Tara Brach - Part 2 - Freedom from Othering: Undoing the Myths that Imprison Us (2018-01-24)

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

Part 2 - Freedom from Othering: Undoing the Myths that Imprison Us (2018-01-24) - 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 two 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. I'd like to start this class with a reading from Ram Dass, who's one of the great spiritual teachers of the era. He writes this. He says, when you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. and some of them are bent and some of them are straight and some of them are evergreens and some of them or whatever

and you look at a tree and you allow it. You see why it's the way it is, you sort of understand that it didn't get enough light and so it turned that way. And you don't get all emotional about it, you just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that and you're constantly saying you're to this or I'm to this

and that judging mind comes in. And so I practice turning people. people into trees, which means appreciating them just the way they are. There's something beautiful and touching about sensing that we could move through life and pick up the conditioning that shaped each other and shaped ourselves and sense the gold, the light, the essential goodness regardless. Just allow. And this is part two of a three-part series

that I'm doing and it's fine if you weren't here last time or didn't listen. But it's a three-part series on freedom from othering. And it's that judging mind that turns others into others and creates the separations that really cause suffering. So I've been doing the different levels of

othering and we started with the more societal level and tonight we're going to look at how we can bad other each other and then next class will be how we turn that bad othering inward. The basic teaching or principle is the boundary to who we include in our heart is the boundary to our freedom. And if we're walling out a lot of people for all the different reasons, we're walling out of people, that we wall people out, then we're in a imprisoned walled-in heart. So that's the basic theme.

And so just a brief review from the last class, which is we looked at really how society is built around myths that create hierarchies. And it's happened through the era, all the ages, that there's stratas and power and privilege on the top, and there's inferior and superior. And so one obvious hierarchy is that males dominate females through the ages. Another is racial oppression. And there's class.

And when it's like fish swimming in water, when a society is really got them thick, most people, there's always people waking up, but most people are believing in this as kind of a natural order. They don't question it. It's like, oh, this is just how it is. It's meant to be this way. It's ordained this way.

So there's a sense that goes with it, though, anyway, that if you're on the higher stratas, there's a sense of entitlement and privilege and sometimes pride, and if you're lower strata, there's a shame and fear. It's a waking-up process that every single one of us has to go through for our personal and spiritual freedom and for the healing of the planet to investigate where we're not conscious of those levels.

We can't wake up without that. Otherwise, we're living in a smaller world than really is the truth of who we are. I had an experience that was kind of a great metaphor for me. This happened about eight years ago. So my husband and I love to swim and we especially love to swim in open waters and we were, we took some time off and did a lot of swimming and one particular time we were aiming for this kind of rocky outcropping across this bay and I felt like my swimming was really improving. I mean I got into a rhythm and flow and I felt strong and gracefully even, you know,

when we were going out there and we did some snorkeling and then we returned and on the return I really tired out I felt exhausted I was breathing heavily my stroke was uneven

and of course as you can imagine what was going on was I was going out there with the currents and I was coming back against the currents and so it is that when we're riding the currents we don't get it. It's much easier to get it when we're in the lower strata that what we're fighting against. But it takes a lot of dedication to realize that when we're in the dominant culture,

we're riding all sorts of currents that make things easier. For me, a big piece of it was it wasn't just this intellectual understanding that, oh, I need to see my unseen biases in order to be free. a heart thing where I started beginning to understand what I hadn't seen through friends that were kind enough to hang in with me and realized this grief that I was missing out on the truth, on a reality that was bigger than my little world. And there's a Unitarian Minister Rebecca Parker who I thought put it really powerfully and I just want to read this too because it had impact on me.

She says, she describes the whitewashed world she lived in. She said it ignored the violence and exploitation in my country's history as well as the resistance, creativity, and multiform beauty of my country's peoples. I was cut off from the reality of where I lived, whom I lived with, and what our history entailed of violence and of beauty. She says, I am speaking of a loss of wholeness within myself and a fragmentation of culture that debilitates life for all of us. We're less present to life.

We're more cut off. We're less creative and loving. So Rumi talks about not seeking after love, but seeking after the barriers that we've created against it. He also talks about forgiving ourselves for that, that if we condemn ourselves for creating barriers and we're conditioned, you can't live in this culture and not be conditioned. So it's nobody's fault and yet it takes a real dedication to realize what's going on with

the currents and to wake ourselves up. So one way that we create other and make distances is by living in that cultural trance and not challenging the inferior or superior and whatever in all the different domains. way that we create distance is in our personal life by making others wrong or bad. We also then feel superior, but we make others wrong or bad. And really, we then perpetuate it with stories that keep us in some way at a distance. And the truth is that any averse of judgment separates and confines our heart. Now I want to make the difference between an aversive judgment like you're bad

with a discriminating recognition that when you do this it causes suffering. One's making the human bad and the other saying this behavior causes suffering. We need discrimination. When it's aversive, when it's aversive judgment, it leads to unwise speaking, unwise behavior. It causes division in families and of course globally bad other creates the violence around the planet. I'd like to pause here and invite a reflection. I'm going to have several reflections tonight just to really with the hope that you will leave this with a deeper commitment to sensing where you're creating separation.

and wanting to take what the poet Mark Nippo describes as that exquisite risk to let go of bad othering. So let's, the first reflection, okay? In this one, I'd like to ask you to bring to mind someone you care about who you sometimes judge adversely. You sometimes, you know, get angry and feel like they're bad and wrong, and other times you don't. when you've got someone in mind, bring to mind a recent time that you were triggered and you were really feeling like they were being bad or wrong. Or you could tell you were pushing them away from your heart in some way. Anger.

Blame. You go right to the moment in that situation when you're blaming that feels the strongest. I mean, remind yourself of what... caused it, how they were acting. So you get in touch, the more you get in touch the more effective the reflection will be. Kind of sense in your body what was so, what made you so angry or annoyed or upset. And then begin to witness what is it really like inside when you're blaming an aversive? What's your heart feel like and your body? Sense yourself, the judging self? What's your mind like? Can you sense the contraction, the narrowness, the fixation,

the tension in the body, the tightness of the heart? And do you like yourself? Do you like the judging self? Are you at home in yourself? There's a value to, in some way, having a flag that says, okay, this is the judging self. It's not my fault but this is the judging self and this isn't home. Now take a moment to have a few full breaths and we're going to switch gears here and remind yourself again the same person of what you really love about this person, what you appreciate. You might imagine this person when they're happy or when they're entertained when something's striking them funny, how they look when they're feeling love for you, when they're vulnerable. Remind yourself of what it's like. Again, witnessing when you're feeling

that appreciation. Just let it in, let it fill you. This is real that you appreciate that your heart resonates with this person in this way. Sense what your heart feels like and your body when you're appreciative, your mind. And sense, do you like this expression of your being? Do you feel at home? Just get to know it. Get to know what it feels like, that place of appreciation and open-heartedness. And know that in the days and weeks to come you can be alert and choose the direction you go in more and more when you're ready to open your eyes. So now here's a challenge, which is if you come out of that kind of an exercise and some part of you,

you starts judging yourself for judging other people so much, then you're prematurely going to part three of the talk and we're not there yet. Okay? So stay here and know that again the last part of the Rumi quote about, you know, look for the ways you create barriers, you know, and forgive them. I didn't know that last piece, but that is so essential just to forgive the fact we judge. If you have a longing to free your heart, just noticing and knowing you want to open your heart is all you need. So, to realize that every one of us is rigged to judge and blame, that it's part of our evolutionary conditioning,

that when we encounter an obstacle to our needs for feeling safe, for feeling gratified, for feeling connected, when there's an obstacle, to them, we feel a sense of unpleasantness and we evaluate whatever we think the causes is bad. We are just rigged to do that. It's our survival system in action, okay? And what happens is that as soon as we are having a hard time and you're the fault, you're the cause, everything contracts and narrows, our survival system has as beam in, our mind gets very...

We forget all about who that person is beyond them causing... this trouble, we forget who we are. We're just a blaming machine and they're the object. It's just very contracted. It's a trance. It's what I often call, and I use this metaphor an awful lot, the circle of awareness and the line going through, below the lines what we're unaware of, above the lines what we're aware of, we're below the line when we're blaming. Okay? Now some are more inclined towards it than others. and it has to do with all sorts of causation, but I'm going to read you something someone sent once.

This is a diary of a dog and a cat. The cat's diary. Day 9.83 of my captivity. My captors continue to taunt with bizarre little dangling objects. They dine lavishly on fresh meat while the other inmates and I are fed hash or some sort of dry nuggets. Although I make my contempt for the rations perfectly clear,

I nevertheless must eat something in order to keep up my strength. The only thing that keeps me going is my dream of escape. In an attempt to discuss them, I once again vomit on the carpet. Today I decapitated a mouse and dropped its headless body at their feet. I had hoped this would strike fear into their hearts, since it clearly demonstrates my capabilities. However, they merely made condescending comments about what a good little hunter. Bogus.

There was some sort of assembly of their accomplices tonight. I was placed in solitary confinement for the duration of the event. However, I could hear the noises and smell the food. I overheard that my confinement was due to the power of allergies. I must learn what this means and how to use it to my advantage. I'm convinced that the other prisoners here are flunkies and snitches. The dog receives special privileges. He's regularly released and he seems to be more willing to return.

He's obviously a dimwit. The bird must be an informant. I observe him communicating with the guards regularly. I'm certain he reports my every move. My captors have arranged protective custody for him in an elevated cell, so he's safe. For now. Okay. The dog's diary.

8 a.m. Dog food, my favorite thing. 9.30 a.m. A car ride. My favorite thing. 9.40 a.m. A walk in the park. My favorite thing.

1030, it got rubbed and petted, my favorite thing. 1 p.m., played in the yard, my favorite thing, 5 o'clock, dinner, my favorite thing, and it goes on. 11 o'clock sleeping on the bed, my favorite thing. Anyway, that's the diary. I liked it. They're both in trance, you know, of course, my favorite thing, you know, But we get fixated, it's a negativity bias, and when things are unpleasant and we blame.

And we're more inclined to bad other when we have strongly unmet needs. And this makes sense. If we were deprived early on, you know, there's going to be less trust, more wounding, more blaming. I remember seeing a little cartoon of two moms having coffee and the little boy, son of one, is wearing a mask and has a blow torch and he's firing onto the wall the words, I need love. And the mother's saying, oh, he just does that to get attention. And we do need love and we do need mirroring.

And when we don't get it, it's not like we're not. we need ongoing affirmations, but we need caring, resonance connection and we don't get it. There's mistrust, there's a feeling of being disappointed by people through our life, and there's blame. One of my friends, author Barbara Graham, wrote a book called Women Who Run with Their Poodles. Anyway, here's one piece of it. She's, dear mom and dad, I just want to drop you a to thank you for teaching me to, quote, keep my trap-shot quote, and not to ruffle any feathers. I'm sure these qualities would have been a real plus in 9th century Japan. In close, please find an invoice for 14 years of analysis, 11 years of karate, and 472 self-esteem

workshops. So unmet needs end up fueling, and the more trauma there's going to be, the more of the more the reflex of something's bad out there blame and of course generational trauma too. So we vary yet it's deeply conditioned in all of us and in particular there's certain ways that bad othering gets tripped off and one of the big ways is when people disagree with us. You know how it is to be in an argument and all of a sudden realize that you're wrong about something, you know, that horrible sinking feeling. We really like being right. We really do. And so there's a lot of blame towards somebody that doesn't see the world

as we do. We tighten up and create separation there. I'll share one of my favorite little stories of this, which is where a little girl asks her mother how the human race came about and the mother says, well, God made Adam and Eve and they had children and all mankind was made. And then she goes and asks her father the same question. His response is, well, many years ago there were monkeys and humans evolved that of monkeys. And so she's puzzled. She goes back to her mom and says, well, mom, how's it possible? You said the human race is created by God and dad said we came from monkeys. Well, dear, it's simple. He told you about his side of the family and I told you about mine.

But we can sense the tenacity of right, of, you know, I'm right, you're wrong. I mean, all you have to do is think of one political figure and it could be any that you particularly feel a sense of adversity to and just know how deep it is in the body, right? And by the way, when I talk about waking up from bad othering, I mean truly from all bad othering. It's like we think that, well, it's okay to bad other just certain people, but it's not.

It's the same closing of our heart. It's the same trance, really. So to sense the tenacity, now there's basically two key elements in waking up from the trance of blame. And the first one is intention that you really have to want to because it's not easy. It's a very deep habit to judge. You know, if I asked for a hand-raise and how many of you feel like you really have judgmental minds and you blame, you know, I won't ask.

But it's there. So you have to want to. And the second is, and they're related, you have to be willing to feel vulnerable because when you let go of blame it opens up to some real vulnerability. going to explore that. But I can say for myself that I didn't really commit to the practice and it's a practice of waking up from judgment until I felt real grief about it. And I felt grief because I started really getting the separation. And I got it on a very personal level. My son was in high school and I realized I was constantly annoyed with the video games

and the this and that, the partying. And so on some way, I was living with him and I only had a couple of years left and he was going to leave for college. And on some level, and this isn't bad othering as in, you know, like a rage against an enemy, but I was not communing with him. And that brought up grief.

And I could then see it with all sorts of other people that I cared about. But on some level I was annoyed or resentful or this or that. And so I turned it into a practice. I just decided, I called it rain on blame. You know, I was just going to bring rain, which is that acronym that helps to bring mindfulness and compassion to what's here. And we'll be basically exploring that. So part two, you have to be willing to be vulnerable because blame is a vulnerability control strategy. You know, when we feel vulnerable when something's off, blame is our way of trying to control

things and fix things. Well, I know what's wrong. I'll do something about it. So again, I love that phrase the exquisite risk that Mark Nippo has because when you commit to waking up from bad othering, you're taking an exquisite risk. A very familiar control strategy. strategy is going to be put to the sidelines and you discover a whole different dimension of who you are without it. So let's reflect. Let's just take a moment and reflect together. And as you just come into stillness, begin with the words that I think are so powerful

from a movie I saw many years ago, the interpreter which is vengeance. is a lazy form of grief. When we're blaming, it's easier to blame than to feel what's there. It's a lazy form of fear. So reflecting again, where in your life right now might you be living in a story of bad other? I just sense somebody that in your close-in circle or somebody a little further out, but where there's a strong feeling of resentment or blame and let yourself, as you bring a person to mind, sense what brought forth the anger, the resentment, or the blame.

Now here's the inquiry. What would you have to feel that's difficult if you stepped out of the story of you're bad or you're wrong? In other words, if you weren't running the blame story, you're bad, you're wrong. What is it that's difficult or unpleasant underneath it that you'd have to feel? Is it a feeling of fear or powerlessness that you'll get hurt again, that others will be hurt? For some, it's sometimes, well if you're not wrong then maybe I'm wrong. Just simply notice without adding any more judgment. Notice with kindness the vulnerability that's there.

What's under that story? What do you have to feel if you just put aside the story? Really hold with gentleness. What you're doing right now I sometimes call a U-turn where you're going from fixating blame outward and attention that's fixated outward to making a U-turn and bringing that attention to your own heart and sensing what's really here underneath the blame? I'm going to share a story of how you can work with this and then we'll be trying it out more, doing a little bit more of a full practice, how we work with the vulnerability

so that we can then respond to others with wise discrimination but not blame. You can listen with your eyes closed or you can open your eyes. It's a story I try to share periodically because it informed me a lot. I wrote it up in True Refuge because I found so much in it. So this is a friend from college contacted me some years back and wanted some support with a life situation. And this man's African-American photojournalist

and he married a Caucasian woman. Her mother was very, very hostile and rude, and she ignored him when he visited. and all she saw was this was a man of a different race, and this is going to mean trouble, this is going to mean unhappiness for both of them. So he was hurt and he was angry. His wife was outraged. He said, we don't ever have to visit them again.

But on his spiritual path, he had a bed and teacher, Chogim Trunkpa, and one of Trunkpah's teachings is never give up on anybody. So he said, I'm hanging in. So we worked with that. and we worked with him creating bad others, she's bad, because she's making me bad, and did the U-turn and what's inside there. And for him it brought right into some real childhood wounds

of shame and sadness and basically not being valued, not being worthwhile. So this is what he brought to his practice, that sense of something's really wrong with me because that's what it brought up underneath the blame, the shame in his body. And they brought what we call these two wings of mindfulness and compassion to that shame. And a simple way of describing it is just to bring mindfulness and say, well, what's this

feel like right now inside me? And you feel the feelings and the compassion is in some way offer care. And that was this practice to keep on bringing attention to doing the U-turn, you know, instead of blaming her, saying, okay. underneath my anger is it makes me feel bad about myself and then feeling the feelings, breathing with them and I often teach to put a hand on the heart because it's such a powerful way of bringing care inward and sending some kindness. So he found more space and more healing inside himself and the next visit was Thanksgiving and he decided he'd go but he'd have the

support of his camera so he could kind of give him a way to stay present with his inner but also attend to by taking pictures. She was still rude and didn't respond to questions and refused to go out to dinner with her daughter and her son-in-law because she didn't want to be seen in public. So it was pretty terrible but he had his camera and he stayed present with himself and he inwardly was taken care of himself. and he emailed me that he could see her better than he had before, that it wasn't so personal that she was a very fearful woman, she was very afraid and she needed to try to control things.

Meanwhile, he did take a lot of pictures over Thanksgiving, and the next time they visited Christmas, they had a gift exchange. And the mother-in-law gave him socks that didn't fit, and some candy and he's this health food nut. But then, you know, she opened his present. And there were two framed pictures that he gave her. And one of them, well, before I tell you that, she opened them and she started weeping. And then the family came around. And he had caught her in some beautiful moments. He caught her playing with her new granddaughter. And there's this adoring expression. The other one, she's on her husband's lap and she was happy and playful.

So he caught her goodness. And that started waking her up out of trance. The real-realness, you know, in other words, the lens with blame is narrow. You don't see who the person is. You're under the line. She became a little more above the line. And of course his practice, his inner practice helped him to see her more. It didn't unfreeze right away.

I mean, this is, you know, conditioning over the generation. But it was the beginning. and he had found an inner refuge so that he did not have to be caught in the small mindiness and trance of blame and she got to loosen up a bit over time. So first thing to say about that story is it doesn't always happen that others come around. You can stop blaming and you can be in a mutual whatever conflict and you can be able to put down the story of blame and the other person might go ahead and keep blaming. So it's not going to always work out that way.

but it's for the freedom of our own hearts. And ultimately, if you are opening your heart, there's something energetic that helps in the world. It doesn't always happen quite in the package you expect. Now, I want to name a couple of challenges about this. And one of the challenges of letting go of bad othering is a sense that it really feels like the other person is bad or wrong. There's like, it's a visceral sense.

It's not my mind, it's not a mind story, it's like a visceral sense of badness. And just to say that we have millions of mind moments of stories with a feeling tone that get associated. You know, they say neurons that fire together, wire together. So it's deep in our body mind to have a verse of reactions. Gandhi puts it this way, says, you know, our beliefs create our thoughts, our thoughts, our thoughts creates our feelings, our feelings create our behavior, behavior creates our character and our character creates our destiny. So we keep having these beliefs and rolling them through and that just creates our way of living

our life. It takes a while to undo the chain so it can help because people go through lifetimes living and blame. You can go through decades blaming generations. So, I find it helps to use the phrase real but not true. That when we have some belief like this person is bad to say to ourselves, this is real but it's not true. It's a real belief and a real feeling in me.

But it's not the truth. In other words, there's more above the line that we're not aware of. We intuit that we're below the line. We know we're narrowed. we need to be willing to hang in there and recognize it and begin to investigate. So the first step is real but not true. Some people tell me they make the U-turn and they try to bring attention but all there is is anger.

And here the trick is, if it's blaming, is to come out of the story over and over because the story of your bad is so sticky. It's like we can come out of it and then moments later we're cycling the same resentful thought patterns. So it takes commitment to say, okay, thank you very much. Those are the resentful thoughts again. Let me come back into my body. Let the anger as an energy be as big as it wants to be.

But don't keep feeding it with the thoughts because you'll find if you let the energy be big, you'll start sensing the vulnerability that's under the anger. and that's where the healing happens. It's in the place of where we feel powerless, where we feel hurt, where we feel afraid, that we begin to bring the self-compassion and then we can start looking at the other with fresh eyes. So taking the next step here,

I'd like to invite you to again close your eyes, if you will. And you might reflect that there's different kinds of bad othering, that we bad other those we don't know from a distance because of their beliefs and actions that we hear about, and we bad other those that we know but there's a real estrangement or conflict. And sometimes those who are dear, as I mentioned, with my son, yet we can lock into resentment and really, keep expecting them to be different than they are. Thomas Merton says, the beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves,

the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them. We only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them. So part of this letting go of blame is forgiving people for not matching the way we want them to be. So again, I invite you to bring to mind a relationship where you want to have less separation but where you get into bad othering. Choose, if you will, a relationship where there's not trauma embedded in it because it won't serve you.

And begin by, I mentioned intention, begin by sensing your sincere intention. What's your highest intention for this relationship? Because that'll give you the energy to really bring an honesty and a wholeheartedness to making that you turn, to undoing the bad othering. So I begin again sensing the situation that triggers you that makes you in some way buy into your bad, you're wrong when you do buy in, that brings you under the line, what goes on.

Just remind yourself what it's like when you're believing the other person's bad or wrong. You might try saying to yourself real but not true that yes, this is a real feeling, it's a real thought in my mind, it's a real resentment, but it's not the truth, that it's not the truth of who they are, it's less than the whole of who they are, and it's less the whole of who I am to be believing

they're wrong and bad. It's real but not true, and just sense if that's useful to you. And as you did earlier, since if I had to put aside the blaming thoughts, what's the vulnerability underneath? What's difficult under there? Is there a feeling of hurt?

Not being understood? Of being unsafe? What's underneath? And as I describe with the photojournalists, whatever you see, you might just sense that you can offer some care inwardly. If you've not tried this, I invite you to put your hand on your heart

and just sense that whatever is underneath the blame, that vulnerable place, to sense you can offer a sense of care, it might be just like, I'm here with you, it's okay. I sometimes say it's okay sweetheart or I'm sorry and I love you. Whatever message, or it could be just energetic message, and let the hand be a light and tender touch, you're actually communicating with your touch, your own caring presence, with that vulnerable place that's underneath the blame. This is a key step.

This is sometimes described as attend and befriend. We're befriending our inner life rather than blaming ourselves for blaming. And from that space of attend and befriend, from that heart space, You might begin to open the attention to the other and just sense if you can look at them from above the line, what else might you see? Perhaps you might notice that ways that they're having a hard time, the ways they're scared, the way they have unmet needs for feeling seen or understood, see what else you can witness about the other person from a more awake place, sensing their vulnerability.

And as you do you might begin imagining or sensing the possibility of different ways you can respond to this person. Notice the sense of who you are as you begin this process of attending and befriending and opening your heart more to this other person including them in your heart. Do you feel more at home in yourself? Do you like who's here? Get more and more familiar, the heart space that can include. And all, it's kind of a fertile void because it's so much possibility of how you can then respond.

The poet Dorothy Hunt writes, do you think peace requires an end to war, tigers eating only vegetables? Is peace require an absence from your boss, your spouse, yourself? Do you think peace will come in some other place than here, some other time than now, in some other heart than yours? Peace is this moment without judgment, that's all. This moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome. Peace is this moment without judgment, that is all. moment in the heart space where everything that is is welcome for these last few moments.

Just sensing that heart space, sensing the potential of living from a heart space where everything that is is welcome, included, held in tenderness. And you might begin to sense that this heart space is your true home, this is your potential, who you really are. Namaste and thank you for your attention. For more talks and meditations and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.