Tara Brach - Living with Courageous Presence

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Living with Courageous Presence - The essence of courage is to willingly feel our vulnerability; this is what allows us to respond to life with an undefended, wise heart. This talk explores the ways we resist opening to vulnerability, and three key steps in cultivating a courageous presence.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. I'd like to explore in this particular talk what it means to live from a courageous presence, how to get in touch with our courage and live from it. And traditionally, as many of you know, courage has been linked to our response when we're facing great external danger. And in one story there's a great sea captain who's walking on his ship when a soldier

rushes to him and exclaims that an enemy ship is approaching and captain replies very calmly, go get my red shirt. So a soldier does it and the enemy ship comes and there's these heavy rounds of fire exchanged and finally they win. And the soldier says, congratulations, sir, but why the red shirt? And the captain replies, well, if I got injured, my blood shouldn't be seen

as I wouldn't want my men to lose hope. Just then another soldier runs up and says, sir, we just spotted another 20 enemy ships. And the captain calmly replies, go bring my yellow pants. So, courage. I'm not sure if that was the best way to start this talk or not, but you got the idea. So if we look at True Courage, to me, one of the most wonderful teaching stories comes from the songs of Milarepa.

And if you haven't heard about Melarepa, he was a Buddhist Tibetan master from the 11th century. And he was very famous in the lore because he was born to a prosperous family. and his father died and then the family was deprived of all their money and their wealth by an aunt and an uncle who were sort of conniving. And Milarepa's mother was completely furious. And so she basically urged him to study sorcery and take revenge, which he did. And he, at his hand, many, many people died, taking revenge. It just kind of rippled out.

So later in his life he had... deep regrets and he went into spiritual life and he found a teacher and his teacher put him through all sorts of wild trials in order to prove himself and finally accepted him as a student. And Milarepa then spent years and years and years in these caves studying and contemplating and discovering really the nature of reality, how to heal and how to wake up. So these songs are based on his discoveries. And so the arc of his life is he's starting completely hijacked by primitive survival brain and acting that out and then the arc of the life is that he, through spiritual practices,

discovered a way to work with his inner life in a way that could free him. And the main metaphor is working with his inner demons. The way it's described is he began. a sense that his mind was, the contents of his mind were like visible projections and his inner demons of aggression and lust and passion and aversion that would appear to him in these different projections as monsters and so on. And in the face of them, rather than being overwhelmed, Milarepa would sing out cheerfully, it's wonderful you came today, you should come again tomorrow, from time to time we

should converse. So that was his response to seeing the demons of his mind. And what he had learned through his years of practice was that if you fight the demons or you run away from the demons or you deny the demons that just feeds them. So, you know, this is why he would just invite them to converse. So in one story, his cave became absolutely wall-to-wall filled with demons. And he, you know, invited them to converse and he made tea and most of them kind of faded out but some really gnarly ones stayed. One real domineering demon in the crowd was really challenging Milarepa. And that's when he made his most brilliant move and his brilliant move was he put his head

in the demon's mouth. And at that moment of full surrender the demon disappeared, vanished. and all that remained was the light of pure awareness. So he surrendered. He put his head in the demon's mouth, the demons dissolved and it's the way it's described and this is Pema Chodron's quote says when the resistance is gone the demons are gone. Okay? We could probably go home now because that's really the that's like the center of it.

When the resistance is gone the demons are gone. I think that courage is a really, really useful word to contemplate. What does it mean? I found in my own life that, well I think of it in an evolutionary way that it's a key capacity in our evolution that are conditioning and our reflex when there's vulnerability, when the demons arise, our conditioning is to do anything but put our head in the way. the mouth of the demon. Our conditioning is to avoid and fight and defend and whatever.

And yet evolution has given us this capacity in our brain, this self-reflexive capacity to see what's going on and the capacity of compassion, we're able to, instead of resisting open, when we sense vulnerability instead of running away, we can actually learn to stay. So that to me is the essence of courage. It's really manifesting this evolutionary capacity to stay when there's vulnerability, to go ahead and feel what's right here. I pose to myself a question a lot and it's, what does it mean to be courageous in this

moment? And you might try it on. it can be for any moment? What does it mean in this moment to be courageous? And for me, when I pose that, what happens is a kind of getting real process where the kind of the layers, whatever layers I've been unconsciously holding on to soften. Mark Nippo, the poet called it taking the exquisite risk because there's this will and a little bit of a little bit of a little, this to be present and it's exquisite because it's vital and vibrant and alive and gorgeous in that sense and it's a risk because we're so used to having our defenses.

So on Facebook I asked people to respond to that question for themselves. I said you know what does it mean to you to be courageous in this moment? person, surrendering to what is and letting go of plans, expectations, and control. Another, courage to love my imperfect self. Another, to give and receive love takes great courage for me. Having courage in this moment for me is to accept the limitations and pain of my current situation to feel these things and hold these feelings. and another that's similar, listen to this.

Courage by admitting to myself that I'm deeply unhappy and not to tell myself snap out of it already as if I could. Just read a couple more. Courage to trust in the perfection of all no matter what's showing up. Right now it means to be open to the unknown and trusting I will be enough. And another person writes, not giving up on myself trying again and again and again to another, it's the courage to be completely open and transparent admitting faults and speaking shame to promote healing.

The demons are universal. Every one of us has a perception that we're in some way a separate organism and we're wanting to hold on to what can help us to thrive and we want to push away what can't. And when we have unmet needs, the demons appear, we react. They're universal, core wants, core fears. And what we end up doing, and this is kind of the ego mechanism we all have it, is that out of these, the core vulnerabilities of our life we create what I sometimes think of as a space suit. It's like life is difficult so we're trying to get through a difficult environment

and we have our defenses and our ways of presenting and the ways we try to prove ourselves and the ways we judge and we're just trying to navigate and trying to keep control of things. And it's not our fault. This is just the way we're designed to do it. And we get identified with the spacesuit. We get identified with the demons and the different expressions. You know, I'm the wanting self, the addicted self, the craving self, the angry self. And what is sad is that when we're identified with the space suit, we lose touch with who's looking through. Right now that consciousness in you that's listening, that's taking in light and form, that

awake awareness. We lose touch. with our awareness and our heart and we get identified with that kind of ego space suit. And so if we blame ourselves for the way we react to the demons, if we blame ourselves for resisting or for our self-doubt or for our insecurity, for our control strategies, that's just another demon that we've invited to the party. Does that make sense? It doesn't help to fight.

We can have demons like those repeating thoughts in our mind that we know are causing a lot of trouble for us, you know, the self-judgments or the self-aversion or the judging others, but if we try to then blast them out of our mind, what happens? If we tell ourselves we're bad for it, what happens? One friend who was describing his own process, he said his first teacher was his father. And he describes how his father was teaching him to play golf and his father would have him standing there. It's hard for me to show you right now but he'd say okay you got to straighten your arm

and you got to keep your hands low and use your body for power and your wrist as a hinge and you keep your head behind the ball and so Steven my friend is trying really hard but he can't get and he's got all these ideas in his mind I'm not going to be able to do it right and I'm going to blow it and his father said look it's a mental game. game, you've got to clear your mind." And so my friend says, yeah, but how do you do that? And his father demonstrates, he raises the club high behind him and as he's swinging goes, son of the bitch, cleared his mind.

We can fight the demons and we can do all these strategies of control and we know they come back. Again, I'm not sure I gave you the best illustration. So cultivating a courageous presence means first identifying our resistance to the demons. And you might sense for yourself what your resistance is. We can see it on a societal level, the way that instead of a society contacting where the suffering is, we can see how we avoid it by pursuing more possessions or money or achievements or by it's the overconsuming or the numbing or creating

the unreal others into enemies, attacking, dehumanizing. We sense how the demons in the cave are for society but in our personal life. How do we do it? How do we resist feeling vulnerability? How did you move through today and maybe, maybe you may be? Maybe unknowingly keep moving away from vulnerability. For many of us we do it just by staying really busy and the more we can get done the more we feel like we're putting up something between us and just feeling vulnerability.

And when we're with others we might fill in the blanks talking a lot. We might try to prove ourselves worthy or get others to rely on us. get some approval. We know how we distract a lot, you know, how many of us stay away from that sense of vulnerability by getting lost online and are by obsessive thinking. I saw, somebody wrote this, I forgot my cell phone when I went to the toilet yesterday. We have 245 tiles. I thought it was kind of cute, but you know. There's a sign in the desert in one way, one direction, this is way, way deep in the desert, one direction is pointing to water and the others towards the internet.

And you can see all the footsteps are veering you know where, right? So we distract ourselves. But the main space suit strategy, the main way that we avoid vulnerability, the main way that we resist the demons is judgment. We resist them by judging ourselves and judging others. We are constantly evaluating how things are going and putting a good, bad, right, wrong. And the main thing we're evaluating is how you're doing or how I'm doing. And it creates separation and it fuels the demons.

So how do we put our head in the mouth? How do we start to open to the vulnerability? that's here and really have that courageous presence, take that exquisite risk. And there's three elements I'd like to walk through with you on how we cultivate a courageous presence when the vulnerability is there but we're covering it up. And the first step is to notice what's happening in the present moment, notice what's stirred up, you know, fear, anger, whatever it is, and simply let it be there without adding on judgment or pushing it away.

This is a really big element. We are getting triggered all the time. But what we do is we tumble into our resistances. We go and eat something or we go online or we obsess. Stop, pause and let it be. Just create a pause. I want to say something about this power of allowing. In the acronym reign, this is we've recognized and we're allowing.

And this is from the Indian philosopher Krishna Merti. And he was trying to convey for decades what some felt were beyond words. But the later part of his life he surprised audiences. He said, do you want to know my secret? And of course, they got very alert because they had been listening for decades and really wanted to find out, you know, wanted to grasp his teaching. So he said, okay, so this is my secret. I don't mind what happens, okay, so you can get triggered, demons, but I don't mind them.

It's like Milarepa saying, okay, you're here, let's converse. I don't mind what happens. So this beginning of getting triggered and just staying, letting it be there is the beginning of freedom. That's the grounds of a courageous presence. The second step is to be willing to directly contact and feel the vulnerability. So we're not only sensing okay it's here and letting it be there but we're actually willing to feel.

And at my retreats when I sit for a handful of days, I always seem to loop back to the same realizations over and over again. And I remember at our New Year's retreat somewhere in the middle, it was like one of those, you know, all of a lot of light about it. It was like, oh, it's just about really being willing to feel what's here. The words willing to feel. So the second part is really contacting the vulnerability with interest and most of all with kindness.

The third is then being able to respond from our wisdom, from our heart. But you can't get to the third unless you've let it be there and contacted it with love. So perhaps one of the more, just the template for it you can see bad, you can see bad, you is with addiction, with addictive behaviors, the ones that we know harm us and they could range from using drugs or overeating sugars or angry blaming behavior or self-blame, any of those are addictive behaviors. And what's the process of courageous presence? Well we start by saying, acknowledging, okay, it's here.

This addiction is playing out. Okay, we start by just acknowledging it. Don't mind that it's there, it doesn't mean that we like it, it means we're just letting it be there. The second, with a compassionate presence we start feeling the vulnerability that's driving the addiction. We would not be eating so much sugar or blaming or attacking ourselves if there wasn't some real deep vulnerability, some unmet need.

So that's step two. We bring compassion to what's there. And then step three, then we try to act with courage which may mean choosing not to engage with that behavior. Choosing again and again to be with the vulnerability not fuel the addiction. By the way, this process of cultivating courage is best done with each other. It's really, really helpful to share what we're working with, share our vulnerabilities, be support teams because, and this is really important, we don't take it as personally.

We don't think of it as my addiction or my demon. It's just the demons that we all experience and that takes away that layer of shame makes it a lot easier to work with. Okay, that's one example. I'd like to give you another example of working with the demons and this one is, what happens when the demons come up when we feel judged? Does anyone here not know what it's like to feel judged? You don't even have to raise your hand.

We all know that one and judgment's interesting because when we feel judged and you remember the space suit, well there's a kind of... deflation that comes and our space suit self will do anything to regain its position. It doesn't matter whether there's truth or not truth in the judgment. We immediately have a flinch response of doing whatever we can to repair that diminished sense of self. It goes very deep our sense of self. So we'll do self-justification, defense or blaming the other person, or blame the other person,

are blaming ourselves, anything but just feel the vulnerability of, okay, judged, doesn't feel good. I'm going to invite you to, in a few minutes, examine how we can develop that courageous presence when we feel judged, because I find it so useful in my own life. And I'll share with you a bit about some recent cave time, because I think of it as cave time. It's like, okay, the demons are up, let's have some cave time and do these steps. And as many of you know, I am a senior teacher and founded the Insight Meditation community here in Washington probably 20 years ago, 22 years ago. And there's been many changes over the years, but some really big ones about four or five

years ago started occurring where I became very, very busy elsewhere and I started withdrawing from some of the areas that I was involved with with our local community here, areas where I had formerly provided a lot of leadership. And in that transition, my communication wasn't so great. I wasn't always so clear about well I'm not doing this anymore and I'm going to do that. It was kind of, I wasn't really myself aware of the shifts that were happening in some ways. But about a year ago I started getting some very clear, strong, aversive feedback that I had created hurt and confusion and mistrust and their other words in my way of pulling back from so much

involvement as a leader. mixed in with founder syndrome and so on. So, okay, the demons, you know, I was being criticized and told in some way I had done something wrong. So for me there was, I could feel the tension and the resistance, like how much I did not want to hang out with that feeling of something's wrong in here. So it became very conscious cave time where I really, sorry, I just say to myself, okay, you're here, let's converse to the demons. And the feeling was really one of being diminished. I could feel that space suit deflation, I'm wrong, I'm bad.

And I could watch my mind coming up with self-justifications over, round after round, of wanting to justify and noticing how others maybe weren't telling me about what I was doing wrong in the best way. And so I kept watching that and having to again and again, I sometimes use the language, meet my edge and soften, meet that edge of feeling wrong and then soften and okay, just feel it, just feel it. And letting the vulnerability in there be all that it was of feeling my imperfection, that I could be hurtful, feeling hurt that other people found me hurtful, the whole thing.

And the more I got into the process, the more it required a very, very deep compassion with myself, with the vulnerable place that felt bad, that she had blown it, she didn't do something right. And what I found was that the more I just let that all be there, the more the space opened up where it was in a very deep way okay. It was like there was room for being imperfect. There was room for the whole process. There was a great tenderness around the whole process.

And so much so that I was just very in touch with my intention, my deep intention which really is to keep waking up and serve waking up, hearts, all of us waking up together. And so there was this sense of by opening to the imperfection I deepened my... real trust for all of us that were the process we were in. And I found that, and now this is step three, how we respond, I started asking people for their input rather than being the victim that was getting, I said, tell me what I'm missing, what is my effect on people in this? You know, I started asking for input and then have become more recently involved with different meetings where there's a lot of acknowledging of hurts, not only the hurts from me,

but it hurts in all different directions and a real effort to understand each other and to seek the healing. So I share this because it wasn't easy to be in the cave and it's not over with. It's not like this happened 30 years ago and I'm telling you a story and I'm out in the clear, You know, this is, and yet it's such a liberating process to how judgment come. And it can be judgment, it doesn't matter whether it's judgment where there really is an imperfection it's being highlighted or maybe you're misunderstood either way to watch the self-struggling to hold its position and to just let ourselves contact out. that hurts and the kindness with it.

That courage to be with the vulnerability is what lets us then respond from, really, from our intelligence and our heart. Veronica Tugaleva writes, emotional pain cannot kill you, but running from it can. Allow, embrace, let yourself feel, let yourself heal. So let's let this be a moment for your reflection. I'd like to invite you to take a moment to close your eyes,

let the attention go within, taking a few moments to arrive right here, to feel your breath and feel your body breathing. And if you haven't already, bring to mind a time where criticism came your way, where you felt judged. And it might be in the past or it might be something going on right now, where you feel judged by another.

And as you let that situation and that person come into focus and it may be something from way back, maybe you don't have something currently going on, but something that might have some sting, letting yourself remind yourself of perhaps what somebody might have said, what the message to you was of how something's wrong with you. And notice, this is cave time, notice the demons that come up whether it's feeling angry or hurt, whether turning on yourself viciously, defensive, rationalizing, judging, judging them back, just to be aware of the demons.

I feel your intention right now to really call on your most courageous and awake, evolved self so that you can pause, like Melarap in the cave, just pause and sense the demons there and just let them be. In a way you can step out of all the thoughts about the situation. Just allow it to be there. You don't have to push anything away and if there's a feeling of deflation to let that be there. You might sense under any anger, under any defensiveness, just to sense the vulnerability that's there because the step two is to contact it. Emotional pain cannot kill you but running away from it can.

Allow. Embrace, let yourself feel. Let yourself heal. It's feeling the vulnerability and if it helps you to put your hand on your heart I do that a lot. Miloraba puts his head in the mouth of the demon I put my hand on my heart

but it's the same contacting fully letting it be there. This is courageous presence with the demon feeling right into the vulnerability and breathing with it letting the feelings of being deficient or imperfect or hurt, let them be there and just breathe. Who you are is bigger than those feelings.

This is the exquisite risk. To not go blaming back, to not blame yourself, just to feel the vulnerability. There's a not okayness deep down that we can feel and be with. We can offer kindness. And now from that place of presence, of courage, You might sense if there's any response either in your heart, your mind or in your actions that would be helpful in this situation.

If it's historical, it would just be in your heart. A kind of sensing this prayer to be free, to not hold anything against yourself or others, to not push anyone out of your heart including yourself. and sensing the experience of your own being when you're not caught in trying to inflate, when you're not fueling the demons, when there's just this presence here. You can bring your breath more consciously and more full and just sense what it would be like to move through the rest of today, tomorrow with that courageous presence that willingness to feel what's here without resistance and how you might respond to things differently,

what choices would open up. We can sense in a societal way and you can open your eyes if you'd like that if we, instead of resisting the demons, instead of burying our vulnerability and being militaristic, oppressing others, over-consuming if instead we were able to be with our vulnerability, then we'd be able to respond in a way that brought healing to our world. We'd be able to choose to be the change as Gandhi put it. We've been talking about on an individual level how we might respond. I shared a bit how for me it let me actually seek more about what was really true.

You know, it let me open to criticism because it didn't feel so personal or stinging because I got bigger. Well, what's the courage that we can now bring to our world and to all the suffering in our world? What does it mean to open to vulnerability there? And for many people there's a sense that, well, if I open to all the hugeness and the horrific suffering of the world, I'll just be overwhelmed, I won't be able to do anything. But really facing the demons is different.

It's a kind of opening that gives us a sense of a kind of courage that allows us to act when we need to act. I'd like to give you a story that I thought was a beautiful reflection of courageous presence in our world. And it comes from a book called Bury the Chains. And this is a story of a small group of people, there's just 12 of them, met in an English coffee shop or tavern in the 1780s talking about the horrors of the suffering of the slave trade that was driving most of the world economy, the British empires and all the empires

of the time. So this is 12 of them. They're meeting in this coffee shop and they determined to do everything they could to stop the evils of slavery. And again, just think of it when we try to take on something that seems horrible and how easy it is to feel whole. hopeless, but this is the courage, the presence. The chief of them was Thomas Clarkson. And so this small group of men rode on horseback around England for 30 years and what they would do is they'd bring well-educated, well-spoken ex-slaves to talk about Middle Passage.

In other words, they describe what they went through and how they and their families had suffered under the lash, how many of them have been killed and tortured and so on. And they'd go around England, this for 30 years going into the living rooms and homes of the English countryside of the gentlemen and gentle women in the countryside telling these stories until the tide of consciousness began to turn. And it was the consciousness of the whole country. And after about 30 years this group combined with the Quakers that they had activated and anyone else they had activated and they got Parliament to pass a law outlawing slavery

in the whole of the British Empire, even though the Quakers wouldn't take off their hats for the king because they believed that that was only in the service of God. When Thomas Clarkson died, they all took their hats off. So that story really touches me because it really shows this evolutionary capacity we have to be courageous with our inner demons and the demons of the world. world and it doesn't matter how demonic the demons seem. It's the courage to care and to act and it comes from presence. It comes from the power of presence.

So I'd like to do a closing reflection with you if you will. It's the final one just to close your eyes. When we resist the demons, when we deny them, when we aggress against them, and we we just fuel them. When the resistance is gone, when we open to the vulnerability and our caring, there's a lot of freedom. So we're really opening to both sorrow and joy. So I invite you first just to bring to mind some part of this world's pain that's very real

to you. It might be a close individual who's suffering or a group of humans or it may be non-humans. animals who are suffering, our mother earth is suffering. And just to take a few moments, and this is that exquisite risk, that courageous presence, to let the vulnerability of that suffering be there and to contact it, to feel that suffering as a stream within your own being, that vulnerability is your own vulnerability. And imagine a response that feel that feeling that suffering as a stream within your own being. that feels aligned for you.

Could be an action or could be your prayer right now, but inhabit it. Inhabit your caring and bringing to mind now a person you love, somebody you care about. What does it mean to be courageous with this person? What is courageous presence with this person? the quality of the quietness and listening of your words, of your actions that would really express a courageous presence. What would it mean to love without holding back? When the resistance is gone, the demons are gone.

We can then live fully, love fully. What does it mean to be courageous in this moment? fresh. What's the experience of an undefended heart right now? When we resist and tighten, our world becomes small. When we open, we enlarge to include this whole mysterious living, dying world. You can start fresh again. What does it mean to be courageous in this moment? We close with the words of Mark Nippo, the poet. Everything is beautiful and I am so sad. This is how the heart makes a duet of wonder and grief.

The light spraying through the lace of the fern is as delicate as the fibers of memory forming their web around the knot in my throat. The breeze makes the birds move from branch to branch as this ache makes me look for those I've lost in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh of the next stranger. In the very center, under it all, what we have that no one can take away and all that we've lost face each other. It is there that I'm adrift feeling punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything.

I am so sad and everything is beautiful. Namaste and thank you so much for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.