Tara Brach - Loving Life, Loving Earth

Episode Date: December 3, 2015

With prayers for the Paris Climate talks: What will it take to have us collectively awaken to the suffering of our earth and respond? This talk looks at how we are destroying our larger body, the earth; what stops us from recognizing and opening to the suffering of loss, and ways we can evolve our consciousness and act on behalf of this precious life. (from 2013-10-02)

So tonight's talk is called loving life, loving this earth. And a friend of mine in the Sangha reminded me or told me a few days ago that tomorrow night is the anniversary of St. Francis's death. And he was known as the patron saint of animals and the environment. So Pope Paul, Pope John Paul II, called him the patron of a colleague. So in a way we get to claim this as a fitting time. It's one way. So here I'd like to maybe name the question that I contemplate a lot within myself,

which is given the sense that this earth is struggling, suffering, and in trouble, What will help us to wake up collectively in a way where it's real enough in our bodies and hearts so that we care enough to respond? What will help us to be sensitive and awake to both the suffering of the earth and the preciousness of life so we actually step out of our routines and in some way collectively try to bring healing to our planet. What will it take? That's my inquiry. One of the things that I'm aware of is that in the United States we spend on an average about 90% of our time indoors. And of that time you might wonder how much of that is

in front of a screen. Probably a good chunk, right? What it tells us is that we're indoors and in a virtual world a lot, and that has to affect our relationship with our larger body of the Earth. It has to. I think of our children, and more than ever that they're living in such a cyber world, such a virtual reality, and more than ever in the history of the planet, not as actively involved with the natural world. Will this generation care enough?

Does these questions make sense to you? So will they really sense this mysterious, fragile world we're a part of? So I was reading one writer from, actually wrote in the New York or some. He described, and this one story tells how his son turned 12, and they'd had a very close relationship, but somehow rather around 12, this distance, this gap opened, and he'd ask him questions when he'd come home from school,

and there's just no verbal willingness at all. But one day, his son texted him and said, how's it going, or something like that? And he kind of texted back, okay, and you, and they got into something, and it was like this light went off that, oh, we can text. He had always kind of looked down on texting, but that was the channel open.

So they began, and his son taught him a lot of the abbreviations. And then he writes, of course, he didn't have to teach me L.O.L. It was so evident that it was lots of love. Because he put it at the end of every message that he sent me. He said, it's such a beautiful telegraphic abbreviation for the 20th century. It's like a little arrow of love you can send out to anyone you know, LOL. So he describes it over the next six months. He had this infatuation with texting, with instant messaging.

He said that this power of emotional transmission you can just have. He started sending LOL to everyone he knew. His sister was getting divorced and he wrote to her, We're all behind you and beside you. L-O-L, you're love. He wrote, my father got L-O-L, and I. I sent him LOL in Canada. Everyone I knew at work, at home, everyone.

I sent them LOL. And he describes the day that he was in the airport texting with his son, and he said how much he hated to be away, but he had to travel to make money because they needed it as a family, and he signed off LOL. And his son responds, Dad, what exactly do you think LOL means? So he says lots of love, obviously.

And then no dad, it means laughing out loud. And its world crumbled. It's like how many people he'd have to write to and explain, you know, that hip transplant, well, I didn't mean like I was really. So we know that in some ways, technology has created more contact and communications and a certain kind of intelligence where we have access to every bit of information in the universe that's available

and in other ways it lessens intimacy. It just does. We get removed from others when we can very quickly shoot off an email versus even pick up a phone and we get removed from the living world.

The earth becomes as other when it's possible, when we're not connected, when we're not engaged, it's possible to hurt or destroy something because we don't belong to it. So rolling back in time a bit, just from the personal side of things, one month before my son was due, when I was eight months pregnant, was when the reactor core at Chernobyl exploded. and I remember really well you know I had many wake-ups to do with

the earth even then but I remember the shock and just wondering what kind of world he would grow up in and I was following Joanna Macy who's one of my heroes in the sense of a spiritual teacher scholar activist very, very wise, dedicated being.

And she had written about despair and empowerment, how sensing the hurting of our earth brings up despair, but we bury it, and how really the way is that we need to be able to speak and contact and share about it, because if we do, then the despair becomes something that will energize us and bring a kind of shared empowerment to act. So she tells about going to Chernobyl, to a town that was very, or a city actually, it was very near to where the reactor are blown up. And this area had been known for its incredibly beautiful forests and mountains.

But at this point, there was such a risk of radiation from the woods that people had to stay, the people that insisted on staying had to put tape around their windows and their doors and they couldn't go out and their kids could no longer play. And one man said this, in the groups that Joanna was running, he said it, that's very hard for us because our ancestors were of the forest.

All our stories are of the forest, walking, picnicking, mushrooming. Yes, we were always people of the forest. And then she asked him, when will you be able to go back? into the forest and he said to her, not in my lifetime. And then he looked at his little grandson and he said, not in his lifetime either. He gestured to the wallpaper. He said, this is our forest now. It would be centuries. And there was silence. One of the women in the

group that she was working with asked why she was rubbing their sorrow in their face, you know, and there was again a silence. But another man from the group responded. He said, at least we can say to our children that we told the truth. And then another said that these visitors, speaking about Joanna and the others, are witness to our suffering. They'll tell the world our story, let others know what happened.

They must never let this poisoning of the earth happen in any other place to anyone else's children. So this was 1986. The message of her teachings are the power and necessity of naming the truths and being with them to be empowered. And over these years, since then, the 28th and years, there has been a growing consciousness. And the poisoning continues at a horrific pace. And I'm not just talking about the accidents. We know about Japan. We know that two years later, 83,000 people evacuees

can't return to the area. BP Gulf oil spill. We do have a very short memory though. I mean, it's amazing to me that these terrible violations to the earth happen and quickly they jar us and then our nervous system seems to adapt. So what happens is that we're injuring our earth. This is our larger body daily with kind of. cutting great swaths of woods down, the way this body of our earth breeze is being disrupted

in a big way, mining and overfishing. The coral reefs, the stories I hear about the coral reefs and I love snorkeling and you can see the difference. It's radical and scary. Putting toxins in the air. And then of course there's the addiction to fossil fuels that is heating our plants. in a way that's destroying species. Some of you might have gone to in New York, the Museum of Natural History, it has some amazing halls in it. One of the halls you go

through time and you go up the spiral walk through time and you go from the 12 billion years ago, fireball explosion and then you're walking, walking, walking, find at the very end there's a hair and humans have been around for the width of of the hair. It gives you a sense of this mystery of what we belong to. There's a hall of biodiversity there. And in the hall of biodiversity, they described the five extinctions that have already occurred. And then there's a plaque and describes how we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction. Some of you probably know about this, but not enough of us know about it. that were in the middle of the sixth grade extinction.

And while all the other extinctions were from natural events, this one is primarily human cost. So there's this plaque there that describes our current extinction spasm that we're in. And the estimate is that half of all plants, animals, and bird species will die off by the end of the century. Another statistic is that in the next, 334 years, 75% of existing mammals will be gone. So I sometimes as a way to remember and be touched and not have this be abstract, well look at,

you know, I'm very lucky because I live right by the Potomac and I see a lot of deer and fox and heron and, you know, creatures. And I say, you know, what if these were not here? It's like, what a lonely world without these creatures that are part of us. Some of you know this list well. These are they're critically endangered. The Amora Leopard, Black Rhino, South China, Tiger, Samatran Elephant, African Wild Dog,

Yanksy, Finless Porpoise, the Bengal Tiger, the Blue Whale. So it goes on. critically endangered. Actually the last three are endangered, not critically endangered. Bumi writes this, he says, sit, be still, and listen, for you are drunk and we are at the edge of the roof. I think that really applies. One of the kind of teaching myths for me is a legend from the Holy Grail. And it really kind of talks about this drunkenness, this trance we're in, where the world is,

our world, our larger body is in a crippled state, really injured. And there's somehow rather we don't get it. So in this legend, this is from the Holy Grail, Parciful, a young knight on a quest. And he wanders into this really parched, devastated land, where nothing grows, it's a waste land. And yet the townspeople are just kind of behaving like everything's normal.

You know, they're not wondering like, what horror has befallen us, or that kind of thing. They're just, they're kind of dull and mechanical. They're under a spill, basically. So Parciful is invited into a, into the castle where he discovers the king lying in bed, pale and dying. And like the land around him, his life is waning. And he's full of questions, but he's been doing. told by older knights that asking questions is improper and so on, so he keeps quiet.

And the next morning he leaves the castle to continue on his journey, but he hasn't gone far before he meets the sorceress country on the road. And when she hears that he hasn't asked the king about himself, she didn't care enough to extend, she goes into a rage. How could he be so callous? He could have saved the king, the kingdom and himself by reaching out. Taking her words to heart, Parcival returns to the wasteland and goes straight to the castle. Without even breaking his stride, he walks right up to where the king is lying on his couch.

He kneels there and gently asks, Oh my lord, what aleth they. At that moment the color comes back into the king's cheeks and he stands up, fully healed. And throughout the kingdom, everything comes to life. newly awakened talk with animation, they laugh, they sing together, and move with a more vigorous step. The crops begin to grow and the grass on the hills glows with the new greens of spring. When we don't acknowledge the suffering, and it can be our own, our own deep sense of loneliness or dissatisfaction, our alienation, our shame, when we don't acknowledge it,

When we don't acknowledge the suffering of our larger body, this earth, we are unable to heal. The habits to look away. We're going to get into that in a bit. But I'd like to, for the rest of this talk and keep my eye on time here, three things. How is it that we end up in trance? I mean, how do we end up getting addicted and drunk and in this trance where things are not well? well, there's a dis-ease that we don't really attend to. How does that happen? How do we create that wasteland? What stops us from recognizing and what serves healing? Yeah, I should do

that in about 14 minutes. So we start with the drunkenness that in some way we're in a trance. You know, Rumi puts it that we're drunk and we're like right on the edge of the roof, we have to wake up. And so when we look at this drunkenness, one of the descriptions that is most jarringly powerful came through Tikna Khan where he cites a Sutra, a Buddha Sutra, our teaching. It's called the Sutra on Sun's Flesh. And here's how it goes. A couple and a young son are crossing a vast desert. And they hadn't planned well.

They ran out of food. So they decided to kill and eat their child. Then of course after that happened they tore their hair out and beat their chests carrying his remains and they just grieved and grieved. So the Buddha tells the story and then in discourse with the monks he talks about how horribly they suffered and that the teaching is we suffer because we get lost in our grasping, our greed, our need to consume

Ticknat Han brings it very current and he says we have to eat, we have to consume with mindfulness, with awareness, or we will be eating the flesh of our own children. I think that's so powerful. Because he's talking about how we consume oil, how we consume coal, how we consume the earth's resources in a way that's not sustainable and that's like eating the flesh of our children, which it is. He says, by overproducing and overconsuming, we destroy the world for future generations and our own health as well.

You can see that with the obesity, with allergies from the food, air, and water, respiratory problems that are bigger than ever. So it's a horrific metaphor, I know. And yet, I think Ticknaut, and many others who see clearly are trying to find the ways like, how do you wake us up? There's this wasteland that we're creating

and we go through the day in some way as if, you know, that's in the future. Oh, 300 years from now, okay, whatever statistics and we don't even know if they're true. Today, what I need to worry about such and such, how do we wake up? So the first step is to begin to understand that we do have an addiction

to consuming and the other side of the consuming is aggressing, pushing away, controlling. And that this whole process of waking up, if we're to wake up and save this earth, there's a change in consciousness that has to happen for us to care enough. And it's a shift from egoic consciousness where we're in fight-flight, freeze, and we're out for accumulating and possessing and enlarging moi. to a sense of we truly belong, truly belong, to this web of life, and we really care that our actions are aligned with that belonging, that we really are acting on behalf of each other in the whole.

That's the shift. If we're caught in egoic consciousness, what happens? Because humans are self-conscious and we're aware of our mortality, more than other less evolved organisms, we're caught in fear. So we are more liable to aggress to a much larger degree and cause us more damage and consume to a much larger degree because of that deepened angst. Does that make sense to you? And I'm really asking, just you can go like this if you doesn't, I'll say it again.

Awareness of mortality, unless we're really willing to be present and open, drives us deeper into our running away, grasping and aggressing. It plays out with our relationships with each other where we try to dominate or control or defend because others are other. When we're an egoic state, others are either an object that'll give us something or someone that's threatening. with the earth. When we're in an ego state, the earth is ours for the taking. It's something we need to control. We need to make sure we don't get hurt by it. And it's something that we

take as much as we can from. And it's really deep in our historic narrative. And this really grabs me how, you know, if you think of Europeans coming over to this country and manifest destiny, that it was a Papal mission to, didn't matter who lived here, come over and take it for the sake of the Papal Empire, right? That we're entitled to just take it, use it as we like. And it, you know, ends up now rather than a Papal Empire, it's a global businesses, and that we actually, our rules and regulations and policies are to honor the right of businesses to make money and at the expense of

the well-being of the earth. I have a friend who works in a think tank and I had a conversation about our economy and the way we relate to the earth. And he made it so clear that the assumption in his think tank, and it doesn't matter whether it's a liberal think tank

are a conservative think tank. The bottom line assumption is that it's good to have increased economic growth and productivity and consumption. That's the assumption. And I sat there and said, why? And he'd say something, and I wasn't even sure what he said. And I'd say, why again? Why? You know, why, if we're obese, would we want to consume more? Why? Why? Why, if we're diabetic would we want more sugar? You know, why if there's global warming would we want more oil production? Why? Joanna Macy says, we've been treating Earth as if it's a supply source and a sewer, extracting resources, pouring waste into it over and over. So our violating is not sustainable. A hundred some, 150 years ago, D.H. Lawrence, I'm not sure how long ago. Anyway,

here's what he wrote. He said, this is what is the matter. with us. We are bleeding at the roots because we are cut off from the earth and the sun and the stars. So this is a bit of a, this is the egoic state in relationship to the earth, that the separate self is separate from the earth and either tries to dominate or take what's, it feels entitled to. And out of fear and out of grasping is not sensitive to the fact that we belong to the earth and the violation violates us and all other species. So then we ask ourselves, we start noticing it, we start reading about it, we have great scientific consensus, 95% is huge on the fact that we're hurtling into destroying the

earth with global warming and that humans are responsible. but what stops us from really having our bodies get it? And so one thing is the lobster pot thing where it's just kind of this gradual thing and we've kind of gotten used to this and then we get used to this and then we get used. So now it's like we don't think about the fact that we can't drink the water, just we can't.

It has to have all sorts of treatments. We kind of take it for granted that these allergies are here and there's more asthma and all. We just get used to it. And in adapting our fixations on our daily stuff, quite naturally, can I get through the day? Can I get this done?

Can I take care of a parent that's sick? Can I be able to deal with this conflict in a relationship? We just take care of what's in front of us because the information on our earth body seems one step removed. So that's one reason. There's another reason, even when it doesn't feel removed, it's uncomfortable to stand out and to talk about it. It's uncomfortable. It's just not like you see your neighbor on the streets. It's like, yeah, there's this phrase global weirding with the weather patterns and so on. So there's comments on it, but it's really

going beyond that and saying this is our... our larger body, its precious life, what can we do? It gets uncomfortable. So that's the second reason. The third and the big one is it's just so upsetting to really let ourselves think about it. It's so upsetting. So it can lead to powerlessness and despair. So people feel that they don't know what to do, that there's nothing they can do to make a difference, that the war's already lost in some ways. Maybe I could do something if I was in Congress or a scientist, some people might think, but I'm just a normal person, a citizen. So there's a sense that what can I do? It's not, it's out of my purview. And the reality of climate change is

so overwhelming that there's a deadening to our feelings. And I would say that it's that deadening, the way we cut off, our numb, are just keeping our trance and fixate elsewhere, but not willing to feel that is the greatest danger to our earth. It's our own way of deadening. That's where the danger is. So we begin to say, so how do we stop deadening? You know, we have to want to. So this is going to be the last. part of the inquiry which is really how can any one of us that feels a little bit of this ripple of this matters how can we be more degrees of intentional about letting ourselves feel the truth and it's feeling the truth it's like a certain

amount of thinking but feeling it letting ourselves feel it I'm convinced that that unless we're embodied and relating to the natural world in a very direct way, we will not fall in love. We won't feel our love. We won't rediscover our love for the aliveness in a way that we want to save it. The first step then is a willingness to be touched by the realness of the earth's suffering. And that means exposing ourselves on purpose and naming it and acknowledging it out loud. It's a lot like in a 12-step group, you know, where the very first step is acknowledging, okay, this is an addiction, this is suffering, I have been cut off from my wholeness and caught in something that is destroying me.

That is the first step. Can we do that with the earth? And we say we're addicted to a kind of consuming and producing and way of being and it's destroying us and name it. In Buddhism, the four noble truths are really the four noble truths also of climate change. It's like the first noble truth to acknowledge the realness of the suffering. The second truth is to recognize the cause, this incest and grasping out of fear, to hold on, to have more. The third truth is change is possible. We can wake up from

the grasping egoic state to a collective that really feels our shared aliveness, our belonging, that loves this aliveness. And the fourth truth is here's how, here's the steps. So we start naming that it's real, we start really letting ourselves feel it. And those feelings, just like compassion for an individual, if we care, it'll energize us to act. So I'll just take a few minutes to talk a little bit about what that means, energize us to act, because we all will have different expressions of that. There's the level of of on an individual way it's very essential that in an in a in our own lives we look at what's our carbon footprint what's my lifestyle how am I living is there something just in my own

life that by aligning it even if it's not the thing that's the largest impact has me feeling aligned there's a matter of integrity and waking up that happens with that. There's a willingness to educate ourselves. And I knew because I wanted to talk with you, it kind of extra motivated me to find out more. And that in turn deepened the tenderness around what's happening. Finding out is useful. Then educating with each other, sharing what we experience. And as Joanna Macy teaches so well, if we try to educate and take action as an individual, we will get either overwhelmed by the despair, burned out, or just disconnect.

We need to do this together. Just as the issue is one of shifting from an egoic mentality to collective, the response needs to be collective. needs to be collective. We need to feel that we're in it together. That'll juice us. So when we start sensing the realness of the pain of our world to speak with each other about how it is to live with that, to be willing to be vulnerable. Denise Levertov says, to speak of sorrow works upon it, moves it from its crouched place barring the way to and from the soul's hall. To speak of sorrow, works upon it, moves it from its crouched place,

barring the way to and from the soul's hall. So we share, we speak of the sorrows. But working on that individual level is not going to be enough. We're too far gone. That's to me the truth. It's an emergency and we need to also have action that's external action, that's and that really targets the institutions that are continuing to drive us towards a wasteland. And that means really changing the narrative and policies of government, of policy, you know, asking the big questions about how do we impact policies that govern the production of fossil fuels and the consumption of them. asking the bigger questions of how do we get involved with disseminating information that

really does inform and awaken. So it's again it's this myth of Percival that it's like we have to do our inner work of with each other of naming and educating and acknowledging and holding that sorrow and we need to act out of that and say what alleth they, what is really happening to the world and really reach out. The last element to name is really coming around to where we started from, which is any action we do arises from consciousness, arises from a visceral sense of caring. And if it doesn't, it'll be torqued with either aggression or just be mental.

So one person said that there's really this race between ignorance and consciousness. And our fundamental task is to keep waking up. And what that means is really waking up our loving for this world. There's a, this is Mary Oliver writes a fall song. You just listen to it and sense how her love for this world comes through these words. Another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues, vines, leaves, the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows, unmattering back from the particular island of this summer, this now.

That now is nowhere except underfoot, moldering in that black subterranean castle of unobservable mysteries, roots and sealed seeds in the wanderings of water. This, I try to remember when times measure painfully chaffs, for instance, when autumn flares out at the last, boisterous, and like us longing to stay, how everything lives shifting from one bright vision to another forever in these momentary pastures. So we practice presence, so we can feel this fleeting, fragile world in our bodies in our veins. We practice waking up in our bodies because if we're not awake in our bodies, we're not going to sense how our body is part of the earth body. We just

won't. We wake up in our bodies because if we're awake in our bodies and our hearts will actually care in a visceral way. We wake up in our bodies so that we can be in nature and actually feel that nature living in us. And so we can sense and be touched by where there's a suffering. I remember last spring when I heard that the dog woods are quite endangered and feeling like I love dogwoods. I don't want a world without dogwoods. The Chesapeake watershed, this river that we have here, it started getting better and now it's worse. And that affects all this biodiversity in the area. And then if you drive into West Virginia and see what it looks like to see a mountain cut off, it makes you cry if you care about this earth.

The Bonaboe and the chimpanzee, the giant panda, loggerhead turtle, orangutan, sea lion, snow leopard, four more species of whale. Do we really want that loneliness of a world that loses these, these, you know, precious beings, these expressions of sacredness. This is, you know, really a practice of remembering what we belong to. We're part of this great mystery. One person writes, the Big Bang started the universe pouring matter through space. Some of this matter formed stars, residue form planets. Everything on Earth, including our living bodies, is formed out of the same material that form the stars and the planets.

Your bones are made of calcium and magnesium and there's seawater in your blood. You are the living Earth in this particular form. Cosmologist Brian Swim says four and a half billion years ago the earth was a flaming molten ball of rock and now it can sing opera. So we wake up our presence

in the most basic way so that we can remember the preciousness of this living world. Just remind you of what it was like for those Apollo 8 astronauts that we keep hearing about now, what it was like for them in 1968 to, they were the first beings to ever leave the Earth's orbit to see our entire blue-green planet swimming in black space and how each expressed this surprise and this awe. They were so stirred by this luminous presence. It's like getting that the earth is not like this ball in space, it's this living organism. The earth brought them to tears. And three years later, Edgar Mitchell writes this, he says, describes being profoundly aware that each and every atom in the universe was connected

in some way. And on seeing Earth from space, he had an understanding of the universe. He had an understanding that all the humans, animals and systems, were part of the same thing, a synergistic whole. So to serve our collective whole, our path is to awaken from this trance of separateness, to sit, as Rumi says, to be still to listen. And then Gary Lawless puts it this way. He says, when the animals come to us asking for our help, will we know what they are saying? When the plants speak to us in their delicate, beautiful language, will we be able to answer them?

When the planet herself sings to us in our dreams, will we be able to wake ourselves and act? So just invite us to close, taking a pause, closing your eyes for a moment. Just resting back in that presence that, can feel this living body right here, vibrating, tingling, heat, cool, and sensing your feet are on the floor, this ground and earth beneath us, this aliveness and flow that we're a part of flowing into our souls of our feet and through our body, that we are this living

earth, earth becoming conscious of itself, sensing how these sensations and the aliveness that lives through us and these sounds are all being received in the awareness that's here and that our heart and awareness includes this world. Everything is a part of our hearts. Everything is alive. Can we let this life live through us? Can we cherish and respond to our world with love, with honesty, with dedication? Namaste. day. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is

IMCW.org. Thank you very much.