Tara Brach - Nourishing Our Spirit in Times of Collective Fear

Episode Date: May 26, 2022

Nourishing Our Spirit in Times of Collective Fear -

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome friends. Our theme for today is nourishing our spirit in difficult times, in times of collective fear. And, you know, I really do feel like the overriding feature of today's world is this collective sense of the threatening and uncertain future. And even those who assume to have their fingers on the pulse don't know, really don't know how we're going to manage climate crisis, don't know what the outcome's going to be in Ukraine, don't know how future pandemic waves are going to play out. And we humans don't like uncertainty.

You know, it's hard to inhabit our lives in the moment when it all feels up for grabs, kind of out of control. I saw a cartoon with a fortune teller talking to a friend, and she's saying, you know, I lost a fair amount of business when some of my best clients got together and successfully threw me a surprise party. And our brain is a predicting machine. We need a certain amount of predicting to be able to successfully navigate. And when this world is destabilized, it triggers a deep fear in the collective psyche.

So the more we sense the reality of inevitable. loss and suffering around the corner, the more anxious our minds get fixating on what's wrong. It's kind of like being in an airplane and being tossed around by unanticipated weather systems and just not being able to land in our life, in our moments, because we're tensing against what's next. I've been spending a lot of time recently with a dear friend who's been diagnosed with an uncommon and an aggressive cancer and she has limited options. And naturally, she's really focused on what's to come and experiencing shock and fear and grief. And her core question right now is, how do I make the most of the time I have knowing what's inevitable,

knowing what's ahead. You know, how do I make the most of right now knowing what I know? And I keep reflecting on this because in a deep way it's our shared question. You know, individually each of us is going to die. Our bodies are going to fail in some way, our minds. We're going to face a lot of loss. And collectively, as we know, we're facing a an increasing amount of climate trauma. We're facing just in these few years ahead of the starvation of millions of people across the planet. We're facing threats of nuclear kind of devastation, continuing pandemic. And in the United States, many of us are reeling from the race-based murders of 10 African Americans in Buffalo.

and the deepening toxicity of white supremacy. Entirely related, we're facing the specter of civil war, really an uncertain fate of democracy. And I'm naming all this because it's a scary future. And it's natural to fear what's to come, to have a lot of grief or anger, distress, alarm. Naturally, we need to dedicate ourselves to bringing whatever healing we can to our world. And it's not the world out there, it's a part of us. And yet, and this is what's crucial, especially if you're thinking, geez, I don't know if I'm up for another talk about the awfulness of the world, no matter what's ahead, there's more to who we are and to what's possible in our lives than living our moments

possessed by painful anticipatory emotions. In other words, if we're ruled by our amygdala, you know, tensing against the future, we lose what most matters to us. You know, we lose connecting in a loving way with each other. We lose living with presence, taking in our world, with appreciation, we lose creativity. And actually, if we're hijacked by our fears, we lose our capacity to respond wisely to the world. You know, it's so clear for my friend with cancer that being fixated on a scary future steals profoundly precious moments of real life that are here now.

So our inquiry, our inquiry, how to face a truly threatening future, and still really be here, you know, live and love fully, savor our moments. And I feel like one of the great gifts of a spiritual path is that it offers pathways for reconnecting, to our inner resources of love and courage and presence in the midst. It offers pathways that nourish our heart and spirit no matter what's going on. You can think of these pathways as falling in two domains and they each require intentional training and the first is a pathway of full presence with what is and that's what we talk about a lot. mindful awareness, being completely, honestly, bravely here with the present moment as it is.

The second pathway is intentionally turning your attention towards whatever arouses a sense of love, our strength, our openness, our spirit. It's what I refer to as turning towards our basic goodness, towards the gold. And friends, we need both. We need presence with our immediate experience, including however unpleasant it is, including simply being with our breath. Because if we regularly bypass that, if we don't have this capacity to ground in the present moment, you won't actually be able to turn towards the goodness,

towards the light in an embodied and full way. And if you have no way of turning towards the light of remembering goodness, of remembering beauty and kindness and joy, you won't have the resilience and the spaciousness to really be present for your life. So we need both pathways. And what we're going to do is explore these related ways of coming and nourishing our spirit. And in particular, I'd like to look at what neuroscience teaches us about deepening access to love and to joy. Okay, the first pathway, which is full presence with what is. And it really involves again and again coming back from our ideas and reactions to the future

where we're lost in thought and connecting with the life of the moment. This is the process of mindfulness, what I often describe as the RA of rain, recognize and allow. A poem that I love by David Wagoner goes like this and you might want to just kind of get quiet for a moment and really listen. Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here. Wherever you are is called here.

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger. Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen, it answers, I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again saying here. If you leave it, you may come back again saying here. No two trees are the same to raven. No two branches are the same to wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. Wherever you are is called here and you must treat it. it as a powerful stranger. I find such power to just saying the word here, here, to call myself back again from the virtual world into what's actually going on. And if we lean ahead, if we lean ahead, we'll be lost in the fears of trouble. I mean, the mind is whatever thoughts you are having,

they have a large percentage that are towards fear. So if, in the sense, Instead we arrive in what's right here. Stand still. Here. We discover a kind of fullness. It's a mystery, a tender awakeness and awareness that really is home. So I've been mentioning my friend and we were recently sitting together on a bench by the river and we began noticing out loud here, what was right here, naming wind on the face, light on

the eyes, the sound of geese. Now, there was a sense of each other side by side. We're simply recognizing the changing flow here, moment by moment, listening, feeling. And then we acknowledge and honored. These are moments of real life, lived life, not missed because we were lost in talking or thinking about what's to come. So presence with the sense with the gateway of our senses, it's a sacred refuge here. It opens us to this awake awareness that's listening and seeing and feeling. Let's take a few moments. We'll be practicing in a few ways during our time together. Take a few moments now to pause and you might let the attention settle, take a few full breaths.

So you might use these words to help you feel yourself right here saying, and you might whisper it out loud at first, right now I'm aware and just name what you're aware of with your senses, what sounds are here, or you might name breathing, or you might name sensations in your body. So whispering over and over again right now I'm aware. and then name what you're aware of, what's right here. And you can let that be a mental whisper now, aware of what's right here. And dropping even the words, just a silent knowing, moment to moment, of what's right here.

Through your senses, as the awareness that you are, what is it like to experience the sounds, the sensations, the felt sense. Be aware of the knower, that background presence that's listening and feeling. Just be that presence. Discover intimately the openness, that allowing quality, that sensitivity and tenderness, getting to know presence. what's right here. And as you're ready, taking a few full breaths, opening your eyes, your eyes are closed. So the ground level of homecoming, of nourishing our spirit is really to let go of the

thoughts of the future and come right here, that intimacy with this moment's experience, connecting with the gold. And now here I want to pause and emphasize a key element. element that deepens this pathway so that if any moment you pause and you say here, what's right here, how can you deepen that sense of presence? And the element that really makes a difference and neuroscience really emphasizes this is that when you feel that sense of contact, heerness, presence, entrain, in other words, get to know it. Pause even longer and notice the quality of the presence. Take it in, bathe in it, get familiar. And let me say why this entraining is necessary. Why when you come

home to something you value like presence or calmness or openness, why entraining to it, anchoring it in your psyche really makes a difference. again, this is where neuroscience comes in. So consider this. You do something for work. Let's say eight people express gratitude and compliment you. And one person has a criticism. What is it you remember? What is it you perseverate over? What stays with you? It's due to our brain's negativity bias that what happens is when we have an unpleasant, our scary experience, it's very sticky. It lodges in the implicit memory. It haunts us. It feels more thinking. It feels more negativity. But when we have a pleasant experience, it's much less sticky. It gets forgotten easily.

So to create stickiness, to increase our access to positive states, we have to entrain. We have to spend some time with it. Pause. Take it in. Get familiar. otherwise our habits that come from the negativity bias are going to rule. There's a story of a woman returning from a meditation retreat and she had a little extra time at the airport between flights so she gets a bottle of water and a small package of cookies and she struggles all her luggage and everything to an unoccupied table and she's reading the paper when she becomes aware of someone rustling at her table and she, from behind her paper, she's flabbergasted to see a neatly dressed young man helping himself to her cookies.

And she didn't want to make a scene, so she leaned across and took a cookie herself, a minute or so passed, more rustling. He's helping himself to another cookie. By the time they're down to the last cookie in the package, she's super angry but can't bring herself to say anything. And then the young man broke the cookie in two, pushed half to her, ate the other half, and left. Sometime later, when the public address system called for her to present her ticket, she's still fuming. And so try to imagine her embarrassment when she opens her pocketbook and is confronted by her package of cookies. She had been eating his. So her negativity bias, assuming greed or insensitivity or people taking advantage of her,

So, neuroscience really guides us in how to shift this bias and that's by in moments of positive experience, hear, when you really touch into here and presence, entrain, pause, three breaths, maybe 30 seconds, soak in it, get to know it, that will let it actually have that stickiness that stays in the unconscious. And for this woman with the cookies, what if she had spent? spent time in training to feelings of trust or generosity or seeing goodness, you know. They could have enjoyed a cookie party, sharing cookies together. Okay, so this is in training and you might wonder then, yeah, but what if you say here,

but what you open to is not that quality of spaciousness or calm or presence, but it's filled with fear and pain? And this is where I want to take the next step and say, that's in the same. invitation to deepen your attention with rain. The initial practice of here is recognize and allow. The full rain is recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture. So, I'll share personally that like many I know, letting in world news is increasingly disturbing. And I'd say that, these last weeks have been especially upsetting the killings by the white supremacist in Buffalo,

the Supreme Court enroo, the deepening crisis in food shortages, just so many on the edge already around the world. So what happens is that on some days, especially when I've taken in a lot of news, I can move through the day, kind of locked in a in a grimness, a sense of weightiness, it feels oppressive, I get anxious, just a background hum. And when I become aware and do a short rain, it goes like this. I'll recognize, oh, I'm this is grim, you know, kind of grim or angry or anxious, I'll recognize it. And then I'll allow it, just okay, let that be here. And then when I investigate under the grimness, you know, there's a fear of increasing suffering in our world.

And if I keep opening, if I keep staying with that, what comes under it is a real sense of sorrow. I touch into grief for our world and there's often tears crying and then end. The nurturing is really bringing, I often bring my hand to my heart and just feeling that caring and feeling a prayerfulness for our world, that there be growing compassion and wisdom, healing. And then I entrain. And entrain in rain comes in after the rain. We're in those moments where I feel, there's more openness and just pure tenderness. And I get to know that because that's home. that openness and tenderness is more who I am. It's more the truth of who I am than that tight grim place.

It can include the grimness, but I'm not being ruled by it. So, again, friends, we can come into presence right here, right now, and when we get to that place of tenderness and openness in training helps us to have it more available. You might practice for a moment, if you will. We'll just take a pause again, take a few full breaths and then bring up something that's not a huge place of pain and reactivity, but where you have some sense of frustration or some sense of anxiety. We're going to do a light rain when you have a place in mind, just rest of anxiety. recognize whatever emotion is strongest, just name it, allow it, investigate by feeling

where it is in the body, what's really going on, you know, what is it that you perhaps have been unwilling to feel that's under it, what is it that you maybe have not been able to accept open to? And as you investigate, you might bring your hand to your heart. and just feel a sense of care going to whatever part of you is vulnerable or distressed. You might even offer yourself a message of comfort. And just sense whatever shift to whatever degree has given you some more presence, some more tenderness. And take three full breaths and just feel fully where you are right now. feel fully the awareness, the presence, the tenderness.

Even if in the sea of that presence, there are still currents, which is quite natural, a fear, upset. Just sense that there's a little more spaciousness and get familiar. Relax back, beloved one, into the timeless presence from which shines stardust and storms, love and light. Rest, beloved one, in the mystery that is your source. Okay, so if you'd like to open your eyes if they were closed, this is the first pathway, being with what's here, being with what's here through the senses, and if it requires a deepening presence with rain, and with each in training.

When you arrive even at a subtle shift where there's more presence, getting to know that presence. This is home. Now the second pathway is intentionally turning toward the light. It's what the Buddhists called gladdening the mind. I had a woman in our Sangha some years ago who was struggling with her health and she shared a conversation she had with a wise friend. The friend had asked, what would happen? What would it feel like for you to think that something good was going to happen rather than something not so good or even bad was going to happen today. And this woman responded totally weird and uncomfortable and her friend said, good, okay, try that. And you might try that, just sense whatever part of the day you're in,

that there's something enriching, enlivening, connecting that's possible, something ahead that's possibly enriching to your life. Not to create an expectation, but openness to possibility. So it's interesting because in happiness research, one common denominator of those deemed happy is choosing happiness, sensing this as a possibility and turning towards it, gladdening the mind. Henri Neuen, Catholic mystic and writer goes further. He says, joy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. So this becomes particularly critical in difficult times where our survival brain can keep us so grim, so tensed against the future. And that, of course, just fuels pessimism and depression, anxiety, an armored heart.

And it also creates high blood pressure and reduced immune response. If we don't have ways of gladdening the mind, turning towards what brings happiness, love, wonder, we won't have resilience. So choosing to turn towards the light, towards happiness, creates an inner environment that really allows true peace and well-being to arise. And again, neuroscience, it's based on this principle of neuroplasticity. And that means that no matter what your patterns are in your life, in your brain, they can be changed. And how we pay attention rewires the brain. In other words, where attention goes, energy flows. The more you turn towards the light,

the more you repeat that, the more energy and familiarity goes in that direction. What we practice gets stronger. In one story, Saul and Mortar, walking from religious service and Saul wonders whether it would be all right to smoke while praying. And Mort says, well, why don't you ask Rabbi Schwartz and says, Saul goes to Rabbi Schwartz and says, Rabbi, may I smoke while I pray? And the rabbi says, no, my son, you may not. That's disrespect to our religion. Saul goes back to his friend, tells him the answer and Mort says, I'm not surprised. I mean, you asked the wrong question. Let me try. So Mort goes up to the rabbi and says, Rabbi, may I pray while I smoke? To which the rabbi eagerly replies, by all means, my son,

by all means. So it's not a great example, but the point is the more you turn your attention in a direction that arouses positive resources like feelings of love or connection or wonder, the more of those experiences will be available to you. Truly, what we practice grow stronger. So you may have felt resigned to depression or anxiety, but these states can be rewired, they can shift. I was working with an environmental scientist and an activist who is acutely aware of the destruction of our earth, our world, and the lack of a meaningful response. And through the day, more and more over these last years, he's been regularly swamped in anger and in fear. And he's particularly pain, thinking about his children and what they're growing up to,

So he told me that he, you know, some months back was talking to his wife about that despair, that is children in their future. And she said, sweetie, I get it. I truly understand. But please, please, don't let the awfulness of the future rob you or them of the love that's here. don't let the awfulness of the future, rob you or them of the love that's here. So wise. I mean, she's not saying to him, don't worry, or she's not saying don't grieve what's happening.

She's simply saying, you don't have to miss the love, the beauty that's here now. And so it is with us that we have to have an honest presence with our experience, that first pathway, and we have to gladden the mind. there are several direct ways of gladdening the mind. Each involves entraning. That once you feel a bit gladdened, you entrain to that, get familiar. And the first is that a lot of times pleasantness just arises spontaneously. You'll see a flower and see the face of the flower and the delicacy and just there's a sense of

kind of wonder. or you might feel that breeze on your cheek or see the glow in a child's eyes and it just springs up in you. In those moments, you can take three long, deep breaths, you can pause there and take in, let in, bathe in that sense of the goodness that's there. And many find rain as a really useful tool of doing that. We often think of rain as something you use with difficulty, but it can also be a powerful tool for increasing your access to positive experiences.

A few days ago, I got a letter from someone who shared how she was bringing rain to happy moments and she described walking to work one day in this uprising of calmness and presence. So she recognized it and she allowed those feelings and then she investigated a little bit more. I'll read what she wrote, the mucky spring weather and anticipation of an important project coming to fruition, a cacophony of bird song, a good night's sleep, just feeling the presence and the calm taking in her world. And then the nurturing was really appreciating and honoring. What a wonderful way to start the day. Getting to know it, opening to that goodness. She wrote that a simple rain reflection on goodness and she says, I mean simple,

maybe 30 seconds or less, made it stronger and more accessible to me during the day. So, any moment that there's a positive feeling that spontaneously arises in train with rain, you know, recognize it, allow it, investigate and feel it, nurture, take those three long deep breaths, It makes it sticky. So you can do this when something spontaneously happens, but you can also intentionally arouse positive states of mind. This will be the final piece that we explore. You can be feeling any way and turn the attention to arouse positive states of mind.

I was talking with one friend who's a teacher, a woman. of color. And this was just a few days ago, we were sharing our grief about the shootings in Buffalo. And she was talking about how that's really up-leveled fear for her. And she told me about needing to shop and going to a parking lot at Food Lion and how she would scan the cars in the lot for Confederate flags. And she talked about for her and for her friends of color, it's just another level of unsafe, that white supremacy has always been here, but it's more above the ground, more energetically and violently embraced in getting worse. So then I asked her about how she was taking care of herself. And she said, well, of course, you know, my practice is to open to the

fear and to be real with it. And she said, I also take real time to nourish myself. And And she does it by reflecting on the lover of her partner and grandson. And one of her main ways is she sits outside and feels this connection with a large tree in her yard. She's named the tree Bodie, which has to do with awakening. And she says that helps her feel the presence of her ancestors and feel supported by the trees and the grass and the air and the ants. In other words, it grounds her back in loving awareness where she doesn't have to hold it alone. And that's her in training. Her entraining is just sensing that loving awareness.

It's like the ocean that has room for the waves. She wrote to me especially now when I feel heart achy and like I need to do more, be more. I'm reminded that I'm resource beyond measure. So again, it doesn't take away the grief or the fear, but it gives us this vast space to unfold in. That's a gift of gladdening the mind. So you can do it through in training when something comes up spontaneously or you can do it through a loving-kindness reflection when you practice loving-kindness or metta and you feel a sense of love and trained to that. Or you can do it when you practice gratitude, when you say to yourself,

you know, what am I grateful for? And then feel the gratitude. So we started and I shared, you know, about my friend with cancer and her question, how do I make the most of the time I have knowing what's ahead? And the truth is that we can't get rid of a threatening future. And we can't avoid our fears or our grief or uncertainty. But there are two pathways that can give us a lot of freedom. And one is really right here, presence with what is, here, here. And the second, the second refuge really is turning towards the light, remembering what we love. And when you touch presence through either of those pathways, when you feel a sense of being at home, in train, pause, breathe with it, get to know it so that you trust that

this is more the truth of who you are than any story that imprisoned you. It's like that environmental activists, we do what we can, we dedicate ourselves to helping. And as his wife said so perfectly, please, please don't let the fear of of the future, rob you of loving today. Okay, we're going to do a final practice of gladdening the mind and then in training with that. And I invite you as we've been doing to let this be a pause, give yourself that gift of taking a few moments to come into stillness, give yourself that gift of taking a few full deep breaths to help collect you right here, right now.

And give yourself that gift of seeing what wants to let go a little in your body. Maybe you bring your attention to the shoulders and notice that you can soften a little. Maybe you can soften the hands, let them rest in an effortless way, soften the belly, allow the breath to move deep into the torso. You might bring a slight smile to the mouth and sense it's spreading so you can feel it in your eyes, let the eyes be soft. You might visualize and sense that curve of a smile spreading through the heart, making room for the life that's here, let it spread that sense of openness and tenderness through the body. And I invite you to reflect on what you love, what you're

grateful for. And as a way of guiding yourself, you might mentally whisper, I'm grateful for, and then just say whatever comes to mind and then whispered again and I'm grateful for and say what comes to mind over and over or if you'd prefer you can say what I love is over and over filling in the blank so choosing one and begin inwardly what I'm grateful for or what I love is and now choose Choose one thing that you named that you're grateful for, that you love. And sense that really close in, what really brings up the gratitude, what really brings up the love. And let go of the object and just feel through your body and your heart the fullness of gratitude and love.

Discover what it's like by letting it fill you, as if you could bathe in it, that every cell could bathe in that feeling of gratitude or love, the spaces between them. Sense how big it is. How big is the gratitude, the love? Just open out into that fullness. Sensing this is home. More true than any story. This is the goal, the essence of what we are. Just take some moments to value that, honor that. Relax back, beloved one. into the timeless presence from which shines stardust and storms, love and light. Rest, beloved one, in the mystery that is your source. As you're ready, if your eyes are closed, opening the eyes,

I want to thank you, friends, for your attention. It gladdens my heart to be with you. I feel like the field that we share is filled with loving, filled with truth, and as what can carry us as we move through these times. Namaste. Thank you.