Tara Brach - Part 1 - Wise Intention--the Compass of our Hearts

Episode Date: October 3, 2012

2012-10-03 - Part 1 - Wise Intention--the Compass of our Hearts - One of the most powerful spiritual practices in the world is to reflect on your hearts deepest intention. These two talks look at the way that ego-based intentions perpetuate thoughts, feelings and actions that keep us imprisoned in feeling separate and limited. In contrast, remembering our deeper intentions call us home to the freedom of our true nature. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

I'd like to start with a brief story that I've seen in many different traditions. And in this one, several centuries ago, a bishop was traveling in remote areas and passed a little island and stopped in for refreshments. There were three fishermen there who explained that centuries earlier they had been Christianized by missionaries. And they had been taught the Lord's Prayer, but they forgot it. And what they were saying now was, you know, we are three and you are three have mercy upon us. So they said, please, teach us what we've forgotten. And, of course, the missionary was, the bishop was appalled, and he set them straight, and he told them how to say the Lord's Prayer.

And there were poor learners, but they gave it all they had. And he sailed off feeling very gratified that he had saved some souls. Well, as it happened months later, he was passing through the same area. and he was saying his prayers on deck and he noticed a spot of light in the far east and it was coming towards him and towards him and as it got close enough he realized that it was the three fishermen and they were walking on water

and they came within speaking distance and they said we hear your boat go past and we came to meet you and please so sorry but we forgot your lovely prayer please so sorry could you tell us tell us again we forgot what was it And then of course the bishop quite humbled said, go back home, my friends, and each time you pray, say we are three, you are three, have mercy upon us.

This is a story really of the power of intention. That what matters is not doing things right. Doesn't matter if we do things according to the book or what we expect or what others expect. what matters is the quality of heart and integrity we bring to what we do. It's that simple. What matters is remembering what we care about as many moments of our life as possible. And really this is the theme of tonight that the more we remember what matters, the more our life becomes organized around that, becomes an expression of that.

So what we find is that when our words and our thoughts and our actions arise out of that remembering, that what matters is love or what matters is truth, what matters is presence. When our life is coming out of that, there's a freedom that ripples out, it's healing for others. And conversely, when our words and actions come out of a sense of grasping or fear, we create suffering for ourselves and others. So in Buddhist psychology, the power of intention is considered right at the center of the path. So in a way you might consider tonight's talk

that the path to nirvana is paved with good intentions. If you'd like to, it's up to you. I don't know if I'm going to name it that or not. So what is an intention? Okay, an intention is the mental and emotional energy that is going towards a certain experience or outcome. And every moment, the intention is considered a neutral mental factor. Every moment intention is having us face somewhere,

that where our attention goes, energy flows. So our intentions having us move to get more comfortable or move to prove something or move to protect something, our move to understand something, but there's intention behind everything. Often it's unconscious. Part of Vapasana are seen clearly, this practice of mindfulness, is bringing mindfulness to that often unconscious process, so we're more awake to what's driving us moment to moment.

If we see it, it doesn't have as much control. In fact, if we see our intention, attention in any moment. In that moment there's the possibility of opening to what might be a deeper, more pure yearning. I sometimes think of it like there's a lot of waves on the surface and we spend a lot of moments of our life being tugged around by them, driven by them. but if we begin to notice the waves we actually open to a much deep or more vast, more peaceful space where a more pure kind of intention arises for us

so we can see what happens on a very more superficial level with intention that if you're on a road trip and you're hungry you know that what you're watching is for the signs for the restaurants right you're not looking at the silhouettes of the trees and the way the sunset, you're kind of checking out which restaurant you want to go to.

If you're hungry. And if you're worried about an upcoming event, making a good impression in some way, and when your child's talking excitedly about what happened at school, your mind is planning or rehearsing. Or as they say in India, when a pickpocket sees a saint, he sees the saint's pocket, you know? So we begin to notice what is our intention When it's to protect our self or enhance our self The world becomes more narrow The mind gets more fixated We call this selfing sometimes in Buddhist lingo these days

You know when we're in our self When our intentions are kind of selfing intentions We get tighter when our intentions towards waking up, towards creating, serving, loving, realizing, there's more of that kind of openness, receptivity. Now, it's completely natural and appropriate that a part of our energy and our intentions and attention would go towards meeting what are described as the hierarchy of needs, that we have to, it's part of our karma, our duty to take care of these bodies and minds

And so, as you know, as you imagine, food, shelter, and so on, we have to have intentionality towards. It's not like if you're in the jungle and the spears are coming at you that you're going to start getting curious about the fauna and the bird life and so on in those moments, right? So we begin by recognizing it's natural that we protect ourselves and that we try to pursue our needs. As I was thinking about this, I was remembering the story of an honest seven-year-old who admitted very calmly to her parents that Billy Brown had kissed her at school after class. How did that happen? Gast her mother. And she said, well, it wasn't easy. She admitted that. She said it took me at least three other friends to help catch them.

So we pursue. And the challenge is this. that for most of us, the suffering is that not that our basic needs aren't met for food, shelter, and so on, as much as that we have become fixated, our developments gotten arrested and we are trying to use substitutes to find satisfaction. And we're fixating our attention over and over and over again.

There's a few ways we do. it. One of them is the fixation on something's missing, my life is not enough. And that's one of the big ones, where it's like we're chasing Billy Brown all the time. In some way we're strategizing to get more attention, more approval, you know, more achievements, more acquisitions. Okay? There's a sense that it's even around information. Like I know many people have described their addiction to the internet is on some level the sense that there's another piece of information they don't have that they need to, I don't know what exactly, I'm not sure need to what, but it's that. So it's rather than presence, there's a fixation, the attention's, the intention is to get

more information. For most of us, one of the big ones, you know, is, you know, just in some way making sure we have enough. There's one woman who writes, I love to shop after a bad relationship. I don't know. I buy a new outfit and it makes me feel better. It just does. Sometimes if I see a really great outfit, I'll break up with someone on purpose. So one of the fixations of our intent is something's missing, have to have more. I'm going to speak a little more about the other one, which is something's wrong. And we get hooked on a perception that something's wrong and all of our intention is around in some way how do I handle this? This is the problem, life is a problem to be solved mentality that a lot of

us are in a lot of moments and there's a sense, you know, that the spears are going to fly at any moment and a lot of people are throwing spears at us, those can be the victim, are I need to throw spears, you know, I need to protect, I need to aggress. And so this is the, these are the intentions behind war and how to be more secure. So we go into judgment a lot. Judgment is a big one. Because most of the time the intention comes back to self, it's not just something's wrong, it's something's wrong with me. A lot of our intentions in life grow out of that basic perception, something is wrong with me. And I'm putting this out there for you just to consider, as you say,

okay, I'm going to be more mindful of my intention. Well, what's going on right now? And you'll find that in some way you're trying to pull yourself out of the red, I think. Make up for not okay self. So this is, I think, the most persistent fear that shapes our intention. something's wrong with me, my intelligence, my personality, my body, my career, I'm not a good parent, I'm not a good friend, I'm not a good child, something's wrong with my mind. And then out of this work, our intention is always how can I show a better self, you know,

how can I enhance myself? For many of us our intention is to improve ourself. Now that seems pretty benign, doesn't it? Okay, I just want to improve myself. and yet even in spiritual life this sense of I want to improve I want to become a better something actually has a real hook in it because it continuously reaffirms right now I'm not enough

that's what we're saying I remember the story about a woman going into Barnes & Noble saying she goes says I went to the bookstore the other day I asked the woman behind the counter where the self-help section was. She said, if I told you that, it would defeat the purpose. So there's this subtle level of the intention, okay, I'm trying to improve myself, I'm trying to learn more, I'm trying to become a more generous person,

I'm trying to tweak my meditation, I'm trying to be better in some way. But for most of us, we also know the layer that's much more over-reiberation, of really being down on ourselves. It's not just trying to improve, it's in some way a deep sense of being flawed. And that's where the intentions that come out of that keep us caught in cycles of suffering. And I'll just name that a little more. Because I suspect most of you are familiar with how it works. That we begin with some observation of how we're falling short and aversive self- judgment, averse of self-judgment and feeling insecure. And then our ways of communicating and behaving out of that insecurity, what do they do? They create the very situations and the

very sense of self we think is bad. You know, we get the responses from the world that are just confirming exactly what we're judging ourselves for. And we're caught in a loop. Feel bad about myself, out of that feeling bad, in some way try to protect or pretend or defend, create an aversive response in others, feel bad about myself. This looping and the way our thoughts and emotions loop is sometimes described as pa-pancha, where we're going in this chain reaction, where we're having feelings and they're like generating thoughts about ourselves and the thoughts generate more feelings and that drives us to an action and then the action creates a reaction. We're caught in a loop.

Some of you might remember this from the Chinese Buddhist text and it describes this prison that we get into. It says, from intention springs the deed, from the deed springs the habits, from the habits grow the character, from the character develops destiny. So I've shared this in different forms before, but it's not until we start seeing the chain of reaction that we're living in that we can step out of it. From the intention springs the deed, what does that mean? If we are living in a sense of something's wrong with me and we have this inner energy, this movement to in some way, you know, more thought.

more self-judgment. We have this energy or movement towards in some way trying to fix ourselves or prove ourselves and then our activities end up creating kind of reaction in the world and then we feel worse about ourselves and we stay in that loop we land up in a place of suffering where we feel separate and we feel profoundly flawed. It just gets confirmed. So there's a bad news, good news about this chain of reaction. The bad news are the difficult news is that the more we repeat it, it's like putting water through a funnel or through a kind of groove and the more it digs that groove like a river until it becomes a really strong current that's very defined. That's the neuropathway we're creating. The

more we feel this intention to prove ourselves or defend ourselves and the more we do it, the more that neuropathway has strength. It creates a whole set of, a whole network actually of thoughts and feelings we're stuck in. So the bad news is that as we repeat it, the scientists put it this way, neurons that fire together, wire together, we develop this really deep patterning of feeling like a bad self and having our intentions arise out of that so that you can actually look at your day and see how many decisions, how many perceptions, how many actions actually came out of the sense of bad self, a lot. It gets organized that way. That's the difficult news. The good news is that it is possible.

to interrupt the chain of reactivity. Just in the way that these pathways are formed, they can be unformed. And so there's not one pattern that you have that you sense as suffering, not one pattern, whether it's a pattern of blaming other people, because that we do also, are a pattern of blaming yourself, or a pattern of feeling victimized, or whatever it is, there's not one pattern that we can't undo. So this is, this is a pattern of blaming yourself. So this is a pattern of feeling victimized. So this was the invitation and the promise of the Buddha. I mean the Buddha said I would not teach you this Dharma if it were not possible. I would not teach you this if it were not possible to be free.

So the beginning recognition in this, in this good news side of things, is actually we can't change the past. Some of you might remember Lily Tomlin saying that forgiveness is giving up all hopes for a better past. You remember that? Okay, we can't change the past. There's only one place we're empowered if we want to alter these patterns. And that's right in this moment. And it's just this moment, it's not the idea of another moment, it's actually in the living

moment that you can actually change your karma. Karma just means this pattern of cause and effect. What this means is that the most profound intention you can have is the intention towards presence. And I would frame it a little larger towards loving presence because presence can sometimes be misunderstood as aiming your attention in a kind of a harsh way on the moment but loving presence has the softness that really allows us to inhabit the moment. That's the most profound intention you can have. If you want to be all that you are, if you want the freedom from the limiting belief,

beliefs if you want to really live and love fully. Right here. So the good news is that right here and now if we train ourselves to pause in the midst of a chain reaction, now we're getting down to the nits and grits, this is how change happens. You're in a chain reaction. You just did something that reminded you of a flaw. You just did something where you said something. with another person that you regretted. You did something that reminds you of how your

mind is not working well. You did some addictive behavior that is confirmation that you're out of control. You said something hurtful to a child or just have that sinking feeling, you know, crushing feeling of being a bad parent, whatever it is. You're about to set off that chain reaction where your intention becomes to either badger yourself and try to condemn yourself into changing, because that's what self-judgment is. We're trying to slam ourselves into being better. Our your intention is to defend yourself so other people can't see what you did, or whatever it is. Instead of that, you pause. Okay, the pause is priceless. I remember one A sponsor said that a learning to pause.

for five seconds was worth a year of meetings. This is a sponsor that had been in for decades. Now he knew it's not an either-or, it's a both-end, but pausing is precious. All the possibility becomes available in a pause. Okay, so that's the first step. We pause and then we listen to deepen our intention. We sense our intention for presence and love in that moment of the pause. Awareness alters the patterning. I'm going to read you. This is from Rumi. Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you as a fish out of water hears the serfs, come back. This turn toward what you deeply love saves you. When you're caught in reactivity, when you're getting nervous, anxious, and speedy, when you're getting judgmental,

when you're turning on yourself, when you're turning on another, when you're feeling somebody said something that wounded you and you're recoiling, any of those kind of things, if there can be a remembering to pause, in that pause you can hear the voice that Roomy talks about that says come back. In that pause, there's a little bit of, more presence that allows you to turn back towards what you love, rather than playing out the chain of reactivity that keeps us locked in that small, separate, victimized self. Is this resonating for you? Okay. All right, we'll keep going that. Now, the meditation practices that we do, where we learn to wake up from thoughts and come

back, where we learn to keep coming back to presence is the core training. Meditation is a training in remembrance. But remembering is not like an event that happened. We're remembering to be here. So that strengthens the muscle. If we can come back, we can get in touch with a deeper intention. otherwise we're actually being driven by more surface waves that are saying oh got to have more of this got to be more comfortable got to get this done got to you know we're driven by that in a moment of pausing ah there's a voice that calls us home a little more audible okay so the last part of this talk we're going to explore two ways of paying attention to our intention. And one of them I think of as becoming mindful of the habitual intent that's

driving us. In other words, what are the surface waves that are really dragging us around? Can we become aware of that? And then the second is a mindful uncovering of the deepest, most pure intention, that voice that's calling us back home. On the habitual intent side, when you're in the midst of reactivity is very hard to say, okay, what is my deepest, purest intention? We can't because we're getting all pulled around and there's something else going on that wants attention. So we pay attention to what's right here. We start right where we are. So for example, you're in a combative situation with another person and you've just had a email exchange or a phone call and you're all stirred up. You can't right away go to your deepest intention.

But what you can do is say, okay, what's my intention with this person right now? What am I wanting? What am I fearing? And you might find, oh, I'm just wanting to feel like that person respects me. So you get the immediate intention is I want respect. Okay? So that's step one. You sense what you're wanting to.

And then the next piece is you step out of all the thoughts about it and really feel that in your body. the pain or the feeling of hurt that you're not respected. In other words, we be present with what is. Investigate the current intention, the habitual one first. Okay, that's first practice. Now we're going to come back and do that a little bit but I want to spend a little more time with the next level which is when we're not stirred up, how do we begin what I consider one of the most precious practices on the path which is, reflecting regularly on our deepest intention. If each one of us that's here, each one of us

that is listening made a point of every day taking some moments to really ask ourselves, what's my deepest aspiration, what really matters to me, there would be a flowering in our lives that we might not have expected. What we most deeply long for is really what we are. Our longing's not for something outside us. It's like that fish that's really coming back to the water. Our longing is for the awareness and love that is what we are. And in the moments that we even sense a tendril of that, that yearning, there's a bit of homecoming right then. In fact, the sign of connecting with a pure intention is you start feeling

it's a felt sense, a shift where you start actually feeling oh yeah that's true, that feels true there's a kind of come home feeling the words I most resonate for me as you feel incredibly sincere not goppy, gunky sincere just feel kind of tender and real okay

and there's an inestown sense because there's just nothing jaded, there's no been there done that. It's all, you're just inhabiting more who you are. It's just a truth. You just know it and it's not conceptual. So this is a regular practice that every one of us can do and it takes a few things. One is it takes being patient because you might notice when I lead a guided meditation here and I do it every single time I ask you to sense your intention, your aspiration. When you first ask that question, if you're not settled in you'll get a prepackaged response. Do you know what I mean?

You know, it's like, okay, what I want is presence or I want peace or I want to relax or I want to have my heart open, but you won't be embodying what your longing is. It takes time to settle so that we're enough awake in our bodies. that we can sense our intent or our aspiration and feel it in our hearts. So it takes patience. It takes asking that question and kind of dropping it in and then just really open, just waiting, just listening, staying in our bodies.

If we stay long enough, as I mentioned, we touch into what matters in a way that we're actually touching into who we are. I like the way Ajashanti puts it. He says, all we really want in the end is to be connected once again with the truth of our being to realize what it is that wears this mask of self. So again, you might consider the surface waves as the selfing waves, that they're natural, that waves are part of the ocean. I mean, we need to take care of ourselves, we need to take care of each other, our bodies and so on.

and if we get fixated we get lost in those waves and we forget the depths and we forget the breath of what belong to. So the commitment is to every day and not just once but I'm suggesting even start with once to create the space to really invite well what really matters. And again for those of you that are listening but not having, didn't do the guided practice, I spent more time with it tonight, really connecting with our aspiration, our intention. If what you connect with initially is just some words and they don't feel deep, like for instance if you say, well, I want, for me, what I usually come up with is loving awareness. What do I really want?

I just want to inhabit loving awareness. I want to live from loving awareness. and often I'll say those words and I'll know they're true but my body's not resonating with them and that's okay because they are true they still have a draw back home

so I just want to encourage you if it feels mechanical as you each day check in with your aspiration it's still valuable but other times you really will connect and it will have that sincerity. Now, one of the most powerful ways that we find that our aspiration comes alive

is when we become aware of impermanence, when we sense a season is changing, we tend to be more present for the changes that are there. There's a kind of a relishing or a cherishing. There's a mantra I've heard, several people use when they encountered their own mortality and one story I'll share with you a woman named Alana who when she told me she had breast cancer my first thought was oh you're just too young and her daughter just turned two when the

biopsy came back and her first thought of course was will I see her grow up that was her first thought about her daughter but then five years later because we've been now we've known each other for a while in remission. She talks about the gift of the crisis, as so many people do, as something that she cherishes, but she wouldn't trade. She wasn't seeking it, but she wouldn't trade it. And she said, I realized that what matters in my life is quality time with my loved ones. So she came down to this aspiration, I really want to be here for my loved ones. and she said

and before the diagnosis her life was as many of our shape by a very demanding career and kept her speeding around and she always felt like the two things are I don't have enough time and I'm letting someone down and they always were hitched together but after her diagnosis her mantra

became I have no time to rush I have no time to rush so this is a shift in intention This is rather than being dragged around by the habitual intentions the surface waves, she dropped deeper because she realized the truth of impermanence. I have no time to rush.

What if we remembered that? What would our life be like? How many moments instead of racing through and missing the moment would we live? How much more life would we have if we remembered that. So for her it meant turning the routine tasks,

whether it was bathing her daughter, preparing meals, shopping into together time, into these little adventures, where she could delight in her daughter's laugh and see the glow in her eyes and her curiosity and she could listen more to her husband who was a journalist as they talked about his day because the moments mattered.

So I share this with you and I remember when she told me she was, I still don't know how long I, I'm going to live, but she said, I'm not going to land up with my daughter going to college and feeling like, oh, it all just flashed by, where did that time go? I'm living my moments. So we get the same transmission, I think, from all the spiritual traditions in a way, which is really don't wait for the diagnosis.

Don't wait. You can live very deeply if you want. You can touch into what matters and have your, life align with it. I remember sharing with you all the palliative care nurse who described it that how many people when they're dying, their deepest regret is that they didn't live true to themselves. She said that's the deepest regret that dying people have, not living true to themselves. They did not, rather than listening to the depths to what really matters, felt like they got tugged around by their own expectations of themselves

and others' expectations of them, you know, the surface waves. So the teaching is not to wait, to begin this reflection now of what really matters. I think one of the main arenas that it seems so poignant is with each other. I mean, how many times even with the people the dearest to us, are we either, you know, doing parallel playing or just missing each other because we're preoccupied? You know, how rare is it really, really connecting? I remember in my, the first retreat I ever did with Tikna Han, the closing ritual, and I've shared this with some of you before where we had us look at each other and say namaste,

which is I see the divine in you. And then he had us hug each other and with the first breath we reflected I'm going to die, with the second breath you're going to die, and then with the third, and we have just these moments together. Can you sense how full these moments become, how much we're contacting what matters when we let the truth of, hey, it's really passing? just practice a bit. We'll do a couple, just two meditations tonight together and then we'll close. So the beginning of knowing if you want to touch what really matters, come into your body.

You might as you close your eyes just let your awareness really sweep through your body. Know that you're here, feel your breath. And you might sense the breath at the heart so that as you breathe in you feel whatever the experience of your heart is, breathing in and out of your heart. You might imagine that you're almost at the end of your life, you have a few days left, but you're able to move around, do things, be with people.

What would be most important? What would be most important about how you spent those days? Now come even closer and sense you just have a few minutes left. What's important about these minutes? What do you want to be paying attention to? How do you want to pay attention? What do you want to trust or experience or know? This is your aspiration.

If you're at the end of your life and looking back, what do you want to see about how you lived your life? Bringing to mind perhaps the person that you care about dearly. Take some moments now. to imagine yourself with that person. Something you see regularly that matters to you. And explore this ritual that Tickna-Han teaches, you might imagine bowing and just looking into that person's eyes

and sensing the sacredness, sensing the mystery that's looking out at you that's the same mystery in you looking at that person, just sensing awareness, consciousness. You might sense that hug that I described where you reflect, I'm going to die, you're going to die. We have just these moments. Sense what matters. Sense your heart's aspiration right now, what you care about. Sometimes you hear a voice through the door calling you, as a fish out of water, hears the serfs, come back. This turns to

toward what you deeply love saves you. Just closing with the metta or loving kindness prayer that all beings everywhere might remember to listen, to come home to presence, to recognize their heart's aspiration and allow that to carry them to freedom. May all beings awaken. May all beings heal. May all beings be free. Namaste.

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.