is who we are it's the presence that's right here So he starts with

it's not outside and then be melting snow be that receptive presence that listening presence so we wash away the doing and just be in this spacious presence and then he says there's a white flower in that quietness

it just grows out of that quietness in other words our life is expressed from that silence let your tongue be that flower. So let's look more closely at a listening presence, what it means, or listen more deeply to it, that our capacity to listen is directly related to our capacity for wisdom and love.

Directly related. If we can listen without interfering in any way, we can know what's here. If we can listen to someone, we can know who they are, they can become included in our awareness, we can feel our connection, our love. What makes it so difficult, and I think this is what's important, because if I did a survey and said, how many of you find it really challenging, how many of you notice how often you're really not listening. One is that it requires being right here, not being preoccupied with what's next.

William James describes this we're in this kind of ceaseless frenzy. This was a long time ago that he described this and it's still true now, that we're in this ceaseless frenzy, always thinking we should be doing something other than what we're involved with right now. So we're in a conversation with someone. most of the time there's some sense of what else we're supposed to be doing or what we're on our way to

so it requires arriving right here it also requires not controlling and that's a really big deal you can't listen and rehearse or manage or control or judge or do anything else at the same time it's rare that we put all that down

so many of our moments whatever we're hearing we're immediately judging, evaluating in some way sensing what it means to us developing our reaction to in a deep way this insecure self needs to assert itself it needs to defend itself

it needs to prove itself and so most of the time when we're in dialogue rather than that openness that just lets it flow through us that's a space of awakeness there's a contraction of selfing that in some ways

trying to defend or control what's happening I mean how often do we really let go of that selfing and listen with no defense some of you might remember this I love this Sylvia cartoons I'll share because it's so much fun

but a woman comes to complain and Sylvia is in the guise of a fortune teller and she says you know my husband won't talk about his feelings and Sylvie says well what's new but she says all right all right I'll answer so what's happening and then Sylvia goes into this trance and she says my guide's about to speak and then she says by the end of 2007 men are going to begin to talk about their feelings women all over America will be sorry within minutes so we know that as soon as what we're hearing is not what we want to hear, we stop listening, right?

We shut down. We don't want to take in what we don't want to hear. And we also know that because of that insecurity, there's a real drive to prove we're right. You know that saying that the world is divided into those who think they're right, and that's the whole saying, you know.

So there's that going on. I love this story about a little girl talking to her teacher about whales. and the teacher said it's physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because even though it has a large, it's a large mammal, its throat is very small. The little girl states that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Irritated the teacher reiterates that a whale couldn't possibly swallow a human. It's physically impossible.

The little girl said, well, when I get to heaven, I will ask Jonah. The teacher asked, well, what if Jonah went to hell? The little girl replied, then you ask him. So I'm playing around a little, but it's actually when you look at your own process of listening, I mean, it's very clear to us that unless it's absolutely non-threatening, or unless there's zero opportunity to prove or fix or something, it's just not so common to have that openness. And mostly we do a lot of interpreting.

It's our minds are busy making our meanings. I remember I saw one cartoon of Henry the 8th and one of his wives, this was done at a mediation conference. So it's got a mediator saying, you say off with her head, but what I hear is I feel neglected. So part of this kind of investigation into listening is just being a little light about it because every one of us has the conditioning to, in a very deep way, want to assert our existence. And so it's very hard just to sit back and just receive. And then on many, many levels, this need, not just to say we're alive,

but here's what I think here's I'm right, you're wrong or interpret. Just to watch that. Just to watch that. What I've found in working with people is that we listen inwardly. We listen to our inner life much in the way that we were listened to.

when we're very young. So this is the psychological strata. And it's an important one. That if for most of us, because our parents had their share of fear and craving and so on, there wasn't so much presence.

They wanted us to be a certain way, so they listened for that or they tried to mold that. And so in a way, we listen to our inner life in a similar way. that often the places within that really need a healing attention, our loneliness or our jealousy, our fear, our grief.

Often, if we weren't attended to with a deep and a courageous presence, we don't know how to offer that inwardly. So instead, we judge the strong emotions that come up, Are we try to manage them, fix them, get rid of them? Are we ignore them? But being able to have a strong feeling and just pause and say, oh, okay, what does it really mean to listen? To listen with that kind of open, kind, allowing presence?

That's an important inquiry. So there's an understanding that I've kind of come to about healing and it's got a metaphor to it, which is that our inner life is, there's a kind of a sense like this fountain of aliveness and that when there's emotions and feelings and parts of our life that haven't been attended to, in other words, hurts, wounds, and they haven't been intended to, they start clogging up that fountain. So rather than a kind of creative flow and expression of the divine through this form, there's a kind of clogging up that goes on, and that creativity is not so free to move.

And that healing happens when we bring a listening attention to the parts that have really been not seen, not heard, not felt. That begins to dissolve that. the tangles and free up that fountain. So it requires interest. There's a question that I ask people a lot when I'm working with them, which is really what wants attention, what wants to be listened to or felt. And because we're rolling into the future and usually in a reactive place, we're usually in that doing self, we don't usually pause and ask that kind of question that we, in our deepest hearts would love someone to ask us, what is it inside right now that really wants attention?

So there's a process in spiritual life of learning to listen and we do it in our meditation. Every time we sit down and pause and there's that kind of inner guidance that says, okay, let me just let go through my body, let me feel my breath, and then let the senses be awakened, just let this life happen, just listen to this life. So we learn to do that a bit and then the next step of untangling the tangles is when the intense and difficult and painful emotions come up, can we still listen? Rather than going into trying to manipulate them or fix them or ignore them, as is our conditioning, can we stay? Listening takes staying. Just take a moment right now if you will to, if you haven't, close your eyes.

and in this pause just sense yourself arriving here and you feel the breath and relax with the breath and sense that melting snow, just be melting snow and just let the sounds wash through you just as the warmth

of the sun will melt the snow just feel that you can receive this wash of sounds, close in sounds like these words and the sounds right outside and the more distilled and sounds. Just relax and notice and let sounds penetrate,

flow into you without defense. Notice as you soften and open to the sounds, that the barrier of outside and inside is not so distinct, and feel the space that's here. It's not limited to skin and bones, the environment of sound, but sound, sensations, all included in this vast listening attention.

Receptivity, you might check in and ask if there's anything going on inside you that wants attention. It might be some difficult situation in your life, something physically uncomfortable. So you can begin to explore including what's difficult in a listening presence. if there's something difficult going on in your life with another person, some addictive struggle, struggle with health, you might sense how have you been relating thus far? Have you offered a listening attention?

Or have you wished for it to be different, tried to fix it, deny it, the learned ways of not attending? For now, offer an intimate listening attention. sense what's in your heart that most wants to be included in awareness. Right now, if there's some real vulnerability, you might even experiment and say, send a message to yourself, I care, I want to listen, I want to be with this. Whatever is here is okay.

That kind of unconditional listening presence. If it's hard to really listen and hold yourself that way, imagine someone you love could be a pet or a person or a Buddha or Kuan Yin listening, absolutely listening kindly to what's here. Sense the space, the healing space of simply listening inwardly so that no matter what's going on now, maybe there's not a difficulty,

but sense the preciousness of offering a listening presence to your own heart a listening attention is an expression of love just be that listening presence so that whatever's going on right now confusion or boredom peace

fear it doesn't matter what the content is it's included like the distant sounds and the close sounds, it's included. Let it wash through you. Sense who you are when there's a listening presence that's totally receptive.

Who are you? Angelus Celestius says, God whose love and joy are present everywhere can't come to visit you unless you aren't there. Can you sense the emptiness and vastness of this listening present?

And when you feel it energetically in the heart, can you sense how it's suffused with love, this listening presence? So continuing in this quality of heerness, just open your eyes. So you can sense even as you keep listening how that receptivity lets you take in visual sound, that the receptivity of listening lets you listen to and feel, sensation right now in a receptive way, that there's a space that opens up, which is the space of awareness when you're listening. And there's a real healing quality to it. As I mentioned with this fountain that when we listen inwardly and really listen, what is tangled begins to

dissolve and what wants to express begins to express. Now often when we're listening inwardly, What first gets expressed are the layers of unresolved, unfelt, unattended to material. So what might happen when you first start listening inwardly is you can feel the contractions or the fears or the conflicts. Keep listening. That's the trick. Stay. Keep listening without any reaction.

What happens is that unfolds and then the next thing unfolds until you begin to discover that you're the space of presence it's happening in. In other words, you're no longer the self that's afraid or jealous or angry. You're the listening space that has a room. And there's a tremendous freedom and healing in that. When you begin to sense you are that presence, that listening presence is what you are. Then that fountain can flow freely. It becomes a very pure expression of spirit. That white flower grows from the silence.

Now, thus far I've been talking about how we bring a listening presence inward. In the same way, when you listen to someone else, you offer a field of healing. You know what it's like when you are talking to someone

and if you bring up something vulnerable and they try to say, oh yeah, that happened to me, are they try to tell you what to do or fix? There's like that shy place in you kind of tightens. But if your vulnerability is met in this real space of caring presence, just listening, there's something freeing. It's almost like some of the tangles in your fountain begin to dissolve,

and there's just more that starts flowing. That's what this listening presence does. Over the years, people have told me many, many stories about the magic of listening. And I share different ones here, and I wanted to share one tonight that, a friend of mine told me a number of years ago. This was a woman who grew up with a mother who was very, very well known. She was a novelist, and she was wealthy. That doesn't usually go together.

She was successful. She was a brilliant woman, and she was also very narcissistic. So she was the center of her universe and everybody else is, according to her. So you'd be with her and friends would come over and anybody with her and she always would hold forth and she had very little interest. She never asked questions about other people that just was not interesting. She was very interested in what she had to say and she happened to be a brilliant woman

and fascinating. So except for the people that really knew her, found that they really had a resistance to listening because. fascinating stories only go so far. The real interest in our time with each other is not being entertained or wowed. It's in connection, and that didn't happen. So for my friend, and she and her sister

would compare notes, her older sister was so estranged that the only time she'd be with her mother was when she had to go on holidays. my friend, the younger sister, was more in touch and their stepfather, but everybody was somewhat estranged from this woman. So mostly that nobody wanted to be a captive audience when they avoided her in some ways. So my friend was a therapist, she did all the training,

so many of us do an act of listening and NVC, nonviolent communication, a lot of other things, and also a Dharma practitioner, you know, Buddhist practice. And so listening became, as for many of us, she got it. That to be free, we really need to be able to step out of our agenda and rest in that space that can really listen inwardly and outwardly. Of course, as any of you know, the biggest challenge is always to do it with your mother or your father. But that was really her intention. and because she was really discovering the secret,

which is when you can listen to someone with no impatience, you know, with no agenda, with no resistance, so that no matter what's coming out, you're just not resisting it, when you can listen with no resistance, what will happen is that person will first do their habitual thing. In other words, they're clogged fountain, will spurt and spurt and spurt, you know, know the way it does. But if you keep listening, really offer that space, what happens is some of those clogged things start dissolving and they start returning to their natural state.

Listening returns us to our natural state and the other too. And so gradually the more pure essence of who they are flows through that fountain. That's the gift if we can listen like that. So after a lot of practice in her life, she decided to go at it with her mom. I'm saying go at it. It sounds very militant, but she was very intentional. And so for a number of weeks in a row, she had different reasons to stop by. They lived in the same area. And she just listened.

And what would happen is that her mother could go on for a long time. But gradually, because this friend was not resisting. like there was nothing in her that was resisting and she would notice the resistances come up she would notice that first she'd feel judgment and that she'd listen inwardly to that and that would dissolve and then she'd feel impatient like this is going on but then because she was being mindful that would dissolve

and she'd feel the deepest thing was unimportant you know when somebody's really narcissistic you begin to feel you're not just a satellite you're just the most insignificant marginal thing in the universe. Well, she'd feel this unimportance and of course that was very deep because if you grow up with somebody that's narcissistic, it's a very deep sense that you don't matter. So she would just listen inwardly to that and start creating space for that and stay with her mom. The third week, her mother had done this normal thing, but she started calming down. It wasn't the stories,

no this, and that. It just wasn't so much. And she started sharing. with my friend how a strain she felt from the family she started saying how she felt alone and unappreciated and like nobody really wanted to spend time with her her friends wanted to spend time with her everybody else in the world thought she was terrific

but how come you know so my friend with all the sincerity in the world just looked at her and said mom you don't know how to listen and she froze but not defend it because

there had been enough hours of sincere listening that there had been some trust in that space. So she started saying, tell me what you mean. And then they started really talking. They started really talking about how it is when somebody doesn't listen to you, they don't feel like you care about them.

And if they don't listen, you don't feel important, or respected, or meaningful. So it's an unpleasant experience. She started sharing that. She shared really how when she had learned more about listening, she started having more intimacy.

Anyway, as it came out, I mean, I don't want to make this too long a story, but this woman really, my friend described that her mother looked at her with a sense of sorrow and understanding that she said she'll never forget. Did something pierced her because she got it. She was not a dumb person,

but she just had been so inside her world, she didn't know what it was like not to have others listen in that way. Or she knew it, but she didn't understand what was going on. She started to listen. She learned. I don't know how far along she is, but the oldest daughter said that for the first time in her life with her mother, she said she felt like she was a real person.

not just an object in her mother's environment. And with their stepdad, they started doing things they hadn't done for years since they've been married, taking walks, having long dinners. There was something going on between them, not just a one-way thing. This is Brenda Veland, who is wonderful on this topic. She says, how to listen? It's harder than you think. I don't believe in critical listening.

for that only puts a person in a straight jacket of hesitancy. He begins to choose his word solemnly or primly. His little inner fountain is only a spring. It dries up. Critical listeners dry you up. But creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly yourself, even at your very worst, even bad temper. Do you mentally say to yourself as you express these things when you're in bad temper?

Hooray, good for you. And they're laughing right there with you and just delighted that any manifestation of yourself bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-tempered, it does not mean you are always so. They don't love you just when you are nice. They love all of you. And this is the point.

To listen means that you intuit the wholeness of a being, and you hold an honor and cherish the wholeness and really appreciate the expressions that come and go, and know in that space you offer, the kind of healing that's possible is that person will relax back into their wholeness, just in your presence. This is really a description of the Bodhisattva path, the path of an awakening being,

this capacity, this listening presence. The Bodhisattva Kwanian has been described as the listener of the listener of suffering, which means embodying listening, not with the ears, but listening with the pores of the body, with the hairs on the head, with the feet listening and fully becoming the pains of the world. So I'll read you that Kuanian takes a vow to bring an end to all suffering, but she was put in the position of listening to all this stuff and having no answers. Okay, this is the mythology. So this is Kuanian's vow.

to listen to all the suffering but not have an answer. Because that's what it's like when we're listening. We're not coming up with an answer. So do you know what happened? She burst into millions of pieces. Then all those pieces came back together and now we have a thousand armed Kuan Yin. Each hand holds a different implement.

One a pen, one has a sword, one has a hoe, one has a flower. Now Kuan Yin is doing the work. She's listening, still having no answers. but the activity is happening in any sphere she belongs to or appears in. So in other words, we respond to whatever's going on appropriately, whatever it is, without an answer, but just because there's that listening presence.

That presence taps us into the universe. It's the source of our wisdom and the source of our love. Let me ask you to reflect again. Just another reflection, because we brought the listening attention inwardly just to practice a little, like the bodhisattva, bringing our attention to another person. So in this pause, sense that this Bodhisattva, Kwanian, the bodhisattva of compassion, is really that loving, listening presence, that's really your essence. So you're going to embody that right now, that listening.

Allow yourself to bring to mind someone in your life that's facing difficulty. Someone in your life that's disappointed, afraid, struggling. The sense that he or she's right here. And sense that you could really listen right now to what's going on for this person. You might sense what the person's telling you about what's going on so that you're listening to the words. You're listening to the heart of this person.

the way we let sounds wash through us. Let the experience of this being wash through you. Receptive. Including him or her fully in your heart. Listening. Imagine, sense that fountain in this being that might be tight or clogged, that the loosening that's possible in your presence.

That as they sense your love and the space you offer, what's possible? Just imagine that. Just sense who you are when you're really offering that listening presence. We're going to continue this as a meditation on sound and in a few moments a meditation on the sounds of the flutes. So just let your attention go inward. Stay inward.

There's no need to go outside. The melting snow. Listening is a pathway to intimacy. with our inner life, with others. The conditioning is to tighten up and get into the identity of a self-doing things. And then all we do is remember and say, oh, here again, come back here.

So even in this moment, pause and remember right here and see if whatever is going on in your body if it's possible to relax just a little bit more in this moment. Relax a little more in this moment, the shoulders, the belly, and let the sounds wash through you, listening to the sounds and listening to the silence. Be that silence, that vast stillness that sounds happen in and are known by, rest in that beingness and listen. Wash yourself of yourself.

A white flower grows in the world. the quietness. Let your tongue become that flower. Namaste. And blessings teach. Thank you. The teaching you have received has been freely offered.

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