Tara Brach - Part 1: The Healing Power of Self-Compassion

Episode Date: March 23, 2011

2011-03-23 - Part 1: The Healing Power of Self-Compassion - Learning to hold our own lives with a gentle compassion is a key element in all emotional healing and spiritual awakening. This two part series explores the suffering of being at war with ourselves and the pathway to freeing our hearts. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donation makes a difference! Thank you!

So again, I want to welcome you here, and I also want to welcome those that are listening and from all over the place. It really does feel like there's this extended field of us, and it's really quite lovely. And maybe begin by saying that the most important truths are the ones that we're most regularly inclined to forget. And that is that we can't be happy. We can't really experience well-being unless we feel a sense of love and care for what's right here in the present moment, including ourselves, said differently.

If we're turned on ourselves or divided against ourselves in any way, in that moment there's a fragmenting that takes us from really feeling at home in our lives, at home with other people. So it said that the heart of Buddhism is compassion and that the heart of compassion is compassion for ourselves. It really has to start with the life that's right here. So the centrality of self-compassion,

which is going to be the subject tonight and next week. We're going to do a two-part series. The centrality of it is something that the Western Buddhist teachers have been really awakened. to over the last few decades that you can't teach about a path of spiritual freedom and can't leapfrog over to realization and skip the fact that we're so often at war with ourselves in an immediate way. Have to start where you are and address that. And Western psychology is now in a very big way emphasizing self-compassion. And it's been quite remarkable in the last couple of years

to see what's happened. There's been increasing amounts of research on, you know, what happens when there's poor bonding when we're very young and how that creates a sense of unworthiness and we don't have compassion for ourselves. And how when we learn to cultivate self-compassion, it changes our whole experience of anxiety, it affects depression. And I read from you, because I love it when the New York Times highlights these things. This is the New York Times last month. The research suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step towards better health.

People who score high on tests of self-compassion of less depression and anxiety and tend to be happier and more optimistic. Preliminary data suggests that self-compassion can even influence how much we eat and may help some people lose weight. They always hitch it to weight loss, you know, everything. That brings people to meditation glasses. So it's really important to be aware

how do we relate to our suffering? So when you get stuck, you know, when you get caught, when you get caught in addictive behavior or caught in a conflict with someone else or a feeling of failure, you know, when you're kind of stuck, do you ignore it? Or do you try to immediately go into problem-solving mode?

Or do you judge yourself further saying, you know, this is just evidence, you know, really a failure? Or is there some pause in a sense of, oh, okay, this I'm in pain right now. Is there is there a pause and some kindness? And the difference between the kind of reactivity where we're ignoring or judging and that kindness is really the difference between a life that's caught in what I often call the trance of of separation and unworthiness and really a quality of inner freedom and peace. So one of my first great wake-ups and this was I was 20 I was on a kind of weekend

and I was going hiking with a friend of mine a woman who was 22, an older, wiser woman who at one point said to me you know, I'm really learning to be my own best friend and at first I said yeah, yeah, okay, right, cool and then I went, whoa and you know how it is

you might we're just ready at certain times for something I just started flashing on all the ways that I was cruel. I'm not even just not kind, cruel to myself. You know, that when I was feeling terrible, you know, if it was a friend that was struggling with something, I'd, you know, be kind and present. But when I was going through, for me then, the misery was caught in cycles of binge eating

and struggling, feeling overweight. And I was just disgusted. I wasn't kind. And I was having a hard time. You know, I had a few relationships that had crashed. And, you know, I was just tearing myself apart for what was wrong with me. And it went on and on. So the point being that I was living with the basic sense,

something's wrong with me and really harsh. And this sense of being your own best friend, you know, something in me cracked open. And I just remember, you know, because it was actually, outside and it was beautiful. I just remember this prayer, you know, please, please, may I be kinder to myself? And I've been since then with many people that I've seen with that same prayer, many people. And we know how it is that, you know, if our child was struggling with making friends or struggling with food, so many kids are overweight now, or struggling with grades, that

we would try, really try, in a compassionate way to show up for our child and how we get caught in this kind of round after round of this, you know, the incessant inner critic, we just get caught. So what I found, and this wake-up was one of my wake-ups, it led to, you know, that prayer and then really getting more and more involved with meditation and eventually radical acceptance. the book came out of that sense of how much suffering we have when we turn on ourselves. And what I found for myself and with clients with students is that there's a shift when we get really intentional and say, I'm really going to train. I'm going to train myself to be kinder. I'm going to practice. Intentionality really matters because the conditioning is so unconscious,

how quickly we've turned on ourselves. It really takes, this is at the center of my life. This really matters. And I've seen over and over how when people in some way get it, okay, I'm suffering as I've turned on myself, and there's a possibility of freedom, if I really, really commit to this. I've seen how when there's that, when a softening occurs,

how so much unfolds from that, so much healing. I've seen how with addiction, you know, we can be abstinent, but have it not really be a deep kind of freedom. And I've seen how people can get really free when that kindness starts opening up. And I've seen how the possibility of intimacy with others opens up so much. In the deepest way, you know, people sometimes mistaken self-compassion for another strategy. to feel good and we do feel better. But it is not a simple psychological strategy. It's like there's so much about affirmations going on. And I saw one of my favorite cartoons with this was this dog that was lying in bed with

earphones. And it's a doggy affirmations. He's listening all night. And it says, you're such a good doggy. Oh, you're just such a good dog. And you are such a good, good dog. So it's not that, okay? Such a good dog.

Self-compassion is a profoundly radical element in waking up from a trance. At the very core of our trance of believing we're separate self and we're a limited self is the sense of not liking that self. In fact, if there's any sense of self, that kind of contraction of I'm here, there's some element of disliking and I'm going to talk about that a bit more but it's what it's the glue if there's a disliking of self that keeps us hooked in the sense of being small and separate so in the moments that we start softening towards ourselves there's a dissolving of the glue there's a very profound waking up from trance so as I mentioned it'll be this

week and next week. And this week, what I'd like to explore is the basic element of how to be mindful of the suffering we get caught in. Because compassion, you know, the key element of compassion, there's several, but one key element is mindfulness, that you cannot be compassionate towards your being unless you're aware of suffering. Compassion. Compassion, comes out of the awareness of suffering. So it begins by being, well, what is it? What does it mean to be mindful of suffering? And this really takes us right to the beginning of the Buddha's teachings,

the first noble truth, because the Buddha basically said, you can't be free unless you get this universal predicament that we're in, which is that each of us has the conditioning to contract. and to feel suffering, every one of us. The word is Dukha in Pali. Duka means uneasiness, unsatisfactoriness, not okayness. And he said it's universal. One of the ways I think it's most useful to understand Duka

is as stress, that it's stressful to be alive. And if we take an evolutionary perspective, that all beings incarnate into form and they feel a sense of, they're kind of organized around a sense of what's inside me and what's out there. And with any incarnation, that sense of separation creates anxiety.

There's a tension or a fear that I'm not going to get what I need, then I'm going to be attacked. So we're living in a continual, stressful situation of having to get something, have it to get defended against something. That when there's pleasantness, we are rigged to grasp after it. And when there is something unpleasant, push it away. These life forms are inherently conditioned to feel stress. We live with that stress in this kind of reactivity. And in human,

because we think, that stress is experience. It translates into our emotional life. It translates into fear and into shame and into depression and into excitement, the whole realm. Now, if in our human life we're born into a culture that's a difficult culture going through hard times, those emotions get amped up. And if we have poor bonding with our parents,

didn't get the love or understanding, if it felt unsafe, it's exacerbated. And what happens then is that our sense of who we are gets hitched to this reactive self. In other words, this is the conditioning of Dukha, that we're born into a stressful life. It gets amplified through our genetics, our culture, our family, and our sense of who we are. gets identified with that wanting, fearing self. This happens to all of us. It's universal. Now, once we get identified,

we try to relieve ourselves, and I call them false refuges. We're all in some way feeling our insecurity and every day trying to relieve it. And to see very personally, well, what are the ways that I take false refuge, is the beginning of unhooking ourselves. So how do we do it?

I mean, we know some of the real obvious ones. We are constantly trying to prove ourselves. We stay busy. We're trying to make an impression. That's one way we take false refuge. Busy, prove, be special. For some of us, we take false refuge by numbing, by overconsuming in some way,

to dull our senses, or to enter into a different mental or emotional state. That's another way. We take false refuge by putting others down because we're insecure, so it makes us more special. Just notice when you're feeling judgmental that there's in some way you're trying to either punish someone or create distance or put them down, put yourself up.

That's one of the big ones. Emerson said that we can see that people don't seem to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. So how many of us have had that experience of being in conflict with one person and then with another and one person's uptight? This other person's kind of narrow mind and this other person doesn't understand. And we get, all of a sudden we start realizing there's a common denominator, moi, you know.

It's like this guy that was driving home from work and, It's been a really tough day, and his wife calls him on a cell phone, and she's distraught because she's heard on the radio that someone is driving the wrong way and the beltway. Heck, Emma, he replies, there's hundreds of them doing that, you know. So we know what it's like when in some way we're blaming, but mostly, and this is where we're going tonight, are false refuges that we judge ourselves. You know, we really turn on ourselves. and it's out of insecurity that we think if we can just control ourselves to being better. Does that make sense? That if we can just judge ourselves enough, we'll get ourselves in some way whipped into shape.

So this is the trance of unworthiness. And the pathway is really simple. In a way, we just get insecure. And out of our insecurity, we do things to feel better. Okay? And we do things like we brag or we lie or we judge or we eat too much. And then we feel ashamed of that and more insecure. And that drives us to more behaviors that we then feel bad about ourselves for. And we cycle and cycle in the behaviors and thoughts and feelings that keep confirming this basic story, there's something wrong with me. It's like Washington Post some years ago now had a best t-shirt award of the year and one of the winning t-shirts was I have occasional delusions of adequacy you know so I describe this proliferation of duca of suffering that most of us get caught in where we have some fundamental sense of something's off and then we do things that then confirm it

as adding the second arrow the first arrow is we feel some uneasiness, or we feel a sense of grief, or we feel fear, or just something feels off. And then the second arrow is, I'm bad, I'm wrong. The Buddha said that the possibility of freedom is that the first arrow can happen. That's inevitable. The duca arises, this uneasy, this sense of grief or fear or jealousy or sorrow, or whatever it is. That's inevitable. But it's possible to be aware of that, to be mindful of that, and not add the second arrow that condemns ourself.

It's the second arrow that makes us wrong for what's going on, that actually it's kind of the nail in the coffin. And so as we explore tonight, that's the entry, that's the entry point for self-compassion. We can start recognizing, okay, things are hard, things are difficult. Pause. Is it possible instead of making myself wrong and I use this gesture hand on the heart to offer kindness instead? This is the place where we can make a difference.

Some of you might remember one of my favorite little stories that a while back a dog, a tired-looking dog, wanders into the yard. The woman writes, I could tell from his collar, though no tags, and well-fed belly and the fact he was clean and had a home that he belonged to someone, but he followed me into the house down the hall

and fell asleep on the couch. My dogs didn't seem to mind. He seemed like a good dog, and I was okay with him, so I let him nap. An hour later, he went to the door, and I let him out. The next day he was back, resumed his position on the couch, and slept for an hour. This continued every day for several weeks.

Curious, I find a note to his collar that I wrote, Every afternoon your dog comes to my house for a nap. I don't mind, but I want to make sure. it's okay with you. The next day he arrived with a different note pinned to his collar. He lives in a home with three children in it. He's trying to catch up on his sleep. May I come with him tomorrow? So there's a kind of spirit to this potential of compassion, but it's hard, and here's why it's hard, that the very nature of this second arrow that we get caught into is not just an idea of I'm wrong or I'm bad, but a feeling about it. It's very hard

to have that feeling of kind of welcoming ourselves and holding ourselves. Most of us have standards about how we should be. And it's really, there's some anguish in sensing how if we just watch day by day, the idea that we should be patient with other people, or we should be generous, or we should be and we don't meet it. You know, we know our secret, secretly we know just how much our attention is focused on moi, you know, how

the cartoon of the guy at the bar and he's confessing to the bartender. You know, I know I'm nothing, but I'm really all I can ever think about, you know? But isn't it so how much of our moments are, we're trying to get more comfortable,

take care of ourselves? I read you, this is T.S. Eliot, who talks about just how painful it is. He says, what is this self inside us, this silent observer, severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us and urge us onto futile activity, and in the end judge us still more severely for the errors into which his own reproaches drove us? Do you understand that's the false refuges? It's like we judge ourselves, we try to do things to feel better, and then we judge ourselves some more. So one of the stories about this kind of cycling that we do, I shared with some of you last year,

and it's really powerful. So I want to share it with you again. This is from the Sun magazine. The writer says, my mother always assured me that unspeakable punishments were bound. of a fall, any child as naughty as I was. If I were you, she'd say, I'd be afraid to go to sleep at night for fear God would strike me dead. She would speak these words softly, regretfully, as though saddened by her errant daughter's fate. I thought myself unloved and unlovable, not only by my own mother, but by God himself. In addition to threatening me with thoughts of eternal damnation, mother also gave me a fear of strangers, germs, disease, and food. poisoning. A precocious and imaginative child, I added to the list some bizarre fears of my own,

rare ailments learned from medical dictionaries, falling into the wrong dimension, spontaneous human combustion. When I was suspended from my private girl school at age 15 for a harmless prank, the head mistress referred to my behavior as damnable. That was no big news to my mother or me. What was news was I had the highest IQ and the lowest grades in the entire student body. I took pride in the fact that although I was a dysfunctional underachiever, at least I wasn't stupid. The most devastating words my mother ever spoke to me came when I asked her if she loved me. I'd been escorted home by the police after one of my many attempts to run away, so it was bad timing on my part. She answered, how could anyone ever love you? It took me almost 50 years to

heal the damage from her ugly remarks. Because they get internalized, right? We get down on ourselves. Recently discussing eating disorders with my therapist, I related a childhood ritual of mine, intending it to be an amusing anecdote to illustrate how far back my eating problems went. I even laughed as I spoke, poking gentle fun at myself. It was only when I noticed my therapist was watching me with sympathy rather than amusement, that I became aware of the tears on my own cheeks. So this is what I told her. From the age of five or six until I was well into my teens,

whenever I had trouble sleeping, I would slip out from under my covers and steal into the kitchen for a bit of bread or cheese, which I would carry back to bed with me. There I'd pretend my hands belonged to someone else, a comforting, reassuring being without a name, an angel perhaps. The right hand would feed me little bites of cheese or bread as the left hand stroked my cheeks and hair. My eyes closed.

I would whisper softly to myself, They're there. Go to sleep. You're safe now. Everything will be all right. I love you. So part of the power of the story is that we see in that early ritual the beginnings of self-compassion, right? You know, they're there.

I love you. And we also see the beginning of an eating disorder, the false refuge, and that this woman locked into the false refuge in decades of then hating herself for really an effort to comfort herself. Did you see the cycle of it, the duca, this basic insecurity, it's aggravated in her family situation. She tries to soothe it in ways that aren't so skillful. The second arrow, I hate myself.

decades it locked it in. So this is our predicament in a way. And the Buddha taught we are all subject to this conditioning to feel insecure. And there's going to be ways that we react. Duca. The duca becomes our identity. We become the self that's not okay when we make ourselves wrong for it. We lock ourselves into the trance of unworthiness. And we're at war with ourselves. That becomes our identity. What are we forgetting? We're forgetting that this is universal conditioning. It's not our fault. And when we lock into that identity, we're forgetting the awareness that's here, the love that's here, this capacity for beauty and humor and creativity. So we lose sight of our wholeness of being and become very, very small with the second arrow. One of the

stories that has kind of impacted me on this universality of Dukha is the example of the Good Samaritan study in Princeton. In this study, the Samarians, Seminarians were given a practice sermon, and half were assigned the story of the Good Samaritan. The other half were kind of given a random story from the Bible. And then the seminarians were supposed to go to another building to give the sermon and be evaluated. Okay? So you've got half of them doing the Good Samaritan one, half of them doing a random study. They're all going to walk to another building and give a sermon. And on the way to the other building, they passed by someone that's kind of slumped in a doorway that's moaning and distressed. And the real question for the study was whether the seminarians would stop to help. What they found,

was whether or not they stopped to help was determined by how much time they thought they had before they had to give their sermon how stressed they were if they believed they'd be late they didn't stop to help even if the sermon they were about to give they were going to preach was on the good samaritan now isn't that interesting you know it's like if i was about to give a talk on self-compassion and all on the way to the talk, I sat here and criticized myself like crazy for like, you know, having these lights and being, you know, what did I impose on this group? That's actually true. I did that a little tonight. So I'm just being honest. So that's what, that's what it's like. But you get the idea. It's like, here these people were and they were going to give a sermon on being a good Samaritan. They passed by a distressed person because of time. And yet, time's a big deal. Most of us have this

feeling like we don't have enough time and it's very a deep thing in us of a fear that we're not going to then get something done that's critical to have a good life or something done that's critical not to have a big failure. So this is a stress and yet these are people dedicated to an ethical life. Now what if you know they had they found that out and their whole identity collapsed and they said oh bad person bad person how sad that this pervasive kind of tendency to get stressed and when we're stressed it overrides the parts of our brain that are activated for empathy. Stress overrides the social brain. It gets us tight.

It gets us self-centered. But it happens to all of us. And we take it personally, don't we? I'm the bad person for not being patient with my child. I'm the bad person for not being able to control my eating. I'm the bad person for, and you can fill in the blank. In this cartoon, it's better to see it, but I'll try to describe it. You've got a mouse in a mouse hole and he's the psychotherapist.

The cat is outside the mouse hole, slumped against the wall, kind of talking to the therapist. The therapist is saying, don't worry, fantasies about devouring the doctor are perfectly normal. So this is our predicament that we're in this trance. It's a kind of an egoic trance where we feel insecure. And then we feel the insecure self doesn't like itself for how it behaves. And that has us lose sight of our wholeness. And the big inquiry is, really, how do we step out of this chain reaction of thoughts and feelings where we keep adding the second arrow of something's wrong with me?

How do we in between the feelings of Dukha and that second arrow pause? and have that intention to be kind. Because if we can pause and have the intention to be kind, the whole trance starts dissolving. This is the words of a teacher that's inspired me a lot, Srinar Sargadata. He says, approach yourself with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors.

Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for yourself. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect. Deny yourself nothing. Give yourself infinity and eternity and discover that you do not need them. You are beyond.

So let me unpack that a little because there's some places in that one that we can get confused. And the first what I love about is she says that your flight from pain and your search for pleasures part of the love you bear for yourself

just the way that young girl's ritual of eating the bread and the cheese it's part of her love for herself just a torqued way. It wasn't the way that was most going to help her. So the false refuge come from trying to take care of ourselves. So not to hate ourselves for them.

They're just confused. But then he says, make love of yourself perfect. This isn't perfect as in another perfection project. Like you blew it, you weren't perfect enough in loving yourself. You know, it's not that. It's really this invitation to take, this is true refuge. It's this invitation to commit. yourself as well as you can to this path of really offering kindness to the life that's here.

In a way, you're saying make love of yourself perfect. The self is really the life, the aliveness right here. And then what happens is if you really offer yourself this without holding back, unconditionally forgiving and loving. If you become unconditionally forgiving and loving, you discover you don't need it because you are that loving presence. You're no longer the self that needs anything. There is a shift in identity. And this is the freedom that happens from self-compassion. It's not like we become, we feel better alone. There's a deeper thing that happens. We untangle the tangle that keeps us even feeling

like a separate self. You might even imagine for a moment, who would you be if you, if you in no way judged yourself adversively. Who would you be if you really offered that unconditional love inwardly? For many of us, it's like, I don't know. It's like the self we know is shaped a lot by our self-critique. Who would we be? So the last portion of this talk is really exploring how we train now. What I'm going to do is the initial steps of self-compassion, how we train in them. And the beginning is, and I'm going to use the acronym Rain, as I often do, and I'd like to remind you of it for those that aren't familiar, that the R of Rain is to recognize. We recognize, oh, this is suffering, Duka, fear, shame. That's the first step in self-compassion.

It's the first noble truth. recognize the suffering. The second part of rain, the A, is we allow what's here to be here. Okay? There's a question with the first, with R, it's what's happening. Can we recognize what's here? And with the A, the question is, can I be with this? Can I allow this to be here? We're going to explore those two pieces of this waking up from the trance and all. offering self-compassion tonight. And the next week we'll explore the eye of rain, which is offering an intimate attention, investigating and offering an intimate attention. That's the I. It's a double eye. And then the end is the freedom, not identified, no longer identified as the judge, no longer

identified as the imperfect self that's being judged. Back to our wholeness, our natural wholeness. So we're going to stay with the R and the A right now. The recognize, for most of us what's happening is we'll find that we're in some way really off balance. And if we pause, we'll recognize, okay, feeling terrible, feeling angry, feeling afraid, recognize Stuka in some way. And then we begin with this, it's a very beginning of compassion. Can I just let it be here for a moment? It's kind of like, can I pause with it? there was a woman who came to retreat a couple of years ago with me.

And she was exploring this because she was very, very much at war with herself. And she had come to retreat a time that her partner had gone through several rounds of chemotherapy and there was a lot of stress and fear in the household. And it was just the beginning when the economy had turned. So there was this downsizing. and she was not sure whether she would have a job. And so there was a huge amount of stress, and she wasn't being as present and patient

as she really, really wanted to be for her partner. So there's a lot of a sense of shame and a sense of guilt that she wasn't coming through. At the beginning of the retreat, I gave a talk on the noble truths and talked about how the first noble truth is Dukkah and the Buddha's invitation was. He said the beginning of freedom is understand this. Just understand this is it. It's here. If you can just recognize Dukha, you're not as identified

with it. So the understanding with recognizing is if you can see it and then you can say, well, I'm not alone. Other people have this happen too. Space opens up. So she went through this retreat And every time she had Some of the thoughts and feelings about what was going on at home She would pause and she'd say This is Duka This is Duka

I mean she'd say it She sometimes said she even was whispering it This is Duka This is Dukkah And then she would say I'm not alone Because it's universal And she started finding

That when she could name This is Duka And I'm not alone and get some sense of others too, there was space. And in that space, she could begin to offer kindness. It took a while. But that space made it possible. She could be with it.

She could start to breathe and feel, okay, this is what's here. This reflection is really powerful. If you can get in trouble, and instead of just being in that chain reaction of struggling and then feeling bad about yourself for it, just go, this is Duka. I'm not alone. There is some space, this recognizing and allowing, give some space. There's a wonderful book coming out next month called Self-Compassion, and it's written by Kristen Neff, and I recommend it. And in the book, Kristen describes a mantra very much like

this when she got caught in the midst of difficulty that many people. people she says have found it's helpful things are really going crazy she's feeling bad about herself she'd say this is suffering it's part of being alive may I hold this with kindness may I offer myself the compassion I need and she said she would say it all over and over and over again this is suffering it's part of being alive may I meet this with kindness may I offer myself the compassion I need. And that would create a space that could make healing possible. So we're going to practice in a few moments as we usually do, or I'm going to invite you to connect with whatever is going on in your life. And we'll explore how do we recognize and

allow what's going on and create that space for compassion. I've described this quote that for me was very impactful. Victor Frankl, he says, between the stimulus and the response, there is a space and in that space lies our power and our freedom. If we can have the stimulus, the duca, and instead of reacting, go, this is duca,

I'm not alone. That creates a space. And in that space, we can find our intention to be kind. We will not remember to be kind if there's no space, if there's no pause. Does that make sense? So tonight again, I'm not doing the whole teachings on how to bring self-compassion to ourselves, but the first step, this is Dukha. I'm not alone. Just pause, recognize and allow.

This is what's here, a pause. And when we do, that intention to be kind starts coming up within us, and we don't have to add the second arrow. Why wait for your awakening? This is Dana Fault, the poet, a good friend of mine. She says, why wait for your awakening? The moment your eyes are open, seize the day. Would you hold back when the beloved beckons? Would you deliver your litany of sins like a child's collection of seashells prized in,

labeled, no, I can't step across the threshold, you say, eyes downcast. I'm not worthy. I'm afraid my motives aren't pure. I'm not perfect. And surely I haven't practiced nearly enough. Do you value your reasons for staying small more than the light shining through the open door? Forgive yourself. Forgive yourself. Now is the only time you have to be whole. Now is the sole moment that exists to live in the light of your true nature. Perfection is not a prerequisite for anything but pain. Please, oh please, don't continue to believe in your stories of deficiency and failure. This is the day of your awakening. So tonight really we're touching on this universality of duca of insecurity and how we take it personally and for those of us that have had

really difficult childhoods and there's more false refuges we take it even more personally we even feel less worthy so the question is how can we begin to make love of ourselves perfect how can we begin with rain to recognize and allow okay this is duca i'm not alone and then just to feel our intention to soften. So let's practice. We'll close the evening with a little practice. And as you feel the sitting posture, let this be a pause where you check in.

Just feel your body, feel the sensations of sitting here, feel this breath, listen to the sounds, the rain. It's handy when it rains when you're about to practice rain. in this silence and stillness of presence just to bring to mind somewhere in your life where you know that you turn on yourself where you're not at home with yourself perhaps something you haven't forgiven or accepted

there might be a situation in a relationship where you're behaving in ways that you feel ashamed of down on yourself for might be at work, behavior at work, might be an addictive behavior, just some way that you know you've locked in. And as you consider this,

you might bring to mind a specific situation where this really gets played out. If you're with another person, seeing the person's face or imagining what's being said, if you're at work, imagining the setting, if you've just drank too much, much or smoked again when you promised yourself you wouldn't or whatever the behavior was if you're just feeling the after effects and down on yourself just to bring that to mind.

Put yourself into the situation and sense what it's like, what it's like to feel the emotions, the fear of what it'll be like in the future if it keeps happening. You know, what you're believing about yourself? What is it you're believing about yourself that's painful? It's often a sense of failure, not being enough. To feel the situation, your feelings, the stories, the second arrow of making yourself wrong. We begin rain, the R of Rain, just to recognize it, okay, what's happening? Just to recognize this is Dukha, suffering.

It may be a particular recognition. This is fear. This is hurt. This is shame. You can mentally whisper it just to make it more immediate and vivid. With the recognize the R of rain, what's happening? This is Duka. And then the A of Rain is allowing, can I let this be right now?

Can I just be with this? I might sense I'm not alone. This is part of life. Can I just make space for it? So with this recognize and allow, we create a kind of pause rather than tumbling into reactivity. It's like you've paused and arrived. And it's in that pause.

You can just sense your intention. May I relate with kindness? Even if you don't know how to yet, just to have the intention opens the door, you're at the gateway of true refuge, when you just feel that that's your intent is to be kind, that your intention is to offer the compassion that's needed. All I plead with you is this. Make love of yourself perfect.

You might sense that if I wasn't down on myself, if I didn't turn on myself, judge myself, who would I be? You might listen to the music that some of you might be familiar with. Just let it in and enjoy it. How could anyone fail to notice that your loving is a mirror? How deeply you're connected to my soul. How could anyone ever tell you You were anything less than beautiful? How could anyone ever tell you you were less than whole?

How could anyone fail to notice that your loving is a miracle? How deeply you're connected to my miracle? deeply you're connected to my soul how could anyone ever tell you you were anything less than beautiful how could anyone ever

tell you you were less than whole how could anyone fail to notice that your loving is a miracle how deeply you're connected to my soul How could anyone ever tell you you were anything less than beautiful? How could anyone ever tell you you were less than whole?

How could anyone fail to notice that your loving is a miracle? How deeply you're connected to my soul? Anything less? How could anyone ever tell you? You were less than whole. How could anyone fail to notice that your loving is a miracle? How deeply you're connected to my soul.

So thank you for being here and for your presence. And I hope you're enjoying the rain that's pouring down so freely. The talk you just listened to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.