Tara Brach - Making the Whole World Your Friend

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Making the Whole World Your Friend - A wonderful translation of the Pali word Metta is friendliness. This talk looks at friendliness through an evolutionary lens, and explores ways we can cultivate a more open heart.    

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome, friends. I'm just back from a trip. I led a retreat and I traveled around Costa Rica a bit, taking in the magic of the natural world and also of the culture. there's a term there that everyone uses. It's put a vida and it means the pure life or the simple life. And Costa Ricans and they're called Ticos consider it an expression of their culture. They use this term to say hello, goodbye, everything's great, everything's cool, a lot of different kind of meanings. But it's an expression of friendliness. There's a sense

saying, you know, here we are and we're connected. And so this talk, it's inspired by experiencing the friendliness as the atmosphere of a culture and just the impact of that. And I want to begin by sharing, you know, I've been reflecting on this groundbreaking work of a biologist Diane P.C. and her mentor, George Shaler, And they gathered more intimate details about guerrillas, about their lifestyle and their eating habits, their behavior, they're socializing than any prior biologists. And the difference was between them and other generations of biologists, they didn't carry a gun. You know, they entered the territory of these gentle giants with an attitude of friendliness,

with respect, with a sense of curiosity, with warmth, and the grillas weren't threatened. And as we can sense, if we have a gun, you know, if we're threatening aggression in some way, if we're mistrusting, if we're judging, it blocks the possibility. of connection. And whether we're approaching our inner life or others, when there's friendliness, it opens the door to understanding and true relatedness. So many of you are familiar with the word meta, which in Polly means loving kindness. But the less known facet in its translation is, the word friendliness. And I often think that if all we did on our paths was to really center cultivating friendliness, that was right at the heart of it, what a world we'd

have, you know, the inner freedom and just the transformations in our society. So this talk we'll look at the value of friendliness and I'll look at it through an evolutionary lens and also some of the conditions that predispose a culture or society to being more or less friendly. And then we'll explore friendliness with strangers and the last piece will be cultivating more friendliness towards ourselves. And so starting with the evolutionary lens, I've been reading about the research of Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. They have a book called Survival of the Friendliest. And their main treaties is that friendliness often enables unusual evolutionary success. In other words, friendly species prevail over time. And their research, first they looked at dogs

and at the social genius of dogs, how they can communicate with humans better than our closest genetic relatives, the Bonnebo. Well, they showed how evolutionary selection for friendliness accounts for the contrast between dogs and wolves, the difference in the physical shapes and forms and psychology. And of course, as we know, dogs are hugely successful and wolves are endangered. They described the work of other researchers. I found so interesting, researchers who had been looking at Fox behavior, and this is a research project that's been going on since 1959. And so what they did was they took one group where there was, they randomized mating, you know,

just, it was just happened naturally. And with another, they actually, it was man-made selection for friendliness. And then they compared what happened. And this is, again, since 1959. and what they saw was that the friendlier group of boxes had the same changes that have been seen between dogs and wolves. In other words, the friendlier foxes had shorter faces and curlier tails and smaller canines. We can see similar evolutionary patterning regarding friendliness, you know, the physical changes

and the adaptive advantage in humans. that when Homo sapiens first evolved, there were four other hominids who had like us, big brains, cultural artifacts, linguistic abilities. But what Homo sapiens had that differentiated was friendliness, and it correlated with the different physical and mental characteristics. In other words, in contrast to the other hominid groups. We had the smaller brow ridges. We had the narrow, shorter faces like the foxes, like the dogs. And then we have a white part of our eyes that makes communication by glance easier, which correlates with for dogs and the friendlier foxes, they had the communicative tails. So humans over time have continued to evolve our sociality.

In other words, we've expanded social networks. We innovate and communicate and identify with larger holes. This is not a new understanding that our evolutionary success is rooted in the capacity to collaborate, to have compassion, to be friendly. But it's crucial to attune to as we face increasing threats to our continued evolution. to look, well, what undermines the qualities of heart and what cultivates them? And this is both individually and societally. So that's kind of the inquiry.

What undermines friendliness, what cultivates it. And intuitively we know what blocks open-heartedness. It's fear. We have fear conditioning that's based on perceiving separation. perceiving an in-group and an out-group, a self and a bad other, a self and a bad inner-self, you know, that separation creates a sense of unsafety. So, let's say we feel threatened by another. The neural networks in our brain that are related to positive sociality become deactivated.

We don't feel friendly. So when we're unsafe, rather than attend and be friend, we regress into some version of fight, flight, or freeze. And the more stress we're under, the more unsafe we feel, the more we get hijacked. We can't be friendly. There's a story of a woman in a job interview, and the interviewer asks, well, tell me, what do you think your biggest character defect? would be. And her response is honesty. And then the interviewer says, honesty, I wouldn't consider honesty a defect. And the applicants reply, I don't care what the hell you think. And it's fun, but most of us know the feeling of a closed heart when we feel judged, when we feel taken advantage

of, opposed, demeaned. You know, we start carrying a gun. We all have a predisposition to how much we feel unsafe and therefore unfriendly. We have a predisposition to how much we carry a gun towards ourselves and towards others. And it's shaped by our personal history, the experiences in our personal life and our genetics. It's handed down generationally, degree of trauma, more trauma, less friendliness. And similarly, societies have varying degrees of safety or threat that impacts how friendly a society is. So you can look historically that a key systematic cause for a lack of safety in a society

has to do with the degree of violent oppression of non-dominant populations. In other words, how rigidly divided is the population due to slavery or religious strife or economic inequities? And again, this is intuitive that the more divided a society, the more fear and violence, the less friendly. Okay, so here I want to go back to Costa Rica because as I mentioned, it's just, it's a common observation. It's a very friendly culture. And, you know, there's articles that rate globally different countries. And it's considered one of the friendliest countries. It's easy to make new friends. And, you know, personally, initially my thought was, oh, well, you know, it's an economy based on tourism. And the locals, the Ticos, the Costa

Ricans are being solicitous, but it's not the case. Those that live there are just, there's just more friendliness. I mean, strangers are in the habit of acknowledging and greeting each other, and people are helpful. One point, we were trying to find a boat pier in this small fishing town. I saw a guy on the street and his construction worker on a break, and, you know, my Spanish is minimal and his English was too, so there was a lot of hand gesturing. But he insisted on walking us because he wanted to make sure we wouldn't get mixed up or lost. And it was so spontaneous. And he wasn't trying to win over a tourist.

He's just naturally friendly and helpful. And I realized that the such a strong tendency towards, friendliness around me impacted my nervous system. I just felt more relaxed, more at home, more open, more friendly myself. And so I got really interested in what inclines Costa Rica in this direction, Puerto Vita. How come that's such a predominant quality? And it just seems a lot, you know, sense of more happiness in the culture. So it became my central inquiry. I asked taxi drivers and tour guides and the different locals we met. And I was talking with one. She was originally from the U.S., married to Costa Rica and been there many years. And I asked her

about Puerto Vita and she said, you know, they really mean it. There's just this conscious appreciation of warm social connections. And she described her mother-in-law. She said if she even mentioned to her mother-in-law that someone needed a place to stay, her mother-in-law wouldn't think twice about, you know, making space. You might know that Costa Rica doesn't have a military. It's one of the handful of countries that doesn't have a military.

So that money goes to universal education health care, and a great attention to the natural environment, a great love for nature. And most of the population is considered middle class. I want to pause here and say, it's not Shangri-La, it's imperfect. There's no lack of problems. There's poverty. There's crime. There's a lot of stealing. In fact, it's one of the highest on the list in terms of stealing, and there's very little murder, although that's growing because there's more drugs, more gangs. There's social inequities. The indigenous people, it's 1.7% of the population are horribly oppressed,

at the bottom of the hierarchy. But here's the thing. The scale of problems, war, hatred, violence, oppression of non-dominant people, it's nothing like the surrounding countries or most countries. and that's due to its history, which I started finding out more about. And here's what's interesting is that Costa Rica was colonized by the Spanish, but because it didn't have a viable cash crop for plantation system, it just had a short spike in cacao, but no gold.

It was some, and it was sparsely settled by indigenous people. In other words, there weren't many to enslave. It wasn't the focus of the colonizers. It was more of an outlier. Its profile of natural resources, which includes indigenous people and cash crops and so on, it didn't draw the rape and plunder and colonizing that other countries did. So there was slavery, but it wasn't plantation slavery, and most of the Spaniards couldn't afford to sustain a slave as they strove.

to maintain their own livelihoods. So Costa Rica's lack of the resources that the Spaniard valued spared it from becoming a center of colonization and slavery. It didn't live under the gun, as so many other countries did. And there's huge implications to this. I mean, researchers have been investigating the psychological effects of colonization. Negative view of their own cultural identity, self-rejection, low self-esteem, depression. Colonization and slavery are like carrying a gun. They shut down friendliness. They shut down the heart. And not just of those who are colonized, those in the position of aggressing and dominating, a feeling superior, are also not living with an open heart. And the impact of colonization and slavery,

is not just when it's in its prime. It's over generations. It's dehumanization that takes a toll over generations, taking away value and dignity. I think Faulkner's line captures this, that the past is never dead. It's not even past. So friends, there's the reason I'm spending time on this is this, that if we're dedicated to spiritual, spiritual awakening, we need to look not only at the individual but also at the collective, the society. You know, we think society's thoughts. Our consciousness is shaped and influenced by our social environment. If there's a huge amount of addiction and violence and dividedness and strife in our society, it affects our nervous system, our feeling of

safety, of belonging, of being friendly. And for a culture to be open-hearted and friendly, members need to feel safe enough, valued, need to feel a belonging. And this doesn't occur when there's the violence of a caste system, of slavery, of oppression. So it's interesting to look at the societies we live in. You can ask yourself, how much friendliness do you encounter How much guardedness? How do you move through your surroundings? How do you relate to those you don't know? Friendliness is the sense of relatedness with others and it's not highly conditional.

If we're really open-hearted, it's inclusive. And friendliness, and this is key, it's directly related to happiness, to feeling deep well-being. I mean, if you think of the people you know, those who are happy are all so friendly. So there's a lot of research on happiness now, and it's so clear that when there's a sense of relatedness, those with a real sense of relationship with others,

experience more well-being. And it's the same thing in a culture, when relatedness is alive, when beings feel valued, there's more joy. I often think of that story of this new young monk arriving at a monastery and it's kind of a grim, somber place. And he's assigned to help the other monks in that tedious work of copying the old canons and laws by hand. But he notices that the monks are kind of grimly copping from copies, not the original manuscript. So he goes to the habit, just to question this, he points out to the abbot, you know, if somebody makes even a small mistake in the first copy, it'll never be picked up

and it'll just be continued in all subsequent copies, kind of like telephone. The abbot says, well, we've been copying from copies for centuries, but you make a good point. So he goes down to the dark caves underneath the monastery where the original manuscript has been held in this lock vault. It hasn't been open for hundreds of years. Hours go by and nobody sees the old abbot. So finally the young monk gets worried and goes downstairs to look for him and he sees him banging his head against the wall and crying uncontrollably. So the young monk says, father, father, what's wrong? And in a choking voice, the old abbot replies, the word was celebrate. Okay, so survival of the friendliest of individuals and cultures that really feel relatedness

and can celebrate together. The researchers I mentioned, Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, point to three domains in our society. They can move us in this direction of more open-heartedness, more friendliness, therefore a more healthy, continued evolution. And each one of these domains nurtures a basic sense of belonging of trust. And the first is democracy, that all are valued as part of a collective identity and decision-making. And that's intuitive that if all members of a society, sense their dignity is valued and are participating, there's going to be more of a sense of trust and relatedness. The second domain is a non-hierarchical view of other humans, other animals,

and the whole living earth. And again, it's intuitive that if we feel our relatedness to each other and to other species in this living earth, it deepens our sense of belonging. And then, And the third area, and I'm going to spend a little more time on this one, is cross-group friendships and communications. In other words, bridges that create empathy and belonging, which means connecting with strangers. So this is, I just want to take some time with this because it's an area that if we become more conscious of, we actually can start rippling out the friendliness. There's a lot of research now on the value of being friendly to strangers and those we don't know,

it makes us happier. And we're so used to identifying as a separate entity and instead of responding with warmth, we're usually guarded and especially if we're in close quarters, you might think of an elevator, we get self-conscious. We cover over with our persona. It's kind of presenting something and this disconnects us from our heart and really also also from our full intelligence. I've always loved this story of a woman who vacationed regularly in the summer in New England, same town as the actor Paul Newman. And her habit was,

you know, Sunday mornings after her walk, she'd go to this bakery, ice cream place to treat herself to her favorite double-dipped chocolate cone. While she walked in and the only patron there one morning was Paul Newman. So her heart skips a beak as she sees his, you know, baby blue eyes and he smiles, but she just kind of nods and responds demurely. But inside, she's completely caught up. Okay, hold it together. You're 42-year-old, married woman of three. What's wrong with you? Pull yourself together. You're not a teenager, very self-conscious. And, you know, so she's telling herself to be cool and don't look over there again. and she gets her cone in one hand or change in the other.

And without a glance in his direction, just glides out the door. She gets to her car and realizes she doesn't have her cone. She goes back in and it's not on the cone rack, it's not with the clerk. And then she finally looks over at Paul Newman. And his face breaks out into that familiar grin and he says, you put it in your purse. We get caught when we're, in so-called public with people we don't know and we forget that we're in this world together

and that we're connected and we forget how much more relaxed and happier we are when we remember and feel that. You probably notice that the kind of good feeling, that warm feeling that comes up when you've exchanged a smile or friendly communication with a stranger. Yet we we're reluctant. It's not the norm. We're afraid it won't be well received if we initiate and we feel uncomfortable. And I can say personally when I'm out and about, especially if I'm in unfamiliar places, I'm more in my own bubble often kind of guarded, especially if it's a new area I somehow rather will assume I'm the outsider. I certainly respond to friendliness. but now and then I'll initiate, but it's not consistent.

I'll share a story that took place about maybe five years ago. I was with Jonathan, my husband, and my dog, Katie, and we were on this pretty empty beach. In fact, there was just one guy sitting kind of towards the back of the beach. He was an old, scruffy-looking guy, kind of a kind of a surf. for away past his prime. And so he's sitting alone in this beach and kind of by these dunes and not doing anything, just sitting there. And then as we were, you know, sat down, he was kind of watching us and we were playing with our dog and I felt a little bit creeped out, but also

frustrated because my dog kept going over to him. And I kept having to go and retrieve her and bring her back, try to get her to stay with us. Well, the third time she did it, I could tell he was enjoying her attentions. He was playing with her, kind of smiling, lit up. So I hung out a little and chatted and they goofed around some. And then when we left, he said, you know, your dog really made my day. He had a sad look to him. And then he just said, thanks.

So I walked away and I could, you know, feel tears. my eyes, just seeing how my inclination is to create another who's, you know, in this case kind of a not okay or strange other, and kind of dismiss them or withhold my heart and just got so struck by then when regardless of my habits the human connecting happens, how sweet it can be, and how meaningful and how once some friendliness is there, it's so easy to see the other person's goodness and value. You know, think of that kind of bumper sticker, I think, is if you live in your heart, you'd be home right now.

So I invite you to a collective experiment for this next week. And of course, many of you do this already, but you might just think of increasing it, which is whenever possible, greet a strange. with some gesture, a friendliness, with a smile, maybe with some words, and just notice. Notice what happens. And if you like, next week I'll be asking for sharing on Facebook and you can share what you noticed. There's a quote I find inspiring. This is Jeffrey Hopkins, who's an interpreter to the Dalai Lama.

He says, it's not sufficient merely to see that sentient beings are suffering. You must also develop a sense of closeness with them, a sense that they are dear. Meditate on everyone as friends to feel that they have been profoundly close. Be a friend to everyone. Consider everyone as a friend. And for me over these last years, it's been part of my practice when I'm interacting with someone I don't know, I'll mentally reflect, we are friends. It's a really helpful reflection.

You might pause right here yourself and maybe take a few full breaths and bring to mind someone who you barely know, someone who you perhaps see now and then, but have not developed a relationship with. It might be somebody that you see as a clerk at a store. or if your child goes to school, somebody through the relationships like that with parents, somebody who's just more steps removed. And when you bring that person to mind, just mentally recite, we are friends, and notice what happens.

And then another person, someone you don't know so well. Somebody at work, somebody through your church. some organization you're part of, we are friends. And again, this is the verse by Maddie Weingass. She says, full of trust you left home and soon learned to walk the path, making yourself a friend to everyone and making everyone a friend. When the whole world is your friend, fear will find no place to call home. When the whole world is your friend, fear will find no place to call home.

And when you make the mind your friend, you'll know what trust really means. Listen, I have followed this path of friendship to its end, and I can say with absolute certainty, it will lead you home. So we've looked at the significance of friendliness through an evolutionary lens, the survival of the friendliness. Some, we've looked at some of what predisposes a culture or society to being friendly or carrying a gun. And we've talked a little bit about breaking the habit of othering by greeting strangers. And this last part is often the first part in our talks about awakening the heart,

and this is befriending our inner life. We often self-colonize. And by that I mean we take the messages from our caregivers or society about what's wrong with us or how we should be different or how we should behave and we internalize it. So we carry a gun aimed at our own self and we consider that self a bad self or parts of it as a bad self. And this makes us feel unsafe because if something's wrong with us, then we're at risk of rejection. in the moments of self-judging, we literally deactivate the more recently evolved parts of our brain. In other words, we deactivate the parts of our brain that are responsible for learning and creativity

and compassion. And just like countries that are colonized or people who are enslaved, we cut ourselves off from inner freedom and well-being and open-heartedness. You know, it's hard to feel friendly outwardly when we're at war with ourselves, when we're carrying a gun internally. You might remember the story of the Buddha who would give talks to groups of people outside the town, there'd be a field and they'd gather. And this happened many times through his life that while he was giving a talk, Mara, who is the kind of shadow side, the god of the shadow side, greed, hatred, delusion, and more would appear around the edges of the field.

And the Buddha's loyal attendant Ananda would see him and go, oh no, Mara's here and he'd go and tell the Buddha, you know, beware, Mara's here. And the Buddha would always reassure him and say, no, no, no problem. And he'd walk right over to Mara and say, I see you Mara, come. Let's have tea. I love that story because it's profound and sophisticated as a means of working with our inner life. When we see we're judging, when we see we're fearful, when we see we're ashamed, when we see we're angry, I see you, Mara, come, let's have tea, befriending. We need to learn how to notice our reactions to Mara, which are usually we condemn ourselves for our imperfections, to see Mara and Dafti, to really meet with a quality of curiosity,

kindness, good humor, friendliness. You know, years ago, I met with a man at retreat who judged himself very harshly. He was judging all his ways of interacting with others, ways he felt like he caused upset or hurt. Deep down he had this belief that I'm not as good as others and they know. So he was judging the parts of him that he felt were Mara and the judgment itself was Mara. So I could tell he had a sense of humor. And so I suggested that whenever he had these kind of self-negative thoughts, he could try this, you could say, oh, there goes Bob again.

His name was Bob. And by meaning, really, there goes a superfect self and replacing a demeaning narrative with a friendly presence. There goes Bob again. Okay. And what happens in that kind of a comment, the moment you say, oh, there goes so and so again, is you shift from identifying with the small self

to being a kind witness. friendliness. So, as mentioned, this was years ago, and I just heard from him a couple of weeks ago, and he said that he had followed this advice, you know, kind of laughing with kindness at parts of himself and saying, you know, there goes Bob again over and over again. He wrote to me, he said, I find laughing at myself allows him to feel better about myself and accept I am a good person, as is everyone I know. He was doing, I see you Mara. Let's have. tea. Oh, there goes Bob again. Friendly. Good Humored. Let's pause here and reflect again, just briefly. You know, friendliness means meeting with interest and warmth, what's here.

And it promotes well-being. You might scan. Just scan today. How friendly have you been towards your inner life? How much have you carried a gun? Just notice today, what's your attitude been? If things have been difficult, did you have tea? Or did you judge? Maybe there's a place today where you film yourself kind of habitually carrying a gun. You can use this opportunity to revisit it. Take a moment to go back. Just notice what was going on. And what happens if you say, I see you, Mara, come, let's have tea. Maybe having tea means you send an inner message to yourself, warmth, the friendliness.

And maybe through the day, having tea means you briefly say, oh, there go so and so again. And there's kindness, good humor, warmth. So friendliness. It's just such a beautiful way of understanding meta, loving kindness. It makes it accessible in our daily life, I think. And I again wonder, what if more and more of us centered friendliness? It requires intention. You know, we have a strong disposition towards feeling threatened either by the Mara of our inner life or others and then shutting down.

And of course, depending on our upbringing and our society, some more than others. So if you've been listening and think of yourself as not a very spontaneously friendly person, don't add judgment, have tea with that. Because the good news is that this quality of an away card is your nature. It's your birthright and it can be brought out and cultivate it. And it takes being on purpose with it. So I want to encourage you to inwardly dedicate to having tea, to being kind, good-humored, warm toward your inner life, because that's the grounds of homecoming. And then practice outwardly. Make everyone your friend. It really helps just to reflect we are friends and experiment, bringing some warmth and greeting strangers. When the whole world

is your friend, fear will find no place to call home. We so need this in our world. It really matters that we evolve our capacity for friendliness. And finally, with those you know, deepening on purpose, you know, our well-being is linked to the depth of feeling relatedness. There's an old Sufi story where there's this Bektashi Dervish who was respected for his piety, his appearance of virtue, his depth, his wisdom. Well, whenever anyone asked him how he became so holy, his response was, I know what is in the Quran. Well, one day he had given this response to a new person who was at the coffee house,

and the man responded, well, what is in the Quran? In the Quran said the Bektashi, there are two pressed flowers and a letter from my friend Abdullah. More than all the formal practices on the path, it's really that heart space of feeling friendly. So we'll close on that note. I invite you if you are not driving or need to have your eyes open to maybe close your eyes or lower your gaze. and take a few full breaths and invite yourself right here and you might want to put your hand on your heart. Just feel that connection with heart space, tender, light touch.

And sense whatever's going on in your life right now that might need some friendliness. Just offer yourself whatever words most resonate in this moment as words of comfort, a message of wisdom, a transmission of care inwardly, a friendliness. And then sense the heart or the heart space really is quite edgeless and vast. And you might see and imagine appearing in that heart space different people in your life. And again, just sensing we are friends, we are friends, animals, non-human animals, plants, all beings. Just sense all beings in your heart. We are friends. We are friends. Sensing that homecoming that happens. When there's a belonging, the poet philosopher John O'Donohue

uses the term Anamkara. It's a Celtic term for true friend. Here's a blessing he offers. May you be blessed with good friends and learn to be a good friend to yourself, journeying to that place in your soul where there is love, warmth, and feeling. May this change you. May it transfigure what is negative, distant, or cold within your heart. May you be brought into real passion, kindness, and belonging. May you treasure your friends. May you be good to them, be there for them, and receive all the challenges, truth, and light you need.

May you never be isolated, but know the embrace of your Anamkara, true friend. And together now extending our prayers for this world, may there be a growing friendliness. May beings cherish and see the value of each other and every living being.

May all beings know the essence of friendliness of Buddha Vida, the pure life that arises from an open heart. Thank you, my friends, for your presence. May you be blessed to move through these days with an open heart. Namaste.