Tara Brach - Part 1 - Freedom from Othering: Undoing the Myths that Imprison Us (2018-01-17)

Episode Date: January 20, 2018

Freedom from Othering: Undoing the Myths that Imprison Us - Part 1 - A primary source of our suffering is the conditioning to create "bad other," or "inferior other." This same conditioning leads us to creating a bad self and turn on ourselves. These three talks explore how we subscribe to societal myths and beliefs that perpetuate this "bad othering," and "bad selfing." They then guide us in bring a healing attention that can reveal the goodness that lives through all beings, and our innate connectedness. A core teaching is, "the boundary to who we include in our hearts is the boundary to our freedom." Your support enables us to continue to offer these talks and meditations freely. If you value them, I hope you will consider offering a donation at this time at www.tarabrach.com/donation/. With gratitude and love, Tara  

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste and welcome. Start with a short teaching story. A linguistics professor was lecturing in his class one day and he was basically saying that in English two negatives make a positive and he continued in some languages like Russian, two negatives still remain a negative, but he said there's no language where two positives make a negative.

And then there was a voice in the back of the room that said, yeah, right. So I begin with some version of the negativity bias, which we talk about a lot. This is the survival brain that is basically scanning for what's wrong. And the negativity bias means we're looking for where there might be a threat, whether it's in ourselves or in others. And what it basically leads to is what I've come to call bad othering, where we perceive others and there's mistrust and there's a sense of danger and we just add on bad.

This is a bad person. And it happens on a societal level and happens, you know, in our relationships, and it happens we bad other ourselves. And we turn into an object to ourselves and bat other ourselves. So for this class and the next, this will be a two-part series, I want to explore freedom from othering, really from any othering, because any othering creates separation, how we undo the myths that imprison us.

And as you can imagine in some deep way, this is really about including and sensing a reverence for life. And it's in honor of really the one holiday that feels like a holy day, one of the few to me of the year that we just had a few days ago. And the message, Martin Luther King's message really of realizing this dream of beloved community of a soul realizing that we belong in each other's hearts. I remember on my first meditation retreat, my takeaway was a sense that the boundary to what I could accept, the boundary to what I could accept mostly about myself, was really the boundary to my freedom. Like to the degree that I was pushing away any part of myself, I was not free. And over the over the degree that I was pushing away. And over the years I've widened or shifted that understanding slightly to be that the boundary

really to who I can include in my heart is the boundary to my freedom. So if there's anyone I'm not including, like anyone where there's a sense of pushing away in some way my heart isn't free. And I find that an amazing reflection. One teacher taught that really the path is to not push anyone including ourselves out of our hearts. Because it creates a wall around our heart when we don't include. So we'll look at this and we'll look at two domains of othering. And one of the domains really we see through human history which is hierarchy where humans

on every continent all over, well, I can't say every continent, I don't know about Antarctica, so let me revise all around the globe through history have created hierarchies. Wherever penguins have a hierarchy, it's probably, and it's not just humans, many species actually have hierarchies, but humans definitely do. And that means above and below, it means that there's statuses and strata's of authority, priority and importance, and it means superior, inferior. And so that's one domain that we're going to look at, how quickly and often unconsciously we assume inferior or superior in many domains of our life.

And the second, which is related, is good, bad, how quickly we make ourselves or others bad. So when we're excluding anybody, we're in a trance. This is the kind of basic principle we're operating off of. And I've often given that metaphor of the circle of awareness, you remember, the line that goes through it, that whatever's below the line is outside of our awareness, whatever is above the lines in our awareness. So when we're excluding, when we're judging, when we're blaming, when we're in a limbic reaction,

we're below the line. and they're suffering in that because when we're below the line we're really living in a fragment of ourselves and if you actually are in the thick of it and you can have the wakefulness to pause if you're in the thick of really feeling derisive towards somebody really contemptuous or whatever

and you pause and you check your body and your mood and your mind state It's a very contracted small self. It doesn't have the space and the wakefulness and the heart that really is our potential and who we want to be. So, when we're under the line, we're in a trance and that includes when we're living in as superior or inferior in a hierarchy. It's true when we're living as pushing someone away as a bad other.

it's true when we're condemning ourselves. So we're going to explore a bit hierarchy because often it's really unconscious. It's because hierarchies are how our society operates and we're embedded in it. We're often not aware of what that conditioning is like. Brief story. The Pope had just finished a tour of the East Coast

and was taking a limo to the airport. He had never driven a limo before, so he asked a chauffeur if he could drive it for a while. Well, the chauffeur didn't have much of a choice. So he climbs in the back of the limo and the pope takes the wheel. Pope proceeds onto Highway 95, starts accelerating to see what the limo could do. He gets to about 90 miles per hour and suddenly sees the blue lights of the State Patrol in the mirror. Pulls over and the trooper comes to the window. The trooper, seeing who it was, says, quite nervously, just a moment, sir, please.

I need to call in. The trooper calls in and asks for the chief. He's very shaken. He tells the chief he's got a really important person pulled over and how is he supposed to handle it. Since this is dated, anyway, it's not Ted Kennedy again as it replies the chief. No, sir, replies the truer.

The guy's more important than that. Is it the governor replied the chief? Nope, even more important replies to the trooper. Is it the president replied the chief? No, even more important replies the trooper. Well, who in the heck is it screams the chief? I don't know, sir, replies the trooper, but he's got the Pope as his chauffeur. So that was my favorite hierarchy joke I could find.

So just to name that there can be functional, wholesome hierarchies in some families, some organizations, in other words, strata that are respectful and they're serving the whole. But given the force of our... limbic system, how much greed and grasping there is in the culture and how much aggression and so on, that's not what has happened mostly. Human societies through history have created these limbic-driven hierarchies, okay, with the stratas where you've got privilege and power on the top and you've got in the lower

discrimination and oppression, the inferior. And the exceptions are really exceptions when you look at any complex society. societies. What happens is when we don't examine them, we're actually living inside them and below the line. So what I'd like to do is focus on three big ones that we can see very much in our society and that is sex, gender, race, and class. And I begin by saying that in the United States our government is based on the Declaration of Independence, 17, 76, all men are created equal. So you can write away kind of hear in that something. What that document did was it created and it affirmed each of these oppressive hierarchies

and they're still in place. So just to consider all men are created equal, it wasn't women, it was men. It was about equality for whites but not for blacks or American. Indians. They were considered humans of a lesser type. And it was class hierarchy because it really had to do with rich and poor. They had no problems in forming this document with the existing inequities that kept the poor poor. There was nothing to do with unemployment benefits or integrated education or health insurance. It held in place the hierarchy of wealth. Now the way that hierarchies get generated and sustained is by men. Internally, for you to believe in a bad self, you have to have myths internally about who you should be,

who, who, you know, like what's right and good and what's bad. Well, same thing for our hierarchies. There's myths that hold them in place. And if you look at each one, if you take each one of those and you say, okay, so what's the myth that held in place that it was men, not women? women, well, the myth was women were not appropriate for the work of, you know, voting. They didn't have the brains to vote, of course, and that women were weaker and not capable. There were an object more to own or possess in some way to dominate and that they shouldn't

get angry or aggressive. In other words, it was those kind of myths. What were the myths at that time about racial hierarchy? And by the way, each of these myths, as you know, is currently being challenged some in a quite dramatic way. What was a myth on racial hierarchy? Well, there's all the pseudoscience about biological difference. And there was the beliefs that slavery was God-ordained, present in all great societies. I remember reading something about Aristotle saying that slaves had a slavish nature.

What that's worth. Slavery was necessary for stable, prosperous society. So it was with the myths that were holding an important. place. Now, most Westerners don't believe in racial hierarchy yet it persists de facto, as we know. So how come? The myths are still there. Faulkner writes that the past is not dead, it is not even past. Okay. So they live on, of course, more subtle forms with unseen bias of, you know, white superiority, white privilege, the words that go around so much, it's not seen. That allows it to keep going on and on.

It's the message sent through all of our institutions, through education, justice system, through the options for employment. James Baldwin writes this. As many of you know, James Baldwin, renowned author, Gaye Efford, America, He writes this in an essay, he says, they can't turn back, and that's the name of the essay, it took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself and half believed before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here. So this is after saviour is over, but the myths and what they do to the psyche continue.

Then there's classism, and these are all intersecting. importantly. And there we have the myth that the deserving, those that are wealthy are deserving because they do this hard work and those that aren't or lazy or not so deserving. And of course it's overlooking how hard it is to break out once somebody has money they can perpetuate it with money and keep building. With the myths come the pride of wealth. and the shame of not wealth. And of course there's a lot of gradation. Another story for you.

Milton Friedman, my friend Jack Cornfields, many of you've heard of, well, at one time this Milton Friedman was a Washington speechwriter. He worked in the Carter White House. He was different than the Milton Friedman, who was the Nobel laureate economist. Two different Milton Friedman's, okay? So here's a story. Melton, Jack's friend, received a call one day, and this was during a time when the economy was in a downturn,

and there were deep concerns in financial circles that the recession was just around the corner. Gets the phone calls. Is Milton Friedman? Yes, it is. Caller goes on to explain that he was the controller for an organization that managed several billion dollars of church finances and wanted to know if Friedman might have any suggestions as to where the money might be safely and wisely invested. So after listening to the story, Friedman replied, Have you considered giving the money to the poor? There was a moment of stunned silence on the other end of the phone and then a tremulous voice asked, Are you the Milton Friedman?

And Friedman immediately replied, are you the real church? It's a good one, don't you think? So coming above the line means that we start shining a little a light in our own lives of where we're living in these hierarchies. How are they shaping our consciousness for each of us? I mean, if you look inside any one of those hierarchies, class, what's the identity? Where is there a sense of either inferior, superior, or shame, or pride? How do you look at other people and where they're standing? Through any of these lens, because most people I know have experienced both feeling superior, feeling somewhere up

higher in one of those domains and also lower. They've experienced both pride and shame. And if you're in the non-dominant stratas, it can come with a lot of hurt, anger, and shame. If you're in the more, if you're in the dominant, often there's less consciousness, it's privilege, there's assumption, there's kind of a self-centeredness, a numbing of the heart, you're not as aware. For myself, because I've spent some time over these last years investigating, I can see through my life places where I was low on the hierarchy. I remember in junior high school, I always brought up Unitarian, but my family's Semitic all in all ways back, both sides.

So I went to a school where I was one of the only Semitic or Jewish, considered by them, it was a junior high school, and I didn't quite know what was happening, but I felt the othering there. And I remember feeling this self-consciousness, like somehow or other I didn't fit and had to work hard to try to belong. There's a lot more to say about each of these. I'm just giving you examples because I'm an invite. you to check in your life also. Yeah, so then I lived for 12 years in an ashram and I

wanted this garb in the world, this white turban and so on. And I got called a diaper head and I got all sorts of rice of comments in different places and almost everywhere I went, I knew I was in some way people, and sometimes they were very suave about it, but I was being taken in as weird. It was a definite outsider feeling. I was publicly abused, emotionally abused by the leader in an international spiritual community and I've written about that and then like most women I know, I've had times of being harassed in ways that have been uninvited and felt terrible. So just to say, I know, I know it feels like I know the anger, the shame, the hurt that it's like, but I've much more spent

my time in the more dominant strata. And that's where my wake-ups have been. That's where I've had the hard work of shining the light and finding how much I was below the line and thinking I was coming above the line only to find out there was more and more and more. And examples of that are being white, being financially stable, and then being a leader or teacher in a meditation community and in a kind of domain that I'm involved with. So on the latter, it's only been in recent years that I, you know, because I work on, you know, with a board with a lot of other people and different organizational ways, that I've started realizing how much, how insensitive I've been to how other people feel around decision-making

with me. The insecurity and discomfort to work with me and that I'd kind of just kind of just steam all over things and not attune. Just to be aware of that, to be aware in the biggest way, and this is the biggest area of wake-up, of course, has been white privilege. I've shared in in past talks that I had the good fortune of spending three and a half years with a multi-racial group dedicated just looking at our relationships and who we were and our identities. And they taught me so much. We'd talk about our sons, raising our sons, and my friend would tell me how she had to instill the fear of police in her son just to be, so he'd.

be careful enough not to be in the wrong place or say the wrong thing and how she was afraid for his life every time he would go out when he was a teen, what she was living with, that I never had to live with. Another would describe what it was like growing up and driving with her father and having them pulled, you know, the police pulling them off the road and her father's shame and having to witness her father's shame. The pain of that. Another, their dearest friends, the daughters, 16, she's going to have a baby and knowing the trajectory of her life where it's going to go by having a child that early, what her options would be. So I share all these because it was a heartbreaking wake-up to realize how much I had assumed,

to realize also how I'd see white faces in power and just assume it as natural, not even question it, which is an assumption of inferior or superior. And then along with that came guilt, like feeling really embarrassing guilty about being white and being privileged and then having to work with allies and share that to realize it's not my guilt, it's the guilt. And it's not my bias, it's the bias, and I have a responsibility in order to wake up, order to be true to who I am to really pay attention. So this has been a really big process and the truth is we're all conditioned.

Every one of us is conditioned. You can't be in this culture and not be conditioned by those myths and we have this capacity to come above the line if we pay attention. So I'd like to invite you to reflect. We're going to do a brief reflection and we'll do that together if you will, just to take a pause and come into a comfortable way of sitting but close your eyes. There's increasing research that both describes the extent to which racial bias exists and there's also research that shows how when we begin to bring the light of mindful awareness

to it we start being able to watch our own minds. we actually can reduce it. We actually can shift so that our hearts become more authentically inclusive. So I'd like to ask you to consider a few different things. And the first is, where have you been in the role or identity of the non-dominant strato?

In other words, what's sometimes called the inferior or the more marginalized. I gave you some examples from my life, where has that been so for you? Could be if you identify as a female, feeling that kind of oppression, could be class-wise, feeling shame or less than because of your income, education.

social status, could be racial, feeling that you've been feeling a shame or outsider, marginalized, oppressed because of race. Bring one example to mind for yourself and as you do see if you can go inside that example and sense what's the experience of who you are when you're in that role or that identity. of the person that in some way is considered less than by others. There are many others that I haven't mentioned, many other categories. It could be for your sexual orientation or gender orientation. It could be to do with the size of your body or it could be to do with different abilities

or physical disabilities. So there are many realms. Where have you felt less than? What have you believed about yourself when you're inside that identity as you just shine a light on this? How has it affected your relationship with others? With others who are supposedly in the superior strata are those in the same? It's the feeling tone, the felt sense that comes with identifying in this way.

Is it shame? Is it fear, anger, hurt? You might take a few full breaths and then I'll ask you to explore something different, which is when you've been in the role or identity in a dominant strata. Might be race, whiteness, male. wealth, could be power at work, where you are in the hierarchy at work, and sometimes this takes a more close look. You might have in mind yourself in that role and perhaps somebody else that you know that's

not. So you can kind of sense the juxtaposition. If it's a powerful position at work, somebody who's way lower in the hierarchy. If it's white, then you might bring to mind an African American friend. If it's wealth, someone that you know, struggles. What's your experience of yourself of who you are when you sense that identity? What do you believe in about yourself? Their sense of importance or superiority or being better?

or maybe is their guilt? What are you believing about others who are not in the strata, who are, as we've been talking about this, using the label of inferior strata, lower strata? Again, this is part of the myth. But how are you feeling? What are you believing about them? And you might, as I mentioned, imagine one person who's them, who's in a different strata. Do you sense a differential? Do they feel less? You might sense what would it be like

to be them? What do you imagine they might experience in this hierarchy, being in this hierarchy? What's their vulnerability, their feeling of less than, what's it like? And sense of you can experience including that person in your heart. You might imagine that you might imagine that, in the days and weeks to come, bringing care and interest, bringing the light of awareness to this, to sensing what's it like for you, including in your heart those that might be identified or feeling less than. Rumi says that our task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

Taking a few full breaths and as you're ready, opening your eyes. There's a languaging of cultural humility that if we really want to wake up and sense the barriers we've created and wake up from them, the first real principle of cultural humility of creating this openness to those of different identity is a dedication to looking.

And the places that it's hardest to see is when you're in a strata, in a social hierarchy, you're in the dominant strata. Because we're embedded in it, we don't see the benefits. We don't see the privileges and we don't realize other people are feeling insecurity, shame, hurt, oppression. We just don't notice. And there's research that shows those in higher,

Stratus don't have the empathy for lower stratus. It's numbed. So we begin to notice the stratification and sense where it inflates or where it numbs or it blinds us or if we're feeling identified with the more marginalized or non-dominant or whatever words you want to put on it, how it deflates and where the shame is. And we can find it in every organization, every business, every setting that we're in. in one church setting walking into the empty sanctuary of a synagogue

a rabbi suddenly possessed by a wave of mystical rapture and he throws himself in the ground before the ark and he proclaims, Lord, I'm nothing, I'm nothing. Seeing the rabbi in such a state that candor felt profoundly moved by similar emotions so he too threw himself down in front of the ark and he proclaims, Lord, I'm nothing, I'm nothing, I'm nothing. Then way back at the synagogue, the janitor seeing the stuff happening, he throws himself to the ground and he too shouts,

Lord, I'm nothing. Whereupon the rabbi turns to the canter and whispers, look who thinks he's nothing? We have hierarchies everywhere. Our practices, whether we're talking about in our meditation, shining a light, wherever there's a knot, wherever there's a numbness, wherever there's something that's separated. it's us from presence, the commitment is to pay attention. And there's this idea that the meditation practices on a cushion or in a cave or inward, but for a mature spiritual path we need to pay attention on all the levels because if we're

going around in a societal hierarchy and not aware that we're part of a class that is basically participating and oppressing another group, we're under the line. We're not living from a whole and awake sense of being. There's a story that I try to share once or twice a year because it was one of the biggest wake-up stories of my whole life and I thought I'd share it as part of this talk. This talk's a new talk. I haven't given this talk before and yet it's very alive for me because it feels like the cutting edge of waking up. We can't wake up unless we pay attention to this domain. And this was, as I mentioned, I was brought up Unitarian and this was shared by Unitarian Minister. Now I heard it

Christmas Eve when I was with my family at church. And this minister, the reading describes a family that is going on the holidays on a road trip and going from San Francisco down somewhere in California. And they have to stop at King's City in this little metropolis for lunch. And they go into a diner and there's four of them and they're road weary and saddle sore. And it's pretty empty. There's only a few people in there and she says she sits her son Eric one years old in a high chair and looks around and wonders what she's doing there. So they're the only family and everyone's either eating or talking quietly. Her reveries interrupted. She says, I heard Eric squeal with glee. Hi there. Two words he thought were one. Hi there. He pounded his

fat baby hands whack whack on the metal high chair tray and his face was alive with excitement. eyes wide, gums bared, and a toothless grin. He wiggled and chirped and giggled, and then I saw the source of his merriment and my eyes couldn't take it in all at once. A tattered rag of a coat obviously bought by someone else eons ago, dirty, greasy, baggy pants, the zipper at half-mast over a spindly body, a shirt that had to ring around the collar and a face, gums as bare as Eric's hair uncombed, unwashed, whiskers, too short to be called a beard, a nose so varicose it looked like the map of New York.

I was too far away to smell him, but I knew he smelled and his hands were waving in the air, flapping on loose wrists. Hi there, baby, hi there, big boy. I see you buster. My husband and I exchanged a look that was a cross between what do we do and poor devil. Eric continued to laugh and answer, hi there, hi there. Every call was echoed. I noticed our waitress's eyebrows shoot to their far.

foreheads and several people sitting near us out loud. This old geezer was creating a nuisance with my beautiful baby. I shoved a cracker, Eric, and I pulverized it on the tray. I whispered whimey under my breath. Our meal came and the nuisance continued. Now the old bum was shouting from across the room, do you know Patty Cake? Adaboy, you know peekaboo? Hey, look, he knows peekaboo.

Nobody thought it was cute. The guy was drunk and a disturbance. I was embarrassed. My husband Dennis was humiliated. Even our six-year-old said, why is that old man talking so loud? Wade in silence. Except Eric, who was running through his repertoire

for the admiring applause of a skid row bum. Finally, I had enough. I turned in the high chair. Eric screamed and clamored to face his old buddy. Now I was really mad. Dennis went to pay the check imploring me to get Eric and meet me in the parking lot. I trungled Eric out of the high chair and turned towards the exit.

The old man sat poised and wading his chair directly between me and the door. Lord, just get me out of here before he speaks to me or Eric. I headed toward the door. It soon became apparent that both the Lord and Eric had other plans. As I drew closer to the man, I turned my back, walking to sidestep him, and any air he might be breathing. As I did so, Eric, all the while with his eyes riveted to his best friend, leaned far over my shoulders reaching both arms in a baby pick-me-up position. In a split second of balancing my baby and turning to counter his weight, I came eye to eye with the old man. Eric was lunging for him, arms spread wide.

The bum's eyes both asked and implored, Would you let me hold your baby? There was no need for me to answer since Eric prepared. held himself from my arms to the man's. Suddenly a very old man and a very young baby were involved in a love relationship. Eric laid his tiny head upon the man's ragged shoulder. The man's eyes closed and I saw tears hover beneath his lashes. His aged hands full of grime and pain and hard labor so gently cradled my baby's bottom and stroked his back. I stood awestruck. The old man rocked and cradled Eric and his arm.

for a moment and then his eyes opened and set squarely on mine. He said in a firm, commanding voice, you take care of this baby. Somehow I managed I will from a throat that contained a stone. He pried Eric from his chest, unwillingly, longingly, as though he was in pain. I held my arms open to receive my baby and again the gentleman addressed me. God bless you, ma'am, you've given me my Christmas gift. I said nothing more than a muttered thanks. With Eric back in my arms I ran for the car. Dennis wondered why I was crying and holding Eric so tightly and why I was saying, my God, my God, forgive me. It creates so much suffering for others and for ourselves when we don't see how we're making others less than. It creates separation.

It keeps the whole movement of violating and violence happening. So our practice is to see this and deepen our attention. One woman who listens to the podcast was living in Uganda, went for a weekend trip to the Memorial, a genocide memorial center in Rwanda, and she saw a plaque and she sent me an email and this is what it said. It said, if you knew me and you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me. Felicia Nantangua. If we really knew each other, we'd see beyond the hierarchy of superior inferior.

If we really knew ourselves, we'd be living above the line. and we wouldn't buy into the myths that basically keep us so small. So it's really an effolutionary unfolding. And the hopefulness is that there's this rapid acceleration of paying attention right now, of undoing the myths and whether we call it, you know, black pride, gay pride, all those movements are the many, other ways that throughout the culture, people are just deepening their attention and undoing the beliefs and the hierarchies that keep us separate. I read, I was reading an article written

by Alicia Garza. She's the co-founder of Black Lives Matters and she was describing there was a lot of conflict over whether Black Lives Matters was going to participate in the Women's March last year. And she decided to go ahead and do it. And she wrote this. She said, our cynicism will not build a movement, collaboration well. Building a movement requires reaching out beyond the people who agree with you. So we widen the circles by deepening our attention to those that we agree with, those we don't agree with, those that feel superior, those that feel inferior. And next week we'll continue by looking very much in our personal relationships where we've habitually pushed away, where we've created bad other, where we're creating separation

because of the beliefs that we're holding onto, and how we do that to ourselves. Again, the theme being that the boundary to who we include is the boundary to our freedom. If we don't include ourselves and each other, we're not free. So I'd like to close. We just take a few moments to pause again. Let yourself arrive. Feel yourself right here in this body that's sitting here, breathing. Just reflect on the words of Nelson Mandala from the long.

road to freedom. He says, I never lost hope that this great transformation would occur. Not only because of the great heroes, but because of the courage of ordinary men and women of my country, I always knew that deep down in every human heart there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of a skin or background or religion. must learn to hate and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love. For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Even in the grimest times in prison when my comrades and I were pushed to our limits, I would see a glimmer of humanity in one of the guards, perhaps just for a second but it was enough to reassure me and keep

me going. Goodness is a flame that can be hidden but not. never extinguished. So may we trust in this goodness that lives within us and all beings. May we pay attention to the barriers that separate us and open our hearts to include all beings everywhere. Namaste and blessings. Thank you. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.